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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

#351

Post by sammorrowdrums »

flippinburgers wrote: post #315
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #167

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…

Dell sells a fully supported laptop. System76. Librem. https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/

https://laptopwithlinux.com/

I run a recent XPS Developer Edition (my second) and I've had so few issues over years. It's always seemed like a different world all users with constant issues.

Would absolutey recommend Elementary OS for Mac users switching to Linux. I moved to Arch a couple of weeks ago, but only because of combination of wanting to try Gnome 40 and wanting to run various cutting edge mobile Linux deps.

No problems with Arch either so far.

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

#352

Post by nmlt »

grey_earthling wrote: post #316
nmlt wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I am wondering about that too. Finder can rename multiple files and has a goto folder option. Edit: I couldn't find a goto option in Nautilus. I don't know how I missed batch rename in Nautilus... Still, if Nautilus has any advanced features, they're well hidden.

Yeah, typing a folder's address could be a bit more discoverable in Nautilus. You can press Ctrl+L (like a web browser), or just start typing a folder address that begins with / or ~ but you're right there's no visible clickable button. My experience is the other way round: it took me several minutes and much frustration to find a way to type a folder address in Finder.

Yes! Thank you, that was the shortcut I was looking for. It isn't in the shortcut help.

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

#353

Post by kaba0 »

gknoy wrote: post #290
beckman466 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your frustrations, yet your problem is with proprietary software and proprietary drivers. I’m sure there’s a way for you to go back to using the old drivers if you’re set on using the latest capabilities of your hardware (without it being FOSS). You don’t have to be the guinea pig, let others do it if it’s not your thing (many programmers do seem to enjoy it, and see it as a challenge).

That sounds a little like telling someone that their problems are that their cows are not spherical. For graphics drivers specifically, having tochoose between FOSS and something that works is very frustrating.

Fortunately with AMD GPUs on linux you get both, as the proprietary driver simply adds some opencl support if my memory serves well.

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

#354

Post by jchw »

One thing that Windows and macOS users will never understand about Linux, because they’ve never truly experienced it, is just how viscerally different the Linux experience is depending on your hardware. You don’t really need to go with a vendor like System76, and going with a fan favorite like Lenovo does not guarantee a good experience, but seriously, Linux on a machine that runs it well is just not comparable to a machine that runs it poorly. The only good news is the count of machines that run Linux well increases over time. My Lenovo P51 used to be pretty piss poor, not so much anymore. Anyway, that’s just one point, but still worth noting.

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

#355

Post by herbst »

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…

I was honestly hyped when i got a MBP beast as developer machine after so many years of hearing mac is basically a luxury unix.

I was and still am heavily dissappointed. This was ~2018 it looked exactly as boring as imagined, a desktop as intiuitive as windows 7s. The terminal felt at best strange, many settings and confirmation dialogs are simply not available via terminal, only hidden somewhere in their UIs. The hardware run hot every day, always and you could not use an external screen without waste cycling your battery to death. Honestly not impressed.

Both mac and windows are like stuck in time compared to modern desktop approaches like gnome shell or recent kdes. If you are a shell guy to some degree no other os will justice

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

#356

Post by kaba0 »

one2three4 wrote: post #228
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #167

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…

Linux has some great new development, like Wayland[1], pipewire. They may be a bit buggy as of now, but the former does basically solve the tinkering with x config things, multi monitor hdpi, hotplugged monitor and the like will just work.

[1] Yeah wayland is a protocol, and it already has some quite stable implementations like gnome and sway.

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

#357

Post by herbst »

PpEY4fu85hkQpn wrote: post #181
marcus_holmes wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. It really doesn't. There are sooo many issues that are still not fixed, years after being reported. Apple's Support site has pages where there's hundreds of people saying "I have this problem too", and no comment from an Apple dev. I'm not blaming them. This shit is hard, even if you control both the hardware and the software. I get why they don't say "it just works" any more.

I'm going to shock you here but every platform has longstanding bugs with hundreds of people complaining about them.

Not sure if i can agree. Major open source issues like this are usually solved at some point by some code hero.

Or you just fix it yourself and solve anyone else problem too

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

#358

Post by hurril »

rjzzleep wrote: post #251
hurril wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is absolutely not. That googling will find a list of hardware supported by Hackintosh and it will find Apple. Two very good responses. Laptops supported by Linux provides neither.

I'm all for bashing Desktop Linux but this statement is just ridiculous. Searching for exactly that search term gives me the following result: >Best Linux Laptops > > Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (8th Generation) Last year, >Lenovo shocked the Linux community by announcing Linux >laptops. ... > Tuxedo Pulse 14 Gen 1. ... > System76 Serval WS. ... > Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition 2020. ... > Purism Librem 14. ... > System…

Are they supported, though? That was the question. Downvote me all you want, put words in my mouth if that is what you need to do, etc.

A. But are they supported and is that a meaningful question? B. I am not bashing anything Linux because I don't hate it in the slightest. C. Did you read the parent I responded to? That comment makes two claims and tries to establish an analogous relation and that does not work the way the author wanted. That was also my reply.

So you missed the point of that post, you missed the point of mine and you strawmanned me :)

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

#359

Post by vetinari »

rbanffy wrote: post #297
vetinari wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it still cannot display powerline characters correctly.

I think it depends on a font supporting them correctly. I’m using a zsh prompt that uses them and it seems normal. Check https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font and let me know if it helps. I was thinking of adding the powerline symbols to the test renderings.

The problem is not with font glyphs, but with colors. Background and foreground colors that should be the same aren't, they are different shades, thus some themes (such as powelevel9k/powerlevek10k) appear broken, see https://imgur.com/a/HAcE4Yu

And the line height -- it could be font, it could be terminal, I didn't investigate (it is DejaVu Sans Mono for Powerline).

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

#360

Post by kruxigt »

Sadly, Dell XPS 13 is not even close to a Macbook in quality. Dell is a company that is notorious for cutting corners when it comes to their hardware. I recently tried an XPS 13 to see if things had improved. It had: broken sound, coil whine, horrible trackpad.
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