Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cfenollosa.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 834 posts

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

#681

Post by tokamak-teapot »

chrisweekly wrote: post #654
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…

Similar experiences (eg w my 2012 mpb15r). You'll be happy to learn that your "#1 hate" is easily resolved: cmd-tab then hold option key down while releasing cmd-tab. Voila, the minimized window is restored with focus. :)

Whenever I’m doing something in MacOS and the option / action I was hoping to find isn’t there, I try the same but with Option held down.

The philosophy seems to be that the UI is kept clean and easy to understand but the power is always there if you need it.

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

#682

Post by brightball »

debaserab2 wrote: post #627
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.

Ironically, this was one of the main reasons for my initial switch and then I went 3 years without using Docker.

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

#683

Post by franklyt »

Very little support for W10 in here, which is understandable.

I just recently switched back from a work Linux config and a hybrid Mac config to a full W10 config for a variety of reasons, the largest being that W10 is solid, performant and doesn’t feel as limiting as Mac, or distracting and warty as Linux, when I’m programming.

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

#684

Post by ActorNightly »

konart wrote: post #135
ActorNightly wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>ther than messing around or spending days playing around with my setup or window manager. I don't get why this narravitve still exists today. Linux works out of the box on many distros perfectly fine. Keybindings are a very special use case, and if you need that customizability and its better on a Mac, then get a Mac. Doesn't mean that Macs are "more productive" If you want to argue actual semantics in terms of valu…

>If you like Mac, then stay on Mac, and stop publishing articles on how good Macs are and how Linux is neat, but your time is so valuable that you can't spend learning a few commaind line tools. "Stop writing good things about things I hate and bad things about things I like!" > don't get why this narravitve still exists today. Linux works out of the box on many distros perfectly fine. Yeah. And then you connect two…

For every niche feature that you cant do on Linux, I can name a niche feature that you cant do on Mac. And for every reason that you tell me how its not an issue on Macs, I can also tell you that its not an issue on Linux.

The point is that this is such a stupid conversation to have.

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

#685

Post by spfzero »

giovani wrote: post #635
ericmay wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh I think the model they implemented makes sense. You are confusing the window of an application with the application itself. Cmd + Tab switches between applications, or windows. If you had multiple windows of an application like Safari open but minimized to the dock, maybe you are switching to Safari the application and then opening a new window? I believe there is a command that actually pulls up the windows indiv…

On my keyboard its CMD + ` by default, but I guess you can probably change it somewhere.

Yep, it's cmd-`. I use the heck out of that when I have multiple spreadsheet windows open, or even an in-progress email window or two.

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

#686

Post by oblio »

franklyt wrote: post #683

Very little support for W10 in here, which is understandable. I just recently switched back from a work Linux config and a hybrid Mac config to a full W10 config for a variety of reasons, the largest being that W10 is solid, performant and doesn’t feel as limiting as Mac, or distracting and warty as Linux, when I’m programming.

I think that if you remove the crap preinstalled on Windows, which is trivial for an experienced Windows user, and you don't have a work laptop with a ton of corporate management-ware installed, Windows 10 is super snappy, stable and with WSL you also get quite a few Linux goodies.

If you approach it with an open and flexible mind, it's at least equal to Linux or Mac desktops, for developers.

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

#687

Post by blunte »

tomp wrote: post #677
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 :)

You can easily enable this in Windows. In Explorer, just go to the View tab/menu, enable Preview Sidebar , click on the image, resize the Preview Sidebar as necessary, look at the image, then disable Preview Sidebar again. Easy /s

Windows Explorer Preview is just not the same. It's either always on or always off, and it takes up space, and it does not pop up above other content.

Quicklook is there only when you want it; it pops up a good sized window on top of anything else, and it goes away just as quickly and easily as you brought it up - spacebar.

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

#688

Post by blunte »

mrtksn wrote: post #621
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 somethin…

I may be missing something, but aren't you describing Finder's Gallery View? In that mode, you can left/right arrow your way through the entire set of files in a folder, viewing each one (image or pdf or whatever).

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

#689

Post by blunte »

bdcravens wrote: post #648
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.

It's so good, so fast, and so easy, (and so obviously useful), I just cannot fathom why Windows doesn't have a comparable answer for this.

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

#690

Post by dang »

dalu wrote: post #508
holstvoogd wrote: post #501

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…

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

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Post reply on HN