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Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

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Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#81

Post by awilfox »

prmoustache wrote: post #61
technobabbler wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

> I haven't had to apply any patch manually for the last 15 at the very least

You're very lucky. I've had to apply patches manually for the majority of my Linux experience, to the point where I can literally recite you the package patch contribution instructions for Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, and Arch from memory.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#82

Post by chrisseaton »

sofixa wrote: post #78
chrisseaton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They left Linux because they want stability and portability so they jumped to macOS? I don't understand. Which bit don’t you understand? macOS is stable with fantastic professional QA and support, and it lets you run more cross-platform ported software than Linux does.

> and it lets you run more cross-platform ported software than Linux does That's a stretch and i find it unlikely, but it's not like we have numbers. However, macOS makes it hard to run random software ( like a utility from GitHub) with their code signing "security" stuff ( working around it is anything but intuitive).

Can you list many major applications available on Windows and on Linux, but not macOS?

The other way around you have major industry applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, Office, Ableton, AutoCAD, etc.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#83

Post by sofixa »

awilfox wrote: post #74
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…

I can do office and productivity tasks, but not in a way that interops with the tools that others use. It's interesting because Pages can spit out a .docx that Word doesn't mangle too badly, but LibreOffice still can't. I still haven't seen an answer to my use of AirPlay, either. Apparently Chrome can do this to a Chromecast, but… If I'm already giving my data to a horrible monopolistic company, I'd rather give it to…

> It's interesting because Pages can spit out a .docx that Word doesn't mangle too badly, but LibreOffice still can't

While i haven't had any issues with LibreOffice created or edited .docx, last week i discovered Pages tries to force you to use their proprietary format ( which of course nobody supports). If you open a .docx with Pages, make an edit and save it, it wants to save in .pages. You have to export it to .docx.

That's the kind of user hostile bullshit that rarely makes it to Linux-first software, and when it does ( e.g. GNOME disallowing desktop icons or snaps auto-updating) there are alternatives. If Apple don't want you to do something, you're out of luck. Best case scenario someone has made a (usually paid) app that implements a workaround (like Karabiner for basic key combination remappings).

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#84

Post by sofixa »

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…

> Considering Macs are typically owned longer than PCs

Are they though? Properly specced PCs have more than decent lives too. The build quality of a Mac or an equivalent-ish ( so not the plastic cheapest possible model ) devicedecent OEM like Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus aren't that far off.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#86

Post by awilfox »

throwaway284534 wrote: post #15
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…

In my opinion as a Linux and Mac user, a lack of consistent user experience. And I’m not talking about raw functionality, but the character and demeanor of a Linux computer. Here’s a short laundry list of personal gripes: I don’t know why HiDPI support is still so flakey, especially so with multi-monitor setups. Sometimes apps just work, and other times the UI is comically small or oversized. The only *nix adjacent O…

> I can only send so many pull requests before giving up and buying a MacBook.

It's funny because that was what happened to me, too. I believe my final set of contributions was an attempt at fixing some low-level thing in Mesa that was causing the entire X server to fail to start with some older Radeon GPU. The Mesa devs themselves were helpful, but the community around them were abusing me to just buy a newer Radeon. In 2020. With the chip shortage and crypto insanity.

> branding

Personally, I think Elementary is a fine name for an OS. I haven't seen Tux on a boot screen in over a decade, but I guess if you compile your own kernel and enable CONFIG_LOGO, you might.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#87

Post by awilfox »

sofixa wrote: post #83
awilfox wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can do office and productivity tasks, but not in a way that interops with the tools that others use. It's interesting because Pages can spit out a .docx that Word doesn't mangle too badly, but LibreOffice still can't. I still haven't seen an answer to my use of AirPlay, either. Apparently Chrome can do this to a Chromecast, but… If I'm already giving my data to a horrible monopolistic company, I'd rather give it to…

> It's interesting because Pages can spit out a .docx that Word doesn't mangle too badly, but LibreOffice still can't While i haven't had any issues with LibreOffice created or edited .docx, last week i discovered Pages tries to force you to use their proprietary format ( which of course nobody supports). If you open a .docx with Pages, make an edit and save it, it wants to save in .pages. You have to export it to .d…

I agree that it should save to the format it was previously saved in as a default, but it isn't necessarily user-hostile. "Normal" people coming over to a Mac probably want to use Pages, and might even appreciate the transparent conversion of their documents to the native format.

If the option to export was missing, that would be user-hostile IMO. Same with your example of GNOME disallowing desktop icons – the feature is missing, not just something you have to enable.

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#88

Post by technobabbler »

prmoustache wrote: post #61
technobabbler wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

You probably don't run the same hardware or software, then. DRM doesn't quite work on Linux (so no 4k). MS Office, a business need, requires WINE or similar. No Adobe. There's Proton now for games, but only a tiny sliver of the full Steam library, especially for less-popular indie games (which is where most of the innovation is in PC gaming).

I've had bad drivers melt my dining table when the fan wouldn't kick in and the CPU didn't thermally throttle, during the Ubuntu install process. I've had to manually adjust display settings in the command line because various pieces of the UI couldn't agree with each other (Ubuntu's UI vs Gnome/KDE vs some other stuff), and hi-DPI, > 60 refresh rate, HDR, ultrawide, etc. were all a pain to set up, especially with multiple monitors. And some apps just don't exist for Linux, like the Sonos controller, motherboard firmware upgrade exes, commercial GIS software, Lightroom, etc.

All of that is just plug and play on Windows, and sometimes on Mac. With Linux it's always a multi-hour ordeal, all to end up with a poor ripoff of the Windows 7 UI or whatever Ubuntu's latest experiment is. Just, why?

The command-line is great, but zsh on macOS takes care of those needs 99% of the time. Among high-hassle tools, running WSL on Windows makes for overall less headaches than running a Windows VM or Wine on Linux. In between, Parallels on macOS is that sweet spot of usability and broad compatibility for me personally. There's nothing that I NEED on Linux on the desktop, so I'm happy to set it up on the server side and use something else at home.

Try as I might, every few years I install a few Linux distros to test them out, because people keep swearing they are better and totally ready. I'm sorry, but for an average lazy user like me, they're just not. ChromeOS is as close as any distro has come, and I'd happily install that if it didn't require a 3rd-party repackaging.

My next laptop might be a Chromebook, which is superficially and technically Linux I guess, but minus the regular chaos of the normal Linux ecosystem. I've never just never had a good experience with desktop Linux outside of Android and ChromeOS, sorry. Maybe you're lucky, or maybe I'm unlucky, but it's always been a hassle and never worth it...

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#89

Post by awilfox »

smoldesu wrote: post #9
hugi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't tried it, but I sincerely doubt it's as good as Things (one of those products you just fall in love with). Things pays attention to the tiniest detail in every single aspect, and it really shows that it's natively written for each of it's platforms, not some quick and cheap Electron crap. I've paid for Things on 4 platform and I'm very happy about it. I have no qualms paying for good software like that, I jus…

Well, for starters, Planner is also a native application written in Vala/GTK. The only non-native part about it is that you're forced to run it as a Flatpak (which is a bummer), but that makes it just about equally as "native" as any sandboxed Mac app. Almost to a comedic extent, Planner does copy a lot of the touches that Things has. For example, dragging the plus icon in the corner to a folder will create a new tas…

Forced to run it as a Flatpak would have been a dealbreaker for me since Flatpak apps don't support Power and my main desktop was the libre Talos II.

Looks like it is missing deadline support, otherwise you are right that it is almost a comedic clone of Things: https://github.com/alainm23/planner/issues/888

Re: Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

#90

Post by alphabettsy »

goosedragons wrote: post #5

For me personally I found macOS got more in the way than out. Besides being easier to install MS Office on it seemed like every few months I'd encounter some speed bump caused by Apple and I'd have to find a workaround. Plus it just really sucks at window management and you're stuck with the macOS UI and whatever tweaks (usually paid) apps can do. For my workflow it just didn't work. I was also extremely annoyed at t…

> every few months I'd encounter some speed bump caused by Apple and I'd have to find a workaround > switched to an older thinkpad that runs Linux natively

The idea of using an older Thinkpad with Linux having fewer “speed bumps” than any Mac seems hard to imagine based on my own experience. Guess it depends on what you use a computer for.

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