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Moving from Macbook to Linux

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Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#91

Post by fsflover »

bsaul wrote: post #75
driverdan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That future looks extremely scary. What can we do, now, as developers ? Stop buying, using, and supporting the Apple ecosystem. Vote with your money. The new chips are faster. So what? The laptop you have today works fine, you don't need the latest and greatest hardware.

i code iOS (native) app for a living. I'm already stuck developing for the app store, using xcode to sign and deploy, using a programming language (that i love) swift that only really works on mac OS. My personal situation isn't going to change anytime soon unfortunately. I was about to dump my iphone next time i had to pick one (and keep my current one for testing), however my laptop is my work computer. I think "st…

> My personal situation isn't going to change anytime soon unfortunately.

It's enough if you just start to seek a way out. Even if it takes years, after you eventually do it, it will be worth it.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#92

Post by fulafel »

Isn't this a bit rash. Just start building and deploying Docker images on AWS ARM instances and RPis, and have a flag day when all your devs switch to M1 laptops. Yes you might have fewer provider or dev machine options after that but that just means fewer distractions.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#93

Post by oriesdan »

I'm on Gentoo myself, but for people coming from MacOS, I would recommend to give KDE Neon a try.

It's based on Ubuntu, but made by interfacers (the KDE team). I have used it for about a year and I thought during that time that it was "osx on linux", because of how well integrated everything was.

The Plasma desktop and the KDE project have been known historically to very well integrate their softwares with one another, but Neon is going a step further, by controlling the OS itself and being way less buggy that other distributions of the Plasma desktop.

That would probably be a good transition OS coming from Apple products, before people get a taste for chaos and pure freedom and want to go wild.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#94

Post by gentleman11 »

vr46 wrote: post #31
anderspitman wrote: post #12

I got into Linux when I was younger because I thought it was cool, and I had plenty of time to fix it when things broke. It's been my daily driver for ~10 years now. But there's quite a bit too learn. If I were to try and switch from Windows or Mac today I'm not sure I'd succeed before giving up. But I'm grateful every day to have a machine that I have some semblance of control over. I use a rolling release distro. I…

What do you use? I have tried this multiple times and always give up. I ran FreeBSD for a decade as a server in a datacentre and have a deep and abiding love for it, but it doesn't sound it makes a usable desktop these days. Ubuntu appears to be the desktop of choice, but I find it buggy, sluggish and tedious. I'd like a practical and speedy OS that is responsive and configurable. But I don't know enough :)

The sluggish performance you get is from gnome (the user interface/desktop environment that Ubuntu defaults to). Every 6 months there is an update that noticeably improves things. If you don’t want to wait for it to be totally smother out, check out another desktop environment like xfce or plasma. Try plasma first since it’s got prettier visuals, but I like the simplicity of xfce (honestly, I rather enjoy gnome so use that most of the time)

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#95

Post by vizzier »

crazygringo wrote: post #16

> but with Apple downgrading its hardware (but still keeping those Apple prices!), the problems just kept stacking up. I get that the author wound up with a lemon, but the idea that Apple is "downgrading its hardware" with more problems arising is ludicrous. Especially now that Apple fixed the keyboards, its hardware is better than it's ever been. You might not like Apple for plenty of other reasons, but the notion t…

Heres what we've lost since the 2013-2015 MBPs that I'm currently running: Magsafe 2, Higher travel keyboards, Removable/Replacable SSds, HDMI port (still the most common for displays right now), an escape key, an SD card reader, USB-A which all my peripherals still use.

Though we've gained USBc and performance. I'm not sure the "better than it's ever been" is so obvious personally. Replacing the previous input ports with dongles reduces the value proposition a fair bit for people with those use cases.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#96

Post by g42gregory »

I’ve been thinking of switching for a long time but here is what’s stopping me: web site rendering in all browsers is seemingly much better on MacOS. The colors are more vivid, fonts are sharper, it’s more pleasing to the eye (vs. Ubuntu). Is there anything that could be done to bring Linux web site rendering closer to MacOS experience?

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#97

Post by ur-whale »

Been doing everything on a Linux laptop for the past ~12 years after kicking OSX to the curb around '08 because of Apple's increasingly fascist tendencies (which have only been getting worse in recent years).

Rarely ever had anything to complain about. The occasional windoze-only app I've needed either runs on top of Wine or - worst case - qemu. None of these are ever a part of my daily workflow.

Not claiming I'm a standard user, but if you're technically inclined and doing any kind of scientific work then Linux can't be beat AFAIC.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#98

Post by rhinoceraptor »

radlad wrote: post #24
anderspitman wrote: post #12

I got into Linux when I was younger because I thought it was cool, and I had plenty of time to fix it when things broke. It's been my daily driver for ~10 years now. But there's quite a bit too learn. If I were to try and switch from Windows or Mac today I'm not sure I'd succeed before giving up. But I'm grateful every day to have a machine that I have some semblance of control over. I use a rolling release distro. I…

I truly believe that the argument for switching to Linux has never been stronger. Windows has embedded bloatware, and Apple allows no control over your hardware. There's really no other option if you care about these things. (Full disclosure - I do own a Macbook for photography work, and use Bootcamp for gaming.) Like you, my Linux installs have been incredibly stable for a long time, even with a rolling release dist…

I've been using Linux for many years, and it's definitely better, but definitely not what I'd want to use seriously. My gaming desktop has a 20.04 drive which I occasionally use, and yet I still find myself dropping to a TTY occasionally to reboot the machine or restart gdm because it waking from sleep, or just plain crashes.

Also, I have 4k, 28" monitors which is just the size where 1x is comically small, and 2x is comically large. I've tried recent Gnome and KDE, and they just can't scale to look right, like what I can do in MacOS or even Windows.

If I couldn't use MacOS for work, I would give Windows 10 a serious consideration. The new WSL and Windows Terminal are very good. I did use WSL 1 for a few years at a previous job, and it was awful.

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#99

Post by gorgoiler »

This is going to sound dumb or elitist but I am so much happier working since I ditched portable computing.

I have a desk at home in an office. I have the same setup at work. I don’t carry my dev environment with me. When I need to work I go to the ’do work stuff’ place.

Nice keyboard. Nice mouse. And a nice OS that, yes, took a whole day to configure but over which I have total control. (Full-screen focus-mode no-ornaments note taking, web browsing, and hacking.)

Re: Moving from Macbook to Linux

#100

Post by x87678r »

vondur wrote: post #6

I think this is going to be a tougher sell for laptops as the M1 chip seems to be a game changer for battery life and performance. Once the majority of software gets native ARM support, it will only get better, not to mention this is only the first iteration of a desktop class Apple Silicon. I do understand from a philosophical point of view why people may not want to use MacOS, particularly after last weeks code sig…

Yeah it sucks I was going to buy my Dell XPS 15 on Black Friday... now I dont know what to do.
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