Does Unity make me want to buy hardware that's hard to upgrade (save for buying a whole new machine) and make me want to abandon a host of software that I use regularly?
Nope.
edit:
I very much enjoy using some proprietary software though. Windows 8, SublimeText, etc. If people want that kind of proprietary support for their Linux-like environment, it certainly seems like OSX is the only real solution atm, especially for people who can't be bothered to go do everything themselves (like me).
I know some people might brand people who pay for software as "casual scum" and whatnot, but I'm willing to trade my money for time and ease of use. I didn't mean to be a dick to the OP and certainly can understand why he would move away from a platform.
However, not going to Debian/Mint/any other alternative and just choosing to dump thousands of dollars for a new environment is something I would not do personally.
I don't think it is. Its about the entire environment - note how he talked about backups, printers, trying in Gnome, etc. I don't think he's saying Ubuntu is bad, but its nothing like the polished experience of a Mac. (FYI: I used debian from 2001, Ubuntu from 2005 after briefly trying Gentoo, and switched to Mac in 2011).
> However, not going to Debian/Mint/any other alternative and just choosing to dump thousands of dollars for a new environment is something I would not do personally.
Here's the thing - that's what everybody said. You know all those Macbooks you see developers with - they all dumped something to get there, mostly Ubuntu and Windows. The entire developer ecosystem dumped thousands of dollars of working hardware and poor OSes because Macs are really that much better.
I did. Work bought me a Mac. I also bought a personal machine for myself because I liked the idea of being a single-OS kind of guy. A year later I actually switched to using Windows 7 at work because I hated Mac OS so much and I switched back to Linux at home after a couple months.
I use Mint these days. Linux lets me get shit done, that's why I use it. I honestly don't know how people can stand using a Mac for "real work". I guess I feel the same way about Linux that you feel about Mac OS, Different strokes for different folks or something like that I suppose.
> I honestly don't know how people can stand using a Mac for "real work".
I live in a terminal (aside: iTerm2 is head and shoulders better than anything I've found on Linux), Photoshop, Xcode and IntelliJ when working--and when not working, literally-literally everything just works without me putting an ounce of effort into making it work. So that's why.
I can be productive on Linux, but spending more than five minutes setting up my environment just starts making me frustrated. (I have a four-monitor desktop, two-GPU that choked on Ubuntu 12.04; I spent a week on trying to get Ubuntu working, gave up, Hackintoshed the thing, and had it running perfectly within two hours.)
Sorry, I tend to be lazy and just group the whole Ubuntu environment UX as "Unity"
I do own an iPad and Mac Mini that I received as gifts, but I find them pretty unbearable to use outside of specific tasks (i.e. watching Youtube videos).
There is some OSX software that I like, such as Adium, SublimeText, and the default screencap tool, but I find the environment kind of annoying to work with and have a much easier time with Windows 7/8.
Overall, I give up just too much convenience and software (like MPC-HC, video games, driver support for appliances and game controllers, easy win-key + P,arrow keys,D,E,R,C,X) to be able to switch to OSX. Also that I value being able to swap out hardware and paying less for hardware in general (even if Macs often have sleek cases).
I know lots of developers who run linux on their macs. Many developers I know also switched to using linux virtual machines for serious development because dealing with the flustercuck of osx package management is too much.
I really want to switch back too, after 10 years of using osx primarily.
Have you tried homebrew? I agree that macports and fink suck, and homebrew had some problems when it started, but it has since matured into a wonderful package manager IMO, and I significantly prefer it to apt.
Though there is usually a counterpoint to most individual points, I found that my perception changed much in the same way. Like the author, I couldn't even grasp the idea of how people were giving up so much control of their devices / computers.
The irony is that given the amount of spyware/crapware on Windows and foisted upon you when using Android, I actually feel more 'in control' of my computing experience than I ever did before.
The major thing that helped me take the jump was the presence of macports or homebrew - I love having a ton of open source software available on my Mac within essentially one command.
I had the exact same experience. One thing not mentioned are the Mac applications you can get, such as 1password, SizeUp, Sparrow etc. - those Apps are 50% of the pleasure of owning a Mac, in my opinion.
The other day I wanted to make some professional voice-over tutorials and I went to our local music store and bought a 400$ microphone and I was surprised when the guy in the store recommended Garageband for recording. But he was right. It is indeed a excellent piece of software.
You should give debian stable a try, I never get any errors... ever. Of course I've already decided on what window manager, browser/etc/customizations I want.
Of course, xmonad+dmenu+debian stable is quite a bit different from Mac OSX. If you are only worried about productivity though, it's hard to beat.
Yeah, me too. In a sense, I miss running stock Ubuntu, but it stopped making me happy and Cinnamon was my fix. Unfortunately, last time I checked several months ago, Cinnamon only reliably works as packaged with Mint, and becomes bugtastic when installed on Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.
I don't have major issues with Linux. I've had a few teething problems with new hardware and occasionally there's a surprise, but nothing like the author described. In fact, for me, GNU/Linux is more of a pleasure to run than any other operating system I've used, including OS X. Having said that, I had major issues with Linux when I tried to make it my primary OS for the first time in 2006 and can empathize with the author of this article. I had such a bad experience that I went back to Windows XP and didn't make the full switch until early 2010; I haven't looked back since.
If anything, this article is a call to action to improve desktop Linux. We're all aware of the second class nature of consumer vendor support, and there are a lot of native apps that don't compare to their OS X or Windows counterparts, both in functionality and aesthetics. (GIMP comes to mind. It's ok, but it's nowhere near as capable as the current version of Photoshop.)
Indeed I have and used it pretty much from the time Unity became mandatory up until Cinnamon became stable enough to use day-to-day. I do like Xfce more than Unity, but not enough to keep using it. I actually really quite love Cinnamon and Mint in general, although it could do with a lot of polish, especially the default login manager which isn't the best. mint-update is very buggy too and half the time just doesn't work. Overall though, it's a happy experience and it looks better to me too.
ubuntu server. you get all of the core competencies of ubuntu without any imposition of UI. you can install a wm easily post-install without the tweaking required to get stock desktop ubuntu to use an alternate wm
They are definitely no longer catering to devs. It would be good for them if the advanced user UI aspects got well covered by 3rd party add-ons. They also need to have tools like Disk Utility catch up to new features like Core Storage, so that things that seem like common operations are well covered like in the old days.
I think the ability to fix it is key, yes it should "just work" but what about when it "just doesn't"? Being able to modify the OS, GUI or any part of my system is useful.
I'm more impressed by an OS that can run on any hardware than an OS that needs specific hardware.
I use Mac, Linux and Windows but to me lack of choice in OS or ability to modify anything isn't a good feature or one to boast about.
I agree that Ubuntu is pretty much ruined after version 10.10 or so, but I just got a MBP Retina when I started a new job last July and wish I'd gone with something that could run linux.
He describes a seamless, responsive experience but I feel neutered AND I've had numerous unexplained crashes, application incompatibility and (by far the worst) ... I can't find substitutes for all the applications I rely on.
I'm not willing to call it bad, and certainly not unusable, but it's also not the paradise he's describing.
Executive summary: If you're going to be a power user on a consumer OS, you're going to have issues that require the brains that make you a power user.
Touchpad support is the big blocker for me. It does support some of the gestures, but the whole experience is sub-par compared to what we were spoiled with on Mac OS. Movement and acceleration is weird, the ignoring of "accidental" contact doesn't always work well, and some gestures take a few attempts to register.
If they could just nail this down, I'd never boot Mac OS again on my MBP.
The large number of pixels on the Retina display (well ... I have it attached to a Thunderbolt monitor too). Ubuntu 13.04 claims they'll support the MBP Retina, but I've already said I want to avoid Unity. I guess that means the drivers are available though. If I was choosing now, I'd probably go for the upgraded Lenovo X1 Carbon (or maybe the 230 ... my son's favorite).
But I also admitted it's usable, so I'll live with it for a couple years.
I have been really unimpressed with the direction of Mac OS the last few releases. The desktop environment is attractive to look at, but I find it somewhat sluggish and moody (don't you show me that dreaded beachball!). 10.6 is the last release I really enjoyed. The next two have been disappointing. It's obvious that Mac OS is no longer Apple's priority.
I dual-booted Arch for a time on my Macbook and was just blown away at the difference in responsiveness. I also had the familiar ease of maintaining/installing/updating/changing my development tools instead of dealing with brew or Macports and XCode.
The thing that prevented me from running Linux on this MBP full time is the less-than-stellar Mac touchpad gesture support. I do think Mac OS nailed gestures and touchpad interaction.
If your Mac is sluggish, you frequently see the dreaded beachball and get warning dialogs about low disk space:
"The core issue seems to be that the virtual memory manager is bad at managing which pages should be freed from the inactive state and which ones should be paged out to disk (and, consequently, back from disk)."
The fact that you even have to do something like this to attempt to get decent performance illustrates my point. Not to mention that this may cause issues if you are RAM-constrained.
It just seems like some engineering effort could be spent to improve this, but it's sucked for the last two Mac OS releases.
"I agree that Ubuntu is pretty much ruined after version 10.10 or so..."
Try CentOS /Scientific Linux/Springdale Linux 6.3 in a VM or booting a live version off a USB. You may be surprised. Same apps/kernel family as 10.04 and support until 2017.
Yes! ... All my VMs at work are RHEL, so I'm moving towards CentOS for my personal stuff. I'm also wondering why Ubuntu never created something like Kickstart (or adopted it). Managing machines with Cobbler/Ansible is very nice!
Reading this from an Arch Linux machine with everything configured to my liking from the system initialisation to package management to window management to terminal emulators feels very strange. Why would I ever want to give up knowing exactly what buttons to press to make my system behave the way I want it to?
The problem is probably: "Googling for some obscure mail archive to find I need to change “bop” to “boop” in /etc/something/config.ini. The amount of time that I had to spend doing this crap was growing instead of shrinking."
If you take the time and patience to understand your system and sift through man pages, configuration time will obviously shrink. If it's growing it's because you've never sat down to truly understand the cogs and screws of your system.
On the other hand, not everyone wants to read man pages, they'd rather something that "just works"... which Mac does way better than Ubuntu, unsurprisingly.
“If you take the time and patience to understand your system and sift through man pages, configuration time will obviously shrink. If it's growing it's because you've never sat down to truly understand the cogs and screws of your system.”
That's a very big “if”. The author said “I was tired of spending time on my computer working on my operating system instead of working on my projects.”
I think he could have taken the time he wasted Googling for duct-tape solutions and used it to read deeper documentation. Then, he wouldn't be so tired. Nonetheless, he wanted something that just worked, which Ubuntu didn't; so the take-away from all this is that Ubuntu is just not such a "consumer friendly" distribution after all. Linux is Linux... it has its roots in a community of hackers that build for hackers... it's hard to escape that ><
Of course it's not a good thing... If you want to hack on your system only to find out that it's all been prepackaged and filled with bells and whistles that can't be removed, there ain't much hacking you can do!
There are many reasons I'd love to be using a Gnu/Linux system over a Mac but I fiercely, passionately and vehemently don't want to be reading man pages and editing config files to get my damn hardware to work. Too old for that shit.
Agreed. I had heard so many stories of Arch being only for experts, difficult to figure out, having to do everything yourself, etc. Then I discovered the Arch wiki and tried it out for myself. The documentation is incredible. Even my specific brand of laptop has its own page with a few common hardware issues and steps to resolve them.
Ubuntu's supposed to "just work," but when it doesn't, you're screwed. Arch "just works" because a very knowledgeable community has probably been through what you're going through and took the time to write down what worked.
Eh, it is so easy to forget to set something up on Arch and scratch your head all the time to figure out what it was. Things that start working on Ubuntu fail rarely.
Arch Wiki is the best! I use it to set up stuff on my Ubuntu computer, sometimes. The thing is, Ubuntu already does most of the stuff from the Arch Wiki automatically.
> If you take the time and patience to understand your system and sift through man pages, configuration time will obviously shrink. If it's growing it's because you've never sat down to truly understand the cogs and screws of your system.
I was doing this back in 1994-1999, while I was a single geek guy with lots of free time at the university. Nowadays I have better things to do with my life.
Either a distribution works out of the box in a given hardware or it lands in the dustbin.
I was a Slackware and BSD user from 1994 to ~2007 (with some Libranet and CentOS in between). I knew Slackware and NetBSD inside out[1].
Why would I ever want to give up knowing exactly what buttons to press to make my system behave the way I want it to?
For me, I just did not have the time anymore. I was fed up with getting audio to behave consistently, compiling libdvdcss after every upgrade to be able to play DVDs, the Word and PowerPoint that people sent me and came out misformatted, overhauls of desktop environments, rewritten device management infrastructure (hotplug / devd -> udev), hand-mounting of encrypted disk images because it was broken in the desktop environment again and the list goes on and on.
I decided that my time was worth more than the 499 Euro for a Mac Mini (in 2007) and I never really looked back.
This is where I'm at now. I love Linux distros for servers, but I've been essentially fighting with desktop versions of Ubuntu/#!/Mint/etc for 4 years and I'm tired of it. It was fun, but it's no longer fun and I want my computer to get out of my way and let me get stuff done.
I loved Arch, but I recently bought my Mac after USB keyboards and mice stopped working on my arch box after a `pacman -syu`. I spent a week trying to figure it out, essentially putting me a week behind on the project I was working on. Decided that it'd just be cheaper to get a Mac. :(
I keep using Linux because it has a real file system, fails less often, and feels faster (maybe because of a better scheduler), but the blog writer has a point.
Documentation on Linux is sparse and incomplete. You talk about man pages: more often than not, I am looking for some feature and cannot find it in the man page. At the end, though, I see the following:
> The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead.
Guess what? The feature was in the info page. And that's when things are good, because sometimes the info page doesn't exist.
Since each component has its own conceptual model (and config file format), configuring one system gives you little information about how you would go about configuring another system. You often end up with contradicting config instructions in different files, and knowing which takes precedence is impossible, unless you are the developer (and even then…)
As a result, you can't just sit down and learn everything, even if the documentation was there. You can't drink the ocean: it never ends.
All of that would not be an issue at all if we had a way to automate the annoying parts:
- A way to search through all configuration files, a way to search through all documentation on all systems.
(I can't believe that Googling it is usually better than searching through installed documentation!)
- A better package management than dpkg / apt. This system gets old fast.
Conflict resolution is awkward, big updates can break things.
Projects such as Nix and its spiritual successor Guix make me hopeful,
but will it ever displace the elephant in the room?
It's particularly painful to watch from my node.js background. Never had a single issue with npm.
Apple's OS is lacking on both front (and the author will soon realize that, at least once he installs Homebrew and fiddles with BSD's lesser set of tools).
The only praise I can make is its standardized plist configuration system,
which is awkward to use and which most cross-platform programs ignore anyway.
However, Apple feels better because its defaults are amazing.
For instance, I tried to install NVIDIA's proprietary drivers today, because Nouveau only goes so far.
Installing it was easy; debugging it was so hard that switching back to a lower standard (Nouveau) was the best option.
Apple has the better option in by default.
This resonated with me - when I am at the computer I just want to get things done - not spend billable time working out why xrandr is not giving the output I need.
I have worked on a FreeBSD machine for years and am now heading to a Debian box - I have been down this route before sadly - but I jus can no longer afford the time to setup and run a box that takes real effort to setup.
I may give virtualised machines one more shot but really I do just want it to work.
I don't see why everyone feels the need to constantly throw their own opinions and use cases in for why one OS is better than another. If Ubuntu doesn't fit your needs and Mac does... good. Don't see why stuff like this gets so many upvotes though.
Though I understand the frustration that linux can provide at times, its a direct consequence of the freedom it gives you. Don't like unity. Sure, use xfce, or xmonad if that's your thing.
The only problem I have with this is that (and I say this as an Apple user) it is becoming clearer and clearer that Apple is pushing their desktops to be a good experience for people that don't know how to use computers, which (so far and IMO) caused a poor experience for people that do know how to use their computers.
The experience on Mountain Lion is irritating enough for me that I am considering switching back to Linux (it works fine on my old laptop, even wireless). My current laptop is still running Snow Leopard and I think their next update will determine if I ever purchase another Apple computer again.
May I humbly suggest Linux Mint? I had all the same problems as you and I made the switch a couple months ago and could not be happier. It's been more stable, the monitor config is better, the UI is way better than unity IMHO. Also my laptop is running way faster, I'm pretty sure the switch freed up 250mb of ram.
Anyway I've also been eying a Mac, but running Mint has been making it really hard to justify buying one.
I'm actually pretty much in the same place. I spend most of my time in front of windows and all I can say is that it is the spawn of hell. When it works, it works pretty well but if something goes wrong you're going to lose half a day to it easily. For example recently we had a client who couldn't download a document in their IE8 on Windows XP due to a cache control bug. It took literally hours to find the issue and get a resolution (which involved setting an undocumented registry flag to an undocumented hex value) and having to issue a group policy update to about 5000 people.
Same with Ubuntu although to be honest it just doesn't work properly, ever. Nothing whatsoever ever does what you tell it and it's a shit to maintain. I'm stuck with two LTS 10.04 machines and there is no long term support - they've shipped a broken MySQL version for 2 years. It's so reliable they turned off hibernate! Launchpad is like an arid desert when it comes to support. We even had paid support from Canonical and it was shit. All out Linux stuff is on debian now.
I've owned a few Macs as well and they've been the most hassle free devices so far although I've had some serious hardware problems such as a 2010 MBP catch fire on me. Before it caught fire, it was the only machine I didn't have to wait for all the time or argue with.
I now reside on a windows 7 x64 on a ThinkPad t61 with virtualbox running debian for dev work.
Persuade me to buy another Mac! What has changed in the last 2 years?
The rise of the SSD should convince you. What was a good system is now an excellent system - OSX benefits hugely from the extra speed. Fusion drive is that much better - it really is the size of a spindle with the speed of a solid-state drive.
I've used both Windows and Linux for work before, and Mac is the only setup that's saved me time instead of wasting it. I found it worth getting used to.
Very similar experience here. Got a MBP for work in 2011 - never looked back, it just works and lets me get to work. The amount of time I need to spend tinkering with this is just tiny!
Also, it really feels like Homebrew is a better apt than apt ever was!
he is holding ubuntu to a different standard. he expects ubuntu to install on arbitrary hw, but he's willing to buy a dedicated "just works" device for osx. well, they do sell these for ubuntu as well.
no linux distro will install on arbitrary hw. nor will osx.
I bought a Mac in 2011 my first ever after about 18 years of Windows PCs which included about 17 years of Linux. I still use both, I even have Windows 8 and Ubuntu 12.10 with Unity.
Macs can be infuriating with some quirks such as no true delete key only backspace which for ex-PC users is labeled "delete". (Yes I know fn+delete=PC style delete).
On a Mac you click a file to highlight it then press delete key gets? Nothing. The intuitive reaction would be it deletes the highlighted file, nope. Sure command+delete but a mouse click and then two keys really? Very inefficient.
Transferring files to a USB stick such as an mkv refuses to move. Lots of space HFS, FAT32 or NTFS formatted? Nope, won't move.
I'm using Ubuntu, and I have to say Mac's are very alluring. It's a *NIX operating system that's actually smooth and works without constant bugs.
I love Ubuntu but it can be incredibly frustrating. Every day single time I connect to wifi or ethernet I get system errors. Slowdowns, especially with the unity dash, are so frequent that I simply don't use it. I know where all my files are so I usually just open a Terminal and run nautilus to the directory I want. If I can get away with it I run software from the terminal, or else I have it on the dock and remember the keyboard shortcut.
When I think about it, I never use any of the fancy gui. I don't use the open window viewer, or the worspace switcher, and, as I said, I try my best to just hide the dock and remember the keyboard shortcuts.
Yeah, the whole X + Unity stack is mind-bogglingly complex, and nvidia is a pain. Their driver is proprietary, so you have to use all of their custom configuration tools to make everything work, and whoopdedoo, their configuration tools are crap.
It took me about two hours to set up XMonad, and about an hour to tweak it to my liking. I haven't touched it in a year. AND since its configuration is stored in a file in my home directory like everything else, and not some random keys in gconf, I can link it into my Dropbox, and persist it across reinstalls. I've switched computers twice - it takes me about an hour to set up my whole environment.
>> Yeah, the whole X + Unity stack is mind-bogglingly complex, and nvidia is a pain. Their driver is proprietary, so you have to use all of their custom configuration tools to make everything work, and whoopdedoo, their configuration tools are crap.
I've used their proprietary driver now for years and on several different cards including one of the newest top of the line cards right now. They work great and deserve a lot of credit for their drivers, hardware and the configuration utilities.
A guy with some hardware with closed source drivers complains that it doesn't work in Ubuntu. Instead of learning the lesson and checking for compatibility or just replacing his $10 USB WiFi stick, goes and spends ›$1000 in a Macbook and hails the nice experience of having everything working.
And that's why i love Debian, the interface might look old and it doesn't have that eye candy look Ubuntu does, however i had zero issues with stability & bugs for the past 3-4 years. Its being said again and again but people still do the same fault, being on Ubuntu is being on the bleeding edge, and although its appealing and 'looks good, feels good, you got the latest version in programs and what not' it gonna bite you in the ass sooner or later.
They are some valid points on the article, for example i also used to face some trouble on my old computer when it came to wireless connectivity, or my old Lexmark printer wouldn't work with Debian or any Linux brand no matter what. HOWEVER those issues can't really be blamed on Linux (as the author tries to) but on the hardware vendors. That's why the next time i got a printer i choose a vendor who did support Linux, same goes for the wifi card of my new laptop which worked just fine also.
Debian is a good choice (I use it as my main OS), but I think the key is to choose one Linux distribution - preferably one run by an open-source community and not by a company - and spend some time using it as your only OS and learn how to fix the most common issues.
It helps if you know other people that use that distribution: that way you can ask each-other for advice when something doesn't work as you'd like it. Alternatively one can join a user's mailing list / IRC chat room, most distributions have one.
But even if your choice turns out to be wrong (i.e. Ubuntu) the solution is not to abandon Linux completely.
In fact I couldn't imagine being able to work on anything else than Linux these days, I just depend too much on it: from a working valgrind tool, to having the source code for the entire OS.
> When I’m at a computer, its because I want to get things
> done. Gone are the days where I have time to tinker around
> and spend countless hours Googling for some obscure mail
> archive to find I need to change “bop” to “boop” in
> /etc/something/config.ini.
This was what moved me to the Mac too, and it's important to note that it's something that doesn't negate the years spent doing that investigative work of finding what to change to what. Those were extremely valuable, and they're the reason I can find my way around a Linux server faster than a lot of people. But, the day came when I was less interested in tinkering with the OS and more interested in tinkering with other stuff. It was probably around a point in the learning curve where learning wasn't happening as quickly, so it wasn't as interesting when something went wrong because I was less likely to learn something new and just as likely to be frustrated. So, I switched.
<blockquote>I actually moved my PC onto my desk instead of on the floor because I got sick of bending over to take care of this. </blockquote>
That reminds me something for sure... :-)
131 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadYep.
Does Unity make me want to buy hardware that's hard to upgrade (save for buying a whole new machine) and make me want to abandon a host of software that I use regularly?
Nope.
edit: I very much enjoy using some proprietary software though. Windows 8, SublimeText, etc. If people want that kind of proprietary support for their Linux-like environment, it certainly seems like OSX is the only real solution atm, especially for people who can't be bothered to go do everything themselves (like me).
I know some people might brand people who pay for software as "casual scum" and whatnot, but I'm willing to trade my money for time and ease of use. I didn't mean to be a dick to the OP and certainly can understand why he would move away from a platform.
However, not going to Debian/Mint/any other alternative and just choosing to dump thousands of dollars for a new environment is something I would not do personally.
I don't think it is. Its about the entire environment - note how he talked about backups, printers, trying in Gnome, etc. I don't think he's saying Ubuntu is bad, but its nothing like the polished experience of a Mac. (FYI: I used debian from 2001, Ubuntu from 2005 after briefly trying Gentoo, and switched to Mac in 2011).
> However, not going to Debian/Mint/any other alternative and just choosing to dump thousands of dollars for a new environment is something I would not do personally.
Here's the thing - that's what everybody said. You know all those Macbooks you see developers with - they all dumped something to get there, mostly Ubuntu and Windows. The entire developer ecosystem dumped thousands of dollars of working hardware and poor OSes because Macs are really that much better.
Try it! Honestly - you will not look back.
I use Mint these days. Linux lets me get shit done, that's why I use it. I honestly don't know how people can stand using a Mac for "real work". I guess I feel the same way about Linux that you feel about Mac OS, Different strokes for different folks or something like that I suppose.
I live in a terminal (aside: iTerm2 is head and shoulders better than anything I've found on Linux), Photoshop, Xcode and IntelliJ when working--and when not working, literally-literally everything just works without me putting an ounce of effort into making it work. So that's why.
I can be productive on Linux, but spending more than five minutes setting up my environment just starts making me frustrated. (I have a four-monitor desktop, two-GPU that choked on Ubuntu 12.04; I spent a week on trying to get Ubuntu working, gave up, Hackintoshed the thing, and had it running perfectly within two hours.)
I do own an iPad and Mac Mini that I received as gifts, but I find them pretty unbearable to use outside of specific tasks (i.e. watching Youtube videos).
There is some OSX software that I like, such as Adium, SublimeText, and the default screencap tool, but I find the environment kind of annoying to work with and have a much easier time with Windows 7/8.
Overall, I give up just too much convenience and software (like MPC-HC, video games, driver support for appliances and game controllers, easy win-key + P,arrow keys,D,E,R,C,X) to be able to switch to OSX. Also that I value being able to swap out hardware and paying less for hardware in general (even if Macs often have sleek cases).
I know lots of developers who run linux on their macs. Many developers I know also switched to using linux virtual machines for serious development because dealing with the flustercuck of osx package management is too much.
I really want to switch back too, after 10 years of using osx primarily.
The irony is that given the amount of spyware/crapware on Windows and foisted upon you when using Android, I actually feel more 'in control' of my computing experience than I ever did before.
The major thing that helped me take the jump was the presence of macports or homebrew - I love having a ton of open source software available on my Mac within essentially one command.
The other day I wanted to make some professional voice-over tutorials and I went to our local music store and bought a 400$ microphone and I was surprised when the guy in the store recommended Garageband for recording. But he was right. It is indeed a excellent piece of software.
Of course, xmonad+dmenu+debian stable is quite a bit different from Mac OSX. If you are only worried about productivity though, it's hard to beat.
I don't have major issues with Linux. I've had a few teething problems with new hardware and occasionally there's a surprise, but nothing like the author described. In fact, for me, GNU/Linux is more of a pleasure to run than any other operating system I've used, including OS X. Having said that, I had major issues with Linux when I tried to make it my primary OS for the first time in 2006 and can empathize with the author of this article. I had such a bad experience that I went back to Windows XP and didn't make the full switch until early 2010; I haven't looked back since.
If anything, this article is a call to action to improve desktop Linux. We're all aware of the second class nature of consumer vendor support, and there are a lot of native apps that don't compare to their OS X or Windows counterparts, both in functionality and aesthetics. (GIMP comes to mind. It's ok, but it's nowhere near as capable as the current version of Photoshop.)
Thinkpads have better battery life/build quality, but Ideapads have better specs for the price.
I'm more impressed by an OS that can run on any hardware than an OS that needs specific hardware.
I use Mac, Linux and Windows but to me lack of choice in OS or ability to modify anything isn't a good feature or one to boast about.
He describes a seamless, responsive experience but I feel neutered AND I've had numerous unexplained crashes, application incompatibility and (by far the worst) ... I can't find substitutes for all the applications I rely on.
I'm not willing to call it bad, and certainly not unusable, but it's also not the paradise he's describing.
Executive summary: If you're going to be a power user on a consumer OS, you're going to have issues that require the brains that make you a power user.
If they could just nail this down, I'd never boot Mac OS again on my MBP.
There's something in the wiki but I have no mac, so I don't know what I'm talking about: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook#Touchpad
But I also admitted it's usable, so I'll live with it for a couple years.
I dual-booted Arch for a time on my Macbook and was just blown away at the difference in responsiveness. I also had the familiar ease of maintaining/installing/updating/changing my development tools instead of dealing with brew or Macports and XCode.
The thing that prevented me from running Linux on this MBP full time is the less-than-stellar Mac touchpad gesture support. I do think Mac OS nailed gestures and touchpad interaction.
"The core issue seems to be that the virtual memory manager is bad at managing which pages should be freed from the inactive state and which ones should be paged out to disk (and, consequently, back from disk)."
http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-de...
It just seems like some engineering effort could be spent to improve this, but it's sucked for the last two Mac OS releases.
Try CentOS /Scientific Linux/Springdale Linux 6.3 in a VM or booting a live version off a USB. You may be surprised. Same apps/kernel family as 10.04 and support until 2017.
The problem is probably: "Googling for some obscure mail archive to find I need to change “bop” to “boop” in /etc/something/config.ini. The amount of time that I had to spend doing this crap was growing instead of shrinking."
If you take the time and patience to understand your system and sift through man pages, configuration time will obviously shrink. If it's growing it's because you've never sat down to truly understand the cogs and screws of your system.
On the other hand, not everyone wants to read man pages, they'd rather something that "just works"... which Mac does way better than Ubuntu, unsurprisingly.
That's a very big “if”. The author said “I was tired of spending time on my computer working on my operating system instead of working on my projects.”
Arch Wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wireless_Setup
I don't know about others but for me one of the above is clearly superior and really the biggest reason for it being my OS of choice.
Ubuntu's supposed to "just work," but when it doesn't, you're screwed. Arch "just works" because a very knowledgeable community has probably been through what you're going through and took the time to write down what worked.
I was doing this back in 1994-1999, while I was a single geek guy with lots of free time at the university. Nowadays I have better things to do with my life.
Either a distribution works out of the box in a given hardware or it lands in the dustbin.
Why would I ever want to give up knowing exactly what buttons to press to make my system behave the way I want it to?
For me, I just did not have the time anymore. I was fed up with getting audio to behave consistently, compiling libdvdcss after every upgrade to be able to play DVDs, the Word and PowerPoint that people sent me and came out misformatted, overhauls of desktop environments, rewritten device management infrastructure (hotplug / devd -> udev), hand-mounting of encrypted disk images because it was broken in the desktop environment again and the list goes on and on.
I decided that my time was worth more than the 499 Euro for a Mac Mini (in 2007) and I never really looked back.
[1] I wrote this book: http://rlworkman.net/howtos/slackbasics.pdf
Documentation on Linux is sparse and incomplete. You talk about man pages: more often than not, I am looking for some feature and cannot find it in the man page. At the end, though, I see the following:
> The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead.
Guess what? The feature was in the info page. And that's when things are good, because sometimes the info page doesn't exist.
Since each component has its own conceptual model (and config file format), configuring one system gives you little information about how you would go about configuring another system. You often end up with contradicting config instructions in different files, and knowing which takes precedence is impossible, unless you are the developer (and even then…) As a result, you can't just sit down and learn everything, even if the documentation was there. You can't drink the ocean: it never ends.
All of that would not be an issue at all if we had a way to automate the annoying parts:
- A way to search through all configuration files, a way to search through all documentation on all systems. (I can't believe that Googling it is usually better than searching through installed documentation!)
- A better package management than dpkg / apt. This system gets old fast. Conflict resolution is awkward, big updates can break things. Projects such as Nix and its spiritual successor Guix make me hopeful, but will it ever displace the elephant in the room? It's particularly painful to watch from my node.js background. Never had a single issue with npm.
Apple's OS is lacking on both front (and the author will soon realize that, at least once he installs Homebrew and fiddles with BSD's lesser set of tools). The only praise I can make is its standardized plist configuration system, which is awkward to use and which most cross-platform programs ignore anyway. However, Apple feels better because its defaults are amazing. For instance, I tried to install NVIDIA's proprietary drivers today, because Nouveau only goes so far. Installing it was easy; debugging it was so hard that switching back to a lower standard (Nouveau) was the best option. Apple has the better option in by default.
When there are literally hundreds of buttons available to press or adjust to tune Unity or Gnome, that exceeds my threshold.
I have worked on a FreeBSD machine for years and am now heading to a Debian box - I have been down this route before sadly - but I jus can no longer afford the time to setup and run a box that takes real effort to setup.
I may give virtualised machines one more shot but really I do just want it to work.
I don't see why everyone feels the need to constantly throw their own opinions and use cases in for why one OS is better than another. If Ubuntu doesn't fit your needs and Mac does... good. Don't see why stuff like this gets so many upvotes though.
The experience on Mountain Lion is irritating enough for me that I am considering switching back to Linux (it works fine on my old laptop, even wireless). My current laptop is still running Snow Leopard and I think their next update will determine if I ever purchase another Apple computer again.
Anyway I've also been eying a Mac, but running Mint has been making it really hard to justify buying one.
Same with Ubuntu although to be honest it just doesn't work properly, ever. Nothing whatsoever ever does what you tell it and it's a shit to maintain. I'm stuck with two LTS 10.04 machines and there is no long term support - they've shipped a broken MySQL version for 2 years. It's so reliable they turned off hibernate! Launchpad is like an arid desert when it comes to support. We even had paid support from Canonical and it was shit. All out Linux stuff is on debian now.
I've owned a few Macs as well and they've been the most hassle free devices so far although I've had some serious hardware problems such as a 2010 MBP catch fire on me. Before it caught fire, it was the only machine I didn't have to wait for all the time or argue with.
I now reside on a windows 7 x64 on a ThinkPad t61 with virtualbox running debian for dev work.
Persuade me to buy another Mac! What has changed in the last 2 years?
I've used both Windows and Linux for work before, and Mac is the only setup that's saved me time instead of wasting it. I found it worth getting used to.
Also, it really feels like Homebrew is a better apt than apt ever was!
no linux distro will install on arbitrary hw. nor will osx.
I bought a Mac in 2011 my first ever after about 18 years of Windows PCs which included about 17 years of Linux. I still use both, I even have Windows 8 and Ubuntu 12.10 with Unity.
Macs can be infuriating with some quirks such as no true delete key only backspace which for ex-PC users is labeled "delete". (Yes I know fn+delete=PC style delete).
On a Mac you click a file to highlight it then press delete key gets? Nothing. The intuitive reaction would be it deletes the highlighted file, nope. Sure command+delete but a mouse click and then two keys really? Very inefficient.
Transferring files to a USB stick such as an mkv refuses to move. Lots of space HFS, FAT32 or NTFS formatted? Nope, won't move.
I love Ubuntu but it can be incredibly frustrating. Every day single time I connect to wifi or ethernet I get system errors. Slowdowns, especially with the unity dash, are so frequent that I simply don't use it. I know where all my files are so I usually just open a Terminal and run nautilus to the directory I want. If I can get away with it I run software from the terminal, or else I have it on the dock and remember the keyboard shortcut.
When I think about it, I never use any of the fancy gui. I don't use the open window viewer, or the worspace switcher, and, as I said, I try my best to just hide the dock and remember the keyboard shortcuts.
Still, it's free and so much better than Windows
It took me about two hours to set up XMonad, and about an hour to tweak it to my liking. I haven't touched it in a year. AND since its configuration is stored in a file in my home directory like everything else, and not some random keys in gconf, I can link it into my Dropbox, and persist it across reinstalls. I've switched computers twice - it takes me about an hour to set up my whole environment.
I've used their proprietary driver now for years and on several different cards including one of the newest top of the line cards right now. They work great and deserve a lot of credit for their drivers, hardware and the configuration utilities.
Or do like I do and have done for several years, buy any new PC you want or laptop and install Ubuntu and it just works.
They are some valid points on the article, for example i also used to face some trouble on my old computer when it came to wireless connectivity, or my old Lexmark printer wouldn't work with Debian or any Linux brand no matter what. HOWEVER those issues can't really be blamed on Linux (as the author tries to) but on the hardware vendors. That's why the next time i got a printer i choose a vendor who did support Linux, same goes for the wifi card of my new laptop which worked just fine also.
It helps if you know other people that use that distribution: that way you can ask each-other for advice when something doesn't work as you'd like it. Alternatively one can join a user's mailing list / IRC chat room, most distributions have one.
But even if your choice turns out to be wrong (i.e. Ubuntu) the solution is not to abandon Linux completely.
In fact I couldn't imagine being able to work on anything else than Linux these days, I just depend too much on it: from a working valgrind tool, to having the source code for the entire OS.
This was what moved me to the Mac too, and it's important to note that it's something that doesn't negate the years spent doing that investigative work of finding what to change to what. Those were extremely valuable, and they're the reason I can find my way around a Linux server faster than a lot of people. But, the day came when I was less interested in tinkering with the OS and more interested in tinkering with other stuff. It was probably around a point in the learning curve where learning wasn't happening as quickly, so it wasn't as interesting when something went wrong because I was less likely to learn something new and just as likely to be frustrated. So, I switched.
> When I purchased a printer for my computer? Of course Ubuntu had no idea what to do with it.
In 25 years you haven't figured it out that you need to check for compatibility/support before buying hardware?