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

351–360 of 610 posts

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#351

Post by aorth »

pmlnr wrote: post #61
aorth wrote: post #15

Yes, the Elementary team has been doing great work for years. Sad that it's all parallel to the efforts of the larger GNOME Desktop project. I don't know how much code gets shared between the two, but I cringe to think that Elementary is dragging along a suitcase full of patches! Some of their apps are forks, while others are written from scratch to fit their design (UI/UX/simplicity) goals. I think their decision to…

> Sad that it's all parallel to the efforts of the larger GNOME Desktop project. That is why open source is still a thing: because of available choices.

Oh, definitely. Open-source software is awesome. I'm just saying it's a shame that they do such awesome work and have to keep it parallel, maintaining a ton of their own software (or suitcase full of patches) with their small team, compared to the GNOME team that has a much larger developer community.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#352

Post by [deleted] »

Grishnakh wrote: post #296
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'd happily pay $100/y (year being, new versions/etc) for a stable and awesome UI/UX. Good luck with that. The problem is that no one will make a UI/UX that's both awesome and stable. It's not like the resources aren't there: there's a ton of DEs for Linux, and they've been working on them for 20 years now. But the problem is they can't ever agree on anything, and they can't ever just leave well enough alone: every…

[deleted]

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#353

Post by stevekemp »

fizzbatter wrote: post #157
INTPenis wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I had known that trick. I payed some money for it, which isn't unusual since I often donate money to open source or activism. But this time I regret every cent. Coming from Mac OS, or even Fedora, Elementary seems unpolished and unstable.

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'd happily pay $100/y (year being, new versions/etc) for a stable and awesome UI/UX.

The problem is that many people have differing ideas of what the UI/UX would look like.

If you asked me to provide such a thing I'd just use Debian. Others might prefer RedHat, or similar. But copying an existing distribution, and keeping up to date with new versions would be a full-time job in itself, and that wouldn't leave any room for actual development.

The GNOME project, and KDE project for that matter, have spent years creating a unified environment, and even with their funds and developers the project is never-ending.

I wouldn't say a minimal & unified distribution is impossible, but it would require a lot more users to pay, up-front.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#355

Post by matzipan »

pjmlp wrote: post #292
matzipan wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have valgrind and many other tools instead of "Instruments". The GNOME project itself [1] has a lot of projects which compete with what you linked. Sure, Apple has a few billion dollars to dump into development every year, so you have to adjust for scale. [1] https://developer.gnome.org/references

None of them has the polish of a full working desktop stack like macOS. Once upon a time, around 2000-2, I did some minor contributions to Gtkmm.

Yeah. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12854983

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#356

Post by vladimir-y »

adultSwim wrote: post #345
vladimir-y wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I used pure Arch for a few last years as a main system on my laptop (installed and configured in console manually, so I'm not a full newbie), and have used other Linux distributives before that also as a main system. Arch is fine, but unfortunately I recently realized that I need more stability and that's why I switched to Manjaro. I'm still not sure, but seems they do some tests and polishing taking Arch packages, making sure core components work well, etc.

PS I installed Manjaro not using GUI installer, since it doesn't support disk encryption well enough, and I don't use GRUB (default Manjaro boot loader), but refind.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#357

Post by veidr »

My own burning hatred towards Apple runs a little hotter than most, and I have been seriously googling (and trying) alternatives since 2012.

That was when my $9000 Mac Pro — which had been a great machine, and still was, except for the little detail about not having been updated since 2009 and thus being stuck with USB 2 (!!!) to say nothing of Thunderbolt and any kind of modern accoutrements — started to feel like a personal affront, a sneering fuck you directed at not just me, but everybody remotely like me. (Wow!!! Déjà vu bro!!)

Nevertheless, I didn't switch then, and all of us complainers won't switch now either.

Because the fucking OS.

I've tried every iteration of Ubuttnu, CentOS, and FreeBSD since. Even OpenWhatever, before the goblins bought it. I have Thinkpads and Dell XPS "Developer Editions" and a drawer full of other crap like that.

Executive summary: it's all garbage time. It's like going back 10+ years. Nothing works right, on any of them. Copy/paste, batteries, wireless networking, drag and drop, high-res displays, multilingual input, even like fucking word processing and email and image editors and terminal programs... it's all like Mac OS X Jaguar level.

We can't give Apple the finger, even though we want to (and definitely after last week, we all want to) because there literally isn't an OS in the world that can touch Mac OS for general-purpose workstation/laptop use. (For niche and limited-purpose, yes, there are options.)

Elementary OS is a fucking joke. Every OS mentioned disparagingly above is a better choice for almost any purpose. But those are still horrible.

Apple's OS advantage is what lets them say "Fuck you peons, here's some 3 year old technology and a bag of dongles, that'll be $4000."

But we're mostly all gonna buy the new shitty MacBook Hipster, or gut it out with our old ones, until a better fucking OS happens. And that won't be soon — it's not even remotely on the horizon.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#358

Post by bshimmin »

falcolas wrote: post #254
fnl wrote: post #211

I try Ubuntu about once a year, in the hopes of getting rid of OSX. But each time, the reason for going back to Apple ID is interoperability : Try dragging stuff (images, fotos, links, files, formatted text ...) from one program to another, including the "dreaded" Finder; Works nearly always in OSX. While Ubuntu has come a long way with these things, I think it's still an even longer way away from what OSX can do. So…

Eh, that functionality has a tendency to break after being used a few times in OSX. Specifically, dragging images from your browser to the finder works the first few times, providing an overlay image which becomes a file icon as you hover over the finder window. A few transfers later, the file icon stops appearing. Then the semi-transparent image stops appearing; though the files are still being copied. Then, silentl…

Macs have become a lot worse at this sort of thing - weird, intermittent user interface failures - over the last few years.

Sometimes I can't drag attachments out of emails (which is about the only damn reason I don't use Mutt for everything) on the first few attempts; I thought for a while it was because the attachment hadn't completely downloaded, but no, it doesn't seem to be as predictable as that.

Moving files around in the Finder in general seems problematic, especially dragging between directories in the list view. This often causes much cursing.

The worst thing about Macs for me now is how much guff pops up entirely unbidden - messages about not having done any backups in 90 days, messages about an update which hasn't been able to be completed (but has caused iTerm to try and quit, which, in itself, causes a dialog to appear that I need to get rid of), iCloud approval nonsense (which also happens on both of my iPhones periodically), iTunes Store requests that I may or may not have made days ago that have failed with an unknown error, etc. The list goes on. I'm sure all of these things in isolation are very clever and should help improve my life, but in toto it's immensely frustrating.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#359

Post by tgarma1234 »

INTPenis wrote: post #111
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 wish I had known that trick. I payed some money for it, which isn't unusual since I often donate money to open source or activism. But this time I regret every cent. Coming from Mac OS, or even Fedora, Elementary seems unpolished and unstable.

I felt the same way ultimately despite my original enthusiasm. To be honest now that I have some experience with the eco-system as a whole, I mean Linux, it's really unreasonable to expect a few developers, even very good ones, to produce a desktop operating system that rivals OS X or Windows or even Fedora because they are competing against very large and well funded teams at huge corporations that by now have at least three decades of experience building desktop operating systems. In short, Elementary OS is a nice idea but it's a somewhat Quixotic endeavor.

Re: Switching from macOS: The Basics

#360

Post by xaduha »

GavinMcG wrote: post #6
xaduha wrote: post #3

Check Solus instead https://solus-project.com/

I've downvoted you for now, since your comment doesn't tell us anything about the project and appears to be a lazy effort to piggyback off the resource that (I presume) a competitor has offered.

I wrote that comment first, but then got a login prompt and thought it didn't go through. But it did, so I deleted my second comment, which went something like

> I recently installed Solus and was pleasantly surprised

I don't have a detailed comparison or anything like that, I haven't used that many Linux desktop distros to begin with, but I did try Elementary OS and found it wanting.

Post reply on HN