The site is down, but we're talking hardware here right? If it can't run MacOS natively, what's the point? I'm not buying Apple stuff necessarily because of the nice form factor, I'm buying it for Unix environment that doesn't suck.
I agree, it’s not fair to say it sucks. However, there is something to be said for having a Unix-based OS without having to sacrifice first-party apps. While Ubuntu and some other flavors have certainly gotten increased support from big players over the years (like Steam), for lots of people there’s still no substitute for the immediately available first party apps on Windows and macOS.
It does when it doesn't run the software I need it to run. Specifically Capture One, and Unibox. Both vital to the work I do. The rest of the dev tools work under Linux, I will give you that. But the MacOS desktop experience is infinitely more polished. It's basically what Linux on desktop wishes it could have been for the last twenty years.
I'm curious, for what reasons do you prefer Ubuntu over Debian? Now that Ubuntu dropped Unity and began defaulting to GNOME 3 it's even closer to Debian.
The things they change from Debian are usually things I disapprove of, such as communicating with proprietary services. I think it also tracks user analytics by default, unlike Debian which shows you a modal during installation asking for permission to regularly keep track of your installed packages; and they set the default value to "disabled".
To me, operating systems are a total commodity. Not because they don't matter, but because they're all really good now. But what matters a lot to me is really good hardware (trackpad, display, and build quality), and most importantly the integration between the hardware and the OS. This is why Apple wins, Linux loses, and Windows is in between (but much closer to Apple on the high end). That's the exact scale of how much investment each OS puts into integration with the laptop hardware it runs on. Notably, this is why I don't care at all what OS runs on my workstation: really good integration with a trackpad and display is unnecessary.
Windows has plenty of warts that I doubt WSL will resolve (can't delete open files, spectacular suicide if you use symlinks or junctions on system resources, different administrative abstractions and CLI tools, that sort of thing) but I might be willing to give it a spin if someone other than microsoft says nice things about it.
If you only want a Unix environment then it's overkill because you do have to deal with Windows and pay some perf / usability penalties. But as the place to do my unix-y things in a computer otherwise setup to run games and big software packages (Unity, Maya, etc) it is great and keeps improving.
For the (relatively common) use case of managing a mixed Windows and Linux server environment, the winning strategy these days seems to be to run your preferred Linux flavor inside a VM on a Windows host. In this scenario, WSL has been very useful for situations where I just don't want to fart around with the full VM. Now that Windows does SSH natively, I don't really have much need for it anymore.
I use it daily for all of my development work (Ocaml, Python, LaTeX, vim, emacs, and a host of other tools, including X11 apps). It is the single biggest reason I was able to ditch my 2017 MacBook Pro a year ago for a Surface Book 2 after ~20 years of mac laptops and Lenovos running linux. I couldn't work with the terrible clacky keyboard they introduced - it didn't malfunction for me, I just loathed how it felt and sounded. Occasional friction when bouncing between apps on the Linux side and the Windows side sharing files, but as long as I work in /mnt/c/Users/USERNAME/ from the Linux side it isn't too bad.
I don't buy the "I've used OSX for so long I can't possibly adapt my workflow to Windows" argument. It took me a few days to get used to the new idioms, but it wasn't that bad. Then again, I've been pretty OS agnostic for my career - Irix, SunOS/Solaris, Linux, OSX, and now Windows+WSL. Other than the part of my career when I was doing systems research and had to care about OS-specific details (e.g., writing Linux kernel modules), I haven't really found it hard to adapt to new environments and be happily productive.
How does the performance feel? I've got a decent Lenovo, primarily running Linux. When I reboot to Windows (10, home came with), everything feels noticeably slower. I haven't tried dev stuff on Windows, but general UI, browsing and so on.
It can be sluggish at times (SB2 13”, maxed out specs), usually on boot when a bunch of background tasks are starting up. I haven’t run Linux on its own on this specific machine, so I don’t have a good comparison. It is tangibly slower than my 15” MBP 2017 when running some compute intensive tasks for work, but that is likely due to differences at the hardware level and not OS. I also have encountered some slowness at the filesystem level, which occasionally annoys me when I’m doing tasks that hit the FS very frequently.
It isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough that I don’t notice the warts too frequently. I’m not very fickle though: at this point in my career, I’ve come to the conclusion that all systems suck in their own special ways.
For what it's worth the aluminum unibody form factor for the macbook pro is its absolute most unique selling point for me.
It keeps the body light, rigid, and cool. No plastic vents to form cracks. No flex when I hold it from a corner. No sweaty palms from the warm plastic. No seams around the screen to collect dust.
Nothing I've seen comes close. If it wasn't a work machine I'd throw Ubuntu or Arch over it in a heartbeat. Mac OS isn't bad, it's just not close a good linux set up.
I use a mix of macOS and windows machines myself, and am doubtful that you're giving windows a fair assessment.
macOS is a unix, but it's not a linux. You probably will end up running in containers anyway, because it's just too different from your servers (e.g. provisioning scripts will not run correctly), and windows supports those containers just fine.
Even if you're not running in containers, you'll probably still be fine. I've been doing web dev for a while on windows and mac (node, php, java, ...) and haven't had major issues getting my workflows to carry over. The only thing that can cause problems are windows file path issues (or rather web app code assuming *nix paths), and for that there is WSL.
Another possible thing you may like about macOS is the unix command line, which is a fair argument, but between msys, wsl and powershell (which is equally powerful yet different) I don't miss anything myself. Again, the command line tools on the mac are subtly different from those on linux, so your shell scripts don't automatically carry over to the server. YMMV.
Finally we get to the UI. If you're hooked on mac-only software, ok fine. There are good alternatives though. For example, I switched from textmate to visual studio code so I could bounce between OS's. Otherwise I find it to be an even mix. Windows task view is similar to mission control. Windows does window docking better than the mac. The mac does system updates better than windows. Windows does gaming support better than the mac. The mac does consistent UI design better than windows. Windows has touch screens, the mac has better trackpads. It all balances out.
I like living on both sides of the fence. It makes me feel like I'm not locked into a platform.
I've used Windows my entire life, MacOS since 2008, Linux / Unix since 1998. I use all three daily, extensively. Mac is the easiest environment for me to manage work, and my life.
Surely this horse is being beaten in the grave by now... Windows is part of the problem, and that’s just one reason people choose Mac vs Windows. Everything else is subjective since PC hardware has been up to par for like a year now.
One thing I found about most laptops out there is Linux power management is not really great at least last time I tried. There is a perceivable difference in Windows power management and Linux unless the laptop is explicitly supported.
Power management seems to be poor on a fresh install of most distros, but all you have to do is install tlp to dramatically improve battery life. On 16.04 all I had to do was install it. I didn't have to configure anything (or even enable the service manually), and got dramatically better battery life than under Windows.
When I installed 18.04 on my XPS 15 I had an issue with power consumption being way too high even with tlp installed (13W on idle), but I used powerstat to investigate and found that runtime power management was not being enabled for my discrete GPU. The tlp defaults must have changed at some point between 16.04 and 18.04. So I set RUNTIME_PM_DRIVER_BLACKLIST="" in /etc/default/tlp and now get <4.5W on idle, which gives about 12 hours of battery.
I would prefer for it all to work perfectly without any configuration, of course, but then you have to accept ridiculously thin and overpriced hardware from Apple :)
The XPS looks thin and same-ish priced from here :)
Nevertheless, Apple continues to try to piss me off (keyboard gate anyone?) so I'd better keep informed:
Does the XPS on Linux go to sleep when you close the lid and wake up when you open it without incident? Network, sound etc continue to work without hassle?
Maybe that explicit support is what's working for me and my Thinkpad, which does have very good support for everything but the fingerprint reader. Windows seems to do worse for battery life.
I've been running Ubuntu 18.04 on my XPS 15 since release, and was running 16.04 for some time before that. Both work really well.
Other distros did not work well out of the box. Ubuntu seems to have the out-of-the-box experience nailed (although I had to install and adjust tlp to get good battery life - now it's much better than it was under Windows)
This is partially true, but I like many people would rather spend my time writing code and not tinkering to make my tools work better. The reason I use and iPhone and MacBook Pro is because I don’t have to tinker to make my battery last, etc.
Not true. Hardware is still a massive issue. How many 15" 16:10 (or better aspect ratio) PC laptops can you name?
I can name only ONE. The Ms surface book 2 which came like a year ago. Everything else has an unusable 16:9 screen. I bought the MBP retina 2015 just for the nice 16:10 screen.
tl;dr: The Dell XPS 15. And yes, he's running Windows 10 on it.
Like probably a lot of other people, I buy Macs because they run macOS, and not because the hardware is great. (Although most of the time, the hardware is also great.)
There are some of us who buy Apple products largely for the form factor and build quality. This hasn't been as much of a problem over the last 6-8 years as industrial design and build quality from other vendors has improved drastically but just know, we do exist.
I buy them almost entirely for the trackpad and the drivers that make it work so well. Never found a non-Apple machine that comes close despite trying to actively optimize for that single feature.
As others have said, Windows is the issue with windows computers.
OSX has plenty of flaws, but it (generally) stays out of your way, is a less hostile development environment, and is compatible with all the things you need. I feel like the Linux folks are attacking this problem by trying to create distros that are easier and easier to use, which is great, but it doesn't solve the compatibility piece, which is this weird chicken and egg thing (consumers still don't want to figure out how to use Wine). Luckily, gaming seems to be making progress here?
Maybe someone could make it so that, out of the box, when you double click an .exe for which PlayOnLinux has a Wine install script, it's automatically used. And if not try to just launch it with Wine and hope for the best. Obviously, the hard part of this would be improving Wine and PlayOnLinux further to the point where that works reliably.
I’d pay for a laptop without a webcam. Before smartphones a laptop with a webcam was nice, but I find whenever I’m video calling someone nowadays it’s through my phone.
Take the webcams out of laptops and you can have a thin bezel without awkward webcam placement.
So much this. Apple should make this the next thing to get removed.
Realistically, how many people shell out for a MacBook but don't have the (usually much cheaper) iPhone or iPad? I don't need forward-facing cameras on all my devices.
I haven't added a webcam to my desktop builds in, I don't know, 10 years? Don't need it on my laptop either.
I've been tempted by Mac partly because of the beautiful display partly because I'm tired of fiddling around to get various Linux bits to work exactly as I want. I'd have to give up some of my customization, but controlling the hardware and software should make it seamless.
Current problem: My ThinkPad docking station has a GPU multiplexer that prevents it from being able to drive two external monitors. Doesn't look like there's a solution at all.
The solution I've ended up on is a HP 13 G1 Chromebook. 95% of what I need to do at home I can do there or SSHed in to my AWS machine: OpenVPN to work, SSH to work, all the stuff in the browser.
My requirements at home are fairly minimal these days. To the point that I just have a base Ubuntu 18.04 install on the ThinkPad with OpenVPN set up and some keys.
This has been an ongoing experiment and it honestly is working out amazingly. This is very good hardware, great display (3200x1800), no worries about the software. It was $500 refurb, and I've been very happy with it. Around the same time I got an Acer for around $250 and the hardware was nowhere near as good.
Depending on what you need to do with it, a Chromebook might do the job.
> Current problem: My ThinkPad docking station has a GPU multiplexer that prevents it from being able to drive two external monitors. Doesn't look like there's a solution at all.
Which ThinkPad do/did you have?
I'm not a ThinkPad fan, but a lot of my co-workers have ThinkPad X1s with a docking station and are able to drive two external monitors plus the built-in display. Most use Windows, some use Linux, all seem to work fine.
I'm using a 2017 15" MacBook Pro and am able to drive two external monitors plus the built-in display as well. This requires a couple of adapters, but I've got it down to one thing that needs to be plugged in. It's very flaky though.
Honestly, the ThinkPads my co-workers use do this a lot better than the MBP does.
Have they finally gotten rid of the persistent coil whine that plagued at least 4 generations of XPS laptops? Because that is number 1 reason why I would never recommend an XPS to anyone, if Dell can't get such a basic thing right.
I have (the now older) XPS 13 with Ubuntu 18.04 and it's awesome. The infamous coil whines were a bit of a bummer but since upgrading (from 17.10) to 18.04, I haven't heard it again ...
I've been living on a high end Dell XPS laptop for several months, and it's just simply not as good as my 2014 MBP in most ways. The Dell screen is exceptional and the keyboard is pretty ok, but I have never used a trackpad as good as on the Mac.
Then when you talk about Windows vs MacOS, I could write a huge long list of reasons life (my life) is so much more productive and less sucky on the Mac.
I think the people that prefer PCs are people using just one or two programs that happen to work well there (or games). But try a wide variety of activities and you find so many little rough edges and missing features/integrations compared to MacOS.
Then if you're a developer targeting Linux for production, there's just no question that your life will be less painful if you're developing in MacOS compared to Windows. I have gotten most things to work eventually in Windows, but it will often be the last platform supported by a given language or set of dev tools. WSL is much better than nothing, but it's not a complete answer (yet... ever...?)
Macs are OK standalone machines, I guess, but client-side caching plus roaming profiles and folder redirection are _the_ killer Windows features for me. The macOS UX for mobile users just isn't as good, and there isn't anything even close to equivalent on FreeBSD/Linux. Now, if only more Windows apps would stop putting caches and temp files in %APPDATA% or installing stuff in %USERPROFILE%... that's what %LOCALAPPDATA% is for! (Firefox, Factorio, npm, maven---I'm talking about you, among many others.)
I'm tired of playing "Will I get to do what I want, or will I spend 40 minutes waiting for Windows Update." I'm tired of "Windows Antimalware FooBarBaz" chewing up 80% of my CPU and spinning my fans up. etc.
I use OS X because it mostly works and mostly stays the hell out of my way.
This is what the Linux Desktop folks never got. I don't want <jazz hands> SNAZZY </jazz hands>. I want mostly works and mostly stays the hell out of my way.
Unfortunately, coding that is a lot of not very fun hard work.
FWIW, my 2.8 ghz 2017 MacBook Pro 15" also has an i7-7700HQ[1], so Owen's (still valid) performance argument boils down to the 32GB memory, the GTX 1050 GPU, and probably the performance pluses of running Windows 10.
I wager the MBP probably has a slightly faster SSD (but macOS and APFS's performance penalties may nullify this hardware advantage).
If your use case does not need this level of performance, adjust your perspective accordingly.
[1] Yeah, yeah, Dell will almost certainly beat Apple to market on Coffee Lake processors. In fact, they're most likely already available in the XPS 15 line.
The i7's in 15" macbooks are only quad-core, and while they can "boost" up to 3.9Ghz, the thermals of the laptop can't sustain that for long before dropping down to 2.9Ghz
Meanwhile, the XPS has 6-core (Coffee Lake), and can sustain 4.1Ghz indefinitely.
I came for MacOS, but the trackpad/scrolling is what prevents me from being able to use any other laptop. The scroll on MacOS is just so much more fluid than any other OS, any time I use a different operating system I feel like I added a 30fps cap or something... So choppy.
You can get very usable machines quite for cheap in the used market, and basically use a dedicated machine for a task, without compromising on the workflow or going against the grain. Like having a Thinkpad just for Vim or CLI stuff, a Mac for A/V and graphic design, and a Windows machine for everything 3d.
Owning and using three laptops sounds crazy, especially if you travel a lot, but you could still launch Chrome on a Thinkpad and do most of the stuff that falls outside of your main task, you could get away with just carrying one for a trip!
Why wait for the holy grail if you could just treat your laptops as dedicated hardware appliances optimized for each task?
I use an Inspiron Dell with similar specs, but it costs something like 1k vs probably 2k for xps. Only thing it's missing is touch screen and it's thicker which I don't care about.
Never really got the appeal of xps over same specced Inspiron, don't see anything worth paying around twice the price for.
78 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadI'm genuinely curious what you use your computer for - what kind of work, or if for entertainment etc..
To be fair, that's true of MacOS and Windows too, but Ubuntu makes it easiest to try / think it might be a good idea.
The things they change from Debian are usually things I disapprove of, such as communicating with proprietary services. I think it also tracks user analytics by default, unlike Debian which shows you a modal during installation asking for permission to regularly keep track of your installed packages; and they set the default value to "disabled".
It's available in Google's cache.[1]
[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
Windows has plenty of warts that I doubt WSL will resolve (can't delete open files, spectacular suicide if you use symlinks or junctions on system resources, different administrative abstractions and CLI tools, that sort of thing) but I might be willing to give it a spin if someone other than microsoft says nice things about it.
I don't buy the "I've used OSX for so long I can't possibly adapt my workflow to Windows" argument. It took me a few days to get used to the new idioms, but it wasn't that bad. Then again, I've been pretty OS agnostic for my career - Irix, SunOS/Solaris, Linux, OSX, and now Windows+WSL. Other than the part of my career when I was doing systems research and had to care about OS-specific details (e.g., writing Linux kernel modules), I haven't really found it hard to adapt to new environments and be happily productive.
It isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough that I don’t notice the warts too frequently. I’m not very fickle though: at this point in my career, I’ve come to the conclusion that all systems suck in their own special ways.
It keeps the body light, rigid, and cool. No plastic vents to form cracks. No flex when I hold it from a corner. No sweaty palms from the warm plastic. No seams around the screen to collect dust.
Nothing I've seen comes close. If it wasn't a work machine I'd throw Ubuntu or Arch over it in a heartbeat. Mac OS isn't bad, it's just not close a good linux set up.
macOS is a unix, but it's not a linux. You probably will end up running in containers anyway, because it's just too different from your servers (e.g. provisioning scripts will not run correctly), and windows supports those containers just fine.
Even if you're not running in containers, you'll probably still be fine. I've been doing web dev for a while on windows and mac (node, php, java, ...) and haven't had major issues getting my workflows to carry over. The only thing that can cause problems are windows file path issues (or rather web app code assuming *nix paths), and for that there is WSL.
Another possible thing you may like about macOS is the unix command line, which is a fair argument, but between msys, wsl and powershell (which is equally powerful yet different) I don't miss anything myself. Again, the command line tools on the mac are subtly different from those on linux, so your shell scripts don't automatically carry over to the server. YMMV.
Finally we get to the UI. If you're hooked on mac-only software, ok fine. There are good alternatives though. For example, I switched from textmate to visual studio code so I could bounce between OS's. Otherwise I find it to be an even mix. Windows task view is similar to mission control. Windows does window docking better than the mac. The mac does system updates better than windows. Windows does gaming support better than the mac. The mac does consistent UI design better than windows. Windows has touch screens, the mac has better trackpads. It all balances out.
I like living on both sides of the fence. It makes me feel like I'm not locked into a platform.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KDcITNl...
When I installed 18.04 on my XPS 15 I had an issue with power consumption being way too high even with tlp installed (13W on idle), but I used powerstat to investigate and found that runtime power management was not being enabled for my discrete GPU. The tlp defaults must have changed at some point between 16.04 and 18.04. So I set RUNTIME_PM_DRIVER_BLACKLIST="" in /etc/default/tlp and now get <4.5W on idle, which gives about 12 hours of battery.
I would prefer for it all to work perfectly without any configuration, of course, but then you have to accept ridiculously thin and overpriced hardware from Apple :)
Nevertheless, Apple continues to try to piss me off (keyboard gate anyone?) so I'd better keep informed:
Does the XPS on Linux go to sleep when you close the lid and wake up when you open it without incident? Network, sound etc continue to work without hassle?
Other distros did not work well out of the box. Ubuntu seems to have the out-of-the-box experience nailed (although I had to install and adjust tlp to get good battery life - now it's much better than it was under Windows)
I can name only ONE. The Ms surface book 2 which came like a year ago. Everything else has an unusable 16:9 screen. I bought the MBP retina 2015 just for the nice 16:10 screen.
Is it really a hardware issue though? Seems more like a MacOS vs Windows problem.
Like probably a lot of other people, I buy Macs because they run macOS, and not because the hardware is great. (Although most of the time, the hardware is also great.)
Install Linux or similarly mature desktop distro.
Done.
It's not that hard.
Me, I'm perfectly OK with 12.5" at 1366x768, because anything that requires more will be done on my 27" monitor anyway.
OSX has plenty of flaws, but it (generally) stays out of your way, is a less hostile development environment, and is compatible with all the things you need. I feel like the Linux folks are attacking this problem by trying to create distros that are easier and easier to use, which is great, but it doesn't solve the compatibility piece, which is this weird chicken and egg thing (consumers still don't want to figure out how to use Wine). Luckily, gaming seems to be making progress here?
Take the webcams out of laptops and you can have a thin bezel without awkward webcam placement.
Realistically, how many people shell out for a MacBook but don't have the (usually much cheaper) iPhone or iPad? I don't need forward-facing cameras on all my devices.
I haven't added a webcam to my desktop builds in, I don't know, 10 years? Don't need it on my laptop either.
Current problem: My ThinkPad docking station has a GPU multiplexer that prevents it from being able to drive two external monitors. Doesn't look like there's a solution at all.
The solution I've ended up on is a HP 13 G1 Chromebook. 95% of what I need to do at home I can do there or SSHed in to my AWS machine: OpenVPN to work, SSH to work, all the stuff in the browser.
My requirements at home are fairly minimal these days. To the point that I just have a base Ubuntu 18.04 install on the ThinkPad with OpenVPN set up and some keys.
This has been an ongoing experiment and it honestly is working out amazingly. This is very good hardware, great display (3200x1800), no worries about the software. It was $500 refurb, and I've been very happy with it. Around the same time I got an Acer for around $250 and the hardware was nowhere near as good.
Depending on what you need to do with it, a Chromebook might do the job.
Which ThinkPad do/did you have?
I'm not a ThinkPad fan, but a lot of my co-workers have ThinkPad X1s with a docking station and are able to drive two external monitors plus the built-in display. Most use Windows, some use Linux, all seem to work fine.
I'm using a 2017 15" MacBook Pro and am able to drive two external monitors plus the built-in display as well. This requires a couple of adapters, but I've got it down to one thing that needs to be plugged in. It's very flaky though.
Honestly, the ThinkPads my co-workers use do this a lot better than the MBP does.
Then when you talk about Windows vs MacOS, I could write a huge long list of reasons life (my life) is so much more productive and less sucky on the Mac.
I think the people that prefer PCs are people using just one or two programs that happen to work well there (or games). But try a wide variety of activities and you find so many little rough edges and missing features/integrations compared to MacOS.
Then if you're a developer targeting Linux for production, there's just no question that your life will be less painful if you're developing in MacOS compared to Windows. I have gotten most things to work eventually in Windows, but it will often be the last platform supported by a given language or set of dev tools. WSL is much better than nothing, but it's not a complete answer (yet... ever...?)
On the other hand, for daily use, Windows 7 was snappier and less in my way than win10 is. Some changes really feel like steps backward.
I'm tired of playing "Will I get to do what I want, or will I spend 40 minutes waiting for Windows Update." I'm tired of "Windows Antimalware FooBarBaz" chewing up 80% of my CPU and spinning my fans up. etc.
I use OS X because it mostly works and mostly stays the hell out of my way.
This is what the Linux Desktop folks never got. I don't want <jazz hands> SNAZZY </jazz hands>. I want mostly works and mostly stays the hell out of my way.
Unfortunately, coding that is a lot of not very fun hard work.
I wager the MBP probably has a slightly faster SSD (but macOS and APFS's performance penalties may nullify this hardware advantage).
If your use case does not need this level of performance, adjust your perspective accordingly.
[1] Yeah, yeah, Dell will almost certainly beat Apple to market on Coffee Lake processors. In fact, they're most likely already available in the XPS 15 line.
Meanwhile, the XPS has 6-core (Coffee Lake), and can sustain 4.1Ghz indefinitely.
It's a very noticeable difference.
http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8750H-vs-...
Owning and using three laptops sounds crazy, especially if you travel a lot, but you could still launch Chrome on a Thinkpad and do most of the stuff that falls outside of your main task, you could get away with just carrying one for a trip!
Why wait for the holy grail if you could just treat your laptops as dedicated hardware appliances optimized for each task?
Never really got the appeal of xps over same specced Inspiron, don't see anything worth paying around twice the price for.
At the very end the author says that linux is supported. So why did he choose Windows? Suspect.