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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

#711

Post by masswerk »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #624
masswerk wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

Pinch & zoom was the killer app to navigate normal websites (as opposed to dedicated XHTML + handheld-stylesheet). This is now for the most dead with `meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"` as a standard.

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

#712

Post by sbuk »

dang wrote: post #692
sbuk wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You're a joke." Wow. "Only rich spoiled brats spend 5k on a laptop that would otherwise cost 1k" Not this again. A fully tricked out MBP 16" costs $6699. RRP for a Lenovo equivalent is $8,894. Dell doesn't sell anything that matches, but equivalent spec is $3,894.99 (MBP 16" $4199). System 76 - $3,174 with a shit display (1080p in a 'high end' laptop is absolutely shocking). Librem 14 (vs MBP 13" for $2299), $2,716…

" Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Didn't have the option to flag, and can't find an option to report 'bugs'."

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

#713

Post by dmitriid »

akra wrote: post #386
dmitriid wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Option + arrows: move by word Option + Shift + arrows: select by word Cmd + arrows: move to the end of the line Cmd + Shift + arrows: select to the end of the line Additionally you can still use the decades old Ctrl+A/Ctrl+E shortcuts almost everywhere (some custom text input reimplementations ignore this).

But of course on a Win/Linux system you rarely need to use three fingers at once. On mac this is all too common for even the basic tasks you state. Shift + End: Select to the end of the line Home + End: Select to the beginning of the line Home or End: Move to beginning or end of line respectively. What's worse is when I plug in a keyboard with Home and End buttons on a recent Macbook Pro they still don't work. Do I n…

> But of course on a Win/Linux system you rarely need to use three fingers at once.

On Windows the Window key is essentially removed from keyboard.

On Linux you can use the Meta key, but I don't know how common that is.

I find myself using a much wider range of shortcuts on Mac than on Windows or on Linux (though I rarely use Linux these days).

It's a personal feeling, not real data :)

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

#714

Post by dmitriid »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #666
dmitriid wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Option + arrows: move by word Option + Shift + arrows: select by word Cmd + arrows: move to the end of the line Cmd + Shift + arrows: select to the end of the line Additionally you can still use the decades old Ctrl+A/Ctrl+E shortcuts almost everywhere (some custom text input reimplementations ignore this).

I'm probably misremembering. How to delete word (back and forward?), maybe it's that one.

Yes, delete/backspace delete one letter (forward/backward respectively), Cmd+delete/backspace deletes a whole word.

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

#715

Post by minimaul »

kaba0 wrote: post #385
minimaul wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for 1. The cons? A super restrictive platform (even more than it was under intel) You can still boot arbitrary unsigned OSes - Apple still allows this, but it is obviously going to take time for other OSes to grow support for apple's custom hardware. So it's still a computer you can control if you want. for 2., wayland is still a very rough experience imo (I periodically try it on an all-intel system, which ought to…

What compositor did you try for wayland?

Mostly kwin, but also sway a little. I understand that GNOME is a bit further along than either of these, though?

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

#716

Post by Tsiklon »

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…

About your cmd-tab point, macOS in its distant past made an architectural choice to decouple the running application from the windows presenting it (I think this goes the whole way back to nextstep).

So while cmd-tab does give the application focus (as you’ll see reflected in the menu bar) it won’t bring up the window.

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

#717

Post by sergeykish »

aniforprez wrote: post #476
dvdkon wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, does "Just Work" now include easily accessible noob-proof configuration of the things you want? In that case, macOS doesn't Just Work for me, because I want to be able to see what apps are playing sound or recording and manually set them to different sinks/sources, maybe even have sound playing from multiple devices at the same time. On Linux with PulseAudio and pavucontrol, this is effortlessly configurable with…

Everything you require is not in the least beginner user problems. I'm talking basic issues faced by a person who only views emails, looks at spreadsheets and word documents and opens their browser

Firefox/Chromium, LibreOffice solves your list.

And from my perspective "Just Works" means don't stand on my way, don't change under my feet.

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

#718

Post by eyesee »

specialist wrote: post #694
cmehdy wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know about brew you can also find a bunch of extra quicklook plugins: https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins Works on and off for some things (video previews for example) but overall worth a quick "brew install" in my opinion.

CSV, markdown, plaintext, and JSON plugins are must-haves for office work. BetterZip's plugin is okay. Even better would be: I'd sacrifice my first born child for a "Show Package Contents" option supporting zip, webarchive, and other common composite files. (Using Finder: highlight file with .app or .dmg extension, right-click to show context menu, chose "Show Package Contents", opens new tab with selected file as "m…

Because they’re not really “composite files”, they’re packages. It’s just a normal directory with a bit set to treat it as a file in context (also driven by file extension). “Show Package Contents” just opens a Finder window rooted within the package. From CLI you’ll see them as a directory.

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

#719

Post by masswerk »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #419
masswerk wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What do you mean by that?

> What do you mean by that?

Smartphones had been around for years (e.g. devices like the SE P800 and P900 series) before the iPhone, but these remained niche and required specially skinned websites for full functionality (XHTML and CSS stylesheets with `medium="handheld"`, which is now dead). It was really the iPhone's capability to render normal websites and to navigate them via pinch & zoom, which was considered the killer-app of the iPhone (esp. before there was an App Store with a wide variety of apps available.) The success of the iPhone was built on the much acclaimed multi-touch feature. And this is now, with responsive web-pages set to `meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"` as a standard, practically disabled and dead. (In other words, with a grain of salt, responsive killed multi-touch – or, at least, rendered it disposable.)

(Moreover, I do not see any wide deployment of two or three finger gestures or similar multi-touch interaction on usual web-apps, especially, as these lack any standardization, but this may be just my own observation and anecdotal. That said, there's probably a niche use for virtual controllers for web games. But it's really the Mac trackpad and maybe the Magic Mouse, where multi-touch lives on with any significance.)

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

#720

Post by craftinator »

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…

> Maybe I've been spoiled by Linux, but I don't understand the hype.

This type of sentiment is usually a sign. If you've been spoiled by something, that's because it's better. I had the same feeling trying to go back to windows, "Man, why am I always fighting damaging updates", "Why can't I change this very simple setting", "Where is the documentation for this file".

The answer usually comes down to "because one thing is really good (not perfect), and the other thing is shitty (but tries to look perfect)."

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