Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by messe » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:45 AM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #5

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…

> 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?

> takes control of /usr/local/ for itself

In fairness, so does ports/pkg/pkg_add on FreeBSD/OpenBSD.

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

#62

Post by martinald » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

I'd be interested to know why the author thinks apt-get is so much better than brew (honest question!). I've never had any problems with homebrew (even on M1 mixing and matching arm and intel binaries).

I have however had many massive problems with apt-get, specifically getting a version of an app that's later that what's included in the distro. It usually ends up with a couple of PPAs that then don't work properly and brick the system.

Homebrew in this regard is far better as all packages are "always" at the latest stable version and I imagine get more testing than some random PPA or backports repo.

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

#63

Post by strategia » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #35

>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…

You may like MacPorts. It is descended from BSD-style package managers.

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

#64

Post by jeroenhd » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

preommr wrote: post #39

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 mor…

> Why are they upgrading their kernel every few weeks?

This makes sense if you install a distro like Manjaro or Arch. Not something I'd ever recommend to someone who's taking Linux for a first spin. I don't think I've had any troubles doing regular kernel upgrades, though, the problems mostly laid in proprietary drivers, specifically Nvidia's.

> How does anyone think nautilus is good?

I have no problems with Nautilus. Perhaps it's not the greatest file manager, but it's way ahead of Finder in my opinion.

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

#65

Post by chasd00 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

xtian wrote: post #44

smoldesu wrote: post #35

>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…

What makes Homebrew a failure? I don’t generally have issues with it for my needs.

My thoughts too, home brew works just fine for me.

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

#66

Post by smoldesu » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:49 AM UTC

strategia wrote: post #63

smoldesu wrote: post #35

>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…

You may like MacPorts. It is descended from BSD-style package managers.

I've given it a whirl, and while it's better than Brew, that's not a high bar to pass. Macports suffers from the same lack of software and strange idiosyncrasies that crop up in Brew, and it really doesn't justify it's place in my workflow.

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

#67

Post by rahimnathwani » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:51 AM UTC

ggm wrote: post #51

rahimnathwani wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's a great story in how much of the world runs in excel. I use it simplistically, but I make no pretence there aren't deep, complex use cases. Maybe because I use it simplistically it doesn't bother me how weak it is compared to native.

Right. Imagine an intermediate user of emacs, vim, sublime or vscode. They'd find switching to nano or notepad.exe pretty rough.

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

#68

Post by astrognomy » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:51 AM UTC

preommr wrote: post #39

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 mor…

> How does anyone think nautilus is good?

I think it's great. If I had to pick between Finder, Windows File Explorer, Nautilus, or Dolphin. I'd honestly choose Nautilus. It's visually simple, has previews, built in support for Google Drive, easy to find how to show hidden files, if I double click an archived file; it decompresses it, and it has an "Open Terminal" right click prompt. If I had to walk someone through performing a file system action, say over a phone, I feel confident that I could do so with the least confusion using Nautilus. I simply never have understood the arguments against Nautilus and am extremely thankful to the developers who have chosen to make the hard decision to reduce features to make the application maintainable.

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

#69

Post by cmeacham98 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:00 AM UTC

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.

Helped a family member with some troubles on their M1 Mac recently. Take with a grain of salt: this is a single 30 minute anecdote from someone who last used OS X about a decade ago.

Finder was the worst part of the experience by far. Perhaps there's some setting to turn this behavior off (or some setting said relative turned on that caused this) but it seemed to constantly attempt to hide the underlying filesystem from me, instead showing files in groups like "Documents" and "Downloads". I could not figure out if/where in the UI I could type in a path to a folder to manually browse to it. The search was slow and awful, to the point of being near useless.

After 10-15 minutes of wasting my time in Finder I gave up and used the terminal for all file operations.

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

#70

Post by akra » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:02 AM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #35

>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…

People state consistent shortcut mapping is an advantage of using Mac but after 2 years of being required to use a Macbook Pro I'm not really sure about that - often they are more complicated IMO. I still miss built in Linux and Windows key mappings. For example Windows + Left to move the window on the left side of screen for side by side apps on the same screen. Great for remote demo's and coding sessions. Ctrl + Shift + F4 to take a screen shot vs Linux PrtSc feels backwards at least to me. On the mouse pointer side with scroll direction most people I know also get a plugin to swap the scroll direction when they use their mouse and switch back to track pad. Another example - on VS Code very often the key bindings don't work on my Mac whereas on my Linux machine they work every time. My point is while I'm probably don't know all the tricks to learn since its not my platform of choice YMMV.

I think the impression of "better key bindings" comes down to familiarity more than anything. Getting used to something else seems uncertain (it may never be as good despite learning investment) when you know on the other platform you can just "get things done fast".