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Comment by wfleming | Hacker News Reader

> Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change.

Depending on which pro needs We're talking about, I don't believe this is true anymore.

I was a Linux user for many years, then an OS X user for over a decade, and earlier this year I'd had enough with being annoyed by OS X & switched back to Linux. I am extremely happy I did.

If you want beautiful GUIs or do video/audio/graphics editing then, yes, macOS is still superior. If you are a developer who spends most of your time split between the terminal and the browser, then Linux is not just an acceptable substitute, but can in fact be a superior replacement.

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> If you want beautiful GUIs or do video/audio/graphics editing then, yes, macOS is still superior.

Adobe porting their Creative Suite to Linux and maybe even releasing their own branded AdobeOS Linux distribution would seem to be a massive existential threat to Apple and Microsoft both, and would give Adobe a possible "out" to the world they live in right now, where Apple tries to do their best to keep Adobe "in check". Seriously: every single one of these threads ends up in the holding pattern of "we could all be using Linux tomorrow if we had [software which is almost entirely controlled by Adobe and which is already designed by them in a way where the UI seems to be an in-house toolkit and which would be trivial for them to port to Linux]"; that would effectively just leave "office productivity" as the only class of software where Microsoft (and to a lesser but still noticeable extent, Apple) would be able to hold people on their platform (and OMG: a future where the next Adobe CS release was a word processor... that would be brutal).

>Adobe porting their Creative Suite to Linux and maybe even releasing their own branded AdobeOS Linux distribution would seem to be a massive existential threat to Apple and Microsoft both

And if my aunty had bollocks she'd be my uncle.

I am going to assume you are trying to say that would never happen, but suddenly going into the operating system market with a Linux distribution is not unprecedented (Google Chrome OS) and doing a simultaneous pivot to take over a related space is not either (Amazon AWS).

Not a chance in hell Adobe is going to do that. It'd increase their costs and the complexity of releases, and all for a platform with 1.x% share and with a culture of not paying for softare

That's like saying Google releasing Chrome OS and Android while porting their software the Linux was dumb because it just increases their costs for a platform that no one uses while totally missing the part that Google now controls an alternative platform that people actually do use... do you really not see how Adobe seems to hold almost all of the cards needed right now to take over as de facto operating system?

There is a big difference between what Adobe and what Google do. Adobe is nowhere near being an operating system, they build application platforms. If anything they are moving towards making all their apps web based.

I can relate. Since I setup a Linux desktop PC running Arch & bspwm, I feel less productive in macOS. The only other desktop UX tool I use is dmenu.

It feels like when I first moved from Windows to OS X. Makes sense, since back then OS X felt minimal compared to Windows, and a bare tiling manager over Linux is the ultimate minimalism.

Proper window tiling was one of the annoyances that prompted me to switch!

I used dwm at first when I switched back to Linux, but found it still doesn't handle multi-head very well, so now I use XMonad (with dmenu), and have been very content with it.

Arch Linux + XMonad is the way I run my stuff.

I still have a MacBook Air lying around that I use when I'm on the road. The amount of visual clutter, annoying UI animations, the nagging from notifications and alerts surprises me every time. I didn't notice it before I started using my current XMonad setup. So either Apple is making it worse or you just don't see it when you don't have a clean and minimal system as a comparison.

There are professional crews running Linux and using either Krita for art / comic work or Blender for modeling and 3d animation. The only industries really lacking right now are video editing, which I believe Kdenlive is making great inroads on, and professional audio, which is the only major field that Mac Pros can target that is not really having their needs met at all (Ardour can be... something, but its UI is barf and the prerequisites to using it are fairly high).

I guess we are also missing professional photo editing to match photoshop (Krita isn't trying to be one, and Gimp is kind of a mess) and 2d animation (in a world of toonboom and flash, synfig is a poor substitute). Freecad is also not a very effective substitute for CAD workstations, but to my knowledge those users have never left Windows for OSX in the first place.

Frustratingly, the brilliant Davinci Resolve has been half ported to Linux. The backend will run on Linux to allow for rendering clusters, but the UI is Mac and Windows only.

Ardour is only half the equation for audio production on Linux, even if it didn't have serious shortcomings. Professional users need an extensive suite of plugins, the vast majority of which are proprietary and have no good Linux alternative. There's no good pitch correction plugins for Linux, no Kontakt compatible sampler, no mastering suite, no restoration and repair suite, no good metering tools.

My Pro needs are iOS and OS X development, in no way Linux can solve that.

How is Linux now on things like suspend/resume and wireless networking these days? I was using Linux for my primary dev laptop until 2010. Once I realized I could shut the lid and reliably wake it up -- something I have yet to see a Windows or Linux laptop do -- I switched over. (But I still use a Linux VM for the actual dev tools).

A lot has improved in the recent years for Linux on the desktop. If you have very new devices, it is recommended to run the newest kernel. Suspend works fine for me.

Let's put it this way: We had someone in to demo a piece of software (webapp) this week which we were considering licensing, they had a Linux laptop (Ubuntu). They weren't able to connect to our corporate wireless and the meeting was delayed almost 40 minutes (ultimately we loaned them an in-house Windows ultrabook to do the demo). I felt embarrassed for them.

I've not seen sleep issues on MacOS or Windows for over ten years. You close the lid it sleeps, you open the lid it wakes. Seems reliable.

Just curious, is that because of VPN?

No nothing I posted about has anything to do with VPN.

The user wasn't able to connect to our guest 802.1X (EAP, 802.11n) wireless network using their Ubuntu laptop. MacOS clients and Windows clients have no issue (it is a guest network, non-employees use it often).

The only time I've ever had an issue connecting to a network with Linux was with a specific university network, which (forgive me if I mangle this because I'm not very familiar with networking protocols) used WPA2, PEAP and MSCHAPv2 and required a username and password to authenticate. The only tricky step was you needed to indicate to the network manager to use a certificate at /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificate.crt

That was a pain to set up, and I switched to their alternative network that permitted whitelisted MAC IDs pretty quickly.

Also, I've noticed that recently, when I connect to certain guest networks at office buildings and libraries and so forth, there is a "login" page where you consent to not look at porn or whatever on their connection that you are supposed to be automatically redirected to when you first connect and try to load a page.

Sometimes the redirect doesn't work, and you are forbidden from loading pages until you've clicked the button on the page it failed to send you to. Going to 1.1.3.1 or 192.168.1.1 or some variant usually finds it.

But for the most part! I have not had any issues with normal "type the password into the WPA network" or "associate with the unsecured network". See my other comment in this chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881305

And in the worst case, I always have my phone with me, rooted with unlimited 4G and a USB cable to tether it with.

YMMV.

My company-issued HP laptop running Windows 7 does not reliably wake from sleep. I have to use hibernation instead.

I've never seen OSX sleep issues. I have seen Windows sleep issues, but less than for Linux. I'm hoping things are better now in 2016. But yeah, I got OSX because I know OSX can talk to everyone.

I have never encountered any wireless issue.

Suspend works fine.

(IIRC suspend issues are mostly due to proprietary drivers, which is basically nVidia and AMD to a smaller extent (AMD's open source drivers work well))

I have, back in 2002 - 2010. That was when the fulltime job I signed on for issued me a MBP. Suspend and wake was terrible. I've had Linux geek swagger in there claiming they could fix it, and then running away when they realized, there was no fix.

That was why I was asking if the state of things for Linux has improved now that it is 2016. Thanks for sharing.

Even today the only way to make this work in Linux is to run Windows or OSX on the hardware, then VirtualBox or VMware, then Linux full-screen. Let the host OS do the tricky stuff like power management and networking.

>Even today the only way to make this work in Linux...

What? I'm running Arch with i3 right now, and networkmanager (with nm-applet for my tray) is doing just fine at finding and associating with networks. `systemctl suspend` suspends my system as desired. I'm sure if I spent some time looking, I could bind it to my power button or laptop lid.

If your complaint is that user shouldn't have to use the command line to suspend their device - I've used Ubuntu versions since 12.04 and they all have this sort of thing built in and intuitively accessible.

Were you referring to something besides network and power management?

That was what I ended up doing. Dev work in VM, and let OSX be egregriously good at talking to people. After I switched to a cloud machine for the Linux dev and started using mosh, I don't really notice that I am not working on a cloud machine. Though if I want to say, take a 3-month coding cruise or travel by train across the US while coding, that might be different.

It does come down to the hardware. I have had no problems with wifi, video, suspend/resume, hibernation etc since a laptop ago bought in 2007. I have been buying the Thinkpad T series with all Intel components. Especially the wifi and gpu are Intel. Everything worked with Ubuntu.

If you have Nvidia or AMD GPUs, some other wifi vendors (cough broadcom cough) then there can be issues due to drivers, firmware, binary blobs etc. They manifest as suspend/resume issues, wifi flakiness etc.

So yes you can do it by selecting component vendors, but in general 100% of systems will not be robust.

As you've probably noticed in the other replies here, opinions vary widely :).

These kinds of things are also part of why I switched to OS X in 2003-ish, so I understand the hesitation.

In my experience, Linux is perfectly fine nowadays for these things. I've been traveling a bit recently (and so have been using a lot more random WiFi access points, tethering with my phone, and relying on battery for power), and everything's pretty much just worked for me.

My company's development team is just about 50/50 Linux/Mac now, and I haven't seen any real difference between the two sides with issues for WiFi. In fact, I've probably seen more difficulty on the Mac side recently: I feel like the last few versions of OS X have had the habit of randomly dropping WiFi connections sometimes. One of my friends has an MBP that will drop a connection & refuse to reconnect until restarted (or at least he hasn't yet found a solution that doesn't involve restarting).

It's possible a lot of the issues people report might be down to hardware/distribution choices: not all hardware support is equal, and not all Linux distributions are equal. FWIW I use Arch Linux on a ThinkPad.

That all might sounds a little "works on my machine", but I'm not trying to say that the contrary stories of people having a terrible time aren't valid concerns. What I am saying is that many Linux users have perfectly stable & pleasant experiences, and many Mac/Windows users don't have stable/pleasant experiences, so ultimately YMMV regardless of what setup you choose.

That sounds like it's worth for me to try again if that is the case. Maybe I can find some decent hardware that works well. Thanks for sharing.

The flip side is for the work I do nowadays, I usually use a Linux VM on something like Digital Ocean. There was at one point I was using a 2011 11" Mac Air to dev work.

And if you split your time between the terminal and the browser and want what amounts to a built-in IDE, OpenBSD is a great answer.

I like the BSDs, and considered doing that instead of Linux.

My company is a heavy Docker user, though: dealing with docker-machine & running Docker via a VM on OS X was one of the final straws that caused me to switch. Given that FreeBSD's Docker support is pretty recent (and was still considered beta when I was deciding to switch), and OpenBSD doesn't have any native support at all as far as I know, I felt that the probability of trading one annoyance for a similar one was too high, so Linux was the right choice for me.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "what amounts to a built-in IDE"?

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