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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

#591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a portrait 4k monitor in my setup and haven't seen any tearing.

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

#592
Anytime I tell people that I switched from Mac to Linux I let them know that it’s not for everybody. I’m happy with my decision, but I did it for the hardware and there are enough quirks that I wouldn’t recommend it for anybody who wasn’t really committed to the move.

Everything in this article is true. I tend to mute the desktop notifications for several noisy applications. I use mail web apps directly rather than using the desktop clients but I am really encouraged by the future of Thunderbird and do plan to switch one day in the future.

In this field, I learn from the quirks though. I use Ansible to manage my laptop configuration and it teaches me a lot about Linux under the hood that I never would have learned otherwise.

When I need docker, I like having a native linux experience.

Ultimately, there’s nothing I need that I can’t do and I can buy hardware that I’m in complete control of (upgrades, etc) which is important to me.

Software wise, I do miss Preview and OmniGraffle. Other than that, I’m not missing much.

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

#593
post #575
post #567

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 sm…

> What is the f*cking point of cmd-tabbing to an application if you don't make its window visible!? What if you have multiple windows of the same application, and you minimize one of them, then auto opening of that window everytime you switch back to the app will be super annoying.

Just take me to most recent non-minimized window of that app. And if there is no such window left, and I told system that I want to switch to the app, then yes, of course I want the most recent window unminimized. This isn't rocket science.

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

#594
post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Experience as in "things you are facing" not as "knowledge" or "know how" ;) What I mean is more like "I would have a bad experience if I put my hand in the fire". I edit my post to be more clear

I get it, you are happy with your Linux experience and think you know better than someone with 30 years UNIX experience, no more to discuss.

I don't, I just think that too much experience can cloud our vision or close ourselves from having better/new experiences in life.

From your friend over the wire.

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

#595

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…

Out of curiosity, what would qualify as an "official site" for laptops supported by Linux? Would it be run by Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, or some other maintainer? I think expecting anything official or authoritative from the Linux side is missing the boat. What you're looking for is hardware vendors who support a Linux desktop environment on their laptops, which are not too difficult to find.

The poster wasn't using Linux to refer to the Linux kernel here - they used it to mean "a Linux distribution". Distributions have their own hardware compatibility documentation systems. Eg Ubuntu has this: https://certification.ubuntu.com/ and Red Hat has https://catalog.redhat.com/hardware .

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

#596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm far too used to the macOS touchpad gestures It's a bit ironic that the Mac is now the epicenter of multi-touch, while its use on mobile platforms has seen some of a decline. Also, I full-heartedly consent to the praise of Preview.

Hmm what decline? The only thing that comes to mind is the removal of force-touch but that's not a multi-touch gesture.

When multi-touch first appeared it was touted as a Holy Grail of UIs.

The only multi-touch gesture that is in widespread usage across all mobile platforms is pinch to zoom. The rest of the multi-touch gestures are probably used 100 times less (maybe less, I can't even remember the last time I used 2+ fingers to do something on my Android devices, except for pinch to zoom).

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

#597

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.

Do be careful, though, when collating PDFs with Preview. I've had several experiences where the resulting file works fine in Preview, but can't be opened by other PDF readers, e.g. Acrobat Reader. Share the file with a non-Mac user and they'll be scratching their head…

I have to do a lot of PDF manipulation for my work, and after some time I accepted, grudgingly, that there's no substitute for Acrobat Pro.

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

#598
post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, this is one of my biggest problems with macOS. So many tremendously useful things are hidden . Why do they do this? It's not good for anyone. I can understand this concept of "just do what's intuitive - try it!", oh what fun - but nobody is going to risk messing up the important files they're working with by randomly dragging things onto other things just to see what happens. Just tell us how to use it. Alm…

My guess is that this is the compromise they strike to reduce the "number of options" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#599
post #567

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 sm…

> when I cmd-tab to a window

There’s no such thing. You command-tab to an application, which can have many or no windows. The different mental model is probably the reason for your frustration.

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

#600
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be the devil's advocate even though I agree with you partially and I personally prefer Linux, both for practical and philosophical reasons. However, I use a Linux laptop privately and macOS for work, so I think by now I understand both systems a little bit. For automating tasks on macOS you can look at something like hammerspoon which is really cool (though I mostly use it to modify some of the macOS keybindings…

> most Linux distros seem to have a better terminal pre-installed. I haven't found a Linux terminal that is as good as iTerm, in terms of features. Any recommendations?

I tried a bunch of terminals and ended up switching from urxvt to termite https://github.com/thestinger/termite a few years back (mainly for it's better handling for refreshing certain curses style output).

This might be the best recent overview of some of the pros and cons between some of the different options: https://anarc.at/blog/2018-04-12-terminal-emulators-1/

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