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Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

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Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#51

Is it finally the year of Linux on the desktop? But seriously, the work System76 is doing is really great. PopOS is really nice to use. The attention it is getting is well deserved.

First year for me not on Linux desktop for my primary device since... 99? M1 Air was the culprit. I still don't particularly love Mac OS and remain somewhat puzzled by the overwhelming love people have for it but:

1. It's usable enough and it's certainly polished and much more importantly

2. The M1 Air is the laptop I always dreamed of. Fast, doesn't get hot, SILENT. It's worth the trade-off for me, but I hope Linux on M1 succeeds and I get to run Linux again.

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that Windows 11 is a thing, I think winning desktop user share from Windows will be easier than ever before. What else is the average Joe going to do with their TPM-less devices?

Throw them in the trash and buy a new PC. They are pretty cheap.

Having worked at an independent PC repair shop, there are a lot of people who would rather keep using their old 6+ year old laptops and have SSDs installed in them than go out and buy a new laptop. Yeah there are cheap ones for sale, but they're underpowered, have regular old HDDs, and only 4GB of RAM. Plus, now they're coming with Windows 11 preinstalled, which will annoy a lot of people who are used to Windows 7 or 10.

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#53
All I want in life is a Linux distro with a package repo full of meticulously reworked & reconfigured packages that make all the keyboard shortcuts across the entire system and every application be like and be as consistent as my old Macs.

I've been full-time Linux (Kubuntu) for a few years now, and I've hobbled together something that only irritates me to death about 30% of the time rather than the 100% of the time it used to before spending days and days fiddling with a bunch of different flavors of remapping at nearly every layer of the system.

If I'm ever fabulously wealthy, I already know I'm just going to finance an open source fastidious spiritual successor to MacOS 10.6

I'm going to give Pop_Os a try, but I suspect I'm going to run into the same problems I always do. The trouble with Linux as a desktop for me isn't weather it's beautiful or not. The problem is how disintegrated everything is and the thousand papercuts ways in which it works.

That said, I absolutely consider it basically an incredible miracle that the experience is as good as it is, frankly. So, I keep at it.

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#54

Is it finally the year of Linux on the desktop? But seriously, the work System76 is doing is really great. PopOS is really nice to use. The attention it is getting is well deserved.

Every year is the Year of Linux on the Desktop as more people move over.

20 years for 1%, there is always hope I guess.

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#55
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it finally the year of Linux on the desktop? Considering that the hope behind this term was about winning the desktop user share from Windows, and not just "being usable" on the desktop, or "being used" on the desktop, no.

Now that Windows 11 is a thing, I think winning desktop user share from Windows will be easier than ever before. What else is the average Joe going to do with their TPM-less devices?

Now that Windows Vista is a thing, I think winning desktop user share from Windows will be easier than ever before. What else is the average Joe going to do with their DX10-less devices?

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#56

I guess I don't get how operating systems are still something that people have such strong opinions on. All of the major operating systems are good enough or can be made good enough by installing a few packages. Pop may be great, but it's useless if you need to run Final Cut Pro. macOS is wonderful, but not if you want to play a lot of AAA games. Windows is fine, but if you are doing a lot of Ruby on Rails you may ha…

> I don't get how operating systems are still something that people have such strong opinions on.

When there is FLOSS, it is very common to also have feelings and ideology mixed in. It is very common for "FLOSS people" to evaluate software beyond familiarity and technical merits.

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#57

This is a little off-topic, but I've been wanting to switch from Windows to Linux and the one thing stopping me is the lack of a good package manager. WAIT, let me explain. On Windows, you can just `scoop install ripgrep fzf jq` and you're in business. And updating all installed packages is one command away. Meanwhile on Debian, the system packages are often years out of date. So authors have started making their own…

Have you considered using Debian testing or even unstable, if you want newer packages?

I absolutely agree that manually installing software leads to a maintainability nightmare.

How does scoop solve the problem? Is it simply by moving faster (which one could do with the less stable Debian repos), or is it doing something like isolating all shared dependencies for every package (I know this is in style these days, but I'm not a huge fan of it).

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#58

This is a little off-topic, but I've been wanting to switch from Windows to Linux and the one thing stopping me is the lack of a good package manager. WAIT, let me explain. On Windows, you can just `scoop install ripgrep fzf jq` and you're in business. And updating all installed packages is one command away. Meanwhile on Debian, the system packages are often years out of date. So authors have started making their own…

almost nobody uses debian on the desktop. If you're using tools like jq, fzf, ripgrep then you're smart enough to use cargo/flatpak/snap to get anything that you want. You can put it in a script and have it all ready for now and in the future if you like if you'd doing it on a lot of machines.

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#59

I guess I don't get how operating systems are still something that people have such strong opinions on. All of the major operating systems are good enough or can be made good enough by installing a few packages. Pop may be great, but it's useless if you need to run Final Cut Pro. macOS is wonderful, but not if you want to play a lot of AAA games. Windows is fine, but if you are doing a lot of Ruby on Rails you may ha…

It's all about what you want in an OS. MacOS for example is very much one size fits all. For someone like me who wants to tune the nuts and bolts of the system is frustrating.

Windows is better at this and Linux of course shines depending on which distro you pick. I consider each distro its own OS. For the same reason gnome doesn't work for me (and thus PopOS doesn't) but KDE and i3 do.

But other people have other priorities. And the software you want to run heavily factors into it.

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#60

This is a little off-topic, but I've been wanting to switch from Windows to Linux and the one thing stopping me is the lack of a good package manager. WAIT, let me explain. On Windows, you can just `scoop install ripgrep fzf jq` and you're in business. And updating all installed packages is one command away. Meanwhile on Debian, the system packages are often years out of date. So authors have started making their own…

Have you tried Arch or Arch-based distribution? I am using Manjaro, and I feel that 'pamac' is a good package manager in terms of keeping up with package update. Arch and its derivatives mainly use 2 repositories, Arch Official Repository and Arch User Repository (AUR). Sometimes, a distribution also has its own repository. AUR is what blown me away a a former Ubuntu user. Because, it often has the package I want to install, even if has no official build for Arch.
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