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I use linux exclusively so I am a bit biased. I have used Mac in the past, but I just don't see the value when all I ever need is a web browser and a terminal a

I use linux exclusively so I am a bit biased. I have used Mac in the past, but I just don't see the value when all I ever need is a web browser and a terminal and I'm set. There's no question that their hardware is the best though. My question is, what's stopping a company like Canonical from polishing Ubuntu to be on par with MacOS in looks and ease of use then designing the "perfect" developer laptop? Seems like they should have done this years ago.

Russell91 10y ago
Their hardware is not the best anymore. Just visited the Palo Alto Apple store and I'm pretty sure a Microsoft Surface Tablet has a better keyboard than the new MacBook Pro. They really smushed down the keyboard to make the whole configuration thinner, but whereas the old Pro's were halfway between the quality of a dome keyboard and a mechanical keyboard IMO, the new ones are even worse than domes.
- seiferteric 10y ago
  Another crazy dream I have for a real developer laptop would be to have like a port with real gpio pins. Since parallel ports went the way of the dodo, there is no simple way to interface with home built electronics anymore. I got a raspberry pi 3 recently and have been having a lot of fun with it. Also a built in fpga would be cool. You would be able to do a lot of prototyping that way, basically make computers fun again instead of a locked down albeit polished appliance.
- erokar 10y ago
  I certainly didn't like the shallow keyboard on the Macbook. I don't even particularly like the keyboard on the Macbook Air I'm typing this on because of the short key travel. But I'm curious as to whether I could get used to the new butterly keyboards. Also, would be interesting what an ergonimcs expert would have to say about them.
noir_lord 10y ago
I don't think that Canonical necessarily needs to design the perfect developer laptop (hardware is hard, expensive and time consuming) rather they could do a deal with one of the current top tier non-apple manufacturers (Dell, Thinkpads or maybe Asus) and then provide complete support for that machine with a complete focus on the out the box polish. I'm running Xubuntu on an old(ish) Vostro 3750 and with the exception of it's somewhat mediocre touchpad (Alps sucks) literally everything works exactly as you'd expect but that wasn't the case when this was a new machine (certain bits where flaky but got fixed over the following year), if they could provide the experience I have now on a 3 year old machine on a brand new machine with top of the line hardware then they'd be onto a bit of a winner, it would certainly top any list I'd look at for a while since my primary requirement for any hardware is does this work properly on Linux already.
- strikerj 10y ago
  Heard of Dell XPS developer edition?
  - swozey 10y ago
    The recent Dell XPS Dev laptops have been plagued with bugs/poor user experience. I'm not sure that's the go to anymore.
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    Absolutely I have but a) people I know with them have still had silly issues b) they came at it from the wrong end, Dell decided to adopt Ubuntu and did some minimal work with Canonical. IMO Canonical needs to commit to a partnership with a vendor to produce a machine they can fully focus and support on, that way you get a product you know will just work and can be polished to a high degree.
XaYdEk 10y ago
What's stopping Canonical ? 1) Their goals. They are trying to get Ubuntu more widely adopted, not to polish it, at least, not yet. 2) Orders of magnitude, risk involved and business model. Apple is like what ? 100,000 employees and 50 billion in revenue. And Canonical is something like 1000 employees and 50 million in revenue ?
swozey 10y ago
The thing separating OSX from Linux nowadays is application quality and ubiquity. I spend 90% of my time in *nix. But unfortunately there are a huge number of fantastic applications that are only developed with OSX (and sometimes Windows) in mind. Linux is the "here's source code, good luck, also the UI was put together in QT in 20 minutes." Now, this is totally the fault of developers and not Apple. Maybe Linux needs some sort of all encompassing app store to incentivize development. The app ecosystem is just light years beyond anything that Linux offers. Yeah, I can spin up a kubernetes environment pretty quickly from the command line using minikube or a few alternatives, but on OSX I can use Kubesolo which ties into Corectl and lets me control systems from the task tray. Not to mention when I'm going to get new employees to hop on board if they're using OSX it's stupid simple as opposed to fighting various Linux configurations/security/etc. 1password has to be run inside of Wine which means the Chrome plugin can't connect to the application so you have to copy paste usernames/passwords into websites which all but defeats the purpose of it. Yeah, you can use keepass, but that's like trading in your 2016 VW for a 1994. Then a ton of tiny $2-10 apps that just make my life and job more productive. Popclip is my must have, it's tiny, you wouldn't ever think about using it if you weren't introduced to it, but once you know about it you wonder why it's not on ever system. Yoink is incredibly useful, it's a bucket where you drag files to input them into other applications. Yeah, that's not difficult, you can cp or move stuff around but once you get used to using it you want it around. There are Linux alternatives to just about everything but they're nearly always disjointed and nowhere near the quality of the OSX version. And if I look up software I can almost always KNOW that there's an OSX version available (sans games). The problem is that Linux, in the laptop/desktop world is still a last effort (if any effort) citizen. And that is hugely unfortunate.
- pritambaral 10y ago
  Sidenote: I honestly think the very necessity of Yoink is a design flaw. Doesn't drags onto the icon of a full screen window switch to that window? That is an ages old design pattern, ever since the birth of drag-and-drop, and breaking that doesn't seem to be of any profit.
  - swozey 10y ago
SiVal 10y ago
I think Google should do it. If you have thousands of CS PhDs on staff looking for something to do and Apple-scale financial power, you ought to be able to design a Linux system (hardware and software) optimized for producers, not consumers. There is something wrong when you go to dev conferences, where Apple never shows its face, and you have a sea of Apple laptops in the crowd, many of them Google employees. Then there are the thousands of Google employees back in the office trying to invent the future with walled garden Apple hardware and operating systems. If you start with an existing Linux system and polish it, instead of starting from scratch, write the drivers and design the hardware to match, and use the needs of your own tens of thousands of in-house producers to guide you, surely you, Google, could come up with something even more attractive to your own developers, artists, producers, inventors than a product built by your competitor that optimizes for thinness, restrictions based on Apple's future plans, and lock-in to Apple stores, products, and services.
- seiferteric 10y ago
  Another candidate would be MS. Apple dumped their legacy OS when it moved to OS X. MS Has already showed interest in linux compatibility with bash for windows, but I wish it would go the other way, linux with their own GUI and a super duper version of WINE (or their own implementation) to support backwards compatibility. I wouldn't even really mind if the gui and the windows compatibility layer would be proprietary, I would probably still end up using it.

Russell91 10y ago

Their hardware is not the best anymore. Just visited the Palo Alto Apple store and I'm pretty sure a Microsoft Surface Tablet has a better keyboard than the new MacBook Pro. They really smushed down the keyboard to make the whole configuration thinner, but whereas the old Pro's were halfway between the quality of a dome keyboard and a mechanical keyboard IMO, the new ones are even worse than domes.

seiferteric 10y ago
Another crazy dream I have for a real developer laptop would be to have like a port with real gpio pins. Since parallel ports went the way of the dodo, there is no simple way to interface with home built electronics anymore. I got a raspberry pi 3 recently and have been having a lot of fun with it. Also a built in fpga would be cool. You would be able to do a lot of prototyping that way, basically make computers fun again instead of a locked down albeit polished appliance.
erokar 10y ago
I certainly didn't like the shallow keyboard on the Macbook. I don't even particularly like the keyboard on the Macbook Air I'm typing this on because of the short key travel. But I'm curious as to whether I could get used to the new butterly keyboards. Also, would be interesting what an ergonimcs expert would have to say about them.

noir_lord 10y ago

I don't think that Canonical necessarily needs to design the perfect developer laptop (hardware is hard, expensive and time consuming) rather they could do a deal with one of the current top tier non-apple manufacturers (Dell, Thinkpads or maybe Asus) and then provide complete support for that machine with a complete focus on the out the box polish. I'm running Xubuntu on an old(ish) Vostro 3750 and with the exception of it's somewhat mediocre touchpad (Alps sucks) literally everything works exactly as you'd expect but that wasn't the case when this was a new machine (certain bits where flaky but got fixed over the following year), if they could provide the experience I have now on a 3 year old machine on a brand new machine with top of the line hardware then they'd be onto a bit of a winner, it would certainly top any list I'd look at for a while since my primary requirement for any hardware is does this work properly on Linux already.

strikerj 10y ago
Heard of Dell XPS developer edition?
- swozey 10y ago
  The recent Dell XPS Dev laptops have been plagued with bugs/poor user experience. I'm not sure that's the go to anymore.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  Absolutely I have but a) people I know with them have still had silly issues b) they came at it from the wrong end, Dell decided to adopt Ubuntu and did some minimal work with Canonical. IMO Canonical needs to commit to a partnership with a vendor to produce a machine they can fully focus and support on, that way you get a product you know will just work and can be polished to a high degree.

XaYdEk 10y ago

What's stopping Canonical ? 1) Their goals. They are trying to get Ubuntu more widely adopted, not to polish it, at least, not yet. 2) Orders of magnitude, risk involved and business model. Apple is like what ? 100,000 employees and 50 billion in revenue. And Canonical is something like 1000 employees and 50 million in revenue ?

swozey 10y ago

The thing separating OSX from Linux nowadays is application quality and ubiquity. I spend 90% of my time in *nix. But unfortunately there are a huge number of fantastic applications that are only developed with OSX (and sometimes Windows) in mind. Linux is the "here's source code, good luck, also the UI was put together in QT in 20 minutes." Now, this is totally the fault of developers and not Apple. Maybe Linux needs some sort of all encompassing app store to incentivize development. The app ecosystem is just light years beyond anything that Linux offers. Yeah, I can spin up a kubernetes environment pretty quickly from the command line using minikube or a few alternatives, but on OSX I can use Kubesolo which ties into Corectl and lets me control systems from the task tray. Not to mention when I'm going to get new employees to hop on board if they're using OSX it's stupid simple as opposed to fighting various Linux configurations/security/etc. 1password has to be run inside of Wine which means the Chrome plugin can't connect to the application so you have to copy paste usernames/passwords into websites which all but defeats the purpose of it. Yeah, you can use keepass, but that's like trading in your 2016 VW for a 1994. Then a ton of tiny $2-10 apps that just make my life and job more productive. Popclip is my must have, it's tiny, you wouldn't ever think about using it if you weren't introduced to it, but once you know about it you wonder why it's not on ever system. Yoink is incredibly useful, it's a bucket where you drag files to input them into other applications. Yeah, that's not difficult, you can cp or move stuff around but once you get used to using it you want it around. There are Linux alternatives to just about everything but they're nearly always disjointed and nowhere near the quality of the OSX version. And if I look up software I can almost always KNOW that there's an OSX version available (sans games). The problem is that Linux, in the laptop/desktop world is still a last effort (if any effort) citizen. And that is hugely unfortunate.

pritambaral 10y ago
Sidenote: I honestly think the very necessity of Yoink is a design flaw. Doesn't drags onto the icon of a full screen window switch to that window? That is an ages old design pattern, ever since the birth of drag-and-drop, and breaking that doesn't seem to be of any profit.
- swozey 10y ago

SiVal 10y ago

I think Google should do it. If you have thousands of CS PhDs on staff looking for something to do and Apple-scale financial power, you ought to be able to design a Linux system (hardware and software) optimized for producers, not consumers. There is something wrong when you go to dev conferences, where Apple never shows its face, and you have a sea of Apple laptops in the crowd, many of them Google employees. Then there are the thousands of Google employees back in the office trying to invent the future with walled garden Apple hardware and operating systems. If you start with an existing Linux system and polish it, instead of starting from scratch, write the drivers and design the hardware to match, and use the needs of your own tens of thousands of in-house producers to guide you, surely you, Google, could come up with something even more attractive to your own developers, artists, producers, inventors than a product built by your competitor that optimizes for thinness, restrictions based on Apple's future plans, and lock-in to Apple stores, products, and services.

seiferteric 10y ago
Another candidate would be MS. Apple dumped their legacy OS when it moved to OS X. MS Has already showed interest in linux compatibility with bash for windows, but I wish it would go the other way, linux with their own GUI and a super duper version of WINE (or their own implementation) to support backwards compatibility. I wouldn't even really mind if the gui and the windows compatibility layer would be proprietary, I would probably still end up using it.