Why I switched from OS X to Linux
jeena.net
jeena.net
There's been a tremendous amount of work over the last ten years to make the Linux desktop environment habitable. At first it was usable for very narrow use cases, like living within an Office-compatible application, but over time that space has grown. What was once done out of spite can now be done for the sake of convenience.
Instead of being all negative about Apple not living up to our expectations I think we should appreciate how much Linux has exceeded them.
As I recall, installing libdvdcss, libdvdnav, libdvdread from the official repos solved that problem and allowed me to painlessly watch dvd's through players like VLC and MPlayer.
Several hundred AskUbuntu posts disagree with you. (And that's for Ubuntu...one of the friendly distros.)
Sure, things are much better, but I think most criticisms of linux not being "out of the box" ready are valid.
However it is faster/more expandable than most macs available today.
This is not true if you have Intel wifi hardware, which is a lot (a majority?) of laptops.
Is ndiswrapper still being developed?
It only supports Windows XP drivers and crashed the kernel when I tried to get my TL-WN8200ND (RTL8192CU) working with it on 64 bit Ubuntu 16.04
The ethernet controller is an Intel I219-LM (rev 31). The driver source that worked was https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/15817/Intel-Networ...
What I had hoped would happen during install was that the kernel would fall back to some simple driver, kinda like the simple VGA drivers, and then find the correct driver and install that.
I cannot understand people that think Ubuntu is on par with OSX and Windows for workstation use.
I keep hearing this, but I've never had an issue (Arch, Macbook Air 2013).
On the contrary, I have endless problems in macOS with WiFi where some networks won't work if I don't specify a DNS (I use Google's, but I assume that doesn't make a difference) - and others won't work if I do! (Meanwhile, other devices are fine doing the opposite.)
There are problem devices out there, but more and more they're the exception, rather than the rule.
Never had a problem with macOS Wifi since 10.5.x.
But it's currently not the case that you can take an arbitrary Windows or Apple machine, install Linux and have a working Wifi. It's very much hit and miss.
The only trouble you may get is with cutting edge hardware because manufacturers are slow.
How do you expect a normal user to this?
Intel chipsets are OEM only. Cards are readily available on Amazon, but are all gray-market apparently.
In short, I don't expect normal users to do this, but I'd expect them to be willing to pay triple the normal markup on $20-$50 componens if they "just worked" in Linux.
To be clear, I'm talking about having an ODM run off copies of Intel/Atheros reference boards. The engineering effort is as low as it gets for hardware manufacturing.
WiFi drivers are much less likely to work out-of-the-box; usually you need a firmware file which may require futzing with the windows driver installation package.
The only hacking I did was to install libdvd-pkg or something like that.
I haven't really used the drive other than what I mentioned. I just grabbed the nearest DVD (disc 2 of 3 of season 7 of "The Big Bang Theory"), popped it in, and it just worked.
That was just a quick "test" to see how difficult it was nowadays to rip/encode DVDs (I haven't done that for probably eight years or so and it was a major PITA back then). I was planning on doing the same to most of our "media collection" so I'm hoping it continues to go well.
Thanks for the heads up. I'll be looking more into this.
I've run into some recent disks that I can't play, but never one that actually damaged my blu-ray drive.
Source? I don't even see how this could be possible.
Never mind that the BR spec has all kinds of weirdness, including things like bundled Java applets(?!).
All in all, its problems like these that keeps us torrenting.
It's annoying, but better than when DVD support first appeared, and you'd end up compiling something like 5 libraries and a custom version of Xine.
I have a hard time seeing how you could possibly be being honest about this.
Isn't distributing libdvdcss illegal in the US and therefore most distributions don't include it? So, most distributions don't come with full DVD playing capabilities out of the box.
For Fedora, it's a matter of adding the RPMFusion-nonfree repository, and installing a couple of packages.
It works 100% reliably 100% of the time.
I had issues with OS X sometimes that I put the MacBook into a bag and it would get hotter and hotter because it didn't sleep and the air couldn't move, untill it panicked and shut itself down to not start burning.
Acer/Wistron laptop with MSFT DSDT would reset spontaneously instead of waking up from sleep.
Chromium possibly does it do, have not tested tho.
Although sometimes you can use Chrome (or evince, or okular), occasionally Adobe Reader is the only one that can fill forms properly.
I've had some success with running current Adobe Reader in wine but trying to print makes the program crash, so there you have it.
Atril is what Evince used to be before it regressed in usability.
Heck, you can even create PDF forms entirely with Free Software, using LibreOffice / OpenOffice.
And don't forget PDF.JS of Firefox, which enables you to view and edit most PDF forms directly in your browser. However, it still has issues with some PDF documents, so I prefer Evince and Okular.
The still-common advice to install Adobe Acrobat Reader is outdated! And it has been outdated for years. In fact, some time ago the FSFE started a (still successful) campaign to convince public entities to no longer tell people to download Acrobat whenever they offer a PDF file. With public entities you can argue that they advertise Adobe without getting paid for that, that they ignore the fact that PDF is an Open Standard, and that they put the plethora of good PDF readers into disadvantage. Instead, most of these public entities now point to a community-driven overview of Free Software PDF readers:
https://pdfreaders.org/pdfreaders.en.html
But as mentioned before: As a Linux you don't need to worry about that, you almost certainly have already installed a good, free PDF viewer in the default installation.
Linux has another learning curve for me than products like Windows server, but i'm slowly getting used to it again.
These days i have very limited money to experiment with computer systems. So i turned an old desktop into an esx. Using linux for my vm's has been very rewarding. There is a ton of resources. Most of the stuff is free. The communities usually love to help you reach your goal.
If I were starting up a 2D media company I might have some concern moving new hires from probably-familiar Adobe applications to the (excellent) Linux alternatives; but still probably not enough to dissuade me completely. For a new 3D studio the industry is so diverse anyway that it would be worth going with Blender to start with, or Maya if the heart desires it.
For software, I don't think there's a worthwhile platform which you can not develop for from Linux (aside apple nonsense, but even all-apple shops end up using OS X VMs for iOS builds since XCode build is highly stateful(!)).
For video editing, kdenlive is the state of the art on linux. Here's a guide written by a professional video editor who uses only free software http://slackermedia.info/
On that note, I honestly can't think of anything other than Adobe products and Microsoft Office that is preventing a mass migration to Linux (or rather Ubuntu, let's be honest) at this point. It has all other killer apps. Dropbox, Spotify, VSCode, Atom, Steam, Chrome, VLC, etc...
I know that Excel is the only thing keeping my dad on macOS these days. He is definitely not the Apple fanboy he once used to be.
What an amazing day that would be... when, at least Adobe, would release builds for Linux. Does anyone know if there's a serious obstacle for them other than market share?
I believe case preservation but insensitivity has been in Mac OS since the original Macintosh File System; certainly it was in the Hierarchical File System and was inherited by HFS+. When they switched to OS X, they still had to maintain filesystem compatibility for the Classic system, and maintaining it for the entire OS probably made porting other Mac applications simpler as well.
Is that a combination of heard and read? I like it!
And while Steam is supported, the Linux library is a shadow of the Windows library even if you exclude older, underplayed games.
True, but you can't expect things to change from one day to the next. There are many more games on Linux now than there were like 3 years ago. Like 2000 more. And it's still growing, and in 2016 we have got more AAA titles than ever mostly thanks to Feral Interactive's porting efforts. It's better and better for Linux gamers. And even AMD is slowly fixing its broken Linux drivers.
If NVidia, Intel, and AMD got serious about Linux graphics support for enthusiasts and professionals, I'm sure we'd see a huge improvement and make switching viable for many traditional hold-outs. Chicken and egg, unfortunately.
They dont have any open source drivers for ANY platform. So that's the same on Windows and Mac. On Linux you have the Nouveau (open source, independent) drivers for nVidia though, and you can already play some games with it despite major performance loss.
As for graphics switching you'll be happy to know this is a problem that the SOLUS distro is going to tackle in 2017 to have a better solution than the existing ones which are mostly broken.
I have deployed thousands of workstations with various ranges of graphics cards. Nvidia is the simplest, a trailing second is AMD (they do make rolling RPMs easy though) They are just as buggy as the windows drivers.
Intel make brilliant drivers now, its just a shame the graphics cards are tiny compared to AMD/Nvidia.
Nvidia just don't do opensource drivers. For me, I frankly couldn't give a fig if they are open source or not, just so long as it works.
I don't think that is necessarily true. WINE does a wonderful job nowadays to run older games - while the support for DX11 is still very much work in progress. Most DX9 games run just fine, and older versions of DX have little to no issues either. IN some cases WINE does a better job running an older Windows game than Windows 10.
The "TearFree" xorg feature does the best job of vsync I have seen in a long time. On the downside, the variable refresh rate stuff hasn't quite landed in mainline yet, and audio over display port hasn't either. holding breath
This is why I still have windows machines for work. If open source CAD software were competitive (or if the commercial companies offered Linux ports) I would be 100% linux.
At this stage in Steam use on Linux, I would say it exists, but it does not appear "supported" by Valve.
env LD_PRELOAD='/usr/$LIB/libstdc++.so.6' steam
Make sure you download Steam from official website, not the version packaged with the distro.
I've been running steamboat. Linux for a while now and have never had any issues running g it. Sure, there aren't a huge number of games for like us, but that has more to do with the game development ecosystem at the moment. Developing on Windows or Mac is just easier. You have access to all the 3d packages from autodesk and other companies.
https://www.google.no/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es...
Somehow I managed. 'dpkg add-architecture i386' ? Also, the steam client never asked for a driver on my machine. Proprietary nvidia does the magic I need for everything to run.
pebkac?
pebcak yourself, I linked to a very long list of google results for this very problem, suggesting quite strongly that the problem does not just lie with me but with the way in which Valve choose to roll out the Steam client. Or are you suggesting that dpkg -i steam.deb and resolving some dependencies is beyond all of those Linux users? Or maybe the problem does actually lie with Valve.
From your link: If you have a 64-bit system, you must install the 32-bit Multilib version of your graphics driver, lib32-alsa-plugins to enable sound, and lib32-curl, lib32-libgpg-error to enable update at first run.
Maybe someone can explain why I need a GPU driver for what is in essence a browser and install wizard? Not being facetious, I honestly want to know why drivers have anything to do with the Steam client working or not.
And is it not time for 64bit Steam client on Linux so that users of 64 bit systems can be free of all these hacks?
Also, I think it's pretty unfair to call Inkscape "terrible". It has, by far, the better shape editing tools (especially CSG) between it and Illustrator. As a bonus, Inkscape tends to output SVG files with maybe one or two unwanted transform()s, rather than the six or seven you get with a typical Sketch or Illustrator SVG.
I hope you don't mean Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator. I tried those a couple of weeks back. Compared to Gimp and Inkscape they are as buggy as hell. Simple .png export with custom dpi often doesn't export to custom dpi. Exported images often aren't pixel-precise if you repeat the export and layer boundaries somehow suffer from float rounding errors if you load/save the file multiple times. I find it amazing how supposedly professional tools can have such major problems. I guess it's just good marketing.
The only thing missing in Gimp is CMYK support and that might be sole reason people are still using Adobe products.
Well I might give it a try, anyway...
The main reason people don't switch is just lack of familiarity, driver issues and unsupported software - all driven by network effects.
There's very little about the OS itself which is preventing adoption. It's entirely about the ecosystem.
That pretty much requires a fuck up on the part of Windows or Mac to drive people to use Linux.
I feel like paid $199 just so Microsoft can sell me to advertisers. Bill never would of stood for this shit.
http://www.howtogeek.com/243263/how-to-disable-ads-on-your-w...
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/218437-dell-laptops-ma...
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/5e7kwl/windo...
Windows XP, Vista, 8. I mean even if these fuck ups haven't brought Linux market share above rounding error, nothing will.
One thing that could make desktop Linux viable - is throwing transparency, openess, customizability and all similar "good" Linux stuff through the window, having a dictatorship with good UX people and forcing users to one true way.
People do not care that they can tinker with their desktop - I really do not care that I cannot make my macOS or Windows look like screenshots in unixporn subreddit - I just want an experience that's concise, the same for every application, polished, clean, lean, etc etc etc. Windows had this in Windows 7 (10th version with UWP programs for tablets really disturbs the UX), macOS still has this.
Elementary and especially Solus distributions are doing that - "oooh you want X? well screw you buddy, that's poor UX".
Vista was a major screw up. I didn't mind Windows 8 as much. But yeah if those mess ups don't sway people, nothing will.
Personally, I don't care about USB-C replacing USB 3.0, or the introduction of the new Touch Bar. The problem is the pricing (that Touch Bar is costing me $700-800 on top of the equivalent 2013 MacBook Pro model). The removal of the physical escape key and the inexplicable removal of the 3.5 mm jack on iPhones does not help to relieve fears that Apple has completely lost control of basic sense as to what their professional users want and need. The MacBook Pro line has fallen into the same category as the MacBook Air. It's supposed to be a professional machine, but it's now being specced to the lowest common denominator, meant for any average consumer.
For some of us, Linux is not being transitioned to with enthusiasm. We do not consider it a drop-in replacement for OS X, and already pre-emptively regret the inferior keyboard and trackpad we'll get on the OEM PC laptop manufacturers offer. Honestly, what the hell is with PC manufacturers that still include the TrackPoint™ Style Point, Nub, Nipple Mouse, Clit Mouse[1]?!
tldr; Apple is alienating its professional users. Windows is flat out unusable as a Linux-based developer platform for us. Linux is simply the only remaining alternative. Frankly, it's not "good enough" - it's simply the only remaining alternative when you can't reason spending $4,000+ on a laptop you actually do still want to buy.
I'm experiencing substantially more carpal tunnel issues because of the Mac's trackpad-only setup. The trackpoint means I never have to take my hands off the keyboard, which I love. Two months in I'm used to Apple's keyboard, but I don't think it's as good; my error rate is still much better on Thinkpads because the more sculpted keys make it easier for my fingers to know where they are.
And I should say that here I mean the older Thinkpad keyboard, not the newer one that looks much more Apple-ish.
I've been on Ubuntu for nearly a decade, so I barely notice many issues any more, but you're absolutely right. It's a long way away from wonderful.
Obviously, I'm just used to it; I wait 2-3 months before upgrading to the latest releases because having three monitors has _always_ been a headache for me when upgrading any sooner. That's my new normal.
That said, I rarely have any issues that make me lose time. I might have to spend 5 minutes googling around before buying things like web cameras to ensure compatibility, but otherwise, everything tends to be stable. My desktop stays running for months at a time without complaints.
The next step would be to go beyond stable and make the platform a joy to use. I want to be able to plug in some of these fun toys like multi-touch pads and high dpi screens and have them work just as well as they do on other platforms. The journey to that ideal is far longer on Linux. But it remains free, hackable, solid, and powerful. And the more people using the system, the faster progress will come.
I remain hopeful and patient.
There's scope somewhere in there for Canonical to improve Launchpad so the experience of fixing issues is more streamlined.
Currently I'm looking into what Guix and Nix can offer me wrt. custom packages.
Most people switching, however, are annoyed by the absence of visual polish everywhere (hardware and software) and the lack of robustness compared to Apple laptops, which you can literally walk on or drop in your bag without paying attention to what else is next to it. Except for mil-spec laptops and thick toughbooks, I wouldn't do this with any computer.
Apart from console apps, there is no unified visual language on Linux, and most desktop application developers do not expect to make as much money as with mac or Windows. This often results in apps that just "get the job done", without much extra polish, but sometimes a LOT of extra features, which can actually confuse users. The best advantage of most Linux software is to be open source, which is unfortunately something 99% of people couldn't care less about.
I'm a day to day Linux user, and I couldn't be happier to have switched back from osx (2004-2016), but the switch is clearly not for everyone yet.
I weigh 138kg. Please hand over your apple laptop for a quick test.
Personally, I have no issues with Linux being used almost exclusively as a developer OS (on desktops and laptops). I don't really see Linux moving towards being used by non-technical users any time soon, and I'm perfectly okay with this.
There aren't enough of them?
Some people like them.
Because it's fucking awesome.
Actually, I was surprised how well the Windows Subsystem for Linux actually works. Yesterday I even compiled some Ubuntu packages (using C++, Qt, Boost, etc.) and submitted them to my PPA on Launchpad. From Windows!
But I agree that it would be great if they could solve this in the future.
The good news is that a lot of these things are getting fixed. E.g. it used to be that path expansion for executable files lookup didn't work too well (as in, you could launch native Windows executables only via direct path, because the subsystem would otherwise check for an ELF header, so you couldn't launch foo.exe in your $PATH just by name), but I understand that this is getting changed in upcoming releases.
I'm keeping an eye on this thing, it is promising. I'm so looking forward to putting all the Red Hat-branded breakage behind me and not have to wrestle with my computer all day.
The trackpad situation is a legitimate gripe, but this is hopefully improving with Microsofts Precision Trackpad standard.
The big advantage of stepping outside the Apple garden into the wider world is choice. You have choices like matte screens, 17" screens, up to 64GB RAM, hotswap batteries, upgradable components, ARM chips, Xeon chips etc etc
Even the current Macbook Pros (high spec Airs) have had equivalents available in the PC world for a while, e.g the X1 Carbon, which is being upgraded to KabyLake soon, while Apple have only just released their Skylake machines.
Are there choices? No, I do not see any choice. You see i3, i3-gaps, fluxbox, openbox, xfce, gnome, cinnamon, mate, kde, panteon, budgie, bspwm etc etc and go "whoa, all these choices", meanwhile I couldn't care less even if there three times more clones of a tilling wms, I just want macOS desktop. Choices of stuff that I will never use are useless.
Different people have different preferences - I like the TrackPoint far better than a touchpad, because I can use it without moving my hands from the keyboard.
I'm a huge linux fan and have ubuntu on a desktop and laptop, but if you hate it there's really no reason you have to use it.
But I will say that linux has come miles and miles. My transition from Windows to full time linux by way of Ubuntu was incredibly seamless. The only thing I really miss is Excel.
Sadly Excel for Mac is the main thing keeping me from switching to Linux. OpenOffice/LO are ok for very basic documents but I routinely deal with files that they can't handle.
For example, if you have an index then a tiny kerning shift can bump an item to a new page and screw up your numbering.
It really depends on the types of documents you're dealing with. Some are hell, others are a no-brainer.
It's good to search for duplicates first or see this filterable list of the most popular dupes: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/duplicates.cgi
Google Sheets straight up fails if you try to upload files in that format. No preview available and no option to work around. So I would have to open the file in Excel anyway.
Relatively new versions of LibreOffice are capable of opening simple files, but once you get into features like named ranges LO fails.
So even if the UI is acceptable, failures on data import force me to keep a copy of Excel around. Keep a VM with Excel for Windows around just in case files don't work in Excel for Mac, but I've used it maybe once in the last 6 months.
You could try office's web app thing if you are mostly a read only excel user.
You could try SoftMaker Office.
Quote: "No other spreadsheet is as compatible with Microsoft Excel as PlanMaker 2016. Both the old .xls files (Microsoft Excel 5.0 and higher) and the modern .xlsx files from Excel 2007 to 2016 are displayed true to the original and saved reliably. This guarantees trouble-free data exchange with Excel users."
I run Arch + i3 as a WM, so a very bare-bone setup, and use just terminals and a browser. No other GUI app. I don't need anything else and I am not a power user, rather a non-tech guy who wants to get stuff done.
About ten years ago, I read all the evilwm source and fixed some quirk in an afternoon. That's usability!
I thing that this is a misrepresentation of the history of desktop Linux. There was a period at the beginning of the century where Linux was arguably far better positioned to take significant market share. At the time, consumer Windows (98/ME) was dramatically bad. Both in terms of stability and security. OS X just came into existence, but was slow and required expensive hardware.
At the time, Linux was far less fragmented. There were only a few distributions and KDE and GNOME ruled the desktop. There was a very serious push some companies to make Linux easy to install (graphical installers popped up in Red Hat, Corel Linux, Caldera, etc.). You could run Microsoft Office using CrossOver Office with virtually no glitches (I used Office like that for years). Corel released Wordperfect for Linux (which still had significance at the time). Loki was pumping out Linux ports of games like crazy. There was a genuine feeling that Linux was taking off on the desktop and many non-tech family/friends installed Linux.
The problem at the time was that web apps basically didn't exist. So a lot of interested people eventually abandoned the idea to switch to Linux, because they had some win32 application that they needed to run.
In 2017, the Linux distribution landscape is more fragmented than ever and the Linux desktop landscape is more fragmented than ever (heck, even GNOME has three popular forks). Moreover, problems are far harder to debug than they were around 2000, because there are multiple layers of stuff piled on each other (D-Bus, systemd, Debian alternatives, *.d, et al. have blessings and curses).
I think there is some movement from OS X to Linux (though it is hard too tell whether it's not just some vocal minority) for four reasons: 1. people rely less than ever on native applications, so it's much easier to move now; 2. OS X is also Unix, so for OS X users it is quite simple to move OS X to Linux and vice versa; and 3. there are serious worries among OS X users about the future of OS X and Apple's lack of focus; 4. Macs are becoming so expensive that it is hard to justify getting relatively bad specs for 1.5 times the price.
But how do you see the push Canonical did with Ubuntu? As I remember, the sentiment was that they were going to make Linux usable and easy for the average user, instead of going after advanced users. And IMHO they really succeeded in doing that, surely you're not saying that was all there before?
A user with absolutely no Linux or terminal experience can use an Ubuntu system for writing letters/emails/browsing and doesn't need to ever touch the terminal (provided all hardware is supported).
When hardware works out the box, everything is fine and dandy. As soon as it doesn't like with many OSs, it's a time waster, you loose your confidence with the entire project.
I can speak to this. Both my wife and roommate use ubuntu referbished laptops I supplied. Neither knows what a terminal is or how to use it. It just works(tm).
and then xp came and it was the better in in everything from 98/ME.
Debian has had flavoured CDs for long time ago.
Is not the first time a read somebody complain about lack of choice but unknowingly is only trying or using Ubuntu (not Kubuntu nor Xubuntu).
May be in latest years Ubuntu has messed up a bit the percepction of Linux Desktop, but Linux Desktop is as healthy and fragmented as always.
And there is a probability that I'm also able to do all that on your box. Not sure about mine.
The Linux you remember is very different than what I remember. To say that back then Linux was unusable on the desktop would be an understatement. Yes, you had Red Hat, Mandrake (later Mandriva) and SuSE that were trying hard to provide a usable desktop distribution, but nothing was working well. And people needed Win32 apps because there were no alternatives usable for Linux.
Nowadays Linux usually works well on most hardware you can throw at it, it doesn't choke on the most basic of tasks and while it still has an app problem, sadly, the web is making that less relevant. Nowadays all that average users need is a good web browser, coupled with Linux's security and remote debugging capabilities, it's a very good fit for my father for example.
Speaking of which, I don't have a high regard for companies and products popular among developers and that don't support Linux. I pay a premium for Dropbox because it works on my Linux box, even though my primary workstation is now OS X. And I've been transitioning away from 1Password. Voting with your wallet does work and if a company isn't supporting Linux then it means it doesn't want my money. OS X was in the same situation a while back, for certain use-cases it still is, yet it prevailed because people have stuck with it.
There was a reason why you could buy Linux in bookstores for years. People were actually using it. For instance, SuSE had quite a stronghold in Europe. I was still in high school and I knew quite a lot of people that were using SuSE Linux.
coupled with Linux's security
What security? It's running every application unsandboxed and each X11 application can read all keystrokes, mouse events, make screengrabs, etc. Linux on the desktop is way behind macOS and Windows when it comes to security. It's just not a very interesting target, because of its small marketshare.
One can only hope that distributors will follow the lead of Fedora and move to Wayland soon.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vishalsi/2006/11/30/what-is...
(Note: I am not a Windows expert.)
Nowadays [...] coupled with Linux's security and remote debugging capabilities, it's a very good fit for my father for example.
In any event, when a user is compromised, it's lol Windows. But when Yahoo is compromised, is anyone opining security in Linux? Or are these social engineering hacks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatter_attack
These days less of a problem. Message injection/sniffing between applications in different contexts doesn't work. Unless you're the administrator, in which case it is game over already.
At that time Windows security was a joke. You could write anywhere on the whole disk and you could "read all keystrokes, mouse events, make screengrabs" as well.
Windows has always had the best desktop system and it still does. Some loud minority always talks about how great the Mac UI is but I think it's hideous and most of the world agrees with me since nobody copied the Mac OS' major UI gimmicks (and if they did, it was seen as a stupid unpopular mistake).
Anyway - I run all three in my business and I'm well versed in each of them. Linux is great for servers and I need Macs for iOS stuff, but nothing beats the sheer convenience of Windows, the best desktop OS that ever was.
Maybe one day Windows will become open source and all the Linux folks can stop trying to catch up on the desktop. Until then, I'll gladly throw my money at Microsoft for providing such a beautiful system for me to use.
Furthermore StarOffice was the office app available (Abiword and Gnumeric and KOffice were very young and struggled with MS Office files as I recall).
Konqueror as a web browser didn't really take off or mature until KDE 3 as I recall? Firefox/Firebird was very young, there was no Google Chrome. I think I might have been running Netscape on Linux at this time??
Having said all this, I did enjoy using Linux at this period. It was a fresh new operating system to me. I remember wasting hours of my life using it.
All this before .Net, Vala, before Qt was open source. egcs and the gcc fiasco, XFree86 etc. etc.
He was a fervent KDE fanboy until he did an about face and starting disparaging KDE over the Qt licensing while pushing a hodgepodge of software under the Gnome moniker.
During that whole time he picked up idea after idea from the Windows world (hell, his first program of fame, Midnight Commander, was a straight clone of the DOS program Norton Commander) and rammed them into Gnome.
And Now he works for Microsoft, go figure...
Thinking about it, i get the feel that Poettering is a rerun of Icaza. Only this time OSX is the source of the "inspiration" rather than Windows.
Beyond that it is yet another round of NIH projects and divide and conqueror political rhetoric.
I did enjoy using Gnumeric so thank Miguel.
Also MC is pretty useful when you SSH into a box and want some form of file manager.
I remember reading those same words in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008...
There's always been some flux to the ease of Linux vs the ease of say..Windows.
There was a time during XP SP1 and SP2 where installing Windows took fucking forever because it had none of the drivers pre-installed, whereas Linux had a grand majority of them bundled.
Windows still had better overall hardware support with peripherals, so there was still the odd thing missing - but if you had a compatible machine, you could do a clean linux install in under an hour and be loaded with apps, codecs, drivers, the works. With XP you would've been left scouring one web page after another for endless download links, often from another computer b/c your NIC driver didn't work out of the box.
As the article mentions, Thunderbird as an email client is _okay_. Rewind back to the late 90s, and applications like Winamp were pretty amazing, it just needed a better user interface. There are loads of music applications on Linux, but I end up using CLI mplayer and even Foobar2k under Wine, because of some of the other shortcomings.
Even the core of Linux desktop applications like Nautilus feel like they are regressing. When a file manager in my mind should be at the heart of an OS. Mounts and copying should be very intuitive.
Much functionality exists in CLI apps, but is stripped out or lacking in desktop applications. Having something like Rsync in your file manager could be great. And better integration with something like Git. But that's after the core utility of the application is polished to the max.
It's the final 10%, and I appreciate how difficult that is, with moving targets weird Window tool-kits and other abstractions and APIs, but it's that polish that makes it.
Having said that Windows always feels like a fragmented Frankenstein's monster with UI inconsistencies not only across core applications but also with third party ones.
While some of the desktop paradigms have worn well, I don't see much radical experimentation on the desktop, and Linux could provide exactly the platform to try things out.
So I disagree that there has been no progression on the desktop front. The progression has been extraordinary. It's true that in some areas things have stalled a little or even gone backwards as of lately, mostly due to the introduction of Gnome 3 in my opinion, but all in all there's no contest between what we have now and what we had 15 years ago.
In this period, Netscape 4.x still worked pretty well and was available on Linux. Opera was also available for Linux at that time. So, it's definitely not true that the Mozilla Suite (which was indeed horrible) was the only available browser.
You could not play MP3 files out of the box due to patent issues.
I remember mpg123, xmms, etc. being available in many distributions. It was primarily Red Hat who didn't distribute MP3 support out of the box. IIRC free decoders were exempt from the decoder licensing fees.
Most graphic cards only worked in VESA mode, so we had no 3D acceleration of any kind.
Around 2000 there were not that many 3D chipsets. 3DFX was still ruling the world and there was 3D support for Linux per Glide. Many 2D accelerators did have support (e.g. Tseng Labs ET series, Matrox chipsets, ATI chipsets, most S3 chipsets). I had a 3DFX Voodoo 3 and was playing accelerated OpenGL games on Linux. I remember tinkering with NetBSD and having to go back to software rendering, which was frustrating.
But the worst thing was the lack of fonts. Fonts were truly abysmal.
Erm, Microsoft's 'Core fonts for the Web' were distributed since 1996. There has been a Sourceforge project (msttcorefont) distributing the fonts since Microsoft took them offline. Many distributions had an installer or package to get these Microsoft fonts. Then you had all the usual Windows fonts.
I think this shows the main problem with users' perception of Linux at the time. Most of the people who tried Linux expected things like that to work out of the box, and when they got the bad defaults instead they proclaimed Linux "unusable". They most likely never knew that MS Fonts package existed. I think I was using Linux for over a year before I discovered it.
I think I spent months fiddling with Linux before I got it to great looking, productive, usable OS which was in some regards even better than Windows XP at the time. For example, CD burning on Windows required 3rd party software which took over the CPU and your machine was basically unusable while it was doing that. K3B on Linux was so much better.
I used KDE in the beginning, but then I switched to IceWM, and spent days configuring it until I got it to run really fast, with USB drive icons showing up and stuff like that. And you got free stuff like CPU/hard drive/network monitors in the taskbar which Windows doesn't have to this day.
Yeah Linux attracts some really strange people - why, why, why do you need these monitors? Why do you need conky with your hostname? With your IP? With your kernel version?
Your workstation is not another random server you administrate, so hostname showing is absolutely not required (unless when you sit down in front of a computer you are high as hell and cannot tell it's your computer, or just too stupid to tell which computer it is)...
There are times I need to check CPU usage, but simple eye candy for 12 year olds who watched too much Hacker movies widgets won't help anyways...
It really pisses me off when I double click to run a program and there's no indication that it's starting up. Seeing CPU spike confirms that it's working. If I had a penny for every time I started a program twice on Windows...
Similar problem when I start some operation in some CPU/HDD intensive program. If the program itself has no progress bar or similar indication I have no clue if it started doing it, or maybe I misclicked.
Similar problem when a browser or another network program seems stuck on a download and I have no clue whether it's the network problem or the program itself is the culprit.
And there are some programs that eat RAM like crazy and on Windows you have no clue when it starts swapping to disk. With monitors you can clearly see that 1. you ran out of RAM and 2. you disk I/O is the cause why the system is slowing down.
I really don't care about hostname or kernel version though. But, I absolutely want to know what's happening in order to use my computer efficiently.
So, you are either using your system inefficiently or you have some beast of a machine with infinite RAM, CPU power and super fast disks.
So those monitors are required if you have 2GB RAM, no SSD and use poorly designed software - seems about right for a linux user, which cannot afford and OS.
CPU monitor is needed to see if some app is running or not. It's killing me not having that on Windows on a daily basic. For example, starting up Steam takes 5-10 seconds before you get any visual clue that your double-click on the Steam icon was acknowledged. On Linux and Mac I get feedback right away because I can see the CPU and I/O spike.
I think the articles comments about poor calendar and contact applications really highlight missing functionality. Outlook did well I think because of the calendar integration. Even the most architecturally stunning systems aren't worth much without a great application eco-system. That's no slant on Linux.
I struggled with Flash on Linux for years.
I too am disappointed by the lack of desktop applications. The advent of the microcomputer has meant that we shouldn't need to connect to a server the other side of the world to do tasks - we can do 99% of them locally (unless collaboration is involved).
Whilst I agree that Windows has 20+ years of history to maintain (and it does this very well) and suffers from inconsistencies (particularly apparent in Windows 10 as they push out apps like System Settings which doesn't adhere to UI standards, I can't double-click the icon top-left to close a window like since 1990 because it doesn't exist...), I would prefer Linux did not experiment with desktop paradigms - look at the Unity and GNOME3 weirdness. It seems apparent that the normal "windows and taskbar" system has worked well for decades. You can take a Mac from the early 90s and find your way around it. Experimentation of this paradigm would be for experimentation's sake.
Applications end up doing their own file management for example.
There are alternative innovative ways to access menus and trigger actions. Context tasks etc. But people are stuck in the past it's like they can't imagine anything different.
Linux also has inconsistencies between windowing tool-kits.
Mobile gets a little more attention these days. But that seems to also be stuck in a rut.
I meant experimental forks. Ubuntu foisting unity upon people was pretty damaging. Again if only they'd concentrated on the last 10%. Instead of creating a mess.
With age some tasks have become harder for me. I used to be quite a whizz at dragging and dropping, and fine pointer precision. Now I'm a bit of a fat handed twat, and my eyes aren't that great. I really do need a 10ft display with simple controls.
A lot of this is stuff is usability and ergonomics 101.
Experimental forks would be a safer way to go. I suppose if they don't have massive development teams/effort, it would be difficult to do. It would satisfy everyone who wants to go and invent the future and do exciting new things (which will likely revert to how they should be when real use of them occurs). I imagine the "let's maintain the existing" team would shrink.
Do you use a mouse or touchpad? As resolutions increase, we have to be more precise for UI or just scale everything 200% (like everyone does on 4K screens or Microsoft Surface Pro 4) thereby defeating having a high resolution in the first place......
There are dozens of us! DOZENS!
I find it ironic that the GNU/Linux is the one that helped make the GNU/Linux desktop less relevant by fostering web apps. Anything that is able to run a recent browser is good enough.
Also the desktop fragmentation and FOSS culture, makes it almost impossible to sell desktop software to GNU/Linux users.
True, but it also boosts the non-traditional Linux desktop. Something like the Chromebook would be a flop 15 years ago.
They only see a window manager taking care of Chrome instances, with ChromeOS specific APIs.
Google can release a Chromebook without any access to Crouton, replaced the Linux kernel by something else, and no USA school buying Chromebooks would notice.
Same applies to Android, specially after the Android 7 locked on linking to private shared objects.
If you look at the engineering workstation segment, there are companies with hundreds or thousands of seats pooling FlexLM licenses of very expensive software, namely for microelectronics design.
Those seats are typically RedHat or CentOS. If you look up revenues for Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys, most of it is EDA software licensing (remainder is mostly IP and training.)
Not prime time news, but not pocket change either.
The enterprise is relatively easy to sell software to GNU/Linux users, because what gets sold is actually training, support and consulting.
All things that non-technical consumers don't care to pay a dime for, but they usually buy shrink-wrapped software, even if on digital form.
I believed back then, and still now, that money is to be made with experts & service. Seems to work very well for companies like RedHat and IBM.
There was a very brief period, between cca. 2005 and 2011 or so, when the fragmentation was less obvious because there was some degree of integration and cohesion (we had things like QtCurve, for instance). Then everyone started having delusions of grandeur again, in an early-90s-Unix manner, and things have been pretty much degrading ever since.
Today's "Linux desktop ecosystem" (God I hate this particular sequence of words) seems less fragmented largely because application development outside the major desktop environments has been largely abandoned, except for very relevant niches (photo/video editing, web browsers). A development that's largely unsurprising between KDE's architecture astronautics and Gnome's see no feedback, speak no feedback, hear no feedback attitude (that GTK, sadly, adopted for a pretty long time).
The unpleasant consequence is, of course, the "app problem" you speak of. A long time ago, the default KDE installation in Slackware 10 (which shipped with KDE 3.5, I think) shipped with a huge suite of applications, including graphical diff tools, VCS frontends, several multimedia players and so on. Two major rewrites later, they haven't re-accumulated this wealth of applications (and some of the ones that they do ship or advertise today are practically abandoned or remnants from the KDE 3 days). Some of the developments have been outright catastrophic, like KMail, which was turned from a very useful mail client to something that borks in a gazillion unpredictable ways as soon as you try to configure more than one account.
Similar things are happening in Gnome land, where they've chased feature-parity with Gnome 2 for years as they've been scrambling to fix everything that wasn't wrong with it and the horde of bugs that ensued from these fixes. Which, in fact, is why they have three forks in the first place. There was a lot of negativity about the Gnome 1 -> Gnome 2 transition, too, but that never resulted in forking. Nowadays we have people trying to keep a KDE branch that hasn't been developed in almost ten years alive, and actively using it (TDE). That's because, for all its flashiness, Apple and design fetishism, the super-disruptive community of desktop developers has failed to develop anything that's convincingly better than what was available ten years ago. The discussion, for some reason, is centered on whether the UI metaphors are adequate, ignoring users' feedback that focuses on far more obvious things, like "this thing KEEPS FUCKING CRASHING", "I just did apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and now all my applications look weird" and "everything is huge on my screen and this would look great on a tablet but this is not a tablet".
The Linux desktop today is far less fragmented, but that's because a) most of the people who could fragment it by developing fragmenting applications have long given up and use Macs and b) a lot of the traditional functions of a computer's desktop and applications have been eaten up by the web. There's little fragmentation to have when virtually all you use now is a web browser, the terminal and maybe a mail client.
Franly if it were not for the objective-C stuff it would make for a real nice option.
Which is quite a shame. Mail.app, for instance, was really good.
The biggest hurdles to GNUstep's adoption were a) its lack of documentation (you were generally expected to use the NeXTStep documentation, although some functions were not implemented at all and others were slightly buggy) and b) the fact that Gorm and ProjectManager were really buggy for a really long time. This made GNUStep development not significantly more pleasant than GTK or Qt development -- not to mention difficult to get into for people who had never written NeXT or OpenStep software before.
I think Linux will be the better option after: SNAP/Wayland goes mainstream and JACK becomes easier (Low latency Audio on Linux is still a nightmare compared to Windows and OSX).
But there are still a few rough edges. That being said, I use it for everything at home now, except for my Suunto GPS tracker, and Serato.
Perhaps I didn't play sound very often in multiple apps at the same time (who can listen to two sounds at once?)
Frankly the major reason for PA to exist at all is to handle transitory audio devices. I think Poettering started working on it because he bought himself a pair of USB headphones (basically a USB soundcard with some headphones hardwired to the analog pins).
Dmix could just as well have been extended to do audio routing. Or just ram sound down all channels unless the user decides to mute some of them.
For all of you poor onlookers who have no idea why people don't like PulseAudio, sit down and let grumpy ol' notalaser tell you the story of how PulseAudio gets all this hate -- much of which is, in fact, entirely undeserved today.
Back in 1999-2000 or so, things were really bad when it came to audio on Linux. The biggest problem most users faced right after being able to finally make something come out of their speakers was mixing audio streams from more than one source. This was especially relevant because, at the time, audio effects were really in vogue on the desktop.
The problem was that OSS was flaky and had basically no support for software mixing -- which meant that, save for the few sound cards that supported this feature in hardware, you couldn't play more than one stream at once. ALSA, on the other hand, was in a very early state, had all sorts of trouble, not too many drivers and updates were going slow considering that this was back when virtually everyone installed Linux from CDs and the biggest hurdle to a rolling release model was dial-up.
The way most desktops solved this problem was with a sound server (yep, basically PulseAudio). KDE used something called aRts; Gnome, I think, used Enlightenment's ESD. Both of these would do the mixing in software and pour everything into /dev/dsp. The bad news? They were really slow, high-latency (and I mean high latency, sometimes I'd get the sound alert a dialog about ten seconds after closing the dialog) and were a little funky. If aRts' queue stalled, for instance, the effect was a little comic -- after unstalling it would end up playing all the sounds that had accumulated in the queue. It was very comic.
By 2004-2005 or so, however, the whole concept ended up being mostly irrelevant, as ALSA began to really support hardware (and software mixing). Gnome eventually dropped ESD altogether. KDE kept up with aRts (but IIRC a lot of distributions started shipping KDE with aRts disabled) up to 2004, then embedded some of its ideas into Phonon. Those of us using something else finally rejoiced and never ran a sound server again.
2004 is also the year when PulseAudio was first released. By the time it got included by default in Fedora, in 2006, playing multiple streams using nothing but ALSA was very much a solved problem. I think it was so solved that it worked on Gentoo out of the box, without having to configure anything, on the more common sound card models. Not that Linux sound was perfect -- drivers were still flaky-ish sometimes, but obviously that was not something that a sound server, be it PA or something else, could solve.
So fast forward to 2007, when PulseAudio is actually unleashed upon the computers of everyone else except Lennart and his friends as it's adopted and enabled by default in Fedora 8. To put it mildly, nothing worked anymore. Very literally -- when we installed it at the crufty place where I held a part-time job there, it broke sound on every single one of the 10-15 different configurations we had, from laptops to desktops. On really old desktops, the breakage was subtle (high latency, occasional crashes). On newer laptops it was entirely terrible, they wouldn't even hiss. PA had no useful documentation, basically no means to do any useful debugging, and its upstream team quickly made a lot of friends due to its leaders' difficult (if superficially gentle) personality.
This was extremely unfortunate because alsa -- while not sucking as much as Pulse's PR machine claimed -- was still pretty bad, and many of its design decisions were firmly rooted in the landscape of the late 1990s Linux. dmix wasn't too power efficient and it had a bunch of other problems re. dynamically-added devices. Linux' sound system needed the improvements that PulseAudio brought; unfortunately, PulseAudio was both very slow in delivering them (in a manner that would not crash once a day, that is) and very eager in being adopted, which resulted in it being widely deployed while it was pretty much in early beta.
This is how everyone came to hate PulseAudio (and Lennart Poettering). It created quite a rift in the community, too, one that went on to be made even deeper. It also hurt PA's development pace in the long run.
tl;dr PulseAudio was too bold, too soon, even though it was, in many ways, too late.
This complete with a "you are holding it wrong" like statement from Poettering as new servings of bile rolled in...
The only real problem which you missed is the hardware. Hardware support on Linux wasn't really good these days. I had to buy a new printer and scanner and setting the CRT monitor to work at acceptable framerate took a lot of fiddling with Xorg config.
Early last year I switched to OSX. In the past I was heavily into various Linux distros: From Ubuntu, to the more lightweight Xubuntu. Fedora. Elementary. I've played with Gnome and Kde.
It is my opinion that the people who seem ecstatic about their switch to Linux are still in their honeymoon period. I don't feel like any Linux distro out there comes close to the stability and elegance of OSX.
I've had so many issues over the years, it's hard to even list them:
- Ubuntu only used the dedicated gfx card on one of my laptops. Never would it settle into integrated. This caused performance issues, overheating, and I ultimately decided it was impossible to use.
- Gnome had so many display, rendering, and performance issues... I still don't know how people tolerate it. Even software listed in this blog post: KeePassX copy/paste never worked for me. Random software that would just blank out and require a full system restart.
- Crashes... so many... crashes. Especially when using multiple monitors.
- Some distros (Elementary, for example) seem to have quite a few hardware limitations. Half the computers I tried to install these distros on would run into errors, a lot of bios chasing, too much time spent on forums to find help... Most of the times you just give up.
- There just isn't enough software. And Wine isn't exactly the perfect solution. Not ONE single good MySQL gui for Linux (just an example). Think about that - and no, Workbench isn't good! It's extremely intensive on resources and bloated.
I moved into OSX because I was fed up. I wanted to work and be productive and not constantly look after hardware and software. At the end of the day I wanted access to bash, pleasant to look at, with plenty of software options. I didn't want to worry about performance, random crashes, and lack of support for multiple displays. It's costly, but the solution for me was OSX.
Of course, now we can both be upset the course the OSX takes from our adoption of it and observe the removal of features with no recourse. Lesser of two evils I suppose.
- No dedicated graphics card. Intel's work well enough.
- I use Lxde with Xmonad. It's fast.
- No crash since I bough my laptop 8 months ago. No multiple monitors either, though.
- Still need proprietary hardware, so I stick to distros that distribute them. I blame the hardware vendors for their needless secrecy.
- I don't miss anything but the latest Windows games.
Interestingly, that would describe my experience with OSX (or macOS).
At home I use my Lenovo T440s with Linux without any problems or glitches in the past two years. Before I had a Dell Vostro, running Linux without problems for five years.
At work I have to use a MacPro (the winecooler-shaped thing) in a network run by the OSX Server app.
Every other day I have to disconnect the thunderbolt display because it can't be woken up.
Thunderbolt network has an incredible latency when connected to other machines in the same room. Unless you transfer one huge file, 100Mbit ethernet is always faster.
Sometimes you're stuck at the login window because the magic mouse and keyboard refuse to connect (randomly) for half an hour.
The OSX Server App fills the error logs at an incredible speed with only six machines and a couple more users. Network home drives are impossible to get right: NFS breaks ~/Library. AFP has constant "Resource busy" errors. SMB is the only one that works for all users but experiences so many random bugs that are impossible to trace. I can't remember a day where all users were able to login in the morning and no program had crashed overnight with data loss due to an SMB mount suddenly disappearing (work is scientific computing). And this is on a 1Gbit ethernet network, six machines and a server, all in the same room. Incredible!
And has anybody ever tried updating the Server App? Last time it got stuck at upgrading the Wiki (that we have never used) because the postgres upgrade script was botched. That was fun to find and fix.
And then the support. Nobody at the shops can really help you with network/server stuff. And the Apple forum is always like this: You find an old post with a apparently working solution. You try to implement the solution but Apple has removed a button that you're supposed to click.
Or you make a new post, only to be told (from somebody who is not an apple official but apparently has access to a secret forum) that apple knows about the bug since 2011 and is working on it. Just wait for the next update. Sure.
On the other hand, I have never had a Linux question that was not already answered in the Arch Linux forum. Is it really just me? Judging from the posts in the Apple forums, it can't be.
But what do other people do to be productive in an Apple network?
SQLyog Community works wonderfully on Wine. I've been using it through multiple versions for almost 15 years with no problems. In fact I'm going crazy looking for a Posgres client that works as well and doesn't cost a fortune (meanwhile I'm working with a mix of pgAdmin and InteliJ's database plugin)
I started using Linux (Ubuntu) last year. I was trying to get into open source software and I had a choice between a Macbook or a Dell laptop with Ubuntu on it.
I was aware that Linux had a reputation of being difficult to use but I was planning on doing some learning anyway, so why not give it a try? Of course, another factor was that I've never really cared for Macs much. I never understood the appeal of Mac design and I always felt like Mac products, and particularly one button mice, violate "form follows function." (note: I'm not design-minded).
Anyway, I was really surprised that Ubuntu desktop (unity) was basically the same thing as Windows, except the sidebar was on the left. That and I could use the software manager (and later, apt-get) to install common programs instead of googling "skype installer," which is what I would have done on windows.
Later, I learned to appreciate how easy it is to edit config files in Linux. Plain text files vs. regedit? Yeah, I'll take the English please.
"Many long time users" will also agree that Unity is just fine as far as UX goes.
Source: I'm a happy Unity user.
Of course, discovery is an issue with this method, and that just came with a few weeks of using it.
As years passed, both Mac OS and Windows have been gradually losing their appeal, getting more and more bloated, resource-hungry, sometimes plain crazy. Finally, they deteriorated to the point of a marginal usefulness to me. Linux, on the other hand, has been improving at an astounding pace. Today, it is friendly. It is snappy. And it does not spy on you. There are many variants to choose from. You can get it up and running in no time. It is there to suit your computing needs.
Today, there is nothing better.
Everything Macbooks (and the OS) provide is replaceable with good alternatives on a Linux environment and I personally had the satisfaction to do so. But still, there existed no notebook with the same keyboard feeling, trackpad (touchpad, whatever), weight and durability as a Macbook. What do I miss here?
Edit: Grammar fix. :)
Right now I think that Mac trackpad has three issues:
* it is freaking cold in the morning (metal case)
* you don't see the buttons (I still don't know if mac 1 one or 2 or 3 buttons :)
* click sound, when you have a child sleeping you don't want to have it so loud or at all (it should make same sound as pushing a keyboard button).
The advantages are:
* 3 finger, 4 finger gestures for desktop switching, window management etc. * You don't really need buttons. 1 finger tap/click is the left click, 2 finger tap/click is the right click. There are tools (i.e MagicPrefs) to make 3 finger tap/click the middle click. If you prefer clicks over taps, the sound can annoy you, that is a catch for sure. * Natural scroll is almost always pixel perfect instead of line snapping.
The best feature is that the click force needed can be configured, and there is a 'silent mode' that removes almost all the click noise.
Rebooting my Macbook into Windows makes the touchpad dumb.
Do you know if this is available on any particular distros out of the box?
On windows is another story, everything feels janky when using trackpad gestures.
I would never go back to Windows or even OSX.
I love Gnome's workspace switcher. OSX's workspace switcher felt tedious and slow by comparison.
With Ubuntu/Gnome, I just Ctrl+Alt+arrow-key to move between workspaces and it's so smooth/quick. It's great for writing/debugging code; I have one workspace with the app/site I'm building, one with my source code and one with the terminal for launching/killing processes. Sometimes I use the fourth workspace to do CPU profiling when doing performance testing.
It's nice that there are just four workspaces - One in each corner, then I can switch to any one of them with a single hotkey without even having to think - I can instantly bring up the one I want in a fraction of a second. It really adds up.
Windows was terrible. I had to move the mouse and click several times every time I wanted to test a change I made to the code. I can't believe I was doing that just a few years ago.
Step 1. Enable workspaces in Settings->Appearance->Behavior->Enable workspaces You can see the four workspaces on the Launcher, near the Trash icon.
Step 2. Add shortcuts to switch to these workspaces in Settings->Keyboard->Shortcuts->Navigation
You set a shortcut for "Switch to workspace 1" (up to 4). Ideally, you would set these to "Alt+1", "Alt+2", etc so that a single shortcut takes you as once to a specific workspace.
My Windows usage is restricted to gaming and music production. Sadly, getting low latency audio on Linux requires lots of fiddling, and even if I do get it running, I'm still going to miss the tons of windows-only audio plugins.
Ctrl-left/Ctrl-right switches workspaces for me. Four-finger swipe does the same.
what am I doing wrong?
But there hit a point when learning the shiny just felt like a chore, and I started gravitating back to tried and true software like emacs. And Linux stopped requiring much futzing to work pretty well. And the need to exchange Word docs evaporated due to Google Docs, LibreOffice, and life circumstances. And somewhere I decided that workstations are a luxury.
And then MacOS started crapping up the UI with stuff I never asked for. It became more of a hassle to strip the Mac than to build up a more comfortable free \*nix environment.
I'm unlikely to go back. I'll always be glad for the decade+ Apple gave me. But I'm even more thankful for the luxury of not needing them.
But as I've said repeatedly in the past, the thing that still drives me completely insane are the keyboard shortcuts, their general inconsistency across DE, apps, etc., the layering interaction of how they're intercepted by different parts of the system (so even when I can manually change them to be consistent, I still can't guarantee they'll be interpreted correctly), and their use of the Control key as the primary modifier in both GUI and Terminal applications.
Linux mostly copied Windows in this regard, and it's just as painful as Windows (and then some) for that reason. I would gladly pay $1,000 for a KDE Neon or Fedora Gnome distro that went through the trouble of thoroughly implementing and maintaining a version with fully Mac-like keyboard shortcuts and keyboard shortcut customization facilities.
I'd pay that per user for my team too. We'd make the money back quickly on savings in hardware purchases.
The whole thing uses basically GNOME standard keyboard shortcuts, and two extremely common ones, Cmd-S and Cmd-W, which are normally used universally for "Save" and "Close" respectively are actually for doing things with the window and workspace manager in elementaryOS.
For the most part the shortcuts seem to be inherited from GNOME/Gtk.
I'll take a look. Maybe I can have some luck either rebuilding everything in a fork of the KDE Neon repos with that enabled or getting the maintainers to enable it.
edit: and LibreOffice would drive me nuts since it won't just import an exported config from a Mac that has Mac keybindings, and the export format is binary, so hard to export on Linux bulk-modify and re-import, so I'd still have to painstakingly go through its clunky interface to change everything to make sense. But still... that'd all be a huge improvement over the current state of affairs.
From your response to the sibling comment, it sounds like you're looking for a way to swap the Super and Control keys? There are actually settings for that in both Gnome and KDE/Plasma. In Gnome, you can go into one of the sections of Gnome Tweak Tool (I think it's called "Typing") and in one of the lists of options, there's a checkbox for something like "Swap left Win and left Control". In MADE/Plasma, it's in main settings app somewhere there's an identical list of checkbox options (I think it's in the "Keyboard" section, but I might be wrong, as I haven't used Plasma in a while; if you're having trouble finding it though, I can go back and find the exact location tomorrow and let you know)
What that doesn't do is decouple terminal shortcuts from GUI shortcuts. It just puts the Control key under my thumb.
Being able to bind almost everything (including running custom scripts) to a keyboard shortcut, having tons of desktop options you can force by matching window or app properties, using special attributes or regexps, all of that screams "don't use default and customize me" to me, which is where KDE really shines, IMO.
There are Linux users that love to hate something, but we those at a distance.
Used ubuntu + Unity, then switched to i3 on Ubuntu. After lots of tweaking, I found out how to get nice font rendering on i3 (default rendering is not so good when you're used to osx).
Then I went on the hunt for replacement apps for my office work : email + calendar + contacts; oh my, spent hours trying Thunderbird, Evolution, Geary (and it's new fork also), also Gnome Calendar, Thunderbird lightning and California for calendar.
In the end, I settled on Thunderbird + Gnome cal, but it felt like a compromise rather than a happy choice.
After some weeks of working with that setup, not finding emails when needed, forgetting about calendar appointments because of sync issues, I just gave up and when back to The Path Of Least Resistance for me : macos.
By the way, so many are using gapps and gsuite these days that this may not matter at all.
Yes, I'm pretty sure also that office apps are not a problem for many Linux-on-desktop users for this particular reason; turns out I don't want to use google office services, so this was not an option for me.
Also, there is no good email client for Linux. Thunderbird is a huge waste of time and other programs are even worse.
So true :)
Can't comment on the state of graphical email clients. But there's still mutt ...
So, yeah, switching from OSX to Linux now isn't so bad. Isn't 2017 the year of "Linux On The Desktop", or was that 2016, or 2015, or 14...
It works great. Running Arch linux btw.
Also, you might want to look into a used Macbook Pro. As you have seen, they can last for awhile and parts (like batteries) are usually easy to source even years after they've been discontinued. FYI, they stopped using the PowerBook naming in 2006.
It's the multi-workspace support, that completely decouples workspaces from screens. (So you can swap them around arbitrarily.)
I realised I liked consistency of keyboard shortcuts and replaced my work MBP15 with a X1 carbo nand realised how crazy heavy the MBP is.
Still miss Lightroom and Preview on Mac OS.
Recently I decided to get my teen brother, who's going into CS soon, a Linux laptop for development and a Raspberry Pi for a project we're doing together (a "magic mirror").
Instantly found desktop Linux to still be a giant pain in the ass. Ubuntu on the Pi defaulted wifi to only manual addressing, not DHCP. On top of that, set to IPv6 only as well. After digging through SO and other forums for a while we finally figured it out.
I've never had a desktop Linux experience work "out of the box". It still takes a power user to make it even half-way tolerable, and as a power user, I found it intolerable. I could see how overwhelming it was just writ plain on his face. Then realized I was making the same expressions.
Apple is definitely irritating me lately with their hardware decisions, but at the end of the day OSX is just better with desktop tasks. Hell, I'd choose Windows desktop experience over Linux, even with MS's privacy issues with Win10. Because I don't want to spend 3 hours figuring out how to turn on wifi.
No, I get it, I mixed together my frustrations with the Pi with my frustrations with the laptop installs. At the end of the day though the combined experiences recently made me go "this is still a pain in the butt".
I keep saying that I have, and its way better now. But, I'm slowly realizing that I haven't done a bare metal install in probably 6 years. I suspect that a lot of people are in the same boat.
Completely the opposite for me. Ubuntu installs on almost anything I've tried (laptops, netbooks, desktops with production dates ranging from 2006 to present day). Install and setup for use usually take less than an hour. For a couple of years now I haven't encountered a single issue (like networking or graphics not working).
Not to say your experience isn't accurate, just wanted to add how impressed I've been with Linux and particularly Ubuntu for the past few years.
Conversely, installing windows (8) on modern, fresh from the factory, HP laptops has been an experience I will never voluntarily repeat.
Additionally, if you're installing on a raspberry pi you're fundamentally at a power user level - my non-techie friends and family are nowhere near that level. If you actually install it on a desktop it's a breeze, I think your frustration stems from engaging in an activity that's fairly challenging no matter what you do. There are plenty of alternatives for your pi, but neither OS X nor Windows are among them.
I'd be more interested to hear how the linux laptop went. Did that come preinstalled? Did your brother like it?
The laptop for him seems to be going okay as a development machine. He's definitely not using it as a daily desktop. And editor and console open is mostly what he's using it for.
It wasn't pre-installed, it was a laptop donated from my work without a hard drive. I gave it to him with a new in box HD and a bootable USB stick for his birthday in November and told him to roll with it. Eventually I had to step in and help because the install just wasn't working, we switched to a DVD install disc instead. The USB just wouldn't work.
I did the same for my daughter for Christmas, except with me doing the installation. This was going to be a desktop experience for her to use for homework and the like. Google Docs, watching YouTube videos, etc.
Sound card issues. Browsing issues. Bluetooth headphone issues. Blue or black screens with no response. Eventually I just bought her a Windows laptop and she's been productive ever since. I'm sure given time I could have corrected every issue by delving through documentation and forums, and in fact she was willing to over look all the issues and power through. But at end of the day I wanted to give her something that worked.
I love Linux for servers. But Linux for desktops still seems like a tinkerer's passion to make it work. In my own experiences it seems not that more advanced than it was a decade ago. I'm glad it works for some though.
As [astrodust] points out, there's been great strides in making the Linux ecosystem "habitable." With more people thinking about putting in the effort to switch, I think it would be useful if we focused on the positive aspects of a free operating system and not just that you can run them on systems without a touchbar. The article mentions configurability and being able to run it on anything. I'd add zero cost and privacy. If you value those things then switching could still be worth it in the end even with other pain points.
Main reason why I didn't use it, I don't want to be tied only to Mac platform. From this perspective, it was a good hunch. I have android phone, omni focus is not available, others are.
List of differences: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t...
I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
Is it not known that this behavior can be disabled back to the old way with a single line command? You simply run this from Terminal:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false
In addition, often you can play Win games using Wine, while on a Mac [EDIT: the following is true only if the game needs Vulkan or OpenGL > 4.1] the only way would be using bootcamp (which means you have to reboot every time you want to play).
Disclaimer: I haven't used Mac OS in recent times so I may be unaware of other solutions.
Sales of my game on Steam seem to confirm that. It sold 8x more copies on Linux than on Mac.
After that pretty much a desktop PC with different Linux distributions, have since standardized on Xubuntu. Got a MBP for my current job. Not exactly loving it but it's ok. Next laptop will very likely not be an Apple laptop. Maybe I'll just stop the little iOS stuff I'm doing completely (as it's my experience that it's fairly horrible on non-Apple products). I'll gladly take recommendations (I was thinking about maybe buying a Mac Mini the next time I get some iOS request) but that's pretty much the only reason why I'd buy Apple hardware now.
PS: I work at Nylas. :)
We also have an infrastructure API product that powers many apps: https://nylas.com/cloud
> ElectronJS
A tad mutually exclusive.
I did try N1 ~6 months ago and performance was as bad as expected in an Electron app, though admittedly it may have improved since then.
I definitely recommend against Nylas, unless you want to pay a subscription fee.
I, and many others, had a very sour experience [0] that wasn't helped by poor communication [1].
tl;dr - a free product suddenly turned into a paid product that was (mis-)sold as an upgrade.
[0] - https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/2617#issuecomment-2331371...
[1] - https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/2617#issuecomment-2331802...
We also didn't want to add an advertising system or sell user data or anything scammy like that to pay the bills, so we decided to simply charge users for the version which uses our hosted backend. We had to implement this pretty quickly, and I wrote about the transition here: https://nylas.com/blog/nylas-pro
Our team at the time was almost entirely engineers (including myself) and we definitely could have done a better job with the messaging.
But on another note... stay tuned! We're working on some updates that should make it more affordable for folks who just want the basic mail experience and don't need any of the pro features like open/link tracking, mail merge, Salesforce integration, etc.
To be honest, it's not really for me - I liked the app, but was only using your server infrastructure because that's the way the app worked. (I just wanted the UI into gmail and outlook.)
Well, you did get a year subscription for free. That part of communication didn't suck. I'd agree it felt a bit like bait 'n switch, but their developers also gotta eat.
I'm just using Nylas N1 as home user, and I don't want any more subscriptions. I'm oversubscribed as it is. If I were commercial of business that'd be different.
A one time fee would be OK with me (YMMV!). It is also still an open source version.
Would I be able to self host on a Raspberry Pi btw? Aren't businesses better off to just self host instead of going w/Pro?
Nope, I would have been more than prepared to roll with that (hell, I might even have ended up paying for it) - but that disappeared as soon as the free tier disappeared.
It seems 1yr free Pro was there to entice you to upgrade, but once there was nothing to upgrade from there was nothing free at all.
> but once there was nothing to upgrade from there was nothing free at all.
There is, if you self host. To me, it seems a serious organisation should anyway, for data protection reasons. Right now, I'm hosting the access to my e-mail data in the USA. Sounds good? For a European (individual, for profit, non profit organisation, or government), it isn't. I'd like to not hold that against Nylas, but OTOH they could just provide a self hosting backend server with Nylas N1 anyway. Or inform the user about this at least.
Nylas also plan to offer a limited, free version on top of that.
Its a young company, so they're still figuring out their business models. Its easy to attribute malice to that, but it could just as well be incompetence.
Konsole has been my daily terminal emulator since the move from GNOME {2,3} (since the removal of fallback mode which subsequently disabled compiz fusion, also breaking a lot of my long term formed habits) to KDE 4.10 (now latest plasma 5). Cannot complain.
However, there is a new GPU accelerated terminal emulator emerging - alacritty which claims to be the fastest in the business. Looks promising (I've tried it) -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13338592
Its only because a lot of general use case computing is becoming browser specific and Linux desktops have made massive strides in usability that the general use case even becomes a possibility but the push factor still remains.
Poeple who are not computer centric will use what comes to them and nearly impossible to imagine a scenario where they reach to install another OS. Even developers are often not systems folks, they know how to get their programming environment going and little beyond that.
The kind of knowledge you need to really manage an OS from installing, hardware, networking, storage is specialized and unless is designed in by hardware and software vendors with support and training be it Linux, Windows or OSX becomes an uphill battle. Possible but time consuming. This knowledge is held by people who are paid to know it or are in technology software industry and unlikely to interest people who just want to use stuff and not gain an indepth knowledge of it.
But now I'm my late 30's, I work as a Linux Admin/DevOps/automation engineer for a living and I have more money than I have time. So time has become very important to me. Even in 2016, running Linux in a desktop is a time sink, since researching hardware and troubleshooting X, etc. other issues, selecting which variant of some basic killer app with strange names to use, all that other stuff I ENJOYED doing I now don't enjoy, because I have hobbies.
HOWEVER, I would be willing to forgo all of that, and suffer the miserable time sink of running Linux on a desktop again for one thing: Adobe support. Lightroom and sometimes Photoshop are 'killer apps' for me for photography as a hobby, and no, I'm not moving to Gimp or something else that's open source. Again, my wallet has more power than my free time is vast.
I had a Mac Pro tower years ago, the big heavy one, before the newer revisions turned it into a tiny garbage-can-shaped appliance that you can't upgrade (soldered graphics, clever). Then I've Macbook Airs, and once that new Pro came out, needless to say I had to pick other alternatives.
At the end of the day I chose a Microsoft Surface Book, because a) Microsoft is now the underdog (and this is coming from an open source, Linux guy by trade) b) the hardware is sexy, with a screen that comes off a real base with a discrete GPU and decent keyboard, turning itself into a tablet c) It runs Lightroom and Photoshop! And the pen is a nice touch.
So that's my story. I'd have a story more closely aligned to moving to Linux if I weren't hobbled by Adobe dependence. But I do say, I don't regret the (very expensive, but time-saving) Surface Book.
Linux is great. I have been coding/learning/programming for almost 3 years and there is a lot of knowledge neccessary to be productive-- in any environment. There have been a large amount of these "os x alternative posts"; and I agree with them.
Apple is alienating people like me-- not just the archetypal guru ninjas who contribute to the kernal or live in vim. I just bought a used 2011 15" macbook pro. The 2012 mbp are really the last year that could be hardware updated. I have a flashdrive with bootable yosemite and a carbon copy of one of my hard drives that run Yosemite. This is because if you upgrade you can't revert to previous gens. Sometimes even when testing a beta.
I am ALL for progression, it would be AWESOME if people updated their browsers and the web could push forward-- but os x has gotten worse. El capitan & sierra are pretty bad imo and many others.
Also, the hardware is leaving a lot to be desired. Also, linux is rising, shit even Microsoft is making software for linux. Apple is barely competing in the "pro" space.
I am sure people will still decelop plenty of hq apps for iphone and macos but with Linux, Android and Microsoft making such obvious pains to win devs, this could be a mistake.
I am running 2 OS back on a 5 year old hardware and the experience is only alightly worse than when I had a 2015 maxed MBP. Also web platforms are allowing tons of greatvsoftware to be env agnostic.
I am semi sick of these posts, but there is a reason they keep topping HN. A few years ago I remeber PG even calling Apple out. He said something like, he had just unconsciously subscribed to Apples next computer, but it wasnt obvious he would anymore. They weren't keeping up.
OS X was-- and still is, pretty great. Cook is likely making the right business decision in the hub progression:
laptop is hub > cloud is hub > phone is hub
But a little more effort to ship better software and reasonable hardware would go so far. No ports, non-upgradeable, limited memory and SSD storage for fing 1600.
I can punt on a decision for 1-2 more years with current configuration but without marked improvement and inprovement v alternatives i will leave amd so will many other like me-- avg & beginner developers, designers and media(photo/video/music) pros.
Bummed.
There of course are far more apps available in apt/yum, but the quality of them typically doesn't compare at all to what you get on OSX. What's a super simple app in nix nearly always tends to have a far higher quality OSX version that has a nice menu bar with actions available, status changes, integrations with other apps, etc.
A lot of simple third party apps that I use daily, like popclip which saves me a ton of clicks when copy/pasting, 1passwords browser extensions (you can run it in Wine but the extensions can't connect to the app), bartender, fantastical, some pomodoro app I always forget to use tend to not have nix versions or alternatives that are anywhere near the same quality and once you've gotten accustomed to using these your workflow when dumped into a raw nix desktop just plummets.
Not to mention when any new hip thing is released on github I can almost guarantee that there's going to be an OSX release readily available.
It's a chicken egg situation which sucks. There's less users so there's less incentive to port the apps.. and there we stand.
1. dtrace (I don't see systemtap improving that, and there's the unhealthy NIH syndrom)
2. wifi reconnnection time (10x slower)
3. power (always behind, always have to patch or recompile kernels or kernel modules. this actually broke my last linux laptop)
OS X is getting worse and worse, almost to the state of systemd. But do I want to switch over to systemd? No, hell no.
Seriously though, it was only until last year that I decided I want to only use Ubuntu (specifically) because I did not want to switch between keybindings between my work Mac and my home PC. My work MacBook is actually much more capable than my home PC, with the retina screen/better processor/etc. However, it now sits collecting dust, only opened to watch movies and will be used as such if and when my employment terminates. I regret asking for a MacBook, thinking I was going to be doing more work within OS X.
However, my mind changed when the little things about OS X started to get to me. I work on two screens mostly (unless it is just my laptop at home.) All windows are usually full-screened. They usually consist of Emacs, Chrome and a terminal, with some side applications like Skype. I don't use any special Unity features, like the Dock, etc. and only use the graphical file browser occasionally. In this setup, OS X seemed to conflict with my desires towards this use-case. I was also getting scared that Apple's use-cases would override mine in the future, conflicting with my rather simple and stable usage requirements. Ubuntu, through the years, has been incredibly stable for me; I rarely have issues with it. When there are issues, they are usually just dumb ones. However, it was 16.04 that solidified the case for me, because it turned out to be more solid than previous versions.
A long time ago, the cracks were starting to show when I threw up my arms over OS X over compiling ruby gems. At the time, I had to always fight with it to compile ruby gems. In Ubuntu, things just worked.
My wife still wants to use OS X/macOS, running a 2010 macbook pro (that is in an advanced state of decay :)) but that's her. I wish I can just by a cheap+powerful PC laptop and stick ubuntu on it, but that's not going to happen.
To sum, to me this is about taste and tolerance. I am glad people are interested in using GNU/Linux-based distributions more. With the audience growing, I am glad to see that this can lead to more investments in the desktop Linux space.
- i3 is great, better than tiling WMs for OS X, including amethyst.
- I didn't notice lack of Microsoft Office - Import to google docs and LibreOffice have been more than sufficient.
- Gimp and inkspace are the biggest difference. Photoshop and Illustrator are much better. On the other hand, I disliked spammy "Adobe creative cloud" on Mac.
- Installing many dev tools is easier. brew was much worse than pacman/yaourt in Arch Linux.
- For many tools mentioned in article (mail, music, calendar) web interface have been better for me, even on Mac
- If you want to use nice new things happening in 2016, like train deep learning models or play VR you need a PC.
- everything sucks at some point - it has never been easier to test before making a decision - it is possible not to switch but to adapt and use different devices and systems - "switching' is not an life commitment; if it sucks for you, switch back; it is not an insult to the system you chose - when encountering issues, spend some time contributing to reports or wiki. Not a user but archlinux wiki is great.
Switching back and forth assumes investment of time and effort, which are tradable things. We trade our time and effort for money, we are willing to pay money for things that saves us time and effort. It's kind of a big deal for some of us.
What is it with MacOS and this workflow? It's annoying enough to make me want to buy Office just so I can open an app and fiddle before I decide if and where I want to save things. Why does everything have to be in a concrete location in the filesystem before I can do anything in the office apps? I do think they fixed this for textedit though so that's nice, that'd have been annoying.
What I feel unreplaceable, (I don't mind free or paid)
- Sequel Pro (Windows may have HeidiSQL)
- Source Tree (Windows one exist but not Linux.)
- Better Touch Tools
- Forklift / Transmit (That does dual pane file browser / sftp remote browser)
- QR clipboard (To pass URL to phone)
- Xcode
Web browser, email and Jetbrains stuff are available all over, so those are fine though.
It's sad and ironic that I can't recommend a good git gui client to a friend who uses Linux daily.
That one's going to be a hard nut to crack...
> Forklift / Transmit (That does dual pane file browser / sftp remote browser)
MC anyone? /semi-s
It has a bad reputation because, back in the day, it was buggy and bloated. But I haven't hit a single bug over these years, and while it eats a significant amount of memory, it's on par with other options (and these days everyone has plenty of RAM).
I'd love to see more people giving it a second chance.
I see a lot of "leaving apple" articles and comments lately. From what I gather, this is because their latest macbook is disappointing. But from what I remember, the initial reason for switching to apple was because of the incredible UX of macOSX.
Did I miss something and there also are software problems in apple world?
The fact that Apple machines built in the last ~4 years do not allow to upgrade RAM, for example, is a problem to me. I own a MacMini, the last version that allowed upgrading RAM, and I just went from 4GB to 16GB, and the difference in performance is significant. Next, I will replace the hard disk with an SSD. Both are impossible on more recent Macs.
Also, it appears many people feel the quality of OS X (pardon me: macOS)) is not what it used to be; Apple, I heard, is also rather slow to deliver patches for security issues other bugs.
The feeling I get, while not following Apple-related news that closely, is that they focus most of their resources on the iPhone/iOS, and OS X and Mac hardware is not really that much of a priority any more.
The UX of macOS is very nice in some points, but personally, I find it about as nice as Gnome2/Mate - some things I like better on macOS, some things I like better on Mate. And of course, this is highly subjective, and may be largely due to force of habit. (In all fairness, Gnome2/Mate seems to have taken a lot of, uh, inspiration from OS X, but still.)
Now that you mention it, I think I've heard something in the stance of "they focus on mobile and leave desktop behind" before.
Thanks for feedback!
listening to music = cmus
cutting pictures = darktable can stay
text editor = emacs or vim
audio processing = idk about this one
writing iso = nope dd is perfect
irc = erc or weechat
email = mutt or gmail website
calendar = org agenda mode (emacs)
address book = org mode table
terminal = urxvt or st
rss = idk i don't read rss
tweeting = don't
passwords = paper
don't have your don't read articles to you, either.
bonus:
browser: vimb or chromium i guess
terminal: alacritty (fewer kinks every day)
clock: xclock
Text Editor - Sublime (nothing comes close, sorry)
Illustrator - Krita
Terminal - Alacritty
Passwords - LastPass
Browser - Firefox
All of these are available for Mac and Linux. A good and simple image editor for Windows is paint.net
Consider using Lightning, it's a plugin for Thunderbird and it's really excellent.
For the rest of the world... sadly, just look at it.
But once you need something advanced, you can install Ubuntu as dual-boot and you will be at home.
Then XP came out, it was better, but still much of the same, I wanted Linux. Went back to Red Hat. Then Ubuntu came out a few years later, stuck with that, but overall Linux didn't progress much.
In 2007 I switched to Mac and stayed with the platform until summer 2015, when I sold my Macbook Pro and switched to a Lenovo Thinkpad running Win10.
Windows 10 is solid, stable and fast, but it just isn't - and will never be - a developer's OS (unless you're a .NET dev). This past summer I built a rig and was running Win10 for a while but couldn't stand it. I installed Linux Mint with Cinnamon. But Cinnamon crashed every time I logged in, no idea why, even on fresh builds (as I kept a separate /home partition).
So a week ago I ventured into the mysterious world of Hackintosh, and I am kicking myself for not doing this sooner. It's the best of both worlds, assuming you don't mind maintaining the system before/after updates to keep it running. I don't have a WiFi card/adapter nor a bluetooth one, so I obviously don't have all the functionality the platform offers but I don't care, it's plenty good enough otherwise. I even have iMessage working with no issues at all.
OS X is the only platform for me, plain and simple.
I know it's in beta and I know many changes are coming, but I needed to start working on a real side project and needed a reliable and dependable dev environment. maybe one day we can replace CMD with bash entirely, that would be nice.
But I also need to target and test Ionic apps on iOS, so I need OS X in some capacity. I've used Phonegap Build but it's a hassle and not free, I'm just more comfy in OS X