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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

#61

Post by prmoustache »

technobabbler wrote: post #19
goosedragons wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides running the latest and greatest MS Office and Photoshop (which is entirely out of the hands of Linux developers) what can't you do? You can browse the modern web, do office and productivity tasks, develop, game, watch a movie etc. Most of people's complaints with Linux are things entirely controlled by 3rd parties like specific software and DRM for crap like Blu-rays and 4K Netflix. Modern DEs like KDE and GN…

IMHO, as a user first and dev second, "things entirely controlled by 3rd parties" aren't a bug, they're a feature. That means someone else gets to jump through the hoops to make it work, not me. The vast majority of useful & fun things on a computer are made by corporate 3rd parties, not GNU & Linux volunteers. Whether it's Netflix, games, Office/Photoshop, obscure drivers, whatever... I can just run an app and expec…

"Whether it's Netflix, games, Office/Photoshop, obscure drivers, whatever... I can just run an app and expect it to work, and if it doesn't, it's not my problem. I'll wait a while and someone else will fix it.

I don't have to tweak obscure config files or apply patches or sideload package manager repos."

I am not sure what you mean.

I have been a linux user for the last 25years and I haven't had to apply any patch manually for the last 15 at the very least, nor looking for obscure drivers.

A config file is the same as an option/settings menu, with the advantage that it is usually much better documented.

Nobody told you that you can watch netflix on Linux as well as running games, use office and powerful photo editing apps as well?

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#62

Post by awilfox »

vehemenz wrote: post #60

About the final point—are Macs really "high cost"? Looking at their current lineup, configured with a minimum of 16GB and 512GB: M1 Mac Mini .......... $1099 M1 MacBook Air ....... $1399 M1 iMac ......,....... $1699 M1 Pro Mac Studio .... $1999 M1 Pro MacBook Pro 14" $1999 M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16" $2499 I'll restrain myself from listing the ways comparing Macs to PCs is not apples to apples. Unless you go for costly st…

My concern with the Mac mini in particular is that then you need a display, and honestly, having an LG Ultrafine 4K hooked up to my Mac Studio, you really need a 5K display to get the most out of a Mac.

I think 1440p displays work well too, or at least they did back in 2014 when I was using Macs, but I didn't see any for sale when I was shopping for an interim while I wait three months for the Studio Display to ship.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#63

Post by sokoloff »

vehemenz wrote: post #60

About the final point—are Macs really "high cost"? Looking at their current lineup, configured with a minimum of 16GB and 512GB: M1 Mac Mini .......... $1099 M1 MacBook Air ....... $1399 M1 iMac ......,....... $1699 M1 Pro Mac Studio .... $1999 M1 Pro MacBook Pro 14" $1999 M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16" $2499 I'll restrain myself from listing the ways comparing Macs to PCs is not apples to apples. Unless you go for costly st…

I think the “Macs are owned longer than PCs” is under-appreciated. My previous MBPro was 6 years old when I upgraded. My wife’s daily as a freelance editor is a mid-2013 MacBook Air. That puts our total capital cost for that computer at under $10/mo.

What would high-cost really be? $5/workday isn’t even high-cost to me if it was a daily coffee bill, but certainly not if it’s your main computing device.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#64

Post by somebehemoth »

vehemenz wrote: post #60

About the final point—are Macs really "high cost"? Looking at their current lineup, configured with a minimum of 16GB and 512GB: M1 Mac Mini .......... $1099 M1 MacBook Air ....... $1399 M1 iMac ......,....... $1699 M1 Pro Mac Studio .... $1999 M1 Pro MacBook Pro 14" $1999 M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16" $2499 I'll restrain myself from listing the ways comparing Macs to PCs is not apples to apples. Unless you go for costly st…

> I don't see how anyone that can afford comparable PCs or UltraBooks would be priced out of Apple products.

And if they can’t afford comparable PC’s, then Macs are not affordable. There are many affordable non-mac options.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#65

Post by number6 »

Kwpolska wrote: post #37
number6 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It's only undermatched by the windows desktop. Who has a file manager that's also the window manager ah and the shell...

Explorer isn’t the window manager. And does it really matter it’s serving as the shell? What technical benefits would a split bring?

Right, they changed that 15 years ago.

Splitting would make them more interchangeable and stable - crashing one part does not tears the whole stack down.

What is the benefit of putting all the different functionality in one application?

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#66

Post by awilfox »

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…

This was a follow-on article to my first one, where I spoke about the deep issues I saw in the Linux ecosystem after running a distro for three years.

My thinking was by showing the Mac has all these nice things that make me productive, this can somehow influence and move the needle so Linux devs who follow my blog have datapoints on what they can work on.

Perhaps some enterprising dev has already read it and is working on an answer to AirPlay, or adding rich text to KDE Connect's clipboard plugin. I would love to do it myself if I had the time.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#67

Post by awilfox »

vbezhenar wrote: post #50

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 h…

That's interesting. Xcode didn't require Rosetta for me. I also didn't have any issues installing Rosetta when I finally did need the functionality. Was this when the M1 was first released? I didn't have an M1 until August 2021.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#68

Post by [deleted] »

atty wrote: post #52

I see some people in the comments saying they strongly prefer Linux desktop to Mac/Windows. If you are one of those people, I am curious - are you comfortable changing system configurations, using the terminal, updating system software by hand, etc? Because I quite enjoy playing around with Linux on the desktop, but I would never suggest it to anyone who isn’t already familiar and enjoys that sort of stuff.

[deleted]

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#69

Post by bsder »

awilfox wrote: post #66
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…

This was a follow-on article to my first one, where I spoke about the deep issues I saw in the Linux ecosystem after running a distro for three years. My thinking was by showing the Mac has all these nice things that make me productive, this can somehow influence and move the needle so Linux devs who follow my blog have datapoints on what they can work on. Perhaps some enterprising dev has already read it and is work…

One thing I would point out is that macOS has some serious bugs that, if you hit them, you have no hope and no option if Apple doesn't care.

The particular one that bites me over and over with the latest versions of macOS is that USB 2.0/3.0 ports will die on macOS for varied and mysterious reasons with hubs and dongles and the only thing you can do is reboot.

This was such a big problem that it finally forced me off of macOS. I have things that I need to plug into USB-A ports. This failure mode is fairly common, reported, and totally due to Apple. Earlier versions of macOS do NOT exhibit this bug. Unfortunately, newer machines can't use the old OS's because "Apple".

Other laptops do not exhibit this bug with Apple and non-Apple hubs and dongles--presumably because they actually have to ship with USB-A ports so that code path actually gets tested.

And, that, in a nutshell is why I finally took the plunge and switched to Linux for daily driving.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#70

Post by awilfox »

_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…

Time is one of the big factors for me, too. One of my favourite stories to tell about my initial migration is when still had a laptop running Linux, I noticed that the Lock Screen was "stuck" for about 5 seconds every time I opened the lid. The Mac didn't do that; it was immediately ready for input when I opened it. Multiply that by three lid events per day and I wasted six hours of my life on a lock screen. I don't even want to think about all the time I wasted waiting for the lagging I had in i965 when scrolling pages in Firefox.

> desktop applications that work well on any major DE and without consideration for package managers

The ability to run proprietary software like that was a goal of the LSB. Everyone abandoned the LSB effort because it was preventing the CADT Model (https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html) from rewriting the stack every 12 months. (Sorry, I am a bit jaded in this regard.)

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