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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

#431

Post by aniforprez »

Hamuko wrote: post #339
karateka wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finder is unbelievably bad compared to Nautilus Whats so bad about finder?

Not having used Nautilus, there's a bunch of bad things about the Finder I can complain about. The tabs. First of all, they're Safari-style tabs and Safari has awful tabs. And then there's a preference called "open folders in new tabs instead of windows". Open up a Finder window, open Terminal and run `open /path/to/directory`. What happens? Directory opens in a new Finder window. There's no way to have Finder rememb…

It's honestly surprising how absolutely horrible it is after years and the new Big Sur only have it a fresh coat of paint without fixing any of these issues

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

#432

Post by nsb1 »

fallingknife wrote: post #384
minimaul wrote: post #368

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…

Preview is awesome! My favorite feature is splitting up and combining PDF's by dragging and dropping the pages.

Wow...TIL...

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

#433

Post by joana035 »

pjmlp wrote: post #292
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).

There is no way, because the only way to make it work is to dig out a pre-historic kernel from the same year Asus released 1215B with Linux support. Proprietary software for 1215B, e.g. Windows, is working just fine with Windows 10, even though it was originally released with Windows 7. So we are talking about Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and several Windows 10 releases, all supporting the original Windows 7 dr…

Have you tried to install AMD proprietary drivers?

Did you installed the firmware for your WiFi card?

By the way you complain about Linux seems that you really don't like it and that nobody can convince you te opposite, but I believe that if you manage to learn the basics around it it pay off in the long run :)

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

#434

Post by notsureaboutpg »

minimaul wrote: post #368

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…

All your points are great but for cross device copy paste, syncing with computer and phone, KDE Connect is excellent and seamless (I'm still trying to figure out how to connect my Android phone with my Mac laptop in the same way)

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

#435

Post by throwaway316943 »

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…

> Haven't tried a laptop that comes with preinstalled linux TBH

Seriously? Why do you think Linux should work perfectly on some random machine that you installed it on? MacOS sure as hell won’t. If you don’t like the experience of doing the work to find the right hardware, distro, and customizing the setup with your favourite software then just buy a prebuilt system with everything installed. Like others have pointed out, many Linux users prefer to fully customize their setup, doing this is easier on Linux because you don’t have to hack around all of the default choices that Apple or Microsoft provide.

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

#436

Post by aniforprez »

xrisk wrote: post #238
aniforprez wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was doing this until recently when I set the env variable. It updates itself every time and then updates everything else too. Maybe I did something wrong to trigger this behaviour but it was definitely updating the packages

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

#437

Post by shaan7 »

watermelon0 wrote: post #363
shaan7 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Interesting. Apart from the per-display scaling (which is basically a Xorg limitation as you said) I had the opposite experience on my XPS 13. At the end I did not want a 4K display but Dell did not offer me the option. So I just used 1080p scaled most of the time.

Battery life was stupid on Windows (~3-4 hours max, while Linux did 7-8 with moderate load). Somehow on Windows the fan would always be running even without any significant activity in Resource Monitor.

I remember playing 4K videos on Linux (Firefox though, and I only tested YouTube) without any trouble (with monitor disconnected though, due to what you described earlier).

Touchpad would work sweet on Linux but needed some tweaking on Windows (otherwise it'd 2-finger scroll too fast sometimes).

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

#438

Post by sooheon »

Vinnl wrote: post #395
crubier wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just prove the point of the author above. If you had the real Preview on MacOS, you’d be using it all the time without even thinking, like 100% of MacOS users. Because it’s fast, it opens everything faster than you can think, and it just works well. The effort required to launch it is zero, or even negative. It’s just part of the OS. But since you have a « sort of » copy cat which does not work as well or as fast…

I wasn't talking about Preview, I was talking about quick look, i.e. when I browse files in my file browser, I can hit space and immediately look at that file in a pared-down interface. But I'm not browsing my files that often, and when I do, the only time I seem to be interested in what it looks like is when I'm looking for an image, in which case the thumbnails that I can see without interaction suffice. So I'm pro…

quick look spreadsheets when you don't want to wait half a minute for excel to load. Quick look pdfs with nondescript names that you've downloaded to check paper titles/authors, quick look ppts youve been emailed (from within the email app) to see if they're worth reading in depth.

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

#439

Post by dkersten »

As someone who has used Windows, Linux and Mac comprehensively over the years, and bounced between all three a few times, I can say that ALL operating systems have warts and problems. There is no such thing as a perfect operating system and its unreasonable to expect that any system will ever work 100% perfectly how you want. You also shouldn't expect to be able to get an operating-system-A experience on operating-system-B, if you want A, keep using A.

However, I've found that with Linux, the "perfect" experience is much more under my control than it is with Mac or Windows.

I've settled on using Sway (on Manjaro, but I also use Ubuntu on one laptop because I was lazy about finding drivers and it came with Ubuntu) and besides Windows games not running well on Proton on Wayland (for which I need to switch to X instead, where I just use gnome), its been a very stress-free and convenient environment for me.

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

#440

Post by somehnguy »

joana035 wrote: post #408
popeathlete wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but this largely reads to me like "I don't wanna use Linux because I wanna use Mac". If you want to move to a different system, you can't expect to get the same thing. Really, the only complaints I can agree with now are 2 and 3, the rest is just invalid. You've got kdeconnect gsconnect nextcloud keepassxc many, many configurable mail clients, especially the beatiful, integrated kmail and their whole PIM…

Not even 3. I don't remember seeing tearing on my Linux for a heck of a long time.

Really? Last year when we were in the office multiple of my coworkers had awful tearing on their Linux machines of multiple distros. I’m sure it was related to their specific hardware/driver setups but still. These were workstation class machines.

I can’t remember ever seeing tearing on my MacOS machines. And I’m even using a cheapo $15 DisplayPort adapter for my third monitor.

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