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Comment by dwighttk | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I'd be much more open to Linux if I spent most of my time in emacs, but since I've spent like 8 minutes in emacs and about 14hrs in vim and have very little desire to increase either of those numbers, it only takes a small dose of Linux to re-enchant myself with Apple.

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How in the world did you come to that conclusion?

I run arch with gnome 3, chromium (+chrome), and vs code as my main dev machine.

No emacs or vim required. No text only interfaces. No terminals unless you open it yourself (In which case it's running powerline with git addons and is still a very nice visual experience)

Gnome 3 with dash to dock is basically a drop in replacement for the osx style desktop. It just works.

Better yet, I'm free to get a better-than-osx experience on any hardware I want (and I REALLY don't want to the new macbook pros - I'm stuck on one at work and it's... bad).

Between work, gaming, personal projects - I'm running osx, win 10, and Arch. They all stay synched with dropbox and google drive. I get unix style terminals/shell everywhere (cmder/conemu for win10), and life is generally lovely.

Of the three, I prefer Arch, then Win 10. Osx is last by a mile. I think apple has a flakey os, and their hardware is rapidly moving in a direction that doesn't suite professional needs.

One can certainly use Linux set up in such a way as to be very similar to a Mac experience. (ElementaryOS seems to me intentionally be Mac-like, for instance. But plenty of other distros are also set up in such a way that the user doesn't have to ever open a terminal if they don't want to.)

There's no rule that you ever have to open either emacs or vim on Linux (though, personally I think you're missing out if you've only spent 8 minutes in emacs, but that's beside the point). In fact, you can just not install either emacs or vim, and thus make certain you don't ever open them by accident.

I recently updated my Linux desktop at home; I tried a variety of live distros - I don't recall if Elementary was one of them - it might have been in there.

The one I ended up using had the Budgie desktop, which I found to be the most "Mac-like" of all the experiences. The distro I used was Ubuntu Budgie, because I wanted the Debian and Ubuntu software ecosystem, but Budgie is a part of the Solus Linux project (which I enjoyed when I tried it, but I didn't like the package system).

So give Solus and/or Ubuntu Budgie a try on a live USB thumbdrive sometime; you might enjoy it, if you are looking for a "more Mac-like" experience...

It's been a while since I've tried Budgie, but I recall it reminded me vaguely of Android in fact.

But, in any case, yes, there are plenty of Linux front-ends which can be 'Mac-like' if you like that sort of thing.

I'm not about to tell people which platforms they should run - each to their own and all that - but I do feel it's worth mentioning there's no need to use emacs nor vim on Linux if you didn't want to.

and on the flip-side to that, the versions available for Windows and Mac are both perfectly serviceable so you may still run the risk of being confronted with them even if you don't switch!

Why do you insist on using Emacs? Also why do you switch to VIM? I feel I'm missing context.

I’m not following how either of those portable editors tip the scale. Enlighten me?

It seems like there is a mindset in people I've run across that makes them especially willing to use Linux and also emacs (vim to a lesser extent, and other command line programs. I mentioned emacs because that's what the guy jumps to in the article). More of their interaction with their computer takes place inside their head whereas I need the computer to represent things more visually. And since emacs (and vim) work on lots of OSes, they can jump right in on any of them and feel at home, while I feel like I'm trying to eat with chopsticks while wearing boxing gloves.

Well, some of us love programming, so I'm not surprised if we're in editors all day, others might be maintainers of open source / Linux projects. But there's a huge amount of users who use it like they would Mac or Windows, I am one of them, I also use both OS' I overall prefer Linux for some things since it puts me in the heart of the platform I would normally deploy production code to and it just feels right, something about being able to take apart any part of my OS feels awesome and hacker friendly, even if I never take it all apart, I know I can.

Same reason I keep Android around, now someone will say it's proprietary blah blah, but I can root my phone and install anything I want on it.

Since I've used Linux there was always a Linux gaming community for example, doubt they spend centuries on VIM or Emacs. Also remembering all the crazy Desktop Environment eye candy from the 2000's like the desktop cube, and the self-incinerating window when you'd close it. Linux just made you feel so damn cool at the fact you could have things that just did all these insanely awesome things!

I spend most of my time in Emacs even when work makes me use a Mac.

Linux has KDE Plasma.

Run VSCode?

You can run a myriad of different editors in linux. Probably the same ones you're used to in OSX, baring x code.

I use vim, on a System76 Linux laptop, and it does not seem an obstacle.

I recently switcher from a Lemur to the new MB pro. I'm a vim user so whenever I code I use an external keyboard that has function keys. I seriously miss my i3 setup and my MB in particular had hardware problems (overheating, video card issues). What I didn't like about the Lemur was the battery (life, didn't hold charge for too long), the screen and the touch pad. For anyone that used Librem, how's the battery and touchpad ?

Did you use tlp or any power tool on linux?

Why? You can change nearly everything to use vim keybindings.

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