6 ms·

I used Linux on the desktop for years, until I switched to a Mac. It's not really the OS itself that would stop me going back, it's the quality of the applicati

by Veen 10y ago

I used Linux on the desktop for years, until I switched to a Mac. It's not really the OS itself that would stop me going back, it's the quality of the applications and the user experience. There's nothing I can do on a Mac that I can't do on Linux – except Apple ecosystem stuff like handoff – but it's generally more pleasant and polished with less faff, which has become more important to me as I've aged.

kristofferR 10y ago
Yes, so much this. The OS X app ecosystem is actually really good (from the user's experience at least). On Windows and Linux it seems to be sufficient to develop applications that functions correctly, but on OS X it's also essential to make them look and feel good.
- Springtime 10y ago
  When I last checked years ago Apple's human interface guidelines were excellent and described in minute detail elements, sizes, and layout principles that help with an application's design. I referred to them when looking at visually balancing preference menus for something completely unrelated and the advice stayed with me. Maintaining a design consistency across a platform helps greatly.
megalomanu 10y ago
I believed the same thing until I try a tiling manager on Linux (i3). And today, Mac and Windows annoying. I have the feeling to lose my time each time I perform a simple task. I also dream of a mobile OS as smooth and fast as i3. Android is anti-productive for me, and, as strange as this may sound, the mobile OS ergonomically closest to my i3 experience is Windows Phone.
- kevincox 10y ago
  It isn't even just tiling managers. As a user of a "traditional" floating window manager I find the Mac window manager painfully inadequate. There are some programs that will help but they don't make it nearly as pleasant to use as KDE, GNOME or any other DE I have tried on linux.
  - stonith 10y ago
    I made myself a set of shortcuts using Hammerspoon so that I could push windows to each of the 4 screen corners as 1/4 width, push to left half or right half of screen, or make full screen. This is really enough of the tiling WM experience (I had come from Xmonad) for the majority of situations.
    - dhruvkar 10y ago
      Check out spectacle[0] for the same functionality. It can run in the background, so gives you a set of customizable shortcuts to move winds (e.g. half screen right, left, top, bottom among many others) while being purely invisible. 0: https://www.spectacleapp.com https://www.spectacleapp.com
  - pfranz 10y ago
    I guess I don't use OSX the same way, but in Windows I really miss Alt-Win to move and resize windows that I use in Linux quite a bit. I tried plugins for Windows, but they just don't work reliably.
rtpg 10y ago
I went through a similar experience. The fact that I no longer have to dual-boot with windows to run some stuff is good, but the big thing is the amount of UI polish I get with Mac apps compared to linux equivalents. I bet there's an untapped market for Linux releases for a lot of mac tools
misja111 10y ago
I switched to Mac as well but it's not the applications that keep me from going back, it is the wifi and printer support. This is just so much better on a Mac than on Linux.
- nickysielicki 10y ago
  I hear this a lot, and I really don't understand it. # apt-get install network-manager network-manager-applet # systemctl enable network-manager # systemctl start network-manager $ # put "nm-applet &" into your ~/.xsession And now you're done. I think most people would find Network-Manager's applet easier to use than if they had to configure a network in Windows 10.
  - misja111 10y ago
    It's not the UI, the problem is that driver support for Linux is not as good as for OSX. OSX connects to wireless networks much faster, and also occasionally Linux won't connect to a network at all while OSX does. This might not be a problem when you just use your computer at home but if you are a consultant and you're at the customer's office, you just don't want to run into those connection problems which Linux occasionally gives.
    - cesnja 10y ago
      I can give you a counter anecdote. At my university, I have the most stable wireless connection (eduroam) among my peers, using NetworkManager and a recent kernel. You just have to find a reasonably supported device - Thinkpad laptops, for example.
    - erlehmann_ 10y ago
      > It's not the UI, the problem is that driver support for Linux is not as good as for OSX. Driver support for new hardware platforms or one where the hardware producer does not help enough might not be that good: I think Intel's Skylake platform might serve as a good example – an older Linux kernel had a bug where laptops would crash when the lid was closed; now that Skylake is older the bug has been fixed. That being said, Linux has drivers for many more stuff out of the box than every other operating system. Of course, for the perfect out of the box experience, you have to choose matching hardware – same as with OS X actually.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
erlehmann_ 10y ago
There is a lot you cannot do on a Mac, but that you can do on Linux. The point is that you do not see it until you have seen it elsewhere. How do you change the GUI theme on a Mac? How do you update all the software to the newest version? With a lot of GNU/Linux distributions, both is easy. What users do not see, they usually do not miss. E.g. many users of OS X do not realize that some command line tools Apple ships are almost ten years old at this point until they find out that “[[” does not work in Bash on OS X or similar: https://github.com/sclorg/s2i-python-container/issues/104 https://github.com/sclorg/s2i-python-container/issues/104
- harperlee 10y ago
  I know they are example questions, and I get your point, but: > How do you change the GUI theme on a Mac? A lot of people don't really have a strong preference for these things. > How do you update all the software to the newest version? brew upgrade > some command line tools Apple ships are almost ten years old at this point You can brew install the good ones with a oneliner: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69223/how-to-replace-mac-os-x-utilities-with-gnu-core-utilities http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69223/how-to-replac... But my overall point: I'm like your parent. I used to be a linux user, but I switched to a macbook 12 a little longer than a year ago and the pros far outweight the cons. And a lot of developers feel this way. You also get longer battery. And you can always spin up a vm for linux requirements. I have tried a lot to use only linux. I was able to drop Windows completely (as I don't play videogames). But at least for the moment, macos is just much better for a lot of people.
  - sjellis 10y ago
    Homebrew is a killer app for MacOS right now. I could switch back to Linux on the desktop (and spent quite a bit time investigating the possibility), but it could actually be harder to keep my Open Source tools up to date. Linuxbrew exists, but Homebrew is a proven and well-supported system. The other key third-party app for me, oddly, turned out to be the Microsoft RDP client. I'm paid to manage servers, and unfortunately, some of those are Windows, so I need a totally reliable RDP client. I also don't care about GUI theming, but I do care about readability, and MacOS on a machine with a Retina display delivers totally crisp font rendering. Linux is now constantly getting better, but I don't think that it could match MacOS yet, even on a machine with an equivalent display.

by Veen 10y ago

kristofferR 10y ago

Yes, so much this. The OS X app ecosystem is actually really good (from the user's experience at least). On Windows and Linux it seems to be sufficient to develop applications that functions correctly, but on OS X it's also essential to make them look and feel good.

Springtime 10y ago
When I last checked years ago Apple's human interface guidelines were excellent and described in minute detail elements, sizes, and layout principles that help with an application's design. I referred to them when looking at visually balancing preference menus for something completely unrelated and the advice stayed with me. Maintaining a design consistency across a platform helps greatly.

megalomanu 10y ago

I believed the same thing until I try a tiling manager on Linux (i3). And today, Mac and Windows annoying. I have the feeling to lose my time each time I perform a simple task. I also dream of a mobile OS as smooth and fast as i3. Android is anti-productive for me, and, as strange as this may sound, the mobile OS ergonomically closest to my i3 experience is Windows Phone.

kevincox 10y ago
It isn't even just tiling managers. As a user of a "traditional" floating window manager I find the Mac window manager painfully inadequate. There are some programs that will help but they don't make it nearly as pleasant to use as KDE, GNOME or any other DE I have tried on linux.
- stonith 10y ago
  I made myself a set of shortcuts using Hammerspoon so that I could push windows to each of the 4 screen corners as 1/4 width, push to left half or right half of screen, or make full screen. This is really enough of the tiling WM experience (I had come from Xmonad) for the majority of situations.
  - dhruvkar 10y ago
    Check out spectacle[0] for the same functionality. It can run in the background, so gives you a set of customizable shortcuts to move winds (e.g. half screen right, left, top, bottom among many others) while being purely invisible. 0: https://www.spectacleapp.com https://www.spectacleapp.com
- pfranz 10y ago
  I guess I don't use OSX the same way, but in Windows I really miss Alt-Win to move and resize windows that I use in Linux quite a bit. I tried plugins for Windows, but they just don't work reliably.

rtpg 10y ago

I went through a similar experience. The fact that I no longer have to dual-boot with windows to run some stuff is good, but the big thing is the amount of UI polish I get with Mac apps compared to linux equivalents. I bet there's an untapped market for Linux releases for a lot of mac tools

misja111 10y ago

I switched to Mac as well but it's not the applications that keep me from going back, it is the wifi and printer support. This is just so much better on a Mac than on Linux.

nickysielicki 10y ago
I hear this a lot, and I really don't understand it. # apt-get install network-manager network-manager-applet # systemctl enable network-manager # systemctl start network-manager $ # put "nm-applet &" into your ~/.xsession And now you're done. I think most people would find Network-Manager's applet easier to use than if they had to configure a network in Windows 10.
- misja111 10y ago
  It's not the UI, the problem is that driver support for Linux is not as good as for OSX. OSX connects to wireless networks much faster, and also occasionally Linux won't connect to a network at all while OSX does. This might not be a problem when you just use your computer at home but if you are a consultant and you're at the customer's office, you just don't want to run into those connection problems which Linux occasionally gives.
  - cesnja 10y ago
    I can give you a counter anecdote. At my university, I have the most stable wireless connection (eduroam) among my peers, using NetworkManager and a recent kernel. You just have to find a reasonably supported device - Thinkpad laptops, for example.
  - erlehmann_ 10y ago
    > It's not the UI, the problem is that driver support for Linux is not as good as for OSX. Driver support for new hardware platforms or one where the hardware producer does not help enough might not be that good: I think Intel's Skylake platform might serve as a good example – an older Linux kernel had a bug where laptops would crash when the lid was closed; now that Skylake is older the bug has been fixed. That being said, Linux has drivers for many more stuff out of the box than every other operating system. Of course, for the perfect out of the box experience, you have to choose matching hardware – same as with OS X actually.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

erlehmann_ 10y ago

There is a lot you cannot do on a Mac, but that you can do on Linux. The point is that you do not see it until you have seen it elsewhere. How do you change the GUI theme on a Mac? How do you update all the software to the newest version? With a lot of GNU/Linux distributions, both is easy. What users do not see, they usually do not miss. E.g. many users of OS X do not realize that some command line tools Apple ships are almost ten years old at this point until they find out that “[[” does not work in Bash on OS X or similar: https://github.com/sclorg/s2i-python-container/issues/104 https://github.com/sclorg/s2i-python-container/issues/104

harperlee 10y ago
I know they are example questions, and I get your point, but: > How do you change the GUI theme on a Mac? A lot of people don't really have a strong preference for these things. > How do you update all the software to the newest version? brew upgrade > some command line tools Apple ships are almost ten years old at this point You can brew install the good ones with a oneliner: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69223/how-to-replace-mac-os-x-utilities-with-gnu-core-utilities http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69223/how-to-replac... But my overall point: I'm like your parent. I used to be a linux user, but I switched to a macbook 12 a little longer than a year ago and the pros far outweight the cons. And a lot of developers feel this way. You also get longer battery. And you can always spin up a vm for linux requirements. I have tried a lot to use only linux. I was able to drop Windows completely (as I don't play videogames). But at least for the moment, macos is just much better for a lot of people.
- sjellis 10y ago
  Homebrew is a killer app for MacOS right now. I could switch back to Linux on the desktop (and spent quite a bit time investigating the possibility), but it could actually be harder to keep my Open Source tools up to date. Linuxbrew exists, but Homebrew is a proven and well-supported system. The other key third-party app for me, oddly, turned out to be the Microsoft RDP client. I'm paid to manage servers, and unfortunately, some of those are Windows, so I need a totally reliable RDP client. I also don't care about GUI theming, but I do care about readability, and MacOS on a machine with a Retina display delivers totally crisp font rendering. Linux is now constantly getting better, but I don't think that it could match MacOS yet, even on a machine with an equivalent display.