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Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

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Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#101

Post by tuesday20 »

pachico wrote: post #62
cameronbrown wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the experience is terrible for the uninitiated. And this is coming from someone who ran Arch as their primary OS since I was 10. Laptop Linux on the whole is not a fun experience for those who just want a machine to work (which was what MacBooks were supposed to be about). I just bought a Surface Laptop 3, and the machine is great. The hardware is nice, Windows on a laptop has improved tenfold since I've last…

I must disagree with you. I have been installing Linux for people who barely know how to use a mouse and the experience was always successful. Of course, I choose a distro with simple UI and software with GUI every time. I don't want to get into the typical "if my mom gets it everyone can" (also because she is a power user) but trust me, the people I installed it for had the same problems they would have had with any…

What is your preferred distro?

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#102

Post by [deleted] »

SCdF wrote: post #81

> By the way, not including the extension cord is unacceptable. This cord is not only a convenience, but it increases safety, because it's the only way to have earth grounding for the laptop. Without it, rubbing your fingers on the surface of the computer generates this weird vibration due to static. .... THAT'S WHAT THAT IS? I have wondered for _years_ why my laptop sometimes feels that way. Another mystery solved!

[deleted]

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#103

Post by calaphos »

lkramer wrote: post #14
rafamvc wrote: post #6

Wsl 2 is incredible. Got a 1000 dollars dell desktop and it is insanely faster than my Mac. Windows has improved a lot, and Linux based development on windows is a lot easier now. 5 years ago I would have quit a job if they asked me to use windows. Macos is still marginally better but not worth the cost IMHO.

Out of curiosity, why not simply run Linux at that point?

I use both extensively but settled for windows + WSL2 for now. In the end it's the little things:

- (fractional) scaling actually works quite well. - the shell works a big better. Feels like a good compromise between gnomes simplicity and KDEs over the top customisability to me. KDE has actually been the most stable out of the three though. - (Nvidia) driver support. Using Manjaro I had to reinstall the Nvidia driver every couple of months because a kernel update broke things. Again, not huge but annoying. - Working hardware video decoding in firefox. On Linux playing videos results in significantly higher CPU load, noise, slowed down browser, etc. Even on a fast machine.

With wsl2 I can now do all my development in that environment and don't need to live with windows slow file system, missing package manager, etc. The remote development features of VSCode with wsl (and other ssh hosts) are also simply amazing.

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#104

Post by jamesu »

werber wrote: post #68

I go between last years Pro for work and this years Air for all things personal and I loathe the Pro. This years keyboard on the Air is by far the best typing experience I’ve ever had on a laptop. I have no idea why they are leaning so hard into the Touchbar, it is the most frustrating “innovation”. I frequently accidentally perform actions and need to break flow to look at it to do actions as simple as changing the…

One other quirk with the touchbar I've noticed is when the machine starts overheating, the touchbar feels noticeably hotter... sometimes to the point of becoming painful to touch.

They should probably rename it to the torturebar.

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#105

Post by enitihas »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #84
fuzzy2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows (the technology) is okay. Not good, but okay. Windows (the experience) degrades every day. Everything is slow even though the specs are good. Granted, corporate “additions” like O365 ATP don’t help and aren’t part of the core system. But many users have to bear with them nonetheless. And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks? They get live notificat…

Any pointers on where to start disabling all the telemetry for someone that was recently forced back to Windows?

https://gist.github.com/alirobe/7f3b34ad89a159e6daa1

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#106

Post by dep_b »

HugoDaniel wrote: post #17

I have the new 16 MBP and love the touch bar. I find it much easier to change brightness/sound (place the finger and drag); I find it much easier to control apps, like music, safari, and all, and the habituation period was shorter than with the keys back in the day (when i started using macs). I would love to be able to easily customize the touch bar though, the author mentions BetterTouchTool, looks good, might be w…

> I find it much easier to change brightness/sound (place the finger and drag)

Right? It's such a pity that Pock messed that one up. I added Pock to have the same thing in the same position all of the time and I really like how it gave me more screen real estate but it's those little details that they missed.

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#107

Post by sneak »

mrweasel wrote: post #58
HugoDaniel wrote: post #17

I have the new 16 MBP and love the touch bar. I find it much easier to change brightness/sound (place the finger and drag); I find it much easier to control apps, like music, safari, and all, and the habituation period was shorter than with the keys back in the day (when i started using macs). I would love to be able to easily customize the touch bar though, the author mentions BetterTouchTool, looks good, might be w…

If Apple had two versions of their laptops, one with the touch bar and one without, I feel pretty confident that the version with the standard F-keys would outsell the touch bar. I mentioned this before, but the real proof that the touch bar isn't for professionals is that you can't buy an Apple keyboard with the touch bar. Local labor laws require that I have a "external" keyboard when working at my desk, so the tou…

> Local labor laws require that I have a "external" keyboard when working at my desk

Whaaa? Why? Where?

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#108

Post by netsec_burn »

londons_explore wrote: post #41
petepete wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made the jump and it's been mostly smooth (7th gen X1 Carbon with Fedora). The one thing that is annoying is when using multiple monitors of different resolutions, Wayland doesn't seem to scale resolution on a per-monitor basis. With the laptop being 4k this is an issue when working anywhere but at home, I tend to just use the laptop screen (which is excellent btw). Stuff that worked without any extra config that i…

Thinkpad = Linux these days sadly... Any other laptop will boot linux, but you'll end up with a lot of rough edges... For example, on the laptop I'm typing this on (latest Ubuntu, old Acer 511G): * Random hangs every few days - some unpatched processor bug related to sleep states. * Wifi diconnects randomly. * Hotkeys don't work * Screen sometimes dims itself to zero, and since the hotkeys don't work, it's rather tri…

From personal experience, I've only had that many issues once on a bleeding edge MSI. It took about a month to work out the issues. Every other system I've used has had a much smaller subset of those issues (I'm not using a Thinkpad). Namely Bluetooth or the fans not working, and individually resolvable.

Re: Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it

#109

Post by dep_b »

lordnacho wrote: post #32

Just got my new MBP 16 inch yesterday, a replacement for my 2015 MBP 15 inch. It's been pretty smooth sailing thus far, no big disappointments. My main reason for replacing the 2015 was to get more CPU power and memory, but the 2015 was actually doing ok, not insanely slow yet. In terms of power I can now have all my tabs open, including heavy ones like Facebook, while running several different IDEs, and changing bet…

I moved my dock to the bar with Pock and I have some of the most used buttons (brightness, volume, mute and night mode) right there. I also added a negative spacing between the icons so they're really close now. Now every time I can expect the same thing to be in the same place on the Touch Bar. And together with the slightly increased resolution and size the screen feels a lot bigger than the 15".

The only thing that doesn't work is tap-and-slide on the volume slider.

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