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So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux

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Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux

#251

Post by thomastjeffery »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #23

I find the fetish for terminal-based music players a bit odd. I associate terminals with doing work , so the idea of having one whose sole purpose is playing music (presumably in the background while you do other stuff) to feel like a waste of screen real-estate and something I'm likely to accidentally pull up while trying to cycle between my other terminal windows where I'm doing stuff. I much prefer something that…

> I associate terminals with doing work

Most of us Linux users find you a bit odd. That's just how it goes.

The shell is a very useful interface. It allows abstractions that just aren't tractable with GUIs. Many of us have found that those abstractions are quite useful for fun things, too.

Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux

#252

Post by grumdan »

jasondclinton wrote: post #112
Tehchops wrote: post #42

End-user Linux has definitely improved in the last few years. It offers a lot of attractive features for what I imagine to be the typical HN demographic. That being said, it's still got rough spots that OSX doesn't. It works great when it works, but when it doesn't.... Font rendering, display/compositor fragmentation etc... Inb4 the anecdotal "well it works for me I just had to download the xf86 font library and comp…

That's true: some things are easier on Mac. In particular, I'd say that using software that hasn't been packaged for your distribution is much easier on Mac. However, your example of fonts is definitely not one of those areas, anymore. Font rendering on Linux is as advanced and capable as any other OS including in the areas of kerning and hinting. It should just work without any user intervention and look great. I ag…

> I agree with you that compositing/window manager fragmentation is a problem. And this article is a perfect example of that. The author may think that they're happy using i3 with Firefox and st at the moment, but the desktop computing environment has gotten so complex and the expectations of users who interact with desktop applications so rich, that a small hobby project DE/WM cannot fully satisfy all of those use cases over the long term.

Users have different needs and preferences, so I see the fragmentation as a positive thing because it gives people choice.

For me personally, xmonad, one of these hobby projects, has been perfectly sufficient for the last 10 years. I also didn't really touch my configuration much in the last ~8 years. More importantly though, I find it actually reduces my mental workload since I no longer have to handle window placement myself.

Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux

#254

Post by amaccuish »

roadbeats wrote: post #21

I guess the author actually meant to say “So long, OSX” as Macbooks (older than 2016 versions) actually are good hosts for running Linux. I myself run have two Macbooks (Air 13 and Pro 15) with dual boot setup, so I get the best of two worlds: perfect programming setup (i3) on Linux, perfect multimedia (I use Lightroom / Premiere sometimes) setup on OSX.

For me I had to switch back to MacOS. The battery life was dreadful on Linux, even with TLP and various other tweaks.

Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux

#255

Post by overcast »

My current setup is as follows. I found this to be the best way of not being distracted by other functions on the same machine. When I want to do one of those 3 tasks, I bootup the correct machine/drive.

MacOS(Hackintosh) - Daily driver, photo editing.

Windows 10 - Gaming

Mint Linux(Disk2 of Gaming PC) - Development

Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux

#256

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

ams6110 wrote: post #221
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are clipboard applications which will pull everything into a single clipboard. KDE Plasma, for instance, has a great built-in clipboard which does this and which also handles at least images as well. > The second dream wish would be for consistent keybindings in all text input boxes, like in Mac OS. Such as make Ctrl-A always go to the beginning of line, Ctrl-E always to the end, and Ctrl-K always kill whatever…

It's a NEXTSTEP legacy. Any MacOS application that uses the standard UI text field classes (NSText, NSTextView, etc) will get the emacs-like key shortcut behaviors. The NS prefix on those classes means "NEXTSTEP" Microsoft Office probably implements its own text box classes so it's different.

Amusingly, at least in certain Emacs libraries (e.g. `frame.el`), `'ns` is also used to indicate macOS.

Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux

#257

Post by eli_gottlieb »

Tehchops wrote: post #42

End-user Linux has definitely improved in the last few years. It offers a lot of attractive features for what I imagine to be the typical HN demographic. That being said, it's still got rough spots that OSX doesn't. It works great when it works, but when it doesn't.... Font rendering, display/compositor fragmentation etc... Inb4 the anecdotal "well it works for me I just had to download the xf86 font library and comp…

>Inb4 the anecdotal "well it works for me I just had to download the xf86 font library and compile with a legacy glibc version..." crew comes in with a thousand and one rebuttals. Problems like that are still a suboptimal user experience, no matter how you slice it.

No, my experience is much more along the lines of, "I download and install Ubuntu or Linux Mint, and then it works without further issues."

Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux

#258

Post by _x5tx »

From someone that has been using linux as his main OS since 2003, I tried to switch to mac once (used for one year) and had to work with a mac for approx. 4 years.

As good as brew is, it is just not as good as having your distro package manager, I ran into so many issues using brew, every mac os upgrade was a pain to keep brew packages working. Then it came docker, what a bliss is to use docker on Linux, but on mac it is just cumbersome, specially because everything is inside that qcow image that only grows until you run out-of-disk. I know it was alleviated by some measures the docker team took to "fix" it, but still it is not as good as docker running on linux.

Nowadays I just buy a thinkpad, put Fedora on it and everything works as expected. Because all of the projects I work with use docker, performance wise it is so much faster than running it on mac os.

Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux

#259

Post by jagger27 »

war1025 wrote: post #176
teddyc wrote: post #36

I resurrected a little NUC computer from a former employee. It has 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD drive. It runs Ubuntu 18.10 fine. The display port runs my 4k monitor @ 60Hz. I bought a USB bluetooth dongle and the smallest microphone I could find on the internet so I can use my old bluetooth mouse and do audio conference calls. I am really loving it for Docker based development b/c it feels like it runs a lot faster. I a…

How do you like the NUC? I have been toying with the idea of buying a mini computer like that. I don't really want a full-size desktop tower, but I also don't really want to go the route of a laptop in a docking station.

As someone who works on an older NUC all day, do yourself a favour a get the highest end one you can afford. The J5005 CPU is an absolute piece of shit. Otherwise they're fine computers if you don't care about graphics performance.

Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux

#260

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

jaabe wrote: post #239

I think I feel the same disenchantment from Apple that the author does, and it really scares me. Because the responses to this piece are basically 220 reasons of why I’ll probably never switch. Don’t get me wrong, I want to like Linux, I just don’t want to spend any time (as in any time) on configurations. I want to plug right into my 4K monitor and have things just work. I want a good trackpad, and so on.

Everyone wants a computer that does what they want it to out of the box. When we say we want something easy, that's what we mean. The problem with that is that everyone wants different things, so it is fundamentally impossible. I think Linux needs to stop trying to be easy, and start trying to be simple.

Throw out all the over-complicated garbage that has become the Linux Desktop and make something that is simple enough for people to build an accurate mental model of how it functions in a relatively short time, and with a set of simple composable tools. Then they can build the thing they want with a relative minimum and without writing any C. It already some composability thanks to the original UNIX commandline toolset, at least for text processing, but those have grown archaic over time and the concept was never properly extended to the GUI.

I doubt that will ever happen though. Instead the community will just keep piling on more and more complexity, keep creating more and more distros to try and cover that infinity of what people want in their effort to make it "easy", and tell anyone who doesn't want to do things the way they do that they're doing them wrong.

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