I installed arch linux on my personal macbook air (2012) and it's given a new lease of life to the laptop; and I enjoyed it enough to switch from a macbook to a Thinkpad at work as well. (I like more minimal UIs, so I ended up going with dwm/dmenu instead of dealing with Gnome).
Moving from Macbook to Linux
431–440 of 518 posts
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#432I 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.…
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'm using a T490, and with one exception everything has worked perfectly. Things like Thunderbolt connecting to a docking station with multiple monitors just works out of the box.
That's not to say that it's been perfect. The touchpad on this thing isn't great. I've had issues with sporadic jumping of the pointer when touching it with two fingers. I replaced the touchpad which did not have any effect. The funny thing is that the problem has been slowing going away over the months. I have never tested it on Windows, so I wouldn't know if there is a hardware problem.
The reason I was mentioning this is because I wanted to give some credit to Lenovo support. I fully expected them to tell me to test on Windows before replacing the touchpad but they were happy to tell me they supported Linux and me showing the issue in Arch Linux was enough for them to replace it.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thinkpads all have soldered ram which is a pratice I can't support, is there a model I missed that has ram slots?
With the exception of the X1 ultrabooks, I don't think any Thinkpad has soldered RAM. My X1 Extreme Gen1 with 64GB and a family member's P51 (or p53 dont remember) with 128 GB definitely do not. I bought the cheapest RAM tier and put in my own modules as soon as I got it. Except for ultrabooks where the sacrifice makes sense, I don't expect Thinkpads with soldered RAM to ever become standard. That's just not their ta…
I can't seem to find any that's not soldered, e.g. all the T14s AMD are soldered, so are the X13, so are the X390
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#434I 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
that is very helpful.
I wish there was a drop-in file that did this at the console/keymap level. It seems every distribution does it a different way.
I always have to make my own keymap for loadkeys
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is, in those ten years the hump's slowly been getting smaller and smaller, every time I reinstall or upgrade there's less and less work to do to get things up and running, to the point where it's not much different than getting a new windows install going. Install some drivers Install some apps Configure things and set up my ui There's a lot less forum hunting, obscure edge cases you run into, random things…
I literally just had to manually debug kernel modules to upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 20.10 because of the breaking changes in proc and renaming "sem[aphore]" to "lock" in places. So no. There is just as much forum hunting as ever.
Well, I can honestly say in the all the years I've been using linux i've never had to do that. I never said edge cases don't exist, just that they're less frequent.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thinkpads all have soldered ram which is a pratice I can't support, is there a model I missed that has ram slots?
The T models without the S usually have no soldered RAM, or only one soldered slot. The ThinkPad T480, for example, has two upgradable RAM slots and one or two NVMe slots. Heck, even the Wi-Fi card is removable. When talking about ThinkPads, I always recommend going with the T line and skipping anything with S at the end.
Oh you're right, they seem to only have 1 slot soldered. They should advertise that more on their website. Seeing 8GB (soldered) + 1 expansion would be clearer
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thinkpads all have soldered ram which is a pratice I can't support, is there a model I missed that has ram slots?
I think soldered storage is the thing that matters more. RAM does not retain state, storage does.
Except having a lot of RAM is vital for some workloads (like compilation, virtualization/containers). Sometimes you may think you're okay with 16GB or RAM, until you need one or two 8GB VM working and a local DB
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#438thinkpad + Ubuntu LTS
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They literally say why on their post.
Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The M1 Macs are impressively capable at video editing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxH3RabNWfE
> The new Macbooks were on the horizon, but I figured I'd wait for v2 of whatever came out.