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I really want to switch to Linux for ideological and control reasons but I'm pulled in two other directions. Firstly there is the comfy prison of Apple I curre
by hughrr 5y ago
I really want to switch to Linux for ideological and control reasons but I'm pulled in two other directions.
Firstly there is the comfy prison of Apple I currently reside in which is fairly friction free if you stay within the rails but costs a kidney to keep going.
Secondly there is the vastly flexible and compatible with weird stuff I use Windows which punches you in the face once a day and treats you badly.
I am at a loss because I am getting older and lazier. I tried to switch to Linux several times over the last 20 years from Windows but it never stuck at the end of the day due to the missing difficult to define "quality" on the desktop which I think (shoot me) that even Microsoft manages to surpass.
The killer though is that I'm using Windows at work on a daily basis due to corporate troll enforcement. Switching back and forth from that to Apple ecosystem is killing me, especially considering the UK keyboard layouts are rather different between both platforms. I'm not even sure I'm happy with Apple because I'm on ARM everything and I can't even fire up an ad-hoc VirtualBox VM like I could on windows and SSH into it to do Linux stuff. And the games are shit. Also getting stuff out of the Apple ecosystem is painful (Numbers / iPhoto / icloud email for example).
Some days I wake up, load a whole custom PC worth of parts into a shopping basket and dream of running windows or linux. But I don't know which one. I'm not even sure I want to leave the comfy prison.
Ugh not sure what the point of that rant was but I'm stuck and don't know which way to go but I'm not happy where I am. Help!
Edit: fine example. So I am editing openstreetmap while writing this infernal rant and the default editor doesn't work properly with safari, nor does it block youtube ads with any adblocker I've used. So I've had to install Chrome just to handle that, which is a PITA because that doesn't work properly with keychain. Then I figure if I use Edge on windows it'll just work, which it will. Even firefox will do that.
- benlivengood 5y agoThe solution that worked pretty well for me at a Windows shop was two monitors, a Linux workstation, and a Windows VM in kvm. The VM stayed up on one of the screens most of the time. This was ~10 years ago and I don't use a windows VM anymore but I was pleasantly surprised within the last year or two to find that Windows 8/10 will happily boot from its own media under kvm (for troubleshooting/restore purposes in my case), so you probably don't even have to reinstall Windows. Just qemu-img convert the disk to qcow or similar to save space. Desktop quality is highly flexible and entirely what you make of it. I'm happy enough with default Ubuntu unity or whatever they ship this year. Xfce if you want incredibly snappy response, better than any other common modern desktop. Most workflows are browser-based or terminal-based at this point anyway; I use very little desktop software (games are by far the majority of non-browser use and I am pretty happy with Steam's selection) any more. Your mileage may vary.
- wrycoder 5y agoThe way to handle YouTube ads is to pay the $10 or so monthly subscription. It seems like a fair price. I haven’t seen an ad in months.
- habi 5y ago> nor does it block youtube ads with any adblocker I've used. I'm superhappy with https://adguard.com/ https://adguard.com/ (https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardForSafari https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardForSafari) and haven't seen a YouTube ad in quite some time...
- habi 5y ago> So I am editing openstreetmap while writing this infernal rant and the default editor doesn't work properly with safari I suggest to use JOSM [1] for editing OSM. It has a bit of a learning curve, but then you're not depending on your OS, since it looks and behaves identically on a Mac, Linux and on Windows :) [1]: http://josm.openstreetmap.de/ http://josm.openstreetmap.de/
- hughrr 5y agoThanks for this one. Makes perfect sense.