6 ms·

Applications and hardware drivers on Mac just work. Even Homebrew works pretty nicely. The visuals of Mac are vastly superior to any flavor of Linux I've tried:

by y7 6y ago

Applications and hardware drivers on Mac just work. Even Homebrew works pretty nicely. The visuals of Mac are vastly superior to any flavor of Linux I've tried: smooth graphics, font rendering, HiDPI support, etc. Some aspects of Mac hardware (screen, touchpad) are very hard to come by with other manufacturers. At this point I'll probably switch to Linux as soon as my 2015 Macbook stops working, but I would've really liked to stay with Apple.

pcwalton 6y ago
At this point FreeType is generally better (faster, more featureful) than Apple's Core Graphics, although FT is very customizable and I prefer Apple-like defaults to the ones most Linux distros use. You can definitely get Apple-like rendering out of FreeType; disabling hinting and making sure stem darkening is on gets you most of the way there.
fsflover 6y ago
> hardware drivers on Mac just work Same for GNU/Linux if you choose the hardware for it (or buy preinstalled).
- reidjs 6y ago
  Until you have to connect to a 12 year old printer at work
  - brianguertin 6y ago
    Mac and Linux actually use the same printer stack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS
  - IntelMiner 6y ago
    Most corporate printers are network attached, many also run under CUPS
- TwoBit 6y ago
  In my experience this argument is BS. Maybe the computer on day one works OK, but it's downhill from there as you maintain and update.
  - alacombe 6y ago
    > ... but it's downhill from there as you maintain and update I've been maintaining a Fedora desktop installed 8 years ago without a snag, updating every year or so as time permit. Not a single problem.
  - ByteJockey 6y ago
    It really does depend on the hardware. Thinkpads usually work really well out of the box (even the nipple mouse works without a hitch). I have plenty of horror stories about other computers though. Usually involving being deep in some page tree on a company's website that they don't seem to have actually expected anyone to go to, trying to figure out which specific vendor id maps to the actual hardware I have.
  - koyote 6y ago
    Huh, in twenty years of using Linux, hardware support has improved with each update not gone down hill. What I do agree with is that on day one support might not be as good for new types of hardware (especially for more niche hardware like a fingerprint reader for example). Even that has improved a lot over the years though.
- ukd1 6y ago
  Try getting hardware accelerated video in Chrome, or FF. Not supported.
  - snark42 6y ago
    Interestingly enough this causes all kind of weird distortion on my brand new 16" MBP. Not sure if it's a hardware issue, but it only happens in the browser with GPU acceleration turned on...
  - dzonga 6y ago
    hardware acceleration has been supported in FF since 75. however your display scaling has to be 100% on x-org or use it in wayland. Linux desktop would've been perfect if it weren't for the fragmentation. btw currently running ubuntu 20.04
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I did exactly that with an Asus Netbook, then Canonical and AMD broke the whole experience with their actions replacing working binary drivers with WIP FOSS alternatives, because Free is Good ™.
stanislavb 6y ago
Same story here
CraftThatBlock 6y ago
Except when they broke most Homebrew installations a few years back (Mojave maybe? Been using Linux for a while now too, that was my tipping point)
saghm 6y ago
> Even Homebrew works pretty nicely It always surprises me when people cite homebrew as a plus rather than a minus in these discussions. Compared to the experience I have with Linux package managers, I've found homebrew to be extraordinarily slow even at the best of times. A simple "brew update" will generally take at least 30 seconds; in that time on something like pacman, I'll usually not only have already finished fetching the list of updates but also actually performing the upgrades, and that's updating my entire system, not just a few userspace packages that I have installed. I can understand that some people prefer MacOS and I don't think they're wrong for doing so, but it's hard for me to believe that someone has given Linux a fair shot when they cite package management as something that Macias does better.
- asah 6y ago
  Yeah sigh, homebrew had definitely slowed down in recent years.
- wool_gather 6y ago
  In my experience this is partly because Homebrew has steadily moved to a "knows better than you" stance and every time you ask it to do one thing, it goes off and does a bunch of other things first. MacPorts is well worth a spin if you're on a Mac and have trouble with Homebrew. I switched sometime last year and am very happy. I think I've actually been using it more because I know it's not going to be a pain every time.
  - jonhohle 6y ago
    I've been a MacPorts user since the days of Fink vs. MacPorts and tried and failed to use brew many times. The biggest argument at the beginning for Homebrew over MacPorts was binary distribution and now MacPorts has that and can still compile custom versions if necessary. MacPorts is always the first thing I install on a new Mac and has been for over 15 years. The several times I've seriously tried Homebrew, I get frustrated (terrible jargon, missing packages, spewing files all over my system, lax security) and go back to MP.
    - 6y ago
diminish 6y ago
The window animation delays in mac are killing me - kind of in a month you lose hours of screen animation time. also macos has ZERO use case as a cloud OS. Any stuff you learn is meaningless except the unixy ones where linux rocks.
- IOT_Apprentice 6y ago
  1) You can turn off windows animation, and it seems strange that it is a performance bottleneck. 2) macOS is not a cloud OS. It certainly can be a portal to the cloud quite easily, via terminal, iterm2, ssh/mosh, VNC etc. But you know that already. You can also run VMs, KVM, docker et al on it as well.
  - diminish 6y ago
    1. it's better to avoid macos totally. 2. u repeat what i said. linux is better in every detail
kelnos 6y ago
I've been running Linux on Macs since my 2005 12" PowerBook. There were a couple years in the middle here I switched to OS X with Linux running in a VM due to hardware support issues (the VM was a pain in the ass to use; there were no end to performance problems). I never liked OS X as an OS all that much. It was fine, but I found it got in my way more than it helped me. In 2016, after getting tired of various hardware bits never working just right on Linux, I gave up and tried someone else's hardware. It was amazing that everything just worked with Linux. I didn't have to fight with bleeding-edge, just-reverse-engineered drivers. I didn't have to wonder if the laptop was going to wake up again after being put to sleep. But I chose somewhat poorly: the hardware I chose was decent, but rough. The battery expanded to the point where it warped the case, which caused the keyboard illumination to intermittently not work, and eventually made the touchpad impossible to use. So I gave up in 2018 and got a MacBook Pro again, though it was a secondhand 2016 model. Once I installed Linux, I found that the keyboard and touchpad didn't work, and I had to build an out-of-tree driver for it, ditto for the WiFi. After that I found that audio and suspend-to-RAM didn't work. It turns out I was "lucky" that I had an older model; the keyboard and mouse setup in the 2017 and 2018 models hadn't been reverse engineered yet and didn't work at all. In 2019 I got fed up with having to use the USB-C headphone adapter from my Pixel in order to hear sound, and to remember to shut my laptop down completely if I was going to be away from AC power for more than a few hours. I again left the Apple hardware world. It's not perfect, but again I marvel at how everything just works (with Linux) without tweaking. I hear so many colleagues complain about various inexplicable broken things on macOS all the time, and I think I've gotten the better deal. Is Linux as polished as macOS? Of course not. I agree with you that the graphics aren't as smooth, font rendering isn't as good (though this is debatable; personally I find Linux rendering to be more crisp and readable than macOS), HiDPI support varies depending on what toolkit any given app was written with. But it works well enough. I think one of the biggest problems that has kept (and will continue to keep) Linux from going mainstream is that even though for the most part it works just fine, when it does break, it breaks spectacularly to the point that you need specialized knowledge to fix it. Fortunately I have that specialized knowledge, so I'm fine, but your average home user does not. I don't have to deal with Apple's keyboard design issues, random WiFi failures (yes, it is incredibly funny to me to find that Linux WiFi can work better than macOS), Apple's overzealous "system integrity protection", or Apple in general deciding they know better than I do as to how I want to use my computer. It makes me happy, and I feel productive.
gavinray 6y ago
Everything on Ubuntu just works, too.
- adolfojp 6y ago
  Except for fractional scaling if you use the proprietary NVIDIA driver. This was an issue on the latest LTS release.
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    It became worse for me since I upgraded to 20.04. Now central screen in 3 screen setup gets panned, which can only be fixed from Nvidia control panel + graphics manager restart. It breaks on the screen lock. Don't upgrade to 20.04 yet, if that's what you have.
alacombe 6y ago
> Applications and hardware drivers on Mac just work. ... until Apple decides to break an API and not provide equivalent functionality, and then you end up with a perfectly functional soft-bricked paperweight. I can't use my external USB monitor because of this.
willtim 6y ago
> The visuals of Mac are vastly superior to any flavor of Linux I've tried. This is subjective. I think the MacOS UI looks and acts like a toy. My Linux machine has a solarised theme (I can toggle light/dark) with minimal window borders (i3, polybar). I think it's much more tasteful than MacOS. GNOME looks better too and it's themeable, unlike MacOS. But this is all of course just my opinion.
- potta_coffee 6y ago
  I agree. I dislike the Mac UI, particularly Finder. The one Mac tool I use and love is the screenshot shortcuts. Other than that, 99% of my time is spent in the terminal and Sublime Text, and Firefox.
potta_coffee 6y ago
I switched to Ubuntu for work about a year ago, I've done zero fiddling since the day I set it up. Linux has really come a long way even in the last 5 years, IMO. I still have a 2015 MBP that I use for my personal work and it's still solid.
- darkteflon 6y ago
  Same, as of late last year I now run an Ubuntu desktop and the Macbook together. What I really like about this setup is the ability to sidestep some problems instead of having to solve everything, allowing me to focus on doing paid work instead of troubleshooting the platform.

by y7 6y ago

pcwalton 6y ago

At this point FreeType is generally better (faster, more featureful) than Apple's Core Graphics, although FT is very customizable and I prefer Apple-like defaults to the ones most Linux distros use. You can definitely get Apple-like rendering out of FreeType; disabling hinting and making sure stem darkening is on gets you most of the way there.

fsflover 6y ago

> hardware drivers on Mac just work Same for GNU/Linux if you choose the hardware for it (or buy preinstalled).

reidjs 6y ago
Until you have to connect to a 12 year old printer at work
- brianguertin 6y ago
  Mac and Linux actually use the same printer stack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS
- IntelMiner 6y ago
  Most corporate printers are network attached, many also run under CUPS
TwoBit 6y ago
In my experience this argument is BS. Maybe the computer on day one works OK, but it's downhill from there as you maintain and update.
- alacombe 6y ago
  > ... but it's downhill from there as you maintain and update I've been maintaining a Fedora desktop installed 8 years ago without a snag, updating every year or so as time permit. Not a single problem.
- ByteJockey 6y ago
  It really does depend on the hardware. Thinkpads usually work really well out of the box (even the nipple mouse works without a hitch). I have plenty of horror stories about other computers though. Usually involving being deep in some page tree on a company's website that they don't seem to have actually expected anyone to go to, trying to figure out which specific vendor id maps to the actual hardware I have.
- koyote 6y ago
  Huh, in twenty years of using Linux, hardware support has improved with each update not gone down hill. What I do agree with is that on day one support might not be as good for new types of hardware (especially for more niche hardware like a fingerprint reader for example). Even that has improved a lot over the years though.
ukd1 6y ago
Try getting hardware accelerated video in Chrome, or FF. Not supported.
- snark42 6y ago
  Interestingly enough this causes all kind of weird distortion on my brand new 16" MBP. Not sure if it's a hardware issue, but it only happens in the browser with GPU acceleration turned on...
- dzonga 6y ago
  hardware acceleration has been supported in FF since 75. however your display scaling has to be 100% on x-org or use it in wayland. Linux desktop would've been perfect if it weren't for the fragmentation. btw currently running ubuntu 20.04
pjmlp 6y ago
I did exactly that with an Asus Netbook, then Canonical and AMD broke the whole experience with their actions replacing working binary drivers with WIP FOSS alternatives, because Free is Good ™.

stanislavb 6y ago

Same story here

CraftThatBlock 6y ago

Except when they broke most Homebrew installations a few years back (Mojave maybe? Been using Linux for a while now too, that was my tipping point)

saghm 6y ago

> Even Homebrew works pretty nicely It always surprises me when people cite homebrew as a plus rather than a minus in these discussions. Compared to the experience I have with Linux package managers, I've found homebrew to be extraordinarily slow even at the best of times. A simple "brew update" will generally take at least 30 seconds; in that time on something like pacman, I'll usually not only have already finished fetching the list of updates but also actually performing the upgrades, and that's updating my entire system, not just a few userspace packages that I have installed. I can understand that some people prefer MacOS and I don't think they're wrong for doing so, but it's hard for me to believe that someone has given Linux a fair shot when they cite package management as something that Macias does better.

asah 6y ago
Yeah sigh, homebrew had definitely slowed down in recent years.
wool_gather 6y ago
In my experience this is partly because Homebrew has steadily moved to a "knows better than you" stance and every time you ask it to do one thing, it goes off and does a bunch of other things first. MacPorts is well worth a spin if you're on a Mac and have trouble with Homebrew. I switched sometime last year and am very happy. I think I've actually been using it more because I know it's not going to be a pain every time.
- jonhohle 6y ago
  I've been a MacPorts user since the days of Fink vs. MacPorts and tried and failed to use brew many times. The biggest argument at the beginning for Homebrew over MacPorts was binary distribution and now MacPorts has that and can still compile custom versions if necessary. MacPorts is always the first thing I install on a new Mac and has been for over 15 years. The several times I've seriously tried Homebrew, I get frustrated (terrible jargon, missing packages, spewing files all over my system, lax security) and go back to MP.
  - 6y ago

diminish 6y ago

The window animation delays in mac are killing me - kind of in a month you lose hours of screen animation time. also macos has ZERO use case as a cloud OS. Any stuff you learn is meaningless except the unixy ones where linux rocks.

IOT_Apprentice 6y ago
1) You can turn off windows animation, and it seems strange that it is a performance bottleneck. 2) macOS is not a cloud OS. It certainly can be a portal to the cloud quite easily, via terminal, iterm2, ssh/mosh, VNC etc. But you know that already. You can also run VMs, KVM, docker et al on it as well.
- diminish 6y ago
  1. it's better to avoid macos totally. 2. u repeat what i said. linux is better in every detail

kelnos 6y ago

I've been running Linux on Macs since my 2005 12" PowerBook. There were a couple years in the middle here I switched to OS X with Linux running in a VM due to hardware support issues (the VM was a pain in the ass to use; there were no end to performance problems). I never liked OS X as an OS all that much. It was fine, but I found it got in my way more than it helped me. In 2016, after getting tired of various hardware bits never working just right on Linux, I gave up and tried someone else's hardware. It was amazing that everything just worked with Linux. I didn't have to fight with bleeding-edge, just-reverse-engineered drivers. I didn't have to wonder if the laptop was going to wake up again after being put to sleep. But I chose somewhat poorly: the hardware I chose was decent, but rough. The battery expanded to the point where it warped the case, which caused the keyboard illumination to intermittently not work, and eventually made the touchpad impossible to use. So I gave up in 2018 and got a MacBook Pro again, though it was a secondhand 2016 model. Once I installed Linux, I found that the keyboard and touchpad didn't work, and I had to build an out-of-tree driver for it, ditto for the WiFi. After that I found that audio and suspend-to-RAM didn't work. It turns out I was "lucky" that I had an older model; the keyboard and mouse setup in the 2017 and 2018 models hadn't been reverse engineered yet and didn't work at all. In 2019 I got fed up with having to use the USB-C headphone adapter from my Pixel in order to hear sound, and to remember to shut my laptop down completely if I was going to be away from AC power for more than a few hours. I again left the Apple hardware world. It's not perfect, but again I marvel at how everything just works (with Linux) without tweaking. I hear so many colleagues complain about various inexplicable broken things on macOS all the time, and I think I've gotten the better deal. Is Linux as polished as macOS? Of course not. I agree with you that the graphics aren't as smooth, font rendering isn't as good (though this is debatable; personally I find Linux rendering to be more crisp and readable than macOS), HiDPI support varies depending on what toolkit any given app was written with. But it works well enough. I think one of the biggest problems that has kept (and will continue to keep) Linux from going mainstream is that even though for the most part it works just fine, when it does break, it breaks spectacularly to the point that you need specialized knowledge to fix it. Fortunately I have that specialized knowledge, so I'm fine, but your average home user does not. I don't have to deal with Apple's keyboard design issues, random WiFi failures (yes, it is incredibly funny to me to find that Linux WiFi can work better than macOS), Apple's overzealous "system integrity protection", or Apple in general deciding they know better than I do as to how I want to use my computer. It makes me happy, and I feel productive.

gavinray 6y ago

Everything on Ubuntu just works, too.

adolfojp 6y ago
Except for fractional scaling if you use the proprietary NVIDIA driver. This was an issue on the latest LTS release.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  It became worse for me since I upgraded to 20.04. Now central screen in 3 screen setup gets panned, which can only be fixed from Nvidia control panel + graphics manager restart. It breaks on the screen lock. Don't upgrade to 20.04 yet, if that's what you have.

alacombe 6y ago

> Applications and hardware drivers on Mac just work. ... until Apple decides to break an API and not provide equivalent functionality, and then you end up with a perfectly functional soft-bricked paperweight. I can't use my external USB monitor because of this.

willtim 6y ago

> The visuals of Mac are vastly superior to any flavor of Linux I've tried. This is subjective. I think the MacOS UI looks and acts like a toy. My Linux machine has a solarised theme (I can toggle light/dark) with minimal window borders (i3, polybar). I think it's much more tasteful than MacOS. GNOME looks better too and it's themeable, unlike MacOS. But this is all of course just my opinion.

potta_coffee 6y ago
I agree. I dislike the Mac UI, particularly Finder. The one Mac tool I use and love is the screenshot shortcuts. Other than that, 99% of my time is spent in the terminal and Sublime Text, and Firefox.

potta_coffee 6y ago

I switched to Ubuntu for work about a year ago, I've done zero fiddling since the day I set it up. Linux has really come a long way even in the last 5 years, IMO. I still have a 2015 MBP that I use for my personal work and it's still solid.

darkteflon 6y ago
Same, as of late last year I now run an Ubuntu desktop and the Macbook together. What I really like about this setup is the ability to sidestep some problems instead of having to solve everything, allowing me to focus on doing paid work instead of troubleshooting the platform.