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Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

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Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#561
post #190

Meh. 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…

> To make an icon on the favorites bar in gnome, you have to edit a .desktop text file! Madness. I mean, I'm a programmer, so I'm capable of it, but it's seriously annoying

Just install the Menu Editor app from the Ubuntu Software channel.

> installing a gnome-shell extension was way more difficult than it should be

Go to extensions.gnome.org, install the Firefox or Chrome extension and click the "Install" button on the website to install gnome-shell extensions.

> brew isn't the best, but on linux I need to use both brew _and_ apt because you can't reliably get anything approaching up-to-date software with apt

Use snaps or flatpak. Using Homebrew on Linux feels wrong.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#562
post #190

Meh. 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 10 on the "happy path" (the right hardware) works very well. My desktop machine is a box by ThinkMate (dual Xeon, 256 GB Ram, Dual 2080 video cards, dual 5K monitors). It "just works" -- including all the power management functions sleep, hibernate, monitor sleep, wake on ethernet, fan control, etc. Super quiet unless all the GPUs are running full blast. My laptop is a Surface Book. Again, it "just works". Pl…

Did you ever get ECC corrected error?

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#563
Kind of a tiny point but it drove me nuts when using Arch. Did anyone who's tried switching from macOS to linux manage to get comparable trackpad behaviour? I fiddled with this for far too long before more or less settling for something pretty underwhelming. I know it's not the most important detail but it's hard after using a rMBP trackpad for years.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Prior to the touchbar model Wait... why can't you do that anymore? I charge, drive 2 displays, and have several chargers and USB devices plugged in just via the 4 USB-C/Thunderbolt ports. Is your complaint the number of ports or the fact that they're USB-C? It sounds like the specific benefit was only the variety of ports unless I'm reading this wrong...

> and have several chargers and USB devices plugged in just via the 4 USB-C/Thunderbolt ports. You may have missed the YubiKey and the wired network. :-)

I did not. You can still use those with a USB-C computer. I still don't see where the issue is.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#565
Had some laughs. And yes, it's all true, at least to an extent. Unfortunately no OS nails everything, all have their shortcomings. I like Linux, Mac and Windows for different reasons and dislike them for different reasons as well. Where one falls short the other excels. And so on. But if I were to pick only one, it would have to be Windows. Pick two, it would be Windows and Linux; Only thing I like about Mac is the overall quality of their apps. Several of them are unmatched in Windows and specially in Linux;

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Took me a while to figure out how to remove the apps I never intend to use It took you a while to figure out how to drag an app to the trash in the same way that deleting any other file works? =/

Can you write uninstaller hooks to run when users draps app in the trash to remove caches and other stuff? I was embarassed by the fact that most applications in macs do not have uninstallers and their trash left around the system.

Developers can, yes, and, in the cases where the developers didn't do this, there's also an app called AppCleaner that's free, lightweight, and can watch the Trash for applications that are deleted. It'll pull all references to the app in the library and remove any remnants.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#568
post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used Linux as my daily driver until about 2008 when I switched to macOS exclusively. I made the transition to Ubuntu across all of my machines over the last three years and its been a much more pleasant experience.

Upgrading macOS and Xcode is a pain, especially with Homebrew and Macports. You'll have to recompile most of your installed applications and it's all managed with a hacked together package manager. Virtualenvs won't survive updates if Python is sideloaded because of linking issues. It's just a mess.

The result is having to spend an unknown amount of time fixing things that upgrades break on macOS, meanwhile upgrades on Ubuntu just work.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#569
post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a long time Linux user and I’ve recently switched to a Chromebook (I wanted a huge batter life). I intended to install Linux on it, but ChromeOS is very mature nowadays and it supports both Android and Linux apps (even graphic ones, like VSCode). I’m sticking to it for now. The experience is incredibly polished.

Chromebooks are "Linux" depending on which definition of Linux you want to use, and getting a Linux environment with some root access is possible without disabling Google's code signing - a VM is run, where you have root, with all the overhead that implies. (I hear it's fine when running on powerful hardware, but it's a bad time on cheap Chromebooks.) It's not really root, eg, you can't change the wifi MAC address of…

By Linux I meant “Linux DEs”. Thanks for clarifying.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#570
Actually in the 90s with Linux you could destroy your external screen by setting the wrong parameters. [1] It was really easy to destroy your partition table or mess up your whole configuration. I think this is the core difference with MacOS and Linux, really messing up your system is quite difficult. (And destroying hardware was never a thing with Apple :))

[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6614/can-...

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