It's all very depressing. Like most of us here, I have become increasingly frustrated with the state of Mac (touch bar, bad keyboards, odd choices that fit neither creators nor developers well, and so on). No point rehashing it all.
But where does that leave us? I spent a year on Windows 10 not so long ago, on upper end laptop hardware with HiDPI screen, and it was less fun and more problem prone than macOS - especially when it came to fast day-to-day stuff we never think about, such as PDF printing, quickview, etc. Plus in Windows you get the mysterious stop-the-world issues (that I suspect are OS level misbehaviors when some remote network connection has become lagged). There may be some use cases where Windows is actually faster/nicer/better than macOS, but they're not non-MS development, Adobe CC work, regular file management work, etc. Maybe games are it.
Desktop Linux (even on standard desktop computers, not just specialized laptops) is far from perfect. Getting everything to work is a lot of effort, and then mysteriously something will stop working. Every window manager has some rough edges or cases where it's unpleasant. Getting and keeping a Linux Desktop in good working order is harder than it should be at this age of Linux.
ChromeOS?... I know some people who use that as their daily driver. Obviously there are desktop apps that they don't need/use (Adobe CC, for example). But what happens when some automated Google thing triggers an account ban? Bricked laptop and no data?
Thing really do not seem to be improving on the whole. Old problems are replaced with new problems, but the layers and separated concerns mean more complexity and more difficulty solving problems.
> Getting and keeping a Linux Desktop in good working order is harder than it should be at this age of Linux.
Maybe because all the developers ran away to Macs, instead of sticking around dogfooding and fixing bugs? Free software is a collaborative social enterprise - it's not really anyone's job to make free stuff for you to use. If, as a developer, you've taken the easy path of proprietary software for years, and now after finally getting fed up of being abused by a company that doesn't have your best interests at heart you return to the world of Free Software only to complain that it's still unpolished - then I'm afraid you are rather entitled, and deserve a serenading by the world's tiniest open source violin.
And make no mistake, the kinds of "rough edges" you refer to are not hard computer science problems. They're broadly just the kinds of everyday maintenance things that inevitably crop up in a huge software project on an ongoing basis and are easily fixed by many eyes and a little graft. The more eyes, and the more graft, the more polished the system.
For what it's worth, Desktop Linux for all its faults is still light years ahead of the competition. Far from perfect, as you say, but it really is the least bad choice. As they say - the best time to rally around Free Software is 10 years ago, and the second best time is now.
I have been dealing with computers since I started CS in school 18 years ago, and well my preferences have been changing since then.
I used to love playing with computers and being able to try different linux distributions even if I had to spend 5 hours to have a usable external monitor (actually spending that time was one of the best parts) but that changed mostly because of my needs, but also because of my economy.
When I had to start being more productive and I could afford it I bought my first Mac Book, and it lasted ten years! At that point I realized that maybe for me it was worth it spending that money and using that time to configure a keyboard doing something else.
I feel I was the target at that time for Apple with some of their products, maybe now things have changed and I am not anymore.
And I guess yes, marketing is what is driving them, but I think they are abandoning part of what they used to be their target and, hopefully, someone will fill that void with something that makes me as happy as when I bought my first Mac Book.
BTW, now I am using a Pixelbook and a Mac Book for my personal stuff and Windows professionally and although is getting worst and worst I will still keep buying them.
While I sympathize with your political position on free software, I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that this point of view is idealistic[1] and short sighted.
The vast majority of engineers don’t commit to switching to free software not because not enough hearts and minds have been convinced yet but because the entire economy and the basis of everyone’s material existence depends on a system that is at this moment market-based.
The popularity of proprietary software stacks is ultimately structural, as are the problems and caveats of proprietary software. Engineers are, in the vast majority, dependent on selling their labor to the commercial employment market for their livelihood, in many cases an extreme amount of labor in a highly competitive environment.
It is absolutely great that many engineers dedicate free labor to contributing to free software, and it is completely unreasonable to expect that anything at all could make the vast majority do it. Not an unreasonable expectation of an individual, but of the structure.
[1] in the sense of philosophical idealism vs materialism
The majority of web servers that serve all the web content that you use are Linux based.
Some of the most popular video games that have massive markets and revenues behind them (CounterStrike and moba games) have all started out as free mods to existing games.
The largest share of the worlds smartphones run Linux.
Twitch streamers, some of which make extremely high salaries, use open source broadcasting software
Python is now becoming the de-facto language of scientific computing, with all the major libraries available for free.
You are greatly discounting how much open source software has affected, and more importantly changed the direction of bought software.
I don't think anybody is doubting about the huge impact of open source in science and technology, is more that maybe linux is still not a substitute for some commercial products
But...it very much is if you are looking at software that falls under the group of "operating systems".
There are use cases that realistically warrant enterprise software, but those stem from the argument of optimization of time - for example, not doing all your computation stuff in python with spending upfront time learning it when you engineers know Matlab. But those are not intrinsic to the software, it just so happens that Mathworks funds universities and pushes their product to be taught in classes, so that they can get revenue from companies buying licenses when their engineers enter the workforce.
If colleges switched to teaching with open source software, this would have zero net effect on the capability/knowledge of someone that graduates said program, because all the material is going to be new to him or her anyways. And, it would also increase the userbase of the software, and thus improve it.
This!. Love your reply. I'm also tired of developers criticizing Linux desktop for not being friendly enough and running away to propietary systems instead of trying to help to fix what they don't like of Linux Desktop. That's the good thing of open source: don't like it? Then fix it and send me a patch and stop complaining. Its not like propietary systems where you only can complain (you can't fix)
Maybe they want to get stuff done, other than puttering around in the tooling. It's a nice option to have, but would be ruinous to productivity.
Also, design by committee rarely produces good UI. You can patch little UI bugs, but if you really want to holistically improve the UI it's a huge undertaking.
Just because you're developer, doesn't mean you want to hack on every tool you use. Software has gotten way too big for that.
I can attest that using free software is not ruinous to productivity - least of all in the field of software development itself.
You don't have to fix every bug you find. Just fix the odd bug, and work around the rest until somebody else fixes it; many hands make light work. But the work doesn't get done at all if you run away to proprietary platforms.
You don't have to boil the ocean. Just do your civic duty from time to time. Once a year, even. If everybody on HN used desktop Linux and, once a year, invested an hour into fixing a minor, polish-level bug, desktop Linux's polish problem would completely disappear.
> You mean like that crufty thing called homebrew?
What kind of problems have you faced with Homebrew? Can you please elaborate?
I use Homebrew all the time and it just works for me out of the box without any issues. I never had to edit configuration files or customize anything to make it do the right thing. It just works.
This attitude really bugs me. Linux is crap because the community around it is dysfunctional and doesn't care about building a working system, not because developers "ran away".
I am typing this on a Mac. I spent years as a desktop Linux user and developer.
For maybe 5-6 years, I invested my evenings and weekends in trying to improve desktop Linux. I fixed bugs in ALSA. I worked on Wine. I fixed bugs in GNOME. I wrote freedesktop.org specs. I did a lot of stuff.
I also watched as lots of other people tried to fix basic problems.
You know what my experience was?
Half the time, attempts to fix things triggered massive flamewars. KDE and GNOME couldn't agree on basic things like how notifications should work; any attempt to come up with a compromise system resulted in the KDE guys screaming and yelling about how everyone should just adopt their own system (which had braindead usability problems). Linux people thought package management was God's Gift to users, even though actual users kept telling them it was awful and they just wanted to download apps from websites. The kernel developers insisted that every driver by GPLd, even though this was incompatible with the business models of key hardware developers, resulting in those firms working around the GPL, ensuring nobody "won". Common distros couldn't play music or video files because of a refusal to pay for software patents.
The other half of the time attempts to fix anything were rapidly undone by pointless ecosystem churn as things were written, rewritten, thrown away, and rewritten again.
There was no coherent plan, no architecture, and competitive evolution turned out to be bad way to create an operating system. Developer experience was a nightmare. Any time something deviated from what was laid down by the original UNIX in the 70s it caused massive schisms and basic APIs split or stopped working.
Linux on the desktop will never be competitive with macOS regardless of how badly Apple screw up their QA because the desktop Linux community is far more dysfunctional.
> That's the good thing of open source: don't like it? Then fix it and send me a patch and stop complaining.
That's simultaneously a good thing and bad thing. It's good because it's possible. It's bad because when everyone is responsible for a platform's software defects, then no one is responsible.
Even if we ignore average users, and just consider developers, the overhead and learning curve is prohibitive. A frontend webdev or even a backend Java dev would probably have a really hard time tracking down and fixing an issue in Xorg or Wayland or in their touchpad driver. The relevant maintainer could likely fix it in a few hours or days if they had the available time and motivation, but the user (who just happens to be a developer in an unrelated field) would likely take many days or weeks.
Even if you match skill-sets -- say a C programmer is having trouble with some GNOME UI issue that would turn out to be a bug in a C library -- you still have a big hump to get over to contribute to a project you're not familiar with. Build system, how to safely test changes on a live system (where the normal software comes from a distro package), code organization and just learning how things work in a new code base, code style, pull request process, review process, etc. -- all of this makes it really difficult to contribute, even if the actual change is small.
I do wish more people would take the time to dig in and scratch their own itches, but I absolutely don't blame them for just wanting to be able to get their work done without having to first fix their OS and tools.
(Credentials: I use Linux as my daily driver, and have gotten frustrated by macOS as a development environment any time I've had to use it as such. I used to be an Xfce core maintainer, a decade ago. These days I mostly do Scala and Java backend dev, and consider myself quite rusty with languages like C.)
Well put! I use KDE nowadays exclusively and all the tremendous progress they showcase here - https://pointieststick.com/ - is very real and exciting. They have made the development process easy and friendly and it really shows in terms of contributions they are getting.
I enjoy reading the progress every week and digging into the bug fixes and review comments! One day I will have some free time to contribute.
I would be very happy to pay $140 one-time price for a fully functional, working Linux desktop environment. Even if it's limited to way fewer hw configurations than a Windows OS. Btw. $140 is the cost of Win 10 Pro.
Well said, no pain no gain. If your not prepared to walk away from proprietary software and deal with the rough edges then you're a captive audience and the creators of the proprietary software have no incentive to improve.
And let's face it, most of these "rough edges" are just excuse making, the sound exactly like the sort of things people say to avoid losing weight, quitting smoking, etc.
> And let's face it, most of these "rough edges" are just excuse making, the sound exactly like the sort of things people say to avoid losing weight, quitting smoking, etc.
In this comment you sound like you're absolutely convinced that linux is the best in every way, and as if linux is a goal, rather than tool to you.
If these rough edges are "excuses" not to use the tool, then how is that not a perfectly legitimate reason not to use it?
This is coming from someone that has linux as a daily driver by the way. I think over the years a lot of these rough edges have gone away, but some are still there. Sound configuration, multiple screen setup or gaming are just a couple of big examples that are still jarring and sometimes don't work right and would absolutely be a turn off for normal users, and a valid reason even for devs to say they don't want this.
People make it sound like these excuses are "entitled" from devs who don't want to contribute, but that just reveals that they think they're entitled to that dev's contribution, which is not true.
> If these rough edges are "excuses" not to use the tool, then how is that not a perfectly legitimate reason not to use it?
Because it gets a little old seeing people reason themselves into a position where they are stuck with apple and it's the fault of linux as the GP did. If only linux were better I wouldn't have to keep buying apple.
If they aren't willing to jump ship then apple has zero incentive to change anything, so they're just stuck and unwilling to accept any way out.
> In this comment you sound like you're absolutely convinced that linux is the best in every way, and as if linux is a goal, rather than tool to you.
It is, at least getting myself off abusive proprietary software is the goal. I can write at length of the problems in linux, but at least I'm not stuck complaining about telemetry and being too lazy to do anything about it anymore. I've still got a way to go in other areas.
This seems perfectly reasonable, and this is for me also part of the reason I'm using linux.
I do however still sympatise with devs and users that simply aren't comfortable making the switch because of these "excuses". I think their position of staying with proprietary software is also perfectly valid- although as you point out, this doesn't help the greater good.
I switched from macOS to Linux [Fedora now] about a year and a half ago, out of the same frustrations that affect a lotta folks --
It took a little while to adjust, but since there are a lot of similarities between the Linux and Darwin command lines [and Linux package management being better than homebrew by my lights] , it wasn't very long before I was like "Damn, why didn't I switch 20 years ago!!!" Plus now my hardware works [edit : and is user-serviceable], is reasonably ergonomic, and OS updates don't break my existing programs...
I agree. And I just did the opposite. Been using Fedora for a year or so on an X1 Carbon and switched to having to use a new 2019 macbook pro for work. I had fond memories of macs when I last used them 6 years ago but today....wow. Not that great an of an experience. At this point for work (eng, devops/sre etc) I'd rather have Linux and I really wish I could use my carbon X1. :(
I see no real adv to dealing with the mac platform today if what you want is a "unix" env. On the Linux of today, the minor annoyances are worth it - and they really are very minor on good hardware and a mainstream distro like Fedora or Ubuntu. Plus you get the tooling on the platform it was developed for - real docker, real pkg mgmt, etc.
Don't get me wrong, there are still some nice things in macos and the hardware (yes the trackpad is nice), but to me they really are not compelling enough args now - at least for me.
Now if only we could get a few of these minor annoyances fixed in the Linux desktop (e.g. Gnome) then I think it might really be the "year of Linux on the desktop" ;)
What I keep hoping for is for Microsoft to announce a new Windows with a Windows desktop & API on top of Linux--a gradual, parallel transition like the decade-long DOS- to NT-based Windows transition.
Since MS seems to have grown tired of trying to "sell" Windows, not sure whether to fight pirates or support them, etc., and is looking to services, most of which run on Linux, they could give "Lindows" away, like Google with Android but with more thought behind it, and create the kind of focus that could get all the things working reliably in a desktop Linux. Other Linux distros could then start with working versions of everything and offer customization options in only the areas that a specific customer segment wanted to manage for themselves.
Spot on re : tooling -- likewise, I too gave up on Gnome early on, and also dislike KDE [too heavy] -- a friend turned me on to LXDE and it's been smooth sailing since
If you haven't tried KDE Plasma in the last year or two, it's worth revisiting. I tentatively tried KDE 4.x back when it was the hot thing, and was disgusted by how it seemed to bring even a top-spec gaming desktop to its knees. Now I run Plasma 5 on my laptop (on Void Linux - I feel that package maintainers make a big difference here), and it's far and away the best desktop experience I've ever had.
I've finally recovered that sense I always got from the Windows 95 shell, that's been missing in every desktop environment until now - that sense of "wow, they've really thought this through".
Agreed. I have always chased my tail when it comes to distros, and when it finally came around to checking out kde (¡again) the plasma version was really an awesome surprise. It still has a few warts, but it's the prettiest/cohesive of them all.
What I want fixed in the linux desktop is IT support. Everything my company does or make works with Mac or Windows, but I can’t even get config values to set for anything else.
I've used Linux several times over the years and the hardware never totally works. I've always had trackpad issues, issues with suspend and hibernate, wifi issues, screen resolution issues, battery life issues, sound issues, driver issues etc.
It 'works' in terms of you can technically do work on it, but you have to make a huge number of concessions and this is before considering it has less application support.
[Edit]: The replies suggest this is mostly still the case, people say it works flawlessly - except for [insert issue here]
Considering that HN is full of programmers and technical users, and literally every time Linux is mentioned people go "I had a problem getting Z working, but I did that and...", "X and Y did not work", "U is not supported", I'd say hit and miss.
Case in point, just from this thread, and from people who say they are otherwise satisfied:
"The worst of my Linux woes were the usual suspend/hibernate issues running Ubuntu on company-provided Thinkpads."
"Suspend/hibernate works on thinkpads with a moderately recent Linux kernel and a bios toggle."
"The only issues I have had is that the sound output sometimes does not automatically switch to/from HDMI when I unplug a TV, and that gnome gets slightly laggy after a really long uptime (its a really weak laptop performance wise)."
"I did have issues setting up certain drivers (i.e. the bloody wifi which tbh is still a bit iffy on my machine) but otherwise it's been amazing."
"actually, on one of my workstations I have a ten-year-old Quadro 4000 that was being a pain in the neck on Fedora 29 -- but the fellows over at LinuxQuestions sorted me out in two shakes."
"I have the latest X1 and almost nobody has a working mic. Also battery life sucks and Bluetoothd always needs a restart after suspends."
"I have a gen 6 and no issues. Is it a 7th gen? BTW what disto? Im on Fedora 30. I would check that you have linux compat turned on in firmware and patch to latest firmware."
"My only Linux laptop was a Fujitsu Lifebook. Turns out laptop manufacturers are garbage at writing ACPI drivers for their own hardware, and so Microsoft has been going around quietly patching them so nobody notices. I ended up having to create my own driver for the lifebook. I cobbled from two other people's failed attempts at making a better one (each fixed different problems) and some fixes from the newest model in that product line. At no point in time did I think it would be fun to write ACPI drivers."
I haven't touched windows or mac os for 15+ years. I definitely recall having to recompile my kernel, tweak default configurations, or hack up broken code to get my desktops working back in the day, but it really hasn't been an issue for at least 7 or 8 years now. One thing I started doing that makes a huge difference is only buying parts and systems that appear on a major distro's compatibility list.
You got me, though, I did have issues with my bluetooth mouse losing connection during suspend on my latest Thinkpad. You could get it working by turning the mouse off then on again, but eventually I fixed it for good with a two line shell script.
Counterpoint is we just issued a shitload of the latest gen x1 carbons (whatever the first gen to get USB c is) and it's all flawless out of the box for Ubuntu. I guess they ship now with a firmware update to fix s3 sleep issues.
Everything on the thinkpad x201 works out of the box with alpine Linux. Considering that’s one of the smaller distros I’m sure the other ones work great (unless of course you run chrome on gnome3 but that’s going to suck even on recent computers.)
Isn't the whole point of OP one giant "it works flawlessly - except for xxx" post? Except in this case, the xxx is a much more seriously negative experience compared to a couple small up-front issues with getting hardware set up the correct way.
It's pretty clear that no OS is going to be perfect; but the message I take away is that Linux is to the point where you completely have the ability to tweak and adjust your system so that it works flawlessly after some effort (as in my case, switched ~1.5 years ago. Zero problems after initial checking of driver situations). On the other hand, macOS, even from a technically savvy point of view, is unfriendly and beyond the user's power to fix.
In my experience most hardware works flawlessly, although admittedly some hardware is better-supported. I've owned two (soon three) Dell XPS 13 laptops since 2013 and have always had a really smooth experience running Ubuntu. The worst of my Linux woes were the usual suspend/hibernate issues running Ubuntu on company-provided Thinkpads.
I've also had to use various Macs for work in the past and have had terrible issues with wireless networking and bluetooth.
"The worst of my Linux woes were the usual suspend/hibernate issues running Ubuntu on company-provided Thinkpads."
I don't doubt that is your experience but I don't know why. Lenovo are pretty Linux friendly and suspend/restore has been a fixed thing in general for years. Maybe you need to update your BIOS.
I can provide you with a very long list of fucked up systems that will, say, not run Windows 10 1903, depending on already installed software and other silly stuff.
I'm typing this on a Dell laptop that runs Arch Linux.
I run Archlinux on a gaming laptop (a Lenovo Legion) and it's perfect for my needs. And everything works! Linux becomes better and more compatible with each passing year. This laptop is a portable development machine with a nice keyboard and a powerful enough processor (I specifically wanted a 45W CPU).
All the "pro" laptops seem to be focused on smaller sizes, and on premium/luxury features and price. I'm glad cheap gaming laptops running Linux are a perfect fit for my use case.
If you are not a gamer and don't need a beefy GPU for development (most people don't), you can also look at more "workstation" grade laptops from e.g. Lenovo (P-series, that kinda thing) or Dell. You'll get a few enterprise features and spec bumps that might be beneficial versus 'gaming' features (e.g.: Xeon, ECC, more NVMe + free slots, free RAM slot, RAM up to 32 or even 64GB).
But yeah, gaming machines always make for great dev stations, whether desktop or laptop.
Some thinkpad models (e.g. 6th gen x1 carbon) didn't ship with bios support for the s3 sleep state. It was added later. Even the ones that were shipped with an updated bios did not have the option enabled (because windows uses "modern sleep"). I don't have a source listing all the lenovo hardware that needs to be configured for proper linux sleep.
I seem to remember borked cifs/smb support at one point being the most painful.
Edit: not sure why the downvote... MacOS, don't remember when, switched to custom cifs network sharing, and it caused a LOT of issues for my workflow at the time.
>[Edit]: The replies suggest this is mostly still the case, people say it works flawlessly - except for [insert issue here]
I count 7 or 8 broadly unconditional "it works fine" child comments. 1 "it mostly works", 1 "I had to write my own ACPI driver", 1 "it works fine except HDMI sound switching isn't automatic sometimes", 1 "drivers were hard to set-up, WiFi is iffy", 1 "it's not perfect so try it first".
IMO that's majority positive - more than can be said for e.g. macOS which fails to do basic things like mount and copy files off an Android phone out of the box.
I don't think your conclusion is a fair one (or perhaps it was premature) and is perhaps tainted by your own negative experiences.
At my last job we had people very happy with linux, with the following caveats:
- they didn’t care about moving it around half a day and keeping decent battery life, for most of them it was effectively a desktop.
- they didn’t care about any CJK support. None of them would be bitching about chinese fonts on japanese pages or worse IME.
- they didn’t need any peripherals outside of screens, keyboards and mices. We had to use a usb dongle to project into videoconf room at a client, I have no hope it would have worked on linux. Printer/scanners would be a nightmare too (and it’s already not good on other platforms I concede)
Linux workstations are plenty usable, thus a lot of positive feedback. But we should acknowledge it’s not for every use case, and it can need tweaking in parts that are different for each user. MacOS with all its current flaws has still a lot of things better done than most (any?) linuxes.
> - they didn’t need any peripherals outside of screens, keyboards and mices. We had to use a usb dongle to project into videoconf room at a client, I have no hope it would have worked on linux.
You can actually buy Linux laptops with not just USB-C, but also USB-A, HDMI, Ethernet ports, etc. As someone with a Linux laptop who has never run into a peripheral issue and has coworkers with peripheral issues with their MacBooks, I'm not super convinced that the grass is greener on the Mac side of this one.
My point was that if you pick the right hardware, you don't even need dongles most of the time on Linux. The laptop I'm this comment on (a Thinkpad X1 Carbon) has a built-in HDMI port, so I can plug into external displays without having to worry about compatibility. Similarly, if ethernet is a concern for you, there are plenty of laptops available with built-in ethernet ports, so you wouldn't need to use a dongle.
For USB-ethernet dongles (even USB-C), I generally expect hardware support to be better (and not require external driver installs) than on macOS or Windows.
That reddit thread is odd, as I've been using the Apple USB-C multi-port dongle to do HDMI on Linux (no config necessary, just plug it in and it works) since before that post was made.
> they didn’t care about any CJK support. None of them would be bitching about chinese fonts on japanese pages or worse IME.
If they did care about CJK support, it's not a big deal. Most distros have CJK fonts packaged up (possibly not installed by default, unfortunately) that are a couple clicks or package manager commands away.
IMEs can be a little less straightforward, but I found adding ibus to an Xfce install to be pretty trivial; just a matter of installing ibus and the input methods I wanted, and then restarting (since GTK, Qt, etc. require environment variables to tell it what IM module to use).
It would be nice if this stuff was set up out of the box, but it's pretty easy to set up, at least compared to other complaints I hear about using desktop Linux.
I agree with you, with small adjustments here and there and some research, linux works decently enough.
Just in this context, we started from a post complaining about having to click into a lot of dialog box every first time something is done, and some stuff that doesn’t synch correctly forcing debugging and some setting reset/resynching. That’s such small potatoes in comparison.
1) For the record, all my Linux machines came preinstalled with Windows;
2) I don't think it's at all unfair to macOS / Mac hardware. Macs used to be great, hardware and software-wise, for development and other "making stuff" type work, and they used to be stone reliable. There's been a real qualitative change in Apple's approach to 'pro' users [for lack of a better term] -- OS updates having more unexpected / unwelcome effects, number and type of physical ports on systems becoming smaller and less practical [not even one single normal USB port on this year's MPB!], user-servicability + upgradeability of hardware diminishing over time to practically zero -- the situation is well bad.
I was a devoted macOS / OSX user, but as I mentioned in the earlier comment, I got fed up and jumped ship due to these reasons, which reasons had real impact on my productivity and contentedness-as-a-user
My ASUS Zenbook (like 3 years old) works absolutely flawlessly. I actually had full crashes on windows, but none on linux. I never thought it would be this good.
The only issues I have had is that the sound output sometimes does not automatically switch to/from HDMI when I unplug a TV, and that gnome gets slightly laggy after a really long uptime (its a really weak laptop performance wise). And I'm a person who gets very annoyed with small issues, I'm just super happy. I have a real native terminal with package management, and a window system that I like, and all software except photoshop.
FWIW, I switched from using a Mac for a decade to using Ubuntu on a brand new Dell XPS and it works perfectly. Even though Linux users are a tiny minority of users, I find they are quite helpful at publishing their problems and eventual solutions. I did have issues setting up certain drivers (i.e. the bloody wifi which tbh is still a bit iffy on my machine) but otherwise it's been amazing.
I'd rather have 100 bugs that I could fix in principle than 1 bug that I just have to deal with because some company thinks it's a feature. And I'd rather be part of thousands of engaged tinkerer types interested in improving the support community than be part of millions that would rather convince me that their expensive hardware is proportionally better instead of actually talking about the tech.
I've been using Linux as a daily driver since high school (15 years ago). Lately though, I have noticed that we Linux types are insufferable in our own ways...
“Lately though, I have noticed that we Linux types are insufferable in our own ways...”
Indeed, but this is the (sour) price of 'victory' too: it means Linux is going mainstream now. Hence, it's becoming more 'popular' with all that entails...
Linux is best 'lived' in professional circles nowadays, imho: specific blogs, forums and channels with solution-driven people. I find myself more and more attracted to the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora space for this reason, too.
Eh. I think Linux is sufficiently fragmented (in this case it's a good thing) that there will always be somewhere to hide if dealing with the ups and downs of the masses isn't your thing.
I like helping people, so if the future holds more software today breaks transparently, then that's more people I'll be able to help.
Right there with you regarding help. One of my pet peeves is to write guides. Even one-offs just to reply to a comment.
I thought you were referring to 'wars' between Gnome/KDE, or against systemd, and we're thankfully relatively free of these popular sports in more professional circles.
If you know Noah Cheliah (podcast Ask Noah, formerly from Jupiter Broadcasting), that's my kind of guy. Up there with the pros, but always willing to go out of his way to help anyone, no questions asked, newbies very much welcome. A great steward of the community imho.
I recently built a home media server/PC and decided to try Manjaro. Amazingly, everything worked out of the box. I actually had a Ubuntu live USB ready to go in case I hit issues, but now I’m in love with Manjaro + KDE :)
The hardware/driver situation is unambiguously better on Linux than it is on Windows. I've had ten times as many problems on Windows over the past ten years or so than I've had on Linux. (never been a serious user of OSX, although I imagine it's better than the situation on either Windows or Linux because Apple controls both the hardware and software)
The problem people run into is that they fall into one of two shitty extremes. You either dive into the deep end and try to configure your own kernel and forget something. (Common in Gentoo circles) Or you go with Debian stable or RHEL and their kernel is two years old and they don't have drivers for the latest generation of graphics drivers because of course they don't. Just install Ubuntu like a normal person and you'll be fine.
Problems with WiFi, trackpads, and hibernation haven't been a problem since like 2010 or so. I get 11 hours battery life on my XPS 13 9360 which advertised 9 hours battery life when it was new in 2016.
> people say it works flawlessly - except for [insert issue here]
This is a thread about how OSX works flawlessly except for [insert issue here]. And as it happens there are a pile of issues this time around. If you have a house that doesn't have stones thrown through its glass walls (besides TempleOS) I'd love to hear about it.
As the comments below suggest [and I also run Thinkpads for portables] -- yep, it works real good for me. Fedora 30 especially has been essentially flawless in my case. No issues with suspend, drivers [even for notoriously fickle stuff like printers], sound, etc -- just solid performance.
EDIT: actually, on one of my workstations I have a ten-year-old Quadro 4000 that was being a pain in the neck on Fedora 29 -- but the fellows over at LinuxQuestions sorted me out in two shakes.
>I've used Linux several times over the years and the hardware never totally works. I've always had trackpad issues, issues with suspend and hibernate, wifi issues, screen resolution issues, battery life issues, sound issues, driver issues etc.
I have a dell XPS13 that came pre-loaded with Ubuntu. It works perfectly out of the box and the hardware quality is fantastic.
I've always specifically selected and researched my hardware before buying. Typically Thinkpads are a good bet - I've used several different generations of The X1 and T series with no problems. I'm currently using an X1 carbon that has great battery life, suspends properly, handles external displays, etc.
I have a gen 6 and no issues. Is it a 7th gen? BTW what disto? Im on Fedora 30.
I would check that you have linux compat turned on in firmware and patch to latest firmware. Also running tlp helps depending on the distro. I get good bat life, mic works fine and no BT issues after sleep/wake.
this is not true on the 6th gen. I don't know about the 7th gen though... if it is true on 7th gen it would be a shame.
Although traditionally lenovo has done well with linux, I will say this is where Dell does this better - actually certifying and supporting some of its laptops on linux for devs.
My only Linux laptop was a Fujitsu Lifebook. Turns out laptop manufacturers are garbage at writing ACPI drivers for their own hardware, and so Microsoft has been going around quietly patching them so nobody notices. I ended up having to create my own driver for the lifebook. I cobbled from two other people's failed attempts at making a better one (each fixed different problems) and some fixes from the newest model in that product line. At no point in time did I think it would be fun to write ACPI drivers.
I uploaded it somewhere so nobody else would have to deal with this bullshit, but you still had to recompile the kernel to get the new version to override the firmware.
At the time they were still talking about how Linux was going to take over the desktop, while the early numbers were already in that laptops were killing desktops. Linux is taking over the server room, but it's essentially nonexistent anywhere else, and it truly has earned that honor.
Newer distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora tend to have much better hardware support than other distros. I've used Linux since Ubuntu 7.04, and hardware support has made leaps and bounds since then.
That said, it's still not perfect, and warrants a trial on a throwaway hard drive if absolute hardware functionality is a must.
As long as the 38 step install process works. ;-) I tried, it locked up trying to load the GUI, specifically 5.3 kernel installer for navi support. Wound up reverting to Ubuntu LTS, will re-evaluate in 6 months when things for my hardware stabilizes.
Done the install manually several times and it is crystal clear what you have to do once you understand how Linux works from boot to the OS. Of course not recommended for beginners and those who have no interest in how the internals work.
Sorry to hear it did not work for Navi, was the wiki any helpful to understand what goes wrong?
Not really... pretty much started loading, then hard locked... couldn't navigate (ctrl-alt-f#) to a usable terminal, etc. At that point, I'd been through several failed attempts and just jumped to Ubuntu LTS, since it's supported by AMD, and dealt with the wifi and onboard audio not working.
Started with Pop!_OS with 5.x kernel (5.2 fir wifi drivers, though not using it). Onboard audio also weird, the UI would show for audio out, but alsamixer was needed to raise "headset" to control the port. When I upgraded to 5.3 and dropped in the lib files for navi10, it booted with the card swapped but stuck at 1080p (on a big 4k screen) after messing with it, I couldn't boot to a gui, but was still able to use the terminal. I decided to give Manjaro architect a try (since you can choose your kernel) that gave the same issue that Arch itself seemed to... hard locking during boot.
I would like to know more, but at some point, I just want to get work done...
Emailed this to you... including here in case anyone else is curious.
------
My hardware:
* Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master
(RGB header connected to Thermaltake fan controller)
* Ryzen 5 3600 (waiting for 3950X)
* Corsair CMW64GX4M4C3200C16 Vengeance RGB PRO 64GB
* LIAN LI PC-O11 Dynamic Razer Edition (USB RGB Controller)
* GIGABYTE Radeon RX 5700 XT GAMING OC
* Creative Sound Blaster E1
The USB sound blaster is mainly because of issues I was having with onbuard audio. I had originally installed Pop!_OS and upgraded the kernel via a few versions, through 5.2 for the onboard wifi (intel ax) drivers. It was when I dropped in the 5700 XT that I had more issues. I was originally running an RX 570.
After I borked my setup, I'd decided to give Manjaro Architect a try, since I could choose my kernel... I saw the same issue that I did when I did an Arch proper setup, with the latest iso as of last Sunday 2019-10-06.
It would boot and hang, loading graphical ui... The keyboard was completely unresponsive.
I was since able to install Ubuntu 18.04.03 LTS and the release drivers from AMD... I didn't bother updating the kernel as I'm not using wifi or onboard audio. I think one of the onboard LAN ports also was never setup, I think I'd need extra drivers for that too.
Thanks for your time... I'm thinking of adding a couple SSDs to test other OSes on, and put Windows on one as a fallback over the weekend.
Ubuntu 18 on carbon x1 extreme. Really smooth, until I do anything special.
Never got external monitor working. Just had issues with my wifi yesterday that persisted through reboots and randomly worked after I booted back into windows and then linux again (dual boot). Lost hours of my life trying to get any combination of browser + smartcard reader to work with two different card readers.
Sleep/Hibernate still don't work properly all the time. Sometimes my laptop decides to do the right thing, and I pray it doesn't undo itself and drain the battery in my backpack.
Literally all I use on a daily basis for the past 5+ years is:
- Terminal of some sort
- Browser (Chrome, Chromium, Firefox)
Really just want a stable OS that stays out of my way, and never pushes shiny new features, only performance and security patches. But the responsiveness of browsers on linux turns me off every time I try to switch (feels sluggish).
Also, I like the MacBook hardware, battery, aesthetic. Just been falling out of love with the OS for the last few years as they seem to be semi-combining it with iOS. Due for an upgrade and have been eyeing the latest MBA... but the OS is getting super annoying.
I’m in a similar boat. I keep really wanting to like Linux; I give it a try, and then get annoyed that for some reason my terminal process is causing my browser UI to lock, or some such nonsense. Sometimes it’s just that there’s no dictator keeping all the keyboard shortcuts relatively consistent between applications. Then I’ll fantasize for a little bit about OpenBSD or FreeBSD, sigh, and go back to using macOS.
I like futzing around with my operating system, but I expect my changes to make things overall worse for the general user, because I have weird preferences. The OS should not be doing the weird preferences.
Sometimes I wonder about Linux users who say you can’t customize macOS. In my experience, it’s a lot of the same kinds of customization potential and rooting around in the system...updating the OS may totally mess up your configuration, but the same is true of updates in the Linux or BSD world.
I tried and failed to get going with OpenBSD. I want to slowly dip my toes into the water of a BSD. Is there a way to have a turn-key system that I can immediately start working on as I do on macOS, and gradually become more familiar with the OS?
I guess what I’m saying is, there are systems that you can buy where the manufacturer has preinstalled Ubuntu and you have a high expectation of the hardware getting out of the way. I want that for FreeBSD or OpenBSD?
Yep! I dig FreeBSD also, and strongly considered it especially for that reason -- just ended up going with Linux because I had a little more experience with it [having remotely used / administered linux servers &etc]
Just don't buy hardware that is too new. X570 platform and rx5700xt, and issues a plenty. Not to mention absolutely abysmal RGB support from hardware vendors.
It's frustrating because it's the "least worst" option.
I use MacOS because it has a thoughtful, consistent, coherent, beautiful user interface and desktop environment. The things I use all day are basically a web browser, mail client, code editor, and terminal. I can do actual work on any BSD really, there is no proprietary app that causes lock-in, I don't use iCloud or any of their services.
All I want is their desktop and core system apps. If Apple stripped down the OS back to Mac OS X Snow Leopard standards, and charged $129, I would pay for it.
If there were an equivalent desktop environment for BSD that replicated the MacOS desktop environment, I would pay money for this. Charge customers to hire full time designers, developers etc.
That is definitely the most frustrating thing about all of this over the past few years. Even with a customised Windows 10 to get rid of the nonsense nobody wants and adding what is missing to even work on the damn thing it's still not as 'least worse' as macOS. It's almost like all commercial OS development moved towards STB's and mobile and nobody gives a crap anymore.
I'll probably still stick to macOS on my mobile hardware (Linux and BSD on the fixed machines, embedded and servers), as it is still least worst, but I miss the feeling of high stability and productivity you would normally get when you work on your machine and don't have to touch any of the other flavours.
Right now, all any other vendor has to do (besides the create-a-BSD-desktop) is good hardware integration. Because that is more effective than people might think. Even with the whole butterfly crap the whole package deal is unbeatable. The only time I ever had hardware/firmware issues was back in the 90's where OpenFirmware got sad because one of the data lines of the ROM was corroding and the SMU would reset every boot making sleep unreliable.
Having a machine that has a good hardware-software relation down to the firmware and no weird double powerons or a bunch of stupid splash screens, one where you can just add your tools and work, it's the best thing. It it used to be exactly that when you got a Mac... any Mac, even if you don't get a powerful one. It always works the same way, it always delivers consistently (unless you break it yourself), always stays out of the way so you can do what you actually came to do.
Yes. Snow Leopard was the greatest OS release of all time!
I actually went to WWDC 2008 when it was announced and they handed out CD’s for it — no new user-level features — just a hardened OS (grand central station and kernel level threading and stuff under the hood was changed).
Sigh. Marketing now rules the world. Look new emoji’s!
What makes the MacOS UI so much better than say Gnome or Enlightenment? I personally can't stand most of the Mac UI experience, however, I am very curious what you (and others) love about it that cannot be replicated on a different OS?
I get it, for some people it doesn’t matter. There is zero difference between xfce (Gnome, Windows, etc) and MacOS.
But for some people, they have used MacOS since OS X 1.0 (or for me, System 7) and there is a particular "Mac" way of doing things. There are expectations and standards for how the system and user interface should work and respond.
Perhaps you could attribute this to baby duck syndrome. You could also attribute it to people having different mental models for the world, there are clean desks and messy desks, different cataloging systems. There is something for everybody. For people who like Macs, everything else seems like a clumsy intolerable mess.
There are themes and hacks to make systems "look" like MacOS, but they fall short of even remotely functioning like it.
Font rendering for one. It's really nice. IME, text quality on a Linux desktop varies even between applications, depending on what toolkit they happen to be using.
That might be true, some apps just don't follow standards well (on MacOS too btw, there are old and ugly UIs from third-party vendors all over the place).
But when you're living between a terminal, editor and browser, and fonts are perfect on these 3 (or whatever else you use)... it's hard to justify using a lesser and more expensive platform, just to correct the 1% of the time some app doesn't look great.
In fact, if we speak 'consistency' in a functional way — not disturbing the user's "flow" while working — I'd argue that bad or extremely limited UX the likes of Windows and now sadly MacOS too (by comparison, and because it got worse in the last five years) is a much bigger problem than font rendering, for most workflows.
Case in point if you really care you can fix font rendering for pretty much every app (and select aliasing parameters like strength and RGB ordering to conform to your external displays panel type and pixels 'pitch'; whereas MacOS or Windows will be hit-or-miss with some models and you just can't help it). Haven't needed to on Ubuntu or Fedora, but I know as of 2017 Arch let you apply general font rendering settings over GTK and Qt, and you can use terminals like urxvt to fully control such things.
I think MacOS fails very badly at basic window and file management. Finder is still broken. Not being able to preview an open application by hovering on its icon (as in Windows) is a big productivity bottleneck. Minimizing/maximizing is plain confusing - why does the window sometimes take up the whole screen and sometimes only fill up 1/2 the real estate?
Things are worse than ever before. Mac OS stability has taken a bit, but it’s not like Windows machines have gotten better. Windows 10 is still a total clusterfuck when it comes to switching between a high dpi internal monitor and an external monitor. The other day my X1 Carbon started randomly powering down (but not hard looking, controlled shutdown, even installing updates). It rebooted four different times in one evening.
Things are just bad now that Steve Jobs is dead. We just have to get used to that.
> Windows 10 is still a total clusterfuck when it comes to switching between a high dpi internal monitor and an external monitor
I really think this must depend on the hardware; Windows 10 switches between monitors fine for me, on multiple laptops. Indeed, I only actually have a problem with this on MacOS, where my MBP even crashes on occasion when switching to external displays.
I have a Windows 10 laptop with 150% scaling on the built in display, and 125% scaling on the monitor I plug into; both high DPI. Whenever I plug in or unplug I get treated to 5-10 seconds of seizure-like moving and resizing of windows, and some blinking of the displays. It usually doesn't get things right, for example windows that were on half the screen will be neither on half nor whole, or they'll be slightly off where they should be but mostly right.
Honestly this is the real reason I’m excited about System76...I don’t really know them or their products, but they have a coherent “passion of computing story,” and PopOS looks pretty. I have no idea if it’s just marketing. I’m just hoping that it’s good, that they’re legit, and that they will do well.
I've often wondered why we have so many luxury brands in automotive, furniture, what have you, a couple in consumer electronics, etc. Even woodworkers have 2 or 3 high end brands that people drool over. And then for computers it's just... Apple, and a revolving list of second place. Sony, Samsung, Alienware... none seem to stick it out.
When it comes to graphics, Windows is now far ahead of macOS. It's simple economics: the GPU manufacturers work with Microsoft for DirectX support due to userbase (especially the game playing userbase, which is where all the profit is). Apple, on the other hand, struggles to keep up with Metal on the same GPUs, unwilling to invest the money to keep up. DXGI, for example, is an extremely powerful and well-supported API, as compared to IOSurface which is like stumbling around in a dark cave.
(On mobile, things are different, but even here PowerVR is increasingly looking beleaguered compared to ARM and Qualcomm's offerings.)
You might want to try the Dell XPS 9380 Developer Edition that comes pre-loaded and configured with Ubuntu 18.04. I switched to it from a 2015 mac laptop I had been using. Set up was pretty easy and everything just worked out of the box. It's also nice that the performance per dollar ratio is better than a new macbook pro.
My only complaint is that the trackpad is a little small for my hands, but the sturdy keyboard with real function keys more than makes up for it.
Eh... I've been on Ubuntu 18.04 for about 1.5 years now on my Dell Precision 5510. Zero problems, all hardware works out of the box. Suspend and hibernate still works flawlessly.
Do you have any tips for getting the touchpad to work well? Mine picks up palm touches and the only solution I've found is to disable the edges of the touch pad.
The default Synaptics driver works well enough for Palm Rejection. In the beginning I had some outlier registered touches while typing but disabling touch-to-click seemed to completely mitigate that. Drivers might have gotten better since then but I don't really know since for about a year I set the touchpad to disable when I use my M570 Wireless Trackball.
> to work is a lot of effort, and then mysteriously something will stop working.
Oh Please. this lie keeps getting repeated every single time this topic comes up. Meanwhile people who actually use Linux every single day have like zero issues for years to keep things running and working. I have 4 machines using different flavors, getting updates all the time and nothing mysteriously breaking, and this for years. Sure, you will always find the one user saying the exact opposite but among all the Linux users I interact with this is not the norm.
Sample bias? Linux users are people who aren't sufficiently bothered by Linux's flaws or don't encounter any flaws due to their HW / usage patterns. Same as any other OS.
To say the parent poster is lying is a bit much. You have know idea what kind of stuff they're trying to do.
> Desktop Linux (even on standard desktop computers, not just specialized laptops) is far from perfect. Getting everything to work is a lot of effort, and then mysteriously something will stop working.
For a counterpoint:
I have had less issues with my Linux setups than with Windows for 15 or so years and I use both for the same:
- development
- mail, timesheets, documents
- small amounts of gaming once in a while (mostly causual matches on CS:GO)
I believe that others have problems with Linux but generally it has a highter tendency to work well out of the box than Windows has.
Also, as mentioned elsewhere, the most annoying thing about Windows is how it "stops the world". It is only milliseconds but for me it is maddening to wait for a high end 2019 PC to respond to keyboard input.
Usually it is driver issues and usually I get it sorted after a few weeks or months but it should be unneccessary for a stock Dell or HP machine. (Protip: don't ever use consumer or prosumer editions, not even XPS, always go for the the pro models.)
It is depressing, but I'll tell you which of those options is actually actively interested in developers and enthusiasts: Linux. Give it the effort that people spend buying exactly the hardware Apple says to buy and then installing (or writing) apps that fix MacOS's clunky window management - and Homebrew, for that matter; consider where it's going as well as where it is; and I think you'll find something for you.
I've come to accept that most OSes are inevitably broken in different ways. OS X has always broken my dev environment on every update. So over three years ago I switched to a ThinkPad X1 Carbon with XUbuntu and have no issues other than having to change my DPI when I connect/disconnect to a non HiDPI screen. Then I recently built a gaming PC with an AMD CPU and an Nvidia GPU, which did not go as smoothly with Linux: I had to install experimental Nvidia drivers, audio is a little wonky, and sometimes the wifi doesnt work and I have to restart. But overall I'm quite happy on XUbuntu and it gives me fewer problems or annoying prompts than Mac OS or Windows ever did. For gaming I use Windows of course.
Interesting you mention Adobe CC as being better on MacOs. For the past couple of years I've seen most people mentioning that Windows is better/faster for these apps.
I moved to Arch Linux a few years back. So did wifey but she doesn't care about what OS she uses. We both use KDE <thingie> for a Window Manager, Libre Office and Evolution (Exchange is involved). Printing is of course CUPS, which is lovely and simply works. Lots of other things installed from the one set of repos.
KDE allows you to "lock" the desktop icons/widgets in place. That is a feature that is sorely missing from all other WMs (Mac/MS/ int al) and for me is a killer feature. Some of my end users have a habit of smearing icons (launchers) all over the place.
Desktop Linux is way better than say Desktop Windows (by OP metric). Updates take a few minutes rather than hours in some cases. Fixing things does not involve sfc /scannow but then neither does that work on any Windows box unless it has spinning rust and loses power regularly without battery backed cache.
I update my wife's laptop via SSH when she is using it and I throw a reboot job at it out of hours via cron.
My wife is happy with what she needs to get to - Facebook, email, some odd Flash games on FB and a few other things. I'm sure that Mac and Windows sysadmins can all say the same (I'm those as well.)
My main job is web development and I'm not using Linux on the Desktop for any political/ideological reasons, I'm using it because it gives me the best experience.
Desktop Linux for me is Ubuntu 18.04 on a ThinkPad T450s and it's currently my favourite daily driver (we have a 2019 MacBook Air at home I share with my partner and a Windows 10 machine for testing websites at work). I can't think of the last time I had any problem getting anything to just work - the T series ThinkPads are well known to work with Linux so YMMV with other brands/models but I just happen to love the ThinkPad form factor and design so I'm super happy.
It sucks now having the Adobe CC suite available on my primary work machine but more and more we are using Figma for any digital design related workflows and it's wonderful.
Regarding Apple laptops, I was holding onto a 2015 MacBook Air until I upgraded it for the 2019 model because it was meant to be the latest-best Air... MacOS, iCloud integration and the keyboard has been disappointing to say the least.
>Desktop Linux (...) is far from perfect. Getting everything to work is a lot of effort, and then mysteriously something will stop working.
Couldn't disagree more. Gnome took a bit of tweaking but it has been performant, stable, and exactly what I want. I recently changed jobs and am forced to use a mbpro. I hate it. It's slow and painful if not impossible to customize.
The only real tweaking that you need is for anything aesthetically. Most of the stuff works out of the box. Granted I can only speak for my hardware, as I am on Intel/Nvidia, whereas AMD/Radeon and Linux have not always played nice with each other.
And also use a MBPro at work. The amount of issues of that I had with it surpass any windows laptop, most notable of which how the usbc port will just stop working, needing an SMC reset, and the laughably long startup from shutdown time despite having an SSD.
The notion that Mac can do hardware or software right is laughable. I guess people forgot the $1000 monitor stand.
Idk about your experiences but I've been using Linux Mint for over a year now and it's just been working smoothly out of the box (better than Windows even). The only part where I had some problems initially were graphics drivers but that's only because I messed with them unnecessarily.
> Getting and keeping a Linux Desktop in good working order is harder than it should be at this age of Linux.
I use desktop Linux as my daily driver (personal and work), and generally have very few problems. I hear so much grief from friends and colleagues who are running macOS and have so many issues. I really don't want to be "that guy" who obnoxiously pushes desktop Linux, understating its usability issues for average users, so I decided to log some of the issues I had over time.
I realized that the failures on Linux, while fewer, were usually much worse: the things that fail on macOS are either annoyances that can be ignored or worked around, or things that can be Googled and fixed (for the most part). There were certainly sometimes failures on Linux that followed that pattern, but there's another class of failures: when things failed, they failed hard. Once, I rebooted after some kernel and Xorg package updates, and Xorg just hung on startup, logged nothing useful, and only responded to SIGKILL. I did manage to fix it, but the average user would be completely lost, and, to make matters worse, would have no GUI to use to search for help on the web. They'd probably end up having to reinstall and hope for the best. That's not acceptable; that might have been a common recovery step with Windows back in the 90s, but people expect better now.
The distinction is that macOS failures are overwhelmingly solely of the type that frustrate and reduce productivity. It's very rare to run into something that grinds you to a complete halt. While desktop Linux has come a long way, and I'd (unscientifically) say there can be fewer frustrations than on macOS, there are still enough hard-stop, my-computer-is-a-brick-now failure modes to make it unsuitable for most users.
you can't just buy any hardware. I'm sure Ubuntu and other distros publish a hardware guide. I have a Thinkpad T490, tried out Manjaro, Suse, Fedora and ended up settling with Kubuntu | Budgie. No hiccups. Everything works out of the box. I have 40gb ram, something I could never get on the current generation macbooks. Keyboard is excellent n trackpoint. only bad thing hardware wise, are the speakers. I also have a Retina macbook pro 2013 personal. and use a 2015 Macbook pro for work. My old job I used the 2018 macbook pro, a shitty computer, that I would compare to my 2012 Dell inspiron, in terms of shittiness. Forgot to mention my thinkapd dispaly is 500 nits 100% ARGB. KDE has fractional scaling to handle DPI displays.
I am using a slightly older version of MacOS on an older MacBook Pro and everything is perfect. My keyboard works. My OS works. My apps work. I have USB-A ports, even an SD card reader!
Apple seems intent on driving the Mac off a cliff - both hardware and software, but for those of us who have not upgraded in the last few years, the good times are right now.
I'm going to keep my MacBook Pro maintained like a classic car until something better comes along.
it's far from an ideal solution, but the only thing that keeps me sane is to have different computers for their strengths.
For example, one of the author's use cases is "Because I’m an idiot with reasons, I have a python daemon that launches as root via launchd." - i shuddered just reading this, i'd never attempt to do that with anything other than linux. but chromeos is perfect for my little laptop i keep in the living room to check my email on. i was also happy using an iPad for the same thing. My software dev machine is a linux desktop, but if i needed a work laptop there's no way i'd put linux on it.
maybe one day there will be an OS that i can use for all the things without complaint, but right now that doesn't seem to be a reality, and i've stopped pretending it can be.
That’s your problem, stop looking for a windows/OS X replacement. The ideas are fundamentally broken; a lot of them are built around pushing you toward just consuming things from other people.
But where does that leave us? I spent a year on Windows 10 not so long ago, on upper end laptop hardware with HiDPI screen, and it was less fun and more problem prone than macOS - especially when it came to fast day-to-day stuff we never think about, such as PDF printing, quickview, etc. Plus in Windows you get the mysterious stop-the-world issues (that I suspect are OS level misbehaviors when some remote network connection has become lagged). There may be some use cases where Windows is actually faster/nicer/better than macOS, but they're not non-MS development, Adobe CC work, regular file management work, etc. Maybe games are it.
Desktop Linux (even on standard desktop computers, not just specialized laptops) is far from perfect. Getting everything to work is a lot of effort, and then mysteriously something will stop working. Every window manager has some rough edges or cases where it's unpleasant. Getting and keeping a Linux Desktop in good working order is harder than it should be at this age of Linux.
ChromeOS?... I know some people who use that as their daily driver. Obviously there are desktop apps that they don't need/use (Adobe CC, for example). But what happens when some automated Google thing triggers an account ban? Bricked laptop and no data?
Thing really do not seem to be improving on the whole. Old problems are replaced with new problems, but the layers and separated concerns mean more complexity and more difficulty solving problems.