Uhhhh. I put my time in with a Linux desktop for nearly a decade until a job bought me a Mac and there's no way I'd go back. And I think my "hacker end of the spectrum" bona fides are pretty good--but those bona fides aren't incompatible with a preference for a pleasing UX that has been considered with users in mind, which for my money no open-source desktop environment has even approached (and I have my beefs with OS X but they're small fry compared to even just "why is there no terminal emulator on par with iTerm2 in 2017?"). Wanting to enjoy using the thing you spend much of your waking life in front of is a pretty reasonable ask, and the indicative give-a-damn of well-thought-out polished experiences is worth it to me to the point where I don't even bother to boot the way faster desktop with way more RAM that sits under my desk when I can just plug in my MacBook Pro and everything just works. (Also that the window system doesn't randomly lose heads, which still happens on my dual-boot desktop, in 2017, to the point where I don't even bother with it. I'll probably Hackintosh that next time I'm bored.)

Casting your own preferences as implicitly "hacker" and pulling out some "qualitative experience" (which among nerds is best read as "subjective preferences") stuff is pretty silly.

I've found Gnome-terminal to be better than iTerm2 in the areas that matter to me - speed, color/font rendering, and configurability. I switched from OS X to Ubuntu and i3 because I was tired of how slow iTerm2 was compared to Gnome Terminal, and haven't regretted it even slightly.

My main workstation is a Lenovo Thinkpad with dual 1440p external monitors, and haven't run into issues losing heads, however, I wrote my own auto-detect and screen layout wrapper for xrandr so that it would consistently do what I wanted. Basically, my window manager makes calls like: `xrandr --output DP-2-1 --left-of eDP-1 --auto --primary --output DP-2-2 --left-of DP-2-1 --auto --output eDP-1 --auto` when I connect to my docking station and `xrandr --output eDP-1 --auto --primary --output DP-2-1 --off --output DP-2-2 --off --output HDMI-2 --off --output HDMI-1 --off` when I disconnect. MacOS's screen arrangement consistency was pretty great, though - on par with the consistency of my own script.

I think the improvement of moving from MacOS to Linux for me has been that I don't have to try to figure out how the OS "magic" works to make it do what I want, because there is no magic, it's just scripts I've written myself and I understand them because I wrote them.

Yes, magic is a great way to describe it. Sometimes it's delightful and benevolent magic, while other times it's more like a trickster's curse.

For me, there came a point when making Free nixen do what I want became easier than making macOS not do what I didn't want. Returning to Linux/*BSD from my decade long sabbatical to macOS, I've been delighted by the things that have changed, but even more delighted by some of the things that haven't.

> I switched from OS X to Ubuntu and i3 because I was tired of how slow iTerm2 was compared to Gnome Terminal

Did you ever try using the built-in Terminal.app? I've never had any speed issues with it.

Similar experience.

I also spent my high school years working on a roadster in the garage with my father, and once I had money I thought I'd like to do that again, but it turns out that knee room, heated seats, airbags, side impact safety, a DSG and not having to fuck around with my car all goddamned weekend trumped my need to tinker, and so it sat in the garage.

Instead I tinker with other things, like frameworks, databases, video games, and plants. And my computer Just Works.

Woah, woah, my comment never said that people who prefer macOS to Linux/*BSD are inferior hackers. I think I was clear that I was differentiating between the software that I run and the software that a creative professional is required to run. That is, I have a choice where to run my dev stacks, while a graphic designer is probably a captive Adobe CS user.

And yes, that's exactly what I meant by "qualitative experience." I was actively calling out that the opinion voiced in my comment was, like, my opinion man.

People are entitled to their preferences, and you clearly have yours neither is "silly" but we can still politely disagree.

It's funny that you say that an Adobe CS user is "captive", but you don't consider yourself "captive" to the superior Linux hacker tools. Ie: why is the creative user captive, but you are free.

If you wanted to move to macOS/Windows you couldn't, because you wouldn't bear their inferiority when it comes to hacker things, so aren't you also captive?

Easy, because I could and occasionally do run my tools on Windows and macOS. And from some of the responses here, it's clear that some people do prefer that.

But, if I wanted to buy the latest Adobe Creative Suite and run it in Linux, I have no real recourse.

So I guess in that sense, my statement could be made more precisely as: Obligate users of such commercial software suites as Adobe Creative Suite are captive users of either Windows or macOS.

Said obligate users _could_ migrate to Gimp or Audacity.

But they don't, for the same reason you stay on Linux. The fact that you can run bash on Windows is not such a huge difference if for other reasons you don't.

They don't want an inferior experience, even if they could tolerate it if strictly necessary.

> Said obligate users _could_ migrate to Gimp or Audacity.

Perhaps—and I've certainly met professionals that claim to use those tools. However, I've met others who claim (rightly or wrongly) that Gimp and Audacity are not perfect substitutes for other commercial packages.

What features from terminator are missing that iterm2 has? What features does the osx window manager have that are not in gnome3?

Have you tried elementary OS? If you are looking for a comparable polished experience I think you will be surprised (in a good way).

> the day-to-day qualitative experience of Linux is head and shoulders above macOS these days.

For you, perhaps. But given your preamble it strongly suggests your conditions make this boil down to "for someone who wants to use Linux, Linux is better."

For a start: Linux is not a monolithic ecosystem. The sheer number of qualifiers that are needed (what flavor? What window manager? What hardware? because driver hell is still a thing) make this statement meaningless.

At best you can say "I've found a combination of hardware and many pieces of software that work better for me."

Good! Happy for you. Seriously.

For a developer like myself I can do anything I want to in MacOS and I don't have to fight it to get it working right - it "just works".

In a way this mirrors the iOS and Android debate: for those who like hyper-customization of their OS then of course Android/Linux is better. It's better due to a fundamental precondition of the requirements.

For the rest of us - those who don't find that as important - the other system is superior because you don't have to do that.

I love Linux and use it every day, but this kind of statement is the same thing the Linux crowd has been saying since the early 2000s (is it the year of Linux on the desktop yet?) and while it is more true now than ever it still masks it's very real issues to mass adoption as a primary OS

Linux is far less fiddly than it used to be, though.

I just recently installed the currently frozen Debian testing (with the intent on staying on it once it replaces the previous stable) and there was nothing to configure, it just works, even starting with a minimal install (no DE) there was nothing to configure, just pull the right packages (like bluez, pulseaudio-module-bluetooth etc) and I could pair with my wireless headphones etc. If you install a complete DE like Gnome or KDE from the metapackages you don't even have to install anything yourself, it just works out of the box. Even for people like me who do minimal installs and run tiling wm there is little to nothing to configure. apt install xorg will get all you need for Xorg to work and autodetect your hardware, echo "exec dwm" >> .xinitrc will get your startx session up.

The early 2k had the massive amount of suffering between very poor WiFI support (lots of kernel drivers out of tree, need to compile them yourself and pray the API was synced with the current kernel or do it yourself), terrible state of audio stack (pulseaudio has gotten a lot more stable now, and is better than what we had in early PA days, or ALSA days), terrible state of GPU support (with mostly nvidia being okay, but still you would have to be more careful with kernel upgrades. Now you can even run a rolling release distro like arch, and pick a LTS kernel). But now it's great. You don't need the proprietary driver for AMD cards, intel iGPUs work fine, NVIDIA requires the proprietary driver for performance but the open source drv will still help you get a decent X session up in the first time install, audio just works, bluetooth just works, wifi just works. Even wifi with proprietary drivers, like the broadcom ship on my mac, it's just a matter of apt install broadcom-sta-dkms and it just works. Even Debian doesn't shy away from distributing the proprietary packages in the non-free repository and it's smooth sailing.

Linux missed many window of opportunities during times when it really could have become closer to a mainstream OS. What is funny, is that in my opinion, Linux is now as ready for mainstream purposes as it could ever be, but the opportunities for it will not come again.

And then we have the locked down versions that are getting popular, like Chrome OS, which is really linux underneath. We'll probably see more of that, not less, in the future, but it's not too bad as long as we have the freedom to unlock the bootloader and install what we want. Google is in a good position to bring an alternative to MacOS/Windows, although it won't be GNU/Linux as we know it in full, but it's close enough.

Not sure Google will actually bring us any Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia

Linux is indeed much less fiddly than it used to be. It's improved massively since my first use, which was Yellow Dog (red hat for macs) back around 2002 or so.

One area that still needs work, though, is consistency. I can understand why this wouldn't be an issue for some, but it when running Linux it feels like I almost spend as much time getting the UI, little behaviors, etc to match up and be consistent between applications/DE/etc. Quite often you can't get 100% of your desired behavior.

Linux is great until it isn't.

I'm a developer and I don't want to waste another second of my life configuring boot or managing drivers on linux.

It's not just design, there's also a heavy reliance on Mac only (or at least Mac and Windows only) pro video and audio programs. I will say though, I've always loved running Linux on desktops where this isn't the use case.

>It's not just design, there's also a heavy reliance on Mac only (or at least Mac and Windows only) pro video and audio programs.

It's even more so in programming. Go to any developer conference, whether it's for Rails, C, Java, Haskell or whatever: a huge percentage there will have MacBook Pros, much much more than the percentage of Mac users in the general market (e.g 10% in the general market and 40 to 60% in developer circles).

Which goes to say how silly the notion that "Mac's are for users who don't know about computers" is.

Macs are for users who want a working GUI and/or a UNIX subsystem, and don't want to do any self-building and/or tinkering.

> "Mac's are for users who don't know about computers"

I honestly haven't heard that argument in years from anyone I'd consider in touch with the current state of tech.

And for a decade I was right there with you on the OSX == *nix plus creature comforts.

But the landscape has changed since that argument held sway for me. Linux has gotten way less fiddly, and the size of my scripts to keep macOS on the straight and narrow has gotten larger.

And Mac OS X has an absolutely shitty software package management "ecosystem". App Store is shitty; compared to apt and dpkg. Brew is the only thing that helps me stay reasonably sane on OS X. But still; to "remove" any large commercial software is basically: reinstall the OS.

You see the same in virtually any physics department (I'm not aware of a similar trend in other STEM subjects, but presumably). Everyone uses a mixture of Linux and OS X. At the start of my PhD, the question wasn't "What laptop do you want?" it was "Do you want a Macbook or an iMac?"

Yes but the MacOS operating system is becoming more and more dumbed down in the UI experience, which nullifies most of the "its got a good UI" argument.

We do have DaVinci resolve and natron.fr available free now which are better than any I've used before so video editing in Linux is improving.