How can you know when it's really "The Year of the Linux Desktop"? Whenever you don't need a "how to make it not suck" blog post to get it to run for normal users.
Moving from Macbook to Linux
201–210 of 518 posts
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 use Arch. I love it and I think it's gotten a easier to install over the years (hard to gauge because I also understand more), but it does lean towards the minimalist side. The big win for me is using a lightweight window manager (i3 in my case), which you can do with any distro. My main recommendation is stick with one of the major distros because you'll get more results when you search for solutions to issues. Wi…
How often do you run into packaging problems? As in, you need some software but it‘s only available for Linux via the Ubuntu repos?
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#203I 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…
Although my Macbook is my main personal interface for a lot of things, I've stabilized on Ubuntu for my workstation machines, and they have been rock-solid stable desktop systems since 2009, at least this generation of hardware. I have not had any of the typical issues - my machines just work very well. I've got a system for software development, and another for Audio (yes, Linux is a functional DAW - digital audio w…
> use containers/virtualization for anything where ones hacking around might be dodgy - i.e. keep the work part of workstation in mind with all system updates/installations, etc.
Care to elaborate? this might be useful to try. I have a similar setup macbook and ubuntu system, but I find that the LTS 18/20 versions often need reboot, and I didn't have the issue with centos. Still, I would probably continue using ubuntu because it usually needs less hacking time in my experience.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#204I switched to linux about a year ago (after 4 years with Mac and 10 years with linux before).
However, transition was anything but smooth. I have Thinkpad X1 Carbon 7th Gen and there was plenty of issues, especially with audio/hardware support. For example:
- Laptop has 4 speakers and it took months until they started working properly
- There is weird cracking when using headphones (need to run command to fix it)
- Attaching/detaching headphones will reset volume (created acpi hook which will change volume for me)
- Fingerprint sensor not working (fixed now)
- CPU throttling (need to use throttled fix)
- Sleep/Suspend issues (fixed now)
- Of course some minor scaling issues
But in general, I'm very happy with my setup. I know about every service running and every package installed. This way I can keep my system lean and super fast.
Also, big thanks to people updating Arch Wiki, otherwise I would be completely screwed.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#205This 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…
That's easy to say in 2020 when mobility in general is non-existent. But if you travel even somewhat often, it's nice to have the ability to carry the environment with you. I used to take the train to work every day. I was never more productive then I was in that time on the train.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#206Earlier 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.
Toolkits like Qt and Gtk only support integer scale factors. (Qt does fractional, but still has glitches) The scaling factor in the article inside gnome tweaks only changes the font scale. I personally use 2x Gtk scale and 80% font scale, and it works OK, but it’s not perfect.
Gnome has a feature in Wayland (Ubuntu has a third-party patch for X11) that scales up to an integer ratio then scales the image back down to fit the right size by making the display frame buffer larger. This is what Mac OS does. It’s slower here than on Mac OS, so it’s not very optimized, and it leaves things ever so slightly less sharp.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#207The 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…
Help port Linux to M1
Apple M1 processor is an ARMv8-a processor which is commonly known as AArch64. There are many distros that support AArch64.
If Apple had created their own proprietary ISA then it is likely that almost nothing would be ported from the get go.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#208I 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…
My first "real" experience with Linux (setting aside weird things like Lindows/Linspire, or the partial Linux experience of WSL, or the sort of "Linux-like" experience of using macOS and using bash and command line to do most of my work, aside from VS Code, communication apps and web browing) was installing Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on a pretty old (maybe 8 years) Dell 11 3137. I hadn't realized the release of 20.04 LTS had just occurred; I was just trying the latest/newest. I put it on a USB stick and did the Try option, and it all loaded up and everything worked. It gave me confidence, so I did a full install. No trouble with WiFi, touch screen, brightness, touch pad. And I was able to install so many of the same cross-platform apps I use everyday that I could get work done on it. (But I prefer a much bigger screen and keyboard.)
I was so impressed, I installed it next on a ~2 year old Asus Flip, and everything worked except for the fingerprint reader. Battery life was about 2/3rd of what I got in Windows 10 (which was already not great) but I used it for a couple of weeks, sometimes getting work done on it, and sometimes playing around with things like Steam - I could play Torchlight on it, or stream Torchlight II from my Windows 10 desktop. Neat! Ended up going back to Windows for better battery, but aside from gaming, the experience was very much on par with Windows, with some things better and some things worse, but no huge differences.
I'm very comfortable with Windows 10 and WSL, and I don't expect Linux to take over as a daily driver any time soon. So I guess in a way, I did "give up" on switching over, but if an employer handed me an all-Linux machine, I think I'd be perfectly pleased to use it all day for work, even if I head back to Windows when I want to play StarCraft.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#209The 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…
I got the new mac. I don't have any intention to contribute to the mac ecosystem. I still hog in what I like best - the terminal. I treat the mac as a client - web+cloud is my backend. The client should feel good to me with decent battery life and snappy experience, and maybe some gaming. But I don't care much else about it.
You might would love a Chromebook. There are some really nice ones out there, and you can run apps packaged for Debian really easily. Chromebook hardware works flawlessly (suspend/resume/etc) and battery life is incredible.
I'll never give up my Fedora ThinkPad, but if I was forced to I could do all my development on a Chromebook with Linux.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#210Plot twist: It looks like they are back on the Mac. [1] And so it goes. You look at almost all of these "I'm switching from Mac to (Linux|Windows 10)!" blog posts and they're almost always back to the Mac within weeks/months. I've attempted to go back to Linux plenty of times, and while the kernel and userspace is top notch, every GUI I've tried just pales in comparison to even the trainwreck that is the current macO…
This is a different author at Monadical. The author of this article still uses Linux. (Source: I work at said company.)