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Moving from Macbook to Linux

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Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#101

Post by nix23 »

tomwojcik wrote: post #30
anderspitman wrote: post #12

I got into Linux when I was younger because I thought it was cool, and I had plenty of time to fix it when things broke. It's been my daily driver for ~10 years now. But there's quite a bit too learn. If I were to try and switch from Windows or Mac today I'm not sure I'd succeed before giving up. But I'm grateful every day to have a machine that I have some semblance of control over. I use a rolling release distro. I…

> I use a rolling release distro This might be the first time someone could have said 'I use Arch' but decided not to.

Could be FreeBSD too

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#102

Post by gonehome »

radlad wrote: post #24
anderspitman wrote: post #12

I got into Linux when I was younger because I thought it was cool, and I had plenty of time to fix it when things broke. It's been my daily driver for ~10 years now. But there's quite a bit too learn. If I were to try and switch from Windows or Mac today I'm not sure I'd succeed before giving up. But I'm grateful every day to have a machine that I have some semblance of control over. I use a rolling release distro. I…

I truly believe that the argument for switching to Linux has never been stronger. Windows has embedded bloatware, and Apple allows no control over your hardware. There's really no other option if you care about these things. (Full disclosure - I do own a Macbook for photography work, and use Bootcamp for gaming.) Like you, my Linux installs have been incredibly stable for a long time, even with a rolling release dist…

Linux on a desktop is okay, linux on a laptop is bad.

I think Linux is cool and grew up playing with different distributions (starting around Fedora Core 4).

I spent most of my time on Ubuntu because it worked the best, but also used Yellow Dog Linux (my first laptop was a 12in Apple power pc powerbook g4), Arch, and some others.

Things that often gave me issues:

- Suspend rarely worked without hacks, even with hacks laptop would often wake and heat up to thermal shutdown in backpack. Hibernate was similarly bad.

- 'Normal' apps often didn't work or worked poorly (Netflix, flash, Spotify, 1Password), things are a lot better on this front now.

- Monitor support was typically bad and caused problems, connecting to monitor, multiple monitors, resolution issues on wake, etc.

- WiFi was often a hassle and either wouldn't work without hacks or would stop working for an unknown reason.

- Sound would stop working for unknown reasons.

- Bad anti-aliasing/font support in general.

- Personally I thought the UI (mostly gnome, then unity) felt slow and UI elements/chrome often took up a ton of visual space - in general things were uglier.

I think a lot of this stuff is better now, but I recently went to install ubuntu on an SSD in my desktop and had to spend a few hours trying to figure out why ubuntu refused to see the SSD in the installer. I eventually had to unplug the HDD to force it to recognize it.

The macOS vertical integration of hardware and software is really good. I think the touchbar is a mistake (and hopefully will go away like the butterfly keyboard did), but the OS works well, battery life is good, and the applications are nice.

I don't think Linux can compete for personal use, for most people macOS or Windows with WSL is a better experience. This is definitely true on laptops. On desktops I think linux has fewer negatives, but I'd still miss macOS ecosystem stuff (imessage/texting from laptop, things like that).

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#103

Post by backtoyoujim »

anderspitman wrote: post #12

I got into Linux when I was younger because I thought it was cool, and I had plenty of time to fix it when things broke. It's been my daily driver for ~10 years now. But there's quite a bit too learn. If I were to try and switch from Windows or Mac today I'm not sure I'd succeed before giving up. But I'm grateful every day to have a machine that I have some semblance of control over. I use a rolling release distro. I…

where is the uptime ?

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#104

Post by ur-whale »

g42gregory wrote: post #96

I’ve been thinking of switching for a long time but here is what’s stopping me: web site rendering in all browsers is seemingly much better on MacOS. The colors are more vivid, fonts are sharper, it’s more pleasing to the eye (vs. Ubuntu). Is there anything that could be done to bring Linux web site rendering closer to MacOS experience?

Although I have a hard time seeing any kind of difference between my Linux laptop and my SO's Mac, if esthetics are that important to you, you might consider that you have a finite number of minutes in your life and that productivity matters a great deal more than how shiny the colors are on a Mac.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#105

Post by [deleted] »

anderspitman wrote: post #12

I got into Linux when I was younger because I thought it was cool, and I had plenty of time to fix it when things broke. It's been my daily driver for ~10 years now. But there's quite a bit too learn. If I were to try and switch from Windows or Mac today I'm not sure I'd succeed before giving up. But I'm grateful every day to have a machine that I have some semblance of control over. I use a rolling release distro. I…

[deleted]

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#106

Post by snazz »

acatton wrote: post #61

What matters is getting the right distro. I've been using Fedora as my daily driver for almost 13 years. But in my current company (a big search engine company), I was forced use a debian-based internal distro for work, and I realized why people say "linux is buggy and broken". Once a month I'm facing a pulseaudio or xorg issue which I've never had single time in my last 7 years using Fedora. Everything just worked o…

I think that reflects more on your company's internal distro than Debian itself, especially since Ubuntu is itself based on Debian.

I know that gLinux has some very non-standard package management stuff, so it wouldn't surprise me if that was related.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#107

Post by gorgoiler »

g42gregory wrote: post #96

I’ve been thinking of switching for a long time but here is what’s stopping me: web site rendering in all browsers is seemingly much better on MacOS. The colors are more vivid, fonts are sharper, it’s more pleasing to the eye (vs. Ubuntu). Is there anything that could be done to bring Linux web site rendering closer to MacOS experience?

What worked for me is a bit weird, but I stopped expecting perfection from my computer tools. I became more comfortable with the notion that it’s amazing this works at all, and it all seemed fine.

Like, having to log in then run startx is odd (my choice) but I like it because it reminds me this is a bunch of things joined together, not a magic fantastic (and fallable) product.

My machine is like a dusty but well organized workshop with cracked antique chisels and CNC lathes alongside each other and I love it.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#108

Post by LawnGnome »

vamsipk wrote: post #20

I'm in the market for a new one now. Are Thinkpad T/P series still the best for running Linux? How about the Dell XPS series which seem to have a better resolution and screen?

I've been running an XPS 13 (with the high DPI screen) for the last 2¾ years as my Linux daily driver, replacing the X230 I had before it. No complaints; I'd recommend it if the 13" ultrabook form factor is what you're looking for.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#109

Post by ur-whale »

shmerl wrote: post #62

Congrats! There were also a lot of refugees from macOS due to how Apple treats gamers. First they let OpenGL rot, then they didn't support Vulkan, then they dropped 32-bit. You don't have such nonsense on Linux.

OSX users are essentially at the mercy of Apple's whim. Most stuff is closed source, features are dropped randomly without a care for what users think, and worst of all (for me): anything you do on Apple is likely to be subjected to bitrot beacause most file formats are closed.

People who still use Macs do this simply because they don't know better.

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