Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by disabled | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

disabled

I have my Ubuntu 18.04 looking like MacOS. The only thing limiting it from really feeling like a Mac is the touchpad.

You can see it here: https://ibb.co/H7khM7h

A good guide for starting out is here: https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-macos-theme-on-ubuntu...

View on HN

Does Ubuntu sleep/wake easily with a lid close (maintaining runtime state), and avoid weird battery drain issues?

To me, that's the killer feature of macOS. I am usually connected w/ a mouse and keyboard, the touchpad is great on the go, but nothing really substitutes the ability to turn it off and on again without thinking twice.

Laptop kernel driver issue. Newest 5.17 doesn't 5.16 does on my laptop, but most laptops I have had that flawlessly function.

My girlfriend uses a MacBook and likes it. She bought a cheap windows all-in-one desktop and simply couldn't use windows. I made the effort during one weekend to make it look and behave like MacOS as much as I could.

Appearance-wise it is very very close. I got some gnome extensions to mimic the behavior quite closely too. In terms of software, it is still missing MSO and some magic apple integration to their other products. Otherwise, she is now a happy linux user on the desktop.

There's more to macOS than look of the desktop, notably the universal menu and full screen mode opens to a new workspace. I find the latter a big productivity boost when working on an undocked laptop as the gestures to switch workspace or windows between an application are so well integrated.

As another data point, one of the worst things on osx for me is their window management, specially that full screen mode creates a new workspace. I switch workspaces with command + a number, and that breakes it.

Same for me, I find WM absolutely infuriating to use.

I have to download a 3rd party application to be able to alt-tab between windows (I will have a few firefox windows open at a time at least)

Often times i'll do the three finger swipe up thing and I'll have like 50 desktops for some reason, and you can only delete them one at a time.

And why does the dock keep the icon of every app I open and close.

I just don't get it, and I'm glad i3/sway exists.

> And why does the dock keep the icon of every app I open and close.

It doesn't, do you actually quit the app or just close the window?

WTF does the green button do? I still don't know.

Yellow has always been minimize, did you mean green? The green button’s function used to be roughly “resize window to fit content” which makes sense because Mac desktops have never been built for maximizing windows, but it depended on developers to let the system know what a program window’s ideal size was and cross platform devs never did, so they changed its primary function to full screening the window and putting it in its own virtual desktop.

Yes, green. Very inconsistent button.

You can also hold the Option key and press the green button to maximize the window.

I end up using moom on all my macos devices though.

For me one killer feature is how MacOS treats every text field equally. I can use the Emacs style Ctrl-A/E/K/etc shortcut keys anywhere I enter text and it works[1]! To me it's deeply ironic that this is a feature in MacOS but not Linux (unless you count the terminal).

[1] With the exception of websites and SPAs that rebind these keys to something else. I really don't like sites that do this.

Universal menu is built into KDE and can be added to GNOME with minimal hassle (though the devs might try to shank you for it). Dynamic workspaces are also a pretty bog-standard feature for desktop environments, so if that's all that MacOS means to you then it might be worth taking another look.

I'm primarily a Ubuntu user but I there are certain design elements of macOS that I appreciate. It's a common theme in reddit for users to post the desktop environments with a macOS skin and state no reason to use a mac now - but the workflow differences extend far beyond the look of an empty desktop with no windows open.

When working portably, macOS is my preferred OS.

I'm not sure about KDE, but Gnome's experience is severely degraded when outputting to an external monitor with different display scaling. Without Wayland there is horrendous screen tearing but pipewire isn't trivial to install which makes screen sharing while WFH problematic. Intel WiFi drivers are a hot mess. There are numerous other QoL differences.

While Gnome supports dynamic workspaces, the workflow is very keyboard based and without Wayland gestures aren't native (e.g. smooth scrolling between workspaces) - AFAIK the only solution is to emulate keyboard shortcuts which is quite jarring given a decade plus of having super responsive smartphones - but Wayland without pipewire is problematic for screensharing, etc ..

KDE global menu is nice in theory but too many apps disregard it entirely which makes things awkward. Might be ok if you can restrict your app selection to Qt only but that’s very difficult to do for most of us.

I mean, the majority of apps I use on a regular basis support it. Chromium, Discord, Konsole, Dolphin, Mailspring, VS Code... the list goes on, and it's not just limited to QT applications. If your only holdout as a Mac user is the global menu, I think you'll be perfectly contented with what KDE offers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com