It's more than being about what kernel our devices run. Android devices are Linux too, but we don't go around saying it's an era of the Linux Handheld. It is, sort of, but the "Linux Desktop" implies a wider free & open source stack of interlinked technologies, multiple disjointed entities working in different places but building towards some kind of intertwingularity. You can not get that endless-frontier expanding-ecosystem boon from a fixed monolithic consumer technology like Chromebook.
> Android devices are Linux too, but we don't go around saying it's an era of the Linux Handheld. It is, sort of, but the "Linux Desktop" implies a wider free & open source stack of interlinked technologies...
Or, you just can say that by "Linux" we actually mean GNU/Linux.
Except the sales numbers for Chromebooks are nuts at least in the education sector I'm in, linux on desktop is basically no where there (so far). Will be interesting if that changes. So there is some kind of boom happening even in these more locked down systems.
Indeed. It does seem like chromebooks are likely to be a great wonderful inroads to Linux, & overall a quite good experience at that. There's a lot to be hopeful here, & it definitely raises awareness.
I'm still not super enthused about a Linux where only one entity drives forward the overall desktop experience. Sure many distos historically have one desktop environment that they prefer, but it's almist always a) a generally compliant piece of the freedesktop standards environment and b) easy to switch out if you want.
If you had asked me a couple years ago, I would have recoiled & wretched at Chromebooks, seen them as another invading conquering anti-libre anti-Linux Desktop anti-option. For the moment, it seems we are much much better able to live in peace & coexist. Originally Chromebooks, like Android, used their own proprietary rendering stack, which was a huge immediate clear & present danger, that Chromebooks had no interest in working with anything or anyone else. These days, Chromebooks run the standard Wayland display server, & crouton/crosstini both seem like fairly good tooling to compute with. Wonderful on-ramps to have.
The obvious "not with the program" schism between Chromebooks & 99.99% of Linux gui based PCs is that Chromebooks, to my knowledge, make no attempt to be Freedesktop compliant system[1], nor do they permit choice of UI.
It's much better than Android. Crosstini & Crouton do wonders to carve a good Linux environment out. Overall I'm for the most part fairly happy. It uses the Wayland display server now, which is fantastic. It's a good product & a pretty decent Linux.
But it's still not "the Linux Desktop" in any way anyone from the past would have recognized, & it stands apart from all the other Linux desktops, which stand together, even in their quite sizable differences. Some of the malleability & libre-ness is missing. That's ok! It's still great. But still like a 10x better version of WSL, & not entirely like a Linux Desktop, as how Linux users would recognize.
In my opinion: generally speaking, not yet! But of course, you are making your switch in 2021 which is great.
I have tried every year and always end up going back to either Windows or MacOS. However, I'm fed up with Windows now, so I've invested in MacOS for now. I'm saying this from my i7 MacBook Pro 2018 with fans blazing because HN on Safari can be demanding.
I'd take a look at your process monitor I'm on a 2019 MacBook Pro 13 with 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 and I barely ever have the fans kick on. Normally when something like that happens to me it tends to be me choking out the ram and causing the cpu to compress and uncompress RAM more than is reasonable.
> with fans blazing because HN on Safari can be demanding.
You've got to be joking?! I have a MacBook Air from 2020, which should still be less powerful than a MacBook Pro from 2018 and even on huge websites full of crap the fans won't kick in, let alone on HN which is the lightest website I frequent often.
The only time I hear the fan is when I compile a large project on my IDE or when the IDE re-indexes the JRE!
My workflow works great for me, I have no trouble finding tabs. I have multiple windows, tab groups, and extensions like TabSorter, The Great Suspender, Alfred Tab Search, and others to manage my tabs as a queue of things I want to read / get back to. I use Pocket as well, but that's for my queue of things I've already read that I want to archive, not things I want to read in the future.
I process a high volume of tabs but I keep it super organized, just like my filesystem and email.
Because of the way browsers work, it's a bad idea to keep that many tabs open. Most browsers consider each tab as its own process, and each tab consumes lots of memory... they really don't optimise for 100s of tabs open at a time.
I understand you got used to that, but really, there's no reason to keep that many tabs open.
That's only true if you don't suspend your tabs. I suspend 90% of the background tabs so they use almost no CPU and MEM while suspended. It works great on my i9 machine, I have plenty of processing power to spare, and I love being able to visually see the state of my reading queue without manually managing bookmarks.
I think this is going to be a tougher sell for laptops as the M1 chip seems to be a game changer for battery life and performance. Once the majority of software gets native ARM support, it will only get better, not to mention this is only the first iteration of a desktop class Apple Silicon. I do understand from a philosophical point of view why people may not want to use MacOS, particularly after last weeks code signing fiasco.
Agreed, it is quite pathetic that the entire rest of the world is getting taken to school by one chip.
I hate to fall back on the "good enough" argument, it's absolutely pathetic that we're here, but PCs are, generally, good enough. Battery life and performance are both pretty stellar in ultrabooks. I'm looking forward to larger & larger tablets becoming a thing, with Apple again alas having to lead the charge there too by introducing 12 inch tablets, which thankfully, others are doing.
In general, a fixed closed ecosystem can advance wonderfully, especially fueled with a multi-trillion dollar market capitalization. But a lot of people are betting on literally everyone else on the planet, to suss & finagle better ways forward, organically, over time, with hopefully building inertia, and I think, maybe not for this decade but some decade, those bets on everyone are good bets.
It's the issue endemic to existing ARM laptop offering: in the best cases, either the performances are lackluster and the battery life is good, or the performances are terrible and the battery life is great. Sure the pinebook is super cheap, but the performances are bad and it gets 6-8h battery.
The real problem is the driver situation for the GPU on ARM. If we could have more mainline supports, the Desktop Linux ARM ecosystem would be a lot better.
We don't yet know what the M1 can do with a higher power budget in desktop form. Very surprising though to see they can generate some reasonable seeming performance especially with native apps.
Docker performance on current Intel Macs is much worse than Linux. So if you're building software to run on an x86 Linux server, dealing with ARM-based MacOS is going to be even a bigger PITA: as both the arch and the OS will be different. I am definitely in the camp of replicating server setups on my laptops, so as sweet and incredible as M1 is, I won't be able to use it.
But for new projects, I honestly do not know what will people do.
If Amazon continues to evolve their Graviton chips, and other cloud providers follow, it will be quite tempting to try a 100% ARM setup...
> Becuase macosx containers run inside a Linux VM, not on the native host OS
My comment was sarcastic.
> same with Windows
Significantly less so as Microsoft themselves provide the virtualisation glue, with a custom kernel and a dedicated / special-cased VM, in the form of WSL2.
The trackpad is still a dealbreaker for me. Nothing I have tried so far comes close to the trackpad on a macbook with the sensitivity turned up to max.
I agree... switched from a Dell XPS13 that came from factory with Linux to a MacBook Air, and it's been a huge upgrade for me :D despite the fact that on paper, the XPS13 should be a lot more powerful. Every laptop I ever bought that wasn't from Apple (besides Dell, tried Sony, Toshiba and Lenovo - Lenovo was close but still comes short) has been a disappointment.
The saddening thing to me is how low on this list of voted improvements "Better tuned acceleration curve" is.
I don't use touchpads, I use mice. That instantly "solves" the first couple problems: I don't need multitouch gestures, and I don't need touchpad palm detection.
I understand that from these results I must be in the minority. But man it would be great to have better tuned acceleration curves.
Apple's mouse/trackpad/touch drivers are out of this world. Anecdotally as someone who collects laptops - you can't beat them. There's polish there that doesn't exist on any other solution on the market!
I recently made the jump from a macbook to a thinkpad with linux ubuntu. For gestures - Fusuma (https://github.com/iberianpig/fusuma) is pretty stable and feels almost entirely like a native macbook
+1. I have been able to cope with just about every other part of the Linux desktop experience, but the pointer sensitivity is atrocious. I wouldn't make a big deal of it but it's so obvious every time I do anything in a GUI. I've tried trackpad and corded mice and they're all the same:
When I turn the sensitivity down low, it caps the max "flick" speed to be sluggish. When I turn the sensitivity up high, even tiny delicate mouse movements lurch my pointer halfway across the screen.
More than anything else, I want a mouse acceleration curve that works like macOS or Windows. Both those operating systems come out of the box good defaults and good configurability. Linux has neither.
Linux people don't want you to "not use Linux", they want you to see that wearing a burlap sack is good for your soul, then you'll embrace it wholeheartedly on their terms. The computing world is as tribal as the USA's Red/Blue[1] arrangement, but the origins of the tribes and the polarisation of opinions are as if perfectly tuned to avoid Linux on the Desktop.
The people who like Linux for its customizability and modularity see user friendliness as removing options, and prefer the side of more difficult but more configurable. Or wouldn't object to friendliness if there was zero cost, but have no personal need for it and so no interest in supporting it or developing it, or don't believe that's possible. Some crossover here with a certain kind of neuro-atypical who sees a BNF grammar dump as a user friendly help message, and believes Linux already is user friendly.
Two of the more vocal sub-tribes are the complexity fetishists and the 37337 hax0r / V for Vendetta user. One takes their sense of self and identity from being visibly clever and able to use Linux and sees people who cannot as inferior morons, the other takes theirs from the counter-culture and sees people who don't use it as pathetic sheep normies. Both vehemently object to the "dumbing down" or "commercialisation" aspects and the accompanying loss of self identity. If anyone can use it, using it isn't a sign of being clever or special; normalising it so your mom could use it would be like making 4chan friendly so your mom could use it, or McDonalds opening a Burning Man stall, or getting Linus Torvalds to tone down his communication style, totally embarassing and unthinkable. Taking away what both groups like about it. Overlaps a lot with the "if it was easier to use, I wouldn't get paid as much to use it, and I'd have to work with morons because only morons like easy to use things" sysadmin sub-tribe.
The anti-Microsoft user is another vocal subtype, whose sole reason for decision making is the polar opposite of whatever Microsoft would do. Ease of use is not bad per-se, it's bad because Microsoft claims to value it. NO progress vectors that lead towards Microsoft are allowed, except (curiously) slavishly making cargo-cult copies of surface level Windows dressing hoping to entice the mysterious "users" to come. When they are freed from Microsoft (or Apple), surely they will see the light, accept mud huts and rejoice.
The Stylites[2] are principled idealists, if Linus Torvalds can have no interest in GUI distributions, or Richard Stallman can use a Holy text-only system for years, that's what we should aspire to. Ease of use is a sinful temptation towards vice. Say three Hail Mary's, your mantra is "but POSIX" and "The UNIX way". Minimailists join here, change your mantra to "Ed is the standard editor".
The least controversial is the pragmatic open source developer, in Mac world they can charge money for small utilities and do and make them nice to use, in Windows world some charge and some are free, in Linux world they can't charge and ease of use and documentation take more effort and time, and nobody is paying for that, so ease is often left as an afterthought.
And people who value free-as-in-beer who will put up with anything if it saves a buck, they're already running Linux on hardware they got from eBay, or Windows because it came with their computer, and have no other requirements. Nice would be nice, as long as the 3D effects runs fast on an S3 Virge DX and don't cost money. Also covers people who can't afford alternatives who also live by "Nice would be nice, as long as the 3D effects runs fast on an S3 Virge DX and don't cost money" but for different reasons. Also covers the majority business use - I'm not paying for (a webserver, a database, a fileserver, an IDE, a compiler, etc (but I will pay Oracle licensing)).
That, or maybe they're just helpfully pointing out the advantages of keyboard navigation to their fellow users. I'm about to hit Tab-Return to post this.
Individually, maybe yes. Collectively there's a huge difference whether that kind of communication spreads en masse from Linux land as:
- I love to learn lots of ways to do things, btw here's a keyboard way to do what you want, isn't this abundance of choice thrilling, wooo wooo!
- I commisserate with your difficulty comrade, if we're both stuck with using this for reasons we cannot change, here's a pragmatic workaround that might help stave off your desire for vodka another few minutes.
- Stop wanting good trackpad drivers what are you, a loser normie or a girl? Keyboard is the One True Way for smart people(tm), here's a mystery button mash combination to show how smart I am, get with the program and memorise it, there's lots more arbitrary memorisation and gatekeeping where that came from.
- Trackpad drivers, what do you think this is - a house of pleasure and sin?! This is a machine for work and plain and simple tools for cleansing the soul. Let me help you find enlightenment through key combination meditations.
I feel like Ubuntu has literally been the user friendly Linux desktop OS for ages now. I don’t really know what all else competes w/ it because in my view nothing has really toppled it since its introduction.
Pop_OS! is impressive, as is elementaryOS but Ubuntu tends to be their & many others base.
Linux distros need to think in layers in regards to users & either ramp up or ramp down the level of complexity better. This idea of one size fits all is dumb, make some difficult decisions & create an OS that caters to at least 2 or 3 different type of users & I think Linux distros could compete a lot easier.
Instead we waste our time talking of merits of one approach vs another. We can walk & chew gum at the same time, it’s not about the approach as much as just recognizing where people are at & meeting them there.
It's a very different approach, but for picking I really like keynav. That said, it's poor for dragging, and garbage for expressing relative motion or tracing out paths (although defining that in terms of control points for a curve could be neat...)
I got into Linux when I was younger because I thought it was cool, and I had plenty of time to fix it when things broke. It's been my daily driver for ~10 years now. But there's quite a bit too learn. If I were to try and switch from Windows or Mac today I'm not sure I'd succeed before giving up.
But I'm grateful every day to have a machine that I have some semblance of control over. I use a rolling release distro. I'm running a recent kernel and haven't done a major re-install in 5 years. During that entire time my computing experience has been incredibly stable. No huge UI changes. No forced system updates. Just a reliable tool I can use to get stuff done.
What I'm trying to communicate is, Linux desktop is usable, and it's worth pushing over the hump.
The thing is, in those ten years the hump's slowly been getting smaller and smaller, every time I reinstall or upgrade there's less and less work to do to get things up and running, to the point where it's not much different than getting a new windows install going.
Install some drivers
Install some apps
Configure things and set up my ui
There's a lot less forum hunting, obscure edge cases you run into, random things not working and all those other problems I remember.
Part of it is my experience at this point, but another large part is just the general improvement of the linux ecosystem over those years.
It really has improved drastically from my first days using it regularly in 2007-2008 or so.
I literally just had to manually debug kernel modules to upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 20.10 because of the breaking changes in proc and renaming "sem[aphore]" to "lock" in places.
So no. There is just as much forum hunting as ever.
Well, I can honestly say in the all the years I've been using linux i've never had to do that. I never said edge cases don't exist, just that they're less frequent.
I truly believe that the argument for switching to Linux has never been stronger. Windows has embedded bloatware, and Apple allows no control over your hardware. There's really no other option if you care about these things. (Full disclosure - I do own a Macbook for photography work, and use Bootcamp for gaming.)
Like you, my Linux installs have been incredibly stable for a long time, even with a rolling release distro which is often considered "unstable."
I use Linux at work, and while I struggle with a few tools others do not as regularly (e.g. video teleconferencing software isn't always optimized for Linux, but overall it works fine), I also don't encounter tons of errors they do. From Apple updates bricking machines, to obscure Bluetooth/Wifi issues that you can't fix, or having to run Docker in a VM, I'm pretty convinced I've got it better.
I have a 2014 Macbook Air that I'm about to replace the battery in. Once that thing goes I really think I'll have to head over to Linux. Mac quality has gone downhill.
When people start buying nice laptops just for Linux, the experience is a lot better. Most of the time, I've put Linux on scrap-heap computers which has always flavored my Ubuntu experience. Laptops with $300 Celerons with TN panels will always make Linux look subpar.
I replaced my MBP with a Dell XPS running Ubuntu. I had serious problems with the Killer wifi card but replaced it with an Intel one for $20. Otherwise everything worked perfectly.
Around the same time my Mac Pro refused to upgrade to the latest version of macOS because I had a RAID. I installed Ubuntu on that as well. I was a little worried because it has multiple monitors but that was handled really well and worked fine out of the box. I did the same for the family iMac. Haven’t looked back.
I've been using Linux for many years, and it's definitely better, but definitely not what I'd want to use seriously. My gaming desktop has a 20.04 drive which I occasionally use, and yet I still find myself dropping to a TTY occasionally to reboot the machine or restart gdm because it waking from sleep, or just plain crashes.
Also, I have 4k, 28" monitors which is just the size where 1x is comically small, and 2x is comically large. I've tried recent Gnome and KDE, and they just can't scale to look right, like what I can do in MacOS or even Windows.
If I couldn't use MacOS for work, I would give Windows 10 a serious consideration. The new WSL and Windows Terminal are very good. I did use WSL 1 for a few years at a previous job, and it was awful.
Really interestingly I've been using a Windows, a Linux and a MacOS machine for many months, swapping them often. Well, Windows/Linux are on the same Ryzen 2700X with a Geforce 1080Ti, the Mac is a 2018 Mini with 32G RAM and 6 core i5. 4k 32" display in each case.
What surprised me:
- Windows UI is WAY the fastest. Linux is the slowest, and with fractional scaling turned off its hardly tolerable
- the font rendering on Windows is perfect, while MacOS is a bit blurry. This is very surprising to me since all the hype around the good scaling of MacOS. Windows hidpi fonts are just perfectly sharp.
- MacOS is absolutely consistent when it comes to rendering and scaling, the others aren't
I have a 4K Display on a Mac and I decided to go with 4x scaling (1920x1080) so that macOS can use Retina. Much sharper. My colleagues go with 2500x or so and I don’t understand how they can stand it.
It's blurry because they use greyscale anti-aliasing and do not at all try to make the pixels fit into the pixel grid. Windows does try to make them fit into the pixel grid.
Personally, I've turned off AA on my PC (and it's a completely useless feature on high resolution displays). What surprises me is as we have been moving into higher resolution displays, the OS makers have been making it HARDER to turn off anti-aliasing of text and this includes newer versions of Qt which have it turned on apparently so programs using Qt now pick up anti-aliasing even if your PC has it turned off.
People go on about how they love their blurry fonts. I don't get it. I like crisp and sharp.
PS. The version of the font, and the font used also makes a difference. A number of them were made during an era when anti-aliasing wasn't as common, so those are hinted to work well without AA, but I have also run into situations where an older version of a font works great with AA off and the newer version of it doesn't because they screwed something up or removed the hinting in the newer version. So if you have a really good font, back it up.
Part of the beauty of Linux is that if you're having issues with gdm's stability, you can replace it with another DM. This isn't possible with Windows or Linux.
As for your DPI issues, I've heard many have had better luck with Wayland than Xorg.
I think it really depends on what programs you use.
I pretty much only use Firefox and terminals. So I set ~/.Xresources Xft.dpi to something that looked nice. Presumably a bunch of programs ignore this (otherwise I wouldn't be seeing complaints about HiDPI online).
Toolkits like Qt and Gtk only support integer scale factors. (Qt does fractional, but still has glitches) The scaling factor in the article inside gnome tweaks only changes the font scale. I personally use 2x Gtk scale and 80% font scale, and it works OK, but it’s not perfect.
Gnome has a feature in Wayland (Ubuntu has a third-party patch for X11) that scales up to an integer ratio then scales the image back down to fit the right size by making the display frame buffer larger. This is what Mac OS does. It’s slower here than on Mac OS, so it’s not very optimized, and it leaves things ever so slightly less sharp.
Plasma Desktop does fractional scaling correctly, is stable and comes with sddm as a display manager instead of gdm. I found the GNOME ecosystem to be bug prone and opinionated in ways that I disagree with, and have been impressed with KDE 5's stability and versatility.
They've had some pretty good memory decreases over the past couple of years actually in Plasma, it rivals a similarly configured xfce nowadays. Gnome is bloated in comparison.
Linux on a desktop is okay, linux on a laptop is bad.
I think Linux is cool and grew up playing with different distributions (starting around Fedora Core 4).
I spent most of my time on Ubuntu because it worked the best, but also used Yellow Dog Linux (my first laptop was a 12in Apple power pc powerbook g4), Arch, and some others.
Things that often gave me issues:
- Suspend rarely worked without hacks, even with hacks laptop would often wake and heat up to thermal shutdown in backpack. Hibernate was similarly bad.
- 'Normal' apps often didn't work or worked poorly (Netflix, flash, Spotify, 1Password), things are a lot better on this front now.
- Monitor support was typically bad and caused problems, connecting to monitor, multiple monitors, resolution issues on wake, etc.
- WiFi was often a hassle and either wouldn't work without hacks or would stop working for an unknown reason.
- Sound would stop working for unknown reasons.
- Bad anti-aliasing/font support in general.
- Personally I thought the UI (mostly gnome, then unity) felt slow and UI elements/chrome often took up a ton of visual space - in general things were uglier.
I think a lot of this stuff is better now, but I recently went to install ubuntu on an SSD in my desktop and had to spend a few hours trying to figure out why ubuntu refused to see the SSD in the installer. I eventually had to unplug the HDD to force it to recognize it.
The macOS vertical integration of hardware and software is really good. I think the touchbar is a mistake (and hopefully will go away like the butterfly keyboard did), but the OS works well, battery life is good, and the applications are nice.
I don't think Linux can compete for personal use, for most people macOS or Windows with WSL is a better experience. This is definitely true on laptops. On desktops I think linux has fewer negatives, but I'd still miss macOS ecosystem stuff (imessage/texting from laptop, things like that).
I had to swap out my network adapter to get wifi working on linux on my thinkpad, and libinput still occasionally locks up...everything... processing phantom drift from the mouse nipple (which would be less annoying if the touchpad mouse buttons weren't part of the same device as the mouse nipple).
Yup. Basically comparing apples to oranges. Unless you're looking at a System76 Laptop or at least a Thinkpad/Dell that's certified.
I've had a great experience with my XPS 13 so far. Everything (Headphones, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi,...) just works, Dell even provides Bios updates. Whereas Windows 10 didn't recognise that my headphones also have a microphone. Only downside is the limited battery management, this is definitely better on ThinkPads.
Parent here - I used to say this too, but I am running Arch Linux on a laptop (ThinkPad T470p), and it's actually working great for me. I agree this used to be the case.
- Suspend works perfectly fine for me, including hibernating (incl. disk encryption) after a predetermined amount of time, and invoking a screenlock on wait.
- Spotify and 1Password X work perfectly fine for me. I have not tried Netflix any time recently, and Flash is dead.
- I use two external monitors, with different DPIs and resolutions, and this is working perfectly fine for me.
- WiFi works perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever.
- Sound works perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever.
- Fonts appear perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever.
- The UI is a sore spot for Linux. Linux doesn't tend to have consistent UI, between GTK, Qt, and other frameworks. Furthermore, adding Electron apps and things like Spotify into the mix, and things start to get funky. Some people put a lot of work into making their UI consistent, but it's tough. Many of the big distros (e.g. Ubuntu) have pretty good success with this I believe. For me, this isn't a huge issue.
As for iMessage, certainly you're going to miss this on Linux, but that's really Apple's fault for not adding it to icloud.com. I use an Android phone, and messages.android.com works on all my devices.
I think the vertical integration used to be a stronger argument, back before messages.android.com. These days, what is it really buying you? A consistent UI? AirDrop? Actually, I believe there's a Linux implementation of that now too.
Out of interest, how do you define "works perfectly fine"? :)
Obviously you're saying "for me", which I recognise, but from my experience playing around with Linux Mint, Kubuntu and Fedora on a Thinkpad T480S over the past year, while things work technically, getting them perfect (in my opinion) takes a lot longer, and might not even be possible in some cases.
Take for example suspend/resume: yes, this works in terms of the machine waking up again, but things like the keyboard and screen brightness get reset (or are at least inconsistent) each time. Googling the problem, there are a lot of suggestions for hooking up scripts to run xbacklight to store / reset it each time, and I did manage to get it almost working "perfectly", but I'm not really sure why I should have to do this from a user's perspective. It's even more annoying in that at least in Linux Mint and Kubuntu's case, controlling the screen brightness isn't possible until you've logged in, so if you resume the laptop and the screen is dark, it's actually sometimes difficult to verify what's going on at the login screen.
Same goes for things like Dropbox - it doesn't know it's been woken up (maybe it's a Dropbox issue not listening for events), so doesn't resync - there are hacks to make a script to touch a file to trigger the refresh, and basically get it working, but again, why do I need to have to do this?
Even getting decent battery life involves (in my experience) tweaking things and running things like powertop to work out what system services are doing what, etc, etc.
Whilst I do agree it's technically possible to get something I'd term "good" with Linux + Laptop, I'm not convinced the average consumer would be that happy with it compared to a Mac or a PC laptop.
This largely matches my experience whenever I play with it.
Things generally work, but poorly with lots of little issues that degrade the experience and regular users wouldn't tolerate.
If you use linux you learn to tolerate the bad experience, but I think it's just because you adapt to deal with it and lower your expectations of what good even is.
Not really. When I have to use Windows or OS X I'm always at pains to get some shit that should be basic working:
-No package manager. You have to download and install third party stuff like chocolatey (resp. brew). Unless you mean scoop (resp. macports)? In any case you have to commit to one and they're much less complete than Debian repos or the AUR so you still end up downloading stuff manually. A thing I don't miss from my teenage years is having to remember unchecking all the crap adware from installation wizards.
-No "open in terminal" option in file managers. Wtf?
-Windows "administrator mode" is incredibly bad and clunky to use. OS X's is better but sometimes you have to use sudo even though everyone tells you it's bad because nothing else works anyway.
-You can't just "upgrade everything" - package manager upgrades are distinct from system upgrades because, as said before, package managers are not builtin. Not only is this very clunky, you're also completely at the mercy of Microsoft and Apple.
-No shortcuts for basic stuff like "open terminal on ~" or "bring up app list with fuzzy search prompt", "hide all windows and bring desktop to the foreground" - windows used to have them but axed them for some reason? doesn't work anymore last time I tested anyway
-OS X file system is case insensitive. wtf? Windows still as really weird quirk where they won't let you easily browse to the WSL directory from the Explorer file browser, some directories can't be easily accessed and some files can't be created due to some backward compatibility behavior from 1974. wtf?
-lots of hardware won't work on Windows out of the box, especially drives with more exotic filesystems. never had a problem with Linux
Maybe all this stuff is duck syndrome but the same could be said about your "little issues"
I mean that NetworkManager, out of the box, supports every WiFi network I've needed. I mean that ALSA and PulseAudio worked out of the box and haven't had any issues, even with Bluetooth. I mean that fonts do not look pixellated or blurry.
And I personally haven't experienced the screen brightness issue.
Certainly, Linux still requires some extra setup to get going, and I think this area is ripe for improvement. But the experiencing of using Linux has been vastly superior in most cases IMO. And when things do break, I can actually fix them, unlike on macOS!
These are good points (thanks) - and it's always good to hear that things are better than I thought.
Consistent UI is nice and recent M1 chip + good battery life I think is also a bonus of vertical integration. It sounds like linux is becoming more of an option though for people that don't care about those things.
From your description it sounds like baseline functionality mostly works (particularly on a desktop).
The other Apple hardware advantage is the trackpad which even windows machines can't compete with. I suspect this is because Apple factored a lot of their iOS multitouch research into their trackpad support. It'd be hard for me to use a non-apple laptop, but linux on a desktop would probably be fine.
ARM support without the vertical integration doesn't mean much, windows runs on ARM too.
It's Apple's M1 design plus ARM plus their software stack that makes it great. Their power also lets them force others to write high quality native software for their chip (along with their design just having way better performance).
I am definitely hopeful to see Apple's ARM laptops start a trend. I do believe there are distros that already target ARM, such as archlinuxarm.org
And you're right - Apple's trackpad has everything else beat. The gestures are great too! I am more of a keyboard aficionado, so I don't mind this too much, but I'm not an average user in this way.
One of the problems is that experience is highly dependent on hardware choice and/or distro/software choice in rather unpredictable ways.
Generally I agree with grandparent: Linux for the desktop is a lot more reliable than for the laptop. The kind of stuff that needs to work on a desktop/server has considerably more testing and polish behind. With the laptop is about as hit-and-miss as things used to be for desktop in the late 90s. A surprising amount of people just accept some stuff not working or working unreliably in their laptops (some of my mates just "deal with it" - for instance one has a webcam that simply isn't supported, just got an external one - and same for the microphone; another one has trouble with external monitors not keeping config or even crashing the machine sometimes: "it's ok I don't need to use an external monitor", eventually managed to make it work after some research - but I'd rather not have to deal with that sort of thing... etc etc).
Having said that, Apple is so far gone that I'm going to have to move to Linux for my next laptop (Linux is already my main choice on the desktop for a long time).
But the thing is, the way that computers work nowadays, the "choose-your-own-OS model" is broken. It's "less broken" for desktop hardware because it moves so much more slowly and incrementally than they used to, especially at the interface level, but laptop hardware moves faster and mobile a lot faster. Hardware-OS combos with OEM pre-made troubleshooting and tailor-made workarounds (hardware nowadays is very buggy, but the user is sheltered from this fact mainly by kernels and drivers). This is much worse in mobile, btw, people are not expected at all to alter hardware or even connect peripherals beyond strong constraints.
So the situation is that you usually get a machine with something installed that has testing done on it as a combo, and "it works" even if the "internal components" (hardware, OS sub-services, etc) don't quite work to spec. You break this link and someone has to do the patching work, which is often "the community", driver/kernel hackers, etc. But this is a lot harder than working with fixed solutions and stuff keeps breaking, and there's when the end user comes in with some final, hopefully trivial fixes. Or, if the machine is popular enough, "the community" again. But few machine-Linux combos are really popular these days, especially compared to Apple laptops.
TL-DR; server computing is pretty solid, desktop computing is rather solid, laptop computing is a mess, mobile computing is a messy hack. The more things are "integrated" and not expected to be interchangeable, the more likely you are to find hiccups along the way, and the shorter hardware cycles don't help - so it's not a problem with Linux per se (the work behind Linux is amazing in terms of adapting to large ranges of hardware, even when hardware vendors didn't facilitate things) but a problem with installing and troubleshooting your own OS rather than having the OEM do it with flexibility to just change their hardware to make the system work best.
I bought a lenovo to have a linux laptop earlier this year, and I must say I think it is the best laptop experience I've had. It has fantastic battery life, everything works with very minimal configuration, and with my i3 desktop setup exactly how I like it I'm more productive than I was on my macbook.
These issues were only ever with the consumer lenovo laptops. Thinkpads never had an issue and generally work with Linux without issues (I heard this was because Redhat used Thinkpads and so there were lots of contributions to make things work but that could just be scuttlebutt)
I work for Red Hat, can confirm we get Think Pads and they do work wonderfully with Fedora and RHEL. I don't work with the kernel team but I can't imagine it's a coincidence that we use ThinkPads and it works well on Fedora.
The font rendering is one of the main things that keeps me on Mac.
On Linux the font rendering is either far too thin or far too thick, no matter which setting I fiddle with. I don't have the greatest eyes and bleh font rendering is huge pain.
I understand others may not be so picky, but acting like the font rendering is on par with Mac is just not true.
I think it at least partially depends on the hardware.
> - Suspend rarely worked without hacks, even with hacks laptop would often wake and heat up to thermal shutdown in backpack. Hibernate was similarly bad.
I did experience this a little bit, but it's been 2-3 years since the last time it happened.
> - 'Normal' apps often didn't work or worked poorly (Netflix, flash, Spotify, 1Password), things are a lot better on this front now.
No comment on this, I haven't really used any of these on my laptop.
> - Monitor support was typically bad and caused problems, connecting to monitor, multiple monitors, resolution issues on wake, etc.
Only issue I had with this was one TV wouldn't take HDMI output at the same time as displaying to my laptop screen.
Everything else has worked great.
> - WiFi was often a hassle and either wouldn't work without hacks or would stop working for an unknown reason.
Haven't had any issues with this, but I would imagine it would be highly dependent on the wireless card you had.
> - Sound would stop working for unknown reasons.
Yeah, audio on linux kinda sucks right now. I've never been stuck without a workaround, but I've needed workarounds multiple times.
> - Bad anti-aliasing/font support in general.
I've not noticed this, but I also haven't looked.
> - Personally I thought the UI (mostly gnome, then unity) felt slow and UI elements/chrome often took up a ton of visual space - in general things were uglier.
GNOME + Pop_shell at least has gotten fast enough to keep me from installing i3 again. This is of course a matter of personal preference.
I personally trust neither Apple or MS, but they both have their upsides.
> > - Monitor support was typically bad and caused problems, connecting to monitor, multiple monitors, resolution issues on wake, etc.
> Only issue I had with this was one TV wouldn't take HDMI output at the same time as displaying to my laptop screen.
I just wanted to throw out some non-Linux issues I've hit in the past couple years.
I believe I had a MacbookPro 2015 and Apple's USB-C to HDMI I consistently had RGB noise patterns and it worked terribly. I switched to a third-party USB-C to DisplayPort and it worked great. I heard about similar issues online. Some talked about it being specific to hardware configuration (that series of MacbookPros) and others pointed to OS updates that triggered it.
I've had trouble with a Windows desktop and an Nvidia card with detecting which port was used to send video signal to on boot. I think it assumed the first HDMI port when I had the intention of using the DisplayPort. I think it got extra confused if the monitor was off on boot (it was trying to detect the signal?) I would often get the BIOS to show up on one output, then Windows may try and use a different one.
I've been using linux on laptops for the last 16 years. It hasn't been that bad for me.
I've been using:
1. Dells
2. HP Elite books
3. Clevos (Branded by sager)
4. Asus Zenbooks
About 16 years ago, the suspend and hibernate was a bit of work to get right. Now it just works right out of the gate. Sometimes it doesn't.. but that's the same for Windows and Macs.
--
"Normal apps"
There is no Netflix app for linux. Flash is mostly gone away, firefox and chrome fixed that 9 years ago at least. Spotify works.
---
Monitor support, most of the X problems are resolved. Intel graphics support is great.
Nvidia Optimus is still a dumpster fire.
---
WIFI- what cards are you using? the intel cards work without an issue.
--
Sound
Yea I don't know what is the deal with alsa vs pulse etc. But most of the time they work out of the gate.. I've had minor issues mostly. Bluetooth audio is annoying. Haven't had complete stopages issues in a very long time.
---
Anti-aliasing/font-support- this is more of your desktop environment than anything. KDE tends to correct those issues.
------
macOS often times has issues with their own software and makes it difficult to troubleshoot when things go wrong.
I had complicated experiences with Linux in the past, but I was young and the problem solver in me loved it.
But, honestly, at lest in the past 5 years, I had no problems especially if we consider laptops that usually have more or less the same standard hardware.
4 years ago I bought an Xiaomi 13' laptop to use it as a browsing machine and occasionally as a media player.
It came with a Chinese windows preinstalled.
Without even looking at the specs I installed Ubuntu on it and I've never had a problem.
I upgraded it from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 to 20.04 and I'm using it right now to watch the 4th season of Fargo
I never had to tweak the configuration or change a single .conf file, it simply worked
The battery lasts 8 hours and if I close the lid it automatically goes on suspend
It's been the best setup I ever had.
Unfortunately it's too underpowered to use it as a working device, but if I could I would be the happiest man in the World.
I agree. I've been using Linux for almost 20 years now, and I remember all the gymnastics and research that was required to get things like audio and wifi working. In 2020, the only reason I dual boot windows and Linux is for video games, which are becoming less and less important to me, and less of an issue with the work Valve is doing.
And, while Linux has gotten considerably more stable and hassle-free, at the same time, Windows, in my experience, has gotten _worse_. The start menu is slow, and makes network requests for some reason. The UI is so flat that I can't tell anything apart, and I'm frequently pestered to link my install with my Microsoft account or enable cortana. I wish I could have used Windows 7 forever :\",
Why can't you? I'm writing this from Windows 7 as we speak. I also have 10 installed on this PC. I prefer 7. I have SMB1 and RDP turned off, I'm not really worried it'll get owned through my router either. I don't use anti-virus either, but then again, I also don't run random exes that arrive in email or through an ad.
As of January 14, 2020, your computer running Windows 7 will still function but Microsoft will no longer provide the following:
Technical support for any issues
Software updates
Security updates or fixes
Aye, I don't use win7 because it's unsupported. Microsoft also updated it automatically when I wasn't looking.
I don't really care enough to support windows 7 myself; as I mentioned, the only reason I have Windows is for video games, so as long as I'm still getting video driver updates, Win10 could be the worst OS in the world and it wouldn't bother me too much.
openSUSE tumbleweed is a very nice rolling distribution. The only problem is that it needs an advanced user to configure it (installing video codecs and navigating the powerful and complex installer).
What do you use? I have tried this multiple times and always give up. I ran FreeBSD for a decade as a server in a datacentre and have a deep and abiding love for it, but it doesn't sound it makes a usable desktop these days. Ubuntu appears to be the desktop of choice, but I find it buggy, sluggish and tedious. I'd like a practical and speedy OS that is responsive and configurable. But I don't know enough :)
If you're comfortable reading docs and starting from the command line, Arch is the hands down winner IMO. Rolling release distro means everything is up-to-date. AUR is packed with anything you could wish for. The Arch wiki is indispensable.
Not OP but I do recommend PopOS. It's worked really well for me.
The sluggish performance you're getting is honestly probably related to CFS (the default linux process scheduler). Windows does an AMAZING job with scheduling for UI applications. You almost never feel like your computer is struggling because anything UI related gets scheduled first. CFS does not do this.
I've found that changing the scheduler to something that may be less efficient overall, but is aimed at desktop use makes my experience so much better.
+1 for PopOS. I used to run Manjaro for ~3 years but then I managed to break it. After that I switched to PopOS. Couldnt be happier after over 4 years of using it.
I use Arch. I love it and I think it's gotten a easier to install over the years (hard to gauge because I also understand more), but it does lean towards the minimalist side. The big win for me is using a lightweight window manager (i3 in my case), which you can do with any distro.
My main recommendation is stick with one of the major distros because you'll get more results when you search for solutions to issues. With Ubuntu you'll find more hits for specific problems, but I think the quality is also sometimes lower. Whereas I think Arch has the best documentation (for linux in general, not just Arch) but in general you'll need to understand more about what's happening under the hood.
Rarely. I think between the official repositories and the AUR, there's probably more useful, updated software than is available for Ubuntu.
Granted, I probably use less programs than most people, and I'm the type of person who would rather download the nodejs tarball and update my PATH than use the system package or nvm.
One of my favorite things about Arch is booting up a fresh install and seeing something like 10 processes running and a tiny amount of memory being used (granted that might be archlinuxarm I'm remembering). It feels like a blank canvas.
The sluggish performance you get is from gnome (the user interface/desktop environment that Ubuntu defaults to). Every 6 months there is an update that noticeably improves things. If you don’t want to wait for it to be totally smother out, check out another desktop environment like xfce or plasma. Try plasma first since it’s got prettier visuals, but I like the simplicity of xfce (honestly, I rather enjoy gnome so use that most of the time)
All my Servers are FreeBSD too, but on the Laptop (because of wireless) i have now openSuse Tumbleweed but with the XFS Filesystem. It's fast and reliable, but to be honest i just need a Terminal, mosh/ssh, mpv, uemacs, Firefox, Wine(for MM VI) and Dosbox on it.
I have been really happy with Manjaro (the Gnome variant). Based on Arch (love the AUR), but easier to setup (more opinionated out of the box).
Honestly the dark theme of the Gnome variant is the most beautiful dark theme I have ever found for a Linux DE. I know there are lots of ways to tweak the various DEs to get some cool looking dark themes, but my experience is that they can take a lot of manual configuring and tend to still fail on the edge cases. The dark theme bundled with Manjaro Gnome looks amazing right out of the box!
I use Ubuntu for my media PC, and I feel like for the casual user, it's plenty easy enough. I use it as an appliance with a steam client and a browser. Do most users actually need more than that?
It's arguably easier to use than windows and macOS because it doesn't require a bunch of separate sign-ins to do things.
I think the only "hard part" for the average user is getting into the boot settings to actually install ubuntu. For a developer I think it's a non-issue.
I think this post kind of discounts the ways in which stable Ubuntu can break. On my last install, I checked the "Auto Login" button on setup which broke the entire install. I think that Ubuntu is definitely not even close to "regular people can use it no problem", but as with everything, YMMV.
I just find that kind of surprising because I have used Ubuntu for the past 8 or so years, in the cloud and on the desktop, and I have not run into a single issue like this.
I mean, I'm comfortable accepting that I'm an edge case and have the worst luck with linux installations ever, but I still think there's so many things that regularly go wrong (even for people that aren't me), that it's definitely not in contention for regular people's daily drivers.
Really? Like what? I mean linux is the backbone of the internet. I think of it as extremely predictable and rock-solid. Describing it as an os where "so many things that regularly go wrong" seems like a totally foreign concept to me.
The last try, I installed Ubuntu on my desktop and checked the 'Auto Login on Start' box on setup, which broke the UI and required a CLI fix. It wasn't hard (because I'm a dev and it was easy to troubleshoot/fix), but it was more than 0 effort and a person that wasn't a dev might not be able to do it.
Prior to that, I had an issue with bluetooth drivers that, IIRC, required finding a custom driver online or some C source file? I don't really remember the specifics, but it was another "I am a dev and this isn't really difficult but is more than 0 effort and my mom couldn't do it."
Prior to that, I installed Ubuntu on my laptop for college and the display drivers were an absolute mess. The screen brightness flickered from 10% to 80% over and over, regardless of what I was pressing or they were set at. I didn't find a fix and ultimately reformatted and went back to windows.
> I mean linux is the backbone of the internet.
Linux containers are great, I use them all the time. Linux as a desktop environment where I use an array of UI applications to develop software, make and observe video files, make games, etc, I have never once had a good experience with. The most recent try, when I encountered the Auto Login issue, I was also totally unable to get Unity to compile/run my company's game. It was yet another thing that I probably could have fixed, but the value-add vs. the effort of constantly having to manually fix each individual piece of software I intended to use, just didn't seem worth it to me. And, what's probably worse (to me), is the general response I found online was "Those issues aren't that big of a deal", which totally ignores my entire point. Death by a thousand paper cuts is a problem, even if each individual paper cut isn't that bad.
Again, I am happy to be told that my experience isn't indicative of the landscape of the env, and that I myself just have terrible luck, but if we're asking what _I_ think, that is my experience which makes me think it's not yet ready for legitimate non-developer use.
Death by a thousand paper drew a visceral response from me, it describes my experience perfectly.
I'm a developer and power user that wants to do various things beyond just browsing.
Things regularly required troubleshooting and fiddling, and for one thing that is fine, but after the 5th serious time consuming issue I get cross and around the 10th I can the migration attempt and go back to windows. Done this every three or four years for the last couple of decades.
I'm due to have another go around 2022 and fingers crossed it will work then, but I doubt it!
Linux application servers tend to be worth it though, and part of that is the use cases are usually much more limited, and on the well worn path.
As a developer really? Which kinds of issues for example? I feel like Linux is the default platform for software development, and Windows is a 3rd class experience by comparison.
Although my Macbook is my main personal interface for a lot of things, I've stabilized on Ubuntu for my workstation machines, and they have been rock-solid stable desktop systems since 2009, at least this generation of hardware. I have not had any of the typical issues - my machines just work very well. I've got a system for software development, and another for Audio (yes, Linux is a functional DAW - digital audio workstation), and they are both just pleasant and joyful systems to use.
Of course, the fact that I have the chops to fix things is key, because I really, really do (Systems Programmer, 30+ years building OS and system-level things), but for the Ubuntu experience key factors have also been: pick your hardware nicely (e.g. Presonus=great Audio for Linux), use package management, do frequent manual updates, and use containers/virtualization for anything where ones hacking around might be dodgy - i.e. keep the work part of workstation in mind with all system updates/installations, etc.
Decades of Linux desktop usage means, to me, the cliche is over. Linux is an awesome desktop workstation. Everything just works, audio, video, graphics .. WINE is perfectly functional .. and there is zero bloatware or concern about walled gardeners.
> use containers/virtualization for anything where ones hacking around might be dodgy - i.e. keep the work part of workstation in mind with all system updates/installations, etc.
Care to elaborate? this might be useful to try. I have a similar setup macbook and ubuntu system, but I find that the LTS 18/20 versions often need reboot, and I didn't have the issue with centos. Still, I would probably continue using ubuntu because it usually needs less hacking time in my experience.
Ha, unfortunately I manage to crash it on a regular basis playing games on a Windows 10 VM with PCI passthrough. "Have you tried downloading a better sound card" has become a running joke on our Discord server when I'm having issues with it.
As a developer I used to have a secondary boot for Ubuntu for stuff that's reliant on *NIX tooling, like Ruby (Ruby on Windows is possible, but it's not worth the hassle).
With Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 I'm able to develop the same without having to dual boot and feeling just as native as running Linux on the system, and I can use Windows software like, say, Photoshop. Visual Studio Code integrates automatically, it's like I've got a Linux 'Window' open.
And when I want to switch off I'm back in Windows for a full gaming environment etc.
I'm completely switched over to full-time Windows now. Maybe not a good thing, but it sure is convenient.
> I got into Linux when I was younger because I thought it was cool, and I had plenty of time to fix it when things broke.
> What I'm trying to communicate is, Linux desktop is usable, and it's worth pushing over the hump.
Huge fan of all of the above.
I do think though that now desktops are less inherently compelling than they used to be. They used to represent a center of activity, a locus of control for the user.
Now, a very sizable % of our computing is off in far away clouds, & the desktop itself is a less compelling, less interesting place to invest time.
My hope is that the Free Desktop / Linux world can begin to grow new roots, become more connected, & return to a little bit more of a place of prominence & relevance. Lots of visioneering & pioneering & engineering to do.
Very true. For me, I still spend most of my time on a desktop (well a Mac Pro, so 'workstation'), but I acknowledge my use case is different from many. I have access to both cloud and DC resources, but for sheer immediacy (and not shuffling lots of data around, is hard for me to beat local (building build and test infrastructure for managed OpenStack installs).
It seems everybody who tries out a Linux distro has individual problems with various UI stacks, rather than Linux itself. The bigger the software (i.e. GNOME, KDE) the harder it fails. And often in unexpected and unpredictable ways, too.
The kind of people who use GNOME or Ubuntu or whatever the 'windows competitor' is always seem to be having problems, but are also the kind of people who see needing to use a terminal as a problem in itself.
I've never ever had a problem with i3, emacs, firefox, and simple <20 line configs. Terminal is fine, it's what most GNU tools are built around in the first place. It's apt that people who really love Linux and appreciate what it does out of the box, and who don't feel the need to turn it into Windows or MacOS, also seem to have the least issues with it.
There is an illusion that there is not as much to learn in Windows or Mac, and in fact all that knowledge is even harder to grasp as a lot of it is proprietary and not transparent.
My first "real" experience with Linux (setting aside weird things like Lindows/Linspire, or the partial Linux experience of WSL, or the sort of "Linux-like" experience of using macOS and using bash and command line to do most of my work, aside from VS Code, communication apps and web browing) was installing Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on a pretty old (maybe 8 years) Dell 11 3137. I hadn't realized the release of 20.04 LTS had just occurred; I was just trying the latest/newest. I put it on a USB stick and did the Try option, and it all loaded up and everything worked. It gave me confidence, so I did a full install. No trouble with WiFi, touch screen, brightness, touch pad. And I was able to install so many of the same cross-platform apps I use everyday that I could get work done on it. (But I prefer a much bigger screen and keyboard.)
I was so impressed, I installed it next on a ~2 year old Asus Flip, and everything worked except for the fingerprint reader. Battery life was about 2/3rd of what I got in Windows 10 (which was already not great) but I used it for a couple of weeks, sometimes getting work done on it, and sometimes playing around with things like Steam - I could play Torchlight on it, or stream Torchlight II from my Windows 10 desktop. Neat! Ended up going back to Windows for better battery, but aside from gaming, the experience was very much on par with Windows, with some things better and some things worse, but no huge differences.
I'm very comfortable with Windows 10 and WSL, and I don't expect Linux to take over as a daily driver any time soon. So I guess in a way, I did "give up" on switching over, but if an employer handed me an all-Linux machine, I think I'd be perfectly pleased to use it all day for work, even if I head back to Windows when I want to play StarCraft.
I've been using Linux on and off since 1996, but I settled on it for the past 10 years and the most traumatic thing I had to do since has been changing gear.
And even then, moving your entire setup from a machine to another have never been easier, when you know how to do it.
Corporate OSs are more polished, that's undeniable, Apple especially provides the best out of the box experience, but it's nothing comprared to the flexibility I can experience using Linux.
I can have a beefed up work laptop with Plasma and all the effects enabled and the same exact setup on the cheap low end laptop with XFCE.
Everything, really, just works.
And when it doesn't, I can somehow make it work.
There have been times I spent days trying to make the Nvidia card work, but it was because I was looking for the perfect setup that I usually don't experience on Windows or MacOS, but there's nothing I can do about it, no matter how much time I spend trying to fix it.
It's simply out of reach.
I'm aware that that's not what the average user is willing to go through, and that's perfectly fine, I don't feel better than them because I use a more complicated system, but I cannot go back to being limited in what I can do because I am not allowed to.
Also, modern distros are really really stable out of the box.
The laptop I use as a replacement for media server is an Ubuntu 20, it was an Ubuntu 18 and 16 before, I simply upgraded it to the new version and it worked, every time better than before.
If there's something I've learned in the past 25 years is that freedom do comes at a cost, but as of today, that cost is actually negligible.
P.s. forgot to mention that I do not have to care anymore about bloatware, automatic updates, things calling home, software you rely on going out of business and, most of all, lack of support or documentation
It great until something breaks. I had a Arch Linux system going for a while and at some point (probably my own fault) broke graphics. I'm technical enough to where I could have probably fixed it on my own but honestly just did not have the time.
Not sure if something like this already exist (especially with ZFS and Btrfs) but it would be nice if there was a easy to use system restore manager you could boot into and restore your system to a last known working state. Again, keyword easy. Yes I'm technical enough to where I could fix it but I just don't have the time.
> but with Apple downgrading its hardware (but still keeping those Apple prices!), the problems just kept stacking up.
I get that the author wound up with a lemon, but the idea that Apple is "downgrading its hardware" with more problems arising is ludicrous.
Especially now that Apple fixed the keyboards, its hardware is better than it's ever been.
You might not like Apple for plenty of other reasons, but the notion that its hardware is getting worse, or a worse value, is insane. The new M1 MBA is the highest-quality best deal of a laptop ever made.
Heres what we've lost since the 2013-2015 MBPs that I'm currently running: Magsafe 2, Higher travel keyboards, Removable/Replacable SSds, HDMI port (still the most common for displays right now), an escape key, an SD card reader, USB-A which all my peripherals still use.
Though we've gained USBc and performance. I'm not sure the "better than it's ever been" is so obvious personally. Replacing the previous input ports with dongles reduces the value proposition a fair bit for people with those use cases.
We've gained not just performance, but insane battery life, less weight, more thinness, amazing color gamut, amazing speakers, and the best trackpad money can buy.
Apple has removed ports sure, but a dock fixes that problem pretty easily.
But fundamentally we're having different conversations. Apple has removed features you personally liked, but the overall hardware quality has just gotten better and better and better. I don't see how that is even open to argument.
I'm in the market for a new one now. Are Thinkpad T/P series still the best for running Linux? How about the Dell XPS series which seem to have a better resolution and screen?
I've been running an XPS 13 (with the high DPI screen) for the last 2¾ years as my Linux daily driver, replacing the X230 I had before it. No complaints; I'd recommend it if the 13" ultrabook form factor is what you're looking for.
The fact that many people reading this post title (including me) look at it with sarcasm is telling on how apple scored big points with its new cpu. Keeping up with mac OS and the trackpad was already quite hard, but CPU could be the killing blow.
Which could lead us in a few years to a situation where mac developers will face the same fate as ios developers : forced to buy hardware to sign their app, forced to push them on the mac app store, forced to give 15/30% cut, forced to be removed whenever an app doesn't feel "right" to apple, or a government strong enough to force Apple.
And competitors will probably follow the trend, because Apple will have proven that it's doable and profitable.
That future looks extremely scary. What can we do, now, as developers ?
> That future looks extremely scary. What can we do, now, as developers ?
Stop buying, using, and supporting the Apple ecosystem. Vote with your money. The new chips are faster. So what? The laptop you have today works fine, you don't need the latest and greatest hardware.
I'm already stuck developing for the app store, using xcode to sign and deploy, using a programming language (that i love) swift that only really works on mac OS.
My personal situation isn't going to change anytime soon unfortunately. I was about to dump my iphone next time i had to pick one (and keep my current one for testing), however my laptop is my work computer.
I think "stop being part of the ecosystem" isn't realistic for many of us. We don't want to work on crap hardware, with a crap OS because that would make us unhappy and unproductive (or in my case, would simply not be an option at all).
However, we can use this current hardware /software to try and build the next generation of tools we would happily be using. My question now being : where to start ?
"What can we do, now, as developers ?"
"i code iOS (native) app for a living."
I think you answered yourself. I am not anti-Apple myself and think it's fine being in the Apple world and buying their crap but if you have doubts about Apple's overarching impact on technology in general, you should beging by ending your relationship with that ecosystem as soon as possible.
If you choose to work in their ecosystem of course you're going to be stuck with whatever Apple does. If you're capable of building iOS apps you're capable of learning other languages and working on something else.
There isn't much you can do other than sucking up what they feed you or getting a new job. If there's a 3rd option I'd love to hear it.
IMO what an alternative needs is momentum, mindshare, and a reality distortion field of its own. Find out how to get a million prople to believe in the need for a next thing, and convince them to cooperatively choose the same next thing. And somehow keep that thing from being mangled in the process.
Make an extra effort to learn something else and move away. If you are already making a living by building ios apps, you're smart enough to be a developer in any other ecosystem.
I have a co-worker that was in your exact same situation and just by showing interest in the devops world and sitting next to them and expressing his interest in that area he managed to just move there and now he loves it. You might find something similar, it just takes will, courage and effort.
After ten years doing iOS apps I switched back to web development and I only wish I’d done it sooner. I feel like I escaped a long, abusive relationship.
In hindsight I marvel that I ever allowed a single corporation to have absolute control over whether or not I’m allowed to publish my work to users.
>We don't want to work on crap hardware, with a crap OS because that would make us unhappy and unproductive (or in my case, would simply not be an option at all).
You consider a Thinkpad with Linux installed and configured properly as "crap hardware, with a crap OS"? Really?
That's already been answered by reviews, the answer is there's a dip in sustained performance for the fanless Air but not on the Pro and Mini, and the fan noise on those is almost imperceptible.
I expect that the x86_64 instruction set will stick around for a very long time. Rosetta is super smooth and very fast on M1 Macs, so legacy apps still work just fine for the time being.
Freedom is less important than convenience. People will put up with all sorts of draconian control as long as they can have smoother scrolling, or a nicer feeling trackpad.
Aren't they? Look at the Epic vs Apple opinions online, people with iPhones say they actually want to be locked down to just one app store without any consumer choice.
Until some good / popular apps aren't available, or isn't compatible with Apple's terms and conditions. I know this is unlikely scenario since almost every companies want Apple's market share, however things happened with IE, so it's possible to happen again with ios.
I imagine the post you are replying to is referring to actually getting the Linux kernel to boot (since there is no BIOS, UEFI, etc.) and writing drivers for all the possibly specialized hardware Apple put in there.
The main issue might be video drivers and other non-standard hardware. There are many reports of people being able to boot into linux on the new M1 by tweaking secure boot.
The way I understand these reports is "it's most likely possible, but we still need to actually make it work". In particular, it seems there's not a complete boot loader.
I don't have any intention to contribute to the mac ecosystem. I still hog in what I like best - the terminal.
I treat the mac as a client - web+cloud is my backend. The client should feel good to me with decent battery life and snappy experience, and maybe some gaming. But I don't care much else about it.
You might would love a Chromebook. There are some really nice ones out there, and you can run apps packaged for Debian really easily. Chromebook hardware works flawlessly (suspend/resume/etc) and battery life is incredible.
I'll never give up my Fedora ThinkPad, but if I was forced to I could do all my development on a Chromebook with Linux.
Yeah great point, disk space on most chromebooks sucks. I used an SD card in one for a while but SD cards wear out so fast. Now I have a USB drive constantly plugged in, but that's not great either.
Do you install linux on the Chromebook, or do you use one of the methods of running a linux userspace under ChromeOS?
I've been using a Chromebook for linux stuff with Crostini for a while (before that I used Crouton). With some frequency something (me or an update) manages to bork things up and have to reinstall the Crostini subsystem, which wipes out all my stuff (things that I care about are usually backed up).
It happens often enough that I'm thinking about going back to a dedicated linux machine, since I think probably that would be more stable for me.
I use Crostini now but used Crouton a lot before Crostini was available. Without Crouton I never had that problem, but I did occasionally have to rebuild because my kids would reboot it and press the spacebar like the scary boot message told them too :facepalm:
With Crostini something did happen that horked the VM and I had to remove and reinstall it. That is pretty annoying. Not sure if I did something to cause it, but I also respect that the feature is still "Beta" and I guess I'm so overjoyed that they're doing it that I'm willing to accept some brokenness :-)
Wayland already has trackpad support that's nearly identical to macOS.
Gnome with a dock is basically the same desktop experience - Pick a distro of your choice.
I can honestly say I prefer my linux XPS to my work macbook, by a large margin.
Plus - It doesn't spy on me. I actually own it. I can release software through channels that aren't entirely abusive.
Basically - The only thing Apple does truly well at this point, in my opinion, is marketing how great Apple is. But it turns out they just aren't all that great.
THIS. I have recently switched back to Ubuntu after a long period of time working for a big corp under a Microsoft ecosystem. I feel like my computer is mine back again.
> Wayland already has trackpad support that's nearly identical to macOS.
I never really understood how input-driver responsibilities are divided between the Linux kernel and X/Wayland.
If you're talking about Macbook's reputation for a pleasant trackpad experience, are you saying that in Linux the relevant code resides within Wayland but not X?
Well of course! How many people who walk into Apple stores are reading hacker news to learn about Wayland, Gnome and XPS running Linux?
I can see you’re frustrated and lashing out with “Don’t buy their shit”. Honestly I would be too if I had to read another hn post on apple & their policies.
But the biggest gap here isn’t technology. Rather it’s empathy.
Empathy for all those people who don’t read hn and would walk into apple stores to buy the best computer they possibly can.
Apple didn't change that by suddenly being excellent and having great marketing. Developers changed that by realising that Macs were good dev machines and writing software that ran on Macs.
Non-tech people ask their tech-savvy friends for advice on what tech to buy. For years that was "buy Apple; it costs more but they're more reliable, the support is great, and they're way cooler".
That's no longer the case. There are manufacturers shipping great Linux laptops, that just work, and it is actually feasible to recommend one to a friend. And running Linux is way cooler these days - every muppet out there has a Macbook ;)
My take on it (and I lived through this) is that pre-web everyone ran on Windows. If you were writing software, it needed to run on Windows, so you had to code on a Windows machine.
Then the web changed things, and a huge number of devs moved from writing Windows desktop applications to writing web applications for the dotcom boom (I was one). This took about a decade, from around '97ish. It also freed people to use different dev machines because most of the servers were LAMP (or variants thereof), and Macs could run the AMP bit fine. Web designers who had started off in Apple-land being designers on Adobe migrated into being web developers, and that helped spread Macs into the web dev community.
Yes, Macs did get better during this same period, and there was a lot of great innovation. But if nothing else had changed then that wouldn't have mattered - if you had to write Windows applications then you couldn't do that on a Mac, no matter how sexy it was.
I find the parallel with today's situation (and this discussion) fascinating.
To quote Balmer - "Developers, Developers, Developers!"
I absolutely agree with you - The vast majority of folks don't give a rats ass about the technology.
But I don't have to convince those people.
I have to convince you, and me, and the other developers that will read this thread.
We're the facilitators that make that hardware useful to the average person. We matter SO much more.
So I'll add some more - Don't take a job at Apple. Don't develop for Apple. Don't advertise to all your non-technical friends and family that you support Apple by buying their shit.
> Wayland already has trackpad support that's nearly identical to macOS.
While PC trackpads were absolutely terrible for a long time, I actually really like the one used on my X1 Carbon. Inertia scrolling and gesters are not as smooth, but the hardware itself is quite pleasant.
> Gnome with a dock is basically the same desktop experience - Pick a distro of your choice.
No it's not, macOS has a fundamentally different approach to apps and windows. Where you open only 1 app instance that can run multiple document windows. You switch between apps, and can then switch between windows in that app. This can partly be immitated in the window manager, but not all apps will work well with this pattern. Also standardized keyboard shortcuts, spelling check, secrets management and general app behaviour is hit and miss on Linux. Whereas on macOS most apps adhere to the human interface guidelines. This consistency and predictability gives me a greater efficiency on Mac over Linux system. I tried going back to Linux for 1,5 years when my then employer didn't allow me to work on a Mac and no matter how much I tweaked it, I could never get the same enjoyment and productivity compared to macOS.
Nobody asked, yet I'll say it nonetheless: I had the same experience, reversed.
Employer gave me a MacBook pro, I tried for a year to get used to it, but no matter how much I tweaked it I couldn't completely get out of the horrible (imo) experience that is Mac os Windows manager.
It I want to switch to an open window I'll switch to the freaking opened window, stop trying to hijack what open an app means.
Anyways, Mac os isn't bad, but you have to accept to give up a lot of things. It's their way, or nothing.
It is time intensive to fix the odds & ends that Linux distros often haven’t. Kinda wish the author of the article would have taken a little more time learning about how easy it is to setup new keybinds in Kinto.sh (xkeysnail).
I mean... you're talking about exactly the same behavior as Gnome with a dock. I have a single application icon, clicking it once brings up the last window I had open. Clicking it twice displays a preview window for each open window, any of which I can click to fullscreen and focus.
It's literally the same as the macOS dock, complete the with the dot indicator for number of open windows.
Plus my upper left hotcorner displays all application windows, and I have my upper right set to display each window of the current application.
Develop for open systems. If you write a program for Windows, make it also available on Linux, or at least make sure it works well on Wine. If you develop for the web, make sure it also works well on Firefox. If you develop for smartphones, make also an Android version, and make sure it also works on AOSP without the Google libraries (or with an alternative replacement). And so on. That way, if these ecosystems become too closed, users will have an alternative; and the existence of that alternative might even help prevent these ecosystems from becoming too closed in the first place.
IDK, the CPU has never been my bottle neck for work. I know it is for some use cases, but for general software development memory has always been my main bottleneck.
I've seen 16GB laptop sticks for 40 quid on Amazon today (OOS now though); I've had 32GB in my 14" EliteBook for a long time now, but paid much more for it. It's probably enough for my needs for some time.
Depending on how you feel that sounds like a reason to look for another job. I greatly prefer not using Windows and macOS is rarely an option for my line of work. OS comes up very early in my job seeking process.
I also worked at a company that gave me one option: Windows. So I took it, and installed Linux on it. First in a VM and later, I just blew the resident OS away.
If you think about it, _thats_ always been Apple’s MO. Back when they had 10% marketshare with macs in the ‘90s or even with 70% marketshare with iPods in the ‘00s.
The forcing function, for all the attributes you listed, over the last 10 years has been the iPhone.
Even the headway’s in 3rd app support that the Mac will get now, is funnily because of the iPhone. Can you imagine what it must look like to Bill Gates from 2003? “Wait you’re telling me that a not yet built device with zero support for existing apps is going to magically make macs have the most abundant catalog of apps in 17 years?!!”
There’s only way counter action to those problems — stop buying apple products.
/disclaimer: I love apple products. But I didn’t mean any of the above with sarcasm.
Your fears seem to come down to the idea that Apple will eventually try to force apps to go through the mac app store. I can understand why people would feel that way seeing what they have done on their mobile platforms but I don't actually think there is any evidence to suggest they want to do that on the mac.
I am not at all convinced Apple wants to go that route so the future of the mac doesn't look scary to me it looks pretty great.
I have no idea why you think this, when Apple are clearly clamping down on what software gets on "their" machines.
They have to tread carefully because anti-trust, and they'll make all the relevant noises, but I think it's clear that the end-goal is only allowing app store apps to be installed.
But tbh the same is true of Windows. They're further away, because history, but they've already played with this once and will do so again.
Apple only has about 10% marketshare with macOS. There is no judge in the US that would rule against them in an anti-trust case over that. It's another story with iOS but that's not what we're talking about here.
Apple has no reason to turn the Mac into a total walled garden. They already have that in the iPad. Walling off macOS would mean getting rid of the Terminal and all of the other developer tools. For what? They would be cutting off their nose to spite their face.
>I don't actually think there is any evidence to suggest they want to do that on the mac
Gatekeeper, requiring Developer ID, deprecating kexts, T2 chip, deprecation of the inclusion of Tk/python/PHP. We are slowly boiling frogs here. It's being squeezed into the direction of iOS.
> In Q3 2020, Apple had an 8.5% share of the market, up from 7% in Q3 2019. Apple ranks as the fourth largest PC maker, behind Lenovo, HP and Dell but ahead of Acer.
The new Macs are fast and have great battery life, but I wouldn't worry about them taking over the market. Windows machines and Chromebooks are arguably better versus Macs now than in 2015 when you couldn't find a laptop outside of a Macbook with a decent trackpad or high resolution screen.
> That future looks extremely scary. What can we do, now, as developers ?
Write blogs about how Apple's business practices threaten the profession of developers, how they can hamper innovation, and how they work against the interest of the consumer (see e.g. IDFA). Also discuss the idea of breaking up Apple in a hardware and a software company, and how this would help improve the market and provide a brighter future for general purpose computing.
And then there are basic things, discussed also by others, like not supporting Apple in any way, i.e. not buying their hardware, not developing for that hardware, and not recommending friends and family to buy Apple products.
More harsh things you could do are: buying an Apple laptop and returning it (your right as a consumer; make sure you state a reason), or putting a license on your FOSS software that is more restrictive on Apple's closed hardware.
create a killer app for the average person that _only_ works on linux, and force users to move.
If your app is attractive enough, and there is enough developers doing this, it will force users to slowly migrate.
To compete, walled-gardens will court you, and you can then negotiate conditions to make it better (instead of taking just money that they will offer).
I've been running Linux on my MBP (2015) for about 6 months now and it's been amazing. Great hardware + Fedora, not had any issues.
It's really sad that >= 2016 models have problems getting Linux running properly (wifi, audio driver issues etc) and I don't hold much hope about getting anything other than MacOS running on these new M1 based Macs.
The key differentiator for me has been the i3 window manager over anything else, I can't imagine ever going back to a non-tiling window manager!
For normal daily use, I prefer something that don't require too much messing around with. I don't really care that much about customization either. For work, I'll just ssh into a remote linux server. I don't necessarily need to do everything on a single local machine.
I've written a few small posts on HN[1] about moving to Linux as someone with a decade of macOS muscle memory that I'd like to still take advantage of.
Interesting that the author didn't consider stability or long time support as a factor to choose a distribution.
I was a happy Fedora user, but I got tired of an uneven quality and only 13+ months of support for a given release. It is a great distro to use the latest versions of everything, but it was too much disruption for me. I guess I'm getting old.
I'm currently on Debian stable, that comes with "good enough" versions of the software I need, and I can compile almost anything else. And it gives me plenty of time to do work without having to spend time on the OS.
I’ve got a laptop with Debian oldstable. I can’t be bothered to upgrade it because I just don’t care.
I’m comfortable with Debian; otherwise I’d look for something with even longer term support, like CentOS. Computers are just boring now and not worth upgrading, which is a good thing.
I've been using Fedora as my daily driver for almost 13 years. But in my current company (a big search engine company), I was forced use a debian-based internal distro for work, and I realized why people say "linux is buggy and broken". Once a month I'm facing a pulseaudio or xorg issue which I've never had single time in my last 7 years using Fedora. Everything just worked out of the box.
I've installed Ubuntu LTS on my parents' computer 5 years ago, same. Everything was working out of the box, never had a single issue.
Central place to add your own stuff and basic setup, push out customized versions of tools with less conflicts, control over what people run (e.g. if your security people or lawyers don't want some software to be ever used).
Google includes their own fleet management software, a custom package management system for security (which involves getting other employees to sign off on new programs), and a few other things.
There were also a lot of refugees from macOS due to how Apple treats gamers. First they let OpenGL rot, then they didn't support Vulkan, then they dropped 32-bit. You don't have such nonsense on Linux.
OSX users are essentially at the mercy of Apple's whim. Most stuff is closed source, features are dropped randomly without a care for what users think, and worst of all (for me): anything you do on Apple is likely to be subjected to bitrot beacause most file formats are closed.
People who still use Macs do this simply because they don't know better.
I've been running Linux since forever, and had an investment in Apple hardware since even longer.
I've not used any laptop but an Apple since 2000, but consider Linux to be my primary professional realm.
MacOS has been a 'decent front-end', but more and more the only love I have for it is physical.
As soon as I can find a Linux laptop from a non-Apple vendor that feels as good to wake up to in bed, I'll ditch the Macbooks and switch.
The trouble is, the physicality of the experience is important. A slab of metal is friendlier than a chunk of solid petroleum-based product.
I do have a GPD Pocket, which fulfills the needs, and is indeed a great little computer .. if they rise to the challenge of building a bigger system while maintaining the language of their metal milled cases, I could consider very little need, indeed, for a continued investment in Apple.
> As soon as I can find a Linux laptop from a non-Apple vendor that feels as good to wake up to in bed, I'll ditch the Macbooks and switch.
I've been using both MBPs and T-series Thinkpads for the past five years. I really want to love the Thinkpad (beyond the keyboard) but the physical experience is night and day.
I use a Macbook and a Linux desktop that I dual-boot for games. Honestly, platform specificity except for the games is gone. I pretty much use the Mac and Linux interchangeably. I've got 20 years on a *nix so I imagine the only reason I don't use Windows for dev is that I don't know the ecosystem.
It can't be very much harder, though.
But my Macbook is a very good laptop. It isn't as good a computer as my desktop (latter more powerful, more RAM, more cooling capacity, bigger GPU) but it's a good laptop. Way better than the gaming laptop I have.
linux on the desktop for me: i cannot get a usable mouse sensitivity (WAY too high, at 400dpi) without downloading sources and recompiling a driver. but mouse input has always been pretty darn barebones/bad for those who care about quality input like 1000hz and no accel.
anyway unless you're willing to make many compromises, using linux daily is a test of time or patience for broken things
I find it funny when people complain Linux is not ready for desktop. Sometimes it's because Windows software doesn't run on it, sometimes because Apple makes a fast chip...
Dunno. Been using it on desktops (well, laptops, mostly) since early 2000s, then some 6-year hiatus with OSX, then back to Linux. Works/worked great for me.
So, Year of Linux Desktop is really old news for some. For most, it'll never arrive.
And that's fine.
What I do like is choice - to each their own. You can now use and be fully productive 3 on completely different platforms, depending on your personal choice and work you do.
It's an incredibly personal choice. I've daily driven macOS for well over a decade, but periodically dip my toe into the Linux world just to get a feel of it's "there" yet or not. Unfortunately for my purposes, it never is, and so I end up returning to macOS.
The biggest problem is that none of the DEs really fit my tastes — they all have to be poked and prodded into kinda doing what I want them to do, but they're never quite there and it's incredibly frustrating. I've also faced similar issues with starting with a bare WM and snapping together smaller pieces.
To get what I want I'd likely have to build my own DE from scratch, which I'm not even necessarily averse to, but I have no idea where to start with the mess that is X11 and Wayland and all the "build your own WM" tutorials that could be used as a springboard are written for building hyperminimal borderless tiling WMs, which aren't straightforward to adapt for a more "typical" floating WM with titlebars and the like.
So I guess the endpoint of this rant is that it's frustrating that building one's ideal Linux desktop from the ground up isn't all that accessible in reality. The configurability and openness is there on principle but it's difficult to take advantage of past a skin-deep level.
If X11 had a future I would've recommended xmonad to you. It's advertised as a tiling WM configured in Haskell, but in reality it's more of a library to make your own WM, as it abstracts most of the low-level details but still lets you change almost anything. It's still quite focused on tiling, yes, so it probably wouldn't be a good fit for you, but the idea of having an abstraction layer above low-level X11/Xlib stuff enabling you to easily build a custom WM is, in my opinion, absolutely awesome.
I find it really sad that in the Wayland world all the window managers are coupled with compositors (and possibly even more than that), which makes it that much harder to roll your own. I wish there was a generic compositor/input server/whatever with some sort of window management RPC interface that would allow running a separate window manager in a subprocess. This would make it so much easier to port xmonad over to the Wayland world and take it from there...
(I'm aware of waymonad's existence, but I believe the process barrier between compositor and WM is really practical, especially during development where the WM rapidly changes, sometimes crashes, but the session still survives.)
> "typical" floating WM with titlebars and the like
My preference also. Currently maintaining a script of calls to 'gsettings set ...', plus a patch to gtk.css, on top of Ubuntu 18.04 Gnome Adwaita.
Doesn't quite get me back to what gtk-2 could do with a bit of its well supported, (even encouraged!) customization options. So the struggle continues.
Totally agree. Some would point to elementary OS/Pantheon as being that, but it’s only really “maclike” superficially and brings some unique annoyances that don’t exist in macOS.
I am not surprised. I've been using Linux for a while, and there a lot of things I miss. I keep an old Mac around to reminisce.
• menu bar: one, at the top of the screen. I think KDE had this, and there might have been a somewhat working extension for GTK that doesn't exist anymore.
• keys: CTRL is mapped to Alt; Alt is mapped to Win. This is a start. ⌘C and ⌘V: work as Copy and Paste in Terminal, ^C and all the other "control" keys work as expected in Terminal. I used to configure Terminal keys using AutoKey. I haven't been able to make ⌘← and ⌘→ work in text boxes - sadly it's hard-coded in X11 to do what Windows does.
• windows: Smarter window positioning and sizing especially with multiple monitors. I miss Zoom: the button that sizes the window to perfectly and minimally fit the content without scroll bars.
• too many additional items to count like ⌥8 to type bullet characters.
This is one of those things that I geek out on as a former macOS user.
> menu bar: one, at the top of the screen. I think KDE had this, and there might have been a somewhat working extension for GTK that doesn't exist anymore.
KDE has this if you use the Window Buttons[1], Window Title[2], and Window AppMenu[3] plugins.
> • keys:
Plasma Desktop lets you remap keys easily, and you can use setxkbmap elsewhere. I haven't tried remapping the ⌘ key for terminal usage, though, but I've remapped most of the macOS shortcuts I used to use.
Maybe you should try out the Ubuntu Budgie distro with my http://kinto.sh project added to handle your key mappings. I've tried countless distros and it is the most mac like experience you will find. EnsoOS would follow it, but of course I'd mention elementaryOS and Pop_OS! if they'd keep support for the global menu like Budgie or EnsoOS(xfce).
i use mac and linux and I really like the mac finder less. But it is a personal choice. I miss the macos8 windowshades...
I feel sometimes linux almost has too many choices. There are a few main stream ones and a bunch of others that have bunch of fans/developers so the end product feels very rough. When the other choices (Windows/mac) are good enough but consistent.
Been a Linux Mint user for nearly 10 years now, never looked back. I installed it on plenty of computers, desktops or laptops, personal or professional. Everything just works out of the box, and keeps working.
I really don't understand the fuss about Linux' usability, like we're still in 2004 or something.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadj/k Chromebooks have been desktop Linux for years and they work great
Or, you just can say that by "Linux" we actually mean GNU/Linux.
I'm still not super enthused about a Linux where only one entity drives forward the overall desktop experience. Sure many distos historically have one desktop environment that they prefer, but it's almist always a) a generally compliant piece of the freedesktop standards environment and b) easy to switch out if you want.
If you had asked me a couple years ago, I would have recoiled & wretched at Chromebooks, seen them as another invading conquering anti-libre anti-Linux Desktop anti-option. For the moment, it seems we are much much better able to live in peace & coexist. Originally Chromebooks, like Android, used their own proprietary rendering stack, which was a huge immediate clear & present danger, that Chromebooks had no interest in working with anything or anyone else. These days, Chromebooks run the standard Wayland display server, & crouton/crosstini both seem like fairly good tooling to compute with. Wonderful on-ramps to have.
That sounds like Desktop + Linux to me!
It's much better than Android. Crosstini & Crouton do wonders to carve a good Linux environment out. Overall I'm for the most part fairly happy. It uses the Wayland display server now, which is fantastic. It's a good product & a pretty decent Linux.
But it's still not "the Linux Desktop" in any way anyone from the past would have recognized, & it stands apart from all the other Linux desktops, which stand together, even in their quite sizable differences. Some of the malleability & libre-ness is missing. That's ok! It's still great. But still like a 10x better version of WSL, & not entirely like a Linux Desktop, as how Linux users would recognize.
[1] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/
If you want to get a Linux based laptop for casual users and dont want to maintain it, just get them a chromebook.
It is also a good everyday machine I can use to ssh into my desktop for real work.
I have tried every year and always end up going back to either Windows or MacOS. However, I'm fed up with Windows now, so I've invested in MacOS for now. I'm saying this from my i7 MacBook Pro 2018 with fans blazing because HN on Safari can be demanding.
You've got to be joking?! I have a MacBook Air from 2020, which should still be less powerful than a MacBook Pro from 2018 and even on huge websites full of crap the fans won't kick in, let alone on HN which is the lightest website I frequent often.
The only time I hear the fan is when I compile a large project on my IDE or when the IDE re-indexes the JRE!
I typically run between 100-200 tabs at any given time, most of them hibernated, but some readers only run 10 tabs.
I think I never have more than 10 tabs open, so this is really surprising to me.
I process a high volume of tabs but I keep it super organized, just like my filesystem and email.
I understand you got used to that, but really, there's no reason to keep that many tabs open.
I hate to fall back on the "good enough" argument, it's absolutely pathetic that we're here, but PCs are, generally, good enough. Battery life and performance are both pretty stellar in ultrabooks. I'm looking forward to larger & larger tablets becoming a thing, with Apple again alas having to lead the charge there too by introducing 12 inch tablets, which thankfully, others are doing.
In general, a fixed closed ecosystem can advance wonderfully, especially fueled with a multi-trillion dollar market capitalization. But a lot of people are betting on literally everyone else on the planet, to suss & finagle better ways forward, organically, over time, with hopefully building inertia, and I think, maybe not for this decade but some decade, those bets on everyone are good bets.
That it's slow makes it a bad one.
It's the issue endemic to existing ARM laptop offering: in the best cases, either the performances are lackluster and the battery life is good, or the performances are terrible and the battery life is great. Sure the pinebook is super cheap, but the performances are bad and it gets 6-8h battery.
But for new projects, I honestly do not know what will people do.
If Amazon continues to evolve their Graviton chips, and other cloud providers follow, it will be quite tempting to try a 100% ARM setup...
One can only wonder why running linux containers on OSX would be slow.
My comment was sarcastic.
> same with Windows
Significantly less so as Microsoft themselves provide the virtualisation glue, with a custom kernel and a dedicated / special-cased VM, in the form of WSL2.
https://www.dell.com/community/Inspiron/Switching-Fn-and-lef...
Aside from operating system, the actual PC laptop hardware just isn't up to the standards.
I don't use touchpads, I use mice. That instantly "solves" the first couple problems: I don't need multitouch gestures, and I don't need touchpad palm detection.
I understand that from these results I must be in the minority. But man it would be great to have better tuned acceleration curves.
Apple's trackpad drivers on Boot Camp are absolute ass, pardon the French.
Any Boot Camp driver from Apple is garbage, actually (I had tons of issues with my iMac Pro audio drivers on Windows)
When I turn the sensitivity down low, it caps the max "flick" speed to be sluggish. When I turn the sensitivity up high, even tiny delicate mouse movements lurch my pointer halfway across the screen.
More than anything else, I want a mouse acceleration curve that works like macOS or Windows. Both those operating systems come out of the box good defaults and good configurability. Linux has neither.
The people who like Linux for its customizability and modularity see user friendliness as removing options, and prefer the side of more difficult but more configurable. Or wouldn't object to friendliness if there was zero cost, but have no personal need for it and so no interest in supporting it or developing it, or don't believe that's possible. Some crossover here with a certain kind of neuro-atypical who sees a BNF grammar dump as a user friendly help message, and believes Linux already is user friendly.
Two of the more vocal sub-tribes are the complexity fetishists and the 37337 hax0r / V for Vendetta user. One takes their sense of self and identity from being visibly clever and able to use Linux and sees people who cannot as inferior morons, the other takes theirs from the counter-culture and sees people who don't use it as pathetic sheep normies. Both vehemently object to the "dumbing down" or "commercialisation" aspects and the accompanying loss of self identity. If anyone can use it, using it isn't a sign of being clever or special; normalising it so your mom could use it would be like making 4chan friendly so your mom could use it, or McDonalds opening a Burning Man stall, or getting Linus Torvalds to tone down his communication style, totally embarassing and unthinkable. Taking away what both groups like about it. Overlaps a lot with the "if it was easier to use, I wouldn't get paid as much to use it, and I'd have to work with morons because only morons like easy to use things" sysadmin sub-tribe.
The anti-Microsoft user is another vocal subtype, whose sole reason for decision making is the polar opposite of whatever Microsoft would do. Ease of use is not bad per-se, it's bad because Microsoft claims to value it. NO progress vectors that lead towards Microsoft are allowed, except (curiously) slavishly making cargo-cult copies of surface level Windows dressing hoping to entice the mysterious "users" to come. When they are freed from Microsoft (or Apple), surely they will see the light, accept mud huts and rejoice.
The Stylites[2] are principled idealists, if Linus Torvalds can have no interest in GUI distributions, or Richard Stallman can use a Holy text-only system for years, that's what we should aspire to. Ease of use is a sinful temptation towards vice. Say three Hail Mary's, your mantra is "but POSIX" and "The UNIX way". Minimailists join here, change your mantra to "Ed is the standard editor".
The least controversial is the pragmatic open source developer, in Mac world they can charge money for small utilities and do and make them nice to use, in Windows world some charge and some are free, in Linux world they can't charge and ease of use and documentation take more effort and time, and nobody is paying for that, so ease is often left as an afterthought.
And people who value free-as-in-beer who will put up with anything if it saves a buck, they're already running Linux on hardware they got from eBay, or Windows because it came with their computer, and have no other requirements. Nice would be nice, as long as the 3D effects runs fast on an S3 Virge DX and don't cost money. Also covers people who can't afford alternatives who also live by "Nice would be nice, as long as the 3D effects runs fast on an S3 Virge DX and don't cost money" but for different reasons. Also covers the majority business use - I'm not paying for (a webserver, a database, a fileserver, an IDE, a compiler, etc (but I will pay Oracle licensing)).
Less princip...
It's about as helpful as telling someone to go shit in the woods when they ask for bidet recommendations.
- I love to learn lots of ways to do things, btw here's a keyboard way to do what you want, isn't this abundance of choice thrilling, wooo wooo!
- I commisserate with your difficulty comrade, if we're both stuck with using this for reasons we cannot change, here's a pragmatic workaround that might help stave off your desire for vodka another few minutes.
- Stop wanting good trackpad drivers what are you, a loser normie or a girl? Keyboard is the One True Way for smart people(tm), here's a mystery button mash combination to show how smart I am, get with the program and memorise it, there's lots more arbitrary memorisation and gatekeeping where that came from.
- Trackpad drivers, what do you think this is - a house of pleasure and sin?! This is a machine for work and plain and simple tools for cleansing the soul. Let me help you find enlightenment through key combination meditations.
Pop_OS! is impressive, as is elementaryOS but Ubuntu tends to be their & many others base.
Linux distros need to think in layers in regards to users & either ramp up or ramp down the level of complexity better. This idea of one size fits all is dumb, make some difficult decisions & create an OS that caters to at least 2 or 3 different type of users & I think Linux distros could compete a lot easier.
Instead we waste our time talking of merits of one approach vs another. We can walk & chew gum at the same time, it’s not about the approach as much as just recognizing where people are at & meeting them there.
But I'm grateful every day to have a machine that I have some semblance of control over. I use a rolling release distro. I'm running a recent kernel and haven't done a major re-install in 5 years. During that entire time my computing experience has been incredibly stable. No huge UI changes. No forced system updates. Just a reliable tool I can use to get stuff done.
What I'm trying to communicate is, Linux desktop is usable, and it's worth pushing over the hump.
Install some drivers
Install some apps
Configure things and set up my ui
There's a lot less forum hunting, obscure edge cases you run into, random things not working and all those other problems I remember.
Part of it is my experience at this point, but another large part is just the general improvement of the linux ecosystem over those years.
It really has improved drastically from my first days using it regularly in 2007-2008 or so.
So no. There is just as much forum hunting as ever.
Like you, my Linux installs have been incredibly stable for a long time, even with a rolling release distro which is often considered "unstable."
I use Linux at work, and while I struggle with a few tools others do not as regularly (e.g. video teleconferencing software isn't always optimized for Linux, but overall it works fine), I also don't encounter tons of errors they do. From Apple updates bricking machines, to obscure Bluetooth/Wifi issues that you can't fix, or having to run Docker in a VM, I'm pretty convinced I've got it better.
Around the same time my Mac Pro refused to upgrade to the latest version of macOS because I had a RAID. I installed Ubuntu on that as well. I was a little worried because it has multiple monitors but that was handled really well and worked fine out of the box. I did the same for the family iMac. Haven’t looked back.
Also, I have 4k, 28" monitors which is just the size where 1x is comically small, and 2x is comically large. I've tried recent Gnome and KDE, and they just can't scale to look right, like what I can do in MacOS or even Windows.
If I couldn't use MacOS for work, I would give Windows 10 a serious consideration. The new WSL and Windows Terminal are very good. I did use WSL 1 for a few years at a previous job, and it was awful.
Really interestingly I've been using a Windows, a Linux and a MacOS machine for many months, swapping them often. Well, Windows/Linux are on the same Ryzen 2700X with a Geforce 1080Ti, the Mac is a 2018 Mini with 32G RAM and 6 core i5. 4k 32" display in each case.
What surprised me: - Windows UI is WAY the fastest. Linux is the slowest, and with fractional scaling turned off its hardly tolerable
- the font rendering on Windows is perfect, while MacOS is a bit blurry. This is very surprising to me since all the hype around the good scaling of MacOS. Windows hidpi fonts are just perfectly sharp.
- MacOS is absolutely consistent when it comes to rendering and scaling, the others aren't
Personally, I've turned off AA on my PC (and it's a completely useless feature on high resolution displays). What surprises me is as we have been moving into higher resolution displays, the OS makers have been making it HARDER to turn off anti-aliasing of text and this includes newer versions of Qt which have it turned on apparently so programs using Qt now pick up anti-aliasing even if your PC has it turned off.
People go on about how they love their blurry fonts. I don't get it. I like crisp and sharp.
PS. The version of the font, and the font used also makes a difference. A number of them were made during an era when anti-aliasing wasn't as common, so those are hinted to work well without AA, but I have also run into situations where an older version of a font works great with AA off and the newer version of it doesn't because they screwed something up or removed the hinting in the newer version. So if you have a really good font, back it up.
As for your DPI issues, I've heard many have had better luck with Wayland than Xorg.
I pretty much only use Firefox and terminals. So I set ~/.Xresources Xft.dpi to something that looked nice. Presumably a bunch of programs ignore this (otherwise I wouldn't be seeing complaints about HiDPI online).
Gnome has a feature in Wayland (Ubuntu has a third-party patch for X11) that scales up to an integer ratio then scales the image back down to fit the right size by making the display frame buffer larger. This is what Mac OS does. It’s slower here than on Mac OS, so it’s not very optimized, and it leaves things ever so slightly less sharp.
Plasma is great and it feels lightweight compared to Gnome
I think Linux is cool and grew up playing with different distributions (starting around Fedora Core 4).
I spent most of my time on Ubuntu because it worked the best, but also used Yellow Dog Linux (my first laptop was a 12in Apple power pc powerbook g4), Arch, and some others.
Things that often gave me issues:
- Suspend rarely worked without hacks, even with hacks laptop would often wake and heat up to thermal shutdown in backpack. Hibernate was similarly bad.
- 'Normal' apps often didn't work or worked poorly (Netflix, flash, Spotify, 1Password), things are a lot better on this front now.
- Monitor support was typically bad and caused problems, connecting to monitor, multiple monitors, resolution issues on wake, etc.
- WiFi was often a hassle and either wouldn't work without hacks or would stop working for an unknown reason.
- Sound would stop working for unknown reasons.
- Bad anti-aliasing/font support in general.
- Personally I thought the UI (mostly gnome, then unity) felt slow and UI elements/chrome often took up a ton of visual space - in general things were uglier.
I think a lot of this stuff is better now, but I recently went to install ubuntu on an SSD in my desktop and had to spend a few hours trying to figure out why ubuntu refused to see the SSD in the installer. I eventually had to unplug the HDD to force it to recognize it.
The macOS vertical integration of hardware and software is really good. I think the touchbar is a mistake (and hopefully will go away like the butterfly keyboard did), but the OS works well, battery life is good, and the applications are nice.
I don't think Linux can compete for personal use, for most people macOS or Windows with WSL is a better experience. This is definitely true on laptops. On desktops I think linux has fewer negatives, but I'd still miss macOS ecosystem stuff (imessage/texting from laptop, things like that).
I've had a great experience with my XPS 13 so far. Everything (Headphones, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi,...) just works, Dell even provides Bios updates. Whereas Windows 10 didn't recognise that my headphones also have a microphone. Only downside is the limited battery management, this is definitely better on ThinkPads.
- Suspend works perfectly fine for me, including hibernating (incl. disk encryption) after a predetermined amount of time, and invoking a screenlock on wait.
- Spotify and 1Password X work perfectly fine for me. I have not tried Netflix any time recently, and Flash is dead.
- I use two external monitors, with different DPIs and resolutions, and this is working perfectly fine for me.
- WiFi works perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever.
- Sound works perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever.
- Fonts appear perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever.
- The UI is a sore spot for Linux. Linux doesn't tend to have consistent UI, between GTK, Qt, and other frameworks. Furthermore, adding Electron apps and things like Spotify into the mix, and things start to get funky. Some people put a lot of work into making their UI consistent, but it's tough. Many of the big distros (e.g. Ubuntu) have pretty good success with this I believe. For me, this isn't a huge issue.
As for iMessage, certainly you're going to miss this on Linux, but that's really Apple's fault for not adding it to icloud.com. I use an Android phone, and messages.android.com works on all my devices.
I think the vertical integration used to be a stronger argument, back before messages.android.com. These days, what is it really buying you? A consistent UI? AirDrop? Actually, I believe there's a Linux implementation of that now too.
Obviously you're saying "for me", which I recognise, but from my experience playing around with Linux Mint, Kubuntu and Fedora on a Thinkpad T480S over the past year, while things work technically, getting them perfect (in my opinion) takes a lot longer, and might not even be possible in some cases.
Take for example suspend/resume: yes, this works in terms of the machine waking up again, but things like the keyboard and screen brightness get reset (or are at least inconsistent) each time. Googling the problem, there are a lot of suggestions for hooking up scripts to run xbacklight to store / reset it each time, and I did manage to get it almost working "perfectly", but I'm not really sure why I should have to do this from a user's perspective. It's even more annoying in that at least in Linux Mint and Kubuntu's case, controlling the screen brightness isn't possible until you've logged in, so if you resume the laptop and the screen is dark, it's actually sometimes difficult to verify what's going on at the login screen.
Same goes for things like Dropbox - it doesn't know it's been woken up (maybe it's a Dropbox issue not listening for events), so doesn't resync - there are hacks to make a script to touch a file to trigger the refresh, and basically get it working, but again, why do I need to have to do this?
Even getting decent battery life involves (in my experience) tweaking things and running things like powertop to work out what system services are doing what, etc, etc.
Whilst I do agree it's technically possible to get something I'd term "good" with Linux + Laptop, I'm not convinced the average consumer would be that happy with it compared to a Mac or a PC laptop.
Things generally work, but poorly with lots of little issues that degrade the experience and regular users wouldn't tolerate.
If you use linux you learn to tolerate the bad experience, but I think it's just because you adapt to deal with it and lower your expectations of what good even is.
-No package manager. You have to download and install third party stuff like chocolatey (resp. brew). Unless you mean scoop (resp. macports)? In any case you have to commit to one and they're much less complete than Debian repos or the AUR so you still end up downloading stuff manually. A thing I don't miss from my teenage years is having to remember unchecking all the crap adware from installation wizards.
-No "open in terminal" option in file managers. Wtf?
-Windows "administrator mode" is incredibly bad and clunky to use. OS X's is better but sometimes you have to use sudo even though everyone tells you it's bad because nothing else works anyway.
-You can't just "upgrade everything" - package manager upgrades are distinct from system upgrades because, as said before, package managers are not builtin. Not only is this very clunky, you're also completely at the mercy of Microsoft and Apple.
-No shortcuts for basic stuff like "open terminal on ~" or "bring up app list with fuzzy search prompt", "hide all windows and bring desktop to the foreground" - windows used to have them but axed them for some reason? doesn't work anymore last time I tested anyway
-OS X file system is case insensitive. wtf? Windows still as really weird quirk where they won't let you easily browse to the WSL directory from the Explorer file browser, some directories can't be easily accessed and some files can't be created due to some backward compatibility behavior from 1974. wtf?
-lots of hardware won't work on Windows out of the box, especially drives with more exotic filesystems. never had a problem with Linux
Maybe all this stuff is duck syndrome but the same could be said about your "little issues"
While using a different OS's, all you see are the things that work worse, not the things that work better.
At least, that how the first few hours go for me.
And I personally haven't experienced the screen brightness issue.
Certainly, Linux still requires some extra setup to get going, and I think this area is ripe for improvement. But the experiencing of using Linux has been vastly superior in most cases IMO. And when things do break, I can actually fix them, unlike on macOS!
Consistent UI is nice and recent M1 chip + good battery life I think is also a bonus of vertical integration. It sounds like linux is becoming more of an option though for people that don't care about those things.
From your description it sounds like baseline functionality mostly works (particularly on a desktop).
The other Apple hardware advantage is the trackpad which even windows machines can't compete with. I suspect this is because Apple factored a lot of their iOS multitouch research into their trackpad support. It'd be hard for me to use a non-apple laptop, but linux on a desktop would probably be fine.
It's Apple's M1 design plus ARM plus their software stack that makes it great. Their power also lets them force others to write high quality native software for their chip (along with their design just having way better performance).
And you're right - Apple's trackpad has everything else beat. The gestures are great too! I am more of a keyboard aficionado, so I don't mind this too much, but I'm not an average user in this way.
One of the problems is that experience is highly dependent on hardware choice and/or distro/software choice in rather unpredictable ways.
Generally I agree with grandparent: Linux for the desktop is a lot more reliable than for the laptop. The kind of stuff that needs to work on a desktop/server has considerably more testing and polish behind. With the laptop is about as hit-and-miss as things used to be for desktop in the late 90s. A surprising amount of people just accept some stuff not working or working unreliably in their laptops (some of my mates just "deal with it" - for instance one has a webcam that simply isn't supported, just got an external one - and same for the microphone; another one has trouble with external monitors not keeping config or even crashing the machine sometimes: "it's ok I don't need to use an external monitor", eventually managed to make it work after some research - but I'd rather not have to deal with that sort of thing... etc etc).
Having said that, Apple is so far gone that I'm going to have to move to Linux for my next laptop (Linux is already my main choice on the desktop for a long time).
But the thing is, the way that computers work nowadays, the "choose-your-own-OS model" is broken. It's "less broken" for desktop hardware because it moves so much more slowly and incrementally than they used to, especially at the interface level, but laptop hardware moves faster and mobile a lot faster. Hardware-OS combos with OEM pre-made troubleshooting and tailor-made workarounds (hardware nowadays is very buggy, but the user is sheltered from this fact mainly by kernels and drivers). This is much worse in mobile, btw, people are not expected at all to alter hardware or even connect peripherals beyond strong constraints.
So the situation is that you usually get a machine with something installed that has testing done on it as a combo, and "it works" even if the "internal components" (hardware, OS sub-services, etc) don't quite work to spec. You break this link and someone has to do the patching work, which is often "the community", driver/kernel hackers, etc. But this is a lot harder than working with fixed solutions and stuff keeps breaking, and there's when the end user comes in with some final, hopefully trivial fixes. Or, if the machine is popular enough, "the community" again. But few machine-Linux combos are really popular these days, especially compared to Apple laptops.
TL-DR; server computing is pretty solid, desktop computing is rather solid, laptop computing is a mess, mobile computing is a messy hack. The more things are "integrated" and not expected to be interchangeable, the more likely you are to find hiccups along the way, and the shorter hardware cycles don't help - so it's not a problem with Linux per se (the work behind Linux is amazing in terms of adapting to large ranges of hardware, even when hardware vendors didn't facilitate things) but a problem with installing and troubleshooting your own OS rather than having the OEM do it with flexibility to just change their hardware to make the system work best.
Not a "gotcha" question, I am seriously asking. Considering a Thinkpad for my next laptop, but memories of Superfish give me pause.
https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_inci...
On Linux the font rendering is either far too thin or far too thick, no matter which setting I fiddle with. I don't have the greatest eyes and bleh font rendering is huge pain.
I understand others may not be so picky, but acting like the font rendering is on par with Mac is just not true.
I think it at least partially depends on the hardware.
> - Suspend rarely worked without hacks, even with hacks laptop would often wake and heat up to thermal shutdown in backpack. Hibernate was similarly bad.
I did experience this a little bit, but it's been 2-3 years since the last time it happened.
> - 'Normal' apps often didn't work or worked poorly (Netflix, flash, Spotify, 1Password), things are a lot better on this front now.
No comment on this, I haven't really used any of these on my laptop.
> - Monitor support was typically bad and caused problems, connecting to monitor, multiple monitors, resolution issues on wake, etc.
Only issue I had with this was one TV wouldn't take HDMI output at the same time as displaying to my laptop screen.
Everything else has worked great.
> - WiFi was often a hassle and either wouldn't work without hacks or would stop working for an unknown reason.
Haven't had any issues with this, but I would imagine it would be highly dependent on the wireless card you had.
> - Sound would stop working for unknown reasons.
Yeah, audio on linux kinda sucks right now. I've never been stuck without a workaround, but I've needed workarounds multiple times.
> - Bad anti-aliasing/font support in general.
I've not noticed this, but I also haven't looked.
> - Personally I thought the UI (mostly gnome, then unity) felt slow and UI elements/chrome often took up a ton of visual space - in general things were uglier.
GNOME + Pop_shell at least has gotten fast enough to keep me from installing i3 again. This is of course a matter of personal preference.
I personally trust neither Apple or MS, but they both have their upsides.
To each their own, and happy hacking!
> Only issue I had with this was one TV wouldn't take HDMI output at the same time as displaying to my laptop screen.
I just wanted to throw out some non-Linux issues I've hit in the past couple years.
I believe I had a MacbookPro 2015 and Apple's USB-C to HDMI I consistently had RGB noise patterns and it worked terribly. I switched to a third-party USB-C to DisplayPort and it worked great. I heard about similar issues online. Some talked about it being specific to hardware configuration (that series of MacbookPros) and others pointed to OS updates that triggered it.
I've had trouble with a Windows desktop and an Nvidia card with detecting which port was used to send video signal to on boot. I think it assumed the first HDMI port when I had the intention of using the DisplayPort. I think it got extra confused if the monitor was off on boot (it was trying to detect the signal?) I would often get the BIOS to show up on one output, then Windows may try and use a different one.
I've been using:
1. Dells
2. HP Elite books
3. Clevos (Branded by sager)
4. Asus Zenbooks
About 16 years ago, the suspend and hibernate was a bit of work to get right. Now it just works right out of the gate. Sometimes it doesn't.. but that's the same for Windows and Macs.
--
"Normal apps"
There is no Netflix app for linux. Flash is mostly gone away, firefox and chrome fixed that 9 years ago at least. Spotify works.
---
Monitor support, most of the X problems are resolved. Intel graphics support is great.
Nvidia Optimus is still a dumpster fire.
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WIFI- what cards are you using? the intel cards work without an issue.
--
Sound
Yea I don't know what is the deal with alsa vs pulse etc. But most of the time they work out of the gate.. I've had minor issues mostly. Bluetooth audio is annoying. Haven't had complete stopages issues in a very long time.
---
Anti-aliasing/font-support- this is more of your desktop environment than anything. KDE tends to correct those issues.
------
macOS often times has issues with their own software and makes it difficult to troubleshoot when things go wrong.
But, honestly, at lest in the past 5 years, I had no problems especially if we consider laptops that usually have more or less the same standard hardware.
4 years ago I bought an Xiaomi 13' laptop to use it as a browsing machine and occasionally as a media player.
It came with a Chinese windows preinstalled.
Without even looking at the specs I installed Ubuntu on it and I've never had a problem.
I upgraded it from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 to 20.04 and I'm using it right now to watch the 4th season of Fargo
I never had to tweak the configuration or change a single .conf file, it simply worked
The battery lasts 8 hours and if I close the lid it automatically goes on suspend
It's been the best setup I ever had.
Unfortunately it's too underpowered to use it as a working device, but if I could I would be the happiest man in the World.
And, while Linux has gotten considerably more stable and hassle-free, at the same time, Windows, in my experience, has gotten _worse_. The start menu is slow, and makes network requests for some reason. The UI is so flat that I can't tell anything apart, and I'm frequently pestered to link my install with my Microsoft account or enable cortana. I wish I could have used Windows 7 forever :\",
Probably the fact it's an unsupported OS,
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-7-end-of-lif...
I don't really care enough to support windows 7 myself; as I mentioned, the only reason I have Windows is for video games, so as long as I'm still getting video driver updates, Win10 could be the worst OS in the world and it wouldn't bother me too much.
This might be the first time someone could have said 'I use Arch' but decided not to.
The sluggish performance you're getting is honestly probably related to CFS (the default linux process scheduler). Windows does an AMAZING job with scheduling for UI applications. You almost never feel like your computer is struggling because anything UI related gets scheduled first. CFS does not do this.
I've found that changing the scheduler to something that may be less efficient overall, but is aimed at desktop use makes my experience so much better.
My main recommendation is stick with one of the major distros because you'll get more results when you search for solutions to issues. With Ubuntu you'll find more hits for specific problems, but I think the quality is also sometimes lower. Whereas I think Arch has the best documentation (for linux in general, not just Arch) but in general you'll need to understand more about what's happening under the hood.
Granted, I probably use less programs than most people, and I'm the type of person who would rather download the nodejs tarball and update my PATH than use the system package or nvm.
Honestly the dark theme of the Gnome variant is the most beautiful dark theme I have ever found for a Linux DE. I know there are lots of ways to tweak the various DEs to get some cool looking dark themes, but my experience is that they can take a lot of manual configuring and tend to still fail on the edge cases. The dark theme bundled with Manjaro Gnome looks amazing right out of the box!
It's arguably easier to use than windows and macOS because it doesn't require a bunch of separate sign-ins to do things.
I think the only "hard part" for the average user is getting into the boot settings to actually install ubuntu. For a developer I think it's a non-issue.
Prior to that, I had an issue with bluetooth drivers that, IIRC, required finding a custom driver online or some C source file? I don't really remember the specifics, but it was another "I am a dev and this isn't really difficult but is more than 0 effort and my mom couldn't do it."
Prior to that, I installed Ubuntu on my laptop for college and the display drivers were an absolute mess. The screen brightness flickered from 10% to 80% over and over, regardless of what I was pressing or they were set at. I didn't find a fix and ultimately reformatted and went back to windows.
> I mean linux is the backbone of the internet.
Linux containers are great, I use them all the time. Linux as a desktop environment where I use an array of UI applications to develop software, make and observe video files, make games, etc, I have never once had a good experience with. The most recent try, when I encountered the Auto Login issue, I was also totally unable to get Unity to compile/run my company's game. It was yet another thing that I probably could have fixed, but the value-add vs. the effort of constantly having to manually fix each individual piece of software I intended to use, just didn't seem worth it to me. And, what's probably worse (to me), is the general response I found online was "Those issues aren't that big of a deal", which totally ignores my entire point. Death by a thousand paper cuts is a problem, even if each individual paper cut isn't that bad.
Again, I am happy to be told that my experience isn't indicative of the landscape of the env, and that I myself just have terrible luck, but if we're asking what _I_ think, that is my experience which makes me think it's not yet ready for legitimate non-developer use.
Death by a thousand paper drew a visceral response from me, it describes my experience perfectly.
I'm a developer and power user that wants to do various things beyond just browsing.
Things regularly required troubleshooting and fiddling, and for one thing that is fine, but after the 5th serious time consuming issue I get cross and around the 10th I can the migration attempt and go back to windows. Done this every three or four years for the last couple of decades.
I'm due to have another go around 2022 and fingers crossed it will work then, but I doubt it!
Linux application servers tend to be worth it though, and part of that is the use cases are usually much more limited, and on the well worn path.
Of course, the fact that I have the chops to fix things is key, because I really, really do (Systems Programmer, 30+ years building OS and system-level things), but for the Ubuntu experience key factors have also been: pick your hardware nicely (e.g. Presonus=great Audio for Linux), use package management, do frequent manual updates, and use containers/virtualization for anything where ones hacking around might be dodgy - i.e. keep the work part of workstation in mind with all system updates/installations, etc.
Decades of Linux desktop usage means, to me, the cliche is over. Linux is an awesome desktop workstation. Everything just works, audio, video, graphics .. WINE is perfectly functional .. and there is zero bloatware or concern about walled gardeners.
Care to elaborate? this might be useful to try. I have a similar setup macbook and ubuntu system, but I find that the LTS 18/20 versions often need reboot, and I didn't have the issue with centos. Still, I would probably continue using ubuntu because it usually needs less hacking time in my experience.
With Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 I'm able to develop the same without having to dual boot and feeling just as native as running Linux on the system, and I can use Windows software like, say, Photoshop. Visual Studio Code integrates automatically, it's like I've got a Linux 'Window' open.
And when I want to switch off I'm back in Windows for a full gaming environment etc.
I'm completely switched over to full-time Windows now. Maybe not a good thing, but it sure is convenient.
> What I'm trying to communicate is, Linux desktop is usable, and it's worth pushing over the hump.
Huge fan of all of the above.
I do think though that now desktops are less inherently compelling than they used to be. They used to represent a center of activity, a locus of control for the user.
Now, a very sizable % of our computing is off in far away clouds, & the desktop itself is a less compelling, less interesting place to invest time.
My hope is that the Free Desktop / Linux world can begin to grow new roots, become more connected, & return to a little bit more of a place of prominence & relevance. Lots of visioneering & pioneering & engineering to do.
The kind of people who use GNOME or Ubuntu or whatever the 'windows competitor' is always seem to be having problems, but are also the kind of people who see needing to use a terminal as a problem in itself.
I've never ever had a problem with i3, emacs, firefox, and simple <20 line configs. Terminal is fine, it's what most GNU tools are built around in the first place. It's apt that people who really love Linux and appreciate what it does out of the box, and who don't feel the need to turn it into Windows or MacOS, also seem to have the least issues with it.
There is an illusion that there is not as much to learn in Windows or Mac, and in fact all that knowledge is even harder to grasp as a lot of it is proprietary and not transparent.
I was so impressed, I installed it next on a ~2 year old Asus Flip, and everything worked except for the fingerprint reader. Battery life was about 2/3rd of what I got in Windows 10 (which was already not great) but I used it for a couple of weeks, sometimes getting work done on it, and sometimes playing around with things like Steam - I could play Torchlight on it, or stream Torchlight II from my Windows 10 desktop. Neat! Ended up going back to Windows for better battery, but aside from gaming, the experience was very much on par with Windows, with some things better and some things worse, but no huge differences.
I'm very comfortable with Windows 10 and WSL, and I don't expect Linux to take over as a daily driver any time soon. So I guess in a way, I did "give up" on switching over, but if an employer handed me an all-Linux machine, I think I'd be perfectly pleased to use it all day for work, even if I head back to Windows when I want to play StarCraft.
And even then, moving your entire setup from a machine to another have never been easier, when you know how to do it.
Corporate OSs are more polished, that's undeniable, Apple especially provides the best out of the box experience, but it's nothing comprared to the flexibility I can experience using Linux.
I can have a beefed up work laptop with Plasma and all the effects enabled and the same exact setup on the cheap low end laptop with XFCE.
Everything, really, just works.
And when it doesn't, I can somehow make it work.
There have been times I spent days trying to make the Nvidia card work, but it was because I was looking for the perfect setup that I usually don't experience on Windows or MacOS, but there's nothing I can do about it, no matter how much time I spend trying to fix it.
It's simply out of reach.
I'm aware that that's not what the average user is willing to go through, and that's perfectly fine, I don't feel better than them because I use a more complicated system, but I cannot go back to being limited in what I can do because I am not allowed to.
Also, modern distros are really really stable out of the box.
The laptop I use as a replacement for media server is an Ubuntu 20, it was an Ubuntu 18 and 16 before, I simply upgraded it to the new version and it worked, every time better than before.
If there's something I've learned in the past 25 years is that freedom do comes at a cost, but as of today, that cost is actually negligible.
P.s. forgot to mention that I do not have to care anymore about bloatware, automatic updates, things calling home, software you rely on going out of business and, most of all, lack of support or documentation
Not sure if something like this already exist (especially with ZFS and Btrfs) but it would be nice if there was a easy to use system restore manager you could boot into and restore your system to a last known working state. Again, keyword easy. Yes I'm technical enough to where I could fix it but I just don't have the time.
They've been fairly happy with it and they're not very technically savy.
I get that the author wound up with a lemon, but the idea that Apple is "downgrading its hardware" with more problems arising is ludicrous.
Especially now that Apple fixed the keyboards, its hardware is better than it's ever been.
You might not like Apple for plenty of other reasons, but the notion that its hardware is getting worse, or a worse value, is insane. The new M1 MBA is the highest-quality best deal of a laptop ever made.
Maybe they will recover all of their fans but it might take more time for some of us. I think today there is still room for doubt.
Though we've gained USBc and performance. I'm not sure the "better than it's ever been" is so obvious personally. Replacing the previous input ports with dongles reduces the value proposition a fair bit for people with those use cases.
Apple has removed ports sure, but a dock fixes that problem pretty easily.
But fundamentally we're having different conversations. Apple has removed features you personally liked, but the overall hardware quality has just gotten better and better and better. I don't see how that is even open to argument.
2018 - https://www.linuxnewssite.com/2018-year-linux-desktop-241220...
2017 - https://www.datamation.com/open-source/is-2017-the-year-of-t...
2016 - https://www.datamation.com/open-source/2016-the-year-of-the-...
2015 - https://linuxaria.com/article/reasons-why-2015-will-be-year-...
2014 - https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
2013 - https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/11uh7q/2013_will_be_...
2012 - https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133669-could-this-be-the-...
2011 - https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
2010 - https://limulus.wordpress.com/2007/08/13/2010-the-year-of-th...
2009 - https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/2009-year-of-the-linux-deskto...
2008 - https://lwn.net/Articles/258874/
2007 - https://www.zdnet.com/article/2007-is-year-of-linux-desktop-...
2006 - https://gcn.com/Articles/2006/03/30/2006-The-year-of-desktop...
2005 - https://www.financialexpress.com/archive/2005-will-be-the-ye...
2004 - https://www.zdnet.com/article/2004-the-year-of-desktop-linux...
As an avid user of Linux throughout all of th...
Which could lead us in a few years to a situation where mac developers will face the same fate as ios developers : forced to buy hardware to sign their app, forced to push them on the mac app store, forced to give 15/30% cut, forced to be removed whenever an app doesn't feel "right" to apple, or a government strong enough to force Apple. And competitors will probably follow the trend, because Apple will have proven that it's doable and profitable.
That future looks extremely scary. What can we do, now, as developers ?
Stop buying, using, and supporting the Apple ecosystem. Vote with your money. The new chips are faster. So what? The laptop you have today works fine, you don't need the latest and greatest hardware.
I'm already stuck developing for the app store, using xcode to sign and deploy, using a programming language (that i love) swift that only really works on mac OS.
My personal situation isn't going to change anytime soon unfortunately. I was about to dump my iphone next time i had to pick one (and keep my current one for testing), however my laptop is my work computer.
I think "stop being part of the ecosystem" isn't realistic for many of us. We don't want to work on crap hardware, with a crap OS because that would make us unhappy and unproductive (or in my case, would simply not be an option at all).
However, we can use this current hardware /software to try and build the next generation of tools we would happily be using. My question now being : where to start ?
It's enough if you just start to seek a way out. Even if it takes years, after you eventually do it, it will be worth it.
I think you answered yourself. I am not anti-Apple myself and think it's fine being in the Apple world and buying their crap but if you have doubts about Apple's overarching impact on technology in general, you should beging by ending your relationship with that ecosystem as soon as possible.
How about find another way to make a living which lines up with your ethics?
(P.S. this comment does not compare Apple to nazis)
There isn't much you can do other than sucking up what they feed you or getting a new job. If there's a 3rd option I'd love to hear it.
IMO what an alternative needs is momentum, mindshare, and a reality distortion field of its own. Find out how to get a million prople to believe in the need for a next thing, and convince them to cooperatively choose the same next thing. And somehow keep that thing from being mangled in the process.
I have a co-worker that was in your exact same situation and just by showing interest in the devops world and sitting next to them and expressing his interest in that area he managed to just move there and now he loves it. You might find something similar, it just takes will, courage and effort.
In hindsight I marvel that I ever allowed a single corporation to have absolute control over whether or not I’m allowed to publish my work to users.
So anything that is not macOS is crap now?
You consider a Thinkpad with Linux installed and configured properly as "crap hardware, with a crap OS"? Really?
I am curious if it will be faster on sustained loads comparatively to some gaming grade laptops.
If Apple had created their own proprietary ISA then it is likely that almost nothing would be ported from the get go.
Or at least this is what this thread implies: https://twitter.com/never_released/status/132739810298317619...
I don't have any intention to contribute to the mac ecosystem. I still hog in what I like best - the terminal.
I treat the mac as a client - web+cloud is my backend. The client should feel good to me with decent battery life and snappy experience, and maybe some gaming. But I don't care much else about it.
I'll never give up my Fedora ThinkPad, but if I was forced to I could do all my development on a Chromebook with Linux.
I've been using a Chromebook for linux stuff with Crostini for a while (before that I used Crouton). With some frequency something (me or an update) manages to bork things up and have to reinstall the Crostini subsystem, which wipes out all my stuff (things that I care about are usually backed up).
It happens often enough that I'm thinking about going back to a dedicated linux machine, since I think probably that would be more stable for me.
With Crostini something did happen that horked the VM and I had to remove and reinstall it. That is pretty annoying. Not sure if I did something to cause it, but I also respect that the feature is still "Beta" and I guess I'm so overjoyed that they're doing it that I'm willing to accept some brokenness :-)
Wayland already has trackpad support that's nearly identical to macOS.
Gnome with a dock is basically the same desktop experience - Pick a distro of your choice.
I can honestly say I prefer my linux XPS to my work macbook, by a large margin.
Plus - It doesn't spy on me. I actually own it. I can release software through channels that aren't entirely abusive.
Basically - The only thing Apple does truly well at this point, in my opinion, is marketing how great Apple is. But it turns out they just aren't all that great.
Don't buy their shit.
I never really understood how input-driver responsibilities are divided between the Linux kernel and X/Wayland.
If you're talking about Macbook's reputation for a pleasant trackpad experience, are you saying that in Linux the relevant code resides within Wayland but not X?
I can see you’re frustrated and lashing out with “Don’t buy their shit”. Honestly I would be too if I had to read another hn post on apple & their policies.
But the biggest gap here isn’t technology. Rather it’s empathy.
Empathy for all those people who don’t read hn and would walk into apple stores to buy the best computer they possibly can.
Apple didn't change that by suddenly being excellent and having great marketing. Developers changed that by realising that Macs were good dev machines and writing software that ran on Macs.
Non-tech people ask their tech-savvy friends for advice on what tech to buy. For years that was "buy Apple; it costs more but they're more reliable, the support is great, and they're way cooler".
That's no longer the case. There are manufacturers shipping great Linux laptops, that just work, and it is actually feasible to recommend one to a friend. And running Linux is way cooler these days - every muppet out there has a Macbook ;)
That is actually pretty much precisely the reason.
Then the web changed things, and a huge number of devs moved from writing Windows desktop applications to writing web applications for the dotcom boom (I was one). This took about a decade, from around '97ish. It also freed people to use different dev machines because most of the servers were LAMP (or variants thereof), and Macs could run the AMP bit fine. Web designers who had started off in Apple-land being designers on Adobe migrated into being web developers, and that helped spread Macs into the web dev community.
Yes, Macs did get better during this same period, and there was a lot of great innovation. But if nothing else had changed then that wouldn't have mattered - if you had to write Windows applications then you couldn't do that on a Mac, no matter how sexy it was.
I find the parallel with today's situation (and this discussion) fascinating.
Ethical software allows users to modify it, but most users have little desire, let alone ability or time to learn how to do so.
I absolutely agree with you - The vast majority of folks don't give a rats ass about the technology.
But I don't have to convince those people.
I have to convince you, and me, and the other developers that will read this thread.
We're the facilitators that make that hardware useful to the average person. We matter SO much more.
So I'll add some more - Don't take a job at Apple. Don't develop for Apple. Don't advertise to all your non-technical friends and family that you support Apple by buying their shit.
While PC trackpads were absolutely terrible for a long time, I actually really like the one used on my X1 Carbon. Inertia scrolling and gesters are not as smooth, but the hardware itself is quite pleasant.
No it's not, macOS has a fundamentally different approach to apps and windows. Where you open only 1 app instance that can run multiple document windows. You switch between apps, and can then switch between windows in that app. This can partly be immitated in the window manager, but not all apps will work well with this pattern. Also standardized keyboard shortcuts, spelling check, secrets management and general app behaviour is hit and miss on Linux. Whereas on macOS most apps adhere to the human interface guidelines. This consistency and predictability gives me a greater efficiency on Mac over Linux system. I tried going back to Linux for 1,5 years when my then employer didn't allow me to work on a Mac and no matter how much I tweaked it, I could never get the same enjoyment and productivity compared to macOS.
Employer gave me a MacBook pro, I tried for a year to get used to it, but no matter how much I tweaked it I couldn't completely get out of the horrible (imo) experience that is Mac os Windows manager.
It I want to switch to an open window I'll switch to the freaking opened window, stop trying to hijack what open an app means.
Anyways, Mac os isn't bad, but you have to accept to give up a lot of things. It's their way, or nothing.
It's literally the same as the macOS dock, complete the with the dot indicator for number of open windows.
Plus my upper left hotcorner displays all application windows, and I have my upper right set to display each window of the current application.
They're preeeetty much identical.
I'd know - I use both daily.
i have now Manjaro Linux on a HP Spectre. (Debian installer crashed .... )
- 4K support is pretty bad for a lot of games. usually some tweaking is required to get the text size - to a readable level.
- Internal Sound-card doesn't work.
- Wifi - had to switch iwd to get stable network. (had lots of packetloss with with wpa-supplicant)
- Getting the Geforce and Intel card working was a pain.
- Touch screen doesn't support reading pressure levels.
- Terminator is misses a bunch of feature that iTerm2 has.
- Last manjaro upgrade disabled the Nvidia graphics card, without warning. (had to restore a previous timeshift backup)
- external monitor doesn't work yet.
- listening to music while lock screen is on doesnt work
- fingerprint scanner doesn't work.
- have to restart bluetooth swith medium probability because it fails to connect to my airpods.
- the UI to unlock your encrypted harddisk at boottime looks also really bad. only text mode. and the text is also not very friendly.
almost all issue, i don't have on the same hardware with windows, but since i really want use linux i accepted it that the HW support is crappy.
Develop for open systems. If you write a program for Windows, make it also available on Linux, or at least make sure it works well on Wine. If you develop for the web, make sure it also works well on Firefox. If you develop for smartphones, make also an Android version, and make sure it also works on AOSP without the Google libraries (or with an alternative replacement). And so on. That way, if these ecosystems become too closed, users will have an alternative; and the existence of that alternative might even help prevent these ecosystems from becoming too closed in the first place.
Don't buy Apple products.
Don't use Apple products.
Don't support Apple products.
Don't develop for Apple products.
Raise awareness among those who would listen.
The forcing function, for all the attributes you listed, over the last 10 years has been the iPhone.
Even the headway’s in 3rd app support that the Mac will get now, is funnily because of the iPhone. Can you imagine what it must look like to Bill Gates from 2003? “Wait you’re telling me that a not yet built device with zero support for existing apps is going to magically make macs have the most abundant catalog of apps in 17 years?!!”
There’s only way counter action to those problems — stop buying apple products.
/disclaimer: I love apple products. But I didn’t mean any of the above with sarcasm.
The CPU is good, but it's not a miracle. Ryzen is still faster, what makes waves is that this is the first time an ARM CPU has beat Intel.
I am not at all convinced Apple wants to go that route so the future of the mac doesn't look scary to me it looks pretty great.
They have to tread carefully because anti-trust, and they'll make all the relevant noises, but I think it's clear that the end-goal is only allowing app store apps to be installed.
But tbh the same is true of Windows. They're further away, because history, but they've already played with this once and will do so again.
Instead, they'll push iPad to be usable as a laptop alternative for more people.
Apple has no reason to turn the Mac into a total walled garden. They already have that in the iPad. Walling off macOS would mean getting rid of the Terminal and all of the other developer tools. For what? They would be cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Gatekeeper, requiring Developer ID, deprecating kexts, T2 chip, deprecation of the inclusion of Tk/python/PHP. We are slowly boiling frogs here. It's being squeezed into the direction of iOS.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/10/12/apples-mac-sees-s...
The new Macs are fast and have great battery life, but I wouldn't worry about them taking over the market. Windows machines and Chromebooks are arguably better versus Macs now than in 2015 when you couldn't find a laptop outside of a Macbook with a decent trackpad or high resolution screen.
Get a job at one of Apple's competitors, and make those competing products better.
Apple beats competitors because their product lineup is simpler and their products don't generally suck as much.
Look at Microsoft's attempt at ARM notebooks a few years ago compared to Apple's now. The difference is staggering.
If we want to see people move away from Apple, they need worthy competitors.
Write blogs about how Apple's business practices threaten the profession of developers, how they can hamper innovation, and how they work against the interest of the consumer (see e.g. IDFA). Also discuss the idea of breaking up Apple in a hardware and a software company, and how this would help improve the market and provide a brighter future for general purpose computing.
And then there are basic things, discussed also by others, like not supporting Apple in any way, i.e. not buying their hardware, not developing for that hardware, and not recommending friends and family to buy Apple products.
More harsh things you could do are: buying an Apple laptop and returning it (your right as a consumer; make sure you state a reason), or putting a license on your FOSS software that is more restrictive on Apple's closed hardware.
create a killer app for the average person that _only_ works on linux, and force users to move.
If your app is attractive enough, and there is enough developers doing this, it will force users to slowly migrate.
To compete, walled-gardens will court you, and you can then negotiate conditions to make it better (instead of taking just money that they will offer).
It's really sad that >= 2016 models have problems getting Linux running properly (wifi, audio driver issues etc) and I don't hold much hope about getting anything other than MacOS running on these new M1 based Macs.
The key differentiator for me has been the i3 window manager over anything else, I can't imagine ever going back to a non-tiling window manager!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23607374
I was a happy Fedora user, but I got tired of an uneven quality and only 13+ months of support for a given release. It is a great distro to use the latest versions of everything, but it was too much disruption for me. I guess I'm getting old.
I'm currently on Debian stable, that comes with "good enough" versions of the software I need, and I can compile almost anything else. And it gives me plenty of time to do work without having to spend time on the OS.
I’m comfortable with Debian; otherwise I’d look for something with even longer term support, like CentOS. Computers are just boring now and not worth upgrading, which is a good thing.
I've been using Fedora as my daily driver for almost 13 years. But in my current company (a big search engine company), I was forced use a debian-based internal distro for work, and I realized why people say "linux is buggy and broken". Once a month I'm facing a pulseaudio or xorg issue which I've never had single time in my last 7 years using Fedora. Everything just worked out of the box.
I've installed Ubuntu LTS on my parents' computer 5 years ago, same. Everything was working out of the box, never had a single issue.
I know that gLinux has some very non-standard package management stuff, so it wouldn't surprise me if that was related.
Take a look at this document: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/fleet_management_a...
There were also a lot of refugees from macOS due to how Apple treats gamers. First they let OpenGL rot, then they didn't support Vulkan, then they dropped 32-bit. You don't have such nonsense on Linux.
People who still use Macs do this simply because they don't know better.
I've not used any laptop but an Apple since 2000, but consider Linux to be my primary professional realm.
MacOS has been a 'decent front-end', but more and more the only love I have for it is physical.
As soon as I can find a Linux laptop from a non-Apple vendor that feels as good to wake up to in bed, I'll ditch the Macbooks and switch.
The trouble is, the physicality of the experience is important. A slab of metal is friendlier than a chunk of solid petroleum-based product.
I do have a GPD Pocket, which fulfills the needs, and is indeed a great little computer .. if they rise to the challenge of building a bigger system while maintaining the language of their metal milled cases, I could consider very little need, indeed, for a continued investment in Apple.
I've been using both MBPs and T-series Thinkpads for the past five years. I really want to love the Thinkpad (beyond the keyboard) but the physical experience is night and day.
It can't be very much harder, though.
But my Macbook is a very good laptop. It isn't as good a computer as my desktop (latter more powerful, more RAM, more cooling capacity, bigger GPU) but it's a good laptop. Way better than the gaming laptop I have.
anyway unless you're willing to make many compromises, using linux daily is a test of time or patience for broken things
Dunno. Been using it on desktops (well, laptops, mostly) since early 2000s, then some 6-year hiatus with OSX, then back to Linux. Works/worked great for me.
So, Year of Linux Desktop is really old news for some. For most, it'll never arrive.
And that's fine.
What I do like is choice - to each their own. You can now use and be fully productive 3 on completely different platforms, depending on your personal choice and work you do.
The biggest problem is that none of the DEs really fit my tastes — they all have to be poked and prodded into kinda doing what I want them to do, but they're never quite there and it's incredibly frustrating. I've also faced similar issues with starting with a bare WM and snapping together smaller pieces.
To get what I want I'd likely have to build my own DE from scratch, which I'm not even necessarily averse to, but I have no idea where to start with the mess that is X11 and Wayland and all the "build your own WM" tutorials that could be used as a springboard are written for building hyperminimal borderless tiling WMs, which aren't straightforward to adapt for a more "typical" floating WM with titlebars and the like.
So I guess the endpoint of this rant is that it's frustrating that building one's ideal Linux desktop from the ground up isn't all that accessible in reality. The configurability and openness is there on principle but it's difficult to take advantage of past a skin-deep level.
I find it really sad that in the Wayland world all the window managers are coupled with compositors (and possibly even more than that), which makes it that much harder to roll your own. I wish there was a generic compositor/input server/whatever with some sort of window management RPC interface that would allow running a separate window manager in a subprocess. This would make it so much easier to port xmonad over to the Wayland world and take it from there...
(I'm aware of waymonad's existence, but I believe the process barrier between compositor and WM is really practical, especially during development where the WM rapidly changes, sometimes crashes, but the session still survives.)
My preference also. Currently maintaining a script of calls to 'gsettings set ...', plus a patch to gtk.css, on top of Ubuntu 18.04 Gnome Adwaita.
Doesn't quite get me back to what gtk-2 could do with a bit of its well supported, (even encouraged!) customization options. So the struggle continues.
• menu bar: one, at the top of the screen. I think KDE had this, and there might have been a somewhat working extension for GTK that doesn't exist anymore.
• keys: CTRL is mapped to Alt; Alt is mapped to Win. This is a start. ⌘C and ⌘V: work as Copy and Paste in Terminal, ^C and all the other "control" keys work as expected in Terminal. I used to configure Terminal keys using AutoKey. I haven't been able to make ⌘← and ⌘→ work in text boxes - sadly it's hard-coded in X11 to do what Windows does.
• windows: Smarter window positioning and sizing especially with multiple monitors. I miss Zoom: the button that sizes the window to perfectly and minimally fit the content without scroll bars.
• too many additional items to count like ⌥8 to type bullet characters.
> menu bar: one, at the top of the screen. I think KDE had this, and there might have been a somewhat working extension for GTK that doesn't exist anymore.
KDE has this if you use the Window Buttons[1], Window Title[2], and Window AppMenu[3] plugins.
> • keys:
Plasma Desktop lets you remap keys easily, and you can use setxkbmap elsewhere. I haven't tried remapping the ⌘ key for terminal usage, though, but I've remapped most of the macOS shortcuts I used to use.
[1] https://github.com/psifidotos/applet-window-buttons
[2] https://github.com/psifidotos/applet-window-title
[3] https://github.com/psifidotos/applet-window-appmenu
I feel sometimes linux almost has too many choices. There are a few main stream ones and a bunch of others that have bunch of fans/developers so the end product feels very rough. When the other choices (Windows/mac) are good enough but consistent.
I really don't understand the fuss about Linux' usability, like we're still in 2004 or something.