6 ms·

I used Linux for 10 years (mainly on Lenovos and some early Dell XPS back in the days), then I switched to MacOS about 3-4 years ago and over the last couple we

I used Linux for 10 years (mainly on Lenovos and some early Dell XPS back in the days), then I switched to MacOS about 3-4 years ago and over the last couple weeks I have been trying to go back to Linux because I am sick having to use MacOS everyday. It is a great OS for an everyday user, but not for a developer. Here is what I tried so far: 1) Dell XPS 9370 Developer edition: This comes preloaded with Ubuntu and it is actually amazing that everything works out of the box. It was too small for me though, and the fan made a rattling noise so I decided to return it. The 4K screen is probably overkill on such a small display. Based on the review people recommend taking the normal screen, it saves a lot of battery and there is not that much difference. 2) Lenovo X1: I didn't like the feel of the Keyboard, and the screen was not that good. Installing Linux (Arch) was easy, but decided to return it. 3) Dell XPS 9570: I have this one for the last two weeks and so far I love it on the hardware level. I would even put it as somehow superior to my MacBook Pro. The downside is that Linux is not well supported at all. I have installed Arch so far and spent all my evenings trying to fix all the drivers. So far: The Nvidia drivers are barely working, ACPI needs a lot of tweaks (but it seems I got it working and got my 7 hours of battery). I still need to work on the Touchpad, and couple other things. So far, the Dell XPS 9570 is a good challenger to the MBP, but installing Linux is still going to be a small challenge

copperx 8y ago
> I am sick having to use MacOS every day. It is a great OS for an everyday user, but not for a developer. Could you expound on that? I'm curious as to why OS X isn't satisfying for you as a developer.
- Scarbutt 8y ago
  If you are deploying to/for linux then developing in linux feels more consistent, natural, compatible, etc... Personally I just use a macbook and develop over ssh.
  - copperx 8y ago
    That comes with its own set of disadvantages. * If you fire up an editor on the remote machine, there is going to be typing lag, unless your Linux machine is in your local network. You can ameliorate this with software such as Mosh, but that comes with its own disadvantages (losing scrollback buffers). * If you edit locally but save the files to the remote system, you have to worry about getting disconnected or your machine shutting off and losing changes. * If you edit and save locally, then transfer changes later (e.g., using Git), you run and test your code on the remote machine, and have to worry about attaching a debugger to the remote program and other fun stuff. I guess it just depends on how big the project you're working with; but I would have a hard time working with more than, say, 10 files on a remote machine. Other solutions aren't exactly optimal either. A virtual machine takes up precious RAM and it is slower than bare metal. You're not using all of your machine's resources. WSL works for most things, but fails for others (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, I/O isn't as fast as it can be). I've come to the conclusion that doing development on Linux on bare metal is the solution with the least compromises; the biggest one being the loss of access to work-related productivity apps such as MS Office, Outlook, and Adobe products.
    - Scarbutt 8y ago
      If you fire up an editor on the remote machine, there is going to be typing lag, unless your Linux machine is in your local network. You can ameliorate this with software such as Mosh, but that comes with its own disadvantages (losing scrollback buffers). No typing lag for me on remote machines (< 70ms). I don't use mosh but the scrollback issue can be solved with tmux which is a must for remote dev. If you edit locally but save the files to the remote system, you have to worry about getting disconnected or your machine shutting off and losing changes. Again, learn what tmux is.
      - copperx 8y ago
        Yes, tmux can reduce the pain significantly. But what if you're using anything graphical for development? VS Code, Jetbrains IDEs? I guess you can use X forwarding. But what a pain. And if you're creating a webapp, you still want to see how it looks on a web browser. But you make some fair points. I will try to use tmux for remote development for a few days.
- tomxor 8y ago
  A lot of the GNU userland used in macOS is _ancient_ I think this is partly due to new GPL3 incompat? Then the BSD userland is _also_ ancient... for no apparent reason... Then there is no native package manager, so you have to use stuff like brew - which kinda sorta works but doesn't really feel anywhere near as consistent, integrated and up do date as basically _any_ linux package manger. Then there's MacOS itself... which is just getting more annoying, I quit after 10.6 (which was best version IMO), everytime I use a mac now I compare it to the relative simplicity and stability of this version, and it's just so much worse. I'm sure others who have more experience with up to date MacOS can give more detail on this. That said, for non developers I'd still recommend a mac over windows, although in recent years it's gone down hill, and personally I don't want to trade my freedom for closed source OS that have their own agenda - I understand that most users don't have the luxury of really being able to use anything not as friendly to basic users.
  - lylecubed 8y ago
    > Then there is no native package manager Isn't brew native? This time around (a few months ago) I didn't notice any issues with setting up a modern frontend dev environment. Not even the dependency hell I always seem to run into on Linux for modern web dev stuff. > I'm sure others who have more experience with up to date MacOS can give more detail on this. I've been using macs off and on since I owned a titanium powerbook G4 that ran Tiger (10.4). I've been doing web development during that entire time as well. Most recently, I got a mac mini with High Sierra installed. I've only been using it for a few months and I'm seriously considering moving back to my WSL setup. I originally moved away from my WSL setup because, about once a month, it would corrupt my git repo and I'd have to wipe it. That wasn't nearly as much hassle as I'm dealing with on a daily basis on the mac mini. My gripes, in short: Fullscreen mode is an abomination, network drives no longer work worth a damn, APFS defaults to case insensitive, my wifi stops working randomly until I turn it off and on again, ditto with the audio, Finder favorites disappear at random and the keyboard modifiers reset themselves at random. When I configure something on Windows it damned well stays configured. I used to be able to say the same about OS X but apparently those days are behind me. It's not all bad, though. The Mac App ecosystem is still the best I've ever encountered. I'll happily pay what Mac apps cost because they still run like a swiss watch. Unfortunately, none of those apps are necessary for web development work.
- ironjunkie 8y ago
  Sure. My Perspective on the OS: MacOS philosophy is to hide/remove all or most settings and hope that the default ones will work for you out of the box. I love to tweak everything and MacOS feels too packaged for me. There is not enough freedom for the advanced user to change things. Also, The OS feels so commercial and made for the masses. this is a personal feeling but I cannot help it. They do a very good job for the normal user that only wants to use a couple well defined apps though. As a developper: I mostly develop Linux infrastructure code (backend and low level). As such, using MacOS means that I'm constantly into a VirtualBox VM (which sucks compared to KVM or anything else) or trying to build stuff over SSH. I spend hours opening SSH tunnels, or mangling with port forwarding inside my VMs. Then, I like to run containers. Docker support for Mac is pretty much basic (or I should call it horrible). So at the end of the day I am using MacOS as a glorified web browser and SSH terminal. I never took the time to learn the low level working of MacOS, and I also hate that every standard linux tool has been slightly altered to make it almost unusable if you are used to the Linux version. (netstat, lsof, ... are a couple examples) Basically I want to get control back on My OS.
  - copperx 8y ago
    > I also hate that every standard linux tool has been slightly altered to make it almost unusable if you are used to the Linux version. (netstat, lsof, ... are a couple examples) It's not that they have been altered by Apple, but that you're using the BSD toolset, not the GNU one. You would have the same issues if you were running FreeBSD.
    - kristianp 8y ago
      Right, because Darwin is based on BSD.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- bacon_waffle 8y ago
  I was working like some sibling posters with web browser, terminals, editor, etc. running in MacOS, but most work files living in a Linux VM. The Linux VM needs to live on my local machine to run a proprietary compiler which sometimes has to be used on the road. Most of my work is in embedded land, so I usually have at least one serial console running and often those go up/down as the device providing them goes up/down. MacOS would fairly regularly get something tangled up in its USB stack (I think they re-did a substantial amount of it for El Capitan), leading to me needing to move my desk USB hub's connection to a different port on the computer. Then, once the second port fell over, I had to restart the computer to get USB back. I used to have an NFS mount between MacOS and the virtual Linux machine - that was an endless source of problems with MacOS losing track of file handles, then refusing to unmount or shut down cleanly. On average, I probably had to hold down the power button to hard-reboot once per day. And, NFS always seemed slower than it should've been. There were silly little issues like my external monitor's HDMI not supporting some volume adjustment protocol for it's audio out, and MacOS refusing to just reduce the levels sent to that device. So, the volume keys didn't work at my desk, except for mute. The security around downloading executables from the net was a pain - way too many clicks to get MacOS to run random open-source programs via Finder.
kanishkdudeja 8y ago
I'm planning on purchasing an XPS 9570 soon as well :)
tomxor 8y ago
Have you considered the new Matebook X Pro (Huawei)? I'd been contemplating XPS vs X1 for a number of years, but this one came along with it's 3:2 display! and it seems to support linux out of the box according to everyone whos tried it so far[1]. It's obviously more of an XPS/macbook contender because it's in the ultrathin category not ultrafast, but the screen... the screeeeeen! I want vertical space. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Huawei/comments/8l37ob/matebook_x_pro_linux/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Huawei/comments/8l37ob/matebook_x_p...
- intopieces 8y ago
  Which DE supports HiDPI?
  - tomxor 8y ago
    I think most reasonably modern DEs support x2 scaling, some people say x2 is slightly on the large side for this laptop though, and that x1.5 or x1.7 is better which can require more fiddling and I doubt all DEs support. I only use i3wm, if you just use a simple WM like this I have herd you can get away with scaling xft dpi and setting some things like bar sizes manually, although I haven't had the opportunity to actually try this yet. Personally i'm not too worried about GTK stuff being 2x if custom sizes are not possible, but it depends where you spend your time.
- touristtam 8y ago
  Let's hope this start a trend for taller screen. Arguing Ad Vitam Eternam with procurement for the extra 120px of the dell screen U line above 24" is tiring.
  - tomxor 8y ago
    Yes, I was hoping dell was going to add a 3:2 to the XPS 13, it so obviously needs it with that giant black bar at the bottom - the trackpad and keyboard can't get any shorter and it kind of makes the whole infinity edge thing a bit of a joke. I guess they only use these stupid dimension screens because it's what is produced for the masses who only consume TV and movies on them.
jnsaff2 8y ago
i have the 9570 i9/4k and after upgrading to kernel 4.17 almost all problems are gone, i run nixos + i3 and battery sometimes reports 16h+ but in reality I’ve gotten about 9h. i don’t fire up the 1050 at all as i don’t need it.
- ironjunkie 8y ago
  Did you consider blogging or writing a guide about it? There is a mismatch on information about the 9570 with chunk of informations here and there if you Google a lot, but nothing definitely well written yet.
rhizome 8y ago
So far, the Dell XPS 9570 is a good challenger to the MBP, but installing Linux is still going to be a small challenge That Dell makes you scroll down 3-4 screenfuls to see what keyboard it has tells me a little about who their target market isn't.
- bacon_waffle 8y ago
  That's true, but I quite like the keyboard it does have. It's not quite as solid as my old 2012 MacBook Pro, but the difference there is subtle. I've only typed a few paragraphs on the modern MacBook Pro keyboards, and didn't find them too offensive, but would prefer the one on the XPS 9570.
matthijs 8y ago
I've been using a HP Spectre x360 (13") with Ubuntu 18.04 for the last couple of weeks and it's been working very well for me. I even use the tablet mode when reading PDFs. Price wise it's quite cheap (same specs as the Dell: i7, 16GB, 1TB SSD, 4k screen) as you can usually find a coupon online. For me it was about EUR300 cheaper than the XPS currently is. So far everything has worked out of the box with exception of the fingerprint reader on the side.
bacon_waffle 8y ago
I've followed a similar progression, and am in the process of adjusting to an XPS 9570 (i7, 4K screen, big battery) running Kubuntu 18.04, from a mid-2012 15" MacBook Pro. Still on the fence - I really want to like the new machine, but it's not being easy. The only improvements really, are the CPU, the screen, and the weight. I would've gladly paid a couple grand to keep the old machine, with a few MacOS bugs fixed and a more modern CPU. The 4K screen does look pretty, but I still haven't managed to get a workable dual-monitor setup with it alongside a not-4K monitor. I wish there had been an option to buy the not-4K screen, and the bigger CPU and battery, but at least in the NZ Dell store that wasn't available. The touchpad in particular is driving me nuts - the heel of my typing hand will often cause the touchpad to jump the cursor off to the side mid-line. The surprise of seeing some chunk of code disappear has resulted in too much spilled martini. It often mistakenly detects middle-clicks. Apparently, there are two drivers that can work with this touchpad, and the other one has some settings that may help... Lots of crashiness and sleep problems I was having turned out to be the nouveau driver being loaded by a systemd service called "nvidia-fallback" - disabling that helped a lot. A lot of the peripheral experience isn't great coming from Apple-land; in particular the TB16 dock is way overpriced and awkward, especially including the '90s throwback power brick. I'd love to not spend hours getting audio to come out the right port between the computer's headphone jack, the dock's, or the computer's speakers (which, BTW, aren't great).

copperx 8y ago

> I am sick having to use MacOS every day. It is a great OS for an everyday user, but not for a developer. Could you expound on that? I'm curious as to why OS X isn't satisfying for you as a developer.

Scarbutt 8y ago
If you are deploying to/for linux then developing in linux feels more consistent, natural, compatible, etc... Personally I just use a macbook and develop over ssh.
- copperx 8y ago
  That comes with its own set of disadvantages. * If you fire up an editor on the remote machine, there is going to be typing lag, unless your Linux machine is in your local network. You can ameliorate this with software such as Mosh, but that comes with its own disadvantages (losing scrollback buffers). * If you edit locally but save the files to the remote system, you have to worry about getting disconnected or your machine shutting off and losing changes. * If you edit and save locally, then transfer changes later (e.g., using Git), you run and test your code on the remote machine, and have to worry about attaching a debugger to the remote program and other fun stuff. I guess it just depends on how big the project you're working with; but I would have a hard time working with more than, say, 10 files on a remote machine. Other solutions aren't exactly optimal either. A virtual machine takes up precious RAM and it is slower than bare metal. You're not using all of your machine's resources. WSL works for most things, but fails for others (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, I/O isn't as fast as it can be). I've come to the conclusion that doing development on Linux on bare metal is the solution with the least compromises; the biggest one being the loss of access to work-related productivity apps such as MS Office, Outlook, and Adobe products.
  - Scarbutt 8y ago
    If you fire up an editor on the remote machine, there is going to be typing lag, unless your Linux machine is in your local network. You can ameliorate this with software such as Mosh, but that comes with its own disadvantages (losing scrollback buffers). No typing lag for me on remote machines (< 70ms). I don't use mosh but the scrollback issue can be solved with tmux which is a must for remote dev. If you edit locally but save the files to the remote system, you have to worry about getting disconnected or your machine shutting off and losing changes. Again, learn what tmux is.
    - copperx 8y ago
      Yes, tmux can reduce the pain significantly. But what if you're using anything graphical for development? VS Code, Jetbrains IDEs? I guess you can use X forwarding. But what a pain. And if you're creating a webapp, you still want to see how it looks on a web browser. But you make some fair points. I will try to use tmux for remote development for a few days.
tomxor 8y ago
A lot of the GNU userland used in macOS is _ancient_ I think this is partly due to new GPL3 incompat? Then the BSD userland is _also_ ancient... for no apparent reason... Then there is no native package manager, so you have to use stuff like brew - which kinda sorta works but doesn't really feel anywhere near as consistent, integrated and up do date as basically _any_ linux package manger. Then there's MacOS itself... which is just getting more annoying, I quit after 10.6 (which was best version IMO), everytime I use a mac now I compare it to the relative simplicity and stability of this version, and it's just so much worse. I'm sure others who have more experience with up to date MacOS can give more detail on this. That said, for non developers I'd still recommend a mac over windows, although in recent years it's gone down hill, and personally I don't want to trade my freedom for closed source OS that have their own agenda - I understand that most users don't have the luxury of really being able to use anything not as friendly to basic users.
- lylecubed 8y ago
  > Then there is no native package manager Isn't brew native? This time around (a few months ago) I didn't notice any issues with setting up a modern frontend dev environment. Not even the dependency hell I always seem to run into on Linux for modern web dev stuff. > I'm sure others who have more experience with up to date MacOS can give more detail on this. I've been using macs off and on since I owned a titanium powerbook G4 that ran Tiger (10.4). I've been doing web development during that entire time as well. Most recently, I got a mac mini with High Sierra installed. I've only been using it for a few months and I'm seriously considering moving back to my WSL setup. I originally moved away from my WSL setup because, about once a month, it would corrupt my git repo and I'd have to wipe it. That wasn't nearly as much hassle as I'm dealing with on a daily basis on the mac mini. My gripes, in short: Fullscreen mode is an abomination, network drives no longer work worth a damn, APFS defaults to case insensitive, my wifi stops working randomly until I turn it off and on again, ditto with the audio, Finder favorites disappear at random and the keyboard modifiers reset themselves at random. When I configure something on Windows it damned well stays configured. I used to be able to say the same about OS X but apparently those days are behind me. It's not all bad, though. The Mac App ecosystem is still the best I've ever encountered. I'll happily pay what Mac apps cost because they still run like a swiss watch. Unfortunately, none of those apps are necessary for web development work.
ironjunkie 8y ago
Sure. My Perspective on the OS: MacOS philosophy is to hide/remove all or most settings and hope that the default ones will work for you out of the box. I love to tweak everything and MacOS feels too packaged for me. There is not enough freedom for the advanced user to change things. Also, The OS feels so commercial and made for the masses. this is a personal feeling but I cannot help it. They do a very good job for the normal user that only wants to use a couple well defined apps though. As a developper: I mostly develop Linux infrastructure code (backend and low level). As such, using MacOS means that I'm constantly into a VirtualBox VM (which sucks compared to KVM or anything else) or trying to build stuff over SSH. I spend hours opening SSH tunnels, or mangling with port forwarding inside my VMs. Then, I like to run containers. Docker support for Mac is pretty much basic (or I should call it horrible). So at the end of the day I am using MacOS as a glorified web browser and SSH terminal. I never took the time to learn the low level working of MacOS, and I also hate that every standard linux tool has been slightly altered to make it almost unusable if you are used to the Linux version. (netstat, lsof, ... are a couple examples) Basically I want to get control back on My OS.
- copperx 8y ago
  > I also hate that every standard linux tool has been slightly altered to make it almost unusable if you are used to the Linux version. (netstat, lsof, ... are a couple examples) It's not that they have been altered by Apple, but that you're using the BSD toolset, not the GNU one. You would have the same issues if you were running FreeBSD.
  - kristianp 8y ago
    Right, because Darwin is based on BSD.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
bacon_waffle 8y ago
I was working like some sibling posters with web browser, terminals, editor, etc. running in MacOS, but most work files living in a Linux VM. The Linux VM needs to live on my local machine to run a proprietary compiler which sometimes has to be used on the road. Most of my work is in embedded land, so I usually have at least one serial console running and often those go up/down as the device providing them goes up/down. MacOS would fairly regularly get something tangled up in its USB stack (I think they re-did a substantial amount of it for El Capitan), leading to me needing to move my desk USB hub's connection to a different port on the computer. Then, once the second port fell over, I had to restart the computer to get USB back. I used to have an NFS mount between MacOS and the virtual Linux machine - that was an endless source of problems with MacOS losing track of file handles, then refusing to unmount or shut down cleanly. On average, I probably had to hold down the power button to hard-reboot once per day. And, NFS always seemed slower than it should've been. There were silly little issues like my external monitor's HDMI not supporting some volume adjustment protocol for it's audio out, and MacOS refusing to just reduce the levels sent to that device. So, the volume keys didn't work at my desk, except for mute. The security around downloading executables from the net was a pain - way too many clicks to get MacOS to run random open-source programs via Finder.

kanishkdudeja 8y ago

I'm planning on purchasing an XPS 9570 soon as well :)

tomxor 8y ago

Have you considered the new Matebook X Pro (Huawei)? I'd been contemplating XPS vs X1 for a number of years, but this one came along with it's 3:2 display! and it seems to support linux out of the box according to everyone whos tried it so far[1]. It's obviously more of an XPS/macbook contender because it's in the ultrathin category not ultrafast, but the screen... the screeeeeen! I want vertical space. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Huawei/comments/8l37ob/matebook_x_pro_linux/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Huawei/comments/8l37ob/matebook_x_p...

intopieces 8y ago
Which DE supports HiDPI?
- tomxor 8y ago
  I think most reasonably modern DEs support x2 scaling, some people say x2 is slightly on the large side for this laptop though, and that x1.5 or x1.7 is better which can require more fiddling and I doubt all DEs support. I only use i3wm, if you just use a simple WM like this I have herd you can get away with scaling xft dpi and setting some things like bar sizes manually, although I haven't had the opportunity to actually try this yet. Personally i'm not too worried about GTK stuff being 2x if custom sizes are not possible, but it depends where you spend your time.
touristtam 8y ago
Let's hope this start a trend for taller screen. Arguing Ad Vitam Eternam with procurement for the extra 120px of the dell screen U line above 24" is tiring.
- tomxor 8y ago
  Yes, I was hoping dell was going to add a 3:2 to the XPS 13, it so obviously needs it with that giant black bar at the bottom - the trackpad and keyboard can't get any shorter and it kind of makes the whole infinity edge thing a bit of a joke. I guess they only use these stupid dimension screens because it's what is produced for the masses who only consume TV and movies on them.

jnsaff2 8y ago

i have the 9570 i9/4k and after upgrading to kernel 4.17 almost all problems are gone, i run nixos + i3 and battery sometimes reports 16h+ but in reality I’ve gotten about 9h. i don’t fire up the 1050 at all as i don’t need it.

ironjunkie 8y ago
Did you consider blogging or writing a guide about it? There is a mismatch on information about the 9570 with chunk of informations here and there if you Google a lot, but nothing definitely well written yet.

rhizome 8y ago

So far, the Dell XPS 9570 is a good challenger to the MBP, but installing Linux is still going to be a small challenge That Dell makes you scroll down 3-4 screenfuls to see what keyboard it has tells me a little about who their target market isn't.

bacon_waffle 8y ago
That's true, but I quite like the keyboard it does have. It's not quite as solid as my old 2012 MacBook Pro, but the difference there is subtle. I've only typed a few paragraphs on the modern MacBook Pro keyboards, and didn't find them too offensive, but would prefer the one on the XPS 9570.

matthijs 8y ago

I've been using a HP Spectre x360 (13") with Ubuntu 18.04 for the last couple of weeks and it's been working very well for me. I even use the tablet mode when reading PDFs. Price wise it's quite cheap (same specs as the Dell: i7, 16GB, 1TB SSD, 4k screen) as you can usually find a coupon online. For me it was about EUR300 cheaper than the XPS currently is. So far everything has worked out of the box with exception of the fingerprint reader on the side.

bacon_waffle 8y ago

I've followed a similar progression, and am in the process of adjusting to an XPS 9570 (i7, 4K screen, big battery) running Kubuntu 18.04, from a mid-2012 15" MacBook Pro. Still on the fence - I really want to like the new machine, but it's not being easy. The only improvements really, are the CPU, the screen, and the weight. I would've gladly paid a couple grand to keep the old machine, with a few MacOS bugs fixed and a more modern CPU. The 4K screen does look pretty, but I still haven't managed to get a workable dual-monitor setup with it alongside a not-4K monitor. I wish there had been an option to buy the not-4K screen, and the bigger CPU and battery, but at least in the NZ Dell store that wasn't available. The touchpad in particular is driving me nuts - the heel of my typing hand will often cause the touchpad to jump the cursor off to the side mid-line. The surprise of seeing some chunk of code disappear has resulted in too much spilled martini. It often mistakenly detects middle-clicks. Apparently, there are two drivers that can work with this touchpad, and the other one has some settings that may help... Lots of crashiness and sleep problems I was having turned out to be the nouveau driver being loaded by a systemd service called "nvidia-fallback" - disabling that helped a lot. A lot of the peripheral experience isn't great coming from Apple-land; in particular the TB16 dock is way overpriced and awkward, especially including the '90s throwback power brick. I'd love to not spend hours getting audio to come out the right port between the computer's headphone jack, the dock's, or the computer's speakers (which, BTW, aren't great).