61–70 of 251 posts
Zero issues so far and I have all the benefits of Apple hardware
The title for this blog post should be "I Miss BSD/Linux for Apple devices". Unsurprisingly, if you buy hardware from one of the most FLOSS hostile hardware manufacturers in existence, your BSD/Linux experience will not be great. > Why doesn’t a great MacBook alternative exist? I really don't understand this question. Is the author seriously suggesting that MacBooks are objectively the best laptops for any use case a…
Around Windows 7 timeframe, I came to peace with FOSS UNIX clones never going to be as mature as proprietary OSes on laptops. Sure, the situation has improved a lot, but they still require compromises of not having everything supported like on desktop PCs, even when buying from Linux OEMs, my experience hasn't been that great. For a brief period, netbooks seemed to be on track, but then they suffered multiple attacks…
I think the situation is a whole lot different since the days of Windows 7. The biggest change is that Windows just stopped caring. The UI is inconsistent and messy. It ceased to be an improvement over Linux a long time ago. Crapware is also another problem. Windows had this problem since the 90s, but it's now worse with Microsoft itself pushing for them. It's the only major desktop operating system to have this prob…
Around Windows 7 timeframe, I came to peace with FOSS UNIX clones never going to be as mature as proprietary OSes on laptops. Sure, the situation has improved a lot, but they still require compromises of not having everything supported like on desktop PCs, even when buying from Linux OEMs, my experience hasn't been that great. For a brief period, netbooks seemed to be on track, but then they suffered multiple attacks…
I think the situation is a whole lot different since the days of Windows 7. The biggest change is that Windows just stopped caring. The UI is inconsistent and messy. It ceased to be an improvement over Linux a long time ago. Crapware is also another problem. Windows had this problem since the 90s, but it's now worse with Microsoft itself pushing for them. It's the only major desktop operating system to have this prob…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Each year I spend close to zero hours dealing with edge case bugs and incompatibilities in Linux and BSD despite all of my personal devices running one form of FOSS OS or another. My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up than macOS would have, but it’s been just as rock solid since. In fact, perhaps ironically, I’ve had more problems with my work MacBook Pro than I have with my personal…
Sorry, but this is still true IMO. For example no good driver is available for the GTX 1080 which will result in a buggy experience. Not even talking about software availability and functionalities. I have had other issues, but anyways I don't want to list them all. I also find it misleading to claim that Arch Linux is "rock solid", just look at the news to see the amount of "manual intervention needed" listed. I lov…
Yeah homebrew exists on macOSbut it’s not part of the base install, let alone official Apple product. The App Store on both Mac and Windows sucks. Not just in the availability of software but also even just raw install performance (they’re slower than pacman + Arch mirrors). Worse still, Windows and macOS still normalise googling for software and then manually downloading and installing it.
So if Arch isn’t “rock solid” because every 6 months or so (though, honestly, it's been more like once every 3 years for me) you need to be slightly more careful doing a full system update, then Windows and macOS are positively primitive by your same benchmark.
To be clear, I’m not a Linux fanboy by any measure, but it’s literally the concept of package management that pushed me towards modern distributions like SuSE and Arch and one of the biggest annoyances I have with Windows and macOS.
After running Linux (plain, crappy boring Ubuntu) as my daily driver for the last few years, I'm convinced that we're at the point where the only real barrier to wider adoption is software, and this is less and less of an issue the more we work in the browser. For your basic user, it's performant, simple, stable, and does everything a computer needs. Every time I boot up Windows it takes forever, I find that a new up…
This really comes down to this.
If you can stabilize what you need, inevitably linux will catch up to where you are and you're set.
If it's an always moving goalpost, the year of Linux on the desktop will always be next year, eternally.
After running Linux (plain, crappy boring Ubuntu) as my daily driver for the last few years, I'm convinced that we're at the point where the only real barrier to wider adoption is software, and this is less and less of an issue the more we work in the browser. For your basic user, it's performant, simple, stable, and does everything a computer needs. Every time I boot up Windows it takes forever, I find that a new up…
Which translates to the other problem that is battery life on laptops. I did a fairly simple test recently that basically opens Reddit main page in Firefox & Chrome and then scrolls it slowly until battery dies. Running on the same exact hardware - Thinkpad T14s AMD gen4 - the battery life was reduced by 30% on Linux with default settings (= no hardware acceleration in either browser). Manually enabling it means that test cannot complete at all because both browsers randomly crash.
And then you look at battery life vs an ARM MacBook, and it's not even funny.
(The page isn’t accessible from Turkey. I had to enable VPN to read the article) As I understand, the author’s main motive to try alternative operating systems is his frustration with mainstream operating systems, a lack of control and understanding so the speak. The fallacy of that is that instead of encountering a few significant problems with a mainstream OS, now the author has to experience a death by thousand cu…
There are frustrations on Linux, but there's also a lot of development where its Windows or macOS that gives "death by a thousand cuts" so there are definitely reasons for you to pick that over Windows or macOS - even with WSL2. Having to forward hardware over HyperV can give a lot of headaches. Windows machines infected by corporate also have crippling I/O speeds. I have a fun example at a customer where even runnin…
The title for this blog post should be "I Miss BSD/Linux for Apple devices". Unsurprisingly, if you buy hardware from one of the most FLOSS hostile hardware manufacturers in existence, your BSD/Linux experience will not be great. > Why doesn’t a great MacBook alternative exist? I really don't understand this question. Is the author seriously suggesting that MacBooks are objectively the best laptops for any use case a…
Main two things for me that (in my opinion) Apple does better than others are 1) excellent trackpad and 2) no air vents at the bottom of the laptop. With those two things I find MacBooks to be very usable on your lap, like for example in trains, airports, or even in an outdoor chair.