You are right, from now on, I will not mind that running Linux on a laptop drains the battery in less than an hour but will instead appreciate the fact that it has MN103 CPU architecture support.
/s
Linux has better hardware support than OS X
31–40 of 218 posts
Re: Linux has better hardware support than OS X
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having been away from the Windows world for so long, I'm curious just how different it actually is. Sure, there are obvious choices for business use in many fields. Even Office is a somewhat obvious choice for most places. However, as a standard consumer, it is much too expensive to "just have." And, really, finding the correct software to just "make a greeting card" or something similar is terrible. Then there is th…
Printing on Windows is so bad that people are employed just to fix it. Office crashes a lot and has compatibility issues with certain formats, and I often just direct people to LibreOffice, which in every case has fixed the problem and run smoothly. Any minor Windows system problem usually results in sending the machine to be re-imaged. If you're on Windows 8, a lot of old stuff simply doesn't work, and in the absenc…
I call bullshit.
I've worked for a couple of printing outfits and Windows has by far been the most reliable bar some big ass Xerox machines with PostScript processing and a Sun workstation tied to it. Fuck, the most unreliable so far has been the PDF rendering engine inside OSX which sometimes just whacks the CPU at 100% and you have to kill the process. And don't give me the shitcrock of Ghostscript or CUPS as a better solution.
Word and Excel have NEVER crashed on me and I've been using them since the '97 versions. Granted I don't upgrade straight away and leave it for an SP or two but you should do that if you want stability. I deal with 200+ page complex documents on a daily basis, some of which hit 100-200Mb. You can't open those in LibreOffice without it falling over.
The only problems I've had with Office documents is where people don't know what they are doing, particularly when it comes to format-prats who don't know what styles and headings are for.
Reimaging - rubbish. System restore is used these days. I've had to reinstall Windows 7 twice since 2009. Once was due to a disk failure and the other time was due to some shit code I wrote trashing system32. I do a sideline of decrapifying people's laptops as well and I haven't had to reinstall a thing. I just don't think you know what you are doing.
Windows 8. Bar Metro which is a POS, everything just works.
You sound like a rabid Linux fanboy.
Note: I use both all the time. I've used Windows since 1993 and UNIX since about 1988.
I can't stand fanboys spouting crap. If I had some karma I'd downvote this.
Re: Linux has better hardware support than OS X
#33Because Xcode. Some of us need to iOS apps too even if it's not our first priority. At this moment the only sane way to do that is having OSX installed on a Mac.
Re: Linux has better hardware support than OS X
#34Interestingly, I run Ubuntu on a MacBook and a MacBook Air. As they are a "fixed" target, I figured that at least one developer would have made sure that they "just worked". And, indeed, they did. The installation tutorial was comprehensive, the out of the box experience was great, and upgrades have gone smoothly. The only thing to note was that I was able to manually update the WiFi drivers for (supposedly) better p…
Yeah, this is why I laughed at the line "No, it doesn’t have an official reference platform, not even whatever PC Linus happens to be using these days.". Linus is quite known for using MacBooks himself.
Re: Linux has better hardware support than OS X
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a Windows and Linux user on a daily basis, I'll tell you that no-one bothers with Office unless they are running a business. Everyone else seems happy with ancient copies of OpenOffice that their cheap laptop came with or LibreOffice if they have to get involved in installing anything. Also, people don't organise photos with additional software now. Windows Explorer itself is pretty damn good at it to be honest an…
I know my wife wanted a windows computer specifically for Excel. She did not realize it costs a good deal extra, so was delighted when I installed LibreOffice. (Other computing devices are kindles. Had a chromebook for a time.) So, there is still some desire for the basic programs. I agree that LibreOffice is more than good enough for the task, though. I don't think I could handle Explorer to support my workflow for…
I used hibernate regularly until I got an SSD, mainly for convenience. I boot in a few seconds now so it's a non issue.
Re: Linux has better hardware support than OS X
#36Valid points but the author highlights one of the original reasons I switched from a ThinkPad running Linux to a MacBook. All high end Linux laptops have driver issues, including ThinkPads. Last thing I knew you still couldn't switch between discreet NVIDIA graphics and the Intel 4000 without a reboot. I've been told some laptops still have issues with sleep / hibernation. Maybe the Dell XPS 13 highlighted in the art…
I use Windows 7 on a 7 year old ThinkPad with Linux inside a VirtualBox VM.
Works better and consumes less power and therefore has longer battery life than Linux on bare metal.
My 2010 MacBook Pro caught fire, so I can't vouch for Apple's reliability.
Re: Linux has better hardware support than OS X
#37It's always been a little mind boggling to me that in Web Development where we deploy to Linux servers nearly 100% of the time so many people, especially in the Ruby community, develop using OS X instead. Personally, I use OS X at work because that's what my employer gave me but at home I use Linux that runs just about perfect with a Dell Vostro laptop. That said, there are some great, modern tools that people have m…
It makes no sense to miss brew on Linux ... The only reason brew exists is because OSX doesn't have an official package manager. Also what problems did you have with rbenv on Linux? It seemed to work just fine the last time I used it ...
I think the interface that brew provides is very simple and easy to use. The terminal output during installation is nice. Again, it's the extra little polishing of these OS X tools that I think really draws people to them and keep using them.
In regards to rbenv, the "core" part of rbenv(switching between versions of Ruby) works fine. It's the other tools like ruby-build and rbenv-install that didn't work for me. I don't mind manually compiling my rubies though.
Re: Linux has better hardware support than OS X
#38It's always been a little mind boggling to me that in Web Development where we deploy to Linux servers nearly 100% of the time so many people, especially in the Ruby community, develop using OS X instead. Personally, I use OS X at work because that's what my employer gave me but at home I use Linux that runs just about perfect with a Dell Vostro laptop. That said, there are some great, modern tools that people have m…
Do people really do this on the native OS on a Mac? I use Macs for all my work, but we deploy to Linux, so that's what runs in all the VMs I run on my Mac. Currently I even use Eclipse in an Ubuntu VM to do the work. I wouldn't know how to install a package on my Mac if I tried, and given that all the production machines run on Linux, I've never seen the need.
It sounds like you're in the minority based on places I've worked and people I've met! Good for you though, I think it requires a lot of discipline to stay on top of VMs which is why so many people install things directly to OS X.
Re: Linux has better hardware support than OS X
#39Linux "supports" most of current hardware by using generic drivers offering minimal functionality for any given device. The device will work, but not any of it's non-standard or advanced features. E.g. want to switch DPI in your new shiny Logitech mouse? Or customize behavior of it's buttons? Nope, sorry, not supported. I, for one, do not consider this a supported hardware, even if basic functionality is there.
Linux's "basic functionality" used the full resolution of my integrated graphics card to allow me to run my monitor at native resolution. Windows 7's basic functionality didn't let me run my monitor at native resolution, thus I had to put up with blurry fonts until I downloaded the (huge!) new driver. At the moment there's lots of anecdote - "This worked under one OS, but not the other" - but a comprehensive review o…
Windows 7 is quite old - it was released back in 2009. It does not know if included graphics driver is compatible with your card. New Ubuntu versions are released twice a year[1], each containing up-to-date hardware info.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubuntu_releases#Versio...
Re: Linux has better hardware support than OS X
#40The current problem with linux is apps and the desktop itself. Apps - where do I start? There are so many to choose from, yet most will never do the complete job. Most desktop environments have devolved into a sorry state in the name of 'organic UI' and mostly unusable graphics animations by the window managers. Things are becoming much easier these days though since everything is moving to the cloud and steam has ar…
I guess it depends on what apps you mean. I use Emacs, Firefox, LibreOffice on occasion, and a lot of development stuff, and it all works fine for me.
I also don't know what you mean by "unusual graphics animations" in terms of window managers. Window Maker has no such thing.