As someone who's run both desktop Linux for a couple years and OS X for the last 5... Not even close. Desktop Linux is an exercise in insanity.
Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
491–500 of 712 posts
Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gnome (3) is just a bit crap. It's the Windows DE of the GNU/Linux world. It's explicitly designed to be boring and not very customizable so that delicate users don't get scared. I use i3 and basically everything is configured via text files. Keyboard shortcuts are trivial etc. You don't need Karabiner to "rebind" because you can directly bind. You don't need to go scary tiling WM, Xfce probably works well, it's been…
Xfce still works well, I just upgraded from 4.12 to 4.14. The only thing that broke on upgrade was the desktop background - I had to reset it to black
Agree! I've been using XFCE for many years, after deciding that Gnome wasn't actually pretty enough to justify all the extra pain.
For me, window managers are mostly just a convenient way to arrange a baroque collection of web browsers and terminals... Occasionally, I use file organization/navigation or a couple other programs that are helpful in my job. But ultimately, I just need a minimal window manager that gets the hell out of the way. (in fact, after setting up awesome rotating Moebius wallpapers, I mostly don't see them, as they're almost entirely buried under the web browsers and terminals.)
Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
#493Meh. I bailed out of the Mac ecosystem last year, as my mid-2012 retina Macbook was finally getting too creaky, and the latest Mac hardware was a regression in many respects, while simultaneously utterly unaffordable. I'm now dual-booting Ubuntu/Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15". What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks. The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are…
I was linux-only from 2002 to about 2009, on laptops, when I switched to Mac. I just set up a linux desktop for kicks the last couple of weeks, and it doesn't seem to me to be any better than it was a decade ago. * No way to adjust mouse scroll speed; official answer seems to be "don't want that". (Or install imwheel and change your mouse scroll to be equal to hitting the down button (!) which breaks other stuff) * T…
> * modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent
Lol, different strokes for different folks. Having to use Karabiner instead of the much more versatile tools on Linux really peeved me when I switched over a few years ago.
I like to rebind my caps lock to function as an extra modifier key. On Linux, you just set it to Hyper; ezpz. On Mac, you just straight up can't, so I have to bind it to command+control+option+shift to get the next best thing (since I would never actually press all four of those keys). And I've had issues with Mac's Keyboard Shortcuts -- some of my shortcuts have just stopped working. I used to have CapsLock+[1-9] as shortcuts to switch to Workspaces 1-9, but some of the shortcuts just stopped working and I've had no luck finding a fix.
On Linux, it may take more effort to do something, but it'll always be possible. So many of the things I want to do on Mac are just not options. When I retire this MacBook, I'll be going back to Linux.
Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
#494Meh. I bailed out of the Mac ecosystem last year, as my mid-2012 retina Macbook was finally getting too creaky, and the latest Mac hardware was a regression in many respects, while simultaneously utterly unaffordable. I'm now dual-booting Ubuntu/Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15". What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks. The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are…
I was linux-only from 2002 to about 2009, on laptops, when I switched to Mac. I just set up a linux desktop for kicks the last couple of weeks, and it doesn't seem to me to be any better than it was a decade ago. * No way to adjust mouse scroll speed; official answer seems to be "don't want that". (Or install imwheel and change your mouse scroll to be equal to hitting the down button (!) which breaks other stuff) * T…
I wanted to find out the proper way to disable middle-click paste because all the solutions I could find involved basically disabling the button all together, but I still wanted to use it for closing tabs etc.
There doesn’t seem to be a way to do it. One high rated StackOverflow answer I found suggested purchasing a mouse with a less sensitive mouse wheel.
Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people have far better things to do than getting into a tinkering rabbit hole to enable basic desktop functionality.
Right. So use Mac, and go for a nice walk outside whenever something pisses you off that is unmodifiable. You have the free time since you're not tinkering, right? :P
You assume that everyone wants to modify everything (or the unmodifiable, as you put it).
After going through many years of FreeBSD and Linux, I now just want things to work. Mac gives me that. Should have switched sooner.
Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
#496Meh. I bailed out of the Mac ecosystem last year, as my mid-2012 retina Macbook was finally getting too creaky, and the latest Mac hardware was a regression in many respects, while simultaneously utterly unaffordable. I'm now dual-booting Ubuntu/Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15". What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks. The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are…
Windows is inferior to MacOS? Bold claim given Enterprise exclusively uses Windows. Your opinion might tarnish your reputation
Enterprise is also the inspiration behind Dilbert.
I agree that Windows is nowhere as bad as it was in the 90s and early 2000s and OS X isn't as good as it was in 2014, but software development on Windows is still slightly painful.
Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people have far better things to do than getting into a tinkering rabbit hole to enable basic desktop functionality.
Right. So use Mac, and go for a nice walk outside whenever something pisses you off that is unmodifiable. You have the free time since you're not tinkering, right? :P
Pretty much, yes.
You're talking about problems that "piss you off", whereas Linux has problems that not only piss you off, but completely stop you from being able to do what you need to do.
It's easy to talk about these things in abstract terms, but frankly I've run across two problems with Mac ever that I actually had to fix in order to do what I needed to do:
1. Get "gcc" to point to "gcc" instead of clang.
2. Get Valgrind to work (which problem is admittedly still not solved).
The problems that I've had to fix in Linux often start immediately upon booting up for the first time and attempting to connect to wireless, and end with me emailing documents to a Mac to print them because I needed the document printed within an hour, not after 8 hours of tinkering.
Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still maintain that the problem is the UI toolkits. The mac ecosystem now has _multiple_ viable indesign and photoshop alternatives. AppKit, Cocoa, UIKit and all those frameworks gradually added all the features third party app developers hacked into their own UI libraries. GTK is something developers frequently curse about and theme developers frequently abandon because the gnome team keeps breaking their themes.…
> GTK is something developers frequently curse about and theme developers frequently abandon because the gnome team keeps breaking their themes. Let's compare comparable. Neither Cocoa nor Win32 do support third-party themes; for the exactly same reason why GTK is breaking them.
I remember themes for Windows XP. Have no idea, though, how many hacks were involved .
Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. My 2012 retina MacBook was getting long in the tooth last year, so I got an X1 Carbon with all the bells and whistles. Remarkably, the on board LTE just plain never worked. (It would randomly die after a few uses requiring a hard reboot.) The screen bezel delaminated and has to be replaced. Developed three dead pixels after a few months of use. Recently started rebooting randomly with a full battery. My dad had…
Just my personal anecdote, I run Mint 19.2 x64 on my X1 Carbon and love it, no issues beyond some initial fiddling to get my hotkeys set up the way I like.
Me too - I run KDE on Ubuntu on a Carbon X1 6th gen - it's great. The only annoying bug are horizontal lines in the terminal from the high DPI scaling.
Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
#500One thing I have to say, in general to many of the posts here about the state of linux, is that linux is just the kernel, and the vast majority of issues people tend to have is due to one or a combination of distro choice and DE/WM choice. I went linux exclusive personally and professionally a few years ago and have nothing but good things to say about it, but far too often I see stuff complaining about linux when it's really not linux per se, but the other software choices.
So, protip, if you are having issues with things like multi-monitors, etc, start out by trying a different DE like awesome/i3, xfce, etc, rather than the big 2 (KDE/Gnome), and if that fails try a another distro (such as Manjaro).
I almost always use Manjaro these days because the hardware detector is second to none, but I used to distrohop habitually and if you get a new laptop it's almost a requirement to try out different distros until you find the one that just works, and this especially applies to MacBooks, which I used to triple boot but started doing linux only on because sometimes it's easier to get a macbook approved in some companies than the equivalent hardware normal laptop.
One side benefit of going linux only is that I have, besides gaming, almost completely GPLized my stack. Plus, I believe if you are managing systems you should be running the OS those systems live on. EG if your core systems are debian, you should have a debian install somewhere that you interact with daily. I can't tell you how many times I've had to help devops people recover from things like MacOS text bunging or outdated bash related problems. I think they should be doing the dev work at least in a container (lxc, etc) on what they are working on instead of the native system.