6 ms·

I bought a MBP, turned it on and started working. I'm partly joking here, but overall I've been trying to use Linux as a desktop environment for nearly 20 year

by movedx 6y ago

I bought a MBP, turned it on and started working. I'm partly joking here, but overall I've been trying to use Linux as a desktop environment for nearly 20 years now. It's come a long way but it feels fragile to me. I've been able to do something as simple as a reboot, only to find the graphics go wonky and I'm left with a terminal to debug it. I even ran FreeBSD as a desktop OS too. That worked well but was also fragile (less so than Linux. The BSDs are solid options.) Maybe as I get older, wiser (ha!) and more patient and I'll give these things a try again (because there are Apple/Mac related issues slowly cropping up) and perhaps they will work better. I even gave Windows 10 a serious try recently, using all the latest console emulators to get a better (Linux/iTerm like) experience, VScode, etc. The "sub system for Linux" worked well for a bit before it didn't (file permissions, moving between the two operating systems, etc.) Ideally I wish I could find the experience I desire within a FreeBSD based desktop environment because then so many hardware options become available to me. Old and new.

whalesalad 6y ago
I am the same way. I have always yearned to be one of those people who daily driver linux - but I have never been more productive than I am on macos.
- pimeys 6y ago
  I'm completely opposite. If I don't get my tiling wm setup with just the apps I need, I'm totally lost and lose all my productivity. Be it Windows 10, macOS or the default installation of Ubuntu or Fedora. Therefore I always use either nixos or freebsd for all my work.
- movedx 6y ago
  Same here. I think sometimes choice is a problem. I like a walled garden for some things.
kelnos 6y ago
It's weird, because at work we're a Mac shop, but I (among a small group of others) buck the trend and run Linux. I have very few issues; I just run Debian stable for 6 months or so after its release, and then switch to testing until 6 months after it goes stable. Meanwhile, my coworkers complain all the time about macOS. Definitely some of it is due to the poorly-written corporate management software they're required to run, but a lot of it is just them constantly fighting against the OS to get their work done. And then even after IT has finished testing the new major macOS release every year (which takes them like 4 months) and allows people to run it on their laptops, they still look at over an hour to upgrade, and a lot of post-install issues. The one big caveat is that on occasion, say once every 2 years, I hit a big issue on Linux that I can fix, but an average non-technical user would probably not be able to figure out, and would end up having to do a full reinstall (or get their family techie person to do it). I do feel like MS and Apple have mostly eliminated that sort of issue (though I could be wrong). The other problem I see is that most people have an existing laptop and want to try Linux on it, and run into hardware incompatibilities. Unfortunately that's just how things are going to be; if you really want to try to run Linux on a laptop, you need to make your purchasing decision with that in mind. You never really think about that when you run macOS or Windows, because Macs/PCs are designed to run that particular OS, and the manufacturer guarantees that everything will work. This phenomenon is especially bad for people with Mac laptops; at this point anything after 2016 means a lot of pain and things that just won't work. Even with a 2016 MacBook Pro you're going to be fighting to get things set up. On the flip side, if you get something that's designed with Linux in mind (like the Dell XPS 13 or something from System76), you're going to have a much better time. But I totally get that most people won't want to buy a new laptop and would prefer to give Linux a spin on whatever they have already. It's just that results are going to be wildly mixed in that case.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  I almost never have major issues with macOS, except for the poorly-written corporate management software. :) But, I know a lot of that is simple familiarity. Someone who's used to Windows or a given Linux desktop environment is going to struggle a bit; I get frustrated with Windows laughably easily. I'm better with Linux, but I've run it -- and FreeBSD, for that matter! -- as full-time desktop environments in the past, and even though the "full-time" part of that is many years ago, some of it still sticks. (I also ran BeOS full-time for a bit over a year, and oddly, that's really the one that I miss the most.) > The other problem I see is that most people have an existing laptop and want to try Linux on it, and run into hardware incompatibilities. Yes, a thousand times. I ran into that more often than I would have expected just trying to get Linux to run in a VM on various Macs over the years, and once in a while on more recent PC hardware that I was trying to do something with. (Then I would write something that suggested Linux was still hard to install and people would argue with me. If it ever comes up again, I should definitely remember to add your caveat about existing hardware!)
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    I don't think I've been happy to have upgraded macOS since about 10.4. something always breaks.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      I've rarely had even anything minor break. I don't know how much of a unicorn this makes me. (I also never had an issue with running MacBook Pros in clamshell mode, which I did literally every day for years, but that's something I used to hear lots of complaints about from others.)
    - Marsymars 6y ago
      Same. Off the top of my head, one upgrade broke my external monitors (by breaking DisplayLink drivers), one upgrade broke Karabiner (by breaking the way it remaps keys) which entirely broke my remote-work workflow, one upgrade broke my ability to play music (by removing iTunes, and having the Music app replacement not be compatible with the iTunes server capability on my Synology NAS), Big Sur for Apple Silicon broke my ability to install any CLI tools. (Homebrew didn’t have Apple Silicon support for some months after the launch of Apple Silicon Macs.) I get that these are in large part technically the fault of third-party developers, but it’s still pretty inconvenient as an end user to be unable expect to upgrade my OS without some major portion of my workflow being entirely non-functional for months.
walrus01 6y ago
Because I need things that will have a reasonably long battery life and 100% reliable suspend/resume/hibernate functionality, I have a Macbook Air 2020 as my laptop, and the previously mentioned debian+xorg+xfce environment as my desktop. The laptop is increasingly a thin client these days as everything I want to do is either inside a TLS session in a browser, or I'm controlling remote Xen, KVM hypervisors and virtual machines (either by SSH or VNC-over-SSH) that have much more cpu and ram resources than could ever be reasonably squeezed into a laptop. The highly refined macbook touchpad user interface is also a part of it. Nothing matches it in the market space intended as Windows-10 laptops. For me what makes Linux on a laptop a really bad and unreliable experience overall is a combination of poor quality/small touchpads, poor quality microphone built in near the keyboard, poor quality screens (you have to pay a LOT to get a screen anywhere near the quality of a macbook air or pro, and I absolutely detest 16:9 ratio laptop screens), and general unreliability in suspend/resume functionality.
- kwanbix 6y ago
  I don't know what the macbook touchpad does that you like so much, as I have not owned a macbook for at least 10 years, however, I think nothing can match a ThinkPad trackpoint.
- vnxli 6y ago
  It is kinda funny how we’re going back to a kind of mainframe/terminal model with the way everything works now
edgyquant 6y ago
> That worked well but was also fragile (less so than Linux. The BSDs are solid options.) I seriously doubt you will run into more problems with Ubuntu or Fedora than you would with FreeBSD. It’s been awhile since I’ve tried, but the BSDs are basically optionless if you want to take full advantage of modern graphics cards. You boot into Ubuntu and the graphics stack, WiFi or Ethernet, it all just works. BSD is like using Linux a decade ago at best.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  Fedora and the various *butu derivatives (e.g. Linux Mint) have always been solid. Built multiple computers from parts and slapped em on several different laptops from different vendors -- no issues. I tried FreeBSD on the desktop and it was sparse and a PITA. I'm sure they can catch up to where Ubuntu was a few years ago, but I'm currently running AAA VR games on Steam on Linux -- no reason to change what I'm running now.
- movedx 6y ago
  Absolutely. It depends on the hardware. I've found if all you're doing is developing then FreeBSD is fine. If you bring simple multi-media use cases into the mix then things get a bit hairy. Ubuntu certainly helps, but it's also hairy when things go wrong or get close to going wrong. I just turn my Mac on and get on with working in a Unix environment.
donw 6y ago
I'm with you on this one, right up until the last two versions of OSX. Stability seems to have gone right out the window, with my machine crashing on a daily basis. It really doesn't like being plugged and unplugged from its Thunderbolt dock, which was a straight up non-problem prior to Mojave. It's also slower. OSX never felt as immediate as Linux or BSD, but it's gotten even worse. When I have some time, I'm going to toss a systemd-free Linux on my old Macbook Air with the garbage keyboard, and see how it feels as a desktop system. Pretty sure I'll miss the consistency of the user interface. That's my biggest gripe about the FOSS world: the user experience is generally shit. And there are a few apps for which I don't have a good replacement yet (Dash being the biggie). And I'm not sure what to do on the phone front: the iPhone is the best hardware by far, but I barely use mine for anything other than the web and watching videos. Will play with a Pinephone and see if it does the job. But everything else I can do between a terminal and a browser, and given that I'm not happy with where Apple is going, it seems like it's time to start getting off the train.

by movedx 6y ago

whalesalad 6y ago

I am the same way. I have always yearned to be one of those people who daily driver linux - but I have never been more productive than I am on macos.

pimeys 6y ago
I'm completely opposite. If I don't get my tiling wm setup with just the apps I need, I'm totally lost and lose all my productivity. Be it Windows 10, macOS or the default installation of Ubuntu or Fedora. Therefore I always use either nixos or freebsd for all my work.
movedx 6y ago
Same here. I think sometimes choice is a problem. I like a walled garden for some things.

kelnos 6y ago

It's weird, because at work we're a Mac shop, but I (among a small group of others) buck the trend and run Linux. I have very few issues; I just run Debian stable for 6 months or so after its release, and then switch to testing until 6 months after it goes stable. Meanwhile, my coworkers complain all the time about macOS. Definitely some of it is due to the poorly-written corporate management software they're required to run, but a lot of it is just them constantly fighting against the OS to get their work done. And then even after IT has finished testing the new major macOS release every year (which takes them like 4 months) and allows people to run it on their laptops, they still look at over an hour to upgrade, and a lot of post-install issues. The one big caveat is that on occasion, say once every 2 years, I hit a big issue on Linux that I can fix, but an average non-technical user would probably not be able to figure out, and would end up having to do a full reinstall (or get their family techie person to do it). I do feel like MS and Apple have mostly eliminated that sort of issue (though I could be wrong). The other problem I see is that most people have an existing laptop and want to try Linux on it, and run into hardware incompatibilities. Unfortunately that's just how things are going to be; if you really want to try to run Linux on a laptop, you need to make your purchasing decision with that in mind. You never really think about that when you run macOS or Windows, because Macs/PCs are designed to run that particular OS, and the manufacturer guarantees that everything will work. This phenomenon is especially bad for people with Mac laptops; at this point anything after 2016 means a lot of pain and things that just won't work. Even with a 2016 MacBook Pro you're going to be fighting to get things set up. On the flip side, if you get something that's designed with Linux in mind (like the Dell XPS 13 or something from System76), you're going to have a much better time. But I totally get that most people won't want to buy a new laptop and would prefer to give Linux a spin on whatever they have already. It's just that results are going to be wildly mixed in that case.

chipotle_coyote 6y ago
I almost never have major issues with macOS, except for the poorly-written corporate management software. :) But, I know a lot of that is simple familiarity. Someone who's used to Windows or a given Linux desktop environment is going to struggle a bit; I get frustrated with Windows laughably easily. I'm better with Linux, but I've run it -- and FreeBSD, for that matter! -- as full-time desktop environments in the past, and even though the "full-time" part of that is many years ago, some of it still sticks. (I also ran BeOS full-time for a bit over a year, and oddly, that's really the one that I miss the most.) > The other problem I see is that most people have an existing laptop and want to try Linux on it, and run into hardware incompatibilities. Yes, a thousand times. I ran into that more often than I would have expected just trying to get Linux to run in a VM on various Macs over the years, and once in a while on more recent PC hardware that I was trying to do something with. (Then I would write something that suggested Linux was still hard to install and people would argue with me. If it ever comes up again, I should definitely remember to add your caveat about existing hardware!)
- aidenn0 6y ago
  I don't think I've been happy to have upgraded macOS since about 10.4. something always breaks.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    I've rarely had even anything minor break. I don't know how much of a unicorn this makes me. (I also never had an issue with running MacBook Pros in clamshell mode, which I did literally every day for years, but that's something I used to hear lots of complaints about from others.)
  - Marsymars 6y ago
    Same. Off the top of my head, one upgrade broke my external monitors (by breaking DisplayLink drivers), one upgrade broke Karabiner (by breaking the way it remaps keys) which entirely broke my remote-work workflow, one upgrade broke my ability to play music (by removing iTunes, and having the Music app replacement not be compatible with the iTunes server capability on my Synology NAS), Big Sur for Apple Silicon broke my ability to install any CLI tools. (Homebrew didn’t have Apple Silicon support for some months after the launch of Apple Silicon Macs.) I get that these are in large part technically the fault of third-party developers, but it’s still pretty inconvenient as an end user to be unable expect to upgrade my OS without some major portion of my workflow being entirely non-functional for months.

walrus01 6y ago

Because I need things that will have a reasonably long battery life and 100% reliable suspend/resume/hibernate functionality, I have a Macbook Air 2020 as my laptop, and the previously mentioned debian+xorg+xfce environment as my desktop. The laptop is increasingly a thin client these days as everything I want to do is either inside a TLS session in a browser, or I'm controlling remote Xen, KVM hypervisors and virtual machines (either by SSH or VNC-over-SSH) that have much more cpu and ram resources than could ever be reasonably squeezed into a laptop. The highly refined macbook touchpad user interface is also a part of it. Nothing matches it in the market space intended as Windows-10 laptops. For me what makes Linux on a laptop a really bad and unreliable experience overall is a combination of poor quality/small touchpads, poor quality microphone built in near the keyboard, poor quality screens (you have to pay a LOT to get a screen anywhere near the quality of a macbook air or pro, and I absolutely detest 16:9 ratio laptop screens), and general unreliability in suspend/resume functionality.

kwanbix 6y ago
I don't know what the macbook touchpad does that you like so much, as I have not owned a macbook for at least 10 years, however, I think nothing can match a ThinkPad trackpoint.
vnxli 6y ago
It is kinda funny how we’re going back to a kind of mainframe/terminal model with the way everything works now

edgyquant 6y ago

> That worked well but was also fragile (less so than Linux. The BSDs are solid options.) I seriously doubt you will run into more problems with Ubuntu or Fedora than you would with FreeBSD. It’s been awhile since I’ve tried, but the BSDs are basically optionless if you want to take full advantage of modern graphics cards. You boot into Ubuntu and the graphics stack, WiFi or Ethernet, it all just works. BSD is like using Linux a decade ago at best.

blaser-waffle 6y ago
Fedora and the various *butu derivatives (e.g. Linux Mint) have always been solid. Built multiple computers from parts and slapped em on several different laptops from different vendors -- no issues. I tried FreeBSD on the desktop and it was sparse and a PITA. I'm sure they can catch up to where Ubuntu was a few years ago, but I'm currently running AAA VR games on Steam on Linux -- no reason to change what I'm running now.
movedx 6y ago
Absolutely. It depends on the hardware. I've found if all you're doing is developing then FreeBSD is fine. If you bring simple multi-media use cases into the mix then things get a bit hairy. Ubuntu certainly helps, but it's also hairy when things go wrong or get close to going wrong. I just turn my Mac on and get on with working in a Unix environment.

donw 6y ago

I'm with you on this one, right up until the last two versions of OSX. Stability seems to have gone right out the window, with my machine crashing on a daily basis. It really doesn't like being plugged and unplugged from its Thunderbolt dock, which was a straight up non-problem prior to Mojave. It's also slower. OSX never felt as immediate as Linux or BSD, but it's gotten even worse. When I have some time, I'm going to toss a systemd-free Linux on my old Macbook Air with the garbage keyboard, and see how it feels as a desktop system. Pretty sure I'll miss the consistency of the user interface. That's my biggest gripe about the FOSS world: the user experience is generally shit. And there are a few apps for which I don't have a good replacement yet (Dash being the biggie). And I'm not sure what to do on the phone front: the iPhone is the best hardware by far, but I barely use mine for anything other than the web and watching videos. Will play with a Pinephone and see if it does the job. But everything else I can do between a terminal and a browser, and given that I'm not happy with where Apple is going, it seems like it's time to start getting off the train.