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

cfenollosa.com

161–170 of 567 posts

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

#161
> First, it's impossible to get a terminal screen without anti-aliasing. My favorite font, IBM VGA8, is unreadable when anti aliased, which is a real shame, because I've been using it since the 90s, and I prefer non-anti-aliased fonts on terminals.

That's a great font, but unless you're using it at 15 (16?) point exactly, it's a mess. For those places, I use Nouveau IBM instead. It tries to recreate the shapes with nice vectors (like someone used one of those pixel art upscalers), instead of emulating pixels in the font.

https://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font

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

#162
post #145

The XPS 17 will be my next “MacBook”. It should be out this month and it ticks all the boxes for me (great screen, supposedly good cooling, user-replaceable SSD/RAM, acceptable weight and size for a 17" laptop). https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/13/21257006/dell-xps-17-15-r... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyRUWM_LOPQ I've been trying Windows again after ~20 years on Macs (via a borrowed Lenovo Carbon X1 and then a s…

How is the touchpad? Every non-apple touch pad I've ever used has bee terrible.

Probably not very good. Personally I always use a Magic Trackpad 2 so I no longer have to take this into consideration.

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

#164
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?

I use O&O ShutUp10 and PiHole. The default PiHole setup seems to block domains used for telemetry.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

https://pi-hole.net/

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

#167

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…

I use Linux on a dell e6400, I'm not a kernel dev, it's completely fine. Same with several other laptops I've owned.

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

#168
post #141

The XPS 17 will be my next “MacBook”. It should be out this month and it ticks all the boxes for me (great screen, supposedly good cooling, user-replaceable SSD/RAM, acceptable weight and size for a 17" laptop). https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/13/21257006/dell-xps-17-15-r... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyRUWM_LOPQ I've been trying Windows again after ~20 years on Macs (via a borrowed Lenovo Carbon X1 and then a s…

On paper Windows is good. In practice the telemetry and the story behind its introduction and how they handled communication means that I won't consider Windows as a primary OS candidate until there's a CEO change at least. It's disappointing to see so many being ignorant about this topic.

Where can I read about the story behind it?

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

#169

mbp2020 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-mbp.jpg air2013 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-mba.jpg iphonese2016 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-se.jpg Perfect illustration of "Apple is iphone-first company".

A lot of it has to do with how laptop web cams work in general and it is not only Apple's problem [1].

A way to improve this situation a bit would be to be able to use the camera of an iPhone as a web cam, either over USB or wifi. You still have the compression and USB transfer, but at least you use the better optics of the phone. There are third party tools, such as EpocCam, that can do it, but require the installation of drivers. This should be a first party solution, in the same fashion as the "take photo" option from the right click menu on Mac OS, which uses an iPhone to take a photo and paste it directly on the open application of the computer.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BLgS7m0W94

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

#170
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for WSL 2. I'm a huge advocate of it at work where people are very pro-Linux. I have noticed a few issues with it that don't make sense seeing as it's meant to have a full Linux Kernel (such as sockets not appearing) but that could be Ubuntu-20.04 being the one at fault to be fair :)

It's really amazing. I don't know much about Linux, but whenever I need to use some Linux only tool(or works best on linux tool), I just use wsl. Tried using a couple of linux desktops but the user experience is just terrible compared to windows for day to day work and there aren't many softwares available.

What parts were terrible?
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