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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

#111

Post by symlinkk »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #21
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 fun…

Like what? Be specific

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

#112

Post by ornornor »

darkandbrooding wrote: post #80
xtian wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.) Hypothet…

Doesn’t apt (for instance) work the same way? Or docker images without a tag? I’d you don’t specify a version in each case then you get the latest available. I’d you want a specific version pinned then you should specify it. I think I don’t see your point, works as intended. If you enforced mandatory version specification every time, you’d have to know exactly which version is which package for anything you install: apt install Firefox > nope won’t work, instead you have to know what is today’s latest Firefox version (changes every couple of days/weeks)

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

#113

Post by anang »

randmeerkat wrote: post #94
darkandbrooding wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.) Hypothet…

Why not run a docker container locally with Postgres and code against that? Then everyone is using the same Postgres version.

If the solution to homebrews handling of major versions is to not use homebrew, I think it indicates there are issues.

I think it should work like almost Linux distros where the major version is fixed for a release lifecycle, and any other installations require modification. So say brew install postgresql should always install 12, and if you want something else you have to add the version modifier.

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

#114

Post by ahartmetz »

ornornor wrote: post #112
darkandbrooding wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.) Hypothet…

Doesn’t apt (for instance) work the same way? Or docker images without a tag? I’d you don’t specify a version in each case then you get the latest available. I’d you want a specific version pinned then you should specify it. I think I don’t see your point, works as intended. If you enforced mandatory version specification every time, you’d have to know exactly which version is which package for anything you install:…

apt generally doesn't switch you to a new incompatible version of a package unless you upgrade your whole install. Browsers are not libraries and have special status due to their importance and having security and feature updates not separated.

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

#115

Post by jug »

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.

QuickLook on Windows Store is actually pretty good. Same usage with spacebar. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/quicklook/9nv4bs3l1h4s?act...

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

#116

Post by xgbi »

ornornor wrote: post #112
darkandbrooding wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.) Hypothet…

Doesn’t apt (for instance) work the same way? Or docker images without a tag? I’d you don’t specify a version in each case then you get the latest available. I’d you want a specific version pinned then you should specify it. I think I don’t see your point, works as intended. If you enforced mandatory version specification every time, you’d have to know exactly which version is which package for anything you install:…

It's not really how apt works but rather how Debian works: you use apt with a specific release repository of Debian (stretch, buster or whatever ISO you installed).

Debian is really strict about its releases and won't push a breaking change in a specific version of the OS.

For instance, `apt install htop` will only ever install the 2.X version of htop in Buster. Including security patches and all, but you won't get a 3.0.0 version without going sideways and add a specific repository for that. Debian will ship with htop version 3 in the next release, but you'll have to upgrade the entire distro for that.

Brew is different in that it allows anybody to merge a new breaking version of the software you use, so `brew install htop` on Monday could give you the 2.x version, and on Tuesday will install the 3.0.0 version.

You could maybe compare it to the rolling releases of Arch. But Arch has a better way of handling it than Brew: they test, they prepare, they communicate for bug changes..

Brew would benefit from segmenting their offering, but you'd lose the bleeding-edginess of it. Really, if you want reproducible packaging on Mac, I'd use nix or docker. If you want convenience and edge, use brew and deal with it.

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

#117

Post by [deleted] »

rektide wrote: post #95
jeeeb wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t say I agree with this. I’ve been using Windows as my daily driver for the last decade since switching back from Mac+Linux for work reasons. Honestly there’s lots to like in Windows 10 even if there’s a bit of bloat around the edges. I cannot imagine wanting to go back to the bad old days of ME. Modern Windows is stable, secure, fast and has plenty in there for power users. Driver support and sleep mode is seaml…

having 4 different sound control panels is a sickening joke. there's so many disjointed laters on layers on layers everywhere. nothing is ever cleaned up, just new glossy over layers that don't quite work as well created atop the old. tragi-comic experience.

[deleted]

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

#118

Post by whateveracct »

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…

`nix-env -i` and `nix-shell -p` can pretty much replace anything you need brew for

and they do it way better

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

#119

Post by ActorNightly »

rvz wrote: post #32

> 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 free…

>ther than messing around or spending days playing around with my setup or window manager.

I don't get why this narravitve still exists today. Linux works out of the box on many distros perfectly fine.

Keybindings are a very special use case, and if you need that customizability and its better on a Mac, then get a Mac. Doesn't mean that Macs are "more productive"

If you want to argue actual semantics in terms of value, Linux wins hands down for what you get. You can look at things like VM software, which is costly for Mac while Free for Linux. You can look at things like privacy - Apple still collects data for themselves, while in Linux you can fully disable that. You can look at open source software, which has a way higher compatibility rate with Linux than Mac, especially with M1 chips where Rosetta, as good as it is, isn't fool proof. You can look at hardware, where most "non-Mac" laptops that run Linux are upgradable and repairable.

If you like Mac, then stay on Mac, and stop publishing articles on how good Macs are and how Linux is neat, but your time is so valuable that you can't spend learning a few commaind line tools.

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

#120

Post by rz2k »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #97
xtian wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

On top of my mind, I think of: Brew upgrade usually breaks stuff if it hasn't been updated in a couple of months, which is not the case for other package managers. Forced update on any command is really bad behavior.

Per gp, I haven't used Pacman in a long time, but when Arch was really popular I'd have a virtual machine, ignore it for a few months, then updates usually failed or rendered the machine inoperable.

The Arch wiki was so good that it inevitably included the exact problem and resolution already, but since I didn't have any important running systems I also might as well have reinstalled the whole thing. In which case I'd run into installation problems that were also perfectly covered in the Arch wiki.

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