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I've run both back and forth and simultaneously for many years (since probably 1997/1998). My ultimately conclusion is that when I run linux on my desktop I fo

I've run both back and forth and simultaneously for many years (since probably 1997/1998). My ultimately conclusion is that when I run linux on my desktop I focus too much on the OS and too little on what I'm trying to accomplish. Oh cool there's a .001 version bump on the graphics drivers, let me spend all day recompiling that and tweaking my awesomerc. MacOS, you just can't do that simply by virtue of being less customizable. Am I quite as efficient as I was when my computer would reboot in <30 seconds to a desktop with all of my browsers open exactly as I wanted them (slack here, different monitoring/graphs exactly tiled exactly on another monitor) and I could switch between specific task-focused desktops with awesome (programming work here, ops here, email/biz work here, etc) no I am not as productive, but, how much time did I spend fine-tuning that setup? It felt like A LOT and I know (for a variety of reasons, this being only one of them) that I'm generally more productive since I retired my last Linux desktop in 2018. That said, please don't take any of this to diminish the accomplishment of the Ashai team. The fact that they did what they did and did it well enough to get mainstreamed is an absurd feat. The fact that it was significantly (primarily?) done by an anime-girl live streaming on twitch is absolutely hilarious.

Koshkin 4y ago
I remember getting addicted to constant updates some years ago, when I was using Gentoo. Switching (back) to Slackware cured me. I do not now why since Slackware, too, gets regular updates. I now check for updates once a month or so.
s_c_r 4y ago
I think it’s a matter of expectations. I use stock Ubuntu and GNOME and have almost zero customizations. I haven’t touched it except to upgrade since 2018 and have had zero issues. I get it though. I also use an M1 and love it.
- speed_spread 4y ago
  Yeah, using one of the big boring distros really helps to focus on work. I've switched to Fedora for my new box and once the hardware setup was sorted I just stopped messing with it.
  - Rediscover 4y ago
    I use Slackware or OpenBSD. I completely understand You said (I used RH based distros when I was at Some-Large Commercial Air* in Seattle (it was a joy minus my second set of mgr's)). As much as I dislike using Red Hat*, they are great at what You mention.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I don’t even install all those gnome extensions everyone insists are essential. The base fedora install + the proprietary codecs repo is literally all you need. Everything else is a waste of time.
jack_pp 4y ago
Well that's like not eating chocolate, no one forces you to do it.. you just gotta not do it. I've been on linux for the past however many years and I don't waste time on my setup at all. I pretty much have the same setup for the last 4-5 years. I've spent maybe 20 hours since then tweaking things / switching distros. Never had to recompile my kernel, my drivers or anything like that since I'm on a t490 thinkpad and it pretty much just works.
farresito 4y ago
I hope that doesn't come across too negative, but that sounds more like a problem that you personally have than something inherent from the customization that Linux offers. I run Arch with i3, vim, and tmux and quite frankly I don't think I spend more than an a couple of hours per month maintaining my configuration, and I don't see exactly where one would spend so much time. If you struggle with that, instead of changing your config, write down on a notepad the changes that you would do, and at the end of the week review them. Chances are the majority of stuff is unimportant.
- ctvo 4y ago
  > I don't think I spend more than an a couple of hours per month maintaining my configuration This is... still significant. Outside of auto updates sometimes rebooting my laptop overnight and major version bumps requiring me to hit the "update" button explicitly once a year, I'm unsure what "maintaining my configuration" would entail once things were setup to your liking on macOS.
  - lttlrck 4y ago
    I'm not sure what the GP is maintaining but I have used the latest Fedora and Sway (and i3 before that) day-in and day-out for years, all I do is run dnf update once in a while... it gets completely out of the way.
    - tempest_ 4y ago
      Yeah, I use an arch derivative so its a rolling distro and even with the problems that entails I update packages about once a week and have not had issues since a bug got me 2 years ago. How often are things changing for these people that configs need to constantly reviewed?
      - palata 4y ago
        I guess some people want heavier customisation, whereas they just accept what macOS enforces. I have been using different Linux distros in the last 15 years (mostly Arch, so rolling), and really I don't customise much (default i3, default vim, etc). Doesn't really require any maintenance at all, I would say.
epgui 4y ago
The other replies to your comment cover my most immediate thought, so I won’t repeat any of that. However, in addition, I think there’s probably a significant amount of highly transferable learnings you’ve gone through while spending all that time configuring your machine. Was any of that time wasted? Well, probably, at least by some measure… But it’s also very hard to gauge the value of all the incidental knowledge you gained about what computers are, how they work, etc. My point is this: don’t over-penalize yourself for wasting time when you’re learning in the process, and try and remember how magical it is to learn things for the first time. And for other readers… It’s good to be pragmatic, but if you’re lucky enough to be in a position to spend a lot of time tinkering, playing, learning, then DO IT. Life is meant to enjoy!
- sanderjd 4y ago
  I loved running Linux in college and tried every new (or old) distribution and compiled oh so much stuff and fiddled with every new (or old) thing I could find to fiddle with and thought it was super cool to write config files by hand and be able to read and modify all the source to everything I was running. As you point out, this was an excellent learning experience for me. I kept doing that for awhile after I graduated, but eventually I realized it wasn't a good learning experience anymore, it was just a tedious waste of my time. I realized I should have been socializing or recreating outdoors or reading or picking up new hobbies if I wasn't working. Since then I've mostly used Macs or Linux machines maintained by the company I work for, and this is definitely a much better use of my time. There are only so many fundamentals to learn here before it becomes just so much minutia and non-essential complexity.
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  > I think there’s probably a significant amount of highly transferable learnings you’ve gone through while spending all that time configuring your machine. Was any of that time wasted? Oh my god no. I ran gentoo ~amd64 on my desktop for YEARS. If you don't know gentoo you don't know what that means, but, I learned A LOT. I wouldn't trade it for anything, it's just not right for me anymore.
binkHN 4y ago
Funny, but this is the same reason I use ChromeOS—I get something that’s simple to use and update, but I can also use the built-in Linux VM for all my Linux needs (and not have to work about hardware inculpabilities, drivers and whatnot).
kitsunesoba 4y ago
This has been one of the barriers to adopting Linux full-time for me too. The depth of the customization is great, but the fact that it's possible means that I'm endlessly twiddling trying to get things "just right", and from there it's a constant battle to keep it that way. Part of this might have to do with how the sorts of tiling WM setups that Linux aficionados seem to love aren't compatible with me at all, and more traditional minimalist setups (e.g. OpenBox+tint2 or whatever the modern equivalents to those are) left too many unfilled or badly filled holes, which drives me to the bigger DEs, which are opinionated in ways that don't necessarily align with me which drives the twiddling. The only way I can see this changing is if I somehow become able to pay the bills without working and pour myself into developing my own DE and essentially make the twiddling my job (which I think I would actually love doing, but doesn't seem particularly realistic).
neoromantique 4y ago
just my 2cents, I have moved back to MacOS once M1 macs were released and have been using macbook air with m1 as my daily driver device ever since. I wasn't really having any problems per se, window management on macos is a bit lacking and I'm not fond of the forced animations everywhere, but overall I was pretty happy with how everything functions. Until few weeks ago I had free time and an adventurous mood to try out the Asahi (It's really painless to do so), and the moment I git clone'd my dotfiles and logged into my old i3 configuration I was very astounded by the sheer snappiness of everything, fingers remember all the shortcuts and all of the workspace switching is /instant/. That's something I have tried to replicate on MacOS multiple times and always failed, yabai and the like are not even close. I still reboot into macos for when I'm mobile as I don't trust sleep on asahi (I don't think it even works that is), but when I use it at home I am very impressed by how stable and daily drive-able it is if current (admittedly, significant) compromises work for you.
- minton 4y ago
  Are you dual booting your M1?
  - neoromantique 4y ago
    Yes, that's default mode of installation for asahi
- howinteresting 4y ago
  This is why I'm tempted to try Asahi. After a decade of using macOS full time the idea of ever using it again makes me want to run to the woods, and Windows is only a little better. The Macs do seem quite powerful, though I expect the AMD laptops coming out this year to rival them. BTW, many professionals like and use a highly customized setup which only Linux can offer. This is true in other fields too. See, for example, Euroracks.
gigatexal 4y ago
Maybe you’re more OCD than I am. Im the opposite. I run dnf upgrade once every few days and don’t bother or think about it afterwards. I start my work Linux PC fire up a terminal and launch vim, slack, open Jira, and get to work. Everything literally just works. And when I’m done my gaming PC that also runs fedora runs steam and Blizzard games just fine. It’s amazing. Now I spend more of my time trying to give back (in the form of money or by evangelism) to the open source projects and maintainers that make my life so beautifully simple and fun.
happymellon 4y ago
As a personal Fedora Gnome user, I have zero customisation I have to do which leads to absolutely zero monthly maintenance. And my personal projects are much easier to just get on with. My work Mac requires constant TLC, although that's mostly because they want a container based workflow which is obviously not native to MacOS and there is always something going wrong that requires a couple of hours tweaking to get healthy again each month. It also doesn't help that my Mac feels more responsive but also feels much slower. Again it's probably the container based workflow, or all the crappy AV and management software scanning each other but compiling code feels like it takes forever compared to my several year old Linux laptop.
- rkangel 4y ago
  I also am a Fedora Gnome user for the same reasons, with the same result. It is by far the most solid, JustWorks Linux experience. I also think that modern Gnome is actually a really good DE.
  - happymellon 4y ago
    One of the reasons folks moved to Mac was because they could get a good development environment without all the Windows bloatware that makes it really hostile to work with. I didn't find it very fast coming from a Linux background, but it was better than Windows. Unfortunately we are now at that state with Mac as well. I have a pre-VPN (Netskope?) that starts before logon which networks the laptop directly to the work public network that I then have to Cisco VPN from that to reach the work network. I have SentinalOne, Netskope, Qualys all installed and all "realtime scanning". And it's slow. Security don't trust the employees and will mandate all this "security" software that could be bypassed if I actually was hostile but makes everyone else's environment terrible. I'm sure if Linux became the desktop of developers we will end up with a load of rootkits too.
    - pastage 4y ago
      My advice flee! SentinelOne is the most unuseable piece of software I have ever used, it only gives you false positives and can not handle spear phishing from people who actually know what they are doing. It sounds good on paper and once you deploy it you will have a hard time arguing for making system "less secure".
pabs3 4y ago
You can get a read-only system with SilverBlue, the immutable variant of Fedora: https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/about https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/about
midoridensha 4y ago
>Oh cool there's a .001 version bump on the graphics drivers, let me spend all day recompiling that and tweaking my awesomerc. That's a you problem, not a Linux problem. I haven't compiled any drivers for Linux in many, many years, probably decades even. It helps to avoid Nvidia GPUs however, but even here I haven't seen a big problem in ages (my work computer unfortunately sticks me with an Nvidia, but Debian updates seem to work as normal).
- smcl 4y ago
  That's true in some cases, but remember hardware support can be a little bit mixed, particularly closer to the bleeding edge. So you could be happy enough most of the time, but if you encounter an issue that is annoying and disruptive but obscure enough that 90% of your day-to-day is OK, then you could definitely find yourself rebuilding and using kernel point-releases
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    I'm sorry, this is just wrong. I've never heard of anyone absolutely needing to compile anything, especially the kernel, on a mainstream Linux distro (e.g. Ubuntu) in ages. Plus, if your graphics card is Nvidia, you don't get to compile anything: the driver is a binary blob (only the shim is compiled).
    - smcl 4y ago
      I have literally experienced this, I'm not sure how you can dismiss it as "just wrong"
      - midoridensha 4y ago
        What, exactly, have you experienced?
    - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
      I ran gentoo, from stage1 ~amd64. I compiled everything from scratch. I know I did it in hard mode.

Koshkin 4y ago

I remember getting addicted to constant updates some years ago, when I was using Gentoo. Switching (back) to Slackware cured me. I do not now why since Slackware, too, gets regular updates. I now check for updates once a month or so.

s_c_r 4y ago

I think it’s a matter of expectations. I use stock Ubuntu and GNOME and have almost zero customizations. I haven’t touched it except to upgrade since 2018 and have had zero issues. I get it though. I also use an M1 and love it.

speed_spread 4y ago
Yeah, using one of the big boring distros really helps to focus on work. I've switched to Fedora for my new box and once the hardware setup was sorted I just stopped messing with it.
- Rediscover 4y ago
  I use Slackware or OpenBSD. I completely understand You said (I used RH based distros when I was at Some-Large Commercial Air* in Seattle (it was a joy minus my second set of mgr's)). As much as I dislike using Red Hat*, they are great at what You mention.
Gigachad 4y ago
I don’t even install all those gnome extensions everyone insists are essential. The base fedora install + the proprietary codecs repo is literally all you need. Everything else is a waste of time.

jack_pp 4y ago

Well that's like not eating chocolate, no one forces you to do it.. you just gotta not do it. I've been on linux for the past however many years and I don't waste time on my setup at all. I pretty much have the same setup for the last 4-5 years. I've spent maybe 20 hours since then tweaking things / switching distros. Never had to recompile my kernel, my drivers or anything like that since I'm on a t490 thinkpad and it pretty much just works.

farresito 4y ago

I hope that doesn't come across too negative, but that sounds more like a problem that you personally have than something inherent from the customization that Linux offers. I run Arch with i3, vim, and tmux and quite frankly I don't think I spend more than an a couple of hours per month maintaining my configuration, and I don't see exactly where one would spend so much time. If you struggle with that, instead of changing your config, write down on a notepad the changes that you would do, and at the end of the week review them. Chances are the majority of stuff is unimportant.

ctvo 4y ago
> I don't think I spend more than an a couple of hours per month maintaining my configuration This is... still significant. Outside of auto updates sometimes rebooting my laptop overnight and major version bumps requiring me to hit the "update" button explicitly once a year, I'm unsure what "maintaining my configuration" would entail once things were setup to your liking on macOS.
- lttlrck 4y ago
  I'm not sure what the GP is maintaining but I have used the latest Fedora and Sway (and i3 before that) day-in and day-out for years, all I do is run dnf update once in a while... it gets completely out of the way.
  - tempest_ 4y ago
    Yeah, I use an arch derivative so its a rolling distro and even with the problems that entails I update packages about once a week and have not had issues since a bug got me 2 years ago. How often are things changing for these people that configs need to constantly reviewed?
    - palata 4y ago
      I guess some people want heavier customisation, whereas they just accept what macOS enforces. I have been using different Linux distros in the last 15 years (mostly Arch, so rolling), and really I don't customise much (default i3, default vim, etc). Doesn't really require any maintenance at all, I would say.

epgui 4y ago

The other replies to your comment cover my most immediate thought, so I won’t repeat any of that. However, in addition, I think there’s probably a significant amount of highly transferable learnings you’ve gone through while spending all that time configuring your machine. Was any of that time wasted? Well, probably, at least by some measure… But it’s also very hard to gauge the value of all the incidental knowledge you gained about what computers are, how they work, etc. My point is this: don’t over-penalize yourself for wasting time when you’re learning in the process, and try and remember how magical it is to learn things for the first time. And for other readers… It’s good to be pragmatic, but if you’re lucky enough to be in a position to spend a lot of time tinkering, playing, learning, then DO IT. Life is meant to enjoy!

sanderjd 4y ago
I loved running Linux in college and tried every new (or old) distribution and compiled oh so much stuff and fiddled with every new (or old) thing I could find to fiddle with and thought it was super cool to write config files by hand and be able to read and modify all the source to everything I was running. As you point out, this was an excellent learning experience for me. I kept doing that for awhile after I graduated, but eventually I realized it wasn't a good learning experience anymore, it was just a tedious waste of my time. I realized I should have been socializing or recreating outdoors or reading or picking up new hobbies if I wasn't working. Since then I've mostly used Macs or Linux machines maintained by the company I work for, and this is definitely a much better use of my time. There are only so many fundamentals to learn here before it becomes just so much minutia and non-essential complexity.
AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
> I think there’s probably a significant amount of highly transferable learnings you’ve gone through while spending all that time configuring your machine. Was any of that time wasted? Oh my god no. I ran gentoo ~amd64 on my desktop for YEARS. If you don't know gentoo you don't know what that means, but, I learned A LOT. I wouldn't trade it for anything, it's just not right for me anymore.

binkHN 4y ago

Funny, but this is the same reason I use ChromeOS—I get something that’s simple to use and update, but I can also use the built-in Linux VM for all my Linux needs (and not have to work about hardware inculpabilities, drivers and whatnot).

kitsunesoba 4y ago

This has been one of the barriers to adopting Linux full-time for me too. The depth of the customization is great, but the fact that it's possible means that I'm endlessly twiddling trying to get things "just right", and from there it's a constant battle to keep it that way. Part of this might have to do with how the sorts of tiling WM setups that Linux aficionados seem to love aren't compatible with me at all, and more traditional minimalist setups (e.g. OpenBox+tint2 or whatever the modern equivalents to those are) left too many unfilled or badly filled holes, which drives me to the bigger DEs, which are opinionated in ways that don't necessarily align with me which drives the twiddling. The only way I can see this changing is if I somehow become able to pay the bills without working and pour myself into developing my own DE and essentially make the twiddling my job (which I think I would actually love doing, but doesn't seem particularly realistic).

neoromantique 4y ago

just my 2cents, I have moved back to MacOS once M1 macs were released and have been using macbook air with m1 as my daily driver device ever since. I wasn't really having any problems per se, window management on macos is a bit lacking and I'm not fond of the forced animations everywhere, but overall I was pretty happy with how everything functions. Until few weeks ago I had free time and an adventurous mood to try out the Asahi (It's really painless to do so), and the moment I git clone'd my dotfiles and logged into my old i3 configuration I was very astounded by the sheer snappiness of everything, fingers remember all the shortcuts and all of the workspace switching is /instant/. That's something I have tried to replicate on MacOS multiple times and always failed, yabai and the like are not even close. I still reboot into macos for when I'm mobile as I don't trust sleep on asahi (I don't think it even works that is), but when I use it at home I am very impressed by how stable and daily drive-able it is if current (admittedly, significant) compromises work for you.

minton 4y ago
Are you dual booting your M1?
- neoromantique 4y ago
  Yes, that's default mode of installation for asahi
howinteresting 4y ago
This is why I'm tempted to try Asahi. After a decade of using macOS full time the idea of ever using it again makes me want to run to the woods, and Windows is only a little better. The Macs do seem quite powerful, though I expect the AMD laptops coming out this year to rival them. BTW, many professionals like and use a highly customized setup which only Linux can offer. This is true in other fields too. See, for example, Euroracks.

gigatexal 4y ago

Maybe you’re more OCD than I am. Im the opposite. I run dnf upgrade once every few days and don’t bother or think about it afterwards. I start my work Linux PC fire up a terminal and launch vim, slack, open Jira, and get to work. Everything literally just works. And when I’m done my gaming PC that also runs fedora runs steam and Blizzard games just fine. It’s amazing. Now I spend more of my time trying to give back (in the form of money or by evangelism) to the open source projects and maintainers that make my life so beautifully simple and fun.

happymellon 4y ago

As a personal Fedora Gnome user, I have zero customisation I have to do which leads to absolutely zero monthly maintenance. And my personal projects are much easier to just get on with. My work Mac requires constant TLC, although that's mostly because they want a container based workflow which is obviously not native to MacOS and there is always something going wrong that requires a couple of hours tweaking to get healthy again each month. It also doesn't help that my Mac feels more responsive but also feels much slower. Again it's probably the container based workflow, or all the crappy AV and management software scanning each other but compiling code feels like it takes forever compared to my several year old Linux laptop.

rkangel 4y ago
I also am a Fedora Gnome user for the same reasons, with the same result. It is by far the most solid, JustWorks Linux experience. I also think that modern Gnome is actually a really good DE.
- happymellon 4y ago
  One of the reasons folks moved to Mac was because they could get a good development environment without all the Windows bloatware that makes it really hostile to work with. I didn't find it very fast coming from a Linux background, but it was better than Windows. Unfortunately we are now at that state with Mac as well. I have a pre-VPN (Netskope?) that starts before logon which networks the laptop directly to the work public network that I then have to Cisco VPN from that to reach the work network. I have SentinalOne, Netskope, Qualys all installed and all "realtime scanning". And it's slow. Security don't trust the employees and will mandate all this "security" software that could be bypassed if I actually was hostile but makes everyone else's environment terrible. I'm sure if Linux became the desktop of developers we will end up with a load of rootkits too.
  - pastage 4y ago
    My advice flee! SentinelOne is the most unuseable piece of software I have ever used, it only gives you false positives and can not handle spear phishing from people who actually know what they are doing. It sounds good on paper and once you deploy it you will have a hard time arguing for making system "less secure".

pabs3 4y ago

You can get a read-only system with SilverBlue, the immutable variant of Fedora: https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/about https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/about

midoridensha 4y ago

>Oh cool there's a .001 version bump on the graphics drivers, let me spend all day recompiling that and tweaking my awesomerc. That's a you problem, not a Linux problem. I haven't compiled any drivers for Linux in many, many years, probably decades even. It helps to avoid Nvidia GPUs however, but even here I haven't seen a big problem in ages (my work computer unfortunately sticks me with an Nvidia, but Debian updates seem to work as normal).

smcl 4y ago
That's true in some cases, but remember hardware support can be a little bit mixed, particularly closer to the bleeding edge. So you could be happy enough most of the time, but if you encounter an issue that is annoying and disruptive but obscure enough that 90% of your day-to-day is OK, then you could definitely find yourself rebuilding and using kernel point-releases
- midoridensha 4y ago
  I'm sorry, this is just wrong. I've never heard of anyone absolutely needing to compile anything, especially the kernel, on a mainstream Linux distro (e.g. Ubuntu) in ages. Plus, if your graphics card is Nvidia, you don't get to compile anything: the driver is a binary blob (only the shim is compiled).
  - smcl 4y ago
    I have literally experienced this, I'm not sure how you can dismiss it as "just wrong"
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      What, exactly, have you experienced?
  - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
    I ran gentoo, from stage1 ~amd64. I compiled everything from scratch. I know I did it in hard mode.