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

cfenollosa.com

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

#231
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 P…

Unbelievable how the Linux community makes excuses (on the desktop) instead of fixing shitty software...it's always the same....

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

#232

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.

The default Mac terminal is dogsh*t, but iTerm2 is great.

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

#233
The biggest problem with Linux for me was different keyboard inputs. CJK, English and, for example, Cyrillic input don’t work together out of the box. Don’t tell me “you should install this and that”. It’s basic functionality that every desktop OS should have. Linux desktop sucks.

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

#235
post #170

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.

Why would you run brew upgrade if you don't want to upgrade packages? I don't understand.

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're complaining about Linux drivers please do so after using a Laptop that supports Linux (Thinkpads for example). So I Googled “laptops supported by Linux”. There is no official site. Ubuntu has a page. But it’s not on the first page of results. I only know about it because I’m familiar with it. Supporters keeps arguing people should jump through hoops. I’m on Linux right now, but people have better things to…

+1 I find it absurd that (some) linux supporters find it not only ok but even a must, to have to tinker around your machine in order to make everything work. I could understand it in the 90s but this is a very different era we're in. I get zero value from having to tinker with my x-org settings to make the external screen work (sometimes). I'm using a computer to create value elsewhere and having to even think about…

I find insane that people need to tinker with anything. My fedora lenovo just works. Lol.

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

#237
post #176
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 tim…

> can not drive 4K and 2K external monitors via thunderbolt adapter.

VGA ftw

> screen tearing sucks

it sure does. look into your os config for a compositor or drop the following into /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-intel.conf :

  Section "Device"
   Identifier "Intel Graphics"
   Driver     "intel"
   Option     "AccelMethod" "sna"
   Option     "TearFree"    "true"
  EndSection

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

#238
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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??"

I don't think brew does this? What it does do is update its package definitions automatically.

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

#239
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I get what you mean, and I have the same complaints about the defaults. Here are some useful shortcuts to know, especially when fixing issues: - View > Go to Folder… (Cmd-Shift-G) to type in a path to go to. - Cmd-Up takes you one level up. - Right-click/Control-click the current folder name in the title bar to see the location of the current folder. This works with any title bar that has a file/folder icon, not just…

If you want Finder to show dot files and system directories:

defaults write com.apple.finder ShowAllFiles 1

Also note that shortcuts like ⌘⇧ G also work in standard open/save dialogs.

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

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 I find it absurd that (some) linux supporters find it not only ok but even a must, to have to tinker around your machine in order to make everything work. I could understand it in the 90s but this is a very different era we're in. I get zero value from having to tinker with my x-org settings to make the external screen work (sometimes). I'm using a computer to create value elsewhere and having to even think about…

I find insane that people need to tinker with anything. My fedora lenovo just works. Lol.

Thinks were a little better with previous ubuntu TBH. After upgrading to latest LTS I got the screen issues on top of everything else.

Think twice before upgrading your distro.

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