5 ms·

I've never heard the opposite. I've switched to OsX 4 years ago after being completely unhappy and irritated with Windows for over 12 years. Now after months of

by brulard 10y ago

I've never heard the opposite. I've switched to OsX 4 years ago after being completely unhappy and irritated with Windows for over 12 years. Now after months of using Ubuntu (unity, xfce) and Mint (Cinnamon) I'm convinced that OsX is best for average (and power) desktop user by a huge margin. Although I would be much more happy with something Open Source.

rayiner 10y ago
I used Linux on the desktop from 2001-2007 or so. Switched to OS X until then. It's no contest: OS X is smoother, more consistent, and lower maintenance. Linux desktops seem to have peaked with GNOME 2.x. I'm not even sure what's going on with Unity.
- idobai 10y ago
  > Linux desktops seem to have peaked with GNOME 2.x. I'm not even sure what's going on with Unity. Gnome 2.x is a dead-end - it was buggy and ugly. Gnome 3.x is far better. Unity is just another canonical-outrage.
  - AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
    Would you mind explaining what you mean by outrage? For productivity, Unity beats any Gnome 3 setup I've tried so far. And we're still not talking about the maintenance/security nightmare that is the Gnome 3 plugin system.
    - idobai 10y ago
      By "outrage" I've meant canonical has developed it because they didn't like gnome shell(they like the innovation-thing). > For productivity, Unity beats any Gnome 3 setup I've tried so far. Unity has problems with multiple monitors, consumes more RAM and CPU and is also hard to customize. > And we're still not talking about the maintenance/security nightmare that is the Gnome 3 plugin system. But we should talk about it if we're here...
      - AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
        > By "outrage" I've meant canonical has developed it because they didn't like gnome shell(they like the innovation-thing). After watching the "we're the only ones who know best, so shut up"-antics of the Gnome developers, I can understand that canonical got cold feet. > Unity has problems with multiple monitors, consumes more RAM and CPU and is also hard to customize. In my experience, setting up multiple monitors was much less of a hassle under Unity than under Gnome. I don't have any recent data on the resources use, but I wouldn't run either Unity or Gnome on a low memory setup. Firefox and Chrome dwarf any RAM use for compositing anyway. >But we should talk about it if we're here... Ok, gladly. In Gnome 3, a lot of functionality comes from extensions. Even changing the theme (from a black top panel) needs an extension. Installing extensions is done over the web using your browser (this works to a varying degree out of the box). I don't know of any recent changes, but about a year ago I had a look under the hood, because I wanted to make my own extensions, and was shocked by how they work. First of all, there seems to be pretty much no integrity checks, signing, hashing to prevent malicious extensions. That's pretty much a no-go if you want to use Gnome in any kind of industrial setting (you will have to maintain them offline and manually on the file system level, sidestepping the supported way). My second gripe is the stability of extensions. Since you're downloading from a website, the currently offered may not fully support your slightly outdated Gnome install. However, if you keep your Gnome up to date, expect random failures of your extensions. From http://lwn.net/Articles/460037/ http://lwn.net/Articles/460037/ about the reasoning behind sidestepping distro packaging (emphasis mine): "The second reason is that extensions are not working with a stable API, so have very specific version requirements that don't really fit into the normal assumptions packaging systems make. If a packaged extension says it works with GNOME Shell 3.2 only and not with GNOME Shell 3.4, then that will likely break the user's attempt to upgrade to the next version of their distribution. We'd rather just disable the extension and let the user find a new version when it becomes available." So, you just updated your Gnome and your productivity extensions fail. Now you have to search replacements and, should you find them, configure them anew. Sometimes extensions just randomly fail. This was the main reason I finally gave up on using Gnome for work. And speaking of stable APIs: another shock was to see that extensions don't operate against a plugin API but are basically Javascript code smudged into the existing running code. This makes gauging the effects one extension has on another pretty much impossible. My final conclusion regarding Gnome 3 was that it is a wobbly work in progress, less configurable than Compiz (there just aren't that much extensions to choose from in the end), based on questionable design principles and taste. It's okay for hobby use, I guess. But I have yet to find a distro that provides an as polished DE setup with Gnome as Ubuntu does with Unity. Don't get me wrong, I want Gnome to be great, since many distros use it as default DE and I want an alternative if Canonical mucks up Unity with their Mir transition and their focus on smart phones. There's also Cinnamon wich I kind of like, but it has the same problems regarding extensions as Gnome. I will give KDE a closer look in the future.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - lisivka 10y ago
    I use Mate (Gnome 2.x fork) daily. Gnome 3.x is ugly and buggy.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  9 years is an incredibly long time in tech. Aside from a lot of other very good wms, there's always mate if you really like GNOME 2. http://mate-desktop.com/ http://mate-desktop.com/ Even better, none of those wms will go away just because Apple decided to change things.
  - type0 10y ago
    MATE is better than OS X desktop, at least for me.
- eropple 10y ago
  I tend to agree. My development workstation runs Linux (and it's fine, but on that machine I only need Sublime, a terminal, Chrome, and IntelliJ--anything creative or entertaining I do on my laptop or in Windows respectively) literally only because I'm not buying a Mac Pro. It works, sort of, after spending a nontrivial time figuring out kludging together decent replacements for common functionality (xsel garbage for pbcopy/pbpaste, etc.); it probably helps that I already install the GNU coreutils on my Macs because I know the GNU tools better. In retrospect, a Mac Pro would probably not be that much more expensive than the time I spent getting this fairly minimally demanding environment set up, though on the other hand I did re-learn a decent bit of stuff about Linux in the process. On the gripping hand, things related to X aren't particularly important to my life, so that's kind of a push.
- Filligree 10y ago
  Then I'd encourage you to try KDE. 4, not 5; 5 is still being developed. I don't know what's going on with the Gnome guys, but KDE is flat-out the best desktop manager I've used, and I'm including Windows and OS X in the comparison. It's not without glitches, but the glitches are mostly of the "Google can't be bothered to make Chrome cooperate, and no-one has updated Emacs' DM support in the last ten years" sort.
  - kitsunesoba 10y ago
    As a long time Mac user I find KDE hard to enjoy. The UIs of KDE apps are almost universally overpacked, messy, or lopsided (one side of the window had its controls crammed while the other has awkward white space). It might sound like a silly gripe but it really bothers me. The design of apps from GTK+ desktop environments (GNOME, Cinnamon, Pantheon) generally feel much better, but they have their own problems.
- wtbob 10y ago
  I agree that GNOME and Unity have jumped the shark — I think that I started to notice when GNOME got rid of xscreensaver and replaced it with a screen-blanker, with an unfulfilled promise of adding screensavers back someday, c.f. https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-March/msg00340.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-March/...). Meanwhile everything went down the path of compositing and otherwise burning way too much CPU to do not a whole lot extra. I switched over to a tiling WM years ago, and have been extremely happy since. It does exactly what I want; I can connect to a running instance with my editor and reconfigure it, as well rewrite it while it's running. It's pretty great.
fnord123 10y ago
You can hear the opposite from me then. I have an OS X laptop and a desktop running Gnome (Fedora) and I find Gnome far better. Originally, I didn't like Gnome 3, but after I used it a lot, I got used to it; I added some extensions, and now I prefer it. In my opinion: * Finder is garbage (alt tab is broken and non configurable. I can't figure out how to convince it that the built in display is always the primary display. It seems to struggle with nfs mounts which Gnome doesn't at all. I've had just as many, or more issues with OS X and projectors as I have with Gnome). Where is the centralised location for Finder extensions to tweak it to my preferences? * The default command line tools that come with OS X are old and basic (reminds me of Sun's tools) and have a death of a thousand paper cuts (e.g. top defaults to sorting by pid, lol; they still ship bash 3.5.57, locales are all fucked up). * brew, compared to dnf or apt, is not good. But that's Open Source people trying to shore up OS X deficiencies so I won't call it "garbage". (F)OSS people put in a lot of effort to keep it running and they deserve praise. * The programs from Apple are all terrible. I literally don't use any except Safari sometimes since it allegedly doesn't use as much battery as Chrome or Firefox. I guess I sometimes copy paste stuff into Textedit and I sometimes use Calculator. It's all certainly usable but there is no consensus that OS X is the best. YMMV. My feeling is that each time there is an OS X release, it jumps ahead of Gnome; but Gnome usually trundles along and surpasses it and maintains a lead most of the time.
- Razengan 10y ago
  > Finder is garbage Try PathFinder: http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/ http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/ It can be used for free until you decide to buy it. > alt tab is broken and non configurable Cmd+Tab? What exactly do you find annoying? Try Missing Control (F3, or set a mouse hot corner in System Preferences -> Mission Control) to quickly see all windows (for all process, or Ctrl+F3 for current app, Cmd+F3 for desktop) and just raise the one you want. Also try TinkerTool: https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html > brew, compared to dnf or apt, is not good. Try nix: https://nixos.org/nix/ https://nixos.org/nix/ > The programs from Apple are all terrible. Which ones, and how, exactly?
  - fnord123 10y ago
vetinari 10y ago
I've got other experience: - random failures to mount network shares, - drag-and-droping files between Finder windows suddenly stops working, - the file rename edit widget appearing in random part of the screen that are bugs, that should not appear in the supposedly best desktop OS.
- radicalbyte 10y ago
  I can recommend using Forklift. It has its own share of bugs, but you don't get the freezing and general crappy experience of Finder when accessing network shared :)
wtbob 10y ago
> Now after months of using Ubuntu (unity, xfce) and Mint (Cinnamon) I'm convinced that OsX is best for average (and power) desktop user by a huge margin. I recently set up Ubuntu and Mint computers for some folks, and can report that Mint is not bad, but Ubuntu is dreck (seriously, the change-user-password dialogue hangs: do Ubuntu users never change their passwords‽). I've been running Debian with stumpwm for years now, and am convinced that this is the way of the future: a tiling window manager, extensible in a real language, capable of performing literally any task I ask of it. Most of the time, my main window is full-screen — that's odd to someone used to a classic desktop interface (as I used to be), but it's actually very much like a modern tablet or phone.

by brulard 10y ago

rayiner 10y ago

I used Linux on the desktop from 2001-2007 or so. Switched to OS X until then. It's no contest: OS X is smoother, more consistent, and lower maintenance. Linux desktops seem to have peaked with GNOME 2.x. I'm not even sure what's going on with Unity.

idobai 10y ago
> Linux desktops seem to have peaked with GNOME 2.x. I'm not even sure what's going on with Unity. Gnome 2.x is a dead-end - it was buggy and ugly. Gnome 3.x is far better. Unity is just another canonical-outrage.
- AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
  Would you mind explaining what you mean by outrage? For productivity, Unity beats any Gnome 3 setup I've tried so far. And we're still not talking about the maintenance/security nightmare that is the Gnome 3 plugin system.
  - idobai 10y ago
    By "outrage" I've meant canonical has developed it because they didn't like gnome shell(they like the innovation-thing). > For productivity, Unity beats any Gnome 3 setup I've tried so far. Unity has problems with multiple monitors, consumes more RAM and CPU and is also hard to customize. > And we're still not talking about the maintenance/security nightmare that is the Gnome 3 plugin system. But we should talk about it if we're here...
    - AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
      > By "outrage" I've meant canonical has developed it because they didn't like gnome shell(they like the innovation-thing). After watching the "we're the only ones who know best, so shut up"-antics of the Gnome developers, I can understand that canonical got cold feet. > Unity has problems with multiple monitors, consumes more RAM and CPU and is also hard to customize. In my experience, setting up multiple monitors was much less of a hassle under Unity than under Gnome. I don't have any recent data on the resources use, but I wouldn't run either Unity or Gnome on a low memory setup. Firefox and Chrome dwarf any RAM use for compositing anyway. >But we should talk about it if we're here... Ok, gladly. In Gnome 3, a lot of functionality comes from extensions. Even changing the theme (from a black top panel) needs an extension. Installing extensions is done over the web using your browser (this works to a varying degree out of the box). I don't know of any recent changes, but about a year ago I had a look under the hood, because I wanted to make my own extensions, and was shocked by how they work. First of all, there seems to be pretty much no integrity checks, signing, hashing to prevent malicious extensions. That's pretty much a no-go if you want to use Gnome in any kind of industrial setting (you will have to maintain them offline and manually on the file system level, sidestepping the supported way). My second gripe is the stability of extensions. Since you're downloading from a website, the currently offered may not fully support your slightly outdated Gnome install. However, if you keep your Gnome up to date, expect random failures of your extensions. From http://lwn.net/Articles/460037/ http://lwn.net/Articles/460037/ about the reasoning behind sidestepping distro packaging (emphasis mine): "The second reason is that extensions are not working with a stable API, so have very specific version requirements that don't really fit into the normal assumptions packaging systems make. If a packaged extension says it works with GNOME Shell 3.2 only and not with GNOME Shell 3.4, then that will likely break the user's attempt to upgrade to the next version of their distribution. We'd rather just disable the extension and let the user find a new version when it becomes available." So, you just updated your Gnome and your productivity extensions fail. Now you have to search replacements and, should you find them, configure them anew. Sometimes extensions just randomly fail. This was the main reason I finally gave up on using Gnome for work. And speaking of stable APIs: another shock was to see that extensions don't operate against a plugin API but are basically Javascript code smudged into the existing running code. This makes gauging the effects one extension has on another pretty much impossible. My final conclusion regarding Gnome 3 was that it is a wobbly work in progress, less configurable than Compiz (there just aren't that much extensions to choose from in the end), based on questionable design principles and taste. It's okay for hobby use, I guess. But I have yet to find a distro that provides an as polished DE setup with Gnome as Ubuntu does with Unity. Don't get me wrong, I want Gnome to be great, since many distros use it as default DE and I want an alternative if Canonical mucks up Unity with their Mir transition and their focus on smart phones. There's also Cinnamon wich I kind of like, but it has the same problems regarding extensions as Gnome. I will give KDE a closer look in the future.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- lisivka 10y ago
  I use Mate (Gnome 2.x fork) daily. Gnome 3.x is ugly and buggy.
aaron-lebo 10y ago
9 years is an incredibly long time in tech. Aside from a lot of other very good wms, there's always mate if you really like GNOME 2. http://mate-desktop.com/ http://mate-desktop.com/ Even better, none of those wms will go away just because Apple decided to change things.
- type0 10y ago
  MATE is better than OS X desktop, at least for me.
eropple 10y ago
I tend to agree. My development workstation runs Linux (and it's fine, but on that machine I only need Sublime, a terminal, Chrome, and IntelliJ--anything creative or entertaining I do on my laptop or in Windows respectively) literally only because I'm not buying a Mac Pro. It works, sort of, after spending a nontrivial time figuring out kludging together decent replacements for common functionality (xsel garbage for pbcopy/pbpaste, etc.); it probably helps that I already install the GNU coreutils on my Macs because I know the GNU tools better. In retrospect, a Mac Pro would probably not be that much more expensive than the time I spent getting this fairly minimally demanding environment set up, though on the other hand I did re-learn a decent bit of stuff about Linux in the process. On the gripping hand, things related to X aren't particularly important to my life, so that's kind of a push.
Filligree 10y ago
Then I'd encourage you to try KDE. 4, not 5; 5 is still being developed. I don't know what's going on with the Gnome guys, but KDE is flat-out the best desktop manager I've used, and I'm including Windows and OS X in the comparison. It's not without glitches, but the glitches are mostly of the "Google can't be bothered to make Chrome cooperate, and no-one has updated Emacs' DM support in the last ten years" sort.
- kitsunesoba 10y ago
  As a long time Mac user I find KDE hard to enjoy. The UIs of KDE apps are almost universally overpacked, messy, or lopsided (one side of the window had its controls crammed while the other has awkward white space). It might sound like a silly gripe but it really bothers me. The design of apps from GTK+ desktop environments (GNOME, Cinnamon, Pantheon) generally feel much better, but they have their own problems.
wtbob 10y ago
I agree that GNOME and Unity have jumped the shark — I think that I started to notice when GNOME got rid of xscreensaver and replaced it with a screen-blanker, with an unfulfilled promise of adding screensavers back someday, c.f. https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-March/msg00340.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-March/...). Meanwhile everything went down the path of compositing and otherwise burning way too much CPU to do not a whole lot extra. I switched over to a tiling WM years ago, and have been extremely happy since. It does exactly what I want; I can connect to a running instance with my editor and reconfigure it, as well rewrite it while it's running. It's pretty great.

fnord123 10y ago

You can hear the opposite from me then. I have an OS X laptop and a desktop running Gnome (Fedora) and I find Gnome far better. Originally, I didn't like Gnome 3, but after I used it a lot, I got used to it; I added some extensions, and now I prefer it. In my opinion: * Finder is garbage (alt tab is broken and non configurable. I can't figure out how to convince it that the built in display is always the primary display. It seems to struggle with nfs mounts which Gnome doesn't at all. I've had just as many, or more issues with OS X and projectors as I have with Gnome). Where is the centralised location for Finder extensions to tweak it to my preferences? * The default command line tools that come with OS X are old and basic (reminds me of Sun's tools) and have a death of a thousand paper cuts (e.g. top defaults to sorting by pid, lol; they still ship bash 3.5.57, locales are all fucked up). * brew, compared to dnf or apt, is not good. But that's Open Source people trying to shore up OS X deficiencies so I won't call it "garbage". (F)OSS people put in a lot of effort to keep it running and they deserve praise. * The programs from Apple are all terrible. I literally don't use any except Safari sometimes since it allegedly doesn't use as much battery as Chrome or Firefox. I guess I sometimes copy paste stuff into Textedit and I sometimes use Calculator. It's all certainly usable but there is no consensus that OS X is the best. YMMV. My feeling is that each time there is an OS X release, it jumps ahead of Gnome; but Gnome usually trundles along and surpasses it and maintains a lead most of the time.

Razengan 10y ago
> Finder is garbage Try PathFinder: http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/ http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/ It can be used for free until you decide to buy it. > alt tab is broken and non configurable Cmd+Tab? What exactly do you find annoying? Try Missing Control (F3, or set a mouse hot corner in System Preferences -> Mission Control) to quickly see all windows (for all process, or Ctrl+F3 for current app, Cmd+F3 for desktop) and just raise the one you want. Also try TinkerTool: https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html > brew, compared to dnf or apt, is not good. Try nix: https://nixos.org/nix/ https://nixos.org/nix/ > The programs from Apple are all terrible. Which ones, and how, exactly?
- fnord123 10y ago

vetinari 10y ago

I've got other experience: - random failures to mount network shares, - drag-and-droping files between Finder windows suddenly stops working, - the file rename edit widget appearing in random part of the screen that are bugs, that should not appear in the supposedly best desktop OS.

radicalbyte 10y ago
I can recommend using Forklift. It has its own share of bugs, but you don't get the freezing and general crappy experience of Finder when accessing network shared :)

wtbob 10y ago

> Now after months of using Ubuntu (unity, xfce) and Mint (Cinnamon) I'm convinced that OsX is best for average (and power) desktop user by a huge margin. I recently set up Ubuntu and Mint computers for some folks, and can report that Mint is not bad, but Ubuntu is dreck (seriously, the change-user-password dialogue hangs: do Ubuntu users never change their passwords‽). I've been running Debian with stumpwm for years now, and am convinced that this is the way of the future: a tiling window manager, extensible in a real language, capable of performing literally any task I ask of it. Most of the time, my main window is full-screen — that's odd to someone used to a classic desktop interface (as I used to be), but it's actually very much like a modern tablet or phone.