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From OS X to Ubuntu

nicolas.perriault.net

231–240 of 403 posts

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#231
post #134

Sure it's possible to use Linux on the desktop. It's also possible to find some laptops that are well supported. Do I want to replace Lightroom, Sketch, Pixelmator, 1Password and Alfred with inferior replacements? No, because my livelihood depends on good tools and I think it's fair to pay money for them.

I find it difficult to believe that your livelihood depends solely on the specific combination of apps you mentioned. It doesn't even seem like you've actually tried any of these apps yet call them inferior? Inferior how? That's quite an elitist stance to portray without the specifics to back it up here.

I can vouch that Lightroom is 100x better than Darktable. The UI is better, and the application crashes less. Lightroom is basically the reason I switched back to a windows desktop (along with Photoshop, Solidworks, MS Word, etc.).

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#232
post #31

IMO if money isn't an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good. Linux on desktops - as in, not a laptop - has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for >10 years. Not much else to say there. If desktop or server, this shouldn't be a discussion. As far as laptops go, I've just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100%…

Does anyone ever try to install Windows from scratch on these new laptops? They have far more problems than Linux out of the box - no Wifi drivers, no correct display driver so everythings stuck at 1024x768. No touchpad driver on one of them. Meanwhile, I've installed Arch and NixOS on a Chromebook Pixel 2013, Chromebook Pixel 2015, Lenovo X1 Carbon and a 2015 Macbook Pro in the last 18 months. Never had a significan…

Exactly. People don't seem to realise how the entire hardware industry holds Windows' hands and even then it isn't THAT much better than a volunteer driven effort. One wonders where Linux would be if the hardware manufacturers showed it even 50% the love they show for Windows.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#233
post #38
post #14

Not related to the blog post but why are the websites form lenovo + dell (and acer) so god damn awful? lenovo.com redirects me to https://www.lenovo.com/se/en/ since i'm currently in Sweden. I then get nice server error as greeting: 403 - Forbidden: Access is denied. If I try to access lenovo.de I get often no response... also for subsequent pages... On dells website it takes an awful lot of time to filter their lapt…

This, this, a thousand times this. One thing that Apple has done very well is put together a website that: A.) Tells you what they are selling, and B.) Can sell it to you. Why is it so hard for other vendors to figure out that this is a pretty good way to sell computers? My girlfriend bought an Asus Zenbook the other day; it's a really nice machine and made me wonder whether there might be a Zenbook for me. So I ende…

I think the problem here is that Apple doesn't really have to have a huge product range because they are pretty much focused on the premium price range.

On the other hand, manufacturers like Asus, Lenovo and Dell have everything from the economy to premium range which makes the content organization a natural headache. And it looks like nobody has figured out a good way to fix everything up.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#234
post #134

Sure it's possible to use Linux on the desktop. It's also possible to find some laptops that are well supported. Do I want to replace Lightroom, Sketch, Pixelmator, 1Password and Alfred with inferior replacements? No, because my livelihood depends on good tools and I think it's fair to pay money for them.

I find it difficult to believe that your livelihood depends solely on the specific combination of apps you mentioned. It doesn't even seem like you've actually tried any of these apps yet call them inferior? Inferior how? That's quite an elitist stance to portray without the specifics to back it up here.

Have you tried any of the apps they're claiming are superior? I would argue Sketch is compared to Inkscape, and Pixelmator is compared to Gimp. For someone who is mostly messing around casually and just for fun, Inkscape and Gimp are great. They give you most of the tools you need or want, but not always in a straightforward way, and their UIs are lacking compared to their commercial counterparts.

Sketch and Pixelmator, to me, operate in a significantly smoother way, and make doing basic tasks substantially easier. The biggest thing that comes to mind for Sketch/Inkscape is exporting sections of the larger project file into individual assets. It's a breeze in sketch. It's integrated in the main UI, it operates in a predictable way, and it just works. Inkscape pulls you through a series of menus, and doesn't have any way to remember how you've previously separated up your assets (unless there's some way to do that deeply hidden in the UI that I could never find).

So yes, Sketch and Pixelmator, and most well-known creative software (anything in the Adobe suite, the Affinity Suite, etc) is generally significantly ahead of the open source options. Would I prefer it otherwise, sure, but the open source options aren't used by that many professionals, and are generally swimming upstream to implement features the commercial ones already have, instead of creating the next great feature (whatever that is) or streamlining their UI to make easier to use.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#235
All laptops at home are running ubuntu, and so is my desktop. For me it was seemingly the opposite to the experience of many people here. I had no issues whatsoever with the laptops, everything worked pretty much out of the box. No issues with function keys not working, wireless, audio or anything else.

On the other hand, on my desktop I had a lot of issues with random system freezes, and with the audio. My headset would have a constant crackling and the graphics card had quite a few issues.

As with most things, YMMV.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#236
post #207
post #31

IMO if money isn't an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good. Linux on desktops - as in, not a laptop - has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for >10 years. Not much else to say there. If desktop or server, this shouldn't be a discussion. As far as laptops go, I've just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100%…

> and god forbid, wirless Stick to Intel WiFi chips, and you'll be OK. They provide an open driver (iwlwifi). Second best is probably Qualcomm Atheros (ath10k), also open driver. Stay away from the rest. Intel 802.11ac cards work really well on Linux. The only problem with laptops can be nasty blacklisting (Lenovo is notorious for that). I.e. if you buy a WiFi card separately and it's not from the "approved" list, th…

You can often install a hacked BIOS wich do not contain such a blacklist, which you can find on the internet, installing which may or may not be a good idea though.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#237
For all your OS X coming to Linux, a word of personal advice. Use a distro with KDE, Kubuntu is great for beginners and install ubuntu-make (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-make), a command line utility that installs your dev environment.

If you feel a bit more adventurous and want the all of the newest Software try Manjaro-KDE.

Why KDE?

KDE has a traditional Desktop experience, that can be tweaked in every way. It is much more polished and all the other Linux desktops and it uses Qt5 as it's base - so the team doesn't need to develop the widget toolkit and can focus on the desktop. Lastly gtk apps look much better in KDE than Qt apps in Gnome.

BTW: I was a long time Unity and then Gnome user, so I know what I am talking about. I switched to KDE this summer and never looked back.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#238
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and god forbid, wirless Stick to Intel WiFi chips, and you'll be OK. They provide an open driver (iwlwifi). Second best is probably Qualcomm Atheros (ath10k), also open driver. Stay away from the rest. Intel 802.11ac cards work really well on Linux. The only problem with laptops can be nasty blacklisting (Lenovo is notorious for that). I.e. if you buy a WiFi card separately and it's not from the "approved" list, th…

You can often install a hacked BIOS wich do not contain such a blacklist, which you can find on the internet, installing which may or may not be a good idea though.

It is possible for some older models. But not for recent ones. Or at least so far no such method was published.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#239
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree with the sentiment that the solution is "another closed-source unix/linux-based operating system that throws away X.org and its attempted modern replacements, that can directly compete with OS X" We don't need more closed, we need more open. What we need is massive rewards for open hardware via customer money. As long as wireless cards and graphics cards are closed by default and drivers are BLOBe…

That's not the Apple experience. The Apple experience means - well, used to mean - an entire ecosystem of hardware, software, content, distribution, marketing, branding, business partnerships, and development. Linux doesn't work with absolute consistency because FOSS people still don't understand that source code is a tiny part of the bigger user experience. The big challenge in the PC business isn't the OS, it's the…

One of the things that attracted me to FOSS in the first place was the complete lack of marketing, i.e. lies. At first I was a little taken aback by the way so many projects would advertise prominently flaws in their product (bugs, missing features, design limitations...), but quickly I got used to it, and now just seems the normal thing to do. Whereas marketing comes across as blatant, manipulative BS.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#240
What about SSDs? The only mention I can find is for the 5720, All-in-One, which is a 27" workstation.

Do the laptops ship with rotational HDDs? IMHO comparing this to a MacBook (with its PCIe SSD) if it has a rotational HDD is disingenuous.

I replaced my root partition HDD with an SSD in 2009 and I'm never going back.

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