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Thanks Mr. Jobs, But it Seems I Can Use a Linux Laptop Now

blog.hypergeometric.com

21–30 of 177 posts

Re: Thanks Mr. Jobs, But it Seems I Can Use a Linux Laptop Now

#22

Can someone explain to me what exactly is wrong with the OS X terminal?

One thing I don't like is you can't completely clear the scrollback, only the visible portion. I often use 'tput reset' when doing new build/test runs and it is nice when the scrollback only contains this time's output.

Cmd + k clears scrollback how you want. If you want to script it, you can use osascript: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/31872/how-do-i-rese... Yeah, it's hacky.

It's a usability trade-off. Defaulting to allow scripts to erase all your scrollback would be pretty annoying in a lot of cases. Ideally there would be a checkbox for this behavior, but Apple doesn't like config options.

One thing I wish terminals had was a "scroll up to the last place I typed something." I think that would solve your problem as well.

Re: Thanks Mr. Jobs, But it Seems I Can Use a Linux Laptop Now

#23

Can someone explain to me what exactly is wrong with the OS X terminal?

It's been a while since I used it, but off the top of my head: - colors never worked right, you can certainly enable them but themes like solarized are impossible to get working. - it took forever to open. as in, a terminal on my machine is just a keypress away and it took the terminal on my osx machine a couple seconds to open a window, and even longer to show me a prompt - somehow they borked mouse input, so clicki…

Might i suggest trying iterm 2

http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home

Re: Thanks Mr. Jobs, But it Seems I Can Use a Linux Laptop Now

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a while since I used it, but off the top of my head: - colors never worked right, you can certainly enable them but themes like solarized are impossible to get working. - it took forever to open. as in, a terminal on my machine is just a keypress away and it took the terminal on my osx machine a couple seconds to open a window, and even longer to show me a prompt - somehow they borked mouse input, so clicki…

Hmm I faced some of the same problems: - Colors work perfect with the tomorrow theme, kinda similar to solarized ( https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-theme/tree/master/O... ) - I think I changed my shell to /bin/bash in the preferences, which fixed it - Haven't encountered this - Haven't encountered this

Might i suggest trying iterm 2

http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home

Re: Thanks Mr. Jobs, But it Seems I Can Use a Linux Laptop Now

#25
post #17

1. What's the battery life like? 2. Are all devices supported with drivers - Bluetooth, 3D, graphics, sleep/wake, 802.11n, webcam, internal mike, ... 3. Does it do instant sleep/wake like a Mac - 100s of times without crashing/rebooting? 4. How does it handle external displays? Plug and play like a Mac? Does it handle display rotate? The internal display is only 1366x768 ? 5. Does it detect a headphone and switch fro…

1). Depends on ACPI support

2). Depends on the hardware, but surprisingly yes. Even the free Nouveau drivers do pretty decent 3d support.

3). Yep, configure it to suspend on closing the lid.

4). Depends on the wm you want.

5). Usually yes.

6). Pretty good, in fact you can enable the two finger scroll pretty easily.

7). More configurable.

If you are considering a switch, I'd recommend installing Fedora or Ubuntu, they usually have pretty amazing defaults. However, if you are considering this using a Macbook/Mac, be prepared for a lot more effort.

Re: Thanks Mr. Jobs, But it Seems I Can Use a Linux Laptop Now

#26

Can someone explain to me what exactly is wrong with the OS X terminal?

For me it was a combination of things. For one, I use emacs and a Norwegian keyboard layout, and Apple handily ensures that '\' is only possible to type using both shift, option and 7. Now, since I'm an emacs user, typing meta+\ should mean command+option+shift+7. As if that wasn't bad enough, I never found a way to configure neither Terminal.app nor iTerm2 or whatever it's called such that I could get both option functionality and a meta key (perhaps this has been fixed later? been a couple years), so when ssh-ing I had to use esc, then option+shift+7.

Combine this with how difficult it is to get a real dev environment set up, on debian-based systems you just apt-get install build-essential etc., similarly on Arch Linux, whereas on a Mac it was installing that whole XCode from a CD which included a bunch of stuff I never needed, then waiting for hours for macports to compile gcc etc. (I never understood why macports didn't go with precompiled binaries, mac's are so uniform compared to linuxes it should be _easier_, shouldn't it?). And then waiting for hours every time gcc etc. got an update, thinking "I thought I did this already, what is this, gentoo?" And the annoyance of having to install GNU sed and ensure it was before OS X sed in PATH because OS X sed was horribly slow on certain regexes (I think they had a \1 in them, can't remember), it felt so … inelegant.

And most of the projects I use and like working on just seemed to have better Linux support; of course I could rant about how OS X is a POSIX too and they should support it just as well as Linux, but, well, I chose convenience. For the sake of my fingers and my patience.

Re: Thanks Mr. Jobs, But it Seems I Can Use a Linux Laptop Now

#28
post #17

1. What's the battery life like? 2. Are all devices supported with drivers - Bluetooth, 3D, graphics, sleep/wake, 802.11n, webcam, internal mike, ... 3. Does it do instant sleep/wake like a Mac - 100s of times without crashing/rebooting? 4. How does it handle external displays? Plug and play like a Mac? Does it handle display rotate? The internal display is only 1366x768 ? 5. Does it detect a headphone and switch fro…

1). Depends on ACPI support 2). Depends on the hardware, but surprisingly yes. Even the free Nouveau drivers do pretty decent 3d support. 3). Yep, configure it to suspend on closing the lid. 4). Depends on the wm you want. 5). Usually yes. 6). Pretty good, in fact you can enable the two finger scroll pretty easily. 7). More configurable. If you are considering a switch, I'd recommend installing Fedora or Ubuntu, they…

Actually - no offense - I'm looking for specific info on the drivers on this system than a generic response. I've heard far too often 'depends on driver/acpi support' to go down that road again :)

Which specific system are you basing your answers on? Can you be more specific on (6) - how many points does the multitouch support?

Re: Thanks Mr. Jobs, But it Seems I Can Use a Linux Laptop Now

#29
post #17

1. What's the battery life like? 2. Are all devices supported with drivers - Bluetooth, 3D, graphics, sleep/wake, 802.11n, webcam, internal mike, ... 3. Does it do instant sleep/wake like a Mac - 100s of times without crashing/rebooting? 4. How does it handle external displays? Plug and play like a Mac? Does it handle display rotate? The internal display is only 1366x768 ? 5. Does it detect a headphone and switch fro…

Look at the new Lenovo Carbon X1 - from what I've heard it pretty much ticks all of those boxes.

Re: Thanks Mr. Jobs, But it Seems I Can Use a Linux Laptop Now

#30
post #11

Why are people voting up this article? There is nothing interesting in it. I'm genuinely curious about what people are finding interesting here.

agreed. the guy barely even mentions why he decided to move to linux, just that he did. or do people just like the sentiment?
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