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> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. This is why I became a Mac user. After 15 years of Linux I was just done with all the bullshi

by jaabe 7y ago

> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. This is why I became a Mac user. After 15 years of Linux I was just done with all the bullshit, but I guess I could look into Pop!_OS.

simula67 7y ago
This is probably why the 'Year of the Linux Desktop' never arrived. The introduction of Macs probably crippled the Linux desktop market. Without Macs companies like System76 would probably have been more successful as more developers demand a good quality Unix compatible machine.
- alrs 7y ago
  System76 would have never happened, Dell and HP were already pushing Linux before OSX dropped. In the year 2000: https://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-linuxs-new-best-friend-5000112307/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-linuxs-new-best-friend-50...
baroffoos 7y ago
I have found fedora to be the just works distro as long as you pick the right hardware to start. A dell XPS + fedora has been the most productive setup I have ever had.
- v_lisivka 7y ago
  Yeah, Dell XPS + Fedora works great together. I actually started to use Bluetooth with Dell. It just works.
- boomskats 7y ago
  Second this, and add 'every thinkpad I've ever owned' to your hardware caveat.
  - baroffoos 7y ago
    My coworkers are leaning towards dell+fedora since every one at the company who has got one of the newer macbooks has had the keyboard fail repeatedly.
- vkazanov 7y ago
  I tend to just use the Dell XPS with Ubuntu preinstalled: hardware-related things really do just work. For everything else I have Emacs :-)
AsyncAwait 7y ago
I don't doubt it's true, but it seems strange to me that because you have many choices, you go to a platform with no choice. Just because there are many choices doesn't mean you can't make one and stick with it, I've been on Arch for almost a decade now and there aren't many compelling reasons for me to switch all this time later. I'd think for many the same is true with Ubuntu LTS.
Jean-Philipe 7y ago
> This is why I became a Mac user. Heard this from so many people. We have the latest (2017-2018) MBP at work and every single one has serious keyboard problems. Other than that, I have had crashes and random reboots when on battery, with a black screen error message, sound issues (solved by turning volume down, switching outputs back and forth, or rebooting) wifi problems (solved by switching off bluetooth). And don't get me started on the touch bar. From Mac fans I usually get answers like "you're pressing the touch bar wrong, you need to wait longer"... I'm also missing a decent software management. brew is miles away from apt. So, for me switching to Mac didn't work out. And the new keyboard is a complete dealbreaker for me. I may still get an older mac with a decent keyboard and put Linux on it.
- jaabe 7y ago
  The touchbar is crap, and being a Danish programmer hitting those {} keys really sucks on a mac keyboard. Everything else has been miles better than Linux though. I mean, when I left fedora 21 for a Mac I had close to a hundred scripts for modifications to make it tolerable. On my Mac I have 0.
  - craigsmansion 7y ago
    If I understand you correctly, over the course of 15 years of upgrades on Linux you ended up with almost a hundred scripts to make your DE on Fedora "tolerable", but then you bought a mac and everything has been perfect from the beginning even in between updates with zero regressions in usability for you personally? If so, good for you, but that doesn't make a non "one size fits all" approach "bullshit".
    - jaabe 7y ago
      I agree, configuration was just part of the “bullshit”. I had to manually disable the dedicated graphics card in my laptop or it would get ridiculously hot while idle. This is probably not an issue if you buy a laptop with preinstalled Linux. I do a lot of presentations. Getting Linux to work with various projectors wasn’t great. Maybe that’s better in 2019, but it’s never been an issue with my Mac. The lack of ports have, but buying a converter solves that. Updates broke my software and I had to spend a lot of time sorting it out. A more stable Linux distro might have been better. My external displays never really worked without problems. Having used a MacBook trackpad makes it really hard to use non-MacBook trackpads. It’s a range of stuff like that. I’m sure you could get Linux to be better, even for me, but I don’t want to use a single second on making it happen. I did when I was younger, that’s why I turned to Linux in the first place. I’ve spent my time building gentoo, but the older I get the more I want things to work out of the box so I can spend my time on other things.
hajile 7y ago
That may have been true at one time, but not anymore. In the 2007-2012 range, mac laptops were the best. After that, hardware stagnated until around 2015 then took a nose dive with the next design. Likewise, the days of the legendary OSX (sorry, MacOS) stability are long-gone. The team has been slowly gutted over the years to work on iOS since it makes them more money. The security issues from a couple years ago show a design team ignoring reasonably security standards and not implementing any kind of testing or QA. I only have one mac system left and that's simply for testing Safari. Modern Linux is much more stable in my experience.
checkyoursudo 7y ago
I have been a full-time Linux user since in got a bunch of Mandrake CDs in 2002 I believe (and a part-time user before that), an iOS user since the start, and a macOS user since last year, and I cannot honestly say that I prefer one over the other in toto, really. I've been using Gentoo Linux as my desktop/work OS for more than 10 years now, and I have no more problems with it than I do with macOS. My Gentoo/Linux complaint is that I cannot for the life of me get PDFs to print correctly. While my one main complaint with macOS is that macports and homebrew are pretty crappy compared to portage, in my purely subjective experience of course. Otherwise, I really like using both, each for different things. They each definitely do different things better than the other, but I don't actually know how much of that has to do directly with the operating systems. Anyway, they are both unix-y enough for me that it's fine for what I want. It's always interesting to me to read about people having such bad experiences with mac or linux or anything else really, since that has never been my own experience. Even with Windows, which I really dislike, I've almost never had any bad technical experience with it. (Bad user experiences, sure.) I don't know if I am just lucky or just have lower standards?

by jaabe 7y ago

simula67 7y ago

This is probably why the 'Year of the Linux Desktop' never arrived. The introduction of Macs probably crippled the Linux desktop market. Without Macs companies like System76 would probably have been more successful as more developers demand a good quality Unix compatible machine.

alrs 7y ago
System76 would have never happened, Dell and HP were already pushing Linux before OSX dropped. In the year 2000: https://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-linuxs-new-best-friend-5000112307/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-linuxs-new-best-friend-50...

baroffoos 7y ago

I have found fedora to be the just works distro as long as you pick the right hardware to start. A dell XPS + fedora has been the most productive setup I have ever had.

v_lisivka 7y ago
Yeah, Dell XPS + Fedora works great together. I actually started to use Bluetooth with Dell. It just works.
boomskats 7y ago
Second this, and add 'every thinkpad I've ever owned' to your hardware caveat.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  My coworkers are leaning towards dell+fedora since every one at the company who has got one of the newer macbooks has had the keyboard fail repeatedly.
vkazanov 7y ago
I tend to just use the Dell XPS with Ubuntu preinstalled: hardware-related things really do just work. For everything else I have Emacs :-)

AsyncAwait 7y ago

I don't doubt it's true, but it seems strange to me that because you have many choices, you go to a platform with no choice. Just because there are many choices doesn't mean you can't make one and stick with it, I've been on Arch for almost a decade now and there aren't many compelling reasons for me to switch all this time later. I'd think for many the same is true with Ubuntu LTS.

Jean-Philipe 7y ago

> This is why I became a Mac user. Heard this from so many people. We have the latest (2017-2018) MBP at work and every single one has serious keyboard problems. Other than that, I have had crashes and random reboots when on battery, with a black screen error message, sound issues (solved by turning volume down, switching outputs back and forth, or rebooting) wifi problems (solved by switching off bluetooth). And don't get me started on the touch bar. From Mac fans I usually get answers like "you're pressing the touch bar wrong, you need to wait longer"... I'm also missing a decent software management. brew is miles away from apt. So, for me switching to Mac didn't work out. And the new keyboard is a complete dealbreaker for me. I may still get an older mac with a decent keyboard and put Linux on it.

jaabe 7y ago
The touchbar is crap, and being a Danish programmer hitting those {} keys really sucks on a mac keyboard. Everything else has been miles better than Linux though. I mean, when I left fedora 21 for a Mac I had close to a hundred scripts for modifications to make it tolerable. On my Mac I have 0.
- craigsmansion 7y ago
  If I understand you correctly, over the course of 15 years of upgrades on Linux you ended up with almost a hundred scripts to make your DE on Fedora "tolerable", but then you bought a mac and everything has been perfect from the beginning even in between updates with zero regressions in usability for you personally? If so, good for you, but that doesn't make a non "one size fits all" approach "bullshit".
  - jaabe 7y ago
    I agree, configuration was just part of the “bullshit”. I had to manually disable the dedicated graphics card in my laptop or it would get ridiculously hot while idle. This is probably not an issue if you buy a laptop with preinstalled Linux. I do a lot of presentations. Getting Linux to work with various projectors wasn’t great. Maybe that’s better in 2019, but it’s never been an issue with my Mac. The lack of ports have, but buying a converter solves that. Updates broke my software and I had to spend a lot of time sorting it out. A more stable Linux distro might have been better. My external displays never really worked without problems. Having used a MacBook trackpad makes it really hard to use non-MacBook trackpads. It’s a range of stuff like that. I’m sure you could get Linux to be better, even for me, but I don’t want to use a single second on making it happen. I did when I was younger, that’s why I turned to Linux in the first place. I’ve spent my time building gentoo, but the older I get the more I want things to work out of the box so I can spend my time on other things.

hajile 7y ago

That may have been true at one time, but not anymore. In the 2007-2012 range, mac laptops were the best. After that, hardware stagnated until around 2015 then took a nose dive with the next design. Likewise, the days of the legendary OSX (sorry, MacOS) stability are long-gone. The team has been slowly gutted over the years to work on iOS since it makes them more money. The security issues from a couple years ago show a design team ignoring reasonably security standards and not implementing any kind of testing or QA. I only have one mac system left and that's simply for testing Safari. Modern Linux is much more stable in my experience.

checkyoursudo 7y ago

I have been a full-time Linux user since in got a bunch of Mandrake CDs in 2002 I believe (and a part-time user before that), an iOS user since the start, and a macOS user since last year, and I cannot honestly say that I prefer one over the other in toto, really. I've been using Gentoo Linux as my desktop/work OS for more than 10 years now, and I have no more problems with it than I do with macOS. My Gentoo/Linux complaint is that I cannot for the life of me get PDFs to print correctly. While my one main complaint with macOS is that macports and homebrew are pretty crappy compared to portage, in my purely subjective experience of course. Otherwise, I really like using both, each for different things. They each definitely do different things better than the other, but I don't actually know how much of that has to do directly with the operating systems. Anyway, they are both unix-y enough for me that it's fine for what I want. It's always interesting to me to read about people having such bad experiences with mac or linux or anything else really, since that has never been my own experience. Even with Windows, which I really dislike, I've almost never had any bad technical experience with it. (Bad user experiences, sure.) I don't know if I am just lucky or just have lower standards?