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

341–350 of 610 posts

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#341

Post by gvb »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #303

The elephant in the room is that Elementary is infringing on Apple's copyright by imitating macOS design. Linux has great desktop environments (Unity, KDE, Gnome). Elementary's claim to fame is that it has good design (wink). If stealing others' GPL-licensed code is wrong, then so is this.

You are confusing copyright[1] (covers written works, such as source code) with design patents[2] (covers look and feel). If Elementary is infringing on Apple's patents, that would be wrong.

A cursory search of OSX design patents[3] turns up the Dock patent[4]. Whether Elementary infringes the patent is a legal matter (IANAL).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=design+patent+osx&ie=utf-8&o...

[4] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...:

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#342

Post by vladimir-y »

reitanqild wrote: post #295
vladimir-y wrote: post #257

I think for those who are not able to install and configure Linux manually from scratch not using a graphical installer would be better to use Windows 10 (not a bad OS), with no irony. Since such kind of articles and "simplified" systems like that "elementary OS" do hide Linux complexity. One day user will face a really serious OS issues and will stuck with that not knowing what to do (for example not bootable system…

Plain wrong IMO. Have been using Linux professionally and on my personal machines on and off for 15 years, sonce I was a student. A bit more work than Windows in some ways, less in others. I came to Ubuntu back in 2005ish based on a tip from a then 50 year old electrical engineer who had fallen in love. My bus driver this morning loves it (we sometimes talk while waiting). So stop spreading this FUD. And this comes f…

You didn't get a point of my message. But I'm not going to keep explaining conversation with a person who is writing to me to stop expressing my own opinion which is backed by some experience, you better keep chatting with your bus driver.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#343

Post by kalleboo »

muyuu wrote: post #256
asadkn wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't change the fact that Mac marketshare is around 7%. Just because they're targeting the coffee shop crowd doesn't mean everyone's using Macs.

In the USA it's 13.5%, and I'm willing to bet that in urban US areas it's even much higher. Here in London (UK) it has to be at least 20%-30%. But yeah, not everyone's using Macs. It's the biggest vendor, but there are more non-Macs than Macs.

Another distinction to make is business vs private users. Unless something has changed recently, Macs are basically unheard of in offices (aside from maybe the receptionist), so if 50% of the market is businesses where there's 0% market share, "how many people use a Mac at the coffee shop" will overstate their overall market share by 50%.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#344

Post by RubyPinch »

equalarrow wrote: post #305
aroman wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just described elementary (fwiw, it is a for-profit LLC). I think you're massively underestimating the magnitude and difficulty of what you're seeking. elementary has been at this for 5 years and made an immense amount of progress, though. But it's definitely still not at the level of Apple, which has had decades and billions of dollars poured into this. It's not a "paid OS" in that it doesn't force you to pay a…

I think this is one big problem with the OSS community: there is no concept of 'value'. People complain about iOS' race to the bottom, but in the OSS community, I frel like this has been there for a long time. "You want to _charge me for it_ ?! Pffft!" We may complain about macOS now with Sierra but for thr most part, macOS has been stable for a long time. I haven't seen a kernel panic in probably a decade. Not sayin…

For me it feels a bit different

I can throw $XX at a linux distro, pray that it goes to the right things and gets improved proper, and then wait until it becomes good, or I could throw $XX at a closed source solution, and have something that works good right now.

Its all fine to donate $XX, but buying for $XX to get something significantly worse than its competitors is a bit weird, and can only really be justified through "I support free software even if it has binary blobs", which is still a bit weird

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#345

Post by adultSwim »

vladimir-y wrote: post #267
haffla wrote: post #124

I find Apricity OS (Arch Linux) much better suited for developers. In fact at work I switched from Ubuntu to Apricity. Through yaourt (paceman frontend) and AUR (Arch User Repository) it's a breeze to install the latest versions of literally everything you need be it Docker, Java or IntelliJ. I think it's comparable with brew. Plus Apricity looks so much better than Elementary in my opinion and almost manages to give…

Why not Manjaro? Does Apricity ship Arch packages passed through the its own repositories doing some testing and making sure core components are not broken and work well one with each other in the Apricity terms and in general? Manjaro does that, there is a kind of release cycle, every 1 or 2 week updates come, ie updates come not directly from the Arch repos (except AUR stuff obviously).

(sincerely) Why Manjaro and not just straight Arch?

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#346

Post by ant6n »

xd1936 wrote: post #172
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…

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?

When BetterTouchTool forced the switch to a "pay-as-you" want version (they even forcefully expired existing versions of the app, it simply stopped working unless you fork over money), their minimum was 4$ or so, because apparently if it was less, then the payment processing would be too high in relation.

So apparently in the bait-and-switch mentality of the mac world, that you can pay '0 dollars' is not obvious.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#347

Post by pmlnr »

aibottle wrote: post #222

Do people realize they can run Linux on their Macbooks? Who needs elementary, just install Debian.

It takes time to get the mentality; took me years as well.

The shiny & pretty, especially if you're coming from the shiny & pretty, seems better and you forget to appreciate the things that silently just work in the background.

I've recently switched from the previous elementary (due to bugs and missing features) first to Mint 18 Cinnamon, just to find a lot of bugs there are well ( at least no missing features ), then to XFCE.

I'm slowly building an itch towards where most distros are moving to (being swallowed up by systemd), so XFCE: to get familiar with something that is truly portable, and runs of BSDs as well. xfwm4 + tint2 as panel + synapse as "menu" to be specific, and I'm really happy I did it.

No, it's not as nice as eOS or Gnome Shell; some apps are quite ugly and the terminal windows don't line up when tiled.

But it works. It's fast, it's glitch and bug-free so far; power management flies, and it feels like I got all the good from the good ol' Gnome2 days with updates.

The truth is, tint2 eliminated the need for fancy indicators: it has an executor, with which you can do (nearly) anything, like displaying weather, cpu temperature, fan speed, changing governors with clicks, etc.

So, as I started: it takes a lot of frustration, but eventually, you'll get to the point of install the most simple, most robust thing.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#348

Post by john61 »

pmontra wrote: post #255
embik wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know the GPL does not allow trial periods and asking for money later on, but feel free to correct me. That's why elementary cannot do such a thing.

The GPL and payment are orthogonal. They could GPL a piece of software that stops working after 30 days if you don't pay. You decide if to compile out the code that checks for the payment (and possibly distribute your version) or pay them those money.

If it stops working it violates the GPL:

Freedom 0: "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose."

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#349

Post by the-dude »

serf wrote: post #150
r3bl wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. It says "pay what you want" and you can literally pay what you want (including nothing).

Well, I think it is. If I pay nothing, I don't pay. I don't say "I paid zero." or "I paid nothing" unless someone asks the specific question "How much did you pay for that?" It's obviously a way to nudge people into paying something . edit: I made an aside about the use of the word 'donation' by cannabis collectives in the U.S. to denote 'payment' (as a way to operate as non-profits and avoid federal problems) as a r…

When I first heard about zero-Ohm resistors I thought it was hilarious.

They do serve a purpose though.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#350

Post by cturner »

chrishacken wrote: post #209
fizzbatter wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish someone would start a paid OS based on Linux and OSS tools. I'd happily pay $100/y (year being, new versions/etc) for a stable and awesome UI/UX. As it is, my Macbook Pro Retina has been crashing a lot and doing weird things frequently since i upgraded to Sierra. Between that and the latest Macbook Pro notebooks, i just don't like Apple anymore. I'm pretty set on buying a highend laptop _(similar build…

I'm right there with you. The only thing that keeps me on a Mac is the combination of Unix + Half decent UX. If someone built a paid Unix/Linux distro that could run Mac Apps, I'd give away my extra kidney for it. Windows almost has me sold with their new Ubuntu subsystem.

I've come to a conclusion that if you have high standards, you can't look to other people for happiness. Even if I had a dream system for a while, at some point they'd follow a new trend that annoyed me and I'd feel left out again. Or they'd fail to follow a trend, and I'd complain that they'd fallen behind.

I've been orphaned from several platforms. OSX surprised me. It appeared to be the dream commodity unix. But then a release broke my workspace usage.

Eventually, I completely switched to a stripped-down unix. I use a bash menu for controlling things like wireless and screen lock. Tmux/dwm are my window managers, I use whatever the latest browser is.

All this required effort to learn and set up. People who look to the big companies for fashion would sneer at this. But it's a sharp tool, and it'll never be made obsolete by shifting trends.

Post reply on HN