My Failed Attempt Switching to Linux

> Buy a Macbook Air for God knows how much and say it's way easier.

...or buy a Dell XPS 13 which actually has Linux pre-installed by the OEM, and comes with hardware that's actually tested on Linux by the OEM.

Apple hardware is notoriously difficult with Linux, because they obviously don't test it on anything but OS X, and the hardware is completely opaque and may even vary within a given {model, year} combination, making it even more difficult for Linux developers to target than most PC hardware.

By contrast, Dell actually sources hardware specifically for the Linux edition (ex: they use a different wireless card for the Linux and Windows editions for this exact reason[0]) and pushes any driver patches upstream to the kernel.

Aside from the philosophical argument for voting with your wallet for a manufacturer that actually devotes resources towards building hardware that works with Linux, you'll just have a way easier time getting everything working.

I'm a longtime Linux user, and having experienced the process on an XPS 13, a Thinkpad, and a Macbook Air, each multiple times over, there's no way I'd ever consider running Linux on any laptop but an XPS 13 (or the Precision, its 15'' counterpart) again.

[0] In other words, don't buy the Windows edition and install Linux on it, because you'll probably have issues with your wireless card if you do. Even if you want to install a different distribution, buy the Ubuntu version - Dell upstreams all its patches, so the wireless card that ships with the Ubuntu version will work on any Linux distribution.

On the flipside, shortly after a discussion with my wife on how user friendly nixes had become, I attempted to convert one of my old Windows 10 boxes to Ubuntu, for the purposes of leveraging mdadm over whatever SW RAID Windows ships with.

I probably could have used Windows RAID tools, but I don't know what they are, and I'm pretty comfortable with the ease of use of mdadm.

Anyway, after downloading Ubuntu 16.04 and dding it to a thumb drive, I was off to the races. Two days later, I realized that "Failed to create a kernel channel" somehow relates to the USB settings, and I stumbled onto a stackoverflow post that had me add 'iommu=soft' to my boot parameters and finally, finally* I was installing software.

I'm not an expert, but I'm definitely not a novice, and while there might have been a short window in which Linux had hit peak compatibility, it seems that the numerous hoops I had to jump through to accommodate UEFI and USB BIOS settings may well indicate that the moment has passed. I hope it catches up again, because for non-technical people, installing an operating system is a really hard thing, and if it's non-trivial for any experienced users, it'll be monumentally hard for grandma.

> I got mine for $650 with IPS 1080p (Zenbook UX305CA).

@franciscop - which distro are you running? I'm primarily a mac user but picked up a UX305FA about 8 months ago to start poking around with Linux.

I've had Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, OpenSUSE, Fedora 25 & 26, and most recently Ubuntu Studio.

In every case I have the same issues that end up turning me away - first and foremost is the screen. I hear it's a nice screen under Windows but no matter what I can't seem to get it to not strain my eyes. I've tried calibrating the screen, different resolutions, and Redshift but no matter what it ends up straining my eyes. Maybe my eyes are too used to Apples retina displays?

The other issue is the jumping cursor. No matter what I do, or how careful I am to keep my palm clear of the track pad, inevitably while typing the cursor jumps up to the top of the screen while I'm mid line. Drives me nuts.

Sorry, not trying to thread jack but seeing how you have a similar machine and seem to like it, I thought I'd throw it out there.

I really want to like this computer, over than those 2 issues it's a great little laptop.

Yes, absolutely. And OpenBSD may have been a better fit for his X260 with regards to device drivers.

And having failed with that (though I don't know why he had to write his own PKGBUILD) why would you then try FreeBSD and NixOS?

I do all my dev work on Linux; hacked it for ten years. I've used a bunch of different debians and red hat in the process (most recently a highly modified elementaryOS).

It took 40 minutes with Arch before I decided to give up. I do like their wiki though.

> not knowing anything about linux and giving up quickly.

to be honest, he said in the article:

> I have a life to live

I mean how do you need to know about macOS before it runs really smooth on your MacBook? You're not getting paid figuring out which Linux set-up with which patches and config tweaks makes it run just as smooth as a MacBook out of the box. Of course it's not a problem if you like to do this stuff or you're a professional Linux developer.

He probably uses an editor made on electron like atom... That is what the cool kidz use today..

Same here, was running Arch on an older laptop for years (recently bricked it, not Arch's fault), replicating my usual setup as far as possible and unless it has something to do with newer hardware... why?

Seconding this, based on my own limited experience of running Linux at home. It's just a desktop with Ubuntu, but I've had all sorts of weird, one-off problems with it that cause me headaches. I would hate to have to deal with this on a day-to-day basis on my primary machine - so I choose not to.

Mac, despite slipping software quality, still mostly Just Works without having to google a dozen forums with half-answers.

I'm an avid macOS user. I was given a Windows machine for work. I lasted a week before installing Ubuntu on it, then another week before I stopped dual booting and started to run Ubuntu as the sole OS.

While I still prefer macOS, Ubuntu has been, dare I say, enjoyable to use from 9-5. I'm running it on a discontinued model of a Lenovo Laptop with a 1080p screen. Which is a downgrade compared to the retina display of my MBP at home.

I think one advantage that I've come across with using Ubuntu is that while everything may not "just work" to the same extent as it does with macOS, it isn't very difficult to find the solution or the right setting to tweak. The only thing I miss is iCloud. I miss having my documents synced across my machines (used to have a Mac at my previous job). So that if I needed a document at home I could just move it to the desktop and it'd show up at home or vice versa. And the iCloud keychain. In the past month I've reset so many passwords with since I've been using iCloud keychain for a few years now, I don't actually know any of my passwords anymore.

I did have an oddity where my Bluetooth stopped working, so I upgraded to Ubuntu 17.04 from 16.04. During this process the driver (I guess?) got deleted for the keyboard and trackpad. I could use them in recovery mode, but not when booting into the OS directly. So I ended up having to do a clean wipe and reinstall. It took me about 2 hours to have everything back up and running including all my tools.

I'm at home on a Mac, but I also love to explore alternative OSes in general, so I'm comfortable with most Linux based OSes out there. My advice to someone truly wishing to leave Macs and/or macOS behind is to try out Elementary OS. It will be a familiar visual and contextual experience and is widely compatible with commodity hardware. The terminal is tweaked for speed and ease of use, the native apps behave themselves and follow Elementary's strict (for Linux) HIG, and it's one of the most beautiful OOTB distros out there (that's purely subjective but it comes from someone who loves the macOS GUI).

Before selling your Mac though, give eOS (or whichever Linux you're looking at) a go in VMWare Player or VirtualBox. Make sure it's a good fit, and please, please, buy decent hardware that is Linux-friendly once it's time to switch. You can even avoid hardware fumbles by installing Elementary on your Mac and keep the hardware you know and love.

Maybe he should just get a big button that says "push here" on it.