Switchers – Irony and Operating Systems | Hacker News Reader

Switchers – Irony and Operating Systems

brianketelsen.com

31 pointsbketelsen14 comments

I find these articles and the recent trend of "Macs used to be cool" kind of strange.

Macs have terminal.app, bash, a handful of proprietary command-line tools (hdiutil) and that's about it.

Never had inherent package management, we have homebrew and macports to thank for that. App Store isn't quite the same and doesn't fulfill the same needs.

You can still run Linux on your MacBook, if that's what you want.

macOS is fine and it's not Windows, that's what this is about right?

Apple makes some pretty decent hardware when it comes to build quality, appearance, and battery life, if it's not your cup of tea maybe look into ThinkPads, they're great machines too!

author here - not just email, it's plugging a projector into a linux box (I'm a trainer) and praying it might work. There are a dozen small things like that making linux great for dev, not so great for everything else.

I have to agree, microsoft is on their game. The surface book and surface studio are the sexiest pieces of hardware that have come along in a LONG time.

Just look at the microsoft surface product family photo https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface?

This is a clear and concise vision for a computing family reminiscent of Steve Jobs' apple. Three form factors, all unique and with their own purpose, all with touch input and pen input. Their operating systems are now all united under the universal windows platform (which means that software is compatible across ALL their platforms, not just their pc platforms). As someone who's been anti m$ with a vengence for the past 13 years or so, I'm astounded at the progress they've made, and I for one betting on them continually making waves for the next few years while everyone else just iterates on the same old crap.

Except I've not once seen anyone use a surface in any configuration but "laptop".

And plugged in, always plugged in, is battery life really that bad on those things?

I recall a fellow consultant in the field whipping his out mid-day at a job and it's totally flatlined.

Email is the hold up? I must be missing something because that's never been the "must have" app situation to prevent a user from going linux in my experience.

This whole article read like astroturfing, and I agree -- if you're going to complain about something not working on Linux, it isn't email.

A lot of weird fringe non-standard email systems like Exchange work hard to maintain incompatibility with Linux.

Yet another reason to avoid Microsoft rather than embrace them.

I stopped reading the article after the first paragraph. Doesn't make sense to avoid an operating system because email.

> The OS itself is still visually superior to anything else, but it’s been showing the signs of neglect for a few years now.

Can you elaborate on this? Without going into any detail your post reads a bit like a paid promotion. Probably not but you gotta be careful because of stuff like this:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/stealth-marketing-micr...

https://uncrunched.com/2014/06/17/microsoft-paying-bloggers-...

I'm not being paid, and not the OP.

Typing this reply on a Thinkpad R50e, which my SO rescued from the neighborhood bin when taking trash out. I put a Debian (Tanglu) on it, and use it for everything.

My beloved Mini is sitting in it's corner of the room, looking as hipster as ever, but it's not the same.

Apple used to have a clearer, more cohesive vision for the UX it's software provides. I feel that they have become more daring with the kind of stuff they let in now. And the stuff that they let go of.

Tiger was amazing, a smooth UNIX, half-way there in each way it mattered but so clearly pointed at the right targets. Leopard was more of everything, and Snow Leopard was the first, I feel that went nowhere in particular. And so it goes.

Stuff keeps changing for reasons of business goals, or background architecture; but not because of matters of taste, or doing more with less. I'm not feeling it.

What Sierra is, in my eye, is a Snow Leopard sitting on the Shared Apple Device Cloud batting it's many eyelashes, whereas before I knew exactly where it was, and what it was about.

Why not just switch all the way to Linux? It runs Chrome (and Firefox!) just as well as Windows, and with a browser it has the email and calendaring apps folks are using these days anyway.

He mentioned the hardware headaches, but for most systems I don't see Linux giving any hardware problems tbh

I have the 15 in. current gen MBP and had a fair few issues with the hardware. A few kernel patches fixed most of them, but that's more effort than should be needed, and there's still some lingering audio driver issues I haven't resolved.

I'm under the impression that the 13 in. model works without issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com