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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." When I switched

"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." When I switched in 2005 I had to convince friends I wasn't crazy. I advocated for the platform. I suffered weird incompatibilities. I dealt with bad updates. I found work arounds for non-multi-platform tools I had to run. But look how stable, how much less restrictive the platform was, I said! And it was! The platform I switched to in 2005 wasn't Linux. It was OS X. In 10 years the world has changed and today if you are in most of the "creative" professions, not using a Mac is the exception. You can today make a lot of arguments against desktop linux, yet for the past several years I've run it exclusively on all my main systems (laptops and desktops, work and home). 10 years ago, plenty of Windows users couldn't imagine a world in which Macs were where they are today. I mean couldn't imagine. The way Mac enthusiasts can't imagine desktop linux today. The parallels aren't exact. They don't need to be. I am neither predicting success or failure. I am simply pointing out that imagination fails and it is a mistake to say "that will probably never change."

tptacek 10y ago
My first Mac was a TiBook, which I bought to install Yellow Dog Linux on. I switched to OSX at 10.1. I worked from 2001-2005 at a decent-sized network software firm in Ann Arbor. Within a year or so of arriving, much of the office had converted to Macs. I don't think having a Mac in '05 made you too much of an outlier --- at least, not if you worked in technology. By 2005, Apple had already started the switch to Intel! This would be nitpicking, except that the timeline matters here. It's not a 10 year gap, just by your own numbers. But it's not 12 years, either. It's more like 16. Let's also remember that Linux has been an unreasonable mass-market desktop choice for a lot longer than 16 years. "The year of Linux on the desktop" is a nerd joke for a reason.
- Adaptive 10y ago
  In 05 I was based in Asia. Macs were edge cases. From 99-03 I ran online ops for a large ad agency network in Asia. PCs were by far the norm outside of the video departments. By 07 I worked in the states for a mac software firm, so I was definitely no outlier by then.
bitwize 10y ago
Virtually all of the rendering heavy lifting and many of the desktops in the world of cinematic VFX are Linux. Have been for years. Even Pixar has a Linux desktop fleet.
- gaius 10y ago
  That is subtly incorrect - what they are is "cheap generic x86" (or x64 now), that's why all those SGIs and Suns were dumped, the price/performance of the hardware. Linux just happened to be the x86 Unix around at the time. It could just have easily been FreeBSD or (if Sun weren't so short-sighted) Solaris x86. Would anyone have ditched IRIX to run Linux on their MIPS kit? Of course not because it was never about the OS in this space, it was about FLOPS/$.
  - redial 10y ago
    Right place at the right time. That's half the battle.
  - dozzie 10y ago
    > It could just have easily been FreeBSD or (if Sun weren't so short-sighted) Solaris x86. What exactly did Sun do wrong with their x86 and x86_64 versions of Solaris that you call "so short-sighted"?
    - gaius 10y ago
      They were afraid that x86 hardware would eclipse SPARC hardware, so development of Solaris x86 lagged behind "real" Solaris, and the HCL was always very small. They wanted to sell you expensive hardware, not a software license. What actually happened was that x86 hardware eclipsed SPARC hardware... And organisations that would have been happy to refresh the hardware and keep the same OS and just recompile their apps found that they couldn't, so they jumped to Linux instead... And the rest, along with Sun itself, is history. I was working for a big Sun customer during this transition, we begged them to make Solaris x86 a first-class citizen, and we had a lot of support within Sun too but the SPARC Mafia won the day and with regret, our next big order was (IIRC) with Dell and SUSE...
erokar 10y ago
I installed Ubuntu on my Macbook Air a couple of days ago. After making some adjustments for the hardware everything works. It's faster and smoother than current MacOS. It also looks better (after slight GUI tweaking). Granted, with Linux you will often have to do a bit of setup initially, but after that you don't need to touch the innards of the OS again if you don't want to. I don't think MacOS is a superior OS compared to Linux anymore. However, MacOS does have an ecosystem of some very good apps that do not have their equivalence in Linux. Hopefully that too will change.
- Adaptive 10y ago
  Out of three daily desktop drivers, one is an XPS 13, one an old repurposed T3500 xeon, and one a Mac Pro 2011 tower. Arch runs faster and smoother on that Mac Pro than OS X. I only really miss Adobe, but I was a heavy user of it. VMs/Wine aren't the same.
- plg 10y ago
  what about close-lid-to-sleep? what about battery usage? what about heat?
bigpeopleareold 10y ago
I copied that exact phrase to create a comment around the fact that the phrase is utter nonsense. It's a not a black-and-white situation. I switched back and forth between OS X and Ubuntu, mainly when changing jobs (I was always saying 'ooo, I can get a Mac' at the new job.) But this has stopped for me. I do not like dealing with the subtle issues with Mac OS X anymore. I'd rather deal with the blunt oddities I see in Ubuntu if it means I get a consistent environment through the years (which it has been after they switched to Unity as a default.) My much more powerful Macbook Pro provided to me from my job sits and collects dust as I use something that I actually feel more productive in. By the way, I am a software engineer. People use software to reach their goals and if they choose Mac, Windows, Linux or BSD or whatever, God bless them.
greenhatman 10y ago
I've been using Linux exclusively for three years now, and I don't see that changing, probably ever. I'm way more productive on my Linux Mint Cinnamon setup than I am on anything else. And I can make it look beautiful with 5 minutes of tweaking. I keep an OS X partition on my MacBook Pro, just for the off chance that I might want to do iOS development at some point.

tptacek 10y ago

My first Mac was a TiBook, which I bought to install Yellow Dog Linux on. I switched to OSX at 10.1. I worked from 2001-2005 at a decent-sized network software firm in Ann Arbor. Within a year or so of arriving, much of the office had converted to Macs. I don't think having a Mac in '05 made you too much of an outlier --- at least, not if you worked in technology. By 2005, Apple had already started the switch to Intel! This would be nitpicking, except that the timeline matters here. It's not a 10 year gap, just by your own numbers. But it's not 12 years, either. It's more like 16. Let's also remember that Linux has been an unreasonable mass-market desktop choice for a lot longer than 16 years. "The year of Linux on the desktop" is a nerd joke for a reason.

Adaptive 10y ago
In 05 I was based in Asia. Macs were edge cases. From 99-03 I ran online ops for a large ad agency network in Asia. PCs were by far the norm outside of the video departments. By 07 I worked in the states for a mac software firm, so I was definitely no outlier by then.

bitwize 10y ago

Virtually all of the rendering heavy lifting and many of the desktops in the world of cinematic VFX are Linux. Have been for years. Even Pixar has a Linux desktop fleet.

gaius 10y ago
That is subtly incorrect - what they are is "cheap generic x86" (or x64 now), that's why all those SGIs and Suns were dumped, the price/performance of the hardware. Linux just happened to be the x86 Unix around at the time. It could just have easily been FreeBSD or (if Sun weren't so short-sighted) Solaris x86. Would anyone have ditched IRIX to run Linux on their MIPS kit? Of course not because it was never about the OS in this space, it was about FLOPS/$.
- redial 10y ago
  Right place at the right time. That's half the battle.
- dozzie 10y ago
  > It could just have easily been FreeBSD or (if Sun weren't so short-sighted) Solaris x86. What exactly did Sun do wrong with their x86 and x86_64 versions of Solaris that you call "so short-sighted"?
  - gaius 10y ago
    They were afraid that x86 hardware would eclipse SPARC hardware, so development of Solaris x86 lagged behind "real" Solaris, and the HCL was always very small. They wanted to sell you expensive hardware, not a software license. What actually happened was that x86 hardware eclipsed SPARC hardware... And organisations that would have been happy to refresh the hardware and keep the same OS and just recompile their apps found that they couldn't, so they jumped to Linux instead... And the rest, along with Sun itself, is history. I was working for a big Sun customer during this transition, we begged them to make Solaris x86 a first-class citizen, and we had a lot of support within Sun too but the SPARC Mafia won the day and with regret, our next big order was (IIRC) with Dell and SUSE...

erokar 10y ago

I installed Ubuntu on my Macbook Air a couple of days ago. After making some adjustments for the hardware everything works. It's faster and smoother than current MacOS. It also looks better (after slight GUI tweaking). Granted, with Linux you will often have to do a bit of setup initially, but after that you don't need to touch the innards of the OS again if you don't want to. I don't think MacOS is a superior OS compared to Linux anymore. However, MacOS does have an ecosystem of some very good apps that do not have their equivalence in Linux. Hopefully that too will change.

Adaptive 10y ago
Out of three daily desktop drivers, one is an XPS 13, one an old repurposed T3500 xeon, and one a Mac Pro 2011 tower. Arch runs faster and smoother on that Mac Pro than OS X. I only really miss Adobe, but I was a heavy user of it. VMs/Wine aren't the same.
plg 10y ago
what about close-lid-to-sleep? what about battery usage? what about heat?

bigpeopleareold 10y ago

I copied that exact phrase to create a comment around the fact that the phrase is utter nonsense. It's a not a black-and-white situation. I switched back and forth between OS X and Ubuntu, mainly when changing jobs (I was always saying 'ooo, I can get a Mac' at the new job.) But this has stopped for me. I do not like dealing with the subtle issues with Mac OS X anymore. I'd rather deal with the blunt oddities I see in Ubuntu if it means I get a consistent environment through the years (which it has been after they switched to Unity as a default.) My much more powerful Macbook Pro provided to me from my job sits and collects dust as I use something that I actually feel more productive in. By the way, I am a software engineer. People use software to reach their goals and if they choose Mac, Windows, Linux or BSD or whatever, God bless them.

greenhatman 10y ago

I've been using Linux exclusively for three years now, and I don't see that changing, probably ever. I'm way more productive on my Linux Mint Cinnamon setup than I am on anything else. And I can make it look beautiful with 5 minutes of tweaking. I keep an OS X partition on my MacBook Pro, just for the off chance that I might want to do iOS development at some point.