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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

#31

Post by rahimnathwani »

ggm wrote: post #2

So 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…

> Post O365 no complaint about office on Linux makes sense really

Excel Online doesn't come close to the feature set or usability of Excel for Windows.

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

#32

Post by rvz »

> If you want to achieve some specific action you need to read four or five manpages, search online, and figure out how you are going to put the pieces together. That made me appreciate Karabiner and BTT much more.

This is still accurate to this day and what they don't tell you. Hence why you always need to search for 'xorg/wayland error' this, 'dbus initialization error' that or a random core dump occurred on a freezing window. I have zero time to search for these issues when I configure what I want and prefer it to 'just work' like it should on macOS.

> On November 10th Apple showed us the future of the Mac and released again laptops worth buying. So I bought the 2020 M1 Macbook Air. You will read a review of it soon.

If you like the M1, you will also like the M1X, M2 or M3 Macs. No need to rush for last years model, hence why I skipped this one.

> The experience of using Linux as a daily driver has been very positive for me, but I do need my productivity.

Exactly. Rather than messing around or spending days playing around with my setup or window manager.

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

#33

Post by rrmm »

I got fed up and shifted fully to a Linux desktop and laptop setup like 20 years ago. Computers are silly devices and there is no end to the annoyances involved with them regardless of operating system.

I got used to it and was/am able to get what I need done. I liked the cheap netbooks when they were a thing, and I like zenbooks these days. You always have to shop with compatibility in mind. Hard edges persist in any environment though the particulars change. I am comfortable with the tradeoffs currently and luckily there are enough people using Linux to take care of most of the show stoppers fairly quickly.

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

#34

Post by astrange »

ratww wrote: post #7
ggm wrote: post #2

So 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…

There were multiple successful package manager systems on macOS (MacPorts and fink) before brew came out. Brew hardly has any technical advantages over them except that maybe fink got stuck using an older version of dpkg/apt, and it made some new mistakes like installing in /usr/local.

Instead what seemed to happen is a new generation of Rails developers got Macs, decided all their tools needed to be written in Ruby by hipsters with lumberjack beards, and so they didn't want to touch the old stuff.

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

#35

Post by smoldesu »

>apt-get was a revolution when it was released in 1998 and it is still the best way to manage software today. brew is a mediocre replacement.

While apt still isn't the best package manager (my heart belongs to pacman, no matter what the haters say), I completely agree that brew is a failed imitation. I wanted to use MacOS for the longest time, because I've been told that it's a real "Unix system". Brew has distilled my fears into a sobering reality. The "advantages" MacOS offers really comes down to eye-candy or slightly more consistent shortcut mapping, but none of this really matters to me when I can't use the software I want, and the OS is always second-guessing my authority. Maybe I've been spoiled by Linux, but I don't understand the hype. Not even on my M1 Macbook Air.

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

#36

Post by bitwize »

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…

WSL 1 was great, WSL 2 is probably even more amazing. The problem is it comes with a massive ball and chain called "the rest of Windows 10". Even ignoring all the ads, all the spyware, all the Windows Update shittiness... the UI is a confusing mess and easily beat by the likes of XFCE, Mate, or Plasma. Add that other stuff, and it's all just a huge pain that I don't want to deal with. So I don't, and I just run Linux desktops. They do what they're called upon to do and otherwise just stay put.

And Windows isn't even that bad. Compared to busted up 90s Windows it's a dream come true. But I've been spoiled by Linux and my "geek privilege" of knowing how to operate it all these years.

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

#37

Post by zepto »

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…

> Because Apple stuff doesn't "just work" any more.

This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes.

Apple software does “just work” with Apple hardware.

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

#38

Post by smoldesu »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #26
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.

Thinkpads have always been the authentic Linux experience in my eyes, especially the models after 2009. I love what modern companies are doing with Linux laptops, but the Thinkpad is still the same, unrivaled, robust monster it has always been. There's nothing special about it, and that's why it's special. It feels standard issue, and hardware failure is a lot less sporadic than Macbooks.

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

#39

Post by preommr »

What a topsy-turvy article.

Mail is fine if you use browser-based solutions. Nobody is talking about only sending plaintext emails? Wtf?

Why are they running so much stuff on wine?

Why are they upgrading their kernel every few weeks?

How does anyone think nautilus is good?

How does anyone think that Gimp/inkscape are better than affinity designer?

These are the things they find useful about linux? There's so much more that makes linux a powerful solution (e.g. great window managers like i3), or much better support for shell based workflows.

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

#40

Post by salamandersauce »

Eh. I've ended up with the opposite conclusion, at least for my purposes. Running Word is neat, but having to spend half a day figuring out what Apple did to C++ headers after an Xcode update so R will compile packages again is not fun. Unfortunately I can't really install Linux on the damn thing because of the hardware.

Also mailspring is a pretty good Linux email client with conversation view...

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