Running Linux on My MacBook
djhworld.github.io
djhworld.github.io
Tried a bunch of dell and Thinkpad devices. Configured a t480s with ubuntu. First meeting where I had to share my screen and I recognized that Chrome is not able to share a dedicated screen of my three monitor setup. You need a script for that, which creates a "fake" webcam, otherwise its only possible to share the three stitched-together screens.
Those are things, I just expect to work out of the box without a script or pulling two monitor cables everytime I want to screen share something.
Bought the 16" Mac a week later, also not happy with that because thermals are just bad, but its better than having to script simple things. Clients don't expect you to "have to script something real quick" during meetings.
As long as Linux does not cover ALL trivial multi media usecases, I don't see myself making the switch.
The 16" runs at 67°C with 2500rpm when doing the same task. So its neither quite nor cool doing basic tasks. You can turn of turbo boost to get around it, but I was expecting something in the same ballpark in terms of coolness and fan noise for basic tasks without tweaking stuff like this myself.
It isn’t. But it still has some rough edges for sure. It highly depends on the hardware you are using. MacBooks are not manufactured to make it easy for alternative OSes.
OP is also trying to use the i3 window manager. It’s barebones, labor intensive and meant for tinkerers and advanced users. If you want an easy plug and play experience you should use a desktop environment.
Newer generations of macbooks just won't work at all. There's no workaround for recent sound (unless it gets reverse engineered) or wifi (unless you rewrite Linux stack to work around broken firmware) devices, and it's likely to only get worse. Here's a good collection for hardware support: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
This is not representative of non-apple brands.
On the other hand, on the pre-2016 models, the components in use are largely off-the-shelf components, much like other manufacturers.
The major difference between Apple laptops and other vendors laptops is that the variation of components in use is significantly smaller on the Apple range, while 'non-apple brands' encompasses a huge variety of different hardware.
I would suspect that if you bought any random laptop, you'd have high odds of picking one that has various components that are not well supported, with even less online support available for you than if you tried it on Apple hardware. If only because the number of people using Apple hardware is so damn high, and the number of people on your particular component configuration is significantly smaller.
[1] https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-lapt...
I guess, but my 2007 and 2010 laptops still work OK.
It's true that Macbooks are an extreme case, but as far as I can tell, there is not a laptop which runs Linux out of the box where tinkering won't be necessary.
Let's take another extreme case: I purchased a System76 Galago Pro, which came shipped with PopOS, a Debian-based Linux distro which is maintained by System76 specifically with the intent of providing better hardware support and quality assurance testing. This is the absolute best case scenario for a Linux laptop.
Two months in, I still haven't figured out how to get my webcam working on Zoom calls, and fonts display pixelated despite having a HiDPI screen (equivalent to MacOS Retina). I had to tinker with settings to get audio to not sound muffled, and connecting to WiFi took more tries than can be attributed to network instability (I'm not sure why it started working, to be honest).
To System76's credit, this is the absolute best experience I've ever had with a Linux laptop. Everything else has worked out of the box so far. In competition with other Linux laptops, including Dell systems which come preinstalled with Linux, System76's laptops win unequivocally in my experience. This is no small achievement, and if you're getting a Linux laptop, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them.
But competing with Windows and MacOS, I think this Linux experience is only competitive with the low-end of Windows installations (i.e. cheap netbooks where it's clear the companies didn't spend much time on getting the configuration right). A higher-end Windows laptop or any Mac laptop will require little-to-no tinkering to get things working.
It’s like I live in parallel universe of Linux hardware support to some of you.
Now the Surface Pro on the other hand, was a disastrous time sink.
Sleep and suspend just work. Battery life is good - typically 5-7 hours. Before this I had no problems with a Thinkpad and even on a MacBook Air (2012).
Maybe I'm just so used to Linux now that I don't notice problems since I've been on it since 1998-ish except for a short stint on OS X.
Dell support is terrible so I can't recommend the XPS. When I had a problem with the battery they wouldn't replace it under warranty since I was not in the country where I bought it, which is total BS.
A lot of these issues are minor, and easily fixed, so I suspect the "parallel universe" effect is indicative of a willingness to overlook small issues. The font issue I found is hardly critical, for example, and I suspect a lot of developers would just live with it.
I do make sure that the hardware is compatible with Linux beforehand. This typically involves buying prior generation hardware (which works out because you can get them for much less), and avoiding Nvidia hardware entirely.
Hp x360 requires zero fiddling, works out the box.
Dell precision 5570 requires zero fiddling, works out of the box.
Samsung Chronos 7 requires zero fiddling, works out of the box.
Every laptop in the past 6 years worked with Linux straight out the gate. Including acpi sleep, graphics acceleration, and wireless networking. Compare that to spending 8 hours last night trying to get windows 10 to run on a 7 year old system
I can assure you it is not 1999 anymore and things are a lot smoother today when you're not trying to coax proprietary black-box appliances into doing things they were explicitely designed not to do.
I know I don't want to play around with my desktop just get work done and for Macbooks, its either macOS or Windows with WSL2 which the former gets out of the way and "just works" and no need for tweaking.
Very much not true these days. Linux on laptops is (in overwhelming majority) a great experience today. I suggest you just try out one of the live images for Ubuntu or Fedora.
On a tangential note I'm surprised that it's still relatively common on HN to see comments like "Linux on desktop doesn't work" or "Java is slow". That was 20 years ago. The world has moved on.
Same thing with Java. Sure, it's not as slow as it was 20 years ago, but it's still slow and painful in comparison to compiled languages.
I've used Linux actively for 30 years or more, and I've never had a "great experience" once with it. It's a tool that I have to beat into submission to get it to do whatever ridiculous workflow someone dreamed up that can't be done on a real operating system.
"The Linux kernel was conceived and created in 1991"
Something tells me your opinion about Java is stronger than your experience. Java IS a compiled language. It just happens at runtime. https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/java/arc...
I see this as yet another example of people here repeating a severely outdated statements about the JVM ecosystem.
I'm under the impression that you are not interested in educating yourself on the topic, however if I'm mistaken, have a look at some reasons why Java can be as fast or faster than c/cpp:
- TLAB (thread-local allocation buffer)
- Escape analysis
- Mono- and bi-morphic callsite optimizations
- JIT in general (dead code elimination, implicit null checks, CHA-based optimizations, etc).
Also, you don't have to use Oracle JVMs. There's IBM's J9, OpenJDK-based Zulu, or commercial JVM from Azul (Zing).
And no, the actual HFT stuff is written in C++.
This is how I know you have no idea what you're talking about.
Source: been working on low-latency HFT Java apps for shops like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS and others for 10+ years.
Not going to reply any more. Not worth it.
Not worth it, indeed.
By running more-commonly-used software on more-commonly-used hardware, you're more likely to find that someone has built in the driver support you need into the OS.
I've run Ubuntu, Fedora, and Manjaro on various Thinkpads and XPSs and it's always Just Worked. I also have Ubuntu running on an old (2012?) macintosh air and that also Just Works.
It's currently running Mint and lives behind my TV as a basic media player/streaming PC. It's about as fast as you'd imagine given its age, but networking is fine, it can output 1920x1080 and stereo sound out of the HDMI port, and it does just fine with both the bluetooth keyboard and Logitech MX Master mouse (via their proprietary little USB receiver).
None of that stuff needed any weird setup or hoop-jumping. All of the tweaking I did was just UI stuff--finding a balance between performance and making it pretty/intuitive enough for others in the house to use it without headaches.
Every time I try it, I end up fixing a bunch of minor and sometimes major problems that take an amount of effort significantly higher than it would to just get things working on MacOS or Windows.
I have seen notable progress every time I try it though. In fact, my latest attempt is mostly an exception to my experience of all of the other times I've tried it.
I have only been running Linux Mint for about 3 weeks, but so far I only have two issues. One of them is significant, and the other one isn't really that big of a deal.
The significant issue is that my Gigabit Ethernet seems much slower than it was on Window when I attempt to download large files. However, my Wireless AC seems to be fine so its not the end of the world.
The minor issue is that Steam refuses to launch most games on my primary monitor the first time I open them. Even after opening and configuring the games individually, some of them still refuse to run on the correct monitor unless I set the resolution to something lower than the Monitor's native resolution. This happens both for games that are native to Linux and games that are running with Proton.
I think this time around the downsides are outweighed by the benefits of running Linux as a primary OS, so I am planning on sticking with it for a long time, but either of these issues would be a valid deal breaker for any reasonable person.
Your post seems to imply that its a myth that Linux doesn't deliver a near perfect desktop experience. If you haven't had any problems that's great. I'm sure a ton of people have no issues or almost no issues. A great desktop OS should serve all common use cases with virtually no issues that require a non-layman's level of technical knowledge to fix. Based on my experience with MacOS, Windows, and Linux, none of them are perfect, but the latter has the most work to do to meet that standard.
Well, I have used Linux as a desktop OS consistently since 22 years now. I started with Thinkpads and they did work well for me, and that's what defines my expectations today - that a laptop works without glitch. And the last two laptops I god were supplied by the respective organizations IT department, so they took care that it works.
On the other hand, I am kinda stuck with an Thinkpad X220 because I like the size, the matte display, the great keyboard, and to read my email or work on something in the train, I absolutely do not need more power than it has.
The key for all that is to buy compatible hardware, and research it before spending the money, not after.
The X220 was an amazing machine. I've had a couple of Thinkpad T series over the years and they were my favorite laptops. The keyboards were great.
I'm hoping the trend of more vendors selling Linux laptops will continue. I think there's a good chance that large companies supporting the OS will lead to a more maintenance free / a more stable experience for a wider range of use cases.
I don't dislike Linux. I simply wish it worked better for my purposes. IMO the best OS would have Windows' Mouse drivers and gaming support, MacOS early-mid 2010's Workflow/UI and touchpad drivers, and Linux's everything else. I work with all 3 major OSs on a daily basis and there are things that each of them does better than the others. Interestingly, the thing I find to be poorly implemented on all 3 is Multi-Monitor support.
I mean, I've run into all kinds of issues trying to install Windows as well, including digging through random vendors' websites looking for drivers. But most people's experience is fine, because the laptop vendor provided all of that out-of-the-box.
IDK, I finally broke down and replaced my rickety ~8 year old laptop and everything (aside from the fingerprint reader) worked right out the box -- surprisingly since it is also a fairly new model so I expected some tinkering while the drivers caught up to mainline linux.
Actually...I can't remember the last time (other than Gnome being stupid with defaults) I've had to mess with a basic install and I've been using linux as my primary OS since around '00.
You'd still have problems on other machines with things like winmodems and integrated graphics, so you'd have to get into downloading driver modules or rebuilding kernels.
In this case, MBP is uncommon HW for Linux users, and things may not work that well. I imagine windows 10 would have similar problems there.
Microsoft allows resellers to use “supported by windows” marketing material on their hardware they sell only if they pass a stringent set of automated tests. So a windows hw provider wouldn’t “have similar problems here” because their consumer hardware would have been designed and tested for windows.
Microsoft set the standard in quality assurance for backwards compatibility
Macbooks have become increasingly difficult for Linux to work on, in some cases it has been made more difficult.
Just took my 7yr old laptop that wouldn't boot windows in reasonable time and installed a brand new Ubuntu to give away to a non technical person.
Had another machine, a strong one with i7 and dedicated card running windows8. Wanted to upgrade it to windows10. The installer bricked my bios. After people who actually know what they're doing reflashed my bios, the windows installation was theoretically working but it took literally 10 minutes to start up a browser. Meanwhile Linux was fine booted from pendrive. I gave it to a friend to get the disk replaced. He wiped everything clean and reinstalled and got it working.
I guess I'm biased and that's why I'm getting the opposite experience to what should happen... ;)
FWIW these laptops were rock solid and ran Linux just fine. Sleep also seemed to work as well(I'd have tried hibernation if I knew how. That's my preferred mode on Windows to save unnecessary power consumption).
I was quite impressed and while my personal daily needs are fully Windows-based, I would not hesitate to recommend those laptops to anyone who wants to get away from Windows.
If you want CentOS or Red Hat, I've had good luck picking any Ubuntu Dell that is also listed as being tested and certified for Red Hat at https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/ecosystem/Red%2.... The only real hassle has been when I wanted to use an Nvidia driver, which requires a driver reinstall after kernel updates, although I believe you can now avoid this with DKMS. I expect that Fedora would also work without issue on any of these.
But 3 years ago I tried Fedora on an Asus N56VZ and it's been flawless. Well, less issues than Windows anyway. That's my definition of flawless.
I will admit it's a bit of a hardware and distro lottery though.
It's been very disruptive to have Apple quality tank, and I'm glad they finally went back to the good keyboard, but at least there's another game in town for developers who want a quality laptop and a real OS.
My thumbs are well trained to use the keys to the sides of the space bar as the main modifier. My solution to the Command/Control issue is to swap the key positions with xkd so that it's always [Win][Alt][Ctrl][Space][Ctrl][Compose]. (Since Macs and PCs swap Alt and Win/Cmd, you need different xkb options for each type of keyboard.)
As for terminals, if you set VTE-based terminals (such as GNOME Terminal) to use Ctrl+C for copy, it will automatically set Ctrl+Shift+C to send SIGINT. Since I don't use many terminal apps that use modifiers, this works for me, and I set paste to Ctrl+V as well.
I mostly use Alacritty now, so I've set it up to do the same thing for Ctrl+Shift+C. Come to think of it, I still need to do so for VS Code's terminal, for the few times I use it.
I just looked in the preferences for Gnome Terminal and didn't see this option. I think I'm used to the current setup enough that I wouldn't switch anyway, but how do you configure this?
And I should say I'm not sure if it's sending SIGINT or actually Ctrl+C (or if that's even different). I learned just enough of this to make it work :-) But before, if I started top, I could press Ctrl+C to quit it. Now I can press Ctrl+Shift+C to quit it, and pressing Ctrl+Shift+C on a bash prompt prints "^C" and I get a new line.
For Alacritty, here's what I've changed
- { key: V, mods: Control, action: Paste }
- { key: C, mods: Control, action: Copy }
- { key: C, mods: Control|Shift, chars: "\x03" }
- { key: W, mods: Control, chars: "\x04" }
- { key: N, mods: Control, action: SpawnNewInstance }
I don't think it's intended to be like this, not sure where to begin troubleshooting.
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND DEFAULT=1
Sway has absolutely zero tearing, for this it is very good.
But, a few issues (mostly wayland and not sway related):
· First you need an AMD card, I don't really have a problem with that as their cards are good now. But if your laptop has nvidia, you are screwed.
· Copy paste still fuzzy
· No global hotkey. Well you have to configure them at the WM level, things like discord push to mute will not work.
· Hard to capture (OBS cannot capture wayland app yet without major tinkering and testing)
· Many popup widgets are positioned on the wrong monitor (like fcitx popup for japanese input)
· Complex X apps are slow or will just crash crash, for example qgis is unusable in X mode and crash in wayland mode, audacity do not update properly…
· Some things require tons of tinkering to get right, like having the proper rendering pipeline, for example using mpv, but when you get it right, you can play 4k movies with 3% cpu usage.
· Tray/notification icons are hard to setup and won't work 100%.
Disclaimer: I use sway on a large desktop workstation, so I cannot comment on issues like power, sleep, external monitors…
[0] https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs
The real problem with wayland are all the apps that just don't support it. From emacs, to, e.g., all the electron apps built with older versions of chromium, etc. You can use them seamlessly with Xwayland, but then a lot of things work "weirdly", e.g., HiDPI displays blurry Xwayland apps, applications like obs-studio cannot record some apps, etc.
The the Sway ecosystem main drawbacks are the immaturity of the tools (e.g., waybar (i3bar replacement), wofi (rofi replacement), etc.) and the drawbacks of wlroots (e.g. lack of nvidia support in contrast to gnome and kde, etc.).
Many things kind of "just work" under Wayland, but many things also kind of just don't properly work. Using pipewire to, e.g., stream desktop apps via webchat from firefox/chrome works weirdly, streaming one monitor or one sway workspace from firefox/chrome does not work, capturing one workspace from sway using obs studio in another workspace does not work, etc.
I hope that fullscreen desktop sharing "just works" now that we've released xdg-desktop-portal-wlr[0]. If you have any trouble with it, hit me up on freenode #sway or raise an issue on this project. We're happy to help and looking for a broader user base to help us test it out.
Also, just remembered another neat piece of software: flameshot. It’s basically macOS’s screenshot editor but even better IMO. I’m not sure whether you can bind it to macOS keyboard shortcuts though.
I'm the guy from the sway github issue mentioning that the chrome autoscaling had been fixed, so maybe you need a more up to date chrome, or maybe there was some kind of regression. (I had some other bug with sway to do with the tray, so haven't been using it).
One other suggestion for an alfred/spotlight alternative is dmenu (or bemenu for a wayland compatible one if you go for sway), there's also rofi as an option which does the same thing iirc.
For whatever reason, fan control does not work out of the box (so it gets way too hot), but it worked for me after installing mbpfan: https://github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan
Except that the calendar on the lock screen somehow was in Romanian, it resisted all attempts to change the language, and he never got around to fixing it. :)
If that's the main reason, how about yabai on Mac? https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
> The primary function of yabai is tiling window management; automatically modifying your window layout using a binary space partitioning algorithm to allow you to focus on the content of your windows without distractions. Additional features of yabai include focus-follows-mouse, disabling animations for switching spaces, creating spaces past the limit of 16 spaces, and much more.
Customisation and configuration are also plainly inferior to i3/sway, plus there's the complicated installation process and necessity to disable apple's walled garden features to get full functionality.
At home I have i3/sway, which is a nice polished user experience; there's no comparison really.
I also had the issue of a limited keyboard and shortcut keys. I use a Kinesis advantage. I don't have a windows key. So I used alt as a super key. This meant that I often couldn't use application shortcuts. It was a major pain. In hindsight I should have mapped in a windows key and sacrificed one of my thumb buttons for it.
The first is drawing at X's borders when having multiple panels connected leads to flickering and graphical artifacts. This means triggering any window/video to go full screen while you have output on more than one monitor. It's not a unique problem to i3, but most other WM's handle window drawing in a different manner.
The other issue I find more annoying. That's tearing while scrolling and playing video unless a compositor like compton is run. This appears to not be a problem for a lot of people, in the way that using frame interpolation on tv's doesn't bother them. For me though, it drives me nuts. Compton by the way hasn't had development in over 3 years.
I just don’t want to think about how to move incredibly quickly around the computer. Easy point and click is all the effort I want to muster, sometimes.
Right. This is an important thing to note.
It takes a lot of mental energy to remember all of these things if they are not already imbued into your brain as effortless muscle memory. Sometimes that energy is better off spent solving the problem you're trying to solve. This is why after about a year of using Vim, I still use the mouse once in a while.
I remember once reporting a bug with the Microsoft Terminal (I use WSL 2 on Windows) on Reddit and when I mentioned mouse support didn't work inside of programs like Vim, it was the most down voted comment I ever created on any platform with swarms of folks saying I wasn't using the terminal as it was supposed to and that I must be an idiot for wanting to select text in Vim with a mouse.
Luckily they fixed the bug (it ended up being one of the highest priority bug fixes they had).
[0] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1481#issuecomment-6404...
I could be wrong though, a while back I did a lot of tweaks to beat the concept of hdpi and variable screen resolutions into my computer, so I don't exactly have a "clean" setup, and it could be something else, but the fonts look crisp on both the low res and high res screens.
I can't say whether this is anything to do with whether it's a build with/without ozone, but it appears to work now (sorry don't know much more than that!)
[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...
I found out that I can update a lot of components of my early 2015 MBP, so I'm going to get a 512GB or 1TB hard drive and see if I can make a Linux partition.
And relating to the article, i3 is the sole reason I use Linux. Such a great window manager.
I’m not sure if the lack of WiFi issues is because Fedora tends to stay pretty up to date kernel wise.
EDIT: to clarify - I had zero issues with having to to anything special to get Wifi working - there are still intermittent issues with the driver that happens maybe once or twice a week
It works perfectly.
I have two macbooks (white plastic) one with Tiger installed and another with Leopard an iPad 1 ( They all are in working condition) Its a shame to not be able to use the machines just because it is not supported.
I would assume that they are good enough for a kid to surf websites and help do his/her homework. Listen to songs while browsing pdfs . Lack of support should not mean that perfectly usable hardware is junked.
After covid, there are a lot of kids in Indian villages whoes education is dependent on online education. Maybe these laptops could be made usable for them. ( Not everyone can afford a mobile phone)
Please do let me know if your linux installs will work for my case as well ( your case covers the Macbook Pro instead of just macbooks)
PS: I myself use i3wm on a lenovo machine. ( Not very happy with Lenovo but its ok ok )
That hardware isn't as valuable as you might think it is. The last plastic Macbook was made in 2010. It's value as a productivity tool is very limited today.
That said, e-Waste is a major problem, which is why in recent years, in the west, companies are required to collect a "recycling fee" on purchase of computer equipment to pay for the eventual recycling of the physical devices. Coincidentally, this was in part prompted by images of children in India and other developing countries picking over toxic E-waste from the west.
However, it's not really feasible for a company to support a device as old as your 2010 plastic Macbook from a software perspective, because software evolves too rapidly to run well on hardware that old. These are not desktop workstation towers for which you can swap out every component for newer ones.
> After covid, there are a lot of kids in Indian villages whoes education is dependent on online education. Maybe these laptops could be made usable for them.
The demands of common 2020 computer use-cases will render the hardware/software unusable, even when running a recent Linux distro.
So they will probably not be useful for remote-education. Basic things like watching educational videos will likely be painfully slow - if they work at all - constrained by the hardware's ability to decode and display the video.
If you do get these common use cases working on that old a device (which would be a fun and worthy hacking project by itself), if you give it to someone else to use, you will also have to deal with the problem of supporting it, and then ensuring their responsible disposal (i.e. not in the village organic waste dump) when they do reach the end of their usable lives. None of this is trivial to accomplish.
Anyhow, great article.
Admirable effort by the developers, though.
That may be your experience, but it's not universal. I wanted to do this, regardless of how many hacks it took, but I'm on the new-and-broken model unfortunately.
I have a 2019 mbp16. It does not "work well". For me, the graphics driver crashes me out of my login session pretty much daily, the network stack occasionally shits itself (reboot) and various internal processes (the... window server?) like to use >50% CPU for no reason at all.
Looking around, I'm not the only one who has issues.
Probably yours is broken somehow. Would recommend bringing it in for service while it's in warranty.
My whole shop uses Macs and nobody has this issue. I’m on one of three different variant MBPs (including one like yours) all day every day - literally around 18 hours a day - and I’ve never seen it.
That’s why I would really suggest opening a ticket on it, especially with a new laptop. I suspect there’s a hardware issue.
It's rife with issues. Power management is odd, brightness sometimes doesn't work, and most annoyingly, the keyboard and trackpad sometimes stops working after 2-3 weeks of 24/7 operation.
I solved most of the issues by disabling the GUI and just letting it boot to the console. I also set mitigations to off in GRUB and it ran cooler. Not ideal with security in mind, but it's just a home server after all.
I get better battery life, because I can turn off things I don't need.
I don't have to restart the audio service before every Zoom call.
I don't have to reboot to get external monitors to work again.
My Yubikey doesn't drain the battery in a few hours.
My system boots to the login screen in the time it takes for the Apple logo to finish showing.
I don't have to fight with the App store to keep software up-to-date.
I don't have to work around a shitty developer experience with homebrew or docker/virtual machines.
I never have to deal with Xcode!
In any case, I probably spent a tenth of the time setting everything up, tweaks and all, than I did unfucking the default install of OS X to be usable.
> I get better battery life, because I can turn off things I don't need.
I had horrible experiences with Linux and battery life on laptops. Fans on all the time, poor or absent support for sleep and hibernate... Proprietary systems consistently performed better for me in that area.
> I don't have to restart the audio service before every Zoom call.
That's really weird. I wouldn't even know how to restart the audio service on OsX.
> I don't have to reboot to get external monitors to work again.
I have occasional issues in that area, but typically it just takes a bit of "nagging" osx to re-detect the monitor, like bringing up the System Preferences panel related to wallpapers.
> My system boots to the login screen in the time it takes for the Apple logo to finish showing.
One shouldn't need to reboot OsX more than once weekly, or less, but yeah, boot times in OsX have gone to the dogs in the last few years. Windows absolutely smokes it, I guess some Linux distros would too.
> I don't have to fight with the App store to keep software up-to-date.
It's been alright until recently, but I agree that the last few moves to persuade us to move to "Vistalina" have been annoying.
> I probably spent a tenth of the time setting everything up, tweaks and all, than I did unfucking the default install of OS X
That's really the opposite for me. The time I always end up spending on stuff like fonts (!) on the average Linux desktop, is just ridiculous.
I'll try it again at some point, but disable TreeStyleTabs, that might have been one of the causes for the slowness.
However it's nice to be able to re-purpose old hardware, even if it's a bit of a hill to climb :)
I own two Thinkpads, a 5th generation X1 carbon and a 2nd generation X1 extreme. Both very nice machines, but not perfect.
On the newer machine in particular, the X1 extreme, I've had many annoying issues.
Suspend did not work for over a year after purchase. If the laptop was left with the lid shut it would run out of battery in a couple of hours. It finally started working with Fedora 32. I don't know if it was fixed because of kernel updates or firmware updates. The laptop still uses way too much power when suspended, but at least I can stick it in my laptop bag for a few hours.
Until Fedora shipped with Gnome running under Wayland, the integrated graphics were too slow to acceptably render the desktop at 4K, which is the native resolution of the panel, and the only resolution choice I am presented with in Gnome. I enabled the nvidia GPU with the proprietary driver, but then I'd get less than 2 hours of battery, and the thing could cook an egg. Compared to my 2012 Macbook Pro, which also has integrated graphics, the experience is much worse, even today, with Wayland.
Battery life is not as good as Windows by default. For some reason, every Linux user with a laptop has to install tlp and powertop just to get decent battery life. Kernel development seems to consistently focus on this, and I'm confident than the situation is incrementally improving.
The synaptics touchpad is hot garbage. If you compare it to a Mac's touchpad, it's just a tragedy how bad it is. I've used both the synaptics driver with Xorg and libinput with Wayland. There is noticeable lag when moving the mouse cursor from a resting position. The cursor will stay where it is, and then jump to where it ought to have moved to. This produces a very jarring UX. Interestingly, the nipple mouse does not have this problem. Finally, the scrolling gestures don't always work, depending where on the touchpad you initiate them.
The keyboard would reproducibly lose keystrokes! This was not fixed until last week by a Lenovo firmware update, and it produced a lot of irritating typos when conversing with coworkers.
Not that I care, but the fingerprint reader doesn't work.
The sound is too quiet even at full volume, so you have to tweak the system config to allow you to adjust it past its default max volume.
I use Linux as a workstation operating system because I write software destined to run on Linux. Despite these problems, I would gladly take them over having to virtualize my entire workflow on a Mac, which I find incredibly painful to do. But these quality problems have left me wondering if Lenovo was the right laptop brand to buy. I left a negative review with Lenovo, after they solicited me to write one, and instead of trying to resolve the problems, they simply refused to publish the review.
Specially when FOSS gets into the way and a perfectly working driver blob was replaced by WIP FOSS driver, just because it feels good to push it down on the users, for example the way broadcom driver got replaced a couple of years ago.
Unless you run it on very customized special built systems like what Apple tends to produce. Same might apply to some other vendors as well.
Just like you buy an Apple machine to run MacOS well, you can easily buy a machine to run Linux well (Dell, Lenovo, System76 are just a few manufacturers who build MacBoook class hardware with Linux preinstalled).
Debatable. I have had an absolutely terrible experience with Linux on a new ThinkPad. System76 doesn’t have as great a build quality AFAIK. Dell is fine, but they don’t have anything with preinstalled Linux anymore.
Installing any non-free linux OS will grant you an complete out-of-the-box experience, imo superior to Windows/Mac. Even Nvidia Optimus powered laptops are fully supported.
Hit me up if you managed to run windows on the same hardware as the OP. Or even running MacOS on any other computer. I am wondering if your documentation would be more concise.
so long..
I could probably make the full-time switch to Linux, if that was the bulk of what I did too. And I do a fair bit of writing and coding. But the majority what I do on my [OSX] computers is Art & Design related. So I need Photoshop and Illustrator and there is nothing available for Linux that even comes close. Inkscape and [especially] The Gimp aren't even in the same league. The only semi-decent graphic design app I've come across on Linux is Krita. But even that is quite limited and more a Painter replacement than a Photoshop or Illustrator one.
Ironically, there is actually better quality graphic design software available for Android [with that Linux core] than there is for Linux itself. I can almost replace Photoshop with Ibis Paint on my S-Pen enabled Samsung tablet [although the picture is a lot less rosy with regards to vector graphics].
That said, I have installed Linux on an old MacBook and Mac Mini, which has given them a new lease of life. But the former I just use for hacking about on and the latter runs Kodi as my media centre. I don't actually do any work on them.
Once setup, Linux runs fine on both those machines, for what I want it to do. But, boy, is getting to that stage in the first place a complete pain in the ballsack!
Both machines have Nvidia graphics cards and even now [probably a decade after I first encountered this problem] Ubuntu's, supposedly user friendly GUI software installer will quite happily 'recommend' you to install an Nvidia driver which will brick your Ubuntu installation with a black screen on reboot.
Now, after running into this problem several times, over the years [I fall for it every time, in the vain hope that Ubuntu might have actually fixed this], I know how to repair things. But it involves a lot of swearing and command line delving into the innards of Grub's configuration.
Imagine some non-techie person deciding to give Linux a try. They boot from the live CD... everything looks fine, so they install. They reboot after the install and either:
1: If they selected "download 3rd party drivers" during installation, boot to a black screen
or
2: If they didn't select 3rd party drivers at install time, they boot to a seemingly working installation, which then recommends they install a 3rd party driver, which will subsequently cause booting to a black screen.
And, as I say, this has been going on for over a decade. And this is with Ubuntu which is the most newbie-approachable distro. In all that time, no-one thought it worthwhile adding a simple sanity check so the installer would NOT recommend installing an Nvidia driver which would break Ubuntu if the OS itself had been installed in UEFI mode!
> .... Both machines have >>> Nvidia graphics cards<<< ....
Yeah. That's painful. Don't do that.
And exactly the reason why it will NEVER be the 'Year of Linux on the Desktop'. It's the Linux equivalent of Steve Jobs's infamous "You're holding it wrong". If someone offers a valid criticism then blame the user. It's so much easier than actually addressing the problem, no matter how glaring.
I wasn't criticising some obscure edge case here, where someone hacks about and messes something up. This is the official GUI installer, which will actually recommend you install something that will, to all intents and purposes, brick your computer. How newbie-friendly can you get!
Even Steve Jobs might have thought twice, before blaming the user for that one!