One Year with ThinkPad and Linux (From MacBook Pro)
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drikerf.com
I did this ultimately for a few reasons. MacOS lets me run Adobe (Photoshop, Lightroom, etc), Fusion360, has a good terminal (iTerm and zsh unix like shell) and Logic.
Mac hardware is still some of the best in the business, no other vendors seem to be able to catch-up. The XPS line is a great example, the battery that Dell chose to put in that laptop can’t run the internals at full power when not connected to AC. There are plenty of other comments about Thinkpads here (I have a T480s through work) and find the overall experience just fine.
The MacBook on the other hand, I use for 8+ hours every day. It’s the machine I reach for first. It sparks joy. It just works when roaming on WiFi, always. It just works with Bluetooth headphones, always. It just works with external displays, first time, every time. To put it simply, the machine gets out of my way and lets me get real work done. I can SSH to wherever I want and get ‘the Linux experience’.
My personal desktop runs Arch and KDE but for a portable, annoyingly, I still think Macs are the only way to go. But damn do I wish they had a SD card slot.
The same monitor worked perfectly without any configuration on both Windows and Linux.
I also just had to reboot my MBP 16 because every so often when the VPN connection drops, there is no way to resuscitate the WiFi network connection without a full reboot :-/
As someone who moved from an XPS to MBP to have a smoother experience with less hardware glitches, I have been sorely disappointed. Once WSL gets full support for running GUI apps and CUDA support, I will almost certainly be moving away from the MBP. The direction of OSX is concerning, and I find it insane that their sandboxing results in a 5 second wait to open a simple Word or CSV file. I booted up my 5 year old XPS a few weeks back and it felt so much snappier than my fully loaded MBP 16!
Crazy as it is, I've found this to be less common after upgrading the firmware on my monitors.
I also have a Linux Thinkpad. It's not perfect either, but it is definitely better.
The Linux Thinkpad also more reliably associates with my Bose headphones. It was hard to pair them the first time around, but after that, they've auto-connected. The MBP will occasionally get into states where it won't find the headphones or the headphones don't find it, and I have to request they manually connect. The MBP does this with my old phone, too…
I do have to agree with the article on the points about the touchpad (MBP's is superior) and on the emoji support. (It's getting there in Linux… but slowly.)
I'd recommend Terminator over gnome-terminal, though.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089GKTC5B/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
The same cannot be said for my experience docking and undocking the T480s with the same monitor and cable.
The fancy metal case isnt properly grounded- I get occasionally a slight tingling /shock from it when I have it plugged in.
Battery life is on par, at best, with my other laptops.
Macos doesn't let me configure or change the things I want to configure or change. Some programs are usability / discoverability nightmares.
Performance of most programs is, at best, similar to linux or Win10, and is frequently worse against other machines with similar hardware.
I have used several models of MacBook and an Air, and personally will not purchase another again... I am tired of paying top dollar for a mediocre experience.
With my feet on the ground, the metal body of my MacBook was “tingly” all over. Feet off the ground, no more tingling.
I’d love to better understand what was going on (and whether it’s potentially dangerous).
FWIW, I was using the Mac power cord with the ground pin. Does this just mean that the wiring in their garage isn’t properly grounded?
Not sure about US. But I think it's the same as the duckheads are only 2-prong iirc so they can't possibly be grounded.
I don't know why Apple thinks it's okay for my computer to run a current through my body. I would love to know what happened at Apple that caused this situation. It's just patently insane.
It's been like this since the earliest days of the metal PowerBooks. Though the un-grounded duckheads appeared only with the later models (the "hockey puck" power supply always had grounding and in fact always had an extension cord). In my house the living room sockets didn't have grounding (at that time it was only mandatory in "wet areas") so I noticed it even then.
It's mainly an issue because of the metal enclosure. On a plastic one you wouldn't notice. And it's not serious current, it's just some induction of the power transformer on the internal shielding.
But yeah I agree, even the duckheads should have proper grounding! The grounding is done through the ground 'pin' that the duckhead clips on to, so technically it should be able to get a third-party duckhead with all three pins. Though I never looked to see if they were available.
Not if they are double insulation/class II:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appliance_classes#Class_II
that is the whole point.
This is an extremely disputable claim. Wifi chipset used by Apple is by far the best in class in my experience. I have 4 laptops - ASUS, Thinkpad, HP laptop from work and MBP 16". All of them get a visit to the special room once a week at least. If we use my commode as a benchmark of wifi radio performance, when I am sitting on it and watching Monty Python, I can get every single joke with MacBookPro 16 streaming smoothly at 320p resolution. Not so much with other products of similar class.
My HP Spectre x360 has not had a problem with the reception once, but I can barely attend video calls or load Jira with the macbook. Likewise, my wife's chromebook and my previous surface book 2 were all perfectly happy.
That said, the Dell XPS 13 was pretty close to equally bad as the macbook, though I haven't had it in a long enough time that I've since re-arranged my sitting area- whether it actually was worse or not I'm not sure.
> This is an extremely disputable claim
I don't think it is; GP couched their assertion pretty clearly as only referring to laptops that they have used. Your personal experience doesn't really change that.
What's so "best in class" about that? I don't regard Broadcom as being particularly great.
Maybe your MacBook just has a better antenna. Or it just happens to be configured in just such a way that it works better in that one room in your house.
I always noticed it when the device was plugged in.
I had a surface book 2 which was actually really nice, but broke down within 2 years, and best buy couldnt get parts to repair it anymore and just refunded the money (laptops are one of tge few things I will always pay for an extended warranty).
Currently, i use an hp spectre x360- a windows partition for gaming, and pop_os for everything else. I was very unimpressed trying to get a few different linux distros to run well on it, though i was trying some strange combinations. Pop_os just works. Literally no tweaking needed whatsoever.
Lenovo's 6th gen carbon x1 got rave reviews, but there was a lot of mixed messaging about newer models and arch, so I never really bothered when i was last looking.
How is the T495 with kernel 5.8? How does the GPU handle day to day life, and video acceleration? And more importantly, does the T495 have soldered RAM?
The awesome thing about the T480 is how I could upgrade a bunch of things, from Wi-Fi card, to RAM, to NVMe drive, and I would not like losing that.
The new T14, unfortunately, will take forever to show up in Brazil, so the T495 seems to be the logical option.
It has 8GB soldered and you can put additional 16GB on the second slot. For me this is good enough.
Hardware video acceleration works out-of-the box with kernel 5.8.
I am not sure if the nvme slot is soldered, but as far as I remember, it's not. It has an additional slot for a standard 2.5 inch drive which you can use to increase capacity.
I can confirm. I have 2019 Macbook Pro and I have problems with the wifi + overheating and occasional restarts of the mac. I had to do multiple SMC restart. I'll switch to XPS 15 with linux dual boot.
Can confirm the issue with the latest 2 versions of MBA
There have been other comments about this, but to make it clear: It's the charger that's not grounded. You will see this effect with every other laptop / charger on the market which has no ground connection in the wall socket. It comes from y capacitors [1] in the switch-mode-power-supply.
[1] http://www.vicorpower.com/resource-library/articles/back-to-...
The other problem that I had with my iPhone is that for the first few days it was getting really hot. I called the Apple support and they told me that it is "normal" - just wait for about a week. OK they where right, after a week problem was gone, but for something that costs a lot of money I would expect better.
Macbooks (I got one at work and I own a small 13'' MBP) are OKish. My only complain is that they can heat up to really high temperatures (maybe I will appreciate it in the winter).
When it comes to Linux, it a good OS but it still has troubles with hardware accessories. About I year ago, (I have a 4 year old PC with Ubuntu) I tried to connect Bluetooth headphones with it and it was a total disaster. I tried about 2 different Bluetooth dongles and installed at least 2 different BT stacks, without effect. After about 15 mins the BT disconnected. I searches the Internet but I couldn't make it work. It may be connected to the fact that I was running quite old Ubuntu 16 LTS back then.
But there are some companies which have started doing the same thing:
- System76
- Tuxedo
These companies test their devices well on a distro and well, it reflects in their pricing too!
Just here to point out that they use a standard commercial off-the-shelf TPM manufactured by Infineon. It's not custom hardware. As with all TPMs, it is the firmware/OS that decides whether to use it for lock-in purposes or freedom.
So they can never achieve the same integration as Apple.
Dell, Lenovo, Purism, Pine64 et al. do.
The two in your parent may (at least System76’s laptops are said to) use Clevo hardware, but they can still ship with custom open source firmware.
It’s also not as if Apple sells their own custom CPU at the moment. Even then, they’ll probably buy other parts from third parties (eg. they buy iPhone OLEDs from Samsung, though they’re said to calibrate them differently).
And finally, integration can be seen as a bad thing. It’s conducive to lock in (see above comment on ARM Macs ending Hackintoshes).
I'm pretty sure Purism's are just standard barebones too, but with some extra modifications like hardware switches. They showed how they solder the wires to the motherboard - if they'd designed it themselves they wouldn't have to do that.
Pine64, indeed, that's true. The enclosure is standard (the PB Pro is the same as my Chinese "ChuWi" laptop :') ) but indeed they made a custom motherboard. I really like that company.
It makes a huge difference in audio quality over bluetooth in my experience.
*edit: Just realized I posted the wrong link. https://eischmann.wordpress.com/2019/02/11/better-bluetooth-...
[0] https://helpguide.sony.net/mdr/wh1000xm3/v1/en/contents/TP00...
Even still LDAC seems superior from my comparison to my Android and iPhone audio.
See this thread for some discussion on it. https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/bion53/force_macos_t...
So as I was saying I'm tempted to move back to Linux for my work laptop for LDAC over BT support as well as other reasons of course.
You can also force them to connect with AptX by following this guide: https://9to5mac.com/2018/08/31/mac-how-to-force-aptx-aac-on-...
Follow this guide: https://9to5mac.com/2018/08/31/mac-how-to-force-aptx-aac-on-...
How is this worse than a MBP that can’t “run the internals at full power” when it doesn’t take breaks to cool off (except maybe outside in winter?)? (Edit: my currently adjacent sibling comment claims that MBPs don’t run at full power off AC either, so their internal utilization seems strictly worse. Reminds me of how Apple arranged with Intel to buy a weaker (and presumably cooler and cheaper) variant of the Xeons available to anyone else for iMac Pros).
> I can SSH to wherever I want and get ‘the Linux experience’.
Depending on your definition of ‘the Linux experience’. For me X is half the GNU/Linux/*BSD experience: dwm, sxhkd, keynav, xcape, the Compose key, simple highlight + middle click/Shift+Insert copypasta. (Edit: xteddy, xeyes, xcowsay, buckle, etc. too).
Not that I as someone who has used Adobe products on macOS for a class and prefers free-as-in-freedom alternatives ever would.
I've had lots of silly issues with bluetooth, wifi and other things not quite "just working" lately on my 2017 MBP. Don't get me started on the keyboard situation. Apple's standards have been slipping on that front. But they are undeniably still very good laptops overall. If it wasn't for the weird keyboards, they'd make pretty decent linux laptops too. As it is, the touchbar is a PITA for that, even if you do manage to get that working (apparently it is doable).
I actually wouldn't mind a linux laptop except that seems to involve a lot of compromises on form factor, sucky touchpads, plasticky/fugly designs, screen resolution, driver compatibility, and manufacturers with not so great reputations on the quality and support front. Apple is also problematic for support lately of course.
I recently bought a new camera and the ability to take the usb-c power cable and plug that into the camera to quickly transfer some photos is quite nice. I don't really miss the memory card slot that much. I also charge my phone of my laptop via usb-c when on the road. I once watched 8 hours of offline netflix on my phone on a transatlantic flight and left the plane with a full charge on my phone and 80% charge on my mac.
I've been considering a linux laptop for ages but there are not a lot of models that meet my requirements of having a form factor that isn't hideously ugly (no "gaming" laptops please), has decent specs for CPU, memory, ssd (this eliminates 98% of the market), an hdpi screen (now we are talking 2, maybe 3 models), and a touchpad that comes reasonably close to what I'm used to. There are not a lot of things in the market that come close enough that I would consider them and none that I'm aware off that don't involve compromising on at least a few things I care about.
This is the 16" MBP with the 5600m with HBM2 memory.
Modern macbooks can ship with a 40 or 60 amp power supply, whereas they should have 90 or 120 amp power supplies. They assume, mostly correctly, that the really intensive workloads will complete before the internal battery is in trouble.
Right, but the initial problem was that full performance wasn't even possible from the battery, regardless of how much charge you were willing to sacrifice.
Armchairers' consensus is Apple botched design and CPU is overheating. Idk. Maybe it's intended design as a form of cTDP.
A more consistent argument would’ve been: “open source advocate, Gimp, Inkscape and others run even better on my mac than on linux” (would disagree on that, but at least it would be a more consistent argument)
The way now is really not even on the desktop, Linux lost there and now the world has moved on. The war is on mobile, and Android isn't truly open in the way that Linux upstream is due to binary blobs and baseband. Hopefully someday we'll see a truly open mobile platform rise to supremacy, but right now we have two separate walled gardens on mobile and not much else.
Within those walled gardens, advocacy can be to use apps which are open source vs proprietary options (e.g. to use andOTP instead of Authy, or Bitwarden instead of LastPass, as a simple example).
Existing inside the walled garden we're all forced to exist in is not hypocrisy, it's pragmatism. Using the best tool for the job and acknowledging the deficiency of open options is just being realistic, not an example of a fall from purity. Not everyone is Richard Stallman.
Things are not manichaean zero sum game.
To be an open source advocate I have to only use open source software? How would I drive my car? Or use my phone? Or my TV? It's just not practical.
I advocate for mostly open source server side software. I wrote a Masters dissertation on Linux and normal peoples interactions with the Linux desktop. I record a podcast twice a month (selfhosted.show) and edit it under Linux sometimes and sometimes on Mac.
My argument, such as it is, is that the tool I use to build and maintain my open source infrastructure doesn't need to be open to allow me to further the open source agenda. Linux changed my life and I do everything I can to give back to the community.
Being dogmatic and pure about the license of every piece of software you use might win internet points but it’s not going to actually get the job done.
Sure. But I wouldn't go around calling myself an "open source advocate" while supporting some of the worst.
Someone can support and advocate for a software development model and for the freedoms and opportunities that can allow for without having to go all-in and ensure that every piece of software they buy, use, or support follows that same model.
A really great way discourage people from advocating for OSS is to harangue them for daring to use Photoshop in lieu of Gimp.
Obviously it’s really convenient and rewarding when best-in class products are also OSS, but that’s not the world we live in.
It strikes me as a really shitty message to say that the only way you can advocate or support something is to go all-in on the model. If the goal is to get more people using and adopting and developing with open tools, yelling at them for not being the pinnacle of “purity” sure seems like a strange way to do it.
If someone calls themselves a “free software advocate,” I’ll agree that that implies a much stronger dogma to a specific set of licenses — but that’s an ideological movement that is materially different from OSS.
A list of my open source contributions include co-founding Linuxserver.io, the Self-Hosted podcast, blogging extensively about open source software (blog.ktz.me) and work for Red Hat. I say this not to be 'look at me' but to show that I try to put my money where my mouth is. I wonder what the other commenters have contributed.
I run NIxOs on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2.
I really love it and it “sparks joy” for me too. Especially because I understand how it’s lit together and sort of “built it” and contribute to the Platform. Very satisfying.
I'm not saying it can't be a great experience if you have a well defined use case such as development. But for an all-round, no compromises experience when stepping outside of development (and this does annoy me btw) I find MacOS to give the least worst set of compromises.
I even watch DistroTube and read r/unixporn. I love Linux!
I had a 2018 13" Macbook Pro and XPS 13 running Ubuntu. Former with Retina, latter with 4k. The Macbook's battery on a daily basis was never a huge problem for me unless running heavy applications like video chat. The XPS 13 has to be tethered to the power brick to run at 4k for more than a few hours. During normal dev work, I can't really get more than 90 minutes where the Macbook would last maybe 4-5 hours.
I suspect it's deeper than better hardware. Linux laptops just have worse battery life (nb4 "just install X Y Z with apt", that's not an acceptable solution when the OS is installed by the OEM and driver stability is still a problem on Linux laptops)
I love Linux, have used it from the very beginning, want to use it on the desktop more, may buy a small NUC to host it and some containers for development -- but I'm not sure I want to spend any time thinking about hardware compatibility and living with it 100% on the desktop.
That said, all the recent reports of Mac hardware concern me. I'm really hoping their next product line is a return to the early 2000s form. We bought a lot of those at the company I was at, and it was a no-brainer.
I could flip it -- convert to a Linux laptop and keep a Mac mini on the desk for media projects.
A Lenovo Legion I bought recently for my kid is nice... but I don't see the hardware lasting as long as the MacBook Air has. I'll see if it even lasts 3-4 years. If it's like the Dells I've owned, it'll "work" but won't feel solid.
- retina-like resolution 15" screen - 32GB RAM - slim and light without a flimsy plastic case - good battery life - good trackpad - keyboard home row centred
I could not find anything. I couldn't even find something with the first three items.
I'm starting to think it might make sense to go with a cheaper MacBook and a little pocket server like this: https://liliputing.com/2020/08/first-look-gmk-nucbox-2-4-inc...
Other than that, the XPS15 was a front runner.
Cheap laptops don't care HiDPI displays because it's cheap. Gaming laptops less care HiDPI displays because it's too much resolution on current GPU.
Most premium models provide both FHD and 4K model, FHD is for battery life and price.
External displays of variable DPI unusable without a paid app like switchresx.
Suspend always drains the battery if using any kind of usb or microscope drive. Endless hacks to finally get it to fully hibernate when closing the lid. Updates break it over time and a new way has to be figured out.
x86 support suddenly thrown away in new updates, decimating game libraries.
Out of date OpenGL and heavy push into proprietary Metal.
App notarization that was promised to just be used for security now being used for iOS related business punishments, bleeding into the desktop.
Windows with WSL gets all the advantages of the terminal in OS X and finally was enough for me to move. With the WSL 2 GPU integration gets rid of the remaining issues, especially as it moves into GPU display application support and not just GPU compute.
Source?
https://venturebeat.com/2020/08/17/apples-epic-retaliation-u...
Hold Option and click the Scaled radio button again. You'll see a list of options.
Yes, I realize that's silly.
I look forward to going back to my old 13" which has an SD slot and MagSafe and all the rest, even though it'll feel crazy slow. The 16" is, for sure, a beast when it comes to performance, but I have found the downsides to be significant.
My takeaway from this whole experience is that computer people will give up practicality for fashion just as much as anyone else.
plugged into a specific port
So, is it wireless or not? Or is it one of those Bluetooth dongle things from the 1990's?
If the mouse is Bluetooth, why not just have it connect directly to the computer? Every Mac since 2003 has had built-in Bluetooth.
macOS is certified Unix. Has been for over a decade.
As to the battery life, this typically requires some work but I found it is generally possible to get good battery life. I am able to get my T440s to run for total 24 hours with the highest option 9-cell, the built in 3-cell and another 3-cell that came original with the laptop. This I did to be able to work on a long yacht cruise with no extra power and required to get backlight almost to minimum and to downclock CPU a little bit.
Now, to get there there are tools that can tell you what is using up the battery and some howtos on the Internet. I don't remember details so it is best if you go look it up yourself.
If you are using i3 you are generally well set up to easily get over 10h of operation.
As to touchpad these are all disappointing on all ThinkPads but probably especially on T440s where it is something called "clickpad". The entire touchpad is a button and you need to press it and try to move your finger while pressing HARD to drag things, for example. Dunno who thought this is a good idea. I always travel with a mouse and a mouse pad to be able to work comfortably:) Still, it is easier to use built in keyboard and a mouse than the reverse, luscious touchpad but keyboard to replace miserable something shipped with Macbook. I don't like typing on something that feels like a solid pane of aluminum with some markings on it.
I switched over to the logitech MX ergo after using a mouse for many years and the usuall pains started.
Can you be as fast as with a mouse with it? As precise?
I move the width of the mouse to span two monitors yet I have no trouble clicking on a 4 dot cluster on 27inch 4k monitor (which would be equivalent of a single pixel on full HD).
Now I am not sure I want to use regular mouse with a PC and trackball with a laptop. In my mind this is either or choice.
It is more precise and once you're into it, you're faster too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21316263
ps, Love my T440s also.
I would like two-finger horiz scroll to work better however, especially the swipe for "back" gesture. Somewhere a few months back was a comment about the XInput team comprising one overloaded guy needing help. I mess with stuff like "synclient HorizScrollDelta" but it really needs acceleration detection to trigger the gesture, not scroll.
pps: it's libinput: https://bill.harding.blog/2020/06/22/linux-touchpad-project-...
I had no tools to open the laptop and power button stopped working so it was not possible to go to bios and disconnect power (the internal battery is always on). I had to stand it on its side like an open wet book to let the water drain and then went shopping for tools. The end was that I had to disassemble EVERYTHING including LCD panel where it had water between individual leaves. I never knew that panel has so many layers.
Anyway, it still lives on. I curse it about once a week for being so tough preventing me from buying newer, better machine:)
The T440s doesn't even care.
Used to be able to just drop commands into rc.local but now it's not as simple.
Speaking of systemd, "man systemd-rc-local-generator" alleges you can still create an rc.local and it will handle it.
Why not? Also you can try https://linrunner.de/tlp/
A Type=oneshot systemd service that is WantedBy=sysinit.target (for early-ish boot) or multi-user.target (for late-ish boot) is the rough equivalent of an entry in /etc/rc.local.
The bootup(7) man page shows how these targets fit into the bootup process.
That said, systemd-rc-local-generator(1) provides backwards-compatibility with /etc/rc.local, so putting stuff in there should still work. Any output or error messages will be logged by the rc-local.service unit.
Same here (X240) but it still has left and right buttons, although not shown. To drag things around, just keep pressed the lower left side of the pad (near the user's belly not the spacebar) then gently move the right finger around the pad. It works the same for selecting text.
My T440 also has the "clickpad", and I hate it for the exact same reason you described. It's another example of the modern design trend toward form-over-function "overminimalism" (e.g. lack of ports, too much focus on thinness, etc.), in my opinion
Lenovo must have realized their screwup, because the later T-series editions went back to discrete mouse buttons.
I would like a laptop that is perfect but, while I can easily imagine one, there does not exist a laptop that is perfect.
A perfect laptop for me would be a Macbook with LTE, ThinkPad keyboard, that would be serviceable by myself and that would not suck at running Docker.
I have a T431s and a T450s.
The T431s was a sort of "special edition" which I believe was the first to offer the "clickpad". And I agree, it sucks. However, the T450s was already back to a classic trackpad. It doesn't compare to the MBP trackpad (nothing does), but I have no issue with it. So it sounds like the 440 series was the only Thinkpad with that clickpad?
I think the idea is as Lenovo not being IBM, they had to have ﾐ田 key and trackpad to get Windows license, while Apple is also praised of their huge clickpads, so the decision to integrate TrackPoint buttons and trackpad into single clickpad made sense on paper, except implementation sucked.
Now he complains about battery life after one year. There is a Thinkpad feature that helps a lot: one can limit the charge level to a configurable value. And tlp does support this for Thinkpad. By just limiting the charge level to 90% for example, and making sure never to discharge the battery completely, one can greatly extend a laptop battery life. You can't use the range fully, but then the battery is much less stressed: Li-Ion batteries suffer at the extreme of the charge range. As the battery last enough for me (and charges quickly) I never found this range reduction to be a problem. And my 5 years TP battery is just fine.
The Dell Latitude also supports this BTW, but it's in the BIOS and not integrated with tlp.
If you have it set up so a single-tap is treated as a click, you should be able to double-tap (single-finger twice, not two fingers) and keep the finger down on the second tap to drag without any clicking.
Likewise, I have two-finger single-tap for right-click, and three-finger single-tap for middle-click. Pretty sure I only had to enable that last one (Ubuntu), all the others were there by default. I can't remember the last time I actually clicked the clickpad...
> Can't do iOS development
Not legally, no. These can be worked around with a VM, just like with the Windows issue. It sucks, but Apple is never going to support their development toolchain on any other platform.
All in all, I think this is a pretty positive review for an "I switched to Linux" blog post. Usually they're more negative about the lack of finish a lot of Linux tools use, but the author of this blog seems to be more tolerant towards the small things in order to gain the big things.
One of the main selling points that Apple uses to sell Mac minis is their use in build farms and render farms.
If you click on Apple's page on Mac minis and scroll down until the 6th or 7th selling point, you'll end up seeing the part where according to Apple it's combination of stackable form factor and performant hardware makes it ideal to compile large xcode projects or perform video encoding.
I solved this with a Mac Mini that lives at home on my desk and was only used for the occasional bit of testing, debug and publishing (I was building using Flutter).
https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox
Or you can lease them online:
GitHub has some kind of Mac hardware or virtualization for their Actions too so you could probably wire something up to build on GitHub:
Run hackintosh on thinkpads. There are a lot of already completed configs available for both the clover and opencore setups.
I have been using as my sole OS (except for some very occasional gaming on Windows) for 10 years. The longer you use it, the happier you become with your setup imo.
There is a very detailed blog post about my setup that has grown over the years: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation
It is about Ubuntu, but many sections apply to all distros. The most important productivity boost for me has been to switch from Bash to Zsh. Mainly because of some great plugins for Zsh, such as z, zsh-peco-history (better history search), zsh-autosuggestions, and zsh-syntax-highlighting. The blog post has copy-paste ready instructions to set it up.
Always remember that the whole debacle of people even moving away from Bash is because Apple and others are afraid of GPLv3. They dread having to contribute back to the open source projects they profit from.
Most of the things I see for Zsh have been possible (and more portable) on Bash for decades. It's just the new javascript-like hype for Zsh that is new, not the capabilities.
True, Bash have lots of baggage, but half the portability and performance trickery is also because of that baggage. It's impossible to have the niceties Bash offer without some of the tradeoffs, and every new shell learned that the hard way.
for me:
- Sluggish UI
- Inadequate package manager
- Unintuitive ways to install stuff
- Slow and large updates
- Can't do Linux development
- Can't try server tools
- Slow boot-to-work time
- Hard to add memory and ram
- Limited interfaces
- Hacker unfriendly
- Can't have a minimal desktop
- High memory usage of base system
In fact, impossible for a long time already.
Upd: I mean laptops; not true for other products.
- Sluggish UI -> I've never experienced this in the last three years of using my 2017 MBP.
- Inadequate package manager -> Somewhat nebulous, most package managers on Linux are available on Unix.
- Slow and large updates -> I honestly don't pay much attention as I have updates install automatically while I'm sleeping, but what size differences have you noticed?
- Slow boot to work -> Never experienced this, boot is less than a minute regularly.
- Can't have a minimal desktop -> Beyond hiding all icons and the dock, what more are you looking for?
- High memory usage of base system -> Never seen this come close to the main applications I use on a daily basis. What quantified results are you receiving to notice this?
> Inadequate package manager -> Somewhat nebulous, most package managers on Linux are available on Unix.
Here he probably compares homebrew with apt/dnf/zypper. Compared to these three, homebrew is quite primitive and prone to be in a bad state. Luckily now you can use nix on MacOS which is a good package manager.
> Can't have a minimal desktop -> Beyond hiding all icons and the dock, what more are you looking for?
I run a minimal desktop with a tiling window manager (bspwm) and a status bar (polybar in my case), I don't need a window decorator and so I don't have one. I also don't need drop shadows on windows and so I disabled them (while keeping them on popups). AFAIK that is simply impossible to achieve on MacOS.
It takes the BSD ports approach, where all packages are maintained together in a centralized repository. The Homebrew approach is closer to a bunch of PPA's and other independently maintained stuff of questionable integration status.
If all you've tried is Homebrew, then I'm not surprised at the reaction.
Not the author, but perhaps they meant that the UI was sluggish to use?
I find OSX great if you have one browser window open, but start to multitask at all and I personally find it a real pig to work with. Open windows are hidden behind a tiny white dot on the task bar, lots of wasted space around the task bar, no snapping or window-splitting, the menus are detached from the windows they are for and you need to focus the window to get the menu to appear, the task switcher thing (expose?) is a horrible jarring swooshy animation that is awfully distracting with things moving around on the screen on their own as you are trying to look at them.
I find it so frustrating to use after almost a decade of using macs now - it does not get any better once "used to it". Linux (Cinnamon or Plasma) + Windows 10 are just so much more intuitive for me. I'd 100% bite the hands off of the IT team here if they offered me a Windows 10 machine instead of a mac for my engineering laptop.
This is not a good point at all. Having to rely on third party applications (without any good way to discover them) to provide something that is taken for granted everywhere else is a horrible user experience!
It's the same if you want to use an external, non-Apple, completely normal HDMI monitor - use a third party application to make it use the default (for the monitor) refresh rate (60 Hz) and resolution (1920x1080).
It's the same if you want to use a completely normal USB computer mouse with a scroll wheel - install a third party application in order to make scroll wheel work like you expect.
And pretty much all those third party tools that are required to turn a Mac into a system that is actually working and allowing the user to be productive costs money as well.
- No focus-follows-mouse options means I can't layer windows in a way that accelerates my workflows. Having to switch between windows constantly is a giant speed bottleneck for me.
- No keybinds for quickly resizing and positioning windows as far as I know. I only use the mouse to quickly position windows and even then just use alt-drag on my Linux desktop.
- Animations. Anything that doesn't just instantly do whatever I told it is wasting my time. I don't need pretty or shiny.
Of course this is my own personal experience, but I am extremely less productive on Mac and Windows compared to Linux due to these and more.
I have. Performance generally degrades over time for me.
> - Slow and large updates -> I honestly don't pay much attention as I have updates install automatically while I'm sleeping, but what size differences have you noticed?
Most OS X updates take the system down for 30+ minutes while you're staring at the black screen w/ white Apple logo. By contrast most Linux systems can update in the background, and a reboot after an update takes no more time than a normal reboot, because it is a normal reboot.
> - Sluggish UI -> I've never experienced this in the last three years of using my 2017 MBP.
There seems to be a type a user who perceives any kind of animation as sluggishness. Before I switched to macOS, I used to hang out in #kde. From time to time someone would come in and complain about the sluggish UI. They'd often list specs that were impressive at the time.
I'd instruct them on how to globally increase KDE's animation speed. That almost always "fixed the issue".
I'm not sure what it is, but for some users animations are indistinguishable from lag.
The computer survived with one scratch to one of its corners.
How do you figure that? Docker gives you a native linux runtime, and you can use x11 if you're developing GTK/QT clients.
I was thinking about getting a used ThinkPad for Emacs + Org plus terminal only. A companion for writing in Emacs/org and for doing dev work (Python, Lisp, Bash). This article made me revisit that plan. (Been using ThinkPads from 2006-2015 and loved the experience. Solid rock hardware and best keybord.) But I can‘t think of getting rid of my Mac as it is adding so much quality to my day to day life.
Could you please share the other Mac-only apps that you'd miss, i'd love to see!
Anyhow since most development is nowadays done for Linux server running Linux on the desktop makes sense. Docker works better on Linux with port mapping.
For the battery time mentioned in the article one can swap batterys on Lenovo and there is a 9 cell battery which should get better run time hours.
- The ABC - Extended keyboard layout gives me easy access to diacriticalized letters like é or č as well as typographic characters like – and –
- long battery life. I'm currently sharing a charger between my work laptop my personal laptop and my iPad and life is easy.
- access to mainstream software like Office, Adobe etc.
- I can easily use my iPad as an external monitor while I'm away from my desk.
- The trackpad is so much more usable than any Windows laptop I've been given from work
- I don't need to spend much time getting stuff in a workable state. Other than disabling caps lock and selecting ABC - Extended as my keyboard layout, I don't feel the need to do much customization on a new Mac.
- Compose key blows your "ABC - Extended layout out of the water." It's more powerful than anything else.
- ... I never really use my XPS 13 without a charger, because I don't really travel around much, but it also has USB-C like all the "cool stuff." I would imagine with some tweaking I can get better battery life but I know it does last a while on standby.
- You won't get mainstream-mainstream stuff on Linux, which is probably a problem for some, but for day-to-day usage many Adobe alternatives exist (Blender, Inkscape, Krita, GIMP), along with commercial and professional things (DAWs (eg. Renoise, Reaper, whatever), and DaVinci Resolve)
- /shrugs VNC maybe? Although there are some pretty small monitors out there that should work. (I use HDMI monitors). Advantages of not being in the Apple ecosystem is that there is more freedom.
- Use a keyboard and mouse. It's faster. And more useful. There are only so many things you can do with a trackpad.
- You don't need to do much customization on Linux either (especially something like Pop!_OS or Ubuntu). Things are a lot better (not perfect, but better) than they were before. Nothing like Windows where you have to uninstall the bloatware though
- Many of the alternatives to mainstream stuff have compatibility issues. Maybe this is better now than the last time I've dealt with them last, but part of why I use word is that I need to send documents to people who use word and I'd rather not have surprises (smaller thing but still significant—Word for the Mac shows the word count at the bottom of the window. Word on Windows doesn't (or at least didn't the last time I used it) and Pages on the Mac will show wordcount only in a mini window.
I'm much more productive with a trackpad. MacOS also includes a number of shortcuts on the trackpad that don't work as well with a mouse (even Apple's magic mouse).
I'd note that some of it is also that I've been trained into the shortcuts that I have on the Mac (both keyboard-based and trackpad-based). Muscle habit goes a long way towards keeping someone on a platform.
I mean, I'd just use PDF, but I get the need for Word. In that case... Office Online is an option? You can probably write up everything in a solution like LibreOffice (which is not as abominable as people make it out to be, and some of the horrid bugs it used to have have been fixed, but it's not perfect either), and export to DOCX, then check it through in Office Online and it should be good. LibreOffice does have word count in the bottom as well, which is a nice addition
Linux also supports trackpad gestures, although they are prone to not being as smooth or whatnot. Since I spend my life on the keyboard I use that instead, and it's just as productive. I find it annoying to go reach for my trackball.
Indeed, yes. Although I should probably take that into account too since I'm switching to a 60% keyboard that doesn't have arrow keys, and I'm going to have to relearn a lot of stuff. In the end, as others have said, switching to Linux feels bad in the beginning but you grow to love it as time passes. Sure, it has issues, such as these, but it also has other strong advantages.
> What trackballs offer free scrolling? My trackball (Marble Trackball from Logitech) offers it, with a little configuration. Effectively, you're holding down a button and using the ball as a scroll wheel, letting you move left and right. I can imagine that any trackball (since by nature they have the "ball") with some configuration could be used for free scrolling (at least, well, on Linux).
> And something done with a keyboard is by definition something not done with a mouse. We scroll on a mouse. We can also scroll on a keyboard (with arrow keys). So they are interchangeable sometimes. I know Windows also has a feature to emulate the mouse with arrow keys. So this isn't inherently true, unless I'm misunderstanding.
Sure, you can do lots of things with a keyboard. But your suggestion was that a mouse is faster and more useful than a trackpad.
I haven't wanted to use a mouse since 2006. I much prefer the trackpad on my 2014 MBP to any mouse. For me it's worth it for the gestures alone.
Each to their own I guess.
Edit: The good news is that the trackpad support is improving constantly especially with Wayland.
A 16" or 17" (remember 17" laptops?) Carbon X1 would get me to move away from the Macbook Pro in a heartbeat.
After that I switched to Dell XPS 13s starting with the 9350, buying new. There was an initial issue with the WiFi adapter being unsupported (as I recall the `developer edition` with Ubuntu supported was more expensive but also had a better supported WiFi card) which initially required me to build a custom kernel module (I think? It was a while ago) but support appeared very soon after in mainline Linux. Subsequently I've had no major compatibility issues - except that support for multiple monitors where the laptop is HiDPI but the external monitors aren't is very poor (the Thinkpads I owned weren't HiDPI - I don't think this is a Dell issue). Edit: Battery life is mediocre on all the XPS models I've had.
Just lately I've been using a work-issued Dell Latitude 7490. I'm enjoying this a lot. Support is solid, the screen isn't HiDPI so multi-monitor usage is fine, its battery life is good enough to get me through a working day without plugging in (sometimes I don't even notice I haven't plugged in), and it has plenty of ports (including USB C, HDMI, and Ethernet).
I've used Macs on and off in the workplace but couldn't get used to them. If I needed to do CAD, Graphic Design, or other things where open source software doesn't cut the mustard I guess I'd go for a Mac, but happily I just don't need to these days (the broad move to Web apps helped a LOT, particularly the move to GSuite for a lot of stuff that would previously have required MS Office).
Just my 2¢.
I would underline what he points out about the battery being a relative shortcoming though. Which is important for anyone who likes being away from a power outlet for a good while.
I think linux has historically really lagged on controlling battery use, Apple has exploited its tight hardware/software integration for years in this regard, and I only see this spread widening frankly. The ARM Macbooks will likely be absolute marathon runners in comparison to any linux laptop, at least for a good while. I'd love to be wrong.
T480 - Larger battery cell (I get >20hrs of use).
Then there's a bunch of configuration options: https://austingwalters.com/increasing-battery-life-on-an-arc...
On my new T14s after the latest updates and a much smaller battery, I can still easily get 8 hours at ~2.5lbs weight, 16 cores, 32Gb RAM.
I don't know if that's because the build quality was so great back then, or because Intel dropped the ball this past decade. I'm guessing it's a little of both, which is why I'm kind of conflicted right now: I love Thinkpads, but I'm also super interested to try out the new ARM-based Macbooks.
> I'm also super interested to try out the new ARM-based Macbooks
I’m having a hard time choosing between an old Thinkpad and the Pinebook Pro for a GNU/Linux laptop. Thinkpads have a better battle-tested durability + repairability reputation and Libreboot is a significant selling point to me. But x86 seems like it’s just beginning to fade into the past in favor of source-available ARM in the present and open-source RISC V in the future, and the Pinebook isn’t exactly terribly flimsy (magnesium-alloy outer shell, maybe inspired by Thinkpads) or expensive ($200).
https://boilingsteam.com/a-complete-look-at-the-pinebook-pro...
The Thinkpads will also work out of the box with basically any kernel from the past 10 years, whereas the Pinebook requiers a patched kernel, patched u-boot, and a third patched component I didn't even know existed and don't remember the name of.
It's a pretty awesome device for $200 but it can't replace a real laptop IMHO, and hardware support is under active development.
When the X2x0 series were released we did complain A LOT about the drop in quality and reminisce about the good old Lenovo times. And of course people already complained about the Lenovo times vs IBM. And I ponder if people used to complain about the drop of quality in IBM times...
But seriously, the X220T specifically is crap. We bought 4 of them and NONE of them survived the first year, with a myriad of failures, including mute microphone/webcam, broken display flex cable, and screen that would not stand in place (it would just fall instead of staying open). Lenovo then replaced them with X230Ts and ALL of them had this issue where the microphone would have a terrible electric noise when the webcam was on (common issue too, google for it). By the time the X240 was released, we just gave up -- no trackpoint click buttons!!! what were they thinking!
There is only one other display which I remember comparable in terrible quality: the early color Palm(Pilot)s. With viewing angles measured in arcminutes rather than degrees.
I've been using a ThinkPad X1 Carbon running Xubuntu since 2016. Before that I was using a MacBook Pro.
The things I like about this machine/Linux are - It's light - The keyboard is great/better - The battery is really good coupled with the low resource usage of Xubuntu (except when I have Zoom, Docker, and lots of Firefox tabs) - Don't have any trouble with audio when using Bluetooth - I don't have to worry about MacOS breaking my dev environment - Setting up dev environment is a breeze
Things I dislike - CPU is not as powerful as a MacBook Pro - The most recent X/Ubuntu broke wake up from sleep - Some software doesn't have a Linux equivalent (Webex) - If you want to dual boot Linux and Windows, getting full disk encryption on X/Ubuntu is challenging - Plugging into a non-hidpi monitor is janky because it can't change dpi per screen - Speakers on this machine suck
For me doing strictly software development, the benefits of a stable and easy to use environment outweigh the warts of Linux.
If I were to get a new machine I'd consider Lenovo again. The new Dell XPS also looks great. I might also give Windows and WSL2 a try in my dual OS desktop. Windows feels a lot smoother compared to Linux (on a very powerful desktop though), but it's constantly notifying you about things which is a distraction.
Purism sells laptops [0] with real hardware kill switches for camera and microphone. Welcome to the future.
> Maintenance: T480 is not slim and this is for the better. I can replace/upgrade most components by myself.
Slimness has nothing to do with repairability / upgradeability. Purism laptops are slim and perfectly repairable. (I'm a happy owner).
You can debug layout issues to some extent using GNOME Web (also known as Epiphany). It uses same webkit engine as Safari. https://webkit.org/downloads/ way at the bottom.
I'm surprised Mac OS has never had an overhaul of the look, on their windows, buttons, icons or anything. On the other hand, I absolutely find it to be nightmare to navigate in Finder - the shortcuts are a mess.. and there is no address bar at all! Other than that I also do find Mac OS to be slower than Linux due to some bloat. On an overall scale, software availability is almost on par with Mac OS. The only drawback for Linux is graphics applications like Photoshop aren't just either available, or not hardware accelerated properly.
- The short cuts are not a mess, they're just not what you're used to.
- macOS may still look similar to previous versions, but, to my taste, anything touched by gnome is a macOS ripoff that looks downright oversized and is either gaudy or too dark.
- Today I tried to get a database manager for mongodb on Ubuntu 20.04 that is more than a wrapper around the command line. Nowhere to be found. And let's not mention video editing, music making, and gaming.
You prefer Linux, fine, but please don't diss the rest.
Regarding the shortcuts, I found Enter, Backspace, using Space Bar for selecting, etc. to be simpler compared to holding down cmd+up/down, and other combinations.
and osx keeps getting worse and worse. What's up with the maximized windows now?!
Not to mention you still can't command+tab between two terminal windows.
I may go back to Linux someday. I miss focus-follows-mouse. Apple sucks at some things, but gets more core capabilities right.
Instead, I went Thinkpad+Linux(Lubuntu) for an iteration. Excellent machine as the article details. I was very happy with it for a couple years.
I wanted something with a beefier GPU though, so most recently went to Asus+W10Pro+WSL2. I was skeptical at first, having been off Windows for a decade, but it is pretty decent. There are some minor annoyances, but not enough to push me back to full Linux yet.
You need to pay attention to what can and can't be upgraded, however. The newest Mini can't have the storage upgraded (you should probably buy it maxed out), but can upgrade the memory to 64GB, so it's cheaper to get the 8GB and then upgrade it yourself. The 21 inch iMac can't be upgraded, so YMMV depending on what you get.
Most items make sense in this context I think, but there is one point that surprised me:
<<Emoji support is not 100%>>
Wtf! In my opinion, that it worths mentioning that, shows at what point Apple marketing brain fucked the Apple device users...
You buy a 2k$ computer, with dozens of high speed CPUs, for what? Putting stupid smileys everywhere? And in addition, this is more an application specific issue than a system one. Where do you use them? Emails, professional word documents?
1. Best touchpad period.
2. Good overall keyboards (Ignore the 2016-2020 butterfly keyboards)
3. Best sounding speakers.
4. Every display has 400+ nits of brightness with good color accuracy.
5. Very good battery life per watt-hour of the battery and lasts better with time as well.
The package is what make the macbooks great. I don't have to go through a list of laptops and go through pros and cons of laptops and there are a LOT of cons.
You may think that bad sounding speakers or 250 nits screen is not a very big deal but just try using a macbook for a while and you'll see how these these make a drastic change in the user experience.
People go on about how macbooks are over-hyped and expensive (they are!) but I think that what they offer is a level above anything else on the market.
I am using a MBA 2015 for my dev purposes and sometimes the 8Gigs of RAM feels like it could use an upgrade. (I want to upgrade but it is so much expensive moving on to the new ones). I've tried so many laptops and none of those impress me. This is the only reason that Macbooks, even though they cost a bomb, last for well over 10 years.
Edit: It "seems" windows laptops are catching up, but please list one laptop that would be usable after, say 8 years. For eg. a MBP 2012 will still work very good in 2020 compared to any of the laptops from even 2015. Are there any windows laptops in 2020 that you can say the same for?
How big of an issue is it to target iOS as a platform on a PC these days with the rise of Flutter, etc? I'm looking to get into app development, but don't have a Mac, nor would I like to buy one if I can avoid it.
Whatever solution you pick for iOS dev: Flutter, React Native, Xamarin etc etc, in the end we will always meet the same thing: iOS SDK. And iOS SDK only runs on Mac, unlike Android.
Unless Apple decide to port their SDK to Windows/Linux (which I believe will not happen), you can't practically avoid Mac.
You can count on the framework to abstract away big significant parts of your app (business logic, UI) but some of the nuances you will probably have to tweak yourself. Launcher icons, handling notches, device specific features, and other weird oddities.
At least in the React Native community, you can often get away with building to the device only once every native dependency change. This becomes a better experience with Expo though
Flutter is nice. Yes, a single codebase typically works both on Android & iOS (sometimes, a little tweaking on each platform is needed).
The problem is: you can't avoid iOS SDK for iOS development. This is not Flutter-specific, BTW, but everything: React Native, Ionic, Xamarin, Pascal etc etc. So you need to have either a Mac machine, or access to Mac cloud server.
I vote the former, because it makes debugging easier.
[0] https://blog.codemagic.io/how-to-develop-and-distribute-ios-...
That’s been my only gripe in moving from a MacBook Air to an XPS running Ubuntu a little over a year ago.
Battery life is comparable in active usage. But if I close my XPS lid and then, for whatever reason, don’t use it for a day or two, I’ll be at zero battery.
I don’t remember this ever being something to even think about with my Mac laptop.
Sleep is still powering the ram. Hibernate writes the ram contents out to a file and shuts the computer off.
It often takes some tinkering to get hibernation to work, if at all.
That is why your computer kills the battery in a few days.
I even use Linux on my personal laptop. It's a Thinkpad actually. Yes, the touch pad on Mac is better. But Linux is just so much quicker and lighter, and really the only major annoying thing I've run into is electronically signing PDFs.
It does seem reasonable to develop on Linux.. for Linux.
I've heard of a few recent experiences specifically using Ubuntu 19/20 on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon/T4xx of some type resulting in a really nice experience, including optimized battery life.
While Ubuntu might not be my desktop of choice, it does seem to have done the most that I can find to work well on laptops from a battery life/driver support/sleep perspective.
I have it loaded on a desktop and it's working flawlessly, and I continue to try and find an issue with it. As a development environment, it may be something to consider seriously.
Part of me is wondering if an Ubuntu/Linux laptop could open up a way to use an iPad as a secondary computing device that where I could continue to enjoy the things that I wanted there.
Even if it was a shittier experience (kubuntu is vastly better than osx in every pertinent way), I'd continue using the thinkpad for the trackpoint and keyboard.
There are different battery choices of 72, 48 and 24 watt hours. I believe the 72 watt hour battery "bulges" a bit and makes the laptop not sit flat.
Edit: You could also disable the MX150 GPU if you don't really use it.
0. TAKE NOTES! Make a setup doc that keeps up with the issues of setting up your computer. ie... I have to do some funky things to get my onboard speakers to work, I never remember how to do it, but my notes remember it for me.
1. The trackpad will suck. Just get an external trackball or mouse, use it instead.
2. Pay for a good built-in keyboard.
3. Make sure you can swap your network card. I have my preference on manufacturer. For historical reasons I typically replace whatever it comes with.
4. If graphics matter to you, avoid NVidia GPU's.
5. Avoid laptops with restrictive bioses. (wifi whitelists, wont let you change boot order but supports two drives, etc)
The notes are also geared for the times I move distros or change a major component in the system. I include what I did, why I did it, where the info came from, and why I removed it or decided to go a different direction.
Battery life isn't great agree. My solution currently is a USB-C portable battery which I get an additional full laptop charge. In the past x220 and t60(p) were favourite models.
Other annoyance (still!) is sleep seems to work on certain kernels and not on others.
Was on ubuntu forever but slowly may move back to debian as I don't like snap packages.
Mouse is Logitech MX Anywhere 2S
Only suggestion currently on getting an laptop is usb-c, ips screen, nvme drive and lots of ram. In fact the CPU doesn't matter much. I used the x series for a decade but now moved to t series and they have gotten lighter and are good value.
This mouse has seriously become my favorite ever. Outstanding battery life, very comfortable, it works on any surface I've tried, and it works great on both macOS and Linux.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpadsforsale/comments/attt0u/sg...
In contrast, I don't understand the Thinkpad hype. Everyone that I've ever tried has just felt low quality to me. I don't understand why people like them so much.
Would you recommend buying a new MBP or getting a laptop?
A MacBook is a laptop, yes? What classifies a MacBook as not being a laptop? In terms of form factor, they are the same. There's nothing special. In fact, MacBooks can run Windows or Linux just like regular "laptops."
As for a recommendation, I don't see why Macs are necessary. USB-C is a huge frustration to deal with (and this includes non-Macs, such as my XPS 13). I'd personally recommend a ThinkPad (which I've decided is going to be my next laptop), but I've never had the opportunity to use one that much. It's just that the keyboard seems much better and it has more options, and I really like the build quality.
- Dongles are a nightmare as well. What if I forget mine when I'm travelling?
Software wise, apart from some rare exceptions (X1 Gen 7?) everything works out of the box on most distros.
This is thing is slow and bordering useless, but I genuinely never had any tech product for 10 years work for well. 10 years, only changed the charger and HD once. Everything else is still working, including a really nice touch pad.
Same here! I still do web browsing, mail and audio editing on my 10 year old 15" MBP. My FireWire audio interface still hooks up perfectly all the time.
The 2010 MBP range honestly seem like the last ones that were built to last. I've upgraded the OS HD to an SSD (made a world of difference) and replaced the CD/DVD with a second 1TB storage drive.
Looking to move to a system 76 or purism as most of my development is happening on a Linux desktop. I've been way more productive and enjoyed myself more developing on Linux.
Not overly concerned about the trackpad conversations -- I like me so buttons to tap. Only concern is battery usage, but the system76 lemur pro seems to have that sorted pretty well.
Has anyone else had reliability problems with the T series? How reliable have the T480's been?
PS. moving to 14" system76/thinkpad too this year
I'm not experienced with this, but I can safely say that if you're willing to, you can use Office 2007 (probably 2010 and 2013, and maybe 2016, but that last one is slow). Alternatively, OnlyOffice has extremely good compatibility with MS Office and works well for the purpose.
I'm using l390 and the touchpad feels good for me. Never use mac, does mac's touchpad is considerably better?
EDIT: formatting
I believe this is because they control both, the hardware and the software side of it.
For me this is the only reason holding me from moving too.
The touchpad is pretty good but it's still not as precise as the Mac touchpad - there is a slight hysteresis that makes it imprecise for short movements. No amount of tweaking settings could overcome this. The only way to be accurate at short range is to slow the overall pointer speed so it takes more than one finger swipe to move across the screen. (If anyone from Microsoft is reading this - why don't you fix it? It can't be that hard.)
The other problem with the Surface Book is the Home and End keys are not accessible at the same time as the function keys - a show-stopper for smooth editing and debugging in an IDE.
The touchpad is pretty good but it's still not as precise as the Mac touchpad - there is a slight hysteresis that makes it imprecise for short movements. No amount of tweaking settings could overcome this. The only way to be accurate at short range is to slow the overall pointer speed so it takes more than one finger swipe to move across the screen.
The other problem with the Surface Book is the Home and End keys are not accessible at the same time as the function keys - a show-stopper for smooth editing and debugging in an IDE.
Let’s take Dell for example. There is nothing stopping them from investing in the touchpad controller and designing it themselves if they want full control. And the OS level work is in the driver which is basically controlled by Dell themselves.
Originally Windows treated all touch pads as USB mice, at which point it was understandable that they couldn’t make their touch pads better. However, now Windows has an excellent and full fledged API that allows far more control, equivalent to what Macs can do. Further, if Dell wanted changes to Windows to improve their touchpad I hardly doubt MS would resist.
Personally, I suspect the real reason touchpad haven’t improved in the Windows world is that the vast majority of windows laptops are used for work and business, so they are either docked, or they have mice plugged in and their customers are happy using it that way.
Apple have a good trackpad because they developed a good trackpad. There is nothing really stopping anyone else from doing the same, whether or not they actually have.
But Microsoft targets businesses who don't care about polish because the buyer and the user are different people, and Linux targets hackers who care more about other things. It has nothing to do with what was originally claimed.
Except, of course, the track point.
First, I was already a vim user for 8 years, so I was used to config files and the terminal. I moved primarily after watching some videos about I3 / awesome WM and browsing the /r/unixporn subreddit. Primarily I liked the idea of designing my own OS from scratch, and the idea of being able to change ANYTHING was really intriguing to me.
I guess it's important to note that as a designer this wouldn't have been possible without tools like Figma and Framer being web based. Put bluntly, Linux native design tooling isn't up to par with what I had on a mac, and without Figma I wouldn't have been able to move over full-time. It's also important to mention that while I classify myself as a designer, I design 90% of the time in code, writing React + CSS. I realize I'm a little different and this likely sways some of my feelings towards linux.
In short, I've really enjoyed the switch. The window management alone has been reason enough. Being able to navigate my windows with key commands, and generally lay things out the way I see fit between polybar + i3 has been fantastic. Don't like a certain shadow? Change it with picom. Don't like seeing title bars on your windows? Change a config. I'm also a designer that believes in heavy focus (think tab focus in a browser) so every window gets a thick focus border. Everything is matched to a color-scheme that I like, and I mean everything. I don't feel like I'm using Linux so much as I've used Linux to build Dave OS.
I was able to migrate nearly $500 of annual tooling to home-made scripts and services that I run through GCP. For example. I used to use cloud app for screenshot / movie snippets. Any designer will tell you something like that is their bread and butter... "hey what do you think of this?". I moved it to Peek / Flameshot + a 40-line bash script that watches a folder and uploads it to a gcp bucket. It took me a half day of learning. At the end of it I had a funny realization... why have I been paying for these simple services for years and complaining about features they didn't have? Now I just add the features.
Performance is hit and miss. Everything I used to do in the terminal (which is where I spend most of my time) feels faster. In general, I had to drop apps and move command line. This was fun! I moved to buku for bookmarks, taskwarrior for todo lists...etc. What I loved about this was it forced me to engage more in the OSS community. I already do mostly OSS stuff for work, but I was in my bubble. Linux forced me out, and I found myself talking a bit more on Github, asking questions and the like. This was the thing that I've ended up loving. In general I've been amazed at the amount of support I've gotten from maintainers by just saying "Hey, I'm a designer, I'm not so knowledgeable about the guts of this code, can you help me out"?
Slack and zoom are slow. They are pretty resource intensive apps and weren't exactly speed kings on my mac, but they do feel noticibly worse on Linux. I'm hoping this is due to my hardware, but I suspect the apps just aren't as considered in Linux. I've really enjoyed AUR / pacman for package management and it feels like brew, but for everything. The one thing I think Linux is missing is a good calendar application that syncs with gcal. The terminal based ones are a little overweight and underdesigned, and I can't find a GUI one I like.
Anyways, I'll probably do a formal blog writeup at some point, and more importantly make some videos of my setup, since it's probably interesting for folks to see how a designer uses Linux, but I thought it'd be worth a quick post to let others know its possible.
Hardware wise I had no trouble with my mac, mostly because I already had my own custom keyboards and the like, but I'm excited about the new Thinkpad on the way more for it's power-to-price.
But the screen is still below par - 400 nits max brightness is too low. And the trackpad is substantially worse than Macbook's.
I'll still keep it because it offers something that Macbook doesn't anymore: reliability
I wanted to let others in my situation (longtime Mac user, avoided the butterfly keyboards so much that I considered a Thinkpad with Linux) know: the new keyboard in my 13-inch 2020 is amazing.
I upgraded from my 2015 to this 2020 a couple of weeks ago under duress: my old machine failed me during an interview videoconference and I couldn't have that happen again. Ran out to buy a new machine and return it if I hated the new keyboard (I expected it to be somewhere between the old keyboard and the terrible butterfly, but at least it has an inverted-T.)
It's spectacular. Key travel is awesome, and it's nice to have inverted-T and dedicated escape key back. This machine is also way faster than my old one thanks to (2x as many cores [thanks to 2018 model]) and the 10th gen stuff (much faster RAM and graphics, etc.).
ARM is coming soon, but there's a lot of uncertainty about that transition and I'm happy to have a highly performant machine that will last me at least three years (when my AppleCare will run out).
It's the single most important reason for me to stay with a MacBook.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1127798/how-to-run-a-iphone-...
Had MacBooks since the white clamshells and eventually wanted to go full linux. So bought the X1 Carbon and really regretted it. Screen and trackpad were by far the worst by comparison.
So I’ve returned. Picked up a Mid-2015 15” MBP a few months back and haven't looked back.