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Moving from Macbook to Linux

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Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#111

Post by FpUser »

driverdan wrote: post #44
bsaul wrote: post #25

The fact that many people reading this post title (including me) look at it with sarcasm is telling on how apple scored big points with its new cpu. Keeping up with mac OS and the trackpad was already quite hard, but CPU could be the killing blow. Which could lead us in a few years to a situation where mac developers will face the same fate as ios developers : forced to buy hardware to sign their app, forced to push…

> That future looks extremely scary. What can we do, now, as developers ? Stop buying, using, and supporting the Apple ecosystem. Vote with your money. The new chips are faster. So what? The laptop you have today works fine, you don't need the latest and greatest hardware.

>"The new chips are faster. So what?"

I am curious if it will be faster on sustained loads comparatively to some gaming grade laptops.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#113

Post by fsflover »

gonehome wrote: post #102
radlad wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All your problems seem to come from the unsupported hardware. Consider a laptop with preinstalled Linux.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#114

Post by cgriswald »

iaw wrote: post #38
radlad wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have a 2014 Macbook Air that I'm about to replace the battery in. Once that thing goes I really think I'll have to head over to Linux. Mac quality has gone downhill.

I replaced my MBP with a Dell XPS running Ubuntu. I had serious problems with the Killer wifi card but replaced it with an Intel one for $20. Otherwise everything worked perfectly.

Around the same time my Mac Pro refused to upgrade to the latest version of macOS because I had a RAID. I installed Ubuntu on that as well. I was a little worried because it has multiple monitors but that was handled really well and worked fine out of the box. I did the same for the family iMac. Haven’t looked back.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#115

Post by snazz »

ur-whale wrote: post #104
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.

I think that this argument goes both ways. You could also say "productivity matters a great deal more than configuring Linux to be 'perfect' when macOS works out of the box".

Disclaimer: I'm typing this on a Mac with a terminal window SSH'd into a Linux box sitting next to me.

Edit: I'm not saying that either is inherently more productive or easier to use, just that it's personal and these arguments cut both ways.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#116

Post by nickthemagicman »

I've installed Ubuntu 20 LTS and it's amazing.

Everything worked out of the box on an XPS 15.

Had some suspend issues, and chrome freezes up occasionally if I have a trillion tabs and windows open.

But overall I like it so much better than Mac and Windows.

Looking forward to seeing what the future holds for Ubuntu.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#117

Post by nix23 »

vr46 wrote: post #31
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…

What do you use? I have tried this multiple times and always give up. I ran FreeBSD for a decade as a server in a datacentre and have a deep and abiding love for it, but it doesn't sound it makes a usable desktop these days. Ubuntu appears to be the desktop of choice, but I find it buggy, sluggish and tedious. I'd like a practical and speedy OS that is responsive and configurable. But I don't know enough :)

All my Servers are FreeBSD too, but on the Laptop (because of wireless) i have now openSuse Tumbleweed but with the XFS Filesystem. It's fast and reliable, but to be honest i just need a Terminal, mosh/ssh, mpv, uemacs, Firefox, Wine(for MM VI) and Dosbox on it.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#118

Post by jlkuester7 »

vr46 wrote: post #31
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…

What do you use? I have tried this multiple times and always give up. I ran FreeBSD for a decade as a server in a datacentre and have a deep and abiding love for it, but it doesn't sound it makes a usable desktop these days. Ubuntu appears to be the desktop of choice, but I find it buggy, sluggish and tedious. I'd like a practical and speedy OS that is responsive and configurable. But I don't know enough :)

I have been really happy with Manjaro (the Gnome variant). Based on Arch (love the AUR), but easier to setup (more opinionated out of the box).

Honestly the dark theme of the Gnome variant is the most beautiful dark theme I have ever found for a Linux DE. I know there are lots of ways to tweak the various DEs to get some cool looking dark themes, but my experience is that they can take a lot of manual configuring and tend to still fail on the edge cases. The dark theme bundled with Manjaro Gnome looks amazing right out of the box!

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#119

Post by heavyset_go »

masklinn wrote: post #60
old-gregg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docker performance on current Intel Macs is much worse than Linux. So if you're building software to run on an x86 Linux server, dealing with ARM-based MacOS is going to be even a bigger PITA: as both the arch and the OS will be different. I am definitely in the camp of replicating server setups on my laptops, so as sweet and incredible as M1 is, I won't be able to use it. But for new projects, I honestly do not know…

> Docker performance on current Intel Macs is much worse than Linux. One can only wonder why running linux containers on OSX would be slow.

Soon people will be running x86 Linux containers virtualized on ARM Macs, making it even slower.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#120

Post by molsongolden »

somesortofsystm wrote: post #64

I've been running Linux since forever, and had an investment in Apple hardware since even longer. I've not used any laptop but an Apple since 2000, but consider Linux to be my primary professional realm. MacOS has been a 'decent front-end', but more and more the only love I have for it is physical. As soon as I can find a Linux laptop from a non-Apple vendor that feels as good to wake up to in bed, I'll ditch the Mac…

> As soon as I can find a Linux laptop from a non-Apple vendor that feels as good to wake up to in bed, I'll ditch the Macbooks and switch.

I've been using both MBPs and T-series Thinkpads for the past five years. I really want to love the Thinkpad (beyond the keyboard) but the physical experience is night and day.

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