From OS X to Ubuntu

That said, the sibling comment has it right. Why am I buying laptops that don't support Linux if I'm going to use Linux on them? From now on, I'll only buy things that have Linux support as a first-class objective.

Same experience here. My guess lingering reputations take more than 3 years to die off. Everything has surprisingly worked well out of the box me with my two Xubuntu installations I've done the last week. This is coming from a FreeBSD-land, where I'm used to setting up configurations files to load drivers and installing Xorg, xfce and it's plugins from scratch.

My setup is a very minimal on Arch, so the comparison is slightly unfair but it shows my point. OS X doesn't do any special magic. Linux can achieve equally low power consumptions with decent drivers and correct setup.

You can say that again. If you ever get a mic working, that is.

Through the years, my headset has switched back and forth between "works flawlessly" and "I've no fucking idea why it won't work or how to make it work".

My current status is the latter, and there seems to be no clear understanding on why it fails. Even though my setup is the exact same (except for OS updates, of course).

Meanwhile, nothing else has failed. Ever.

Second time I did it differently and wrote it up on the distro forum,you can see it here http://forums.bodhilinux.com/index.php?/topic/14043-bluetoot...

Seems like it got a lot easier between Bodhi Linux 3.x and 4.0 (Ubuntu 14 vs 16).

I'm able to find the Windows version [0], as well as the XPS 13 Developer Edition [1], but no XPS 15 Developer edition.

I just want my 15 inches. I did 13 for years and the pain still haunts me.

[0] http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-15-9560-laptop/pd

[1] http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt...

The fact that hardware - though much improved in the past 15 years - is still a crapshoot on Linux, particularly when it comes to laptop hardware, is so frustrating.

Windows will work on practically any combination of hardware. OS X will work on any hardware it is permitted to operate on. Linux is the only consortium of operating systems that still suffer from the inability to "just work out of the box". I can't see how it's ever supposed to be "the year" for linux when just getting it to run properly on hardware requires buying OEM meant-for-Windows, but we-promise-it-works-with-linux garbage.

Is a "pre-installed" linux laptop even cross-distro compatible? If the laptop comes with Ubuntu pre-installed, what are the odds I can replace it with CentOS or Arch? Is the laptop "designed for linux", or "designed for exactly what is factory shipped, and nothing else"? Can I even do a fresh install of the shipped operating system, or do they hack in additional manufacturer packages/kernel drivers that require you to never reinstall on top of the shipped install? How about OS upgrades? Are they reliable, or do you risk running into compatibility problems, even with a new version of the same distro?

What we really need is a BSD/unix/linux[1] competitor to OS X. RedHat tried, and IMO failed. We need another closed-source unix/linux-based operating system that throws away X.org and its attempted modern replacements, that can directly compete with OS X. I'm tired of waiting for the open source world to try - and fail - to gather momentum. And tired of Apple, who has the best unix/linux operating system, fucking us over with every hardware release.

[1] How do you type a literal asterisk on HN? Backslash and double-asterisk don't work. nix. \nix. nix

As far as I know they haven't resolved it yet.

I wish I could. Unfortunately, I live in a country (Taiwan) where no one knows about Linux. It's impossible to buy a pre-installed Linux laptop here.

You know the most ironic part? My job here is to certify hardware (including a lot of laptops) to work on Linux... so that you guys in the US and Europe can enjoy it :)

Used a nice little laptop for years in college. I kept fighting it on the headphone jack. It would not recognize when it was plugged in, or the sound did not work period. Hot keys would not work. Etc, etc. Besides that, everyone would always comment on what a nice little laptop it was as I ran it into the ground.

When it died I bounced from HP (horrible, came with AMD graphics that would overheat and AMD cut support for a month later, while still selling them) and then Dell (mostly horrible, but due to Sandy Bridge having horrible graphics support, the Dell had a short power cord, the USB shorted out)

Got System76 Lemur, it was like my old laptop, very small, very quiet, hardware switches for wifi, brightness & turning off screen so they would work. Ivy Bridge would freeze X if I closed and opened the lid enough, but that disappeared with the next version of Ubuntu. Similar issue with Skylake Lemur, went away when I used Manjaro with Mesa 13.

There is a small premium vs Dell or HP systems, but those are Dell and HP systems. You get what you pay for. Loud, poorly design pieces of crap (at least when I bought them). If you are willing to drop a grand and a half on a Macbook you would still save money on a System76.

Guess what, the Ubuntu devs decided they should replace the Broadcom closed source WiFi drivers by the half-working open source ones, so during six months I didn't had a working wireless connection.

Asus could not support us, and Ubuntu forums were full of hacking the old drivers into the updated ones, or have patience and wait for the new working ones.

I had to disable sleep and hibernation, because it would only wake up again by forcing a full reboot, taking the battery out.

Still have it with GNU/Linux, just to have a machine around with it running directly on hardware, instead of a VM.

I am writing this on a Chromebook Pixel 2013 variant, the wifi on this machine and every other Chromebook I have used is rock solid. I like the 'design classic' aspect of the Pixel (original flavour) and I didn't want to take it to pieces or leave it broken. Therefore, new Chromebook. My new cheap (£250) Chromebook is the Asus one with the HD screen, zero moving parts and a tough aluminium case. Everything on it works except for the internal speakers (sound is on HDMI) but I don't need sound to read my emails and write stuff in 'vi'.

Rather than go for an esoteric linux I went for the ease of Gallium OS. This is an XFCE Ubuntu with all the hardware sorted except that HDMI sound problem...

Now for ports... I presume next-gen Chromebooks will be USB-C, I just wanted a glorified keyboard/screen with wifi that worked, however, the ports are proper ones on the Chromebook, no fiddly mini HDMI or other leads that restrict the movement of the laptop. Battery life - realistically I can go all day but I get range anxiety if I do that so I carry the brick.

I run DHCP on the cheap Chromebook complete with a reverse proxy so that my dev environment (still on the old laptop) can be worked on via the Chromebook (which runs keyboard/mouse sharing via Synergy) and via the phone/tablet for testing.

I believe that the next generation Chromebooks are going to solve a lot of problems for me, my cheap chromebook doesn't do sound, the screen is non-touch but HD, the keyboard is not backlit (I use an external keyboard now) and I am not sure it has a CPU... I wonder if the android running next-gen Chromebooks will eat into the non-pro, non-developer market that Apple are trying to make their own, if this does happen then the Apple market share will start to diminish.

Very frustrating.

Game and graphics programming - fair point.

Nice buttons, assuming you mean that row of lights and so on that laptop designers seem to love, always just work for me. Volume, wi-fi, etc work. What doesn't work is the "open a calculator" type button, but I could fix that with a bit of customizing key bindings. As it's so easy to open the "everything finder" in the DE I use ( Moshka/E17) it is easier than reaching for those off-keyboard buttons.

Maybe you need to distro hop a bit more?!

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:Hardware

To my limited knowledge, intel hardware has excellent linux support. If you need a little more muscle in the GPU go for nvidia rather than AMD.

The only good way to get their machines is through a reputable reseller who has them on a shelf.

On the other hand, manufacturers like Asus, Lenovo and Dell have everything from the economy to premium range which makes the content organization a natural headache. And it looks like nobody has figured out a good way to fix everything up.

  A.) Tells you what they are selling, and
  B.) Can sell it to you.

  C.) Be able to configure a US keyboard when you're not in the US.

(I'm sure it might be possible to order one over the phone, but why should I have to?)

"The framistan line is successful but I hear from our customers that we should have some options that add [x] and drop [y], while having support for more [z]."

"We need to create a new line, a totally separate brand from framistan that has way more [x], [y] but no [z] at all. The competition has entered this space and there is clearly a market there."

They say this as often as they can, iterating over various x, y, z triples and they maximize the product line, perhaps until they hear feedback like yours.

Apple, OTOH, does whatever they want, targeting limited segments in order to keep everything simple. They lose out on lots of opportunity by restricting themselves to just parts of the market. But they also have a money tree, so it doesn't really matter.

Re: nonsense model names. As a technical consumer I much prefer these very-distinct names that change with each new release. When I read a review, it's very likely that I'm reading the right review. When I'm buying used, it's very likely that I'm getting the right product. Brands like Amazon Kindle Fire, MacBook, IMO make searching for and finding the right stuff harder. I can appreciate the elegance of a simple product name, though. Typically they're concealing the true model info under some other header, but it's usually harder to identify.

I recently bought an induction hob, and it's exactly the same.

Bosch for example have a series 4, 6 and 8 and within that, models with various configurations. At first I assumed series 8 was the best or newest, but there are low and high end models in all of the series. I looked through the manufacturers specs, and even in terms of features I couldn't see anything different between the series, only between induvidual models. Maybe the series refers to what day the 'design team' came up with it?

I tried to look at some reviews online to see what people said was the best - I live in Northern Europe and haven't yet picked up the language so looked at reviews on UK and German sites. Except the models available there aren't available here, and vice versa.

At the end of the day they are all pretty much the same (they all cook stuff), so I just went to the shop and picked one that wasn't too cheap or too expensive and looked the prettiest (Wife Approved TM).

[0] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=597804

The two biggest issues I've ever had with linux are printer support and modem support. Time solved both issues before developers did, no one uses dial up and I no longer print anything at home.

I would agree if you could show causation, but this is only correlation. I could tell you how many hundreds, maybe thousands of hours I do exactly what you've described with NO freezing, but so could a lot of others. I'm sure others yet can tell you of freezing.

None of this is perfect. But one anecdata does not a readiness state (nor lack of it) make.

My PC, which runs Windows, does the same thing. I've determined that it's actually an issue with the power supply. It has nothing to do with the operating system.

I guess what I'm saying is, do some troubleshooting first before you blame it on Ubuntu.

Note: sometimes a bad drive works fine under windows but dies under linux simply because windows doesn't happen to use the fault sectors.

https://xkcd.com/963/

And the best part is, Wayland (Ozone) support is already in Chromium, it's just not really enabled right now.

Absolutely.

Linux offers could work for people just wanting a working computer with less risk of viruses. People that don't care for their machine running Linux. Most other people interested are tech savvy and will compare other offerings as well or selfbuild.

Edit: to clarify, desktop might range from dirt cheap commodity hw to high profile workstations. So no blades, rack-mounted stuff etc. (I don't know what fits your definition of server).

I believe those missed the point about Linux. They thought the rage was all about saving the costs of Windows licenses, and they could not survive the aggressive licensing program of the late Windows XP/Vista period, when Microsoft practically gave away licenses almost for free. I don't believe it's about costs. IMHO it's more about freedom.

Without a doubt, however, Linux based OS's have come a very long way even in just the last 5 years, let alone the last 20. Mint KDE for example, works almost out of the box for me on my 2013 MbPro w/ external 4k monitor (except internal trackpad / Magic Trackpad 2). I suspect I'll be able to remove that "almost" in the next year or two if not sooner and once messing with X config is no longer required, hopefully X (or Wayland) will be stable.

Yeah, let the CADT flow...

As far as manufacturers, I've tried running this on Apple, Dell, Gateway, and desktop boxes I built over the years. There isn't much of a difference between any of them.

Even if all my software ran on Linux I still wouldn't have the peace of mind that walking in a store and buying an Apple laptop offers. I would have to research models or order and wait for an XPS to arrive in order to have a machine that is sure to work.

I've tried darktabke and the UI is a mess, same with Gimp. A lot of open source software is unpolished and lacking in documentation. If that is elitist so be it.

Sketch and Pixelmator, to me, operate in a significantly smoother way, and make doing basic tasks substantially easier. The biggest thing that comes to mind for Sketch/Inkscape is exporting sections of the larger project file into individual assets. It's a breeze in sketch. It's integrated in the main UI, it operates in a predictable way, and it just works. Inkscape pulls you through a series of menus, and doesn't have any way to remember how you've previously separated up your assets (unless there's some way to do that deeply hidden in the UI that I could never find).

So yes, Sketch and Pixelmator, and most well-known creative software (anything in the Adobe suite, the Affinity Suite, etc) is generally significantly ahead of the open source options. Would I prefer it otherwise, sure, but the open source options aren't used by that many professionals, and are generally swimming upstream to implement features the commercial ones already have, instead of creating the next great feature (whatever that is) or streamlining their UI to make easier to use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNoVb5k40sU&t=30

the guy (a pro photographer) explains how to make GIMP less ugly and more usable.

No wonder so many people are moving to Sketch.

The only thing that becomes messy is that some applications might use Qt, others GTK, and the themes might be inconsistent. Fortunately there's a GTK engine for Qt and a Qt engine for GTK that allow you to have a more unified experience.

The menu also might end up with many applications and the preferred applications for each file type can be a bit hard to manage when you have multiple desktop environments installed.

I used to enjoy endless customizing (Enlightenment) but that ended up taking the place of actually doing work. These days I leave everything set to default and install as little software as I possibly can.

When I see a company resorting to such artificial and globally-detrimental methods in a sorry attempt to retain/lock customers, I feel like it's an implicit admission that they've lost much of their mind-share, their "higher" vision, their "capital of relevance" so to speak.

It's basically a tantrum disconnected from a higher coherent vision, like "if I can't have it, then nobody gets it!" and goes on to break the thing in question.

Such negativity.

Jobs' Apple was aggressive and ruthless, but not negative, it really sought to add value to their customers life; it was indeed much more loyal to, and respectful of, said customers (and I suspect much less to its partners). Above all it was damn substantial in its own way, towards its own path: you don't lock X because you can and that's the best you could come up with, you lock X because it makes sense from a business perspective without alienating the user. You may have disliked many of their decisions, the matter of the fact is that in the long run they made sense from a deeper perspective.

Cook's Apple is nothing like that, it's like "hipsters meet hedge funds" philosophy of profit/design, more shady/disingenuous ways of enticing customer pride/lock. Even their marketing can be misguiding nowadays, and while not lying, it's way passed a red line that Jobs never crossed: yes you may sell a lot with a clever marketing twist (not lies per se, but a message that feels as much once you've realized there was intent behind your misunderstanding or misplaced expectations); but in the long run, it hurts your very ability to sell anew, i.e. you traded trust for profit and may end up deserving none.

Such a flawed approach to adding value to the world, making the sector worse off, overall, the more it's entangled in the artificially closed Apple ecosystem. No wonder people have woken up and many are actively trying to escape Apple's garden now, but that's only the 1% of the savviest --most consumers keep buying the latest Macs, often for reasons like customer service (consciously) and social status biases (unconsciously).

If I may use a pop reference, Apple used to be a Vulcan company, now they're closer to a Ferengi clone.

This isn't just an abstract rant, it's a high-level account of all the very real and practical reasons that drove me off the Apple wagon during the past 4 years or so, why I stopped spending $2K/year on their products (did that for a decade) and why I don't recommend Macs/iOS anymore to most of my contacts (and right there is at least 10x my spending, also gone to MS, Google, Dell, Samsung, HTC, ASUS, etc.)

I know this all may sound harsh and a bit hyperbolic, but it's basically my way of saying it's little things like these that show, or rather raises questions, how/whether a company lost its way. About UI/UX on Apple products for instance, or software quality in general, or the hardware philosophy of sleek/hot/not powerful Macs, the first signs were already there by 2013: the current situation isn't surprising if you were deep into the Apple ecosystem and paying attention to such aspects, in painful detail I agree. Right at the same moment MS changed and became Nadella's opened, software-first, partner-friendly company, and even if not obvious at all some years ago, their current situation isn't surprising either looking at how details, little events here and there in the MS ecosystem, painted a very clear picture towards that vision.

If I were invested in Apple right now, as a consumer or investor, I wouldn't trust their ability to remain "above" or "equal to" MS/Google by 2020, in terms of OS/software/services. Not saying they won't, but there's momentum to reverse there, it's currently downhill (and much faster than I had anticipated, Windows 10 or Android really are on par nowadays, if not actually better on many such "details"). The question is whether Apple under several CEOs will prove to be an IBM or a Microsoft: can this 20th century company effectively embrace new paradigms? Can they move past their previous decisions, which may have made sense at the time, but would eventually grow to become obsolete or even flawed as computing and behaviors evolve in time? How is their internal culture conducive to such change, how much does it impede meaningful design and innovation currently?

Somehow never noticed that on macOS - either applications are designed better and only known long tasks change the cursor, or there's a system wide control - show spinner near cursor only if app was in busy state for 500 ms or something.

This year tried out Ubuntu, elementaryOS, Manjaro and Solus. Well, Solus on boot on my system had a black screen, and when booted in VirtualBox on Windows - black screen but atleast network notification showed that I'm connected to the internet, after I dismissed the notification - black screen again.

In the VM config, be sure to set virtual displays to the same number of monitors you have/are using on Windows. Then install the guest addons on your distro and make sure it is working correctly (ex.: you don't need to lock your mouse inside the VM, etc).

Sometimes, "guest addons" version mismatch causes the video driver to do funny stuff or just not work at all, falling back to svga, so I recommend (as much as I dislike this course of action) that you install the same "guest addons" pack on your Linux guest that comes with your instaled VirtualBox. That means not using the distro-packaged version of it (Ubuntu/Debian has the pack on their repos but they are usually outdated).

Also, up the Vm's VIDEO MEMORY to like 128mb or so. It starts too low on VBox's default config and without a big enough framebuffer, even with everything working perfectly you won't see your displays resize to full resolution. If you can make your windows really tiny and the desktop resizes accordingly, but can't make them change size dynamically once you get to a certain point, it's probably lacking virtual video memory.

Hope I could help!

o/

http://planetvm.net/blog/?p=2936

Most likely, if I would switch to Linux, just use DarkTable and figure things out.

One huge benefit of all of us switching to Linux, would be demand for good solutions for our problems, both as a potential providers of those solutions, as well as market.

> I've been a super hardcore Lightroom user and lover, but eventually found Darktable and am perfectly happy with it now. Its ergonomics take a little while to get used to though.

I know one pro photographer that use Darktable, not because its free but because it has some fancy algorithms that Lightroom lacks.

It's actually pretty much in the same place (touchable area is bigger than the visual button) and I'm pretty certain it displays at all times.

Missing the feedback is more than understandable criticism (that I agree with) but muscle memory of hitting the key in the first place itself shouldn't really change, hasn't for me - as someone who does use vim a fair amount.