8 ms·

No distributions with truly great out of the box defaults, too much time tied up in configuration, too few Linux app developers with a user-oriented mindset and

No distributions with truly great out of the box defaults, too much time tied up in configuration, too few Linux app developers with a user-oriented mindset and obsession with getting all the details right. Also, just generally death by a thousand cuts with ridiculous numbers of small annoyances. With a Mac I can have it set up to my liking and be working in little more than an hour. Under Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) it’s a multi day project.

sandGorgon 8y ago
That is incorrect. I really urge you to try Fedora 28 today (you can liveboot). I have had Mac users use my laptop for a little while and love the usability. Everything simply works. I use Skype Web and Zoom to do videoconferencing ...and obviously all the Slack-like tools work great. And you have the choice to buy spectacular developer focused hardware like XPS or ThinkPad laptops.
- kitsunesoba 8y ago
  I had Fedora 26 or 27 installed on a secondary partition on my tower for a while and wasn’t particularly impressed. All of the things mentioned in my original comment applied to some degree... I could make it work and I’d use it over Windows any day but it wouldn’t be my first choice.
- free652 8y ago
  I am using linux/unix for 25+ years, but the desktop just never works for me. I'd echo its just death by a thousand cuts. The usual suspects: fonts, video drivers, sounds drivers, various USB devices supports, sleep/wake issues. And lack of basic apps, like a good multitabbed SSH/RDP terminal.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    I honestly can't believe what I'm reading here. Is it still 1999 where you live!?
    - mbreese 8y ago
      I agree with the parent. I’ve been using Linux since before 1999, sometimes as my main desktop, but often not. This comes up somewhat regularly, and probably always will - it’s the nature of the beast. I’ve found myself very happy using a Mac as my main desktop. It’s not perfect either, but good enough.
    - Bizarro 8y ago
      I started using Linux around '97ish and agree with the parent too. The problem for me wasn't investing the time in tweaking a new installation, but apt-get dist upgrade (whatever it's called these days) would eventually break my system...in very bad ways.
      - brazzledazzle 8y ago
        To be totally fair upgrading macOS or Windows can be a minefield too.
        krotton 8y ago
        I had exactly one issue with a macOS upgrade - when they introduced APFS. The upgrade process has failed in the middle with an FS-related error, but AFAIR it resolved itself after rebooting and retrying. For comparison, Windows 10 and various popular Linux distributions have caused me a lot more after-update trouble: input devices ceasing to work, graphics drivers breaking and falling back to the built-in generic ones (with a 800x600 resolution, on Windows), graphics drivers breaking and not falling back to anything, but just causing X to fail to start (on Linux). Once (a few years back, I admit) upgrading Debian testing brought in a new version of the kernel that turned out to have some ACPI-related bug on my machine and consistently freeze about 30 - 60 seconds after booting. This all is of course just personal experience, but I think I'm not the only person with similar ones.
      - sandGorgon 8y ago
        I hear this a lot. And mostly from Ubuntu victims. I have not reinstalled my Fedora XPS 13 laptop for over 4 years. I have clean upgraded 3 times. Fedora is spectacular and has been spectacular for many years now. The driver support is brilliant. It was one of the first distros to have absolutely seamless integration with RAID mode NVME (which was something the XPS set it to). I will be very surprised if you have to "tweak" your laptop. Everything that you have in OSX is already there - including nightmode, etc... the works. And here's the cool part - customizing Fedora is a browser extension away! http://extensions.gnome.org/ http://extensions.gnome.org/
  - cmiles74 8y ago
    For the most part, I think Linux has moved from a thousand cuts to just a hundred or so and those hundred will persist. A Fedora installation covers alot of the hardware out there, but there will always be new machines where support is incomplete (Surface, MacBook, etc.) It's tempting to compare Linux with MacOS, but also (in my opinion) unfair. Apple appears to be making conscious decisions about what goes in their machines and not simply picking the cheapest components. I think Windows is closer to a fair comparison (they have to try and support everything out there) I have had no more hassle under Linux than I've had with Windows.
    - torstenvl 8y ago
      It's not unfair. There's nothing preventing, say, RedHat, from offering its own hardware for sale. EDIT: Rather than downvoting, perhaps those who disagree with me could tell me why other companies aren't capable of "making conscious decisions about what goes in their machines"? Apple is, after all, far from the only Unix vendor to do so. Whether it's HP-UX or Solaris, it's fairly common for Unix vendors to tightly couple their software to supported hardware. What is preventing Red Hat from offering a fully Red Hat compatible laptop that works near-perfectly out of the box?
      - vetinari 8y ago
        There are machines certified for RHEL, Ubuntu or SuSE. If you do your purchase outside this list and something doesn't work, it was your decision and now your problem. It is not Redhat's or Canonical problem. They are not in hardware business, their partners are, and the information which models were tested and what was the result is publicly available.
- lloeki 8y ago
  Comically enough, I tried not so long ago: Fedora didn't boot. Like, doesn't even reach the login manager. Everyone has their own stories and use cases, why are people so hell-bent on convincing their use case and solution is The One True Way and-I-can't-understand-why-you-re-using-anything-else?
  - crispinb 8y ago
    See other comment here on the Ikea effect. That's part of it anyway. I think the other part is humans can get fetishistic about almost anything. It seems to be part of our nature. Unsurprisingly, it's shaped around computers for HN types. Add into the mix that the organisations which make the alternatives (Apple, Microsoft) really are bloody horrible, so that adds an ethical angle. If there's anything people like more than fondling their fetishes, it's finger-pointing at others for doing wrong. So yes it's silly, but it's fairly strongly motivated silliness.
- brailsafe 8y ago
  I don't necessarily doubt that Fedora 28 is passable day-to-day platform, but I did think it was a little surprising that you mention Skype as your first example of what should be a list of critical apps that bridge the transition. Would be curious to hear if others do use Skype, but for me it's literally been years. It came up as a joke in conversation recently, as we waxed nostalgic — yes I'm actually using that phrase — about chat apps from days gone by.
  - dvtv75 8y ago
    I dual boot Win10 and Kubuntu 18.04, plus I run Kubuntu on my laptop. I use Skype in both Windows and Kubuntu. Under Windows, almost unbelievably, it never works right. It either can't find the camera or it can't find the mic, but if it can find the camera it still won't transmit from it. In Linux, I had a little mucking about to get the sound going, but now it just goes.
  - sandGorgon 8y ago
    Here's where I think is the difference between the western world and NBU - The Next Billion Users. Skype and Whatsapp video are the only two ones that work reasonably well in India with shaky mobile bandwidth. I mentioned Zoom as well. But here's the thing - have you used Skype Web ? There's no installation needed.
    - brailsafe 8y ago
      Interesting point. I wouldn't have assumed that, because I've never had a good experience with Skype's handling of unstable connections here in Canada. That said, no I haven't tried Skype for web. Regarding the rest of the world, WhatsApp definitely comes to mind. For chat, video, and audio.
- crispinb 8y ago
  > And you have the choice to buy spectacular developer focused hardware like XPS or ThinkPad laptops. I'm using an XPS 15. A recent purchase - I'm an OS X user by choice, but Apple currently makes no laptop hardware I'm interested in buying. Here's the relevant archwiki page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_9560 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_9560 It would take me days to work through that horror. I'd still end up with an only partially-working machine. Yes, it's the fault of Dell & chipset manufacturers for not supporting Linux, but if I'm going to spend effort apportioning blame for the world's ills, I'll do that on things that matter more (torture, ecosystem collapse, social isolation). In practical terms, I can spend time setting up & configuring Linux, or I can use Windows today and plant some vegetables, or walk up a hill, read a new volume of history or philosophy, talk to a friend. Windows is kind of nasty, but all the applications I need are available for it, it can launch them, it can give me access to files, and I don't spend any time messing with it. Good enough for me.
  - crispinb 8y ago
    (I'm not claiming that Windows is as undemanding as OS X by the way. The impedance mismatch between WSL environments and the rest of the system, and Windows' relative instability, make it more time consuming to set up and maintain. The order for me is OS X < Windows < Linux, with the Windows-Linux gap the larger of the two)
tangentspace 8y ago
I've had the opposite experience. Stock Kubuntu 18.04 provides pretty much the experience I want with just a few tweaks to fine tune the touchpad and font DPI. Once the base system is installed it only takes a few more minutes to set up my dev tools using Ansible. On Mac OS, I'm also pretty happy with the stock interface, but I spend quite a bit more time downloading and installing dev tools. Then I end up running out of memory because Docker for Mac and Minikube both end up running Linux virtual machines in the background.
- raarts 8y ago
  You can drop Minicube now Docker for Mac includes Kubernetes
danieldk 8y ago
Also, just generally death by a thousand cuts with ridiculous numbers of small annoyances. This used to be the difference. But between Preview.app bugs (crashes all the time when previewing beamer slides, slow rendering, jumping through slides in non-linear order), sticky or stuck keys on the butterfly keyboard, ancient UNIX userland (yes, you can install newer versions with Homebrew or Nix), weird bugs when running XQuartz, etc. The gap is narrowing pretty quickly. Also, I have been using NixOS on my Linux workstation at home. I like it so much that I want fully declarative system configurations everywhere ;).
- OJFord 8y ago
  And on macOS, when I hit them it's generally hard to find a solution. On Linux, there's an Arch wiki page, or something.
- spindle 8y ago
  NixOS made a big difference for me too.
- ncol 8y ago
  I can't agree. I work in enterprise Linux. We essentially make distributions, build systems, customized kernels etc. Linux, desktop Linux especially, is the worst of the big operating systems. It certainly has qualities, but if you make a table with all the different things to expect from an operating system and you look into each section without being too subjective Linux will come last overall. And I don't think it really is changing. Ever wondered why Ubuntu doesn't really seem to be getting better, mostly just shifting technologies around? Well, that is because it essentially reached the level that desktop Linux is at. Anything else is going to be going in the direction of something like Android and even that isn't necessarily up to the standard of the alternatives. I would like to elaborate, but I think it is pretty futile to do so online, which is pretty telling in itself. One example that should challenge people view would be the ssh default story that is on the front page right now. Everything in Linux is pretty much like that if you dig deep enough. And while its competitors aren't perfect either, they are just far more consistent. Because that is a major selling point for them.
subsection1h 8y ago
> too few Linux app developers with a user-oriented mindset By "user-oriented", do you mean kitsunesoba-oriented? Or do you think all users have the same preferences? > With a Mac I can have it set up to my liking and be working in little more than an hour. macOS doesn't even include tiling window management out of the box. Apple clearly optimizes macOS for the average user. If you're an average user, that's cool. But for people with sophisticated workflows who aren't average users, the out-of-the-box experience provided by macOS (and Windows, GNOME, etc.) may be grossly inadequate.
- lloeki 8y ago
  The argument that using a tiling window manager is a prerequisite of being a non-average user is a highly arrogant generalization of your use case.
  - crispinb 8y ago
    There is a general rule that the more time people spend futzing with some particular aspect of their shit, the more they fetishise it. It's a kind of cognitive sunk-costs fallacy. I've used i3, and it's great. I wish something like it were available on Windows or macOS. But it's just a trivial convenience; hardly something to develop an emotional attachment to. Let's face it, humans are odd creatures and will attach to almost anything.
    - lloeki 8y ago
      IKEA effect! An example of which is those prepared doughs where you have to add eggs... the egg could (and has been at some point) be included but marketing discovered that requiring the add-your-own-egg step made people love the end product more because they somehow made it themselves. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
      - crispinb 8y ago
        Nice - I hadn't come across that. Spot on.
riquito 8y ago
> With a Mac I can have it set up to my liking and be working in little more than an hour. Under Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) it’s a multi day project. With a Mac I set it up as much as I can in little more than an hour, with no hope to achieve what I really want. Under Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) it's a multi day project but I can get whatever I want.
- batteryhorse 8y ago
  It can be a bit of a rabbit hole. I wasn't happy with any of the window managers or desktop environments for Linux so I wrote my own. I didn't like the way any of them handled multiple monitors, but it ends up being more than a multi day project. I still don't have what I want, so now I'm trying to find a way to get rid of X or at least fix XRandR, because it doesn't support multiple GPU's the way I would like (Wayland is not a solution either).
geezerjay 8y ago
> With a Mac I can have it set up to my liking and be working in little more than an hour. How much of that is due to being accostumed to using Mac's defaults? I nean, Debian's default setup is pretty much my ideal setup, but that's because throughout the years I've got accostumed to it, not because Debian's UI guidelines are awesome.
spiderjerusalem 8y ago
This can be amortized though. You spend one good weekend setting things up to your liking and dump your dotfiles and other config properly in a git repo and you don't have to do it every single time. A one time xmonad + arch setup that I did a couple of years ago has lasted me across 3 machines with only minor tweaking.
- kosinus 8y ago
  Dotfiles are like code, and need to be maintained. Some upgrade will break your custom configuration, and then you have to dive into docs again. I try to make few customizations to the default macOS install, and just roll with the changes coming from Apple. I do have some dotfiles, containing mostly just SSH and ViM configs. But I've already had to fight ViM several times because of it.
  - vinceguidry 8y ago
    Maintenance is amortizable as well. Every time you have to do a deep dive to find out what's wrong, you learn a little more about the state of the art of that particular part of the world. Then you can make a change that is more robust.
flurrything 8y ago
No MS Office, no Keynote, no Photoshop / Illustrator / ..
some_account 8y ago
Linux distributions have become a lot nicer. I find myself not changing much at all anymore - it just works.

sandGorgon 8y ago

That is incorrect. I really urge you to try Fedora 28 today (you can liveboot). I have had Mac users use my laptop for a little while and love the usability. Everything simply works. I use Skype Web and Zoom to do videoconferencing ...and obviously all the Slack-like tools work great. And you have the choice to buy spectacular developer focused hardware like XPS or ThinkPad laptops.

kitsunesoba 8y ago
I had Fedora 26 or 27 installed on a secondary partition on my tower for a while and wasn’t particularly impressed. All of the things mentioned in my original comment applied to some degree... I could make it work and I’d use it over Windows any day but it wouldn’t be my first choice.
free652 8y ago
I am using linux/unix for 25+ years, but the desktop just never works for me. I'd echo its just death by a thousand cuts. The usual suspects: fonts, video drivers, sounds drivers, various USB devices supports, sleep/wake issues. And lack of basic apps, like a good multitabbed SSH/RDP terminal.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  I honestly can't believe what I'm reading here. Is it still 1999 where you live!?
  - mbreese 8y ago
    I agree with the parent. I’ve been using Linux since before 1999, sometimes as my main desktop, but often not. This comes up somewhat regularly, and probably always will - it’s the nature of the beast. I’ve found myself very happy using a Mac as my main desktop. It’s not perfect either, but good enough.
  - Bizarro 8y ago
    I started using Linux around '97ish and agree with the parent too. The problem for me wasn't investing the time in tweaking a new installation, but apt-get dist upgrade (whatever it's called these days) would eventually break my system...in very bad ways.
    - brazzledazzle 8y ago
      To be totally fair upgrading macOS or Windows can be a minefield too.
      - krotton 8y ago
        I had exactly one issue with a macOS upgrade - when they introduced APFS. The upgrade process has failed in the middle with an FS-related error, but AFAIR it resolved itself after rebooting and retrying. For comparison, Windows 10 and various popular Linux distributions have caused me a lot more after-update trouble: input devices ceasing to work, graphics drivers breaking and falling back to the built-in generic ones (with a 800x600 resolution, on Windows), graphics drivers breaking and not falling back to anything, but just causing X to fail to start (on Linux). Once (a few years back, I admit) upgrading Debian testing brought in a new version of the kernel that turned out to have some ACPI-related bug on my machine and consistently freeze about 30 - 60 seconds after booting. This all is of course just personal experience, but I think I'm not the only person with similar ones.
    - sandGorgon 8y ago
      I hear this a lot. And mostly from Ubuntu victims. I have not reinstalled my Fedora XPS 13 laptop for over 4 years. I have clean upgraded 3 times. Fedora is spectacular and has been spectacular for many years now. The driver support is brilliant. It was one of the first distros to have absolutely seamless integration with RAID mode NVME (which was something the XPS set it to). I will be very surprised if you have to "tweak" your laptop. Everything that you have in OSX is already there - including nightmode, etc... the works. And here's the cool part - customizing Fedora is a browser extension away! http://extensions.gnome.org/ http://extensions.gnome.org/
- cmiles74 8y ago
  For the most part, I think Linux has moved from a thousand cuts to just a hundred or so and those hundred will persist. A Fedora installation covers alot of the hardware out there, but there will always be new machines where support is incomplete (Surface, MacBook, etc.) It's tempting to compare Linux with MacOS, but also (in my opinion) unfair. Apple appears to be making conscious decisions about what goes in their machines and not simply picking the cheapest components. I think Windows is closer to a fair comparison (they have to try and support everything out there) I have had no more hassle under Linux than I've had with Windows.
  - torstenvl 8y ago
    It's not unfair. There's nothing preventing, say, RedHat, from offering its own hardware for sale. EDIT: Rather than downvoting, perhaps those who disagree with me could tell me why other companies aren't capable of "making conscious decisions about what goes in their machines"? Apple is, after all, far from the only Unix vendor to do so. Whether it's HP-UX or Solaris, it's fairly common for Unix vendors to tightly couple their software to supported hardware. What is preventing Red Hat from offering a fully Red Hat compatible laptop that works near-perfectly out of the box?
    - vetinari 8y ago
      There are machines certified for RHEL, Ubuntu or SuSE. If you do your purchase outside this list and something doesn't work, it was your decision and now your problem. It is not Redhat's or Canonical problem. They are not in hardware business, their partners are, and the information which models were tested and what was the result is publicly available.
lloeki 8y ago
Comically enough, I tried not so long ago: Fedora didn't boot. Like, doesn't even reach the login manager. Everyone has their own stories and use cases, why are people so hell-bent on convincing their use case and solution is The One True Way and-I-can't-understand-why-you-re-using-anything-else?
- crispinb 8y ago
  See other comment here on the Ikea effect. That's part of it anyway. I think the other part is humans can get fetishistic about almost anything. It seems to be part of our nature. Unsurprisingly, it's shaped around computers for HN types. Add into the mix that the organisations which make the alternatives (Apple, Microsoft) really are bloody horrible, so that adds an ethical angle. If there's anything people like more than fondling their fetishes, it's finger-pointing at others for doing wrong. So yes it's silly, but it's fairly strongly motivated silliness.
brailsafe 8y ago
I don't necessarily doubt that Fedora 28 is passable day-to-day platform, but I did think it was a little surprising that you mention Skype as your first example of what should be a list of critical apps that bridge the transition. Would be curious to hear if others do use Skype, but for me it's literally been years. It came up as a joke in conversation recently, as we waxed nostalgic — yes I'm actually using that phrase — about chat apps from days gone by.
- dvtv75 8y ago
  I dual boot Win10 and Kubuntu 18.04, plus I run Kubuntu on my laptop. I use Skype in both Windows and Kubuntu. Under Windows, almost unbelievably, it never works right. It either can't find the camera or it can't find the mic, but if it can find the camera it still won't transmit from it. In Linux, I had a little mucking about to get the sound going, but now it just goes.
- sandGorgon 8y ago
  Here's where I think is the difference between the western world and NBU - The Next Billion Users. Skype and Whatsapp video are the only two ones that work reasonably well in India with shaky mobile bandwidth. I mentioned Zoom as well. But here's the thing - have you used Skype Web ? There's no installation needed.
  - brailsafe 8y ago
    Interesting point. I wouldn't have assumed that, because I've never had a good experience with Skype's handling of unstable connections here in Canada. That said, no I haven't tried Skype for web. Regarding the rest of the world, WhatsApp definitely comes to mind. For chat, video, and audio.
crispinb 8y ago
> And you have the choice to buy spectacular developer focused hardware like XPS or ThinkPad laptops. I'm using an XPS 15. A recent purchase - I'm an OS X user by choice, but Apple currently makes no laptop hardware I'm interested in buying. Here's the relevant archwiki page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_9560 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_9560 It would take me days to work through that horror. I'd still end up with an only partially-working machine. Yes, it's the fault of Dell & chipset manufacturers for not supporting Linux, but if I'm going to spend effort apportioning blame for the world's ills, I'll do that on things that matter more (torture, ecosystem collapse, social isolation). In practical terms, I can spend time setting up & configuring Linux, or I can use Windows today and plant some vegetables, or walk up a hill, read a new volume of history or philosophy, talk to a friend. Windows is kind of nasty, but all the applications I need are available for it, it can launch them, it can give me access to files, and I don't spend any time messing with it. Good enough for me.
- crispinb 8y ago
  (I'm not claiming that Windows is as undemanding as OS X by the way. The impedance mismatch between WSL environments and the rest of the system, and Windows' relative instability, make it more time consuming to set up and maintain. The order for me is OS X < Windows < Linux, with the Windows-Linux gap the larger of the two)

tangentspace 8y ago

I've had the opposite experience. Stock Kubuntu 18.04 provides pretty much the experience I want with just a few tweaks to fine tune the touchpad and font DPI. Once the base system is installed it only takes a few more minutes to set up my dev tools using Ansible. On Mac OS, I'm also pretty happy with the stock interface, but I spend quite a bit more time downloading and installing dev tools. Then I end up running out of memory because Docker for Mac and Minikube both end up running Linux virtual machines in the background.

raarts 8y ago
You can drop Minicube now Docker for Mac includes Kubernetes

danieldk 8y ago

Also, just generally death by a thousand cuts with ridiculous numbers of small annoyances. This used to be the difference. But between Preview.app bugs (crashes all the time when previewing beamer slides, slow rendering, jumping through slides in non-linear order), sticky or stuck keys on the butterfly keyboard, ancient UNIX userland (yes, you can install newer versions with Homebrew or Nix), weird bugs when running XQuartz, etc. The gap is narrowing pretty quickly. Also, I have been using NixOS on my Linux workstation at home. I like it so much that I want fully declarative system configurations everywhere ;).

OJFord 8y ago
And on macOS, when I hit them it's generally hard to find a solution. On Linux, there's an Arch wiki page, or something.
spindle 8y ago
NixOS made a big difference for me too.
ncol 8y ago
I can't agree. I work in enterprise Linux. We essentially make distributions, build systems, customized kernels etc. Linux, desktop Linux especially, is the worst of the big operating systems. It certainly has qualities, but if you make a table with all the different things to expect from an operating system and you look into each section without being too subjective Linux will come last overall. And I don't think it really is changing. Ever wondered why Ubuntu doesn't really seem to be getting better, mostly just shifting technologies around? Well, that is because it essentially reached the level that desktop Linux is at. Anything else is going to be going in the direction of something like Android and even that isn't necessarily up to the standard of the alternatives. I would like to elaborate, but I think it is pretty futile to do so online, which is pretty telling in itself. One example that should challenge people view would be the ssh default story that is on the front page right now. Everything in Linux is pretty much like that if you dig deep enough. And while its competitors aren't perfect either, they are just far more consistent. Because that is a major selling point for them.

subsection1h 8y ago

> too few Linux app developers with a user-oriented mindset By "user-oriented", do you mean kitsunesoba-oriented? Or do you think all users have the same preferences? > With a Mac I can have it set up to my liking and be working in little more than an hour. macOS doesn't even include tiling window management out of the box. Apple clearly optimizes macOS for the average user. If you're an average user, that's cool. But for people with sophisticated workflows who aren't average users, the out-of-the-box experience provided by macOS (and Windows, GNOME, etc.) may be grossly inadequate.

lloeki 8y ago
The argument that using a tiling window manager is a prerequisite of being a non-average user is a highly arrogant generalization of your use case.
- crispinb 8y ago
  There is a general rule that the more time people spend futzing with some particular aspect of their shit, the more they fetishise it. It's a kind of cognitive sunk-costs fallacy. I've used i3, and it's great. I wish something like it were available on Windows or macOS. But it's just a trivial convenience; hardly something to develop an emotional attachment to. Let's face it, humans are odd creatures and will attach to almost anything.
  - lloeki 8y ago
    IKEA effect! An example of which is those prepared doughs where you have to add eggs... the egg could (and has been at some point) be included but marketing discovered that requiring the add-your-own-egg step made people love the end product more because they somehow made it themselves. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
    - crispinb 8y ago
      Nice - I hadn't come across that. Spot on.

riquito 8y ago

> With a Mac I can have it set up to my liking and be working in little more than an hour. Under Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) it’s a multi day project. With a Mac I set it up as much as I can in little more than an hour, with no hope to achieve what I really want. Under Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) it's a multi day project but I can get whatever I want.

batteryhorse 8y ago
It can be a bit of a rabbit hole. I wasn't happy with any of the window managers or desktop environments for Linux so I wrote my own. I didn't like the way any of them handled multiple monitors, but it ends up being more than a multi day project. I still don't have what I want, so now I'm trying to find a way to get rid of X or at least fix XRandR, because it doesn't support multiple GPU's the way I would like (Wayland is not a solution either).

geezerjay 8y ago

> With a Mac I can have it set up to my liking and be working in little more than an hour. How much of that is due to being accostumed to using Mac's defaults? I nean, Debian's default setup is pretty much my ideal setup, but that's because throughout the years I've got accostumed to it, not because Debian's UI guidelines are awesome.

spiderjerusalem 8y ago

This can be amortized though. You spend one good weekend setting things up to your liking and dump your dotfiles and other config properly in a git repo and you don't have to do it every single time. A one time xmonad + arch setup that I did a couple of years ago has lasted me across 3 machines with only minor tweaking.

kosinus 8y ago
Dotfiles are like code, and need to be maintained. Some upgrade will break your custom configuration, and then you have to dive into docs again. I try to make few customizations to the default macOS install, and just roll with the changes coming from Apple. I do have some dotfiles, containing mostly just SSH and ViM configs. But I've already had to fight ViM several times because of it.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  Maintenance is amortizable as well. Every time you have to do a deep dive to find out what's wrong, you learn a little more about the state of the art of that particular part of the world. Then you can make a change that is more robust.

flurrything 8y ago

No MS Office, no Keynote, no Photoshop / Illustrator / ..

some_account 8y ago

Linux distributions have become a lot nicer. I find myself not changing much at all anymore - it just works.