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Comment by aeronaute | Hacker News Reader

I agree.

I've tried using various distros on a Lenovo T480 recently. The laptop itself is decent though the screen is a little small for my tastes. Regardless, no matter what combination of OS and hardware that I've tried, nothing holds a candle to a Macbook. I'd really like to be able to use Linux on whatever piece of hardware I want, though things like the retina display and trackpad (among other things) keep me from leaving. Macbooks are such a joy to use, which I can't say about most other hardware/software unfortunately.

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That's certainly have an informed comparison if you have a T480 that you've tested! I'm not trying to be combative and say that various features are pointless, just that they are nice-to-haves and not really that necessary in my view. I primarily code and make my font size large anyway, so am not a category that benefits much from a high-density display.

Consensus can't be divined from comment threads, but many threads on HN related to Apple hardware generally bring people out of the wood-work venting about keyboards, battery life, touch bar, mag-safe, ports, software regressions, etc. with sentiments of "if I wasn't beholden to macOS/Photoshop/Final-Cut-Pro I'd switch to something else". So it may not be obvious from someone who just reads about Macs from HN comments that they are either (1) the best hardware or (2) a joy to use (although let me be the first to admit that's a completely flawed way to form an opinion about anything lol).

Personally I think the largest reason people move or stick to Linux/BSD is that there are unique features that can't be found in other OSs, and that these balance out the utility of features lost. This would be in contrast to fulfilling full feature-parity with no switching cost. For Linux/BSD, I would consider this things related to the nature of free software and user control.

> I think the largest reason people move or stick to Linux/BSD is that there are unique features that can't be found in other OSs

I was going to argue with you, but now that I think about it more, I believe you are right. People use Windows or Mac generally to run some specific software (for example if you need Visual Studio or want to play certain games, you are going to use Windows and probably don't think about the OS very often).

Conversely, users pick Linux because they want to run Linux.

Considering both Linux and MacOS are Unix, what kinds of things can you do in Linux (or BSD) that you can't do in MacOS? Is it all about the window manager?

What does "Retina" mean to you? I use a ThinkPad T480S with the WQHD display option and have never been able to spot individual pixels.

I will agree that the WQHD screen is nice. If you only compared the screens themselves (Retina vs WQHD) then I don't think there would be a significant difference. But the problem for me comes from resolution scaling. Fractional scaling on the distros I tried was poor. I think that this is a software issue more than a hardware issue, but Retina screens come with software that supports them well.

Another thing that didn't work well at all was when I tried to use an external monitor with the T480. I had to go back and adjust the fractional scaling settings to make it look decent, and then revert those changes when I went back to just the laptop screen.

Edit: forgot about the aspect ratio too, that's a nice feature of the Retina screens.

i've just got an upgrade and gnome on xorg on ubuntu seems to have really great retina support, such that i feel like i must be dreaming. last week, windows was better (altho important programs occasionally crashed). right now, gnome/xorg seems perfect.

just wheo i was thinking of switching to a tiling wm if i could find a mouse-friendly one

Thin laptops with QHD displays generally cost around the same as a MacBook (and still have crappy trackpads).

Apple defines retina as 220 dpi for laptops. WQHD at 14 inch is 210 dpi, so basically retina. FHD at 14 inch, the most common resolution these days, is 157 dpi, and quite clearly not retina.

Another big difference is aspect ratio. Lenovo ships 16:9 displays. WQHD gives an effective vertical resolution of 720px at 2x. FHD at 1.5x is also an effective vertical resolution of 720px, or 864px at 1.25x. Apple on the other hand ships 16:10 displays with an effective vertical resolution of 900 px at 2x. That means a 13 inch macbook pro fits more lines of code on the screen than a 14 inch FHD or WQHD thinkpad.

LInes of code on the screen … How small do you make your font size? I mean, it must be pretty small, so that you cannot read it with one display but can read it with a so called retina display.

Not sure that's practical at all and thus whether it makes any difference.

I feel you may be looking at this through too narrow of a lens since it's not just about lines of code, though that's one part of it. I think the point is that a 13 inch Retina screen can fit more "stuff" than a 14 inch non-Retina FHD/WQHD screen.

Sorry for not making it clearer. I meant lines of code the same apparent size, whatever your preferred size is.

To me, "Retina" also means 2x scaling.

The advantage of having 1280x800 scaled resolution on a 2560x1600-capable screen is the incredible sharpness of text. I personally find it very noticeable, it's so much easier on my eyes.

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