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Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

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Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#141

Post by awilfox »

sph wrote: post #128
Klonoar wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, yeah. You can also always disable SIP and spelunk around if you want to. There's just far less of a hivemind for macOS tinkering and it's not as readily apparent to jump into. But it does exist.

The macOS tinkering is like tuning your car engine while trying not to void the warranty, the Linux tinkering is being able to turn your car into a rocket-powered go kart. It's not the same thing.

You can't really "void the warranty" poking at Mac OS internals, and the built-in recovery partition makes it pretty easy to fix anything you break. Same as booting a BusyBox shell when you break something in Linux.

… though turning a car into a rocket-powered go kart seems like exactly the right analogy for running Linux as a desktop in my mind. Supercharged and able to fly, but not street legal or practical in any way.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#142

Post by awilfox »

sph wrote: post #130
awilfox wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had hardware accelerated graphics work correctly, and I don't want to have to use the Google ecosystem – that's an article for another day, probably. When I was "all-in" on the libre ecosystem, I used a ThinkPad for laptop and Talos for desktop. The ThinkPad had just the Intel iGPU that didn't work right in Firefox, and the Talos had blue lines through everything in OSM because "lol x86 monoculture" meant…

When did you last use Linux? Because hardware acceleration has been working and default in Firefox for a while, except on NVIDIA, and video acceleration (not required for Google Maps) needed manual tweaking the Firefox config but has been available as well for a while. The Linux desktop moves at incredible pace. The experience I had 2 years ago was more crude than my desktop in 2022.

February 2021 as a daily-driver; I still have a VM to this day.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#143

Post by wink »

Fascinating, I've never heard of this universal clipboard and I'd absolutely hate it. Guess I'm one of those anti-mobile curmudgeons because I see how it could help with what the author described, but for the 1 thing per week I share between my mobile and computers there are 'safer' ways that won't leak everything everywhere else.

Maybe people are different (as I usually note when I say that I hate the 'close lid for sleep' on laptops and go out of my way to disable that) :P

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#144

Post by 8fingerlouie »

As someone who exclusively used Linux desktops since the early Gnome 1.x days, who migrated to MacOS around 2005, the major selling point of MacOS is "it just works".

Your experience may differ if you're not "all in" on the Apple ecosystem, but using mostly/only Apple devices means that everything integrates, and integrates well. You may recreate a similar experience with Android and KDE (or Windows i guess), but it feels much more "tacked on" than in MacOS where it just works out of the box.

I also mostly use "stock apps" which may or may not improve my experience. Instead of trying to force MacOS to fit my workflow, i fit my workflow to the tools available, and it has rewarded me well.

I still keep a VM with Gnome (Debian 11) running every now and then, but it's mostly just for fun.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#145

Post by awilfox »

prmoustache wrote: post #119
technobabbler wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably don't run the same hardware or software, then. DRM doesn't quite work on Linux (so no 4k). MS Office, a business need, requires WINE or similar. No Adobe. There's Proton now for games, but only a tiny sliver of the full Steam library, especially for less-popular indie games (which is where most of the innovation is in PC gaming). I've had bad drivers melt my dining table when the fan wouldn't kick in and…

Adobe softwares can be replaced by other tools and their licensing these day make it something you don't want regardless of the platform it would run on. Office 365 works well enough on the web, calligra and libreoffice are compatible enough to make it a non issue. You can even upload and work on odf documents on office 365 these days. I like having 4k in the living room and I have a chromecast for that but I'd rathe…

> You don't miss retina if you never used it.

This line of thinking baffles me. I should put up with subpar text-rendering and pixelated fonts and widgets because that's how we did things before?

> I guess it comes from poor buying skills.

I purposefully went out of my way to buy a Radeon that was explicitly supported by amdgpu.ko. I poured over driver code to see which USB Wi-Fi would work best. I gave up on 4K back in 2017 because neither Qt nor Gtk were "ready" for High-DPI and bought a 1080p panel instead.

None of this changes the fact that I had to patch things all the time because of bugs. Not hardware bugs, but software bugs. Thread safety bugs. GConf bugs. I found and fixed a bug in systemd because they had the GUID wrong for automatic root mount on IA-64. Firefox was doing swizzling wrong causing window tearing on some GPUs. I even fixed a damn bug in the Rust libc crate related to ioctl(3).

The reason your experience is so good is because people find these bugs and fix them. Like I used to do before I left the community, partially due to this mindset that if the user has a problem the user must be the problem.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#146

Post by brailsafe »

sph wrote: post #133
andyfleming wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never understood the window tiling complaint. While MacOS doesn’t have tiling built in, it’s readily available for free. Are there features that aren’t available in those applications?

macOS window management is incredibly worse than the other two operating system, and that's if you use Spectacle and other helper tools. Without them, it's even worse. I loved my time with macOS but window management was definitely the worst thing about the OS for me.

Ya but... how could those differences be so impactful? I tile my windows occasionally, it's handy, but I can't imagine that being my single issue vote.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#147

Post by goldorak »

atty wrote: post #52

I see some people in the comments saying they strongly prefer Linux desktop to Mac/Windows. If you are one of those people, I am curious - are you comfortable changing system configurations, using the terminal, updating system software by hand, etc? Because I quite enjoy playing around with Linux on the desktop, but I would never suggest it to anyone who isn’t already familiar and enjoys that sort of stuff.

For me yes, It's really convenient and easy to manage (specially between multiple targets, git integration...) For my parents and family, well they just don't usually change anything so for me it's win-win situation.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#148

Post by eternityforest »

vehemenz wrote: post #60

About the final point—are Macs really "high cost"? Looking at their current lineup, configured with a minimum of 16GB and 512GB: M1 Mac Mini .......... $1099 M1 MacBook Air ....... $1399 M1 iMac ......,....... $1699 M1 Pro Mac Studio .... $1999 M1 Pro MacBook Pro 14" $1999 M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16" $2499 I'll restrain myself from listing the ways comparing Macs to PCs is not apples to apples. Unless you go for costly st…

4 years?? I expect 5 or 6 from a $600ish laptop.

They're reasonable for top end buyers, but not as reasonable for consumers, and everyday coders.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#149

Post by sph »

brailsafe wrote: post #146
sph wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS window management is incredibly worse than the other two operating system, and that's if you use Spectacle and other helper tools. Without them, it's even worse. I loved my time with macOS but window management was definitely the worst thing about the OS for me.

Ya but... how could those differences be so impactful? I tile my windows occasionally, it's handy, but I can't imagine that being my single issue vote.

I don't tile my windows, macOS' window management is a death by a thousand cuts. I haven't used it since Mojave so I forgot what exactly used to bother me, sorry.

It's certainly serviceable, Windows feels better to me, Linux is the best: Super+right click to resize windows, and Super+drag to move them around are killer features.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#150

Post by Nextgrid »

Tehchops wrote: post #41

I'm honestly torn. I was a big Linux proponent for a while, then Apple won me over with Macs for a time. They did "just work" for my day-to-day(DevOps). However, last spring, I bought a new personal system for freelance work/side projects, and have been running Ubuntu as my daily driver. Funny enough, it seems like during that same period the my UX on my work-supplied Mac(2019-era MBP) has been steadily declining. I'…

The new AirPods-related bullshit that broke existing functionality pushed me to switch to Linux for day to day work. It's a downgrade in certain ways, but at least I can actually join calls reliably.
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