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I Miss BSD/Linux

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Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#71

Post by dmz73 »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #39
bitsandboots wrote: post #36

I feel the author's grief over lack of time, but it has lead me to very different solutions. All around the idea of the OS should not interrupt, should not change rapidly, and my interaction with programs should not be much different from OS to OS. At work, I opted for a mac due to how terrible the windows options were. But macos itself fought me all the way so the way to be happy at work was to replace finder, to re…

> Debian: something I can trust, that gets out of my way, and changes slowly. Wholeheartedly agree. Debian has won the distro wars in my opinion. Their massive effort in safety and not breaking things means I can use stable as a "it just works" tool and focus on my actual work/fun.

Unfortunately, Debian is like Linux on desktop, always 80% there. You just cannot trust that plain Debian will get it right, even if it works that one time you install it. Two most recent issues that made me change to something else: 1) VLC in Debian is modified so it cannot play RTSP streams so you cannot watch video from your security camera. Windows VLC wroks. Flatpak VLC works. 2) Debian kernel update in point release broke NVIDIA driver so you cannot even see your desktop. Debian STABLE is just Linux kernel with old software. If it doesn't work now then it will definitely not work for next 2 years and if it does work now it can break at any time. All other Linux distros are not much better. Every update has 50% chance of breaking some software from distro repository but at least other distros fix their f-ups faster than Debian.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#72

Post by adamomada »

hnarn wrote: post #40

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…

Have a search in this very thread for “laptop manufacturers just don’t care”. To me Apple seems to be the last one to give a shit

So, why doesn’t a great MacBook alternative exist? It’s a valid question.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#73

Post by TheRoque »

hnlmorg wrote: post #66
TheRoque wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

“Manual intervention” in ArchLinux is just where you need to do something in a specific order during a system update. It takes all of about 30 seconds to do and is still a hell of a lot easier than having to install software on Windows and macOS. 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 availabili…

Package management in most Linux distro is a bliss, this I 100% agree on.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#74

Post by p0w3n3d »

It seems that there is now a HUGE problem with PDF support under Linux. Since Adobe stopped shipping acrobat reader to Linux, to get official support one needs to run Acrobat using Wine. That's horrible, and really discouraging to any person who works within a larger organisation that uses PDF.

On the other side is the MacOS that has Preview which gives extensive possibilities to annotate and highlight PDF documents even if they are scans containing only jpgs inside.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#75

Post by sumuyuda »

Philpax wrote: post #49
hnarn wrote: post #40

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…

The Apple Silicon MacBooks are very, very good. They're efficient, fast, well-built, have great peripherals, don't power themselves back on when you close the lid, and are generally the best laptops I have ever used. The worst part of them is macOS, and I hope that either Asahi Linux can get all of the hardware working correctly or the other laptop manufacturers can get their act together. Unfortunately, I suspect th…

There’s still no USB-A support, so the dongle book was never truly fixed.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#76

Post by petepete »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #74

It seems that there is now a HUGE problem with PDF support under Linux. Since Adobe stopped shipping acrobat reader to Linux, to get official support one needs to run Acrobat using Wine. That's horrible, and really discouraging to any person who works within a larger organisation that uses PDF. On the other side is the MacOS that has Preview which gives extensive possibilities to annotate and highlight PDF documents…

I annotate and higlight text all the time with GNOME's document viewer. It works so well I hadn't even considered people might find it problematic.

https://apps.gnome.org/en-GB/Evince/

I realise it probably doesn't support some 'fancy' PDF stuff like signatures, but I don't use them.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#77

Post by jmclnx »

pjmlp wrote: post #16

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…

>Around Windows 7 timeframe, I came to peace with FOSS UNIX clones never going to be as mature as proprietary OSes on laptops

What does mature mean ? Unless you mean an entertainment or gaming device, I find for real computing, Linux/BSD is 100x better than Windows or MACs.

For entertainment a TV, Cell Phone, tablet is a better choice.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#78

Post by Ferret7446 »

thrownawayjests wrote: post #53

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…

Hence the existence of Chrome OS.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#79

Post by srazzaque »

bitsandboots wrote: post #36

I feel the author's grief over lack of time, but it has lead me to very different solutions. All around the idea of the OS should not interrupt, should not change rapidly, and my interaction with programs should not be much different from OS to OS. At work, I opted for a mac due to how terrible the windows options were. But macos itself fought me all the way so the way to be happy at work was to replace finder, to re…

> At home, I no longer dual-boot because I vm.

Curious, do you have a Windows host and Linux guest(s)? Or the other way around?

I currently have Linux as my primary with a Windows guest OS for when I need it (e.g. Office - I actually think Excel is great - or if I'm doing any Win32/C++ dev). But, I'm thinking of doing it the other way around on my next PC.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#80

Post by sshine »

cue_the_strings wrote: post #52
sshine wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Each year I spend close to zero hours > My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up I think the honest way to calculate maintenance time is to amortise setup time over the years your laptop is in active duty. That becomes like at least five hours per year for me. My Linux installations usually live for 2-3 years, and ArchLinux typically takes 1-2 evenings to set up: Partly because I enjo…

I set up my Arch install on my machine in 2015 and it took me a couple of days. That OS install has seen 5 SSDs so far, and 4 machines. My secret? I only buy hardware that's known to work well with Linux, mostly thinkpads, and I really don't do anything on the machine beyond coding and web browsing + some light CAD, so I never get anything with GPUs.

I use the same strategy, but I only copy dotfiles.

I think setup can be automated further.

My latest thinkpad had a GPU.

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