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As a heavy Vim user, this might be my last Apple development machine. I can always remap Caps Lock to Esc, but years of muscle memory > a flashy feature I have

As a heavy Vim user, this might be my last Apple development machine. I can always remap Caps Lock to Esc, but years of muscle memory > a flashy feature I have little use for. There's nothing I'd pay extra for in this new machine: touchbar is a meh, biometric authentication has been around since ~2005, the hardware specs are finally catching up with what everyone else has been shipping for a couple years, the new keyboard is horrible, Siri is the new ubiquitous feature nobody wants, USB C... meh. I wonder if 2017 will finally be the year software developers go back to Linux machines? If only the story for mixed DPI displays was solid, I think it might finally be The Year of Desktop Linux :P.

asadlionpk 10y ago
The upcoming devs never used Linux in the first place. So I highly doubt that. The tools will have to adapt.
- dguaraglia 10y ago
  Sure, but there's an argument for Linux as a development platform: most modern stacks are mostly OS agnostic. Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, Swift, Android development... unless you are doing iOS or Windows development, there's nothing tying you to one or another OS. Even .NET development is going that way.
beamatronic 10y ago
I agree, in all of Microsoft and Apple's recent moves, the big winner is Ubuntu ( at least, for those in my immediate circle, who want an OS that Just Works )
massysett 10y ago
Linux is not bad. But nobody is making decent Linux hardware, and the instant you slap Linux onto a Windows machine, battery life plummets. My days buying Windows machines and struggling to get Linux on them are over. I'd rather buy a Mac and get a Unix I can use without having to install it. Is anyone actually selling a decent preinstalled Linux laptop? If I really wanted to use Linux I would rather buy a Windows laptop and run Linux in a VM.
- beamatronic 10y ago
  How about Ubuntu on an Asus Zenbook? Asus seems to make solid hardware year-over-year without a lot of "surprises"
  - majewsky 10y ago
    I have a 2012 Zenbook UX31A on Arch Linux and I'm very happy with it, especially how it seemingly hasn't aged at all (except that I have to tighten the screws every once in a while). The only thing that might prompt me to replace it someday is the 4 GB of RAM, which is frequently a problem with larger Minecraft modpacks.
- dguaraglia 10y ago
  My last try was Fedora and Mint on last years Dell XPS 13. Battery life was fine (comparable to my MBP) but the experience when plugging in my low-DPI destkop monitor was terrible. Supposedly the new Wayland-based distros provide a better story for that. Other than that Gnome3 finally behaves nicely across the board. Still a lot of inconsistencies between applications (QT-based programs look like crap on Gnome and vice-versa, and TK programs look like crap everywhere) but all in all the experience was way better than in 2011 which was the last year I used Linux as my base OS.
- stemuk 10y ago
  The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is actually among the strongest MacBook competitors. It has a really strong i7 provessor, 512GB SSD and 8 GB of ram. All of this in a light carbon unibody enclosure, and at 1499 (without OS- saves Windows 10 licensing costs) its even pretty cheap for the specs you get.
  - ktsmith 10y ago
    It's only a competitor against the 13" version of the MacBook Pro though.
- OJFord 10y ago
  > the instant you slap Linux onto a Windows machine, > battery life plummets Yep. I ran Arch on my MBA for a while, thought I might have more luck than Windows machines (since it's easier to find people doing the same thing) but driver support is meh. I'm perfectly happy to configure things - it's why I don't really want to be on macOS, and oh boy do I miss i3wm - but as soon as I was looking up recommendations for configuring my CPU fan and power management on obscure blog posts, I gave up on it. I think there's definitely a market for a Linux developer laptop that's a single awesome machine, that then makes a great single target for the kind of app support seen on macOS.
deleted 10y ago
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jerf 10y ago
"I can always remap Caps Lock to Esc, but years of muscle memory > a flashy feature I have little use for." For what it's worth, as a perennial keyboard layout fiddler, in my experience you should expect it take about 5 minutes to adjust the first day, then about 3 the next, then about 1 the next, then you'll have an equally hard (or easy, if you prefer) time going back if you need to. Moving one key is very easy, as long as you make sure that the original key doesn't work somehow. "The original key physically doesn't exist anymore" definitely meets that criterion. (I theorize one could learn a new layout without having to drop one's productivity to the floor by switching all at once by switching one key at a time, about one per day, until you've entirely switched. I've never tried to learn it as I'm happy with my layout and nobody else has wanted to try it yet.) Also, mixed DPI on Linux is at least getting better. I ended up with a 4K 15" screen, and I'm using XMonad with a whatever-I-feel-like mix of Gnome and KDE apps, which is probably just about the worst case you can get, and it was not anywhere near as bad as I had feared. It is certainly not perfect, don't get me wrong, but it's not disastrous.
appleiigs 10y ago
Esc is used heavily in Excel too. I use Excel all day at work, then Vim at night for my hobby.
chadcmulligan 10y ago
> As a heavy Vim user, As productive as Vim is for some, I think there'd be very few people in Apple asking the question "How can we make Vim more productive", there probably hasn't been for the last 20 years
deleted 10y ago
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asadlionpk 10y ago

The upcoming devs never used Linux in the first place. So I highly doubt that. The tools will have to adapt.

dguaraglia 10y ago
Sure, but there's an argument for Linux as a development platform: most modern stacks are mostly OS agnostic. Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, Swift, Android development... unless you are doing iOS or Windows development, there's nothing tying you to one or another OS. Even .NET development is going that way.

beamatronic 10y ago

I agree, in all of Microsoft and Apple's recent moves, the big winner is Ubuntu ( at least, for those in my immediate circle, who want an OS that Just Works )

massysett 10y ago

Linux is not bad. But nobody is making decent Linux hardware, and the instant you slap Linux onto a Windows machine, battery life plummets. My days buying Windows machines and struggling to get Linux on them are over. I'd rather buy a Mac and get a Unix I can use without having to install it. Is anyone actually selling a decent preinstalled Linux laptop? If I really wanted to use Linux I would rather buy a Windows laptop and run Linux in a VM.

beamatronic 10y ago
How about Ubuntu on an Asus Zenbook? Asus seems to make solid hardware year-over-year without a lot of "surprises"
- majewsky 10y ago
  I have a 2012 Zenbook UX31A on Arch Linux and I'm very happy with it, especially how it seemingly hasn't aged at all (except that I have to tighten the screws every once in a while). The only thing that might prompt me to replace it someday is the 4 GB of RAM, which is frequently a problem with larger Minecraft modpacks.
dguaraglia 10y ago
My last try was Fedora and Mint on last years Dell XPS 13. Battery life was fine (comparable to my MBP) but the experience when plugging in my low-DPI destkop monitor was terrible. Supposedly the new Wayland-based distros provide a better story for that. Other than that Gnome3 finally behaves nicely across the board. Still a lot of inconsistencies between applications (QT-based programs look like crap on Gnome and vice-versa, and TK programs look like crap everywhere) but all in all the experience was way better than in 2011 which was the last year I used Linux as my base OS.
stemuk 10y ago
The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is actually among the strongest MacBook competitors. It has a really strong i7 provessor, 512GB SSD and 8 GB of ram. All of this in a light carbon unibody enclosure, and at 1499 (without OS- saves Windows 10 licensing costs) its even pretty cheap for the specs you get.
- ktsmith 10y ago
  It's only a competitor against the 13" version of the MacBook Pro though.
OJFord 10y ago
> the instant you slap Linux onto a Windows machine, > battery life plummets Yep. I ran Arch on my MBA for a while, thought I might have more luck than Windows machines (since it's easier to find people doing the same thing) but driver support is meh. I'm perfectly happy to configure things - it's why I don't really want to be on macOS, and oh boy do I miss i3wm - but as soon as I was looking up recommendations for configuring my CPU fan and power management on obscure blog posts, I gave up on it. I think there's definitely a market for a Linux developer laptop that's a single awesome machine, that then makes a great single target for the kind of app support seen on macOS.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jerf 10y ago

"I can always remap Caps Lock to Esc, but years of muscle memory > a flashy feature I have little use for." For what it's worth, as a perennial keyboard layout fiddler, in my experience you should expect it take about 5 minutes to adjust the first day, then about 3 the next, then about 1 the next, then you'll have an equally hard (or easy, if you prefer) time going back if you need to. Moving one key is very easy, as long as you make sure that the original key doesn't work somehow. "The original key physically doesn't exist anymore" definitely meets that criterion. (I theorize one could learn a new layout without having to drop one's productivity to the floor by switching all at once by switching one key at a time, about one per day, until you've entirely switched. I've never tried to learn it as I'm happy with my layout and nobody else has wanted to try it yet.) Also, mixed DPI on Linux is at least getting better. I ended up with a 4K 15" screen, and I'm using XMonad with a whatever-I-feel-like mix of Gnome and KDE apps, which is probably just about the worst case you can get, and it was not anywhere near as bad as I had feared. It is certainly not perfect, don't get me wrong, but it's not disastrous.

appleiigs 10y ago

Esc is used heavily in Excel too. I use Excel all day at work, then Vim at night for my hobby.

chadcmulligan 10y ago

> As a heavy Vim user, As productive as Vim is for some, I think there'd be very few people in Apple asking the question "How can we make Vim more productive", there probably hasn't been for the last 20 years

deleted 10y ago

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