Comment by CityWanderer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CityWanderer | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've run it with one monitor, two would be hard since it only has a single USB C and I don't have any monitors that can daisy chain.. if that's even a thing. The issue is that Linux doesn't play nicely with having different pixel densities on each monitor. You can try to make it scale, but then apps appear in different sizes depending on which screen you open them on. It's pretty horrible, so I run the laptop at half-res (1600x900) so that it matches the monitor and everything is the same size.

Suspend/resume works fine.

I've had to restart the network-manager service just once to get WiFi to refresh. Otherwise it's fine reconnecting when you come in/out of suspend.

Other things: battery isn't great but I don't use it away from a desk. On the first couple of days the Ubuntu Software Centre kept crashing; I think it's fine now but I don't tend to use it anyway. I disabled the Dell apt source because it was failing - I don't know if that was a one-off problem or it's just broken.

But, I'm running Linux as my primary development environment again and it just feels _so good_ after a few painful months on OS X.

> I've run it with one monitor, two would be hard since it only has a single USB C and I don't have any monitors that can daisy chain.. if that's even a thing.

Most of Dells Ultrasharp monitors from the past couple of years have supported Daisychaining through Displayport. I have an older XPS 9333 DE from 2014 and use it with Dell's U2715H and U2415H monitors through a single displayport connection.

> But, I'm running Linux as my primary development environment again and it just feels _so good_ after a few painful months on OS X.

Can you expand on that, please. Why were you months on OS X painful? Just curious to hear the use case that caused this.

I've been using Linux of some flavour at home for the last 15 years, only straying onto Windows for gaming. I've been lucky to use Ubuntu at work for most of my professional career too (6-7 years?) - so it's what I know and what I'm used to.

I started a new role a few months ago that forced me onto OS X and found physical and software issues. Physically OS X does not let you configure mice properly without installing third party drivers. Of course I ditched the "magic" mouse pretty quickly after my hand started hurting after a couple of days, but even with a normal mouse you simply cannot configure mouse sensitivity and acceleration properly - it cannot treat a mouse on par with what Linux or Windows will. You need extra drivers to even enable mouse buttons 3,4 and 5.

The keyboard shortcuts hurt too, sometimes using Ctrl, sometimes using Cmd, but that could be just fighting 15 years of muscle memory - so take that with a grain of salt (but it indirectly caused more physical finger pain).

Software-wise I don't know how objective I can be, but it feels faster/simpler to install software and things like the terminal are much better integrated - I can auto-complete git branch names on the command line for instance. Maybe OS X can do that kind of thing, but certainly not out of the box. To me, OS X feels like a 95% emulation of Linux, just that slightly bit lacking.

Then there are the embarrassing things like I couldn't find the shortcut to go to the end of the current line. On Linux it's the End key - on Mac I assume it's some combination somewhere.

> Then there are the embarrassing things like I couldn't find the shortcut to go to the end of the current line. On Linux it's the End key - on Mac I assume it's some combination somewhere.

Crt+a. Every emacs shortcuts work everywhere in MacOS.

The canonical way for the End key is fn + right arrow, fn + left arrow for Home, and fn + up/down arrow for Page Up/Down. And you can even use Del with fn + Backspace! But me too, I prefer the emacs shortcuts.

Either emacs shortcuts do not work in MacOS, or you mean Ctrl+e to go to the end of current line :)

I find your problems are mostly fighting your own muscle memory. The Cmd key is much more consistent for the entire OS. You can do Cmd + C, Cmd + V, Cmd + R, Cmd + Q pretty much anywhere (including the terminal), whereas in Linux you have to use Ctrl + shift + c/v. And the ergonomics of the Cmd key is way better than ctrl key. For installing development software, there's `brew`, and the terminal is exactly same. I don't know any feature that is Linux-only to feel the `better integrated` To go to the end of line, just use Cmd + right/left.

> Of course I ditched the "magic" mouse pretty quickly

I'm now questioning myself on this comment. I have med-large hands and the magic mouse, even though not intuitive at first, became my favorite mouse. I've tried many difference mouses (I believe that's the plural of the computer kind) since swiping to go back/forth on web pages is so much easier.

I guess its dogmatic; I freely use shortcuts on web browsers to switch to specific tabs or going back/forth when doing research/googling/SO but when I'm browsing/reading/wasting time, and only using the mouse, the swipe is quite intuitive.

Now I have to see if: it's easier to swipe between pages or use a 3rd/4th button to perform similar tasks...i'm sure it's nerdy/geeky but its an interesting question nonetheless, from the daily routine standpoint.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com