Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by throwanem » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 10:01 AM UTC

Zardoz84 wrote: post #319

throwanem wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple Saturdays ago, I spent thirty minutes setting up WSL2 on a Windows 10 machine. Immediately afterward, I called Apple and spent a thousand dollars on an M1 Mac mini for same-day pickup. I've been running Linux devenvs on Windows, in Virtualbox, for something well over a decade now. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the vaunted WSL2 is literally just that, plus preinstalled OS images that save maybe a…

> I'd tolerate it if I had no better option. Did you try to install a native Linux distribution. The experience is always better that running on a VM.

The machine also has to run Lightroom.

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

#362

Post by Veen » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 10:03 AM UTC

m12k wrote: post #175

Veen wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

I definitely agree with you on the lack of cmd-x for cut. However, you can do cmd-c to copy, and then cmd-option-v to move files rather than copy them.

Enter to rename and cmd-o to open was hard to adapt to when I moved from Windows, but it's second nature now.

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

#363

Post by watermelon0 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 10:04 AM UTC

shaan7 wrote: post #269

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…

> Either provide a list so people know exactly what to buy, or all complaints are valid. Sure, these are two devices I have recently used with Linux that work out of the box: Dell XPS 13 ThinkPad T14s Or more generally, you can extend that to any ThinkPad or Dell device without a dedicated graphics card and you will have a good Linux experience. OP somehow has issues on XPS 13, probably due to meddling with too many…

I have XPS 9380, and it's far from ideal:

- when using external display, video tearing would be visible either on internal or external display

- Xorg doesn't really support different scaling for different displays, and Wayland has other issues

- battery life is shorter than on Windows

- graphics performance is worse, at least in Firefox/Chrome (smooth animations on Windows would be choppy on Linux)

- touchpad is not great on Windows, but it's even worse on Linux (even after fiddling with settings, and trying many solutions, using it on Windows feels better)

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

#364

Post by eertami » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 10:04 AM UTC

brabel wrote: post #338

eertami wrote: post #317

I disagree. The hardware and build quality of the XPS13 is notably better than my MBP, except for better CPU performance which I do not notice at all in daily usage (I know all ultrabook keyboards are terrible but the MBP is an a whole other level of awful.) Linux on the XPS has surprised me. I hadn't used desktop Linux for ~6 years, but I remember lots of tinkering to get what I wanted. Now... If I had to describe i…

> The hardware and build quality of the XPS13 is notably better than my MBP Strongly disagree... the trackpad is much worse on XPS13, and the power plug is a joke. Mine broke, I took it to a technician to fix and he said it's very common to break that on XPS13's, just have a look at the stupid plug they use... after that, the plug didn't quite fit anymore and when I tried to make it fit better, the metal base for the…

> MacOS is actually very polished

Anecdotal I know, but my experience differs. I'm fixing problems more frequently on OSX than Linux. I started using OSX in 2015 and honestly I now consciously fear the "System update available" notifications.

I can't speak to your plug issues, as both the Macbook and XPS (2021) I have are USB-C and appear to function identically. Sounds annoying though for sure. I don't notice any difference in the trackpads, but admittedly I use them infrequently.

Sorry to hear about the QC issues. I suppose my opinion will sour if I run into them later down the line, but for now it's certainly the preferred option. Slightly smaller and lighter with a better (but still terrible) keyboard, and feels much more comfortable for my palms vs the MBP. And native Linux is very well supported so I don't need to deal with Docker for Mac or virtual machines to do day to day development work.

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

#365

Post by nathias » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 10:08 AM UTC

Apple is for people who want the generic apple experience, if you want to customize its the worst of all. I run arch linux on thinkpad carbon x1 and its the best laptop I ever owned or seen, mostly because I care much more about my own customized workflow (tile management, fast terminal instantiation, vim keys everywhere, CLI apps when possible etc.).

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

#366

Post by 2muchcoffeeman » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 10:09 AM UTC

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…

Yep, from a third party site. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not true.

I don’t have to double check Apple machines. And anything with a Windows sticker works with Windows.

Some Linux distro should explicitly support some line of laptops. Literally “buy these models because we will 100% support them”.

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

#367

Post by kaba0 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 10:10 AM UTC

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?

Imo, both are kind of sucky. (Just install a gnome group on each, then remove it and install plasma and see how many non-used service whatever continues to be installed). Nix is the correct solution to the dependency hell problem.

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

#368

Post by minimaul » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 10:12 AM UTC

From someone who tends to try this switch about once a year (because the lack of TLC the Mac was getting in the last 5 or so years was getting very very worrying - M1 feels like Apple actually care about the Mac again), I agree with a lot of these pain points. My biggest personal issues end up being (and these are super subjective!):

- Preview on macOS is great and no other OS has anything remotely equivalent. First class PDF support, ability to easily annotate anything, makes basic PDF editing easy.

- I'm far too used to the macOS touchpad gestures, and emulating these on linux doesn't end up working well. There is an ongoing project for this but it's very Ubuntu-centric for now. I am hopeful this will help the whole ecosystem improve though! This is still a pain for me on a desktop because my work setup uses a touchpad as the pointer device.

- it's nigh impossible to eliminate tearing on multimonitor setups with X11, and X11 doesn't support a mix of DPIs for displays without scaling tricks that make text look awful on the low-DPI displays. Wayland was promising here last time I tried, but Wayland itself still has a lot of rough edges for a desktop. Plus since last time I tried I have replaced my last low DPI monitor on my dev setup, so this ought to be a point I can ignore going forward :)

- Finding a mail client I don't hate on linux is tricky. I've never been able to get on with the console clients, and I actually quite like Mac Mail. Thunderbird is kinda okay.

- My chosen password manager (1password) still has a fairly awful linux experience. This is getting better - they're producing a native app now. Said native app needs to support the local browser extensions though!

- I like the various iCloud/multi device integration features for Apple OSes far too much. This is mostly relatively simple things, that produce disproportionate pain - eg cross-device copy+paste, browser tab syncing, bookmark syncing, etc. Yes, Firefox has Firefox Sync, and Chrome has it's own sync stuff too, but there's nothing as all-encompassing.

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

#369

Post by dghf » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 10:13 AM UTC

> I am an extreme power user, to the point that many of the keys on my keyboard don't do what the keycap says.

Is that really the definition of an extreme power user? I switched the layout on my work MacBook to UK and remapped caps lock to command, but I’m in no way a Mac power user, let alone an extreme one.

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

#370

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 10:14 AM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #353

gknoy wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope, older GPUs just get basic support, while the older proprietary driver, more feature rich, don't work in modern kernels.