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>certainly no Linux distribution comes close on the "pleasant-to-use" part; What have you tried recently? I spent an hour installing Ubuntu and running a scrip

>certainly no Linux distribution comes close on the "pleasant-to-use" part; What have you tried recently? I spent an hour installing Ubuntu and running a script to get the power management tweaks on my MBA and it's far better than OS X was. Since Leopard I've been fighting OS X more and more. It gets in my way, it makes things unnecessarily hard, I'm tired of having to fuck (sorry, but it's an accurate expression of how much time I've wasted) with homebrew and macports. On the other hand, I installed Elementary OS Beta and tweaked the fonts and was perfectly happy with the out-of-box experience.

ricardobeat 14y ago
If you were perfectly happy with the out-of-the-box experience for Linux, why did you need homebrew/macports on OSX? I've never had any issues with homebrew whatsoever. It's just a thin wrapper for build scripts, it's pretty easy to dig in and see what's going wrong.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  I'm not that crazy of a dev and there were at least 4-5 things that straight up wouldn't build in homebrew or lacked scripts. Basic GNU tools shipping with Mac OS X are vastly out of date (and in some cases buggy) due to GPL issues. I finally gave up after an afternoon of fighting getting GDB signed to be able to debug my Golang app and wound up installing a VM, adding a new SSH key to Github, setting up my dev environment and debugging it in linux in less time. I used OS X because I had a MBA. When classes were over I decided to see how much work Linux would be on it given that Mac hardware and linux don't always get along. Basically everything worked out of the box though, minus a powersave script I ran.
  - veemjeem 14y ago
    Well, let's just say a lot of things don't work in linux either. Depending what you're building, sometimes it's reliant on a certain gcc version, or distro. Generally speaking, compile from source is usually the last resort if the package can't be found via apt-get, and occasionally you'll have to tweak the makefile or the ./configure script settings. Any time you're building something that isn't extremely popular, you're likely to get build problems.
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
      So far, the ratio of build issues I've run into in OS X to the build issues from version mismatching in linux is approaching infinity. egrep, gdb, and the few other things I fought last month in brew were not uncommon things. They were all things that were preinstalled in Ubuntu. Furthermore, I haven't had to build anything from source other than the projects I collab on in years. I don't know why we're quibbling about this, it's generally accepted among Mac devs... it's a small price to pay if you like the OS X user experience. I haven't for some time now so the developer tools lacking and the competition of better linux DEs have tipped that scale. Trust me, I still love my MBA.
eropple 14y ago
In the last six months I've tried Elementary (closest), Ubuntu (Unity and Kubuntu), Mint (MATE and Cinnamon), and Fedora. None stuck. And it's not really the distributions' fault, but rather the applications and all the little things. Ricardobeat put it nicely elsewhere in the thread: design-by-committee. There isn't a feeling of focus from one end to the other and there is a sense of welcoming to applications with crap UX that do something important. I don't like that, and I don't feel like that's common on OS X (like, even their weird Calendar skin doesn't get in the way of a good application). It's an OS built by a lot of different people doing lots of parts in different ways. I'm not saying that I was told anything different, that's what it says right on the tin. But I find that doesn't make for a great user experience. (To Elementary's credit, activities where you can stay within the Elementary suite of applications are really pretty nice! But that makes being thrown outside at the likes of GIMP even more jarring.)
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  > There isn't a feeling of focus from one end to the other Like what? I hear this repeatedly but it's with a helping dose of handwaving and a lack of specifics. I guess I just don't see that. I use VLC, Gnome-terminal, Sublime Text, Pantheon-Files, Chrome, Firefox and that's basically it. They all act the same as I expect in any desktop environment and I've literally never had a meta-moment of worry or thought about something being "off". Gimp is awkward on every platform, what does that have to do with Linux DEs?
  - wpietri 14y ago
    Off the top of my head, talking about the Ubuntu 12.04.1 I use daily on two different Thinkpads: I have to log in and out or reboot pretty much every day to solve X or window manager problems. There are a variety of focus and window ordering issues. Coming back from sleep each one has different display twitches; nothing worse than the usual Linux user contempt, but definitely unpolished. The Unity stuff is going in a good direction but I don't think they've been doing a ton of user testing; it also frequently feels clunky to me. Network Manager is slow to find networks and regularly crashes. Device support is so-so: the Android tethering that is support to magically work never does; plugging in a phone or a tablet frequently requires command-line incantations and is often buggy. One of my devices has a touch-screen; a minor kernel upgrade broke this a couple months back, and it is still broken. I think they're right to go for a better UI experience, but right now I think they're in a valley between the solid but ugly Linux experience I was used to and the solid but friendly experience that Apple has inspired them to pursue. Right now I think it's flaky both in a usability sense and in a technical sense, which I find thoroughly disappointing.

ricardobeat 14y ago

If you were perfectly happy with the out-of-the-box experience for Linux, why did you need homebrew/macports on OSX? I've never had any issues with homebrew whatsoever. It's just a thin wrapper for build scripts, it's pretty easy to dig in and see what's going wrong.

drivebyacct2 14y ago
I'm not that crazy of a dev and there were at least 4-5 things that straight up wouldn't build in homebrew or lacked scripts. Basic GNU tools shipping with Mac OS X are vastly out of date (and in some cases buggy) due to GPL issues. I finally gave up after an afternoon of fighting getting GDB signed to be able to debug my Golang app and wound up installing a VM, adding a new SSH key to Github, setting up my dev environment and debugging it in linux in less time. I used OS X because I had a MBA. When classes were over I decided to see how much work Linux would be on it given that Mac hardware and linux don't always get along. Basically everything worked out of the box though, minus a powersave script I ran.
- veemjeem 14y ago
  Well, let's just say a lot of things don't work in linux either. Depending what you're building, sometimes it's reliant on a certain gcc version, or distro. Generally speaking, compile from source is usually the last resort if the package can't be found via apt-get, and occasionally you'll have to tweak the makefile or the ./configure script settings. Any time you're building something that isn't extremely popular, you're likely to get build problems.
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    So far, the ratio of build issues I've run into in OS X to the build issues from version mismatching in linux is approaching infinity. egrep, gdb, and the few other things I fought last month in brew were not uncommon things. They were all things that were preinstalled in Ubuntu. Furthermore, I haven't had to build anything from source other than the projects I collab on in years. I don't know why we're quibbling about this, it's generally accepted among Mac devs... it's a small price to pay if you like the OS X user experience. I haven't for some time now so the developer tools lacking and the competition of better linux DEs have tipped that scale. Trust me, I still love my MBA.

eropple 14y ago

In the last six months I've tried Elementary (closest), Ubuntu (Unity and Kubuntu), Mint (MATE and Cinnamon), and Fedora. None stuck. And it's not really the distributions' fault, but rather the applications and all the little things. Ricardobeat put it nicely elsewhere in the thread: design-by-committee. There isn't a feeling of focus from one end to the other and there is a sense of welcoming to applications with crap UX that do something important. I don't like that, and I don't feel like that's common on OS X (like, even their weird Calendar skin doesn't get in the way of a good application). It's an OS built by a lot of different people doing lots of parts in different ways. I'm not saying that I was told anything different, that's what it says right on the tin. But I find that doesn't make for a great user experience. (To Elementary's credit, activities where you can stay within the Elementary suite of applications are really pretty nice! But that makes being thrown outside at the likes of GIMP even more jarring.)

drivebyacct2 14y ago
> There isn't a feeling of focus from one end to the other Like what? I hear this repeatedly but it's with a helping dose of handwaving and a lack of specifics. I guess I just don't see that. I use VLC, Gnome-terminal, Sublime Text, Pantheon-Files, Chrome, Firefox and that's basically it. They all act the same as I expect in any desktop environment and I've literally never had a meta-moment of worry or thought about something being "off". Gimp is awkward on every platform, what does that have to do with Linux DEs?
- wpietri 14y ago
  Off the top of my head, talking about the Ubuntu 12.04.1 I use daily on two different Thinkpads: I have to log in and out or reboot pretty much every day to solve X or window manager problems. There are a variety of focus and window ordering issues. Coming back from sleep each one has different display twitches; nothing worse than the usual Linux user contempt, but definitely unpolished. The Unity stuff is going in a good direction but I don't think they've been doing a ton of user testing; it also frequently feels clunky to me. Network Manager is slow to find networks and regularly crashes. Device support is so-so: the Android tethering that is support to magically work never does; plugging in a phone or a tablet frequently requires command-line incantations and is often buggy. One of my devices has a touch-screen; a minor kernel upgrade broke this a couple months back, and it is still broken. I think they're right to go for a better UI experience, but right now I think they're in a valley between the solid but ugly Linux experience I was used to and the solid but friendly experience that Apple has inspired them to pursue. Right now I think it's flaky both in a usability sense and in a technical sense, which I find thoroughly disappointing.