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So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux

• mscasts 8y ago
  I installed (ubuntu) Linux recently on my new HP Spectre x360. Unfortunately, there was some issues still. My webcam didn't work at all. The touchpad was bad in comparison to Windows drivers and the graphics drivers sucked. But overall it works much better today than like ~5 years ago. Got back to Windows and I am unsure if I will ever run linux on the desktop full time even if it is a distant dream and have been for long. The only issue is that there is still a lot of issues on many laptops. Most desktops work great and it is easier to switch hardware parts. On laptops, it seems that it's still a dice throw. I hope that changes in the future. Unfortunately, it is the chicken and the egg problem here and will most likely continue. Linux is a lot better than 5 years ago, but so is Windows and MacOS as well even if they both have stuff that sucks. I used to believe that [current year] was the year of linux on desktop, but I no longer believe that mostly because of what makes linux so great, all the choices.
  • brightball 8y ago
    This was a concern that I also had when I switched, but I was in the market for a laptop when I jumped, which led to actively shopping for linux laptops. I ended up settling on Dell Developer Edition and the experience has been virtually perfect. The only thing that doesn't work is the built in fingerprint scanner.
  • war1025 8y ago
    Linux on laptops really comes down to picking the right laptop. I have both a Thinkpad (work) and a Dell Inspiron (home) running Debian. Both work really well by default. I know HN folks tend to really like Thinkpads, but I honestly think the Linux compatibility of my Inspiron is as good if not better. Also just stick to Intel integrated graphics. AMD and NVidia can work, but they are a pain.
  • mbreese 8y ago
    For laptop support, it really helps if you can get ahold of one of these “Linux-first” computers, like the OP. When the components all are supported, the experience is much smoother. But that’s also the downside — often the hardware isn’t supported. Desktop Linux devices just aren’t the top priority for developers. Honestly, if you want to go this route, it’s almost easier to just run Linux in a VM on top of Windows or macOS.
    • mscasts 8y ago
      Well, I thought about that while ordering. Sent a mail to System76 which was the only company I knew about besides Dells XPS (that wasn't available in my country at the time). They didn't have chargers that fit with the european sockets and their system was still more expensive than the other options anyway. Plus, if something goes wrong, there is no real support available in my country. I would have to ship it half around the world for any support. Even on hardware that are supposed to be supported, I have many times run into problems because of it only supports x distro or something like that. Sure it often is an pretty easy fix, but you still have to dig into to config files, read forums on the internet to get help.
      • the_duke 8y ago
        Linux is certainly more hassle than Windows/OS X. Since you mentioned XPS: I've been running Arch Linux on a new Dell XPS13 without any issues. Webcam, microphone, touchpad, etc: all works fine.
  • sam0x17 8y ago
    I've had a lot of trouble getting it to work properly on the Surface Book Pro (wifi doesn't work upon resume from sleep), and Lenovo X1 Carbon 2nd Gen (can't adjust screen brightness on OLED screen, which is really bad because it's very bright, and will burn in very quickly). Both of these problems have hacky work-arounds that I can get working myself if I really want to, but it definitely detracts from the experience. Every other laptop I've ever tried has worked perfectly though.
• TransAMrit 8y ago
  > Recently I’ve just found myself disenchanted with Apple in a way similar to how I felt maybe twelve years earlier with Microsoft, when I switched to Linux the first time. This is exactly why I've been switching back to Linux everywhere, including laptops. Apple has done a pretty good job recreating the modern Windows experience.
  • dwighttk 8y ago
    I feel like I'd be much more open to Linux if I spent most of my time in emacs, but since I've spent like 8 minutes in emacs and about 14hrs in vim and have very little desire to increase either of those numbers, it only takes a small dose of Linux to re-enchant myself with Apple.
    • rossdavidh 8y ago
      I use vim, on a System76 Linux laptop, and it does not seem an obstacle.
      • tzumby 8y ago
        I recently switcher from a Lemur to the new MB pro. I'm a vim user so whenever I code I use an external keyboard that has function keys. I seriously miss my i3 setup and my MB in particular had hardware problems (overheating, video card issues). What I didn't like about the Lemur was the battery (life, didn't hold charge for too long), the screen and the touch pad. For anyone that used Librem, how's the battery and touchpad ?
        • ProAm 8y ago
          Did you use tlp or any power tool on linux?
    • giancarlostoro 8y ago
      Why do you insist on using Emacs? Also why do you switch to VIM? I feel I'm missing context.
• brightball 8y ago
  Good new take on the migrating to Linux articles. The PureOS setup is pretty cool. I'm 2 years on pure Linux after about 10 years on Mac, so it definitely gets my endorsement as well. Haven't written up anything about it yet but the experience has been very smooth.
  • sonnyblarney 8y ago
    Can you recommend a write up that compares various flavours. I like the notion of going Linux but frankly I have no love or will for the hiccups. I just want stuff to work.
    • AsyncAwait 8y ago
      If you want stuff to 'just work' and no surprises, period - Linux Mint. If you want the very latest software versions, always, while maintaining most of the 'just works' but maybe a bit more bleeding edge go with a friendly rolling release distro like Manjaro.
    • brightball 8y ago
      I need to write one up. I tried a few for at least a couple of months at a time just to really commit to getting to know them. Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, Korora (Mint for Fedora) and a couple of others. Mint was great. I ran it for about a year but then switched to Ubuntu after the 18.04 release that switched to Gnome 3. Ubuntu being the dominant installation tends to lead to better support from vendors, etc in my experience. YMMV. I honestly don’t think you can go wrong with either. The biggest thing is going to be committing to push through any little quirks that might come up. For example, I thought multi screen support didn’t work when I tried to use my apple DVI adapter. Turns out that apple uses a “passive” adapter that depends on software installed on the Mac to actually work. If you get an “active” adapter...everything works fine. I also wasn’t thrilled with the Magic Mouse experience, so I ended up getting a different mouse that’s performed wonderfully. Now that I’m far enough down the road I’ve started managing my configuration with Ansible so I have an easy way to just rebuild my install if I try something new. A lot of people do that too, it’s a good time.
• alanfranzoni 8y ago
  I must say that the whole desktop looks like something from the 90s. If you find it fine for your needs, that's great. But I don't think it's a general solution. Linux is so half-baked with respect to desktop, very often it's getting as problematic as a Windows system, especially on laptops.
  • coding123 8y ago
    How is it half baked?
    • mishurov 8y ago
      Apple NPCs are bluepilled af, so don't take their opinion seriously, it's irrelevant for a techie.
    • alanfranzoni 8y ago
      Some examples from my latest (Ubuntu 18.04) linux experience: - Does hidpi work? For ALL applications, and flawlessly? - Is the desktop responsive, or does it feel laggy? - File manager:Can I customize my favourites, including removing the builtin ones? - Can you use a lot of good desktop applications? Like MS Word, Adobe Photoshop, and similar? Or Google Drive, Pixelmator, Dash, Flux, tools in general that may have a small price but make your work considerably faster? - Does bluetooth audio work flawlessly, like, you can use a bt audio device, then stop, then start again? - does the system include a braindead, just-works backup-and-restore system? Sure: if you know Linux well enough, AND YOU SPEND ENOUGH TIME ON YOUR SYSTEM, you can fix most of the above issues (I could not fix the Gnome DE latency with hidpi, btw). But I don't want to waste my time fixing my desktop; I want to pay, and my desktop should just work. Then: if you like the Linux desktop, feel free to use it.
      • Majestic121 8y ago
        I agree with your statement that a desktop should Just Work, and the Linux desktop experience is not perfect, but you seem to have had a harder experience than most would. I don't expect you to get back on Linux or anything, but paying for known supported hardware (e.g. Dell XPS 13) goes a long way to have a 'no-tinkering-needed' experience (pretty much like OSX run better on its own hardware). For the record, HiDPI works flawlessly and responsively with a Dell Precision 5510, including when using projectors with different resolutions. Never had an issue with my Bluetooth headphones, and the system does include a braindead, just-works backup-and-restore system : deja-dup, which works with Google Drive out of the box after inputing your credentials. Applications that don't have a Linux version can be a pain, but most have perfectly good alternative (Google Docs, Flux, Zeal for Dash). Some of them don't really, or require a big change (typically, Photoshop/Gimp), and those can indeed require one to stay on a specific OS
• shinylane 8y ago
  This is a great read, thank you for your documented experience here. I'm very interested in trying this as my OSX is already rocking a good tmux/vi setup. I do fiddle with modern react and JS, any issues with JS compatibility on that browser? I enjoy Mint in an ASUS laptop, but memory and hardware issues do arise.
• ahnick 8y ago
  I love the look of the Librem 13 mentioned in the article. If it had 32GB of memory then I'd consider switching over. As is though, you'll have to pry my T480 ThinkPad from my cold dead hands. :-)
• toyg 8y ago
  (That color theme is... not for me.) I long for the Linux prairies of old, but I've grown fat and lazy on OSX. Linux is a youngster's game. Apple got it wrong in 2016 but there are signs that we might have passed "iPhone peak"... maybe they will be forced to pay attention again to us old farts.
  • rusk 8y ago
    Gloria Gaynor [0] couldn't have put it better ;-) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYkACVDFmeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYkACVDFmeg
  • fouc 8y ago
    Yeah, I loved linux but I'm fat and lazy on OSX. I don't want to be sucked into the rabbit hole of being able to configure and tweak everything, and never quite feeling like I found the greenest pastures.
    • dtemp 8y ago
      I've installed Ubuntu 18.10 on my Dell laptop, and I've done no configuring/tweaking that you describe. Just the default install, changed maybe one or two settings in ubuntu's version of "System Preferences", installed my Firefox extensions, changed the desktop background. You don't need to do any configuring/tweaking if you don't want to. Everything works.
  • cullenking 8y ago
    Turns out that fat/lazy also applies to Linux. Meaning I used to also try to optimize the heck out of my linux install. Went back to Linux from OSX last year, and was perfectly fine adjusting my workflow to suit my new machine, rather than trying to make my machine suit my ideal workflow. What this means is that I installed a base ubuntu system with awesomewm and just used it mostly stock. I already had awesomewm experience from 5+ years prior, but for the first month of moving back to Linux I was also perfectly happy chugging along with gnome. What I am saying is give it a try. Only time I miss OSX now is when I need to sign a PDF.
• dbingham 8y ago
  What screen resolutions do the Librems support? Their tech specs don't actually list the resolutions, just the graphic card and size of the display. That's, honestly, one of the main things holding me to my mac: I want the retina display. That and the fact that all the PC hardware makers insist on offsetting the damned touchpad. Which, maybe it's just my preference, but I hate when they offset the damned touchpad.
  • ahnick 8y ago
    Yeah, offset touchpads are a big thumbs down. Basically just look for the models without dedicated numeric pads. Fortunately those don't typically start showing up until around 15" form factors.
  • driverdan 8y ago
    Unfortunately their 13" is only 1920x1080, a non-starter at a price that's about the same as a MacBook.
  • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    Long term Mac user, currently with Macbook Pro. It's Apple that offsets the damn touchpad. I don't want it central to the case, I want it central to the home keys (F and J) of the keyboard. Apple centres with the case. Which is broken. There's more keys on the right side of a keyboard than the left (without a number pad), thanks to punctuation and brackets, so hands rest slightly left of case centre line. Truth be told I'd prefer Apple fit a trackpoint, but that's never happening.
    • dbingham 8y ago
      I have one of the old MacBook Pros where the homerow was centered on the case, and so was the touchpad. Which is exactly what I want.
      • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        So do I (2015). There's roughly half a key of trackpad to the left of F, and roughly 1.5 to the right of J. For me that's mis-aligned with where my hands rest, even if both component blocks are neatly case centred for pretty and symmetric photos. The moral of which is, I suppose, that personal preferences are hard to align. :)
• roadbeats 8y ago
  I guess the author actually meant to say “So long, OSX” as Macbooks (older than 2016 versions) actually are good hosts for running Linux. I myself run have two Macbooks (Air 13 and Pro 15) with dual boot setup, so I get the best of two worlds: perfect programming setup (i3) on Linux, perfect multimedia (I use Lightroom / Premiere sometimes) setup on OSX.
  • AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
    The author mentions, however, that he also bought a new Librem 13 laptop to go with it. So presumably he ditched the Macbook hardware as well.
    • roadbeats 8y ago
      Yes, he didn’t have to ditch Macbook though.
  • chrisseaton 8y ago
    > I guess the author actually meant to say “So long, OSX” It's called macOS, if you're going to be pedantic about something someone else wrote. It's not been called OSX (actually OS X) for years.
    • roadbeats 8y ago
      I didn't mean to be pedantic. Any name that refers to the software is fine.
  • amaccuish 8y ago
    For me I had to switch back to MacOS. The battery life was dreadful on Linux, even with TLP and various other tweaks.
  • djhworld 8y ago
    Here is a good github repo tracking the state of Linux on Macbooks >= 2016 https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux Doesn't look hopeful at the moment...
• AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
  I find the fetish for terminal-based music players a bit odd. I associate terminals with doing work, so the idea of having one whose sole purpose is playing music (presumably in the background while you do other stuff) to feel like a waste of screen real-estate and something I'm likely to accidentally pull up while trying to cycle between my other terminal windows where I'm doing stuff. I much prefer something that I can kick off to play an album or a playlist and have it all but vanish from sight, either into the taskbar or, preferably, into the system tray.
  • pram 8y ago
    Ah but how else are you going to have enough stuff open in tmux to impress people with your screenshot on r/unixporn
    • Tehchops 8y ago
      Found the elephant in the room, you did.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • Tsiklon 8y ago
      Shoot, you're onto us. Any time I was posting there included screenshots of 'ranger', various permutations of 'htop', and a 'Matrix' style scrolling character feed.
  • number-sequence 8y ago
    I like terminal based music players when I’m doing work exactly because the terminal already feels like work, so it doesn’t feel as much like Tidal or Bandcamp or SoundCloud are open in the background and something I could get distracted by. For keeping it out of sight, tmux or any terminal multiplexer is great at that.
    • Tehchops 8y ago
      Is there one that works with Soundcloud and Spotify?
• sesteel 8y ago
  I recently installed Pop!_OS from System 76 on a newly purchased thinkpad x1 extreme and it has been an absolute joy. Pop!_OS's lineage is up the Debian/Ubuntu branch but has a lot of features that make for a practical experience. You can easily switch between Nvidia and Intel embedded graphics for example.
  • jdhawk 8y ago
    There are still a few rough spots surrounding Docks, external monitors, and HiDPI (if you went 4k). Additionally, I had to jump through a few more hoops in order to get Thermal Throttling under control, increase the battery life to a usable level, etc.. I'm sure that all these things will eventually get rolled in as more users get X1E's, but overall the Pop!_OS experience has been smooth for the Newness of the hardware
• sam0x17 8y ago
  All of that said, what's with the bright manila color theme? There are plenty of people using i3 with a particularly awesome looking setup. Now macos and windows people are going to see this manila paper theme and think, that looks like 90's crap, fuck linux. So that's great :/
  • floren 8y ago
    > Now macos and windows people are going to see this manila paper theme and think, that looks like 90's crap, fuck linux. It's a nice change from the typical screenshots of green text on black terminals.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • rmavis 8y ago
    Well, I did warn people about this: > You might not be impressed much with my environment—I pretty much just copied the acme colors—but some people have put a lot of work into making their setups look sexy. https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn
  • acdw 8y ago
    I actually really love this theme, and have been trying for an acme-ish theme on my laptop for some time. @rmavis, do you think you could share any of the setup with me? Especially your terminal colors.
• MattyRad 8y ago
  This is a shameless plug, but if anyone wants a nudge toward Linux (Ubuntu), coming from Mac, I have a recent write up of things things that I personally gain by using Ubuntu over Mac. https://code.mradford.com/post/ubuntu-vs-mac/ https://code.mradford.com/post/ubuntu-vs-mac/
  • russfink 8y ago
    Well written, but the last sentence kind of trails off. (Perhaps there was a homicidal bunny in the room.)
    • MattyRad 8y ago
      Ha, yeah, thanks. Updated. This article went through a lot of iterations so make it sound least rant-y, so I had a lot of botched copy-paste.
  • mishurov 8y ago
    There's absolutely no need to bring retards here. Let them stay on their OSX or whatever it's called nowadays.
  • irq 8y ago
    Re: your article - there are no Thunderbolt monitors with an integrated GPU. There were rumors about this happening some day, but it hasn’t yet. Also, your review omits battery life... Why? It’s one of the most important considerations.
    • MattyRad 8y ago
      That's interesting... my Macbook Air sometimes struggles by itself, but never has issues performance-wise (especially with docker and npm) when it's plugged in to the thunderbolt. Surely some kind of magic happens, but I guess it could just be happenstance, or my imagination.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• uvee 8y ago
  I've been running Linux (Ubuntu 18.04 with Gnome) on my Dell XPS 13 for a while now and its been working quite well. My biggest concern was mobility, like attaching it to different DPI monitors and have things work well still. With Gnome as my shell, it has been keeping up quite well with the expectations (except some programs not picking up changes right, e.g. IntelliJ). I had moved off of OSX after the new gen of MacBookPros were unusable for me. I was using Windows + WSL for a while but eventually decided to give Linux a try. Things have been quite smooth really. Since most of my dev is around docker etc. it feels like home (not that OSX Docker experience was bad, Windows I can't say).
• teddyc 8y ago
  I resurrected a little NUC computer from a former employee. It has 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD drive. It runs Ubuntu 18.10 fine. The display port runs my 4k monitor @ 60Hz. I bought a USB bluetooth dongle and the smallest microphone I could find on the internet so I can use my old bluetooth mouse and do audio conference calls. I am really loving it for Docker based development b/c it feels like it runs a lot faster. I also love the Home, End PgUp and PgDn keys. Keyboard shortcuts are tough. As is muscle memory going back and forth. My goal is to keep my macbook in my backpack and never take it out during the workday. On most days, that's what happens.
  • benologist 8y ago
    Keyboard shortcuts, and generally bad keyboard/mouse/trackpad options, are the only thing I miss about switching to Elementary OS. I really wish it was keyboard-equivalent to macOS. I'm using a Microsoft all-in-one with a built-in trackpad and it's bearable but if my Apple hardware worked like this I would get it exchanged for being faulty lol.
  • war1025 8y ago
    How do you like the NUC? I have been toying with the idea of buying a mini computer like that. I don't really want a full-size desktop tower, but I also don't really want to go the route of a laptop in a docking station.
    • jagger27 8y ago
      As someone who works on an older NUC all day, do yourself a favour a get the highest end one you can afford. The J5005 CPU is an absolute piece of shit. Otherwise they're fine computers if you don't care about graphics performance.
      • war1025 8y ago
        In fact I don't care about graphics performance. Thanks for the tip. Not sure if I'll ever actually go through with buying one, but seems like a neat idea anyway.
• javajosh 8y ago
  This might be weird, but what I want is something like a real TempleOS. Maybe something like a kernel and all the apps are written in Rebol, where the whole base system including window manager is 1MB max and you can easily, instantly drop into a mode where you can edit anything down to memory and CPU registers. It seems to me that what the Linux desktop gives you is a bad compromise between this hackers paradise (which isn't very practical and very productive in one quirky mode) and a software developers paradise (quite practical and productive in a wide variety of modes). The right solution is a late 2016 MBPr (the one with magsafe and SD card and good keyboard), and a Thinkpad with my fantasy RebolOS running on it.
• simplecomplex 8y ago
  I was hoping for a comparison between OS X and Linux, but the article is just an overview of the OP’s Linux apps. The title is misleading, as there’s really nothing here about MacBooks. But good to know tiling window managers are still being used.
• Tehchops 8y ago
  End-user Linux has definitely improved in the last few years. It offers a lot of attractive features for what I imagine to be the typical HN demographic. That being said, it's still got rough spots that OSX doesn't. It works great when it works, but when it doesn't.... Font rendering, display/compositor fragmentation etc... Inb4 the anecdotal "well it works for me I just had to download the xf86 font library and compile with a legacy glibc version..." crew comes in with a thousand and one rebuttals. Problems like that are still a suboptimal user experience, no matter how you slice it. I'd definitely consider a Linux daily driver for some of my work, but there are things that are just going to be less painful on Apple.
  • larrik 8y ago
    I would also say that Apple has plenty of rough spots that Linux doesn't as well. Font rendering the Apple way is a style choice at best. What does "display/compositor fragmentation" mean to end-user?
    • akiselev 8y ago
      > What does "display/compositor fragmentation" mean to end-user? My 1Password FireFox extension (ubuntu 18.04 LTS) doesn't work on X unless I log in through the website but it works just fine on Wayland.
      • vetinari 8y ago
        What is your X session? Gnome/KDE or plain window manager? It might be, that your wm is not launching some service that wayland session is and 1password needs.
        • pdpi 8y ago
          The fact that you're asking this question and suggesting that root cause is itself a significant part of the problem the OP was talking about.
• jwr 8y ago
  I so wish the Linux community would get its act together and implement a working usable clipboard. It's the one thing I miss the most whenever I switch from Mac OS to Linux. On a Mac, you can cut/copy/paste using predictable keystrokes in any application, anywhere. And there is a single clipboard. On Linux, you have to deal with a multitude of behaviors (middle mouse button, Ctrl-C, others, and does it paste where the cursor is or do you have to click the middle mouse button exactly where you want stuff pasted, etc). And I'm not even talking about multiple media types: all I need is plaintext. The second dream wish would be for consistent keybindings in all text input boxes, like in Mac OS. Such as make Ctrl-A always go to the beginning of line, Ctrl-E always to the end, and Ctrl-K always kill whatever is in there. If I had that, I think I could use Linux without getting annoyed every couple of minutes. I would still miss apps like TextExpander, flawless drag&drop, and lots of other things, but I could at least use it without frustration. Unfortunately, none of this is likely to happen. If you wonder why, it's enough to look at the responses that will surely land here:
  • devereaux 8y ago
    you can do that with xdotool if you want to paste the xbuffer. I suggest handling the shortcuts at the window manager level. this force ctrl-c to always do copy - even in the terminal, but nothing stty can't fix quickly - I use ctrl-x instead as it is close by. end result, my ctrl c and ctrl v work as you would expect -- always!
    • shmerl 8y ago
      There is wl-copy / wl-paste if you are using Wayland compositor.
      • devereaux 8y ago
        I'm using xorg but very interested in Wayland. My main "fear" with wayland is that my scripts to properly handle things like a uniform copy/paste will stop working Would you have some links? I am especially interested in ways to handle shortcuts like with autohotkey on Windows: a context dependent remap (ex: pressing a given physical key may send ctrl-tab in an application, but ctrl-pagedown in another if said other application doesn't support remapping shortcuts)
• patrickg_zill 8y ago
  The Second Moribundity of Apple is nigh. First was the stagnation a few years after Jobs left. Now that Jobs is gone, Cook is showing he has the logistics knowledge but not the other parts of product leadership needed.
  • _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    I'm not sure that Apple cares though. At this point they don't really seem that interested in 'computers' (as per their own ads), and the iOS ecosystem is where they make their money.
• k__ 8y ago
  I read that more and more parts are soldered on the logic board in the new version, which means people have to buy new macbooks every few years anyway. I tried to upgrade my RAM and found out it's soldered in, whelp, lets see how long I can stand 8GB of RAM, haha.
  • Synaesthesia 8y ago
    With a fast SSD, I find it completely acceptable, even my old 4gb MBA was OK in performance, depends on your use case.
    • k__ 8y ago
      Coding (Xcode, Android Studio) and video editing (FCPX)
• DanCarvajal 8y ago
  As a graphic designer, if I Adobe CC worked on GNU/Linux I would gladly switch. Alas my job is very depended on Adobe InDesign.
• carlospwk 8y ago
  I find it depressing that (despite this post) there really are only two viable operating systems for 99% of the user base that needs ease of use and commercial software. Same in mobile devices. And there is absolutely nothing indicating a change to the status quo.
  • zrobotics 8y ago
    To be fair though, this is mostly a setup problem. There are a lot of people who only need a personal computer to use a browser. I've switched my father & stepfather over to Linux mint, and the amount of tech support is actually lower than when one was on Mac and one was on windows. I think the big issue is that Linux isn't pre-installed. That, and there are programs that won't work (my mother is still on win10 due to MS Office). Remember, most people aren't software devs, and have very different concerns. And increasingly there are more and more people who don't even own a proper computer, since a smartphone will suffice for their needs.
• proyb 8y ago
  As far as I like about Linux but audio quality feel less bass despite a tweak to supposedly bring the best sound on ALSA didn’t help. Piano timbres sound far better on macOS and Windows unless you could advice me.
  • mastercheif 8y ago
    What DAC are you using? And what audio applications? On MacOS and Windows, if your music player is not using CoreAudio or WASAPI “exclusive mode”, your audio is going to get res ampler and dithered by the OS mixer. This may be the difference that you’re hearing.
• o_____________o 8y ago
  Funny how the main thing that keeps me away from Linux now was the main pain point over a decade ago: Adobe suite
• nepeckman 8y ago
  My 2011 Macbook has been hanging on and functioning well with some upgrades. When I do finally replace it, it will be with a linux laptop. I'm not interested in paying that ridiculous price for a computer that sacrifices functionality for aesthetics. I fully expect that there will be some trade offs in the "Just Works" category, but I've been using linux as the driver on my desktop for a while with few issues.
  • fiala__ 8y ago
    I'm about to switch to Linux from my 2010 MBP (which is still basically working) and my main motivation is exactly the fact that "Just Works" no longer applies to MacBooks. My £2800 company MBP has half-broken USB-C ports, malfunctioning Touch Bar, various audio issues, and I can't use Blender to render on the GPU because of Apple's shitty outdated OpenGL. I could have two Linux laptops with better specs for the price of this piece of fancy aluminium, and a similar amount of bugs/broken stuff.
• mrspeaker 8y ago
  This is most definitely selection bias, but it seems like there's something in the air at the moment with people jumping off the "mainstream tech" ship. Lots of talk of nostalgia for 90s internet culture, switching to Linux (I also switched to Linux (and Emacs!) after a decade+ on Mac), more secure/transparent tech with phones etc. More willingness to put up with "rough spots" and "less shiny" for greater access to things under-the-hood. Is it just nostalgia? Global politics? Me hanging around other nerds who are also getting older? I dunno, but now computers seem more exciting than ever! Ok, I gotta get back to IRC and browsing the internet on M-x eww...
  • phil21 8y ago
    > Is it just nostalgia? Maybe. I think the Internet was pretty much an objectively better place in the 90s, but far more useful for "real world" things today. For me it's pretty personal and to be completely honest immensely sad. Since I was 14 I've worked full time on this "Internet" stuff and like to think I've contributed my tiny slice of pushing the future forward (and at times, unfortunately the opposite!). I truly bought the dream that enabling decentralized communications would allow for far more human potential to be realized, and perhaps even bring down longstanding immoral power structures. Nope. Unfortunately my life's work has been used to centralize control and engage in monopoly-like behaviour. Watching everyone hell-bent on moving to just a few central "cloud providers" is incredibly frustrating. This road leads to tears. Seeing that there are only really a half dozen "eyeball" ISPs in the US that matter is just as frustrating, and will harm us long-term. Basically for me I'm sure it was some youthful optimism and passion, but it's really a lot like building a really cool robot and then seeing someone use that to go to war against people you love. Trying to recreate those times won't work, it never does. My only hope is that in another decade or three the newer generation realizes we're back to where we were with the giant telecoms and fight back with another new black swan technology.
    • rusk 8y ago
      Looking back, I'm wondering how I could have ever expected anything else ... all this amazing and eye-wateringly expensive network infrastructure provided for free! On a more positive note however, I do believe the pendulum swings back. Sometimes you've just got to stand back and watch the mistakes be made. I think a lot of this fascination with retro tech is in part an attempt to find a safe-space to operate while waiting for it all to blow over .. kind of like the Magratheans [https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Magrathea https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Magrathea].
• vesak 8y ago
  Man, this is so weird. I used Linux from 1996ish to 2017 and then just moved almost everything to Apple. I don’t remember the exact reason, but probably it had something to do with Wayland taking forever to stabilize, and the community starting to smell bad. And I’m happy, probably happier than before. Sure, Apple’s stuff isn’t perfect, but it’s way closer to it than any Linux combination I ever tried. The only thing I miss is i3, but turns out, not that much. I hope my move didn’t jinx the whole platform...
  • thejrk_ 8y ago
    I think finding something that works for you and fills your needs is exciting and people want to share their experience about it. The problem exist when people start to think what works for them will work for everyone and if you don't use X you're wrong. I want choice not necessarily change.
  • mbrock 8y ago
    I've only been using GNU/Linux since around 2000. I started on Slackware 7, then I was on Red Hat for a while, had a Gentoo phase, and then Debian was my main choice for a long time, although I used Ubuntu on some computers... When the first Intel MacBook came out I was 17 and bought one for all my savings. I thought it was really amazing to have a beautiful laptop running a polished desktop Unix-like. But I always had a stationary Debian computer too. I never really liked GNOME or the other desktop environments. For most of the time I've just used Ratpoison (or stumpwm) with GNU Emacs and a few terminals. That way I feel way more efficient and less distracted; even on Mac OS I usually maximize everything into a separate workspace, or now occasionally use the new split-screen function. Sometime right around when I started doing coding for a living, after university, I drifted away from GNU/Linux. I just used MacBooks and iPhones. Of course I still used GNU Emacs. But the Apple ecosystem was basically fine for my rather ambient computing needs at home. My workplaces used either Windows or Mac. But then in 2015 I got my first GNU/Linux laptop and installed NixOS which I had used on some servers and fallen in love. NixOS pretty much reinvigorated my love for GNU/Linux, and I love it again. I still have a bunch of Apple products. I treat them as separate lineages with different strengths and purposes. The NixOS machine is for serious hacking, and then I'm satisfied with letting the Macs handle photos, playing DRM movies, all kinds of random stuff. I use an iPhone and some Mac apps that sync with iOS, etc. But my NixOS machines are awesome too, and they're the ones I really love — basically because of the freedom, in the FSF sense. I know they're not doing weird stuff behind my back, I know I can hack them freely, and I can configure them exactly like I want them.
• vivan 8y ago
  I attempted to move to Ubuntu on my XPS 13, but couldn't manage to get the DPI scaling to work properly. Weirdly, if I run Ubuntu in a VM under windows it scales fine. There are still too many of these small problems to justify making the move for me fully.
  • MrZongle2 8y ago
    Preach. Currently running Ubuntu 18.04 on an XPS 15, and it's been.... interesting. Disappointing, in some respects, as having set up the system to dual-boot into Windows 10 and having seen what the hardware can accomplish, I feel as if I've had to try remarkably hard to get close to that in a Linux environment.
  • timbit42 8y ago
    I'm using Kubuntu on my XPS 15 for that reason. KDE seems to have the best DPI scaling of the Linux desktops.
• shmerl 8y ago
  Welcome back! macOS can't really beat Linux in productivity. Especially if you are using well configurable DE. I like KDE for that.
• safgasCVS 8y ago
  This is daft - the switch to Linux from macOS is done entirely out of some moronic desire to be different and very little to do with functionality. Windows to Linux I can Understand but the HN hive mind defends Linux like their firstborn. Let it go. It’s a lot of work for very little upside. Let the downvotes come
  • shmerl 8y ago
    I've seen many refugees from macOS coming to Linux, so it's not surprising in the least. Good for them, it will increase their productivity. This was especially boosted by those interested in gaming, and Apple abandoning OpenGL and planning to ditch 32-bit support.
    • safgasCVS 8y ago
      Fine there’s always movement between states and each person has their reasons for moving them it good or bad. That said I have tried the switch repeatedly after reading such posts/recommendations only to realise I’ve spent more time trying to get something really basic to work for no tangible benefit. For those who found the transition worthwhile then I tip my hat off to you
  • _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    Maybe macOS works well for you, and so for you to switch would only be 'out of some moronic desire to be different', but there are certainly lots of valid reasons a person might prefer being on Linux rather than macOS, from not trusting closed-source OSes to wanting tools that aren't out of date.
  • rmavis 8y ago
    Please, enlighten me further about my aspirations and motivations.
• naibafo 8y ago
  There are different issues with OSX though, that colleagues of mine had, that never occur with Linux. E.g. the chore of somehow managing different software versions such as the outdated default one and a second one installed with homebrew. Almost all my colleagues struggled with setting up python 2 und 3 correctly at some point, whereas this just worked for me on Linux. Some struggled with font rendering between a 1080p monitor and their Retina displays as well.
  • Tehchops 8y ago
    >Almost all my colleagues struggled with setting up python 2 und 3 correctly at some point, whereas this just worked for me on Linux. This is one area where I'd have to concede the Apple experience is objectively suboptimal. However, the Python ecosystem isn't doing anyone any favors here.
    • mitchty 8y ago
      I just use nix on OS X, better package manager than most linux distros have. I have my own copies of py2/3 and the system one, not a huge deal to be honest (outside of the pain of linux side nixos updates breaking derivations for macOS, but thats generally not a fault of the os).
      • 0az 8y ago
        The issue I have with Nix, vs a combined MacPorts+Homebrew is that Nix is a pain to get working. The time investment required for Nix is too high.
        • mitchty 8y ago
          No argument there, I definitely agree, however its easily my favorite package manager. And lets me keep nixos config similarly.
        • jamesgeck0 8y ago
          Last time I tried Nix I eventually got the Nix environment working, but ran into MacOS-specific issues trying to install relatively common development-related packages like Ruby and PostgreSQL.
• debrice 8y ago
  I have a hard time working on MacOS, so I use linux, but that's because I'm a developer. I have a hard time doing simple things on linux so I use MacBook for my day-to-day things, but that's because I'm a human being. Linux is great, MacOS is great, these posts who love to hate on one to love another aren't.
• Synaesthesia 8y ago
  Personally have no issues with iTunes, it's nice and fast even on my non-ssd PC (hackintosh), and deals with my 300gb+ library with no problems.
• arronblown 8y ago
  Good bye hardware, hello software? This is such a stupid title.
• DontSueMeBro 8y ago
  MacBook implies MacOS and the article is comparing that hardware+OS combination with just an OS. It would have been nice to hear what hardware solution the author ended up with, along with Linux, for a fuller comparison. Mostly because I'm in the same boat as the author and will be moving away from a Mac after 15 years to Linux, but am lost on the hardware front. Right now really wanting a Lenovo Yoga C930, maybe.
  • shhh_quiet 8y ago
    The article notes that the author is using a Purism Librem 13 laptop.
• mawburn 8y ago
  One of the big features Macs have for me is that I can call customer service any time of day and they can work through any serious issue I have with my Mac. I've only had to call a few times, but they were able to work out some pretty serious issues quickly each time. I think the longest I was on the phone was 1.5hrs to find out that my own IT dept had screwed up Casper settings that I couldn't fix. For a work machine I don't really want to do that kind of debugging myself. I just want it to work. I've been running Linux at home for about a decade and usually have no issues, but when I do I'm not dead in the water with project deadline hanging over my head.
  • Tehchops 8y ago
    > One of the big features Macs have for me is that I can call customer service any time of day and they can work through any serious issue I have with my Mac This is something else that often gets left out in these discussions. For better or worse, Apple offers an ecosystem/platform, and the support to go along with it. Suppose you do make a Linux laptop work for your daily driver. You're still left out in the cold if you have an iPhone/iWatch/iPad. The tight integration that's offered, along with the ubiquitous(and very useful) iCloud is something that Linux just doesn't have. And yes, I am aware of the various flavors of self-hosted solutions, the dangers of lock-in etc... If I've already been fighting to make my laptop functional for work, I don't want to start the same battle again for my hobbies too.
    • willtim 8y ago
      If you buy a business-class machine like a ThinkPad, you will get a modular and repairable machine with typically 3 years on-site support as standard, in most countries. This is not true with Apple. Apple machines are essentially unrepairable in the field and even with the expensive AppleCare option, you will likely lose possession of your machine for a significant amount of time.
      • ianhowson 8y ago
        With Apple, you can take it to any store and they'll diagnose it immediately. With business support (which isn't even expensive for individuals; it was $500/year when I had it) they'll give you a loaner on the spot. If you've got backups, your downtime for a dead machine maybe a few hours.
• pp19dd 8y ago
  Rather than spend money on a new laptop that I wasn't sure I even wanted, I tried out a Pinebook. For $99 I got a fairly usable Linux machine, albeit with its own quirks. 11.6" IPS, 64 bit ARM CPU, 10,000 mAH battery, 2GB RAM. Overall, I chuckled at what I got (keyboard remapping helped since it's based on an Android layout), but some weeks afterwards I marveled at the minimalist utility and how well it held charge. Evaluating it was an interesting exercise. Google docs aren't fast enough on the machine for comfort (try writing a novel) so a comparable Chromebook is a superior choice. But, KDE Kate is great. Terminal, of course, flies as fast as anywhere. If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend to look at it as a point of minimalist reference if nothing else.
• aoro 8y ago
  What pulls me to linux over my MacBook is the package managers. The apt-get system is much better than homebrew in my experience.
  • jorvi 8y ago
    See, I don’t get this. I know that from a technical perspective apt is much nicer because its ‘first party’ to the OS, but homebrew both feels much simpler in us and its packages are so fresh that it trails the stable branch of packages by a day or so. Apt packages are frozen in place, unless you go with extra PPAs. Or if you go with a rolling release like Arch, there’s small things breaking constantly.
• jgowdy 8y ago
  I try to avoid me too posts, especially on HN, but I recently ditched my MBP for an XPS 13 running Mint. I'm very impressed with how much software is natively available now, Wine 4.0 staging is reaching amazing levels of support, and even Steam gaming with native titles and Windows games running under Proton. I'm very pleased with the transition and recommend that if you're on the fence, give it a shot and see if it works for you. Ignore how things were last time you tried.
• Tade0 8y ago
  Ubuntu gave a lease of life to my old(2013) laptop after an update in Win10 locked me out of my account. I use a company-issued MacBook Pro for work and was considering an identical machine as my personal daily driver until I did a comparison which revealed what an absolute monster of a laptop I could have for the same price instead. I mean - the Apple ecosystem is great an all but I need some raw computing power from time to time and Linux is currently able to provide that.
• simplicio 8y ago
  Interesting that he's using suckless.org programs. I was reading through their codebase just to practice reading C, and was curious how much use they had "in the wild"
• ausjke 8y ago
  Why the switch :) Linux desktop has been my sole desktop for the last 15 years, it gets better and got the job done. I must admit that Ubuntu made a big difference. On the other hand unless you're a PC game lover, the PC itself is more of a chromebook, i.e. nice hardware running a modern browser plus a few decent editors. The OS underneath is less irrelevant now. Linux has space to improve though, for me it is the power management especially for laptops.
• growt 8y ago
  Since TFA talks a lot about i3 and dmenu, here are my scripts to have your most used commands on top in dmenu in i3: https://github.com/grothkopp/dmenu_run_favorites https://github.com/grothkopp/dmenu_run_favorites
• Waterluvian 8y ago
  Hooking up three monitors, 2 of which are 4k onto Ubuntu is the most frustrating thing I've done with that OS. It just works on OSX though. Rough spots is a good way to describe it. Overall it works... But not without effort and competence.
  • InitialLastName 8y ago
    That doesn't "Just work" on Windows 7 or 10, though, so not sure it's a failure on the part of Linux as much as a success on the part of macOS.
    • raesene9 8y ago
      Anecdata incoming, multi-monitor on Win 10 works just fine for me. I've got 2 screens attached to my laptop and they're just fine, even with different scaling on each one.
    • joombaga 8y ago
      It does work though. X can't be configured with 2 different DPIs at all.
      • cr0sh 8y ago
        Are you sure? http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/ http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/ I can't say I've played around with it, but the above seems to indicate that such support is available - but that you might have issues with apps not supporting it (or reporting their DPI properly). There also might be problems with other layers above raw X (?) - but it seems like X itself does support it in some manner? I once had X supporting two mice on dual monitors (this was a while back - I had a couple of CRT monitors at the time); seeing that made me think X could do almost anything I asked of it (depending on how I "asked").
        • joombaga 8y ago
          Nope! Looks like I was wrong. I was never able to get it working on Gnome without the upscale/downscale workaround suggested in your link (resulting in terribly degraded image quality), but perhaps that is the fault of Gnome/GTK. It wouldn't have occurred to me that the fault could lie in any other layer than that which controls the resolution/DPI, but I'm certainly no expert on the Linux graphical stack.
• throw12311112 8y ago
  I recently 'downgraded' from a 2017 MBP nonTB to a 2015 X1 Carbon Thinkpad with Manjaro Linux installed and i'm loving it. Only cost me 330 euros second hand. Apple are dead to me after I spent thousands on a machine that has a broken keyboard. In hindsight I wish I switched to Linux years ago for my professional computing. swdevs, sysadmins & security people who know the ins and outs of computing should switch. I call it conscious computing.
• dagss 8y ago
  I need tiling window managers. Not negotiable at all. I have the impression that there are no alternatives for Windows or Mac? If so that alone frees med from considering those..
• jniedrauer 8y ago
  I've been developing fulltime on Linux since 2014. I can't speak for the default distros/DEs, since I've been using i3 and sway the entire time. But it's been a fantastic development environment for me. I recently watched one of my colleagues run a build on their macbook. Not a complicated build. A go binary compile and a docker image build. But it really struck me how slow it was. What takes 15 seconds on my underpowered linux workstation took 60+ seconds on their $2000 macbook. That's unacceptable to me.
• systemtest 8y ago
  I'm currently on Ubuntu 18.04 and I love it but: - Firefox takes literally 10 seconds to start unless I disable eth0 - Chromium isn't able to resolve DNS for local intranet sites - Have not tried chrome as installing it means fiddling with apt repos, wget or gdebi These issues are unresolved as of January 2019. I can't say that I ever had such issues on macOS. I have had DNS issues because of my specific ISP router after a major macOS upgrade but my ISP patched it within a week.
  • cheald 8y ago
    The first two issues both sound like you have misconfigured DNS and the first resolver in your list is invalid (and has to time out). The same misconfiguration under OSX would be likely to create the same issues.
    • systemtest 8y ago
      Thank you for solving the first issue! I switched DNS from automatic to manual. Now I do have to adjust this every time I switch networks so perhaps I should write a script that does this automatically.
      • dpark 8y ago
        Why are you manually configuring DNS? If you need it to switch between different networks, it sounds like you should let DHCP do its job instead of overriding it.
      • kilburn 8y ago
        If your problem is over wifi, NetworkManager (the default in Ubuntu) should let you do this automatically. Networkmanager defines a "connection" for every (stored) wifi, which you can view: nmcli connection show Now, you can set the dns servers to use when any of these connections is activated. For instance, define google's servers by: nmcli conn mod <connection-name> ipv4.dns "8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4" This will override the DNS settings (which come from DHCP by default) whenever you connect to this specific network :)
• overgard 8y ago
  MacBooks don’t seem like great developer machines anymore. The keyboards are really lacking (bad travel and lack of useful keys), the touch bar is a silly gimmick, it needs 50 dongles to connect to anything, and every macOS update seems to break developer tools in surprising ways.
• rv-de 8y ago
  Linux Mint 19 (xfce) on any Thinkpad (T-series) is absolutely phantastic. Everything works either out of the box or is trivial to set up. LM 19 also works perfect on my gf's cheap Acer - which is saying something. I even converted my clueless father on his old days to Linux thanks to LM 19 xfce.
• unfunco 8y ago
  Anecdotal like other comments but I and a few others from my workplace have switched to Dell XPS machines and run Linux now, and it's because we're working with Docker, even with 16GB RAM and solid-state drives, the performance of Docker on MacOS is pathetic, and entirely unusable for our work. The XPS machines we have are ugly, they're flimsy, they have a grotesque carbon-fibre pattern on them, the keys leave imprints on the monitor after the lid has been closed, the fan drowns out the sound of music in my apartment, the camera is situated about 5mm above the keyboard with it's rickety keys, it is without a doubt the ugliest, the worst computer I have owned, I eat tramadol just to handle the back-pain from carrying it around in my rucksack, but I'm much less angry and frustrated working on it than I am on a Mac because it doesn't shit it's pants when more than a few containers are running.
  • mattnewton 8y ago
    Have you tried running Linux on a MacBook? This used to be pretty well supported (albeit expensive) way of getting pretty hardware and the software you needed, but I haven’t tried in a while.
    • OxO4 8y ago
      AFAIK newer Macs with a T2 security chip block OSs other than macOS and Windows 10 [0] (at least on the internal drive). [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-T2-Blocks-Linux-UEFI https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-T2...
  • geoka9 8y ago
    I started using X1 Carbon 6th recently and it's an amazing little machine. Extremely portable (a 14" that weighs 2.5 lbs and fits in a 13" sleeve), great keyboard, great Linux support, good display, and it runs very cool (the fan is never on, despite running multiple virtualbox instances in addition to regular work that causes sporadic CPU spikes - e.g. compiling). It's also very pleasant to touch and hold in your hands, especially if you like the Thinkpad aesthetics.
    • 8y ago
• TomK32 8y ago
  My decade of PowerMacs and Macbooks ended three years ago, sadly I started using it when iTunes still had m4p and I'm too lazy these days to go through the elaborate extraction processes.
• davidcollantes 8y ago
  Shouldn't it be "So Long, macOS. Hello again, Linux?" I have known people who has done the same, and are back again on macOS. Give it a bit, and it will pass.
• jeena 8y ago
  I did that a couple of years ago and never looked back https://jeena.net/why-i-switchedfrom-osx-to-linux https://jeena.net/why-i-switchedfrom-osx-to-linux
• resca79 8y ago
  When I switched from linux to mac it was just for the hardware, at time I bought a ibook g4 the most beautifull laptop that I have had, the battery in 2006 has a duration around 9 hours of coding. Recently when I think to back to linux the only my worries is the system update and the fact that I cannot test or compile any iOS app.
• blt 8y ago
  Librem lacks HiDPI. Is there a Linux optimized laptop with HiDPI and a near-apple quality trackpad?
• kingofhdds 8y ago
  Strictly speaking, almost nothing in the article is about Linux. It's about tools which work perfectly on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or Illumos. Some of them work on OSX too, btw.
• danans 8y ago
  For the software development aspects of my work, I've developed a strong aversion to manual mouse-based management of overlapping windows, as provided by the traditional Mac, Windows and Linux desktop environments. They require too much manual effort to position/resize/organize windows, which are IMO a dated skeumorphic affordance which provides limited productivity. That starts to matter more when you are dealing with early symptoms of RSI. Instead, I've found that a tiling WM like XMonad[1] + its virtual desktops is a great way to organize my separate tasks and minimize extraneous window management. Each workspace contains the "windows" for a particular long running task, and if I ever need more screen real estate for a particular window, I cycle through the layout modes until I find one that works - usually just a few key presses away. However, unlike the author, I keep my non-programming compute tasks (email, media, etc.) separate from my programming tasks by using a traditional desktop environment for those, because there are a lot of things in the traditional desktop that are optimized for those tasks (i.e. desktop notifications, media controls, etc.) This requires running 2 different machines, but there are plenty of good ways, either via hardware or software, to make the switches between the two environments mostly seamless. [1] https://xmonad.org/ https://xmonad.org/
• rorygibson 8y ago
  I just - last week - moved from a 2012 retina MBP 13" to a new XPS 13" with Ubuntu 18. Loving it. Also running i3 (actually i3-gaps, + terminator, dmenu, emacs) I also bought a 34" curved ultrawide Samsung, which powers the XPS over USB-C. Single cable, and my mechanical keyboard is plugged into the monitor as a hub. Everything just works. It's ace.
• osrec 8y ago
  For anyone who just wants a system that works, and doesn't require whizzy animations all over the place, try Lubuntu. I've been using it for a while and it simply gets out of your way and just let's you get on with things. Best operating system I've used till date for development.
  • thomastjeffery 8y ago
    XFCE (Xubuntu) is just as good, in case LMDE (Lubuntu) isn't quite what you want.
    • osrec 8y ago
      I've always found Lubuntu snappier. Also, multiple monitors work beautifully on Lubuntu - I unfortunately had issues with Xubuntu.
• talkingtab 8y ago
  For me there are multiple issues that point toward Linux - Linux has gotten better - I have two older Macs, an iMac and a 2012 MacBook. The usability of MacOs on these is worse with every new version of the Mac OS - I have no confidence in new Apple hardware. They seem to be focused on customers who will buy things with a much higher cost to benefit ratio than I can afford. I have doubts that Apple will even continue to support Mac's. - Apple feels like the new Windows to me, and we all know how well that went. I do not see the kind of user focused innovation that was their trademark. - Other than movies, music, web development, email and browsing I find myself using my doing less and less with my computers - My experience with all of those functions has frustration creep perhaps because my hardware is old. But then again, can't Apple support older harder? Sorry if I descended into a tirade, but the net result is - I love my 2012 MacBook and will probably keep it. - I'm looking to see if I can run linux on my 2013 iMac. - I am trying to find inexpensive hardware (laptop or desktop) as a development machine.
• jaabe 8y ago
  I think I feel the same disenchantment from Apple that the author does, and it really scares me. Because the responses to this piece are basically 220 reasons of why I’ll probably never switch. Don’t get me wrong, I want to like Linux, I just don’t want to spend any time (as in any time) on configurations. I want to plug right into my 4K monitor and have things just work. I want a good trackpad, and so on.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Everyone wants a computer that does what they want it to out of the box. When we say we want something easy, that's what we mean. The problem with that is that everyone wants different things, so it is fundamentally impossible. I think Linux needs to stop trying to be easy, and start trying to be simple. Throw out all the over-complicated garbage that has become the Linux Desktop and make something that is simple enough for people to build an accurate mental model of how it functions in a relatively short time, and with a set of simple composable tools. Then they can build the thing they want with a relative minimum and without writing any C. It already some composability thanks to the original UNIX commandline toolset, at least for text processing, but those have grown archaic over time and the concept was never properly extended to the GUI. I doubt that will ever happen though. Instead the community will just keep piling on more and more complexity, keep creating more and more distros to try and cover that infinity of what people want in their effort to make it "easy", and tell anyone who doesn't want to do things the way they do that they're doing them wrong.
  • thomastjeffery 8y ago
    In my experience, the only frustration left is display scaling. Everything else "just works", while leaving configuration as an option for those who want it. Unfortunately, display scaling is just impossible with Xorg, and Wayland is still not really usable.
• loser777 8y ago
  I wish this post touched on some deeper reasons that the author was "disenchanted" with Apple. Having dabbled in tiling window managers, terminal music players, and many other /r/unixporn memes, this kind of infatuation with UI candy makes me think that the author's issues with Apple were only skin deep. Many of the things mentioned here (e.g., tiling WMs, emacs _REALLY?_) are not mutually exclusive with macOS. I run GNU/Linux exclusively on my headless work machines, but I think moving to Linux on the laptop still makes you trade too much (battery life, system integration). I wonder if the author has realized that rebranded ODM hardware (Librem and System76) and a modern Macbook are unfortunately not in remotely the same league. I DD'd a T420 with debian on it religiously throughout undergrad, and I'm not in a hurry to go back. (I do miss the keyboard sometimes though)
  • rmavis 8y ago
    > I wish this post touched on some deeper reasons that the author was "disenchanted" with Apple. It's mainly the feeling of ownership. Apple's apparently increasing hostility toward third-party upgrade-and-repair shops (see the whole "right to repair" issue) forces owners of their machines to use their support exclusively. I'd prefer to have more options for upgrading my hardware than buying a new machine. These decisions make sense for Apple but not for me. Maybe it's because they're still small but Purism hasn't set me up for this sort of antagonistic relationship. There's also the increased sense of creativity with Linux. It feels a little bit like working with Legos. Because "unix philosophy" and such that other commenters feel are trivial wastes of time, I'm free to make the machine behave as I wish. And I like that. Of course there are also superficial things. I don't like notifications that force a behavior, like being forced to opening System Preferences because the only button on the notification is "View". But it's also more than that. > Having dabbled in tiling window managers, terminal music players, and many other /r/unixporn memes I mean, if you want to demean things you don't like as "memes", that's your prerogative. But I don't use a tiling window manager or terminal music player to impress people. I use them because I like them---they're fast, the mental models make sense, they expose me to new/unfamiliar concepts, and I can customize them to suit me. > Many of the things mentioned here (e.g., tiling WMs, emacs _REALLY?_) are not mutually exclusive with macOS. True. I've been using emacs (yeah, really) on macOS for a decade. No complaints there. > I wonder if the author has realized that rebranded ODM hardware (Librem and System76) and a modern Macbook are unfortunately not in remotely the same league. The Librem 13 is easily the best-feeling laptop I've ever used.
• rkangel 8y ago
  What are people's experiences with the build quality of these artisanal laptop builders? I have Thinkpad (running Fedora), but I like the solidity and maintainability. Do things like the Librem last in daily use?
  • rmavis 8y ago
    The Purism forums show there's some variability but my experience has been great. The Librem 13 is the best-feeling laptop I've ever used. It's sturdy (unlike a Macbook Air) but thinner and lighter than my 10-year-old Macbook. It's in a very satisfying middle ground. The keys are great and the trackpad, though not quite as nice as Apple's, is very good. My one complaint is with the color. Smudges definitely appear pretty quickly. On the other hand, I'm less likely to type with gross fingers now and I wipe down my machine more often (maybe a couple times a month), which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
• overcast 8y ago
  My current setup is as follows. I found this to be the best way of not being distracted by other functions on the same machine. When I want to do one of those 3 tasks, I bootup the correct machine/drive. MacOS(Hackintosh) - Daily driver, photo editing. Windows 10 - Gaming Mint Linux(Disk2 of Gaming PC) - Development
• loop0 8y ago
  From someone that has been using linux as his main OS since 2003, I tried to switch to mac once (used for one year) and had to work with a mac for approx. 4 years. As good as brew is, it is just not as good as having your distro package manager, I ran into so many issues using brew, every mac os upgrade was a pain to keep brew packages working. Then it came docker, what a bliss is to use docker on Linux, but on mac it is just cumbersome, specially because everything is inside that qcow image that only grows until you run out-of-disk. I know it was alleviated by some measures the docker team took to "fix" it, but still it is not as good as docker running on linux. Nowadays I just buy a thinkpad, put Fedora on it and everything works as expected. Because all of the projects I work with use docker, performance wise it is so much faster than running it on mac os.
• babyslothzoo 8y ago
  This type of report, and the comments here echoing it, should worry Apple. Years of bad decisions and neglect for the Mac have added up. The bad keyboards, touch bars, unnecessary port removals, etc, it feels like the company forgot who the "Pro" Mac line is made for. I hope they course correct but fear they won't.
• bwidlar 8y ago
  Old macos user too. Using Arch Linux since some months ago. This is my happy world now: xcape -e "Shift_L=parenleft;Shift_R=parenright" sxhkd & unclutter & feh --auto-rotate --bg-fill --randomize ~/pics/wallpapers & jack_control start jack_control dps nperiods 3 jack_control dps period 2048 cd ~/prog/bar/ ./bar | ./lemonbar -B#080808 -F#333333 -f "luculent" -b & cd exec bspwm I am going to stay here for very long, the rolling release concept is a gift from gods.
• perfect_wave 8y ago
  I'm surprised no one has mentioned the price of the laptop that the author gets. The thing is $1,400 base price - and that's with a 120 GB SSD and 4 GB of RAM. Up it to 8 GB of RAM and a 500 GB SSD and you're paying $1,7000. Seems quite the hefty price to pay.
• asselinpaul 8y ago
  Recently tried the switch. Bought a top-spec Thinkpad P1, installed a few distros. Ended up returning it due to: - poor scaling on 4k display (Linux) - awful speakers - poor battery life Reluctantly back on a MBP — no complaints besides the useless Touchbar. Things just work.
• the_cat_kittles 8y ago
  been using ubuntu for the last 2 weeks. i cannot believe i hadnt thought to do this sooner. i miss nothing from mac or windows land, except easier drivers for some peripherals. i cannot believe how worthless windows terminal is. i cannot believe how bloated osx is. ububtu is a dream!
• isacikgoz 8y ago
  I am also planning to migrate from macbook. I am tired of constant hardware failures, of my current macbook and previous one. OS on the other hand is not better than in any field if I compare it to Linux. The only valid reason for me to stay with macOS is support of MS office tools.
• psadauskas 8y ago
  I've used both Linux and OSX for a long time, and what I've found is that while Linux breaks a little more often, I stand a much better chance of being able to fix it. When I google for a Linux problem, there's much more likely to be an answer that works on StackOverflow, while on OSX it often just leads me to the Apple support forums with dozens of people asking the same question and no real answer. Similarly, while the little utility apps on OSX tended to be better written, on Linux if they didn't work quite the way I wanted there was usually a config file I could tweak that would make it better. On OSX I just had to either write an app myself (and I don't know XCode, ObjC or Swift) or hope that someone else would. And some things on OSX were just impossible. I find that a tiling window manager fits really well in my development flow, and while it can sorta be emulated with tools like Divvy and Alfred, I always found it to be more cumbersome than awesome or i3. But, Alfred is a way better launcher than anything I've found available on Linux.
  • fiter 8y ago
    I find that in the Gnome ecosystem, the apps will not have a config file that can be tweaked. Sometimes there will be an add-on or separate app the allows a tweak, but there's a concerted effort to remove options.
    • jamesgeck0 8y ago
      Many Gnome config files are binary to improve startup performance, but they can still be edited using the appropriate tool.
    • psadauskas 8y ago
      True, Gnome is nearly as un-customizable as OSX, but with even fewer add on apps to "fix" it. I find KDE to be a much better user experience out-of-the-box, and also more customizable and extendable.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    I find that when I google Linux problems I'm much more likely to get dozens of answers, all of them wrong. They're for a different distro, or a different arrangement of the software stack, or out of date, or not actually answers (why would you want to do that?), or just plain wrong. Theoretically it could be a lot better, if the documentation was better, the stack wasn't so maddeningly complicated, and there wasn't so much needless fragmentation.
• whalesalad 8y ago
  Hats off to this person for jumping ship, I couldn't do it. I acquired a new contract recently that had a fairly heavy duty dev environment requirement (old rails app, mysql, elasticsearch, memcached, redis, nginx) and my ~2012 Macbook Air was choking on it. I spent a few weeks really chewing on my next move. I was worried about the keyboard on the latest Macbook Pro's, that was really my only hesitation. I seriously considered the Thinkpad as well as the XPS but ultimately decided I couldn't afford to leave OS X. There is a grass-is-greener mentality around leaving for Linux, because it's definitely improved, but it's still nowhere even close. I knew I would miss iMessage, my Airpods wouldn't work, i'd have all the strange issues with the clipboard or drivers, and I wouldn't be able to work on iOS applications. I spent nearly 3k on this machine, but (knock on wood) my Apple gear has never let me down. Sure, there are ocassional issues but the gear is really in a league of its own in terms of quality and fit-finish. My 2012 Air made it through a handful of startups and side projects, rails apps, django apps, elixir, iOS, and traveled with me all over the world. Hoping to get another 6+ years out of this. It's got 32gb of ram and the upgraded Radeon so I think it'll pull its weight for a while. I have come to REALLY love the keyboard and now older models feel antiquated to me (totally was not anticipating this), and the touchbar is not as annoying as so many people make it out to be.
• marsrover 8y ago
  I built a computer the other day and installed Ubuntu on it. Worked pretty much flawlessly out of the box and I could see it being my main driver for years to come.
• yingw787 8y ago
  Yay, another Linux post! Anybody check out Project Sputnik? I think Dell (forked?) Ubuntu in order to make it work on XPS/Precision laptops and Dell hardware. https://bartongeorge.io/2012/05/07/introducing-project-sputnik-developer-laptop/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bartongeorge%2FnMQw+%28A+Blueprint+for+the+Cloud%29 https://bartongeorge.io/2012/05/07/introducing-project-sputn...
• cr0sh 8y ago
  I just recently (a couple months ago) updated my Linux desktop experience at home. I had been running an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS install, that was getting long-in-the-tooth, as well as being unstable. Part of the instability had to do with various hacks and patches I had put in place, including a big one where I updated gcc to the latest version to support C11; this broke my update process horribly - so much so that when I went to update the NVidia drivers, my system became ultra-b0rked. I had been meaning to do an upgrade - now I was forced to. What saved me a great amount of trouble was the fact that I had partitioned my system; that is, when I had installed Ubuntu, I had put it on an SSD (/tmp and a few others were on a RAM disk), and /home was on a separate drive. So all I had to do was pull the SSD, drop in a new one, and re-install something else. Actually, I also used a different drive for my /home directory, because my old drive was getting old - plus my /home directory itself had a lot of old baggage. To that end, I migrated it to a new drive, created a new user with the new OS install, then migrated the files I needed across (moving from Chrome to Chromium wasn't as easy as it should have been, but it was doable). For the most part, it was painless. I ended up sticking with Ubuntu - but this time I went with Ubuntu Budgie. What I had done was check several other live distros first (regular Ubuntu, BunsenLabs, Solus, Mint, and a few others) to see what was out there again. See, my old system I had built from 14.04 LTS - but I had started with "minimal" and built it up to look and work almost identical to CrunchBang (#!), because I liked it so much (and #! had died, but its descendents hadn't been in a finished state - which is why I looked at BunsenLabs). I ultimately wanted something like the MBP setup I used for work; I thought I had found it with Solus. It seemed almost perfect - except for its package manager. While it had a lot of offerings, I worried about the ease of whether I could install third-party stuff. One thing I had "vowed" to never again do was to "compile and install from source" (that was part of what got my into this mess); if I ever needed to do that, it would be better for me to run it in a container, on a VM, or in some other manner - just not mangled into my main system with no "accountability" as to what was done and where. Solus' package management was a custom system, that leaned heavily on app images; I liked that, it was something I had recently looked into (like a week before all this happened), so I wanted that option. But their library wasn't as extensive as the Ubuntu ecosystem, and I also wasn't sure what to do about third-party .deb files and the like - how would I install those. So I looked around for a viable alternative. I found it with Ubuntu Budgie. I could be on the latest version of Ubuntu (I actually chose stability over latest - so I went with 18.04 LTS), but still have the Budgie desktop (with Plank and other goodness). I've found the best of both worlds, and I have a system now that I believe is as close to my MBP (well, OSX) as I can get with Linux; honestly, I consider it a bit superior. I've decided, as alluded before, not to install anything from source, as tempting as it may be, and instead only stick within the confines of what is available via apt and (trusted) third-party PPAs. Otherwise, I'll consider using one of the various app image systems, a VirtualBox VM, or something similar - or look for something else. I just don't want to end up in the same boat down the line. Is it perfect? No. But it certainly beats the pants off of what I had to do with Linux 10 years before, or 10 years before that. I've been using Linux in one form or another since 1995 (my first "install" was MonkeyLinux, which runs on a DOS filesystem; my first "real" Linux distro was TurboLinux 2.0); back then it was a "nightmare" - a fun nightmare, to be honest. Nothing like recompiling your kernel to get the latest PCMCIA drivers working, among other things. But I'm pretty past that kind of thing today. Not completely, of course, as b0rking my system with a custom manglement to get gcc/C11 working (took me a while to get all the dependencies just right, but I had it up and running - but the update system for 14.04 LTS did not like it at all).
• dgzl 8y ago
  I've come to terms with the idea that different environments offer different things. With Mac and OSX, you get a beautiful and thoughtful presentation, terminal access, and great with media. You can code, you can look sexy, you can edit your media projects with serious ease. With Windows, you have brute power, great compatibility, and it's a better option for the market (i.e. cheap and expensive options). Windows is still King of mass market and gaming . (Withholding mobile) With Linux, you have the option to have many kinds of environments at the lowest cost, with the understanding that you might have to work to get where you actually want to be. But when you get there, the satisfaction is 100x anything you'll get from the other platforms. (Withholding bsd, plan9, etc.) I've been using Linux for about 7 years, mostly because I realized much of my CS homework can be done on Linux, and it was cool at the time. Also, Macs were/are way out of my budget, and Windows machines are a dime a dozen, just pick your price point. Then I realized the real magic of Linux: it's a free product of the world, for the world. Long after the business behind Windows and Mac leave the planet, Linux will stand as the people's platform. And I figured I should start learning it.
• jasonfrank 8y ago
  When my 2013 MacBook Air died from a coffee spill about a year ago, I wanted to try a different laptop. I picked the X1 Carbon (6th gen) which is a very nice machine in many ways. However, I ended up switching back for two main reasons: 1. the touchpad is good but not nearly as good. I would regularly accidentally click on things while scrolling, despite fiddling with the settings. It was maddening. 2. For my work, Linux is a better fit than Windows. When I installed Ubuntu on the X1, both the touchpad and trackpoint were entirely unusable. I did a bit of searching and tried a few recommendations but never got it to work. I don't want to carry around a mouse. I now have the new MacBook Air and I'm generally happy with it. Keyboard is not as good as the old ones in my opinion.
• glenrivard 8y ago
  Replaced a Mac book pro with a Pixel book for development because the PB now supports GNU/Linux. Ideal is use the same environment you use in the cloud for development.
• contingencies 8y ago
  Same story here, ditched Apple. It's less the money, more the attitude. I have never liked their keyboards. Gentoo dying semi-frequently became tedious, so I'm currently on NixOS despite issues. My perfect OS would be the power of a Gentoo-style build from source distro combined with a functional management layer performing versioned system snapshots out of the box (but allowing COW for easy additions, unlike NixOS) so you could combine the best of both worlds. In the future I look forward to a detachable screen and hotels, offices and transportation with standardized secure wireless screencasting... and will someone replace the international mains power plugs with a new multi-voltage (DC on demand) standard already!
• amvalo 8y ago
  My dealbreaker with linux is the keyboard shortcuts. On mac, ^A and ^E work in every text field. Also, you can press cmd with your thumb, which is much more ergonomic than mashing ctrl with your pinky. OSX also has more well thought-out shortcuts than linux in general. You can try to configure these things on linux, but it's tedious and never works perfectly.
  • spurgu 8y ago
    I have had a "Mac thumb" for a good while now, the thumb position of constant Cmd+C-ing is horrible. Not ergonomic at all. I love the fact that it's the same everywhere though and don't have to Ctrl+Shift+C to copy in the terminal.
• evilturnip 8y ago
  For some cool Linux desktop setups, checkout r/unixporn on reddit. Some of the desktop setups on there approach the level of art.
• nkoren 8y ago
  My 2012 Retina Macbook was on its last legs. I was deeply uninspired by both the regressive functionality and excessive price of the of the latest generation of Macs. So after almost 15 years in the Mac ecosystem, I bid it adieu and got a Dell XPS 9560, with dual-boot Windows 10 and Ubuntu. I'm regretting that now. Ubuntu was a breeze for setting up development environments, but a nightmare in basically every other sense. Keyboard drivers misbehaving, randomly disabling system shortcuts in certain key applications (like Chrome). Mouse wheel working horribly and requiring many hours of hacking to fix. Fans spinning out of control in some kind of fight with the BIOS that I still haven't been able to win, after more than 20 hours of working on it. And you want to connect a second monitor with a different resolution than your primary? Fuck you, no. Just no. You absolutely, positively, cannot do that. I spent days following red herrings on forums before giving up. On the Windows side of thing, it's much better. Most things Just Work -- except that getting the mouse wheel to work correctly is a 15-step registry-hacking process followed by a reboot[1], and this needs to be repeated each time Bluetooth forgets it knows this mouse -- which is every other day or so. Oh, and also, it's so difficult to set up as a development environment that my CTO has told me not to bother. So, yeah, after a month, I'm having regrets. I still think that Apple is taking the piss, but after all the time and frustration I've sunk into Linux -- and, to a lesser extent, Windows -- the Apple Tax is beginning to look like relatively good value for money. 1: You think I'm exaggerating? Honestly I'm not: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-other_settings/reverse-the-scroll-of-mouse/334669c3-8a45-4600-830a-8df628d7415e https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...
• KaiserPro 8y ago
  From what I've seen of OP's setup, I'm surprised they every had a macbook in the first place. Literally everything is textmode barring the browser. you might as well have a tty and a separate device for the browser.
• sysashi 8y ago
  Sorry for off topic and I know it's not a complaint aggregator but 90% of the time when I reboot my mbp (2017) it does not recognize usb keyboard and mouse. That's so frustrating and my google-fu does not help me at all, resetting PRAM does however. I'm thinking about just rolling my favorite distribution on this machine. (Although not really sure how things are working now, last time I checked on my mb air 2011 everything was pretty smooth except battery life)
• EugeneOZ 8y ago
  Pff, how many such posts I saw, and in few months later "I'm in Mac again".
• m0zg 8y ago
  Funny, I'm thinking of moving in the opposite direction due to the lack of support of hidpi in the latest LTS Ubuntu. There's some support in Kubuntu, but I don't like KDE.
• jherdman 8y ago
  I gave Ubuntu a solid shot for a few weeks in 2018. I came running back to Apple without hesitation. At the end of the day end-user experience on Linux just isn't as nice, cohesive, or friendly.
• faleidel 8y ago
  Something I made while search for a replacement for my own macbook: http://nomoremacbook.com/ http://nomoremacbook.com/ I have a macbook pro 2012 and still don't know what my next computer is going to be.
• mmgutz 8y ago
  Am I the only one that uses Linux in a virtual machine as their daily driver? I do this whether I'm on Windows or MacOS. Linux with a lightweight window manager, like i3, works great in a virtual machine. Docker works flawleslly inside a VM as well.
• AtlasBarfed 8y ago
  16GB max? Unspecified max resolution on the display? storage is "configurable"? HDMI version (4k capable could be 1.4b or 2.0)? For a tech laptop, the specs are very unspecific.
• 5_minutes 8y ago
  I’d love to switch to Linux - just to be able to work with a decent hardware laptop again. But can’t live without a few mac-only apps, like Sketch. I find that iMac’s offer good value for money, but the Macbook Pro’s are horrible laptops. I’m still convinced that Jobs was smart enough to build good machines for developers. Cook doesn’t care. I still have an MBP 17”, still works great, battery is dead. I would’ve loved a new version of that machine under Jobs. 1500$ new iPhones, product lines not even being slightly updated... it’s a mess. BUT: it’s nice to have your photos appear on your desktop and ipad and, it’s just easy.
• shawnb576 8y ago
  I tried this experiment last year. Bought a DELL XPS 13 at Costco, put Ubuntu 18.04 on it and dove in. I've been a Mac guy for ~10y just like the author. Worked at MS prior to that, so lots of Windows. My experience is that it's one of those things that seems great on day 1, OK on day 1, and so on. Spoiler, after about 6 months I gave up and went back to Win10, which is really improving rapidly with WSL, etc. I run an Ubuntu VM in Hyper-V if I need "real" Linux for something. It's death of a thousand cuts. Beyond random Linux config issues, the UI can be laggy, the power management is terrible, etc. I enjoyed the fiddling but just don't have time for it.
• koshak 8y ago
  My phone is coupled with my laptop. All my settings are backed up. All my docs, pics, music, random files all are synced with “cloud”. If my laptop or my phone gets hit by a bus I will go to the nearest shop, get a new device and get it set up from backup within an hour. I delegated the fine tuning and customization to a third party once I realized I don’t have time for it anymore. I am fine with it although it is not ideal and there is room for improvement. There is always some. Everywhere. Please ping me from future when Linux (or Fuchsia or whatever is there in the second half of 2020s) is capable of that as well and there are vendors/providers who are honest, dependable and trusted who I can allow to store my data, identity and privacy and have good sleep. Cheers.
• NotANaN 8y ago
  Since the government insists that it has the authority to violate the 4th Amendment whenever it feels like if I'm in a 100-mile vicinity of a border, I really want devices to have "reset switches" which reset the device to, if not a factory-default state, then a state of "just completed initial configuration without logging into any services." Which is the state I now feel compelled to set my devices whenever I travel, and then restore from a remote backup when I reach my destination.
• k_bx 8y ago
  Dual-booting on my 2014 MBP. Works surprisingly wonderful, even has pixel-perfect scrolling in Chrome. Battery is great as well. Only using it for development, and overall it was a great idea to switch from trying to set up macOS with Docker and other stuff.