6 ms·

For people wed to commercial design apps, I can totally understand the draw of running macOS on commodity hardware. But as someone who skews more to the hacker

For people wed to commercial design apps, I can totally understand the draw of running macOS on commodity hardware. But as someone who skews more to the hacker end of the spectrum and doesn't depend on commercial software, the day-to-day qualitative experience of Linux is head and shoulders above macOS these days. Ditto OpenBSD, etc. I'll never go back. At least it does if you've already come around to using a desktop formfactor. For me I get lots of physical RAM (R / Pandas) a mechanical keyboard, and one of those straight-out-of-the-90s Logitech marble mouses that you'll pry from my cold dead fingers. Hardware support in Linux/*BSD for any Intel graphics based system is a total non-issue.

Xyzodiac 10y ago
It's not just design, there's also a heavy reliance on Mac only (or at least Mac and Windows only) pro video and audio programs. I will say though, I've always loved running Linux on desktops where this isn't the use case.
- radium3d 10y ago
  We do have DaVinci resolve and natron.fr available free now which are better than any I've used before so video editing in Linux is improving.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >It's not just design, there's also a heavy reliance on Mac only (or at least Mac and Windows only) pro video and audio programs. It's even more so in programming. Go to any developer conference, whether it's for Rails, C, Java, Haskell or whatever: a huge percentage there will have MacBook Pros, much much more than the percentage of Mac users in the general market (e.g 10% in the general market and 40 to 60% in developer circles). Which goes to say how silly the notion that "Mac's are for users who don't know about computers" is. Macs are for users who want a working GUI and/or a UNIX subsystem, and don't want to do any self-building and/or tinkering.
  - peatmoss 10y ago
    > "Mac's are for users who don't know about computers" I honestly haven't heard that argument in years from anyone I'd consider in touch with the current state of tech. And for a decade I was right there with you on the OSX == *nix plus creature comforts. But the landscape has changed since that argument held sway for me. Linux has gotten way less fiddly, and the size of my scripts to keep macOS on the straight and narrow has gotten larger.
    - Pokepokalypse 10y ago
      And Mac OS X has an absolutely shitty software package management "ecosystem". App Store is shitty; compared to apt and dpkg. Brew is the only thing that helps me stay reasonably sane on OS X. But still; to "remove" any large commercial software is basically: reinstall the OS.
  - joshvm 10y ago
    You see the same in virtually any physics department (I'm not aware of a similar trend in other STEM subjects, but presumably). Everyone uses a mixture of Linux and OS X. At the start of my PhD, the question wasn't "What laptop do you want?" it was "Do you want a Macbook or an iMac?"
  - laythea 10y ago
    Yes but the MacOS operating system is becoming more and more dumbed down in the UI experience, which nullifies most of the "its got a good UI" argument.
eropple 10y ago
Uhhhh. I put my time in with a Linux desktop for nearly a decade until a job bought me a Mac and there's no way I'd go back. And I think my "hacker end of the spectrum" bona fides are pretty good--but those bona fides aren't incompatible with a preference for a pleasing UX that has been considered with users in mind, which for my money no open-source desktop environment has even approached (and I have my beefs with OS X but they're small fry compared to even just "why is there no terminal emulator on par with iTerm2 in 2017?"). Wanting to enjoy using the thing you spend much of your waking life in front of is a pretty reasonable ask, and the indicative give-a-damn of well-thought-out polished experiences is worth it to me to the point where I don't even bother to boot the way faster desktop with way more RAM that sits under my desk when I can just plug in my MacBook Pro and everything just works. (Also that the window system doesn't randomly lose heads, which still happens on my dual-boot desktop, in 2017, to the point where I don't even bother with it. I'll probably Hackintosh that next time I'm bored.) Casting your own preferences as implicitly "hacker" and pulling out some "qualitative experience" (which among nerds is best read as "subjective preferences") stuff is pretty silly.
- peatmoss 10y ago
  Woah, woah, my comment never said that people who prefer macOS to Linux/*BSD are inferior hackers. I think I was clear that I was differentiating between the software that I run and the software that a creative professional is required to run. That is, I have a choice where to run my dev stacks, while a graphic designer is probably a captive Adobe CS user. And yes, that's exactly what I meant by "qualitative experience." I was actively calling out that the opinion voiced in my comment was, like, my opinion man. People are entitled to their preferences, and you clearly have yours neither is "silly" but we can still politely disagree.
  - 21 10y ago
    It's funny that you say that an Adobe CS user is "captive", but you don't consider yourself "captive" to the superior Linux hacker tools. Ie: why is the creative user captive, but you are free. If you wanted to move to macOS/Windows you couldn't, because you wouldn't bear their inferiority when it comes to hacker things, so aren't you also captive?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
abritinthebay 10y ago
> the day-to-day qualitative experience of Linux is head and shoulders above macOS these days. For you, perhaps. But given your preamble it strongly suggests your conditions make this boil down to "for someone who wants to use Linux, Linux is better." For a start: Linux is not a monolithic ecosystem. The sheer number of qualifiers that are needed (what flavor? What window manager? What hardware? because driver hell is still a thing) make this statement meaningless. At best you can say "I've found a combination of hardware and many pieces of software that work better for me." Good! Happy for you. Seriously. For a developer like myself I can do anything I want to in MacOS and I don't have to fight it to get it working right - it "just works". In a way this mirrors the iOS and Android debate: for those who like hyper-customization of their OS then of course Android/Linux is better. It's better due to a fundamental precondition of the requirements. For the rest of us - those who don't find that as important - the other system is superior because you don't have to do that. I love Linux and use it every day, but this kind of statement is the same thing the Linux crowd has been saying since the early 2000s (is it the year of Linux on the desktop yet?) and while it is more true now than ever it still masks it's very real issues to mass adoption as a primary OS
- Trd 10y ago
  Linux is far less fiddly than it used to be, though. I just recently installed the currently frozen Debian testing (with the intent on staying on it once it replaces the previous stable) and there was nothing to configure, it just works, even starting with a minimal install (no DE) there was nothing to configure, just pull the right packages (like bluez, pulseaudio-module-bluetooth etc) and I could pair with my wireless headphones etc. If you install a complete DE like Gnome or KDE from the metapackages you don't even have to install anything yourself, it just works out of the box. Even for people like me who do minimal installs and run tiling wm there is little to nothing to configure. apt install xorg will get all you need for Xorg to work and autodetect your hardware, echo "exec dwm" >> .xinitrc will get your startx session up. The early 2k had the massive amount of suffering between very poor WiFI support (lots of kernel drivers out of tree, need to compile them yourself and pray the API was synced with the current kernel or do it yourself), terrible state of audio stack (pulseaudio has gotten a lot more stable now, and is better than what we had in early PA days, or ALSA days), terrible state of GPU support (with mostly nvidia being okay, but still you would have to be more careful with kernel upgrades. Now you can even run a rolling release distro like arch, and pick a LTS kernel). But now it's great. You don't need the proprietary driver for AMD cards, intel iGPUs work fine, NVIDIA requires the proprietary driver for performance but the open source drv will still help you get a decent X session up in the first time install, audio just works, bluetooth just works, wifi just works. Even wifi with proprietary drivers, like the broadcom ship on my mac, it's just a matter of apt install broadcom-sta-dkms and it just works. Even Debian doesn't shy away from distributing the proprietary packages in the non-free repository and it's smooth sailing. Linux missed many window of opportunities during times when it really could have become closer to a mainstream OS. What is funny, is that in my opinion, Linux is now as ready for mainstream purposes as it could ever be, but the opportunities for it will not come again. And then we have the locked down versions that are getting popular, like Chrome OS, which is really linux underneath. We'll probably see more of that, not less, in the future, but it's not too bad as long as we have the freedom to unlock the bootloader and install what we want. Google is in a good position to bring an alternative to MacOS/Windows, although it won't be GNU/Linux as we know it in full, but it's close enough.
accountyaccount 10y ago
Linux is great until it isn't. I'm a developer and I don't want to waste another second of my life configuring boot or managing drivers on linux.

Xyzodiac 10y ago

It's not just design, there's also a heavy reliance on Mac only (or at least Mac and Windows only) pro video and audio programs. I will say though, I've always loved running Linux on desktops where this isn't the use case.

radium3d 10y ago
We do have DaVinci resolve and natron.fr available free now which are better than any I've used before so video editing in Linux is improving.
coldtea 10y ago
>It's not just design, there's also a heavy reliance on Mac only (or at least Mac and Windows only) pro video and audio programs. It's even more so in programming. Go to any developer conference, whether it's for Rails, C, Java, Haskell or whatever: a huge percentage there will have MacBook Pros, much much more than the percentage of Mac users in the general market (e.g 10% in the general market and 40 to 60% in developer circles). Which goes to say how silly the notion that "Mac's are for users who don't know about computers" is. Macs are for users who want a working GUI and/or a UNIX subsystem, and don't want to do any self-building and/or tinkering.
- peatmoss 10y ago
  > "Mac's are for users who don't know about computers" I honestly haven't heard that argument in years from anyone I'd consider in touch with the current state of tech. And for a decade I was right there with you on the OSX == *nix plus creature comforts. But the landscape has changed since that argument held sway for me. Linux has gotten way less fiddly, and the size of my scripts to keep macOS on the straight and narrow has gotten larger.
  - Pokepokalypse 10y ago
    And Mac OS X has an absolutely shitty software package management "ecosystem". App Store is shitty; compared to apt and dpkg. Brew is the only thing that helps me stay reasonably sane on OS X. But still; to "remove" any large commercial software is basically: reinstall the OS.
- joshvm 10y ago
  You see the same in virtually any physics department (I'm not aware of a similar trend in other STEM subjects, but presumably). Everyone uses a mixture of Linux and OS X. At the start of my PhD, the question wasn't "What laptop do you want?" it was "Do you want a Macbook or an iMac?"
- laythea 10y ago
  Yes but the MacOS operating system is becoming more and more dumbed down in the UI experience, which nullifies most of the "its got a good UI" argument.

eropple 10y ago

Uhhhh. I put my time in with a Linux desktop for nearly a decade until a job bought me a Mac and there's no way I'd go back. And I think my "hacker end of the spectrum" bona fides are pretty good--but those bona fides aren't incompatible with a preference for a pleasing UX that has been considered with users in mind, which for my money no open-source desktop environment has even approached (and I have my beefs with OS X but they're small fry compared to even just "why is there no terminal emulator on par with iTerm2 in 2017?"). Wanting to enjoy using the thing you spend much of your waking life in front of is a pretty reasonable ask, and the indicative give-a-damn of well-thought-out polished experiences is worth it to me to the point where I don't even bother to boot the way faster desktop with way more RAM that sits under my desk when I can just plug in my MacBook Pro and everything just works. (Also that the window system doesn't randomly lose heads, which still happens on my dual-boot desktop, in 2017, to the point where I don't even bother with it. I'll probably Hackintosh that next time I'm bored.) Casting your own preferences as implicitly "hacker" and pulling out some "qualitative experience" (which among nerds is best read as "subjective preferences") stuff is pretty silly.

peatmoss 10y ago
Woah, woah, my comment never said that people who prefer macOS to Linux/*BSD are inferior hackers. I think I was clear that I was differentiating between the software that I run and the software that a creative professional is required to run. That is, I have a choice where to run my dev stacks, while a graphic designer is probably a captive Adobe CS user. And yes, that's exactly what I meant by "qualitative experience." I was actively calling out that the opinion voiced in my comment was, like, my opinion man. People are entitled to their preferences, and you clearly have yours neither is "silly" but we can still politely disagree.
- 21 10y ago
  It's funny that you say that an Adobe CS user is "captive", but you don't consider yourself "captive" to the superior Linux hacker tools. Ie: why is the creative user captive, but you are free. If you wanted to move to macOS/Windows you couldn't, because you wouldn't bear their inferiority when it comes to hacker things, so aren't you also captive?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

abritinthebay 10y ago

> the day-to-day qualitative experience of Linux is head and shoulders above macOS these days. For you, perhaps. But given your preamble it strongly suggests your conditions make this boil down to "for someone who wants to use Linux, Linux is better." For a start: Linux is not a monolithic ecosystem. The sheer number of qualifiers that are needed (what flavor? What window manager? What hardware? because driver hell is still a thing) make this statement meaningless. At best you can say "I've found a combination of hardware and many pieces of software that work better for me." Good! Happy for you. Seriously. For a developer like myself I can do anything I want to in MacOS and I don't have to fight it to get it working right - it "just works". In a way this mirrors the iOS and Android debate: for those who like hyper-customization of their OS then of course Android/Linux is better. It's better due to a fundamental precondition of the requirements. For the rest of us - those who don't find that as important - the other system is superior because you don't have to do that. I love Linux and use it every day, but this kind of statement is the same thing the Linux crowd has been saying since the early 2000s (is it the year of Linux on the desktop yet?) and while it is more true now than ever it still masks it's very real issues to mass adoption as a primary OS

Trd 10y ago
Linux is far less fiddly than it used to be, though. I just recently installed the currently frozen Debian testing (with the intent on staying on it once it replaces the previous stable) and there was nothing to configure, it just works, even starting with a minimal install (no DE) there was nothing to configure, just pull the right packages (like bluez, pulseaudio-module-bluetooth etc) and I could pair with my wireless headphones etc. If you install a complete DE like Gnome or KDE from the metapackages you don't even have to install anything yourself, it just works out of the box. Even for people like me who do minimal installs and run tiling wm there is little to nothing to configure. apt install xorg will get all you need for Xorg to work and autodetect your hardware, echo "exec dwm" >> .xinitrc will get your startx session up. The early 2k had the massive amount of suffering between very poor WiFI support (lots of kernel drivers out of tree, need to compile them yourself and pray the API was synced with the current kernel or do it yourself), terrible state of audio stack (pulseaudio has gotten a lot more stable now, and is better than what we had in early PA days, or ALSA days), terrible state of GPU support (with mostly nvidia being okay, but still you would have to be more careful with kernel upgrades. Now you can even run a rolling release distro like arch, and pick a LTS kernel). But now it's great. You don't need the proprietary driver for AMD cards, intel iGPUs work fine, NVIDIA requires the proprietary driver for performance but the open source drv will still help you get a decent X session up in the first time install, audio just works, bluetooth just works, wifi just works. Even wifi with proprietary drivers, like the broadcom ship on my mac, it's just a matter of apt install broadcom-sta-dkms and it just works. Even Debian doesn't shy away from distributing the proprietary packages in the non-free repository and it's smooth sailing. Linux missed many window of opportunities during times when it really could have become closer to a mainstream OS. What is funny, is that in my opinion, Linux is now as ready for mainstream purposes as it could ever be, but the opportunities for it will not come again. And then we have the locked down versions that are getting popular, like Chrome OS, which is really linux underneath. We'll probably see more of that, not less, in the future, but it's not too bad as long as we have the freedom to unlock the bootloader and install what we want. Google is in a good position to bring an alternative to MacOS/Windows, although it won't be GNU/Linux as we know it in full, but it's close enough.

accountyaccount 10y ago

Linux is great until it isn't. I'm a developer and I don't want to waste another second of my life configuring boot or managing drivers on linux.