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

Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

dywypi.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 334 posts

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#231

Post by rbanffy »

taylorbuley wrote: post #190
mackal wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kubuntu isn't on death watch, there was one person being paid to work on it, the rest was community support. The last version he didn't even work on (he was off working on bazaar or something) If Kubuntu does die it will be at least like 3 releases out.

Canonical recently stopped funding Kubuntu: http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/canonical-to-stop-funding...

If you read the article you posted, you'll know "stopped funding Kubuntu" means Canonical "has paid for developer Jonathan Riddell to spend the last seven years working on Kubuntu" and will ask him to do something else after 12.04. He already wasn't fully dedicated to Kubuntu for a year or so.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#232

Post by sounds »

Craiggybear wrote: post #176
daedalus_j wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because you're using 10.5, last of the great OS-X's. Performance requirements went up in 10.6 and WAY up in 10.7. I have an old MBPro running 10.5 and it consistently feels faster (and is provably far more stable) than my new model work machine running 10.7

Really? Glad in many ways I am still using 10.5 then. I've no problem with stability. As you mention it seems quite rock solid. I had no idea that the memory requirement for 10.6 or 10.7 was so high (I've heard anecdotal comments from non-tech friends). But then I'd also heard the official Apple line that 10.6 was meant to be better at memory management and slightly faster than 10.5 because the binaries were no longe…

10.6 adds a lot of new frameworks, which get loaded by Apple's apps, so memory usage goes up.

10.6 does free up disk space (but that's not as useful as memory).

Obligatory: I also went back to 10.5 after spending some time on 10.6, fwiw.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#234

Post by ohgodthecat »

rbanffy wrote: post #226
zbuc wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who uses both Linux(most familiar with Fedora and Ubuntu) and OS X regularly I have to say I completely disagree with you. My Linux systems are always a headache. Last week I pulled a recommended patch from the system updater and it broke Xorg. I had to remove it by hand and reinstall it.

The last time my X broke was a couple years back. Ubuntu pushed a defective update. Before that, the last time something like that happened was when I was using Debian Sid. Breaking X is something you expect with Sid. And if you are running it, you re supposed to be able to fix it and submit a patch. If you are breaking X, you are doing something wrong.

I think it probably depends on the distro, I've had quite a few systems break on Arch because I didn't read update warnings on the Arch Linux website after they had pushed a bad update.

Tangentially that is why I moved to xubuntu from Arch, though I'm sure Arch is a bit nicer with regards to headaches now.

Fedora likes to break frequently though I don't know if packages as big as X are likely to fall through the cracks.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#235

Post by paxswill »

jonhohle wrote: post #179
semanticist wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Apple don't provide these package management tools, volunteering third-parties do. Apple are never going to provide Linux-style package management tools because the market for them is minuscule compared to Apple's real market: normal people. For normal people, there's the App Store.

It may not have started out that way (but it may have, I'm not sure), but MacPorts is an Apple hosted project: http://www.macosforge.org/ What they don't host is the source or compiled versions of any of the packages in the MacPorts repository - potentially for the same reason they include no GPLv3 software in their OS.

In some cases, they do. This is especially apparent if you're still using MacPort with PPC, as most of the packages it pulls down are form the MacPorts servers.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#236

Post by nona »

2mur wrote: post #166
seclorum wrote: post #15

After two decades of Unix use, in 2000 I switched to Apple and OSX - the only reason I considered it was because of the design of the Titanium Powerbook, which I saw in those days as an amazing piece of hardware design, which - amazingly - gave me a Unix workstation in a fantastic portable package. I simply couldn't believe that Apple, of all people, were delivering what I'd wanted for years - a smart, functional, fu…

How is the power management of Ubuntu on the Macbook and does close-lid-to-sleep work flawlessly? Those are the two non-starters for me with linux on a laptop. OSX just does an awesome job with both of these.

Works for me on Debian. Battery life is somewhat shorter, but not to the point that it bothers me.

That said, it took a few kernel iterations before every last bit of hardware was fully supported.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#237

Post by brown9-2 »

Flow wrote: post #207
brown9-2 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And since MacPorts installs everything in a separate directory from system tools/libraries, how could it screw anything up? Like Homebrew it never installs anything outside of it's home.

But what is your point? I never meant this to be a MacPorts vs HomeBrew discussion, I've only used HomeBrew. Being downvoted I'm obviously missing something. Care to let me know what it is instead of just downvoting me?

I'm agreeing with you, and also curious how HomeBrew and MacPorts could have screwed up any geek's laptop.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#238

Post by blktiger »

4ad wrote: post #104
jakobe wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open activity monitor, and check which applications use a lot of memory. (Look at the "Real Mem" column). If your computer frequently freezes, the problem is mostly a specific application (Virtualbox comes to mind), not just Mac OS X itself. 4GB are more than enough for casual browsing.

Activity Monitor is a tool too blunt for these kind of scenarios. It pains me, Mac OS X has DTrace which makes it a breeze to find out what really happens, however, the only GUI tools built on top of DTrace are profiler for programmers, nothing for the casual user. Activity Monitor presents data that's not really useful and does so in an intrusive manner and in a confusing display. Mac OS X already comes with parts o…

Activity Monitor is way older than DTrace and I don't think Apple has made any code changes to it in a long time.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#239

Post by Derbasti »

esusatyo wrote: post #31
Derbasti wrote: post #9

I have been a Mac user for the last four years. I used to really like it, everything was stable and polished and just worked really well. But in the last few months, things started falling apart. My computer would freeze every few days, syncing would destroy parts of my data, the iPhone would crash every now and then, there would be weird random glitches... I'm certainly not ready to abandon ship yet, but I can see i…

May I ask if you've upgraded to Lion a few months ago? My 4 years old Macbook was not as bad as you described, but it does become a lot less stable than when it was under Snow Leopard. Even Safari does not work properly in Lion. Snow Leopard was truly very stable, it's the best major version of OS X that I've used. I hope the minor OS X updates will fix out all of the Lion bugs.

Well, if I remember correctly, all that stuff did not happen to me when I upgraded to Snow Leopard. That's really all I'm saying.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#240

Post by blinkingled »

jgw wrote: post #228
eropple wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I used to do Java development in eclipse/netbeans with db, ide and appserv all running on one machine that had 2GB and I never had any issues... memory hogs hello. This matches my own experience pretty well. I have a MBP with 8GB of RAM and a Linux box with 16GB of RAM at work for Java development, but that's because our Java web app at work requires 7GB+ (!) to get off the ground. Most of my own personal devel…

I'm rather off-topic, but your monitor resolution comment made me smile. I'm currently trying to squeeze the last dying days out of my 15.4" Dell Latitude D810 with its expansive 1920x1200 native res. It's a 7 year old machine, but I can't stand the thought of losing it, because the only laptop I know of with that resolution today is the massive MBP 17". 16x10 aspect ratio is pretty much a thing of the past now. It's…

HP Elitebook 8560w comes close - it is bulky and thick but I am not sure if you need to move it a lot or not. If not then you might like it.
Post reply on HN