So Carlos says "don't pick off single issues because it's forest/trees stuff" but I gotta say: he thinks apt is better than brew.
Nothing else felt "wrong" but that one just threw me completely. I can go with his whole write up, but not that.
Admittedly I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which brew conforms to.
I also totally get his preview/calendar/mail.app vibe. Mail.app is not getting better. But the trio are pretty rock solid. Post O365 no complaint about office on Linux makes sense really, so it comes down to productivity apps and integration.
And yea, I wish a decent gtk port into osx was a thing.
> I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which brew conforms to.
Brew conforms to your idea of how a traditional UNIX package manager should work? The same brew that pretends multiple users don't exist and takes control of /usr/local/ for itself? Are we talking about the same thing?
Ok. You got me there. But, in my defence, most macs are run single user. If I'd done any login separation I'd probably be wincing at what I said there.
Apt, yum, bundles, renamed packages at random, the whole -devel thing.. brrrr. Please, no.
Macports lost out. Liked it, found it wasn't getting enough attention.
Brew is the single thing that I absolutely loathe about macOS.
It dog slow (does it really need to git pull from GitHub every 15 minutes, really?), doesn't support multiple users, doesn't support alternative folders, hates static compilation (which is mostly why the two previous break), and lots of new things are not available there anymore.
In my new computer I didn't even install it, I just used the Rustup/Dotnet/RVM/NVM install instructions rather than using Brew. I then got statically compiled versions of ffmpeg, jq, z7, which took a couple minutes. Let's see how long until I cave. I'll probably try MacPorts.
Yes. Brew is a crutch, and so network hungry. Nobody cares, but if you move to the mountains and want to do software development, a Mac will grind to a halt every so often for myriad reasons decided by someone at Apple, or just some dev accustomed to 100mbps.
Linux (Arch for me, but probably others) can be told to respect your personal situation, as opposed to dictating it.
Both of these experiences are completely unlike mine, but I guess that goes to the variances in what people want and use.
The one thing I want in brew and don't have, is hugin. Nothing else I use is missing. Iterm and docker and other cask like installs can be ropey especially if they do update checks inside themselves.
I, probably a very simplistic user compared to others. YMMV.
ArchLinux has been painless. although I must say I've not tried anything too cutting edge with the GUI. Even if you don't use Arch, the Wiki is invaluable.
The wiki... Shows that community maintained resources don't have to suck.
I'm just using Sway and yay all day. The blunt edge works for me.
And, can't say this enough, please always keep in mind that your software may be used by someone with a slower connection or who may even be entirely offline sometimes. I deserve music while driving, and text is king. (Elon - starlink me please)
I've been using MacPorts continuously for about 10 years now. It's been completely pain free. I think I ran into a single broken package in that time period.
I've been slowly transitioning to using nix for all my software installations on macOS: it's pretty nice to have one tool that can manage all my 3rd-party software; manage the configuration of a bunch of programs, via home-manager; and, with lorri and direnv, replace nvm/rbenv/etc.
> I just used the Rustup/Dotnet/RVM/NVM install instructions rather than using Brew. I then got statically compiled versions of ffmpeg, jq, z7, which took a couple minutes.
This is the setup I prefer in a vacuum, although it depends on the stuff you need being available.
I also do think MacPorts is quite good. It follows UNIX principles, and it doesn't try to take over the systems. Everything is contained in its own world inside /opt/.
There were multiple successful package manager systems on macOS (MacPorts and fink) before brew came out. Brew hardly has any technical advantages over them except that maybe fink got stuck using an older version of dpkg/apt, and it made some new mistakes like installing in /usr/local.
Instead what seemed to happen is a new generation of Rails developers got Macs, decided all their tools needed to be written in Ruby by hipsters with lumberjack beards, and so they didn't want to touch the old stuff.
There's a great story in how much of the world runs in excel. I use it simplistically, but I make no pretence there aren't deep, complex use cases. Maybe because I use it simplistically it doesn't bother me how weak it is compared to native.
Yea, although for the Emacs user because all x11 apps acquire x11 through MIT's X10R4 idea of textbox edit norms, they get the in line text edit/move behaviour they expected on anybody's xorg app. Not such on notepad.exe
Powershell doesn't do it for me, but that aside WSL might.
Yes, the whole problem is that Mac still doesn’t have serious competition, at least in certain areas I care about like the trackpad. So when they start shitting up their hardware there’s nowhere to go.
All you can do is wait for Apple to hopefully recognize their mistakes, and in the meantime, read blogposts that are like “well the trackpad support sucks, but... <lots of prevarication>”
I was linux only until last year when someone convinced me to try a Mac. I have been very happy with it: it's way less intrusive than what I had pictured (I think prejudice against commercial OSes from my windows days). Memory and CPU issues that seem to crop up in ubuntu using desktop apps are not present - I had a lot of trouble using e.g. zoom and g-suite on ubuntu without having either lockups or full blast cooling fan. And I still have a unix-like OS that I can do my usual development, ssh-ing, and file manipulation on.
I currently have a Mac for "office productivity" stuff and ubuntu for development, but if I had to only have one computer, it would be a Mac.
I was also Linux-only for several years, then I started getting into Macs and they felt more or less good enough. I definitely appreciated not spending as much time just to make my computer work, and I liked the familiarity of the terminal. I started drifting back toward Linux as my Macs started to give out.
The macOS installer kept failing and I had to jump through hoops to download the installer for the macOS version I wanted and 'verify' it. (This was ~10.10-10.13, not sure if it's still as much trouble to verify an installer that isn't the latest version.) After the second Mac that refused to reinstall, I had had enough and put Ubuntu on it.
I started to realize around 2012 (with the release of soldered-RAM Retina MBPs and razor-edge discless iMacs) that Apple did not need me as a customer, and eventually I was fine with that. I have one remaining Mac Mini that I use as an HTPC and to get pictures off of my iPad. For daily use I usually prefer an old Thinkpad running Debian.
Same here with regards to preferring the old Thinkpads for daily use. The trouble as I it is that the great ones are getting really old now, and the newer ones don't seem to be of the same ilk.
I picked up a W500 recently to replace my R61i, and while it’s an incremental improvement it easily handles 80 percent of what I need a computer to do. I’m planning to add a Bluetooth adapter to get that up to 90%, the rest being limitations of the Core2 Duo and graphics card.
I’d maybe consider going a little newer and going to a T series but it sounds like they really started going downhill (build-wise) when they changed the keyboard. Even the W500 has a lot more keyboard flex than the R61i, in an attempt to add lightness to a chunky laptop.
The author doesn't state whether they installed Linux on a laptop that shipped with Windows, or bought an actual "Linux laptop". There's a huge difference, like reviewing a Hackintosh and saying "Macs are shite".
I did the same. I accidentally fubar'd my lovely 2015 Macbook by pouring a beer into it. I bought a Dell XPS and dual-booted Linux, which kinda worked but wasn't great. Then I bought a Purism 14, which has been awesome (after some teething troubles with the build quality).
I'm kinda tempted by the M1 goodness. But to be honest, I'm not happy at all about going back into the walled garden of MacOS.
I guess my main point of difference with the OP is that I never bought into the Apple ecosystem in the first place - I didn't use mail.app or calendar.app much. I never liked the Apple applications, they never seemed happy letting me take control of my life, and always seemed opinionated about what I should be doing.
I'm now running i3wm on PureOS (debian-derived), tweaked to how I like it. And it's great. Couldn't be happier. Except for Zoom's Linux client, (but Spotify's Linux client is now pretty good, so there's hope!). And odd config issues with the USB ethernet.
But the point is that I can go fiddle with those issues, and learn how Linux USB ethernet works, and generally mess about with my setup however I like. Yes I might brick it. But that's better than "oh it's gone dark, I have to take it to an Apple Store to get it fixed". Which is f-all use in a pandemic lockdown (or in rural SE Asia, which is where I was when I poured the beer in the Macbook in the first place). It's MY computer, not Apple's. That's actually important, not an ideological stance that doesn't matter in practice.
Because Apple stuff doesn't "just work" any more. And if it doesn't "just work" there's f-all you can do except take it to the Store. And usually they'll just shrug and hand you a new one, and hope you backed everything up to their servers. I mean, sure, that's OK. But it's not what I want.
I considered buying a System76 Lemur not too long ago because I liked the machine's specs and enjoy popOS, but after seeing QC issues with System76's OEM decided against it and got a Thinkpad X1 Nano instead.
Interested to see how their in-house laptop project goes though.
Thinkpads have always been the authentic Linux experience in my eyes, especially the models after 2009. I love what modern companies are doing with Linux laptops, but the Thinkpad is still the same, unrivaled, robust monster it has always been. There's nothing special about it, and that's why it's special. It feels standard issue, and hardware failure is a lot less sporadic than Macbooks.
I am using Pop!_OS on Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2 - everything works (though switching between dedicated and integrated graphics has rough edges). Perfectly fine for normal use.
It is! The only issue afaik is that it doesn't support wayland yet, so you won't be getting any of the nice tracked trackpad gestures (unless something has changed since I last checked).
My mac kernel panicked weekly for the last year. The software had stopped major development for the last 5 years on any area that doesn't help major media production or make it more like iOS.
But the software does work. It just doesn't do much interesting stuff anymore.
> Apple software does “just work” with Apple hardware.
This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes.
Apple software is far from being immune to bugs, bad UX, etc., even on Apple hardware, as I can personally attest today from using a Macbook Pro daily for work.
You use this word, "straw man". I do not think it means what you think it means.
No, it is not a straw man to point out that bugs interfere with the notion that something "just works". When bugs interfere with getting things done - as I've found they often do in the course of using macOS daily, like when I can't open firewall ports for development or share my screen via Google Hangouts because the Big Sur update broke the password prompt for editing restricted things like firewall settings or app permissions, or when apps can't present an Open File dialog anymore across the board because God knows why, then it's a complete farce to call that "just working". There is no "just" nor "works" about that. Not to mention all the little paper cuts, like the lock screen taking 30 seconds to unfuck itself before I can actually type in a password, or constantly forgetting which applications I've set to open things by default (meaning that every so often I end up with a cacophony of fan whirring instead of an editor window when I try to open an XML file because macOS yet again decided to reset the default app to fucking XCode). (EDIT: oh, and the Touch Bar stops working if I plug in an external keyboard, which is just dandy)
Also, I love how both comments immediately coming to defend Apple's honor stop at the "bugs" bit and entirely ignore that I'm taking a fat steamy deuce on Apple's UX, too. So on that note:
> It means not having to do a bunch of incidental configuration, tuning, and setup.
Which you have to do anyway, because the macOS UX sucks, and seems to be getting worse with each update. Want to have persistent named workspaces? Nope, gotta install some buggy hack of an extension to do it (which in turn required going through a whole bunch of red tape to bypass a bunch of security checks, because of course it does). Want to control where in which of those workspaces application windows open (or at the very least whichever workspace currently has the selected window)? lol fuck user intent, Workspace 1 Monitor 1, and switching away from whatever workspace was on Monitor 1 because double fuck user intent. Application menus are so far away from application windows that the Ever Given could do a goddamn u-turn between them with room to spare. Forward/back buttons on mice don't inherently set focus, so instead of navigating the history on the window my cursor's actually pointing at said buttons end up doing so for some random window on an entirely different monitor. (EDIT: and how could I forget the arcane screenshot shortcuts! Command-Alt-whatever-4? The fuck?)
I could go on, but this comment's already enough of a deranged rant. A Chromebook has fewer bugs and a better UX. Even the grotesque hackjob that is the average GNU/Linux desktop has fewer bugs and a better UX. The bugginess and UX is maybe better than (modern, non-LTSC) Windows, but that bar is so low that even ants have to duck when crawling under it.
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EDIT:
I will, however, give Apple credit where credit's due: I do like the use of Command instead of Control for the CUA shortcut prefix (and the use of Emacs shortcuts for text navigation), and the touchpad gestures are nice, even if limited in options. It'd be great if more operating systems adopted these things. And the Touch Bar's kinda cool, I guess.
Beyond that, I don't really have much praise for macOS. It's overrated, and "just works" is a myth in this day and age. It was arguably a lot more true back in the PowerPC days (even if OpenBSD is my current preference for my PowerPC Macs), but it's been getting worse and worse over the years. Maybe the switch to ARM will be an inflection point re: software quality. Fingers crossed.
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EDIT 2:
And even just now, doing an SMC reset (to fix that password issue in System Preferences) broke the UI, giv...
(As a follow up here: turns out the Dock crashing is a MacForge thing AFAICT, so I won't blame macOS for that beyond the fact that I wouldn't need MacForge at all if macOS supported things that even ChromeOS supports, let alone a "real" Linux distro. Still janky that I have to disconnect from my docking station to log in, though; that's a far cry from "just works")
If by ‘better UX’ you mean doesn’t even try to do things.
> Application menus are so far away from application windows that the Ever Given could do a goddamn u-turn between them with room to spare.
Have you considered why? There are good UX reasons for this. It uses less screen real estate, and leverages Fitt’s law because you don’t have to be accurate in the vertical dimension. It’s fine to have a preference for menus in windows. There are some arguments in favor of that, but you are just articulating a preference here.
Really your comment has nothing to do with whether MacOS *just works(, you have articulated a list of preferences and desires for it to work more like other things you have more familiarity with.
You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it.
I increasingly don’t like it either for various reasons, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t just work.
Cherry picking bits and pieces of what I mentioned rather than addressing the entirety of the argument does not a good counter-argument make. And no, neither does linking some dictionary entry as if it actually proves you understand what that dictionary entry is saying. No comment on the Touch Bar being disabled with external keyboards plugged in? Or needing to disconnect USB-C devices to login? Or password prompts being broken in System Preferences? These are bugs that actively hinder usability and pretty clearly contradict the notion of "just works". It is not a strawman - at all - to suggest that these bugs and others directly challenge the notion that something "just works".
You know what is a strawman? Cherry picking only some minor weaker points you want to attack while entirely ignoring the ones that you don't, and then trying to pass that off as a substitute for addressing all points in their entirety. If you actually understood what a "strawman" is, you would recognize immediately that your behavior in this discussion is much closer than mine to that definition you cited, and then you'd kindly refrain, thanks.
> You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it.
I "just don't like it" specifically because it does not "just work". It is tolerable usability-wise only after extensive fiddling and tweaking and troubleshooting, and that's only on good days when those aforementioned bugs ain't actively preventing me from using basic OS functionality.
And that's fine - I do enjoy fiddling with things on my Linux and OpenBSD desktops - but those Linux and OpenBSD desktops don't advertise themselves as "you shouldn't ever need to fiddle with things because everything just works" the way macOS does, and therefore I'm a lot less frustrated with that fiddling because those systems are designed for it and encourage it and make it easy and friendly and fun. Nothing about customizing macOS is easy or friendly or fun; it is not designed for it, and it does not encourage it. It is Apple's way or the highway - and given the evolution of Apple's way lately, the highway doesn't look so bad after all.
> and leverages Fitt’s law because you don’t have to be accurate in the vertical dimension
Right, let's watch users spend multiple seconds dragging a cursor to a window toward the bottom-right, clicking, and then dragging that cursor all the way back to the top-left just to save fractions of a second on vertical positioning in a specific spot.
Fitt's law is hardly useful here. If the window ain't maximized, then you need some degree of vertical precision to select the window in order to make its menu visible anyway. And if it is maximized, then it literally doesn't matter what owns the menu 'cause it'll be in approximately the same place either way.
That is:
> There are good UX reasons for this.
There were good UX reasons for this, back in the days of m68k Macs where mice were some newfangled invention and displays were tiny. In those days that unintuitive disconnection was a fair tradeoff to make if it meant conserving that tiny amount of vertical real estate and helping people figure out those newfangled rodents.
Now? It's been, what, 40 years? People know how to use mice (or, if not, can figure it out with a bit of practice - Microsoft understood this and opted to encourage that practice with games like Minesweeper and Solitaire instead of paternalistically assuming users will remain permanently inept), and even the absolute lowest screen resolution Apple sells on a Macbook has multiple times the amount of vertical and horizontal screen space. That tradeoff is far less useful now.
> Cherry picking bits and pieces of what I mentioned rather than addressing the entirety of the argument does not a good counter-argument make.
Here’s where I addressed the entirety of your argument:
> Really your comment has nothing to do with whether MacOS *just works(, you have articulated a list of preferences and desires for it to work more like other things you have more familiarity with.
You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it.
I increasingly don’t like it either for various reasons, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t just work.
As for cherry picking. I don’t need to refute every point you made - they all fall under this umbrella.
> And no, neither does linking some dictionary entry as if it actually proves you understand what that dictionary entry is saying.
It does. If it didn’t you’d have addressed it, but you didn’t.
Your entire argument boils down to “Mac OS doesn’t work like linux”.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t just work. It means it isn’t a good choice for you.
> It is tolerable usability-wise only after extensive fiddling and tweaking and troubleshooting,
Almost nobody does this. Most people find it very usable as is. As I said - this is just about your preferences and nothing more.
> and that's only on good days when those aforementioned bugs ain't actively preventing me from using basic OS functionality.ugh
This is also something almost nobody experiences.
Perhaps your attempts to make MacOS work differently from how it was designed are causing you these problems.
What is odd to me is that you continue to use an operating system that is so ill suited to your preferences.
> Here’s where I addressed the entirety of your argument:
...except for the usability-hindering bugs. Hardly meaningful to reduce those to "user preference"; like, no shit I'd prefer it if basic devices like keyboards and mice worked on boot without extra fiddling.
> This is also something almost nobody experiences.
The Big Sur upgrade breaking the password prompt in System Preferences, as one especially annoying example, is pretty well documented online - and was documented for Catalina upgrades, too. It's exactly where I got the troubleshooting step of "reset SMC". I'm far from alone there.
> Perhaps your attempts to make MacOS work differently from how it was designed are causing you these problems.
Most of them were an issue long before I felt the need to tweak things. And all of them are far outside the scope of said tweaks.
> What is odd to me is that you continue to use an operating system that is so ill suited to your preferences.
It's a work machine. My own computers all run Linux or OpenBSD (with a few exceptions, like the old laptop running Haiku).
No it doesn't. It really doesn't. There are sooo many issues that are still not fixed, years after being reported. Apple's Support site has pages where there's hundreds of people saying "I have this problem too", and no comment from an Apple dev.
I'm not blaming them. This shit is hard, even if you control both the hardware and the software. I get why they don't say "it just works" any more.
Either i dont agree or we have a different understanding of major issue. Not being able to use a second screen withput active power, or being able to cook an egg in idle are in my eyes major issues. Both of which have long threads with no real response.
I still get “me too“ emails from issues ive “me too“ 5+ years ago.
There really is nowhere for everyday consumers to complain about comparable issues in Linux. There is nobody to complain to, and the the only options are self help.
Anyone who fails, fails silently, and there is also the issue that because of all the variation in hardware and software setups it’s hard to even determine that an issue is the same.
On the other side, Apple has more than a billion active users, so a few hundred people with a single issue really doesn’t mean anything at all.
> There are sooo many issues that are still not fixed, years after being reported. Apple's Support site has pages where there's hundreds of people saying "I have this problem too", and no comment from an Apple dev.
With a billion end-users this is really just noise. In any case this is a meaningless comparison. With Linux there is nowhere and nobody to even ask for this kind of support.
The answer is always some version of RTFM or fix it yourself.
> With Linux there is nowhere and nobody to even ask for this kind of support.
This is not true. Every time I've run into a Linux problem, googling the error has always produced an answer. Often more than one answer. Often mutually incompatible answers. But one of them usually works. In the end.
For Apple, googling the problem often leads to an Apple Support page that has no answers, just an endless stream of "I have this problem too".
> The answer is always some version of RTFM or fix it yourself.
In particular the UI became a dumpster fire. I won't go into the Playmobil interface of Big Sur, let's just say that's a question of (acquired?) taste.
However, the interface is much too big. Most of my computer screen (a 15" MBP) is taken up by empty space.
Then you have all kinds of weird behavior in Apple apps that just wasn't there before. And I'm talking "Apple apps as shipped with MacOS", in particular Safari and Mail.
If I have Mail running in full screen, Safari in full screen also (different "virtual desktop") and I click on a link in Mail it will attempt to open it in safari on the same screen as Mail. No, it won't attempt to tile the windows, just stack them. Yeah, that's not supposed to work and it doesn't. In order to get back to Safari, I have to un-fullscreen Mail. If I try to reach Safari via Expose or Mission Control or whatever it's called today, it will select it, then when the animation finishes zooming in, it instantly switches back to Mail.
Speaking of Safari, my "favorite": try to open a new tab. Wait around for an hour while it spins the beach ball. Tried removing the history, the "smart" thingies on the new tab page had already been disabled, etc. This keeps on happening from time to time.
Then for some reason, sometimes in dark mode, the active button of dialog boxes is fully white. If I click outside the window and come back, it gets its regular color so I can read the text.
Also, auto light / dark mode used to work as it says on the tin. Now it randomly doesn't and gets stuck in one mode or the other. Fun fact: if I go to settings, switch from Auto to the one it's stuck it, nothing happens. Switch back to Auto, and now it knows how to change. No, it's not timezone related, as I don't change those and haven't since 2019. The clock is always on time.
I also use a USB drive for time machine. Sometimes, for some reason, the time machine icon in the menu bar becomes white on light grey. (In Big Sur the menu bar doesn't change color in dark mode, so why does the icon even have a light mode?). In Finder, the "eject" button is not aligned with the name of the drive until I click on it. Fun side effet: I have to click it twice to actually do something useful. You might argue that aligning the icon is useful (happens after the same click) but I'd rather I didn't have to do that. Even on my dinky file manager in Linux this doesn't happen and have never seen it happen.
Then, there's the App Store. For some reason, sometimes it won't update the apps. The progress goes all the way to almost full. Then it does something for a while. Then it says it needs to close the app. I say ok. Then it says "yeah, actually, I can't update it". Why? Won't say. Then after a while, it manages to update it somehow. This has happened with multiple apps, including Numbers (Apple app).
Now all these (except for the Safari beach ball) first started happening when I updated to Big Sur. I figured my mac may have accumulated cruft or incompatible settings during the years. It's a 2013 MBP that got the "transfer your data" from my older one and it also went through a bunch of public betas. So I figured might as well try the Windows treatment and do a clean install. Nope, none of the issues went away even without copying over anything from the previous install.
So even on "Apple hardware", there still are issues. And I really don't think any of those issues can be attributed to my particular hardware being old. And all of those issues are new issues in functionality that had been in MacOS for years and that worked well.
Now my MBP is gathering dust because it's just irritating to use. I find Linux (on Arch with i3 of all things) is getting out of my way and being less of a hassle to actually get my work done. Of course, I hate the hardware (som...
I just went back to their site to check, and the 14 they show now looks different to mine. I guess there's a previous version that I bought back in late 2018?
Linux main problems with laptops are drivers and firmware. The best you can hope for, when replacing windows - is that it runs somewhat stable.
But startup time, performance and batterie life will be much worse on standard config. And like the article said, don't expect resume/sleep to work consistently. Which can be very, very annoying and time wasting.
My use case is short(or long) bursts of working with it, and then stopping for some time and then later resuming, expecting everything to be as it was, when I reopen. And I can't do this consistently. Which sucks. On a old Linux laptop I got hibernation to work (mostly) consistently so that worked, too, but took even longer to resume. On my previous modell, I gave even up, trying it to get to work.
And now I just bought a HP Pavillon gaming Laptop. And I actually run Windows now, even though I hate windows.
But I need to get things done. And I don't want to mess with config settings, probably for weeks, to bring performance at least close to the stock values, windows provides.
Now this is not the fault of Linux, proprietary hardware support and optimisation are just very complicated. But it still sucks. And it really does not help, when certain linux evangelist claim to everyone, especially newcomers, everything is fine and much better than on windows and co.
Which is just not true.
Especially startup time annoys me. It is just painfully slow. And the chromebooks are showing, that it does not have to be that way.
My cheap Asus rugged chromebook, has by far the best startup time/wakeup time/standby life, of all the devices I ever used!
I open it and can immediately resume working. Just what I want and need. Optimized linux drivers and firmware that work. (And reworked procedures under the hood)
Everything else with ChromeOS is horrible, though. Shitty software, and lacking applications and all tied to google.
So for now I have to work with windows again, which in its stock config comes with so many bloatware, ads and spyware - that it is hard to believe people put up with this.
But what choice do they have?
I probably have to try purism at some point, but sadly with all my mobile linux experience so far, I expect just a expensive, but mediocre experience. And there does not seem to exist a version with a decent gpu?
I clarified now in the article that the "Linux Laptop" is a Dell XPS 13" Developer Edition, which is marketed indeed as a Linux laptop, and the Ubuntu is marketed as "Ubuntu Dell".
It was stated in the previous article of the series but you are right that it was not evident in the text.
Does it actually ship with Linux installed though?
That, I think, is the main difference. I had an XPS 15" and I was totally unable to get any support from Dell when running Linux on it. I understand the XPS 13's are marketed as being more "Linux-friendly", but I don't know how supported they are.
How are you finding that? I hear they work really well with Linux. I had such a bad time with the XPS15, I keep wondering why there's such a disparity between them.
I also switched to Linux, and I love it, but only on my desktop machine. I got uhk for key remapping, and that's been great. For email and calendar, I use wavebox, which side steps most of the app issues.
As the article says: The laptop experience is not anywhere near as good. I had a lot of the same issues, even on a system 76.
Eventually I decided to try giving windows wsl2 a shot for my laptop, and I gotta give Microsoft credit. It's been great. All the benefits of windows ecosystem, hardware comparability, games etc.... And the ability to do pretty much everything development wise through wsl2. The keyboard combos are similar enough in Linux and windows that I don't have trouble switching contexts. However, most of my development is still on desktop.
A few years ago, I would probably have described myself as a never Microsofter. Maybe my passion for using as much open source software as possible is dying down, or maybe Microsofts push to embrace open source is paying off. Whichever it is, I've come back around to appreciating windows recently.
Microsoft is really killing it these past couple years. I'm still not sure I'd recommend for a tech team over OSX. But mostly because most devs now know how to deal with the issues from Brew and OSX, not so much Windows. But hell, most barely know how to deal with Linux/Unix stuff.
>But mostly because most devs now know how to deal with the issues from Brew and OSX, not so much Windows. But hell, most barely know how to deal with Linux/Unix stuff.
If you can operate Brew, you can operate a Linux package manager.
I use Linux Mint on various laptops (mostly Zenbooks) as a primary OS in HiDPI mode and I am totally fine with it. You just need to install drivers properly and find software you need and then you finally feel like in control and 100% in the flow.
WSL 1 was great, WSL 2 is probably even more amazing. The problem is it comes with a massive ball and chain called "the rest of Windows 10". Even ignoring all the ads, all the spyware, all the Windows Update shittiness... the UI is a confusing mess and easily beat by the likes of XFCE, Mate, or Plasma. Add that other stuff, and it's all just a huge pain that I don't want to deal with. So I don't, and I just run Linux desktops. They do what they're called upon to do and otherwise just stay put.
And Windows isn't even that bad. Compared to busted up 90s Windows it's a dream come true. But I've been spoiled by Linux and my "geek privilege" of knowing how to operate it all these years.
> Compared to busted up 90s Windows it's a dream come true.
Hard disagree. A 90's-era Windows wasn't perfect by any means, but Windows peaked with Windows 2000 and it's been downhill from there. Modern Windows - at least as Microsoft intends for people to use day-to-day - is an abomination, and I would sooner use Windows ME day-to-day than any version of Windows 10 normally available to consumers.
That said, most of that downhill has been due to bloat. Windows 10 LTSC almost makes Windows nice enough for me to consider using it as my daily driver again.
Can’t say I agree with this. I’ve been using Windows as my daily driver for the last decade since switching back from Mac+Linux for work reasons.
Honestly there’s lots to like in Windows 10 even if there’s a bit of bloat around the edges. I cannot imagine wanting to go back to the bad old days of ME. Modern Windows is stable, secure, fast and has plenty in there for power users.
Driver support and sleep mode is seamless and just works. Even video drivers are sandboxes in their own process. Windows can and I have seen it recover from video and other driver crashes. My laptop can switch between embedded and nVidia graphics seamlessly. This is a lot better than the situation on Linux.
Integrated firewall, AV (Windows Defender), drive encryption (bit defender) and application signing is great for end users. The update process is pushy but nags less than I’ve seen on Macs and honestly you should update regularly.
PowerShell, WSL and inbuilt virtualisation (Hyper-V) are great for power users. Revamped Explorer is also nice with options like open in PowerShell.
Integration with Azure AD and SSO means that for all internal applications for work I don’t need to sign on.
My main complaints are that start menu search is still broken with unnecessary integration with Bing and file search corrupting search results with the slightest typo, file copy is still slow for many small files (although directory merging is nice) and Microsoft is a way too aggressive in their product placements on the start menu and trying to force people to create Microsoft accounts.
having 4 different sound control panels is a sickening joke. there's so many disjointed laters on layers on layers everywhere. nothing is ever cleaned up, just new glossy over layers that don't quite work as well created atop the old. tragi-comic experience.
You can now set a static IP either in the new network configuration panel or from the old adapter properties. If you set a static IP in one, it won't show up in the other. Either being set to a static IP overrides a DHCP setting. Who knows what happens if they are both set to different static IPs.
See, all of these things would be great reasons to use Windows, and I agree that these are nice (though I'd hardly call "seamless GPU switching" unique to Windows; my Linux laptops can do that perfectly fine with FOSS drivers).
The problem is that the Microsoft-sanctioned Windows desktop experience seems to be actively hostile to user experience due to all the extra shit that Microsoft has tacked onto the "goodness" that's Windows 10:
- Cortana not only enabled by default and difficult to remove, but shouting at me at max volume as my very first experience with a new Windows installation
- Random apps being preinstalled, even on so-called "professional" versions (hell, even on enterprise versions by default - and yeah, it's trivial to disable these things with GPOs, but I shouldn't have to)
- Literally no option to create a user account in the "home" edition that doesn't entail connecting to an online account, which is dumb as hell
- Ads. On a product that I paid money for. What the fuck, Microsoft?
Each of these things in isolation is itself entirely unacceptable for any product that even remotely respects its users. In combination, these things make Windows 10 Home and Professional the two absolute worst versions of Windows money has ever been able to buy, and fundamentally undermine any trust I might have in Microsoft.
I would, however, change my tune in a heartbeat if LTSC was at least an option, if not the default, for desktops. Windows 10 LTSC is what Windows 10 should be, and probably would be if the Windows team didn't seem driven to make the default Windows UX as janky as possible. I still think Windows 2000 was peak Windows, but LTSC is almost there - all the neat things you mention, and none of the bullshit.
----
EDIT: there are also a bunch of little papercuts that bug me every time I use Windows, like never knowing which tool is the "right" one to use for various things (screenshots come to mind; what was wrong with the Snipping Tool?), or the fact that "ClearType" is anything but. Not that Windows 2000 didn't have its own share of little papercuts, but when an OS has accumulated 20 more years of those papercuts, they start to really add up.
Also, maybe I'm just butthurt that Microsoft dropped Space Cadet Pinball ;)
Didn't realise Linux did seamless GPU switching these days. It's good to know. Personally I wish they'd move to proper driver isolation though.
Agreed about the BS. Honestly I'd pay more money to get rid of it and have thought about switching back to Linux a few times but the day-to-day Windows 10 experience is smooth enough that I always end up staying (maybe I just have Stockholm syndrome from the downright abuse Apple and Google throw at their mobile users though..)
==
PS: Snipping Tool is still around btw and works fine. Sometimes you might want to hit print screen to capture mouse over state though.
Also as long as you don't connect to the internet you can skip creating an MS account on setup and Cortana won't bother you either afterwards either.
Microsoft has disabled Cortana during the Windows 10 install process for recent versions -- albeit not for this reason. Rather, it was due to IT personnel doing multiple installs for corporate deployments only to be faced with a room full of chattering Cortanas.
EDIT: It's more likely due to Microsoft decoupling Cortana from the OS and making it available as an app download. Since Cortana is not a selling point of Windows 10 itself it makes no sense to have it during the install.
>Nautilus is better than the Finder. It's not even close.
That's astounding. Finder must be awful.
To me, Nautilus is virtually unusable -- it's like a toy file manager. Nothing beats Dolphin (or PCManFM as a not-so-close second). For some reason, Qt apps are way better than GTK apps in general.
Personally I find Nautilus much more irritating than Finder has ever been. Finder has most of the features most people need, you just need to know where to look for them, but Nautlius just straight up cuts stuff out.
Some of Nautilus' forked kin like Nemo (Cinnamon) and Thunar (XFCE) are decent though.
Dolphin is alright but in my case it has a bit of "MS Office" syndrome where I only ever use maybe 20-30% of its functionality, with the rest just being more clutter to have to dig through. I know some find those things useful, but in my case it's just going to collect dust and get in the way.
Helped a family member with some troubles on their M1 Mac recently. Take with a grain of salt: this is a single 30 minute anecdote from someone who last used OS X about a decade ago.
Finder was the worst part of the experience by far. Perhaps there's some setting to turn this behavior off (or some setting said relative turned on that caused this) but it seemed to constantly attempt to hide the underlying filesystem from me, instead showing files in groups like "Documents" and "Downloads". I could not figure out if/where in the UI I could type in a path to a folder to manually browse to it. The search was slow and awful, to the point of being near useless.
After 10-15 minutes of wasting my time in Finder I gave up and used the terminal for all file operations.
In case the knowledge ever comes handy in the future:
- You can toggle on a path bar in Finder windows with View > Show Path Bar. Additionally, the path of open folders and files can be viewed by Command-clicking the icon next to the title in the titlebar (this works in third party apps too)
- You can navigate to folders by path with Go > Go to Folder… or Command-Shift-G
- Visibility of hidden files/folders can be toggled with Command-Shift-. (also works in open/save dialogs)
Also, as a general rule, in Mac apps everything an app is capable of is surfaced through its menus, so if you’re ever looking for a specific function in one, menus are a good place to check. Cross platform stuff ignores this custom frequently but that’s nothing new.
Documents and Downloads are the actual directories on disk, they're not some sort of abstraction. It's pretty simple. /Users/<user>/Documents, /Users/<user>/Downloads, etc.
I get what you mean, and I have the same complaints about the defaults. Here are some useful shortcuts to know, especially when fixing issues:
- View > Go to Folder… (Cmd-Shift-G) to type in a path to go to.
- Cmd-Up takes you one level up.
- Right-click/Control-click the current folder name in the title bar to see the location of the current folder. This works with any title bar that has a file/folder icon, not just Finder!
- Cmd-Shift-. to temporarily show hidden files.
And here are some settings I recommend that turn Finder into a very pleasant experience for someone coming from Linux. I always set these as soon as I get a new account:
- View > as Columns (You might need to set this a few times for different initial folders.)
- View > Show Path Bar
- Preferences > General: New Finder windows show (home folder)
- Preferences > Sidebar > Favorites: Make sure (home folder) is checked. I'd actually recommend unchecking every other item in this group (except for Airdrop if you need it). Why: Having less sidebar items makes Column View work better because, when opening a folder in Column View, the sidebar item that's the closest ancestor is shown as the leftmost column.
- Preferences > Sidebar > Locations: Make sure "Hard disks" is completely checked. By default, the / disk is hidden from the sidebar.
The thing that always bothered me about de Icaza is that he should know better, given his credentials and how immersed he'd been in the FOSS scene for so long.
He boils down the issues with Linux on the desktop to what jwz calls Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers[0] model. Essentially open source developers don't have the discipline and patience to do the hard work of maintaining their software, and instead just want to refine their designs, throw things away, start over from scratch, and make things perfect.
I don't disagree with this view, and I think it's just somewhat silly to expect the same level of polish and back-compat on Linux that you'd see on a commercial OS with commercial apps. Certainly there is a lot of very polished software built under the OSS model (though many of that software has funded full-time developers working on it), but any project that is either run largely by volunteers, or largely by the programmers themselves, is often not going to end up like a polished, seamless, corporate product. Companies (and product managers) make decisions about building software in a very different way than developers do. They have different priorities, and different things they care about.
There will never be a "year of Linux on the desktop", because FOSS Linux-based OSes are constantly-moving targets run by people who generally aren't getting paid to do the work necessary for that to happen. That's pretty much always been the case, and even with all the corporate interest around Linux (Canonical comes to mind), it's just not happening.
My first experience with Linux was with Red Hat 4 back in 1997 or so, though I didn't start using Linux as my daily driver until 2002 or so. It has always had, and will always have, many rough edges. For me, I find that I have fewer problems with it than I did during my stints running macOS, but... that's just me, and I can fix nearly any issue I run into (even if they are few and far between) with a minimum of effort and time. That's not for everyone, and that's fine.
[0] Don't click (copy/paste into a new tab), as jwz has a nasty redirect for people coming from HN, but: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
I estimate that by the middle of this decade, linux will no longer be a moving target for third parties. It is just getting complex, mature and polished enough to keep continuously changing. It will likely be good enough for most things most people would like to do.
Nevertheless, I don't think that will make its market in increase significantly. There are more factors that influence the success on the desktop beyond polish, maturity and technical excellence. Even listening what industry say they need is a good indicator of what needs to be done. The "third party software industry" is like steve jobs said about users: "we can't just ask for what customers want".
A lot has changed, Apple braking compatibility, Microsoft braking so much. Microsoft hegemony on desktop destroyed by web, smartphones and Apple, so much that ChromeOS exists. No Flash, no IE, Microsoft Edge based on Chromium. Windows adopted Linux with WSL. Wine getting better, Valve Proton drives gaming on Linux. Open source AMD GPU driver. Wayland. The future is awesome.
He thought of stomping alternatives, parroting Jobs, that's wrong. The reason I've switched to Linux is such attitude from Microsoft. Linux experience is a moving target. At first we are expats, striving to replicate what was lost, but Linux provides much more. Why not explore it?
Microsoft Windows is powered by legacy, enterprise and gaming. Apple macOS advertises polished experience, creative applications, iOS development. Google Android, Apple iOS — touch oriented OS, app store. Google Chromebook — security and web. Linux is different, every community strives to find its own answer.
I would like to see someone do the equivalent experiment now with a Win10+WSL2 setup.
I'm carefully watching Apple to see what the next line of Macbook Pros looks like. Esp. how well the M1 architecture fits into a development workflow that will still for the forseeable future center heavily on deployment to x86 architecture. We already are seeing significant time wastage from employees having to fight architecture issues with docker. We will see where that ends up. And then, whether the rumors are true that they might support more ports and even options without the touch bar. These things would signal a genuine change of heart on considering developers to be first class citizens in their ecosystem. If all these turn out positive I'll be sticking with it. If not, Win10+WSL2 are looking extremely compelling.
Apple made Macs UNIX developer-friendly (2001) before they switched to x86 (2005), so they have a good chunk of non-hypothetical past data to look at. Really hoping this means they won't screw this up.
WSL2 has quirks that make it not the same as running linux natively. For some workflows this may not matter but I have seen it evaluated for some use cases where not everything worked.
Also, windows is, for lack of a better word, obnoxious, in the way it bothers you about updates (and other messages of various kinds), and forces you to restart frequently and kn its terms.
The few times I have used windows recently, I found it the opposite of "just getting out of the way and letting me work", and I fear that even if wsl did work smoothly for what I was doing, just the fact that windows was running in the background would degrade the experience.
A couple Saturdays ago, I spent thirty minutes setting up WSL2 on a Windows 10 machine. Immediately afterward, I called Apple and spent a thousand dollars on an M1 Mac mini for same-day pickup.
I've been running Linux devenvs on Windows, in Virtualbox, for something well over a decade now. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the vaunted WSL2 is literally just that, plus preinstalled OS images that save maybe a half hour's work, plus also it actually breaks virtualization so you can only use WSL2 and no other VMs. And ~ is still just a shared folder, so chown and symlinks don't work.
I'd tolerate it if I had no better option, just like I have all those other times. But even then, just running Virtualbox proper is no worse in any way, and better in some. I really don't understand what the hell all the hype is about - maybe for folks who've only ever used Windows and never had a chance to really try Linux at all, I can see it, but people who have no reason not to know better also seem often to be over the moon about it and I can't for the life of me figure out why.
Granted, that Lenovo had been pissing me off well before I tried turning it into a dev machine - Windows 10 is just a dumpster fire in every respect, WSL2 or no. But it was WSL2 turning out to be literally just broken Virtualbox that really sent me over the top.
And I have to thank Microsoft for that! Even with the occasional slight flakiness of any new architecture, the M1 mini is an excellent dev machine, blazing fast and unbelievably power-efficient - the same deskside UPS that promised 50 minutes runtime for the Windows box claims almost 300 for the mini, and that's with something like a 10x perf boost. If WSL2 hadn't been so lousy, I might have taken another year to make the jump.
No way I can list them all, but here's my top five:
1. Start menu is awfully designed, really slow, and doesn't even return exact matches sometimes. Seriously, it shouldn't take that long to launch something.
2. Lack of tabs in file explorer forces me to have like three-to-five windows open, making alt+tab navigation annoying.
3. It's like each app does its own thing with notifications. It does have a decent notification system, it just happens that nobody really uses it.
4. Lack of proper package management makes every app run their own update checker in the background. I easily have 10-15 items in my tray, and have to chase down something essential like Bluetooth across them. And half the time at least one of them doesn't have an icon!
5. Updates. Booted into Windows after about a month, it restarted twice + gave me multiple notifications that it's gonna restart again outside active hours. I only need to use it for like an hour or so.
You are probably better off with the Mac, but I can recommend one option that many people ignore but that works for well me.
Modern Linux virtualization (KVM/Qemu) is powerful and is getting easier to setup with programs such as Virtual Machine Manager and Boxes. I run several Windows VMs without problems and they have usable performance.
I have used Windows VMs for Word and Skype for Business using KVM.
Lightroom is an utter resource hog and practically unusable without GPU acceleration - reasonable given the 45-megabyte raws I develop in it, but still a constraint. Too, I use a physical edit controller that needs a driver of its own, and setting up USB passthrough is probably a hassle. Judging by the docs I've read, setting up GPU passthrough certainly is. Meanwhile, the Mac driver for that edit controller, compiled to x86_64 and not yet updated for arm64, works flawlessly and with no extra effort under Rosetta 2. (And Darktable isn't really an option - impressive as anything given the constraints the devs have to work under, but one of those constraints is relatively poor support for undocumented raw formats including those my cameras produce, so I can't get the same quality of results out of it that Lightroom gives me.)
In general, I avoid sysadmin work wherever possible these days, as for example when I migrated to Fastmail in January after 17 years of self-hosting. Back when I set that up, I had more time than money, and an interest in learning how to do it, besides. These days I have more money than time, and already know very well how. So at this point it's just a question of the most efficient use of resources, and - in part because of that drive to learn new things, which I now apply to other technologies - obtaining more money has become fairly straightforward, while obtaining more time is of course impossible, human life lasting only as long as it does.
Sure, by dint of enough effort, I could have got WSL2 working acceptably, or get Lightroom running OK under virtualization, or whatever. But at this stage in my life, I can afford to spend money to not have to deal with those problems, so that was what I happily did.
Apparently WSL 1 is different, it's a layer between linux apps and the windows kernel. WSL 2 is not great, esp. file operations, that's why VSCode has a wsl plugin.
Yeah, I know, but I also hear WSL1 is super slow especially for Node, which is a big part of what my mentees want to learn - the major point of setting up that devenv at all was so I could use it for mentoring, and quite aside from
my own impatience with flaky tech, I also don't want to waste a mentee's valuable time with nonsense on the part of the machine we're using as a teaching and learning tool.
We all have busy lives. When there's only an hour a week or an hour every other week to spare for doing this, it's on me to make sure they get the most out of that time. So, from that perspective too, it was more worth spending the money on a known good platform than spending any more time dinking with one that had already shown itself at best only questionably equal to the task.
Without invalidating the rest of your comment, 30 mins is way shorter than I consider a valid attempt at this. I'm happy to invest even months in achieving an optimal setup, as long as it gets there.
Most of what I am interested in is a streamlined docker setup and WSL2 provides an amazing experience for that, with a single docker / container experience spanning both the Windows host and the linux VM. While there are still some issues with it I have reasonable confidence MS will sort out the sharing of memory and CPUs so that resources can be shared better b/w Win10 and Docker/Linux than you would ever get without a lot of work through VirtualBox.
On the Windows side all I really need is a proper, native office experience. Working in a regulated industry there isn't really any room for less than 100% fidelity in handling official documents and forms. But I will never need to touch powershell or anything else from the native Win10 experience.
No setup involving "oh, it's literally just worse Virtualbox" was ever going to be optimal for me, not when I could just use a Mac and do everything I care to do on that machine without putting up with a lot of nonsense to marshal between two very different and not all that compatible operating systems and filesystems. As I said in the comment to which you replied, I've done lots of that with Linux in Virtualbox on Windows. I know how to do it just fine. It was wanting to do it that I lacked. And, happily, I didn't have to! I could do something else instead. So something else is what I did.
I'm glad you have something that works for you! I'm glad I have something that works for me, too.
I'm just not sure I agree that "literally worse than Virutalbox" is a fair assessment. For example, I don't think VirtualBox can do dynamic memory sharing no?
I basically did that for the first WSL. I occasionally helped friends install drivers or find their printer, but mostly didn't touch Windows from XP until I got a job using Win10. I used macOS at home Linux at work during that period. I wont comment on WSL because I haven't used v2 and it wasn't my biggest annoyance (it also doesn't sounds like v2 fixed the issues I had with it)
Man, I hated it. I'm just not a fan of how windows are managed, OS updates are constant and require a lengthy reboot, installing/uninstalling is the same awkward mess except now there's 2 Program Files directories, Control Panel is like archeology digging through generations of UIs dating back to Windows 95.
I hate all the intrusive tracking, ads, and preinstalled games and junk.
I tried to give PowerShell a fair shake. I liked some of the concepts around it. It's annoying the documentation requires a download (I was on an airgapped network). It was super awkward to wrap everything in a BAT file. Everyone else just wrote in BAT files because our needs weren't huge. They would be more maintainable and better behaved as PowerShell scripts, but it didn't seem worth pushing for. PowerShell was just so verbose I found it very hard to use as a REPL to build pipelines.
The experience triggered a lot of things I hadn't thought about in over a decade and I was bummed at how few things had changed. That's probably the case for macOS and Linux, but personally I find myself liking those OSes more than Windows...I've definitely been exasperated explaining their shortcomings to others because I've been comfortable avoiding them.
I ended up mostly using it as a dumb terminal to ssh into an Ubuntu box running tmux and vim.
I'm a Linux user on my own hardware and was just put onto win10 at my current gig.
WSL has made this workable, really. Not the nightmare I expected. But the rest of windows still sucks.
As for apple stuff, I used to use Macs for a decade, starting with a colour iMac right down to MBP 2013 ... The platform felt like it got and more in the way. I hated the app store. Firwire transfer from old to new machine also didn't work properly between two OSX versions. Set up took long. Everything was a forced login. The straw that broke the camel's back was shitty support when I came home after closing the brand new laptop to find a cracked glass screen when I opened it up again.
Been using Dell's xps series and Nuc barebones since then, and moving some crucial things like keyPass files onto Google drive. I can spin up a new Dev ready setup in about 15-30mins. Everything works out of the box. Bliss.
Dell btw gave me great support every time I had a hardware issue.
I switched to Linux when learning nodejs and web development in general. Setting up nodejs and using commandline was pain so I decided to completely switch to Ubuntu and never looked back and I consider that one of the best decisions I ever made.
Now after getting tempted to try Arch Linux and I finally gave it a try and its been great so far and especially the Arch Wiki has been the best resource for all my linux knowledge
I just can’t thank enough whoever created ArchWiki Project it’s full of great knowledge related to Linux.
I just wanna take a moment and appreciate the efforts of people who contributed to archwiki and to linux project in general making it great for people like us to use it as a daily driver
Indeed. Arch's disadvantages are obvious, but the educational contribution of the Arch community to all its users has been immense. Almost everyone technical that I know personally has really levelled up through it at some stage. I think Arch's detractors often miss its role in getting more people truly on board with Linux and OSS.
You complain about power user tools, then list a bunch of Xorg tools. Xorg is dying; move to Wayland. I use Sway, but if you want something that's closer to a macOS power user experience, you should probably go with KDE[0].
Tearing? Fundamental Xorg problem. Fixed in Wayland. Wayland has some rough edges, but the reality of the ecosystem is Xorg is dead and not coming back, and it's better to be a little ahead of the curve than behind it and complaining about things that are resolved on the other side.
Tearing is one of the reasons why Wayland was started. "Every frame is perfect" was the goal, and they baked it into the design by making all updates atomic.
That's why I doubt the author had a full Wayland setup running. Maybe the app ran via Xwayland or there was no Wayland at all.
> If you want to achieve some specific action you need to read four or five manpages, search online, and figure out how you are going to put the pieces together. That made me appreciate Karabiner and BTT much more.
This is still accurate to this day and what they don't tell you. Hence why you always need to search for 'xorg/wayland error' this, 'dbus initialization error' that or a random core dump occurred on a freezing window. I have zero time to search for these issues when I configure what I want and prefer it to 'just work' like it should on macOS.
> On November 10th Apple showed us the future of the Mac and released again laptops worth buying. So I bought the 2020 M1 Macbook Air. You will read a review of it soon.
If you like the M1, you will also like the M1X, M2 or M3 Macs. No need to rush for last years model, hence why I skipped this one.
> The experience of using Linux as a daily driver has been very positive for me, but I do need my productivity.
Exactly. Rather than messing around or spending days playing around with my setup or window manager.
>ther than messing around or spending days playing around with my setup or window manager.
I don't get why this narravitve still exists today. Linux works out of the box on many distros perfectly fine.
Keybindings are a very special use case, and if you need that customizability and its better on a Mac, then get a Mac. Doesn't mean that Macs are "more productive"
If you want to argue actual semantics in terms of value, Linux wins hands down for what you get. You can look at things like VM software, which is costly for Mac while Free for Linux. You can look at things like privacy - Apple still collects data for themselves, while in Linux you can fully disable that. You can look at open source software, which has a way higher compatibility rate with Linux than Mac, especially with M1 chips where Rosetta, as good as it is, isn't fool proof. You can look at hardware, where most "non-Mac" laptops that run Linux are upgradable and repairable.
If you like Mac, then stay on Mac, and stop publishing articles on how good Macs are and how Linux is neat, but your time is so valuable that you can't spend learning a few commaind line tools.
>If you like Mac, then stay on Mac, and stop publishing articles on how good Macs are and how Linux is neat, but your time is so valuable that you can't spend learning a few commaind line tools.
"Stop writing good things about things I hate and bad things about things I like!"
> don't get why this narravitve still exists today. Linux works out of the box on many distros perfectly fine.
Yeah. And then you connect two monitors with different scaling factor. Turns out X11 can't handle this and Wayland is still broken.
Yeah. And then you connect two monitors with different scaling factor. Turns out X11 can't handle this and Wayland is still broken
Actually, this works fine in Wayland. I have used Wayland without any issues with amdgpu, including with mixed-DPI screens with GNOME's fractional scaling. However, things go downhill once you have to use X11 applications, and you typically do. E.g. JetBrains IDEs are a train wreck with fractional scaling enabled in GNOME on Wayland.
That's the problem. This work fine in Wayland but some things that were working fine on X11 do not.
In the end you just give a sigh and go back to you macOS (assuming you were trying to switch).
PS: for me though linux distro share the same problems they had back when I was using Ubuntu and the Arch before 2013. Not much have changed since then. Linux on a home\work pc is still mostly about freedom but mostly not about well build human-to-machine interface.
For every niche feature that you cant do on Linux, I can name a niche feature that you cant do on Mac. And for every reason that you tell me how its not an issue on Macs, I can also tell you that its not an issue on Linux.
The point is that this is such a stupid conversation to have.
Double monitor setup works fine. Double monitor scaling setup is iffy.
Also, speaking of external monitors and Macs "just working", google "mac external monitor not working after sleep", which is the problem that i definitely have on my work issued Mac, but not any of my linux laptops.
Ubuntu literally does not have an easy way to configure what happens when you close a laptop. I want it to hibernate instead of sleep. Someone else didn't want it to go to sleep at all. None of the settings options allow this. While Googling it for a friend the only result was running a few commands and changing some stuff in some config file. You cannot possibly expect a business analyst who hasn't even opened the terminal once in their life to not be immediately put off and scared by this. This is the advantage of Macs. They literally do just work
So, does "Just Work" now include easily accessible noob-proof configuration of the things you want? In that case, macOS doesn't Just Work for me, because I want to be able to see what apps are playing sound or recording and manually set them to different sinks/sources, maybe even have sound playing from multiple devices at the same time. On Linux with PulseAudio and pavucontrol, this is effortlessly configurable with an intuitive GUI. I'm not even sure this is possible on macOS.
My point is, unless we agree on roughly what features are required, "Just Works" is a useless subjective specifier. We all have different priorities, so we either have to accept that there's no universal way to evaluate OSs or agree on some subset that really should Just Work.
By the way, KDE Plasma has pretty comprehensive GUI settings on power-related settings. I think having GNOME 3 and Ubuntu be the de-facto standard Linux experience is actually harming the perception of desktop Linux. People switch expecting a customizable, power-user friendly experience and get a DE that's trying to be the opposite.
Try soundflower for mac. I think JACK audio also works on Mac/Win.
> "Just Works" is a useless subjective specifier.
I'd say a good usable mail client, a readily available video editor, sound recording software and office suite are more important than an advanced audio mixer.
> sound playing from multiple devices at the same time
This seems like a very niche use case. Along the lines of the usual nerdy response of linux being able to compile gcc or run vim and why would anyone use their computer for anything else.
> I'd say a good usable mail client, a readily available video editor, sound recording software and office suite are more important than an advanced audio mixer.
I'm not disputing that. It isn't hard to agree on what an average user definitely needs and therefore must work. The hard part is where to draw the line, what is still needed and what is niche.
> This seems like a very niche use case.
Maybe. But it's very much something an "average user" might want. It's actually something I want to be able to do so I can watch a film with my sister, each with our own headphones. That's a real user need, not something "meta" like the FLOSS things you mentioned (not a solution by itself, but something that can help a programmer fill that user need).
Everything you require is not in the least beginner user problems. I'm talking basic issues faced by a person who only views emails, looks at spreadsheets and word documents and opens their browser
I get that, and my setup is definitely not beginner-friendly. But I think we need to agree on what beginners actually do, because I wouldn't say customising power settings falls into that category.
The problem as I see it is that even people who really are beginners sometimes want to reach for more advanced functionality, and different systems expose different advanced functions in a user-friendly way.
I got fed up and shifted fully to a Linux desktop and laptop setup like 20 years ago. Computers are silly devices and there is no end to the annoyances involved with them regardless of operating system.
I got used to it and was/am able to get what I need done. I liked the cheap netbooks when they were a thing, and I like zenbooks these days. You always have to shop with compatibility in mind. Hard edges persist in any environment though the particulars change. I am comfortable with the tradeoffs currently and luckily there are enough people using Linux to take care of most of the show stoppers fairly quickly.
Agree here. I use Windows at work and use full time Linux on home desktop since 7 or 8 years. Both have bugs and annoyances but one thing that turns me off on windows is how computer becomes more and more sluggish as the time goes on with each update. Never had that issue with Linux. Updates might break a thing or two. I am okay with occasional break/fix but just can't get used to progressive sluggishness.
>apt-get was a revolution when it was released in 1998 and it is still the best way to manage software today. brew is a mediocre replacement.
While apt still isn't the best package manager (my heart belongs to pacman, no matter what the haters say), I completely agree that brew is a failed imitation. I wanted to use MacOS for the longest time, because I've been told that it's a real "Unix system". Brew has distilled my fears into a sobering reality. The "advantages" MacOS offers really comes down to eye-candy or slightly more consistent shortcut mapping, but none of this really matters to me when I can't use the software I want, and the OS is always second-guessing my authority. Maybe I've been spoiled by Linux, but I don't understand the hype. Not even on my M1 Macbook Air.
There is one single feature of homebrew that regularly bites my coworkers. You can refer to software by name@version ("brew install postgresql@11" or "brew install postgresql@12") and there is no confusion about what you are installing; or you can refer to software by name only ("brew install postgresql") and the version number is calculated to be "most recently released." (v13 at the time this was written.)
Hypothetically I have two machines that I want to build out and give to developers. One machine arrives on Monday. My script runs "brew install postgresql" (no version), because of when I ran that script postgresql@10 gets installed. Tests pass, I hand that machine off to a new developer. The second machine arrives on Wednesday. I run the same script, but because v11 of postgres was added to homebrew on Tuesday, the second machine receives postgresql@11 even though the first machine received @10. Same script, two days apart, different major version of postgresql.
Yes, I can write my scripts carefully to avoid this. But consider this scenario: a new developer encounters a problem, tries to solve it themselves, finds a seemingly helpful blog, and ends up with postgresql@13 and node@15 when everyone else in their team is using postgresql@11 and node@12. Now tests are failing, but only for this one developer and only locally...
For example Ubuntu X.Y LTS always use a pinner version of Apache 2.xxx and it will remain that version throughout that LTS release, such as 18.04. what they do for you is apply security patches and bump Apache 2.xxx.Y where Y is the security release applied patch. Apache stays at 2.xxx for the duration of that LTS and is considered the Stable version. Want something newer like Apache 3.x install from a PPA or an all-in-one bundled Snap package...
Except dpgk/apt is pretty good about keeping track of what libraries are being used. I've had homebrew upgrade readline to the next major version, uninstalling the version that all my other utilities were linked against. Admittedly, this was years ago and I don't know if that still happens; the experienced has soured me on homebrew and I actively avoid having to run the brew command and risking the same again.
Apt sidesteps this problem because Debian-based releases are not rolling releases. Unless you install a custom PPA, if you are running Ubuntu 18.04 and you "apt-get install postgres" you will always get version 10.x. The major version number will not get bumped for Ubuntu 18.04.
If want to use a version of postgres other than 10.x, you can either use a different version of Ubuntu or install a custom PPA.
Apt's target audience is systems administrators. Homebrew's target audience is independent developers who might need to have four different versions of Postgresql installed simultaneously on their laptop, because they maintain Rails/Django/Node apps for four different clients who are each unwilling to upgrade for whatever reason.
IMO homebrew is "messy" because it is trying to solve a harder problem. If there is such a thing as an average enterprise software developer, I would argue that homebrew is trying to solve problems that the enterprise developer does not have.
We do this where I work and while it’s great that it solves this problem, but Docker on macOS leaves much to be desired. The situation with filesystem performance is abysmal, and if you’re unlucky, CPU usage can go through the roof even when running a few lightweight containers.
That is my preferred solution and I think it works great. I have persuaded a couple of coworkers to switch, but only a couple so far.
Containerized Postgres is a real win, but running OpenLDAP (+ custom schema) as a containerized application has measurably improved my quality of life. Kudos and great gratitude to the people behind
https://github.com/osixia/docker-openldap
If the solution to homebrews handling of major versions is to not use homebrew, I think it indicates there are issues.
I think it should work like almost Linux distros where the major version is fixed for a release lifecycle, and any other installations require modification. So say brew install postgresql should always install 12, and if you want something else you have to add the version modifier.
This is a side point but the docker suggestion is far cleaner if you work on multiple apps as you can easily configure and run multiple versions with Dockerfiles and compose files to be exactly right for each app, with only the plugins the specific app needs, data stored in a custom location for each app, and the ability to turn off postgres for an app. System postgres installs and upgrades are a needles pain for development.
But I agree that's nothing to do with brew conversation.
Not just different apps but having multiple working environments for the same app - very useful when you wreck the db on a feature branch and need to jump to another to fix a bug etc.
I think you could also utilize 'Brewfile' with pinned versions, where needed, and the latest available for the rest. I manage my environment this way when migrating from one work laptop to another. Works fine so far.
Alternatively, you can create your own 'tap' to gain more control over some packages.
For databases, I'd stick to running them as containers, too.
Homebrew is not ideal, of course, but there are ways to achieve desired goals until we have something better.
Doesn’t apt (for instance) work the same way? Or docker images without a tag? I’d you don’t specify a version in each case then you get the latest available. I’d you want a specific version pinned then you should specify it. I think I don’t see your point, works as intended. If you enforced mandatory version specification every time, you’d have to know exactly which version is which package for anything you install: apt install Firefox > nope won’t work, instead you have to know what is today’s latest Firefox version (changes every couple of days/weeks)
apt generally doesn't switch you to a new incompatible version of a package unless you upgrade your whole install. Browsers are not libraries and have special status due to their importance and having security and feature updates not separated.
It's not really how apt works but rather how Debian works: you use apt with a specific release repository of Debian (stretch, buster or whatever ISO you installed).
Debian is really strict about its releases and won't push a breaking change in a specific version of the OS.
For instance, `apt install htop` will only ever install the 2.X version of htop in Buster. Including security patches and all, but you won't get a 3.0.0 version without going sideways and add a specific repository for that. Debian will ship with htop version 3 in the next release, but you'll have to upgrade the entire distro for that.
Brew is different in that it allows anybody to merge a new breaking version of the software you use, so `brew install htop` on Monday could give you the 2.x version, and on Tuesday will install the 3.0.0 version.
You could maybe compare it to the rolling releases of Arch. But Arch has a better way of handling it than Brew: they test, they prepare, they communicate for bug changes..
Brew would benefit from segmenting their offering, but you'd lose the bleeding-edginess of it. Really, if you want reproducible packaging on Mac, I'd use nix or docker. If you want convenience and edge, use brew and deal with it.
> For instance, `apt install htop` will only ever install the 2.X version of htop in Buster. Including security patches and all, but you won't get a 3.0.0 version without going sideways and add a specific repository for that. Debian will ship with htop version 3 in the next release, but you'll have to upgrade the entire distro for that.
Debian has an official backports repository if you want that behavior. It just gives you the freedom to choose.
On most debian-based distros, most packages aren't upgraded to a new major version in the repos for a particular version of the OS. If a new version of postgres is released, it won't be added to the apt repos for the current stable debian, ubuntu, etc. distributions. Instead it will be included in the repo for the next major release of the distro.
There are exceptions to that, for example browsers like Firefox and Chromium, but upgrading the major version of Firefox is much less risky than upgrading the major version of postgresql.
Rolling release distros like Debian Sid (and archlinux, though that doesn't use apt) don't work this way, which is why rolling release distros have a reputation for being less stable.
That’s really interesting, does anyone have a book or blog post taking about this versioning and releasing strategy?
I feel like as a new dev there’s so much in engineering I could learn from that’s already been solved and re-solved again and again or at least addressed by existing distribution systems.
However the reading materials to learn about some of this stuff seems far and few or very niche, sitting on some cached blog post from the 90s..
It's actually worse than you think since the @version notation needs to be explicitly marked by the maintainer of the package.
If they don't do this then there is no easy way to install an older version of a package, you will have to get the old .rb file from the brew git history and execute it yourself.
I found it much worse that installing anything STILL by defaults upgrades literally everything. You have to actually set an ENV variable to stop this behaviour. My stuff constantly broke because I'd forget about this and install something else and a couple days later I'd go "what happened??"
It was doing this until recently when I set the env variable. It updates itself every time and then updates everything else too. Maybe I did something wrong to trigger this behaviour but it was definitely updating the packages
I've seen the exact same behavior. I didn't realize it was behind an environment variable. I passed a package to the command and for the next week I was dealing with issues from everything being upgraded.
Per gp, I haven't used Pacman in a long time, but when Arch was really popular I'd have a virtual machine, ignore it for a few months, then updates usually failed or rendered the machine inoperable.
The Arch wiki was so good that it inevitably included the exact problem and resolution already, but since I didn't have any important running systems I also might as well have reinstalled the whole thing. In which case I'd run into installation problems that were also perfectly covered in the Arch wiki.
Nowadays you can install Arch to a zfs or btrfs subvolume and have snapshots before every update, so a failed update requires you to just reboot to the previous snapshot and do a rollback.
I have never seen this personally, because the first thing to do if you haven't upgraded Arch in a long time is check archlinux.org where they list right in the front page any breaking update, which are quite rare and they provide the exact steps to proceed.
Or just install informant from AUR, to force you to read the Archlinux package news before proceeding with any pacman operation.
I find Docker to replace the parts that suck about using brew. E.g. I would never install something like Postgres using brew again. Small command line tools sure, but anything with complex dependencies and where you might need multiple versions it’s just better to use containers.
I had packages installed by brew that used readline 7. This went on fine for a while. At some point, brew installed something (at my direction) and moved to readline 8. Unbeknownst to me, readline 7 disappeared from my system! Tada, a pile of tools require reinstallation. Oh, and I didn't notice until weeks later when psql stopped working.
- updating the package index on each operation. I just want to install stuff, dammit. I don't need you to run git pull to update the gazillion package definitions
- `brew update` and `brew upgrade` dichotomy. 99.9999999999% of the time I need to update/upgrade a package, not brew. If I ever needed to upgrade brew, I could run `brew update --brew` or something
I've given it a whirl, and while it's better than Brew, that's not a high bar to pass. Macports suffers from the same lack of software and strange idiosyncrasies that crop up in Brew, and it really doesn't justify it's place in my workflow.
Used to use MacPorts for many, many years. But grew tired of it breaking important packages or just failing to update when doing macOS major version updates.
Also, MacPorts can many times just fail to install a package or fail to update a series of dependencies. Good luck then getting your operation important packages running ..
Anyway, switched to Brew completely a while ago when updating to Big Sur, so have no idea if Brew will also do the same thing over time, but at least their system seems more simple, which might result in less breakage.
People state consistent shortcut mapping is an advantage of using Mac but after 2 years of being required to use a Macbook Pro I'm not really sure about that - often they are more complicated IMO. I still miss built in Linux and Windows key mappings. For example Windows + Left to move the window on the left side of screen for side by side apps on the same screen. Great for remote demo's and coding sessions. Ctrl + Shift + F4 to take a screen shot vs Linux PrtSc feels backwards at least to me. On the mouse pointer side with scroll direction most people I know also get a plugin to swap the scroll direction when they use their mouse and switch back to track pad. Another example - on VS Code very often the key bindings don't work on my Mac whereas on my Linux machine they work every time. My point is while I'm probably don't know all the tricks to learn since its not my platform of choice YMMV.
I think the impression of "better key bindings" comes down to familiarity more than anything. Getting used to something else seems uncertain (it may never be as good despite learning investment) when you know on the other platform you can just "get things done fast".
I used a macbook for 2 years and the key binding is definitely less consistent than windows or linux. If nothing something as important as word navigation and word selection (ctrl+arrows and ctrl+shift+ arrows on linux and windows), is located in different modifiers (can't remember which), something along the lines of: move with command+arrow and select with option+shift+arrows.
Drives me crazy every time, given that command + backspace deletes a word (and command +del deletes a word in the other direction).
But of course on a Win/Linux system you rarely need to use three fingers at once. On mac this is all too common for even the basic tasks you state.
Shift + End: Select to the end of the line
Home + End: Select to the beginning of the line
Home or End: Move to beginning or end of line respectively.
What's worse is when I plug in a keyboard with Home and End buttons on a recent Macbook Pro they still don't work. Do I need another plugin for that? Even if I do personally I don't find the Mac keyboard shortcuts better than Linux/Windows. Tbh after using Mac for 2 years running now every day at work I still don't quite get how people find it easier - I still wish personally for a Linux or even Windows machine to speed up my productivity.
And that's because people prefer what they are familiar with them - the mental leap to jump to another way of working for most people isn't pleasant and isn't really worth the investment. Mac still feels like a "second language" to me just as Linux must feel to mac users - I'm always translating it back to "how do I do this Linux/Windows thing" in Mac. In the end Linux, Windows, and Mac are perfectly capable OS'es and the differences is marginal between them which makes switching difficult. But I do prefer my Linux machine these days - more just comes out of the box.
> If nothing something as important as word navigation and word selection (ctrl+arrows and ctrl+shift+ arrows on linux and windows), is located in different modifiers (can't remember which), something along the lines of: move with command+arrow and select with option+shift+arrows.
I think you’re misremembering here, I don’t think there are any macOS keyboard shortcuts that work like this. It’s always shift plus the original keyboard shortcut to select.
It could be! There is one that's hostile, but I can't remember which. I know for sure because my colleague switched back to a Mac and it's complaining about it
On a mac I can't live without "Magnet" [1]. It lets you do organize your windows in half/thirds of screens with simple keystrokes. That should be part of the OS.
It's not even a software development exclusive problem. You might create a product, sell it on Amazon and then notice Amazon sell its own AmazonBasics version of it after a while.
I use Rectangle [0] for the same purpose, it has a few more bells and whistles and is open source. It does have a bit of a debounce problem on multiple screens though (one tap might move the window two positions).
Will try it out. Having said that it is on my Linux machine "for free". I'm not even quite sure if I'm allowed to use these paid apps on the Macbook Pro I've been given.
For Linux users on Gnome looking for similar functionality, I use the gTile extension to accomplish this. When I first got my ultrawide display on macOS, Divvy was critical to be able to do this. gTile was a similar enough replacement to get me my workflow back.
Macports is a system that installs in the /opt root folder to run along side your native applications without overwriting them, but it compiles each application as you install. Installations can be very slow. It seems like it was adopted from FreeBSD's ports system.
Fink is more apt like but I haven't used it in years. All the packages are precompiled and the installations are much faster, but it seems out of date.
For both packing systems all the code and installation packages are managed by volunteers so quality varies across packages.
> Is MacPorts Universal?
MacPorts works on Apple Silicon as well as Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs, but, by default, the ports you install will be compiled only for the architecture you're currently running on. This means that if you migrate from, say, a PowerPC Mac to an Intel one and use Migration Assistant to copy your data to the new machine, you should reinstall all your ports on the new machine to rebuild them for Intel.
What they mean is that the downloaded binary will have been compiled for only the architecture you're running on. Take a look at all the binaries on http://packages.macports.org. MacPorts downloads from here.
If MacPorts is compiling from source, you're either using a non-default varient, on a very old version of OS X (MacPorts supports Tiger, but doesn't build binaries), or have some other unusual configuration option set.
That can't be true. For any mildly complex application I install it asks for "xcode-select --install". I'm using an intel Mac on 10.14.6, so it is pretty standard. I just reinstalled the software under a year ago and redownloaded macports from the website and installed it. It seems to require a local compiler to be installed for most applications, such as gcc or llvm. For instance, why wouldn't installing ffmpeg just download the ffmpeg binary instead of the all the compiler dependencies?
Oh, that may be because ffmpeg uses libraries with incompatible licenses. I should have mentioned, ports with nonredistributable binaries are also built from source, and MacPorts tends to interpret licenses conservatively.
Does the list change if you specify the +gpl2 varient?
I'm just doing the "standard install". Macports does source code for standard installs. End of discussion.
Heavenly Lord, he just keeps coming back with more rules lawyering. The macport for git goes through patching, configuring, building routine that is common in source code installs. Give me peace of mind, strength, and patience in dealing with internet trolls.
...no, it does that when the standard install would not be possible to legally redistribute. :) It's true that MacPorts generally prioritizes providing more features (in ffmpeg's case, access to more encoders and decoders) over providing a prebuilt binary.
I suggested the +gpl2 varient because I noticed it was present for all the ffmpeg binaries on MacPorts's build server. This is probably why. http://packages.macports.org/ffmpeg/
Now, if adding +gpl2 still causes MacPorts to pull in cmake, that's interesting, and I would like to bring that up on MacPorts's mailing list in case there's a bug. But I suspect adding +gpl2 will make it go away.
Yeah, I’m a maintainer, MacPorts will download a binary if it can. ffmpeg is a weird case thanks to the non-free variants, but even it has some binary installs.
Also, for instance, OpenJDK is a port that is offered and we do not compile that in any way on any system because that way lies madness.
The other reason that macports will build from source is when there isn’t a binary like early on in Big Sur.
I am sorry, but you are wrong. MacPorts will not go through configure/build/install for all ports, only those for which no binary archive can be made available. As others have already explained, this happens when license restrictions do not allow redistribution of a binary.
With your example of ffmpeg, you can check yourself that ffmpeg-4.3.2_0+gpl2.darwin_18.x86_64.tbz2 exists as a binary archive and will be used on a standard install on macOS 10.14. MacPorts will definitely not build ffmpeg from source by default.
I recommend you test again with something simpler than ffmpeg, for example bzip2 or less.
Yea, I think I've been through a similar thought process. Apple hardware is second to none and their machines do look awfully pretty. Macs have become the default engineering laptop in all the start ups I've been at in the past ~10 years but I never got to the point where I was really comfortable. I have grown to really love wsl 2 on windows in the past year that I've used it. To me it seems really elegant and has been a dream to work on. Most assume it's just a vm running on windows, but the integration it has between Linux and windows make it extremely powerful (eg from your Linux shell you can run windows executables, so you can do stuff like run powershell to write text to your windows clipboard or run 'code .' to open the windows vs code gui on your current working directory in wsl). I'm not sure if it would be best for everyone, but as an SRE it's great to have my Linux container have the same operating system my company uses in production so that I don't need to figure out how to do stuff on two different operating systems and I am just a lot more comfortable on centos.
For me, the ease of use of PKGBUILD files makes it easier to interface external or modifird software with the system (this has led to success of the AUR).
Apt itself is great, but the PPA repos that make every dist upgrade more complex is kind of not nice. With pacman you have AUR and very simple package scripts, that lets you easily add whatever to your system that's not included in the distribution.
There is "checkinstall" that creates an apt package by watching changes during a "make install" step. So you can install many programs that don't provide .deb packages or only provide source code that way.
Imo, both are kind of sucky. (Just install a gnome group on each, then remove it and install plasma and see how many non-used service whatever continues to be installed). Nix is the correct solution to the dependency hell problem.
> because I've been told that it's a real "Unix system".
OSX certainly isn't a "real Unix system".
OSX a huge hodgepodge of proprietary crap with a Unix component buried somewhere in the middle of the dung heap to get FOSS proponent to believe that Apple believes in openness.
They were even certified as of 10.5 as a true-to-god Unix system. They have been more unixy than Linux for a while!
Unix, until Linux had made a breakthrough, was a proprietary system. The AT&T Unix, Xenix, AIX, SunOS, you name them. Openness of the source is not a defining characteristic.
I was honestly hyped when i got a MBP beast as developer machine after so many years of hearing mac is basically a luxury unix.
I was and still am heavily dissappointed. This was ~2018 it looked exactly as boring as imagined, a desktop as intiuitive as windows 7s. The terminal felt at best strange, many settings and confirmation dialogs are simply not available via terminal, only hidden somewhere in their UIs. The hardware run hot every day, always and you could not use an external screen without waste cycling your battery to death. Honestly not impressed.
Both mac and windows are like stuck in time compared to modern desktop approaches like gnome shell or recent kdes. If you are a shell guy to some degree no other os will justice
Very concise way to put it. I feel the same way. With FOSS I feel that I'm fighting with the software, and with proprietary stuff I feel like I'm fighting against the software.
I switched to all Linux in my house a few years ago, it is a simpler and better existence overall. My kids laptops are mint, my wife is the only holdout on Mac. Mac is not bad, but for me it doesn’t have a lot of advantages and has a lot of obvious disadvantages.
Can you explain briefly what the issues are around brew? I've been a Mac user for the past decade and I still remember the days of macports, so brew still feels like magic to me.
> Maybe I've been spoiled by Linux, but I don't understand the hype.
This type of sentiment is usually a sign. If you've been spoiled by something, that's because it's better. I had the same feeling trying to go back to windows, "Man, why am I always fighting damaging updates", "Why can't I change this very simple setting", "Where is the documentation for this file".
The answer usually comes down to "because one thing is really good (not perfect), and the other thing is shitty (but tries to look perfect)."
I adopt a different attitude. If you have been spoiled by something, doesn't mean it's better, just that you are set in your ways. Which might be good, but sometimes it's better to broaden your horizon.
I liked macOS, I had used Linux full time for 15 years, spoiled by it if you will, then I tried to set up a WSL environment just for me and let me tell you: you guys can keep your Macs and half arsed Linux distros, Windows these days is truly underrated. Being able to game, have a better Linux and Docker experience than macOS, and not stuck in the 90s like Linux actually feels great.
Because the reality is that all software is actually crap. If you think one is better than another, you need to look harder.
Agree about brew and highly recommend nix in its place. Failed updates can’t take down your system (it’s literally impossible, as changes are made atomically), different packages maintain separate versions of their dependencies so there’s no dependency hell, and it’s very speedy. Only downside is it’s not as Mac centric as brew, so AFAIK casks are a no go.
Mail is fine if you use browser-based solutions. Nobody is talking about only sending plaintext emails? Wtf?
Why are they running so much stuff on wine?
Why are they upgrading their kernel every few weeks?
How does anyone think nautilus is good?
How does anyone think that Gimp/inkscape are better than affinity designer?
These are the things they find useful about linux? There's so much more that makes linux a powerful solution (e.g. great window managers like i3), or much better support for shell based workflows.
> Why are they upgrading their kernel every few weeks?
This makes sense if you install a distro like Manjaro or Arch. Not something I'd ever recommend to someone who's taking Linux for a first spin. I don't think I've had any troubles doing regular kernel upgrades, though, the problems mostly laid in proprietary drivers, specifically Nvidia's.
> How does anyone think nautilus is good?
I have no problems with Nautilus. Perhaps it's not the greatest file manager, but it's way ahead of Finder in my opinion.
Fedora also does kernel updates within a stable release, and some proprietary hardware works best with it while being mildly broken on Debian-derived distros so I might even recommend it to some first-time users.
I think it's great. If I had to pick between Finder, Windows File Explorer, Nautilus, or Dolphin. I'd honestly choose Nautilus. It's visually simple, has previews, built in support for Google Drive, easy to find how to show hidden files, if I double click an archived file; it decompresses it, and it has an "Open Terminal" right click prompt. If I had to walk someone through performing a file system action, say over a phone, I feel confident that I could do so with the least confusion using Nautilus. I simply never have understood the arguments against Nautilus and am extremely thankful to the developers who have chosen to make the hard decision to reduce features to make the application maintainable.
I agree that you don't need i3 for the common scenario (IDE + terminal in my case). i3 is more about the myriad of uncommon scenarios that come up all the time.
For example, maybe I want to keep an eye on several terminal commands at the same time. With i3 I just press the terminal shortcut n times and I have n new terminal windows sharing the space. If one of the commands fails with a long error message I press another shortcut and the terminal windows are now tabbed and full height, with the IDE still visible on the side.
Or maybe I want a small browser window or Slack window in a corner to keep an eye on a meeting or discussion while I work.
Whatever uncommon layout best serves my needs right now, i3 can get it done in seconds.
You never really need a tiling WM, though. i3 just solves my problems really well, so well in fact that I actively enjoy using it. Some people feel the same way about vim, and you never really need vim either.
Maybe how you use Linux is different from how the authors uses Linux? Maybe their relation to their computer is different from yours? Maybe Linux serves some use cases well, and not others?
Eh. I've ended up with the opposite conclusion, at least for my purposes. Running Word is neat, but having to spend half a day figuring out what Apple did to C++ headers after an Xcode update so R will compile packages again is not fun. Unfortunately I can't really install Linux on the damn thing because of the hardware.
Also mailspring is a pretty good Linux email client with conversation view...
Seconding the Mailspring recommendation, but be aware that it requires a Mailspring ID. There’s some progress, though, with a telemetry-free fork[1] (that’s the version I’m using right now) and plans to make the ID optional in the official client [2].
Oh and one day Xcode will suddenly stop updating. Why? Because I lost my credit card yesterday and blocked it, so now App Store will not update a free app. Whaa?
I agree. The author makes it clear that using "business" tools like MSOffice and writing a lot of nicely formatted emails is important to him. Wouldn't have switched to Linux if that was the case for me. I'm writing < 10 emails per day - Evolution + WebDav/CardDav is good enough for me.
I'm also on a 2018 Xps with Ubuntu 20.04 and everything just works.
To me, the clear advantage is how installing all kind of obscure R/Python packages is usually a smooth experience, whereas a working Mac version frequently doesn't even exist or requires struggling with obscure errors, especially after MacOs upgrades (e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/mcmc_stan/status/1186923309662953...)
Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time, with “quick look” as a contender for most under-appreciated feature.
Just hitting spacebar to see virtually any file, and the ability to open in preview and read or even markup and make small changes, is so nice. Whenever I use a non-Mac system I really miss those two features.
Not sure how GNOME's preview feature is written, but macOS QuickLook plugins are written in C, C++, or Objective-C and the plugins included with the OS leverage OpenCL (or maybe Metal now) to accelerate rendering of previews, which is part of why it's so fast.
The ability to extend QuickLook to support more types is huge too. If it can be rendered to a static image or HTML page it can have a QuickLook plugin written for it.
QuickLook is great. And the plugins are fantastic. I remember when I used to have a Mac there was a QL a plug-in that allowed you to peek into and browse Zip/Rar/DMG files.
That was so useful at a time where my workflow included multiple zip files containing assignments etc. Being able to simply hit spacebar to look into them, instead of decompressing and creating a new folder was incredible.
And if I’m not mistaken, the same plugin also allowed spotlight to then search the contents of the zip files.
> Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen macOS users saying they can’t leave it in part because of Preview. But IDK if any have listed any features not present in both GNOME’s Evince and KDE’s Okular (not that I’ve ever needed or used any of the three).
Editing PDFs and sticking your signature on documents is trivial with Preview.app. Save-as-PDF is broken (edits don't show up reliably), but you can easily just print to PDF to work around that bug.
I can't get Evince or Okular to do this task: it'd be great if either worked, but I haven't looked into it.
(FWIW, I'm a full-time Linux desktop user, but I have to test PhotoStructure on Windows and macOS, so those boxes are on my desk too. PDF-related tasks are the only other reason why I turn to my Mac.)
How are those for editing PDFs? I haven't tried those specific tools, but in the past when I tried it was surprisingly difficult to figure out how to do things like merge 2 PDFs or rearrange the pages on non-Macs
Used it for a while, but it really annoys with random “let’s get updates in chinese” popup from time to time. This is that last mile that non-macs always get wrong, gosh.
Edit: to add some value to the rant, there is also MiniBin, which sits in a tray area and allows you to open/purge your recycle bin without reaching a desktop icon.
To this day I have still never found any application on any device that is as simple and easy to add an arrow and some red text to an image for highlighting something as it is with preview. It is just unbelievable how janky and bad every single other application is at doing this simple task. Not even on phones is there anything easy.
Ahh interesting point. Somebody needs to make their next 20% project a gmail labs extension that gives a simple annotate option to images in mail. It would probably be a sleeper hit that gets more use than 90% of other gmail features.
Hmm, I installed a quick look equivalent on my desktop because I saw that mentioned as being so useful a lot, but I keep forgetting I have it. In what situations would you use it?
If you had the real Preview on MacOS, you’d be using it all the time without even thinking, like 100% of MacOS users. Because it’s fast, it opens everything faster than you can think, and it just works well. The effort required to launch it is zero, or even negative. It’s just part of the OS.
But since you have a « sort of » copy cat which does not work as well or as fast, is not as well integrated, does not support as many files or any fatal flaw like that, you just don’t use it.
So yes, Preview is underrated and really hard to replicate.
I wasn't talking about Preview, I was talking about quick look, i.e. when I browse files in my file browser, I can hit space and immediately look at that file in a pared-down interface. But I'm not browsing my files that often, and when I do, the only time I seem to be interested in what it looks like is when I'm looking for an image, in which case the thumbnails that I can see without interaction suffice.
So I'm probably missing something. Does that mean that, because it's so fast and low-effort, you use it as a complete replacement of a native app you'd use otherwise? And then just for files you're just consuming, or does it also work for editing? And what kind of files?
Note that I'm not out to prove any point, I just want to understand what I'm missing :)
quick look spreadsheets when you don't want to wait half a minute for excel to load. Quick look pdfs with nondescript names that you've downloaded to check paper titles/authors, quick look ppts youve been emailed (from within the email app) to see if they're worth reading in depth.
It's faster, and less jarring when it opens due to animating FROM the file). It also works in Open / Save dialogue windows in any app which the equivalent does not.
That little "wait is this the file I want to open / overwrite?" When saving a file, it adds to an overall feeling of polish.
Like a tasty meal, it's all in the details and how they add up
> Does that mean that, because it's so fast and low-effort, you use it as a complete replacement of a native app you'd use otherwise?
In my case, yes. It’s the only way I ever look at images, and I often use it to have a quick look at scripts or text/data files (try it on a CSV and it’ll show as a table!). It’s also convenient for design files, whose apps are incredibly slow to launch. With Alfred[1] you can even preview URLs directly.
Finally, QuickLook shines when you have file formats for which you don’t have an editor (e.g. you may need to view a Photoshop or Word document once in a while). It allows you to view them faster than in the editing application, for free, without having to install or configure anything.
Unlike the swath of people who are singing praises to Preview, I rarely touch it and mostly resort to QuickLook, even for PDFs.
> And then just for files you're just consuming, or does it also work for editing?
It works (at least) to edit images like Preview (annotate, rotate, crop).
Thanks, I suppose I should make an effort to think of it when I look at local images or PDFs (which I don't do that often) - although edit doesn't seem to be supported by my version of it, unfortunately. CSVs or files without an editor I don't think I ever touch :)
Preview works better than anything I’ve found for adding or deleting pages to a PDF, and using the camera to input your signature is such a nice feature.
I wish preview had the option to disable editing, I find its ability to make small changes a misfeature. I use it to read big spec documents, and it wants to change them all the time -- I think accidentally clicking on tables is the usual trigger. I resorted to making all my pdf files read-only, but Preview is the only pdf viewer that's ever forced me to do that...
I finally reinstalled my Windows 10 after some time for a gaming PC and it was surprising to me that they are very intrusive. Like, I have to create a Microsoft account? And they have other sorts of update that happened randomly. Can we trust Microsoft?
I'd be interested to know why the author thinks apt-get is so much better than brew (honest question!). I've never had any problems with homebrew (even on M1 mixing and matching arm and intel binaries).
I have however had many massive problems with apt-get, specifically getting a version of an app that's later that what's included in the distro. It usually ends up with a couple of PPAs that then don't work properly and brick the system.
Homebrew in this regard is far better as all packages are "always" at the latest stable version and I imagine get more testing than some random PPA or backports repo.
This piece is mostly evidence that it is hard to switch platforms and expect to preserve one's workflow. Doesn't work. Have to adopt to the native ergonomics.
In that context, Linux is often best looked as a Chromebook Pro. Great when you can do most of your work in or around a browser, plus or minus the shell.
I don’t disagree with the author’s observations, but I think it’s important to note that basically what they describe is that “Linux is not a better OSX than OSX”, as opposed to “Linux is not a better OS than OSX”.
The latter may also be true, but that’s not what they describe in this article. Because in this article what they are trying to describe is trying to setup Linux to do the things they did on OSX the way they did it on OSX.
I think the three major OSes are now sufficiently different that calling any of them “better” than the others is meaningless. All three have issues but they are in different places. And many of the things people complain about are just different from what they are used to.
If you're complaining about Linux drivers please do so after using a Laptop that supports Linux (Thinkpads for example). Just like it wouldn't be fair to complain about macOS on a Hackintosh - sound didn't work well and had to patch the DSDT.
> but there are rough edges for the power user.
> I am an extreme power user, ...
> In the end, I was able to replicate most of my macOS power tools setup via input hooks and shell scripts, but it took much longer than it should have.
It's very hard to define who a Power User is. But if you've spent a few years on Linux, you'd be able to do many things faster on Linux than on macOS. For instance, it's easier to automate tasks with shell scripts in Linux than to attempt the same with osascript.
I use macOS only when I'm forced to - because the absolute fundamentals are broken. Finder is unbelievably bad compared to Nautilus, package management is terrible, limited ability to tile windows, not even a simple way to set up an Application launch shortcut out of the box (yeah, can do with Automator).
I can't speak for GP, but I'd pay for Path Finder even if all it did was give me cmd-x to cut, and enter key to mean open instead of rename. It does a ton more, but those two are the killer features for me (Tabs used to be one too, but Finder finally got those a while ago).
I definitely agree with you on the lack of cmd-x for cut. However, you can do cmd-c to copy, and then cmd-option-v to move files rather than copy them.
Enter to rename and cmd-o to open was hard to adapt to when I moved from Windows, but it's second nature now.
Using the distinction of paste as copy vs paste as move, instead of overloading the cut metaphor is a better choice semantically. When you cut text or images from a document with ctrl/cmd-x the content is deleted immediately. It’s weird and inconsistent that in windows the files get greyed out and if you don’t paste them they... eventually look normal again when you put something else in the clipboard? Modifying the paste with option on mac is also consistenT with option switching between move and copy while dragging files.
* No ability to use single click + hover to highlight
* Relative sizing feels way off - everything in Finder always seems to be simultaneously way too spaced out while also being way too small.
* Never seems to remember view preferences properly, and often defaults to confusing arrangements.
* Doesn't like to stay connected to network drives, despite any number of tricks I've tried.
* The usual cut/paste/delete operations being needlessly complicated to perform
I do prefer macOS overall, partly because I'm tired of having to constantly tweak and fix Linux whenever I try to use it as a desktop system, and because of things like iTerm2 and BetterTouchTool.
But I really hate trying to do any kind of real file management with Finder, and most third-party apps I've tried just seem to replicate everything I dislike about Finder.
He specifically targeted the "complain about linux drivers" part in his comment didn't he? He didn't dismantle the entire post, just comment on a specific part he disagreed with. I don't fully agree with it, especially since things such suspend, the fingerprint scanner and the LTE modem were still a mystery to be solved with the x1c6/7.
But if anything, your attitude that's effectively shutting down any criticism is the problem.
I clarified now in the article that the "Linux Laptop" is a Dell XPS 13" Developer Edition, which is marketed indeed as a Linux laptop, and the Ubuntu is marketed as "Ubuntu Dell".
> Screen tearing with the intel driver. Come on. This was solved on xorg and now with Wayland it's back.
Since you mentioned Dell XPS, I'm thinking they'd have sold it to you with Ubuntu 20.04. But why did you choose Wayland - which IIRC is not the default in 20.04? These are the trickiest pieces of the distro, and will take years to stabilize. Especially considering that Linux aims to work across the entire set of PCs in existence.
It is a 2018 Dell XPS. It had a previous version preinstalled, which used Wayland. I explicitly remember having to edit the settings to run with Xorg because otherwise screen sharing in Google Meet would not work.
I upgraded to 20.04 at some point. During the six months I tried both environments. I ended up with Xorg just because it works.
If you're complaining about Linux drivers please do so after using a Laptop that supports Linux (Thinkpads for example).
So I Googled “laptops supported by Linux”. There is no official site. Ubuntu has a page. But it’s not on the first page of results. I only know about it because I’m familiar with it.
Supporters keeps arguing people should jump through hoops. I’m on Linux right now, but people have better things to do. Either provide a list so people know exactly what to buy, or all complaints are valid.
Apple sells you the whole package: take it or leave it. Windows supports everything and has their logo everywhere.
Again, that's like googling "laptops supported by MacOS" and expecting to find a list of Hackintosh compatible hardware. Dell and Lenovo both sell laptops pre-installed with Linux, and there are also boutique shops like System76 and TUXEDO. And I DDGed "Linux Laptops" and got all these suggestions.
Of course, Linux doesn't quite have the mass market consumer experience you get with MacOS or Windows, but it's not exactly hard to find laptops pre-installed with Linux.
Are they supported, though? That was the question. Downvote me all you want, put words in my mouth if that is what you need to do, etc.
A. But are they supported and is that a meaningful question?
B. I am not bashing anything Linux because I don't hate it in the slightest.
C. Did you read the parent I responded to? That comment makes two claims and tries to establish an analogous relation and that does not work the way the author wanted. That was also my reply.
So you missed the point of that post, you missed the point of mine and you strawmanned me :)
Several of the laptops mentioned are vendors who sell them officially with Linux support (system 76, dell developer edition, purism...) , so you either didn't bother or trying to create a false narrative
Actually the previous poster talked about sites for laptops supporting hackintoshes. I'd be very surprised if you find that information on any "official" website.
Not to give an argument along the lines of "You're holding it wrong," but...okay, yeah, I'm going to do that.
You hold a gun in one way. If you mess that up in any fashion, you probably won't hit what you're trying to, and, worse, might shoot yourself.
Saying things like "There is no official site" is holding Linux wrong. Linux isn't an operating system. Linux is just a kernel.
So phrase your search the right way:
"laptops that support GNU/Linux installation"
You'll be surprised to find, immediately it lists a whole bunch of laptops sold with a Linux kernel on them! I don't normally use Google, but just for you, I checked on it: It even has an easy-answers page.
If you want the whole package, look up an operating system, not a kernel.
With my latest Linux machine I actually picked some easy to get laptops on a steep discount and then started googling to find other people’s experience. I’ve been using some Linux distribution or other for a long time.
But that’s not what a newbie or outsider sees. And until there is the kind of assurance from some Linux distribution or whatever, all criticisms of the difficulty of getting a Linux machine running are valid.
> And until there is the kind of assurance from some Linux distribution or whatever, all criticisms of the difficulty of getting a Linux machine running are valid.
Great, they're invalid! Off the top of my head, System76 and KDE both sell laptops running it. As both of them have distributions, and selling something is more or less as close to assurance as you can get, by your own logic here the criticisms are worthless.
I don't even care about "le Linux on the desktop meme", personally, I just find these criticisms incredibly lazy and transparently without merit.
+1 I find it absurd that (some) linux supporters find it not only ok but even a must, to have to tinker around your machine in order to make everything work. I could understand it in the 90s but this is a very different era we're in. I get zero value from having to tinker with my x-org settings to make the external screen work (sometimes). I'm using a computer to create value elsewhere and having to even think about stuff that should just work eats up my time and energy.
I believe this is the main reason that OSx and even Windows are much more prevalent in company laptops that any linux distro. And I don't see this changing anytime soon. If even Ubuntu didn't make that cut I don't see which (distro) will.
Haven't tried a laptop that comes with preinstalled linux TBH. Maybe there's some light there. Dunno. But my last experience with a Thinkpad 550 and latest ubuntu was bad. As in no proper keyboard, terrible screen issues, networking issues...
Ubuntu has been going down the drain for a long time.
The problem is that they successfully (and for good reason) became the de facto Desktop Linux for users who wanted a desktop and not mess with it much.
They’ve cornered that market to the point there are very few alternatives (at least very few that will come preinstalled and supported) but because they want to IPO I guess, they’ve stopped focusing on the desktop at all and instead are concentrating on server uses primarily, which leads to significant issues.
The irony is by becoming the “it just works“ monster ubuntu tries to be right now it brought issues that no other major linux faces.
For me (using linux for 15+ years as desktop) ubuntu tends to break after only a few months. Usually complex dependencies like steam, wine or video editing stuff break first. I rarely manage to get out of a update without some dependencies breaking...
Fedora, Manjaro, Debian, ... nothing like that. Just a major stable operating system
Edit:// to clearify. I do like and use ubuntu server because its simple and well supported. I just think its mediocre as desktop OS and would recommend anyone to check Manjaro or Fedora
I vastly prefer Fedora but could never get tensorflow to work with my GPU (Nvidia 1660x,) and unfortunately now I can’t get it to work with Ubuntu either. Or, more accurately, I can’t get it to work while using display drivers. I have to install one or the other.
> but because they want to IPO I guess, they’ve stopped focusing on the desktop at all
No, that's simply because the desktop, after all these years, still brings in little or no money - whereas server builds are used in clouds (at one point they were the most popular "cloud distro") and do make significant money through revenue-sharing agreements.
Ubuntu desktop started going downhill the minute Shuttleworth decided he'd had enough with the "generous mecenate" thing and Ubuntu should make back its costs. Since then, it's been a series of steers towards anything that could make some cash.
No tinkering required, the only change required to make it useable was to set desktop scaling for HiDPI, accessible via Displays area if the settings app. No terminal commands required.
So does Ubuntu. I've installed it on a few family's computers without any issues as long as the hardware wasn't brand spanking new. The defaults are fine and it makes a good secure machine for the (younger) kids to use the internet on for those families who limit their kids time on the internet.
Personally i think it is insane to install OSX or Windows for anyone who does not want to tinker these days. Why not just a major linux (maybe not ubuntu if you dont like tinkering, but fedora or so) so the box works without issues for more than a few months
Linux has some great new development, like Wayland[1], pipewire. They may be a bit buggy as of now, but the former does basically solve the tinkering with x config things, multi monitor hdpi, hotplugged monitor and the like will just work.
[1] Yeah wayland is a protocol, and it already has some quite stable implementations like gnome and sway.
If anything, the amount of tinkering required has increased as hardware has gotten more complex. I'm probably looking through rose-tinted glasses to some extent, but in the mid 2000s it was usually quite easy to get graphics and sound working well in Linux on generic PC hardware. And of course, most people didn't need to worry about WiFi, Bluetooth, suspend/resume, touchpads, etc. etc. in those days.
I constantly had problems with these and more back then. (E.g. making my TV grabbing card work was a nightmare.) I don't experience this since I've been using a ThinkPad.
Depends on what you tinker with. Getting basic things to work on your hardware is frustrating. Nobody wants to deal with that really. The answer for that is getting a laptop (or desktop) that is well supported. I know it can feel limiting, but with OSX you only get to choose from one vendor...
If we talk about tinkering for customizing your user experience then it's very empowering. You can get things to work exactly as you'd like and that is a productivity booster. (Even if it just removes frustration and friction.) Sometimes it means being able to undo the stupid decisions of the developers (e.g. GNOME) which may seem like the first category (i.e. you have to tinker just in order to get things work again as they used to), but if you are stuck on windows or osx you'd have a lot less chance to do so and you'd lot more likely just have to put up with it.
E.g. in the past 2+ decades I have to wrestle to get my desktop grid layout (3x3 desktops/workspaces) to work, because some idiot back around 2000 figured out that it's "not the right metaphor" or what not and they should not be geometrically related, yadda-yadda. Since then, every major upgrade of gnome breaks the external solution I use (which is different every time). Is it frustrating? Yes. At least I know not to upgrade until I know there is a workaround again. But I can keep using it nevertheless. (I used to have a utility that provided this feature on windows. The last version I've used it on was XP and even back then it wasn't available for download anymore. I'm not sure at all if I could still use it on win10 or even win7.)
I don't have to mess around with xorg config for more than 10 years.
I'm using Debian and the only thing I had to do is enable non-free to get some firmwares.
Everything works 100% hassle free.
My experiences with macos were quite frustrating, specially around package management (or the lack of it), poor quality of brew packages (too many dependencies breaking stuff), constant slowdown and crashes with mildly median workload, screen artifacts around the desktop time to time, having to disable stuff to be able to change things in /usr or /etc, too many stuff eating up ram by default, etc.
Honestly don't know how people can use that and be happy.
> Haven't tried a laptop that comes with preinstalled linux TBH
Seriously? Why do you think Linux should work perfectly on some random machine that you installed it on? MacOS sure as hell won’t. If you don’t like the experience of doing the work to find the right hardware, distro, and customizing the setup with your favourite software then just buy a prebuilt system with everything installed. Like others have pointed out, many Linux users prefer to fully customize their setup, doing this is easier on Linux because you don’t have to hack around all of the default choices that Apple or Microsoft provide.
Ok, sure, many users prefer to fully customize their setup. But what about those who don't? Why isn't there a ready-to-go option like a Windows lapotop?
There are many, obviously not as many as ones that offer Windows.
In my previous workplace I had the option to choose any laptop and I chose one that comes with ubuntu preinstalled from the Dell XPS family. The reason I was comfortable with buying this for work, it comes preinstalled and I wouldn't have to tinker but I could call support. Didn't ever have to in the past few year.
There are a bunch of Lenovo thinkpads and thinkstations that come preinstalled with ubuntu. Not to forget multiple companies such as System76, Pursim etc.
There are options if you really want them. Whether you like to use one is up to one's personal preference. Though, it doesn't help that way too many people who haven't used a linux laptop in recent times have strong opinions about them, as evident in this thread.
I got a System76 Darter Pro for work, preinstalled with Ubuntu. It worked perfectly. It booted directly into a graphical display manager. All drivers worked out of the box. Not sure what else there is to say here. That sounds like what you're after.
For reasons, I ended up installing Arch on the same laptop. It was your typical Arch experience, but I was able to get everything working, including fiddly stuffy like keyboard backlights, and monitor backlighting. Keyboard hardware controls all function. And this was with existing Arch packages. I didn't have to go hacking anywhere.
If I had to levy criticism, I'd say the preinstalled Linux options are at the same price point as Apple, and no where near Microsoft. Yeah, it's going to be harder to find an off-the-shelf $300 laptop with Linux preinstalled. I can say the same about a Mac too.
System 76 is not cheap. Worse if you’re international. Dell has limited options available and none that are available with their discounts. So if you want a nice and powerful dev machine... back to researching and tinkering. Is the cheapest way and if something is messed up, you still have the Windows license.
I acknowledged as much. However, the OP's comparison is with a Mac so I don't think discussing the cheapest approach is in the scope of the discussion.
There are ready to go options! System76 sells Linux computers, there's a few other companies that do too. Dell has stuff like their XPS Developer Editions that are designed for and come with Ubuntu out of the box. You just can't hop over to Best Buy and get a random system.
Yeah, buy a linux certified laptop and you're done. You want the ability to hop hardware without paying the price that you might have to configure the OS to suit your workflow/hardware. Even the king of multiplatform PCs windows 10 you will sometimes experience issues until you install the right drivers.
Our family Lenovo all-in-one windows machine with its preinstalled windows: Time synchronization doesn't work. Have to set the clock manually. When logging in and if another user is logged in the start bar freezes for up to 5 minutes before it lets me do anything. All sorts of things like this. Random problems like that.
My personal Windows machine upstairs loses sound output via my monitor every time the monitor goes to sleep and wakes up. Windows just forgets that the device exists. Sometimes plugging in a headphone and then unplugging it will "remind" Windows that there's an HDMI output device, other times not.
No issues with Linux on that machine at all. Everything just works, stock Debian install. No issues with sound, only issue being that the fan is a bit loud so I had to fiddle with bios settings to get it quieter.
Even when bought with support, it might come with surprises.
I got the Asus 1215B with Linux, then Ubuntu decided to replace the perfectly working wlan driver with a FOSS one, except it took half an year to reach parity with the proprietary one.
Likewise, they decided to replace AMD driver with the open source one, goodbye OpenGL 4.1 now it doesn't do more than OpenGL 3.3, and hardware video decoding is still not a thing.
At the same time, the Windows DX 11 drivers shipped with the same hardware (it was Windows 7 back then), still work on Windows 10.
This kind of settled Linux on desktop for me, now it belongs to VMs, and on ChromeOS/WebOS/Android it is anyway just an implementation detail.
I get your frustrations, yet your problem is with proprietary software and proprietary drivers. I’m sure there’s a way for you to go back to using the old drivers if you’re set on using the latest capabilities of your hardware (without it being FOSS).
You don’t have to be the guinea pig, let others do it if it’s not your thing (many programmers do seem to enjoy it, and see it as a challenge).
That sounds a little like telling someone that their problems are that their cows are not spherical. For graphics drivers specifically, having tochoose between FOSS and something that works is very frustrating.
I would have agreed with you but sound input broke for me (Lenovo flex 14 with AMD R5 3500U) on fedora with kernel 5.8 and didn’t get fixed until 5.9. That was months of something being broken. How did this happen and more importantly did we learn anything to prevent this from happening in the future?
For now fedora is on an old desktop machine with an ancient i3-2100 processor and I just ssh into it.
> The FOSS amd and intel drivers work great and have for years.
Intel has a random lock up in the Mesa. It had this lock up for several years. It has not been fixed. I have a 4k laptop with it, it is incredibly frustrating that I cannot use kitty or alacritty on it because of that crash.
AMD driver crashes on modern cards every few weeks.
If you want to have a "What are you talking about, it just works?" experience, you buy an NVidia card with proprietary drivers, slap X11 on it and you are off to the races. It just works (currently driving 4x 4k monitors). Last crash was about 11 months ago. The crash manifested in a freeze for about 20 seconds, followed by it recovering by itself.
OSS graphics drivers are just not as good as people claim.
Well, it is still open after all, given you are a very experienced guy you should consider rolling the sleeves and sending some patches to fix that, right?
Giving back to the community for something you get for _free_ is nice.
My gratis work is done for things that really matter to fellow humans, like charity, poor people on the street and not so lucky people that need an helping hand to get back into society, refugees that almost faced death running away from oppressive regimes.
That is where I can gladly give my skills and money.
Look buddy, your experience (having a bad time) with Linux seems to be quite frustrating, I couldn't find one positive comment about Linux from you in this post.
Maybe I'm very lucky with Linux, but I don't agree that it is as bad as you are saying.
I'm sorry for you, maybe you should stay with windows indeed. :/
There is no way, because the only way to make it work is to dig out a pre-historic kernel from the same year Asus released 1215B with Linux support.
Proprietary software for 1215B, e.g. Windows, is working just fine with Windows 10, even though it was originally released with Windows 7.
So we are talking about Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and several Windows 10 releases, all supporting the original Windows 7 drivers for Asus 1215B.
I have been a Linux guinea pig since Slackware 2.0 came on Linux Unleashed book, eventually one gets tired of the Linux Desktop meme.
Linux was anyway just the way I got cheap UNIX clone at home during my degree, professionally I have spent more years using commercial UNIXes.
Nowadays any POSIX clone will do the job, or as alternative we stuck the Linux kernel into a VM.
Have you tried to install AMD proprietary drivers?
Did you installed the firmware for your WiFi card?
By the way you complain about Linux seems that you really don't like it and that nobody can convince you te opposite, but I believe that if you manage to learn the basics around it it pay off in the long run :)
> There is no way, because the only way to make it work is to dig out a pre-historic kernel from the same year Asus released 1215B with Linux support.
My dear, my first UNIX experience was with Xenix back in 1993, I also used DG/UX, Tru64, HP-UX, Aix, Solaris, Slackware, Red-Hat, Yasdril, Mandranke, SuSE, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Debian, OS, Scientific Linux.
Back in 2002 - 2003, I wrote cluster simulation software while at CERN running on Linux, followed by other examples of deployment of Linux based software into production, like Nokia's NetAct cluster monitoring platform.
I judge my Linux experience starting in Summer 1995, the year I got my first Linux distribution, Slackware 2.0, that makes a couple of years in experience.
Try to not see everything as an attack against your identity, detach yourself from it and don't take yourself too seriously. Been there, done that.
Now I have a way more pleasant life experience and people takes me seriously without having me needing to assert who I am. Life is lighter now and I have more friends, people few more comfortable around me.
I'm giving this feedback because I think it will make your life better too.
Was nice to chat with you, now I'll go out for a bike ride while I still a bit of sun over here.
> Either provide a list so people know exactly what to buy, or all complaints are valid.
Sure, these are two devices I have recently used with Linux that work out of the box:
Dell XPS 13
ThinkPad T14s
Or more generally, you can extend that to any ThinkPad or Dell device without a dedicated graphics card and you will have a good Linux experience.
OP somehow has issues on XPS 13, probably due to meddling with too many things. My XPS 13 (9360) has everything working out of the box with Ubuntu 20.04
A very good idea if you want to confirm just before placing an order is to google "<laptop name> Arch Linux wiki" which will take you to the Arch wiki page for that device. There you can see if there are any known compatibility issues.
The Ubuntu certified devices page is pretty good as well.
> Apple sells you the whole package: take it or leave it.
For Linux Dell and Lenovo do that too (in most regions these days).
From what I understand from the blog post, the author is expecting Linux and the software to behave the same as macOS. That is just comparing apples and oranges. If you want a system that you are used to, you should probably stick to that. As in, if macOS works for you, I see no reason you should switch to Linux. I used a Mac for ~5 years before finally giving up because I just hated the window management (among other things). But hey, that does not need to apply to everyone.
- when using external display, video tearing would be visible either on internal or external display
- Xorg doesn't really support different scaling for different displays, and Wayland has other issues
- battery life is shorter than on Windows
- graphics performance is worse, at least in Firefox/Chrome (smooth animations on Windows would be choppy on Linux)
- touchpad is not great on Windows, but it's even worse on Linux (even after fiddling with settings, and trying many solutions, using it on Windows feels better)
Interesting. Apart from the per-display scaling (which is basically a Xorg limitation as you said) I had the opposite experience on my XPS 13. At the end I did not want a 4K display but Dell did not offer me the option. So I just used 1080p scaled most of the time.
Battery life was stupid on Windows (~3-4 hours max, while Linux did 7-8 with moderate load). Somehow on Windows the fan would always be running even without any significant activity in Resource Monitor.
I remember playing 4K videos on Linux (Firefox though, and I only tested YouTube) without any trouble (with monitor disconnected though, due to what you described earlier).
Touchpad would work sweet on Linux but needed some tweaking on Windows (otherwise it'd 2-finger scroll too fast sometimes).
> So I Googled “laptops supported by Linux”. There is no official site.
https://linux-on-laptops.com/ has been around for a long time and it looks like it's still being updated. Though the official Linux-Laptop-HOWTO does need a lot of work to make it current.
I run a recent XPS Developer Edition (my second) and I've had so few issues over years. It's always seemed like a different world all users with constant issues.
Would absolutey recommend Elementary OS for Mac users switching to Linux. I moved to Arch a couple of weeks ago, but only because of combination of wanting to try Gnome 40 and wanting to run various cutting edge mobile Linux deps.
Does anyone shop for laptops this way? or anything else for that matter - Google "laptops that support usb c" and expect an official page from usb c? or google "cars that have a turbocharger" and expect an official page from turbocharger? And, when you don't find it come to a conclusion that usb c is bad.
No offense but seems like even if you did find laptops with linux and pick the best one, you probably won't like it because you have already made up your mind.
Out of curiosity, what would qualify as an "official site" for laptops supported by Linux? Would it be run by Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, or some other maintainer? I think expecting anything official or authoritative from the Linux side is missing the boat.
What you're looking for is hardware vendors who support a Linux desktop environment on their laptops, which are not too difficult to find.
The poster wasn't using Linux to refer to the Linux kernel here - they used it to mean "a Linux distribution". Distributions have their own hardware compatibility documentation systems. Eg Ubuntu has this: https://certification.ubuntu.com/ and Red Hat has https://catalog.redhat.com/hardware .
Hence my question. Per site guidelines I assumed the most generous interpretation of the poster's comment, which to me means they found those sites and do not consider them official. In that light, I was curious what they would consider official.
I prefer to take a hardware vendor's opinion as to whether that hardware is supported by Linux. They have some skin in the game, and have the resources to test the hardware, whereas many Linux distros will rely on user reports.
I imagine Ubuntu and Redhat have more resources to validate hardware and so those sites are likely more reliable, but once you get to niche distros YMMV on their compatibility matrices.
I own Thinkpad X1 extreme, that I bought with my own money, and chose as working laptop Thinkpad Carbon. Both are not working well with linux.
1. Carbon, due to it's intel chip, can not drive 4K and 2K external monitors via thunderbolt adapter.
2. I need to authorize dock (Lenovo's thunderbolt dock) after every reboot.
3. The screen tearing sucks.
4. I need to have pulse audio volume control window opened all the time, otherwise the laptop loses my external sound card after first call via browser, and I need to turn it off/on.
On my own laptop, where I installed Ubuntu, I can boot only into 5.8.0.43 kernel (the one which I initially installed). All others, that I've got via apt-get update stuck with blinking cursor at last step of boot, and it's well known problem.
The longer I'm trying to love linux for work os, the more I realize that only tool that I truly want from linux is i3. For the rest I'm happily using WSL2 on my home, and don't have choice with work.
So on next hardware refresh date I think I'll choose Mac. The supplied by job laptop config is also more performant than carbon. So, hope, I'll be able to use my monitors in native res, and not put 2K into 1920x1020 mode
> Thus enabling TearFree requires more memory and is slower (reduced throughput) and introduces a small amount of output latency, but it should not impact input latency
However, TearFree does murder performance and lead to some horrible screen lag at times, and as an extra bonus AccelMethod sna is still crashy years after being introduced :(
edit: there's also the modesetting driver + a reasonable compositor, but this can come with it's own set of bugs and issues in my experience.
I've been interested in recording music using free software on Linux. The exchange above is similar to the cycle I've been in... encountering problems, finding magical incantations that fix things in some ways but often involve some sort of tradeoff, and making gradual progress toward being as productive as I am using Apple's Logic.
But I've been doing this three steps forward, two steps back routine for like three years now. I have most things working but it has really taken the full force of my frustration with Apple to keep returning to it and making progress.
It's exactly why I have mac laptops for work and personal use, although I also have a full time linux desktop (and also a windows one for gaming. still no real alternative there!).
I'm an easily frustrated person and I end up with enough pain points on linux for both work and personal use that I've never managed to make the switch full time.
Curious. If you had to buy tomorrow, what would you do? Given that M1 Pro won't be out till end of 21(?) and despite that, current Pros don't seem to come with a reduced price.
I have a 13” M1 pro, it’s easily the best computer I’ve owned (and I have a Ryzen 3600/Vega 10 desktop with 128GB of RAM that runs KDE Plasma very well, but there’s still no competition)
I haven't done my research recently. Thinkpad works fine with Windows, so, most likely, it'd be last gen Mac/Thinkpad Extreme or something in that league.
I had hopes that Microsoft will evolve Surface Books to normal processors, but it seems like the line is dying.
> 1. Carbon, due to it's intel chip, can not drive 4K and 2K external monitors via thunderbolt adapter.
Is this a Linux only issue? I saw people reporting on Reddit that they are using 4k @ 60hz external monitors. Was thinking of getting an X1C but not if it can't do 4k
I wouldn't be surprised if it was a thunderbolt linux issue. The dell "docking station" usb-c hubs don't really work well with anything else than dell windows machines. Same with some lenovo bluetooth mice.
I do remember however that contrary to macos my 2012 macbook air could drive higher resolution external monitors when running linux. So I'd put this into the Thunderbolt is a hackjob on linux box.
Some non-apple laptops sometimes reduce badwidth of thunderbold 3 (e.g. in mine t490s the bandwidth is halved, just because - this is hardware, not linux).
I was having huge flaky thunderbolt problems on my Linux T490 - even updating the laptop firmware didn't fix it despite Lenovo changelogs indicating a bunch of thunderbolt dock bugs fixed.
Then I swapped the Lenovo thunderbolt dock with another one at work and everything just worked fine. I run 3 monitors (2 external 2560x1440) at once, but no 4k.
Maybe it was dock firmware versions - the Lenovo dock updater software was Windows only, so I had never tried it.
>4. I need to have pulse audio volume control window opened all the time, otherwise the laptop loses my external sound card after first call via browser, and I need to turn it off/on.
Sounds is really bad
To get sound on my headphones, I need to restart pulseaudio and ALSA, and unplug and replug the headphones
I was trying to make the Mac to Linux switch just like the author, mostly due to excitement around sway (wayland). But it was awful, none of the basic things I wanted to do seemed doable...I would research solutions and they wouldn’t work. So I tried switching to i3 in the hopes of at least having a more established ecosystem to rely on.
But similar story. Half-baked (or sometimes, overcooked) support, configs that we’re supposed to swap eg CapsLock with Escape not working as described or losing their effect after sleep, impossible to get my multi monitor high DPI setup to work without coloration or resolution issues, futzing around with sound and not able to get it working as hoped just like the last time I tried to do this in 2008...you know, all the things you want before you start doing actual work, but none of them function properly OOTB or, often, even after reading extensive documentation and advice.
I wish I could use i3, but my BetterTouchTool configuration gives me something that is close enough.
I might still try FreeBSD, but I totally feel twice-burned by Linux at this point.
> I was trying to make the Mac to Linux switch just like the author
I've tried a couple of times, but finally decided what's the point. Linux is amazing on all the servers I run and manage. It's lightweight, supported well, and does a great job. I also rarely have to tinker with it. For servers, it really does just work.
On the PC side not so much. I used to run linux in various flavors on the desktop side for years. It provided more power than windows IMO. Then OS X came out with actual unix underpinnings, a functional media system (UI, audio, video), and fully supported creative apps like Ps, MS Office, and later LR.
Against my better judgement I tried a final time move to desktop linux a couple of years ago, but multi-monitor mixes of hi and low dpi were just unworkable. I actually posted a question (it may have been here on HN - can't remember), and one of the responses was 'no one needs HiDPI screens'. Got it.
The ones that have bugged me today: It randomly forgets view preferences. There is something weird about SMB shares where they appear mounted but actually aren’t.
It doesn’t have scroll bars in its default state.
MacOS is my favourite by a mile, but there are some major warts, though the finder isn’t my major gripe.
Unless I’m completely misunderstanding you, showing Thumbnails has an obvious button on the toolbar. Go to parent is harder, but I think for the sequence you describe there’s a back button on the toolbar that will do what you want. Otherwise, you can use the breadcrumb bar at the bottom (can’t remember if this is a default setting or not) or open the Go menu and learn that Command-Up is the shortcut for “parent directory”. (A little later you discover this is symmetrical: Command-Up goes “up” out of the folder you’re looking at, Command-Down goes “down” into the selected item.)
To go to the parent, command click on the title in the title bar of the window.
I don’t know how you’d ever guess that, but I remember it back from the Mac OS 9 days.
Yeah, I am wondering about that too. Finder can rename multiple files and has a goto folder option. Edit: I couldn't find a goto option in Nautilus. I don't know how I missed batch rename in Nautilus... Still, if Nautilus has any advanced features, they're well hidden.
I agree, I’ve always found the Finder extremely usable, especially once you’ve taken a couple minutes to browse the menus and learn the Keyboard Shortcuts.
One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that people don’t seem to bother to look at the menus anymore: one of the first things I’ve always done with a new application (ever since Windows 3.1 on a Pentium 90) is open the menus and skim the menu items to figure out the basic functionality available.
Selecting multiple files and pressing F2 or "Rename Files…" under the context menu is about as intuitive for renaming multiple files as I can possibly imagine.
Yeah, typing a folder's address could be a bit more discoverable in Nautilus. You can press Ctrl+L (like a web browser), or just start typing a folder address that begins with / or ~ but you're right there's no visible clickable button.
My experience is the other way round: it took me several minutes and much frustration to find a way to type a folder address in Finder.
Not having used Nautilus, there's a bunch of bad things about the Finder I can complain about.
The tabs. First of all, they're Safari-style tabs and Safari has awful tabs. And then there's a preference called "open folders in new tabs instead of windows". Open up a Finder window, open Terminal and run `open /path/to/directory`. What happens? Directory opens in a new Finder window.
There's no way to have Finder remember what size a window should be. There's a bunch of tricks that people post online of how you can have Finder remember a window size but they don't work. It might register it on a folder-level but then you run `open /path/to/directory` and it opens up a postage stamp sized window (even though it should open a tab).
It's honestly surprising how absolutely horrible it is after years and the new Big Sur only have it a fresh coat of paint without fixing any of these issues
But that's not cut and paste. That's copy and special paste. And I don't want to start training my brain to use a different set of keys to do the exact same thing that I can do elsewhere just because Apple thinks I should.
The only thing I can think of is that Finder doesn't support SFTP out of the box.
It's a bit embarrassing that Apple doesn't support an entry-level feature like that, but otherwise Finder has been steadily improving for the past few years.
I'll be the devil's advocate even though I agree with you partially and I personally prefer Linux, both for practical and philosophical reasons. However, I use a Linux laptop privately and macOS for work, so I think by now I understand both systems a little bit.
For automating tasks on macOS you can look at something like hammerspoon which is really cool (though I mostly use it to modify some of the macOS keybindings which I find ridiculous) [1].
Finder is crap, I agree. But then again, I'm mostly in the terminal, so I don't care much. I would however complain that the default terminal on macOS is really not very good and I always install iTerm2... most Linux distros seem to have a better terminal pre-installed.
Package manager is better on Linux for system packages, applications, etc. (in fact, such a thing doesn't really exist on macOS, save for maybe homebrew cask, but that has problems). However, dev packages are tricky on Linux, too. Generally, for dev packages I might want to have a) a very specific (and often the latest) version of something, and b) often multiple versions installed separately. Additionally, on most Linux distros you can't install without root. On a Linux machine, I mostly have to install such tools in addition to my package managed libraries and apps, on macOS I can typically just "brew install rbenv" or so (though homebrew has its own share of problems).
In general I would say that macOS makes it slightly easier to do things sort-of reasonably well for default flows but can break down quickly once you want something more custom. With Linux, while it has become a lot (!) better in the last 15 years or so, I still occasionally need to debug some audio problem or so. The upside is that problems on Linux are generally solvable (although, in some instances it can be hard to figure out exactly how). If your macOS does something that is weird or buggy (e.g.: before the update to big sur I had the annoying issue that my system would go into DND mode after every restart, which is really not good if you don't want to miss notifications), then you're out of luck and there's nothing you can do.
> I would however complain that the default terminal on macOS is really not very good and I always install iTerm2...
Apple’s terminal is one of the very few that passes the VT torture test and has support for double width and height attributes. Sadly, it doesn’t do overlines and doesn’t italicise my terminal font.
I think it depends on a font supporting them correctly. I’m using a zsh prompt that uses them and it seems normal. Check https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font and let me know if it helps. I was thinking of adding the powerline symbols to the test renderings.
The problem is not with font glyphs, but with colors. Background and foreground colors that should be the same aren't, they are different shades, thus some themes (such as powelevel9k/powerlevek10k) appear broken, see https://imgur.com/a/HAcE4Yu
And the line height -- it could be font, it could be terminal, I didn't investigate (it is DejaVu Sans Mono for Powerline).
Terminal allows fine tuning the spacing. I tried to optimise my font to look good on the default settings, but that doesn’t always work and never works for every program.
I tried a bunch of terminals and ended up switching from urxvt to termite https://github.com/thestinger/termite a few years back (mainly for it's better handling for refreshing certain curses style output).
I think “Linux supported” is a vague promise that should not be relied on. I had a T495s which is supported officially on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. And it was quite frankly broken. Closing the lid didn’t work, it drank batteries faster than windows by a mile and plugging in external displays caused the X server to crash.
This is unfortunately every experience I’ve had with Linux on native hardware to some capacity in the last 24 years of using it other than dumb headless servers. So I use windows as the native OS and virtualise anything else.
Anyone who is a "extreme power user" is doomed to fail on any new platform. You should approach a new platform planning to learn and embrace what you find there, and become a new power user. Trying to port over the most "extreme power user" workflows you're used to on one system is inevitably going to fail. This was doomed from the start.
> For instance, it's easier to automate tasks with shell scripts in Linux than to attempt the same with osascript.
Are you talking about automating UI tasks in linux? Nearly all of my linux shell scripts work fine on macOS and vice versa unless they are using something OS specific.
While not perfect, with macOS I get a large majority of what makes Unix nice while also avoiding the UI annoyances. Using macOS also tends to give more software options over unix/linux alone, like PS, LR, the Affinity toolset, etc...
My anecdote. Few weeks ago I bought Dell Latitude 3410. It's an extremely cheap (and underpowered) 13" laptop. I upgraded RAM and installed M.2 SSD. It came with Ubuntu 18.04 pre-installed (which contained a dozen of dell-specific packages). I installed Fedora 33 and checked everything I could check. Every bit of hardware worked correctly out of the box, so I'm pretty happy so far. And despite being underpowered, it's very fast and snappy, definitely faster than my old Macbook in day-to-day usage.
I paid $600 for laptop and $150 for RAM and SSD upgrades. Comparable Macbook Air would cost $2000 for me.
It does have terrible TN screen, cheap touchpad and bad keyboard layout. That's good enough for me, as I prefer external everything in day-to-day use.
> If you're complaining about Linux drivers please do so after using a Laptop that supports Linux (Thinkpads for example)
I bought a Lenovo specifically since they mentioned all their laptops will support Linux in the future.
Note that historically Lenovo didn't really "support" Linux. Remember the Windows tax and how most Thinkpads came with Windows and most still do? Thinkpads supported Linux in spite of Lenovo / IBM.
Anyhoo, my new Lenovo had to wait a few months until the trackpad worked! Turns out Lenovo only meant that business laptops (or some other sub-category) will support Linux out of the box. Silly me.
When I bought my Thinkpad (one year after its release and with lots of recommendations) it took more than a year before it worked reliably without any kernel panics and weird lockups. External monitor support when docked was broken for even longer. Now I fear the day this notebook stops working and I might have to go through similar trouble again.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadNothing else felt "wrong" but that one just threw me completely. I can go with his whole write up, but not that.
Admittedly I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which brew conforms to.
I also totally get his preview/calendar/mail.app vibe. Mail.app is not getting better. But the trio are pretty rock solid. Post O365 no complaint about office on Linux makes sense really, so it comes down to productivity apps and integration.
And yea, I wish a decent gtk port into osx was a thing.
Brew conforms to your idea of how a traditional UNIX package manager should work? The same brew that pretends multiple users don't exist and takes control of /usr/local/ for itself? Are we talking about the same thing?
Apt, yum, bundles, renamed packages at random, the whole -devel thing.. brrrr. Please, no.
Macports lost out. Liked it, found it wasn't getting enough attention.
Pkg on mac works pretty well
In fairness, so does ports/pkg/pkg_add on FreeBSD/OpenBSD.
It dog slow (does it really need to git pull from GitHub every 15 minutes, really?), doesn't support multiple users, doesn't support alternative folders, hates static compilation (which is mostly why the two previous break), and lots of new things are not available there anymore.
In my new computer I didn't even install it, I just used the Rustup/Dotnet/RVM/NVM install instructions rather than using Brew. I then got statically compiled versions of ffmpeg, jq, z7, which took a couple minutes. Let's see how long until I cave. I'll probably try MacPorts.
Linux (Arch for me, but probably others) can be told to respect your personal situation, as opposed to dictating it.
The one thing I want in brew and don't have, is hugin. Nothing else I use is missing. Iterm and docker and other cask like installs can be ropey especially if they do update checks inside themselves.
I, probably a very simplistic user compared to others. YMMV.
ArchLinux has been painless. although I must say I've not tried anything too cutting edge with the GUI. Even if you don't use Arch, the Wiki is invaluable.
I'm just using Sway and yay all day. The blunt edge works for me.
And, can't say this enough, please always keep in mind that your software may be used by someone with a slower connection or who may even be entirely offline sometimes. I deserve music while driving, and text is king. (Elon - starlink me please)
I've been using MacPorts continuously for about 10 years now. It's been completely pain free. I think I ran into a single broken package in that time period.
This is the setup I prefer in a vacuum, although it depends on the stuff you need being available.
I also do think MacPorts is quite good. It follows UNIX principles, and it doesn't try to take over the systems. Everything is contained in its own world inside /opt/.
Instead what seemed to happen is a new generation of Rails developers got Macs, decided all their tools needed to be written in Ruby by hipsters with lumberjack beards, and so they didn't want to touch the old stuff.
This makes me mistrust your judgement.
and they do it way better
Excel Online doesn't come close to the feature set or usability of Excel for Windows.
Powershell doesn't do it for me, but that aside WSL might.
All you can do is wait for Apple to hopefully recognize their mistakes, and in the meantime, read blogposts that are like “well the trackpad support sucks, but... <lots of prevarication>”
I currently have a Mac for "office productivity" stuff and ubuntu for development, but if I had to only have one computer, it would be a Mac.
The macOS installer kept failing and I had to jump through hoops to download the installer for the macOS version I wanted and 'verify' it. (This was ~10.10-10.13, not sure if it's still as much trouble to verify an installer that isn't the latest version.) After the second Mac that refused to reinstall, I had had enough and put Ubuntu on it.
I started to realize around 2012 (with the release of soldered-RAM Retina MBPs and razor-edge discless iMacs) that Apple did not need me as a customer, and eventually I was fine with that. I have one remaining Mac Mini that I use as an HTPC and to get pictures off of my iPad. For daily use I usually prefer an old Thinkpad running Debian.
I’d maybe consider going a little newer and going to a T series but it sounds like they really started going downhill (build-wise) when they changed the keyboard. Even the W500 has a lot more keyboard flex than the R61i, in an attempt to add lightness to a chunky laptop.
I did the same. I accidentally fubar'd my lovely 2015 Macbook by pouring a beer into it. I bought a Dell XPS and dual-booted Linux, which kinda worked but wasn't great. Then I bought a Purism 14, which has been awesome (after some teething troubles with the build quality).
I'm kinda tempted by the M1 goodness. But to be honest, I'm not happy at all about going back into the walled garden of MacOS.
I guess my main point of difference with the OP is that I never bought into the Apple ecosystem in the first place - I didn't use mail.app or calendar.app much. I never liked the Apple applications, they never seemed happy letting me take control of my life, and always seemed opinionated about what I should be doing.
I'm now running i3wm on PureOS (debian-derived), tweaked to how I like it. And it's great. Couldn't be happier. Except for Zoom's Linux client, (but Spotify's Linux client is now pretty good, so there's hope!). And odd config issues with the USB ethernet.
But the point is that I can go fiddle with those issues, and learn how Linux USB ethernet works, and generally mess about with my setup however I like. Yes I might brick it. But that's better than "oh it's gone dark, I have to take it to an Apple Store to get it fixed". Which is f-all use in a pandemic lockdown (or in rural SE Asia, which is where I was when I poured the beer in the Macbook in the first place). It's MY computer, not Apple's. That's actually important, not an ideological stance that doesn't matter in practice.
Because Apple stuff doesn't "just work" any more. And if it doesn't "just work" there's f-all you can do except take it to the Store. And usually they'll just shrug and hand you a new one, and hope you backed everything up to their servers. I mean, sure, that's OK. But it's not what I want.
Interested to see how their in-house laptop project goes though.
This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes.
Apple software does “just work” with Apple hardware.
But the software does work. It just doesn't do much interesting stuff anymore.
This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes.
Apple software is far from being immune to bugs, bad UX, etc., even on Apple hardware, as I can personally attest today from using a Macbook Pro daily for work.
This is a total straw man.
“Just works” has never meant free of bugs. It means not having to do a bunch of incidental configuration, tuning, and setup.
Things do just work.
You use this word, "straw man". I do not think it means what you think it means.
No, it is not a straw man to point out that bugs interfere with the notion that something "just works". When bugs interfere with getting things done - as I've found they often do in the course of using macOS daily, like when I can't open firewall ports for development or share my screen via Google Hangouts because the Big Sur update broke the password prompt for editing restricted things like firewall settings or app permissions, or when apps can't present an Open File dialog anymore across the board because God knows why, then it's a complete farce to call that "just working". There is no "just" nor "works" about that. Not to mention all the little paper cuts, like the lock screen taking 30 seconds to unfuck itself before I can actually type in a password, or constantly forgetting which applications I've set to open things by default (meaning that every so often I end up with a cacophony of fan whirring instead of an editor window when I try to open an XML file because macOS yet again decided to reset the default app to fucking XCode). (EDIT: oh, and the Touch Bar stops working if I plug in an external keyboard, which is just dandy)
Also, I love how both comments immediately coming to defend Apple's honor stop at the "bugs" bit and entirely ignore that I'm taking a fat steamy deuce on Apple's UX, too. So on that note:
> It means not having to do a bunch of incidental configuration, tuning, and setup.
Which you have to do anyway, because the macOS UX sucks, and seems to be getting worse with each update. Want to have persistent named workspaces? Nope, gotta install some buggy hack of an extension to do it (which in turn required going through a whole bunch of red tape to bypass a bunch of security checks, because of course it does). Want to control where in which of those workspaces application windows open (or at the very least whichever workspace currently has the selected window)? lol fuck user intent, Workspace 1 Monitor 1, and switching away from whatever workspace was on Monitor 1 because double fuck user intent. Application menus are so far away from application windows that the Ever Given could do a goddamn u-turn between them with room to spare. Forward/back buttons on mice don't inherently set focus, so instead of navigating the history on the window my cursor's actually pointing at said buttons end up doing so for some random window on an entirely different monitor. (EDIT: and how could I forget the arcane screenshot shortcuts! Command-Alt-whatever-4? The fuck?)
I could go on, but this comment's already enough of a deranged rant. A Chromebook has fewer bugs and a better UX. Even the grotesque hackjob that is the average GNU/Linux desktop has fewer bugs and a better UX. The bugginess and UX is maybe better than (modern, non-LTSC) Windows, but that bar is so low that even ants have to duck when crawling under it.
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EDIT:
I will, however, give Apple credit where credit's due: I do like the use of Command instead of Control for the CUA shortcut prefix (and the use of Emacs shortcuts for text navigation), and the touchpad gestures are nice, even if limited in options. It'd be great if more operating systems adopted these things. And the Touch Bar's kinda cool, I guess.
Beyond that, I don't really have much praise for macOS. It's overrated, and "just works" is a myth in this day and age. It was arguably a lot more true back in the PowerPC days (even if OpenBSD is my current preference for my PowerPC Macs), but it's been getting worse and worse over the years. Maybe the switch to ARM will be an inflection point re: software quality. Fingers crossed.
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EDIT 2:
And even just now, doing an SMC reset (to fix that password issue in System Preferences) broke the UI, giv...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/straw%20man
Being ‘immune from bugs’ is an obvious straw man.
> A Chromebook has fewer bugs and a better UX
If by ‘better UX’ you mean doesn’t even try to do things.
> Application menus are so far away from application windows that the Ever Given could do a goddamn u-turn between them with room to spare.
Have you considered why? There are good UX reasons for this. It uses less screen real estate, and leverages Fitt’s law because you don’t have to be accurate in the vertical dimension. It’s fine to have a preference for menus in windows. There are some arguments in favor of that, but you are just articulating a preference here.
Really your comment has nothing to do with whether MacOS *just works(, you have articulated a list of preferences and desires for it to work more like other things you have more familiarity with.
You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it.
I increasingly don’t like it either for various reasons, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t just work.
You know what is a strawman? Cherry picking only some minor weaker points you want to attack while entirely ignoring the ones that you don't, and then trying to pass that off as a substitute for addressing all points in their entirety. If you actually understood what a "strawman" is, you would recognize immediately that your behavior in this discussion is much closer than mine to that definition you cited, and then you'd kindly refrain, thanks.
> You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it.
I "just don't like it" specifically because it does not "just work". It is tolerable usability-wise only after extensive fiddling and tweaking and troubleshooting, and that's only on good days when those aforementioned bugs ain't actively preventing me from using basic OS functionality.
And that's fine - I do enjoy fiddling with things on my Linux and OpenBSD desktops - but those Linux and OpenBSD desktops don't advertise themselves as "you shouldn't ever need to fiddle with things because everything just works" the way macOS does, and therefore I'm a lot less frustrated with that fiddling because those systems are designed for it and encourage it and make it easy and friendly and fun. Nothing about customizing macOS is easy or friendly or fun; it is not designed for it, and it does not encourage it. It is Apple's way or the highway - and given the evolution of Apple's way lately, the highway doesn't look so bad after all.
> and leverages Fitt’s law because you don’t have to be accurate in the vertical dimension
Right, let's watch users spend multiple seconds dragging a cursor to a window toward the bottom-right, clicking, and then dragging that cursor all the way back to the top-left just to save fractions of a second on vertical positioning in a specific spot.
Fitt's law is hardly useful here. If the window ain't maximized, then you need some degree of vertical precision to select the window in order to make its menu visible anyway. And if it is maximized, then it literally doesn't matter what owns the menu 'cause it'll be in approximately the same place either way.
That is:
> There are good UX reasons for this.
There were good UX reasons for this, back in the days of m68k Macs where mice were some newfangled invention and displays were tiny. In those days that unintuitive disconnection was a fair tradeoff to make if it meant conserving that tiny amount of vertical real estate and helping people figure out those newfangled rodents.
Now? It's been, what, 40 years? People know how to use mice (or, if not, can figure it out with a bit of practice - Microsoft understood this and opted to encourage that practice with games like Minesweeper and Solitaire instead of paternalistically assuming users will remain permanently inept), and even the absolute lowest screen resolution Apple sells on a Macbook has multiple times the amount of vertical and horizontal screen space. That tradeoff is far less useful now.
Here’s where I addressed the entirety of your argument:
> Really your comment has nothing to do with whether MacOS *just works(, you have articulated a list of preferences and desires for it to work more like other things you have more familiarity with. You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it. I increasingly don’t like it either for various reasons, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t just work.
As for cherry picking. I don’t need to refute every point you made - they all fall under this umbrella.
> And no, neither does linking some dictionary entry as if it actually proves you understand what that dictionary entry is saying.
It does. If it didn’t you’d have addressed it, but you didn’t.
Your entire argument boils down to “Mac OS doesn’t work like linux”.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t just work. It means it isn’t a good choice for you.
> It is tolerable usability-wise only after extensive fiddling and tweaking and troubleshooting,
Almost nobody does this. Most people find it very usable as is. As I said - this is just about your preferences and nothing more.
> and that's only on good days when those aforementioned bugs ain't actively preventing me from using basic OS functionality.ugh
This is also something almost nobody experiences.
Perhaps your attempts to make MacOS work differently from how it was designed are causing you these problems.
What is odd to me is that you continue to use an operating system that is so ill suited to your preferences.
...except for the usability-hindering bugs. Hardly meaningful to reduce those to "user preference"; like, no shit I'd prefer it if basic devices like keyboards and mice worked on boot without extra fiddling.
> This is also something almost nobody experiences.
The Big Sur upgrade breaking the password prompt in System Preferences, as one especially annoying example, is pretty well documented online - and was documented for Catalina upgrades, too. It's exactly where I got the troubleshooting step of "reset SMC". I'm far from alone there.
> Perhaps your attempts to make MacOS work differently from how it was designed are causing you these problems.
Most of them were an issue long before I felt the need to tweak things. And all of them are far outside the scope of said tweaks.
> What is odd to me is that you continue to use an operating system that is so ill suited to your preferences.
It's a work machine. My own computers all run Linux or OpenBSD (with a few exceptions, like the old laptop running Haiku).
I'm not blaming them. This shit is hard, even if you control both the hardware and the software. I get why they don't say "it just works" any more.
Or you just fix it yourself and solve anyone else problem too
Apple obviously doesn’t have a lot of unfixed major issues. Many small complaints is another matter.
I still get “me too“ emails from issues ive “me too“ 5+ years ago.
There really is nowhere for everyday consumers to complain about comparable issues in Linux. There is nobody to complain to, and the the only options are self help.
Anyone who fails, fails silently, and there is also the issue that because of all the variation in hardware and software setups it’s hard to even determine that an issue is the same.
On the other side, Apple has more than a billion active users, so a few hundred people with a single issue really doesn’t mean anything at all.
With a billion end-users this is really just noise. In any case this is a meaningless comparison. With Linux there is nowhere and nobody to even ask for this kind of support.
The answer is always some version of RTFM or fix it yourself.
This is not true. Every time I've run into a Linux problem, googling the error has always produced an answer. Often more than one answer. Often mutually incompatible answers. But one of them usually works. In the end.
For Apple, googling the problem often leads to an Apple Support page that has no answers, just an endless stream of "I have this problem too".
> The answer is always some version of RTFM or fix it yourself.
At least you can fix it yourself.
Almost no regular consumers can in fact fix it themselves.
That’s why you see a small number of minor issues being complained about a lot on Mac forums.
In particular the UI became a dumpster fire. I won't go into the Playmobil interface of Big Sur, let's just say that's a question of (acquired?) taste.
However, the interface is much too big. Most of my computer screen (a 15" MBP) is taken up by empty space.
Then you have all kinds of weird behavior in Apple apps that just wasn't there before. And I'm talking "Apple apps as shipped with MacOS", in particular Safari and Mail.
If I have Mail running in full screen, Safari in full screen also (different "virtual desktop") and I click on a link in Mail it will attempt to open it in safari on the same screen as Mail. No, it won't attempt to tile the windows, just stack them. Yeah, that's not supposed to work and it doesn't. In order to get back to Safari, I have to un-fullscreen Mail. If I try to reach Safari via Expose or Mission Control or whatever it's called today, it will select it, then when the animation finishes zooming in, it instantly switches back to Mail.
Speaking of Safari, my "favorite": try to open a new tab. Wait around for an hour while it spins the beach ball. Tried removing the history, the "smart" thingies on the new tab page had already been disabled, etc. This keeps on happening from time to time.
Then for some reason, sometimes in dark mode, the active button of dialog boxes is fully white. If I click outside the window and come back, it gets its regular color so I can read the text.
Also, auto light / dark mode used to work as it says on the tin. Now it randomly doesn't and gets stuck in one mode or the other. Fun fact: if I go to settings, switch from Auto to the one it's stuck it, nothing happens. Switch back to Auto, and now it knows how to change. No, it's not timezone related, as I don't change those and haven't since 2019. The clock is always on time.
I also use a USB drive for time machine. Sometimes, for some reason, the time machine icon in the menu bar becomes white on light grey. (In Big Sur the menu bar doesn't change color in dark mode, so why does the icon even have a light mode?). In Finder, the "eject" button is not aligned with the name of the drive until I click on it. Fun side effet: I have to click it twice to actually do something useful. You might argue that aligning the icon is useful (happens after the same click) but I'd rather I didn't have to do that. Even on my dinky file manager in Linux this doesn't happen and have never seen it happen.
Then, there's the App Store. For some reason, sometimes it won't update the apps. The progress goes all the way to almost full. Then it does something for a while. Then it says it needs to close the app. I say ok. Then it says "yeah, actually, I can't update it". Why? Won't say. Then after a while, it manages to update it somehow. This has happened with multiple apps, including Numbers (Apple app).
Now all these (except for the Safari beach ball) first started happening when I updated to Big Sur. I figured my mac may have accumulated cruft or incompatible settings during the years. It's a 2013 MBP that got the "transfer your data" from my older one and it also went through a bunch of public betas. So I figured might as well try the Windows treatment and do a clean install. Nope, none of the issues went away even without copying over anything from the previous install.
So even on "Apple hardware", there still are issues. And I really don't think any of those issues can be attributed to my particular hardware being old. And all of those issues are new issues in functionality that had been in MacOS for years and that worked well.
Now my MBP is gathering dust because it's just irritating to use. I find Linux (on Arch with i3 of all things) is getting out of my way and being less of a hassle to actually get my work done. Of course, I hate the hardware (som...
Linux main problems with laptops are drivers and firmware. The best you can hope for, when replacing windows - is that it runs somewhat stable.
But startup time, performance and batterie life will be much worse on standard config. And like the article said, don't expect resume/sleep to work consistently. Which can be very, very annoying and time wasting.
My use case is short(or long) bursts of working with it, and then stopping for some time and then later resuming, expecting everything to be as it was, when I reopen. And I can't do this consistently. Which sucks. On a old Linux laptop I got hibernation to work (mostly) consistently so that worked, too, but took even longer to resume. On my previous modell, I gave even up, trying it to get to work.
And now I just bought a HP Pavillon gaming Laptop. And I actually run Windows now, even though I hate windows. But I need to get things done. And I don't want to mess with config settings, probably for weeks, to bring performance at least close to the stock values, windows provides.
Now this is not the fault of Linux, proprietary hardware support and optimisation are just very complicated. But it still sucks. And it really does not help, when certain linux evangelist claim to everyone, especially newcomers, everything is fine and much better than on windows and co. Which is just not true.
Especially startup time annoys me. It is just painfully slow. And the chromebooks are showing, that it does not have to be that way. My cheap Asus rugged chromebook, has by far the best startup time/wakeup time/standby life, of all the devices I ever used! I open it and can immediately resume working. Just what I want and need. Optimized linux drivers and firmware that work. (And reworked procedures under the hood) Everything else with ChromeOS is horrible, though. Shitty software, and lacking applications and all tied to google.
So for now I have to work with windows again, which in its stock config comes with so many bloatware, ads and spyware - that it is hard to believe people put up with this. But what choice do they have?
I probably have to try purism at some point, but sadly with all my mobile linux experience so far, I expect just a expensive, but mediocre experience. And there does not seem to exist a version with a decent gpu?
It was stated in the previous article of the series but you are right that it was not evident in the text.
That, I think, is the main difference. I had an XPS 15" and I was totally unable to get any support from Dell when running Linux on it. I understand the XPS 13's are marketed as being more "Linux-friendly", but I don't know how supported they are.
As the article says: The laptop experience is not anywhere near as good. I had a lot of the same issues, even on a system 76.
Eventually I decided to try giving windows wsl2 a shot for my laptop, and I gotta give Microsoft credit. It's been great. All the benefits of windows ecosystem, hardware comparability, games etc.... And the ability to do pretty much everything development wise through wsl2. The keyboard combos are similar enough in Linux and windows that I don't have trouble switching contexts. However, most of my development is still on desktop.
A few years ago, I would probably have described myself as a never Microsofter. Maybe my passion for using as much open source software as possible is dying down, or maybe Microsofts push to embrace open source is paying off. Whichever it is, I've come back around to appreciating windows recently.
That was a neat trick. You get me to read your whole post because I wanted to know why you didn't use Linux on your servers.
If you can operate Brew, you can operate a Linux package manager.
And Windows isn't even that bad. Compared to busted up 90s Windows it's a dream come true. But I've been spoiled by Linux and my "geek privilege" of knowing how to operate it all these years.
Hard disagree. A 90's-era Windows wasn't perfect by any means, but Windows peaked with Windows 2000 and it's been downhill from there. Modern Windows - at least as Microsoft intends for people to use day-to-day - is an abomination, and I would sooner use Windows ME day-to-day than any version of Windows 10 normally available to consumers.
That said, most of that downhill has been due to bloat. Windows 10 LTSC almost makes Windows nice enough for me to consider using it as my daily driver again.
Honestly there’s lots to like in Windows 10 even if there’s a bit of bloat around the edges. I cannot imagine wanting to go back to the bad old days of ME. Modern Windows is stable, secure, fast and has plenty in there for power users.
Driver support and sleep mode is seamless and just works. Even video drivers are sandboxes in their own process. Windows can and I have seen it recover from video and other driver crashes. My laptop can switch between embedded and nVidia graphics seamlessly. This is a lot better than the situation on Linux.
Integrated firewall, AV (Windows Defender), drive encryption (bit defender) and application signing is great for end users. The update process is pushy but nags less than I’ve seen on Macs and honestly you should update regularly.
PowerShell, WSL and inbuilt virtualisation (Hyper-V) are great for power users. Revamped Explorer is also nice with options like open in PowerShell.
Integration with Azure AD and SSO means that for all internal applications for work I don’t need to sign on.
My main complaints are that start menu search is still broken with unnecessary integration with Bing and file search corrupting search results with the slightest typo, file copy is still slow for many small files (although directory merging is nice) and Microsoft is a way too aggressive in their product placements on the start menu and trying to force people to create Microsoft accounts.
You can now set a static IP either in the new network configuration panel or from the old adapter properties. If you set a static IP in one, it won't show up in the other. Either being set to a static IP overrides a DHCP setting. Who knows what happens if they are both set to different static IPs.
The problem is that the Microsoft-sanctioned Windows desktop experience seems to be actively hostile to user experience due to all the extra shit that Microsoft has tacked onto the "goodness" that's Windows 10:
- Cortana not only enabled by default and difficult to remove, but shouting at me at max volume as my very first experience with a new Windows installation
- Random apps being preinstalled, even on so-called "professional" versions (hell, even on enterprise versions by default - and yeah, it's trivial to disable these things with GPOs, but I shouldn't have to)
- Literally no option to create a user account in the "home" edition that doesn't entail connecting to an online account, which is dumb as hell
- Ads. On a product that I paid money for. What the fuck, Microsoft?
Each of these things in isolation is itself entirely unacceptable for any product that even remotely respects its users. In combination, these things make Windows 10 Home and Professional the two absolute worst versions of Windows money has ever been able to buy, and fundamentally undermine any trust I might have in Microsoft.
I would, however, change my tune in a heartbeat if LTSC was at least an option, if not the default, for desktops. Windows 10 LTSC is what Windows 10 should be, and probably would be if the Windows team didn't seem driven to make the default Windows UX as janky as possible. I still think Windows 2000 was peak Windows, but LTSC is almost there - all the neat things you mention, and none of the bullshit.
----
EDIT: there are also a bunch of little papercuts that bug me every time I use Windows, like never knowing which tool is the "right" one to use for various things (screenshots come to mind; what was wrong with the Snipping Tool?), or the fact that "ClearType" is anything but. Not that Windows 2000 didn't have its own share of little papercuts, but when an OS has accumulated 20 more years of those papercuts, they start to really add up.
Also, maybe I'm just butthurt that Microsoft dropped Space Cadet Pinball ;)
Agreed about the BS. Honestly I'd pay more money to get rid of it and have thought about switching back to Linux a few times but the day-to-day Windows 10 experience is smooth enough that I always end up staying (maybe I just have Stockholm syndrome from the downright abuse Apple and Google throw at their mobile users though..)
==
PS: Snipping Tool is still around btw and works fine. Sometimes you might want to hit print screen to capture mouse over state though.
Also as long as you don't connect to the internet you can skip creating an MS account on setup and Cortana won't bother you either afterwards either.
Everything is wrong with that.
EDIT: It's more likely due to Microsoft decoupling Cortana from the OS and making it available as an app download. Since Cortana is not a selling point of Windows 10 itself it makes no sense to have it during the install.
The etc contains the integrated spying and telemetry and a horrible update system. A big caveat.
That's astounding. Finder must be awful.
To me, Nautilus is virtually unusable -- it's like a toy file manager. Nothing beats Dolphin (or PCManFM as a not-so-close second). For some reason, Qt apps are way better than GTK apps in general.
Some of Nautilus' forked kin like Nemo (Cinnamon) and Thunar (XFCE) are decent though.
Dolphin is alright but in my case it has a bit of "MS Office" syndrome where I only ever use maybe 20-30% of its functionality, with the rest just being more clutter to have to dig through. I know some find those things useful, but in my case it's just going to collect dust and get in the way.
Finder was the worst part of the experience by far. Perhaps there's some setting to turn this behavior off (or some setting said relative turned on that caused this) but it seemed to constantly attempt to hide the underlying filesystem from me, instead showing files in groups like "Documents" and "Downloads". I could not figure out if/where in the UI I could type in a path to a folder to manually browse to it. The search was slow and awful, to the point of being near useless.
After 10-15 minutes of wasting my time in Finder I gave up and used the terminal for all file operations.
- You can toggle on a path bar in Finder windows with View > Show Path Bar. Additionally, the path of open folders and files can be viewed by Command-clicking the icon next to the title in the titlebar (this works in third party apps too)
- You can navigate to folders by path with Go > Go to Folder… or Command-Shift-G
- Visibility of hidden files/folders can be toggled with Command-Shift-. (also works in open/save dialogs)
Also, as a general rule, in Mac apps everything an app is capable of is surfaced through its menus, so if you’re ever looking for a specific function in one, menus are a good place to check. Cross platform stuff ignores this custom frequently but that’s nothing new.
- View > Go to Folder… (Cmd-Shift-G) to type in a path to go to.
- Cmd-Up takes you one level up.
- Right-click/Control-click the current folder name in the title bar to see the location of the current folder. This works with any title bar that has a file/folder icon, not just Finder!
- Cmd-Shift-. to temporarily show hidden files.
And here are some settings I recommend that turn Finder into a very pleasant experience for someone coming from Linux. I always set these as soon as I get a new account:
- View > as Columns (You might need to set this a few times for different initial folders.)
- View > Show Path Bar
- Preferences > General: New Finder windows show (home folder)
- Preferences > Sidebar > Favorites: Make sure (home folder) is checked. I'd actually recommend unchecking every other item in this group (except for Airdrop if you need it). Why: Having less sidebar items makes Column View work better because, when opening a folder in Column View, the sidebar item that's the closest ancestor is shown as the leftmost column.
- Preferences > Sidebar > Locations: Make sure "Hard disks" is completely checked. By default, the / disk is hidden from the sidebar.
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowAllFiles 1
Also note that shortcuts like ⌘⇧ G also work in standard open/save dialogs.
He boils down the issues with Linux on the desktop to what jwz calls Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers[0] model. Essentially open source developers don't have the discipline and patience to do the hard work of maintaining their software, and instead just want to refine their designs, throw things away, start over from scratch, and make things perfect.
I don't disagree with this view, and I think it's just somewhat silly to expect the same level of polish and back-compat on Linux that you'd see on a commercial OS with commercial apps. Certainly there is a lot of very polished software built under the OSS model (though many of that software has funded full-time developers working on it), but any project that is either run largely by volunteers, or largely by the programmers themselves, is often not going to end up like a polished, seamless, corporate product. Companies (and product managers) make decisions about building software in a very different way than developers do. They have different priorities, and different things they care about.
There will never be a "year of Linux on the desktop", because FOSS Linux-based OSes are constantly-moving targets run by people who generally aren't getting paid to do the work necessary for that to happen. That's pretty much always been the case, and even with all the corporate interest around Linux (Canonical comes to mind), it's just not happening.
My first experience with Linux was with Red Hat 4 back in 1997 or so, though I didn't start using Linux as my daily driver until 2002 or so. It has always had, and will always have, many rough edges. For me, I find that I have fewer problems with it than I did during my stints running macOS, but... that's just me, and I can fix nearly any issue I run into (even if they are few and far between) with a minimum of effort and time. That's not for everyone, and that's fine.
[0] Don't click (copy/paste into a new tab), as jwz has a nasty redirect for people coming from HN, but: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
Nevertheless, I don't think that will make its market in increase significantly. There are more factors that influence the success on the desktop beyond polish, maturity and technical excellence. Even listening what industry say they need is a good indicator of what needs to be done. The "third party software industry" is like steve jobs said about users: "we can't just ask for what customers want".
A lot has changed, Apple braking compatibility, Microsoft braking so much. Microsoft hegemony on desktop destroyed by web, smartphones and Apple, so much that ChromeOS exists. No Flash, no IE, Microsoft Edge based on Chromium. Windows adopted Linux with WSL. Wine getting better, Valve Proton drives gaming on Linux. Open source AMD GPU driver. Wayland. The future is awesome.
He thought of stomping alternatives, parroting Jobs, that's wrong. The reason I've switched to Linux is such attitude from Microsoft. Linux experience is a moving target. At first we are expats, striving to replicate what was lost, but Linux provides much more. Why not explore it?
Microsoft Windows is powered by legacy, enterprise and gaming. Apple macOS advertises polished experience, creative applications, iOS development. Google Android, Apple iOS — touch oriented OS, app store. Google Chromebook — security and web. Linux is different, every community strives to find its own answer.
I switched my x220 to kubuntu after windows 19.09 support ended and it’s been fine. Random things like printing don’t work, but nothing I need daily.
https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools
I'm carefully watching Apple to see what the next line of Macbook Pros looks like. Esp. how well the M1 architecture fits into a development workflow that will still for the forseeable future center heavily on deployment to x86 architecture. We already are seeing significant time wastage from employees having to fight architecture issues with docker. We will see where that ends up. And then, whether the rumors are true that they might support more ports and even options without the touch bar. These things would signal a genuine change of heart on considering developers to be first class citizens in their ecosystem. If all these turn out positive I'll be sticking with it. If not, Win10+WSL2 are looking extremely compelling.
Also, windows is, for lack of a better word, obnoxious, in the way it bothers you about updates (and other messages of various kinds), and forces you to restart frequently and kn its terms.
The few times I have used windows recently, I found it the opposite of "just getting out of the way and letting me work", and I fear that even if wsl did work smoothly for what I was doing, just the fact that windows was running in the background would degrade the experience.
I've been running Linux devenvs on Windows, in Virtualbox, for something well over a decade now. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the vaunted WSL2 is literally just that, plus preinstalled OS images that save maybe a half hour's work, plus also it actually breaks virtualization so you can only use WSL2 and no other VMs. And ~ is still just a shared folder, so chown and symlinks don't work.
I'd tolerate it if I had no better option, just like I have all those other times. But even then, just running Virtualbox proper is no worse in any way, and better in some. I really don't understand what the hell all the hype is about - maybe for folks who've only ever used Windows and never had a chance to really try Linux at all, I can see it, but people who have no reason not to know better also seem often to be over the moon about it and I can't for the life of me figure out why.
Granted, that Lenovo had been pissing me off well before I tried turning it into a dev machine - Windows 10 is just a dumpster fire in every respect, WSL2 or no. But it was WSL2 turning out to be literally just broken Virtualbox that really sent me over the top.
And I have to thank Microsoft for that! Even with the occasional slight flakiness of any new architecture, the M1 mini is an excellent dev machine, blazing fast and unbelievably power-efficient - the same deskside UPS that promised 50 minutes runtime for the Windows box claims almost 300 for the mini, and that's with something like a 10x perf boost. If WSL2 hadn't been so lousy, I might have taken another year to make the jump.
Well it works great for me. What issues are you experiencing?
1. Start menu is awfully designed, really slow, and doesn't even return exact matches sometimes. Seriously, it shouldn't take that long to launch something.
2. Lack of tabs in file explorer forces me to have like three-to-five windows open, making alt+tab navigation annoying.
3. It's like each app does its own thing with notifications. It does have a decent notification system, it just happens that nobody really uses it.
4. Lack of proper package management makes every app run their own update checker in the background. I easily have 10-15 items in my tray, and have to chase down something essential like Bluetooth across them. And half the time at least one of them doesn't have an icon!
5. Updates. Booted into Windows after about a month, it restarted twice + gave me multiple notifications that it's gonna restart again outside active hours. I only need to use it for like an hour or so.
Did you try to install a native Linux distribution. The experience is always better that running on a VM.
Modern Linux virtualization (KVM/Qemu) is powerful and is getting easier to setup with programs such as Virtual Machine Manager and Boxes. I run several Windows VMs without problems and they have usable performance.
I have used Windows VMs for Word and Skype for Business using KVM.
Lightroom is an utter resource hog and practically unusable without GPU acceleration - reasonable given the 45-megabyte raws I develop in it, but still a constraint. Too, I use a physical edit controller that needs a driver of its own, and setting up USB passthrough is probably a hassle. Judging by the docs I've read, setting up GPU passthrough certainly is. Meanwhile, the Mac driver for that edit controller, compiled to x86_64 and not yet updated for arm64, works flawlessly and with no extra effort under Rosetta 2. (And Darktable isn't really an option - impressive as anything given the constraints the devs have to work under, but one of those constraints is relatively poor support for undocumented raw formats including those my cameras produce, so I can't get the same quality of results out of it that Lightroom gives me.)
In general, I avoid sysadmin work wherever possible these days, as for example when I migrated to Fastmail in January after 17 years of self-hosting. Back when I set that up, I had more time than money, and an interest in learning how to do it, besides. These days I have more money than time, and already know very well how. So at this point it's just a question of the most efficient use of resources, and - in part because of that drive to learn new things, which I now apply to other technologies - obtaining more money has become fairly straightforward, while obtaining more time is of course impossible, human life lasting only as long as it does.
Sure, by dint of enough effort, I could have got WSL2 working acceptably, or get Lightroom running OK under virtualization, or whatever. But at this stage in my life, I can afford to spend money to not have to deal with those problems, so that was what I happily did.
We all have busy lives. When there's only an hour a week or an hour every other week to spare for doing this, it's on me to make sure they get the most out of that time. So, from that perspective too, it was more worth spending the money on a known good platform than spending any more time dinking with one that had already shown itself at best only questionably equal to the task.
Most of what I am interested in is a streamlined docker setup and WSL2 provides an amazing experience for that, with a single docker / container experience spanning both the Windows host and the linux VM. While there are still some issues with it I have reasonable confidence MS will sort out the sharing of memory and CPUs so that resources can be shared better b/w Win10 and Docker/Linux than you would ever get without a lot of work through VirtualBox.
On the Windows side all I really need is a proper, native office experience. Working in a regulated industry there isn't really any room for less than 100% fidelity in handling official documents and forms. But I will never need to touch powershell or anything else from the native Win10 experience.
I'm glad you have something that works for you! I'm glad I have something that works for me, too.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/memory-reclaim-in...
Man, I hated it. I'm just not a fan of how windows are managed, OS updates are constant and require a lengthy reboot, installing/uninstalling is the same awkward mess except now there's 2 Program Files directories, Control Panel is like archeology digging through generations of UIs dating back to Windows 95.
I hate all the intrusive tracking, ads, and preinstalled games and junk.
I tried to give PowerShell a fair shake. I liked some of the concepts around it. It's annoying the documentation requires a download (I was on an airgapped network). It was super awkward to wrap everything in a BAT file. Everyone else just wrote in BAT files because our needs weren't huge. They would be more maintainable and better behaved as PowerShell scripts, but it didn't seem worth pushing for. PowerShell was just so verbose I found it very hard to use as a REPL to build pipelines.
The experience triggered a lot of things I hadn't thought about in over a decade and I was bummed at how few things had changed. That's probably the case for macOS and Linux, but personally I find myself liking those OSes more than Windows...I've definitely been exasperated explaining their shortcomings to others because I've been comfortable avoiding them.
I ended up mostly using it as a dumb terminal to ssh into an Ubuntu box running tmux and vim.
WSL has made this workable, really. Not the nightmare I expected. But the rest of windows still sucks.
As for apple stuff, I used to use Macs for a decade, starting with a colour iMac right down to MBP 2013 ... The platform felt like it got and more in the way. I hated the app store. Firwire transfer from old to new machine also didn't work properly between two OSX versions. Set up took long. Everything was a forced login. The straw that broke the camel's back was shitty support when I came home after closing the brand new laptop to find a cracked glass screen when I opened it up again.
Been using Dell's xps series and Nuc barebones since then, and moving some crucial things like keyPass files onto Google drive. I can spin up a new Dev ready setup in about 15-30mins. Everything works out of the box. Bliss.
Dell btw gave me great support every time I had a hardware issue.
Now after getting tempted to try Arch Linux and I finally gave it a try and its been great so far and especially the Arch Wiki has been the best resource for all my linux knowledge
I just can’t thank enough whoever created ArchWiki Project it’s full of great knowledge related to Linux.
I just wanna take a moment and appreciate the efforts of people who contributed to archwiki and to linux project in general making it great for people like us to use it as a daily driver
Tearing? Fundamental Xorg problem. Fixed in Wayland. Wayland has some rough edges, but the reality of the ecosystem is Xorg is dead and not coming back, and it's better to be a little ahead of the curve than behind it and complaining about things that are resolved on the other side.
[0]: https://kde.org/
TFA:
> Screen tearing with the intel driver. Come on. This was solved on xorg and now with Wayland it's back.
That's why I doubt the author had a full Wayland setup running. Maybe the app ran via Xwayland or there was no Wayland at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(display_server_protoc...
This is still accurate to this day and what they don't tell you. Hence why you always need to search for 'xorg/wayland error' this, 'dbus initialization error' that or a random core dump occurred on a freezing window. I have zero time to search for these issues when I configure what I want and prefer it to 'just work' like it should on macOS.
> On November 10th Apple showed us the future of the Mac and released again laptops worth buying. So I bought the 2020 M1 Macbook Air. You will read a review of it soon.
If you like the M1, you will also like the M1X, M2 or M3 Macs. No need to rush for last years model, hence why I skipped this one.
> The experience of using Linux as a daily driver has been very positive for me, but I do need my productivity.
Exactly. Rather than messing around or spending days playing around with my setup or window manager.
I don't get why this narravitve still exists today. Linux works out of the box on many distros perfectly fine.
Keybindings are a very special use case, and if you need that customizability and its better on a Mac, then get a Mac. Doesn't mean that Macs are "more productive"
If you want to argue actual semantics in terms of value, Linux wins hands down for what you get. You can look at things like VM software, which is costly for Mac while Free for Linux. You can look at things like privacy - Apple still collects data for themselves, while in Linux you can fully disable that. You can look at open source software, which has a way higher compatibility rate with Linux than Mac, especially with M1 chips where Rosetta, as good as it is, isn't fool proof. You can look at hardware, where most "non-Mac" laptops that run Linux are upgradable and repairable.
If you like Mac, then stay on Mac, and stop publishing articles on how good Macs are and how Linux is neat, but your time is so valuable that you can't spend learning a few commaind line tools.
"Stop writing good things about things I hate and bad things about things I like!"
> don't get why this narravitve still exists today. Linux works out of the box on many distros perfectly fine.
Yeah. And then you connect two monitors with different scaling factor. Turns out X11 can't handle this and Wayland is still broken.
Actually, this works fine in Wayland. I have used Wayland without any issues with amdgpu, including with mixed-DPI screens with GNOME's fractional scaling. However, things go downhill once you have to use X11 applications, and you typically do. E.g. JetBrains IDEs are a train wreck with fractional scaling enabled in GNOME on Wayland.
In the end you just give a sigh and go back to you macOS (assuming you were trying to switch).
PS: for me though linux distro share the same problems they had back when I was using Ubuntu and the Arch before 2013. Not much have changed since then. Linux on a home\work pc is still mostly about freedom but mostly not about well build human-to-machine interface.
The point is that this is such a stupid conversation to have.
Both macOS and Windows can handle it just fine. Linux somehow is is still in the 90s in this regard.
I do agree that the conversation about niche features (or issues) is stupid though. Not like I've started one.
Also, speaking of external monitors and Macs "just working", google "mac external monitor not working after sleep", which is the problem that i definitely have on my work issued Mac, but not any of my linux laptops.
My point is, unless we agree on roughly what features are required, "Just Works" is a useless subjective specifier. We all have different priorities, so we either have to accept that there's no universal way to evaluate OSs or agree on some subset that really should Just Work.
By the way, KDE Plasma has pretty comprehensive GUI settings on power-related settings. I think having GNOME 3 and Ubuntu be the de-facto standard Linux experience is actually harming the perception of desktop Linux. People switch expecting a customizable, power-user friendly experience and get a DE that's trying to be the opposite.
> "Just Works" is a useless subjective specifier.
I'd say a good usable mail client, a readily available video editor, sound recording software and office suite are more important than an advanced audio mixer.
> sound playing from multiple devices at the same time
This seems like a very niche use case. Along the lines of the usual nerdy response of linux being able to compile gcc or run vim and why would anyone use their computer for anything else.
I'm not disputing that. It isn't hard to agree on what an average user definitely needs and therefore must work. The hard part is where to draw the line, what is still needed and what is niche.
> This seems like a very niche use case.
Maybe. But it's very much something an "average user" might want. It's actually something I want to be able to do so I can watch a film with my sister, each with our own headphones. That's a real user need, not something "meta" like the FLOSS things you mentioned (not a solution by itself, but something that can help a programmer fill that user need).
The problem as I see it is that even people who really are beginners sometimes want to reach for more advanced functionality, and different systems expose different advanced functions in a user-friendly way.
And from my perspective "Just Works" means don't stand on my way, don't change under my feet.
I got used to it and was/am able to get what I need done. I liked the cheap netbooks when they were a thing, and I like zenbooks these days. You always have to shop with compatibility in mind. Hard edges persist in any environment though the particulars change. I am comfortable with the tradeoffs currently and luckily there are enough people using Linux to take care of most of the show stoppers fairly quickly.
While apt still isn't the best package manager (my heart belongs to pacman, no matter what the haters say), I completely agree that brew is a failed imitation. I wanted to use MacOS for the longest time, because I've been told that it's a real "Unix system". Brew has distilled my fears into a sobering reality. The "advantages" MacOS offers really comes down to eye-candy or slightly more consistent shortcut mapping, but none of this really matters to me when I can't use the software I want, and the OS is always second-guessing my authority. Maybe I've been spoiled by Linux, but I don't understand the hype. Not even on my M1 Macbook Air.
Hypothetically I have two machines that I want to build out and give to developers. One machine arrives on Monday. My script runs "brew install postgresql" (no version), because of when I ran that script postgresql@10 gets installed. Tests pass, I hand that machine off to a new developer. The second machine arrives on Wednesday. I run the same script, but because v11 of postgres was added to homebrew on Tuesday, the second machine receives postgresql@11 even though the first machine received @10. Same script, two days apart, different major version of postgresql.
Yes, I can write my scripts carefully to avoid this. But consider this scenario: a new developer encounters a problem, tries to solve it themselves, finds a seemingly helpful blog, and ends up with postgresql@13 and node@15 when everyone else in their team is using postgresql@11 and node@12. Now tests are failing, but only for this one developer and only locally...
Mac OS itself doesn’t really have this problem since applications can bundle the exact version of their required frameworks, a bit like Ubuntu Snaps.
It's been a while since I used apt, but if I remember correctly you'd have the same problem the parent described, right?
-------------------
And regarding the 'name@version' criticism: If you want to stick to a version, how can you do it without specifying it?
Only if you are running Debian Sid or equivalent.
If want to use a version of postgres other than 10.x, you can either use a different version of Ubuntu or install a custom PPA.
Apt's target audience is systems administrators. Homebrew's target audience is independent developers who might need to have four different versions of Postgresql installed simultaneously on their laptop, because they maintain Rails/Django/Node apps for four different clients who are each unwilling to upgrade for whatever reason.
IMO homebrew is "messy" because it is trying to solve a harder problem. If there is such a thing as an average enterprise software developer, I would argue that homebrew is trying to solve problems that the enterprise developer does not have.
Containerized Postgres is a real win, but running OpenLDAP (+ custom schema) as a containerized application has measurably improved my quality of life. Kudos and great gratitude to the people behind https://github.com/osixia/docker-openldap
I think it should work like almost Linux distros where the major version is fixed for a release lifecycle, and any other installations require modification. So say brew install postgresql should always install 12, and if you want something else you have to add the version modifier.
But I agree that's nothing to do with brew conversation.
Alternatively, you can create your own 'tap' to gain more control over some packages.
For databases, I'd stick to running them as containers, too.
Homebrew is not ideal, of course, but there are ways to achieve desired goals until we have something better.
Debian is really strict about its releases and won't push a breaking change in a specific version of the OS.
For instance, `apt install htop` will only ever install the 2.X version of htop in Buster. Including security patches and all, but you won't get a 3.0.0 version without going sideways and add a specific repository for that. Debian will ship with htop version 3 in the next release, but you'll have to upgrade the entire distro for that.
Brew is different in that it allows anybody to merge a new breaking version of the software you use, so `brew install htop` on Monday could give you the 2.x version, and on Tuesday will install the 3.0.0 version.
You could maybe compare it to the rolling releases of Arch. But Arch has a better way of handling it than Brew: they test, they prepare, they communicate for bug changes..
Brew would benefit from segmenting their offering, but you'd lose the bleeding-edginess of it. Really, if you want reproducible packaging on Mac, I'd use nix or docker. If you want convenience and edge, use brew and deal with it.
Debian has an official backports repository if you want that behavior. It just gives you the freedom to choose.
There are exceptions to that, for example browsers like Firefox and Chromium, but upgrading the major version of Firefox is much less risky than upgrading the major version of postgresql.
Rolling release distros like Debian Sid (and archlinux, though that doesn't use apt) don't work this way, which is why rolling release distros have a reputation for being less stable.
I feel like as a new dev there’s so much in engineering I could learn from that’s already been solved and re-solved again and again or at least addressed by existing distribution systems.
However the reading materials to learn about some of this stuff seems far and few or very niche, sitting on some cached blog post from the 90s..
If they don't do this then there is no easy way to install an older version of a package, you will have to get the old .rb file from the brew git history and execute it yourself.
Tests failing.
Brew upgrade usually breaks stuff if it hasn't been updated in a couple of months, which is not the case for other package managers.
Forced update on any command is really bad behavior.
The Arch wiki was so good that it inevitably included the exact problem and resolution already, but since I didn't have any important running systems I also might as well have reinstalled the whole thing. In which case I'd run into installation problems that were also perfectly covered in the Arch wiki.
NixOS has a similar strategy.
Or just install informant from AUR, to force you to read the Archlinux package news before proceeding with any pacman operation.
Homebrew actually went the other direction and embedded non-consensual spyware directly into the package manager itself.
It's worth using nix on macos - takes a few hoops to get running, but it's worlds better than brew. Albeit, a fair bit more complex than docker.
I had packages installed by brew that used readline 7. This went on fine for a while. At some point, brew installed something (at my direction) and moved to readline 8. Unbeknownst to me, readline 7 disappeared from my system! Tada, a pile of tools require reinstallation. Oh, and I didn't notice until weeks later when psql stopped working.
I'm not the only one, at least... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19063175
- updating the package index on each operation. I just want to install stuff, dammit. I don't need you to run git pull to update the gazillion package definitions
- `brew update` and `brew upgrade` dichotomy. 99.9999999999% of the time I need to update/upgrade a package, not brew. If I ever needed to upgrade brew, I could run `brew update --brew` or something
Also, MacPorts can many times just fail to install a package or fail to update a series of dependencies. Good luck then getting your operation important packages running ..
Anyway, switched to Brew completely a while ago when updating to Big Sur, so have no idea if Brew will also do the same thing over time, but at least their system seems more simple, which might result in less breakage.
I think the impression of "better key bindings" comes down to familiarity more than anything. Getting used to something else seems uncertain (it may never be as good despite learning investment) when you know on the other platform you can just "get things done fast".
You can bind keys and mouse to window move/resize actions.
Drives me crazy every time, given that command + backspace deletes a word (and command +del deletes a word in the other direction).
Option + Shift + arrows: select by word
Cmd + arrows: move to the end of the line
Cmd + Shift + arrows: select to the end of the line
Additionally you can still use the decades old Ctrl+A/Ctrl+E shortcuts almost everywhere (some custom text input reimplementations ignore this).
Shift + End: Select to the end of the line Home + End: Select to the beginning of the line Home or End: Move to beginning or end of line respectively.
What's worse is when I plug in a keyboard with Home and End buttons on a recent Macbook Pro they still don't work. Do I need another plugin for that? Even if I do personally I don't find the Mac keyboard shortcuts better than Linux/Windows. Tbh after using Mac for 2 years running now every day at work I still don't quite get how people find it easier - I still wish personally for a Linux or even Windows machine to speed up my productivity.
And that's because people prefer what they are familiar with them - the mental leap to jump to another way of working for most people isn't pleasant and isn't really worth the investment. Mac still feels like a "second language" to me just as Linux must feel to mac users - I'm always translating it back to "how do I do this Linux/Windows thing" in Mac. In the end Linux, Windows, and Mac are perfectly capable OS'es and the differences is marginal between them which makes switching difficult. But I do prefer my Linux machine these days - more just comes out of the box.
On Windows the Window key is essentially removed from keyboard.
On Linux you can use the Meta key, but I don't know how common that is.
I find myself using a much wider range of shortcuts on Mac than on Windows or on Linux (though I rarely use Linux these days).
It's a personal feeling, not real data :)
How to delete word (back and forward?), maybe it's that one.
These are in fact Emacs keybindings and they date from early NeXTstep. OS X inherited them from NeXT.
I think you’re misremembering here, I don’t think there are any macOS keyboard shortcuts that work like this. It’s always shift plus the original keyboard shortcut to select.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12
[0] https://rectangleapp.com
[1]: https://i3wm.org/
No it doesn’t. Hasn’t been that way for years.
https://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ
> Is MacPorts Universal? MacPorts works on Apple Silicon as well as Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs, but, by default, the ports you install will be compiled only for the architecture you're currently running on. This means that if you migrate from, say, a PowerPC Mac to an Intel one and use Migration Assistant to copy your data to the new machine, you should reinstall all your ports on the new machine to rebuild them for Intel.
If MacPorts is compiling from source, you're either using a non-default varient, on a very old version of OS X (MacPorts supports Tiger, but doesn't build binaries), or have some other unusual configuration option set.
> sh ~ % sudo port install ffmpeg
---> Computing dependencies for ffmpeg
The following dependencies will be installed:
Xft2
XviD
aom
autoconf
automake
brotli
cairo
cargo
cargo-bootstrap
cargo-c
cctools
cmake
... etc
Does the list change if you specify the +gpl2 varient?
Heavenly Lord, he just keeps coming back with more rules lawyering. The macport for git goes through patching, configuring, building routine that is common in source code installs. Give me peace of mind, strength, and patience in dealing with internet trolls.
I suggested the +gpl2 varient because I noticed it was present for all the ffmpeg binaries on MacPorts's build server. This is probably why. http://packages.macports.org/ffmpeg/
Now, if adding +gpl2 still causes MacPorts to pull in cmake, that's interesting, and I would like to bring that up on MacPorts's mailing list in case there's a bug. But I suspect adding +gpl2 will make it go away.
Also, for instance, OpenJDK is a port that is offered and we do not compile that in any way on any system because that way lies madness.
The other reason that macports will build from source is when there isn’t a binary like early on in Big Sur.
With your example of ffmpeg, you can check yourself that ffmpeg-4.3.2_0+gpl2.darwin_18.x86_64.tbz2 exists as a binary archive and will be used on a standard install on macOS 10.14. MacPorts will definitely not build ffmpeg from source by default.
I recommend you test again with something simpler than ffmpeg, for example bzip2 or less.
With apt this is not that straightforward.
https://wiki.debian.org/CheckInstall
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Meta_package_and_packag...
I recommend MacPorts instead. Brew broke my computer more than once.
OSX certainly isn't a "real Unix system".
OSX a huge hodgepodge of proprietary crap with a Unix component buried somewhere in the middle of the dung heap to get FOSS proponent to believe that Apple believes in openness.
Unix, until Linux had made a breakthrough, was a proprietary system. The AT&T Unix, Xenix, AIX, SunOS, you name them. Openness of the source is not a defining characteristic.
Historically, that is exactly what "real Unix systems" were
I was and still am heavily dissappointed. This was ~2018 it looked exactly as boring as imagined, a desktop as intiuitive as windows 7s. The terminal felt at best strange, many settings and confirmation dialogs are simply not available via terminal, only hidden somewhere in their UIs. The hardware run hot every day, always and you could not use an external screen without waste cycling your battery to death. Honestly not impressed.
Both mac and windows are like stuck in time compared to modern desktop approaches like gnome shell or recent kdes. If you are a shell guy to some degree no other os will justice
Very concise way to put it. I feel the same way. With FOSS I feel that I'm fighting with the software, and with proprietary stuff I feel like I'm fighting against the software.
I mean, not really, no.
This type of sentiment is usually a sign. If you've been spoiled by something, that's because it's better. I had the same feeling trying to go back to windows, "Man, why am I always fighting damaging updates", "Why can't I change this very simple setting", "Where is the documentation for this file".
The answer usually comes down to "because one thing is really good (not perfect), and the other thing is shitty (but tries to look perfect)."
I liked macOS, I had used Linux full time for 15 years, spoiled by it if you will, then I tried to set up a WSL environment just for me and let me tell you: you guys can keep your Macs and half arsed Linux distros, Windows these days is truly underrated. Being able to game, have a better Linux and Docker experience than macOS, and not stuck in the 90s like Linux actually feels great.
Because the reality is that all software is actually crap. If you think one is better than another, you need to look harder.
Mail is fine if you use browser-based solutions. Nobody is talking about only sending plaintext emails? Wtf?
Why are they running so much stuff on wine?
Why are they upgrading their kernel every few weeks?
How does anyone think nautilus is good?
How does anyone think that Gimp/inkscape are better than affinity designer?
These are the things they find useful about linux? There's so much more that makes linux a powerful solution (e.g. great window managers like i3), or much better support for shell based workflows.
This makes sense if you install a distro like Manjaro or Arch. Not something I'd ever recommend to someone who's taking Linux for a first spin. I don't think I've had any troubles doing regular kernel upgrades, though, the problems mostly laid in proprietary drivers, specifically Nvidia's.
> How does anyone think nautilus is good?
I have no problems with Nautilus. Perhaps it's not the greatest file manager, but it's way ahead of Finder in my opinion.
I think it's great. If I had to pick between Finder, Windows File Explorer, Nautilus, or Dolphin. I'd honestly choose Nautilus. It's visually simple, has previews, built in support for Google Drive, easy to find how to show hidden files, if I double click an archived file; it decompresses it, and it has an "Open Terminal" right click prompt. If I had to walk someone through performing a file system action, say over a phone, I feel confident that I could do so with the least confusion using Nautilus. I simply never have understood the arguments against Nautilus and am extremely thankful to the developers who have chosen to make the hard decision to reduce features to make the application maintainable.
I'm pretty sure I had like 4 kernel upgrades on my Fedora machine in the last month.
>great window managers like i3
Tiling wms like i3 target a very narrow user base. Unless you are a sysadmin or just work only with terminal they are pretty useless.
I don't have non-maximized windows for example (except for Telegram, Obsidian and iTerm quake-like instance)
If you only use the terminal, you don't need a tiling WM because tmux and others offer similar functionality out of the box.
Tiling WMs are useful in the opposite scenario, when you use many different apps and need a unified way to manage them all.
I just can't imagine working in an environment where you have, say, 4 apps occupying 4 parts of your screen continuously.
Splitting screen in two (terminal and browser) is the common scenario for me but you don't need i3 for this.
For example, maybe I want to keep an eye on several terminal commands at the same time. With i3 I just press the terminal shortcut n times and I have n new terminal windows sharing the space. If one of the commands fails with a long error message I press another shortcut and the terminal windows are now tabbed and full height, with the IDE still visible on the side.
Or maybe I want a small browser window or Slack window in a corner to keep an eye on a meeting or discussion while I work.
Whatever uncommon layout best serves my needs right now, i3 can get it done in seconds.
You never really need a tiling WM, though. i3 just solves my problems really well, so well in fact that I actively enjoy using it. Some people feel the same way about vim, and you never really need vim either.
Also mailspring is a pretty good Linux email client with conversation view...
[1]: https://github.com/notpushkin/Mailspring-Libre
[2]: https://community.getmailspring.com/t/mailspring-without-mai...
I'm also on a 2018 Xps with Ubuntu 20.04 and everything just works.
To me, the clear advantage is how installing all kind of obscure R/Python packages is usually a smooth experience, whereas a working Mac version frequently doesn't even exist or requires struggling with obscure errors, especially after MacOs upgrades (e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/mcmc_stan/status/1186923309662953...)
Just hitting spacebar to see virtually any file, and the ability to open in preview and read or even markup and make small changes, is so nice. Whenever I use a non-Mac system I really miss those two features.
no, thank you </SecurityHat>
Once upon a time I used a Macbook, never again :D
That was so useful at a time where my workflow included multiple zip files containing assignments etc. Being able to simply hit spacebar to look into them, instead of decompressing and creating a new folder was incredible.
And if I’m not mistaken, the same plugin also allowed spotlight to then search the contents of the zip files.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen macOS users saying they can’t leave it in part because of Preview. But IDK if any have listed any features not present in both GNOME’s Evince and KDE’s Okular (not that I’ve ever needed or used any of the three).
I can't get Evince or Okular to do this task: it'd be great if either worked, but I haven't looked into it.
(FWIW, I'm a full-time Linux desktop user, but I have to test PhotoStructure on Windows and macOS, so those boxes are on my desk too. PDF-related tasks are the only other reason why I turn to my Mac.)
[1] https://pooi.moe/QuickLook/ [2] https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook
Edit: to add some value to the rant, there is also MiniBin, which sits in a tray area and allows you to open/purge your recycle bin without reaching a desktop icon.
Best feature: you can remove pages from a PDF. Just drag them off the left side pane
It combines the adding of the arrow with the process of sending it to someone.
If you had the real Preview on MacOS, you’d be using it all the time without even thinking, like 100% of MacOS users. Because it’s fast, it opens everything faster than you can think, and it just works well. The effort required to launch it is zero, or even negative. It’s just part of the OS.
But since you have a « sort of » copy cat which does not work as well or as fast, is not as well integrated, does not support as many files or any fatal flaw like that, you just don’t use it.
So yes, Preview is underrated and really hard to replicate.
So I'm probably missing something. Does that mean that, because it's so fast and low-effort, you use it as a complete replacement of a native app you'd use otherwise? And then just for files you're just consuming, or does it also work for editing? And what kind of files?
Note that I'm not out to prove any point, I just want to understand what I'm missing :)
That little "wait is this the file I want to open / overwrite?" When saving a file, it adds to an overall feeling of polish.
Like a tasty meal, it's all in the details and how they add up
In my case, yes. It’s the only way I ever look at images, and I often use it to have a quick look at scripts or text/data files (try it on a CSV and it’ll show as a table!). It’s also convenient for design files, whose apps are incredibly slow to launch. With Alfred[1] you can even preview URLs directly.
Finally, QuickLook shines when you have file formats for which you don’t have an editor (e.g. you may need to view a Photoshop or Word document once in a while). It allows you to view them faster than in the editing application, for free, without having to install or configure anything.
Unlike the swath of people who are singing praises to Preview, I rarely touch it and mostly resort to QuickLook, even for PDFs.
> And then just for files you're just consuming, or does it also work for editing?
It works (at least) to edit images like Preview (annotate, rotate, crop).
[1]: https://www.alfredapp.com
I have however had many massive problems with apt-get, specifically getting a version of an app that's later that what's included in the distro. It usually ends up with a couple of PPAs that then don't work properly and brick the system.
Homebrew in this regard is far better as all packages are "always" at the latest stable version and I imagine get more testing than some random PPA or backports repo.
In that context, Linux is often best looked as a Chromebook Pro. Great when you can do most of your work in or around a browser, plus or minus the shell.
And among Linuxes, Fedora crushes. Cheers.
The latter may also be true, but that’s not what they describe in this article. Because in this article what they are trying to describe is trying to setup Linux to do the things they did on OSX the way they did it on OSX.
Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15 https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...
513 comments, the last one which reads:
"Adding to my previous post: Same issues with Mail on Catalina as on Big Sur 11.2.3. Mails keep vanishing."
https://github.com/elementary/mail
> but there are rough edges for the power user.
> I am an extreme power user, ...
> In the end, I was able to replicate most of my macOS power tools setup via input hooks and shell scripts, but it took much longer than it should have.
It's very hard to define who a Power User is. But if you've spent a few years on Linux, you'd be able to do many things faster on Linux than on macOS. For instance, it's easier to automate tasks with shell scripts in Linux than to attempt the same with osascript.
I use macOS only when I'm forced to - because the absolute fundamentals are broken. Finder is unbelievably bad compared to Nautilus, package management is terrible, limited ability to tile windows, not even a simple way to set up an Application launch shortcut out of the box (yeah, can do with Automator).
This may be true, but the article explicitly targets people moving from Mac to Linux, not people with years of Linux experience.
I’m interested why you don’t like Finder. It does the job for me. What do you think it’s missing?
Enter to rename and cmd-o to open was hard to adapt to when I moved from Windows, but it's second nature now.
* No ability to show thumbnails in folder icons
* No ability to use single click + hover to highlight
* Relative sizing feels way off - everything in Finder always seems to be simultaneously way too spaced out while also being way too small.
* Never seems to remember view preferences properly, and often defaults to confusing arrangements.
* Doesn't like to stay connected to network drives, despite any number of tricks I've tried.
* The usual cut/paste/delete operations being needlessly complicated to perform
I do prefer macOS overall, partly because I'm tired of having to constantly tweak and fix Linux whenever I try to use it as a desktop system, and because of things like iTerm2 and BetterTouchTool.
But I really hate trying to do any kind of real file management with Finder, and most third-party apps I've tried just seem to replicate everything I dislike about Finder.
But if anything, your attitude that's effectively shutting down any criticism is the problem.
Since you mentioned Dell XPS, I'm thinking they'd have sold it to you with Ubuntu 20.04. But why did you choose Wayland - which IIRC is not the default in 20.04? These are the trickiest pieces of the distro, and will take years to stabilize. Especially considering that Linux aims to work across the entire set of PCs in existence.
I upgraded to 20.04 at some point. During the six months I tried both environments. I ended up with Xorg just because it works.
So I Googled “laptops supported by Linux”. There is no official site. Ubuntu has a page. But it’s not on the first page of results. I only know about it because I’m familiar with it.
Supporters keeps arguing people should jump through hoops. I’m on Linux right now, but people have better things to do. Either provide a list so people know exactly what to buy, or all complaints are valid.
Apple sells you the whole package: take it or leave it. Windows supports everything and has their logo everywhere.
Of course, Linux doesn't quite have the mass market consumer experience you get with MacOS or Windows, but it's not exactly hard to find laptops pre-installed with Linux.
Laptops supported by Linux provides neither.
>Best Linux Laptops
>
> Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (8th Generation) Last year,
>Lenovo shocked the Linux community by announcing Linux
>laptops. ...
> Tuxedo Pulse 14 Gen 1. ...
> System76 Serval WS. ...
> Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition 2020. ...
> Purism Librem 14. ...
> System76 Galago Pro. ...
> Lenovo ThinkPad P53 Mobile Workstation. ...
> DELL Inspiron 15 3000.
>
>More items...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=Laptops+s...
A. But are they supported and is that a meaningful question? B. I am not bashing anything Linux because I don't hate it in the slightest. C. Did you read the parent I responded to? That comment makes two claims and tries to establish an analogous relation and that does not work the way the author wanted. That was also my reply.
So you missed the point of that post, you missed the point of mine and you strawmanned me :)
I don’t have to double check Apple machines. And anything with a Windows sticker works with Windows.
Some Linux distro should explicitly support some line of laptops. Literally “buy these models because we will 100% support them”.
Like PopOS from System 76?
Dell or Lenovo has international presence and if something goes wrong with the hardware, support exists.
You hold a gun in one way. If you mess that up in any fashion, you probably won't hit what you're trying to, and, worse, might shoot yourself.
Saying things like "There is no official site" is holding Linux wrong. Linux isn't an operating system. Linux is just a kernel.
So phrase your search the right way:
"laptops that support GNU/Linux installation"
You'll be surprised to find, immediately it lists a whole bunch of laptops sold with a Linux kernel on them! I don't normally use Google, but just for you, I checked on it: It even has an easy-answers page.
If you want the whole package, look up an operating system, not a kernel.
It was at this point that this troll immediately turned tasteless like chewed up sugarcane.
But that’s not what a newbie or outsider sees. And until there is the kind of assurance from some Linux distribution or whatever, all criticisms of the difficulty of getting a Linux machine running are valid.
Great, they're invalid! Off the top of my head, System76 and KDE both sell laptops running it. As both of them have distributions, and selling something is more or less as close to assurance as you can get, by your own logic here the criticisms are worthless.
I don't even care about "le Linux on the desktop meme", personally, I just find these criticisms incredibly lazy and transparently without merit.
I believe this is the main reason that OSx and even Windows are much more prevalent in company laptops that any linux distro. And I don't see this changing anytime soon. If even Ubuntu didn't make that cut I don't see which (distro) will.
Haven't tried a laptop that comes with preinstalled linux TBH. Maybe there's some light there. Dunno. But my last experience with a Thinkpad 550 and latest ubuntu was bad. As in no proper keyboard, terrible screen issues, networking issues...
Think twice before upgrading your distro.
The problem is that they successfully (and for good reason) became the de facto Desktop Linux for users who wanted a desktop and not mess with it much.
They’ve cornered that market to the point there are very few alternatives (at least very few that will come preinstalled and supported) but because they want to IPO I guess, they’ve stopped focusing on the desktop at all and instead are concentrating on server uses primarily, which leads to significant issues.
For me (using linux for 15+ years as desktop) ubuntu tends to break after only a few months. Usually complex dependencies like steam, wine or video editing stuff break first. I rarely manage to get out of a update without some dependencies breaking...
Fedora, Manjaro, Debian, ... nothing like that. Just a major stable operating system
Edit:// to clearify. I do like and use ubuntu server because its simple and well supported. I just think its mediocre as desktop OS and would recommend anyone to check Manjaro or Fedora
No, that's simply because the desktop, after all these years, still brings in little or no money - whereas server builds are used in clouds (at one point they were the most popular "cloud distro") and do make significant money through revenue-sharing agreements.
Ubuntu desktop started going downhill the minute Shuttleworth decided he'd had enough with the "generous mecenate" thing and Ubuntu should make back its costs. Since then, it's been a series of steers towards anything that could make some cash.
No tinkering required, the only change required to make it useable was to set desktop scaling for HiDPI, accessible via Displays area if the settings app. No terminal commands required.
[1] Yeah wayland is a protocol, and it already has some quite stable implementations like gnome and sway.
If we talk about tinkering for customizing your user experience then it's very empowering. You can get things to work exactly as you'd like and that is a productivity booster. (Even if it just removes frustration and friction.) Sometimes it means being able to undo the stupid decisions of the developers (e.g. GNOME) which may seem like the first category (i.e. you have to tinker just in order to get things work again as they used to), but if you are stuck on windows or osx you'd have a lot less chance to do so and you'd lot more likely just have to put up with it.
E.g. in the past 2+ decades I have to wrestle to get my desktop grid layout (3x3 desktops/workspaces) to work, because some idiot back around 2000 figured out that it's "not the right metaphor" or what not and they should not be geometrically related, yadda-yadda. Since then, every major upgrade of gnome breaks the external solution I use (which is different every time). Is it frustrating? Yes. At least I know not to upgrade until I know there is a workaround again. But I can keep using it nevertheless. (I used to have a utility that provided this feature on windows. The last version I've used it on was XP and even back then it wasn't available for download anymore. I'm not sure at all if I could still use it on win10 or even win7.)
I'm using Debian and the only thing I had to do is enable non-free to get some firmwares.
Everything works 100% hassle free.
My experiences with macos were quite frustrating, specially around package management (or the lack of it), poor quality of brew packages (too many dependencies breaking stuff), constant slowdown and crashes with mildly median workload, screen artifacts around the desktop time to time, having to disable stuff to be able to change things in /usr or /etc, too many stuff eating up ram by default, etc.
Honestly don't know how people can use that and be happy.
Seriously? Why do you think Linux should work perfectly on some random machine that you installed it on? MacOS sure as hell won’t. If you don’t like the experience of doing the work to find the right hardware, distro, and customizing the setup with your favourite software then just buy a prebuilt system with everything installed. Like others have pointed out, many Linux users prefer to fully customize their setup, doing this is easier on Linux because you don’t have to hack around all of the default choices that Apple or Microsoft provide.
There are options if you really want them. Whether you like to use one is up to one's personal preference. Though, it doesn't help that way too many people who haven't used a linux laptop in recent times have strong opinions about them, as evident in this thread.
For reasons, I ended up installing Arch on the same laptop. It was your typical Arch experience, but I was able to get everything working, including fiddly stuffy like keyboard backlights, and monitor backlighting. Keyboard hardware controls all function. And this was with existing Arch packages. I didn't have to go hacking anywhere.
If I had to levy criticism, I'd say the preinstalled Linux options are at the same price point as Apple, and no where near Microsoft. Yeah, it's going to be harder to find an off-the-shelf $300 laptop with Linux preinstalled. I can say the same about a Mac too.
I acknowledged as much. However, the OP's comparison is with a Mac so I don't think discussing the cheapest approach is in the scope of the discussion.
Our family Lenovo all-in-one windows machine with its preinstalled windows: Time synchronization doesn't work. Have to set the clock manually. When logging in and if another user is logged in the start bar freezes for up to 5 minutes before it lets me do anything. All sorts of things like this. Random problems like that.
My personal Windows machine upstairs loses sound output via my monitor every time the monitor goes to sleep and wakes up. Windows just forgets that the device exists. Sometimes plugging in a headphone and then unplugging it will "remind" Windows that there's an HDMI output device, other times not.
No issues with Linux on that machine at all. Everything just works, stock Debian install. No issues with sound, only issue being that the fan is a bit loud so I had to fiddle with bios settings to get it quieter.
Windows insists on the source port of NTP to be 123, and many ISPs (like ATT) block this port. No idea why MS hasn't fixed this issue.
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/e16117c3-0...
I got the Asus 1215B with Linux, then Ubuntu decided to replace the perfectly working wlan driver with a FOSS one, except it took half an year to reach parity with the proprietary one.
Likewise, they decided to replace AMD driver with the open source one, goodbye OpenGL 4.1 now it doesn't do more than OpenGL 3.3, and hardware video decoding is still not a thing.
At the same time, the Windows DX 11 drivers shipped with the same hardware (it was Windows 7 back then), still work on Windows 10.
This kind of settled Linux on desktop for me, now it belongs to VMs, and on ChromeOS/WebOS/Android it is anyway just an implementation detail.
You don’t have to be the guinea pig, let others do it if it’s not your thing (many programmers do seem to enjoy it, and see it as a challenge).
For now fedora is on an old desktop machine with an ancient i3-2100 processor and I just ssh into it.
Intel has a random lock up in the Mesa. It had this lock up for several years. It has not been fixed. I have a 4k laptop with it, it is incredibly frustrating that I cannot use kitty or alacritty on it because of that crash.
AMD driver crashes on modern cards every few weeks.
If you want to have a "What are you talking about, it just works?" experience, you buy an NVidia card with proprietary drivers, slap X11 on it and you are off to the races. It just works (currently driving 4x 4k monitors). Last crash was about 11 months ago. The crash manifested in a freeze for about 20 seconds, followed by it recovering by itself.
OSS graphics drivers are just not as good as people claim.
Giving back to the community for something you get for _free_ is nice.
That is where I can gladly give my skills and money.
Fixing code on Internet for free ain't it.
Maybe I'm very lucky with Linux, but I don't agree that it is as bad as you are saying.
I'm sorry for you, maybe you should stay with windows indeed. :/
What I mean is more like "I would have a bad experience if I put my hand in the fire".
I edit my post to be more clear
From your friend over the wire.
Proprietary software for 1215B, e.g. Windows, is working just fine with Windows 10, even though it was originally released with Windows 7.
So we are talking about Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and several Windows 10 releases, all supporting the original Windows 7 drivers for Asus 1215B.
I have been a Linux guinea pig since Slackware 2.0 came on Linux Unleashed book, eventually one gets tired of the Linux Desktop meme.
Linux was anyway just the way I got cheap UNIX clone at home during my degree, professionally I have spent more years using commercial UNIXes.
Nowadays any POSIX clone will do the job, or as alternative we stuck the Linux kernel into a VM.
Did you installed the firmware for your WiFi card?
By the way you complain about Linux seems that you really don't like it and that nobody can convince you te opposite, but I believe that if you manage to learn the basics around it it pay off in the long run :)
> There is no way, because the only way to make it work is to dig out a pre-historic kernel from the same year Asus released 1215B with Linux support.
My dear, my first UNIX experience was with Xenix back in 1993, I also used DG/UX, Tru64, HP-UX, Aix, Solaris, Slackware, Red-Hat, Yasdril, Mandranke, SuSE, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Debian, OS, Scientific Linux.
Back in 2002 - 2003, I wrote cluster simulation software while at CERN running on Linux, followed by other examples of deployment of Linux based software into production, like Nokia's NetAct cluster monitoring platform.
I think I can manage with the basics.
I just think that those issues are relatively easy to fix and that you can still have the proprietary gpu modules to get OpenGL 4.1 back.
For the wifi to work well with the open module you could have installed the firmwares.
That's what I mean by basics, I didn't meant to put down your credentials :)
Sorry again for my poor writing
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/AMD
That hardware always felt like a throw away when it came out during the netbook boom from a decade ago.
For me Debian Testing with Gnome is being a very nice experience (enjoyable ride).
Try to not see everything as an attack against your identity, detach yourself from it and don't take yourself too seriously. Been there, done that.
Now I have a way more pleasant life experience and people takes me seriously without having me needing to assert who I am. Life is lighter now and I have more friends, people few more comfortable around me.
I'm giving this feedback because I think it will make your life better too.
Was nice to chat with you, now I'll go out for a bike ride while I still a bit of sun over here.
Happy Easter!
Sure, these are two devices I have recently used with Linux that work out of the box:
Dell XPS 13
ThinkPad T14s
Or more generally, you can extend that to any ThinkPad or Dell device without a dedicated graphics card and you will have a good Linux experience. OP somehow has issues on XPS 13, probably due to meddling with too many things. My XPS 13 (9360) has everything working out of the box with Ubuntu 20.04
A very good idea if you want to confirm just before placing an order is to google "<laptop name> Arch Linux wiki" which will take you to the Arch wiki page for that device. There you can see if there are any known compatibility issues.
The Ubuntu certified devices page is pretty good as well.
> Apple sells you the whole package: take it or leave it.
For Linux Dell and Lenovo do that too (in most regions these days).
From what I understand from the blog post, the author is expecting Linux and the software to behave the same as macOS. That is just comparing apples and oranges. If you want a system that you are used to, you should probably stick to that. As in, if macOS works for you, I see no reason you should switch to Linux. I used a Mac for ~5 years before finally giving up because I just hated the window management (among other things). But hey, that does not need to apply to everyone.
- when using external display, video tearing would be visible either on internal or external display
- Xorg doesn't really support different scaling for different displays, and Wayland has other issues
- battery life is shorter than on Windows
- graphics performance is worse, at least in Firefox/Chrome (smooth animations on Windows would be choppy on Linux)
- touchpad is not great on Windows, but it's even worse on Linux (even after fiddling with settings, and trying many solutions, using it on Windows feels better)
My experience is different from yours. With Wayland I had smoother graphics than xorg.
Battery life was stupid on Windows (~3-4 hours max, while Linux did 7-8 with moderate load). Somehow on Windows the fan would always be running even without any significant activity in Resource Monitor.
I remember playing 4K videos on Linux (Firefox though, and I only tested YouTube) without any trouble (with monitor disconnected though, due to what you described earlier).
Touchpad would work sweet on Linux but needed some tweaking on Windows (otherwise it'd 2-finger scroll too fast sometimes).
That isn't true. The X1 Carbon from 2019 didn't have a working microphone driver for over a year.
If you care about Linux you should only buy a machine with Linux preinstalled and officially supported.
This is Lenovo's list of laptops with the minimum versions of Redhat, Suse and Ubuntu they support.
https://linux-on-laptops.com/ has been around for a long time and it looks like it's still being updated. Though the official Linux-Laptop-HOWTO does need a lot of work to make it current.
System76.
Librem. https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/
I run a recent XPS Developer Edition (my second) and I've had so few issues over years. It's always seemed like a different world all users with constant issues.
Would absolutey recommend Elementary OS for Mac users switching to Linux. I moved to Arch a couple of weeks ago, but only because of combination of wanting to try Gnome 40 and wanting to run various cutting edge mobile Linux deps.
No problems with Arch either so far.
No offense but seems like even if you did find laptops with linux and pick the best one, you probably won't like it because you have already made up your mind.
What you're looking for is hardware vendors who support a Linux desktop environment on their laptops, which are not too difficult to find.
I prefer to take a hardware vendor's opinion as to whether that hardware is supported by Linux. They have some skin in the game, and have the resources to test the hardware, whereas many Linux distros will rely on user reports.
I imagine Ubuntu and Redhat have more resources to validate hardware and so those sites are likely more reliable, but once you get to niche distros YMMV on their compatibility matrices.
1. Carbon, due to it's intel chip, can not drive 4K and 2K external monitors via thunderbolt adapter.
2. I need to authorize dock (Lenovo's thunderbolt dock) after every reboot.
3. The screen tearing sucks.
4. I need to have pulse audio volume control window opened all the time, otherwise the laptop loses my external sound card after first call via browser, and I need to turn it off/on.
On my own laptop, where I installed Ubuntu, I can boot only into 5.8.0.43 kernel (the one which I initially installed). All others, that I've got via apt-get update stuck with blinking cursor at last step of boot, and it's well known problem.
The longer I'm trying to love linux for work os, the more I realize that only tool that I truly want from linux is i3. For the rest I'm happily using WSL2 on my home, and don't have choice with work.
So on next hardware refresh date I think I'll choose Mac. The supplied by job laptop config is also more performant than carbon. So, hope, I'll be able to use my monitors in native res, and not put 2K into 1920x1020 mode
VGA ftw
> screen tearing sucks
it sure does. look into your os config for a compositor or drop the following into /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-intel.conf :
> Thus enabling TearFree requires more memory and is slower (reduced throughput) and introduces a small amount of output latency, but it should not impact input latency
edit: there's also the modesetting driver + a reasonable compositor, but this can come with it's own set of bugs and issues in my experience.
But I've been doing this three steps forward, two steps back routine for like three years now. I have most things working but it has really taken the full force of my frustration with Apple to keep returning to it and making progress.
I'm an easily frustrated person and I end up with enough pain points on linux for both work and personal use that I've never managed to make the switch full time.
I had hopes that Microsoft will evolve Surface Books to normal processors, but it seems like the line is dying.
Is this a Linux only issue? I saw people reporting on Reddit that they are using 4k @ 60hz external monitors. Was thinking of getting an X1C but not if it can't do 4k
I do remember however that contrary to macos my 2012 macbook air could drive higher resolution external monitors when running linux. So I'd put this into the Thunderbolt is a hackjob on linux box.
Some non-apple laptops sometimes reduce badwidth of thunderbold 3 (e.g. in mine t490s the bandwidth is halved, just because - this is hardware, not linux).
If you're still facing this, there is UI for remembering the authorization https://christian.kellner.me/2018/04/23/the-state-of-thunder...
I'm on a AMD device right now so I can't test it myself, just sharing the link in case its useful :)
Then I swapped the Lenovo thunderbolt dock with another one at work and everything just worked fine. I run 3 monitors (2 external 2560x1440) at once, but no 4k.
Maybe it was dock firmware versions - the Lenovo dock updater software was Windows only, so I had never tried it.
Sounds is really bad
To get sound on my headphones, I need to restart pulseaudio and ALSA, and unplug and replug the headphones
Use Wayland instead of X11.
But similar story. Half-baked (or sometimes, overcooked) support, configs that we’re supposed to swap eg CapsLock with Escape not working as described or losing their effect after sleep, impossible to get my multi monitor high DPI setup to work without coloration or resolution issues, futzing around with sound and not able to get it working as hoped just like the last time I tried to do this in 2008...you know, all the things you want before you start doing actual work, but none of them function properly OOTB or, often, even after reading extensive documentation and advice.
I wish I could use i3, but my BetterTouchTool configuration gives me something that is close enough.
I might still try FreeBSD, but I totally feel twice-burned by Linux at this point.
I've tried a couple of times, but finally decided what's the point. Linux is amazing on all the servers I run and manage. It's lightweight, supported well, and does a great job. I also rarely have to tinker with it. For servers, it really does just work.
On the PC side not so much. I used to run linux in various flavors on the desktop side for years. It provided more power than windows IMO. Then OS X came out with actual unix underpinnings, a functional media system (UI, audio, video), and fully supported creative apps like Ps, MS Office, and later LR.
Against my better judgement I tried a final time move to desktop linux a couple of years ago, but multi-monitor mixes of hi and low dpi were just unworkable. I actually posted a question (it may have been here on HN - can't remember), and one of the responses was 'no one needs HiDPI screens'. Got it.
Whats so bad about finder?
MacOS is my favourite by a mile, but there are some major warts, though the finder isn’t my major gripe.
Open a folder with images. How on earth do you switch to visible thumbnails?
And more like that.
These things should be intuitive and easy to do.
It's really easy, or am I misunderstanding you? View -> as Icons. It even has a keyboard shortcut. Or press space bar while with the file selected.
One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that people don’t seem to bother to look at the menus anymore: one of the first things I’ve always done with a new application (ever since Windows 3.1 on a Pentium 90) is open the menus and skim the menu items to figure out the basic functionality available.
My experience is the other way round: it took me several minutes and much frustration to find a way to type a folder address in Finder.
CLI makes it better and if more graphical view is required then Midnight Commander on Linux/Mac or Total Commander on windows.
More about finder - why it doesn't show the whole path? It is like it was intentionally made not to trouble people with filesystems.
The tabs. First of all, they're Safari-style tabs and Safari has awful tabs. And then there's a preference called "open folders in new tabs instead of windows". Open up a Finder window, open Terminal and run `open /path/to/directory`. What happens? Directory opens in a new Finder window.
There's no way to have Finder remember what size a window should be. There's a bunch of tricks that people post online of how you can have Finder remember a window size but they don't work. It might register it on a folder-level but then you run `open /path/to/directory` and it opens up a postage stamp sized window (even though it should open a tab).
And where the hell is cut and paste?
It's a bit embarrassing that Apple doesn't support an entry-level feature like that, but otherwise Finder has been steadily improving for the past few years.
For automating tasks on macOS you can look at something like hammerspoon which is really cool (though I mostly use it to modify some of the macOS keybindings which I find ridiculous) [1].
Finder is crap, I agree. But then again, I'm mostly in the terminal, so I don't care much. I would however complain that the default terminal on macOS is really not very good and I always install iTerm2... most Linux distros seem to have a better terminal pre-installed.
Package manager is better on Linux for system packages, applications, etc. (in fact, such a thing doesn't really exist on macOS, save for maybe homebrew cask, but that has problems). However, dev packages are tricky on Linux, too. Generally, for dev packages I might want to have a) a very specific (and often the latest) version of something, and b) often multiple versions installed separately. Additionally, on most Linux distros you can't install without root. On a Linux machine, I mostly have to install such tools in addition to my package managed libraries and apps, on macOS I can typically just "brew install rbenv" or so (though homebrew has its own share of problems).
In general I would say that macOS makes it slightly easier to do things sort-of reasonably well for default flows but can break down quickly once you want something more custom. With Linux, while it has become a lot (!) better in the last 15 years or so, I still occasionally need to debug some audio problem or so. The upside is that problems on Linux are generally solvable (although, in some instances it can be hard to figure out exactly how). If your macOS does something that is weird or buggy (e.g.: before the update to big sur I had the annoying issue that my system would go into DND mode after every restart, which is really not good if you don't want to miss notifications), then you're out of luck and there's nothing you can do.
[1]: https://www.hammerspoon.org/
Apple’s terminal is one of the very few that passes the VT torture test and has support for double width and height attributes. Sadly, it doesn’t do overlines and doesn’t italicise my terminal font.
And the line height -- it could be font, it could be terminal, I didn't investigate (it is DejaVu Sans Mono for Powerline).
I haven't found a Linux terminal that is as good as iTerm, in terms of features. Any recommendations?
for my needs, gnome-terminal seems to be enough, although it might not have all the features that iTerm has
This might be the best recent overview of some of the pros and cons between some of the different options: https://anarc.at/blog/2018-04-12-terminal-emulators-1/
This is unfortunately every experience I’ve had with Linux on native hardware to some capacity in the last 24 years of using it other than dumb headless servers. So I use windows as the native OS and virtualise anything else.
And the minute I did software update there, everything broke. (Because it was using some binary graphic driver that broke with newer kernel.)
I could not even use the computer after that, only the console. I needed to reinstall old ubuntu in order to get my data.
Never again
Well, if that’s the argument, I want to see this device that’s guaranteed to not break.
> For instance, it's easier to automate tasks with shell scripts in Linux than to attempt the same with osascript.
macOS is a Unix, so you can obviously automate it via shell scripts. `osascript` is just an additional option?
Are you talking about automating UI tasks in linux? Nearly all of my linux shell scripts work fine on macOS and vice versa unless they are using something OS specific.
While not perfect, with macOS I get a large majority of what makes Unix nice while also avoiding the UI annoyances. Using macOS also tends to give more software options over unix/linux alone, like PS, LR, the Affinity toolset, etc...
I paid $600 for laptop and $150 for RAM and SSD upgrades. Comparable Macbook Air would cost $2000 for me.
It does have terrible TN screen, cheap touchpad and bad keyboard layout. That's good enough for me, as I prefer external everything in day-to-day use.
I bought a Lenovo specifically since they mentioned all their laptops will support Linux in the future.
Note that historically Lenovo didn't really "support" Linux. Remember the Windows tax and how most Thinkpads came with Windows and most still do? Thinkpads supported Linux in spite of Lenovo / IBM.
Anyhoo, my new Lenovo had to wait a few months until the trackpad worked! Turns out Lenovo only meant that business laptops (or some other sub-category) will support Linux out of the box. Silly me.