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Moving from Macbook to Linux

monadical.com

211–220 of 518 posts

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#211

I got into Linux when I was younger because I thought it was cool, and I had plenty of time to fix it when things broke. It's been my daily driver for ~10 years now. But there's quite a bit too learn. If I were to try and switch from Windows or Mac today I'm not sure I'd succeed before giving up. But I'm grateful every day to have a machine that I have some semblance of control over. I use a rolling release distro. I…

I've been using Linux on and off since 1996, but I settled on it for the past 10 years and the most traumatic thing I had to do since has been changing gear.

And even then, moving your entire setup from a machine to another have never been easier, when you know how to do it.

Corporate OSs are more polished, that's undeniable, Apple especially provides the best out of the box experience, but it's nothing comprared to the flexibility I can experience using Linux.

I can have a beefed up work laptop with Plasma and all the effects enabled and the same exact setup on the cheap low end laptop with XFCE.

Everything, really, just works.

And when it doesn't, I can somehow make it work.

There have been times I spent days trying to make the Nvidia card work, but it was because I was looking for the perfect setup that I usually don't experience on Windows or MacOS, but there's nothing I can do about it, no matter how much time I spend trying to fix it.

It's simply out of reach.

I'm aware that that's not what the average user is willing to go through, and that's perfectly fine, I don't feel better than them because I use a more complicated system, but I cannot go back to being limited in what I can do because I am not allowed to.

Also, modern distros are really really stable out of the box.

The laptop I use as a replacement for media server is an Ubuntu 20, it was an Ubuntu 18 and 16 before, I simply upgraded it to the new version and it worked, every time better than before.

If there's something I've learned in the past 25 years is that freedom do comes at a cost, but as of today, that cost is actually negligible.

P.s. forgot to mention that I do not have to care anymore about bloatware, automatic updates, things calling home, software you rely on going out of business and, most of all, lack of support or documentation

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#212
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly believe that the argument for switching to Linux has never been stronger. Windows has embedded bloatware, and Apple allows no control over your hardware. There's really no other option if you care about these things. (Full disclosure - I do own a Macbook for photography work, and use Bootcamp for gaming.) Like you, my Linux installs have been incredibly stable for a long time, even with a rolling release dist…

I've been using Linux for many years, and it's definitely better, but definitely not what I'd want to use seriously. My gaming desktop has a 20.04 drive which I occasionally use, and yet I still find myself dropping to a TTY occasionally to reboot the machine or restart gdm because it waking from sleep, or just plain crashes. Also, I have 4k, 28" monitors which is just the size where 1x is comically small, and 2x is…

Plasma Desktop does fractional scaling correctly, is stable and comes with sddm as a display manager instead of gdm. I found the GNOME ecosystem to be bug prone and opinionated in ways that I disagree with, and have been impressed with KDE 5's stability and versatility.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#213

My Linux experience has been bad, yet I would still choose it over the alternatives. I don't want to give up control over my devices or fight an endless battle against bloatware / spyware. Some of the issues: * Hibernate / suspend does not work reliably on my Thinkpad. I gave up trying to configure it. * Encrypting my drive was much more complicated to setup than on a Mac. * Trackpad does not feel nearly as good as o…

I work in a quantitative science in academia, and this is a major reason stopping me from making the switch. It can be incredibly time consuming to solve problems. In my college days I spent days trying to get my keyboard backlight to work and my trackpad to work properly. I have a bunch of research work that needs to get done yesterday and I simply don't have time to troll forums or hang out in IRC for someone who might help me. Throw in some daily driver software that I am comfortable using does not run on Linux and I am still stuck on a Mac many years later.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#214
post #95

> but with Apple downgrading its hardware (but still keeping those Apple prices!), the problems just kept stacking up. I get that the author wound up with a lemon, but the idea that Apple is "downgrading its hardware" with more problems arising is ludicrous. Especially now that Apple fixed the keyboards, its hardware is better than it's ever been. You might not like Apple for plenty of other reasons, but the notion t…

Heres what we've lost since the 2013-2015 MBPs that I'm currently running: Magsafe 2, Higher travel keyboards, Removable/Replacable SSds, HDMI port (still the most common for displays right now), an escape key, an SD card reader, USB-A which all my peripherals still use. Though we've gained USBc and performance. I'm not sure the "better than it's ever been" is so obvious personally. Replacing the previous input ports…

We've gained not just performance, but insane battery life, less weight, more thinness, amazing color gamut, amazing speakers, and the best trackpad money can buy.

Apple has removed ports sure, but a dock fixes that problem pretty easily.

But fundamentally we're having different conversations. Apple has removed features you personally liked, but the overall hardware quality has just gotten better and better and better. I don't see how that is even open to argument.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#215

My Linux experience has been bad, yet I would still choose it over the alternatives. I don't want to give up control over my devices or fight an endless battle against bloatware / spyware. Some of the issues: * Hibernate / suspend does not work reliably on my Thinkpad. I gave up trying to configure it. * Encrypting my drive was much more complicated to setup than on a Mac. * Trackpad does not feel nearly as good as o…

Linux always works out of the box on my Librem 15, which was designed to run Linux from the beginning.

And you can run Qubes on it, which is a big plus.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#216

My Linux experience has been bad, yet I would still choose it over the alternatives. I don't want to give up control over my devices or fight an endless battle against bloatware / spyware. Some of the issues: * Hibernate / suspend does not work reliably on my Thinkpad. I gave up trying to configure it. * Encrypting my drive was much more complicated to setup than on a Mac. * Trackpad does not feel nearly as good as o…

Linux always works out of the box on my Librem 15, which was designed to run Linux from the beginning.

That’s exactly why, after 17 years as an Apple user, I settled on a System76 Lemur Pro, rather than a Lenovo or Dell . The OS integration (Pop-OS) is excellent, and the hardware explicitly supported.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#217
post #25

The fact that many people reading this post title (including me) look at it with sarcasm is telling on how apple scored big points with its new cpu. Keeping up with mac OS and the trackpad was already quite hard, but CPU could be the killing blow. Which could lead us in a few years to a situation where mac developers will face the same fate as ios developers : forced to buy hardware to sign their app, forced to push…

Don't buy their shit. Period. Wayland already has trackpad support that's nearly identical to macOS. Gnome with a dock is basically the same desktop experience - Pick a distro of your choice. I can honestly say I prefer my linux XPS to my work macbook, by a large margin. Plus - It doesn't spy on me. I actually own it. I can release software through channels that aren't entirely abusive. Basically - The only thing App…

> Wayland already has trackpad support that's nearly identical to macOS.

I never really understood how input-driver responsibilities are divided between the Linux kernel and X/Wayland.

If you're talking about Macbook's reputation for a pleasant trackpad experience, are you saying that in Linux the relevant code resides within Wayland but not X?

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#218
post #106
post #61

What matters is getting the right distro. I've been using Fedora as my daily driver for almost 13 years. But in my current company (a big search engine company), I was forced use a debian-based internal distro for work, and I realized why people say "linux is buggy and broken". Once a month I'm facing a pulseaudio or xorg issue which I've never had single time in my last 7 years using Fedora. Everything just worked o…

I think that reflects more on your company's internal distro than Debian itself, especially since Ubuntu is itself based on Debian. I know that gLinux has some very non-standard package management stuff, so it wouldn't surprise me if that was related.

What exactly is the point of running an internal distro?

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#219
I went down the same road last year and many of the suggestions are same I eventually found. I gave up scaling though because it's garbage.

The gnome-tweaks solution mentioned in the article works, but it's buggy. Some apps ignore the setting (Dia, I'm looking at you!) and in some distros (Mint, I'm looking at you) parts of the OS bug out, with e.g., some dock icons being scaled and some not. Anyway, the resulting hodge-podge was awful enough that I'm using a 1080 resolution on my fancy 4K screen.

Remaining issues include video playback, which bugs out from time to time, bluetooth, which mostly works except when it doesn't want to connect or when it sets the sound profile to the early-bleedingly awful HSP setting.

One issue worth mentioning is new hardware. When I switched I bought a (then new) X1 Carbon 7, which turned out to have no support for its fancy new digital microphone. The driver took six months to make its way into mainstream distros and I spent this period doing telecon calls with voice via my telephone and video via the webcam.

Anyway, everything mostly works these days. One thing I enjoy compared to modern macs is not having to fight my machine over the right to install software I want (code signing my own gdb binaries is an awful experience).

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#220
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use? I have tried this multiple times and always give up. I ran FreeBSD for a decade as a server in a datacentre and have a deep and abiding love for it, but it doesn't sound it makes a usable desktop these days. Ubuntu appears to be the desktop of choice, but I find it buggy, sluggish and tedious. I'd like a practical and speedy OS that is responsive and configurable. But I don't know enough :)

I use Arch. I love it and I think it's gotten a easier to install over the years (hard to gauge because I also understand more), but it does lean towards the minimalist side. The big win for me is using a lightweight window manager (i3 in my case), which you can do with any distro. My main recommendation is stick with one of the major distros because you'll get more results when you search for solutions to issues. Wi…

Sold, on all counts. I have an MBA 2012 running Ubuntu that will be trashed this weekend in favour of Arch.
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