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I'm someone who used desktop Linux exclusively for 10+ years before switching to a MacBook Air running OS X. I made the switch because I no longer had the time

I'm someone who used desktop Linux exclusively for 10+ years before switching to a MacBook Air running OS X. I made the switch because I no longer had the time and interest in maintaining my OS - I wanted it to just work. Much can be said for Linux distros' improvements in hardware support over the years, but it pales in comparison to paying for a superbly built computer (even Torvalds uses an MBA) and never having to think about hardware compatibility or OS breakage again. That's worth the (significant) premium in cost for me, and it is worth it for many others on HN. (This is only on the desktop side, obviously; I use an Android phone and run Debian/Ubuntu on my servers.)

AndreasFrom 13y ago
From the outside it seems that Mac developers have just as much trouble, but with things like homebrew and developer tools in general. At least if doing anything else than web programming. Is this wrong?
- marssaxman 13y ago
  I do mostly platform-independent C++ stuff, using Mac OS for my day-to-day work. No web development. I am unfamiliar with homebrew. What sort of troubles have you heard about?
  - AndreasFrom 13y ago
    BSD tools instead of GNU that behave differently and old compiler versions. And generally incompatibilities that need to be ironed out, but I'm glad to be mistaken.
- aroman 13y ago
  Yes. The package management is excellent via Brew (similar to archlinux's system). The "trouble" comes from getting the core OS to behave and play nice with the hardware. That is rarely an issue with Apple's platform, speaking from personal comparative experience. Also, Apple's SDK for their own platforms is the currently the best around, bar none.
- cjensen 13y ago
  If you try to continue to run Linux apps via various Mac-packaging systems, then yes you are going to have a bad time. It's the same packages and upgrade interdependencies as on Linux, plus extra breakage due to running on not-Linux. The way forward on a Mac is to run Mac native applications. Not really a surprise -- a Windows user who switches to Linux but wants to run all the same old stuff via Wine would be better served by switching to native apps where possible.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    I've tried that, but the officially blessed Mac way of doing package management, the App Store, has almost none of what I want in it. How am I supposed to switch if there is nothing to switch to? Say I want to stop using Audacity and switch to a proper Mac solution. What do I pull from the App Store?
    - ceol 13y ago
      GarageBand? Logic Pro X? Reason? Cubase? Ableton Live? My personal favorite is Renoise, since it's cross-platform. Any number of DAWs are available on OS X — you just have to pay for them, sometimes.
      - Yetanfou 13y ago
        but... where's the source? Those are all closed, proprietary programs. They might be fine in their own right, but they are not free software. Audacity is free software, as is Ardour. The better answer to this question is probably that Mac OS X is not the best platform to run free software on, just like Microsoft Windows is suboptimal at best. Given that those platforms are closed and proprietary this is not that surprising. If you want to run free software, start at the bottom - the kernel. It is not like there is a dearth of choice when it comes to running free kernels after all.
    - cjensen 13y ago
      Downloading executables remains a blessed way of downloading stuff for the Mac; I use Audacity. I wish more free software developers would pay the $99 tithe to get their stuff added to the Mac App Store though. (Any free software guys here? I'll pay the $99 for the first one to email me at cjensen@acm.org)
azakai 13y ago
> I made the switch because I no longer had the time and interest in maintaining my OS - I wanted it to just work. I feel that is no longer a valid excuse. I use ubuntu on thinkpads, and it just works. I see people around me with more issues with their OS X machines in fact. That might be just anecdotal, of course.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- ghswa 13y ago
  I gave up on Ubuntu when I could no longer have faith that my environment would be recognisable from one release to the next. For me, and my mother, that's a very important part of "just works".
  - pavanky 13y ago
    Some would say that is the meaning of being stagnant. If you want something that "just works" in that the environment is recognisable, use something like Redhat. You caught Ubuntu (or Fedora or other distributions that moved to GNOME 3) were on GNOME 2 greater part of the last decade. A breaking UI change had to be done at some point, and it happened to be 2 years ago. Even on macs, there was a huge overhaul going from OS9 to OSX in 2001. You can make a point saying that you don't like the new UI. That will be a much more sound argument than saying the environment is changing from one release to the next.
  - YokoZar 13y ago
    If you want something stable that doesn't change much from one release to the next, you could just not upgrade. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 5 years, and that support includes backporting hardware-enablement work.
    - ghswa 13y ago
      Sticking to LTS releases was actually the worst way to do this as it meant catching 10.04 which was effectively a "one off" UI, resulting in two changes to the UI rather than one big overhaul. My mother started off on 8.04 LTS. When upgrading to 10.04 LTS the window buttons changed sides and there was a new theme (this is enough to throw many users). When upgrading to 12.04 LTS there was a change from Gnome to Unity. My mother now chooses to use a Mac because she was fed up with her computer "changing" each time I updated it. I doubt I could convince her to try any Linux distribution again - there are no perceivable benefits for her.
takluyver 13y ago
In case anyone reading this doesn't already know about them, there are options for getting computers designed to work with Linux. I've heard good things about System 76, and Dell now offer a developer-oriented laptop with Ubuntu. These options probably aren't yet as polished as Macs, but if you want convenience and still care about an open source OS, give them your support. They won't get better without demand from people like us.
- fixxer 13y ago
  I've never had a problem getting Linux to work on a laptop. That includes Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo, even HP EliteBook (pain in the ass, but running LMDE quite nicely with NVidia). Is the argument that those machines are bad because they ship with Windows? I'm a huge hater of MS-anything (I can not quantify my hate of Windoze), but I don't see a valid argument to support overpaying for a slow System 76 machine when I can get my i7 Toshiba for $879 and put whatever OS I want (including a hackintosh VM).
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    Check out Zareason - the prices are pretty reasonable. I like buying from them because they've vetted every part of the hardware to make sure that any distro you want will work on it, and they'll find you the packages to install if the weird one you chose doesn't have them. I actually do the reverse - buy a Zareason and install Windows on it for freelance projects that I need Windows to maintain, because I know that after the maintenance window has ended on those, I can throw Debian on it without issues.
  - takluyver 13y ago
    The impression I get is that major Linux distros will work on almost any laptop, but if you want it to work well (good battery life, flawless suspend/resume, no issues with graphics drivers), you still need to think about your hardware. I don't believe that Linux can ever go mainstream through just being installed on Windows machines: for most people it's just too much effort for too little reward. And for reasons both practical and principled, I want Linux to be a mainstream option. So I support people selling computers with Linux.
kunai 13y ago
I used that same excuse to switch to Mac, but found that OS X really didn't "just work" and that there were tons of things that needed extensive configuration to get to work properly. Now, I'm on a Chromebook Pixel, and I can say safely that it's the only computer I've EVER used that really lives up to the "just works" mantra. To top it off, it actually is Linux inside, so for someone like me who uses a Linux VM on OS X most of the time, all I have to do is install crouton, do startx and go with Gnome 3 (which is quite polished now).
- hnriot 13y ago
  if you're bypassing the ChromeOS by installing a full Linux stack then aren't you undoing the "just works" part and you're back to the same issue of "maintaining" an OS. And its a very expensive machine for what you're getting. The Air is less expensive for more hardware, and you get a real operating system.
  - kunai 13y ago
    Not quite. Around 70% of the time, I'm in pure Chrome OS. The 30% I start a GNOME 3 session is to edit in Sublime and do some light image editing, and since GNOME 3 is pretty much full-GUI now without many config files, it's one setup and done.
    - gohrt 13y ago
      Can you switch without a full reboot?
      - hayksaakian 13y ago
        I would also like to know this.
      - agravier 13y ago
        I used to use a dirty hack for that (https://github.com/agravier/chromarch https://github.com/agravier/chromarch), but it was developed for the first generation of Samsung chromebooks, I don't know if it would work on the latest ones.
stefanix 13y ago
I switched to Linux after using OSX for 7 years. You do save a lot of time though not having to agree to EULAs and iTunes updates :)
- DigitalJack 13y ago
  I think you may have found the one user experience issue that linux handles better.
- sounds 13y ago
  Pro Tip: if you don't use iTunes (ever) then you can use this. The next time Software Update asks you to update iTunes: 1. uncheck iTunes from the list of updates 2. click the help menu, search for "ignore update" and click on one of the options. (I don't remember exactly what it's called.) It's a hidden way to tell Software Update to never bother you with iTunes updates again. Warning: This will leave you exposed to any security issues in iTunes, so don't run iTunes after you've shut off its updates.
stormbrew 13y ago
I was in the same boat. Switched from mixed windows/linux desktops to Macs around 2007 or so. Switched back to Linux a couple years ago, though, and honestly it's as much an out of the box experience as OSX ever has been. Mint in particular is stellar out of the box. You do have to be somewhat careful of the hardware you buy, but arguing that having to buy exclusively Apple hardware is somehow better than exclusively buying, say, IBM hardware to maintain compatibility with your OS is pure sophistry.
ams6110 13y ago
It's not perfect. Mountain Lion crashed for me just two days ago. Just based on my perceptions, I'd say Mac OS stability has declined since they moved off of PPC.
- rsynnott 13y ago
  The _hardware_ stability definitely did, though it has improved since. They became quite dependent on Intel for chipsets when they did that, and at the time Intel chipsets for laptops in particular were of quite poor quality compared to their old PPC chipsets.
gnuvince 13y ago
For what it's worth, I installed Debian Wheezy on my ThinkPad T420 last week, after years of being away from Debian GNU/Linux (I got caught by the Ubuntu bug), and I must say that I was extremely impressed; my video card, sound card, ethernet card, webcam, microphone, trackpad, trackpoint, SNES and Xbox360 controllers all worked out of the box. I had to apt-get install firmware-realtek, a non-free package to get Wifi working, but once I had downloaded it, my wireless card worked without any further configuration. As for stability, I think Debian's reputation for being rock solid is well established and deserved. I'm extremely happy with the setup I have and with how little effort I had to expand to get it. If you have an older machine lying around, I'd heartily recommend giving it a whirl.
sspiff 13y ago
I use Linux Mint, and it has been running for a year now without maintenance. It was convenient to use and pretty to look at out of the box, and all my hardware worked. I assume the same is true for other Ubuntu derivatives and probably other major distros. Linux today is not Linux 10, 5 or even 3 years ago. They've improved a lot.
username42 13y ago
I also need an OS that just work and that gets out of my way. I have used ubuntu until the beginning of this year without fiddling into the system. This is the first year that I have to fiddle because I can not cope with unity. I have tried linux mint with cinnamon, ubuntu with cinnamon. It works but it is not very polished, it looks very old. This week, I have just installed ubuntu-gnome (gnome 3.8) for the computer of my old father. I has required some effort to learn how to configure it. At first, it looks fine. I just hope I will not encounter any problem.
Intermernet 13y ago
Pretty sure Linus is on a Chromebook Pixel now.

AndreasFrom 13y ago

From the outside it seems that Mac developers have just as much trouble, but with things like homebrew and developer tools in general. At least if doing anything else than web programming. Is this wrong?

marssaxman 13y ago
I do mostly platform-independent C++ stuff, using Mac OS for my day-to-day work. No web development. I am unfamiliar with homebrew. What sort of troubles have you heard about?
- AndreasFrom 13y ago
  BSD tools instead of GNU that behave differently and old compiler versions. And generally incompatibilities that need to be ironed out, but I'm glad to be mistaken.
aroman 13y ago
Yes. The package management is excellent via Brew (similar to archlinux's system). The "trouble" comes from getting the core OS to behave and play nice with the hardware. That is rarely an issue with Apple's platform, speaking from personal comparative experience. Also, Apple's SDK for their own platforms is the currently the best around, bar none.
cjensen 13y ago
If you try to continue to run Linux apps via various Mac-packaging systems, then yes you are going to have a bad time. It's the same packages and upgrade interdependencies as on Linux, plus extra breakage due to running on not-Linux. The way forward on a Mac is to run Mac native applications. Not really a surprise -- a Windows user who switches to Linux but wants to run all the same old stuff via Wine would be better served by switching to native apps where possible.
- _delirium 13y ago
  I've tried that, but the officially blessed Mac way of doing package management, the App Store, has almost none of what I want in it. How am I supposed to switch if there is nothing to switch to? Say I want to stop using Audacity and switch to a proper Mac solution. What do I pull from the App Store?
  - ceol 13y ago
    GarageBand? Logic Pro X? Reason? Cubase? Ableton Live? My personal favorite is Renoise, since it's cross-platform. Any number of DAWs are available on OS X — you just have to pay for them, sometimes.
    - Yetanfou 13y ago
      but... where's the source? Those are all closed, proprietary programs. They might be fine in their own right, but they are not free software. Audacity is free software, as is Ardour. The better answer to this question is probably that Mac OS X is not the best platform to run free software on, just like Microsoft Windows is suboptimal at best. Given that those platforms are closed and proprietary this is not that surprising. If you want to run free software, start at the bottom - the kernel. It is not like there is a dearth of choice when it comes to running free kernels after all.
  - cjensen 13y ago
    Downloading executables remains a blessed way of downloading stuff for the Mac; I use Audacity. I wish more free software developers would pay the $99 tithe to get their stuff added to the Mac App Store though. (Any free software guys here? I'll pay the $99 for the first one to email me at cjensen@acm.org)

azakai 13y ago

> I made the switch because I no longer had the time and interest in maintaining my OS - I wanted it to just work. I feel that is no longer a valid excuse. I use ubuntu on thinkpads, and it just works. I see people around me with more issues with their OS X machines in fact. That might be just anecdotal, of course.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ghswa 13y ago
I gave up on Ubuntu when I could no longer have faith that my environment would be recognisable from one release to the next. For me, and my mother, that's a very important part of "just works".
- pavanky 13y ago
  Some would say that is the meaning of being stagnant. If you want something that "just works" in that the environment is recognisable, use something like Redhat. You caught Ubuntu (or Fedora or other distributions that moved to GNOME 3) were on GNOME 2 greater part of the last decade. A breaking UI change had to be done at some point, and it happened to be 2 years ago. Even on macs, there was a huge overhaul going from OS9 to OSX in 2001. You can make a point saying that you don't like the new UI. That will be a much more sound argument than saying the environment is changing from one release to the next.
- YokoZar 13y ago
  If you want something stable that doesn't change much from one release to the next, you could just not upgrade. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 5 years, and that support includes backporting hardware-enablement work.
  - ghswa 13y ago
    Sticking to LTS releases was actually the worst way to do this as it meant catching 10.04 which was effectively a "one off" UI, resulting in two changes to the UI rather than one big overhaul. My mother started off on 8.04 LTS. When upgrading to 10.04 LTS the window buttons changed sides and there was a new theme (this is enough to throw many users). When upgrading to 12.04 LTS there was a change from Gnome to Unity. My mother now chooses to use a Mac because she was fed up with her computer "changing" each time I updated it. I doubt I could convince her to try any Linux distribution again - there are no perceivable benefits for her.

takluyver 13y ago

In case anyone reading this doesn't already know about them, there are options for getting computers designed to work with Linux. I've heard good things about System 76, and Dell now offer a developer-oriented laptop with Ubuntu. These options probably aren't yet as polished as Macs, but if you want convenience and still care about an open source OS, give them your support. They won't get better without demand from people like us.

fixxer 13y ago
I've never had a problem getting Linux to work on a laptop. That includes Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo, even HP EliteBook (pain in the ass, but running LMDE quite nicely with NVidia). Is the argument that those machines are bad because they ship with Windows? I'm a huge hater of MS-anything (I can not quantify my hate of Windoze), but I don't see a valid argument to support overpaying for a slow System 76 machine when I can get my i7 Toshiba for $879 and put whatever OS I want (including a hackintosh VM).
- pessimizer 13y ago
  Check out Zareason - the prices are pretty reasonable. I like buying from them because they've vetted every part of the hardware to make sure that any distro you want will work on it, and they'll find you the packages to install if the weird one you chose doesn't have them. I actually do the reverse - buy a Zareason and install Windows on it for freelance projects that I need Windows to maintain, because I know that after the maintenance window has ended on those, I can throw Debian on it without issues.
- takluyver 13y ago
  The impression I get is that major Linux distros will work on almost any laptop, but if you want it to work well (good battery life, flawless suspend/resume, no issues with graphics drivers), you still need to think about your hardware. I don't believe that Linux can ever go mainstream through just being installed on Windows machines: for most people it's just too much effort for too little reward. And for reasons both practical and principled, I want Linux to be a mainstream option. So I support people selling computers with Linux.

kunai 13y ago

I used that same excuse to switch to Mac, but found that OS X really didn't "just work" and that there were tons of things that needed extensive configuration to get to work properly. Now, I'm on a Chromebook Pixel, and I can say safely that it's the only computer I've EVER used that really lives up to the "just works" mantra. To top it off, it actually is Linux inside, so for someone like me who uses a Linux VM on OS X most of the time, all I have to do is install crouton, do startx and go with Gnome 3 (which is quite polished now).

hnriot 13y ago
if you're bypassing the ChromeOS by installing a full Linux stack then aren't you undoing the "just works" part and you're back to the same issue of "maintaining" an OS. And its a very expensive machine for what you're getting. The Air is less expensive for more hardware, and you get a real operating system.
- kunai 13y ago
  Not quite. Around 70% of the time, I'm in pure Chrome OS. The 30% I start a GNOME 3 session is to edit in Sublime and do some light image editing, and since GNOME 3 is pretty much full-GUI now without many config files, it's one setup and done.
  - gohrt 13y ago
    Can you switch without a full reboot?
    - hayksaakian 13y ago
      I would also like to know this.
    - agravier 13y ago
      I used to use a dirty hack for that (https://github.com/agravier/chromarch https://github.com/agravier/chromarch), but it was developed for the first generation of Samsung chromebooks, I don't know if it would work on the latest ones.

stefanix 13y ago

I switched to Linux after using OSX for 7 years. You do save a lot of time though not having to agree to EULAs and iTunes updates :)

DigitalJack 13y ago
I think you may have found the one user experience issue that linux handles better.
sounds 13y ago
Pro Tip: if you don't use iTunes (ever) then you can use this. The next time Software Update asks you to update iTunes: 1. uncheck iTunes from the list of updates 2. click the help menu, search for "ignore update" and click on one of the options. (I don't remember exactly what it's called.) It's a hidden way to tell Software Update to never bother you with iTunes updates again. Warning: This will leave you exposed to any security issues in iTunes, so don't run iTunes after you've shut off its updates.

stormbrew 13y ago

I was in the same boat. Switched from mixed windows/linux desktops to Macs around 2007 or so. Switched back to Linux a couple years ago, though, and honestly it's as much an out of the box experience as OSX ever has been. Mint in particular is stellar out of the box. You do have to be somewhat careful of the hardware you buy, but arguing that having to buy exclusively Apple hardware is somehow better than exclusively buying, say, IBM hardware to maintain compatibility with your OS is pure sophistry.

ams6110 13y ago

It's not perfect. Mountain Lion crashed for me just two days ago. Just based on my perceptions, I'd say Mac OS stability has declined since they moved off of PPC.

rsynnott 13y ago
The _hardware_ stability definitely did, though it has improved since. They became quite dependent on Intel for chipsets when they did that, and at the time Intel chipsets for laptops in particular were of quite poor quality compared to their old PPC chipsets.

gnuvince 13y ago

For what it's worth, I installed Debian Wheezy on my ThinkPad T420 last week, after years of being away from Debian GNU/Linux (I got caught by the Ubuntu bug), and I must say that I was extremely impressed; my video card, sound card, ethernet card, webcam, microphone, trackpad, trackpoint, SNES and Xbox360 controllers all worked out of the box. I had to apt-get install firmware-realtek, a non-free package to get Wifi working, but once I had downloaded it, my wireless card worked without any further configuration. As for stability, I think Debian's reputation for being rock solid is well established and deserved. I'm extremely happy with the setup I have and with how little effort I had to expand to get it. If you have an older machine lying around, I'd heartily recommend giving it a whirl.

sspiff 13y ago

I use Linux Mint, and it has been running for a year now without maintenance. It was convenient to use and pretty to look at out of the box, and all my hardware worked. I assume the same is true for other Ubuntu derivatives and probably other major distros. Linux today is not Linux 10, 5 or even 3 years ago. They've improved a lot.

username42 13y ago

I also need an OS that just work and that gets out of my way. I have used ubuntu until the beginning of this year without fiddling into the system. This is the first year that I have to fiddle because I can not cope with unity. I have tried linux mint with cinnamon, ubuntu with cinnamon. It works but it is not very polished, it looks very old. This week, I have just installed ubuntu-gnome (gnome 3.8) for the computer of my old father. I has required some effort to learn how to configure it. At first, it looks fine. I just hope I will not encounter any problem.

Intermernet 13y ago

Pretty sure Linus is on a Chromebook Pixel now.