From Mac to Linux – the setup I've grown to love

I mainly use Windows for games but every now and then I don't want to leave my desktop to make some changes to a repo while my character is respawning/spectating or something haha

WSL2 is going to be awesome for sure

This still holds, right?

Installed erpalma/throttled from github to squeeze my CPU perf to max. Also make sure to set sleep to S3 in BIOS. Otherwise nothing else to do. Everything seems to work just fine.

The 7th Gen just came out so there might still be some issues but I would look around and see if it's good to go.

I use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Once 19 is done I will more than likely move on to 20.04 LTS

I'm running a T530. Max out the ram, get a ssd, it's great. I'm probably on my third one, I keep buying junkers for $50 from eBay for the parts. I majorly abuse it. The magnesium frame likes to crack near the heatsink, the steel frame around the screen likes to crack 1 inch above the hinges, don't spill water on the table it's sitting on.

The X1 Extreme is nice. It is one of relatively few PC laptops that are comparable to the 15" MBP in terms of performance (H-series processor rather than U-series) and portability. It has upgradeable RAM/SSD, so I got the base model with the upgrade CPU then purchased 32GB/1TB separately and saved something like $600-700 as a result. With slightly better cooling and a 3:2 display I think it would be nearly perfect.

Concerning distro, if you want to "just get work done" I recommend Ubuntu if like the way it looks or want to use one of the non-Gnome desktops. If you do like Gnome but but like the Ubuntu desktop, Fedora is great.

The yoga needed some tweaks to get the OLED brightness to work correctly, but other than that they basically worked out of the box under ubuntu 18.04. My only complaints are that the oled panel only came in gloss and has since been discontinued (although there are rumors that a 15" 4k oled will be available on the x1 extreme), and that the mouse click on the yoga is several orders of magnitude too loud. The trackpoint buttons are fine and the keyboard is great, but the trackpad click is loud enough to hear in the next room over.

I've had a MacBook/PowerBook Pro (and Thinkpad) since Titanium and the First MacBook Pro and if it wasn't for the fact of macOS and the convenience of being in the Apple ecosystem with their iPhone, TV, HomePod(s), Watch, Music, and iCloud I would be back on Linux (I actually came from FreeBSD on my Thinkpad). I'm currently using a 2017 and 2018 MacBook Pro. The 2017 would be great except the keyboard (and of course the soldered RAM/HDD) is absolutely trash. The 2018 is much better, but nothing like a Thinkpad. I also miss the Trackpoint, but the Apple Trackpad is good.

I miss my Thinkpad (+ BSD) bad, but being an iOS / web developer and entrenched in the Apple ecosystem (which I honestly like the convenience) I feel stuck and hard to even get a secondary machine. I even leave a fully maxed out P53 and P1 (I can't decide which one I want) in my Lenovo cart ready to buy at a given moment.

It's like their product management is run by sadistic assholes.

Never had a Mac before, everybody was saying they were fantastic. You'll see, coming from Windows, what a difference, they would say.

The first had some serious hardware failure which made it reset at random times. With time the resets became more frequent until it became impossible to use it. I gave it back to IT with the order to destroy it.

The second had the infamous keyboard. God knows how much I hated it. Random keys wouldn't work, but most commonly the ones you need more, like shift. Thanks Apple. Went to IT and told them to throw it in the bin.

This last one I got has the horrid touch-bar which starts the bloody Siri 3 to 5 times a day because my finger randomly flies by the up-right corner of the laptop (typically when I am looking for the backspace). I hate it. The network sometimes goes away, for unknown reasons, until I reset the network card. Recently, the screen sometimes shows some worrisome fast-disappearing black areas.

You'll see, they would say. Very reliable, they would say.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/06/august-6-1997----...

Update environment. MacOS requires reboots and nags you constantly until you do. Whereas, apt and dnf are simple and can be automated in the background.

Doing anything 'interesting' requires you to reboot and fiddle with the firmware. Where linux sudo works as expected.

Outdated software due to licensing issues. See GPL and bash. Not to mention you will be much closer to a production environment and you will find less bugs developing due to differences in OS.

Lots more but this is a good start. All of these things are small and mostly can be worked around but they add up I'm a big way.

The road on Linux isn't completely rosy and can take more learning if you need to do anything really complicated. Tools are great but not necessarily pretty, etc.

This is hard to put into words. If I'm an artist, my tools are very, very focused and robust. I might have specific pens and brushes that I know the feel of very well. They're not flashy and they don't have advertisements written on them, and they don't change their properties behind my back. Everything about them is designed to help me draw. If I'm a musician, I spend a lot of money to buy an instrument, and I get to know it very well. I have particular brands of reeds that are consistent that I'm likely preparing or sanding myself. I know my instrument so well that I can tell you which notes trend slightly flat or sharp, and after a while adjusting to that becomes instinctive.

So if I'm a professional programmer, I likewise want a computing environment that I understand completely and can service myself, and that is very customized to my own preferences. It's no different from any other professional field -- the point of the computer is to help me get work done, everything else is secondary.

You'll get different answers if you ask someone why Linux makes them productive, because the benefit of Linux is that it adapts to you. For me, personally, the biggest upgrades to my productivity have been:

1. Switching to Linux in general

2. Switching to Emacs/Spacemacs (Emacs works best on Linux)

3. Switching to Arch as my main distro (which is hard to do unless you already know Linux)

4. Most recently, switching to EXWM as a window manager (which is a lot easier to do on Arch)

Each step of this process has been me getting rid of things that distract me from work, and each step has built on the last. Switching to Linux gives me a setup that is much more customizable and stable, switching to Emacs gives me an editor that is very tightly integrated into the host operating system, switching to Arch allows me to have a very minimal setup (its easier to debug because there's less going on), and switching to EXWM allows me to focus the entire setup on work.

On the other hand, I have an old Surface Pro 3 that's running Manjaro/Gnome that I use for drawing. It's a very different setup from my main computer, because I use it for different things. Again, my computer should adapt to my workflow, not the other way around. The Surface setup is actually interesting, because it suffers from driver issues (unreliable Wifi, bad suspend support). And yet I'm still more productive on it than I was on Windows. I think people underestimate how much time and energy can get lost to distractions, surprise updates, stuff like that. Specialized devices are really stinking good for getting stuff done.

But everyone is different. I know people that get frustrated by the initial setup times or needing to dig more into the OS internals, and I get that -- it's reasonable. For me, once I got past that I found Linux to be really stable, because it doesn't change until you tell it to. Linux is the only OS I'll set up for someone who's not tech-savy, because putting in more work up front means I won't need to do as much regular maintenance.

From Wikipedia “Thge Apple T2 chip is a SoC from Apple first released in the iMac Pro 2017. It is a 64-bit ARMv8 chip (a variant of the A10, or T8010), and runs a separate operating system called bridgeOS 2.0,[95] which is a watchOS derivative.[96] It provides a secure enclave for encrypted keys, gives users the ability to lock down the computer's boot process, handles system functions like the camera and audio control, and handles on-the-fly encryption and decryption for the solid-state drive.[97][98][99]”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple-designed_processors

It seems the be going the opposite way, since by far and large there's more offering hardware wise than there has ever been, so what you see is manufacturers catering to niches more than before.

https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/dell-laptops-netbooks-and-ta...

These days… I’d say things aren’t all that different. On one hand, Linux has better hardware support overall, and Dell and some smaller manufacturers are offering Linux laptops. On the other, a lot of hardware still doesn’t work, or doesn’t work well. Some laptops have been getting more custom hardware, including Apple’s and others, and Linux has fallen behind a bit in supporting it. But it’s nothing new for Linux to take time to support new hardware.

Not sure about the Bluetooth part (i had this kind of issue once in like 10 years) but the battery life, getting 2 hours is not common anymore. Sure, you won't get as long as Windows on the same hardware more of the time, but 5 to 7 hours on a full charge is what you can expect, if not longer.

I try to move over every six months to a year or so, and it's the same gripes every time at this point.

Driver support's reasonable now, and the desktop environments are generally solid enough, but things like mixed DPI work really badly on Linux, my browser nearly always tears when scrolling on my secondary display, etc.

But... the single biggest killer for me though is how badly Linux copes with very low amounts of free memory. Put 32G in a machine and it still periodically runs completely out under my dev workload and when that happens, the whole system becomes unusable and I have to hard reboot it. I'm not sure what macOS and Windows do differently, but it just doesn't happen on either of those two OSes.

I really want to have the freedom to pick and choose my hardware more, but at the moment I keep falling back to macOS.

It's a UNIX environment so it has the tooling I want and a solid GUI that works well.

Bluetooth? I don't even use it. Battery life? I'm on a desktop.

But, weird hardware issues popped up now and then which I didn't have to deal with on my MacBook, such as the wifi card that had to be manually installed, the headphone jack sometimes doing weird things, the processors overheating.

I was able to solve those problems by searching online and finding others who had the same issue which lead to instructions to fix the problem, but I just can't imagine my family members who have never used the Terminal in their entire life having the same success.

The fact is that with my old MacBooks (and the computers I've given to my family) the only hardware related issue we've had over the last 10+ years is the battery related issues from the MBP.

As I'm typing this, I got 14hours and 33minutes of battery left and it's only charged to 83%. In hardcore scenarios out of the grid for a few days (where I go sailing) I got a few spare batteries. (the laptop is the Lenovo X270)

> In this case, I'm measuring my productivity by the time it takes to mess around with the OS to get the desired result, and the fact that the stability baseline just never seems to get there.

The time investment goes down significantly over time. After a decade using linux on as a daily driver, I don't remember the last time I've tweak anything.

> fed up ... and go back to macOS.

Same thing but the other way around. I stay away from my Mac except for:

- making sure my applications look good enough on a Mac and are usable

- making music as I'm not patient enough to relearn everything on a different platform but that's just laziness from my end

I can finally say Ubuntu MATE 18.04 for me is pretty solid. There's still two issues I wrestle with, but other than that it's been very dependable for me.

When it comes to OSes these days, I feel like you have to pick the least bad one. A truly rock solid OS just doesn't exist in my experience.

I've been running linux desktops and laptops for about 20 years, starting with early/pre-RHEL redhat, and moving around to many others. My first laptop was a pentium thing at 75 MHz, and I triple booted Linux, OS2, and Windows/DOS on it. I wound up kicking off the last two, as I used them only infrequently.

Battery life is an issue for me, but its not linux specific. The laptops I have, all have power hungry ram and GPU cards. I get 2 hours on them, or if I play with the brightness and other things, I can stretch it to 4 hours. My old 2010 laptop (still in use, still running linux) is a 16GB ram, 0.5TB SSD affair with an NVidia GTX560m card. My 2018 laptop is a 48GB ram, 1.5 TB SSD (0.5 + 1.0) with an M2 256GB SSD for the included windows 10 home, and a GTX 1060m card. Windows 10 on the newer laptop lasts about 2.5 hours before it shuts down. I now run the pre-installed windows 10 via a kvm with passthrough of the M2 into the instance.

All of these are currently running late model Linux Mint 19.2 with accelerated graphics.

Work laptop is a Mac 16 GB ram, 512GB SSD with an intel/AMD hybrid graphics bit. This will last 5 hours with significant tweaks to aggressive power off, and me not running any builds on it.

I like the mac for its physical fit and finish, weight, etc. But I need to bring the power supply with me, as I can burn through much of the power in a 2 hour meeting.

I like the linux machine for work, and everything else. It just works. The drivers just work. The networking just works. Single/multi displays just work. I have cinammon (display manager) set up to a very comfortable configuration.

I am hopeful that the day job will enable me to trade up to a bigger machine with linux and nvidia graphics at some point ... 32GB is bare minimum for a functional machine for me, 48->64GB is better.

My home office deskside is an older Sandy Bridge machine with 16 cores, 128 GB ram, old GTX750ti card, running the same environment as on my laptop.

Of course, YMMV.

I use Arch Linux, and a combination of KDE and i3 so one would expect me to have a ton of rediculous problems. But I haven't had a single problem. It took me a single day to set up my computer how I wanted it (I've used Linux before) and I haven't had to touch a config file since.

Part of this might be that in using a Dell XPS DE, which is designed to work well with Linux, but I think it might just be a YMMV situation. And I do a lot of back end, applications, web and front end development (mostly in my spare time), so I think I've hit a lot of programmer use-cases.

Also, I get 15 hour battery life streaming 4K video on my 4K touch screen, and more doing other stuff.

I also used an Apple Magic Touchpad or whatever over Bluetooth with it, including gestures and it worked really well. Better, actually, as far as Bluetooth, than my Mac. I only stopped because it wasn't good for my hand and wrist health.

Just adding my anecdata. Overall my experience with Linux has been hugely positive.

It's true that Linux won't run with all hardware, but this is even more true for MacOS ;)

> Windows sometimes works

I'm going to take exception to this. Windows 10 has been a disaster for me.

Effectively, Windows 10 treats me like a "supplicant". "Oh, great computer, can you please do some work for me right now?" "I say NAY! I must now commence my Update Ritual. Please come back and ask again. But I make no guarantees."

Every ... single ... time. WTF!

> MacOS mostly works

Unless you want to do modern graphics and then you get the "joy" of learning Metal (or not). Or, you can simply throw in the towel and switch to Windows/Linux where you can use OpenGL and Vulkan. Valve is funding MoltenVK (a Vulkan shim on top of Metal) because it is more cost effective than dealing with Metal. Let that sink in for a minute.

And OS X hardware is a disaster. We've actually stockpiled used-2015 era OS X laptops in the office. At this point we have enough if someone has a laptop that goes down.

Technically, there are more 100% Linux compatible laptops than macos dito...

That is true even if you limit yourself to thinkpads

I'm pretty sure that would be my problem if I tried to move (back to) Linux. A lot of the HN crowd is (understandably!) focused on development, and the chances are your favorite dev environment is going to be good-or-better on Linux as it is on the Mac. But I can't find a screenplay writing program on Linux I personally like as much as Highland for the Mac, or a Markdown editor that I like as much as iA Writer or BBEdit for the "heavy lifting" of technical writing at work, or a graphics editor I like as much as Acorn, or a Twitter client I like as much as Twitterrific, or a Markdown previewer/converter I like as much as Marked, and and and. I know it's all subjective, but it's a sticking point. And the last I checked, at least, I couldn't find good equivalents to OS X Services/Quick Actions, which can be just amazing.

I'm sure if Apple really tanks, I could make the switch and hit a happy place, but it'd be turbulent for a while.

But there are always going to be exceptions, new problems will arise that will slow you down. That's another reason why I'm on a mainstream OS and not linux, because when I do encounter a problem that slows me down, devs work at breakneck speed to fix bugs and there is extensive documentation because the community is much larger than the linux community. I'd be spending waaay too much time in the weeds on ubuntu, sifting through pages of SEO crap search results to find the one sage forum post from 10 years ago with now deleted screenshots, just trying to run the software and workflows I know like the back of my hand on macos. I don't want to start over and be a dumbass again, I've found my niche.

Now, don't put Arch on your servers either because there's no real security story for Arch, but in that time I have learned tons about systemd, and you can't put a price on that.

On the Asus Nvidia updates broke my Windows manager on Ubuntu it not happen with Arch.

The Arch install is a little bit more complex but you can do exactly what you want which was for me: use systemd boot instead of grub, and cipher only the home partition.

Once the setup is done, I did not have any issue, fiddling to be done.

For me where I lost time on Linux was when I tried to customize my desktop environment to my liking with i3/polybar/etc. Now I just run Gnome3 on Wayland, far from perfect but it is a good compromise TBH between setup ease/integrated UI components and features.

I think that archlinuxs advantage is that it's minimalistic, the philosophy is simple, you know what is running on your computer and generally why.

Tinkering with arch itself isn't that time consuming because the package management is so incredibly good, along with the AUR and wiki. These are invaluable.

I really do think the difficulty is overhyped though, it's really not hard at all.

For example, I don't use tabs in the terminal. I usually open a new window and use the WM from outside the terminal, or use tmux inside the terminal. Tabs in the terminal itself are not that useful in my workflow.

My current favorite Linux terminal is kitty (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/), and before that I used rxvt-unicode.

Other than that I use Linux (Mint) for my main Desktop OS, but I still deal with plenty of rough edges. The latest ones:

- Wifi doesn't work after suspend wakeup. - After upgrading OS to next version using recommended UI method, PC us unable to start graphics mode bc it doesn't find some random UI package... i had to login in TTY and manually install it. - CS:GG, a game with Linux native port suddenly decided to get choppy lagged sound. Same game works well in Windows in same PC - Connecting bluetooth headphones sometimes works, sometimes doesn't

So yeah, plenty of rough edges. Still I use it because I love the programming workflow and use docker with Linux containers.

And this is from someone who loves the iPhone.

I have gone the other way. One of the thumb-buttons on my Ergodox EZ is"Super + C" makro. The other is "Super + V".

One-thumb copy/paste.

On Mac it's Command+C everywhere.

I think some other terminal emulators might also let you do this.

Only macOS gets this right.

For example I can type Ctrl-b while editing the URL in the browser omnibar to move the cursor back a character or alt-b to move it back a word, just like you can in the terminal and then use "Win"-b to bookmark a page.

And your command changes the keys you use for moving the cursor in the terminal.

If, in about:config, you set ui.key.accelKey to 91, then Super-W will close a single tab (and Super-T will open a single tab etc.). This obviously won't work in Chromium, though.

It can pretty much do anything you want, given enough time and configuration... but when that configuration breaks: good luck.

Some people prefer "it just works" over losing some control.

Personally I dislike macOS's "virtual desktops" and much prefer being able to swap between different desktops in i3, and being able to send windows wherever, control tiling, etc.

Again, a personal opinion. It costs as much as the equivalent MacBook Pro. I would not choose it over a MacBook because why? Apple has been known to care for customers in the sense that even if they fuck up keyboard design, they run a service program for free. Battery mess up - replacement for cheap. Simply that they have a brand to protect. I can rest assured that I can make a warranty claim that will go through. I’m not sure if I can say that about Huawei. I might try them if they are cheaper or give me some incentive to try. But, if they are the same cost, why would I willingly take the uncertainty?

Some incentives hat would make decide that way are :

1. Open drivers and documentation.

2. Promise of equivalent service or replacement if necessary.

3. Repair/upgrade friendly design - no soldering of memory and SSD. I'm okay if that makes the laptop a few millimeters thicker and a few grams heavier.

Thanks for the info though.

Spectacle has "next/previous display" shortcut.

To disable animations on workspace switching:

defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES && killall Dock

Lets give it a try...

I use xetex for a little project, and while some of those character mappings are very convenient others are not. Vulgar fractions, for instance, work in some fonts but not others. For instance LTC Californian Pro has the unicode glyphs for the vulgar fractions, but xetex doesn't translate e.g. 3/8 to ⅜. Goudy Oldstyle is missing many vulgar fractions (e.g. ⅜), but the tex mappings work. Go figure.

Granted, fractions aren't mapped to keys in OSX, but I use plenty of those mappings on a regular basis including the bullet (•, ·), degree (°), accented characters (á, é, í, ó, ü, ö, ñ), currency characters (£, ¢, €), and the section character — §. I can get all of these with simple keystrokes and, best of all, zero fiddling with keybindings.

I think automated Browser testing is the only thing I am seeing I would have to do from Windows

Not a diehard win10 user, but as far as I know you can only disable this legitimately if you pay out for Win10 Enterprise.

I think there are registry hacks that work on other versions though.

On my home PC I just searched up candy crush and uninstalled it with a right click.

On my work PC using Windows 10 pro and signed in to a domain I don't get them at all.

Re Malware, I think Windows 10 has an excellent security model, and you would have to be pretty careless to get malware problems. However I won't deny that Windows is a much bigger target due to number of installs.

Microsoft Office on Mac is a big cause. I have some users who only use Office or a browser and still use Mac. I cannot understand it, Office on Mac is simply bit as good as Office on Windows.