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At my last job we had people very happy with linux, with the following caveats: - they didn’t care about moving it around half a day and keeping decent battery

by hrktb 7y ago

At my last job we had people very happy with linux, with the following caveats: - they didn’t care about moving it around half a day and keeping decent battery life, for most of them it was effectively a desktop. - they didn’t care about any CJK support. None of them would be bitching about chinese fonts on japanese pages or worse IME. - they didn’t need any peripherals outside of screens, keyboards and mices. We had to use a usb dongle to project into videoconf room at a client, I have no hope it would have worked on linux. Printer/scanners would be a nightmare too (and it’s already not good on other platforms I concede) Linux workstations are plenty usable, thus a lot of positive feedback. But we should acknowledge it’s not for every use case, and it can need tweaking in parts that are different for each user. MacOS with all its current flaws has still a lot of things better done than most (any?) linuxes.

saghm 7y ago
> - they didn’t need any peripherals outside of screens, keyboards and mices. We had to use a usb dongle to project into videoconf room at a client, I have no hope it would have worked on linux. You can actually buy Linux laptops with not just USB-C, but also USB-A, HDMI, Ethernet ports, etc. As someone with a Linux laptop who has never run into a peripheral issue and has coworkers with peripheral issues with their MacBooks, I'm not super convinced that the grass is greener on the Mac side of this one.
- hrktb 7y ago
  Presence of ports doesn’t mean compatibility though. I have cheap USB-C - ethernet dongle I bought on amazon that works on my mac and windows. Is the chipset supported on linux ? who knows, but probably ? Now my USB-C to HDMI dongle ? hmmm https://www.reddit.com/r/GPDPocket/comments/8smhzy/so_hdmi_over_usbc_on_linux_is_a_joke/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GPDPocket/comments/8smhzy/so_hdmi_o...
  - kelnos 7y ago
    For USB-ethernet dongles (even USB-C), I generally expect hardware support to be better (and not require external driver installs) than on macOS or Windows. That reddit thread is odd, as I've been using the Apple USB-C multi-port dongle to do HDMI on Linux (no config necessary, just plug it in and it works) since before that post was made.
  - saghm 7y ago
    My point was that if you pick the right hardware, you don't even need dongles most of the time on Linux. The laptop I'm this comment on (a Thinkpad X1 Carbon) has a built-in HDMI port, so I can plug into external displays without having to worry about compatibility. Similarly, if ethernet is a concern for you, there are plenty of laptops available with built-in ethernet ports, so you wouldn't need to use a dongle.
kelnos 7y ago
> they didn’t care about any CJK support. None of them would be bitching about chinese fonts on japanese pages or worse IME. If they did care about CJK support, it's not a big deal. Most distros have CJK fonts packaged up (possibly not installed by default, unfortunately) that are a couple clicks or package manager commands away. IMEs can be a little less straightforward, but I found adding ibus to an Xfce install to be pretty trivial; just a matter of installing ibus and the input methods I wanted, and then restarting (since GTK, Qt, etc. require environment variables to tell it what IM module to use). It would be nice if this stuff was set up out of the box, but it's pretty easy to set up, at least compared to other complaints I hear about using desktop Linux.
- hrktb 7y ago
  I agree with you, with small adjustments here and there and some research, linux works decently enough. Just in this context, we started from a post complaining about having to click into a lot of dialog box every first time something is done, and some stuff that doesn’t synch correctly forcing debugging and some setting reset/resynching. That’s such small potatoes in comparison.

by hrktb 7y ago

saghm 7y ago

> - they didn’t need any peripherals outside of screens, keyboards and mices. We had to use a usb dongle to project into videoconf room at a client, I have no hope it would have worked on linux. You can actually buy Linux laptops with not just USB-C, but also USB-A, HDMI, Ethernet ports, etc. As someone with a Linux laptop who has never run into a peripheral issue and has coworkers with peripheral issues with their MacBooks, I'm not super convinced that the grass is greener on the Mac side of this one.

hrktb 7y ago
Presence of ports doesn’t mean compatibility though. I have cheap USB-C - ethernet dongle I bought on amazon that works on my mac and windows. Is the chipset supported on linux ? who knows, but probably ? Now my USB-C to HDMI dongle ? hmmm https://www.reddit.com/r/GPDPocket/comments/8smhzy/so_hdmi_over_usbc_on_linux_is_a_joke/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GPDPocket/comments/8smhzy/so_hdmi_o...
- kelnos 7y ago
  For USB-ethernet dongles (even USB-C), I generally expect hardware support to be better (and not require external driver installs) than on macOS or Windows. That reddit thread is odd, as I've been using the Apple USB-C multi-port dongle to do HDMI on Linux (no config necessary, just plug it in and it works) since before that post was made.
- saghm 7y ago
  My point was that if you pick the right hardware, you don't even need dongles most of the time on Linux. The laptop I'm this comment on (a Thinkpad X1 Carbon) has a built-in HDMI port, so I can plug into external displays without having to worry about compatibility. Similarly, if ethernet is a concern for you, there are plenty of laptops available with built-in ethernet ports, so you wouldn't need to use a dongle.

kelnos 7y ago

> they didn’t care about any CJK support. None of them would be bitching about chinese fonts on japanese pages or worse IME. If they did care about CJK support, it's not a big deal. Most distros have CJK fonts packaged up (possibly not installed by default, unfortunately) that are a couple clicks or package manager commands away. IMEs can be a little less straightforward, but I found adding ibus to an Xfce install to be pretty trivial; just a matter of installing ibus and the input methods I wanted, and then restarting (since GTK, Qt, etc. require environment variables to tell it what IM module to use). It would be nice if this stuff was set up out of the box, but it's pretty easy to set up, at least compared to other complaints I hear about using desktop Linux.

hrktb 7y ago
I agree with you, with small adjustments here and there and some research, linux works decently enough. Just in this context, we started from a post complaining about having to click into a lot of dialog box every first time something is done, and some stuff that doesn’t synch correctly forcing debugging and some setting reset/resynching. That’s such small potatoes in comparison.