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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

I recently went back to Linux after using MacOS for seemingly ever.

I’m on Ubuntu LTS with ZFS and i3 and while I miss the amazing hardware of my 2020 MacBook (non M1) I just love the flexibility of the Linux setup: package management is a first class thing, containers are too; Magnet was nice but it’s no i3. And overall things just work which is really nice.

I do miss airdrop and access to messages and other aspects of the apple ecosystem that I enjoy from lock-in but I’m happy for now and going to keep at it.

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After using macs for the better part of a decade and recently moving to Linux: the Linux desktop ecosystem is vibrant and fun if you like to tinker.

There are things that aren’t as streamlined like power management but I’ve been able to get my framework laptop to pretty much exactly how I like it.

I was nervous about sleep/hibernation but honestly using systemd and a couple of tweaks (enabling sleep-then-hibernate) and everything is super reliable, rarely any issues.

Wayland + Sway is a killer combination and everything is super snappy.

I fell in love with workspaces in Mac with touchpad gestures but on a high refresh rate monitor the animation is so slow and it cannot be tweaked. On sway there is no animation and it is instant.

I think once the steam deck matures we are going to truly see a year of Linux desktop soon.

I didn’t bother to test this because I don’t use multiple desktops, but maybe this is what you were looking for:

> defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0

https://osxdaily.com/2012/02/14/speed-up-misson-control-anim...

That stopped working several versions ago.

I've spent hours trying to make the Mac interface work well. I've come to the conclusion that it's unfixable.

Confirmed. Bummer. Sorry to hear that.

Plasma has workspace-like features and check this out for gestures[1].

[1] https://gitlab.com/cunidev/gestures

Can I install sway on the 20.04 LTS and when I choose it at the GDM login have it switch to Wayland? i.e Can I have both xorg+proprietary nvidia drivers running for i3 and stock gnome and then do wayland+sway when chosen?

> I do miss airdrop and access to messages

Check out KDE Connect[1]. It works outside of KDE, too.

[1] https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

There are several solutions to access iMessage on non-Apple platforms including https://bluebubbles.app/, https://airmessage.org/, and https://www.beeper.com/. You'll need an Apple device or Hackintosh as a server, but you can pay beeper to set up their software on a jailbroken iPhone and send it to you.

I also recently moved back to running Linux (on a Thinkpad) after using macOS for a few years. One of the things I miss terribly from macOS is pinch-zoom in Chrome. Has anyone found a way to easily enable it? Thanks!

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