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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

#171

Post by qbasic_forever »

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?!

To this day I have still never found any application on any device that is as simple and easy to add an arrow and some red text to an image for highlighting something as it is with preview. It is just unbelievable how janky and bad every single other application is at doing this simple task. Not even on phones is there anything easy.

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

#172

Post by aniforprez »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #160
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…

I never understood how someone can make a good-faith effort to document their Linux experiences and for people to label it "complaining".

Welcome to the Linux community where every year is the "year of the Linux desktop"

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

#173

Post by aniforprez »

Rapzid wrote: post #170
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…

"brew upgrade" caused no end of troubles. Let's just upgrade everything to the next major version(MySQL 5.6 -> 5.7). Tests failing.

I found it much worse that installing anything STILL by defaults upgrades literally everything. You have to actually set an ENV variable to stop this behaviour. My stuff constantly broke because I'd forget about this and install something else and a couple days later I'd go "what happened??"

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

#174

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#175

Post by m12k »

Veen wrote: post #147
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?

I can't speak for GP, but I'd pay for Path Finder even if all it did was give me cmd-x to cut, and enter key to mean open instead of rename. It does a ton more, but those two are the killer features for me (Tabs used to be one too, but Finder finally got those a while ago).

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

#176

Post by galkk »

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…

I own Thinkpad X1 extreme, that I bought with my own money, and chose as working laptop Thinkpad Carbon. Both are not working well with linux.

1. Carbon, due to it's intel chip, can not drive 4K and 2K external monitors via thunderbolt adapter.

2. I need to authorize dock (Lenovo's thunderbolt dock) after every reboot.

3. The screen tearing sucks.

4. I need to have pulse audio volume control window opened all the time, otherwise the laptop loses my external sound card after first call via browser, and I need to turn it off/on.

On my own laptop, where I installed Ubuntu, I can boot only into 5.8.0.43 kernel (the one which I initially installed). All others, that I've got via apt-get update stuck with blinking cursor at last step of boot, and it's well known problem.

The longer I'm trying to love linux for work os, the more I realize that only tool that I truly want from linux is i3. For the rest I'm happily using WSL2 on my home, and don't have choice with work.

So on next hardware refresh date I think I'll choose Mac. The supplied by job laptop config is also more performant than carbon. So, hope, I'll be able to use my monitors in native res, and not put 2K into 1920x1020 mode

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

#177

Post by bArray »

Essentially the article boils down to "I am used to a Mac and anything that doesn't behave like a Mac is incorrect, and I'm unwilling to invest time into figuring it out". It's fair enough stance, but unless you are willing to invest time into becoming a Linux 'power user', you're going to remain locked into whatever hardware Apple happens to be peddling at the time.

The M1 seems great today, but Apple will slump again in the future and there will be yet another blog about how a Mac user tried Linux and found out it's different. With Linux I'm pretty free to move about different hardware platforms and pick whatever is out there that suites my needs. This ranges from desktops, to laptops, to tablets, and now even phones. The Linux 'ecosystem' looks more compelling every day, especially for power users.

For those looking to transition, I would recommend doing so by running something like Ubuntu in a VM on your Mac and slowly transition your workflow. You'll find that in some areas your workflow will be significantly better and after some experimenting you'll find the right tools for you.

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

#178

Post by jeswin »

carlesfe wrote: post #162
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…

I clarified now in the article that the "Linux Laptop" is a Dell XPS 13" Developer Edition, which is marketed indeed as a Linux laptop, and the Ubuntu is marketed as "Ubuntu Dell".

> Screen tearing with the intel driver. Come on. This was solved on xorg and now with Wayland it's back.

Since you mentioned Dell XPS, I'm thinking they'd have sold it to you with Ubuntu 20.04. But why did you choose Wayland - which IIRC is not the default in 20.04? These are the trickiest pieces of the distro, and will take years to stabilize. Especially considering that Linux aims to work across the entire set of PCs in existence.

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

#179

Post by aniforprez »

ActorNightly wrote: post #119
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 valu…

Ubuntu literally does not have an easy way to configure what happens when you close a laptop. I want it to hibernate instead of sleep. Someone else didn't want it to go to sleep at all. None of the settings options allow this. While Googling it for a friend the only result was running a few commands and changing some stuff in some config file. You cannot possibly expect a business analyst who hasn't even opened the terminal once in their life to not be immediately put off and scared by this. This is the advantage of Macs. They literally do just work

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

#180

Post by karateka »

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…

> Finder is unbelievably bad compared to Nautilus

Whats so bad about finder?

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