Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Switching from macOS: The Basics

blog.elementary.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 610 posts

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#281

Post by chairmanwow »

kybernetyk wrote: post #33

So I went to their main page to download an ISO to give it a try in a VM. They hid the download button really well: You have to type in "0" into the "how much you'd like to pay" field for the "Purchase" button to change to "Download". I mean I understand that open source projects need funding. But if you want people to try your niche OS at least make it obvious how to download it. Ask for money later after people had…

I agree this is kinda frustrating, but judging from other comments it seems like ElementaryOS is maintained by a for-profit company. Driving conversions is probably more important to them rather than optimizing for total total number of downloads. I personally think this strategy is limited in scope as it ignores the life-time value of users that donate after using for a period of time, but always interesting to play devil's advocate.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#282

Post by reitanqild »

yalogin wrote: post #270

What exactly is the reason to switch to another OS? I thought the complaints were about hardware. How the hell is elementary OS going to make the hardware better? Also can someone tell me the main complaint about the hardware, is it the USB-C and the sd card?

It can run on non-Apple hardware.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#283

Post by vetinari »

makomk wrote: post #237
vetinari wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Linux world[1] has got together and is banging out a solution for a somewhat bigger problem that the multitude of X toolkits and their different (non) approach to HiDPI. It's called Wayland, it took some time to make and next week, new Fedora is coming out that uses it by default (until now you could "only" opt-in during login). [1] Except Ubuntu, they have their own NIH solution, of course.

Wayland, the solution where not only does every toolkit have a different and often incomplete approach to HiDPI, they now all have their own implementations of window titlebars and widgets too?

Toolkits always had their own implementation of widgets, that's not even Linux or X11 specific. The same applies to Windows and macOS: ever noticed that MS Office has different widgets than Photoshop? The only difference is, that Windows and macOS had one or more widget libraries supplied with the system and synced look&feel for them, while there was no canonical widget library or l&f for X11.

Title bars are up to compositor (it was up to window manager in X11). Even client side window decorations (i.e. mostly title bar combined with toolbar) are nothing new, if that is what you mean with custom implementation of window titlebars.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#284

Post by pmontra »

awinder wrote: post #221
nsxwolf wrote: post #159

So USB-C is what it takes to get you to switch to Linux? What are you going to do when all other laptop manufacturers follow suit - switch back? Mac users who make this threat sound just like people who threaten to move to Canada every election cycle.

Most of the laptop manufacturers are mixing the legacy ports with the new usb-c ports. That'll probably continue for a while, and not sure if you'll see things like sd card readers disappear anytime soon. Apple's DNA is to make upsetting changes quickly (often to their benefit), but that's not how a lot of users like things to go down, so this feels like a legitimate gripe. As for when the escape key / function row i…

> not sure if you'll see things like sd card readers disappear anytime soon

I hope they don't. I love to open my camera, put the SD card in my computer and copy all the pictures.

The camera also has a WiFi chip, which would let me download pics and control it with a very invasive mobile app (lots of unnecessary permissions). I just disabled it. Needless to say the desktop application runs only on Windows and Mac. I could have installed it in a VM but the SD card is just faster.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#285

Post by dberg »

marrs wrote: post #186
xd1936 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody in the FOSS community gets really mad at that decision... I thought it was intuitive. "How much do you want to pay?" "0 Dollars." "Great!" Why is that so horrible?

Don't ever rely on your own perception of what's intuitive to evaluate a user experience. Someone has given specific feedback to the contrary, which means that there will be others. If I was the site's maintainer, I'd be heading straight for the analytics to see if they support this feedback.

>Don't ever rely on your own perception of what's intuitive to evaluate a user experience

Really great line, i liked that a lot.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#286

Post by module0000 »

toyg wrote: post #53
kybernetyk wrote: post #33

So I went to their main page to download an ISO to give it a try in a VM. They hid the download button really well: You have to type in "0" into the "how much you'd like to pay" field for the "Purchase" button to change to "Download". I mean I understand that open source projects need funding. But if you want people to try your niche OS at least make it obvious how to download it. Ask for money later after people had…

This is a long-standing criticism of Elementary. I think they initially didn't even provide a way to get a free download, and eventually settled for the current UI. Basically the founder-owner is adamant that someone has to pay for his time, and tbh I don't begrudge him.

As an OSS contributor, I _do_ begrudge him for it - and this is why.

If you were to email Elementary and ask for support with a non-working 'sg' kernel module, I would be highly surprised if they offered you any support. More likely, they would tell you to contact one of the authors, who did not receive one dime for our work. He takes your money, and shirks off supporting you to people that _didn't_ take your money.

edit: typo

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#287

Post by mrcarrot »

jansenv wrote: post #248
epmaybe wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest gripe with OS X right now is that Safari doesn't play nice with some website when it comes to dragging pictures and pasting them in from the clipboard.

I also can't stand the lack of plugin support on Safari. Is uBlock origin or similar available on that platform yet?

There are adblocking plugins available now, yes. Though last time I checked uBlock Origin wasn't one of them, unfortunately.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#288

Post by pjmlp »

marrs wrote: post #216
pjmlp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. GNU/Linux doesn't have desktop stack capable of matching Objective-C, Swift frameworks both in feature set and related GUI tooling.

GTK+ supports both of those languages. Also, macOS's "tooling" is XCode, so Linux's tooling is superior by default.

If you think that, then you don't have any idea of what a fully working desktop stack for GUI developers looks like.

GTK+ is no competition for these APIs:

https://developer.apple.com/reference/

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#289

Post by matzipan »

Exuma wrote: post #268

Honestly, this looks abysmal. This is like 1/1000th of the complexity and flexibility of macOS. What are you actually so upset about that warrants building a new, hideous, kiddy-version of mac OS?

You clearly haven't tried neither elementary nor Linux in general. There are many legitimate reasons why you might want to use elementary just as well as there are many legitimate reasons why you might want to use macOS. You're condemning diversity? To each their own.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#290

Post by reitoei »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #88
tambourine_man wrote: post #22

Unfortunately, no Photoshop, no go

I feel like, unless your situation dictates a specific product (which is unlikely), this should be rephrased "Unfortunately, no graphics editor that does x, y, z". If you continue to put up a 'Photoshop' barrier, then you will never be able to consider any alternatives — assume Photoshop will never happen on Linux, but that there may well be a graphics tool in future that is far superior as far as your needs are conc…

> If you continue to put up a 'Photoshop' barrier, then you will never be able to consider any alternatives

It's an industry/education barrier more than anything else. Photoshop has been the standard for years because it generally works quite well and is supported on the two major desktop operating systems.

> assume Photoshop will never happen on Linux

Probably not, no money in it for Adobe. I've always said I'd happily pay for a commercial Linux OS developed by Adobe that ran Creative Suite.

> it may even already exist

It doesn't.

> the developers behind OS alternatives will never know what functionality you require if all the details you give are "Photoshop"

No offence but you're kind of talking about Photoshop like it's MS Paint. It's a ubiquitous, massively bloated, complicated piece of software (10 million LOC, roughly the same as the Linux kernel?) that can take years to master.

Post reply on HN