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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

#771

Post by CincinnatiMan »

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…

Hitting space and then arrow key doesn't seem to navigate to different photos. Is that what you're saying should be possible?

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

#772

Post by raimue »

guessbest wrote: post #762
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that may be because ffmpeg uses libraries with incompatible licenses. I should have mentioned, ports with nonredistributable binaries are also built from source, and MacPorts tends to interpret licenses conservatively. Does the list change if you specify the +gpl2 varient?

I'm just doing the "standard install". Macports does source code for standard installs. End of discussion. Heavenly Lord, he just keeps coming back with more rules lawyering. The macport for git goes through patching, configuring, building routine that is common in source code installs. Give me peace of mind, strength, and patience in dealing with internet trolls.

I am sorry, but you are wrong. MacPorts will not go through configure/build/install for all ports, only those for which no binary archive can be made available. As others have already explained, this happens when license restrictions do not allow redistribution of a binary.

With your example of ffmpeg, you can check yourself that ffmpeg-4.3.2_0+gpl2.darwin_18.x86_64.tbz2 exists as a binary archive and will be used on a standard install on macOS 10.14. MacPorts will definitely not build ffmpeg from source by default.

I recommend you test again with something simpler than ffmpeg, for example bzip2 or less.

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

#773

Post by marcus_holmes »

zepto wrote: post #707
marcus_holmes wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. It really doesn't. There are sooo many issues that are still not fixed, years after being reported. Apple's Support site has pages where there's hundreds of people saying "I have this problem too", and no comment from an Apple dev. I'm not blaming them. This shit is hard, even if you control both the hardware and the software. I get why they don't say "it just works" any more.

> There are sooo many issues that are still not fixed, years after being reported. Apple's Support site has pages where there's hundreds of people saying "I have this problem too", and no comment from an Apple dev. With a billion end-users this is really just noise. In any case this is a meaningless comparison. With Linux there is nowhere and nobody to even ask for this kind of support. The answer is always some vers…

> With Linux there is nowhere and nobody to even ask for this kind of support.

This is not true. Every time I've run into a Linux problem, googling the error has always produced an answer. Often more than one answer. Often mutually incompatible answers. But one of them usually works. In the end.

For Apple, googling the problem often leads to an Apple Support page that has no answers, just an endless stream of "I have this problem too".

> The answer is always some version of RTFM or fix it yourself.

At least you can fix it yourself.

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

#774

Post by marcus_holmes »

augusto2112 wrote: post #630
marcus_holmes wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How are you finding that? I hear they work really well with Linux. I had such a bad time with the XPS15, I keep wondering why there's such a disparity between them.

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

#775

Post by CincinnatiMan »

ericmay wrote: post #620
blunte wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tomato Tomato. As another person clarified, I'm probably trying to switch to the most recent window of a given application. For all practical purposes, the window and the application are the same thing. There may be additional windows of that app, but they are all that app.

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…

I recently switched to a Mac and overall the OS is superior to Windows, but Windows and Linux handling of windows just makes more sense in my mind. If you have 3 windows you are cycling through, composed of 1 Excel spreadsheet and 2 browser windows, it's very nice to just keep track in your mind of whether the window you want is the most recent in your "history" of windows or 2 ago, and hit Alt+Tab as needed. In the Mac world you have to switch between Cmd+Tab and Cmd+` depending on which you want to reach and where you're starting from, and that just seems like an unnecessary split to think about.

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

#776

Post by cmrdporcupine »

matwood wrote: post #741
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, not my experience these days. Our family Lenovo all-in-one windows machine with its preinstalled windows: Time synchronization doesn't work. Have to set the clock manually. When logging in and if another user is logged in the start bar freezes for up to 5 minutes before it lets me do anything. All sorts of things like this. Random problems like that. My personal Windows machine upstairs loses sound output vi…

> Time synchronization doesn't work. Windows insists on the source port of NTP to be 123, and many ISPs (like ATT) block this port. No idea why MS hasn't fixed this issue. https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/e16117c3-0...

Somehow my other windows machine is fine though? Same LAN

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

#777

Post by lofi_lory »

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…

Thunderbird has "move to junk" on 'J'. I haven't found a way to deactivate that. Ultra annoying.

Evolution is fine, but I really wish Gnome's Mail and Calendar apps would get more love and development as they look modern and minimalistic. The accounts management is lacking support for the general case, sadly. And GPG...

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

#778

Post by hk1337 »

Delk wrote: post #614
hk1337 wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My chosen password manager (1password) still has a fairly awful linux experience. This is my biggest roadblock to Linux as well. I don’t sync to 1Password.com though and that’s all that is available, so it’s more than just a poor experience for me. I thought about trying to share a Keepass database but that’s had some issues. I tried sharing via Keybase and had a weird issue that when I edited something in Keepass,…

I've been keeping a Keepass database on Dropbox (encrypted with password + key file, neither of which are stored on Dropbox, obviously) for a while, and haven't noticed any issues with syncing. I'm mostly using it from a single device, though, but I don't think it should be likely for the sharing to introduce problems even if I made heavier use of multiple devices. It's not like the database is constantly being modif…

I like Keepass but I am looking to drop Dropbox and I need to be able to sync it with mobile as well.

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

#779

Post by kalleboo »

ur-whale wrote: post #255
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…

> because I've been told that it's a real "Unix system". OSX certainly isn't a "real Unix system". OSX a huge hodgepodge of proprietary crap with a Unix component buried somewhere in the middle of the dung heap to get FOSS proponent to believe that Apple believes in openness.

> OSX a huge hodgepodge of proprietary crap

Historically, that is exactly what "real Unix systems" were

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

#780

Post by iimblack »

kaba0 wrote: post #367
sildur wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, what's the advantage of pacman over apt?

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.

Pacman has meta packages for this.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Meta_package_and_packag...

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