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Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

catfox.life

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Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#41

Post by Tehchops »

I'm honestly torn.

I was a big Linux proponent for a while, then Apple won me over with Macs for a time. They did "just work" for my day-to-day(DevOps).

However, last spring, I bought a new personal system for freelance work/side projects, and have been running Ubuntu as my daily driver. Funny enough, it seems like during that same period the my UX on my work-supplied Mac(2019-era MBP) has been steadily declining. I've been dealing with maddening slowdowns and numerous bluetooth issues(with Airpods no less!).

Conversely, I find working on the Ubuntu machine much more enjoyable, and I'm exploring the option of getting a Linux machine supplied by work as well. I'll caveat by saying it took some time to hone in on solid configurations, tweaks, and a good DE/WM(i3wm), but I gotta say Linux is winning me back over.

All that being said, I'm not deluded enough to think Linux(in its current state) is ever going to make inroads with Apple's consumer/pro-sumer userbase. It's still very much an enthusiast option in my mind.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#42

Post by bastardoperator »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #23
gurjeet wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet Linux, whatever distro you use, wasn’t right for you to begin with; but you made it yours by tweaking it to your liking. Trust me, you can tweak macOS to your liking, as well. I used to be a Linux lover, but after trying for almost a decade, for my desktop needs, I’ve given up on Linux, and adopted macOS. macOS is a POSIX environment, and you have almost the whole GNU ecosystem available to you, if you want.

Well- one of my main gripes was that I had to spend a lot of time and work getting macOS to behave like Linux did - so at some point I decided to stop wasting my time and use the real thing :) so “whatever distro you use, wasn’t right for you to begin with; but you made it yours by tweaking it to your liking.” You’re not entirely wrong but it was far less painful than tweaking macOS. “ you can tweak macOS to your lik…

  brew install coreutils
Getting GNU tools on MacOS is super easy and honestly I don't know anyone using ports/fink. All of my development ends up on Linux machines, in rare cases I need something specific to Linux or my production environment, I just connect to a dev machine but for the most part I use MacOS as the primary desktop at work along with everyone else.

For me it's all about workflow. I spend a lot of time in alacritty, vscode, and a browser with bitwarden. I'm covered on every OS with those tools so I've stopped caring about OS all together, I like bits of all of them, and dislike bits of all of them.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#43

Post by nmstoker »

All seems sensible stuff, the "it just works" can't be overstated.

But the Apple Maps point felt like a stretch - Google Maps is available everywhere. I don't see much to suggest you'd need it as an app, it works great in the browser with hardware accelerated graphics, which it has had for 10+ years.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#44

Post by nyanpasu64 »

_8j50 wrote: post #32

I have found time to be the biggest factor. I use to have hours every day to tinker with Linux, I enjoy the tinkering personally and I can endure the lack of features. But at some point I began spending more than 8h on average on my work and really needed a break each day to not get burned out and take care of *health,on top of which I have a backlog of things to study up on for $work, any platform (including windows…

Funny, I've experienced breakage in "happy-path" operations on macOS, that I haven't had recently on Linux. On Arch, building SDL apps is accomplished by installing packages systemwide. On macOS, setting up Qt Creator with CMake and Ninja is accomplished by installing CMake and Ninja... oh wait CMake can't find Ninja because $PATH is only edited for apps launched from a terminal, not Qt Creator! And on M1 Mac, Homebrew installs libraries to /opt/homebrew/, so the average build system can't even find the SDL you install there. I haven't figured out yet how to make apps include that path.

On Linux, having gdb launch apps is easy, though debugging running apps needs sudo or tinkering with yama. On macOS, having lldb launch a release-mode app (eg. ls or cat) requires disabling SIP then entering your admin password or Touch ID. And Valgrind doesn't work on Mac.

True, editing government forms on Linux is a pain. Chrome is close to usable, though its formatting is iffy. Though I dread contaminating Windows installations with Adobe's bloatware.

And I've had Arch and Paru break sometimes, rebuilding software and such.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#45

Post by QuikAccount »

gurjeet wrote: post #21
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #17

“Platform A has these features I find convenient therefore I migrated from platform B which doesn’t have them”. That’s all this article is. Platform B might as well have been windows. I’m not sure why everyone is reading it as a dismissal of desktop Linux as a concept. I tried a Mac for a while, found it too restrictive, moved back to Linux on the desktop - doesn’t mean the Mac sucks or anything, just wasn’t right fo…

I bet Linux, whatever distro you use, wasn’t right for you to begin with; but you made it yours by tweaking it to your liking. Trust me, you can tweak macOS to your liking, as well. I used to be a Linux lover, but after trying for almost a decade, for my desktop needs, I’ve given up on Linux, and adopted macOS. macOS is a POSIX environment, and you have almost the whole GNU ecosystem available to you, if you want.

I had to use a Mac for work for a while. You are right you can tweak MacOS to your liking but the difference is Linux distros actively encourage tweaking while Apple actively discourages and tries to get in the way.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#46

Post by kitsunesoba »

_8j50 wrote: post #32

I have found time to be the biggest factor. I use to have hours every day to tinker with Linux, I enjoy the tinkering personally and I can endure the lack of features. But at some point I began spending more than 8h on average on my work and really needed a break each day to not get burned out and take care of *health,on top of which I have a backlog of things to study up on for $work, any platform (including windows…

Getting Linux to a 100% satisfactory state has proven quite difficult for me. Admittedly, this is likely because I'm not shaping my hardware choices around using Linux, but it's proven difficult nonetheless.

Point in case, my Thinkpad X1 Nano which I was toying with the idea of flipping over to a pure Linux machine recently. Most of its hardware is supported well by Linux (Intel iGPU, Intel networking, etc and no bizarro components like you tend to see in cheaper laptops), but it comes with a display that's best run at 150% or 175% UI scale, which Linux still struggles to get right. Using the latest Fedora as a base so I'm not missing out on newer additions, I tried GNOME and KDE Plasma under both Wayland and X11 as well as Cinnamon under just X11 (since it lacks Wayland support) and none of them handled fractional scaling correctly/optimally across all the apps I need to use.

Meanwhile, Windows 10 and 11 on the same machine handle UI scaling fine, even with apps I wouldn't expect that from.

So to use Linux, I'd need to make a concession somewhere, whether that's with some apps not rendering their UI correctly or by using a laptop that has a "normal" DPI screen and probably the terribly low screen brightness that typically comes with those panels. That concession-making is not fun.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#47

Post by QuikAccount »

ricardobeat wrote: post #33
xaduha wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bet Linux, whatever distro you use, wasn’t right for you to begin with; but you made it yours by tweaking it to your liking. In my case, absolutely not. I'm using Solus (Budgie) on my notebook and that's because it suits me basically OOTB. What I do have though is a headless NixOS server to which I connect with VSCode for a dev environment. But I wouldn't use NixOS on desktop when Solus is a much better choice, b…

What’s special about Solus? Looking at its website, it looks like any other standard Linux distro.

Not the person you are asking but Solus is just very solid. There is nothing super special about it but it is one of the few distros I have ever used that "just works."

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#48

Post by twblalock »

rvz wrote: post #3

> At the end of the day, my goal in life is to make a difference, and also have a bit of fun. I want a system that is out of my way and lets me focus on that. For me, in 2022, that system is a Mac. TL;DR: Another very happy Apple customer. It seems that they are not looking back at the Linux Desktop. What can the Linux Desktop ecosystem learn from this?

> What can the Linux Desktop ecosystem learn from this?

Fundamentally the problem is lack of alignment between all the different people working on the Linux desktop. Nobody is in charge promoting a single vision and herding all the cats to achieve it, and nobody ever will be, because the Linux community won't accept it.

That leads to fragmentation, and because there are so many moving parts that aren't developed in alignment, users need to tinker with their desktops to get the outcomes they want.

The problem is, some people seem to think Linux on the desktop can become popular with the general public despite the fragmentation and tinkering needed to make it work. That's not going to happen. The Linux community cannot have it both ways: fragmentation and success on the desktop are incompatible.

For a while, it seemed possible that Ubuntu would overcome that contradiction by offering a curated Linux desktop for normal people that would become so widespread it would end up being the de facto Linux desktop, and anything else would be a special flavor for people who really wanted to tinker. But that hasn't really panned out, and a lot of the opposition to Ubuntu comes from within the Linux community.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#49

Post by atty »

smoldesu wrote: post #2

> You could probably make something as nice and integrated as Things on Linux, but for someone as busy as me, it is nice to use what is already there. I find this a funny point, as Things is one of the apps that has a near-direct clone[0] on Linux. It also costs $49.99 less than Things! [0] https://github.com/alainm23/planner

Does planner have native apps on iOS/iPad that it syncs with? If it does, I can’t find it in the App Store currently.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#50

Post by vbezhenar »

I’m a bit disappointed by current macOS state. Xcode breaks console: even man man starts throwing some warnings. softwareupdate —-install-rosetta reports success with error and doesn’t actually installs anything. Xcode still requires Rosetta. I unpacked JDK and every console command fails because macOS doesn’t trust it yada yada. I have to go to settings and allow every binary. And I need 4 JDKs… After compiling go helloworld first launch takes like second. It seems to check notatization of my hello world. So much for M1 speed. After boot Spotlight hammers CPU for 3-5 minutes. So much for battery life. It’s a mess for development. Nothing unsolvable but definitely worse than it was 7 years ago.
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