I switched from macOS to Linux after 15 years of Apple
markosaric.com
markosaric.com
This will be super unpopular, but Linux missed the desktop boat 20 years ago, and my feeling as someone who at the time built his gentoo OS's from source, it was the fault of a few things:
1) Fragmented gui development. There were too many projects with none focusing on really making a better gui than mac/windows.
2) A lack of bread and butter 1st class "business" apps - you know, office. OpenOffice is fine, IF you are ok with the janky ui and no one knowing how it works.
3) lack of open source exchange type mail/cal/etc server and outlook-like client). Holy fudge, I tried to get this going and people just crapped on me for suggesting it.
4) Until recently, installing on laptops was an absolute crap shoot.
5) Just, apps, in general. Gimp is fine, but it has never been close to photoshop. GUI standards are all over the place, etc. People go to a platform because it has the tools they want. The real fallout from point 1 is no one would ever port apps to linux (a little hyperbolic - a lot of high-end post production apps and audio apps all made it over). Open source yadda yadda, thats nice (this is not a brush off, it IS nice), but the ecosystem could be light years ahead of where we are now.
Good luck getting multiple different sized monitors to work well out of the box (e.g. laptop + external) on Linux, sometimes even with tinkering you are left with subpar scaling on one. Mac on the other hand just handles whatever combo of monitors and resolutions you throw at it with nothing that you have to do on your side and has done so for a decade now.
Things are much more likely to eventually break if you use an installation too long - I rarely have issues with 5+ year old Windows but most distros don't even support that, and even if they do good luck getting through all the upgrades without having to tinker. Hell, I have to manually mess with PPAs at least once a year just to apply updates.
There's also just too much choice with so many of the options having drawbacks that are hard to distinguish between, especially for non-power users.
There's a ton of other stuff like that that we Linux users are used to so it's not too bad for us but that cause so many people who get a linux machine from a friend to eventually just pay for a Windows install on it since they can't deal with it..
Just Works™ actually. Using a laptop/external simultaneous combo at different resolutions right now, and it's literally perfect. It even gets the scaling right. Not a second of configuration.
- 5k
- Built in webcam
- Built in speakers
- Built in mic
All work on Fedora. Thinking about it now, I realize that I may be overselling it in that I did have to tinker to get brightness adjusting to work. I installed this [0] tool, and mapped +/- to Super +, and Super - so that I can quickly adjust brightness.
So, it's definitely not as seamless a setup as the Mac, but it was honestly not bad at all and is a great setup.
It sounds like you might still be using Xorg?
These are all solved problems in Wayland (that is, as long as the applications are native Wayland clients, and not running through XWayland) but some people are still reluctant or unable (see NVidia EGLStream debacle) to migrate yet.
I think this is the biggest issue in the Linux user Space. This is simply a wrong assumption for at least a few years now.
Ubuntu, for some reason, tends more break way more dramatic than other distros (usually something with complex deps)
Suddenly seeing a black screen with an Apple while I'm in the middle of something important is irritating at best, especially when it happens repeatedly and I haven't pinned down the RC.
Of course, that assumes a desktop environment. On a server, if a process starts using up a lot of memory, it's probably vitally important to keeping the (database|webserver) up, and should not be constrained in any way.
Which probably explains the situation that we're in.
I was so angry I went and upgraded to 64GB of RAM and now it's stable. I found out that I don't use any more tabs than I have in the past, with gobs of RAM available. So I believe it's just the web getting more bloated over time along with Chrome getting more bloated. One day I suspect I'll be running the same number of tabs and 64GB won't even save me.
Lately I've been running with "swappiness" turned way down, but not with completely disabled swap. Eh, I've got 32 GiB of RAM now, my system can handle a few programs in memory -- even a couple of Electron ones.
(edit) if it is not installed by the distro allready (eg dietpi). It creates a swappartition per thread inside ram, unused pages get compressed and stored there. Increases SSD lifetime by reducing writes to swappartition/file on disk.
I wonder if the arrival of the 3D revolution was just a little too early for computer nerds to embrace an open source ecosystem from the get-go and how different it would've been if "If you want to run DOOM/Quake/Unreal Tournament then install OpenSUSE/Slackware so you don't have to bother Fiddling with drivers on DOS" would've been more commonplace.
From the 80s to the 2000s, video games became a multi-billion dollar industry that inspired two half-generations of kids to pursue careers in technology, but the world of FOSS was so focused on different use cases that the middle ground of "computer curious" kids probably wasn't as big of a revolution as it could've been.
Hopefully, the work Valve is putting into Proton/WINE + Steam Deck will give us a piece of that alternate history.
1. What is great about the windows GUI? Virtual desktops depend on monitors, annoying popup notifications that cannot be disabled and its resource intensive. IMHO linux has always been light years ahead of windows for as long as I remember, theres dozens of window managers better than the windows one. I am never 100% comfortable in windows, it's so locked down I feel like I am living in a hotel.
2. I do everything with the google docs these days, even on windows. So do a lot of businesses.
3. Again, most people seem to be using google calendar.
4. I actually found it easier to install on laptops back in the day. UEFI made it more painful.
5. A lot of unix tools are 2nd class citizens on windows. You can use WSL but file access is dog slow compared to the real thing.
In WSL1, access to files on the Windows host is far quicker than WSL2 and symlinks work everywhere.
To try to counteract this, I opted in to the insiders dev channel recently to try the upcoming X11 support, i.e. run IDEA inside WSL. While the performance is quite good, it's broken, e.g. try using find in project, the window disappears immediately 9 times out of 10.
In many ways, I found WSL1 more useable as I could use one shell for both the Windows and WSL filesystems with reasonable performance. I now use cygwin if I want to use gnu linux type tools on Windows.
Once the X11 support matures it will be a pretty good experience overall if people are willing to install things like IDEA in WSL, I'm looking forward to that.
I find this pretty annoying, as I need to access Windows files from WSL more often than the opposite (e.g. get stuff from my Windows Downloads folder, or use bash to quickly interact with a Windows folder). Do you know if access to Docker volumes is faster or slower on WSL2 by the way? I wouldn't switch back to WSL1 since some nix/cabal stuff didn't work on WSL1 at all but I am curious as that's the other point where my windows/wsl filesystems touch in ways I've never looked into.
If your files are stored within the VM itself, WSL2's access to them is effectively native. However accessing the files from Windows requires going through the \\wsl$ (P9) network share. This presents problems as Windows isn't going to receive file notification events if you do something like `git checkout`. Additionally, if your project utilizes symlinks, Windows only sees them as an empty file.
Users of VS Code largely will not encounter these problems as running `code` from within the WSL layer will start a remote server, it's seamless, that's genuinely very cool. However, if you use anything else, I've found it to be problematic.
The "best" solution I arrived at (other than dual-booting Linux, which is totally worth it!) is to install `xorg-server` from cygwin, install my IDE of choice in WSL2 (IDEA) and use X11 forwarding. This way the IDE has a relatively real-time view of the filesystem, receives notification events, symlinks work, chmod is preserved if using safe-writes etc.
If you need to use bash (and other tools not provided by Git Bash), cygwin is a useful addition. You can also use `mklink` from cmd/powershell to create a directory hardlink to the \\wsl$ folder if you need to copy things into WSL (although it's easier to access /mnt/drive from WSL2). Either way, I've found any direction of crossing Host/VM filesystem boundaries to be slower than WSL1's approach.
Why don't ya'll just use Linux?
This just sounds so much more difficult than using the real thing.
If you need anything Windows-related (e.g. to use a specific game or software) using WSL on top is actually really nice (I do all my real work from there fine when not on my Linux machine currently) and less hassle than dual-booting. If I decide not to use anything Windows related or do GPU-based ML (which I assume is worse on WSl) outside of the cloud I'll install Linux on another drive on this machine and go back to it fully. I honestly never expected to stick to Windows with just WSL on this machine when I put it on for trying some games.
That’s why I put up with WSL2. I hate dealing with bootloaders.
It's easier now to just maintain a single installation of Windows than setup a dual boot and continuously switch between whenever you want to edit an image in Photoshop or play a commercial game.
And nevermind doing GPU accelerated tasks unless I want to faff around doing KVM stuff.
Easier to just use Windows directly and WSL2 when I need it.
You're not sacrificing any resources, in both cases you're running a full Linux and a full Windows.
As far as GPU acceleration it's just as much of a pain inside of WSL2 than in a regular VM.
Fwiw I only use Windows for Genshin Impact now. Photoshop works well enough usig Wine, the installer won't run but that's not an issue.
Not really. For one, you are mostly fine running Linux terminal-only so it's really light and you are using less resources with Windows+WSL than Linux + full VM Windows.
Second, if you need both Linux and Windows you typically need Windows for something heavy - e.g. a Game, Photoshop, whatever, so having Windows in the VM is typically more limiting.
Also you really miss a lot of Linux if you're running it terminal only without a GPU. Being unable to use the Jetbrains IDEs on Linux is the biggest one for a developer that's universal to any field.
Also if you have to do something heavy, it's almost universally better to do it on Linux, ie, higher speed and better reliability.
What do you need it for in WSL2? Perhaps machine learning/crypto stuff?
> Photoshop works well enough usig Wine, the installer won't run but that's not an issue
If you were using Windows it would work better than 'well enough' and the installer would run.
GPU acceleration in WSL2 is useful for ML, but also accelerated video encode/decode, and some simulations I had to work on. It's also very useful for anything using a GUI, as all the major UI toolkits in Linux use native GPU acceleration.
Real desktop linux has been, and is, a thing. I've been using Linux as my primary business desktop for more than 20 years. Yes, really.
Now, in the industry I'm in, I am forced into a windows 10 environment. Which I do the best I can to push out of the way, so I can have a real machine. MobaXterm to provide a single root X window. XFCE4 for windowing, Plank for a dock. WSL2 (unfortunately) underneath, running an older RHEL (not my choice). Looks/feels mostly like a linux box.
I use it for dev/testing/analytics/data science. File access is still as slow as sin, network performance is terrible. Windows apps are unstable, and will take down the machine from time to time.
I am pushing for a linux laptop/desktop as I am far more productive in that desktop environment. Since most of our work is linux based, this makes sense.
Big no go for anyone who also want to test software in other VMs
Some might, but goodness knows I've never run into one. The corporate America I have interacted with so far (30 year career, so not trivial) is Office all the way down, and deeply enmeshed with Exchange calendaring. (I mean, as an MSFT-hater from the 90s, it pains me to admit this, but Exchange calendaring is materially better than anything else. Sometimes, Redmond does things well.)
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-g-suite-gmail-2-billi...
Regarding you experience with GSuite, assuming that you have used MS Office previously, do you find it sufficient for your needs?
I worked with MS Office before. My use of Word was the same and google docs, actually, I think is better due to a lack of fancy features. I just use basic text formatting in outline format and attached pictures.
I didn't use excel before.
So yeah I prefer gsuite to office. I had to do a document with word and track changes over email a few months back. It was brutal. Gsuite destroys that workflow.
Did those 3 companies have more than 1000 employees? 100?
Googles suite of tools have been first class citizens at almost every company I've been at.
Sure, if you're a software company GSuite is good enough.
Our o365 was down for about half the trial period. We chose google....
And by "legacy" I presume you mean, "Have been around at least 30 years." Sorry to tell you, but the Walmarts of the world aren't so much legacy as established.
Excel is so far ahead of Google's offering - or anything else in that space -- that it's ubiquitous. It's insanely powerful, and its power is accessible to nontechnical people. That's an enormous thing.
Remember, spreadsheets were the original "killer app" that got PCs into the biz world. They're still a huge part of everyday life for vast numbers of workers -- and not just in the midwest as you sneeringly suggest.
> it's ubiquitous
it isn't - as I stated elsewhere I've never worked at a company where MS Office tools were a first class citizen, while almost every company I've worked at uses google docs/sheets frequently.
> It's insanely powerful
maybe? I mean I think if you need powerful tools excel/sheets is never the solution - they are really good at solving simple problems easily - there are better fits for problems that need "insane power"
> its power is accessible to nontechnical people
very fair point - the on ramp gets nontechnical people to become technical, but it is _not_ easier to do complex things in excel/sheets than in a general purpose programming language. It's just more accessible.
> as you sneeringly suggest.
starting and ending with a point to make the parent sounds malicious when no malice needed to be interpreted.
I think I will go back and downvote now. It's simply not a conversation that warrants much of any emotional response. We're talking about boring tools here.
2. There's no "maybe" about Excel's accessible power. You have a bias to coding, which is predictable here, but "just learn to code" is not the answer for most people who just want to ask questions of the dataset. Excel does this for them. So yes, if you need powerful tools, spreadsheets absolutely ARE VERY OFTEN THE SOLUTION.
3. The power available to someone who learned to code at 12 is one thing, but that power is fundamentally alien and totally unapproachable to the average MBA in finance. And consequently it's entirely irrelevant. OTOH, Excel with its host of data science add-ins is HIGHLY available and will allow the user to get answers without having to learn to code. This is power.
My comment re: "as you sneeringly suggest" was 100% directed at pknomad, who snarked that the only people using something as tragically unhip as spreadsheets were in the midwest -- i.e., out of step with the mainstream and tied to ways of the past.
I stand by that comment without reservation, but it wasn't directed at YOU given that it was a reply to someone else.
My observation is based on the fact that most companies in mid-west (even Chicago yes) use Office generally because they're migrating from on-premise Microsoft solutions. I'm not passing any judgements.
Cargill, Old Republic Insurance company, et al all use Office365 or Microsoft solution.
Excel is indeed ahead of G suite offering but my post never made any indication otherwise.
In my world, Office is only used when you are consulting to companies where most data is for monthly meetings made of people that don't really care.
Heck, I regularly manage to run into people that have managed to convince themselves that nobody actually runs Linux servers or that Java is the only programming language that has any traction...
The truth is that real-world tech adoption is actually extremely heterogeneous and we would all do well to remind ourselves of that from time to time.
It’s fine as a replacement for Word (I guess? I’m not much of a Word user). But Excel is so far ahead. And the ergonomics of working in a real application vs a web app is a significant difference.
I'm an Excel fan as well but in our case it simply would not work due to the fact the team is spread across so many locations.
** Google Docs encountered an error. Please try reloading this page, or coming back to it in a few minutes.
To learn more about the Google Docs editors, please visit our help centre.
We're sorry for the inconvenience. - The Google Docs Team **
... It went away 10 minutes later, but I can't have that in the middle of a working day.
Sorry, the file you have requested does not exist.
Make sure that you have the correct URL and that the file exists.
Get stuff done with Google Drive
Apps in Google Drive make it easy to create, store and share online documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more.
Learn more at drive.google.com/start/apps.
....
The above is actually an error produced by me just trying to create a new blank page.
Sorry, I won't be going near Sheets for anything I care about. I'll try again in a year. The above annoyed the hell out of me.
I realize the parent question was more focused on how people find success with Google Docs, but if that success is primarily due to collaboration, and collaboration in O365 is now decent, I wonder if some of the justifications for using Google Docs still hold up.
I haven’t had many issues over the last 6-12 months, though, and as far as I can tell, they continue to improve.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a fan of MS products and as I said, I think Google still has the edge in collaboration. But they’ve come far, and it wasn’t that long ago that those collaboration features were unusable or non-existent.
I do a big charity bike ride every year, and track my donors in Excel (largely because the initial dump of donation data came from the org in that format).
I try to be smart about my appeals, and I rapidly ran into limitations on pulling certain sets of email addresses out of Excel easily/simply/etc., and my next-step turned out to be Jupyter. It's GREAT for that, and I can still keep my data in Excel as a source and just query against it.
But I can't imagine trying to do the whole thing in Jupyter.
Excel is an amazing piece of software esp for a power gui. But so is Python. For my work I'm either dealing with about 1k rows max... or I'm dealing with millions of rows or more, things that break excel. Or multi terra, stuff that likes a cluster.
Google Docs is to Word what Google Sheets is to Excel in terms of functionality. As long as what you're doing is simple, it's fine, and if what you're doing requires collaboration, it's great. But when you want to do something remotely complex, Docs and Sheets largely get their asses handed to them by Apple's free iWork apps, let alone Microsoft Office.
I think the big transition at PWC was 5 years or so ago I think, but to this day every document I get from them is Excel / Word. Despite how much work went into those accounts - these are not complex spreadsheets either!
- Regex support in find & replace and regexextract(). - FX rates as a formula instead of as a data type. IIRC Excel requires 2 columns to display a FX rate (one to specify the pair, one to print the number); Google Sheets specifies the pair inside the formula.
Example: How do you enter a cell to edit in Excel? On the desktop (I'm a mac user), it's ctrl-u (yep - ctrl). On the web I can't find any shortcut. I have to double click the cell like an animal.
Example: How do you select all the text inside a cell. On the mac it's cmd-a as you'd expect, on the web it's ctrl-a. Sigh.
The seamless collaboration of Google's apps is a joy, though as you've indicated, you give up a lot of features and power.
If you've never programmed, "just use SQL" is super daunting. OTOH, Excel gives you access to that kind of data query power without writing code, and the people who are good at it can do pretty amazing things with it. It's a different way of solving that problem.
It's a powerful tool, and it's a well-built one (again, it pains me to say, bc I grew up hating MSFT). If you're on a platform that has access to a native app, exploring it can actually be fun.
It's not something most people would choose their operating system for.
Just because the average HN poster doesn't interact with these people from their tech silo doesn't mean they don't exist.
And yeah, there's a real history in computing of spreadsheets literally driving platform adoption.
What glitches have you seen (so I'm prepared when I meet them)?
You can also use WSL2, which has fast file I/O. Unless you're trying to write to files in /mnt/c, at which point the comparison makes less sense, and a more accurate comparison would be trying to write to files on a remote Windows machine from Linux (also slow).
> compared to the real thing
Um, it is the "real thing". It's running in a hypervisor, on the real CPU core.
Why is this a negative? This is actually one of the largest pain points for me in switching from Windows/Mac to Linux.
I confirm, my pathway to linux started with using alternative shells & apps on windows to improve on the existing ones, bblean, xoblite, aston shell... good times
1) XFCE is the pinnacle of desktop environments: https://xfce.org/
It's extremely stable, looks good, works fast and is customizable. It works equally well on old underpowered devices, modern ones, as well as servers (should you ever need that sort of thing for whatever reason). It also has plenty of widgets without any of the modern bloat.
2) LibreOffice is great open source office software: https://www.libreoffice.org/
It started out as a fork of OpenOffice and has since become the mainstay under GNU/Linux distributions. It does word processing. It does spreadsheets. You can make drawings and visualizations in it. It does presentations. There's even a simple database offering in there, a la MS Access.
It also supports MS Office formats for the most part and can convert them to open ones with very few issues! The performance is also better than any web based offering. Plus, it's cross platform!
3) Thunderbird is perhaps the best mail client, regardless of platform: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/
It's stable, reliable and has its origins in Mozilla. It does everything i'd expect a mail client to do and i've had no problems with it to date. Plus, it's cross platform!
As for mail servers, i think that mail servers are a horrible mess for the most part, regardless of which platform you need them on. I think that your best bet in that regard is just using a Docker container that packages all of the components that you'd need: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver
4) This is absolutely true, but then again, you can say the same about any piece of unpopular hardware.
Linux on mobile phones is a mess. Then again, even FreeBSD on certain pieces of desktop hardware oftentimes fails to work as well. Many years have passed, but this can still be problematic, given that perhaps we treat drivers wrong as an industry.
My cheap Chinese netbook (i'm not too well off financially) had the mouse not work on Fedora and some other distros. Sometimes the audio wouldn't work. Now, sometimes the mouse gets stuck in a state where it acts as a scroll wheel. In Windows, function keys worked as they should (after pressing the Fn key you could access them), but in Linux distros it was flipped and i found myself having to press Fn to use the F1-F12 keys, with no option in BIOS to flip this. The fingerprint scanner just doesn't work and isn't even detected. The Wi-Fi drivers didn't work and i had to compile them from some random GitHub repository that i found online. The distro didn't have GCC and the netbook doesn't have an ethernet port so i had to suffer through doing an air gapped install, which was problematic because of the dependencies. I got it working for the most part, but it was a pain.
Things really should be better. But that can probably only be achieved by either open drivers and open standards for most of the hardware out there, or by killing off about 75% of the hardware vendors out there, which in practice simply means that you only have to buy hardware that works well (e.g. Thinkpads).
5) The choices that i find myself making are rather easy - either i use open source software, or i do less.
However i agree for the most part with the observations about Linux not being an awfully popular platform for porting applications. I do think that this has three main causes: packaging being somewhat difficult to get started with (as well as needing to support a variety of distros), the GUI frameworks across Windows/Linux/Mac being a total mess and there being no "good" options out there, and then there also really not being a large commercial effort to make the struggle of porting something over worthwhile.
Interestingly, the GUI framework situation isn't such a large issue if you go with something like Lazarus, JavaFX or even Swing for your software, but those can be ugly, so people don't. Still, i'd argue that either of those have the potential to be better choices than Electron apps.
> Open source yadda yadda.
This is it right here. I think this is the main differentiator. At the end of the day whether a person is happy on Linux depends on how much they care about software freedom. I'm willing to put up with the Linux jank because free software is really important to me and aligns with my values.
In the end, it gets not so bad. But GUI front ends for package managers, like [especially] GNOME Software are horrendous from my experience. Which is not so great of a look; of all the things that should be user-friendly it should be package management (IMHO). Package manager failures (conflicts, whatever) are handled horribly by GUI front-ends and even then usually require some expertise to fix, which is a pain. At least Fedora Silverblue nails the updates so that stuff usually doesn't break... but of all the things that were broken OOTB for me on my install... it was (duh!) GNOME Software.
But the GUIs are awful. The cli experience is awful, too, but better and we get used to it. They're never going to get used to it, and why would they want to? I don't know the answer; package management is a complicated problem. But maybe some sort of distributed app-store experience where the package manager also manages marketing for and forums about the apps. See, I really don't know - but having to go to a webpage and read a bunch of marketing material then download, or go to an app store and get descriptions, screenshots, and commentary by other users is somehow a subjectively better experience for non-tech types than "apt-cache search" or its GUI equivalents.
The manjaro gui tool also to you do snap/ flatpak. Those two are about as close as you'll get to a district independent package manager.
I think that holds true for anything honestly. I never cared much about how annoying it is to install EXEs on windows, visiting each website, clicking through another dialog etc. Neither did I care about the GUI.
Now that I'm using Linux on my personal devices however, I got to like package managers and tiling WMs.
But from a historical perspective, desktop Linux was only made possible by Nvidia and their closed driver. That's a sad fact. I've been on Linux "desktop" since 1995 or so. There are only two businesses that really gave much of a crap about Linux (other than Red Hat) and those were: id Software and Nvidia. ATI had total garbage for drivers for many many years. Practically up until AMD bought them. I built a HTPC back in 2005 around a passively-cooled ATI card trying to get it silent as possible. The idea was that I would use the Radeon driver on Linux and everything would just work. But it didn't. And I was stuck using Windows.
ATI shares part of the blame for why Linux never made it on the desktop. You can't have one of the two major video card vendors dropping the ball for so long and come out okay.
Intel Integrated graphics has been around for a long time now, it has open drivers and since its first release, it has been more than adequate for most non-gamers.
Maybe that's just me, but I don't really care that much about NVidia or ATI/AMD, and the state of their drives don't impact my ability to meaningfully use Linux on the desktop.
It is ultimately just way better than Windows. Windows 10 is just an embarrassment.
Business apps: Google Docs & Microsoft Office both have web versions that are good enough for many people.
Mail / calendar clients: I am a nerd who prefers to use emacs for email, but I’m the weirdo—just like anyone who uses a native Outlook client. I also use Fastmail’s web interface, its iOS app, and the mail app on my iPhone. And even that is weird, because everyone just uses Gmail.
Laptop support: Yes that used to be a problem for Linux for varying definitions of “recently.” Used to be. My corp-issued laptop took to Linux just fine with nothing discernibly less functional than Windows.
The apps that don’t exist on the web are getting more and more niche.
This MIGHT be because the invite/accept/scheduling setup in Exchange is so good that it's hard to sell anything else. It also might be that most big orgs are very wisely reticent to host their email with an advertising company.
I'm also gonna push back on the "web tools are enough for most people." I mean, how effective is the web version of Excel, really? Can it easily interact with local data stores for elaborate data mining and updatable queries? My guess is "probably not". How is it for macro development? My company works closely with the finance orgs of our client parties, and let me tell you a LOT of these folks are extremely advanced Excel users. Web tools aren't to par here.
Web Outlook is also pretty awful compared to the native version, quite honestly, as is Word. Maybe PowerPoint is okay, but I'm not a power user of PPT so I don't really know.
My professional life has been interacting with very large organizations (as clients, not employers) -- think Fortune 500 firms, if not bigger. Major oil companies (I live in Texas), major defense contractors, etc.
These are not GSuite users, generally speaking. It's Office and Exchange in these places. Microsoft is VERY VERY STRONG at the Enterprise level.
I setup several companies on google apps. Never had an issue. But I would be more reluctant to do so again.
Pushback -- neither excel nor sheets are the right tool for that job.
- No other tools are made available to them by their hidebound, ossified IT;
- They don't have training in SQL or other query languages, but they are WIZARDS with pivot tables and related technologies.
One thing that's hard for tech folks to really internalize is that tool choice is secondary to results for many folks. That's okay. It's especially ok if organizational factors prevent better or more "appropriate" tools.
The people you describe still exist, just like me and my fellow emacs users. But we’re not the future.
R and Pandas are cool, but they do not appear to be gaining market share from people using pivot tables and Power Query in our market.
I’d posit that customers of “high-end project management financial reporting software sold to very large customers” is starting to get niche.
Again, my point isn’t to say that these people don’t exist. My point is that “data wizard” increasingly means not Excel. Plenty of non-tech firms are happy to hire entry-level “data scientists” who write some SQL queries, gin up some reports with spiffy graphics, and bang together a dashboard in Shiny or Tableau. It used to be that this kind of basic reporting work was done almost exclusively with Excel. Even if Excel has exclusivity in some specific industries, Excel’s influence and utter dominance just isn’t what it used to be.
Put another way, I’ve taught intro R / Python skills to enough undergrad and grad students in professional career tracks to see that the future for Excel looks weaker than its past.
You can use photoshop cc on linux
I've found PhotoGIMP makes GIMP UI more like Photoshop, which helps me a lot: https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP/releases
On a Mac I switched from Photoshop to Pixelmator no problem. Hoping PhotoGimp can help me do the same.
Desktop Linux in 2021 is nothing like it was 20 years ago. Plasma Desktop is a great experience these days, and in my opinion, surpasses both the Windows and macOS desktop shell experiences while implementing features from both systems.
True, it's now significantly more complicated and there at least 300 more distros worth of fragmentation. But at least sound finally works!... usually...
Yes Linux desktops have been a complicated topic. But it's incredible easy to build something less distractive than windows 10.
One problem I do have with Plasma (though this may just be how arch packages it) - Dolphin, the native plasma file manager, is not included by default. Yes, I know it's not much of an imposition to do pacman -Sy dolphin but a file manager seems like an integral part of the system to me worthy of being included in the base package for a desktop environment.
Little choices like that affect new user adoption.
And ask someone who isn't familiar with it to find a setting. It's a hot mess. Just a hot mess a majority of people are used to.
Disclaimer: very happy user
Getting KDE Connect (Killer feature IMO) to work needed fiddling with the firewall, but while annoying at the time in retrospect it leaves a good impression.
Podman is availlable without jumping through hoops, and nearly everthing i need is availlable via opi (think AUR but mostly official, directly from OBS), if it is not in Tumbleweed allready.
In my experience, Plasma Desktop runs well even on old hardware and uses about the same amount of memory as Xfce.
The brutal fact is commercial software is essential to the success of any desktop or mobile platform. That’s because it brings massive investment. The total ongoing investment in commercial applications dwarfs that of open source desktop applications, in developer-hours terms, probably thousands, or tens of thousands to one. Getting to that scale means paying people money, and not just developers. Artists, designers, QA and domain experts in the specialist fields niche apps serve. There’s just no way open source apps can possibly compete.
By failing to provide compelling support for commercial application development and distribution, the Linux desktop has starved itself of the breadth and depth of apps needed to succeed. When you’re competing with the Mac, Windows, iOS or Android you’re not just competing with Apple, Microsoft or Google. You’re competing with the hundreds of billions of dollars in app and service ecosystems that have been built around those platforms.
(Which, (1) of course is the creator's right, but I still miss the old mindset, and (2) "why not just keep using the old software?" doesn't work because Apple's commitment to backward compatibility is, umm, not high.)
Also their moving Big Brother onto the iPhone is a pretty good sign where they are taking all of their systems. No, I don't want my computer spying on me for the sake of my government. Not so much because I think that they will do me wrong, as because it provides a way to target inconvenient people who I don't want targeted. (Think Snowden.)
That one is 90% gone and Apple will likely kill off the remainder before long. They're in the consumer gadgets business now, that there is accidentally a computer in there somewhere is more of a historical artifact than the main business driver. It's all about eco-systems and lock in, not about productivity or creativity.
Citation needed...?
Everything you've listed still works and works very well on macOS.
Developers used to prefer Mac because it was Unix when the UI on every other Unix-like was bad. Now the UI on Linux is better than it used to be, and Windows has WSL et al, and Mac is full of "pay for a license annually and deal with code signing nonsense" that developers hate.
I've used both (PS on macOS/Windows) recently and find them to be more or less equivalent. Given the choice of using macOS or Windows, I'd still take macOS.
Not sure what the point of your line re: hardware is when a standard M1 Mini runs very well for this use case. If you want a bigger monitor... just buy the bigger monitor with a Mini.
>Now the UI on Linux is better than it used to be
I ran Desktop Linux for years before going macOS, and I check in periodically. I remain unimpressed, it's still a jumbled mess of an ecosystem. UI is also not the stumbling block to Linux adoption - hardware support alone, while better, still isn't up to what you get with the big two.
>and Windows has WSL et al
This is a fair point, and was an incredibly smart thing for MSFT to do.
>and Mac is full of "pay for a license annually and deal with code signing nonsense" that developers hate.
Have you ever code signed anything elsewhere, where you buy certs and such? It costs money. Apple's setup is a flat $100/year and "just works". This is also only if you're shipping software, you can run homebrew/etc just fine if you're doing dev work - there's tons of developers working on macOS who never pay Apple the $100/year for membership.
Can you actually refute what I'm saying, which is that macOS is still very usable by developers? The OP I responded to originally is claiming that the macOS devs loved is "90% gone", but outside of HN/Reddit echo chambers I don't see people switching en-masse.
But to Apple's credit, it can be done, and done using the native toolset. It took me awhile, but my relatively simple Makefile is building fat binaries (x86_64 + arm64), building and signing the application package, submitting the package for signing, and stapling certificates. Not monolithically--it's not a giant shell script posing as a Makefile. I have proper, correctly defined build dependencies for every real target up to `make submit`. So `make submit` will effectively build and submit a package both from a fresh checkout, as well as incrementally from an existing tree where only a few object files need rebuilding. But `make submit` and `make staple` themselves are .PHONY targets; they're not idempotent, but invoking them multiple times is still benign.
I would not call it esoteric and/or opaque. It's one or two shell scripts and an API key through App Connect for the notarization pass.
Once you figure things out, it's not nearly as bad. The tools can work well. And that's hugely valuable. But documentation and consistency are significantly worse than common open source projects. And at least with open source you can also resort to looking at the code to figure things out. I find myself constantly doing that for Keychain, actually. Fortunately older versions of Apple's Security.framework are open source, which helps me diagnose and analyze API usage problems. Want to figure out how to retrieve the usage constraints (i.e. SecAccessControlCreateFlags) used to generate a T2 Secure Enclave private key? Or even simpler, want to figure out if its even possible to derive those constraints? Only the code is going to tell you.
Ugh, not this again.
Apple's hardware support is fine because they only have to support a few bits of hardware. Microsoft's hardware support is fine because everyone (aside from Apple) sells their laptops preinstalled with Windows, and so of course they design them with Windows in mind, and test to make sure things work.
Linux's hardware support is also fine, if you buy your hardware with the intent to run Linux on it and look for something that's supported well, or buy something the manufacturer has built with Linux support in mind. All the "Linux hardware support is bad" stuff comes from people who already have a random Windows laptop or Mac and decide they want to run Linux on it, despite the fact that if they just did a quick web search they'd find a list of problems with their hardware.
Saying Linux's hardware support isn't good enough is like saying macOS's hardware support is not good enough, because you tried to run macOS on a random HP laptop. Run an OS on hardware that it supports well and your experience will be fine.
> UI is also not the stumbling block to Linux adoption
I agree that it's not the stumbling block, but it's a big one. The GNOME developers seem to like to completely change everything often, and break a bunch of things in the process. I don't know much about KDE; last time I tried it was in the late 90s. Xfce (which I use) is ridiculously stable (it's hardly changed at all in the 15+ years I've used it, and I think that's a good thing), but it's built by a very small team, and so it's always a bit behind on polish and covering all tasks with GUI tools. But I love it[0], and it works well and stays out of my way.
The other major stumbling block is commercial software distribution. Go check out a commercial software package's website, and unless it's Electron- or Java-based, you'll see one download each for Windows and Mac, and 10 different downloads for various distros and versions of Linux (if you're lucky!). I would hate to be the person who manages releases for all that.
I don't particularly mind, though: most of the software I use is open source and in my distro's package manager, and the few commercial apps I have work fine (because I run Debian, and most commercial apps will have a Debian download, or at least an Ubuntu one that can be made to work without much trouble). But that's just me, and an average user wouldn't want to put up with this.
Honestly, I'm afraid that too much desktop popularity would destroy Linux (and turn it into the ad-laden garbage that is Windows or the increasingly-locked-down prison that is macOS). I'm fairly happy with its current popularity, where hardware support and software availability are good enough for my purposes, but without the platform becoming too commercialized.
[0] Full disclosure: I was an Xfce core developer for 5 years in the aughts, so I'm a bit biased.
I recently bought a Huion tablet only after checking that it works on Linux.
Install on Linux couldn't be easier: plug the thing and ready to work, pressure detection and all.
I did the same on Windows. It got detected, Windows told me that it was downloading the drivers, and after 10 seconds it worked... kind of. Any trace waited like 1 second to start drawing, and long pressure was a secondary click. What!? How can anybody draw with this? Pressure didn't work, it just worked as the mouse. Time to search: disable something called "windows ink", but directly in the register so it doesn't re-enable on boot. Ok, the secondary button issue gone, but the delayed draw still there. Maybe some stabilizer? Disable Krita stabilizer... Nope. Go to Huion web page, download an app to configure the pen: windows ink still enabled some how, the app allows you to disable it for real. Pressure still unseen. More tweaks on the app... Yes, finally, after two hours the tablet behaves just like in Linux after two seconds, and I only have to keep open a third party app that is probably calling home, just to avoid Windows to mess things up again.
Yes, hardware is a breeze in Windows, except when it isn't.
Of course you would, because macOS is better than Windows. That has always been the case. But then you have to deal with Apple's hardware segmentation strategy.
> Not sure what the point of your line re: hardware is when a standard M1 Mini runs very well for this use case. If you want a bigger monitor... just buy the bigger monitor with a Mini.
The M1 Mini has 4+4 cores. Creative work typically involves software that will use arbitrarily many cores, and on that kind of workload the M1 compares quite disfavorably with 16+ core x64 processors. If you want a Mac with the equivalent processing power of a Ryzen 9 5950X, you're paying $8000+ for a 16-core Mac Pro.
Which they do on purpose so that people doing professional work don't buy the Mini.
And it's the same problem for developers for the same reason. Compiling a big project on a 4+4 core machine is a lot slower than doing it on a 64-core Threadripper, but you can't even get a 64-core Mac.
> I ran Desktop Linux for years before going macOS, and I check in periodically. I remain unimpressed, it's still a jumbled mess of an ecosystem. UI is also not the stumbling block to Linux adoption
Many years ago the UI on Linux systems was basically unusable. It was the stumbling block to Linux adoption.
Now it's "good enough" and the stumbling block is... nothing. Millions of regular people have a Chromebook (i.e. Linux) and they use it just fine, and there is nothing superior about ChromeOS over Ubuntu et al, it just has a bigger corporation marketing it.
> Have you ever code signed anything elsewhere, where you buy certs and such? It costs money.
You're comparing it to alternatives which are also a pain in the butt, when the better alternative is to not do it at all because it's totally useless.
They'll give basically anybody who pays a code signing cert. A nobody who nobody trusts for anything can get one. Attackers can steal one from any of the millions of people who were forced to get one. So it's not providing any trust at all, so it's completely pointless, but it's still paying money and wasting time for no benefit.
> Can you actually refute what I'm saying, which is that macOS is still very usable by developers?
It's not that you literally can't use it. It's that it's worse now than the alternatives. And it's also worse now than it used to be. It would be hard to beat Snow Leopard on a modern 64-core workstation, but you can't get that anywhere. And the closest thing is the same workstation running Linux.
If you said Photoshop 3.0 was clearly better on Mac System 7 than Windows 3.1 in 1994, you might have a point (that was before my time using Photoshop or Windows, so I can’t comment).
You'd be surprised. Creatives aren't going anywhere...
The stories of its imminent death are just that stories. 1 for every 1000 users who remain and 100 than come in.
Huge disagree, the 2021 MBP's that will launch later this year will bring back lots of creatives. Digital Content is going to scream on ARM Macs. I think Apple Sillicon has brought back a renewed focus on the Mac and performance and customers will follow.
I don't want corporations like Apple or Microsoft controlling my hardware. We can see where that's got us and it's a disgusting dead end of the user not truly having control or ownership.
Linux is the OS for people who like tinkering. Tinkering is the point. It's all about building random crap for the sake of building it and hand-editing config files.
On the desktop 90% of the projects are second rate clones of commercial software with a weird GUI, poorer features, and added user hostility.
As for corporations - they already control your hardware. There is no such thing as open hardware, and won't be until chip-level designs can be fabbed at home. (And even then, because chip design is far beyond the skills of the average hacker and won't be practical without AI doing the heavy lifting.)
But worse - Linux and corporations have both locked down your imagination to the point where you cannot imagine that your experience does not generalise.
Access to source doesn't change that, because access to source code and tinkering aren't a substitute for being able to imagine original, beautiful, and useful new things for end users - not just an endless churn of half-finished clone projects and infinite dev tools.
Bollocks. I use linux for my work every day and like my privacy and the confidentiality of my data.
No. You can do it if you want, but you don't have to.
I used to have a huge .emacsrc, .Xresources and what not in the far past. Today I have just a couple of lines that help me avoiding stupid mistakes, but nothing at all to try to tune look and feel. I use Xfce on some machines and i3 on others. Both just work out of the box. The former for an average user, the latter of course needs a certain attitude and some learning initially. I am sure you can also work with Gnome or KDE without starting tinkering.
Maybe one exception: hdpi support on Xfce does not seem to be ready, at least not on Xubuntu LTS. So one step of tinkering was needed: Turn off the nonsense. And never look back.
A lot of free/open-source software is created by a single developer in their spare time, because they want an open & functional version of their favourite commercial app.
The weird GUI is what you get when you can't devote unlimited man-hours and millions of $ to the project.
A lot of good has come from the Linux and open-source movement, let's not pretend otherwise.
I will take weird or unpolished GUI over polished, dark patterns, thank you very much.
Because that's the choice that we really make.
I wonder why people would conflate those two things? Sure, not all free desktop software is bad, but enough of it is that people prefer the commercial alternatives.
So more people use free desktop software? Hmmm
Also, that is the most confusing statement I have ever read.
No, it isn't.
"I'm not like the normies, because I am cool and underground." is a hipsterism.
"I'm not like the normies, because unlike them I happen to possess the skills to escape from a situation we all hate" is not an hipsterism.
> Linux is the OS for people who like tinkering. Tinkering is the point.
This is also completely false. Improvements were made, things generally work out of the box. Polished and user friendly user interfaces exist.
_But_: interfacing with those commercial products/services that spoiled the fun of mainstream systems generally sucks. Because those only work if you give up control to them. Which was one of the main reasons you went to Linux anyway.
I would rephrase this as "Linux is for people who like to customize their experience without compromise". Sure tinkering is fun but its the tool to get to your destination. When I first started using linux I spent maybe a year tinkering and playing with things. This would be along the lines of "XYZ isn't working how I want it to, let's find a way of making it work the way I want" where XYZ is anything from my screenshot tool to my window manager.
Over time this has meant switching DEs, writing glue scripts, swapping out bit and pieces here and there to build the desktop experience I want. Now I have things to my liking I just have an Ansible script which I can apply to a minimal install and have everything just the way I want it in a couple of minutes. I've not made any major changes in the last 10 years. I might add things as I find I need them but that's maybe a couple of dozen minutes a year.
I can however totally understand if people don't want that experience, most people just want to turn on their device and have it "just work" even if that "just working" means you have to conform to the way the developer thinks it should work. This is why people love Apple products, and the reason I don't.
Linux is not a puzzle, it is an extensible tool.
This is just flat out wrong. I spend more time waiting for OS X to "upgrade" than I ever do with package management and kernel upgrades in Linux. Ultimately upgrades in Linux are easier, there's no tinkering required. For odd configurations, sure - there may be some tinkering you can do to make things work more how you'd like. For example I have a SFF desktop machine that runs an eGPU. I only want the eGPU for some OpenCV use cases and I run the iGPU for my desktop window manager. Sure, in that case I did have to tweak things a bit, but I actually found an eGPU manager [0] in the process and everything now "just works".
But printing, window management, software installation, etc are all simple and just as easy (if not more so) than what you've described - "...hand-editing config files". I'd say you are not a Linux user or have not tried any notable Linux distributions in a long time if that's your perspective.
> As for corporations - they already control your hardware.
No, they don't. While, yes, Intel and AMD may have things in their hardware that I don't control - the Linux distributions I use don't have copious amounts of telemetry being fed back to corporations like Apple/Microsoft/Google.
> But worse - Linux and corporations have both locked down your imagination to the point where you cannot imagine that your experience does not generalise.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here but I'd have to say, in my opinion, the comment doesn't seem to make any sense given my long-term experience with Linux on the desktop.
I don't tinker on my Linux machine. I bought a supported Linux machine (System76) and haven't tinkered with it at all since I bought it. I just wanted a machine that worked and I didn't have to deal with all the ways MacOS terminal experience was different from Linux terminal experience. Simple things like not having docker running in a hidden VM and many more.
GUI and features aside: I thought "added user hostility" was a big-corporate feature?
Free software is exactly what kept Linux free, the moment it would get locked up it would go the same way that Windows and MacOS have gone: consumer oriented platforms rather than computer operating systems. Ideal for pushing ads and for-pay software down your throat rather than tools for you to use as you see fit.
But there is nothing more valuable to me than my time. It takes me less time to be productive on Windows and OS X and remove all the junk, than it does to waste countless hours trying to get a Linux DE configured "just right" based on whatever combo I'm using and feature parity I need.
I'll chose my time over my money, and I'm OK with that. Turns out paying professionals for quality goods is an alright business model, and I'm not losing any sleep by not having source code access.
But this is just an upfront cost. With Windows, which I've tried to use regularly, there are many annoyances which introduce friction in the day to day. So the "opex" if you will is much higher.
Just this morning I started my Windows machine to play a quick game and wanted to check out something on the internet beforehand. It started bugging me about some "recommended browser settings" in some Edge window that showed up half off-screen that I couldn't move. Then there's the Windows Terminal app which sometimes takes forever to start up. And windows that pop up and look active but aren't.
Then there's a bunch of other little annoyances which I now forget but over a work day end up aggravating. Of course, YMMV as they say, and I know people who aren't as bothered by those. But in case you are annoyed, the upfront cost of setting up your Linux DE just right may be cheaper in the long run.
I've spent a while setting up i3 a few years ago, just out of curiosity. I had been a MacOS user at the time for a very long time. But then something happened, and it grew on me. Now I only use my mac from time to time when idly watching a movie in bed, because I find it slower to use. I hate having to hunt around for windows, move then around, click on some Dock icon which sometimes doesn't show, others shows up while it shouldn't (in the full-screen Mail window usually).
I guess the point is that different people have different needs and are willing to pay different prices for those. There's also a case to be made about high upfront cost + low maintenance vs low upfront cost + high maintenance.
> Turns out paying professionals for quality goods is an alright business model, and I'm not losing any sleep by not having source code access.
Well, of course. Only issue is how you define quality, as related to what you need. For me, the price of the Windows license was lumped in the same bin with the GPU. Have to buy it to be able to play a game I wanted to play. But I'd feel robbed if I had to pay for it and than have to use it for my job. In my case, I haven't looked under the hood of the Linux kernel or the DE or the terminal app or anything, for that matter. It just works better for me. And I'm also OK to invest some time if it means I'll be more confortable down the road.
Wouldn't be surprised if I've spent more time alone on Linux just figuring out network file sharing than all other DE-related configurations combined.
On the other hand, I wouldn't deploy software against any other OS (unless it's an app). There's no world where I don't want or see Linux. I'm just not sold on it's DE experience so far.
There is no customization you can make to a DE that saves me so much time and energy long term that it makes up for all the other time and energy needed to invest in Linux DE as a daily driver. Most of my energy seems to be devoted to task-specific regiments, more influenced by that tasks software.
In twenty five years, I've probably spent less than $3,000 on Microsoft products personally. I've got my moneys worth.
Mounting remote file systems can be done easily in the GUI, as can sharing. Like any such software, it's going to have a learning curve.
I can't remember the last time I was on Linux and didn't have to start off by installing cifs-utils, and then hunting down instructions on writing an .smbcredentials file.
Windows also makes it (relatively) easy to administer file sharing if you're on a AD domain. All said and done, I personally use Unraid for my home NAS.
NFS is simpler and easier to manage.
There is a solution for that, dsclient, but it is still missing Kerberos support, so you have to account for that.
Both macs and linux can handle this fine.
I have never gotten inter-OS file sharing like SMB/Samba to work right other than using rsync or scp. And the only intra-OS file sharing I've ever had a good experience with is Mac AirDrop.
That's weird. I usually just fire up Samba and everything works pretty much as expected. Granted, I don't use GUI tools, but one of the examples in the default config file is pretty much what you need (share the homes, or something to that effect).
I went through exactly the same experience after trying i3. Also a Mac user. I couldn't move to Linux at the time because apps, so I did my best to recreate that experience on a Mac. Rectangle+Karabiner+Hammerspoon did the trick, and at this point I'm so used to it that when I set up my Linux desktop, I actually recreated the same shortcuts in i3 vs. the default i3 config.
So I would say if you _have to_ stay on a Mac, there are ways to customise and tinker too, with the end result much better than you expect.
I was more or less in the same boat app-wise, as for work I use Office 365 and at the time the web apps were barely usable. I also loved Apple Mail, and to me, it still is the best email client I've ever used (disclaimer: I don't tend to do anything "fancy" with my email). Nowadays, Outlook online works well enough for my needs (I'd say it's actually better than when I was using the 'heavy client' on the Windows machine I was given). Teams works well (as in no worse than elsewhere) on Linux, too, so all my work-related needs are met.
Hammerspoon is just an automation tool for Mac, you can do a lot of things with it, including moving windows around and a lot of other stuff (just look at the docs to get a feel). I use it as an app switcher: I found that it's more efficient to do "show me Slack" or "show me VSCode" than "move to workspace 3 where VSCode should be". I don't use workspaces at all nowadays. So, with the help of Karabiner, I mapped my most-used apps to combinations like "caps+g" for Google Chrome, "caps+s" for Slack, "caps+c" for VSCode etc. And for cycling through windows of the same app, there's a built-in cmd-` on MacOS.
One thing that people fall into is the ability to tweak things endlessly. If you simply don't do that and use a good default install then you are going to do just fine without all that tuning.
For me my main tools are shell, browser, various audio related programs (audacity, midi editors, score editors and so on) and installing a new linux machine takes about as long as copying the data off the medium takes. Then I copy over (or mount, depending on the circumstances) my homedir and get to work.
The other systems did not react the same way; they still consider that doing it is fine.
Yeah, I agree.
But the major difference might be that once configured a linux desktop environment is "just right" for quite a lot longer than you think -- and once it is "just right" you get marginal productivity gains in small aspects, which in aggregate, is probably a lot of time saved.
I'm a bit biased because I already sank the cost into my desktop setup in 2011. But frankly: my desktop environment very much gets out of my way.
Plus, notwithstanding the CSAM detection thing, Apple has been steadily introducing a stream of really sweet consumer privacy features for the ordinary user, such as Sign in with Apple, Apple relay (basically TOR lite for grandma), email aliases, etc.
[1]: created with https://www.windowsafg.com/win10x86_x64_uefi.html
Say someone implements an appstore for Linux, and start selling apps. This could theoretically be enough to get commercial developers onto the platform, opening up for wider popularization of Linux. That doesn't mean you have to install that appstore.. Heck of Linux ever becomes popular, it's probably gonna be Ubuntu. If you don't like that, well, use fedora then. Or nixOS!
Once your default distribution starts shipping with built in ads, and every other distribution follows suit because it makes them boatloads of money, your linux desktop will be well and truly dead.
Is there some idiom or trope to this that I'm missing that makes it obvious sarcasm? Because that's literally not possible without some inconceivable laws being passed, so I'm confused as to what you're trying to communicate.
Both got forked a bunch, but the mother project remains the popular one due to user stickiness and, frankly, sheer amount of (paid) effort invested compared to small-scale volunteer efforts. Users can still choose to go with Iceweasel, disabled Pocket integration or Ungoogled Chromium or whatever fork de jour, but generally they don't because "the ecosystem keeps moving". They generally get more desirable things added than annoyances. Unless a company gets it wrong and you get a WhatsApp-level backlash to make another competitor viable.
With constantly moving goalposts, commercial interests can keep the upper hand as the community (and much other competition) can't keep up fast enough. That's why Google keeps pushing the web into ever new directions, and why standardized APIs got replaced by ever-changing Electron apps with mandatory auto-update.
If the popular distributions ship with ads, I'm not afraid as long as there is competition out there that does without. I can always do Arch or Debian instead of Ubuntu and I know they'll do the right thing.
Where it gets dangerous is when the base technology is controlled by commercial interests. Microsoft owning secure boot certificates, Android not getting drivers upstreamed, Apple deciding who gets to compete by owning the App Store. Linux may end up in this spot at some point if a particular vendor (or consortium of commercial interests) becomes too powerful compared to the community and smaller competition. Once it gets there, the only escape is having viable alternatives.
If you rely on commercial software, your alternatives come with huge switching costs. Chromium to Firefox is a little tedious, Mac to Linux is a major disruption. The more you rely on a particular piece of commercial software, the more they can control you.
But competition generally does the trick. I don't mind games being closed source, there are so many quality alternatives that the game studios simply can't lock most users in. Now, app stores for games? That's where you want to be cautious, because they control what competition looks like. Operating systems and drivers? If they turn on you, better start swearing and leaving investments behind. Chip-level DRM? Zero leverage, ask your government for help and if they're not willing, you're screwed.
So really, commercial software isn't that much of an issue high up in the stack. The lower you get, the more careful you want to be about end user communities retaining control. Let the companies make apps, let them sell apps, don't let them grow platforms. The platforms should belong to users.
If a company comes along and makes a commercial platform out of Linux, run.
Look at nvidia. They release proprietary drivers that do things in the opposite way things are supposed to be done. It's supposed to be integrated, they do their own thing. It's supposed to be open, they close it. They only do things if it's on their terms. They don't contribute to Linux as a whole, they merely co-opt it for their own purposes. They don't believe in making Linux a better system for all, they do just enough to satisfy their customers and call it a day.
If that's what commercial software means for Linux, the other platforms can keep it.
It would be a benefit to Linux adoption.
> tech was certainly more enjoyable to me before everyone had to consider the “average user,”
Yeah. To people like us, computing has intrinsic value. We like the system. We want to control it. We want to understand it. We want to make it better. We want to make it ours.
Normal people simply don't care about this. Corporations make every effort to hide the computer from them. That's where the money is so we end up getting lumped together with this average person.
Why can't we have systems designed for programmers? It doesn't matter if some normal person can't use it.
The trouble comes from a slippage in expectations and the increased incentives to do bad things.
Once some (e.g.) spyware in some software is expected and acceptable, suddenly more spyware in even more apps could potentially be acceptable. Now it becomes a constant effort to keeping track of a known good application set which expends a lot of energy. And any one of those apps in the good set could spoil at any time.
And of course, the increased commercial incentives of a lot of non-technical people using the platform immensely increase the likelihood of this occuring.
So it's not hipsterism, it's just something that's been observed to happen many, many times.
I am not saying this makes Linux bad. What I am saying is, making it easier to charge for software is not going to “spoil” Linux with commercial parasites. If anything, paid software could help undermine the surveillance economy by providing a more direct way to support the creation of good software that doesn’t spy on you, like the default Google Android apps or the Google web apps many people use on Linux desktops. All that stuff is commercial too, you just don’t pay for it in money, and maybe the source code is open, but you darn sure pay with your personal data.
So far desktop Linux has successfully repelled most commercial software simply by being very difficult to package software for.
A couple of guys could figure out how to package Ardour so that it runs on every Linux distro except NixOS [0]. The idea that its hard to package software in a cross-distro way is pure BS.
[0] NixOS plays games with ld.so, which breaks any packaging that relies on being able to set LD_LOAD_PATH. It's the only Linux distro that does this to my knowledge.
In general you can probably get a program to run on just about any Linux platform by providing X86 and ARM binaries, statically linking everything, and having fallbacks in case you need to use a certain subsystem (graphics, audio, etc..) and you don't know which one the user is going to want to use.
My experience with software development for big enterprisey customers is that you figure out what distros most of your customers are going to be using, and you test on those distros. That's a fair bit of work, because you might have to release both apt and rpm packages and maintain them, and the test environment is complicated and it doesn't cover the case where some random person wants to run your product on Arch/Mandriva/Gentoo/Mint or whatever. Testing every Linux distro is just not practically feasible, so a lot of people will end up running on platforms you didn't test. Maybe that's fine.
I wasn't addressing the fallbacks in any way.
> My experience with software development for big enterprisey customers is that you figure out what distros most of your customers are going to be using, and you test on those distros.
This is their mistake. If you instead understand how applications run on Linux in general, you can do what Ardour (and Firefox and many, many others) do: create distro agnostic binary installable versions. We don't test every distro - we don't need to. We design the package so that if certain extremely minimal conditions are met, the package will run. Firefox has done the same (even if many people use the distro version instead).
Distro-agnostic tarballs or self-extracting archives you can just expand and run can work, but it's also not ideal because it subverts the package manager. Package managers allow you to install, remove, and update all the software installed in a system in a consistent way, and a tarball exists outside that ecosystem and lacks its benefits. In that sense, a binary tarball is a second-class citizen that doesn't integrate well with the rest of the system and is probably a security liability. Maybe that's an acceptable trade-off for a few applications, but it should leave a person with a "there's probably a better way to do this" sort of feeling.
If your bundle contains the application and its libraries, it's not a part of that ecosystem, and it makes sense that it exists outside of it. In the case of Ardour, since a number of the dependency stack libraries contain patches that will never be upstreamed (or are for EOL'ed libraries), it makes even more sense.
Yes, there is the risk that if the bundle contains a security issue that has already been updated within the package manager's ecosystem, that's a liability.
But the flip side is that "integrating well with the rest of the system" is precisely what makes 3rd party packaging for all (or even many) distros challenging. I note that most of the efforts to address the situation all essentially bypass the package manager ecosystem (flatpak, for example), and that macOS has used the "standalone application folder except for core system libs" for decades now. The liabilities are real, but small, and seem to be an acceptable tradeoff for software that developers want to run on all (or even many) distros.
To a product manager, this looks like a black hole where money and engineering/tech support resources get chewed up with very little value creation to show for it.
It’s also how some very mediocre distributions became enterprise standards for Linux - their value proposition basically being, “we’re not a moving target, and the Fortune 500 can buy a maintenance contract from us”. But this only happened in server land, where the hardware ecosystem isn’t so chaotic.
"significant commercial application": you have no idea how many downloads or users of Ardour there are.
"mercurial set of cross-platform moving targets": precisely what is addressed.
"nontechnical users": that's a new constraint not present in the original description, but probably not much of an issue if you're discussing a specialized tool rather than a "desktop" application.
"hardware ecosystem": completely irrelevant to the case in question.
By all means, though, all the best with your startup.
The question wasn't "why it’s super rare to target Linux for desktop applications". It wasn't a question at all, in fact. It was an assertion that it's hard to package 3rd party applications for Linux, and I am asserting that this claim is incorrect.
As to whether or not the packaging situation explains why it's super rare to target Linux for desktop application, that is indeed a different question, with multiple answers.
I'm not convinced anyone actually got both right so far - see how recent sanboxing improvements basically killed Anbox on modern Android versions. Or try to get a ssh/samba server running on a Samsung Galaxy device so you can push files to it to avoid buggy inconvenient MTP - mission impossible!
This has already brought along the 'commercial parasites' that have spoiled the original experience, pushing in a thousand different directions with a thousand different things that need to be done quickly to meet business goals, elegance, clarity, and simplicity be damned.
GNU Linux was specifically developed, to escape the Softwarmageddon that is currently playing out in the other centralized eco-systems. To weaken that, would be to re-invite disaster. In my eyes, linux should ban commercial software like Teams from running, if there is a open source alternative. Chop of a limb if you want to survive the infection of end-stage-surveillance capitalism. Let the corpo-borgs eat one another.
This is the problem with living in a techie bubble like HN. Meanwhile in the real world billions of people are happily using Windows and MacOS, and would have no idea what you're talking about.
You remind me of the dyed-in-the-wool Marxists I knew in the 80s sitting tight* waiting for capitalism to collapse, and those before them in the 20s and 30s. And those before them in the 19th Century. Still waiting. Any day now. The signs are everywhere.
* Almost literally. One friend at the time quit college to pick potatoes in Norfolk because when capitalism collapsed having practical skills would help him live off the land. That was about 1987. I wonder how he's doing.
The Tax-idermy, were a society pushes ridiculous amounts of stabilization money into collapsing external peripheral "shell" societies who in return send refugee waves in convulsions, while slowly sinking into the civil/war/crime collapse accepting end-state is in full, brutally visible progress.
The politicians, leering for the authoritarian toolkit, because they doubt they can stabilize the mess that is to come.
How bad does it have to get, before you take a step back and acknowledge, that yes, this is un-subjective worser and even local recovery is unlikely, due to interconnected nature of global society and nature.
Sorry if things are bleak, but software seems to be one of the few levers i myself can pull towards a positive outcome, a better place, by allowing others to escape the dystopia of government eating the cooperated monopolies for societal control because government needs to be in control of something- anything and its definitely not in control of anything that would change outcomes.
You can actually do this right now. Go back and see what critics of the developed world economic systems were saying 30 years ago, or 50 years ago, or 150 years ago. What predictions were they making about growth and employment, what signs of failure did they see, and did those things actually matter in the long term? Doom mongering about the collapse of capitalism has a very, very, very long history.
Please, please try to find out, and let us know!
Isn't any given distro's package repository basically the same thing? I mean, sure you can go around it but the same is true of Google's Play Store, it's just a pain in the ass in both cases.
The top comment for you right now makes a snipe about hipsterism. Well yes, but that shouldn't be a pejorative. It's great that this ecosystem exists in all it's hipster geekery. It's a hobbyist community serving hobbyist and techno-geek purposes. We need that.
Where the cognitive dissonance comes in is thinking that this has anything whatever to do with mass appeal and serving the needs of ordinary non-technical users. That's a very different and in many ways mutually incompatible objective. What non-technical users need is a radically standardised, easy to use platform with a wide variety of highly compatible software and devices with solid QA, services and support. Only the commercial market has proved capable of providing these at anything like the scale needed because that means paying a lot of people to do these things every day as a job.
This is why mass market Linux projects like OLPC fail. They think 99% of the work has been done by the community already and they just need to package it up and deliver it to users. The problem is making all that work seamlessly and efficiently for users, developing a complete high quality product, delivering and selling it and building services around it is a huge ton of work. It's not 1%, it's more like 50% and you need people doing it day in, day out.
The reason Mac OS and Windows have more users is because of pre-installs. It is almost impossible for a regular user to find a PC with Linux preinstalled on it, so application developers ignore the platform.
Lots of companies have successfully built commercial GUI products on top of linux. However most of these products are specialist tools (e.g. EDA, video editor) or embedded. I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with the development or distribution tools.
They commit to long-term support for software distributed as shrinkwrapped binaries? You can buy a program written for Windows 20 years ago and it will work. If you try to run a program written for Linux 5 years ago it probably won't.
AppImage just works on any Linux distribution. There are no external dependencies, since the package bundles all of the dependencies and there is no runtime required. I don't see how an AppImage downloaded today wouldn't work in 5 years.
I don't like Snap because the server implementation is closed source and controlled by a single company (Canonical), but Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (which bundles Snap) is supported until April 2030.
My employer makes commercial cross platform software for Windows and Linux (and in decades past, various commercial Unixes). If you install the 32-bit libraries, you can run our software from 8 years ago just fine on modern Linux. If you also use LD_PRELOAD to replace a couple of C library functions with ones that don't take the `restrict` type qualifier on their arguments too seriously, then you can run our software from 16 years ago just fine too.
Commercial software didn't come to Linux in the volume that it came to Windows and macOS because the users didn't come to Linux in the volume they came to Windows and macOS. And the users didn't come because Mac and Windows mostly just work, that was far from the case for Linux in the late 90s and early 2000s when the total number of desktop and laptops in service was exploding. And these days Linux mostly just works - I can't remember the last time I had to futz with an X11 modeline or a kernel module - but its too late.
If Linux desktops had a critical mass of users that were willing to buy proprietary software, the proprietary software companies would make Linux software for the same reason that game development companies make games for Nintendo's underpowered gaming hardware if it sells well (but don't if it ends up flopping like the Wii U).
To get to that critical mass, Linux desktop needs something that Mac and Windows don't offer that appeals to the average non-technical computer user. The single best opportunity for Linux was when Microsoft came out with Windows 8 with its awful new "Metro" interface. If a Linux distro had a GUI that was at least as good as Windows 7, out of the box support for Windows applications, drivers that just work and major OEMs willing to sell it preinstalled at the time, it would have drawn Windows users. Right now, thanks to Valve's efforts at getting Windows games to run on Linux, the Steam Deck is likely to be the most commercially successful GNU+Linux computer ever made because it can run most of your Windows Steam library and gaming is the main reason consumers buy Windows these days (the needs of low end consumers who just want to read email and be spied on by Facebook are best served with an iPad or Chromebook).
Linux is, on the surface, a much more appealing platform than iOS or Android for developers because there's no monopoly app store taking a 30% cut and demanding you take features out of your software. Its also more appealing than Mac because there's no Gatekeeper program that you have to take extra steps to get around. Developers tolerate these practices because the users are on those platforms and especially because Apple products tend to sell to wealthier people who are more willing to spend money on software than Android or Windows users (let alone Linux users who are generally believers in open source and some of whom are "free software" advocates who agree with RMS's views on the immorality of proprietary software). Ultimately, software companies will go where the users are. Platforms don't have to cater to them. They have to attract the users which forces the software companies to release their software for the platform. When you focus on making a platform that appeals to software companies instead of users, you end up with the Epic Games Store which has lots of software but few users.
[edit] I'd like to add that my private devices have been exclusively on Mac since the Mac SE around 1992, my company is exclusively on Mac, my clients buy Macs for internal use because we write their internal apps for them, and overall I've been responsible for purchasing somewhere around 100 Macs. I know they don't care and have never cared about my opinion as a customer, but their interests aligned with mine. Now they appear not to.
I became a convert because it just worked. I didn’t need to constantly mess with it to keep it running well. So well that my 2008 MBP lasted until 2018 until the battery swelled and cracked the case. I’m now 3 years into a MBA and this will prob carry me through to retirement.
Comparing Ubuntu 20.04 with my wife's Macbook Air M1 I do not see any differences in ease of use.
Now Windows 11 will again be the best reason to migrate, and nothing will change yet again.
Ah but Google is taking over the Web and such, blame on all that help them achieve their goal.
FTFY.
I think once you're in this other territory then you should consider full native instead of Electron. Why you choose to use an editor housed in a browser engine with tracking baked into the application is your decision. There are plenty of other native editors, both GUI and TUI, a user can choose.
Any app can send network requests, so any app can incorporate tracking. This has nothing to do with Electron either.
But to your original point: yes, the more Electron apps that are really just web apps and can be gotten as PWAs, the better.
At that point might as well make an app.
Offline is one of the biggest reasons to ship a full PWA. This is what service workers are for. The biggest reason to not ship a PWA is Apple barely supports them and you can't siphon as much user data if sandboxed in the browser.
I would LOVE if I could get a basic PWA from my bank that didn't have all of these permissions like trying to read if I'm rooted or not, location access, storage -- none of their business what I do with my device or where I am -- and I could still scan QR codes, check balance, do transfers.
Office 365 provides good enough Web Apps to get by without having a native Office installation. I don't have any commercial Desktop Software that I'd need specifically for my work: CRM, issue tracker, Documentation, Figma,... - all available in the Browser.
Distribution to Linux has been fine so far, and hopefully we're part of the solution to the problem you've outlined.
Linux accounts for about 5% of my users, and for whatever reason the community thought it would be a good idea to fragment that minority further into Arch users, Debian users, CentOS users, OpenSUSE users, Ubuntu users (14, 16, 18 and 20, all with different glibc versions).
Modern tools like AppImage make this at least somewhat standard, but Windows has had sane, standardised installers for almost 3 decades now.
I have and it's not really that different from what works on Windows: Compile against the base system you want to support and then ship your own libraries for all other dependencies, statically linking those that you can.
Could there be things to make this more convenient? Sure - one thing I'd love to see is for glibc to support a WINVER analogue to target older versions with the same installed headers. But that is only for convenience - you can just build on older (LTS) distros or assemble your own toolchain if you need newer compiler versions (not as hard as it sounds, there are plenty of resources out there).
> fragment that minority further into Arch users, Debian users, CentOS users, OpenSUSE users, Ubuntu users
How does this matter to binary software distributions? What Distro-specific issues have you encountered that weren't just Arch-has-a-newer-library-so-I-get-an-early-warning-for-compatibility-issues-that-Ubuntu-will-have-in-the-next version.
> all with different glibc versions
So? Compile against the oldest glibc you want to support. All newer ones are backwards compatible and will have no problem running your program.
> Modern tools like AppImage make this at least somewhat standard, but Windows has had sane, standardised installers for almost 3 decades now.
Linux theoretically also has a standard package format (RPM according to the LSB). But just like with MSI on Windows, people tend to roll their own thing for various reasons - and it really is not a problem at all.
For me, I compiled a binary on my Windows machine, manually put it into an MSI alongside the the required VC++ redistributable, and it worked out of the box on every single system from Vista through to current version Windows 10 (and probably 11 too) - x86 and x64, with no issues whatsoever. If I had used the XP-compatible version of VS2015 I could have targeted that too.
Similar story for Mac (although distribution there has since become a minor pain in the arse with code signing and notarisation).
For Linux, I built a .deb manually on Ubuntu 16.04, specified the dependencies just like with Windows and uploaded it. Obviously this crashed violently on most things that weren't modern (for the time) and Ubuntu-based.
In the end, I fixed it exactly as you suggested - I built on an older LTS distro (on a CI server by this stage), shipped all of my own libraries and aggressively made sure that it would load those versions and only those versions. This still required some random hack to work on certain modern systems, as it needed a hack to support both modern glibc and a compatibility version bundled with the app.
These days, I could get a reliable Linux release up in a heartbeat, but this is only after learning the details of a fickle system through multiple iterations of user interaction.
All the commercial (proprietary) software I run (and my colleagues run) is web based nowadays. The commercial (proprietary) software we build is also web based nowadays.
Sure there are exceptions. But for most office work: web based is the norm.
The fact that linux does fine in this area can be reduced from the fact that Chromebooks haven't flopped.
You should not be running closed apps on your OS. Ever.
Good. Please let Linux continue to remain exactly what it is now, an amazing operating system for people who want to avoid Microsoft and Apple.
I certainly don't want it to "make it" so commercial apps take over.
I honestly don't see what I would gain using Mac or windows , except that hibernation works from the start
I am in love with the fact my OS layer just does not change at all. It's boring and I like it that way.
~8-9 years of Ubuntu + i3 (and 11 years on Ubuntu in total), on 4 different laptops (3 Thinkpads), all using the same set of dotfiles and working stably for years.
Installing Linux on a laptop is pretty much painless these days. Also, the neat thing about being able to (re-)store my configs / dotfiles is that I can run my install script on any machine and 5 minutes later the entire machine is completely set up and feels like one of the machines I've been using for years. Back in the 2000s I went through the process of reinstalling Windows a bunch of times and I still remember how painful that was because after installation everything had to be reconfigured and customized in some GUI, which would take hours and never result in quite the same setup I used to have. Now with Linux I've been using the same setup for the past 10 years across machines. (Which is nice as it allows me to tweak my settings over time.)
And even that. My only longer Mac experience was a MBP (2016?) and this machine (and none of my co-workers) wasn't able to re attach a external monitor and external keyboard after hypernating. The time I worked there nobody found a solution
I use gimp and inkscape sometimes.
Gnome 3 is perfect for 99% of what I need it to do.
I still own an iPhone, it compliments my Linux laptop well where I do my serious work, the phone is a toy.
They use a Web browser, email, calendar, word processor, spreadsheet, an image editor, and a dozen smaller proprietary apps that are absolutely essential to their job.
I think it may be the last of those... all the various industry specific apps that are hindering Linux as much as the obvious big players like Microsoft. I think word processing on Linux is fine; but your company's eight year old customized CRM tool will never, ever, be available on anything but Windows. Or specialized document scanner. Or sales commission tracker.
Microsoft appears to have taken a step back from their long-held focus of not breaking things on upgrades.
Granted, these clients should not be using Win9x apps still and hoping for compatibility.
When people say that "X has no alternative for Excel", that X includes Windows as well. As a good rule of thumb: If there actually is an alternative on Windows, then there is also one on linux.
Only if you’re not in 99.9% of the computer user base.
I think it just comes down to how you uses a computer. I mainly program, web browse, and listen to music. I don't game, watch movies, nor use or want to use 'business' apps. Abiword is about the most business app I use with any regularity. If I -have- to do something else, usually GDocs can handle it.
Re: 5) It might depend on the person. I've only ever used Gimp, and while it has redone the UI multiple times, and some things remain nonintuitive, I find myself around it well enough. When PhotoPea launched with its PS style UI, I wanted to give it a try to see what I was missing. I find myself lost, probably how a PS user feels going into Gimp.
A lot of the items that GP and you are discussing are, from my perspective, complaints about Linux circa 2005, maybe 2010 in a few cases.
I do all the above things and problems are rare. To the point where I ditched my Windows install for gaming. Steam's work on Proton means games seem to just work with the exception of specific Anti-Cheat software in certain games (and even in those games it's usually just MP that doesn't work).
KDE Plasma gives me basically the Windows 7 desktop interface with whatever window dressing I want and virtual desktop support out of the box. Plus, I can do everything that Linux can without any Windows overhead.
Maybe I'm really lucky re: productivity stuff but honestly I don't have a ton of complaints about it.
Thanks to Valve's Proton, now most Windows games work flawlessly on Linux. When you install them from Steam, you don't even have to know they're Windows binaries, they just work.
The second thing (and which you mention) is the laptop install situation, I was never sure if running Linux on whatever laptop would work, and if yes if it would work 100%, meaning no wifi/sound/battery drain issues. That was one of the main reasons that has kept me away from Linux since then. Granted, if Apple goes on its current way of trying to restrict access to its machines I may make the switch back sometime in the near future.
Most wifi cards on Laptops now are either Intel or Killer. So most distros will ship with these common ones. They also usually ship with universal drivers for things like trackpads and monitors so that at least everything "works" out of the box on a fresh install. However you still are best hunting down specific drivers for your equipment to get the best experience or performance.
My personal experience is that if you use a Dell or Lenovo laptop, that you won't need to worry about compatibility. These two companies in particular seem to have the best linux support so their equipment generally just works. I have found HP to "mostly" work. Good luck with Asus or Gigabyte. I wouldn't even try a lesser brand than those.
Battery life on Linux is a mixed bag. There are tools you can install that can give you incredible control over your battery and drag a battery's life out much longer than you would get from the same laptop on Windows. But you will need to constantly manage it and be aware of it. For example I need to go into the terminal and manually change a profile every time I connect and disconnect from the charger. As opposed to Mac and Windows that mostly manage themselves to get the best performance/battery life ratio. I found that if you don't do anything with Linux and just run it on battery that you will get substantially lower battery life than the same device would give you on Windows.
That was 5 years ago and I never looked back. I think that adapter is the secret key. Once you have that it doesn't make sense why you wouldn't use KDE Plasma.
I literally only know LS MKDIR and then conda commands. I don't know what any folder does outside of /home. I don't care about these things. Everything has always just worked and if something breaks I can reinstall in about 10 minutes.
The experience people describe on here is what I remember in 1999 when I spent a week trying to get my soundcard to work and gave up.
Let's be real you won't buy the cheapest Fujitsu or whatever anyway. You are going to get a proper ThinkPad or something and than Linux is the faster and better working system either way.
Asus EEE 1005HA
Asus U36G
HP EliteBook 8470p
HP ProBook 430 G6
ThinkPad x220
Acer that I don't remember by model number (I have installed it for others)
Yes, the wifi issue is solved since like 2013. You usually only need to install firmware, which is a standard package from your distribution's repository (some user-friendly distribution even do this for you).
I flirted with Linux but never used it full time until about 2017 when the C710 Chromebook came out. What I really wanted was a basic laptop that was cheap enough to toss into a bag. So I nuked ChromeOS and started using ChrUbuntu.
Windows 10 had been out for about 2 years by that point and it became an increasing source of frustration, but I also knew I couldn't stay on Windows 7 forever.
What surprised me was that I came to prefer using my ChrUbuntu laptop despite having a much, much, MUCH more powerful desktop.
Windows 10 broke me. Why? How?
Inconsistency in the UI. Still finding old shit buried under several layers of new shit. It was still all shit in the end.
Ads in the Start Menu.
Haphazard driver support.
Forced updates and starts. Kind of a problem when you're trying to do a 17 hour overnight render job, y'know...
The problems I had in Windows just didn't seem to exist in Linux. The things people said "Oh, you have to go to the command line to fix everything" didn't seem to ring true at all. The memes, stereotypes, the disclaimers and talking points, all of it, were badly out of date. With Ubuntu, I could install from LiveUSB, entirely graphical, go through less steps during the installation process compared to Windows and still install software like Steam, vendor specific drivers and other stuff without ever touching the command line. AND Ubuntu doesn't piss me off by forcing me to restart when I don't want to.
After that, I continued to have BSOD's in Windows 10 with hardware that ran flawlessly under Ubuntu.
Networking, filesystem management was slower in Windows 10. I didn't have any issue getting Samba working in Linux to use with the NAS drives during video editing and transfer.
Google Drive was more than good enough when it came to office file compatibility. In the production house I worked out of, it came to be the preferred method. Gone was the Office shackles... and rightly so, after decades of email attachments being the viral vector for Windows systems, it's safer to just share a Drive link.
It was also because of the overhead of management that the house ended up switching from Outlook/Exchange to GoogleApps completely.
The more we did online, the less it mattered what type of system we were using.
The last, and still current, issue we still had? Adobe. After Apple's Final Cut fiasco, Adobe's failure to provide themselves as an alternative on Linux based setups was a major disappointment.
So, at this point... I have a separate airgapped Windows 7 box that runs my offline Adobe CS apps. They don't get updated and they don't need to be. (Why Win 7? Windows 10 BSODs on that box, too.)
Recently did an upgrade on my main system as well. Had a Ryzen 7 2700X setup that ran great for 3 years. Decided to make that my Windows 10 sidebox for apps that still don't quite work under Wine (though Proton is really helping to reduce that number of apps) and... yep. Have gotten hard freezes and BSODs for the first time when all I did was format the SSD to put Windows 10 on it.
Windows is decades of crap compressed into an OS. Despite having started with MSDos5.0 and Windows 3.0, using WinNT4 through to Win7 as my primary and only OS... I find Windows cumbersome, clunky, kludgy and badly implemented compared to where Ubuntu is today.
Year of the Linux desktop? Fuck off. People repeat that like it's some great joke, but the honest truth is... I use Linux now despite never having had a Linux background because it is less annoying to use than Windows.
I switched to sshfs as soon as I migrated my home infrastructure to Linux. It's much faster compared to Samba at least if you have low performance hardware on the NAS side. I wanted authentication and you don't have to fiddle with Kerberos.
mWindows 11 will be the greatest Windows yet, said Redmond marketing.
Linux is the only reason why I ever discovered a love for programming and computing.
I see at least 25 Windows tickets for every Linux desktop ticket.
Sure I am paid more than an equivalent Windows admin but the ongoing cost of support is far less. Stuff just doesn't randomly stop working like in Windows. It's really nice.
I know I have plenty of small problems with my Linux desktop, same as I have with my old Windows desktops, but I generally know how to fix/learn to fix those without going to a support line. That would be true even if you gave me a Windows computer.
Essentially, if you gave the people filing all the Windows support tickets a Linux machine instead, would that fix the problem? Or is it that those people are more likely to need support help AND also happen to prefer/need Windows.
It's not your average office I'll admit that, but we do have non-technical people on Linux that work help desk and RMA (think $100k networking gear).
Windows Rant Incoming:
Windows Update sucks. It just sucks. I fucking hate it. It fails for no reason, it fails for every reason. With how important updates are for Windows updating should JUST WORK.
I was trying to curate updates via WSUS and then moved to W4B SAC but recently said eff it and just let them update however they want. Just let the updates fail, they'll work eventually. I really don't care anymore or have the energy to.
It's vile and a pain in the ass to deal with.
Linux/Ubuntu? "Oh, I should update. Okay, Alt+T, sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade"
Done.
It does it when I tell it to and only then.
Sadly, it still is. I have a System76 Oryx running the manufacturers distro and I still have issues with hybrid graphics, Wifi breaking randomly, Bluetooth devices not connecting, and the the fans spinning up like crazy and the UI freezing for seconds at a time. On a laptop built for Linux! I still like it but I can't tell anyone it "just works"
I mean, my laptop is a MSI GS65 and :
- fans spin up like crazy randomly
- if I plug an ethernet cable, I have to disable & reenable the adapter on windows
- sometimes on reboot the mousepad won't work and I have to power off and wait and power back on
- sometimes on reboot the HDMI won't work and I have to power off and wait and power back on
and all this on Windows, Linux also have the two last problems (though much less since some recent kernels) but not the two first.
Laptops just suck.
I've been using Lenovo Thinkpad's with no problems at all. I just ordered a Frame.Work laptop that I'm stoked for. Hopefully it goes well.
It still is. I mean it will sort of work, but power management, battery management, and even obvious things like swap drives may just not work right after install.
I don't denigrate your approach with Windows but please don't tell me I can't do x because I literally can on Linux.
My Linux devices are often domain joined - I log into an AD (used to be eDirectory but wth) I don't care. AD is quite a decent LDAP directory - not as good as eDir though but I doubt many here are capable of discussing that little number. I make huge use of Kerberos - all my browsers can connect to my Apaches etc with SSO if I so wish. Let's Encrypt and putting AD and vCentre CA certs into the various places like /usr/local/share/whatever and running the maint script keeps the browsers from getting upset.
I used to have email via GroupWise but we moved to Exchange back in the day (2011 from memory) I've used Evolution EWS since then. Provided you get your endpoints and DNS in line then you can use Kerberos, otherwise it's NTLM ... lol. You can put Exchange behind HA Proxy. That gets you loads of extra goodies like being able to hide squidgy bits and upping the SSL/TLS to the point where you can make say Exchange 2013 PCI/DSS compliant.
I have no idea why you fixate on GIMP, there are so many graphics apps available it is quite embarrassing. Have a look at say Krita.
Ditch OpenOffice. LibreOffice is capable and where the development is happening. Back in the day I was a MS Office trainer (and a few other things). I know what leading and kerning actually means and dealing with hanging indents, n and m dashes and all the rest. Upper case used to be stored in the upper row of cases in a printer's workshop, leading was shims of lead to move letters up and down. I taught Lotus 1-2-3 macros to company execs as well as Super Calc and even Excel. I can write macros in more languages badly than I care to recall. I wrote a Finite Capacity Scheduler (yes: finite) in Excel VBA for a pie factory near Plymouth. I'm quite happy with LO. It's quite capable in my opinion.
I've got loads of CAD options - I'm a fan of 3D printing. LibreCAD and OpenSCAD are absolutely belting and getting better every month. Blender is quite capable I'm told. I have not even started on that little number but I gather it is absolutely the dog's nadgers. Apparently film studios use it.
I have so many high quality options available to me using Linux. I'm 50 years old. I've used computers from ZX80 and I still have a Commodore 64 (with a USB interface now). My first real PC was a 8086. I managed to get a cracked copy of AutoCAD to work on my 80286 with a 80287 co-processor that my parents bought me for my birthday at something like £120 back in 1987ish.
I'm a sysadmin so not too fussed about IDEs but there are an absolute shitload of them available. Bear in mind the real difference between a Linux distro and Windows and Apples: We've always had an appstore and it is part of the system and not a bolt on.
When I type:
# emerge -Uve --deep --newuse @world
# yay -Syu
# apt update && apt upgrade
I've seen Windows updates last for days at worst. At best it takes at least 15 minutes. On average you'll need around 30 mins except for Defender updates.
So:
1) Take your pick - for me KDE 2) LO for Office apps. There are so many first class apps it's hard to create a starting point 3) Evo + EWS. OK I'll accept that there is only one app here. You do get all functionality including calendar. You also have more options for notifications 4) Really? 5) You have access to a ridiculous amount of software from a central source
I think that open source has already surpassed closed source stuff by quite a long way. I own my own company and live and die by my choices. I've been doing IT for about 30 years and for about the last 15 of those I have not used MS software on my personal gear.
I wrote this a while back but I do keep it up to date: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Intranet - might be handy for someone integrating Linux in a Windows world.
I don't think the target is "better than mac/windows", but I'd argue KDE focuses a lot on making a good UI. Read [1] a bit, you'll see that a lot of work is done on fixing usability bugs and bringing small improvements to an already great desktop environment.
By the way, I've entered in a store that sells computers and noticed the Windows laptops. I was shocked to see myself think "Wait, are they selling computers on Plasma now?". If think it was Windows 11, it's amazing to see that it really resembles Plasma with a white theme.
About your #1, well a few tried and for some people they succeeded, but for most people KDE got about equally good some time ago, and both Windows and MacOS kept getting worse and worse. The result is that KDE is much better than those now.
About #2, with the new Office365, Windows is also lacking a reasonably good outlook-like client. The exchange OWA is a much better alternative now, and you can access it from Linux just as easily as from Windows.
Considering picking up and older Mac now that the hardware is finally affordable prices as more of it hits the used market. Not sure if I'll leave MacOS on it or install windows or Linux.
On one hand telling a random MacOS/Winows-person to switch to Linux is most probably NOK. Image&video editing & office apps and probably other stuff (doubts about audio apps - I loved Linux+"Jack"+filters when playing guitar as an amateur) are not as good as on those OSs.
On the other hand telling the same to a techy guy/girl >might< be OK. E.g. a huge amount of programming languages can be installed & handled very easily, many different filesystems (with their pros&cons) are available, same for networking stuff (e.g. Wireguard, nfs with multiple connections since kernel ~5.3, bundle multiple separate TCP/IP connections together, etc...), same for virtualization technologies(Xen, KVM, multiple container flavours), etc... is available to be installed&configured&used quite easily, a lot of stuff can be read/dealt through "/sys" and "/proc" (makes it easy e.g. when reversing-engineering a controller), etc... . It's literally "dreamland" if 1) you wish for something like that (or maybe you aren't even aware that something like that can be done easily on this SW-level) and 2) you're able&willing to invest time in it.
E.g. in my case, on the desktop, I'm super happy with Linux+Gentoo; I guess because I'm a pure techy guy + picky hehe:
I don't have a strong need for any "office" app (Libreoffice is more or less ok for the basic stuff that I need, graphics editing is more or less ok with the available apps), at the same time I want some things (e.g. placement of some windows when I start them, remapping of keyboard keys, ...) to be set up "just as I want them to be" which cannot work with Windows (and I'm excluding OSx by default as being too protective - e.g. bought many years ago an iPod nano 6th gen, could not copy to it files from Linux as the iPod storage was encrypted therefore I threw it away) => yes, Linux & the distro is not easy to handle, but that in turn made me learn a lot of stuff, which in turn made me able to handle a lot of extra stuff (e.g. recently to install ~20 different DBs to do tests & in some cases proof-of-concepts, to understand better networking & tunnels to then work around limitations at work, a lot more stuff...), which in turn made me able to handle as well servers.
Of course, Gimp will never be close to Photoshop because it never aimed to be
as for apps, I dont know, Linux is superior in many ways for non GUI work. If you need photoshop then yeah this is not the right OS for you. But I would not want to touch anything Adobe with their dirty subscription models. its not true of all categories though. Krita for digital painting is amazing. Blender for 3d work too. The real answer is... it depends.
...and some very expensive (6-figure prices - per year) IC design software is Linux-only. Look at Cadence Virtuoso, for example. Not available on Windows nor Mac.
I don't know but I've always interacted in terminal, making the fact that I use macOS not significant.
Exactly. Except I am quite pleased how OpenOffice is right now, but I digress back to agreeing with you.
I use Linux everywhere, just rarely on bare metal. All the linux I use is in memory somewhere. My bare metal machine recreational and general use machine is Mac. It runs Windows but it hasn't in two years.
The OS isn't the hill I'm here to die on. Its just the fact of life.
Gimp. I shudder at the thought. Honestly at this point, I feel the same about Gimp as I do about people clinging onto to pre-subscription Photoshop. Its like these arbitrary and clueless bragging points they now both have to rationalize life choices - whether it is an attempt to stick it to the man because they became the get of my lawn people resistant to change without realizing it, or because they actually can't afford it and this is also a byproduct of their life decisions. In either scenario, there seems to be a lack of observation that the commercial products are lightyears ahead now and there is no point in intentionally inconveniencing yourself for a cause nobody else cares about.
> There were too many projects with none focusing on really making a better gui than mac/windows.
Many of us have preferred Linux desktops for a decade or two.
Calling a desktop gui better when it lacks the basics like multiple virtual desktops is quite a stretch IMO. Same goes for not being able to update your kernel without getting a brand new desktop environment either you want it or not. Same goes for not being able to customize CMD-tab on Mac.
> A lack of bread and butter 1st class "business" apps
so far so good until this:
> OpenOffice is fine, IF you are ok with the janky ui and no one knowing how it works.
In fact for many years OpenOffice, now Libre Office has been less alien to large segments of the user base.
For a number of things it has also been significantly better at times: I remember very well having to import a certain report patched together by four others to use an actually working styling system.
> lack of open source exchange type mail/cal/etc server and outlook-like client)
This was a good point for a long time. I can work around it by using my iPad for this these days.
> Until recently, installing on laptops was an absolute crap shoot.
Having Linux work better on laptops than Windows is the default state for most laptops and have been for a decase. Last big issue was a screen resolution problem solved by installing the 915 driver using synapse on nc6230 or something back in 2006.
Getting a Windows machine to stop lagging unpredictably though, that is job best left for a specialist. Some come working out of the box, but those are the exception.
(Although it should be noted that I hate lagging as much as designers hate misalignment.)
Foss projects do need to attract more ux designers though. I was telling a friend the other day about how amazing blender is… but had to admit it was so unintuitive/un-discoverable that you can’t really use the program without going through fairly specific tutorials for what you are trying to do
(2) Wrong. Just by you saying "Open Office" means that you are out of touch. You are stuck back in 2010. There is no pathos here. If you have not gotten the memo that Open Office is dead and the project that took over and continued improving is called Libre Office, then it is a sign you are out of touch. Libre Office is not janky, and hundreds of thousands of users beg to differ.
(3) There are several. Thunderbird and Evolution. However you always have your outlook.com for work email.
(4) Wrong. Recently? Define recently. The last 10 years has been a joyride.
(5) Wrong. Krita for photoshop workloads is amazing. Applications are thriving.
What the Linux desktops lacked is powerful leadership, period.
I would only recommend Ubuntu to people I dislike.
I'm surprised the photoshop doesn't have the same feature. it would makes things so much easier for online tutorials just to name the tool or setting instead of having to list out the full location in the file menu (which is something that might be subject to change in future versions)
Not really true. Windows has copied loads of stuff from Linux GUIs over the years. I began to notice this around Windows Vista.
> A lack of bread and butter 1st class "business" apps - you know, office. OpenOffice is fine, IF you are ok with the janky ui and no one knowing how it works
This is valid. Shouldn't be so bad today with web apps being a thing.
> lack of open source exchange type mail/cal/etc server and outlook-like client). Holy fudge, I tried to get this going and people just crapped on me for suggesting it.
Yeah, because MS locks other mail clients out. Thunderbird is an excellent email client. Outlook is some proprietary business messaging thing that also happens to support email (badly).
I think the situation is less bad now, but my point was the boat had mostly sailed.
--
Thunderbird is fine (i use it daily), but nothing touches the functionality of outlook (on windows - not the limited versions that exist on the web and elsewhere). And I was as anti MS as anyone back then, but once I had to actually implement exchange servers as part of my job vs using sendmail and a bunch of random crap - there was just no contest. I always knew it was important, but it really is the killer business app.
And now that you dont need to hire 1.5 people minimum to manage it, and pay for servers and infrastructure etc to get the benefits, it is now more a killer app than ever, to those who need it. (really, I hope to never manage on-location exchange ever again)
--
Having recently reentered the world of the full MS and Office stack, janky shit is the standard. Word - the app, online and teams. None of them work right. The meme where someone thinks they’ll just move an image is accurate. Headers and footers, formatting and most other parts are actually broken or have unpredictable behaviour across apps that are presumably supposed to be the same?
I feel like an old man shouting into a void, but it isn’t right how crappy the industry standard has become.
You open up OpenOffice for the first time, it looks like software from 10 years ago.
I hate teams with a searing passion, but the thing is though it does break, it looks pretty good doing it.
Question of taste. Really. If you like an os inspired by sonic the hedgehog, Mac and windows is for you.
2) A lack of bread and butter 1st class
What are you lacking? OpenOffice not good enough? Use softmaker. Does windows actually have an SSH by now?
3) lack of open source exchange type mail/cal/etc
Evolution, Thunderbird and a few proprietary ones
4) Until recently, installing on laptops was an absolute crap shoot.
I had not had a problem in 20 years
5) Just, apps, in general. Gimp is fine, but it has
Fair point. I have used Photoshop with wine for some specific color maps
2) here is where peoples blind spots can be, but they really reallllly don't understand that MS made some apps that basically need to be aped feature for feature to allow for migration to linux as a desktop. Again touching on familiarity (as in with the gui) but also feature set. People who make money writing certain things can't use certain apps because the features needed by those users don't exist because the software (at the time it needed to be) wasn't mature enough.
3) Thunderbird and evolution are not replacements for outlook. Exchange/outlook had database backed mail and calendaring. No one to this day is even remotely close. Not google, not anyone. This is the biggest app in business for better or worse. Not only did you have database backed calendaring and email, but you also had ridiculously fine-grained group policy management, and way better tools for retention (and this is actually a bfd) If an oss replacement had been made 15-20 years ago the computing landscape would be hugely different.
Only windows gets the full feature set to this day - ios/mac/android/web all don't get the full thing (because no/limited GPOs)
There WAS a project called zimbra or something, and I think they knew replacing exchange was a holy grail (and wanted to benefit monetarily), but iirc it was a paid thing, and never took off in any meaningful way.
4) remember, you, we, are not 99.99% of computer users. I have had hmm, 4 linux laptops over the years, and while fine, it was never problem free. Driver support mostly came down to age and brand, most of them were Dells.
Nothing to feel bad about saying. As a mass-market option it absolutely did. There was no flood of new users coming along back then, and there wont be this time around either.
But for me as a developer, I still think a Linux-desktop is the best desktop I can get. So that's what I'm going to use.
And that's all I care about. That the wider masses run Windows or MacOS doesn't really bother me at all. After all, why should it?
Eventually, competitive pressure forced Microsoft to develop ("heavily borrow") a GUI. All sarcasms aside, mWindows has become usable. But this GUI is a heavy cost.
GNU-Linux is a success. For the generations of people who were sold "a GUI", Linux is often seen as too hard. But for people who found easy access to compilers and other tools through GNU-Linux, there is nothing better.
There is room for all these operating systems, obviously. As for which one is best, there is no contest in my mind. The one that does not lock me in and lets me build what I need is an easy winner.
But that depends on the type of users: for devs & office workers, I think Google suite can replace MS Office and many Internet apps can help with many other types of everyday app that's available on Mac or Window.
Seriously, where are the "take my money" opportunities. I don't want free OpenOffice. I want to pay $100 for something better, whatever the heck that is, maybe a little less clunky. I don't want free open source Notes app, I want to pay for something that's polished.
The Linux community is incredibly giving and passionate and it seems like it's all "free" but sucks up my time. I couldn't even figure out how to slow the scroll of my trackpad on Ubuntu after lots of digging.
Please, coming as a Mac user, take my money.
Which is fundamentally different to the Apple and Mac platform. It is the polish app and "take my money" market. And for most part it is doing exceptionally well. ( On macOS, not MacBook )
I'll take the opportunity to recommend Standard Notes. They have great Linux support, it's basically an Apple Notes replacement with E2EE for $50/year.
Take my money!
Open source means supporting a collective achievement that is shared by humanity.
I use FreeCAD, not because it is better than Fusion 360, and not because one is less expensive, but because the latter is owned by a corporation that exploits knowledge investment (i.e. Free for students, free for everyone to "jk we just wanted you to invest in learning it")
The same goes with most Linux software. The only exception is the operating system itself and gnome, which I find to be miles better than the commercial alternatives. It's so much better, it isn't even a contest. Of course, the caveat is software availability, which to some extent also includes drivers. But that is hardly Linux's fault, although that detail makes little difference to the end user.
Open source also means, to a much larger extent, the absence of dark patterns. Drivers aren't accompanied by telemetry software with a company logo.
Observations:
- Bottom left of the quadrant is Facebook, "you are the product". (free / proprietary)
- Bottom right is Linux, pay with sweat (free / open)
- Top left is traditional software (paid / proprietary)
- Top right is ideal (paid / open)
Of course subjective, but I'd for example place Linux in free, open, and high quality. Similar with blender. Windows would be paid/proprietary but not that good. Etc
Also, Mac is a much bigger market than Linux on the desktop, and tends to be used by people with money (for the expensive hardware). More of a profession, less of a hobby.
Maybe as Wine advances we'll be able to use more and more commercial Windows software, kind of like what is happening with games. But I'm not holding my breath yet.
For your office example, try WPS office. Never used it myself but I heard good things. There are paid text editors like sublime or the stuff that jetbrains is building. There is also lots of Linux desktop software in the SFX industry.
Checking WPS out now: https://www.wps.com/premium $30/year, not too bad. The fact that their free version runs on ads is a turnoff from a brand standpoint.
From this perspective, donations are extremely prevalent, they are just not in terms of money. Of course this doesn't bring food to the table of contributors however. I agree that there should be more monetary donations in FLOSS.
Linux is for users who don’t value their time.
However, a lot of open source software projects will also accept donations in addition to code (if you do not have time to contribute the latter) so if you find something lacking there may be an easy way for you to help. I like to pick a few OSS projects every year to make some donations to. I have always figured it would be better to help improve the open source solutions than it is to look for proprietary ones.
- Companies choose Electron to reduce the cost of supporting Windows and Mac, which has the side effect of making Linux supported easily even if the market isn't there. People sure like to complain about Electron but it has been very beneficial for Linux desktops.
- Selling Linux software has always been hard, mainly due to piracy and a widespread aversion to closed-source software within Linux users. With subscription business models being more popular/acceptable nowadays, which comes along a requirement to be always-online, such services are more easily available on Linux too.
For example Linux has VSCode, Spotify, 1password, Bitwarden, Obsidian, Slack, Discord, Skype, Typora, Simplenote, Inkdrop, Wordpress, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Signal, Atom, Ghost… It has improved drastically from even just 10 years ago, when almost no popular software/service was available.
And that's not mentioning the general shift to using webapps instead of desktop apps (Google Workspace, Office 365, most email services, Jira, Github, Asana…), which obviously makes Linux much more viable.
A lot of mudslinging about performance but for a devoted team it’s very possible to build a solid web app.
Love what it’s done for software
I feel its popularity is more to do with one stack everywhere, than say, some groundbreaking tech idea.
All that aside, I must agree. Electron, however you view it, has greatly boosted linux compat among popular applications.
No, frankly. Java GUI apps on Linux back in the day were often a complete disaster unless it was an open source app with a large Linux dev base. GUI apps had to be written for and tested on all the various platforms they were going to run on. You could probably run simple apps using the oldest lowest common denominator graphics toolkits working without specific support, but those old toolkits were as clunky and ugly as hell.
Electron is far more out of the box on Linux than Java ever was.
Ofcourse there are exceptions, and I am surprised there aren't more companies that go with the ardour model. They give away the source but charge for binaries.
I would even like it if they charge for everything but have it be open source, so you can't download an "official copy" unless you pay.
There is an age-old axiom that 'free isn't free', and Linux quite literally embodies everything about that for me.
When I can get native, commercial software for Linux; without interpreter layers such as WINE, I, along with the majority of the rest of computer users, will consider it. Until then, there are far too many compromises for me to consider it.
I would so much rather pay for a piece of software I rely on - especially every day - and get the support that comes with it to boot - than have it for free. And so do millions of others.
The entire world runs on Linux and other F/OSS software like Python, Ruby, GCC, Clang, MySQL, Spark, VSCode, etc etc.
The programs you're talking about aren't the only kind of value out there.
> When I can get native, commercial software for Linux; without interpreter layers such as WINE
Valve has integrated their version of Wine (Proton) into Steam with great success. Wine isn't a bad option for the kind of GUI tools that tend not to be popular on Linux.
Coming to it, it is a little weird at first. Note that on Mac at least there's the garage band/imovie/ iphoto apps available for free with the OS too.
Your right though, the everything is free and unsupported (usually the take my money moment is for support) . For example I needed to do some minor video editing, what do I use..? There are some major apps that tend to stand out: LibreOffice/Krita/Gimp among others.
I'm using POPos so I tend to find a list of applications and see what's available pre-packaged for my version of linux.
Even Unreal Engine can build on linux with work. Its a bit of a pain, but maybe I'm used to it now..
Seems to be an unfilled niche. Is an opensource app store that sells closed-source software possible or reasonable?
(edit) Brian Eno is a huge fan.
(edit) copy'n'paste from their site:
Pianoteq is an award-winning virtual instrument which you can install on your computer (PC/Mac). It is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and will even run on some ARM-based boards such as the Raspberry Pi. It can be used both in standalone mode and as an instrument plug-in in VST, AAX, and AudioUnits hosts.
What makes Pianoteq superior to other virtual instruments is that the instruments are physically modelled and thus can simulate the playability and complex behaviour of real acoustic instruments. Because there are no samples, the file size is just a tiny fraction of that required by other virtual instruments, making Pianoteq perfect for any modern laptop.
The secret of Pianoteq
The Pianoteq history is strongly connected to the outstanding career of Philippe Guillaume, who, so to speak, had three lives in one.
In a first life he was a high level expert in piano tuning and piano restoration. He worked with prestigious artists like Maria João Pires and Alicia de la Rocha.
Then at age 30, he started a second life with basic studies in mathematics and succeeded brilliantly in the prestigious French Agrégation competition. He earned in a very short time the title of Doctor in Applied Mathematics degree, then became a full professor, and the Director of the Department of Mathematics of INSA-Toulouse, France.
The adventure of Pianoteq started when Philippe Guillaume tuned his first piano and when he wrote his first mathematical model.
The third life of Philippe Guillaume is devoted to developing and promoting Pianoteq.
With the help of his colleagues and a carefully chosen team of experienced musicians, the complex instrument step by step turned into a vivid and convincing piano simulation which makes it the very first piano of its kind.
Until then, here three quality paid apps for Linux:
* Lightworks - professional video editing with GPU support * Bigwig Studio (like Ableton live, creating EDM style music, midi arrangements etc) * Maya - 3D animation software (Pixar uses this too) * IntelliJ/PhpStorm/Pycharm/Rubymine/etc IDEs for coding
I use almost entirely Open Source tools as a game dev for various reasons (some ideological and some practical). All of them get money from me on a monthly basis. It's a security thing; I give them money because I want them to stick around and because there are features that they're working on that I'll need for future projects. Paying them money is much more cost efficient and much safer than trying to build all of my own tools, and much safer and more future-proof than buying into commercial engines.
What I get out of that arrangement is closer relationships with the developers, slightly more input into how software gets built, but mostly just confidence that the products will get better and an increased likelyhood that devs will fix things that are incredibly annoying to me. And some software products (Blender in particular) have shown that this model can work really well if there's enough buy-in from the community. Blender/Krita will even let you sponsor development on specific features if you're willing to pay enough money.
Unfortunately, like with anything else, products suffer if there's not enough funding, and a lot of Open Source products are underfunded. There's an open question in the OS world about how you get people to donate voluntarily rather than forcing them to give money. People don't have the perspective I describe above, it's not an intuitive way to the think about software.
But if you're not in that boat, if you're actually willing to pay money purely to get better software, that's a solveable problem today. Many Open Source products support donations, and at the scale you're talking about (equivalent to Mac, one or two devs make something really good as their job), getting donations to the point where people can work on a project full time would be enough to get the kind of quality boosts you want. Most Open Source projects accepting donations are not at that level yet, but again, if you genuinely want to pay money to increase software quality, you can do that.
But it does require a shift in thinking, you have to break away from the philosophy that the Mac ecosystem has aggressively drilled into you that says you pay for access to things. In Mac, the way you support developers is you pay for access, and as a side effect they build better apps. In Linux, (most of the time) you pay for development, not access. Everyone understands in theory that we pay for software because we want the software to improve. But theory is different than practice, emotionally we buy software because we have to. In Linux with Open Source, if you want software to get better you are forced to internalize the underlying theory -- you have to get your brain to actually believe that you are paying for continued development instead of access to something that already exists. And then at that point, you realize that kicking someone $5-10 a month so that they'll add new scripting APIs to Tiled is actually a really good deal.
Mac's system has the advantage that it forces everyone to participate, so it's easier for Mac developers to get enough money to focus on building really polished products. Mac doesn't require its users to believe that they're paying for development. The weakness of Linux's system is it doesn't force everyone to participate in supporting the ecosystem, so there's way less funding. But while that's a legitimate criticism of Open Source, it's also a purely social/psychological phenomenon. There's no law of nature that means we couldn't collectively pay developers of Open Source apps enough so that they could devote the same amount of time to development as Mac devs do.
And if we did that, then quality would skyrocket, Mac is proof of that. The Mac app ecosystem proves that you don't need giant companies to have great software, all you need are a few developers per-app that can afford to put all of their attention into their apps instead of just their free time.
The big issue, I guess, is that social/psychological phenomenon you're referring to. I've noticed on HN that when discussions come up about how creators -- artists, fiction writers, journalists, filmmakers, etc. -- are or should be compensated for their work, there is a very loud contingent that invariably pops up arguing, in effect, that creators shouldn't expect any compensation at all. "Nobody is owed a living," and "if they really want to create, they'll do it for free." I can't help but suspect that is also a pretty big stumbling block for funding the creation of free software: everyone philosophically appreciates the free as in speech aspect, but an awful lot of free software consumers seem to be pretty in love with the free as in beer aspect, too.
I do think it's legitimately a shift in thinking, I think that people are not accustomed to actually thinking about why they're paying money -- both in Open Source and with proprietary apps.
It's in some ways to Open Source's credit that it rejects the notion that the only way to fund software is through artificial scarcity of the finished product. There is some debate in Open Source communities about whether rejecting that kind of funding is ultimately a sustainable strategy. And I won't weigh in on that other than to really make it clear that what I'm talking about is not embracing that we need more paywalls in Open Source.
I get my Open Source software free as in speech, but I also get it free as in beer. I am not paying for the software, the software is free. I'm at the point with a lot of this stuff where I won't pay the software, it feels weird to do so. What I am paying for is someone to continue developing the software, I'm paying for someone to devote a few extra minutes towards making the things I am heavily reliant on better. And I'm paying that monthly because at the start of each month, I still want however many minutes of development time my money can buy.
I am not paying for Krita, I am paying for a dedicated team of developers who have thought way more than me about the architecture and UX of Krita, to make Krita's animation system support motion tweening.
When you internalize what you're paying for, it becomes a lot less about "paying what you owe" or "not being a leech" (although of course there are also moral/social aspects to donations as well). It's just realizing that it wouldn't take much money to greatly increase the amount of development time these projects get, and for many of these projects, that increased development time could permanently solve some tangible problems in my life, and I want that.
The current Patreon page for Tiled is a good example of this: https://www.patreon.com/bjorn
I use Tiled for 100% of my current mapmaking, even for commercial products that I'm developing. Tiled is free (as in speech and beer), I don't pay for it. But... 222 people donating collectively $2,000 a month mean this developer now has an office where he works on Tiled for 2 days a week. And as a result, I'm observing that Tiled is getting more development and releasing new features that I care about.
Tiled already does a lot of stuff that I care about, and I would like it to be what I use for mapmaking indefinitely. Forget morals or responsibility or anything, 222 people donating around $10 a month is enough to ensure that something exists that would never otherwise exist at the same level of quality and with the same software freedoms, and that it's good enough that I can realistically use it on commercial products. That is a bargain, and it didn't take much collective action to make it happen, and it could get even better in the future. There are problems in the Linux ecosystem that we could permanently solve by even just temporarily as a community dumping money onto the developers working on them, and it wouldn't be that expensive to do.
At this point I've stopped trying to refine my work environment anymore, just because I'm tired of being nickeled and dimed for every little thing
Most long-term macOS users have a collection that they’ve added to slowly over time as they discovered them on various sites.
Be forewarned that brew is slow and unreliable compared to apt or dnf. The compiler Apple ships also has weird defaults; you may need to reconfigure your builds.
Alternatively, just build in docker (but beware that docker performance is worse than Linux).
Time to port apt-get to the Mac?
[1] I've been a Ubuntu user for 6 years and just got a Mac for work.
Open source relies on the kindness of strangers, sometimes a project has critical mass (or a corporate sponsor) to keep it alive, others just fizzle out. Then I need to spend time finding a replacement.
For example: this is why I chose Newsblur as my Google Reader replacement, they took my money. And I haven't regretted my choice even once.
Oh and Alfred really doesn't have a replacement anywhere. I bought Soulver just because of the Alfred integration.
If you use OSS, anyone can keep the software up to date.
It requires someone who is already invested in the software, preferably using it themselves and also has the skills to keep the development going.
The creator no longer cares or uses the software themselves. Maybe they hand off the repo to someone else, who in turn gets crushed under the load and disappears.
It has, but it is also macOS only: Launchbar. My personal pain points are also apps like DevonThink and Hammerspoon/Keyboard Maestro.
Re: Alfred, I think it's best in class, and I'm personally happy to pay for it. There's free alternatives (Raycast or w/e it's called), but they're years away in features and usability.
For me the better thing is also free, it's called markdown.
Agree on trackpad though, someone has probably hacked something together but hardware driver is kind of hard to make as third party.
I can't use markdown to open a .docx file for a revision my client sent me.
Afterall I think certain official documents are still typed out in plain text.
Someone wrote bash. There's no company behind it. It's mostly just Chet. How do you want to pay Chet? I'm not sure he even accepts donations.
Looking through my bash history to see what I use most often, I think of the OpenSSH devs wrote ssh. Then I think that lots of volunteers wrote Emacs. Oh, oauthtool, I use that often. I should figure out who wrote that. I suppose there's all of the Linux hackers who wrote each part of my kernel. Mercurial as my git. Hey, I wrote parts of that, so at least my debt there feels paid. Ah, there's the Mate developers who forked from Gnome 2 long ago and are now mostly doing basic maintenance on that codebase. Some GNU hackers wrote each of the coreutils but that was long ago and someone else is maintaining them now. Oh, Firefox, of course, the OS-within-an-OS. That also has its own few hundred hackers over the decades that should be paid.
How am I supposed to be paying all of the thousands of people who each wrote a little part of my OS? Apple didn't pay all of the people who wrote the free parts of their OS either. Did you?
There simply is no societal structure in place to pay the people who wrote this stone soup of an OS.
I prefer to keep it mostly free as that was how I could afford it back in the days but there's nothing wrong with using pid products you like.
I also try to give back a bit extra now that I can afford it.
I think stuff for you is coming, you're just a little early and a lot of things are in development. That said, Elementary OS was trying to offer the type of thing you're looking for.
It might be time for me to jump back into the desktop app market. I used to make (IMHO) really nice polished Qt apps primarily for Linux but also available for Windows and Mac. I quit doing it because the market collapsed around 2014, but maybe it's time to get back in !!
1. With enough time and effort I can make it do whatever I want it to do (that can be done).
2. I'm a Python web developer and we deploy to Linux so it means I only really need to learn one OS (time to learn is in limited supply for me as man who cares about family life).
What this means practically for me is that 95% of what the OS provides works the way I want it to. I have a handful of things I customize and I've scripted those (Linux is great for scripting) so it's easy to apply when I refresh my OS every 1-2 years.
It also means I don't have to do things the Apple way, I can make it work the way I want it to work (within reason).
It also means I don't have an OS that will put advertisements in the start menu (that was the last straw for my family using Windows, everyone uses Linux now).
I realize if I was a lawyer and needed Microsoft Office or a designer and needed the Adobe Suite, then I couldn't take this approach or would need to run a different OS in a VM. I wish the Linux desktop would be an attractive target for all popular commercial apps to support it. But I'm not holding my breath, that's not why I use it.
I did this when I was younger. Now I have more money than time, so I'm prepared to pay to spend less time making stuff do what I want it to do.
> It also means I don't have to do things the Apple way, I can make it work the way I want it to work (within reason).
I used to fine-tune my system with the weirdest shit, every corner of the screen did a different thing, all 3 buttons did different things to windows depending on where you clicked.
Now I just use macOS pretty much vanilla out of the box. If I use Linux, I just use the defaults.
Copying over settings to multiple computers is just way too much bike-shedding for me.
BUT first you need to spend a good year bikeshedding said repo and picking a sync tool and a versioning strategy and testing it and and. =)
I've been there already.
ie. spending way too much time configuring your working environment vs actually working.
Unfortunately, the writer does not use iOS devices, iCloud, FaceTime, unlikely to be using iMessage (although not explicitly stated), so this is great if you're hooked in macOS only, and not with iDevices & iCloud services as well.
That's a bit extreme. I would say that it's only inconvenient if you need/want to switch - everyone can make a guess about the probability that they will want to switch in the future, what effort it would take and whether that's worth it for the value they will get in the meantime.
she either calls or messages, which from the lock-in standpoint is just better and perfectly adequate - it means much less spurious messaging
But FaceTime and iMessage? There are plenty of alternatives. More importantly the alternatives have bigger user bases. What is making you feel locked into iMessage?
Interoperability between apple devices and services is good, but any individual service is not actually great. They are only good if you commit everything to apple.
So if you actually wanted to break free, switching from iMessage and FaceTime would be the easiest. Reduce your dependencies of stuff in the walled garden, then leaving that garden get easier.
Apple knows that switching from MacOS/iOS is hard if you use their services that only work on their devices. The solution is don't use their services even if you use their devices.
When the not-tech savvy grandmother uses iMessage and FaceTime, it's hard to encourage her to switch to What'sApp or Discord.
If an entire family feels compelled to use apple products because the family users apple products things start feeling more like a religion then a technical choice for a product.
The fact that the software choices of other people are forcing your hardware choices here is horrible.
Just because unreasonable walls exist else where does not justify unreasonable walls everywhere.
Whatsapp/facebook is definitely a market leader in the chat world, but they can be disrupted. You can use theirs or other products on your iPhone, Android, PC, Mac, or Linux.
With the hardware vendor, iMessage isn't used because it's necessarily better but because it is a forced automatic sign up when you use their phone.
iMessage IS the sms application. And you cannot install alternative SMS apps. You are quite literally forced to use it if you want to communicate with people with other phones.
Apple does not care about iMessage as a platform. They only care that it is difficult to leave it.
It's why switching to another device causes problems for most. People who were communicating with you over iMessage will still send their messages there. If you have to very manually and very unintuitively de-enroll your number from iMessage.
For the non-technical this makes it appear that other devices do not work at all. They are trapped in the apple ecosystem even if they don't like it.
Agree to disagree I guess. It is "forced automatic sign up" to use GooglePlayServices when you use android. Using microG is significantly more complicated than unenrolling from iMessage, and you can go to Settings>Messages>iMessage to switch it to just plain SMS, if thats really your prerogative(I've done this when traveling overseas).
To me iMessage is unequivocally better because I'm not the product the way I am on most(all?) trivial to use free services(spinning up a Matrix/IRC/etc server is not trivial). I pay for hardware that has an ability, in this case to use iMessage and Facetime, and in return I'm given some level of assurance that my actions on those platforms aren't going to be monetized through advertisement and leaking of PII. Being able to receive high quality photos from my family through an easy to use interface when I'm not at home without some surveillance corp knowing my location is a good deal to me. My Apple devices last a long time and require minimal upkeep.
>Apple does not care about iMessage as a platform. They only care that it is difficult to leave it. I agree, they could offer iMessage on Android for a monthly/yearly fee like they do Apple Music. I would heavily support this and I'm sure they would lose some market share. To play devils advocate, I'm not savvy to the calculus on developing such an app and API scheme to prevent users from using an alternate client, and they would have no control over, say, an android keyboard keylogging/screen reading their user's messages, I guess they could implement their own secure Apple keyboard for the App, I think password managers do this? But this is starting to seem like a pretty significant engineering burden, that would probably make the service unrealistically expensive. idk. Security is part of the implicit marketing of iMessage, it's pay to use not use to be used. That said, I have no doubt that the driving reason for not opening up iMessage is because it keeps people, especially in the US, locked in to iPhones. Trying to keep customers locked in is pretty standard business practice though. So you can hang your hat on me and others with a similar point of view being okay with abusive business practices if you like.
That said, I do think that
> you have to very manually and very unintuitively de-enroll your number from iMessage.
Is scummy. No bones about it, if you wipe your iPhone it should ask you right then and there if you want to unenroll your number from iMessage, and they should monitor delivery and email you if they suspect that you no longer have an iPhone asking if you want to unenroll from iMessage delivery(e.g. you broke your iPhone and replaced it with another product). Writing the email would be very difficult though, many naive users would probably be alarmed that Apple can tell if they receive messages. But it should be easy not hard, the current experience is terrible indeed.
And while I'm at it, you should be able to have a first class Apple experience without an iPhone. Specifically I should be able to pair my Apple Watch with an iPad or iPod.
BTW Whatsapp also has audio and video calls.
I understand it's ubiquitous, but I don't personally use it, and can't imagine joining it. Nobody I know uses it, but I will absolutely allow as how that probably has to do with demographics -- my network of friends, family, and coworkers is overwhelmingly on iOS.
Also, what should 90% of the world population that can't afford an iPhone do?
I use Linux but that happily keep an iPad for certain things (mail, calendar, video meetings etc).
I use other apps too, but somehow straight up SMS messages from non iPhone users seem to get routed to iMessage on my phone. The messages also seem to get forwarded to a computer if your logged in.
It’s hard because you have a whole family and/or friends on iMessage, and you need to get everyone to switch. That can be tricky. It’s doable, but it’s definitely harder than, e.g, copying your photos somewhere else. I can do that by myself, but I need to get everyone else on board to switch away from iMessage.
I haven’t connected my iPhone to a PC is 6 years. iTunes is the worst piece of software ever made. Thankfully it hasn’t been needed or even useful for half a decade.
At home I use VLC for videos, or Chrome/Firefox for Netflix (and other streaming services). I also picked up a Chromebook tablet for various media consumption needs. I can't really think of the last time I needed a non-Linux system for anything.
Attack it piece by piece.
I have some experience de-siloing myself, and I have some insight on this. The first and most important thing is that you should (for the most part) not use anything that's a free hosted cloud service.
Find a cross platform equivalent to those services and start switching to them. Standards based hosted services are much easier to set up than self-hosting, and makes it MUCH easier to switch out later.
The first thing I'd recommend you do is get Signal installed. Figure out which of your friends are on there already, and just start sending them messages from that.
Next, register a domain. Your name is a good start, since you'll need it for email (and for, if the privacy landscape in the US continues on its trajectory, self-hosting)
Here are some good (non exhaustive) cross-platform alternatives that I use or have used:
- icloud photos: Google Drive, Smugmug (my fav), Flickr
- icloud mail/contacts/calendars: Fastmail (mail + card/caldav syncing)
- imessage/facetime: signal (im aware there's other chat clients but signal is me and my friends' go to. Discord, whatsapp, telegram, etc also exist)
- safari: Firefox with account set up
I pay less than $150 a year, and I get phone or email support with a real person for all of the services I use. I use an iphone, apple watch, with windows 10 on a laptop, and desktop linux. It all works together pretty well, and it really wasn't that hard to establish.
It’s insanely useful, and such a drag when I don’t have it. (Eg when working from my Linux workstation)
The GNOME client is GSConnect: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/
But I cant even use it in Firefox on my Mac.
I still have a few people on Messages, but they contact me through my iPhone, so I'm not losing anything. It baffles me why anyone on this site would use services that are not available across all major platofrms.
Using Linux was pretty awesome but there were a bunch of niggles that made it irritating, especially around battery life. No matter how many things I tried, power top and all the other battery tricks, it just wasn't that good.
The other was getting hardware accelerated video to work in Firefox, although I think Firefox finally supports it nowadays with recent versions.
- The M1 Macbook Pro get 20 hours of battery.
- The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 gets 20 hours of battery.
- The Dell XPS 13 gets 19 hours of battery
Those are probably the most popular laptop models in use today in the category of premium laptops, which is the category of computer I think the majority of people reading this comment will be using.
Cheaper laptops will not be as good as that, but evenmost of $600-800 laptops will get 8-10 hours of battery life.
19-20 hours of battery, and a nice 16:10 screen. Also, super light.
Everything on default Fedora just works out of the box.
I switched back to a Mac with an M1 Mac and the battery lasts for days. I almost never use it plugged in now. I can go many days with normal use, not even compromising to conserve battery. On linux you need to use PowerTop and tweak it to the performance/endurance ratio you want. You are constantly thinking about it. The new M1 Mac doesn't require those compromises or even the need to think about it.
Also i'll add that you can TOTALLY get by on Linux. Linux users are quick to offer solutions like:
- "run that windows program in WINE"
- "there's a Gnome extension that does that"
- "I found a binary on github that will do what you want"
- "all you have to do is make a script and it'll do the same thing"
- "use [FOSS Program] instead of [Evil Corporate Program I really want], it works basically the same"
- "the native version of that program doesn't exist on Linux, but you can use the web version which is basically the same"
But when I switched back to Mac I remembered how I didn't have to make compromises anymore. I could have the programs I wanted, without the weird open source versions that weren't quite as good. Programs just installed, I didn't need to compile them or get the right installers or anything like that. You don't get weird incompatibilities of certain programs and your WM. You didn't worry about battery life or drivers anymore. I didn't need to use web versions. Yes I had to re-purchase some license keys for many apps but this doesn't bother me. I don't mind paying for software that improves my quality of life.
This isn't to shit on Linux. I actually use Linux all day long for work, just ironically I am SSH'd in via my Mac. Linux makes a great server. Its also a Good desktop. But Mac makes a better desktop. Call me a fanboy or a sellout. But I the experience isn't as polished as Mac and in many ways not even as "polished" as Windows (and that was hard for me to type out). Also don't tell me I am too stupid for Linux or didn't give it a chance or didn't learn it enough to enjoy it. I have a RHCA and LPIC-2 certifications. I work in Linux via the terminal 8 hours a day. I know how linux works, but as a graphical system I really would rather have Mac.
However to be fair, I run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on my work computer and that is the closest Linux distro to the Windows/Mac world that you will find. Virtually everything works out of the box and is reliable. It is worth the license fee IMO. You still compromise on app selection, but it does solve many of the annoyances around drivers and compatibility that other distros suffer with. It is far harder to customize, but if you just want something that you can install and start using like you would with Windows, then RHEL is the solution.
- I use an apple trackpad and everything is weird with it. Sensitivity is all wrong and I still get spurious taps and clicks. FF doesn’t have smooth scrolling working by default. Intellij doesn’t support it at all. Driver is buggy too - sometimes after waking from sleep I have to power cycle my keyboard / trackpad for them to work.
- There don’t seem to be any consistency around keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+C sometimes copies and sometimes sends SIGINT. What’s the shortcut for “move cursor forward one word” or “move cursor to end of line”? On macos those shortcuts are consistent in every app. On Linux? Nope! I can’t even configure intellij to use the shortcuts I’m used to because it doesn’t let you use the meta key as a modifier.
- Hibernate and sleep is buggy. Sometimes the machine just doesn’t come back up.
- I sometimes have a duplicate mouse cursor, just hovering over all my windows for no reason. I can’t get rid of it. Apparently it has something to do with hidpi but who knows what.
And so on. There’s so many little interactions where something is half broken and I roll my eyes and move on with my life. For all its flaws, I didn’t realise how good macos is until I switched to Linux. Linux is definitely better than it was - all my hardware more or less worked out of the box. But I’m still keeping an eye on apple’s rumoured M1X laptops.
I just switched and both the Dell trackpad and Magic Trackpad worked flawlessly at a macOS quality level. Superior to Windows, but really macOS (and now Elementary) is the quality bar.
No, there are plenty of software problems too. In a recent media PC build I couldn't get sound to work if a browser was launched from Kodi, even after several hours of faffing about with pulse. It wasn't hardware, the sound worked fine in Kodi.
I frequently find myself in scenarios where I want to install software that is not in the repo (every distro has this problem). If there is no PPA or AppImage I will either have to hack up some other distro's package to make an appfolder version or build it from source myself in a VM. That's pretty annoying for something that's trivial in other OSs.
OBS can't seem to remember the various video capture sources between reboots. To be fair to Linux there might be a viable way for it to do so[0], but it isn't using it.
And a ton of other little things I've forgotten because they're so common to my experience of using Linux I don't bother to remember them.
Elsewhere in this thread you can read that other people have the same death-by-a-thousand-cuts thing going on, it's very common.
[0] I imagine using udev supplied device names or something instead of just what's under /dev/video.
Remember the M1 is a 10W chip.
But none of my workloads work on macOS. So the point is moot.
I did have an M1 MBA and mini until recently for reference.
Reviews on tech boards about macOS are similar to reviews for apartment buildings: why would anybody bother writing a good one? Complaints and issues bubble to the top.
It's extremely frustrating when you're just trying to work and your OS gets in the way _and_ everyone online just says, "Well, it works for me!"
Post your issues/an example then. I'm legitimately curious.
and it puts them all back where they were when you plug it back in. it's so nice!
I had three major issues with the M1. Firstly not enough RAM and it’s crazy expensive. Secondly I couldn’t run local x86-64 VMs which are if you like it or not the defacto cloud standard. Thirdly a lot of third party stuff just doesn’t work at all. The last point was the killer. I had a massive problem trying to get something Qt based working properly and eventually gave up. Oh and the thing feels physically horrible - give me a plastic laptop with rounded edges any day.
Then the whole CSAM thing.
So fuck Apple. Out came the T495 again and it’s sitting here with 24Gb of RAM and a 1TiB SSD that I put in myself and didn’t have to pay in organs.
In fact as a pricing point the T495 cost me £550 new old stock with 20 months of next business day premier warranty left. +16Gb of RAM was £77. +1TiB £109.
I am familiar with Ubuntu/Debian as servers, never intended to use Linux Desktop seriously.
So as I sad numerous time here I switched my company to Arch/Manjaro on Apple Hardware, some of the engineers are with KDE, some with Gnome and I don't here any complains whatsoever. We are adapted all the work to Linux Desktops in record time, but this is not the important point that I want to share.
The important point is in the semantics of the following words related to computing: User Control. Transparency. Security. Peace of mind.
Apple progressively lost me with all Unification of the platforms and ignoring professionals constantly. Recent "scanning fiasco" cured my fetishism completely.
I am running Manjaro with Gnome and find that with minimal technical effort I have unique UX (Gnome Layout Switcher with tiling option) which makes me more productive than macOS. I never expected so painless transition, honestly.
On a commercial software: I will pay double or triple the price for Affinity Designer port to Linux. I have asked in the past and they answered No, but we will see in the future.
I think they’re all broken. Not just Linux Desktop.
Just to make the point that it doesn't have to be one person.
A lot of car designs are done by a single person aided by a small group of exceptional designers. That brings me to a second point - that team has to be the cream of the crop. Not any goof with design degree but a demonstrated long history of exceptional understanding of human to machine interaction. Apple attracted such people back in the day.
And if you don't like it, you're wrong. Not because your opinion is not valid, but because that's what you're requesting essentially.
Agreed. At this point it is just a matter of which brand of brokenness you tolerate best.
1. You need space for the Nix store, so it's not appropriate for every system (I like building small embedded appliances).
2. A six month release cycle can get a bit tiresome after a while. I know it's personal preference, but I wish it was a bit longer.
3. Or, in order to contribute to the project, you need to chase the dragon with the unstable channel.
4. Forcing all the system state through the funnel of a single config file is great, except that it doesn't cover home directories. I found that I ended up with a massive unmanaged blob of state in my home directory which I couldn't capture (I never tried out home-manager, maybe I should have).
This is not to detract from NixOS! NixOS is great, and I remain a massive fan :-). But on my personal systems I find myself using macOS and Debian these days. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
EDIT: Line spacing
I want to write a blog post about my way of setting up NixOS. There are many ways to go about it and I feel like mine prioritizes simplicity and doesn’t use complex Nix techniques, so it may be very helpful for beginners.
I suppose an upgrade would still result in two copies of everything, at least temporarily, but at least the target system doesn't need source code, compilers, etc.
https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/command-ref/nix-copy-c...
Solus has that on lock for me and initially I didn't see it as particularly special, I too thought distros didn't matter much anymore. I thought I could switch away from it to any number of capable distros, but it never worked out and I returned to Solus every time.
But once you do learn it and fully prepared your set-up, it's amazing. Around a month ago I switched from Arch to NixOS after using the former for around a decade and I'm very happy with it despite its warts.
I've been thinking how interesting it would be to create a user-friendly Linux distribution on top of standard NixOS (similar to what Manjaro is to Arch), which would not require learning Nix language or tinkering with the configs. I mean, system configuration/choosing packages/drivers/kernels should not really require a user to write in Nix language - the sane choices can mostly be represented by a set of GUI checkboxes. There also could be GUI utilities for other Nix goodness, such as creating nix-shells with necessary dependencies available, declaring wrappers for proprietary software, or building temporary VMs. So, I would say, the user absolutely does not need to know a lot about Nix to fully appreciate robustness of NixOS way, and in principle, with the right tools/GUIs it can be very approachable for even non-technical users - it's just that user friendliness seemingly has not been a priority so far.
NixOS looks neat, but holy hell I absolutely do not have the time to deal with the learning curve OR the implicit abandonment of all the tools I use to do my job.
However, a fun trick I learned recently is to tether your phone to your computer while installing any Linux distro. My phone's tether connection over USB just looks like ethernet (as far as I can tell), so there is less fiddling around. My Android phone can tether to my wifi as well, so no need to use your cellular data.
Is there a version of this future where I don't have to learn a new language just to effectively use a computer?
Only FOSS has given me that so far. With the others, I inevitably run into "interface I'm used to changes without my consent".
Also, I recently found Chicago 95 and am very pleased with the results of that five-minute shellscript :D
and staying at hotels can be annoying sometimes, like having the room cleaners bother you, or in the restaurant trying to enjoy your dinner in peace the but the waiter keeps bugging you every 5 minutes!
This is an unpopular opinion in the FOS world but; I know I can donate, but I would love for there to be a high end desktop linux project that had a paid license.
It was actively maintained, adequately staffed and produced a user-centric distribution that could rival the high quality user experience you see in MacOS.
I tried to learn how to write a desktop environment a while ago and I am nowhere near smart enough for that.
I just want there to be an alternative to Windows and MacOS that is actually nice to live in on a daily basis.
im not quite sure zorin counts as being "adequately staffed" though. as far as i know its just 2 brothers from Ireland working in it all this time, but maybe they have more staff these days. i can't imagine how they could pull off zorin os and also zorin grid with only two of them
Windows has been on the user experience decline for some time now. Rather than looking for ways to improve the user experience, they are looking for creative ways to introduce Microsoft Teams. Windows 7, while aged (and possibly viewed through nostalgia), was a pretty amazing cohesive experience.
There is literally nothing I do now that Windows 10 does better than Windows 7 (other than the actual requirement for software support). Not only does 10 take longer to start-up, but the start menu was destroyed and the new Microsoft Store app design (UWP?) is hideous and unintuitive.
I tolerate Windows now because of software support. I have nowhere else to play my games and don't even think about VR on a non-windows platform.
MacOS is certainly a better example of cohesive design (with some caveats, like their Window management is from the 90s).
I would love to see a Linux desktop environment take the best things from MacOS and the best things from Windows. Gnome 40 is _really_ close and that makes me very happy
GNOME 40 is pretty good, and I think KDE gets better every day, although they do have a lot of cruft still, inconsistencies even within their own app suite.
I remember a time when the host operating system was an important choice that limited what kinds of things you could do with a computer. It's really not anymore IMHO.
Mac Docker is insanely resource-heavy since it runs through that virtualization layer instead of being native. Definitely a major source of frustration unless you keep your Docker stack very, very small or have an absolutely max-spec Macbook Pro.
I've been using Linux since the late 1990's (SuSE 5.x) and using Debian as my sole OS for the last 15+ years.
I took the plunge and bought a MacBook Pro M1 about 6 months ago.
What I miss about Linux:
- the choice of different desktops (warts and all!)
- zero friction software development (all the open source tools just work)
- privacy and open source
- as you'd expect, the OS and hardware are really integrated (suspend/resume butter smooth and faster than my Debian/Thinkpad experience)
- integration with my iPhone (sharing passwords, iMessaging on my laptop)
Edit: formatting
This assumption has the important consequence that distros don't provide a stable interface (libraries, etc) that applications can depend on. Two years from now your binary may stop working when the distribution updates their libraries.
Most people think the package manager model is an advantage, because it makes installing things that are in the package manager easier, but in reality it comes at a big cost for anything that isn't in the package manager or doesn't want to be in it, including most commercial software.
I love it. I’m really happy with the switch and have no plans to ever go back but it’s a decision you need to choose and commit to. I’d never recommend it to somebody else. If Linux is right for you, you will seek it out and make it happen.
I did exactly the opposite From Linux to MacOS. And this after more than a decade of using Linux for my work and my desktop. Everything began because I started to have battery and dock station issues with Fedora running on the Dell laptop that my previous employer provided me with. Then I asked IT and they suggested and somehow convinced me to try a Macbook pro and after debating with myself I finally did it. I struggled for a bit because of the brain muscle and all the habits in terms of configuration but I eventually adapted to it. At home, I happily continued using Linux. Even I bought a new Thinkpad not so long ago (p14s Gen1 with Ryzen 7 pro) and installed Linux right away as always. The performance was decent but I had many issues with my dock station (in my setup at home), suspend and some system crashes due to the GPU driver (Over Ubuntu and Fedora). I finally got tired and bought a MacBook pro for personal usage too.
I would like to summarize a few points that pushed me on my decision apart from the issue I mentioned: - At this point of my life, I only want technical challenges on my work (DevOps Engineer), not in my personal computer. I got sick of upgrading the kernel and having to spent a couple of hours every now and then fixing something. I just want to turn on a button and type. That's it.
- Also tired of the elitism of the Linux community in general. That feeling of superiority I've detected in many forums from people that presumes of using that twisted distro or Windows Manager.
- Also tired of the huge amount of toxicity and fanaticism (systemd rants, Canonical/Ubuntu sucks, this and that).
- The quality of the laptop (material and display). Mac devices are expensive. I spent on mine 2800£ but I think it worths the investment comparing it with any of the numerous Dell/Acer/Thinkpads I've owned before.
- Lack of software. Apart from computers, I like to make music. Options like Cubase are not available for Linux.
- From a users perspective, the philosophy of 'everything has to be free' (free in terms of price).
Note: Any of the previous points are just *personal* appreciations and conclusions and just have changed things in terms of personal tooling. For infrastructure I managed, Linux forever. Maybe (and probably) I am not right or being unfair but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
By "tinkering" do you mean every once in a while something really important completely stops working and you have to pull your hair out in the middle of some important work in order to get that thing fixed so you can use your computer properly again, which usually involves a series of incomprehensible steps you found on the 17th page of a phpBB forum thread?
Or...?
Because, that being one primary reason many people choose macOS over Windows, it would really suck.
Asking because the article was interesting, Gnome looked great, and it'd be genuinely fantastic if this assumption on my part was wrong.
But if you want to have some new thing or change something so it works more how you would like, that can lead to some tinkering.
I see something nice someone is using or has done. Then I can copy their config, but that's their personal config and I want something slightly different. That takes tinkering.
OSX is basically: Use it as designed. And it's designed for what most people want, but if you want to push the boundaries of that you are going to have a frustrating experience.
As I understand it, modern windows environments provide a linux layer, and so they would be a viable choice now, except if you want your desktop to integrate easily with other apple products.
One thing I don't miss about linux is the level of fiddling that it required. At one point linux was the only alternative to expensive workstations (betraying my age here) and so it was worth the pain of rebuilding the kernel, messing with code to get sound cards to work, etc. But the 1990s are over: you can get good power on a desktop without much expense, and if you know unix, you can hook up to large clusters in any academic environment, for computations that take days or weeks to complete.
Although I respect those who use linux desktop environments, I have stopped recommending it, at least to those more interested in getting work done than in exploring operating system mechanics.
However the shadow side is much less hardware support. For me that worked out fine but it won't be for everyone.
One of the things I love is not being stuck with one company's choices anymore. I can decide when I want to install updates, not beg Microsoft not to reboot my computer. I can decide how I want the UI to function instead of Apple forcing their way on me. I'm not having to work around a bunch of tie-ins to cloud services which both MS and Apple do heavily. I don't have to go out of my way to block telemetry. My computer doesn't check if every app is approved by its vendor (Mac notarisation). I don't have my own computer spying on me.
It's a bit more work but it really makes me feel like my computer is my computer again. It's so worth it.
I'm using a Lenovo T460s WQHD, and the most important advice I could give you:
- First try with a VM is ok, but if you really plan to switch, try on REAL HARDWARE - most of the issues I had was not using hardware with Linux support (e.g. Wifi)
- Don't try to "rebuild" MacOS or Windows - change the mindset to linux
- Plan a huge amount of time (weeks) for getting a neat set up and try at least for 4 Weeks, before you give up
- Make a list of what are really MUST have features at the end and keep it as short as possible
- Understand at least the fundamentals of the boot process, the X Server, Desktop Environments/Window Managers/Display Managers, Terminal / Shell / TTY
- Don't switch distro too early - if something does not work, try to stick to your choice and fix the problems
https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/blob/91d28894a74a19f...
https://int3ractive.com/blog/2018/make-the-best-of-macbook-t...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exQh0_JKBJQ
I feel like that would go a long way to making things better
If I can’t solve this then I will switch to Ubuntu but as others have pointed out, I can see it will be a big time sink, that I’d like to avoid.
Are you using stock Terminal.app or iTerm2? The latter is notably improved and might benefit you if you haven't tried it.
But this week, I was reminded why I still use Mac OS 10.13. On my Mac, I tried to install ffmpeg with rubberband support. When trying to compile it, brew gave cryptic error messages and eventually failed. For something else, I tried installing qemu, also using brew. There were a load of errors telling me I'm using an outdated OS and should feel bad about it, and again, it failed after 156 minutes with some libiconv error that I don't even totally understand, never mind know how to resolve. Something to do with having imagemagick already installed. I tried downloading an image from docker, and the docker-machine wasn't running, and even when I started it, the pull command from dockerhub still failed.
On a Mac, these kinds of errors are unusual. On Linux, build errors like that are normal.
I want to be able to install software in less than half an hour. Whether it's brew, apt-get, yum, pip, npm, or whatever other package manager you wish for - recompiling all my software is extremely slow, and by the time it's finished I've already moved on to something else.
For as long as software continues to be distributed as binaries for Mac, in a dmg or pkg, I'll continue using my Mac. I do still have to recompile sometimes, but it's something I dread, because of the huge amount of time it takes. Requiring this for every software package on Linux is what's pushing me away from the platform.
You say that recompiling software is slow and errors during compilation are normal on Linux. I don't find myself compiling software very often. Most things are grabbed as binaries by the package manager. For everything else there's the AUR (which I rarely experience issues with.)
Unless of course said software is not in your repo, then expect that it will take at least 2.5 hours.
In my experience that's relatively rare. Occasionally they have an AppImage, which is great, maybe a PPA if you're on Ubuntu. but otherwise the best you can do is try to hack some other distro's binary to work. For most niche software I've found that it is only available as source though. Then you get to try and get a working build environment...
I think it's the opposite, and the errors that you encountered are a good example of why, since they all appear to be Mac/Homebrew-specific.
> On my Mac, I tried to install ffmpeg with rubberband support. When trying to compile it, brew gave cryptic error messages and eventually failed.
The FFmpeg in my distro's packages (OpenSUSE) and in Ubuntu's packages comes with rubberband already enabled. They are binary packages - no compilation needed, and it all just works. When I last used Homebrew I was surprised at how often it needed to compile things. For Linux users, compilation is rare.
> For something else, I tried installing qemu, also using brew. There were a load of errors telling me I'm using an outdated OS and should feel bad about it, and again, it failed after 156 minutes with some libiconv error that I don't even totally understand, never mind know how to resolve.
libiconv is not a thing in GNU/Linux. In Linux, iconv() is part of libc. libiconv is only used to port software to platforms which don't have iconv, or have an iconv() which is deficient in some way. Also, again, my distro and Ubuntu both include a binary package for qemu - no compilation needed.
> Whether it's brew, apt-get, yum, pip, npm, or whatever other package manager you wish for - recompiling all my software is extremely slow, and by the time it's finished I've already moved on to something else. [...] Requiring this for every software package on Linux is what's pushing me away from the platform.
I think you have the wrong idea about apt-get and package managers on Linux. Most distro package managers do not compile your software. Almost all the popular distros have binary package managers, which means compilation errors (on your machine) are not possible. Ironically, Homebrew (and Cygwin) users spend a lot more time compiling than Linux users do, so don't let your experience with Homebrew colour your opinion of Linux. They are not alike.
[Goes on to illustrate all the problems he's had... On MacOS.]
> For as long as software continues to be distributed as binaries for Mac,
Apparently it isn't, is it, since you've been compiling so much?
> in a dmg or pkg, I'll continue using my Mac.
So when are you quitting?
> I do still have to recompile sometimes, but it's something I dread, because of the huge amount of time it takes.
On MacOS. So you're dreading Linux. Impressive logic.
> Requiring this for every software package on Linux
[Citation needed]
> is what's pushing me away from the platform.
The wrong one. All the shit you've been whining about should logically be pushing you away from MacOS.
Linux on the desktop has tons of problems, some of itself, some of the hardware you have to use with it, specially if we're talking about laptops.
Using Linux on the desktop is like trying to use Mac OS for your servers. Just don't. Save yourself a lot of pain. I also dislike many things about Mac os and apple in general, but the alternatives aren't any better.
I tried installing Ubuntu studio, the OS marketed for "creatives", and the first part of the experience is incoherent dialogs asking you to manually type the number of bytes you want your linux partition to have. You have to type in an 15 digit number or something not knowing how severe the consequences might be if you get this number wrong. Maybe you'll just waste a lot of time, maybe your computer hard drive might get fucked up and become unusable (until you invest even more time in learning how to fix it). I was repulsed and stopped trying to install it. I don't have enough free time. I installed ubuntu back in 2010 and I don't remember it being so bad. Maybe my priorities in life changed. I'd love to be a linux guru but I don't have time.
Mind you, I might have audio working on my linux workstation, but I can't seem to get the mouse wheel doing the right thing. That's the price to pay, and I might grumble about it (a lot) but it's better than having half the available API your app used to use just diseapear into thin air.
On my work machine, 99% of the time I just use VSCode, terminal, Git, Docker, and a browser... I reckon all those will actually run better on Linux than macOS.
It's a pretty well known problem. If you're dealing with a few smallish files you won't notice it, but applications with lots of little files (Node, Python, etc) will have to sync all those files, and that can be pretty slow.
I very much hope the rest of the industry can respond to the M1.
Also, I own a cheap Chromebook and in general Chrome seems to runs much smoother than on my expensive iMac.
Or one can just use Arch + `yay` and move on already!
[0] https://github.com/flathub/org.wireshark.Wireshark/issues/4
I guess the intersection of people that a) want to run a network package capture program that for even for "normal" use requires root privileges or privilege escalation and b) want to run said app as a distro-independent software is rather small.
Since the aim of flatpak is to provide easy sandboxing out of the box, I guess that running applications without sandboxing is not rally high priority for the developers.
> Frankly that's pretty ridiculous and makes the flatpak nigh-useless.
Not really. There are plenty of use-cases where flatpak shines.
I don't see how these two things are at all related. There's no fundamental reason I can't have distro-independent software that is also able to run with root privileges if the user desires it. So it seems to me that Flatpak has baked-in this limitation (along with a bunch of others, but I digress).
> Since the aim of flatpak is to provide easy sandboxing out of the box, I guess that running applications without sandboxing is not rally high priority for the developers.
It would seem to me that not sandboxing something would actually be much easier than sandboxing it, but perhaps I'm unaware of a fundamental implementation detail of Flatpak.
> Not really. There are plenty of use-cases where flatpak shines.
That specific flatpak, not flatpak in general.
Nope, you're absolutely right; there is no fundamental reason this couldn't work. It's just not the focus of attention and so there's no work being done in that regard. Flatpak's primary goal is to distribute user software, so most/all of the work is done to deliver that use-case.
> So it seems to me that Flatpak has baked-in this limitation (along with a bunch of others, but I digress).
It's not a limitation of Flatpak - at least not a conceptual limitation. It's possible, it just has to be done by someone.
> It would seem to me that not sandboxing something would actually be much easier than sandboxing it, but perhaps I'm unaware of a fundamental implementation detail of Flatpak.
If the aim is to make sandboxing as easy as possible, that doesn't mean it will be easy to _not_ sandbox.
> That specific flatpak, not flatpak in general.
I'm not sure if I catch your drift.
Sometimes user software needs higher level privileges. I don't see why that should exclude it from consideration.
> It's not a limitation of Flatpak - at least not a conceptual limitation. It's possible, it just has to be done by someone.
Flatpak has been around for 5 years, and apparently there are still so many unfinished high-priority things with it that I can expect to wait at least 5 more to see this simple use case addressed?
> If the aim is to make sandboxing as easy as possible, that doesn't mean it will be easy to _not_ sandbox.
I don't follow the logic here. The default state of applications on Linux is that they are not sandboxed. If flatpak did nothing but download and run binaries with appropriate library mappings it would not be sandboxed at all. The sandboxing is something that has to be added on top. When looking for information on how flatpak actually works I find only very obtuse documentation, but nearest I can figure it uses Linux's various namespaces, which shouldn't prevent CAP_NET_RAW from being used as far as I'm aware.
> I'm not sure if I catch your drift.
I was saying the Wireshark flatpak was nigh-useless. Not flatpak in general.
Snap seems to be deeply flawed however. They use compressed files to store things that need to be mounted when one wants to run an application[1].
[0] https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap [1] https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/managing-ubuntu-snaps/
I personally prefer Gentoo's way: user-owned "overlib"s for special stuff (and you would check the overlib's history to understand how committed the owner is), the rest merged into the main repository (if if manages to be merged, depending on QA).
Hard disagree. The best way to install software of all the OSs I've ever used was the original Macintosh way: Just copy a single file. The same thing was used in RiscOS, NeXT, and a few others and is the inspiration for AppImage.
I just couldn't imagine running a non-free OS on my own computers. Linux happens to be the one that I'm familiar with and I trust but that could change (although as the years go by, I doubt it will). But running a proprietary thing? There's just no way. I won't do it. Imagine installing wheels on your car that belong to someone else and having to ask permission whenever you want to drive. It's the same thing.
- The software (Elementary OS 6): https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/08/16/1200
- The hardware (Lenovo Ryzen laptop): https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/08/26/1400
I’d say that for a developer it’s a pretty much perfect set up these days. Definitely not so much for corporate work.
I love Debian. But really, if you want the best experience on the desktop you really want to be using a rolling release distro or something that’s released more often than Debian.
If you’re coming from MacOS something like elementary OS [1][2] might also be a good starting point.
[2] https://blog.elementary.io/elementary-os-6-odin-released/
I clicked in hoping for an in-depth comparison between Linux in 2021 and macOS, and pain points were had moving to Linux from macOS.
There are a lot of those posts around but reading a new one I hope to learn more about what has been developing.
This is a fairly generic "How to install Linux", with a little bit of padding.
The most interesting bit of it I thought was "My MacBook 4-year-old MacBook wasn’t too compatible with Linux.
This is counter to my own experience, but I probably have not done it on that specific vintage.
Anyone know what the issue is that model?
Linux had all the opportunities to be really good, but the development process was slow, hardware compatibility was a crap and occasionally I would loose a day or two after a postponed update (which got fixes already) to make it work again. I don't really understand why Canonical/Ubuntu dropped Gnome and worked 7 years for Unity, then switched back to Gnome again. 7 years developments and contributions to the Gnome could really make a difference.
1.) They only run on Windows or Mac OS
2.) They're considerably more expensive
Having said that, there are some people who really like Reaper. I keep trying it and I keep going back to Logic Pro - and that's what keeps me on Mac OS.
Bottom line? It's the application software that will determine which OS you run.
I'm mostly a backend developer, so intellij, vs code, docker (definitely better on linux), and lots of command line tools (all designed for unix type environments) all work fine on Linux. All the business stuff is cloud/browser based these days so I don't need MS Office or other stuff that was a big deal 13 years ago (when I last used Windows). And the few things that aren't are glorified electron apps that are available in the snap store.
I don't actually use any mac specific stuff that I care about (basically non of the i-* stuff). Never was that impressed with that stuff. I even process photos in Darktable (on a mac!) because I like it that much. And that is definitely going to be faster and nicer on Linux. Also, my steam library should come back alive once I move to a Linux desktop thanks to wine/proton being a thing now. I know my way around Linux of course as I've been doing devops and data processing long enough and have been dabbling with but never committed to Linux on my own machines since the nineties.
So, why don't I? Just two reasons remaining: finding good laptops that come close to my 15" MBP hardware is pretty hard. Apple did a nice job and they are miles apart from all the me too options out there for windows users. There are a few OKish things out there and they are similarly priced to macs. But it seems it's always something you are compromising on. And the second reason is just the amount of hassle involved with using Linux. It's a never ending stream of stuff that should work but clearly isn't which then leads to hours of researching why it isn't. Printer not printing, standby not doing its thing, etc. I've been there done that. Fine as a hobby but stressful when you have more important things to do. I recently installed arch in qemu on a mac. Actually works fairly nice. But it took me ages to get networking working. I could see myself using this and I get why Valve picked this for their Steam console.
The author says - "I used Windows before purchasing my first MacBook but returning was not in my considerations due to the state of that OS with inbuilt ads, bloat and privacy concerns."
What in-built ADs? I have not seen any so far
Its even worse if you buy an OEM device or get stuck with Windows 10 Home.
With Home, once your PC finds out you have WiFi, it will not let you set up the device without a Microsoft Account, and it will remember your WiFi details even if you kill the OOBE and restart. (among countless other extremely user-hostile features Microsoft has added)
Just link to https://www.gnome.org/ instead. Nice article and welcome to Linux!
I plan on moving back to Linux once the core apps cease to operate — iMessage, easy transfer of music/audiobooks to iPhone, FaceTime.
Also, I’m pretty sure Dell and Lenovo have OoB support for Linux. Lenovo especially since RedHat is under the same umbrella.
If you buy any modern laptop that's not junk, you're going to be paying hundreds of dollars. I simply don't see why you wouldn't grab an M1 Air at this point.
Is it Big Sur/Monterey...? Like, if you could upgrade, would you?
I have a thinkpad and I have been pretty impressed with the linux support. I get firmware updates through my package manager, which makes for a nice experience keeping it up to date.
- homebrew is slow and brittle, between 10x and 100x slower than pacman in my experience, and the only package manager I've used that breaks at least every year
- homebrew is only a userspace package mananger, many applications have their own update mechanisms. I greatly prefer being able to update my entire system with one command.
- xcode is a fragile 10GiB pig that I don't want, but homebrew needs it
- docker has a significant performance overhead on macOS
- the tiling window managers available on macOS are less reliable and don't have the features I value
- some terminal based software is significantly slower on recent versions of macOS, even on a 2019 macbook. I'm not sure what's causing it but there is noticeable lag that I don't get on much older hardware with linux
- documentation; in my experience searching for error messages on macOS results in something like "paste this command into a terminal, no one knows why, and it will break again on the next OS release" or "plug the charger into the left usbc port not the right". Where as on linux I end up on the arch wiki with a fix that makes sense, and I've learned something I find valuable or interesting
- I don't like how macOS is visually turning into iOS, I like that I have the option to use what looks like a "desktop" on linux
I'm learning nix at the moment, and hopefully that can solve a lot of the problems I have with maxOS/brew.
macOS is good, linux is good, as always it depends on what you need.
Oh well, on the plus side there's an actually perfect desktop out there already: i3. And sway potentially. I do miss Gnome's full-assedness (attention to detail and their strong opinions/focus) sometimes.
Stronger hardware driver support from vendors and
Photoshop. (Krita/GIMP/etc just aren't quite there yet, not to mention that most content/tutorials/etc are Photoshop oriented).
Part of the reason for this is that with the new apple-only chips they will be able to finish locking the operating system down and forcing everyone to buy software from the app store.
That's their revenue model going forward.
I know that feel. I started wanting to "try out" Linux in 1995 or so but after a few shirt months my Windows partition languished, unused and unbooted-into.
I installed it on a USB flash drive and it's not bad.
#FirstWorldProblems right here!
Seriously, a few hours doing a data backup and clean OS install would make the laptop feel snappy again...
It's the only OS I know of that's remotely close to MacOS in terms of aesthetic, and with Proton I can play pretty much every game on Steam.
Due to the absence of a window's equivalent `Uninstall or Change Program`, I can't even recommend it to my parents either. There are a lot of ways to install software, but to uninstall you need to know what is installed and that isn't as simple as Windows/macOS.
Also since Netflix and Prime Video does not support 1080p playback on Linux (irrespective of your browser), I can't use it as my only OS either.
If you're lucky, it's smooth as butter. Personally I'm in the unlucky group (i3-6100U + HD 520).
Work is being done to improve the situation: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441
1. What a computer is.
2. How a computer works.
From the article: "This means that the most important choice you have at the start of your Linux journey is to determine the desktop environment you want to try..."
You are the reason the world is breaking.
Next gen Apple laptops will be selling you out to your respective governments for storing unapproved memes and saying unapproved things. They'll also be locked down progressively tighter, so Apple is able to extract more rent out of you even though you think you "own" the hardware. A decade ago I've resolved to not do any serious, long term work using tooling and operating systems that aren't Free. I've yet to regret this decision. It only makes sense that we don't allow trillion dollar corporations to deny us access to our own work 10-20-30 years from now. It also makes a ton of sense to store long term work in formats for which you could _debug the code_ if it rots over time.
I'm not a fundamentalist, though, so I use Windows for hobbies (audio recording, photography), but even then I watch out that the actual underlying work is stored in formats that I could in a pinch read with libre tooling on a libre OS of my choice.
I was so happy when Valve announced they'd ditch debian/ubuntu and gnome
The article makes it look great to anyone familiar with macOS, which while it has faults is generally regarded as a pretty good OS GUI.
Is there something bad about Gnome the article is missing?
That's the point I stopped reading.
New users probably shouldn't use a rolling release because updates can cause the install to be unbootable, leaving a bad impression of linux.
I've had a way better experience with desktop Linux when using a managed rolling release like Manjaro.
I’d like to know because I am interested in trying different distros but don’t want to have to keep setting up machines.
It's easier to add to the system than remove redundant packages, and if the distro developers focus on the repositories and package management software it benefits everyone much more. That's one of the big reasons people go for Arch.
Nobody cares if LibreOffice or Inkscape or whatever is preinstalled. Just put a usable appstore on the taskbar by default, it works for smartphones too. Many distros are about as necessary as Samsung's or LG's customized Android builds.
Some people want to build everything from source.
Some people want a preconfigured Gnome enviornment.
Some people want a preconfigured KDE environment.
Some people want a distro with the latest version of packages.
Some people want a distro that is conservative about upgrading packages.
Some people are running in VMs and don't need all that extra crap.
Some people want a version that pedantically sticks to the spirit of the GPL.
Some people want a version that is maximally convinient GPL be damned.
I'm sure there's more reasons.
I get on with my day and you can barely see the blood dribble out of the corner of my mouth when I put the verb in the wrong position. systemctl rofl restart ... [fuck] backspace etc ... [bollocks][arse] ... hit enter.
I use Arch (formerly Gentoo) on my work and home PCs/laptops because I like rolling releases with a bleeding edge. I generally run Ubuntu LTS minimal installs for servers because they are tiny and stable and guarantee to be upgradeable to the next LTS release. I run Home Assistant IoT wranglers on Debian because that's what HA insists on for "Supervised".
My wife uses Arch because I look after it and she doesn't care. It simply has to just work and it has for years now without skipping a beat.
Upgrading hardware for laptops and PCs means dumping the filesystems to files on a server or whatever and blatting them onto the new device. If there is physical space, put the old HD/SSD/whatevs into the new box and use a live CD like system rescue or Clonezilla. All the drivers are built in out of the box. These days most things simply work with minimal fiddling. I can't remember the last time I fiddled with xorg.conf. OK I disabled the touchscreen on this laptop when I cracked it and that involved fiddling with xorg. I remember setting modelines by hand in XFree86 ...
IMO it's about time we converge on just 4-5 languages -- each with unique benefits that can't be had easily in the other ones! -- and finally start to be truly productive.
Programming is mostly a complete mess today and everybody loves their own ugly disabled baby. Sigh.
Small footprint systems language - C, Zig, Ada/SPARK; Higher level dynamic language - CL, Scheme, JS, Clojure; Full Spectrum Language - Rust, Red + Red/System; Basic low level embedded - Forth; Higher level static language - Haskel, SML, Java;
But already these start breaking down, particularly static languages are a minefield. Lazy vs eager evaluation, nominal vs structural typing are two major axis of differentiation there. Then for both static and dynamic languages the question of immutable by default vs immutable as an add-on. Further there's a question of do you need 3 languages for system, high level, and full spectrum vs picking one of the two approaches? And even this binning of 5 completely ignores to what degree concurrency should be a first-class concern of the language. Then there's the whole question of VMs and is there value to building your whole ecosystem on a shared VM? And further, now there's the problem of exposing functionality to non-developers. Should we include a tool like Lua or R that targets non-devs, use a tool like Racket or Red with their very explicit support for creating small custom DSLs, or is that a total non issue because the correct solution is to write GUI tools for that market?
Then the bigger question is, to kitchen sink or not. Languages like CL, Scala, and C++ have taken an approach of implement a ton of features and then trust the developers to sort it out. Other languages are laser focused on a single feature and then take it to its extreme, kinda like how Clojure does with immutability or Pony with actors. Yet if we don't embrace multiparadigm languages, we're leaving a ton of research on the table or accepting the zoo of programing languages.
Yeah programming is a shitshow.
This is an even more true argument today (minus the concrete language names). We desperately need such a curated subset.
The problem is of course us the pesky humans with short-sighted feelings we cling to as if our life depends on it. Desired job security is a big offender as well.
The pertinent questions today with regards to a language are:
- Is the runtime fast (if it's interpreted)?
- If it's compiled ahead-of-time, does it produce efficient machine code? (Golang is one example of machine code that can be better, whereas OCaml and Rust are known to produce some seriously fast machine code.)
- Are the runtime's performance characteristics predictable, e.g. latency remains stable under load? (Especially if the runtime has a garbage collector.)
- Does it run on a reasonable amount of platforms? ARM, x86 (32/64 bit), AVR, and a few more? Can it run on embedded devices?
- Does the language/runtime/ecosystem give you good parallel/concurrent abilities? Preemptively scheduled actors and/or green threads is probably the best idea for servers (Erlang / Elixir are good example do due to the underlying BEAM VM). IMO this is hugely important nowadays. Stuff like parallel iterators and parallel map/reduce/join/various-transform operations are other important enablers.
- Does the language help you avoid various bugs? Examples are Rust's borrow checker or many languages' support for sum types.
---
Additionally... why do we even use languages that don't get compiled by GCC or LLVM, at all? I am tired of listening to people's stories about their beautifully simple and genius compiler... which of course can't even do SIMD intrinsics or properly unroll loops. Yeah, "genius" and super simple indeed. /facepalms
Will we ever learn? Gods.
---
I've been around and I can claim that many times people get attached to the language simply because it has good libraries and good community. I fully relate to that and it's the reason why I want to work with Elixir even after 5 years of mostly uninterrupted career with it but... at one point, after many other problems are solved, you inevitably start hitting brick walls and you question your career choices.
I can't claim any strong experience or authority even after almost 20 years in the industry but so far only Rust seems to be a very good all-around language with a dead-serious and dedicated community that's trying to penetrate basically everywhere. The good news is that they might just succeed because the language is that good -- although it too started showing some warts but so far they're bearable.
But I don't see the world putting their differences aside and starting to work on a common cause. It's sadly not how humanity works. :(
But, among the small set of relatively user-friendly distros, sure, it doesn't actually matter that much. A generous reading would take that meaning from it, I think.
I totally agree with the "uselessness" of too many distros but not with your conclusion.
There are multiple reasons for linux not being Mainstream on the desktop.
Windows comes preinstalled on 99% of all non self built laptops/desktops.
Installing an OS is not something the average user does.
It's different and people hate change, unless it's popular
Ubuntu you just use gnome, and I've don't think I've ever actually seen redhat (or any centos) attached to a desktop environment.
They think about the GUI, the command-line programs that ship with it (curl/grep/ls/etc.), the driver support, and the package manager it ships with. These are all trivial abstractions built on deeper facilities.
The farther down you go, the less people understand. Who actually can express the difference between X11 and Wayland that isn't full of weasel words and equivocation? What about mesa, or dbus, or pulseaudio? These are all core components that alter the "flavor" of a desktop Linux system. And yet, all distros basically use the same off-the-shelf components. They only change the higher level GUIs and package managers and stuff.
And people GROSSLY underestimate how much the kernel contributes to the "flavor" of Linux. (I could go on and on about how the GNU GPL directly impacts how drivers are developed for the kernel, or how the small number of core devs are overwhelmed by additions for hardware drivers which move rapidly and break things, and the subsequent vulnerability patches, leaving little time for desktop-focused improvements).
People tend to say things like "the kernel just manages the hardware" or "the kernel is just an interface layer for the hardware" or "MacOS and BSD are the same, only the kernel differs". If only they knew. The kernel is like a seed crystal that defines what can grow outward from there (without massive painful compatibility shims).
Lastly, people OVERestimate the importance of things that are entirely irrelevant to a desktop OS. Just look at how many desktop Linux users are arguing over SystemD vs SysV vs whatever else. Are desktop Linux users really digging into log files, and are annoyed that the log files are now in a binary format? Are desktop Linux users really annoyed that sudo is now part of systemd, instead of a standalone binary that they can swap out? I think the number is low, but the number of desktop Linux users arguing about such things is high.
Just tried to compile my Sciter project, full rebuild scapp executable in particular - standalone Sciter binary (HTML/CSS/JS).
- Windows / Visual Studio / VC++ - 58 seconds. Self assembled machine, i7 / 4 cores
- Linux / Code::Blocks / GCC - 3 minutes 24 seconds. MacMini 2018, i7 / 6 cores
- MacOS / XCode / LLVM - 4 minutes 20 seconds. MacMini 2020, M1
So no surprise that I am using Windows as my primary dev platform.
As always, YMMV, depends on what you are using your machine for.
I use cut and paste every few minutes.
The keys are not compatible with MacOS - why not? Surely this is an obvious need. I seem to recall the cut and paste keys aren't even compatible with Windows. The cut and paste doesn't even seem to work consistently across applications.
Instead of just using the GUI, I have to constantly break my workflow to think about what keys I'm pressing - that's not a great way to enable switching to Linux from another OS.
If cut and paste is painful then we're a long way from desktop Linux being viable for me personally. It seems such an easy thing to get right, but that's the essence of desktop Linux - 20 years down the track and the first thing you do cuts your finger.
I'd be pleased to hear if some other distro has nailed this or if it's a universal issue.
Do you mean that they're not compatible with a macbook keyboard? control-c / x / v work fine on all of my Ubuntu computers, but I might be misunderstanding what issue you are running into.
https://github.com/chzyer/readline/blob/master/doc/shortcut....
I don't know if I'm an oddball but I'm switching all day long between Mac, Windows and Linux machines and I'd die if I had to use a different set of terminal shortcuts every time.
On the topic of keys, Mac users often fail to mention the reverse situation. Coming to a Mac from other environments, the keymaps are not intuitive to me and often leads to frustration, especially if you're frequently switching between work (Mac) and personal (Linux) machines.
Extended (hours, over several days) trackpad use is the first thing that's ever given me serious RSI, in over 20 years of computing. I think the action of click-n-dragging is the main cause. And MacBooks are the only laptops I've used where I don't hate having to use the trackpad for more than a couple minutes, so....
1) Copy-paste shortcuts are different in terminals, on Linux, than they are everywhere else. They are the same, on macOS.
2) Much like drag-n-drop, reasonable support for copy-paste of things that aren't plain text is less common on Linux than on macOS, and attempting it is more likely to either not work or have unexpected effects.
(P.S. Fedora 34 is the most current released version)
1. Did a minimal installation without a GUI. 2. Installed Gnome. 3. Installed KDE. 4. Uninstalled Gnome and KDE. The system ended up in a broken state: many important packages were deleted, I couldn't connect to the network, and the package manager stopped working.
"Obvious"? Typical conceited Mac user. It's not as if the Mac were dominant in the computer or OS market.
> I seem to recall the cut and paste keys aren't even compatible with Windows.
Depends: Your whine doesn't mention what these "incompatible" keys you're whining about actually are. If they're [Ctrl]-[Ins], [Shift]-[Ins], and [Shift]-[Del], then those are actually the Windows CUA standard ones. The silly [Ctrl]-[C|V|X] alternatives copied from Apple are not standard.