OP obviously didn't try i3. duck :)
Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
441–450 of 834 posts
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#442Earlier 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…
Apparently WSL 1 is different, it's a layer between linux apps and the windows kernel. WSL 2 is not great, esp. file operations, that's why VSCode has a wsl plugin.
Yeah, I know, but I also hear WSL1 is super slow especially for Node, which is a big part of what my mentees want to learn - the major point of setting up that devenv at all was so I could use it for mentoring, and quite aside from
my own impatience with flaky tech, I also don't want to waste a mentee's valuable time with nonsense on the part of the machine we're using as a teaching and learning tool.
We all have busy lives. When there's only an hour a week or an hour every other week to spare for doing this, it's on me to make sure they get the most out of that time. So, from that perspective too, it was more worth spending the money on a known good platform than spending any more time dinking with one that had already shown itself at best only questionably equal to the task.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#443>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…
> The "advantages" MacOS offers really comes down to eye-candy or slightly more consistent shortcut mapping,
I mean, not really, no.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#444> The grass is not greener on the other side.
Sure it is, just not ALL of it. Everything's a tradeoff; I like my work Mac, but I'd never buy one, and not just the absurd Apple Tax reason. For my use cases, BY AND LARGE Linux works better, for me, but the Mac has some really neat features I miss in Linux.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
Preview is awesome! My favorite feature is splitting up and combining PDF's by dragging and dropping the pages.
Wow...TIL...
Yeah thats the other thing I found fascinating about macOS, a bunch of useful features are very hard to discover. Mostly because you won't see any menu entries, but some sort of drag-and-drop will / alt+click will activate a very useful feature.
Their idea of being user friendly, I guess.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#446From 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…
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…
You’re too dismissive, Linux apps are terrible compared to Mac and it’s a big reason preventing me from switching.
That you got used to using crappy software doesn’t mean I want to do the same.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#447From 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…
> it's nigh impossible to eliminate tearing on multimonitor setups with X11,
I haven't seen tearing in longer than I can remember, and can't remember anyone even mentioning it, so I think you're overplaying this point JUST a tad. I tend to use older laptops with Linux, and older screens (VGA, DVI), so maybe that's the reason.
I hate touchpads.
I don't do PDF editing.
Everything's a tradeoff.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#448Earlier 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…
You’re too dismissive, Linux apps are terrible compared to Mac and it’s a big reason preventing me from switching. That you got used to using crappy software doesn’t mean I want to do the same.
> Linux apps are terrible compared to Mac
And it's this sort of absolutism that continues to solidify the "cult" like impression of the Apple consumerism culture.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Terminal allows fine tuning the spacing. I tried to optimise my font to look good on the default settings, but that doesn’t always work and never works for every program.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#450From 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…
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…
I don't think it's even a matter of wanting to use Mac. What I read was "I simply don't want change. Full stop."
Subjeectively, being attached to an email client feels odd to me. That's what the brower is for; same for a PW manager. If Bitwarden has a client, I wouldn't even know. The browser ext works just fine. I used to use LastPass.
Ya can't have change without change. It's not necessarily easy. But it's always true: No delta, no glory.