> Linux is only free if your time has no value
Hah, that's great. I'll have to tuck that one away.
Hah, that's great. I'll have to tuck that one away.
Pop!_OS comes with a built-in tiling manager you can toggle on that completely changes the game for development. If you have never used a tiling manager, you owe it to yourself to do it at least once. The built in software manager is excellent, and is the one-stop-shop for installing VSCode, Android Studio, Steam, Chromium and IntelliJ all at once. No finding/adding repos, automatic updates, it just works.
Even gaming (on Steam and Lutris) is a breeze. It honestly requires zero tinkering (on Steam at least) to get 90% of my library to run (including AAA titles.) If you haven't used desktop Linux since 2010, it is a radically different experience. It honestly is easier to use and get what I want it to do than a MBP today.
(Disclaimer, I'm sure mileage varies depending on your environment, hardware, and chosen distro, just sharing my experience. I prefer to compare the XPS + Linux experience to MBP + macOS)
The one thing I really, really like is using i3 to make every app run on a specific monitor and tiling all windows. When I restart my machine, every app I use launches on the right monitor. This customization has been awesome.
It's definitely gotten better over the past decade, and maybe the jab is a little unfair if you're using off-the-shelf Ubuntu on very vanilla hardware. But that's mostly what I do when I use Linux, and yet I've never had it "just work" without several asterisks.
Sure, the mouse and keyboard just work. The display and network adapter (usually) just work. Audio may or may not just work. A second display may not play very nicely. Setting up GRUB/dual-booting always takes some effort to get it running smoothly enough for daily use. Installing my dev tools, there's always one random things that goes wrong. Sometimes I'll install my browser the wrong way and it doesn't get an icon in my launcher; so I have to go look up how to configure that manually. I still have this weird issue where whenever I boot Linux and then boot back to Windows, my system clock (in Windows) is off by 6 hours; I gave up trying to fix it because it wasn't worth the effort.
It's a death by a thousand cuts. I'm sure officially-supported installations like those on the XPS 13 work just fine, but if you're installing it yourself you're going to get pulled off track from what you were trying to do with your computer, and into forums trying to find someone else who had your exact issue. Some people revel in this experience, and I've been known to take a sense of accomplishment from it before, but most of the time I don't want to be messing with my computer, I want to be using it.
And I agree with your assessment that I don't think I've ever installed even Ubuntu and had everything work perfectly out of the box. In contrast, Windows has plenty of things you'll want to change configuration on, but usually nothing that's outright broken.
> It's definitely gotten better over the past decade, and maybe the jab is a little unfair if you're using off-the-shelf Ubuntu on very vanilla hardware
> I'm sure officially-supported installations like those on the XPS 13 work just fine
That's fair, my use cases pretty much line up with that. I do view the XPS with Pop to be a MBP killer. I did install it myself (getting it on a USB drive is harder than literally the rest of the setup combined (did not dual boot, clean install,) and that wasn't bad at all) but Dell's Project Sputnik ensures Linux compatibility with the XPS line, and Pop!_OS noticed and applied firmware updates for my laptop. I compare the experience to choosing between a MBP and a Hackintosh. XPS + Linux seems to work better for dev work, better for software compatibility, far better for gaming, and is arguably a better experience overall compared to the MBP.
Now, I do also run Pop!_OS on a desktop that I put together (Ryzen 5 & GTX 1060) (no dual booting) and have had a similarly flawless experience. Pop!_OS installed my NVidia driver on the initial install. Better experience for dev work than Windows (haven't given WSL a shot yet though,) but a small number of gaming titles don't work. No where near the experience of setting up a Hackintosh, and compatible with far more software than Catalina.
I would certainly do Linux over a Hackintosh any day, because for me the entire point of Apple-anything is having the complete package that's been designed and ensured to work well together. At least with Linux they know you're trying to assemble something yourself and there's a large community of forum-goers giving you a good chance of finding all those little fixes you're going to need.
Personally I use Windows for gaming and a Mac for dev and my Linux partition for that rare dev use-case that just doesn't quite work on the Mac (happens maybe once a year)
I fixed this in pretty quickly after install. The reason for the issue is that your Linux machine uses UTC to store time on the hardware clock whereas Windows uses the local timezone. The solution is to either let windows use UTC or Linux use local time.
In my case I went with Windows on UTC based on this link: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/System_time#UTC_in_Wind...
Hope that helps
I will concede that the fingerprint reader doesn't work, and I haven't spent any time trying to make it work, I don't have much patience for tinkering with stuff like that these days.
It always goes as follows:
Complain: I am trying distribution X, having problems A, B, C
Standard Reply: Why are you still using X? Distribution Y is much better now.
Left as exercise for the reader when Slackware 2.0 came out.
For ex: I got a Lenovo X1 Extreme near release date and Linux was a bit of a pain to get working... I actually bricked my first laptop due to a simple bios config change which was actually Lenovo's fault - but I don't have to change those settings to install Windows.
Don't get me wrong. I love Unix/Linux. But saying it just works is misleading.
I agree it’s far better than it used to be but until I can install programs without having to crack open terminal I feel like it still has a ways to go.
The latest LTS version of the largest distro doesn’t even let you drag and drop to the desktop.
System76 maintains a list of trusted repos that allows you to install all of your software from the Pop!_Shop. All of the examples I gave are real, you can install VSCode, IntelliJ, Android Studio, Steam, and much more from official sources and official repos with one click on the Pop!_Shop. It is essentially a pretty, managed app store that handles updates, installs, and repos for you.
For non-Steam games, I use Lutris, which is probably the least polished part of getting software installed, but I still don't have to crack open a terminal. If that doesn't immediately work, I don't bother with it anymore. I can get 90%+ of my titles running this way.
From installing my vpn app to games from gog I find I have to go to the terminal for a good percentage of my installations.
Even with simple utilities though, I find that the app store is FULL of garbage. Why are there multiple VLC entries in the store published by people other than VideoLAN?
There is a Gog galaxy client published by a random developer that is just a wine wrapper of the windows client (and also doesn't work). This is not a good experience and I don't think the average user is ready for that sort of thing.
> I can get 90%+ of my titles running this way.
I'll agree that a majority can come from the app store (for me its probably more like 70%) but it needs to be way higher imo to be ready for the average user.
Along similar lines I am currently having an issue with my ubuntu 20 install where i have to change the audio device every time I boot my computer, there doesn't seem to be a way to set the default device -again- without popping into terminal. It is frustrating to deal with all these idiosyncrasies which is why I prefer to work on MAC OS when I can.
My anecdotal experience tells me otherwise. During confinement, I tried to install OpenSUSE on an old laptop I had around for the kids to do their classes online. The laptop kept losing wifi credentials. Able, but not wanting to, troubleshoot I proceeded to install Unbuntu. That was all good until I went on the GUI to enable auto-login. Now I cannot log in. Not big issues, I have the skills to fix it but not the time.
edit: typos
I really live by trying not to be snarky but this is testing my principles given how nice a mac trackpad is... (used Linux for a long time and now I've been on macos for almost the same amount of years, I love Linux and appreciate all the work people put into it, to be clear)
Tell me a gesture you use or rely on and I'll give it a shot and reply with my results. I'm ignorant on the cool stuff one can do with a Mac track pad. I thought the two fingers to right-click was pretty neat.