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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

#821

Post by mcculley »

toyg wrote: post #660
2ion wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not stop at PDF / Acrobat. Windows sucks for media and document management. No thumbnails for random media / file types. No playback for random media types. Metadata may be in the files, but who cares? --- the OS makes no sensible use of them except in the details view of "library" folders to show the title and an obscure tab in Explorer's file properties dialog. Calendaring? Sorry, we don't support CalDAV. E…

Microsoft had to walk a tight rope, historically, for fear of antitrust action. If they had improved Windows too much, big developers would have gone ballistic and dragged them in the courts again. Apple never had to care about this, and it shows.

Microsoft only had to worry about antitrust because of their previous anticompetitive/antimarket behavior. It is easy to imagine ways that Microsoft could have fostered the ecosystem while supporting Quick Look in File Explorer.

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

#822

Post by mekster »

Diesel555 wrote: post #817
mekster wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could you miss QuickLook for 7 years!? Maybe you're missing more.

I also was missing it, I'd ask how did you know it was there?

Maybe because I was already using macos when QuickLook was introduced...

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

#823

Post by xjm »

aloer wrote: post #581
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…

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 :)

Neat! I just discovered the gnome alternative gnome-sushi (available via apt-get). It's very nice, but sadly the "open file" dialog doesn't trigger gnome-sushi.

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

#824

Post by zsmi »

prestonbriggs wrote: post #653
argvargc wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, this is one of my biggest problems with macOS. So many tremendously useful things are hidden . Why do they do this? It's not good for anyone. I can understand this concept of "just do what's intuitive - try it!", oh what fun - but nobody is going to risk messing up the important files they're working with by randomly dragging things onto other things just to see what happens. Just tell us how to use it. Alm…

Cynically, I think the publishers have a deal that Apple won't publish manuals.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome-mh43558/mac

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

#825

Post by mceachen »

mceachen wrote: post #90
boogies wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Preview is probably the most underrated app of all time I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen macOS users saying they can’t leave it in part because of Preview. But IDK if any have listed any features not present in both GNOME’s Evince and KDE’s Okular (not that I’ve ever needed or used any of the three).

Editing PDFs and sticking your signature on documents is trivial with Preview.app. Save-as-PDF is broken (edits don't show up reliably), but you can easily just print to PDF to work around that bug. I can't get Evince or Okular to do this task: it'd be great if either worked, but I haven't looked into it. (FWIW, I'm a full-time Linux desktop user, but I have to test PhotoStructure on Windows and macOS, so those boxes…

(tried again, and neither Evince nor Okular support signatures, at least with the versions shipped with Ubuntu 20.04)

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

#826

Post by ActorNightly »

konart wrote: post #809
ActorNightly wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is that a niche feature? A lot of people have double monitor setup. Sometimes with a different scaling factor. Both macOS and Windows can handle it just fine. Linux somehow is is still in the 90s in this regard. I do agree that the conversation about niche features (or issues) is stupid though. Not like I've started one.

Double monitor setup works fine. Double monitor scaling setup is iffy.

Also, speaking of external monitors and Macs "just working", google "mac external monitor not working after sleep", which is the problem that i definitely have on my work issued Mac, but not any of my linux laptops.

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

#827

Post by zzzzzzzza »

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…

"In terms of reliability, every time over the last 20 years (some distant, some recent) where I tried to live with a Linux desktop, things would stop working after a short while."

nixos (a linux variant) addresses this on a much deeper level than any other os.

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

#828

Post by tomaskafka »

toxik wrote: post #633
tomaskafka wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there’s a setting for this behavior, or there used to be at least. Edit ah. no it’s when you click the app icon in the dock. I guess that’s the behavior sought here?

Yes - I'd like this to happen when I cmd+tab to app.

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

#829

Post by ric2b »

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've been doing it for years, no issues.

And on Android I use Keepass2Android, which also syncs to the same Dropbox folder, it works seamlessly.

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

#830

Post by Hiopl »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #803
Hiopl wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exists for Windows though as a third-party application, which points to one of the reasons why Windows is great. There's great software for nearly anything you could think of. It's one of the main things I miss when I use Linux. The usability/functionality in the applications simply isn't there and it will never be there, for whatever reason.

Ha, I'm the other way - you're an 'apt search blah' then 'sudo apt install foo' away from just about any type of software. Chocolatey has helped bring that closer for me on Windows. I guess it's probably what ones familiar with/used to.

Linux has been my main OS on at least one of my devices for as long as I can remember. I still think there's a stark difference in what applications are capable of. It feels like most Linux applications try to make GUIs as simple as possible, while shunting all possible advanced features into the command line. For example, there's not a single file browser that in any way compares to Directory Opus, which is my replacement file explorer on Windows.
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