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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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Well it is/was already, it runs google-chrome as a Runtime-Environment.

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

#202
I also carried out this experiment, mainly cos I couldn’t afford a Mac for a while. Completely agree with all his comments except: the default terminal in Ubuntu is a gazillion times better than Mac and that makes a huge difference. But ultimately productivity suites matter, webmail sucks, and all of the email clients on Linux were awful. That’s a showstopper for anyone doing a lot of office or management work.

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

#203

Hello, author here. I knew that if this got posted to HN I'd need to explain myself more :) To address some of the top comments: - 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". However, this is missing the forest for the trees, because only a couple of the issues I mentioned were rela…

All your points are valid as much as I can tell, but this one : "requiring a Live.com user for a local account," You can create a local account without any live.com user by just disabling internet while installing windows. I know it's still working around the software... But it's still doable.

I fell for the trick. Once you set up networking, you can't un-setup it even with a reboot.

Therefore, I had to disable the wifi in the bios. I felt fooled and it made me very angry.

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

#204

I also carried out this experiment, mainly cos I couldn’t afford a Mac for a while. Completely agree with all his comments except: the default terminal in Ubuntu is a gazillion times better than Mac and that makes a huge difference. But ultimately productivity suites matter, webmail sucks, and all of the email clients on Linux were awful. That’s a showstopper for anyone doing a lot of office or management work.

Just out of curiosity, which mail client do you prefer? Mail.app?

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

#205
Left desktop Linux for a Mac and I’m not going back. Everything just works. Docker for Mac plus brew install coreutils to get the gnu utilities I love from Linux user land and I’m good. Also magnet for window management and I don’t need i3 (often I just split one terminal in iterm2). To each their own, though. I like the hardware, the Mac plays nice with all my homepods, and my AppleTV, and the trackpad is hands down the best ever and the keyboard is much improved.

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

#206
post #95
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.

tragi-comic, hilariously terrible.

You can now set a static IP either in the new network configuration panel or from the old adapter properties. If you set a static IP in one, it won't show up in the other. Either being set to a static IP overrides a DHCP setting. Who knows what happens if they are both set to different static IPs.

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

#207

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.

Hmm, I installed a quick look equivalent on my desktop because I saw that mentioned as being so useful a lot, but I keep forgetting I have it. In what situations would you use it?

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

#208
I am someone who has recently transitioned from Mac to Linux.

Here were my grievances with Mac:

- Lack of absolute control over the system: In linux I can increase inotify watchers, use a local version of whatever CLI I am working with i.e Docker (Docker is uncomfortable to use on Mac), apply patches to kernel modules if I need em, apply bugfixes instantly etc

- The keyboard for my Macbook Pro 2015 has become sticky and the keyboard for Macbook Air 2020 is too shallow and hard to press for me. My Thinkpad E15 seems to do it just right. I imagine this is even better on a superior model.

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

#209
post #25

I would like to see someone do the equivalent experiment now with a Win10+WSL2 setup. I'm carefully watching Apple to see what the next line of Macbook Pros looks like. Esp. how well the M1 architecture fits into a development workflow that will still for the forseeable future center heavily on deployment to x86 architecture. We already are seeing significant time wastage from employees having to fight architecture i…

I basically did that for the first WSL. I occasionally helped friends install drivers or find their printer, but mostly didn't touch Windows from XP until I got a job using Win10. I used macOS at home Linux at work during that period. I wont comment on WSL because I haven't used v2 and it wasn't my biggest annoyance (it also doesn't sounds like v2 fixed the issues I had with it)

Man, I hated it. I'm just not a fan of how windows are managed, OS updates are constant and require a lengthy reboot, installing/uninstalling is the same awkward mess except now there's 2 Program Files directories, Control Panel is like archeology digging through generations of UIs dating back to Windows 95.

I hate all the intrusive tracking, ads, and preinstalled games and junk.

I tried to give PowerShell a fair shake. I liked some of the concepts around it. It's annoying the documentation requires a download (I was on an airgapped network). It was super awkward to wrap everything in a BAT file. Everyone else just wrote in BAT files because our needs weren't huge. They would be more maintainable and better behaved as PowerShell scripts, but it didn't seem worth pushing for. PowerShell was just so verbose I found it very hard to use as a REPL to build pipelines.

The experience triggered a lot of things I hadn't thought about in over a decade and I was bummed at how few things had changed. That's probably the case for macOS and Linux, but personally I find myself liking those OSes more than Windows...I've definitely been exasperated explaining their shortcomings to others because I've been comfortable avoiding them.

I ended up mostly using it as a dumb terminal to ssh into an Ubuntu box running tmux and vim.

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

#210

Eh. I've ended up with the opposite conclusion, at least for my purposes. Running Word is neat, but having to spend half a day figuring out what Apple did to C++ headers after an Xcode update so R will compile packages again is not fun. Unfortunately I can't really install Linux on the damn thing because of the hardware. Also mailspring is a pretty good Linux email client with conversation view...

Seconding the Mailspring recommendation, but be aware that it requires a Mailspring ID. There’s some progress, though, with a telemetry-free fork[1] (that’s the version I’m using right now) and plans to make the ID optional in the official client [2].

[1]: https://github.com/notpushkin/Mailspring-Libre

[2]: https://community.getmailspring.com/t/mailspring-without-mai...

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