The pangs of dislike started to show up in 10.7 (Lion). The iOS-like GUI and "features" such as Launchpad didn't resonate with me. As things progressed, I became increasingly annoyed with the environment.
I've never seriously used Linux, but my recent "upgrade" experiences have not been good: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/01/5k-retina-imac-and-mac-os-... . Finder crashes; FCP X crashes; a user account crashes; permissions problems; migration problems. Snow Leopard rarely if ever crashed.
No, he's disclaiming his anecdote by admitting up front he isn't like the article's author who will now switch to Linux. He's just an OS X user who has the same complaints (but, apparently, no recourse)
I've noticed less finder crashes in Yosemite than any previous version and FCP X has been incredibly stable even as I push it more than ever before. Running Yosemite and FCPX on both a new Mac Pro and a two year old Macbook Pro.
I will say that I've had more permissions issues than any prior install.
I appreciate the points made, but without comparisons on a point-by-point basis, I'm still left wondering what the specific linux runes are to replace OS X - even for this one user.
More damning than the lack of personal connection, though, was the complete lack of transparency and general decline in software quality, as I perceived it.
It seems that these frustrations against OS X is a mismatch to this user's minimalist requirements: a mail client, iTerm, and a web browser. The OS X ecosystem caters a wide net of users ranging from the pink keyboards of middle school girls to the coffee-infused palms of college students.
It's important to notice that he's switching to a desktop running linux. Running linux on laptops is still a gamble. Sometimes things work great. Sometimes you spend months trying to fix basic stuff like screen brightness[1][2] on hardware certified by Ubuntu.[3]
I think there's a market for a linux distro that targets a limited set of premium hardware. I'd gladly pay money for an OS that worked out of the box on any MacBook or Surface Pro made in the past two years.
Edit: Many people are replying with brands that work for them. I'm glad they've been lucky enough to avoid problems, but I am making a different point. On Macs, OS X is practically guaranteed to work out of the box. Wifi, bluetooth, trackpad, screen brightness, power management, hardware graphics acceleration, resume from suspend/hibernate, etc Just Works™. On Apple's hardware, users never have to worry about kernel flags or special drivers. The same is not true for any combination of laptop brand and linux distro. I truly wish it were otherwise.
Since I can't reply to 'aaron-lebo" in the app I'm using:
I'm running Ubuntu and a set of kernel modules I can link later but they are the very same that were then altered for Arch ( which I also tried but had some problems with ). These have carried me from 13.04-14.04 and I'm hoping the 3.17 kernel will be included soon because these components are built right into that kernel version AFAIK.
No (non-chrome) distro currently works out of the box on the c720 (at least among the x64 variants). The most convenient solution at the moment involves recompiling the kernel after every security upgrade, which is hardly ideal.
While technically you're right the worst I have to do is pay attention when a kernel upgrade is part of apt-get dist-upgrade and then run a single script then reboot.
Did you not see my links to where a ThinkPad, certified by Ubuntu, has broken screen brightness? I own an X140e and it has been a nightmare. I've had it for a year and I still can't get bluetooth to work[1]. I've also tried a Carbon X1 and it leaves much to be desired.
Like I said, it's a gamble. Sometimes the hardware and drivers and phase of the moon is right and everything works. Sometimes no amount of kernel flags and customized modules will fix it. I (along with many others) am willing to pay to not have to worry about potential problems.
I haven't seen you mention it anywhere, so did you try a BIOS / firmware update? I've had similar bugs on multiple Thinkpads before and they were universally cured by an update.
I've tried 12.04LTS, 13.10, 14.04LTS, and now 14.10. Sometimes upgrading, sometimes from a clean install. The current issues with my ThinkPad are due to bugs in the latest drivers.
The backlight issue is not a bug inherent to Thinkpads. The kernel works very hard to sort out the whole vendor specific mess about backlight interfaces and works out an appropriate place to manage the controls for users (what users? system daemons? console users? desktop environment? desktop end users?) There has been some major rework around kernel 3.16 and many behaviors have changed.
In the case of ThinkPads, you have three interfaces to control backlight brightness: acpi_video0 (standard ACPI interface), intel_backlight (GPU interface), and thinkpad_acpi (vendor specific interface) all with different semantics conforming to ACPI standard, Windows 7 behaviors, Windows 8 behaviors, and vendor private behaviors, and you have user interfaces including BIOS wired special keys, sysfs, udev, X utils, GPU control panels, and desktop environment settings to control the brightness. You have these moving parts for just one vendor and the kernel needs to coordinate all the madness with all the vendors. And the fixes coming out in latest version kernel might not even make it to your version of distros.
So there is a lot of complexity in the even seemingly trivial screen brightness control. Linux still has much to do with the support of heterogeneous hardware. But this is the price you pay for the freedom.
Purely anecdotal but I dual boot windows/linux(ubuntu) regularly on four separate ultrabooks(from three different manufacturers) with few complaints. (beyond the dearth of updates(that I appreciate anyway)).
Yep, my experience has been anything labelled ultrabook works pretty well. My main linux laptop is a toshiba z830. The only problem out of the box with Ubuntu is a fairly easy to solve backlight issue.
In particular, though, there's an ancient piece of conventional wisdom that always floats around that's very pro-nvidia+linux, but I think it's terribly outdated. AMD and nVidia compatibility with linux are both quite bad and both the OSS and proprietary drivers create a lot of problems for both. You're better off just using Intel straight through, their OSS drivers are plenty good for dev work and quite stable in my experience.
Do check the reviews, though. For a while, system76 had a terrible reputation for quality, and none of them compare to my t420 even today, as far as I can tell.
I bought a System76 laptop this summer, to replace one I bought in 2012. Both worked great for me. My Ubuntu 14.10 upgrade went off without a hitch, and the 2012 laptop has upgraded without problems as well.
I know someone that went from a Macbook Pro to one of these. He's been incredibly happy with it, and described the "just works" factor as being in the same range as his old Pro.
The XPS series is no pillar of Linux support. Turn to Thinkpads for this[0]. In case you can't be bothered with the upcoming wall of text: Dell seems to have entirely different definitions of "support" for the paid OS, vs. the free one.
I could pick my own hardware for work, and I went with an XPS 13 9333 "Ubuntu edition" + superspeed dock for over 1300 GBP ($2K USD). I shouldn't have sponged on the extra hundred or so bucks for the X1 Carbon (..."startup"...), but the "Linux readiness" sucked me in. I don't exactly feel like I got my money's worth:
- "Coil Whine"[1]. My expectations from a $2K SSD laptop is complete fucking silence unless the fans are going. There is still some serious coil whine happening when some arbitrary conditions are met - If you often work in a quiet environment (any AM workers here?), you will notice this eventually. This also changes pitch when <things>, so you won't be tuning it out. This was noted as fixed by Dell for the 9333[2], when in fact it hasn't been. Not exclusively a Linux issue, but unacceptable in a $2K machine.
- Driver support: wifi: Identity crisis. The stock wifi drivers don't quite register as wifi drivers, but at least NetworkManager still kinda works. "Huh?"
# iwconfig
[...]
wlan0 no wireless extensions.
Why do I care? Because maybe I wanted to switch out NetworkManager for wicd (not possible). Maybe I wanted monitor mode on my card (nope). Maybe I just wanted to run Kismet - or anything other than NetworkManager (not possible). Huh.
- Driver support: wifi: instability. I got very frequent wifi disconnects/hiccups/delays on both the 2.4G and the 5G bands, when other hardware on the same location worked just fine (my Mac co-workers liked to pick on me for this, but hey, I would too in their shoes). By "delays", I'm not nit-picking milliseconds, I mean getting 2000ms+ pingbacks from the AP when a macbook placed right on top of it (for science) got the expected 20-70ms. Huh.
- Driver support: Touchscreen: forget about it.[3] Kind of entirely broken. After using the touch screen, moving the mouse (or trackpad) again will "jump" the cursor position to around 2x, 2y of where you left the touchscreen pointer. This was so annoying when I had a bottom-right "hot corner" kind of thing on Ubuntu (Mac convert here, forgive me) that I disabled the touchscreen entirely with xinput (any accidental touches would subsequently trigger "expose" mode). Also, if you attach a second monitor, the touchscreen input is mapped to the entire virtual desktop, rather than the laptop screen alone. As a consequence, under such circumstances, the touchscreen would only work correctly for taps at 0,0. Huh.
- Superspeed Dock: forget about it entirely, you'll regret buying one for Linux. First of all, not actually a dock, but a port replicator. Nevermind that, that's me being pedantic. Secondly, $180. Nevermind that, that's me being cheap. Thirdly, it doesn't work: Ethernet won't work[4], audio/mic won't work, HDMI won't work, DVI won't work. Very disappointing, I was looking forward to a triple screen setup. Oh well. Counterpoint: Well, Dell says it won't work, so what did you expect? Dell should put some more intelligence into its "also recommended for you" part of the website. Even if I had seen it, I would have expected some kind of hackaround to be possible. I search far and wide - no dice for the stuff that I cared for (screens/audio). It seems to be related to DisplayLink, which simply dropped Linux Support for its 3xxx/4xxx series. Nice.
Apologies for abusing your vertical screen real-estate, but I've been holding back this rant for well over a year now, and "it's your fault for triggering it" (I kid). But seriously, Dell's "Linux re...
Ditto with coil whine on laptops. (Not same brand.)
My laptop is noticeably whiny a large chunk of the time. Seems to predominantly occur when scrolling image-heavy webpages, or graphics demos with no framerate limiters, but happens other times as well.
Coil whine is terrible! I'm unsure how that gets by anyone's QA.
The "fix" is to disable low power CPU states. Yeah, you cut battery life, but at least it doesn't bore into your brain. I'd also suggest if you have onsite warranty to keep asking for replacements. Until laptop reviewers grow spines, it's probably the only way to get an issued noticed.
Edit: If you want to see if that'll help, just get a program to run at full CPU and see if the sound goes away. On several ThinkPads I noticed this (scrolling activates CPU), then saw people mentioning the CPU suspend states. Bingo.
I'll try this out, but in XPS's case it is very much a Heisenbug.
For some people it triggers only when a secondary monitor is attached (that's me, usually - right now I don't think it is on, but then again the fans are going so they may be covering it).
For others, it immediately goes away if you switch off the backlight (didn't work for me).
I don't recall if someone has mentioned this in the XPS coil whine bughunt, but I'll give it a go the next time my laptop starts whining. Thanks!
I like that it comes with 12.04 instead of 14.04. The former is, in my experience, much more stable for daily use. The latter has a much improved Unity experience, but there are stability issues compared to 12.04.
It is a bit out of my range, but it's nice to know Dell is offering a quality non-Windows machine.
Yes, I use vagrant and virtualbox and haven't had any issues running a centos or ubuntu. Best of both worlds, and heaven compared to cygwin (oh, the scripts I've written to deal with cygwin).
Most of my scripts run unmodified between Cygwin and Linux (OSX is a different story, if you don't have GNU tools on the path).
The single biggest problem with Cygwin is performance: forking is very slow. When I need to rewrite a script for Cygwin, it's almost invariably to reduce the number of processes spawned.
But almost all of the time, it just works, even building third-party stuff from source. On my home setup, I spend about half my terminal time with Cygwin, the other half in ssh sessions to Linux boxes, and there's no real mental context switch required.
I've had incredibly good luck for the last several years with Linux on a laptop. You just have to be a bit careful. Here's what I've found:
- Backlight bugs are usually related to ACPI tables in the BIOS. Doing a BIOS upgrade will often fix them. This is especially true on the Thinkpad line where Lenovo explicitly supports Linux in its BIOS.
- Be careful with switchable graphics. While they have gotten a lot better, especially with open source drivers, they are still a pain (even on Windows). Choose a laptop with an Intel, or AMD APU. Or, barring that, make sure all of the scanouts are connected to the Intel card, like in my Thinkpad W540. The new Macbook Pro Retina 15" is exactly what you want to avoid - it forces all inputs to be connected to the discrete card when you boot Linux.
- Make sure you have a good wifi card. Intel or Atheros is the best.
- Do a bit of research before buying, like on the arch wiki.
- If you buy a bleeding edge laptop chipset, expect to need to use a bleeding edge distro for complete support.
> Do a bit of research before buying, like on the arch wiki
This, a thousand times. While I haven't used Arch for a few years, and probably never will again, they have some of the best and most complete documentation in the GNU/Linux world. Chances are, if there's ever been a Linux-specific issue, some Arch user has run into it and either fixed it themselves or found the answer in the Arch community. Their wiki is quite thorough as well.
Another great source is linuxquestions.org. Half a million members and still growing, and they cover all major distros (though there's a ton of Slackware power users there, which suits me fine).
I have long argued that the marketing of various GNU/Linux distros as something you can install on any PC if you get tired of Windows for whatever reason was a huge mistake on the part of the community.
This attitude created the insane expectation that Ubuntu (or whatever) should run on any machine that previously ran Windows. That is a (hopelessly) tall order to fill, especially considering that new versions of Windows itself won't always run on machines that previously ran an older version of Windows.
We, as a community, mistakenly emphasized the sheer number of installs over the quality of those installs and the happiness of their users. The best way to market GNU/Linux, in my opinion, is to show someone a fully compatible, fully working machine that "Just Work[ed]" out of the box and explain, honestly, how it was achieved (by buying the right machine and using a distro known to work with that machine).
I believe that the "we can make any machine work, sort of..." attitude created a lot of crazy expectations, which hurt "switchers" and thus actually hurt the sale of fully compatible machines. Very sad.
I'm with you though. I bought a Mac solely for the battery life and the screen. If I could get a well-built machine, with a screen that didn't look washed out and a battery that consistently lasted more than four hours without weird tricks I would gladly pay Mac prices for it.
I looked at that, and almost went with it over a MacBook. One problem is that it has very mixed reviews and some history of heat problems. Clearly Apple has had its share of issues as well, but that brings me to the next problem: it's a Dell. I have attempted twice in the past to give Dell my money, in both cases they botched the order so badly that I canceled it. Even still, I actually started the process of buying an XPS 13, only to be told that it wouldn't ship for over a month. I just can't take Dell seriously outside the enterprise market.
I've been running linux on a variety of laptops for 15+ years without any issues that were outside my comfort level.
If you are looking for a locked-down consumer appliance of a computer then linux really isn't for you.
That's really the most extraordinary part of the whole movement. 20 years into it it's become mainstream on phones, set top boxes, and embedded devices everywhere but it hasn't also necessarily become some washed down, stupefied, lowest-common-denominator black box that is impenetrable to look at where you rely on the whims of some private company to fix issues that you are unable to communicate to them.
It's still grass-roots and community driven at its core. It hasn't sold out. Anyone is still just a bit a time and hard work away from making a difference - that's pretty powerful.
>> If you are looking for a locked-down consumer appliance of a computer then linux really isn't for you.
As other have pointed out System 76 targets Linux. I've got an old Dell that shipped with Ubuntu, still works great. Someone else mentioned their new series for Ubuntu, search on the Dell site.
This is the best explanation of linux in terms of where it sits with respect to other operating systems. I've had a pretty similar experience as yourself with linux on laptops. Sometimes there are surprises, especially when upgrading, but nothing that the community can't handle. And usually the experience is much better with linux than Windows. I bought a Win8 machine last year and the wifi stopped working due to a bad driver. At the time I thought it was bad hardware, but under linux it worked flawlessly. Just recently, with the latest win8.1 updates, the wifi started to work again. Yeah, yeah, I know, the windows apologists will blame the wifi manufacturer, anyone but Microsoft. I got you. BUT... it worked for me under linux!
"If you are looking for a locked-down consumer appliance of a computer then linux really isn't for you." LOL, I was going to say, what about chromeOS? That's a locked down distro based on linux. Luckily it is very easy to install a linux distro on it, as I have. You can have the best of both worlds, a locked down simple to use computer, and a tweak to your heart's delight linux distro.
there's certainly a fanboy hobbyist requirement in making a linux-you-install-yourself work for you. it takes a bit of passion and commitment.
Just like the automobile enthusiast who always disassembles parts of their car and replaces components - although their cars probably break down more often these people are enraptured in the art of auto mechanics. What would be our expensive nightmare is to them, hours of enjoyable pastime.
Well, then, you can't afford to have less than two laptops then - because every single operating system, including Linux, Windows and OS/X, had botched upgrades.
True, though I wouldn't personally buy two laptops just to avoid update hell. I'd rather just manually update once I'm sure it won't bork my system, and only when I can afford some potential downtime.
That said, I can't imagine too many developers or IT professionals who only have one working computer at their disposal. I am typing this on my Windows 7/Slackware main workstation, with an old laptop running OpenBSD to my left and an old tower running NetBSD to my right. I can jump on either of those two and get back to work in a few minutes if this one goes down.
Sure. When I was a freelance consultant doing Windows stuff, I did have a backup laptop for just that reason - in case an upgrade borked things, or my hardware failed.
OSX makes this particularly easy, though: you clone an OSX install with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to an external drive. (I have this scheduled to run nightly) You can then boot another Mac from that external drive.
The result is that you don't have to maintain two separate OSX installs. You can borrow somebody else's Mac, boot from your external drive, and boom - your data and your entire working environment are ready to go.
Of course you could also accomplish this with other operating systems. If your main work environment is a virtual machine, it's pretty trivial.
I've tried Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13, certified for 12.04. It was acceptable, resume didn't work. But Webex doesn't work and GitLab BV customers use it, so I bought a MPB yesterday.
I still sometimes have to use Windows for work and resume/hibernate works about half the time. The other half I have to power reset it. That's with HP, Dell and Lennovo running Windows 7.
This is an issue that is easy to solve when you control the hardware and the software. Also, if a bug crops up the prevents sleep/hibernate from working seamlessly, I'm sure it goes to the top of the priority list.
It's one of those things that has worked well for a long time. I remember on an old Powerbook G4, putting OSX to sleep while it was in the middle of the shutdown process only to wake it later to be welcomed by the shutdown process finishing and powering off.
[Not that OSX didn't have huge warts in those days. SambaFS/CIFS filesystem driver didn't deal well with the server going away for whatever reason. Reads/writes would block forever (because the driver didn't decide to time-out) and anything that attempted to touch it (even Finder) would immediately get sucked in to endlessly waiting.]
Yes. Honestly, if all OSX brought to the table was "works seamlessly with laptop hardware" I'd probably still use it - unless there was a Linux distro that did the same.
>I think there's a market for a linux distro that targets a limited set of premium hardware.
Technically, and conceptually, I think a better observation to make would be that there is a market for premium hardware that works well with linux. Thinkpads used to occupy this niche, but no longer.
> On Macs, OS X is practically guaranteed to work out of the box. Wifi, bluetooth, trackpad, screen brightness, power management, hardware graphics acceleration, resume from suspend/hibernate, etc Just Works™.
Interesting - my experience with respect to this is that Apple will "just replace it" if a user complains enough.
Both my MBPs (17" 2009, last 17" made (2012?)) had chronic sleep/resume issues, where they would wake up unprompted, either immediately after going to sleep, or after a while (in my bag, turning it into a furnace), or not resume at all when waking up.
The Genius Bar "replaced a daughterboard, which should fix it"[1], which naturally didn't.
In my quest for a solution, I tried everything and met hundreds of poor souls with this problem, of varying technical aptitude - some far exceeding mine.
Changing the sleep mode, examining logs/dmesg/provided no hints, or relief. I gave up and started shutting it down or hibernating.
I don't miss OS X.
[1] Not a direct quote, but something equally eye-roll-invoking.
I'm sorry you had a poor experience, but I think most would agree that such problems are quite rare compared to other OSes. Also, it sounds like you had decent support from Apple. Though they failed, they expended significant effort and money to try and solve the problem.
But your anecdote doesn't address my point: Do you think any combination of laptop brand and linux distro would be more likely to have everything work out of the box than Apple hardware running OS X?
> I think most would agree that such problems are quite rare compared to other OSes.
Macbooks are very popular nowadays, but somewhat less so 5-6 years ago when I was diagnosing this. There were many, many people in my shoes all over the Apple discussions and other forums ("hunderds" from my previous post is almost definitely an underestimation). I'm not sure what percentage of total users this adds up to, but personally I wouldn't call it "rare". You can picture the frustration of paying top dollar for a premium machine/experience, not getting Genius Bar help and trying out any whacky witchcraft-y solution in case it works (reset SMC! PRAM! throw salt behind your back! try the new firmware from today!). Ugh.
> Also, it sounds like you had decent support from Apple. Though they failed, they expended significant effort and money to try and solve the problem.
Not quite. It was I who expended significant effort (take it in/be laptopless for a few days) and money (not under warranty) and to no avail. I don't remember what they said they fixed, but they charged me a little for some hardware part and labour. I didn't repeat the experiment for that issue, but the next time I had to get Apple support, the response was astounding as well.[1] I don't place much faith in the Genius Bar, and it is far from blind Apple-bashing in my case.
> But your anecdote doesn't address my point: Do you think any combination of laptop brand and linux distro would be more likely to have everything work out of the box than Apple hardware running OS X?
Well, yes, but you aren't going to like it. If you want a "brand" recommendation, Thinkpads are still your best bet. I've seen you're hit by that brightness bug, and that really does suck, but... "such problems are quite rare compared to the average Linux on Thinkpad experience" :/ I got a refurb X220 from ebay and put 14.04 on it - everything worked, down to the fingerprint reader. Go for a specific model rather than a brand, as "Our Milages Do Vary" even within brands.
As for the out-of-the-box experience, for my personal use case (hacker/developer) I don't value it that much. I'd much rather tweak a bit, but then have a system that "won't betray me", than have something that works 90% of the way I'd want it to, out of the box, and occasionally crash and fail me in mysterious undiagnosable ways. OS X wasn't even at 90% for me - "Always on Top" available out of the box nowadays? I had Afloat for this (and transparencies) in 10.6, but it didn't work for 10.7+
For the out-of-the-box experience in a casual user's use case, I have another anecdote for you - my distinctly non-technical mother. After seemingly making a hobby out of infecting her Windows XP/Vista over the years, I had this crazy idea to try Linux Mint on her crapware HP 17" laptop. I won't lie to you, I did hold my breath a bit while installing, hoping that I'll manage to sort out the inevitable issues, and I was surprised to find no issues at all. Everything worked out of the box and she's still using it, over a year later, with no complaints or need for technical support from me. She's a casual user - browsing, email, flash game or two - and she didn't really need Windows that much after all.
Finally, just like OS X works well with specific hardware, Linux is sort-of the same. If all vendors bothered with Linux support, the situation would be different and you'd have much greater chances of "Just Works" - but alas, that isn't so. If you can pick your laptop to be compatible, you won't have issues 99% of the time. Occasionally, vendors lie/exaggerate about the extent of Linux support (grep for "XPS 13" for my rant elsewhere on this thread about Dell), so always doub...
But in all honesty, can you name another manufacturer who does have good technical support? I have dealt with tech support people from Dell, HP, Panasonic, Lenovo, and Apple. They all have the same roadmap of denial:
1. I don't see the problem.
2. Oh, I see, that's a feature!
3. Hmm, not a feature you say, then it must be those pesky 3rd party apps you are using.
4. Ok, ok, it's a clean install, have you done all the upgrades?
5. You have? I see, well we will probably fix it in the next driver/software update, wouldn't you like to just wait?
6. You wouldn't???? Ok, fine, I guess it might be a hardware issue, but it's probably not covered under warranty, because they all do it.
7. Ok, I guess it's just your device, but are you sure you have warranty?
8. Ok, fine, will fix it, but just this once!
Apple is no more a pain in the ass than any of the other major manufacturers. At least they have an Apple Store in most markets, so you can go and bitch at someone in person, rather than engaging in a futile argument with a bangladeshi call center operator. At least with Apple you have an option to choke to death the person who is "assisting" you, when you eventually snap, instead of just threatening to do so :) Ok, I am not sure if that last bit is a plus.
That being said, I do agree that Genius Bar people are mostly idiots, and are trained to avoid fixing your problem, if at all possible. But honestly, can't you say the same about all of the other companies.
Heh - spot on. I may have had slightly higher expectations from Apple due to their premium pricing (and public image) at some point, but certainly not after actually needing support.
My point was in response to "you received decent support from Apple", which has never been my case.
I pay HP about 100 Euro per year for a next business day support and whenever something breaks in my laptop they either send me a technician or mail me the spare parts. In the last 8 years I remember the technician coming here to replace a worn out keyboard (5 years) and a screen which was developing some whitish pixels. The shipped me a couple of hard disks, one of them just in case the problem I had was related to the disk, and two new power units. No complaints ever.
If you pay for business level support it's usually much better. Panasonic only really deals with Business, so I had the best experience with them, though I still had to fight through initial wall of incompetence. Apple also has a business program which is very good, on par with Panasonic in my experience, but with Apple I think you have to buy in volume to get into that program. Nowadays, though, I make it a point to only buy lightly used hardware and fix it my self if a problem arises. So far it's been cheaper than buying warranty and hell of a lot less aggravating. Fingers crossed, of course.
I'm adding this here because you gave me the idea indirectly... but what if there were a Linux Distro that targeted OS X? To make a Linux or FreeBSD version of the "Just Works" experience?
I've always wondered why this wasn't the case already. The great part about targeting Apple hardware is that there isn't that much of it (comparatively).
Most distros already do this. Most distros already try to "Just Work". A better approach, I think, is to ship (with the distro, autodetected at install time) tweaks for for specific hardware, and to explicitly target developers in the out-of-the-box setup of the system. Fedora[0] (as I've said elsewhere in these comments) is now doing the latter, while still maintaining a "Just Works" system; it would be interesting if they chose to do the former as well.
I meant more for the whole focus of the distro to be supporting specifically Mac hardware and it's variations out of the box. For instance, supporting the media keys from Mac and etc.
That would be Elementary OS. It's gotten pretty awesome lately.
I would highly recommend Elementary to jaded OS X users in particular, along with anyone else with an inclination to use Linux. I regularly and happily use all major OSs for coding, design and other super serious stuff, and this is my favorite Linux distro by far.
I tried Elementary about a year ago and uninstalled it after a couple hours. Everything was ridiculously dumbed down and unproductive, worse than anything I've ever seen. I'm a devout OSX user and contrary to popular opinion I don't find anything easier to use about OSX over Windows for general usage.
Went from NetBSD to OS X in 2002, then to Linux in 2008, then back to OS X in 2011.
I spend almost all of my time in cross-platform apps, but the little inconveniences of Linux on a laptop just weren't worth the trouble back in 2011, and I'd be surprised if anything has changed since then.
OS X at its ugliest and least stable wipes the floor with Linux at its best, imo.
Please notice original parent commenter @brandonmenc didn't provide any reasoning either. (S)he just proclaimed "OSX can wipe the floor with Linux" and left it at that as a declaration.
> little inconveniences of Linux on a laptop just weren't worth the trouble
Specifically: sleep/restore, display brightness control, sound, battery life, wifi, fonts, endless desktop tweaking. ymmv, but this stuff has just never been optimal out of the box.
When I say "wipe the floor," I mean in regards to time wasted (measurable) and appearance (subjective).
I definitely like Ubuntu's font rendering engine better than either Windows or OSX's. The one used by other Distros though (FreeType) is like a way inferior version of MS ClearType.
One thing that definitely kills the Linux experience for most people is that they buy a new laptop model and then complain about Linux not supporting their hardware. In fact, the latest Linux kernel image will generally be pretty awesome about hardware support, but most Linux distros ship with an older kernel version.
I am not an Apple fan and when I say it I say it in its strongest sense. But I love my Macboook Air (and find almost anything else sold by them priced ridiculously high). I have been using OSX for last 3.5 years and I moved to OSX from Windows and Ubuntu and it was good till they one decides "let's blur OSX and iOS" and trust me it's been a clear and sharp downhill slope from then.
As per the list you have made, I didn't find any difficulty with anything but fonts and that was ten years ago. Some of my friends still use Ubuntu and when I say this I am not saying with any malaise or Apple-hate (which I honestly do not posses) but I must confess, today's Ubuntu's font rendering is a lot better than OSX's.
Not to mention it just works out of the box now, everything! And if you are the tweaker type, no doubt you have got the endless possibilities. But as you mentioned and rightly so, ymmv.
At my last workplace, the OSX laptops were all 2-3+ years old... and were all incredibly slow. I was always surprised that people could get any work done on them. One woman had an OSX laptop that would boot up with the entire 4GB of memory in use, with no applications or agents loaded except maybe spotify. All the shiny UI in the world doesn't make you more productive when you have to wait for a mouse click to register.
The linux machines were whiteboxes of the same age, and while there was a curl or two in setting them up, were still just as speedy and usable when aged as they were when new.
I have a Macbook Pro with 4GB RAM & normal HDD and I don't recommend upgrading past Mountain Lion, since Mavericks uses at least 3GB after booting up. I'm guessing Apple engineers are provided with Mac Pro with blazing speeds so they don't understand the pain of using the latest OSX with 4GB RAM & normal HDD.
As for Spotify, it consumes a lot of memory. You'd better off with iTunes.
I'm getting the same feeling lately with OS X. I think part of the feeling stems from other operating systems improving, thus making OS X not as attractive by comparison. I switched to OS X in 2007. At that point, Windows was a mess, and most Linux distros were hard to configure. OS X seemed like a breeze back then. Nowadays, Windows has improved a lot, and a lot of Linux distros have greatly improved their usability. OS X just doesn't stand out like it used to.
To top it off, Apple has shifted their focus from 'it just works' to 'buy a new iPhone/iPad for no reason'.
I think the notion of OS X being pretty good until up to 10.6 and then getting worse, with many new features feeling "strategic" (for Apple) instead of useful resonates with people. I have this impression too, at least.
I'm getting more interested in dipping my toes back into linux laptops, partly for privacy and control reasons, and partly because I'm finding it more difficult to develop on OS X as I am more frequently using micro services and docker and virtualization. I haven't picked a platform yet though because I would like to see how "free" (libre) I can get for privacy/control reasons, and it's time-consuming to make the right choice - I see a couple Trisquel-related options including a 2006 Gluglug thinkpad (but it appears to be perpetually out of stock), and a "novena" (https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop) but it looks like that will still have some non-free stuff in it.
Photoshop remains the reason I haven't used Linux as my primary OS for a couple years now. I held out for a long time, but it's just a singularly useful piece of software with no reasonable equivalents.
Absolutely, windows is still a disaster. For developers working with open source technologies, windows is a difficult platform to use. I was attending a workshop on Angular.js and rails where I had the misfortune to have brought my windows 8.1 machine with me. Everyone, including myself, who had a windows machine could not get going with any of the workshop material.
If you develop with Rails do it on a VM, even a headless server you ssh into and export the filesystem to your Windows editor. Ruby on Windows is an inferior experience, because most of the developers in the ecosystem are on Mac and Linux. The servers are on Linux.
It really isn't, not for professional (web) designer work at least. It might be ok for removing a couple of red eyes, but honestly the interface is so clunky it's just a PITA to use.
Gimp is comparatively terrible at a higher level. 3D, vector, text, smart objects, adjustment layers, ... if you are in any industry that relies on Photoshop beyond basic usage, it's very difficult to be with second string alternatives. This is just how things are in the wild, but I find it baffling that this is still the case after so many years.
Yes and I chuckled at the mental image of woz using the term "shitshow". Only to be disappointed when I got the bottom of the page and saw it was written by a Geoff. Good article, though.
Part of me thinks this is a bit sleazy. He knows how recognizable the name "Wozniak" is, and doubly so if he's going to be running a tech blog and posting about Aplle related things. Would gregwozniak.ca or gwozniak.ca been that much worse? It would be infinitely less confusing and link-baity.
It is when your name is identical to the co-Founder's name. It's link-baity by the fact that many people were baited into clicking that link under false pretenses.
I'm not accusing this Wozniak of malice, however.
I didn't look at the TLD I just clicked. I thought Woz was ditching OS X, I got excited. I was baited.
About 50 pixels to the left of the title is "Geoff Wozniak"...furthermore, I don't think it's fair to disparage people with names that happen to be shared by celebrities.
I'm going to commit the cardinal sin of meta-commenting twice on the same submission and rhetorically ask why anyone would be downvoting the parent?
To clarify the stated fact: the name appears in the left margin on an iPad, just like on a desktop browser at normal width. However on an iPhone, it appears at the bottom of the page. It does the same thing if your browser window is set to less than 768px wide.
It's not hard to see how in those circumstances, someone could be misled into thinking that the article's author was Woz, especially if they didn't read all the way to the end.
I don't see why happening to have a famous person with your last name means you can't use your last name for a domain. If a) Ira Remsen was still alive and b) I was a food blogger instead of a tech enthusiast, I wouldn't hesitate to buy remsen.com or remsen.food (if i wanted it) just because Ira happened to invent artificial sweeteners.
Wozniak is a very common Polish surname and is in the top 10 of most popular surnames there. I didn't think it was The Woz especially since it has a Canadian tld.
Anyway that might be my Polish bias talking, but I don't see how many could have made that mistake.
Op wrote a good piece. It stands on its own unrelated to his surname.
Someone else is being downvoted into oblivion for using the term "link bait" so I'll tread carefully here, but this is the second time I've ended up on Geoff Wozniak's blog as a result of a headline that, on its own, is just as uninteresting as "some guy decides he doesn't like latest version of OS X", yet coming from Steve Wozniak it would definitely be worth reading.
It's not link-baity in the sense that there's really anything wrong with using your own name for your blog (although try telling that to Mike Rowe), but it's link-baity in the context of HN where the domain shows up with equal importance to the headline and where the name "Wozniak" is very clearly associated with one and only one person.
I think the "flag" link is unfit for purpose and should be moved & changed. Firstly, it should appear on the comments page as well as the listing pages. Secondly, there should be multiple reasons for flagging (or a free-text, one-line reason field), so that it's at least possible to flag a misleading headline for alteration, without the possibility that the entire submission could be flag-killed.
I even agree with the poster about certain issues with OS X. It's particularly annoying as someone that recently switched away from Windows, after finally losing patience with Microsoft's similarly erosive programme of needless tinkering and randomly breaking stuff in lieu of tangible improvements. However, I don't come to HN to read opinions that agree with my existing world-view and pat myself on the back for being right (or at least, that's not my main reason).
I am however interested in opinions that are not just from "some guy" but which represent the defection of a key figure, such as "DHH: why I've finally given up on Ruby" or "RMS: why closed-source is better after all". I would definitely read those and would be equally disappointed if the author turned out to be an unrelated namesake.
I've been using OS X since 10.2, though I keep a Windows box around for games. I also feel that OS X has become less stable and performant in recent years, and every now and then I spin up a Linux distro on a spare hard disk just to try it out.
These experiments rarely last very long, and almost always end because the video/graphics support is just so terrible. I have yet to find a reliable way to play videos without horrible screen tearing.
But I don't know what alternative there is. Windows' experiments with Metro was a disaster. PC-BSD has some really nice features (I love ZFS and use it on my fileserver) but has the same issues with hardware support, especially graphics hardware support.
Windows 10 is essentially what Windows 8 should have been, or at worst, 8.1. It's quite usable. The ugliest thing in Win10 is the Store, integrated into the Start menu. The Store is filled with junk apps and outright scams. Microsoft refuses to fix these issues. In fact, I reported a fake Dropbox app that listed "@Microsoft Corporation" as the publisher. MS wrote back to say the app was fine, and if the developers were lying, I should just leave a review.
The result is that for many things you might type into the start menu, you get offers to install scams on your PC. Idiotic.
> In fact, I reported a fake Dropbox app that listed "@Microsoft Corporation" as the publisher. MS wrote back to say the app was fine, and if the developers were lying, I should just leave a review.
Or the other form of support: post to Twitter/HackerNews/etc. and light a fire that they will quickly need to put out...
AFAIK, there's no way to link to the Windows Store, just the phone store (which is marginally better). I've written Satya and the PM in charge of the store. Many devs are in contact with them about it. There's even a third party report on how bad the situation is, and in August, MS announced they were cleaning up and published reportapp@Microsoft.com, which seems unmonitored.
It's so bad that Netflix required three takedowns for the same publisher before MS decided not to allow scam "official" Netflix apps. The second hit for Facebook is a scam (FB has no way I found to report stuff if you don't have a FB account - lame for security.)
I'm betting that some high level people at Microsoft have a bonus tied to "number of apps published". That's the only way this crap makes sense. Even unpaid 14yr olds would do s better job cleaning up the Store. It's far worse than Android Marketplace ever was.
Windows 8 wasn't all that bad. Relative to Windows 7 it was just two steps forward and two steps back. For all the Metro haters: the core workflow to launch applications (winkey + number keys or winkey + search + enter) is still the same as Windows 7.
Windows 8.1 improved things a bit by identifying some scenarios where Metro was unnecessary and keeping it out of the way. So relative to Windows 7 it's now two steps forward and one step back.
I've used the Windows 10 preview and early signs suggest that it's going to be two steps forward from Windows 7.
If the core workflow was actually the same, then businesses wouldn't have been so loathe to upgrade to it. From what I've witnessed, few people launch their primary applications through text search - they prefer shortcut icons, whether they be in the menu, taskbar, or desktop.
Shortcuts on the desktop and pinned applications on the taskbar remain the same. The new start screen permits shortcuts. All the existing avenues are still wide open.
This isn't necessarily true. Like so many things, perception is reality. People oftentimes do things out of fear--in this case, fear that their old workflow isn't the same--rather than rational conclusion.
Must be lots of windows fanbois here, otherwise I'm not sure why I got downvoted. Really, they may not want to hear this, but Windows 8 really sucked. Microsoft knows it, and that is why they're running away as fast as they can from it.
Windows 7 is my preferred modern OS. For a time in work I was using a windows 8 machine and I found it bafflingly bad. What were the 2 steps forward you mentioned? I'm curious. In my experience it was just 2 steps backward, period.
There's big ticket improvements for performance [1] and a huge step forward for multiple monitor support [2]. I've given third-party multiple monitor utilities the boot. Multiple monitor support in Windows 8 is squarely in "good enough" territory.
There's smaller improvements too, like the new Task Manager [3].
There's also mundane stuff like rejigged NTFS this and that [4].
Thankyou for a very informative response!
My reaction to that stuff..
1. Good! 200Mb of extra free memory, but big whoop! (when you have 16 gb)
2. Dont care. I never use multiple monitors, cus I only have one set of eyes.
3. Basically the same stuff as before arranged differently (they have just moved some stuff from msconfig into task manager)
4. That does seem like a good improvement
One thing I had heard was that game performance was better on windows 8 and 8.1 compared to 7. Though after looking up some benchmarks investigating that, it does not seem to be the case. There are some differences either way depending on game/graphics card but they are very minor anyway.
I had the same complaints wrt video tearing, however in very recent distros (F21+) the issue has largely been resolved.
In non-composited environments, tearing would happen unless a hardware overlay used.
In composited environments, tearing would be inevitable because the compositor would use a nonsynchronized back-to-front-buffer copy. This has largely been replaced with a synchronized buffer flip, so that there is no tearing at all.
The one remaining issue I have is with fullscreen Firefox videos. These get "direct" output (they skip the compositor) but don't use a hardware overlay, and therefore tear. There are a couple solutions for this that I'm playing with.
I play Steam games on my 4 years old machine(ati graphics card, Athlon processor) on Ubuntu 14.04. The only issue i had was font disappearing in Civ and Democracy 3. Just waiting for Skylake to upgrade.
I've been considering this for a while -- especially after the Yosemite upgrade, in which my machine has been randomly hanging [0], and in which my machine gets noticeably slower (cmd-tab takes a quarter to a half a second to actually finish switching and repainting windows) over the course of a few days of uptime. OS X software quality is very clearly not a priority at Apple, which is a shame, because this machine is still the best hardware I've ever had the pleasure of using. I don't know what my next machine will be, but if things go at the current pace, I imagine it won't be running OS X.
My previous Linux machine was a Sony VAIO SZ, running Ubuntu 8.04; it did basically everything that I needed, and my only complaint that I'd have if downgrading to it today would be the reduction in battery life. Is there a great set of laptop hardware to run Linux on these days? What do people use when they just want a candy-reduced window system?
[0] MacBook Pro Retina 15", Mid 2012; periodically, usually while I am scrolling through a web page, the machine becomes unresponsive (sound stops, cursor stops), and a minute or two later, the machine powers off. Sometimes it reboots on its own; afterwards, there's no kernel panic log. As far as I can tell, something goes wrong, and after a few minutes, the SMC's watchdog timer gives up, and shoots the machine in the head.
If it was a hardware issue, that's one thing, but:
I despise the "fresh install"/"just format it" response to problems - it shows that nobody really knows wtf is going on and/or can't help you, but maybe starting from a clean slate will make it not broken? (Until it happens again and you need to clean-slate it, naturally). Wreaks of Windows ME-level quality in both software and software support.
The "format it for Linux anyway" argument seems a litte fallacious to me. You'd have to format it to put any other OS on it, sure. The point is to get to a state (OS/whatever) where you don't have to resort to random "nuke blasting" methods to fix something.
If formatting once for Linux means I never have to nuke it from space again to fix an issue, then yeah, I'll take it.
This really sounds like a hardware problem, not Yosemite. I've upgraded 4 Macs (2 Airs, older iMac, and old MacBook Pro) and haven't seen any problems like you describe.
I'm seeing this same exact issue on my MBPr13. Occasionally I'll wake the laptop and it will show gray garbage on the screen, so I'm suspecting some kind of video issue / interaction with scrolling in Safari. It really got bad with the 10.10.2 beta, so I'm hoping they fix it with a point release.
While I haven't switched to another OS, Yosemite has been the worst release of OS X that I've used (I've been an OS X user since Jaguar).
The general rule is to wait until at least 10.x.1 (or later), but even now, there are still bugs that indicate that there is little to no structure release or QA process at Apple, and it's likely that few teams have gotten the religion of testing.
* In 10.0.0, systems on Exchange in our office would
freeze after anywhere from 5-60 minutes. Only a hard
reboot would make them responsive.
* smart mailboxes no longer live update for me. I just
have to trut that the messages I've deleted or moved
will be gone when I manually reload the mailbox.
* replying to calendar events in Mail no longer provides
any indication that some action has been performed.
(Maybe this is related to the smart mailbox issue
above).
* Calendar will just stop drawing every once in a while
requiring a restart.
* Calendar frequently barfs on event updates and requires
reverting to the server version for any hope of
reconciling the changes.
* Safari frequently consumes all memory and all CPU for
lighter workloads than I used to run (because I know it
will go out of control at somepoint).
* The background of the login screen frequently has
graphical glitches which are likely caused by
overwriting areas of graphic or texture memory (this
seems to happen on Intel or dedicated graphics cards)
* iPhoto forced a database update, crashed in the middle
of the migration, and corrupted a decade old library.
This happened immediately after time machine told me
that it needed to start a new a backup and deleted my
most recent good backup.
With all of the pulled releases of iOS and Safari lately,I really hope someone at Apple is mandating some soul searching and release process changes. I'm not happy to act as Apple's QA department.
The pains of switching were greatly exaggerated in my head.
First you get a good base: Ubuntu / Debian / Fedora (?), etc.
You may have to spend a few hours sorting out drivers. I personally haven't had to do so for ages.
Then you ditch Unity (or $default) and try out a few window managers until you find what you like.
Then you "fix it" by customising away your annoyances and tailor it to your workflow.
I'm too tired to re-write this to sound less preachy - so downvotes are welcome - but I was a diehard OSX (up to 10.6) user until I put my toe in the Linux pool. I was expecting it to be freezing and "braced for impact", but actually, it was quite warm and inviting.
Exception: If need OS X apps, your path may be met with more friction. If there's a Windows equivalent to the OS X app, give Wine a try (Windows Emulator) - I keep hearing about how it gives people grief, but as far as I've seen, even my (distinctly non-technical) mother has installed and used small Windows applications without a glitch (or even realising that she is running Windows applications on her Mint). I think I read about some Mac-wine kind of thing, but not sure how mature it is - Google will help you.
To borrow a slogan: Just do it. You may be as surprised as I was.
I migrated from desktop Linux to OS X and use FreeBSD and Linux on my other computers. OS X does more right (for me) than any other commercial or open source Unix or Unix-like system, but that doesn't mean its perfect, and its growing further from being perfect as time goes on.
Have you tried this with a fresh account? I've only seen one of those problems (Mail being stealthy about Exchange calendar replies except for deleting the message). The fact that you're seeing graphical glitches sounds like you might have a hardware problem which could also explain the corrupted data.
There are numerous accounts of the graphical glitch issue. It only happens on the background layer, and its happening on a machine with integrated graphics, not one of the machines with well known AMD graphics issues. The type of artifact is very similar to texture memory being overwritten.
It could very well be a hardware issue, but since it only happens at the login screen and it consistently happens only after the Yosemite update, I'm fairly certain its software.
Just an FYI to everyone else who saw the domain name and clicked through, this is not by Steve Wozniak, it is by someone unrelated named Geoff Wozniak. Good article however.
It's interesting to hear about OSX crashing. I didn't think that was common. I've been a linux user for the longest time, and have always had to tweak something to get it running the way that I wanted to. That doesn't bother me since I like to do that kind of stuff. That and the fact that I've never had any problems with linux crashing, especially compared to Windows, has kept me on linux. But I know a lot of people who left linux for OSX because they didn't like to tweak things and just wanted to get things done.
A friend recently switched from a mac laptop at work to a windows laptop which surprised me. While she has always been a windows user, I was surprised that OSX didn't convert her to the platform. I also noticed that as more and more people start using macs, I hear more and more grumbling about them.
> It's interesting to hear about OSX crashing. I didn't think that was common.
It's not – on any of the recent operating systems in normal usage, crashes are rare and usually a sign of failed hardware.
> I also noticed that as more and more people start using macs, I hear more and more grumbling about them.
That's largely a function of popularity and time, particularly since we're well past the point where people have had time to accumulate custom/broken settings and install a ton of system-altering crud. I'm sure if everyone switched to Linux today, they'd start by talking about how much faster it is and within a few years be complaining about how the same system is slow and unreliable, particularly if they'd ever installed software written by a large company.
"I'm sure if everyone switched to Linux today, they'd start by talking about how much faster it is and within a few years be complaining about how the same system is slow and unreliable"
Not at all. Linux isn't windows. I don't know if that happens to OSX, but adding slow software to linux only slows the system when the software is running. The best example of that would be flash, which will bring a linux box to its knees. Once you kill the flash process, everything is back to normal.
Oddly enough, I switched from Ubuntu Linux to OS X because of upgrade pains of my own -- regressions in the Intel display drivers on my older hardware, suffering performance as a result of Unity, and cloud services making changes to messaging protocols in ways that constantly broke Pidgin/libpurple/Empathy.
At one point, I had a workflow consisting of a Chromebook + Chrome + GMail + Secure Shell[0] + Linux VPS running Ubuntu Linux. It worked pretty well so long as I could rely on there being a fast, low-latency, stable internet connection (say, at a university). Then I moved to the Bay Area. ;)
[0] Chrome Extension which purportedly contains OpenSSH compiled for Portable Native Client so that it can run inside Chrome. Convenient, but YMMV for the paranoid.
I had been dabbling with couple of big distributions - RHEL, Debian, SuSE, Knoppix, and maybe one or two others - when dual-booting on an older machine before I switched to Ubuntu; each one had problems with some hardware or another (sound, dial-up modem, required a DVD drive for installation, monitor, and later, Wi-Fi adapter) whereas Ubuntu just worked.
I also tried Arch Linux both in a VPS and in a Virtual Machine after switching to OS X, but at some point realized that I had more money and far less free time to spend tinkering with config files than when I was in middle school.
Sometimes I look at the latest Intel-based Surface Pros and wonder whether it makes sense to go back to Microsoft-land.
I can recommend trying a chromebook. You get a "linux" (crouton) laptop with excellent battery life and you don't have to spend hours upon hours of wrestling with custom wifi firmware, etc. The only drawback is that disk space is extremely limited, and there is still no real "mid-range" version (they all seem to have shitty non-IPS screens except Toshiba's latest). Also if you press space bar and then enter upon booting it'll wipe your chroot! :-) And if you need virtualization or custom kernels, also probably not a good fit.
I don't think Yosemite is as bad as people are making out; there have been some odd bugs, but many of them are caused by odd legacy migrations from old laptops or botched upgrades it seems. A fresh install seems to fix many problems experienced by many.
Even if OS X Yosemite is buggy, I don't think it's worth the switch to Linux for a desktop machine. It's a step backwards.
Personally, I switched to Linux in the late 90s as my full-time daily operating system, and kept it that way for nearly a decade. Then I was issued a Mac at a new job.
And... I don't understand the "control freak" comment, because OS X quickly became my daily OS. Adjustment consisted of learning a couple new GUI conventions, and the BSD-ish flavor of OS X's underlying Unix tools as opposed to the GNU stuff I knew.
Ten years ago I spent most of my productive time in a terminal window, running irssi, Emacs and a variety of shells inside screen. Today I spend most of my productive time in a terminal window, running irssi, Emacs and a variety of shells inside screen.
For non-productive stuff, I went from having a browser, music and video player, and some games to having a browser, music and video player, and some games.
Steve Jobs never broke into my house and uninstalled stuff or DRM'd my existing music collection. OS X has never said "I can't let you do that, Dave". Stuff works how I expect it to, and I have access to a wider variety of non-progammer-y software now, plus an OS that's easy to keep relatively safe when I want to recommend to a non-technical friend or relation.
So perhaps you could elaborate on what "control freak" elements are affecting me without my knowledge?
All extremely valid points. I don't really see the upgrades to OSX as very useful and have made things strangely unstable (since it seems that even the basic OS gets broken on each release). I think OSX is still the best OS to use though even if it doesn't look like it's headed in a good direction (I also do xCode dev sooo...). I wonder if some of the tools to turn off these new features could significantly improve the experience, though you'd still need to wait a few months after a 1.0 release of the OS to wait for the basic stability fixes
For me it's the fact that so many of the new wave of techs are mainly focused on Linux. Docker being one. I think OSX is losing it's hacker status. Linux as an open source OS will eventually take over in this market.
Given that the name "Geoff Wozniak" is plaster on the side of the article, I'd assume the author bears little, if any, relation to Steve Wozniak of Apple fame.
I'm sure this guy is savvy but I think that he gets much more credence due to his last name being Wozniak. Sorry but any post saying "why I did ____" seems to rub me the wrong way. I would have much more respect for a post that outlined issues found and how to reproduce them than a "I'm tired of this so you should be too" kind of post. personally I don't ca if you know or like/dislike what I use to work. If I wanted apple or anyone else to fix a problem I would file a bug report for this items I can't deal with as opposed to throwing a hissyfit about how my needs aren't being met by a company.
How do you fix complaints like "Apple aren't forthcoming with information about updates"? Get hired at Apple, work your way up the chain until you're a bigwig, and implement a new policy contrary to their current corporate culture? It's not like people aren't already begging them for more info. Filing a bug report isn't going to improve that.
Seems like a bit of a high bar you've set there for the author.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 353 ms ] threadI've never seriously used Linux, but my recent "upgrade" experiences have not been good: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/01/5k-retina-imac-and-mac-os-... . Finder crashes; FCP X crashes; a user account crashes; permissions problems; migration problems. Snow Leopard rarely if ever crashed.
You mean "OS X"?
I will say that I've had more permissions issues than any prior install.
e.g. - I think it's Woz.
0: http://beta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3230&cid=1410837
1: http://apple-beta.slashdot.org/story/00/01/03/1035237/interv...
It seems that these frustrations against OS X is a mismatch to this user's minimalist requirements: a mail client, iTerm, and a web browser. The OS X ecosystem caters a wide net of users ranging from the pink keyboards of middle school girls to the coffee-infused palms of college students.
I think there's a market for a linux distro that targets a limited set of premium hardware. I'd gladly pay money for an OS that worked out of the box on any MacBook or Surface Pro made in the past two years.
Edit: Many people are replying with brands that work for them. I'm glad they've been lucky enough to avoid problems, but I am making a different point. On Macs, OS X is practically guaranteed to work out of the box. Wifi, bluetooth, trackpad, screen brightness, power management, hardware graphics acceleration, resume from suspend/hibernate, etc Just Works™. On Apple's hardware, users never have to worry about kernel flags or special drivers. The same is not true for any combination of laptop brand and linux distro. I truly wish it were otherwise.
1. http://fujii.github.io/2014/03/02/thinkpad-edge-e145-backlig...
2. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fglrx-installer/+b...
3. http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201309-14195/
... unless you think ahead and only buy (and recommend) Thinkpads.
Edit: wanted to clarify that this C720 is my current personal portable. My other is a custom built desktop also running Ubuntu.
I'm running Ubuntu and a set of kernel modules I can link later but they are the very same that were then altered for Arch ( which I also tried but had some problems with ). These have carried me from 13.04-14.04 and I'm hoping the 3.17 kernel will be included soon because these components are built right into that kernel version AFAIK.
Well, that does kinda destroy the convenience of apt.
Like I said, it's a gamble. Sometimes the hardware and drivers and phase of the moon is right and everything works. Sometimes no amount of kernel flags and customized modules will fix it. I (along with many others) am willing to pay to not have to worry about potential problems.
1. I ranted a little about it near the end of a recent blog post: http://geoff.greer.fm/2015/01/03/ten-years-of-progress-in-la...
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack
That fixed the only issue I had which was with the 1 Gig ethernet. Now I'm on stock 14 and of course it has all the newer drivers already.
I use a Carbon X1 and have had no issue. Before I've been through other X's and a W.
In the case of ThinkPads, you have three interfaces to control backlight brightness: acpi_video0 (standard ACPI interface), intel_backlight (GPU interface), and thinkpad_acpi (vendor specific interface) all with different semantics conforming to ACPI standard, Windows 7 behaviors, Windows 8 behaviors, and vendor private behaviors, and you have user interfaces including BIOS wired special keys, sysfs, udev, X utils, GPU control panels, and desktop environment settings to control the brightness. You have these moving parts for just one vendor and the kernel needs to coordinate all the madness with all the vendors. And the fixes coming out in latest version kernel might not even make it to your version of distros.
So there is a lot of complexity in the even seemingly trivial screen brightness control. Linux still has much to do with the support of heterogeneous hardware. But this is the price you pay for the freedom.
Everything worked out of the box. 100%.
In particular, though, there's an ancient piece of conventional wisdom that always floats around that's very pro-nvidia+linux, but I think it's terribly outdated. AMD and nVidia compatibility with linux are both quite bad and both the OSS and proprietary drivers create a lot of problems for both. You're better off just using Intel straight through, their OSS drivers are plenty good for dev work and quite stable in my experience.
1.http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd.aspx
I could pick my own hardware for work, and I went with an XPS 13 9333 "Ubuntu edition" + superspeed dock for over 1300 GBP ($2K USD). I shouldn't have sponged on the extra hundred or so bucks for the X1 Carbon (..."startup"...), but the "Linux readiness" sucked me in. I don't exactly feel like I got my money's worth:
- "Coil Whine"[1]. My expectations from a $2K SSD laptop is complete fucking silence unless the fans are going. There is still some serious coil whine happening when some arbitrary conditions are met - If you often work in a quiet environment (any AM workers here?), you will notice this eventually. This also changes pitch when <things>, so you won't be tuning it out. This was noted as fixed by Dell for the 9333[2], when in fact it hasn't been. Not exclusively a Linux issue, but unacceptable in a $2K machine.
- Driver support: wifi: Identity crisis. The stock wifi drivers don't quite register as wifi drivers, but at least NetworkManager still kinda works. "Huh?"
Why do I care? Because maybe I wanted to switch out NetworkManager for wicd (not possible). Maybe I wanted monitor mode on my card (nope). Maybe I just wanted to run Kismet - or anything other than NetworkManager (not possible). Huh.- Driver support: wifi: instability. I got very frequent wifi disconnects/hiccups/delays on both the 2.4G and the 5G bands, when other hardware on the same location worked just fine (my Mac co-workers liked to pick on me for this, but hey, I would too in their shoes). By "delays", I'm not nit-picking milliseconds, I mean getting 2000ms+ pingbacks from the AP when a macbook placed right on top of it (for science) got the expected 20-70ms. Huh.
- Driver support: Touchscreen: forget about it.[3] Kind of entirely broken. After using the touch screen, moving the mouse (or trackpad) again will "jump" the cursor position to around 2x, 2y of where you left the touchscreen pointer. This was so annoying when I had a bottom-right "hot corner" kind of thing on Ubuntu (Mac convert here, forgive me) that I disabled the touchscreen entirely with xinput (any accidental touches would subsequently trigger "expose" mode). Also, if you attach a second monitor, the touchscreen input is mapped to the entire virtual desktop, rather than the laptop screen alone. As a consequence, under such circumstances, the touchscreen would only work correctly for taps at 0,0. Huh.
- Superspeed Dock: forget about it entirely, you'll regret buying one for Linux. First of all, not actually a dock, but a port replicator. Nevermind that, that's me being pedantic. Secondly, $180. Nevermind that, that's me being cheap. Thirdly, it doesn't work: Ethernet won't work[4], audio/mic won't work, HDMI won't work, DVI won't work. Very disappointing, I was looking forward to a triple screen setup. Oh well. Counterpoint: Well, Dell says it won't work, so what did you expect? Dell should put some more intelligence into its "also recommended for you" part of the website. Even if I had seen it, I would have expected some kind of hackaround to be possible. I search far and wide - no dice for the stuff that I cared for (screens/audio). It seems to be related to DisplayLink, which simply dropped Linux Support for its 3xxx/4xxx series. Nice.
Apologies for abusing your vertical screen real-estate, but I've been holding back this rant for well over a year now, and "it's your fault for triggering it" (I kid). But seriously, Dell's "Linux re...
My laptop is noticeably whiny a large chunk of the time. Seems to predominantly occur when scrolling image-heavy webpages, or graphics demos with no framerate limiters, but happens other times as well.
The "fix" is to disable low power CPU states. Yeah, you cut battery life, but at least it doesn't bore into your brain. I'd also suggest if you have onsite warranty to keep asking for replacements. Until laptop reviewers grow spines, it's probably the only way to get an issued noticed.
Edit: If you want to see if that'll help, just get a program to run at full CPU and see if the sound goes away. On several ThinkPads I noticed this (scrolling activates CPU), then saw people mentioning the CPU suspend states. Bingo.
For some people it triggers only when a secondary monitor is attached (that's me, usually - right now I don't think it is on, but then again the fans are going so they may be covering it).
For others, it immediately goes away if you switch off the backlight (didn't work for me).
I don't recall if someone has mentioned this in the XPS coil whine bughunt, but I'll give it a go the next time my laptop starts whining. Thanks!
It is a bit out of my range, but it's nice to know Dell is offering a quality non-Windows machine.
The single biggest problem with Cygwin is performance: forking is very slow. When I need to rewrite a script for Cygwin, it's almost invariably to reduce the number of processes spawned.
But almost all of the time, it just works, even building third-party stuff from source. On my home setup, I spend about half my terminal time with Cygwin, the other half in ssh sessions to Linux boxes, and there's no real mental context switch required.
- Backlight bugs are usually related to ACPI tables in the BIOS. Doing a BIOS upgrade will often fix them. This is especially true on the Thinkpad line where Lenovo explicitly supports Linux in its BIOS.
- Be careful with switchable graphics. While they have gotten a lot better, especially with open source drivers, they are still a pain (even on Windows). Choose a laptop with an Intel, or AMD APU. Or, barring that, make sure all of the scanouts are connected to the Intel card, like in my Thinkpad W540. The new Macbook Pro Retina 15" is exactly what you want to avoid - it forces all inputs to be connected to the discrete card when you boot Linux.
- Make sure you have a good wifi card. Intel or Atheros is the best.
- Do a bit of research before buying, like on the arch wiki.
- If you buy a bleeding edge laptop chipset, expect to need to use a bleeding edge distro for complete support.
This, a thousand times. While I haven't used Arch for a few years, and probably never will again, they have some of the best and most complete documentation in the GNU/Linux world. Chances are, if there's ever been a Linux-specific issue, some Arch user has run into it and either fixed it themselves or found the answer in the Arch community. Their wiki is quite thorough as well.
Another great source is linuxquestions.org. Half a million members and still growing, and they cover all major distros (though there's a ton of Slackware power users there, which suits me fine).
This attitude created the insane expectation that Ubuntu (or whatever) should run on any machine that previously ran Windows. That is a (hopelessly) tall order to fill, especially considering that new versions of Windows itself won't always run on machines that previously ran an older version of Windows.
We, as a community, mistakenly emphasized the sheer number of installs over the quality of those installs and the happiness of their users. The best way to market GNU/Linux, in my opinion, is to show someone a fully compatible, fully working machine that "Just Work[ed]" out of the box and explain, honestly, how it was achieved (by buying the right machine and using a distro known to work with that machine).
I believe that the "we can make any machine work, sort of..." attitude created a lot of crazy expectations, which hurt "switchers" and thus actually hurt the sale of fully compatible machines. Very sad.
I'm with you though. I bought a Mac solely for the battery life and the screen. If I could get a well-built machine, with a screen that didn't look washed out and a battery that consistently lasted more than four hours without weird tricks I would gladly pay Mac prices for it.
If you are looking for a locked-down consumer appliance of a computer then linux really isn't for you.
That's really the most extraordinary part of the whole movement. 20 years into it it's become mainstream on phones, set top boxes, and embedded devices everywhere but it hasn't also necessarily become some washed down, stupefied, lowest-common-denominator black box that is impenetrable to look at where you rely on the whims of some private company to fix issues that you are unable to communicate to them.
It's still grass-roots and community driven at its core. It hasn't sold out. Anyone is still just a bit a time and hard work away from making a difference - that's pretty powerful.
As other have pointed out System 76 targets Linux. I've got an old Dell that shipped with Ubuntu, still works great. Someone else mentioned their new series for Ubuntu, search on the Dell site.
"If you are looking for a locked-down consumer appliance of a computer then linux really isn't for you." LOL, I was going to say, what about chromeOS? That's a locked down distro based on linux. Luckily it is very easy to install a linux distro on it, as I have. You can have the best of both worlds, a locked down simple to use computer, and a tweak to your heart's delight linux distro.
But I write code for a living and I really can't justify ever having my laptop out of commission because of hardware/OS issues.
"Hey, boss. I'm not going to have my work done today because I installed an $DISTRO update and now my laptop is having driver issues."
Just like the automobile enthusiast who always disassembles parts of their car and replaces components - although their cars probably break down more often these people are enraptured in the art of auto mechanics. What would be our expensive nightmare is to them, hours of enjoyable pastime.
That said, I can't imagine too many developers or IT professionals who only have one working computer at their disposal. I am typing this on my Windows 7/Slackware main workstation, with an old laptop running OpenBSD to my left and an old tower running NetBSD to my right. I can jump on either of those two and get back to work in a few minutes if this one goes down.
OSX makes this particularly easy, though: you clone an OSX install with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to an external drive. (I have this scheduled to run nightly) You can then boot another Mac from that external drive.
The result is that you don't have to maintain two separate OSX installs. You can borrow somebody else's Mac, boot from your external drive, and boom - your data and your entire working environment are ready to go.
Of course you could also accomplish this with other operating systems. If your main work environment is a virtual machine, it's pretty trivial.
I still sometimes have to use Windows for work and resume/hibernate works about half the time. The other half I have to power reset it. That's with HP, Dell and Lennovo running Windows 7.
FYI: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/sleep-and-hibern...
I'm guessing here but I bet the picture for sleep/hibernate ain't all rosy for Macs either.
It's one of those things that has worked well for a long time. I remember on an old Powerbook G4, putting OSX to sleep while it was in the middle of the shutdown process only to wake it later to be welcomed by the shutdown process finishing and powering off.
[Not that OSX didn't have huge warts in those days. SambaFS/CIFS filesystem driver didn't deal well with the server going away for whatever reason. Reads/writes would block forever (because the driver didn't decide to time-out) and anything that attempted to touch it (even Finder) would immediately get sucked in to endlessly waiting.]
Technically, and conceptually, I think a better observation to make would be that there is a market for premium hardware that works well with linux. Thinkpads used to occupy this niche, but no longer.
Interesting - my experience with respect to this is that Apple will "just replace it" if a user complains enough.
Both my MBPs (17" 2009, last 17" made (2012?)) had chronic sleep/resume issues, where they would wake up unprompted, either immediately after going to sleep, or after a while (in my bag, turning it into a furnace), or not resume at all when waking up.
The Genius Bar "replaced a daughterboard, which should fix it"[1], which naturally didn't.
In my quest for a solution, I tried everything and met hundreds of poor souls with this problem, of varying technical aptitude - some far exceeding mine.
Changing the sleep mode, examining logs/dmesg/provided no hints, or relief. I gave up and started shutting it down or hibernating.
I don't miss OS X.
[1] Not a direct quote, but something equally eye-roll-invoking.
But your anecdote doesn't address my point: Do you think any combination of laptop brand and linux distro would be more likely to have everything work out of the box than Apple hardware running OS X?
By no means! It worked out for the best.
> I think most would agree that such problems are quite rare compared to other OSes.
Macbooks are very popular nowadays, but somewhat less so 5-6 years ago when I was diagnosing this. There were many, many people in my shoes all over the Apple discussions and other forums ("hunderds" from my previous post is almost definitely an underestimation). I'm not sure what percentage of total users this adds up to, but personally I wouldn't call it "rare". You can picture the frustration of paying top dollar for a premium machine/experience, not getting Genius Bar help and trying out any whacky witchcraft-y solution in case it works (reset SMC! PRAM! throw salt behind your back! try the new firmware from today!). Ugh.
> Also, it sounds like you had decent support from Apple. Though they failed, they expended significant effort and money to try and solve the problem.
Not quite. It was I who expended significant effort (take it in/be laptopless for a few days) and money (not under warranty) and to no avail. I don't remember what they said they fixed, but they charged me a little for some hardware part and labour. I didn't repeat the experiment for that issue, but the next time I had to get Apple support, the response was astounding as well.[1] I don't place much faith in the Genius Bar, and it is far from blind Apple-bashing in my case.
> But your anecdote doesn't address my point: Do you think any combination of laptop brand and linux distro would be more likely to have everything work out of the box than Apple hardware running OS X?
Well, yes, but you aren't going to like it. If you want a "brand" recommendation, Thinkpads are still your best bet. I've seen you're hit by that brightness bug, and that really does suck, but... "such problems are quite rare compared to the average Linux on Thinkpad experience" :/ I got a refurb X220 from ebay and put 14.04 on it - everything worked, down to the fingerprint reader. Go for a specific model rather than a brand, as "Our Milages Do Vary" even within brands.
As for the out-of-the-box experience, for my personal use case (hacker/developer) I don't value it that much. I'd much rather tweak a bit, but then have a system that "won't betray me", than have something that works 90% of the way I'd want it to, out of the box, and occasionally crash and fail me in mysterious undiagnosable ways. OS X wasn't even at 90% for me - "Always on Top" available out of the box nowadays? I had Afloat for this (and transparencies) in 10.6, but it didn't work for 10.7+
For the out-of-the-box experience in a casual user's use case, I have another anecdote for you - my distinctly non-technical mother. After seemingly making a hobby out of infecting her Windows XP/Vista over the years, I had this crazy idea to try Linux Mint on her crapware HP 17" laptop. I won't lie to you, I did hold my breath a bit while installing, hoping that I'll manage to sort out the inevitable issues, and I was surprised to find no issues at all. Everything worked out of the box and she's still using it, over a year later, with no complaints or need for technical support from me. She's a casual user - browsing, email, flash game or two - and she didn't really need Windows that much after all.
Finally, just like OS X works well with specific hardware, Linux is sort-of the same. If all vendors bothered with Linux support, the situation would be different and you'd have much greater chances of "Just Works" - but alas, that isn't so. If you can pick your laptop to be compatible, you won't have issues 99% of the time. Occasionally, vendors lie/exaggerate about the extent of Linux support (grep for "XPS 13" for my rant elsewhere on this thread about Dell), so always doub...
1. I don't see the problem. 2. Oh, I see, that's a feature! 3. Hmm, not a feature you say, then it must be those pesky 3rd party apps you are using. 4. Ok, ok, it's a clean install, have you done all the upgrades? 5. You have? I see, well we will probably fix it in the next driver/software update, wouldn't you like to just wait? 6. You wouldn't???? Ok, fine, I guess it might be a hardware issue, but it's probably not covered under warranty, because they all do it. 7. Ok, I guess it's just your device, but are you sure you have warranty? 8. Ok, fine, will fix it, but just this once!
Apple is no more a pain in the ass than any of the other major manufacturers. At least they have an Apple Store in most markets, so you can go and bitch at someone in person, rather than engaging in a futile argument with a bangladeshi call center operator. At least with Apple you have an option to choke to death the person who is "assisting" you, when you eventually snap, instead of just threatening to do so :) Ok, I am not sure if that last bit is a plus.
That being said, I do agree that Genius Bar people are mostly idiots, and are trained to avoid fixing your problem, if at all possible. But honestly, can't you say the same about all of the other companies.
My point was in response to "you received decent support from Apple", which has never been my case.
[0]: https://getfedora.org/
I would highly recommend Elementary to jaded OS X users in particular, along with anyone else with an inclination to use Linux. I regularly and happily use all major OSs for coding, design and other super serious stuff, and this is my favorite Linux distro by far.
http://elementaryos.org/
Has it gotten better since then?
It looks nice.
And has no window menu whatsoever in any application at all, despite having plenty of space for that.
You video player has detected the wrong ratio for the video you want to see?
Bad luck, elementary will not let you change it.
Just get supported hw, and you will be fine, applies to all operating systems.
I believe the same is true of OS X, which only works reliably on something like 12% of laptops sold.
Went from NetBSD to OS X in 2002, then to Linux in 2008, then back to OS X in 2011.
I spend almost all of my time in cross-platform apps, but the little inconveniences of Linux on a laptop just weren't worth the trouble back in 2011, and I'd be surprised if anything has changed since then.
OS X at its ugliest and least stable wipes the floor with Linux at its best, imo.
Edit: wholly agree with OSX not wiping the floor with Linux
Specifically: sleep/restore, display brightness control, sound, battery life, wifi, fonts, endless desktop tweaking. ymmv, but this stuff has just never been optimal out of the box.
When I say "wipe the floor," I mean in regards to time wasted (measurable) and appearance (subjective).
On another note I would just like to mention 2 years is a long time in Linux and you might want to give it another go.
One thing that definitely kills the Linux experience for most people is that they buy a new laptop model and then complain about Linux not supporting their hardware. In fact, the latest Linux kernel image will generally be pretty awesome about hardware support, but most Linux distros ship with an older kernel version.
As per the list you have made, I didn't find any difficulty with anything but fonts and that was ten years ago. Some of my friends still use Ubuntu and when I say this I am not saying with any malaise or Apple-hate (which I honestly do not posses) but I must confess, today's Ubuntu's font rendering is a lot better than OSX's.
Not to mention it just works out of the box now, everything! And if you are the tweaker type, no doubt you have got the endless possibilities. But as you mentioned and rightly so, ymmv.
The linux machines were whiteboxes of the same age, and while there was a curl or two in setting them up, were still just as speedy and usable when aged as they were when new.
As for Spotify, it consumes a lot of memory. You'd better off with iTunes.
To top it off, Apple has shifted their focus from 'it just works' to 'buy a new iPhone/iPad for no reason'.
This only got to the top of Hacker News because of this guy's last name.
It was the breakage of Spotlight-Preview integration that removed my last reason to stay on OS X.
Now that I'm mostly done with my hacks (check http://en.blog.guylhem.net/post/106153399669/how-to-recreate...), I have a spare one to sell. It's the tablet version, with a wacom digitizer (works with xournal)
$ systemd-analyze Startup finished in 763ms (kernel) + 579ms (userspace) = 1.343s
Email me if you are interested.
EDIT: Holy down votes. Don't know what to say. I thought it was Woz, sosume. All I did was agree with the less-downvoted parent.
EDIT 2: Hive mind crit axotty for 9999.
It's the guys name. Using ones own name cannot be linkbaity or misleading.
I'm not accusing this Wozniak of malice, however.
I didn't look at the TLD I just clicked. I thought Woz was ditching OS X, I got excited. I was baited.
To clarify the stated fact: the name appears in the left margin on an iPad, just like on a desktop browser at normal width. However on an iPhone, it appears at the bottom of the page. It does the same thing if your browser window is set to less than 768px wide.
It's not hard to see how in those circumstances, someone could be misled into thinking that the article's author was Woz, especially if they didn't read all the way to the end.
Anyway that might be my Polish bias talking, but I don't see how many could have made that mistake.
Op wrote a good piece. It stands on its own unrelated to his surname.
It's not link-baity in the sense that there's really anything wrong with using your own name for your blog (although try telling that to Mike Rowe), but it's link-baity in the context of HN where the domain shows up with equal importance to the headline and where the name "Wozniak" is very clearly associated with one and only one person.
I think the "flag" link is unfit for purpose and should be moved & changed. Firstly, it should appear on the comments page as well as the listing pages. Secondly, there should be multiple reasons for flagging (or a free-text, one-line reason field), so that it's at least possible to flag a misleading headline for alteration, without the possibility that the entire submission could be flag-killed.
I even agree with the poster about certain issues with OS X. It's particularly annoying as someone that recently switched away from Windows, after finally losing patience with Microsoft's similarly erosive programme of needless tinkering and randomly breaking stuff in lieu of tangible improvements. However, I don't come to HN to read opinions that agree with my existing world-view and pat myself on the back for being right (or at least, that's not my main reason).
I am however interested in opinions that are not just from "some guy" but which represent the defection of a key figure, such as "DHH: why I've finally given up on Ruby" or "RMS: why closed-source is better after all". I would definitely read those and would be equally disappointed if the author turned out to be an unrelated namesake.
These experiments rarely last very long, and almost always end because the video/graphics support is just so terrible. I have yet to find a reliable way to play videos without horrible screen tearing.
But I don't know what alternative there is. Windows' experiments with Metro was a disaster. PC-BSD has some really nice features (I love ZFS and use it on my fileserver) but has the same issues with hardware support, especially graphics hardware support.
I fear for the future.
The result is that for many things you might type into the start menu, you get offers to install scams on your PC. Idiotic.
Or the other form of support: post to Twitter/HackerNews/etc. and light a fire that they will quickly need to put out...
It's so bad that Netflix required three takedowns for the same publisher before MS decided not to allow scam "official" Netflix apps. The second hit for Facebook is a scam (FB has no way I found to report stuff if you don't have a FB account - lame for security.)
I'm betting that some high level people at Microsoft have a bonus tied to "number of apps published". That's the only way this crap makes sense. Even unpaid 14yr olds would do s better job cleaning up the Store. It's far worse than Android Marketplace ever was.
Windows 8.1 improved things a bit by identifying some scenarios where Metro was unnecessary and keeping it out of the way. So relative to Windows 7 it's now two steps forward and one step back.
I've used the Windows 10 preview and early signs suggest that it's going to be two steps forward from Windows 7.
That's funny, because ALL of the non-technical regular people that I know of hate windows 8. A lot of them downgraded to Windows 7.
There's smaller improvements too, like the new Task Manager [3].
There's also mundane stuff like rejigged NTFS this and that [4].
Client Hyper-V is a welcome addition.
etc. etc.
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/07/reducing-runti...
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/21/enhancing-wind...
[3] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/13/the-windows-8-...
[4] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/09/redesigning-ch...
One thing I had heard was that game performance was better on windows 8 and 8.1 compared to 7. Though after looking up some benchmarks investigating that, it does not seem to be the case. There are some differences either way depending on game/graphics card but they are very minor anyway.
http://www.ocaholic.ch/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-8-gaming-perform...
I kept using xp until 7 came out. This is also what industry did. So I'll probably wait until they bring out another one aimed at industry.
Unfortunately, the improvements were negated by the lame ass UI, which thankfully Microsoft will be ditching.
In non-composited environments, tearing would happen unless a hardware overlay used.
In composited environments, tearing would be inevitable because the compositor would use a nonsynchronized back-to-front-buffer copy. This has largely been replaced with a synchronized buffer flip, so that there is no tearing at all.
The one remaining issue I have is with fullscreen Firefox videos. These get "direct" output (they skip the compositor) but don't use a hardware overlay, and therefore tear. There are a couple solutions for this that I'm playing with.
My previous Linux machine was a Sony VAIO SZ, running Ubuntu 8.04; it did basically everything that I needed, and my only complaint that I'd have if downgrading to it today would be the reduction in battery life. Is there a great set of laptop hardware to run Linux on these days? What do people use when they just want a candy-reduced window system?
[0] MacBook Pro Retina 15", Mid 2012; periodically, usually while I am scrolling through a web page, the machine becomes unresponsive (sound stops, cursor stops), and a minute or two later, the machine powers off. Sometimes it reboots on its own; afterwards, there's no kernel panic log. As far as I can tell, something goes wrong, and after a few minutes, the SMC's watchdog timer gives up, and shoots the machine in the head.
But, as the grandparent said, this sounds more like a hardware issue,
I despise the "fresh install"/"just format it" response to problems - it shows that nobody really knows wtf is going on and/or can't help you, but maybe starting from a clean slate will make it not broken? (Until it happens again and you need to clean-slate it, naturally). Wreaks of Windows ME-level quality in both software and software support.
The "format it for Linux anyway" argument seems a litte fallacious to me. You'd have to format it to put any other OS on it, sure. The point is to get to a state (OS/whatever) where you don't have to resort to random "nuke blasting" methods to fix something.
If formatting once for Linux means I never have to nuke it from space again to fix an issue, then yeah, I'll take it.
The general rule is to wait until at least 10.x.1 (or later), but even now, there are still bugs that indicate that there is little to no structure release or QA process at Apple, and it's likely that few teams have gotten the religion of testing.
With all of the pulled releases of iOS and Safari lately,I really hope someone at Apple is mandating some soul searching and release process changes. I'm not happy to act as Apple's QA department.Edit: formatting
The pains of switching were greatly exaggerated in my head.
First you get a good base: Ubuntu / Debian / Fedora (?), etc.
You may have to spend a few hours sorting out drivers. I personally haven't had to do so for ages.
Then you ditch Unity (or $default) and try out a few window managers until you find what you like.
Then you "fix it" by customising away your annoyances and tailor it to your workflow.
I'm too tired to re-write this to sound less preachy - so downvotes are welcome - but I was a diehard OSX (up to 10.6) user until I put my toe in the Linux pool. I was expecting it to be freezing and "braced for impact", but actually, it was quite warm and inviting.
Exception: If need OS X apps, your path may be met with more friction. If there's a Windows equivalent to the OS X app, give Wine a try (Windows Emulator) - I keep hearing about how it gives people grief, but as far as I've seen, even my (distinctly non-technical) mother has installed and used small Windows applications without a glitch (or even realising that she is running Windows applications on her Mint). I think I read about some Mac-wine kind of thing, but not sure how mature it is - Google will help you.
To borrow a slogan: Just do it. You may be as surprised as I was.
It could very well be a hardware issue, but since it only happens at the login screen and it consistently happens only after the Yosemite update, I'm fairly certain its software.
If you don't like it just remove the Launchpad icon from the dock and don't hit the F4 key.
A friend recently switched from a mac laptop at work to a windows laptop which surprised me. While she has always been a windows user, I was surprised that OSX didn't convert her to the platform. I also noticed that as more and more people start using macs, I hear more and more grumbling about them.
It's not – on any of the recent operating systems in normal usage, crashes are rare and usually a sign of failed hardware.
> I also noticed that as more and more people start using macs, I hear more and more grumbling about them.
That's largely a function of popularity and time, particularly since we're well past the point where people have had time to accumulate custom/broken settings and install a ton of system-altering crud. I'm sure if everyone switched to Linux today, they'd start by talking about how much faster it is and within a few years be complaining about how the same system is slow and unreliable, particularly if they'd ever installed software written by a large company.
Not at all. Linux isn't windows. I don't know if that happens to OSX, but adding slow software to linux only slows the system when the software is running. The best example of that would be flash, which will bring a linux box to its knees. Once you kill the flash process, everything is back to normal.
At one point, I had a workflow consisting of a Chromebook + Chrome + GMail + Secure Shell[0] + Linux VPS running Ubuntu Linux. It worked pretty well so long as I could rely on there being a fast, low-latency, stable internet connection (say, at a university). Then I moved to the Bay Area. ;)
[0] Chrome Extension which purportedly contains OpenSSH compiled for Portable Native Client so that it can run inside Chrome. Convenient, but YMMV for the paranoid.
I also tried Arch Linux both in a VPS and in a Virtual Machine after switching to OS X, but at some point realized that I had more money and far less free time to spend tinkering with config files than when I was in middle school.
Sometimes I look at the latest Intel-based Surface Pros and wonder whether it makes sense to go back to Microsoft-land.
Even if OS X Yosemite is buggy, I don't think it's worth the switch to Linux for a desktop machine. It's a step backwards.
And... I don't understand the "control freak" comment, because OS X quickly became my daily OS. Adjustment consisted of learning a couple new GUI conventions, and the BSD-ish flavor of OS X's underlying Unix tools as opposed to the GNU stuff I knew.
Ten years ago I spent most of my productive time in a terminal window, running irssi, Emacs and a variety of shells inside screen. Today I spend most of my productive time in a terminal window, running irssi, Emacs and a variety of shells inside screen.
For non-productive stuff, I went from having a browser, music and video player, and some games to having a browser, music and video player, and some games.
Steve Jobs never broke into my house and uninstalled stuff or DRM'd my existing music collection. OS X has never said "I can't let you do that, Dave". Stuff works how I expect it to, and I have access to a wider variety of non-progammer-y software now, plus an OS that's easy to keep relatively safe when I want to recommend to a non-technical friend or relation.
So perhaps you could elaborate on what "control freak" elements are affecting me without my knowledge?
How so?
Seems like a bit of a high bar you've set there for the author.