Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop • Hacker News Board

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

#561

Post by joelellis » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

christophilus wrote: post #498

acomjean wrote: post #490

I went from Mac to Linux at home. My experience as someone who uses Linux but isn’t great at it, is that it works well as a desktop os. I’m lazy I willing to pay for simplicity so I bought a preinstalled Linux laptop. And it’s been chugging along fine. Everything Works (excepting wake forms sleep when I close the lid sometimes, it’s like gambling...but I manually suspend and that works) I takes a little research to f…

Not sure what OS you’re running (my guess is Ubuntu). I’ve had no issues with wake from sleep when using Fedora, FYI. My biggest complaint is the Nautilus file browser’s address bar being mostly worthless, the Gnome terminal’s inability to move tabs into a new window, and the inability to use normal copy / paste in the terminal (Elementary OS gets this right, and I run their terminal on Fedora now... I may look into…

FYI, you can use ctrl+l to get the path bar as just plain text that you can edit.

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

#562

Post by joana035 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #544

joana035 wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think judging the Linux experience based on an EeePC is fair. That hardware always felt like a throw away when it came out during the netbook boom from a decade ago.

I judge my Linux experience starting in Summer 1995, the year I got my first Linux distribution, Slackware 2.0, that makes a couple of years in experience.

I wish you can give another try, much has changed since then.

For me Debian Testing with Gnome is being a very nice experience (enjoyable ride).

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

#563

Post by CalChris » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

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.

I use Preview for merging + deleting pages which is rare but useful but otherwise I use Skim.

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

#564

Post by chiefalchemist » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

minimaul wrote: post #510

chiefalchemist wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, 1passwor…

It's absolutely subjective / personal. That being said, (non-mobile) OSs are less crucial, provided you have a browser. For a while I was having to move back and forth between Win and Apple. Being more browser-based made that less friction-y. Frankly, I think that's universally a good position to be in. That is, ultimately I don't care what OS. I'll be okay.

Humans adapt. It's what we do. Yet so often we mistake wants for needs.

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

#565

Post by fortran77 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:25 PM UTC

Windows 10 + WSL would have been a better thing to switch to.

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

#566

Post by redshirtrob » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:25 PM UTC

nikanj wrote: post #462

jchw wrote: post #354

One thing that Windows and macOS users will never understand about Linux, because they’ve never truly experienced it, is just how viscerally different the Linux experience is depending on your hardware. You don’t really need to go with a vendor like System76, and going with a fan favorite like Lenovo does not guarantee a good experience, but seriously, Linux on a machine that runs it well is just not comparable to a…

In my experience, Linux PDF readers suck, and so do email clients. OpenOffice is not as good as Excel / Word. Not sure how changing the hardware would fix this. Most of the Linux complaints that I see are focused on the quality of the applications, not a driver support

I've mentioned something similar elsewhere in this thread, but I really don't see why someone would choose Linux if their daily work revolved around marking up PDFs, editing Office documents and sending email.

I do these things on occasion (maybe once a quarter). When the time comes I drop the file on a suitable machine, do the work there, and get back to my real job (writing software that runs on Linux).

Conversely, if I was still developing iOS software, I would not insist on using a Linux or Microsoft machine. It's just not practical.

I get that people think the PDF/Office/Email should be on-par with Apple/Microsoft on Linux...but they're just not. I wish they were too, but I'm not going to spend my time making a Preview quality Linux app. These are objectively hard things to do. Most folks developing for Linux have other priorities.

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

#567

Post by blunte » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:26 PM UTC

Preview is one of the most underrated pieces of software in the world today.

I make the assumption that Quicklook uses Preview (because surely it must).

Being able to hit spacebar on just about any kind of selected document/image type file and see a near instant look, multiple pages and all, is so important. Once you don't have that (move to the Windows world), you realize how much you miss it. And you can, with a small bit of effort, add capabilities for additional files such as Markdown.

Being able to open a PDF or image in a fast, reliable native viewer, and even do some level of editing (such as quickly adding a signature!) is super useful.

In terms of reliability, every time over the last 20 years (some distant, some recent) where I tried to live with a Linux desktop, things would stop working after a short while. Meanwhile, I have lived on my 2014 MBP since 2014, going through multiple OS upgrades in place - no wipes/reinstalls - and find it just as performant as ever. It is in most use cases more performant than my 2017 _much_ higher spec Dell XPS 15 (in Windows or Linux boot mode).

There are still some things I hate, #1 being that when I cmd-tab to a window which is minimized, it doesn't raise that window. What is the f*cking point of cmd-tabbing to an application if you don't make its window visible!? This I have never understood. But generally speaking, macOS on Apple hardware is unmatched by any alternative.

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

#568

Post by haolez » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:26 PM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #367

sildur wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, what's the advantage of pacman over apt?

Imo, both are kind of sucky. (Just install a gnome group on each, then remove it and install plasma and see how many non-used service whatever continues to be installed). Nix is the correct solution to the dependency hell problem.

Nix could allow for home installs, however. It would make it useful in a lot more situations.

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

#569

Post by mroche » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:27 PM UTC

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…

My chosen password manager (1password) still has a fairly awful linux experience. This is getting better - they're producing a native app now. Said native app needs to support the local browser extensions though!

The desktop app is pretty good now, and if you’re using the Beta browser extension, it can talk to the desktop app to unlock. This feature is still in development, though, and has some restrictions.

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

#570

Post by vlozko » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

ur-whale wrote: post #255

smoldesu wrote: post #35

>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.

Yes, it is real UNIX: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ With the exception of 10.7, IIRC, it has been for over 15 years.