personally I prefer Linux on a Lenovo hands down.. (calm down fan boys.. it's a personal preference). But the Mac has some nice things.. I do like the UI of the Mac better than Unity.. though I hate the menu bar only showing on one screen.. always had to tinker with the Mac to get that on multiple screens.. the biggest thing I need from the Mac isn't really Apple's.. Its M$ Office.. Every day at work I get a spreadsheet or a word doc that just doesn't quite work in Libreoffice..
Ask HN: Switching from OS X to Linux
161–169 of 169 posts
Re: Ask HN: Switching from OS X to Linux
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alfred is awesome http://www.alfredapp.com/ It is based on an idea from an older launcher called Quicksilver http://qsapp.com/ These types of apps have existed in OS X for a long time. I'm kind of surprised that Linux doesn't have an equivalent yet, as pretty much any open-source dev who uses a Mac laptop knows about the above apps.
They have existed on Linux for just as long, it's just you Mac folks haven't heard of them as there's more choice, and all the major desktops have this functionality built in, at least as far as app launching goes - just press the windows key and start typing works in Unity & Gnome at least. Less chance for market dominance from any one tool. The coolest, ultra minimal yet featureful one is dmenu, which I haven't see…
Nice.
In doing a bit of Googling of dmenu I found this
http://alternativeto.net/software/dmenu/?platform=mac
Which may be helpful for others as a general way to find alternatives for a given piece of software on other platforms.
Re: Ask HN: Switching from OS X to Linux
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be careful when updating packages. As an OS X user used to blithely updating anything and everything because it always "just works," I've gotten into shocking situations where I've actually bricked my Elementary install simply by doing an update. When I approached Linux users about this, their response was something along the lines of "Yeah... don't do that." (Seriously?) As a result I've had to run Elementary in a V…
It depends on the distro. Some distros can and will mangle themselves if you blindly upgrade everything without doing at least some research beforehand (Ubuntu and Arch are notorious for this; Arch because it's bleeding-edge and has absolutely zero consideration for compatibility between packages, and Ubuntu because... well... who the hell knows). Others do a much better job of making sure all packages are well-teste…
> No problem; just select your last-known-good configuration at boot, then try again
This sounds like a configuration that could potentially be applied to other Linux OS'es, no?
Re: Ask HN: Switching from OS X to Linux
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on the distro. Some distros can and will mangle themselves if you blindly upgrade everything without doing at least some research beforehand (Ubuntu and Arch are notorious for this; Arch because it's bleeding-edge and has absolutely zero consideration for compatibility between packages, and Ubuntu because... well... who the hell knows). Others do a much better job of making sure all packages are well-teste…
> No problem; just select your last-known-good configuration at boot, then try again This sounds like a configuration that could potentially be applied to other Linux OS'es, no?
In theory, yes.
In practice, this tends to be a difficult problem to solve because most Linux environments are managed imperatively/procedurally rather than declaratively, meaning that in order to revert to a previous state, you have to be able to run the exact commands required to do so. The traditional answer is to manage such a system with Puppet or Chef - thus allowing an administrator to tell the system what it should look like rather than how it should go about it - but that's generally yet another layer of logical overhead to be considered.
NixOS - in theory, at least - addresses this more fully by integrating declarative configuration rather pervasively throughout the operating system itself, rather than trying to just add a layer on top of the operating system in order to manage it. It relies heavily on the Nix package manager - instead of installing a program directly to the filesystem hierarchy, it installs it to an isolated folder named with a theoretically-unique hash, allowing multiple versions of the same program to coexist without conflicting (and allowing users to pick which version they want), making it painless to roll back software upgrades (just go back to a different selection of which package folders should be linked to, rather than having to manually remove and revert each package), etc.; NixOS leverages this package management system for everything, rather than just the software installed, and will create GRUB entries whenever you commit your configuration changes (by running `nixos-rebuild switch` or `nixos-rebuild boot`, causing an instant configuration switch or a configuration switch on next boot, respectively).
Other operating systems can hypothetically do this, too, and they'd end up looking similar to NixOS in terms of how things are organized and configured. As I said, I think that's probably the direction where most operating systems will eventually go.
Re: Ask HN: Switching from OS X to Linux
#165I switched a few weeks ago because I was tired of OS X, too. I tried every distribution out there and the one I've kept is Debian Jessie. Debian is great in that it's a simple and stable Gnome experience. Linux can be much more dangerous than OS X in terms of applications crashing badly, so I like the fact that I have an OS that I have thoroughly tested, fixed, and that won't move much in years. And I can get both th…
Tried every distribution out there - and you chose Debian Jessie over LinuxBBQ?
Re: Ask HN: Switching from OS X to Linux
#166Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr is where you want to be. It Just Works, plus there's a huge and awesome community to help out if you have questions. I haven't tried the derivatives, like Mint or Elementary, but I've heard good things. Note that even though Ubuntu is based on Debian, you do not want Debian... It's release cycle is a lot slower, the UI is much less polished, and you'll be stuck with versions of software that…
> you'll be stuck with versions of software that are really really out of date I've had way more trouble with out of date packages on Ubuntu than Debian (Sid).
Just to add to your comment. I've had almost zero issues with Sid, and the issues I've had I've avoided by using apt-listbugs anyways. I can't say that when I tired Ubuntu and Mint. Mint actually botched my install on an update, took me 3 hours to undo the mess and I promptly backed up and installed Debian on that machine. YMMV
Re: Ask HN: Switching from OS X to Linux
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No problem; just select your last-known-good configuration at boot, then try again This sounds like a configuration that could potentially be applied to other Linux OS'es, no?
In theory, yes. In practice, this tends to be a difficult problem to solve because most Linux environments are managed imperatively/procedurally rather than declaratively, meaning that in order to revert to a previous state, you have to be able to run the exact commands required to do so. The traditional answer is to manage such a system with Puppet or Chef - thus allowing an administrator to tell the system what it…
So all the actual filesystem entries are basically soft or hardlinks to the most recently selected version?
Time Machine on OS X works that way (as do a few other incremental backup solutions, I believe). Notably in Time Machine's case, it hacks a way to hardlink to entire directories which haven't changed, which is normally not possible. (There's a parallel here with how immutable data structures are managed.)
Re: Ask HN: Switching from OS X to Linux
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arch is arguably worse than most about this, because their rolling repositories dump versions after a couple of updates are available. So if you wait too long to update, it can't even figure out how to get started, because it no longer has the slightest idea what the packages you have installed even mean. Don't get me wrong, I like Arch a lot, and I've been using it as my main Linux distribution for the past five yea…
I guess I'm kind of surprised that people are OK with updating infrequently. Don't your distros distribute security updates? How long do you wait before applying them?
I usually do updates about once a week. If I need to install a new package, I'll usually refresh everything then as well. But occasionally it's longer than that. I just forget for a week or so, go on holiday, etc.
Most of the time, I come back, do an "Syu", and it's fine. Occasionally though, things go pear-shaped. Once or twice I've needed to manually fetch packages from one of the archive sites and manually copy it into pacman's cache directory to get things up and going again.
Re: Ask HN: Switching from OS X to Linux
#169I want to add that if person wants a very OS X like desktop for GNU/Linux then Étoilé DE is very much the thing.
Only downside is that it isn't very mature yet. And in fact is in a need of developers. Alternative to Étoilé is the Window Maker with GNUStep and GWorkspace but it isn't everybody's cup of tea.