Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course — the same can be said for terminal programs or Windows apps run via virtualization. Those are not "Mac apps".
so what is a "Mac app"?
A GUI program that uses native APIs to display windows and menus.
So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux
461–470 of 531 posts
Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agreed with everything you said except this: > but there are still things that just going to be less painful on Apple. Of course OSX is more user friendly now , but Linux desktop has improved by leaps and bounds. 4 years ago you needed to be a developer or extremely savvy to run the average desktop distro, now I would say you just need to be tech sdavvy. I would argue that for the ho hum business cases (not extreme…
People have been saying that ever since, uhm, the first Mandrake release? It’s so much easier now, soon it will all be so smooth! except every year there is something else to rewrite/rejig. As soon as auto-configuring XFree was kinda figured out, out goes XFree and in comes x.org. Xorg getting to the point where having 3d animations doesn’t require kernel-module-config expertise? Out goes Xorg, in comes Wayland. Gnom…
Yes the churn is an issue especially in desktop environments but relatively painless all things considered.
I don't think there has been a single inflection point for me there has been steady incremental improvement.
If you want to think about how far things have come I started using Linux in 2001 with Mandrake. Around 2.2 -> 2.4 kernel switch. So much has changed since the bad old days. I don't want to throw out a "back in my day we walked up hill in snow both ways" style rant but...
-All we had was EXT2 and we liked it...
-You had to manually configure modelines for your video card changing display resolution was more or less a crapshoot
-Apps would exclusively lock the sound card which typically meant the first thing you opened would be only thing capable of playing sound. But you could pipe things to /dev/dsp and have the speaker emit random beeps that was kind of cool
-window manager used to crash a lot and you'd lose all the title bars for all the windows this happened fairly often - cntrl alt backspace is still in my muscle memory years later.
-Printers were basically impossible to configure.
People complain about changes like ASLA, pulse audio etc but I think there is a lot of rose tinted glasses being applied to how things were before. Sure some things aren't perfect but neither was their predecessors and on the whole they fixed more things then they broke.
Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux
#463I've used both Linux and OSX for a long time, and what I've found is that while Linux breaks a little more often, I stand a much better chance of being able to fix it. When I google for a Linux problem, there's much more likely to be an answer that works on StackOverflow, while on OSX it often just leads me to the Apple support forums with dozens of people asking the same question and no real answer. Similarly, while…
I find that when I google Linux problems I'm much more likely to get dozens of answers, all of them wrong. They're for a different distro, or a different arrangement of the software stack, or out of date, or not actually answers (why would you want to do that?), or just plain wrong. Theoretically it could be a lot better, if the documentation was better, the stack wasn't so maddeningly complicated, and there wasn't s…
Really? Whenever I'm googling a problem, I just prefix it with "Fedora" or "Ubuntu 18.04" or whatever I'm using, and most everything is relevant. Additionally, the Arch wiki is probably some of the best documentation out there, but I don't find it to hard to translate to either distro.
Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
With a tiling display manager like i3, dwm or awesome, system tray isn't that useful. You tends to have one app (or a group of app that you always use together) per virtual desktop that you access in one keyboard shortcut. You never circle through apps as it's not necessary. Most of the apps are in fullscreen or tiled depending on your need. No window is hiding another one. When you're use to it, having to move your…
I felt like the kind of micro optimizations that a tiling window manager gives you aren’t worth it in the long run. Sure, it felt like I was moving faster when I used keyboard shortcuts to fly around but at the end of the day, switching between windows was never a real bottleneck to begin with. FWIW I used i3 exclusively for 2-3 years.
What do you use now, and how does it compare?
I switched to i3 because I was just frustrated with what I had used in the past. I wanted a simple window manager without animations (disabling them on my phone was also a huge gain in terms of usability), that just works and does not get in the way (I had a slow laptop on which Gnome was painfully slow, at the time). The cost was basically to write a configuration file matching what I wanted, learning a few key to switch workspaces and windows, but that was it.
I agree with you that these are micro-optimizations time-wise, but the frustration can be real and it gets in the way when you use your computer all day long. The simpler, the better I'd say (although it doesn't have to be a tiling window manager).
Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux
#465I've used both Linux and OSX for a long time, and what I've found is that while Linux breaks a little more often, I stand a much better chance of being able to fix it. When I google for a Linux problem, there's much more likely to be an answer that works on StackOverflow, while on OSX it often just leads me to the Apple support forums with dozens of people asking the same question and no real answer. Similarly, while…
I find that in the Gnome ecosystem, the apps will not have a config file that can be tweaked. Sometimes there will be an add-on or separate app the allows a tweak, but there's a concerted effort to remove options.
True, Gnome is nearly as un-customizable as OSX, but with even fewer add on apps to "fix" it. I find KDE to be a much better user experience out-of-the-box, and also more customizable and extendable.
Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux
#466I tried this experiment last year. Bought a DELL XPS 13 at Costco, put Ubuntu 18.04 on it and dove in. I've been a Mac guy for ~10y just like the author. Worked at MS prior to that, so lots of Windows.
My experience is that it's one of those things that seems great on day 1, OK on day 1, and so on.
Spoiler, after about 6 months I gave up and went back to Win10, which is really improving rapidly with WSL, etc. I run an Ubuntu VM in Hyper-V if I need "real" Linux for something.
It's death of a thousand cuts. Beyond random Linux config issues, the UI can be laggy, the power management is terrible, etc.
I enjoyed the fiddling but just don't have time for it.
Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux
#467End-user Linux has definitely improved in the last few years. It offers a lot of attractive features for what I imagine to be the typical HN demographic. That being said, it's still got rough spots that OSX doesn't. It works great when it works, but when it doesn't.... Font rendering, display/compositor fragmentation etc... Inb4 the anecdotal "well it works for me I just had to download the xf86 font library and comp…
That being said, it's still got rough spots that OSX doesn't. It works great when it works, but when it doesn't.... Someone really needs to make Linux distros just work when hooking a laptop up to a projector. The fact that there's so much trouble that's so public and faced with so much concentrated embarrassment is a serious ongoing PR impediment to Linux. Linux distros got printing licked across the board, so it ca…
In Linux's defense even the corporate issued Dell laptops at my work running Windows 10 struggle with projectors. I see it daily in meetings people have to randomly mash the function key until display gets mirrored to projector properly, need to plug / unplug projector repeatedly until it works. People hit fullscreen in powerpoint and projector display just disappears and have to go through plug in unplug again dance.
From everything I've seen a projector "just working" seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux
#468My dealbreaker with linux is the keyboard shortcuts. On mac, ^A and ^E work in every text field. Also, you can press cmd with your thumb, which is much more ergonomic than mashing ctrl with your pinky. OSX also has more well thought-out shortcuts than linux in general. You can try to configure these things on linux, but it's tedious and never works perfectly.
I have had a "Mac thumb" for a good while now, the thumb position of constant Cmd+C-ing is horrible. Not ergonomic at all.
I love the fact that it's the same everywhere though and don't have to Ctrl+Shift+C to copy in the terminal.
Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
I felt like the kind of micro optimizations that a tiling window manager gives you aren’t worth it in the long run. Sure, it felt like I was moving faster when I used keyboard shortcuts to fly around but at the end of the day, switching between windows was never a real bottleneck to begin with. FWIW I used i3 exclusively for 2-3 years.
What do you use now, and how does it compare? I switched to i3 because I was just frustrated with what I had used in the past. I wanted a simple window manager without animations (disabling them on my phone was also a huge gain in terms of usability), that just works and does not get in the way (I had a slow laptop on which Gnome was painfully slow, at the time). The cost was basically to write a configuration file m…
Now I use Windows and MacOS, but immediately after leaving i3 I switched back to gnome.
I haven’t used a computer than ran gnome slowly in a long time, so that has something to do with it.
Re: So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much this, as UI focused developer I abandoned my Linux zealotry back to Windows. Yes Hollywood is pretty much sold on Maya and Houdini on Linux, but they use their own in-house distributions and have no issues dealing with binary blobs for performance. Meanwhile my Asus netbook sold with Linux still can't do video decoding on hardware nor OpenGL 4 support, in spite of DirectX 11 class hardware, because AMD de…
I see lots of advice online to just use the kernel driver for AMD cards these days, but in my experience it is slow. On some of my machines it benchmarks slower than the Intel graphics. In other cases it is faster, but only by about 50% or so. It is disappointing. I still tend to prefer nVidia graphics when I'm building my own systems because even if the driver is a big binary blob it does work.
I don't care much about performance because I mostly play strategy games, my issue with the kernel driver is it's instability, many games will hard crash my system.