17 ms·

It's all very depressing. Like most of us here, I have become increasingly frustrated with the state of Mac (touch bar, bad keyboards, odd choices that fit nei

by blunte 7y ago

It's all very depressing. Like most of us here, I have become increasingly frustrated with the state of Mac (touch bar, bad keyboards, odd choices that fit neither creators nor developers well, and so on). No point rehashing it all. But where does that leave us? I spent a year on Windows 10 not so long ago, on upper end laptop hardware with HiDPI screen, and it was less fun and more problem prone than macOS - especially when it came to fast day-to-day stuff we never think about, such as PDF printing, quickview, etc. Plus in Windows you get the mysterious stop-the-world issues (that I suspect are OS level misbehaviors when some remote network connection has become lagged). There may be some use cases where Windows is actually faster/nicer/better than macOS, but they're not non-MS development, Adobe CC work, regular file management work, etc. Maybe games are it. Desktop Linux (even on standard desktop computers, not just specialized laptops) is far from perfect. Getting everything to work is a lot of effort, and then mysteriously something will stop working. Every window manager has some rough edges or cases where it's unpleasant. Getting and keeping a Linux Desktop in good working order is harder than it should be at this age of Linux. ChromeOS?... I know some people who use that as their daily driver. Obviously there are desktop apps that they don't need/use (Adobe CC, for example). But what happens when some automated Google thing triggers an account ban? Bricked laptop and no data? Thing really do not seem to be improving on the whole. Old problems are replaced with new problems, but the layers and separated concerns mean more complexity and more difficulty solving problems.

MisterOctober 7y ago
I switched from macOS to Linux [Fedora now] about a year and a half ago, out of the same frustrations that affect a lotta folks -- It took a little while to adjust, but since there are a lot of similarities between the Linux and Darwin command lines [and Linux package management being better than homebrew by my lights] , it wasn't very long before I was like "Damn, why didn't I switch 20 years ago!!!" Plus now my hardware works [edit : and is user-serviceable], is reasonably ergonomic, and OS updates don't break my existing programs...
- fossuser 7y ago
  Does the hardware actually work? I've used Linux several times over the years and the hardware never totally works. I've always had trackpad issues, issues with suspend and hibernate, wifi issues, screen resolution issues, battery life issues, sound issues, driver issues etc. It 'works' in terms of you can technically do work on it, but you have to make a huge number of concessions and this is before considering it has less application support. [Edit]: The replies suggest this is mostly still the case, people say it works flawlessly - except for [insert issue here]
  - TheAdamAndChe 7y ago
    Newer distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora tend to have much better hardware support than other distros. I've used Linux since Ubuntu 7.04, and hardware support has made leaps and bounds since then. That said, it's still not perfect, and warrants a trial on a throwaway hard drive if absolute hardware functionality is a must.
    - ekianjo 7y ago
      Except Arch, which is miles better in hardware support because it is uses the very latest kernels
      - tracker1 7y ago
        As long as the 38 step install process works. ;-) I tried, it locked up trying to load the GUI, specifically 5.3 kernel installer for navi support. Wound up reverting to Ubuntu LTS, will re-evaluate in 6 months when things for my hardware stabilizes.
        ekianjo 7y ago
        Done the install manually several times and it is crystal clear what you have to do once you understand how Linux works from boot to the OS. Of course not recommended for beginners and those who have no interest in how the internals work. Sorry to hear it did not work for Navi, was the wiki any helpful to understand what goes wrong?
mring33621 7y ago
I had a Lubuntu installation in virtualbox in win7 that worked just fine for several years, as a java development environment. Just sayin'.
rayiner 7y ago
Things are worse than ever before. Mac OS stability has taken a bit, but it’s not like Windows machines have gotten better. Windows 10 is still a total clusterfuck when it comes to switching between a high dpi internal monitor and an external monitor. The other day my X1 Carbon started randomly powering down (but not hard looking, controlled shutdown, even installing updates). It rebooted four different times in one evening. Things are just bad now that Steve Jobs is dead. We just have to get used to that.
- GordonS 7y ago
  > Windows 10 is still a total clusterfuck when it comes to switching between a high dpi internal monitor and an external monitor I really think this must depend on the hardware; Windows 10 switches between monitors fine for me, on multiple laptops. Indeed, I only actually have a problem with this on MacOS, where my MBP even crashes on occasion when switching to external displays.
  - bootlooped 7y ago
    I have a Windows 10 laptop with 150% scaling on the built in display, and 125% scaling on the monitor I plug into; both high DPI. Whenever I plug in or unplug I get treated to 5-10 seconds of seizure-like moving and resizing of windows, and some blinking of the displays. It usually doesn't get things right, for example windows that were on half the screen will be neither on half nor whole, or they'll be slightly off where they should be but mostly right.
- hinkley 7y ago
  Ives was sort of a protege to Steve, but he's backing away now. I don't really know who if anyone can step up to fill this vacuum. I keep hoping to hear about some 30-year-old up-and-comer running a company with flawless hardware, but it keeps not happening.
  - IggleSniggle 7y ago
    Honestly this is the real reason I’m excited about System76...I don’t really know them or their products, but they have a coherent “passion of computing story,” and PopOS looks pretty. I have no idea if it’s just marketing. I’m just hoping that it’s good, that they’re legit, and that they will do well.
remlov 7y ago
Eh... I've been on Ubuntu 18.04 for about 1.5 years now on my Dell Precision 5510. Zero problems, all hardware works out of the box. Suspend and hibernate still works flawlessly.
- ottobonn 7y ago
  Do you have any tips for getting the touchpad to work well? Mine picks up palm touches and the only solution I've found is to disable the edges of the touch pad.
  - remlov 7y ago
    The default Synaptics driver works well enough for Palm Rejection. In the beginning I had some outlier registered touches while typing but disabling touch-to-click seemed to completely mitigate that. Drivers might have gotten better since then but I don't really know since for about a year I set the touchpad to disable when I use my M570 Wireless Trackball.
dingus 7y ago
It's frustrating because it's the "least worst" option. I use MacOS because it has a thoughtful, consistent, coherent, beautiful user interface and desktop environment. The things I use all day are basically a web browser, mail client, code editor, and terminal. I can do actual work on any BSD really, there is no proprietary app that causes lock-in, I don't use iCloud or any of their services. All I want is their desktop and core system apps. If Apple stripped down the OS back to Mac OS X Snow Leopard standards, and charged $129, I would pay for it. If there were an equivalent desktop environment for BSD that replicated the MacOS desktop environment, I would pay money for this. Charge customers to hire full time designers, developers etc.
- oneplane 7y ago
  That is definitely the most frustrating thing about all of this over the past few years. Even with a customised Windows 10 to get rid of the nonsense nobody wants and adding what is missing to even work on the damn thing it's still not as 'least worse' as macOS. It's almost like all commercial OS development moved towards STB's and mobile and nobody gives a crap anymore. I'll probably still stick to macOS on my mobile hardware (Linux and BSD on the fixed machines, embedded and servers), as it is still least worst, but I miss the feeling of high stability and productivity you would normally get when you work on your machine and don't have to touch any of the other flavours. Right now, all any other vendor has to do (besides the create-a-BSD-desktop) is good hardware integration. Because that is more effective than people might think. Even with the whole butterfly crap the whole package deal is unbeatable. The only time I ever had hardware/firmware issues was back in the 90's where OpenFirmware got sad because one of the data lines of the ROM was corroding and the SMU would reset every boot making sleep unreliable. Having a machine that has a good hardware-software relation down to the firmware and no weird double powerons or a bunch of stupid splash screens, one where you can just add your tools and work, it's the best thing. It it used to be exactly that when you got a Mac... any Mac, even if you don't get a powerful one. It always works the same way, it always delivers consistently (unless you break it yourself), always stays out of the way so you can do what you actually came to do. Sigh.
- waynecochran 7y ago
  Yes. Snow Leopard was the greatest OS release of all time! I actually went to WWDC 2008 when it was announced and they handed out CD’s for it — no new user-level features — just a hardened OS (grand central station and kernel level threading and stuff under the hood was changed). Sigh. Marketing now rules the world. Look new emoji’s!
dylan-m 7y ago
It is depressing, but I'll tell you which of those options is actually actively interested in developers and enthusiasts: Linux. Give it the effort that people spend buying exactly the hardware Apple says to buy and then installing (or writing) apps that fix MacOS's clunky window management - and Homebrew, for that matter; consider where it's going as well as where it is; and I think you'll find something for you.
egman_ekki 7y ago
Interesting you mention Adobe CC as being better on MacOs. For the past couple of years I've seen most people mentioning that Windows is better/faster for these apps.
apayan 7y ago
You might want to try the Dell XPS 9380 Developer Edition that comes pre-loaded and configured with Ubuntu 18.04. I switched to it from a 2015 mac laptop I had been using. Set up was pretty easy and everything just worked out of the box. It's also nice that the performance per dollar ratio is better than a new macbook pro. My only complaint is that the trackpad is a little small for my hands, but the sturdy keyboard with real function keys more than makes up for it.
ekianjo 7y ago
> to work is a lot of effort, and then mysteriously something will stop working. Oh Please. this lie keeps getting repeated every single time this topic comes up. Meanwhile people who actually use Linux every single day have like zero issues for years to keep things running and working. I have 4 machines using different flavors, getting updates all the time and nothing mysteriously breaking, and this for years. Sure, you will always find the one user saying the exact opposite but among all the Linux users I interact with this is not the norm.
- JabavuAdams 7y ago
  Sample bias? Linux users are people who aren't sufficiently bothered by Linux's flaws or don't encounter any flaws due to their HW / usage patterns. Same as any other OS. To say the parent poster is lying is a bit much. You have know idea what kind of stuff they're trying to do.
t0astbread 7y ago
Idk about your experiences but I've been using Linux Mint for over a year now and it's just been working smoothly out of the box (better than Windows even). The only part where I had some problems initially were graphics drivers but that's only because I messed with them unnecessarily.
notatoad 7y ago
it's far from an ideal solution, but the only thing that keeps me sane is to have different computers for their strengths. For example, one of the author's use cases is "Because I’m an idiot with reasons, I have a python daemon that launches as root via launchd." - i shuddered just reading this, i'd never attempt to do that with anything other than linux. but chromeos is perfect for my little laptop i keep in the living room to check my email on. i was also happy using an iPad for the same thing. My software dev machine is a linux desktop, but if i needed a work laptop there's no way i'd put linux on it. maybe one day there will be an OS that i can use for all the things without complaint, but right now that doesn't seem to be a reality, and i've stopped pretending it can be.
gerdesj 7y ago
I moved to Arch Linux a few years back. So did wifey but she doesn't care about what OS she uses. We both use KDE <thingie> for a Window Manager, Libre Office and Evolution (Exchange is involved). Printing is of course CUPS, which is lovely and simply works. Lots of other things installed from the one set of repos. KDE allows you to "lock" the desktop icons/widgets in place. That is a feature that is sorely missing from all other WMs (Mac/MS/ int al) and for me is a killer feature. Some of my end users have a habit of smearing icons (launchers) all over the place. Desktop Linux is way better than say Desktop Windows (by OP metric). Updates take a few minutes rather than hours in some cases. Fixing things does not involve sfc /scannow but then neither does that work on any Windows box unless it has spinning rust and loses power regularly without battery backed cache. I update my wife's laptop via SSH when she is using it and I throw a reboot job at it out of hours via cron. My wife is happy with what she needs to get to - Facebook, email, some odd Flash games on FB and a few other things. I'm sure that Mac and Windows sysadmins can all say the same (I'm those as well.)
weberc2 7y ago
Also—and this is the biggest deal for me—mac is the only trackbar that works.
dTal 7y ago
> Getting and keeping a Linux Desktop in good working order is harder than it should be at this age of Linux. Maybe because all the developers ran away to Macs, instead of sticking around dogfooding and fixing bugs? Free software is a collaborative social enterprise - it's not really anyone's job to make free stuff for you to use. If, as a developer, you've taken the easy path of proprietary software for years, and now after finally getting fed up of being abused by a company that doesn't have your best interests at heart you return to the world of Free Software only to complain that it's still unpolished - then I'm afraid you are rather entitled, and deserve a serenading by the world's tiniest open source violin. And make no mistake, the kinds of "rough edges" you refer to are not hard computer science problems. They're broadly just the kinds of everyday maintenance things that inevitably crop up in a huge software project on an ongoing basis and are easily fixed by many eyes and a little graft. The more eyes, and the more graft, the more polished the system. For what it's worth, Desktop Linux for all its faults is still light years ahead of the competition. Far from perfect, as you say, but it really is the least bad choice. As they say - the best time to rally around Free Software is 10 years ago, and the second best time is now.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  Has anyone made an open-source micro-violin yet? Well, there are open-source violins... http://www.hovalabs.com/hova-instruments/hovalin http://www.hovalabs.com/hova-instruments/hovalin
  - sbr464 7y ago
    This is cool, thx for sharing.
- clopez 7y ago
  This!. Love your reply. I'm also tired of developers criticizing Linux desktop for not being friendly enough and running away to propietary systems instead of trying to help to fix what they don't like of Linux Desktop. That's the good thing of open source: don't like it? Then fix it and send me a patch and stop complaining. Its not like propietary systems where you only can complain (you can't fix)
seandoe 7y ago
>Desktop Linux (...) is far from perfect. Getting everything to work is a lot of effort, and then mysteriously something will stop working. Couldn't disagree more. Gnome took a bit of tweaking but it has been performant, stable, and exactly what I want. I recently changed jobs and am forced to use a mbpro. I hate it. It's slow and painful if not impossible to customize.
- ActorNightly 7y ago
  The only real tweaking that you need is for anything aesthetically. Most of the stuff works out of the box. Granted I can only speak for my hardware, as I am on Intel/Nvidia, whereas AMD/Radeon and Linux have not always played nice with each other. And also use a MBPro at work. The amount of issues of that I had with it surpass any windows laptop, most notable of which how the usbc port will just stop working, needing an SMC reset, and the laughably long startup from shutdown time despite having an SSD. The notion that Mac can do hardware or software right is laughable. I guess people forgot the $1000 monitor stand.
fwip 7y ago
Re: ChromeOS ban, you can use another account on that same hardware, make a new account, or use a "guest" account. Not great, but not bricked.
dzonga 7y ago
you can't just buy any hardware. I'm sure Ubuntu and other distros publish a hardware guide. I have a Thinkpad T490, tried out Manjaro, Suse, Fedora and ended up settling with Kubuntu | Budgie. No hiccups. Everything works out of the box. I have 40gb ram, something I could never get on the current generation macbooks. Keyboard is excellent n trackpoint. only bad thing hardware wise, are the speakers. I also have a Retina macbook pro 2013 personal. and use a 2015 Macbook pro for work. My old job I used the 2018 macbook pro, a shitty computer, that I would compare to my 2012 Dell inspiron, in terms of shittiness. Forgot to mention my thinkapd dispaly is 500 nits 100% ARGB. KDE has fractional scaling to handle DPI displays.
JJMalina 7y ago
I've come to accept that most OSes are inevitably broken in different ways. OS X has always broken my dev environment on every update. So over three years ago I switched to a ThinkPad X1 Carbon with XUbuntu and have no issues other than having to change my DPI when I connect/disconnect to a non HiDPI screen. Then I recently built a gaming PC with an AMD CPU and an Nvidia GPU, which did not go as smoothly with Linux: I had to install experimental Nvidia drivers, audio is a little wonky, and sometimes the wifi doesnt work and I have to restart. But overall I'm quite happy on XUbuntu and it gives me fewer problems or annoying prompts than Mac OS or Windows ever did. For gaming I use Windows of course.
swiley 7y ago
> Desktop Linux That’s your problem, stop looking for a windows/OS X replacement. The ideas are fundamentally broken; a lot of them are built around pushing you toward just consuming things from other people.
mantap 7y ago
I am using a slightly older version of MacOS on an older MacBook Pro and everything is perfect. My keyboard works. My OS works. My apps work. I have USB-A ports, even an SD card reader! Apple seems intent on driving the Mac off a cliff - both hardware and software, but for those of us who have not upgraded in the last few years, the good times are right now. I'm going to keep my MacBook Pro maintained like a classic car until something better comes along.
cossovich 7y ago
My main job is web development and I'm not using Linux on the Desktop for any political/ideological reasons, I'm using it because it gives me the best experience. Desktop Linux for me is Ubuntu 18.04 on a ThinkPad T450s and it's currently my favourite daily driver (we have a 2019 MacBook Air at home I share with my partner and a Windows 10 machine for testing websites at work). I can't think of the last time I had any problem getting anything to just work - the T series ThinkPads are well known to work with Linux so YMMV with other brands/models but I just happen to love the ThinkPad form factor and design so I'm super happy. It sucks now having the Adobe CC suite available on my primary work machine but more and more we are using Figma for any digital design related workflows and it's wonderful. Regarding Apple laptops, I was holding onto a 2015 MacBook Air until I upgraded it for the 2019 model because it was meant to be the latest-best Air... MacOS, iCloud integration and the keyboard has been disappointing to say the least.
eitland 7y ago
> Desktop Linux (even on standard desktop computers, not just specialized laptops) is far from perfect. Getting everything to work is a lot of effort, and then mysteriously something will stop working. For a counterpoint: I have had less issues with my Linux setups than with Windows for 15 or so years and I use both for the same: - development - mail, timesheets, documents - small amounts of gaming once in a while (mostly causual matches on CS:GO) I believe that others have problems with Linux but generally it has a highter tendency to work well out of the box than Windows has. Also, as mentioned elsewhere, the most annoying thing about Windows is how it "stops the world". It is only milliseconds but for me it is maddening to wait for a high end 2019 PC to respond to keyboard input. Usually it is driver issues and usually I get it sorted after a few weeks or months but it should be unneccessary for a stock Dell or HP machine. (Protip: don't ever use consumer or prosumer editions, not even XPS, always go for the the pro models.)
puranjay 7y ago
Did your Windows laptop have a SSD or HDD? I'd been using a laptop with an HDD (but otherwise great specs) and the experience was trash. Then I upgraded to an SSD and its an entirely new OS.
kelnos 7y ago
> Getting and keeping a Linux Desktop in good working order is harder than it should be at this age of Linux. I use desktop Linux as my daily driver (personal and work), and generally have very few problems. I hear so much grief from friends and colleagues who are running macOS and have so many issues. I really don't want to be "that guy" who obnoxiously pushes desktop Linux, understating its usability issues for average users, so I decided to log some of the issues I had over time. I realized that the failures on Linux, while fewer, were usually much worse: the things that fail on macOS are either annoyances that can be ignored or worked around, or things that can be Googled and fixed (for the most part). There were certainly sometimes failures on Linux that followed that pattern, but there's another class of failures: when things failed, they failed hard. Once, I rebooted after some kernel and Xorg package updates, and Xorg just hung on startup, logged nothing useful, and only responded to SIGKILL. I did manage to fix it, but the average user would be completely lost, and, to make matters worse, would have no GUI to use to search for help on the web. They'd probably end up having to reinstall and hope for the best. That's not acceptable; that might have been a common recovery step with Windows back in the 90s, but people expect better now. The distinction is that macOS failures are overwhelmingly solely of the type that frustrate and reduce productivity. It's very rare to run into something that grinds you to a complete halt. While desktop Linux has come a long way, and I'd (unscientifically) say there can be fewer frustrations than on macOS, there are still enough hard-stop, my-computer-is-a-brick-now failure modes to make it unsuitable for most users.

by blunte 7y ago

MisterOctober 7y ago

I switched from macOS to Linux [Fedora now] about a year and a half ago, out of the same frustrations that affect a lotta folks -- It took a little while to adjust, but since there are a lot of similarities between the Linux and Darwin command lines [and Linux package management being better than homebrew by my lights] , it wasn't very long before I was like "Damn, why didn't I switch 20 years ago!!!" Plus now my hardware works [edit : and is user-serviceable], is reasonably ergonomic, and OS updates don't break my existing programs...

fossuser 7y ago
Does the hardware actually work? I've used Linux several times over the years and the hardware never totally works. I've always had trackpad issues, issues with suspend and hibernate, wifi issues, screen resolution issues, battery life issues, sound issues, driver issues etc. It 'works' in terms of you can technically do work on it, but you have to make a huge number of concessions and this is before considering it has less application support. [Edit]: The replies suggest this is mostly still the case, people say it works flawlessly - except for [insert issue here]
- TheAdamAndChe 7y ago
  Newer distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora tend to have much better hardware support than other distros. I've used Linux since Ubuntu 7.04, and hardware support has made leaps and bounds since then. That said, it's still not perfect, and warrants a trial on a throwaway hard drive if absolute hardware functionality is a must.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    Except Arch, which is miles better in hardware support because it is uses the very latest kernels
    - tracker1 7y ago
      As long as the 38 step install process works. ;-) I tried, it locked up trying to load the GUI, specifically 5.3 kernel installer for navi support. Wound up reverting to Ubuntu LTS, will re-evaluate in 6 months when things for my hardware stabilizes.
      - ekianjo 7y ago
        Done the install manually several times and it is crystal clear what you have to do once you understand how Linux works from boot to the OS. Of course not recommended for beginners and those who have no interest in how the internals work. Sorry to hear it did not work for Navi, was the wiki any helpful to understand what goes wrong?

mring33621 7y ago

I had a Lubuntu installation in virtualbox in win7 that worked just fine for several years, as a java development environment. Just sayin'.

rayiner 7y ago

Things are worse than ever before. Mac OS stability has taken a bit, but it’s not like Windows machines have gotten better. Windows 10 is still a total clusterfuck when it comes to switching between a high dpi internal monitor and an external monitor. The other day my X1 Carbon started randomly powering down (but not hard looking, controlled shutdown, even installing updates). It rebooted four different times in one evening. Things are just bad now that Steve Jobs is dead. We just have to get used to that.

GordonS 7y ago
> Windows 10 is still a total clusterfuck when it comes to switching between a high dpi internal monitor and an external monitor I really think this must depend on the hardware; Windows 10 switches between monitors fine for me, on multiple laptops. Indeed, I only actually have a problem with this on MacOS, where my MBP even crashes on occasion when switching to external displays.
- bootlooped 7y ago
  I have a Windows 10 laptop with 150% scaling on the built in display, and 125% scaling on the monitor I plug into; both high DPI. Whenever I plug in or unplug I get treated to 5-10 seconds of seizure-like moving and resizing of windows, and some blinking of the displays. It usually doesn't get things right, for example windows that were on half the screen will be neither on half nor whole, or they'll be slightly off where they should be but mostly right.
hinkley 7y ago
Ives was sort of a protege to Steve, but he's backing away now. I don't really know who if anyone can step up to fill this vacuum. I keep hoping to hear about some 30-year-old up-and-comer running a company with flawless hardware, but it keeps not happening.
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  Honestly this is the real reason I’m excited about System76...I don’t really know them or their products, but they have a coherent “passion of computing story,” and PopOS looks pretty. I have no idea if it’s just marketing. I’m just hoping that it’s good, that they’re legit, and that they will do well.

remlov 7y ago

Eh... I've been on Ubuntu 18.04 for about 1.5 years now on my Dell Precision 5510. Zero problems, all hardware works out of the box. Suspend and hibernate still works flawlessly.

ottobonn 7y ago
Do you have any tips for getting the touchpad to work well? Mine picks up palm touches and the only solution I've found is to disable the edges of the touch pad.
- remlov 7y ago
  The default Synaptics driver works well enough for Palm Rejection. In the beginning I had some outlier registered touches while typing but disabling touch-to-click seemed to completely mitigate that. Drivers might have gotten better since then but I don't really know since for about a year I set the touchpad to disable when I use my M570 Wireless Trackball.

dingus 7y ago

It's frustrating because it's the "least worst" option. I use MacOS because it has a thoughtful, consistent, coherent, beautiful user interface and desktop environment. The things I use all day are basically a web browser, mail client, code editor, and terminal. I can do actual work on any BSD really, there is no proprietary app that causes lock-in, I don't use iCloud or any of their services. All I want is their desktop and core system apps. If Apple stripped down the OS back to Mac OS X Snow Leopard standards, and charged $129, I would pay for it. If there were an equivalent desktop environment for BSD that replicated the MacOS desktop environment, I would pay money for this. Charge customers to hire full time designers, developers etc.

oneplane 7y ago
That is definitely the most frustrating thing about all of this over the past few years. Even with a customised Windows 10 to get rid of the nonsense nobody wants and adding what is missing to even work on the damn thing it's still not as 'least worse' as macOS. It's almost like all commercial OS development moved towards STB's and mobile and nobody gives a crap anymore. I'll probably still stick to macOS on my mobile hardware (Linux and BSD on the fixed machines, embedded and servers), as it is still least worst, but I miss the feeling of high stability and productivity you would normally get when you work on your machine and don't have to touch any of the other flavours. Right now, all any other vendor has to do (besides the create-a-BSD-desktop) is good hardware integration. Because that is more effective than people might think. Even with the whole butterfly crap the whole package deal is unbeatable. The only time I ever had hardware/firmware issues was back in the 90's where OpenFirmware got sad because one of the data lines of the ROM was corroding and the SMU would reset every boot making sleep unreliable. Having a machine that has a good hardware-software relation down to the firmware and no weird double powerons or a bunch of stupid splash screens, one where you can just add your tools and work, it's the best thing. It it used to be exactly that when you got a Mac... any Mac, even if you don't get a powerful one. It always works the same way, it always delivers consistently (unless you break it yourself), always stays out of the way so you can do what you actually came to do. Sigh.
waynecochran 7y ago
Yes. Snow Leopard was the greatest OS release of all time! I actually went to WWDC 2008 when it was announced and they handed out CD’s for it — no new user-level features — just a hardened OS (grand central station and kernel level threading and stuff under the hood was changed). Sigh. Marketing now rules the world. Look new emoji’s!

dylan-m 7y ago

It is depressing, but I'll tell you which of those options is actually actively interested in developers and enthusiasts: Linux. Give it the effort that people spend buying exactly the hardware Apple says to buy and then installing (or writing) apps that fix MacOS's clunky window management - and Homebrew, for that matter; consider where it's going as well as where it is; and I think you'll find something for you.

egman_ekki 7y ago

Interesting you mention Adobe CC as being better on MacOs. For the past couple of years I've seen most people mentioning that Windows is better/faster for these apps.

apayan 7y ago

You might want to try the Dell XPS 9380 Developer Edition that comes pre-loaded and configured with Ubuntu 18.04. I switched to it from a 2015 mac laptop I had been using. Set up was pretty easy and everything just worked out of the box. It's also nice that the performance per dollar ratio is better than a new macbook pro. My only complaint is that the trackpad is a little small for my hands, but the sturdy keyboard with real function keys more than makes up for it.

ekianjo 7y ago

> to work is a lot of effort, and then mysteriously something will stop working. Oh Please. this lie keeps getting repeated every single time this topic comes up. Meanwhile people who actually use Linux every single day have like zero issues for years to keep things running and working. I have 4 machines using different flavors, getting updates all the time and nothing mysteriously breaking, and this for years. Sure, you will always find the one user saying the exact opposite but among all the Linux users I interact with this is not the norm.

JabavuAdams 7y ago
Sample bias? Linux users are people who aren't sufficiently bothered by Linux's flaws or don't encounter any flaws due to their HW / usage patterns. Same as any other OS. To say the parent poster is lying is a bit much. You have know idea what kind of stuff they're trying to do.

t0astbread 7y ago

Idk about your experiences but I've been using Linux Mint for over a year now and it's just been working smoothly out of the box (better than Windows even). The only part where I had some problems initially were graphics drivers but that's only because I messed with them unnecessarily.

notatoad 7y ago

it's far from an ideal solution, but the only thing that keeps me sane is to have different computers for their strengths. For example, one of the author's use cases is "Because I’m an idiot with reasons, I have a python daemon that launches as root via launchd." - i shuddered just reading this, i'd never attempt to do that with anything other than linux. but chromeos is perfect for my little laptop i keep in the living room to check my email on. i was also happy using an iPad for the same thing. My software dev machine is a linux desktop, but if i needed a work laptop there's no way i'd put linux on it. maybe one day there will be an OS that i can use for all the things without complaint, but right now that doesn't seem to be a reality, and i've stopped pretending it can be.

gerdesj 7y ago

I moved to Arch Linux a few years back. So did wifey but she doesn't care about what OS she uses. We both use KDE <thingie> for a Window Manager, Libre Office and Evolution (Exchange is involved). Printing is of course CUPS, which is lovely and simply works. Lots of other things installed from the one set of repos. KDE allows you to "lock" the desktop icons/widgets in place. That is a feature that is sorely missing from all other WMs (Mac/MS/ int al) and for me is a killer feature. Some of my end users have a habit of smearing icons (launchers) all over the place. Desktop Linux is way better than say Desktop Windows (by OP metric). Updates take a few minutes rather than hours in some cases. Fixing things does not involve sfc /scannow but then neither does that work on any Windows box unless it has spinning rust and loses power regularly without battery backed cache. I update my wife's laptop via SSH when she is using it and I throw a reboot job at it out of hours via cron. My wife is happy with what she needs to get to - Facebook, email, some odd Flash games on FB and a few other things. I'm sure that Mac and Windows sysadmins can all say the same (I'm those as well.)

weberc2 7y ago

Also—and this is the biggest deal for me—mac is the only trackbar that works.

dTal 7y ago

> Getting and keeping a Linux Desktop in good working order is harder than it should be at this age of Linux. Maybe because all the developers ran away to Macs, instead of sticking around dogfooding and fixing bugs? Free software is a collaborative social enterprise - it's not really anyone's job to make free stuff for you to use. If, as a developer, you've taken the easy path of proprietary software for years, and now after finally getting fed up of being abused by a company that doesn't have your best interests at heart you return to the world of Free Software only to complain that it's still unpolished - then I'm afraid you are rather entitled, and deserve a serenading by the world's tiniest open source violin. And make no mistake, the kinds of "rough edges" you refer to are not hard computer science problems. They're broadly just the kinds of everyday maintenance things that inevitably crop up in a huge software project on an ongoing basis and are easily fixed by many eyes and a little graft. The more eyes, and the more graft, the more polished the system. For what it's worth, Desktop Linux for all its faults is still light years ahead of the competition. Far from perfect, as you say, but it really is the least bad choice. As they say - the best time to rally around Free Software is 10 years ago, and the second best time is now.

HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
Has anyone made an open-source micro-violin yet? Well, there are open-source violins... http://www.hovalabs.com/hova-instruments/hovalin http://www.hovalabs.com/hova-instruments/hovalin
- sbr464 7y ago
  This is cool, thx for sharing.
clopez 7y ago
This!. Love your reply. I'm also tired of developers criticizing Linux desktop for not being friendly enough and running away to propietary systems instead of trying to help to fix what they don't like of Linux Desktop. That's the good thing of open source: don't like it? Then fix it and send me a patch and stop complaining. Its not like propietary systems where you only can complain (you can't fix)

seandoe 7y ago

>Desktop Linux (...) is far from perfect. Getting everything to work is a lot of effort, and then mysteriously something will stop working. Couldn't disagree more. Gnome took a bit of tweaking but it has been performant, stable, and exactly what I want. I recently changed jobs and am forced to use a mbpro. I hate it. It's slow and painful if not impossible to customize.

ActorNightly 7y ago
The only real tweaking that you need is for anything aesthetically. Most of the stuff works out of the box. Granted I can only speak for my hardware, as I am on Intel/Nvidia, whereas AMD/Radeon and Linux have not always played nice with each other. And also use a MBPro at work. The amount of issues of that I had with it surpass any windows laptop, most notable of which how the usbc port will just stop working, needing an SMC reset, and the laughably long startup from shutdown time despite having an SSD. The notion that Mac can do hardware or software right is laughable. I guess people forgot the $1000 monitor stand.

fwip 7y ago

Re: ChromeOS ban, you can use another account on that same hardware, make a new account, or use a "guest" account. Not great, but not bricked.

dzonga 7y ago

you can't just buy any hardware. I'm sure Ubuntu and other distros publish a hardware guide. I have a Thinkpad T490, tried out Manjaro, Suse, Fedora and ended up settling with Kubuntu | Budgie. No hiccups. Everything works out of the box. I have 40gb ram, something I could never get on the current generation macbooks. Keyboard is excellent n trackpoint. only bad thing hardware wise, are the speakers. I also have a Retina macbook pro 2013 personal. and use a 2015 Macbook pro for work. My old job I used the 2018 macbook pro, a shitty computer, that I would compare to my 2012 Dell inspiron, in terms of shittiness. Forgot to mention my thinkapd dispaly is 500 nits 100% ARGB. KDE has fractional scaling to handle DPI displays.

JJMalina 7y ago

I've come to accept that most OSes are inevitably broken in different ways. OS X has always broken my dev environment on every update. So over three years ago I switched to a ThinkPad X1 Carbon with XUbuntu and have no issues other than having to change my DPI when I connect/disconnect to a non HiDPI screen. Then I recently built a gaming PC with an AMD CPU and an Nvidia GPU, which did not go as smoothly with Linux: I had to install experimental Nvidia drivers, audio is a little wonky, and sometimes the wifi doesnt work and I have to restart. But overall I'm quite happy on XUbuntu and it gives me fewer problems or annoying prompts than Mac OS or Windows ever did. For gaming I use Windows of course.

swiley 7y ago

> Desktop Linux That’s your problem, stop looking for a windows/OS X replacement. The ideas are fundamentally broken; a lot of them are built around pushing you toward just consuming things from other people.

mantap 7y ago

I am using a slightly older version of MacOS on an older MacBook Pro and everything is perfect. My keyboard works. My OS works. My apps work. I have USB-A ports, even an SD card reader! Apple seems intent on driving the Mac off a cliff - both hardware and software, but for those of us who have not upgraded in the last few years, the good times are right now. I'm going to keep my MacBook Pro maintained like a classic car until something better comes along.

cossovich 7y ago

My main job is web development and I'm not using Linux on the Desktop for any political/ideological reasons, I'm using it because it gives me the best experience. Desktop Linux for me is Ubuntu 18.04 on a ThinkPad T450s and it's currently my favourite daily driver (we have a 2019 MacBook Air at home I share with my partner and a Windows 10 machine for testing websites at work). I can't think of the last time I had any problem getting anything to just work - the T series ThinkPads are well known to work with Linux so YMMV with other brands/models but I just happen to love the ThinkPad form factor and design so I'm super happy. It sucks now having the Adobe CC suite available on my primary work machine but more and more we are using Figma for any digital design related workflows and it's wonderful. Regarding Apple laptops, I was holding onto a 2015 MacBook Air until I upgraded it for the 2019 model because it was meant to be the latest-best Air... MacOS, iCloud integration and the keyboard has been disappointing to say the least.

eitland 7y ago

> Desktop Linux (even on standard desktop computers, not just specialized laptops) is far from perfect. Getting everything to work is a lot of effort, and then mysteriously something will stop working. For a counterpoint: I have had less issues with my Linux setups than with Windows for 15 or so years and I use both for the same: - development - mail, timesheets, documents - small amounts of gaming once in a while (mostly causual matches on CS:GO) I believe that others have problems with Linux but generally it has a highter tendency to work well out of the box than Windows has. Also, as mentioned elsewhere, the most annoying thing about Windows is how it "stops the world". It is only milliseconds but for me it is maddening to wait for a high end 2019 PC to respond to keyboard input. Usually it is driver issues and usually I get it sorted after a few weeks or months but it should be unneccessary for a stock Dell or HP machine. (Protip: don't ever use consumer or prosumer editions, not even XPS, always go for the the pro models.)

puranjay 7y ago

Did your Windows laptop have a SSD or HDD? I'd been using a laptop with an HDD (but otherwise great specs) and the experience was trash. Then I upgraded to an SSD and its an entirely new OS.

kelnos 7y ago

> Getting and keeping a Linux Desktop in good working order is harder than it should be at this age of Linux. I use desktop Linux as my daily driver (personal and work), and generally have very few problems. I hear so much grief from friends and colleagues who are running macOS and have so many issues. I really don't want to be "that guy" who obnoxiously pushes desktop Linux, understating its usability issues for average users, so I decided to log some of the issues I had over time. I realized that the failures on Linux, while fewer, were usually much worse: the things that fail on macOS are either annoyances that can be ignored or worked around, or things that can be Googled and fixed (for the most part). There were certainly sometimes failures on Linux that followed that pattern, but there's another class of failures: when things failed, they failed hard. Once, I rebooted after some kernel and Xorg package updates, and Xorg just hung on startup, logged nothing useful, and only responded to SIGKILL. I did manage to fix it, but the average user would be completely lost, and, to make matters worse, would have no GUI to use to search for help on the web. They'd probably end up having to reinstall and hope for the best. That's not acceptable; that might have been a common recovery step with Windows back in the 90s, but people expect better now. The distinction is that macOS failures are overwhelmingly solely of the type that frustrate and reduce productivity. It's very rare to run into something that grinds you to a complete halt. While desktop Linux has come a long way, and I'd (unscientifically) say there can be fewer frustrations than on macOS, there are still enough hard-stop, my-computer-is-a-brick-now failure modes to make it unsuitable for most users.