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Running Linux on My MacBook

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Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#141

Post by o-__-o »

kerkeslager wrote: post #75
viraptor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're seeing an extreme case here. Macbooks are actively breaking other OSes. Better to treat it as: "look how much you can bend Linux to work on a proprietary toaster", rather than "look how hard it is to run Linux on a laptop". Newer generations of macbooks just won't work at all. There's no workaround for recent sound (unless it gets reverse engineered) or wifi (unless you rewrite Linux stack to work around broke…

> You're seeing an extreme case here. Macbooks are actively breaking other OSes. Better to treat it as: "look how much you can bend Linux to work on a proprietary toaster", rather than "look how hard it is to run Linux on a laptop". It's true that Macbooks are an extreme case, but as far as I can tell, there is not a laptop which runs Linux out of the box where tinkering won't be necessary. Let's take another extreme…

> there is not a laptop which runs Linux out of the box where tinkering won't be necessary.

Hp x360 requires zero fiddling, works out the box.

Dell precision 5570 requires zero fiddling, works out of the box.

Samsung Chronos 7 requires zero fiddling, works out of the box.

Every laptop in the past 6 years worked with Linux straight out the gate. Including acpi sleep, graphics acceleration, and wireless networking. Compare that to spending 8 hours last night trying to get windows 10 to run on a 7 year old system

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#142

Post by danshick »

kuon wrote: post #131

I switched to sway, which has very good performances, Firefox under wayland also flies, it's been the fastest browsing experience so far. I can have hundred of tabs open with tree style tabs with no lag whatsoever. Sway has absolutely zero tearing, for this it is very good. But, a few issues (mostly wayland and not sway related): · First you need an AMD card, I don't really have a problem with that as their cards are…

OBS can capture wlroots based compositors with the wlrobs[0] plugin. Give it a shot, it's really smooth for me. There's also wl-recorder[1] which is much more light weight if you don't need any of the fancier features. Also, cyanreg is working on txproto[2] which is a much faster/feature rich version of wl-recorder, although I'm not sure it is ready for prime time as it uses a couple bleeding edge libs.

[0] https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs

[1] https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder

[2] https://github.com/cyanreg/txproto

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#143

Post by o-__-o »

hpcjoe wrote: post #70
peteretep wrote: post #5

Thank you for writing this! Whenever I see people using Linux as their main laptop OS, I'm struck by remembering the amount of tinkering needed circa 1999 which was the last time I did it. Having read this -- the custom scripts, the "suspend still doesn't work properly" -- it feels like that's still the case.

On my multiple Linux laptops, suspend just works. Has for a long time (many years) with no tinkering. In this case, MBP is uncommon HW for Linux users, and things may not work that well. I imagine windows 10 would have similar problems there.

> I imagine windows 10 would have similar problems there.

Microsoft allows resellers to use “supported by windows” marketing material on their hardware they sell only if they pass a stringent set of automated tests. So a windows hw provider wouldn’t “have similar problems here” because their consumer hardware would have been designed and tested for windows.

Microsoft set the standard in quality assurance for backwards compatibility

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#144

Post by bananamerica »

vaccarium wrote: post #140

At a previous job, a coworker got a new Mac but still wanted to use Linux. He spent several days setting the system up, and eventually got it up and running smoothly. Except that the calendar on the lock screen somehow was in Romanian, it resisted all attempts to change the language, and he never got around to fixing it. :)

It’s never too late to learn Romanian!

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#145

Post by danshick »

mijoharas wrote: post #118

I'm surprised about the comment on sway, because afaik the issue mentioned about a blurry chrome was fixed a while ago[0]. Maybe it's caused by something else... [0] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1481#issuecomment-6404...

It depends a ton on what distro you are using. Some distros that now ship with wayland native desktops have tons of downstream patching to smooth out the experience. If you run Arch for instance, the default Chromium package is not ozone, and will run with XWayland (although chromium-ozone is available in the AUR). It's possible your distro is doing something differently.

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#146

Post by wtetzner »

phaus wrote: post #104
jnxx wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've tried out Linux as a Desktop OS pretty consistently every 2-3 years for about 20 years on various Desktop and Laptop computers Well, I have used Linux as a desktop OS consistently since 22 years now. I started with Thinkpads and they did work well for me, and that's what defines my expectations today - that a laptop works without glitch. And the last two laptops I god were supplied by the respective organizati…

I'm not saying its bad or that you can't have a good experience with it, but we should take the "Linux as a Desktop" idea in the proper context. When people bring this idea up again and again, they are usually claiming that Linux is ready to replace Mainstream Desktop OS's for average people. So it usually falls short of that standard because there are only a handful of vendors selling vetted Linux Hardware, only two…

I think Linux itself is ready to go mainstream, but it's not going to work until enough laptop vendors start selling with Linux pre-installed, and with the issues worked out already.

I mean, I've run into all kinds of issues trying to install Windows as well, including digging through random vendors' websites looking for drivers. But most people's experience is fine, because the laptop vendor provided all of that out-of-the-box.

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#147

Post by bananamerica »

gowld wrote: post #117

> The main reason for the switch was one killer app; the i3 window manager. Keyboard shortcuts, tiled windows, lightning fast to use - it feels like a piece of software designed for people who tinker and use computers a lot. If that's the main reason, how about yabai on Mac? https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai > The primary function of yabai is tiling window management; automatically modifying your window layout usi…

Yabai is unable to tile Emacs, and I use Emacs 99% of the time. So sadly that’s a no for me.

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#148

Post by danshick »

fluffything wrote: post #19
intarga wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About sway, if you don’t mind using Firefox, that works natively under Wayland. On another note though, the reason I don’t use sway, is that I couldn’t figure out how to get inertial scrolling working... Did you manage this, or just not bother with inertial scrolling?

I use the chromium ozone packages from the AUR with sway on Wayland and they work fine. The real problem with wayland are all the apps that just don't support it. From emacs, to, e.g., all the electron apps built with older versions of chromium, etc. You can use them seamlessly with Xwayland, but then a lot of things work "weirdly", e.g., HiDPI displays blurry Xwayland apps, applications like obs-studio cannot record…

WebRTC (firefox and chrome) can (usually) stream individual XWayland windows using the same mechanism that was in place for window sharing under X. Wayland native apps are not shareable (and may not be if/until some protocol changes are introduced).

I hope that fullscreen desktop sharing "just works" now that we've released xdg-desktop-portal-wlr[0]. If you have any trouble with it, hit me up on freenode #sway or raise an issue on this project. We're happy to help and looking for a broader user base to help us test it out.

[0] https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

Re: Running Linux on My MacBook

#150

Post by bananamerica »

Normille wrote: post #58

The trouble with almost every article that I read of this kind is that the author is either a writer or a coder. So their demands on Linux are relatively minor; a terminal, an IDE, something to mangle text with. I could probably make the full-time switch to Linux, if that was the bulk of what I did too. And I do a fair bit of writing and coding. But the majority what I do on my [OSX] computers is Art & Design related…

It turns out that a FOSS operating system largely maintained by volunteers does not meet your requirements, and you know what? That’s fine. No ones forcing you to use it. Giving people options is the whole point of Linux. We cannot compel other companies (such as NVIDIA) to support it anyway.
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