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Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

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Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#171

Post by sofixa »

kaba0 wrote: post #162
sofixa wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Considering Macs are typically owned longer than PCs Are they though? Properly specced PCs have more than decent lives too. The build quality of a Mac or an equivalent-ish ( so not the plastic cheapest possible model ) devicedecent OEM like Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus aren't that far off.

In terms of laptops, my experience is that they are more often subpar than not. Other than Thinkpads perhaps (of which newer ones are quite prone to goddamn throttling, but I guess it is up to intel mostly?)

If you get the cheapest crap available, yes, they're subpar. Any decent non-consumer oriented cheapest possible Dell, HP, etc. is absolutely fine. There are defects from times to times, of course ( like Apple had with the butterfly keyboard), but build quality is quite similar to Apple.

I have a fancy-ish Asus with aluminium body that is 7 years old now ( that cost 1/3 the price of a MacBook Pro at the time) which, next to my newly issued MBP, looks decent. Weird clickicking sound from the right button on the touchpad, small screen and thick bezels aside ( all of which are more due to the age than anything else) it still works perfectly.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#172

Post by technobabbler »

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…

I don't think it's fair to suggest that my use cases and priorities are less important than yours.

Maybe LibreOffice and GIMP are enough for you. They are not for me, especially in professional contexts where 90% similarity isn't the same as actually compatible, especially when I collaborate with other users and designers. And I actually appreciate the Creative Cloud subscription pricing, which is great for occasional users like me who can sub for a while and then cancel without having to spend thousands of dollars at a time. Software have network effects too, and I don't produce documents and graphics for my own gratification, but to satisfy team and client needs, and telling them "Oh, but it looks fine in LibreOffice, you need to use a real document standard and not some proprietary format" is not really an option. Maybe if you're Stallman and get to dictate the terms. I'm not. I need software that works with what other people use, and software that I can use to get jobs with employers that pay me in dollars and not ideals.

Maybe you don't care about anything but 1080p 16:9 displays. That's fine, but there are others who do. Whether for spreadsheets or vectors or photos, sometimes more pixels are better, and definitely having plug and play support for things like monitor brightness are nice too. It's fine if you don't care about any of that. You don't get to tell me what I care about. Shrug.

As for poor buying skills, eh, I'm perfectly happy running Linux on my phone and servers, Windows on my desktop, macOS on my laptop, and iOS on the iPad. And guess what, I don't even know or care what architecture my microwave runs on. I just don't feel the need to install Linux on everything. Each device has their specialty, whether that's cooking food or playing games or mobile apps or web dev or GIS.

I'm glad you like your Linux UI. I tried Ubuntu on a Yoga 2 a few years ago but didn't like it. To each their own, eh?

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#173

Post by vincent-manis »

alwillis wrote: post #110
QuikAccount wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to use a Mac for work for a while. You are right you can tweak MacOS to your liking but the difference is Linux distros actively encourage tweaking while Apple actively discourages and tries to get in the way.

Apple actively discourages and tries to get in the way This is false. Apple doesn’t actively discourage anything. Apple put all of options in the operating system for a reason and ships with a Terminal. The GUI allows regular people to get shit done without requiring them to be experts. Meanwhile, developers, hackers, tinkerers, can tweak to their heart’s content on the things that matter to them while getting the be…

I switched to macOS last year. My software inventory is overwhelmingly free software, and I currently have Emacs, TeX, Audacity, Inkscape, the Gimp, and a dozen or so Scheme and Lisp systems all running just fine [1]. In fact, I have a pretty good reproduction of the Ubuntu system I was running before. I have no complaints.

As for tweaking, the two major tweaks I depend upon are remapping Caps Lock as Compose (Karabiner lets me do that, along with some stuff I found that lets me use an X11 style XCompose file), and turning off GateKeeper completely (that's one thing I would never tell a naïve user how to do, or even that it is possible).

No claims that macOS is great for everybody, but I'm an experienced Unix user (my first Unix system was V7 on a PDP-11/45), and it works great for me.

[1] The one hack I needed was that you need a workaround to install MIT Scheme on Apple Silicon.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#174

Post by awilfox »

chrisseaton wrote: post #82
sofixa wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it lets you run more cross-platform ported software than Linux does That's a stretch and i find it unlikely, but it's not like we have numbers. However, macOS makes it hard to run random software ( like a utility from GitHub) with their code signing "security" stuff ( working around it is anything but intuitive).

Can you list many major applications available on Windows and on Linux, but not macOS? The other way around you have major industry applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, Office, Ableton, AutoCAD, etc.

One of my friends reminded me of CrossOver, which has eliminated that last small gap. And it is nice to finally be able to give back to the WINE community after using it for so long – I think my first use of WINE was Red Hat 9 in 2002.

The only one I can think of that isn't a total niche is SQL Server. Siemens NX dropped Mac support a while ago, but the Linux version is CLI-only. There are some more niche software (PaintShop Pro, A&B, Pro Motion NG) that suggest WINE for Linux users but I don't know how much that counts.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#175

Post by awilfox »

vincent-manis wrote: post #173
alwillis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple actively discourages and tries to get in the way This is false. Apple doesn’t actively discourage anything. Apple put all of options in the operating system for a reason and ships with a Terminal. The GUI allows regular people to get shit done without requiring them to be experts. Meanwhile, developers, hackers, tinkerers, can tweak to their heart’s content on the things that matter to them while getting the be…

I switched to macOS last year. My software inventory is overwhelmingly free software, and I currently have Emacs, TeX, Audacity, Inkscape, the Gimp, and a dozen or so Scheme and Lisp systems all running just fine [1]. In fact, I have a pretty good reproduction of the Ubuntu system I was running before. I have no complaints. As for tweaking, the two major tweaks I depend upon are remapping Caps Lock as Compose (Karabi…

I wonder if that has any influence on it. My first Unix system was Solaris in the 90s, and I never felt the need to tweak it endlessly. Perhaps those who started on Linux and grew accustomed to tweaking everything from the outset find some enjoyment in it that I just don't.

Anyone out there need a research paper on human behaviour related to preference of OS based on formative computing experiences? I'd be fascinated. :)

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#176

Post by dTal »

renewiltord wrote: post #111
alphabettsy wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every few months I'd encounter some speed bump caused by Apple and I'd have to find a workaround > switched to an older thinkpad that runs Linux natively The idea of using an older Thinkpad with Linux having fewer “speed bumps” than any Mac seems hard to imagine based on my own experience. Guess it depends on what you use a computer for.

Bizarrely there was a time when I had the perfect Gnome 2 installation on Ubuntu (16? 14?) and it was better at working like a computer than anything else I’ve had. But as soon as I upgraded, everything went away. I remember something weird like I could “pick up” a window and swap workspaces and drop it and it was perfect. I can only guess that that feature was some emergent property of the implementation and not a d…

> remember something weird like I could “pick up” a window and swap workspaces and drop it and it was perfect.

Just tried that on Plasma, works perfectly. The ̶f̶u̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ past is now!

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#177

Post by dTal »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #170
_8j50 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Simple rule of thumb as a consumer: If it is not in the repo/store/steam then it does not exist. Same for iOS or android by the way: If you need to jailbreak/root for an app, for the average user it might as well not exist. Forget all that. I am talking about gary's clipboard manager or something. This is crazy, you can't even install elasticsearch or Mongo without adding a repo! My whole point was this approach wo…

You could do that if software vendors bothered to provide the option. To your example, you can download Elasticsearch as an archive from their website [0], unarchive it, and you're off to the races. JetBrains IDEs work the same way, grab a zip, unzip it, and bam, you're good to go. They can even keep themselves up to date on their own. It will also install a shortcut in your DE's menu. Ditto for Zoom and 1Passowrd, w…

People seem to think Linux has a technical problem with just distributing binaries, but it really doesn't - it's a cultural problem. Even many pieces of free software don't bother to provide archives you can just unpack and run. I heave a deep sigh when I find an interesting program I want to try but my options are "run Ubuntu and install the .deb" or "build from source". If Zoom, JetBrains, Arduino, Blender, Firefox, Julia, VSCode, SALOME, and X-Plane 11 can just give me a binary, why can't you?

Yet we still see discussions like this, where people think packaging is some major roadblock on Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30777172

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#178

Post by renewiltord »

dTal wrote: post #176
renewiltord wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bizarrely there was a time when I had the perfect Gnome 2 installation on Ubuntu (16? 14?) and it was better at working like a computer than anything else I’ve had. But as soon as I upgraded, everything went away. I remember something weird like I could “pick up” a window and swap workspaces and drop it and it was perfect. I can only guess that that feature was some emergent property of the implementation and not a d…

> remember something weird like I could “pick up” a window and swap workspaces and drop it and it was perfect. Just tried that on Plasma, works perfectly. The ̶f̶u̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ past is now!

I recall KDE being a mess but that was during the switch to KDE4. This is something I really need to be better about: losing my memories of trouble with things from decades ago. I have the same hesitancy with FUSE.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#179

Post by dTal »

renewiltord wrote: post #178
dTal wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> remember something weird like I could “pick up” a window and swap workspaces and drop it and it was perfect. Just tried that on Plasma, works perfectly. The ̶f̶u̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ past is now!

I recall KDE being a mess but that was during the switch to KDE4. This is something I really need to be better about: losing my memories of trouble with things from decades ago. I have the same hesitancy with FUSE.

Oh, KDE Plasma is a completely different animal now. Lightweight (really!) and a pleasure to use as a power user. I also remember the KDE4 days and had firmly placed KDE in the "unusably bloated garbage" bucket, but when I tentatively tried Plasma 5 on my laptop a few years back I said "holy crap" and immediately installed it on everything. Plasma is a gem.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#180

Post by eternityforest »

StillBored wrote: post #169
eternityforest wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

$600, 5 year old laptop user here. A couple years in I put another $500 in and upgraded the disk to 2T, and 32G of ram. More recently I put a wifi 6E card in it too. Its still fine for most things, if I need to compile something large, I connect to my 64 core build machine. But of course I tend to use my (also fairly old) desktop more than the laptop anyway. PS: It is a cheap dell 14" inspiron with a 1080P screen, in…

That's what I did, I got a Vivobook F510UA, and upgraded the RAM to after a few years 24GB, then a few months ago I changed to a 1TB SSD when I started getting bad sectors.

The battery is definitely a bit worn by this point, but I mostly just use it as a desktop, I have a $100 HP from I don't even know when that I use for actual on the go work, it's smaller and lighter and less likely to ruin my life if stolen on the bus. And it's even fast enough to run FreeCAD!

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