Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
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Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#2So Carlos says "don't pick off single issues because it's forest/trees stuff" but I gotta say: he thinks apt is better than brew.
Nothing else felt "wrong" but that one just threw me completely. I can go with his whole write up, but not that.
Admittedly I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which brew conforms to.
I also totally get his preview/calendar/mail.app vibe. Mail.app is not getting better. But the trio are pretty rock solid. Post O365 no complaint about office on Linux makes sense really, so it comes down to productivity apps and integration.
And yea, I wish a decent gtk port into osx was a thing.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#3Yes, the whole problem is that Mac still doesn’t have serious competition, at least in certain areas I care about like the trackpad. So when they start shitting up their hardware there’s nowhere to go.
All you can do is wait for Apple to hopefully recognize their mistakes, and in the meantime, read blogposts that are like “well the trackpad support sucks, but... ”
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#4I was linux only until last year when someone convinced me to try a Mac. I have been very happy with it: it's way less intrusive than what I had pictured (I think prejudice against commercial OSes from my windows days). Memory and CPU issues that seem to crop up in ubuntu using desktop apps are not present - I had a lot of trouble using e.g. zoom and g-suite on ubuntu without having either lockups or full blast cooling fan. And I still have a unix-like OS that I can do my usual development, ssh-ing, and file manipulation on.
I currently have a Mac for "office productivity" stuff and ubuntu for development, but if I had to only have one computer, it would be a Mac.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#5So Carlos says "don't pick off single issues because it's forest/trees stuff" but I gotta say: he thinks apt is better than brew. Nothing else felt "wrong" but that one just threw me completely. I can go with his whole write up, but not that. Admittedly I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which brew conforms to. I also totally get his previe…
> I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which brew conforms to.
Brew conforms to your idea of how a traditional UNIX package manager should work? The same brew that pretends multiple users don't exist and takes control of /usr/local/ for itself? Are we talking about the same thing?
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#6So Carlos says "don't pick off single issues because it's forest/trees stuff" but I gotta say: he thinks apt is better than brew. Nothing else felt "wrong" but that one just threw me completely. I can go with his whole write up, but not that. Admittedly I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which brew conforms to. I also totally get his previe…
> I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which brew conforms to. Brew conforms to your idea of how a traditional UNIX package manager should work? The same brew that pretends multiple users don't exist and takes control of /usr/local/ for itself? Are we talking about the same thing?
Ok. You got me there. But, in my defence, most macs are run single user. If I'd done any login separation I'd probably be wincing at what I said there.
Apt, yum, bundles, renamed packages at random, the whole -devel thing.. brrrr. Please, no.
Macports lost out. Liked it, found it wasn't getting enough attention.
Pkg on mac works pretty well
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#7So Carlos says "don't pick off single issues because it's forest/trees stuff" but I gotta say: he thinks apt is better than brew. Nothing else felt "wrong" but that one just threw me completely. I can go with his whole write up, but not that. Admittedly I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which brew conforms to. I also totally get his previe…
Brew is the single thing that I absolutely loathe about macOS.
It dog slow (does it really need to git pull from GitHub every 15 minutes, really?), doesn't support multiple users, doesn't support alternative folders, hates static compilation (which is mostly why the two previous break), and lots of new things are not available there anymore.
In my new computer I didn't even install it, I just used the Rustup/Dotnet/RVM/NVM install instructions rather than using Brew. I then got statically compiled versions of ffmpeg, jq, z7, which took a couple minutes. Let's see how long until I cave. I'll probably try MacPorts.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#8So Carlos says "don't pick off single issues because it's forest/trees stuff" but I gotta say: he thinks apt is better than brew. Nothing else felt "wrong" but that one just threw me completely. I can go with his whole write up, but not that. Admittedly I come from a BSD background on 7th ed. 32V and 4.1bsd onward, so to me ports and pkg are the more natural path, which brew conforms to. I also totally get his previe…
Brew is the single thing that I absolutely loathe about macOS. It dog slow (does it really need to git pull from GitHub every 15 minutes, really?), doesn't support multiple users, doesn't support alternative folders, hates static compilation (which is mostly why the two previous break), and lots of new things are not available there anymore. In my new computer I didn't even install it, I just used the Rustup/Dotnet/R…
Yes. Brew is a crutch, and so network hungry. Nobody cares, but if you move to the mountains and want to do software development, a Mac will grind to a halt every so often for myriad reasons decided by someone at Apple, or just some dev accustomed to 100mbps.
Linux (Arch for me, but probably others) can be told to respect your personal situation, as opposed to dictating it.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brew is the single thing that I absolutely loathe about macOS. It dog slow (does it really need to git pull from GitHub every 15 minutes, really?), doesn't support multiple users, doesn't support alternative folders, hates static compilation (which is mostly why the two previous break), and lots of new things are not available there anymore. In my new computer I didn't even install it, I just used the Rustup/Dotnet/R…
Yes. Brew is a crutch, and so network hungry. Nobody cares, but if you move to the mountains and want to do software development, a Mac will grind to a halt every so often for myriad reasons decided by someone at Apple, or just some dev accustomed to 100mbps. Linux (Arch for me, but probably others) can be told to respect your personal situation, as opposed to dictating it.
Both of these experiences are completely unlike mine, but I guess that goes to the variances in what people want and use.
The one thing I want in brew and don't have, is hugin. Nothing else I use is missing. Iterm and docker and other cask like installs can be ropey especially if they do update checks inside themselves.
I, probably a very simplistic user compared to others. YMMV.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#10The author doesn't state whether they installed Linux on a laptop that shipped with Windows, or bought an actual "Linux laptop". There's a huge difference, like reviewing a Hackintosh and saying "Macs are shite".
I did the same. I accidentally fubar'd my lovely 2015 Macbook by pouring a beer into it. I bought a Dell XPS and dual-booted Linux, which kinda worked but wasn't great. Then I bought a Purism 14, which has been awesome (after some teething troubles with the build quality).
I'm kinda tempted by the M1 goodness. But to be honest, I'm not happy at all about going back into the walled garden of MacOS.
I guess my main point of difference with the OP is that I never bought into the Apple ecosystem in the first place - I didn't use mail.app or calendar.app much. I never liked the Apple applications, they never seemed happy letting me take control of my life, and always seemed opinionated about what I should be doing.
I'm now running i3wm on PureOS (debian-derived), tweaked to how I like it. And it's great. Couldn't be happier. Except for Zoom's Linux client, (but Spotify's Linux client is now pretty good, so there's hope!). And odd config issues with the USB ethernet.
But the point is that I can go fiddle with those issues, and learn how Linux USB ethernet works, and generally mess about with my setup however I like. Yes I might brick it. But that's better than "oh it's gone dark, I have to take it to an Apple Store to get it fixed". Which is f-all use in a pandemic lockdown (or in rural SE Asia, which is where I was when I poured the beer in the Macbook in the first place). It's MY computer, not Apple's. That's actually important, not an ideological stance that doesn't matter in practice.
Because Apple stuff doesn't "just work" any more. And if it doesn't "just work" there's f-all you can do except take it to the Store. And usually they'll just shrug and hand you a new one, and hope you backed everything up to their servers. I mean, sure, that's OK. But it's not what I want.