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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

#71

Post by imbnwa »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #58
burlesona wrote: post #41

Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time, with “quick look” as a contender for most under-appreciated feature. Just hitting spacebar to see virtually any file, and the ability to open in preview and read or even markup and make small changes, is so nice. Whenever I use a non-Mac system I really miss those two features.

The ability to extend QuickLook to support more types is huge too. If it can be rendered to a static image or HTML page it can have a QuickLook plugin written for it.

Did not know this

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

#72

Post by jonahbenton »

This piece is mostly evidence that it is hard to switch platforms and expect to preserve one's workflow. Doesn't work. Have to adopt to the native ergonomics.

In that context, Linux is often best looked as a Chromebook Pro. Great when you can do most of your work in or around a browser, plus or minus the shell.

And among Linuxes, Fedora crushes. Cheers.

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

#73

Post by ggm »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #67
ggm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea, although for the Emacs user because all x11 apps acquire x11 through MIT's X10R4 idea of textbox edit norms, they get the in line text edit/move behaviour they expected on anybody's xorg app. Not such on notepad.exe

Powershell doesn't do it for me, but that aside WSL might.

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

#74

Post by zepto »

yellowapple wrote: post #46
zepto wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Apple software does “just work” with Apple hardware. This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes. Apple software is far from being immune to bugs, bad UX, etc., even on Apple hardware, as I can personally attest today from using a Macbook Pro daily for work.

> being immune to bugs

This is a total straw man.

“Just works” has never meant free of bugs. It means not having to do a bunch of incidental configuration, tuning, and setup.

Things do just work.

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

#75

Post by lupire »

kelnos wrote: post #59
marcodiego wrote: post #17

Tell that to Icaza: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26668789

The thing that always bothered me about de Icaza is that he should know better, given his credentials and how immersed he'd been in the FOSS scene for so long. He boils down the issues with Linux on the desktop to what jwz calls Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers[0] model. Essentially open source developers don't have the discipline and patience to do the hard work of maintaining their software, and instead just…

If you don't want clicks, don't put the https:// in the comment.

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

#76

Post by lupire »

astrange wrote: post #34
ratww wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

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…

> hipsters with lumberjack beards

This makes me mistrust your judgement.

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

#77

Post by guessbest »

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…

Macports is a system that installs in the /opt root folder to run along side your native applications without overwriting them, but it compiles each application as you install. Installations can be very slow. It seems like it was adopted from FreeBSD's ports system. Fink is more apt like but I haven't used it in years. All the packages are precompiled and the installations are much faster, but it seems out of date. For both packing systems all the code and installation packages are managed by volunteers so quality varies across packages.

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

#78

Post by marcus_holmes »

zepto wrote: post #37
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.

No it doesn't. It really doesn't. There are sooo many issues that are still not fixed, years after being reported. Apple's Support site has pages where there's hundreds of people saying "I have this problem too", and no comment from an Apple dev.

I'm not blaming them. This shit is hard, even if you control both the hardware and the software. I get why they don't say "it just works" any more.

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

#79

Post by marcodiego »

kelnos wrote: post #59
marcodiego wrote: post #17

Tell that to Icaza: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26668789

The thing that always bothered me about de Icaza is that he should know better, given his credentials and how immersed he'd been in the FOSS scene for so long. He boils down the issues with Linux on the desktop to what jwz calls Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers[0] model. Essentially open source developers don't have the discipline and patience to do the hard work of maintaining their software, and instead just…

I estimate that by the middle of this decade, linux will no longer be a moving target for third parties. It is just getting complex, mature and polished enough to keep continuously changing. It will likely be good enough for most things most people would like to do.

Nevertheless, I don't think that will make its market in increase significantly. There are more factors that influence the success on the desktop beyond polish, maturity and technical excellence. Even listening what industry say they need is a good indicator of what needs to be done. The "third party software industry" is like steve jobs said about users: "we can't just ask for what customers want".

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

#80

Post by darkandbrooding »

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.

There is one single feature of homebrew that regularly bites my coworkers. You can refer to software by name@version ("brew install postgresql@11" or "brew install postgresql@12") and there is no confusion about what you are installing; or you can refer to software by name only ("brew install postgresql") and the version number is calculated to be "most recently released." (v13 at the time this was written.)

Hypothetically I have two machines that I want to build out and give to developers. One machine arrives on Monday. My script runs "brew install postgresql" (no version), because of when I ran that script postgresql@10 gets installed. Tests pass, I hand that machine off to a new developer. The second machine arrives on Wednesday. I run the same script, but because v11 of postgres was added to homebrew on Tuesday, the second machine receives postgresql@11 even though the first machine received @10. Same script, two days apart, different major version of postgresql.

Yes, I can write my scripts carefully to avoid this. But consider this scenario: a new developer encounters a problem, tries to solve it themselves, finds a seemingly helpful blog, and ends up with postgresql@13 and node@15 when everyone else in their team is using postgresql@11 and node@12. Now tests are failing, but only for this one developer and only locally...

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