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Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

shkspr.mobi

681–690 of 740 posts

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#681
post #88

I'll add some to the list: - Control external monitor sound volume. There are buggy paid and open source solutions, but they all trigger all kind of bugs with sound and macOS itself. - Capture game audio with OBS together with microphone input. - Being able to wait for files to copy and work Finder at the same time. Yeah I could find replacement for Finder, but why the hell? - Use Valve Proton. Yeah, Linux is great t…

Wrt audio: What any pulseaudio or pipewire-based desktop can do, is to route streams from separate applications to separate devices. You can have one application playing into your headphones, second into your speakers and third streaming over bluetooth to your soundbar. Never managed to do anything similar with Mac (also I never explored any 3rd-party apps to do it, they might exist, but with PA/Pipewire, it is built…

I do this with a paid app called Loopback https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#682
post #306

I'm always amazed at how many little third party utilities or programs people recommend downloading or buying just to bring the desktop experience on macOS up to parity with Linux (or even Windows!). The lack of snapping/tiling at this point is just a deliberately malicious decision. I can't fathom why they will not implement some version of this better than that half-hearted split screen view that requires a separat…

Mac users eagerly recommend importing Linux tools (Docker, Brew) to make MacOS a tolerable dev environment. But they completely miss the fact that Apple makes it illegal to do the reverse: I can not run a MacOS VM on Linux. I can't understand the mindset that makes that kind of company behavior acceptable or the tradeoff worth it.

I didn’t know Homebrew was so successful on Linux that someone would think it’s a Linux tool; that surprised me

(Homebrew started on Mac OS X)

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No way to fullscreen a window without moving it into a separate workspace. One of the reasons why I almost never use the full screen feature. You can click on the full screen button on the too left-hand corner of each window whilst holding Option, I think that’s the closest you can do out-of-the box. You can assign a keyboard shortcut for this very easily (seriously, the way we can define keyboard shortcuts for alm…

I do use magnet. But something I do want something to be truly fullscreen (no menubar or anything else visible), but without being on another workspace. I think the most common use case for this is with videos. I often want to fullscreen a video, but still be able to quickly switch between windows so that I can for example reply to a message. Note that with any non-fullscreen window I can continue to see live updates…

Try exiting full-screen in the video player (green button) back to windowed mode and then double clicking the title bar. It’s not full, full-screen, but it’s the largest window you can get.

I’m still not sure why you can’t switch between applications even if they aren’t on the same workspace though. Cmd tab, Cmd tab takes me from a full-screen video to the last app on a separate workspace, and right back to the video.

And if you want to see other apps at the same time as the video, no wonder full-screen gets in the way.

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#684
post #392
post #306

I'm always amazed at how many little third party utilities or programs people recommend downloading or buying just to bring the desktop experience on macOS up to parity with Linux (or even Windows!). The lack of snapping/tiling at this point is just a deliberately malicious decision. I can't fathom why they will not implement some version of this better than that half-hearted split screen view that requires a separat…

The catch is, with enough 3rd party apps MacOS can do all that stuff but no amount of 3rd party apps and utilities can make Ubuntu match the MacOS experience. To match macOS on Ubuntu you will need a full time Linux guru as PA to smooth things out for your. You will need another one for the after hours. Therefore, Ubuntu is great for really rich people or people who need that one thing that Ubuntu excels at and nothi…

Different strokes for different folks. I run a pretty vanilla Ubuntu on a desktop at home, and macOS on an M1 laptop at work. The out of the box experience on Ubuntu / Gnome these days feels better to me for the things I do: web browser, terminal, emacs, and perhaps an unfair addition-Steam games.

The macOS experience out of the box turns out to be pretty rough in some places, and is untweakable. I recently gave up on my ergonomic trackball and bought a generic mouse because making the scroll buttons work in macOS was impossible.

I took a long hiatus from Linux to run exclusively macOS until just a few years ago, then I started running a mix again. If I have to run a laptop, nobody beats Apple on hardware. But macOS is the price I pay to have a portable that gets good battery life. It's a compromise. By contrast, if I could had a permanent desk at work that I could have a desktop computer at, I'd much prefer that.

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal laptop is a mac os, and agree with some of the criticism. However, stability-wise, it has been rock-solid. I also manage my own Ubuntu desktop for work, and had to reinstall the system 3 times from scratch because it magically stopped working. In the end it turned out to be something with a new kernel, but it took me, dunno, 2 days to debug.

I don't know what I have to do to get the sublime desktop experience that macOS is famous for... My work-issued Macbook Pro regularly forgets which monitor (my external monitor or the built-in display) is the primary monitor and moves the dock and task bar between them seemingly at random. My mouse sensitivity is cranked all the way up but my mouse still feels like it's mired in tar compared to my Windows and Linux m…

The three finger swipe up (“mission control”) reveals the hidden dock if you need to see it or use it

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#686

2 of these 3 things, I have done multiple times on a Mac. Mounting NFS is natively supported in macOS and has been for nearly a decade. Mounting SSH is supported by 3rd-party tools, yes, but they're the same cross-platform 3rd-party tool you'd use in Linux... sshfs, which is built on top of FUSE, which is something you can install on a Mac and is not installed by default in most Linux distributions (although fair eno…

> Mounting NFS is natively supported in macOS

In the version I was using, mount-readonly yes, mount-readwrite no. Had to install Mounty for readwrite.

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#687

Before using a Mac I was told how glorious it was and a feat of engineering. Reality is that the Mac and associated products are not as perfect as Apple fans make it out to be. The window manager on Mac makes me want to scream. Navigating the file system in Finder is not intuitive and don't get me started on the Magic Mouse and it's charging port...

My mainboard on my MBP died twice; replaced the first time but it's too expensive to replace again.

The touchpad started to drift and the clicking mechanism started to go wonky.

In short, I think the MBP is pretty solid, but if you get a lemon build version, you're stuck with it.

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#688
post #467

I switched from Linux Mint desktop to an M1 Air last year. Performance-wise, the M1 is very impressive, probably feels about 80% as fast as my 6 year old desktop (that sounds like snark, but it isn't). Meanwhile, the battery life is insane (I've never brought the charger anywhere but my desk, and will often use it for a week out and about). I opted for the Magic Keyboard and Magic Touchpad, because I had a lot of tro…

>Also, the fact that everything I want to tweak requires buying an app? I find this is often the case with MacOS, sometimes with open alternatives available. I wanted windows/linux like window snapping and found a free solution called Rectangle[0], but discovered however they do it was causing mouse lag in games. Apple dev friend investigated into it with logs from my machine and discovered they are "just not doing i…

why wouldn’t closing the rectangle before launching game be the solution?

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#689
post #467

I switched from Linux Mint desktop to an M1 Air last year. Performance-wise, the M1 is very impressive, probably feels about 80% as fast as my 6 year old desktop (that sounds like snark, but it isn't). Meanwhile, the battery life is insane (I've never brought the charger anywhere but my desk, and will often use it for a week out and about). I opted for the Magic Keyboard and Magic Touchpad, because I had a lot of tro…

The mouse acceleration curve on Mac drives me insane. There is a way to set it to "0" with some command line incantation, but it still does not set it to 0. Also, the fact that I can't independently control the scroll direction of mice and trackpads is insane to me. The whole selling point of Apple is that "it just works" , but I can't even get my mouse working properly! That's like the lowest bar for an OS.

That’s interesting, may be that’s why I feel it strange when operating a mouse on Windows/Linux?

Are there links to this acceleration? Thanks.

Re: Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

#690
post #551
post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and macOS has good MS Office support. This. I get the M1 must be very good but what I really want is something I doubt I'm going to get: native Office support in Linux. I use Office rarely but on those rare occasions it sucks to use Office 365.

WSL gives you all the *nix bits of Ubuntu and native MS Office support.

But the kernel is wrong. I kind of buy this philosophically until I tried it. It just feels like you put the the wrong person in control, while all the time you really want to deal with another.
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