The trackpad is still a dealbreaker for me. Nothing I have tried so far comes close to the trackpad on a macbook with the sensitivity turned up to max.
What do you think of high end chromebooks?
Moving from Macbook to Linux
121–130 of 518 posts
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
i code iOS (native) app for a living. I'm already stuck developing for the app store, using xcode to sign and deploy, using a programming language (that i love) swift that only really works on mac OS. My personal situation isn't going to change anytime soon unfortunately. I was about to dump my iphone next time i had to pick one (and keep my current one for testing), however my laptop is my work computer. I think "st…
Stopping saying that the rest is crap would be a start
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#123The 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.
AMD's been making some pretty fast chips, lately.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#124People don't consider ChromeOS as a Linux desktop but I consider it a great one. With the addition of Crostini, you get a full Debian based Linux running near native speed inside a KVM vm, and you can communicate between the ChromeOS and the VM seamlessly. You can run Linux GUI programs and it will work (albeit the UI is a bit off, font etc), so vscode/IntelliJ works. You can listen to localhost:$PORT in the Linux VM…
ChromeOS is excellent. It is such a pleasure to use. Yes, there are minor bugs from time to time, but I like it very much.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#125I did the same thing last year for similar reasons. Unfortunately there are some deal breakers for me and I’ll be going back to Mac.
Easily the worst part for me, and it’s the same with Windows: Mouse scrolling, touchpad feel and gesture experience. Line scrolling without inertia feels ridiculous to me. Linux gesture replacements I’ve tried feel like hacky proof of concepts.
Integrations like iMessages, Facetime, AirDrop, AirPlay are also hard to give up.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#126This is going to sound dumb or elitist but I am so much happier working since I ditched portable computing. I have a desk at home in an office. I have the same setup at work. I don’t carry my dev environment with me. When I need to work I go to the ’do work stuff’ place. Nice keyboard. Nice mouse. And a nice OS that, yes, took a whole day to configure but over which I have total control. (Full-screen focus-mode no-or…
I think desk setups are underrated. I got (a relatively cheap) one this March and the difference is touchable. I went the gamers way: Gamer keyboard, Gamer Mouse + pad, 3 screens, AMD for processor, nvme and also ArchLinux.
Needless to say, I can no longer work on macOS or an Apple device. The speeds you get with a bare-bone install and a window manager are unparalleled.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#127I 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 Ubuntu for my media PC, and I feel like for the casual user, it's plenty easy enough. I use it as an appliance with a steam client and a browser. Do most users actually need more than that? It's arguably easier to use than windows and macOS because it doesn't require a bunch of separate sign-ins to do things. I think the only "hard part" for the average user is getting into the boot settings to actually install…
I think this post kind of discounts the ways in which stable Ubuntu can break. On my last install, I checked the "Auto Login" button on setup which broke the entire install. I think that Ubuntu is definitely not even close to "regular people can use it no problem", but as with everything, YMMV.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#128Earlier 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…
Parent here - I used to say this too, but I am running Arch Linux on a laptop (ThinkPad T470p), and it's actually working great for me. I agree this used to be the case.
- Suspend works perfectly fine for me, including hibernating (incl. disk encryption) after a predetermined amount of time, and invoking a screenlock on wait.
- Spotify and 1Password X work perfectly fine for me. I have not tried Netflix any time recently, and Flash is dead.
- I use two external monitors, with different DPIs and resolutions, and this is working perfectly fine for me.
- WiFi works perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever.
- Sound works perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever.
- Fonts appear perfectly fine for me, no issues whatsoever.
- The UI is a sore spot for Linux. Linux doesn't tend to have consistent UI, between GTK, Qt, and other frameworks. Furthermore, adding Electron apps and things like Spotify into the mix, and things start to get funky. Some people put a lot of work into making their UI consistent, but it's tough. Many of the big distros (e.g. Ubuntu) have pretty good success with this I believe. For me, this isn't a huge issue.
As for iMessage, certainly you're going to miss this on Linux, but that's really Apple's fault for not adding it to icloud.com. I use an Android phone, and messages.android.com works on all my devices.
I think the vertical integration used to be a stronger argument, back before messages.android.com. These days, what is it really buying you? A consistent UI? AirDrop? Actually, I believe there's a Linux implementation of that now too.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#129Earlier 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've been using Linux for many years, and it's definitely better, but definitely not what I'd want to use seriously. My gaming desktop has a 20.04 drive which I occasionally use, and yet I still find myself dropping to a TTY occasionally to reboot the machine or restart gdm because it waking from sleep, or just plain crashes. Also, I have 4k, 28" monitors which is just the size where 1x is comically small, and 2x is…
Doesn't Ubuntu support fractional scaling? That doesn't work for you?
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#130The timing of this is funny because I literally only switched to a mac from linux a month ago. I may be an outlier but I prefer the "polish" and user experience of ubuntu to apple - I find the unity gui to be easier to navigate and understand than mac, and I find the OS way less intrusive.
But what caused me to switch to a mac was the constant CPU and memory problems I was having with ubuntu.
Chrome and zoom both seemed to kill the machine when used for too long or in the wrong combination. That is the kind of problem I dont want to spend time debugging, and switching to Mac, it is gone, and my productivity is way higher, even accounting for the new annoyances.
But now between the new architecture and the moves for greater control over how I use my machine, I really dont know how to think about what I want my next computer to be. While I dismissed WSL in the past, I'd say it is becoming a contender again.