Switching from macOS: The Basics
blog.elementary.io
blog.elementary.io
That was when my $9000 Mac Pro — which had been a great machine, and still was, except for the little detail about not having been updated since 2009 and thus being stuck with USB 2 (!!!) to say nothing of Thunderbolt and any kind of modern accoutrements — started to feel like a personal affront, a sneering fuck you directed at not just me, but everybody remotely like me. (Wow!!! Déjà vu bro!!)
Nevertheless, I didn't switch then, and all of us complainers won't switch now either.
Because the fucking OS.
I've tried every iteration of Ubuttnu, CentOS, and FreeBSD since. Even OpenWhatever, before the goblins bought it. I have Thinkpads and Dell XPS "Developer Editions" and a drawer full of other crap like that.
Executive summary: it's all garbage time. It's like going back 10+ years. Nothing works right, on any of them. Copy/paste, batteries, wireless networking, drag and drop, high-res displays, multilingual input, even like fucking word processing and email and image editors and terminal programs... it's all like Mac OS X Jaguar level.
We can't give Apple the finger, even though we want to (and definitely after last week, we all want to) because there literally isn't an OS in the world that can touch Mac OS for general-purpose workstation/laptop use. (For niche and limited-purpose, yes, there are options.)
Elementary OS is a fucking joke. Every OS mentioned disparagingly above is a better choice for almost any purpose. But those are still horrible.
Apple's OS advantage is what lets them say "Fuck you peons, here's some 3 year old technology and a bag of dongles, that'll be $4000."
But we're mostly all gonna buy the new shitty MacBook Hipster, or gut it out with our old ones, until a better fucking OS happens. And that won't be soon — it's not even remotely on the horizon.
They could simply point out all the things that you can do on Windows that you cannot do on macOS because Apple will not let you.
Although I did use a Mac as a workstation for a couple years ~ 2010, and found that particularly trying, so that may factor in to how people receive my assessment. It was close to what I wanted, but still far enough away to just generally annoy me by not being configurable enough to actually do what I wanted.
e.g., for my uses, I am constantly running into 'rough edges'. Huge swathes of /proc are missing, which breaks a lot of tools I simply expect to work. As an example, I have a very simple script for tooling with my raspberry pis. It does an ipv6 broadcast ping (ff02::1) on my ethernet interface, and ssh's to the address that returns. Nice easy way to solve the chicken & egg of sshing to a device that has no address configured yet.
On 'Bash on Ubuntu on Windows', it fails because I can't use the -I(interface) option with either ping or ping6 - setsockopt(SO_BINDTODEVICE): Protocol not available. (and you can't broadcast without that, because the broadcast address is the same on every interface, so it can't figure it out itself).
Then I can't list my own IP address, either the new way (ip addr show - SO_SNDBUF: Invalid Argument) or the traditional way (ifconfig - /proc/net/dev doesn't exist), which was my script's other requirement - because if I broadcast on my own interfaces, I'll also reply to them, so I need to know my own address to exclude it from the replies.
Most of this may be very situational, or may be me doing things the wrong way, and may not affect what you expect to run on a linux subsystem. But it did hammer home for me quite quickly, that this isn't a unix environment - it's a very shallow veneer.
The OSes are miles behind though.
I have a Dell XPS Developer edition - I definitely think it's a step in the right direction. I agree with you in terms of screen and build quality. The battery life is mediocre at best. The trackpad isn't terrible but it's certainly not something I'd compare to my MacBook (even a 2010 model). OS complaints aside, mac trackpads really stand out.
The Dell XPS laptops have got one thing going for them: relatively good build quality. They don't feel or look cheap, which already puts it ahead of most PCs in the market. Just walk into your local Best Buy and see the junk they are selling to people.
From my experience the most recent Dell XPS 15" has several issues, but I'll mention the two object and non-anecdotal issues:
- They suffer from "coil whine," which is when internal components resonate and cause an audible high frequency noise. It is super annoying, and a huge disappointment for a ~$2k purchase. Even the new Dell XPS 13" which just got refreshed with the new Intel Kaby Lake processors still suffers from this, which shows Dell didn't care to fix a widely documented issue that has been known for a long time. Just Google "dell xps coil whine."
- The 4K screen has way too much glare, and they quickly strained my eyes. The low resolution version don't suffer from this, but I imagine most people are getting the 4K touch display.
I won't get into the Mac vs Windows vs Linux debate, because you won't be enjoying the XPS with buzzing noises and glares in your eyes with any OS.
Ater wasting time with the Dell XPS, I went and happily paid the Apple "premium" for the 2016 MBP. And don't get me started on Thinkpads, they are simply not what they used to be.
> MPB is a pretty bad value
You show me laptop with the level of hardware/software integration as a MBP, and a no-BS *nix desktop experience, and I promise you I'll be the first one in line to buy one.
The only thing I can think is that it's really difficult and expensive to iron out all those little hardware bugs.
I don't think Lenovo's efforts lived up to the glory of the Thinkpad line, but I will give them credit for the X1 Carbon. Though the Carbon only comes in a 14" model.
From an industrial design standpoint, the Surface Book is fantastic and demands respect. I bought the Surface Book when it first came out, and that thing was always overheating, which is a no-go for something trying to be a tablet/notebook. It also suffered from various issues when it launched. Microsoft actually asked Best Buy to stop selling them for a brief moment while the issues were fixed.
I feel Ubuntu could have been there if they had continued their effort to create a rock-solid Gnome 2 experience instead of starting to copy Mac for no good reason (dock, window decorations, alt-tab handling etc).
Now Ubuntu has lost a few years of development time and what once made a hardcode KDE fan like Gnome now feels completely alien to the point where I have stopped even testing the LTS releases.
Honestly if you put together fancy slides in Keynote, it might work (though Beamer is still nicer). I even managed to set up the email client and read emails occasionally when my workstation was rebooting. After two years I asked for a laptop with Linux and nicer keyboards and I couldn’t be happier.
Can you be more specific? i.e. - copy paste with a highlight+middle mouse button is frankly awesome in GNOME.
- Batteries - yeah, Windows laptops usually don't have amazing battery life and it can even be slightly worse under Linux, however if you're working in a mode where you laptop is 99% plugged in and you just need occasionally a couple of hours from it, it's quite doable, which I'd imagine is the use-case for most "workstation" usage scenarios.
- wireless networking - works great if you're willing to do a bit of research before buying, instead of just dropping Linux on any garbage PC and expecting it to work flawlessly, (why won't you try that with macOS and report back?)
- drag and drop - that seems... highly unlikely, unless you're dragging/dropping from/to some weird, wrapped wine port that doesn't communicate with your desktop
- high-res displays - not as good as macOS, but works quite well in GNOME 3 and improving all the time, (far better than Windows)
- multilingual input, even like fucking word processing and email and image editors and terminal programs - things like multilingual input work well, word processing works well, but certainly there's no MS Office, (which isn't that great on a Mac either), there's no Photoshop, but I find it strange that Krita, GIMP etc. won't suffice you for many tasks, mail works well and terminal programs work amazingly well as well. In addition gaming on Linux is now miles better than on macOS, in addition to the far superior customisability and superior package management, not to mention not being under the will of a single company that does whatever it feels like that day, which matters to some.
Oh my gosh, this is my least favorite thing about using gnome! I accidentally paste all the time and can't turn it off particularly easily. Very sad.
I'm only picking on this to illustrate the point: things are hacked together at almost every level for a workstation. This is why "The Year of the Linux Desktop" never happened.
In stark contrast, I am much, much happier with Linux as a server machine than as a workstation, and prefer it to any others.
As a counter-example: Much earlier versions of Windows had a menu in the top left corner. The shortcut to close a window used to be double-clicking in that corner. In Windows 7 (not sure about 8 or 10), that menu button/icon is gone. Of course, you can close a windows with the X in the right corner, but the old shortcut still works even though there is seemingly nothing there.
I can't remember where I read this, but I always think of it when it comes to UX design:
Always have more than one way to do the same thing in a UI. Users will pick whichever works better for their worklow.
The windows X is more of a backwards compatibility thing I imagine, because it makes no sense to have an invisible menu in the top left corner.
Tap twice and drag on the second tap to select.
Tap with three fingers to paste.
Don't use the buttons.
Unfortunately, it turns out this usage pattern is terrible for the battery.
If you let it sufficiently (not fully!) discharge at least once a month, I don't see why it would be particularly terrible for the battery, what am I missing?
I've been using my laptop battery for about three years with exactly this pattern, and what once lasted ~4 hours on a charge now lasts about 25 minutes.
Paste is Ctrl+V in your browser, in your notepad, in your IDE, but it's Ctrl-Shift-V in your terminal.
Now copy a bunch of IPs from your AWS page into terminal to ssh into them for an hour or so.
Fuck that shit, I'm getting a second mortgage for the MBP and a set of 19 dongles.
Why doesn't Linux track actual hardware proved to be compatible. Each year the same 'bit of research' with no guarantees at all. Oh, wait, Linux does not — because it isn't a Product.
Sure it does [1]. The "bit of research" involves finding out if your desired machine has one of the many chips known to work flawlessly, which shouldn't be a problem, unless you don't mind what you spend your money on and just buy impulsively.
There are also chipset manufactures which are known to be more friendly than others, for example almost any modern Intel Wireless chip will work just fine.
Even for generally unfriendly OEMs, you can find amazingly clear documentation [2].
> Oh, wait, Linux does not
Again, you just asserted stuff without any evidence, see above.
> because it isn't a Product
Not sure by what definition of "product" you're going by, (if any), but you can absolutely get commercial support from a number of companies i.e. Canonical, RedHat, SuSE and even Oracle if you so desire.
[1] - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WirelessCardsSupp... [2] - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/broadcom_wireless
"Product" is at least a site like easylinux.com, where you see that in late 2016 you can buy compatible X,Y and almost compatible Z (bios-only fan control), and in 2015 there were A,B,C, and in 2014 D was the best choice. Please click on direct link, torrent or ftp to download a distro image that already contains all the specific drivers and software.
Obviously, I'm unable to provide any evidence for something that doesn't exist.
I am afraid you'll find the Linux of today is much different than a decade ago.
In regards to known working laptops, you mean something like this[1], this[2], this[3] or this[4] ?
Also you can just buy from [5] or [6] and have Linux preinstalled with all the correct drivers.
[1] - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:Laptops [2] - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_(2016)#XPS_... [3] - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HP_Spectre_x360_ap012dx [4] - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook [5] - https://system76.com/laptops [6] - https://www.entroware.com/store/laptops
And honestly you can just ask the community on Reddit/IRC/Distroo forums etc. about their experience with the model you want to buy, is that really a problem if you're a "Pro" user spending serious money on the machine?
It honestly just looks like you're too lazy to look. Or maybe you just made up your mind and refuse to budge even when provided evidence to the contrary - I honestly do not understand why you engage in a discussion then, you've already made up your mind.
I'm watching local linux community for years despite not using it, and from what I see, Arch and blah-blah-wiki are still no Products. Curious if you really use this Arch and selected hw by its wiki, or you just googled for me, writing from ubuntu on 10-year old thinkpad. Locals can't really tell what to buy, because virtually everyone except those having ancient thinkpads have at least one issue. Some sit with charger always attached, some can't sleep, some have crashes because nvidia-blob, some because nouveau-blob, others just bought macbook and have no problems trolling linuxoids from osx.
5-6 seem to be not presented in my country.
I can spend some money on recent notebook (but don't get that 'serious' and 'pro' arguments, because we talk about regular user and regular hw) after just your hype, but what an idiot will I feel myself when it will lose wifi too often or fail to sleep on close. I understand you, arguing for linux on desktop is hard, because desktop is still few% of enthusiasts. Statistics prove it all.
Arch has been rock solid for me for 5 years. You just seem to repeat stereotypes.
> Because it is just words without any customer review or experience.
The words have been written from experience.../head against wall/
> still no Products.
WTF is with this "products" - every Linux distro is a "product", even the kernel is a "product" if you will. I told you if you want professional support pay Canonical or RedHat, but you shouldn't need it if you have basic comprehension skills.
> Curious if you really use this Arch and selected hw by its wiki, or you just googled for me, writing from ubuntu on 10-year old thinkpad.
I indeed run it on VERY modern HW and am typing this from [this baby][1] and even run my home server on Arch, because it's been super stable for me, (on [2] if you're interested...)
[1] - https://www.obsidian-pc.com/en/portatil-clevo-p751dm2-g [2] - http://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/nuc/nuc-kit-nuc6i7k...
> Locals can't really tell what to buy, because virtually everyone except those having ancient thinkpads have at least one issue.
Buy any Clevo or a Dell Dev Edition or even a modern HP laptop and you'll be fine.
> others just bought macbook and have no problems trolling linuxoids from osx.
As someone who has to use a MBP for iOS dev, I'll be very careful with the trolling, since there was no release of macOS since 10.6 without major issues, including Sierra. Not even talking 10.7, which was worse than Vista.
> I can spend some money on recent notebook (but don't get that 'serious' and 'pro' arguments, because we talk about regular user and regular hw)
You do what you will - we're talking about a pro here, because this is a post in context of people being disappointed with the newest MBP not being Pro enough for the "Pros".
> what an idiot will I feel myself when it will lose wifi too often or fail to sleep on close.
You have NO IDEA of the irony of this - my 2015 MBP randomly looses WiFi every second day or so, google, "macbook pro loses wifi", it as I am far from alone.
> arguing for linux on desktop is hard
It is in some ways, but I don't care what OS you run and have no desire to "convert you ", I just want to disprove the perceptions that were true a decade ago and have long since been resolved.
Just to give an example of how frustrating this is, i.e. "I tried PulseAudio in 2005 and it sucked, PulseAudio suckzzz!", yeah, it's 2016 and it no longer sucks, in fact it's pretty awesome.
The battery lasted about three hours, the $300 graphics card did not function at all because of poor drivers (graphics switching is still theoretical on even user friendly linux os' because of dark age xserver)
I had to spend two weeks to get the wifi working by messing around with conf files
The concept of hardware/software integration seems to evade the general purpose computing industry to the detriment of us all, I am not sure why someone hasn't built a tightly integrated linux laptop yet.
At this point the GUIS look pretty decent and there is plenty of software (most people only use browsers anyway) we just need to get the basics working well.
It's a known issue, and that's not all. When the machine originally launched there were huge problems with the audio, the trackpad, the bluetooth, and the screen brightness control.
You don't have to buy it. I did... for $1100, and now it mostly sits on a shelf. I had to go back to my MacBook Air to get multi-modal work done. I can use Linux as a primary machine if the only thing I ever use is Emacs. The instant I have to venture across different applications and different modes of content creation (docs, code, slide decks, etc.) it's a very bespoke and inefficient experience.
Also I don't understand how something can be bespoke and inefficient at the same time. With MacOS, you learn the Apple way, with Linux you have the freedom to create your own workflow. This freedom is what stops Linux from being a noon friendly OS, and frankly, I am happy about that.
Also. I definitely do not have "the freedom to create my own workflow". No amount of my trying, including digging into window manager, UI toolkits, and application code for KDE, GNOME, or Xfce resulted in my being able to provide consistent keyboard shortcuts across the board. So I wasn't able to get to a point where I could use 30-years of muscle memory and predictability in and across the UX to facilitate my work.
I'm not a noo[n]. I'm a distributed systems engineer and functional programmer.
This "Linux is open source, so it can do anything!" trope is really annoying.
Linux offers a lot of pick your own adventure style options for everybody. Yes, it takes a bit of time to get used to it, but so does getting used to the cmd/ctrl abomination in Macs. I don't see people complaining about that.
The only application that by default violates the normal keyboard shortcuts is the terminal and even that has menu options for changing them to what you like. I don't know what application doesn't respect common shortcuts to break your muscle memory but I then I am not a distributed systems engineer so what do I know.
Very useful, intuitive UX, Alfred like functionality out of the box, very nice UI (not just for linux, for anything!), productive workflow, and gets out of your way when you need to get things done.
I still have to find a hardware replacement with a great keyboard, solid trackpad, killer battery, and great display, but my OS concerns are finally resolved.
Edit: Repo with screenshots: https://github.com/varlesh/Arc-Dark-KDE
But it would be unfair for me to blame Apple's OS for most of these faults.
It's worth pointing out that Apple is the odd one out when it comes to modifier keys. Switching between Linux and Windows, alot of the keyboard shortcuts remain exactly the same. Going from Windows to OS X is a really frustrating from that aspect.
I find this two-dimensional switching incredibly useful for multitasking, whereas Windows just flattens all windows to the alt-tab list, which quickly becomes overwhelming if you're a power user who doesn't like to close windows.
In some of my workflows I jump back and forth between programs a lot. Example (not everything I do is this tedious : ) Alt + tab, tab, ctrl + shift + end, ctrl + c, alt + tab, ctrl + v.
When I was on Mac it felt like this would break down multiple times a day: CMD + tab, oh wait, another Window of the same App, that means CMD - tab to go back, then something I have forgotten, possibly CMD + | on my keyboard back then, then the same insanity next time.
Basically for someone like me who works quick but has lots of things to keep in mind this breaks down immediately.
I don't want to stop and think if this is another Window or another App, I just want to go back to that second last thing I worked on.
As I said, I have to believe you guys actually like it but for me this particular (mis- IMO)feature was one of the main reasons why I will ask nicely to get a Windows or Linuzx laptop instead of a Mac.
In return I ask that you believe me when I say that I haven't come across one of those jarring font issues that Mac people complain about in Linux. My touchpad is good enough, - I try to use my keyboard most of the time anyway etc etc.
You should be all set. I've used it for years because I also prefer Windows' flat window switching.
Also, only $14--less than the price of most dongles. ;)
Of all the OS X criticism, this is the most absurd. Command, Control, they are all arbitrary choice, why even whinge about it. Is like going to France and complaining everyone speaks French
>> a sneering fuck you directed at not just me, but everybody remotely like me.
You overpaid 8k for a machine so why should Apple care? You are clearly going to buy their next product.
>>But we're mostly all gonna buy the new shitty MacBook Hipster, or gut it out with our old ones
According to Netmarketshare stats at least 2% have abandoned OSX since May 2016.
When I go into a brand new elementary installation to try it out, and I can't set the proxy, i shake my head and wonder how anybody can take this OS seriously.
Not even that the proxy setting didn't work, I actually couldn't set it in the GUI, it would just wipe my setting.
Yeah... linux is not perfectly viable, its a mess.
oh. well, as long as that's been cleared up.
And that right there is the problem. Laziness is a good thing, it means the software is being more useful. And you should encourage complaints and fix the problem, which can only make things better for everyone.
Is there a problem attracting quality graphic designers to open source projects?
In my opinion, there is no reason the design can't be made to look better while still maintaining the familiarity (like OS X mavericks did, for better or worse).
FYI there are macOS compatible PCI-E USB 3 cards available. Apparently some of the newest USB-C PCI-E cards work too though I haven't tried it myself.
You apparently have a strong preference for MacOS. Lots of people do, but many people dislike it. IMO, there isn't a clear winner.
Works with laptops too, just be super careful what you buy. Might work on a Thinkpad P70, not sure.
I'm still amazed at your impression though, as I'm happily using Linux on my laptops and feel like everything works as it should (because I can get my work done).
But believe it or not, people exist that prefer other operating systems.
I myself am a gamer as well as a developer, so my primary OS at home is Windows 10. My secondary one which I use for development and writing is Ubuntu 16.10. I recently began abandoning Mac - not because the OS is horrible or Apple is a bad company, but because it no longer syncs with my personal flow. Well, that, and I can no longer justify the pricetag.
So while I haven't tried Elementary, I'd be astonished if it's any better at interoperability than Ubuntu...
Among web devs Safari is considered "the new IE" (which among web devs is probably the lowest insult)
TL;DR avoid Safari. It's rubbish.
Specifically, dragging images from your browser to the finder works the first few times, providing an overlay image which becomes a file icon as you hover over the finder window. A few transfers later, the file icon stops appearing. Then the semi-transparent image stops appearing; though the files are still being copied. Then, silently, the copying starts to fail completely. Not fun.
Sometimes I can't drag attachments out of emails (which is about the only damn reason I don't use Mutt for everything) on the first few attempts; I thought for a while it was because the attachment hadn't completely downloaded, but no, it doesn't seem to be as predictable as that.
Moving files around in the Finder in general seems problematic, especially dragging between directories in the list view. This often causes much cursing.
The worst thing about Macs for me now is how much guff pops up entirely unbidden - messages about not having done any backups in 90 days, messages about an update which hasn't been able to be completed (but has caused iTerm to try and quit, which, in itself, causes a dialog to appear that I need to get rid of), iCloud approval nonsense (which also happens on both of my iPhones periodically), iTunes Store requests that I may or may not have made days ago that have failed with an unknown error, etc. The list goes on. I'm sure all of these things in isolation are very clever and should help improve my life, but in toto it's immensely frustrating.
I switched to AwesomeWM a while ago, and the first thing I changed in the RC is that it replicated Gnome's automatic/endless workspaces behavior.
Of course that is highly subjective, but i always thought that going for a window hunt everytime you have to switch context is pretty backward, and I can't figure out why even the more sophisticated Apple users I know won't use workspaces for their benefit. On Windows, I get it - if only because that sort of workflow was impossible without special tools before Win10.
Does anyone have thoughts on this? Is this a "culture thing", or is it because users that switched over from Windows never even thought of the workspaces feature?
In fact, if you subtract the gazillion of little 3rd party tools you have to install to make Windows usable, the actual OS is a disappointment, and if you can use those tools you still have to install them through a wizard - by hand. Microsofts dev tools (i.e. Visual Studio) also seem to suffer from the same symptoms, although that seems to be changing slowly.
One could argue that you have to install many tools via a package manager on other OSes, but at least, you get most of them (neatly organised) just by trusting one source (Canonical, Debian, whatever).
Right now everybody is using Macs. Walk into the Bay Area coffee shop, you see Macs everywhere. I love that.
I build desktop software for Macs (focuslist.co). My apps are prettier than any others. They are easier and faster to use. This is the reason why people pay me $5 while they can get the job done with paper and pen.
This is thanks to Mac as a platform. Mac developers don't want to just get the job done. They want to get the job done while winning an Apple Design Award. That's why Mac apps are the best.
Take Mac away and high quality desktop apps will go away. We'll have to endure multi-platform Electron stuff. Ugh.
Well... no. Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE; they are all high quality desktops. Don't mix the desktop with the applications you're running on it.
> We'll have to endure multi-platform Electron stuff.
Now that is indeed a real issue, and yes, ugh.
Edit: I've misread the original, sorry, so adding a few things: if you're using the default apps or the ones built for that specific environment only, you're good to go with GTK3, QT, whatever. The trouble comes when you mix these, but that is true even for the MacOS. Personally I really dislike the approach of Chrome, not giving a s* how it _should_ look like to look at least a little native.
So much so that most developers using or targeting elementaryOS integrate their design really well.[2] For those that don't but still use GTK3, they also integrate quite well out of the box.
GNU/Linux doesn't have desktop stack capable of matching Objective-C, Swift frameworks both in feature set and related GUI tooling.
Still use GNU/Linux on my travel netbook and of course, some of our servers run it. Last time I used Qt in anger was 5.3, while trying to do a mobile project that I eventually ported to pure native APIs.
Do you know of any other frameworks, besides those that cover all of these ones?
https://developer.apple.com/reference/
Not to mention the related GUI tooling.
Where is Instruments on QtCreator, for example.
The GNOME project itself [1] has a lot of projects which compete with what you linked. Sure, Apple has a few billion dollars to dump into development every year, so you have to adjust for scale.
Once upon a time, around 2000-2, I did some minor contributions to Gtkmm.
Do I like it when things are pretty? Sure.
Do I need them to be pretty to get shit done? No
Not much in that department, either. Nothing that beats the proprietary software staples, especially for creatives, that I happen to use: no Cubase, Pro Tools, Photoshop, Premiere, etc. Lots of apps ranging from "close but no cigar" to "why even try?".
I care about CLI tools developed for macOS and Windows in mind, that take advantage of the respective OS APIs.
I know that is what drove me away.
Most just want a window manager for xterms.
Designers get bashed because they don't know what people want.
Performance on GUIs gets bashed, because what matters is doing xterms over remote X connections.
Glances at 2nd and 3rd monitors
Well I can't argue there.
GTK+ is no competition for these APIs:
Because they don't care about stuff like GUI. And it shows.
I'm going to leave it there before the mist descends, but basically as far as I'm concerned Apple couldn't design a paper bag without fucking it up.
Where Linux sucked was in the distros' constant "improvement" of core features that weren't broken in order to be first past the post. For example PulseAudio was introduced before it actually worked with most hardware configurations, and nobody cared about the cool new features it came with. Ubuntu deciding to adopt KDE4 before it was ready for general release was another stupid decision. In fact, I'm basically talking about Ubuntu and Gnome.
Qt alone exceeds the feature set, has more GUI tooling, and is multi-platform. That's just Qt, and the same could be said for GTK. I'm not slinging mud at Obj-c and the frameworks Apple maintains, but they are not unique snowflakes without equal.
https://developer.apple.com/reference/
I can find tons of entries without parity in Qt.
And their current trend to invent a different flavor of JavaScript every few releases, no thanks.
It looks great in screenshots, but the feeling is much inferior, a fact I lament.
I don't know what magic MacOS does under the hood, but no other linux distro I've EVER used comes close, with the possible exception of Gnome. Unfortunately Gnome is ugly as sin.
Sure, but since last time I've started KDE, I got a ton of segfaults errors coming from all over the place (and not just nepomuk)... Well, if the desktop is fine but the wifi interface or the notification tray is segfaulting, I'm just gonna throw the whole thing.
well... no. Speaking as long-time Linux user who tried all of this and in the end using i3 to avoid constant stream of bugs from DE.
Times are changing
Times are always changing. Markets grow rapidly, and then they mature and growth gets flatter.
Specifically looking at Apple, while I agree that their focus has shifted away from the Mac platform somewhat and towards iOS, wasn't that to be expected with the huge growth in mobile and tablets over the last 10 years? Now, mobile growth is slowing[0] and tablet sales are flat/dropping[1].
Laptops aren't going anywhere... the vast majority of white collar workers use a laptop or desktop everyday. And while I can't predict what Apple is going to do (who can?), it seems unlikely that they'd completely drop a market that generated $5.7B in revenue in Q4 of 2016 [2].
[0]: http://www.businessinsider.com/smartphone-growth-is-slowing-... [1]: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/tablet-decline-q2-2016/ [2]: http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/apple-q4-2016-financial...
ETA: Btw, macOS Server is over here: http://www.apple.com/macos/server/
Well, thats kind of a narcissistic statement. How many people develop for Windows? How many for Linux? How many for Mac? oh.
I try to make my software as beautiful as I can, and keep a simple and usable UX. There are developers who don't care about guidelines, or design. That's not a platform fault, is just that there are developers who just want the job done, even in a ugly fashion.
"Take Mac away and high quality desktop apps will go away."
As if all the world's high quality apps are only developed on and for the Mac.
And that is the biggest problem in software world, that's why our computers are full of half-baked, ugly, poor documented and uncompatible programs - because someone "just wanted to get job done".
I'm a multi-plat guy who has a Macbook and a Windows machine. This makes me want to get a real open source initiative going on Windows to enable better UI assembly. Xaml is great but it has a ways to go.
I can see how having a simple UI with few controls on it can sometimes be translated as "pretty" in certain circles, but simply having few features and few controls doesn't magically mean your app is top of the pile on the entire Earth regarding "prettiness". It is quite an assertion to make.
EDIT: Again, this is not meant offensively but was more of a response to the assertion that the app is prettier than ANY others.
Furthermore, I certainly agree with the rest of the comment where they state that more attention is paid to UI etc. on MacOS than other platforms, typically.
Really this is just what users have been telling me last 6 months. "I bought it because it looks good."
Guess they're just used to worse.
Out of interest, how did you market it / raise awareness of it?
For me and a lot of others what I really want is a UNIX that just works.
Meaning it just works with its hardware in all ways... audio and video playing, recording, editing and everything else all work very well, without having to recompile the kernel or hunt down and install alpha drivers without source hosted on sketchy sites, which is what drove me away from other UNIXes.
Also macOS is a good platform for developing native iOS apps. Why iOS and not Android? Mostly because the version adoption curve of Android is pretty bad.
The point is it's more about functionality and getting stuff done than it is about pretty. With other UNIXes there was always too much fighting with the system.
Unfortunately that doesn't exist apart from macOS right now.
Because there's some price spike? If anything things are as cheap or expensive as ever.
But yeah, not everyone's using Macs. It's the biggest vendor, but there are more non-Macs than Macs.
But yeah, many other variables to consider. Age as well, it's mostly younger people in coffee shops.
Questions to ask when deciding what platforms to support:
Of Android and iOS, which has the users willing to spend money on apps? More than $0.99?
Of Windows, Linux, and macOS, which has the users willing to spend money on apps? More than a few dollars?
Worse yet, is if i pick a stable variety of Linux, it's likely to not be pretty. The pretty Linux OSs (in my experience) tend to be at least as unstable as OSX. Ugh.
(Note: I upgraded to Sierra, crash or have weird crap happen ~4times a week)
edit: Why the downvote? Note that i explicitly stated this was my experience. Furthermore, i had the same experience when my Macbook Pro Retina was new, and came with OSX Mavericks. Both Mavericks and Sierra have gave me the impression that Apple releases unstable OSs for major versions, and need time to make it stable again.
I'm not complaining/etc, just saying i'm not getting a crash report on the last two items - and i'm unsure about if i received one the times the OS actually crashed.
As soon as Intel rolls out their full Kaby Lake line, the Macbook Pro will get a rev that will improve speed and permit 32GB of RAM. Counting in design and manufacturing time, that could be about a year from now.
And USB-C is clearly the future for connectors. In a year or two a lot more peripherals will be shipping with USB-C as the default cord.
This is why Apple carries a huge amount of cash around on their books: so that they can make long-term decisions even if it hurts in the short term.
Can you comment on why you think this is true? A cursory look at Kaby Lake does not seem to indicate any sort of intrinsic change that would allow the MBP to have more memory.
My biggest problem is the obsession with "Thin and Light" crippling system specs. I get that a 11-13" laptop isn't gonna have the best GPU in the world, but I'd like a decent one in my 15" 'Pro' model please...and I'll take a little less thin and light to get it.
This is even more true on desktop. I don't really care about how bulbous you make the back of my iMac or Mac Pro, just give me SLI GTX1080s.
I get it, I'm the niche, I'm a gamer with a Mac, but I still exist.
For me, even as a Mac user, I avoid Mac-only apps as much as I possibly can because I want the freedom to switch platforms in the future. I will happily have all my apps be slightly less pretty if it means they work on any OS.
This may be one of the most pretentious things I've ever read on HN.
The issue is that Apple is alienating early adopters by removing ports, charging double for obsolete hardware and introducing gimmicks instead of real innovation. And there is a decrease in OS quality from Apple.
They hid the download button really well: You have to type in "0" into the "how much you'd like to pay" field for the "Purchase" button to change to "Download".
I mean I understand that open source projects need funding. But if you want people to try your niche OS at least make it obvious how to download it. Ask for money later after people had to chance to try it out.
I only typed in 0 because I know that "trick" from other websites. If I hadn't known I would have just left the website and would possibly never return.
I run a small software company myself. We're selling our software on the internet. But our website focuses on getting people to download the free trial first. The "asking for money" is then done once the trial period ends.
It's already hard to get people to download your stuff for free. With obviously visible download buttons.
If we did what Elementary is doing we would be closing our shop rather soon.
Yet some projects still squeak out some money: Synergy, DOSBox Turbo, etc.
_that's why it won't work_
Freedom 0: "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose."
Does this line make a program un-GPL?
exit(0) if Time.now > Time.new(2016,11,15,0,0,0)No thank you, I'd rather use Mint or Ubuntu if I want an easy distro.
Comparing that to GNOME, where everything is so damn big that it wastes half of my screen and KDE where the default apps are usually bloated and confusing and can do way too many things, I call Pantheon as a win for the developers.
EDIT: Also, one neat trick that I've never seen any other terminal emulator doing other than Pantheon Terminal, is that you get a desktop notification every time you're not focused on the terminal when it finishes its job. For example, let's say I do something like "sudo apt install netbeans". Since the download is large, I'm going to focus on something else in the meantime and I'll get a desktop notification when the installation is finished.
First of all, it's a rather large download, so you're probably going to close the website as soon as you click on the download button. Second of all, to consume the product in this case, you have to install it. And yet again, after you do so, if you get greeted with the "donate" window right away, you're going to dismiss it because you still haven't tested out the product.
So, what you need is a timer, something that says like "after 30 minutes (or an hour, or two hours) of usage, display the window", but that would require the OS to make calls to external servers without the user consent, and, because we are talking about a Linux-based operating system, people would be complaining that this is a a privacy violation.
Not necessarily. It's not like you expect the buyer to do a careful analysis of what it's worth before they pay. You can usually decide this sort of thing based on very quick impressions. Also, there's the aspect of it just seeming nicer to ask after the download has happened. Then it's clear that you already have the product, now it's up to you to decide what to pay for it, if anything at all. Here people have been tricked into thinking they had to pay and begrudge the author.
Really? On most sites that I visit, I 'Save As' every link that I care to download, so that there is no separate tab to close. (But maybe you were referring only to this specific site.) Maybe the solution is just to make sure that there's more of interest on your download page than just the download button?
If I pay nothing, I don't pay.
I don't say "I paid zero." or "I paid nothing" unless someone asks the specific question "How much did you pay for that?"
It's obviously a way to nudge people into paying something.
edit: I made an aside about the use of the word 'donation' by cannabis collectives in the U.S. to denote 'payment' (as a way to operate as non-profits and avoid federal problems) as a reference to similarly weak wording used in a nefarious way, but I thought the relationship to the pattern here was weak, so I removed it.
They do serve a purpose though.
Stare into the abyss etc.
From what I can remember, there was never a time where they disallowed a way of downloading the OS for free, they just made it more difficult to figure out over time.
If you were to email Elementary and ask for support with a non-working 'sg' kernel module, I would be highly surprised if they offered you any support. More likely, they would tell you to contact one of the authors, who did not receive one dime for our work. He takes your money, and shirks off supporting you to people that _didn't_ take your money.
edit: typo
By voluntarily contributing to an OSS-licensed project, you don't have the moral right to begrudge him for it. What they are doing is completely permitted by the license; RMS has spelled it out over and over. So, no sympathy from me.
I would prefer to pay a reasonable subscription fee with a support contract which is also not illegal, but benefits all parties.
But this time I regret every cent. Coming from Mac OS, or even Fedora, Elementary seems unpolished and unstable.
As it is, my Macbook Pro Retina has been crashing a lot and doing weird things frequently since i upgraded to Sierra. Between that and the latest Macbook Pro notebooks, i just don't like Apple anymore. I'm pretty set on buying a highend laptop _(similar build quality to Apple)_ and putting Linux on it... but that's where the fun stops. Linux UIs tend to lag behind significantly.
I want a for-profit UI company working on a Linux UI. OSS just can't compete with Apple on design it seems.. and in my opinion, users shouldn't have to choose between OSS and pretty design.
It's bad enough that if/when i leave OSX, i lose a lot of my apps due to them not supporting (or not supporting competently) Linux, but losing apps and UX.. well, it's a tough pill to swallow.
Windows almost has me sold with their new Ubuntu subsystem.
Anything in particular you are missing?
I use Docker for Windows.
It works tolerably well, but the hyper-v thing that it runs on is currently my #1 suspect when Windows takes > 30 seconds to connect to any network :-/
I've been orphaned from several platforms. OSX surprised me. It appeared to be the dream commodity unix. But then a release broke my workspace usage.
Eventually, I completely switched to a stripped-down unix. I use a bash menu for controlling things like wireless and screen lock. Tmux/dwm are my window managers, I use whatever the latest browser is.
All this required effort to learn and set up. People who look to the big companies for fashion would sneer at this. But it's a sharp tool, and it'll never be made obsolete by shifting trends.
> Is that not what Red Hat is? I thought that's what the Red Hat license provided?
I won't say anything bad about Red Hat, but calling the UX awesome isn't something I would do based on my experience. Then again, they might have changed but I haven't heard anybody mentioning it.
(This used to be Canonicals niche before they picked up the assumption that Mac-like == Good ; )
I'll agree most UX on Linux isn't great. But GUI is such a pain in the ass that most people really don't want to work on it. Plus, plenty of Linux users aren't casual users and will accept or prefer function over form.
I myself am a heavy terminal user and pretty much limit my GUI use to the occasional image editor and the browser.
RedHat makes their money on support licensing for the server. Employees are paid to work on Fedora, but it is not the RedHat product.
Which is really too bad. It's the only RPM distro I've seen that's reasonably well put together.
Edit: this -
> Which is really too bad. It's the only RPM distro I've seen that's reasonably well put together.
Anything specific I should be aware of wrt OpenSUSE?
I think you're massively underestimating the magnitude and difficulty of what you're seeking. elementary has been at this for 5 years and made an immense amount of progress, though. But it's definitely still not at the level of Apple, which has had decades and billions of dollars poured into this.
It's not a "paid OS" in that it doesn't force you to pay a particular dollar amount, though. (People tend to lose their minds when you charge them for open-source software.)
https://elementary.io/docs/human-interface-guidelines
f/d: I was on the elementary core team
People complain about iOS' race to the bottom, but in the OSS community, I frel like this has been there for a long time. "You want to _charge me for it_ ?! Pffft!"
We may complain about macOS now with Sierra but for thr most part, macOS has been stable for a long time. I haven't seen a kernel panic in probably a decade. Not saying it's perfect, but there's a point you hit when people are paid to make things happen and macOS hit that point yeats ago.
I would argue Elementary provides a lot of value and should therefore weed out the complainers and worst of the bunch by charging. I would remove the 'pay what you want' and just charge $30 or $40.
We don't live in the Star Trek universe yet, so people still need money to live. I fully believe in and support companies, individuals, and groups that provide a good value for what they charge.
I _want_ those people making great things and doing it full time. Otherwise, you just get abandonware or crappy products where people don't fix bugs because they have a day job to deal with. That's the reality in my mind.
Allows students, poor etc, still manages to weed out the most entitled ones it seems ;-)
I can throw $XX at a linux distro, pray that it goes to the right things and gets improved proper, and then wait until it becomes good, or I could throw $XX at a closed source solution, and have something that works good right now.
Its all fine to donate $XX, but buying for $XX to get something significantly worse than its competitors is a bit weird, and can only really be justified through "I support free software even if it has binary blobs", which is still a bit weird
Good luck with that. The problem is that no one will make a UI/UX that's both awesome and stable. It's not like the resources aren't there: there's a ton of DEs for Linux, and they've been working on them for 20 years now. But the problem is they can't ever agree on anything, and they can't ever just leave well enough alone: every time they get something stable, they abandon it and make up something completely new and unstable. It's easily the 2nd biggest hindrance to Linux-on-the-desktop adoption (the biggest of course being application compatibility/inertia with Windows).
>but that's where the fun stops. Linux UIs tend to lag behind significantly.
That's the Linux community's fault. It's not the features that lag, either; KDE, feature-wise, has always been far ahead of the commercial UIs. For one simple example, I can't middle-click and vertically maximize a window on any other DE that I know of, but in KDE that's been a standard feature for at least 15 years. For another simple example, multiple desktops have been standard on Unix UIs for over 30 years, but never in Windows or Mac. The problem with Linux UIs isn't design, it's stability: everyone's constantly revamping stuff (Gnome3, KDE4, KDE5, etc.) and never spending any time fixing bugs. For instance, I have the Dvorak keyboard set on my LM17.3/KDE desktop, but several KDE apps don't respect that and go back to Qwerty. (To be fair, Windows is even worse: I have my work Win7 desktop set so I can switch between Qwerty and Dvorak, and the stupid thing is constantly switching back and forth randomly.)
But to your point of bug fixing, I absolutely agree. macOS is plagued by this as well, but mot to the degree Linux DE's are.
I've used multiple desktops since the 90's and loved it. macOS has had support for a while, but the animation switching from desktop to desktop was horrendous. I got a utility to fix that, but it's a joke they don't just include a checkbox to toggle the animations. This is one huge UX fail in my mind.
I really wonder sometimes why distros don't use it more, and make their own custom themes for it, instead of just leaving it at the default. It wouldn't take that much work to make themes to make it look almost like anything you want. Or you could even make a different version of Plasma which emulates some other OS/DE if you needed to, leaving all the underpinnings intact.
or, you can get the Dell XPS Developer Edition with Ubuntu pre-installed.
The problem is that many people have differing ideas of what the UI/UX would look like.
If you asked me to provide such a thing I'd just use Debian. Others might prefer RedHat, or similar. But copying an existing distribution, and keeping up to date with new versions would be a full-time job in itself, and that wouldn't leave any room for actual development.
The GNOME project, and KDE project for that matter, have spent years creating a unified environment, and even with their funds and developers the project is never-ending.
I wouldn't say a minimal & unified distribution is impossible, but it would require a lot more users to pay, up-front.
It is definitely a case of "to each their own", but the only issue with KDE right now is developer churn. As the writers and more experienced developers in some applications reduce their participation due to time constraints, it is incredibly hard for anyone to step into those shoes in often millions of LOCs code bases. A lot of UI rot isn't because we don't have technologies (Kirigami, Qt Quick Controls 2, Plasmoids, etc) that enable fantastic UI and UX experiences, it is because porting forward hundreds of applications comes down to who has the time and willpower to either continue maintaining their 10 year old project or someone having the willpower to learn what can often be very ugly C++ or ancient PyQt codebases.
I also have no problem with what Gnome is doing. Their applications may not be for me, but I can recognize the beauty in what they are trying to accomplish, and still think they have a much better design language than anything MS / Apple is putting out. Whenever I sit down at OSX / Windows I feel like both are stuck in the 90s, often because half their applications (especially system management) were written then and never updated since, and because they just make random UI splits every release to look shiny and new by just changing the shell look and keeping the rest jarringly legacy.
GNOME sits on the other side of the spectrum on these issues but I personally find it and in fact most GTK+ apps more aesthetically pleasing and more well organized even if all the buttons are too huge and its white space is like a football field.
Talk more than others about usability - happily gloss over all kinds of weirdness[0] in your expensive setups.[1]
Happily pays quite a lot for your Macs - "regret every cent" after donating peanuts for the development of a Linux distro.
Just saying.
Edit: downvotes welcome! I cannot buy anything for my Internet points here in Western Europe.
A textual description of my wrongdoings would be even more awesome!
Edit2: you don't need to upvote me! Instead just tell me what I did wrong!
[0]: Yes, there is. If you cannot spot it I won't recommend you for any lead UX role.
[1]: Not saying it is bad or not worth the price though. Just expensive (given that you have to have a Mac to run it legally) and far from perfect.
I don't think it's fair to compare OS X (with runs on a very limited set of hardware) with a Linux distribution running on a random not-well-supported system. If you want an apples-to-apples comparison I'd suggest to test Ubuntu on one of the officially supported systems - see https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/ for a list.
But you are right, some people mix these different issues up. My next laptop will come with Linux pre-installed - so I expect to report that all the bits work correctly (except Linux will be running on top of Qubes rather than on the metal, so...)
I hackintosh so I'm less well-placed to answer your second point, but I'll try: A Mac is expensive, but you know exactly what you're getting and you know it will work well (recent dongle madness notwithstanding).
Meanwhile, eOS markets itself (previously implicitly and now apparently explicitly) as a potential replacement for OSX. But it's nowhere near. It's an outdated version of Ubuntu with some basic custom apps on top (a calculator, another basic wrapper around webkit, a slightly cleaned up fork of a file browser, etc).
And then you stray to the third party apps, and as always with desktop Linux, they're awful. Everything uses a slightly different toolkit, the UI elements are ugly, UX seems to be devs' lowest priority item, and of course you can't completely interact with industry standard formats (DOCX, PSD). The Intel Mesa driver still tears and/or stutters (actually all drivers do except Nvidia's) so watching videos is an awful experience.
Most of those items above are not fatal by themselves, but together they make for a miserable experience. I used desktop Linux (mainly Ubuntu) for over a year since I needed to do some dev and couldn't run OSX at the time. I won't try again unless there's a revolution in the desktop FOSS world. (Good video drivers, standard well-designed toolkit, UX as a priority, deeper integration of things like WINE.)
I do have some family members who use ancient core2duo laptops and do absolutely everything in Chrome. I pop Ubuntu MATE on their machines so they can avoid malware. I also always keep a live USB stick handy for flexible troubleshooting. As far as I'm concerned, this is basically the limit of usefulness for desktop Linux.
I understand some people value the flexibility above everything else and thrive under desktop Linux. I'm not trying to devalue their views or say that their setup is wrong. Use whatever works for you- but if you haven't gave OSX a serious shot yet, do try it.
> Not now, take me to the download ›
Link.
"How much do you want to pay?"
"0 Dollars."
"Great!"
Why is that so horrible?
"We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software. We didn’t exclude a $0 button to deceive you; we believe our software really is worth something."
That's why you let users decide after they've used the software. You don't tell someone that up front and expect a payment when you haven't been able to try and test the software for yourself and your team.
If it's worthy, then users will come back and offer a payment or contact you to find out how they can contribute if they feel its really worth it.
I think a lot of people have this misconception that everybody who uses open source software just assumes it should be free. In my own experience, it's quite the opposite. Most people who use open source are actually more willing to pay for something they feel is valuable to them without hesitation. They're also usually willing to pay a little more then perhaps is necessary in order to make sure its maintained and supported.
Really great line, i liked that a lot.
So apparently in the bait-and-switch mentality of the mac world, that you can pay '0 dollars' is not obvious.
I also think if you read the rest of what they're saying, it's probably is true that we will only get Linux GUIs which are competitive with Windows or Mac when people are willing to fund their professional development. OSS works exceptionally well for lower level components, or for components targeted at developers, because everyone involved benefits. For a professional developer a contribution acts as a good mechanism to raise your profile within the community and improve your ability to earn a decent salary elsewhere. For a company, running open source projects means they can solicit contributions and improve their profile; they contribute to other projects because it gives them a base to be able to build their products. We don't expect or find that OSS developers of high profile projects are starving in garrets, they are in fact leaders of their communities, highly prized and in-demand.
But these mechanisms do not have the same force when the consumer of the software is a general user, not a developer in the same field. i.e. when you're writing software in C++ which is then going to be used by graphic designers or artists, or by a casual user. In those case, the direct reputational benefits just aren't there, and that's why those sort of projects often struggle to take off. And on top of that those projects also involve a lot of painstaking and arguably boring work to get everything polished to a fine sheen. Krita for instance is excellent, but it has found a way to fund development through yearly crowdfunding. I think the same applies to Linux GUI's, that ultimately you need some pot of money able to support developers, which moves around according to the desires of informed consumers. In my opinion, that's what it will take for desktop Linux to become a serious mass market alternative to Mac and Windows.
It's not rational for me as a consumer to fund such an unsure bet, especially when changing an operating system has lots of friction. I assume that the proposed talent of an individual investor is in the ability to sieve good from bad in a sea of maybe. But I also don't understand the market well enough to see how such an unproven bet might succeed in a very stale market dominated by arguably one entity (you can't really buy macOS) -- maybe two.
I'd also say that while software work is expensive and requires talented labor, and while operating system work takes an intense amount of effort, there's something to be said about the fact that Elementary OS could even build their OS to begin with. How did they do it? On the backs of billions of dollars of free labor. I can't imagine how it would be if the whole world hid their source code with proprietary-only software, and Elementary had to start from ground 0.
What rational model governs this situation?
You mention that investors have lots of money and are therefore able to take on risks. I suspect that nearly everyone who would consider downloading this operating system has a lot of money relative to the $5 suggested donation, and certainly relative to the $1 you could choose instead. And if you truly don't have that, then you can do $0 instead.
You can make the risk to yourself arbitrarily low, selecting whatever you think fits your profile of cost vs potential reward. That is their rational model.
[1]: http://blog.elementary.io/post/110645528530/payments
[2]: https://github.com/elementary/website/pull/655
It is a shame for Elementary OS Team, because this issue was many times discussed on GH issues / IRC about implementing just a "$0" button. As I remember in launchpad there is also a task or discussion about suggestion of the dialog which will remind about donation after certain time duration.
Edit:
Found https://blueprints.launchpad.net/elementaryos/+spec/donation...
An "I would like to try it first" button.
They should include more videos and screenshots so people have a better idea of what they are buying.
Inkscape and Gimp are the stalwarts, but for someone coming from Sketch or Photoshop they feel quite ancient and somewhat messy.
https://www.figma.com is cross-platform (web based), and a pretty good Sketch competitor
For a Lightroom replacement, Darktable is actually quite good (though I really miss the high quality shadows/highlights algorithm from ACR)
If you use macOS because you need to run Mac software, then you probably aren't going anywhere.
now i'm back to linux because i can't stand the decisions apple took. plus, it feels like osx (now macOS) is less and less table on every iteration. i had a BSOD while trying to plug my external monitor ffs.
Since the Linux release of SD I've been dual booting elementary on my desktop and have had a pretty solid experience. For me it's games that make me keep a Windows installation around.
They're actually claiming I'm going to give up Photoshop, Pixelmator, Lightroom, CaptureOne rather than buying an external card-reader. And that's ignoring that most of us already prefer 3rd-party external card readers for speed alone ..
This is probably the most painful thing on desktop at the moment, because no one gives a s* to desktop mail apps these days.
I recently switched back to evolution from Thunderbird, but where one if great, the other falls short ( in this case, GPG with Evolution is _painful_ ). Geary is... well, not mature, Claws and Sylpheed are a bit too oldschool and mutt is ... well, mutt.
I'd love to see something like Rainloop[1] as a real desktop app. Mailpile[2] is a nice idea, but is nowhere even close to the usability of Rainloop.
As for mail, Thunderbird is not so bad.
I'm still on the very same install, just switched to xfwm4 and tint2, and I'm quite happy.
[1] https://github.com/matzipan/envoyer/blob/master/README.md#re...
The only laptops comparable to Macbook Pro hardware quality and battery life are the Dell XPS series and the Thinkpad X1.
I feel there is a serious shortage of good laptops with linux pre-installed that the non-technical user can pickup and start using.
For me, the palm rejection has never worked as well as it does on Macs and the scrolling and multi-touch gestures are so pathetic under Linux on a laptop that its better to just disable the touchpad and stick with a mouse.
Even the glassy smooth feel of the Mac touchpad is superior to other laptops and the new haptic touchpad on the newer macs makes clicking on any part of the touchpad wonderful.
I do have a question for HN: with enough practice, does a keyboard with the pointing stick ever feel adequate? I've never seemed to get the hang of it in the numerous times I've had to use them (each time for only a few minutes).
In the end, its macOS that's still holding me back. Haven't decided yet tough.
I install http://cmder.net/ on every Windows machine. Makes my life more pleasant
It's annoying enough on my gaming machine, I can't imagine using Win10 on a device I use for serious work. Reboots seemingly every 36 hours or so. Their update system is totally out of control.
So, in the two things that matter less for laptops? Because on the go you can do with less performance and you don't need as much connectivity, if that means less weight and more battery life.
On the flip-side, we've gotten external GPUs through Thunderbolt. So we've gotten the ability to extend laptop GPUs.
Another positive development is that SSDs are likely to continue getting faster. Maybe RAM won't be upgradeable anymore, but if Intel can push out their Octane/3D XPoint tech, you might get SSDs so fast that you can get almost the same benefit swapping to a faster SSD as upgraded RAM.
I mean, you've never been able to upgrade your CPU cache. If RAM is a glorified cache for the SSD, why complain that you can't upgrade that anymore?
Maybe one day SSDs will be soldered on in laptops too though :/
>>If RAM is a glorified cache for the SSD This 'really' depends on your workloads and it's not always the case, even though it's often the RAM is mostly used as disk cache.
Looking at current generation of soldered CPU and glue as building solution is off putting at best. It feels like a cheap toy produced in a sweat shop.
Think about Atari, Acorn, Amiga and such. While there were a few Pro like models, the majority of the home users were using the full packaged ones, with connection ports for external extensions.
Apple was the last one with this mindset, and thanks to their survival and success, that is the trend the industry is now returning to.
Specially given that computers have reached a plateau for 90% of the users out there.
If someone makes them as compact and replaceable i'm on board, i just haven't seen it. Not saying it's not possible of course :)
Just recently I was looking for a new laptop and ended up buying a refurbished thinkpad t430 (270e with 8gb [gonna become 16] ram, ssd and i5 3rd gen)just because I am sure I can change basically every part of it whenever I want for a low price.
The build quality of their offerings seems to get better with each successive generation too, and of course everything works out of the box.
I just wish they would partner with someone in the EU; that way shipping costs, VAT, and tariffs can be handled more transparently.
Then you're not really into this mobility thing?
link? I heard they had crappy broadcom chipsets but would be good to get some specific info.
TBH the sites i looked at last night seemed to say the current hardware that ships with windows is well supported...
Glad if that has changed!
I personally think XPS has a much better design for a laptop.
https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/laptops/
and
where the first two I found with some quick googling
What are you going to do when all other laptop manufacturers follow suit - switch back?
Mac users who make this threat sound just like people who threaten to move to Canada every election cycle.
I complain because Apple decided to make the macbook pro 15 inch lighter and thinner resulting in 25% less battery (going from 99.5 watt-hour to 76.0-watt-hour), this means that they have to make more compromises to keep a good battery life and instead of having a decent graphic card like the nvidia gtx 1080 or 32GB ram, the new macbook pros are underpowered.
Since, apple is unlikely to decide to go back to the previous form factor, they are unlikely to ever sell a laptop with decent performances compared to their competitors.
And to add insult to the injury, switching to usb-c forces users (at least for a year or two) to carry a lot of extra adapters which makes the weight loss moot.
Once the next generation of Intel processors land, I bet we'll see Macbook Pros with faster processors and 32GB or more of RAM. At that point they will catch up to their competitors.
But it's important to remember who Apple considers their competitors. They've never competed on the cheap end--everyone knows that--but they've also never competed on the high-power end. For at least the past 8 years it's been possible to buy laptops that deliver more horsepower than a Macbook Pro, by caring less about size, weight, and battery life. I think that will always be true.
I would love a 32G or 64G machine too, but did you see what Phil Schiller said about the 32G issue? It sounded like it wasn't a matter of a little bit more power, it was a LOT more. We really don't know how much more. Apple does know. If the new design was two inches thick people would be complaining about that.
Personally I'm expecting that no matter what the vendor. desktops will always be more powerful than laptops, and some people will always complain that the gap is too large.
For your VMs it might help that the new SSDs are reportedly quite fast in this generation.
USB-A adapter for my wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse.
A gigabit ethernet adapter.
Mini-DP x2 adapter, for my desktop screens. I may be able to leave those attached to the screens, though. I'd need another one for home in that case.
Power adapter, HDMI adapter and two USB-A, for attaching to any external screens, speakerphones, and webcams when in a conference room.
If I include my hobbies, I will also be needing a USB-C to USB-B cable for my USB hub (or a few new USB-C to Mini- and Micro-USB cables), and a SD card adapter.
> For your VMs it might help that the new SSDs are reportedly quite fast in this generation.
Not compared to memory. You don't want to put your computer in a constant state of swap - something easy to do with VMs.
Perhaps not compared to memory, but that gap continues to look smaller and smaller.
The new PCIe/NVME drive's bandwidth looks to be within 1(-ish) order of magnitude of ddr3. Apple is claiming ~3GB/s read ~2GB write and iirc 1600mhz ddr3 is somewhere around 20GB/s rw. I don't know what the latency numbers are, but I know the NVME/PCIe bus is a dramatic improvement -- not saying it will be measured in nanoseconds, however.
I have some fusion ioDrives at work that have about 3GB/s r 2.5 w with ~30 microsecond latency over the PCIe bus. Exciting times we live in for io :)
And when that gap is gone (or maybe even within 2-4x, given the advancements in L1-L4 cache mechanisms), we can re-write our OSes and rejoice. Sadly, they're not gone yet, and I can still bring my Mac to its knees by starting one too many VMs.
Even then I'll still need adapters to operate in the places where that cash has not yet been spent (i.e. conference rooms).
And perhaps it's just me lamenting a sunk cost, but it is going to suck to throw away hundreds of dollars worth of cables, hubs and adapters.
You don't need that keyboard or mouse. And, as you said, they are wireless. But the real point is they are not needed. It's a laptop. No need to carry an extra keyboard around with it. Just keep those things at home, I would think. And the adapter for their wireless wires or whatever. Not a problem.
>A gigabit ethernet adapter.
WiFi? This one could be handy, in very rare cases. Better bring a cable too. And a small hub or switch in case there are no ports available. And power for the switch. And a second cable and adapter in case you want to do 2x 1GB... hmmmmm maybe this being prepared for everything bit can be carried too far, no? But let's blame Apple.
>Mini-DP x2 adapter, for my desktop screens. I may be able to leave those attached to the screens, though.
There. What you just said. Leave them attached. No problem.
>I'd need another one for home in that case.
Yep, not a problem.
>Power adapter, HDMI adapter and two USB-A, for attaching to any external screens, speakerphones, and webcams when in a conference room.
It already comes with a power cord. What laptop doesn't?
It has a camera built in.
It has speakers and a microphone.
For connecting to the big screen, AirPlay is wireless.
If all these don't work for you, any decently equipped conference room or company where the room is located should have the proper equipment available. Otherwise you have to make do with the fantastic quality of the built in AV components of the laptop. If they don't even have a screen, are you going to bring one just in case? Of course not; you'll present off the screen on the laptop, in a pinch. As with all the other stuff. But in most cases you won't even need to because they'll have the proper equipment on hand.
And you forgot about conferencing tools like Google Hangouts, which can be freely used by everyone if they simply decide to.
>If I include my hobbies, I will also be needing a USB-C to USB-B cable for my USB hub (or a few new USB-C to Mini- and Micro-USB cables), and a SD card adapter.
Those can stay at home. If you go on a trip to take lots of photos on an SD card, then of course for any such trip you are bringing an SD adapter. Big deal.
To sum up, of all these I see precisely one that while very optional might be nice to have sometimes: the ethernet adapter. The others seem like just moving the goalposts to justify hating on Apple.
As for when the escape key / function row is going to disappear from windows computers, I'd say that one is a ways off / never.
As for when it's going to be impossible to get a nice nvidea graphics card, but given the track record, I'd say this trends towards "never" as well.
I hope they don't. I love to open my camera, put the SD card in my computer and copy all the pictures.
The camera also has a WiFi chip, which would let me download pics and control it with a very invasive mobile app (lots of unnecessary permissions). I just disabled it. Needless to say the desktop application runs only on Windows and Mac. I could have installed it in a VM but the SD card is just faster.
Until USB-C becomes the universal standard it's meant to be, consumers are better served by having multiple ports on their PCs to choose from.
I'm curious about the new MacBook Pro keys, they allude to second generation butterfly keys. Have you had a chance to try the newly released system's keyboard?
I have the 2014 MBP so my comparison is skipping the first generation of butterfly keyboard that you mentioned, I've been told that its worse than that one too but I can't say myself.
One thing I saw someone mention is that because the new keyboard is wider you might not be able to rest a poker on top anymore, possibly because it won't reach the edges to sit on them without sitting directly on the keys?
I may have to give this a try when the time comes. By far the best looking Linux GUI i've seen yet.
I can't wait to see an a GUI layer made for NixOS though. I really want to be done with stateful OSs, NixOS is so tempting.
PS I installed Manjaro not using GUI installer, since it doesn't support disk encryption well enough, and I don't use GRUB (default Manjaro boot loader), but refind.
I don't get the angst. To me the disappointment is wholly related to the action bar/etc/whatever it is called. Its such a lame approach to adding additional functionality I would have never expected it from Apple. The Windows environment has many machines fully embracing touch screens right where the action is.
This is purely a promotional article, pretending to be a help article. Look at the unattributed quotes it uses. Pretty sure the part about anybody switching from anything to anything is made up. Sure people switch sometimes. Sure people are complaining about Apple products, what else is new? Way to capitalize on our sincere discussions of platform choices.
If HN swallows this kind of marketing-masquerading-as-technical-advice article so easily, we're going to see a lot more of this writing pattern in the future. Which means more marketing noise. Please don't buy it so readily.
Perhaps you don't find it interesting, but as a developer, I like it.
It probably assumes you'll be installing from fresh.
You should indeed install it fresh. I hope you didn't give your friends a bad expression.
This isn't really a problem with Elementary OS itself, more the proliferation of toolkits available, but to pretend that it is a drop-in replacement for a Mac (with its unified Cocoa UI) isn't quite right. (Yes, I know you can run FLTK and X apps on Mac so it's ugly too).
I just don't have any interest in installing it full. Instead I went with KDE Neon.
First impressions, it's very very pretty, the design out the box is nice though it's completely the antithesis of how I work (3 screens, panel on each, window buttons only for windows on that screen).
The level of integration is nice, it feels cohesive.
That said XFCE4 with some tweaking is pretty much perfect for me, it exactly works the way I want things to work.
https://siliconislandblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/31/thoughts-...
> and support a preferred programming language (Vala)
Sure but they had like 10 years to do that, I remember a french guy who ever wrote a complete IDE with autocompletition + package manager for Vala on Windows. Support from the Gnome Foundation ? zip .
Oh, and I even found the link.
http://www.tarnyko.net/en/?q=node/24
So the tooling my ass, they just don't want to bother with Vala
Also, GObject itself made a lot of sense in an era when C was dominant. Maybe now, not so much.
They lost their mojo because of their weird decisions in the past and not because their stack isn't hip. How many JavaScript developers did they attract by writing the Gnome Shell in JavaScript? And the Rust community is a tiny fraction of the JavaScript community.
They are trying to turn a donkey into a racehorse. And if they do a full rewrite, people will have forgotten about Gnome by the time they are finished. Someone give them Joel Spolsky's article on refactoring to read.
Ubuntu veered towards the touch stuff, using nontraditional approaches; I honestly get lost these days when I have to use it.
I prefer it over Ubuntu because the UI makes more sense to me than Ubuntu's Unity.
The great thing is that they all use the same core system, so try them, or even install them at the same time (except Elementary), and use them until you find your favorite.
Why would you use? I would list why I tried it and used it for 3 months - at work. I stopped using it because it became a little difficult to manage the stability issues, build problems (at that it was very unstable as I mentioned above) and then the start-up I worked for got funded and gave everyone the then latest Macbook Pro (I had been using an Air at home anyway).
I found it pretty. Simple. Not at all cluttered - very clean look. I was used to OSX and its look and feel was/is very much inspired from OSX (or a similar UX/UI design philosophy if I may say so). And it's open source.
I kept using it also because I kind of fell in love with Midori (the Elementary browser and that's one app from Elementary I still miss on OSX).
Why not Ubuntu? Honestly, everyone else in my team used Ubuntu and it worked perfectly fine for them and whenever I ran into issues I was just asked one question "why the h not Ubuntu?". It was mostly aesthetics. Elementary felt very simple and pleasing to my eyes (yes, even when compared to X/LUbuntu) and for some reason I never really liked Ubuntu after Unity and all that happened (that was back in college - can't recall all the reasons as of now). Also, it was definitely lighter then Ubuntu.
This may not be the answers you are looking for but I thought I will chip in with my own reasons. And yes, I am going back to Linux too. My Air is 5 years old now and is already showing its age. I don't think I would like to spend the latest Macbook Pro kind of money for another Apple laptop. Then most probably I will try one of these - Elementary or Solus or Apricity etc on a lightweight 13ish inch laptop.
I'm sorry to say though, that I don't remember how I did it, since I've been using mainly macOS and Windows for quite some time now.
My solution is to organize myself so that I don't have to move windows around. I mostly need browser, terminal and emacs. I open chrome in one monitor with specific scaling option, and when I move emacs or terminal around I manually decrease font size with Ctrl-+/-
All these things disappeared when I changed the external monitor for a HiDPI one.
It's called Wayland, it took some time to make and next week, new Fedora is coming out that uses it by default (until now you could "only" opt-in during login).
[1] Except Ubuntu, they have their own NIH solution, of course.
Title bars are up to compositor (it was up to window manager in X11). Even client side window decorations (i.e. mostly title bar combined with toolbar) are nothing new, if that is what you mean with custom implementation of window titlebars.
There were other distros in the past trying to copy macOS, pear os[3] was one of them.
I remember Lindows[4] trying to market itself as a windows replacement. I can't believe they got sued and actually lost[5]! Xandros[6] was also in this space. They probably went BK.
Every year is the year of Linux for the desktop but it's really not possible to capture this market. It'll have to come from someone like google. Why couldn't chrome os have been a legit linux distro instead of trying for a niche netbook market with a locked down OS?
[1] http://xfce.org/
[2] http://wiki.go-docky.com/index.php?title=Welcome_to_the_Dock...
[3] http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pear
[4] http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=linspire
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Lindows.com....
mac OS is built by one major player and they have a clear direction of where they want to take this. Linux, in general, is built by communities of people who may or may not have diverging opinions, priorities and interests. While this gives you a lot diversity, it can be quite problematic.
The financial aspect is also important. elementary LLC itself, has only 2 full-time employees, while Apple is sitting on a pile of cash. Yes, elementary builds on a solid open-source base [1] built by thousands of developers world-wide, some volunteers, some employees, but it's still a significant difference.
Having a smaller scale, it means elementary can be more agile in its changes. This also means that there is smaller testing base, which means there will be more bugs. The nice part is that, when you find a bug, you can help fix it [2].
What issues still exist with using Linux on laptops?
The last computer I had significant hardware problems with on linux had a Pentium 4, but I've been vary careful with hardware choice in the last decade. Do your research and you'll be fine.
It depends on laptop model, some are worse than others. Just google "<latop_name> linux problem" and see what others encounter. Personally, I don't have any problems with my 5 years old Dell laptop running Kubuntu.
I have a HP laptop for work running Ubuntu that appears on their Certified hardware list. Wifi is buggy, using an external monitor is buggy, there are always "Internal Errors", sleep simply does not work, it crashes regularly.
It was the fact that software I needed was available on Mac and I didn't want to use Windows.
Of course, not everything will work, but for me, they often fall into the nice-to-have category of features, not a must-have. Maybe my preferences are not shared widely.
Been using Debian unstable and Xmonad for a long time, and it's hard to try and use anything else now. Most dev tools work natively ... no funky VMs to emulate, except Windows for Edge browser testing ... all works really well.
Have been using Linux professionally and on my personal machines on and off for 15 years, sonce I was a student. A bit more work than Windows in some ways, less in others.
I came to Ubuntu back in 2005ish based on a tip from a then 50 year old electrical engineer who had fallen in love.
My bus driver this morning loves it (we sometimes talk while waiting).
So stop spreading this FUD.
And this comes from someone who has started liking Windows UX lately.
It doesn't seem like you got mine:
Lots of people - including people who aren't pro users - have been using Linux happily for years.
Post like yours are likely to discourage people from even trying, which is why I try to correct what I see as misinformation.
You are free to explain why I am wrong instead of starting to pick on the anecdote.
It looks like I dodged a bullet; in 4-5 years, when I'll need an upgrade, all these issues will be solved, USB-C will either have become standard or gone firewire's way, the pointless emoji board will be quietly shelved, more RAM will be possible, etc
The shiny & pretty, especially if you're coming from the shiny & pretty, seems better and you forget to appreciate the things that silently just work in the background.
I've recently switched from the previous elementary (due to bugs and missing features) first to Mint 18 Cinnamon, just to find a lot of bugs there are well ( at least no missing features ), then to XFCE.
I'm slowly building an itch towards where most distros are moving to (being swallowed up by systemd), so XFCE: to get familiar with something that is truly portable, and runs of BSDs as well. xfwm4 + tint2 as panel + synapse as "menu" to be specific, and I'm really happy I did it.
No, it's not as nice as eOS or Gnome Shell; some apps are quite ugly and the terminal windows don't line up when tiled.
But it works. It's fast, it's glitch and bug-free so far; power management flies, and it feels like I got all the good from the good ol' Gnome2 days with updates.
The truth is, tint2 eliminated the need for fancy indicators: it has an executor, with which you can do (nearly) anything, like displaying weather, cpu temperature, fan speed, changing governors with clicks, etc.
So, as I started: it takes a lot of frustration, but eventually, you'll get to the point of install the most simple, most robust thing.
Is the experience a lot better if it's just Debian alone?
"Exiting the ecosystem" is a guide crying out to be written though.
In many ways I even prefer Unity. OSX is becoming a bit stagnant and bloated of late. The Unity UI is fast, the effects are polished and not gimmicky, the launcher and search across apps and file is near instantaneous, driver detection and configuration is streamlined and everything looks well put together.
Most Linux users have put up with some pretty awful apps, UIs and configs over the evolution of Linux and I am glad how far Ubuntu has come.
Elementary is decent but at the moment both Gnome and Unity have moved ahead and offer a more consistent and professional user experience for first timers.
I'm just going to link conversation from a couple of days before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12830761
Here's a community post: https://www.reddit.com/r/elementaryos/comments/53gkr1/elemen...
And some hidpi icon work: http://blog.elementary.io/post/124193007916/whats-up-with-hi...
Do the apps integrate, in some meaningful way, more easily with each other than with, say, a stock Gnome install on top of Red Hat?
Is it as novel as Etoile? Or is it just a skin + conforming apps?
Windows 10 with forced updates is too big if a reliability risk, especially when we're under deadline. Even if we could accept the spyware.
MBP could work, but it's very expensive, and the 16GB limit would be painful.
Mac Pro is expensive and somewhat outdated, and also is not portable.
Windows as a guest on Linux may work for us, but I'm still unclear on how that will impact color calibration / transforms.
I wish Adobe would just offer CS for Linux. Even at twice the price it would be our best option.
A workflow of, for example, Rawtherapee + GIMP would be more than enough for basic to upper intermediate tasks to replace Lightroom with. ( No, I'm not talking bs, my wife is actually using this for work; just like Mixxx is usable for professional DJing. ) There is also digiKam, which is rather impressive; it is lacking a few features, yet, but not as many as you'd think.
PS & Lightroom is everywhere, that is what's tought in schools; it's the MS Office of photo & design, and it shouldn't be.
There are, of course, situations, when the all-in-one PS is needed, but it's really, really rare.
Give digiKam and GIMP a go, but give them weeks, not minutes. Most of those who run away are only literally trying them for hours at max while these are utterly different tools.
I honestly wonder where GIMP, digiKam and the rest would be with the money PS subscriptions generate, paying for People With Good UX Taste.
Despite saying this, this is a fairly good option and I applaud Wine for its existence and the monumental undertaking they undertook (poor grammar, sorry).
Adobe won't make a Photoshop port, unless it is 100% obvious to them, that they are leaving more money on the table by not porting it than is the cost of porting and support.
Which may suck for you, if your business or job requires Photoshop right now. You aren't going to switch to Linux then, because you will get Photoshop and whatever OS it requires in the state it is today - which decreases the motivation for Adobe from previous paragraph.
And certainly no option for a business, but rarely for your average Joe, either. It is often hit and miss.
Like I have said countless times, a lot of users are bound to using either Windows or Mac because of a few applications. There is Microsoft Office (cloud versions are not good enough). Visual Studio. Adobe products. Avid. Ableton. Apple’s own software (Logic, Final Cut).
Where there even is alternatives, they are just not good enough.
Where Linux has gotten some support, is from the VFX industry, especially from Autodesk. You can use Maya and Nuke and Linux. Actually, almost all VFX companies use Linux in their shop.
As an engineer part of your skill is trying to translate what people are saying into something meaningful
Even if there was a collection of Linux-compatible software that was just as effective as PS and LR, professionals don't necessarily have the time available to learn those tools.
It's an industry/education barrier more than anything else. Photoshop has been the standard for years because it generally works quite well and is supported on the two major desktop operating systems.
> assume Photoshop will never happen on Linux
Probably not, no money in it for Adobe. I've always said I'd happily pay for a commercial Linux OS developed by Adobe that ran Creative Suite.
> it may even already exist
It doesn't.
> the developers behind OS alternatives will never know what functionality you require if all the details you give are "Photoshop"
No offence but you're kind of talking about Photoshop like it's MS Paint. It's a ubiquitous, massively bloated, complicated piece of software (10 million LOC, roughly the same as the Linux kernel?) that can take years to master.
I mean why elementary as your choice for a Linux distro?
As to how many people really are migrating, who knows. I'm an Apple user, but I'm not going to take the rabid fanboy position that these distro makers must be lying when they say they've noticed more interest, lately.
A cursory search of OSX design patents[3] turns up the Dock patent[4]. Whether Elementary infringes the patent is a legal matter (IANAL).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=design+patent+osx&ie=utf-8&o...
[4] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...:
> I recently installed Solus and was pleasantly surprised
I don't have a detailed comparison or anything like that, I haven't used that many Linux desktop distros to begin with, but I did try Elementary OS and found it wanting.
There are some screens in this pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5Ymf8oYXx-PSXU2eFlsR0NvY1E...
Nonetheless, bravo to the Elementary team for taking the time to even write up this blog post (which is apparently the first in a series).
Edit: replies pointed out that Epiphany is the default web browser. Point still stands that Chrome implements the most security mitigations out of ALL browsers on the market.
They switched to the default GNOME browser "Epiphany" in the latest release of elementary OS. But I agree, the first thing i did was install a different browser. In my case Firefox.
I got the latest version via flatpak and I've completely replaced Chrome. There are still a few issues to be ironed out in flatpak (like notifications and downloads support), but it's getting there!
[1] https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2016/03/30/positive-progr...
Also, how is this any different than macOS shipping with Safari only, or Windows shipping with Edge only? You're holding an open source project to a higher standard than two highly successful commercial offerings.
Would any security-conscious person DO recommend a browser made by an advertising company for datamining purposes?
Firefox is a much better choice for the privacy/security-aware individual.
https://theintercept.com/2016/07/29/a-famed-hacker-is-gradin...
They give one example (with a graph) of the security mitigations that are in popular web browsers:
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/20...
Firefox scored below Chrome and Safari in several areas: address space layout randomization (ASLR), heap protection, stack guards, fortified source. And I've even seen infosec people saying that Firefox has some of these, but doesn't even enable them on builds for some platforms!
That is why open source is still a thing: because of available choices.
Of course, Chrome is still better feature wise, however, Elementary or any other distribution would need Google's permission to distribute Chrome.