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Moving from Macbook to Linux

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Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#251

Post by wing-_-nuts »

freedomben wrote: post #209
Aperocky wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Disk space is the thing that kills chromebooks for me. Instead, I spent like 800 on an xps 13, swapped out for a 1tb ssd, and man, it is nice

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#252

Post by busterarm »

gorgoiler wrote: post #99

This 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…

My workflow wherever is generally to be SSH'd to things, so largely yes, but the laptop lets me do work from the bed.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#253

Post by jasonv »

glogla wrote: post #180
gorgoiler wrote: post #99

This 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…

The benefit of laptop is that it's ... everything. It's a replacement for desktop, for TV in living room, for TV in bedroom, for something to look up stuff in kitchen or workshop, and you can take it when you travel, use it in a hotel room or in a train or plane ... It's not perfect and perhaps not good replacement for many of those things, but it is so practical. Especially if you live in a small apartment where des…

I've been rockng a Macbook Air since 2013. I love the thing and it works fine, but I can't do video editing, which I need to do. The new Macbooks were on the horizon, but I figured I'd wait for v2 of whatever came out.

So I bought a Dell gaming machine, for the GPU.

First impressions from the week:

* Windows is still pretty kludgy.

* There are no good Gmail cients for Windows (settled on eM, but it crashes a lot, on macOS I used Mailplane, Mimestream and Outlook; Outlook on windows doesn't automatically connect to Google Calendars, even though the macOS and iOS versions do).

* The Dell came with a terrible keyboard, I'll have to buy a better one. It didn't come with speakers, so I bought some (I was planning to get reference monitors anyway, but having NO sound for a few days was interesting). It doesn't have a webcam, which is fine, but I'd have to buy one if that becomes important.

* The cables, cables, cables.

* I can use the Phone app to connect to my iPhone, and iCloud on Windows works well enough (for Drive and Photos).

* Windows apps don't adhere to the design guidelines nearly as consistently as macOS apps do. Fonts and usability is far more varied.

I will see about dual-booting Linux, and I'll see about getting Davinci Resolve working.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#254

Post by 120photo »

120photo wrote: post #230
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…

It great until something breaks. I had a Arch Linux system going for a while and at some point (probably my own fault) broke graphics. I'm technical enough to where I could have probably fixed it on my own but honestly just did not have the time. Not sure if something like this already exist (especially with ZFS and Btrfs) but it would be nice if there was a easy to use system restore manager you could boot into and…

Did a quick search, Timeshift looks to be the answer I did not know I was looking for. Will use next time I setup a personal Linux desktop.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#255

Post by monksy »

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…

After my parents fell for a tech support scam (no money lost), I ended up converting them over to Ubuntu via the phone.

They've been fairly happy with it and they're not very technically savy.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#256

Post by busterarm »

robertbalent wrote: post #204

I 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) - A…

The sound issues should be resolved with the next PulseAudio version.

I'm with ya. I mostly get around the issues by using the Creative BT-W3 with my wireless headphones. I have to have the device to use bluetooth audio with openbsd anyway.

Everything else is fixed. I just bought my 7th Gen a month or two ago -- it pays to buy laptops at the end of their product cycle. Likely I paid almost half what you did for my laptop.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#257

Post by fierarul »

The MBP wasn't keeping up with CPU needs so I moved this year to the Lenovo Legion which has the 16-threads Ryzen 4800h.

Being so new/modern it was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the hardest to get everything right. It still has some usual resume from sleep quirks but everything finally works. From experience older laptops fare much better with Linux.

In my developer group I think was among the few remaining with macOS. The M1 triggered some interest, but as a media device, perhaps.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#258

Post by FeeJai »

throwaway47399 wrote: post #151
conceptualspace wrote: post #110

to me the most underrated thing i miss on Linux compared to mac is the file manager. I'm trying to get nnn setup efficiently but the out of the box options feel incredibly half baked in comparison to finder

Finder has no "open in terminal" option - into the trash it goes

Drag and drop will do

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#259

Post by ur-whale »

snazz wrote: post #115
ur-whale wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would agree with you if the year was ~2002 where using Linux was indeed a lot of work.

In 2020, everything works out of the box for me on Linux. YMMV of course, I'm only speaking for my own workflow.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#260

Post by kitsunesoba »

senko wrote: post #68

I find it funny when people complain Linux is not ready for desktop. Sometimes it's because Windows software doesn't run on it, sometimes because Apple makes a fast chip... Dunno. Been using it on desktops (well, laptops, mostly) since early 2000s, then some 6-year hiatus with OSX, then back to Linux. Works/worked great for me. So, Year of Linux Desktop is really old news for some. For most, it'll never arrive. And t…

It's an incredibly personal choice. I've daily driven macOS for well over a decade, but periodically dip my toe into the Linux world just to get a feel of it's "there" yet or not. Unfortunately for my purposes, it never is, and so I end up returning to macOS.

The biggest problem is that none of the DEs really fit my tastes — they all have to be poked and prodded into kinda doing what I want them to do, but they're never quite there and it's incredibly frustrating. I've also faced similar issues with starting with a bare WM and snapping together smaller pieces.

To get what I want I'd likely have to build my own DE from scratch, which I'm not even necessarily averse to, but I have no idea where to start with the mess that is X11 and Wayland and all the "build your own WM" tutorials that could be used as a springboard are written for building hyperminimal borderless tiling WMs, which aren't straightforward to adapt for a more "typical" floating WM with titlebars and the like.

So I guess the endpoint of this rant is that it's frustrating that building one's ideal Linux desktop from the ground up isn't all that accessible in reality. The configurability and openness is there on principle but it's difficult to take advantage of past a skin-deep level.

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