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Moving from Macbook to Linux

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Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#451

Post by BodhiDude »

BodhiDude wrote: post #363
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.…

QUESTION: As a Mac Dude: Did you ever get the Apple Magic keyboard to work? I think it was the right mouse click that never worked. (I never used a Mac) If you look for a Laptop, Dell XPS are pretty good. If you buy one used, avoid the one which has the camera at the bottom of the screen. People look right up your nose in meetings I was told.

I meant magic keypad.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#452

Post by Wubdidu »

toyg wrote: post #448
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…

I’m tempted by a desktop but I worry about noise. Typically power components == big cooling reqs == big fans == big noise. There are specialized vendors who guarantee quiet but obviously they cost more.

Big fans are a good thing because they move much more air with much less RPM. If you care about noise, buy components with low power requirements and low heat output and slam a ridiculously overpowered cooling solution on it. I recently tried a workstation radeon GPU with one very small fan that would be essentially silent if it were in a case. Something like a recent i3 or i5 would mean so low heat output that high end coolers from Noctua would probably work somewhere around the lowest RPM with correctly configured fan curves. That, combined with the possibility of putting the case below the desk instead of right next to yourself like a laptop sounds much more silent as my macbook pro. An efficiently cooled i5 should be much more powerful than the frequently thermally throttled ultrabook/mobile CPUs. Those components are usually the cheaper ones too.

Granted, my high end gaming machine can get a bit noisier compared to my macbook, but even then the kind of noise is more pleasant than the relatively high pitched wind coming out of the MBP. The 3900X and the GPU do generate a ton of great though, so the focus is not on noise and heat output like in your case.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#453

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

1_player wrote: post #302
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 -…

I've been running Arch Linux for many, many years now on three or four machines at the same time.

I've never had anything break, unlike in Ubuntu. (Constant Ubuntu breakages were the thing that drove me to Arch in the first place.)

Arch Linux is basically "default upstream Linux", which means less random patches and stuff built on top of it.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#454

Post by wyclif »

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…

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.

This is exactly what I've returned to as well, and I'd forgotten for a while (or maybe didn't understand) what was so good about this setup. Working only in my own "do work stuff" office at my own desk means when I'm not working, I'm free to enjoy things without technology getting in the way, and I find that when I do get to my desk I'm a lot more focused, energized, and ready to go. Best of all, I don't have to deal with obscure laptop config issues.

I have a Linux box: it's an ATX tower, a 40" monitor, an Apple Magic Trackpad 2, and most significantly a mechanical keyboard. The importance of the latter can't be overstated: having good key travel, Cherry MX switches, and tactile feedback makes development a vastly better experience.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#455

Post by gorgoiler »

toyg wrote: post #448
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…

I’m tempted by a desktop but I worry about noise. Typically power components == big cooling reqs == big fans == big noise. There are specialized vendors who guarantee quiet but obviously they cost more.

Intel’s line of mini PCs have worked well for me. They call them the Next Unit of Computing, or NUC.

Older generations [of the hardware!] have more stable Linux support. I currently have a gen 4 Intel NUC (Haswell) and it is a lovely platform.

Not a lot of local compute power though. For that, it seems better to go all-in on well cooled datacentre hardware and connect to it remotely.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#456

Post by brabel »

nikisweeting wrote: post #229
brabel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with fans blazing because HN on Safari can be demanding. You've got to be joking?! I have a MacBook Air from 2020, which should still be less powerful than a MacBook Pro from 2018 and even on huge websites full of crap the fans won't kick in, let alone on HN which is the lightest website I frequent often. The only time I hear the fan is when I compile a large project on my IDE or when the IDE re-indexes the JRE!

It's all whats in your tabs, comparing otherwise is useless. I typically run between 100-200 tabs at any given time, most of them hibernated, but some readers only run 10 tabs.

100 tabs? Don't you ever close them? How do you even find a tab again when you want it? Can't you just use bookmarks or something like Pocket?

I think I never have more than 10 tabs open, so this is really surprising to me.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#457

Post by apjana »

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

Can you please elaborate what you mean by "half baked"? nnn has macOS users and I believe the number is picking up given we are getting more bug reports from macOS users recently. Knowing macOS users, we can consider polishing some crude corners if the problem statement seems reasonable.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#458

Post by nikita2206 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #370
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.…

What about mobile workstations like Dell Precision, HP Zbook, Thinkpad P53? Those workstations usually claim to support Linux officially, they are really powerful workhorses, they allow using of server-grade components (Xeons, ECC RAM, Quadro GPUs). Do people avoid them because they are expensive, bulky or do not run long on battery? If I would buy laptop today, I would look into those machines first, they seem to ma…

My experience with Thinkpad P52 was quite bad. The intel graphics resets at least two times a day which requires a reboot to fix. I’ve filed an issue in the Intel DRM repository but haven’t got any answer yet, this might as well be a faulty hardware issue which I have to idea how to prove (Windows works fine and it’s all warranty would care about). Plus it’s gigantic and heavy, its fingerprint sensor doesn’t have Linux drivers (there are some unofficial drivers that were implemented very recently but the laptop is a few years old at this point), the IR camera for face recognition doesn’t work either in Linux. It’s also noisy when it’s doing computationally expensive stuff, I’m not sure if there’s silent alternatives though.

It can support up to 64gb though and two NVMe drives + one Sata drive so that’s nice. But it drove me mad in the past few months that I’ve been using it, by hanging several times a day so I built instead a desktop machine for Linux as they never have these kind of issues, and for mobile use I might as well be fine with MBP from 2015

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#459

Post by neurostimulant »

BodhiDude wrote: post #363
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.…

QUESTION: As a Mac Dude: Did you ever get the Apple Magic keyboard to work? I think it was the right mouse click that never worked. (I never used a Mac) If you look for a Laptop, Dell XPS are pretty good. If you buy one used, avoid the one which has the camera at the bottom of the screen. People look right up your nose in meetings I was told.

Hmm, do you mean apple keyboard or magic mouse? For the keyboard, mine works but it took a while to connect after boot. I either has to wait several minutes before I can use the keyboard to login, or just use another keyboard until the apple bluetooth keyboard is finally connected.

As for magic mouse, right clicks works, but it might be because I already configured the mouse to enable right click on my mac. The mouse seem to store that settings locally in the device itself. My only gripes is inertial scrolling doesn't seem to work. I'm using ubuntu 20.04 desktop.

Edit: forgot to include the biggest annoyance related to using apple bluetooth keyboard on my linux desktop: for some reason, ubuntu seem to think the right half side of the keyboard is actually a numpad. I had to install numlockx and add `numlockx off` to gnome startup command list to fix this.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#460

Post by intricatedetail »

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…

Don't forget about sentencing your customers to Apple Sur(veillance).
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