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Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

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Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#481
post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but this largely reads to me like "I don't wanna use Linux because I wanna use Mac". If you want to move to a different system, you can't expect to get the same thing. Really, the only complaints I can agree with now are 2 and 3, the rest is just invalid. You've got kdeconnect gsconnect nextcloud keepassxc many, many configurable mail clients, especially the beatiful, integrated kmail and their whole PIM…

" beatiful, integrated kmail and their whole PIM suite" Is that the one that used a MySQL database on the desktop? The disaster known as akonadi? That would frequently lock up requiring restarts? When I used KDE back in the day one thing I'd make sure was to remove PIM/akonadi/kmail completely and use Thunderbird or whatever else instead.

"Is that the one that used a MySQL database on the desktop?"

It's been a few months since I gave up, but IIRC Akonadi has a few storage backends.

I was looking for a GUI mail client to replace using my various webmail based interfaces. As much as I love Plasma, KMail and its ilk were painful. Akonadi still has issues all these years later, and gave me trouble setting it up. The messages produced are less than helpful.

Once KMail was running, it was fine to use, albeit with an occasional crash, just at the wrong times so it got annoying. I stopped using it.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#482
post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't normally use Google, but just for you, I checked on it: It even has an easy-answers page. It was at this point that this troll immediately turned tasteless like chewed up sugarcane.

DuckDuckGo is perfectly sufficient, but the above poster uses Google. So I used Google to demonstrate.

Oh my bad. I mistakenly thought use of LMGTFY to be a narcissistic troll. Missed the part where searching google is part of the experiment.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#483
post #477

From someone who tends to try this switch about once a year (because the lack of TLC the Mac was getting in the last 5 or so years was getting very very worrying - M1 feels like Apple actually care about the Mac again), I agree with a lot of these pain points. My biggest personal issues end up being (and these are super subjective!): - Preview on macOS is great and no other OS has anything remotely equivalent. First…

The recently released GNOME 40 has some new gestures enabled out of the box (3 finger vertical swipe for application switcher and horizontal for workspace switcher) and they work much better than previous attempts I've seen at touchpad gesture on Linux. The animation actually tracks your fingers now!

And can you change them? Or is gnome still less customisable than even macOS?

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#485
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be the devil's advocate even though I agree with you partially and I personally prefer Linux, both for practical and philosophical reasons. However, I use a Linux laptop privately and macOS for work, so I think by now I understand both systems a little bit. For automating tasks on macOS you can look at something like hammerspoon which is really cool (though I mostly use it to modify some of the macOS keybindings…

> most Linux distros seem to have a better terminal pre-installed. I haven't found a Linux terminal that is as good as iTerm, in terms of features. Any recommendations?

iTerm is certainly good, but I was comparing it more to Terminal.app

for my needs, gnome-terminal seems to be enough, although it might not have all the features that iTerm has

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#486

From someone who tends to try this switch about once a year (because the lack of TLC the Mac was getting in the last 5 or so years was getting very very worrying - M1 feels like Apple actually care about the Mac again), I agree with a lot of these pain points. My biggest personal issues end up being (and these are super subjective!): - Preview on macOS is great and no other OS has anything remotely equivalent. First…

The only thing I like about windows is the image preview. You can easily scroll through a folder and look at all the images while you window is maximized. You can do the same in MacOS but I don’t think gallery is as good.

Previews capabilities are much better than any any built in tool or Adobe reader.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point being, multi-touch was what got the the smartphone revolution going, especially on the Web. Whereas now…

What do you mean by that?

Sounds obvious now but pinch to zoom was a big new feature on iPhone that traditional phones, even those with touch capability, did not have muti-touch. Part of this was capacitive touch screen technology that few other devices had at the time, instead having cheaper resistive which pretty much required a stylus to do anything but press in a particular spot on screen. I don't believe android devices had muti-touch originally even though they had capacitive touch screens. Touchpads on laptops and touch screens added multi-touch years later.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#488
post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but this largely reads to me like "I don't wanna use Linux because I wanna use Mac". If you want to move to a different system, you can't expect to get the same thing. Really, the only complaints I can agree with now are 2 and 3, the rest is just invalid. You've got kdeconnect gsconnect nextcloud keepassxc many, many configurable mail clients, especially the beatiful, integrated kmail and their whole PIM…

" beatiful, integrated kmail and their whole PIM suite" Is that the one that used a MySQL database on the desktop? The disaster known as akonadi? That would frequently lock up requiring restarts? When I used KDE back in the day one thing I'd make sure was to remove PIM/akonadi/kmail completely and use Thunderbird or whatever else instead.

Akonadi was an ambitious idea that was really badly implemented. I've not used KDE for ages so I have no idea what the current state of play is - I think they now disable it by default. Someone should have probably rewritten it with sqlite, back then.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#489

From someone who tends to try this switch about once a year (because the lack of TLC the Mac was getting in the last 5 or so years was getting very very worrying - M1 feels like Apple actually care about the Mac again), I agree with a lot of these pain points. My biggest personal issues end up being (and these are super subjective!): - Preview on macOS is great and no other OS has anything remotely equivalent. First…

No offense, but this largely reads to me like "I don't wanna use Linux because I wanna use Mac". If you want to move to a different system, you can't expect to get the same thing. Really, the only complaints I can agree with now are 2 and 3, the rest is just invalid. You've got kdeconnect gsconnect nextcloud keepassxc many, many configurable mail clients, especially the beatiful, integrated kmail and their whole PIM…

I'm not sure that the criticisms for the article and parent comment are quite so easy to dismiss wholesale, but I do concur that many of them are actually criticisms of the GNOME DE and not so much Linux itself. In my experience as a daily Linux user it was somewhere between 2-3 years ago that KDE Plasma surpassed GNOME as the most productive desktop environment for Linux, and the distance between the two only appears to widening still. I would love to see what impact the simple choice to swap plain Ubuntu for Kubuntu would have had on their conclusions.

Re: Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

#490
I went from Mac to Linux at home.

My experience as someone who uses Linux but isn’t great at it, is that it works well as a desktop os.

I’m lazy I willing to pay for simplicity so I bought a preinstalled Linux laptop. And it’s been chugging along fine. Everything Works (excepting wake forms sleep when I close the lid sometimes, it’s like gambling...but I manually suspend and that works)

I takes a little research to figure out which application are available (I’ve heard of none of these video editors..) but I haven’t had any issues. Libre office works great.

I even got unreal engine compiled and running. It’s pretty nice experience overall.

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