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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

#21

Post by kitsunesoba »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #16

>Nautilus is better than the Finder. It's not even close. That's astounding. Finder must be awful. To me, Nautilus is virtually unusable -- it's like a toy file manager. Nothing beats Dolphin (or PCManFM as a not-so-close second). For some reason, Qt apps are way better than GTK apps in general.

Personally I find Nautilus much more irritating than Finder has ever been. Finder has most of the features most people need, you just need to know where to look for them, but Nautlius just straight up cuts stuff out.

Some of Nautilus' forked kin like Nemo (Cinnamon) and Thunar (XFCE) are decent though.

Dolphin is alright but in my case it has a bit of "MS Office" syndrome where I only ever use maybe 20-30% of its functionality, with the rest just being more clutter to have to dig through. I know some find those things useful, but in my case it's just going to collect dust and get in the way.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#23

Post by mattwad »

ericwooley wrote: post #12

I also switched to Linux, and I love it, but only on my desktop machine. I got uhk for key remapping, and that's been great. For email and calendar, I use wavebox, which side steps most of the app issues. As the article says: The laptop experience is not anywhere near as good. I had a lot of the same issues, even on a system 76. Eventually I decided to try giving windows wsl2 a shot for my laptop, and I gotta give Mi…

Microsoft is really killing it these past couple years. I'm still not sure I'd recommend for a tech team over OSX. But mostly because most devs now know how to deal with the issues from Brew and OSX, not so much Windows. But hell, most barely know how to deal with Linux/Unix stuff.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#24

Post by bitL »

ericwooley wrote: post #12

I also switched to Linux, and I love it, but only on my desktop machine. I got uhk for key remapping, and that's been great. For email and calendar, I use wavebox, which side steps most of the app issues. As the article says: The laptop experience is not anywhere near as good. I had a lot of the same issues, even on a system 76. Eventually I decided to try giving windows wsl2 a shot for my laptop, and I gotta give Mi…

I use Linux Mint on various laptops (mostly Zenbooks) as a primary OS in HiDPI mode and I am totally fine with it. You just need to install drivers properly and find software you need and then you finally feel like in control and 100% in the flow.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#25

Post by zmmmmm »

I would like to see someone do the equivalent experiment now with a Win10+WSL2 setup.

I'm carefully watching Apple to see what the next line of Macbook Pros looks like. Esp. how well the M1 architecture fits into a development workflow that will still for the forseeable future center heavily on deployment to x86 architecture. We already are seeing significant time wastage from employees having to fight architecture issues with docker. We will see where that ends up. And then, whether the rumors are true that they might support more ports and even options without the touch bar. These things would signal a genuine change of heart on considering developers to be first class citizens in their ecosystem. If all these turn out positive I'll be sticking with it. If not, Win10+WSL2 are looking extremely compelling.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#26

Post by kitsunesoba »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #10

The 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 b…

I considered buying a System76 Lemur not too long ago because I liked the machine's specs and enjoy popOS, but after seeing QC issues with System76's OEM decided against it and got a Thinkpad X1 Nano instead.

Interested to see how their in-house laptop project goes though.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#27

Post by mraza007 »

I switched to Linux when learning nodejs and web development in general. Setting up nodejs and using commandline was pain so I decided to completely switch to Ubuntu and never looked back and I consider that one of the best decisions I ever made.

Now after getting tempted to try Arch Linux and I finally gave it a try and its been great so far and especially the Arch Wiki has been the best resource for all my linux knowledge

I just can’t thank enough whoever created ArchWiki Project it’s full of great knowledge related to Linux.

I just wanna take a moment and appreciate the efforts of people who contributed to archwiki and to linux project in general making it great for people like us to use it as a daily driver

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#28

Post by smoldesu »

mattwad wrote: post #23
ericwooley wrote: post #12

I also switched to Linux, and I love it, but only on my desktop machine. I got uhk for key remapping, and that's been great. For email and calendar, I use wavebox, which side steps most of the app issues. As the article says: The laptop experience is not anywhere near as good. I had a lot of the same issues, even on a system 76. Eventually I decided to try giving windows wsl2 a shot for my laptop, and I gotta give Mi…

Microsoft is really killing it these past couple years. I'm still not sure I'd recommend for a tech team over OSX. But mostly because most devs now know how to deal with the issues from Brew and OSX, not so much Windows. But hell, most barely know how to deal with Linux/Unix stuff.

>But mostly because most devs now know how to deal with the issues from Brew and OSX, not so much Windows. But hell, most barely know how to deal with Linux/Unix stuff.

If you can operate Brew, you can operate a Linux package manager.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#29

Post by szhu »

zmmmmm wrote: post #25

I would like to see someone do the equivalent experiment now with a Win10+WSL2 setup. I'm carefully watching Apple to see what the next line of Macbook Pros looks like. Esp. how well the M1 architecture fits into a development workflow that will still for the forseeable future center heavily on deployment to x86 architecture. We already are seeing significant time wastage from employees having to fight architecture i…

Apple made Macs UNIX developer-friendly (2001) before they switched to x86 (2005), so they have a good chunk of non-hypothetical past data to look at. Really hoping this means they won't screw this up.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#30

Post by vngzs »

You complain about power user tools, then list a bunch of Xorg tools. Xorg is dying; move to Wayland. I use Sway, but if you want something that's closer to a macOS power user experience, you should probably go with KDE[0].

Tearing? Fundamental Xorg problem. Fixed in Wayland. Wayland has some rough edges, but the reality of the ecosystem is Xorg is dead and not coming back, and it's better to be a little ahead of the curve than behind it and complaining about things that are resolved on the other side.

[0]: https://kde.org/

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