I use a dual xeon, 64GB Linux desktop which performs reasonably well.
A colleague runs a Linux machine with 16GB of ram. Compiling the same project can cause OOM issues for him and the kernel starts whacking processes.
Even if he closes all non-essential processes, his builds run 10x as long as mine due to memory constraints.
My main point here - let’s not pretend your 4GB machine is being used to do any intense local work.
The inverse of this is seen on my Intel MacBook Air and my colleague’s M1 MacBook Air. The compilation time for our code is 35 minutes or more on my machine and only 3 minutes on the M1.
That depends entirely on what you consider intense local work. Just because you are not compiling doesn’t mean running your 15 microservice stack locally is not intense.
I'd argue that _most_ programmers or even data analysts don't need more than 8 GB to perform their actual work.
But realistically they need 16+ anyway because of opening 200 browser tabs, memory-heavy IDEs, etc. 32 or 64 is nice for sure, but definitely not needed for actual "work" workloads for the most part.
Which distro and can't you configure this? (Genuinely interested)
Also if the MacBook is better, than you should use that device. It's your "conclusion".
Most Linux distro suggest you to setup swap so instead of crashing it could use the swap. I personally don't use swap, because if something is consuming too much ram I most likely want it dead.
I don't know what are you compiling, but requiring more than 16GB of ram for compiling something sounds lazy and unneeded. Likewise you can use a browser extension which reclaims ram from unused tabs.
I can understand the need to have 64gb to do video editing or rendering, but most of the times we need that much ram is because our software is badly written and we don't want to face the problem, not because of the complexity of what we're doing.
Swap is still useful to move stuff out to disk that _never_ gets accessed again.
While the tooling and system stability are better, the desktop and app experiences are far worse. It’s buggy, half-baked, and crash.
I regularly hop distributions and do clean installs to see if that will fix it but they’re all the same — pop!_os might be slightly more stable in that regard.
I’ve been using Linux since 1992. I’ve had several year periods in the 90s and early 2000s where Linux was all I used.
I can ditch GNOME, KDE, and XFCE and go back to twm or i3 or fvwm or Window Maker, but I’ve moved beyond thoses experiences. I want a more functional desktop.
But, I see now why I paid more to put up with Apple.
So besides dpi-scaling issues linux is known for, whats the draw? Some hotkey that does a thing? Some visual candy? Smoothness in transitions?
Whatever it is, it's hard for me to imagine it being worth the tradeoff. I can't even name desktop workspaces on a Mac!
I'm reviewing the "new features" section on Monterey: https://www.apple.com/macos/monterey/features/ and I'm not seeing much other than a few known areas (multi-device support if you bought fully into the apple ecosystem, etc).
With most "I tried linux desktop" people it's a problem of DE/WM, but you seem to be beyond that so I'm genuinely curious.
A more cohesive experience across the desktop and applications, eg.:
- The look and feel is uniform. Admittedly somewhat less so, these days now that the Apple Human Interface Guidelines are largely ignored.
- Mac apps and generally more stable.
- Mac apps generally have more features.
- The Mac apps I use generally tend to tie into the hardware (hw acceleration, drivers, etc) much better. The benefit of controlling the vertical, I suppose.
- The keyboard shortcuts both exist and are the same across apps.
- The design patterns.
- The AppleScript/x-callback-url, etc).
- Third party apps generally tend to fit well into the above.
On Linux, almost everybody seems to have their own ideas on how an app should be arranged. With full desktop environments, like GNOME and KDE lessen this, but it's still really, really common.
That said, my money is still on Linux and other open source OSes, because I don't want a single company telling me what I can and can't do.
A few things that stand out about it to me vs GNOME 3, KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXDE, and whatever the Windows interface is called:
- The consistency of the menu system, and being able to search and use the menus of any app from the keyboard with shift-cmd-?. This is like having Emacs M-x or Sublime/VSCode shift-cmd-P in every desktop app.
- Being able to assign custom keyboard shortcuts for any menu option in any app.
- Emacs keybindings for editing text in every text field (including on the web). I believe GNOME Tweaks is supposed to do this, but I could never get it to work reliably and universally like macOS.
- Native app ecosystem. Third-party Mac software is generally the most polished, though not quite as much exists as for Windows.
- System animations. This is a small one, but it makes things more fun and makes the whole system feel fluid and “organic,” for lack of a better term.
Firefox crashing is probably a Firefox problem.
You can set the scaling to be anything you want on X, just set the Xft.dpi number in your .Xresources file.
One problem with your Hackintosh install is that it’s closed source, no? As far as you know it’s exfiltrating your financial information to China.
People who do that generally don't use Gnome, but i3/swaywm/xmonad and multitude of tools where you're in control what happens.
Grass isn't always greener.
Edit for an example, I'm stuck on Catalina because they tried deprecating functionality my firewall uses. And the window shifter shortcut key program I use won't work in Big Sur.
No, that's Microsoft Windows. Apple only does it annually.
Microsoft really only tries to preserve basic compatibility for well-behaved applications that aren't tightly integrated with any OS components or specific hardware/drivers and aren't doing anything that Microsoft disapproves of. Anything that strays outside those boundaries will run into trouble, and a lot of software ends up falling outside those boundaries even if it didn't really need to.
Both operating systems are pretty bad at letting you wield control over your own computer. But macOS doesn't try as hard to obscure the BS or obstruct your attempts to tame it, and macOS actually lets you refuse updates that you don't want.
I use Linux as my daily driver and the apps I use (GNOME Terminal, other terms, Spotify, Slack, Brave and Firefox, and the GNOME desktop itself) crash multiple, sometimes several times a day on my two (work, personal) machines.
This happens across diverse machines, as well as across multiple distributions (though again, pop!_os, so far seems much less trashy for whatever reason).
Does the OS hard lock or completely crash? No... unless you have graphics drivers issues, which isn't unlikely. Then, oh man, yes, lots. X/Wayland crashes that restart the window server? Yep. Applications crashing pretty regularly or glitching out so badly they have to be restarted, including the basic applications distributed with the heavier DEs? Yep. And it turns out that your windowing environment crashing or the main program you're currently using crashing is really close to as bad as the whole machine blue-screening in Windows, from the perspective of the user. Using Linux makes me anxious, even though I very much know WTF I'm doing with it. MacOS and even (spits) Windows don't do that to me, any more. Now that I've experienced not feeling that way, I can't go back. I go years between work-lost crashes of any sort at all on MacOS. Linux, one month without such a thing would be miraculous.
If you build up from almost nothing and keep things very minimal and have very boring and stable old hardware, and do as much as possible from the command line, it can be kinda OK, but it's a lot of work to set something up like that, and ongoing effort every time you do something manually that'd be automatic or trivial on a more full-featured GUI desktop. If you start with something like Ubuntu or Fedora standard desktop installs, though, there's just too much that can go wrong, and it will, with some frequency.
I could tolerate some hardware or workflows not working and things generally being a little less convenient, maybe, if it were rock solid, but it's very far from that. The main problems seem to be that its entire graphics stack is incredibly fragile (Wayland doesn't seem to have done much, if anything, to fix that) and it's way too easy for a glitchy driver to screw up the whole system.
The only issue I had recently were audio issues which were both due to my buggy soundcard and a bug in Pipewire. Excluding that, I've had almost no issues with desktop Linux since 2017.
I use my computer to write Elixir code, write music with Logic and Studio One, and edit photos/videos. Maybe none of those tasks trigger the problems other people are having.
I ran windows, then linux for ~4 years as a daily driver, switched to mac about a year ago.
I do back end/front end development full time for work + work on many performance sensitive personal projects, and couldn't be happier with the OS.
It's almost like different users have different experiences based on their use cases...
All these problems have since gone away thanks to software updates and (importantly) a BIOS update. It turned out my USB controller wasn't being configured correctly by the motherboard. If I didn't happen to check for BIOS updates, I'd still have lots of problems.
And that was still a better experience than the HP laptop I bought a couple of years ago. That laptop had so much HP crap preinstalled that it sat on 30% CPU usage at all times out of the box. The biggest offender was some HP process doing microphone noise reduction. It ran all the time regardless of whether or not the microphone was being used - and utterly demolished the machine's battery life.
Apple is far from perfect, but they have a better reputation than most vendors for a reason. And their technical support is are excellent. I've had thousands of dollars of free hardware repairs & replacements over the years when things have broken in my apple machines. I wish they didn't break so much; and I wish they prioritised fixing software bugs over adding features internally. (APFS aside, I would trade the last 5 years of macOS features for better stability and performance in a heartbeat.) But there's a reason they're so well liked on HN. They're still pretty excellent in comparison to the competition.
You said:
> The [mac users] that don’t complain have low standards
I agree with you. I'd go even further and say most users have low standards, because the out-of-the-box experience with most modern computers is pretty bad. Apple users should absolutely complain more when the out-of-the-box experience with their computer isn't perfect. We all should.
Apple customers keep buying apple computers despite their issues not because we have low standards. We do it because the alternatives are even worse.
I think you’re probably right about this. It’s like we’ve been trained to have low expectations.
If nonlinux users are trained to have low expectations, Linux users are trained to rape themselves constantly.
Here's my experience with Arch Linux: 1) You install what you need to install 2) You read the doc and configure to your liking, learning what the system can and cannot do and how it works with everything else 3) Things generally work as documented and you go your merry way 4) When something break or doesn't work, you have the knowledge or a general idea of what to fix
Compared to proprietary systems where there is no documentation and little configuration, when things break or misbehave you're essentially screwed. Will you wait for an official fix or look online for reverse engineers? You bought a black box and you can't just open it and fix it.
I'd rather spend a day learning about my system during the installation and having it work for years, instead of buying yet another black box I can't open.
Learning linux doesn't take a day. Second off those black boxes statistically are more reliable than linux EVEN when you account for all the things you talked about.
The reason for this is simple. Microsoft has a business advantage and unfairly strong arms hardware manufacturers to make their stuff work with windows. This unfair advantage makes the windows user experience better and more reliable than GNU linux whos' developers constantly have to play catch up with hardware.
In the last 20 years PC hardware has become ridiculously faster - and yet the user experience seems to have changed little.
I saw an article ages ago whereby Microsoft apparently had a dependencies approval gateway. If you made any change based on Windows you had to remove/reduce your dependencies or make a good case for not doing so.
I was hoping that would catch on.
Each operating system has benefits and downsides. For user experience linux is definitively the worst. Definitively. The differences are so large that it's almost comical how someone on this planet can't see the difference. If you can't see this then you are the one that is part of a cult.
I use linux every day for work and:
- Hidpi support is spotty (its getting better but still a bit spotty)
- Smooth scrolling in applications is inconsistent at best
- The keyboard shortcuts for moving the text cursor around are inconsistent between programs
- Hardware support is much more of a crap shoot. Linux has a harder job than macos in trying to support every combination of janky hardware out there. But as a user, I don't really care. I just know that if I buy a mac, the OS will work perfectly with the hardware on offer. That isn't true on linux.
- Lots of useful software isn't available on linux. Eg, I love Monodraw, but thats macos only.
- App distribution on Linux is a mess. Apt? RPM? Snap? Flatpack? Etc etc. I have 2 copies of discord installed for some reason, and I have no idea what the difference is between them.
Etcetera..
Linux gives you the choice and freedom to spend an unlimited number of hours customizing everything. With linux I'm in complete control and I love that. On macos, things usually just work out of the box. I love that too.
No OS is perfect. There's tradeoffs with everything. If you don't understand other people's preferences, that doesn't make you right. It makes you ignorant.
He's obviously comparing a linux PC experience with an apple OSX experience. It's a completely valid comparison but you're just being mean an inappropriate.
Wow, well, thanks a lot. I've been developing on both the Mac and Linux for years and I don't have this issue on any of the multiple MBPs I use, including my personal 2013 model. I'm not saying I have no problems on the Mac, but they're not worse than the issues I had with Linux, especially on laptops.
so what is the laptop that would meet this standard for which you're making a judgement?
So far, apple hardware has been superior to any other manufacturer, even with their warts, and their anti-consumer practises (of not having replaceable batteries, etc).
I've been perfectly happy with a surface book 2, and various Lenovo and HP laptops. They each have better and worse product lines. Currently rocking an HP elitebook for personal use and a MB Pro for work.
The hardware quality is more or less the same on both. With the pro, you get a moderately better touchpad, a bit thinner and metal chassis. On the other hand, crap keyboard and the abomination that is the touch bar, and no legacy ports.
Personally, I don't think I would buy Apple for myself ever again, but that's just me.
I primarily navigate by keyboard, so the difference between an acceptable and amazing trackpad is pretty minimal for my preferences. On the other hand, port wonkiness, temperamental wifi, okay keys, mediocre battery, driver issues and an utterly useless webcam convinced me to ditch the XPS the first chance I got. It's amazing I used it nearly 18 months.
This is where it started... https://www.engadget.com/2009-05-24-dell-now-offering-studio...
Milage may vary with other manufacturers, it doesn't look like you would change to another manufacturer. Which is ok.
Check business notebooks, from HP or Lenovo. (I forgot one particular Dell series.)
Microsoft is basically a toy OS run by incompetents without reasonable QA unfit to be anything but a launcher for stream.
That's a pretty broad brush you're painting with right there.
> they haven’t experienced anything better.
I don't want to gratify this pointless flame any more than to say that I have used all of Windows (XP, Vista, 8, 8.1, 10), Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and macOS as my daily driver at one point or another, and I currently use macOS because I have yet to experience anything better. There is a simple explanation for your problems here: something is wrong with your system (or you are overtaxing it) if it beachballs constantly. This is not typical macOS behavior, especially not since they switched to SSDs. I actually haven’t seen a beachball in years.
It just isn't as polished, and even that's debatable.
OSX is plenty responsive, and I basically never see beachballs.
It's not a matter of low standards.
Yes, I can go setup an oom daemon, but Linux should handle this for me out of the box (ideally with some sort of logic to avoid killing something like X taking down every single program I have open). Getting stuck for half an hour or longer is just not acceptable to let happen.
I like how x86 is a power sucking hog for the performance and enthusiasts response is to go out and buy more power sucking hogs!
Someone wasn’t around when Linux could figure out what to do with a USB device. Spectre? Meltdown? What are those?
It’s almost as if engineering is hard and being a critic is easy.
Kind of like numbers, language allows for a never ending, so big in a sense, corpus of little ideas.