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Moving from Macbook to Linux

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Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#181

Post by hacknat »

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…

IDK, the CPU has never been my bottle neck for work. I know it is for some use cases, but for general software development memory has always been my main bottleneck.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#182

Post by gonehome »

berkut wrote: post #167
radlad wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rece…

Out of interest, how do you define "works perfectly fine"? :) Obviously you're saying "for me", which I recognise, but from my experience playing around with Linux Mint, Kubuntu and Fedora on a Thinkpad T480S over the past year, while things work technically, getting them perfect (in my opinion) takes a lot longer, and might not even be possible in some cases. Take for example suspend/resume: yes, this works in terms…

This largely matches my experience whenever I play with it.

Things generally work, but poorly with lots of little issues that degrade the experience and regular users wouldn't tolerate.

If you use linux you learn to tolerate the bad experience, but I think it's just because you adapt to deal with it and lower your expectations of what good even is.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#183

Post by whateveracct »

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…

Linux desktop/laptop is totally worth it ... if you're already a software person. Which I am :)

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#184

Post by Shared404 »

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…

> linux on a laptop is bad.

I think it at least partially depends on the hardware.

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

I did experience this a little bit, but it's been 2-3 years since the last time it happened.

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

No comment on this, I haven't really used any of these on my laptop.

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

Only issue I had with this was one TV wouldn't take HDMI output at the same time as displaying to my laptop screen.

Everything else has worked great.

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

Haven't had any issues with this, but I would imagine it would be highly dependent on the wireless card you had.

> - Sound would stop working for unknown reasons.

Yeah, audio on linux kinda sucks right now. I've never been stuck without a workaround, but I've needed workarounds multiple times.

> - Bad anti-aliasing/font support in general.

I've not noticed this, but I also haven't looked.

> - 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.

GNOME + Pop_shell at least has gotten fast enough to keep me from installing i3 again. This is of course a matter of personal preference.

I personally trust neither Apple or MS, but they both have their upsides.

To each their own, and happy hacking!

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#185

Post by ainiriand »

horsawlarway wrote: post #85
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…

Don't buy their shit. Period. Wayland already has trackpad support that's nearly identical to macOS. Gnome with a dock is basically the same desktop experience - Pick a distro of your choice. I can honestly say I prefer my linux XPS to my work macbook, by a large margin. Plus - It doesn't spy on me. I actually own it. I can release software through channels that aren't entirely abusive. Basically - The only thing App…

THIS. I have recently switched back to Ubuntu after a long period of time working for a big corp under a Microsoft ecosystem. I feel like my computer is mine back again.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#186

Post by varispeed »

ben7799 wrote: post #143

This stuff is always a joke. Who knows what his actual job is but any time you see these articles they immediately start with long sections of all the hacks & work needed to make the basics work. Battery Life Issues Getting a mouse to work Getting displays to work Wifi Issues Fixing keyboard mapping issues You're not supposed to have to waste your time on this stuff. It's been about 3 years since I tried to make a la…

I had such experience with Mac. It seems like for every little thing you want to do you need to install an app. This prompted me to check out Linux. I got XPS 13 and Linux installation was smooth and everything worked just fine out of the box.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#187

Post by bee_rider »

fabianhjr wrote: post #161
radlad wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the beauty of Linux is that if you're having issues with gdm's stability, you can replace it with another DM. This isn't possible with Windows or Linux. As for your DPI issues, I've heard many have had better luck with Wayland than Xorg.

I haven't had an issue with xorg and gdm/gnome on a 4k HiDPI display. I set the scaling to 1.5.

I think it really depends on what programs you use.

I pretty much only use Firefox and terminals. So I set ~/.Xresources Xft.dpi to something that looked nice. Presumably a bunch of programs ignore this (otherwise I wouldn't be seeing complaints about HiDPI online).

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#188

Post by tartoran »

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…

> But there's quite a bit too learn.

There is an illusion that there is not as much to learn in Windows or Mac, and in fact all that knowledge is even harder to grasp as a lot of it is proprietary and not transparent.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#190

Post by bird_monster »

skohan wrote: post #159
bird_monster wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just find that kind of surprising because I have used Ubuntu for the past 8 or so years, in the cloud and on the desktop, and I have not run into a single issue like this.

I mean, I'm comfortable accepting that I'm an edge case and have the worst luck with linux installations ever, but I still think there's so many things that regularly go wrong (even for people that aren't me), that it's definitely not in contention for regular people's daily drivers.
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