22 ms·

From OS X to Ubuntu

544 points by bpierre 10y ago

steve371 10y ago
I agree it can be a bit work to get ur ubuntu laptop works perfect. But just a simple wireless driver install with ubuntu 14.04 lts gives me the perfect experience. While my win10 connection constantly droppes.
anthk 10y ago
>I didn't debate this for days, I installed the latest available Ubuntu right away as it was the distribution Man, stick to 16.04, add PlayDEB and the official MESA releases. If you want something recent based on GNU/Linux, desktop oriented, and fast, get SolusOS.
- robert_foss 10y ago
  Why stick with 16.04?
  - nishs 10y ago
    Not OP, probably because it an LTS release.
    - viraptor 10y ago
      While LTS has benefits, there are reasons to running the latest version you can get. Especially with new hardware, there are going to be updates to the relevant drivers which can improve the battery life a lot. Over the first year after I bought the older X1, my battery life got an extra hour or so because of i915 module improvements. (I was following latest arch kernels)
    - slitaz 10y ago
      The LTS releases get a kernel upgrade and graphics libraries every six months or so. So, you get newer hardware support even if you stay at 16.04. There is a new such update for 16.04 at the end of this month. It is the 16.04.02 update.
leastangle 10y ago
Waiting for the new X1 Carbon to be available in order to replace my MBP...
partycoder 10y ago
Elementary OS is very similar to Mac OS in terms of UI. Of course the project is rather new, but is very promising. The desktop environment (Pantheon) is installable in Ubuntu, though. Once in a while you might end up with a messed up situation that might require some effort to fix.
- willismichael 10y ago
  How well does it work to install Pantheon on Ubuntu? I'm curious to try it on a home computer that has other users without impacting them, is there a simple way to make it launch Pantheon when I sign in, but still use Unity for other user accounts on the machine? Ages ago I remember using a login client that allowed you to pick which desktop environment you wanted to use, but I'm not sure how to do it on Ubuntu... I guess I could google around for whatever command-line-and-text-editor-fu is required.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
    Lightdm/gdm (the service that provides the login screen) generally provides a way to choose an alternate session to start on login and then remember it on a per-user basis.
    - guitarbill 10y ago
      The way this works on Ubuntu is there's a small icon (circle-like) next to the user name, click this and if you have other desktop environments installed, you can select it. It's a great way to try out new ones. I tried Ubuntu + Cinnamon before making the jump to Mint.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
        I've pretty much given up on Linux desktop environments in favor of tiling window managers. First I tried XMonad and then, when I had an issue with my monitor layout that was causing XMonad to crash (X reporting my monitor size as 0x0 for some reason). I jumped to StumpWM and have been using it ever since (it had the same problem, but I found it much easier to locate and fix the bug in a Common Lisp program than in a Haskell program: especially because I could connect to the running window manager with Slime in emacs, catch the error, and then fiddle around in the REPL for a while to find the X calls that could actually return the right monitor size).
baldfat 10y ago
Linux is all about customized computer. Personally I love tiled window managers (i3) and urvxt for a terminal and I prefer my gui programs to be mostly KDE. I am the only person in the world like this. Welcome to your way (As long as you don't mind working for it)
- Koshkin 10y ago
  > Linux is all about customized computer. While true for many Linux fans, the majority of regular Linux users, especially those in the enterprise arena, do not customize anything and simply use it the way it is installed/configured by default - pretty much as they would were they using Windows or MacOS.
  - criddell 10y ago
    These days I advise people to pick the most popular distro and leave everything as close to the default settings as possible. I used to enjoy endless customizing (Enlightenment) but that ended up taking the place of actually doing work. These days I leave everything set to default and install as little software as I possibly can.
- slitaz 10y ago
  I used to do just that. But the installation ended carrying many skeletons and cruft. Now I reinstall Ubuntu LTS every two years and clean up my desktop. If there is a worthy configuration, I carry it over to the new installation.
ekianjo 10y ago
> For things like cropping & scaling images, The Gimp does an okay job. Strange, Darktable can do that too, very well and easier than on Gimp.
hhandoko 10y ago
> If you know f.lux, RedShift is an alternative to it for Linux. Good to know there's an alternative, but to clarify: f.lux is available on Linux as well (the statement makes it as if it weren't, just not open-source).
- saghm 10y ago
  I think due to the closed-source nature of f.lux, RedShift is in the main repos for more distros than f.lux, making it easier for new Linux users to install.
  - hhandoko 10y ago
    That's a good point, thanks. I was looking at it as an Ubuntu user :)
ekianjo 10y ago
> So, is Linux ready for the desktop? > For me, the answer is yes. Honestly it's been ready for years on the desktop (of course, this does not apply if you are an expert user in Y software only available on Z platform and need to use it for your job/company, etc...). Ubuntu 16.04 did not bring anything significant on the table, it's just that most people have not noticed. I switched full Linux back in 2009~2010 and I have never looked back since.
- antouank 10y ago
  I agree that desktop on linux is ready, with the main trade-off being: you have to spend more time setting things up, but you can customise your software/hardware to any level you want. ( and just like Y software, there's X hardware that might not work with linux. those damn printers... ) Btw, I also started with Ubuntu but I'm finding Arch a much better and up to date distro.
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    Arch is definitely the way most Linux users go once they get in a comfort zone with their existing distro (Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc...) and want to get something with better hardware support or even better software support (with Arch's fantastic AUR!). Antergos makes it easier than ever to jump into Arch, too.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    What is it that you like about Arch? Maybe I should give it a shot, although with Ubuntu you know you'll have both the solutions and the software available somewhere.
    - rhodysurf 10y ago
      For personal use its the most up to date and because its rolling release i never have to actually upgrade or wait for releases. Also newer kernels for newer hardware.
      - 10y ago
J0-nas 10y ago
Not related to the blog post but why are the websites form lenovo + dell (and acer) so god damn awful? lenovo.com redirects me to https://www.lenovo.com/se/en/ https://www.lenovo.com/se/en/ since i'm currently in Sweden. I then get nice server error as greeting: 403 - Forbidden: Access is denied. If I try to access lenovo.de I get often no response... also for subsequent pages... On dells website it takes an awful lot of time to filter their laptops. It's not even 100 items... why does it take so long? Acer has a nice compare function. The only problem is that you can't compare laptops of their business line with the home ones. They also have too many different models. The compare function doesn't showcase any difference.
- flukus 10y ago
  Even worse when you're trying to dig through a maze of URL's to find drivers, half the link will go to the US site which will then get redirected to the regional one where the file doesn't exist. Had to do it once for a network drive with "export restrictions" it took hours to find their awful, half working driver. IME Dell are one of the better ones.
- wineisfine 10y ago
  Yeah try ordering anything from Lenovo on your iPad... their site is buggy as hell. I mean, how much effort can it take to clean it up?
- nkoren 10y ago
  This, this, a thousand times this. One thing that Apple has done very well is put together a website that: A.) Tells you what they are selling, and B.) Can sell it to you. Why is it so hard for other vendors to figure out that this is a pretty good way to sell computers? My girlfriend bought an Asus Zenbook the other day; it's a really nice machine and made me wonder whether there might be a Zenbook for me. So I ended up on http://www.asus.com/zenbook/global/index.html http://www.asus.com/zenbook/global/index.html. Is there a product list? No. A comparison feature? No. A way to buy, like, anything at all? Fuck you, says Asus. Here, have a bunch of annoying marketing copy; if you like that enough then maybe you can buy from some online retailer who has screwed up the model-numbers, unless you'd rather go to a shop were some know-nothing highschooler will try to make a commission by upselling you. Had the same experience with HP. I take your word for it that Leno and Dell and Acer are similar. Really made me appreciate Apple's retail mechanisms (as much as I'm aiming to exit their ecosystem). Seriously, industry: WTF? Get it together, guys!
SloppyStone 10y ago
If only Linux had decent image editors... I would have made the jump years ago, but Gimp and Inkscape ain't just cutting it.
- blhack 10y ago
  Gimp's UI makes me really sad :( -- I used to be a HUGE proponent of it, since I had grown up using it. I had never known photoshop before, so gimp's UI made sense to me. 3-4 years ago they seem to have changed (apparently to make things closer to photoshop, is my guess?), and now it seems like the UI sucks for everybody.
  - criddell 10y ago
    I don't ever remember a time where people weren't complaining about Gimp's UI.
- Jeaye 10y ago
  For painting, there's https://krita.org/en/ https://krita.org/en/ which has some excellent features.
- mtw 10y ago
  Same for me - last I checked, Gimp's UI is too damn awful. But I only need 5% of PHotoshop's features (smart selection, fill with color, resize, crop, optimize for web) to optimize images for web work
  - flukus 10y ago
    Does this apply to the single window mode as well?
  - pawadu 10y ago
    GIMP is ugly? watch this video, just give it 5 minutes of your time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNoVb5k40sU&t=30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNoVb5k40sU&t=30 the guy (a pro photographer) explains how to make GIMP less ugly and more usable.
montyboy_us 10y ago
+1 on the X1 Carbon. I made the switch this year, too, post MacBook Pro announcement. Have been running Fedora flawlessly. Cheers.
- nishs 10y ago
  Could you comment on your battery life experience / any heating issues?
  - viraptor 10y ago
    Previous generation X1. Easily getting 6h of scripting. (As in, no heavy compiler or processing needed) Slightly warm, but no issues with heat.
    - phongngtuan 10y ago
      Tbh that does not sound very good for a flagship model...
      - viraptor 10y ago
        I've never seen a laptop actually survive longer than 7h practically. The advertised battery life may say >10, synthetic benchmarks may say a bit lower. But once you use it with wifi on, with proper brightness, actually doing some work - no - it always takes a big hit.
        phongngtuan 10y ago
        Did you try windows, or if linux with lightweight use, would it improve the battery life? I had a macbook pro for 4 years so battery degraded and the processor wasn't that efficient but anecdote for newer macbook rarely reports anything less than 6 hours. I'm interested in a X270 (for the battery) but then I read somewhere battery on linux is kinda unstable. What do you think?
kinnth 10y ago
Im also going to make the switch with the Lenovo X1. Apple are just taking the piss with peripherals and cost now. Nice read, gives me more faith in my choice.
- wineisfine 10y ago
  Me too, waiting for the new one to become available.
- criddell 10y ago
  Will you miss the retina display though?
  - artursapek 10y ago
    I just bought the highest-end 4th gen X1 Carbon and it has a high-density 2560x1440 matte display. It's as good as or better than the MBP's. And Ubuntu handles handles UI scaling surprisingly well.
    - intopieces 10y ago
      > And Ubuntu handles handles UI scaling surprisingly well. This is why I jumped from Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13 9343 (Early 2015) to a new MacBook Pro (Late 2016, non-touch). I was tired of being surprised when things worked well. I gave it a good shot -- five months of tweaking, five months of reinstalls and forum posts and being back on the Linux Train with everything. But it just got so old. Workarounds for workarounds, unpredictability, lack of interoperability with my other devices... I just couldn't do it anymore. Linux rarely delights. I still keep Elementary OS on a desktop (it too has some oddities, but it's mostly smooth sailing) but on a laptop, when I'm out of my home and really want to just get work done, I haven't found anything as pleasing as OS X. I enjoyed Linux for learning how to tweak things, but sometimes I want to use the computer, not configured it. And Ubuntu was always needing configuration.
  - jronald 10y ago
    The new Macbook Pros come with similar resolutions: 13" Macbook pro: 2560-by-1600 native resolution at 227 pixels per inch 15" Macbook pro: 2880-by-1800 native resolution at 220 pixels per inch 14" x1 carbon: 14.0" (355mm) WQHD (2560x1440), anti-glare (209.8 PPI)
sk1pper 10y ago
IMO if money isn't an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good. Linux on desktops - as in, not a laptop - has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for >10 years. Not much else to say there. If desktop or server, this shouldn't be a discussion. As far as laptops go, I've just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100% usable and gets you everything you need. Getting things set up can be a way bigger PITA on Linux, like function keys, sound, and god forbid, wirless. I've never installed Linux on a laptop and had wireless not suck, at least a little bit. Mostly just randomly dropping connection. It's gotten better in the last few years, but it hasn't reached that perfect reliability that my mbp seems to have. Ubuntu seems to break a bit more on average - and those errors are a bit more likely to be obnoxious, or blockers even - like during boot. Not saying this is commonplace, but I've NEVER had OS X kernel panic on me during boot. Again, I would be perfectly happy a linux box instead, but for me it's worth a bit of extra $$ for what has seemed to me to be better reliability. Most of my experiences have been with Ubuntu LTS releases but really, I've tried all the big ones, and on quite a few different laptops over the years. YMMV of course. Edit: all that being said, prob will switch over when this one dies, because touch bar... lol
- throwaway729 10y ago
  Wireless hasn't been a problem (for me) for at least the past 3 years. The really dramatic improvements happened prior before 2010, and things have only gotten better since then. Bluetooth is still a damned mess. That, and battery life, and GPUs "just working", are the big differentiators IME. Of course YMMV.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    My experience matches yours. Wifi has worked for me for ages now, with various chipsets, but battery life has been very hit-and-miss, GPUs are almost a lost cause, and function keys/backlighting/cameras/other non-essentials are hairy. That said, the sibling comment has it right. Why am I buying laptops that don't support Linux if I'm going to use Linux on them? From now on, I'll only buy things that have Linux support as a first-class objective.
desireco42 10y ago
Most important part here, and what is mostly stopping me from jumping ship is photography. Darktable is probably fantastic software, however there is number of great plugins for Lightroom that I would miss dearly.
- contingencies 10y ago
  You can virtualize or dual-boot if your photography workflow is anything like mine (mostly huge, batch-oriented). You can even use eg. VMWare unity mode to right-click to open in Lightroom in a virtualized windows or OSX instance. Performance won't be perfect but it's definitely good enough. Less so for video editing. Personally the bigger irritation has been printer drivers. I have a Canon Pixma Pro 1 which has no drivers for Linux, forcing me to maintain out of date Windows systems to print with, at which point one can spend a thousand years defibrillating half-baked theories on color management and virtualization, or crushingly accept a partial solution. Canon: GIVE US LINUX DRIVERS.
  - CarVac 10y ago
    Printing is perfectly fine with Epson printers.
    - gonzo 10y ago
      And Brother, and HP.
    - pawadu 10y ago
      At work we have an old HP printer that only worked with linux out of the box. Windows 8 needed drivers to be downloaded and even than couldn't print duplex. OSX people had similar problems. Windows 10 worked really smoothly on the other hand. And now that it has a proper shell I am starting to like Windows again...
  - lucaspiller 10y ago
    Wasn't unity mode been removed from Linux hosts? Or did they add it back? http://planetvm.net/blog/?p=2936 http://planetvm.net/blog/?p=2936
codezero 10y ago
Curious what the wifi, sleep, and battery life stories are like in comparison to Mac OS.
- throwaway729 10y ago
  IME wifi isn't much a problem anymore. Might want to look up the chipset before purchase to be sure, but I've had zero issues since maybe 2006? Sleep is still kinda annoying. Every once in a while my machine ends up not going to sleep when I close the lid and I end up with a hot brick at 2% battery when I take it out of my bag. TBF this has happened to me with MBPs too, though. Battery life is a major differentiator. Mac wins there for all normal use cases.
  - criddell 10y ago
    How well are high-dpi displays handled these days?
    - pkaye 10y ago
      I just switched to a 4K monitor for my Ubuntu desktop system. Everything was automatically recognized. I just had to use one of the settings to scale things up to my liking. Beyond this, a couple apps were still of the wrong font scaling so I had to tweak them individually. Lastly the console and boot fonts have to be changed separately but there was an online link that gave me the command line settings to make those happen. In the end the effort was not not much more than I dealt with in Windows.
    - favadi 10y ago
      Unity hands scaling well, but many applications just don't work well with HiDPI. But same problem happens with Windows 10. In this regard, OS X does the job better.
- autoreleasepool 10y ago
  I just installed Xubuntu on my mother's aging MacBook. Wifi and sleep/resume worked out of the box (even during installation) and batter life has been good. Plus her internet browser and email are much snappier now.
rurban 10y ago
Dtrace? systemtap is not close to dtrace performance and ease of use. I'd rather switch to freebsd or dragonfly than back to linux.
- tomrod 10y ago
  All three are excellent choices.
- gonzo 10y ago
  Kris Moore reports that TrueOS (previously PC-BSD) works on the X1 Carbon 4th gen except for resume.
- moosingin3space 10y ago
  Stay tuned with some of the BPF performance monitoring stuff landing, it's supposed to be pretty good. I don't know much about it, unfortunately.
jstewartmobile 10y ago
I've been using vanilla Debian w/XFCE as my development desktop for years now, and it has been great. I am especially fond of the Guake terminal (http://guake-project.org http://guake-project.org). It is just a translucent terminal that swoops up/down from the top with a keypress.
peterburkimsher 10y ago
Is there a common high-level scripting tool for Gnome, like AppleScript? For me it's all about the APIs. When I want to do something like: tell application "iTunes" to return every track whose genre is "Rock" and rating > 3 then I don't want to mess around with API documentation for 10 hours and trying lots of different music managers, then importing my large library, just to lose all the tags. I expect similar APIs in the file browser, text editor, photo library, contacts, calendar, and web browser apps too. A common API is what makes an ecosystem to me.
- TD-Linux 10y ago
  Yes and no, there's a standard API called D-Bus. If you want to browse it you can run a program like D-Feet and choose "session bus". It's not tied to a particular language though, rather you need bindings to it. In addition, it's somewhat more complex than AppleScript, and the APIs that most apps provide are rarely documented. It does have the concept of standard interfaces, so many apps will often implement identical APIs.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
asciimo 10y ago
> And now I see their latest MBP line with the Esc key removed... What?! Ha. It almost seems like post-Jobs Apple "innovates" by removing classic user interfaces.
- jaegerpicker 10y ago
  It's only technically removed. The function row including the escape button was replaced with a touch screen that can and does display an escape button in the given context. It's still bad because the escape button is in a different place and doesn't always display at the right time. As a emacs user, escape is my meta key, I dislike it because it messes with my muscle memory.
  - DRW_ 10y ago
    > It's still bad because the escape button is in a different place and doesn't always display at the right time. It's actually pretty much in the same place (touchable area is bigger than the visual button) and I'm pretty certain it displays at all times. Missing the feedback is more than understandable criticism (that I agree with) but muscle memory of hitting the key in the first place itself shouldn't really change, hasn't for me - as someone who does use vim a fair amount.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I went in the opposite direction. I downloaded Slackware over a 2400bud modem, and have used Linux ever since then. For a long time, Linux was my principle OS for a laptop, but occasionally using OS X on a Mac laptop. I have mostly been retired for a long while, and usually try to limit my work time to 4 hours a day. I want that 4 hours to be as productive as possible, and right now my little MacBook is a bit more productive. Cost is not an issue.
- sedatk 10y ago
  > I downloaded Slackware over a 2400bud modem That is some serious phone bill.
- tyfon 10y ago
  I was lucky enough to get the Slackware book with the cd around 1993-94(?) so I didn't have to go through the whole floppydisk dance. I did try something called minilinux before though that I downloaded off a bbs. I think it was 4 floppies :) Still using linux to this day both at home and work.
Abishek_Muthian 10y ago
In my humble opinion, OSX : Productivity, Linux : Development, Windows : Games I've been with all of these for all my computing life & still doing the same. OSX/macOS is great for anyone who doesn't want to meddle with their system, especially if you use iDevices. Though developers have historically liked OSX, it could be apt for web development or anything non resource consuming (like java/android). For e.g I symlinked my android sdk (15 GB) to another SSD and had the android studio run from the native partition & the android studio's instant run feature sure made whole lot of mess and took 1 hour to compile ~2,00,000 lines of code. Of course this is not the fault of OSX, but I can manage partitions better & expandability is cheaper in a linux based system. Of course Linux : I use an external SSD with Arch Linux for android development with the Mac. It has improved my development productivity multifold. Of course you might need some tinkering to do, but will be straight forward unless it involves GPU. Basically GPU drivers, especially Nvidia sucks big time on linux. Windows : DirectX.
- slitaz 10y ago
  The game situation is changing fast. Even CivIV was just announced that it is coming to Linux. Perhaps the Vulkan drivers will make it even better to write crossplatform games.
  - hobarrera 10y ago
    Plus, wine works marvelously nowadays, with lots of games getting platinum or gold ratings, some even on the day they're released.
- pawadu 10y ago
  > OSX/macOS is great for anyone who doesn't want to meddle with their system We use ubuntu for that here. Outside adding your own dotfiles the machines are completely untouched. Works like a charm. Okay, I admit I have also changed my desktop background ;)
artursapek 10y ago
I made the exact same move a couple months ago (Ubuntu on X1 Carbon) and have never been happier with a computer.
terrywang 10y ago
Linux? Desktop? Different answer from different people. For me I've always been optimistic. Linux as desktop offers choices and freedom. I've been running Linux as my main desktop since Fedora Core 1 (you can count). Overall the kernel and desktop environments (window managers) are getting better (especially KDE). Of course, there has been learning curves and all sort of frustration, many weird problems to attack but never a real showstopper AS LONG AS you had the time and passion to research (learn) and fix them (at least it is how I have built up my Linux skills tree). It's about freedom and choice, also the habit that has formed over the years. I do use a MacBook Pro 15" for work (on the move, portability, battery life is better than running Linux on it - plus the wireless driver hassle - no worth it - as long as iTerm2 and homebrew is in place - don't care), but the pretty much all grunt work is done on my workstations (2 optiplex) in office and home. They both are running Arch Linux + KDE Plasma 5 (Xfce4 and other light weight WMs as alternatives). I just feel relaxed and in control of the OS (can do pretty much what I want - like mount a part of physical memory as ramfs/tmpfs and use it to do heavy I/O tasks etc... similar to drive a manual car ;-) I don't mind using a Mac but do consider Linux as a good and free alternative when coming across things that do not work well on Mac. It may not work for all but you'll have to give it a try to know. In addition, better consult and seek advice from Linux veterans regarding distribution/desktop environment/window manager choices, known hardware support issues and best practices beforehand, save you time and trouble ;-)
- terrywang 10y ago
  With regard to Power Management TLP may be useful for people who run Linux on laptops TLP – Linux Advanced Power Management http://linrunner.de/tlp http://linrunner.de/tlp https://github.com/linrunner/TLP https://github.com/linrunner/TLP Laptop Mode Tools is the then standard way of power saving, not sure if it is obsolete now. https://github.com/rickysarraf/laptop-mode-tools https://github.com/rickysarraf/laptop-mode-tools In addition, Intel's PowerTop and other stuff on 01.org can also be useful if running on Intel architecture (GPU). I had been running Ubuntu 8.04, 10.04 12.04 on Dell Latitude D630 and E6410 (suspend to memory worked fine `pm-suspend` and then `systemctl suspend`) for several years, during that period of time laptop mainly sat on docking station as a desktop so I couldn't care less about power management, performance was first priority (e.g. no HDD spin-down `hdparm -B 254 /dev/sdX`, no swap devices, vm.swappiness=1 etc...). HTH
csdreamer7 10y ago
For those of you looking for a nice little Linux laptop check out System76's Lemur. https://system76.com/laptops/lemur https://system76.com/laptops/lemur I have the older Skylake version and it runs just fine as long as you use Mesa 13 (I use Manjaro so it is not an issue). System76 does little things such as commit driver fixes to the kernel and flash a custom bios and firmware to make the hardware run better with Linux. If you want to good hardware support on Linux you can't go wrong with buying laptop from them.
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  I just wish they (or a comparable competitor) opened up shop in Europe. Ordering from the US is doable, but the hit-or-miss import tax sucks, and for warranty the distance and economic zone mismatch mean delays and high shipping costs. That said, they make great laptops. I love my four year old Gazelle.
mnm1 10y ago
The problem is/was never Linux. For me, it's always been X. At some point, it just stops working. I've had to reinstall from scratch so many times over the last 20 years that I've lost count. Tried again these last couple of months. Nope. The longest X has stayed stable has been almost 6 months, about 5 years ago. Same as 20 and 10 years ago. This time it was only a few weeks. After that, I'm lucky if I get a text login prompt at all. Maybe Wayland will be better but I'm not holding my breath based on what I've read so far. On top of X's display issues, it has input issues, especially with trackpads. This should be self explanatory to anyone who's run Linux on an Macbook Pro and likely with any other trackpad. I think many of the issues can be fixed with many days spent on tweaking the drivers, but some of the issues don't seem to have a fix that the drivers support (proper double tap detection that only registers a double tap if my fingers are close together--should part of accidental touch detection--for example). I really want it to work but X is simply insufferable in its current form. I shouldn't have to reinstall the OS multiple times just to test it out or debug X when it fails to load (it's just easier to reinstall). Ironically, everything else works perfectly for me, including all necessary software, wifi, nvidia gfx, etc.
- terrywang 10y ago
  X is really old and should be phased out. That's why Fedora has made Wayland the default display manager in latest Fedora 25. I have never had the problem you've described, most issue I've encountered (my VGA/GPU were all Intel/NVIDIA) can be fixed (using pseudo console, SSH, chroot etc...) without reinstall (which doesn't really fix the root cause). The issues you've mentioned, try to look for workarounds from distro wiki or stackoverflow (sister sites), or even Gentoo/Arch Docs, try to get mentor who's a Linux veteran will save you time and effort. I've been running rolling release for many years and it has never broken once after the sysV init -> systemd migration (I did a reinstall). Even Ubuntu / Kubuntu LTS versions have been stable, I wonder if it the VGA/GPU driver causing all the troubles. HTH
  - mnm1 10y ago
    I'm hoping Wayland does indeed solve the problems X has. Unfortunately, it's not just one problem but a series of them spread over multiple machines from various vendors. This latest one I think is probably not the graphics driver as it did work fine for a couple of weeks but the trackpad driver. I think I might give Fedora 25 a shot and see if there's a difference. Without a doubt, however, Linux based OS's have come a very long way even in just the last 5 years, let alone the last 20. Mint KDE for example, works almost out of the box for me on my 2013 MbPro w/ external 4k monitor (except internal trackpad / Magic Trackpad 2). I suspect I'll be able to remove that "almost" in the next year or two if not sooner and once messing with X config is no longer required, hopefully X (or Wayland) will be stable.
DoodleBuggy 10y ago
Didn't work for me, yet, but maybe someday. In the meantime I'm still holding out hope that Apple saves the Mac. Sigh.
corv 10y ago
Sure it's possible to use Linux on the desktop. It's also possible to find some laptops that are well supported. Do I want to replace Lightroom, Sketch, Pixelmator, 1Password and Alfred with inferior replacements? No, because my livelihood depends on good tools and I think it's fair to pay money for them.
- kajecounterhack 10y ago
  FWIW Figma is quickly becoming a great replacement for Sketch. And I think Adobe is working on cloud equivalents for many of their offerings, so when those are ready at least some of your concerns will be removed. 1Password definitely has replacements that aren't inferior. Alfred is OS specific tuning and you can easily get settings you enjoy on your Linux desktop.
  - corv 10y ago
    And yet Linux is missing a lot of high quality commercial software. Even if all my software ran on Linux I still wouldn't have the peace of mind that walking in a store and buying an Apple laptop offers. I would have to research models or order and wait for an XPS to arrive in order to have a machine that is sure to work.
- methodin 10y ago
  I find it difficult to believe that your livelihood depends solely on the specific combination of apps you mentioned. It doesn't even seem like you've actually tried any of these apps yet call them inferior? Inferior how? That's quite an elitist stance to portray without the specifics to back it up here.
  - corv 10y ago
    My livelihood doesn't depend on Lightroom but I don't want a laptop that only does a subset of my computing. I've tried darktabke and the UI is a mess, same with Gimp. A lot of open source software is unpolished and lacking in documentation. If that is elitist so be it.
  - 10y ago
gonzo 10y ago
After a decade on MacBooks, I've just gone the same route as the author. Ubuntu on an X1 Carbon 4th gen. After moving to 16.10, the only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint reader. I also buy the systems for most of the developers in my company (we do pfSense), and they're also going to be asked to consider the same solution on future upgrades.
- csdreamer7 10y ago
  gonzo, you may want to check out my comment here on the Lemur. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13362198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13362198
jhanschoo 10y ago
This is pretty tangential to the topic, but if anybody is looking to dual- or triple-boot without resorting to third-party EFI software, http://courses.cms.caltech.edu/cs171/materials/pdfs/How_to_Dual-Boot_OSX_and_Ubuntu.pdf http://courses.cms.caltech.edu/cs171/materials/pdfs/How_to_D... offers the best guide to setting up such an environment using the Apple EFI. I've successfully followed a modified version of this guide's steps to install Ubuntu to a bootable USB drive and am very satisfied with it.
methodin 10y ago
For the most part all software/hardware combinations are pretty solid for a majority of users. Those that required very specific things - obviously not. Hell I'm a developer and switched to Chromebooks since I only need a browser and ssh. Everyone should always be out there looking at other stuff - chances are you can discover something new or even better than what you thought possible.
- themodelplumber 10y ago
  > Everyone should always be out there looking at other stuff - chances are you can discover something new or even better than what you thought possible This is a great point. I bought Dell's first Ubuntu laptop offering back in '07 or '08, and am still thankful I did to this day, even though the machine has long since retired. Back then the MacBook Pro was a very solid offering, and a Linux laptop was almost a joke. But I still have Youtube video tutorials I recorded from that laptop, it was a great machine and your point is as true now as it was then. Try it out, don't just sit there ignorantly whinging, is my version. :-)
cossovich 10y ago
I moved from OS X to Ubuntu running on Thinkpads as my main work machine around the Ubuntu 12.04 era... haven't looked back. I have an 11" Macbook Air as a backup/home machine and I think Canonical have closed the gap in terms of polish and stability. If you stick with well supported hardware (Thinkpad T and X series in my experience) you can't go wrong.
Walkman 10y ago
A lot of people find "alternatives" to the OS X apps, but they don't realize the difference is so huge it's not even funny. Alfred DOES NOT have an alternative on any platform. It's so good it's unbelievable, takes job of multiple programs I need to constantly use on Linux. Also DashDoc, etc. Also there is Terminator yes, but it's feature set is nowhere near of iTerm2, it's crazy what you can do with it and how convenient is it compared to any terminal emulators.
jordic 10y ago
Don't miss the point that every morning when you open your laptop you will be proud of using a free Desktop.
voycey 10y ago
Disclaimer: I have been using Linux as my main OS for many years now.... However, I actually agree with a lot of the below, the alternative programs on Linux aren't up to scratch with tools people build their livelihood on (Illustrator, Photoshop, Sketch etc). But the opposite is true also, I find development painful on OSX, I get pissed when starting with a new company and they assume I want a Mac. My stack is LAMP, it's what the servers run, its what I want to run on my local development machine as well. I am currently on Windows / Virtualbox with a full desktop version of Ubuntu 16.04 and its a great setup, best of both worlds, I can develop natively and if there is anything I need to do that is beyond the capabilities of any Linux Replacements (e.g I had to some pretty heavy vector editing the other day), I have Windows available just a minimise away!
renownedmedia 10y ago
I've been switching back and forth between OS X and Linux for the past several years. I'm currently at a year and a half into a Linux streak and really enjoying recent advancements. My Dell XPS 13 typically gets 10 hours of battery life. Linux itself is quite stable. Simply install a recent distro and off you go. If you're using a heavy Window Manager you'll get all the convenient configuration applets you need. The real issue, IMO, is the desire to tinker. OS X is a bit limiting in what you can do with it. I haven't seen anyone with custom window decorations in OS X in a long time. Short of running a software update we aren't capable of tweaking kernel versions and system utilities. If we stick to the same limitations in Linux it's going to be near impossible to break. Once the Linux tinkering sets in you'll find that you've installed a bleeding edge kernel, changed some repository sources, modified Xorg.conf, ./configure && make && make install'd an obscure library (then (mostly) uninstalled it), and installed Python 2 alongside Python 3 without rebooting for two months. Good luck rebooting at that point ;) With great power comes a great desire to shoot ourselves in the foot.
- sscarduzio 10y ago
  Sadly, I second this. But even tweaking the themes or the trackpad sensitivity is a huge time sink that waits for me to bite the bait in a weakness moment. About the Python 2 alongside Python 3 et similia: fortunately, integrating Virtualenv for python and Docker for all the rest in your workflow solves many of those crazy lib dependencies causing instability. About the xorg.conf and instable kernels, I'm VERY SURPRISED there's not a Linux kernel fork, heck even a branch that is pre-optimised and stabilised for those 4 or 5 most common Linux laptops. And if it's unreasonable to delegate this effort to the kernel devs, how about Ubuntu starts to maintain an XPS13-2015/X1Carbon2016 variant of the kernel deb package?
- willismichael 10y ago
  Oh come on, I've been a Linux enthusiast for over a decade now and it's been years since I've even touched xorg.conf, installed a kernel that didn't come from a standard repo, or had trouble rebooting due to a change I made to the system. Linux has gotten significantly less painful over the years, and it's not just that I'm more familiar with it now. Installing a mainstream distro these days is easier than the last time I installed Windows (granted, that was XP). I finally caved and started using a Mac for work. I was afraid that I would like it so much that I would just have to buy one for home, but I actually find Linux is still pleasant to use, I still think I prefer it over Mac OS.
tuananh 10y ago
I tried Fedora 25 recently. While the driver support is way way better than before (everything works out of the box) but the graphic driver support is abysmal. It works but stutter like crazy. Installing graphic driver is not very trivial.
0max 10y ago
On the flip side, I just went from OS X to Windows 10, which has Ubuntu available under developer settings...And now I can play all my old Windows Steam games. Last time I used Windows for my workhorse was Vista.
techolic 10y ago
It should be included some internet law that every article contains a tl;dr section.
digi_owl 10y ago
With these things it boils down to two issues that are often related. First being drivers, second being software patents. With regards to drivers there are two variants of the issue. The first is buggy proprietary drivers. Please stop insisting on using Nividia hardware under Linux just because they offer a proprietary driver pack. That driver pack is a mess and a half, and most of the complaints i have seen levied against X11 can be explained by said proprietary drivers being in use. The second is buggy hardware hidden by proprietary Windows drivers. This is why you see all kinds of power management issues under Linux. All too often the hardware will claim to support being suspended, but never come back to life one done so. Manufacturers knows of this, and will implement workarounds in their official drivers. As for software patents, they result in FOSS having to wait some 20 years to implement "bleeding obvious" features to avoid getting sued.
deleted 10y ago
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ravirajx7 10y ago
There may be 1000s of reasons for using linux distro which i genuinely don't know about but one thing which i have noticed is that linux requires lot of time setting things up. There is terminal for you to work as app store and there is app store also ( though this app store doesn't have that many apps). I have used ubuntu,debian,manjaro,budgie remix and things which i have found buggy about all of these distros are it's Wi-Fi support (like it supports my mobile hotspot but I don't know why it's buggy with my college wifi and i still can't access internet over my college hotspot) Maybe I'm noob? and i don't know how to solve many of its issues. But genuinely speaking do i need that much of skill just to run an os? Seriously? i never ever had any problem using windows. Some other issues with Linux distros include its Bluetooth support which also stuck. I mean why do i need to invest so much of time putting apt get install xyz? After finding commands over internet. Even basic file managers and many packages like media plugings etc. you need to update time to time which means for you to use linux distro efficiently you need to be connected with internet. Ever tried using Linux without internet? Use it once you'll feel the boredom using it. The main reason i still use linux is just fan following ( i.e. its Internet based reviews its virus security and all that which you too know about ). And all being said i have lost so many files because whole of my os just crashed several times without me knowing any reason? And one more you know? you can't use windows hard disk drive without shutting down or logging your windows off properly. I mean why do i need to put this much of effort just to use this linux distro? Though on the other side you are skipping windows gold class desktop environment and its user friendliness. You have to put some more effort again to play games. I'm amazed how people love complex things than the easier one.
stymaar 10y ago
> Nowadays even Steam is available for Linux, with more and more titles available. That should get you covered for a little while. If it doesn't, PlayOnLinux allows running Windows games on Wine. Most of the time, it works just fine. I'm my experience can be totally true if you have an Nvidia Graphic card (I run almost every games on my desktop) but it can also be false if you have something else (my laptop have an Integrated Intel graphic and I can run nothing). The author have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which have a newer version of Intel graphic and it looks like he achieves to run games, so maybe there is some progress on that front also.
Insanity 10y ago
All laptops at home are running ubuntu, and so is my desktop. For me it was seemingly the opposite to the experience of many people here. I had no issues whatsoever with the laptops, everything worked pretty much out of the box. No issues with function keys not working, wireless, audio or anything else. On the other hand, on my desktop I had a lot of issues with random system freezes, and with the audio. My headset would have a constant crackling and the graphics card had quite a few issues. As with most things, YMMV.
macco 10y ago
For all your OS X coming to Linux, a word of personal advice. Use a distro with KDE, Kubuntu is great for beginners and install ubuntu-make (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-make https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-make), a command line utility that installs your dev environment. If you feel a bit more adventurous and want the all of the newest Software try Manjaro-KDE. Why KDE? KDE has a traditional Desktop experience, that can be tweaked in every way. It is much more polished and all the other Linux desktops and it uses Qt5 as it's base - so the team doesn't need to develop the widget toolkit and can focus on the desktop. Lastly gtk apps look much better in KDE than Qt apps in Gnome. BTW: I was a long time Unity and then Gnome user, so I know what I am talking about. I switched to KDE this summer and never looked back.
- aruggirello 10y ago
  If I recall correctly, Kubuntu was the reference KDE platform when Plasma 5 made its debut (two years ago). Nowadays, it seems Fedora leads the way, but Kubuntu is a great choice nonetheless. BTW I'm using Kubuntu 16.04.
- more_original 10y ago
  The choice of desktop environment is quite a personal matter. I would recommend Gnome 3, which is especially polished on Fedora. The early transition years from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 were rough, and I switched to KDE for this time. KDE was fine, but Gnome 3 has been polished a lot in the last view years. So I switched back to Gnome 3 and never looked back :).
  - macco 10y ago
    > The choice of desktop environment is quite a personal matter. Absolutely.
runeks 10y ago
What about SSDs? The only mention I can find is for the 5720, All-in-One, which is a 27" workstation. Do the laptops ship with rotational HDDs? IMHO comparing this to a MacBook (with its PCIe SSD) if it has a rotational HDD is disingenuous. I replaced my root partition HDD with an SSD in 2009 and I'm never going back.
hd4 10y ago
Since a few versions now (and also in 16.04 LTS), the Bluetooth drivers in the kernel used by Ubuntu have been broken. Otherwise Ubuntu is a solid distro and it doesn’t get in my way.
ldev 10y ago
Tried to switch to Linux like a month ago, main gripes: 1) Typing sudo before everything. Entering your password everytime OS farts. Geez. Even installing nodejs required to type sudo, meanwhile on macOS - brew install node. Also Ubuntu has outdated packages (nodejs version in their "up do date" repository starts with a zero, need to hunt down ppas, I mean at this point package repository loses it's point, because it's easier to go to the package's website and download it than googling out two ppas and checking which one is more legit, buut then you run into another issue - windows has exe files, macos has dmg files, linux has a zip file and it's not recommended to install this way, what a royal mess). 2) No good dock software. There's plank, xfce, kde provides almost "docks", but all plainly suck. What I want from dock - notifications in dock on app icon (you got 2 unread messages in skype, mail app, messenger, etc etc - show a little overlay on the icon with number "2") and tasks in submenu - right click on skype icon - common tasks like changing online status, right click on music player icon - show Play/Pause, Skip song, etc etc. There's a bazillion choices and every linux fanboy touts about the POWER OF CHOICE - but all choices suck (so you could say there's no choice, there's even no one option). 3) I really love global app menu. Well, I was told Linux has THE customizability... Apparently not when you want something more technically difficult than one of the same tilling wm or conky config - for the most part using jaytana and vala global menu worked, but IntelliJ IDEA's globbal menu entries did nothing on click and some gtk3 software didn't hid their own app menu, so not really working well. Customizability my ass. I like linux on server, it's allright there (although FreeBSD with clearly defined base system and /usr is actually designed), but as a desktop OS - not even close.
- Sean1708 10y ago
  It might be worth giving ApricityOS[0] a try next time you fancy delving into Linux, I've a lot of good things from ex-Mac users who switched to it. [0]: https://apricityos.com/ https://apricityos.com/
  - ldev 10y ago
    Thanks. I try out Linux every year and it's getting better, I mean Linux gets 95% of things right (if not right - atleast you can live with it), but devil's in the details and those remaining little 5% really piss me off. Like xfce - program can change it's state or w/e to busy for 50 ms and you get the loading spinner near your cursor for 50 ms. So cursor just "blinks" with loading spinner. Sometimes repeatedly. Somehow never noticed that on macOS - either applications are designed better and only known long tasks change the cursor, or there's a system wide control - show spinner near cursor only if app was in busy state for 500 ms or something. This year tried out Ubuntu, elementaryOS, Manjaro and Solus. Well, Solus on boot on my system had a black screen, and when booted in VirtualBox on Windows - black screen but atleast network notification showed that I'm connected to the internet, after I dismissed the notification - black screen again.
dirtyhenry 10y ago
My main point to stick to macOS is the lack of any solid alternative to Xcode for iOS development. For a non-development environment, I think Raspbian provides a good enough experience. #stuckForever
- pawadu 10y ago
  This is because Apple wants to lock you in. It is your choice to stay with the platform or get out. Fun fact: if you remote login into a OSX machine you wont be allowed to build and publish iOS apps. Apple has disabled that on purpose. Think about that for a minute!
  - K0SM0S 10y ago
    Sounds like the "evil" MS of the late 90s/early 2000s. When I see a company resorting to such artificial and globally-detrimental methods in a sorry attempt to retain/lock customers, I feel like it's an implicit admission that they've lost much of their mind-share, their "higher" vision, their "capital of relevance" so to speak. It's basically a tantrum disconnected from a higher coherent vision, like "if I can't have it, then nobody gets it!" and goes on to break the thing in question. Such negativity. Jobs' Apple was aggressive and ruthless, but not negative, it really sought to add value to their customers life; it was indeed much more loyal to, and respectful of, said customers (and I suspect much less to its partners). Above all it was damn substantial in its own way, towards its own path: you don't lock X because you can and that's the best you could come up with, you lock X because it makes sense from a business perspective without alienating the user. You may have disliked many of their decisions, the matter of the fact is that in the long run they made sense from a deeper perspective. Cook's Apple is nothing like that, it's like "hipsters meet hedge funds" philosophy of profit/design, more shady/disingenuous ways of enticing customer pride/lock. Even their marketing can be misguiding nowadays, and while not lying, it's way passed a red line that Jobs never crossed: yes you may sell a lot with a clever marketing twist (not lies per se, but a message that feels as much once you've realized there was intent behind your misunderstanding or misplaced expectations); but in the long run, it hurts your very ability to sell anew, i.e. you traded trust for profit and may end up deserving none. Such a flawed approach to adding value to the world, making the sector worse off, overall, the more it's entangled in the artificially closed Apple ecosystem. No wonder people have woken up and many are actively trying to escape Apple's garden now, but that's only the 1% of the savviest --most consumers keep buying the latest Macs, often for reasons like customer service (consciously) and social status biases (unconsciously). If I may use a pop reference, Apple used to be a Vulcan company, now they're closer to a Ferengi clone. This isn't just an abstract rant, it's a high-level account of all the very real and practical reasons that drove me off the Apple wagon during the past 4 years or so, why I stopped spending $2K/year on their products (did that for a decade) and why I don't recommend Macs/iOS anymore to most of my contacts (and right there is at least 10x my spending, also gone to MS, Google, Dell, Samsung, HTC, ASUS, etc.) I know this all may sound harsh and a bit hyperbolic, but it's basically my way of saying it's little things like these that show, or rather raises questions, how/whether a company lost its way. About UI/UX on Apple products for instance, or software quality in general, or the hardware philosophy of sleek/hot/not powerful Macs, the first signs were already there by 2013: the current situation isn't surprising if you were deep into the Apple ecosystem and paying attention to such aspects, in painful detail I agree. Right at the same moment MS changed and became Nadella's opened, software-first, partner-friendly company, and even if not obvious at all some years ago, their current situation isn't surprising either looking at how details, little events here and there in the MS ecosystem, painted a very clear picture towards that vision. If I were invested in Apple right now, as a consumer or investor, I wouldn't trust their ability to remain "above" or "equal to" MS/Google by 2020, in terms of OS/software/services. Not saying they won't, but there's momentum to reverse there, it's currently downhill (and much faster than I had anticipated, Windows 10 or Android really are on par nowadays, if not actually better on many such "details"). The question is whether Apple under several CEOs will prove to be an IBM or a Microsoft: can this 20th century company effectively embrace new paradigms? Can they move past their previous decisions, which may have made sense at the time, but would eventually grow to become obsolete or even flawed as computing and behaviors evolve in time? How is their internal culture conducive to such change, how much does it impede meaningful design and innovation currently?
aruggirello 10y ago
Shameless plug: wish me good luck - I'm going to open an ecommerce for Linux- & BSD- preinstalled laptop & desktop computers in Italy (because that's where I live). Mind you, it's a small business, initially limited to reselling OEM-preinstalled systems already available in the wholesale market, but if it works, I'm planning to launch my own models, too. Any suggestions?
- pawelkomarnicki 10y ago
  Don't do it.
  - thepiwo 10y ago
    I'd say he should try, but with out to high expectations or financial investments. Linux offers could work for people just wanting a working computer with less risk of viruses. People that don't care for their machine running Linux. Most other people interested are tech savvy and will compare other offerings as well or selfbuild.
  - aruggirello 10y ago
    Please elaborate. Are there specific reasons you think I might not have considered yet?
- thepiwo 10y ago
  Do you already have a Name/Website? Will you only offer Desktop and Server PCs?
  - aruggirello 10y ago
    Not yet, but I'm working on that. Server market is tough, I won't do that, at least initially. I'm oriented towards hardware that may be suitable for developers/DevOps: laptop, desktop. Edit: to clarify, desktop might range from dirt cheap commodity hw to high profile workstations. So no blades, rack-mounted stuff etc. (I don't know what fits your definition of server).
- 10y ago
pawelkomarnicki 10y ago
Why not using Windows 10 laptop with Vagrant for development?
Adracus 10y ago
Sure, functionality-wise Ubuntu and also other Linux operating systems can definitely match the palette that OS X offers. The problems with Ubuntu are starting if you are getting into the area of peripherals: Drivers for some things are missing or are not performing as comparable Hardware does under OS X, it gets even worse when you're struggling with HiDPI: Have you ever tried to have one non-HiDPI and one HiDPI screen as when using your QHD laptop screen together with a FullHD secondary monitor? Total pain in the ass under Ubuntu and in contrast very easy on OS X.
Vinkekatten 10y ago
For work (java + web developer) Linux is what I would prefer. Unfortunately we're a Windows shop. For play (gaming + photography) it's a no go. Stuck with Windows for a while longer I suppose.
chmike 10y ago
I have an Ubuntu desktop and a Macbook air laptop. On the Desktop computer I have a TypeMatrix Bépo keyboard which is great for French people writing French text and coding. What I'm missing on my Ubuntu computer is Word and Excel. LibreOffice is very far from the quality of Word. So I use my Mac when I have to write word documents but the Mac interface is a pain. I had a windows laptop but although the hardware was good it was very slooooow at start up. It needed 30minutes to be ready to be usable (reboot or wake up) and without any roaming and with virus checking disabled. That's useless. The only serious problem in my field with Ubuntu is that many people use Word as document format and this is annoying.
- fb03 10y ago
  I feel your pain and sadly, the only way I could find around this issue was to use a virtual machine running Windows 7 with Office 2010. I have used Libreoffice's Writer with some degree of success. My dissertation was written in it and some of its specific features are actually more advanced than the Word counterparts, mainly: automatically numbering pictures and tables, auto-TOCs and formatting styles. Word does all that but Writer is way more flexible in this regard. What I couldn't adapt to, though, was the gap between MS Excel and Libreoffice's Calc. The difference in functionality and usability is huge :-( Just try to properly format a bunch of cells in Calc and you'll realize how cumbersome and painful it is. The virtual machine approach works nicely but then you have another box to mantain. Since mine is just for Office I leave it Internet-less and that makes for another set of adaptations (ex.: how to put and remove content to the VM, need to use CIFS/Samba for that, etc). o/
spectaclepiece 10y ago
I would switch to Linux in a heartbeat if Adobe and Autodesk had support for it.
fb03 10y ago
I consider this a sad reality, being a huge FOSS fan and systems admin with several deployed/mantained linux servers, but, for most power users: -> Right now, if you can, have all three operating systems available, according to your needs and each system's software coverage strengths and weaknesses. Expanding (and this is where it might get controversial): If you game (for real), make music (for real) or produce video (for real), you are stuck with Windows... -> Mac OS X comes really close for video and graphics, BUT, for rendering shit out you are still going to want a fully loaded multi-gpu rig, and you can't legally install OS X on that. -> For music production, Mac OS X is already used in lots of shops, but if you like experimenting, you are still going to miss a bunch of audio plugins that are free and readily available for the Win32 ecosystem. Also, setting up low latency audio and plugins on Windows is a breeze. -> If you build a gaming rig, you're stuck with Windows as well for the same performance reasons. Here's what I am doing right now: [On the go] I have a good-ish Macbook. The reason I chose a mac was because at the time I bought it (4 years ago), they were the only ones offering real 6h+ battery life. I'm usually on the move so I like to always have a box with me to squeeze some study/code in between the daily downtime. If I install Ubuntu or Windows on this laptop, battery is used 30% quicker, so no can do. [At the home office] I produce music and game on a pretty beefy Windows rig. I need to boot to Windows because of the low latency/realtime requirements of gaming and live audio. When I need to code I just fire up a fullscreen Ubuntu VM (with like, 8gb of dedicated ram) and code away. This VM even finds and uses all my displays so I'm fully immersed, and performance for development is quite good (C and Python dev, mostly Eclipse CDT and Pycharm). This setup is more complex than the usual, but I'm always fiddling with lots of stuff and this is how I keep myself happy and productive. I don't want to spend all day long configuring and compromising, trying to fit all my needs in one OS, it's just not going to happen. I think I'm better off actually doing real work ;)
- jdhawk 10y ago
  > This VM even finds and uses all my displays Are you using VirtualBox? VMWare? I have had hell getting this to work properly.
  - fb03 10y ago
omouse 10y ago
Fedora is also a great option; I switched to it a few months ago from Ubuntu and it's been great.
dxxvi 10y ago
Linux can replace Windows except printing or printing-related features. For example, Firefox in Linux has very little printing options and it doesn't print correctly on a letter-sized pdf file.
nurettin 10y ago
>> Kafkaian That's a rather kafkaesque way of putting it.
jeromenerf 10y ago
These mac/osx exodus posts reminds me of how non durable the whole ecosystem is. Perfectly working hardware (routers, dongles, laptops, mobiles ..) is declared EOL and gradually becomes less functional and more of a security issue. Destructive recycling could be an option, but damn, we are talking about "perfectly working devices", with a real value and a pretty high environmental cost. How do you deal with them?
deleted 10y ago
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agmcleod 10y ago
I think linux is nice and all. But i've had my share of issues with Ubuntu & video card drivers over the years. I've tried to run dual boot on my PC at home, and haven't had much luck keeping it stable. I think the best experience I had was running Ubuntu back around 2008, 2009, on my dell inspiron laptop. Wireless was a challenge, but otherwise it ran great. On the weekend I picked up a laptop I ordered during boxing day sales. An asus rog with a gtx 1070 in it. More for going to gaming events and that, but I put linux mint on the second hard drive so I can mess around from time to time. Haven't tested the web cam, but most things seem to work fine. I guess time will tell if it's something I want to move to (still use a mac at work)
joantune 10y ago
Big questions (for me at least here) How is the Pad sensitivity on that combo (i.e. X1 Carbon + Ubuntu + Gnome3) Also: do you have the double finger scroll thing, what about the double tap for secondary mouse button? also three finger move and four finger gestures? One of the things I love about my Mac is how easy to use the trackpad is with all of its features. (the other things are durability and being a POSIX system, both covered apparently by the lenovo and being a Linux). I won't pay an extra 1000USD or more for it though, especially if it's reasonably ok in the X1 for instance

544 points by bpierre 10y ago

I agree it can be a bit work to get ur ubuntu laptop works perfect. But just a simple wireless driver install with ubuntu 14.04 lts gives me the perfect experience. While my win10 connection constantly droppes.

anthk 10y ago

>I didn't debate this for days, I installed the latest available Ubuntu right away as it was the distribution Man, stick to 16.04, add PlayDEB and the official MESA releases. If you want something recent based on GNU/Linux, desktop oriented, and fast, get SolusOS.

robert_foss 10y ago
Why stick with 16.04?
- nishs 10y ago
  Not OP, probably because it an LTS release.
  - viraptor 10y ago
    While LTS has benefits, there are reasons to running the latest version you can get. Especially with new hardware, there are going to be updates to the relevant drivers which can improve the battery life a lot. Over the first year after I bought the older X1, my battery life got an extra hour or so because of i915 module improvements. (I was following latest arch kernels)
  - slitaz 10y ago
    The LTS releases get a kernel upgrade and graphics libraries every six months or so. So, you get newer hardware support even if you stay at 16.04. There is a new such update for 16.04 at the end of this month. It is the 16.04.02 update.

leastangle 10y ago

Waiting for the new X1 Carbon to be available in order to replace my MBP...

partycoder 10y ago

Elementary OS is very similar to Mac OS in terms of UI. Of course the project is rather new, but is very promising. The desktop environment (Pantheon) is installable in Ubuntu, though. Once in a while you might end up with a messed up situation that might require some effort to fix.

willismichael 10y ago
How well does it work to install Pantheon on Ubuntu? I'm curious to try it on a home computer that has other users without impacting them, is there a simple way to make it launch Pantheon when I sign in, but still use Unity for other user accounts on the machine? Ages ago I remember using a login client that allowed you to pick which desktop environment you wanted to use, but I'm not sure how to do it on Ubuntu... I guess I could google around for whatever command-line-and-text-editor-fu is required.
- fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
  Lightdm/gdm (the service that provides the login screen) generally provides a way to choose an alternate session to start on login and then remember it on a per-user basis.
  - guitarbill 10y ago
    The way this works on Ubuntu is there's a small icon (circle-like) next to the user name, click this and if you have other desktop environments installed, you can select it. It's a great way to try out new ones. I tried Ubuntu + Cinnamon before making the jump to Mint.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
      I've pretty much given up on Linux desktop environments in favor of tiling window managers. First I tried XMonad and then, when I had an issue with my monitor layout that was causing XMonad to crash (X reporting my monitor size as 0x0 for some reason). I jumped to StumpWM and have been using it ever since (it had the same problem, but I found it much easier to locate and fix the bug in a Common Lisp program than in a Haskell program: especially because I could connect to the running window manager with Slime in emacs, catch the error, and then fiddle around in the REPL for a while to find the X calls that could actually return the right monitor size).

baldfat 10y ago

Linux is all about customized computer. Personally I love tiled window managers (i3) and urvxt for a terminal and I prefer my gui programs to be mostly KDE. I am the only person in the world like this. Welcome to your way (As long as you don't mind working for it)

Koshkin 10y ago
> Linux is all about customized computer. While true for many Linux fans, the majority of regular Linux users, especially those in the enterprise arena, do not customize anything and simply use it the way it is installed/configured by default - pretty much as they would were they using Windows or MacOS.
- criddell 10y ago
  These days I advise people to pick the most popular distro and leave everything as close to the default settings as possible. I used to enjoy endless customizing (Enlightenment) but that ended up taking the place of actually doing work. These days I leave everything set to default and install as little software as I possibly can.
slitaz 10y ago
I used to do just that. But the installation ended carrying many skeletons and cruft. Now I reinstall Ubuntu LTS every two years and clean up my desktop. If there is a worthy configuration, I carry it over to the new installation.

ekianjo 10y ago

> For things like cropping & scaling images, The Gimp does an okay job. Strange, Darktable can do that too, very well and easier than on Gimp.

hhandoko 10y ago

> If you know f.lux, RedShift is an alternative to it for Linux. Good to know there's an alternative, but to clarify: f.lux is available on Linux as well (the statement makes it as if it weren't, just not open-source).

saghm 10y ago
I think due to the closed-source nature of f.lux, RedShift is in the main repos for more distros than f.lux, making it easier for new Linux users to install.
- hhandoko 10y ago
  That's a good point, thanks. I was looking at it as an Ubuntu user :)

ekianjo 10y ago

> So, is Linux ready for the desktop? > For me, the answer is yes. Honestly it's been ready for years on the desktop (of course, this does not apply if you are an expert user in Y software only available on Z platform and need to use it for your job/company, etc...). Ubuntu 16.04 did not bring anything significant on the table, it's just that most people have not noticed. I switched full Linux back in 2009~2010 and I have never looked back since.

antouank 10y ago
I agree that desktop on linux is ready, with the main trade-off being: you have to spend more time setting things up, but you can customise your software/hardware to any level you want. ( and just like Y software, there's X hardware that might not work with linux. those damn printers... ) Btw, I also started with Ubuntu but I'm finding Arch a much better and up to date distro.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  Arch is definitely the way most Linux users go once they get in a comfort zone with their existing distro (Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc...) and want to get something with better hardware support or even better software support (with Arch's fantastic AUR!). Antergos makes it easier than ever to jump into Arch, too.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  What is it that you like about Arch? Maybe I should give it a shot, although with Ubuntu you know you'll have both the solutions and the software available somewhere.
  - rhodysurf 10y ago
    For personal use its the most up to date and because its rolling release i never have to actually upgrade or wait for releases. Also newer kernels for newer hardware.
    - 10y ago

J0-nas 10y ago

Not related to the blog post but why are the websites form lenovo + dell (and acer) so god damn awful? lenovo.com redirects me to https://www.lenovo.com/se/en/ https://www.lenovo.com/se/en/ since i'm currently in Sweden. I then get nice server error as greeting: 403 - Forbidden: Access is denied. If I try to access lenovo.de I get often no response... also for subsequent pages... On dells website it takes an awful lot of time to filter their laptops. It's not even 100 items... why does it take so long? Acer has a nice compare function. The only problem is that you can't compare laptops of their business line with the home ones. They also have too many different models. The compare function doesn't showcase any difference.

flukus 10y ago
Even worse when you're trying to dig through a maze of URL's to find drivers, half the link will go to the US site which will then get redirected to the regional one where the file doesn't exist. Had to do it once for a network drive with "export restrictions" it took hours to find their awful, half working driver. IME Dell are one of the better ones.
wineisfine 10y ago
Yeah try ordering anything from Lenovo on your iPad... their site is buggy as hell. I mean, how much effort can it take to clean it up?
nkoren 10y ago
This, this, a thousand times this. One thing that Apple has done very well is put together a website that: A.) Tells you what they are selling, and B.) Can sell it to you. Why is it so hard for other vendors to figure out that this is a pretty good way to sell computers? My girlfriend bought an Asus Zenbook the other day; it's a really nice machine and made me wonder whether there might be a Zenbook for me. So I ended up on http://www.asus.com/zenbook/global/index.html http://www.asus.com/zenbook/global/index.html. Is there a product list? No. A comparison feature? No. A way to buy, like, anything at all? Fuck you, says Asus. Here, have a bunch of annoying marketing copy; if you like that enough then maybe you can buy from some online retailer who has screwed up the model-numbers, unless you'd rather go to a shop were some know-nothing highschooler will try to make a commission by upselling you. Had the same experience with HP. I take your word for it that Leno and Dell and Acer are similar. Really made me appreciate Apple's retail mechanisms (as much as I'm aiming to exit their ecosystem). Seriously, industry: WTF? Get it together, guys!

SloppyStone 10y ago

If only Linux had decent image editors... I would have made the jump years ago, but Gimp and Inkscape ain't just cutting it.

blhack 10y ago
Gimp's UI makes me really sad :( -- I used to be a HUGE proponent of it, since I had grown up using it. I had never known photoshop before, so gimp's UI made sense to me. 3-4 years ago they seem to have changed (apparently to make things closer to photoshop, is my guess?), and now it seems like the UI sucks for everybody.
- criddell 10y ago
  I don't ever remember a time where people weren't complaining about Gimp's UI.
Jeaye 10y ago
For painting, there's https://krita.org/en/ https://krita.org/en/ which has some excellent features.
mtw 10y ago
Same for me - last I checked, Gimp's UI is too damn awful. But I only need 5% of PHotoshop's features (smart selection, fill with color, resize, crop, optimize for web) to optimize images for web work
- flukus 10y ago
  Does this apply to the single window mode as well?
- pawadu 10y ago
  GIMP is ugly? watch this video, just give it 5 minutes of your time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNoVb5k40sU&t=30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNoVb5k40sU&t=30 the guy (a pro photographer) explains how to make GIMP less ugly and more usable.

montyboy_us 10y ago

+1 on the X1 Carbon. I made the switch this year, too, post MacBook Pro announcement. Have been running Fedora flawlessly. Cheers.

nishs 10y ago
Could you comment on your battery life experience / any heating issues?
- viraptor 10y ago
  Previous generation X1. Easily getting 6h of scripting. (As in, no heavy compiler or processing needed) Slightly warm, but no issues with heat.
  - phongngtuan 10y ago
    Tbh that does not sound very good for a flagship model...
    - viraptor 10y ago
      I've never seen a laptop actually survive longer than 7h practically. The advertised battery life may say >10, synthetic benchmarks may say a bit lower. But once you use it with wifi on, with proper brightness, actually doing some work - no - it always takes a big hit.
      - phongngtuan 10y ago
        Did you try windows, or if linux with lightweight use, would it improve the battery life? I had a macbook pro for 4 years so battery degraded and the processor wasn't that efficient but anecdote for newer macbook rarely reports anything less than 6 hours. I'm interested in a X270 (for the battery) but then I read somewhere battery on linux is kinda unstable. What do you think?

kinnth 10y ago

Im also going to make the switch with the Lenovo X1. Apple are just taking the piss with peripherals and cost now. Nice read, gives me more faith in my choice.

wineisfine 10y ago
Me too, waiting for the new one to become available.
criddell 10y ago
Will you miss the retina display though?
- artursapek 10y ago
  I just bought the highest-end 4th gen X1 Carbon and it has a high-density 2560x1440 matte display. It's as good as or better than the MBP's. And Ubuntu handles handles UI scaling surprisingly well.
  - intopieces 10y ago
    > And Ubuntu handles handles UI scaling surprisingly well. This is why I jumped from Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13 9343 (Early 2015) to a new MacBook Pro (Late 2016, non-touch). I was tired of being surprised when things worked well. I gave it a good shot -- five months of tweaking, five months of reinstalls and forum posts and being back on the Linux Train with everything. But it just got so old. Workarounds for workarounds, unpredictability, lack of interoperability with my other devices... I just couldn't do it anymore. Linux rarely delights. I still keep Elementary OS on a desktop (it too has some oddities, but it's mostly smooth sailing) but on a laptop, when I'm out of my home and really want to just get work done, I haven't found anything as pleasing as OS X. I enjoyed Linux for learning how to tweak things, but sometimes I want to use the computer, not configured it. And Ubuntu was always needing configuration.
- jronald 10y ago
  The new Macbook Pros come with similar resolutions: 13" Macbook pro: 2560-by-1600 native resolution at 227 pixels per inch 15" Macbook pro: 2880-by-1800 native resolution at 220 pixels per inch 14" x1 carbon: 14.0" (355mm) WQHD (2560x1440), anti-glare (209.8 PPI)

sk1pper 10y ago

IMO if money isn't an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good. Linux on desktops - as in, not a laptop - has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for >10 years. Not much else to say there. If desktop or server, this shouldn't be a discussion. As far as laptops go, I've just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100% usable and gets you everything you need. Getting things set up can be a way bigger PITA on Linux, like function keys, sound, and god forbid, wirless. I've never installed Linux on a laptop and had wireless not suck, at least a little bit. Mostly just randomly dropping connection. It's gotten better in the last few years, but it hasn't reached that perfect reliability that my mbp seems to have. Ubuntu seems to break a bit more on average - and those errors are a bit more likely to be obnoxious, or blockers even - like during boot. Not saying this is commonplace, but I've NEVER had OS X kernel panic on me during boot. Again, I would be perfectly happy a linux box instead, but for me it's worth a bit of extra $$ for what has seemed to me to be better reliability. Most of my experiences have been with Ubuntu LTS releases but really, I've tried all the big ones, and on quite a few different laptops over the years. YMMV of course. Edit: all that being said, prob will switch over when this one dies, because touch bar... lol

throwaway729 10y ago
Wireless hasn't been a problem (for me) for at least the past 3 years. The really dramatic improvements happened prior before 2010, and things have only gotten better since then. Bluetooth is still a damned mess. That, and battery life, and GPUs "just working", are the big differentiators IME. Of course YMMV.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  My experience matches yours. Wifi has worked for me for ages now, with various chipsets, but battery life has been very hit-and-miss, GPUs are almost a lost cause, and function keys/backlighting/cameras/other non-essentials are hairy. That said, the sibling comment has it right. Why am I buying laptops that don't support Linux if I'm going to use Linux on them? From now on, I'll only buy things that have Linux support as a first-class objective.

desireco42 10y ago

Most important part here, and what is mostly stopping me from jumping ship is photography. Darktable is probably fantastic software, however there is number of great plugins for Lightroom that I would miss dearly.

contingencies 10y ago
You can virtualize or dual-boot if your photography workflow is anything like mine (mostly huge, batch-oriented). You can even use eg. VMWare unity mode to right-click to open in Lightroom in a virtualized windows or OSX instance. Performance won't be perfect but it's definitely good enough. Less so for video editing. Personally the bigger irritation has been printer drivers. I have a Canon Pixma Pro 1 which has no drivers for Linux, forcing me to maintain out of date Windows systems to print with, at which point one can spend a thousand years defibrillating half-baked theories on color management and virtualization, or crushingly accept a partial solution. Canon: GIVE US LINUX DRIVERS.
- CarVac 10y ago
  Printing is perfectly fine with Epson printers.
  - gonzo 10y ago
    And Brother, and HP.
  - pawadu 10y ago
    At work we have an old HP printer that only worked with linux out of the box. Windows 8 needed drivers to be downloaded and even than couldn't print duplex. OSX people had similar problems. Windows 10 worked really smoothly on the other hand. And now that it has a proper shell I am starting to like Windows again...
- lucaspiller 10y ago
  Wasn't unity mode been removed from Linux hosts? Or did they add it back? http://planetvm.net/blog/?p=2936 http://planetvm.net/blog/?p=2936

codezero 10y ago

Curious what the wifi, sleep, and battery life stories are like in comparison to Mac OS.

throwaway729 10y ago
IME wifi isn't much a problem anymore. Might want to look up the chipset before purchase to be sure, but I've had zero issues since maybe 2006? Sleep is still kinda annoying. Every once in a while my machine ends up not going to sleep when I close the lid and I end up with a hot brick at 2% battery when I take it out of my bag. TBF this has happened to me with MBPs too, though. Battery life is a major differentiator. Mac wins there for all normal use cases.
- criddell 10y ago
  How well are high-dpi displays handled these days?
  - pkaye 10y ago
    I just switched to a 4K monitor for my Ubuntu desktop system. Everything was automatically recognized. I just had to use one of the settings to scale things up to my liking. Beyond this, a couple apps were still of the wrong font scaling so I had to tweak them individually. Lastly the console and boot fonts have to be changed separately but there was an online link that gave me the command line settings to make those happen. In the end the effort was not not much more than I dealt with in Windows.
  - favadi 10y ago
    Unity hands scaling well, but many applications just don't work well with HiDPI. But same problem happens with Windows 10. In this regard, OS X does the job better.
autoreleasepool 10y ago
I just installed Xubuntu on my mother's aging MacBook. Wifi and sleep/resume worked out of the box (even during installation) and batter life has been good. Plus her internet browser and email are much snappier now.

rurban 10y ago

Dtrace? systemtap is not close to dtrace performance and ease of use. I'd rather switch to freebsd or dragonfly than back to linux.

tomrod 10y ago
All three are excellent choices.
gonzo 10y ago
Kris Moore reports that TrueOS (previously PC-BSD) works on the X1 Carbon 4th gen except for resume.
moosingin3space 10y ago
Stay tuned with some of the BPF performance monitoring stuff landing, it's supposed to be pretty good. I don't know much about it, unfortunately.

jstewartmobile 10y ago

I've been using vanilla Debian w/XFCE as my development desktop for years now, and it has been great. I am especially fond of the Guake terminal (http://guake-project.org http://guake-project.org). It is just a translucent terminal that swoops up/down from the top with a keypress.

peterburkimsher 10y ago

Is there a common high-level scripting tool for Gnome, like AppleScript? For me it's all about the APIs. When I want to do something like: tell application "iTunes" to return every track whose genre is "Rock" and rating > 3 then I don't want to mess around with API documentation for 10 hours and trying lots of different music managers, then importing my large library, just to lose all the tags. I expect similar APIs in the file browser, text editor, photo library, contacts, calendar, and web browser apps too. A common API is what makes an ecosystem to me.

TD-Linux 10y ago
Yes and no, there's a standard API called D-Bus. If you want to browse it you can run a program like D-Feet and choose "session bus". It's not tied to a particular language though, rather you need bindings to it. In addition, it's somewhat more complex than AppleScript, and the APIs that most apps provide are rarely documented. It does have the concept of standard interfaces, so many apps will often implement identical APIs.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

asciimo 10y ago

> And now I see their latest MBP line with the Esc key removed... What?! Ha. It almost seems like post-Jobs Apple "innovates" by removing classic user interfaces.

jaegerpicker 10y ago
It's only technically removed. The function row including the escape button was replaced with a touch screen that can and does display an escape button in the given context. It's still bad because the escape button is in a different place and doesn't always display at the right time. As a emacs user, escape is my meta key, I dislike it because it messes with my muscle memory.
- DRW_ 10y ago
  > It's still bad because the escape button is in a different place and doesn't always display at the right time. It's actually pretty much in the same place (touchable area is bigger than the visual button) and I'm pretty certain it displays at all times. Missing the feedback is more than understandable criticism (that I agree with) but muscle memory of hitting the key in the first place itself shouldn't really change, hasn't for me - as someone who does use vim a fair amount.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I went in the opposite direction. I downloaded Slackware over a 2400bud modem, and have used Linux ever since then. For a long time, Linux was my principle OS for a laptop, but occasionally using OS X on a Mac laptop. I have mostly been retired for a long while, and usually try to limit my work time to 4 hours a day. I want that 4 hours to be as productive as possible, and right now my little MacBook is a bit more productive. Cost is not an issue.

sedatk 10y ago
> I downloaded Slackware over a 2400bud modem That is some serious phone bill.
tyfon 10y ago
I was lucky enough to get the Slackware book with the cd around 1993-94(?) so I didn't have to go through the whole floppydisk dance. I did try something called minilinux before though that I downloaded off a bbs. I think it was 4 floppies :) Still using linux to this day both at home and work.

Abishek_Muthian 10y ago

In my humble opinion, OSX : Productivity, Linux : Development, Windows : Games I've been with all of these for all my computing life & still doing the same. OSX/macOS is great for anyone who doesn't want to meddle with their system, especially if you use iDevices. Though developers have historically liked OSX, it could be apt for web development or anything non resource consuming (like java/android). For e.g I symlinked my android sdk (15 GB) to another SSD and had the android studio run from the native partition & the android studio's instant run feature sure made whole lot of mess and took 1 hour to compile ~2,00,000 lines of code. Of course this is not the fault of OSX, but I can manage partitions better & expandability is cheaper in a linux based system. Of course Linux : I use an external SSD with Arch Linux for android development with the Mac. It has improved my development productivity multifold. Of course you might need some tinkering to do, but will be straight forward unless it involves GPU. Basically GPU drivers, especially Nvidia sucks big time on linux. Windows : DirectX.

slitaz 10y ago
The game situation is changing fast. Even CivIV was just announced that it is coming to Linux. Perhaps the Vulkan drivers will make it even better to write crossplatform games.
- hobarrera 10y ago
  Plus, wine works marvelously nowadays, with lots of games getting platinum or gold ratings, some even on the day they're released.
pawadu 10y ago
> OSX/macOS is great for anyone who doesn't want to meddle with their system We use ubuntu for that here. Outside adding your own dotfiles the machines are completely untouched. Works like a charm. Okay, I admit I have also changed my desktop background ;)

artursapek 10y ago

I made the exact same move a couple months ago (Ubuntu on X1 Carbon) and have never been happier with a computer.

terrywang 10y ago

Linux? Desktop? Different answer from different people. For me I've always been optimistic. Linux as desktop offers choices and freedom. I've been running Linux as my main desktop since Fedora Core 1 (you can count). Overall the kernel and desktop environments (window managers) are getting better (especially KDE). Of course, there has been learning curves and all sort of frustration, many weird problems to attack but never a real showstopper AS LONG AS you had the time and passion to research (learn) and fix them (at least it is how I have built up my Linux skills tree). It's about freedom and choice, also the habit that has formed over the years. I do use a MacBook Pro 15" for work (on the move, portability, battery life is better than running Linux on it - plus the wireless driver hassle - no worth it - as long as iTerm2 and homebrew is in place - don't care), but the pretty much all grunt work is done on my workstations (2 optiplex) in office and home. They both are running Arch Linux + KDE Plasma 5 (Xfce4 and other light weight WMs as alternatives). I just feel relaxed and in control of the OS (can do pretty much what I want - like mount a part of physical memory as ramfs/tmpfs and use it to do heavy I/O tasks etc... similar to drive a manual car ;-) I don't mind using a Mac but do consider Linux as a good and free alternative when coming across things that do not work well on Mac. It may not work for all but you'll have to give it a try to know. In addition, better consult and seek advice from Linux veterans regarding distribution/desktop environment/window manager choices, known hardware support issues and best practices beforehand, save you time and trouble ;-)

terrywang 10y ago
With regard to Power Management TLP may be useful for people who run Linux on laptops TLP – Linux Advanced Power Management http://linrunner.de/tlp http://linrunner.de/tlp https://github.com/linrunner/TLP https://github.com/linrunner/TLP Laptop Mode Tools is the then standard way of power saving, not sure if it is obsolete now. https://github.com/rickysarraf/laptop-mode-tools https://github.com/rickysarraf/laptop-mode-tools In addition, Intel's PowerTop and other stuff on 01.org can also be useful if running on Intel architecture (GPU). I had been running Ubuntu 8.04, 10.04 12.04 on Dell Latitude D630 and E6410 (suspend to memory worked fine `pm-suspend` and then `systemctl suspend`) for several years, during that period of time laptop mainly sat on docking station as a desktop so I couldn't care less about power management, performance was first priority (e.g. no HDD spin-down `hdparm -B 254 /dev/sdX`, no swap devices, vm.swappiness=1 etc...). HTH

csdreamer7 10y ago

For those of you looking for a nice little Linux laptop check out System76's Lemur. https://system76.com/laptops/lemur https://system76.com/laptops/lemur I have the older Skylake version and it runs just fine as long as you use Mesa 13 (I use Manjaro so it is not an issue). System76 does little things such as commit driver fixes to the kernel and flash a custom bios and firmware to make the hardware run better with Linux. If you want to good hardware support on Linux you can't go wrong with buying laptop from them.

Freak_NL 10y ago
I just wish they (or a comparable competitor) opened up shop in Europe. Ordering from the US is doable, but the hit-or-miss import tax sucks, and for warranty the distance and economic zone mismatch mean delays and high shipping costs. That said, they make great laptops. I love my four year old Gazelle.

mnm1 10y ago

The problem is/was never Linux. For me, it's always been X. At some point, it just stops working. I've had to reinstall from scratch so many times over the last 20 years that I've lost count. Tried again these last couple of months. Nope. The longest X has stayed stable has been almost 6 months, about 5 years ago. Same as 20 and 10 years ago. This time it was only a few weeks. After that, I'm lucky if I get a text login prompt at all. Maybe Wayland will be better but I'm not holding my breath based on what I've read so far. On top of X's display issues, it has input issues, especially with trackpads. This should be self explanatory to anyone who's run Linux on an Macbook Pro and likely with any other trackpad. I think many of the issues can be fixed with many days spent on tweaking the drivers, but some of the issues don't seem to have a fix that the drivers support (proper double tap detection that only registers a double tap if my fingers are close together--should part of accidental touch detection--for example). I really want it to work but X is simply insufferable in its current form. I shouldn't have to reinstall the OS multiple times just to test it out or debug X when it fails to load (it's just easier to reinstall). Ironically, everything else works perfectly for me, including all necessary software, wifi, nvidia gfx, etc.

terrywang 10y ago
X is really old and should be phased out. That's why Fedora has made Wayland the default display manager in latest Fedora 25. I have never had the problem you've described, most issue I've encountered (my VGA/GPU were all Intel/NVIDIA) can be fixed (using pseudo console, SSH, chroot etc...) without reinstall (which doesn't really fix the root cause). The issues you've mentioned, try to look for workarounds from distro wiki or stackoverflow (sister sites), or even Gentoo/Arch Docs, try to get mentor who's a Linux veteran will save you time and effort. I've been running rolling release for many years and it has never broken once after the sysV init -> systemd migration (I did a reinstall). Even Ubuntu / Kubuntu LTS versions have been stable, I wonder if it the VGA/GPU driver causing all the troubles. HTH
- mnm1 10y ago
  I'm hoping Wayland does indeed solve the problems X has. Unfortunately, it's not just one problem but a series of them spread over multiple machines from various vendors. This latest one I think is probably not the graphics driver as it did work fine for a couple of weeks but the trackpad driver. I think I might give Fedora 25 a shot and see if there's a difference. Without a doubt, however, Linux based OS's have come a very long way even in just the last 5 years, let alone the last 20. Mint KDE for example, works almost out of the box for me on my 2013 MbPro w/ external 4k monitor (except internal trackpad / Magic Trackpad 2). I suspect I'll be able to remove that "almost" in the next year or two if not sooner and once messing with X config is no longer required, hopefully X (or Wayland) will be stable.

DoodleBuggy 10y ago

Didn't work for me, yet, but maybe someday. In the meantime I'm still holding out hope that Apple saves the Mac. Sigh.

corv 10y ago

Sure it's possible to use Linux on the desktop. It's also possible to find some laptops that are well supported. Do I want to replace Lightroom, Sketch, Pixelmator, 1Password and Alfred with inferior replacements? No, because my livelihood depends on good tools and I think it's fair to pay money for them.

kajecounterhack 10y ago
FWIW Figma is quickly becoming a great replacement for Sketch. And I think Adobe is working on cloud equivalents for many of their offerings, so when those are ready at least some of your concerns will be removed. 1Password definitely has replacements that aren't inferior. Alfred is OS specific tuning and you can easily get settings you enjoy on your Linux desktop.
- corv 10y ago
  And yet Linux is missing a lot of high quality commercial software. Even if all my software ran on Linux I still wouldn't have the peace of mind that walking in a store and buying an Apple laptop offers. I would have to research models or order and wait for an XPS to arrive in order to have a machine that is sure to work.
methodin 10y ago
I find it difficult to believe that your livelihood depends solely on the specific combination of apps you mentioned. It doesn't even seem like you've actually tried any of these apps yet call them inferior? Inferior how? That's quite an elitist stance to portray without the specifics to back it up here.
- corv 10y ago
  My livelihood doesn't depend on Lightroom but I don't want a laptop that only does a subset of my computing. I've tried darktabke and the UI is a mess, same with Gimp. A lot of open source software is unpolished and lacking in documentation. If that is elitist so be it.
- 10y ago

gonzo 10y ago

After a decade on MacBooks, I've just gone the same route as the author. Ubuntu on an X1 Carbon 4th gen. After moving to 16.10, the only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint reader. I also buy the systems for most of the developers in my company (we do pfSense), and they're also going to be asked to consider the same solution on future upgrades.

csdreamer7 10y ago
gonzo, you may want to check out my comment here on the Lemur. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13362198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13362198

jhanschoo 10y ago

This is pretty tangential to the topic, but if anybody is looking to dual- or triple-boot without resorting to third-party EFI software, http://courses.cms.caltech.edu/cs171/materials/pdfs/How_to_Dual-Boot_OSX_and_Ubuntu.pdf http://courses.cms.caltech.edu/cs171/materials/pdfs/How_to_D... offers the best guide to setting up such an environment using the Apple EFI. I've successfully followed a modified version of this guide's steps to install Ubuntu to a bootable USB drive and am very satisfied with it.

methodin 10y ago

For the most part all software/hardware combinations are pretty solid for a majority of users. Those that required very specific things - obviously not. Hell I'm a developer and switched to Chromebooks since I only need a browser and ssh. Everyone should always be out there looking at other stuff - chances are you can discover something new or even better than what you thought possible.

themodelplumber 10y ago
> Everyone should always be out there looking at other stuff - chances are you can discover something new or even better than what you thought possible This is a great point. I bought Dell's first Ubuntu laptop offering back in '07 or '08, and am still thankful I did to this day, even though the machine has long since retired. Back then the MacBook Pro was a very solid offering, and a Linux laptop was almost a joke. But I still have Youtube video tutorials I recorded from that laptop, it was a great machine and your point is as true now as it was then. Try it out, don't just sit there ignorantly whinging, is my version. :-)

cossovich 10y ago

I moved from OS X to Ubuntu running on Thinkpads as my main work machine around the Ubuntu 12.04 era... haven't looked back. I have an 11" Macbook Air as a backup/home machine and I think Canonical have closed the gap in terms of polish and stability. If you stick with well supported hardware (Thinkpad T and X series in my experience) you can't go wrong.

Walkman 10y ago

A lot of people find "alternatives" to the OS X apps, but they don't realize the difference is so huge it's not even funny. Alfred DOES NOT have an alternative on any platform. It's so good it's unbelievable, takes job of multiple programs I need to constantly use on Linux. Also DashDoc, etc. Also there is Terminator yes, but it's feature set is nowhere near of iTerm2, it's crazy what you can do with it and how convenient is it compared to any terminal emulators.

jordic 10y ago

Don't miss the point that every morning when you open your laptop you will be proud of using a free Desktop.

voycey 10y ago

Disclaimer: I have been using Linux as my main OS for many years now.... However, I actually agree with a lot of the below, the alternative programs on Linux aren't up to scratch with tools people build their livelihood on (Illustrator, Photoshop, Sketch etc). But the opposite is true also, I find development painful on OSX, I get pissed when starting with a new company and they assume I want a Mac. My stack is LAMP, it's what the servers run, its what I want to run on my local development machine as well. I am currently on Windows / Virtualbox with a full desktop version of Ubuntu 16.04 and its a great setup, best of both worlds, I can develop natively and if there is anything I need to do that is beyond the capabilities of any Linux Replacements (e.g I had to some pretty heavy vector editing the other day), I have Windows available just a minimise away!

renownedmedia 10y ago

I've been switching back and forth between OS X and Linux for the past several years. I'm currently at a year and a half into a Linux streak and really enjoying recent advancements. My Dell XPS 13 typically gets 10 hours of battery life. Linux itself is quite stable. Simply install a recent distro and off you go. If you're using a heavy Window Manager you'll get all the convenient configuration applets you need. The real issue, IMO, is the desire to tinker. OS X is a bit limiting in what you can do with it. I haven't seen anyone with custom window decorations in OS X in a long time. Short of running a software update we aren't capable of tweaking kernel versions and system utilities. If we stick to the same limitations in Linux it's going to be near impossible to break. Once the Linux tinkering sets in you'll find that you've installed a bleeding edge kernel, changed some repository sources, modified Xorg.conf, ./configure && make && make install'd an obscure library (then (mostly) uninstalled it), and installed Python 2 alongside Python 3 without rebooting for two months. Good luck rebooting at that point ;) With great power comes a great desire to shoot ourselves in the foot.

sscarduzio 10y ago
Sadly, I second this. But even tweaking the themes or the trackpad sensitivity is a huge time sink that waits for me to bite the bait in a weakness moment. About the Python 2 alongside Python 3 et similia: fortunately, integrating Virtualenv for python and Docker for all the rest in your workflow solves many of those crazy lib dependencies causing instability. About the xorg.conf and instable kernels, I'm VERY SURPRISED there's not a Linux kernel fork, heck even a branch that is pre-optimised and stabilised for those 4 or 5 most common Linux laptops. And if it's unreasonable to delegate this effort to the kernel devs, how about Ubuntu starts to maintain an XPS13-2015/X1Carbon2016 variant of the kernel deb package?
willismichael 10y ago
Oh come on, I've been a Linux enthusiast for over a decade now and it's been years since I've even touched xorg.conf, installed a kernel that didn't come from a standard repo, or had trouble rebooting due to a change I made to the system. Linux has gotten significantly less painful over the years, and it's not just that I'm more familiar with it now. Installing a mainstream distro these days is easier than the last time I installed Windows (granted, that was XP). I finally caved and started using a Mac for work. I was afraid that I would like it so much that I would just have to buy one for home, but I actually find Linux is still pleasant to use, I still think I prefer it over Mac OS.

tuananh 10y ago

I tried Fedora 25 recently. While the driver support is way way better than before (everything works out of the box) but the graphic driver support is abysmal. It works but stutter like crazy. Installing graphic driver is not very trivial.

0max 10y ago

On the flip side, I just went from OS X to Windows 10, which has Ubuntu available under developer settings...And now I can play all my old Windows Steam games. Last time I used Windows for my workhorse was Vista.

techolic 10y ago

It should be included some internet law that every article contains a tl;dr section.

digi_owl 10y ago

With these things it boils down to two issues that are often related. First being drivers, second being software patents. With regards to drivers there are two variants of the issue. The first is buggy proprietary drivers. Please stop insisting on using Nividia hardware under Linux just because they offer a proprietary driver pack. That driver pack is a mess and a half, and most of the complaints i have seen levied against X11 can be explained by said proprietary drivers being in use. The second is buggy hardware hidden by proprietary Windows drivers. This is why you see all kinds of power management issues under Linux. All too often the hardware will claim to support being suspended, but never come back to life one done so. Manufacturers knows of this, and will implement workarounds in their official drivers. As for software patents, they result in FOSS having to wait some 20 years to implement "bleeding obvious" features to avoid getting sued.

deleted 10y ago

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ravirajx7 10y ago

There may be 1000s of reasons for using linux distro which i genuinely don't know about but one thing which i have noticed is that linux requires lot of time setting things up. There is terminal for you to work as app store and there is app store also ( though this app store doesn't have that many apps). I have used ubuntu,debian,manjaro,budgie remix and things which i have found buggy about all of these distros are it's Wi-Fi support (like it supports my mobile hotspot but I don't know why it's buggy with my college wifi and i still can't access internet over my college hotspot) Maybe I'm noob? and i don't know how to solve many of its issues. But genuinely speaking do i need that much of skill just to run an os? Seriously? i never ever had any problem using windows. Some other issues with Linux distros include its Bluetooth support which also stuck. I mean why do i need to invest so much of time putting apt get install xyz? After finding commands over internet. Even basic file managers and many packages like media plugings etc. you need to update time to time which means for you to use linux distro efficiently you need to be connected with internet. Ever tried using Linux without internet? Use it once you'll feel the boredom using it. The main reason i still use linux is just fan following ( i.e. its Internet based reviews its virus security and all that which you too know about ). And all being said i have lost so many files because whole of my os just crashed several times without me knowing any reason? And one more you know? you can't use windows hard disk drive without shutting down or logging your windows off properly. I mean why do i need to put this much of effort just to use this linux distro? Though on the other side you are skipping windows gold class desktop environment and its user friendliness. You have to put some more effort again to play games. I'm amazed how people love complex things than the easier one.

stymaar 10y ago

> Nowadays even Steam is available for Linux, with more and more titles available. That should get you covered for a little while. If it doesn't, PlayOnLinux allows running Windows games on Wine. Most of the time, it works just fine. I'm my experience can be totally true if you have an Nvidia Graphic card (I run almost every games on my desktop) but it can also be false if you have something else (my laptop have an Integrated Intel graphic and I can run nothing). The author have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which have a newer version of Intel graphic and it looks like he achieves to run games, so maybe there is some progress on that front also.

Insanity 10y ago

All laptops at home are running ubuntu, and so is my desktop. For me it was seemingly the opposite to the experience of many people here. I had no issues whatsoever with the laptops, everything worked pretty much out of the box. No issues with function keys not working, wireless, audio or anything else. On the other hand, on my desktop I had a lot of issues with random system freezes, and with the audio. My headset would have a constant crackling and the graphics card had quite a few issues. As with most things, YMMV.

macco 10y ago

For all your OS X coming to Linux, a word of personal advice. Use a distro with KDE, Kubuntu is great for beginners and install ubuntu-make (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-make https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-make), a command line utility that installs your dev environment. If you feel a bit more adventurous and want the all of the newest Software try Manjaro-KDE. Why KDE? KDE has a traditional Desktop experience, that can be tweaked in every way. It is much more polished and all the other Linux desktops and it uses Qt5 as it's base - so the team doesn't need to develop the widget toolkit and can focus on the desktop. Lastly gtk apps look much better in KDE than Qt apps in Gnome. BTW: I was a long time Unity and then Gnome user, so I know what I am talking about. I switched to KDE this summer and never looked back.

aruggirello 10y ago
If I recall correctly, Kubuntu was the reference KDE platform when Plasma 5 made its debut (two years ago). Nowadays, it seems Fedora leads the way, but Kubuntu is a great choice nonetheless. BTW I'm using Kubuntu 16.04.
more_original 10y ago
The choice of desktop environment is quite a personal matter. I would recommend Gnome 3, which is especially polished on Fedora. The early transition years from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 were rough, and I switched to KDE for this time. KDE was fine, but Gnome 3 has been polished a lot in the last view years. So I switched back to Gnome 3 and never looked back :).
- macco 10y ago
  > The choice of desktop environment is quite a personal matter. Absolutely.

runeks 10y ago

What about SSDs? The only mention I can find is for the 5720, All-in-One, which is a 27" workstation. Do the laptops ship with rotational HDDs? IMHO comparing this to a MacBook (with its PCIe SSD) if it has a rotational HDD is disingenuous. I replaced my root partition HDD with an SSD in 2009 and I'm never going back.

hd4 10y ago

Since a few versions now (and also in 16.04 LTS), the Bluetooth drivers in the kernel used by Ubuntu have been broken. Otherwise Ubuntu is a solid distro and it doesn’t get in my way.

ldev 10y ago

Tried to switch to Linux like a month ago, main gripes: 1) Typing sudo before everything. Entering your password everytime OS farts. Geez. Even installing nodejs required to type sudo, meanwhile on macOS - brew install node. Also Ubuntu has outdated packages (nodejs version in their "up do date" repository starts with a zero, need to hunt down ppas, I mean at this point package repository loses it's point, because it's easier to go to the package's website and download it than googling out two ppas and checking which one is more legit, buut then you run into another issue - windows has exe files, macos has dmg files, linux has a zip file and it's not recommended to install this way, what a royal mess). 2) No good dock software. There's plank, xfce, kde provides almost "docks", but all plainly suck. What I want from dock - notifications in dock on app icon (you got 2 unread messages in skype, mail app, messenger, etc etc - show a little overlay on the icon with number "2") and tasks in submenu - right click on skype icon - common tasks like changing online status, right click on music player icon - show Play/Pause, Skip song, etc etc. There's a bazillion choices and every linux fanboy touts about the POWER OF CHOICE - but all choices suck (so you could say there's no choice, there's even no one option). 3) I really love global app menu. Well, I was told Linux has THE customizability... Apparently not when you want something more technically difficult than one of the same tilling wm or conky config - for the most part using jaytana and vala global menu worked, but IntelliJ IDEA's globbal menu entries did nothing on click and some gtk3 software didn't hid their own app menu, so not really working well. Customizability my ass. I like linux on server, it's allright there (although FreeBSD with clearly defined base system and /usr is actually designed), but as a desktop OS - not even close.

Sean1708 10y ago
It might be worth giving ApricityOS[0] a try next time you fancy delving into Linux, I've a lot of good things from ex-Mac users who switched to it. [0]: https://apricityos.com/ https://apricityos.com/
- ldev 10y ago
  Thanks. I try out Linux every year and it's getting better, I mean Linux gets 95% of things right (if not right - atleast you can live with it), but devil's in the details and those remaining little 5% really piss me off. Like xfce - program can change it's state or w/e to busy for 50 ms and you get the loading spinner near your cursor for 50 ms. So cursor just "blinks" with loading spinner. Sometimes repeatedly. Somehow never noticed that on macOS - either applications are designed better and only known long tasks change the cursor, or there's a system wide control - show spinner near cursor only if app was in busy state for 500 ms or something. This year tried out Ubuntu, elementaryOS, Manjaro and Solus. Well, Solus on boot on my system had a black screen, and when booted in VirtualBox on Windows - black screen but atleast network notification showed that I'm connected to the internet, after I dismissed the notification - black screen again.

dirtyhenry 10y ago

My main point to stick to macOS is the lack of any solid alternative to Xcode for iOS development. For a non-development environment, I think Raspbian provides a good enough experience. #stuckForever

pawadu 10y ago
This is because Apple wants to lock you in. It is your choice to stay with the platform or get out. Fun fact: if you remote login into a OSX machine you wont be allowed to build and publish iOS apps. Apple has disabled that on purpose. Think about that for a minute!
- K0SM0S 10y ago
  Sounds like the "evil" MS of the late 90s/early 2000s. When I see a company resorting to such artificial and globally-detrimental methods in a sorry attempt to retain/lock customers, I feel like it's an implicit admission that they've lost much of their mind-share, their "higher" vision, their "capital of relevance" so to speak. It's basically a tantrum disconnected from a higher coherent vision, like "if I can't have it, then nobody gets it!" and goes on to break the thing in question. Such negativity. Jobs' Apple was aggressive and ruthless, but not negative, it really sought to add value to their customers life; it was indeed much more loyal to, and respectful of, said customers (and I suspect much less to its partners). Above all it was damn substantial in its own way, towards its own path: you don't lock X because you can and that's the best you could come up with, you lock X because it makes sense from a business perspective without alienating the user. You may have disliked many of their decisions, the matter of the fact is that in the long run they made sense from a deeper perspective. Cook's Apple is nothing like that, it's like "hipsters meet hedge funds" philosophy of profit/design, more shady/disingenuous ways of enticing customer pride/lock. Even their marketing can be misguiding nowadays, and while not lying, it's way passed a red line that Jobs never crossed: yes you may sell a lot with a clever marketing twist (not lies per se, but a message that feels as much once you've realized there was intent behind your misunderstanding or misplaced expectations); but in the long run, it hurts your very ability to sell anew, i.e. you traded trust for profit and may end up deserving none. Such a flawed approach to adding value to the world, making the sector worse off, overall, the more it's entangled in the artificially closed Apple ecosystem. No wonder people have woken up and many are actively trying to escape Apple's garden now, but that's only the 1% of the savviest --most consumers keep buying the latest Macs, often for reasons like customer service (consciously) and social status biases (unconsciously). If I may use a pop reference, Apple used to be a Vulcan company, now they're closer to a Ferengi clone. This isn't just an abstract rant, it's a high-level account of all the very real and practical reasons that drove me off the Apple wagon during the past 4 years or so, why I stopped spending $2K/year on their products (did that for a decade) and why I don't recommend Macs/iOS anymore to most of my contacts (and right there is at least 10x my spending, also gone to MS, Google, Dell, Samsung, HTC, ASUS, etc.) I know this all may sound harsh and a bit hyperbolic, but it's basically my way of saying it's little things like these that show, or rather raises questions, how/whether a company lost its way. About UI/UX on Apple products for instance, or software quality in general, or the hardware philosophy of sleek/hot/not powerful Macs, the first signs were already there by 2013: the current situation isn't surprising if you were deep into the Apple ecosystem and paying attention to such aspects, in painful detail I agree. Right at the same moment MS changed and became Nadella's opened, software-first, partner-friendly company, and even if not obvious at all some years ago, their current situation isn't surprising either looking at how details, little events here and there in the MS ecosystem, painted a very clear picture towards that vision. If I were invested in Apple right now, as a consumer or investor, I wouldn't trust their ability to remain "above" or "equal to" MS/Google by 2020, in terms of OS/software/services. Not saying they won't, but there's momentum to reverse there, it's currently downhill (and much faster than I had anticipated, Windows 10 or Android really are on par nowadays, if not actually better on many such "details"). The question is whether Apple under several CEOs will prove to be an IBM or a Microsoft: can this 20th century company effectively embrace new paradigms? Can they move past their previous decisions, which may have made sense at the time, but would eventually grow to become obsolete or even flawed as computing and behaviors evolve in time? How is their internal culture conducive to such change, how much does it impede meaningful design and innovation currently?

aruggirello 10y ago

Shameless plug: wish me good luck - I'm going to open an ecommerce for Linux- & BSD- preinstalled laptop & desktop computers in Italy (because that's where I live). Mind you, it's a small business, initially limited to reselling OEM-preinstalled systems already available in the wholesale market, but if it works, I'm planning to launch my own models, too. Any suggestions?

pawelkomarnicki 10y ago
Don't do it.
- thepiwo 10y ago
  I'd say he should try, but with out to high expectations or financial investments. Linux offers could work for people just wanting a working computer with less risk of viruses. People that don't care for their machine running Linux. Most other people interested are tech savvy and will compare other offerings as well or selfbuild.
- aruggirello 10y ago
  Please elaborate. Are there specific reasons you think I might not have considered yet?
thepiwo 10y ago
Do you already have a Name/Website? Will you only offer Desktop and Server PCs?
- aruggirello 10y ago
  Not yet, but I'm working on that. Server market is tough, I won't do that, at least initially. I'm oriented towards hardware that may be suitable for developers/DevOps: laptop, desktop. Edit: to clarify, desktop might range from dirt cheap commodity hw to high profile workstations. So no blades, rack-mounted stuff etc. (I don't know what fits your definition of server).
10y ago

pawelkomarnicki 10y ago

Why not using Windows 10 laptop with Vagrant for development?

Adracus 10y ago

Sure, functionality-wise Ubuntu and also other Linux operating systems can definitely match the palette that OS X offers. The problems with Ubuntu are starting if you are getting into the area of peripherals: Drivers for some things are missing or are not performing as comparable Hardware does under OS X, it gets even worse when you're struggling with HiDPI: Have you ever tried to have one non-HiDPI and one HiDPI screen as when using your QHD laptop screen together with a FullHD secondary monitor? Total pain in the ass under Ubuntu and in contrast very easy on OS X.

Vinkekatten 10y ago

For work (java + web developer) Linux is what I would prefer. Unfortunately we're a Windows shop. For play (gaming + photography) it's a no go. Stuck with Windows for a while longer I suppose.

chmike 10y ago

I have an Ubuntu desktop and a Macbook air laptop. On the Desktop computer I have a TypeMatrix Bépo keyboard which is great for French people writing French text and coding. What I'm missing on my Ubuntu computer is Word and Excel. LibreOffice is very far from the quality of Word. So I use my Mac when I have to write word documents but the Mac interface is a pain. I had a windows laptop but although the hardware was good it was very slooooow at start up. It needed 30minutes to be ready to be usable (reboot or wake up) and without any roaming and with virus checking disabled. That's useless. The only serious problem in my field with Ubuntu is that many people use Word as document format and this is annoying.

fb03 10y ago
I feel your pain and sadly, the only way I could find around this issue was to use a virtual machine running Windows 7 with Office 2010. I have used Libreoffice's Writer with some degree of success. My dissertation was written in it and some of its specific features are actually more advanced than the Word counterparts, mainly: automatically numbering pictures and tables, auto-TOCs and formatting styles. Word does all that but Writer is way more flexible in this regard. What I couldn't adapt to, though, was the gap between MS Excel and Libreoffice's Calc. The difference in functionality and usability is huge :-( Just try to properly format a bunch of cells in Calc and you'll realize how cumbersome and painful it is. The virtual machine approach works nicely but then you have another box to mantain. Since mine is just for Office I leave it Internet-less and that makes for another set of adaptations (ex.: how to put and remove content to the VM, need to use CIFS/Samba for that, etc). o/

spectaclepiece 10y ago

I would switch to Linux in a heartbeat if Adobe and Autodesk had support for it.

fb03 10y ago

I consider this a sad reality, being a huge FOSS fan and systems admin with several deployed/mantained linux servers, but, for most power users: -> Right now, if you can, have all three operating systems available, according to your needs and each system's software coverage strengths and weaknesses. Expanding (and this is where it might get controversial): If you game (for real), make music (for real) or produce video (for real), you are stuck with Windows... -> Mac OS X comes really close for video and graphics, BUT, for rendering shit out you are still going to want a fully loaded multi-gpu rig, and you can't legally install OS X on that. -> For music production, Mac OS X is already used in lots of shops, but if you like experimenting, you are still going to miss a bunch of audio plugins that are free and readily available for the Win32 ecosystem. Also, setting up low latency audio and plugins on Windows is a breeze. -> If you build a gaming rig, you're stuck with Windows as well for the same performance reasons. Here's what I am doing right now: [On the go] I have a good-ish Macbook. The reason I chose a mac was because at the time I bought it (4 years ago), they were the only ones offering real 6h+ battery life. I'm usually on the move so I like to always have a box with me to squeeze some study/code in between the daily downtime. If I install Ubuntu or Windows on this laptop, battery is used 30% quicker, so no can do. [At the home office] I produce music and game on a pretty beefy Windows rig. I need to boot to Windows because of the low latency/realtime requirements of gaming and live audio. When I need to code I just fire up a fullscreen Ubuntu VM (with like, 8gb of dedicated ram) and code away. This VM even finds and uses all my displays so I'm fully immersed, and performance for development is quite good (C and Python dev, mostly Eclipse CDT and Pycharm). This setup is more complex than the usual, but I'm always fiddling with lots of stuff and this is how I keep myself happy and productive. I don't want to spend all day long configuring and compromising, trying to fit all my needs in one OS, it's just not going to happen. I think I'm better off actually doing real work ;)

jdhawk 10y ago
> This VM even finds and uses all my displays Are you using VirtualBox? VMWare? I have had hell getting this to work properly.
- fb03 10y ago

omouse 10y ago

Fedora is also a great option; I switched to it a few months ago from Ubuntu and it's been great.

dxxvi 10y ago

Linux can replace Windows except printing or printing-related features. For example, Firefox in Linux has very little printing options and it doesn't print correctly on a letter-sized pdf file.

nurettin 10y ago

>> Kafkaian That's a rather kafkaesque way of putting it.

jeromenerf 10y ago

These mac/osx exodus posts reminds me of how non durable the whole ecosystem is. Perfectly working hardware (routers, dongles, laptops, mobiles ..) is declared EOL and gradually becomes less functional and more of a security issue. Destructive recycling could be an option, but damn, we are talking about "perfectly working devices", with a real value and a pretty high environmental cost. How do you deal with them?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

agmcleod 10y ago

I think linux is nice and all. But i've had my share of issues with Ubuntu & video card drivers over the years. I've tried to run dual boot on my PC at home, and haven't had much luck keeping it stable. I think the best experience I had was running Ubuntu back around 2008, 2009, on my dell inspiron laptop. Wireless was a challenge, but otherwise it ran great. On the weekend I picked up a laptop I ordered during boxing day sales. An asus rog with a gtx 1070 in it. More for going to gaming events and that, but I put linux mint on the second hard drive so I can mess around from time to time. Haven't tested the web cam, but most things seem to work fine. I guess time will tell if it's something I want to move to (still use a mac at work)

joantune 10y ago

Big questions (for me at least here) How is the Pad sensitivity on that combo (i.e. X1 Carbon + Ubuntu + Gnome3) Also: do you have the double finger scroll thing, what about the double tap for secondary mouse button? also three finger move and four finger gestures? One of the things I love about my Mac is how easy to use the trackpad is with all of its features. (the other things are durability and being a POSIX system, both covered apparently by the lenovo and being a Linux). I won't pay an extra 1000USD or more for it though, especially if it's reasonably ok in the X1 for instance