At my home, I have a Ubuntu desktop which works perfectly. I use Eclipse, Android Studio and Atom editor. On work, I use MBP and pretty much the same environment.
I know it is not a common opinion but no matter what I do, I still like Ubuntu more than macos. I agree that macos looks more polished, engineered and complete but somehow, I prefer Ubuntu's plastic feeling. It has been 6 months and still my opinions did not change.
There is also the problems of macOS with Eclipse and other GTK applications (Meld) some other stuff about Mac that I couldn't fully adapt yet.
Lastly, FYI, no, I am not hater and I like MBP, especially as a solid metal object.
It's the only thing keeping my mac at this point. Fear of having to debug driver shit when i don't want to deal with any of that.
When it was first released, there were some issues with suspend and the touch screen, but they were all resolved a few months later in a newer kernel release. Fedora 25 ships with that newer kernel by default.
My 2nd Gen Lenovo X2 carbon is high end and runs Ubuntu flawlessly.
I do agree that Linux has very variable performance and experiences across machines. I really do like the laptop though. I'm looking at the Razer Blade Pro (that machine is a beast but looks sexy still) and some Dell Precision laptops for an upgrade (will be passing on the Blade to my brother) but the Pro is extremely costly at the moment.
I don't care much about Apple hardware specifically, but they got my hooked because of the OS.
Pretty lame.
My linux environment was very minimal though (mostly living in the terminal, used a tiling WM, vim as my editor). In many ways my mac environment isn't that different except without the tiling WM.
That setup worked quite well, although used more resources than if I hadn't used Virtualbox.
I wish there was a modern version that isn't macOS.
On a rant tangental note a slight annoyance I have lately is that all the window managers are getting pushed out / ignored because of Wayland.
With Wayland you basically have to write an entire desktop instead of just a window manager. I used to love that about Linux.. the pick and choose what works best model but now the choices are becoming fewer.
Oh well back to my macbook with zero choice.
I agree that there is a lack of great window managers on OS X. I'd love to be able to run awesomewm.
https://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html
This enables you to do what you're referring to in MacOS.
If you haven't yet tweaked these "not well-advertised" settings, this may indeed turn out to be a "this changes everything!" moment for you
https://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html
If you haven't yet tweaked these "not well-advertised" settings, this may indeed turn out to be a "this changes everything!" moment for you
For OS X at least...
https://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html
If you haven't yet tweaked these "not well-advertised" settings, this may indeed turn out to be a "this changes everything!" moment for you
C'mon now, don't be lazy, add that s to the end of http to create a link:
I've used Ubuntu since seven years at work, the mac since 17 years, Windows not anymore since seven years, unless when helping others. I would change to Linux anytime if all would just work, meaning Photoshop and other software that now doesn't work. Plus the mac is still my favorite piece of hardware. When I bought this 2015 Macbook, I've looked for a good Linux laptop, and came out at about the same price. Then the choice was easy.
Most of those desktop screenshots remind me of Winamp skins from back in the day - yes it's a great piece of software and endlessly customisable, but most of those customisations are terrible. Like a 14 year old with a copy of Neuromancer and MS Paint.
I'm constantly trying Linux distros and DEs and the answer when I talk about this is 'Well if you spend time tweaking it...'
NO, that's not the right answer. Endless configuration options means there wasn't the will to make a design decision and stick to it. 'Customisation' can be an excuse for a poor job. That's why Elementary OS is the least horrible desktop, even if it still has issues. Their lack of global menus may be a questionable decision, but at least it's a decision.
Linux gives you the freedom to choose the environment that suits you personally best. Windows doesn't give you ANY choice, and it's still bad! If you like to be told what is good and make no optimizations for your personal workflow, more power to you. But don't go saying that Linux is "not the right answer", that's just silly. Works on my machine :)
What makes it worse is that they change, regroup and rename things each f-ing year. W7 made it hard to select apps (floating groups in taskbar), explorer introduced dumb libraries, control panel is always a mess, as is /Users/Shared (iirc) thing. Now that w10. I try it and understand that I'm unable to do anything again and again.
Biggest questionable change in macos for 6 years was new ui flavor and maximize button became fullscreen. That said, iTunes also experiments too much.
>> So I've been considering Linux as my first option.
Linux re-defines ugly. It works great but it's very kludgy. Like many others I can setup my workflow on any of the three machines and have tried it out on many different machines from Dell to IBM to Apple. Sublime, terminals, Chrome/FireFox, DropBox, it works well enough on anything but I made my current choice on 'niceness', battery life, screen, and form-factor, even if it cost me a couple hundred dollars more. On a machine I use for 3 years it's 30-40 cents a day.
At least that is what it reminded me of.
Battery life is 12-14 hours of real work with the big battery (which costs something like 18$ more than the regular one).
I still use a Macbook Air for iOS development but I now boot the Thinkpad for everything else.
(Oh and if there's an engineer working for Spotify in the crowd, thanks for the Linux app!)
KDE is a bigger and more complex system so it works a bit differently depending on what distribution you use. Some distros like KDE Neon always have the most recent KDE while other like OpenSUSE Leap prefer to use stable versions of the applications.
When it comes to wifi/sound/etc it has to do with whether the driver for that contains binary blobs. Some distros don't ship blobs due to security and/or software freedom concerns while other distros have a more relaxed policy when it comes to proprietary software.
Thinkpads have a reputation for being very easy to run Linux on. You should expect everything to work out of the box. For the Dell computer you might have to install drivers separately but you can't tell for sure without knowing the exact model you have. You could do a test drive with a Live USB to check out. I wouldn't expect things to work out of the box on the macbook though. Apple isn't very Linux friendly and their macbooks have many specialized components that are only found on Apple products so Linux support is not very good. But even then, some dedicated hackers still try to reverse engineer them so you might have better support if you have an older model instead of the latest macbook.
The following table can help a bit with determining if wifi will work on your computer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_wire...
That's what you want.
Just works, anyone can use it, and if you wish, you can right-click on anything and have tenthousand config options to make everything exactly as customized as you want it.
Edit: Fedora on workstaton / laptop, CentOS 7 on a dev server where a desktop has utility. Not on production boxes.
Which is why I use it!
If I get myself a workstation again (and there are solid reasons for doing so, like CUDA for DNN development when you're tired of working on servers for local development), I'll definitely give KDE another go.
This is the product of dictatorship style development on one side (Windows, OSX) Vs democracy on the other side (Linux distros).
Democracy implies diversity. Dictatorship implies uniformity.
Can you have the uniformity you are looking for within a democracy?
(or some would argue that anarchy would be a better metaphor for the Linux scene)
But I don't actually think the horrible state of desktop Linux is down to any of that. Device drivers are Linux's big problem. Desktop environments are a simple matter of getting used to them and learning what to tweak.
I don't assume the state of desktop Linux to be horrible. It's simply more diverse than the state of Windows and OSX.
For many people that is a good thing. There's intrinsic value in variety.
I don't think it's a good idea for Linux advocates to deny or downplay the effect that driver issues have on the overall desktop/laptop Linux experience.
Please elaborate. I mean... Universal copy paste has just been working the last 20 years... Unless I'm missing something basic?
Of course most *nix user use the middle mouse button for copy-paste in the terminal as standard and never really notice this.
I miss the middle-click-paste in macOS. Also the maximise behaviour in macOS is really annoying.
I use hammerspoon to paper over a lot of the annoying parts of macos (after using linux on desktop+laptop for over a decade). Here's a minimal excerpt from my config to get a more-reasonable "maximize" behavior: https://gist.github.com/philsnow/c19506dec17597ab9e4bf02f8d2...
Switch alt for ctrl with the same commands to send to the top quarters of the screen, add a shift to that to send it to the bottom quarters.
I don't move windows with the mouse on OSX/MacOS anymore.
I've standardized on Xubuntu but there are some pretty sweet desktop managers/window managers out there. That being said I feel like I'm fairly close to converting to i3.
My equillibrium point is suckless.org's dwm[0] with all defaults except using Terminus as font and Super(windows) instead of Alt key. ~6 months, no irritation, no configuration change.
Tiling window managers which have extensive configuration options are useful as tinkering material, but not actual working environments. If you want a tiling window manager not for eye appeal and beauty but for simplicity and ease of use, look at r/unixporn/ and use whatever they are not using.
For my particular style, being able to extend the WM (not customise endlessly: actually extend) is pretty awesome, but I understand that not everyone's into that.
After getting everything set up the way I like it, I'll never switch.
"It" can be any distro. GNU/Linux distros aren't a single entity, and they never will settle on a common interface---that's a good thing. Larger distros like Ubuntu will, but if you're going to adopt this perspective, you'll need to start thinking about the individual distributions and companies/communities behind them rather than "the" GNU/Linux desktop.
Not if you're looking for a macOS alternative. I'm fine with the "distros" doing what they want. However, that is not going to lead to a cohesive experience of the kind that macOS is able to provide.
A bigger problem than the desktop environment may be that apps are written to different UI toolkits (these days mostly GTK+ and Qt), and the different environments provide themes to get a unified look. Most apps aren't targeting a particular desktop environment, and so you get this inherent tension, where it's "unopinioned all the way down" and nobody makes a clear decision about a unified look/feel to anything.
I can see why a certain group of hackers like this jangly mess where a lot of time is spent on customizing stuff to work exactly the way they like it, being able to choose a completely different "window manager" and so on. I was like that in my early years, and today I just want things that work. What I want is consistency and stability with a mind behind it. I want it to boot up and render high-quality, subpixel-aliased fonts, and then I'd like to get right to work.
The KDE community seems more closely aligned with this idea, but they still don't control the apps, and unfortunately they still seem to be stuck in the Windows 2000 copy machine mindset.
I can agree with this criticism (granted, I don't use many GUI programs)---not that they're different toolkits, but that they often have drastically different theming and UX. Uniformity through common theming/UX APIs would be beneficial.
Functionally I think there a lot to be said for tiling window managers and I think they look great with Compton plus semi transparent windows, selectively obviously.
Of course it might not be your cup of tea.
So I've been considering Linux as my first option. I fired up a few VMs and dipped my toes in various Linux desktop environments: Elementary, Fedora 25, and Ubuntu (Unity) so far. These are all GNOME 3 variants. And... oh boy. Linux land really needs some kind of unifying revolution to happen, because this is a mess. Things have gotten a little smoother in the decade or so since I was last exploring Linux desktops, but it's like they're still figuring out what it's supposed to even be. GNOME feels like it's stuck between trying to be Windows and OS X, with some super weird details (like the launcher thing) that makes it feel like they had plans to build a touch screen OS for tablets or something. Meanwhile, there's little consistency between apps (and Elementary tries to remove menu bars as a concept, what's up with that?), and everything feels put together randomly by people with widely divergent ideas of what a kind of desktop environment to aspire to. It also struck me how much competition there is -- there are at least three GNOME forks (two of 3.x, one of 2.x), for example -- a situation which seems to exist partly due to infighting.
Maybe with out tweaking and plugins and customization you can beat it into some shape that lets you work efficiently, but the experience put me off, to be honest. I don't like being that negative, but I was a bit shocked about how bad it was. Mint was next on my list, but I'm not sure I will continue since it's another GNOME 3 fork.