I have the same experience. I bought a System76 darter pro, it comes with a linux pre-installed. I've been using it on and of for a year now but cannot 'give up' my mac:
- It is not stable at all; weekly complete freezes
- The key-bindings are a joke. Even after remapping and hacking stuff
- bluetooth support sucks, sometimes it works for days, then it will not reconnect and keep spewing errors.
- Sound drivers seems buggy, it takes 20-30s to 'switch' to a BT speaker.
- I cannot for the life of me figure out how to install Ruby 'correctly' via apt.
Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
501–510 of 834 posts
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
+1
I do indeed have a portrait monitor for throwing terminals on to, and it's the worst place for making tearing visible.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#503I have used a Thinkpad T470s for 3 years at my current employer with Fedora and it worked quite well (including standby, multi-monitor support etc). However, I have just switched to a Mac, and I can only say I've been missing it. The consistency of the key combination, the polish of the desktop applications. It's little things but they do add up.
When I first switched to the Linux machine, I first noticed every single papercut (e.g. warning messages that felt like errors). Then I grew more and more "tolerant" of these things. All in all, the experience was fine; but I never really loved it.
Not to mention, if you pick a Mac you often care about the aesthetics of the chassis and display; my Thinkpad with its low-light matte display (with very poor performance in natural lighting conditions) and its brick-like appearance (someone love them, I honestly don't), it always struck me as pretty meh.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#504I also switched to Linux, and I love it, but only on my desktop machine. I got uhk for key remapping, and that's been great. For email and calendar, I use wavebox, which side steps most of the app issues. As the article says: The laptop experience is not anywhere near as good. I had a lot of the same issues, even on a system 76. Eventually I decided to try giving windows wsl2 a shot for my laptop, and I gotta give Mi…
I use Linux Mint on various laptops (mostly Zenbooks) as a primary OS in HiDPI mode and I am totally fine with it. You just need to install drivers properly and find software you need and then you finally feel like in control and 100% in the flow.
Me too, several different High and very low end laptops using mint, mostly flawless except one issue with wifi
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It is however true that majority of Linux software that is excellent can leak over to Mac since OSS can be ported over, but the other way around doesn't really work.
Having said that, i have all the tools I need on Linux, excepting office, which I run via wine. I wish I didn't have to, but what can you do.
I also find a lot of people complain about to be simple habit; I've been using Linux 25ish years, and was an early (too early) adaptor of GNOME 3, and MacOS just pisses me off. I know that most of my complaints are simply me not being used to it though. I could learn to live with it I'm sure, but I'm not moving to a platform that's as hostile to users as MacOS. I'd rather move to Windows.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#506If 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 own Thinkpad X1 extreme, that I bought with my own money, and chose as working laptop Thinkpad Carbon. Both are not working well with linux. 1. Carbon, due to it's intel chip, can not drive 4K and 2K external monitors via thunderbolt adapter. 2. I need to authorize dock (Lenovo's thunderbolt dock) after every reboot. 3. The screen tearing sucks. 4. I need to have pulse audio volume control window opened all the tim…
> 3. The screen tearing sucks.
Use Wayland instead of X11.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#507Since I spent most of my time in browser apps now, there isn't much difference in day-to-day work anymore when switching between OS.
Linux was good enough for the desktop 10 years ago and it only got better with more and more browser apps popping up since then.
I hope with WebAssembly we will finally get better performance out of browser based apps and maybe even get rid of Windows for high-end games.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#508I have the same experience. I bought a System76 darter pro, it comes with a linux pre-installed. I've been using it on and of for a year now but cannot 'give up' my mac: - It is not stable at all; weekly complete freezes - The key-bindings are a joke. Even after remapping and hacking stuff - bluetooth support sucks, sometimes it works for days, then it will not reconnect and keep spewing errors. - Sound drivers seems…
You use rbenv.
You don't sound very tech savvy, but using Ruby?
It's weird how my workstations and desktops and laptops and netbooks all run Linux just fine, only you're having those issues.
You're a joke. You're not adaptable. When in Rome...
Only rich spoiled brats spend 5k on a laptop that would otherwise cost 1k
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#509From 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…
> - 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.
If you're not a mailing list based developer, I would recommend MailSpring, which is both snappy any polished.
Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
#510Earlier 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…
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 t…
I tend to like native apps a lot rather than browser equivalents.
I self-host my mail server and use an IMAP+SMTP client to talk to it - I don't use something like gmail. $work uses gmail and the web ui frustrates the hell out of me (and I pity anyone whose only experience with a native email client is being paired with gmail, because their IMAP implementation makes it rather painful!).
For password manager, 1password has a native app and browser extensions that talk to that local native app. There are browser only ones too, but I prefer the native app integration because it shares unlock state between all of the extensions and the full desktop client all in one go.
But you're right, you can't have change without things actually changing. It's a tradeoff between convenience and what you're used to, and the benefits of what you get from changing. For me, for now that ends up sitting on the side of macOS. For others, that might be Linux or even Windows. I don't think any of those positions are wrong, it's all about what works for each person.