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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

#471
post #142

If 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’m curious what you mean by this:

> For instance, it's easier to automate tasks with shell scripts in Linux than to attempt the same with osascript.

macOS is a Unix, so you can obviously automate it via shell scripts. `osascript` is just an additional option?

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

#472
post #458

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…

" beatiful, integrated kmail and their whole PIM suite" Is that the one that used a MySQL database on the desktop? The disaster known as akonadi? That would frequently lock up requiring restarts? When I used KDE back in the day one thing I'd make sure was to remove PIM/akonadi/kmail completely and use Thunderbird or whatever else instead.

Yeah, Akonadi isn't great right now, but KMail is a very nice client.

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

#473

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.

You can shift/cmd select a few pages and drop them out into finder as a new pdf too.

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

#474

>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…

> because I've been told that it's a real "Unix system". OSX certainly isn't a "real Unix system". OSX a huge hodgepodge of proprietary crap with a Unix component buried somewhere in the middle of the dung heap to get FOSS proponent to believe that Apple believes in openness.

They were even certified as of 10.5 as a true-to-god Unix system. They have been more unixy than Linux for a while!

Unix, until Linux had made a breakthrough, was a proprietary system. The AT&T Unix, Xenix, AIX, SunOS, you name them. Openness of the source is not a defining characteristic.

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

#475
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People state consistent shortcut mapping is an advantage of using Mac but after 2 years of being required to use a Macbook Pro I'm not really sure about that - often they are more complicated IMO. I still miss built in Linux and Windows key mappings. For example Windows + Left to move the window on the left side of screen for side by side apps on the same screen. Great for remote demo's and coding sessions. Ctrl + Sh…

I used a macbook for 2 years and the key binding is definitely less consistent than windows or linux. If nothing something as important as word navigation and word selection (ctrl+arrows and ctrl+shift+ arrows on linux and windows), is located in different modifiers (can't remember which), something along the lines of: move with command+arrow and select with option+shift+arrows. Drives me crazy every time, given that…

> If nothing something as important as word navigation and word selection (ctrl+arrows and ctrl+shift+ arrows on linux and windows), is located in different modifiers (can't remember which), something along the lines of: move with command+arrow and select with option+shift+arrows.

I think you’re misremembering here, I don’t think there are any macOS keyboard shortcuts that work like this. It’s always shift plus the original keyboard shortcut to select.

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

#476
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu literally does not have an easy way to configure what happens when you close a laptop. I want it to hibernate instead of sleep. Someone else didn't want it to go to sleep at all. None of the settings options allow this. While Googling it for a friend the only result was running a few commands and changing some stuff in some config file. You cannot possibly expect a business analyst who hasn't even opened the t…

So, does "Just Work" now include easily accessible noob-proof configuration of the things you want? In that case, macOS doesn't Just Work for me, because I want to be able to see what apps are playing sound or recording and manually set them to different sinks/sources, maybe even have sound playing from multiple devices at the same time. On Linux with PulseAudio and pavucontrol, this is effortlessly configurable with…

Everything you require is not in the least beginner user problems. I'm talking basic issues faced by a person who only views emails, looks at spreadsheets and word documents and opens their browser

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

#477

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…

The recently released GNOME 40 has some new gestures enabled out of the box (3 finger vertical swipe for application switcher and horizontal for workspace switcher) and they work much better than previous attempts I've seen at touchpad gesture on Linux. The animation actually tracks your fingers now!

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

#478

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…

> 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.

If you rotate a monitor (portrait mode) screen tearing becomes very frequent.

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

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Krita for some time as a replacement of GIMP. However, I still don't understand how these programs are rather powerful and complete, and yet the text tool sucks in all of them.

Gimp's text tool was quite nice last time I checked. Krita's on the other hand is just horrible...

I don't understand how you can be happy with the text tool. It's easily the worst part of Gimp for me. I can't even find a way to move the text around after entering the text, I always resort to resizing the box from two corners to emulate a move.

I'm probably doing something wrong but this is the status after using Gimp as my only graphics editor for about 15 years.

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

#480

I've heard that a lot: "If you complain about Linux then you installed it on the wrong computer, and you're using it wrong." Basically it's your fault when Linux doesn't work. Doesn't matter if 1 of 2000 packages or libraries has a system breaking bug. It's your fault if you "updated too soon", or "did not update yet". It's even your fault when bug reporting doesn't work the way the distribution maintainers designed…

"You're using Ubuntu, you should use Pop OS/Mint/Fedora/new Fedora/new/old Debian, it's flawless". And "you are using Gnome, I haven't had any issues with KDE, Plasma, XFCE, i3, Mate, oh Enlightenment, Enlightenment is the best."Why are you using Geary/Thunderbird/LibreOffice, I do all my email/coding/music in emacs/vim, you never have to leave the terminal and it has worked fine for over 30 years." "Everyone knows VLC is buggy, use mpv... mpv is not working for you? You should use VLC, never had problems with it." "Linux is wonderful on my machine, once I recompiled my kernel to verxion xyz everything worked out of the box."
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