Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

What if you have multiple windows of the same application, and you minimize one of them, then auto opening of that window everytime you switch back to the app will be super annoying.

Just an example that I have about every day: before sharing a file via file select/open dialog I can double check if it’s the correct one.

I can only speculate that quicklook prevents a substantial amount of accidental information leak across the entire world :)

There’s no such thing. You command-tab to an application, which can have many or no windows. The different mental model is probably the reason for your frustration.

Hold the option key while releasing cmd, it will raise the minimized window.

Ubuntu 20.04 is really easy to use.

I can't stand the mbp. Hoops to jump through for everything with a cli. Extra permissions to make build tools work. Extra additions to file permissions that are incompatible with docker. Special gui with extra settings to make docker work. vpns that have to run inside the top bar and freeze up with no way to get them to shut down. Weirdness with .net core compilations. User admin only with a gui. Difficulty finding files because the finder window doesn't follow path. Extra steps to launch apps from the cli. Weird ppi so text settings that are legible everywhere else aren't in Mac. Slow keyboard repeat rates that are hard to change.

You'll be happy to learn that your "#1 hate" is easily resolved: cmd-tab then hold option key down while releasing cmd-tab. Voila, the minimized window is restored with focus. :)

So while cmd-tab does give the application focus (as you’ll see reflected in the menu bar) it won’t bring up the window.

[1] https://bahoom.com/hyperdock

[2] https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch

xpdf satisfies most of my PDF reading needs now instead. It has tabs too, which is handy.

The change to High Sierra also broke some nice iTunes behavior I had been exploiting previously that let me connect to my home iTunes share over a VPN connection. Ah well.

https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook

lmfao. About the preview thing ;

- ranger (cli) has the file preview thing, no need to press spacebar. Has all the vim keybindings, you can cycle preview through files much faster than on macos. - (sushi)[https://github.com/GNOME/sushi], if you want to use gui.

- all of this is free software.

nixos (a linux variant) addresses this on a much deeper level than any other os.

I think the impression of "better key bindings" comes down to familiarity more than anything. Getting used to something else seems uncertain (it may never be as good despite learning investment) when you know on the other platform you can just "get things done fast".

I recommend MacPorts instead. Brew broke my computer more than once.

OSX certainly isn't a "real Unix system".

OSX a huge hodgepodge of proprietary crap with a Unix component buried somewhere in the middle of the dung heap to get FOSS proponent to believe that Apple believes in openness.

I was and still am heavily dissappointed. This was ~2018 it looked exactly as boring as imagined, a desktop as intiuitive as windows 7s. The terminal felt at best strange, many settings and confirmation dialogs are simply not available via terminal, only hidden somewhere in their UIs. The hardware run hot every day, always and you could not use an external screen without waste cycling your battery to death. Honestly not impressed.

Both mac and windows are like stuck in time compared to modern desktop approaches like gnome shell or recent kdes. If you are a shell guy to some degree no other os will justice

Very concise way to put it. I feel the same way. With FOSS I feel that I'm fighting with the software, and with proprietary stuff I feel like I'm fighting against the software.

I mean, not really, no.

This type of sentiment is usually a sign. If you've been spoiled by something, that's because it's better. I had the same feeling trying to go back to windows, "Man, why am I always fighting damaging updates", "Why can't I change this very simple setting", "Where is the documentation for this file".

The answer usually comes down to "because one thing is really good (not perfect), and the other thing is shitty (but tries to look perfect)."

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen macOS users saying they can’t leave it in part because of Preview. But IDK if any have listed any features not present in both GNOME’s Evince and KDE’s Okular (not that I’ve ever needed or used any of the three).

It's a bit ironic that the Mac is now the epicenter of multi-touch, while its use on mobile platforms has seen some of a decline.

Also, I full-heartedly consent to the praise of Preview.

I haven't seen tearing in longer than I can remember, and can't remember anyone even mentioning it, so I think you're overplaying this point JUST a tad. I tend to use older laptops with Linux, and older screens (VGA, DVI), so maybe that's the reason.

I hate touchpads.

I don't do PDF editing.

Everything's a tradeoff.

Previews capabilities are much better than any any built in tool or Adobe reader.

How is the generation of 2D bar codes that many (government) forms use when you enter information into the various fields?

If you're not a mailing list based developer, I would recommend MailSpring, which is both snappy any polished.

https://getmailspring.com/

This is my biggest roadblock to Linux as well. I don’t sync to 1Password.com though and that’s all that is available, so it’s more than just a poor experience for me.

I thought about trying to share a Keepass database but that’s had some issues. I tried sharing via Keybase and had a weird issue that when I edited something in Keepass, it was unreadable in Linux. I didn’t have a problem if I shared it via USB drive though.

The desktop app is pretty good now, and if you’re using the Beta browser extension, it can talk to the desktop app to unlock. This feature is still in development, though, and has some restrictions.

As far as phone integration, KDEConnect is quite good, though it only works if the devices are in the same network.

Unfortunately the modularity of Linux, despite being it's strength means that it can never possibly provide a UI/UX as coherent and interoperable as the Mac.

How can you provide things like spell checking, font rendering, copy/paste, drag and drop, password sync, across every widget and text field in the OS if every framework an application is built with and every part of the OS chain can be swapped out for something else and they're all made with distributed teams with no one at the helm to be the one to say "Drag and drop is broken in your app, you might not use it or care but others do, you need to fix it". or "Why does the text look weird in your app?"

This worries me because "M1 feels like Apple actually care about the Mac again" I completely disagree with this, I think Apple is aiming to have Macs running mostly iOS applications in the near future and MacOS will eventually be deprecated once we hit critical mass of that.

Not to mention the specific things I point out here that make the Mac great are being eroded away as more and more Mac apps are just electron wrapped React with custom text field components that disable OS spell checking and things like that.

Next time you give linux a try, you might want to check out https://kdeconnect.kde.org/ and https://syncthing.net/. I'm not a Mac user but I'd be surprised if between these you'd be missing any features.

You're looking for Nextcloud.

Evolution is fine, but I really wish Gnome's Mail and Calendar apps would get more love and development as they look modern and minimalistic. The accounts management is lacking support for the general case, sadly. And GPG...

Have you tried Mailspring?

> My chosen password manager (1password) still has a fairly awful linux experience

Maybe a good time to try something open-source such as Bitwarden? The fact that 1password is closed-source is a major disadvantage.

This may be true, but the article explicitly targets people moving from Mac to Linux, not people with years of Linux experience.

I’m interested why you don’t like Finder. It does the job for me. What do you think it’s missing?

So I Googled “laptops supported by Linux”. There is no official site. Ubuntu has a page. But it’s not on the first page of results. I only know about it because I’m familiar with it.

Supporters keeps arguing people should jump through hoops. I’m on Linux right now, but people have better things to do. Either provide a list so people know exactly what to buy, or all complaints are valid.

Apple sells you the whole package: take it or leave it. Windows supports everything and has their logo everywhere.

1. Carbon, due to it's intel chip, can not drive 4K and 2K external monitors via thunderbolt adapter.

2. I need to authorize dock (Lenovo's thunderbolt dock) after every reboot.

3. The screen tearing sucks.

4. I need to have pulse audio volume control window opened all the time, otherwise the laptop loses my external sound card after first call via browser, and I need to turn it off/on.

On my own laptop, where I installed Ubuntu, I can boot only into 5.8.0.43 kernel (the one which I initially installed). All others, that I've got via apt-get update stuck with blinking cursor at last step of boot, and it's well known problem.

The longer I'm trying to love linux for work os, the more I realize that only tool that I truly want from linux is i3. For the rest I'm happily using WSL2 on my home, and don't have choice with work.

So on next hardware refresh date I think I'll choose Mac. The supplied by job laptop config is also more performant than carbon. So, hope, I'll be able to use my monitors in native res, and not put 2K into 1920x1020 mode

Whats so bad about finder?

For automating tasks on macOS you can look at something like hammerspoon which is really cool (though I mostly use it to modify some of the macOS keybindings which I find ridiculous) [1].

Finder is crap, I agree. But then again, I'm mostly in the terminal, so I don't care much. I would however complain that the default terminal on macOS is really not very good and I always install iTerm2... most Linux distros seem to have a better terminal pre-installed.

Package manager is better on Linux for system packages, applications, etc. (in fact, such a thing doesn't really exist on macOS, save for maybe homebrew cask, but that has problems). However, dev packages are tricky on Linux, too. Generally, for dev packages I might want to have a) a very specific (and often the latest) version of something, and b) often multiple versions installed separately. Additionally, on most Linux distros you can't install without root. On a Linux machine, I mostly have to install such tools in addition to my package managed libraries and apps, on macOS I can typically just "brew install rbenv" or so (though homebrew has its own share of problems).

In general I would say that macOS makes it slightly easier to do things sort-of reasonably well for default flows but can break down quickly once you want something more custom. With Linux, while it has become a lot (!) better in the last 15 years or so, I still occasionally need to debug some audio problem or so. The upside is that problems on Linux are generally solvable (although, in some instances it can be hard to figure out exactly how). If your macOS does something that is weird or buggy (e.g.: before the update to big sur I had the annoying issue that my system would go into DND mode after every restart, which is really not good if you don't want to miss notifications), then you're out of luck and there's nothing you can do.

[1]: https://www.hammerspoon.org/

This is unfortunately every experience I’ve had with Linux on native hardware to some capacity in the last 24 years of using it other than dumb headless servers. So I use windows as the native OS and virtualise anything else.

And the minute I did software update there, everything broke. (Because it was using some binary graphic driver that broke with newer kernel.)

I could not even use the computer after that, only the console. I needed to reinstall old ubuntu in order to get my data.

Never again

> For instance, it's easier to automate tasks with shell scripts in Linux than to attempt the same with osascript.

macOS is a Unix, so you can obviously automate it via shell scripts. `osascript` is just an additional option?

Are you talking about automating UI tasks in linux? Nearly all of my linux shell scripts work fine on macOS and vice versa unless they are using something OS specific.

While not perfect, with macOS I get a large majority of what makes Unix nice while also avoiding the UI annoyances. Using macOS also tends to give more software options over unix/linux alone, like PS, LR, the Affinity toolset, etc...

I paid $600 for laptop and $150 for RAM and SSD upgrades. Comparable Macbook Air would cost $2000 for me.

It does have terrible TN screen, cheap touchpad and bad keyboard layout. That's good enough for me, as I prefer external everything in day-to-day use.

I bought a Lenovo specifically since they mentioned all their laptops will support Linux in the future.

Note that historically Lenovo didn't really "support" Linux. Remember the Windows tax and how most Thinkpads came with Windows and most still do? Thinkpads supported Linux in spite of Lenovo / IBM.

Anyhoo, my new Lenovo had to wait a few months until the trackpad worked! Turns out Lenovo only meant that business laptops (or some other sub-category) will support Linux out of the box. Silly me.

That was a neat trick. You get me to read your whole post because I wanted to know why you didn't use Linux on your servers.

And Windows isn't even that bad. Compared to busted up 90s Windows it's a dream come true. But I've been spoiled by Linux and my "geek privilege" of knowing how to operate it all these years.

The etc contains the integrated spying and telemetry and a horrible update system. A big caveat.

Interested to see how their in-house laptop project goes though.

This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes.

Apple software does “just work” with Apple hardware.

Linux main problems with laptops are drivers and firmware. The best you can hope for, when replacing windows - is that it runs somewhat stable.

But startup time, performance and batterie life will be much worse on standard config. And like the article said, don't expect resume/sleep to work consistently. Which can be very, very annoying and time wasting.

My use case is short(or long) bursts of working with it, and then stopping for some time and then later resuming, expecting everything to be as it was, when I reopen. And I can't do this consistently. Which sucks. On a old Linux laptop I got hibernation to work (mostly) consistently so that worked, too, but took even longer to resume. On my previous modell, I gave even up, trying it to get to work.

And now I just bought a HP Pavillon gaming Laptop. And I actually run Windows now, even though I hate windows. But I need to get things done. And I don't want to mess with config settings, probably for weeks, to bring performance at least close to the stock values, windows provides.

Now this is not the fault of Linux, proprietary hardware support and optimisation are just very complicated. But it still sucks. And it really does not help, when certain linux evangelist claim to everyone, especially newcomers, everything is fine and much better than on windows and co. Which is just not true.

Especially startup time annoys me. It is just painfully slow. And the chromebooks are showing, that it does not have to be that way. My cheap Asus rugged chromebook, has by far the best startup time/wakeup time/standby life, of all the devices I ever used! I open it and can immediately resume working. Just what I want and need. Optimized linux drivers and firmware that work. (And reworked procedures under the hood) Everything else with ChromeOS is horrible, though. Shitty software, and lacking applications and all tied to google.

So for now I have to work with windows again, which in its stock config comes with so many bloatware, ads and spyware - that it is hard to believe people put up with this. But what choice do they have?

I probably have to try purism at some point, but sadly with all my mobile linux experience so far, I expect just a expensive, but mediocre experience. And there does not seem to exist a version with a decent gpu?

It was stated in the previous article of the series but you are right that it was not evident in the text.

As for the many many paper cuts of Linux, it’s a sacrifice I’ve accepted in exchange for having control over my desktop experience. It doesn’t change out from under me over the many years that I’ve used Linux. With windows and Mac I always felt like I was one software update away from them changing something out from under me.

The system administration and shell skills that I’ve picked up are an investment that keeps accruing over my entire software development career, and make me a more capable developer for being able to jump into infrastructure and devops concerns around the software that I write. I expect this knowledge will last me for decades more.

The daily experience of using Linux is generally one of being more exposed to the internals of the system. You’re only ever a thin layer above the kernel and its system calls.

If the inner workings of an operating system are a mystery that you’d like to explore, then you will uncover those mysteries in the course of running Linux as your every day experience. The error messages and log files are obscure but they’re always available.

If you have a problem and you have the patience and persistence to dive into it, then the next layer of abstraction is available for you to explore. You live your virtual life in a workshop, with powerful tools scattered about. A few times a year you discover a new one and it becomes part of you.

I added a partition to one of my MacBooks and installed Linux on it, best of both worlds. It was surprisingly easy.

I don't get why this narravitve still exists today. Linux works out of the box on many distros perfectly fine.

Keybindings are a very special use case, and if you need that customizability and its better on a Mac, then get a Mac. Doesn't mean that Macs are "more productive"

If you want to argue actual semantics in terms of value, Linux wins hands down for what you get. You can look at things like VM software, which is costly for Mac while Free for Linux. You can look at things like privacy - Apple still collects data for themselves, while in Linux you can fully disable that. You can look at open source software, which has a way higher compatibility rate with Linux than Mac, especially with M1 chips where Rosetta, as good as it is, isn't fool proof. You can look at hardware, where most "non-Mac" laptops that run Linux are upgradable and repairable.

If you like Mac, then stay on Mac, and stop publishing articles on how good Macs are and how Linux is neat, but your time is so valuable that you can't spend learning a few commaind line tools.

I do get people's resistance to switch. I bought a M1 Mac Mini because I wanted to be able to test and optimize code for it, but found the difference in experience jarring enough that I enabled remote desktop and now mostly run code on it through ssh. I'm sure I could configure it to behave more like I'm used to, but, why bother? If things were flipped, and I was that comfortable with the Mac experience while Linux felt alien, I'd probably feel the same way.

Most of the Linux complaints that I see are focused on the quality of the applications, not a driver support

The macOS installer kept failing and I had to jump through hoops to download the installer for the macOS version I wanted and 'verify' it. (This was ~10.10-10.13, not sure if it's still as much trouble to verify an installer that isn't the latest version.) After the second Mac that refused to reinstall, I had had enough and put Ubuntu on it.

I started to realize around 2012 (with the release of soldered-RAM Retina MBPs and razor-edge discless iMacs) that Apple did not need me as a customer, and eventually I was fine with that. I have one remaining Mac Mini that I use as an HTPC and to get pictures off of my iPad. For daily use I usually prefer an old Thinkpad running Debian.

It's not really that popular on Linux though even though it was first released on *nix some 23 years ago. I don't think people generally recommend it, simply because they don't know it. It's more likely that you know ACDSee from Windows and decide to use something similar on Linux.

So it's not necessarily his fault for not knowing it.

https://www.xnview.com/en/

Also, windows is, for lack of a better word, obnoxious, in the way it bothers you about updates (and other messages of various kinds), and forces you to restart frequently and kn its terms.

The few times I have used windows recently, I found it the opposite of "just getting out of the way and letting me work", and I fear that even if wsl did work smoothly for what I was doing, just the fact that windows was running in the background would degrade the experience.

I've been running Linux devenvs on Windows, in Virtualbox, for something well over a decade now. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the vaunted WSL2 is literally just that, plus preinstalled OS images that save maybe a half hour's work, plus also it actually breaks virtualization so you can only use WSL2 and no other VMs. And ~ is still just a shared folder, so chown and symlinks don't work.

I'd tolerate it if I had no better option, just like I have all those other times. But even then, just running Virtualbox proper is no worse in any way, and better in some. I really don't understand what the hell all the hype is about - maybe for folks who've only ever used Windows and never had a chance to really try Linux at all, I can see it, but people who have no reason not to know better also seem often to be over the moon about it and I can't for the life of me figure out why.

Granted, that Lenovo had been pissing me off well before I tried turning it into a dev machine - Windows 10 is just a dumpster fire in every respect, WSL2 or no. But it was WSL2 turning out to be literally just broken Virtualbox that really sent me over the top.

And I have to thank Microsoft for that! Even with the occasional slight flakiness of any new architecture, the M1 mini is an excellent dev machine, blazing fast and unbelievably power-efficient - the same deskside UPS that promised 50 minutes runtime for the Windows box claims almost 300 for the mini, and that's with something like a 10x perf boost. If WSL2 hadn't been so lousy, I might have taken another year to make the jump.

Man, I hated it. I'm just not a fan of how windows are managed, OS updates are constant and require a lengthy reboot, installing/uninstalling is the same awkward mess except now there's 2 Program Files directories, Control Panel is like archeology digging through generations of UIs dating back to Windows 95.

I hate all the intrusive tracking, ads, and preinstalled games and junk.

I tried to give PowerShell a fair shake. I liked some of the concepts around it. It's annoying the documentation requires a download (I was on an airgapped network). It was super awkward to wrap everything in a BAT file. Everyone else just wrote in BAT files because our needs weren't huge. They would be more maintainable and better behaved as PowerShell scripts, but it didn't seem worth pushing for. PowerShell was just so verbose I found it very hard to use as a REPL to build pipelines.

The experience triggered a lot of things I hadn't thought about in over a decade and I was bummed at how few things had changed. That's probably the case for macOS and Linux, but personally I find myself liking those OSes more than Windows...I've definitely been exasperated explaining their shortcomings to others because I've been comfortable avoiding them.

I ended up mostly using it as a dumb terminal to ssh into an Ubuntu box running tmux and vim.

WSL has made this workable, really. Not the nightmare I expected. But the rest of windows still sucks.

As for apple stuff, I used to use Macs for a decade, starting with a colour iMac right down to MBP 2013 ... The platform felt like it got and more in the way. I hated the app store. Firwire transfer from old to new machine also didn't work properly between two OSX versions. Set up took long. Everything was a forced login. The straw that broke the camel's back was shitty support when I came home after closing the brand new laptop to find a cracked glass screen when I opened it up again.

Been using Dell's xps series and Nuc barebones since then, and moving some crucial things like keyPass files onto Google drive. I can spin up a new Dev ready setup in about 15-30mins. Everything works out of the box. Bliss.

Dell btw gave me great support every time I had a hardware issue.

This is a severely underrated point. If you're not running docker on a linux host, you are running it on a VM and getting all the performance tradeoffs you would get with developing on a VM. There seems to be a lot of developers that are unaware of this.

for 2., wayland is still a very rough experience imo (I periodically try it on an all-intel system, which ought to be a good target as everything is OSS supported, etc). Lot of apps still don't have native wayland backends (although this is improving!) and it seems generally less stable than boring old X11 for me.

To take an automotive analogy, road cars and SUVs are designed for the rules of the road and they come with things like a warranty. Meanwhile race cars are different. You might have to put the engine in yourself and good luck with the warranty. Comparing the road car (SUV or truck) with the race car is not a fair comparison. The race car doesn't have the cup holders, sat nav, seats in the back, airbags, central door locking or tyres for the road. In everything that matters to most drivers the race car is just useless. But most drivers are not racing drivers, so what would they know.

[1]: https://github.com/notpushkin/Mailspring-Libre

[2]: https://community.getmailspring.com/t/mailspring-without-mai...

I'm also on a 2018 Xps with Ubuntu 20.04 and everything just works.

To me, the clear advantage is how installing all kind of obscure R/Python packages is usually a smooth experience, whereas a working Mac version frequently doesn't even exist or requires struggling with obscure errors, especially after MacOs upgrades (e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/mcmc_stan/status/1186923309662953...)

This makes sense if you install a distro like Manjaro or Arch. Not something I'd ever recommend to someone who's taking Linux for a first spin. I don't think I've had any troubles doing regular kernel upgrades, though, the problems mostly laid in proprietary drivers, specifically Nvidia's.

> How does anyone think nautilus is good?

I have no problems with Nautilus. Perhaps it's not the greatest file manager, but it's way ahead of Finder in my opinion.

I think it's great. If I had to pick between Finder, Windows File Explorer, Nautilus, or Dolphin. I'd honestly choose Nautilus. It's visually simple, has previews, built in support for Google Drive, easy to find how to show hidden files, if I double click an archived file; it decompresses it, and it has an "Open Terminal" right click prompt. If I had to walk someone through performing a file system action, say over a phone, I feel confident that I could do so with the least confusion using Nautilus. I simply never have understood the arguments against Nautilus and am extremely thankful to the developers who have chosen to make the hard decision to reduce features to make the application maintainable.

I'm pretty sure I had like 4 kernel upgrades on my Fedora machine in the last month.

>great window managers like i3

Tiling wms like i3 target a very narrow user base. Unless you are a sysadmin or just work only with terminal they are pretty useless.

I don't have non-maximized windows for example (except for Telegram, Obsidian and iTerm quake-like instance)

I use a MacBook 2015 for work and that feels much nicer and has better build quality. I don't plan on buying another XPS.

Strongly disagree... the trackpad is much worse on XPS13, and the power plug is a joke. Mine broke, I took it to a technician to fix and he said it's very common to break that on XPS13's, just have a look at the stupid plug they use... after that, the plug didn't quite fit anymore and when I tried to make it fit better, the metal base for the plug broke completely (and I was being really careful!). Now I have a plug hanging outside and the only way to fix it is to buy a new frame (which I haven't been able to so far).

Bought a MacBook Air to replace it and couldn't be happier with my choice... it's a bit slower but so much quieter, better hardware in every way, and MacOS is actually very polished compared to Ubuntu and KDE.

This type of thing pops up pretty often on HN from Apple users and it's almost always the same, I don't every see Linux users posting this sort of thing, different mentalities I guess.

Full disclosure, I didn't finish reading because it quickly devolved into fanboyish propaganda. It showed the typical fanboyism we should all be grown up enough to get over by now and not just "use my platform, it's better for everyone because it suits me better than yours does".

I (and my entire team; backend development) have been running Linux on our XPS 15's for the best part of a decade now. The Android development team at my place all run Linux too. The iOS Devs run on Apple devices, and the Windows Devs run on Windows, operations team all run Linux but they're using Latitudes (I think? The chunkier ones which still have ports and ethernet), management run a mix of Windows and Mac.

I have been exclusively running Linux on my personal XPS 13 for 2-3 years (since buying it), and on my MSI gaming laptop 5-6 years before then. I also run it on my gaming Desktop and have no major issues on any of those. I have been running 4K displays (which has gotten better in the past couple of years, particular with Gnome), and using Thunderbolt docks. My laptops and desktop sleep and wake just fine, CPU scaling works, I run a mixture of AMD Ryzen, and Intel Core CPUs and I've never had to touch a driver (Nvidia on work XPS is disabled at the moment). My desktop upgrades the Nvidia driver as part of its normal routine.

Let's be clear, the email apps aren't great on Linux, but I'm a backend software engineer, I don't care about email, it's just a thing I need to use occasionally to reply to my colleagues and sometimes our clients. I don't need HTML emails, in fact, it's almost always junk if it is HTML, calender I use but don't need anything advanced, just to know when meetings etc are.

Keyboard? My XPS 13 (2019) has much nicer keys than my work XPS 15 (2017) so they're improving for sure, however, I write code for a living, I have hundreds £££s worth of keyboards to type on, so the built in keyboard is a minor point. Use the tool for the job and all.

What I'm not blind to is that gaming would be easier/more reliable if I ran Windows, you won't catch me telling everyone to switch to gaming on Linux, I have my reasons for doing it, but it can be done if you really want to, you'll have to accept some compromises.

If you design/content create, Mac, I'm told is the best platform, you won't find me telling people to do that on Linux, but if you _really_ want, you can.

Guess what, if you write server software targeting Linux, use Linux, it has the best tools for the job.

The build quality of the XPSs is excellent. Unless I wanted to spend a lot more money on a specced thinkpad-carbon, I'd always buy an XPS over any other brand, they're super thin, very strong, great battery life, and DELL isn't hostile to you repairing them, you can buy a battery and change it yourself, the service manual is even on the website.

It has two jobs: store events and remind you about events. Calendar gives notifications 10 minutes into meetings I'm already in (because my phone tells me about the meetings). It is unfathomable that this could have been released if anyone uses it.

Some of Nautilus' forked kin like Nemo (Cinnamon) and Thunar (XFCE) are decent though.

Dolphin is alright but in my case it has a bit of "MS Office" syndrome where I only ever use maybe 20-30% of its functionality, with the rest just being more clutter to have to dig through. I know some find those things useful, but in my case it's just going to collect dust and get in the way.

Finder was the worst part of the experience by far. Perhaps there's some setting to turn this behavior off (or some setting said relative turned on that caused this) but it seemed to constantly attempt to hide the underlying filesystem from me, instead showing files in groups like "Documents" and "Downloads". I could not figure out if/where in the UI I could type in a path to a folder to manually browse to it. The search was slow and awful, to the point of being near useless.

After 10-15 minutes of wasting my time in Finder I gave up and used the terminal for all file operations.

If you approach it with an open and flexible mind, it's at least equal to Linux or Mac desktops, for developers.

You can create a local account without any live.com user by just disabling internet while installing windows. I know it's still working around the software... But it's still doable.

- Perfect support for HTML email with attachments, calendar invitations, and conversations

- Use MS Office and Adobe Reader (with Wine in my case)

- Perfect support for Google Meet, Teams, Slack and Zoom, including screen sharing (full screen or just a window)

- Ability to customize the action for any keypress, combination of keys, mouse keys including the scroll wheel, and trackpad gestures.

- A good way to manage a constant flow of notifications: chat, email, calendar/reminders, and such

- Connectivity with bluetooth headsets. My Airpods microphone wouldn't work so I had to buy another brand of headphones.

- Support for a Wacom tablet, it was good but it lost my settings on reboot

- Local copy of Google Drive documents (did this with Insync, a paid tool)

- Working with two clouds with the same user: work and personal. This includes unified inboxes and calendars, task lists, etc.

If all I needed was to send plaintext email and edit code in vim I'd use OpenBSD ;)

My first major complaint is the lack of fingerprint reader driver. It simply does not work.

My desktop environment is Gnome on Wayland.

The support of multiple monitors with different pixel densities is also problematic. You can set fractional scaling but the rendering was really blurry. So now I have a script that runs when I connect an external monitor that just changes text scaling in Gnome (usually when connected on an external monitor I don´t use the laptop screen).

Other than that I have better battery life than on Windows 10 even if video hardware acceleration is less efficient than on Windows (firefox is the only browser supporting it). And for server side development which I occasionally do on my personal laptop, I vastly prefer Linux over Mac or Windows (even with WSL2).

I have not found anything better than wmii, last year replicated experience in xmonad now without any WM controls. My environment is clean and unobtrusive — xterm, vim, mpv, mupdf. Arch Linux user since 2009. Recently I've tried Windows and macOS, can't stand them.

There are other projects though — Gnome, KDE, more mainstream approach.

TFA:

> Screen tearing with the intel driver. Come on. This was solved on xorg and now with Wayland it's back.

Thunderbird is pretty good and in my experience, less buggy than Apple Mail, especially when using providers other than iCloud. My wife absolutely hated Apple Mail, primarily because it would forget passwords and stop syncing/sending. So I moved her to Thunderbird and now she's happy.

Of course, you can install iTerm2 which is even better.

I had to temporarily switch back to my 2013 MPB while my 2019 was in for repair (my fault, drink near laptop = bad idea) and was actually surprised how mushy the keys felt on it in comparison to the 2019. Of course it is a matter of taste, but IMO once you get used to it, the 2019/20 keyboards are actually the best Apple have made, so maybe it is worth persevering.

Certainly a million miles from the butterfly disaster! That said, I mostly work with an external Microsoft Sculpt keyboard, which is probably more like the older MPB in feel.

He boils down the issues with Linux on the desktop to what jwz calls Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers[0] model. Essentially open source developers don't have the discipline and patience to do the hard work of maintaining their software, and instead just want to refine their designs, throw things away, start over from scratch, and make things perfect.

I don't disagree with this view, and I think it's just somewhat silly to expect the same level of polish and back-compat on Linux that you'd see on a commercial OS with commercial apps. Certainly there is a lot of very polished software built under the OSS model (though many of that software has funded full-time developers working on it), but any project that is either run largely by volunteers, or largely by the programmers themselves, is often not going to end up like a polished, seamless, corporate product. Companies (and product managers) make decisions about building software in a very different way than developers do. They have different priorities, and different things they care about.

There will never be a "year of Linux on the desktop", because FOSS Linux-based OSes are constantly-moving targets run by people who generally aren't getting paid to do the work necessary for that to happen. That's pretty much always been the case, and even with all the corporate interest around Linux (Canonical comes to mind), it's just not happening.

My first experience with Linux was with Red Hat 4 back in 1997 or so, though I didn't start using Linux as my daily driver until 2002 or so. It has always had, and will always have, many rough edges. For me, I find that I have fewer problems with it than I did during my stints running macOS, but... that's just me, and I can fix nearly any issue I run into (even if they are few and far between) with a minimum of effort and time. That's not for everyone, and that's fine.

[0] Don't click (copy/paste into a new tab), as jwz has a nasty redirect for people coming from HN, but: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html