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

#621

Post by mrtksn » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

blunte wrote: 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…

Windows users who switch to macOS will complain that their new shiny and expensive machine won't let them to go through their photos in a folder using the arrow keys and they have to open the photos one by one. Then you tell them to hit the space when a photo is selected, they first look at the keyboard then at the screen and they are like "O.K. that will work", you proceed to tell them to try it on a PDF or something else and that's the moment they recognise the value that they paid for :)

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

#622

Post by Delk » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 3:46 PM UTC

yakubin wrote: post #421

joana035 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even 3. I don't remember seeing tearing on my Linux for a heck of a long time.

Try watching Netflix in Firefox or Chromium. Or enable smooth scrolling in Firefox and hit PageDown a couple times. The issue with scrolling can be resolved by enabling hardware acceleration, but this isn't the default in Firefox and the obscure config breaks from time to time. Until hardware acceleration becomes the default, not an opt-in, I consider this feature broken. Aside from Netflix, I'll sometimes see tearin…

I wonder if there are significant differences between video hardware or drivers, or perhaps even generations. I've watched Netflix, a local HBO streaming service and YouTube on Linux for years on Intel graphics without noticing tearing, and yes, back when there was tearing when watching video on a previous (pretty old) machine I had, I did notice it.

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

#623

Post by krotos » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 3:47 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…

> - I like the various iCloud/multi device integration features

Next time you give linux a try, you might want to check out https://kdeconnect.kde.org/ and https://syncthing.net/. I'm not a Mac user but I'd be surprised if between these you'd be missing any features.

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

#624

Post by qbasic_forever » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

masswerk wrote: post #417

easygenes wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multi-touch doesn’t get in the way of the screen on Mac. Also doesn’t require changing how you hold the device.

The point being, multi-touch was what got the the smartphone revolution going, especially on the Web. Whereas now…

> multi-touch was what got the the smartphone revolution going

Massive citation needed. When I bought the first iPod touch (at the time it was a gen 1 iPhone without the GSM modem) it was because it had a real web browser and not the BS 'mobile' browsers on my Windows Mobile smartphone. I could actually visit a store's website and find their hours, check if an item was in stock, etc. There wasn't even an app store back then... IIRC multitouch was only used for zooming into photos in the photos app.

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

#625

Post by ericmay » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #615

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…

I've lost hope that Linux will ever be able to provide an experience on the level of the Mac, I'd like to move away from Apple myself too. Unfortunately the modularity of Linux, despite being it's strength means that it can never possibly provide a UI/UX as coherent and interoperable as the Mac. How can you provide things like spell checking, font rendering, copy/paste, drag and drop, password sync, across every widg…

> This worries me because "M1 feels like Apple actually care about the Mac again" I completely disagree with this, I think Apple is aiming to have Macs running mostly iOS applications in the near future and MacOS will eventually be deprecated once we hit critical mass of that.

They’ll be running apps, but the lines between iPhone, iPad, and Mac will be blurred and I think this is fine. Similar to how apps now may have different features or layouts as you switch from iPhone to iPad.

I’m a little less worried about them deprecating macOS. They could do it tomorrow really but there doesn’t seem to be a need to do so. I think the goal here is to actually make the Mac stronger by unlocking access to the iOS App Library. It’s a good goal. I know some will complain about the iOS apps not being open source or something but probably 95% of users (myself included) don’t really care. I find open source software extremely valuable, but I don’t care if Flappy Bird or Office 365 are open source. I just need to use the software and get on with my day.

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

#626

Post by sbuk » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 3:54 PM UTC

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #602

aloer wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quicklook is such an amazing feature and it seems so basic that I just don’t get why windows hasn’t added anything like that. Are there patents on this? Just an example that I have about every day: before sharing a file via file select/open dialog I can double check if it’s the correct one. I can only speculate that quicklook prevents a substantial amount of accidental information leak across the entire world :)

Because Windows users have long been dependent on Acrobat Reader (or lately, browser PDF renderers) for showing PDFs. If Apple had a relationship with a third party providing something akin to a system application like Windows and Adobe, they'd happily make a native equivalent and relegate the old product to the dustbin. Windows doesn't do that as much.

Preview has been there from the very early days of NeXT and Display PostScript (NeXT worked on DPS with Adobe). Apple’s pdf handling has always been baked in as Quartz is ‘pdf based’.

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

#627

Post by debaserab2 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 3:55 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #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 u…

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

This is a severely underrated point. If you're not running docker on a linux host, you are running it on a VM and getting all the performance tradeoffs you would get with developing on a VM. There seems to be a lot of developers that are unaware of this.

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

#628

Post by __david__ » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

one2three4 wrote: post #252

karateka wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finder is unbelievably bad compared to Nautilus Whats so bad about finder?

UI. Add a shortcut to a folder. Go there. Now try to go to parent folder... Open a folder with images. How on earth do you switch to visible thumbnails? And more like that. These things should be intuitive and easy to do.

To go to the parent, command click on the title in the title bar of the window. I don’t know how you’d ever guess that, but I remember it back from the Mac OS 9 days.

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

#629

Post by 2ion » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #602

aloer wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quicklook is such an amazing feature and it seems so basic that I just don’t get why windows hasn’t added anything like that. Are there patents on this? Just an example that I have about every day: before sharing a file via file select/open dialog I can double check if it’s the correct one. I can only speculate that quicklook prevents a substantial amount of accidental information leak across the entire world :)

Because Windows users have long been dependent on Acrobat Reader (or lately, browser PDF renderers) for showing PDFs. If Apple had a relationship with a third party providing something akin to a system application like Windows and Adobe, they'd happily make a native equivalent and relegate the old product to the dustbin. Windows doesn't do that as much.

It does not stop at PDF / Acrobat. Windows sucks for media and document management. No thumbnails for random media / file types. No playback for random media types. Metadata may be in the files, but who cares? --- the OS makes no sensible use of them except in the details view of "library" folders to show the title and an obscure tab in Explorer's file properties dialog. Calendaring? Sorry, we don't support CalDAV. Email? Well we have IMAP support but it's a footnote. Contacts? God help you, we want you to use Outlook and Outlook only.

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

#630

Post by augusto2112 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #519

carlesfe wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clarified now in the article that the "Linux Laptop" is a Dell XPS 13" Developer Edition, which is marketed indeed as a Linux laptop, and the Ubuntu is marketed as "Ubuntu Dell". It was stated in the previous article of the series but you are right that it was not evident in the text.

Does it actually ship with Linux installed though? That, I think, is the main difference. I had an XPS 15" and I was totally unable to get any support from Dell when running Linux on it. I understand the XPS 13's are marketed as being more "Linux-friendly", but I don't know how supported they are.

I have a XPS 13 as well, and it does ship with Ubuntu.