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Moving from Macbook to Linux

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Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#301

Post by hibbelig »

fakedang wrote: post #179
sz4kerto wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really slow. Really interestingly I've been using a Windows, a Linux and a MacOS machine for many months, swapping them often. Well, Windows/Linux are on the same Ryzen 2700X with a Geforce 1080Ti, the Mac is a 2018 Mini with 32G RAM and 6 core i5. 4k 32" display in each case. What surprised me: - Windows UI is WAY the fastest. Linux is the slowest, and with fractional scaling turned off its hardly tolerable - t…

Interesting.... I felt that the MacOS was a bit blurry for my liking too. I thought it was my eyes or something, but looks like I'm not alone.

I have a 4K Display on a Mac and I decided to go with 4x scaling (1920x1080) so that macOS can use Retina. Much sharper. My colleagues go with 2500x or so and I don’t understand how they can stand it.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#302

Post by 1_player »

hacknat wrote: post #154

I would strongly recommend the following combination for beginners: Thinkpad + Fedora Fedora stays on the cutting edge of the kernel, which means that driver support is quite good. Additionally, most of the Linux kernel developers use Thinkpads, so the drivers for Thinkpad are always good. I've never had to download drivers individually. Here's a list of things that just "worked" without me having to do anything: 1.…

I had a really bad time with Fedora 32, used to Arch Linux: it always felt like RHEL unstable, with many breaking changes not documented (Fedora 32 needed some kernel and firewall hacks to work with Docker [1]) and have their own set of unstandard tools, still not very much documented. I spent 3 hours trying to understand how to compile a patched mainline kernel -- need to learn about dracut, koji, fedpkg, rpmbuild -- and none of these tools are documented clearly on a central, official place, but can be found through googling, reading mailing lists, piecing stuff together from deprecated wiki pages.

COPR [2] is interesting, like PPA, with the worst user experience I've ever seen. The patched kernel I was interested about was already compiled by somebody, and available through COPR, but good luck finding which repo has an up-to-date version of the package you're interested. The whole Fedora COPR site is more than useless.

I mean, the default experience was pretty good, but being the unstable branch of Red Hat means there's a lot of breakage, every release changes something big and you're constantly on the bleeding edge without the safety net of a top notch wiki like Arch Linux has.

1: https://fedoramagazine.org/docker-and-fedora-32/

2: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#303

Post by DeltaWhy »

busterarm wrote: post #276
cpursley wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for bringing this up. Can folk's recommend specific thinkpads that play well with linux? I'm specifically interested in Ryzen versions.

The T14s might work, but IIRC most of the Ryzen models are in the E series and hardware support there is spotty.

Just got a Ryzen T14 - only had it for a few days but it's working great. Arch works well out of the box, but Debian needs a kernel and some firmware packages from sid in order to get WiFi working.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#304

Post by maxk42 »

I first began running linux at home in 1995. It was a wild ride for a few years but I eventually returned to Windows and then OS X. But back around 2013 I got back into Linux on the Desktop. First Ubuntu, then Arch, and now Fedora for the past three years. Just set up my third Fedora machine. With the Cinnamon window manager, it's honestly better than the experience provided by OS X. Plus I can put it on a $200 netbook and use it for real-world work, which I did for a year around 2015.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#305

Post by skrtskrt »

busterarm wrote: post #290
pkaye wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So X1 Carbon works well with Linux?

8th Gen might not be so hot yet from what I've heard. 7th Gen minor issues. 6th and prior are flawless.

What have you heard about the 8th Gen? That with Manjaro would be my prime candidate to move from Macbook

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#306

Post by [deleted] »

solaceb wrote: post #291
cafed00d wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well of course! How many people who walk into Apple stores are reading hacker news to learn about Wayland, Gnome and XPS running Linux? I can see you’re frustrated and lashing out with “Don’t buy their shit”. Honestly I would be too if I had to read another hn post on apple & their policies. But the biggest gap here isn’t technology. Rather it’s empathy. Empathy for all those people who don’t read hn and would walk i…

Therein lies a tricky obstacle for the FOSS movement: Ethical software allows users to modify it, but most users have little desire, let alone ability or time to learn how to do so.

[deleted]

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#307

Post by radlad »

gonehome wrote: post #177
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…

These are good points (thanks) - and it's always good to hear that things are better than I thought. Consistent UI is nice and recent M1 chip + good battery life I think is also a bonus of vertical integration. It sounds like linux is becoming more of an option though for people that don't care about those things. From your description it sounds like baseline functionality mostly works (particularly on a desktop). Th…

I am definitely hopeful to see Apple's ARM laptops start a trend. I do believe there are distros that already target ARM, such as archlinuxarm.org

And you're right - Apple's trackpad has everything else beat. The gestures are great too! I am more of a keyboard aficionado, so I don't mind this too much, but I'm not an average user in this way.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#308

Post by snazz »

lavp wrote: post #218
snazz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that reflects more on your company's internal distro than Debian itself, especially since Ubuntu is itself based on Debian. I know that gLinux has some very non-standard package management stuff, so it wouldn't surprise me if that was related.

What exactly is the point of running an internal distro?

Google includes their own fleet management software, a custom package management system for security (which involves getting other employees to sign off on new programs), and a few other things.

Take a look at this document: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/fleet_management_a...

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#309

Post by radlad »

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…

I mean that NetworkManager, out of the box, supports every WiFi network I've needed. I mean that ALSA and PulseAudio worked out of the box and haven't had any issues, even with Bluetooth. I mean that fonts do not look pixellated or blurry.

And I personally haven't experienced the screen brightness issue.

Certainly, Linux still requires some extra setup to get going, and I think this area is ripe for improvement. But the experiencing of using Linux has been vastly superior in most cases IMO. And when things do break, I can actually fix them, unlike on macOS!

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#310

Post by toastercat »

nikisweeting wrote: post #223
toastercat wrote: post #140

This page completely fails to load without JavaScript. :( It looks like just static content though?

Yeah sorry it's a home-grown blog platform and we're still working out the kinks. No-JS support is on our list but has been low priority. Here's a static-friendly version: https://docs.monadical.com/s/SJagdPZ7w

Thanks! It does look great, for what it's worth.
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