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Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

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Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#501

Post by mduerksen »

JDiculous wrote: post #479
mduerksen wrote: post #168

Any serious contender should have an answer to the MBPs extraordinary touchpad. It is key to working without a mouse, and therefore being truly mobile and comfortable at the same time. So please post at least some information for this aspect, which is one of the things the OP explicitly listed. Some examples: - Would you be able to do some solid Photoshop/Sketch/Gimp/Inkscape/Blender work with the touchpad/knob of yo…

Are people really working in Photoshop/Sketch/Gimp/Inkscape/Blender using the trackpad? Sounds extraordinarily inefficient compared to using a mouse.

Yes, me at least (design work is not my main profession but needed for creating e.g. mobile apps).

It was my biggest surprise when I first bought a macbook: After a few weeks I noticed I didn't miss a mouse enough to bother bringing one with me.

I do 95% of my work when I'm commuting by train. Only for the last 5% super involved work I have to resort to plugging in a mouse when I'm in the office.

With all other laptops I have ever dealt with (admittedly not the replacements proposed in this thread), the ratio would be more like 50:50 or worse.

I also had a pretty high quality trackpoint from a business line Dell. Still missed the mouse.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#502

Post by sz4kerto »

manigandham wrote: post #290
fortran77 wrote: post #259

Windows 10 on good hardware is very, very nice. My advice is "don't fight windows". I've seen many people try to make Windows like Unix. Don't. Use Windows versions of things, not things compiled under Cygwin or MinGW. Learn to use Powershell and Powershell scripting language. I do development (C/C++/CUDA/Erlang/Python) all day long on Windows 10 and in addition use desktop applications like Microsoft Office and Adob…

WSL 2.0 is a full linux kernel powered by HyperV and is very fast with minimal overhead. Useful for using all those Linux tools directly on the same filesystem.

Interestingly it's running _besides_ Windows, not under it.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#503

Post by kstenerud »

mduerksen wrote: post #168

Any serious contender should have an answer to the MBPs extraordinary touchpad. It is key to working without a mouse, and therefore being truly mobile and comfortable at the same time. So please post at least some information for this aspect, which is one of the things the OP explicitly listed. Some examples: - Would you be able to do some solid Photoshop/Sketch/Gimp/Inkscape/Blender work with the touchpad/knob of yo…

I've got an Asus C302 Flip Chromebook, and the touchpad on it is as good as the Mac touchpad. It's just a shame that this machine is so underpowered, because it would be absolutely perfect with an i5, m.2 SSD, and 20g of RAM.

What I do now is set up virtual desktops on my server and connect to it via Chrome Remote Desktop from the C302. I have a Thinkpad for when I need to travel, but it really sucks having to switch back to a mouse (the touchpad on that thing is horrible).

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#504

Post by inopinatus »

jkelleyrtp wrote: post #451
inopinatus wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first hurdle for me is still whether it has an Escape key.

You can rebind your capslock key to escape. I'm so addicted that I rebind it on every keyboard I use now. It's a much better location than normal escape and works everywhere throughout the OS.

Tried it. Not a fan.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#505

Post by msbarnett »

xfer wrote: post #494
msbarnett wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > people are all happy to talk about how easy linux is to customize until you broach the subject of changing keybindings to use a mac-like scheme (using command for gui interactions as a rule of thumb, readline bindings everywhere there's text entry) > BTW, I'm using i3, and I think it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to what you're describing. Really? How does one go about configur…

How does that work? If i implement my own editor using sdl2, how will it know? Are you sure it's not just cocoa specific? If that's the case it's possible for gtk too.

> If i implement my own editor using sdl2, how will it know? Are you sure it's not just cocoa specific? If that's the case it's possible for gtk too.

Of course it’s system textbox specific; if you reimplement your own, there is no magic involved.

And obviously it’s possible in GTK. And KDE, and one-offs like Firefox, for that matter. I’d suggest that the fact that you have to do it in about 20 different ways to cover your common apps, and a few will not even offer this kind of configuration, is net-worse than the OS which makes this so easy because there’s a standard GUI toolkit that nearly everything uses.

This doesn’t mean “Linux Bad, OS X Good”, but it is indicative of the fact that “Linux is configurable and OS X isn’t” is a very poor descriptor of reality.

Configurability is a complex topic with a lot of different facets, and both OSes offer different ranges of ease of configurability in different areas.

ColanR made the extraordinary claim that, ostensibly because he uses i3, “it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to ”. This is a very typical Linux user’s response in which they very narrowly equate mac keybindings with “window manager configuration”, when the flexibility offered by the system is in reality much broader than that.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#506

Post by radmarshallb »

dotancohen wrote: post #460
seized wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's an analogy for user preference files in drunken frat boy language... And no one here is a drunk frat boy. So it just comes off as tasteless and creepy.

I do not see any drunken frat boy language. I see an analogy. An analogy that makes sense to me.

What people are saying is that you should use an analogy that does not involve touching women in ways they do not want to be. Regardless of whether it "makes sense" to you, outwardly it feels degrading—especially that specific sentence that multiple people have pointed out to you.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#507

Post by sam_lowry_ »

forty wrote: post #487
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are not many ThinkPads with Ethernet ports. T4??p or P?? are the only ones left, IIRC. Others have either no port or a difficult to use clapet.

My T480s does have an Ethernet port. I believe T490s lost it but the T490 (which has similar size to the T480s) still has it.

Did you try to use it? Whenever I have to take out the cable, I ask a colleage with long nails for help. As I keep T480s upright with on hand, they pull down the clapet simultaneously from both so I can pull out the cable with the other hand.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#508

Post by cmiles74 »

msbarnett wrote: post #474
ColanR wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you're using OSes that are trying to cater to a diminishingly technical crowd. I read (somewhere, a year or so ago) that the generation now in their late 20s/early 30s was the last one that actually needed to care about how their computers worked, because their computers occasionally needed to be fixed. Generally speaking, I think that the newer generation has likely never been exposed to a computer tha…

> > people are all happy to talk about how easy linux is to customize until you broach the subject of changing keybindings to use a mac-like scheme (using command for gui interactions as a rule of thumb, readline bindings everywhere there's text entry) > BTW, I'm using i3, and I think it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to what you're describing. Really? How does one go about configur…

The Cocoa text input widget supports these keybindings and is used in many applications. Linux does not have one single input widget that is as popular (Gnome apps use a GTK text widget, KDE apps use a Qt text widget, etc.) On Linux, you would need to address this setting on a per widget set basis.

I don't think this supports the argument that Mac OS X is somehow more customizable that Linux. In my opinion it's the opposite: every application is strongly encouraged to use the same text widget. We're lucky in this case that we like this function. In other cases (like virtual desktop management) Apple's decisions have been towards less customizability. I believe that has long been a Hallmark of Apple, back when OS X was released Apple scoffed at the idea that anyone would ever want to change the default theme (which at that time was a bit more extreme). A "gray" theme.was introduced after much pressure from customers.

That said, I seriously doubt that the Apple Computer of today is as interested in ensuring this functionality to the same degree as the Apple of ten years ago. They have made many developer unfriendly decisions in the past decade, I wouldn't count on this feature being present indefinitely.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#509

Post by msbarnett »

cmiles74 wrote: post #508
msbarnett wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > people are all happy to talk about how easy linux is to customize until you broach the subject of changing keybindings to use a mac-like scheme (using command for gui interactions as a rule of thumb, readline bindings everywhere there's text entry) > BTW, I'm using i3, and I think it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to what you're describing. Really? How does one go about configur…

The Cocoa text input widget supports these keybindings and is used in many applications. Linux does not have one single input widget that is as popular (Gnome apps use a GTK text widget, KDE apps use a Qt text widget, etc.) On Linux, you would need to address this setting on a per widget set basis. I don't think this supports the argument that Mac OS X is somehow more customizable that Linux. In my opinion it's the o…

> Linux does not have one single input widget that is as popular (Gnome apps use a GTK text widget, KDE apps use a Qt text widget, etc.). On Linux, you would need to address this setting on a per widget set basis.

Yes, I clearly already understood that. I was pointing out how absurd ColanR’s claim was that he could do this all through i3 config “super easy”. It isn’t within the domain of the window manager to control the toolkits’ widget bindings, which are all over the map in terms of customizability.

> I don't think this supports the argument that Mac OS X is somehow more customizable that Linux. In my opinion it's the opposite: every application is strongly encouraged to use the same text widget.

Which, in my opinion, strongly increases customizability because I can be sure the things I customize work the way I want them to effectively everywhere; I am not limited by every third application author’s obstinate choice to hardcode some other set of bindings in some deliberately incompatible toolkit.

I’d suggest that our disagreement comes down to the fact that configurability is not a linear gradient, but a fairly complex, multi-dimensional topic with a lot of subtle trade-offs that different people may have different preferences surrounding.

> I wouldn't count on this feature being present indefinitely.

Sure. Similarly I don’t count on however you do this in GTK today still working in 5 years, given how often they CADT their way into new incompatible configuration systems.

Re: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

#510

Post by radmarshallb »

dotancohen wrote: post #495
sbuk wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. It’s about objectification.

Hi, I'm the OP of this "controversal" opinion. There is nothing objectifying anybody here. I really do not see how anyone is getting at that. In what way have I made anybody an "object"? With all the respect in the world, I understand what you are crusading for. But you are on a witch hunt, and actively making people your enemies who would otherwise support your cause.

Your failure to understand how your comment could be considered "objectifying" is your own. The reasoning has been explained to you. Saying those who would point it out to you are on a "witch hunt" reveals a serious lack of reflection on your part.
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