Meh. I bailed out of the Mac ecosystem last year, as my mid-2012 retina Macbook was finally getting too creaky, and the latest Mac hardware was a regression in many respects, while simultaneously utterly unaffordable. I'm now dual-booting Ubuntu/Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15".
What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks. The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are very similar to the problems with 2019-era Linux. External monitors are a particular pain point for me. I've got an HDPI laptop and I want to plug into an old non-HDPI era monitor. Doesn't work. Spend the next 10 hours poking around forums, trying weird XWindows options, installing Wayland, etc. Still doesn't work. Eventually, give up.
Windows 10 works marginally better. Both remain vastly inferior to MacOs.
I'm not saying that the grass isn't greener on the other side. Macs are regressing, but the grass isn't greener on either side. Let's stop pretending otherwise.
I was linux-only from 2002 to about 2009, on laptops, when I switched to Mac. I just set up a linux desktop for kicks the last couple of weeks, and it doesn't seem to me to be any better than it was a decade ago.
* No way to adjust mouse scroll speed; official answer seems to be "don't want that". (Or install imwheel and change your mouse scroll to be equal to hitting the down button (!) which breaks other stuff)
* To make an icon on the favorites bar in gnome, you have to edit a .desktop text file! Madness. I mean, I'm a programmer, so I'm capable of it, but it's seriously annoying
* modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent
* searching for help usually yields results that are half a decade or more old, and it's very difficult to figure out if it's current advice or not
* installing a gnome-shell extension was way more difficult than it should be
* brew isn't the best, but on linux I need to use both brew _and_ apt because you can't reliably get anything approaching up-to-date software with apt
I remain reasonably happy with it, but Mac is still so far ahead of it in terms of usability it's wild.
Gnome (3) is just a bit crap. It's the Windows DE of the GNU/Linux world. It's explicitly designed to be boring and not very customizable so that delicate users don't get scared.
I use i3 and basically everything is configured via text files. Keyboard shortcuts are trivial etc. You don't need Karabiner to "rebind" because you can directly bind.
You don't need to go scary tiling WM, Xfce probably works well, it's been years since I last used it.
If apt is out of date that's probably because you're using a stable rather than rolling release distro.
All of this requires some research and tinkering. If you're me, you prefer research to being told what to do.
> I use i3 and basically everything is configured via text files. Keyboard shortcuts are trivial etc. You don't need Karabiner to "rebind" because you can directly bind.
This is the kind of hyperbole that Linux advocates like to throw around a lot, and it’s unfortunate, because it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what people are asking for when they say things like “I wish there was a decent replacement for Karabiner”.
i3’s config files let you bind i3’s config. That’s not the same thing at all.
With Karabiner, in 3 seconds, I can have ^w bound to “delete word backwards” functionality in every single application globally. You can’t even remotely accomplish that in i3’s config by itself — you need to venture into X config files, and special gtk config files for gtk/gnome apps, and some other set of config for KDE stuff, and then after that you still have to deal with the occasional one-off app like Firefox closing a window when you went to delete a word out of force of habit, and so you get to spend time discovering yet another way to tell it to respect a key binding.
And then at some point during some random update some random set of apps will break all over again. It’s a far fucking cry from Karibiner.
I don't think that there's a general appreciation for the depth and configurability of the cocoa/nextstep text and keyboard engine among linux and windows users.
Almost all macos applications use it everywhere, so globally modifying keyboard bindings in all applications in all circumstances is easy. If I want to bind Meta-f to jump a word forward, I can have that behavior in every single text box or editing region in every single application. Url bars, forms, everything!
Accomplishing the same thing in linux typically means descending into the hoary netherworld of xkb mappings. <shiver/>
I have a tickling suspicion that if any free-software OS has any chance at replicating that sort of global unification/consistency across apps, it's Haiku. Sure, there are plenty of apps that are just straight ports from the Linux ecosystem, but there are also lots of apps written first and foremost for BeOS/Haiku (or ported to Haiku exceptionally well) and consequently feel like they "belong" just as nicely as the ones that come preinstalled.
> And then at some point during some random update some random set of apps will break all over again. It’s a far fucking cry from Karibiner.
My experience: Karabiner breaks on every Mac OS X release, and unlike xmodmap, I have never been able to get the following setup completely working in Mac OS X (some combination of: not being able to rebind the modifier keys, not being able to exchange () and [], and one time not even being able to rebind caps lock after an OS update):
The X Window System is not Linux. It is not even GNU/Linux. But at least it is better than Mac OS X for things that I want to do, like running on different operating systems, and avoiding unwanted breaking updates shoved on me by multinational corporations.
This is also not really not something that solves the same problem as karibiner at all, afaict. This is just binding shell commands to hotkey sequences.
For bspwm, where all it’s functionality is exposed to shell commands it can very narrowly achieve something similar, but again, Karibiner’s scope of operation is all apps system-wide.
What people are wishing for when they wish for “a karibiner equivalent” isn’t a hotkey mapping app per se — there’s obviously dozens and dozens of half-baked versions of those. What people are actually wanting is a system for setting globally-consistent keybindings such that they can set it once and universally every app respects it. That would require either a system wide protocol for agreeing on keybindings no matter what wheel-reinventing UI/desktop toolkit an app was built in, or an Uber-keybindings app that knew how to write defaults to the 20 different preference files that control this stuff for different toolkits.
> Gnome (3) is just a bit crap. It's the Windows DE of the GNU/Linux world.
Windows is wayWAY more customizable than Gnome 3. As an example all the issues the GP mentions are things Windows support out of the box (among many other stuff).
Gnome 3 is the result of arrogant programmers pretending to be "UX designers" and act as if they were Steve Jobs without having an ounce of his skills/taste while ignoring that even Steve Jobs took advice from others.
I still maintain that the problem is the UI toolkits.
The mac ecosystem now has _multiple_ viable indesign and photoshop alternatives.
AppKit, Cocoa, UIKit and all those frameworks gradually added all the features third party app developers hacked into their own UI libraries.
GTK is something developers frequently curse about and theme developers frequently abandon because the gnome team keeps breaking their themes.
QT while great is nowhere near the ease of use of the cocoa frameworks and for every 20 cocoa books you find one QT book.
Bottom line is, as much as you may hate Xcode it's exponentially easier to make a good looking application on a mac compared to any linux counterpart. At the end of the day, people want to use (for example) photoshop or something similar without dual booting.
And if you use the Apple toolkits, you lose around 95% of your potential market. For my project, Krita, made with Qt (not QT, Qt...), 90% of downloads are Windows, 7% Linux, 3% macOS. And since Apple seems hell-bent on making people share-croppers in their walled garden with asinine things like Metal, and notarizing and all that, well, in a year or two, it might be 0%, and I'll be fine with that.
I would think that 3% is because there are other viable alternatives. Personally, I've paid for Pixelmator and Acorn on macOS because my needs are more about cropping, adding text, file format, levels, or color space changes--those apps seemed to pop up quickly and had features like hardware acceleration before Photoshop because they leaned on Apple's APIs. My industry is still heavily invested in Photoshop, so I'm already familiar with it and I don't have much of a need for digital painting.
For digital painting I usually suggest people check out something like Krita or Affinity (they are already aware of Photoshop). I just don't have much firsthand experience with them since I felt like my needs were met with other software.
Sidenote: After actually downloading Krita it is more Photoshop-like than expected. I'll check it out as a replacement for myself. There's also been a huge, but very rare, need for Photoshop at my job (we use Linux) which has always been a problem (usually in modifying textures where Nuke isn't a good fit). The current plan was to try and find a CS6 license and either dual-boot Windows or use WINE or to buy Elements. Gimp was always too much to ask of them. I'll see if Krita fits that need.
That’s not because you have 3% macOS downloads that you can say that everyone loses around 95% potential downloads. It may simply be because your app is not marketed towards Mac users and alternatives exists.
Krita is great (and I happen to be one of your 3%!).
Given that macOS has a reputation, deserved or not, of being the de facto OS for graphic designers, why do you think you have so relatively few Mac users?
90% Windows users is basically what you would expect based on its desktop market share. The interesting thing is having more than twice as many Linux users as Mac.
This could be one of those places where the efficient market hypothesis is wrong because of incomplete information. The reputation of macOS for graphic designers is well known, but if the result of that is that everyone makes graphics design programs for macOS and not Linux then the macOS market gets saturated with supply and each supplier has to share the market with many competitors. Meanwhile the opposite on Linux, less competition so more volume per supplier.
It implies that Linux may be a good market for graphic design software because there is currently less supply there than demand. At least until more of the suppliers figure that out and release their software for it. (But that may itself cause more graphic designers to switch to Linux, which would then still justify the porting effort even as other suppliers move there too.)
Many digital painters seem to have moved to the iPad and apps like Procreate which can be had for a few bucks. I also find eInk hardware like the Remarkable tablet and the like interesting, they run on Linux. Have you thought about a standalone tablet that runs only Krita? Even if it's only black/white, having the tools from Krita on a device like that would be killer.
That mirrors my experience with hobbyists. My wife doesn't like using a Wacom and we could never warrant a Cintiq. So she uses Procreate on a tablet. It's also kind of hard to get her to try new stuff because the little time she has to draw she wants to spend time drawing.
For people who do it for their job, they're willing to invest in the hardware and software. I can't speak directly to painting software, but in my industry people really cling to the software they know or the rest of the industry uses. It's an uphill battle even if the software is better or cheaper to get adoption.
XP required themes signed by Microsoft. There were cracks that removed that requirement, but the result was, that when something was broken, you got to keep all the pieces.
For OSX, there were also hacks that changed the system appearance, and Apple took increasingly harder stance against them. Again, they break more than they solve.
The reason why platform vendors do not support third-party theming is, that it limits their ability for further development. They would need to preserve compatibility for something, that is internal implementation detail. For first party themes, they can keep them in lockstep with the rest of framework. For third party, they cannot. So they prevent third parties from existing.
Good point. I’m also convinced that macOS are more willing than Linux users to pay for software, which makes it possible for the developers to get some monetary return on the time they invest in creating good and usable software.
FOSS development can of course be funded via Patreon, donations, etc. But IMHO those models doesn’t seem to work so well for sophisticated GUI applications. (With some exceptions here and there.)
I tend to feel like there’s already enough roadblocks in the way to get things done. I used to tinker around with my OSs but now I want them out of the way to a large extent.
> I used to tinker around with my OSs but now I want them out of the way to a large extent.
This might seem counter intuitive, but configuring your own desktop kinda achieves "out of the way" on Linux... it gives you something persistent and reliable, it's a worthwhile investment. Like the parent, I use i3wm, it might seem a bit too spartan at first, but that's part of the beauty... less to configure, less gui in the way, less opinions, config a single text file, defaults are sane! I have hardly changed anything beyond my initial dot file setup about 5 years ago, yet have taken them through many desktop installs without any messing around.
Also configuring your desktop is not the same as Linux in 2000, you don't need to sift through thousands of lines of x11 config. Just pick the bits of desktop you like and stick it in a shell script, copy some config files here and there that you deem worthwhile configuring (smaller DEs or WM make this a far more minimal tasks than the big all signing all dancing KDEs and Gnomes).
... it's a small investment in time to pay for sanity and persistent experience over many years, the macOS days I could not bear the random changes pushed on users which became more and more heavy handed towards later versions.
TL:DR I like my custom configured linux desktop... because of how it prevents me from having to continually configure my desktop.
Unfortunately no-one provides what I consider to be a sane default.
I'm fairly happy with what I have. I add the odd alias to my dotfiles and a few things I pick up but for the most part I've had my config for half a decade or so now.
By contrast I could never figure out how to like, get Windows to fuck off with the telemetry ads bullshit. It always felt like I would disable it and then behind my back some randoservice would enable it again or install an update that brings back OneDrive or some madness.
The best bit about my Linux setup is that it's all just files. Home folder, few flat text files with the odd bit of json, we're home.
For what it's worth, I've had a lot of success with the Tron script[1] for getting rid of Windows Bloat. It disables a ton of garbage via Registry Keys which windows is much less likely to overwrite. It can be a little aggressive on some stuff like blocking your microphone from working in any app (easily fixable) but I'd rather have it that way than having to uninstall Candy Crush once a week.
Stating it that way makes it seem like you're opposed to learning something new. That's fine, but a lot of people including GP just looked once and never did anything else.
Frankly, yes, I'm opposed to learning new tools when the old tools I used for the same task did the task just as well.
Knowledge is power, so learning should increase your power. If learning is necessary to just keep being able to do the same things you were doing, you're not increasing your power, you're struggling to stay where you are.
I’m not. However, I can’t keep going back to square one. I need problems I’ve solved to remain solved, not have to jump into X configs in Vim because my monitor layout won’t stay between sessions (random example from many years ago). I have 5 hours of work to do today, I’d like to not spend 2 of them in man files “learning” about an abstraction I can’t afford to be digging into right now.
You're talking about problems that "piss you off", whereas Linux has problems that not only piss you off, but completely stop you from being able to do what you need to do.
It's easy to talk about these things in abstract terms, but frankly I've run across two problems with Mac ever that I actually had to fix in order to do what I needed to do:
1. Get "gcc" to point to "gcc" instead of clang.
2. Get Valgrind to work (which problem is admittedly still not solved).
The problems that I've had to fix in Linux often start immediately upon booting up for the first time and attempting to connect to wireless, and end with me emailing documents to a Mac to print them because I needed the document printed within an hour, not after 8 hours of tinkering.
You assume that everyone wants to modify everything (or the unmodifiable, as you put it).
After going through many years of FreeBSD and Linux, I now just want things to work. Mac gives me that. Should have switched sooner.
I used Linux as my daily driver until about 2008 when I switched to macOS exclusively. I made the transition to Ubuntu across all of my machines over the last three years and its been a much more pleasant experience.
Upgrading macOS and Xcode is a pain, especially with Homebrew and Macports. You'll have to recompile most of your installed applications and it's all managed with a hacked together package manager. Virtualenvs won't survive updates if Python is sideloaded because of linking issues. It's just a mess.
The result is having to spend an unknown amount of time fixing things that upgrades break on macOS, meanwhile upgrades on Ubuntu just work.
There was a time I fine tuned every aspect of every desktop environment I had. I had custom widgets on Windows 3 by replacing bitmap resources in Windows 3.1's SVGA.DRV. Did the same up until Gnome 2.
Then I stopped. These days rarely go beyond setting terminal font (I built mine, so it's only fair I play lab rat with it) and some Emacs settings. The effort spent in customizing every detail of every app is very rarely, if ever, recovered.
I feel a bit embarrassed I recently added overline support to tmux because I wanted proper overlined status lines on my terminals. In my defense, I did it for fun, not to improve my performance.
I suspect what you mean when you say "it didn't work" is actually, "they didn't like it", which is actually not the same thing. I see a lot of people saying they didn't like things on Macs, not a lot of people saying things didn't work on Macs.
I've never used an OS that actually _didn't work_.
Unless we're talking about 15+ years ago before Linux had driver support for most stuff, or trying to like, just install Mac OS on an unsupported platform without hackintosh workarounds.
Everyone here saying that they used to tweak everything and now doesn't has just aged. You no longer feel the joy of your youth of computing in the same way. This is natural.
It's not really a rabbit hole. It has a clearly defined end.
I transitioned from GNOME to i3wm quite a while ago (after like 15 GNOME upgrade cycles, where I always had to figure out what changed, and fix what broke), and it was basically a day or two figuring out what I want and inventing/learning the shortcuts (not fulltime days, mind you). And maybe 2-3 instances of "this feels stupid, how can I improve it".
Certainly orders of magnitude less time than I ever spend making Windows do what I want on every damn re-install.
Now that I had my configs, I just copied them to all my 4 or so desktop/laptop machines, and it's such a timesaver. i3wm being ultra stable, there's no ongoing maintenance.
Agree! I've been using XFCE for many years, after deciding that Gnome wasn't actually pretty enough to justify all the extra pain.
For me, window managers are mostly just a convenient way to arrange a baroque collection of web browsers and terminals... Occasionally, I use file organization/navigation or a couple other programs that are helpful in my job. But ultimately, I just need a minimal window manager that gets the hell out of the way. (in fact, after setting up awesome rotating Moebius wallpapers, I mostly don't see them, as they're almost entirely buried under the web browsers and terminals.)
i3 is the best thing to happen my computing in years.
You'll need to copy some config if you want your volume buttons, brightness buttons, etc to work. But as far as I am concerned it is the only good Linux display manager.
>No way to adjust mouse scroll speed; official answer seems to be "don't want that". (Or install imwheel and change your mouse scroll to be equal to hitting the down button (!) which breaks other stuff)
I just checked gnome settings and it has option to change touchpad speed. Don't have a mouse so can't comment for that but it should be there.
>To make an icon on the favorites bar in gnome, you have to edit a .desktop text file! Madness. I mean, I'm a programmer, so I'm capable of it, but it's seriously annoying
Open the app and right click the app icon in dock(if that is what you mean by favorites bar) and it should have an option to add to favorites.
>modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent
I have found gnome to have the easiest way to edit all shortcuts. Settings>Devices>Keyboard should show you all the keyboard shortcuts and if you scroll to bottom you will find option to add custom shortcuts which you can set to any command. Much more extensive than the frustrating MacOS keyboard shortcuts in my opinion.
> installing a gnome-shell extension was way more difficult than it should be
> brew isn't the best, but on linux I need to use both brew _and_ apt because you can't reliably get anything approaching up-to-date software with apt
Agreed. That's why I use pacman. Pacman is hands down the best package manager I have ever used. Combined with AUR it has the most extensive up-to-date packages. Pacman is the default package manager for Arch Linux. I use arch, btw. Had to do this :)
I agree linux was in a pretty bad shape a decade ago and we still need to improve a lot but to say it is still the same is ignoring all the hardwork of a large number of wonderful people who have been contributing to the codebase.
> Open the app and right click the app icon in dock(if that is what you mean by favorites bar) and it should have an option to add to favorites.
neat! that didn't work for kitty though, for example, I had to do it manually.
> I have found gnome to have the easiest way to edit all shortcuts. Settings>Devices>Keyboard should show you all the keyboard shortcuts and if you scroll to bottom you will find option to add custom shortcuts which you can set to any command. Much more extensive than the frustrating MacOS keyboard shortcuts in my opinion.
The shortcuts panel is indeed very nice, and the shortcuts that you can change there are nice. However, many aren't changeable there, and you have to install (!) and go to the very poorly designed keyboard modifications panel of gnome-tweaks, for example, to change caps lock to esc and tell gnome what you want your windows/mac key to do.
Where it falls down from karabiner is:
1. there's no way to have different settings for different keyboards. I have two that I use regularly, with fairly different layouts
2. it lacks the power of karabiner; I'd love to have a rule like "command-c equals ctrl-shift-c but command-t equals ctrl-t". Trivial in karabiner, impossible in gnome
> all you then have to do is click install while on the website
I'm glad they have that, but I don't want to give my browser that security hole, so I grant you that one's a bit on me. Should be easier to do a manual installation anyway.
> I agree linux was in a pretty bad shape a decade ago and we still need to improve a lot but to say it is still the same is ignoring all the hardwork of a large number of wonderful people who have been contributing to the codebase.
I do not at all mean to trash the hard work people have done, I really (truly!) respect it. However, from this particular user's perspective, the problems are about equal to what they were a decade ago.
I don't know why it would be a Weyland or X issue. Scroll speed should be controlled by the widgets, GTK in the case of GNOME. Trying to set it at the compositor level seems misguided.
X stops at a very low level. Scroll Wheel events in X are treated as button presses. There's no X API call to get a "scroll by this much" per Button4 or Button5 events. It wouldn't even make sense in the context. All of that is handled by libraries above the X level.
I am on Gnome 3.32.2. I remembered Ubuntu lagged behind but didn't know this much.
Maybe the touchpad speed is added in later versions of gnome.
Your keyboard shortcut use case is much more complex than mine and I haven't used Karabiner(though I should try because until now I am hating my mac experience and I am stuck with a mac as a daily driver for the past month).
It should be possible to use multiple keyboards with different layouts and shortcuts as a colleague of mine used to use his build this way. I have always been on the road so don't have the luxury. https://superuser.com/questions/351936/separate-keyboard-for...
I don't use kitty but use alacritty and there is an option for changing the copy and paste shortcuts. So you can use command+c for copy. Also for your original query about command-c ctrl-shift-c have you tried setting it up as a macro? Maybe that would work.
> I'm glad they have that, but I don't want to give my browser that security hole, so I grant you that one's a bit on me. Should be easier to do a manual installation anyway.
I worry about this as well. I used to use this but later realised that I don't need new extensions and just use my existing list so I made a script for this which has been serving me well for some time now. Though with my shift to i3 my gnome use is quite limited for a few years now so can't say if it would hold for routine use case.
> I do not at all mean to trash the hard work people have done, I really (truly!) respect it. However, from this particular user's perspective, the problems are about equal to what they were a decade ago.
Everything you have listed is solvable by using a different distribution/desktop environment. You can use something like Manjaro to get really up to date software, and it comes with different desktop environment flavors like Cinnamon. I think a more modern desktop environment would suit you best, and I highly recommend Cinnamon.
This is my issue with Linux, though, despite having a dev VM environment of several distros. There are a metric f*ckton of Linux distros out there and, for every one of them that fixes the problems mentioned in one breath, they break or ignore a whole litany of other things. When I first started with Linux, it was pretty much Red Hat or bust and that was a pain but you knew what you were getting into. Now, it's nearly impossible to know what a lot of the differences are between all the different distros and which one may or may not work for your particular situation. Worse yet, it's now happened to me twice where I've set up a distro, spent the time to get it mostly working, and then, after using it for a few weeks, there's some annoyance or hardware issue that I can't resolve that is resolved in another distro. So I install the next one, get it mostly working, and then run into some other non-trivial annoyance or issue. Repeat, ad nauseam.
Linux, to me, is still very much a tinkerer's OS. If you don't have the time to tinker and get things working and just want to get things done, Linux is not the way to go.
> Worse yet, it's now happened to me twice where I've set up a distro, spent the time to get it mostly working, and then, after using it for a few weeks, there's some annoyance or hardware issue that I can't resolve that is resolved in another distro
A problem should only be unfixable without distro hopping if it requires a newer kernel or some other updated software. Even then, you can usually opt into a newer kernel and fix it in whatever distro you were running. So a rolling release is unlikely to face this issue, or if you check your hardware compatibility before installing.
Generally though, Linux is Linux, and troubleshooting would solve these problems.
>Generally though, Linux is Linux, and troubleshooting would solve these problems.
Sure... but, to me, troubleshooting is tinkering. I don't want to have to troubleshoot my input device because it suddenly changes after an install or kernel update. Yes, I know that I can solve these problems but I don't want to have to do it all the time.
It's really not. I think you're giving Linux far too much credit. If it really did "just work" and was that easy, you'd see way more computers in the wild using it. It's literally a free alternative that can be installed on any computer. The two biggest barriers to adoption are non-existent with Linux and yet it still has a minuscule user base comparatively. Unless you don't exclude servers, Linux doesn't "just work" for most people.
And I think you're conflating market share with how well something works.
> If it really did "just work" and was that easy, you'd see way more computers in the wild using it.
I encounter a number every day, in software engineering. For non-technical users installing an operating system is beyond what most can comprehend anyway. I'd wager the vast majority of hardware never sees an OS change in its life. Add on that desktop linux is not supported by most games and you've more or less excluded the semi-technical market too. That easily accounts for a small user base regardless of how well it works.
And if you take into account what people use it for - software development largely, in my experience - it seems natural that it has a smaller user base.
> Unless you don't exclude servers, Linux doesn't "just work" for most people.
You haven't really shown that, just a small market share.
I don't understand the point you're making here. You initially said that Linux being arduous is an outdated trope and then admitted that the only people you see using Linux are software engineers and that non-technical users can't even comprehend the install. Who is Linux non-arduous for, then, except technical users and software engineers? Was your argument meant to apply to only the technical users because that wasn't clear, if that's the case.
> You initially said that Linux being arduous is an outdated trope
Yes
> then admitted that the only people you see using Linux are software engineers and that non-technical users can't even comprehend the install
Any install, you don't see them installing windows either. I'm not sure my mother (for instance) really comprehends what an operating system is as a separate entity to "the computer".
> Was your argument meant to apply to only the technical users because that wasn't clear, if that's the case.
My argument, as stated, was that it works fine and the trope that you'll spend your life fiddling with it is outdated. This has absolutely f*ck all to do with how many people use it, as that number is affected by a lot of other factors.
You'll find elsewhere on this page I've talked about messing around with xrandr to get DPI-related stuff looking good on Xfce. And yes, I had to spend some time figuring that out, an evening of my life gone.
I had to spend a comparable amount of time recently trying to figure out how to get my bluetooth keyboard working properly when attached to OS X, and ended up creating a custom keymap for it. And since Catalina my macbook pro has spontaneously rebooted a bunch of times while asleep.
Windows has been a complete bastard with its update packages lately, and it took days of effort to update the four PCs in our house to Windows 10 1903, for no known reason, having got stuck on an older version that was going out of support and started throwing up warnings about being out of date. I'm still not sure how I fixed that, having tried a whole bunch of different methods over the course of several days. Incidentally the old version it got stuck on only had partial support for HDR which explains a load of other weirdness I was seeing on one of the machines.
So to me this idea that Linux on the desktop is a pain in the arse to keep running properly but other systems are not just doesn't ring true.
They've all cost me time and effort lately. Probably the least troublesome system we have in the house is a laptop running Linux Mint that we use to order pizza in the living room... Or my old ARM chromebook I suppose, but that's in well deserved retirement now.
>It's literally a free alternative that can be installed on any computer.
Practically nobody installs operating systems on their computer. The computer they bought comes with one and it never changes. The stability of Linux isn't the problem here.
Ok but even if I, hypothetically, conceded that point, all it would take to make my point is 1 piece of hardware or software that didn't work as intended. Wacom tablets, for example, do not have drivers that can be installed from Wacom. Yes, there is an Open Source project for those but most users wouldn't know or have the technical capability to install that past what's been contributed to the kernel.
For technical users, Linux is fine but it still needs some tinkering. Technical users are more comfortable with tinkering so it's probably not a big deal and "just works" for them but that's a very liberal definition of "just works", imo.
>Our drivers are pre-installed in many major distribution... Oftentimes, you can simply plug in your tablet and start working.
I understand it's just an example though. Yes you can sometimes buy some strange hardware that won't automatically work. This happens in Windows too, and installing a package does not require more technical capability than installing something on Windows.
>them but that's a very liberal definition of "just works", imo.
Anyone that's managing to install Linux on their computer has the knowledge necessary to make it " just work." Anybody that buys a computer with Linux on it should expect it to just work.
>Anyone that's managing to install Linux on their computer has the knowledge necessary to make it " just work."
I disagree wholeheartedly. Linux is easy to install. It's not easy to write a driver for a piece of hardware. It's not even easy sometimes to install a driver that someone else wrote.
Case in point: the state of VR on Linux right now. It works for a lot of people that can dork around with setting things up. It's not, in any way, shape, or form, ready for use by people.
Edit: The Wacom example still supports my point anyways. The drivers that you say are included are from the project page. They are not official Wacom drivers and, as such, are missing functionality for some tablets.
> Linux, to me, is still very much a tinkerer's OS. If you don't have the time to tinker and get things working and just want to get things done, Linux is not the way to go.
Completely disagree with you. There are many fully featured desktop environments that are as feature rich as Windows or OSX. Cinnamon, elementary OS, Pop_OS are just three off the top of my head. And hardware support has gotten amazing since 2012 and onwards.
I use a flavor of linux on a few chromebooks and have used it on several laptops from brands like Apple, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, MSI as my primary OS since 2012 and haven't had any notable hardware issues. Things simply work out of the box.
Can you be more specific about what issues you experienced? When was it that you had these issues? I am having a hard time believing you, because my personal experience has been so positive.
This reads like every forum post where someone has asked "how's X distro work on Y laptop", and then people respond with something like the following:
"Runs great! No issues. Suspend/resume are wonky but I'm able to get by. Bluetooth doesn't work reliably but who needs that? Wifi is slower than in Windows."
This is also my experience, recently, with investigating laptops to switch to from my MBP2015. The average person does not give a single shit about this stuff. They expect it to either work, or they'll go where it does. Pop!_OS is certainly a step in the right direction, but it is in no way a true competitor to the ecosystems found on Windows/macOS.
I've run Linux/FreeBSD on and off since 2002ish, too, so I don't feel off in saying this.
There is almost no laptop out there that "just works" with Linux. You might get lucky, and the stars align when you do an install/buy a pre-set Linux laptop from System76/Dell, and then it works, but this isn't always the case for people.
On a Mac? Keyboard issues aside, things "just work" most of the time. I can run a Mac and ship actual products to people, or I can run some open source cobbled together setup and spend my time trying to make it work instead.
You only live once, so you should only do the latter for ideological reasons.
> This reads like every forum post where someone has asked "how's X distro work on Y laptop", and then people respond with something like the following:
"Runs great! No issues. Suspend/resume are wonky but I'm able to get by. Bluetooth doesn't work reliably but who needs that? Wifi is slower than in Windows."
I am not sure what you are talking about. I didn't mention a single suspend/resume/bluetooth or wifi problem. I mentioned the following brands: Apple, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, MSI
And laptops from these brands that I purchased and used worked out of the box. You are free to not believe me, but you shouldn't put words in my mouth. I am typing this on a Dell Latitude E7450 and there are no issues with this laptop whatsoever. Suspend/sleep works flawlessly, no audio issues, no wifi issues, bluetooth works flawlessly, everything worked out of the box on manjaro linux.
Also I use my Lenovo X1 carbon with manjaro linux to develop software for a fortune 500/inc 500 corporation 8 hours a day and have been doing it for close to a year without a single issue.
My work gave me the latest fully loaded macbook pro but I returned it because I hate the keyboard (it's unreliable as hell and has no travel distance and feels awful) and the touchbar is an abomination. The keyboard is one of the single most important things on a laptop and if the keyboard experience is lacking, the whole experience sucks. I am very happy with x1 carbon latest gen and manjaro linux and my setup destroys the macbooks other devs use when it comes to things like running unit tests.
>This reads like every forum post where someone has asked "how's X distro work on Y laptop"
This is exactly how I felt reading that response. Yes, I'll admit that I don't have experience with every distro that's out there so there may be situations that are as the parent comment described. However, I've been using Linux on servers for 10+ years and still find desktop Linux to be a pain in the ass with the exact caveats that you're describing, regardless of the flavor I've used.
When was the last time you tried to seriously use linux? Server linux and linux on personal computing devices are not the same thing at all so not sure why you brought that up. In reality most of the hardware related pain points disappeared in 2012'ish and now there are many user friendly distros that just work out of the box. My grandma uses linux.
> They're the Linux kernel except the desktop versions have a window manager running on top of them that handles the GUI which typically isn't found on a server.
Bingo! Servers are designed to run rock solid stable distributions with the minimum amount of software necessary to get the job done. Desktop distributions come with a desktop environment that allow the users to do things like pick a wifi network or change audio volume. At work we use alpine linux docker images which do not come with even a text editor. They are two very unique use cases. No one sane runs web servers with a full blown Ubuntu desktop distribution because the overhead would be insane. This is one of the reasons why linux servers are so common, and dominate the market share, because they don't have to run full blown desktop environments that'll never be used.
Comparing desktop linux distributions to linux servers is like comparing a ferrari to a honda civic, because both of them are internal combustion engine cars.
And I'm having a hard time believing you because the hardware support for the MacBook trackpad has been abysmal on Linux in multiple flavors. Someone else in this thread mentioned support for mouse scroll speed and that's definitely one that I've run into and had to use workarounds to get to a comfortable place. I also need to use a Wacom tablet that should have 100% support on Linux because it's at least 8 years old that doesn't work properly as an input device. I've had issues with support for wireless cards, peripherals like printers, and even support for things that worked at one point in one flavor that didn't work in another.
I'm glad that you've had a great experience but I can assure you that it's less common than you're making it out to be. And this doesn't even begin to get into the issues that aren't really the fault of any one Linux distro (software availability, for example) but that are just a side-effect of Linux not being a popular desktop OS, regardless of the flavor. Linux can be used as a primary driver in certain cases and I'm sure that some of those cases also happened without any kind of hardware issues. I just don't think that's common nor do I think it's enough to recommend it as a primary driver for anyone that's not a tinkerer.
You should try a modern distribution like cinnamon. I too have a wacom tablet and it works out of the box without requiring any driver installation whatsoever.
I concur. Manjaro solves a lot of the problems of the Linux desktop, and brings with it the great Arch community.
And for keybindings, you're probably better off figuring out how xmodmap works.
It's not pretty. But honestly, if you want pretty when it comes to keybinding, nothing beats a good keyboard. Like the UHKB, Ergo Dox, anything supported by QMK basically.
The GNOME project has gone very far astray. Their UX "experts" are self-appointed tyrants who want to control how you use the computer and seem to get sick kicks out of telling users that they're wrong whenever users want do something even slightly different. "You THINK you want to change your mouse speed but actually you're an idiot and you're wrong" is a classic example of this.
GNOME is more of a problem than linux itself. It doesn't have to be this bad. More distros could be packaging KDE (or even XFCE?) as the default, but incentives seem misaligned.
"Linux" in 2019 refers to such a broad array of software that it's almost meaningless when talking about a specific experience. It's annoying to do, but trying some different distros and guis is well worth the time. There are plenty of people who self identify as full time linux users who cant stand to use each others computers, so there isn't any kind of consensus about what a good linux experience is because people are often trying to get very different things done.
Personally i thing gnome 3 is utter garbage, and poisons people against the whole ecosystem because it's usually what people try first because the screenshots look shiny. You might have a better time with mate or something similar.
I last used KDE about a year ago, so I'm not sure if this is still a problem, but even KDE doesn't let you slow down mouse cursor speed, only make it faster. Is that still the case?
They didn't even have a slider for controlling mouse speed, only a numerical text entry. It boggles the mind.
The "Mouse" Systems Setting I have on screen on my up-to-date KDE right now has a slider for pointer speed with no numerical entry. There is only a small handful of other settings that quite useful (acceleration profile, invert scroll direction, and a couple other things). KDE has been working hard on usability lately.
Yes the KDE Usability & Productivity initiative helped a lot making KDE suck less in this regard. A lot of configuration dialogs were improved, a lot of small irritating bugs were fixed and the default are more sane now. And because Nate Graham blog about all these changes every week, KDE also got a lot of new contributors.
Btw Plasma 5.17 will be released tomorrow, so all the improvements of the last 6 months will be available very soon.
There were no mouse acceleration options for Plasma until release 5.13 which was released in 2018, which is well after the libinput transition. Essentially since the feature was added there's been an open bug report on it not working on X11.
I felt the same way so for my Linux laptop I moved over to Plasma. It's a real desktop with sane defaults, and I can recommend it.
Obviously not quite the same level of polish as the Mac, but try it, you may be pleasantly surprised.
Gnome3 has been such a regression of user experience, I've never had a good time using it.
> To make an icon on the favorites bar in gnome, you have to edit a .desktop text file! Madness. I mean, I'm a programmer, so I'm capable of it, but it's seriously annoying
Just install the Menu Editor app from the Ubuntu Software channel.
> installing a gnome-shell extension was way more difficult than it should be
Go to extensions.gnome.org, install the Firefox or Chrome extension and click the "Install" button on the website to install gnome-shell extensions.
> brew isn't the best, but on linux I need to use both brew _and_ apt because you can't reliably get anything approaching up-to-date software with apt
Use snaps or flatpak. Using Homebrew on Linux feels wrong.
Funnily, I find I am most productive in Gnome 3, despite its many flaws. The workflow that revolves around the super key to view, launch, and switch between windows and desktops works very well, and I have not been able to fully recreate the same experience in any of the other DEs (though I haven't tried Budgie).
One big change that helped reduce the performance lag is turning off animations using the Tweak Tool. It was like a breath of fresh air once I made that adjustment.
Sadly Gnome3, although sucking badly in many aspects, dumbed down and bloated, is the only viable option for tablets. Unless something has changed in the last months, having correct screen orientation and rotation consistent with correct touch management without adding/editing scripts by hand is a nightmare: imagine you finally get the screen correctly orientated but now if you drag the finger to the right the arrow goes up.
I ran budgie for about a year before switching back to windows for work and its leagues better than Gnome in my experience. Though at this point I think I would go for KDE given the opportunity.
I dont mind KDE and I do like Kubuntu but at work everyones on Gnome DEs so I try to have close enough environments so they dont blame KDE for all my problems when things break.
Windows usually has some easier to setup utilities to develop on for some projects. We have Mac, Windows and mostly Linux devs. I sometimes wish I was on Windows its more predictable to me.
I wanted to find out the proper way to disable middle-click paste because all the solutions I could find involved basically disabling the button all together, but I still wanted to use it for closing tabs etc.
There doesn’t seem to be a way to do it. One high rated StackOverflow answer I found suggested purchasing a mouse with a less sensitive mouse wheel.
This was one of my biggest grievances with desktop Linux. Not driver support or a lack of applications or ugly interfaces, but the fucking middle click to paste enabled by default!
It just shows such poor taste for defaults, especially when tap-to-click is enabled. Text gets randomly inserted everywhere. On Manjaro this causes sticky notes to be created everywhere on the desktop. It's insane that someone gave it the thumbs up.
And the stackoverflow solutions all just disable the middle click altogether like you said.
> * modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent
That's not a Linux problem, it's a window manager problem. Setting keyboard shortcuts is a piece of cake in StumpWM.
> * searching for help usually yields results that are half a decade or more old, and it's very difficult to figure out if it's current advice or not
That's a search engine problem, and it affects a lot of stuff besides Linux.
> * brew isn't the best, but on linux I need to use both brew _and_ apt because you can't reliably get anything approaching up-to-date software with apt
That depends on your distro. Lots of systems use Apt, and they all have their own package servers. I've used Debian testing for years, and it's always been reasonably up to date.
I had a somewhat similar experience with Linux on an old Mac mini a few years ago. Too many things had to be fiddled with using config files and scripts. I had to resort to using a Magic Trackpad like a regular mouse. There was quite a bit missing "out of the box". I will admit that Linux has improved a lot over the years. But I find that macOS seems to be the one with a "batteries included" experience and is the least annoying among Windows, Linux and macOS. While it's possible to setup Linux to one's preferences with some effort, I find Windows to be standing in my way and slowing me down most of the time even for trivial things (I'm looking at you, Windows 10).
I think the one annoying thing about Windows is the forced updates. Apple has started taking a leaf from Windows. A few weeks ago my system updated and asked to restart without giving me any choice of saying no.
This is necessary for security.
Still you can trivially disable updates for a week or report them again and again.
What would be nice though is if they developed a live patching system like the modern Linux kernel allow which means:
Windows partial updates without rebooting.
No operating system should update against the user's wishes. And this time the system didn't give me an option to delay, it simply let me know that it's about to restart and that I better save my work.
I was talking about OSX. I think operating systems should make it very clear to the users what critical updates need to be installed, but they shouldn't force users to update against their will and interrupt their workflow. Something like this:
> These critical security updates are essential for continuing safe and secure operation of your computer!
> Critical security update x: allows an attacker to take control of your PC
> Critical security update y: ....
> Critical security update z: ....
In the U.S at least we give people personal liberties over much more serious matters such as allowing people to refuse care in a medical context. The health of someone's personal PC is nothing next to that.
My operating system should never destroy my work or force me to waste time manually getting back to the productive place I was.
On Windows you can delay it many times (by scheduling the restart repeatedly a few days apart) but if you're not vigilant about doing that, it will just go ahead and destroy stuff.
I agree this is the logic behind this situation - but sometimes, I want to use the Hole-Hawg to do the thing I want it to do. I am uncomfortable with losing that freedom.
Further, there have been some updates labelled "security" such as in Windows 7, which were actually telemetry. I think the ability to do mandatory updates skewed the perspective of the team behind them as to what constitutes security (eg: this telemtry will help us catch dangerous work flows which do need a fix of some kind!). IMHO, when you take away users autonomy, you make them into the dumb users you fear.
> To make an icon on the favorites bar in gnome, you have to edit a .desktop text file! Madness.
.desktop files are about the dumbest damn thing ever. Why is the 'category' of an application, which pretty much every menu interprets as its sub-folder location, determined here [0]? Why is there absolutely no ability whatsoever to set a relative path to an icon file [1]? It's like there were designed by someone who had never used a GUI before and had one described to him while writing the spec [0].
[0] Given other choices made by FreeDesktop.org, this might actually be true.
While I'm glad that I'm not the only one who is in the same situation and frame-of-mind as you, I wish more people admitted this. The endless chain of Linux re-distroing to fix issues is absolutely the main issue with Linux.
I blame Ubuntu's mid-2000s decision to offer "Ubuntu", "Lubuntu", "Kubuntu", and "Xubuntu", which seemed to convince people that the only way to change desktop environments is to reinstall Linux.
They're all there, just a few clicks away in whatever crap-ass GUI Ubuntu has stuck on top of apt these days. At the end of the day, all these distros are just Debian, Redhat, or (rarely) Arch under the hood, so if you get sick of lack of support for JimBobLinux, you can just install Debian and quit fucking around. I did that 15 years ago (good god) and haven't regretted it.
> * modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent
Lol, different strokes for different folks. Having to use Karabiner instead of the much more versatile tools on Linux really peeved me when I switched over a few years ago.
I like to rebind my caps lock to function as an extra modifier key. On Linux, you just set it to Hyper; ezpz. On Mac, you just straight up can't, so I have to bind it to command+control+option+shift to get the next best thing (since I would never actually press all four of those keys). And I've had issues with Mac's Keyboard Shortcuts -- some of my shortcuts have just stopped working. I used to have CapsLock+[1-9] as shortcuts to switch to Workspaces 1-9, but some of the shortcuts just stopped working and I've had no luck finding a fix.
On Linux, it may take more effort to do something, but it'll always be possible. So many of the things I want to do on Mac are just not options. When I retire this MacBook, I'll be going back to Linux.
This pretty much sums up both why I switched from Windows to Linux and why I'll never buy anything Apple is pushing. On Linux, the easy stuff is annoying and the hard-but-necessary stuff is even more annoying; on Windows and Mac, the easy stuff is easy and the hard-but-necessary stuff is impossible.
Edit: Well, that and also because, if my OS is going to randomly break whenever some idiot pushes a "update", it might as well be one I don't pay money for, and one that only updates when I tell it to.
> modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent
This had been a headache for me as well, but I've had great luck with AutoKey. Obviously it would be better if there was a native solution, but at least this works IME.
> * No way to adjust mouse scroll speed; official answer seems to be "don't want that". (Or install imwheel and change your mouse scroll to be equal to hitting the down button (!) which breaks other stuff)
Oh yeah, that! Lost another five-ish hours to that, and eventually just decided to live with crappy scrolling.
Having used Linux since about 2000, gnome has regressed and KDE has improved. I switched to KDE about a year ago and haven't looked back:
> * No way to adjust mouse scroll speed; official answer seems to be "don't want that". (Or install imwheel and change your mouse scroll to be equal to hitting the down button (!) which breaks other stuff)
- Never had to do this, but I checked. Under "Input Devices" I see "Mouse wheel scrolls by:" as a setting
> * To make an icon on the favorites bar in gnome, you have to edit a .desktop text file! Madness. I mean, I'm a programmer, so I'm capable of it, but it's seriously annoying
- With KDE you can drag any application to the quicklaunch widget, or right-click to add.
> * modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent
I've not used Karabiner, but a quick look does make it look more feature-complete than any single GUI tool I know of on linux. However, keyboard shortcuts are all configurable from a central place on KDE. My biggest downside is that the organization of the "Global Shortcuts" has a UI that only makes sense to a KDE developer. IMO a single list would be more useful than having categories.
> * searching for help usually yields results that are half a decade or more old, and it's very difficult to figure out if it's current advice or not
True of most systems these days unfortunately; looking for the date of the post on forums/stack-overflow helps
> * installing a gnome-shell extension was way more difficult than it should be
I've not needed to install a KDE widget that wasn't in the base setup, so I cannot comment.
> * brew isn't the best, but on linux I need to use both brew _and_ apt because you can't reliably get anything approaching up-to-date software with apt
I have nothing good to say about Ubuntu in general except that it's popularity means that it is easier to get the correct answer by googling. It is by far the most finicky distro I've administered, including Gentoo (which is so high-maintenance that you should only run it if administering systems is a fun hobby). If you want up-to-date software from your package manager, use a rolling release distro. Otherwise the best you can do is something like a base setup and then side-load the software you want. This problem has been identified to the point where there are several brew-like systems (and things like snap as well), but no clear winner yet.
> I remain reasonably happy with it, but Mac is still so far ahead of it in terms of usability it's wild.
I think this will always be true. The Mac has such a lead in "There is a bright path and things will be fine so long as you don't stray from it" coupled with the fact that they control both hardware and software means that there just don't seem to be enough people who both want a Linux like that and have the know-how to make it happen. The counterpoint is perhaps chromebooks, which occupy such a different price-point compared to macs that they make their own niche at least in primary and secondary education.
> If you want up-to-date software from your package manager, use a rolling release distro. Otherwise the best you can do is something like a base setup and then side-load the software you want. This problem has been identified to the point where there are several brew-like systems (and things like snap as well), but no clear winner yet.
I use openSuSE Leap with a bunch of OBS (build service) repos added. I get a nice stable base OS with updated packages when I want them. And it runs KDE/Plasma nicely, too, and not as an afterthought or something like other distros.
Windows 10 works marginally better. Both remain vastly inferior to MacOs.
That's where I'm stuck. We're all-in at our house on Apple stuff. I'm no Windows hater per se, hell, I used to work at Microsoft and my wife still does. And there was a time that I'd say about Mac OS: "this is what an operating system should be". Oh, you most certainly disagree, but bear with me. I don't say that anymore. Too much half-assed shit, and yada yada, no need to repeat it here; macOS ain't what it used to be. But what else am I going to use? I keep rootin' for Linux, but every time I boot one of my VMs, well, it ain't replacing macOS just yet. Windows (at least the NT variants) when I worked for MSFT was a perfectly servicable operating system. It wasn't Unix, but it was better than classic Mac OS, and pretty damned solid. But I have to use Windows 10 at work now, and I fucking hate it. Again, no need to repeat it all here, I just do.
Yeah, Mac hardware sucks, too. I guess when my 2012 retina dies, I'll have to...oh, wait a minute, I'm still plugging away on a seven year old laptop? That I've dragged all over God's creation and use daily? Still as functional as the day I bought it? I dunno, will I find a better alternative come replacement time? Or has the quality of everything else gone down, too? I know, I know, X1 Carbon, XPS; but then my gut seems to think that I hear just as much complaining about those, too.
So in truth, when the 2012 MBP dies, I have no idea what I'm going to do to replace it.
EDIT: thanks, folks. Don't know why I hadn't considered used 2015. If a 2012 is fine, I ought to be tickled with a 2015, right? :-)
Sidenote: "which listed the magical indentation that purges reserved space." Unless you're using Python, I think the author wants to replace "indentation" with "incantation".
Find a used 2015 mbp. I love mine (15 inch, mid 2015).
I probably would have upgraded for a better gpu, but the keyboards are too iffy for me. I shed a lot, and if dust/detritus is the mbp keyboard killer, it will never work for me.
Honestly I mostly use my iPad now. Work-work is still a dell laptop with win 10, and is daily torture to use. Mostly from all the corporate spyware my employer loads it down with.
At home, even for coding, I use the iPad second gen 12.9 and a vps.
I'm in the same boat as the guy you replied to and yea, I hear people recommend the 2015s all the time. Might do that, eventually. Then my laptop is 4 years old instead of 8 (and I'll probably still have to pay 4 digits for a used one). But what about 5 years from now? At one point, these options fade away.
My hope is that Apple is secretly listening.
They can't be happy about the negative butterfly keyboard headlines. They can't be completely unaware of "professionals" with a "Pro" model mentioning how they don't care about how flat their MBP is and would rather have better hardware. Any mention of the state of MBPs these days leads to a discussion about how disappointing they are. Every single time they get brought up!
That wasn't always the case, despite all the people making fun of Apple users being brainwashed and whatnot. Up until – yea, basically 2015, Apple users happily chuckled at these discussions as the overall usage of Apple products remained a pleasant experience. But I don't see that anymore. I see desperate clinging to pre-2016 models, a hope that "things will improve" and nervous looks at the alternatives (Win 10, Linux), which don't seem attractive at all.
Basically, if Apple announced a new MBP line tomorrow, 2mm thicker but with a proper keyboard, MagSafe, no-nonsense specs and an option to drop the gimmicks (touchbar) for shaving a few hundred dollars off that insane price (current 15" offers starting at 2.699,00€, here, that's with a 256GB SSD), I bet they'd get overrun with preorders within seconds.
I have hopes because, honestly, I'm out of options and it sucks. So I have to interpret certain things positively. Apple just dropped 3DTouch from the new iPhones, which is an indicator they're willing to let go when shit plain doesn't work out. Jony Ive leaving might be a completely random and unrelated event and I generally respect what he did for keeping things clean and focused – but maybe his departure is a signal to return back to more... "robust" design? Who knows. Whatever the case, Apple needs to get its head out of its ass and acknowledge just how unhappy even die hard fans are with their current MBP line.
I'd love to believe this -- I have 5 Apple laptops from the Pismo G3 through a mid-2012, and liked all of them -- and I'd love to go back to being satisfied with that kind of purchase cycle again.
But I don't think Apple got it right before by listening in the sense of gathering feedback, I think they had some internal vision that came from a kind of attention to people like you and I as a market that they cared about.
And I think either the people who had a knack for that vision are gone, or the days when Apple could be bothered to care about that market are gone.
To echo the others, I had a similar problem though I was on a 2011 MBP. Didn't want the new MBP so I bought the most pimped out 2015 model you could get, the one with the 2.8Ghz i7 CPU, AMD GPU and 1TB SSD. Also had a low battery cycle count (<50).
Plan to use this one for at least another 5 years. It's still plenty fast.
I understand why they did--but I also think keeping magsafe would have been fine, too. When I looked for non-Mac alternatives my criteria was; no proprietary connector, either magsafe-like (like the Surface) or USB-C.
I really really wish they didn't ditch all of the other nice stuff when they ditched magsafe. They got rid of the external battery charge level indicator, the light showing if it's charging, etc. A few times now I've woken up expecting a charged laptop but the cable was loose or not plugged in on the other side (and I missed the sound). It's really awkward to open the lid and wake it up to see how fully charged it is or if it has finished charging. Minor details like those were what I liked about using a Mac.
They do have third-party USB-C cables with LEDs, but since they're passive (just looking at current traveling through the cable) I've heard they're not always correct. I'm curious, but skeptical, of the USB-C cables with the magsafe-like breakoff.
If you'll decide to go with pre-2016 MacBook, find a Louis Rossmann video about what mac to buy. He repairs MacBooks for a long time and thus has a good idea about which model will serve you the longest. As I recall, his recommendation was to go with some 2014 model instead of 2015 because of some faults 2015s had. Of course, you'll need to weigh it against the performance differences between the two.
the problem with this is that he repairs laptops from people who don’t know how to take care of them so the problems he’s repairing will likely never be a problem for someone here. i’ve never once had any of the problems in any of his videos (or even a problem at all). he sure talks shit about apple like they’re all junk though.
Oh yeah, he's definitely biased, but if you filter the stuff, and I understand how you wouldn't want to, but if you filter it, there are descriptions of issues that you can't avoid with care. Some examples:
1. dGPU that's soldered poorly and whuch thus gets cracks in solder balls after repeated heat cycling because the cooling solution and fan curve is not tuned for performance.
2. Motherboards being poorly supported, which leads to them flexing a little every time the laptop is opened and clised, which leads to components becoming desoldered due to cracks in the solder.
3. On the newer macbooks he says that there are chips that just die randomly, as he's had specimens that were quite new and without a sign of bad handling on the inside and out and yet a chip has gone bad all of a sudden.
I came here to say the same. I do have more issues with macOS than I did, say, 5 years ago.
However, the constant Windows update cycle is a nightmare and Linux still can't seem to get battery life and things like Bluetooth (audio inputs, etc.) quite right, so I'm left with hoping that Apple gets their stuff back together.
Operating system stability just seems to have declined in general in the last 3-5 years.
Can you elaborate on what do you mean by Windows update cycle? I have a Mac Mini, that I rarely touch to check a new release of something on Mac, and practically every time I have to use it, an update is pending.
With Windows it feels the same way, except a lot of what Windows Update does runs silently in the background, sometimes during your most precious computing hours with no way to stop it except force quitting through the Task Manager. And half the time the updates fail. And when you quickly want to shut down sometimes Windows also forces an update...
Apple seems to love doing this too. It's just great when it decides to update iMovie and iTunes, huge apps which I have never used, when your battery is at 30% and you're on a terrible WiFi connection. It's hard to tell that the update is in progress at all, and seemingly impossible to stop.
Took me a while to figure out how to remove the apps I never intend to use and disable auto-updates for the ones I do use. It can be disabled yeah, but the auto-update is the default, and I have a feeling it will get mysteriously turned back on at some point, and I won't notice until it kills my battery at an awkward time again.
It's not clear that dragging an app to the trash is the "official" way to remove an app, and will remove all associated data, including whatever links it to the App Store, and causes the store to not attempt to "repair" the app by downloading it again or something.
It does seem that the "official" way to remove some App Store apps is to long-press on them in the Launchpad, and then click the "X" button that appears.
Maybe I was overthinking things, but IMO neither of these methods seem very discoverable or clear about what they actually do. Would it be that hard to put a clear "uninstall" button somewhere in the App Store? Android does this, and Windows mostly does too, AFAIK.
>It's not clear that dragging an app to the trash is the "official" way to remove an app
How so? The "official" way to delete files on MacOS is to put them in the Trash. Support articles on Apple's site also show that dragging an application to the trash is one of the official methods of removing an application, unless it was a package installer.
it’s not clear because your thinking in the windows / linux world where you need to run the uninstalled or remove the package respectively. if you think about it, if you want to delete something what do you do? so i disagree, it makes perfect sense.
Can you write uninstaller hooks to run when users draps app in the trash to remove caches and other stuff? I was embarassed by the fact that most applications in macs do not have uninstallers and their trash left around the system.
Developers can, yes, and, in the cases where the developers didn't do this, there's also an app called AppCleaner that's free, lightweight, and can watch the Trash for applications that are deleted. It'll pull all references to the app in the library and remove any remnants.
last i checked microsoft still doesn’t have scheduled boot times (granted this would likely be a bios setting on windows boxes) so i’d have to leave my PC on overnight to run the updates. it’s a bandaid, not a fix for the update problem.
Do you have anything to point to how to startup a windows box from cold boot using the Task Scheduler? Either I'm failing at google atm or you still have to schedule startup through the BIOS
Gah, you're right - I set it up ages ago and haven't touched it since; it's set to sleep and wake automatically, not to actually shut down. You would need to schedule startup through the BIOS if you wanted it to fully shutdown (I'd done that with my previous desktop).
it depends on the frequency of use of the mac. i’m in the same boat, just reversed (rarely touch my gaming windows pc but use my mac daily) and every time i boot the windows machine there is an update. most of the time windows needs a reboot as well. so imo the issue is the frequency of windows updates is higher, and has a higher chance of needing a reboot after the update.
Regarding Windows update cycle, you have the option of using LTSC, pausing updates for up to 35 days (yes, that's a built-in option now), or adjust update settings with GPO.
Even at a massive enterprise with a 9 figure account relationship with Microsoft, they just won’t fix issues after a few weeks of release. The product groups will rope a dope you until you hit some product cycle milestone and then tell you to fuck off.
The company has laid off or reallocated everyone and moved them to Azure. It’s Windows latest or bust. Since Apple is a shitshow with Mac and Google is too mercurial to rely on, dumpster fire is the new normal.
If you can do it, the smart money right now is to invest in iOS and watch Chrome.
I mean, the GP and most people who hear "fighting the Windows update cycle" assume you mean "fighting against being forced to interrupt your work and reboot to update" (the constant complain among Windows users) rather than something about intentionally avoiding new versions of the OS.
If you were an OS company and it were possible to force everyone to be running on master (and thereby not have any security vulnerabilities), wouldn't you, too?
But even then, this isn't true:
> It’s Windows latest or bust
Windows IoT Core is pretty stable. Wouldn't want your ATM or billboard rebooting every night. There are folks at Microsoft who remember how to do LTS software. They just don't think it's a good idea in a consumer product.
Microsoft moved to a model where addressing security updates, non-security failures and feature enhancements in rolled together into one stream of change.
You need to look at your risks systematically. If you're a billboard provider, uptime matters, and you update when risks exist that you don't have other controls for. In an individual or corporate use case, ymmv. Some people want the bleeding edge all of the time. Other people want a stable user and application experience, and apply fixes for security or functional errata only.
People ultimately make choices. From what I see, many people are doing the stuff that matters to them to the perceived stability of their phone. Schools are increasingly Chrome-focused. Enterprises are still Microsoft, but they are spending too much on Windows.
> and thereby not have any security vulnerabilities
That's not what running on master means. It means that all of your (many) security vulnerabilities are ones you don't know about[1] and random things keep breaking for no reason (and when you report them, it breaks in a way that's just different enough to let your bug report be closed as FIXED).
1: except (if you pay attention) the ones the developer advertises as 'features', like ssh with a default password of "password" baked into the kernel for "inventory management".
Have you tried using tlp/powertop? I'd say my battery life is pretty comparable to Windows after having done some optimizations using aforementioned tools.
Can confirm. Battery life on my T420 went from about 3 to about 7 hours after installing. No manual config necessary.
I mention "T420" because I think it's pretty manufacturer-specific. ThinkPad and XPS usually have good hardware support on commmon Linux distributions, but other laptops may not.
I have not, but will check it out. My problem is I love the idea of being able to tinker and get to a super stable, lovable mobile Linux setup, but I just don't have time right now. Maybe someday. :)
It's not much tinkering at all. Once you've installed powertop (probably just "dnf install powertop" or "apt install powertop", or whatever your favorite flavour is), you can just run "sudo powertop --auto-tune"[0]. If you do like to tinker, you could maybe write your own init script to run that on boot, but your distro probably included one already.
As with the other comment saying "have you used X/Y command" it is funny, given the original article.
Someone should setup a list of all these "tricks" and non-standard "patches" that people have to use in Linux after installing it so that it works decently.
Nowadays my desktop PC is a Linux (Mint) one. I like it, and I use it for several things, including gaming. But I don't kid me, the usability is utter crap, and coming from a 25 year yourny with Linux, it is still playing catchup with regards to hardware control (audio, bluetooth, wifi, etc).
Why do you think the usability is crap? Can you be more specific? I haven't had any issues with audio/bluetooth/wifi and many many people at my workplace use linux for development and I haven't heard about audio/wifi related issues since maybe 10 years ago.
- bluetooth headphones refuse to connect half of the time (they work 100% on my phone and on windows on same hardware)
- audio: sometimes sound just refuses to play.. have to restart graphical session.
- upgrade: after upgrading mint to latest version, restarting got stuck in the terminal: it was missing some package. Had to manually pat install it.
- Android studio/mobile: have to fight for the OS to recognize connected mobile for adb.
- Game: CS:GO sometimes sound is either choppy or "fixing" it in game settings makes it leggy. Same game in steam as well works fine in windows in same hardware.
And the list of thousand paper cuts could go on.
Don't get me wrong, I still use Mint as my main OS in that computer. I have always been a Linux/BSD enthusiast. When I was in my 20s I enjoyed a lot tinkering with it, to make X11R6 work, then winmodems, then sound cards (with alsa), then wifi , etc. But nowadays at 37, I care less and less about dealing with that kind of thing.
Yeah, I don't get it. I set it up for a lot of my family, including grandpas and whatnot, taught them how to upgrade packages and basically forgot about it. With Windows that was never possible.
What Linux has gotten right (on my hardware), is wake from suspend. That laptop never has problems with that. What's frustrating, is my work MBP laptop, can't seem to reliably wake from sleep (inc using my external monitor).
Yes. My 2012 retina MacBook was getting long in the tooth last year, so I got an X1 Carbon with all the bells and whistles. Remarkably, the on board LTE just plain never worked. (It would randomly die after a few uses requiring a hard reboot.) The screen bezel delaminated and has to be replaced. Developed three dead pixels after a few months of use. Recently started rebooting randomly with a full battery. My dad had similar problems with an X1 Carbon which he bought on my recommendation.
And Windows 10 is still bad. So many apps are not DPI aware. Windows Store apps are better in this regard, but often are stripped down and bereft of features. (Out of the box it was unusable. I installed LTSC which made things better. But I haven’t had to reinstall my OS, except to sell a machine, since I first moved to Mac from Linux in 2007.)
My wife, by contrast, bit the bullet and got a 2018 MacBook Pro to replace her 2012 retina. It took her a bit to adjust to the new keyboard, but she’s a much happier camper than I am.
I tried to use Windows on my laptop to run some ETL software, not because I was trying to get off of macOS but because that particular tool only exists on Windows for right now, and running it on a 4K display or a HiDPI display makes it completely unusable. The fonts for the icons and everything else are so unbelievably tiny and using the scaling features just makes everything bigger. If Windows had a good way of dealing with apps that aren't HiDPI aware, it wouldn't be an issue but even the tools that they do have aren't consistent in how they fix the issue. Scaling the UI by 200% isn't a good fix.
I know you can. It still doesn't handle a good chunk of applications correctly. Since Windows didn't implement UI scaling foundationally, there are a ton of apps that will scale fonts in the UI without scaling the rest of the UI or they'll scale the UI in addition to the fonts which leaves you with normal-sized fonts and giant UI toolbars/icons.
I tried switching to a Windows laptop at work a couple years ago, and bounced off of it (returning to an ancient MacBook) basically entirely because of this. That, in combination with the laptop's 4K monitor, conspired to make it impossible for me to read text in some applications I used without a magnifying glass.
I suspect that Windows might be totally fine with so many apps not being DPI aware if laptop manufacturers weren't also doing things like creating 15" 4K monitors.
Just my personal anecdote, I run Mint 19.2 x64 on my X1 Carbon and love it, no issues beyond some initial fiddling to get my hotkeys set up the way I like.
Me too - I run KDE on Ubuntu on a Carbon X1 6th gen - it's great. The only annoying bug are horizontal lines in the terminal from the high DPI scaling.
Windows 10 on the "happy path" (the right hardware) works very well.
My desktop machine is a box by ThinkMate (dual Xeon, 256 GB Ram, Dual 2080 video cards, dual 5K monitors). It "just works" -- including all the power management functions sleep, hibernate, monitor sleep, wake on ethernet, fan control, etc. Super quiet unless all the GPUs are running full blast.
My laptop is a Surface Book. Again, it "just works". Plug in a monitor, share the desktop, sleep and wake.
And other vendors are getting better at not putting in crapware that breaks windows, like hard-to-uninstall 30-day trial versions that nag you, or silly "extra keys" or help software (IBM used to have a key that brought up an IBM help system that was completely useless--and it used to get pressed accidentally.)
I switched from Mac to Windows when Windows 10 came out and haven't looked back. It "just works."
Several dozen corrected bit-flips a year. I've seen stats that one can expect 1 bit-flip/gigabyte/month for a server that running a full load. You'd be crazy not to use ECC memory for production work.
Props for escaping the Apple cult for Windows, but I'm sorry, how much RAM? Why does anyone need that much RAM? And more importantly, how much did it cost?
W.r.t your hidpi/non-hidpi issue - a 'proper' solution is slowly making its way out of the woodwork. Wayland apparently will allow us to solve this problem, but in the meantime here's my solution if it'll help you.
I have a 4k dell xps 13 and a 2k monitor. I have this script set up to run on boot.
What this does is it forces your internal display to run at exactly quarter resolution (ie 1600x900), and adds your second display at its native resolution to the setup. Since the panel is running at a multiple of its native resolution, it still looks fine, if not quite as pixel perfect. This has the nice side effect of making the laptop feel a bit faster since it's driving a quarter of the pixels it usually has to drive. This makes the monitor panel do the scaling too, which is nice. With this setup, both displays will be running at a roughly similar DPI which will make scaling issues... a non issue!
A couple of thoughts:
* That's exactly the point. I don't want to give up on my 4k resolution, I specifically bought a laptop with high resolution.
* I'm running Ubuntu on my Dell XPS 15. I solved the problem by scaling the external display (--scale 2x2 in xrandr), which also solves the problem but allows me to keep the 4k resolution on the built-in display. The only issue is, that select programs with nonstandard UI components (telegram client) break, everything else works like a charm
* Thanks for the gist.
You're very kind to offer help like this, but from the article: "... the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best" quote seems apt.
The wayland protocol solve this. I do think that at least gnome 3.34+ and wlroot based window managers support this, but it needs to be confirmed as i don't have this setup and just used ratios on same dpi monitors. Not sure how it works with X based app also that are run through xwayland.
I was aware of the irony - I just chose to provide help because some of us don't have an option to use anything other than desktop linux in this configuration and the gist is helpful to others. It's clearly not a just works solution, as I stated in the comment, but it does solve the problem until Wayland comes together and provides us with a proper scaling solution.
I don't know how we came to this point. Laptops in 2019 certainly suck across the board. A good keyboard is almost impossible to find and reliability isn't a thing we even consider.
In contrast, I don't think there has ever been a better time for desktops. Mechanical keyboards have become fashionable again, AMD has brought the fight to Intel's table, and GPUs have never been faster and cheaper.
Really? I run Raspbian, Windows and FreeBSD on my home on different machines for different purposes, and though all three have their weaknesses, they are much better than they were two decades ago.
Opinions are a funny thing, I find MacOs vastly inferior to Windows, but I grew up with Windows so I'm biased that way; I'm betting you and people claiming 'the good old days of mac' are biased too.
I use both Windows and Mac. I find Windows file management and window management to be much better. Love the preview you get when you hover over an app icon in the taskbar. Also love how windows don't automatically take up the entire screen. I like to have two windows open simultaneously. This is much smoother on Windows than Mac.
I also prefer Windows' taskbar instead of Mac's dock.
The negative is changing preferences and the general ugliness of Windows. Mac is just prettier.
The two systems seem to be built for different things. Mac prioritizes single application, focus based work. Windows is better when you're multitasking.
I do most of my writing and creative work on Mac. But when I have to do some heavy duty productivity work with multiple apps/windows, I switch to my Windows desktop.
I feel exactly the same way as you. It boggles my mind that Finder is the best OSX has to offer for file management after all these decades. I find windows explorer to be far superior and more intuitive in almost all cases.
I absolutely love that in Windows Explorer, you can simply click the navbar in the top to transform it into a selected/highlighted text-string path representation (Pro-tip, type cmd in this navbar and hit enter and a DOS prompt opens in the specific folder you are in). Windows explorer also provides a "Copy Path" button in the navbar (that can also be accessed via keyboard shortcuts rather than some gymnastics of right-clicking and holding option keys down).
There are definitely things that OSX does better than Windows, but Finder absolutely infuriates me. I much prefer Files in Ubuntu over Finder.
> (Pro-tip, type cmd in this navbar and hit enter and a DOS prompt opens in the specific folder you are in)
Your system default shell (shared with Win+X menu, defaults to PowerShell for the last few Windows releases but you can switch it back to CMD) is also directly on the File menu in the modern ribbon and opens in the current path. (Alt+F,R is the keyboard shortcut I see, with PowerShell as my system default.) It's a little bit faster than the use the path box as a launcher trick (though use the path box as a launcher is an older trick that predates the modern ribbon).
Ha! Nice. Not sure why it's hidden away under the File tab, but that is pretty handy. Thanks.
edit - Apparently you can add it to your quick-access toolbar as well, in which case it saves you one key-press with keyboard shortcuts :-) Alt + <quick access number>
I always add the copy-path button to the quick access toolbar (right-click on the button in the ribbon's Home tab) for faster mouse access when the ribbon is minimized.
You can even select multiple items and copy-path to get a list of paths, to paste into a text file for command-line processing, or into Excel.
right clicking with option held is difficult? you’re not a mac user so maybe you didn’t realize this but the option key is used to modify many things (like promptless shutdown/restart/trash empty). click open a menu and press option and you’ll seem some menus entirely change.
Also Finder absolutely does support showing the path, and right clicking on any node gives you the option to copy the path as a string.
Having to use a keyboard modifier and a mouse right-click and then traversing down a menu to pick the correct option to copy the path is indeed annoying. It really should be one or the other, and ideally you should be able to do the same both ways because it is a lot faster to just be able to do it via keyboard shortcuts if you are used to navigating your filemanager via keyboard. Windows also lets you Shift+right click to get a copy path option which I find equally annoying, but I can copy it using pure keyboard shortcuts very quickly (or alternately, simply clicking in the navbar and right-click, "copy"). Both of those approaches are way faster.
Even in Ubuntu, you can use Ctrl + L to get a selected file-path for your current folder in the Files application which is a lot faster than having to deal with the way Finder exposes file paths.
i feel like you’re complaining about minor issues. if you really find this one thing annoying enough to write off a whole OS then you’re being a bit ridiculous. most of us are tech savvy so why are you using the GUI anyways when you have unix?
I mean you seem overly defensive about this. Firstly, I never said that I wrote off the entire OS because of this... you are just putting words in my mouth. I did state that Finder feels like a very subpar file manager compared to Windows Explorer and I completely stand behind that.
Lastly, it is absolutely absurd to excuse a poor file manager by saying that you should just use a terminal anyways. There are plenty of reasons to still use a file manager over the terminal, even if you are an "elite" unix God.
Listen to yourself, you're complaining about a keystroke + mouse combo, it seems petty especially in a world with macros.
"Firstly, I never said that I wrote off the entire OS because of this... you are just putting words in my mouth. I did state that Finder feels like a very subpar file manager compared to Windows Explorer and I completely stand behind that."
You're correct, my apologies.
"Lastly, it is absolutely absurd to excuse a poor file manager by saying that you should just use a terminal anyways. There are plenty of reasons to still use a file manager over the terminal, even if you are an "elite" unix God."
Please name some? Things like viewing docs and photos, sure. However `cd ~/Pictures && open .`. When navigating via the terminal a copy of the working directory is one command away "pwd | pbcopy". You are complaining about having to have your hand on the mouse and keyboard at the same time, and seem to take more offense at the mouse side of it so perhaps I wrongly assumed you were a keyboard power user. As far as productivity for finding and managing files I very much doubt the GUI is more productive, but maybe that's just me (it's not).
Windows is so poorly designed that I still wonder why there's Settings as well as Control Panel offering mostly the same settings, and old settings dialogs from Windows XP or Windows 2000 are still around!
> Windows is so poorly designed that I still wonder why there's Settings as well as Control Panel offering mostly the same settings, and old settings dialogs from Windows XP or Windows 2000 are still around!
Mostly due to backward compatibility, as there were a fair amount of Windows applications that loaded DLLs to add a custom panel to Control Panel.
Well, many people on HN hate that Apple has a poor record on managing backward compatibility (like deprecating 32-bit apps or Carbon), but if they do to the scale of Microsoft, this is what happens.
I wanted to associate a file type with a program in Windows 10 recently, and I found at least 4 different menu items that lead to the same unhelpful modern screen. Unhelpful because it only let me pick 'App Store' Apps, not anything else I have installed. Some answers online suggested these very item as ways to go to the old screen but it looks like they closed that escape hatch.
I was having trouble because it was a 'special' file type (CMD) so the context menu didn't offer the Open With option, I suppose to save this clueless user from himself. So instead I dove into the registry and did a manual hack which will hopefully stick around between updates.
Control Panel has been around for 24+ years and on top of that some (older) driver packages and apps install third party control panel applets as well. It's going to be a long rough road deprecating Control Panel and replacing it with Settings.
> The two systems seem to be built for different things. Mac prioritizes single application, focus based work. Windows is better when you're multitasking
Well, Mac has multiple desktops to manage multitasking, and in Catalina the zoom button does have an option to tile windows left or right.
There are also apps you can get (I like divvy) which really open up advanced window management options.
Windows 10 has had multiple desktop support since it launched. It's at the top of the Expose-like "Task View" screen, which further doubles as the Windows Timeline screen in more recent versions of Windows 10 (with the keyboard shortcut Win+Tab, and an icon by default on the Taskbar).
The "Aero Snap" window management tools built in to Windows (for horizontal halves since Vista, and quartiles since 10) are pretty powerful. The recently rebooted Microsoft PowerToys includes an app directly similar to divvy called Fancy Zones: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/tree/master/src/modul...
Yeah I hate that file grouping feature in my Downloads folder.
Windows 10 overall is very stable but just a few days ago I did have Explorer crash in a new and interesting way like you say.
It went away and didn't come back as it usually does, so I started a new instance from the task manager. This instance seemed to be missing some kind of callback hook so when files in the directory changed it wouldn't update the display. So I would delete or paste a file, or make a new folder, and have to hit F5 to see it. If I didn't refresh then it also seemed to forget what folder it was in and paste into the wrong one, sometimes multiple times with one keypress.
It was very weird, but luckily Windows knows best and rebooted itself for an update when I went to sleep.
Press Ctrl-^ ? it doesn’t give you a single pop up but chances are when you do this you’re looking for a specific window and having them all visible saves time.
> I like to have two windows open simultaneously. This is much smoother on Windows than Mac.
Have you tried Magnet? It’s a macOS app that supplies the window snap/tile features that Windows has. It’s one of the first things I install on a new system (along with Display Menu and f.lux).
I remember the few times I had to interact with MacOs to be really frustrating but I don't remember all the specifics, I remember actionable buttons being too small (so easier to miss), and the top bar changing options depending on what app is focused to bother me as well, because thats and extra click (to make the top bar appear) for every interaction there when you have 2 apps side to side. In general from what I know the key functional advantages Windows has are: Software from 15 years ago still works fine without issues, real Linux inside by default (Ubuntu on WLS), videogames.
> I remember the few times I had to interact with MacOs to be really frustrating but I don't remember all the specifics
Then you just need to spend a bit more time on it.
Seriously, my wife had exactly the same attitude, until her company was bought by Apple and she was issued a MacBook Pro. Within a week she thought it was the best OS she'd ever used.
I grew up using Windows (since Windows/386) and switched to OSX about ten years ago. For whatever it's worth, I still can't get used to window management or keyboard shortcuts on the Mac. (The Windows key turned into a really nice addition to an already well thought out set of Windows/CUA bindings, while OSX is still caught between its MacOS <10 and NeXTStep heritages.)
The one time I had to use MacOS I managed to get something tolerable after spending a lot of time in Karabiner, but the keyboard controls were just incomplete and inconsistent and there wasn't any way around it.
Let's not even get into Finder and how awful it is in so many ways.
”Let's not even get into Finder and how awful it is in so many ways.“
Yea, let’s. Given that you’re talking about Karabiner to swap cmd keys you’re talking about an old version of macOS. So what specifically is bad about Finder? It may not be an issue anymore
I prefer macOS over Windows, having used both for a long time. But one area where Windows has beaten macOS is keyboard shortcut support. I can use a Windows system and applications without a mouse and get many things done (including using a program like Paint.Net for image editing/manipulation). But macOS is inferior on this front, and it's quite difficult to use it if a trackpad or mouse isn't available. I know that macOS, unlike Windows, allows custom keyboard shortcuts to be setup for all applications for menu options, but it's still not the same as the built-in experience on Windows.
While at Microsoft, I did a stint as an accessibility lead. No better way to find some accessibility bugs than to hide the mouse in a drawer for a few days. And you can do it, because if you can't, then you need file a bug. So I got pretty darned good at Windows keyboard shortcuts. As an aside, if you do public presentations, people will comment on the fact that you rarely touch the mouse. :-)
When I flipped to Mac, I tried the same thing: get those shortcuts down until the mouse isn't necessary. I've since given up, but IIRC, it can be done but it is a lot harder. For starters, it's broken out of the box because you have to set $SETTING to be able to Tab to some controls. The menu is accessed on Windows with the Alt key. On Mac, Cmd-Opt-F2. Screenshot? PrtScn versus Cmd-Opt-Shift...something, I never can remember.
It probably doesn't solve the problems completely, but I’ve found the Shortcat app indispensable when navigating macOS by keyboard. It uses the underlying accessibility features to create link hints like the Vim plug-ins for browsers do.
I don't follow. MacOS has very extensive keyboard shortcuts and they dynamically show in the menu bar of every application. Is there a specific thing that's missing? It actually drives me nuts on Windows that apps don't consistently have to show you the keyboard shortcuts. Moving to Office on the PC from the Mac was infuriating because some of the shortcuts are different but there's not even any way to see what they are easily. If there is, it must be right in front of my eyes because I just don't believe that it could be that hidden.
A much better selection of apps, Explorer is vastly better than Finder, a vastly larger variety of hardware choices, and WSL/WSL2 is actual Linux, which means that many command line Linux apps work out of the box.
Window management has really stagnated in MacOS. All the focus has been on full screen apps rather than useful tools like dragging to the side to splitscreen as Windows has.
Apple should have long since sherlocked BetterSnapTool.
The taskbar. Explorer. Keyboard acceleration. Window management. Speed. Apps. Freedom.
I like the taskbar configured the classic way, not the new way that tries to copy the macOS Dock. Unfortunately, to get all the features that I want out of the taskbar, I have to install a utility called 7+ taskbar tweaker. With that, you can arrange items however you want and middle clicking a taskbar item becomes useful, to close a window. If you like middle-clicking to close tabs in Chrome, it's the same thing... I wish there was a similar utility for macOS because I like to use the taskbar to track what I'm working on. In macOS the easy path is basically to put everything in full screen and use the touchpad to swipe between them which I find very inefficient. Or, you can use Mission Control/Spaces but I would rather have something on the screen at all times rather than something I have to bring up with a gesture or key combo.
I love the Windows Explorer because it's very extendable. For instance, you won't find anything like Tortoise Git on any other platform that can match its quality. I also like using the keyboard to do things and the keyboard commands for Explorer make sense compared to Finder. Like pressing ENTER to open a file or Delete to delete a file.
Keyboard acceleration on Windows and other platforms that emulate Windows (like XFCE) are generally much better than on macOS in my opinion as well because its a simpler system. Instead of memorizing 1,000 unique Mac keyboard shortcuts, I basically have to memorize 1 or 2: Alt + any underlined letter in a menu. Alt + Space to do window commands (move, minimize, etc). From there, I can do anything. Furthermore, I find the notation for Mac keyboard shortcuts to be inscrutable. They display symbols on the menus that are not printed on the keyboard keys and it always takes me a second to figure out which key to press.
For Window Management - I won't list every function that Windows lets you perform on application windows, but suffice it to say that snapping built-in is great because it's on every workstation/server and I find Apple's insistence that you shouldn't maximize windows to be very weird and annoying.
Finally, I find many things to just work faster and more efficiently on Windows. In my experience, on the same exact hardware, common apps like web browsers, code editors and so forth are just snappier under Windows. I also like having a choice and there is a plethora of apps and hardware for Windows in any category.
However, in today's world - I have to run all three to get by. For Linux, I love Manjaro XFCE or Xubuntu very much and Manjaro is on my main workstations at work and home. I mainly use Windows now only for Windows-specific stuff. Same for Mac - I keep one 2015 Macbook Pro around to compile React-Native stuff for iOS and I actually have one old Mac Pro from 2012 in my basement because it's such a nice looking piece of hardware that I hate to get rid of it! I might re-purpose it as a Linux box one day.
There were periods where the outlook and software quality was bleak... and there were periods where the outlook and software quality was amazing.
Right now is not anywhere near as bad as it’s been a few times in the past (pre-OS X, early OS X days especially)... but if someone doesn’t turn around the ship things are headed that way currently.
I started using linux in 2006 and I'd say linux is best its ever been. I used to have so many problems with my graphics drivers, now things usually work out of the box. I have not had any problems with multi-monitor support, although I have heard that HDPI screen experience still needs to be refined. I have a macbook pro running Mojave, and my gaming desktop runs Windows, my personal and favorite device runs Manjaro linux. I use all 3 main operating systems regularly and I'd say the linux story suits me and my needs best.
Same here, about 2008 for me. The complaints I have are pretty minimal (audio is a bit wonky sometimes, but nothing difficult to resolve; hilariously enough my laptop does have wifi issues, but I don't care, I'm plugged in 99% of the time anyways). To be fair, I'm using the exact opposite of an out of the box experience. I've been refining my setup for years and using it is truly a joy to me.
Seconded. Graphics drivers work OOTB and the Open ATI/AMD drivers are actually pretty good. Steam (with Proton) work well for most games save for the newest AAA titles, and WINE is pretty solid. Base install Fedora isn't too bad, and Linux Mint pretty good as well.
Been using macOS and Ubuntu for years now, and while I try to make Ubuntu my primary operating system so I can ditch my slow MacBook Air 2018, I always end up going back to it.
Look, I love Ubuntu. Heck, I am a recognized Ubuntu Member, was the leader of the LoCo Team for my country for a while, helped a few universities in my state switch to Ubuntu from Windows, have a plaque signed by Mark Shuttleworth acknowledging my contributions and everything. But macOS is simply better, even though it sucks monkey balls right now — better for me, of course.
My Ubuntu machine — which I built to edit photos and game — currently runs on a Threadripper 2950X with two VEGA 64 GPUs. It should be a beast, and it is, but the entire computer freezes from time to time and requires a hard reboot to come back to life. Nothing I could find in the logs so far. Sometimes that happens once a week, sometimes it happens five times a day — heck, I had it happen right after a reboot once.
While the MacBook Air chokes when I open more than say, 45 tabs in Safari, I never had similar issues, and I only reboot this computer when I forget to charge it.
You can say Apple is dead all you want, but there will always be people like me that will go the Apple route because they are tired of troubleshooting shit all day — I spent a fair amount of time doing that in my earlier days, and I spend all day doing that at work, so why would I want to do that 24/7?
Hate to point out what may be obvious, but since this is a self-build, have you entirely eliminated hardware issues? Bad connections or components that just don’t jive properly together? Just saying cause the first thing that came to mind when you described the issue is something similar I had a while back with mismatched RAM; it doesnt sound as though the comparison controls for these kinds of causes.
Yep, already did rule these things out — it also doesn't happen in Ubuntu 18.04 or Windows, only on Ubuntu 19.04.
My guess is that this is a kernel or GPU driver issue, since it doesn't happen in Ubuntu 18.04, but it will take time to find exactly which version of the kernel get this to stop.
> My Ubuntu machine — which I built to edit photos and game — currently runs on a Threadripper 2950X with two VEGA 64 GPUs. It should be a beast, and it is, but the entire computer freezes from time to time and requires a hard reboot to come back to life.
That's the story with all the assembled pcs out there.
Something is faulty, replace it.
When I stopped doing it myself and started buying workstations with an actual warranty, my problems ended.
My main machine has been a Debian testing for the past 3 years on a Lenovo P70 with 64gb of ram, not a single glitch, except those things a power user running bleeding edge software has to face .
The quality of the hardware is very important, Mac hardware is just good and extremely overpriced.
I commented above, but this is not faulty hardware — the same issue do not happen in Windows 10 or Ubuntu 18.04, for example.
The whole point of leaving macOS for me was to be able to build my own hardware without spending an insane amount of money. You think MacBooks are expensive in the US, come to Brazil and try to buy one.
The fact that other software does not complain does not mean it is not faulty/mismatched hardware. Linux will frequently trigger more faults (as an example, since it aggressively uses entire memory as filesystem cache, memory problems are highlighted even when Windows runs just fine).
Similarly, new drivers might be stressing the system in a way the old ones didn't (eg. cooling might be insufficient).
Not saying that is happening for you, but the fact that older Ubuntu or Windows work correctly is not an indicator of trouble-free hardware.
The answer, which is far more practical these days, given the proliferation of computers, is setup netconsole (to an RPi?), and get debug messages out of the kernel, assuming the crashed aren't MCE errors that are logged to bios and reported on bootup. The other bit to rail against, is closed source drivers and blobs. They'll crash the kernel, and debugging those are basically impossible.
While I agree with this, and I will end up troubleshooting the issue and figuring it out this week, it kinda proves my point. I would not need something like this in macOS.
On the other hand, if I did, I don't have the same troubleshooting power I would have with Linux. I guess /u/nkoren is right, computing in 2019 sucks.
It proves your point, but puts up a new one: netconsole isn't possible on OS X outside of Cupertino. I don't want to have to work at Apple to debug this issue that exists on Radar, outside of public view, but isn't reliably reproducible, and isn't even possible to fix in the next release OS X, or a custom kext.
>> I've got an HDPI laptop and I want to plug into an old non-HDPI era monitor. Doesn't work.
At all? That's unusual...
I've got a 4K screen and a 1920x1200 screen next to each other, I use XFCE. I had to fart around with xrandr for a couple of hours but now I have the desktop working better than Windows or OS X - no fuzzy font rendering when moving windows between monitors like OS X, no weird size jumps like Windows.
I have the same Dell Windows/Ubuntu setup. In case this helps you, I found that whilst plugging in a DisplayPort monitor into the USB-C port didn't work, I could get my 4k monitor to work either by going through a USB-C Dock made by Dell, or by using an Hdmi cable.
I also managed to get a 2015 MBP second-hand quite cheaply, and although the specs are a bit weaker it is a lot more pleasant to use.
I have Fedora 30 running KDE as a desktop in a VM and a laptop. In the VM its actually very nice. Dolphin is nicer than Explorer, with tabs and better view options. The desktop customization options work well and I can set it up very similar to a Windows task bar as I am used to.
The most annoying issue I've noticed is that copy and paste would stop working cross application sometimes (pretty poor). But turning off an "auto copy on select" option seems to fix that. Still an issue as its broken by default.
The laptop (AMD Matebook) is a different story. There is just not the hardware testing capacity that Microsoft and their hardware vendors provide. So kernel updates will break hibernate/sleep, or it has never worked. The trackpad will stop responding to taps after resuming, and other issues. There are also some minor graphical issues but that's mainly down to AMD drivers.
KDE is the best its ever been. The issues come from hardware issues that can never be fully tested and fixed without a vendor taking Linux support seriously.
There are other things under the hood. Things that a desktop OS can't do anymore, not today.
Your password manager kWallet is, once unlocked at system start, an unencrypted file where any application can access any password.
If kMail fetches a signed mail in background, you'll be unexpectedly prompted to accept the certificate with no indication where the pop-up came from.
Password dialogues have no priority whatsoever. When a password dialogue pops up just before another application starts, you're likely to enter your password into the wrong dialogue.
My main machine is an iMac but I recently setup a Windows desktop machine for making music and gaming because none of the curren Apple offering fit my needs.
Even in 2019 a lot of Windows software doesn't support scaling correctly. It seems like outside of the very big and popular applications everything is a win32 app from 20 years ago.
The fixes for meltdown/specter cause some real slowdown of Intel performance, why is my quad core i7 so creaky compared to my old a6 with and, the i7 should smoke an old and a6 but thanks to these hardware bugs the i7 is creaky and slow.
How is macOS any better? Default macOS, without third-party software. Does vanilla macOS even have keyboard-based window management yet? Does it still have weird modals where you're forced to use the mouse to select an option?
> Does it still have weird modals where you're forced to use the mouse to select an option?
I don't think I've ever encountered a modal like this. Not with "Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls" turned on. By keyboard-based window management you mean being able to tile windows? That can be added with a third-party app pretty easily, but I think it's much a much less fundamental problem than those pointed out in Linux.
So that answers my question? You still, in 2019, cannot even move a window/app on the desktop in vanilla macOS using your keyboard?
That, to me, is crazy. How can a company with the resources of Apple not implement this basic feature? Simply the equivalent of Windows' win + arrow keys would be a huge improvement.
I know third party software offers such features and more, I am simply not interested, some are even paid software. I need no such software with Windows or the Linux DEs I use.
Besides, it's just one example of crazy things missing from macOS.
> but I think it's much a much less fundamental problem than those pointed out in Linux.
> You still, in 2019, cannot even move a window/app on the desktop in vanilla macOS using your keyboard?
> That, to me, is crazy. How can a company with the resources of Apple not implement this basic feature?
That's one solution to the problem of selecting the thing you want to work on.
Apple's solution has been to throw hardware at the problem. You have gestures, expose, mission control, etc. all available from a really good touchpad.
It would be crazy for a linux distro to take that approach because they can't bundle a high quality touchpad with every laptop they sell.
I definitely don't claim their approach that they will do best of class support for a pointing-heavy workload will suit everyone, just that it makes sense for a combined OS and hardware vendor.
It answers one part of your question. The other issue you pointed out doesn't actually exist.
> How can a company with the resources of Apple not implement this basic feature?
The answer, as it always is in cases like this, is that Apple thinks most users don't want or need the feature. Apple probably considers full screen mode to cover the use case of wanting two windows side-by-side. Personally, I never tile windows to either side of my screen — I prefer to have my windows laid out all over the screen and then switch using cmd+tab or mouse. IMO, this is what windows were designed for.
* paying a few bucks for BetterTouchTool, Alfred, and SwitchResX so I get insane levels of control over window placement, monitor resolutions, etc. via keyboard shortcuts & gestures (on, I should note, my deliciously smooth and responsive apple trackpad)
over:
* spending hours/days/weeks trying to figure out/find the right X config to get my display to work at one resolution I want, let alone trying to figure out how to dynamically switch between configurations without everything crashing every fifth attempt"
any day of the week.
(Now, to be fair, like many others in this thread I hopped off the linux/freebsd/etc. train a few years ago (after being all-in for around a decade), so it's a few years since I've had that second experience - and maybe that particular struggle is no longer a struggle any more. Judging from other comments in this thread, however, it doesn't sound like it.)
Oddly enough my experience in years of computing on different platforms, including some exotic one, is the exact opposite.
For me MacOS is the worst when it comes to external monitors.
I’ve seen people use Dell XPS, but the huge bottom bezel and lack of macs touchpad threw me off. At this point, it seem like the only selling point of Apple being it’s touchpad. And even everyone knows it there doesn’t seem to be anyone catching up. I even managed to play Diablo 2 with just touchpad.
I really don’t like the direction apple is heading though, starting with the pointless touchbar. I hope some day other company can create a touchpad rivaling Mac and Linux push a patch that can make use of that touchpad in the same way/same quality that Mac does
The keyboard also feels like slamming your fingers against a wall. There is no travel distance, and a speck of dust can disable keys. There are also thermal issues with the chassis, and the lack of ports is also a hassle for developers.
I totally agree though that the touchpad experience is the best on Apple hardware + osx. Pure joy to use the Apple touchpad, really wish other manufacturers would take a leaf from Apple.
The XPS is alright. Its touchpad hasn't been as big a transition as I'd feared -- although the loss of kinetic scrolling is certainly lamented.
My main issues with the XPS are:
- Only slightly quieter than a vacuum cleaner.
- Unless you want to use the fancy GPU in Linux, in which case it's louder than a vacuum cleaner and has a very short battery life. (I keep the GPU disabled)
- Camera is placed at the bottom of the bezel, which is an ideal location for observing your fingers on the keyboard, or if you give the screen a jaunty tilt, peering far up your nostrils. Serves no other purpose. I really can't fathom the process by which that camera got greenlit. I use an external clip-on camera instead.
A Mac would certainly be better. For the same amount of power and storage, it would also be 3x the price, and (in recent years) probaly less robust.
I am stil amazed at whan my late 2013 Mac Book Pro can do. Recently I've bought one of the cheapest 4k monitor (27" Philips 276E). Connected to Mac Book via some cheap DP-miniDP cord and it works perfectly - sharp image, no problems of any sort. I doubt if most of the other laptops from that era, or even slighlty newer would allow me to do that.
I had a Dell XPS15, Ubuntu 18.04, with a set of fixes applied (I think GitHub JackHack96 dell-xps-9570-ubuntu-respin).
It worked OK with either 1080p or 4k external monitors - this was my everyday development machine.
No way was it perfect, but it was usable. Windows 10 has other issues. I don't use Mac, but I could see it clearly is far better at dealing with HiDpi monitors.
I’m a long time Linux user and I’ve recently switched to a Chromebook (I wanted a huge batter life).
I intended to install Linux on it, but ChromeOS is very mature nowadays and it supports both Android and Linux apps (even graphic ones, like VSCode). I’m sticking to it for now. The experience is incredibly polished.
Chromebooks are "Linux" depending on which definition of Linux you want to use, and getting a Linux environment with some root access is possible without disabling Google's code signing - a VM is run, where you have root, with all the overhead that implies. (I hear it's fine when running on powerful hardware, but it's a bad time on cheap Chromebooks.) It's not really root, eg, you can't change the wifi MAC address of the host. (Yes, it's 2019, and I still find myself doing that. Yes it's stupid.) You can disable the code signing and get true root, without having to fully go in and install a desktop Linux, with all that implies (positive and negative). There's a boot screen that can be disabled but that requires opening up the hardware.
It's certainly nice, and a viable option these days, but I wanted to give caveats, as it's imperfect. I used to be a Thinkpad person (I miss my trackpoint dearly) but I'm on a Chromebook these days.
I've been a "MacBook" user since 2002 (tiBook), with subsidiary Linux machines playing second fiddle for when I'm at the Homebase.
Before that, I was 80% Linux and 20% SGI/MIPS for most of the 90's.
I Wish someone would make a Linux laptop as physically appealing as the 2018 MacBook Pro.
I have a GPD Pocket. Its pretty damn close. Gimme the same (or better, naturally) specs, but better form-factor than the MacBook Pro, and I will switch immediately.
Alas, until then, I'm using a MacBook.
READY TO SWITCH THOUGH! ITS THE HARDWARE, NOT THE SOFTWARE!
I wholeheartedly agree. The state of personal computing in 2019 is one of uncomfortable compromises. I'm still using my Macs; I have a 2013 Mac Pro that I regularly use at home, a 2013 MacBook Air that I also regularly use whenever I'm not at home, and a work-issued 2018 MacBook Pro that I use all the time. I believe that the macOS experience and value proposition has regressed from what it was earlier this decade. I resent the move toward non-upgradeable RAM and storage, and I resent the higher prices, especially with the 2019 Mac Pro, which starts at $5999 (compare that to the $2999 entry-level price of the 2013 Mac Pro). I am also concerned about the direction of the Mac; I am concerned that within the next five years the Mac will be a locked-down platform with some allowances for programmability.
I feel that the writing is on the wall regarding the future of the Mac, and eventually I'll have to change platforms. I've been testing the waters with Windows 10 and Linux. I have a Dell XPS 9570 with Windows 10 Professional that I sometimes use. It's an excellent machine (I like it better than my work-issued 2018 MacBook Pro), and I really like Windows' Linux subsystem, but Windows 10 has its annoyances, most notably the ads and the mandatory updates. I also think Windows 10's interface looks gaudy with its oversized bars (especially the title bars), although Windows 10 doesn't look as bad on a 4K monitor. I also use the Linux Mint distribution on a ThinkPad T430 that I use for web browsing, traveling, and some light programming. I like the Cinnamon desktop, and I can generally find replacements for many of the macOS applications I use. However, I miss the fit-and-finish of macOS. I miss the consistency between applications found in macOS. I miss macOS's pervasive support for PDFs, and macOS's superior font rendering compared to Linux. I miss macOS's Dictionary.app, which I regularly use for both English and Japanese; so far I have not found anything like it on other platforms.
So, while I could sell my Macs and switch entirely to Windows 10 and Linux tomorrow and still remain productive, I will lose many of the positive aspects of the Mac that keep me on the platform. macOS is still the desktop that emphasizes fit-and-finish and consistency among applications, and I will lose this fit-and-finish and consistency when switching to other platforms.
Honestly, I think the time is ripe for another operating system, one that picks up where macOS has left off yet is not restricted to a specific vendor's hardware. Personally I believe the desktop operating system of the future will be one that draws from some ideas from the past that have never been fully realized. The high-level interface will be inspired by the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, preferably those from the classic Mac era (I admit, as much as I like Mac OS X, I believe that the classic Mac OS era was actually superior from a usability standpoint, even if its infrastructure wasn't solid). Application software should be built using components inspired by Apple's OpenDoc project. The system should be an object system inspired by Smalltalk or CLOS that enables pervasive programmability of the environment and supports an objects-all-the-way-down environment, and the operating system should provide a REPL for programmers. The difficult part will be how to make such an operating system happen, since building an operating system is a large effort, and I believe part of the reason why the desktop computing situation in 2019 is the way that it is has to do with market forces. Still, I'm dreaming of such an operating system being developed.
Regarding fit and finish, I recommend that you just try to get over it. It is really not a big deal if both kinds of file dialogs work fine and both widget styles are mostly flat grey (etc, you get the idea). In other parts of life, similar things are also "needlessly different" and you can also use them just fine. You kind of need a dictator to make everything the same, with parallels to computing...
> Personally I believe the desktop operating system of the future will be one that draws from some ideas from the past that have never been fully realized.
> from the classic Mac era (I admit, as much as I like Mac OS X, I believe that the classic Mac OS era was actually superior from a usability standpoint, even if its infrastructure wasn't solid). Application software should be built using components inspired by Apple's OpenDoc project. The system should be an object system inspired by Smalltalk or CLOS that enables pervasive programmability of the environment and supports an objects-all-the-way-down environment, and the operating system should provide a REPL for programmers. The difficult part will be how to make such an operating system happen, since building an operating system is a large effort, and I believe part of the reason why the desktop computing situation in 2019 is the way that it is has to do with market forces.
Enterprise is also the inspiration behind Dilbert.
I agree that Windows is nowhere as bad as it was in the 90s and early 2000s and OS X isn't as good as it was in 2014, but software development on Windows is still slightly painful.
Windows 2000 was actually pretty nice, it was my favorite Windows. It was an already quite refined member of the NT series and also the last no-nonsense NT. XP felt garish and annoying, even though the actual technology improved overall, especially with the service packs.
Windows 2000 SP3 was felt really nice compared to constant crashing with 95/98 and XP's ugly UI and again increased crashes. But if you try 2000 now, it's clumsy and it was only SP3 that was finally stable.
XP could be easily improved by just switching to classic UI style and any wallpaper other than the default teletubbyland. Still I think 7 was the first Windows that didn't need reboot at least once per day and would't give blue screens.
1. Never once seen an issue with USB-C to HDMI or VGA connections. It doesn't even make any sense since MacBook Pro users with external, third party monitors are an extremely common combination.
2. I just downloaded Caret (Markdown editor) from their website and used Homebrew to install a CLI tool. Nothing has changed between the current OSX and previous ones.
3. If you have a tech support issue go into the Apple Store and work with them 1-1. Very rare to find anything that someone in the store doesn't know.
4. MacBook Pro has 4 USB-C ports.
5. If you resort to calling groups of people "condescending elitist hipster latte drinkers" then pretty sure you've lost the argument.
Linux 2000: writing a post summarizing Linux's issues will compel a point by point response in which a fanboy will either tell you "works for me" or "you're holding it wrong".
Apple 2019: writing a post summarizing Apple products' issues will compel a point by point response in which a fanboy will either tell you "works for me" or "you're holding it wrong".
{any technology} {any year}: writing a post summarizing X products' issues will compel a point by point response in which a fanboy will either tell you "works for me" or "you're holding it wrong".
> 5. If you resort to calling groups of people "condescending elitist hipster latte drinkers" then pretty sure you've lost the argument.
As a condescending elitist hipster latte drinker on an ultralight convertible Lenovo Yoga + Windows 10, I feel excluded. The days that condescending elitist hipster latte drinkers only used Mac have long passed.
“Oh, please. People don’t _actually use_ macs while drinking their lattes anymore (except maybe ironically). Lenovo (running Windows with the Linux Subsystem enabled) is the only halfway decent way to get work done. Unless of course you’re one of those hipsters running Arch. I’ve been meaning to try that, actually.” -actual 2019 computing hipster, probably
Wait, is Arch back to being a hipster thing? I thought we'd graduated to well-known distro.
I've been using Arch since '06, back when Judd was still in charge and the repos were divided up in terms of "stuff Judd maintains" and "stuff other devs maintain." It was this small community project that nobody had really heard about, and I got so used to it just not being a thing that when (sometime in the range of '10 - '12?) folks started talking about it as a hipster thing, it really took me by surprise. A few years later it seemed like it was just one of the more well known "hands on" distros with great docs, and I was glad to have that phase be done with.
A recent survey of /r/linux users even had Arch as the most commonly used distro. I know it's not an unbiased sample and that Ubuntu is probably the most widely used all up, but it was still a surprise. Arch is mainstream - for a Linux distro.
> 1. Never once seen an issue with USB-C to HDMI or VGA connections. It doesn't even make any sense since MacBook Pro users with external, third party monitors are an extremely common combination.
Last year I had a lot of problems with this. It was pretty common[1] that USB-C to HDMI cables would work at first and then stop working in a particular port. Sometimes rebooting helped. Sometimes swapping the cable for another in the same port helped. Sometimes using another port immediately helped. There was never a good explanation for why this was happening; most resources blamed the cables. After some software update last year, suddenly all these bad cables are fine in any port.
As of this summer, there's a shiny new issue where connecting to GMail (at least) from System Preferences doesn't work, which I discovered through changing my password recently. SysPref claims it needs to open a Google login in Safari (even though that isn't my system browser!), but when Safari opens, it's to a blank page. Again, searching makes this seem like a pretty well-known problem, but no one has a solution, and Apple seems silent on it, and enough people do not have the problem that a common response is that those of us experiencing the issue must be doing or have done something wrong. And maybe we are(!), but I'd sure like to know what.
> 3. If you have a tech support issue go into the Apple Store and work with them 1-1.
Well, that literally hadn't occurred to me (for problem 2, above); I would have assumed store employees don't know anything one couldn't google immediately?
[1] I was quite annoyed that this went on long enough for me to have an opinion like "pretty common" for these connections not to work sometimes, over more than half a dozen such cables.
I constantly still have problems with my Dell 4k monitor (first gen and last year's model), where it doesn't wake properly from sleep. Most of the time, I resolve it with the following.
- Switch the USB-C port from one to another
- Open up my laptop from clamshell mode and switch the cables around
- Unplug my monitor
- Restart my computer
The nuclear option of rebooting my computer and monitor always seems to work.
I have this exact same problem - 2018 MBP, Dell U3415W. Sometimes it works, sometimes I can move the mouse enough to get it to work, sometimes the monitor won't wake up at all, sometimes the monitor wakes up and has a VGA screen resolution. I thought I had "fixed" it by turning off sleep mode in the MBP, but after a couple of days of working properly it started failing to wake up again.
I know its a problem with the macOS somewhere but Apple just doesn't seem to be focused on fixing these types of things. Even if you file a bug report it disappears into the ether and is never heard from again.
I own a Dell P2715Q 4K monitor and was having similar issues across operating systems. My understanding is Dell silently fixed this in firmware on new units, but provides no way of updating the firmware in the field.
I have the same issue, but I'm also using the Dell 180w dock with it. I just have to switch ports for the USB-C cable that comes from the dock 1-4 times. Usually the first plug in produces nothing on the monitor. The first port swap gets me on the external display, but at 1920x1080 resolution. The 2nd port swap gets me back at 4k on the external.
i have those problems still, sometimes after waking up, so i play the game have i tried this usb-c port or not. it usualy works after one two times. thank god i have 4 of them. i have a 2 external monitors and usually close the macbook.
but hey at least it works. on my linux laptop it allways forgets the layout that i had and resorts to puting the external monitor right, and dont ger me started on X and fractional scalling.
You can use xrandr to load your specific layout at startup. If you don't wanna be bothered with crafting an xrandr command, you can use arandr to generate the script for you.
Scaling is a mess though, totally agree with that.
the problem for me is having mixed dpi monitors and fractionql scaling. for laptop monitor 150% to work it scales everything 2x, that also means that my external 27" 2560 which should be 1x is rendered to 5120 and that is causing stuttering and lag, at least i think it is, tried different drivers and so on. if i set the external monitor to 125 scaling then the rendered resolution is 4k and that works better, ni shuttering and lag.
i dont know why it does need to run the external monitor to 2x if i want 1x. and i lost way to much time playing with the setup. ubuntu 1904, if you have any new ideas im willing to try it.
Becasue X11 doesn't support mixed dpi monitors, so you are using a hack where it pretends to have the same dpi and downsample where necessary.
For proper mixed dpi under Linux, you must use Wayland. But then, under Wayland, the fractional scaling is still not done (the wayland apps will work fine at given fractional scale, but x11 app will be @1 upsampled, i.e. blurry. That includes the browsers).
YMMV, but since switching to Wayland I've found issues like that to be a lot less common. Not gone completely, but rare enough that I never remember the last time when it finally occurs again. ;)
can you share your setup or screenshot ?
have you enabled fractional scaling
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"
Regarding the first point, I had to give up on using an external monitor because fonts look blurry and give me a headache after a while. The same monitor with Windows and Linux shows perfectly fine fonts. I tried all sort of incantations found on forums, and nothing works.
Apple redid font smoothing with Mojave, and now it looks like garbage on non-retina displays. Most 4K displays seem to be bigger, rather than denser, so you can't do much to fix it.
I brought an Apple PowerBook G4 back in 2005, and one of the standard system configs allowed you to calibrate the subpixel rendering parameters of fonts for the built-in display, as well as any external displays. It remembers each external display by serial model so that it could load the correct calibration profile for that particular display each time it's plugged in. I must have obsessively calibrated each of my displays at least ten times.
Was this feature removed from OSX? Or did OP try it already and it didn't help much? Honest question here; I haven't touched a mac in over a decade.
I tried. It didn't help, the root issue is that Apple removed anti-aliasing, which is the only thing that can make fonts look readable on a 1080p resolution display. An old MacBook running OSX 10.6 looks perfectly fine on my external monitor.
Is your Mac running the external monitor in its native resolution?
I have a 4k display, and when I select the "Looks like 3840 x 2160" option, UI elements are too small. Selecting "Looks like 2560 x 1440" results in blurry fonts. So I've selected "Looks like 1920 x 1080", and thanks to Retina, fonts are crystal clear. Unfortunately, UI elements (such as the menu bar at the top of the screen) are pretty gigantic now, but I live with it.
"Things break at random for reasons you can't understand and the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best."
Thanks, but I already tried that in the past. I didn't notice any difference. Maybe it looks decent if you have a screen with high enough resolution, but ony my 1080p screen it still looks bad.
Depends, a small protip, if you have an apple product that died because of water. Go to an apple reseller in a country without apple store. Most of the times they will turn a blind eye on the water damage and just repair it since they get paid by repairs.
I live in a country without an Apple store (Iceland) and I have no problems. There are multiple Apple Authorized Service Providers here that provide excellent support and service. And Iceland is a teeny tiny market so I imagine it's even easier in most parts of the world.
I'm living in a country without Apple Store. When my Macbook broke, I went to authorized service center. They replaced SSD. It took over a month. So if it would be my work machine, I wouldn't be able to work for over a month. This is just unacceptable.
If you are a professional it's unacceptable to only have one work machine and no backup machine.
What if it was stolen or broken entirely instead of "SSD needs replacement"?
Then there would be nobody to replace it for you (in a month or a day), but you'd still have work to do. At best you would buy a new one, set it up again, and lose a few days to get back on track while your customers wait.
And that's assuming you have the credit at hand then and there (and you don't need to do any market research, but can just grab a machine).
Backups (both hardware and data) or not, a month turnaround is still awful and unacceptable, and reason enough to switch suppliers. Companies that take business customers seriously offer same-day on-site service.
You can send in a computer to Apple for a turn around of less than a week in most cases. Because they decided to go to a physical location, it probably caused a delay. I'm not defending the store in any way but that definitely isn't the best place to go if you know there is not a store in your area.
replacement of batter and screen was done in two days, given that parts were ordered and shipped from another city. not bad. But I understand what original article owner writes. sometimes non usb keyboards stop working and only plugging them in into the port on the hub and replugging them back into the system block gets them recognized again.
Things change, deal with it. I've swapped USB cables to USB-C cables. Only USB drives, which i rarely use anymore require an adapter. Meanwhile, I can use all 4 ports to:
- Run a display
- Charge my laptop
- Charge a phone
- Connect a drive
I can even use a single port to both charge the laptop and run a screen with multiple USB devices attached to it.
I now need to daisy chain converters to use my PS/2 mouse on my MacBook though, so that's a bit of a hassle.
I mean, that’s fantastic for you, but not everyone has the money to just upgrade all of their equipment the moment a port changes, so we’re forced to buy $100 adapters for everything.
It’d be fun if at least the iPhone was chargeable with usb-c, but even that requires an adapter.
That's such weird reasoning. You spend over 1k (3k in my case) to get the latest version of a premium brand laptop, but can't afford the cables? Those cables cost $2-5 each on AliExpress. If that's too much, you definitely shouldn't be spending over 1k on a laptop.
Also, there are usb-c to lightning cables, so I'm not sure why you think you need an adapter.
Wait... why can't you do that anymore? I charge, drive 2 displays, and have several chargers and USB devices plugged in just via the 4 USB-C/Thunderbolt ports. Is your complaint the number of ports or the fact that they're USB-C? It sounds like the specific benefit was only the variety of ports unless I'm reading this wrong...
Totally agree, a few years ago I had a 2015 27inch iMac with AppleCare which ended up getting a smudge under the display. Apple repaired it no problem.
About a year later, the stand became a little loose so over the course of the day it would end up tilting down.
Apple sympathised this was the 2nd time I had to send it in for a repair, they ended replacing with a similar specced iMac from the current year. They also give me the opportunity to upgrade any components I wanted just like if I was buying new. They also give me another 3 years of Apple Care. Ended up upgrading the CPU and GPU for about £300 and getting a brand new 2018 iMac
Obviously this is anecdotal but its things like this which keep me going back to Apple.
It depends on the person you get to help you, I think. Some friends have had faulty power supplies replaced even out of warranty but I was told they couldn't help me and I had to buy a new one. It's down to luck, I think.
100% agreed on the luck. I took my 2007 era MacBook to the Apple Store in 2009 or so for a battery that had begun to swell, and incidentally that had suffered from the notorious cracked top case issue. I had a friend that worked at the Genius Bar but he was busy with another customer so I just got luck of the draw with regard to technician.
Despite being out of the 1 year warranty without Apple Care, the woman who took my computer put in a work order to have the top case replaced and handed me a new battery off the shelf and rang it up $0.00
My friend was free as I was walking out of the store, and asked what it was I came in for. I explained about the top case and battery and when he realized I was getting the repair and replacement for free, he looked incredulous and said that he would've charged anyone for both of those without warranty or AppleCare.
Does two years of Apple Care get you on site and accidental coverage for under $200? Oh and no deductible. Apples per incident Accidental Damage on a Covered AppleCare+ device is $99-299.
And yet I'd bet the laptop was still cheaper tham a comparable one from Apple, where the built-in upcharges are for thinness, macOS, and extortionate non-upgradeable RAM that you'd better buy up front because you don't want to be stuck with not enough RAM in a year or two.
Does it matter when getting good support from Apple requires buying AppleCare? Dell is solving the problem of not having physical stores to do servicing by sending people in trucks.
Literally every day I come to work I have to fiddle with my usb-c to hdmi connector (yes, I replaced it once).
Not to mention a bunch of other weird things, like relocking 10 seconds after I login occasionally and having to restart so my headphone jack works (2017 macbook pro).
I have relatively other complaints (keyboard, dongles) as a first time mac user, but weird stuff like the above does remind me of past linux experiences.
I think part of the problem is rose-colored glasses. macOS definitely has bugs today. The question is, is it actually any worse than it was 12 years ago (in what was probably the Mac's heyday in terms of attention from Apple)? I'm not sure it is.
It's interesting you say 12 years ago -- 12 years ago was Leopard which according to Apple, contained over 300 changes / enhancements.
That is similar to Catalina with its too many new untested features.
Then they fixed the bugs in Snow Leopard.
The severity of Catalina's bugs are much greater than Snow Leopard. For example, there is now simultaneously a Mail deletion bug and iCloud bug to ruin your data across all machines.
This Macbook Pro has an actual keyboard, magsafe power port, continues to function great, works great with external monitors (HDMI port). Other than feeling squeezed for RAM and that the CPU isn't the fastest anymore, it was well worth the purchase price.
I have a 2012 MacBook Pro (same design as yours) and agree with you. I think it's probably the best laptop design Apple ever shipped. My work laptop is one of the new ones, and I don't particularly mind the USB-C ports, but the keyboard and the touch bar are pretty bad.
As an early-2013 MacBook Pro user, I concur. I bought the one-notch-below-top-of-the-line model, and it has been well worth the price.
Since then the hardware has gotten worse, and with MacOS Catalina, the software is worse as well (the removal of 32-bit support affects my workflow; I can't use MacOS Catalina).
The sad thing is, nothing else has really gotten better. I'm leaning toward side-grading to Linux, but there's risk involved in buying a full-spec machine for Linux and perhaps finding it doesn't do everything I need it to do.
Anecdata point #2: I've had minimal problems with my 2 TB/USBC->HDMI connectors (esp with Mojave), across 2017, 2018 and 2019 MBP 15". Perhaps your cable isn't the best?
On your first point, I agree if you’re talking about first party adapters. The issue is that a lot of people and companies buy third-party and those are a crapshoot.
At my office all Mac users get cheap multi port usb-c dongles and they’re terrible. The HDMI connections display content that’s too contrast-y and end up giving users headaches. It’s very frustrating.
Though I am not a "condescending elitist hipster latte drinker" (or at least I hope I am not), I agree with most of OPs sentiments. I would like to see Apple invest more into making sure their stuff "just works", because that's why I use their systems: they are the least-crappy of anything that is out there today.
I won't pick up the bait here, but I'll just say that I regularly use Mac OS, Windows and Linux, and I have good reasons for saying that Mac OS sucks the least of those three systems for desktop use.
I have constantly had issues with Apple miniDP to VGA adaptors completely failing to detect projectors correct resolutions and they just fall back to 800x600. Holding down alt and clicking on the resolution drop down never provides the right resolution you are looking for either. Not fun to do a presentation on such a setup.
Only if you get one with a Touch Bar - which are the more expensive end of the MBP range.
However many users don’t like the Touch Bar. For myself, I used escape and the F-keys a lot and the idea of remapping caps lock is really more of a kludge than a proper fix (not least of all because I do frequently hope between USB keyboards and Linux laptops as well - so pressing caps lock isn’t a habit I particularly want ingrained into muscle memory).
Given the premium you pay for Apple and the form factor of USB-C, having more than 2 ports shouldn’t be a feature reserved for the upper tiers of MacBook Pro’s. In fact it never used to be back before MBPs took on the design stylings of their “Air” counterparts.
I can’t code with those damn things. I got one from work and returned it, I do not understand how they decided people needed it. I haven’t looked at my keyboard since Mavis Beacon back in elementary school and suddenly it demands my attention, so annoying
I have to all but disable them (using spacer elements to make most of it blank, disabling per-app buttons so it stays that way all the time) to make them tolerable. Otherwise I brush the bottom edge of it too often, making a variety of undesired shit happen.
So they hiked the prices in order to give me a "feature" I wouldn't care about even if it did work well, and have to effectively disable to be able to use the laptop. Thanks.
If they'd kept prices about the same (the modest spec bump certainly didn't justify such a large increase...) and left off the damn touchbar I'd be on a new one now. Still on my 2014 instead, tempted to drop a few hundred on a fast Dell or Lenovo and stick Linux on it but knowing it'd just piss me off so much I'd return it. Really wish anyone would give them some real competition on their OS.
That change happened literally only a couple of months ago (maybe 3 tops). Seems a bit pedantic to down vote him/her when their point was true for most of the last 3 years.
Wish they’d still stick with the function keys... but axed it off this year. Regardless it’s ridiculous to sell any machine with only two ports.... even the $35 Raspberry pi has ports than this!
I'm good with 2 available ports like my MBPs 2015 have (as they still have MagSafe; which I prefer, btw). The problem with MB(P)s with 2 USB-C is that one is used for charger, hence you got effectively only 1 port.
I would encourage you to reconsider rebinding the caps lock key, unless you have a good reason to keep it (perhaps you're a COBOL programmer?).
You can change it to behave that way for all usb keyboards and you can also use xmodmap or a program called xcape to add dual functionality to the key in linux.
Not the OP but I too switch between lots of systems. The idea of reconfiguring each and every one of them, including work colleagues machines, physical terminals for on-prem systems, my wife Windows laptop and so on and so forth, just to fix a bad design on a singular work laptop, seems like insanely bad advice. Instead I'm going to order myself a Linux machine for my next upgrade and have my hardware function the way I find productive.
YMMV but the appeal of MBPs for me was never OSX/macOS but rather the build quality of their hardware. I don't feel that's the case any longer. I guess if Macs are your main platform then remapping might be a more favourable option but for people where the MBP is the outlier (like myself) changing everything else to fit is just bad advice.
It's your prerogative to do what you want with your machine.
Caps lock being on the home row is a bad design in my opinion. Remapping it to something useful is making your hardware work for you, not against you. You obviously can't make your coworkers change their behavior but you're completely in control of your own, where most of your work is likely being done.
My hardware does already work for me. Remapping caps lock is a micro-optimisation where as committing keystrokes to muscle memory is not. So the jarring effect I'd experience when switching back to a system that doesn't have caps lock remapped would easily outstrip any benefit I'd receive from it.
I switch between different keyboard layouts fairly frequently (I use a kinesis advantage 2 which is quite different from traditional keyboards) so maybe it is just being used to being somewhat uncomfortable when having to type on other keyboards that is making it harder to appreciate the difficulty it actually presents to others.
It seems like you are using different keyboards constantly so fixing it on one laptop maybe doesn't offer you much benefit. I doubt that everyone that reads this is constantly changing keyboards, though. For those it would certainly be beneficial unless they are for whatever reason using caps lock frequently.
I'll second this. I work between home and two different offices, each with it's own monitor configuration. The offices each have the same model of monitor, but I configure them to be on different sides of the laptop itself. This has worked flawlessly for years, including with Catalina.
I've found I got this to work reliably when I connected the same monitor to the same port every time. I'm not sure how well other OSes handle this though.
I face the problem on a daily basis connecting my external monitor with my Macbook Pro and Mac Mini via thunderbolt. Either monitor is not detected or I am not able to wake the computer from sleep when the external monitor is connected.
I'm currently experiencing issues with trying to use an nVIDIA eGPU as apparently only AMD cards are supported officially. Display port chaining also fails to work as it only mirrors displays.
> 5. If you resort to calling groups of people "condescending elitist hipster latte drinkers" then pretty sure you've lost the argument.
Agreed. It always surprises me to see this kind of text in an argument outside of a grade school schoolyard. I've never once read anything like this and thought to myself, "Well, that proves it! This guy's right!"
Had an issue with my space bar. Brought it in for a recall, had it back within 5 days. The fixed it in house and didn’t send it to a 3rd party. Speed and Apple employees fixing things had me put on my slippers.
Meanwhile HP doesn’t want to fix my work Zbook because while the high pitch fan whine is annoying, the computer still functions. Keys and the little mouse button are falling off after one year.
Lenovo ThinkPads have like a 2 day turnaround. Good service and speed isnt exclusive to Apple, do they really deserve credit for something many companies execute well? Apple brought enterprise level support to consumers, past enterprise price.
In my experience Lenovo Thinkpad hardware customer service easily beats Apple in efficiency and speed. You spend considerably less time debating the topic than with Apple and Dell. "Hey this is broken, did you try this, ok send it in, we will ship you a box." Or for less than $100 you can have 2-3 years on-site. On a higher end X1 Carbon right now 2 year on site with accidental damage (ad is usually depot only, but the on site covers normal failures) is less than $200. 5 days to get my laptop back to me would feel slow.
I've been on MacOS since 5 (mac classic). I went to Win 2000 and XP for a while but came back at 10.3.
On average every 2 years I'd pick up a few distros of Linux, play with it, then drop it and go back to OS X. This continued until recently. This last year I've been on Linux for the first time. Specifically, Linux Mint.
OS X hasn't been going in a direction I strongly care for (10.6 was my favorite, as well as Windows 2000). I'm a power user who just wants things to work. I don't need all the bells and whistles. I want a low maintenance experience without bugs, that just works. Right now Linux Mint is that on my hardware.
The only modification I've done to the system is using the graphics card for v-sync instead of the cpu. Outside of that, I'm on a 4k monitor that works at 60fps. I've not had a single crash or noticeable bug since installing (except a bug in Firefox). I haven't had to go deep in the terminal, but I have built custom versions of software. eg, the version of cmake on the OS is older than the version needed to build cuda projects that use cmake.
It's a minimum no bells and whistles it just works experience. So I'm happy. Is it for everyone? No. Are more every day desktop users going to be picking up Linux in the near future? Probably. Video game support has gotten so good on Linux that people who play video games have been slowly jumping ship. I've been surprised.
Though, if they break anything, I'll go back to OSX.
Mint is such a wonderful distro for people who want to use Linux but don't want to mess with things. I'm glad you've been enjoying it so far. Canonical really dropped the ball with how great a no-config, no-bullshit distro can be. Ubuntu felt like it was on this path 10 years ago before they started adding all the unnecessary bullshit. I'm glad Mint is the fork that picked up the slack.
I might be unusual, but I never cared for Ubuntu, even when everyone was raving about it.
I like to minimize whitespace. While my monitor is decently sized, too many distros have a horizontal bar on the top and the bottom of the screen. It feels like wasted space. Mint doesn't do that, and it's professional looking. It's dark theme looks and feels great too.
Well, no, it's not the Linux of 2000, it's worse than that, because it's closed source.
The GNU/Linux (e.g. the ecosystem) of 2019 is really fantastic. It keeps on getting better, and better, and better.
There may be a few missteps, maybe you don't like GNOME 3, but you can still use Xfce, or KDE, or LXDE, or i3 or whatever else if you want, no-one is stopping you.
By contrast, if Apple or Microsoft update the OS and make it wanky in some way you're SOL.
It honestly boggles my mind that professional software developers tolerate that kind of stuff. I guess if you're a web dev or you're 20 years deep into a career in a specific stack the benefits outweigh the costs.
I'm probably coming up on 15 years of *nix now. I do look back sometimes. It's universally terrible.
Earlier this year I purchased a fairly pricey Asus laptop. A few months in the wireless card appeared to commit seppuku so I reinstalled the drivers, no dice, reinstalled windows, no dice and now my touchpad was broken. Every driver failed to affect any device, so I installed the latest Ubuntu and it all 'just worked', including the keyboard backlight.
When I explained this to ASUS support they said the hardware must be faulty and my only option is to send the laptop in. That is ostensibly not true as Ubuntu can't magically repair hardware failures.
Meanwhile my other Windows box restarts every night, but fails to apply updates, so every time I use it I am greeted with that failure and no insight or path to success.
I had this happen to my Dell XPS 15 about 2 years back. It was a year old at the time so still under warranty. Dell said it was a hardware failure and I had to return it. IT issued me a new Precision 5520 that has worked really well since.
As somebody on a 2015 15" MBP looking to make the switch, how do you deal with things like Word/Excel documents or updating the firmware of IOT things (not mine but those of relatives) that only offer proprietary Windows and Mac updaters/installers? Do you just spin up a KVM and pass through USB, or use a separate computer?
These edge cases (and the uneasy feeling that there are many others that I won't discover until I make the switch) are the main reasons holding me back at the moment. The lack of interoperability because Linux is not an established consumer OS (yet).
I run all Linux at home (and LineageOS on my phone). For things like this I keep an old Windows laptop (Core2Duo) in the closet. For IOT/app-based stuff (none are mine - they all belong to my parents/relatives), I have my brother's old screen-shattered iPhone.
For documents I just use LibreOffice and suffer; if I absolutely need Office I suppose I could use my old discs and install it on the Windows machine, but have not had any need to in the past 3 years since I switched. When I send documents to people I just export as PDF and they're none the wiser.
Save for extracting BIOS updates from custom .exe files (thanks HP and Dell) I never use either of them.
Im my case, I use Crossover and a VM. They work well for my use cases.
> Word/Excel documents
I run Office 2010 in Crossover, which works very well. (I have a copy of 2016 as well, but it is slower.) You can also try WPS office, which does a decent job of handling Office documents.
> updating the firmware of IOT things
I have a Windows VM and I use USB passthrough for things like iTunes. I usually use it less than once a month.
I've never liked how much Crossover costs to stay on the latest version. I only pay for an upgrade when if it breaks. (You can use the last version you payed for indefinitely.) They also will occasionally have discounts.
Prior to having CrossOver, I used PlayOnLinux. When I last used it, Office 2010 worked, but had some issues such as fonts not being embedded in exported PDF files.
It may also be possible to install Office through Steam, which has the Proton compatibility layer based on Crossover. There is some information on using Proton for non-steam games here: https://streamable.com/pukwz
Of course, Crossover is just an enterprise supported version of Wine, so you could probably get Office working in plain Wine, but the automated setup support a tool like Crossover or PlayOnLinux provides makes it significantly easier to get things working without unusual and difficult to troubleshoot issues.
Libreoffice for the former. Honestly, I deal with that stuff so rarely nowadays that I could probably get away with like, going to the library for it even if LO didn't exist.
I don't deal with proprietary IoT things. If I did I probably would KVM it, yeah.
I generally just don't care about things that aren't supported. Probably not the answer you're looking for, but there it is.
I write for my day job so I spend a lot of time in "office" software.
I used to deal with a lot of MS Office documents, less so now. Most forms and web docs are PDFs and there's a growing crowd of people happy to send Open formatted docs. I've used Libre/Open Office for about 5 years as my main office suit and had no issues. It does feel less polished, and I do miss the "styles" thing you can do with MS Word but for copy I find it perfectly adequate.
If I need professional typesetting, or really anything more than Libre Office can handle, I use LaTeX. It's actually very quick.
You can also use MS Office online; their web editor is very good. I use it when I need to preserve an MS Word themed document's formatting.
I can't speak for everyone but I have a Windows 7 VM just for things like this. But I can say I don't think I've ever needed to use it. I run photoshop (cs5) in wine, although I could program get by with gimp I rarely do anything other than crop or rotate a photo. For Office I just use Google Docs or LibreOffice depending on the situation. I'd say 90% the former 10% the latter.
I open word an Excel documents in LibreOffice. Should work for documents without macros. I've had less luck with PP, but it's been years since I've tried that.
The title might indeed be flamebait, but I can relate to parts of the rant:
- after 2 years, my LG Ultrafine 5K still won't turn on at least once a week. During the first year, it was even freezing the MBP (monitor is up to date).
- after 2 years using it, touch bar still feels like a miss, a toy gadget, now I need to carry an external keyboard (together with many dongles). And touch bar is still buggy, I have to switch apps to unlock it at least once a week. Not really "Pro" AFAIC.
- kernel_task runs at 50% CPU now and then for no reason (cannot reproduce, no logs)
- I need to reboot my MBP once a week for no reason (cannot reproduce, no logs), I don't care for the few minutes lost, it's just I can't debug it easily
- restriction on Safari Extensions requires to publish through App Store only, which killed uBlock Origin (at least for now)
kernel_task is due to high temperature on the left thunderbolt ports caused by charging. Plug your charger into the right side instead and it'll go away in about 15 seconds.
As someone running my 2015 MPB into the ground this sounds absolutely insane. I love MacOS, but this is on par with the “you’re holding it wrong” insanity. I really hope Apple gets their newer MBP straightened out before I have to buy a new laptop.
Trying to write a non-serious article doesn't give you a free pass to say things like "[linux] fanboys are condescending elitist computer nerds" or that "[Apple] fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers".
Not that it's illegal, but he shouldn't be surprised if people just dismiss him whatever message he's trying to send just because he seems insufferable.
This is not a discussion I intend to extend, especially in the context of this silly article.
I will say that you can write whatever the hell you want on the internet and the reach you'll get will probably be the free pass or not, it's not for you or me to decide.
He can say whatever he wants, people can upvote whatever they want, commenters can comment whatever they want. I'm just trying to justify a viewpoint you could be taking when interacting with this article...
> Trying to write a non-serious article doesn't give you a free pass to say things like
Yes and no. Technically it's his blog and he can put whatever he wants if he doesn't want people to take him seriously. I'm not saying I agree with his language used but he probably wasn't expecting it to feature on news aggregaters and it's not like internet discussions comparing Apple and Linux are known for being devoid of arguments and heated knee-jerk comments; even without the initial flamebait.
I'm not remotely convinced by the article. It's clear the author thinks he has clickbait title and just ran an article on it, it's compltely beneath HN, Linux == macOS? Please.
I do believe that macos is not as stable, performant or well thought out as it used to be. There are also a few recurring bugs that really annoy me (search not working in Apple Mail forcing me to reindex for example)
But, I think this article is over the top... I've never had issues with external monitors (nor know anyone who had some), I never use the App store (I oppose it on principle) and when
I've had a non standard issue with my mac, the technician proved knowledgeable and quickly figured I did know what I was doing so didn't baby talk me. It turned out to be a hardware problem but I was impressed with how well they diagnosed it.
FWIW, my new MacBook using an external dock and USB-C to display port has insane problems. I have to unplug and plug back in at least once per day, and even worse, sometimes after sleep the monitor will work, but typing and clicking will be laggy, which I am sometimes able to resolve only by unplugging the monitor and plugging back in, but other times it requires a restart.
Specifically the USB-C to HDMI dongle for the Macbook seems to be totally useless. It has terrible reviews, is one of the only Apple products I've ever seen that required multiple full machine reboots to install a driver, and is just completely unreliable.
We'll see if the new version is any better, but I'm not hopeful given either Apple doesn't seem to really know what devices are supposed to be able to play 4K iTunes content or may have just silently pulled the feature at the last minute and not told anyone.
This has happened to me: my external monitor created harmonic interference with its electrical frequency and literally prevented wifi from reaching my mac.
It's something i never thought possible but here we are; not saying this is mac's fault but monitor issues are not uncommon and this definitely didn't happen with windows.
Note: I had written this comment before I had read the actual article, so it is only vaguely related to the topic, but it seems wasteful to delete it...
This might be a subjective thing, but Linux when I used it in 2008-9 (I was a kid then) was unfriendly. My local community was very unfriendly, expecting you to RTFM three times except often the manual didn't exist or was obsoleted years ago.
Linux (Debian was what I used then) was rough. I had standard hardware, but I never got GPU to work without extreme tearing and pink-green lines and artifacts on the display. It was fast, I'll give it that. I often had to solve problems by reinstalling it, because I didn't have the resources (most didn't exist) to fix it "properly". I am not gonna talk about it further, but it was worse than now.
Ubuntu's 10.10 "Чиста Десетка" (as we called it here) was a release that started changing things for the better. The purity and exclusive-ness of the comunity was fading, people became more accepting. I attended meetups, met new people, made friends and got a lot of my issues fixed and many things explained.
In parallel with the comunity's development, the OS itself was developing and improving. IMO Unity was better than Gnome Shell at that time, and it really gave a friendlier feel to the OS. The kernel got more and more support for things you would expect to "just work" (especially in Serbia where so many people were using HSPA+ USB modems such as Huawei E1550 which had awful support before). GPU drivers got massively improved, new filesystem improvements reduced unnecessary latency, initiatives to prioritize UI-responsiveness and fludity came to provide a more awe-inspiring UX than Compiz cubes...
It just became better, and it keeps getting better.
Until 2014-15 it was my understanding that the approved way was to reinstall the OS every 6-7 months. Things would slowly stop working with drivers and software installations...
(I briefly switched to Fedora, which is now my most long-lived linux install at 3-4 years, I gather that also debian and ubuntu got better over time)
> Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work. Fanboys are very vocal that this is the fault of projector manufacturers for not ensuring that their HW works with every Apple model.
Glad I'm not the only one having issues getting my non-antialiased fonts to render properly on external monitors. Crossing fingers for 2020.
A semi-related issue I've had as well is macOS has a tendency to try and use the wrong colour space for HDMI monitors, causing everything to appear purple.
Mine was flickering on a Dell external monitor. It didn't happen so much if you had it as the main monitor (i.e. the one the tab-application switcher appeared on). Other wise it would constantly go into power saving mode and then come back on - works fine with Debian!
While I want to sympathize with the author here he hasn't given any examples. If he/she has come up with blanket statements like "does not work with external monitors" or "hardware support is a pain" he should substantiate his claims by telling us what he did and how many monitors he tried.
He also does not mention why having one channel to install software is a bad thing. I am sure he saw issues but presenting use cases will help his argument. I do have an issue with the software installation source. On the whole I see it as a good thing. Linux in 2000 had a problem (one that isn't resolved even now), there is no one channel that gets you all you want, you are inevitably forced to go and find software and install from source which doesn't recognize that dependencies are already solved and will simply install copies again which will fuck up your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and nothing works. Macs on the other hand for the most part don't have that problem. If the app store does not meet your needs, you are most likely a developer and so you would go through home-brew.
He didn't provide examples for monitors or hardware, I suspect, because he cannot do so in a way that doesn't make it clear his claims are extremely weak and thin.
Is this satire of the ridiculous false equivalencies so often employed in modern rhetoric? Does the author really think using a Mac in 2019 is a complicated and fiddly as using a Linux machine in 2000?
Or are people just upvoting something because it's the kind of lazy hot take that's candy for socially ranked sites like this? This is why I believe sites like HN and Reddit often make their readers dumber despite surfacing good information.
Whenever something gets upvoted very fast in a manner that doesn't seem consistent with a site's regular usage, suspect that it's botted/been paid for by rival companies.
Anything getting 300+ points in 3 hours is rarely organic. There's almost nothing else currently on the front page with this kind of votes/time ratio, besides the post about Google banning accounts.
Apple 2019: if your problem is not google-trivial, there's nothing you can do. Calling Apple's tech support line does not help, because they will just type your problem description into Google and read the first hit.
Really? My experience of calling Apple tech support (to troubleshoot something to do with Messages on my Mac) was that they were surprisingly well-informed, and they fixed my issue with approximately zero patronising, script-parroting, is-it-turned-on? nonsense.
Is not nonsense as most simple problems are caused by simple mistakes. Don't reflect your experience with computers and tools to the average user's experience.
Well, OK, it’s reasonable place to start, but I think most of the HN crowd will have experienced the frustration of being unable to break out of that model. Obligatory XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/806/
Uhh it’s an extremely stupid question if they’re asking for support about a word processor bug visible on screen. Blindly defending arbitrary practices out of context is stupid. Stop doing it.
My one experience with Apple support was a complete disappointment. iOS 11 made my iPhone 6+ unusable. Their only suggestion was to try rebooting it. This was right before the battery scandal broke.
I had the same issue with XCode update. Today, the download finally started, progress bar reached 100% then... XCode was not installed. Infuriating. Too bad Microsoft don’t allow easy access to LTSB and destroyed Windows UI. I feel the state of commercial OS declined sharply in the last decade.
Something about Catalina has been causing issues with both installing Xcode and massively increased phantom disk usage (not just related to TimeMachine). I didn’t experience the former (have colleagues who did though), but did experience the later and had it self correct (on a machine without TM enabled).
My recollection of Linux in year 2000 was it was very easy to understand how everything worked. If you were searching for "terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best" then you were definitely doing it wrong (in 2000 and now).
Most likely to be a driver (or even hardware) bug. I had a SB AWE32 card which would do that, and I even hacked on the driver for a while to try to diagnose it before concluding the soundcard was probably taking PCI bus master and never releasing it, not really something that Linux could do anything about.
It's possible that the equivalent Windows driver - which didn't crash - had a secret workaround to prevent it from tickling the hardware bug. I used to work on OS-9 drivers for custom hardware at my first job, and we usually ended up bodging the driver to fix hardware bugs, because respinning the hardware was terribly expensive or even not possible in the time available.
Creative was notorious for having chipset-specific PCI bus master issues even on Windows. The only way to fix it was to disable bus master, and that is what Creative drivers did on Windows.
On Linux you were expected to be a grown boy and do it yourself in the BIOS.
> Not only that, there are and were multiple ways of installing software in Linux
Technically true, but practically false. To this day I get told that I shouldn't be even trying to use software that isn't in the repo. There are still a whole lot of applications released with a Windows binary and a tar.xz of source for Linux.
At DebConf 2014, none other than Linus himself bitched out the community for how difficult distributing things for Linux was. It should not require an army of maintainers across a score of repos to distribute software. And it isn't like the technology to make it simple isn't available. AppImage has been around since 2004 (it was called Klik at the time) and its existence has and continues to be largely ignored by the community. Other parts of the community are openly hostile to the very concept of simple application distribution, like Drew DeVault.
The situation is so awful, that recently when I wanted to use an application on my Linux laptop I found it easier to run the Windows version under WINE than get the Linux version installed.
And the most infuriating thing about it all is how incredibly resistant the community is to doing anything to change this situation.
AppImage & snapd & flatpak are poor solutions to a real problem. It's better to wait until someone comes up with a good solution than accept a bad one.
I would agree about snapd and flatpak, but AppImage is pretty close to ideal. The only more ideal way I can think of is if AppImage didn't require FUSE and could embed an icon (there was a proposal for an embedded icon standard in ELF, which was thoroughly ignored by the community).
It has been 20 years. How much longer should we wait for functionality the original Macintosh included in 1984?
autogen.sh isn't intended to be invoked for user installs. Users are supposed to invoke ./configure, with the configure script being generated by a developer invoking autogen.sh and readily packaged as part of the software's tarball.
Homebrew will remain unaffected, since it does not set the quarantine bit on its binaries (which are usually invoked from the terminal anyways). Homebrew Cask opts in to Gatekeeper so it’ll be subject to notarization requirements.
It ist not only a bit excessive, it is completely wrong. Most software for the Mac comes as disk images from the creator. You just drag the application to your programs folder and thats it. That is the way I installed most programs on my Mac. The App Store is nice to have but a less common way of installing programs. Also, services like the notarisation offered by Apple show clearly, while they love their App Store, they clearly support alternatives.
I know a lot of developers who get by fine without Homebrew. Either they use another package manager or they’re happy with downloading applications and packages from the internet and using those.
I'm no fan of MacOS, but I certainly agree with you on this point - there are a multitude of ways to install software on MacOS, and it doesn't go out of it's way to prevent me from using those.
I have to say that I was outraged and reminded how much I hate the culture of machine maintenance glorification culture popular among the Linux people. Top-notch trolling.
Apple people will be outraged about this post, even if it's mostly a joke.
My conclusion from it is that there are difficult topics, and, apparently, changing standards fast is not helping at all. (DisplayPort was finally more or less working, but sure, swap to another display outlet... and the same for a lot of things).
There is no time to build systems (hw or sw, or god forbid, the two together) that are _mainly_ bug free with common hardware. Windows XP in it's final days was close to this. The most stable desktop linux distribution I used was a short lived Linux Mint release, 10 (Julia), which doesn't make any sense.
Maybe if standards we slowed down a bit and we'd give more time to sand the rough edges tech history wouldn't constantly run in circles.
Linux 2000: There is only One True Way of installing software: using distro packages. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad.
This isn't true. People have been running `./configure && make && make install` since long before 2000 and long after 2000 as well.
Also, IIRC "alien" already existed in 2000, letting you install packages packaged for other distros (e.g. installing rpm on Debian).
Linux 2000: if your problem is not google-trivial, there's nothing you can do. Asking friends for assistance does not help, because they will just type your problem description into Google and read the first hit.
My recollection is that in 2000 people were less prone to just do a websearch and then give up when no relevant results are returned. People would ask in IRC or mailing lists.
Hell, in 2001 I had Linux on my home machine and I didn't have an internet connection at all. The only way to get things to work was to rely on friends and to figure stuff out for myself.
It was also more normal to spend days or weeks on a problem and not expect everything to be handed to you on a silver platter via Google or StackOverflow.
> It was also more normal to spend days or weeks on a problem and not expect everything to be handed to you on a silver platter via Google or StackOverflow.
Excuse me but that is definitely not what someone should be doing unless they don't have any actual work to do and instead can use all their time to play with Linux distro configurations. It is unacceptable to have to resort to spending days or weeks on a problem. That is an absolute show stopper for almost everyone.
You can "defend" Linux with the fact that it is a open source project that is maintained and improved by people in their free time, and that is absolutely okay and acceptable. But you can't then complain why hasn't Linux taken over the desktop. Why? Because, unlike on servers where the only person responsible for it is a "guru", everyone uses a PC and expects it to work and let them use it to accomplish work or entertain themselves. If Linux cannot do that, people won't use it, no matter the [whether subjective or objective] freedom-restrictions, dark patterns, privacy violations and outright illegal activity of Microsoft, or the [subjectively?] overpriced Apple ecosystem.
edit: Also, I'd like to add that I use Ubuntu exclusively at home and have a super-paranoid-level network firewall setup that blocks and monitors all traffic, and use AOSP on my phone with only blobs for GPU, SoC initialization and the magic black box that is the baseband processor. I use Ubuntu because it works for me better and more often than Windows, but I am a geek and I know things that my parents don't.
Okay bad example they also use Linux that I forced on them to be able to remotely administer it. But in any case people use what works for them best. I cannot afford an update that gets stuck on Getting things ready... and risk shutting down the PC and having it do a mandatory recovery or rollback procedure. Linux breaks less often for me because I pick my hardware and software and set it up. But nobody can expect that of people and they shouldn't have to. Death by a thousand paper cuts and rough edges and all.
Why isn't this true? Of course you can do "anything else", the claim is that you are generally advised to not do that, e.g. https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian (point 1.3)
Even if this is true, there’s a crucial difference: 90% of what you want to do in MacOS is very simple and works, on 2000 Linux nothing was simple at all. I know because I only used Linux back then.
> it said that there is not enough free space available to run the installer. So I deleted a bunch of files and tried again.
This sounds like the Samsung phone I purchased new some 5+ years ago.
This brand new phone never managed to do an update in all that time.
It would always insist a new update was available but on every attempt it would fail with some vague recourse issue.
It would even ask for permission to send details of the failed attempt back to home base.
After a dozen of failed attempts, a dozen approvals for feedback requests, the purchase of addition SIM memory cards to give it more memory in the hope the update would work, the online thing that did work was to just take the phone offline (data offline) and ignore the update request.
Now this was never a top end phone (less than $300 some 5+ years ago) but what was amazing is how bad this new phone from day one would continually insist an update was required, with each an every update failing to install.
This looks a little unfair to 2000's Linux fanboys (which of course included me): The well maintained, comprehensive, tested list of software, mirrors and checksums that Debian had and inspired other distros to emulate were a godsend compared to downloading a code tar file and hunt dependencies manually (when not modifying code yourself), you were always free to use other channels, but other channels were just usually worst; all other points seem to have similar nuances, from a user point of view situation is similar but is actually a real problem out of scope of developers (Linux) vs. Apple just being jerks.
> It consisted of running tmutil from the command line and giving it a bunch of command line arguments that did not seem to make sense or have any correlation to the thing that I wanted to do.
It’s not completely obvious, but when you delete something it doesn’t disappear immediately because your Mac will keep it around on a local Time Machine snapshot so that it can keep decent history even if you’re away from your backup drive for a bit. And even if this wasn’t the case, with APFS copy-on-write deleting a file won’t necessarily free up space on your filesystem if there’s another copy hanging around.
I have run into the storage problem a number of times, yeah. Once there was a `.Trash` file in some hard-to-access place that needed deleting. And if your Time Machine backups are failing, they can create a big cache somewhere mysterious in the file system. I have told Time Machine to ignore docker files as well, not sure if it helped in every case. In one case I deleted all my node_modules folders, and Time Machine backup succeeded and macOS deleted it's prepared backup files, freeing up tonnes of space.
We'll see if it occurs again with Catalina.
All the other stuff is almost entirely wrong, in my experience.
In my experience, when we talk about software (hardware issues are always a thing on less used systems) Linux is the less black-box of these three OSes. If you have a non trivial problem with Windows or OSX OSes or apps, you're out of luck. With Linux, you have the tools to reach the root causes. Or at least, that used to be the case. New apps in Linux (particularly in Ubuntu) want to be as "friendly" as Windows or OSX, so they hide how things works, and put layer over layer of abstraction to the point where nothing is obvious anymore.
Thanks for posting this! Some funny parallels in a humorous blog post is a great way to start any Monday!
Yes, I can read from the comments that it rubbed people the wrong way - but lighten up! I did a satirical piece on Apple earlier this year, but had to remind readers not to get their feathers ruffled beforehand: https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/2...
I will say that Mac OS is incredibly disk-hungry (and MBPs get vastly more expensive when you add options like bigger (still not that big) disks). I don't want to become a Mac OS hobbyist and figure out how this happens (I like Mac OS overall because it's a BSD and I'm a BSD guy, but it is not my hobby BSD of choice) so I ended up just spending a few bucks on some "cleaner" program that purged a surprisingly huge amount of disk the first run and purges like 5 gigs a week thereafter.
Not saying it is your issue, but if you do use Time Machine, have it enabled all the time and you are not always connected to your Time Machine backup disk then Time Machine will continue to make those backups except it does them to your local disk. Because of this you will end up with time machine snapshots and you can get rid of them using the tmutil command that was referenced in the post.
In order to do so, see for example [1].
In earlier macOS versions you could disable the local time machine snapshots, but I seem to recall that that no longer works (but I might be wrong on that)
Because you're tied to an expensive fixed-size SSD that you can't upgrade and the system hogging disk space reduces the space left to store the colossal 4K videos that every phone shoots these days and the VM snapshots you need?
Also every iOS virtual image includes identical files so you end up with about 5 GB of identical sample photos and other garbage for each iPhone image. Why they can't put them in a single directory and symbolically link to them is beyond me.
I say this with a 2012 MacBook that I've put a 1TB SSD in and a 2016 MacBook Pro with a fixed non-upgradeable SSD. Constantly fighting for disk space.
It is good tradeoff, except when you start running out of space, MacOS does not seem to clear the caches when you start running out of space. I have 128GB MacBook Pro and removing the ~/Library/Caches was somewhat regular excercise (it occupies 5-10GB usually) I had to do when I had lots of stuff installed.
- to borrow another commenter's words, I'm tied to an expensive fixed-size SSD that I can't upgrade (fortunately, I don't have 4k videos; unfortunately, I have too many d----d VM snapshots and the like)
Unless there is some compression involved, using more disk means slower starting and running apps.
Edit: even with compression, I'd argue that uncompressing is faster than reading disk.
I get the frustration 'cuz all of Apple's stuff seems pretty flaky right now, but there's still a huuuuge difference to the linux of 2000: whatever your config + problems, there's gunna be a bunch of other people running the exact same config, w/ the exact same problems.
Which means that there's a pretty good chance w/ time they'll get resolved. (Especially if you avoid upgrading to the latest and shiniest immediately, since Apple seems incapable of finding and fixing problems in-house.)
With linux, you could be running a mix of hardware + software that _no-one_ had ever tested before, and whatever your particular config was, it wasn't shared by everyone -- so whether you could get that mix to function properly was pretty much an unknown quantity and required a lot of luck and elbow grease.
I do wonder if at some point as the curve of hardware progress flattens out and the space of "what should software do" becomes more explored, we'll start to see more finely crafted software w/ fewer problems. Might be an analogy here to how in the early days of cars they were quite unreliable, but now they're pretty amazingly robust, for years on end. We're in the "new & shitty" stage of software, I think.
One thing I have to say, in general to many of the posts here about the state of linux, is that linux is just the kernel, and the vast majority of issues people tend to have is due to one or a combination of distro choice and DE/WM choice. I went linux exclusive personally and professionally a few years ago and have nothing but good things to say about it, but far too often I see stuff complaining about linux when it's really not linux per se, but the other software choices.
So, protip, if you are having issues with things like multi-monitors, etc, start out by trying a different DE like awesome/i3, xfce, etc, rather than the big 2 (KDE/Gnome), and if that fails try a another distro (such as Manjaro).
I almost always use Manjaro these days because the hardware detector is second to none, but I used to distrohop habitually and if you get a new laptop it's almost a requirement to try out different distros until you find the one that just works, and this especially applies to MacBooks, which I used to triple boot but started doing linux only on because sometimes it's easier to get a macbook approved in some companies than the equivalent hardware normal laptop.
One side benefit of going linux only is that I have, besides gaming, almost completely GPLized my stack. Plus, I believe if you are managing systems you should be running the OS those systems live on. EG if your core systems are debian, you should have a debian install somewhere that you interact with daily. I can't tell you how many times I've had to help devops people recover from things like MacOS text bunging or outdated bash related problems. I think they should be doing the dev work at least in a container (lxc, etc) on what they are working on instead of the native system.
And in typical fashion, this person lists the exact problem I'm having with my mac (disk space not reclaimed after deleting files) and says "fixed it" without ever saying what steps they did to actually fix the problem. Now they'll get indexed by Google and show up on top so the next person with this problem will find the post, but not find any helpful solution.
>After a ton more googling I managed to find a chat buried somewhere deep in Reddit which listed the magical indentation that purges reserved space. It consisted of running tmutil from the command line and giving it a bunch of command line arguments that did not seem to make sense or have any correlation to the thing that I wanted to do. But it did work and eventually I got XCode updated.
I had this exact problem recently. There's a simpler, safer solution. Delete files to free up enough space. They're moved to "Reserved Space", and when the system fails to delete them to free up space for new installs/updates, you run
sudo purge
in the commandline.
Wait 20m or so and the Reserved Space should be emptied and your hard drive free space again.
I haven’t thought of it this way before but I think you’re right. External monitor support does break randomly and hardware support through dongles is extremely flakey.
A small excerpt from my personal list of woes:
- Using a USB-c <-> DVI cable gives the monitor a purple hue. An HDMI cable does not. Also, this isn’t an issue in bootcamp.
- Can’t use the serial debugger of a Particle Photon because it can’t use the dongle’s USB-A interface directly.
- Sometimes the Touch Bar goes completely unresponsive for ~10s. Sometimes, after a reboot or after waking from sleep, it just doesn’t start at all.
- At one point the speakers started blasting white noise at the loudest volume for no apparent reason. Closed the lid, opened it, same thing. Rebooted the machine and never encountered that problem again.
- If a certain kind of network error occurs when setting up Time Machine then System Preferences will hang completely for ~5 minutes.
In many ways the experience is what I would expect if I could run Linux on this machine: Hardware kind of works with lots of random bugs.
For your first problem, perhaps some monitor auto detection has gone crazy with a colour profile. Have a look under System Preferences -> Displays -> Colour (you need to have the monitor plugged in to tweak it.)
Maybe one of the pins in the DVI connector is dodgy? Have you tried another connector/DVI cable/DVI source to rule out the display? I know you said it didn't happen in bootcamp but perhaps there's some deep magic happening.
There are some call outs in this worth talking about...
> Apple 2019: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even for popular devices like Android phones.
Is the Android issue on Apple or on Google. Each is very much into ecosystem lock-in. Who is failing to write the integration software?
IMHO, it would be far better for consumers if these things were like plumbing or electrical. You can mix and match from different manufacturers because of standard sizes and interfaces.
> Apple 2019: if your problem is not google-trivial, there's nothing you can do. Calling Apple's tech support line does not help, because they will just type your problem description into Google and read the first hit.
How much of this is UX and expectations. I imagine the person writing this isn't an average consumer. Is the expectation someone who can do level 4 tech support rather than the tech support reps on the front lines? Those front line people trained to handle general consumers rather than people who read HN.
> This felt exactly like using Linux in the early 2000s.
In my experience (I have personal machines running all three OSes), macOS has certainly declined over the last few years, but I would say it just feels like Windows now. Windows has always had the occasional nonsensical problems you had to find an incantation online to solve. Fortunately, the platform (and its pitfalls) are consistent enough across different platforms and users' experiences that it's generally not super hard to find the right fix. The same is usually true for Macs.
The thing with Linux, even in 2019, is that most of its problems are sensical in isolation, there are just more of them. If you really know your system you actually have hope of solving them on your own, whereas you're going to have a much harder time finding a magic fix from someone else who had your exact issue, because there's a good chance nobody else has had your exact issue.
Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work.
Is this true? Because I'll tell you a story about my early days of using Mac OS. We've all sat in meetings waiting for someone to do the Fn-F5/Ctrl-Alt-F3 dance trying to get the laptop to output to the projector. I had to do a presentation, and using Mac OS for the first to do so. "Oh, shoot, I don't even know the keyboard dance to do to hook it up. Meh, plug it in, figure it out in a minute." Plugged it in and...it just worked(tm). As soon as cable touched plug, it output to the projector. Fuckin'-A. And here's the kicker: Mac OS was running on a Hackintosh, not real Apple hardware. That right there was enough to sell me on Mac OS. I don't connect to random external monitors much anymore, but I've never had a problem getting output to any random display I've hooked a Mac to.
In many cases the things he claims are past linux behavior remains the same today. Perhaps he hasn't used Linux in recent years?
> External Monitors
Plugging in monitors in linux today frequently does not behave as you expect. The chances of errant behavior is significantly higher on linux than any other operating system. I can't speak to apple computers not working with projectors, but it seems like he's comparing apples to oranges here.
> Software Installation
The "One True Way" of installing software is still the case in linux. Installing outside of the native package manager's repositories is discouraged. Installing of any software on mac is 'discouraged' in that you need to authorize just about every installation you do on the app store. Homebrew does not require sudo to install applications, though GUI applications will generally still need an okay from the user to open and use. The outlier in software installation is Windows, where it is still encouraged to install executables downloaded on the internet.
> Hardware comaptibility
Linux and MacOS both bake hardware compatibility into the kernel. You will still run into weird cases where a display port out on your graphics card won't work with linux for some indiscernible reason. This is admittedly significantly better than it was in 2000, however.
> Laptop features
Linux didn't have dedicated laptops in 2000. The fact that they lacked USB ports has nothing to do with Linux.
Current macbook pros have 4 usb ports (other than entry level mbp 13). Retina macbook pros had 2. I'm certain he's talking about usb-a ports, however. This isn't unique to Apple laptops, however. Most PC laptops manufactured today lack more than 2 usb type a ports. It's very difficult to find.
> Advocate behavior
It's pretty remarkable how someone can be so condemning of condescending elitist behavior while simultaneously being a condescending elitist jerk.
> It's pretty remarkable how someone can be so condemning of condescending elitist behavior while simultaneously being a condescending elitist jerk.
Had the exact same thought!
> I can't speak to apple computers not working with projectors
I can. I organize hack days all over the globe and have to deal with lots of different types of laptops from virtually all manufacturers. Apple laptops (even old ones going back to the mid-2000s) virtually never have an issue connecting to a projector as long as you have the right adapter (my gear bag has like 15, but most of those aren’t for Apple laptops, I think I primarily use ~3 for them). I certainly can’t say that for Windows (admittedly mostly due to shitty laptop hardware, not Windows’ fault directly), let alone Linux.
>In many cases the things he claims are past linux behavior remains the same today. Perhaps he hasn't used Linux in recent years?
I'm not sure what hardware you're using. On my end Linux so stable I haven't had a crash in years. Though, I have had some Firefox updates not render sites correctly. That and the default desktop behavior isn't ideal. Setting Force Full Composition Pipeline makes everything run as smooth as butter, similar to how OSX feels. It really should be the default behavior. All in all, Linux is far more stable and usable as a desktop today.
In the end everyone's opinions on these things are going to be informed by their individual experiences. Linux is generally going to lag behind windows in hardware support since most hardware is designed, tested, and supported with Windows.
I installed Mint on my father's computer and it has been rock solid for him. I tend to find ways to break installations, but that's certainly not linux's fault. That said, it's still very much a mixed bag for me.
"Things break at random for reasons you can't understand and the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best" that's still Linux for me, nothing has changed in the last 19 years.
I use Ubuntu with Cinnamon when I can. It supports almost everything, and is endlessly flexible, looks nice. Supports a full data science stack + GPU.
My work provided me with a Macbook pro which is fine since I run everything in docker anyway, the hardware looks nice but the keyboard sucks. Each key has like .5mm clearance and one grain of dirt will stop it from working. I would never buy another mac because their walled garden policy is terrible.
I use windows for gaming, but hate developing on it. What can I say, it works as a casual desktop. Except if you want to move it to a new drive, or do anything beyond web browsing and video games.
They are all okay, not sure why there is so much vitriol in this thread.
Actually in the 90s with Linux you could destroy your external screen by setting the wrong parameters. [1] It was really easy to destroy your partition table or mess up your whole configuration. I think this is the core difference with MacOS and Linux, really messing up your system is quite difficult. (And destroying hardware was never a thing with Apple :))
Can’t we just admit all three major OS’s suck badly for various reasons? Why do we need to pick winners when they all have major usability issues?
* Apple and Microsoft don’t care about your needs at all and provide no route to changing or fixing the software you use. If you aren’t a large corporation you’re nobody. They will NEVER ask your needs but tell you them.
* BSD/Linux with X11 is still working to catch up with basic Windows usability and may already be a suitable replacement for you, but if you want changes they will take years for the community to invest in.
* There are no other options for getting work done.
There were so many bits of this that I found weird but this one stood out:
> Linux 2000: There is only One True Way of installing software: using distro packages. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad.
I was in my "dating phase" of testing Linux distros out as a kid in those days, and I never felt "bad" building something from source when not available from aptitude (or portage, or whatever)...?
I feel like being able to build one-off software has always been part of the ethos of Linux due to the whole "freedom" aspect and all =/
On a MacBook with Catalina I can't update XCode at all; it downloads ~4GB then resets the progress and starts re-downloading until it reaches 100% where it resets progress again and repeats.
Had some laughs. And yes, it's all true, at least to an extent. Unfortunately no OS nails everything, all have their shortcomings. I like Linux, Mac and Windows for different reasons and dislike them for different reasons as well. Where one falls short the other excels. And so on. But if I were to pick only one, it would have to be Windows. Pick two, it would be Windows and Linux; Only thing I like about Mac is the overall quality of their apps. Several of them are unmatched in Windows and specially in Linux;
Linux was something you downloaded for $0 and half the fun was tinkering on it.
Apple is a proprietary product that you pay a hefty premium compared to other available options for.
It's getting to the point where even the most full-throated Apple advocates have to admit that things are not going in the right direction, and normies are starting to bitch and moan about their Macbooks more than Windows laptops that cost half to a quarter. They really need to focus on quality, if they want to remain a viable platform.
Apple laptops are incredibly good. But I did notice, switching to a 2012 temporarily, that I only missed like... half a dozen things. It was half the speed, twice the mass, but it got the job done shockingly well. I hated the old hinge trackpad, and the keys weren't to my liking. A few apps (mostly iPad ports) had typography that was hard to read on a non-Retina display. I switched back to the 2018 and yes it was a huge relief, but I could have switched back to my 2018 model 3 or 4 days ago and that says something.
Because it is a humourous interpretation of the problems of the latest MacOS update and general imperfections of the platform. Humour is not a lost art, and please accept the fact that the update wasn't smooth sailing for many people. Maybe not the majority, but many.
I guess what I really want to know is: is there a 2019 Linux distro which is the Mac OS of 2011? One where stuff just works, looks good, and works smoothly.
I know what this guy is trying to say about Apple, but it should be said that Linux isn't that way any more.
Really the last time I installed a Linux distro on a laptop it went wonderfully. I'm not even a Linux fan boy. I'm also not usually complimentary about things like this that should just be the norm. All that said, client side Linux is so much better than it used to be. It's a dramatic improvement.
> Things break at random for reasons you can't understand and the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best.
Depends on whom you ask. There are people who use it exactly because when "things break at random" they absolutely can understand the reasons and actually fix it in contrast to some other OSes (or Linux from more recent years).
When my 2014 era MacBook Pro dies, I have an XPS15 waiting in the wings.
Unless Apple makes significant design improvements, I'm not going back. Windows is terrible in a number of ways, but it's improved dramatically in the last few years and I can get work done on it without raising my blood pressure. Apple's seriously screwing the pooch with developers and designers and doesn't seem to care.
> Apple 2019: fanboys will let you know in no uncertain terms that their system is the best and will take over all desktop computer usage. Said fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers.
Apple has always had an unusually strong contingent of people like this. But I guess if you were going to stick with them in the 1990s, you had to have an irrational attachment to their brand.
Kind of a tiny point but it drove me nuts when using Arch. Did anyone who's tried switching from macOS to linux manage to get comparable trackpad behaviour? I fiddled with this for far too long before more or less settling for something pretty underwhelming. I know it's not the most important detail but it's hard after using a rMBP trackpad for years.
When I saw that it required more than a 5m fix on my Lenovo I just accepted this as my new setup and committed to only using the trackpoint instead. Ironically, as a programmer the trackpoint has now become crucial to my setup (easier on the wrists/thumbs; faster), and made it a lot easier to go "all the way" with tiled windows managers. So the lack of decent trackpad support made me really consider other setups that now I realise work better for me. Obv, your mileage may vary
Programming wise I'm all onboard with window managers and spend most of my time in vim + tmux but reading articles and browsing documentation or pull requests I really like the trackpad. But maybe you're right and it's a matter of better exploring and accepting other workflows.
Basically -- don't assume the person is stupid, figure out a way to interpret it better.
Surely the author is aware of the inaccuracies in a direct comparison. The author is implicitly pointing out that a multi-billion dollar corporation is putting out a product that is not polished in several ways, while people who love the product do mental gymnastics to defend against any flaw rather than admitting that such flaws exist.
> Surely the author is aware of the inaccuracies in a direct comparison. The author is implicitly pointing out that a multi-billion dollar corporation is putting out a product that is not polished in several ways, while people who love the product do mental gymnastics to defend against any flaw rather than admitting that such flaws exist.
It's like the people on Reddit ios/apple/mac subs who run iOS 13 or Catalina betas and claim they haven't experienced a single bug.
I don't understand that mentality. One, you're defending a corporation. Two, even if they make your favorite devices/software, it's OK to say something negative.
> Apple 2019: Use my iPad as a secondary screen wirelessly Linux 2000: …
When was VNC first released? Sure, wasn't available on iPad .. because iPad was not available yet.
>Apple 2019: Sync my contacts, notes, calendars, wirelessly with all my devices Linux 2000: …
You keep repeating that word, wirelessly. Are you trying to make a point that rsync over ethernet does not count?
This all sounds like a bunch of buzzwords and proprietary gimmicks when standard solution was already available. That standard solution may needed some work, but the basic functionality was there.
Yeah but none of these things actually work. That’s not to say back in 2000 Linux evangelism wasn’t similarly disingenuous ... anybody remember the joys of plug n’ play?
As a JVM developer, to me, Windows became a superior developer operating system to both MacOS and Linux about five years ago.
I still use both Windows and MacOS on a daily basis and dislike my MacOS time more and more each day, due to a mix of hardware reasons and software issues like the ones described in that article.
Wow, this article is bad -- like, literally WRONG on nearly every boldfaced point.
1. "External monitors don't work". Wrong. I present often, and frequently use hotel projectors or monitors. I've never had a problem connecting to a monitor.
2. "You can only install software from the App Store". Wrong. Software installation is simple. Sure, you can use the App Store, but you absolutely do not have to.
3. "Only a limited number of hardware works out of the box". I have yet to run into a hardware compatibility problem. I use non-Apple keyboards and non-Apple mice, non-Apple cameras, non-Apple mass storage, Sennheiser headset, etc.
4. Tech support with Apple is better than I've had with any other major tech vendor, including Dell -- where we pay out the wazoo for supposedly gold-plated support -- with only one actual problem: Apple doesn't sell the 'we fix it RIGHT NOW' plan Dell offers. (Of course, Dell tends not to actually meet this promise, so ...)
5. "It is very difficult to find a laptop with more than 2 USB ports." Wrong. Apparently the author didn't look very hard, because the 15" Macbook Pro has 4 USB-C ports. Here, he seems to be mad that the other two models -- marketed as compact and slim over powerful -- have made more tradeoffs to be small than the 15".
So yeah, forgive me if I don't take his comments terribly seriously. It's not that there aren't some very legitimate criticisms to be made about Cupertino, even if you don't take a position on proprietary software. There definitely are. But absolutely none of these are valid.
However, I'm absolutely certain that the Apple-hating contingent on HN will eat it up with a spoon. :(
As predicted, the anti-Apple contingent, and right on time -- and with exactly the sort of paper-thin rebuttal I was expecting, too.
1. The argument he made was "plugging an external projector will most likely not work." All that is necessary to disprove this is to show examples where it does work. I do that all the time, in a variety of locations with a variety of ages and brands of projectors and monitors, and never see an issue, it seems that pointing out my experience is relevant. The author has made a blanket and unsupportable statement easily disproved with one counterexample, so there's not a lot that needs to be done here.
2. In point of fact, the author made NO argument. His (erroneous) complaint is "there is only one true way," but this is also easily disproved with a cursory survey of major vendors, nearly all of whom provide direct-download installers today just as they have done for 20+ years.
3. See #1. "only a small number of things work" is not an argument, either. He can claim this, but it's not true; as many, many other folks have pointed out, Mac hardware is broadly compatible with peripherals from a wide range of makers. In 20+ years of using Mac laptops, I've never had a problem with a peripheral not working.
4. Yeah, it is. Tech support with Apple, by phone or in person, is far superior than the support you'll get from any major hardware vendor without purchasing a pricey service plan, and probably better than you'll get even if you do. That the author contends it's no better than random Googling means either s/he didn't try Apple support, or that s/he is fantastically inexperienced with (e.g.) Dell or HP service.
>All that is necessary to disprove this is to show examples where it does work.
No, the opposite of "likely won't" is definitely not "sometimes will". And your other descriptions are not even close to what is written in the article.
I don't care one way or the other about the complaints raised (and of course they are exaggerated, it is supposed to be humorous), but you are discussing stuff nobody said.
"Apple 2019: fanboys will let you know in no uncertain terms that their system is the best and will take over all desktop computer usage. Said fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers." - sounds much like the Sonos discussion forum.
"Linux 2000: There is only One True Way of installing software: using distro packages. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad."
That is absolutely correct and if one is installing software in any other way than packaging it into an OS package, one is hacking in the worst possible, amateurish way, with the added bonus that every experienced UNIX system administrator will hate one's guts come time to automate the installation of one's software. It's enough to make my blood boil and suddenly get violent and I don't even work as a system administrator. This is not an issue specific to Linux, it's one quarter laziness, one quarter ignorance, one quarter incompetence and one quarter amateurism: if, as a programmer, one considers a programming tool like OS packaging too hard or too complicated, one is truly in the wrong profession.
So all those sysadmins installing oracle rdbms, websphere stuff or basically any other kind of enterprise software in the last 10 years are in the wrong profession?
There are a lot of people in that subprofession which have no business being there. Go to any larger non-Silicon Valley enterprise and the first thing you'll run into are system engineering departments doing work Oracle should have done 40 years ago -- system engineering OS packages out of Oracle's products. Oracle RDBMS is the #1 product Oracle's customers have a system engineering department for; it's just yet another blight on that company's long list of screw-ups.
People like you are the reason Linux is not and will likely never be a good Desktop OS. It should not require an army of maintainers, repos, and all that bullshit just to get software from developer to user.
Thankfully there is AppImage. Now if only more developers would distribute that way.
Actually there are no words which can describe my hate of GNU and Linux, so you Sir are confused. On top of that, the easiest and fastest way for end users to install software is through OS packages, rather than making poor users install one piece of software through pip, the other through npm and yet another through some other arbitrary, language or ecosystem proprietary "packaging" format. Poor users; my heart goes out to them, for their suffering is also mine.
I am supportive of delivering software through OS packages, and from the experience of working with computers for the past 35+ years, I'm absolutely convinced that the only way to correctly deliver software is through native operating system packages, on any platform.
I would agree with this statement only under the condition that said "native OS package" is a single file or folder that can simply be copied and placed anywhere the user wants it.
Otherwise, whatever the OS wants is very low on my list of things I give a damn about. The computer should serve the user, not the other way around.
I suppose having problems with external monitors makes it like Linux, since if you want to support monitor hardware on your immutable headless Linux server instance deployed in the cloud you are doing something wrong.
I see a lot of people here bitchin about bad Linux desktop experience and they I see they were all using Gnome. Just give KDE a try people. It is very light, clean NixOS KDE5 installation consumed 450MBs of RAM.
Sounds about right. I switched to Mac in 2009 (from linux) and still have not found any reason to go back. I agree that a lot of stuff in the macOS world could be better. But things would have to get a lot worse before switching would make sense.
Mac user since 2010. At the time the laptop hardware was just so far ahead of anything else when it came to battery life and sleekness.
I still like it for general use (web, development, terminal stuff).
But the hardware is driving me away. Un-repairable, expensive, non-upgradeable, failure-prone...
I have a 2 year old MacBook Pro with a fan that gets annoying clickity/clackity, $500 repair from the Apple store. No thanks I will live with it.
One of my biggest pet peeves with MacOS is that even though it's so nice to use, it's just so damn slow. Everything is slow. When I user a lesser Windows 10 or Ubuntu machine, it feels like a rocket.
The only thing that feels fast on a Mac is Safari.
Apple's strength has been hardware/software integration for a long time. If you have an Apple product, you can be reasonably sure that if you connect it to another Apple product, it will work well with minimal work.
Linux's biggest weakness (for the situations where one would use an Apple product) is hardware/software integration. If you have a Linux laptop for a while, you've probably spent hours tinkering with hardware drivers, and are still not happy with the results.
System76 seems to at least recognize the problem and be trying to work on it in Pop!OS, which I'm excited about.
… without the openness. Soon RIP OpenCL, and OGL. Also non existing bare metal Vulkan kext. (I know about moltenVK … but this is 3rd party metal wrapper)
No, it's not. Most prominently Apple costs thousands, Linux is a community driven kernel and software distributions on top of it, which commonly are free of charge. From that perspective his comparisons are nil. Linux doesn't make computers that have problems. Apple has its own closed ecosystem of hardware and software, Linux is Open Source Software. To say that modern Apple systems are just as bad as Linux systems 20 years ago is making Linux look bad, it's an unfair comparison. Remember Apple 20 years ago? It was even worse than today!
macOS is still light years better than subjecting yourself to Windows or Linux and the Escheresque nightmare they call a GUI.
Maybe once they have figured out how to scale for high-DPI displays without looking like something stretched up in Deluxe Paint*, I might tolerate giving them a second glance.
(Not a jab at DP, it was the bomb and I miss it dearly.)
> Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work."
Yeah, no.
> Software installation
That was not true for Linux in 2000 (alas, I know, I had to manually compile tarballs for all kinds of stuff, and download binaries of others), and is not true for macOS in 2019. Notarization != the app store.
>Apple 2019: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even for popular devices like Android phones.
I definitely had problems with external monitors, (not even projectors), being either blurry, using the wrong color profile or not being recognized until some time after I log in, so "Yeah, no" might be the answer you wish was true, but isn't.
This is so shallow it feels like it was written just to create buzz.
It's so easy to build a shallow and polarized list like this about ANYTHING. All I can take from this article is that this guy doesn't seem to be good at argumentation. 2/10 on Apple whining.
TL;DR: A user is as frustrated with the Apple experience in 2019 as s/he was in 2000 with Linux. Then that user goes on to rant about some things that frustrate him/her, completely ignoring that one is FOSS and by no means a hardware manufacturer while the other is proprietary and primarily a hardware manufacturer.
> Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work. Fanboys are very vocal that this is the fault of projector manufacturers for not ensuring that their HW works with every Apple model.
I just setup a new Macbook Pro with Catalina (one day ago). Plugged three monitors. (Adapters were cheap knock-off from China). And it worked fine.
> Apple 2019: There is only True Way of installing software: using the Apple store. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad.
I'd say the state of OSX is much better than Linux. Apple doesn't favor the Apple store as far as I'm aware but just signing apps. Apps in MacOS are simpler. They are a "single" file bundle (but the bundle is mostly non-exposed to the user). Uninstall is also simpler: you just remove the file from your applications folder.
In the longer run, this should make you trust your applications more although signed by apple doesn't mean it's not going to harm your setup. This might prevent average users from installing apps but more sophisticated ones will just go around it.
> Apple 2019: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even for popular devices like Android phones. Things either don't work at all, have reduced functionality, or kinda work but fail spuriously every now and then for no discernible reason.
I already have the whole laptop working from the get-go. That's already an advantage over Linux. I have my old printer working. Ledger worked out of the box with no drivers setup. Maybe I'm in the minority.
> Apple 2019: it is very difficult to find a laptop with more than two USB ports.
Macbook Pros come with 4 usb-c ports. That's more than enough considering that you can run multiple things on parallel on a single usb-c port.
> Apple 2019: fanboys will let you know in no uncertain terms that their system is the best and will take over all desktop computer usage. Said fanboys are condescending elitist hipster latte web site designers.
Stop talking to retarded people. Your quality of life will increase considerably.
Yes but no because it is 2019. It's simply a list of things that Linux sucked at and Apple is now dropping support as it no longer matters or things that affect a very small number of its users.
I remember when I tried to use Linux as my desktop operating system because it was up and coming to destroy Windows.
>External monitors
I don't know how you can have a problem with that. I have a 10gbp dongle from Amazon with HDMA, DVI and VGA output and works with no configuration. On Linux, I had to do some hacky stuff on the terminal to get a monitor to somewhat work(wouldn't turn off, would come back from sleep mode etc.)
>Software installation
I don't feel any pressure to use Mac Appstore, in fact, I never use Mac Appstore. I also, in fact, know that people don't actually use Mac Appstore because here are many stories about Mac Appstore being useless for developers
>Hardware compatibility
The given example is an Android phone. That's nothing like the given example of not being able to use your graphics card on Linux. The Android phone is not an integral part of the Mac user experience, it is a separate computer that you may choose not to use if that computer's vendors are not providing decent support.
>Technical support
I would agree that Apple lacks on the phone support but Mac power users are much more polite on the internet than the grumpy Linux gurus out there that will not hesitate you to tell you how stupid you are for not being able to solve that basic problem. Also, there are Apple stores where you can hand over your computer and get it fixed.
>Advocate behaviour
Oh god, this is no comparison. Lunux power users are the worst. They are out there to get you down, they are angry, unfriendly and arrogant. They are on a mission. Maybe they should seek help just as Linux Trovalds.
Plugging a dongle or clicking on a DMG file and dragging an icon is no comparison to fiddling in the terminal following precise commands where mistakes can brick your machine.
What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks. The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are very similar to the problems with 2019-era Linux. External monitors are a particular pain point for me. I've got an HDPI laptop and I want to plug into an old non-HDPI era monitor. Doesn't work. Spend the next 10 hours poking around forums, trying weird XWindows options, installing Wayland, etc. Still doesn't work. Eventually, give up.
Windows 10 works marginally better. Both remain vastly inferior to MacOs.
I'm not saying that the grass isn't greener on the other side. Macs are regressing, but the grass isn't greener on either side. Let's stop pretending otherwise.