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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

At the risk of being that (Linux) guy --

What is gained here if we're just still applying faster cycles to Apple-esque wasteful (and perhaps harmful, as we're apparently learning re: their telemetry) software?

If people really dig their Apple stuff, great. But I think its worth thinking about the likelihood that a "slower" computer running Linux could probably serve the actual user better in terms of "getting stuff done." Moreover, I think we're pretty close to "beauty" parity here as well. Apple's advantage now is probably mostly the networked devices, i.e. unity between phone and pc messages, etc.

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> But I think its worth thinking about the likelihood that a "slower" computer running Linux could probably serve the actual user better in terms of "getting stuff done." Moreover, I think we're pretty close to "beauty" parity here as well.

This is just not true. I'm sorry but I've used linux on the desktop many times, using many different distros, and many different desktop environments. It's shiny and pretty when you first install and then very quickly you run into apps that don't follow that design methodology and it takes you out of it. Desktop linux is not ready for average users and honestly it may never be. Also "getting stuff done." and desktop linux do not belong in the same sentence. I've personally spent and watched coworkers spend hours and hours tinkering with graphics cards drivers or other random quirks. Linux is amazing, don't get me wrong, it's a workhorse with immense power and the ability to tinker to your heart's content BUT most users, myself included, don't want to put in the upfront and ongoing work to keep it in tip-top condition.

I will forever use linux on servers and enjoy every minute of it but for the desktop linux is nowhere near ready for primetime. I've watched too many people online and in-person preach about linux on the desktop and then watched them having to spend tons of time tinkering with it so they can "get stuff done". Is it possible to be productive on the linux desktop? Absolutely but I value my time way too highly to spend the effort to make that a reality.

What are we meant do with these ever constant, hand-wavey "linux bad" posts with exactly ZERO specifics. They mean nothing to all of us reading this comment on Linux systems that give us less fuss than Windows (and I know because I game on it) and there's nothing actionable. It's just a "nuh uh!!" after someone suggests there might be a better tool for the job.

Also, I really can't sympathize with this implication that not following the platform UI principles is somehow fundamentally "breaking" the user experience. It's virtually impossible to find two mainstream, popular, "good-UX" Win10 or OS X apps that follow some mythic standard UI.

As a new Linux user, I don’t think I agree, at least not 100%. I picked Linux Mint, and found it quite easy to install and maintain on my AMD desktop. All the drivers were already there.

The only difficulty I had was installing Docker, but an hour later I had that and my other required programs installed and I was able to be productive.

It took me less than three hours to make a USB stick, install, and get my programs needed for me to code again.

That said, I had also tried Ubuntu and found it a not-so-great experience. I had to look for a few different drivers and learn how to install them from the command line. After that it was fine, but I didn’t like the UI and didn’t really want to spend the time learning how to tweak it to my liking.

So I think the right distro really matters in the case of making Linux attractive to common users. IMO Cinnamon/ Mint is the one for that.

Just to present another point of view (from my subjective experience). Yes it is possible to be productive on the linux desktop.

I'm using Fedora 33 on my personal laptop with nvidia drivers. And never needed to install any drivers for my work laptop.

Upgraded both laptops 3 times from Fedora 30 without a hitch.

And it's a one step process using a graphical interface [1].

What I'm saying is that (in my own experience), linux of today is very different from linux of 10 or 20 years ago. I've had my share of problems before, installing drivers for graphic cards and modems back in the "00"s but I think that most linux distros have come a long way since then.

Linux may not be the best choice "getting stuff done" for an average user. But, from my own experience, for a software developer it's a good choice. And in the company I work for, most developers have hp elitebooks with fedora installed. (I'm picking software developers for the comparison because they represent a significant portion of macbook pro users).

[1]: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/upgrading/

> * I've personally spent and watched coworkers spend hours and hours tinkering with graphics cards drivers or other random quirks*

This is like complaining that a Hackintosh is buggy and requires tinkering. If you want a polished experience, buy computers with first class Linux support from vendors. Even better if you buy machines with Linux preinstalled.

> Desktop linux is not ready for average users

If ChromeOS would suit a user's needs, then so would a polished Linux distribution like Ubuntu with Firefox or Chrome, most of the time.

> What is gained here if we're just still applying faster cycles to Apple-esque wasteful (and perhaps harmful, as we're apparently learning re: their telemetry) software?

Your comment is based on some sweeping claims with no supporting evidence — can you point to something specific you think is wasteful, alleged harmful telemetry (not Jeffrey Paul's misunderstandings about OCSP), or prevents “getting stuff done”?

As someone who started using Linux as a desktop OS in the 1990s I would especially suggest that if smugly-nonspecific sneering at other operating systems was an effective advocacy strategy the number of Linux desktop users would be a lot greater than it is now.

I've tried Linux on the desktop and know that I'm significantly more productive on a Mac (and also more productive on a Mac vs Windows).

It's partly a personal thing but I think that you have to look at the evidence in the marketplace - people switch to Linux for philosophical or technical reasons but not generally due to the user experience. Denying that evidence and pretending that it's otherwise isn't going to change that situation especially now Apple has an imminent hardware advantage.

Another linux guy here, on the market for a new linux laptop.

After reading the article, which linux-compatible laptops, would you say, come the closest to compete with the new generation of Apple products? Long battery life, plenty of power, good screen, good speakers? Is it the inevitable Dell XPS 13 and Thinkpad X1 Carbon, or are there any other darlings among the linux community?

It's not as good as Apple yet, but getting there IMO: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14.

lol this is just delusional. The Librem is the build quality of a generic Chromebook. Maybe competitive with Apple in like 2006, as in the polycarbonate MacBook!

Tiger Lake matches M1 in single-core perf, but gets trounced in multi. AMD has some good options, but I haven't seen a thin&light style AMD based laptop come out yet.

Check out System76, their Linux support is unparalleled. The lemur pro is interesting. I don't know if you'll find the specs for the screen/speakers, though.

I got the XPS 13, myself, but it still requires 'tweaks' - like running thermald master so your system doesn't throttle down too much after a short 'boost', and running kernel 5.10 because it allows your CPU to enter the PC10 power-saving state (Ubuntu's oem-5.8 may have this backported, I haven't checked).

As always, install your favorite user-agent spoofer as well. I just ran into a problem with some web videoconferencing software that works fine, but you have to tell it your running Win/Chrome.

This is why people say desktop Linux isn't here yet. It kinda is, but only if you're an expert (or want to be forced to become one)... I still love it, though, and always will.

Tiger lake at 26w compared to M1 at 10W matches single thread. So not really Apple to apples there.

> In multi-threaded scenarios, power highly depends on the workload. In memory-heavy workloads where the CPU utilisation isn’t as high, we’re seeing 18W active power, going up to around 22W in average workloads, and peaking around 27W in compute heavy workloads. These figures are generally what you’d like to compare to “TDPs” of other platforms, although again to get an apples-to-apples comparison you’d need to further subtract some of the overhead as measured on the Mac mini here – my best guess would be a 20 to 24W range.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

So the Tiger Lake TDP is of multicore usage, not single core.

> The lemur pro is interesting. I don't know if you'll find the specs for the screen/speakers, though.

I've seen a youtube review demonstrating that its speakers are abysmal [0, around 7:30 minutes in]. I have a feeling that this is the quality that is to be expected of Clevo laptops :-(

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v6u1CbQ574

which linux-compatible laptops, would you say, come the closest to compete with the new generation of Apple products?

When there's a technological jump, there's not much you can do.

There's not a laptop you can buy that close enough to the M1-based MacBook Air or MacBook Pro to matter really.

You can't get something as light, as powerful and with the battery life these machines have.

Look, Apple demonstrated Debian running in a VM on an Apple Silicon Mac in June, so we know it's possible. And I'd bet dollars to doughnuts it's blazing fast.

You saw the comments in the article; people are talking about more than a day without having to plug these devices in. People are rendering 8k video while doing other stuff with no slowdown and without hearing the fan, in the case of the MacBook Pro.

These machines can drive up to six displays using DisplayLink adapters. Just nuts.

"M1 Macs Able to Run Up to Six External Displays Using DisplayLink Adapters": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25199444

I'm struggling with the same dilemma at the moment but at the 15" size point.

I just bought the XPS 15 (2020 model) in the i7-10750H / 16 GB / 1 TB / 4K touchscreen configuration, with 4 years of extended warranty, and it set me back $3000 USD here in the UK. This was with 16% Dell Advantage discount. For comparison in the US a slightly better package with 32GB of RAM is currently up for less ($2,750, so more like $2,900 after sales tax I guess). Retail.

I've also bought the exact same configuration and package, refurbished from the Dell Outlet, in the standard HD resolution for $1,900. This one has yet to arrive.

So how does the 4K XPS fair in Linux?

I booted in to Ubuntu 20.10 using a USB stick and... the keyboard didn't work. For some reason Ubuntu brings up the on-screen keyboard when I use the touchscreen, but the physical keyboard is completely non-functional.

Fedora 33 live? No wifi.

Manjaro XFCE worked great. I was pleasantly surprised (once all the 4K related scaling settings were fixed) how good it looked and how well everything just worked.

Paying $1,100 for a 4K touchscreen upgrade that causes nothing but problems on Linux is a hard thing to justify and, unfortunately for Dell, the screen on the XPS is probably its biggest selling point right now. Now M1 is a known quantity they really need to discount these laptops imho.

On the XPS you only get 3 USB-C ports, and one is constantly in use for me because I rarely unplug. I will be needing a stupidly expensive dock, so I have no idea how anyone can cope with just the 2 on the XPS 13. The keyboard is better than average but still pretty harsh, the touchpad has borderline build quality (springboardy) and is too large for my tastes (and I miss physical buttons), and the although the screen is gorgeously sharp and bright the fact that it's glossy still causes reflections in my home office.

I do not think I will be keeping either laptop, and instead I'm looking toward the X1 Extreme Gen3, with its better port options, keyboard and build quality.

macOS has been my daily driver since 2006, fully since 2010 (when I got rid of my desktop which I dual booted between Windows for gaming and Linux for development). It's perfectly suitable for "getting stuff done". In the rare case where macOS doesn't run something that I need that another *nix or Windows supports I spin up a VM or VPS.

I would 100% use linux (because I like tinkering) if it didn't have issues with HiDPI, and really terrible localization compared to MacOS.

Everything else I can deal with, not having those two work out of the box just sucks.

Also, if you have a headless Linux server (even in a virtual machine, say Hyper-V), I don't really see how you will get less stuff done by using any other OS.

Linux still doesn't have smooth scrolling. There is little visual consistency or shared UX patterns across apps. I had to hunt down a good font because the one that came installed with Pop and Ubuntu was terrible. Spent a day getting drivers for a wifi card to work. Had graphical flickers due to a bug in picom/nvidia that I had to go in and fix. Don't even get me started on the app ecosystem - Mac/win has stuff like omnifocus, 1password, Alfred, photoshop etc etc. Linux mostly you hope there's a web app.

There is strong opposition to the idea of paid app stores on Linux but almost all the best software I use is paid, because it takes teams of people working hard to build it. This is actually the most critical issue imo.

Linux has come a long way but I think they are understandably reluctant to hear bad news that it's still not good enough compared to the alternatives, even if it's much much better than it was.

Linux gets the look right. But it gets the feel wrong, very wrong. This surprises me. I don’t understand why they haven’t caught up on feel.

This is entirely subjective. As a primarily Linux user who uses a Mac for work, I would argue the opposite. Likely based more on familiarity than anything else.

depends on what you do, for most people - chromeOS would be plenty fine for 'getting stuff done'

i will provide one bit of anecdotal reasoning tho, within my company - the exchange server will _not_ work on anything other than paid for linux clients, but works flawless on apple's standard mail app. sure, they could set up the server a different way, but...why?

not sure why the downvotes, i said most people - not most HN readers

I have never lacked for "getting stuff done" on a Mac.

I found the macOS desktop much more responsive than GNOME which feels like a beast. Now I use MATE which is nice and simple but it’s no where near as nice as macOS.

I don't get the anti-Linux comments here. I use Manjaro with XFCE as my daily driver and I haven't had to tinker with shit on it since I set it up. Has nobody tried this distro?

Everything I need to do on it runs like a dream. Installing software is easier than anything, especially since I just use the GUI for that. I've had more trouble with Mac and Windows.

Even other Linux distros that I've tried don't really stand up to Manjaro. Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives have you hunting down PPAs and using the terminal to add things - maybe that's the "tinkering" that annoys people? If so, I wholly recommend you try Manjaro or another Arch based distro.

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