So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux
richardmavis.info
richardmavis.info
It offers a lot of attractive features for what I imagine to be the typical HN demographic.
That being said, it's still got rough spots that OSX doesn't. It works great when it works, but when it doesn't....
Font rendering, display/compositor fragmentation etc...
Inb4 the anecdotal "well it works for me I just had to download the xf86 font library and compile with a legacy glibc version..." crew comes in with a thousand and one rebuttals. Problems like that are still a suboptimal user experience, no matter how you slice it.
I'd definitely consider a Linux daily driver for some of my work, but there are things that are just going to be less painful on Apple.
Font rendering the Apple way is a style choice at best.
What does "display/compositor fragmentation" mean to end-user?
My 1Password FireFox extension (ubuntu 18.04 LTS) doesn't work on X unless I log in through the website but it works just fine on Wayland.
Edit: akiselev said 1Password, not LastPass. My mistake. Interesting that I experienced this same issue with LastPass.
After I login through the 1password website, the extension window opens just fine so it might be some input security service, but how would a Firefox extension even have access to a system service like that except through Firefox's built in APIs?
With keepassxc you have native application and extension, that communicate together via socket. The native application can use whatever native APIs it wants.
However, back to you. What's more weird, if it is pure Firefox Webextension, that Firefox (still by default) launches as X11 application under Wayland, so the extension should have no way to know the difference.
The practical implications of what it means to the end user is that companies/entities that write any GUI-enabled software for Linux are forced to make decisions about what(if any) OS they'll support.
And just like that, we've waded into "cracking open the window manager" just to figure out what's going on.
Hey there! Beyer from 1Password here. It sounds like your issue might be related to my post here: https://goo.gl/cdhFbz
The good news is the underlying bug that was "breaking password fields in Firefox" was recently resolved. You can read about it here: https://goo.gl/uFv5rL
If you are still having an issue using 1Password X after updating gnome-shell, please reach out to us at support+x@1password.com, and we'd be happy to help!
Thanks for using 1Password!
Given how much of a hacker's usage of a computer is working with text (reading pages, writing code and documentation, taking notes) it's a style choice that actually has a significant impact.
(By the way, macOS Mojave deprecates subpixel antialiasing — a poor decision when there are many non-hidpi displays still being used)
That was the time of sub-100dpi screens though. With 300dpi (Retina) screens these days it does not matter much anymore.
However, your example of fonts is definitely not one of those areas, anymore. Font rendering on Linux is as advanced and capable as any other OS including in the areas of kerning and hinting. It should just work without any user intervention and look great.
I agree with you that compositing/window manager fragmentation is a problem. And this article is a perfect example of that. The author may think that they're happy using i3 with Firefox and st at the moment, but the desktop computing environment has gotten so complex and the expectations of users who interact with desktop applications so rich, that a small hobby project DE/WM cannot fully satisfy all of those use cases over the long term. The only two desktop environment projects that have enough resources to meet the needs of users behind them are KDE and GNOME. And we shouldn't be telling new Linux users to try anything but those two.
FWIW, I've worked at Google for 7 years where we use Linux on our workstations. Many engineers fiddle with various "hacker" window managers like i3, Sway, Awesome, or fvwm. They almost universally give up and switch to GNOME(/Cinnamon) or KDE: it's just too fiddly/not complete and they'd rather use their brain power for solving real problems. The authors example of messing around with dmenu because "unix philosophy" is an example of this kind of waste of time that people eventually get tired of because they have better things to spend their time on.
This isn't entirely true. AIUI, Apple enables LCD filtering and subpixel rendering by default, because it knows that you're using an LCD and what the subpixel order is. However, these are usually toggleable via the GUI, and even without them it usually still looks fine.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/07/13/macos-10-14-mojave-remove...
External displays are nowhere near the normal use case?
The highest supported resolution on a MacBook is still scaled down. Only a couple of expensive LG displays match the actual density as far as I know.
The MacBook Air only got a Retina display a few months ago. The low-end iMac is still 1080p.
I like my desktop lean and mean. I do not want distractions. When I am dealing with a remote system crashing under load, the last thing I want is my desktop or my shortcuts to behave in weird ways. Things must always work, in a consistent way. Funny thing is I can only get that in Linux... and in Windows 10.
Customization is a feature, just not everyone needs that feature.
So I disagree with your assessment, as some users will find Gnome or KDE too distracting.
That doesn't leave much of gnome.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, you can use Alt + left click to move any window around, and Alt + right click to resize. No need to reveal the title bar except perhaps to read the occasional title.
I never thought I could move away from LXDE but I think I'm going to soon.
At the moment I'm considering Sway mostly because of the wide use and community, but it's a "long term" project this month or the next :-)
Users have different needs and preferences, so I see the fragmentation as a positive thing because it gives people choice.
For me personally, xmonad, one of these hobby projects, has been perfectly sufficient for the last 10 years. I also didn't really touch my configuration much in the last ~8 years. More importantly though, I find it actually reduces my mental workload since I no longer have to handle window placement myself.
No matter the thing I'm doing, every useful or efficient placing of windows is always no more than one or two keystrokes away.
So take a user from Windows 10 or OSX whatever, and sit them in front of your favorite stable Linux distro running a terminal emulator and a browser of your choice.
Are the fonts going to be rendered in a way that is unobtrusive for those users, or will things look ugly and difficult to read?
Because I'm running a chroot of Debian Buster on my Chromebook and boy, that terminal sure does look blurry. (And is this a bug that will be fixed when Buster stabilizes, or am I expected to go read some font wiki on a different machine to "guess-and-check" it back to sanity?)
I don't want to switch to OSX. But I also understand why someone wouldn't trust the UX of a system that ships in "headache-mode" by default.
Edit: clarification
Someone really needs to make Linux distros just work when hooking a laptop up to a projector. The fact that there's so much trouble that's so public and faced with so much concentrated embarrassment is a serious ongoing PR impediment to Linux.
Linux distros got printing licked across the board, so it can happen.
How about a Linux version of Airdrop?
Really? Because I definitely got the impression it was a widespread joke in that circle of devs. Also, when I saw it happen to the last poor sap, it happened on Bionic Beaver. Is this more of the Thermocline of Truth?
This was the story with printing in Linux as well, back in the day. It would work fine for some, and be a nightmare for others.
This also happened with printing. People would say it worked fine for them, then point out that scroungers on quirky old laptops were getting what they deserved. Really, the fault wasn't those quirky old laptops, but rather fragile and not so well standardized software.
(fwiw the sway 1.0 betas, which are more or less i3 ported to Wayland, handle this type of case beautifully, and unless my kernel does Strange Things and panics, I basically plug and play into whatever I want, much like one would expect from the GNOME/KDE experience)
The amount of time that joke's been around should be taken as a sign of a persistent condition.
unless my kernel does Strange Things and panics, I basically plug and play into whatever I want
The kernel doing strange things and panicking doing plug and play was never a thing on OS X when I started using it. Seems to me it's not been a thing for Windows since before Windows 7.
It's long been speculated that one problem with Linux is cultural. Are Linux desktops trapped by cultural expectations?
The only OS I haven't had kernel panics on in recent memory is, indeed, Windows starting with 7, but I have a long list of other reasons I can't/don't/won't use it as my daily driver.
I'm still rocking my 2012 Macbook Pro. It's been solid.
The only OS I haven't had kernel panics on in recent memory is, indeed, Windows starting with 7, but I have a long list of other reasons I can't/don't/won't use it as my daily driver.
I can only stand to do my development on a windows machine by using a Linux VM.
From everything I've seen a projector "just working" seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
My experience with Macbooks has been excellent. Even Airplay over an Apple TV just does the right thing with presenter view in Keynote just working. The one time I had a rotten experience on a Macbook was when I had to use Zoom.
Yes Hollywood is pretty much sold on Maya and Houdini on Linux, but they use their own in-house distributions and have no issues dealing with binary blobs for performance.
Meanwhile my Asus netbook sold with Linux still can't do video decoding on hardware nor OpenGL 4 support, in spite of DirectX 11 class hardware, because AMD decided to reboot their driver development.
No, my experience is much more along the lines of, "I download and install Ubuntu or Linux Mint, and then it works without further issues."
My current Dell Inspiron 7000 didn't need a single driver installed manually (with Ubuntu). Pretty impressive.
There's no rhyme or reason.
Sometimes, my wifi is broken. On a different distro, it's not. Right now, under Ubuntu 18.10, my suspend from resume is broken - it wasn't on 18.04.
I have the official Linux laptop, basically - a Dell XPS 9350, all 100% Intel hardware, no binary blobs.
The Killer Wi-Fi card has none of the connectivity problems I read about almost everywhere for this model.... but has all the throughput problems, running at about 15% of the throughput/bandwidth of my Chromebook (an Intel AC card) sitting right next to it as of the last time I tested.
I'd definitely not call Linux consistent, but it's better than it was when I started using it back in 2006-2007ish, and I wouldn't trade it for any other setup (and it's not for a lack of trying: my primary work machine for 2.5ish of the last 6 years was a Macbook Pro of some sort for one reason or another)
I've been using Ubuntu exclusively for well over a decade for everyday work, only occasionally going into a Windows VM, and it's really been perfectly fine, great even, as a developer. I bought a X1 Yoga the month after it was released and Ubuntu installed perfectly on it, the only thing that didn't work out of the box is the fingerprint reader.
Until a year ago, battery life wasn't as good as Windows/Mac, but it's very good with the latest versions.
Proprietary software that some people need to run, now that's another issue, but for most development tasks it's fantastically manageable and accessible, a real pushback against closed systems.
Here is the point. It absolutely is fine as a developer. But my parents would never be able to get accustomed to Ubuntu or any other distro. It was hard enough to make them use email.
The truth is that the vast majority of people just want things to work. Like turning on a TV without any setup. Hell, people pay electronics stores 100€ to plugin a cable and run the "find channels" function.
OECD studies have shown that more people than one thinks are incapable of using search in email [1].
You mention the fingerprint reader not working out of the box - with my laptop, Fingerprint GUI was basically waiting on one of its dependencies to somehow figure out how to integrate my fingerprint scanner. Things like my active-stylus capable touchscreen weren't supported, and there were no applications to really utilize it even if it was.
I switched to Windows as my primary OS when I realized Windows PowerShell had basically become on par with Linux in almost every degree and that VS Code was as cushy as I could hope for in a development environment. The only thing I've found that isn't supported out of the box is Redis, but I downloaded a ridiculously lightweight version of Ubuntu from the Microsoft store (we're talking <1 MB memory footprint) with one click and was then good to go.
The other thing that really impressed me was all the easy to use tuning software. With ThrottleStop I was able to easily under-volt my processor to completely eliminate things like thermal throttling and improve performance all while greatly improving my battery life. Nvidia support is also way better so I can turn off my graphics card for anything but games - and then there's MSI Afterburner to under-volt my GPU when I am using it.
And yeah, not only do my fingerprint scanner and stylus work on Windows, but Windows has Windows Ink built in so I can easily take screenshots of whatever I'm doing with Snip & Sketch and annotate them with a pen in an instant, and I can use Sketchpad like an on the fly whiteboard when I need to do some math.
Plus, it has art programs like Krita that basically turn my laptop into an iPad Pro when I feel like getting artistic.
And with programs like Enpass, I can use my fingerprint with Windows Hello in place of my master password for stuff like logins and credit card information, which is a lot more secure for someone like me that does a lot of my work from coffee shops.
I still love Ubuntu, but all the offerings of Windows 10 has kind of made me a Windows fanboy and even makes MacOS seem like a decisive downgrade.
Not trying to discourage you from using it like that. Its perfectly fine as long as you realize that the fingerprint is only secure against random people on the street or just not very competent attackers... which is fine and is probably enough for most scenarios!
but now on the topic itself... the windows subsystem for linux is perfectly fine for a lot of things, there are quite a few issues however. All files accessible from windows will have 777 for example, there are a few applications that have issues with that. daemons exit as soon as the last terminal closes is another thing many people have to stumble upon.
and ymmv on the issues you mentioned. everything you mentioned is completely uninteresting to me, personally. a good window manager such as i3wm offsets pretty much every shiny-ness windows 10 has for any development purposes.
i do use windows for anything else though. (and am sadly forced to use it at work as well)
Not sure how Throttlestop compares to the latest Linux options. I've got many containers going, three instances of vscode, a zillion tabs, performance is not an issue.
But, I realize not everyone cares about a free and transparent world, even when it's more and less as good. It must at least encourages companies like Microsoft to keep opening up and getting better.
And you know what? Its mostly true[1], but its also true for me in reverse.
Mac OS has definitely improved in the last few years... that being said, it's still got rough spots that Fedora 29 doesn't. For me, this would be just as true of a statement.
[1] Maybe not the part about "had to download[...]" which felt a bit biased.
Yeah that good for MacOS and virtually every other piece of technology.
> but there are still things that just going to be less painful on Apple.
Of course OSX is more user friendly now, but Linux desktop has improved by leaps and bounds. 4 years ago you needed to be a developer or extremely savvy to run the average desktop distro, now I would say you just need to be tech sdavvy. I would argue that for the ho hum business cases (not extreme use case profiles like design and video production) that Ubuntu won’t cause any unnavigable issues.
I think in a few years you will see the Linux diaries continue in popularity, especially among developers. Laptops have become commodity items. There just isn’t that much that differentiates (for me at least) a MacBook from a good ThinkPad.
As soon as auto-configuring XFree was kinda figured out, out goes XFree and in comes x.org. Xorg getting to the point where having 3d animations doesn’t require kernel-module-config expertise? Out goes Xorg, in comes Wayland. Gnome 2 worked out the kinks? Time for Unity! Kde 4 finally getting snappy? time to break it up! Init systems figured out? Systemd! ALSA getting adoption? Pulseaudio! Pulseaudio finally working? Let’s rip it out! And so on and so forth, in an endless churn.
Now, this sort of churn also happens in commercial alternatives; but stuff gets shipped when it’s 99.9% working, left running for years (or decades, if from Microsoft), then maybe gets rewritten with something that must be better (no regressions) or it won’t even ship. In the Linux world, it’s all just thrown over the wall; maybe you’ll be lucky and it will work on your machine, and maybe it won’t. By the time it gets fixed, it will be time to replace it. And so the experience is a perennial struggle against half-finished, unpolished software.
I don't think there has been a single inflection point for me there has been steady incremental improvement.
If you want to think about how far things have come I started using Linux in 2001 with Mandrake. Around 2.2 -> 2.4 kernel switch. So much has changed since the bad old days. I don't want to throw out a "back in my day we walked up hill in snow both ways" style rant but...
-All we had was EXT2 and we liked it...
-You had to manually configure modelines for your video card changing display resolution was more or less a crapshoot
-Apps would exclusively lock the sound card which typically meant the first thing you opened would be only thing capable of playing sound. But you could pipe things to /dev/dsp and have the speaker emit random beeps that was kind of cool
-window manager used to crash a lot and you'd lose all the title bars for all the windows this happened fairly often - cntrl alt backspace is still in my muscle memory years later.
-Printers were basically impossible to configure.
People complain about changes like ASLA, pulse audio etc but I think there is a lot of rose tinted glasses being applied to how things were before. Sure some things aren't perfect but neither was their predecessors and on the whole they fixed more things then they broke.
So I can agree that “Linux will get smoother”, because progress is more or less inevitable, but “linux will be as smooth as [Windows|MacOS]”, as upthread implied? Never going to happen.
There are a lot of use case profiles that are very ho hum for which Linux is a non-starter. I'm thinking specifically of basically any time you need to use Mac-only software. Likewise, I'm sure there's Linux-only software that would make OSX a non-starter.
IMHO, all of the major modern operating systems are good enough and have been for a while now. Pick the applications you want then find the OS that best supports those applications.
It would be nice if the Purism guys would open some retail stores. Once you can walk in some place and get help it gets to be a lot easier to recommend those machines to less tech-savvy relatives.
Everyone has their own view of rough spots but those aren't mine.
The rough spots I'm experiencing with Linux are very specific. Namely lack of support for some proprietary VPN solutions like Junos Pulse for example.
Also lack of native clients for software like Webex Teams, forcing you to use their web apps which use up so much resources that I'm convinced they've caused my laptop to stall a couple of times.
And of course, perhaps related to the issue above, anything relating to graphics does need work.
The major positive thing I can say about using Linux daily in work and personal life is that it works so well that when it fails you get very annoyed. That's a good sign. It means that it's rare enough to annoy me. If it was too common I wouldn't be surprised when it fails.
I also switched back from Mac to Linux, 2 years ago.
But I use vanilla Gnome 3 on Fedora. Before Mac I used tiling window managers but now I don't see the point. It's just so much configuration to handle which Gnome does without a single line of config or shell code.
As for the font thing, maybe I'm not a fontphile or something, but they're usually fine for me.
The XPS machines we have are ugly, they're flimsy, they have a grotesque carbon-fibre pattern on them, the keys leave imprints on the monitor after the lid has been closed, the fan drowns out the sound of music in my apartment, the camera is situated about 5mm above the keyboard with it's rickety keys, it is without a doubt the ugliest, the worst computer I have owned, I eat tramadol just to handle the back-pain from carrying it around in my rucksack, but I'm much less angry and frustrated working on it than I am on a Mac because it doesn't shit it's pants when more than a few containers are running.
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-T2...
It's also very pleasant to touch and hold in your hands, especially if you like the Thinkpad aesthetics.
The fingerprint reader doesn't work though, not that I know what I would use one for.
I use it to log in, plus to auth for anything that requires root. I’m doing some coding so occasionally do something that requires sudo in a terminal. A prompt appears and asks me to swipe my finger. It’s very neat.
I got a personal 2016 XPS 13 (9350) because of Project Sputnik (https://bartongeorge.io/tag/project-sputnik/), which brought official desktop-Linux support to it. I also work at Google where we have a very solid desktop distribution, providing me a working example of almost every tweak I might want to make. Owning the hardware has been a great experience since two changes. First, I swapped out the Killer wifi card and replaced it with an Intel card. Unfortunately this is table stakes for any machine with that card. Second, I thought the spring on the keyboard's keys was much stronger than another XPS 13 that I'd test-driven, so I rolled the dice on eBay and bought a replacement for something like $20. I swapped it in, and it indeed restored the light touch that I liked about the other one. I wouldn't expect many people to do this.
As for software, I've settled successfully on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, running the same Cinnamon desktop environment we use at work. A key part of my success has been committing to Ansible for configuration management. When I make a settings change I want to keep, I figure out where it's persisted, and then upstream it into my Ansible repo. This has the three-part benefit of teaching me a little about the system (mostly dconf), creating a worklog of changes I've made to the machine, and giving me the psychological comfort that if things get really bad, I can reinstall the OS plus all my tweaks. (Just to be clear, these aren't
I've since expanded the Ansible setup to manage a tiny target-practice server I keep on a cloud service, and over the holiday break this year I successfully set up an old desktop in a closet by (1) installing base Ubuntu, (2) unzipping my Ansible repo to it, (3) running a bootstrap script in the repo that installs python, git, and ansible, and runs Ansible on itself, and then (4) drinking a cup of coffee. By the end I had a machine that was substantially identical to my XPS 13.
I'm sure I'm proving someone's point that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. But from my perspective, the Linux-hardware interface is excellent on a Dell XPS 13 because of Project Sputnik, and if you can factor out the likely dozens of hours I spent overengineering my personal Ansible configuration system, I now have a reliable, easily reproducible desktop setup that rivals the manageability of a Chromebook, which is my personal gold standard for desktop statelessness.
And, it installed Ubuntu (mate) without a hitch. Everything worked out of the box except the font scaling. I suspect that's a Mate specific problem though. Gnome may work better.
Our development environment has been with docker on Mac for a few years. It's definitely slow, but we found it acceptable. Do you happen to use a very large image with tons of IO work?
What Mac were you using previously? 13 inch macbook pro is heavier than the 2.67 pound 13 inch XPS
Same with my Late 2013 MacBook Pro.
> the keyboard with it's rickety keys
I haven't used the XPS keyboards extensively but they seem to get good reviews and in my limited experience, I definitely prefer them to the new MacBook keyboards (which I've used quite a bit).
> I eat tramadol just to handle the back-pain from carrying it around in my rucksack
The XPS 13 is actually lighter than the MacBook Pro 13 and the new MacBook Air. The XPS 15 is half a pound heavier than the MacBook Pro 15, which should be barely noticeable when carried in a backpack. I am not quite following.
Some struggled with font rendering between a 1080p monitor and their Retina displays as well.
This is one area where I'd have to concede the Apple experience is objectively suboptimal.
However, the Python ecosystem isn't doing anyone any favors here.
C++ ecosystem sucks a lot when you have to build 5 libraries using 5 different building systems. Linux package managers do that for you.
Or, God forbid, you want to use clang or gcc. Or intel's whatever.
Plus there are DLLs and COM libraries as well.
Apple isn't, either. They ship a version of Python by default that is woefully out of date and conflicts with any other Python that you install, and what's more, some of their tools (notably, LLDB) freak out if you have a newer Python on your $PATH.
I'm still not sure I know the best way to install Python packages. It seems someone has something bad to say about any given method (pkg mgr, pip, venv, etc).
OSX comes with some software such as git and python2 preinstalled. However they do not usually keep that software up to date and there is no way for you to change that, which means that community package managers need to be used to install more up to date software versions in parallel to the system ones
BTW, on either platform your best bet IMO is installing all your scripting languages within some kind of version manager. I like pyenv, rbenv, and nodenv since they work exactly the same way between the three languages.
These days I tend to recommend using https://pipenv.readthedocs.io/ or https://poetry.eustace.io/ which will automate creation of those virtual environments and provide a nice interface for managing versioned package installs (i.e. `pipenv install foobar` will record the exact version you installed, including SHA-256 hashes, for repeatable installs).
If you're in the Red Hat world, note also that they're making some big (and I think welcome) changes to isolate the Python they use from the version developers use, which will also allow tracking newer versions faster:
https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/11/27/what-no-python...
1. brew install pyenv 2. pyenv install 2.7.x 3. pyenv install 3.x 4. cd work; pyenv local 3.7.x (by default, all projects under "work" will use 3.x) 5. cd work/legacy; pyenv local 2.7.x (but this one will be on 2.x)
then for each project, I'll create a separate virtual environment.
For various reasons, I have about 6 separate python versions and a dozen or so mini projects all working flawlessly as separate virtual environments created under separate versions managed by pyenv, and I always have the latest pyenv thanks to brew.
If there’s no requirement from some OS feature to have a particular package preinstalled, I would rather not even have it in the base system if I’m just going to have to replace it with an updated (and updateable) version.
Linux and the multiple variants have been horrible. Also, you commented about Python 2-3, I agree I had issues with OS X. But you are ignoring the fact that installing software on Linux is still a mess of resolving all the dependencies and the package manager. Where in OS X, it is just a file move to App.
Nowadays, I run dev code on a Linux docker container. I do pretty much anything else on OS X.
As far as installing apps, I guess it depends on what you're trying to install. In my experience installing apps is easier on Linux than on any proprietary OS, so long as you're installing open source applications and working within the package manager and keeping your system up to date. If you want to run proprietary software on your open source OS, then yeah it's more difficult since Linux distributions aren't really designed for it.
My second mainline Linux install was a copy of RedHat on a laptop.
Mind you, this was RedHat 5.1 on an old 486 laptop with 8 meg of RAM, PCMCIA, etc. Sometime in 1995 or 96, I forget.
Several re-compiles later, I had that entire system working - all drivers for all the hardware, including the built-in modem (plus sound and PCMCIA ethernet).
I got lucky there.
I had an Asus laptop that would only pickup wifi if I hibernated it first. I have a Dell touchscreen model that took a full day to get the touchpad to work at all as Ubuntu kept defaulting to the screen. Too afraid to do a fresh install of the current (or any other) distro because I can't remember how I fixed the touchpad issue.
> But you are ignoring the fact that installing software on Linux is still a mess of resolving all the dependencies and the package manager. Where in OS X, it is just a file move to App.
This is also highly dependent on specific experiences. I haven't had any issues with conflicting dependencies on Arch linux in the past few years. And personally I appreciate a system package manager for all software instead of having to download applications and doing drag and drop for installation
Similarly, TeX installation is hard and it's forcefully shoehorned on the installation, and you can't do anything better in the current situation.
My solution is to run a Linux VM for these situations. For programming and server-like purposes, a headless minimal installation is fine. For TeX authoring, an XFCE installation is very handy and not impacting battery life in a visible way.
Installing MacTeX has always been one of the most straightforward things I can imagine.
When they were working on these problems, I was in the middle of my Ph.D., and I needed a stable TeX installation, fast. I installed a Linux VM, all my woes went away, and that method just stuck.
I just checked the MacTeX page now, and it looks like they solved the problems I mentioned above, but currently I'm too lazy and need that TeX installation keep working, so I'll not retry it now.
I much prefer something that I can kick off to play an album or a playlist and have it all but vanish from sight, either into the taskbar or, preferably, into the system tray.
Any time I was posting there included screenshots of 'ranger', various permutations of 'htop', and a 'Matrix' style scrolling character feed.
You never circle through apps as it's not necessary. Most of the apps are in fullscreen or tiled depending on your need. No window is hiding another one.
When you're use to it, having to move your hand to the mouse or trackpad and click on stuff feels painful. Then keyboard driven apps (which terminal apps are usually really good at) makes total sense because you still don't want to have to move your hands and click in stuff.
Basically usability switches from graphical apps made for mouse/trackpad to keyboard driven. It's a quite different way to manages windows that have usually a learning curve as it is keyboard driven, but it's really efficient.
After using i3 for about 3-4 years, I have to admit that I'm always a bit lost on floating WMs now and feel like an idiot for a few minutes until I'm somewhat comfortable again.
To me tiling WMs are just vastly superior. Anecdotally, most people I know that have seriously tried to use a tiling WM usually end up sticking with them.
The great thing about i3 (and also other tiling WMs) is that they are very flexible and customizable to your preferred workflow.
Together with them being centered around the keyboard and easily scriptable, you can use them in a way that works best for your preferences and your environment.
For coding on my laptop, the active main workspace is split into three parts, with the editor taking the left half of the screen, and the right half split into browser and terminal (with the terminal being a TAB container with multiple terminals that I can quickly switch between).
When I need to focus on either the editor or the browser, I make them full screen (I have shortcuts to jump between full screen browser and full screen editor directly with one keystroke).
On other workspaces I have setups with music player, email, Jira/Bug tracker/etc that are always launched in the same configuration on boot and are also just a shortcut away.
So it works great on a laptop too, even if you spend a lot of time with one app maximized.
Sure, it felt like I was moving faster when I used keyboard shortcuts to fly around but at the end of the day, switching between windows was never a real bottleneck to begin with.
FWIW I used i3 exclusively for 2-3 years.
I switched to i3 because I was just frustrated with what I had used in the past. I wanted a simple window manager without animations (disabling them on my phone was also a huge gain in terms of usability), that just works and does not get in the way (I had a slow laptop on which Gnome was painfully slow, at the time). The cost was basically to write a configuration file matching what I wanted, learning a few key to switch workspaces and windows, but that was it.
I agree with you that these are micro-optimizations time-wise, but the frustration can be real and it gets in the way when you use your computer all day long. The simpler, the better I'd say (although it doesn't have to be a tiling window manager).
I haven’t used a computer than ran gnome slowly in a long time, so that has something to do with it.
Play Pause etc. just work without the terminal. The biggest advantage in comparison most graphical players for me is that there is no startup time. If I want to play a song I can do so immediately and even without leaving the terminal I am currently working in.
It’s lightweight, responsive, and makes me feel like I have much more control over my music.
I have it always open in the corner of my sceeen with a tiling window manager.
It's less clutter IMHO. But i don't use tiling wm.
Most of us Linux users find you a bit odd. That's just how it goes.
The shell is a very useful interface. It allows abstractions that just aren't tractable with GUIs. Many of us have found that those abstractions are quite useful for fun things, too.
I'm so used to playing all of my media with mpv that using any kind of GUI app would feel like sludging through molasses.
This is exactly why I've been switching back to Linux everywhere, including laptops. Apple has done a pretty good job recreating the modern Windows experience.
Same reason I keep Android around, now someone will say it's proprietary blah blah, but I can root my phone and install anything I want on it.
Since I've used Linux there was always a Linux gaming community for example, doubt they spend centuries on VIM or Emacs. Also remembering all the crazy Desktop Environment eye candy from the 2000's like the desktop cube, and the self-incinerating window when you'd close it. Linux just made you feel so damn cool at the fact you could have things that just did all these insanely awesome things!
There's no rule that you ever have to open either emacs or vim on Linux (though, personally I think you're missing out if you've only spent 8 minutes in emacs, but that's beside the point). In fact, you can just not install either emacs or vim, and thus make certain you don't ever open them by accident.
The one I ended up using had the Budgie desktop, which I found to be the most "Mac-like" of all the experiences. The distro I used was Ubuntu Budgie, because I wanted the Debian and Ubuntu software ecosystem, but Budgie is a part of the Solus Linux project (which I enjoyed when I tried it, but I didn't like the package system).
So give Solus and/or Ubuntu Budgie a try on a live USB thumbdrive sometime; you might enjoy it, if you are looking for a "more Mac-like" experience...
But, in any case, yes, there are plenty of Linux front-ends which can be 'Mac-like' if you like that sort of thing.
I run arch with gnome 3, chromium (+chrome), and vs code as my main dev machine.
No emacs or vim required. No text only interfaces. No terminals unless you open it yourself (In which case it's running powerline with git addons and is still a very nice visual experience)
Gnome 3 with dash to dock is basically a drop in replacement for the osx style desktop. It just works.
Better yet, I'm free to get a better-than-osx experience on any hardware I want (and I REALLY don't want to the new macbook pros - I'm stuck on one at work and it's... bad).
Between work, gaming, personal projects - I'm running osx, win 10, and Arch. They all stay synched with dropbox and google drive. I get unix style terminals/shell everywhere (cmder/conemu for win10), and life is generally lovely.
Of the three, I prefer Arch, then Win 10. Osx is last by a mile. I think apple has a flakey os, and their hardware is rapidly moving in a direction that doesn't suite professional needs.
Linux has KDE Plasma.
I long for the Linux prairies of old, but I've grown fat and lazy on OSX. Linux is a youngster's game.
Apple got it wrong in 2016 but there are signs that we might have passed "iPhone peak"... maybe they will be forced to pay attention again to us old farts.
What this means is that I installed a base ubuntu system with awesomewm and just used it mostly stock. I already had awesomewm experience from 5+ years prior, but for the first month of moving back to Linux I was also perfectly happy chugging along with gnome.
What I am saying is give it a try. Only time I miss OSX now is when I need to sign a PDF.
45 years old here and still rocking Linux (does that qualify as "old" - probably - sigh). Started playing with it in 1995 (MonkeyLinux on DOS!); haven't stopped.
Stuff's gotten dirt-simple compared to what I remember having to do in the past. Certainly no kernel recompiles needed any longer (but if you really wanted to, you can do them).
Have I gotten "fat and lazy"? Yep - just on Linux. I can't see that changing in the future, either...
On a Mac, you can cut/copy/paste using predictable keystrokes in any application, anywhere. And there is a single clipboard. On Linux, you have to deal with a multitude of behaviors (middle mouse button, Ctrl-C, others, and does it paste where the cursor is or do you have to click the middle mouse button exactly where you want stuff pasted, etc).
And I'm not even talking about multiple media types: all I need is plaintext.
The second dream wish would be for consistent keybindings in all text input boxes, like in Mac OS. Such as make Ctrl-A always go to the beginning of line, Ctrl-E always to the end, and Ctrl-K always kill whatever is in there.
If I had that, I think I could use Linux without getting annoyed every couple of minutes. I would still miss apps like TextExpander, flawless drag&drop, and lots of other things, but I could at least use it without frustration.
Unfortunately, none of this is likely to happen. If you wonder why, it's enough to look at the responses that will surely land here:
end result, my ctrl c and ctrl v work as you would expect -- always!
Would you have some links? I am especially interested in ways to handle shortcuts like with autohotkey on Windows: a context dependent remap (ex: pressing a given physical key may send ctrl-tab in an application, but ctrl-pagedown in another if said other application doesn't support remapping shortcuts)
KWin for example allows setting various global shortcuts: https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kde-workspace/kcontrol/keys/i...
For wl-copy / wl-paste, see: https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard
I'm thinking about starting with weston and moving to sway if it doesn't do the job
Actually, in some apps the cursor disappears and in some the cursor goes to the end, but the behavior of what happens when text is selected is always the same.
I agree with GP: I find the two separate copy-paste methods very useful and wouldn't want to see them merged. Users who aren't aware of one of the aren't affected, and those who are get an extra buffer to use.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/513VKV7DZBL.gif
Usually a scroll wheel, now.
> The second dream wish would be for consistent keybindings in all text input boxes, like in Mac OS. Such as make Ctrl-A always go to the beginning of line, Ctrl-E always to the end, and Ctrl-K always kill whatever is in there.
For this, you should really just run Emacs. But this isn't a Linux issue really, but a more general 'problem' of competing conventions (Emacs, vi, CUA, etc.) for keyboard shortcuts.
The controls are actually a little strange, because they aren't well documented or discoverable, and don't seem to be configurable, unlike most other shortcuts.
The NS prefix on those classes means "NEXTSTEP"
Microsoft Office probably implements its own text box classes so it's different.
Interesting, because Linux is my daily driver, and when I borrow my spouse's MacBook one of the things I get tripped up on is some programs seem to use Ctrl+C/V and other programs use Command+C/V for copying/pasting
What programs are you using that use Ctrl for clipboard actions? Do they also allow their Cmd equivalents, or are they just using the wrong keys?
So if you have windows office because it has traditionally been better than the one offered to mac you'd have to remember to use control instead of command.
(runs under x11, does not support cmd-c/v)
I've never encountered an app that uses Ctrl. A developer would really have to go out of their way to accomplish this in their app, since the copy/paste menus are provided by Cocoa; the keyboard shortcuts are essentially built into the OS.
Out of curiosity, could you name an example or two?
One piece of advice: In your clipboard manager you can check a box to sync the middle click and ctrl+c buffers, if you want a single clipboard.
On a more substantive note (globally consistent actions from keystrokes). It would be great, but not going to happen because there are established modes where the same keystrokes lead to well known results. And those actions are different depending on the application. Maybe it would be good if this was not the case, but that ship has sailed a long time ago. MacOS is in sync because its BDFL (Apple) forces it to.
Example: Ctrl-Z. In a terminal, it suspends a process. In most GUI editors it performs undo. Shall we force a global standard? I would pay to watch a user get its editor suspended when he presses Ctrl-Z to undo a typo. Did the program crash? Let me start it again ... what does it mean it is already running?? Where are my edits??? I'll just reboot the machine!
So agreed, global synchronizations that would force this to happen are unlikely. Fortunately. My 2c.
Yes. Windows botched this by hijacking the Control key, and the desktop-Linux crowd are unable to do anything but imitate Windows. Pre-Linux GUIs didn't have this problem, and MacOS doesn't have this problem.
It certainly makes sense when running inside a terminal. But when it's an X11 application, it makes me angry everytime I fumble C-X and it interrupts my workflow.
That seems to be a defining characteristic of Linux communities, anyway. Not sure how you can say "all" communities are like that.
> Example: Ctrl-Z. In a terminal, it suspends a process. In most GUI editors it performs undo. Shall we force a global standard?
Haiku uses Alt instead of Ctrl for shortcuts (similar to macOS and the Cmd key), so Alt+Z does undo and Ctrl+Z suspends a process, both in the Terminal. (If you want to use Windows-style keybindings, then it's the reverse, of course.)
It would be nice to have a universal "pause" shortcut in GUI apps. Why would it instantly hide the app?
Would you pay to watch someone kill a process when they meant to copy text?
Description: Autocutsel tracks changes in the server's cutbuffer and CLIPBOARD selection. When the CLIPBOARD is changed, it updates the cutbuffer. When the cutbuffer is changed, it owns the CLIPBOARD selection. The cutbuffer and CLIPBOARD selection are always synchronized.
With this, I can highlight text (which is an implicit "copy") or use CTRL-C and paste with middle-click or CTRL-V (or in emacs, CTRL-Y) and it all works.
The only weirdness is in Google Docs, which seems to hijack CTRL-C, CTRL-V, etc. for its own handling.
Shortcuts are just better on the OSX side of the fence (not perfect, but way better). IMHO, global actions (copy, paste, select all, cut, undo, redo, etc.) should be mapped to one modifier (say AltGr) and local actions to another (say Ctrl). The most important part of this scheme would be that "global modifier + key" has an unsurprising result that is consistent system-wide. Then "local modifier + something, or modifier1 + modifier2 + something" can do whatever the app wants. This would improve things immensely IMHO...
I don't know about others, but with terminator[0] I'm able to map Ctrl+C to copy - but if nothing is selected, then ^C works as normal. Is that what you're looking for?
From the terminal's point of view, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+Shift+C do the same thing. The only reason you can't usually use Ctrl+Shift+C is that by default that combination is intercepted by gnome-terminal to mean "copy".
(I wouldn't be surprised if other emulators with configurable keyboard shortcuts let you do a similar thing).
(If the terminal's Ctrl+Shift+C really bothers you, many terminal emulators allow you to rebind it to Ctrl+C)
That's needlessly rude.
It's unreasonable to expect that criticisms be phrased politically to avoid stepping on oversensitive toes.
>It's unreasonable to expect that criticisms be phrased politically to avoid stepping on oversensitive toes.
If you mean politely then no, it's not unreasonable to phrase criticisms rudely. It's unreasonable to phrase them rudely and then expect the recipient to do anything about it.
edit: Also, I said _needlessly_ rude. Are you saying the poster needs to be rude?
If I say “The USA needs to get its act together and fix its broken immigration system”, I don’t see this as particularly rude. By criticizing the immigration system, I’m already saying that it’s fucked up. The fact that I use the phrase “get it together” is irrelevant to both tone and content.
And again, the subject is a large group. The idea that particular individuals should take offense at such a mild blanket statement feels kind of ridiculous.
People don't talk like this in real life.
You probably don’t feel bad saying something like “McDonald’s burgers suck”, but if you tell someone who invited you to a cook-out that their burger sucks, you’re an asshole. Context and audience matter.
And people very much do talk like this is real life. People who understand context and audience can do so just fine.
Personally, I love that all the software I have used in Linux does nothing to encroach on my super+* keybindings.
I also love having a secondary clipboard that feels more permanent (ctrl+xcv), while having a quick and dirty one (select middle-click)
Also, some context before I get flamed for being a newbie: I've used Linux since before 1.0 (that's 1993). My usual working keyboard setup pretty much requires a Super key and a Hyper is quite helpful, too.
alias x='/usr/bin/setxkbmap -option ctrl:swap_lalt_lctl'
I installed Autokey and have keys assigned for Terminal. So for instance: pressing <alt>+c sends a <ctrl>+c, and pressing <ctrl>+c sends <shift>+<ctrl>+c. I have pretty much all of the alt keys assigned to send control keys, and all of Command keys (control keys) to do what I expect: Close ^w, Copy ^c, Find Next ^g, Find ^f, New ^n, Paste ^v, Select All ^a.
Middle-click paste has just made me terrified of ever pressing the middle mouse button for fear of sending PII to somebody.
The Linux communities are full of volunteers. It seems like their act is actually quite together! There is no 'buyer' to make demands with their dollar. Only there is a developer who one day decides they want a feature.
as for consistent keybindings, I feel you on that. However your example is a bit flawed. home/end keys do what you want, and ctrl left/right does word skipping.
Be the change you want to see in the world. Open source developers are volunteers scratching their own itches, working on their own time. I wish someone would come build me a house for free too, and if they did I'd be hard pressed to complain about the number of windows.
The thing about Linux is, there's all these evangelists out there who insist that everyone should use Linux (or that they are superior to you for doing so) and, when you tell them why you don't, insisting your preferences are wrong, your workflow is wrong, it works for them so you're a liar, or you should fix it yourself.
If it weren't for those people, I think the attitude towards Linux would be more like it is towards Haiku. No one really complains about it, they just don't use it.
I've had better luck over on Wayland, thankfully
There is also only one clipboard, and none of the "primary paste buffer / selection buffer / etc." nonsense, either.
So ... the dream is alive on Haiku, anyway. :)
> It’s just another clipboard. One clipboard is interfaced via the keyboard. One clipboard is interfaced via the mouse.
Perhaps that’s common knowledge, but that understanding made me instantly fall in love with middle-click paste.
In most terminal emulators, Ctrl-C deviates from normal behavior in favor of sending SIGINT. However, some terminal emulators (e.g. the one in elementary OS) makes the simple decision that if text is highlighted, copy it. Otherwise, send SIGINT. That closes all loose ends for me.
> On a Mac .. there is a single clipboard.
There are 3 clipboards, at least. Cmd-C/Cmd-V most everywhere, Ctrl-K/Ctrl-U/Ctrl-Y in most text fields, and select/middle-click in Terminal.app. It's like having 3 hands, I find it works well.
Rough spots is a good way to describe it. Overall it works... But not without effort and competence.
http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/
I can't say I've played around with it, but the above seems to indicate that such support is available - but that you might have issues with apps not supporting it (or reporting their DPI properly). There also might be problems with other layers above raw X (?) - but it seems like X itself does support it in some manner?
I once had X supporting two mice on dual monitors (this was a while back - I had a couple of CRT monitors at the time); seeing that made me think X could do almost anything I asked of it (depending on how I "asked").
I honestly got so tired of it I just invested in an Alienware 34" monitor. I haven't had the problem since.
*setup is an Alienware 15 laptop which supports dual monitor out for up to 3 active displays if including the laptop monitor
Windows that go out of bounds and are un-retrievable, permanently glitched window-content rendering when moving between densities, inaccurate mouse positions, desktops that resize to like 320x200 and then to the actual (shrinking every window and mashing all icons together, and breaking the notification area and status bar area in the process), I don't think I've ever had it work out-of-the-box even once on multiple machines and multiple monitors / projectors / etc. Some of this only occurs the first time it learns a new setup, but much of it just keeps happening randomly.
On macs for like the past 5+ years? Almost perfect behavior, for almost every OS version, except on apps that clearly do their own thing (e.g. IntelliJ sometimes shrinks to nothingness, and Steam is just hot garbage much of the time).
My exact same problem! How did you solve it ?
I think in the latest kernel developments there have been lots of updates on USB-C and ports in general.
But that’s why I like Linux as well; it gives me the options to use different distributions and environments. It might be messy sometimes, but I’m not locked in to one vendor.
Not a big deal, but just thought I'd mention that macOS isn't exactly perfect when it comes to external monitors.
I fixed the issue by using a USB-C to DisplayPort adapter made by a third party. I think that also allowed 4k at 60Hz. I later switched to a multi-port adapter with HDMI out and didn't have this problem.
This problem was horrible noise and loss of connection. People hate dongles for the convenience and price factor, but I think everyone underestimates how it introduces technical and compatibility issues.
I plug in a display port to HDMI adapter to find that it's not the right kind of HDMI and therefore only does 30hz.
I thought it was odd when Apple got a lot of heat for not using X and writing their own thing. It sounds like Apple had evaluated X and determined it wouldn't fit their needs. The same thing happened when things like Wayland started getting written.
This does make things a bit too big on the 24" external display which has nearly the same resolution, but it's not distracting. Some websites I use CTRL-+ and CTRL-- to change the scaling, or rather fine tune it, depending on more than +-20% and the rendering gets wonky. Firefox seems to remember this per site even after a relaunch or reboot.
The biggest problem I have is Bluetooth, my mouse is always disconnecting on Linux, dozens of times per day, but the same laptop+mouse rebooted to Windows 10 - no problem.
Which most people in this forum have plenty of. This isn't a post saying "Linux is ready for everyone on every laptop", it's that it works for this person using a pre-approved set of hardware, just as MacOS is apparently terrible on other hardware.
Is it just nostalgia? Global politics? Me hanging around other nerds who are also getting older? I dunno, but now computers seem more exciting than ever!
Ok, I gotta get back to IRC and browsing the internet on M-x eww...
Maybe. I think the Internet was pretty much an objectively better place in the 90s, but far more useful for "real world" things today.
For me it's pretty personal and to be completely honest immensely sad. Since I was 14 I've worked full time on this "Internet" stuff and like to think I've contributed my tiny slice of pushing the future forward (and at times, unfortunately the opposite!). I truly bought the dream that enabling decentralized communications would allow for far more human potential to be realized, and perhaps even bring down longstanding immoral power structures.
Nope. Unfortunately my life's work has been used to centralize control and engage in monopoly-like behaviour. Watching everyone hell-bent on moving to just a few central "cloud providers" is incredibly frustrating. This road leads to tears. Seeing that there are only really a half dozen "eyeball" ISPs in the US that matter is just as frustrating, and will harm us long-term.
Basically for me I'm sure it was some youthful optimism and passion, but it's really a lot like building a really cool robot and then seeing someone use that to go to war against people you love.
Trying to recreate those times won't work, it never does. My only hope is that in another decade or three the newer generation realizes we're back to where we were with the giant telecoms and fight back with another new black swan technology.
I bought a laser cutter recently that requires internet access so they can use "the power of google cloud" to process vector files. Something computers have had NO problems with since he 90s.
I want a keyboard, not half a keyboard and a weird touch display that does nothing useful for me I want a directory that's synced to durable cloud-based storage, not a monolithic service product that tries to work its hooks into every corner of my computer(s) and digital life in general. I want software that writes data in common formats to a filesystem I can understand and interact with as such, rather than squirreling away my data somewhere application-specific that isn't replicated on my personally owned storage, in some unknown format that's probably locked down according to business concerns I shouldn't have to care about, and subject to some arbitrary TOS picked out of the massive constellation of TOSs we all have little practical choice but to be subject to. And so on.
The more time passes, the more consumer products seem to drift away from what I want. It's a shame because a lot of the hardware is really quite nice and technically capable of hosting my workloads, but the software makes me feel dirty when I use it and often just can't do what I need. I think there is a crazy emphasis on consuming rather than creating, and it hobbles so many products that could be great.
For instance, I bought my girlfriend an iPad Pro for Christmas and it's amazing, and I'm so fucking jealous. But it can't run a *nix terminal without a boatload of caveats, doesn't have a real accessible filesystem, and there are a million other little problems (like, I can't remap caps lock to control). So, as much potential as I think that form factor has for me, the product itself is useless because it's pretending it's not a general-purpose computing device.
Rant over, I guess. Ultimately I don't expect big companies to go out of their way to cater to users like me, but it's a constant disappointment.
I think computers are generally too complicated for lay users. People tolerated the quirks because there was no alternative. Even on a Mac, which wouldn't suffer from the same hardware compatibility issues as a PC/Windows machine, users would still need to understand how to organize files, properly close applications, and avoid running/opening arbitrary programs/files from the internet. And that's if they could connect to the internet at all.
iOS and its ilk solved all of that. And in that moment, the number of people who needed to be exposed to all of that underlying complexity shrank considerably. There is most certainly something lost for those people, but at the end of the day, there is a cognitive cost to understanding how those pieces work, and I think the mass market has shifted away from implementations that require (or allow for) that visibility. I think that's fine, provided there are still hardware options available to the rest of us. :)
I bought a USB bluetooth dongle and the smallest microphone I could find on the internet so I can use my old bluetooth mouse and do audio conference calls.
I am really loving it for Docker based development b/c it feels like it runs a lot faster.
I also love the Home, End PgUp and PgDn keys. Keyboard shortcuts are tough. As is muscle memory going back and forth.
My goal is to keep my macbook in my backpack and never take it out during the workday. On most days, that's what happens.
I'm using a Microsoft all-in-one with a built-in trackpad and it's bearable but if my Apple hardware worked like this I would get it exchanged for being faulty lol.
You can get some of them with a preinstall of Windows but because they aren't made by the big builders who stock Best Buy and Walmart shelves they don't often show up in front of consumers faces to buy, much like Linux desktops. But Dell / HP / etc have no real reason to risk their business investing in their own NUCs because theres nothing really competing with them in their spaces for that kind of hardware, and they already make the all in one computers that are about one notch too far up the "unmoddable" ladder for most of us to be content with.
* We primarily use webex for conference calls internally (I believe there is a browser version for that now that would hopefully work on Linux) but I seem to also have apps installed for a half-dozen other conference apps that our partners might use.
* Printing and scanning (issues here were one of two reasons I went to Mac from Linux six years ago)
* Adobe products (InDesign in particular doesn't seem to have an acceptable alternative.)
For years I used Windows inside of a VM and/or remote desktop (the other reason I switched from Linux to Mac as the client seemed to keep getting worse with each version of Ubuntu) to handle working on Linux. Don't really want to go back to that but OSX feels like it is getting more sluggish and I miss the configurability of Linux. Still have it on a backup machine that is mostly used as a Plex Server and for playing Stardew Valley.
For a work machine I don't really want to do that kind of debugging myself. I just want it to work. I've been running Linux at home for about a decade and usually have no issues, but when I do I'm not dead in the water with project deadline hanging over my head.
This is something else that often gets left out in these discussions. For better or worse, Apple offers an ecosystem/platform, and the support to go along with it.
Suppose you do make a Linux laptop work for your daily driver. You're still left out in the cold if you have an iPhone/iWatch/iPad.
The tight integration that's offered, along with the ubiquitous(and very useful) iCloud is something that Linux just doesn't have.
And yes, I am aware of the various flavors of self-hosted solutions, the dangers of lock-in etc...
If I've already been fighting to make my laptop functional for work, I don't want to start the same battle again for my hobbies too.
If you've got backups, your downtime for a dead machine maybe a few hours.
Also, in my experience, Crashplan is a steaming pile of garbage. Are you verifying that your restores are checksum-accurate? Are you verifying that all files are present after a restore? Neither was true for me, and support were unable to help.
Similarly, while the little utility apps on OSX tended to be better written, on Linux if they didn't work quite the way I wanted there was usually a config file I could tweak that would make it better. On OSX I just had to either write an app myself (and I don't know XCode, ObjC or Swift) or hope that someone else would. And some things on OSX were just impossible. I find that a tiling window manager fits really well in my development flow, and while it can sorta be emulated with tools like Divvy and Alfred, I always found it to be more cumbersome than awesome or i3. But, Alfred is a way better launcher than anything I've found available on Linux.
Theoretically it could be a lot better, if the documentation was better, the stack wasn't so maddeningly complicated, and there wasn't so much needless fragmentation.
I used Linux from 1996ish to 2017 and then just moved almost everything to Apple. I don’t remember the exact reason, but probably it had something to do with Wayland taking forever to stabilize, and the community starting to smell bad. And I’m happy, probably happier than before. Sure, Apple’s stuff isn’t perfect, but it’s way closer to it than any Linux combination I ever tried. The only thing I miss is i3, but turns out, not that much.
I hope my move didn’t jinx the whole platform...
When the first Intel MacBook came out I was 17 and bought one for all my savings. I thought it was really amazing to have a beautiful laptop running a polished desktop Unix-like. But I always had a stationary Debian computer too.
I never really liked GNOME or the other desktop environments. For most of the time I've just used Ratpoison (or stumpwm) with GNU Emacs and a few terminals. That way I feel way more efficient and less distracted; even on Mac OS I usually maximize everything into a separate workspace, or now occasionally use the new split-screen function.
Sometime right around when I started doing coding for a living, after university, I drifted away from GNU/Linux. I just used MacBooks and iPhones. Of course I still used GNU Emacs. But the Apple ecosystem was basically fine for my rather ambient computing needs at home. My workplaces used either Windows or Mac.
But then in 2015 I got my first GNU/Linux laptop and installed NixOS which I had used on some servers and fallen in love. NixOS pretty much reinvigorated my love for GNU/Linux, and I love it again.
I still have a bunch of Apple products. I treat them as separate lineages with different strengths and purposes. The NixOS machine is for serious hacking, and then I'm satisfied with letting the Macs handle photos, playing DRM movies, all kinds of random stuff. I use an iPhone and some Mac apps that sync with iOS, etc.
But my NixOS machines are awesome too, and they're the ones I really love — basically because of the freedom, in the FSF sense. I know they're not doing weird stuff behind my back, I know I can hack them freely, and I can configure them exactly like I want them.
I loved OSX and the stylish apps, but I noticed I was only using IntelliJ, iTerm and the browser most of the time. r/unixporn made me wishing Linux was a better fit for me, but I could not miss apps from Adobe or Affinity.
This was solved by setting up a vfio configuration, and now even the fanciest games run smoothly in my VM.
I still use an iPhone and iPad, but they are mostly for consumption, note taking and drawing.
Also, your review omits battery life... Why? It’s one of the most important considerations.
That and the fact that all the PC hardware makers insist on offsetting the damned touchpad. Which, maybe it's just my preference, but I hate when they offset the damned touchpad.
It's Apple that offsets the damn touchpad. I don't want it central to the case, I want it central to the home keys (F and J) of the keyboard.
Apple centres with the case. Which is broken. There's more keys on the right side of a keyboard than the left (without a number pad), thanks to punctuation and brackets, so hands rest slightly left of case centre line.
Truth be told I'd prefer Apple fit a trackpoint, but that's never happening.
There's roughly half a key of trackpad to the left of F, and roughly 1.5 to the right of J. For me that's mis-aligned with where my hands rest, even if both component blocks are neatly case centred for pretty and symmetric photos.
The moral of which is, I suppose, that personal preferences are hard to align. :)
I'd definitely recommend the Dell XPS 13 if you're going to be paying that much. It has great linux support.
I think it might still dual boot into MacOS, but I don't think I have tested that for four years . . .
I recently watched one of my colleagues run a build on their macbook. Not a complicated build. A go binary compile and a docker image build. But it really struck me how slow it was. What takes 15 seconds on my underpowered linux workstation took 60+ seconds on their $2000 macbook. That's unacceptable to me.
I run GNU/Linux exclusively on my headless work machines, but I think moving to Linux on the laptop still makes you trade too much (battery life, system integration). I wonder if the author has realized that rebranded ODM hardware (Librem and System76) and a modern Macbook are unfortunately not in remotely the same league.
I DD'd a T420 with debian on it religiously throughout undergrad, and I'm not in a hurry to go back. (I do miss the keyboard sometimes though)
It's mainly the feeling of ownership. Apple's apparently increasing hostility toward third-party upgrade-and-repair shops (see the whole "right to repair" issue) forces owners of their machines to use their support exclusively. I'd prefer to have more options for upgrading my hardware than buying a new machine. These decisions make sense for Apple but not for me. Maybe it's because they're still small but Purism hasn't set me up for this sort of antagonistic relationship.
There's also the increased sense of creativity with Linux. It feels a little bit like working with Legos. Because "unix philosophy" and such that other commenters feel are trivial wastes of time, I'm free to make the machine behave as I wish. And I like that.
Of course there are also superficial things. I don't like notifications that force a behavior, like being forced to opening System Preferences because the only button on the notification is "View". But it's also more than that.
> Having dabbled in tiling window managers, terminal music players, and many other /r/unixporn memes
I mean, if you want to demean things you don't like as "memes", that's your prerogative. But I don't use a tiling window manager or terminal music player to impress people. I use them because I like them---they're fast, the mental models make sense, they expose me to new/unfamiliar concepts, and I can customize them to suit me.
> Many of the things mentioned here (e.g., tiling WMs, emacs _REALLY?_) are not mutually exclusive with macOS.
True. I've been using emacs (yeah, really) on macOS for a decade. No complaints there.
> I wonder if the author has realized that rebranded ODM hardware (Librem and System76) and a modern Macbook are unfortunately not in remotely the same league.
The Librem 13 is easily the best-feeling laptop I've ever used.
I'm regretting that now.
Ubuntu was a breeze for setting up development environments, but a nightmare in basically every other sense. Keyboard drivers misbehaving, randomly disabling system shortcuts in certain key applications (like Chrome). Mouse wheel working horribly and requiring many hours of hacking to fix. Fans spinning out of control in some kind of fight with the BIOS that I still haven't been able to win, after more than 20 hours of working on it. And you want to connect a second monitor with a different resolution than your primary? Fuck you, no. Just no. You absolutely, positively, cannot do that. I spent days following red herrings on forums before giving up.
On the Windows side of thing, it's much better. Most things Just Work -- except that getting the mouse wheel to work correctly is a 15-step registry-hacking process followed by a reboot[1], and this needs to be repeated each time Bluetooth forgets it knows this mouse -- which is every other day or so. Oh, and also, it's so difficult to set up as a development environment that my CTO has told me not to bother.
So, yeah, after a month, I'm having regrets. I still think that Apple is taking the piss, but after all the time and frustration I've sunk into Linux -- and, to a lesser extent, Windows -- the Apple Tax is beginning to look like relatively good value for money.
1: You think I'm exaggerating? Honestly I'm not: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...
As good as brew is, it is just not as good as having your distro package manager, I ran into so many issues using brew, every mac os upgrade was a pain to keep brew packages working. Then it came docker, what a bliss is to use docker on Linux, but on mac it is just cumbersome, specially because everything is inside that qcow image that only grows until you run out-of-disk. I know it was alleviated by some measures the docker team took to "fix" it, but still it is not as good as docker running on linux.
Nowadays I just buy a thinkpad, put Fedora on it and everything works as expected. Because all of the projects I work with use docker, performance wise it is so much faster than running it on mac os.
My £2800 company MBP has half-broken USB-C ports, malfunctioning Touch Bar, various audio issues, and I can't use Blender to render on the GPU because of Apple's shitty outdated OpenGL. I could have two Linux laptops with better specs for the price of this piece of fancy aluminium, and a similar amount of bugs/broken stuff.
Gentoo dying semi-frequently became tedious, so I'm currently on NixOS despite issues. My perfect OS would be the power of a Gentoo-style build from source distro combined with a functional management layer performing versioned system snapshots out of the box (but allowing COW for easy additions, unlike NixOS) so you could combine the best of both worlds.
In the future I look forward to a detachable screen and hotels, offices and transportation with standardized secure wireless screencasting... and will someone replace the international mains power plugs with a new multi-voltage (DC on demand) standard already!
I had moved off of OSX after the new gen of MacBookPros were unusable for me. I was using Windows + WSL for a while but eventually decided to give Linux a try. Things have been quite smooth really. Since most of my dev is around docker etc. it feels like home (not that OSX Docker experience was bad, Windows I can't say).
I'm 2 years on pure Linux after about 10 years on Mac, so it definitely gets my endorsement as well. Haven't written up anything about it yet but the experience has been very smooth.
I like the notion of going Linux but frankly I have no love or will for the hiccups. I just want stuff to work.
If you want the very latest software versions, always, while maintaining most of the 'just works' but maybe a bit more bleeding edge go with a friendly rolling release distro like Manjaro.
Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, Korora (Mint for Fedora) and a couple of others.
Mint was great. I ran it for about a year but then switched to Ubuntu after the 18.04 release that switched to Gnome 3. Ubuntu being the dominant installation tends to lead to better support from vendors, etc in my experience. YMMV.
I honestly don’t think you can go wrong with either. The biggest thing is going to be committing to push through any little quirks that might come up.
For example, I thought multi screen support didn’t work when I tried to use my apple DVI adapter. Turns out that apple uses a “passive” adapter that depends on software installed on the Mac to actually work. If you get an “active” adapter...everything works fine.
I also wasn’t thrilled with the Magic Mouse experience, so I ended up getting a different mouse that’s performed wonderfully.
Now that I’m far enough down the road I’ve started managing my configuration with Ansible so I have an easy way to just rebuild my install if I try something new. A lot of people do that too, it’s a good time.
Additionally, I had to jump through a few more hoops in order to get Thermal Throttling under control, increase the battery life to a usable level, etc..
I'm sure that all these things will eventually get rolled in as more users get X1E's, but overall the Pop!_OS experience has been smooth for the Newness of the hardware
I have a hard time doing simple things on linux so I use MacBook for my day-to-day things, but that's because I'm a human being.
Linux is great, MacOS is great, these posts who love to hate on one to love another aren't.
Which is the state I now feel compelled to set my devices whenever I travel, and then restore from a remote backup when I reach my destination.
Sorry if I descended into a tirade, but the net result is - I love my 2012 MacBook and will probably keep it. - I'm looking to see if I can run linux on my 2013 iMac. - I am trying to find inexpensive hardware (laptop or desktop) as a development machine.
It's called macOS, if you're going to be pedantic about something someone else wrote. It's not been called OSX (actually OS X) for years.
https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
Doesn't look hopeful at the moment...
But overall it works much better today than like ~5 years ago. Got back to Windows and I am unsure if I will ever run linux on the desktop full time even if it is a distant dream and have been for long.
The only issue is that there is still a lot of issues on many laptops. Most desktops work great and it is easier to switch hardware parts.
On laptops, it seems that it's still a dice throw. I hope that changes in the future. Unfortunately, it is the chicken and the egg problem here and will most likely continue. Linux is a lot better than 5 years ago, but so is Windows and MacOS as well even if they both have stuff that sucks.
I used to believe that [current year] was the year of linux on desktop, but I no longer believe that mostly because of what makes linux so great, all the choices.
I ended up settling on Dell Developer Edition and the experience has been virtually perfect. The only thing that doesn't work is the built in fingerprint scanner.
I have both a Thinkpad (work) and a Dell Inspiron (home) running Debian. Both work really well by default. I know HN folks tend to really like Thinkpads, but I honestly think the Linux compatibility of my Inspiron is as good if not better.
Also just stick to Intel integrated graphics. AMD and NVidia can work, but they are a pain.
But that’s also the downside — often the hardware isn’t supported. Desktop Linux devices just aren’t the top priority for developers.
Honestly, if you want to go this route, it’s almost easier to just run Linux in a VM on top of Windows or macOS.
Even on hardware that are supposed to be supported, I have many times run into problems because of it only supports x distro or something like that. Sure it often is an pretty easy fix, but you still have to dig into to config files, read forums on the internet to get help.
Since you mentioned XPS: I've been running Arch Linux on a new Dell XPS13 without any issues. Webcam, microphone, touchpad, etc: all works fine.
I even converted my clueless father on his old days to Linux thanks to LM 19 xfce.
Overall, I chuckled at what I got (keyboard remapping helped since it's based on an Android layout), but some weeks afterwards I marveled at the minimalist utility and how well it held charge.
Evaluating it was an interesting exercise. Google docs aren't fast enough on the machine for comfort (try writing a novel) so a comparable Chromebook is a superior choice. But, KDE Kate is great. Terminal, of course, flies as fast as anywhere.
If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend to look at it as a point of minimalist reference if nothing else.
My experience is that it's one of those things that seems great on day 1, OK on day 1, and so on.
Spoiler, after about 6 months I gave up and went back to Win10, which is really improving rapidly with WSL, etc. I run an Ubuntu VM in Hyper-V if I need "real" Linux for something.
It's death of a thousand cuts. Beyond random Linux config issues, the UI can be laggy, the power management is terrible, etc.
I enjoyed the fiddling but just don't have time for it.
The title is misleading, as there’s really nothing here about MacBooks. But good to know tiling window managers are still being used.
My one complaint is with the color. Smudges definitely appear pretty quickly. On the other hand, I'm less likely to type with gross fingers now and I wipe down my machine more often (maybe a couple times a month), which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
This is my happy world now:
xcape -e "Shift_L=parenleft;Shift_R=parenright"
sxhkd &
unclutter &
feh --auto-rotate --bg-fill --randomize ~/pics/wallpapers &
jack_control start
jack_control dps nperiods 3
jack_control dps period 2048
cd ~/prog/bar/
./bar | ./lemonbar -B#080808 -F#333333 -f "luculent" -b &
cd
exec bspwm
Instead, I've found that a tiling WM like XMonad[1] + its virtual desktops is a great way to organize my separate tasks and minimize extraneous window management. Each workspace contains the "windows" for a particular long running task, and if I ever need more screen real estate for a particular window, I cycle through the layout modes until I find one that works - usually just a few key presses away.
However, unlike the author, I keep my non-programming compute tasks (email, media, etc.) separate from my programming tasks by using a traditional desktop environment for those, because there are a lot of things in the traditional desktop that are optimized for those tasks (i.e. desktop notifications, media controls, etc.) This requires running 2 different machines, but there are plenty of good ways, either via hardware or software, to make the switches between the two environments mostly seamless.
I spent a few weeks really chewing on my next move. I was worried about the keyboard on the latest Macbook Pro's, that was really my only hesitation. I seriously considered the Thinkpad as well as the XPS but ultimately decided I couldn't afford to leave OS X.
There is a grass-is-greener mentality around leaving for Linux, because it's definitely improved, but it's still nowhere even close. I knew I would miss iMessage, my Airpods wouldn't work, i'd have all the strange issues with the clipboard or drivers, and I wouldn't be able to work on iOS applications.
I spent nearly 3k on this machine, but (knock on wood) my Apple gear has never let me down. Sure, there are ocassional issues but the gear is really in a league of its own in terms of quality and fit-finish. My 2012 Air made it through a handful of startups and side projects, rails apps, django apps, elixir, iOS, and traveled with me all over the world.
Hoping to get another 6+ years out of this. It's got 32gb of ram and the upgraded Radeon so I think it'll pull its weight for a while. I have come to REALLY love the keyboard and now older models feel antiquated to me (totally was not anticipating this), and the touchbar is not as annoying as so many people make it out to be.
https://bartongeorge.io/2012/05/07/introducing-project-sputn...
With Mac and OSX, you get a beautiful and thoughtful presentation, terminal access, and great with media. You can code, you can look sexy, you can edit your media projects with serious ease.
With Windows, you have brute power, great compatibility, and it's a better option for the market (i.e. cheap and expensive options). Windows is still King of mass market and gaming . (Withholding mobile)
With Linux, you have the option to have many kinds of environments at the lowest cost, with the understanding that you might have to work to get where you actually want to be. But when you get there, the satisfaction is 100x anything you'll get from the other platforms. (Withholding bsd, plan9, etc.)
I've been using Linux for about 7 years, mostly because I realized much of my CS homework can be done on Linux, and it was cool at the time. Also, Macs were/are way out of my budget, and Windows machines are a dime a dozen, just pick your price point. Then I realized the real magic of Linux: it's a free product of the world, for the world. Long after the business behind Windows and Mac leave the planet, Linux will stand as the people's platform. And I figured I should start learning it.
I use a company-issued MacBook Pro for work and was considering an identical machine as my personal daily driver until I did a comparison which revealed what an absolute monster of a laptop I could have for the same price instead.
I mean - the Apple ecosystem is great an all but I need some raw computing power from time to time and Linux is currently able to provide that.
On mac, ^A and ^E work in every text field. Also, you can press cmd with your thumb, which is much more ergonomic than mashing ctrl with your pinky. OSX also has more well thought-out shortcuts than linux in general.
You can try to configure these things on linux, but it's tedious and never works perfectly.
I love the fact that it's the same everywhere though and don't have to Ctrl+Shift+C to copy in the terminal.
Also running i3 (actually i3-gaps, + terminator, dmenu, emacs)
I also bought a 34" curved ultrawide Samsung, which powers the XPS over USB-C. Single cable, and my mechanical keyboard is plugged into the monitor as a hub.
Everything just works. It's ace.
I do fiddle with modern react and JS, any issues with JS compatibility on that browser? I enjoy Mint in an ASUS laptop, but memory and hardware issues do arise.
I've been using it for a while and it simply gets out of your way and just let's you get on with things. Best operating system I've used till date for development.
However, I ended up switching back for two main reasons:
1. the touchpad is good but not nearly as good. I would regularly accidentally click on things while scrolling, despite fiddling with the settings. It was maddening.
2. For my work, Linux is a better fit than Windows. When I installed Ubuntu on the X1, both the touchpad and trackpoint were entirely unusable. I did a bit of searching and tried a few recommendations but never got it to work. I don't want to carry around a mouse.
I now have the new MacBook Air and I'm generally happy with it. Keyboard is not as good as the old ones in my opinion.
Ended up returning it due to:
- poor scaling on 4k display (Linux)
- awful speakers
- poor battery life
Things just work.
It seems to me that what the Linux desktop gives you is a bad compromise between this hackers paradise (which isn't very practical and very productive in one quirky mode) and a software developers paradise (quite practical and productive in a wide variety of modes). The right solution is a late 2016 MBPr (the one with magsafe and SD card and good keyboard), and a Thinkpad with my fantasy RebolOS running on it.
Seems quite the hefty price to pay.
I tried to upgrade my RAM and found out it's soldered in, whelp, lets see how long I can stand 8GB of RAM, haha.
There are still too many of these small problems to justify making the move for me fully.
I find that iMac’s offer good value for money, but the Macbook Pro’s are horrible laptops.
I’m still convinced that Jobs was smart enough to build good machines for developers. Cook doesn’t care.
I still have an MBP 17”, still works great, battery is dead. I would’ve loved a new version of that machine under Jobs.
1500$ new iPhones, product lines not even being slightly updated... it’s a mess.
BUT: it’s nice to have your photos appear on your desktop and ipad and, it’s just easy.
I have the impression that there are no alternatives for Windows or Mac? If so that alone frees med from considering those..
Apple are dead to me after I spent thousands on a machine that has a broken keyboard.
In hindsight I wish I switched to Linux years ago for my professional computing. swdevs, sysadmins & security people who know the ins and outs of computing should switch.
I call it conscious computing.
Linux desktop has been my sole desktop for the last 15 years, it gets better and got the job done. I must admit that Ubuntu made a big difference.
On the other hand unless you're a PC game lover, the PC itself is more of a chromebook, i.e. nice hardware running a modern browser plus a few decent editors. The OS underneath is less irrelevant now.
Linux has space to improve though, for me it is the power management especially for laptops.
Don’t get me wrong, I want to like Linux, I just don’t want to spend any time (as in any time) on configurations. I want to plug right into my 4K monitor and have things just work. I want a good trackpad, and so on.
Throw out all the over-complicated garbage that has become the Linux Desktop and make something that is simple enough for people to build an accurate mental model of how it functions in a relatively short time, and with a set of simple composable tools. Then they can build the thing they want with a relative minimum and without writing any C. It already some composability thanks to the original UNIX commandline toolset, at least for text processing, but those have grown archaic over time and the concept was never properly extended to the GUI.
I doubt that will ever happen though. Instead the community will just keep piling on more and more complexity, keep creating more and more distros to try and cover that infinity of what people want in their effort to make it "easy", and tell anyone who doesn't want to do things the way they do that they're doing them wrong.
Unfortunately, display scaling is just impossible with Xorg, and Wayland is still not really usable.
Years of bad decisions and neglect for the Mac have added up. The bad keyboards, touch bars, unnecessary port removals, etc, it feels like the company forgot who the "Pro" Mac line is made for. I hope they course correct but fear they won't.
It's a nice change from the typical screenshots of green text on black terminals.
> You might not be impressed much with my environment—I pretty much just copied the acme colors—but some people have put a lot of work into making their setups look sexy.
MacOS(Hackintosh) - Daily driver, photo editing.
Windows 10 - Gaming
Mint Linux(Disk2 of Gaming PC) - Development
Remember, most people aren't software devs, and have very different concerns. And increasingly there are more and more people who don't even own a proper computer, since a smartphone will suffice for their needs.
I have a macbook pro 2012 and still don't know what my next computer is going to be.
Only using it for development, and overall it was a great idea to switch from trying to set up macOS with Docker and other stuff.
Linux with a lightweight window manager, like i3, works great in a virtual machine. Docker works flawleslly inside a VM as well.
Literally everything is textmode barring the browser. you might as well have a tty and a separate device for the browser.
Piano timbres sound far better on macOS and Windows unless you could advice me.
I delegated the fine tuning and customization to a third party once I realized I don’t have time for it anymore.
I am fine with it although it is not ideal and there is room for improvement. There is always some. Everywhere.
Please ping me from future when Linux (or Fuchsia or whatever is there in the second half of 2020s) is capable of that as well and there are vendors/providers who are honest, dependable and trusted who I can allow to store my data, identity and privacy and have good sleep.
Cheers.
For a tech laptop, the specs are very unspecific.
- Firefox takes literally 10 seconds to start unless I disable eth0
- Chromium isn't able to resolve DNS for local intranet sites
- Have not tried chrome as installing it means fiddling with apt repos, wget or gdebi
These issues are unresolved as of January 2019. I can't say that I ever had such issues on macOS. I have had DNS issues because of my specific ISP router after a major macOS upgrade but my ISP patched it within a week.
Networkmanager defines a "connection" for every (stored) wifi, which you can view:
nmcli connection show
nmcli conn mod <connection-name> ipv4.dns "8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4"
Getting NetworkManager to work properly was a matter of disabling all that systemd stuff and then setting it up using config files and nmcli (the gnome GUI just broke everything too easily).
My impression after all that was that NetworkManager is a very capable piece of software littered with bad interfaces and impenetrable documentation. You will emerge victorious if you fight those hard enough. In contrast, trying to setup the system using the various systemd-thingies got me to "xxx is planned but not working now" every time.
Btw, I do have a weird complicated network configuration because I'm switching between ethernet and wifi, and have multiple bridged and/or routed vms/containers (with all of kvm, lxc, and virtualbox).
Part of the instability had to do with various hacks and patches I had put in place, including a big one where I updated gcc to the latest version to support C11; this broke my update process horribly - so much so that when I went to update the NVidia drivers, my system became ultra-b0rked. I had been meaning to do an upgrade - now I was forced to.
What saved me a great amount of trouble was the fact that I had partitioned my system; that is, when I had installed Ubuntu, I had put it on an SSD (/tmp and a few others were on a RAM disk), and /home was on a separate drive. So all I had to do was pull the SSD, drop in a new one, and re-install something else.
Actually, I also used a different drive for my /home directory, because my old drive was getting old - plus my /home directory itself had a lot of old baggage. To that end, I migrated it to a new drive, created a new user with the new OS install, then migrated the files I needed across (moving from Chrome to Chromium wasn't as easy as it should have been, but it was doable). For the most part, it was painless.
I ended up sticking with Ubuntu - but this time I went with Ubuntu Budgie. What I had done was check several other live distros first (regular Ubuntu, BunsenLabs, Solus, Mint, and a few others) to see what was out there again. See, my old system I had built from 14.04 LTS - but I had started with "minimal" and built it up to look and work almost identical to CrunchBang (#!), because I liked it so much (and #! had died, but its descendents hadn't been in a finished state - which is why I looked at BunsenLabs).
I ultimately wanted something like the MBP setup I used for work; I thought I had found it with Solus. It seemed almost perfect - except for its package manager. While it had a lot of offerings, I worried about the ease of whether I could install third-party stuff. One thing I had "vowed" to never again do was to "compile and install from source" (that was part of what got my into this mess); if I ever needed to do that, it would be better for me to run it in a container, on a VM, or in some other manner - just not mangled into my main system with no "accountability" as to what was done and where.
Solus' package management was a custom system, that leaned heavily on app images; I liked that, it was something I had recently looked into (like a week before all this happened), so I wanted that option. But their library wasn't as extensive as the Ubuntu ecosystem, and I also wasn't sure what to do about third-party .deb files and the like - how would I install those. So I looked around for a viable alternative.
I found it with Ubuntu Budgie. I could be on the latest version of Ubuntu (I actually chose stability over latest - so I went with 18.04 LTS), but still have the Budgie desktop (with Plank and other goodness). I've found the best of both worlds, and I have a system now that I believe is as close to my MBP (well, OSX) as I can get with Linux; honestly, I consider it a bit superior.
I've decided, as alluded before, not to install anything from source, as tempting as it may be, and instead only stick within the confines of what is available via apt and (trusted) third-party PPAs. Otherwise, I'll consider using one of the various app image systems, a VirtualBox VM, or something similar - or look for something else. I just don't want to end up in the same boat down the line.
Is it perfect? No. But it certainly beats the pants off of what I had to do with Linux 10 years before, or 10 years before that.
I've been using Linux in one form or another since 1995 (my first "install" was MonkeyLinux, which runs on a DOS filesystem; my first "real" Linux distro was TurboLinux 2.0); back then it was a "nightmare" - a fun nightmare, to be honest. Nothing like recompiling your kernel to get the latest PCMCIA drivers working, among other things. But I'm pretty past that kind of thing today.
Not completely, of course, as b0rking my system with a custom manglement to get gcc/C11 working (took me a while to get all the dependencies just right, but I had it up and running - but the update system for 14.04 LTS did not like it at all).
This is such a stupid title.
Now that Jobs is gone, Cook is showing he has the logistics knowledge but not the other parts of product leadership needed.
Sure: if you know Linux well enough, AND YOU SPEND ENOUGH TIME ON YOUR SYSTEM, you can fix most of the above issues (I could not fix the Gnome DE latency with hidpi, btw). But I don't want to waste my time fixing my desktop; I want to pay, and my desktop should just work.
Then: if you like the Linux desktop, feel free to use it.
I don't expect you to get back on Linux or anything, but paying for known supported hardware (e.g. Dell XPS 13) goes a long way to have a 'no-tinkering-needed' experience (pretty much like OSX run better on its own hardware).
For the record, HiDPI works flawlessly and responsively with a Dell Precision 5510, including when using projectors with different resolutions. Never had an issue with my Bluetooth headphones, and the system does include a braindead, just-works backup-and-restore system : deja-dup, which works with Google Drive out of the box after inputing your credentials.
Applications that don't have a Linux version can be a pain, but most have perfectly good alternative (Google Docs, Flux, Zeal for Dash).
Some of them don't really, or require a big change (typically, Photoshop/Gimp), and those can indeed require one to stay on a specific OS
Go to "Budgie Themes" and you can set the theme from there. Things like the Pop theme from System76 are included in the list, as well as Arc etc. I personally like to install arc-dark manually from https://launchpad.net/~noobslab/+archive/ubuntu/themes
There are also some really good cursors in that PPA
My latest Linux build sits in my music studio and I record and edit audio for production.
I think your conclusion is invalid and specious, but it's an opinion.
But I have switched from Gnome to i3. Over the years I’ve migrated from graphical to text-based applications for most things
I think any comments about the looks of a Linux desktop must be sure to talk about what Desktop Environment are you saying that about. I find KDE and Gnome to actually have a much more modern look and feel then anything from Apple and Microsoft.
Personally I have found Windows 10 to be much much better for me as a Linux user and I can run OpenSUSE on the command line a great help. Still I think Linux has been and will continue to be the platform that pushes Desktop Environments and features. There are other issues but this is not one of the problems.
"The whole desktop" -> I was talking EXPLICITLY about the exact setup of the desktop of the article, not about a "generic" Linux desktop. I don't know where you got that impression.
Amusingly, the macOS UI, on the other hand, is almost literally from the 90s (it dates from 2000, I think). And the Windows 10 UI isn't meaningfully different from the Win95 interface.
So it's really mainly on Linux that you actually have the option of modern UIs.
> Linux is so half-baked with respect to desktop
Considering the linked article does not show anything about a usual linux desktop, what are you basing your opinion on?