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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

#641

Post by smoldesu »

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…

>Yes, Firefox has Firefox Sync, and Chrome has it's own sync stuff too, but there's nothing as all-encompassing.

You're looking for Nextcloud.

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

#642

Post by smoldesu »

krotos wrote: post #623
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.

+1 for KDE Connect. I had a friend who nearly shit their pants when they realized that "Continuity Clipboard" and "Airdrop" weren't iPhone-exclusive features.

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

#643

Post by sbuk »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #605
sbuk wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is renaming poor? You can batch rename and a simple click on the file name allows for renaming. Last time I used Nautilus, you still had to activate file renaming with a keypress or from a menu and that had to be done in a moat window. Viewing properties in Finder is easily done with cmd-i or viewable in column mode.

> You can batch rename and a simple click on the file name allows for renaming. Exactly! So every time I double-click a bit slower than macOS wants me to, it enters the renaming mode. I rarely need to rename files, and since the name should be entered via keyboard anyway, a special hotkey makes way more sense. Also, not showing file extensions by default is a big problem. And it is generally EXTREMELY SLOW, I shrug e…

Personally, I find that counter-intuitive in a WIMP UI. If it keeps happening, you can change your double-click speed in System Preferences - shortcut key is Enter (which has been the shortcut since before Windows or Gnome/KDE existed). File extensions have always been hidden by default. Again, on a WIMP based UI, they're kind of superfluous. Finder is super snappy form me. Literally just launched it and it's there straight away. Obviously YMMV...

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

#644

Post by mistersquid »

tomaskafka wrote: post #593
usaphp wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

If one is screensharing or presenting to an audience and the only windows in the target app are minimized but contain sensitive information, one most certainly would not want one of those minimized windows to reveal.

As a sibling to your comment points out, the solution is to hold the option key down while releasing the command key. This verifies a user’s intention to reveal the first-minimized window.

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

#645

Post by smoldesu »

akdor1154 wrote: post #483
opencl wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

And can you change them? Or is gnome still less customisable than even macOS?

From what I've seen, it's very customizable. There's a custom Gestures app that allows you to bind an infinite amount of gestures to any shell command you want.

>is gnome still less customizable than even macOS?

Gnome has been more flexible since 2003, seeing as I haven't seen someone successfully replace the MacOS stylesheet. On Gnome, it's a 2 minute process, tops.

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

#646

Post by fallingknife »

theobeers wrote: post #597
fallingknife wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I have found is that when annotating PDF's the annotations show up, except on Acrobat. Never could figure out how to fix.

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

#647

Post by kaba0 »

haolez wrote: post #568
kaba0 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean with home installs? Installing nix itself without root?

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

#648

Post by bdcravens »

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…

The PDF editing and signature workflow is so good that I never print out PDFs to sign and scan them in any more.

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

#649

Post by jackcviers3 »

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…

I had a Linux IdeaPad p400 for like 12 years with Ubuntu. 0 issues. I now have a system 76 gazelle. No problems.

Ubuntu 20.04 is really easy to use.

I can't stand the mbp. Hoops to jump through for everything with a cli. Extra permissions to make build tools work. Extra additions to file permissions that are incompatible with docker. Special gui with extra settings to make docker work. vpns that have to run inside the top bar and freeze up with no way to get them to shut down. Weirdness with .net core compilations. User admin only with a gui. Difficulty finding files because the finder window doesn't follow path. Extra steps to launch apps from the cli. Weird ppi so text settings that are legible everywhere else aren't in Mac. Slow keyboard repeat rates that are hard to change.

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

#650

Post by mistersquid »

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…

> 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.

I don’t understand comments like this because iOS apps as well as macOS apps are built using macOS devices. While it may come to pass that iOS becomes a viable platform to develop iOS and macOS (?!) apps, Apple cannot proceed by removing the ability to develop apps on both platforms.

Apple has proved itself a canny organization with regard to the development and maintenance of its platforms (bugs and pain points notwithstanding), so it seems highly unlikely they would move forward in a way that prevents the development and maintenance of those major platforms.

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