The lack of equally high standard replacements for software such as
For me, it's Devonthink Pro (http://www.devontechnologies.com/solutions/writers.html) in particular and also Lightroom. Yes, there is progress on Dark Table, but there's too much useful software on OS X and despite Apple's faults its laptop hardware still leads the pack.
Yes, the lack of ports on the new MBP is annoying. If I had to buy a new MBP today I'd just get the last version—which is still fantastic—refurbished, and kick the hardware can down the road a couple years.
Funny that this got written. I've looked at switching from macOS to Windows 10.
My first operating system was Windows 95. I then upgraded to 98, and later XP. I decided to go with a Mac in 2008 after Windows Vista just couldn't get itself together.
I use Macs at work, and I've been using Windows 10 at home since June, with my old Apple keyboard and everything.
My impression is that both operating systems are very close to parity. I use the same apps on both, including a lot of Unixy stuff that now works fine on Windows. Even the Windows font rendering is a lot like the Mac's now.
The Mac ecosystem still has a huge advantage in hardware quality, but I think Microsoft has caught up in software quality.
Except the stupid decision(s) they continue to make, like advertisements in my operating system.
Seriously, i can't comprehend why they take a paying customer (me) and frequently think i want to see their ads my operating system is some kind of blog.
(The ad in question is for me to try some new microsoft product.. i forget which one offhand, Office Live? no idea. I usually see too much red when it happens to even read.)
The ads I've seen in Win 10 (Home): (1) (Don't I want to claim my) Free trial for Office 365? (2) MS Edge is faster/better than my (non-MS) default browser (and don't I want to try Edge?).
These seem to recur once after each Windows Update reboot. Anyone know of a way to permanently disable these?
Settings -> Notifications -> "Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows" is the main one. If you want to really dial it in you can also disable notifications for individual apps like Office or Edge on that page.
Note that if you're on Insider builds, there have sometimes been build-to-build update issues that reset some settings, which can result in this toggle being reset. IMO that's a serious bug you should report, but (hopefully) wouldn't make it to a stable release.
I agree; it would be great to hear from developers who've experimented with switching from macOS to Windows 10, and use Ubuntu userspace on Windows.
I switched about a month ago and, to be honest, I've been pleasantly surprised with Windows 10, with modern, top-of-the-line Windows hardware, and especially with Ubuntu on Windows.
Reading Dave's (https://daverupert.com/tag/davegoeswindows) experience switching to Windows turned me off considering it as an option. However I've ordered an Eve V so will try it out when that comes later in the year.
I've been doing Rails dev on Windows for a couple of years now (I use cmder/conemu, not the linux subystem). For the most part, my workflow is similar to what I was doing when I was on Mac, but I guess it really depends on what you're doing.
If there's something in Rails you can't do in Windows proper, you can still opt to use Vagrant on Windows for a more pure unix experience.
Another path you can take: build your own desktop and install a Hackintosh OS!
Here's my build (http://pcpartpicker.com/list/pYWQMp), which runs into some driver issues but can be fixed with Kext utility. This setup allows me to do CUDA programming + Deep Learning stuff natively in OSX, while having access to pretty Mac software. It's great, I highly recommend it!
That was a company selling Hackintoshes. In the many years since, Hackintoshes have remained a thing and I'm unaware of any individuals that have faced criminal or civil penalties.
Until recently, a Hackintosh was a time-consuming way of producing a somewhat worse Mac. As Apple is starting to drive us away, I bet the phenomenon will grow, and then Apple's interest in squishing it will too. And the fact is, Apple could shut this phenomenon down in a matter of hours if they wanted to.
This level of risk is fun but not for the faint of heart.
There's the potential to create a pretty powerful machine for the buck, but it's definitely fraught with challenge. Reminds me of building a decent desktop Linux machine in the late 90's/early 2000's.
not really, i was running osx 10.5, so almost 10 years ago out of the box, the only thing that i had to play with was sound.
there was only one rule and i believe the same i truth now, if you plan to run hackintosh u better watch what hardware you get. if you do that u can run hackintosh without problems.
> Until recently, a Hackintosh was a time-consuming way of producing a somewhat worse Mac.
Oh? What has changed?
> This level of risk is fun but not for the faint of heart.
Read: as soon as a new patch comes out for macOS you are either running around with known security vulnerabilities (as well as missing reliability fixes), or you're a guinea pig entirely unsure if it breaks anything and if so how much effort it is going to take to get the patch applied. Why? Mainly due to drivers.
Besides, good luck finding a well working laptop with good macOS support.
I gave up and bought a MBP 2015 instead. Very nice machine. Expensive, but nice.
For a workstation or MP replacement it'd make more sense. The MP hasn't been updated for 4 years and with physical access to the quick machine its easier to fix issues. You're also guaranteed not on the go, so you got all the tools you need at your disposal. However there is still a risk for loss of productivity and worst of all you can't plan it. Because you don't know when Apple does release their software updates.
I don't think it'd be wise of them to shut down the Hackintosh community. The vast majority of Hackintosh refugees aren't going to be buying Macs, they're going to be wiping their macOS partitions and jumping ship to Windows or some random Linux distro instead. It'd shrink the number of people invested in the Apple ecosystem (including subscriptions like iCloud and Apple Music) and put a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of people with sway of family/friend and perhaps even corporate purchasing decisions, not to mention strongly casts Apple in a Big Corporate Bully sort of light. There's not a scenario in which they kill off Hackintoshing that's a net benefit for Apple.
Apple is a hardware company. The services you mention are small in terms of revenue compared to their profits in hardware. If the Hackintosh community is large enough that the services revenue or impact on the ecosystem is signigicant, Apple would rather have the revenues associated with the hardware as well.
The fact that Apple hasn't done this already is because it's insignificant, not because of some benelovence on Apple's part. They're not going to encourage unlicensed use of the OS. The OS is there to sell the hardware, not vice versa.
This is shockingly similar to the gaming PC I helped my kid build last year. We didn't build it with a mackintosh in mind, but it's nice to know we could do it if we wanted.
I've done the same and it's a great way to go. If you stick with known components in known configurations, it's easy to get working. Relatively anyways.
I have been watching elementary from the sidelines and I am wondering how deep is the keyboard integration in Pantheon?
I moved from OSX to Linux recently too and I am generally pretty happy with multi-monitor and pseudo-tiling support in gnome3. I can do most of my window movement and application switching with few shortcuts (it requires few gnome extensions). Such as -
1. switch application with shortcut rather than alt-tabbing (something like - Super-1 for Emacs, Super-2 for terminal etc). It requires a gnome extension.
2. Tile the Windows with shortcuts. Currently gnome3 has limited support but it mostly works out of box.
3. Launching or switching application with a global shortcut. Requires a gnome extension.
4. Move Window between monitors etc.
Such things usually requires at least 2 or 3 paid apps on OSX. Divvy, Sizeup etc.
Oh and 1Password works perfectly okay via Wine, including the browser extension. So, that is one thing you should checkoff your list if that is stopping you. :-)
I'm full-time OSX user/developer, but if Rails is really your sticking point, shouldn't the linux subsystem make Win10 at least viable for a trial? Or, frankly, anything that can run VMWare or Virtualbox?
I switched to Windows hoping to use the WSL - looks great for the most part, but there are still lots of blocking bugs. Ruby and Git install, but not OpenSSL, which makes Rails development difficult. Lots of niggles here and there, basically.
Should be great when it comes out of beta, though - a good terminal and we'll be all set.
If you haven't tried ConEmu [0], it's pretty awesome. I use it with the Git Bash that comes with the full windows git installer and it Just Works for most of my terminal needs. Haven't tried it with WSL but it can most likely be rigged up.
I use conemu with WSL... it's the best one available for Windows, but it still pales in comparison to the default macOS terminal, and even the one that ships with Elementary. The customziation, tabs, layout, fonts all work fine but seem a bit bolted on.
I feel the need to point out that what "ships" with elementaryOS is basically meaningless. You can install what you want, easily, and the default configuration is a recommendation. Welcome to Linux-land. https://www.distrowatch.com/
No, it isn't. Debian packages, Ubuntu packages, etc. are tested together as a group and you can expect that they integrate properly. The same cannot be said for third-party OSX .apps. They're more like adding another repo to your sources.list. Hell, OSX won't even let you uninstall Terminal.app.
Oh, absolutely, but I'm actually saying the terminal that ships with Elementary is superb. The macOS stock terminal is also really good. But the Windows stock terminal is downright horrible, Powershell is slightly better, but not Unixy, and ConEmu is so-so, but better than the other Windows options.
Well, it was you who said he should pay for Windows if Rails was his sticking point.
And I said you don't need to pay for anything if you want to do Rails programming. In fact, here, the "inferior alternative" for this task may be the proprietary one.
Another thing would be using his computer for gaming. In that case, I wouldn't object, of course.
>Note that I don’t currently consider Windows a viable alternative. For the work that I do (Rails) and tools I use something *nix based is the best choice for me.
For what it's worth Windows 10 now has a bash shell based on Ubuntu available.
I'm not Windows' biggest fan, but I'd consider it + Linux/BSD in hyper-v to be a nice start (say on a Surface Pro) -- if you need something that Just Works.
The bash subsystem is interesting, but I'd go with the virtualization solution first.
This is a solution I will test out later in the year. I like the idea of a 2-in-1 computer and I've ordered a http://eve-tech.com. I'll certainly be trying out the VM on Windows option when it comes.
Setting up a Rails environment on it has plenty of quirks, though. And other common Linux apps don't work right either, ones you typically install along with Rails
I'm surprised this was downvoted -- the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is extremely powerful and well done.
It's a full Ubuntu userland and you can even run graphical (X) applications. I've used it for Pebble development, running the (python + ARM GCC) SDK and QEMU-based emulator all on Windows. I've run into a few minor issues but for the majority of tasks it works great -- I've completely stopped using my Ubuntu VM and do all my Linux tasks in WSL.
Same thinking here! Behind the scenes engineering in Windows in recent years has been impressive. The whole DLL adaption method started sometime when W7 was released is a pretty impressive piece of engineering. Followed by WSL now.
The WSL has potential to become a very useful tool. So much so I'm considering switching from macOS on my next laptop or so. Unfortunately unlike your case, my workflow depends on a lot of networking code. WSL still has many gaps in the socket emulation pieces. It'll likely mature over time, and it's impressive that some people are already able to switch from a Linux VM!
A plus one from me. I've used WSL for the last couple months to run a bunch of ruby and postgresql based stuff and once I got past a few teething problems upgrading it from ubuntu 14.04 to 16.10 it's been excellent. The performance of linux ruby under WSL is MUCH better than windows ruby. I'd recommend WSL to any ruby dev on windows simply for that.
A co-worker is also using it to run cross compilers for embedded linux hardware devices (various patched versions of GCC and such) and it's been flawless for him, which I found quite impressive too.
I really hoped this would be good but in it's current form it just seems too unstable and small incompatibilities that screw you. I ended up going nix vm on my work issued XPS 15 and things are going great.
I'm thinking about trying it, but a friend of mine said that he could crash it easily by just doing the examples from Mastering the Linux Command Line. I think a Surface might make a decent piece of hardware but either WSL (i.e. the horrendously named Bash on Ubuntu on Windows) has to get a lot more stable or Linux support will have to improve. I hear Linux support for the Surface Pro 3 is basically there, but SP4 still needs some work.
a friend of mine said that he could crash it easily by just doing the examples from Mastering the Linux Command Line
Not really surprising (dev version, comes with warnings about compatibility, ...). But why would you let that hold you back for trying it out for what you are going to use it for? Counter-anecdote: I've ran gui apps like SublimeText, gcc, ... without crashing; also see other comments. tldr; try it first-hand instead of relying on anecdotal proof it isn't, or is, ready.
WSL (i.e. the horrendously named Bash on Ubuntu on Windows)
Note that 'WSL' and 'Ubuntu on Windows' and 'Bash on Ubuntu on Windows' are seperate terms for different things
Well, in my case I actually suffer of random crashes, and it is not only sometimes too. Almost every time that I run WSL for something more advanced them SSH I already expect it to crash or at least lack some feature that I want/need.
I'm not exactly sure why this happens, but when I try to use Windows my hand (mouse hand) cramps up and I get angry and frustrated.
In my view, Windows 10 is still miles away in consistency across the entire system, compared to macOS. Windows 10 actually made it worse, because it's trying to accommodate both Windows 7 and Windows 8 design.
Currently I don't think we have alternatives to macOS. I understand that I sound like a grumpy Apple fanboy, but Windows is't ready to replace macOS. The distance between macOS and Windows have increased in the later years, and not because Apple have improved anything, it's Microsoft who have made Windows worse.
I could agree with you one year ago. But after latest upgrade to macOS I got so many issues on my MacBook Air and MacBook Pro that I decided 'enough is enough' :)
Am I the only one who's never had any issues? 7 years so far. Just replaced my latest one because work got me one. They both run great, except the older one has some fan issues but never anything that prevented me from using it.
But then again I rarely install new things, only have a few base programs I run routinely, and reformat regularly.
I've just had a ton of issues with the mouse becoming unresponsive... and then having to do a restart, whereas on El Capitan and Yosemite I could basically leave my computer on for forever.
No, I still have not installed Sierra on either. I don't want any siri bullshit. I wonder how long it'll last before I'm somehow forced to upgrade to Sierra. I'm willing to bet it'll be fully baked into the next OS release.
> but when I try to use Windows my hand (mouse hand) cramps up and I get angry and frustrated
Same here! Also i start to suffer from 'update-fatigue' when using Windows. The endless updates, reboots, and god knows what it's doing in the background which consumes resources... it all just feels so clumsy. I've never experienced anything like this in OSX.
Really? Because OS X pesters me about pending updates via the App Store all the time, and the only deferment option it provides is "wait until tonight".
Except it will tell you and you can say no. On Windows, you can only extend the actual reboot, sometimes, and that within 30 seconds.
If you go for a pee, you might return to a rebooting machine.
It's unfortunate that a user needs to find such an option. It's likely that the location and UI of the option will be changed yet again each release.
MS "needs" (?) to prioritize "don't torment your users". Of course, for corporate captives, they can torment away with impunity since The Management has already decided You Must Endure... (and probably locked out the setting in question, as well)
I've noticed since the big update (Anniversary Update), the default setting is a sane "after hours" range of 9pm to 7am on a fresh installation. So, it seems they are improving and are attempting to avoid situations where you're at work in the middle of the day, step away for coffee, and come back to find an update/reboot cycle has wiped out your hard work. I was pointing out the setting for the OP because either he hasn't updated far enough to get the sane default, or he's somehow changed it without knowing and needs to fix it.
Well, that's a lot better than the nagware that used to run during our first-thing-in-the-morning calls 3 or 4 years ago. Hopefully corporate IT doesn't screw it up (of course looking it down, fully screwed).
I still like the Mac's unobtrusive "get it tonight after I shut down" option, though :-) (or Ubuntu's "I'll get it when I'm good and ready", but that's not a system for worker bees)
>MS "needs" (?) to prioritize "don't torment your users".
No, no they don't.
If the user knows what they're doing, they run Windows Update manually at times when it's convenient for them (e.g. just before going out to lunch) so that they never encounter a forced reboot situation.
If the user doesn't know what they're doing, they exactly the people who need to be forced to the latest update so they don't wind up inadvertently joining a botnet.
And, of course, there are ways to forcibly disable WU for really advanced users but at that point whatever befalls them is quite clearly their own responsibility.
That's probably the only thing that truly irritates me about Windows these days. Everything else is just a design decision that, as a technical user, I am easily able to adapt to. But not knowing if my machine is going to decide to reboot itself at any random moment without me having the option to stop it from doing that? Unacceptable. Completely unacceptable.
I know you should save often and bad things can happen like a power outage or a glitch or something, but those things are rare. My Windows 10 machine choosing to reboot itself without telling me? At least once a week.
Imagine if you had random power outages once a week, and having a UPS plugged in couldn't stop it.
>> But not knowing if my machine is going to decide to reboot itself at any random moment without me having the option to stop it from doing that? Unacceptable. Completely unacceptable.
Yes, you can set what time it will reboot, but you can't set it to "never", or even "next week". And the pop-up to reboot does not take control of the screen, so if you're doing something full screen like a game or a Powerpoint presentation, you miss it and have to wait for the reboot. Even if you're in front of a client.
When I'm done with my work for the day on Windows and I go to bed, I'm never sure if everything will still be there when I wake up. Far too often I wake up and I'm at a login screen with all of my active windows and documents closed. That's incredibly disruptive, and there's no way to stop that.
There is no way to tell Windows 10 "don't reboot until I explicitly ask you to do so".
>> The endless updates, reboots, and god knows what it's doing in the background which consumes resources...
Really? Windows has its share of hair pulling annoyances to be sure, but endless might be overstating it.
In my experience since switching, I find that resource consumption is comparable to OSX. I get that this is anecdotal, but I leave my main machines on 24-7, and I basically only reboot when an update forces me to, which sometimes is once a week (when there are frequent updates), but most of the time it is for stretches longer than two weeks.
One of the reasons I use Elementary OS despite my ambivalence towards systemd is the consistency. It's not your typical Linux desktop experience, it's much more cohesive than Windows or even macOS. I have my main workstation booting both Windows 10 (which I do enjoy) and Elementary, and I find myself only booting into Windows to play certain Steam games that won't install on Linux.
> One of the reasons I use Elementary OS despite my ambivalence towards systemd is the consistency.
I wrote "consistency across the entire system". I immediately believe that they did a lot of GUI polish and polishing of the default apps. But polishing the GUI of a POSIX-like system does not deliver consistency (only GUI polish). There is still the whole UNIX-like subsurface (like it or not), which delivers completely different abstractions than the GUI does (this is clearly not consistent).
BeOS (for which currently under the name HaikuOS they try to reimplement it in an open source way) is another example of an OS which was designed from beginning on to have a GUI and is thus also very consistent.
Yep, I get it, and as I said I'm still not sold on systemd and therefore use Elementary with the knowledge that if it breaks and I have to fix it, I'll have to deal with that massive tumor. The great thing about Elementary is, if all you need is a ⁎nix system with a consistent GUI for something like web development but without buying Apple's premium hardware, it really shines. The Terminal app is the best I've used on any OS, and while the text editor isn't quite a full fledged programmer's editor, it's good enough for a lackey like me. I figured out that Geany is overkill for my needs, and Scratch handles all my use cases fine.
I do think they try a bit too hard to look like macOS, but if you're going for the best desktop Linux experience, why not copy the best commercial ⁎nix desktop?
I agree completely about BeOS/Haiku; BeOS was my daily driver for several years until the death of the company caused me to have to move on. I have yet to find a modern OS that even comes close to that kind of cohesive, sensible, practical approach to desktop computing. Haiku is coming along well, but it's still not stable enough for daily use beyond dogfooding for Haiku devs.
> In my experience, GNU/Linux distros do not usually include 3 seperate GUI settings
I have never seen a GNU/Linux distribution where I didn't have to configure some things via modification of configuration files in a text editor. Even these two differences (GUI vs. text file editing) is much more different than a few different design styles in Windows' control panel. Also the way settings are set in configuration files is IMHO even more different among different GNU/Linux applications than the different design styles in Windows' control panel.
How is windows 10 consistent? Half the apps are metro ones that fullscreen (pdf viewer) and half are still win32. Some work well on touch screen others horribly. Windows 10 is a frankenOS.
Nope, I skipped windows 8 almost entirely. I'm talking about windows 10 in 2016, it's still a kludged together mess of a touch based mobile OS and a full desktop OS.
This is a bit confusing. Your comments are factually incorrect (there are no forced-full-screen apps in Windows 10, and the default PDF reader is Edge, which is windowed by default and was designed from the ground up for Windows 10, never for Windows 8 or "Metro"), or at least outdated.
It's a bit of a blemish that there are two control panels, but almost no users are ever exposed to Win32. You can do virtually everything (from updates to domain join to adding/removing Windows components) from the modern Settings app. The legacy control panel is just that, and is irrelevant for most users. I'd love to see it modernized, but there are many much better uses of resources (security! performance! battery life!) than modernizing 90s-era utilities that few customers are ever exposed to.
Just look at the control panels, there's actually two of them in Windows 10, one Metro, and one win32. Some settings are only available in one, some only in the other.
I switched to Windows 10 (Microsoft Surface 4 Pro) after ~15 years of using Linux and 5 years of MacOS.
In Bash (based on Ubuntu) 99% of utilities just work. I can use npm, install modules and they still work. For me in Windows 10 - everything just works.
Though I still miss:
1. MacBook's touchpad :-(
2. Emacs-like keybindings everywhere in OS (like MacOS has).
If you force yourself to use the keyboard you might find it as convenient in Windows as it was in OS X. However, it is almost modal like vim. When I used Windows, I was used to `alt` followed by a series of keys for repetitive or common commands.
As an alternative to WSL docker for windows is also very helpful.
I use it to spin up linux images that contain all the devtools that I need, and mount files/code from windows in there. For a terminal just enter the image with exec /bin/sh. To get a consistent experience I also use msys bash (which is bundled with git for windows) for terminal use on windows. With that setup entering and exiting linux containers feels very similar to on OSX.
The downside of docker for windows is that you need HyperV activated, which weans VirtualBox no longer works. The older boot2docker solution worked together with VirtualBox - however it didn't support filesharing between windows and docker containers, so there's unfortunately a tradeoff.
I run a full Linux VM in HyperV, I install git for windows, which comes with everything I need for the most part.. VS Code and my browsers. From there, I'll do samba sharing from the VM so I can edit in windows, and run in linux.
I've tried docker for windows, and even WSL+Ubuntu+Bash, and it's just not as good. I use conemu, VS Code, and Chrome more than anything else.
The ESC key being missing gets blown out of proportion. Every time I hit it, I'm amazed at how it just works. Apple has made it so hitting any where in that vicinity basically triggers the ESC.
The key not physically being there is unnerving. There's no tactile feedback, _unlike every other key on the keybord_. As a touch typist, I found this extremely distracting during the week that I tried out the MBP 2016. Not every attempt to hit Esc worked, so I found myself constantly and instinctively hitting it 2-3 times "just to be sure", and then also constantly glancing down to see whether in fact I was aiming right. That's not great UI.
Another problem with the touch bar is unintended touches. I constantly found myself accidentally resting a finger on the Esc key, which of course caused all sorts of weirdness in various apps.
Finally, as a touch typist the touch bar was simply distracting. I never look at the keyboard, but the touch bar really wants you to look down, which is a source of distraction, especially when it changes contents in the periphery of your vision.
If the touch bar brought lots of utility, I might have learned to deal with it, but it is really is of limited value. Emojis? There's cmd-ctrl-space for that (the touch bar doesn't have search so you'll be scrolling a lot to hunt down the right emoji). Safari tab previews? They're idiotically tiny. And so on.
I wondered about the lack of a tactile response, and tried out one of the new MBPs a few days back. I'm also a touch-typist, and you're absolutely right. It bugs me immensely, not having tactile feedback.
I'm a touch typist, and there's no way I'm going to use touch bar. I've tested it in the local Apple store, and it just doesn't work for me, nor do their new keyboards.
I appreciated Apple's innovations in the past, but imho Apple shows little understanding of their remaining users in the "pro" market, or rather unwillingness to cater for them. Pro users want predictable work horses and a roadmap for their software purchases, not the new shiny and Apple doing away with basic functionalities of a computer system such as standard keyboards and ports.
Why didn't Apple make touch bar optional on the higher end Macbook Pros?
By removing every single legacy port long before there's anywhere near ubiquitous USB-C? Even USB-C cables themselves are more commonly sold as USB-A to USB-C. I love having usable DisplayPort/Thunderbolt, HDMI, and USB-A on my 2013 rMBP - I never need a dongle. If I went to a 2016, I'd need at least 3, every day.
> Prioritising thinness and weight over everything else
Battery life is certainly not the same, and the lack of a 16GB option or a faster processor is a well-missed loss.
Trying to do exactly the same thing - I still have a maxed out rMBP 2013 that works great, so setting up alternatives now before I'm forced to.
The Intel Skull Canyon NUC is what I'm using, with Elementary running on Virtualbox in Windows 10 (waiting for the Samsung 960 EVO to sell globally before setting up a native install).
The one massive problem for me that keeps me going back to the laptop is that the Mac absolutely nailed keyboard layout by separating the command and control keys. And no other OS is currently able to do so.
I use the basic emacs shortcuts for navigation in all the apps that support them (crtl a,e,n,p), and the command key to issue commands like close tab, save, new tab etc.
This is absolutely impossible to replicate on any other OS (AFAIK). I can map the command key to the control key, but that's about it - it just becomes a new way to hit control. Being able to consistently map and access the command key (as SUPER) simply can't be done.
Yes I suspect the keyboard shortcuts will bother me too. One of the things I like about Elementary is that there are a bunch of things bound to Command out of the box. They also refer to it as ⌘, which has a nice familiarity about it.
The underlying Ubuntu still refers to it as the Super key, but elementary uses the clover to symbolise it when it can. Still can't get to Mac like setups, though - apparently in Linux it's the applications that intercept the Super key, so it's never going to be possible to get a consistent experience.
Window managers definitely get a first crack at keyboard input. For example, I have a bunch of super-related keyboard combos set in i3wm that always go to it. I doubt that's the problem you're referring to. More likely it's that the window manager has no consistent means to make any given window/app do anything in particular, like copy or paste. The app decides its own key combos for those. There's no universal way to do it globally short of using nothing but apps that are specifically intended to work with gnome or kde or another uberenvironment's configuration system. Basically, you could bind super-c at the WM level, but you couldn't make it always copy.
> The one massive problem for me that keeps me going back to the laptop
> is that the Mac absolutely nailed keyboard layout by separating
> the command and control keys.
The saddest thing is that *nix systems generally did likewise, before the this-is-finally-the-year-of-desktop-Linux crowd arrived to insist on imitating every Windows mistake. No one else was boneheaded enough to screw up the Control key's function of generating control characters.
Traditional X11 programs have (had) fully configurable key bindings in their app-defaults.
Today, KDE (and other Qt) programs at least allow individually changing shortcuts to use Super. Qt has an internal switch to use Super everywhere, but it's hard-coded to the Mac platform. Perhaps eventually there will be enough pressure from OS X refugees to make it a user configurable setting.
Of course, that doesn't give you new-tab/close-tab/save on M-t/w/s, for that you have to install some Firefox addon etc. – not quite OS-wide consistency :(
> The first option I tried was an i3 based desktop. However whilst I wanted to like tiling window managers I decided it wasn’t for me.
It took me a week or so to get used to i3, but once I did I can't see myself ever going back. I've been using i3 at work and at home for about year now, and every time I get on my (Mac Book) laptop it's a frustrating experience: I feel like I spend more time trying to figure out how to get to the window I want that actually using it...
i3 is great, until you try to do something simple like change the time zone for your desktop clock or add some wallpaper. I switched from Linux to Mac because I
was too well acquainted with making symlinks to /usr/share/ somewhere just to change my clock when I traveled, and then figuring out just how few processes I had to restart so it would take effect.
Unfortunately the Linux desktops were actually worse than the barebones window managers like i3: there was some sort of glibc bug that screwed up clock display on GNOME for at least a year. GNOME assumed glibc did it right, which was a reasonable assumption...but an incorrect one, but with i3 I could control this.
Now that I'm on Mac I look back in amazement at the time I spent on Linux learning ultimately useless stuff like why a bug in glibc would mess up my GNOME clock but not an i3 clock.
Yeah, I found I needed to set up some keyboard shortcuts for controlling mute/volume levels, but other than that it's been pretty set-and-forget (timezones not being a problem on a desktop).
The time I spent setting those things up has been more than made up for over the last year as I've spent less time managing windows and more time just doing work.
I'm on a Mac but at this point I could probably take it or leave it. Most of my life is shell + Firefox + Emacs + IntelliJ, and those all run basically the same regardless of OS.
If anything, my plan would be to move more of my life into Emacs so that I'm even less exposed to stupid ideas from my OS/laptop vendor.
I have been using i3 on a netbook for the last two days and I can definitely see how it would be lovely. But then again, Linux has changed a lot since I was into it seriously and I'm sure I will experience pain if I have to do anything substantial to tweak it, like symlink timezone files.
> i3 is great, until you try to do something simple like change the time zone for your desktop clock or add some wallpaper. I switched from Linux to Mac because I was too well acquainted with making symlinks to /usr/share/ somewhere just to change my clock when I traveled, and then figuring out just how few processes I had to restart so it would take effect.
Systemd makes using i3 so much easier. No more fiddling with consolekit and dbus just to get working external drives (logind solves the problem of local authentication), no more fiddling with symlinks to set time (timedatectl to the rescue).
> Unfortunately the Linux desktops were actually worse than the barebones window managers like i3: there was some sort of glibc bug that screwed up clock display on GNOME for at least a year. GNOME assumed glibc did it right, which was a reasonable assumption...but an incorrect one, but with i3 I could control this.
Gnome nowadays use timedatectl AFAIK to set time too. The last time I had a issue with setting date or time in Gnome was pre-systemd days.
While some people may not like systemd, I find tools like timedatectl, localectl and hostnamectl to be quite useful. They work much better than trying to write a shell script or parse something.
Most people hate systemd for the sake of hating something, or following the hate train. At least for me all my close encounters with it have been positive.
A lot of people don't like systemd because it heavily violates the unix principle of "do one thing and do it well". It replaces a lot of subsystems (eg: goodbye to all your old ways of looking at logs). Also, the primary developers have a poor attitude.
Systemd is relatively nice now, but the disdain for it wasn't just 'hate train'.
> Systemd is relatively nice now, but the disdain for it wasn't just 'hate train'.
No, it is mostly hate train. I only read one or two solid (technical) arguments against systemd. And no, no one of them is found in the regular systemd-hate sites.
> Also, the primary developers have a poor attitude.
I think the community have a worse attitude them the core developers, however this is mostly anectodal observation.
> eg: goodbye to all your old ways of looking at logs
systemd enable syslog.service
Here you go, all your old logs in the place you expect them.
> I only read one or two solid (technical) arguments against systemd. And no, no one of them is found in the regular systemd-hate sites.
There's an invisible pink unicorn who knows the winners of every horse race, but only I can see and hear her. Of course, I'm not going to tell you the winners; that's my secret!
Did you get onto the systemd stuff late? I got in midway along and found a few things that were iffy. One of the definite problems was the core developers' disdain for other people's use cases - even Torvalds said he was ambivalent about systemd itself, but the developers were pretty user-hostile and that was a problem.
> Here you go, all your old logs in the place you expect them.
Cool. In the same vein, do we have centralised logging in systemd yet? Or do we still have to run another syslog tool to ship them? Last I looked half a year ago, the consensus was still "ship them through rsyslog/syslog-ng", so you still have to run your old syslog in parallel. Only the IPU knows why they would make a new journaling system for a primarily-server OS, and keep kicking the "centralisation" can down the road.
Yes, the anti-syslog commentary went too far, but there were a lot of problems with it, especially before it had been battle-hardened. But whether or not you do or don't like systemd, you'd be crazy to say that it fits in with that unix principle I mentioned above.
I quit desktop Linux right as systemd was taking hold. I used Debian but was thinking of switching to Arch for systemd alone. systemd is one of the best things to happen to Linux setups since X started configuring itself and since kernels got everything compiled in so you don't have to configure them. I do not understand the systemd hate. I think it's telling that the distributors--who actually have to do the work of maintaining init systems--have mostly switched to systemd while random vocal haters who do not have to keep the init system patched and working sit around and complain about systemd.
This. It boggles the mind how much time one can waste solving admin, busy-work type issues on Linux, specially when trying to use a GUI. I mean wifi, Bluetooth, retina class resolution issues, drivers for multiple devices not being available... unless one is using Linux to learn and understand it as a server of some type I can't fathom using it as a replacement for Mac OS.
> unless one is using Linux to learn and understand it as a server of some type I can't fathom using it as a replacement for Mac OS.
Perhaps some of us value our freedom?
Perhaps some of us find that it helps to develop on the same platform on which we deploy?
Perhaps some of us find that we don't, actually, spend all that much time on 'admin, busy-work type issues,' having decided on good, solid distros which fit our use cases (Debian works for me, others prefer RedHat)?
At the end of the day, though, it really is about freedom for me. You complain that you must tweak your system; I value that I can tweak mine.
i don't know, i've been running archlinux on my mbp and the only busy work i did was installing wifi drivers (which i did using cower and it was quite easy).
everything i have worked out of the box. and, as a plus, android usb tethering works a lot better on linux than on osx (thanks to networkmanager)
I'm assuming if you want someone else to ensure everything works for you without hassle then logically you would by a machine with linux preinstalled with a long term support release and then wait until a month after the next lts release to update after everyone else works out the kinks in the new release.
What you consider "busy-work admin issues", many people consider tier-1 features.
For instance, take sloppy focus. On my Linux machines, I can type in one window while interacting with another, and I use that ability fairly often. On my Mac, I have to spend time resizing and rearranging windows because I have to click a window to type there, and clicking raises it to the foreground, obscuring my other windows. Does the amount of time I spend managing windows outweigh the configuration time for the Linux box? I doubt it. But the end result is that my Linux machine feels like I built it exactly to spec. I value the fact that my OS, window manager, etc. do exactly what I want them to do in the same way that many people value the trackpad. I'm absolutely as annoyed and frustrated by the fact that the maximize/fullscreen button on my OS X windows moves my window to Space N+1 instead of keeping it where it is where a quick Cmd-Tab would bring a background window quickly back on top of the still-visible fullscreen window than I am that the trackpad on my Arch Linux box is less reliable at interpreting a gesture.
I've had good luck in the past with XFCE (in Xubuntu & OpenBSD) together with XMonad for this use case. Even now, where I don't use any of the panels and whatnot, I will occasionally fire up an XFCE control panel to do whatever it is that needs doing.
Similarly, I've been using AwesomeWM for a few years. Going back to OS X is frustrating to me because it's so languorous and lacking control. On Arch/AwesomeWM, I can instantly flip to the space I want, but Mission Control forces me to walk through each space, insisting on animating the sequence and taking it's time to swap in the applications as I go along.
"Mission Control forces me to walk through each space"
Try swiping up instead. That'll give you a list of spaces to choose from. Certainly not as direct as your non-OS X WM but faster than stepping through each one.
Usually I'm not making the switch visually. On arch, I know what spaces each application is one and just switch to it instinctively. The visual search and movement to the trackpad ends up being slower and more annoying than a quick Super+3 or whatever it needs to be.
Try rebinding your shortcuts. These made OSX usable for me without resorting to a full blown tiling wm. It's not as fun as xmonad, but it speeds things up. There's a tweak for decreasing the animation time, I believe it's toggleable via in Prefrences.
Cmd-j/k for next/prev space, cmd-h/k for switching windows. Cmd-H/J/K/L for desktops 1-4. I spend most days in vim/screen anyway so it feels natural.
> but Mission Control forces me to walk through each space, insisting on animating the sequence and taking it's time to swap in the applications as I go along.
Alfred. Alt+Space by default (note you can also remove keybinds of Spotlight to make room for Alfred because I use Cmd+Space for Alfred and Alt+Space for iTerm2 fullscreen, running tmux via tmuxp).
EDIT: As joobus wrote above, I also recommend Amethyst. There's a small learning curve with the keybinds but that's it. Oh, I and I recommend Flux (remember you can temporarily put it off).
I'll plug TotalSpaces2 (https://totalspaces.binaryage.com/) here. If you're stuck with OS X for whatever reason, it's well worth the $12 to remove that god-damned animation that eats keystrokes for a full second longer than it takes my hands to start trying to interact with whatever's on the screen I'm switching to.
You can set keyboard shortcuts for the specific spaces, specifically control + {1,2,3,4} for each space. In the keyboard section in system preferences, under "shortcuts" tab.
Check out Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst for Mac. I use i3 at home, and when I first started using OSX at work it drove me nuts until I found Amethyst.
A colleague turned me on to KWM (https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm). If forced to use a Mac again, I'll probably use that. Amethyst never quite worked right for me, and I found myself restarting Amethyst all the time to un-break something.
Ditto for me with StumpWM. Whenever I have to use a machine without a tiling WM I feel like I've taken a trip back in time — back to an unpleasant and archaic part of time. Having to mouse over to windows feels like having to turn a hand-crank to navigate.
(not the OP) Complicated, is my reason. I have a hell of a time making sense of the configuration syntax.
NixOS is one of those "this has to be the future" things for me, but a future i can't currently use, despite wanting it. I hope someday i can make the switch.
Also, Elementary is pretty.. and call me vein, but that is nice. Generally i want the OS to "just work" and pretty gives me the false, emotional impression that it will.
NixOS is what got me to switch back from Mac to Linux. Being able to copy someone else's config for my MacBookPro and have a pretty damn good, working system was incredible. It really opened my eyes.
Perhaps coming by #nixos on Freenode for an afternoon could get you over the configuration hurdle?
I remember I tried NixOS in a VM on a Thursday and was so smitten that I replaced OSX on Saturday.
It's not purely the syntax, but more difficulty finding API documentation to match "what i want to do". Eg, if i wanted to add a package, or if i wanted to add a custom package, what function would i use? (not a question directed at you). If i wanted to add a chroot, what would i use? What args are available on those functions? etcetc
The documentation was a massive frustration to an already confused person.
On top of that, it seemed every package/binary i wanted wasn't available in Nixpkgs, or was outdated in Nixpkgs - so i had to learn how to modify the binaries for pretty much everything i did. And, when you don't know what you're doing, this is a massive barrier to entry.
I'm not too savvy on Linux and runtime requirements of binaries, so finding the requirements of a binary or setting up chroots for binaries that i could not modify was very time consuming. I spent most of my time doing that, in fact.
The concept of NixOS represents time saved to me. Reproducible builds based on a idempotent config, awesome! But in reality, i had to figure out how to make everything i wanted idempotent, and it was just a massive barrier.
I'm super smitten, i think the documentation just needs a bit of work. I would love to run it on my home server and also Nixpkgs on my Mac.
I've been running NixOS on a casual home desktop for about a year now.
I'm in love with some of its big ideas, like per-project dependency files that mostly eliminate my need for VMs and container management tools, and being able to read my OS configuration in a single file.
On the other hand, most of my work these days ends up as a Dockerfile and Docker images anyways, and the benefits of Nix package management could be had with Nix alone (not NixOS).
So at the end of the day I'm running a slightly buggy KDE 5 desktop that I haven't invested the time in fixing. I have a cool package manager, but I'm using it with one global nix environment. Packages are not hard to find once I know what I'm looking for, but discovering those packages and their nix-specific names can be tricky at times.
That said I'm new to desktop Linux, and it's hard to fault NixOS for most of the (relative) difficulties I've encountered.
Thank you! I'm honestly not sure which bugs should go with NixOS and which should go to some application or library that I can't figure out. A typical example: since installing a different video card, videos will play in Firefox but not Chrome.
1. Switched my notebook from NixOS back to Debian. NixOS’s advantages are not actually advantages in my practical reality.
2. NixOS being such a niche distro makes it _such a pain_ to use random binaries from not-yet-packaged software, which I do often enough.
3. Also, the Nix packages I use are sometimes a bit broken. That also happens in Debian, but I don’t know enough Nix to fix stuff myself.
Beware: I’m a Debian Developer, so my view is obviously biased. That said, I think the trouble I had is representative for trouble other people might have with NixOS. In total, I used it for about half a year, I think.
To the point (reality) of Arch's amazing docs; I fully agree with the author. I've never experienced a more comprehensive and up-to-date doc regarding a distro. For this reason, I exclusively use Arch for both desktop and laptop. It is a freeing/empowering experience installing Arch.
I've got a Dell Developer Edition arriving on Thursday and everything I've been reading about Arch has been seriously considering installing it almost immediately.
I installed Ubuntu + GNOME on my Mac a couple of years ago as a toy but a have slowly been migrating to it as my main OS.
For what I use it for (light web dev) it is the same or better than OS X.
The only thing stopping me from throwing out OS X completely are the Adobe apps (InDesign in particular) but even with that I have switched to doing most of 90% of my work on paper or in a text file then only complete layouts in OS X.
Can we stop using the term "clean" to describe interfaces? Clean doesn't really mean anything in design and also is a one sided term without an opposite term that is not disparaging. Are all other interfaces that are not clean, dirty? Or unsanitary? Or cluttered? It becomes and absolute term like beautiful or professional which are all really just fluff terms for "good".
Good point. I actually paused and tried to come up with something better when I was proofreading the post but failed to do so. I'll keep it mind for future posts.
It actually conveys pretty well that the interface is uncluttered and with a minimal aesthetic, with lots of space, etc.
>Are all other interfaces that are not clean, dirty? Or unsanitary? Or cluttered?
Obviously cluttered.
Don't really understand the objection. "Clean" has been part of UI vocabulary, and before that, of aesthetic criticism (in fine arts, architecture, industrial design, etc) for ages. ("Clean lines", etc).
Since you feel that way, would you mind showing me an example of an interface you do not consider "clean" but is of high quality and excellent usability?
I don't understand the ports complaint. Or maybe it's others who don't understand their ports complaint. The USB-C connector is a physical connector, and Apple's implementation of it supports every useful protocol and function available. DisplayPort, USB3.1 and below, Thunderbolt3, charging and HDMI[0]. Just buy USB-C to whatever cables and you're done with it. USB-A to C transition complete. You don't need adapters for those protocols, they're passive cables.
What do people want? A bunch of ports that not everyone needs or wants to waste space when I could have more multipurpose USB-C ports?
Got USB-A mice and keyboards? Ok, buy a docking station or USB-C to USB-A hub and never think about it again. Got a mouse you like to carry around that isn't wireless? Pickup a small adapter[1] to get you through the transition. The only thing I can think of is ethernet but again, not everyone is going to use that. I do want ethernet, but the USB-C Thunderbolt adapter is fine. It certainly isn't the only laptop going without ethernet today. Again, why waste a port when you can have these reversible universal ports. Miss MagSafe[2]?
Either way, the complaints about the ports don't hold much water once properly researched and the change is inevitable.
The reason I passed on the new MBP15 is the 24% reduction in battery capacity from 2015[3].
I needed a new machine so I bought an Acer Chromebook[4] to tide me over until Apple gets a form-fitting large capacity battery[5] in the MBPs. My configuration is $3000 and I'm just not going to spend that sort of money unless it's near-perfect. I may build a PC and remote into it as per the article until the next MBP once again matches its high price but I won't hand them 3K for a battery that's 3/4th the size of the 2015 model (66% capacity for the 13").
There's still a huge confusion on what cables are legitimate USB 3 Type C cables, or Thunderbolt or some third option that I forget but bricking devices is a possibility with the current mix of options.
I've read a bit about that. In general, just use what comes with the USB-C device you're using. Longterm, quality issues with cabling will be sorted out. I only have one anecdote with my own equipment. I have an external SSD case[0] that came with a USB-A cable and I simply bought a micro-B to USB-C cable[1] and it worked when I tried it without issue.
What most people seem to want other than ethernet is a HDMI cable (or port) and something like this[2] will work direct from a new MBP. When I was going to buy one, I was going to grab one of those just to keep in my bag.
I understand why a full size RJ45 is a nice thing to omit because it's fat and actually prevents good slim design.
Why you wouldn't just throw in a legacy USB jack though is really odd. You can do anything with an adapter, but I just want to jam that old thumbdrive right in, without adapters or docking stations. I'd certainly give up a type-c port (if there are several) for a legacy usb port just to be able to do that.
I've used FreeBSD as a desktop OS, briefly. I've also used a number of Linux distributions as desktop OSes since the late 1990s.
The bottom line is that Linux tends to have better hardware support, especially for laptop hardware and power management.
When you run into problems, you'll usually have a much easier time finding vendor support or online community help for a Linux distribution than for FreeBSD.
Under the hood, FreeBSD is a lot simpler than Linux, and a lot of people like it for that reason. But if you want a generic Gnome/KDE/tiling WM/etc. desktop experience, and you don't need any BSD-specific features, I think Linux is the way to go. After all, we are talking about a replacement for MacOS here, which is pretty well integrated with the hardware and does not require a lot of tinkering to get working.
> The bottom line is that Linux tends to have better hardware support, especially for laptop hardware and power management.
I've been playing around with various BSDs over the past couple of years, and I really want to like any of them enough to keep installed, but this is exactly the issue I've run into with freebsd and it's derivatives. On both my last laptop and the current one, I can get everything working to a fairly reasonable state, but there are minor but annoying hardware issues I just don't have to deal with in Linux.
In my most recent attempt (installing TrueOS on my spare SSD), some apps occasionally crash when I use the Intel video driver, so I'm forced to use scfb, which is a bit slower and doesn't render fonts as nicely. Additionally, the wifi tends to be a bit slower; I average around 4-5 MB (not Mb) down on Linux, but top out around 2 MB on TrueOS. I also have to use Firefox instead of Chromium on FreeBSD and its derivatives, as there always seem to be some bugs in the FreeBSD port; right now, it renders some bizarrely-shaped section of the window in a deep shade of yellow covering part of the URL bar and the top of the page, and signing in to Google to sync my extensions and history hasn't worked for like 10 major versions of Chromium.
I really like DragonflyBSD; it works a bit better for me out of the box than FreeBSD (I don't need to configure to not have the fan running at full blast all the time, and I've strangely had fewer issues with Chromium despite it using the same ports tree as FreeBSD with some custom patches), but I've had issues running any display manager other than Slim, and even that hasn't worked that well for me, as I've never been able to get the numlock and auto-login settings working (yes, I know, autologin is "insecure", but I always have FDE on my machines, so if someone can get past that, I don't think the login screen will stop them). Unfortunately I haven't been able to try it out lately; on my current laptop, BSDs weirdly seem to think that my screen resolution is 1024x768, and the only way I've found to fix that is by setting the GOP in EFI, which is not an option for DragonflyBSD currently. I've spent more time than I'm willing to admit trying to follow the manual EFI installation inductions I found on the DragonflyBSD mailing list; I think I got it to boot once, but apparently the snapshot I was using panicked when trying to load the specific wifi driver during startup (although I found out later it could load it fine after it was fully booted), and I've never gotten it to boot since, so I'm not convinced I wasn't mildly hallucinating or something. Every now and then the Dragonfly Digest will have some post talking about some new small step towards EFI support though, so I'm optimistic that someday soon I'll be able to boot it on my current laptop and discover a whole new set of reasons why I can't use it.
OpenBSD, on the other hand, works pretty great for me out of the box in terms of the GUI and hardware, but I'm not fond of the packaging system; I tend to like to have fairly recent versions of apps, so updates come a bit slowly compared to what I'm used to. Even worse, pkg_add is kind of horrifying to me compared to what you get on FreeBSD-based systems; for reasons I can't comprehend, it seems to query for updates individually for each package you have installed rather than first just getting a list of updated packages and then downloading the updates for the packages (if there are any). I'm unfortunately too spoiled to wait several minutes just to find out that there aren't actually any updates for my system.
I've never been able to get far into setting up NetBSD. A couple of years ago I got it installed but couldn't get Xorg to start up, and I've been unable to get the installer to boot on the most recent release; it prompts me to select the boot device from a number of options, ...
I tried NetBSD on my Acer Aspire One netbook from like six years ago. Most things worked out of the box. One thing that did not was the keyboard did not wake after suspend, which was manual (typing apm -z). I decided that was a deal-breaker and switched to Ubuntu, which worked perfectly out of the box, including lid-shut suspend.
NetBSD also gave me a bizarre halt-the-world problem on installation the first few times ("Old BPB too big") until I skipped the first sector.
I figure this laptop is old enough if it isn't supported by now it won't ever be.
I use FreeBSD as a desktop/laptop/workstation since years and it works great for me. Total control over the system You work on is priceless.
Everything on my hardware works (ThinkPad W530). The WWAN(3g) connection, Wifi, SD Card Reader, Power Management, multi monitor setup, external disk in the Modular Bay ...
Also having ZFS and ZFS Boot Environments on a system is great for updates/changes. You are literally bulletproof.
How is a non-tangible filesystem making you "literally" bulletproof?
The BSDs are great for very specific tasks, but I find more general use users will prefer Linux with GNU userland. It has wider hardware support and a larger community for resources such as documentation and troubleshooting.
... and yet, despite that, the doco for the BSDs is often better quality than the Linux doco. It hasn't actually turned out in practice that the larger community results in the better doco.
Please read about ZFS Boot Environments, no matter if from Oracle documentation or Illumos one, You will get the idea what it provides. There is beadm command same as in Solaris/Illumos and You can select BE at boot in the FreeBSD bootloader.
In short the idea is that You create snapshot (BE) of the current system state (filesystems), then make changes/upgrades. If something went wrong, then You reboot to that snapshot (BE) like nothing had happened.
About GNU userland, I also use SOME GNU tools like 'gls' (GNU ls) or 'gawk' (GNU awk). They are provided by the FreeBSD sysutils/coreutils package/port, I also use sysutils/moreutils like 'vipe' or 'vidir'.
The documentation part on FreeBSD is much better then on Linux, check the Handbook, or Wiki, or FAQ, or plain old MAN PAGES with useful examples. I sometimes read/use ARCH Linux wiki or Gentoo WIKI but for most of the time FreeBSD documentation is second to none. Even with a lot less people then Linux has.
BTW, while there are a lot more Linux people out there then BSD people, remember that Linux people are fragmented over about thousand Linux distributions while there are only several BSD distributions.
I do not want to sound 'bad' here but I also found many times that 'BSD people' known more about Linux then 'Linux people' if You know that I mean.
Ideally I'd only need a single computer and there are goals like being about view/edit the source code of my OS/apps that Windows doesn't tick. Still as mentioned in other comments I'm getting a Windows 2-in-1 later in the year so can try it then.
ConEmu is nice in my experience, but requires some tweeking. Some people I know use MobaXterm. The main drawback is windows itself, with its disruptive updates lately.
FWIW, whenever I am forced to use Windows I want to hurl my computer through a window after using it for only a few minutes. Doing anything takes click after click after click: it's way too much work. Manual window management is horrible: it's way too much work. Trying to figure out how to make anything work is a chore, as is evaluating which websites are giving correct advice, which are outdated and which are trying to infect me with malware: it's way too much work.
Granted, I feel the exact same way about macOS (with slightly less concern about malware, to be sure).
After the refresh of the Macbook Pro I decided to get a desktop replacement laptop.
Whether or not that is acceptable for your use cases depends. For me, I already have a Surface Pro 3 for ultra portable needs. Because of that, I found myself never using my Macbook Pro when I couldn't plug it in. And given how slowly cpus are gaining in performance these days, if plausible, it makes more sense to me to focus on performance over battery & weight.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadFor me, it's Devonthink Pro (http://www.devontechnologies.com/solutions/writers.html) in particular and also Lightroom. Yes, there is progress on Dark Table, but there's too much useful software on OS X and despite Apple's faults its laptop hardware still leads the pack.
Yes, the lack of ports on the new MBP is annoying. If I had to buy a new MBP today I'd just get the last version—which is still fantastic—refurbished, and kick the hardware can down the road a couple years.
My first operating system was Windows 95. I then upgraded to 98, and later XP. I decided to go with a Mac in 2008 after Windows Vista just couldn't get itself together.
My impression is that both operating systems are very close to parity. I use the same apps on both, including a lot of Unixy stuff that now works fine on Windows. Even the Windows font rendering is a lot like the Mac's now.
The Mac ecosystem still has a huge advantage in hardware quality, but I think Microsoft has caught up in software quality.
Seriously, i can't comprehend why they take a paying customer (me) and frequently think i want to see their ads my operating system is some kind of blog.
(The ad in question is for me to try some new microsoft product.. i forget which one offhand, Office Live? no idea. I usually see too much red when it happens to even read.)
These seem to recur once after each Windows Update reboot. Anyone know of a way to permanently disable these?
Like, i cannot even stress how pissed off it makes me.
Note that if you're on Insider builds, there have sometimes been build-to-build update issues that reset some settings, which can result in this toggle being reset. IMO that's a serious bug you should report, but (hopefully) wouldn't make it to a stable release.
(disclaimer: MSFT employee on the Edge team)
I switched about a month ago and, to be honest, I've been pleasantly surprised with Windows 10, with modern, top-of-the-line Windows hardware, and especially with Ubuntu on Windows.
If there's something in Rails you can't do in Windows proper, you can still opt to use Vagrant on Windows for a more pure unix experience.
Here's my build (http://pcpartpicker.com/list/pYWQMp), which runs into some driver issues but can be fixed with Kext utility. This setup allows me to do CUDA programming + Deep Learning stuff natively in OSX, while having access to pretty Mac software. It's great, I highly recommend it!
This level of risk is fun but not for the faint of heart.
there was only one rule and i believe the same i truth now, if you plan to run hackintosh u better watch what hardware you get. if you do that u can run hackintosh without problems.
Oh? What has changed?
> This level of risk is fun but not for the faint of heart.
Read: as soon as a new patch comes out for macOS you are either running around with known security vulnerabilities (as well as missing reliability fixes), or you're a guinea pig entirely unsure if it breaks anything and if so how much effort it is going to take to get the patch applied. Why? Mainly due to drivers.
Besides, good luck finding a well working laptop with good macOS support.
I gave up and bought a MBP 2015 instead. Very nice machine. Expensive, but nice.
For a workstation or MP replacement it'd make more sense. The MP hasn't been updated for 4 years and with physical access to the quick machine its easier to fix issues. You're also guaranteed not on the go, so you got all the tools you need at your disposal. However there is still a risk for loss of productivity and worst of all you can't plan it. Because you don't know when Apple does release their software updates.
The fact that Apple hasn't done this already is because it's insignificant, not because of some benelovence on Apple's part. They're not going to encourage unlicensed use of the OS. The OS is there to sell the hardware, not vice versa.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
I moved from OSX to Linux recently too and I am generally pretty happy with multi-monitor and pseudo-tiling support in gnome3. I can do most of my window movement and application switching with few shortcuts (it requires few gnome extensions). Such as -
1. switch application with shortcut rather than alt-tabbing (something like - Super-1 for Emacs, Super-2 for terminal etc). It requires a gnome extension.
2. Tile the Windows with shortcuts. Currently gnome3 has limited support but it mostly works out of box.
3. Launching or switching application with a global shortcut. Requires a gnome extension.
4. Move Window between monitors etc.
Such things usually requires at least 2 or 3 paid apps on OSX. Divvy, Sizeup etc.
Oh and 1Password works perfectly okay via Wine, including the browser extension. So, that is one thing you should checkoff your list if that is stopping you. :-)
I just finished importing my 1Password data into https://www.enpass.io looks like it might turn out to be a good option.
Should be great when it comes out of beta, though - a good terminal and we'll be all set.
[0] https://conemu.github.io/
you can install what you want on macOS and you can install what you want on Windows. Both have custom terminal apps
It's not listed in his requirements and Win10 may satisfy him.
There are lots of free things in life that have an inferior free alternative or only free alternatives and this may be one of them.
And I said you don't need to pay for anything if you want to do Rails programming. In fact, here, the "inferior alternative" for this task may be the proprietary one.
Another thing would be using his computer for gaming. In that case, I wouldn't object, of course.
When I talk to normal/non-techies about this issue, they often see it as a non-issue and/or terrifying.
Why not help Windows and Mac users by writing more software for the preferred environments?
Installing a foreign operating system is like installing a different language on your PC. You must have other motivation than normal users.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/medical-equipment-crashes-dur...
For what it's worth Windows 10 now has a bash shell based on Ubuntu available.
http://www.howtogeek.com/249966/how-to-install-and-use-the-l...
The bash subsystem is interesting, but I'd go with the virtualization solution first.
I thought that was true on any OS... :/
It's a full Ubuntu userland and you can even run graphical (X) applications. I've used it for Pebble development, running the (python + ARM GCC) SDK and QEMU-based emulator all on Windows. I've run into a few minor issues but for the majority of tasks it works great -- I've completely stopped using my Ubuntu VM and do all my Linux tasks in WSL.
The WSL has potential to become a very useful tool. So much so I'm considering switching from macOS on my next laptop or so. Unfortunately unlike your case, my workflow depends on a lot of networking code. WSL still has many gaps in the socket emulation pieces. It'll likely mature over time, and it's impressive that some people are already able to switch from a Linux VM!
A co-worker is also using it to run cross compilers for embedded linux hardware devices (various patched versions of GCC and such) and it's been flawless for him, which I found quite impressive too.
All word-of-mouth, of course.
Not really surprising (dev version, comes with warnings about compatibility, ...). But why would you let that hold you back for trying it out for what you are going to use it for? Counter-anecdote: I've ran gui apps like SublimeText, gcc, ... without crashing; also see other comments. tldr; try it first-hand instead of relying on anecdotal proof it isn't, or is, ready.
WSL (i.e. the horrendously named Bash on Ubuntu on Windows)
Note that 'WSL' and 'Ubuntu on Windows' and 'Bash on Ubuntu on Windows' are seperate terms for different things
In my view, Windows 10 is still miles away in consistency across the entire system, compared to macOS. Windows 10 actually made it worse, because it's trying to accommodate both Windows 7 and Windows 8 design.
Currently I don't think we have alternatives to macOS. I understand that I sound like a grumpy Apple fanboy, but Windows is't ready to replace macOS. The distance between macOS and Windows have increased in the later years, and not because Apple have improved anything, it's Microsoft who have made Windows worse.
But then again I rarely install new things, only have a few base programs I run routinely, and reformat regularly.
I've just had a ton of issues with the mouse becoming unresponsive... and then having to do a restart, whereas on El Capitan and Yosemite I could basically leave my computer on for forever.
Same here! Also i start to suffer from 'update-fatigue' when using Windows. The endless updates, reboots, and god knows what it's doing in the background which consumes resources... it all just feels so clumsy. I've never experienced anything like this in OSX.
http://imgur.com/VfcdIEd
MS "needs" (?) to prioritize "don't torment your users". Of course, for corporate captives, they can torment away with impunity since The Management has already decided You Must Endure... (and probably locked out the setting in question, as well)
I still like the Mac's unobtrusive "get it tonight after I shut down" option, though :-) (or Ubuntu's "I'll get it when I'm good and ready", but that's not a system for worker bees)
No, no they don't.
If the user knows what they're doing, they run Windows Update manually at times when it's convenient for them (e.g. just before going out to lunch) so that they never encounter a forced reboot situation.
If the user doesn't know what they're doing, they exactly the people who need to be forced to the latest update so they don't wind up inadvertently joining a botnet.
And, of course, there are ways to forcibly disable WU for really advanced users but at that point whatever befalls them is quite clearly their own responsibility.
So, win-win for everybody but the malware makers.
Like IBM and Oracle, MS is in the position of "Management says we've already won, so suck it, users!"
Payback ... and all :-)
I know you should save often and bad things can happen like a power outage or a glitch or something, but those things are rare. My Windows 10 machine choosing to reboot itself without telling me? At least once a week.
Imagine if you had random power outages once a week, and having a UPS plugged in couldn't stop it.
First of all you can set the time interval when the Windows will be able to update https://i.imgur.com/BZNadeE.png
And even if you are working in this time Windows ask you what do you prefer - reboot now or later.
I'am not Windows fanboy. I sue MacOS, Windows and Linux at the same time.
When I'm done with my work for the day on Windows and I go to bed, I'm never sure if everything will still be there when I wake up. Far too often I wake up and I'm at a login screen with all of my active windows and documents closed. That's incredibly disruptive, and there's no way to stop that.
There is no way to tell Windows 10 "don't reboot until I explicitly ask you to do so".
Really? Windows has its share of hair pulling annoyances to be sure, but endless might be overstating it.
In my experience since switching, I find that resource consumption is comparable to OSX. I get that this is anecdotal, but I leave my main machines on 24-7, and I basically only reboot when an update forces me to, which sometimes is once a week (when there are frequent updates), but most of the time it is for stretches longer than two weeks.
http://superuser.com/questions/946957/stopping-all-automatic...
I'm managing a friend's Win10Pro machine and so far it's been awesome. On the other hand, OSX which I'm running seems clunky and old-fashioned.
In my view GNU/Linux distributions are still miles away from Windows 10 in consistency across the entire system.
Give Elementary a go, you may be surprised.
I wrote "consistency across the entire system". I immediately believe that they did a lot of GUI polish and polishing of the default apps. But polishing the GUI of a POSIX-like system does not deliver consistency (only GUI polish). There is still the whole UNIX-like subsurface (like it or not), which delivers completely different abstractions than the GUI does (this is clearly not consistent).
For example rio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_(windowing_system)) implements Windowing as private namespace (a central element of Plan 9) - very consistent.
BeOS (for which currently under the name HaikuOS they try to reimplement it in an open source way) is another example of an OS which was designed from beginning on to have a GUI and is thus also very consistent.
I do think they try a bit too hard to look like macOS, but if you're going for the best desktop Linux experience, why not copy the best commercial ⁎nix desktop?
I agree completely about BeOS/Haiku; BeOS was my daily driver for several years until the death of the company caused me to have to move on. I have yet to find a modern OS that even comes close to that kind of cohesive, sensible, practical approach to desktop computing. Haiku is coming along well, but it's still not stable enough for daily use beyond dogfooding for Haiku devs.
I have never seen a GNU/Linux distribution where I didn't have to configure some things via modification of configuration files in a text editor. Even these two differences (GUI vs. text file editing) is much more different than a few different design styles in Windows' control panel. Also the way settings are set in configuration files is IMHO even more different among different GNU/Linux applications than the different design styles in Windows' control panel.
It's a bit of a blemish that there are two control panels, but almost no users are ever exposed to Win32. You can do virtually everything (from updates to domain join to adding/removing Windows components) from the modern Settings app. The legacy control panel is just that, and is irrelevant for most users. I'd love to see it modernized, but there are many much better uses of resources (security! performance! battery life!) than modernizing 90s-era utilities that few customers are ever exposed to.
Windows 10 isn't a good example of consistency, but every GNU/Linux distribution I have seen is much worse.
Though I still miss: 1. MacBook's touchpad :-( 2. Emacs-like keybindings everywhere in OS (like MacOS has).
I use it to spin up linux images that contain all the devtools that I need, and mount files/code from windows in there. For a terminal just enter the image with exec /bin/sh. To get a consistent experience I also use msys bash (which is bundled with git for windows) for terminal use on windows. With that setup entering and exiting linux containers feels very similar to on OSX.
The downside of docker for windows is that you need HyperV activated, which weans VirtualBox no longer works. The older boot2docker solution worked together with VirtualBox - however it didn't support filesharing between windows and docker containers, so there's unfortunately a tradeoff.
I've tried docker for windows, and even WSL+Ubuntu+Bash, and it's just not as good. I use conemu, VS Code, and Chrome more than anything else.
you can switch back to default F1... keys
> Removing all legacy ports necessitating the use of dongles for everything
Somewhere have to start the transition
> Prioritising thinness and weight over everything else
Batterylife is the same
Worst thing on the new rMBPs: No silent trackpad click option m(
I use OS X just as an client.
Not following... the physical key is gone, replaced by the touch bar?
Another problem with the touch bar is unintended touches. I constantly found myself accidentally resting a finger on the Esc key, which of course caused all sorts of weirdness in various apps.
Finally, as a touch typist the touch bar was simply distracting. I never look at the keyboard, but the touch bar really wants you to look down, which is a source of distraction, especially when it changes contents in the periphery of your vision.
If the touch bar brought lots of utility, I might have learned to deal with it, but it is really is of limited value. Emojis? There's cmd-ctrl-space for that (the touch bar doesn't have search so you'll be scrolling a lot to hunt down the right emoji). Safari tab previews? They're idiotically tiny. And so on.
I doubt anyone is going to remove CTRL or [ anytime soon, so getting used to that would future-proof you quite well.
I appreciated Apple's innovations in the past, but imho Apple shows little understanding of their remaining users in the "pro" market, or rather unwillingness to cater for them. Pro users want predictable work horses and a roadmap for their software purchases, not the new shiny and Apple doing away with basic functionalities of a computer system such as standard keyboards and ports.
Why didn't Apple make touch bar optional on the higher end Macbook Pros?
Quite a few folks including Consumer Reports would differ with you on that point.
For example when they re-tried with Chrome (instead of Safari) the found exactly the same, and in some cases better, battery life.
By removing every single legacy port long before there's anywhere near ubiquitous USB-C? Even USB-C cables themselves are more commonly sold as USB-A to USB-C. I love having usable DisplayPort/Thunderbolt, HDMI, and USB-A on my 2013 rMBP - I never need a dongle. If I went to a 2016, I'd need at least 3, every day.
> Prioritising thinness and weight over everything else
Battery life is certainly not the same, and the lack of a 16GB option or a faster processor is a well-missed loss.
Is it certainly not the same? It seems pretty much the same to me. Lack of a 16GB option? I have a 16 GB TB mac.
The FUD is getting old.
Why not just set Caps Lock to Esc? Works well with Vim and you don't wanna use Caps Lock anyway.
I use Karabiner Elements to set it that way. Karabiner doesn't work with Sierra.
The Intel Skull Canyon NUC is what I'm using, with Elementary running on Virtualbox in Windows 10 (waiting for the Samsung 960 EVO to sell globally before setting up a native install).
The one massive problem for me that keeps me going back to the laptop is that the Mac absolutely nailed keyboard layout by separating the command and control keys. And no other OS is currently able to do so.
I use the basic emacs shortcuts for navigation in all the apps that support them (crtl a,e,n,p), and the command key to issue commands like close tab, save, new tab etc.
This is absolutely impossible to replicate on any other OS (AFAIK). I can map the command key to the control key, but that's about it - it just becomes a new way to hit control. Being able to consistently map and access the command key (as SUPER) simply can't be done.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/switchboard-plug-keyboard/+bug/16...
Traditional X11 programs have (had) fully configurable key bindings in their app-defaults.
Today, KDE (and other Qt) programs at least allow individually changing shortcuts to use Super. Qt has an internal switch to use Super everywhere, but it's hard-coded to the Mac platform. Perhaps eventually there will be enough pressure from OS X refugees to make it a user configurable setting.
I use these settings and find them quite handy.
Of course, that doesn't give you new-tab/close-tab/save on M-t/w/s, for that you have to install some Firefox addon etc. – not quite OS-wide consistency :(
It took me a week or so to get used to i3, but once I did I can't see myself ever going back. I've been using i3 at work and at home for about year now, and every time I get on my (Mac Book) laptop it's a frustrating experience: I feel like I spend more time trying to figure out how to get to the window I want that actually using it...
Unfortunately the Linux desktops were actually worse than the barebones window managers like i3: there was some sort of glibc bug that screwed up clock display on GNOME for at least a year. GNOME assumed glibc did it right, which was a reasonable assumption...but an incorrect one, but with i3 I could control this.
Now that I'm on Mac I look back in amazement at the time I spent on Linux learning ultimately useless stuff like why a bug in glibc would mess up my GNOME clock but not an i3 clock.
The time I spent setting those things up has been more than made up for over the last year as I've spent less time managing windows and more time just doing work.
If anything, my plan would be to move more of my life into Emacs so that I'm even less exposed to stupid ideas from my OS/laptop vendor.
I have been using i3 on a netbook for the last two days and I can definitely see how it would be lovely. But then again, Linux has changed a lot since I was into it seriously and I'm sure I will experience pain if I have to do anything substantial to tweak it, like symlink timezone files.
Systemd makes using i3 so much easier. No more fiddling with consolekit and dbus just to get working external drives (logind solves the problem of local authentication), no more fiddling with symlinks to set time (timedatectl to the rescue).
> Unfortunately the Linux desktops were actually worse than the barebones window managers like i3: there was some sort of glibc bug that screwed up clock display on GNOME for at least a year. GNOME assumed glibc did it right, which was a reasonable assumption...but an incorrect one, but with i3 I could control this.
Gnome nowadays use timedatectl AFAIK to set time too. The last time I had a issue with setting date or time in Gnome was pre-systemd days.
While some people may not like systemd, I find tools like timedatectl, localectl and hostnamectl to be quite useful. They work much better than trying to write a shell script or parse something.
Systemd is relatively nice now, but the disdain for it wasn't just 'hate train'.
No, it is mostly hate train. I only read one or two solid (technical) arguments against systemd. And no, no one of them is found in the regular systemd-hate sites.
> Also, the primary developers have a poor attitude.
I think the community have a worse attitude them the core developers, however this is mostly anectodal observation.
> eg: goodbye to all your old ways of looking at logs
systemd enable syslog.service
Here you go, all your old logs in the place you expect them.
There's an invisible pink unicorn who knows the winners of every horse race, but only I can see and hear her. Of course, I'm not going to tell you the winners; that's my secret!
Did you get onto the systemd stuff late? I got in midway along and found a few things that were iffy. One of the definite problems was the core developers' disdain for other people's use cases - even Torvalds said he was ambivalent about systemd itself, but the developers were pretty user-hostile and that was a problem.
> Here you go, all your old logs in the place you expect them.
Cool. In the same vein, do we have centralised logging in systemd yet? Or do we still have to run another syslog tool to ship them? Last I looked half a year ago, the consensus was still "ship them through rsyslog/syslog-ng", so you still have to run your old syslog in parallel. Only the IPU knows why they would make a new journaling system for a primarily-server OS, and keep kicking the "centralisation" can down the road.
Yes, the anti-syslog commentary went too far, but there were a lot of problems with it, especially before it had been battle-hardened. But whether or not you do or don't like systemd, you'd be crazy to say that it fits in with that unix principle I mentioned above.
Perhaps some of us value our freedom?
Perhaps some of us find that it helps to develop on the same platform on which we deploy?
Perhaps some of us find that we don't, actually, spend all that much time on 'admin, busy-work type issues,' having decided on good, solid distros which fit our use cases (Debian works for me, others prefer RedHat)?
At the end of the day, though, it really is about freedom for me. You complain that you must tweak your system; I value that I can tweak mine.
everything i have worked out of the box. and, as a plus, android usb tethering works a lot better on linux than on osx (thanks to networkmanager)
You know kinda like you do with apple machines.
For instance, take sloppy focus. On my Linux machines, I can type in one window while interacting with another, and I use that ability fairly often. On my Mac, I have to spend time resizing and rearranging windows because I have to click a window to type there, and clicking raises it to the foreground, obscuring my other windows. Does the amount of time I spend managing windows outweigh the configuration time for the Linux box? I doubt it. But the end result is that my Linux machine feels like I built it exactly to spec. I value the fact that my OS, window manager, etc. do exactly what I want them to do in the same way that many people value the trackpad. I'm absolutely as annoyed and frustrated by the fact that the maximize/fullscreen button on my OS X windows moves my window to Space N+1 instead of keeping it where it is where a quick Cmd-Tab would bring a background window quickly back on top of the still-visible fullscreen window than I am that the trackpad on my Arch Linux box is less reliable at interpreting a gesture.
Try swiping up instead. That'll give you a list of spaces to choose from. Certainly not as direct as your non-OS X WM but faster than stepping through each one.
Cmd-j/k for next/prev space, cmd-h/k for switching windows. Cmd-H/J/K/L for desktops 1-4. I spend most days in vim/screen anyway so it feels natural.
Alfred. Alt+Space by default (note you can also remove keybinds of Spotlight to make room for Alfred because I use Cmd+Space for Alfred and Alt+Space for iTerm2 fullscreen, running tmux via tmuxp).
EDIT: As joobus wrote above, I also recommend Amethyst. There's a small learning curve with the keybinds but that's it. Oh, I and I recommend Flux (remember you can temporarily put it off).
Also, KWM has focus follows mouse.
Edit: I'm appreciating the feedback for "why not?" and am sending it around to people in the community. :)
NixOS is one of those "this has to be the future" things for me, but a future i can't currently use, despite wanting it. I hope someday i can make the switch.
Also, Elementary is pretty.. and call me vein, but that is nice. Generally i want the OS to "just work" and pretty gives me the false, emotional impression that it will.
Perhaps coming by #nixos on Freenode for an afternoon could get you over the configuration hurdle?
I remember I tried NixOS in a VM on a Thursday and was so smitten that I replaced OSX on Saturday.
Edit: I really appreciate your feedback on this!
It's not purely the syntax, but more difficulty finding API documentation to match "what i want to do". Eg, if i wanted to add a package, or if i wanted to add a custom package, what function would i use? (not a question directed at you). If i wanted to add a chroot, what would i use? What args are available on those functions? etcetc
The documentation was a massive frustration to an already confused person.
On top of that, it seemed every package/binary i wanted wasn't available in Nixpkgs, or was outdated in Nixpkgs - so i had to learn how to modify the binaries for pretty much everything i did. And, when you don't know what you're doing, this is a massive barrier to entry.
I'm not too savvy on Linux and runtime requirements of binaries, so finding the requirements of a binary or setting up chroots for binaries that i could not modify was very time consuming. I spent most of my time doing that, in fact.
The concept of NixOS represents time saved to me. Reproducible builds based on a idempotent config, awesome! But in reality, i had to figure out how to make everything i wanted idempotent, and it was just a massive barrier.
I'm super smitten, i think the documentation just needs a bit of work. I would love to run it on my home server and also Nixpkgs on my Mac.
I'm in love with some of its big ideas, like per-project dependency files that mostly eliminate my need for VMs and container management tools, and being able to read my OS configuration in a single file.
On the other hand, most of my work these days ends up as a Dockerfile and Docker images anyways, and the benefits of Nix package management could be had with Nix alone (not NixOS).
So at the end of the day I'm running a slightly buggy KDE 5 desktop that I haven't invested the time in fixing. I have a cool package manager, but I'm using it with one global nix environment. Packages are not hard to find once I know what I'm looking for, but discovering those packages and their nix-specific names can be tricky at times.
That said I'm new to desktop Linux, and it's hard to fault NixOS for most of the (relative) difficulties I've encountered.
1. Switched my notebook from NixOS back to Debian. NixOS’s advantages are not actually advantages in my practical reality.
2. NixOS being such a niche distro makes it _such a pain_ to use random binaries from not-yet-packaged software, which I do often enough.
3. Also, the Nix packages I use are sometimes a bit broken. That also happens in Debian, but I don’t know enough Nix to fix stuff myself.
Beware: I’m a Debian Developer, so my view is obviously biased. That said, I think the trouble I had is representative for trouble other people might have with NixOS. In total, I used it for about half a year, I think.
For what I use it for (light web dev) it is the same or better than OS X.
The only thing stopping me from throwing out OS X completely are the Adobe apps (InDesign in particular) but even with that I have switched to doing most of 90% of my work on paper or in a text file then only complete layouts in OS X.
Can we stop using the term "clean" to describe interfaces? Clean doesn't really mean anything in design and also is a one sided term without an opposite term that is not disparaging. Are all other interfaces that are not clean, dirty? Or unsanitary? Or cluttered? It becomes and absolute term like beautiful or professional which are all really just fluff terms for "good".
It actually conveys pretty well that the interface is uncluttered and with a minimal aesthetic, with lots of space, etc.
>Are all other interfaces that are not clean, dirty? Or unsanitary? Or cluttered?
Obviously cluttered.
Don't really understand the objection. "Clean" has been part of UI vocabulary, and before that, of aesthetic criticism (in fine arts, architecture, industrial design, etc) for ages. ("Clean lines", etc).
What do people want? A bunch of ports that not everyone needs or wants to waste space when I could have more multipurpose USB-C ports?
Got USB-A mice and keyboards? Ok, buy a docking station or USB-C to USB-A hub and never think about it again. Got a mouse you like to carry around that isn't wireless? Pickup a small adapter[1] to get you through the transition. The only thing I can think of is ethernet but again, not everyone is going to use that. I do want ethernet, but the USB-C Thunderbolt adapter is fine. It certainly isn't the only laptop going without ethernet today. Again, why waste a port when you can have these reversible universal ports. Miss MagSafe[2]?
Either way, the complaints about the ports don't hold much water once properly researched and the change is inevitable. The reason I passed on the new MBP15 is the 24% reduction in battery capacity from 2015[3].
I needed a new machine so I bought an Acer Chromebook[4] to tide me over until Apple gets a form-fitting large capacity battery[5] in the MBPs. My configuration is $3000 and I'm just not going to spend that sort of money unless it's near-perfect. I may build a PC and remote into it as per the article until the next MBP once again matches its high price but I won't hand them 3K for a battery that's 3/4th the size of the 2015 model (66% capacity for the 13").
[0]https://youtu.be/JirCwapScUs?t=4m18s
[1]http://a.co/4zD6Jt3
[2]http://a.co/4WDmyeT
[3]http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/12/explaining-the-battery-...
[4]https://www.acer.com/ac/en/CA/content/model/NX.GJEAA.002
[5]http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/20/14024322/macbook-pro-batt...
What most people seem to want other than ethernet is a HDMI cable (or port) and something like this[2] will work direct from a new MBP. When I was going to buy one, I was going to grab one of those just to keep in my bag.
[0]http://a.co/51jXxNK
[1]http://a.co/8FGPfnM
[2]http://a.co/ekyPXpD
Why you wouldn't just throw in a legacy USB jack though is really odd. You can do anything with an adapter, but I just want to jam that old thumbdrive right in, without adapters or docking stations. I'd certainly give up a type-c port (if there are several) for a legacy usb port just to be able to do that.
The bottom line is that Linux tends to have better hardware support, especially for laptop hardware and power management.
When you run into problems, you'll usually have a much easier time finding vendor support or online community help for a Linux distribution than for FreeBSD.
Under the hood, FreeBSD is a lot simpler than Linux, and a lot of people like it for that reason. But if you want a generic Gnome/KDE/tiling WM/etc. desktop experience, and you don't need any BSD-specific features, I think Linux is the way to go. After all, we are talking about a replacement for MacOS here, which is pretty well integrated with the hardware and does not require a lot of tinkering to get working.
I've been playing around with various BSDs over the past couple of years, and I really want to like any of them enough to keep installed, but this is exactly the issue I've run into with freebsd and it's derivatives. On both my last laptop and the current one, I can get everything working to a fairly reasonable state, but there are minor but annoying hardware issues I just don't have to deal with in Linux.
In my most recent attempt (installing TrueOS on my spare SSD), some apps occasionally crash when I use the Intel video driver, so I'm forced to use scfb, which is a bit slower and doesn't render fonts as nicely. Additionally, the wifi tends to be a bit slower; I average around 4-5 MB (not Mb) down on Linux, but top out around 2 MB on TrueOS. I also have to use Firefox instead of Chromium on FreeBSD and its derivatives, as there always seem to be some bugs in the FreeBSD port; right now, it renders some bizarrely-shaped section of the window in a deep shade of yellow covering part of the URL bar and the top of the page, and signing in to Google to sync my extensions and history hasn't worked for like 10 major versions of Chromium.
I really like DragonflyBSD; it works a bit better for me out of the box than FreeBSD (I don't need to configure to not have the fan running at full blast all the time, and I've strangely had fewer issues with Chromium despite it using the same ports tree as FreeBSD with some custom patches), but I've had issues running any display manager other than Slim, and even that hasn't worked that well for me, as I've never been able to get the numlock and auto-login settings working (yes, I know, autologin is "insecure", but I always have FDE on my machines, so if someone can get past that, I don't think the login screen will stop them). Unfortunately I haven't been able to try it out lately; on my current laptop, BSDs weirdly seem to think that my screen resolution is 1024x768, and the only way I've found to fix that is by setting the GOP in EFI, which is not an option for DragonflyBSD currently. I've spent more time than I'm willing to admit trying to follow the manual EFI installation inductions I found on the DragonflyBSD mailing list; I think I got it to boot once, but apparently the snapshot I was using panicked when trying to load the specific wifi driver during startup (although I found out later it could load it fine after it was fully booted), and I've never gotten it to boot since, so I'm not convinced I wasn't mildly hallucinating or something. Every now and then the Dragonfly Digest will have some post talking about some new small step towards EFI support though, so I'm optimistic that someday soon I'll be able to boot it on my current laptop and discover a whole new set of reasons why I can't use it.
OpenBSD, on the other hand, works pretty great for me out of the box in terms of the GUI and hardware, but I'm not fond of the packaging system; I tend to like to have fairly recent versions of apps, so updates come a bit slowly compared to what I'm used to. Even worse, pkg_add is kind of horrifying to me compared to what you get on FreeBSD-based systems; for reasons I can't comprehend, it seems to query for updates individually for each package you have installed rather than first just getting a list of updated packages and then downloading the updates for the packages (if there are any). I'm unfortunately too spoiled to wait several minutes just to find out that there aren't actually any updates for my system.
I've never been able to get far into setting up NetBSD. A couple of years ago I got it installed but couldn't get Xorg to start up, and I've been unable to get the installer to boot on the most recent release; it prompts me to select the boot device from a number of options, ...
NetBSD also gave me a bizarre halt-the-world problem on installation the first few times ("Old BPB too big") until I skipped the first sector.
I figure this laptop is old enough if it isn't supported by now it won't ever be.
Everything on my hardware works (ThinkPad W530). The WWAN(3g) connection, Wifi, SD Card Reader, Power Management, multi monitor setup, external disk in the Modular Bay ...
Also having ZFS and ZFS Boot Environments on a system is great for updates/changes. You are literally bulletproof.
Some screens: http://vermaden.deviantart.com/art/CorporateBSD-FreeBSD-at-W... http://vermaden.deviantart.com/art/FreeBSD-10-3-Openbox-6356...
Regards, vermaden
The BSDs are great for very specific tasks, but I find more general use users will prefer Linux with GNU userland. It has wider hardware support and a larger community for resources such as documentation and troubleshooting.
In short the idea is that You create snapshot (BE) of the current system state (filesystems), then make changes/upgrades. If something went wrong, then You reboot to that snapshot (BE) like nothing had happened.
About GNU userland, I also use SOME GNU tools like 'gls' (GNU ls) or 'gawk' (GNU awk). They are provided by the FreeBSD sysutils/coreutils package/port, I also use sysutils/moreutils like 'vipe' or 'vidir'.
The documentation part on FreeBSD is much better then on Linux, check the Handbook, or Wiki, or FAQ, or plain old MAN PAGES with useful examples. I sometimes read/use ARCH Linux wiki or Gentoo WIKI but for most of the time FreeBSD documentation is second to none. Even with a lot less people then Linux has.
BTW, while there are a lot more Linux people out there then BSD people, remember that Linux people are fragmented over about thousand Linux distributions while there are only several BSD distributions.
I do not want to sound 'bad' here but I also found many times that 'BSD people' known more about Linux then 'Linux people' if You know that I mean.
Regards, vermaden
And I do mean Server as X Windows switches the common usage of client and sever.
Granted, I feel the exact same way about macOS (with slightly less concern about malware, to be sure).
Whether or not that is acceptable for your use cases depends. For me, I already have a Surface Pro 3 for ultra portable needs. Because of that, I found myself never using my Macbook Pro when I couldn't plug it in. And given how slowly cpus are gaining in performance these days, if plausible, it makes more sense to me to focus on performance over battery & weight.
I prefer the mac but apple seems to be really working hard to blow it.