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At this point, I only buy Apple products because of inertia. Give me an out-of-the-box Linux laptop that's as easy to use and that supports the software I need
by psi75 4y ago
At this point, I only buy Apple products because of inertia. Give me an out-of-the-box Linux laptop that's as easy to use and that supports the software I need for my work, and give me a way to port over all of my cloud stuff, and I'm done with Apple forever. They're trading on the reputation they earned decades ago.
This said, the problem isn't limited to one company. It's how capitalism works. In order to succeed, whether as a company or individual, you have to convince people to part with something called money they have been programmed to avoid parting with as much as humanly possible... in other words, you succeed not based on the value of what you produce (because wage work's actual cost is literally a rounding error) if you are better at transactions in a zero-sum game than others are. We probably need for money to exist, because trade wouldn't work without it, and because we're still a hundred years or more from true post-scarcity communism, but having a whole society run on an operating system of zero-sum transactions has some pretty clear negatives--neither the smallest nor the worst of which is tech waste--even if it's not always evident how best to fix this. Companies are going to keep producing short-lived crap because it's good for sales, because ultimately anything other than "good for sales" cannot be afforded under this particular economic system where something is either sold or it dies.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago>Give me an out-of-the-box Linux laptop that's as easy to use and that supports the software I need for my work, and give me a way to port over all of my cloud stuff, and I'm done with Apple forever. They're trading on the reputation they earned decades ago Buy a Dell XPS.
- MerelyMortal 4y agoIt seems to be a lottery with the earlier XPS laptops (hardware-wise), but I have a 2020 model and it's been very good. I'm definitely interested in my next laptop being an XPS. I bought one that came with Windows and installed Ubuntu on it and it's great. The only thing I haven't tried is the fingerprint reader.
- pca006132 4y agoI think quite a lot of Windows laptop works fine with Linux nowadays? Perhaps not out-of-the-box, but they works fine after installing the OS manually (which doesn't really take much time TBH). I'm not sure what software you need for work, but if they are open source they are usually fine with Linux (iirc Mac exclusive projects usually have alternatives) . For cloud stuff, I don't know what you are using so can't really comment about it.
- scarface74 4y agoAs long as you don’t care about things like battery life, heat, or your laptop sounding like a 747 under load.
- pca006132 4y agoI'm using a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 with a Ryzen 7, which works fine, battery lasts for more than 6 hours if I am not doing computationally intensive work, not as good as a Mac but works for me. The heat is also fine, the fan is not too loud and it doesn't run usually. I think you just have to avoid gaming notebook.
- scarface74 4y ago6 hours of battery life is less than one third of the low end MacBook Air. Unfortunately, because of the prevalence of Electron apps like Teams and Slack. It doesn’t take much to tax an x86 based laptop. Chrome is also a notorious battery hog. It’s nice to be able to treat my laptop like I’ve been treating iPads for a decade - a portable device that you don’t have to worry about running out of battery during a day of normal use.
- ornornor 4y agoNot true at all. It does require a bit more semi manual tweaking but you’re being overly dramatic.
- scarface74 4y ago
- kibwen 4y agoWhat software do you need for you work? Assuming you're a software developer, and unless you're doing something Apple-specific, it's hard to think of software that works on Mac but doesn't work on Linux. As far as options go, I picked up a System76 earlier this year and I've been surprisingly happy with PopOS.
- lttlrck 4y agoEven if you are a developer, you often have to interact with non-developers using either Microsoft or Apples Office suites. Some people really hate using web-based office tools, and for good reason. (I develop on Linux, and use Office 365 without too much trouble but it's far from perfect)
- zx8080 4y agoI was in the similar situation. I've used linux on workstation in 00s, but since around 2012 been using corporate Macbooks mostly. My recent experiment with moving to the cheapest Thinkpad (E14 Gen 3, the one with AMD) was successful and using it for personal projects makes me very happy. I bought the cheapest configuration and added some RAM and the second (!) NVMe disk to install linux in addition to windows (nice to have, but downgraded it to win10 from 11). Linux is so much stable and overall better than macos and windows.
- Tijdreiziger 4y agoI’d really like to switch from Windows to Linux, but the software situation seems like a real problem. According to ProtonDB, a third of the top 1000 games have issues on Linux, and popular creative software (Affinity, Ableton) is right out.
- ornornor 4y agoI use Linux 95% of the time. When a game doesn’t work in Linux, I simply reboot into windows. Same with my CAD package that will never run in Linux (or a VM for that matter).
- Tijdreiziger 4y agoI did the dualboot thing for a couple of years, but it's a hassle to have to close all your open windows, tabs, documents etc. These days I'd rather just run a single OS.
- ornornor 4y agoThis, or have some kind of suspend mode on steroids where everything is back like you left it when rebooting. Kinda like being able to hibernate windows and Linux when rebooting into the other.
- askafriend 4y ago> They're trading on the reputation they earned decades ago. This is obviously not true. People love the products Apple makes - it's really that simple.