71–80 of 169 posts
Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr is where you want to be. It Just Works, plus there's a huge and awesome community to help out if you have questions. I haven't tried the derivatives, like Mint or Elementary, but I've heard good things. Note that even though Ubuntu is based on Debian, you do not want Debian... It's release cycle is a lot slower, the UI is much less polished, and you'll be stuck with versions of software that…
I recently switched to Xubuntu from Linux Mint XFCE. The Linux Mint distros are a bit nicer, but they do not support dist-upgrade so you have to do a complete reinstall when you want to upgrade to the next version. Xubuntu supports dist-upgrade.
For a terminal, you can give terminology a try: https://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/terminology
tycat can put an image inline in your terminal. tyls gives you an inline folder view with thumbnails that you can click and preview.
Feels like a thoroughly modern terminal emulator.
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there's also ControllerMate which certainly has a kernel extension.
I used to use ControllerMate, but it just wasn't as good. Now I use Karabiner, but doesn't anyone else think it's a bit absurd to have to get a kernel extension just to remap keys?
I'd be much more concerned if Karabiner couldn't exist in a future OS X. That you can have it, use it and have it work well is more important than the mechanics of how it works underneath.
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My experience with Arch and updates is exactly opposite. Specifically, if I boot up a computer with Arch on it that has been sitting in a corner for a month or so, updating is almost guaranteed to break everything. I think this is just because of frequency of Arch updates. If you update every day, then it's probably no big deal. But then I find the same is true for other distros (go too long without updating software…
Arch is arguably worse than most about this, because their rolling repositories dump versions after a couple of updates are available. So if you wait too long to update, it can't even figure out how to get started, because it no longer has the slightest idea what the packages you have installed even mean. Don't get me wrong, I like Arch a lot, and I've been using it as my main Linux distribution for the past five yea…
Try Elementary OS, its based off ubuntu and is almost a dead ringer for OSX. It has the window management you are looking for as well as a couple of apps. Try Synapse as a replacement for Alfred.
If you did like older OS X (10.6) you'd probably want to at least try Elementary OS which is essentially a Ubuntu on steroids and without the Canonical's BS trying to attain the polish of OS X. I would stay away from Mint as much as possible because it's not well optimised distribution in my opinion.
Even if you choose Ubuntu, you can always replace the complete desktop with something else. For example you can have Ubuntu without Unity. In fact many people do run Ubuntu with Gnome 3, KDE 4, Enlightenment e17, XFCE, CDE, or something else.
If Linux isn't your thing you probably might want to also check out what FreeBSD (or PC-BSD) camp has to offer. It might be little bit more familiar for you. And if you really want, you could run Darwin with XNU kernel and have a free and open source system which is made out of the same blocks that form the core of the OS X.
iTerm is pretty handy on OS X. There are lots of terminal applications out there for GNU/Linux. E.g. Gnome Terminal is pretty damn good and does wrap the text. But that doesn't mean it's the only one out there.
As for Alfred... there are several different similar "Quicksilver" replacements. I'd suggest that you check Gnome-Do. But again it's not the only one out there. You might also find it funny and useful to use something like Guake Terminal which is Quake's console stylish terminal that you can access by pressing tilde.
I'm giving you Gnome programs but KDE has its own completely equivalent programs too.
If you're new to GNU/Linux you probably want to start with KDE or XFCE. (Disclaimer: I'm using XFCE because it's flexible and small.) You probably might find the kind of polish OS X offers in Gnome 3 but it requires quite a bit of tuning to "feel good" as a DE.
I switched a few weeks ago because I was tired of OS X, too. I tried every distribution out there and the one I've kept is Debian Jessie. Debian is great in that it's a simple and stable Gnome experience. Linux can be much more dangerous than OS X in terms of applications crashing badly, so I like the fact that I have an OS that I have thoroughly tested, fixed, and that won't move much in years. And I can get both th…
krunner is a mini-CLI you can open with alt-F2 by default (customizable of course). It allows searching apps or the web, opening web sites, search files, controlling music being played, or whatever really as it's extensible through plugins.
If using KDE is acceptable to you, you can learn more here: https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Krunner
I switched a few weeks ago because I was tired of OS X, too. I tried every distribution out there and the one I've kept is Debian Jessie. Debian is great in that it's a simple and stable Gnome experience. Linux can be much more dangerous than OS X in terms of applications crashing badly, so I like the fact that I have an OS that I have thoroughly tested, fixed, and that won't move much in years. And I can get both th…
I have no experience with OS X and Alfred, but from what you describe it looks like krunner for the KDE desktop environment. krunner is a mini-CLI you can open with alt-F2 by default (customizable of course). It allows searching apps or the web, opening web sites, search files, controlling music being played, or whatever really as it's extensible through plugins. If using KDE is acceptable to you, you can learn more…
[0] https://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/terminology [1] https://yakuake.kde.org/