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Elementary OS

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Re: Elementary OS

#181

Post by pritambaral »

lukeschlather wrote: post #37
creshal wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dell comes closest with their Developer Edition, but even they aren't trying too hard and just tell people to suck it up when e.g. the touchpad firmware is broken.

Dell is really not trying. Most laptops ship with touchpads that work fine on Linux. Dell ships buggy, painful firmware with a premium laptop, and people give them the benefit of the doubt because it's a "Linux problem," not their mistake.

Have you seen the buggy behaviour you mention with the Developer Edition laptops?

Their Developer Edition laptops get special treatment with regards to Linux compatibility. At one point, the made the the company they sourced some new touchpads from develop drivers for Linux and got it upstreamed.

Re: Elementary OS

#182

Post by dkarapetyan »

mavelikara wrote: post #9

My mini Ask HN: After over a decade of using Mac OS X, I am considering switching to Linux for my dev laptop. The tools I worry about are those that interact with audio and webcam - Go To Meeting, Google Hangout etc. My work involves me having to teleconf with others often. Does anyone here have experience using Linux well in such scenarios. If so, what hardware are you using? Also, does sleep-on-closing-lid work wel…

I'm using project sputnik from dell. No issues the entire time I've had it. Skype works pretty well and people have told me several times that it is the clearest screen sharing experience they've had but I don't really know what that means. Been about 3 years now and has gone from ubuntu 12.04 to 16.04 without any problems. I expect it to continue to work fine and have been looking into upgrading to the latest model.

Re: Elementary OS

#183

Post by ngauthier »

ngauthier wrote: post #180
mavelikara wrote: post #9

My mini Ask HN: After over a decade of using Mac OS X, I am considering switching to Linux for my dev laptop. The tools I worry about are those that interact with audio and webcam - Go To Meeting, Google Hangout etc. My work involves me having to teleconf with others often. Does anyone here have experience using Linux well in such scenarios. If so, what hardware are you using? Also, does sleep-on-closing-lid work wel…

I founded MeetSpace, which is video conferencing for distributed teams. I developed MeetSpace on a linux laptop (yoga 2 pro) and a linux desktop (custom w/ logitech c922 webcam). I can tell you that for the most part it's worked flawlessly. The only issues I ever had were that linux rendering wasn't great, so sometimes the CPU was high just from rendering! We are browser-only, so because we don't have a native app we…

Oh, and if you switch, Dell's XPS series tends to work very well in linux, especially if you buy their developer edition, because they support ubuntu, which means you can find the drivers even if you don't use ubuntu.

Re: Elementary OS

#184

Post by pritambaral »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #116

> the terminal emits a desktop notification whenever it detects that a long-running process has finished. Does anyone know how this is implemented? Edit: pretty simple: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elementary-apps/pantheon-termin... http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elementary-apps/pantheon-termin...

That can be achieved in any terminal emulator that visually shows the occurrence of an ASCII bell.

For instance, all I had to do was include `\a` in my `$PS1` and now whenever a command finishes running and bash is ready for a new command, my terminal emulator gets a bell.

Konsole (and any Konsole based terminal emulators, like Yakuake) shows a notification if a bell happens in a non-foreground session.

Konsole also has explicit tab-specific settings for "Monitor for Silence" and "Monitor for Activity".

Re: Elementary OS

#185

Post by hug »

chongli wrote: post #169
Yhippa wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a difference between "graybeards" and "neckbeards"? I think culturally there is a difference and he possibly meant to use greybeard here.

Yes. "Neckbeard" has connotations of sexism and other ugliness. "Graybeard" merely connotes old age and anachronism.

I would add experience, wisdom, and stubbornness to that list, personally.

Re: Elementary OS

#186

Post by SwellJoe »

kuschku wrote: post #136
SwellJoe wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Every time Elementary OS comes up, people are like, "Finally a nice looking Linux desktop!", and I'm over here thinking, "meh...regular old Gnome 3, as shipped with recent Fedora versions, looks nicer and more cohesive, to me."

Regular old Gnome3 is horrible to use with multiple screens. Good luck running a program in full screen on your main monitor, while also doing stuff on a secondary monitor, where you have to switch windows, open new ones, etc. Gnome3 is only useful on non-touch laptops, not on any other usecase.

Huh...I don't think I know what you're talking about. What specific problems have you had with multiple screens? I don't currently have my system setup for multiple displays (I live in an RV and don't have room for that kind of setup), but did use Gnome 3 with a second display for quite a long time. I don't remember any problems with switching windows and such. It seemed to work pretty much the same as Windows or macOS.

The only multi-monitor complaint I had about Gnome 3 was that opening the Activities bar or changing apps led to both displays dimming. This makes Gnome 3 horrible for presentations, screening films, or pretty much anything you'd want to use a projector for. I'm hopeful that problem has been fixed, as I've rarely felt so annoyed at a piece of software. Notifications were also problematic, in that they would pop up over full screen applications (which is, IMHO, never the right behavior...full screen apps should really be treated as sacred, by default). But, at least notifications can be disabled. The misfeature of screen dimming and shrinking app windows across displays could not be disabled last time I messed with it (admittedly, a year or two ago).

"Gnome3 is only useful on non-touch laptops"

Which touch features do you think are missing? Mine seems to work fine, though I so rarely use the touchscreen that I may be missing something important. I find touchscreens hard to use for anything more than basic scrolling, so it's not a feature I even wanted, but it came with my laptop, and I was surprised to see it worked fine out-of-the-box with Linux. I didn't even tweak it.

Re: Elementary OS

#187

Post by pjmlp »

rcarmo wrote: post #148
pjmlp wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I think people are overreacting. UNIX support was never a goal for macOS, neither for NeXT, rather a nice way to bring developers from Sun and SGI into their platforms. The business value for developers was always the Objective-C libraries, which is quite clear from most presentations done by Jobs, some of them available on YouTube. It is as if some people needed this week's presentation to wake up for the re…

I used A/UX. For real, because at the time we had VAXen and Suns, and it was a good way to make use of the 68030 Macs we had (I think it never ran on the IIfx, which had a 68040) I have no delusions about Apple culture. But apparently you're forgetting that Apple heavily marketed OSX's association with UNIX after the merge with NeXT, and that it made a lot of noise about how the Mac would be the best UNIX workstation…

I was at CERN when they visited us with the same type of sales pitch, but I always saw it as an attempt to get people to buy Macs than anything else, specially after how things went with Copland.

The real Apple culture was Object Pascal, Common Lisp, Hypercard, Dylan, Newton, MacApp, PowerPlant, QuickDraw,...

Now they have money and they actually need is macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS developers, not UNIX developers deploying code on GNU/Linux servers.

Re: Elementary OS

#188

Post by jmiserez »

djhworld wrote: post #150

I bought a 2015 MBP back in January, so I'm all set for a few years at least. Whether OSX goes down the pan even more, I don't know. Moving to Linux seems like a romantic idea, but I can forsee there being a number of problems that would make it unfeasible for me 1. I use 1Password, no Linux client 2. Spotify client is no longer being developed for Linux 3. YouNeedABudget software is not Linux compatible - I have 2+…

1. 1Password apparently works fine with WINE, but I haven't used it myself.

2. Spotify will still receive updates for Linux, they just don't have a dedicated Linux developer on it anymore. On my machine it still works fine.

3. I prefer GoodBudget, which IMHO is much better than YNAB, especially when it comes to their iOS/Android apps. The desktop client just runs in the browser. Also, I've heard YNAB will be discontinuing their desktop apps?

4. There's https://github.com/odeke-em/drive, a fork of the official drive client, and it's still being actively developed.

5. Haven't used Alfred, but you can get some of it's features using other tools, e.g. indexed search using Tracker, clipboard history using Diodon, and perhaps some other things. However you are right that you can't get the kind of polished automation Alfred seems to provide. Rather, you'll have to write shell scripts and use the commandline tools to get what you want. Absolutely everything is possible, but it'll feel a bit like using lots of duct tape at first.

Note: I'm not saying you should switch right away (1). But I used Linux (Ubuntu) full-time for work and at home for the last 5 years and I was able to do everything with very few exceptions (2). Most peripherals that I bought just worked out of the box. Going Linux full-time is 100% doable.

Also, with so many apps running in the browser (or on Electron) the choice of OS matters less every year.

(1) in fact, I'll probably get a Mac myself this year for developing iOS apps.

(2) Only exception: Windows VM for Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint & iTunes for iPhone syncing. All other software ran in WINE or had a reasonable Linux alternatives.

Re: Elementary OS

#189

Post by pjmlp »

_qc3o wrote: post #153

I really don't understand why developers use macs at all. They're not good dev machines. All production systems I work with are some flavor of linux (mostly ubuntu). There is actually a real impedance mismatch when I'm using my mac for work purposes. All those cores and RAM become meaningless when I have to do everything in a VM anyway. My personal dev machine is a project sputnik running ubuntu 16.04. I can understa…

> I really don't understand why developers use macs at all.

Because there are developers on this world that don't develop for UNIX, rather native applications for macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS.

Being a developer doesn't mean one is only allowed to work on UNIX.

Re: Elementary OS

#190

Post by e12e »

maratc wrote: post #149

Now I need a decent terminal (iTerm2-like quality) and a sane set of shortcuts (like a shortcut for "Copy" that doesn't stop processes in terminal) and I'd be all set...

I've been pretty happy with the "sakura" terminal[s] - I don't really know iTerm2, though, so I'm not sure what "iTerm2-like quality" means, or if Sakura matches (or surpasses, for that matter) it.

I'm not sure why you need a shortcut for copy, select copies by default on linux[x11] - middle-button pastes (or shift-insert).

[s] http://www.pleyades.net/david/projects/sakura

[x11] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch01.en....

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