I thought Liquid Glass was cool & interesting when I first saw it in the Developer releases, but I find myself yearning to go back to Sequoia. Hopefully, Apple decides to go back to "simple" soon.

My kid dumped a glass of water all over my MBP M1 a few days ago. Deciding between an inferior M4 with Sequoia or a fancy new M5 with Tahoe has been rough :/

If it helps, I've been using XFCE since 2007 and it's remained functionally identical for all of those almost 20 years. It just works, it improves a tiny bit with each major upgrade, and they don't rearrange everything every couple years for the sake of justifying a salary.

Maybe it's a good opportunity to consider whether you actually have to keep running on Apple's treadmill.

I’d love an XFCE (or even gnome tbh) environment on a properly built laptop, unfortunately only Apple is able to build something that works in all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.

FWIW that all worked out of the box for me on my Intel Framework. But yes, it's fair to say there are tradeoffs for each solution. Maybe Apple's cons are getting big enough these days. Worth considering.

I have an oled thinkpad running fedora that has never had a sleep issue. Excellent touchpad as well. Thinkpad X1 Carbon.

Which version? I have a X1 Carbon from, uhh, 2017? It supports S3 sleep. I'd think about an upgrade, if only I wasn't worried about sleep issues. I run Debian if that makes any difference.

Actually now that I think about it, my visceral reaction is one of dread: a feeling the trouble will be more than the benefit of a new computer.

For me the touchpad experience is not just about the hardware. I got a Magic Trackpad for my Linux desktop hoping that it would at least be somewhat comparable to my MacBook. But scrolling and gestures are nowhere near as consistent and fluid as in macOS since the software support just isn't there.

As a fairly typical example, getting Firefox on Linux to actually scroll smoothly takes googling and fiddling with settings. Gesture support is hit or miss. On macOS, Firefox behaves just like any other native app in this regard.

Firefox on Fedora on X1 Carbon and scrolling just works. Maybe it was different in the past.

This was a few weeks ago. IIRC, the issue with Firefox was not that it didn't scroll but that the scrolling wasn't inertial unless you changed some settings.

If you “fling” the page, lift your fingers off, and then tap with two fingers, does the page come to a stop?

Just tested - it does indeed.

My Magic Trackpad feels more consistent on Linux, Force Touch notwithstanding.

I have a thinkpad p1 with popos, but it doesn’t sleep properly. Closing the lid causes it to be super active. I have to lay it down up side down so the ventilation gaps are not blocked, otherwise it overheats. Burned one SSD this way.

Did you buy this from system76, or did you just install Pop!_OS on hardware you already owned?

Installed it myself, it’s not a system76 but a Lenovo thinkpad.

Fixed it with the help of claude, it quickly helped me diagnose the issue and fix it. The drivers for the discrete nvidia graphics card had suspend disabled. Enabling it enabled automatic suspend when closing the lid.

> all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.

All of these seem to be fine on my thinkpad (true, I probably have somewhat lower standards for passable display). Battery life sucks a bit, what I can usually fine outlet somewhat to plug into.

> unfortunately only Apple is able to build something that works in all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck

In my case I'd add:

- Chassis that doesn't flex like crazy

- Battery life good enough that I typically don't need to think about AC outlet accessibility

- Can sit in standby for upwards of a week without battery drain forcing it to shut down

- Is inaudible except when maxing out CPU or GPU for several minutes

- Has a screen panel with a resolution that's either 1x or 2x UI scaling native

The number of laptops in the market that check these boxes is disappointingly tiny.

I don’t see anyone in these replies really addressing the touchpad. Would love to hear from people who have used macbooks if they have found a Linux machine that matches the Apple trackpad.

“Never tried a MacBook, my Linux machine trackpad always worked perfectly” is the usual response I get when I press for a response… but without trying Apple (on this one thing) you’ll never understand until you’ve experienced the downgrade.

> but without trying Apple (on this one thing) you’ll never understand until you’ve experienced the downgrade.

I don't doubt you find something special about the macOS trackpad experience, but I've used a Mac every day at work for 3 years and I genuinely don't feel any more or less fond of its trackpad than I do the one on my Framework laptop running Linux. They're both trackpads that do trackpad things. Shrug.

Thank you, this is the sort of response I need to take framework seriously. I asked because had genuinely never found anyone who could make an honest comparison (I used Linux in pre macOS days but that was a decade ago).

Do you use a mouse most of the time? That’s the other variable I wonder about. When I used Linux I found it normal to plug in a mouse whenever possible, but when I switched to macOS and got used to the trackpad I stopped using a mouse or keyboard, even if I’m plugged into a bigger screen.

On my Framework, I only use the trackpad, don't have a mouse for it. My work mac laptop lives on a desk so I mostly use a mouse for it, but also use the trackpad plenty when I head to a conference room for meetings etc.

One thing you might've missed in the last decade, is Linux relatively recently gained a new click mode that works like macOS does. One finger left click, two finger right click, two finger scrolling, etc.

Since it's Linux, it is very configurable and may not be enabled by default depending on your distro.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/clickpad...

https://smarttech101.com/libinput-fix-your-linux-touchpad-us...

However, more user friendly distros will hopefully(!) do that configuration for you or present a nice UI to enable it.

I switched from mac to linux for my personal dev machine 5-6 years ago but kept using macbooks at work until recently. The keyboard and trackpad are slightly better on macs in my experience, but the difference is small enough that I never think about it.

One caveat is that I've never been a power user of trackpad gestures, so if that's central to your workflow I can't say how the platforms compare.

Overall I'm immensly happy about dropping Apple for Linux, it was definitely the right decision. The initial migration takes a bit to work out but the beautiful thing with Linux is that if you don't like something enough you can usually find a way to change or fix it; with Apple you're left screaming into the void.

only slightly better? really?

Around 2018 I used a Mac at work and a Dell XPS at home and I had zero issues with the trackpad on the Dell. It was a bit smaller than the Mac's, but I actually preferred that because it was so large I'd sometimes move the mouse accidentally. Back then I thought PCs had finally caught up with Mac trackpads, but was extremely disappointed when the next XPS had one of those trackpads that is just integrated with the laptop cover (it's like a touchscreen instead of a pad inside a cut-off, if that makes sense). My guess is they changed for the aesthetics, but it was so bad that I returned it. I haven't used a good trackpad on a Linux PC since that Dell.

I’ve combined my MacBook with a Linux desktop for about five years now. Linux has its pros as a developer, but IMHO daily driving it is like walking around with pebbles in my shoes.

Something as basic as scrolling feels slightly inconsistent in just about every app and keybindings are all over the place. There’s always the allure of getting the config ”just right” but after a while I swear I start seeing Sisyphus’ reflection in my screen.

What DE are you using? Some of the higher profile ones (Gnome, KDE) try to be all smooth and polished and feature-full and in my opinion just introduce more complications and bugs that get in the way of just being a good desktop. I like XFCE because it's just a really good, simple window manager, desktop, and set of basic utilities. Other than that it just gets out of your way and doesn't make you relearn how to do things every few years. It's like if the Win98 desktop got another 30 years of gentle refinement.

I’ve tried XFCE, i3, Pop Shell and plain Gnome.

But it doesn’t really matter, since the DE doesn’t determine how individual apps behave.

My baseline is OSX from decade ago OSX with native apps where everyone was following the Apple HIG so consistently that using a Java app felt like waking up in the twilight zone. macOS these days have fallen quite a bit from its UX glory days but there’s still quite a bit to go before it hits the level of Ubuntu or Windows.

On Linux it feels to me like every app exists in its own parallell dimension where you never know if even the basic laws of physics still apply.

Fair. I guess I haven't had that experience, but so much stuff is web-based these days that probably 90% of my computing time is just spent in a browser and the rest in just a handful of applications that I know well.

I'd guess that I am unusually picky about UX for being a techie. The story would probably have been very different 20 years ago when fiddling with my computer was more of a hobby than a chore.

Yeah, could be. You mentioned elsewhere in this thread having to tinker a bunch to get scrolling in Firefox to be smooth and I don't even know what that means :) I just put 2 fingers on the touchpad and move them up and Firefox scrolls the page down and I'm happy, haha.

Anyway sounds like you've already done what I suggested and it didn't out work you. I hope for your sake Apple comes to their senses soon!

I'm completely with you on this. Everything from scrolling to how windows behave makes a huge difference in the feeling of quality and responsiveness.

Once you're spoiled by a macOS machine's smoothness, it's hard to use anything else, where cursors feel like they're literally lagging behind your trackpad movements and land somewhere imprecise, and scrolling feels like opening a rusty car door as it catches on itself and you feel the friction.

macOS on an Apple Touchpad is like using a well-oiled machine by comparison. These things really matter!

I'm in the same position and understand your complaints about the lack of uniformity across applications in Linux DEs. But I use the Linux desktop as a daily driver because I absolutely despise the lack of customization in macOS, especially as it relates to "virtual workspaces" or "virtual desktops." In Linux, I can have multiple different desktops, each named intuitively, and each with its own set of applications. In macOS, I can't even _name_ the virtual desktops. What's more absurd is the "logic" around when an application has focus when it's minimized, and how its window behaves when you Cmd-Tab to it. Utterly exasperating that Apple, a company who has long prided itself on HCI, falls so far short of the mark in intuitive interface behavior.

”Intuitive” means very different things to different people. Personally I don’t see anything intuitive about having named workspaces. In my desktop where I have a 42” screen I use pop shell with tiling and unnamed workspaces. On the MacBook I’ll just use fullscreen and exposé. Even though I’ve used the concept for decades I still do not find floating windows to be ”intuitive” except for dialog and similar transient UI.

> dumped a glass of water all over my MBP

I believe that's how the designers at Apple came up with Liquid Glass

Liquid Glass is not that bad lol.

Neither is an M4 Pro.

There could be hope for it, but it might be too late now. I dumped tea on my M1 Macbook air earlier this year. I managed to save it - sort of. I had to replace the battery. The screen was working but also had liquid damage so I replaced it as well.

Immediately after spilling tea on it I shut it off, took off the bottom plate, rinsed it with water, and rinsed it again with isopropyl alcohol. I think I waved a heat gun over it for a bit and then left it in front of a fan. This was about 8 months ago and it still works!

The only lingering problem is that when caps lock is off, the light on the key is slightly illuminated. Weird, but I can tolerate that!

”What doesn’t kill your only cripples you for life” best describes its state. I did my best to dry it up ASAP but when I flipped it over water started pouring out of the rear fan grid…

TouchID no longer works, Bluetooth reception is shit and various keys feel sticky/crunchy. I’d keep it as-is if it wasn’t my main work machine.

are macs m5 out? can you wait that long?

The base M5 is available for MBP 14”. The M5 SSD is almost 2x as fast and single core performance is 10+ % better.

The issue is that they cannot be downgraded to Sequoia. So one has to decide on what’s preferable - a step up for HW but a step down for OS or vice versa?

One would hope that Tahoe improves with time but considering the trajectory of both macOS and iOS I fear that it will take years to resolve the UX and bug issues if it ever happens.

wow thanks i somehow missed that.

I like to disable SIP and gut my Mac OS but i know that's not a very safe choice

Eventually it will go away just like brushed metal, lickable, green felt, and woodgrain. Unfortunately for that to happen they will need to invent something so heinous you will wish for liquid glass.

Personally I would be down for a return to woodgrain or brushed metal.

I was going to reply "Susan Kare's bitmap pinstripes or bust" but based on this interview [0] that was Andy Hertzfeld.

0. https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/intervie...

It’s infuriating that you can’t downgrade.

Especially when Sequoia will be supported by security updates for at least another 1-2 years. There aren't any compelling "gotta have it" reasons to upgrade to Tahoe.

Work is forcing us to upgrade to Tahoe end of January, not looking forward to it.

My workplace's dumbass outsourced IT group forced the upgrade the day Tahoe came out, without giving us time to assess the risks for software compatibility or stability first.

Companies need to make it optional until security updates are no longer available for the previous major version.

eh, the problems aren't prominent on macOS.

Just keep giving Apple more money. That'll show them!

How is using an already paid for computer giving more money to Apple?

They treat you belong to community, and use your appearance in hidden ads as "just another consumer choose A.. products".

Even if you will intentionally hide all logos of A.. from A.. products u use, their design is very distinctive and widely known, so even looking on Xiaomi most people will think it is A..

Plus, A.. products usually deep integrated into their infrastructure, I mean A.. Wi-fi router, A.. printer, A.. speakers, A.. interfaces (Lightning), etc.

Simple market economics, really: the more people sell their Apple computer, the more supply there is, ergo its value will decrease, and the relative value of the brand with it. You are doing the inverse of this.