Comment by mplanchard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mplanchard | Hacker News Reader

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I have also switched back to Linux after about 8 years in Mac world, and have been really pleasantly surprised. Things still aren’t perfect, but they’re a far cry from where they were in 2010. My wife and I recently got a new Lenovo ThinkPad and Dell XPS, respectively, both with Linux preinstalled. The fingerprint readers work! The webcams work! Audio works! Wifi works! All with close to zero hassle (had to enable a PAM option to use the fingerprint reader with sudo, but otherwise no problems).

I miss MacOS keyboard shortcuts a bit, but most of the software I use for work and personal projects (emacs, terminal/tmux, docker) runs an order of magnitude faster. I love having a real package manager again, and I get first class support for most of the developer-centric tooling I really care about (e.g. Nix).

I like many was a little tempted by the M1 Macs, but seeing two coworkers have to switch away from them because critical dev tooling isn’t functional, reading about the SSD write issues recently, and now this about the insane size of update files helps temper the temptation.

Keyboard shortcuts are a big sticking point for me switching away from macOS. I expected I could wrestle Linux into something that resembles macOS shortcuts but it’s tricky and inconsistent. The clearest example of where macOS excels with shortcuts is in a terminal window: Command+C for copy, Control+C to kill a process. Control+Shift+C just doesn’t cut it for me on Linux.

I agree with you on software. Real package managers are great.

I hate to say it, because it’s so against what Linux has been for 25 years, but it would be great if there was a $99 distro with a heavily tweaked window manager that looks consistent across most apps, doesn’t have huge top bars, and conforms to macOS keyboard shortcuts. A lightning fast Spotlight analog would be great too. I recognize I can probably get pretty close to this vision with a patchwork of already available software but I want someone to tie a bow on it and maintain it for me.

You just described Haiku

Oh, what could’ve been. I really like what BeOS does, I’m sure there are analogs to this feature but it’s nice that it’s built in. https://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/node_monitoring

I'm not going to use this as a platform to evangelize Linux, but I think you should give KDE a look. It looks really pretty out-of-the-box, and offers you a lot of control over the look and feel of your desktop. On top of that, it has a nearly endless list of keyboard shortcuts that can be rebound in the settings app painlessly. It's a far-cry from a lot of the other DEs I've used in the past, and the "batteries-included" mentality makes it a great analog for Mac and Windows users alike.

KDE has a lot going for it but its customizability is so deep as to be daunting. Each time I've tried using it I've ended up burning hours trying to get every detail just right.

I think it'd benefit quite a lot from including several sane sets of defaults to use as starting points.

Opensuse has an excellent default kde.

Same with Neon IMO (it is developed by KDE people).

The most recent update---a pretty big one---has improved the daunting experience a lot.

A big factor of it being daunting, was that the settings were a mess. There are settings for appearances of the DE littered in different sections of system settings. This has been vastly improved.

The default Breeze theme felt dated before (not in a good way); the new update had also improved on that.

I'd say, that the default of the latest Plasma (5.21) is quite sane, to the point that I just chose Breeze Twilight (an included theme) without customization and had been happy since.

My biggest blocker isn’t a specific window manager, in that I can get a reasonable setup together in a relatively decent amount of time—it’s more around the fragmentation, or maybe my perceived fragmentation of the ecosystem as a whole.

I’ll get things set up. Then I’ll look for some alternative of an application I’m used to on Mac. There’ll be something, but it was written for KDE and I’m running Gnome, or vice versa, and it looks and feels decidedly out of place.

I’ll run something like Slack, or Spotify, and it’s sluggish and looks awkward next to all of my other windows.

It’s not one big thing that keeps me in the Mac ecosystem. I don’t like the direction it’s headed in either, but every time I try to make the switch it’s like death by a thousand cuts of a bunch of little things trying to get things to a point where it feels comfortable and cohesive—and ultimately I need to be able to work—the time investment necessary to get something that allows me to just sit down and work (and deal with random little issues that pop up throughout the process) pushes me right back to Mac every time.

Why would I press a key to copy/paste?

Highlight text, then middle click

Muscle memory, no middle click on most trackpads. It just feels weird coming from a browser after using Control+C to copy something and then having to use Control+Shift+V to paste. I never got used to the right click to paste paradigm. I expect a context menu.

I've never used a non-mac laptop without a middle button.

Muscle memory and 'the way things work' works both ways. You have to jump through hoops to do basic things like focus-follows-mouse/raise on click, multiple desktops, alt-drag to move a window etc (to be honest I'm not sure if you can even do those on a mac)

ThinkPads are what I reach for on the PC side of things, and those still have a dedicated middle button for the most part. Otherwise I can't think of a single modern example of a laptop with a middle button. They're all click pads these days like Macs.

The standard unix 3rd button emulation is left+right click at the same time. Should work pretty much everywhere without configuration.

In the case of "tap to click", a 3 finger tap would also emulate this, or as a middle mouse click.

> no middle click on most trackpads

If your trackpad has multitouch, triple touch should correspond to the middle click. Works for me on Linux by default.

Because often I need to highlight text in the terminal, copy it, then highlight text somewhere else (e.g. in a text input field in a browser, the address bar in the browser, etc.) and paste over it. Selecting the specific destination text I want to overwrite blows away my previous selection.

In many cases I do just highlight and right-click where I want the text pasted. But that workflow doesn't work a large portion of the time and I need a clipboard that isn't being wiped out almost any time I click on something.

> Selecting the specific destination text I want to overwrite blows away my previous selection.

Oof, is this the normal Linux behavior? That sounds annoying. In MacOS every app (or even tab) has its own separate highlight that it maintains. So in your example, selecting text in the browser would leave the terminal unaffected, and when you bring the terminal back to the foreground your text is still highlighted.

The highlight doesn't vanish, the clipboard contents do, because that's global and it gets written on highlight.

Nitpick: You're talking about the primary selection, not the clipboard. Those are two different distinct things.

It doesn't surprise me to learn that at all, because I've been confused about having two clipboards in Linux. But I don't remember hearing the term "primary selection" - my interpretation of the behavior was that there are just two separate clipboards. I guess that's not accurate - why not?

I've been using Pop_OS for the past few months, and haven't had any issues resembling this whatsoever. Of course my clipboard gets overwritten if I don't use a utility that saves previous text selections, but I don't recall this being a feature in any of the Windows/Mac/Linux Operating Systems by default.

X11 supports this with a secondary selection. Unfortunately this functionality isn't exposed in any modern UI toolkits. It does work with Motif apps though.

You have a modifier key "Super", probably with Windows logo, which you can remap for the shortcuts you've had with command.

Mostly I get by well enough by switching alt to ctrl, meta to alt, and ctrl to meta, plus caps lock mapped to ctrl. This gives me mostly an approximation of the Mac keyboard. Still have to remember the shift when copying and pasting in the terminal, but that’s not a huge deal because most of my terminal use is via emacs, where I have vim mode via evil, so copy and paste is done in normal mode with y and p. For me,a little bit of frustration with the keyboard is not so bad compared to the upsides.

I do Caps Lock to Control too, which frees up the bottom left key as a Function key on external keyboards.

This, plus I just gave up and mapped ctrl+v to paste in terminal directly. Also alt-tab is now windows+tab, which is close enough.

I feel the pain. Unfortunately I gave up trying to get Firefox to understand/use super or hyper as command keys. Mostly however I get by fine with caps lock set as control with the exception of VSCode with the Vim plug-in overriding ctrl-c/ctrl-v and breaking copy/paste. Of course VSCode doesn't support super/hyper instead of control key on Linux.

Firefox _used to_ handle it (ui.key.accelKey = 91) but it's been buggy since Quantum.

When I switched from Mac to Linux a few years back, I also had this issue. My solution was radical, I switched to i3 and configured many, many customized shortcuts. Having to "re-learn" nearly everything made it easier because I was forcing a learning curve.

> Control+Shift+C just doesn’t cut it for me on Linux.

Use middle click.

Gnome terminal and all its derivatives support ctrl-c and ctrl-v natively for copy/paste if you just set those as the keybindings in its preferences.

It then uses smart detection for when to send SIGINT vs copy/paste.

if there's no running process, it copies on ctrl-c

If there's a running process and no selected text, it sends sigint on ctrl-c

If there's a running process and selected text, it copies

It will always send sigint on ctrl-shift-c

---

Frankly I wish they would just default to that setting. It's much more pleasant to use than having to remember a different copy/paste shortcut for working in the terminal.

One of the first things I change on any new machine I setup for desktop use.

You can customize the entirety of the to of a terminal. I understand that this might be annoying, but macOS has it's fair share of "screwed up shortcuts" in spots that are not customizable easily (I did, with heavy use of a custom Karabiner config). The main one is word navigation/word selection/word deletion, which are not located all on the same modifiers (cmd), like it is on windows and linux

As someone who's mainly been a macOS user in the past couple decades but regularly uses Windows and Linux, I find that the number of papercuts, sharp edges, and lack of consistency in the desktop Linux experience is still too high for my taste. It's certainly much better than it used to be but still has a way to go. But then again, I have little need to tweak system internals.

I downvoted you for the lack of details. What you are saying can be said about any system, just change the name. Even about Mac.

Fair enough, but if I elaborated much it'd quickly turn into a blogpost.

In attempt to sum things up, I'd say that many of the woes of the modern Linux desktop stem from being stuck between different worlds — one example would be with the X11 vs. Wayland situation. Wayland has slowly been improving over time, but there are still concessions that are being made by using either. I understand that transitions are difficult and that particular case is being made more difficult by parties like Nvidia, but the end result is a degraded end-user experience that won't be fixed until the transition is over.

The easiest fix for this issue is to not use Wayland, like 99% of users. I'm not sure who gave you the idea that Wayland is production ready, but it's certainly not going to see prime-time Linux for another few years.

Ubuntu 21.04 will be using Wayland by default for non-Nvidia users, which would suggest that it's not far off.

There are also configurations that are better supported by Wayland than X11, not to mention Wayland handles things like trackpad gestures better (which at this point, X11 is never going to get better at), so even if it's not yet production ready there are reasons why some might want to use it.

Such is the burden of choice. Today, however, x11 is still the standard.

x11 is considered deprecated and is in maintenance mode so it very much is not the standard anymore.

Well, it is still the standard, in the same way that Windows XP was still the standard in 2010.

X is no more standard than Wayland at this point. While many distributions still use X by default, it is in maintenance mode, and on it's way out.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/trying-wayland-by-default-aga...

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/WaylandByDefault

It seems reasonable to expect that these two distro's are the main ones in use by people who don't know enough to pick for themselves.

"Grass is green, the sky is blue"

"I downvoted you for lack of details"

FFS.

But in reality, the grass is orange and the sky is brown.

::Mind Blown::

> I downvoted you for the lack of details.

Have you heard of... asking?

This is HN. If you are writing something, try to say something meaningful or don’t post at all.

I've just realized the reason I like this site so much is because I can watch a passionate argument play out and still like both sides.

Indeed, I switched to Mac in 2004 because Linux was a horrible UX mess at that point. Mac was a great POSIX system with a consistent UI and major first-party apps.

Now Apple is becoming more and more unworkable to use as a unix system, and Linux is really much better now. Only gap is still first-party software unfortunately but luckily I don't really ever need stuff like photoshop and office personally.

> luckily I don't really ever need stuff like ... office

If you do, check out CrossOver: https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover

It's a straight up Microsoft Office suite clone for Mac and Linux, which can open, save, AND create MSOffice formats (.docx, etc.).

Huh? CrossOver is just a Wine fork with a GUI. It's not an Office suite. You can install the real MS Office on it, but it has no actual office applications built-in.

are you thinking of libreoffice?

Others have spoken about how the Linux experience have improved vastly due KDE Plasma et al. I think something which has been part and parcel of the Linux experience always been the latency(From opening apps to performing other tasks), that's what made it usable on even older hardware and I feel it's underrated.

I switched from Kaby Lake-based Core i5 MacBook Pro to Kaby Lake-based Core i5 Linux laptop half the cost due to the Big Sur issues and the productivity has improved several fold.

The apps just opens at the blink of an eye, A phrase often used to describe M1 based Macs is absolutely applicable to my Linux experience after switching from a Mac. Further with KVM, large enough RAM VMs run like any other apps without bogging down the system.

I just tried the latest Ubuntu on an X1 Carbon and was disappointed. At first it was looking good, but then the warts started to show through. I could live with some of the problems, but I had to do some searching to learn that the reason Firefox scrolling was laggy was I was using a non-standard hidpi scale factor, the UI froze multiple times in just a few days, and it felt all around glitchier.

1. Maybe give Kubuntu a try. Have not used Gnome in many years now, but when I did, lag was a given.

2. Have you setup full disk encryption? Unless tweaked (thanks to Cloudflare kernel patches) dm-crypt will cause short system freezes.

3. Firefox is still an unfortunate story on Linux. Still no hardware acceleration enabled by default (and just in the last year, I think, made toggleable universally in about:config)

2. Ah, I did set it up (and it had to do it by hand to dual boot). It's just all these things added up--they're table stakes for an OS.

As a pro, at least, dual booting with Linux is still straighforward. I guess other OSes can't compete there.

I have to admit that otherwise its not all roses in Linuxland. Fedora for example, a couple of versions ago switched their upgrade peocedure to the awful download now, reboot system and wait for updates to complete. Basically upgrades feel like Window upgrades now. Maybe that's the way they want to "force" users to swith to Fedora Silverblue :)

Or, you could just install Debian. Then install all the windowing environments you find interesting. No "swap to Kubuntu" required, just start a different window manager. Hell, run all of them simultaneously on the same install using a VNC server.

Thanks for mentioning the Cloudflare patches. While I had already read about that in the past, I wasn't sure what's the current status of their work. So I checked it out and was pleasantly surprised as their patches are included in the mainline kernel since Linux 5.9.

Here is their blog post about the whole topic: https://blog.cloudflare.com/speeding-up-linux-disk-encryptio...

> I like many was a little tempted by the M1 Macs

If you’re interested in the gains on the M1 but dissatisfied with macOS, I encourage supporting the development of native Linux on M1, Asahi Linux. Please contribute however you can. I can’t do the groundwork, so I joined up on Patreon.

https://asahilinux.org/

We should really be thankful of that one guy in france who got linux working with a variety of cameras.

> The fingerprint readers work! The webcams work! Audio works! Wifi works! All with close to zero hassle (had to enable a PAM option to use the fingerprint reader with sudo, but otherwise no problems).

You're happy now, but wait until you try using the trackpads.

There's only one company in the world that cares enough about ergonomic fit and finish to make a laptop that's actually pleasant to use over long periods of time: Apple. The kinks will be worked out with the M1s and macOS in general, and then Linux will look like the joke it is by comparison again.

Honestly, a mediocre trackpad is a small price to pay for an ethically sourced system. Considering I do 90% of my work with a mouse, I've never really missed using MacOS. The touch-based metaphors only hurt mouse users anyways.

Fwiw I don’t mind the trackpad on my XPS or my wife’s ThinkPad at all. Two finger scrolling works just fine, I’ve set up trackpad gestures to go into the overview and switch between workspaces (three finger swipes), and I don’t have any problem moving the cursor around or clicking on things.

I do try to use the mouse as little as possible on whatever system I’m using, but even when I have to, it’s no problem. Just as a point of comparison, I don’t think the trackpads on these machines are anywhere near as much worse (for me) compared to the MacBooks as the keyboards on the MacBooks on the past couple of generations (2018? whenever they added the zero travel keyboards that constantly broke) were compared to literally any other keyboard.

I’ve got Debian on an X1 carbon and everything is flawless. I wouldn’t doubt that mac’s trackpad is still slightly better by some measure but any difference is in the noise for me.

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