6 ms·

Try Elementary OS, its based off ubuntu and is almost a dead ringer for OSX. It has the window management you are looking for as well as a couple of apps. Try S

by dakoon2003 12y ago

Try Elementary OS, its based off ubuntu and is almost a dead ringer for OSX. It has the window management you are looking for as well as a couple of apps. Try Synapse as a replacement for Alfred.

GutenYe 12y ago
Indeed, Elementary OS is very handy for anyone coming from OSX.
- MarkyC4 12y ago
  But note that it is still in its infancy. I use 0.3 beta as a daily driver on my personal laptop, but only because all my work gets saved to git repositories or dropbox folders. If it craps out (hey, it /is/ beta after all!), I switch to an Ubuntu Live USB to work. That being said, the more people on Elementary the better! I've grown to like Vala, and encourage devs to help contribute.
crazychrome 12y ago
elementary os is quite stable. the only problem i have w/ it is the dev team promoting yet another lang to code apps. why not rust/nim/go?
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Vala predates all these, and it's been a de facto GNOME standard for a while now.
  - crazychrome 12y ago
    The last time I heard from GNOME was about javascript binding. I think the choosing of programming language in this age is more to do with marketing. Piggyback is the right way.
cheald 12y ago
The recent kerfluffle in which the ElementaryOS team changed their download page to try to hide the "free" option and said "We want users to understand that they're pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software" makes me super hesitant to even try it. I'm not sure I want to be using a Linux distro produced by people who think that free-as-in-beer is a bug.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  To be honest, I don't see that as too much of a problem; Ardour, for example, is free-as-in-speech and technically free-as-in-beer (since you don't have to buy Ardour to get the source code and compile it yourself, and it is indeed available as a package for most distros), but still only provides binary downloads via the website to users who pay for them. There are also plenty of distros - like RHEL and SUSE - that are only officially available in their paid-for versions (though both of those have corresponding free-as-in-beer development/testing versions - Fedora and openSUSE, respectively - and CentOS also exists as a theoretically-drop-in RHEL replacement). Software has to be monetized somehow. SUSE and RHEL and Oracle Linux are monetized by subscriptions to support contracts. Slackware is monetized by sales of double-sided DVDs. Ubuntu is monetized by a mix of support contracts and begging for donations on the download page. OpenBSD is monetized by a a mix of donations and merchandise sales (including install CD packs and t-shirts and such). I'm not one to believe that ElementaryOS is any more or less sinful than any of those examples.
  - cheald 12y ago
    I don't have any problem with monetizing FOSS - I think it's awesome, in fact. I have a ton of respect for RedHat and their business model. Ardour's model is great, too - the product is free, but we'll sell you convenience. It's entirely possible to have a saleable product coexist with a FOSS license. My issue with the eOS team wasn't that they said "we want to make money for this", but that they accused their users of being cheats for not paying them for the software, the vast majority of which they didn't write or maintain. I want OSS devs making money. Heck, I want the eOS guys making money, if they're making a product that people like and want to see continued. But their tack was pretty amazingly hypocritical.
joshuapants 12y ago
On the same note as Synapse, give Albert a try; it's inspired a bit more directly by Alfred https://github.com/ManuelSchneid3r/albert https://github.com/ManuelSchneid3r/albert
lectrick 12y ago
Be careful when updating packages. As an OS X user used to blithely updating anything and everything because it always "just works," I've gotten into shocking situations where I've actually bricked my Elementary install simply by doing an update. When I approached Linux users about this, their response was something along the lines of "Yeah... don't do that." (Seriously?) As a result I've had to run Elementary in a VM with snapshotting, and I roll back the snapshot if an update hoses the install. Kinda shitty, if you ask me.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  It depends on the distro. Some distros can and will mangle themselves if you blindly upgrade everything without doing at least some research beforehand (Ubuntu and Arch are notorious for this; Arch because it's bleeding-edge and has absolutely zero consideration for compatibility between packages, and Ubuntu because... well... who the hell knows). Others do a much better job of making sure all packages are well-tested both in isolation and in integration before making them available as upgrades; Debian Stable, Slackware, and openSUSE are good examples of systems where you can usually do a blind upgrade of everything without problems. And then you have NixOS, which - while not really mainstream yet - is probably a good indicator of the future of configuration and package management, and - I think - will someday be the gold standard here. Upgrade fucked up your system? No problem; just select your last-known-good configuration at boot, then try again (or don't try again, if that's your prerogative).
  - lectrick 12y ago
    > No problem; just select your last-known-good configuration at boot, then try again This sounds like a configuration that could potentially be applied to other Linux OS'es, no?
    - yellowapple 12y ago
      In theory, yes. In practice, this tends to be a difficult problem to solve because most Linux environments are managed imperatively/procedurally rather than declaratively, meaning that in order to revert to a previous state, you have to be able to run the exact commands required to do so. The traditional answer is to manage such a system with Puppet or Chef - thus allowing an administrator to tell the system what it should look like rather than how it should go about it - but that's generally yet another layer of logical overhead to be considered. NixOS - in theory, at least - addresses this more fully by integrating declarative configuration rather pervasively throughout the operating system itself, rather than trying to just add a layer on top of the operating system in order to manage it. It relies heavily on the Nix package manager - instead of installing a program directly to the filesystem hierarchy, it installs it to an isolated folder named with a theoretically-unique hash, allowing multiple versions of the same program to coexist without conflicting (and allowing users to pick which version they want), making it painless to roll back software upgrades (just go back to a different selection of which package folders should be linked to, rather than having to manually remove and revert each package), etc.; NixOS leverages this package management system for everything, rather than just the software installed, and will create GRUB entries whenever you commit your configuration changes (by running `nixos-rebuild switch` or `nixos-rebuild boot`, causing an instant configuration switch or a configuration switch on next boot, respectively). Other operating systems can hypothetically do this, too, and they'd end up looking similar to NixOS in terms of how things are organized and configured. As I said, I think that's probably the direction where most operating systems will eventually go.

Try Elementary OS, its based off ubuntu and is almost a dead ringer for OSX. It has the window management you are looking for as well as a couple of apps. Try Synapse as a replacement for Alfred.

GutenYe 12y ago

Indeed, Elementary OS is very handy for anyone coming from OSX.

MarkyC4 12y ago
But note that it is still in its infancy. I use 0.3 beta as a daily driver on my personal laptop, but only because all my work gets saved to git repositories or dropbox folders. If it craps out (hey, it /is/ beta after all!), I switch to an Ubuntu Live USB to work. That being said, the more people on Elementary the better! I've grown to like Vala, and encourage devs to help contribute.

crazychrome 12y ago

elementary os is quite stable. the only problem i have w/ it is the dev team promoting yet another lang to code apps. why not rust/nim/go?

vezzy-fnord 12y ago
Vala predates all these, and it's been a de facto GNOME standard for a while now.
- crazychrome 12y ago
  The last time I heard from GNOME was about javascript binding. I think the choosing of programming language in this age is more to do with marketing. Piggyback is the right way.

cheald 12y ago

The recent kerfluffle in which the ElementaryOS team changed their download page to try to hide the "free" option and said "We want users to understand that they're pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software" makes me super hesitant to even try it. I'm not sure I want to be using a Linux distro produced by people who think that free-as-in-beer is a bug.

yellowapple 12y ago
To be honest, I don't see that as too much of a problem; Ardour, for example, is free-as-in-speech and technically free-as-in-beer (since you don't have to buy Ardour to get the source code and compile it yourself, and it is indeed available as a package for most distros), but still only provides binary downloads via the website to users who pay for them. There are also plenty of distros - like RHEL and SUSE - that are only officially available in their paid-for versions (though both of those have corresponding free-as-in-beer development/testing versions - Fedora and openSUSE, respectively - and CentOS also exists as a theoretically-drop-in RHEL replacement). Software has to be monetized somehow. SUSE and RHEL and Oracle Linux are monetized by subscriptions to support contracts. Slackware is monetized by sales of double-sided DVDs. Ubuntu is monetized by a mix of support contracts and begging for donations on the download page. OpenBSD is monetized by a a mix of donations and merchandise sales (including install CD packs and t-shirts and such). I'm not one to believe that ElementaryOS is any more or less sinful than any of those examples.
- cheald 12y ago
  I don't have any problem with monetizing FOSS - I think it's awesome, in fact. I have a ton of respect for RedHat and their business model. Ardour's model is great, too - the product is free, but we'll sell you convenience. It's entirely possible to have a saleable product coexist with a FOSS license. My issue with the eOS team wasn't that they said "we want to make money for this", but that they accused their users of being cheats for not paying them for the software, the vast majority of which they didn't write or maintain. I want OSS devs making money. Heck, I want the eOS guys making money, if they're making a product that people like and want to see continued. But their tack was pretty amazingly hypocritical.

joshuapants 12y ago

On the same note as Synapse, give Albert a try; it's inspired a bit more directly by Alfred https://github.com/ManuelSchneid3r/albert https://github.com/ManuelSchneid3r/albert

lectrick 12y ago

Be careful when updating packages. As an OS X user used to blithely updating anything and everything because it always "just works," I've gotten into shocking situations where I've actually bricked my Elementary install simply by doing an update. When I approached Linux users about this, their response was something along the lines of "Yeah... don't do that." (Seriously?) As a result I've had to run Elementary in a VM with snapshotting, and I roll back the snapshot if an update hoses the install. Kinda shitty, if you ask me.

yellowapple 12y ago
It depends on the distro. Some distros can and will mangle themselves if you blindly upgrade everything without doing at least some research beforehand (Ubuntu and Arch are notorious for this; Arch because it's bleeding-edge and has absolutely zero consideration for compatibility between packages, and Ubuntu because... well... who the hell knows). Others do a much better job of making sure all packages are well-tested both in isolation and in integration before making them available as upgrades; Debian Stable, Slackware, and openSUSE are good examples of systems where you can usually do a blind upgrade of everything without problems. And then you have NixOS, which - while not really mainstream yet - is probably a good indicator of the future of configuration and package management, and - I think - will someday be the gold standard here. Upgrade fucked up your system? No problem; just select your last-known-good configuration at boot, then try again (or don't try again, if that's your prerogative).
- lectrick 12y ago
  > No problem; just select your last-known-good configuration at boot, then try again This sounds like a configuration that could potentially be applied to other Linux OS'es, no?
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    In theory, yes. In practice, this tends to be a difficult problem to solve because most Linux environments are managed imperatively/procedurally rather than declaratively, meaning that in order to revert to a previous state, you have to be able to run the exact commands required to do so. The traditional answer is to manage such a system with Puppet or Chef - thus allowing an administrator to tell the system what it should look like rather than how it should go about it - but that's generally yet another layer of logical overhead to be considered. NixOS - in theory, at least - addresses this more fully by integrating declarative configuration rather pervasively throughout the operating system itself, rather than trying to just add a layer on top of the operating system in order to manage it. It relies heavily on the Nix package manager - instead of installing a program directly to the filesystem hierarchy, it installs it to an isolated folder named with a theoretically-unique hash, allowing multiple versions of the same program to coexist without conflicting (and allowing users to pick which version they want), making it painless to roll back software upgrades (just go back to a different selection of which package folders should be linked to, rather than having to manually remove and revert each package), etc.; NixOS leverages this package management system for everything, rather than just the software installed, and will create GRUB entries whenever you commit your configuration changes (by running `nixos-rebuild switch` or `nixos-rebuild boot`, causing an instant configuration switch or a configuration switch on next boot, respectively). Other operating systems can hypothetically do this, too, and they'd end up looking similar to NixOS in terms of how things are organized and configured. As I said, I think that's probably the direction where most operating systems will eventually go.