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Moving from Macbook to Linux

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Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#441

Post by gorgoiler »

autocorr wrote: post #407
gorgoiler wrote: post #99

This is going to sound dumb or elitist but I am so much happier working since I ditched portable computing. I have a desk at home in an office. I have the same setup at work. I don’t carry my dev environment with me. When I need to work I go to the ’do work stuff’ place. Nice keyboard. Nice mouse. And a nice OS that, yes, took a whole day to configure but over which I have total control. (Full-screen focus-mode no-or…

Who doesn't like having nice peripherals? :) I'm the same between a work and home desktop. It's great to not have to carry anything to or from the office. Maintaining several computers also helps avoid the "single point of failure laptop problem". Between two desktops and a laptop, if any one of the three explodes (or are stolen) it's easy to work from the remaining two until replacement. Or in a more mundane case, f…

I rent a virtual server with IPv6 connectivity. Like you, I use WireGuard to uplift[1] any machine I use into the same data center as the virtual server.

All my machines now have static public addresses. All my containers too. The firewalls are simple. It’s refreshing doing this in 2020. It also brings a sense of freedom (but not mobility) that might explain why I’m happy without a laptop.

What’s old is new. I must have had an unrequited nostalgia for 1990s Novell Windows NT Workstations, but with Linux. (Come to think of it, when I was using WinNT at University we had so much IPv4 space that they too all had routable IP addresses. When I were a lad...)

[1] Ha, I used the word uplift before remembering https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_(science_fiction)

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#442

Post by cercatrova »

least wrote: post #428
mrspeaker wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom is less important than convenience. People will put up with all sorts of draconian control as long as they can have smoother scrolling, or a nicer feeling trackpad.

This implies that people are giving up significant control of their devices, which isn't true.

Aren't they? Look at the Epic vs Apple opinions online, people with iPhones say they actually want to be locked down to just one app store without any consumer choice.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#443

Post by bartvk »

Aeolun wrote: post #406
fidelramos wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What can we do, now, as developers ? Don't buy Apple products. Don't use Apple products. Don't support Apple products. Don't develop for Apple products. Raise awareness among those who would listen.

But my company only gives me the option between mac and windows.

I also worked at a company that gave me one option: Windows. So I took it, and installed Linux on it. First in a VM and later, I just blew the resident OS away.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#444

Post by tlavoie »

vbezhenar wrote: post #370
hacknat wrote: post #154

I would strongly recommend the following combination for beginners: Thinkpad + Fedora Fedora stays on the cutting edge of the kernel, which means that driver support is quite good. Additionally, most of the Linux kernel developers use Thinkpads, so the drivers for Thinkpad are always good. I've never had to download drivers individually. Here's a list of things that just "worked" without me having to do anything: 1.…

What about mobile workstations like Dell Precision, HP Zbook, Thinkpad P53? Those workstations usually claim to support Linux officially, they are really powerful workhorses, they allow using of server-grade components (Xeons, ECC RAM, Quadro GPUs). Do people avoid them because they are expensive, bulky or do not run long on battery? If I would buy laptop today, I would look into those machines first, they seem to ma…

My P50 is a couple years old, works great. It's exactly what I needed, with room to grow (and I can do it myself).

Also, I have found a few things that seem to make a large difference on power/battery. Currently running i3 desktop, and a Firefox extension (auto tab discard) that unloads pages I've not been in recently.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#445

Post by circularfoyers »

1_player wrote: post #302
hacknat wrote: post #154

I would strongly recommend the following combination for beginners: Thinkpad + Fedora Fedora stays on the cutting edge of the kernel, which means that driver support is quite good. Additionally, most of the Linux kernel developers use Thinkpads, so the drivers for Thinkpad are always good. I've never had to download drivers individually. Here's a list of things that just "worked" without me having to do anything: 1.…

I had a really bad time with Fedora 32, used to Arch Linux: it always felt like RHEL unstable, with many breaking changes not documented (Fedora 32 needed some kernel and firewall hacks to work with Docker [1]) and have their own set of unstandard tools, still not very much documented. I spent 3 hours trying to understand how to compile a patched mainline kernel -- need to learn about dracut, koji, fedpkg, rpmbuild -…

The Fedora packaging guidelines is an official, pretty thorough guide to RPM packaging with lots of examples for specific languages[1]. The Fedora docs also cover creating a custom kernel too[2].

I recently moved over to Podman from Docker and found the documentation for it very good as well.[3]

I do agree that the search functionality of Copr is extremely basic to the point of being useless for popular packages such as custom kernels, but I believe there is some effort to remedy this with upvoting Copr repos, but I'd argue this is still not enough.

I found though as someone new to Copr that it was very easy to figure out as someone simply building my own packages.

[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines

[2] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/kernel/build...

[3] https://docs.podman.io/en/latest

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#446

Post by toyg »

m463 wrote: post #434
jlgaddis wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. I had to install "gnome-tweaks" in order to remap my CapsLock key to Control. $ cat ~/.config/autostart/map-caps-lock-to-ctrl.desktop [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=0.9.4 Type=Application Name=Map CAPS LOCK to CTRL Comment=Remaps the CAPS LOCK key to another CTRL key Exec=/usr/bin/setxkbmap -option 'ctrl:nocaps' OnlyShowIn=XFCE; StartupNotify=false Terminal=false Hidden=false

that is very helpful. I wish there was a drop-in file that did this at the console/keymap level. It seems every distribution does it a different way. I always have to make my own keymap for loadkeys

This is the sort of thing freedesktop.org was supposed to solve. It seems like the effort floundered when GNOME decided to go “postmodern” with their shell.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#447

Post by circularfoyers »

Aeolun wrote: post #414
IggleSniggle wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? Does Steam bake in some kind of automatic virtualization support for Windows games these days?

Jup, comes with a customized proton build, and the ability to select specific proton versions if you have them installed. I’d say 50% of games works out of the box. And 25% more after installing some video libraries that are for some reason not automatically installed.

You can also get more precise and up to date numbers on what does and doesn't work from ProtonDB[1]. In the reports for each game you're able to see details like distro release, proton release and any other extra steps required (if any) to get the game working.

[1] https://www.protondb.com

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#448

Post by toyg »

gorgoiler wrote: post #99

This is going to sound dumb or elitist but I am so much happier working since I ditched portable computing. I have a desk at home in an office. I have the same setup at work. I don’t carry my dev environment with me. When I need to work I go to the ’do work stuff’ place. Nice keyboard. Nice mouse. And a nice OS that, yes, took a whole day to configure but over which I have total control. (Full-screen focus-mode no-or…

I’m tempted by a desktop but I worry about noise. Typically power components == big cooling reqs == big fans == big noise. There are specialized vendors who guarantee quiet but obviously they cost more.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#449

Post by mmphosis »

peteretep wrote: post #393
kitsunesoba wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an incredibly personal choice. I've daily driven macOS for well over a decade, but periodically dip my toe into the Linux world just to get a feel of it's "there" yet or not. Unfortunately for my purposes, it never is, and so I end up returning to macOS. The biggest problem is that none of the DEs really fit my tastes — they all have to be poked and prodded into kinda doing what I want them to do, but they're ne…

Surprised there isn’t something that does an almost perfect OS X emulation

I am not surprised. I've been using Linux for a while, and there a lot of things I miss. I keep an old Mac around to reminisce.

• menu bar: one, at the top of the screen. I think KDE had this, and there might have been a somewhat working extension for GTK that doesn't exist anymore.

• keys: CTRL is mapped to Alt; Alt is mapped to Win. This is a start. ⌘C and ⌘V: work as Copy and Paste in Terminal, ^C and all the other "control" keys work as expected in Terminal. I used to configure Terminal keys using AutoKey. I haven't been able to make ⌘← and ⌘→ work in text boxes - sadly it's hard-coded in X11 to do what Windows does.

• windows: Smarter window positioning and sizing especially with multiple monitors. I miss Zoom: the button that sizes the window to perfectly and minimally fit the content without scroll bars.

• too many additional items to count like ⌥8 to type bullet characters.

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