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Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

• ggm 6y ago
  So Carlos says "don't pick off single issues because it's forest/trees stuff" but I gotta say: he thinks apt is better than brew. Nothing else felt "wrong" but that one just threw me completely. I can go with his whole write up, but not that. Admittedly I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which brew conforms to. I also totally get his preview/calendar/mail.app vibe. Mail.app is not getting better. But the trio are pretty rock solid. Post O365 no complaint about office on Linux makes sense really, so it comes down to productivity apps and integration. And yea, I wish a decent gtk port into osx was a thing.
  • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    > I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which brew conforms to. Brew conforms to your idea of how a traditional UNIX package manager should work? The same brew that pretends multiple users don't exist and takes control of /usr/local/ for itself? Are we talking about the same thing?
    • ggm 6y ago
      Ok. You got me there. But, in my defence, most macs are run single user. If I'd done any login separation I'd probably be wincing at what I said there. Apt, yum, bundles, renamed packages at random, the whole -devel thing.. brrrr. Please, no. Macports lost out. Liked it, found it wasn't getting enough attention. Pkg on mac works pretty well
    • messe 6y ago
      > takes control of /usr/local/ for itself In fairness, so does ports/pkg/pkg_add on FreeBSD/OpenBSD.
      • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        They require sudo to install stuff though, right?
  • ratww 6y ago
    Brew is the single thing that I absolutely loathe about macOS. It dog slow (does it really need to git pull from GitHub every 15 minutes, really?), doesn't support multiple users, doesn't support alternative folders, hates static compilation (which is mostly why the two previous break), and lots of new things are not available there anymore. In my new computer I didn't even install it, I just used the Rustup/Dotnet/RVM/NVM install instructions rather than using Brew. I then got statically compiled versions of ffmpeg, jq, z7, which took a couple minutes. Let's see how long until I cave. I'll probably try MacPorts.
    • hashkb 6y ago
      Yes. Brew is a crutch, and so network hungry. Nobody cares, but if you move to the mountains and want to do software development, a Mac will grind to a halt every so often for myriad reasons decided by someone at Apple, or just some dev accustomed to 100mbps. Linux (Arch for me, but probably others) can be told to respect your personal situation, as opposed to dictating it.
      • ggm 6y ago
        Both of these experiences are completely unlike mine, but I guess that goes to the variances in what people want and use. The one thing I want in brew and don't have, is hugin. Nothing else I use is missing. Iterm and docker and other cask like installs can be ropey especially if they do update checks inside themselves. I, probably a very simplistic user compared to others. YMMV.
      • nanis 6y ago
        > Linux (Arch for me, but probably others) ArchLinux has been painless. although I must say I've not tried anything too cutting edge with the GUI. Even if you don't use Arch, the Wiki is invaluable.
        • hashkb 6y ago
          The wiki... Shows that community maintained resources don't have to suck. I'm just using Sway and yay all day. The blunt edge works for me. And, can't say this enough, please always keep in mind that your software may be used by someone with a slower connection or who may even be entirely offline sometimes. I deserve music while driving, and text is king. (Elon - starlink me please)
  • rahimnathwani 6y ago
    > Post O365 no complaint about office on Linux makes sense really Excel Online doesn't come close to the feature set or usability of Excel for Windows.
    • ggm 6y ago
      There's a great story in how much of the world runs in excel. I use it simplistically, but I make no pretence there aren't deep, complex use cases. Maybe because I use it simplistically it doesn't bother me how weak it is compared to native.
      • rahimnathwani 6y ago
        Right. Imagine an intermediate user of emacs, vim, sublime or vscode. They'd find switching to nano or notepad.exe pretty rough.
        • ggm 6y ago
          Yea, although for the Emacs user because all x11 apps acquire x11 through MIT's X10R4 idea of textbox edit norms, they get the in line text edit/move behaviour they expected on anybody's xorg app. Not such on notepad.exe Powershell doesn't do it for me, but that aside WSL might.
• draw_down 6y ago
  Yes, the whole problem is that Mac still doesn’t have serious competition, at least in certain areas I care about like the trackpad. So when they start shitting up their hardware there’s nowhere to go. All you can do is wait for Apple to hopefully recognize their mistakes, and in the meantime, read blogposts that are like “well the trackpad support sucks, but... <lots of prevarication>”
• iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
  I was linux only until last year when someone convinced me to try a Mac. I have been very happy with it: it's way less intrusive than what I had pictured (I think prejudice against commercial OSes from my windows days). Memory and CPU issues that seem to crop up in ubuntu using desktop apps are not present - I had a lot of trouble using e.g. zoom and g-suite on ubuntu without having either lockups or full blast cooling fan. And I still have a unix-like OS that I can do my usual development, ssh-ing, and file manipulation on. I currently have a Mac for "office productivity" stuff and ubuntu for development, but if I had to only have one computer, it would be a Mac.
  • drewzero1 6y ago
    I was also Linux-only for several years, then I started getting into Macs and they felt more or less good enough. I definitely appreciated not spending as much time just to make my computer work, and I liked the familiarity of the terminal. I started drifting back toward Linux as my Macs started to give out. The macOS installer kept failing and I had to jump through hoops to download the installer for the macOS version I wanted and 'verify' it. (This was ~10.10-10.13, not sure if it's still as much trouble to verify an installer that isn't the latest version.) After the second Mac that refused to reinstall, I had had enough and put Ubuntu on it. I started to realize around 2012 (with the release of soldered-RAM Retina MBPs and razor-edge discless iMacs) that Apple did not need me as a customer, and eventually I was fine with that. I have one remaining Mac Mini that I use as an HTPC and to get pictures off of my iPad. For daily use I usually prefer an old Thinkpad running Debian.
    • hotcrossbunny 6y ago
      Same here with regards to preferring the old Thinkpads for daily use. The trouble as I it is that the great ones are getting really old now, and the newer ones don't seem to be of the same ilk.
      • drewzero1 6y ago
        I picked up a W500 recently to replace my R61i, and while it’s an incremental improvement it easily handles 80 percent of what I need a computer to do. I’m planning to add a Bluetooth adapter to get that up to 90%, the rest being limitations of the Core2 Duo and graphics card. I’d maybe consider going a little newer and going to a T series but it sounds like they really started going downhill (build-wise) when they changed the keyboard. Even the W500 has a lot more keyboard flex than the R61i, in an attempt to add lightness to a chunky laptop.
• marcus_holmes 6y ago
  The author doesn't state whether they installed Linux on a laptop that shipped with Windows, or bought an actual "Linux laptop". There's a huge difference, like reviewing a Hackintosh and saying "Macs are shite". I did the same. I accidentally fubar'd my lovely 2015 Macbook by pouring a beer into it. I bought a Dell XPS and dual-booted Linux, which kinda worked but wasn't great. Then I bought a Purism 14, which has been awesome (after some teething troubles with the build quality). I'm kinda tempted by the M1 goodness. But to be honest, I'm not happy at all about going back into the walled garden of MacOS. I guess my main point of difference with the OP is that I never bought into the Apple ecosystem in the first place - I didn't use mail.app or calendar.app much. I never liked the Apple applications, they never seemed happy letting me take control of my life, and always seemed opinionated about what I should be doing. I'm now running i3wm on PureOS (debian-derived), tweaked to how I like it. And it's great. Couldn't be happier. Except for Zoom's Linux client, (but Spotify's Linux client is now pretty good, so there's hope!). And odd config issues with the USB ethernet. But the point is that I can go fiddle with those issues, and learn how Linux USB ethernet works, and generally mess about with my setup however I like. Yes I might brick it. But that's better than "oh it's gone dark, I have to take it to an Apple Store to get it fixed". Which is f-all use in a pandemic lockdown (or in rural SE Asia, which is where I was when I poured the beer in the Macbook in the first place). It's MY computer, not Apple's. That's actually important, not an ideological stance that doesn't matter in practice. Because Apple stuff doesn't "just work" any more. And if it doesn't "just work" there's f-all you can do except take it to the Store. And usually they'll just shrug and hand you a new one, and hope you backed everything up to their servers. I mean, sure, that's OK. But it's not what I want.
  • kitsunesoba 6y ago
    I considered buying a System76 Lemur not too long ago because I liked the machine's specs and enjoy popOS, but after seeing QC issues with System76's OEM decided against it and got a Thinkpad X1 Nano instead. Interested to see how their in-house laptop project goes though.
    • smoldesu 6y ago
      Thinkpads have always been the authentic Linux experience in my eyes, especially the models after 2009. I love what modern companies are doing with Linux laptops, but the Thinkpad is still the same, unrivaled, robust monster it has always been. There's nothing special about it, and that's why it's special. It feels standard issue, and hardware failure is a lot less sporadic than Macbooks.
• ericwooley 6y ago
  I also switched to Linux, and I love it, but only on my desktop machine. I got uhk for key remapping, and that's been great. For email and calendar, I use wavebox, which side steps most of the app issues. As the article says: The laptop experience is not anywhere near as good. I had a lot of the same issues, even on a system 76. Eventually I decided to try giving windows wsl2 a shot for my laptop, and I gotta give Microsoft credit. It's been great. All the benefits of windows ecosystem, hardware comparability, games etc.... And the ability to do pretty much everything development wise through wsl2. The keyboard combos are similar enough in Linux and windows that I don't have trouble switching contexts. However, most of my development is still on desktop. A few years ago, I would probably have described myself as a never Microsofter. Maybe my passion for using as much open source software as possible is dying down, or maybe Microsofts push to embrace open source is paying off. Whichever it is, I've come back around to appreciating windows recently.
  • cptskippy 6y ago
    > but only on my desktop machine... The laptop experience is not anywhere near as good. That was a neat trick. You get me to read your whole post because I wanted to know why you didn't use Linux on your servers.
    • Operyl 6y ago
      Given the context of the article, I didn’t expect him to be even talking about Linux Servers in his comment.
  • mattwad 6y ago
    Microsoft is really killing it these past couple years. I'm still not sure I'd recommend for a tech team over OSX. But mostly because most devs now know how to deal with the issues from Brew and OSX, not so much Windows. But hell, most barely know how to deal with Linux/Unix stuff.
    • smoldesu 6y ago
      >But mostly because most devs now know how to deal with the issues from Brew and OSX, not so much Windows. But hell, most barely know how to deal with Linux/Unix stuff. If you can operate Brew, you can operate a Linux package manager.
• shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  >Nautilus is better than the Finder. It's not even close. That's astounding. Finder must be awful. To me, Nautilus is virtually unusable -- it's like a toy file manager. Nothing beats Dolphin (or PCManFM as a not-so-close second). For some reason, Qt apps are way better than GTK apps in general.
  • kitsunesoba 6y ago
    Personally I find Nautilus much more irritating than Finder has ever been. Finder has most of the features most people need, you just need to know where to look for them, but Nautlius just straight up cuts stuff out. Some of Nautilus' forked kin like Nemo (Cinnamon) and Thunar (XFCE) are decent though. Dolphin is alright but in my case it has a bit of "MS Office" syndrome where I only ever use maybe 20-30% of its functionality, with the rest just being more clutter to have to dig through. I know some find those things useful, but in my case it's just going to collect dust and get in the way.
    • symlinkk 6y ago
      Like what? Be specific
  • cmeacham98 6y ago
    Helped a family member with some troubles on their M1 Mac recently. Take with a grain of salt: this is a single 30 minute anecdote from someone who last used OS X about a decade ago. Finder was the worst part of the experience by far. Perhaps there's some setting to turn this behavior off (or some setting said relative turned on that caused this) but it seemed to constantly attempt to hide the underlying filesystem from me, instead showing files in groups like "Documents" and "Downloads". I could not figure out if/where in the UI I could type in a path to a folder to manually browse to it. The search was slow and awful, to the point of being near useless. After 10-15 minutes of wasting my time in Finder I gave up and used the terminal for all file operations.
    • kitsunesoba 6y ago
      In case the knowledge ever comes handy in the future: - You can toggle on a path bar in Finder windows with View > Show Path Bar. Additionally, the path of open folders and files can be viewed by Command-clicking the icon next to the title in the titlebar (this works in third party apps too) - You can navigate to folders by path with Go > Go to Folder… or Command-Shift-G - Visibility of hidden files/folders can be toggled with Command-Shift-. (also works in open/save dialogs) Also, as a general rule, in Mac apps everything an app is capable of is surfaced through its menus, so if you’re ever looking for a specific function in one, menus are a good place to check. Cross platform stuff ignores this custom frequently but that’s nothing new.
• marcodiego 6y ago
  Tell that to Icaza: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26668789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26668789
  • kelnos 6y ago
    The thing that always bothered me about de Icaza is that he should know better, given his credentials and how immersed he'd been in the FOSS scene for so long. He boils down the issues with Linux on the desktop to what jwz calls Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers[0] model. Essentially open source developers don't have the discipline and patience to do the hard work of maintaining their software, and instead just want to refine their designs, throw things away, start over from scratch, and make things perfect. I don't disagree with this view, and I think it's just somewhat silly to expect the same level of polish and back-compat on Linux that you'd see on a commercial OS with commercial apps. Certainly there is a lot of very polished software built under the OSS model (though many of that software has funded full-time developers working on it), but any project that is either run largely by volunteers, or largely by the programmers themselves, is often not going to end up like a polished, seamless, corporate product. Companies (and product managers) make decisions about building software in a very different way than developers do. They have different priorities, and different things they care about. There will never be a "year of Linux on the desktop", because FOSS Linux-based OSes are constantly-moving targets run by people who generally aren't getting paid to do the work necessary for that to happen. That's pretty much always been the case, and even with all the corporate interest around Linux (Canonical comes to mind), it's just not happening. My first experience with Linux was with Red Hat 4 back in 1997 or so, though I didn't start using Linux as my daily driver until 2002 or so. It has always had, and will always have, many rough edges. For me, I find that I have fewer problems with it than I did during my stints running macOS, but... that's just me, and I can fix nearly any issue I run into (even if they are few and far between) with a minimum of effort and time. That's not for everyone, and that's fine. [0] Don't click (copy/paste into a new tab), as jwz has a nasty redirect for people coming from HN, but: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
    • lupire 6y ago
• whatsmyusername 6y ago
  To be fair, I’d never use a gnome distro. Basic things are plugins now, because 1% market share says “be super weird and experimental” I switched my x220 to kubuntu after windows 19.09 support ended and it’s been fine. Random things like printing don’t work, but nothing I need daily.
• nitsky 6y ago
  For key mapping, I wish the author had discovered interception-tools. It is far more powerful and easy to use than karabiner. https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools
  • carlesfe 6y ago
    Didn't know them, thanks for the link!
• zmmmmm 6y ago
  I would like to see someone do the equivalent experiment now with a Win10+WSL2 setup. I'm carefully watching Apple to see what the next line of Macbook Pros looks like. Esp. how well the M1 architecture fits into a development workflow that will still for the forseeable future center heavily on deployment to x86 architecture. We already are seeing significant time wastage from employees having to fight architecture issues with docker. We will see where that ends up. And then, whether the rumors are true that they might support more ports and even options without the touch bar. These things would signal a genuine change of heart on considering developers to be first class citizens in their ecosystem. If all these turn out positive I'll be sticking with it. If not, Win10+WSL2 are looking extremely compelling.
  • szhu 6y ago
    Apple made Macs UNIX developer-friendly (2001) before they switched to x86 (2005), so they have a good chunk of non-hypothetical past data to look at. Really hoping this means they won't screw this up.
  • iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
    WSL2 has quirks that make it not the same as running linux natively. For some workflows this may not matter but I have seen it evaluated for some use cases where not everything worked. Also, windows is, for lack of a better word, obnoxious, in the way it bothers you about updates (and other messages of various kinds), and forces you to restart frequently and kn its terms. The few times I have used windows recently, I found it the opposite of "just getting out of the way and letting me work", and I fear that even if wsl did work smoothly for what I was doing, just the fact that windows was running in the background would degrade the experience.
  • throwanem 6y ago
    A couple Saturdays ago, I spent thirty minutes setting up WSL2 on a Windows 10 machine. Immediately afterward, I called Apple and spent a thousand dollars on an M1 Mac mini for same-day pickup. I've been running Linux devenvs on Windows, in Virtualbox, for something well over a decade now. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the vaunted WSL2 is literally just that, plus preinstalled OS images that save maybe a half hour's work, plus also it actually breaks virtualization so you can only use WSL2 and no other VMs. And ~ is still just a shared folder, so chown and symlinks don't work. I'd tolerate it if I had no better option, just like I have all those other times. But even then, just running Virtualbox proper is no worse in any way, and better in some. I really don't understand what the hell all the hype is about - maybe for folks who've only ever used Windows and never had a chance to really try Linux at all, I can see it, but people who have no reason not to know better also seem often to be over the moon about it and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Granted, that Lenovo had been pissing me off well before I tried turning it into a dev machine - Windows 10 is just a dumpster fire in every respect, WSL2 or no. But it was WSL2 turning out to be literally just broken Virtualbox that really sent me over the top. And I have to thank Microsoft for that! Even with the occasional slight flakiness of any new architecture, the M1 mini is an excellent dev machine, blazing fast and unbelievably power-efficient - the same deskside UPS that promised 50 minutes runtime for the Windows box claims almost 300 for the mini, and that's with something like a 10x perf boost. If WSL2 hadn't been so lousy, I might have taken another year to make the jump.
• mraza007 6y ago
  I switched to Linux when learning nodejs and web development in general. Setting up nodejs and using commandline was pain so I decided to completely switch to Ubuntu and never looked back and I consider that one of the best decisions I ever made. Now after getting tempted to try Arch Linux and I finally gave it a try and its been great so far and especially the Arch Wiki has been the best resource for all my linux knowledge I just can’t thank enough whoever created ArchWiki Project it’s full of great knowledge related to Linux. I just wanna take a moment and appreciate the efforts of people who contributed to archwiki and to linux project in general making it great for people like us to use it as a daily driver
  • cdogl 6y ago
    Indeed. Arch's disadvantages are obvious, but the educational contribution of the Arch community to all its users has been immense. Almost everyone technical that I know personally has really levelled up through it at some stage. I think Arch's detractors often miss its role in getting more people truly on board with Linux and OSS.
• vngzs 6y ago
  You complain about power user tools, then list a bunch of Xorg tools. Xorg is dying; move to Wayland. I use Sway, but if you want something that's closer to a macOS power user experience, you should probably go with KDE[0]. Tearing? Fundamental Xorg problem. Fixed in Wayland. Wayland has some rough edges, but the reality of the ecosystem is Xorg is dead and not coming back, and it's better to be a little ahead of the curve than behind it and complaining about things that are resolved on the other side. [0]: https://kde.org/ https://kde.org/
  • boogies 6y ago
    > Tearing? Fundamental Xorg problem. Fixed in Wayland. TFA: > Screen tearing with the intel driver. Come on. This was solved on xorg and now with Wayland it's back.
    • andor 6y ago
      Tearing is one of the reasons why Wayland was started. "Every frame is perfect" was the goal, and they baked it into the design by making all updates atomic. That's why I doubt the author had a full Wayland setup running. Maybe the app ran via Xwayland or there was no Wayland at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(display_server_protocol)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(display_server_protoc...
• rvz 6y ago
  > If you want to achieve some specific action you need to read four or five manpages, search online, and figure out how you are going to put the pieces together. That made me appreciate Karabiner and BTT much more. This is still accurate to this day and what they don't tell you. Hence why you always need to search for 'xorg/wayland error' this, 'dbus initialization error' that or a random core dump occurred on a freezing window. I have zero time to search for these issues when I configure what I want and prefer it to 'just work' like it should on macOS. > On November 10th Apple showed us the future of the Mac and released again laptops worth buying. So I bought the 2020 M1 Macbook Air. You will read a review of it soon. If you like the M1, you will also like the M1X, M2 or M3 Macs. No need to rush for last years model, hence why I skipped this one. > The experience of using Linux as a daily driver has been very positive for me, but I do need my productivity. Exactly. Rather than messing around or spending days playing around with my setup or window manager.
  • ActorNightly 6y ago
    >ther than messing around or spending days playing around with my setup or window manager. I don't get why this narravitve still exists today. Linux works out of the box on many distros perfectly fine. Keybindings are a very special use case, and if you need that customizability and its better on a Mac, then get a Mac. Doesn't mean that Macs are "more productive" If you want to argue actual semantics in terms of value, Linux wins hands down for what you get. You can look at things like VM software, which is costly for Mac while Free for Linux. You can look at things like privacy - Apple still collects data for themselves, while in Linux you can fully disable that. You can look at open source software, which has a way higher compatibility rate with Linux than Mac, especially with M1 chips where Rosetta, as good as it is, isn't fool proof. You can look at hardware, where most "non-Mac" laptops that run Linux are upgradable and repairable. If you like Mac, then stay on Mac, and stop publishing articles on how good Macs are and how Linux is neat, but your time is so valuable that you can't spend learning a few commaind line tools.
    • konart 6y ago
      >If you like Mac, then stay on Mac, and stop publishing articles on how good Macs are and how Linux is neat, but your time is so valuable that you can't spend learning a few commaind line tools. "Stop writing good things about things I hate and bad things about things I like!" > don't get why this narravitve still exists today. Linux works out of the box on many distros perfectly fine. Yeah. And then you connect two monitors with different scaling factor. Turns out X11 can't handle this and Wayland is still broken.
• rrmm 6y ago
  I got fed up and shifted fully to a Linux desktop and laptop setup like 20 years ago. Computers are silly devices and there is no end to the annoyances involved with them regardless of operating system. I got used to it and was/am able to get what I need done. I liked the cheap netbooks when they were a thing, and I like zenbooks these days. You always have to shop with compatibility in mind. Hard edges persist in any environment though the particulars change. I am comfortable with the tradeoffs currently and luckily there are enough people using Linux to take care of most of the show stoppers fairly quickly.
  • sound1 6y ago
    Agree here. I use Windows at work and use full time Linux on home desktop since 7 or 8 years. Both have bugs and annoyances but one thing that turns me off on windows is how computer becomes more and more sluggish as the time goes on with each update. Never had that issue with Linux. Updates might break a thing or two. I am okay with occasional break/fix but just can't get used to progressive sluggishness.
• smoldesu 6y ago
  >apt-get was a revolution when it was released in 1998 and it is still the best way to manage software today. brew is a mediocre replacement. While apt still isn't the best package manager (my heart belongs to pacman, no matter what the haters say), I completely agree that brew is a failed imitation. I wanted to use MacOS for the longest time, because I've been told that it's a real "Unix system". Brew has distilled my fears into a sobering reality. The "advantages" MacOS offers really comes down to eye-candy or slightly more consistent shortcut mapping, but none of this really matters to me when I can't use the software I want, and the OS is always second-guessing my authority. Maybe I've been spoiled by Linux, but I don't understand the hype. Not even on my M1 Macbook Air.
  • xtian 6y ago
    What makes Homebrew a failure? I don’t generally have issues with it for my needs.
    • chasd00 6y ago
      My thoughts too, home brew works just fine for me.
    • darkandbrooding 6y ago
      There is one single feature of homebrew that regularly bites my coworkers. You can refer to software by name@version ("brew install postgresql@11" or "brew install postgresql@12") and there is no confusion about what you are installing; or you can refer to software by name only ("brew install postgresql") and the version number is calculated to be "most recently released." (v13 at the time this was written.) Hypothetically I have two machines that I want to build out and give to developers. One machine arrives on Monday. My script runs "brew install postgresql" (no version), because of when I ran that script postgresql@10 gets installed. Tests pass, I hand that machine off to a new developer. The second machine arrives on Wednesday. I run the same script, but because v11 of postgres was added to homebrew on Tuesday, the second machine receives postgresql@11 even though the first machine received @10. Same script, two days apart, different major version of postgresql. Yes, I can write my scripts carefully to avoid this. But consider this scenario: a new developer encounters a problem, tries to solve it themselves, finds a seemingly helpful blog, and ends up with postgresql@13 and node@15 when everyone else in their team is using postgresql@11 and node@12. Now tests are failing, but only for this one developer and only locally...
• preommr 6y ago
  What a topsy-turvy article. Mail is fine if you use browser-based solutions. Nobody is talking about only sending plaintext emails? Wtf? Why are they running so much stuff on wine? Why are they upgrading their kernel every few weeks? How does anyone think nautilus is good? How does anyone think that Gimp/inkscape are better than affinity designer? These are the things they find useful about linux? There's so much more that makes linux a powerful solution (e.g. great window managers like i3), or much better support for shell based workflows.
  • symlinkk 6y ago
    What’s wrong with nautilus?
  • jeroenhd 6y ago
    > Why are they upgrading their kernel every few weeks? This makes sense if you install a distro like Manjaro or Arch. Not something I'd ever recommend to someone who's taking Linux for a first spin. I don't think I've had any troubles doing regular kernel upgrades, though, the problems mostly laid in proprietary drivers, specifically Nvidia's. > How does anyone think nautilus is good? I have no problems with Nautilus. Perhaps it's not the greatest file manager, but it's way ahead of Finder in my opinion.
    • zozbot234 6y ago
      Fedora also does kernel updates within a stable release, and some proprietary hardware works best with it while being mildly broken on Debian-derived distros so I might even recommend it to some first-time users.
  • astrognomy 6y ago
    > How does anyone think nautilus is good? I think it's great. If I had to pick between Finder, Windows File Explorer, Nautilus, or Dolphin. I'd honestly choose Nautilus. It's visually simple, has previews, built in support for Google Drive, easy to find how to show hidden files, if I double click an archived file; it decompresses it, and it has an "Open Terminal" right click prompt. If I had to walk someone through performing a file system action, say over a phone, I feel confident that I could do so with the least confusion using Nautilus. I simply never have understood the arguments against Nautilus and am extremely thankful to the developers who have chosen to make the hard decision to reduce features to make the application maintainable.
• salamandersauce 6y ago
  Eh. I've ended up with the opposite conclusion, at least for my purposes. Running Word is neat, but having to spend half a day figuring out what Apple did to C++ headers after an Xcode update so R will compile packages again is not fun. Unfortunately I can't really install Linux on the damn thing because of the hardware. Also mailspring is a pretty good Linux email client with conversation view...
  • flobosg 6y ago
    Seconding the Mailspring recommendation, but be aware that it requires a Mailspring ID. There’s some progress, though, with a telemetry-free fork[1] (that’s the version I’m using right now) and plans to make the ID optional in the official client [2]. [1]: https://github.com/notpushkin/Mailspring-Libre https://github.com/notpushkin/Mailspring-Libre [2]: https://community.getmailspring.com/t/mailspring-without-mailspring-id/64/2 https://community.getmailspring.com/t/mailspring-without-mai...
  • shaan7 6y ago
    Oh and one day Xcode will suddenly stop updating. Why? Because I lost my credit card yesterday and blocked it, so now App Store will not update a free app. Whaa?
  • lytefm 6y ago
    I agree. The author makes it clear that using "business" tools like MSOffice and writing a lot of nicely formatted emails is important to him. Wouldn't have switched to Linux if that was the case for me. I'm writing < 10 emails per day - Evolution + WebDav/CardDav is good enough for me. I'm also on a 2018 Xps with Ubuntu 20.04 and everything just works. To me, the clear advantage is how installing all kind of obscure R/Python packages is usually a smooth experience, whereas a working Mac version frequently doesn't even exist or requires struggling with obscure errors, especially after MacOs upgrades (e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/mcmc_stan/status/1186923309662953472 https://mobile.twitter.com/mcmc_stan/status/1186923309662953...)
• burlesona 6y ago
  Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time, with “quick look” as a contender for most under-appreciated feature. Just hitting spacebar to see virtually any file, and the ability to open in preview and read or even markup and make small changes, is so nice. Whenever I use a non-Mac system I really miss those two features.
  • calabroa 6y ago
    Agreed. Updating PDFs is so painful everywhere else but just works in preview.
  • symlinkk 6y ago
    GNOME has this feature
    • PurpleFoxy 6y ago
      It does and it mostly works but it doesn’t seem to be as fast as on macOS.
      • kitsunesoba 6y ago
        Not sure how GNOME's preview feature is written, but macOS QuickLook plugins are written in C, C++, or Objective-C and the plugins included with the OS leverage OpenCL (or maybe Metal now) to accelerate rendering of previews, which is part of why it's so fast.
        • spacemanmatt 6y ago
          <SecurityHat> > plugins written in C, C++, ... no, thank you </SecurityHat>
      • symlinkk 6y ago
        Knew I would get this type of response. The goalposts keep shifting
• christiansakai 6y ago
  I finally reinstalled my Windows 10 after some time for a gaming PC and it was surprising to me that they are very intrusive. Like, I have to create a Microsoft account? And they have other sorts of update that happened randomly. Can we trust Microsoft?
• martinald 6y ago
  I'd be interested to know why the author thinks apt-get is so much better than brew (honest question!). I've never had any problems with homebrew (even on M1 mixing and matching arm and intel binaries). I have however had many massive problems with apt-get, specifically getting a version of an app that's later that what's included in the distro. It usually ends up with a couple of PPAs that then don't work properly and brick the system. Homebrew in this regard is far better as all packages are "always" at the latest stable version and I imagine get more testing than some random PPA or backports repo.
• jonahbenton 6y ago
  This piece is mostly evidence that it is hard to switch platforms and expect to preserve one's workflow. Doesn't work. Have to adopt to the native ergonomics. In that context, Linux is often best looked as a Chromebook Pro. Great when you can do most of your work in or around a browser, plus or minus the shell. And among Linuxes, Fedora crushes. Cheers.
• addicted 6y ago
  I don’t disagree with the author’s observations, but I think it’s important to note that basically what they describe is that “Linux is not a better OSX than OSX”, as opposed to “Linux is not a better OS than OSX”. The latter may also be true, but that’s not what they describe in this article. Because in this article what they are trying to describe is trying to setup Linux to do the things they did on OSX the way they did it on OSX.
  • yoz-y 6y ago
    I think the three major OSes are now sufficiently different that calling any of them “better” than the others is meaningless. All three have issues but they are in different places. And many of the things people complain about are just different from what they are used to.
• miles 6y ago
  > For some reason Mail.app gets a lot of criticism, but it does almost everything well Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15 https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-10-15/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1... 513 comments, the last one which reads: "Adding to my previous post: Same issues with Mail on Catalina as on Big Sur 11.2.3. Mails keep vanishing."
• pabs3 6y ago
  I hear the elementary mail app has a conversation view, I haven't been able to get the elementary mail app working on other distros though. https://github.com/elementary/mail https://github.com/elementary/mail
  • flobosg 6y ago
    FWIW, the Elementary app started as a Geary fork, but if I’m not wrong it got a rewrite a while ago.
• jeswin 6y ago
  If you're complaining about Linux drivers please do so after using a Laptop that supports Linux (Thinkpads for example). Just like it wouldn't be fair to complain about macOS on a Hackintosh - sound didn't work well and had to patch the DSDT. > but there are rough edges for the power user. > I am an extreme power user, ... > In the end, I was able to replicate most of my macOS power tools setup via input hooks and shell scripts, but it took much longer than it should have. It's very hard to define who a Power User is. But if you've spent a few years on Linux, you'd be able to do many things faster on Linux than on macOS. For instance, it's easier to automate tasks with shell scripts in Linux than to attempt the same with osascript. I use macOS only when I'm forced to - because the absolute fundamentals are broken. Finder is unbelievably bad compared to Nautilus, package management is terrible, limited ability to tile windows, not even a simple way to set up an Application launch shortcut out of the box (yeah, can do with Automator).
  • Veen 6y ago
    > But if you've spent a few years on Linux, you'd be able to do many things faster on Linux than on macOS This may be true, but the article explicitly targets people moving from Mac to Linux, not people with years of Linux experience. I’m interested why you don’t like Finder. It does the job for me. What do you think it’s missing?
    • m12k 6y ago
      I can't speak for GP, but I'd pay for Path Finder even if all it did was give me cmd-x to cut, and enter key to mean open instead of rename. It does a ton more, but those two are the killer features for me (Tabs used to be one too, but Finder finally got those a while ago).
      • Veen 6y ago
        I definitely agree with you on the lack of cmd-x for cut. However, you can do cmd-c to copy, and then cmd-option-v to move files rather than copy them. Enter to rename and cmd-o to open was hard to adapt to when I moved from Windows, but it's second nature now.
• chovybizzass 6y ago
  I use a macbook for 10 years and switched to Linux 2 years ago. its great, things have come a long way. I've run Linux desktop on asus zenbook, dell xps, and lenovo slim 7. My work gave me a macbook and i don't like it.
• cryptica 6y ago
  As an power user (dev), I would never consider switching away from Kubuntu for any other OS.
  • apareis 6y ago
    That I find interesting. Been trying KDE flavour more recently and the only distro that would work for me is openSUSE (Tumbleweed) KDE. Everything was pretty much perfect. I've tried KDE Neon and Kubuntu, both didn't have the correct dark icons for LibreOffice (as an example). As a developer about to switch companies, I'm now faced with a forced switch to Linux or if I want I could also stay on Apple (M1). I'm really inclined to say goodbye to Apple, as I have suffered too many uncomfortable changes over the most recent 12 years or so. I feel home in KDE, tried Gnome which I find too hard.
    • cryptica 6y ago
      Agreed, KDE is great. The default theme is somewhat disappointing but once configured, it beats OSX and Windows hands down. It's extremely configurable. I also wouldn't mind Ubuntu/Gnome but I encountered some touchpad issues with my new HP laptop and I didn't want to fiddle too much with the Ubuntu drivers and internals. Kubuntu was just more configurable including the touchpad driver.
• richardfey 6y ago
  I haven't (consciously) sent an email with pictures in years...surprised that author uses a lot of them.
  • carlesfe 6y ago
    I have a job where I have to communicate with non-technical people
• bArray 6y ago
  Essentially the article boils down to "I am used to a Mac and anything that doesn't behave like a Mac is incorrect, and I'm unwilling to invest time into figuring it out". It's fair enough stance, but unless you are willing to invest time into becoming a Linux 'power user', you're going to remain locked into whatever hardware Apple happens to be peddling at the time. The M1 seems great today, but Apple will slump again in the future and there will be yet another blog about how a Mac user tried Linux and found out it's different. With Linux I'm pretty free to move about different hardware platforms and pick whatever is out there that suites my needs. This ranges from desktops, to laptops, to tablets, and now even phones. The Linux 'ecosystem' looks more compelling every day, especially for power users. For those looking to transition, I would recommend doing so by running something like Ubuntu in a VM on your Mac and slowly transition your workflow. You'll find that in some areas your workflow will be significantly better and after some experimenting you'll find the right tools for you.
  • cpach 6y ago
    What it all boils down to is a matter of taste, IMO. In the 90s there used to be big differences. E.g. Apple had their own network protocols and so on. It was harder to use FOSS software on a Windows 98 system etc. These days, both Linux and macOS are Unix/Unix-like. Windows 10 has WSL. They can all run Chrome, Firefox, Visual Studio Code, Emacs, vi, Sublime Text, bash, git, grep, etc etc. So whatever you choose you can probably find a way to configure a reasonable system. Some details differ, but in many parts they are all alike.
  • carlosrg 6y ago
    >Essentially the article boils down to "I am used to a Mac and anything that doesn't behave like a Mac is incorrect, and I'm unwilling to invest time into figuring it out". It doesn't look like that. He has legitimate issues with things he needs for his job, like a good email client and calendar client. No matter how you try to adapt your workflow, the PIM situation in Linux is very poor.
  • bigpeopleareold 6y ago
    I agree with this sentiment. If anyone realizes that all they are mostly doing is using, let's say, a browser, IDE and terminal for most tasks and some tooling that can be used anywhere, the value proposition for macOS (or Windows for that matter) is much lower. My last Mac I stopped using in ~2016 because I made that realization myself. Even if my hardware is not to the standard of Apple's hardware, the only thing it should do is not fail randomly on work-critical devices. That doesn't happen at all to me - Ubuntu on the ThinkPads I use work great.
• bArray 6y ago
  This reminds me of the h3h3 video of a student dropping out of college because they couldn't install their Verizon CD on Ubuntu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRWrmT0ovPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRWrmT0ovPE
• ossusermivami 6y ago
  I have just switched back to Linux in January after over 10 years on OSX, I am quite an advanced user and usually write my plugins/extensions or software if i have something missing, Everything is fine when I started to figure the nightmare that is nvidia and being able to sign those to load in kernel, it's incredible how far linux has come since using it in the 90s/2000s, My only issue is not actually with Linux, it's with the hardware. Using it as desktop works just fine, but the laptop keyboard and mousepad is bloody clunky... So I still use my macbook when traveling or when I am out of work. Since I configure a magic keyboard on linux, i don't have much a context switch issue (except maybe Command+w Command+c/v and Control-Shift-c/v Alt+f4) Oh yeah the only thing driving me crazy is not having proper emacs keybinding all over OS, you can set this up for firefox but then select-all which is supposed to be alt+a is kinda clunky and does not seem to work all the time...
• carlesfe 6y ago
  Hello, author here. I knew that if this got posted to HN I'd need to explain myself more :) To address some of the top comments: - I clarified now in the article that the "Linux Laptop" is a Dell XPS 13" Developer Edition, which is marketed indeed as a Linux laptop, and the Ubuntu is marketed as "Ubuntu Dell". However, this is missing the forest for the trees, because only a couple of the issues I mentioned were related to hardware. The main point of the article is software polish, not hardware compatibility. On the previous article where I decide which laptop to use I already mention that it's not an issue nowadays: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/how-i-moved-my-setup-from-a-mac-to-a-linux-laptop.html https://cfenollosa.com/blog/how-i-moved-my-setup-from-a-mac-... - What is a power user? Indeed, the core point of the article. I tried to be as detailed as possible with my requirements. Saying it is "a bunch of custom keyboard shortcuts" is a straw man. - apt-get vs other package managers. I've used rpm/yum, emerge, pkg_add, brew, and port. I found that apt-get is very fast and reliable. brew is embarrassingly slow and doesn't apply important changes to config files, just drops you a notice asking the user to do it. - The Mac also sucks. Yes indeed! That is why I ditched it for six months! - What about Windows? Well, I install Windows 10 regularly for other members of my team. I hate it. Not only you have to work around the software, you have to actively fight AGAINST the system and its dark patterns. Preinstalled crap, "fake" requiring a Live.com user for a local account, constant and unexpected reboots, telemetry... sorry, it's not for me. - Do you use Linux on your servers? Yes, indeed. Debian as base, then containers with Void. - Didn't you expect you'd need to change your workflow? Sure, that is why I stayed with Linux for six months and not two weeks. I gave myself time. By the way I have been using Linux non-stop since 1999, and 7 years as my only system. I know the Linux-isms - Just do [the opposite of my requirements]. I wish! - How can you like Nautilus? I just said it's better than the Finder. - This is an article aimed at Mac users who are considering a migration to Linux in hope of a more polished system. If you've never used a Mac, you probably can't relate because you don't know what you're missing (happened to me before I tried a Mac!) I'll hang around to answer more questions, thanks for all your feedback!
  • danmur 6y ago
    I think at some point it's just hard to get used to something new. Linux to me is incredibly polished in terms of both UX and customisability, compared to both Windows and Mac (both of which I've used commercially for 5+ years). But I've been using linux on desktop and server for at least 20 years so I'm probably just not able to see some of the things people complain about (or they're just non-issues for me).
• linza 6y ago
  Operating systems and people's use cases seem to be so specialized that you will rarely see someone switch because they feel happier at the other side. Especially for professional work there seems to be "one true way" and emulating that on a different setup obviously has some productivity loss. It's a bit silly though to call out the author for not using the right linux laptop or being too hung up on their workflow. It's not unfair towards linux, the conversion of a macos power user was never meant to be!
• randomsearch 6y ago
  I also carried out this experiment, mainly cos I couldn’t afford a Mac for a while. Completely agree with all his comments except: the default terminal in Ubuntu is a gazillion times better than Mac and that makes a huge difference. But ultimately productivity suites matter, webmail sucks, and all of the email clients on Linux were awful. That’s a showstopper for anyone doing a lot of office or management work.
  • cpach 6y ago
    Just out of curiosity, which mail client do you prefer? Mail.app?
    • randomsearch 6y ago
      It's the best I've used, but it is still surprisingly buggy.
  • willtim 6y ago
    > all of the email clients on Linux were awful Thunderbird is pretty good and in my experience, less buggy than Apple Mail, especially when using providers other than iCloud. My wife absolutely hated Apple Mail, primarily because it would forget passwords and stop syncing/sending. So I moved her to Thunderbird and now she's happy.
    • input_sh 6y ago
      I've been using Thunderbird for like a decade, but I've been spoiled by Fastmail's web interface so much that I now consider Thunderbird to be one giant mess from a UX perspective. Half the time I miss-click the first email and sort by subject. In what world would I want to sort my emails by subject!? Search vs. filter messages, I really don't need two search bars, one is fine. I'm annoyed that the default sort is oldest to newest, and that I have to change it for each individual folder. Tabs really don't fit into how I consume my email. Flagging important ones is good enough. I'd take Geary (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary) over Thunderbird any day, but lack of GPG integration is what's forcing me to stick to Thunderbird.
• gigatexal 6y ago
  Left desktop Linux for a Mac and I’m not going back. Everything just works. Docker for Mac plus brew install coreutils to get the gnu utilities I love from Linux user land and I’m good. Also magnet for window management and I don’t need i3 (often I just split one terminal in iterm2). To each their own, though. I like the hardware, the Mac plays nice with all my homepods, and my AppleTV, and the trackpad is hands down the best ever and the keyboard is much improved.
• jbirer 6y ago
  I am someone who has recently transitioned from Mac to Linux. Here were my grievances with Mac: - Lack of absolute control over the system: In linux I can increase inotify watchers, use a local version of whatever CLI I am working with i.e Docker (Docker is uncomfortable to use on Mac), apply patches to kernel modules if I need em, apply bugfixes instantly etc - The keyboard for my Macbook Pro 2015 has become sticky and the keyboard for Macbook Air 2020 is too shallow and hard to press for me. My Thinkpad E15 seems to do it just right. I imagine this is even better on a superior model.
  • angrais 6y ago
    Why do you find docker uncomfortable to use on OSX? Also, what CLI replacement do you use on Linux?
    • jhanschoo 6y ago
      Docker is installed different on Linux (as Docker Engine) vs. on Win and macOS (as Docker Desktop). A workflow or team assuming either would run into issues on the other. Most importantly Docker Engine runs as a service with root permissions whereas Docker Desktop implements a VM that hosts its services, with workflow implications for development where a host process and a container needs to communicate.
  • tomduncalf 6y ago
    > the keyboard for Macbook Air 2020 is too shallow and hard to press I had to temporarily switch back to my 2013 MPB while my 2019 was in for repair (my fault, drink near laptop = bad idea) and was actually surprised how mushy the keys felt on it in comparison to the 2019. Of course it is a matter of taste, but IMO once you get used to it, the 2019/20 keyboards are actually the best Apple have made, so maybe it is worth persevering. Certainly a million miles from the butterfly disaster! That said, I mostly work with an external Microsoft Sculpt keyboard, which is probably more like the older MPB in feel.
• pfranz 6y ago
  I'm sure Gimp has its fans, but do people just not know about Krita? I'm not saying it's as fast/easy at small changes in Preview, but it's cross platform and mostly a drop-in for people who are familiar with Photoshop. I know people who use it on non-Linux platforms and chose it on its own merits, not giving any excuses because it's Open Source or ported from Linux--they probably don't even know.
  • thn-gap 6y ago
    I've been using Krita for some time as a replacement of GIMP. However, I still don't understand how these programs are rather powerful and complete, and yet the text tool sucks in all of them.
    • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      Powerful text tools are to be found in vector graphics programs. I use Inkscape and Affinity Designer. YMMV
    • franga2000 6y ago
      Gimp's text tool was quite nice last time I checked. Krita's on the other hand is just horrible...
      • distances 6y ago
        I don't understand how you can be happy with the text tool. It's easily the worst part of Gimp for me. I can't even find a way to move the text around after entering the text, I always resort to resizing the box from two corners to emulate a move. I'm probably doing something wrong but this is the status after using Gimp as my only graphics editor for about 15 years.
        • mrj 6y ago
          Yeah the only movable surface is the letter itself. I usually find myself zooming WAY in to be able to click on the letters so I can move, and then still sometimes miss and move the whole layer...
• AmanA 6y ago
  The biggest problem with Linux for me was different keyboard inputs. CJK, English and, for example, Cyrillic input don’t work together out of the box. Don’t tell me “you should install this and that”. It’s basic functionality that every desktop OS should have. Linux desktop sucks.
• herpderperator 6y ago
  > Yes, the apps I missed the most from the Mac were Mail.app, Calendar.app, and Preview.app. > I am an extreme power user Do those statements really go together? I'm not trying to stir anything; genuinely curious.
  • carlesfe 6y ago
    The article is built specifically around the irony of that contradiction
    • arcturus17 6y ago
      I can't tell what the contradiction is. I am a Mac user but I largely use the Google suite web apps, which I guess is the polar opposite of being a "power user". What's contradictory however about someone using Mail or Calendar and being a power user? Is there a world of productivity apps that are much better designed than those? Or is anything below "I do everything in emacs" not a power user? Saludos.
      • eertami 6y ago
        The Google web suite apps work quite well, in contrast to the Calendar app which I've never managed to get working. I think the argument is more "How can a power user survive with something so flagrantly non-functional?"
  • Ar-Curunir 6y ago
    Being a power user doesn’t mean that you have to run basic functionality like mail and calendar stuff from the terminal, and the GUI equivalents on Linux are not good enough
  • fnord123 6y ago
    I saw that OP missed Calendar.app and I was convinced he was a liar. I regret that this is so aggressively ad hominem but Calendar has such obvious bugs I do not believe anyone - even the Calendar dev team - uses it. It has two jobs: store events and remind you about events. Calendar gives notifications 10 minutes into meetings I'm already in (because my phone tells me about the meetings). It is unfathomable that this could have been released if anyone uses it.
• ur-whale 6y ago
  >Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop Knee-jerk reaction : good for you. I did the same back in '08 and never felt a need to go back to prison, however nice the curtains and wallpaper are.
• jonseager 6y ago
  I think this all has to do with your intended use case. I’ve been a full time Linux desktop user for ~10 years now, and I completely agree that the PIM/email/calendar apps need a lot of work to compete with the standard macOS apps. Interesting many macOS users default to Gnome-based distros for the familiar paradigm, but I’ve had a lot of success recommending Plasma to such users. It’s not as pretty, but it is very stable and has a lot of the same default/built in functionality in the K* apps that Mac users usually expect. Doesn’t stop me periodically getting dragged back to Gnome, mind you... I’ve used it on a bunch of different hardware and rarely had issues with screen tearing or ‘needing to tweak’ to make things work. And I truly cannot find a better alternative for most dev workflows. It’s swings and roundabouts. I settle for using the web Gmail/Calendar experience in exchange for the other benefits it brings to my work
• dgan 6y ago
  I work with a colleague who uses a mac while almost the whole company uses linux. The number of times he complained something doesn't work (like using curl? Or running some python? I don't know i never had a mac) when it clearly does, is amazing. So i guess you trade one type of annoyance for another Personnally been using Linux for 5 years everyday now
• peferron 6y ago
  I use a Mac laptop for leisure and a Linux desktop for work. I'm very happy with both. Switching their roles would be miserable: Linux laptops can't compete on trackpad and battery life, and Macs can't compete on perf especially if you need more than 16 GB of RAM. Macs also don't have i3, but that's subjective.
• wideareanetwork 6y ago
  What’s wrong with Mac? I love it. If find it really weird people could find great fault with OSX.
• gorgoiler 6y ago
  For all their faults there is one compelling feature of open and free systems: you have the source code for everything at your fingertips. The command line might give a similar feeling of having the whole system at your control but that’s not really a differentiator these days with macOS. If (and realistically, only if) you are an engineer, having the source code is a killer feature.
• keenreed 6y ago
  I tried to use MacOSX on my Dell XPS13. Installation was very difficult, driver support lacking and it often crashed. I find Linux much better.
  • kristianp 6y ago
    Did you get any help from Apple support? I hope you asked for your money back!
• gbil 6y ago
  While I agree with many things, since when Gnome = Linux? But maybe that is part of the problem
  • topspin 6y ago
    That's a big part of the problem. Someone with the ambition to write up their MacOS to Linux experience lost to the tarpit of Gnome.
  • carlesfe 6y ago
    Just after the intro: I feel like I need to clarify that this is an article aimed at Mac users who are considering a migration to Linux in hope of a more polished system. As usual, personal experiences and requirements are subjective. I know that Ubuntu ≠ Gnome ≠ Linux. I also know that I'm not entitled to anything, everybody is welcome to send patches. Just let me say that if you try to cherry-pick any single issue, you're missing the forest for the trees.
• eertami 6y ago
  I disagree. The hardware and build quality of the XPS13 is notably better than my MBP, except for better CPU performance which I do not notice at all in daily usage (I know all ultrabook keyboards are terrible but the MBP is an a whole other level of awful.) Linux on the XPS has surprised me. I hadn't used desktop Linux for ~6 years, but I remember lots of tinkering to get what I wanted. Now... If I had to describe it in one word it would be "boring". Boring because it just works. Honestly, I have spent significantly more time fixing problems in OSX behaviour than I do fixing problems on Linux. Even just weird things like Terminal text rendering breaking after an OS update which I've never seen on Linux. Admittedly I have never used the default Mail/Calendar apps on either OS. I appreciate I'm biased because I know how to use Linux fairly well, in spite of a 6 year hiatus. The writer can of course hold his own opinion, but I take it with a large grain of salt. It's also disingenuous to present his own problems as reasons not to use something. It's fine to have a preference but I don't see why he needs to try and influence other people's decisions.
  • Klonoar 6y ago
    You have to be doing something out there if text rendering in Terminal of all things breaks after an update.
    • turbinerneiter 6y ago
      No matter who reports breakage ever, on whichever machine, on whichever OS - this is always the answer. "If it doesn't work for you, you are doing something weird." It's both true and false - it's true, I've progressively gone more vanilla in my desktop Linux setup, because the more boring and closer to the original developers intention you run it, the less hassle and issues you have. Its false because -everyone- is doing something weird, and nothing should break ever. Breakage will always occur more often in the edge cases then mainstream use. Its still bad tough.
  • c7DJTLrn 6y ago
    I have an XPS 9370 and it feels rickety and poorly made. It can't be opened without holding it with both hands. The screen gets smears on it from getting in contact with the keyboard. The bezels scratch very easily. The light from the LED in the power button bleeds out from the edges. The charging brick makes a high pitched whine when being used. I use a MacBook 2015 for work and that feels much nicer and has better build quality. I don't plan on buying another XPS.
• aritmo 6y ago
  I could not find information about the Linux distro he used. He says at some point "Wayland", which cancels Ubuntu. Which distro did he install?
  • sofixa 6y ago
    Ubuntu comes with Wayland, and on the login screen you can switch to it ( at least it does on mine that's a 16.10 updated to 18.04 to 20.04, and i've never installed Wayland myself)
  • carlesfe 6y ago
    I used Ubuntu Dell 18.?? then 20.04, the official ISOs from Dell, since the laptop is a 2018 XPS "Developer Edition"
• tumblewit 6y ago
  As someone who is comfortable with linux and macOS and also someone who used an M1 MBA here is my take because this article does not do justice to each of the platform pros and cons: 1. The M1 Macs are amazing. If you are the kind of person who needs a GUI and involves lot of app related work go for it. (this person seems more interested in stuff like that so linux ain’t gonna cut it for him). The cons? A super restrictive platform (even more than it was under intel) and a very pricey hardware affair where getting anything fixed is hard. My speaker was faulty after my 2016 mbp already had a broken display thanks to apple. I hope new MBPs do a much better job at hardware after the keyboards that seem to be fixed now. 2. Linux can do everything almost that Windows / macOS can. But not necessarily better. In GUI it’s still a mess but wayland actually fixed tearing so I’m not sure what is the deal here. Overall I think you need to spend time with linux to become comfortable vs expecting a distro to solve all your requirements. If you really want the fine control go with Arch it’s usually good for cutting edge hardware.
  • minimaul 6y ago
    for 1. The cons? A super restrictive platform (even more than it was under intel) You can still boot arbitrary unsigned OSes - Apple still allows this, but it is obviously going to take time for other OSes to grow support for apple's custom hardware. So it's still a computer you can control if you want. for 2., wayland is still a very rough experience imo (I periodically try it on an all-intel system, which ought to be a good target as everything is OSS supported, etc). Lot of apps still don't have native wayland backends (although this is improving!) and it seems generally less stable than boring old X11 for me.
    • kaba0 6y ago
      What compositor did you try for wayland?
      • minimaul 6y ago
        Mostly kwin, but also sway a little. I understand that GNOME is a bit further along than either of these, though?
• pschastain 6y ago
  I'm still bitter over the changes made to Preview.app post-Mavericks. Apple has hobbled some of their built-in apps for no apparent reason.
• dschuetz 6y ago
  I've heard that a lot: "If you complain about Linux then you installed it on the wrong computer, and you're using it wrong." Basically it's your fault when Linux doesn't work. Doesn't matter if 1 of 2000 packages or libraries has a system breaking bug. It's your fault if you "updated too soon", or "did not update yet". It's even your fault when bug reporting doesn't work the way the distribution maintainers designed it, because when the window manager throws errors randomly and you try to report it, the bug reporting crashes too. Because of "you must have done something wrong" and "why would you want to do that, use the website!". I use Linux because it gives me good if crude tools, not because it makes me happy to use them.
  • dsego 6y ago
    "You're using Ubuntu, you should use Pop OS/Mint/Fedora/new Fedora/new/old Debian, it's flawless". And "you are using Gnome, I haven't had any issues with KDE, Plasma, XFCE, i3, Mate, oh Enlightenment, Enlightenment is the best."Why are you using Geary/Thunderbird/LibreOffice, I do all my email/coding/music in emacs/vim, you never have to leave the terminal and it has worked fine for over 30 years." "Everyone knows VLC is buggy, use mpv... mpv is not working for you? You should use VLC, never had problems with it." "Linux is wonderful on my machine, once I recompiled my kernel to verxion xyz everything worked out of the box."
    • dschuetz 6y ago
      Yes, exactly. And the classic: "idk, works for me", cracks me up every single time.
    • sergeykish 6y ago
      And that's it, Linux allows to craft experience. Different philosophy. Linux — everything is possible, some achievable. macOS/Windows — some things allowed.
• jchw 6y ago
  One thing that Windows and macOS users will never understand about Linux, because they’ve never truly experienced it, is just how viscerally different the Linux experience is depending on your hardware. You don’t really need to go with a vendor like System76, and going with a fan favorite like Lenovo does not guarantee a good experience, but seriously, Linux on a machine that runs it well is just not comparable to a machine that runs it poorly. The only good news is the count of machines that run Linux well increases over time. My Lenovo P51 used to be pretty piss poor, not so much anymore. Anyway, that’s just one point, but still worth noting.
  • celrod 6y ago
    I've been using Linux almost exclusively for many years, and I had to google what screen tearing is after all the comments about it in this thread. I do get people's resistance to switch. I bought a M1 Mac Mini because I wanted to be able to test and optimize code for it, but found the difference in experience jarring enough that I enabled remote desktop and now mostly run code on it through ssh. I'm sure I could configure it to behave more like I'm used to, but, why bother? If things were flipped, and I was that comfortable with the Mac experience while Linux felt alien, I'd probably feel the same way.
    • jchw 6y ago
      Screen tearing is typically very difficult to avoid with proprietary NVIDIA, but I have no issues with my AMD setups running Linux. I suspect that is usually the main difference.
      • celrod 6y ago
        Ah. I have AMD GPUs on desktop, and integrated graphics on laptops.
  • nikanj 6y ago
    In my experience, Linux PDF readers suck, and so do email clients. OpenOffice is not as good as Excel / Word. Not sure how changing the hardware would fix this. Most of the Linux complaints that I see are focused on the quality of the applications, not a driver support
• kruxigt 6y ago
  Sadly, Dell XPS 13 is not even close to a Macbook in quality. Dell is a company that is notorious for cutting corners when it comes to their hardware. I recently tried an XPS 13 to see if things had improved. It had: broken sound, coil whine, horrible trackpad.
• nathias 6y ago
  Apple is for people who want the generic apple experience, if you want to customize its the worst of all. I run arch linux on thinkpad carbon x1 and its the best laptop I ever owned or seen, mostly because I care much more about my own customized workflow (tile management, fast terminal instantiation, vim keys everywhere, CLI apps when possible etc.).
• minimaul 6y ago
  From someone who tends to try this switch about once a year (because the lack of TLC the Mac was getting in the last 5 or so years was getting very very worrying - M1 feels like Apple actually care about the Mac again), I agree with a lot of these pain points. My biggest personal issues end up being (and these are super subjective!): - Preview on macOS is great and no other OS has anything remotely equivalent. First class PDF support, ability to easily annotate anything, makes basic PDF editing easy. - I'm far too used to the macOS touchpad gestures, and emulating these on linux doesn't end up working well. There is an ongoing project for this but it's very Ubuntu-centric for now. I am hopeful this will help the whole ecosystem improve though! This is still a pain for me on a desktop because my work setup uses a touchpad as the pointer device. - it's nigh impossible to eliminate tearing on multimonitor setups with X11, and X11 doesn't support a mix of DPIs for displays without scaling tricks that make text look awful on the low-DPI displays. Wayland was promising here last time I tried, but Wayland itself still has a lot of rough edges for a desktop. Plus since last time I tried I have replaced my last low DPI monitor on my dev setup, so this ought to be a point I can ignore going forward :) - Finding a mail client I don't hate on linux is tricky. I've never been able to get on with the console clients, and I actually quite like Mac Mail. Thunderbird is kinda okay. - My chosen password manager (1password) still has a fairly awful linux experience. This is getting better - they're producing a native app now. Said native app needs to support the local browser extensions though! - I like the various iCloud/multi device integration features for Apple OSes far too much. This is mostly relatively simple things, that produce disproportionate pain - eg cross-device copy+paste, browser tab syncing, bookmark syncing, etc. Yes, Firefox has Firefox Sync, and Chrome has it's own sync stuff too, but there's nothing as all-encompassing.
  • masswerk 6y ago
    > I'm far too used to the macOS touchpad gestures It's a bit ironic that the Mac is now the epicenter of multi-touch, while its use on mobile platforms has seen some of a decline. Also, I full-heartedly consent to the praise of Preview.
    • easygenes 6y ago
      Multi-touch doesn’t get in the way of the screen on Mac. Also doesn’t require changing how you hold the device.
• dghf 6y ago
  > I am an extreme power user, to the point that many of the keys on my keyboard don't do what the keycap says. Is that really the definition of an extreme power user? I switched the layout on my work MacBook to UK and remapped caps lock to command, but I’m in no way a Mac power user, let alone an extreme one.
  • kinghtown 6y ago
    You’ve misread. He wasn’t suggesting that the process for remapping a keyboard falls under power user, as in understanding how to do that. Remapping keys on a keyboard so they are exactly how you want them for your workflow definitely is the behaviour of a power user.
    • rbreaves 6y ago
      Am I extreme? I did write kinto.sh https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto
• mkl95 6y ago
  I used to work at a place where every workstation was a $5000 Mac. I quickly found out those things are clunkier than my $600 laptop, and way clunkier than my ancient desktop box. As a Linux user of many years I didn't enjoy having to deal with my workstation.
• Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  For me, ubuntu is hands down better than mac. - Finder is a disaster - LibreOffice on mac works far worse - General aestetics is very unfortunate (ymmv) But macOS has that one killer application for me that makes it worth suffering all of this: Sketch.
  • dbspin 6y ago
    Finder is certainly less visually appealing since it became monochrome, but a disaster? Its preview tools are excellent. It provides tabbed view, which is bizarrely still not available in Windows explorer. It's excellent at remembering the state of folders, and which information was previously available in columns. It works well across different sized screens. Not a huge fan of the look and feel of Big Sur in general, but moving back to MacOs recently after using windows of a couple of years, finder is a wonderful breath of fresh air.
    • Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      For one thing, it is extremely slow. Every time open file meny appears, or need to search for something, prepare to wait 15-30 seconds. File management is a pain, renaming, viewing properties, etc are likely the worst of all file managers I've ever seen. Nautilus is so much better (but it changed for the worse since 2008, too). (I'd prefer a Far Manager version for linux / iOS to manage files, but I have accepted that this will never happen, unfortunately)
      • sbuk 6y ago
        How is renaming poor? You can batch rename and a simple click on the file name allows for renaming. Last time I used Nautilus, you still had to activate file renaming with a keypress or from a menu and that had to be done in a moat window. Viewing properties in Finder is easily done with cmd-i or viewable in column mode.
        • Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
          > You can batch rename and a simple click on the file name allows for renaming. Exactly! So every time I double-click a bit slower than macOS wants me to, it enters the renaming mode. I rarely need to rename files, and since the name should be entered via keyboard anyway, a special hotkey makes way more sense. Also, not showing file extensions by default is a big problem. And it is generally EXTREMELY SLOW, I shrug every time I have to launch the damn thing.
• theelous3 6y ago
  > I feel like I need to clarify that this is an article aimed at Mac users who are considering a migration to Linux in hope of a more polished system I... don't really know what to say here. Seems like a fundamental misunderstanding. On a mac, polished is pre-polished - polished from the box to a nice one shape fits all sphere. For linux, you machine it out of stock to your personal dimensions, and hand polish to the finish of your choice. Comparing the two misses the point of both.
• sudhirkhanger 6y ago
  I have been an Linux and open source software user for over a decade. I will be getting a Mac from work and it feels weird to jump on the proprietary bandwagon. That being said one can get used to most of the complainants about the app space. But system continues to have problems with hibernation/resume and memory management. App updates, critical, and system updates should be separated. If one opens a large apps then slowly the system load will increase to a level which will render the system unusable.
• unnouinceput 6y ago
  The first and main mistake any OS switchers do, regardless from where they come and to which OS they go is the fact that they expect the new OS to provide the same experience like the one they come from. Switching from Windows to Linux, people expect great GUI and hand holding. Switching from Linux to Windows, people expect a lot of customization and are annoyed by hand holding Microsoft does. Switching from Mac to Windows, people expect the Apple's way of hand holding, which is done differently by Microsoft and thus is annoying. Before doing such a drastic move maybe do a parallel of your most menial everyday task on both OS'es and then decide how to move about on the new OS regarding that. Also read about the philosophy behind each OS and understand it's strengths and weaknesses. Only after that you can complete and/or adjust to this switch. As an example, I was first a Windows user. Then I started to go about with Linux. And I loved the style of pipe one program to next to complete a task using nothing but bash/batch (whatever terminology you prefer). This was before Windows implemented same using PowerShell, hence why I love and use to this very day CygWin. On many of my customers systems CygWin is installed and used for production. The article's author mistake is exactly this lack of adjusting and instead trying to force Mac style on Linux. My 2 cents.
• dkersten 6y ago
  As someone who has used Windows, Linux and Mac comprehensively over the years, and bounced between all three a few times, I can say that ALL operating systems have warts and problems. There is no such thing as a perfect operating system and its unreasonable to expect that any system will ever work 100% perfectly how you want. You also shouldn't expect to be able to get an operating-system-A experience on operating-system-B, if you want A, keep using A. However, I've found that with Linux, the "perfect" experience is much more under my control than it is with Mac or Windows. I've settled on using Sway (on Manjaro, but I also use Ubuntu on one laptop because I was lazy about finding drivers and it came with Ubuntu) and besides Windows games not running well on Proton on Wayland (for which I need to switch to X instead, where I just use gnome), its been a very stress-free and convenient environment for me.
• bradwood 6y ago
  OP obviously didn't try i3. duck :)
  • carlesfe 6y ago
    I used dwm as my main desktop for many years when I was a developer :)
• michaelcampbell 6y ago
  > The grass is not greener on the other side. Sure it is, just not ALL of it. Everything's a tradeoff; I like my work Mac, but I'd never buy one, and not just the absurd Apple Tax reason. For my use cases, BY AND LARGE Linux works better, for me, but the Mac has some really neat features I miss in Linux.
• giorgioz 6y ago
  macOS has a great UX but in my personal opinion I dislike the native Mail app and native Calendar app. I use Gmail and to me Gmail is far better than the native Mail app on macOS. I also don't see how the author consider himself a power-user and then use the native Mail app which is clearly less advanced than Gmail which offers far more features and integrations.
  • bayindirh 6y ago
    As a macOS & Linux user and KDE fan (without the boy), I love how macOS uses space so efficiently and has great productivity flow. Also, the native mail & calendar apps are not that crippled when combined with a capable IMAP/CalDAV server combo. After using it for some time, I personally like how I can map it into my mental model and use effortlessly. I'm not a macOS power user though. I like the vanilla macOS and doesn't add many tools on top of that (like Brew, HammerSpoon, yadda yadda).
• afturkrull 6y ago
  I have used Linux exclusively at home for years. Recently, I was very impressed with antiX Linux. Runs like the blazes on minimal hardware and highly configurable. For those used to a more busy desktop there's Ubuntu Mate or Lubuntu. A minimum version of Ubuntu, but not as minimum as antiX Linux. https://antixlinux.com/ https://antixlinux.com/ https://ubuntu-mate.org/ https://ubuntu-mate.org/ https://lubuntu.net/ https://lubuntu.net/
• RamblingCTO 6y ago
  What I would like to add is: bluetooth support and sound stuff. It feels like it's still an afterthought in the community and is still flaky at best. I think the main problem with linux on desktops shows quite perfectly in this thread. Good UX? Nah, why would we? Invest your own time, fiddle around until you settle on a mediocre and cumbersome solution. I've been using Arch for over 13 years now and over 10 years of MacBooks with a short break. It feels like the problems are still the same. Though the X auto configuration got way better. I love (especially) Arch though, but not the experience of using it on a day-to-day basis. I always miss pacman on macs, but I miss the UX on arch.
  • sergeykish 6y ago
    You are too harsh, good UX is subjective. I have not found anything better than wmii, last year replicated experience in xmonad now without any WM controls. My environment is clean and unobtrusive — xterm, vim, mpv, mupdf. Arch Linux user since 2009. Recently I've tried Windows and macOS, can't stand them. There are other projects though — Gnome, KDE, more mainstream approach.
• edoloughlin 6y ago
  The article seems to boils down to: a lot of proprietary software I like on the Mac doesn’t exist on Linux
• perfopt 6y ago
  Read up to the point he said the app he missed most was Mail.app!!! Ha ha ha. As a long time Mac and iOS user I dont use the mail apps on either platform. IMP its pretty badly done.
• acomjean 6y ago
  I went from Mac to Linux at home. My experience as someone who uses Linux but isn’t great at it, is that it works well as a desktop os. I’m lazy I willing to pay for simplicity so I bought a preinstalled Linux laptop. And it’s been chugging along fine. Everything Works (excepting wake forms sleep when I close the lid sometimes, it’s like gambling...but I manually suspend and that works) I takes a little research to figure out which application are available (I’ve heard of none of these video editors..) but I haven’t had any issues. Libre office works great. I even got unreal engine compiled and running. It’s pretty nice experience overall.
  • christophilus 6y ago
    Not sure what OS you’re running (my guess is Ubuntu). I’ve had no issues with wake from sleep when using Fedora, FYI. My biggest complaint is the Nautilus file browser’s address bar being mostly worthless, the Gnome terminal’s inability to move tabs into a new window, and the inability to use normal copy / paste in the terminal (Elementary OS gets this right, and I run their terminal on Fedora now... I may look into running their file browser, too...)
    • acomjean 6y ago
      It’s pop!os which is Ubuntu with gnome. My laptop has an nvidia gpu and it works great. Even steam works will which was unexpected and made the machine more enjoyable although myself a little less productive on it. I always mean to try fedora.
    • joelellis 6y ago
      FYI, you can use ctrl+l to get the path bar as just plain text that you can edit.
      • christophilus 6y ago
        !!! Well, I’ll be.
• happyjack 6y ago
  I thought this review was super fair and I really enjoyed his takes. I had a Macintosh from 2012-2016 and can definitely agree with many of his opinions (preview.app is amazing, notifications on Mac are amazing). I've been on / off Linux as a daily driver since 2009. I went off Linux during the Gnome 2 / Unity debacle, had to use Windows for engineering school (not compsci or "tech") and had a Mac mini in there (2012-2016). I agree with the author and I left Macintosh when I felt that Apple simple didn't care about their "computer" division anymore. With the M1 and new advancements in their desktop OS, I think Apple is starting to put more effort in their laptops / desktops again. I think apt-get is amazing as well and it would be cool to see a REAL package manager for MacOS. For what it's worth, I run RHEL workstation, use an iPhone, and have been thinking of getting a Macbook as "corporate compatibility layer" for when a client uses teams or MS office or some junk like that that has no browser or Linux support.
• holstvoogd 6y ago
  I have the same experience. I bought a System76 darter pro, it comes with a linux pre-installed. I've been using it on and of for a year now but cannot 'give up' my mac: - It is not stable at all; weekly complete freezes - The key-bindings are a joke. Even after remapping and hacking stuff - bluetooth support sucks, sometimes it works for days, then it will not reconnect and keep spewing errors. - Sound drivers seems buggy, it takes 20-30s to 'switch' to a BT speaker. - I cannot for the life of me figure out how to install Ruby 'correctly' via apt.
  • dalu 6y ago
    You use rbenv. You don't sound very tech savvy, but using Ruby? It's weird how my workstations and desktops and laptops and netbooks all run Linux just fine, only you're having those issues. You're a joke. You're not adaptable. When in Rome... Only rich spoiled brats spend 5k on a laptop that would otherwise cost 1k
    • sbuk 6y ago
      "You're a joke." Wow. "Only rich spoiled brats spend 5k on a laptop that would otherwise cost 1k" Not this again. A fully tricked out MBP 16" costs $6699. RRP for a Lenovo equivalent is $8,894. Dell doesn't sell anything that matches, but equivalent spec is $3,894.99 (MBP 16" $4199). System 76 - $3,174 with a shit display (1080p in a 'high end' laptop is absolutely shocking). Librem 14 (vs MBP 13" for $2299), $2,716 - again, with a really poor screen, but now the Mac has a better processor and significantly better battery life. So, yet again, we illustrate that when you look for equivalent new spec of an Apple device, they cost about the same. There is always manufacturer refurbished or secondhand, much like every other laptop.
      • dang 6y ago
        "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        • 6y ago
• evacchi 6y ago
  I have used a Thinkpad T470s for 3 years at my current employer with Fedora and it worked quite well (including standby, multi-monitor support etc). However, I have just switched to a Mac, and I can only say I've been missing it. The consistency of the key combination, the polish of the desktop applications. It's little things but they do add up. When I first switched to the Linux machine, I first noticed every single papercut (e.g. warning messages that felt like errors). Then I grew more and more "tolerant" of these things. All in all, the experience was fine; but I never really loved it. Not to mention, if you pick a Mac you often care about the aesthetics of the chassis and display; my Thinkpad with its low-light matte display (with very poor performance in natural lighting conditions) and its brick-like appearance (someone love them, I honestly don't), it always struck me as pretty meh.
  • rashkov 6y ago
    In defense of the Thinkpad matte screen, in my experience it’s fantastic to use outdoors in direct sunlight compared to a glass covered screen. Even with a much higher overall brightness, the glare just killed any visibility on my 2017 dell xps. As for the many many paper cuts of Linux, it’s a sacrifice I’ve accepted in exchange for having control over my desktop experience. It doesn’t change out from under me over the many years that I’ve used Linux. With windows and Mac I always felt like I was one software update away from them changing something out from under me. The system administration and shell skills that I’ve picked up are an investment that keeps accruing over my entire software development career, and make me a more capable developer for being able to jump into infrastructure and devops concerns around the software that I write. I expect this knowledge will last me for decades more. The daily experience of using Linux is generally one of being more exposed to the internals of the system. You’re only ever a thin layer above the kernel and its system calls. If the inner workings of an operating system are a mystery that you’d like to explore, then you will uncover those mysteries in the course of running Linux as your every day experience. The error messages and log files are obscure but they’re always available. If you have a problem and you have the patience and persistence to dive into it, then the next layer of abstraction is available for you to explore. You live your virtual life in a workshop, with powerful tools scattered about. A few times a year you discover a new one and it becomes part of you.
  • 6y ago
• k__ 6y ago
  Since I spent most of my time in browser apps now, there isn't much difference in day-to-day work anymore when switching between OS. Linux was good enough for the desktop 10 years ago and it only got better with more and more browser apps popping up since then. I hope with WebAssembly we will finally get better performance out of browser based apps and maybe even get rid of Windows for high-end games.
• alpineidyll3 6y ago
  This guy was not a developer, or at least that's not his main function. I have switched, and find it more productive, but I never have to use word....
• zarkov99 6y ago
  I agree with the article in that the Apple hardware is superior. The best laptops available for Linux are the Dell XPSs and they are not in the same league as the Mac (I have both). However, for developers, especially system software developers, Linux is a far better choice in terms of software. Everything is scriptable, tools and libraries are typically built first for Linux and then ported over, you get enormous customizability for your workflow. Its not even close.
• jgalt212 6y ago
  Our code runs on Linux servers, our (business) customers all run Windows. I run a linux laptop as I don't want to introduce another stack into the mix.
• PicassoCTs 6y ago
  I did for work. Always had a screw-driver with me, in case the system frozze and i needed to remove the battery to get it working again, because the power button wouldn't restart it. Tryied to diagnose the error, but it wasn't cooling and other colleagues had it too- so i guess its just distro-crap. I suffer through it for open source, but it ain't something i can recommend.
• flerchin 6y ago
  Stop liking things I don't like!
• stjohnswarts 6y ago
  When I read "I am an extreme power user, I use the keyboard" I stopped reading. I think these power users have an inflated sense of self and the writing is atrocious. No doubt he's a rockstar code ninja too.
• redshirtrob 6y ago
  What I like about Linux over Mac is I can do just about anything I want. Apple puts guardrails up, or has weird technical reasons [0] why certain things just can't be done. On Linux, I know it's just a matter of perseverance to achieve my desired workflow. With Apple, I'm always left wondering if the problem is even solvable. That said, I'm quite a bit different from OP. I'm not concerned with marking up images with circles and arrows and a paragraph explaining what each one is. If that was my workflow, I think I'd be much happier on Mac as well. [0] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/settling-osx-focus-follows-mouse-debate.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/settling-osx-focus-f...
• fortran77 6y ago
  Windows 10 + WSL would have been a better thing to switch to.
• blunte 6y ago
  Preview is one of the most underrated pieces of software in the world today. I make the assumption that Quicklook uses Preview (because surely it must). Being able to hit spacebar on just about any kind of selected document/image type file and see a near instant look, multiple pages and all, is so important. Once you don't have that (move to the Windows world), you realize how much you miss it. And you can, with a small bit of effort, add capabilities for additional files such as Markdown. Being able to open a PDF or image in a fast, reliable native viewer, and even do some level of editing (such as quickly adding a signature!) is super useful. In terms of reliability, every time over the last 20 years (some distant, some recent) where I tried to live with a Linux desktop, things would stop working after a short while. Meanwhile, I have lived on my 2014 MBP since 2014, going through multiple OS upgrades in place - no wipes/reinstalls - and find it just as performant as ever. It is in most use cases more performant than my 2017 _much_ higher spec Dell XPS 15 (in Windows or Linux boot mode). There are still some things I hate, #1 being that when I cmd-tab to a window which is minimized, it doesn't raise that window. What is the f*cking point of cmd-tabbing to an application if you don't make its window visible!? This I have never understood. But generally speaking, macOS on Apple hardware is unmatched by any alternative.
  • usaphp 6y ago
    > What is the f*cking point of cmd-tabbing to an application if you don't make its window visible!? What if you have multiple windows of the same application, and you minimize one of them, then auto opening of that window everytime you switch back to the app will be super annoying.
    • mromanuk 6y ago
      And if you want to open the minimized or hidden window, after cmd-tab, do a option-cmd-tab and finally release cmd-tab. The window will get focus
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • 6y ago
• kyledrake 6y ago
  I have been a long term linux user, tried an M1 macbook air recently and actually switched back to linux (a 13" razer blade stealth). I found the linux laptop to actually be faster, more responsive, have better software for me (plenty of free alternatives that are Good Enough for my purposes, also it's linux and my servers run linux, so no weird OS crossover issues). To my incredible surprise, I actually feel that the linux laptop's trackpad works better than the one on the macbook! This was one of the big reasons I wanted to switch back to a macbook and I was extremely disappointed with the results. I was having serious issues even just selecting text with the trackpad on the macbook air. The author notes a 2-3 second delay in DNS lookups - I'm actually having that problem with my macbook, and not with my linux laptop, and I have no idea what weird Apple goop is causing it or how to fix it. To each their own I guess. I tried the new macbooks because of what everyone has been saying but was pretty disappointed in the experience, so much so that I was wondering if my macbook air was damaged somehow. The battery life was solid, though.
• lhl 6y ago
  To preface, I think all of the author's complaints are pretty valid. I spent 15 years primarily on Mac laptops/desktops and finally switched in 2015 after a few years of being less and less happy with the direction both the hardware and OS was taking, and it was definitely a rough transition even having years and years of UNIX/LINUX experience and using "perfectly" compatible hardware (I started with a Thinkpad X250 and started with an Ubuntu default DE before ditching it pretty quickly for a custom Arch/Openbox setup that I've been yak-shaving since). There are still quirks (sleep/suspend, bluetooth, multi-display, DPI and color adjustment) that make it far less dependable than using a Mac, but on the flip side, I feel like I've had much superior (if more complex) customizability, and in general, less unsolvable/nasty surprises when upgrading. I still have some Mac testing machines and it seems like MacOS has continued to get buggier and less power-user friendly with every update. Also, for my needs, luckily I was a lot less dependent on PIM features, and much more so for dev tools, so it was a better fit for my needs overall. WINE (and virtualization) has been a huge thing for bridging some of the missing pieces as well. While the edges have been rougher, one other big advantage for me has been the much wider hardware selection - over the past few years I've switched from Thinkpads, to Chromebooks, to gaming laptops w/ beefy CUDA support, and now to a 8C16T Mobile Ryzen laptop with 64GB of RAM w/ 12h+ battery life that's almost as fast as my desktop workstation.
  • Labo333 6y ago
    What is your "8C16T Mobile Ryzen laptop"? 12+ battery life sounds really promising!!!
    • lhl 6y ago
      It's a Mechrevo Code 01 (TongFang PF5NU1G). It's sold by a number of OEMs including w/ Linux pre-installed as the KDE Slimbook, Tuxedo Pulse and others. Actually, I linked to almost all of the various OEM releases along with a detailed review from when I got mine last summer: https://www.notion.so/lhl/Mechrevo-Code-01-TongFang-PF5NU1G-Information-8009025fdefc40118ab0ea973e7e0988 https://www.notion.so/lhl/Mechrevo-Code-01-TongFang-PF5NU1G-... Note, pretty soon, 5800H and 5800U laptops should be available. The new CPU should perform even better (Zen 3 based vs Zen 2) and in general seem there seem to be more premium builds coming. USB-C DP and 2.5K displays would be the big things I'd be looking for if I were shopping this year. Personally, I'm ok w/ waiting for for next gen though (USB 4.0).
• brightball 6y ago
  Anytime I tell people that I switched from Mac to Linux I let them know that it’s not for everybody. I’m happy with my decision, but I did it for the hardware and there are enough quirks that I wouldn’t recommend it for anybody who wasn’t really committed to the move. Everything in this article is true. I tend to mute the desktop notifications for several noisy applications. I use mail web apps directly rather than using the desktop clients but I am really encouraged by the future of Thunderbird and do plan to switch one day in the future. In this field, I learn from the quirks though. I use Ansible to manage my laptop configuration and it teaches me a lot about Linux under the hood that I never would have learned otherwise. When I need docker, I like having a native linux experience. Ultimately, there’s nothing I need that I can’t do and I can buy hardware that I’m in complete control of (upgrades, etc) which is important to me. Software wise, I do miss Preview and OmniGraffle. Other than that, I’m not missing much.
  • debaserab2 6y ago
    > When I need docker, I like having a native linux experience. This is a severely underrated point. If you're not running docker on a linux host, you are running it on a VM and getting all the performance tradeoffs you would get with developing on a VM. There seems to be a lot of developers that are unaware of this.
    • brightball 6y ago
      Ironically, this was one of the main reasons for my initial switch and then I went 3 years without using Docker.
• tambourine_man 6y ago
  > Emoji selector, Caffeine Those are built in to macOS and have been for years.
• elif 6y ago
  I think OP would be happy running Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) Using windows for the popup/productivity/keybind easy mode stuff, while running Linux applications natively for development.
• 29athrowaway 6y ago
  Some things not mentioned in this article: The Pantheon desktop environment (default in elementaryOS, a Linux distro) is the most similar to macOS, in case that's what you are looking for. Kupfer is an alternative to Alfred. Tilix is an alternative to iTerm2. Instead of using Crossover, just use SoftMaker FreeOffice. I would use Xournal++ rather than Xournal. Gimp has a lot of annoyances right now, notably: uses GTK 2 which doesn't support HiDPI. Gimp 2.99.2 (development version) adds support for GTK 3 but it's unstable and crashes often. Hopefully Gimp 3 is released soon. For now, I use Krita.
• linsomniac 6y ago
  I'm a Linux fan, but I'm toying with the idea of getting one of the new Macs to replacement my Chromebook... For work I am very happy with my Linux setup. ~5-6 years ago I got a good chromebook as an experiment, and I really like it in general. Long battery life, good build, high res screen, good security model, not much mucking around on it. It's a $1K chromebook that I got almost half price because refurb. The double edged sword is that it's limited. There are benefits to that I don't expect much from it. But for anything beyond web browsing I just use it as an ssh terminal. It works fine there, but I haven't found a programming environment I can use on it. Note: It apparently will never support the Linux apps. Sometimes I make movies, and borrow my wife's Windows laptop to run Resolve on. It's worlds better than any of the video editors I've used on Linux, and I was never able to get Resolve working on Linux. So with the new Mac I was thinking maybe I should try one of those instead of the Chromebook? At the lower end of the spectrum, the price is comparable to a good Chromebook (and I was dissatisfied with the lower end Chromebooks). But, if I actually want to do video editing I need 1-2TB of storage, which pushes the price up close to $2K. But if I avoid upgrading both my laptop AND personal desktop because of it... One option would be a lower end Mac and an external SSD. At least until I accidentally unplug it on the couch while editing a video. But for 95% of my personal use, the Chromebook is just great. What's a fella to do...
• JediPig 6y ago
  the apple m1... is the only laptop anyone should be purchasing until the AMD 5900 HS is available to everyone. I can't stress this enough, the $1400 laptop fully loaded MBA, completely smokes the competition, including the $2800 windows. Until windows catches up with Unified Memory Arch, the m1 is the only logical choice.
• franklyt 6y ago
  Very little support for W10 in here, which is understandable. I just recently switched back from a work Linux config and a hybrid Mac config to a full W10 config for a variety of reasons, the largest being that W10 is solid, performant and doesn’t feel as limiting as Mac, or distracting and warty as Linux, when I’m programming.
  • oblio 6y ago
    I think that if you remove the crap preinstalled on Windows, which is trivial for an experienced Windows user, and you don't have a work laptop with a ton of corporate management-ware installed, Windows 10 is super snappy, stable and with WSL you also get quite a few Linux goodies. If you approach it with an open and flexible mind, it's at least equal to Linux or Mac desktops, for developers.
• unix1 6y ago
  The blog post says > migrating to Linux is fine, but don't expect a better experience than the Mac. It seems that depends on what you do (and like). If you spend most of your time in Mail.app and previewing your files with Preview app and you like those apps, then perhaps Mac OS is a good choice for you. I personally don't fall into those categories. I care more about the software development experience where Linux is a better option for me. In fact, I was a bit surprised that the blog post was from "Engineer, developer, entrepreneur" and there was no coverage of software engineering/development tools. Here are things I prefer on Linux (not in any particular order): docker actually runs without taking over half to all of the system, window manager behaves the way I configure it, Kate works better, it's closer to what's in production - I don't need to run another docker container do/test simple things or fight with Mac OS workarounds, most tools/packages I use are a simple command away - Linux package managers are better and have a lot more packages than Homebrew, all/most installed packages get updates automatically, GUI file managers and file open dialogs are better than the Finder app, app menus belong to their windows, fonts aren't extra blurry on external monitors, most software stack is open source - if I find a bug I can troubleshoot or even try fixing it, etc., etc. Things I liked better on a Mac: giant click anywhere touchpad (though tap-to-click feature was inadequate).
  • mraza007 6y ago
    I feel mac touchpad is very topnotch but other than that I totally agree with the points you made about the linux
• jgavinray 6y ago
  In reading this, I found it very misleading. The expectation is that the author's work flows is somehow impacted and slower because certain commercial software that said author has been become dependent on does not exist. The large blanket statements such as: "Power tools are more limited and more difficult to use", "Any advanced Mac user knows about Karabiner, BetterTouchTool, Choosy, Alfred, Automator, and more." "With Linux, you can achieve almost the same feature set, but it is harder and more limited." In this case, the author has limited themselves to what is commercially available. Or looking at their choice tools they mentioned, the wrong tool for the job. The entire review seems very biased in the context that the expectation is Linux should have the same tooling and UX as macOS. There is no mention on viewing other GUIs that could be tuned to better suit the expectations of the author.
• bengale 6y ago
  This is my exact experience. My current setup involves a powerful Linux rig under my desk that I use remotely over SSH for development work but my Mac is my ‘frontend’. But for a while I tried to use that Linux box exclusively. This has been working really well for me, docker runs faster and I can get a lot more bang for my buck performance wise. Plus I get to keep using things like fantastical. I much prefer the Mac UI as well tbh and seem to not run into whatever bugs people seem to complain about.
• deleted 6y ago
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• lrvick 6y ago
  I honestly have not met another Linux user in Silicon Valley that actually lives here and I have been here 7 years. I have to fly to Germany and hang out at CCC to find people that know how to be productive with open source hacker-friendly software. It is even rare over there to meet a Mac user. I meet more FreeBSD users than Mac users in Europe. Meanwhile in the US It feels like at every new employer or client it is a PITA to get a Linux machine because no one has ever asked for one before. It is just assumed no one could possibly get a technical job done without Apple. I have been told multiple times that I need to use Apple so IT can help me when it breaks in spite of me literally being a Linux hardening specialist who even has a few lines in the kernel. I can maintain my own machine, thanks. I have even had people insist on sending me Apple laptops even if a Linux machine is approved just because they are so sure I am going to need it. I never do. Where are all of you hiding? I feel like I need a support group of people that also opped out of the cult.
  • nightowl_games 6y ago
    I'm up in Canada using Linux for c/c++. Im no expert in Linux either. I just use mint pretty much out the box and it works awesome for me. I'm just too cheap to buy a MacBook and prefer desktops anyways. I understand that docker is bad on mac too, that seems like it'd be a big deal.
• jurschreuder 6y ago
  If there was no OS pre-installed on laptops, everybody would use Linux.
• unanswered 6y ago
  For opening a very large and organizationally complex PDF like the ARMv8 Architecture Reference Manual, Preview.app is the only PDF reader, on any platform, which I would recommend. The competition is simply a joke in comparison. I also like it for filling out PDF forms; I think I ended up using a web service (!!) the last time I wanted to do that on another platform. But aside from Preview.app, I don't find anything commendable about macOS. I've remained on an old and vulnerable version to ensure I don't lose control of my own hardware, and what's more, I will never upgrade that hardware given how bad the new hardware seems. In short, I'm just waiting for a Preview.app clone/same-weight-class competitor on Windows and I'll be off to one of Msft's first party laptops.
• rbreaves 6y ago
  > Any advanced Mac user knows about Karabiner, BetterTouchTool, Choosy, Alfred, Automator, and more. > With Linux, you can achieve almost the same feature set, but it is harder and more limited. > For example. To customize your keyboard, you will need a combination of xdotool, xbindkeys, xcape, xmodmap and setxkbmap to capture some event and then run a shell script. There is a Gnome Shell plugin that allows you to tweak your keyboard, but it's nowhere near Karabiner. Much of what you said is true, but you may also want to checkout my mac-style shortcut keys for linux project over here https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto. It takes a lot of the effort and annoyance of remapping out of the equation imo. Generally it is more difficult to find working alternatives on changing basic linux behaviors quickly, whether those solutions be free or cost money. And yes libinput-gestures can be difficult to work w/ I spent over an hour until I realized I needed to log off and back on -.-. Also it is concerning that you say screen tearing is back under Wayland - I haven't spent much time in Wayland because I have not yet worked out a good solution for porting my kinto project to it.
• dan15 6y ago
  For email, Mailspring is great, cross-platform, and open-source.
• nunez 6y ago
  This was great. I love how Carlos ends his experience with positive takeaways from using Linux. I worked with someone who used Linux as their main OS. They _ALWAYS_ had issues with Zoom. Terrible audio over IP (phone was better), terrible video quality, video would timeout after a few seconds, A/V mis-sync, etc. That would be a non-starter for me, given that I use Zoom frequently. On the topic of email clients: I'm always wanting to use them, especially when I'm spending more time in the terminal, but its lack of integration with any calendars always stops me from getting serious with it. That and it having not-great support for Office 365.
• jgwil2 6y ago
  > Suffice to say, I had both Thunderbird and Gmail open and used either one depending on the task I needed to complete. Genuinely curious as to what people cannot accomplish in the Gmail web client (or any major web client for that matter) that they can accomplish with the desktop app. I have outlook for work and while I use the desktop client out of habit, plenty of colleagues use the web client exclusively.
• kvz 6y ago
  I had a similar experience and documented my steps https://kvz.io/tobuntu.html https://kvz.io/tobuntu.html