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Comment by mangecoeur | Hacker News Reader

As an ex-linux user and current mac user, I'm still frustrated by linux laptop hardware support. Ethernet ports that need to be re-plugged, suspend-to-disk not working... lots of glitches things that were already annoying 6-7 years ago but now are hard to justify compared with the polish you can expect from other systems. I could never go back from my macbook because I need everything to just work - no glitchy touchpads, dodgy networking, haphazard sleep (and that's before we get into the quality of the available hardware). I want to actually do things with my computer, not spend my time fixing glitches.

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I recently switched back to Linux (ThinkPad/Arch/Kernel4.8) after 5 years using a Macbook Pro (after using linux for 5 years previously).

Linux hardware support has become much better without a doubt.

However just in the last couple days I've had the following sporadic issues:

* External usb keyboard/mouse simply wouldn't work (and doesn't show up in lsusb). Restart fixed.

* If left overnight, occasionally won't wake up from sleep; requires restart.

* Upon start trackpad/trackpoint occasionally doesn't work; do not show up in xinput; probably fixable, but haven't dug into it.

On the other hand, mac had its own issues:

* Macbook takes relatively forever to come back from sleep; thinkpad is practically immediate.

* Macbook wireless constantly has issues connecting, to the point of having to turn off wireless and back on multiple times (this occurs often).

* Opening many tabs in chrome on mac causes serious slowdowns. Have yet to see any slowdown on thinkpad even with 20-30 tabs. This also goes generally for mac beachball issues.

In general, Arch/i3 combo is far better than MacOS for my needs (95% of time in terminal/browser).

>* Macbook takes relatively forever to come back from sleep; thinkpad is practically immediate.

Waking up from sleep has been nice and fast in Linux for a while, but I have to say that regardless of all the frustrations I've found using OS X over the last year, waking from sleep isn't one of them. It has been nice and fast every time.

>* Macbook wireless constantly has issues connecting, to the point of having to turn off wireless and back on multiple times (this occurs often).

I've found wireless to be a really bizarre experience on OS X. If there are two networks it can connect to in range, it doesn't seem to pay much attention to the strength of the signal, and it always seems to overstate how strong the signal is (that may feed into the former).

I can be sitting in the same room as another wireless endpoint, and it'll choose the one furthest away from it, where wireless strength is pretty low, and constantly suffer communication problems. I've made it a point now to go check which wifi it has connected to.

It has a user definable order of preference across all SSIDs which you can tweak in network preferences.

Sure. I'd rather it just went with the one with the strongest signal, however. I shouldn't need to juggle SSID priority order based on which room I happen to be in.

You can change your sleep mode to get rid of the hibernate restoration. I have to warn you although, your battery life of your sleeping laptop will go down:

http://www.macworld.com/article/1053471/software/sleepmode.h...

Thanks! I didn't know about that. Maybe that's the difference as my linux is solely suspend to ram (never could get hibernate to work)

Indeed, very useful. On Android I had similar issues and had to install a program called Wifi Prioritiser (or something akin to that as there's multiple solutions available). Unfortunately it has a slight impact on battery life.

But macOS is famous for having fast wake from sleep. It's always had this, years before Windows and Linux started catching up. It's always been near-instantaneous for me.

That said, it would seem that they have, and continue to have, issues with waking up with a new external monitor. Maybe you're being hit by this? Occasionally when I arrive at home or the office and plug my asleep-and-lid-closed MBP 2015 in, the screen will display garbage for a while, and hang for 10-30 seconds until it shows the unlock screen. Sometimes it doesn't recover at all.

I should have been more specific, and the word 'forever' was overly hyperbolic - though when you're doing it 20 times in an hour it gets to feel that way.

Relative is the key:

Linux wakes up in milliseconds every time; by the time I open the lid all the way it's ready to go. rMBP (2012) can be from almost as fast as linux to ~10 seconds. I'd guess the average is ~3 seconds; though sometimes even when it wakes up fast I'll still get a beachball for a bit.

I mostly use my laptop around the house and often open and close it many times in a short period -- for instance say I'm reading something technical on the kindle in the armchair; I'll flip it open quite often to test or look something up quickly, so even having to wait a few seconds gets obnoxious.

I could just leave it open, but I don't always have a safe place to put it while open.

note: no external monitor, so that's not the issue.

A few notes for context on why (for my needs) linux is better than mac:

Off the top of my head there are a few primary reasons I prefer linux:

* WM Aesthetics - Arch+i3 (or any minimal, preferably tiling WM) provides a gorgeous minimalist aesthetic -- checkout /r/unixporn for examples. MacOS is just too visually noisy for me.

* I was going to buy a new macbook pro, but then they went and got rid of the escape and function keys. Escape I could probably live without (I tap caps-lock for escape), but function keys I want (at least until the apple touchbar proves itself to be comparatively useful).

* I'm tired of Apple's hyperbole and smugness, especially considering they haven't done anything really interesting since Jobs passed away.

* Customizability: really no comparison here. This is my big one.

* Pacman/AUR - honestly homebrew is pretty good though.

Negatives:

* Occasional weirdness/breakage.

* Can take a lot of research to figure out how to get things to work at times (note: usually not common things anymore though, like wifi etc); sometimes they just don't work without an unreasonable amount of work, or at all (e.g. hibernate). Many things are esoteric in general and have marginal documentation (arch wiki is great though). Granted this is part of the fun (I mean, I am a programmer :).

* Spent tens of hours setting things up to function the way I want (keep in mind I don't use gnome/kde so that would likely fix a lot of issues like external monitor support for HiDPI, and I tend to do heavy/esoteric customization of the user experience). Most of this is because I haven't used linux as my personal machine for ~5 years (i.e. setting it up again would be a few hours or less likely). If you use Gnome/Unity/KDE this probably wouldn't be the case.

* HiDPI (x1 carbon): I think this is actually decent in kde/gnome/unity (?), but it's pretty terrible in most GUI apps in my minimal setup. After some fiddling chromium is fine and I generally simply don't use GUI apps otherwise, and when I do it's still usable if not great. Retina screen and OS support was the primary thing that kept me on a mac. (edit: terminal and chrome look great so I'm happy)

* Miss a few apps: Quiver, Artful, Dash

* I still keep my mac around just in case, but haven't needed it yet.

* Touchpad: nothing touches a macbook (although I'm not jazzed about the huge new one), on the other hand the X1 Carbon's is actually quite good.

oh, and I use Manjaro-i3 [1] -- I've been there, done that with setting up Arch from scratch...highly recommended.

1: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/manjaro-i3-16-06-16-06-1/3329

> * Macbook takes relatively forever to come back from sleep; thinkpad is practically immediate.

What about battery life?

Have you tried [1]? This is based on a HN comment. Explanations on the functions are also found here [2].

> * Macbook wireless constantly has issues connecting, to the point of having to turn off wireless and back on multiple times (this occurs often).

Which macOS version was this? Wasn't a related framework replaced recently? Or was that only DNS?

> * Opening many tabs in chrome on mac causes serious slowdowns. Have yet to see any slowdown on thinkpad even with 20-30 tabs. This also goes generally for mac beachball issues.

How much RAM is in the MBP? I had 100+ tabs open on a MBP 2010 (4 GB RAM default, replaced with 8 GB RAM, replaced 512 GB HDD with 256 GB SSD) and never had any issue with that after the hardware replacements. Are you comparing a 5 year old machine with a new one?

> In general, Arch/i3 combo is far better than MacOS for my needs (95% of time in terminal/browser).

Have you ever tried Homebrew (+ Cask) + Amethyst + iTerm2 + Tmux on the Mac?

[1] http://pastebin.com/F3Sh2mjY

[2] http://blog.taylormcgann.com/2012/07/05/hibernate-from-termi...

FUD. I do use the features you are mentioning, but encounter none of the issues. Thinkpad + Arch user.

We Linux users need to realize we are an island, and it's our duty to:

- Either Linux-QA-check on our own / as a community the hardware we're buying before we buy, because the constructor isn't doing it (it's doing it for the actively supported OS, Windows).

- Or buy {System76 / Thinkpad}, and get {a lot of / some} help from the constructor.

EDIT: agreed that Mac hardware quality is miles ahead though, not contradicting you on this specific point.

> FUD.

That's a very disrespectful way of starting a post. In particular as you conclude that you largely agree with them. So which is it, they're spreading "Fear, uncertainty and doubt" or they're right? In either case, seems unconstructive.

> So which is it, they're spreading "Fear, uncertainty and doubt" or they're right?

They're spreading the FUD that Linux laptop hardware support is frustrating, no questions asked. It's FUD because it's a fear-inducing oversimplification of the current state of things, which is that Linux laptop hardware support is enjoyable -if you do your homework-.

From your perspective, maybe. But it's a very close minded thing to say.

I think the point was that most would rather just have a machine that works out of the box so they can do their actual work instead of 'doing their homework' on how to get their machine to hibernate, connect to wifi reliably, etc...

You're re-framing the context of "doing their homework".

I agree you shouldn't be doing any homework to perform basic tasks such as "get [the] machine to hibernate, connect to wifi reliably, etc...". I'm not doing any of it on my Thinkpad, where these tasks work without messing around.

And in an ideal world, yes, I'd love not having to ever think about it too :) . But in the current Windows-dominated non-Mac consumer hardware world, what I say is that you should be doing homework prior to buying a machine you expect to install Linux on.

OP meant on what machine to buy (something you'd probably do before buying a Windows laptop anyway). But if like me can't be bothered with even this then just buy a system 76 or an xps with ubuntu pre-installed... No homework required.

It's not FUD by definition because they are literally talking about their personal experiences. FUD is a form of astroturfing. FUD is knowingly and intentionally dishonest, by definition. If you're going to immediately sink to that level, why bother with FUD accusations- just go full Slashdot and accuse them of shilling for some company you don't like because of some random tribal affiliation.

Having to do your homework rather than it working out of the box is frustrating.

+1 Thinkpad+Fedora user here... things have never been better.

I'd also try out an XPS-13 if I could afford it; but my $300 second-hand x230 works like a charm for now.

Dismissing anecdotes about failure as FUD is not constructive. FUD is first and foremost a business tactic.

Sure, anecdotes aren't necessarily that useful. For every happy Mac user there seems to be an angry one who always had hardware problems, for example. But it's not exactly news that Linux has issues with hardware compatibility. It's the nature of the beast, really; Apple is able to target a very specific configuration, whereas Linux has to work on any old crappy Windows PC.

> "Dismissing anecdotes about failure as FUD is not constructive. FUD is first and foremost a business tactic."

Hm, reading {your, UnoriginalGuy, mwfunk} comments, I realize "FUD" is a loaded term. I was using it literally, missing the strong stuff associated with it. Point taken, thanks.

Similar story here. Used linux in my HS/early college years, but switched to Mac when the swapped to intel. Recently looked at the possibilities of using linux again, but haven't really found any hardware that "just works." There is that one dell ubuntu dev laptop, but that is a pretty expensive gamble at $1800.

The best luck I've had for now is installing ubuntu on a crappy cheap Samsung Chromebook. Runs really well and everything seems to work fine, but the hardware is junk (The screen is atrocious coming from retina IPS displays.) Fun to play around with though, plus the battery life is incredible for it's $180 price tag.

I've got a Dell dev laptop on order now. Hope to give a full report on how well it work soon.

Dell has a 30 day return policy for what it's worth though.

I recently got the Precision 5500, which is great for the most part. The screen flicker is a trifle irritating, but I've had zero Linux compatibility problems. (I opted for Intel graphics.)

I just got one with the discrete graphics, and it works great with nvidia-prime. I only had to configure the touchpad a bit to avoid bumping it while I type. I upgraded from my beloved T420, and this is a great laptop.

I've owned and used both the Dell Precision M3800 and now the Precision 5510 running Ubuntu. They've generally worked well for me. The M3800 with UHD screen and discrete graphics generally sounded like a jet taking off when the fan was going. The 5510 is practically silent in my experience and works more reliably to boot (e.g. I have a lot less trouble with the new Intel WiFi card than I did with the M3800's Broadcom card). Your mileage may vary of course.

What chromebook and how hard was the install?

I hear you on the display. My retina screen makes anything else painful.

I have a Samsung ARM (2 core, 2G RAM, 16G Flash) based ChromeBook, Model XE303C12. It's rather simple to get Linux to work on it. You first enable developer mode and then install Crouton (which basically runs a full fledged Linux in chroot jail - to satisfy the based Linux install.

It works exceptionally well and I generally get about 10 hours of use on each battery charge. I store my work in progress on a USB3 USB flash drive.

The screen is only 1366 x 768 and the touchpad is rather lousy. So given the shortcomings, I've gone back to using an old MBP. Maybe buying a second-hand MBA and installing Linux on that is the better option.

It really seems like only Apple can do touchpads. Thank you for the feedback! It saves me doing it and regretting it. Though some of them have better monitors.

We have more than one (dell.com/sputnik), several of which are less than $1800. If you're in Europe, you can also order online most of our Latitudes with Ubuntu too (should be able to by phone in the US too).

I'm running linux on my laptops for decades and experienced none of the problems you mentioned. Everything works flawlessly. If you plan to run linux on your laptop, you will have to research first how well the computer is supported. You can't install MacOS (or even Windows) on just any computer neither.

I'll raise you one and say that even if you installed Linux on a laptop built for Linux, it would still be inferior to a MacBook. I bought a System76 GalagoPro a few years back, today it is a media center. It's the most use it's gotten since I bought it.

Depends...I had more problems with my work MBP to be honest than with my Arch clevo laptop I use at home.

On the MBP, I experience semi-frequent freezes, kernel panics, overheating, unstable WiFi, inaccurate battery status reporting, scaling issues, occasional green tint, FS lock up etc. - it's still nice, but I wouldn't say it's more smooth than modern Linux with GNOME 3, in fact I've had much less problems with that setup than with my MBP.

Arguably the difference is still the amount of resources Apple throws at the Macbook line compared to the amount of resources System76 throws at their computers. Truth be told I'd rather buy a Thinkpad or Dell XPS than a System76 laptop.

Apple has engineers dedicated to building hardware and software that work together. They design and manufacture their own hardware. System76 doesn't. They pick out some components, and get them assembled elsewhere, and ship that out to you.

A better comparison would be Dell's XPS line, which at least has some number of people actively working on making sure they work well and are well supported, but still not to the same degree as Apple, and my understanding is they're generally told "make this work with Linux", as opposed to building a laptop specifically for linux.

The basic issue with all this is hardware manufacturers, and their fire and forget attitudes towards products.

Thus they barely get their stuff working on the major commercial platforms, and all the rest have to either beg for specs so they can write their own (good luck) or reverse engineers (and risking bricking the hardware because of abusing standards for firmware flashing and whatsnot).

And your primary complaint boils down to power management, aka ACPI. And it, like UEFI, suffers from the second system effect (Linus Torvalds do not hold either in high regard for example). There is at least one documented case of a name brand motherboard offering up junk ACPI data unless Linux claimed to be Windows.

Linux appears to be at a standstill because each time a new motherboard or expansion card gets released, the process basically starts from ground zero unless it happens to be based of some bottom of the barrel chip with zero modifications so the Linux devs can just add another product ID to the driver table and call it a day (resulting in things like USB webcam drivers that support some 100+ camera models).

> There is at least one documented case of a name brand motherboard offering up junk ACPI data unless Linux claimed to be Windows

I hadn't heard about this and was curious. Google turned up this:

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869249

> Thus they barely get their stuff working on the major commercial platforms, and all the rest have to either beg for specs so they can write their own (good luck) or reverse engineers (and risking bricking the hardware because of abusing standards for firmware flashing and whatsnot).

Thus the shortest way to get a working system is to stop being an hipster and use one of the major commercial platforms.

> Thus the shortest way to get a working system is to stop being an hipster and use one of the major commercial platforms.

Being a hipster has very little to do with using Linux these days. Wanting a productive, customisable work environment has a lot, on the other hand.

Whenever you're stuck with bad drivers, hardware issues and having to reverse engineer your platform, you are not productive.

Perhaps, but I get very annoyed with basically everything to do with Windows. Best case scenario for actually getting work done on a computer running Windows for me is to just setup a virtual machine running some flavor of Linux, and just spend all my working time in that VM.

Which, in that case, why even have Windows installed, you're just giving resources to something that isn't doing anything besides giving you access to an entirely separate operating system.

Yes, this is perhaps a manufactured problem, but windows is just generally not conductive to my style of work. And really all I need is zsh, tmux, and vim working without causing an audible ping every time I hit a key to be happy.

I'm probably the only one around here that went from Mac to Linux... I decided to do this after a number of frustrating problems with hardware: ethernet port not working [1] and a severely swollen battery (although I followed all the advices to prevent this) which was not covered by the warranty "because of the laptop's serial number".

I decided to buy a Lenovo E540 a couple of years ago, on which I run Linux Mint: I like KDE's awesome interface add much add I liked Mac OS X's. I wouldn't ever go back...

[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5687308?tstart=0

I still run Linux despite all the challenges and all the hardware constantly breaking and working just-not-right, because I just love the openness and I don't understand how can Apple (and windows) users survive without "apt-get". Homebrew is a poor substitute for me.

I am basically using linux just for apt-get, the configurability and the ability to test server-side software in the same-ish environment as it will actually run in is a nice plus.

But yeah, people that argue that "there are no issues" are either lying or were incredibly lucky. I actually bought a laptop that had ubuntu pre-installed that stopped working immediately after doing a system update! (Because the laptop had a binary blob driver for a graphic card, and that stopped working with some new kernel or whatever.)

Being a current Linux and former macOS user, I actually miss Homebrew sometimes. It's much easier to get recent versions of software and also easier to set up your own repository (tap).

This is one of the reasons why Arch is so popular, AUR + a client has a very similar feeling to Homebrew.

Huh. Didn't know. Perhaps I should take a look at Arch more seriously :)

Consider using a VM, and using either Windows or OS X as graphical user interface. You can then easily SSH into the VM, and do most of the development there. If you run a samba (or nfs) server on the VM, you can even easily use e.g. VS Code. Add an X server and you can run (albeit not very fast) run graphical programs (e.g. and IDE) as well.

Which introduces issues on other sides ...

And what would be the upside to that?

Sure, HW would work better, but I don't want to update two OSes instead of one.

And the only thing I am really missing on Linux is Adobe Creation Suite. GIMP and Inkscape are not nearly adequate (although they are for a better price). And there is literally nothing like Flash, for a simple animation.

I've found apt-get compared to homebrew close to useless, it has rapidly outdated packages that have been modified and "fixed" in various ways by maintainers. It also does not properly separate two completely different concerns:

1. Provide a updates for a base installation, the details of which you essentially don't want care about (working drivers, recent kernel version, recent version of wayland/x11 etc.)

2. Provide a repository of curated, versioned and up-to-date software development dependencies

Apt-get does an adequate job at 1., although I have more than once broken my base installation because the binary graphics driver broke after an update, but not so much at 2.

Homebrew is good because you can completely mess up your installation and not effect the base system at all and it is a good starting point to get reasonably up to date development packages. It also offers a much smoother user experience than most package managers.

YMMV. For me, I got angry that there were many parallel ways of updating and getting software on Mac.

Some elevated Apple apps are updated via System Update. Some are updated via Mac App Store. Some are updating themselves when they feel like it. Some are updated via brew, or via macports.

But I am not gonna argue much or anything, I grew out of my teens and I no longer want to tell other people that my OS is the best :) it's not, I definitely wouldn't give Linux to my mom (at this state).

It does provide this via PPAs

I run linux mostly because I want to be able to use the machine in whatever way I like. MacOS is designed around "You use it this way", and tries to keep you away from the warts by kind-of enforcing that position.

One of the most ridiculous examples of "You must do it our way" is the inability to remap mouse buttons (or even support buttons on a mouse with more than left, right and scroll.) MacOS would rather you use gestures on the magic mouse (that thing is an ergonomic nightmare). To be able to support extra buttons, you have to pay for software from the app store, e.g. USB Overdrive.

Homebrew has been pretty great for me. You can install desktop apps with brew cask, dump your current app install state with brew bundle and then reinstall it all with one command on a new machine. You can even manage mac store apps with brew bundle with the `mas` app. It has been pretty central in my dotfiles script.

In my experience Linux on Mac when the hardware is supported brings overall better experience for development than Mac OS. USB-to-anything dongles that just work without any driver installation, much better behaviour under memory pressure, container technologies that allows to run not-so-trusted software without overhead of VM, fancy networking setups for stimulating production setups.

For that I tolerate ocasional (like twice in a week) forced power offs when the notebook does not wake up or when wifi stops working.

About drivers: You are right... but things get a lot lot more messy if your specific USB driver is not maintained in the Linux Kernel.

I have the opposite experience with memory pressure (speaking only about desktop here). macOS (& Windows) do memory compression by default and most of Linuxes I know don't do that by default. I also have the feeling that at least desktop Linux get's incredible slow when you run out of memory and swapping begins (never encountered similar amount of slowliness on Windows or macOS with low memory).

Regarding container technology and macOS. If you are into docker checkout latest dlite beta: https://github.com/nlf/dlite/releases It runs docker on Kernel virtualization level on macOS with xhyve without the need of VirtualBox etc.

I always activate zswap as a part of Linux installation. With that Linux handles memory pressure better than mac os or Windows especially when the size of dataset reaches 130-150% of RAM.

I installed Docker today on a fresh macOS installation and was very delighted to find out that VirtualBox is no longer required. The latest official Docker version for Mac uses HyperKit, also based on xhyve.

All operating systems suffer from similar random, minor, glitchy issues. I use all three extensively on a daily basis and while there are things I like about all three, there are also things I dislike about each of them.

Linux is generally a little worse. However, from my experience Windows and MacOS are approximately equally buggy in comparison to one another.

An example of an issue I have with my Macbook is that every single day I have to plug my network cable into it 2-4 times before it will recognize the connection.

I agree to this, but Linux gives other advantages in the long run like better updates and greater independence.

Furthermore you have a lot less problems these days with Linux IMO and so often the quirks are fast to fix. E.g. the full installation cost me 1h plus 1h for copying my old data and I could start working.

> dodgy networking

Had recurring wifi issues on a Macbook Pro as well (as did many of my co-workers)... Not saying it's great on Linux but I would hardly call the alternatives much better...

Same, after about 48 hours uptime my MacBook will start dropping network connection every few minutes. This can only be cured by a full reboot.

The MacBook also regularly (at least once per week) drops all input devices (including built in keyboard and trackpad), which can only be cured by a hard power-strangle and reboot.

My colleagues experience the same problems too.

Basically, the ultra-reliable Mac is a myth, its as prone to failure as any computer.

I've never experienced this. Have you considered taking it into the genius bar?

Exact same experience. Roughly 48 hours of uptime and then I have to reboot in order to maintain a SSH connection.

That, and Finder that becomes unusably slow after working with images for a few hours. (Admittedly, tens of thousands of images, but it degrades to the point that merely opening an empty folder takes 2-3 seconds.)

I have this issue with my 11" MacBook Air as well as my 15" MacBook Pro from work. I do not have the issue with my personal MacBook Pro, which is identical hardware configuration and model to my work machine. All are running the same version of macOS. It's honestly a kind of a mystery to me.

Same. Also never-ending Bluetooth issues.

Agreed. I pay extra $$ for system 76 machines for just this reason. Things just work.

I haven't found a model from system 76 that has a display more than 1080x1920, but I really want to support them.

To be fair, I've only bought their Meerkat (like a Mac Mini). I looked at their laptop offerings, but couldn't justify the high price for underwhelming specs. I wound up giving up and just buying a $200 Chromebook.

Witnessed both a mac and windows machine having software/networking glitches, both with non-esoteric hardware pretty much at factory settings. I wish it was a case of use just fire up and forget, but sadly 'bugs' plague all platforms.

Yes, yes, exactly this. I've been using Linux for 15+ years on my desk/laptop, but switched to Mac roughly one year ago. I'm afraid I can never go back.

I had none of problem stated above for years. I use/used Acer/Dell/HP/Medion notebooks with Fedora Linux.

I don't really have problems with any of these things ...

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