41–50 of 88 posts
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I did consider, but I bet that the solution would feel like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Even if I use Arch Linux, I want to be sure the hardware is working
How? Thinkpads are Intel reference designs with a plastic black case, and Macbooks are Intel reference designs with an aluminium case.
You bought a new computer because of a fan error?! You could have got a new fan with next day delivery (so Tuesday in your case) for a hell of a lot less than a new computer and all the time it took you to get OS X setup how you want. Or do you earn such crazy amounts of money that you made enough money on that Monday to cover the cost of the new Mac and your time configuring it?
I see you found SizeUp. That's also my application of choice. But it doesn't look like you did a lot of research into the available choices, or at least didn't bother listing them. Here's but a handful, for others who are interested: ShiftIt: https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt TileWindows: http://www.carsten-mielke.com/tilewindows.html Mercury Mover: http://www.heliumfoot.com/mercurymover/ ... Or if you like mouse c…
http://spectacleapp.com/ https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle
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No thunderbolt support, for one, so you can't use the beautiful 27" external monitor. The nVidia/ATI drivers on Linux aren't nearly as good, either.
The nVidia/ATI drivers on Linux aren't nearly as good, either. In what way?
Second, they do all sorts of stupid non-standard stuff, so you can't use KMS, a framebuffer or xrandr[1]. The GUI application for managing monitors sucks balls and isn't scriptable. I happen to use some older monitors, and that gives me all sorts of pains, too.
To be somewhat fair, it used to be even worse. But it's still nowhere near decent, and will never be unless they open the specs and release the source for the drivers.
In the future, I will exclusively use Intel Graphics. While they aren't perfect either (from what I could gather), at least the drivers are open, which already places them light-years ahead of nvidia and ATI. For the record, my netbook never had a single graphics-related problem, while I lost count of how often I cursed nvidia for their shitty drivers on my desktop.
[1] Support was apparently added to the current beta, but I haven't tried it yet.
Disclosure: I'm a dmenu developer.
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I really love Arch, but for me the reason it's segregated to a VM is: - power management: Linux does not hold a candle to OSX (which is able to shutdown entire components like soundcard, webcam dynamically when not in use) - Lion's external display+lid+sleep behavior: external screen+AC power makes lid-close sleep inoperant, so I can just plug both lid closed and my laptop wakes up to be a desktop (bluetooth input de…
The Linux kernel is capable of commanding individual devices to power off. Run powertop and it will show you what's using power and offer to turn it off. My experience with Thinkpads (from two or three years ago) is that running Windows gives you about 10 hours of battery life while doing essentially nothing, while running Linux gives you 8 hours. Both are so high that it doesn't really matter. My X220 has never run…
Oh I perfectly know that, the problem is that it's manual. With OSX I play a song, soundcard comes alive from its powered off state and plays sound, song stops, soundcard powers down after a little idle timeout. The same goes for the webcam, ethernet board and various other components. With Linux I have to either write some suboptimal wrappers to programs to kick devices in or out, or do it manually, or sacrifice battery life.
Comparing battery life, Linux is two~three full hours behind OSX out of seven~eight (after thorough analysis involving powertop1/2). That's a 30% drop and brings me to almost a day to a little more than half a day of work per cycle. Well, it was so a year ago, because now my battery has crossed the 600 cycle count bar so it holds an hour less. And don't start telling me "oh that was a year ago, Linux has improved on that front since then", since OSX improved in that area too (I've looked at hard data battery metrics).
> For your second point, just explicitly command your computer to do what you want. If you want it to go to sleep, type "acpitool -s". If you don't want it to go to sleep, don't type that.
You're missing the point, I perfectly know that too.
Find me a single PC that can do this:
1) asleep with lid closed, you plug in an external screen and if you're on AC power the computer wakes up and makes the external screen primary, else it does not even wake up and stays asleep.
2) awake with lid closed, AC and screen plugged in, you plug out external screen or AC power and the computer goes to sleep
3) awake with lid closed, AC and screen plugged in, you open the lid and it becomes primary while external screen becomes secondary.
4) awake with lid open, AC doesn't matter but you plug in an external screen and this one becomes secondary, retains its specific configuration including relative position, wallpapers, resolution and color calibration settings from previous times per external screen device.
I've written my own extendable acpid handler in Python to achieve various schemes, react to complex events, and take complex actions. I know exactly how to do 2, 3 and 4, and I know exactly how much hackery and time is needed to achieve this, and it's not really reliable in the end. As for 1 it might as well be downright impossible.
> My X220 has never run out of battery, and I fly a lot and don't really plug my laptop in at home, so 8 hours is apparently enough.
As I said my battery is getting past middle-aged and the more minutes, the happier. Also you can consider not only "instant" battery life (i.e time it takes to go from full to empty) but long-term battery life (time it takes before the battery is a complete brick): the longer the cycles, the less wear it takes, so the longer it lasts before going to the trash.
> If you like OS X
I do :-)
If only Lion's "full-screen" would really be a chrome-less tiling window manager I'd be completely happy. Things, like Window Magnet, fullscreen Terminal.app and tmux help a lot though.
(plus ignorant/simplistic: it's not like everything else related to one's OS use and needs will be the same).
I use Arch + Xmonad at work and I simply love it as the OP does. Sometimes I need to work from home and I don't want to keep two laptops here, so I need to use my old 2008 unibody Macbook. Working in OSX with Vim and console is painful after the Linux experience. Installing lots of utilities might help, but I chose to install Ubuntu with Xmonad and after couple of hours I had my favorite environment ready for product…
I haven't used XMonad but I've been a heavy ion3 user for many years. Last I checked none of the available bolt-ons (including Sizeup which the author proposes) would come anywhere near a true tiling WM. The only candidate that would even try to automatically tile windows was TylerWM - but that was buggy as hell. All the others only act on keyboard-shortcuts, which largely defeats the purpose. I'd happily pay $200+ f…
I use Arch + Xmonad at work and I simply love it as the OP does. Sometimes I need to work from home and I don't want to keep two laptops here, so I need to use my old 2008 unibody Macbook. Working in OSX with Vim and console is painful after the Linux experience. Installing lots of utilities might help, but I chose to install Ubuntu with Xmonad and after couple of hours I had my favorite environment ready for product…
Thinkpad. Great build quality, Linux friendly.
What model is preferable nowadays? There are not lots of shops to test them at least in Berlin. I want 13" and lightweight, but still powerful enough laptop. Lots of ram, i7 CPU and a SSD disk. The most important thing is an excellent keyboard and touchpad. I heard Lenovo is not using the old and excellent keyboard in their laptops anymore and I haven't tested the new one yet.