UNIX support was never a goal for macOS, neither for NeXT, rather a nice way to bring developers from Sun and SGI into their platforms.
The business value for developers was always the Objective-C libraries, which is quite clear from most presentations done by Jobs, some of them available on YouTube.
It is as if some people needed this week's presentation to wake up for the real Apple culture, that goes back to the days when they kind of toyed around with A/UX.
I used A/UX. For real, because at the time we had VAXen and Suns, and it was a good way to make use of the 68030 Macs we had (I think it never ran on the IIfx, which had a 68040)
I have no delusions about Apple culture. But apparently you're forgetting that Apple heavily marketed OSX's association with UNIX after the merge with NeXT, and that it made a lot of noise about how the Mac would be the best UNIX workstation ever.
I lived through those years and saw the same presentations you mentioned - some on VHS tapes that were shipped to us after the events. There was no toying about OSX as a workstation, it was even on the sales pitch guides.
I was at CERN when they visited us with the same type of sales pitch, but I always saw it as an attempt to get people to buy Macs than anything else, specially after how things went with Copland.
The real Apple culture was Object Pascal, Common Lisp, Hypercard, Dylan, Newton, MacApp, PowerPlant, QuickDraw,...
Now they have money and they actually need is macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS developers, not UNIX developers deploying code on GNU/Linux servers.
Of course not. I never meant to suggest this would be a macOS replacement - and as a former dabbler in GNUStep, let me tell you that that way wouldn't work either.
I am ok with the Mac as it is, I don't see an issue with it, and actually am looking forward to eventually being able to play with the magic toolbar from Swift in a future acquisition.
Well, I've been waiting for a suitable desktop Mac for the latter part of six years. I'm certainly not OK with the disrepair their product line is in, nor with the value for money of the "Pro" (or, as I prefer to call them, the "Air SE") range.
I don't use desktops since 2006, only laptops with docking stations.
Many of our customers follow similar patterns, I hardly see new desktops being deployed, so I have some sympathy for Apple thinking that it might not be worthwhile to keep doing them.
Erm. I just installed from an SD card, because I had already removed ChromeOS previously (in case you haven't read that bit). Unlocking your Chromebook is highly dependent on the specific hardware, so I suggest you Google around.
I really like elementaryOS - not for myself (need to use macOS for dev), but pretty much all of my family was migrated to it.
It has proven to be significantly more stable and simple to use than Windows and the default applications really nicely hit the simplicity and usability for a user that primarily needs web, email, photos and minor document editing. I'd even argue it's better than macOS for that user profile (especially since it's not localized to my local language, which eOS and most of major Linux apps are).
The fact that it actually looks good by default is nice as well.
Known downsides:
- It's based on Ubuntu LTS (which is great!), but the new versions tend to lag after Ubuntu LTS releases by months at a time.
- No upgrade path between versions.
- Releases tend to be buggy on some hardware after release.
I would move to an Elementary OS if it's UI/UX was moved over an Arch based distribution. I mean Elementary OS simply looks beautiful and is stable(-ish). On top of Manjaro or something that holds back updates I wouldn't be able to figure out a more perfect development/daily driver system.
Antegros has been my daily driver on my desktop (MBP laptop for work) for about....six months. I wholeheartedly and without thinking twice endorse this.
I'm currently using Archlinux now, so far I enjoy using it, but the fact that we have to put much effort on installing it makes me don't want to recommend it.
I try to find simple-to-install-with-Arch-linux-based-OS, still with rolling release and pacman -Syu to update the entire OS.
You might want to try Solus. It has a beautiful UI, works great out of the box and is rolling release. Also the devs are really fucking fast if any issues should arise.
Not sure about the stability. I am using Ubuntu for over a year and it's way less stable than Windows was. Sometimes I encounter crashes when suspending or waking up. I also encounter lots of minor problems. For me the Windows experience was definitely more polished.
While hardware manufacturers testing on windows does explain a lot, don't discount the massive amount of work MS put into making windows work on flaky hardware. They really do (or at least did) seem to have the mentality of "we will be blamed if it doesn't work, so bend over backwards to make things work"
If you ever feel like giving it a try again do it with a computer that is known to work well. While Linux will run on lots of random PC hardware, its support is not consistent across all hardware. The easiest way to do this is to buy from a company who sells Linux based systems.
One of the biggest problems in the Linux ecosystem is the lack of any good source on hardware compatibility tracking.
Generally the less like a server your computer is, the less nice the driver support. I have a Xeon workstation with a nvidia quatro graphics card at work and it has been rock solid for years. The same cannot be said of my laptop.
Stability largely depends on your hardware. I would not expect one linux distribution to run better than other in most cases. Especially not here given Elementary is based on Ubuntu.
OP here - Yes and no. Mail can now cope much better with some HTML email, but there still isn't an obvious way to add a signature (I allude to that in the post).
Mail used to use webkitgtk (the old api), but has been since ported to use webkit2gtk (the new, multi-process api), you might wanna give it a second look.
EDIT: I stand corrected. This has not happened yet. I confused this with some other changes.
After over a decade of using Mac OS X, I am considering switching to Linux for my dev laptop. The tools I worry about are those that interact with audio and webcam - Go To Meeting, Google Hangout etc. My work involves me having to teleconf with others often.
Does anyone here have experience using Linux well in such scenarios. If so, what hardware are you using?
You can use the web version of skype now. I'd never install the dumpster desktop version but if anyone refuses to use alternatives I can just go to web.skype.com and it... works.
Hangouts can dial phone numbers if you want a web phone dialer. Phone numbers are agnostic and the client backing them does not really matter (since you should have no expectation of privacy over the PSTN anyway).
Heeeey so, if we're talking about potential alternatives here? I need to just leave this here and encourage anyone looking for something better to take a look: https://www.meetspaceapp.com
Full disclaimer: I'm a friend of the founder, however I'm a paying customer due to the fact that
1. It's worked wonders with my clients
and 2. It's so much better than hangouts or skype.
Compared to the big boys it may be considered a bit spartan but for what it does, it does it extraordinarily well.
The reason we stuck with jitsi-meet is that it could be self hosted on an semi-airgapped network, and not break without internet. Also, your friend should invest in a ssl cert, because your link goes directly to a privacy warning.
Laptop support will vary a bit, but some brands tend to work really well. Look for the specific model + Linux to see if there are hardware issues.
I used to use Ubuntu and had Hangouts and GoToMeeting work just fine (also, Skype and Appear.in).
I switched to Mac for two reasons: browser testing Safari and quality hardware (aluminum case, retina screen, support for 3+ monitors, nice hinges). I suppose iOS app development is another reason you'd want it.
Goto meeting does work on GNU/Linux. It even has some terrifying X exploit that allows you to share any window that X knows about. It works fine, you just have to use Chromium.
> Bluetooth is kind of a mess, on Xubuntu at least.
(Speaking as someone who likes Xfce, and is currently switching from MacOS to Linux and is mostly settled on Xubuntu), I think that's mostly an Xfce thing. GNOME (and therefore Unity, Budgie, possibly Cinnamon and maybe MATE) handle it better.
I can confirm that Bluetooth can be a bit buggy using MATE DE/WM on Debian. Mostly I've used it for headphones, which require an unreasonable amount of resyncing. But there are multiple possible reasons for this – reasons I haven't discovered.
Using Deb on a macbook 4,1 from 2008. Camera doesn't work though. What year is your mackbook? I configured this one last week for a friend who had it laying around in the closet for years with a locked password and no particular interest in Macs. I convinced them to nix the MacOS and try Linux, arguing it would perform more efficiently, and compared to the MacOS version previously installed, it very much does. And tell me; did you reformat the drive, or just add a partition? I used gdisks and GPT partitioning and eventually wangled it, though not without a little trouble.
I'm not sure; it was an old Debian Stable dvd, from early last year. And the first thing I did was change the repos to Unstable and do a dist-upgrade. The kernel release is presently 4.7.0-1-amd64. It was all a fairly annoying task to begin with a blank hard-drive and end with a usable system, but it was pretty neat when I got it. It's a usable system now, with a few minor bugs.
I have a Clevo 740su, the same model as the old Galago Ultrapro from System76 (I just got it from Sager instead) which has a webcam that works fine out of the box on Linux, the headphone jack works fine, etc. I use KDE and the plasma-pa tray applet easily lets you switch output audio devices for applications which I use (as an example) to playback movies from my desktop to TV.
linux works perfectly well in all these scenarios and is actually better than Windows.
hangouts works brilliantly. skype (even the old version) works great with both audio and video. in fact i have switched over to the skype web version which works on the chrome browser (no video call for now.. but audio works brilliantly).
i use fedora 24..which just works and is pretty cutting edge. i switched over from Ubuntu pretty recently and have been very happy.
im on a xps 13. previously i was on a thinkpad. there is no dearth of cool laptops on Linux.
Nice to see another Fedora user! I find it runs better than Ubuntu. Faster and more stable. Recently I have been using Cinnamon over GNOME3. What DE do you use?
May I ask what are you using to get media and crypto? As far as I know, Fedora doesn't ship media codecs (including mp3) and has limited cryptography, right?
No matter what this informal poll shows, there will be more problems than with macOS, over the long term. I know lots of people that use Linux and they very often have problems with audio apps. As for sleep-on-closing-the-lid, I think that's gotten better, but I don't think it will ever approach the stability of it on macOS. In 5 years, I think I've had a very small number of problems with this on macOS, and it always involved undocking from a physical keyboard, mouse and multiple monitors. My friends on Windows and Linux are always having problems with this.
I have personally never had any issues with audio on linux the past 5 years. ALSA and pulseaudio have become pretty mature now. Only thing i needed for hangouts to work was to install Chrome instead of Chromium and then it worked. Webcam, audio and mic worked out of the box. I have however heard that there are some issues with the iSight camera on Macs under Linux, I have not tried this myself though.
With a ThinkPad, sleep-on-closing-the-lid has never been an issue, I actually wasn't even aware it was a problem that people faced. Presumably it depends almost entirely on the laptop.
My idea that I think would work but never came around to before Windows became usable for me was to keep a linux workstation or decent developer laptop and then have an iPad (or some good Android pad) for Skype etc.
That I think would be the best of both worlds for me.
Can confirm this. I'm typing this on a System76 galago pro, which is more than 2 years old at this point. Over time, I've seen the very same issues which you'd expect from any other system: bluetooth misbehaving, graphics issues etc.
In particular:
1. The graphic card (Intel onboard Crystal Eye) switches to low-power mode on battery. The windows Intel driver has an option to switch it to performance mode. No such option on the linux drivers.
2. The damn Xf86Display Key (Projector shortcut) isn't supported.
However, I've realized over time that irrespective of your choice, you will face issues on _your device_. NTFS would stop working on your Mac, or your iPhone will refuse to connect to your Car's bluetooth one fine day.
I am using Slack, GotoMeeting, join.me, etc., and in general -- I'm working remotely.
Linux is better for development, but worse for collaboration. You can get almost everything working, but it takes effort.
GotoMeeting screensharing tends to work, but not always. Join.me doesn't. The tools for Windows (my other OS) are much better if you need to capture screenshots or recordings often (typical use case: hotkey -> record part of the screen -> paste into Slack.. this is doable on Linux, but on Windows, it takes almost zero effort).
The audio is getting better on Linux, but I have many audio devices (external DAC, audio-through-Displayport, analog headset, etc.), and switching between them quickly is more painful than how it is on Windows. This is aggravated by the fact that I hate all DEs (except maybe Gnome3), so I use i3 WM -- which is brilliant but stuff like clipboard management doesn't work well out of the box.
In general, Linux can work for my (your?) use case, but it's significantly worse than Windows. It's better for development though (in general). Currently I run Linux VMs under Windows, that works okay.
Having a Windows VM on Linux seems workable albeit clunky for the ~5% of things that I must have like GoToMeeting, etc. Thing is I already use a Windows VM on Mac for some things like that because I am very security-conscious and OS-pollution-conscious and don't like installing intrusive stuff like GoToMeeting on my main OS.
Can you elaborate on "Linux is better for development"? Guessing it can only come down to differences in apt and brew and not much more (not that this couldn't be reason enough)?
edit: this article mentioned MacOS and Linux and so that's all I thought OP's comment was referring to. We all know the advantages compared to Windows. Of course Windows is constantly improving.
Sorry - it's better for my job. But e.g. for Xamarin development it's worse :) I don't even consider macOS because I never liked the Mac hardware (had a late 2013 rMBP...)
Funny story: My new-ish Dell laptop (Inspiron 15 7559 i7 with 4k touchscreen display; which I got at an absurdly low sales price from the Dell outlet store) does not reliably recover from sleep under Windows, but does under Linux (neither worked when I first got the laptop, but now only Windows fails and now only some of the time). That's a first, for me, as I have had a huge variety of sleep related bugs in Linux over the years, but fewer under Windows.
Google Hangouts works fine under Chrome on Linux, but is quirkier under Firefox (I don't think I ever got the voice/video plugin working under Firefox, but I rarely use the video features these days, so I just run Chrome when I need it). Both video and audio Hangouts work fine under Chrome.
With very new hardware, you probably need a very new Linux distribution, and newer hardware can have installation quirks. Getting Linux onto my box took a lot of fiddling, but it now runs Fedora 24 quite nicely.
Basic "just run code" stuff seems to be working well enough, and on a desktop which always runs at max in my case it doesn’t need to support power savings modes either.
I think it's gotten pretty good in the past few months. As I mentioned, I had problems when I first installed Linux and it took longer than it historically has, but it's mostly been resolved with kernel and other updates. I can't think of any major issues; the 4k support in Linux is a bit quirky (but it's a bit quirky under Windows 10, as well), and so I've found myself fiddling more than I'd like on that front. But, there have been no showstoppers, even though my laptop has very new components on all fronts.
Skylake support isn't mature enough in Windows either, though.
However, I have two devices with a Skylake processor and neither have on Linux (as of recently, there were some minor ones with bad power states on cores). One of them dualboots Windows, and windows has some random weird issues with Skylake and BSODs randomly (but rarely). Sometimes it "wakes up" into BSOD.
I'm writing this from a Kaby Lake (7th gen) I5 running Fedora 24 and it shipped with Ubuntu (Dell XPS). It does require the newest packages but I don't see any major issues. My Skylake (6th gen) NUC I5 works well with Fedora 24 too. Mind to elaborate what specific problems you have with them?
I've been using Fedora on my desktop machine for a few months and it's fantastic. Because I had such a good experience with it I decided to sell my MacBook Pro about a month ago and bought this laptop. Dual-booted Fedora 24 and Windows (for gaming) and I'm loving it. Like you, I had to finagle Fedora a bit to get it working but now I use it as my main dev machine.
A couple of years back I was having persistent sleep/wake issues that seemed to stem from graphics driver issues. I switched between the open source and Nvidia binaries, trying to find a stable combination. What a nightmare. In the end, I decided that I didn't want to mess around and tried out a few Live CDs (think I tried Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora). In the end, Fedora worked out of the box and completed my "stress test" of sleep, wake, sleep, wake. I had to give up stellar 3D performance, but have found things to be working quite well and consistent now through all the Fedora updates.
Might give Elementary OS a spin. This old Thinkpad T510 is getting dated, but still solid as ever (besides battery life).
I founded MeetSpace, which is video conferencing for distributed teams. I developed MeetSpace on a linux laptop (yoga 2 pro) and a linux desktop (custom w/ logitech c922 webcam).
I can tell you that for the most part it's worked flawlessly. The only issues I ever had were that linux rendering wasn't great, so sometimes the CPU was high just from rendering!
We are browser-only, so because we don't have a native app we just use browser functionality. The only thing we use the extensions for is for security to ask for permission to use the screen (it's really like a dozen lines of code).
Oh, and if you switch, Dell's XPS series tends to work very well in linux, especially if you buy their developer edition, because they support ubuntu, which means you can find the drivers even if you don't use ubuntu.
I'm using project sputnik from dell. No issues the entire time I've had it. Skype works pretty well and people have told me several times that it is the clearest screen sharing experience they've had but I don't really know what that means. Been about 3 years now and has gone from ubuntu 12.04 to 16.04 without any problems. I expect it to continue to work fine and have been looking into upgrading to the latest model.
I use Google Hangouts on Linux all the time. No issues at all.
Sleep-on-lid-closing works reasonably well nowadays; I can't remember the last time I've run into a laptop which has issues on that front. However, I'd definitely do my research before buying a new laptop, especially if it's a very new one (in other words: you'll have better chances of power-management compatibility on laptops that are a bit more battle-tested).
This is why I still choose to go with Mac OS X, even if their most recent hardware is very, very expensive.
I don't have time to tinker with compiling kernels, configuring X11, figuring out which photo management software to use, setting up reliable backups, getting my Bluetooth headset to work, and, yes, getting the machine to suspend when I close the lid and wake up when I open it.
These are basics that will just work with OS X, very, very, reliably.
That said, if anyone can point me to a Linux distro (Debian/Ubuntu preferred) and hardware that actually work reliably together, please do.
Gosh, frankly speaking, I haven't had to do any of that stuff (except for the Bluetooth headset, I never had one of those, no idea how it works) in 7 years.
In 2009 I installed Mandriva on a laptop--everything just worked. In 2011, I jumped ship to Mageia, the community-driven offshoot of Mandriva. Everything still just worked. Fast forward several laptops later, including mine and friends' and relations' laptops, and it all just works. Compiling a kernel? Wouldn't know how anymore. Fiddling with X11? No idea. I don't even have problems with Pulseaudio.
Compare that to dual booting this one with Windows 10. For several months, Windows 10 had a bug where it wouldn't save the touchpad settings. Every time, I'd have to disable tap-to-click. UGH. They finally fixed it, but what a pain.
(And when I had an OS X machine, received as part of payment for a job... between the beach ball and the not-infrequent crashes, where the screen dims and displays that fatal error message, it was a pain to get any work done.)
> compiling kernels, configuring X11, figuring out which photo management software to use, setting up reliable backups, getting my Bluetooth headset to work, and, yes, getting the machine to suspend when I close the lid and wake up when I open it.
I haven't heard of the need for compiling kernels, configuring X11 etc. in a loong time.
> setting up reliable backups, getting my Bluetooth headset to work, and, yes, getting the machine to suspend when I close the lid and wake up when I open it
Again, works out of the box, just pick a laptop that is known to work well, i.e. a Clevo, Lenovo or some of the newer DELL machines to give Linux a proper chance - there's no point in trying a laptop that is known to work only with Windows and then complain about it - the same way you don't complain if macOS doesn't work well on a DELL.
You pick a specific machine to run macOS, do the same for Linux and everything will work beautifully out of the box.
For personal use, I decided to move away from a laptop entirely. I'm very much enjoying having a workstation that enforces me going to a specific place to do work. If that appeals to you, then it's very easy to find 100% compatible hardware.
If not, then I can vouch that my wife's Thinkpad runs Ubuntu with no issues. I concur with others that kernel compiling and X11 configuration have long been non-issues.
Compiling your kernel hasn't been necessary for like a decade by now. Configuring X is becoming a thing of the past, partially because of working automatic config, and partially because of the move away from X to Wayland-based desktops.
I use Fedora on a ThinkPad X230. It works an absolute dream. GNOME is my favorite of all the desktops, and Fedora by default ships a fully setup and functioning Gnome on Wayland session (which will also be the default session in the next release, coming in a few weeks).
The reason I chose to run Fedora on a ThinkPad is because it required no tweaking and fiddling at all to get working nicely. I'm all about that seamless out-of-the-box experience.
I was amused by the post here today about the Touch ID fork of sudo for macOS, because I already use the same feature on my ThinkPad every day, and it required absolutely no configuration or setup (other than enrolling my fingerprint).
For reasonably popular hardware, compiling kernels or configuring X.org has been a thing of the past for years (unless one really wants to).
Since you are asking for specifics, I run openSUSE Tumbleweed on an Asus Zenbook UX 305, and with the exception of keyboard backlight, all the builtin hardware works as expected. I have never tried to attach an external display. I did not try Ubuntu on this machine, the Debian installer pretty much bailed on me. (Tumbleweed is a rolling release distro, so the amount of updates it receives can be slightly annoying at times, OTOH the software is very much up to date.) I have to admit I have not tried suspending the machine by closing the lid, but Fn+F1 works reliably.
Google Hangouts works fine. I've had problems with Skype and audio after a distro upgrade on Ubuntu (but an `apt purge` and `apt install` fixed them).
Sleep-on-closing-lid has worked fine for me for many years.
It's funny that, with regards to Just Working after installation, Linux seems to be way ahead of Windows. I installed both of them on my laptop and while on Linux everything worked fine from the start without needing extra setup steps (including the multitouch trackpad; the not-so-standard function keys like keyboard brightness; even the this weird external subwoofer that came with the laptop), on Windows i had to download and install special drivers for all those things, and even for much more basic stuff, like the wireless card (had to dig through old computer stuff to find an ethernet cable to connect to the internet).
Now, i understand why this is the case. Linux distros are designed to be installed by their users, while Windows is designed to come pre-installed on computers. But i still find it curious how Linux is much more non-tech-savvy-friendly in this particular regard.
Only the g2m web client works on linux; anything you need the desktop app for (i.e. pretty much anything for which you are the presenter) does not work.
WebEx's Linux support is excellent though.
Google Hangouts works fine under chrome on linux.
As far as hardware, webcam support is generally good. It's now at the point where if you bought a random webcam, there is a better than 50% chance it will just work. That being said, it's much safer to check if others have used it, or to just buy a laptop that has a webcam and ships with linux support (Both Dell and HP have laptops that ship with linux installed). I have a Creative Labs USB webcam that unfortunately has no model number printed on it (I have a long list of things I don't like about built-in webcams).
Sleep has worked on all laptops I've tried in the past decade or so. Hibernate (i.e. suspend to disk) is much more spotty.
Battery life lies somewhere between windows 7 and Mac, though certain applications are particularly bad at draining the battery (powertop can be useful in identifying these).
In general linux on a laptop has gotten way better; in particular networking is much more bearable now that NetworkManager actually works and it's much easier to find laptops with linux supported wifi gear preinstalled.
[edit]
I saw someone mention audio issues; that reminds me. The situation there is more like what networking was like 5-6 years ago. Pulse Audio promises to provide all the basic features people expect from an audio stack), but sometimes crashes, or drains your battery or just causes weird sounds to come out of your speaker. On the other hand, getting ALSA+dmix setup correctly without pulse audio (which is the only real alternative), is fairly arcane, and leaves you without things like per-application volume control (though many linux applications provide their own software-implemented volume control).
For me, only showstopper to migrate from Mac to Linux is alternative for iMovie and Lightroom. Any progress on this alternatives for Linux in last year or two? What programs do I need to check?
Elementary is nice, it is also my backup OS, and I also donated some money to them 1 year ago.
As an alternative to Lightroom, try Darktable: https://www.darktable.org/ . Several people I know seem quite happy with it, and LWN has positive reviews of it.
OP here. I actually installed that this morning, am still fiddling with it. Other folk report trouble importing their Lightroom XMP metadata on some versions, can't say much about that.
Video editors on Linux are strikingly crappy in my experience. KDEnlive is the one I settled on and have been using for my tutorial videos for a couple of years, but it still has random crashes and some of its UI choices are questionable. But, it's the one I recommend when people ask.
The truth is though - there is no replacement for Lightroom. Digikam has the file management capabilities but the editor experience is clunky (pop out editor, edit modules require opening, no apparent easy sync of settings across images, poor noise control) and it's not the fastest app I've used. Digikam 5 is a big improvement is some ways but the editor is still very clunky to use.
ASP is just buggy. I tried it on Debian Jessie and Ubuntu 16.04 and on both it lasted a few days before simply refusing to open, even after install. It's also slow, even though they claim it's faster. And it does annoying stuff like paint its own window borders to look like a Windows app.
Darktable is the best RAW editor I've used, but it's got essentially zero file management. Batch output requires a new mental abstraction with the 'queue'. For volume work (hundreds of images at a time) it seems ill equipped as you have to create a style or copy the history stack (which doesn't seem to have an easy keyboard shortcut). I'm still working on this one as it has so much power and control it could be fantastic, but more work needs to be done on the process of the edit or you can get stuck in the editors rabbit hole of fine detail.
RAWtherapee - that's the next one to test for me. My initial feature check showed it suffers some of the complaints of Darktable like no file management (as far as I can see) and an involved edit process.
If you pair any of the above applications with gThumb you can get some of the file management back in the most LR style I have found, but (infuriatingly) gThumb doesn't seem to display images in subfolders for whatever reason.
My conclusions so far (as a former pro photographer) is that there is potential in the linux world to equal and even do better that LR but it's definitely not there yet and definitely not in one programme.
And let's not start talking about Photoshop/GIMP - which of course ISN'T photoshop, as they keep telling us.
Is Pitivi still written using Python to gtk bindings? I found it really really slow using Python for GUI apps, eg Ubuntu software center and every RPM took redhat rewrote every fedora release but it has been years since I've used it as I moved to macOS.
I actually did the same after the Macbook pro presentation. Got Elementary OS on my desktop to try it. Works fine so far, better UI/UX than Ubuntu for sure.
A desktop linux could really grab an audience right now with the current state of windows and the agnosticism that is common in today's applications. The problem with desktop linux has always been that polish isn't quite there.
Things like handling gracefully video card/dual monitor, audio switching, and sleep mode recovery end up being headaches that use up a lot of time googling around and generally learning about stuff you shouldn't have to know.
It would be nice to see a company that specializes in a linux flavor sell a machine that is specifically built for that OS and with high build quality. Chromebooks are the closest thing to that but pushing a web-only interface is a major drawback.
They do offer apt repos with some light configuration, firmware installation, etc. I referenced their source code when setting up my equivalent Clevo from pro-star.
I've been keeping tabs on ChromeOS as well. Right now the variations out there aren't as flexible or well-suported as Elementary, largely because it's essentially Ubuntu LTS.
Dell comes closest with their Developer Edition, but even they aren't trying too hard and just tell people to suck it up when e.g. the touchpad firmware is broken.
Dell is really not trying. Most laptops ship with touchpads that work fine on Linux. Dell ships buggy, painful firmware with a premium laptop, and people give them the benefit of the doubt because it's a "Linux problem," not their mistake.
Have you seen the buggy behaviour you mention with the Developer Edition laptops?
Their Developer Edition laptops get special treatment with regards to Linux compatibility. At one point, the made the the company they sourced some new touchpads from develop drivers for Linux and got it upstreamed.
My company issued me one when I started a few months ago. I tried really hard to make it work, but the thing was too buggy in too many different ways. I finally gave up and grabbed a random old Lenovo out of storage, put an SSD, 16GB of RAM, and a new battery in it and it works great.
KDE just started shipping their own distro with Neon that always pushes the latest desktop rather than freezing it between releases on Ubuntu. It would be really neat to see notebooks shipping with it preinstalled.
It's a scam project. They claim 100% open hardware but it's just an off the shelf Intel laptop with closed firmware and ME intact. You'd do better with something from System76 or a similar Linux-first vendor.
They did make over-ambitious claims when they were initially crowdfunding/scoping, but I don't think it's their fault that Intel run the processor market for laptops. I think it's good (if naive) that they were shooting for the FSF hardware badge.
I've spent a few minutes on a Librem 13, and it seems like an extremely high quality piece of hardware. It's cool that they're assembled in South San Francisco, too. I really really want to like System76 machines, but they're just so damned ugly!
They didn't just make the claims during crowdfunding, they doubled down after release. They are charging a premium for a claim of fully open hardware that they can't back up. You can get the same hardware at the same quality level for hundreds less and install your own Free OS. No, you're still not going to get a fully open BIOS, but at least you're not paying hundreds more to be lied to about it. They made promises that Intel would allow them source access to ME and other low level BIOS components, when Intel obviously would never do such a thing for one small startup. The whole project stinks of bait-and-switch.
Your best bet for a Librem-quality machine that is actually designed to run Linux is a Google Chromebook Pixel. If you want a truly 100% open from the chips up laptop, right now your only option is Bunnie's Novena, but it's not for the faint of heart; it's a true hacker's machine and not a ripoff of a MacBook.
I've been looking for a replacement OS to try over macOS for a while, so I just tried this on for size.
2-year old MBP. Created a boot disk with the Elementary ISO and started up. Fairly snappy, connected over a USB 3 connection to a 500GB SSD.
First thing I tried to install was Google Chrome. DEBian package. Fail. Google search for others who have tried. Found recent article, followed step-by-step. Failed. :-(
I just downloaded the official Chrome .deb and did a sudo dpkg -i foo.deb.
Can't understand how that would fail, really. One thing you might try is doing an apt-get install -f, since there might be implicit dependencies depending on the build, and this forces apt to figure them out.
Just a quick question to make sure I understand properly: do you mean you tried to install an application while running the ElementaryOS live USB? If so, perhaps that's why it failed?
Depending on how the live boot OS is set up, installing new applications may not work at all. Some live USB creator apps I've used give the option of setting aside some space for a writable filesystem that will with with Ubuntu live images (and possibly others).
In either case, the best way to get a real sense of how much you like the OS is to do a proper install of it in a VM. The live ISO will mostly just show you if the OS supports your hardware and everything (WiFi, etc.) works.
OP here. No settings for that on my trackpad. It's doable in Linux, but I don't see any prebuilt hooks for that in Elementary other than a hotkey combo.
It's certainly on the to-do list, but some features related to swipe were implemented in the GTK version after than the one Ubuntu 16.04 LTS currently ships, so it'll take a bit more time.
Loading this page with JS disabled, all the images are blurred. Loading it with JS, there's a fancy fade-in animation on the images. What is the point of this? Why would you intentionally distort the images for people who browse with JS disabled?
It's a simple approach to lazy loading, so that you only download the images you actually want to view on a phone as you scroll to them.
(I also pick the right kind of image depending on your display DPI, and resize them on the back-end, but that's beside the point here)
I get a _lot_ of mobile visitors, and mobile bandwidth is expensive, so I'm considerate to them - folk with JavaScript disabled know how to re-enable it to view the images, and are a very minute percentage of my page views.
FYI I also get the blurry images in Firefox's reader mode. (I had to go back to the original to see if that was intentional when I saw the first screenshot ;-)
The images did not load at all for me the first time I went to the page. There were just blank spaces at odd places and it wasn't until halfway through the article that I realized there were supposed to be images. I also saw some raw markdown-looking text like "[foo][f]", though other formatting and links rendered correctly. I'm using Firefox 49 on Ubuntu 16.04.
I just refreshed again and everything seems to be working now.
OP here. It does not add anything that I wanted, and I had already ditched XFCE in favor of LXDE in the past. The point of the post was not to get Elementary running on a Chromebook, it was to see if I, coming from a Mac, could use it on a future desktop without issues and the usual ugly UIs Linux DEs have.
Riiiight. I don't want to spend hours tweaking my desktop. It's hard enough to pick a decent wallpaper, and since I've been using X desktops since the SunOS era, believe me when I tell you that I have no interest in wrestling with multiple X toolkits to achieve the kiddie look of the day...
My experience tweaking my Linux desktop didn't take nearly that long. It depends I suppose on how in detail you want to get, but a much nicer look than the standard is fairly easy to achieve.
/r/unixporn crowd is always interested in posts that customize their Linux setups to the max: use Window Managers almost exclusively, have a unified color scheme all over the system etc. That's not minor tweaking.
I've been using elementaryOS for a few years now and just upgraded to Loki. On the whole it has been great, but there are just a few buggy elements that occasionally make me want to wipe the thing and start fresh with Ubuntu, which at least I can trust to not break. Hoping that eOS continues to become more polished.
I really wish that they'd narrow their ambition and just ship a really great desktop environment that could be installable in stock Ubuntu. I guess that's harder to monetize.
Agreed about the few buggy elements. The last version had a bug with the cursor for about 6 months. Freya's still got the window focus bug that Ubuntu has had for years (haven't tried Loki yet). They're waiting for upstream fixes, but it does undermine the fundamental usability message of the distribution. If they do manage to grow to a major distribution, they really need to set aside a significant amount of money to sponsor upstream developers to fix these problems in weeks rather than months.
That depends on hardware (and amount of proprietary firmwares) really. On newer Macs where a lot of things are non-standard and controlled via EFI, it's going to be tough - same as BootCamp where Apple doesn't provide drivers for powersaving.
On things like ThinkPads, XPS Developer Editions, etc. the battery is rather comparable to their Windows counterparts for most cases.
Surprised to hear that Apple does not provide power management for other operating systems. Are there any recent benchmarks for macOS versus Windows in terms of power saving?
Yeah, to me it's kind of the broken-windows theory. When I see something that tasteless upfront, it makes me question the quality of the thing from the top down. It's like if you went to buy a used car and it had flame stickers all over it. Sure, it's just surface level tacky, but it would lead you to question how well the owner took care of it. When I see a bad macOS knockoff, all I can think is, if the best their ux design can do is rip off apple, then I'm not sure I want to commit long term to the thing (especially since I think that many of apple's UX decisions have actually been really bad form-over-function calls)
I agree. Every time Elementary OS comes up, people are like, "Finally a nice looking Linux desktop!", and I'm over here thinking, "meh...regular old Gnome 3, as shipped with recent Fedora versions, looks nicer and more cohesive, to me."
Regular old Gnome3 is horrible to use with multiple screens.
Good luck running a program in full screen on your main monitor, while also doing stuff on a secondary monitor, where you have to switch windows, open new ones, etc.
Gnome3 is only useful on non-touch laptops, not on any other usecase.
Huh...I don't think I know what you're talking about. What specific problems have you had with multiple screens? I don't currently have my system setup for multiple displays (I live in an RV and don't have room for that kind of setup), but did use Gnome 3 with a second display for quite a long time. I don't remember any problems with switching windows and such. It seemed to work pretty much the same as Windows or macOS.
The only multi-monitor complaint I had about Gnome 3 was that opening the Activities bar or changing apps led to both displays dimming. This makes Gnome 3 horrible for presentations, screening films, or pretty much anything you'd want to use a projector for. I'm hopeful that problem has been fixed, as I've rarely felt so annoyed at a piece of software. Notifications were also problematic, in that they would pop up over full screen applications (which is, IMHO, never the right behavior...full screen apps should really be treated as sacred, by default). But, at least notifications can be disabled. The misfeature of screen dimming and shrinking app windows across displays could not be disabled last time I messed with it (admittedly, a year or two ago).
"Gnome3 is only useful on non-touch laptops"
Which touch features do you think are missing? Mine seems to work fine, though I so rarely use the touchscreen that I may be missing something important. I find touchscreens hard to use for anything more than basic scrolling, so it's not a feature I even wanted, but it came with my laptop, and I was surprised to see it worked fine out-of-the-box with Linux. I didn't even tweak it.
> This makes Gnome 3 horrible for presentations, screening films, or pretty much anything you'd want to use a projector for. I'm hopeful that problem has been fixed, as I've rarely felt so annoyed at a piece of software.
That’s exactly what my issue with multiple screens is.
Still not fixed.
> Which touch features do you think are missing?
It’s not that I think touch features are missing, it’s that I think non-laptop features are missing.
On a screen with 1440p or 2304p height, and 27" diagonal, I can afford to have a lot of things directly in view – I don’t need to have them hidden behind things like the dimmed activity menu.
Which, btw, isn’t very ideal for touch users either.
It works really well on old computers in my experience. I first ran it because Ubuntu was so slow to be unusuable on an old Core2Duo, and on that hardware Elementary was very fast.
The AppCenter is the hottest development area, so there are new features and fixes landing every day. But in the not very distant future you're going to see the result of a lot of work: https://houston.elementary.io/
As a slight aside. Can anyone point me to any recent work being done to get working Linux drivers for the various Mac hardware bits that have been problematic in the past? I'm only finding old howtos for Linux on Mac which usually end up with some hardware or other not working. I'm specifically interested in Linux on MacBook Air. Thanks.
I've been using it for the last 2/3 years. Started using it because my computer was old, and it was a lot faster than Ubuntu, and much more polished (in my opinion) than XFCE or LFCE, and have used it ever since. Has worked really well. Definitely has one or two persistent bugs, though. There was a really annoying cursor one for a long time, and then one with window focus which Ubuntu also suffered from. It's also annoying not to be able to do updates in place. To be fair, I think they are often upstream issues, Ubuntu also was waiting for that upstream focus fix for a long time. But it does mean they're not yet fulfilling the promise of a completely seamless, polished, Linux distribution.
For the moment, for my use case it's the best distribution, but it's not quite at the stage where I'd want to put it on a relative's computer, and I think given their stated aims that's the litmus test.
It's not a blog, it's a Wiki (https://github.com/rcarmo/sushy), and the blog just hangs off it. I see no damning in that - you can always either not visit or not click :)
Then you gotta warn us in the title that you link everything :). Just kidding, but on a more serious note I also found it very distracting. Sure, link the first occurrence of the word, but I see no reason macOS needs to be linked every time it's mentioned. Even the big daddy of wikis, Wikipedia, recommends against linking things that have already been linked and very common terms [0]:
> An overlinked article contains an excessive number of links, making it difficult to identify links likely to aid the reader's understanding significantly. A 2015 study of log data found that "in the English Wikipedia, of all the 800,000 links added ... in February 2015, the majority (66%) were not clicked even a single time in March 2015, and among the rest, most links were clicked only very rarely", and that "simply adding more links does not increase the overall number of clicks taken from a page. Instead, links compete with each other for user attention."
When I, an internet user see a link, it's visual distinctiveness cues to me that it might lead me to more information that emphasizes something. It's fine for websites to link to their own tags, but there's also overdoing it.
I'm testing out a little JS to hide all but the first link of each kind (it makes sense for the anchors to stick around to do internal reference counting). Will be up soon.
That can be achieved in any terminal emulator that visually shows the occurrence of an ASCII bell.
For instance, all I had to do was include `\a` in my `$PS1` and now whenever a command finishes running and bash is ready for a new command, my terminal emulator gets a bell.
Konsole (and any Konsole based terminal emulators, like Yakuake) shows a notification if a bell happens in a non-foreground session.
Konsole also has explicit tab-specific settings for "Monitor for Silence" and "Monitor for Activity".
> Wouldn't that beep every time you run a command?
It's up to the terminal emulator to do what it wants with the beep character. Technically, it's up to whoever has to display the character; if you're running bash at a tty — an actual terminal — then the kernel gets to decide what to do, so it beeps, since there is little else it could choose to do.
Terminal emulators, on the other hand, know they aren't actually in a limited environment and can do a lot more than playing a sound. That's why there's such a thing as "visual bell" among terminal emulators. Some highlight the tab title upon visual bell, Konsole merely sends a notification if a bell occurs.
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> And/or interfere with any programs that use the beep for their own purposes?
I don't quite understand what you mean here. There isn't any way for arbitrary programs to listen for / wait for / register callbacks for the beep.
If you're thinking about the `\a` in `$PS1` ... well, PS1 is shown only when bash runs as an interactive process.
Also, the beep control in ALSA is muted by default.
Wow, that's a pretty great idea. Enough people do this wrong manually that it seems like something that could be better solved by the OS.
One example I've seen of doing it wrong is adding black opaque rectangles as layers and then sending out all layers including the original. Another is pixelating it in a way where it's possible to revert the pixelation since the font is known (e.g. parts of a facebook post)
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadUNIX support was never a goal for macOS, neither for NeXT, rather a nice way to bring developers from Sun and SGI into their platforms.
The business value for developers was always the Objective-C libraries, which is quite clear from most presentations done by Jobs, some of them available on YouTube.
It is as if some people needed this week's presentation to wake up for the real Apple culture, that goes back to the days when they kind of toyed around with A/UX.
I have no delusions about Apple culture. But apparently you're forgetting that Apple heavily marketed OSX's association with UNIX after the merge with NeXT, and that it made a lot of noise about how the Mac would be the best UNIX workstation ever.
I lived through those years and saw the same presentations you mentioned - some on VHS tapes that were shipped to us after the events. There was no toying about OSX as a workstation, it was even on the sales pitch guides.
The real Apple culture was Object Pascal, Common Lisp, Hypercard, Dylan, Newton, MacApp, PowerPlant, QuickDraw,...
Now they have money and they actually need is macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS developers, not UNIX developers deploying code on GNU/Linux servers.
Many of our customers follow similar patterns, I hardly see new desktops being deployed, so I have some sympathy for Apple thinking that it might not be worthwhile to keep doing them.
Also it sounds like you want the ability to develop for osx on a non-osx device. That seems counterintuitive.
It has proven to be significantly more stable and simple to use than Windows and the default applications really nicely hit the simplicity and usability for a user that primarily needs web, email, photos and minor document editing. I'd even argue it's better than macOS for that user profile (especially since it's not localized to my local language, which eOS and most of major Linux apps are).
The fact that it actually looks good by default is nice as well.
Known downsides:
- It's based on Ubuntu LTS (which is great!), but the new versions tend to lag after Ubuntu LTS releases by months at a time.
- No upgrade path between versions.
- Releases tend to be buggy on some hardware after release.
I'm currently using Archlinux now, so far I enjoy using it, but the fact that we have to put much effort on installing it makes me don't want to recommend it.
I try to find simple-to-install-with-Arch-linux-based-OS, still with rolling release and pacman -Syu to update the entire OS.
Is Elementary OS significantly different?
Damn it, there is at least one documented case of a motherboard giving a junk ACPI return if the OS identified itself as anything other than Windows.
One of the biggest problems in the Linux ecosystem is the lack of any good source on hardware compatibility tracking.
Did they improve on this front?
EDIT: I stand corrected. This has not happened yet. I confused this with some other changes.
After over a decade of using Mac OS X, I am considering switching to Linux for my dev laptop. The tools I worry about are those that interact with audio and webcam - Go To Meeting, Google Hangout etc. My work involves me having to teleconf with others often.
Does anyone here have experience using Linux well in such scenarios. If so, what hardware are you using?
Also, does sleep-on-closing-lid work well?
Last time I tried (2+ years ago, it might be different now) Go To Meeting also wasn't working on Linux.
I've used Linux on the desktop between 2009-2014 and basically anything multimedia related was a chore.
Now just need a 'stop sharing my desktop' button.
Full disclaimer: I'm a friend of the founder, however I'm a paying customer due to the fact that
1. It's worked wonders with my clients and 2. It's so much better than hangouts or skype.
Compared to the big boys it may be considered a bit spartan but for what it does, it does it extraordinarily well.
I used to use Ubuntu and had Hangouts and GoToMeeting work just fine (also, Skype and Appear.in).
I switched to Mac for two reasons: browser testing Safari and quality hardware (aluminum case, retina screen, support for 3+ monitors, nice hinges). I suppose iOS app development is another reason you'd want it.
For some reason I had to install "cheese" to make it work. But that's all. No extra drivers needed or anything else.
Bluetooth is kind of a mess, on Xubuntu at least.
(Speaking as someone who likes Xfce, and is currently switching from MacOS to Linux and is mostly settled on Xubuntu), I think that's mostly an Xfce thing. GNOME (and therefore Unity, Budgie, possibly Cinnamon and maybe MATE) handle it better.
webcam both on the mbp and my logitech hd work out of the box. sleep on closing lid also works quite well -- and i feel waking it up is faster.
which kernel were you installing?
hangouts works brilliantly. skype (even the old version) works great with both audio and video. in fact i have switched over to the skype web version which works on the chrome browser (no video call for now.. but audio works brilliantly).
i use fedora 24..which just works and is pretty cutting edge. i switched over from Ubuntu pretty recently and have been very happy.
im on a xps 13. previously i was on a thinkpad. there is no dearth of cool laptops on Linux.
plus it comes with all the new systemd security integration. i dont think cinnamon has been rebased on gnome 3 yet
That I think would be the best of both worlds for me.
In particular:
1. The graphic card (Intel onboard Crystal Eye) switches to low-power mode on battery. The windows Intel driver has an option to switch it to performance mode. No such option on the linux drivers.
2. The damn Xf86Display Key (Projector shortcut) isn't supported.
However, I've realized over time that irrespective of your choice, you will face issues on _your device_. NTFS would stop working on your Mac, or your iPhone will refuse to connect to your Car's bluetooth one fine day.
(/rant)
Linux is better for development, but worse for collaboration. You can get almost everything working, but it takes effort.
GotoMeeting screensharing tends to work, but not always. Join.me doesn't. The tools for Windows (my other OS) are much better if you need to capture screenshots or recordings often (typical use case: hotkey -> record part of the screen -> paste into Slack.. this is doable on Linux, but on Windows, it takes almost zero effort). The audio is getting better on Linux, but I have many audio devices (external DAC, audio-through-Displayport, analog headset, etc.), and switching between them quickly is more painful than how it is on Windows. This is aggravated by the fact that I hate all DEs (except maybe Gnome3), so I use i3 WM -- which is brilliant but stuff like clipboard management doesn't work well out of the box.
In general, Linux can work for my (your?) use case, but it's significantly worse than Windows. It's better for development though (in general). Currently I run Linux VMs under Windows, that works okay.
Ah, and Skype for Linux alpha works fine.
Having a Windows VM on Linux seems workable albeit clunky for the ~5% of things that I must have like GoToMeeting, etc. Thing is I already use a Windows VM on Mac for some things like that because I am very security-conscious and OS-pollution-conscious and don't like installing intrusive stuff like GoToMeeting on my main OS.
edit: this article mentioned MacOS and Linux and so that's all I thought OP's comment was referring to. We all know the advantages compared to Windows. Of course Windows is constantly improving.
Funny story: My new-ish Dell laptop (Inspiron 15 7559 i7 with 4k touchscreen display; which I got at an absurdly low sales price from the Dell outlet store) does not reliably recover from sleep under Windows, but does under Linux (neither worked when I first got the laptop, but now only Windows fails and now only some of the time). That's a first, for me, as I have had a huge variety of sleep related bugs in Linux over the years, but fewer under Windows.
Google Hangouts works fine under Chrome on Linux, but is quirkier under Firefox (I don't think I ever got the voice/video plugin working under Firefox, but I rarely use the video features these days, so I just run Chrome when I need it). Both video and audio Hangouts work fine under Chrome.
With very new hardware, you probably need a very new Linux distribution, and newer hardware can have installation quirks. Getting Linux onto my box took a lot of fiddling, but it now runs Fedora 24 quite nicely.
Basic "just run code" stuff seems to be working well enough, and on a desktop which always runs at max in my case it doesn’t need to support power savings modes either.
However, I have two devices with a Skylake processor and neither have on Linux (as of recently, there were some minor ones with bad power states on cores). One of them dualboots Windows, and windows has some random weird issues with Skylake and BSODs randomly (but rarely). Sometimes it "wakes up" into BSOD.
I'm still seeing powersaving issues even on Haswell. I believe basic support for Skylake only shipped in Ubuntu LTS only recently, too.
A couple of years back I was having persistent sleep/wake issues that seemed to stem from graphics driver issues. I switched between the open source and Nvidia binaries, trying to find a stable combination. What a nightmare. In the end, I decided that I didn't want to mess around and tried out a few Live CDs (think I tried Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora). In the end, Fedora worked out of the box and completed my "stress test" of sleep, wake, sleep, wake. I had to give up stellar 3D performance, but have found things to be working quite well and consistent now through all the Fedora updates.
Might give Elementary OS a spin. This old Thinkpad T510 is getting dated, but still solid as ever (besides battery life).
I can tell you that for the most part it's worked flawlessly. The only issues I ever had were that linux rendering wasn't great, so sometimes the CPU was high just from rendering!
We are browser-only, so because we don't have a native app we just use browser functionality. The only thing we use the extensions for is for security to ask for permission to use the screen (it's really like a dozen lines of code).
Sleep-on-lid-closing works reasonably well nowadays; I can't remember the last time I've run into a laptop which has issues on that front. However, I'd definitely do my research before buying a new laptop, especially if it's a very new one (in other words: you'll have better chances of power-management compatibility on laptops that are a bit more battle-tested).
I don't have time to tinker with compiling kernels, configuring X11, figuring out which photo management software to use, setting up reliable backups, getting my Bluetooth headset to work, and, yes, getting the machine to suspend when I close the lid and wake up when I open it.
These are basics that will just work with OS X, very, very, reliably.
That said, if anyone can point me to a Linux distro (Debian/Ubuntu preferred) and hardware that actually work reliably together, please do.
In 2009 I installed Mandriva on a laptop--everything just worked. In 2011, I jumped ship to Mageia, the community-driven offshoot of Mandriva. Everything still just worked. Fast forward several laptops later, including mine and friends' and relations' laptops, and it all just works. Compiling a kernel? Wouldn't know how anymore. Fiddling with X11? No idea. I don't even have problems with Pulseaudio.
Compare that to dual booting this one with Windows 10. For several months, Windows 10 had a bug where it wouldn't save the touchpad settings. Every time, I'd have to disable tap-to-click. UGH. They finally fixed it, but what a pain.
(And when I had an OS X machine, received as part of payment for a job... between the beach ball and the not-infrequent crashes, where the screen dims and displays that fatal error message, it was a pain to get any work done.)
That's fine, you are paying a premium for all this, it better "just" works. Elementary OS is free of charge.
I haven't heard of the need for compiling kernels, configuring X11 etc. in a loong time.
> setting up reliable backups, getting my Bluetooth headset to work, and, yes, getting the machine to suspend when I close the lid and wake up when I open it
Again, works out of the box, just pick a laptop that is known to work well, i.e. a Clevo, Lenovo or some of the newer DELL machines to give Linux a proper chance - there's no point in trying a laptop that is known to work only with Windows and then complain about it - the same way you don't complain if macOS doesn't work well on a DELL.
You pick a specific machine to run macOS, do the same for Linux and everything will work beautifully out of the box.
If not, then I can vouch that my wife's Thinkpad runs Ubuntu with no issues. I concur with others that kernel compiling and X11 configuration have long been non-issues.
I use Fedora on a ThinkPad X230. It works an absolute dream. GNOME is my favorite of all the desktops, and Fedora by default ships a fully setup and functioning Gnome on Wayland session (which will also be the default session in the next release, coming in a few weeks).
The reason I chose to run Fedora on a ThinkPad is because it required no tweaking and fiddling at all to get working nicely. I'm all about that seamless out-of-the-box experience.
I was amused by the post here today about the Touch ID fork of sudo for macOS, because I already use the same feature on my ThinkPad every day, and it required absolutely no configuration or setup (other than enrolling my fingerprint).
Since you are asking for specifics, I run openSUSE Tumbleweed on an Asus Zenbook UX 305, and with the exception of keyboard backlight, all the builtin hardware works as expected. I have never tried to attach an external display. I did not try Ubuntu on this machine, the Debian installer pretty much bailed on me. (Tumbleweed is a rolling release distro, so the amount of updates it receives can be slightly annoying at times, OTOH the software is very much up to date.) I have to admit I have not tried suspending the machine by closing the lid, but Fn+F1 works reliably.
Sleep-on-closing-lid has worked fine for me for many years.
It's funny that, with regards to Just Working after installation, Linux seems to be way ahead of Windows. I installed both of them on my laptop and while on Linux everything worked fine from the start without needing extra setup steps (including the multitouch trackpad; the not-so-standard function keys like keyboard brightness; even the this weird external subwoofer that came with the laptop), on Windows i had to download and install special drivers for all those things, and even for much more basic stuff, like the wireless card (had to dig through old computer stuff to find an ethernet cable to connect to the internet).
Now, i understand why this is the case. Linux distros are designed to be installed by their users, while Windows is designed to come pre-installed on computers. But i still find it curious how Linux is much more non-tech-savvy-friendly in this particular regard.
WebEx's Linux support is excellent though.
Google Hangouts works fine under chrome on linux.
As far as hardware, webcam support is generally good. It's now at the point where if you bought a random webcam, there is a better than 50% chance it will just work. That being said, it's much safer to check if others have used it, or to just buy a laptop that has a webcam and ships with linux support (Both Dell and HP have laptops that ship with linux installed). I have a Creative Labs USB webcam that unfortunately has no model number printed on it (I have a long list of things I don't like about built-in webcams).
Sleep has worked on all laptops I've tried in the past decade or so. Hibernate (i.e. suspend to disk) is much more spotty.
Battery life lies somewhere between windows 7 and Mac, though certain applications are particularly bad at draining the battery (powertop can be useful in identifying these).
In general linux on a laptop has gotten way better; in particular networking is much more bearable now that NetworkManager actually works and it's much easier to find laptops with linux supported wifi gear preinstalled.
[edit]
I saw someone mention audio issues; that reminds me. The situation there is more like what networking was like 5-6 years ago. Pulse Audio promises to provide all the basic features people expect from an audio stack), but sometimes crashes, or drains your battery or just causes weird sounds to come out of your speaker. On the other hand, getting ALSA+dmix setup correctly without pulse audio (which is the only real alternative), is fairly arcane, and leaves you without things like per-application volume control (though many linux applications provide their own software-implemented volume control).
Elementary is nice, it is also my backup OS, and I also donated some money to them 1 year ago.
iMovie: Pitivi, OpenShot, KDEnlive and even Lightworks for something more advanced.
Lightroom: Darktable, Rawtherapee and Corel Aftershot Pro.
ASP is just buggy. I tried it on Debian Jessie and Ubuntu 16.04 and on both it lasted a few days before simply refusing to open, even after install. It's also slow, even though they claim it's faster. And it does annoying stuff like paint its own window borders to look like a Windows app.
Darktable is the best RAW editor I've used, but it's got essentially zero file management. Batch output requires a new mental abstraction with the 'queue'. For volume work (hundreds of images at a time) it seems ill equipped as you have to create a style or copy the history stack (which doesn't seem to have an easy keyboard shortcut). I'm still working on this one as it has so much power and control it could be fantastic, but more work needs to be done on the process of the edit or you can get stuck in the editors rabbit hole of fine detail.
RAWtherapee - that's the next one to test for me. My initial feature check showed it suffers some of the complaints of Darktable like no file management (as far as I can see) and an involved edit process.
If you pair any of the above applications with gThumb you can get some of the file management back in the most LR style I have found, but (infuriatingly) gThumb doesn't seem to display images in subfolders for whatever reason.
My conclusions so far (as a former pro photographer) is that there is potential in the linux world to equal and even do better that LR but it's definitely not there yet and definitely not in one programme.
And let's not start talking about Photoshop/GIMP - which of course ISN'T photoshop, as they keep telling us.
Has it improved in that area?
But I have some problems with the Nvidia support. https://elementaryos.stackexchange.com/questions/8952/artifa... Also v-sync doesn't really work, I get lots of tearing.
The terminal is nice and the window manager is good as well. ( elementarty-tweaks should be in there by default )
Things like handling gracefully video card/dual monitor, audio switching, and sleep mode recovery end up being headaches that use up a lot of time googling around and generally learning about stuff you shouldn't have to know.
It would be nice to see a company that specializes in a linux flavor sell a machine that is specifically built for that OS and with high build quality. Chromebooks are the closest thing to that but pushing a web-only interface is a major drawback.
Are there any serious projects in this direction?
Their Developer Edition laptops get special treatment with regards to Linux compatibility. At one point, the made the the company they sourced some new touchpads from develop drivers for Linux and got it upstreamed.
I've spent a few minutes on a Librem 13, and it seems like an extremely high quality piece of hardware. It's cool that they're assembled in South San Francisco, too. I really really want to like System76 machines, but they're just so damned ugly!
Your best bet for a Librem-quality machine that is actually designed to run Linux is a Google Chromebook Pixel. If you want a truly 100% open from the chips up laptop, right now your only option is Bunnie's Novena, but it's not for the faint of heart; it's a true hacker's machine and not a ripoff of a MacBook.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Purism-Li...
https://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/02/23/the-truth-about-p...
2-year old MBP. Created a boot disk with the Elementary ISO and started up. Fairly snappy, connected over a USB 3 connection to a 500GB SSD.
First thing I tried to install was Google Chrome. DEBian package. Fail. Google search for others who have tried. Found recent article, followed step-by-step. Failed. :-(
Can't understand how that would fail, really. One thing you might try is doing an apt-get install -f, since there might be implicit dependencies depending on the build, and this forces apt to figure them out.
Depending on how the live boot OS is set up, installing new applications may not work at all. Some live USB creator apps I've used give the option of setting aside some space for a writable filesystem that will with with Ubuntu live images (and possibly others).
In either case, the best way to get a real sense of how much you like the OS is to do a proper install of it in a VM. The live ISO will mostly just show you if the OS supports your hardware and everything (WiFi, etc.) works.
I personally want that feature too.
(I also pick the right kind of image depending on your display DPI, and resize them on the back-end, but that's beside the point here)
I get a _lot_ of mobile visitors, and mobile bandwidth is expensive, so I'm considerate to them - folk with JavaScript disabled know how to re-enable it to view the images, and are a very minute percentage of my page views.
Sorry! :)
I just refreshed again and everything seems to be working now.
https://galliumos.org/
/r/unixporn crowd is always interested in posts that customize their Linux setups to the max: use Window Managers almost exclusively, have a unified color scheme all over the system etc. That's not minor tweaking.
Your life is not as easy as when using macOS, but it's well worth it to refuse to be ripped off by Apple.
The keynote really sucked.
I bet there are a lot of people who are switching.
On things like ThinkPads, XPS Developer Editions, etc. the battery is rather comparable to their Windows counterparts for most cases.
But I intend to use this on a beefy desktop crammed with VMs and Docker containers, so that's not a problem for me.
Good luck running a program in full screen on your main monitor, while also doing stuff on a secondary monitor, where you have to switch windows, open new ones, etc.
Gnome3 is only useful on non-touch laptops, not on any other usecase.
The only multi-monitor complaint I had about Gnome 3 was that opening the Activities bar or changing apps led to both displays dimming. This makes Gnome 3 horrible for presentations, screening films, or pretty much anything you'd want to use a projector for. I'm hopeful that problem has been fixed, as I've rarely felt so annoyed at a piece of software. Notifications were also problematic, in that they would pop up over full screen applications (which is, IMHO, never the right behavior...full screen apps should really be treated as sacred, by default). But, at least notifications can be disabled. The misfeature of screen dimming and shrinking app windows across displays could not be disabled last time I messed with it (admittedly, a year or two ago).
"Gnome3 is only useful on non-touch laptops"
Which touch features do you think are missing? Mine seems to work fine, though I so rarely use the touchscreen that I may be missing something important. I find touchscreens hard to use for anything more than basic scrolling, so it's not a feature I even wanted, but it came with my laptop, and I was surprised to see it worked fine out-of-the-box with Linux. I didn't even tweak it.
That’s exactly what my issue with multiple screens is.
Still not fixed.
> Which touch features do you think are missing?
It’s not that I think touch features are missing, it’s that I think non-laptop features are missing.
On a screen with 1440p or 2304p height, and 27" diagonal, I can afford to have a lot of things directly in view – I don’t need to have them hidden behind things like the dimmed activity menu.
Which, btw, isn’t very ideal for touch users either.
There is a problem with Epiphany, namely that the webkit version that ships with Ubuntu is long outdated, hopefully that's going to get fixed: https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2016/02/01/on-webkit-secu...
[1] - https://antergos.com
For the moment, for my use case it's the best distribution, but it's not quite at the stage where I'd want to put it on a relative's computer, and I think given their stated aims that's the litmus test.
(Well, there's also http://papyros.io, but I'm not confident that it will amount to anything)
BTW, that practice of making keywords (which often repeat throughout the text) into links (often to your own damn blog) is abhorrent.
> An overlinked article contains an excessive number of links, making it difficult to identify links likely to aid the reader's understanding significantly. A 2015 study of log data found that "in the English Wikipedia, of all the 800,000 links added ... in February 2015, the majority (66%) were not clicked even a single time in March 2015, and among the rest, most links were clicked only very rarely", and that "simply adding more links does not increase the overall number of clicks taken from a page. Instead, links compete with each other for user attention."
When I, an internet user see a link, it's visual distinctiveness cues to me that it might lead me to more information that emphasizes something. It's fine for websites to link to their own tags, but there's also overdoing it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Link...
Does anyone know how this is implemented?
Edit: pretty simple: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elementary-apps/pantheon-termin... http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elementary-apps/pantheon-termin...
For instance, all I had to do was include `\a` in my `$PS1` and now whenever a command finishes running and bash is ready for a new command, my terminal emulator gets a bell.
Konsole (and any Konsole based terminal emulators, like Yakuake) shows a notification if a bell happens in a non-foreground session.
Konsole also has explicit tab-specific settings for "Monitor for Silence" and "Monitor for Activity".
It's up to the terminal emulator to do what it wants with the beep character. Technically, it's up to whoever has to display the character; if you're running bash at a tty — an actual terminal — then the kernel gets to decide what to do, so it beeps, since there is little else it could choose to do.
Terminal emulators, on the other hand, know they aren't actually in a limited environment and can do a lot more than playing a sound. That's why there's such a thing as "visual bell" among terminal emulators. Some highlight the tab title upon visual bell, Konsole merely sends a notification if a bell occurs.
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> And/or interfere with any programs that use the beep for their own purposes?
I don't quite understand what you mean here. There isn't any way for arbitrary programs to listen for / wait for / register callbacks for the beep.
If you're thinking about the `\a` in `$PS1` ... well, PS1 is shown only when bash runs as an interactive process.
Also, the beep control in ALSA is muted by default.
Wow, that's a pretty great idea. Enough people do this wrong manually that it seems like something that could be better solved by the OS.
One example I've seen of doing it wrong is adding black opaque rectangles as layers and then sending out all layers including the original. Another is pixelating it in a way where it's possible to revert the pixelation since the font is known (e.g. parts of a facebook post)