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> Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change. Depending on which

> Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change. Depending on which pro needs We're talking about, I don't believe this is true anymore. I was a Linux user for many years, then an OS X user for over a decade, and earlier this year I'd had enough with being annoyed by OS X & switched back to Linux. I am extremely happy I did. If you want beautiful GUIs or do video/audio/graphics editing then, yes, macOS is still superior. If you are a developer who spends most of your time split between the terminal and the browser, then Linux is not just an acceptable substitute, but can in fact be a superior replacement.

sverige 10y ago
And if you split your time between the terminal and the browser and want what amounts to a built-in IDE, OpenBSD is a great answer.
- wfleming 10y ago
  I like the BSDs, and considered doing that instead of Linux. My company is a heavy Docker user, though: dealing with docker-machine & running Docker via a VM on OS X was one of the final straws that caused me to switch. Given that FreeBSD's Docker support is pretty recent (and was still considered beta when I was deciding to switch), and OpenBSD doesn't have any native support at all as far as I know, I felt that the probability of trading one annoyance for a similar one was too high, so Linux was the right choice for me.
- trungaczne 10y ago
  Can you elaborate on what you mean by "what amounts to a built-in IDE"?
kenOfYugen 10y ago
I can relate. Since I setup a Linux desktop PC running Arch & bspwm, I feel less productive in macOS. The only other desktop UX tool I use is dmenu. It feels like when I first moved from Windows to OS X. Makes sense, since back then OS X felt minimal compared to Windows, and a bare tiling manager over Linux is the ultimate minimalism.
- wfleming 10y ago
  Proper window tiling was one of the annoyances that prompted me to switch! I used dwm at first when I switched back to Linux, but found it still doesn't handle multi-head very well, so now I use XMonad (with dmenu), and have been very content with it.
  - QuantumRoar 10y ago
    Arch Linux + XMonad is the way I run my stuff. I still have a MacBook Air lying around that I use when I'm on the road. The amount of visual clutter, annoying UI animations, the nagging from notifications and alerts surprises me every time. I didn't notice it before I started using my current XMonad setup. So either Apple is making it worse or you just don't see it when you don't have a clean and minimal system as a comparison.
zanny 10y ago
There are professional crews running Linux and using either Krita for art / comic work or Blender for modeling and 3d animation. The only industries really lacking right now are video editing, which I believe Kdenlive is making great inroads on, and professional audio, which is the only major field that Mac Pros can target that is not really having their needs met at all (Ardour can be... something, but its UI is barf and the prerequisites to using it are fairly high). I guess we are also missing professional photo editing to match photoshop (Krita isn't trying to be one, and Gimp is kind of a mess) and 2d animation (in a world of toonboom and flash, synfig is a poor substitute). Freecad is also not a very effective substitute for CAD workstations, but to my knowledge those users have never left Windows for OSX in the first place.
- jdietrich 10y ago
  Frustratingly, the brilliant Davinci Resolve has been half ported to Linux. The backend will run on Linux to allow for rendering clusters, but the UI is Mac and Windows only. Ardour is only half the equation for audio production on Linux, even if it didn't have serious shortcomings. Professional users need an extensive suite of plugins, the vast majority of which are proprietary and have no good Linux alternative. There's no good pitch correction plugins for Linux, no Kontakt compatible sampler, no mastering suite, no restoration and repair suite, no good metering tools.
saurik 10y ago
> If you want beautiful GUIs or do video/audio/graphics editing then, yes, macOS is still superior. Adobe porting their Creative Suite to Linux and maybe even releasing their own branded AdobeOS Linux distribution would seem to be a massive existential threat to Apple and Microsoft both, and would give Adobe a possible "out" to the world they live in right now, where Apple tries to do their best to keep Adobe "in check". Seriously: every single one of these threads ends up in the holding pattern of "we could all be using Linux tomorrow if we had [software which is almost entirely controlled by Adobe and which is already designed by them in a way where the UI seems to be an in-house toolkit and which would be trivial for them to port to Linux]"; that would effectively just leave "office productivity" as the only class of software where Microsoft (and to a lesser but still noticeable extent, Apple) would be able to hold people on their platform (and OMG: a future where the next Adobe CS release was a word processor... that would be brutal).
- paulcole 10y ago
  >Adobe porting their Creative Suite to Linux and maybe even releasing their own branded AdobeOS Linux distribution would seem to be a massive existential threat to Apple and Microsoft both And if my aunty had bollocks she'd be my uncle.
  - saurik 10y ago
    I am going to assume you are trying to say that would never happen, but suddenly going into the operating system market with a Linux distribution is not unprecedented (Google Chrome OS) and doing a simultaneous pivot to take over a related space is not either (Amazon AWS).
- gotofritz 10y ago
  Not a chance in hell Adobe is going to do that. It'd increase their costs and the complexity of releases, and all for a platform with 1.x% share and with a culture of not paying for softare
  - saurik 10y ago
hosh 10y ago
How is Linux now on things like suspend/resume and wireless networking these days? I was using Linux for my primary dev laptop until 2010. Once I realized I could shut the lid and reliably wake it up -- something I have yet to see a Windows or Linux laptop do -- I switched over. (But I still use a Linux VM for the actual dev tools).
- chrisper 10y ago
  A lot has improved in the recent years for Linux on the desktop. If you have very new devices, it is recommended to run the newest kernel. Suspend works fine for me.
- UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
  Let's put it this way: We had someone in to demo a piece of software (webapp) this week which we were considering licensing, they had a Linux laptop (Ubuntu). They weren't able to connect to our corporate wireless and the meeting was delayed almost 40 minutes (ultimately we loaned them an in-house Windows ultrabook to do the demo). I felt embarrassed for them. I've not seen sleep issues on MacOS or Windows for over ten years. You close the lid it sleeps, you open the lid it wakes. Seems reliable.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    Just curious, is that because of VPN?
    - UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
      No nothing I posted about has anything to do with VPN. The user wasn't able to connect to our guest 802.1X (EAP, 802.11n) wireless network using their Ubuntu laptop. MacOS clients and Windows clients have no issue (it is a guest network, non-employees use it often).
      - mos_basik 10y ago
        The only time I've ever had an issue connecting to a network with Linux was with a specific university network, which (forgive me if I mangle this because I'm not very familiar with networking protocols) used WPA2, PEAP and MSCHAPv2 and required a username and password to authenticate. The only tricky step was you needed to indicate to the network manager to use a certificate at /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificate.crt That was a pain to set up, and I switched to their alternative network that permitted whitelisted MAC IDs pretty quickly. Also, I've noticed that recently, when I connect to certain guest networks at office buildings and libraries and so forth, there is a "login" page where you consent to not look at porn or whatever on their connection that you are supposed to be automatically redirected to when you first connect and try to load a page. Sometimes the redirect doesn't work, and you are forbidden from loading pages until you've clicked the button on the page it failed to send you to. Going to 1.1.3.1 or 192.168.1.1 or some variant usually finds it. But for the most part! I have not had any issues with normal "type the password into the WPA network" or "associate with the unsecured network". See my other comment in this chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881305 And in the worst case, I always have my phone with me, rooted with unlimited 4G and a USB cable to tether it with. YMMV.
pjmlp 10y ago
My Pro needs are iOS and OS X development, in no way Linux can solve that.

sverige 10y ago

And if you split your time between the terminal and the browser and want what amounts to a built-in IDE, OpenBSD is a great answer.

wfleming 10y ago
I like the BSDs, and considered doing that instead of Linux. My company is a heavy Docker user, though: dealing with docker-machine & running Docker via a VM on OS X was one of the final straws that caused me to switch. Given that FreeBSD's Docker support is pretty recent (and was still considered beta when I was deciding to switch), and OpenBSD doesn't have any native support at all as far as I know, I felt that the probability of trading one annoyance for a similar one was too high, so Linux was the right choice for me.
trungaczne 10y ago
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "what amounts to a built-in IDE"?

kenOfYugen 10y ago

I can relate. Since I setup a Linux desktop PC running Arch & bspwm, I feel less productive in macOS. The only other desktop UX tool I use is dmenu. It feels like when I first moved from Windows to OS X. Makes sense, since back then OS X felt minimal compared to Windows, and a bare tiling manager over Linux is the ultimate minimalism.

wfleming 10y ago
Proper window tiling was one of the annoyances that prompted me to switch! I used dwm at first when I switched back to Linux, but found it still doesn't handle multi-head very well, so now I use XMonad (with dmenu), and have been very content with it.
- QuantumRoar 10y ago
  Arch Linux + XMonad is the way I run my stuff. I still have a MacBook Air lying around that I use when I'm on the road. The amount of visual clutter, annoying UI animations, the nagging from notifications and alerts surprises me every time. I didn't notice it before I started using my current XMonad setup. So either Apple is making it worse or you just don't see it when you don't have a clean and minimal system as a comparison.

zanny 10y ago

There are professional crews running Linux and using either Krita for art / comic work or Blender for modeling and 3d animation. The only industries really lacking right now are video editing, which I believe Kdenlive is making great inroads on, and professional audio, which is the only major field that Mac Pros can target that is not really having their needs met at all (Ardour can be... something, but its UI is barf and the prerequisites to using it are fairly high). I guess we are also missing professional photo editing to match photoshop (Krita isn't trying to be one, and Gimp is kind of a mess) and 2d animation (in a world of toonboom and flash, synfig is a poor substitute). Freecad is also not a very effective substitute for CAD workstations, but to my knowledge those users have never left Windows for OSX in the first place.

jdietrich 10y ago
Frustratingly, the brilliant Davinci Resolve has been half ported to Linux. The backend will run on Linux to allow for rendering clusters, but the UI is Mac and Windows only. Ardour is only half the equation for audio production on Linux, even if it didn't have serious shortcomings. Professional users need an extensive suite of plugins, the vast majority of which are proprietary and have no good Linux alternative. There's no good pitch correction plugins for Linux, no Kontakt compatible sampler, no mastering suite, no restoration and repair suite, no good metering tools.

saurik 10y ago

> If you want beautiful GUIs or do video/audio/graphics editing then, yes, macOS is still superior. Adobe porting their Creative Suite to Linux and maybe even releasing their own branded AdobeOS Linux distribution would seem to be a massive existential threat to Apple and Microsoft both, and would give Adobe a possible "out" to the world they live in right now, where Apple tries to do their best to keep Adobe "in check". Seriously: every single one of these threads ends up in the holding pattern of "we could all be using Linux tomorrow if we had [software which is almost entirely controlled by Adobe and which is already designed by them in a way where the UI seems to be an in-house toolkit and which would be trivial for them to port to Linux]"; that would effectively just leave "office productivity" as the only class of software where Microsoft (and to a lesser but still noticeable extent, Apple) would be able to hold people on their platform (and OMG: a future where the next Adobe CS release was a word processor... that would be brutal).

paulcole 10y ago
>Adobe porting their Creative Suite to Linux and maybe even releasing their own branded AdobeOS Linux distribution would seem to be a massive existential threat to Apple and Microsoft both And if my aunty had bollocks she'd be my uncle.
- saurik 10y ago
  I am going to assume you are trying to say that would never happen, but suddenly going into the operating system market with a Linux distribution is not unprecedented (Google Chrome OS) and doing a simultaneous pivot to take over a related space is not either (Amazon AWS).
gotofritz 10y ago
Not a chance in hell Adobe is going to do that. It'd increase their costs and the complexity of releases, and all for a platform with 1.x% share and with a culture of not paying for softare
- saurik 10y ago

hosh 10y ago

How is Linux now on things like suspend/resume and wireless networking these days? I was using Linux for my primary dev laptop until 2010. Once I realized I could shut the lid and reliably wake it up -- something I have yet to see a Windows or Linux laptop do -- I switched over. (But I still use a Linux VM for the actual dev tools).

chrisper 10y ago
A lot has improved in the recent years for Linux on the desktop. If you have very new devices, it is recommended to run the newest kernel. Suspend works fine for me.
UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
Let's put it this way: We had someone in to demo a piece of software (webapp) this week which we were considering licensing, they had a Linux laptop (Ubuntu). They weren't able to connect to our corporate wireless and the meeting was delayed almost 40 minutes (ultimately we loaned them an in-house Windows ultrabook to do the demo). I felt embarrassed for them. I've not seen sleep issues on MacOS or Windows for over ten years. You close the lid it sleeps, you open the lid it wakes. Seems reliable.
- witty_username 10y ago
  Just curious, is that because of VPN?
  - UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
    No nothing I posted about has anything to do with VPN. The user wasn't able to connect to our guest 802.1X (EAP, 802.11n) wireless network using their Ubuntu laptop. MacOS clients and Windows clients have no issue (it is a guest network, non-employees use it often).
    - mos_basik 10y ago
      The only time I've ever had an issue connecting to a network with Linux was with a specific university network, which (forgive me if I mangle this because I'm not very familiar with networking protocols) used WPA2, PEAP and MSCHAPv2 and required a username and password to authenticate. The only tricky step was you needed to indicate to the network manager to use a certificate at /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificate.crt That was a pain to set up, and I switched to their alternative network that permitted whitelisted MAC IDs pretty quickly. Also, I've noticed that recently, when I connect to certain guest networks at office buildings and libraries and so forth, there is a "login" page where you consent to not look at porn or whatever on their connection that you are supposed to be automatically redirected to when you first connect and try to load a page. Sometimes the redirect doesn't work, and you are forbidden from loading pages until you've clicked the button on the page it failed to send you to. Going to 1.1.3.1 or 192.168.1.1 or some variant usually finds it. But for the most part! I have not had any issues with normal "type the password into the WPA network" or "associate with the unsecured network". See my other comment in this chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881305 And in the worst case, I always have my phone with me, rooted with unlimited 4G and a USB cable to tether it with. YMMV.

pjmlp 10y ago

My Pro needs are iOS and OS X development, in no way Linux can solve that.