* 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.

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If apt is out of date that's probably because you're using a stable rather than rolling release distro.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.

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.

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/>

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):

https://oneofus.la/have-emacs-will-hack/2018-04-08-lisp-mach...

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.

That's why bspwm uses a WM independent tool for all keybindings:

https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd

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.

Or a VIM plugin

Windows is way WAY 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.

What? Last time I've tried it I couldn't even set CAPSLOCK for layout switching. Even Gnome is WAY more customizable than that nonsense.

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.

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.

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?

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.)

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.

Let's compare comparable. Neither Cocoa nor Win32 do support third-party themes; for the exactly same reason why GTK is breaking them.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

[1]https://github.com/bmrf/tron

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.

You have the free time since you're not tinkering, right? :P

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Go ahead and tinker but leave some space for others to do the same their way. It’s not “crap” it’s “not my preference”

“Delicate users”. The bravado of someone getting good at organizing text really well. You’re such a mans man.

/flex

>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

https://extensions.gnome.org/ for finding the extensions for installing the extensions on the website use this chrome extension using which all you then have to do is click install while on the website https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gnome-shell-integr... Gnome tweaks to manage them otherwise

> 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.

3.24 I think? whatever the ubuntu beta is using.

> 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.

I can assure you it is not

edit to add issue link: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/issues/3...

> 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.

Keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, etc.

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.

Agreed. A long road to travel.

I have it on vanilla Gnome 3.34

https://imgur.com/BldCTMf

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.

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.

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.

For the most part it just works. More so than windows in my recent experience.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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 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.

First of all, stop with the personal attacks and inflammatory baits. Take them to reddit please. Read over these: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Others of the distro (use another one if you want up-to-date packages).

They didn't even have a slider for controlling mouse speed, only a numerical text entry. It boggles the mind.

Btw Plasma 5.17 will be released tomorrow, so all the improvements of the last 6 months will be available very soon.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=398713

There is a slider for adjusting pointer speed.

Gnome3 has been such a regression of user experience, I've never had a good time using it.

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.

MATE, XFCE, LXDE and KDE are all better choices.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

.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.

(fwiw: my propensity for installing new DEs and distros in the hope of solving all my problems was what made me leave linux in the first place)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good news. There is. It's called autokey. Its a bit clunkier and crashes occasionally, but it allows you to rebind you application shortcuts.

Finding this made migrating back to linux possible for me.

https://github.com/autokey/autokey/wiki/API-Examples

Oh yeah, that! Lost another five-ish hours to that, and eventually just decided to live with crappy scrolling.

> * 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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

Plan to use this one for at least another 5 years. It's still plenty fast.

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.

There are used MBPs available from various reputable sources. That's my goto at work, when someone's laptop dies.

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.

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.

Not sure how this is worse, than Windows.

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 took you a while to figure out how to drag an app to the trash in the same way that deleting any other file works? =/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

0 - https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/8-powertop/

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).

- 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.

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 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.

This is something that Microsoft were highlighting to Win32 and WinForms developers long before HiDPI screens became commonplace. Unfortunately, it's only recently that the API support has been fleshed out. Compare Windows 10 (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/hidpi/high-dp...) with Windows XP to Windows 8.1 support (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dn469266(v=vs.71)).

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."

Here's a paper about it: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

We do signal processing software in C++ and GPGPU so we like a lot of ram to hold samples. I probably only needed half of it.

I think people who want to compile Rust also need hundreds of GB or RAM....

I have a 4k dell xps 13 and a 2k monitor. I have this script set up to run on boot.

https://gist.github.com/kn100/7193667d393fcf34d4d5c6c359a695...

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!

I hope this helps.

sudo xrandr --output DP-3 --scale 2x2 --mode 1920x1080 --fb 7680x2160 --pos 3840x0 --output eDP-1 --mode 3840x2160 --pos 0x0

DP-3 being my external full-HD display, placed to the right.

If it makes anyone feel better wrt their religion of choice, Mac users have been using scripts in this spirit to force WiFi reconnection on wakeup.

Sent from my iPhone

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.

What parts of Windows do you prefer over MacOS?

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.

What really boggles my mind is how difficult it is to simply get a text string for the current path in Finder - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/252171/mac-finder-...

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.

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).

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>

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.

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.

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.

either way, to each their own.

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!

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.

with something with less functionality and even less logic on where to look for a particular setting?

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.

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...

I've never had Explorer crash so damn much. Another of my least-favorite features is how they group your files by recently used now. Ugh.

Then you have Quick Access, Recently Used, 'Places'....

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.

I agree on all of the quick access, recent etc garbage. I disabled at installs after I finally upgraded to Win 10.

https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

I'm not sure why Apple hasn't added this as a native feature. Hyperdock has had it for years.

I even wrote my own little proof-of-concept version of it:

https://github.com/robilic/DockHand

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).

SPOILER: rightclickwindow'stitle

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.)

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

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.

https://shortcatapp.com/

Apple should have long since sherlocked BetterSnapTool.

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.

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.

Two decades later, and I still can't find as performant or useable a system as that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What fundamental problems?

> 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.

> 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.

> What fundamental problems?

The ones pointed out all over this thread.

* 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.)

For anyone struggling with this, Spectacle is free and open source: https://www.spectacleapp.com

It kinds works good enough, but never great.

Especially with old hardware.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

> 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.

This is exactly right.

Bold claim given Enterprise exclusively uses Windows.

Your opinion might tarnish your reputation

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.

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.