4 ms·
I did. Against my will about 10 months ago. I had used ubuntu as my primary os in high school and arch in freshman / sophomore of college, so I wasn't new. But
by globuous 8y ago
I did. Against my will about 10 months ago. I had used ubuntu as my primary os in high school and arch in freshman / sophomore of college, so I wasn't new. But had used macbook pros for the next 7 years: when I transitioned to mac and never looked back. But then the day after quitting my job to start a startup with 0 money, I got my mac stolen. So in a way, I was financially forced.
I went with arch again on some cheap second hand laptop, because I remembered the install to be a good compromise between understanding the various parts of the system i was about to use, fun, and without too much voodoo. I remembered it to be more stable than my ubuntus. Maybe because I had less apps.
When I got my arch again, time to chose my UI. I tried dwn because I was now free from a window environment and wanted to give tiling a try. I loved it but missed something elegant. So i gave KDE a try because I was on KDE back in the days of ubuntu and arch. And I remembered KDE on arch to work much better than on ubuntu but that's another story. But with KDE, too many of the apps were old school creating incoherencies between apps UIs, I missed the elegancy of my mac. So, I gave a try to good ol' GNOME, but with the 3rd version although I had only heard bad things about it until then. It was perfect for what I needed.
Gnome takes the good parts of macos and leaves the rest. If feels polished and the apps seem well integrated with each other. I can configure the shortcuts the way I need them. My setup is now a Spacemacs instance for everything dev / sys admin related and the rest of gnome for emails, blender, etc. And honestly, I like the gnome UI, it's smooth, stable, easy. I get no crashes and no lag. The Apple fanboy becomes a GNU fanboy.
So far the only thing I miss is being stuck with evolution as my mail / calendar client because I rely on sending and accepting invites and gnome mail and gnome calendar don't have that feature yet. Evolution is gnome 2 UI and is incoherent with my gnome 3 apps, poor me :( Time for me to contribute !
But then, then you also get the fun part. A package manager, on Arch (or Manjaro being the Ubuntu of arch as I understand it) you have pacman and yaourt. I've never had to compile anything by hand, if it's not on pacman its on yaourt. Need Blender / Gimp / Krita for whatever reason ? done. Libre Office, Anything ? 4 word command and done. The most obscure add on for whatever app ? its on AUR. And I assume it's the same for everything else. Event the app starter shell thing is a great replacement for spotlight.
Finally, my emacs now works perfectly. My OS X version had some random bugs occasionally making it unusable. So I can finally have my tiled environment for anything related (missed you dwm workflow) and the 'elegancy' or GNOME 3 for everything else just an alt tab away.
So all an all, the Apple fanboy I had become doesn't need Apple anymore. Actually, if I were given the latest macbook pro, I'd miss my arch. It just sucks because, I miss Apple hardware, say what you want but it's hella durable.
I could go on and on, but this message is already way too long, and I don't want to spoil all the fun.
Hope I helped :)
P.S. Gnome 3 haters, come on, for a noob like me or my grandma, it's amazing, I'm shocked. It took me 30 minutes to setup my shortcuts the systray and a few other things. and the shell works really well, it's a good replacement to spotlight.