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Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

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Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#221

Post by peatmoss »

tehwalrus wrote: post #124
tluyben2 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly offtopic; I worry about Window managers... Too much, I admit but it's such a difference in productivity for me . Is there a good i3/ratpoison alternative for Mac OS X or Windows? I think I have tried all that came up with Google and they are far less efficient than both of the above.

I use Amathyst on Mac, having got used to AwesomeWM and then needing to switch. I believe its (unfamiliar to me) key bindings are based on i3. https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

Mentioned elsewhere, but KWM may be a little more to your liking and focus follows mouse: https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#222

Post by brightball »

INTPenis wrote: post #146

I had the same prejudice about Fedora and RedHat back when I was a debian fanboy. But if you look at what Redhat is doing with their money and their company then you soon realize that Redhat Inc. not only IS a large part of the Linux community, but also supports the open source movement in many ways. So Fedora has been my main distro of choice for a couple years now. I still hesitate to order RHEL licenses at work, u…

There's a part of me that really wants to use RHEL on the desktop to both support the company and to encourage them to put more of an emphasis on it. I'd love to see Dell Developer Edition with RedHat out there.

To me, that just seems like a long term win.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#223

Post by RossBencina »

Lio wrote: post #166
frik wrote: post #109

Or the other way: Finding an Alternative to Windows 10 That non-optional phone-home, non-optional updates, ads on startmenu, little QA (buggy like never before) - Windows up to Win7 was so nice, since Nadella everything went downhill, so sad, but true. Good that Win7 is supported until 2020, and promising alternatives are around the corner with Google Android/Fuchsia, macOS, Linux - although, the transition will be p…

I see the downvotes for the parent post but no rebuttals to the phone home/privacy issues in Windows 10. I ask this as someone who hasn't really used Windows for 10+ years, could someone who knows please discuss the state of privacy in Windows 10? Is this a non-issue because you can turn off all the monitoring? How would one go about that? Is it a non-issue because Windows 10 doesn't send private information back to…

I use Windows 10 on my main dev box. I somewhat agree with the parent. The Windows 10 situation has been enough to push me to start experimenting with Linux.

The phone-home and forced-update-reboot are the big problems for me:

The phone-home behavior of Windows 10 is a repellent. Turning it all off is non-trivial. The easily accessible privacy settings don't disable everything. There are various lists of firewall rules, scripts, policy settings etc. I can't recommend a specific source, but I think there are some well-maintained lists/scripts on github. To be honest, I'm not sure whether anyone knows exactly what goes back to Microsoft (not being tin-foil hat about it, I just don't think it's well documented).

The no-choice-auto-update-reboot thing is also terrible (I've lost data on more than one occasion from unsaved files when Windows forces a reboot while I'm afk). This can be disabled with a lot of work and research. Some people say manual updates will re-enable it. Note that I really do want to keep my machine up to date, but ideally I don't want to have to reboot, and when I do have to reboot I want to choose exactly when. I didn't buy a UPS so my computer could reboot randomly by itself.

As for "ads on startmenu, little QA (buggy like never before)":

Running Windows 10 Pro I have not seen any advertising.

The system runs fine for me. Arguably it runs with lower memory usage than Win 7. I agree that Win 7 is very stable, and that's been my experience with Win 10 too. That said, I only started using Win10 in mid 2016, so perhaps earlier builds were worse.

Overall I would have been happy to stay with Win 7. So far I've found Linux GUI to be less polished, but maybe I'll get used to it.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#224

Post by rahkiin »

untog wrote: post #216
DavideNL wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but when I try to use Windows my hand (mouse hand) cramps up and I get angry and frustrated Same here! Also i start to suffer from 'update-fatigue' when using Windows. The endless updates, reboots, and god knows what it's doing in the background which consumes resources... it all just feels so clumsy. I've never experienced anything like this in OSX.

Really? Because OS X pesters me about pending updates via the App Store all the time, and the only deferment option it provides is "wait until tonight".

Except it will tell you and you can say no. On Windows, you can only extend the actual reboot, sometimes, and that within 30 seconds. If you go for a pee, you might return to a rebooting machine.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#225

Post by fusiongyro »

stinos wrote: post #103
fusiongyro wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thinking about trying it, but a friend of mine said that he could crash it easily by just doing the examples from Mastering the Linux Command Line . I think a Surface might make a decent piece of hardware but either WSL (i.e. the horrendously named Bash on Ubuntu on Windows) has to get a lot more stable or Linux support will have to improve. I hear Linux support for the Surface Pro 3 is basically there, but SP4 s…

a friend of mine said that he could crash it easily by just doing the examples from Mastering the Linux Command Line Not really surprising (dev version, comes with warnings about compatibility, ...). But why would you let that hold you back for trying it out for what you are going to use it for? Counter-anecdote: I've ran gui apps like SublimeText, gcc, ... without crashing; also see other comments. tldr; try it firs…

What's holding me back is the expenditure of money.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#226

Post by brightball »

vxxzy wrote: post #26

To the point (reality) of Arch's amazing docs; I fully agree with the author. I've never experienced a more comprehensive and up-to-date doc regarding a distro. For this reason, I exclusively use Arch for both desktop and laptop. It is a freeing/empowering experience installing Arch.

I've got a Dell Developer Edition arriving on Thursday and everything I've been reading about Arch has been seriously considering installing it almost immediately.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#227

Post by ahawkins »

Klathmon wrote: post #162
slantyyz wrote: post #102

I know the OTA dismissed Windows, but when I switched from OSX to Windows a couple of years ago, I found Scott Hanselman's "Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows" [1] to be indispensable. I've been doing Rails work on Windows since switching, but ymmv depending on what your workflow and toolchain are. I also found that there were a lot of workarounds/alternatives to software/tools that I thought I…

I gotta say I've tried to do the VM thing. I REALLY tried. But it just isn't something that will work for any significant amount of time. It would break with any updates, half the time xcode just wouldn't work, and it would sometimes be so slow that you'd need to wait minutes for some fancy animation to run. And this wasn't even to get around buying a MacBook, we had one, I just wanted to compile and sign a hybrid ap…

Have you considered CircleCI? They have iOS/OSX toolchain support.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#228

Post by hiram112 »

Klathmon wrote: post #162
slantyyz wrote: post #102

I know the OTA dismissed Windows, but when I switched from OSX to Windows a couple of years ago, I found Scott Hanselman's "Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows" [1] to be indispensable. I've been doing Rails work on Windows since switching, but ymmv depending on what your workflow and toolchain are. I also found that there were a lot of workarounds/alternatives to software/tools that I thought I…

I gotta say I've tried to do the VM thing. I REALLY tried. But it just isn't something that will work for any significant amount of time. It would break with any updates, half the time xcode just wouldn't work, and it would sometimes be so slow that you'd need to wait minutes for some fancy animation to run. And this wasn't even to get around buying a MacBook, we had one, I just wanted to compile and sign a hybrid ap…

I've also tried to use a Linux VM on Widnows due to issues with Node, paths in various Scala libs, and a dozen other problems.

Cygwin works for 50%, but not for everything.

I've tried Win 10 with Subsystem for Linux (Ubuntu Bash) and unfortunately it is not even close to production ready. Besides, I'm terribly disappointed with Win 10 after having been really happy with Windows 7 since its release.

Running a few Java and Javascript projects in IntelliJ on a VM is an exercise in frustration, even on a very powerful Dell Precision with an I7, SSD, and 32 GB of ram.

It works somewhat, but I'm very happy with my work provided 2015 MB Pro with only 16GB of ram. With Brew, Docker, etc. everything works great. If work hadn't paid for the Mac, I don't think I'd buy a new model due to the price and lack of upgradability, no escape key, ports, etc.

That being said, I've just installed Fedora 25 on a second m2 drive I put into my one Win 10 laptop. So far it is pretty good for dev work. It's not perfect, but it's approaching usability with a small Win VM for Office.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#229

Post by ourcat »

ourcat wrote: post #145
z1mm32m4n wrote: post #126

Many articles about wanting to leave the macOS ecosystem mention Sketch. Sketch is macOS only (and will be for the forseeable future), so it's understandable that people want to consider the implications of switching away from it. Recently, however, I stumbled upon Figma, a web-based, real-time collaborative interface design app (i.e., a competitor of Sketch). After convincing my group to experiment with it for a sch…

I've never really understood why people use Sketch. I recently worked on a project where I had asked for some basic vanilla templates of a mobile site from the designers and was sent a huge Sketch file. It was utterly useless and I had to code everything by hand myself, since the 'designers' very clearly had zero clue about HTML+CSS or any notion of responsiveness, thanks to apps like Sketch which teach nothing of th…

just to clarify: I expected HTML (etc.) files. We'd already been through the whole wireframing process.

I also requested a responsive design.

What I got was as useful as a PDF.

Sorry, just kvetching on Sketching.

I just felt it was a waste of time that some basic coding skills could have solved. ;)

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#230

Post by tehwalrus »

peatmoss wrote: post #221
tehwalrus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Amathyst on Mac, having got used to AwesomeWM and then needing to switch. I believe its (unfamiliar to me) key bindings are based on i3. https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

Mentioned elsewhere, but KWM may be a little more to your liking and focus follows mouse: https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm

Amethyst has an experimental focus follows mouse. Does KWM handle modal dialogs a little better than Amethyst in that mode?

(I will also say that macOS's menu bar app buttons were not designed with focus follows mouse in mind!)

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