Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

support.system76.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 380 posts

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#351

Post by ninkendo »

PostThisTooFast wrote: post #293
xenomachina wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger issue is that command-tab switches between apps, not windows, and command-` switches between windows in the same app, and neither work across spaces. I ended up installing https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ which adds a keystroke that will cycle through all windows in all apps on all spaces. It's a huge improvement.

Yes, Alt-Tab is a HUGE improvement over Apple's implementation because it not only restores minimized apps as it should, but can also create a window for a running app that lacks one (with Finder being a critical example).

Hold option as you release cmd and it will behave as you describe (opening the default window for an app with no open windows, restoring minimized apps… it’s equivalent to clicking the Dock icon for that app)

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#352

Post by GekkePrutser »

skinnymuch wrote: post #330
GekkePrutser wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

genuinely asking, what sort of tuning do Windows and Linux have that Mac doesn’t? I’m sure it will be obvious once I’m given examples, but for now I don’t get it. From what you’ve said, gnome and kde is something. From my limited experience with them, the major difference that Mac can’t do is the menu bar or Windows style bottom bar as different options. Mac does stick with the top menu bar as something always there…

Well for example on Mac it seems to be impossible to turn off stuff like "App Nap" completely. I want my workstation to run 24/7 so it is ready and responsive whenever I need it. Yet in the latest versions I used every time I returned to my Mac I saw all the apps 'catching up' for a while, they had obviously been sleeping. And I had all sleep functions turned off in the GUI and with CLI commands like pmset. Yet they persist in pushing this. Another time I was decrypting a FileVault external drive, and went to bed after a few minutes when it was at 3%. In the morning when I looked it was at 5% and when I moved the mouse I heard the external drive spin up. Again it had been sleeping without being asked to do so, and this really screwed me up because I needed to clone that drive before going on a flight. I don't want Apple overriding what I want, probably so they can publish higher battery lifetime (and in fact in this case it was a Mac Mini so 'battery' lifetime was completely irrelevant).

Another thing is SSH access. I want to permit only public key access to my SSH daemon. Since about 10.12 or so (when SIP really started taking effect), macOS has been removing my changes from /private/etc/ssh/sshd_config and dumping them on the desktop when upgrades were done, in a passive-agressive way of saying "keep your shit to yourself". Not sure if it's even still possible to do this now with the sealed system volume because by the time Mojave and Big Sur came out I was already off the platform in terms of personal use.

Caffeinate (a CLI command to keep the machine awake) and a tool to constantly move the mouse (Jiggler) combined did work, but this is too hacky for my liking. If I want my OS not to do sleep of any kind, I should be able to tell it so.

Customisation with Gnome and Mac is possible but requires a ton of third-party tools which are often broken by system upgrades. I've tried all that both on Gnome and Mac but I got too annoyed with things constantly breaking. As a user wishing for great amounts of customisation you are clearly an undesirable on the platform.

I've used Mac as a daily driver from 10.2 until 10.14 or so, and I've had enough of these issues over the years that I just gave up on it. I still use every OS under the sun every day :) Because of work. But my main driver is FreeBSD + KDE and I like it a lot better.

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#353

Post by GekkePrutser »

b5n wrote: post #199
GekkePrutser wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want up to date everything you simply chose the wrong distro. It's not really the package manager's fault. Debian goes for stable versions during a release and backports security patches. It's one of their main design philosophies. It really shines for boxes you want to run something for years with minimal maintenance. Get arch, manjaro or another rolling distro and you'll have what you want :) Or perhaps Ubun…

Or just use a fresher Debian release. Testing and unstable are often more dependable than other distro's version of stable.

That's true, I mentioned this in my post at first. But I removed it because Debian itself doesn't deem it stable and I didn't want to get into that whole discussion :)

But indeed Debian has a very different perception of the term 'stable' than Arch.

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#354

Post by GekkePrutser »

howdydoo wrote: post #115
GekkePrutser wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want up to date everything you simply chose the wrong distro. It's not really the package manager's fault. Debian goes for stable versions during a release and backports security patches. It's one of their main design philosophies. It really shines for boxes you want to run something for years with minimal maintenance. Get arch, manjaro or another rolling distro and you'll have what you want :) Or perhaps Ubun…

I just think it's weird that I can't have an LTS OS with non-LTS userland apps. But I guess I have to accept that. Snap is a nonstarter for me for many reasons. Startup speed is important for shell pipelines, and also it's insane to bundle that much stuff just to run a statically-linked binary. And it wouldn't even solve the version problem, it looks like ripgrep on Snap is two years old. https://snapcraft.io/ripgrep…

> I just think it's weird that I can't have an LTS OS with non-LTS userland apps. But I guess I have to accept that.

That's a good point, but it's kind of part of the structure of a traditional linux system. Every library is provided only once in the system. Also, the line between what is "the OS" and "the userland apps" tends to be pretty blurry on Linux.

It has big advantages too. That libSSL vulnerability? apt dist-upgrade and all your apps that use it are patched. No need for each app developer to incorporate it. And the dynamic shared memory can do the things it's supposed to. Great for efficiency.

Solutions like snap indeed trade off that efficiency and single point of patching for easier deployment by devs, but it has too many drawbacks for me too. Though snap is exceptionally bad in terms of startup speed compared to FlatPak and AppImage so perhaps you could look at a distro that does that.

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#355

Post by parkingrift »

drdec wrote: post #208
parkingrift wrote: post #165

Weird comparisons. On the left we have first party apps by Apple, and on the right we have whatever you want to download from the internet. Particularly egregious for things on the right that are also available on the left, which is most of them.

It's not a comparison. It's a guide for getting tasks done on Pop!_OS for people who are used to macOS. It's like those guides for replacing jQuery with vanilla JavaScript. Of course the vanilla JavaScript is available for people using jQuery, but that's not the point.

People who are used to macOS aren’t using macOS default applications. The comparisons make no sense.

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#356

Post by db48x »

_dain_ wrote: post #346
db48x wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Linux there is a separate “clipboard” that gets “clobbered” every time you highlight something. See my other comment on the matter or https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xorg-docs/specs/ICCCM... .

I know; I just pretend that clipboard doesn't exist. I've never found it convenient for anything other than pasting to terminals that screw up the CTRL-C/CTRL-V shortcuts.

Hmm. I am genuinely curious, how is it less convenient for you? To copy something to the clipboard you have to select it and press control–c, then to paste it you have to click where you want it to go and press control–v. That’s not very hard, certainly. But to use selection instead you only have to select it, then hover over where you want it and middle click. That’s fewer steps!

Of course I am assuming that your hand is already on the mouse. However, you said that you highlight things frequently as you read them, so I assume that’s what you meant.

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#357

Post by [deleted] »

ar_lan wrote: post #319
Skunkleton wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Operating systems are a fundamental part of the experience of using a computer. Let me expand on that a little. For most of your tasks, it won't matter too much which OS you are using. The web browser is largely equally well supported on all platforms, as are editors, compilers, etc. Where the operating system becomes a fundamental experience is around the times when things start to go wrong in some way. What happens…

It's pretty much this reason that I started running Linux in a VM for my development work, and use macOS for everything else. macOS is fundamentally just a better ecosystem in my opinion for everything it caters to - that is, I actively use an iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, and Macbook. I use a lot of apps that sync seamlessly between each other and simply run best on macOS (or only run on macOS ). However, I've been bur…

[deleted]

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#358

Post by spindle »

rbreaves wrote: post #218
spindle wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't someone use kmonad or libinput or something to make a utility that holds a database of the most-used applications and, whenever the user focuses a window, remaps the keyboard to some set of consistent system-wide bindings? I don't think that exists, does it? EXWM comes close, but it doesn't have the database. I know, I know, I just said "someone" when I should do it myself.

There are 3 options here. https://github.com/mooz/xkeysnail https://github.com/k0kubun/xremap https://github.com/autokey/autokey My advice is to skip the last one unless you need something truly complicated and a config syntax that is just insane regardless of your level of complexity imo. Of course if you just want mac based keybinds to be done for you then use my kinto app. https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto

My main point was the database idea.

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#359

Post by chalupa-man »

bscphil wrote: post #168
criddell wrote: post #21

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…

> All of the major operating systems are good enough or can be made good enough by installing a few packages. And that's exactly the problem - macOS and Windows don't have "packages" in the sense that they do in Linux distributions. You can install software on both, of course, but it's relatively speaking a mess and Homebrew / Chocolately don't really suffice to make the experience anywhere nearly as clean and consis…

How do you feel about the Windows official package manager, winget? I find it a lot more polished and usable than Chocolatey was, and didn't notice much difference compared to apt or dnf, but admittedly my experience is limited and I haven't done much complex with any of the four.

Re: Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

#360

Post by chalupa-man »

ByteJockey wrote: post #280
sebow wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on the definition.The year we break 1% market share (usually with the steam survey as reference)? Already happened. I would say it's gonna be exploding after steam deck launches.I think it's gonna be higher than 2%,maybe 3% this year.Would be surprised if it gets past 5%, but that's a decent stretch(though not impossible at all).

Gaming was always the one thing that kept the more tech-savvy on windows boxes. I know it kept me there for a long time as a teenager. If that can be broken, I don't think 10% is infeasible. Though I think Microsoft would have to really screw up to lose their status as the "default" OS.

Valve's new Steam Deck device runs Linux. If it proves popular, that will be a big incentive for developers to improve Linux support for their games, and help jump that hurdle.
Post reply on HN