8 ms·

Linux vs. Mac

20 points by TigerTeamX 4y ago

Have any long term Linux users here switched to Mac? What problems did you have, what do better than expected? I am seriously considering switching. I have been using Linux for like 10+ years, but this month have been rough. I was using Mint in the start of the month, but an upgrade broke so many things - even "Shutdown" and "restart" was not possible. I switched to Ubuntu 22.10, and now every 30 minutes I get a crash. I bought a new Microphone that kinda works, but not really.

b7we5b7a 4y ago
I've been using Linux as my daily driver for ~15y, have a Windows installation just for non-Steam games. When I switched jobs 5y ago I was issued a MacBook, and I had to adapt. My workflow is mostly with syseng/devops, so I have ~6 applications that I use daily, 3 I use once every couple weeks, the rest I don't even know exist. To this day, I've never fully adapted to MacOS UI: the Command key is the center of the universe, and it's in a completely unnatural position (double it if you have big hands, not to mention the useless Fn key in place of Ctrl). You can remap it, but then you're never sure what you're pressing anymore if you attach a new keyboard. Alt-tabbing is #1 in my grind-my-gears daily list: MacOS uses application tabbing, which doesn't make any sense whatsoever to me. I use Witch to solve it, but sometimes the Witch overlay won't display, even though it did for the previous 4h (and I'm 99% sure Witch isn't the problem). Window tiling/placement is #2: Windows 7 had magnetic corners already, MacOS seems hell-bent on pushing touchpad gestures, magic corners to activate features and workspaces. I don't want to lift my hands from the keyboard and stare at randomly aligned miniatures of windows to understand which one I need to click: I want to easily alt-tab between them! I don't want to wait for a couple seconds of animation while you swipe left/right the windows across workspaces! And the stupid third green button in the title bar of a window should definitely NOT maximize the window and send it to a separate workspace and hiding the title bar! BetterSnapTool helps with window placement, at least. I have disabled all gestures, mission control, workspaces and magic corners entirely. The only two gestures that are useful to me are two-finger-scroll (like Windows/Linux do it, UNnatural apparently) and two-finger-swipe left/right (because they can save a ton of time pressing back/forward in the browser, at times). Focus stealing is #3: if you open an app, and it takes a while to load, you may think you can go back to your business for the 15-30s it takes, right? NOPE! While you're right in the middle of entering your password or <important command> in an SSH session, the Notes app you opened earlier will happily steal the focus mid-words! Oh, I was also one of the unlucky guys to come in right during the period of the Touchbar madness: too late to skip it, too early to take a model without it. I have essentially disabled 90% of the stuff, and it shows FN1-FN12 keys by default for all apps. When I press the Fn key, I get brightness/audio/backlight control, nothing else. Unfortunately the ESC key stays up there, I simply learnt not to use it too much anymore (yes, I know it can be remapped, but seriously, why should I remap a key so useful in the first place?). Finder is next-to-useless to me, I try to actively avoid it and tab away in the terminal most of the times. Windows Explorer is _SO_ much more logical: the tree and the content are separate panels, and you can navigate the tree much more easily. The CLI applications seem ok, until you actually try to use them. Some are outdated, some are the BSD-y versions or derivations and lack modern features. Linux ones have evolved slightly since 25y ago and are just more ergonomic, e.g: `find . -name "stuff"` vs `find -name "stuff"`, and other small paper cuts. After a couple weeks, I just prepended the brew-installed coreutils/findutils PATH and went on with my life. The graphics department is a joke and suffers from NIH syndrome, if you ever want to do even some light gaming on it. My Linux desktop can run AAA Steam games under Sway better than some compiled-for-Mac games I've tried. I believe they did a good job with the filesystem and security-by-design though, those pretty much just work. Perhaps too much of a good job: I tried installing Linux, and thanks to the T2 chip I just gave up in the end - custom-built kernel, special not-so-stable modules, half of the stuff not working. I simply gave up. I hope the Asahi Linux project will enable a better experience, because as others have said, the hardware is almost unbeatable for the price-point. But the software... ugh. Just not for me. Lately I've been using Ubuntu as daily driver for servers/runners, and toyed with the GUI in VMs. For all the bad things that are usually said about Gnome and Canonical, I've grown to appreciate it. Probably the experience is best on recent and open hardware and drivers (Intel/AMD), I learned to stay away from nVidia under linux ~10y ago and never looked back. I also quite like where Pop!_OS is going (COSMIC, Rust), I'm pretty sure when they release their new DE I'll try it out.
rich_sasha 4y ago
I love Linux, but oh my God it is so unstable for me. Updates crash things all the time. The whole Nvidia driver takes me days to sort out each time. Depending on segment, commercial software tends to be less available. You also need to know just so much low level stuff just to keep going. Wayland vs X, display managers, grub config... Too much for me. Linux has many redeeming features but it can be a full time job just to keep it running. By contrast, Mac comes in one size and configurability is limited, but out of the box it just works.
- TigerTeamX 4y ago
  Yeah exactly! Especially the whole Wayland and Snap experience. It seems like it is not quite there - I understand the benefits but just not right there.
- redeeman 4y ago
  could you describe a bit what you do that takes days to sort out nvidia driver?
  - rich_sasha 4y ago
    I recently set up two boxes with Ubuntu 20.04 . Both were on the Ubuntu list of supported hardware. Power on - it works. Install updates and restart - black screen. Ok not to panic, just do the usual: google random commands on the Internet and type them in. Ok, boot Linux in nosplash mode - fine, that works. Reinstall Nvidia drivers - whole box goes to shit and the only thing that does anything is reinstalling the distro from scratch. Tried this again for good measure just in case, but unsurprisingly with the same effect. Many gray hairs later, it turns out the system update installs a new kernel which has a bug to do with Nvidia drivers causing the whole thing to crash and burn. So if I downgrade the kernel (is that even a good idea?) and install Nvidia drivers there, it's ok. Some more random-commands-from-internet and this is done. Nvidia drivers installed, computer works. Now I'll "just" install MATE instead of the default desktop env which I dislike. Some warnings about display manager..? Hmm let's see what happens in a mo. Install complete, reboot, machine is fucked again. I'm getting desperate now, for a week I did nothing but type various cryptic commands, prepending sudo if they didn't work. I mean, I'm a decent Linux user, but I don't know what the lshw command I just typed in does. But never mind. On an Estonian Linux forum I find someone who has the same issue, and has a fix: boot in safe mode, get a terminal, disable some obscure MATE option via cli, then reboot. Yes! That worked - but why..? I breathe a sigh of relief and think fondly of my Mac at home. There are or course the Nouveau drivers, but they get my PC hot if I wiggle.the mouse too much so that's not an option. If it happened once, maybe I was unlucky, but happened on two different boxes in the span of months from each other.
mongol 4y ago
Have you checked your RAM memory?
- TigerTeamX 4y ago
  Great suggestion, running memtester now.
ofalkaed 4y ago
I have not used Macs in years but the one observation I would offer, a good amount of linux/OSS software seems to break when Apple updates the OS and it does not seem a good platform if you want to keep using such software. This observation is based off of the dozen or so projects I follow the development of (mostly audio related) so may not be at all accurate to the wider view and I just may have found one of the little niches where these problems are more common.
- blacksmith_tb 4y ago
  Hmm, is this an AI response? How could Apple break linux sw? I use four personal machines pretty frequently (a few hours, a few time a week), one Mac Mini, a recent all-AMD Asus laptop running Ubuntu 22.10, an old Dell laptop (with a discreet nVidia card) running Ubuntu 22.10, and a really old Toshiba ultrabook running Pop_OS! None of them break regularly, though the Asus (probably from being the newest) has a fingerprint sensor that has never quite worked right under Ubuntu. Other than the slowness and clunkiness of snaps, Ubuntu seems fine to me? Going forward I will probably stick to Pop, it seems a little better thought out than plain ol' Ubuntu, but the differences aren't night and day.
  - TigerTeamX 4y ago
    Dont know if it is a AI response, but one of my friends had a M1 and we couldn't watch a movie because VLC wasn't ported yet. Just some weird things with Snaps that made me "snap" :P Like, Installing Chromium with snap, and then it doesn't have access to file drop which is something I use like 20 times a day. This easily adds 30 minutes to my work. Or sharing my screen I have to click 4 buttons in a slow and clunky manner.
    - ofalkaed 4y ago
      Snap, flatpack and the like are not really sorted out yet and possibly never will be. Best to avoid them and if you cant install from your distro's repo than compile it yourself. The issue with your friend and their M1 was probably because he was running linux on it and not OSX? he surely could have watched a movie with the native OSX apps if that was not the case.
rochak 4y ago
I was in the same boat as you. Used Linux for many years, switched a couple of distributions in the hopes of finding anything stable that also worked out of the box, the closest I got to was Debian but even it had issues with Wifi and Bluetooth. Finally bit the bullet on Macs and it has been okay at best. Sure, I got the reliability and things that worked out of the box, but lost a lot in terms of freedom and flexibility.
- TigerTeamX 4y ago
  Freedom and flexibity is a large part, but also so many bad stories when the hardware breaks.
mackwell 4y ago
Crash every 30 minutes on a clean install sounds like a hardware issue. In my experience an Ubuntu install is able to run continuously for long stretches without issue. Whether you enjoy switching to Mac OS is going to depend on what you use your machine for. In general, for my main work machine I use Mac and I have very little to no downtime ever. However, much of the benefit of going Mac is gained if you go all in on the ecosystem across devices.
- TigerTeamX 4y ago
  Yeah definitely weird and it didn't happen before. I am running a memtester as mongol suggested. I really enjoy Linux and the freedom it gives me, but using 30 hours last month getting things to work so I can do work... is not how I want to spend my time.
dgan 4y ago
Funny, I just found a new job where I got a MacBook Pro for the first time in my life, M2 chip. I am Linux user for 7 years now, and I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed + XFCE + NVIDIA card, and I literally have 0 problems with it for 2 last years Opinion on Mac book after using it for barely 3 weeks: Excellent: - battery life - sound sucks, out of top of my head: - when you press Enter it wants to rename a file (?? lol) - terminal hotkeys don't always work (Ctrl + back doesn't delete a word...) - "fn" is the most left key... instead of control... - windows management is trash, i cant "magnet" to borders of the screen - I wasn't able to plug a LG usb mouse (?? apparently I need a tutorial to plug a mouse) - hotkeys in Pycharm/Intellij are different and not interchangeable - brew is not as good as zypper - need to use AppleStore for some applications - when installing applications they don't seem to be available in terminal ...
- ShrimpHawk 4y ago
  Use Rectangle[1] for magnet snapping window management. For almost every mac complaint there exists a tool to solve it. [1]https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/
  - PrimeMcFly 4y ago
    > For almost every mac complaint there exists a tool to solve it. Instead of running an OS with a ton of little tools and hacks, why not just run on that lets you configure it how you want?
    - sshine 4y ago
      You configure Linux by installing lots of little tools, too. Mac has defaults, and they seem off when you don't use Mac. Once you accept Mac as your system, you either adopt those defaults or start tweaking them. I think of Mac as a UNIX with an average window manager, but with excellent integrations.
      - PrimeMcFly 4y ago
        I can tweak Linux by adding little tools, sure, but it's very useable even if I don't. And sure, to some extent Mac has a different paradigm, and if you are used to it it won't seem strange. But on top of all of that, objectively, the mac UI is still incredibly limiting and frustrating in ways that no other DE is, even with being familiar with it.
BenGosub 4y ago
I have been a happy Ubuntu user for years. For ke the OS is completely stable and never crashes. It's also very efficient with resources, compared to Windows. I have a music production hobby and the main obstacle for me in using Linux is no drivers for hardware and no VSTs.
Kim_Bruning 4y ago
All the operating systems seem to suck at the moment. If there is anything that a) just works b) is pretty c) allows me to run all the software d) doesn't sell my private data to the highest bidder that would be nice.
- TigerTeamX 4y ago
  Apple stuff probably comes the closet to your criteria.
cramjabsyn 4y ago
Yes I ran a linux desktop for years and switched to mac. Aside from getting used to the feel of the UI and finding replacement apps (that sometimes cost a few bucks) the experience has been excellent. My Mac just works, upgrades are seamless (but do wait a few months before major os upgrades), the battery lasts all day, the audio and video quality are good, lid close suspends the system correctly every time. And everything syncs with my phone. I spend most of my time in the terminal anyway, and just ssh to my linux dev host. I don't worry about trying to set up a full dev environment on my laptop, I prefer to do that on a linux server
kleer001 4y ago
Are you on a shiny new desktop with all the bells and whistles with more RAM than you'll ever need and a 10TB RAID setup? Are you on a scuzzy 20 year old laptop with 64MB of ram and a 20GB HD? Have you considered an Arch based distro? Personally I switched from 15 years with Apple products to Linux land and while it's a lot different I like it.
jamesbvaughan 4y ago
I switched from a Linux laptop to a Macbook Pro for after about 5 years on Linux. The initial reason was that my last employer required us to use Macbooks. I now have the option to use whatever computer I'd like and (for now at least) I'm still sticking with the Macbook. The main things that keep me on it are: - Excellent hardware. The build quality is higher than any non-Apple laptop I've tried and the display is really good. - Performance and battery usage with the Apple silicon chip is great. - iCloud sync. I use an iPhone and frequently make use of iMessage, photos, and clipboard syncing between devices. I know that you can replicate a lot of that with Android and Linux, but at this point I'm pretty deep in Apple's ecosystem and am unlikely to switch away anytime soon. The biggest thing I miss is having a good tiling window manager experience. I have a desktop running Sway[0] and really love it. I've tried a handful of tiling window managers for mac and none of them have felt really good to use. They all feel like I'm fighting the OS more than working with it. If there were a lightweight laptop with good linux compatibility, a high-dpi, high refresh rate display, and competitive battery life, I'd be very tempted to switch back to linux just to have a good window manager again. I'm hoping that Asahi on the MBP can give me that, but it seems like it's not quite ready for daily driving yet. [0] https://swaywm.org/ https://swaywm.org/
- brucethemoose2 4y ago
  Terrible windows laptops are just terrible laptops, but seeing my Asus G14 side by side next to a macbook pro doesn't really leave me wanting for anything. Its about the same size. The screen, keyboard, trackpad... all comparable. It has more ports. The cooling system in the G14 blows the mac away, hence it can run passively and sip battery just piddling around the desktop. The mac has 3 big advantages as far as I can tell: - Power efficiency under heavy GPU/AI loads. If you even sniff the dGPU in a PC, you can kiss your battery goodby. - A large RAM pool for GPU/AI stuff. - No fussing around with different power settings/fan profiles for different situations. As for the PC laptop - It has a huge gaming advantage -"native nvidia" is often easier for ML stuff. Software differences are a whole other can of worms.
  - jamesbvaughan 4y ago
    The G14 looks pretty good - I hadn't checked it out before. It's slightly thicker and heavier than the MPB and I'd really like to go lighter rather than heavier if I were to switch. If gaming were a priority for me though, something like this seems like it would be the way to go.
chrisfosterelli 4y ago
I switched from being a lifelong Linux user to being a Mac user. Nearly everything was better: 95%+ of the tools I use were the exact same, everything was just more usable and stable. The biggest draw was that I wasn't stuck with PC hardware anymore, which is nice because I really prefer Macbook hardware and most Linux OS's just don't work well enough with it for me. I'm a web developer though so YMMV depending on what you're doing for work, but for me I was able to bring vim, Chrome, zsh, and most linux commands, which covers the vast majority of my day. The biggest drawback was that running FOSS was something I cared about and no longer doing so made me feel sad for a bit. The filesystem layout is slightly different but still UNIX-y and newer versions of MacOS don't let you put files wherever you want (which makes sense from a security perspective but is nonetheless an adjustment). I struggle to think of much more than that. The operating system just gets out of my way now and I appreciate that, and we still run Linux on all of our servers for everything so I've got that at least.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  I’ve never encountered a warning about not putting files wherever I want. Where would you want to put files, say, outside your user’s home folder?
  - chrisfosterelli 4y ago
    There's been a couple times I had a generic binary I wanted to drop in `/bin/` or a package that wanted to install itself to `/usr/` The correct way is to just not do this, which is fine, it was just super weird to use `sudo` and then have the OS tell me 'no'. It's much more rare now that I've created $HOME/.bin and added it to my $PATH and nearly all 3rd party apps have been updated to not install to SIP directories.
ChymeraXYZ 4y ago
I switched last year after being exclusively on Linux for approx 5 years. Hardware is hands down the best in terms of battery life. It's hilarious compared to pretty much anything else I have tried. Software is... Meh. But the part that really is the window management. What is there currently in mac (and Windows) is, mildly put, a joke.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  If you have to use Windows, look into PowerToys/FancyZones. I actually prefer that to the Mac at this point.
kkoncevicius 4y ago
Bad: - Inability to set up your /home/ (which is /Users/ on a mac) the way you like it. There are default folders for Documents, Pictures, Music, etc and they cannot be deleted. If you delete them they are recreated either immediately or on reboot. My hack-of-a-solution was to alias ls to hide them [1]. - There are also applications that you cannot delete. One such application is Chess - a program that let's you play chess. No idea why it's there by default and why it's impossible to delete it. - .DS_Store files. Whenever you open a folder in a Finder (default file browser on a Mac) it will add a hidden .DS_Store file within that folder. This file stores and remembers how you chose to arrange your folders in a graphical file manager. But these files often get in a way: you will find them in tarballs, git repositories, etc. Just like with removing folders, I don't think there is a solution that can turn them off. - Recent OS update made system-settings look like you are on a phone. Apple probably wants to push an interface for system settings that is common to iPads, iPhones, MacBooks and even Apple Watches, but for me it's hard to get used to that. Good: - Default Applications are quite tasteful. In particular the Mail client, and default Apple Terminal. They have everything I need without being full of toy features - Stable. Both hardware and Software. My MacBook pro is 5 years old now, but I never had an issue with hangs, reboots, crashes or anything of this kind. - Third-party package managers. Homebrew is more popular, but I prefer MacPorts. Whichever you choose, you can set up your system to use linux compilers, shells, coreutils, etc. By default Apple command line arsenal is a bit dated and opinionated so to me this is a must. Once you have this done the command-line experience is almost indistinguishable from Linux (well, apart from /home/ stuff and .DS_Store things). [1]: http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/posts/cleaning_home_on_macos/index.html http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/posts/cleaning_home_on_macos/i...
- TigerTeamX 4y ago
  Thanks for the nice summary. What about user interface? I always felt MacOS clunky when I tried a Macbook. E.g. no sticky windows.
  - kkoncevicius 4y ago
    The desktop environment is quite configurable and can adapt to a few different styles of doing things. For example, I like asceticism so I hide the menu bar (clock, etc, on top), hide the dock (list of opened applications and quick-launch icons), and have an empty desktop with just a wallpaper. I use "Spotlight Search" (which you get by pressing meta-spacebar) to launch everything. The search is very integrated with the system so you are able to start applications, search your email inbox, browse bookmarks and web history, open notes and contacts, etc, all with the same search. But of course there are also feature for people who do things differently. One good example is Stage Manager [1]. There are also things like "Mission Control" and multiple desktops, but I am not the right person to talk about these. Oh one more thing - seems like Apple likes to reverse things on purpose. So the "x" for closing windows is on the left, and not on the right. The desktop icons appear on the right, not on the left. If you use trackpad to scroll it's also reversed - when your fingers slide down the page slides down as well. Takes some time getting used to this. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7t_BCmY-lg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7t_BCmY-lg
0xbadc0de5 4y ago
Sounds like a hardware problem to me. I've been daily driving Fedora and Ubuntu Linux for around 20 years now and it's been getting progressively better and more stable. The last 5 years or so I no longer even bother installing Windows on my PC's. Buying a Mac will certainly solve any hardware issue you're currently experiencing. But so would buying a new PC. Mac's have their own issues, as does Windows and BSD. It's a pick-your-poison situation.
brucethemoose2 4y ago
"Stable" linux distros like Mint and Ubuntu have given me nothing but trouble, as the packages are so old that they have unfixed bugs with newer hardware. I am running CachyOS now and love it, but for a "stable" distro I would probably pick Fedora Kionite, or maybe Clear Linux, and augment their package selection with flatpack.
locusofself 4y ago
It's hard to beat the Apple UX. My macbook air m1 is the best laptop I have ever had. Do I love macOS? Not really. But if you need to develop in Linux just fire up a VM. I use a windows laptop for my work because I work at Microsoft. At the end of the day most of us spend 90% of our time in a browser, vs code, and bash or powershell. The experience between the 3 major OSs is not that different.
- shortrounddev 4y ago
  > The experience between the 3 major OSs is not that different I agree, for programming tasks (though I really came to hate everything about macOS UX for everything else). The one major difference I've noticed is that docker runs great on Linux, runs great on Windows with Docker Desktop/WSL2, and runs like mollases on my company issues 8gb macbook pro
brucethemoose2 4y ago
And as for OSX vs linux... apples and oranges. Just depends on what apps I want to run. Personally I love the ease of machine learning stuff in linux, but thats now a strong suit of Apple hardware too. If you are buying a GPU/NPU-less laptop, I would probably go with Apple, if only so you can run LLMs and stuff locally.
aborsy 4y ago
Ubuntu works pretty good on laptop and desktop. I don’t recall any problems for years. The hardware support is excellent, but if occasionally something is not supported, there can be inconveniences. You should check if your distribution works on that laptop. I won’t switch because I don’t trust a closed source black box with my life. I can understand what Linux does, and suitably lock it down and customize it. I support FOSS, and Linux in particular. Freedom is amazing!
franciscop 4y ago
I have! IMHO any answer is going to be personal, so I'm going to give my personal take. Advantages: - Biggest one without a doubt is battery life. This is both a hardware and software issue, but it's such a deal breaker for me who used to work remotely and was always frustrated with Linux because of this. - High quality hardware. When I used linux I basically chose the closest laptop possible to mac anyway, since they ARE the highest quality in hardware (body case, touchpad, keyboard, etc.). Still nothing comes close by a mile in PC-land. I used to use the Zenbook line. - The programming transition is super-smooth. As a front-end dev, I did not notice at all the transition from the coding point of view. As you probably know, the new Apple Silicon also is great for dev. - Better UI consistency. In Linux you have different distros, each with it's own style that in 2023 are pretty great TBH. But then each program will use a different style, so it's a bit of a mess. With Mac you have a consistent UI across all apps. - As you said, everything (even with the Apple Silicon) basically works out of the box smoothly. Problems: - Pushing for Apple services. In the end, it's a platform and they push for their own services. Be it Safari, or having to go through XCode, or the Apple Store, yeah I am not too happy with that. - In Linux-land there's usually mid-range programs that do the job well, while with mac you have either the super-specialized ones or the not-enough ones. Example: light editing a pic with GIMP, light video editing with KDEnlive, etc. - Filesystem compatibility, I have my external backup drives encrypted with EXT3/4, and of course that doesn't work with Mac. - When you do manage to break something (I did in the past by installing python 3 and renaming `python` to point to `python3`) it's a lot harder to fix, in Linux it's easy to just burn a USB and reinstall it all. - Bunch of punctual problems that were fixed eventually; but point to the flaw that Apple is a single system and you are at their mercy. Couple of generations of all their laptops had terrible keyboards, the Apple Silicon was a lot smoother than I expected but still ofc it was a transition so was a bit painful, etc.
pprotas 4y ago
I’ve used Windows, Linux and Mac all my life. It’s all the same, honestly. Just pick your poison. Apple hardware is definitely better though!
peterhi 4y ago
The os itself eats much more of the resources than linux running on the same hardware. Macos is a "bigger" operating system (more parts) and they all want memory and cycles. Linux is positively anorexic in comparison :) It will also depend on how good you are at switching your "muscle memory" at the keyboard. But this is the same for all three of the main oses (linux, macos and windows). It can be very frustrating when you hit a keystroke combination and either it does nothing or something completely different Ubuntu / Mint is rock solid. I run Ubuntu 22.04 and have had no problems despite heavy customisation on old hardware (Dell Optiplex 3040). If you can install Ubuntu (or Mint) I would expect to run it without issue
- CoolCold 4y ago
  > I switched to Ubuntu 22.10, and now every 30 minutes I get a crash. I bought a new Microphone that kinda works, but not really.
debrice 4y ago
Cmd + C is great… regarding the rest, I suspect your hardware could also be the sources of your problems. I also think anybody can work on any OS (as it is the case right now). Most of my compute is done on my Linux desktop, I sometimes work remotely on my MacBook via SSH and SSH+VPN when away from home. In my experience all Mac laptops get uncomfortably (understatement ) hot quickly and sometimes won’t turn on the ventilation on (when available)
gtop3 4y ago
I'm going to focus on my experience, instead of addressing anything about your situation. I use two computers. A Fedora Linux workstation and a M1 Macbook Pro. I've been using Linux daily for about 15 years and macOS daily for about 10. My experience will be highly subjective, and it's rare to talk about them without striking up a debate. I could very feasibly only use my MBP. It could do all of my workloads. I choose to have a Linux desktop and use it as my primary computing device because I prefer working on Linux. This is something I pay extra for because I get more joy and experience less frustration from using Linux than macOS. The reason I choose to own a MBP is because I think Apple makes the best laptop hardware. The Apple silicon chips generation of MBPs are easily my favorite. I find it really convenient to have the ability to compute somewhere that is not my desk. If Linux had the same level of support for Apple hardware as macOS has, I would not use macOS. A lot of skills used in Linux will transfer over to macOS. The biggest ones are the command line. Homebrew and Ports are both capable package managers and will have most of the tools you need. I personally find APT/RPM to be both faster and more complete, but I have no data to back this up. Your bash scripts, python workflows, or whatever will mostly be intact. Anything operating on the OS layer will probably be broken, and you might be surprised about some command line applications missing in macOS because they relay on OS layer. I can make macOS work for me here, and do real development on it, but find Linux to be slightly more comfortable and full of features. iterm2 is a great terminal emulator for macOS. For the GUI userspace I find I still prefer the Linux options after years of exposure to macOS. I feel limited in my options for basic tools like file managers or clipboards. Many applications will try to do things in a certain style I refer to as "the mac way". It's fine, and easy to get use to. I feel it often leads to too many files in my desktop folder or Applications folder for my taste. Some tools, like firefox or emacs feel largely the same where the only differences are the areas in which the tool interacts with the OS layer. I am sometimes pleased to see that commercial software has better macOS support than Linux support, and I will rarely use macOS for specific software unavailable on Linux. On the OS layer of things, macOS generally has better stability and simpler upgrades than desktop Linux. I do like the iCloud integration, and find the MBP to be more in sync with my iPhone than my Linux desktop. I find the security and permissions layer of macOS to be more focused on non-expert users than Linux is. I am often asked to confirm before running binaries, and occasionally have to go into system settings to give an application specific permissions. The operating system is also very protective of some folders, and will ask for user permission before writing to what I would consider user-space folders. I find this is type of thing is generally tending towards being more annoying over time. I tend to think macs are a decent value. They are the highest quality laptop built, and operating one feels like it takes less system maintenance than a Linux laptop would. It seems like they often charge more for ram and storage than you would expect on a Linux system, so I focus on my actual needs more on my laptop. I spend about $3000 for a MBP and $3000 for a Linux workstation, and fully upgrade both about every 3 years. I could go much longer between upgrades. I could use cheaper computers too. These are tools that get thousands of hours of use each, and am happy to pay a premium for tools I enjoy using. I usually donate my old computers to family members. They usually receive a long lifespan of use. The Linux desktops seem to receive longer periods of use, because teenagers will upgrade a few parts and use them as gaming PCs.
mindcrime 4y ago
I haven't switched, from Linux to Mac in the sense that all of my personal computers are Linux. But I did switch from Windows to Mac at my $DAYJOB, so I have a lot of experience using both Linux and Mac, and in the same day no less. I've been using the Mac for around 2 years now I guess. My take? I'd scrap Mac OS X and put Linux on that Macbook in a heartbeat if it were allowed by company policy. I can't find a single thing that OS X does bette than Linux, and there are plenty of things that it doesn't do as well (by my personal standards). And that's before even getting into the ideological aspect, and the fact that I fundamentally hate Apple and their entire "walled garden, locked down, proprietary bullshit" world-view. The Mac hardware is nice, no doubt. But for my money, give me Linux any day of the week.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  I’ve been using UNIX (actual UNIX) and MacOS since before it got a BSD userland (so you can add one zero and 10 more years to your two) and it’s actually fun to see this kind of opinion, because it’s so biased to the point of ignoring all the actual shared history that macOS has. Relax. Touch grass. Figure out why it is that way. You may not like it all the same, but you’ll be able to understand why it’s that way.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
dysoco 4y ago
I did recently buy a Macbook Air M1 (Had never used Mac before) and stopped dualbooting Linux on my desktop machine (which I mostly use with Windows for gaming now) so I guess I qualify. Granted I haven't been doing anything extremely weird or complex with my Macbook, but so far I've been loving it, some pros and cons: Pros ======================= * Amazing battery life (prolly mostly because of hardware, but OS can come into play) * Amazing speed. Linux is usually speedy as well, but normally suspend/hibernate does not work, I can never turn off the macbook, and just open it and start using it in less than 5 seconds. * Great stability. Linux usually has crashes, sometimes requiring reboot, weird graphical glitches, apps that just won't open, slowdowns, etc. etc. Which usually happen exponentially more with uptime, this never happens on my Macbook, it just works all the time, and I never have to shut it down either. * Good native default apps by default, many 3rd party apps are also native and very well designed as well. (Although Linux has improved a lot in this regard as well). * Great font rendering. Could be the screen but I remember having poor rendering in Linux compared with Windows with the same screen. * Overall it just looks gorgeous and very polished (UI side, not so much UX side, read cons). * Not having other options for distros, hardware, having limited customization, etc. can sometimes be a pro, I have to think less about my system and I do more about what matters. * Great hardware overall in the Macbook (but not MacOS related). Cons ======================== * The UI is just plain stupid. I read many people arguing that it's just "different" and "the Mac way" but some decisions are just extremely anti-intuitive. Minimizing an app does nothing, alt-tab works weird, snapping windows works weird, closing a window will not shut down the app, many apps have a different response to either closing/maximizing the window or double-clicking the title-bar, etc. etc. (note that there are some 3rd party apps that solve some of these things, but not all). * Many apps have also weird (and imho, bad) and anti-intuitive interactions because of 1st point. * Many of the 3rd party apps you have to pay for, compared to Windows or Linux where they are usually free. I know $5 isn't much for someone in USA or Europe, but in other countries, it adds up for little utilities. * I believe you can play more games in Linux nowadays with Proton than you can on the Mac natively. * Overall I think Linux is more versatile, some libraries/dev tools are just easier to get on and run on Linux, like Docker. If you use software like Adobe products this probably works the other way around for you, but I don't. * No HDMI/USB plugs on the Macbook, have to buy a dongle and walk around with that as well, it's cumbersome but I understand it's to have a thin laptop. Conclusion ==================== I love the Macbook and overall my experience is better than with Linux; I would even consider using it as a desktop if I could get a good dock+keyboard+mouse combo that works flawlessly. HOWEVER if I could get a laptop with the same hardware, screen, battery life, etc. for the same price, in my country, but with Linux, would I get that instead? Honestly I believe so, I still believe KDE and even Gnome have a better user-experience, it's just that stability, speed and battery life just matters THAT much.
7e 4y ago
I’ve used Linux and Mac laptops simultaneously for the past two years. Linux has been terrible and the Mac has been a dream. The Linux desktop is a Potemkin village.
28304283409234 4y ago
Long time (23 years) Linux user forced to work on Mac by employer. Hate every minute of it. Brew is only impressive if you never used apt. Everything nags about licenses. Docker … well… hahahaha. External usb Ethernet dongles keep refusing to connect after sleeping. The CapsLock has a “helpful” feature that basically ignores the first press, in case you made a mistake. Fine, but I mapped CapsLock to be another CTRL. So ctrl+c constantly fails due to the stupid delay. Needed to install karabiner. These are just the things I can name while sitting on the can reading HN. Can you imagine? Everything but the arm hardware is subpar compared to Linux.
Zurrrrr 4y ago
I don't think I could ever switch to Mac. I'm not a fan of the price markup, don't want to support a company that is so anti-right to repair and so pro lock-in, and aside from all of that their UI always feels like it gets in the way more than it enables me to work. I'll take an equivalent thinbook at a third of the price and put any number of stable and lightweight DEs on it instead.
beej71 4y ago
I have an Intel Mac, an M1, and a Linux laptop. IMHO, the places Linux wins are: 1. Customization. You can customize the desktop experience ad infinitum with Linux. You can customize it a bit with MacOS. 2. Speed. On older hardware, I've never seen Windows or MacOS outperform a lightweight Unix install. Gives old machines new life. 3. Cost. Not only is the hardware cheaper, it's actually possible to upgrade. So you have to weigh the importance of those factors. FWIW, the MacOS M1 has panicked on me 3 times in the past 6 months. Which is 3 more times than the other computers combined. 30 minute crashes sound to me like either a hardware issue (either busted or bad driver) or a broken Mint install. (I'm Arch, myself.) Since I'm a fan of R2R, I'll probably get a Framework next--no ARM, sadly.
nathants 4y ago
switch to alpine edge or arch. that will be your last ever non-optional upgrade.
wolfium3 4y ago
I switched in the other direction (Mac to Linux). I grew up with Windows PC's + laptops and Mac's keyboard and general way of doing things was just always really unintuitive (maybe infuriating?) for me. I also didn't like Mac's prescriptive attitude toward me as a user. It's MY machine. I bought it, it belongs to ME. I should be able to do whatever I want to the deepest parts of the configs if I feel inclined to do so. (Like "right to repair" I would like something similar to "right to full control of my own hardware")
TigerTeamX 4y ago
AUTHOR HERE Thanks guys, I installed Fedora - third distro this month - and as they say the third is the charm. Everything seems to work - until of course next update :D Have a good weekend!
phendrenad2 4y ago
Big fan of Macs. I don't even understand what people see in Linux these days. Sure, I can play around like they do on /r/unixporn, but I don't particularly care to customize my desktop. It's just a tool to get work done, not a public art exhibit.
kingkongjaffa 4y ago
I love my M1 Mac but it has some personal stuff, development stuff, light steam games etc. I’m really tempted to buy a used thinkpad and put a Linux distro on it as a pure dev environment that’s easy to wipe and start over quickly.
shortrounddev 4y ago
I actually went from Linux to Windows. I had to use a macbook at work and utterly despised it. I used to have a running list of every little thing that ground me down about macOS

Linux vs. Mac

20 points by TigerTeamX 4y ago

b7we5b7a 4y ago

I've been using Linux as my daily driver for ~15y, have a Windows installation just for non-Steam games. When I switched jobs 5y ago I was issued a MacBook, and I had to adapt. My workflow is mostly with syseng/devops, so I have ~6 applications that I use daily, 3 I use once every couple weeks, the rest I don't even know exist. To this day, I've never fully adapted to MacOS UI: the Command key is the center of the universe, and it's in a completely unnatural position (double it if you have big hands, not to mention the useless Fn key in place of Ctrl). You can remap it, but then you're never sure what you're pressing anymore if you attach a new keyboard. Alt-tabbing is #1 in my grind-my-gears daily list: MacOS uses application tabbing, which doesn't make any sense whatsoever to me. I use Witch to solve it, but sometimes the Witch overlay won't display, even though it did for the previous 4h (and I'm 99% sure Witch isn't the problem). Window tiling/placement is #2: Windows 7 had magnetic corners already, MacOS seems hell-bent on pushing touchpad gestures, magic corners to activate features and workspaces. I don't want to lift my hands from the keyboard and stare at randomly aligned miniatures of windows to understand which one I need to click: I want to easily alt-tab between them! I don't want to wait for a couple seconds of animation while you swipe left/right the windows across workspaces! And the stupid third green button in the title bar of a window should definitely NOT maximize the window and send it to a separate workspace and hiding the title bar! BetterSnapTool helps with window placement, at least. I have disabled all gestures, mission control, workspaces and magic corners entirely. The only two gestures that are useful to me are two-finger-scroll (like Windows/Linux do it, UNnatural apparently) and two-finger-swipe left/right (because they can save a ton of time pressing back/forward in the browser, at times). Focus stealing is #3: if you open an app, and it takes a while to load, you may think you can go back to your business for the 15-30s it takes, right? NOPE! While you're right in the middle of entering your password or <important command> in an SSH session, the Notes app you opened earlier will happily steal the focus mid-words! Oh, I was also one of the unlucky guys to come in right during the period of the Touchbar madness: too late to skip it, too early to take a model without it. I have essentially disabled 90% of the stuff, and it shows FN1-FN12 keys by default for all apps. When I press the Fn key, I get brightness/audio/backlight control, nothing else. Unfortunately the ESC key stays up there, I simply learnt not to use it too much anymore (yes, I know it can be remapped, but seriously, why should I remap a key so useful in the first place?). Finder is next-to-useless to me, I try to actively avoid it and tab away in the terminal most of the times. Windows Explorer is _SO_ much more logical: the tree and the content are separate panels, and you can navigate the tree much more easily. The CLI applications seem ok, until you actually try to use them. Some are outdated, some are the BSD-y versions or derivations and lack modern features. Linux ones have evolved slightly since 25y ago and are just more ergonomic, e.g: `find . -name "stuff"` vs `find -name "stuff"`, and other small paper cuts. After a couple weeks, I just prepended the brew-installed coreutils/findutils PATH and went on with my life. The graphics department is a joke and suffers from NIH syndrome, if you ever want to do even some light gaming on it. My Linux desktop can run AAA Steam games under Sway better than some compiled-for-Mac games I've tried. I believe they did a good job with the filesystem and security-by-design though, those pretty much just work. Perhaps too much of a good job: I tried installing Linux, and thanks to the T2 chip I just gave up in the end - custom-built kernel, special not-so-stable modules, half of the stuff not working. I simply gave up. I hope the Asahi Linux project will enable a better experience, because as others have said, the hardware is almost unbeatable for the price-point. But the software... ugh. Just not for me. Lately I've been using Ubuntu as daily driver for servers/runners, and toyed with the GUI in VMs. For all the bad things that are usually said about Gnome and Canonical, I've grown to appreciate it. Probably the experience is best on recent and open hardware and drivers (Intel/AMD), I learned to stay away from nVidia under linux ~10y ago and never looked back. I also quite like where Pop!_OS is going (COSMIC, Rust), I'm pretty sure when they release their new DE I'll try it out.

rich_sasha 4y ago

I love Linux, but oh my God it is so unstable for me. Updates crash things all the time. The whole Nvidia driver takes me days to sort out each time. Depending on segment, commercial software tends to be less available. You also need to know just so much low level stuff just to keep going. Wayland vs X, display managers, grub config... Too much for me. Linux has many redeeming features but it can be a full time job just to keep it running. By contrast, Mac comes in one size and configurability is limited, but out of the box it just works.

TigerTeamX 4y ago
Yeah exactly! Especially the whole Wayland and Snap experience. It seems like it is not quite there - I understand the benefits but just not right there.
redeeman 4y ago
could you describe a bit what you do that takes days to sort out nvidia driver?
- rich_sasha 4y ago
  I recently set up two boxes with Ubuntu 20.04 . Both were on the Ubuntu list of supported hardware. Power on - it works. Install updates and restart - black screen. Ok not to panic, just do the usual: google random commands on the Internet and type them in. Ok, boot Linux in nosplash mode - fine, that works. Reinstall Nvidia drivers - whole box goes to shit and the only thing that does anything is reinstalling the distro from scratch. Tried this again for good measure just in case, but unsurprisingly with the same effect. Many gray hairs later, it turns out the system update installs a new kernel which has a bug to do with Nvidia drivers causing the whole thing to crash and burn. So if I downgrade the kernel (is that even a good idea?) and install Nvidia drivers there, it's ok. Some more random-commands-from-internet and this is done. Nvidia drivers installed, computer works. Now I'll "just" install MATE instead of the default desktop env which I dislike. Some warnings about display manager..? Hmm let's see what happens in a mo. Install complete, reboot, machine is fucked again. I'm getting desperate now, for a week I did nothing but type various cryptic commands, prepending sudo if they didn't work. I mean, I'm a decent Linux user, but I don't know what the lshw command I just typed in does. But never mind. On an Estonian Linux forum I find someone who has the same issue, and has a fix: boot in safe mode, get a terminal, disable some obscure MATE option via cli, then reboot. Yes! That worked - but why..? I breathe a sigh of relief and think fondly of my Mac at home. There are or course the Nouveau drivers, but they get my PC hot if I wiggle.the mouse too much so that's not an option. If it happened once, maybe I was unlucky, but happened on two different boxes in the span of months from each other.

mongol 4y ago

Have you checked your RAM memory?

TigerTeamX 4y ago
Great suggestion, running memtester now.

ofalkaed 4y ago

I have not used Macs in years but the one observation I would offer, a good amount of linux/OSS software seems to break when Apple updates the OS and it does not seem a good platform if you want to keep using such software. This observation is based off of the dozen or so projects I follow the development of (mostly audio related) so may not be at all accurate to the wider view and I just may have found one of the little niches where these problems are more common.

blacksmith_tb 4y ago
Hmm, is this an AI response? How could Apple break linux sw? I use four personal machines pretty frequently (a few hours, a few time a week), one Mac Mini, a recent all-AMD Asus laptop running Ubuntu 22.10, an old Dell laptop (with a discreet nVidia card) running Ubuntu 22.10, and a really old Toshiba ultrabook running Pop_OS! None of them break regularly, though the Asus (probably from being the newest) has a fingerprint sensor that has never quite worked right under Ubuntu. Other than the slowness and clunkiness of snaps, Ubuntu seems fine to me? Going forward I will probably stick to Pop, it seems a little better thought out than plain ol' Ubuntu, but the differences aren't night and day.
- TigerTeamX 4y ago
  Dont know if it is a AI response, but one of my friends had a M1 and we couldn't watch a movie because VLC wasn't ported yet. Just some weird things with Snaps that made me "snap" :P Like, Installing Chromium with snap, and then it doesn't have access to file drop which is something I use like 20 times a day. This easily adds 30 minutes to my work. Or sharing my screen I have to click 4 buttons in a slow and clunky manner.
  - ofalkaed 4y ago
    Snap, flatpack and the like are not really sorted out yet and possibly never will be. Best to avoid them and if you cant install from your distro's repo than compile it yourself. The issue with your friend and their M1 was probably because he was running linux on it and not OSX? he surely could have watched a movie with the native OSX apps if that was not the case.

rochak 4y ago

I was in the same boat as you. Used Linux for many years, switched a couple of distributions in the hopes of finding anything stable that also worked out of the box, the closest I got to was Debian but even it had issues with Wifi and Bluetooth. Finally bit the bullet on Macs and it has been okay at best. Sure, I got the reliability and things that worked out of the box, but lost a lot in terms of freedom and flexibility.

TigerTeamX 4y ago
Freedom and flexibity is a large part, but also so many bad stories when the hardware breaks.

mackwell 4y ago

Crash every 30 minutes on a clean install sounds like a hardware issue. In my experience an Ubuntu install is able to run continuously for long stretches without issue. Whether you enjoy switching to Mac OS is going to depend on what you use your machine for. In general, for my main work machine I use Mac and I have very little to no downtime ever. However, much of the benefit of going Mac is gained if you go all in on the ecosystem across devices.

TigerTeamX 4y ago
Yeah definitely weird and it didn't happen before. I am running a memtester as mongol suggested. I really enjoy Linux and the freedom it gives me, but using 30 hours last month getting things to work so I can do work... is not how I want to spend my time.

dgan 4y ago

Funny, I just found a new job where I got a MacBook Pro for the first time in my life, M2 chip. I am Linux user for 7 years now, and I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed + XFCE + NVIDIA card, and I literally have 0 problems with it for 2 last years Opinion on Mac book after using it for barely 3 weeks: Excellent: - battery life - sound sucks, out of top of my head: - when you press Enter it wants to rename a file (?? lol) - terminal hotkeys don't always work (Ctrl + back doesn't delete a word...) - "fn" is the most left key... instead of control... - windows management is trash, i cant "magnet" to borders of the screen - I wasn't able to plug a LG usb mouse (?? apparently I need a tutorial to plug a mouse) - hotkeys in Pycharm/Intellij are different and not interchangeable - brew is not as good as zypper - need to use AppleStore for some applications - when installing applications they don't seem to be available in terminal ...

ShrimpHawk 4y ago
Use Rectangle[1] for magnet snapping window management. For almost every mac complaint there exists a tool to solve it. [1]https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/
- PrimeMcFly 4y ago
  > For almost every mac complaint there exists a tool to solve it. Instead of running an OS with a ton of little tools and hacks, why not just run on that lets you configure it how you want?
  - sshine 4y ago
    You configure Linux by installing lots of little tools, too. Mac has defaults, and they seem off when you don't use Mac. Once you accept Mac as your system, you either adopt those defaults or start tweaking them. I think of Mac as a UNIX with an average window manager, but with excellent integrations.
    - PrimeMcFly 4y ago
      I can tweak Linux by adding little tools, sure, but it's very useable even if I don't. And sure, to some extent Mac has a different paradigm, and if you are used to it it won't seem strange. But on top of all of that, objectively, the mac UI is still incredibly limiting and frustrating in ways that no other DE is, even with being familiar with it.

BenGosub 4y ago

I have been a happy Ubuntu user for years. For ke the OS is completely stable and never crashes. It's also very efficient with resources, compared to Windows. I have a music production hobby and the main obstacle for me in using Linux is no drivers for hardware and no VSTs.

Kim_Bruning 4y ago

All the operating systems seem to suck at the moment. If there is anything that a) just works b) is pretty c) allows me to run all the software d) doesn't sell my private data to the highest bidder that would be nice.

TigerTeamX 4y ago
Apple stuff probably comes the closet to your criteria.

cramjabsyn 4y ago

Yes I ran a linux desktop for years and switched to mac. Aside from getting used to the feel of the UI and finding replacement apps (that sometimes cost a few bucks) the experience has been excellent. My Mac just works, upgrades are seamless (but do wait a few months before major os upgrades), the battery lasts all day, the audio and video quality are good, lid close suspends the system correctly every time. And everything syncs with my phone. I spend most of my time in the terminal anyway, and just ssh to my linux dev host. I don't worry about trying to set up a full dev environment on my laptop, I prefer to do that on a linux server

kleer001 4y ago

Are you on a shiny new desktop with all the bells and whistles with more RAM than you'll ever need and a 10TB RAID setup? Are you on a scuzzy 20 year old laptop with 64MB of ram and a 20GB HD? Have you considered an Arch based distro? Personally I switched from 15 years with Apple products to Linux land and while it's a lot different I like it.

jamesbvaughan 4y ago

I switched from a Linux laptop to a Macbook Pro for after about 5 years on Linux. The initial reason was that my last employer required us to use Macbooks. I now have the option to use whatever computer I'd like and (for now at least) I'm still sticking with the Macbook. The main things that keep me on it are: - Excellent hardware. The build quality is higher than any non-Apple laptop I've tried and the display is really good. - Performance and battery usage with the Apple silicon chip is great. - iCloud sync. I use an iPhone and frequently make use of iMessage, photos, and clipboard syncing between devices. I know that you can replicate a lot of that with Android and Linux, but at this point I'm pretty deep in Apple's ecosystem and am unlikely to switch away anytime soon. The biggest thing I miss is having a good tiling window manager experience. I have a desktop running Sway[0] and really love it. I've tried a handful of tiling window managers for mac and none of them have felt really good to use. They all feel like I'm fighting the OS more than working with it. If there were a lightweight laptop with good linux compatibility, a high-dpi, high refresh rate display, and competitive battery life, I'd be very tempted to switch back to linux just to have a good window manager again. I'm hoping that Asahi on the MBP can give me that, but it seems like it's not quite ready for daily driving yet. [0] https://swaywm.org/ https://swaywm.org/

brucethemoose2 4y ago
Terrible windows laptops are just terrible laptops, but seeing my Asus G14 side by side next to a macbook pro doesn't really leave me wanting for anything. Its about the same size. The screen, keyboard, trackpad... all comparable. It has more ports. The cooling system in the G14 blows the mac away, hence it can run passively and sip battery just piddling around the desktop. The mac has 3 big advantages as far as I can tell: - Power efficiency under heavy GPU/AI loads. If you even sniff the dGPU in a PC, you can kiss your battery goodby. - A large RAM pool for GPU/AI stuff. - No fussing around with different power settings/fan profiles for different situations. As for the PC laptop - It has a huge gaming advantage -"native nvidia" is often easier for ML stuff. Software differences are a whole other can of worms.
- jamesbvaughan 4y ago
  The G14 looks pretty good - I hadn't checked it out before. It's slightly thicker and heavier than the MPB and I'd really like to go lighter rather than heavier if I were to switch. If gaming were a priority for me though, something like this seems like it would be the way to go.

chrisfosterelli 4y ago

I switched from being a lifelong Linux user to being a Mac user. Nearly everything was better: 95%+ of the tools I use were the exact same, everything was just more usable and stable. The biggest draw was that I wasn't stuck with PC hardware anymore, which is nice because I really prefer Macbook hardware and most Linux OS's just don't work well enough with it for me. I'm a web developer though so YMMV depending on what you're doing for work, but for me I was able to bring vim, Chrome, zsh, and most linux commands, which covers the vast majority of my day. The biggest drawback was that running FOSS was something I cared about and no longer doing so made me feel sad for a bit. The filesystem layout is slightly different but still UNIX-y and newer versions of MacOS don't let you put files wherever you want (which makes sense from a security perspective but is nonetheless an adjustment). I struggle to think of much more than that. The operating system just gets out of my way now and I appreciate that, and we still run Linux on all of our servers for everything so I've got that at least.

unsupp0rted 4y ago
I’ve never encountered a warning about not putting files wherever I want. Where would you want to put files, say, outside your user’s home folder?
- chrisfosterelli 4y ago
  There's been a couple times I had a generic binary I wanted to drop in `/bin/` or a package that wanted to install itself to `/usr/` The correct way is to just not do this, which is fine, it was just super weird to use `sudo` and then have the OS tell me 'no'. It's much more rare now that I've created $HOME/.bin and added it to my $PATH and nearly all 3rd party apps have been updated to not install to SIP directories.

ChymeraXYZ 4y ago

I switched last year after being exclusively on Linux for approx 5 years. Hardware is hands down the best in terms of battery life. It's hilarious compared to pretty much anything else I have tried. Software is... Meh. But the part that really is the window management. What is there currently in mac (and Windows) is, mildly put, a joke.

rcarmo 4y ago
If you have to use Windows, look into PowerToys/FancyZones. I actually prefer that to the Mac at this point.

kkoncevicius 4y ago

Bad: - Inability to set up your /home/ (which is /Users/ on a mac) the way you like it. There are default folders for Documents, Pictures, Music, etc and they cannot be deleted. If you delete them they are recreated either immediately or on reboot. My hack-of-a-solution was to alias ls to hide them [1]. - There are also applications that you cannot delete. One such application is Chess - a program that let's you play chess. No idea why it's there by default and why it's impossible to delete it. - .DS_Store files. Whenever you open a folder in a Finder (default file browser on a Mac) it will add a hidden .DS_Store file within that folder. This file stores and remembers how you chose to arrange your folders in a graphical file manager. But these files often get in a way: you will find them in tarballs, git repositories, etc. Just like with removing folders, I don't think there is a solution that can turn them off. - Recent OS update made system-settings look like you are on a phone. Apple probably wants to push an interface for system settings that is common to iPads, iPhones, MacBooks and even Apple Watches, but for me it's hard to get used to that. Good: - Default Applications are quite tasteful. In particular the Mail client, and default Apple Terminal. They have everything I need without being full of toy features - Stable. Both hardware and Software. My MacBook pro is 5 years old now, but I never had an issue with hangs, reboots, crashes or anything of this kind. - Third-party package managers. Homebrew is more popular, but I prefer MacPorts. Whichever you choose, you can set up your system to use linux compilers, shells, coreutils, etc. By default Apple command line arsenal is a bit dated and opinionated so to me this is a must. Once you have this done the command-line experience is almost indistinguishable from Linux (well, apart from /home/ stuff and .DS_Store things). [1]: http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/posts/cleaning_home_on_macos/index.html http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/posts/cleaning_home_on_macos/i...

TigerTeamX 4y ago
Thanks for the nice summary. What about user interface? I always felt MacOS clunky when I tried a Macbook. E.g. no sticky windows.
- kkoncevicius 4y ago
  The desktop environment is quite configurable and can adapt to a few different styles of doing things. For example, I like asceticism so I hide the menu bar (clock, etc, on top), hide the dock (list of opened applications and quick-launch icons), and have an empty desktop with just a wallpaper. I use "Spotlight Search" (which you get by pressing meta-spacebar) to launch everything. The search is very integrated with the system so you are able to start applications, search your email inbox, browse bookmarks and web history, open notes and contacts, etc, all with the same search. But of course there are also feature for people who do things differently. One good example is Stage Manager [1]. There are also things like "Mission Control" and multiple desktops, but I am not the right person to talk about these. Oh one more thing - seems like Apple likes to reverse things on purpose. So the "x" for closing windows is on the left, and not on the right. The desktop icons appear on the right, not on the left. If you use trackpad to scroll it's also reversed - when your fingers slide down the page slides down as well. Takes some time getting used to this. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7t_BCmY-lg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7t_BCmY-lg

0xbadc0de5 4y ago

Sounds like a hardware problem to me. I've been daily driving Fedora and Ubuntu Linux for around 20 years now and it's been getting progressively better and more stable. The last 5 years or so I no longer even bother installing Windows on my PC's. Buying a Mac will certainly solve any hardware issue you're currently experiencing. But so would buying a new PC. Mac's have their own issues, as does Windows and BSD. It's a pick-your-poison situation.

brucethemoose2 4y ago

"Stable" linux distros like Mint and Ubuntu have given me nothing but trouble, as the packages are so old that they have unfixed bugs with newer hardware. I am running CachyOS now and love it, but for a "stable" distro I would probably pick Fedora Kionite, or maybe Clear Linux, and augment their package selection with flatpack.

locusofself 4y ago

It's hard to beat the Apple UX. My macbook air m1 is the best laptop I have ever had. Do I love macOS? Not really. But if you need to develop in Linux just fire up a VM. I use a windows laptop for my work because I work at Microsoft. At the end of the day most of us spend 90% of our time in a browser, vs code, and bash or powershell. The experience between the 3 major OSs is not that different.

shortrounddev 4y ago
> The experience between the 3 major OSs is not that different I agree, for programming tasks (though I really came to hate everything about macOS UX for everything else). The one major difference I've noticed is that docker runs great on Linux, runs great on Windows with Docker Desktop/WSL2, and runs like mollases on my company issues 8gb macbook pro

brucethemoose2 4y ago

And as for OSX vs linux... apples and oranges. Just depends on what apps I want to run. Personally I love the ease of machine learning stuff in linux, but thats now a strong suit of Apple hardware too. If you are buying a GPU/NPU-less laptop, I would probably go with Apple, if only so you can run LLMs and stuff locally.

aborsy 4y ago

Ubuntu works pretty good on laptop and desktop. I don’t recall any problems for years. The hardware support is excellent, but if occasionally something is not supported, there can be inconveniences. You should check if your distribution works on that laptop. I won’t switch because I don’t trust a closed source black box with my life. I can understand what Linux does, and suitably lock it down and customize it. I support FOSS, and Linux in particular. Freedom is amazing!

franciscop 4y ago

I have! IMHO any answer is going to be personal, so I'm going to give my personal take. Advantages: - Biggest one without a doubt is battery life. This is both a hardware and software issue, but it's such a deal breaker for me who used to work remotely and was always frustrated with Linux because of this. - High quality hardware. When I used linux I basically chose the closest laptop possible to mac anyway, since they ARE the highest quality in hardware (body case, touchpad, keyboard, etc.). Still nothing comes close by a mile in PC-land. I used to use the Zenbook line. - The programming transition is super-smooth. As a front-end dev, I did not notice at all the transition from the coding point of view. As you probably know, the new Apple Silicon also is great for dev. - Better UI consistency. In Linux you have different distros, each with it's own style that in 2023 are pretty great TBH. But then each program will use a different style, so it's a bit of a mess. With Mac you have a consistent UI across all apps. - As you said, everything (even with the Apple Silicon) basically works out of the box smoothly. Problems: - Pushing for Apple services. In the end, it's a platform and they push for their own services. Be it Safari, or having to go through XCode, or the Apple Store, yeah I am not too happy with that. - In Linux-land there's usually mid-range programs that do the job well, while with mac you have either the super-specialized ones or the not-enough ones. Example: light editing a pic with GIMP, light video editing with KDEnlive, etc. - Filesystem compatibility, I have my external backup drives encrypted with EXT3/4, and of course that doesn't work with Mac. - When you do manage to break something (I did in the past by installing python 3 and renaming `python` to point to `python3`) it's a lot harder to fix, in Linux it's easy to just burn a USB and reinstall it all. - Bunch of punctual problems that were fixed eventually; but point to the flaw that Apple is a single system and you are at their mercy. Couple of generations of all their laptops had terrible keyboards, the Apple Silicon was a lot smoother than I expected but still ofc it was a transition so was a bit painful, etc.

pprotas 4y ago

I’ve used Windows, Linux and Mac all my life. It’s all the same, honestly. Just pick your poison. Apple hardware is definitely better though!

peterhi 4y ago

The os itself eats much more of the resources than linux running on the same hardware. Macos is a "bigger" operating system (more parts) and they all want memory and cycles. Linux is positively anorexic in comparison :) It will also depend on how good you are at switching your "muscle memory" at the keyboard. But this is the same for all three of the main oses (linux, macos and windows). It can be very frustrating when you hit a keystroke combination and either it does nothing or something completely different Ubuntu / Mint is rock solid. I run Ubuntu 22.04 and have had no problems despite heavy customisation on old hardware (Dell Optiplex 3040). If you can install Ubuntu (or Mint) I would expect to run it without issue

CoolCold 4y ago
> I switched to Ubuntu 22.10, and now every 30 minutes I get a crash. I bought a new Microphone that kinda works, but not really.

debrice 4y ago

Cmd + C is great… regarding the rest, I suspect your hardware could also be the sources of your problems. I also think anybody can work on any OS (as it is the case right now). Most of my compute is done on my Linux desktop, I sometimes work remotely on my MacBook via SSH and SSH+VPN when away from home. In my experience all Mac laptops get uncomfortably (understatement ) hot quickly and sometimes won’t turn on the ventilation on (when available)

gtop3 4y ago

I'm going to focus on my experience, instead of addressing anything about your situation. I use two computers. A Fedora Linux workstation and a M1 Macbook Pro. I've been using Linux daily for about 15 years and macOS daily for about 10. My experience will be highly subjective, and it's rare to talk about them without striking up a debate. I could very feasibly only use my MBP. It could do all of my workloads. I choose to have a Linux desktop and use it as my primary computing device because I prefer working on Linux. This is something I pay extra for because I get more joy and experience less frustration from using Linux than macOS. The reason I choose to own a MBP is because I think Apple makes the best laptop hardware. The Apple silicon chips generation of MBPs are easily my favorite. I find it really convenient to have the ability to compute somewhere that is not my desk. If Linux had the same level of support for Apple hardware as macOS has, I would not use macOS. A lot of skills used in Linux will transfer over to macOS. The biggest ones are the command line. Homebrew and Ports are both capable package managers and will have most of the tools you need. I personally find APT/RPM to be both faster and more complete, but I have no data to back this up. Your bash scripts, python workflows, or whatever will mostly be intact. Anything operating on the OS layer will probably be broken, and you might be surprised about some command line applications missing in macOS because they relay on OS layer. I can make macOS work for me here, and do real development on it, but find Linux to be slightly more comfortable and full of features. iterm2 is a great terminal emulator for macOS. For the GUI userspace I find I still prefer the Linux options after years of exposure to macOS. I feel limited in my options for basic tools like file managers or clipboards. Many applications will try to do things in a certain style I refer to as "the mac way". It's fine, and easy to get use to. I feel it often leads to too many files in my desktop folder or Applications folder for my taste. Some tools, like firefox or emacs feel largely the same where the only differences are the areas in which the tool interacts with the OS layer. I am sometimes pleased to see that commercial software has better macOS support than Linux support, and I will rarely use macOS for specific software unavailable on Linux. On the OS layer of things, macOS generally has better stability and simpler upgrades than desktop Linux. I do like the iCloud integration, and find the MBP to be more in sync with my iPhone than my Linux desktop. I find the security and permissions layer of macOS to be more focused on non-expert users than Linux is. I am often asked to confirm before running binaries, and occasionally have to go into system settings to give an application specific permissions. The operating system is also very protective of some folders, and will ask for user permission before writing to what I would consider user-space folders. I find this is type of thing is generally tending towards being more annoying over time. I tend to think macs are a decent value. They are the highest quality laptop built, and operating one feels like it takes less system maintenance than a Linux laptop would. It seems like they often charge more for ram and storage than you would expect on a Linux system, so I focus on my actual needs more on my laptop. I spend about $3000 for a MBP and $3000 for a Linux workstation, and fully upgrade both about every 3 years. I could go much longer between upgrades. I could use cheaper computers too. These are tools that get thousands of hours of use each, and am happy to pay a premium for tools I enjoy using. I usually donate my old computers to family members. They usually receive a long lifespan of use. The Linux desktops seem to receive longer periods of use, because teenagers will upgrade a few parts and use them as gaming PCs.

mindcrime 4y ago

I haven't switched, from Linux to Mac in the sense that all of my personal computers are Linux. But I did switch from Windows to Mac at my $DAYJOB, so I have a lot of experience using both Linux and Mac, and in the same day no less. I've been using the Mac for around 2 years now I guess. My take? I'd scrap Mac OS X and put Linux on that Macbook in a heartbeat if it were allowed by company policy. I can't find a single thing that OS X does bette than Linux, and there are plenty of things that it doesn't do as well (by my personal standards). And that's before even getting into the ideological aspect, and the fact that I fundamentally hate Apple and their entire "walled garden, locked down, proprietary bullshit" world-view. The Mac hardware is nice, no doubt. But for my money, give me Linux any day of the week.

rcarmo 4y ago
I’ve been using UNIX (actual UNIX) and MacOS since before it got a BSD userland (so you can add one zero and 10 more years to your two) and it’s actually fun to see this kind of opinion, because it’s so biased to the point of ignoring all the actual shared history that macOS has. Relax. Touch grass. Figure out why it is that way. You may not like it all the same, but you’ll be able to understand why it’s that way.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

dysoco 4y ago

I did recently buy a Macbook Air M1 (Had never used Mac before) and stopped dualbooting Linux on my desktop machine (which I mostly use with Windows for gaming now) so I guess I qualify. Granted I haven't been doing anything extremely weird or complex with my Macbook, but so far I've been loving it, some pros and cons: Pros ======================= * Amazing battery life (prolly mostly because of hardware, but OS can come into play) * Amazing speed. Linux is usually speedy as well, but normally suspend/hibernate does not work, I can never turn off the macbook, and just open it and start using it in less than 5 seconds. * Great stability. Linux usually has crashes, sometimes requiring reboot, weird graphical glitches, apps that just won't open, slowdowns, etc. etc. Which usually happen exponentially more with uptime, this never happens on my Macbook, it just works all the time, and I never have to shut it down either. * Good native default apps by default, many 3rd party apps are also native and very well designed as well. (Although Linux has improved a lot in this regard as well). * Great font rendering. Could be the screen but I remember having poor rendering in Linux compared with Windows with the same screen. * Overall it just looks gorgeous and very polished (UI side, not so much UX side, read cons). * Not having other options for distros, hardware, having limited customization, etc. can sometimes be a pro, I have to think less about my system and I do more about what matters. * Great hardware overall in the Macbook (but not MacOS related). Cons ======================== * The UI is just plain stupid. I read many people arguing that it's just "different" and "the Mac way" but some decisions are just extremely anti-intuitive. Minimizing an app does nothing, alt-tab works weird, snapping windows works weird, closing a window will not shut down the app, many apps have a different response to either closing/maximizing the window or double-clicking the title-bar, etc. etc. (note that there are some 3rd party apps that solve some of these things, but not all). * Many apps have also weird (and imho, bad) and anti-intuitive interactions because of 1st point. * Many of the 3rd party apps you have to pay for, compared to Windows or Linux where they are usually free. I know $5 isn't much for someone in USA or Europe, but in other countries, it adds up for little utilities. * I believe you can play more games in Linux nowadays with Proton than you can on the Mac natively. * Overall I think Linux is more versatile, some libraries/dev tools are just easier to get on and run on Linux, like Docker. If you use software like Adobe products this probably works the other way around for you, but I don't. * No HDMI/USB plugs on the Macbook, have to buy a dongle and walk around with that as well, it's cumbersome but I understand it's to have a thin laptop. Conclusion ==================== I love the Macbook and overall my experience is better than with Linux; I would even consider using it as a desktop if I could get a good dock+keyboard+mouse combo that works flawlessly. HOWEVER if I could get a laptop with the same hardware, screen, battery life, etc. for the same price, in my country, but with Linux, would I get that instead? Honestly I believe so, I still believe KDE and even Gnome have a better user-experience, it's just that stability, speed and battery life just matters THAT much.

7e 4y ago

I’ve used Linux and Mac laptops simultaneously for the past two years. Linux has been terrible and the Mac has been a dream. The Linux desktop is a Potemkin village.

28304283409234 4y ago

Long time (23 years) Linux user forced to work on Mac by employer. Hate every minute of it. Brew is only impressive if you never used apt. Everything nags about licenses. Docker … well… hahahaha. External usb Ethernet dongles keep refusing to connect after sleeping. The CapsLock has a “helpful” feature that basically ignores the first press, in case you made a mistake. Fine, but I mapped CapsLock to be another CTRL. So ctrl+c constantly fails due to the stupid delay. Needed to install karabiner. These are just the things I can name while sitting on the can reading HN. Can you imagine? Everything but the arm hardware is subpar compared to Linux.

Zurrrrr 4y ago

I don't think I could ever switch to Mac. I'm not a fan of the price markup, don't want to support a company that is so anti-right to repair and so pro lock-in, and aside from all of that their UI always feels like it gets in the way more than it enables me to work. I'll take an equivalent thinbook at a third of the price and put any number of stable and lightweight DEs on it instead.

beej71 4y ago

I have an Intel Mac, an M1, and a Linux laptop. IMHO, the places Linux wins are: 1. Customization. You can customize the desktop experience ad infinitum with Linux. You can customize it a bit with MacOS. 2. Speed. On older hardware, I've never seen Windows or MacOS outperform a lightweight Unix install. Gives old machines new life. 3. Cost. Not only is the hardware cheaper, it's actually possible to upgrade. So you have to weigh the importance of those factors. FWIW, the MacOS M1 has panicked on me 3 times in the past 6 months. Which is 3 more times than the other computers combined. 30 minute crashes sound to me like either a hardware issue (either busted or bad driver) or a broken Mint install. (I'm Arch, myself.) Since I'm a fan of R2R, I'll probably get a Framework next--no ARM, sadly.

nathants 4y ago

switch to alpine edge or arch. that will be your last ever non-optional upgrade.

wolfium3 4y ago

I switched in the other direction (Mac to Linux). I grew up with Windows PC's + laptops and Mac's keyboard and general way of doing things was just always really unintuitive (maybe infuriating?) for me. I also didn't like Mac's prescriptive attitude toward me as a user. It's MY machine. I bought it, it belongs to ME. I should be able to do whatever I want to the deepest parts of the configs if I feel inclined to do so. (Like "right to repair" I would like something similar to "right to full control of my own hardware")

TigerTeamX 4y ago

AUTHOR HERE Thanks guys, I installed Fedora - third distro this month - and as they say the third is the charm. Everything seems to work - until of course next update :D Have a good weekend!

phendrenad2 4y ago

Big fan of Macs. I don't even understand what people see in Linux these days. Sure, I can play around like they do on /r/unixporn, but I don't particularly care to customize my desktop. It's just a tool to get work done, not a public art exhibit.

kingkongjaffa 4y ago

I love my M1 Mac but it has some personal stuff, development stuff, light steam games etc. I’m really tempted to buy a used thinkpad and put a Linux distro on it as a pure dev environment that’s easy to wipe and start over quickly.

shortrounddev 4y ago

I actually went from Linux to Windows. I had to use a macbook at work and utterly despised it. I used to have a running list of every little thing that ground me down about macOS