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Comment by enjo | Hacker News Reader

The latest rev pushed me to a PC for the first time in like 15 years. It's partly because I didn't love the new Macbook Pro, but also cause hey..change is fun sometimes.

I'm very happy with my new Surface Book. I never thought I'd like the touchscreen as much as I do. I LOVE being able to go to tablet mode for calls and stuff where I sort of want to just wander around. The pen has completely changed how I do flow-charting and wire-framing.

The new Linux subsystem thing is a god-send. It was completely seamless for me to transition from the Mac to Windows pretty much solely because there wasn't really a transition. All our provisioning and development scripts just worked.

It's been fun to do a bit of gaming on it too :)

The touchpad is really the only thing that I think compares poorly. Apple really nails that whole experience. After a few weeks I'm getting better with it, but it's still painful compared to the precision and certainty I had on my Macbook Pro.

I'm sure I'll be back on a Macbook someday (cause hey, change is fun) but no regrets right now.

View on HN

I'm also considering a switch, but Windows drives me up the wall whenever I touch it. macOS has been getting uglier and more awkward to use the last few years, but Windows is still the king of ugly.

So I've been considering Linux as my first option. I fired up a few VMs and dipped my toes in various Linux desktop environments: Elementary, Fedora 25, and Ubuntu (Unity) so far. These are all GNOME 3 variants. And... oh boy. Linux land really needs some kind of unifying revolution to happen, because this is a mess. Things have gotten a little smoother in the decade or so since I was last exploring Linux desktops, but it's like they're still figuring out what it's supposed to even be. GNOME feels like it's stuck between trying to be Windows and OS X, with some super weird details (like the launcher thing) that makes it feel like they had plans to build a touch screen OS for tablets or something. Meanwhile, there's little consistency between apps (and Elementary tries to remove menu bars as a concept, what's up with that?), and everything feels put together randomly by people with widely divergent ideas of what a kind of desktop environment to aspire to. It also struck me how much competition there is -- there are at least three GNOME forks (two of 3.x, one of 2.x), for example -- a situation which seems to exist partly due to infighting.

Maybe with out tweaking and plugins and customization you can beat it into some shape that lets you work efficiently, but the experience put me off, to be honest. I don't like being that negative, but I was a bit shocked about how bad it was. Mint was next on my list, but I'm not sure I will continue since it's another GNOME 3 fork.

This is why I always return to XFCE. It may not be rapidly evolving, but if I'm running a Linux desktop, I want simple.

On what Distro though? What should I try if I want something that pretty much works out of the box i.e. has acceptable battery life + WiFi + Sound + Suspend mode on a Macbook / Latitude / Thinkpad without me having to set up config files according to all kinds of internet sources for a day... or even a week?

KDE Neon or Kubuntu.

That's what you want.

Just works, anyone can use it, and if you wish, you can right-click on anything and have tenthousand config options to make everything exactly as customized as you want it.

I'm using a Thinkpad T460 with the latest Ubuntu and everything works out of the box. Even the smartcard reader works with my ID to sign my tax form.

Battery life is 12-14 hours of real work with the big battery (which costs something like 18$ more than the regular one).

I still use a Macbook Air for iOS development but I now boot the Thinkpad for everything else.

(Oh and if there's an engineer working for Spotify in the crowd, thanks for the Linux app!)

Try Xubuntu off a USB stick on your chosen hardware first.

XFCE is very stable so it should work almost exactly the same on every distro. Just pick the one that you like the most / is easier to install for you / etc.

KDE is a bigger and more complex system so it works a bit differently depending on what distribution you use. Some distros like KDE Neon always have the most recent KDE while other like OpenSUSE Leap prefer to use stable versions of the applications.

When it comes to wifi/sound/etc it has to do with whether the driver for that contains binary blobs. Some distros don't ship blobs due to security and/or software freedom concerns while other distros have a more relaxed policy when it comes to proprietary software.

Thinkpads have a reputation for being very easy to run Linux on. You should expect everything to work out of the box. For the Dell computer you might have to install drivers separately but you can't tell for sure without knowing the exact model you have. You could do a test drive with a Live USB to check out. I wouldn't expect things to work out of the box on the macbook though. Apple isn't very Linux friendly and their macbooks have many specialized components that are only found on Apple products so Linux support is not very good. But even then, some dedicated hackers still try to reverse engineer them so you might have better support if you have an older model instead of the latest macbook.

The following table can help a bit with determining if wifi will work on your computer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_wire...

Xubuntu.

Fedora XFCE spin, or CentOS 7.

Edit: Fedora on workstaton / laptop, CentOS 7 on a dev server where a desktop has utility. Not on production boxes.

I never understood why XFCE is not the default for Ubuntu desktop. It was(is?) part of Xubuntu, the lightweight Ubuntu distro, years ago. I had the most basic entry level laptop, but I managed to connect 2 external monitors to it while the tiling would remember the locations of all programs in all three monitors and it was FAST. Nothing I have tried since has touched it. It set me up for a lot of disappointment! I now have a macbook and while it's a great and integrated machine, CMD-tab - which I use to switch screens - doesn't even work properly if an application is in fullscreen mode.

Xubuntu still exists.

Not everyone misses CDE.

At least that is what it reminded me of.

I never really used CDE, but XFCE just turned out to be my speed.

> [XFCE] may not be rapidly evolving

Which is why I use it!

And it works. No flashy in your face features trying to impress you with bouncing balls or animations, it's just like an improved version of Windows 2000 interface.

You can try https://neon.kde.org if you want. I am very pleased with it on a desktop.

Woha! That's some serious design there. I am heavily, heavily impressed by what the KDE folks are building. I will admit that I don't think I'll switch to KDE anytime soon - I had been using it throughout the 3.x series, and was extremely excited about (and then disappointed by) the 4.x releases, but then switched to MacOS and never looked back.

If I get myself a workstation again (and there are solid reasons for doing so, like CUDA for DNN development when you're tired of working on servers for local development), I'll definitely give KDE another go.

Had the same thing. Turns out, I'm more of a design snob then I thought I was. Trying to move away from macOS and trying out Windows and a few Linux distro's, my god it's all ugly.

I don't care much about Apple hardware specifically, but they got my hooked because of the OS.

Pretty lame.

Try something without any design at all, like Linux with a tiling window manager and some minimal applications.

This is what I use Windows for. It's an SSH terminal that has a web browser and plays music (via groove which is actually quite good)

Is Putty still a thing on Win or does it have something native?

Putty (or Kitty or MobaTerm) is still a thing, but there are other options. The Linux subsystem will give you a *nix shell and ssh that works exactly like you expect it to. There is also msys which will give you an ssh client you can run directly from cmd.exe or power shell. Microsoft have been working on a proper native port of OpenSSH, but while it apparently works pretty well, it's still not feature complete or ready to be shipped as a standard part of Windows (hopefully early next year).

I use putty. Haven't found a compelling reason to use anything else yet.

My previous laptop was a windows machine that acted as a web browser, music/video player and VirtualBox host. All of my work was done in linux in virtualbox (and my SSH terminal was also bash running on linux in virtualbox).

My linux environment was very minimal though (mostly living in the terminal, used a tiling WM, vim as my editor). In many ways my mac environment isn't that different except without the tiling WM.

That setup worked quite well, although used more resources than if I hadn't used Virtualbox.

I totally agree with you- but it's worth pointing out that a tiling window manager + minimal applications is still a designed interface.

I agree. To my mind the greatest obstacle to Linux Desktop adoption is the traditional Desktop concept.

To me, NeXTStep was the best feature rich desktop.

I wish there was a modern version that isn't macOS.

Well it depends on what you consider modern but Openbox is still alive and kicking (albeit it is only a window manager).

On a rant tangental note a slight annoyance I have lately is that all the window managers are getting pushed out / ignored because of Wayland.

With Wayland you basically have to write an entire desktop instead of just a window manager. I used to love that about Linux.. the pick and choose what works best model but now the choices are becoming fewer.

Oh well back to my macbook with zero choice.

The only wm I loved and stuck with on Linux was Windowmaker. Your comment is why - NeXTStep was awesome and missed..

Weirdly enough that's how I spend a lot of my time on my iPad Pro - use Mosh to connect to a Linux box and then use tmux and vim to set up tiles and do my work.

Back in 2009 my dream was to run OSX with a Thinkpad keyboard and trackpoint. Now that I have OSX on a Thinkpad X220 my dream is to run i3-wm with unified application design language and underlying foundations. On OSX Spotlight works well and gives me what I want, and applications look good. There aren't any missing icons and text size isn't all over the place. Amethyst WM on OSX is pretty good, but it's not as good as i3. I'm not sure if it's easier to make applications look good on Linux or to get a WM that looks more like i3 on OSX.

Oh nice, how is driver support on the X220? I've had mixed luck with Hackintoshes.

I agree that there is a lack of great window managers on OS X. I'd love to be able to run awesomewm.

Take a look at reddit.com/r/unixporn

C'mon now, don't be lazy, add that http:// to the front to create a link:

http://reddit.com/r/unixporn/

> C'mon now, don't be lazy, add that http:// to the front to create a link:

C'mon now, don't be lazy, add that s to the end of http to create a link:

https://reddit.com/r/unixporn/

I didn't know that was a feature. Oops!

I never get these screenshots of desktop backgrounds. It's background-porn. The fact that it's made on Linux and has a Linux menubar and different fonts than Windows or Mac - who cares?

I've used Ubuntu since seven years at work, the mac since 17 years, Windows not anymore since seven years, unless when helping others. I would change to Linux anytime if all would just work, meaning Photoshop and other software that now doesn't work. Plus the mac is still my favorite piece of hardware. When I bought this 2015 Macbook, I've looked for a good Linux laptop, and came out at about the same price. Then the choice was easy.

Most of those posts have a good deal of theming setup. Usually people include just the background alone because people invariably want the source to use on their own setups :P

Don't get it either. Most themes or skins or whatever for Linux desktops (including the default ones) are pretty terrible - the fit and finish is generally poor. If I'm going to be staring at something for 8+ hours a day the inconsistencies really start to grate.

Most of those desktop screenshots remind me of Winamp skins from back in the day - yes it's a great piece of software and endlessly customisable, but most of those customisations are terrible. Like a 14 year old with a copy of Neuromancer and MS Paint.

I'm constantly trying Linux distros and DEs and the answer when I talk about this is 'Well if you spend time tweaking it...'

NO, that's not the right answer. Endless configuration options means there wasn't the will to make a design decision and stick to it. 'Customisation' can be an excuse for a poor job. That's why Elementary OS is the least horrible desktop, even if it still has issues. Their lack of global menus may be a questionable decision, but at least it's a decision.

Maybe someone should do a kickstarter project for this: to get a decent Linux distro well designed. Hah!

do y'all really think Cinnamon is unpolished? I use a Mac at work and definitely prefer Cinnamon over the Mac interface

The problem with your rant is that people have different opinions on what is "good". You would probably hate my setup because it's a tiling WM with nothing. No conky bar, no date/time in the bar, no power monitors, etc. But it works the best for me because I don't like any distractions at all.

Linux gives you the freedom to choose the environment that suits you personally best. Windows doesn't give you ANY choice, and it's still bad! If you like to be told what is good and make no optimizations for your personal workflow, more power to you. But don't go saying that Linux is "not the right answer", that's just silly. Works on my machine :)

Funny I'm the exact opposite. Only on a MBPr for the hardware, otherwise would prefer Linux to OSX. Lightweight tiling window manager + Vim keybinds for all apps = super efficient. With OSX I actually have to use the mouse. How quaint.

how do you get vim keybinds in every app?

Also curious!

(dupe of other comment in same thread by me)

For OS X at least...

https://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html

If you haven't yet tweaked these "not well-advertised" settings, this may indeed turn out to be a "this changes everything!" moment for you

I guess he's picking the apps that support that - probably web browser via extension, and cli apps which often do that.

For OS X at least...

https://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html

If you haven't yet tweaked these "not well-advertised" settings, this may indeed turn out to be a "this changes everything!" moment for you

pretty much everything has a vi-mode these days. all shells, tmux, browser via extension (vimperator/vimium/cvim/surfingkeys) or by default (uzbl et al), wm by configuration or default (bspwm/i3/awesome etc.). intellij even has support for an .ideavimrc which surprisingly works quite well.

Yup, this.

Script that stuff with Hammerspoon :)

Customizing the Cocoa Text System (which in turn pretty much affects all apps with text input)

https://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html

This enables you to do what you're referring to in MacOS.

If you haven't yet tweaked these "not well-advertised" settings, this may indeed turn out to be a "this changes everything!" moment for you

Give an up-to-date KDE a shot.

KDE certainly is powerful and the Kparts system is amazing. However, in the beauty category I would put it at the bottom of the bunch.

So, did you use a recent version?

I have to concur, the latest Fedora 25 with the KDE Plasma is a beauty to use. Put it on a new Thinkpad X1 Carbon, screen is amazing, fonts crystal clear, all very smooth.

KDE Plasma 5 is gorgeous. I couldn't stand KDE4's "windows XP" look but now KDE is one of my favorite DEs.

I used Plasma 5 for a while and really loved the interface and the ability to customize almost anything, but what got me in the end was trying to sync settings across multiple machines. From what I can tell, there are a bunch of random files with names starting with "k" dumped in ~/.config that store most of the settings, but copying them to different machines didn't seem to work. Of course, it's not much easier to sync settings with something like Gnome, but it takes me a lot less time and effort to set up Gnome with the exact settings I like than Plasma. If I didn't switch around machines/distros a lot, I probably would have stuck with Plasma though.

KDE was trash when Ubuntu first started and chose GNOME but I'm sure they are kicking themselves now.

You'd think it wouldn't be that hard to make a prettier UI, but apparently it is.

Original windows interface is pretty usable.

What makes it worse is that they change, regroup and rename things each f-ing year. W7 made it hard to select apps (floating groups in taskbar), explorer introduced dumb libraries, control panel is always a mess, as is /Users/Shared (iirc) thing. Now that w10. I try it and understand that I'm unable to do anything again and again.

Biggest questionable change in macos for 6 years was new ui flavor and maximize button became fullscreen. That said, iTunes also experiments too much.

Ubuntu with Unity looks pretty good out of the box. The appearance of my desktop has been a non-issue for years.

Try i3 or fluxbox while you're still experimenting (or KDE for that matter if you've only gone with Gnome so far). Diversity is actually a good thing :)

I've standardized on Xubuntu but there are some pretty sweet desktop managers/window managers out there. That being said I feel like I'm fairly close to converting to i3.

You know lots of environments are quite configurable both in aethetics and functionality have you explored this. If you just booted up and didn't explore your options you might have missed the better part of your options.

Functionally I think there a lot to be said for tiling window managers and I think they look great with Compton plus semi transparent windows, selectively obviously.

Of course it might not be your cup of tea.

I am experiencing the same thing, but on the reverse side.

At my home, I have a Ubuntu desktop which works perfectly. I use Eclipse, Android Studio and Atom editor. On work, I use MBP and pretty much the same environment.

I know it is not a common opinion but no matter what I do, I still like Ubuntu more than macos. I agree that macos looks more polished, engineered and complete but somehow, I prefer Ubuntu's plastic feeling. It has been 6 months and still my opinions did not change.

There is also the problems of macOS with Eclipse and other GTK applications (Meld) some other stuff about Mac that I couldn't fully adapt yet.

Lastly, FYI, no, I am not hater and I like MBP, especially as a solid metal object.

Eclipse is just super janky under macOS, and the GUI doesn't even work the same as its Windows counterpart -- which makes teaching classes with Eclipse a study in pain

MacOS lost me somewhere around Mavericks and the idea of a tablet that is also my PC was appealing, so I tried a Surface Pro 3 and decided to keep it. Ubuntu Bash for Windows is great, but is Beta and still needs some work. As for my old 2011 MBP, Ubuntu runs very well on it. For a couple of decades I kept trying Linux on the desktop, and today I am happy with it. From managing photos, CAD for my 3D printer, Python development and music with my keyboard, Dropbox support, it really is remarkable how far the desktop has come. I am still using the web client for OneNote though...

I'm just trying to find a high end laptop that will run Linux flawlessly. No trackpad driver issues. Zero. Perfect plug and play.

It's the only thing keeping my mac at this point. Fear of having to debug driver shit when i don't want to deal with any of that.

System76 sells laptops with Linux preloaded. I believe Dell does as well (or at least used to if they don't anymore). I'm not sure how high end you are looking for but a quick glance shows System76's most expensive laptop is well over $2,000.

>I'm just trying to find a high end laptop that will run Linux flawlessly.

My 2nd Gen Lenovo X2 carbon is high end and runs Ubuntu flawlessly.

You can also look at Zareason[1]. I have been interested, but my 2015 MBP still gets things done. I did install Lubuntu on my old 2009 MBP. Runs well, but I have yet to get the keyboard mappings right and a USB mouse makes things easier. I want to minimize GUI bling and use my CPU cycles for number (and image) crunching...

[1] https://zareason.com/shop/Laptops/

My XPS 13 9350 works perfectly with Fedora 25. Installed Fedora and literally everything works out of the box. That includes things like HiDPI auto scaling, touch screen, suspend, media keys, etc.

When it was first released, there were some issues with suspend and the touch screen, but they were all resolved a few months later in a newer kernel release. Fedora 25 ships with that newer kernel by default.

Check out Razer Blade or the Blade Pro, any Alienware, any System86 machine, most of the Dell XPS series. Don't touch HP with Linux (really bad firmware and driver compat issues).

I just bought a Razer blade and it has not been flawless with Ubuntu. Specifically, when I close the laptop lid, and then open it again, I keep getting logged out every ~15 seconds, until I restart the computer. As a work-around, I must manually suspend the laptop before closing the lid.

I have the Blade Stealth and haven't had any problems with it yet apart from an update that caused my fans to keep on spinning. It's been fixed since then.

I do agree that Linux has very variable performance and experiences across machines. I really do like the laptop though. I'm looking at the Razer Blade Pro (that machine is a beast but looks sexy still) and some Dell Precision laptops for an upgrade (will be passing on the Blade to my brother) but the Pro is extremely costly at the moment.

I've run ubuntu with zero issues on my thinkpads (w520 and w541) at work for the past ~5 years. No trackpad issues, no wifi issues, no audio or bluetooth problems. It just works.

Try Linux Mint + Mate. It's simple, pleasant looking, and totally intuitive for me at least.

Mate is not only in Mint.

Right, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. GP said they were considering Linux Mint, and so I replied with a suggestion for a GUI that in my experience pairs well with Mint.

Or Ubuntu Mate 16.04, and switch to the "TraditionalOK" theme. (The default theme is, IMHO, not attractive.)

> "Meanwhile, there's little consistency between apps (and Elementary tries to remove menu bars as a concept, what's up with that?), and everything feels put together randomly by people with widely divergent ideas of what a kind of desktop environment to aspire to."

This is the product of dictatorship style development on one side (Windows, OSX) Vs democracy on the other side (Linux distros).

Democracy implies diversity. Dictatorship implies uniformity.

Can you have the uniformity you are looking for within a democracy?

(or some would argue that anarchy would be a better metaphor for the Linux scene)

It's not democracy vs dictatorship. It's individualism/pluralism vs central planning. You can have central planning with democratic legitimacy or without it.

But I don't actually think the horrible state of desktop Linux is down to any of that. Device drivers are Linux's big problem. Desktop environments are a simple matter of getting used to them and learning what to tweak.

> "the horrible state of desktop Linux"

I don't assume the state of desktop Linux to be horrible. It's simply more diverse than the state of Windows and OSX.

For many people that is a good thing. There's intrinsic value in variety.

As I said, it's driver issues that make the Linux desktop/laptop experience horrible, not the diversity of desktop environments.

I don't think it's a good idea for Linux advocates to deny or downplay the effect that driver issues have on the overall desktop/laptop Linux experience.

> s. Things have gotten a little smoother in the decade or so since I was last exploring Linux desktops,

Actually it has gotten worse

I tried Ubuntu and couldn't get over the ugly font and not being able copy paste from anything to anything else. Plus there's no good power management on laptops and no PC ever came out with a quality trackpad that can match macbook.

> I tried Ubuntu and couldn't get over the ugly font and not being able copy paste from anything to anything else

Please elaborate. I mean... Universal copy paste has just been working the last 20 years... Unless I'm missing something basic?

I remember that ctrl+c and ctrl+v didn't work across applications. I think Terminal was one of them. Couldn't copy and paste into it. Out of the box anyway.

Yea that is a 'feature'. The problem is that ctrl+c already means something else in the terminal. Many (most?) terminals map copy and paste to ctrl+shift+c and ctrl+shift+v to get around this.

Of course most *nix user use the middle mouse button for copy-paste in the terminal as standard and never really notice this.

Either that or select - right click - copy/paste. It all works, but the shortcuts don't align. Ctrl-c is sigint, ctrl+v varies, but in vim it escapes special key press.

Yes.

I miss the middle-click-paste in macOS. Also the maximise behaviour in macOS is really annoying.

> Also the maximise behaviour in macOS is really annoying.

I use hammerspoon to paper over a lot of the annoying parts of macos (after using linux on desktop+laptop for over a decade). Here's a minimal excerpt from my config to get a more-reasonable "maximize" behavior: https://gist.github.com/philsnow/c19506dec17597ab9e4bf02f8d2...

Install Spectacle. [cmd]+[alt]+[f] for actual maximize (NOT fullscreen). Replace the f with left arrow and you get half pane left, same with right, or up... you get the idea.

Switch alt for ctrl with the same commands to send to the top quarters of the screen, add a shift to that to send it to the bottom quarters.

I don't move windows with the mouse on OSX/MacOS anymore.

shift-insert pastes anywhere, including into the terminal.

This is why I prefer OSX,the command + V works in terminal because command + V is not mapped to anything in the terminal.

I wish the various linux WMs/DEs took inspiration from the Mac on this, vs the Windows ctrl-combo method. In addition to avoiding key combo collisions in the terminal, I like how in Mac OS X all the control keys for line editing work everywhere. It messes me up when I go to a Windows machine and find that ctrl-w closes my window when I just wanted to delete a word.

In MATE Terminal, and I think GNOME Terminal, you can chance the keybindings to remove the shift — and if you do this, you can send ^C with shift-control-c.

That's a limitation (or rather idiosyncratic behavior) of Terminal not Ubuntu. Copy/paste works everywhere else.

> they're still figuring out what it's supposed to even be

"It" can be any distro. GNU/Linux distros aren't a single entity, and they never will settle on a common interface---that's a good thing. Larger distros like Ubuntu will, but if you're going to adopt this perspective, you'll need to start thinking about the individual distributions and companies/communities behind them rather than "the" GNU/Linux desktop.

> that's a good thing

Not if you're looking for a macOS alternative. I'm fine with the "distros" doing what they want. However, that is not going to lead to a cohesive experience of the kind that macOS is able to provide.

A bigger problem than the desktop environment may be that apps are written to different UI toolkits (these days mostly GTK+ and Qt), and the different environments provide themes to get a unified look. Most apps aren't targeting a particular desktop environment, and so you get this inherent tension, where it's "unopinioned all the way down" and nobody makes a clear decision about a unified look/feel to anything.

I can see why a certain group of hackers like this jangly mess where a lot of time is spent on customizing stuff to work exactly the way they like it, being able to choose a completely different "window manager" and so on. I was like that in my early years, and today I just want things that work. What I want is consistency and stability with a mind behind it. I want it to boot up and render high-quality, subpixel-aliased fonts, and then I'd like to get right to work.

The KDE community seems more closely aligned with this idea, but they still don't control the apps, and unfortunately they still seem to be stuck in the Windows 2000 copy machine mindset.

> A bigger problem than the desktop environment may be that apps are written to different UI toolkits (these days mostly GTK+ and Qt)

I can agree with this criticism (granted, I don't use many GUI programs)---not that they're different toolkits, but that they often have drastically different theming and UX. Uniformity through common theming/UX APIs would be beneficial.

>> but Windows is still the king of ugly.

>> So I've been considering Linux as my first option.

Linux re-defines ugly. It works great but it's very kludgy. Like many others I can setup my workflow on any of the three machines and have tried it out on many different machines from Dell to IBM to Apple. Sublime, terminals, Chrome/FireFox, DropBox, it works well enough on anything but I made my current choice on 'niceness', battery life, screen, and form-factor, even if it cost me a couple hundred dollars more. On a machine I use for 3 years it's 30-40 cents a day.

Maybe I'm an old fart, but everything seems to be getting worse. OSX is worse than it was, Windows is worse than it was, Linux is worse than it was. If you just want to browse the web, okay, but anything beyond that and you are off in a maze of twisty passages, none of them like the other.

Windows has definitely got worse for the consumer, but great for Microsoft. Not sure MacOSX has got worse... there just isn't much innovation anymore

I have surfed through distros, desktop environments and window managers for nearly a year.

My equillibrium point is suckless.org's dwm[0] with all defaults except using Terminus as font and Super(windows) instead of Alt key. ~6 months, no irritation, no configuration change.

Tiling window managers which have extensive configuration options are useful as tinkering material, but not actual working environments. If you want a tiling window manager not for eye appeal and beauty but for simplicity and ease of use, look at r/unixporn/ and use whatever they are not using.

[0]: http://dwm.suckless.org/

I've ended up in a very similar position: stumpwm, st, Adobe Source Code Pro & Super.

For my particular style, being able to extend the WM (not customise endlessly: actually extend) is pretty awesome, but I understand that not everyone's into that.

After getting everything set up the way I like it, I'll never switch.

Hah, I run the exact same config. I used to be a wmii user but moved to Windows for quite a while when work and school required software that only ran there. Now I'm back on the tiling window manager train with dwm, and I realize I had forgotten how much I like this setup.

Great thing about Linux is you can customise it to no end, and you can make it look much better than Macs even.

I recently switched because I need something with some GPU horsepower. I was pleasantly surprised with Windows 10 dark theme + http://cmder.net

I would love to use Windows all the time at home but as my Windows 10 installation believes it is up to date (but is clearly an old build number, irritatingly/stupidly only visible in the settings app and not my computer > Properties), it really is not up to date and I have no idea when Microsoft will decide that it is.

It's rubbish. And the lack of consistency throughout the OS (icons different everywhere, duplication of settings app despite same underlying COM snap-ins, settings app titlebar isn't really a titlebar, 3 different right-click menus - one for the Start menu, one for Edge, one for everywhere else) it is driving me insane. You have to learn all of these edge cases on how to interact with core OS windows.

That shouldn't be the case!!

Windows 3.11 came with a manual (I have it) that informed you how to interact with the desktop and windows. Just imagine the mess they'd have to write for Windows 10 - "drag the blue bar at the top, unless it is the settings app, where there is no blue bar and you can't tell where the titlebar ends and the toolbar begins"; "single click on buttons, unless you are presented with the 'open with which app?' dialog where you will be able to double-click on the button that has the name of the application you wish to use" etc etc etc

EDIT: And I say all this where I use my PC all day at work as a C++ Windows dev and Windows at home when I need to cross-compile. Don't get me started on the lack of future for the MFC codebase we have at work.

Just to chime in that my windows 10 also still does not want to go to the Anniversary version. I have tried the auto update and the manual installer to no avail. Reinstalling the whole system did nothing as well. I have a standard 2014 mbp so the configuration is all but banal. Everybody is raving about the Linux subsystem but as far as I am concerned it does not exist.

Yep that's the problem I am faced with too. My work PC is also on Windows 10 but not on the anniversary update, so I have no idea what wonderful new delights everyone is partying about.

How can I be sure I am running a secure up to date system if the "am I up to date check" essentially lies to me?

The older Windows 10 releases still get monthly security updates... You can force an upgrade via the Media Creation Tool.

What is so special about the anniversary update that I would have to do that though? Colleagues with the exact same hardware did get the update, is it some sinister A/B testing?

It comes with the Linux subsystem.

Honestly, I haven't had much luck with it as it is still lacking serious features. It has improved in beta versions, but I think it is going to be a while 'till it is stable enough to use instead of a Linux VM, at least on standard builds of Windows 10.

My understanding is that if your computer tries and fails to upgrade, it will only retry a certain number of times before giving up. Your best bet is probably to do an upgrade install with an Anniversary Edition ISO, which I believe you can download from Microsoft directly. Upgrading with install media is a totally different mechanism, more akin to a clean install + data and app migration, than Windows Update and should get you back on the update train again as well.

Yeah the design issues really get to me too. I'm a Windows guy through and through. I've been on Windows since 3.11. I'm not moving to any other OS, but wow is the design fucking horrible. With MS's budget, how bloody hard could it be to actually get a design grad to unify the design? It's seriously 2 months of work for a handful of people. It drives me up the wall.

Sometimes I think there are less people working there than what we think.

If you think that it's 2 months of work and can be done by a design grad, you're crazy.

Implementation might be far more work, but unifying the design is not.

I wholeheartedly disagree. When you have that many products and that much user testing to do, unifying a design like that could take even an entire year unless it's something they've been working on already (which, in this scenario, we're assuming they aren't).

I still say Windows 7 is the best OS they've put out. The whole Metro UI is a disaster.

You don't really get the Metro UI as a start menu in Windows 10, although the metro apps forced on you are irritating. E.g. Calculator now has a pointless splash screen, delaying your use of it.

Same here. My employer, who is almost exclusively Mac, were reluctant to get me the new MBP.

I got a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition (Kaby Lake) and so far, so good. Am very happy. Like you say, I wish it had the Apple touchpad (but not the new one - that's getting _too_ big).

Everything else is great. The Infinity Edge screen, beautiful keyboard...

Been considering getting one. They come with option of Ubuntu. But I read too many complaints on things like coil whine, HiDPI, and low uptime on battery.

Hmm? Doesn't the Kaby Lake have like 20+ hours of battery life with the fullHD screen? 14 or so with the hiDPI?

In Windows. Driver issues in Linux drop battery life to more "normal" levels, IIRC.

Did hear about coil whine - mine doesn't exhibit it.

HiDPI looks pretty good for the most part.

I largely run with AC power, so really need to test this (I've only had it since Friday).

A few months ago I made a similar transition - to a Surface Pro 4. I'd been on Mac since 2009. Before that, Windows and Linux.

I think you sum it up well - there are some rough edges in the Windows world, but there also are in the Mac world. I find I hardly use my iPad now.

Oddly enough I find the track pad on the Surface Pro 4 keyboard to be the absolute BEST track pad I've ever used on a PC (even better than the one I played with on the Surface Book) which is...just absurd and odd. But hey I thought it was interesting just how much I liked it compared to everything else.

I found that the gestures were odd, coming from a MacBook. I also notice that my MacBook's touchpad (whilst great in macOS) being absurdly dumb when I reboot to Windows on the same hardware.

To the touch experience you describe, I would add that the terminal support is also rather "meh".

I use WSL a lot during the day; and the stock terminal is way not good and third party options such as conemu are OK, but still comes with annoying issues. My emacs quality time gets messed up because of some of these issues... there may be no way around some of that and it may simply be the reality of a system that maps certain keys one way and a subsystem that would like them another.

Otherwise, I own a Surface Book for travel and tablet like usage and I use a Lenovo workstation for my day-to-day stuff. All Win 10. Very happy overall.

Could you elaborate on its impact on how you do development? One reason I still have a mac is because it's so developer friendly. Linux is very time-consuming to make things work with and is incompatible with various hardware. Also some mac software is great.

I have a Zenbook.

Windows for development isn't nearly as convinent as OSX. Yes there's lots of customization you can do to make it bearable. Powershell isn't as awful as CMD, but projects aren't supporting Powershell as much as bash any time this decade AFAIK.

The Linux subsystem works, but the flow between Windows and Linux is lacking.

I tried Linux. Linux doesn't handle my mix of high DPI and normal DPI monitors (every month I'm told Wayland is going to support it "soon") so I can't use it. I know that sounds silly, but my monitors are a huge part of how I work. Not supporting my workspace is pretty much a non-starter. But to seal the deal it also crashed going to sleep a few times.

So I installed OSX... on my Zenbook. Because somehow OS X managed to handle my hardware better than Ubuntu had (bar the stock wireless card), and it was developer friendly.

I prefer brew to apt-get. Yes, apt-get is vastly more powerful, but I never had brew fail on me because a previous install had messed up.

OS X also has a lot of mindshare. Tooling tends tend to progress from Linux and OS X in ease of use before entering a gulf and reaching Windows eventually.

I got my copy of OSX legitimately, but to me it's telling I essentially had to go to "bootleg OSX" to get my hardware and software experiences in sync. OS X even supports the touchscreen as a mouse, not that I ever used the touchscreen on a laptop that only supports the laptop form factor and no others...

Hackintosh works really well if you have the compatible hardware. It's also my platform of choice.

Couldn't recommend this enough, though I do wish I had portability

Thanks for the details! Interesting the touchscreen still works.

Yeah, I sometimes joke that Asus put out a touchscreen MacBook before Apple did

Cygwin

The only times when apt-get fails is when your disk is full (!) or when you're including foreign repositories. (Debian has a LOT more in official repos than Ubuntu).

Problem is that each software upgrade from Apple contains important security and reliability fixes. You get those even on old Mac hardware (my MBP is 6 years old now). On a Hackintosh, you don't know whether those software upgrades are going to work, or if they will break or brick your system. On top of that, when I looked around, I couldn't find some kind of good guide advising me which ultrabook to buy as Hackintosh. There's no clear comparisons and just a lot of homebrew mentality. I'm not interested in that; I want something which works well, and stays working well.

> OS X also has a lot of mindshare.

Sure, but I expect that to go down now. IMNSHO, YMMV.

I didn't get the Zenbook ever dreaming I'd Hackintosh it, it was more a move of desperation than anything.

And I definitely wouldn't recommend buying a laptop just to Hackintosh it, its more of a fun hack than anything with a few specific exceptions where there's strong overlap between an Apple product and an existing PCs hardware (and at that point you might as well just buy the official product if you're only going to Hackintosh it, bar cost)

I'd have just gotten another MBP if I wanted OS X for the start for the reasons you list (and the fact that while in many areas OSX was handling the hardware better, it still didn't support the stock wifi or the Optimus setup).

I think the MBP issues are overblown. The 2015 is still around and still fully capable. I find it strange that people are complaining about the 2016, but then comparing it to laptops that were out for months, and in some cases years, when the 2015 was out, but weren't being chosen over the 2015 by the same users.

There's some backlash because people wanted a MBP refresh and it isn't want they wanted, but I don't see OSX losing that much developer mindshare in the long term. I don't agree with the fear lingering about it being the "end of days" for "Pro MBPs", I think this MBP was an interesting experiment that came at a very poor time (when people were already anxious for a progression of the MBP 2015-2011 in a new form factor, with a bigger battery most likely)

> I find it strange that people are complaining about the 2016, but then comparing it to laptops that were out for months, and in some cases years, when the 2015 was out, but weren't being chosen over the 2015 by the same users.

Well given that the 2016 is more expensive, has shorter battery life, and is missing a bunch of ports, one could argue that it's worse (at least for some use cases) than the 2015.

But the 2015 is still being sold, so I'd expect them to move onto the 2015 (or stay on it if they were already using it)

It did not lower in price, so you're working with hardware of between 1 and 2 years old which on top of being old did not become cheaper.

One small advantage the 2016 version seems to have is being able to get power from either side of the laptop while the 2015 has 1x Magsafe (why on earth did they replace that) and 2 USB-C.

> Linux doesn't handle my mix of high DPI and normal DPI monitors (every month I'm told Wayland is going to support it "soon") so I can't use it.

This, this, this. I have been trying off and on for a couple years to move from MacOS to Linux and the HiDPI situation is a mess. Apparently it's not much better in Windows, so maybe if someone is coming from Windows they are used to problems. But, coming from MacOS where I have a rMBP and a mix of HiDPI and HD monitors and they all 'just work' I had assumed that was the state of the industry for a long time. Once I started reading up on the issue it became apparent in the HiDPI world it is MacOS >>>>>>> Windows > Linux.

The last time I brought this up on HN, someone responded saying I didn't need HiDPI :/

I had similar experiences with Windows hiDPI support but they've all been resolved in the last year with recent software updates.

Windows support it pretty well. Some/Most applications don't. I am running windows on a MBP at 150% and a second monitor at 100% somethings are zoomed on the second, some are very small.

Windows 10 have built a very impressive Linux compatibility layer. It's not a VM, they are executing native ELF binaries using the windows kernel. They run a version of Ubuntu 14.04 on top of it that most notably includes package management. It's currently missing upstart, so some things don't work nicely, but MOST things work just fine. I believe upstart is available on some preview versions now. Everything on our development stack (largely python) worked straight out of the box.

So on windows I have a real bash shell. I have dpkg. I effectively have Ubuntu. I can provision my machine using the ansible scripts we use to provision our production machines (took only minor updates to make them work).

There are some missing pieces. Docker doesn't work from within the linux subsystem. Upstart doesn't work. There is some weirdness related to how you interact with the windows environment from the linux subsystem. For instance I had to install a hack to allow me to open files in sublime from within the linux subsystem.

It's a mixed bag. You have a real Ubuntu environment with real package management, which is awesome (as opposed to homebrew). Yet some things that work on OS X don't work quite as seamlessly on Windows.

I think for most developers, it's probably going to work pretty damn nicely tho.

One painfully missing thing is FUSE support. My workflow involves coding on an sftp-mounted directory, which doesn't work in the Windows version. Alas, it seems the only remote mounting Windows will ever have is WebDAV.

Last time I used Windows, there were several commercial (but cheap) products that supported mounting remote file systems, including SFTP. Tried any of them? Quick Google gives me NetDrive (free) and ExpanDrive.

I don't thiiiink this is WebDAV behind the scenes: https://www.petri.com/vsphere-powercli-psdrives

Dokan provides FUSE support going back to Windows 7. There are also paid solutions with ExpanDrive and Mountain Duck, but in my experience Dokan+WinSSHFS [0] is easy to setup and works great.

[0]: https://igikorn.com/sshfs-windows-10/

Hopefully you're just opening files on the Windows side in the subsystem: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/11/17/do-n...

Also why can't you use Docker for Windows for your Docker needs?

I wish it could access hardware. Currently want to play around with machine learning, I only have one graphics card that I regularly use for gaming, so I have to dual boot to get anything like TensorFlow working.

When I develop on Windows, I use a full-screen Ubuntu VM. It's not meaningfully different from having a Linux machine at the scale of work I'm doing.

Same, though I used to use Fedora.

The Win 10 Linux subsystem is still a mess, though it is improving in beta versions.

I'm a developer and spend most of my time in a terminal, usually in vim. I recently switched from OSX to Linux and have not looked back. OSX/macOS has been getting too goofy for my tastes.

I spent roughly $300 (reusing my current Apple Cinema LED monitor) to build a desktop replacement for my mac pro. Can't be happier.

Then I spent about $600 on a laptop (Thinkpad T460) to replace my Macbook Pro Retina. Also fantastic.

Everything's been great. The keyboard on the T460 is awesome. The battery life thus far is about 16 hours.

I don't see myself ever going back to macOS again. I'm running Arch, using i3 as a window manager, and feel right at home. Basically this feels like a computer again.

I'm curious about that keyboard, because i'm considering getting a Thinkpad T420 or T460, but the T460 keyboard looks like one of those horrible mushy and wholly unacceptable laptop keyboards to me, whereas the T420 at least seems reminiscent of the old revered Thinkpad keyboards. Can you comment?

Hmm, I have the new 2016 MBP, 2014 MBP and T460s and the keyboard on T460s beats the other two by a significant margin. I don't think it has the same feel of the older thinkpads, but it still gives a very clear feedback and give in comparison to even the 2014 MacBook one.

The 2016 MacBook keyboard is just downright horrible. You kinda get used to it but returning to others keeps reminding me that it's just worse in every regard.

After researching a bit more i might end up getting the T420. Solid keyboard, and with an i5 and a fancy SSD it'll be fine for my needs (plus a cd-bay battery, yay!). Blazing even, considering that i'm still on a C2D as my daily driver. Frustratingly my first-gen unibody (2008?) MacBook with Arch Linux just won't die, which would give me an excuse to drop a few hundred on a 2nd-hand Thinkpad.

When I've switched back and forth (to Thinkpads), I don't miss the touchpad as I love the trackpoint. I do miss trackpoint a few months when I've switched to Mac, despite the excellent touchpad.

Latest Macbook Pro drove me to finally switch to Ubuntu for my main dev machine. It sucks not having some of the mac apps I'm used to but I've had nearly 0 problems since switching.

I am shocked how often I use my touchscreen on my Dell XPS laptop. I started off never using it, now find myself using it regularly when I'm on the go (not docked obviously).

Takes a bit of time to get acquainted, but I really enjoy it.

Same here, I thought I would never touch it and almost looked option without it. Glad I bought touchscreen.

Ditto. Last year, I made the mistake of buying a non-touch laptop thinking I didn't care that much. Had to take it back to the shop and swap it for a touch-screen machine....

If you want touch on your laptop and you're not ready to upgrade yet, you should check out the AirBar. You do need to buy the right bar for your screen size though. It's obviously not as good as a real touch screen, but it seems like a decent substitute until you can get one.

Product Site: http://www.air.bar/

Video Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR5r1EfvheI

Many thanks, that's very interesting.

No 17" models. :(

> The touchpad is really the only thing that I think compares poorly.

Which is why Surface Pro owners often turn to these: https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msuk/en_GB/pdp/productI...

> I'm sure I'll be back on a Macbook someday (cause hey, change is fun) but no regrets right now.

After a few years with Surface touch and pen, going back to a Mac is like having a limb removed....

Strong opinions, weakly held :)

But, yes, I transition from a Mac (home) to Windows (work) daily and while I can choose not to, I find that working on different OS and learning its nuances has taught me a lot about how my Python programs execute, for instance.

> The new Linux subsystem thing is a god-send.

Does that mean I get a UNIX env/shell on windows?

yes.

Yes. Ubuntu 14.04 specifically[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux

And 16.04 is on developer preview, so that should hopefully be coming to everyone soon. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/release_not...

The only painful bit is that they don't yet support the nvidia drivers, I'm doing rnn under the linux subsystem and it works great except I'm hurting for gpu access. If you plan on using windows subsystem for linux for machine learning don't bother spending money on a GPU https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/266908-command-prompt-con...

Yup, and to my (and many others' surprise), this thing works actually very well. Not every single app will run but all of the basics for what we need here (mainly gcc) seem to be fine. And it runs graphical apps as well: run an X server on Windows (Moba XTerm or so), export DISPLAY=:0 and of you go. Only tried it with SublimeText so far and that worked out so no complaints yet.

Same here, switched to a Dell XPS13 after 15 years of macs (Still use an iMac at work).

Dell quality has been very bad though, I'm not amused.

Linux bash on Windows also helped me a lot to transition development work to Windows.

I just bought an xps 15 running arch linux to replace my mba 13. The build quality is poorer for sure.

My main complains.

Keyboard: - Cheap plastic that doesn't feel nice to type for long hours - Oh I miss the mac keyboard layout, the control and alt keys on are hard to adjust on windows and linux especially when copy and paste puts your fingers in awkward positions

Touchpad: - Good, but still a ways to go compared to macs. I am buying a MX Master to compensate for this.

Battery Life: - Over exaggeration of duration in advertisement

Its aesthetically pleasing but the general everyday use just doesn't physically feel great. With a macbook, its very easy to focus cause every command is almost second nature. With the xps, I have look back at the keyboard all the time to see what's going on.

I need a linux machine so I don't have much choice. Or I can pay almost triple the price for a macbook pro for the same specs and even slower vm on top.

> I just bought an xps 15 running arch linux to replace my mba 13. The build quality is poorer for sure.

and

> Or I can pay almost triple the price for a macbook pro for the same specs and even slower vm on top.

;-)

What's the problem with the XPS keyboards? I have an XPS 13 skylake (early 2016) and I absolutely love the keyboard. I'm saying this as a touch typist who actually used a Model M keyboard (best keyboard ever made, period; fingers just fly over it) back in the day. I found the XPS keyboards way better than that of Mac notebooks, especially the newer ones found in last year's 12" Macbook, and now in the Macbook Pros.

If not buying the new MBP is scary enough for Apple to make them really work on their laptops, I will stay a bit longer on my 2013 MBP.

What's reassuring is that we need a Mac to work/compile iOS apps. Until they port the toolchain to iOS, not taking care of the Mac could be dangerous to their ecosystem.

Actively taking my Mac environment into a Linux one. Have been for a couple of weeks now. [1]

I use PCs for most of my development work, and Macs when I can (when I'm doing the more ops-like bits of devops, and for personal use). The MacOS environment is really nice, and the Windows tools for writing native code are really good, but the writing is on the wall: Own your computing environment or you will working at someone's sufferance.

I'm not going to go full bull-goose Stallman, but it seems like a worthwhile thing to do.

[1] It's rocky. Device support is spotty, and user interfaces are often staggeringly bad. Maybe with more people piling on things will get better.

It's been several years now that I've been wondering if my current Macbook might be my last one. I love the one I have (it's a late 2011 17" Macbook Pro with a ton of custom upgrades), but they don't make anything like it anymore, it's harder to do your own upgrades, and new versions of their beautiful OS are getting uglier.

Windows is a no go for me. I want a unix underneath, and Windows has its own share of ugly (though I do keep hearing nice things about Surface). I haven't looked at Linux distros lately, but I'm hoping there's one that's as nice and pretty as OS X in its better days.

I've honestly tried hard trying to use the Linux subsystem but I always end up hitting a roadblock because of some feature they don't support yet. Recently I tried installing postgres 9.5 and failed. There is also no sync between Windows files and those in Linux. Additionally so far I haven't seen a single good terminal emulator in Windows with the looks and features of Pantheon or iterm.

I tried windows. I stopped because I didn't like all the telemetry they collect on users, including your keystroke and stylus movements.

They say they do this to train Cortana, but it has the side effect of giving the NSA a front row seat to everything I do.

You known this is optional, right? You can turn it off during and after installation of Windows.

Also, Android and iOS + most of the popular apps you use, including the desktop ones, use some kind of tracking/telemetry and you don't even have the option to disable.

What kind of anti virus program did you buy for it?

You don't need to buy them anymore. Microsoft's one comes built in.

I wouldn't recommend it as it fails in pretty much any test I've seen. However, there are plenty of good, free antivirus software for Windows. I use Avast (free).

Our company is sticking with our current stockpile of 2012-2014 Macbooks. They have a lot of life left in them anyway, but when it comes to an office, having to reinvest in new, HUGE displays, new cabling, new laptops? Apple needs to come up with something more compelling than a stupid bar.

And agree, at home, Windows 10's unix capabilities are amazing. Apple needs to dedicate some real resources to the Mac line and turn them back from being overpriced toys and back to useful tools.

I just bought a new mid 2015 mbp for that reason. Beyond the $300 price increase, there's an additional $400 backdoor price increase for additional chargers and a pile of dongles to replace all the functionality that currently works. Not throwing in a single usb-A port was the final fuck you that tipped me over the edge to the older generation.

$400 for dongles? Got a breakdown on that?

Not the original poster but I'll have a go...

1. OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock so I can connect my existing monitor and wired network (not yet available): $279.

2. Replacement for my USB-A Superdrive: $39.99

3. Thunderbolt 3 hdmi media kit for presentations: $49

4. USB-C SD card reader: $29

5. USB-C to Lightning cable: $20

6. USB-C to USB-A dongle so I can connect my ANT+ dongle: $9

7. Power supply extension cable (you don't get that included anymore): $19

8. Probably would want a USB-C to microUSB lead too (although I could go through the USB-A adapter with existing cables): $19

Total: $463.99

That doesn't seem too outlandish a set up for me. I haven't included an extra PSU, VGA or TB3 to TB2 for example.

Now I live in the UK and the exchange rate isn't doing us any favours at the moment so all of the above will be somewhat more expensive too.

Just a note. If you get the TB 3 dock most of the other dongles are redundant unless you need the functionality on the go.

Yep that occurred to me too.

It becomes a case of do you disconnect and bring the TB 3 dock with you, buy a second 'traveling' dock or get just what you need for travel and hope for the best.

Honestly, I think a docking situation like that looks awesome. I like the idea of just usb-c, but Apple was probably a bit ahead of the curve here. In a year no one will be talking about it, and places like monoprice will have cheap dongles.

I also get what Apple is trying to do. My current MBP has the sd-card reader. I use it because I have a d7100, but everyone else I know with a mbp has literally never used that reader. For them it's a complete waste of space/weight. It is easy to get caught up in what we (as in HNers) need, and miss the fact that many people probably never using anything beyond the power port.

It's a similar situation with the removal of the headphone jack. Apple has stats and those show that the majority of people either use the headphones that come with the phone or have bought BT ones. Apple got ripped hard, but the rumors are most of the flagships coming out next year will also not have a headphone jack.

It's also worth noting that the OWC dock is not official hardware and so may not behave quite as smoothly as the Thunderbolts (currently) do.

Good list, although replacing all your USB-A peripherals can be avoided with a C->A adapter or two.

Two additional chargers, one that stays in my backpack and one for the other room in my house where I work: $180. $150-ish worth of dock for my desk so various stuff works including Logitech wireless mouse, monitor, external drives -- I didn't choose one yet but that's the price range. DVI for projectors and HDMI for various stuff: $100. Three $10 usb-A dongles, one each of which would probably be tied to the power adapters because I personally and professionally have a dozen devices that use usb-A. And the above is well over $400.

I'm still sticking with the 2012 pre-retina because it's apparently the last MBP you can get if you don't want the damn glossy screen, which somehow is standard even though it makes the problem of reflected lighting/glare worse.

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