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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

#521

Post by hk1337 »

minimaul wrote: post #368

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…

> My chosen password manager (1password) still has a fairly awful linux experience.

This is my biggest roadblock to Linux as well. I don’t sync to 1Password.com though and that’s all that is available, so it’s more than just a poor experience for me.

I thought about trying to share a Keepass database but that’s had some issues. I tried sharing via Keybase and had a weird issue that when I edited something in Keepass, it was unreadable in Linux. I didn’t have a problem if I shared it via USB drive though.

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

#522

Post by marcus_holmes »

Klonoar wrote: post #143
marcus_holmes wrote: post #10

The author doesn't state whether they installed Linux on a laptop that shipped with Windows, or bought an actual "Linux laptop". There's a huge difference, like reviewing a Hackintosh and saying "Macs are shite". I did the same. I accidentally fubar'd my lovely 2015 Macbook by pouring a beer into it. I bought a Dell XPS and dual-booted Linux, which kinda worked but wasn't great. Then I bought a Purism 14, which has b…

Wait, Purism actually shipped the 14?

I just went back to their site to check, and the 14 they show now looks different to mine. I guess there's a previous version that I bought back in late 2018?

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

#523

Post by marcus_holmes »

PpEY4fu85hkQpn wrote: post #181
marcus_holmes wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. It really doesn't. There are sooo many issues that are still not fixed, years after being reported. Apple's Support site has pages where there's hundreds of people saying "I have this problem too", and no comment from an Apple dev. I'm not blaming them. This shit is hard, even if you control both the hardware and the software. I get why they don't say "it just works" any more.

I'm going to shock you here but every platform has longstanding bugs with hundreds of people complaining about them.

That's kinda the point - Apple is no different from any other platform in this respect.

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

#524

Post by dTal »

83457 wrote: post #487
monsieurbanana wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 or…

I don't think it was so much that resistive touchscreens were cheaper; rather, the dominant mobile interaction model had for a decade been oriented around styluses - handwriting recognition, small UI elements - and resistive touchscreens are simply more precise. Even with a capacitive screen, direct physical interaction such as smooth scrolling and pinch-zooming requires graphical horsepower that just wasn't on the table until around the time the iPhone came along.

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

#525

Post by PicassoCTs »

I did for work. Always had a screw-driver with me, in case the system frozze and i needed to remove the battery to get it working again, because the power button wouldn't restart it. Tryied to diagnose the error, but it wasn't cooling and other colleagues had it too- so i guess its just distro-crap. I suffer through it for open source, but it ain't something i can recommend.

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

#526

Post by sbuk »

dalu wrote: post #508
holstvoogd wrote: post #501

I have the same experience. I bought a System76 darter pro, it comes with a linux pre-installed. I've been using it on and of for a year now but cannot 'give up' my mac: - It is not stable at all; weekly complete freezes - The key-bindings are a joke. Even after remapping and hacking stuff - bluetooth support sucks, sometimes it works for days, then it will not reconnect and keep spewing errors. - Sound drivers seems…

You use rbenv. You don't sound very tech savvy, but using Ruby? It's weird how my workstations and desktops and laptops and netbooks all run Linux just fine, only you're having those issues. You're a joke. You're not adaptable. When in Rome... Only rich spoiled brats spend 5k on a laptop that would otherwise cost 1k

"You're a joke."

Wow.

"Only rich spoiled brats spend 5k on a laptop that would otherwise cost 1k"

Not this again. A fully tricked out MBP 16" costs $6699. RRP for a Lenovo equivalent is $8,894. Dell doesn't sell anything that matches, but equivalent spec is $3,894.99 (MBP 16" $4199). System 76 - $3,174 with a shit display (1080p in a 'high end' laptop is absolutely shocking). Librem 14 (vs MBP 13" for $2299), $2,716 - again, with a really poor screen, but now the Mac has a better processor and significantly better battery life. So, yet again, we illustrate that when you look for equivalent new spec of an Apple device, they cost about the same. There is always manufacturer refurbished or secondhand, much like every other laptop.

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

#527

Post by pjmlp »

joana035 wrote: post #520
pjmlp wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missed this remark? > There is no way, because the only way to make it work is to dig out a pre-historic kernel from the same year Asus released 1215B with Linux support. My dear, my first UNIX experience was with Xenix back in 1993, I also used DG/UX, Tru64, HP-UX, Aix, Solaris, Slackware, Red-Hat, Yasdril, Mandranke, SuSE, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Debian, OS, Scientific Linux. Back in 2002 - 2003, I wrote cluster simulatio…

Sorry, I didn't though that would offend you. I just think that those issues are relatively easy to fix and that you can still have the proprietary gpu modules to get OpenGL 4.1 back. For the wifi to work well with the open module you could have installed the firmwares. That's what I mean by basics, I didn't meant to put down your credentials :) Sorry again for my poor writing

None taken, and it is easier just to re-install Windows with the proprietary drivers than hacking a modern kernel to run fxglr.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/AMD

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

#528

Post by joana035 »

pjmlp wrote: post #464
kaba0 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, unfortunately it is not backported for older GPUs. But it doesn’t make the case of supported hardwares worse.

It does, because the hardware support for OpenGL 4.1 got broken due to ideology.

Well, it is still open after all, given you are a very experienced guy you should consider rolling the sleeves and sending some patches to fix that, right?

Giving back to the community for something you get for _free_ is nice.

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

#529

Post by grishka »

robert_foss wrote: post #509
minimaul wrote: post #368

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…

> - Finding a mail client I don't hate on linux is tricky. I've never been able to get on with the console clients, and I actually quite like Mac Mail. Thunderbird is kinda okay. If you're not a mailing list based developer, I would recommend MailSpring, which is both snappy any polished. https://getmailspring.com/

The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country.

What the...

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

#530

Post by argvargc »

shaan7 wrote: post #445
nsb1 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow...TIL...

Yeah thats the other thing I found fascinating about macOS, a bunch of useful features are very hard to discover. Mostly because you won't see any menu entries, but some sort of drag-and-drop will / alt+click will activate a very useful feature. Their idea of being user friendly, I guess.

Actually, this is one of my biggest problems with macOS. So many tremendously useful things are hidden.

Why do they do this? It's not good for anyone. I can understand this concept of "just do what's intuitive - try it!", oh what fun - but nobody is going to risk messing up the important files they're working with by randomly dragging things onto other things just to see what happens.

Just tell us how to use it.

Almost every (third-party) iOS app or game by comparison seems to have understood this basic concept of educating the user on how to use the product, but Apple falls far behind especially on macOS.

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