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Comment by laddng | Hacker News Reader

I've had a good, satisfying run with MacBook Pros, but now I'm stepping off the Apple train. I understand that Apple is trying to go in a new direction with the new MacBook Pros, and I won't complain about it. I am now simply moving to an Arch Linux setup on an old Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 to continue living inside the Terminal.

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A couple years back, I was (increasingly un)happily using Mac OS X on a MBP. I made the switch back to a Free *nix and a tiling window manager.

While it's gotten some eye-rolls from tech friends, the UX of my current system is amazing. I have an almost vanilla Xmonad configuration, combined with dmenu, and passwordstore / dmenu integration. It simply rocks.

I anticipate soon starting a new job with a firm that has more or less standardized around Apple hardware. I find myself kind of dreading going back to a Mac. I may decide to be "that guy" and ask for something like the Thinkpad Carbon X1 in lieu of the standard issue equipment.

Ask.

I was given a Macbook, and thought I'd get used to it, but I couldn't. Basic stuff is broken, like maximizing a window. Focus-follows-mouse doesn't work properly, and multiple windows from the same application are broken -- I'm not sure what the "correct" way to switch between multiple Firefox windows is, but it's clunky.

Linux on the Macbook can probably work if you're determined, but I'm (obviously) not a fan of Apple hardware. It was much easier to take a spare Dell desktop -- which has twice the RAM and a better CPU than the Macbook.

Standard way to switch between application windows is command-backquote. (cmd-`) Works great.

It does work great, meaning that it reliably executes the intended functionality correctly. My problem is that the intended functionality is not what I want. I have lots of terminals, Emacs windows, browser windows, etc. open at any given time, and I want my window manager to be agnostic to which is which. When I signal "focus next window", I want that to both jump between windows of an application AND jump to a window of another application, whichever is next in the focus ring. You can't (easily at least) do that on a Mac.

I installed https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch to get this behavior (it even has thumbnails of the window), but ideally you would have that option out of the box indeed.

BetterTouchTool is also a handy way of dealing with the lack of a maximize option. Also provides window snapping, which can be quite useful.

Yes!

I've spent so much time in my ion3 setup (now notion..) that changing things is just silly, and I'm so glad I don't have to. Open source code lets you continually port forward what you care about, because you have access to the source code.

I'm on something like 14 years using it? It's just awesome to me that everyone else is off inventing new ways of managing windows, and I'm here pressing F3 to run a program like I always have.

Xmonad is pretty wonderful, even in vanilla. Excellent piece of software!

Any chance you're willing to share your config with me? I'm really tempted to get a carbon.

I really feel most Linux distros were made for developers and development. Whenever I try to do things on Windows and OSX I get insanely frustrated with the amount of friction. It's nice to have an OS that trusts you and lets you make mistakes.

I had that problem with Linux where I wanted to be able to seamlessly use my Wacom pad with a decent graphics editing suite... oops no, it's terrible. Mainly because the environment for these tools is proprietary and there aren't enough graphics people in the Linux market to support it as a platform.

So... mac it still is. Windows is looking better these days.

When was this? Wacom drivers come built into Ubuntu now. I use my tablet with MyPaint. I agree that the graphics suites could be better, but it works for my not-so-artistic pursuits.

The last I tried it the baseline works. All of the buttons, wheels, pressure sensitivity, tip angles, etc... not good.

Just want to re-iterate it's not Linux's fault, it just doesn't work well as a proprietary platform. So if your program needs art assets you'll have to get them elsewhere. And if you want to deploy on Mac or Win you'll have to have one of those anyway... so shrug.

I like programming on Linux for sure it's just not there as a personal OS. And I used to run a very stripped down, customized Arch distro... on a desktop PC. It never worked well on any laptop I've owned and required too much hand-holding with rolling releases breaking things occasionally.

UNIX developers.

Windows is quite a nightmare for any time of compiled code in my opinion.

All of the Microsoft 'stuff' (anything in Visual Studio) works okay but once you start installing python or node modules, forget about it.

I remember the click finally happened when I spent an afternoon installing package after package to get a node module to compile on Windows. When I installed it on OS X, it just installed... I didn't have to do anything.

I installed Ubuntu that night and never went back (except to play games because WINE is just ehhh)

True story, tried compiling a node machine learning thing.

After 3 hours on Windows, I just brew-installed the damn thing from github on Mac and it just pulled all the dependencies.

I'm feeling the same way. Clearly Apple doesn't care about the same things I do. The Pro is supposed to be for power users, and the touch bar to me feels like it's built for casual users(keyboard shortcuts for people who don't know keyboard shortcuts. I use almost no built in mac apps, so it's unlikely that I'll ever use it. It's just one more thing to raise the price and one more thing that can go wrong. Combined with the fact that I'd have to get a dock or a dock/monitor and things look super unappealing at this point. But they shaved off 1/2 a pound! that's better than having useful ports, right?

I'm not suggesting you do this, for legal reasons blah blah blah, but putting together a hackintosh is pretty easy these days if you really like osx.

How easy is it to maintain? Last I heard every update breaks everything.

nah it's not bad. Sometimes you just need to reinstall the same audio kernels, etc (depending on your hardware). There are many guides to find compatible hardware

link?

It’s not. You’re pretty much stuck on a static OS unless you want to spend hours dealing with various problems each update.

I used a hackintosh for a year for development. It took a day to setup, which is of course a lot more work than for a typical osx experience. However, once setup it was better than the mac pro I was using. Might have even been more stable. Upgrades were a bit of a hassle, but not horrible.

If you can run Linux not sure what's the ultimate benefit of OSX (from a pure development standpoint).

I moved from Linux to OSX a few years ago. The smoothness of 3-finger swiping between full-screen windows and just the smooth UI / build quality of the Macbook is what I liked the most. Also the battery life!

I am now considering a Hackintosh. Don't want to put in too much time maintaining it though so still not sure about it.

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