Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X – Part 2
bitcannon.net
bitcannon.net
First, you'll hear all about arch. It's lovely, it really is. But, if you like the "just work" nature of OSX back in the day, look at Ubuntu proper or Ubuntu-gnome (if you don't like Unity). I'm sure people will chime in here with others that they have thoughts on here, though in my experience, Ubuntu is the best at this game and it's not even close. Yes, it has problems too (let's not start the nitpicking thing, I'm making a general statement), but it is by far the best stable linux desktop. Fedora is acceptable, particularly of late, but it /still/ is behind Ubuntu.
Second, with Ubuntu/Debian, stick with whatever is in the archive or PPA. Everything else isn't worth the pain. Perhaps Snaps can improve this problem, though I'm sceptical. Linuxbrew and other such things will not be worth the problems they bring.
Third, use a stable UI. Don't go with Pantheon, Mate, Cinnamon, Elementary or something else like that. Again, it's not worth the pain. I personally don't like KDE though it would qualify as "stable" along with Unity, Gnome-Shell and XFCE. I prefer Gnome-shell and Unity so that is what I use.
Lastly, things will be worse in some ways from OSX, and much better in others.
If the advise looks pretty straight forward, it is. Stick with the known working, well supported projects as your base, tinker in customisation to suite, and don't go with lesser known/supported projects if you only really care about something "just working".
My take on unity is that the main problem is simply bugs, not design defects of philosophical issues.
You'd be surprised.
It's not like this has been the experience on just a single install or a single system. I've used Ubuntu on and off for many years on various hardware. IMO Ubuntu has only gotten worse.
I've yet to experience a single crash in Arch.
As for those complaining about Arch's install being tedious, use Arch Anywhere; it's a great installer.
As for your first question, give me a few example package names and I'll check how easy it is.
I haven't experienced this with a ``cutting-edge'' distro like Arch.
I had been using Arch for over 5 years and I really enjoyed it but these days it's just not worth the effort. I had to format my hard drive and start from scratch and just didn't want to go through the pain of setting everything up to what it was before so I just went straight to Xubuntu. I was very positively surprised at how much just worked the way I wanted it to work out of the box. Sure, the default installer installed a bunch of packages that I did not want but it's easy to remove those.
The installation work can be trivially automated with a shell script (note though that the Arch wiki generally discourages this). The benefits of this are that in the process of creating the script, one has a good sense of the installation process and can customize it, unlike the case of Ubuntu and many other distros where a lot of stuff happens behind the scenes. The con is that this script needs to be kept up to date with the (occasional) change in the Arch project.
I have had good success with this method - over the past 2 years and 3 fresh installs on laptops and a desktop. Basically, with a new laptop and a reasonably fast internet connection, I can go from the USB installation medium to a complete desktop environment tailored for my needs with everything configured correctly in ~ 10-15 minutes, with minimal interaction needed during the process (only to set things like the password).
Also note that in most use cases some post installation tweaking gets done, such as the installation of new applications as per interest.
So there are primarily 2 things the script can handle: 1. The annoying "low level work" - network configuration, boot loader configuration, etc. This should be relatively stable and fixed across a variety of hardware.
2. Application specific configuration needs (e.g vimrc, .bashrc). This may evolve over time/usage patterns - for this one can try keeping the script up to date, or not bother and simply focus on 1 above.
But like I said above, I prefer Arch (with i3).
In my case, as a musician/creative (and thus also a MacOS user) I absolutely recommend the UbuntuStudio variant of the Ubuntu family, because it comes with tons of great applications for audio/media/video production. Anyone who thinks that this is a Developers-/Hackers-only option should definitely take a peek at just the depth and breadth of the creative tools that are packed into UbuntuStudio setup.
I mean switching to Linux but using a homebrew port instead of the native package manager? Really?
> However it turns out Linuxbrew manages it’s own version of all the packages it tracks (makes sense I guess). This end up duplicating many of the packages available or already installed by the system package manager. This works on macOS since there is no system package repository but did not sit well with me on a Linux system.
But I am still wondering why linuxbrew exists to begin with. I mean, I understand the point of having snap or flatpack in addition to native distro packages, but linuxbrew?
There are also these universal package formats that some directly from the developers.
The Linux 'solution' to this problem is to compile from sources. linuxbrew is a way of automating that, if you will.
As a developer, switching to Linux can give you a very nice custom enviroment with CLI applications like mutt or zathura and a DE like xmonad or i3. But you can't have a GUI as polished as MacOS, although things are getting closer.
One of the big innovations of Linux was package management. So using homebrew is indeed a bit absurd.
Actually, I would argue next-generation package managers like nix or guix are extremely interesting and have tons of advantages. Maximizing benefits of a MacOS to Linux switch maybe makes it advisable to use one of those.
Why not?
> you can't have a GUI as polished as MacOS
Why not?
All it would take would be for a company to publish a Linux UI library and a standards doc, and to curate an app store. I don't see any reason that a Linux machine could not be made to look and feel like a Mac. There's no magic in OS X, just a lot of hard work.
I'm not saying this would be easy, only that I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible. And given how badly Apple is dropping the ball, I also don't see any reason why it couldn't be lucrative. When Google started, everyone thought that the search market was mature and that Yahoo and Microsoft would lead the computer industry forever. I don't see any reason Apple could not be unseated just as they were.
You lose 90% of the value of having UX that 'just works' if the driver support is buggy or isn't there. Developing and testing drivers is expensive.
Apple solves this problem by designing and selling the hardware as well, and controlling the whole stack. They then charge extra margins for the privilege of using a Mac.
MS solves this problem by shoving the driver work onto each hardware vendor.
So while you can make and publish a very polished Linux distro / library, what's the business plan for getting paid for it, when the UX only gets you a fraction of the way towards having a seamless 'out of the box' experience for users?
But as a counter-example, Intel® HD Graphics 530 can easily handle Half-Life 2, with power to spare.
Because for the last 20+ years, FOSS haven't managed to be consistent, employ professional level designers, not rewrite everything from scratch every 5-6 years, and maintain parity with commercial OS offerings at the Desktop GUI level.
Why? Because of lack of resources, programmers hoping to what's interesting and not to grunt work that must be done, people dropping out of projects and no formal structure to force a continuous experience so new members get to change whole direction, etc.
And plain lack of resources. GTK+, the core basis of Gnome and tons of apps, one of the more important libs, only had one person fully maintaining it (at least a few years ago -- the person complained publicly in blog posts).
Contrast with the Windows or Cocoa gui libs that have teams of tens of programmers.
>I'm not saying this would be easy, only that I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible.
Anything is possible, it's all 1s and 0s. Whatever it's there or at least probable is more important.
Of course, one can beat MacOS at its polished GUI game. But it requires coordination. A single distro can do it. I expected Ubuntu to follow this path.
With so much fragmentation it's not easy though. X11 vs Wayland, GNOME vs KDE, a myriad of desktop systems, etc.
However, fragmentation comes from the bazaar model that makes Linux so resilient. I would never trade this for a bit of polish.
Also, as a programmer, I prefer simple CLI applications that compose well than GUI silos. That's why the current situation does not bother me much.
That has historically been antithetic to free software culture and its bazaar style of development.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Frankly, I don't find macOS's GUI to be particularly polished, or even pleasant. Of course, people that like macOS usually do, but, well, that's somewhat self-selecting.
I honestly think thinks like Cinnamon or KDE are nicer that the macOS GUI.
On Linux we have a myriad of alternatives.
I really don't get why that seem's so off.
You will be running back to osx in no time after a horrifying Linux experience. So take my advice: save yourself the headache and stay with Apple.
The parent's goal is not to embrace change, is to get back to having the same things they liked and worked for them on the new platform.
If they could be satisfied with any random thing, they would have just as well stayed and followed the old platforms new direction.
I think that's understood. It's just that trying to make Linux behave like OS X might end up being more painful than just embracing change. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try, I guess, but it's something to keep in mind.
If you switch from MacOS to, say, Linux, you'll inevitably lose some things you value, but there are also inevitably things in the new OS you would miss if you switched in the other direction. You owe it to yourself to go find a few.
Not every non mac laptop comes with shitty battery and components ;)
Oh yeah, and you don't have to be afraid an OS update will make your laptop unbootable. Has happened to me under Ubuntu twice.
- Apple Kerberos does not support MS-KKDCP and multiple factor auth. Services that require Authentication Indicator are simply not available from macOS. Their Ticket Viewer is even more simplistic than in 10.6 timeframe.
- Their IPSec implementation is weird and haven't managed to make it work with Strongswan yet.
> Oh yeah, and you don't have to be afraid an OS update will make your laptop unbootable. Has happened to me under Ubuntu twice.
Just wait, sometimes it happens there too. There's a reason for that recovery partition.
Perspectives :)
That's not true. Apple's yearly OS upgrades can and do brick machines. At least with Ubuntu, I'd stand a good chance of diagnosing and fixing the issue.
Also, we are just talking about Ubuntu here and not all Linux distributions. For example, NixOS is a Linux with an entirely different method of managing upgrades.
Built into the OS :
Automator (aka Unix pipes for GUI apps)
Preview (doubles as a comprehensive image + PDF editor. Scans your signature from a piece of paper held in front of the webcam)
OS-wide data detectors : hover over a date in any text field, set up a calendar event instantly.
Time Machine : dead simple backups
Notes (now with native Evernote import)
Photos (with easy to use bread & butter editing + ML-based search/cataloguing, not to mention integrated backup+iOS sync)
iMovie
Garageband (+ comprehensive audio/MIDI routing)
Comprehensive cross-device integration with Messages / Facetime / Photos / Continuity
Before anyone replies with a list of supposedly equivalent desktop Linux apps : Apple has never been about the What (ticking boxes in a checklist), more about the How (the overall experience)
I'll admit that quality has suffered under the new 1 year OS release cycle, but in my experience it's still a notch or two above Windows or Linux's best desktop setups.
For years I used WordNet as my dictionary because it was the only electronic dictionary I knew of that was less than 90 years old and didn't put the definition on a web page cluttered with distractions (and because paper dictionaries are too slow and tedious compared to electronic ones).
But over the years it slowly dawned on me that it is not a good dictionary. Then I realized my Mac came with a good electronic dictionary.
(Another former Linux user.)
For example, despite the shallow learning curve, in our house, time machine was both unreliable and patronising (the time travel UI). For me, I'm using ZFS snapshots for my backup, technically it's more than a notch better than time machine.
Another example would be Notes, Apple have demonstrated over many years that they cannot write reliable bidirectional sync. Unison just works.
That's the key issue. If you're starting out, do not like to customize, or have not yet reached your (locally optimal) setup, then I guess Mac is superior.
However, having perfected my setup over the last 12 years, I find the default Mac tools quite limited; e.g.
Time Machine is inferior (except in UI) to Borg, to which I've switched recently from Bup, to which I've switched before from a set of rsync scripts (which are time-machine equivalent, and I had them running long before time machine existed).
I don't make music (so don't care about GarageBand), and I also care about privacy so all the cross-device integration that apple offers goes out the door.
Thunderbird is, for my use case, superior to Apple Mail; Firefox is superior to Safari.
Finder puts junk all over my file system, and the old hacks to stop it (aseptic, and a couple of others) are no longer supported under Sierra.
I like Unity (the v on 14.4 - I think v7) with a few tweaks much better than the Mac doc, though that's a matter of taste.
And I like the transparency of the system. My main laptop ubuntu never breaks, but when I do weird experiments on other hardware, I can actually tell what's going on - if my Mac had trouble booting, it's likely the recovery partition will come useful - but there's basically nothing else I can do.
Example: in college I had to work with some C code written by a professor who was apparently a Pascal diehard. He included a header in everything he wrote which #define'd Pascal keywords to their C equivalents:
#define BEGIN {
#define END }
...etc. I like Pascal just fine (Turbo Pascal 3.0 forever), but this just seemed belligerently pointless.
Eventually the person gets more acclimated to the second system on its own terms, and when the need arises to use a third system, they just go straight to learning the idioms of that system first, they don't try to make the third system conform to a previous system. I've got to think that the Pascal guy stopped using that header after a while, and didn't bother making a new one when circumstances made him move to a third language.
Anyway, so IMO that's the general pattern that people might think is off, because we've all had to deal with it in one form or another, but I don't think that's necessarily what's happening here.
Because you're fighting a losing battle.
There's absolutely no way to make Linux work the same way as macOS, simply because they do things differently by design. If you try, you're going to waste countless hours, have a horrible time, and at the most only make Linux slightly resemble macOS in terms of the experience.
I actually find that in terms of UX, Linux is a lot more similar to Windows than it is to macOS.
For me, what I missed of macOS when I tried out Linux was the easy shortcuts, easy access to special characters (accented letters, etc. without the compose key), the focus on drag-and-drop to do things, the quality of the look & feel of most apps, and most importantly the consistency that macOS has. There is of course no way to make all Linux developers stick to the exact same guidelines, but I had a feeling on Linux that every time I installed an app, I had to relearn a lot of things. Shortcuts and other conventions are always the same on macOS, on Linux they change alongside many interface elements, down to the windows controls.
In general though, I had a better time when I embraced how Linux does things, rather than try to recreate my macOS workflow.
Ultimately, I have no interest in wasting hours and hours configuring and fixing things up, just so that I have freedom with the software on my computer. I don't like many decisions that Apple has taken lately, and don't especially like how expensive and outdated their hardware is, but my hourly rate is pretty good, and with the money I make from gained (or not lost) productivity because things just work I can buy not one, but probably 10 MacBook Pros, and save myself a lot of frustration. I can then have freedom not from using open source software, but because I'm done working and I can go grab a beer with my friends or girlfriend instead of staying home configuring X.org.
Personally, I came to the same conclusion recently. But I went the Hackintosh route instead of switching to a Linux/dual-booted Windows machine. The latest rMBP’s disappointing hardware and battery life, not to mention the cost premium, made the decision fairly easy for me. That, and I wanted to go back to using a separate desktop and laptop after repeatedly hitting performance bottlenecks with Adobe Lightroom on my previous rMBP. My photography pretty much nixed a Linux option unless I wanted to dual-boot into Windows more often than I’d prefer. There are alternatives like Darktable, but even though Lightroom is a resource pig that needs a diet and a lot of optimization work still, it’s my preferred catalog software that I’m most comfortable in. And when you’re trying to sort through 3-5k+ photos shot over a very busy weekend, comfort is the deciding factor.
As a developer, I have no problem with the popular Linux distros. I’ve worked with Linux servers for years, and I love the approach to package management package management. I’m perfectly comfortable with CLI apps. But when I’m not doing dev work, I don’t want to be saddled by the need to constantly boot into Windows for other tasks.
The Hackintosh route gave me the best of both worlds. Better hardware that I can upgrade on my own terms, my preferred GUI environment, and no need to dual-boot unless I want to game. I had a bit of extra work to deal with in the beginning to get everything working properly (with my Skylake build, proper audio support and the wireless networking card in particular), but it didn’t take much of an effort thanks to a very robust community ([tonymacx86.com]). The only other issue is checking on discussions for new software updates to make sure there aren’t any problems before I go and install them. But that’s not too big a deal, all things considered.
Tl;dr - I guess my point is that we all have our preferred environments and will go to a hell of a lot of trouble to maintain them. Or, if that’s not an option, then to at least get things close to them. Even when that can mean more trouble later on. Using a homebrew port strikes me as a less-than-advantageous approach, but I can imagine why the original author did so.
darkwake=8 worked for me on a Skylake setup (Z170X, Core i5, nvidia graphics card with web drivers). Sleep and wake work flawlessly.
From one phtographer to another, and not to be a dick, but if you're shooting that many photos in one weekend you're doing something wrong.. the only scenario where I can imagine reasonably coming up with that many photos is motion photography with burst. Easiest rule I can give you is to pretend you have an old-style camera with a limited amount of rolls. Imagine how many rolls would be reasonable for the session you're having if it was 1980? If you stick to that, your photo quality will dramatically shoot up and the effort you have to expend sifting will go down a lot.
In my personal work, that's not an issue as I shoot almost exclusively with manual focus glass (Loxia lenses, adapted glass, etc.). With focus magnification and peaking, it's very rare to ever have to reject a photo for blatant focus issues even when I'm using a lens with a razor-thin DOF at f/1.2.
Isn't it OBVIOUS? Because they very much like their existing platform and how it works, but just dislike some things enough (e.g. the hardware options offered lately) that they want to move away.
There have been some adjustments but it's been very smooth. Adding the non-conflicted 3rd party repos suggested by Korora was a big help.
Hardware aside,fedora strikes the right balance between control and easy to use for me.
I also don't have high end requirements for my text editor though. I'm a java/c++ guy who uses commercial IDEs.
At the same time I like that nvidia and others more or less "acknowledge" fedora exists and publishes drivers and rpms for most things.
That being said, DNF also works well enough for me. I haven't had to build anything from source.
I have tried macs, lived in SF for a few years surrounded by them, had colleagues who used them, and just never understood the appeal. I tried it once and just didn't feel the need to switch.
Macs feel over priced and don't really get upgraded.
For those who buy in to the whole apple ecosystem (including development) I could understand why you would do it though. I don't do mobile development though. Much of my experience is definitely specific but I think broad enough to match a certain kind of audience that might use macs but be on the "fringes" of the ecosystem without doing iphone development and the like.
Currently dual booting it on one MBA11" 2012 and one MBA13" 2014 (wifi via the proprietary wl driver).
It's trying really hard to imitate Apple – they even have these "Human Interface Guidelines" somewhere that read like some sort of Apple parody. In reality it's a fake, thin veneer of a user interface bolted onto a generic Linux distribution. Apple software may have their own faults. I think most of the whining is just boredom, but iTunes for example is definitely not the pinnacle of UI. But the beauty of macOS has always been in getting some things exactly right with the competence and attention of a master craftsman/woman. I'd name text rendering as an example, or sleep.
Elementary OS is made by people who think wearing a turtleneck makes them Steve Jobs, but they just don't get that you also have to throw a prototype or two at your CXOs from time to time :)
I don't think Linux on the desktop will benefit from such cloning. Just look at Open Office: a UI that perpetually felt four years out of date that probably took five times as many hours of work as the google docs that actually made Office unnecessary.
(https://funnelfiasco.com/blog/2015/02/13/elementary-misses-t...)
I admire open source, but open source software suffers very strongly from "programmer design". It's a difficult process to get these things right, and I wouldn't expect some distribution to pop up overnight that does things on the same level of refinement as OS X. These things take time, and we need to encourage projects that do try.
Really, there is something as 'being too minimalist'. To the point of being almost useless.
When I tried to use the default video player of EOS, there was no option in sight to add a subtitles file.
I can understand not being able to fine tune the font used for subtitles. But removing the feature altogether?
For example, here [1], upper left quadrant: "Ap plications", "A ppC enter", "C alendar". Anyone know why it's so bad? Is it a configuration flag?
Perhaps I'm just used to font-weirdness, but I honestly would never have noticed that had you not directly pointed it out.
While Open Sans is clearly not perfect, it's not as bad as the Linux screenshot.
Maybe the problem is just with the particular font used. See the browser window on the right side of the screenshot. It mentions "Apple", and it's rendered well there.
It definitely seems that Open Sans has weaker kerning than the other font used in the web browser in that screenshot.
If you need a replacement for Alfred, you should have a look at Albert [0]. I use Albert in Linux Mint as a replacement for the Main menu.
Millions of people get their work done with Linux every day and it works great and people love it - but it's not the Mac feeling or way. You have to learn to like Linux for what it is, even if it's not perfect. You might miss a few features but it's easily ran on a variety of hardware these days and for the most part works great. The T450S I have Ubuntu on is the best it's ever been in my 15+ years of running Linux on laptops. Heck it wasn't even that bad back then with my Dell C600 and RedHat 7
For many Ubuntu users, the LTS release is the best choice. The base packages remain stable and supported. The Linux kernel is updated automatically every six months and the next update is scheduled for next week when Ubuntu 16.04.2 will be made available (existing users will get upgraded automatically.)
If you want any actual development packages which are not provided by the system packaging, you can (and should) install them with Ubuntu Make (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-make). Anything Jetbrains, all Eclipse packages, Go, NetBeans, SublimeText, Arduino, Android Studio, Scala, NodeJS, Kotlin, DART, and more.
edit: typoes
Problem is they weren't stable. I ran into bugs in the old so called stable packages that were fixed in newer versions.
If there was a way run it fast and reliably I'd switch in a heartbeat. Basically no crashing, hardware accelerated (GPU) display/filters and a color profiled workflow. Booting to Windows to generate the profiles would be acceptable.
Last I checked, however, neither virtualization (even with GPU passthrough) nor Wine where quite there. Besides, with the tight release schedule that the Creative Cloud imposes, I don't think it ever will.
Having said that, there are definitely some major issues. One of the most contentious is not having a minimize button by default. Their reasoning is 'well if you close one of our apps, it resumes state when you start it up again, which is effectively the same as minimizing'. Not only do their apps not reliably resume state, most other apps don't support this, and their response is 'well that sucks.. but they should adjust their app to work with our specific distro gimmick kthxbai'. Another big one is multiple Window management: if I have 5 windows open of the same app and want to temporarily hide two of them, minimize accomplishes this easily. With Elementary, I have to pick which one I close last because that one will 'resume state'.
Another baffling thing is them not using the 'global menu' in the menubar that Ubuntu (and macOS) have. The global menu is probably one of the main reasons people like macOS so much (even though they don't realize it).. you know that whatever app you're in, you can always find all actions in the menu bar. Preferences are always under $APPNAME, Print is always under File, Hiding and viewing interface elements is always under View, etc.
Their (Ubuntu's as well) installer also doesn't use home partition encryption by default, nor does it offer an easy way to set up LVM on LUKS. This is a problem with most distros though.. with macOS having your disk FileVaulted is extremely straightforward and simple. It's literally flipping a switch. And the use of it is simple as well: Boot up, enter user password (which is also the encryption password) -> decrypt disk and login.
They also do some funky stuff to the Ubuntu installer since installing 16.04LTS gives me working Wi-Fi on my MBP 2015 Retina, but installing Elementary OS (which is based on the same 16.04LTS) doesn't even detect my Wi-Fi chip. The firmware and driver are there, so it should work (doubly so because same base distro), but it simply doesn't.
I totally agree on Global menu. I use Gnome and I miss global menu dearly
I've also had zero issues with installing .debs, including Slack, so I wonder if the problems the OP faced were just lack of familiarity (I had no troubles when switching from Fedora to Ubuntu a long while ago, and am constantly amazed at how Linux folk tend to have visceral reactions to different package managers and distros).
Unity is unbelievably sleek and fast and everything mostly just works. Those of us who have struggled with Linux desktops since the early 2000s will know what a massive leap this is.
Now if you can get this experience pre-bundled by hardware vendors then those who are not locked in to other platforms by platform specific apps can definitely use this productively. But if they have to install the OS and fiddle with drivers then it becomes a completely different ball game like it would be if they had to install Windows or OSX from scratch.
E.g. alt+clicking the button that shows/hides the notification center (that's the name?) will toggle notification popups.
Another one, alt+clicking the wifi will display additional data about it.
Holding alt while right clicking on an app in the dock will toggle between "quit" and "force quit" as well.
Etc.
Wouldn't it be great if there was a commercial multiplatform apps marketplace, similar to Steam but more productivity focused?
The marketplace could even provide developers with an SDK to enable them to easily create packaging, networking and UIs without having to use OS specific libraries. Basically anything that usually has to be done for each platform separately. Similar to how Unity3D helps with multiplatform game development.
Something like this could push developers to release commercial software on Linux, too, because it would be basically just another build from the same source.
And who knows some day Adobe and other big players might release their products like Photoshop, Lightroom etc on it.
Why not just use the web version? Seems to be exactly the same as the app as far as I can tell
Edit: typos.
It's a pity there's so much antagonism against Windows from MacOS/Linux users.
I've been using both MacOS and Windows on a daily basis for the past ten years (and a lot of Linux before that) and to me, Windows has become the best OS for developers.
First of all, let's get this out of the way: Bash works just fine. Install a distribution and a console with bash and you'll get everything (dotfiles, ssh, etc...) working under an hour.
Another important point is that Windows is the most keyboard friendly OS out of the three. As a developer, I use my mouse as little as possible so it's vital that I have access to all functions and all menus from the mouse. MacOS is terrible in that area (how come I still can't pop up the File menu from the keyboard in 2017?).
Windows also has some of the best file managers of all. My preference is for xPlorer2 because, again, I can manipulate files at the speed of light with just the keyboard, but there are plenty of alternatives.
Anyway, keep an open mind if you're looking for another OS and make sure you include Windows 10 in your trials, or you might be missing out on something that will make you at least as productive as you used to be with your current OS.
It's amusing to see GUI-resistance all these years later, after Microsoft has worked so very hard to make Windows work and look just like MacOS. Well, like it would look if it had been designed by people with no taste.
I also don't share your frustration with the keyboard use in Mac OS; I rarely take my hands off home row but when I do it's to use a beautifully responsive trackpad full of powerful and useful gestures just inches below. It's the one thing I miss on ubuntu.
I'm sorry, but have you ever seen a true master of the command line?
I routinely juggle between vi, emacs, IDEA, bash, Word and Excel and I use the keyboard on most of these apps. But I'm forced to reach for the mouse a lot more on MacOS than on Windows.
I am still running Win 7, and still have a MBP with MacOS installed. At this time I'm not buying another Mac laptop/desktop(LOL) but if I do get a new laptop that is Win only I'm going to install Win 7 over Win 10.
Windows Explorer to me is way more intuitive that MacOS Finder, which I find to be more difficult to use.
Fn+Ctrl+F2 = focus on menu bar
I literally had to spend an hour removing every POS adware app installed by the OEM, then I still have to put up with notices from M$ asking me to buy their stuff, even though I don't use their software for anything. And there's the virus software, which are all installed by two or three different people and all of which are asking me everyday to buy their stuff.
It's nice that they've moved devs out of the ghetto and I admire the work people have put in to make sure we have nice things again. But I still will be at best lukewarm to anything from M$.
Maybe keyboard shortcuts in windows have improved since Win7 which is the last time I used it semi-regularly, but I've always found the opposite to be true, and don't understand where the notion that windows relies less on the mouse comes from. The consistency of keyboard shortcuts between apps on the mac has been much better in my experience, and it's very straightforward for regular users to discover, customize or add keyboard shortcuts to specific menu items that you access frequently via keyboard preferences. It's also just more consistently designed; it's intuitive that if cmd-z is undo then shift-cmd-z is redo. ctrl-z and ctrl-y on windows is much harder to learn & conceptualize.
Even more important is that every text entry field in the mac os gui implements emacs cursor selection and movement and has since 10.0.[1] While windows relies on less powerful modified arrow key commands. If you know or learn these, then not having them all in other OS GUIs is painful.
I also much prefer that cmd takes on shortcuts for GUI apps while ctrl is relied upon much less frequently in this context. It drives me a bit nuts in windows that ctrl-c is copy for gui apps, but still also abort process in the commandline. Not overloading historical commandline control characters is an underrated reason why mac os is so comfortable to use it as a unix system.
As for the menubar, it's ctrl-F2, but if you're spending a lot of time paging through menus using the arrow keys, there are better solutions to accessing frequently used commands.
Add to this the bevy popular third party text ui tools over the years that allow one to carry out complex tasks without leaving the keyboard, from launchbar, to quicksilver, alfred, and spotlight (which has itself improved a lot over the years). Mac 'power users' kept their hands on the keyboard using these for years before windows implemented win+r to bring up a very limited application launcher.
Taking it to an extreme, utilities such as the actively-developed Karabiner[2] offer a ridiculous amount of additional functionality for keyboard shortcuts, including different takes on global vi-binding, adding a 'hyper' key for more custom shortcuts (actually cmd-opt-ctrl-shift), modifying access to international characters (changing it so that opt-a,o,u quickly produces umlaut characters for writing in German on an american keyboard is hugely helpful for instance), or allowing the caps-lock key to function as escape if you're a heavy vim user, while preserving a mapping of caps-c to ctrl-c (amongst any other shortcuts) if your muscle memory for that is too powerful to give up. I realize that similar tools must exist on windows, but the uptake on stuff like this and the aforementioned quicksilver and alfred seems higher amongst mac devs than windows devs.
[1] See here for example: http://jblevins.org/log/kbd
[2] https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner
Edit: I'd be remiss to not link to these incredible old posts by Brent Terpstra on changing keymappings and using Karabiner (then called KeyRemap4MacBook). Some of the stuff people do is nuts, but it shows the power, and how easy it is to achieve a lot just by editing a DefaultKeyBindings.dict file in your home directory.
The trouble is with Apple falling so far behind on hardware, and enforcing the developer-hostile 'touch bar' faux keyboard to the few new machines they do bother to introduce, it's hard to see what happens next. For the first time in my computer-using adult life, there just isn't anywhere good to go when my current machine needs replacing. Linux demands more of my time than I'm willing to give it. Windows is adware. MacOS runs on hardware I don't want (Hackintosh? Might as well just go linux).
What is one point here, and most important for me at least, is that Apple Air line probably going off the air. The price point (value for money) of it was what convinced me to buy my first Apple product (4+ years ago; and last so far except a keyboard as I couldn't find a decent third party one in India). The cost of a machine that I don't need and don't like much either is isn't justifiable just to remain in a particular ecosystem I became comfortable with.
My battery is dying and the machine itself is showing signs of age. I know I won't like it but when the time comes I will be looking for alternatives too if I can't get OSX in an affordable way.
If I got this right, he built a desktop PC? How is he then comparing his custom-built PC to the Macbook Pro, which is a laptop. Maybe he should have saved the pain of finding the replacement and bought the Mac Pro?
> After all, most parts of the elementary desktop environment (pantheon) are in the Arch User Repository (AUR).
So, Mr. Author, let me get this right: in Ubuntu it was really easy to install Slack. Just a double click of a package.
Then you thought that Arch Linux was better then Elementry because you couldn't double click a dpkg file, so you installed the Elementary stuff through the AUR. A website that would require you to use the command line before you could get Slack even installed?
Ubuntu does have old versions of drivers and applications. As Elementry is based on Ubuntu, it is to be expected that you would recieve older driers inside Elementary.
Are there any good alternatives available on Linux?
We're transitioning away from cloud sync for almost all functionality. More info here: https://blog.nylas.com/nylas-mail-is-now-free-8350d6a1044d
PS. SSL Labs gives your site an F grade due to CVE-2016-2107.
Edit: Fixed now. We should have an "A+" rating. :)
So it will be entirely useless for touch typists, ie. most developers.
I like macOS, but my current MB Pro will be my last.
On top of that, I've actually had to spend far less time computer janitoring it than I have on the various *NIX installs I've run in those same 6 years.
I totally understand not wanting any OS-based surprises while trying to get work done, but as long as your CPU and motherboard are supported, you're generally good to go.
I actually wrote about my experience: https://medium.com/@Ezhik/2fb487efe717 - but even disregarding obvious concerns like legality, there's still plenty of reasons to want to give Linux a shot properly, which mostly come down to the direction Apple is taking OS X and its hardware in.
Is there a way to get better performance out of Gnome video player when scrubbing back and forth in a video? Quicktime 7 and X on macOS (and commercial tools like RV on Linux) are great at this, and it would be cool to have an open source equivalent.
Why would anyone user anything other than videolan VLC?
I don't think I've ever used mpv, I am really curious why you believe it is better.
The reason ive stuck with vlc is because it can handle anything you throw at it, and has a responsive and minimal UI. If I find anything equally good I wouldn't mind trying it out
And I really enjoy the up-to-date nature of Arch compared to Debian distros; I don't look back fondly upon the trouble I had to go through to use new packages with Ubuntu back in the day.
I consider the track-pad and how most apps scroll in OSX one of the big niceties of the platform.
Battery life is not quite as good as MacOS, but I think it's pretty good for my needs (at least 4-5 hrs running non-trivial workloads).
I'm driving two 4K@60hz Dells and the built in screen on an older MBP 15". Granted, it's finicky to get set up right, but it works w/ configurable screens and right cabling.
Furthermore, you sound like you're describing Linux itself. You're either a troll or terrible at indicating sarcasm.
The next issue I had was the lack of a nice, Apple-supported package manager. Homebrew and ports are poor replacements for things like Pacman and the AUR. There's no emphasis on many of the things that makes life on Linux easy.
These are my top two complaints; the second can be debated, but the first is unjustifiable when Linux runs on the same hardware without hiccups.
I don't like multiple key presses for what should be one simple key press it seems sloppy and counter intuitive for a key that's existed for decades.
And now with WSL it's becoming increasingly easier to keep using Windows. The "forced" reboots/updates is simply 2 config changes away from getting out of your way (takes 10 seconds) and the recommended apps takes 30 secs to uninstall. Seriously it isn't rocket science, it makes me laugh seeing developers (who are technical in nature) complain and struggle configuring the OS, all the while they'll gladly spend hours/days/weeks configuring Linux. For what? "Freedom"? Please.
LTS releases make sense for plenty of desktop use cases: enterprise/education SOEs; kiosks; non-technical users; even developer workstations in some cases.
> elementary almost completely removes menus. As a heavy
keyboard shortcut user this makes discovering shortcuts
difficult
> the Mac App Store, Homebrew and Arch Linux. With each of
these it’s a simple matter to install the latest version
of a tool or application. On elementary I ran into a
number of cases where software I wished to install did not
exist in the Ubuntu repos or were outdated
> as time went on I started running into more bugs [...]
At this point the system was actively harming my productivity