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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

#141

Post by konart »

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?

I'm pretty sure I had like 4 kernel upgrades on my Fedora machine in the last month.

>great window managers like i3

Tiling wms like i3 target a very narrow user base. Unless you are a sysadmin or just work only with terminal they are pretty useless.

I don't have non-maximized windows for example (except for Telegram, Obsidian and iTerm quake-like instance)

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

#142

Post by jeswin »

If you're complaining about Linux drivers please do so after using a Laptop that supports Linux (Thinkpads for example). Just like it wouldn't be fair to complain about macOS on a Hackintosh - sound didn't work well and had to patch the DSDT.

> but there are rough edges for the power user.

> I am an extreme power user, ...

> In the end, I was able to replicate most of my macOS power tools setup via input hooks and shell scripts, but it took much longer than it should have.

It's very hard to define who a Power User is. But if you've spent a few years on Linux, you'd be able to do many things faster on Linux than on macOS. For instance, it's easier to automate tasks with shell scripts in Linux than to attempt the same with osascript.

I use macOS only when I'm forced to - because the absolute fundamentals are broken. Finder is unbelievably bad compared to Nautilus, package management is terrible, limited ability to tile windows, not even a simple way to set up an Application launch shortcut out of the box (yeah, can do with Automator).

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

#143

Post by Klonoar »

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…

Wait, Purism actually shipped the 14?

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

#144

Post by b0afc375b5 »

piyiotisk wrote: post #129
akra wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 + Sh…

I think the best mac app for managing windows using key bindings is https://rectangleapp.com/ . Also, is free and open source

Very nice. This is the only thing I miss from windows/linux. Thanks!

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

#145

Post by Mandatum »

thayne wrote: post #121
ornornor wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

On most debian-based distros, most packages aren't upgraded to a new major version in the repos for a particular version of the OS. If a new version of postgres is released, it won't be added to the apt repos for the current stable debian, ubuntu, etc. distributions. Instead it will be included in the repo for the next major release of the distro. There are exceptions to that, for example browsers like Firefox and Ch…

That’s really interesting, does anyone have a book or blog post taking about this versioning and releasing strategy?

I feel like as a new dev there’s so much in engineering I could learn from that’s already been solved and re-solved again and again or at least addressed by existing distribution systems.

However the reading materials to learn about some of this stuff seems far and few or very niche, sitting on some cached blog post from the 90s..

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

#146

Post by zxexz »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #134
xtian wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I find Docker to replace the parts that suck about using brew. E.g. I would never install something like Postgres using brew again. Small command line tools sure, but anything with complex dependencies and where you might need multiple versions it’s just better to use containers.

I do the same thing, but it sucks having to literally dedicate a couple cores and a few gigs of RAM to a virtual machine.

It's worth using nix on macos - takes a few hoops to get running, but it's worlds better than brew. Albeit, a fair bit more complex than docker.

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

#147

Post by Veen »

jeswin wrote: post #142

If you're complaining about Linux drivers please do so after using a Laptop that supports Linux (Thinkpads for example). Just like it wouldn't be fair to complain about macOS on a Hackintosh - sound didn't work well and had to patch the DSDT. > but there are rough edges for the power user. > I am an extreme power user, ... > In the end, I was able to replicate most of my macOS power tools setup via input hooks and sh…

> But if you've spent a few years on Linux, you'd be able to do many things faster on Linux than on macOS

This may be true, but the article explicitly targets people moving from Mac to Linux, not people with years of Linux experience.

I’m interested why you don’t like Finder. It does the job for me. What do you think it’s missing?

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

#148

Post by jshier »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #69
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 f…

Documents and Downloads are the actual directories on disk, they're not some sort of abstraction. It's pretty simple. /Users//Documents, /Users//Downloads, etc.

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

#149

Post by raverbashing »

Rainymood wrote: post #137
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.

Wait what? You can make small changes in preview?!

Yes, you can annotate, add text etc

Best feature: you can remove pages from a PDF. Just drag them off the left side pane

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

#150

Post by x0x0 »

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.

(maybe this is my incorrect usage?)

I had packages installed by brew that used readline 7. This went on fine for a while. At some point, brew installed something (at my direction) and moved to readline 8. Unbeknownst to me, readline 7 disappeared from my system! Tada, a pile of tools require reinstallation. Oh, and I didn't notice until weeks later when psql stopped working.

I'm not the only one, at least... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19063175

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