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Moving from Macbook to Linux

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Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#371

Post by Sunspark »

sleepydog wrote: post #236
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…

I agree. I've been using Linux for almost 20 years now, and I remember all the gymnastics and research that was required to get things like audio and wifi working. In 2020, the only reason I dual boot windows and Linux is for video games, which are becoming less and less important to me, and less of an issue with the work Valve is doing. And, while Linux has gotten considerably more stable and hassle-free, at the sam…

Why can't you? I'm writing this from Windows 7 as we speak. I also have 10 installed on this PC. I prefer 7. I have SMB1 and RDP turned off, I'm not really worried it'll get owned through my router either. I don't use anti-virus either, but then again, I also don't run random exes that arrive in email or through an ad.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#372

Post by amelius »

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…

> That future looks extremely scary. What can we do, now, as developers ?

Write blogs about how Apple's business practices threaten the profession of developers, how they can hamper innovation, and how they work against the interest of the consumer (see e.g. IDFA). Also discuss the idea of breaking up Apple in a hardware and a software company, and how this would help improve the market and provide a brighter future for general purpose computing.

And then there are basic things, discussed also by others, like not supporting Apple in any way, i.e. not buying their hardware, not developing for that hardware, and not recommending friends and family to buy Apple products.

More harsh things you could do are: buying an Apple laptop and returning it (your right as a consumer; make sure you state a reason), or putting a license on your FOSS software that is more restrictive on Apple's closed hardware.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#373

Post by rektide »

donor20 wrote: post #15
rektide wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more than being about what kernel our devices run. Android devices are Linux too, but we don't go around saying it's an era of the Linux Handheld. It is, sort of, but the "Linux Desktop" implies a wider free & open source stack of interlinked technologies, multiple disjointed entities working in different places but building towards some kind of intertwingularity. You can not get that endless-frontier expanding-…

Except the sales numbers for Chromebooks are nuts at least in the education sector I'm in, linux on desktop is basically no where there (so far). Will be interesting if that changes. So there is some kind of boom happening even in these more locked down systems.

Indeed. It does seem like chromebooks are likely to be a great wonderful inroads to Linux, & overall a quite good experience at that. There's a lot to be hopeful here, & it definitely raises awareness.

I'm still not super enthused about a Linux where only one entity drives forward the overall desktop experience. Sure many distos historically have one desktop environment that they prefer, but it's almist always a) a generally compliant piece of the freedesktop standards environment and b) easy to switch out if you want.

If you had asked me a couple years ago, I would have recoiled & wretched at Chromebooks, seen them as another invading conquering anti-libre anti-Linux Desktop anti-option. For the moment, it seems we are much much better able to live in peace & coexist. Originally Chromebooks, like Android, used their own proprietary rendering stack, which was a huge immediate clear & present danger, that Chromebooks had no interest in working with anything or anyone else. These days, Chromebooks run the standard Wayland display server, & crouton/crosstini both seem like fairly good tooling to compute with. Wonderful on-ramps to have.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#374

Post by Liskni_si »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #260
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 ne…

If X11 had a future I would've recommended xmonad to you. It's advertised as a tiling WM configured in Haskell, but in reality it's more of a library to make your own WM, as it abstracts most of the low-level details but still lets you change almost anything. It's still quite focused on tiling, yes, so it probably wouldn't be a good fit for you, but the idea of having an abstraction layer above low-level X11/Xlib stuff enabling you to easily build a custom WM is, in my opinion, absolutely awesome.

I find it really sad that in the Wayland world all the window managers are coupled with compositors (and possibly even more than that), which makes it that much harder to roll your own. I wish there was a generic compositor/input server/whatever with some sort of window management RPC interface that would allow running a separate window manager in a subprocess. This would make it so much easier to port xmonad over to the Wayland world and take it from there...

(I'm aware of waymonad's existence, but I believe the process barrier between compositor and WM is really practical, especially during development where the WM rapidly changes, sometimes crashes, but the session still survives.)

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#375

Post by Uhhrrr »

jodrellblank wrote: post #350
masklinn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you not want people to use linux?

Linux people don't want you to "not use Linux", they want you to see that wearing a burlap sack is good for your soul , then you'll embrace it wholeheartedly on their terms. The computing world is as tribal as the USA's Red/Blue[1] arrangement, but the origins of the tribes and the polarisation of opinions are as if perfectly tuned to avoid Linux on the Desktop. The people who like Linux for its customizability and m…

That, or maybe they're just helpfully pointing out the advantages of keyboard navigation to their fellow users. I'm about to hit Tab-Return to post this.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#376

Post by jlgaddis »

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.…

> 1. I had to install "gnome-tweaks" in order to remap my CapsLock key to Control.

  $ cat ~/.config/autostart/map-caps-lock-to-ctrl.desktop
  [Desktop Entry]
  Encoding=UTF-8
  Version=0.9.4
  Type=Application
  Name=Map CAPS LOCK to CTRL
  Comment=Remaps the CAPS LOCK key to another CTRL key
  Exec=/usr/bin/setxkbmap -option 'ctrl:nocaps'
  OnlyShowIn=XFCE;
  StartupNotify=false
  Terminal=false
  Hidden=false

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#377

Post by 1over137 »

wayne wrote: post #279
busterarm wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just any thinkpad! Stick to the X, T & to some extent P series. Avoid nvidia graphics if you can. Arch Linux (and to some extent OpenBSD) probably has the best support/documentation/fixes for any ACPI/APM management issues you have. I have a top-end 2017 MBP and I just recently bought a brand new 7th Gen X1 Carbon for very cheaply (like $800) and it _screams_ in comparison to the Mac.

I setup a Thinkpad X-series with OpenBSD a few months ago and the hardware support was stellar. I researched ahead of time (lots of googling and reading HN and Reddit threads) and it seemed like the OpenBSD devs were using a handful of Thinkpad models so those worked perfectly. I've mostly used it to surf the web (Firefox) and code (Vim). No one would say it's as seamless as using a Macbook, but being able to tinker…

Is there a good resource for Thinkpads for sale in 2020 that work well with OpenBSD/FreeBSD/linux? A lot of the suggested models I find are from several years ago.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#378

Post by z3ncyberpunk »

pkaye wrote: post #278
busterarm wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just any thinkpad! Stick to the X, T & to some extent P series. Avoid nvidia graphics if you can. Arch Linux (and to some extent OpenBSD) probably has the best support/documentation/fixes for any ACPI/APM management issues you have. I have a top-end 2017 MBP and I just recently bought a brand new 7th Gen X1 Carbon for very cheaply (like $800) and it _screams_ in comparison to the Mac.

So X1 Carbon works well with Linux?

X1 C7 w/ Pop!_OS 20.04, works great with pretty much everything supported "out of the box" in the X1 short of the WWAN chip set (it also might, i have not had time or need for it enough to check recently. Last I checked WWAN drivers were spotty but getting better but that was also when i was trying Ubuntu amd Kubuntu 19.04 which had kind of janky hardware support for keyboard LEDs and audio). I didn't see any native support in the network manager but aside from that, great hardware and firmware support in OS, plug and play for audio devices can sometimes be dumb but its much better than most linux OS I've used. I was never a fan of GNOME but Pop!_OS pulls it off quite nicely.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#379

Post by ibraheemdev »

cpursley wrote: post #272
busterarm wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just any thinkpad! Stick to the X, T & to some extent P series. Avoid nvidia graphics if you can. Arch Linux (and to some extent OpenBSD) probably has the best support/documentation/fixes for any ACPI/APM management issues you have. I have a top-end 2017 MBP and I just recently bought a brand new 7th Gen X1 Carbon for very cheaply (like $800) and it _screams_ in comparison to the Mac.

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

I recently bought a t14 with a 4750u. Ubuntu worked great out of the box, but the battery lasted about 4 hours. I don't know if it was a hardware issue, but I tried everything and couldn't get it to last more than 5 hours. Everything else was great though. I was running Rust compiles on large projects without a sound from the fan, and it stayed cool throughout. Sucks that I had to return it because of the battery.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#380

Post by NeutronStar »

peferron wrote: post #346
eikenberry wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why either/or.. with laptops you can have both the desktop experience and the portable experience. I have a laptop that I primarily use as a desktop. I like it that way best, but I like the option to take it with me. For when I travel or just times I want to sit out in the family room.

If your work is CPU or memory-hungry, I don't think there's a single laptop out there than can touch the performance of a Zen 3 desktop with 64 GB+ of memory. I spend 99% of my working hours at my desk so it's a no-brainer for me to use a desktop. For the rare times I need to work somewhere else I just git push on the desktop, git pull on the laptop, and keep working.

I use vscode and the remote ssh extension, the interface can be on the laptop but the desktop does all the hard work.
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