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Comment by cztomsik | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, linux is (unfortunately) only good for running server apps. Ubuntu is good but it's still like 20ys in the past when compared to macos (and that's including how macos gets worse with every new release). There are so many things wrong or half-finished, inconsistent (3 ways to copy/paste, no native GUI fw/toolkit, vsync/video/browser tearing), I'm afraid to install updates because sometimes it won't boot up and I'll need to figure out what went wrong this time (instead of doing what I wanted). Linux ppl like to say it's because of HW but no, it's because they don't care or they have different goals but then I don't understand why the same people often don't understand why linux is not more widespread.

If you want to get job done, get a mac, it's still the best choice (unfortunately, I don't like it but it's the least evil - W7 was good too but W10 spy/adware is ew)

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I use desktop Linux for last ~20 years. I don't use Gnome; my choice is simpler things like Xfce, and Window Maker before that.

I find the fact that I can configure it my way utterly important, and performance-increasing, for me. This is exactly what I dislike about MacOS: it is very opnionated and rather inflexible. (I also see zero vsync tearing, and I'm fine with GTK2, GTK3, and Qt all look reasonably consistent under the theme I can and did customize myself.)

You are correct, MacOS and desktop Linux have different target audiences, with distinctly different preferences, neither of which is "more correct". This is not Linux "20 years behind" MacOS; it's often away in a completely different direction. (Though yes, Gnome folks try to imitate MacOS, and they are forever behind by construction, because they are chasing, not blazing new trails.)

This. I couldn’t figure out how to do multiple workspaces and switching between two full screened apps took ~500ms. Virtually all Linux DEs did that seamlessly.

That is, except that trash fire that was the Ubuntu default up until ~19.x

use mission control to create "spaces" (workspace)

see

   System Preferences -> Mission Control

to make sure you have a key or mouse button mapped to invoke mission control.

invoke mission control and press the (+) sign in the upper right hand corner to get the number of spaces you'd like

You can switch between spaces using keys defined in

  System Preferences -> Keyboard -> [Shortcuts]

choose mission control on the left and map they keys you like. I use option-1 .. option-8 (aka alt-1 .. alt-8) to switch to specific spaces.

(I'm not using catalina, for all I know apple has removed spaces because it's not something an appliance should have)

I think the issue with this is that there’s still the delay due to the animation. Even with the reduce motion setting (which turns it from a slide animation to a fade), there is still a noticeable delay.

AFAIK there is no way to disable the animation in Catalina without disabling SIP.

This is totally fair and I don't think we are in disagreement.

I should word it differently: Don't expect regular people with previous mac/windows experience (which I myself find very intuitive) to be happy with linux. I've yet not found a single distro which would be on par or better. Every distro I've tried (many of them over the years), I was always dissapointed, just like the guy in the original article.

And it's partly so because people like to say that "you can replace your mac/winpc with raspi4" which you can't (without being seriously limited)

I've been using desktop Linux for over a decade (Red Hat, Suse in the early days, before settling on Ubuntu) and Linux works just fine for me. Granted, I like my computer to conform to my needs (and not the other way around), so I set up my configurations years ago & these have survived through multiple upgrades.

I had to pick up OS X in the past few years and it has been disappointing - I have to brew install all manner of utilities before I can be productive (or at capriciously random times brew cask install. WTF). In all, I find the BSD commandline utils bundled with OS X to be more onerous/less humane than the GNU equivalents (ls *.zip -lh)

I never had to second-guess an Ubuntu upgrade - nothing ever broke, but I don't think I'll ever upgrade to Catalina: it's just too risky for very little upside.

I've lost three boxes in ubu upgrades, although in retrospect two of them were blob video drivers.

16 years ago, I switched from Windows XP to SUSE Linux as my desktop OS. The desktop manager was KDE. (I think I had a choice between Gnome and KDE at that time, and KDE was the more-supported option).

It worked great. I managed to keep it as my primary OS for a couple years until I got an iMac.

Just this year I installed Ubuntu on an Intel NUC, and was flabbergasted at how spartan the new Gnome is. KDE a long time ago was more polished and exposed more settings to me than this abomination almost 2 decades later.

Maybe it's nostalgia or something, but I just can't shake the feeling that to "solve" problems, desktop environment providers just rip features out. UIs keep sacrificing functionality on the alter of simplicity, to the point where I'm not sure what the point of a desktop environment is anymore. Might as well go bare-bones window manager and control my system exclusively through the terminal.

You're not wrong, KDE3 was something of a high point for personal computing.

KDE still has most of the features it had 20 years ago, and has added many more. I've been using it since 2003, and currently on a NUC.

Why not use KDE? Kubuntu is an "apt install kubuntu-desktop" away. (Double check that.)

I'm using the NUC to host a VM instance of Home Assistant, and run a PostgreSQL instance outside the VM for logging (What HA calls "recorder").

I don't work within it on a daily basis. I probably VNC into it once a month or less, just to apply updates or troubleshoot any issues. It's stable so I'm not keen on mucking about with any non-default packages. I seem to get myself tangled up a lot more lately whenever I decide to make any changes to a running system.[0]

But who am I kidding? I'm sure I'll have some free time one of these days and decide to give KDE a shot.

[0] https://xkcd.com/349/

Take Linux Mint Cinnamon for a spin. I think it'll change your perspective for Linux on the desktop. Browsers like Vivaldi make a consistent experience across all three OS platforms.

I did. It's still the same thing over and over again - try this, ok cool, looks good until you need something which is not covered or is buggy or needs an hour of extra configuration. So I sometimes make mistake and say it loud that it sucks and somebody says yeah, try some other distro, XXX is really great.

Not anymore, thank you - I have linux on my living room PC and few raspis and I occasionally try different distros just to check if it didn't improve but I'd never ever install linux on my work machine and I'm not going to recommend that to anybody until it will work for me. BTW: It took ubuntu 2 years(!!!) to actually make onscreen keyboard work with screen zoom.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised with Proton from Valve, that's likely the best thing which happened in the linux ecosystem for years so it's not like I hate linux or anything like that, I'm just used to better experience.

Mint w/ Cinnamon was the first distro I tried (as my main; I dabbled with Damn Small Linux for a bit on a couple non-daily-drivers) after switching off Ubuntu in the wake of Canonical refusing to budge on the Amazon Lens. Absolutely hated it then; yeah, it looked a bit more traditional, but it felt just as inflexible as GNOME 3 or Unity, and certainly no less buggy, either. Ended up switching to MATE and thoroughly enjoyed it (stuck with that before eventually moving to Debian, then a brief Fedora stint, then flip-flopping between openSUSE and Slackware before settling on the latter).

Haven't tried Cinnamon since; maybe it's improved in the last decade or however long it's been.

I use Mint; have done for ... eight? years after I got fed up with incessantly gardening Arch. (Too high maintenance to be my friend, I decided after 6 years.)

Recently I had to start using windows 10. On Microsoft's own hardware. Oy vey.

I doubt that someone who likes Mac OS will like Mint, but it's definitely a better Windows than Windows. Comfortable rather than stylish, but without jarring jumps to 30 year old UI styles at random times, or six different ways to not quite do what you want. Or the surveillance.

If you don't like Mint, then try MX Linux or Manjaro.

Mint was one of the best distros, I've tried.

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