I fought software update and driver issues for years. I ran the most bog standard HP laptops that I could get, albeit w/ Nvidia GPUs. Every distribution upgrade there was something that went wrong. One of a list of usual suspects: video driver, power management, and wifi. Things were never completely broken. It would be something like not being able to close the lid, sleep, and properly recover. Or not being able to connect to wifi when coming back from sleep. Or not being able to stay connected to wifi after a couple hours and needing the kernel modules to be removed and reinserted.
I kept a set of hard drives so that I could always move to the next version of the OS on a clean install. I could fall back easily if the next release presented problems. I would tinker and fix the sort of issues you get with these random outlier driver problems and press forward. I had a good regimen going, but ultimately it was the power management issues that wore me down. Randomly finding the battery dead because the laptop didn't sleep when I closed the lid or not being able to properly return from sleep was just too much.
I've been running Linux for 20 years and I'm not willing to put up with these problems on my workstation. It seems like it must be a very small minority that can.
If you're going to have an actual destkop machine maybe you can avoid most of these problems. And maybe these things have been solved finally for laptops, but I wouldn't know, I moved on and haven't looked back.
What makes you think everyone faces the same issues as you? Maybe the problem is your specific hardware? I've been running linux based distros as my daily driver for over 10 years and literally never had any of the issues you described. Never had issues with power management, wifi always worked out of the box on all distros I've tried and suspend/resume always worked flawlessly. If you want a laptop that works well under linux, buy a thinkpad or a dell developer edition laptop.
I learned, the hard way, the truth of the cliché: Linux is free only if your time is not worth money.
I'd also like to add my voice as one of those who have used linux for over ten years with excellent out-of-the-box support for hardware. Often, linux will even offer a better experience by including support for obscure hardware out-of-the-box. No internet connectivity or hardware driver media required.
I realize my experience is anecdotal. However, for me and many others it seems, linux just works.
When was the last time you used a linux desktop, 2005? On any linux desktop I can think of (MATE, Gnome, KDE) this is a matter of going to Settings | Mouse & Touchpad | check or un-check the natural scrolling box as desired
This is the real value of macOS. I agree that I liked it better when it was more Unix and less Apple unix-like but it's still better than fighting with your Linux config on a x86 machine.
I tend to use it everywhere... running a hackintosh on my desktop now, and mbp for personal laptop, and work assigned is another mbp.
However, if they go off of x86, that may drive me back to linux to be closer to prod/deploy environment.
- https://askubuntu.com/questions/604002/mouse-wheel-scrolls-i...
- https://askubuntu.com/questions/819662/how-to-invert-touchpa...
(They're mutually exclusive; I put the 1st one 1st as undoing that one is a case of rerunning the command replacing the '1' with a '0')
If the first one succeeds, try putting the command you used into ~/.Xdefaults and see if it sticks. The 2nd approach puts info into a file anyway.
If these fail, what desktop environment are you using?
The problem is "didn't work out of the box". Using Linux as a desktop OS can be a death-by-a-thousand-cuts experience. Sure, whatever problem you run into there's probably someone who's figured out how to solve it and posted instructions online. But if the solutions are known, then the operating system shouldn't have those problems out of the box.
First is the "violation of least surprise" principle. Linux as a UNIX is traditionalist to a fault, sometimes obsessively so beyond what is helpful. Scrolling is typically done inverted in X11.
So, that means this would need to be a configurable option.
From the standpoint you're talking (where the comparison is to macOS), now you're in UI territory, which has typically never been one of Linux's strong points.
Someone has go build the UI, but then that'll only be for one given desktop environment, and so now you have duplication of work. Unless every DE does that work, if you're not using one of the DEs that has done the work - well, you get no radio selection group or dropdown or whatever.
There are very real reasons why Linux isn't best in class. The politics, infighting and greybeard traditionalism does more to hurt the "it just works" flow other environments have.
(Note that I'm not saying "politics", "infighting" and "greybeard traditionalism" are the same thing; they're very different groups and issues, but they combine to form stalemates and inertial cancellations. For example, when traditionalism met systemd, the result was a vicious catfight instead of unified action. Things could have worked out where the community met Red Hat's lobbying with a list of terms and requirements. Nah; everyone just threw their hands up in the air and screamed instead. This is what's broken in Linux. I think KDE had it sorted in 1999 when they pragmatically grabbed the still-closed-source Qt and made a desktop environment out of it. Then GNOME came along and drowned everyone more political overhead than the W3C and Internet working groups combined, and user experience is definitively worse for GTK ever being created.)
xinput set-prop 'ELAN1200:00 04F3:301A Touchpad' 308 1
xinput set-prop 'ELAN1200:00 04F3:301A Touchpad' 295 1
Traveling and working remote, battery power is very important. You cant shutdown or sleep your computer seamlessly. Its just simple thing. It should just work.
Yes you can customize it as you wish but I dont want to. I want to spend time for actual coding and having time for myself.
This was a big moment for me. I was a huge anti-Apple guy, I had built my own laptops and used Android and everything had to be open and hackable. Until one day I just realized it wasn't fun anymore. I would have to stop what I was doing to fix some broken (virtual or real) duct tape that held everything together.
I bought my first Mac the month I replaced the CPU, then the motherboard (wrong socket), then the RAM (incompatible with my new mobo), and then was staring down a dying video card in my desktop. I realized I didn't want to fix it. I picked the wrong parts because I didn't care anymore, I didn't care enough to do the proper research. I spent all day fixing computer problems, I hated doing it on my own time too.
What I want is a computing appliance that lets me do my job and nothing more. I don't have that yet, I still have to deal with system updates and reboots and filesystem maintenance and all that nonsense with my Macbook, but it's closer. I've been considering a Chromebook but I have had bad luck with Google products in the past.
Not a month goes by where I don't re-read Mark O'Connor's "I swapped my MacBook for an iPad+Linode" series and find myself agreeing more and more.
http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-...
The thing is, though, desktop linux users are just used to this. Your choices boil down to:
1) do a lot of research and setup and then constant maintenance to restore settings that updates casually break, and understand that there will still be exceptions and gaps, or
2) try to stay inside the lines of Gnome, or Unity, or whatever ElementaryOS calls their graphical shell, and ignore the thousands of applications that do not match the look and feel of your chosen environment.
I keep going back and trying desktop linux every few years since switching from Gentoo to Mac in 2003, and sometimes I use it exclusively as my personal machine for months at a time, but in the end, frustration always drives me back into Apple's arms. :(
In any gnome 3 distro I've ever used, I've only ever had to change it in the gnome control center and it works system wide.
Right now I'm running solus mate and changing it in the mate mouse and touchpad settings is system wide and works in both qt and gtk apps...
Were you using a touchpad driver other than libinput?
(Actually, I do remember that in some versions you had to figure out how to trick the system into thinking you might have a touchpad before it would provide you a place to change the mouse wheel scroll direction, but that seems like a separate failure of preference panels, rather than the root of the issue).
That being said, many laptops which were originally for windows have issues like this too. Desktops are usually fine because they tend to use highly standardised components. Laptops, not so much. This is pretty much entirely because companies are not willing to write open source drivers, and the good integration of stuff in package managers only works if drivers fit the packaging requirements. This usually means open source. I imagine this is mostly a problem of slightly higher cost, but also embarrassment of the jankiness of code. For mass produced systems with volume in mind, where the target consumer barely cares about reputation, it just isn't a priority.
In other words, you have to go for something expensive while also not being an OEM who opposes openness.
tl;dr you need to do your research before you buy. Linux needs cooperation from all parties, you can't expect compatibility with everything.
I don't see a trend there. Some things always worked, while others didn't. Same for the current MBP's. It's the usual problem for hardware where the vendor doesn't provide Linux drivers: you need somebody to write these drivers in their spare time and only a few people are willing to do so. I maintain an overview of the Linux compatibility of the MBP's >=2016 (https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux/) and it's absolutely astonishing what a few people can achieve, even without documentation of the hardware. Given, the hardware support isn't that good yet in Linux, but if there would be 10 instead of 2-3 people working in their spare time on the drivers, first class support would be there pretty soon. So if you care about Linux compatibility of Macs: Get your hands dirty and do something about it!
> It's just not worth getting a Mac to run linux.
For me it's worth it, because it feels like somebody thought really hard about getting things right, which results in really, really nice hardware (except for the latest keyboards and the Touch Bar of course).
I had to go into recovery mode last week because an automatic kernel upgrade broke.
You're doing that thing where you ignore the argument to refute a tiny irrelevant point of the argument.
Thats a rhetoic device for arguing without content, like the whole 'attacking the person not the argument'.
Your point is not compelling and does not refute the parent comment.
2. Professional photographers for a long time primarily used CompactFlash which has never had built in hardware support. So I can't imagine they are suddenly missing something they never had. It's the prosumers who were the heavy uses of SD cards and who were inconvenienced with the decision. Although most cameras come with WiFi these days so you can see Apple's thinking in removing the port.
3. Using a SD card as external storage is an awful idea. It was never designed for that much IO especially on OSX which can thrash storage devices pretty badly (check fs_usage). Just buy a USB-C enclosure and a 2.5inch hard drive like everyone else. Very cheap and comes in large sizes.
The old Model (15") (no new processor + no usb-c)
Isn't this the same argument people used when the Mac ditched the floppy, and then again when they ditched the CD-ROM drive?
Edit: Oh and also lack of CUDA support i.e. NVIDIA cards.
Linux is a great OS. I spend all day SSH'd into it. From a Mac. Because my workstation needs to work, and it's not going to work if I'm copying and pasting kernel code from Stack Overflow to get my trackpad to scroll the correct direction. I'm not a C programmer, so keep me as far from the kernel as you can.
The best environment for a computer scientist is the one that lets them get their work done in the most comfortable fashion. And for most of us, that's Linux on the server and something else on our workstations.