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Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

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Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finder is unbelievably bad compared to Nautilus Whats so bad about finder?

The ones that have bugged me today: It randomly forgets view preferences. There is something weird about SMB shares where they appear mounted but actually aren’t. It doesn’t have scroll bars in its default state. MacOS is my favourite by a mile, but there are some major warts, though the finder isn’t my major gripe.

The scrollbar thing is system-wide, not Finder-specific: it’s definitely a somewhat annoying default.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#262
I work with a colleague who uses a mac while almost the whole company uses linux. The number of times he complained something doesn't work (like using curl? Or running some python? I don't know i never had a mac) when it clearly does, is amazing.

So i guess you trade one type of annoyance for another

Personnally been using Linux for 5 years everyday now

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finder is unbelievably bad compared to Nautilus Whats so bad about finder?

The ones that have bugged me today: It randomly forgets view preferences. There is something weird about SMB shares where they appear mounted but actually aren’t. It doesn’t have scroll bars in its default state. MacOS is my favourite by a mile, but there are some major warts, though the finder isn’t my major gripe.

Well, concerning SMB shares I had the same problem in Nautilus a few days ago.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#264
I use a Mac laptop for leisure and a Linux desktop for work. I'm very happy with both. Switching their roles would be miserable: Linux laptops can't compete on trackpad and battery life, and Macs can't compete on perf especially if you need more than 16 GB of RAM. Macs also don't have i3, but that's subjective.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#265
post #218

I'm sure Gimp has its fans, but do people just not know about Krita? I'm not saying it's as fast/easy at small changes in Preview, but it's cross platform and mostly a drop-in for people who are familiar with Photoshop. I know people who use it on non-Linux platforms and chose it on its own merits, not giving any excuses because it's Open Source or ported from Linux--they probably don't even know.

I've been using Krita for some time as a replacement of GIMP. However, I still don't understand how these programs are rather powerful and complete, and yet the text tool sucks in all of them.

Powerful text tools are to be found in vector graphics programs.

I use Inkscape and Affinity Designer.

YMMV

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finder is unbelievably bad compared to Nautilus Whats so bad about finder?

UI. Add a shortcut to a folder. Go there. Now try to go to parent folder... Open a folder with images. How on earth do you switch to visible thumbnails? And more like that. These things should be intuitive and easy to do.

Unless I’m completely misunderstanding you, showing Thumbnails has an obvious button on the toolbar. Go to parent is harder, but I think for the sequence you describe there’s a back button on the toolbar that will do what you want. Otherwise, you can use the breadcrumb bar at the bottom (can’t remember if this is a default setting or not) or open the Go menu and learn that Command-Up is the shortcut for “parent directory”. (A little later you discover this is symmetrical: Command-Up goes “up” out of the folder you’re looking at, Command-Down goes “down” into the selected item.)

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be the devil's advocate even though I agree with you partially and I personally prefer Linux, both for practical and philosophical reasons. However, I use a Linux laptop privately and macOS for work, so I think by now I understand both systems a little bit. For automating tasks on macOS you can look at something like hammerspoon which is really cool (though I mostly use it to modify some of the macOS keybindings…

> I would however complain that the default terminal on macOS is really not very good and I always install iTerm2... Apple’s terminal is one of the very few that passes the VT torture test and has support for double width and height attributes. Sadly, it doesn’t do overlines and doesn’t italicise my terminal font.

And it still cannot display powerline characters correctly.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finder is unbelievably bad compared to Nautilus Whats so bad about finder?

UI. Add a shortcut to a folder. Go there. Now try to go to parent folder... Open a folder with images. How on earth do you switch to visible thumbnails? And more like that. These things should be intuitive and easy to do.

>Open a folder with images. How on earth do you switch to visible thumbnails?

It's really easy, or am I misunderstanding you? View -> as Icons. It even has a keyboard shortcut. Or press space bar while with the file selected.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#269
post #142

If you're complaining about Linux drivers please do so after using a Laptop that supports Linux (Thinkpads for example). Just like it wouldn't be fair to complain about macOS on a Hackintosh - sound didn't work well and had to patch the DSDT. > but there are rough edges for the power user. > I am an extreme power user, ... > In the end, I was able to replicate most of my macOS power tools setup via input hooks and sh…

If you're complaining about Linux drivers please do so after using a Laptop that supports Linux (Thinkpads for example). So I Googled “laptops supported by Linux”. There is no official site. Ubuntu has a page. But it’s not on the first page of results. I only know about it because I’m familiar with it. Supporters keeps arguing people should jump through hoops. I’m on Linux right now, but people have better things to…

> Either provide a list so people know exactly what to buy, or all complaints are valid.

Sure, these are two devices I have recently used with Linux that work out of the box:

Dell XPS 13

ThinkPad T14s

Or more generally, you can extend that to any ThinkPad or Dell device without a dedicated graphics card and you will have a good Linux experience. OP somehow has issues on XPS 13, probably due to meddling with too many things. My XPS 13 (9360) has everything working out of the box with Ubuntu 20.04

A very good idea if you want to confirm just before placing an order is to google " Arch Linux wiki" which will take you to the Arch wiki page for that device. There you can see if there are any known compatibility issues.

The Ubuntu certified devices page is pretty good as well.

> Apple sells you the whole package: take it or leave it.

For Linux Dell and Lenovo do that too (in most regions these days).

From what I understand from the blog post, the author is expecting Linux and the software to behave the same as macOS. That is just comparing apples and oranges. If you want a system that you are used to, you should probably stick to that. As in, if macOS works for you, I see no reason you should switch to Linux. I used a Mac for ~5 years before finally giving up because I just hated the window management (among other things). But hey, that does not need to apply to everyone.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#270
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why are they upgrading their kernel every few weeks? I'm pretty sure I had like 4 kernel upgrades on my Fedora machine in the last month. >great window managers like i3 Tiling wms like i3 target a very narrow user base. Unless you are a sysadmin or just work only with terminal they are pretty useless. I don't have non-maximized windows for example (except for Telegram, Obsidian and iTerm quake-like instance)

> Tiling wms like i3 target a very narrow user base. Unless you are a sysadmin or just work only with terminal they are pretty useless. If you only use the terminal, you don't need a tiling WM because tmux and others offer similar functionality out of the box. Tiling WMs are useful in the opposite scenario, when you use many different apps and need a unified way to manage them all.

Valid point, I stand corrected.

I just can't imagine working in an environment where you have, say, 4 apps occupying 4 parts of your screen continuously.

Splitting screen in two (terminal and browser) is the common scenario for me but you don't need i3 for this.

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