Live data from Hacker News

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

cfenollosa.com

781–790 of 834 posts

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

#781
post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But one of them usually works. In the end. > At least you can fix it yourself.

Almost no regular consumers can in fact fix it themselves.

That’s why you see a small number of minor issues being complained about a lot on Mac forums.

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

#782
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 th…

> the Finder window doesn’t follow path

⌘⇧G (“go”)

> extra steps to launch apps from cli

`open -a TextEdit`, `open -a Safari index.html`, etc

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

#783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preview is awesome! My favorite feature is splitting up and combining PDF's by dragging and dropping the pages.

Yeah I found out you can combine two videos in QuickTime by dragging one into the other. Amazing but I had to Google it

Wow, that really beats ffmpeg’s concat demuxer

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

#784
post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a total straw man. You use this word, "straw man". I do not think it means what you think it means. No, it is not a straw man to point out that bugs interfere with the notion that something "just works". When bugs interfere with getting things done - as I've found they often do in the course of using macOS daily, like when I can't open firewall ports for development or share my screen via Google Hangouts be…

> You use this word, "straw man". I do not think it means what you think it means. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/straw%20man Being ‘immune from bugs’ is an obvious straw man. > A Chromebook has fewer bugs and a better UX If by ‘better UX’ you mean doesn’t even try to do things. > Application menus are so far away from application windows that the Ever Given could do a goddamn u-turn between them with roo…

Cherry picking bits and pieces of what I mentioned rather than addressing the entirety of the argument does not a good counter-argument make. And no, neither does linking some dictionary entry as if it actually proves you understand what that dictionary entry is saying. No comment on the Touch Bar being disabled with external keyboards plugged in? Or needing to disconnect USB-C devices to login? Or password prompts being broken in System Preferences? These are bugs that actively hinder usability and pretty clearly contradict the notion of "just works". It is not a strawman - at all - to suggest that these bugs and others directly challenge the notion that something "just works".

You know what is a strawman? Cherry picking only some minor weaker points you want to attack while entirely ignoring the ones that you don't, and then trying to pass that off as a substitute for addressing all points in their entirety. If you actually understood what a "strawman" is, you would recognize immediately that your behavior in this discussion is much closer than mine to that definition you cited, and then you'd kindly refrain, thanks.

> You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it.

I "just don't like it" specifically because it does not "just work". It is tolerable usability-wise only after extensive fiddling and tweaking and troubleshooting, and that's only on good days when those aforementioned bugs ain't actively preventing me from using basic OS functionality.

And that's fine - I do enjoy fiddling with things on my Linux and OpenBSD desktops - but those Linux and OpenBSD desktops don't advertise themselves as "you shouldn't ever need to fiddle with things because everything just works" the way macOS does, and therefore I'm a lot less frustrated with that fiddling because those systems are designed for it and encourage it and make it easy and friendly and fun. Nothing about customizing macOS is easy or friendly or fun; it is not designed for it, and it does not encourage it. It is Apple's way or the highway - and given the evolution of Apple's way lately, the highway doesn't look so bad after all.

> and leverages Fitt’s law because you don’t have to be accurate in the vertical dimension

Right, let's watch users spend multiple seconds dragging a cursor to a window toward the bottom-right, clicking, and then dragging that cursor all the way back to the top-left just to save fractions of a second on vertical positioning in a specific spot.

Fitt's law is hardly useful here. If the window ain't maximized, then you need some degree of vertical precision to select the window in order to make its menu visible anyway. And if it is maximized, then it literally doesn't matter what owns the menu 'cause it'll be in approximately the same place either way.

That is:

> There are good UX reasons for this.

There were good UX reasons for this, back in the days of m68k Macs where mice were some newfangled invention and displays were tiny. In those days that unintuitive disconnection was a fair tradeoff to make if it meant conserving that tiny amount of vertical real estate and helping people figure out those newfangled rodents.

Now? It's been, what, 40 years? People know how to use mice (or, if not, can figure it out with a bit of practice - Microsoft understood this and opted to encourage that practice with games like Minesweeper and Solitaire instead of paternalistically assuming users will remain permanently inept), and even the absolute lowest screen resolution Apple sells on a Macbook has multiple times the amount of vertical and horizontal screen space. That tradeoff is far less useful now.

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

#785

>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…

Agree about brew and highly recommend nix in its place. Failed updates can’t take down your system (it’s literally impossible, as changes are made atomically), different packages maintain separate versions of their dependencies so there’s no dependency hell, and it’s very speedy. Only downside is it’s not as Mac centric as brew, so AFAIK casks are a no go.

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

#787
post #700
post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For me, that moment was uninstalling an app. I had to Google it. “Drag the app to the trash bin.” Remember how hard it is to uninstall stuff on Windows? Especially if you’re doing more than one?

It's... not hard at all to uninstall stuff on Windows. They'll all be in the Apps & Features list.

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

#789
post #573
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not having used Nautilus, there's a bunch of bad things about the Finder I can complain about. The tabs. First of all, they're Safari-style tabs and Safari has awful tabs. And then there's a preference called "open folders in new tabs instead of windows". Open up a Finder window, open Terminal and run `open /path/to/directory`. What happens? Directory opens in a new Finder window. There's no way to have Finder rememb…

Cut & paste is Copy followed by Option-Paste: Cmd-C, nav to destination, Opt-Cmd-V

But that's not cut and paste. That's copy and special paste. And I don't want to start training my brain to use a different set of keys to do the exact same thing that I can do elsewhere just because Apple thinks I should.

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

#790

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…

> Finding a mail client I don't hate on linux is tricky

Have you tried Mailspring?

> My chosen password manager (1password) still has a fairly awful linux experience

Maybe a good time to try something open-source such as Bitwarden? The fact that 1password is closed-source is a major disadvantage.

Post reply on HN