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Guide to Leaving your Mac

76 points by gigasquid 13y ago

greatsuccess 13y ago
I don't need a guide to leaving the best computer currently made. If I had to use a PC I don't know if I would bother with computers at all except for my job. PC laptops have the reputation they deserve and I think they not only tarnished personal/mobile computing as a general concept (only to be rescued by Apple), PC laptops should be the first category of the PC family to die out completely and save people the misery and disillusionment that when you buy such a thing, that you think you actually bought something. And Im not even saying Windows laptops, this is a commodity hardware issue combined with fantastically disappointing software (Windows or Ubuntu), but I wouldn't want one running OS X either. It's time for the PC industry to take out its own trash.
- busterarm 13y ago
  The OEMs have been quite terrible for a long time. Even Lenovo is a barely-trustworthy brand to me anymore -- and it's the only brand and they don't currently have anything in their product lineup that I'd be happy to use. Dell and HP have become especially crap. Toshiba, which used to be crap is now somehow the better mass-market OEM out there. I wouldn't spend my own money on anything from Asus; every single Asus product I've ever come across has failed in under 3 years. What I really want is for Apple to make an iPad that will let me use a USB keyboard. Safari and SSH are all I need.
  - greglindahl 13y ago
    There are many nice bluetooth keyboards that work fine with iPads.
    - busterarm 13y ago
      I use a Realforce 87U as my primary keyboard and my secondary keyboards all have Cherry MX Red or Blue switches. I have purchased custom-manufactured aluminum cases for my KBC Pokers. I also hate Alps switches. It's almost a guarantee that there is nothing on the market that I will find suitable for getting real work done. There's the KBTalking Pro, but it's fullsize and not good for travel. The Neo 87 has poor build quality and the wireless barely works. It'd have to be at least a TKL but a 60% or HHKB would be better. The best I've seen is a bluetooth mod that's far too battery-hungry for prime-time. I want something with a wire. Bluetooth keyboard pairing and the typically-horrendous bluetooth stacks border on nightmarish.
wandermatt 13y ago
Would be more useful to hear a retrospective after six months.
- mkhpalm 13y ago
  I left Apple last year after nearly a decade of using Apple products. I have a Zenbook Prime running Debian unstable now. I find Gnome Shell just as easy to use as OSX. In fact its more functional in many aspects like how quickly I can get to the things I'm looking for. That said, there are pros and cons to using OSX or Linux. But I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I think people should use whatever floats their boat.
- tokenrove 13y ago
  I left Apple around the PPC->Intel transition, for Thinkpads (and recently, a Zenbook) running Debian. No regrets; life got much better; would not go back; YMMV. (I still have to use OS X and iOS machines regularly at work, and this only confirms my decision.)
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  I left apple a bit over a year ago because I wanted to get a laptop with some serious GPU power (I was doing lots of sequence alignments that took hours to do on my old laptop and hours to upload to / download from my university's compute cluster). The computer performed fabulously at this task, but my experience with the Microsoft ecosystem has been absolutely dreadful. Now that I no longer need the GPU power, I will gladly pay a few hundred dollar premium to get a mac laptop for my next computer. I would probably pay a 2x premium if Apple asked it. -------- OS Installation: The Horror Story -------- * Reinstalling the OS is a 4-5 hour manual slog through serial numbers and a dozen drivers that must be manually installed in the correct order, not a 1-hour fire-and-forget process like in the Mac ecosystem. (hours of my time vs minutes of my time). * The bundled "backup solution" works neither for imaging nor for incremental document recovery. "Time Machine" this is not. * MSE antivirus was dreadfully slow (Just downloaded an installer? It'll wait 30 seconds before launching 5 copies of the .exe corresponding to the 5 times you clicked on it). * I got a 30gb SSD as a boot volume and put Windows on it, then linked ("junctioned") the "Program Files" directory to my HDD (I'd done similar on my mac without trouble). Big mistake, none of the applications would launch. They didn't launch after I copied them back either (yes, I looked up permission-resetting instructions and followed them to the letter). I had to reinstall. * I looked up a Microsoft support document explaining how to properly put programs on a different HD (and also that it was unsupported). It involved registry edits and DOS-fu from the system restore disk. The next time Windows Update ran, it broke my system so that no program would launch (DLL error every time). Rolling back the updates didn't work, of course. I had to reinstall. Gave up on the 30gb SSD. * I tried to upgrade my Win7 install to Win8. Big mistake. The installer took 2 hours to give me an unhelpful generic error message. After hours of searching through forums I found out that it scans your installed Win7 drivers+programs one by one and barfs if any of them aren't compatible (but it doesn't tell you that, of course). * I tried a fresh install of Win8 on a new 250gb SSD I got on black friday. It froze every time I woke from sleep. Oh, and it would boot to an I/O error bluescreen unless I booted into Win7 first, touched a file on the SSD, and rebooted (yes, touching a file was necessary). Two firmware updates and a handful of driver updates later and I had the same symptoms. * On a hunch, I switched the SSD from SATA slot 2 to 0. This broke the bootloader, and Microsoft's instructions to fix it didn't work, giving a generic error message that many people on the support forum seemed to experience but that nobody had a fix for. There were 2 Microsoft employees with unhelpful non-fix "solutions," though. * I nuked the Win7 HDD install and reinstalled Win8 afresh on the SSD (now slot 0). It seems to be stable so far. * There was a 4-month period where Dell's GPU drivers had broken OpenCL compatibility and the manufacturer drivers would silently fail to install unless I ran a 3rd-party sketchware wiping program first and disabled signature enforcement on every boot. * Audio drivers occasionally fail to wake from sleep (no audio till reboot). No, updating them to the manufacturer version didn't help. No, reinstalling Dell's recommended drivers didn't help either. -------- Small Gripes -------- * No decent UNIX command line. Cygwin starts slowly and is poorly integrated with the system. * I can't get decent 2-finger scroll without a 3rd party program that is occasionally broken by system updates. * I can't remap capslock without downloading a 3rd-party program to perform registry edits. * I can't shut off the screen without installing a 3rd party program to do so. * In Win7, all allowed keyboard layout switching shortcuts were combinations of modifiers that conflicted with productivity apps like Illustrator. Also, the layout would occasionally become "stuck" and failed to respect the GUI switcher. In Win8, they added a no-conflict key combination for switching layouts but it doesn't work in fullscreen apps. * Metro. It looks slick, but it doesn't have any of the options you regularly need to access. Fortunately the old menagerie of Windows utilities is still there, just moved around. * No standard install system that lets you inspect the installer's logs, scripts, or contents. * The intimate connection between my computer account and Microsoft cloud account creeps me out. * The full-screen force-quit mechanism is insane (ctrl-alt-del, open Task Manager, press Windows to reveal the Launch Bar, click on the arrow to see all system tray icons, right-click the tiny Task Manager icon (a gray box), enable "Always on Top", highlight the program in the task manager, hit "End Task", wait, hit "End Task" on the dialog box that pops up, and finally decline to send a bug report to Microsoft) * I can't use the keyboard to navigate directories that contain a mixture of files and folders because in Mircrosoft-Land "Alphabetical Order" means "Sort folders first, then files." * The sub-HD preloaded desktop backgrounds (yes, really). -------- Small Victories -------- * Cheaper, better hardware (not remotely cost effective, given the hassle) * I can manually tweak virtual memory settings (not that I should have to tweak it, which I do, but I think it's terribly cool that I can and that there's a GUI for it) * Compatibility * The super-handy "superuser menu" (Win-X) * The ability to roll-back updates. It has never worked when I needed it to, but I like the idea. -------- Concluding Remarks -------- I've had better UX with linux, which is saying something, since I had previously considered linux UX to be fairly poor, or rather great -- until a mission-critical piece of it inevitably broke. Turns out the same thing applies Windows, except worse. Sadly, it sees that there is tremendous value in having a non-fragmented ecosystem. My next computer will be a mac. -------- My Plea to You -------- If you know how to fix any of my gripes, please speak up. I'm still a newbie. Maybe these are just growing pains. I don't think so, but I can hope.
jmduke 13y ago
I've got an iPhone, iPad, and MBA. In an abstract sense -- that is, all other things equal -- I'd like to swap them out for non-Apple products. I dislike Apple's software, their entire "magic/creative/yadda-yadda-yadda" branding, and of course their price tag. But the app ecosystem and hardware to me seem absolutely incomparable. I can't see myself ever switching my phone or tablet because it seems as though iOS apps are just unapproachably better than Android counterparts -- and there aren't any laptops as functional and, yes, straight-up pretty as the MacBook Air. (The reason the author cited for switching from Apple was two failed laptops. For what it's worth, my previous laptop -- a Dell -- broke every six months or so. [I had four-year insurance, thankfully, and replaced it once the insurance ran out.]
- jccalhoun 13y ago
  I switched from ipods and ipod touches to android and I can't really see myself going back any time soon because of the ability to tweak and customize android. I don't miss any apps from ios and I don't think I have ever felt like an android app was worse than an ios version.
  - Legion 13y ago
    I'm of the same mind. I switched from the iPhone to Android because I was dissatisfied with the tiny iPhone screens, but I expected a quality drop-off in apps. The drop-off, in the instances where it does exist, is not nearly as dramatic as advertised. It's pretty small, really, which has me looking at switching my tablet from iPad to an Android tablet as well. Plus, on Android, I have a browser with functioning plug-ins (Firefox). iOS's app ecosystem doesn't seem so great when it fails so dramatically at perhaps the most important app: web browser.
  - astrodust 13y ago
    It's like switching from real orange juice to Fanta. Some people won't notice, and some people will like it better. The problem with Android isn't the OS, it's the stupid number of hardware configurations possible that make fine-tuning the application to the screen virtually impossible. Most applications, even the best, are still rough around the edges compared to their iOS counterparts. If you want tweaking and customizing, Android is the only way to go.
shalalala 13y ago
I happen to like the hardware a bit more than when I first got the MBPr, but would LOVE to have a good Debian install guide for this puppy. Heck, I might even settle for Ubuntu in the meantime.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- kevinchen 13y ago
  Run a live cd and double click the installer icon?
msluyter 13y ago
The article doesn't address what for me are the major sticking points: iTunes and iPhoto. I have years of music & photos stored in both, and to switch to linux I'd need an relatively painless migration strategy. Anyone have any suggestions?
- deepGem 13y ago
  Have you tried using any of the cloud photo organizers? openphoto comes to mind.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  For iTunes, Google Music provided a pretty darn seamless transition. You download their client software, it scans your iTunes library, and registers the songs you have with Google Play. Songs it doesn't recognize, it uploads. This is a double-feature because Google Music is both platform-agnostic, and integrates with Android. Google Music itself is not necessarily the most amazing user experience, and someone with a bajillion music files may be upset with it, but for me the high quality (all purchased & "recognized" music is 320kbps) and general platform- and client-agnostic nature trumps music management "power".
- adrusi 13y ago
  Ah, yes. iTunes. I just did this a few days ago---switched from iTunes to a Linux alternative. This was hard. I've never bought anything through iTunes, but I love the program for managing my music library. It looks nice, which is important for me while listening to music, and it's very powerful, with smart playlists and the play queue. I eventually settled for Banshee and imported my library with a lot of manual support. It wasn't easy or fun to switch, but it only took a couple hours to get right, and now I'm quite pleased with the result. iPhoto, however, has always been shit. Mostly because it's slow. I haven't moved my photos to Linux yet, but I think Darktable is supposed to be good.
busterarm 13y ago
I have a mid-2011 Mac Mini and for a while considered an rMBP almost necessary. Instead of shelling out for one, I stuck a $40 SSD in a Lenovo x100e I had sitting around and installed Arch on it (after a decade or so of being a Slackware user). Best computing decision I ever made. For one, I prefer the smaller form factor, trackpoint and much superior keyboard (even if it's still chiclet). Secondly, I hardly ever use X. I get so much more work done on this laptop than I can on any other computer and it's relatively distraction-free (I added a couple roguelikes and dwarf fortress). Just log in and tmux is ready to go with what I need to start working. The one downside is that, on the occasions that I do use X, the fonts aren't very good. I wouldn't even begin to know how to approach making typography more Mac-like, but I'm okay with that. I spend 99% of my time in the console. In fact, going forward I see myself using a VPS or running a dedicated server somewhere and then it doesn't really matter what laptop I use.
- astrodust 13y ago
  That's the problem. Apple's typography is well ahead of anything in the Linux world, and even Linux is still ahead of what Windows has. The "Retina" screens make this even harder to match.
  - busterarm 13y ago
    For sure, but I'm not such a typography nerd that what's on Linux is unacceptable to me. Ultimately I'm going to get my work done however is most efficient; that just tends to be Linux. My Mac (which I'm using now) is great for web browsing and reading articles. I'd sooner use my Kindle for that than my Linux laptop though and often I do. Once Apple makes a retina iPad around 10 inches and lets me use my own USB keyboard, I'll never use anything else. If that iPad Pro rumor pans out, it'd better have USB.
    - astrodust 13y ago
      I've been impressed that typography on Linux isn't as bad as Windows, but it's still got a long way to go to measure up to Apple. It's not just clarity and accuracy of the typefaces themselves, but subtle details like how the ligatures (things like how "fi" and "ff" are rendered) are properly applied. Typography is one of those things that, once you've seen it, you can't un-see it. You can only try to not care. Apple's not interested in adding USB to the iPad since Bluetooth already does anything USB can do and more, at least from the perspective of a consumer. If you want a portable USB-capable tablet, maybe you want a Surface Pro. That thing would be pretty awesome if someone can Linux it. In any case, you can already use pretty much any Bluetooth keyboard you want, and there are a large number of third party ones to pick from.
derengel 13y ago
Is sad but the MBA really has no rival, quality/hardware wise.
- jonemo 13y ago
  Mac hardware doesn't break, but when you purchase the four year warranty on a Dell (which will get you a total near the price of an equivalent Macbook) it will break a few times during the four years, but each time you get it fixed or replaced next day at home.
  - dima55 13y ago
    I've never seen an apple laptop that didn't break after a few (<= 2) years. YMMV.
    - woofyman 13y ago
      My 2008 MBP has never had any issues.
    - eddieroger 13y ago
      I've never seen one break long after that. In fact, I finally just had to part ways with an iBook from 2001 that lasted me over a decade, and upgraded from 9.2 to 10.5.
    - ljoshua 13y ago
      I've yet to have any of the Apple laptops that I've owned (or desktops for that matter) that have broken in that timeframe. In fact I'm using an MBP that's going on it's fifth year here, and the only thing that's changed is I popped in a new battery after about four years. Excellent track record for me. (Of course, YMMV.)
    - Watabou 13y ago
      Using a 2008 MBP. No issues. Of course, I have now given it to a mom who is happily using it. And this was the macbook pro with a GPU that had a high rate of failure (8600M GT)
jkelsey 13y ago
The author was having hardware problems, so he switched his software? There's nothing more open about Dell's hardware than Apple's and just because Dell offers a laptop with Linux does that mean you're now in some sort of open-source utopia where the open-source community comes together to solve every single computer problem that users encounter. Don't get me wrong, I think Linux is great and there's tons of awesome open-source projects, but I don't think Ubuntu is one of them. If you've been following Canonical's behavior with Ubuntu over the past few years, you should be aware of what I'm talking about. And Dell? Well, their XPS laptops do seem to be of higher quality than what most of the PC industry offers, but support? I'm sorry, but I feel much more confidence in the Genius Bar. Apple's not perfect, but the rest of the latop manufacturers are a joke.
- tujv 13y ago
  I was hoping for a comparison between competing platforms and how they stack up against iOS OSX. But this article is free software evangelism ("I set myself free") not a serious guide to moving away from Apple.
  - jkelsey 13y ago
    > But this article is free software evangelism ("I set myself free") [...] That is what is so irritating about this type of rhetoric; I switched from OS X to Ubuntu and now I'm free! Well, no, you just switched from one corporate controlled Operating System to another. Ubuntu may be open-source, but it's hardly free. Biggest example: You have to opt-out of Canonical's desktop search results sharing relationship with Amazon. At least when I look for files on a Mac, I don't get ads in my search results. If you like Ubuntu over OS X, then that's fine, but please don't say it's because of "freedom". If people are going to write about their holier-than-thou articles about how they switched to free software, they better be running something like Trisequel Linux on a Gluglug Laptop (http://www.fsf.org/news/gluglug-x60-laptop-now-certified-to-respect-your-freedom http://www.fsf.org/news/gluglug-x60-laptop-now-certified-to-...) or perhaps they should think about something else to write about.
    - 13y ago
prg318 13y ago
This article mentions that there is no native 1Password client for Linux and recommends some kind of dropbox workaround. While this probably true at the time of writing, Icculus recently wrote a native Linux client [1]. There's more details about it in this G+ post if you are interested: - https://plus.google.com/+RyanGordon/posts/ZFyb9TQS9zB https://plus.google.com/+RyanGordon/posts/ZFyb9TQS9zB [1] https://icculus.org/1pass/ https://icculus.org/1pass/
- adinb 13y ago
  With the exception of using the browser plugins, 1password works great in wine—I pointed it to my Dropbox folder and was able to read and write passwords.
latch 13y ago
I looked at getting a Sputnik 3, but it's available only in select countries and 16GB isn't an option (nor is it for MBA, but it is for the relatively light rMBP). And I hate the Dell logo. In fact, I hate all text logos. It's ridiculous. 150" TVs in shopping malls with a huge "SAMSUNG" or "SONY" at the bottom. If you have to do something, use some image (an apple, the ubuntu reactor thing, windows 4 squares...)
mmanfrin 13y ago
I recently switched my Windows desktop to Ubuntu, with the intention of making myself an at-home desktop dev environment. I still use my Macbook for work, and my MBA for personal dev. My thoughts have been positive, Ubuntu is much nicer than I remember previous brushes with Linux being. A lot of things required slight configuration, but Ubuntu and Linux have hit that critical mass that most of my problems can be solved with a simple search. However, there are a few persistent problems that have lots of different solutions that dont all seem to work; and I feel there are lots of lacking areas in the app ecosystem. For instance, there does not seem to be a single well-designed SQL gui for linux. Everything looks out of Windows-ME-era-enterprise. For Macs, you have Sequel Pro amongst a lot of strong competition. Additionally, homebrew is a lot easier/more robust than apt-get; no repositories to deal with. I think this all points to something about me, specifically: I want software to make some assumptions for me. Brew does this, apt-get doesnt. This is both the strength of Mac and the strength of Linux -- they cater to the level of assumption that their camps want. I, unfortunately, want more assumption. Also, as a small side note, I can't get League of Legends to work on WINE, so I am unable to play with excoworkers -- that was the main way we kept in touch and it's pushing me to a point that I might put Windows back on my desktop, if only to have that connection back -- a little juvenile, but oh well.
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  > I can't get League of Legends to work on WINE You do realize you can dual boot, right?
  - kbar13 13y ago
    dual booting is really annoying.
    - w1ntermute 13y ago
      I find it very useful - it keeps me from playing "just one game" when I really need to be coding.
    - adrusi 13y ago
w1ntermute 13y ago
At least there's the option of leaving Macs for other brands. As a ThinkPad user, I'm totally fucked because of Lenovo's decision to get rid of the physical TrackPoint buttons[0]. First they got rid of the traditional keyboard in favor an Apple-style chiclet keyboard (which, after using both extensively, is a severe downgrade from the traditional ThinkPad keyboard). Now they're getting rid of the TrackPoint buttons. Next is going to be the TrackPoint, all in the name of copying Apple. There's no one else making a proper TrackPoint (and HP and Dell are ditching what they did have), and using a trackpad is so slow. It's sad to see Lenovo take a great laptop line and turn it into an Apple clone. 0: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXa0XzNvuZU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXa0XzNvuZU
- busterarm 13y ago
  Here here. Trackpoint has long been a major factor for me picking Thinkpads. The lack of physical buttons on the new ones is beyond annoying and trackpads in the Windows PC space are total crap. Macs really do have everyone beat there, but even better are Wacom's intuos Touch models. I use a few gestures to quickly move windows around in OSX but can almost totally stick to the keyboard.
  - w1ntermute 13y ago
    I'm amazed that more people never got into using TrackPoints. Mac or PC, I've never seen anyone able to use the trackpad to mouse around at anywhere near the speed that I (or other ThinkPad users) can use the TrackPoint to do so. It's funny to see how astonished people are at how quickly I can navigate, when it's really just a matter of using the right tool.
    - busterarm 13y ago
      Most people never realized that there are three different Trackpoint tips and the default was for a long time that crappy classic dome. The soft dome is somewhat better but I've been a soft rim diehard for near 15 years now. Also I think the quality of whatever rubber they used in the mid-90s was really poor. Gestures are a pretty big deal to me now though. Gestures and the keyboard shortcuts for me are much faster.
cgtyoder 13y ago
It's unfortunate that your Apple hardware experience was so poor, but you're really not going to have better luck elsewhere - all the major hw manufacturers have a fairly similar failure rate [1] (Apple apparently is one of the better ones). You just got unlucky. [1] http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliab... http://www.statisticbrain.com/laptop-malfunction-rates/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/laptop-malfunction-rates/
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
eddieroger 13y ago
Every time I consider ditching my MacBook for a Linux machine, I come back to wondering why I'd want to do that at all. If it's to appease my command-line-junky insides, I can open up Terminal (or iTerm 2) and have instant UNIX. If it's to run some LAMP-esque stack, I can fire up homebrew and have everything I want. And if I don't really want to deal with the inner-workings of a machine, I can spend time in Aqua and have access to some of the best designed software in the game. Lastly, it plays with my ecosystem of gadgets - my iPhone and iPad are first class citizens, and thanks to iCloud and quality developers, things work seamlessly between all my tech, including my AppleTV through mirroring or extended display in Mavericks. I realize that this last bit makes me not the target audience for the article anymore, but it's worth saying. The author states his only reason for leaving is failed hardware. I've had nothing but great experiences with Apple's hardware, and in the few rare exceptions, Apple has gone above and beyond to make the situation right. Fixes after warranty period, quick turnaround, etc, have kept my business with them.
kevinchen 13y ago
I wouldn't take OS X vs Linux advice from a person who calls her computer a "Mac Air"
- jambo 13y ago
  That's cheap and hardly warrants a reply. "Mac Air" may not be the trade name of the computer, but it's not ambiguous and has no bearing on the substance of the article.
pimeys 13y ago
For me the real breakthrough was to get rid of Ubuntu and install Arch and configure everything by myself for my laptop. It was super fun, learning to use systemd and making everything to work. Having xmonad, with pretty fonts, automatic suspend, wifi, vpn and all that working. And it was not at all that hard and took me one night and a couple of beers to get everything done. I might be different than most of computer users, but I really do enjoy doing everything by myself. Now I know exactly what's wrong if something breaks. And Arch (or Funtoo, my work distro) are much easier to configure with a text editor compared to Ubuntu (or if we go this path, to OSX). I like systemd much more than upstart or launchd. I like the idea of a rolling release, so I don't have the nerve breaking massive updates every now and then. But if just switching from OSX to a Unity distro, for me that wouldn't be enough to switch.
zacinbusiness 13y ago
I really want to like Linux. I've spent hours, here and there, hacking away with various distributions of Linux and on different hardware (I was part of the group that finally got CompizFusion working on the HP Mininote 2133). But when it comes down to it I don't want to have to be elbow deep in source code just to fix a sound card problem or similar. I love Linux as an idea, and that it's free has done wonders for the world as far as opening access to the internet and its knowledge. But I just don't see it as a viable day-to-day OS for me. At the same time, I have and will continue to tinker around with Linux (I learned about Lua because of Conky!) because I don't think that there's any harm in learning new things. And I've found that I learn best by breaking things and then trying to fix what I broke - and that's a nearly weekly experience for me when I try to use anything but Unbuntu.
bane 13y ago
I currently split time between a 15" rMBP and a few Windows 7 machines and to be honest, I prefer the time on my Windows 7 machines despite many downsides. Every few years I'll have a go at going Mac (this is try #3) and they'll all sort of peter out and I'll end up back in Windows. I think this current go around has been the most successful, I love my rMBP hardware. And the work that Apple has put into making touchpads actually useful (both with hardware and software) is miraculous. The keyboards are nice typing experiences (I'm more mixed on the magic mouse). It's also an awesome portable virtualization platform that I've had 4 or 5 Linux VMs all up and running like a champ on it. Multiple workspaces are usually awesome, I keep several workspaces for different semantic parts of my day and the flow is really nice. Airdrop is magic. For the most part things just work. To try and make it really stick, I went cold turkey for the better part of 9 months and didn't touch a Windows machine. But then, small frustrations and irritations finally built up and I recently just built myself a new Windows 7 computer and pretty much use it for all of my day-to-day with my Mac sitting in a travel bag for when I need to go on the road. What is it that keeps pushing me back? I've spent a lot of time thinking about why this is and sorta have it narrowed down to a few user scenarios: Here's 1 line of reasoning: 1. When I'm using my Mac, I find I try and avoid actually interacting with OS X as much as possible. I spend all of my time in Office, a web browser, a console window or a virtualized linux machine and that gets me through 95% of my day. 2. Digging in deeper and I find that OS X, while having some nice bits here and there (as discussed above), is so full of so many clumsy frustrations that I've never really been able to get over the feeling of reduced productivity when I'm dealing with it. I've realized that I deal with this by simply avoiding doing the things that frustrate or irritate me. Some of this probably stems from me not wanting to do things the prescribed "Apple way" and wanting to do it my own way. But it's irritating enough that I want to get away from the entire system after any extended interaction with the OS bits. 3. By and large this is focused on Finder (there's other issues, but Finder is the biggest problem I have), which is probably the single worst file manager I've used in 30 years of computing, and no amount of "getting used to it" seems to alleviate the simple fact that it sucks. I've tried a couple replacements, but they all seem to scratch some small itch and nothing really comes close to the magical file management wonderland that is the Windows 7 Explorer. It's so bad that even after a solid year with my Mac I still can't reliably predict where a new folder is going to be created. I know this makes me sound impossibly dumb, but these kinds of simple file management interface problems have been solved everywhere else. Even the various Linux file managers work better and more reliably. I would be so much more interested in staying on my Mac if I knew I could manage files without feeling like I was poking around a dark damp hole trying to sort through and pick up grains of rice with my elbows. I could go on for pages ranting about the abortion of ideas that is Finder, but let's just conclude that I hate it. 4. I realized that one of the reasons I spend so much time in a terminal then is because managing files form the command line is better! (the other reason I'm in the command line is so I can ssh into my linux VMs) 5. so if most of what I'm doing is Chrome, Office, ssh and Linux via VirtualBox, which are essentially equivalent experiences in OS X or Windows, and then doing OS things like moving files around works better in Windows, why should I still use my Mac? I've come up with other lines of reasoning: - all of the media production tools I personally work with have emphasized Windows development over Mac development for a while or no Mac equivalent exists at all. - retrocomputing and retrogaming, which I have a deep personal interest in, has a far richer ecosystem under Windows and the tools that have version for both OSs tend to work better in Windows. Also moving around and organizing tens of thousands of files related to this hobby is much better under Windows - another hobby, photography, I shoot thousands upon thousands of photos and haven't met an photo organizing tool I like, so I manage everything on the filesystem, which again means I'm avoiding finder - Until Mavericks, multi-monitor support with full-screen apps was broken, and there's no excuse for it. None. Maximize was solved in Windows 3.0. 23 years ago - OS X seems to keep growing interface hair, meaning what started as simple elegant design slowly accumulated feature cruft until the design is no longer simple or elegant and the design wasn't really flexible enough to accommodate this growing interface hair. Witness the madness around the resizing window buttons in OS X. But all the various crap that shows up in my menubar vs. sometimes in my dock vs. sometimes nowhere but ps, etc. Or the haphazard combinations of modifier hotkey combinations that don't really carryover between apps, a legacy of the one-button mouse movement which is now just vestigial, but now means I have to keep track of which combination of shift, fn, control, option and command to use in some combination before I even think about what button I need to push to modify some other key to do some menial task that's standard and two buttons in Windows. - Even after taking hundreds of screen shots over the last year, I still have to lookup the madness of screen capture in OS X every single time I sit down to take more screen shots. Here's a 3 page article on it. http://osxdaily.com/2010/05/13/print-screen-mac/ http://osxdaily.com/2010/05/13/print-screen-mac/ Sure I don't get a "prt scr" key on the keyboard, but I get half a dozen key modifier keys and an eject key. I'll sometimes just put off the task till I get home and just do it in Windows it's so irritating. - There's no paint program that ships with OS X. Boggles the mind. - Having to buy and install tons of little apps to "fix" some broken or poorly designed behavior in the default apps that ship with the OS. This isn't like buying photoshop because it fixed paint. Photoshop is a different level entirely to paint. This is like iTerm2 which is almost exactly like, but just fixes a few things and adds a couple things to iTerm. And this kind of drop-in replacement cancer permeates the entire Mac experience. There's entire ecosystems of slightly different replacements for the default apps, and it's entirely expected that setting up a new mac will involve hunting these down and installing them to replace the broken stuff that the OS ships with. I'm really just exhausted of both this process and the attitude that this is a perfectly normal and sane thing to do. It's not, the OS is shipped broken and Apple needs to fix this stuff. - Video performance is noticeably better in Windows. I'm not sure what it is, but I find my Mac has lots of little screen-tearing issues, and watching full-screen video on it just isn't as snappy (using VLC on both) as it was on my 6 year old Windows box (before I built my current one). - Things usually just work in OS X. But when they don't you enter a world of mystery that goes as deep as a computer science degree can take you. In Windows, these days things also more or less just work, but when they don't, there's a kind of expectation in the design that you're likely to have an issue so there's all sorts of good error reporting and resolution paths to try and exhaust before even having to start searching forums for advice. - I need to read NTFS volumes frequently and OS X's default NTFS compatibility sucks and the fixes are out of date and don't work very well either. In contrast, I've never had to read an HFS (or whatever Apple journaled blah blah file system) volume. - no dedicated page up/down home or end keys. I use those keys all the time. Why are they gone? It's irritating having to hunt down a modifier key and an arrow and hope that you figured out the magic combination that's "home". - I can't multi-tab drag in Chrome. I drag groups of tabs around in Windows all the time. Doesn't work in OS X. - minimized windows are a pain to bring up. Therefore I don't minimize in OS X. The dock (especially when auto-hid) is flaky and won't show up half the time. The delay for when it does feel like popping up when my mouse is down at the bottom of the screen feels entirely random. - I don't like any of the text editors I've tried. I just end up in vi in iterm. But I really want a good text editor. - VNC is not a suitable remote desktop solution compared to RDP. It's just not. I Remote into half a dozen machines over the course of a day and wish I had a decent way to remote into my Mac that wasn't VNC. - and more and more and more I'm sure there are built in solutions I'm overlooking, or some app I can install that fixes this or modifies that, or some setting that makes something behave better than the default. But the point is that outside of applications that exist on both platforms equally, I'm avoiding or annoyed with everything else on the platform. I'm committed to sticking it out and have even resolved to spend more time on my mac - especially post-Mavericks. But it's just not a better computing experience for me. It's interesting and it's different, and it makes me yearn for certain things that windows doesn't have (multiple workspaces), but when the equivalent functions work better in Windows I'm forced to choose the easier and less frustrating environment to spend time in.
7stark7 13y ago
My experience: Broken motherboard AND screen on my Macbook air. Apple replaced both for free, with no AppleCare. I have a few other stories just like this one.

76 points by gigasquid 13y ago

I don't need a guide to leaving the best computer currently made. If I had to use a PC I don't know if I would bother with computers at all except for my job. PC laptops have the reputation they deserve and I think they not only tarnished personal/mobile computing as a general concept (only to be rescued by Apple), PC laptops should be the first category of the PC family to die out completely and save people the misery and disillusionment that when you buy such a thing, that you think you actually bought something. And Im not even saying Windows laptops, this is a commodity hardware issue combined with fantastically disappointing software (Windows or Ubuntu), but I wouldn't want one running OS X either. It's time for the PC industry to take out its own trash.

busterarm 13y ago
The OEMs have been quite terrible for a long time. Even Lenovo is a barely-trustworthy brand to me anymore -- and it's the only brand and they don't currently have anything in their product lineup that I'd be happy to use. Dell and HP have become especially crap. Toshiba, which used to be crap is now somehow the better mass-market OEM out there. I wouldn't spend my own money on anything from Asus; every single Asus product I've ever come across has failed in under 3 years. What I really want is for Apple to make an iPad that will let me use a USB keyboard. Safari and SSH are all I need.
- greglindahl 13y ago
  There are many nice bluetooth keyboards that work fine with iPads.
  - busterarm 13y ago
    I use a Realforce 87U as my primary keyboard and my secondary keyboards all have Cherry MX Red or Blue switches. I have purchased custom-manufactured aluminum cases for my KBC Pokers. I also hate Alps switches. It's almost a guarantee that there is nothing on the market that I will find suitable for getting real work done. There's the KBTalking Pro, but it's fullsize and not good for travel. The Neo 87 has poor build quality and the wireless barely works. It'd have to be at least a TKL but a 60% or HHKB would be better. The best I've seen is a bluetooth mod that's far too battery-hungry for prime-time. I want something with a wire. Bluetooth keyboard pairing and the typically-horrendous bluetooth stacks border on nightmarish.

wandermatt 13y ago

Would be more useful to hear a retrospective after six months.

mkhpalm 13y ago
I left Apple last year after nearly a decade of using Apple products. I have a Zenbook Prime running Debian unstable now. I find Gnome Shell just as easy to use as OSX. In fact its more functional in many aspects like how quickly I can get to the things I'm looking for. That said, there are pros and cons to using OSX or Linux. But I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I think people should use whatever floats their boat.
tokenrove 13y ago
I left Apple around the PPC->Intel transition, for Thinkpads (and recently, a Zenbook) running Debian. No regrets; life got much better; would not go back; YMMV. (I still have to use OS X and iOS machines regularly at work, and this only confirms my decision.)
jjoonathan 13y ago
I left apple a bit over a year ago because I wanted to get a laptop with some serious GPU power (I was doing lots of sequence alignments that took hours to do on my old laptop and hours to upload to / download from my university's compute cluster). The computer performed fabulously at this task, but my experience with the Microsoft ecosystem has been absolutely dreadful. Now that I no longer need the GPU power, I will gladly pay a few hundred dollar premium to get a mac laptop for my next computer. I would probably pay a 2x premium if Apple asked it. -------- OS Installation: The Horror Story -------- * Reinstalling the OS is a 4-5 hour manual slog through serial numbers and a dozen drivers that must be manually installed in the correct order, not a 1-hour fire-and-forget process like in the Mac ecosystem. (hours of my time vs minutes of my time). * The bundled "backup solution" works neither for imaging nor for incremental document recovery. "Time Machine" this is not. * MSE antivirus was dreadfully slow (Just downloaded an installer? It'll wait 30 seconds before launching 5 copies of the .exe corresponding to the 5 times you clicked on it). * I got a 30gb SSD as a boot volume and put Windows on it, then linked ("junctioned") the "Program Files" directory to my HDD (I'd done similar on my mac without trouble). Big mistake, none of the applications would launch. They didn't launch after I copied them back either (yes, I looked up permission-resetting instructions and followed them to the letter). I had to reinstall. * I looked up a Microsoft support document explaining how to properly put programs on a different HD (and also that it was unsupported). It involved registry edits and DOS-fu from the system restore disk. The next time Windows Update ran, it broke my system so that no program would launch (DLL error every time). Rolling back the updates didn't work, of course. I had to reinstall. Gave up on the 30gb SSD. * I tried to upgrade my Win7 install to Win8. Big mistake. The installer took 2 hours to give me an unhelpful generic error message. After hours of searching through forums I found out that it scans your installed Win7 drivers+programs one by one and barfs if any of them aren't compatible (but it doesn't tell you that, of course). * I tried a fresh install of Win8 on a new 250gb SSD I got on black friday. It froze every time I woke from sleep. Oh, and it would boot to an I/O error bluescreen unless I booted into Win7 first, touched a file on the SSD, and rebooted (yes, touching a file was necessary). Two firmware updates and a handful of driver updates later and I had the same symptoms. * On a hunch, I switched the SSD from SATA slot 2 to 0. This broke the bootloader, and Microsoft's instructions to fix it didn't work, giving a generic error message that many people on the support forum seemed to experience but that nobody had a fix for. There were 2 Microsoft employees with unhelpful non-fix "solutions," though. * I nuked the Win7 HDD install and reinstalled Win8 afresh on the SSD (now slot 0). It seems to be stable so far. * There was a 4-month period where Dell's GPU drivers had broken OpenCL compatibility and the manufacturer drivers would silently fail to install unless I ran a 3rd-party sketchware wiping program first and disabled signature enforcement on every boot. * Audio drivers occasionally fail to wake from sleep (no audio till reboot). No, updating them to the manufacturer version didn't help. No, reinstalling Dell's recommended drivers didn't help either. -------- Small Gripes -------- * No decent UNIX command line. Cygwin starts slowly and is poorly integrated with the system. * I can't get decent 2-finger scroll without a 3rd party program that is occasionally broken by system updates. * I can't remap capslock without downloading a 3rd-party program to perform registry edits. * I can't shut off the screen without installing a 3rd party program to do so. * In Win7, all allowed keyboard layout switching shortcuts were combinations of modifiers that conflicted with productivity apps like Illustrator. Also, the layout would occasionally become "stuck" and failed to respect the GUI switcher. In Win8, they added a no-conflict key combination for switching layouts but it doesn't work in fullscreen apps. * Metro. It looks slick, but it doesn't have any of the options you regularly need to access. Fortunately the old menagerie of Windows utilities is still there, just moved around. * No standard install system that lets you inspect the installer's logs, scripts, or contents. * The intimate connection between my computer account and Microsoft cloud account creeps me out. * The full-screen force-quit mechanism is insane (ctrl-alt-del, open Task Manager, press Windows to reveal the Launch Bar, click on the arrow to see all system tray icons, right-click the tiny Task Manager icon (a gray box), enable "Always on Top", highlight the program in the task manager, hit "End Task", wait, hit "End Task" on the dialog box that pops up, and finally decline to send a bug report to Microsoft) * I can't use the keyboard to navigate directories that contain a mixture of files and folders because in Mircrosoft-Land "Alphabetical Order" means "Sort folders first, then files." * The sub-HD preloaded desktop backgrounds (yes, really). -------- Small Victories -------- * Cheaper, better hardware (not remotely cost effective, given the hassle) * I can manually tweak virtual memory settings (not that I should have to tweak it, which I do, but I think it's terribly cool that I can and that there's a GUI for it) * Compatibility * The super-handy "superuser menu" (Win-X) * The ability to roll-back updates. It has never worked when I needed it to, but I like the idea. -------- Concluding Remarks -------- I've had better UX with linux, which is saying something, since I had previously considered linux UX to be fairly poor, or rather great -- until a mission-critical piece of it inevitably broke. Turns out the same thing applies Windows, except worse. Sadly, it sees that there is tremendous value in having a non-fragmented ecosystem. My next computer will be a mac. -------- My Plea to You -------- If you know how to fix any of my gripes, please speak up. I'm still a newbie. Maybe these are just growing pains. I don't think so, but I can hope.

jmduke 13y ago

I've got an iPhone, iPad, and MBA. In an abstract sense -- that is, all other things equal -- I'd like to swap them out for non-Apple products. I dislike Apple's software, their entire "magic/creative/yadda-yadda-yadda" branding, and of course their price tag. But the app ecosystem and hardware to me seem absolutely incomparable. I can't see myself ever switching my phone or tablet because it seems as though iOS apps are just unapproachably better than Android counterparts -- and there aren't any laptops as functional and, yes, straight-up pretty as the MacBook Air. (The reason the author cited for switching from Apple was two failed laptops. For what it's worth, my previous laptop -- a Dell -- broke every six months or so. [I had four-year insurance, thankfully, and replaced it once the insurance ran out.]

jccalhoun 13y ago
I switched from ipods and ipod touches to android and I can't really see myself going back any time soon because of the ability to tweak and customize android. I don't miss any apps from ios and I don't think I have ever felt like an android app was worse than an ios version.
- Legion 13y ago
  I'm of the same mind. I switched from the iPhone to Android because I was dissatisfied with the tiny iPhone screens, but I expected a quality drop-off in apps. The drop-off, in the instances where it does exist, is not nearly as dramatic as advertised. It's pretty small, really, which has me looking at switching my tablet from iPad to an Android tablet as well. Plus, on Android, I have a browser with functioning plug-ins (Firefox). iOS's app ecosystem doesn't seem so great when it fails so dramatically at perhaps the most important app: web browser.
- astrodust 13y ago
  It's like switching from real orange juice to Fanta. Some people won't notice, and some people will like it better. The problem with Android isn't the OS, it's the stupid number of hardware configurations possible that make fine-tuning the application to the screen virtually impossible. Most applications, even the best, are still rough around the edges compared to their iOS counterparts. If you want tweaking and customizing, Android is the only way to go.

shalalala 13y ago

I happen to like the hardware a bit more than when I first got the MBPr, but would LOVE to have a good Debian install guide for this puppy. Heck, I might even settle for Ubuntu in the meantime.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
kevinchen 13y ago
Run a live cd and double click the installer icon?

msluyter 13y ago

The article doesn't address what for me are the major sticking points: iTunes and iPhoto. I have years of music & photos stored in both, and to switch to linux I'd need an relatively painless migration strategy. Anyone have any suggestions?

deepGem 13y ago
Have you tried using any of the cloud photo organizers? openphoto comes to mind.
sliverstorm 13y ago
For iTunes, Google Music provided a pretty darn seamless transition. You download their client software, it scans your iTunes library, and registers the songs you have with Google Play. Songs it doesn't recognize, it uploads. This is a double-feature because Google Music is both platform-agnostic, and integrates with Android. Google Music itself is not necessarily the most amazing user experience, and someone with a bajillion music files may be upset with it, but for me the high quality (all purchased & "recognized" music is 320kbps) and general platform- and client-agnostic nature trumps music management "power".
adrusi 13y ago
Ah, yes. iTunes. I just did this a few days ago---switched from iTunes to a Linux alternative. This was hard. I've never bought anything through iTunes, but I love the program for managing my music library. It looks nice, which is important for me while listening to music, and it's very powerful, with smart playlists and the play queue. I eventually settled for Banshee and imported my library with a lot of manual support. It wasn't easy or fun to switch, but it only took a couple hours to get right, and now I'm quite pleased with the result. iPhoto, however, has always been shit. Mostly because it's slow. I haven't moved my photos to Linux yet, but I think Darktable is supposed to be good.

busterarm 13y ago

I have a mid-2011 Mac Mini and for a while considered an rMBP almost necessary. Instead of shelling out for one, I stuck a $40 SSD in a Lenovo x100e I had sitting around and installed Arch on it (after a decade or so of being a Slackware user). Best computing decision I ever made. For one, I prefer the smaller form factor, trackpoint and much superior keyboard (even if it's still chiclet). Secondly, I hardly ever use X. I get so much more work done on this laptop than I can on any other computer and it's relatively distraction-free (I added a couple roguelikes and dwarf fortress). Just log in and tmux is ready to go with what I need to start working. The one downside is that, on the occasions that I do use X, the fonts aren't very good. I wouldn't even begin to know how to approach making typography more Mac-like, but I'm okay with that. I spend 99% of my time in the console. In fact, going forward I see myself using a VPS or running a dedicated server somewhere and then it doesn't really matter what laptop I use.

astrodust 13y ago
That's the problem. Apple's typography is well ahead of anything in the Linux world, and even Linux is still ahead of what Windows has. The "Retina" screens make this even harder to match.
- busterarm 13y ago
  For sure, but I'm not such a typography nerd that what's on Linux is unacceptable to me. Ultimately I'm going to get my work done however is most efficient; that just tends to be Linux. My Mac (which I'm using now) is great for web browsing and reading articles. I'd sooner use my Kindle for that than my Linux laptop though and often I do. Once Apple makes a retina iPad around 10 inches and lets me use my own USB keyboard, I'll never use anything else. If that iPad Pro rumor pans out, it'd better have USB.
  - astrodust 13y ago
    I've been impressed that typography on Linux isn't as bad as Windows, but it's still got a long way to go to measure up to Apple. It's not just clarity and accuracy of the typefaces themselves, but subtle details like how the ligatures (things like how "fi" and "ff" are rendered) are properly applied. Typography is one of those things that, once you've seen it, you can't un-see it. You can only try to not care. Apple's not interested in adding USB to the iPad since Bluetooth already does anything USB can do and more, at least from the perspective of a consumer. If you want a portable USB-capable tablet, maybe you want a Surface Pro. That thing would be pretty awesome if someone can Linux it. In any case, you can already use pretty much any Bluetooth keyboard you want, and there are a large number of third party ones to pick from.

derengel 13y ago

Is sad but the MBA really has no rival, quality/hardware wise.

jonemo 13y ago
Mac hardware doesn't break, but when you purchase the four year warranty on a Dell (which will get you a total near the price of an equivalent Macbook) it will break a few times during the four years, but each time you get it fixed or replaced next day at home.
- dima55 13y ago
  I've never seen an apple laptop that didn't break after a few (<= 2) years. YMMV.
  - woofyman 13y ago
    My 2008 MBP has never had any issues.
  - eddieroger 13y ago
    I've never seen one break long after that. In fact, I finally just had to part ways with an iBook from 2001 that lasted me over a decade, and upgraded from 9.2 to 10.5.
  - ljoshua 13y ago
    I've yet to have any of the Apple laptops that I've owned (or desktops for that matter) that have broken in that timeframe. In fact I'm using an MBP that's going on it's fifth year here, and the only thing that's changed is I popped in a new battery after about four years. Excellent track record for me. (Of course, YMMV.)
  - Watabou 13y ago
    Using a 2008 MBP. No issues. Of course, I have now given it to a mom who is happily using it. And this was the macbook pro with a GPU that had a high rate of failure (8600M GT)

jkelsey 13y ago

The author was having hardware problems, so he switched his software? There's nothing more open about Dell's hardware than Apple's and just because Dell offers a laptop with Linux does that mean you're now in some sort of open-source utopia where the open-source community comes together to solve every single computer problem that users encounter. Don't get me wrong, I think Linux is great and there's tons of awesome open-source projects, but I don't think Ubuntu is one of them. If you've been following Canonical's behavior with Ubuntu over the past few years, you should be aware of what I'm talking about. And Dell? Well, their XPS laptops do seem to be of higher quality than what most of the PC industry offers, but support? I'm sorry, but I feel much more confidence in the Genius Bar. Apple's not perfect, but the rest of the latop manufacturers are a joke.

tujv 13y ago
I was hoping for a comparison between competing platforms and how they stack up against iOS OSX. But this article is free software evangelism ("I set myself free") not a serious guide to moving away from Apple.
- jkelsey 13y ago
  > But this article is free software evangelism ("I set myself free") [...] That is what is so irritating about this type of rhetoric; I switched from OS X to Ubuntu and now I'm free! Well, no, you just switched from one corporate controlled Operating System to another. Ubuntu may be open-source, but it's hardly free. Biggest example: You have to opt-out of Canonical's desktop search results sharing relationship with Amazon. At least when I look for files on a Mac, I don't get ads in my search results. If you like Ubuntu over OS X, then that's fine, but please don't say it's because of "freedom". If people are going to write about their holier-than-thou articles about how they switched to free software, they better be running something like Trisequel Linux on a Gluglug Laptop (http://www.fsf.org/news/gluglug-x60-laptop-now-certified-to-respect-your-freedom http://www.fsf.org/news/gluglug-x60-laptop-now-certified-to-...) or perhaps they should think about something else to write about.
  - 13y ago

prg318 13y ago

This article mentions that there is no native 1Password client for Linux and recommends some kind of dropbox workaround. While this probably true at the time of writing, Icculus recently wrote a native Linux client [1]. There's more details about it in this G+ post if you are interested: - https://plus.google.com/+RyanGordon/posts/ZFyb9TQS9zB https://plus.google.com/+RyanGordon/posts/ZFyb9TQS9zB [1] https://icculus.org/1pass/ https://icculus.org/1pass/

adinb 13y ago
With the exception of using the browser plugins, 1password works great in wine—I pointed it to my Dropbox folder and was able to read and write passwords.

latch 13y ago

I looked at getting a Sputnik 3, but it's available only in select countries and 16GB isn't an option (nor is it for MBA, but it is for the relatively light rMBP). And I hate the Dell logo. In fact, I hate all text logos. It's ridiculous. 150" TVs in shopping malls with a huge "SAMSUNG" or "SONY" at the bottom. If you have to do something, use some image (an apple, the ubuntu reactor thing, windows 4 squares...)

mmanfrin 13y ago

I recently switched my Windows desktop to Ubuntu, with the intention of making myself an at-home desktop dev environment. I still use my Macbook for work, and my MBA for personal dev. My thoughts have been positive, Ubuntu is much nicer than I remember previous brushes with Linux being. A lot of things required slight configuration, but Ubuntu and Linux have hit that critical mass that most of my problems can be solved with a simple search. However, there are a few persistent problems that have lots of different solutions that dont all seem to work; and I feel there are lots of lacking areas in the app ecosystem. For instance, there does not seem to be a single well-designed SQL gui for linux. Everything looks out of Windows-ME-era-enterprise. For Macs, you have Sequel Pro amongst a lot of strong competition. Additionally, homebrew is a lot easier/more robust than apt-get; no repositories to deal with. I think this all points to something about me, specifically: I want software to make some assumptions for me. Brew does this, apt-get doesnt. This is both the strength of Mac and the strength of Linux -- they cater to the level of assumption that their camps want. I, unfortunately, want more assumption. Also, as a small side note, I can't get League of Legends to work on WINE, so I am unable to play with excoworkers -- that was the main way we kept in touch and it's pushing me to a point that I might put Windows back on my desktop, if only to have that connection back -- a little juvenile, but oh well.

w1ntermute 13y ago
> I can't get League of Legends to work on WINE You do realize you can dual boot, right?
- kbar13 13y ago
  dual booting is really annoying.
  - w1ntermute 13y ago
    I find it very useful - it keeps me from playing "just one game" when I really need to be coding.
  - adrusi 13y ago

w1ntermute 13y ago

At least there's the option of leaving Macs for other brands. As a ThinkPad user, I'm totally fucked because of Lenovo's decision to get rid of the physical TrackPoint buttons[0]. First they got rid of the traditional keyboard in favor an Apple-style chiclet keyboard (which, after using both extensively, is a severe downgrade from the traditional ThinkPad keyboard). Now they're getting rid of the TrackPoint buttons. Next is going to be the TrackPoint, all in the name of copying Apple. There's no one else making a proper TrackPoint (and HP and Dell are ditching what they did have), and using a trackpad is so slow. It's sad to see Lenovo take a great laptop line and turn it into an Apple clone. 0: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXa0XzNvuZU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXa0XzNvuZU

busterarm 13y ago
Here here. Trackpoint has long been a major factor for me picking Thinkpads. The lack of physical buttons on the new ones is beyond annoying and trackpads in the Windows PC space are total crap. Macs really do have everyone beat there, but even better are Wacom's intuos Touch models. I use a few gestures to quickly move windows around in OSX but can almost totally stick to the keyboard.
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  I'm amazed that more people never got into using TrackPoints. Mac or PC, I've never seen anyone able to use the trackpad to mouse around at anywhere near the speed that I (or other ThinkPad users) can use the TrackPoint to do so. It's funny to see how astonished people are at how quickly I can navigate, when it's really just a matter of using the right tool.
  - busterarm 13y ago
    Most people never realized that there are three different Trackpoint tips and the default was for a long time that crappy classic dome. The soft dome is somewhat better but I've been a soft rim diehard for near 15 years now. Also I think the quality of whatever rubber they used in the mid-90s was really poor. Gestures are a pretty big deal to me now though. Gestures and the keyboard shortcuts for me are much faster.

cgtyoder 13y ago

It's unfortunate that your Apple hardware experience was so poor, but you're really not going to have better luck elsewhere - all the major hw manufacturers have a fairly similar failure rate [1] (Apple apparently is one of the better ones). You just got unlucky. [1] http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliab... http://www.statisticbrain.com/laptop-malfunction-rates/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/laptop-malfunction-rates/

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

eddieroger 13y ago

Every time I consider ditching my MacBook for a Linux machine, I come back to wondering why I'd want to do that at all. If it's to appease my command-line-junky insides, I can open up Terminal (or iTerm 2) and have instant UNIX. If it's to run some LAMP-esque stack, I can fire up homebrew and have everything I want. And if I don't really want to deal with the inner-workings of a machine, I can spend time in Aqua and have access to some of the best designed software in the game. Lastly, it plays with my ecosystem of gadgets - my iPhone and iPad are first class citizens, and thanks to iCloud and quality developers, things work seamlessly between all my tech, including my AppleTV through mirroring or extended display in Mavericks. I realize that this last bit makes me not the target audience for the article anymore, but it's worth saying. The author states his only reason for leaving is failed hardware. I've had nothing but great experiences with Apple's hardware, and in the few rare exceptions, Apple has gone above and beyond to make the situation right. Fixes after warranty period, quick turnaround, etc, have kept my business with them.

kevinchen 13y ago

I wouldn't take OS X vs Linux advice from a person who calls her computer a "Mac Air"

jambo 13y ago
That's cheap and hardly warrants a reply. "Mac Air" may not be the trade name of the computer, but it's not ambiguous and has no bearing on the substance of the article.

pimeys 13y ago

For me the real breakthrough was to get rid of Ubuntu and install Arch and configure everything by myself for my laptop. It was super fun, learning to use systemd and making everything to work. Having xmonad, with pretty fonts, automatic suspend, wifi, vpn and all that working. And it was not at all that hard and took me one night and a couple of beers to get everything done. I might be different than most of computer users, but I really do enjoy doing everything by myself. Now I know exactly what's wrong if something breaks. And Arch (or Funtoo, my work distro) are much easier to configure with a text editor compared to Ubuntu (or if we go this path, to OSX). I like systemd much more than upstart or launchd. I like the idea of a rolling release, so I don't have the nerve breaking massive updates every now and then. But if just switching from OSX to a Unity distro, for me that wouldn't be enough to switch.

zacinbusiness 13y ago

I really want to like Linux. I've spent hours, here and there, hacking away with various distributions of Linux and on different hardware (I was part of the group that finally got CompizFusion working on the HP Mininote 2133). But when it comes down to it I don't want to have to be elbow deep in source code just to fix a sound card problem or similar. I love Linux as an idea, and that it's free has done wonders for the world as far as opening access to the internet and its knowledge. But I just don't see it as a viable day-to-day OS for me. At the same time, I have and will continue to tinker around with Linux (I learned about Lua because of Conky!) because I don't think that there's any harm in learning new things. And I've found that I learn best by breaking things and then trying to fix what I broke - and that's a nearly weekly experience for me when I try to use anything but Unbuntu.

bane 13y ago

I currently split time between a 15" rMBP and a few Windows 7 machines and to be honest, I prefer the time on my Windows 7 machines despite many downsides. Every few years I'll have a go at going Mac (this is try #3) and they'll all sort of peter out and I'll end up back in Windows. I think this current go around has been the most successful, I love my rMBP hardware. And the work that Apple has put into making touchpads actually useful (both with hardware and software) is miraculous. The keyboards are nice typing experiences (I'm more mixed on the magic mouse). It's also an awesome portable virtualization platform that I've had 4 or 5 Linux VMs all up and running like a champ on it. Multiple workspaces are usually awesome, I keep several workspaces for different semantic parts of my day and the flow is really nice. Airdrop is magic. For the most part things just work. To try and make it really stick, I went cold turkey for the better part of 9 months and didn't touch a Windows machine. But then, small frustrations and irritations finally built up and I recently just built myself a new Windows 7 computer and pretty much use it for all of my day-to-day with my Mac sitting in a travel bag for when I need to go on the road. What is it that keeps pushing me back? I've spent a lot of time thinking about why this is and sorta have it narrowed down to a few user scenarios: Here's 1 line of reasoning: 1. When I'm using my Mac, I find I try and avoid actually interacting with OS X as much as possible. I spend all of my time in Office, a web browser, a console window or a virtualized linux machine and that gets me through 95% of my day. 2. Digging in deeper and I find that OS X, while having some nice bits here and there (as discussed above), is so full of so many clumsy frustrations that I've never really been able to get over the feeling of reduced productivity when I'm dealing with it. I've realized that I deal with this by simply avoiding doing the things that frustrate or irritate me. Some of this probably stems from me not wanting to do things the prescribed "Apple way" and wanting to do it my own way. But it's irritating enough that I want to get away from the entire system after any extended interaction with the OS bits. 3. By and large this is focused on Finder (there's other issues, but Finder is the biggest problem I have), which is probably the single worst file manager I've used in 30 years of computing, and no amount of "getting used to it" seems to alleviate the simple fact that it sucks. I've tried a couple replacements, but they all seem to scratch some small itch and nothing really comes close to the magical file management wonderland that is the Windows 7 Explorer. It's so bad that even after a solid year with my Mac I still can't reliably predict where a new folder is going to be created. I know this makes me sound impossibly dumb, but these kinds of simple file management interface problems have been solved everywhere else. Even the various Linux file managers work better and more reliably. I would be so much more interested in staying on my Mac if I knew I could manage files without feeling like I was poking around a dark damp hole trying to sort through and pick up grains of rice with my elbows. I could go on for pages ranting about the abortion of ideas that is Finder, but let's just conclude that I hate it. 4. I realized that one of the reasons I spend so much time in a terminal then is because managing files form the command line is better! (the other reason I'm in the command line is so I can ssh into my linux VMs) 5. so if most of what I'm doing is Chrome, Office, ssh and Linux via VirtualBox, which are essentially equivalent experiences in OS X or Windows, and then doing OS things like moving files around works better in Windows, why should I still use my Mac? I've come up with other lines of reasoning: - all of the media production tools I personally work with have emphasized Windows development over Mac development for a while or no Mac equivalent exists at all. - retrocomputing and retrogaming, which I have a deep personal interest in, has a far richer ecosystem under Windows and the tools that have version for both OSs tend to work better in Windows. Also moving around and organizing tens of thousands of files related to this hobby is much better under Windows - another hobby, photography, I shoot thousands upon thousands of photos and haven't met an photo organizing tool I like, so I manage everything on the filesystem, which again means I'm avoiding finder - Until Mavericks, multi-monitor support with full-screen apps was broken, and there's no excuse for it. None. Maximize was solved in Windows 3.0. 23 years ago - OS X seems to keep growing interface hair, meaning what started as simple elegant design slowly accumulated feature cruft until the design is no longer simple or elegant and the design wasn't really flexible enough to accommodate this growing interface hair. Witness the madness around the resizing window buttons in OS X. But all the various crap that shows up in my menubar vs. sometimes in my dock vs. sometimes nowhere but ps, etc. Or the haphazard combinations of modifier hotkey combinations that don't really carryover between apps, a legacy of the one-button mouse movement which is now just vestigial, but now means I have to keep track of which combination of shift, fn, control, option and command to use in some combination before I even think about what button I need to push to modify some other key to do some menial task that's standard and two buttons in Windows. - Even after taking hundreds of screen shots over the last year, I still have to lookup the madness of screen capture in OS X every single time I sit down to take more screen shots. Here's a 3 page article on it. http://osxdaily.com/2010/05/13/print-screen-mac/ http://osxdaily.com/2010/05/13/print-screen-mac/ Sure I don't get a "prt scr" key on the keyboard, but I get half a dozen key modifier keys and an eject key. I'll sometimes just put off the task till I get home and just do it in Windows it's so irritating. - There's no paint program that ships with OS X. Boggles the mind. - Having to buy and install tons of little apps to "fix" some broken or poorly designed behavior in the default apps that ship with the OS. This isn't like buying photoshop because it fixed paint. Photoshop is a different level entirely to paint. This is like iTerm2 which is almost exactly like, but just fixes a few things and adds a couple things to iTerm. And this kind of drop-in replacement cancer permeates the entire Mac experience. There's entire ecosystems of slightly different replacements for the default apps, and it's entirely expected that setting up a new mac will involve hunting these down and installing them to replace the broken stuff that the OS ships with. I'm really just exhausted of both this process and the attitude that this is a perfectly normal and sane thing to do. It's not, the OS is shipped broken and Apple needs to fix this stuff. - Video performance is noticeably better in Windows. I'm not sure what it is, but I find my Mac has lots of little screen-tearing issues, and watching full-screen video on it just isn't as snappy (using VLC on both) as it was on my 6 year old Windows box (before I built my current one). - Things usually just work in OS X. But when they don't you enter a world of mystery that goes as deep as a computer science degree can take you. In Windows, these days things also more or less just work, but when they don't, there's a kind of expectation in the design that you're likely to have an issue so there's all sorts of good error reporting and resolution paths to try and exhaust before even having to start searching forums for advice. - I need to read NTFS volumes frequently and OS X's default NTFS compatibility sucks and the fixes are out of date and don't work very well either. In contrast, I've never had to read an HFS (or whatever Apple journaled blah blah file system) volume. - no dedicated page up/down home or end keys. I use those keys all the time. Why are they gone? It's irritating having to hunt down a modifier key and an arrow and hope that you figured out the magic combination that's "home". - I can't multi-tab drag in Chrome. I drag groups of tabs around in Windows all the time. Doesn't work in OS X. - minimized windows are a pain to bring up. Therefore I don't minimize in OS X. The dock (especially when auto-hid) is flaky and won't show up half the time. The delay for when it does feel like popping up when my mouse is down at the bottom of the screen feels entirely random. - I don't like any of the text editors I've tried. I just end up in vi in iterm. But I really want a good text editor. - VNC is not a suitable remote desktop solution compared to RDP. It's just not. I Remote into half a dozen machines over the course of a day and wish I had a decent way to remote into my Mac that wasn't VNC. - and more and more and more I'm sure there are built in solutions I'm overlooking, or some app I can install that fixes this or modifies that, or some setting that makes something behave better than the default. But the point is that outside of applications that exist on both platforms equally, I'm avoiding or annoyed with everything else on the platform. I'm committed to sticking it out and have even resolved to spend more time on my mac - especially post-Mavericks. But it's just not a better computing experience for me. It's interesting and it's different, and it makes me yearn for certain things that windows doesn't have (multiple workspaces), but when the equivalent functions work better in Windows I'm forced to choose the easier and less frustrating environment to spend time in.

7stark7 13y ago

My experience: Broken motherboard AND screen on my Macbook air. Apple replaced both for free, with no AppleCare. I have a few other stories just like this one.