From Mac to Linux – the setup I've grown to love
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From a performance to value perspective you cannot beat Linux. Docker/Microk8s the overhead is so low. Dev speed is leagues ahead the unfortunate circumstance of having to run Docker/Minikube in a VM on Windows and macOS. Also filesystem IO is unreal compared to Windows at least.
Getting a refurb Thinkpad on ebay and having better compute hardware than a mac pro for half the price is also a nice cherry on top so to speak. That and the insane sales Lenovo has all the time for brand new machines is kind of hard to beat as well.
Next up is Windows from a hardware perspective. Same refurb thinkpad can dual boot without issue.
Then lastly macOS. I have had a mac since 2011. I am having a hard time with the direction Apple is going with their laptops.
I have all 3 and they all have their merits, but I find myself using Windows/Linux at home exclusively and macOS at work and I don't mind the context switch.
To each their own!
With the uncertain future of mac with their potential switch to ARM and not shipping python and ruby by default, I see some drawbacks to the dev ecosystem. I know brew will package a ruby version to handle this but I do worry about the ARM switch.
Linux used to be quite difficult, but I stuck with Ubuntu and the UX/UI has improved so much :)
This, a thousand times this. I had a discussion earlier this week with the owner of a Mac repair shop of 15+ years here in Toronto, who lamented the release of any Mac portable since 2015 - saying 'thank God for the 2012-2015 units, or I would be out of business.'
I told him I'd been buying Macs for 15 years, and during especially times like buying my first iBook at age 15, I absolutely relied on, and still rely on, purchasing a laptop with the intent to upgrade the RAM and the HDD/SSD in the future.
With the laptops continually increasing in price, justified by tacking on useless features nobody wants, and then preventing upgrades, the laptops are out of reach for me to justify as an intermediate iOS developer. The 2017 models locked to 16GB are already virtually obsolete to a serious developer or film editor.
I will not, would not, on principle, buy a computer whose hard drive is soldered to the Logic Board, if only for the sake of retaining the hard drive itself aside from the laptop.
There is no possible, potential benefit a soldered hard drive, or soldered RAM, gives me, and the detriments far, far outweigh any benefits.
Previously, if the hard drive or RAM got corrupted or damaged, I could replace those parts the same day. What now?
Truly - and I mean truly, butterfly keyboard and lack of ports aside, even internally, Apple has finally gone from questionably being form of over function, to its focus on form over function being a literal insult to its long term dedicated users, and simply not responding to criticisms.
So the media laughs at the Touch Bar, fans and critics deride it, and Apple's response - to cancel the non-touch bar version of the 13" MacBook Pro.
I've had a MacBook/PowerBook Pro (and Thinkpad) since Titanium and the First MacBook Pro and if it wasn't for the fact of macOS and the convenience of being in the Apple ecosystem with their iPhone, TV, HomePod(s), Watch, Music, and iCloud I would be back on Linux (I actually came from FreeBSD on my Thinkpad). I'm currently using a 2017 and 2018 MacBook Pro. The 2017 would be great except the keyboard (and of course the soldered RAM/HDD) is absolutely trash. The 2018 is much better, but nothing like a Thinkpad. I also miss the Trackpoint, but the Apple Trackpad is good.
I miss my Thinkpad (+ BSD) bad, but being an iOS / web developer and entrenched in the Apple ecosystem (which I honestly like the convenience) I feel stuck and hard to even get a secondary machine. I even leave a fully maxed out P53 and P1 (I can't decide which one I want) in my Lenovo cart ready to buy at a given moment.
Golden, golden days. Every other film editor and director I've ever met, I've had a talk about how blessed the 17" G4 was (at the time).
Never had a Mac before, everybody was saying they were fantastic. You'll see, coming from Windows, what a difference, they would say.
The first had some serious hardware failure which made it reset at random times. With time the resets became more frequent until it became impossible to use it. I gave it back to IT with the order to destroy it.
The second had the infamous keyboard. God knows how much I hated it. Random keys wouldn't work, but most commonly the ones you need more, like shift. Thanks Apple. Went to IT and told them to throw it in the bin.
This last one I got has the horrid touch-bar which starts the bloody Siri 3 to 5 times a day because my finger randomly flies by the up-right corner of the laptop (typically when I am looking for the backspace). I hate it. The network sometimes goes away, for unknown reasons, until I reset the network card. Recently, the screen sometimes shows some worrisome fast-disappearing black areas.
You'll see, they would say. Very reliable, they would say.
Other than that though, I think you might just have been unlucky. In professional env, I've seen bad units with pretty much every brand out-there. It shouldn't happen, but it does. In my experience, Apple will replace these without much fuzz, but their service, certainly towards businesses, is a far cry from that of for example Dell.
The Touch Bar complaint is just you not investing enough time with the system to get to know it. You can disable siri, and completely customise the touch bar.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
It's like their product management is run by sadistic assholes.
"Lower end Mac Pro" sounds an awful lot like the "xMac," a Mac that would be more like an iMac but a box that takes cards, which is something that some folks have wanted for literally two decades at this point. It's clearly not what Apple wants to bring to market. The low-end headless desktop Mac is the Mac mini -- and I suspect it would be a great machine for a lot of developers. That doesn't mean it's what you want, and I'm not saying you're wrong to want something else! I am saying, though, that "Apple won't make my dream Mac" isn't a sign of sadism.
From removing the non-touch bar MacBook Pro model, to the ghastly price of the new Mac Pro, to their refusal to create an upgraded iPhone SE-sized model - Apple has started to shove things down the user base's throat now more than ever.
Apple has always been guilty of this to some extent, but for me, it's offerings worked with me, my workflow, and their direction grew with me - I embraced the move to Intel, because, as a developer, being able to dual-boot, and eventually even virtualize the dual-boot with parallels, was excellent for me. (Waiting for Office 2008 and the Universal Adobe CS3 package, however...)
The point is - Apple has always at least provided options in the past that were, well, options. At this point, there is no option in Apple's lineup I would keep for free - I'd simply rather sell a new MBP and create a hackintoshed Lenovo ThinkPad in a heartbeat than actually use any of their offerings on the daily, which I can say from experience, as I happen to have to use both on the daily.
Not to mention brew is vastly inferior to most Linux package managers (apt, yum, pacman, etc.)
On Ubuntu, it's snap.
This still holds, right?
In my experience, unless your needs are extremely basic, sooner or later you'll run into an issue where the solution is basically to commit nuclear warfare on your filesystem and start over again. Also, expect to rely on random blog posts and stack overflow as the de facto user's guide (which maybe is just the state of the world for everything now.)
The "Moby" VM on Windows is a bit annoying - it takes 30s or so to start the Docker engine, bind mounts/volumes are a bit pernickety, and resource use is obviously higher than without a VM. Having said that, once it's started everything works pretty well, with containers starting almost instantaneously.
I believe there are some IO perf issues if you're using WSL (I don't use it much, preferring git bash for most things).
Both of these issues should be fixed when WSL2 finally arrives. But unless you're on an Insider's build, I believe that's going to be 2020 (someone please correct me if that's wrong).
Windows NT had Windows Services for UNIX, replaced by Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications on Windows 2003 until Windows 8, eventually replaced by Windows Subsystem for Linux, given that now Linux API compatibility has became more relevant than straight POSIX code compatibility.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/06/august-6-1997----...
The hardware, especially the keyboard and touchbar, are utter trash and reminiscent of the dell and HP laptops around 2008, which were the reason I dumped those brands in the first place.
All the pointless dongles were a moronic excuse to make thinner machines. They forgot about function and also failed to realize that aesthetic doesn’t matter if the keyboard is literally a dumpster fire.
I wonder sometimes if Tim Cook is becoming senile or if he just don’t care since the iPhone was printing money.
I mainly use Windows for games but every now and then I don't want to leave my desktop to make some changes to a repo while my character is respawning/spectating or something haha
WSL2 is going to be awesome for sure
But it is very fast!
The Insider build also green screens less often than the most recent general release did!
Having Github available for issues is great too, as you can see progress being made in fixing the bugs - I feel more connected then when I actually worked inside Microsoft!
Which Thinkpad model do you recommend?
And which Linux distro do you use?
The X1 Extreme is nice. It is one of relatively few PC laptops that are comparable to the 15" MBP in terms of performance (H-series processor rather than U-series) and portability. It has upgradeable RAM/SSD, so I got the base model with the upgrade CPU then purchased 32GB/1TB separately and saved something like $600-700 as a result. With slightly better cooling and a 3:2 display I think it would be nearly perfect.
Concerning distro, if you want to "just get work done" I recommend Ubuntu if like the way it looks or want to use one of the non-Gnome desktops. If you do like Gnome but but like the Ubuntu desktop, Fedora is great.
Maybe I am unlucky. I bought it because I finally wanted a 15" screen with a centred keyboard, i.e. without the num-pad, because uncentered for touch typers is really really weird. It started that in order to get Linux running I had to switch the graphics card to discrete mode, at least this is what I found on Internet. This bricked the machine and according to the Lenovo support thread I was far from alone [0]! Luckily I had on-site 24h support, so called. They were able to come only after a week... With the wrong board... With travels in between I had in total to wait for 1 month to make the machine work.
Now it works and I am using it and trying to accept it.
- It is extremely loud! BIOS updates made it better as of lately and I got a bit more used to it.
- It gets extremely hot. So hot that actually typing on it gets uncomfortable.
- I am not able to do any meaningful work for more than 3 hours on battery. With my last X25 with 2 batteries I was able to work a whole day!
- The screen is like a mirror! I found a workaround by trying to work as much as possible with white background.
- And finally, but this is probably more the fault of Ubuntu/Gnome/nVidia - it is the laggiest experience ever! I mean, I am working most of the time in a terminal! Typing on the terminal is so laggy, that I do not even remember back to 1995 when I was starting using Linux to have such a laggy experience. Come on, this is supposed to be the most powerfull machine that I ever had?!
- Using external screen is possible only when switching ot nVidia. When using Intel graphics card (to prolong battery life) you cannot switch on external screen.
- Another, but probably this is Gnome/Ubunut/nVidia annoying thing is, that as soon as I lock the screen in Gnome, the fan starts turning like hell and the temperature rises! Come on, is Gnome screensaver mining bitcoins or what? I mean, I configured it to just turn off the screen when I lock it! And instead of saving energy it is heating the planet!
By now I spend so much time trying to configure, update and whatever that I am really tired of it. I mean, I have work to do! I am trying to prepare to go to NixOS, because I heard from some people that they got it configured to be usable. Preparing for this slowly, when I can dedicate time.
It's not all bad though. There are some positive things:
- I like the physical build quality. It feels solid and sturdy.
- The screen (I have the 3840x2160 resolution) brightness, resolution and colors are really good. To watch photographs or to see movies. Unfortunately working on text is only possible with white screen. Otherwise it is like a mirror. It would even be possible to work outside, but you need to have electricity, the battery life is horrible.
- I like the keyboard. The touch depths is nice and I have the impression that it is a bit more distinctive than on the prior models that I had (X25 and T450s).
- The CPU power is more than enough for me.
[0] - https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/Anoth...
EDIT: Typo, s/X24/X25/
Installed erpalma/throttled from github to squeeze my CPU perf to max. Also make sure to set sleep to S3 in BIOS. Otherwise nothing else to do. Everything seems to work just fine.
The 7th Gen just came out so there might still be some issues but I would look around and see if it's good to go.
I use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Once 19 is done I will more than likely move on to 20.04 LTS
The yoga needed some tweaks to get the OLED brightness to work correctly, but other than that they basically worked out of the box under ubuntu 18.04. My only complaints are that the oled panel only came in gloss and has since been discontinued (although there are rumors that a 15" 4k oled will be available on the x1 extreme), and that the mouse click on the yoga is several orders of magnitude too loud. The trackpoint buttons are fine and the keyboard is great, but the trackpad click is loud enough to hear in the next room over.
I'm running a T530. Max out the ram, get a ssd, it's great. I'm probably on my third one, I keep buying junkers for $50 from eBay for the parts. I majorly abuse it. The magnesium frame likes to crack near the heatsink, the steel frame around the screen likes to crack 1 inch above the hinges, don't spill water on the table it's sitting on.
In this case, I'm measuring my productivity by the time it takes to mess around with the OS to get the desired result, and the fact that the stability baseline just never seems to get there.
I get and support the attraction to Linux on the desktop, but find YMMV to be very much true.
I try to move over every six months to a year or so, and it's the same gripes every time at this point.
Driver support's reasonable now, and the desktop environments are generally solid enough, but things like mixed DPI work really badly on Linux, my browser nearly always tears when scrolling on my secondary display, etc.
But... the single biggest killer for me though is how badly Linux copes with very low amounts of free memory. Put 32G in a machine and it still periodically runs completely out under my dev workload and when that happens, the whole system becomes unusable and I have to hard reboot it. I'm not sure what macOS and Windows do differently, but it just doesn't happen on either of those two OSes.
I really want to have the freedom to pick and choose my hardware more, but at the moment I keep falling back to macOS.
It's a UNIX environment so it has the tooling I want and a solid GUI that works well.
I used to have that problem too, but it went away when I stopped using JetBrains products :). Not for any reason other than the contract I was working on ended.
As I'm typing this, I got 14hours and 33minutes of battery left and it's only charged to 83%. In hardcore scenarios out of the grid for a few days (where I go sailing) I got a few spare batteries. (the laptop is the Lenovo X270)
> In this case, I'm measuring my productivity by the time it takes to mess around with the OS to get the desired result, and the fact that the stability baseline just never seems to get there.
The time investment goes down significantly over time. After a decade using linux on as a daily driver, I don't remember the last time I've tweak anything.
> fed up ... and go back to macOS.
Same thing but the other way around. I stay away from my Mac except for:
- making sure my applications look good enough on a Mac and are usable
- making music as I'm not patient enough to relearn everything on a different platform but that's just laziness from my end
I've been running linux desktops and laptops for about 20 years, starting with early/pre-RHEL redhat, and moving around to many others. My first laptop was a pentium thing at 75 MHz, and I triple booted Linux, OS2, and Windows/DOS on it. I wound up kicking off the last two, as I used them only infrequently.
Battery life is an issue for me, but its not linux specific. The laptops I have, all have power hungry ram and GPU cards. I get 2 hours on them, or if I play with the brightness and other things, I can stretch it to 4 hours. My old 2010 laptop (still in use, still running linux) is a 16GB ram, 0.5TB SSD affair with an NVidia GTX560m card. My 2018 laptop is a 48GB ram, 1.5 TB SSD (0.5 + 1.0) with an M2 256GB SSD for the included windows 10 home, and a GTX 1060m card. Windows 10 on the newer laptop lasts about 2.5 hours before it shuts down. I now run the pre-installed windows 10 via a kvm with passthrough of the M2 into the instance.
All of these are currently running late model Linux Mint 19.2 with accelerated graphics.
Work laptop is a Mac 16 GB ram, 512GB SSD with an intel/AMD hybrid graphics bit. This will last 5 hours with significant tweaks to aggressive power off, and me not running any builds on it.
I like the mac for its physical fit and finish, weight, etc. But I need to bring the power supply with me, as I can burn through much of the power in a 2 hour meeting.
I like the linux machine for work, and everything else. It just works. The drivers just work. The networking just works. Single/multi displays just work. I have cinammon (display manager) set up to a very comfortable configuration.
I am hopeful that the day job will enable me to trade up to a bigger machine with linux and nvidia graphics at some point ... 32GB is bare minimum for a functional machine for me, 48->64GB is better.
My home office deskside is an older Sandy Bridge machine with 16 cores, 128 GB ram, old GTX750ti card, running the same environment as on my laptop.
Of course, YMMV.
I can finally say Ubuntu MATE 18.04 for me is pretty solid. There's still two issues I wrestle with, but other than that it's been very dependable for me.
When it comes to OSes these days, I feel like you have to pick the least bad one. A truly rock solid OS just doesn't exist in my experience.
But, weird hardware issues popped up now and then which I didn't have to deal with on my MacBook, such as the wifi card that had to be manually installed, the headphone jack sometimes doing weird things, the processors overheating.
I was able to solve those problems by searching online and finding others who had the same issue which lead to instructions to fix the problem, but I just can't imagine my family members who have never used the Terminal in their entire life having the same success.
The fact is that with my old MacBooks (and the computers I've given to my family) the only hardware related issue we've had over the last 10+ years is the battery related issues from the MBP.
I use Arch Linux, and a combination of KDE and i3 so one would expect me to have a ton of rediculous problems. But I haven't had a single problem. It took me a single day to set up my computer how I wanted it (I've used Linux before) and I haven't had to touch a config file since.
Part of this might be that in using a Dell XPS DE, which is designed to work well with Linux, but I think it might just be a YMMV situation. And I do a lot of back end, applications, web and front end development (mostly in my spare time), so I think I've hit a lot of programmer use-cases.
Also, I get 15 hour battery life streaming 4K video on my 4K touch screen, and more doing other stuff.
I also used an Apple Magic Touchpad or whatever over Bluetooth with it, including gestures and it worked really well. Better, actually, as far as Bluetooth, than my Mac. I only stopped because it wasn't good for my hand and wrist health.
Just adding my anecdata. Overall my experience with Linux has been hugely positive.
Not sure about the Bluetooth part (i had this kind of issue once in like 10 years) but the battery life, getting 2 hours is not common anymore. Sure, you won't get as long as Windows on the same hardware more of the time, but 5 to 7 hours on a full charge is what you can expect, if not longer.
Bluetooth? I don't even use it. Battery life? I'm on a desktop.
It's true that Linux won't run with all hardware, but this is even more true for MacOS ;)
Not so trivial on Linux. The fact that the author considers Firefox add-ons (!) a Linux feature is a clear indicator they never even tried on a Mac and were enamored by Linux due to the lionisation in the particular subreddits they follow.
Kind of like here! Not that there is anything wrong with getting excited about something. Just don't make sweeping generalizations.
Also, a small tip: You can put your Mac apps and configurations in Dropbox and they will show up and work as you expect across your multiple machines.
There are a couple of automatic tiling window managers for MacOS, the most notable being Yabai (https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai) and Amethyst (https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst).
Yabai doesn't handle window switching on its own but it can use SKHD (https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd) or any other application that can bind terminal commands to keyboard shortcuts such as Hammerspoon (https://www.hammerspoon.org) or BetterTouchTool (https://folivora.ai) or even Keyboard Maestro. The commands are context-aware of spaces and the placement of windows on the x-y plane so you can move between windows relative to their position on the screen.
https://puu.sh/E9qyC/cdbeb9ce4c.png
On another note, highly recommend Puush (https://puush.me/) for instantly taking and sharing screenshots without having to manually upload.
Anyhow, you're more likely looking for something like Amethyst.
https://superuser.com/questions/299241/in-mac-os-what-is-the...
Things tend to just work on the Mac, even though I use it for a wide variety of tasks (programming mainly, writing, music, and video secondarily, plus some photo work). Music and Video (DAWs and NLEs) are almost a joke in Linux.
You have to be cautious to buy compatible laptop hardware, and still there's always something not working on new setups, usually sleep, sound, GPU compositor, bluetooth, etc.
I'm pretty sure that would be my problem if I tried to move (back to) Linux. A lot of the HN crowd is (understandably!) focused on development, and the chances are your favorite dev environment is going to be good-or-better on Linux as it is on the Mac. But I can't find a screenplay writing program on Linux I personally like as much as Highland for the Mac, or a Markdown editor that I like as much as iA Writer or BBEdit for the "heavy lifting" of technical writing at work, or a graphics editor I like as much as Acorn, or a Twitter client I like as much as Twitterrific, or a Markdown previewer/converter I like as much as Marked, and and and. I know it's all subjective, but it's a sticking point. And the last I checked, at least, I couldn't find good equivalents to OS X Services/Quick Actions, which can be just amazing.
I'm sure if Apple really tanks, I could make the switch and hit a happy place, but it'd be turbulent for a while.
Those of us into graphics programming, UI/UX are better served with macOS/Windows tooling, development enviroments and SDKs.
That is what triggered my move back into those platforms.
Technically, there are more 100% Linux compatible laptops than macos dito...
That is true even if you limit yourself to thinkpads
Installed Xubuntu and forgot about those for years, the experience is still smooth, fast and the computers turn-on fast.
> Windows sometimes works
I'm going to take exception to this. Windows 10 has been a disaster for me.
Effectively, Windows 10 treats me like a "supplicant". "Oh, great computer, can you please do some work for me right now?" "I say NAY! I must now commence my Update Ritual. Please come back and ask again. But I make no guarantees."
Every ... single ... time. WTF!
> MacOS mostly works
Unless you want to do modern graphics and then you get the "joy" of learning Metal (or not). Or, you can simply throw in the towel and switch to Windows/Linux where you can use OpenGL and Vulkan. Valve is funding MoltenVK (a Vulkan shim on top of Metal) because it is more cost effective than dealing with Metal. Let that sink in for a minute.
And OS X hardware is a disaster. We've actually stockpiled used-2015 era OS X laptops in the office. At this point we have enough if someone has a laptop that goes down.
I don't fully understand why Linux is able to do its system updates as one of several tasks, but Windows has to take over the computer to do it though. Is it just that if a Linux box gets stuffed during update, the user is probably able to recover, so the relative risks are different?
It seems the be going the opposite way, since by far and large there's more offering hardware wise than there has ever been, so what you see is manufacturers catering to niches more than before.
https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/dell-laptops-netbooks-and-ta...
From Wikipedia “Thge Apple T2 chip is a SoC from Apple first released in the iMac Pro 2017. It is a 64-bit ARMv8 chip (a variant of the A10, or T8010), and runs a separate operating system called bridgeOS 2.0,[95] which is a watchOS derivative.[96] It provides a secure enclave for encrypted keys, gives users the ability to lock down the computer's boot process, handles system functions like the camera and audio control, and handles on-the-fly encryption and decryption for the solid-state drive.[97][98][99]”
These days… I’d say things aren’t all that different. On one hand, Linux has better hardware support overall, and Dell and some smaller manufacturers are offering Linux laptops. On the other, a lot of hardware still doesn’t work, or doesn’t work well. Some laptops have been getting more custom hardware, including Apple’s and others, and Linux has fallen behind a bit in supporting it. But it’s nothing new for Linux to take time to support new hardware.
Update environment. MacOS requires reboots and nags you constantly until you do. Whereas, apt and dnf are simple and can be automated in the background.
Doing anything 'interesting' requires you to reboot and fiddle with the firmware. Where linux sudo works as expected.
Outdated software due to licensing issues. See GPL and bash. Not to mention you will be much closer to a production environment and you will find less bugs developing due to differences in OS.
Lots more but this is a good start. All of these things are small and mostly can be worked around but they add up I'm a big way.
The road on Linux isn't completely rosy and can take more learning if you need to do anything really complicated. Tools are great but not necessarily pretty, etc.
This is hard to put into words. If I'm an artist, my tools are very, very focused and robust. I might have specific pens and brushes that I know the feel of very well. They're not flashy and they don't have advertisements written on them, and they don't change their properties behind my back. Everything about them is designed to help me draw. If I'm a musician, I spend a lot of money to buy an instrument, and I get to know it very well. I have particular brands of reeds that are consistent that I'm likely preparing or sanding myself. I know my instrument so well that I can tell you which notes trend slightly flat or sharp, and after a while adjusting to that becomes instinctive.
So if I'm a professional programmer, I likewise want a computing environment that I understand completely and can service myself, and that is very customized to my own preferences. It's no different from any other professional field -- the point of the computer is to help me get work done, everything else is secondary.
You'll get different answers if you ask someone why Linux makes them productive, because the benefit of Linux is that it adapts to you. For me, personally, the biggest upgrades to my productivity have been:
1. Switching to Linux in general
2. Switching to Emacs/Spacemacs (Emacs works best on Linux)
3. Switching to Arch as my main distro (which is hard to do unless you already know Linux)
4. Most recently, switching to EXWM as a window manager (which is a lot easier to do on Arch)
Each step of this process has been me getting rid of things that distract me from work, and each step has built on the last. Switching to Linux gives me a setup that is much more customizable and stable, switching to Emacs gives me an editor that is very tightly integrated into the host operating system, switching to Arch allows me to have a very minimal setup (its easier to debug because there's less going on), and switching to EXWM allows me to focus the entire setup on work.
On the other hand, I have an old Surface Pro 3 that's running Manjaro/Gnome that I use for drawing. It's a very different setup from my main computer, because I use it for different things. Again, my computer should adapt to my workflow, not the other way around. The Surface setup is actually interesting, because it suffers from driver issues (unreliable Wifi, bad suspend support). And yet I'm still more productive on it than I was on Windows. I think people underestimate how much time and energy can get lost to distractions, surprise updates, stuff like that. Specialized devices are really stinking good for getting stuff done.
But everyone is different. I know people that get frustrated by the initial setup times or needing to dig more into the OS internals, and I get that -- it's reasonable. For me, once I got past that I found Linux to be really stable, because it doesn't change until you tell it to. Linux is the only OS I'll set up for someone who's not tech-savy, because putting in more work up front means I won't need to do as much regular maintenance.
Kind of reminds me of this article. You say you're more productive but honestly: how much time have you spent working on and customising your OS and is it a continuous project? Can you really say you're more productive than the people who open their lid and just work?
By tinkering and customizing you might gain a productive work environment but the way I see it is that some people just want to tinker because it makes them happy. The ’increased productivity’ seems to be more of a way to rationalize it to oneself.
Now, don't put Arch on your servers either because there's no real security story for Arch, but in that time I have learned tons about systemd, and you can't put a price on that.
I think that archlinuxs advantage is that it's minimalistic, the philosophy is simple, you know what is running on your computer and generally why.
Tinkering with arch itself isn't that time consuming because the package management is so incredibly good, along with the AUR and wiki. These are invaluable.
I really do think the difficulty is overhyped though, it's really not hard at all.
On the Asus Nvidia updates broke my Windows manager on Ubuntu it not happen with Arch.
The Arch install is a little bit more complex but you can do exactly what you want which was for me: use systemd boot instead of grub, and cipher only the home partition.
Once the setup is done, I did not have any issue, fiddling to be done.
For me where I lost time on Linux was when I tried to customize my desktop environment to my liking with i3/polybar/etc. Now I just run Gnome3 on Wayland, far from perfect but it is a good compromise TBH between setup ease/integrated UI components and features.
But there are always going to be exceptions, new problems will arise that will slow you down. That's another reason why I'm on a mainstream OS and not linux, because when I do encounter a problem that slows me down, devs work at breakneck speed to fix bugs and there is extensive documentation because the community is much larger than the linux community. I'd be spending waaay too much time in the weeds on ubuntu, sifting through pages of SEO crap search results to find the one sage forum post from 10 years ago with now deleted screenshots, just trying to run the software and workflows I know like the back of my hand on macos. I don't want to start over and be a dumbass again, I've found my niche.
I bought a pre configured Linux computer (laptop). They’re not very common but common enough.
I haven’t had to spend any time with setup, and frankly I’ve been pleased that everything just works. My main complaint it Battery life isn’t terrible but isn’t great but for what I do it’s good enough.
I don't know if overall all the tinkering I've done over the years was a net positive in terms of efficient use of working hours.
But I can for sure tell you that if I've just opened my lid and worked, I would have been much less satisfied while working when I would constantly run into unnecessary limitations of my tools. Hard to put a quantifier on work satisfaction.
As a professional, using the right tools for your job should be part of your job. You wouldn't trust a workman hammering a nail into the wall with a screwdriver just because that's the only tool in his tool belt.
And this isn't even an exaggerated metaphor. For decades Windows was unusable OOTB for any serious development. OSX is still handicapped by a decades old userspace (better than nothing but not good).
1. Do you know what the end state is, and do you know that you'll be significantly more productive? If so, then spend some real time on it.
2. Do you not know what the end state is, OR are you not sure what the best setup is? If so, then do the absolute minimum amount of work to make your changes functional and no more. Then use the incomplete setup for a while and see how it feels.
3. Are you not sure of the end state, AND are you not sure it will make you more productive? Then put it off and keep using your current setup, or at most try it out on a separate computer in your free time.
It's not unlike working on software architecture. You can get so focused on good architecture and clean code that you never get any real work done. Some code is fine to leave ugly. But not all code -- the art is knowing when code actually needs to be refactored, and figuring out how to refactor it in a way that doesn't lock you out of developing new features for a month.
Environment customization is the same way.
- I do open a laptop and just work. Using configuration that I’ve already created to suit my work.
- Other people is a big group, and one that doesn’t matter so much here. I’m more productive using what I’ve opted to change than without. Yes, the minor time investment was worth it.
It may not be by 30-40% as some people claim, but even at 1% that's around 20 hours in a year assuming a light schedule (40 hours a week 48 weeks a year).
But just because you are using Linux, doesn't mean you have to spend a lot of time customizing. Actually, customizing can be a lot quicker on Linux than on Windows for example (due to the well-integrated package managers).
That said, I do think that some customizations help with productivity, but you should know your limits. If you are trying something completely new, which nobody has done before, you are unlikely to find huge productivity boosts. But if you cautiously follow some best practices you might find some productivity treasures.
ps: one talk that I find a pretty strong example is "the unix chainsaw" by Gary Bernhardt (of wat js fame). He shows how to using tools `against` themselves, as data, to help your work. It's not rocket science, but it's 1) something I rarely do truly 2) easy to fall back as tools as silos instead of .. `objects` collaborating.
Agreed, this doesn’t apply to everyone. Years ago, every 6 months I’d switch to Linux/hackintosh purely out of frustration (or envy) as OSX looked sooo much better than anything else (antialiasing!) AND supported Adobe CC.
Nowadays I’m a Mac user and I’m unlikely to switch, because I’ve grown a bit tired of my tweaking marathons and need a proper *nix system.
I wish Windows just became a GUI layer on top of Linux though.
In which case then sure, pretty much anything will suit you fine. It's not a universal rule though - I spend the vast majority of my time in TextMate or an IDE and probably 10% of time in my terminal, so the comfort of the Mac UI is a more significant factor.
Some people develop programming languages. For them, a GUI-less environment may be ideal.
I do web development. So I need the GUI, not just for testing, but for dealing with image and video assets that come in from the art department, or creating mockups, or presentations, or maps, etc.
It's still "development," but unsuited for a 100% command line experience.
As is often the case, it's easy for someone in one field of "development" to forget that it's a broad category of experiences.
And this is from someone who loves the iPhone.
If you enjoy the tiling window, with nearly everything driven by the keyboard way of working, then Mac OS can’t come close from a UI perspective.
>In which case then sure, pretty much anything will suit you fine.
I thought the same. I’m married to Photoshop. How good is graphic acceleration support inside a VM these days?
I need to run the latest version, fast and glitch free. Wine will never be a solution unfortunately, unless Adobe supports it officially.
For example, I don't use tabs in the terminal. I usually open a new window and use the WM from outside the terminal, or use tmux inside the terminal. Tabs in the terminal itself are not that useful in my workflow.
My current favorite Linux terminal is kitty (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/), and before that I used rxvt-unicode.
Other than that I use Linux (Mint) for my main Desktop OS, but I still deal with plenty of rough edges. The latest ones:
- Wifi doesn't work after suspend wakeup. - After upgrading OS to next version using recommended UI method, PC us unable to start graphics mode bc it doesn't find some random UI package... i had to login in TTY and manually install it. - CS:GG, a game with Linux native port suddenly decided to get choppy lagged sound. Same game works well in Windows in same PC - Connecting bluetooth headphones sometimes works, sometimes doesn't
So yeah, plenty of rough edges. Still I use it because I love the programming workflow and use docker with Linux containers.
And I say this as someone with both macOS and Linux laptops that I work from, but because of the above and other similar things I think you're always up for disappointment if you expect to get Linux to be exactly like macOS.
All of them honor Ctrl+Insert for copy and Shift+Insert for paste. This will work on browsers, editors , shells, etc. FYI this will also work on Windows XP cmd.
Linux has its own set of standards that has evolved to work on keyboards that do not have the super modifier (e.g. in India), but has far more consistency built into it that the Mac
When I switched over from Mac my initial thought was “get this working like my Mac”. After about a day that changed to “learn the Linux way.”
Switched 2 years ago and the only thing I miss after 10 years on OSX is OmniGraffle.
Only macOS gets this right.
On Mac it's Command+C everywhere.
I think some other terminal emulators might also let you do this.
I have gone the other way. One of the thumb-buttons on my Ergodox EZ is"Super + C" makro. The other is "Super + V".
One-thumb copy/paste.
setxkbmap -option ctrl:swap_lwin_lctl -option ctrl:swap_rwin_rctlFor example I can type Ctrl-b while editing the URL in the browser omnibar to move the cursor back a character or alt-b to move it back a word, just like you can in the terminal and then use "Win"-b to bookmark a page.
And your command changes the keys you use for moving the cursor in the terminal.
I switched from Linux to OSX/MacOS around eight years ago, and the better and (to me) more intuitive modifier keys have been one of the features that have kept me there; along with the convenience of Emacs/Readline keybindings for text editing everywhere.
Getting keybindings to work the same way in Linux currently involves a Rube Goldberg setup of GTK3 key themes [1] and AutoKey [2] for me, and some things still don't work right (Super-W closing a single tab in Firefox/Chrome, etc.) Also, it looks like key themes are going away in GTK4 [3].
The Hawck daemon cited elsewhere in the conversation looks promising, maybe that'll work better.
[1] http://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/gtk3-emacs-key-theme.html
If, in about:config, you set ui.key.accelKey to 91, then Super-W will close a single tab (and Super-T will open a single tab etc.). This obviously won't work in Chromium, though.
It was a relief when I didn't have to use a mac for work anymore.
Any tmux CC mode supporting terminals for Linux or Windows?
Have used a Mac before for work, and run Arch with Sway for home and work now. The only thing worth the cost of a Mac is having money to spend on a Mac and feeling like that it is best for you. If you use i3 or Sway on Linux and like it, you'll likely never want to go back. Especially with an Arch-based distro with the AUR.
I develop GNU/Linux software, for GNU/Linux desktops and servers. Obviously I use a GNU/Linux desktop. If I programmed Windows software, well, yeah, I'd probably use that.
The whole debate strikes me as some sort of weird discussion about, like, how the house that a professional (or hobbyist) woodworker/carpenter lives in, and the house that a lawyer lives in, are probably completely different, because one just doesn't find it difficult to build a shelf or make up a kitchen or whatever, it's barely even an inconvenience to them, they eat that shit for breakfast, whereas the other might find it a better use of their time to employ someone to do it.
That said, you should obviously use free software because otherwise you're basically a kiddy fiddler.
This comment shows me how these type of threads are useless and sound as random whining to everyone. Your experience and use case is so perpendicular to mine and 100% as valid as mine. But one person love for something is another person hate.
It can pretty much do anything you want, given enough time and configuration... but when that configuration breaks: good luck.
Some people prefer "it just works" over losing some control.
Personally I dislike macOS's "virtual desktops" and much prefer being able to swap between different desktops in i3, and being able to send windows wherever, control tiling, etc.
Like the OP I use i3, and every time I have to use Windows or macOS I feel like I'm using a crippled machine. If I could put i3 on Windows or macOS, then I'd happily switch. With brew or wsl I really wouldn't notice much of a difference, given 90% of my day is spent in emacs, a terminal or a browser.
The biggest draw of the Lenovos is that the they have yet to run hot. My previous Macbook would get sooo hot... I worried when I kept it on my lap.
The documentation on the fedora website had been so exhaustive and well written.
I had a PC at my old job and it was painful to use. All you have is alt-tab really, and that felt like a little half assed script an undergrad whipped up on a lark. Also everything was on network drives which were never indexed for search, so that was painful too. As well as all the usual pain points from every new windows version functioning as a reskinned windows xp in practice.
=
no Linux if you want to do something serious with photography or video.
Da Vinci Resolve (https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/) is another professional video editor used for popular movies (Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2 for example).
Both work on Linux.
If the proprietary media apps are a must, having a Windows VM works good (with GPU pass through if you need it), as does dual-booting with Windows or a Hackintosh system (which is actually pretty easy these days).
Again, a personal opinion. It costs as much as the equivalent MacBook Pro. I would not choose it over a MacBook because why? Apple has been known to care for customers in the sense that even if they fuck up keyboard design, they run a service program for free. Battery mess up - replacement for cheap. Simply that they have a brand to protect. I can rest assured that I can make a warranty claim that will go through. I’m not sure if I can say that about Huawei. I might try them if they are cheaper or give me some incentive to try. But, if they are the same cost, why would I willingly take the uncertainty?
Some incentives hat would make decide that way are :
1. Open drivers and documentation.
2. Promise of equivalent service or replacement if necessary.
3. Repair/upgrade friendly design - no soldering of memory and SSD. I'm okay if that makes the laptop a few millimeters thicker and a few grams heavier.
Thanks for the info though.
I need to fill out pdf forms pretty often (bureaucracy) and sign them with my signature png.
There is no decent software for Linux that let you do that.
I have tried them all, currently I am using foxit reader in wine and it's not great and very sluggish but usually works
iMessage integration won't happen because Apple has closed down their API. There have been reverse engineering efforts but such a system is never reliable enough for comfortable desktop integration imo.
I've never come across iMessage lock-in as everyone I know either uses WhatsApp, Telegram or plain old SMS so I don't know what limitations you might run into in your setup.
Come to think of it, KDE connect on iOS won't happen (GPL conflict with app store, restrictions to apps, limitations on background execution). I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything else from the Apple ecosystem.
I can also make and receive calls from my Mac, provided the Mac and iPhone are on the same network.
I’ve been using PopOS a bit of late, and have found their tweaks on Gnome to mostly work pretty well. I have had to swap around keys to get used to the format some—basically my big thing is having the special characters available through the Alt/Option key is important to me as I do a lot of writing and frequently use things like long dashes.
One thing I found helped a lot was replacing the caps-lock functionality with the super key, which makes the super functionality easily accessible while still keeping the extended characters within reach.
There are apps I wish had stronger equivalents—Alfred immediately comes to mind—as they have helped speed up my workflow in MacOS. And some apps (Photoshop, InDesign) don’t have a replacement strong enough to use as a daily driver.
While I’m still mostly MacOS these days, PopOS is pretty likable.
I use a QMK-based keyboard (although I am sure you can achieve similar levels of functionality with Karabiner) where choosing my window placement is a 2-key macro.
I've been using Amethyst for multiple years at this point, and it has been great for my workflow.
Lets give it a try...
The biggest deal breaker is that you can't programmatically move a window to a new workspace (I think?); and that you can't disable the animations for switching workspaces (biggest problem).
Spectacle has "next/previous display" shortcut.
To disable animations on workspace switching:
defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES && killall Dock
- I couldn't figure how the heck to open a web browser, apparently it's a completely unlabeled compass icon.
- You have to use some non-obvious, secret combination of keys while clicking on an application icon if you want to open another instance of that application.
I never did understand why people will pay so much more for Mac machines. I tried it, hated it, could only get things done by opening a terminal and treating the Mac like a generic UNIX system. Went back to Linux as quick as I could.
I'm not surprised this guy's happy to be switching away from Mac.
these are the barriers to me switching.
If you want to use GNOME, it includes a good color management interface that will look oddly familiar coming from macOS. There’s other ways to do it too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_color_management
As for messaging, I’ve heard good things about KDE Connect. Not sure if it works with iOS though.
For pretty user-interface and default fonts, you can edit a fontconfig file that will let you specify aliases for fonts and some pretty complex configuration to get the right font in each saturation. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration
I use xetex for a little project, and while some of those character mappings are very convenient others are not. Vulgar fractions, for instance, work in some fonts but not others. For instance LTC Californian Pro has the unicode glyphs for the vulgar fractions, but xetex doesn't translate e.g. 3/8 to ⅜. Goudy Oldstyle is missing many vulgar fractions (e.g. ⅜), but the tex mappings work. Go figure.
Granted, fractions aren't mapped to keys in OSX, but I use plenty of those mappings on a regular basis including the bullet (•, ·), degree (°), accented characters (á, é, í, ó, ü, ö, ñ), currency characters (£, ¢, €), and the section character — §. I can get all of these with simple keystrokes and, best of all, zero fiddling with keybindings.
Probably Compose - - -, Compose s s, and Compose m u respectively. Or, if they wanted the Mac layout, they'd run ‘setxkbmap us mac -print | xkbcomp - $DISPLAY’ or tick the equivalent box in their favourite GUI settings. (Option-SHIFT-dash for an em dash, BTW; option-dash is an en dash.)
X and Mac keyboard layout systems have similar power; I slightly prefer the Mac one because you can define arbitrary dead keys, but on the other hand X has Compose.
So is Automator (which I wish more people knew about).
the only actual benefit macs used to have was that it was a polished, non-windows system, but pretty much any mainstream linux distro these days works fine even out of the box.
TL;DR: the reason to use Linux is that it's not controlled by Apple ;)
Since then I run Arch with Gnome3/Wayland and everything just works including bluetooth/suspend/usbc dock/etc... except the following: - the fingerprint scanner, there are no Linux driver (even for the Ubuntu version sold by Dell) - Wayland fractional scaling does not really work, everything is blurry, so I don't use it. When my I am disconnected from the external monitor I just type a command to do text scaling... - Battery life is still inferior compared to Windows, especially when I watch youtube videos (I don't use Firefox on Linux because of the lack of hardware acceleration)
Compared to MacOSX I find Linux better for development and Ops. All the tools just work, are up-to-date and can be installed from the command line (pacman with the user repositories > brew/cask). For amateur video editing/photo editing, you now have plenty of choice (especially for video). Of course Gnome3 is inferior in term of performance, stability and is less visually appealing.
The OS is a commodity nowadays. Well more and more. Many applications can be found for the 3 major OS. That is why more and more OS vendors offer cloud services like backup/security/planning tied to the OS, well integrated and not opened.
Also more and more Microsoft/Apple/Google will integrate AI related services tied to your usage and what they know of you, so Linux will not be able to compete in that area.
Right now I've gone half in and have Fedora Server on an Intel NUC that I SSH into. So not quite a desktop replacement, but a nice linux environment for doing dev in. Disadvantage is you rely on a network connection for this approach, but it will do for now
So I moved to a 2014/2015 MBP and installed macports as well (not brew, because I don't want crap in /usr).
So my GUI "Just Works TM", my wifi etc same, sound, etc. MS Office.
Macports gives me the standard GNU utils/bash/etc, I don't use much of the MacOS there. iTerm2 is a great terminal emulator and its tmux CC mode is awesome. I don't have to tweak to get stuff that works.
Yes I'm aware things have come a long way since 2014 on the Linux desktop, but I don't gain anything from using it. If I need a Linux environment, either AWS (or DO or Azure or GCP etc) or a VM locally will give me that, but in terms of userspace in a terminal, there's nothing I need that isn't in Macports.
What could be going on for you could be individual windows versus end-to-end workflow.
Origins of Mac are neither home users nor hipsters, origins are content creators, from office to graphics and publishing. By contrast, origins of Windows is as window manager for backwards compatible DOS programs. Even today, many Windows programs in the workplace started as mainframe green screens now laid out in Windows Forms. This different DNA at the heart makes the surface behave differently.
MacOS design and feel is less about individual apps, more about creative flow, with gestures to swipe between apps and (mostly) the same keyboard shortcuts across tools, almost anything can cut and paste to almost anything, and so on. The oversized trackpad on the Macbooks is to drive with fluidity.
This difference in flow-centric versus window or app-centric makes crossing back and forth frustrating, the other side just doesn’t feel right. Neither is wrong, they’re just coming from a different place, for a different purpose.
To switch, you have to spend long enough in the other side to adapt how you think about work to the DNA of the ecosystem, develop the new muscle memory to turn your ideas into productivity in that paradigm for work.
PS. MacOS’s Terminal is remarkably fast, and its command line is bash, so that may feel comfortable to you. Darwin, the system on which MacOS was built, is a derivative of 4.4BSD-Lite2 and FreeBSD, so you can think of it as a unix under a workflow optimized GUI.
Where I think macos shines is the freakish speed you can achieve when you get familiar with the keybinds and the baked in multitasking (nitpicky, but I find hitting cmd with my thumb more comfortable than reaching for ctrl with my pinky). I slap the desktops around, windows fly apart and come back together refocused on a new thought. Search dialog pops up on top of anything and a file from deep in my mess of folders is opened as fast as I can type out a portion of the name. Challenge yourself to use only your keyboard for a while (as much as you can of course). Write out some cheat sheets with keybinds (by hand so you actually remember them). Time machine is probably also the most painless backup solution beyond putting all your files behind a cloud folder, and it versions as long as you have space on your backup drive.
Then it's also a unix machine first and foremost. Lots of functionality is in the native packages, and there are plenty of ways to easily install other unix packages (brew). For instance, it wasn't hard to mount a server like a local drive on macos, using native finder to manage files and directories and the built in ssh for my pipelines. On windows, I have to use winscp and putty, which are great community tools but ultimately another layer of friction to deal with.
As far as what reviews say, ignore ignore ignore. Everyone has their preferences, all of what I've said is ultimately subjective and based on my experiences and biases. I remember that line, "windows is good now guise!!" when vista came out. Give it an honest shake and see what you prefer.
Edit: don't get me wrong, I like the macOS UI, but I don't do anything fancy in it and would be a lot less happy with it if I want using shiftIt for window arrangement.
The laptop is fine. It costs 3x what I would pay for a Linux laptop, but I'm not the one footing the bill. Yawn Oh well. Laptops.
_____
Now what was something that IMPRESSED me is the 2018 Ipad. I did NOT previously consider the possibility of having a screen, wireless keyboard, and a 4g tethered phone connection on me at all times.
I have my Linux desktop at home serving on SSH and MOSH. I have my Ipad set up with a terminal app and an ssh key that lets me remote in. BOOM. My hoss machine at home with a great internet connection at my fingertips. Totally portable dev environment.
On top of THAT, the iPad UX is very tolerable. And having a detached screen with no keyboard is great. I can access Oreilly online learning, Kindle, and Dropbox and read whenever I feel like it ( which I have done a LOT ).
Heck, this whole summer I have been sitting out on my deck reading books, watching Youtube, using Steam Link on my gaming PC, hacking on my dev box, and pretty much EVERYTHING else on that little iPad.
Combo that with the new Sidecar feature coming with the next version of iOS, and I'm thinking I am going to upgrade to an iPad pro. It is a drawing tablet, an SSH terminal, a great reading device, a multimedia device with resolution good enough to watch movies and read comic books on, AND a secondary monitor when I feel like setting up outside on a nice day and hacking on my work laptop? Yes please.
The only downsides: iOS native games are few and far between. One of the top recommendations is FTL, a game released in 2012. If they could get Magic the Gathering: Arena, Hades ( Supergiant Games ), Into the Breach, and a regular cadence of good indie titles on there, I would marry the thing.
The other downside: The walled garden means they keep emulators and implementation for the Switch pro controller out of the app store. Booo! ...but understandable.
True but macOS also has OpenEmu which is great.
lol of course they would go with Manjaro and i3.
1. fzf - mentioned in the article. 2. Albert - application launcher 3. Clipit - similar to mac's copyclip, but not as easy CopyClip
All but one-- MacOS doesn't allow click-through. If you're working in one window and want to click on something in a second window, you need to click twice, once to select the other window and then again to do whatever you were looking to do. This drives me crazy on an hourly basis and there is no way to fix it.
And this is great. This literally means that Linux is ready for a developer desktop, and has been for years. It wins over the Mac experience in a fair competition.
Define "fair", because I feel like this inevitably means stripping away legitimate use cases.
Just a command away from it setting up the Tmux panes with the right sizes and processes running.
Stopped reading at this point. Nothing wrong with tinkering with your GUI, but my priorities differ.
PS: I'm not telling you what you should or shouldn't read. Just trying to understand what you meant.
However, I always need to ssh onto a “real machine” to get actual work done.
That doesn’t bode well
I finally removed Ubuntu from my home laptop too. I'm now using it in WSL with VS Code.
Everything day to day works better. My shares mount easily, my media players work, but best of all I get proper versions of Word and Excel. I still manage a bunch of Macs at work, but I have come to regard them as the BetaMax computer. Worst of all this is BetaMax, with the users not having noticed that the rest of the world has BluRay. I get so many Mac Users telling me 1990's anecdotes about things Macs do better than Windows. "Macs update silently in the background". No they don't. Windows 10 does a pretty good job of it though.
I have narrowed it down to the real truth. Macs look cool when you are sat in a hipster coffee shop with your hipster book pro. That and stuff with iPhone compatibility, home user stuff.
How does this work in practice? Do you run VS code from WSL with an X server? If not, how do you deal with VS code locking your files? As far as I know, the permission issues when accessing the same files from windows and WSL have yet to be solved.
I am very impressed with WSL and how far it's come in the last few years, but the integration between the linux and windows file systems doesn't seem to be quite as seamless as I would like to rely on it completely. I often find myself restarting the Lxssmanager to solve the file permission issues as well as the zombie process issue that still seems to plague WSL.
Some people prefer Windows, some Linux and some MacOS. These days you can get work done with all of the most popular OSes without losing a lot in productivity. Beyond that it’s just a matter of preference.
Personally I have opted for Apple ecosystem but can’t really argue it being universally better than others. But then again, dont really feel the need to make that claim either. Just use the software and hardware you are most happy & efficient with.
Microsoft Office on Mac is a big cause. I have some users who only use Office or a browser and still use Mac. I cannot understand it, Office on Mac is simply bit as good as Office on Windows.
The few times I’ve had a look at Windows 10 I’ve been seriously put off by all of the ‘junk’ that is automatically installed, e.g. candy crush etc.
I also worry about Windows still being a big target for malware.
What can die hard Win10 users tell me about these concerns?
On my home PC I just searched up candy crush and uninstalled it with a right click.
On my work PC using Windows 10 pro and signed in to a domain I don't get them at all.
Re Malware, I think Windows 10 has an excellent security model, and you would have to be pretty careless to get malware problems. However I won't deny that Windows is a much bigger target due to number of installs.
Not a diehard win10 user, but as far as I know you can only disable this legitimately if you pay out for Win10 Enterprise.
I think there are registry hacks that work on other versions though.
I think automated Browser testing is the only thing I am seeing I would have to do from Windows