If you think about it, Microsoft and Apple have considerable advantage when it comes to peripherals and bug fixing. With peripherals they have decades of experience working with vendors who are enticed to support them - I walked through the halls at building 27 (which was Windows engineering before I lived in Redmond in 1997) and the halls were decorated floor to ceiling with hardware peripheral boxes everywhere. That would have been Windows 95 or NT or something like that. Multiply that experience 25 years forward and you have a rough idea how much depth and breadth you'd get across every person, peripheral, and PC involved. No Linux vendor is close. Now consider the situation for bug resolution: you have dramatically narrower focus when you consider the source, tools, and binaries. Linux has numerous breadth and depth across kernel, hardware, peripherals, toolchains, and so on. There's really no one outside canonical and redhat and IBM driving that commercially. Compare to Apple or Microsoft who can afford to fund development across vendors for decades with no impact to their bottom line. If you wanted to have something approaching macos or windows, it's simple: reduce the features and focus on a single distro running a single desktop environment running on a single hardware environment. Fix those bugs and those bugs only. Ship! That's pretty much what you've got here minus the funding (AFAIK): https://pop.system76.com/ Outside that, I'd vote for Garuda Sway, Manjaro Sway, or maybe Regolith Linux since I believe that Sway will eventually win the Linux Desktop war once people realize form follows function and those three have a headstart with the last having an easy port given i3 and ubuntu. I believe arch is a better base so I'd pick either of the arch-based distros, but garuda is ahead of manjaro given it's keybindings being ahead by a year or so.
Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?
151–157 of 157 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
You will be miserable and waiting forever because what you want is impossible for all practical purposes. Feature parity is a red herring when some newer features just can't be done properly on X. The "xorg ideology" is to basically not have security on anything and to consider GPUs to be an afterthought, as stated by a parent comment. From a user perspective, this situation is untenable and yet will never actually i…
The “security” of wayland is a bit of an illusion imo. I’ve already seen a user pick it apart awhile ago. Regardless I don’t what they’re trying to do, but they do need to add in a proper method for granting higher privileges to apps to have more access to Wayland in the same way macOS grants access to Remote Desktop apps.
Proper security is layered. Wayland is like a steel-framed door, while X is like having a hole for the door. Of course not even the steel door worth anything if you don’t have windows in place, but you can’t even begin to secure your place without a door.
X simply can’t separate different applications inputs and display outputs, unless you go full on nested X servers, while wayland solves this aspect splendidly.
Of course it is only a single step into the correct direction, you still need sandboxing and the like, but just sandboxing wouldn’t have been enough for X.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple has also gone to lengths to make it difficult to run an alternative OS on their hardware. Like the Facetime camera on the 2015+ MacBook. (Fair dues to the person who got that working). One of my personal laptops is a 2015 MacBook Pro, and the camera driver is the only thing I had to manually screw around with. Everything else worked perfectly in every distro I threw at it.
What was the issue with the webcam? I presume it's not a standard USB video device? Are you sure it's really only about making it harder to run other OSes on the hardware, and not because there was some actual feature gain from whatever the customization is? I know they have put effort into locking things down a lot with the newer models with the T2 chip, and while I don't agree with it it's obvious that there are re…
I didn't say Apple has gone to extreme lengths. That would cost them a ton for little benefit. They got a 3rd party (Broadcom) to build the webcam and keep the spec a secret. Neither Broadcom nor Apple provide anything that would make it usable in another OS. I know they don't "have to", but I believe that buying a machine makes it mine, and I should be allowed to use it however I want. How many other manufacturers keep basic info a secret, and provide zero support in any alternative OS?
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I base my work on Ubuntu Budgie, but I make efforts to support a few popular others for kinto.sh. https://sourceforge.net/projects/sorunme/files/
Wow, do people actually still use sourceforge? I found it to be really clunky and missing features compared to github or gitlab or something.
You don't upload entire 2-5gb iso or vm images to github or gitlab imo. The sorun.me project itself is in fact hosted on github - not sourceforge. Will admit I had no reason to be on sourceforge at all until I was like "Hey.. I need a place to host these images." and I realized that sourceforge is still a thing and perfect for hosting such large images for free.
Of course I could host it myself - but I guess I should just provide links on my actual sorun.me page.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, do people actually still use sourceforge? I found it to be really clunky and missing features compared to github or gitlab or something.
You don't upload entire 2-5gb iso or vm images to github or gitlab imo. The sorun.me project itself is in fact hosted on github - not sourceforge. Will admit I had no reason to be on sourceforge at all until I was like "Hey.. I need a place to host these images." and I realized that sourceforge is still a thing and perfect for hosting such large images for free. Of course I could host it myself - but I guess I should…
Oh cool, good to know. I never noticed that before.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?
#156Unlike macOS, Fedora just works.
I had to switch over when the pain with macOS and it's HW got too much.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mostly because we have no viable option. Most work places want to have one device for all staff. So the IOS team and the Android team and Marketing and API and JS team, all need one common system. Windows is out for the Rails/Elixir team, and IOS team need Macs. Marketing and Sales teams could live in Windows or Mac's The only Venn diagram match is Mac. Low powered or high powered, Mac is the answer. Honestly... Pack…
The ios being exclusive to MacOS is an Apple made problem though. So you're paying double in hardware cost because of some decision by Apple that no other platform may compile for ios.
I don't know about double for the hardware.
A new Lenovo cost about 3k, and a new Mac costs about that too.
The Lenovo comes with windows (so rails and elixir dev's can't use it)
Mac didn't decide not to support rails, or lock rails devs out of other OS's.