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Comment by hi_mom | Hacker News Reader

Seems like an awful lot of configuration to get it half working like you want.

On the one hand, I’m thinking about getting an XPS because it’s literally 2K cheaper than a macbook and is upgradeable. On the other hand, a macbook still has a bit better build quality and macOS is still the most polished and easy to use OS (even after Catalina).

I need a stable OS that allows me to be productive without having to waste hours looking for workarounds and setup and doesn’t break my config every upgrade. I also really, really like Time Machine.

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> Seems like an awful lot of configuration to get it half working like you want.

Now look at it other way around. How much time would you have to spend to configure OSX to behave like Ubuntu?

As someone who uses both, I'd kill for middle click paste...

I'd kill for having a fully consistent copy/paste on Linux :-D

As of today, without any extra clipboard manager installed, if I copy something from the Network Manager GUI, and I close it, the content is lost.

(I'm a hardcore linux user, so this is a small joke, but still a typical Linux issue)

KeyboardMaestro could probably do that on the Mac

People using Mac hardware never seem to be aware of how simple life is with select + middle click

Karabiner, and it’s free.

https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/

Author here. Agreed, macOS is much quicker to get going. Although if you'd really log all the `brew`s and UI interactions that made your machine yours, it'd still be a long post too : )

But again, if this post is signaling to you: Ubuntu is still no macOS. Then that's exactly what my experience is like. That said, I'm productive on it, and there's things to like even so.

> Agreed, macOS is much quicker to get going

It really depends on what you're preferences are. The author is customising Ubuntu to behave like macOS, so naturally it will take longer. I have the opposite problem where I've spent hours in total configuring macOS to be more Linux-like and it's keyboard controls are still not quite "right", CLI isn't quite "right", etc. It's still a nice OS to run but it will never behave quite like the my personal preferred platform.

However I'm not saying one OS is better nor worse than the other, just that the level of personalisation on modern OSs will always depend more on the person than the OS.

Why does it have to be one or the other? Speaking for myself, I believe I try to create more coherent experience on different OSes, so that the switching is less severe. This is true regardless of OS, but the modifications are just different. When I share my experience with my OSes, this is where I am coming from, but it is unrealistic for the rest of the world (due to my modifications).

We should, IMO, take into account the default user experience. How is that? Sure, you can install WSL and Bash on Windows but by default you have a different CLI. How is that CLI? The reviewer went with Ubuntu because that is the most popular Linux desktop with a healthy community, yet at the same time considered NixOS [1]. At the same time, they're making all kind of modifications which makes it very personal and unique but also less useful. As a blister, they're sharing their modifications (with comments) which is nice.

Whenever I use a VM in macOS (usually Kali) I also am running with hacks in macOS to make copy/paste work seemless in the VM. Because from Linux, I can't expect it to work. But that is also why this review is useful: you can try to run a VM on Linux, and see if you can modify it to a more Mac-like experience. If that works for you, perhaps running macOS on your laptop and Linux on your desktop works out. Because for something like a desktop, I find it silly to shell out so much for so little (iMac, Mac Pro) given you can build a powerful workstation for very little amount of money (I just did that with the latest Ryzen series).

[1] I'm currently trying to find time to install NixOS on a separate partition and giving it a whirl to replace Ubuntu 19.10.

Sorry but I'm rather confused about the point you're address because your opening sentence is a disagreement to my post yet the rest of your content is anecdote where you reiterate the same points I was making. Obviously you're welcome to disagree with me but I can't tell what it is you are disagreeing with.

Sorry, I did not quote properly. I was replying to this specific part:

> The author is customising Ubuntu to behave like macOS, so naturally it will take longer. I have the opposite problem where I've spent hours in total configuring macOS to be more Linux-like and it's keyboard controls are still not quite "right", CLI isn't quite "right", etc.

I could've summed it up as follows: reviews like these are in-depth but specific, while generic out of box experience applies to all but lacks for power users.

As an example, macOS does not come by default with a package manager, it nowadays has Zsh as default shell, and does not ship with Python anymore.

> I need a stable OS that allows me to be productive without having to waste hours looking for workarounds and setup and doesn’t break my config every upgrade.

You won't get that in my experience. I've used MacOS, Windows 10, and various Linuxes over the last few years. Every Linux I've used swallows literally 10x the amount of fiddling / searching / configuration time compared to the mainstream alternatives (I log all my sysadmin time, so this is an objective measure for my own case). Linux is currently my main OS (indeed the only one on my daily work laptop), because I find the trade-offs for development work worth it. But only just. It is a total pain in the arse.

You will of course get people informing you that distro X just works, but invariably they either have minimal requirements that a default installation meets, or they have accumulated thousands of hours worth of expertise that naturally makes it seem to them that everything is simple and transparent. Which it really isn't.

Recently switched from MacOS to Pop OS on Thinkpad X1 exreme gen2, very satisfied with the high level of immediate productivity and minimal required fiddling. For a Linux distro, "it just works" rather well.

Add to that an appreciation for better keyboard and non-shiny screen... overall I feel better developing on this than Macbook pro surprisingly.

You've probably made a smart choice with the Thinkpad, as by all accounts it has good Linux h/w compatibility. I'd consider something similar next time I'm up for a replacement. Others have recommended pop_os to me, and from all accounts it's great, but distro-hopping isn't a productive use of time.

> overall I feel better developing on this than Macbook pro surprisingly

Me too with my current setup despite some configuration frustrations. I do actually prefer it (which is why it's stuck around), but that's after having spent far more hours fiddling around than I ever wanted to, and with a bunch of things still not set up because I've spent my sysadmin time budget.

Contrary to my comments about wasting time distro-hopping, I was tempted enough by some of pop_os's claims (good hdpi support etc) to give it a try on a spare partition. Probably my worst Linux installer experience yet - it was a mess on my machine (Dell XPS 15). Didn't boot in UEFI mode, then when I got past that it didn't allow me to assign partitions as I wished. I got past that with an installer-bug bypass kludge, and then .. the install itself failed.

When I'm in the programming flow, I kind of love Linux. Everything's super-fast, the UI is unfussy and keeps out of my way, and it mostly kind of leaves me alone.

But when it comes to actually configuring or changing anything, the irritation mounts and I wish we had a real 21st century desktop OS. By the 22nd century, maybe.

This reminds me of "Every OS Sucks" by Wes Borg of Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie (with Chris Smith playing the guitar).

Here's the relevant part of the song about Linux: https://youtu.be/CPRvc2UMeMI?t=316

Note that even an XPS requires some workarounds, at least on a vanilla Ubuntu installation. They're just a few, however.

Having said that, with the HWE and PPA strategy, Canonical effectively solves the problem of troublesome upgrades. Nowadays one can stay on a LTS for many years, and still have an up to date system.

Of course with the strategy one won't get desktop environment updates, but that's implicit in this choice.

As a small footnote, Linux-compatible machines to consider (but not necessarily preferrable as whole), are the Lenovo alternatives, as the XPS has a disappointingly mediocre keyboard, whose keys bend on the sides.

> Seems like an awful lot of configuration to get it half working like you want.

Switching from X to Y while expecting Y to work like X requires some configuration however not that much these days. It used to be impossible.

I am a linux and ios user and in 2019, "the world is my oyster". I can effortlessly work on terminals and servers of any contemporary OS. Damm, I can even linux apps on one of our intern dedicated chromebooks if I were to forget my laptop home cough.

I feel a bit sorry for windows and macos users. It seems their ways were a bit too opiniated / proprietary to be embraced at large.

I would just get a XPS if I wanted a better Linux experience rather than install Ubuntu on my MacBook as Macs are optimised for macOS which is why it is easy to use but they always have poor support for Linux. I see less of a reason to mess around with something else less optimised unless you are ready to tolerate the oddities and inconsistencies found from switching from macOS to Ubuntu.

> I need a stable OS that allows me to be productive without having to waste hours looking for workarounds and setup and doesn’t break my config every upgrade.

Exactly this, If I just want to get my work done and avoiding tweaking sane defaults or googling issues or reverting settings in my specific desktop setup, I'd choose macOS straight away. For only development issues, I would need a machine that is better for finding or debugging system-level bugs in low-level software components, I'd choose a XPS with Ubuntu.

A Hackintosh or Linux on a Mac both require extensive tweaking depending on your requirements and may not be for the faint of heart. Your milage may vary here.

I've also been looking around for an alternative these days. The main reason for me is performance: you can get a HP ZBOOK STUDIO X360 G5 with 64GB RAM, i9, 2TB SSD, solid 4k display and graphics for roughly 3500€

I'm just unsure of how much productivity I'd lose when going back to windows with a virtualized linux for software development.

I guess I have to hold out and hope for the new macbook pro 16".

Take a look at popOS

Have you heard of our lord and savior NixOS?

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