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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

#211

Post by willtim »

randomsearch wrote: post #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.

> all of the email clients on Linux were awful

Thunderbird is pretty good and in my experience, less buggy than Apple Mail, especially when using providers other than iCloud. My wife absolutely hated Apple Mail, primarily because it would forget passwords and stop syncing/sending. So I moved her to Thunderbird and now she's happy.

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

#212

Post by andreareina »

x0x0 wrote: post #150
xtian wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://…

Yup, same exact problem. Bunch of stuff depending on readline 7, install something that wants readline 8, everything breaks. What a faff.

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

#213

Post by angrais »

jbirer wrote: post #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…

Why do you find docker uncomfortable to use on OSX? Also, what CLI replacement do you use on Linux?

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

#214

Post by uncledave »

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 think “Linux supported” is a vague promise that should not be relied on. I had a T495s which is supported officially on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. And it was quite frankly broken. Closing the lid didn’t work, it drank batteries faster than windows by a mile and plugging in external displays caused the X server to crash.

This is unfortunately every experience I’ve had with Linux on native hardware to some capacity in the last 24 years of using it other than dumb headless servers. So I use windows as the native OS and virtualise anything else.

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

#215

Post by dmitriid »

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.

My personal gripes:

- updating the package index on each operation. I just want to install stuff, dammit. I don't need you to run git pull to update the gazillion package definitions

- `brew update` and `brew upgrade` dichotomy. 99.9999999999% of the time I need to update/upgrade a package, not brew. If I ever needed to upgrade brew, I could run `brew update --brew` or something

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

#216

Post by sildur »

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…

Honest question, what's the advantage of pacman over apt?

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

#217

Post by flobosg »

pabs3 wrote: post #124

I hear the elementary mail app has a conversation view, I haven't been able to get the elementary mail app working on other distros though. https://github.com/elementary/mail

FWIW, the Elementary app started as a Geary fork, but if I’m not wrong it got a rewrite a while ago.

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

#218

Post by pfranz »

I'm sure Gimp has its fans, but do people just not know about Krita? I'm not saying it's as fast/easy at small changes in Preview, but it's cross platform and mostly a drop-in for people who are familiar with Photoshop. I know people who use it on non-Linux platforms and chose it on its own merits, not giving any excuses because it's Open Source or ported from Linux--they probably don't even know.

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

#219

Post by zucker42 »

sildur wrote: post #216
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…

Honest question, what's the advantage of pacman over apt?

For me, the ease of use of PKGBUILD files makes it easier to interface external or modifird software with the system (this has led to success of the AUR).

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

#220

Post by rbanffy »

Tainnor wrote: post #188
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'll be the devil's advocate even though I agree with you partially and I personally prefer Linux, both for practical and philosophical reasons. However, I use a Linux laptop privately and macOS for work, so I think by now I understand both systems a little bit. For automating tasks on macOS you can look at something like hammerspoon which is really cool (though I mostly use it to modify some of the macOS keybindings…

> I would however complain that the default terminal on macOS is really not very good and I always install iTerm2...

Apple’s terminal is one of the very few that passes the VT torture test and has support for double width and height attributes. Sadly, it doesn’t do overlines and doesn’t italicise my terminal font.

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