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Yep. I just tried a three month experiment with using Linux as the primary OS on my laptop. That experiment came to an end last week, and I'm back to macOS. W
by GlenTheMachine 8y ago
Yep.
I just tried a three month experiment with using Linux as the primary OS on my laptop. That experiment came to an end last week, and I'm back to macOS.
What killed me was:
- wake-on-open working about 33% of the time. The other 66% of the time required a reboot.
- substantially worse battery life
- clunky handling of Exchange calendars. The major Linux applications are fine for personal use, but they really struggle in an enterprise environment.
- buggy rendering of Word docs (both OpenOffice and Abiword, but the bugs were different)
- no easy way to change screen resolution over VNC. This turns out to be important if you actually try to use screen sharing to get stuff done, and use two or more different platforms as the client.
- the straw that broke the camel's back: my linux email client worked well (for emails - not calendars, etc) for almost the entire three month experiment, until last Friday it somehow decided that my password was different from what it actually was, and insisted on interrogating the enterprise email server several times a second using the bad password. The Exchange server here is configured to lock an account after N incorrect passwords. So effectively the client auto-locked my account every time I fired it up. I still have no idea why it's using an incorrect password, and debugging it wold require my sysadmin to essentially stay on the phone with me and keep hitting the "unlock account" button, or whatever he has to do. My relationship with him would not survive this, and using Linux isn't worth pissing him off.
So, back to the Mac for me. I'll try again in another five years and see if anything's improved. It wasn't any one big thing. It was a lot of little things. Bugs that probably were work-around-able, but not worth it. Little bits of friction in the office applications interfaces that made using them just a little more painful. Multiply by a thousand, and you have a substantially worse productivity environment (unless you're a software developer 100% of the time, which I'm not).
- nizmow 8y agoRegarding the VNC point in your post, I’ve experimented with this a whole lot in recent times getting a good remote desktop solution going. TigerVNC server, using its embedded X server, plus the TigerVNC viewer, work absolutely perfectly. Even including the viewer supporting proper dual head, resizing, switching and all. Of course, if you want to use your existing X server it might not work as well, I haven’t tried it. For most of the rest of your complaints, I use web apps for everything, even on OS X / Windows. Sad at the state of native apps on both Windows and Linux.
- GlenTheMachine 8y agoI can't use web apps. My org doesn't allow any proprietary data to exist on the cloud.
- lallysingh 8y ago#s 1 and 2 are hardware. I genuinely haven't had those problems in ~4 thinkpads I've used over the years that have been linux-only. Linux is a lot easier on g-suite enterprises than in exchange/office ones. Considering how much of the latter's going online now, maybe it won't matter at all later.
- izacus 8y agoConsidering the problems... were you actually trying to run Linux on a MacBook, which is pretty much a full proprietary, non-documented platform with bunch of Apple proprietary and undocumented power management controllers?
- GlenTheMachine 8y agoNo. Dell XPS 15.