I used to work at a place where every workstation was a $5000 Mac. I quickly found out those things are clunkier than my $600 laptop, and way clunkier than my ancient desktop box. As a Linux user of many years I didn't enjoy having to deal with my workstation.
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
#372Earlier 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.
The FOSS amd and intel drivers work great and have for years.
I would have agreed with you but sound input broke for me (Lenovo flex 14 with AMD R5 3500U) on fedora with kernel 5.8 and didn’t get fixed until 5.9. That was months of something being broken. How did this happen and more importantly did we learn anything to prevent this from happening in the future?
For now fedora is on an old desktop machine with an ancient i3-2100 processor and I just ssh into it.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#373Earlier 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.
The FOSS amd and intel drivers work great and have for years.
Some Intel GPUs only got Vulkan support on Windows.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#374Earlier 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…
> 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.
That isn't true. The X1 Carbon from 2019 didn't have a working microphone driver for over a year.
If you care about Linux you should only buy a machine with Linux preinstalled and officially supported.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#375I got fed up and shifted fully to a Linux desktop and laptop setup like 20 years ago. Computers are silly devices and there is no end to the annoyances involved with them regardless of operating system. I got used to it and was/am able to get what I need done. I liked the cheap netbooks when they were a thing, and I like zenbooks these days. You always have to shop with compatibility in mind. Hard edges persist in an…
Agree here. I use Windows at work and use full time Linux on home desktop since 7 or 8 years. Both have bugs and annoyances but one thing that turns me off on windows is how computer becomes more and more sluggish as the time goes on with each update. Never had that issue with Linux. Updates might break a thing or two. I am okay with occasional break/fix but just can't get used to progressive sluggishness.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#376> 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.
You’ve misread. He wasn’t suggesting that the process for remapping a keyboard falls under power user, as in understanding how to do that. Remapping keys on a keyboard so they are exactly how you want them for your workflow definitely is the behaviour of a power user.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#377I 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 author is speaking authoritatively while coming from a very narrow, specific perspective, which seems pretty common on hacker news with Apple users who write about "my platform is better than yours" to the point of being disingenuous.
This type of thing pops up pretty often on HN from Apple users and it's almost always the same, I don't every see Linux users posting this sort of thing, different mentalities I guess.
Full disclosure, I didn't finish reading because it quickly devolved into fanboyish propaganda. It showed the typical fanboyism we should all be grown up enough to get over by now and not just "use my platform, it's better for everyone because it suits me better than yours does".
I (and my entire team; backend development) have been running Linux on our XPS 15's for the best part of a decade now. The Android development team at my place all run Linux too. The iOS Devs run on Apple devices, and the Windows Devs run on Windows, operations team all run Linux but they're using Latitudes (I think? The chunkier ones which still have ports and ethernet), management run a mix of Windows and Mac.
I have been exclusively running Linux on my personal XPS 13 for 2-3 years (since buying it), and on my MSI gaming laptop 5-6 years before then. I also run it on my gaming Desktop and have no major issues on any of those. I have been running 4K displays (which has gotten better in the past couple of years, particular with Gnome), and using Thunderbolt docks. My laptops and desktop sleep and wake just fine, CPU scaling works, I run a mixture of AMD Ryzen, and Intel Core CPUs and I've never had to touch a driver (Nvidia on work XPS is disabled at the moment). My desktop upgrades the Nvidia driver as part of its normal routine.
Let's be clear, the email apps aren't great on Linux, but I'm a backend software engineer, I don't care about email, it's just a thing I need to use occasionally to reply to my colleagues and sometimes our clients. I don't need HTML emails, in fact, it's almost always junk if it is HTML, calender I use but don't need anything advanced, just to know when meetings etc are.
Keyboard? My XPS 13 (2019) has much nicer keys than my work XPS 15 (2017) so they're improving for sure, however, I write code for a living, I have hundreds £££s worth of keyboards to type on, so the built in keyboard is a minor point. Use the tool for the job and all.
What I'm not blind to is that gaming would be easier/more reliable if I ran Windows, you won't catch me telling everyone to switch to gaming on Linux, I have my reasons for doing it, but it can be done if you really want to, you'll have to accept some compromises.
If you design/content create, Mac, I'm told is the best platform, you won't find me telling people to do that on Linux, but if you _really_ want, you can.
Guess what, if you write server software targeting Linux, use Linux, it has the best tools for the job.
The build quality of the XPSs is excellent. Unless I wanted to spend a lot more money on a specced thinkpad-carbon, I'd always buy an XPS over any other brand, they're super thin, very strong, great battery life, and DELL isn't hostile to you repairing them, you can buy a battery and change it yourself, the service manual is even on the website.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#378For me, ubuntu is hands down better than mac.
- Finder is a disaster
- LibreOffice on mac works far worse
- General aestetics is very unfortunate (ymmv)
But macOS has that one killer application for me that makes it worth suffering all of this: Sketch.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#379If 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 still remember when I bought a laptop officially preloaded with Ubuntu.
And the minute I did software update there, everything broke. (Because it was using some binary graphic driver that broke with newer kernel.)
I could not even use the computer after that, only the console. I needed to reinstall old ubuntu in order to get my data.
Never again
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#380Earlier 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…
If anything, the amount of tinkering required has increased as hardware has gotten more complex. I'm probably looking through rose-tinted glasses to some extent, but in the mid 2000s it was usually quite easy to get graphics and sound working well in Linux on generic PC hardware. And of course, most people didn't need to worry about WiFi, Bluetooth, suspend/resume, touchpads, etc. etc. in those days.