Switching from macOS to Pop_OS | Hacker News Reader

Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

support.system76.com

342 pointszathan368 comments

All I want in life is a Linux distro with a package repo full of meticulously reworked & reconfigured packages that make all the keyboard shortcuts across the entire system and every application be like and be as consistent as my old Macs.

I've been full-time Linux (Kubuntu) for a few years now, and I've hobbled together something that only irritates me to death about 30% of the time rather than the 100% of the time it used to before spending days and days fiddling with a bunch of different flavors of remapping at nearly every layer of the system.

If I'm ever fabulously wealthy, I already know I'm just going to finance an open source fastidious spiritual successor to MacOS 10.6

I'm going to give Pop_Os a try, but I suspect I'm going to run into the same problems I always do. The trouble with Linux as a desktop for me isn't weather it's beautiful or not. The problem is how disintegrated everything is and the thousand papercuts ways in which it works.

That said, I absolutely consider it basically an incredible miracle that the experience is as good as it is, frankly. So, I keep at it.

Lol. I came here to say the only thing that matters is that copy and paste in Linux is 'cntrl+shift+c'. You can try changing it, but your still fucked in most terminals, and then you end up with two key combos depending on context. It's a nightmare, and I'm really glad you have the top comment. Clearly I'm not alone.

Why bother implementing ctrl+c and ctrl+v in Linux when highlighting text copies it, and middle click pastes it? Ctrl+c feels like the dark ages in comparison.

The biggest pain with this is when you want to highlight some other text to paste over. For example I use the keyboard method for copying urls and pasting into my address bar, otherwise when you select all on the address bar you copy that instead.

At least in Firefox you don’t need to clear out the urlbar before pasting into it; what you paste replaces whatever is there. Dunno about Chrome.

I usually use middle paste on a desktop mouse but keyboard paste on a touchpad device. As for copying on highlight it depends how you manage your windows, if you use a traditional floating WM and typically click windows to select them you end up with a lot of single character copies messing with your clipboard. Doubly so in the touchpad case again. Or if you like to highlight to bulk delete/replace or if you like to highlight to simply highlight the section on your terminal as you read a manpage or whatever in another window or probably more use cases that didn't immediately come to mind.

Point being it's more about use case matching than one option being the dark ages and another being The One Right Way™. Layer on that some like using clipboard history and others just want a single parking space and it gets even more blurry.

I'm one of those people who highlights lines as I read them to help me keep focus. Plus, I'd rather have explicit copying via a specific action than something that just happens automatically on highlight.

Middle-click paste is a non-starter for anyone who uses a pointing stick (TrackPoint), since the middle mouse button is held down to scroll with the stick. Pointing stick users will usually try to disable the selection clipboard to avoid having unwanted text pop up in unexpected places.

Regardless, from my experience, the terminal is the only place where Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V are not the standard shortcuts to copy and paste on Linux. These shortcuts seem to be universal everywhere else.

I do it every day and never have issues with scrolling vs pasting.

The biggest issue is that some apps don't play nice with the x clipboard.

When I hold down the middle mouse button to scroll, change my mind, and then release the middle mouse button to move the cursor elsewhere, that results in an unwanted paste. That has happened enough times, especially in code editors, for the selection clipboard to be an annoyance for me whenever I am using a keyboard equipped with a pointing stick.

Some desktop environments and Linux apps have the option to turn off middle-click paste, though this preference is not always honored. I respect the preference of those who do like the selection keyboard, and I don't even have a problem with it being the default. But, I don't think it should be forced on all users, and I don't think decisions about other core desktop functions (like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V) should be made under the assumption that the selection clipboard is enabled.

> That has happened enough times, especially in code editors

Ah, that's probably the difference. I don't usually scroll through a text editor (as I'm usually using vim). I can definitely see how it'd be an issue in a graphical text editor.

Note that the select and middle click method is technically the same as drag and drop. It also doesn't use the same copy-paste buffer as copy and paste.

Not to mention many Linux users hate having to use the mouse.

Because maybe I don't want to clobber my clipboard with every damned thing I highlight?

On Linux there is a separate “clipboard” that gets “clobbered” every time you highlight something. See my other comment on the matter or https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xorg-docs/specs/ICCCM....

I know; I just pretend that clipboard doesn't exist. I've never found it convenient for anything other than pasting to terminals that screw up the CTRL-C/CTRL-V shortcuts.

Hmm. I am genuinely curious, how is it less convenient for you? To copy something to the clipboard you have to select it and press control–c, then to paste it you have to click where you want it to go and press control–v. That’s not very hard, certainly. But to use selection instead you only have to select it, then hover over where you want it and middle click. That’s fewer steps!

Of course I am assuming that your hand is already on the mouse. However, you said that you highlight things frequently as you read them, so I assume that’s what you meant.

because as I said, if I already have something on the clipboard, I don't want it to be overwritten by everything I highlight. a non-copying reason to highlight is the "search for" feature in a browser, I use that all the time. a very common thing is to highlight some text, then highlight some other text in an input field or text editing program, then paste to replace the highlighted text with the copied text. if all I had was the middleclick buffer, this wouldn't be possible.

Ah, I see. It looks like you have three similar reasons.

The first is something I guess I don’t do. If I select something that I want to paste somewhere, then I’m going to paste it right away; I already know exactly where it goes.

The second is that searching in applications you use frequently replaces the selection? That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Applications are supposed to claim the primary selection only when the user explicitly selects something, not merely when something is highlighted to make it more visible. Sad to hear that any application gets this one wrong; that’s supposed to be a pretty easy thing to get correct.

The third is about pasting into textboxes. This one is more subtle, but pasting from the primary selection into a textbox is supposed to replace the content of the text box, rather than appending to it. Certainly Firefox does for the urlbar, though to be honest I’m not sure that I’ve never noticed one way or the other if it does for anything else. Most of my text editing is done in Emacs, which doesn’t use textboxes very much, and which has a lot of other ways to quickly enter text without needing a lot of copy and paste.

Thanks for answering; it’s really interesting to see just how different people’s use–cases really are. I find selection to be more convenient because it’s simpler, while you find it to be less convenient because the programs you use aren’t as thoughtful, or because you use selection for other things. I guess we should both be glad that Linux implements both styles!

>The first is something I guess I don’t do. If I select something that I want to paste somewhere, then I’m going to paste it right away; I already know exactly where it goes.

I often want to paste things multiple times. e.g. I paste an interesting URL to an instant message chat, then maybe 10 minutes later I paste the same URL to someone else.

>The second is that searching in applications you use frequently replaces the selection?

no that's not what I mean. I'm talking about this: https://imgur.com/QiQiBLT.png

suppose I didn't know what "appending" meant and I wanted to search for it. I can highlight it, rightclick, then choose "search Google". I don't want to paste "appending" anywhere, I just want to search Google for it. but the act of highlighting it will overwrite whatever is in the middleclick buffer. so if that's the only clipboard I had, searching the web would interfere with copypaste, which is stupid.

>This one is more subtle, but pasting from the primary selection into a textbox is supposed to replace the content of the text box, rather than appending to it.

again that's not what I meant. I'm talking about taking a portion of the text in one textbox and replacing it with the text from elsewhere. for example, suppose I want to change part of the message I'm typing right now with lorem ipsum. it looks like this:

[1] https://imgur.com/GWldV00.png (ctrl-c copies)

[2] https://imgur.com/63RrISF.png (highlight destination. this overrides middleclick buffer, destroying the lorem ipsum copy if it were placed there)

[3] https://imgur.com/zGavx2b.png (ctrl-v pastes)

Sure, I understand. You can also do that by reversing the order of the two operations (paste into the document, then select and delete the unnecessary text), or you can use both selections (select the text to be copied while holding down alt, then select the text to replace while not holding alt, and middle click from the secondary selection by holding alt).

But that’s not really the point; the point is that it’s nice to have both mechanisms available. Some people will find selections more convenient, others won’t.

If you use Miro in Firefox on Linux, middle click dragging moves you around the board and pastes your clipboard contents in as a post-it.

Since when did highlighting text copy it? That would be a true nightmare for me as I use highlighting to focus when I read, extensively.

On Linux, it has basically always worked that way. However, there are essentially two¹ different clipboards. Of course some applications could do things differently, but usually they will use what you think of as the clipboard for keyboard shortcuts like control–c and control–v, while selecting things with the mouse uses a separate system².

There are some interesting differences between them as well. When using the clipboard your application sends whatever you copied to the clipboard and pasting copies it out of the clipboard. With selection, however, the application merely announces that the user has selected something in that application. When you middle–click to paste, the application you pasted into must send a message to whichever application was most recently used to select something (relayed via the X server), and the reply contains the selected data.

https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xorg-docs/specs/ICCCM...

¹ Actually, there are three³. CLIPBOARD for control–c/v, PRIMARY for selecting with the mouse, and SECONDARY for selecting with the mouse while holding down alt.

² But of course these two systems are implemented using the same messages to and from the X server. They simply have different conventions for how they are used.

³ Actually, there are as many as you care to implement. These three are simply conventional; applications are free to use other names to identify other communication channels.

⁴ … Profit!

I developed the utterly useless capacity to switch between Azerty / QWERTY and OS X/Debian/Win pretty seamlessly. I will make a mistake, look à what I’m currently using a switch the layout internally.

I really wish I did not have to do that

Are there any apps other than terminals that don't use ctrl-c? I can forgive that in a terminal app because it conflicts with SIGINT, but it would be very weird if a normal app like vscode did it differently.

Not really no. It seems to be only terminals.

Mind you, Mac has a similar annoyance with its command-C/V. If you work with Linux (+BSD) , Windows and Mac every day, as I do, be prepared to be frustrated a LOT.

I'd love if keyboards just had dedicated keys for this. It's used enough to warrant them (much more than other obscure functions like SysRq that do get their own key, or Apple's 19 function keys). I guess this is because I'm the DOS single task days there wasn't much of a need for copying and pasting.

alt+w is ctrl+c in emacs. moreover you can enable emacs-like key bindings in most terminals so alt+w can work there too without conflict

You would think, but I'm a sys admin and 1) live in the terminal. 2) copy and paste to/from the terminal often 3) do not like accidentally cancelling a command when I just meant to copy something.

That doesn't fly with me. I just use Alacritty and re-bind the keys so I can still use ctrl-c and v:

https://github.com/pkulak/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/alacr...

That was actually what I ended up doing too.....but then I miss having tabs and go back to the system terminal, and Allacrity explicitly doesn't want tabs. Argh. It's all so anoying.

Why not use tmux for tabbing?

Yeah, I use my window manager for the tabs. They are very necessary, but I like it better when the WM does it instead of every app. You'd be surprised how often you want to have your browser and terminal tabbed together in the same window once it's an option. Plus, you don't have to remember ever app's tabbing hotkeys.

For various reasons, most Linux applications try not to use the Super (Windows) key for anything by default, which makes it a good candidate for use as a custom modifier key for whatever you want. For example, users of tiling window managers often use Super+... for interacting with their desktop (open a terminal, open a launcher, switch workspaces, swap windows, etc.).

There's nothing stopping you from deciding to use Super+c/v as copy/paste instead of Ctrl+c/v or Ctrl+Shift+c/v. Apple doesn't use Ctrl+c/v either... they use Command, so the conflict you're referring to doesn't exist there either.

Except that key binding for copy and paste are application specific and not always configurable, so indeed Linux echo system does actually stop you from making that sorta mod.

I think MacOS got something right by using its Command key for "desktop-wide" shortcuts that aren't specific to one application, (kind of) leaving Ctrl and Alt for applications.

I generally try to follow this pattern when possible.

But I really do wish that it was easier to get a consistent look and feel on Linux, including key bindings.

except that it doesn't ... e.g. switching workspaces on mac ist ctrl+arrow.

That's why I said "kind of".

Terminal is the only thing that maps ctrl+shift+c/v to copy/paste because ctrl+c/v conflicts with signals. I've never come across any other program that maps something that isn't ctrl+c/v to copy/paste.

MacOS is able to keep this consistent because ctrl+c/v isn't mapped to copy/paste, and instead command+c/v is. If you really want, Linux is perfectly capable of mapping Super+c/v to copy/paste. You would probably only need to do this in your terminal emulator and your DE.

Really not a good idea to remap super for copy and paste though.. that is just a very surface level thing to do I think and recommend to any mac user transitioning to Linux and is why I built Kinto.sh so that hacks like "remap Super+c/v" for copy and paste don't have to exist.

https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto

The proper way is remap the modifier keys and then remap further based on the app on focus. Gives you coverage whether you explicitly remapped an individual app or not.

I came to this thread just to post that System 76 should hire you to work on their keyboard shortcuts if they are serious about attracting macOS users. Muscle memory is the only thing keeping me on macOS now, I’ve tried using an IDE on both Windows and Linux and gave up after a couple minutes.

I tried kinto on Pop about a year ago and it worked pretty well but conflicted with their workspace and tiling key commands so never tried switching to it beyond a single days worth of preview.

Yea, I am not surprised. I actually was trying to target Pop_OS! to use as a daily on a desktop of mine, but... I had issues with the installer due to it not liking a network ethernet device I believe. I did get past that, but then I had an issue with wanting to use btrfs for snapshot features - the installer though does not setup your partitions correctly for that.

It felt like Pop_OS! went out of their way to rewrite the own custom installers and then just decided not to support btrfs for whatever opinionated reason? I dunno - but it made me rather unhappy with the situation and I switched back to my Ubuntu Budgie distro of choice. Sad - because I would have dog fooded Kinto.sh seriously on Pop_OS! had they supported btrfs properly w/ snapshot support. Most Ubuntu based distros don't change the installer so much that proper btrfs support is broken.

I do support them though and may purchase one of their laptops in the future and sure - I would love to work for System76 - despite not yet using their OS on anything besides a VM. I do think they get a lot right, and love that they open sourced their BIOS for their laptops. We need more companies like them selling Linux pre-installed.

This almost works. This is what I initially tried to do. Just do a basic remapping of Control to Super in terms of key position. Then I tried to force my terminal to take Super-C, etc. to send the proper control sequence, and never succeeded. So, terminal windows and terminal applications became their own nightmare of special-casing, context-sensitive hell. My workflows bounce back and forth between lots of GUI stuff and terminal stuff, so I always have to be vigilant about what I'm copying from and what I'm pasting too. It's error prone and keeps me squarely out of fluid unconscious muscle memory speed-working.

Remapping the position of Control to the Super key just shuffles the annoyance around, unfortunately. I tried to live with it for a few months.

Yeah, as the other person pointed out, it's not that simple.

Like yourself, I also thought Linux would be capable, until you actually dig in to do it and realize it's a nightmare of different conflicts.

For starters, that super key is usually for the main menu/dashboard in most Linux os's and intentionally not easy to remap.

Then each application has its own key mapping, so even if you change the system copy/paste, chrome and any other app may have it practically hard coded - they are not all configurable and that includes most terminal applications.

Seems so simple till you dig in and try to accomplish it. In the end, the best solution was to find a terminal app where I could switch the copy command with the cancel command, and then I just have to remember when I'm on my Linux system, cntrl+shift+c is to cancel a command. 1/2 the time I use the system terminal though, and then the command is back to Linux native.

So now I have to remember that special terminal app to use, and that the cancel command is different, on top of the fact the key binding are on different keys also.

It is annoying as hell. And that is ultimately why I end up using my work Mac, even for personal stuff I would prefer to be on Linux.

Four examples:

- Pretty much everything uses ctrl+shift+v for pasting without formating. Really useful for emails, Word, ...etc.

- vim does not use ctrl+c/v

- emacs (=Mac keybindings) also does not. Simply because their bindings predate IBM's ctrl+c/v

- middle mouse button works everywhere and can use the same clipboard (one checkbox)

Why don't we have dedicated "Copy" and "Paste" keys yet? I hate typing Ctrl+Key all the time.

Put them in the place of "Scroll Lock" and "Pause/Break" or "SysRq".

You can achieve this by using your own keyboard (one which has extra programmable keys) or by using Karabiner (or AutoHotKey or …) to make life easier for you. For instance, if you hold C down it could interpret that as Command-C.

Apple gets around that issue by using a differnet modifier key. They have a different modifier key since the original Macintosh dropped the mostly standard control key. It was added to their Macintosh keyboards later, for interoperability with other systems. Windows, on the other hand, has the same issue as Linux. As soon as you call up a command prompt, they are using different shortcut keys.

> They have a different modifier key since the original Macintosh dropped the mostly standard control key.

The ctrl-z/x/c/v combination didn't exist when the Macintosh came out. The cmd+z/x/c/v existed on the Lisa (39 years ago!), so predates Mac by 2 years, which in turn predates Windows using by using ctrl-z/x/c/v by 8. Originally, Windows used the IBM CUA standard[0], which can still be used in Windows (KDE and Gnome came 13 and 16 years later respectively). If you're in a windows terminal, try ctrl+ins to copy and shift+ins to paste, works in Gnome and in KDE (with some remapping in Konsole.) Using ctrl-c in a *NIX based system seems like a dumb decision to me, since ctrl-c is SIGINT - kind of useful.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access#Descrip...

Get yourself a terminal that supports smart copy. It's a thing.

Tilix, kitty, Windows Terminal and others support using ctrl-c for both copy-to-clipboard and SIGINT.

To me it's a game changer and judging from the sibling comments, pretty much no one knows this is a feature that exists. Ctrl-Shift-C/V is barbaric and I have opened issues and merge requests to implement it in other popular terminal emulators.

Dang, some sweet advice. Thank you!

For me, getting the keybindings right is the killer feature Elementary OS provides. Sadly it doesn't actually install on any of the old MacBooks I have, so I don't actually use it.

How old are your MacBooks? It works fine on a pre-Retina 2012 MacBook Pro.

Couldn't agree more about consistent keyboard shortcuts. It's crazy to me that mere copy/paste doesn't have a consistent keyboard shortcut across the system (eg terminal uses ctrl-shift-c or something). And if copy/paste isn't consistent, there's little hope for other shortcuts.

Ctrl-C is a break signal. When you're in the UI, ctrl-c, ctrl-x, and ctrl-v work like you would expect.

How do you send a break on a mac terminal? I didn't think it was any different.

Ctrl-C is break on mac terminals too, but it’s not a problem since for Mac applications the primary modifier is command — so instead or Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for copy and paste, it’s Cmd-C and Cmd-V for everything, including the terminal.

> Ctrl-C is a break signal

and you can change that if you want in your terminal emulator. I modified some of my xterm's defaults using stty (I didn't change ctrl-c though, but you can change it).

Not a problem in KDE.

Having recently moved back to Linux (PopOS) from Windows, the one biggest annoyance is not being able to configure two-finger touchpad swipe to be browser back/forward. This is the default in Mac, easily configurable in Windows (perhaps it's the default?), and default in ChromeOS. But simply not an option in any Linux I've tried. The Epiphany Browser does it, but that lacks extension support so is a no-go for me. Any extensions or workarounds I've tried only support three-finger swipes.

So, along with consistent keyboard shortcuts, I'd like to add consistent and configurable mouse/trackball actions (some apps scrollwheel goes up/down, others it zooms, some support pinch zoom, some don't).

Touchpad gestures for Linux apps are being worked on:

- Latest update (December 2021): https://www.gitclear.com/blog/linux_touchpad_update_december...

- HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29555822

So far, pinch-to-zoom has been implemented in Firefox. (If you are using X11 instead of Wayland, then the environment variable MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 needs to be set.) Gestures for back/forward navigation have not been implemented yet (Firefox Bugzilla issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1539730).

The project aims to support gestures in other Linux apps, too. If you would like to help fund this project, the developer has a GitHub sponsor page here:

https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear

What I don't quite get is why this needs a project; it just needs configuration options; for example, two-finger swipes currently map to mouse buttons (buttons 6 and 7 for left/right swiping) which most apps interpret as scrolling (in every direction). I'm about to write a script to remap those to browser back and browser forward actions (after a delay to prevent repeated actions), but I'm so surprised it's not baked into the desktop environment.

But thanks for the link, I'll check it out

> What I don't quite get is why this needs a project

If this was MacOS, I'd agree. But on Linux, it's a different hardware landscape. There are hundreds of trackpads that Linux is compatible with, but not every one of them is multitouch (or implements multitouch the same way). Gesture support on Linux has been a long time coming, but that's mostly because getting uniform trackpad support over thousands of laptops is just not a very fast process, whereas on MacOS, Apple can make certain assumptions about the hardware it's running.

It’s more about how on MacOS, Apple gets to dictate what signal that gesture is going to send to the applications and you can’t configure it to send anything else. So either the application recognizes that signal and it works for every system, or it doesn’t and it doesn’t work for every system.

This makes it a lot more likely that apps are going to recognize that signal so it works for every system. It’s the paradox of choice.

Not really. On macOS, trackpad swipes produce a series of horizontal scroll events, not a simple back/forward event. An app can do whatever it wants with the scroll events. Safari, when the scroll position is at the end of the horizontal outer edge of the document, does an interactive back/forward animation that tracks your fingers while they remain on the trackpad.

As far as I know you’re supposed to use the NSGestureRecognizer system to recognize this kind of gestures and it’ll automatically make it work like you write. If you try to handle all the events yourself you end up doing a lot of work for probably a worse result.

You are correct.

> On macOS, trackpad swipes produce a series of horizontal scroll events, not a simple back/forward event.

That's not true. On macOS (and also iOS), you subscribe to gesture recognizers (i.e. swipe gestures), not isolated events, which give you easy access to how users interact with macOS without having to analyze (and likely analyze incorrectly) low-level trackpad interaction.

You could always choose to look directly at events instead, but if you are trying to get the behavior of a widely-used gesture like swiping forward/back, you will get much more accuracy (and happiness from users, and less dev time) by just recognizing them at a high level, which is what Apple expects.

As a user interested in three-finger middle-click and not interested in two-finger back swiping I have the exact opposite experience.

In Windows and Linux clicking the trackpad with 3 fingers causes a middle click, in MacOS this is not an option at all. Moreover, enabling it is apparently a project so difficult that the cheapest solution[0] I could find costs €8 just to add middle click functionality, nothing else.

[0]: https://middleclick.app/

My annoyance in going to pop from windows is lack of the address bar in the file explorer. I miss the ability to copy/paste file paths there, click up to navigate up the directory structure, drag and drop paths into shortcuts, etc.

Assuming Nautilus, Ctrl+L. I do wish just clicking on it worked though. I'd guess the reason they haven't implemented that is because it's also the window bar, so it's draggable.

and default in ChromeOS. But simply not an option in any Linux I've tried.

Bit of a tangent, but it's always funny to me to discuss ChromeOS and Android as distinct from Linux distributions. I get that they're each practically as "Linux" as TiVo (and might not even be that forever, depending on how Fuscia evolves), but it actually might help avoid confusion if we started using the term GNU/Linux unironically in some contexts.

Because they actually are, the fact that they use the Linux kernel is an implementation detail.

Termux folks keep hitting walls, because they refuse to acknowledge these are the only APIs they are allowed to call.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis

So when they make use of other Linux stuff that according to Google are private APIs, things don't go well.

As for ChromeOS, the kernel isn't exposed to userspace in any form, which are basically Webapps.

Running Linux applications on Chrome OS makes use of a secondary distribution in a VM, pretty much similar to how WSL 2 works on Windows.

So they might use the Linux kernel, yet they are far away from being distros that can easily run the GNU stuff.

Really? You cannot use an exciting OS without pinching movements?

It is not the first time I hear this, so this OSX feature must be truly addictive & productive.

This thread has a special focus on switching the operating system from macOS to Pop_OS. In this context, mentioning missing features between the operating systems is valid.

I don’t really like the snide nature of your comment, people care a lot about things like trackpad functionalities. Objectively, unix has been lacking in this department.

It doesn't necessarily read as snide.

(actually swipe movements, but pinching movements is the same idea)

In my case (and I suspect many others) a case of muscle memory, which can take a while to retrain, so you move to a new OS hoping you can keep the same motions you're used to and just get your work done. It's also important if you regularly have to use multiple OSes (as some tech support people have to do, and when you need to test on different OSes)

For what it's worth I've been using libinput-gestures in combination with xdotool for exactly this purpose, it's been working great for a while.

Will your 10.6 rework include the Display Gamma change that Apple included at release?

yup yup yup. i would pack my bags from Mac land and move to that distro right away. (if i had adobe too, lol…)

having a global menu interface that presents a uniform structure for navigating applications to the end user with sane default keyboard shortcuts (but universally configurable) would be a -game changer-

it also opens the doors to novel ideas up like Command Palette-like UX paradigms. imagine changing the resolution of a graphic document with about ten keystrokes, and being able to work so seamlessly in all of your apps! it’s almost like a universal command interface that works in GUI apps… okay, maybe i’m getting ahead of myself.

> If I'm ever fabulously wealthy, I already know I'm just going to finance an open source fastidious spiritual successor to MacOS 10.6

i, for one, root for your financial success ;)

The global menubar is such a big thing for me that it’s tempting to try to maintain forks of various things that ensure that global menubars like those in KDE and XFCE (w/extension) work properly — that is, the menubar in the app window hides (if present) and in apps that don’t have a menubar normally (like GNOME stuff) also populate global menubars.

unfortunately the line of work i’m in demands i have immediate access to Adobe CC, which is notoriously borked on linux thru wine (for now!)

if and whenever i’m able to make the jump though, i would absolutely love to do the same. i would love to help organise and coordinate efforts towards it

I think you'd like Gnome.

Im a former Mac person and I really like it. Ticks all the boxes you've just said.

i love Gnome and it’s always my choice when i’m in Linux land (40 was a great step forward, with a much more elegant virtual desktop workflow for one) but as far as i can see, there’s no universal interface for global menus (that is exposed on the UI anyway, there may well be something exposed on dbus…)

incidentally, KDE apps sometimes do expose global menus, and there is a shell extension for this on Gnome, but it didn’t work in 40 last i checked.

but yes, it is the perfect jumping point for the kind of workflow i desire :)

I find this funny, in that I struggle with Mac all the time. The worst grievance lately is that I don't know how to just pop back and forth between three windows. Something about the way command tab works just kills my ability to reason about what the window stack currently is.

And, for the life of me, I never get copy paste from a terminal to work like I want it to.

You might like to try rcmd? No affiliation, and I’ll add that it didn’t work on my external MS Natural keyboard, so I stopped using it. But I like the idea. Perhaps it would work for you?

https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd/

Window switching on mac has always driven me mad. I cut my teeth on windows so that is probably why.

Why can’t one switch between windows of the same application on MacOS with a modifier+tab combination?

It's Cmd-`, which is close enough to tab that I find it very handy

Headed in the other direction (Linux at home to Mac at work) for years now, I can't understand what the fuss is about with Mac keyboard shortcuts. In my experience, I don't find them consistent, useful, or pleasant to use. You hit the nail on the head with alt-tab.

alt-tab is universal. Hell, alt-tab works on Android if you hook up a keyboard to it. Mac is the only thing where alt-tab falls on its face. Even if you remind yourself that you're on Mac and use cmd-tab, it cycles between apps, not windows. You need to use cmd-` for that. I often find myself in a cycle of using 3 windows across 2 apps and it drives me bonkers.

> Mac is the only thing where alt-tab falls on its face. Even if you remind yourself that you're on Mac and use cmd-tab...

But alt on a Windows keyboard layout and and command on a Mac keyboard layout are the same key location, so I don't understand how you can be confused by this... maybe stop looking at the keyboard?

The bigger issue is that command-tab switches between apps, not windows, and command-` switches between windows in the same app, and neither work across spaces.

I ended up installing https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ which adds a keystroke that will cycle through all windows in all apps on all spaces. It's a huge improvement.

Command left/right arrow, for example, switches between terminal windows in different spaces, and to terminal windows within the same space as well. Press the shift key as well to shift between tabs. (At least on my MacBook Pro's Japanese keyboard.) I don't recall have modded this behavior.

That's definitely better than command-`, thanks.

It's still not as nice as alt-tab, though. Frequently most of my windows are a mix of terminals and browser windows. I may be using several web apps and several command-line tools. Having to think about whether the application I want to switch to happens to be using the same "shell" application is not helpful.

I just want to be able to use one key to cycle through all windows in all spaces, and which lets me easily flip between the two most recent windows. Windows (and virtually every Linux DE) has had this for decades. It amazes me that macOS only recently got this, and only because of a third-party tool.

Yes, Alt-Tab is a HUGE improvement over Apple's implementation because it not only restores minimized apps as it should, but can also create a window for a running app that lacks one (with Finder being a critical example).

Hold option as you release cmd and it will behave as you describe (opening the default window for an app with no open windows, restoring minimized apps… it’s equivalent to clicking the Dock icon for that app)

Mac differs between switching windows and applications.

So if you work in an IDE, keep reading docs in one Firefox window and test your application in another Firefox window then in KDE or XFCE or another sane windowing system[1] - even Windows - you just use alt - tab.

On Mac you have to stop an think: Should I switch to another browser Window? Ok, that is CMD - backtick. Switch to or from IDE? That is CMD - tab.

Press the wrong combination? Now Cyberduck has entered the mix.

[1]:I was about to write Windows or Linux but starting with Unity and now also Gnome has copied this to be bug comptible with Mac

> but starting with Unity and now also Gnome has copied this to be bug comptible with Mac

This is simultaneously one of the saddest and funniest things I've read about GNOME in a while (which has a surprisingly high bar on both accounts)

Here's how to fix it in Gnome :)

Settings -> Keyboard -> View and Customize Shortcuts -> Switch windows -> Alt + Tab

And for completeness, on the command line

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-windows "['<Alt>Tab']"

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-windows-backward "['<Shift><Alt>Tab']"

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-applications "[]"

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-applications-backward "[]"

Personally i like how Window Maker does it: you can switch between all windows like in Windows, KDE, XFCE and most other floating window managers (by default on Alt+Tab) but you can also switch only between the windows of the current group (usually all windows of an application belong to the same group) or quickly toggle between the last two workspaces (what WM calls virtual desktops). The last two aren't bound to keys by default, but personally i have those set to Alt+` (sort of taken from when i used a Mac for a while) and Win+Tab respectively.

The only annoyance is that it doesn't seem to distinguish between window types so, e.g., in GIMP in multiple window mode it also cycles between utility windows like the toolbar, options, etc instead of only the image windows - though some applications do not even bother providing window hints about their window types.

Also the whole paradigm breaks down on macos if you have multiple desktops. Suppose you have one terminal open on desktop 1, and a browser and terminal on desktop 2. From the browser, if you cmd tab to switch to terminal, it will never go to the terminal on desktop 1, even if that was the last window in focus.

If you use the same keyboard for both, by default they end up in different places. The Mac treats the Windows key as the Command key, and the Alt key as the Option key.

(You can tweak this, if you need to, in System Preferences, Keyboard section, Keyboard tab, Modifier Keys... button.)

By default GNOME has the same distinction between apps and windows and works with the backtick, too. I find it comfortable enough once you get used to it. You can do 2 different things with almost the same command (in terms of fingers position). It's only manageable with a US keyboard layout though, I give you that.

I'm not sure that the grievance is necessarily that Mac shortcut keys are better, but it's that what the OP is used to. It's a pain to switch.

I'm an Emacs man. Many Emacs shortcut keys suck, but it's what I'm used to, so it's what I want.

I use hyperswitch: https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch

Unrelated, I also use Hyperdock, from the same developer, to get the dock into the 21st century.

Personally I prefer alt-tab (cmd+tab) on macOS is prefer over other operating systems. It makes it easier to work with multi window applications like browser, spreadsheets etc. If you never minimize windows, only hide them it makes life easier.

Make your desired windows fullscreen, then swipe side to side on the trackpad (3 or 4 fingers) to switch between them almost instantly. One of the best features of MacOS, IMO.

Really nice, unless you have a big-ish screen. It is jarring to have the entire screen slide back and forth, and of course a bad use of screen real estate.

If almost instantly means 700 milliseconds on a regular monitor and 950 milliseconds on a 21:9 monitor, sure, instantly.

Gnome does the same. Slow, jarring and pretty useless for mouse+keyboard or displays larger than laptop sized.

"Just swish your virtual desktops around" seems extremely convoluted when I just want to switch between different windows.

But it doesn't work so well if you prefer to use a conventional external mouse.

I was stuck using the shortcuts (ctrl + left or right arrow key), or clicking the Mission Control button I had to pin to the Dock.

I struggled with Mac on my M1 Air for about six months then donated it to my partner and returned to Fedora on an XPS 13. Muscle memory was bad enough but the feeling of being watched was worse.

Little Snitch is pretty good to stop unwanted network connections on OSX

>And, for the life of me, I never get copy paste from a terminal to work like I want it to.

Doesn't command+c/command+v work?

I think most of my trouble is highlighting the part I want copied. Can't remember, and I now do most of my work in emacs. Such that I am now used to all of my editor buffer being treated the same.

Fair enough.

I use emacs as well, but apple touchpads are good enough that frankly it's probably faster for me to just highlight text in iterm2 with the mouse (which is what I do). In emacs I use the standard C-spc shortcuts, though.

None of my work is particularly terminal-heavy, thankfully.

I suspect that I probably just notice the times in the terminal that it is hard for me. I also use a rollermouse. Which, I love, but I have found I am nowhere near as accurate with it as I probably should be.

I made a FOSS alt-tab drop-in for macOS: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

I also list alternatives on that page. That may inspire you

Thanks for making this, I installed it the other day after switching to a Mac for work and being really frustrated with the default alt+tab behaviour.

I hate the mac my work makes me use, but this makes it a bit less painful. Thank you.

Exactly what I was looking for, thx!

Apple messed up its Alt-Tab implementation with one simple blunder: It doesn't restore minimized apps. I tab TO an application, but when I'm done I minimize it out of the way. But then you can't Command-Tab back to it, because Apple keeps it uselessly minimized.

> I never get copy paste

You can just use middle click everywhere, no? One checkbox in the clipboard manager and done.

Btw ctrl+shift+v to paste is often much more useful than ctrl+v, e.g. for emails, and is the exact same in the terminal.

best comment ever (well, to be more precise, best consumer software comment ever)

Why doesn't someone use kmonad or libinput or something to make a utility that holds a database of the most-used applications and, whenever the user focuses a window, remaps the keyboard to some set of consistent system-wide bindings?

I don't think that exists, does it? EXWM comes close, but it doesn't have the database.

I know, I know, I just said "someone" when I should do it myself.

There are 3 options here.

https://github.com/mooz/xkeysnail

https://github.com/k0kubun/xremap

https://github.com/autokey/autokey

My advice is to skip the last one unless you need something truly complicated and a config syntax that is just insane regardless of your level of complexity imo.

Of course if you just want mac based keybinds to be done for you then use my kinto app.

https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto

I use AutoHotKey in Wine, and that works for me.

Really? I’ve never seriously considered trying AHK in wine.. just kinda assume that won’t work lol.

Am curious now how well that works via xrdp then as xkeysnail & other uinput methods don’t.

Let me describe you my use case and workflow. It works within the Wine bottle. My AHK setup is IIRC 1:1 from Windows and does check for window titles, I did not verify it works on Linux applications (I do need to verify this given the IIRC). So what I have is I run WoW within Wine, and then I run within the same Wine bottle AHK (I use repeater features so I don't have to mash buttons ie. not for botting). Unfortunately the latency feels noticeably worse and it also feels I have lower FPS than native Windows plus WoW plus AHK so I run it now in Proxmox + Windows + AHK as passthrough. For WoW addons I use a CLI Python tool called CurseBreaker which uses Curseforge API though Curse got sold to Overwolf and they are closing the API to push their proprietary app (in past, Curse would work in Wine I suppose Overwolf would, too). I also use FirefoxPWA to run Netflix/Prime/Disney+ on Windows which should work on Linux as well. I might retry how the latency is. Cause I do prefer a Linux desktop like Sway or Gnome over Windows though with Powertoys, Windows Terminal, Scoop, and perhaps your tool etc it becomes bearable. (I use macOS as daily driver.) FWIW, I adapted my AHK script to FFXIV which I recently started playing and on Proxmox + Windows it works. No idea if and how well (latency) it would work on native Windows or native Linux.

The killer for me is if/when my mouse doesn't work well enough or latency spikes if video card, so I ended up for the Proxmox setup to use PCIe Aorus NVMe card with two NVMe in RAID0 instead of SATA or PCIe. Now it works reasonably well. I think its related to my board having 20 PCIe lanes, 16 of which used for GPU. But we've come a long way I/O wise for PC (x86-32).

On another note, Blizzard might ban me for Proxmox usage since they changed policy when GeForce Now became a thing (they never did for AHK and I used it for about 10 years now, some of which I played the game intensive but they did do banwaves). Who knows what Square Enix policy is going to be. If they ban me I will appeal, tell them my setup, show them my script, and that I have a swollen nerve on my hand (work related injury). If a human reads it and believes me, at least they'll shake tbeir head concerning their policy. Or so I hope.

On macOS I use Hammerspoon and Karabiner Elements but that machine isn't used for gaming. Similar tools, different purpose. Though I do always rebind caps lock...

My main point was the database idea.

> and be as consistent as my old Macs.

Would it help if I point out that this is just rose tinted glasses? ;-)

Or at least, when I used Mac full time back in 2009 - 2012, it was the least consistent thing I ever used: even such basic shortcuts as moving a word forward or backwards was inconsistent. Same with home/end: in one app it would be CMD + arrow left/right, in another it would be fn + arrow left/right. In Safari CMD + left meant back which kind of made sense but was hugely annoying when I filed out a web form in Oracle Enterprise Manager or something, wanted to select to the start of the line and ended up leaving the form, discarding half an hours work.

(Yes, bad web application. Feel free to tell Oracle that.)

That said, I kind of like Apple when they aren't messing up keyboards physically or logically and aren't busy snooping in my pictures. I've convinced my wife to use iPhone and switched most of my kids phones to iPhones and even use one myself and have bought a Mac mini lately - it is good as long as one can take it slowly, one careful step at a time - definitely not something I'd want to deal with in anger or if my life or the customers data depend on it.

And consistent - it is not!

It's been a while since I used a Mac but my recollection is that the same Emacs style key bindings were available for all text fields pretty much without exception.

https://jblevins.org/log/kbd

Thanks, this might come in useful at some point.

That said, on Windows and in Linux this is extremely much simpler and more consistent, I can write it down right here and now, it doesn't need a full web page:

arrow keys: move

ctrl + arrow left/right: move left/right to next word boundary.

shift + arrow left/right: select a character to the left/right.

ctrl + shift + arrow left/right: select to next word boundary.

There's a pretty popular macOS key bindings file that remaps shortcuts to be more in line with what you would find on a Windows machine particularly with respect to word boundaries and text editing, which is pretty much a must install on any new Mac for me.

except at some terminals, when ctrl+arrow doesn't work, or prints a weird character, so you try alt+arrow and it does work. then you're using alt+arrow for so long you go to another terminal, use it, and end up switching to another tty session, the same as you had learnt for ctrl+alt+F2. your brain pauses for 5 seconds, you try and get back with ctrl+alt+F1, which does nothing here. then you capsize bare metal and revert back to a VM within your childhood OS to emotionally distance yourself from the shapeshifting nightmare of linux key bindings, install the latest guest additions, accidentally press ctrl+alt+down at a loading screen out of underwhelmed boredom, now your screen within a screen is downside-up. you then short circuit your $300 keyboard with tears, before briefly dismissing reconsidering your life choices

Replace ctrl by alt and that's macOS hotkeys. Except there are a ton more which one can use (but of course doesn't have to use)

Completely agree with this sentiment. I can't stand MacOS for this, and various other reasons. I'll never use it again as a personal OS.

Seems I am not alone.

I have recently started to use it for personal things though, but again just things that I can use all the time in the world for.

I tried installing a dev environment on it and it was instant frustration.

Definitely not rose tinted glasses. I regularly use an old SE/30 to write notes in Word 5 just as an escape from distractions when I'm trying to get thoughts down and organized.

Sounds older than what I worked on, one of the beloved (by Mac fans) 2009 Macbook Pros.

Mac SE/30 is from circa 1989.

I’ve been using Macs since 2009 for programming and have always used _by default_ Option+arrows in all apps for jumping between words and Cmd+arrow for beginning and end of line/file. I have never experienced “fn” to be used for moving the cursor around. It’s interesting that you had a different experience since these have been OS defaults and you can change them of course. I wonder if these was another software which messed with your shortcuts?

The things I remember using for work back then was eclipse, Textedit(not sure about the name, but at least the simple text editor that came with Mac), Safari, Firefox and Chrome.

Eclipse, Firefox, and Chrome use non-native text controls to varying degrees. That may have been your issue. Apple can’t do anything about bad third-party software.

Of all the things to criticize macOS and Macs on, keyboard shortcuts are not it. They’re the gold standard of consistency and ergonomics as far as I’m concerned. I get not being used to them and having different muscle memory.

This. It is mostly a memory muscle issue people have to deal with.. and using your thumb - strongest digit for your primary modifier vs a pinky.. the weakest ought to just be common sense.

Nonsense. I don’t know what software you were using, but it must have been a badly ported from a different platform. The basic shortcuts have not changed much since the 1980’s. Moving a word forwards or backwards has always been option-left/option-right arrow. In fact, the default shell configuration in Terminal allows you to navigate the command line with option-left/right-arrow.

Ok, so I had to dig out an old blog post: https://techinorg.blogspot.com/2010/04/swithing-to-mac-one-y...

So it wasn't jumping between words it was home/end.

https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto comes close for keyboard shortcuts

Came here to post this. The developer seems to take macOS keyboard shortcuts on Linux seriously.

I do. Guilty as charged.

Thanks for the mention. Am a little surprised they wouldn't list it. I know mmstick at Pop_OS! is aware of it because I mentioned it to him at some point when I felt it had become mature enough. Although it really is not properly packaged into a deb install file just yet, been a bit busy, but also just trying to make heavy use of my own app for my own dev purposes as well without doing daily or weekly development on Kinto at this point. (I have made over 1,000 commits in a 2yr span just on Kinto. Even went from it being written in C to Python.)

I suspect once I package it properly and make it available in various repos and app stores that it will get more coverage. Also Kinto is feature complete as far as I am concerned, only changes that happen now are mostly minor. May do a rewrite of some parts of it to make updates go smoother and allow users to retain their own changes easier but no major functionality changes or additions are planned at this time.

Huge upvote for Kinto!

Works flawlessly on Windows and Ubuntu for me :-)

Makes life worth living! ;-)

I watched a pretty old Q&A with Linus, and he called out distros for breaking "app space" all the time as the main reason why the Linux Desktop hasn't happened. I think he's definitely identified one of the bigger issues (but not all of them).

NixOS, by accident or intention, inherently circumvents this problem. It also has actual non-existent UX: you need to manage your own home-manager configs (for now, I want to change that). The maintainers have put good effort into being able to express tons of preferences in your nixfile (to the degree of Firefox plugins).

You may get nerdsniped by it.

Could try my Sorun.me script.. built for Ubuntu Budgie and installs a lot of dev goodies (can be read in a basic yaml config file before installing) and yes consistent shortcuts from my meticulously built Kinto.sh app.

https://github.com/rbreaves/sorun

Have fun!!!

The config file for the curious.

https://github.com/rbreaves/sorun/blob/main/configs/ubuntu_b...

I haven't tried but it seems like you could use a keybinding daemon to effectively remap any application by changing layer in response to window focus changes.

See Ktrl + alt or Kmonad

https://github.com/ItayGarin/ktrl https://github.com/ItayGarin/alt https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad

KDE apps are also universally very remappable

My strategy has been to stick to everything Gnome on Ubuntu. In gnome tweaks you can even turn on ctrl-a and ctrl-e! Everything feels consistent

Really wish Linux followed macs example of using super instead of ctrl for copy/paste/etc in general though…

Many window managers, especially tiling, use super key extensively for shortcuts. This feels more like an acquired taste/habit than anything. Making applination-level shortcuts follow Windows make more sense for onboarding. Many keyboards have dip switches to swap the keys if you really cared.

I just disagree on this front, at least as a power user. Mac is able to have window manager shortcuts as well!! The problem is that I want to have copy/paste and I want to have my emacs-style movement keys, but because of Linux DMs choosing to use the same key for both we end up with ctrl-shift-c

Kinto is the best solution I've found for a Mac keyboard and key-bindings on both Linux and Windows!

I can't say much about the MacOS side of things (I do use a Mac at my day-job, but only because the choice is Mac or Windows, no Linux option). But as far as PopOS goes... I've been using it full-time on my personal laptop for several months now, and I'm very happy. Surprisingly so, you might say.

Why "surprising?" Well TBH, I always looked at PopOS as kind of a niche / oddball thing, along with any other distro that exists only because a device manufacturer is pushing it. I had assumed that when I got my System76 box I'd immediately install Fedora or something. But when it got here I felt too lazy to do that on "day zero" so I figured "Aaah, heck, I'll keep this PopOS thing around until I get some spare time, then I'll do a reinstall." Fast forward 6+ months now and I'm still running PopOS and am pretty happy with it. It mostly "just works" and I have access to basically all of the same packages as Ubuntu so everything I've needed to install (modulo a very small number) has been right at my fingertips, a quick "apt install" away.

Net-net, if anybody out there is thinking of trying PopOS, I'd encourage you to give it a whirl. Note: I am not associated with PopOS or System76 in any way, aside from being a System76 customer. I have no financial stake in this discussion.

Which System76 laptop are you using, and how has your experience been with it?

I went with a Gazelle. I splurged a little bit and got 32GB of RAM, and both a NVMe drive and an SSD, so I have both plenty of RAM and plenty of fast storage. By and large I am extremely satisfied with this box so far. The only thing I really don't like, and this is admittedly a pretty subjective thing, is the layout of the keyboard vis-a-vis the right shift key. I prefer a full-length shift key, above the arrow keys. This has a smaller shift key, which is just to the left of the up arrow key and above the left arrow key. It's a minor nit, but it's not as convenient to the way I like to use the shift and arrow keys together for selecting text.

I have a Galago Pro and in general I like it. some drawbacks I see:

- Terrible battery life

- Sound quality and volume not very good

- Problems with suspend/wake and fan control. The fan turns on when a USB-C is connected and the device is in suspend mode. Sometimes the fan goes into super turbo mode at night and can only be stopped with a hard reset. This one really bugs me and I would like system76 to fix it

Otherwise I like the machine. Display is good. I like the keyboard better than on my Macbook 2019. Trackpad works surprisingly well.

I have an old oryx4 (intel8th gen/ nvidia graphics). Its my daily driver. Its been quite durable, (I did have to replace a fan which wasn't too bad. In fairness I think my environment may have caused that. But its basically a clevo model laptop rebadged, so getting a part wasn't bad.).

The screen/keyboard/ trackpad are decent. It can run steam/ unreal engine/ jetbrains/). Lots of ports. Its a great development machine. Its always been great with the auto updates and software installs for the most part. (although right now, its in some state where its got some libc packages ahead of where the next upgrade thinks it should be. so it fails.... my first real linuxy state issue).

My main gripes are battery life when using the nvidia graphics and having to reboot to switch from nvidia to intel. For me its mostly a lugable hooked up to external monitors. They have a "hybrid mode" now, but when I tried last year it didn't seem to be great. Battery is much much better without the graphics card running.

I'd buy another.

Meanwhile I replaced PopOS on my ThinkPad a couple days ago, for some reason I had an increasing number of bugs and stability issues. I'm getting the impression polished/user-friendly distros just don't like me.

>I'm getting the impression polished/user-friendly distros just don't like me.

Very relatable. I always seemed to get into worse messes with Debian, Ubuntu, Manjaro, whatever... than Arch, Void, or Guix System.

What do you do when GDM breaks? Uninstall it, in my experience. These distros that are very shiny and preconfigured can quickly make me feel lost and not-in-control compared to the classic minimal wm (or wayland compositor) + assorted separate programs I chose on purpose and enjoy using.

Downsides to this situation are that it's tough to recommend a distro to someone new. It'd either be one I don't actually like/trust or one that would give them a hard time as a beginner. Also that I may come off as overly negative in conversations with people using those more polished and popular distros.

> (I do use a Mac at my day-job, but only because the choice is Mac or Windows, no Linux option).

This is true at my employment too but we just tell them we're installing a Linux OS and IT does not care. You may want to check if you can get a Linux option by choosing Windows hardware.

Nah, there's no way to get away with that here. This is a highly regulated industry and IT has everything locked down tighter than a drum. Running a non-approved OS on a company machine is probably a fireable offense. I'm not even sure if you'd get a warning first.

I recently installed Pop_OS on a new Workstation and wanted it to look and feel like MacOS as much as possible. It's surprisingly easy. You can even make Firefox look like Safari if that's your jazz.

Here's what I used: https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme

> https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme

Thanks for this! I didn't realize that such a thing existed.

https://elementary.io/ might be interesting to you if not looked already

I've always found the small instances where macOS Linux themes and actual macOS diverge annoying. To me, themes that use patterns and idioms that were instead inspired by, and not copied from, macOS are a happy medium.

As much as I enjoy the heritage of Linux theming, I do have to agree with you. A lot of it comes down to a difference in HIG, and as you've suggested, the quality of a theme mostly comes down to how well it works with those constraints. Normally I'm pretty unimpressed (those Big Sur themes have a real chicken-and-egg feel to them), but the few themes that I've seen that go out of their way to make a good, Mac-like experience are Nordic[0] (my personal fav and daily driver), Prof [1], and Juno [2].

[0] https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1267246/

[1] https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1334194/

[2] https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1280977/

But does it work like a Mac?

I find it to be close enough for my purposes. I've also re-bound some keyboard shortcuts.

I guess I don't get how operating systems are still something that people have such strong opinions on. All of the major operating systems are good enough or can be made good enough by installing a few packages.

Pop may be great, but it's useless if you need to run Final Cut Pro. macOS is wonderful, but not if you want to play a lot of AAA games. Windows is fine, but if you are doing a lot of Ruby on Rails you may have an easier path on some Linux distro.

> I guess I don't get how operating systems are still something that people have such strong opinions on. All of the major operating systems are good enough or can be made good enough by installing a few packages.

The phrase "good enough" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here as people have different priorities. For some people, having their dev environment broken by updates is a huge negative, something MacOS has done to myself and others frequently over the past few years. Others, like myself, don't care so much and so indeed MacOS is "good enough" for me but certainly not for everyone.

> I don't get how operating systems are still something that people have such strong opinions on.

When there is FLOSS, it is very common to also have feelings and ideology mixed in. It is very common for "FLOSS people" to evaluate software beyond familiarity and technical merits.

It's all about what you want in an OS. MacOS for example is very much one size fits all. For someone like me who wants to tune the nuts and bolts of the system is frustrating.

Windows is better at this and Linux of course shines depending on which distro you pick. I consider each distro its own OS. For the same reason gnome doesn't work for me (and thus PopOS doesn't) but KDE and i3 do.

But other people have other priorities. And the software you want to run heavily factors into it.

genuinely asking, what sort of tuning do Windows and Linux have that Mac doesn’t? I’m sure it will be obvious once I’m given examples, but for now I don’t get it.

From what you’ve said, gnome and kde is something. From my limited experience with them, the major difference that Mac can’t do is the menu bar or Windows style bottom bar as different options. Mac does stick with the top menu bar as something always there (though you can hide it in newer versions). Most other things can be customized in Mac as well. A lot may require 3rd party apps on Mac to achieve though.

I’ve had multiple Mac users have a hard time using my main Mac because of how I’ve customized it to my liking.

Well for example on Mac it seems to be impossible to turn off stuff like "App Nap" completely. I want my workstation to run 24/7 so it is ready and responsive whenever I need it. Yet in the latest versions I used every time I returned to my Mac I saw all the apps 'catching up' for a while, they had obviously been sleeping. And I had all sleep functions turned off in the GUI and with CLI commands like pmset. Yet they persist in pushing this. Another time I was decrypting a FileVault external drive, and went to bed after a few minutes when it was at 3%. In the morning when I looked it was at 5% and when I moved the mouse I heard the external drive spin up. Again it had been sleeping without being asked to do so, and this really screwed me up because I needed to clone that drive before going on a flight. I don't want Apple overriding what I want, probably so they can publish higher battery lifetime (and in fact in this case it was a Mac Mini so 'battery' lifetime was completely irrelevant).

Another thing is SSH access. I want to permit only public key access to my SSH daemon. Since about 10.12 or so (when SIP really started taking effect), macOS has been removing my changes from /private/etc/ssh/sshd_config and dumping them on the desktop when upgrades were done, in a passive-agressive way of saying "keep your shit to yourself". Not sure if it's even still possible to do this now with the sealed system volume because by the time Mojave and Big Sur came out I was already off the platform in terms of personal use.

Caffeinate (a CLI command to keep the machine awake) and a tool to constantly move the mouse (Jiggler) combined did work, but this is too hacky for my liking. If I want my OS not to do sleep of any kind, I should be able to tell it so.

Customisation with Gnome and Mac is possible but requires a ton of third-party tools which are often broken by system upgrades. I've tried all that both on Gnome and Mac but I got too annoyed with things constantly breaking. As a user wishing for great amounts of customisation you are clearly an undesirable on the platform.

I've used Mac as a daily driver from 10.2 until 10.14 or so, and I've had enough of these issues over the years that I just gave up on it. I still use every OS under the sun every day :) Because of work. But my main driver is FreeBSD + KDE and I like it a lot better.

Ah interesting. I always assumed running a basic app that keeps the Mac fully on work. Maybe I haven’t noticed this stuff not working. Maybe whichever app I used worked?

Yeah agree with SIP stuff. I don’t have that stuff turned on. Im on Catalina and Big Sur so I also have wanted stuff like you said and do that. However I completely agree with you. I expect at some point MacOS won’t let me even semi easily edit stuff like that. It’ll be like iOS which I jailbreak usually and then customize ssh etc. however iOS 15 also has newer SIP sort of things that now mean jailbreaking won’t be allowed to edit the root file system.

—

I was thinking the things that would be brought up would be random geeky sort of stuff. Like the plethora of apps I use on Mac (usually procrastinating) that let me do quite a bit without putting into much time. Like alt tab alternative app, using keyboard as much as possible, keyboard maestro and apple script for GUI automation, etc.

Not saying Linux can’t do all that. I was more thinking in situations like that are comparable.

—

I do want to try FreeBSD soon one day. Hopefully this will push me to prioritize that.

I find this comment disheartening. Not only because it diminishes the polished nature of today's landscape of open source options from IoT through to the data center, but the genuine disregard for anything that doesn't run niche commercial software.

Beyond that many of us enjoy not running operating systems attached to overpriced hardware and/or organizations that legitimately spy on their users through their "OS".

The “niche commercial software” is how some people make a living jfyi

So what? Some people people make a living as a cook too. Doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate kitchen appliances not designed for commercial use.

I get that.

My point is that OP says they don't "get" why people have opinions on OSes and then goes on to state how Pop_OS is "useless" if you want to run niche commercial software.

I mean if OSes don't matter then I guess one doesn't need Final Cut Pro. Kdenlive or OpenShot should be just fine, right? I find that sort of argument disheartening and it is because it diminishes the free and polished options we have at our disposal.

That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that all the major operating systems, both proprietary and open source, are pretty good. What people do is pick the OS that best supports the software they use.

There’s so much nuance to it though.

Sure, each of the “big three” work well enough these days for most tasks, but there’s more to it than just compatibility.

macOS has pretty unobtrusive systems in place for code signing and only running software from known vendors.

Linux has code-signing, in that it exists as a technology, but it’s not ubiquitously supported and you don’t get a centralised service vouching for recognised vendors out of the box (which makes sense as it kind of goes against the libre ethos - but it’s not a great situation for many users).

Windows supports gaming and most desktop software, but the security system (last I checked - please tell me if I’m way out of date on this) isn’t granular enough to cater to what you may or may not be comfortable with - so a lot of software will just trigger a UAC prompt for carte-blanche admin rights, which is as dangerous as you imagine.

Yes, Windows still has UAC issues and the farthest code signing goes for that is that unsigned code will have a yellow UAC versus blue/neutral[0].

0: https://i.judge.sh/zY50J/VyN1SkEG_H.png unverified, https://i.judge.sh/GmEa4/DVjFllkp_R.png verified on 11

I think you understand perfectly why people have strong opinions. Depending on your particular use case, one will work magnificently while the other will be toast.

My point is that if I’m a gamer, I may not be a fan of Windows any more than I’m a fan of Seagate hard drives or Comcast internet. It’s just another bit of infrastructure that I need to do what I actually want to do - play games.

If you don't do online multiplayer, it pretty easy to be happy with Linux. Pick up something DRM-free on GoG or if you're a Steam user, many indie games are native as are Feral AAA and then there's Proton. If it doesn't work natively or through Proton, I just press the refund button on Steam because there's a lot of games out there that do work with my setup that it's not worth losing sleep over a handful of games.

I was shocked at how good Proton was. I accidentally became a digital nomad (went on holiday, couldn't come home due to covid restrictions, decided to never come back) and have been without my gaming desktop for months now. Age of Empires 4 came out and I really wanted to play it, so I gave steam + proton a shot. It actually worked, a AAA game released this year worked without much tweaking, I just had to get proton_ge[0]. I assume that mainline proton has caught up, so if you tried to play AoE4 on Linux today, it'll probably "just work".

[0] https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom

I use Windows with wsl2. It's really good, specially with W11 which brings seamless integration with Linux GUI apps. Definitely worth a try.

I've used Windows on at least one machine since 3.1, and the turn they made in anti-user dark patterns going from 7 to 10 was the end for me. They want me to relinquish the idea that the OS is something I own and control for myself. And that's just not something I'm willing to do. So I quit Windows entirely a few years ago. Still need a VM for some things, but I don't miss it. I hear they finally fixed the print spooler after twenty years, but that's not enough for me.

Operating systems are a fundamental part of the experience of using a computer. Let me expand on that a little. For most of your tasks, it won't matter too much which OS you are using. The web browser is largely equally well supported on all platforms, as are editors, compilers, etc. Where the operating system becomes a fundamental experience is around the times when things start to go wrong in some way. What happens if you are missing an important tool? What happens if you encounter some bugs or other instabilities? What about when you need security updates? What if you don't like how windows maximize?

These error conditions are where operating systems differ so greatly from each other. On one end of the spectrum you have open source operating systems. When you encounter some error condition, you spend your time researching solutions. In the extreme, you modify whatever isn't working to your tastes on your own. On the other end of the spectrum you have fully locked down operating systems like iOS. Here when something goes wrong, you instead decide how to adapt your use of the device to avoid whatever issue you encountered.

What happens when things go wrong is what drives me to one OS or another, and is usually what is relevant in these discussions.

It's pretty much this reason that I started running Linux in a VM for my development work, and use macOS for everything else. macOS is fundamentally just a better ecosystem in my opinion for everything it caters to - that is, I actively use an iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, and Macbook. I use a lot of apps that sync seamlessly between each other and simply run best on macOS (or only run on macOS).

However, I've been burned _1000_ too many times for almost all of my development work (the sole exceptions have been Go and Java). But writing Python was a nightmare, last I checked (although this was prior to the full deprecation of Python2). Since then, I run an easily repeatable, tight-knit developer VM that I ssh into (or run graphical if absolutely necessary, like to handle oauth flows), and I literally do not notice any difference. It's as if it were native macOS (with the exception that I'm not running shared folders, so some files don't exist as far as Finder is concerned).

The Linux desktop is flexible and customizable. I wish mainstream apps would run on Linux as well, so we could experiment and further develop established UI paradigms.

Except it isn't. In order to deal with something as simple as unifying how keyboard shortcuts work across the UI (the desktop environment, intra-UI idioms for movement & selection, etc.) I'd have to unpack 30 years of legacy X11 decisions and idiosyncrasies, sort out how to reform numerous different UI toolkits, and often dig into the applications themselves on an application by application basis.

It's often impenetrable despite its being open source.

Perhaps there should be more of a pragmatic push for dual booting? I daily Fedora Linux but I can boot to Windows for random unsupported games. My setup is perfect for me despite being ~10 years old.

My problem with OSX and Windows is that they’re basically nannies. They often pretend to know what is best for me. Linux (and Pop OS in specific) never does this. I feel in control of my own computer again.

> All of the major operating systems are good enough or can be made good enough by installing a few packages.

And that's exactly the problem - macOS and Windows don't have "packages" in the sense that they do in Linux distributions. You can install software on both, of course, but it's relatively speaking a mess and Homebrew / Chocolately don't really suffice to make the experience anywhere nearly as clean and consistent as it is on literally any Linux distribution.

Other than that, I would agree, though for computer experts I would argue that Linux gives you the ability to fully understand how your system functions and control it at every level, and that this can be valuable. It's also a lot easier to use primarily open-source software on Linux. On the other hand, Linux can't run a lot of proprietary programs that are readily available on other systems.

How do you feel about the Windows official package manager, winget? I find it a lot more polished and usable than Chocolatey was, and didn't notice much difference compared to apt or dnf, but admittedly my experience is limited and I haven't done much complex with any of the four.

Regarding Ruby on Rails on Windows, using Docker is probably the way to go. As a bonus, deployment will become easy, as well.

Or just WSL and be done

All very pretty I'm sure. But, at the end of the day, much though I enjoy twiddling with Linux and poking around different distros, I'm stuck with MacOS because [like a lot of folks who use MacOS for work reasons and not to be 'hipster cool'] I work in the design industry and that means the Adobe suite is a must.

Linux has nothing that comes close. And the customary recommendations; The Gimp and Inkscape are so pitifully awful compared to Photoshop and Illustrator that I seriously doubt the people who suggest them are professional designers, who have to work with these packages, day in and day out. So, yeah, I'm all for Linux distros which try and lift some of the elegant design cues from MacOS. But, at the end of the day, the OS is just something I use to open / edit / save and move files around. It's not where I actually get my work done.

> And the customary recommendations; The Gimp and Inkscape are so pitifully awful compared to Photoshop and Illustrator that I seriously doubt the people who suggest them are professional designers, who have to work with these packages, day in and day out.

Understandable. While I do think familiarity has some impact, I picked up photoshop for the first time much faster than The Gimp, Inkscape was closer but Illustrator was still faster.

For my purposes, running Linux+FL/OSS is worthwhile as a hobbyist however.

I'm curious if you've tried Krita, and if so what your experience was? I found it much much much more intuitive than The Gimp.

I've tried Krita and found it quite impressively polished [dare I say 'for a Linux graphics app']. However I'd see it as more of a replacement for something like Painter or Manga Studio than Photoshop or Illustrator

Back about a decade ago when I was doing similar work that required Adobe tools, I used Virtualbox and really enjoyed the compromise. The desktop flexibility of XFCE was enough reason for me at the time, being kind of tired of all the third party commercial tools I was using for the same conveniences in Mac OS that didn't work as well.

Turns out I also wanted to play with my work more, and I ended up writing scripts to do a lot of the work I thought I would use Adobe for.

It was also pretty funny to start getting "share flowchart template pls" requests from my colleague who used InDesign, when I had created the flowcharts in LibreOffice and Inkscape.

So IDK, tools and results are one thing, but fun new processes are often fun and also end up getting results that were worth it in different ways.

I think these articles are meant for casual users and programmer, which greatly outnumber desktop publishing/artistic users. No one has claimed with a straight face that gimp will let you replace photoshop overnight.

> No one has claimed with a straight face that gimp will let you replace photoshop overnight.

Eh, high school me is sitting somewhere in the background sheepishly right now.

High school me was not the most intelligent guy.

I think for highschool you it probably was a 100% replacement for everything you ever did with Photoshop.

I actually did take photography and use Photoshop pretty extensively.

> No one has claimed with a straight face that gimp will let you replace photoshop overnight.

Sure there is: [Switch from Photoshop to Gimp: Tips From a Pro](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7480806).

The author of the article above plays on the ambiguity between hobbyist and professional:

> I stopped using Adobe Photoshop and switched to GIMP for all my personal photography projects. This wasn’t the impossible task that most people believe it is.

> I spend about 90% of my time in Lightroom and only 10% in Photoshop. This is the same for many other professionals

But closes the argument with:

> For the reduced role that Photoshop now plays in many photographers’ workflows, GIMP is surprisingly capable.

People who work "day in and day out" with a product, are typically a minority on those discussions. Here's another: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485643 - the opinion is clearcut like the parent's (ie. no way GIMP can replace Photoshop).

On the other hand, there certainly is a range on the spectrum where people can reasonably use GIMP. But at the very least, the idea of "GIMP can replace Photoshop" should be qualified precisely by the use case.

does photoshop have a command palette yet that lets you search for commands? that's one feature i really like about gimp, being able to press the / key and then search for levels, blur, invert, rotate image etc etc

its especially useful for stuff that you would normally have to spend a minute or two going through the menus trying to find.

apart from that though i have to admit its hard getting used to gimp but i haven't really put the same effort into learning it as i did with photoshop so its too soon to tell

Is it finally the year of Linux on the desktop?

But seriously, the work System76 is doing is really great. PopOS is really nice to use. The attention it is getting is well deserved.

>Is it finally the year of Linux on the desktop?

Considering that the hope behind this term was about winning the desktop user share from Windows, and not just "being usable" on the desktop, or "being used" on the desktop, no.

Now that Windows 11 is a thing, I think winning desktop user share from Windows will be easier than ever before. What else is the average Joe going to do with their TPM-less devices?

Throw them in the trash and buy a new PC. They are pretty cheap.

Having worked at an independent PC repair shop, there are a lot of people who would rather keep using their old 6+ year old laptops and have SSDs installed in them than go out and buy a new laptop. Yeah there are cheap ones for sale, but they're underpowered, have regular old HDDs, and only 4GB of RAM. Plus, now they're coming with Windows 11 preinstalled, which will annoy a lot of people who are used to Windows 7 or 10.

6+ year old laptops run very decently with 8gb RAM, a SSD and a modern linux distro.

Currently work at an independent PC repair shop, and can confirm this.

It's not uncommon for us to get a machine which is limping along on Windows 7 for the 15th year in a row, add an SSD and reinstall 7, 10, or rarely Linux Mint depending on how stubborn the user is on not upgrading to 10 and how open they are to change.

Windows 10 is like 6-7 years old now no? This cannot be representing the majority of the market. How much of the market actually upgrades their OEM pcs?

Keep them on 10, and eventually throw them and upgrade when the time comes.

Now that Windows Vista is a thing, I think winning desktop user share from Windows will be easier than ever before. What else is the average Joe going to do with their DX10-less devices?

We heard similar comments about Me, Vista and 8.

Yeah, it was a joke.

Every year can be that year if you just use it.

Every year is the Year of Linux on the Desktop as more people move over.

20 years for 1%, there is always hope I guess.

Steam Deck should at least double that.

Steam Deck isn't a desktop tho

It is if you plug a monitor and peripherals. Runs a full KDE Plasma desktop.

Ah, then we can add Xbox to the amount of Windows desktops in use as well.

The Xbox doesn't show a Windows desktop when you plug stuff in. Your constant trolling on Linux threads isn't appreciated.

It is called experience from a failed Linux Desktop sales pitch.

Been there done that.

Ex-Linux zealot, whose digital trail even includes emails using M$ on the signature.

You've gone from being one zealot to another. Oh well, whatever floats your boat.

The same way that counting Android phones as desktop does?

Nothing alike. Steam Deck is running a full Linux distro under the hood, using existing repositories for updates, along with their own launcher (not DE).

On the contrary, XBox has the full disposal of Windows Store and UWP applications available to it.

So no difference than using Windows 10S, 10X or whatever other UWP only variants Microsoft has released thus far.

UWP is nothing like it. Steam Deck is just running Linux with an existing DE, with some Valve-supported software and drivers.

Indeed, XBox runs two versions of Windows via a type 1 hypervisor, one version is a minimal Windows kernel tailored for gaming, while the other supports the OS services required to have the UWP runtime running on the same hardware.

Not at all the same thing. /s

Indeed, Steam Deck runs one version of Linux (based on Arch) and enables Windows games through a non-virtualized compatibility layer (Proton, forked from Wine).

Not at all the same thing.

Whatever dude, we will see the hard numbers quite soon.

Only if you view the achievement as trying to win market share, but since Linux is FOSS there technically is no market to share with the commercially provided OSes. Market share only matters if you're trying to make money by creating the OS. Otherwise Year of Linux on the Desktop is a personal goal for the user so the usage is actually 100% when they switch over. 2021 was the year that Sally and Bob switched, 2022 will be the year Derrick, Anne and Louisa switch, etc.

Like many security exploits have proven, being FOSS matters very little when there aren't resources to keep it going.

Derrick, Anne and Louisa won't switch if it doesn't support their shinny new laptop.

By the way, I do use Linux since Slackware 2.0, winning Windows desktop market share was the original goal of The Year of Linux Desktop.

Now one can to turn it around to make it mean a slightly different goal, so that after 30 years it can finally tick the box.

Ironically the Year of Linux Desktop has been achieved indeed.

Derrick, Anne and Louisa don't need to switch, because it already runs on a VM installed via Windows Store.

Twisting the definition to a more practical idea is better for progress, and will attract more users because it will seem like a more tangible goal. And I don’t count WSL as Linux on the desktop because it was already possible to run a VM of Linux on Windows and vice versa before it existed.

Twisting the definition is acknowledging having lost the original goal.

Projects don't pivot just because it feels good doing so.

Same applies to Windows on the server room, WSL did not became a standard option despite the years of Virtual Box and VMWare just because Microsoft though it would be nice to do so.

> Twisting the definition is acknowledging having lost the original goal.

No it doesn’t. It just acknowledges that times change, software gets better, and idea is made more accomplishable instead of betting on a single year where some sort of great migration happens (which was silly).

That depends on the definition.The year we break 1% market share (usually with the steam survey as reference)? Already happened.

I would say it's gonna be exploding after steam deck launches.I think it's gonna be higher than 2%,maybe 3% this year.Would be surprised if it gets past 5%, but that's a decent stretch(though not impossible at all).

Gaming was always the one thing that kept the more tech-savvy on windows boxes. I know it kept me there for a long time as a teenager.

If that can be broken, I don't think 10% is infeasible. Though I think Microsoft would have to really screw up to lose their status as the "default" OS.

Valve's new Steam Deck device runs Linux. If it proves popular, that will be a big incentive for developers to improve Linux support for their games, and help jump that hurdle.

First year for me not on Linux desktop for my primary device since... 99? M1 Air was the culprit. I still don't particularly love Mac OS and remain somewhat puzzled by the overwhelming love people have for it but:

1. It's usable enough and it's certainly polished and much more importantly

2. The M1 Air is the laptop I always dreamed of. Fast, doesn't get hot, SILENT. It's worth the trade-off for me, but I hope Linux on M1 succeeds and I get to run Linux again.

I switched almost 2 years ago to macOS, I still have a hard time resizing windows and I miss how well it worked on Windows. But as yourself I’m in love with my MB Air, I bought it as a placeholder while waiting for the new Pros but I can’t go back to a heavier machine to get performance that I don’t need out of it. Sure it’s leaking in screen real estate and brightness, but I’m afraid there aren’t any alternatives to a fanless M1 Air.

I have been using the Magnet app[0] since 2013 for window management on Mac. You can use it to position/resize windows using mouse gestures (dragging to edges etc) and shortcuts. BetterTouchTool is another powerful tool that can be used for window management along with many other things.

[0] https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/

[1] https://folivora.ai/

I had the choice of a M1 or a Thinkpad (which is what I've been using for the past decade). It was a very difficult decision - everything I hear about the M1 is incredible. I ended up getting a thinkpad because I really don't like macOS. But I don't know if I'll make that same decision in a couple years.

I too just moved from a 2010 macbook pro over to a S76 lemur pro as my main machine a few months ago. I think a lot of people who fit that wedge of "not hardcore techies, but passionate about freedom of software" have been dismayed with the recent apple/microsoft moves/censorship/etc, and are realizing linux is actually pretty user friendly with plenty of software options versus ten years ago.

Quite possibly. Their Lemur Pro laptop is really amazing, and I consistently grab it over my Macbook Pro or Macbook Air because it is lighter, faster, gets better battery life, and the PopOS UI is better than the lipsticked pig that Mac OS has become these days.

Why does the Lenmur have so much batter battery life than the Galago? The Galago lasts maybe 3-4 hours web browsing or watching videos.

The Lemur has a 73 Wh battery, while the Galago is 49 Wh, so 50% more battery. I'll also guess that the Lemur has much lower resting power consumption, since it doesn't have fancy graphics and has a lot of firmware designed to minimize power usage and turned on by default.

The two most expensive laptops that I have purchased are a Systems76 and a MacBook Pro. Great value on both counts.

I don't find the Pop_OS desktop to be as easy to use as macOS, but it is good enough.

Off topic, but as I approach my 71st birthday, and I will probably totally retire in a year or two, I have thought of simplifying my gear, and one thing I am sure of is that the only laptop I will want is a Chromebook with Linux containers. Otherwise in an Apple Watch and Apple iTV box is likely all I will need. For tech experiments, a Pro account on Google Colab (good GPU support) is likely all I will will need.

I was thinking the other day that Apple is the only company developing their operating system and devices for consumers.

I am not sure where Microsofts attention is these days. They have Windows Server I am not sure how the teams are allocated anymore.

The vast majority of investment and work in Linux is for what FAANG and other enterprises need.

The visual sugar POP_OS adds is nice, perhaps the on Linux. But it doesnt let you run Office 365, Creative Cloud, the vast majority of photo editing tools I use, or all the nice little apps I have on the Mac.

I have been running Linux since 1994, but I have not yet found it convenient replacement for my desktop.

It is getting very close on the "dev / coding" side, I can make that work

Yea, Desktop Linux is edging closer and closer. I am finding that I have been able to make go of Ubuntu Budgie w/ my kinto.sh app, sorun.me & autorandr.. which I need to the last thing to sorun.me as it is my "setup my entire desktop OS in 5 minutes or less" script.

Autorandr is amazing.. and I am also making betterScale atm to help hiDPI laptop users scale their Gnome based or Budgie based DE w/ or w/o mixed lo and hi dpi monitors.

This is a little off-topic, but I've been wanting to switch from Windows to Linux and the one thing stopping me is the lack of a good package manager. WAIT, let me explain.

On Windows, you can just `scoop install ripgrep fzf jq` and you're in business. And updating all installed packages is one command away.

Meanwhile on Debian, the system packages are often years out of date. So authors have started making their own custom install scripts [1], or just telling you to `curl` the binary into /usr/bin [2]. To update these manually-curled binaries you need to run a different set of steps for every one. There's no way to list outdated apps, and there's no easy way to update everything.

On top of that, many apps I use aren't even packaged (k9s, broot are two random ones I just found). Sometimes you can find a third-party repo, but that's yet another person you rely on to get updates. Whereas with scoop, it fetches straight from the source, so there's never any waiting.

Is there some alternative to `apt` that everyone is using? Or how do people generally deal with this?

[1]: https://starship.rs/guide/

[2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep#installation

Arch Linux :)

Indeed, after pacman and yay I'm never going back to Debian-based systems for personal use. The Arch User Repository is so much more hassle-free than trying to install stuff on Debian from 3rd-party repos.

What gives people confidence in the security of the user repository packages?

You can audit the PKGBUILD scripts yourself. A good AUR helper, such as paru (https://github.com/morganamilo/paru), will by default automatically present the PKGBUILD for the user to evaluate before proceeding with the installation.

Thank you

I heard rumors long ago that Arch has occasional stability problems caused by updates. Is that still true these days?

I guess that's ironic to hear considering my original question, but I appreciate a different update cadence between the OS (I want LTS, stable) and things like `ripgrep`, which if there's a bug, it won't keep me from booting my system and I can just downgrade if I notice it.

i am not experiencing such instability, compared to a normal distro, i have actually no idea what breaks because so many things happened on the system, here a few packages here in there and i can easily pinpoint what problem is!

I haven’t used it, but Manjaro is the more stable Arch. It has a longer release cycle, but nothing is like Ubuntu LTS, which I use for the same reason. I’d rather just not even be tempted to deal with newest updates and Ubuntu seems to be the only way to avoid that because enough people realize they have to keep a maintained version compatible with the current Ubuntu LTS.

> I heard rumors long ago that Arch has occasional stability problems caused by updates. Is that still true these days?

Been using arch for ~5 years. Maybe once a year something goes funky and I have to check the news page to see if any manual interventions are required.

They give you the exact command to run most (all?) of the time.

You could use pkgsrc or Nix.

You can search distros based on the exact kind of packaging solution you want. The diversity is pretty amazing.

Scoop installs directly from the first-party source, so you only need to write a package once per app, instead of once per version of each app. Are there any distros that work like that?

It sounds a bit like a good reason to use PPAs in some ways. But the rest of your writeup above is also the exact reason you want multiple ways to go about this thing, rather than one way. I think I use at least six different methods of getting the software, each with various strengths depending on the situation.

For example I see that Scoop runs best with "portable" apps and links directly to those third-party binary web resources. But what does the Scoop ecosystem do about third-party platforms that require special compile-time flags? Typically that's where a third-party repo maintainer would come in.

Have you considered using Debian testing or even unstable, if you want newer packages?

I absolutely agree that manually installing software leads to a maintainability nightmare.

How does scoop solve the problem? Is it simply by moving faster (which one could do with the less stable Debian repos), or is it doing something like isolating all shared dependencies for every package (I know this is in style these days, but I'm not a huge fan of it).

The name "testing" kind of turns me off tbh. I want my OS to boot reliably. I don't want to be a test subject.

> How does scoop solve the problem?

It skips intermediate packaging steps and goes directly to the source. e.g. if the author publishes on GitHub, Scoop will request `github.com/ripgrep/releases/latest` (or whatever) and then download `ripgrep-$version.exe`. It has very primitive dependency handling, but I don't think that matters because I mostly install Go/Rust tools which are statically linked.

I honenstly think it's a genius solution. There's no wait time for updates, and you don't have to trust whatever user created the package on every version update.

How is that genius? It basically ignores compatibility and stability as concepts entirely. Most people don’t want breaking changes to happen at arbitrary updates.

almost nobody uses debian on the desktop. If you're using tools like jq, fzf, ripgrep then you're smart enough to use cargo/flatpak/snap to get anything that you want. You can put it in a script and have it all ready for now and in the future if you like if you'd doing it on a lot of machines.

Have you tried Arch or Arch-based distribution? I am using Manjaro, and I feel that 'pamac' is a good package manager in terms of keeping up with package update. Arch and its derivatives mainly use 2 repositories, Arch Official Repository and Arch User Repository (AUR). Sometimes, a distribution also has its own repository. AUR is what blown me away a a former Ubuntu user. Because, it often has the package I want to install, even if has no official build for Arch.

Arch or Fedora. Even Ubuntu will likely be more up to date. Some people use Debian Sid, which is kinda like a rolling distro, if you squint.

But seriously: Arch-based or Fedora is what you want. They’re up to date.

Being out of date is Debian Stable's whole thing. Don't pick that if you want the latest versions, or just use containers

I’m pretty sure there is a homebrew for linux project, but I’ve never used it.

Remember apt packages have a rigorous review process. Scoop installs every program in user space, which is very good, but it’s nothing like what apt’s review process offers. The comparison on convenience alone is naive.

I think scoop is really nice. It’s a near perfect solution for the problem it solves, but the only problem it solves is convenience, and you’re still stuck using Windows.

Ultimately, I’ve found the most hassle-free solution is a default Ubuntu installation with a maintained dotfiles repo that has a ./scripts directory to document installation methods when necessary.

Or, do one better and make Dockerfiles for your dev environments and barely install anything on your local machine.

I am tempted by Manjaro, but I generally like to stick to the beaten path as much as possible so I don’t run into too many snags that slow me down.

If you want up to date everything you simply chose the wrong distro. It's not really the package manager's fault.

Debian goes for stable versions during a release and backports security patches. It's one of their main design philosophies. It really shines for boxes you want to run something for years with minimal maintenance.

Get arch, manjaro or another rolling distro and you'll have what you want :)

Or perhaps Ubuntu which is Debian based, but they put a lot of effort into decoupling the OS packages and libs from third party software using snap. It does have some drawbacks though like launching speed and integration. Personally I go the rolling way for my daily drivers.

I just think it's weird that I can't have an LTS OS with non-LTS userland apps. But I guess I have to accept that.

Snap is a nonstarter for me for many reasons. Startup speed is important for shell pipelines, and also it's insane to bundle that much stuff just to run a statically-linked binary. And it wouldn't even solve the version problem, it looks like ripgrep on Snap is two years old. https://snapcraft.io/ripgrep

It looks like manjaro is the most recommended arch distro so I'll give it a try.

Manjaro kinda went off the deep end, I would recommend installing Arch manually, or maybe using Antergos.

Actually, Fedora may be better for your usecase. Assuming no proprietary drivers are required, it's a very simple install process, and tends to keep quite up to date software while remaining more stable than Arch.

Can you elaborate, what happened with Manjaro?

A little while ago they forgot to upgrade their SSL certificate.

Their suggested work around? Users setting the clock back.

Hmm for anything Rust I just always run ‘cargo install xxx’. I realize that doesn’t help you, but I’m surprised using the package manager is actually the most convenient cross-platform way to install.

> I just think it's weird that I can't have an LTS OS with non-LTS userland apps. But I guess I have to accept that.

That's a good point, but it's kind of part of the structure of a traditional linux system. Every library is provided only once in the system. Also, the line between what is "the OS" and "the userland apps" tends to be pretty blurry on Linux.

It has big advantages too. That libSSL vulnerability? apt dist-upgrade and all your apps that use it are patched. No need for each app developer to incorporate it. And the dynamic shared memory can do the things it's supposed to. Great for efficiency.

Solutions like snap indeed trade off that efficiency and single point of patching for easier deployment by devs, but it has too many drawbacks for me too. Though snap is exceptionally bad in terms of startup speed compared to FlatPak and AppImage so perhaps you could look at a distro that does that.

Or just use a fresher Debian release. Testing and unstable are often more dependable than other distro's version of stable.

That's true, I mentioned this in my post at first. But I removed it because Debian itself doesn't deem it stable and I didn't want to get into that whole discussion :)

But indeed Debian has a very different perception of the term 'stable' than Arch.

I made the mistake of using debian stable when I first used it and ran into this problem.

Debian stable is not a good desktop OS.

guix is what you are looking for, (I think)

a bit complicated at first sight but if you value your freedom and is a poweruser then it is the panacea, and you can do this on any linux or unices...

alternatively nix,

I've honestly rarely run into something that made me miss not having the latest version of something.

Sure is something is new or under heavy develoent it might be an issue but having a 3 year old version of jq vs a 3 day old version has rarely come up for me.

With that said you have plenty of choice:

Flatpacks provide the latest versions of lots of things.

Homebrew is available for Linux (I have never tried it)

Don't use Debian as many people have already suggested

Compile yourself/manage your own version. Like people have been doing for decades.

For this while I would highly suggest putting things in `~/bin` or `/opt` and adding it to your $PATH, never put things in `/usr/bin`, that's is what apt manages and you could easily shoot yourself in the foot if you fuck about there.

One alternative you could use is nix. It works as a package manager even when not running NixOS, and the software is generally up-to-date in the unstable channel (which most people use as far as I can tell).

The backports repo solves most of it, with an occasional supplement from testing.

    # /etc/apt/preferences
    Package: *
    Pin: release o=Debian Backports,a=bullseye-backports
    Pin-Priority: 500
    
    Package: *
    Pin: release o=Debian,a=stable
    Pin-Priority: 100
    
    Package: *
    Pin: release o=Debian,a=testing
    Pin-Priority: 98
    
    Package: *
    Pin: release o=Debian,a=unstable
    Pin-Priority: 50

Then:

    $ apt-cache policy ripgrep fzf jq
    ripgrep:
      Installed: (none)
      Candidate: 12.1.1-1+b1
      Version table:
         13.0.0-2 98
             50 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable/main amd64 Packages
             98 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing/main amd64 Packages
         12.1.1-1+b1 100
            100 http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye/main amd64 Packages
    fzf:
      Installed: (none)
      Candidate: 0.24.3-1+b6
      Version table:
         0.29.0-1 98
             50 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable/main amd64 Packages
             98 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing/main amd64 Packages
         0.24.3-1+b6 100
            100 http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye/main amd64 Packages
    jq:
      Installed: 1.6-2.1
      Candidate: 1.6-2.1
      Version table:
     *** 1.6-2.1 100
            100 http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye/main amd64 Packages
             50 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable/main amd64 Packages
             98 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing/main amd64 Packages
            100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

PS. Don't curl into /usr/bin, the distro owns that. Downloads go to $HOME/bin or /usr/local/bin.

For the CNCF landscape of tooling there's Arkade, which would at least cover you on the k9s front. [1]

Personally, I just use Nix plus a Home Manager "flake". [2] It's completely self-contained so on any new computer I can install Nix, then build this flake manifest and have my entire developer environment ready to go in a few minutes. Having clean installed or adopted so many computers, at home or work, I have become obsessed with the fewest number of steps to productive environment.

[1] https://github.com/alexellis/arkade

[2] https://dee.underscore.world/blog/home-manager-flakes/

As others have said, Debian Stable is not the way to go if you want up-to-date packages. Personally I find Fedora to be ideal in terms of update cadence, packages are kept up-to-date but still get some more testing compared to a fully rolling distro.

I bought a desktop from System76 (it's wonderful) so I gave Pop_os a spin. It's pretty clean but there were just too many little things that didn't _quite_ work right. Customizing keyboard shortcuts never quite got me what I wanted. UI elements in the status bar that would stop being clickable. Buggy config screens. I eventually gave up.

I love the idea and I wish them the best of luck, but as of a couple months ago, they weren't there yet.

Another opinion: Pop_OS is fine and perfectly useable. I have used it for 3 years without any big issues. Sure pop_os store hangs occasionally but it times out and fixes itself and I haven't seen it doing even that in 22.10. It's fine folks, give it a try.

I've been using it as my main OS for nearly 3 years now, without any of the problems you describe.

I've run Pop!_OS on a Lenovo X395 for over 2 years, and on a custom build PC for the last year. I've have had the opposite experience -- it just works. Granted the Pop!_Shop isn't very good.

I find the branding of the gigantic P and the exclamation point, when used as a backdrop, to be excessively distracting from the content in the foreground.

Also find it hard to read the article since I see "Pop!_OS" and think they're trying to emphasize something

"PopOS" with no punctuation seems a lot cleaner.

This is my first time reading about this OS and the naming is very strange to me. I don't understand why they decided to go with "!_" in the middle. It feels a little too techy for a mainstream user. Why not PopOS or Pop OS?

Maybe there's a German on the team who insisted on visually splitting the "Pop" from the "OS". "Popos" is German for "booties".

> It feels a little too techy for a mainstream user.

To be fair, they market themselves as "Pop!_OS is an operating system for STEM and creative professionals who use their computer as a tool to discover and create." on the main page for the OS.

I'll admit, I don't love the !_ but for the opposite reason - it feels faux techy to me.

It's just branding, PopOS or popos is what most people type Do Not use the pop!_os when searching for related info or you'll get far fewer hits.

PopOS is nice, but I still find that nothing beats Budgie as far as Ubuntu distros go. Just way cleaner UI than anything else out there.

After my previous Linux experience with Ubuntu 10 years ago, I gave pop os a try last year and was surprised how good it was.

I think the engineers at System76 really know what they are doing and am excited about their new DE.

So you're comparing current pop os to Ubuntu 10 years ago?

Are they? I only see two events mentioned, with 9 years in between.

Gotta give my love here! Pop OS works well. Coming a severely mixed household with Windows 11/10 (for vr and gaming), Max OS X (for work), and Linux when not gaming. I recently switched my non gaming os on my household computers from Ubuntu to PopOS. I love the auto-tiling feature, and it’s in support for nvidia cards is a very nice touch. I’m also excited to see they are investing in Rust development of the frontend. Gonna be an interesting year for sure!

On a linux desktop I actually don't want something that tries too hard to copy MacOS.

I want a traditional desktop metaphor not very different from KDE2.

The closest thing right now is something like ordinary xorg + XFCE4 + all of the XFCE4 additional packages.

XFCE4 is small, clean and minimalist enough that it's entirely unobtrusive as a linux desktop GUI. With sufficient customization of the taskbar, and multi-desktop switcher, it's the best I've found so far.

This doesn’t mention the Mac’s approach to special characters, which is actually pretty doable in Pop_OS! if you set the keyboard as English (Macintosh) and set up Gnome Tweaks so that the Windows key is set as the third-level keys. (I generally move the Win key to the Caps Lock for my use case.)

Pop_OS! is a decent Linux OS for switchers, though I recently switched to Garuda Linux as my secondary Linux OS and am finding it a good balance.

Perfect? No.

Awesome? Yes.

Currently using pop os for all my desktop-type computing (gaming, coding, casual web, etc).

The true sign that it is awesome is that I feel confident again (after quite a few years) to suggest non-technical people (mom, grandma type of people) to install linux on their main system, because I know I will get far less calls saying "I can't do this". And when I do get these calls they will be easier to address.

I really tried by getting a nice System76 laptop from work, but PopOS is orders of magnitude more fragile for me than my Mac-s. In a couple of years of using it I've had my screen have random images drawn on it by the graphics driver, closing the screen without putting the laptop in sleep mode often ends up in having to reboot, my battery had to be replaced after 18 months just to mention the major issues. After upgrading to PopOS 21.10, my screen shuts off after 30 seconds idle time, and the launcher got reworked so that the first thing that comes up is not my curated list of apps. It feels like a Linux desktop from old times...

Weird comparisons. On the left we have first party apps by Apple, and on the right we have whatever you want to download from the internet.

Particularly egregious for things on the right that are also available on the left, which is most of them.

It's not a comparison. It's a guide for getting tasks done on Pop!_OS for people who are used to macOS.

It's like those guides for replacing jQuery with vanilla JavaScript. Of course the vanilla JavaScript is available for people using jQuery, but that's not the point.

People who are used to macOS aren’t using macOS default applications. The comparisons make no sense.

Pop_OS looks interesting! Quick note to the system76 guys, I think the Digital Audio Workstation section seems off. Audacity is a great tool but it has more in common with a basic SoundRecorder app than LogicPro or GarageBand. It's more of a great utility that you use in addition to those. I think you missed Gimp vs Photoshop as a great comparison as well as Blender vs Autodesk tools for 3D modeling and rendering.

All in all this is a great reminder of how far Desktop linux has come and how narrow the software gap is. In some cases, the Linux options are better or as fully-fledged while also being free\unencumbered.

Distro does not matter as much too me like Desktop Environment or Window Manager. I tried many distributions, in the end, I got back Fedora but then to Ubuntu (mostly because of the ZFS on Root thing and everything works out of the box experience). Artix was pretty good, but KDE and krohnkite was "too customizable" for me and dwm to less desktop environment.

BTW: If someone would like to have a tiling window manager on MacOS, try Amethyst[1]. Pretty awesome ;)

[1]: https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

Absolutely love the work system76 is doing. My only regret is that I run pop on a Razer rather than one of their machines. Hopefully they get their in-house laptops up and running soon :)

Condolences. Razer is pretty hostile towards Linux. I can't believe BIOS and firmware upgrades can only be done through a green-accented Windows 10+ GUI: opposed to upload to Linux Vendor Firmware Service, no *.bin files flashable from the BIOS, no Windows PE support, no FreeDOS.

Has anyone been able to successfully resolve screen tearing with nVidia graphics cards on linux? I have a nVidia 1070 with a beefy AMD Ryzen 7 3700X that I would love to use as a daily driver but I just can't stand scrolling in FF on it. I constantly get tearing and other artifacts that make it so frustrating to use I give up.

I've tried every tutorial I can find on the net, every CLI flag etc. Nothing seems to work!

I used Pop_OS last year to test Linux for general desktop use. Despite it's flaws, I really enjoyed using it unlike the last time I used Linux distros in the 2000s.

The only reason I ultimately went back to Windows on the desktop is because Linux doesn't support Ableton. It's a shame since Pop_OS was easily the better environment for software development.

Having switched from macOS to PopOS very recently, it’s been pretty smooth. My only real issue is that Remote Desktop support is worse than macOS which is itself far worse than Windows RDP. I know it’s a Linux/Debian wide problem, but I’d really like someone to step up and bundle something polished out of the box.

Vnc? I think most people use ssh for remote for Linux which is why it probably doesn’t get much love

Vnc works for the basic use case of viewing a remote screen. It’s a mess for interactive use, especially with the default implementations you can find on Linux imo. macOS’s built in screen sharing is the only vnc server/client combo that has acceptable latency but even it fails to support basic features like dynamic resolution for different clients.

And I agree that SSH is definitely far more common; I of course use SSH but there are lots of reasons why an interactive desktop is either required, or just far more convenient.

X forwarding via compressed SSH (ssh -XC) is likely the simplest bet, especially now that WSL has good support for it, if you need more advanced remote desktop you can take a look at x2go which is based on NoMachine's NX protocol.

I’m currently using NoMachine with their custom server/client.

X forwarding via SSH only works for single applications and not an entire desktop correct?

It took me (way too much) effort but I managed to get a pretty stable and smooth RDP server set up on my desktop. Sadly, GNOME3 and RDP don't work well together, so it broke after a random upgrade and hasn't worked since.

You used to be able to use X11 forwarding quite well, but most tools I use tend to render their entire screens as a canvas causing way too many unnecessary updates. Wayland also makes it nearly impossible to do this on a modern system without compatibility layers.

When RDP on Linux works, it works pretty well. I'd love for someone in the GNOME team to find a way to make RDP compatible and easier to set up. There's a VNC setting in the settings somewhere, but VNC is pretty insecure and terrible for interactive work.

On Windows tigerVNC has dynamic resolution which is very useful, but yes VNC’s latency is poor..

It’s truly amazing how good windows default RDP is in contrast. Unfortunately, I don’t ever plan to use windows…

What are the better RDP options that debian is not packaging?

To be honest the only good RDP I’ve used is Windows RDP. I’m not saying that Debian isn’t packaging a good alternative but rather I haven’t seen a good option that’s useable for interactive work.

I've been using chrome remote desktop to get to a box and it's been alright. I also use teamviewer. Which is ok but struggles with scrolling.

I'm still pretty unhappy with myself for using chrome remote desktop though. It's something I wouldn't be doing if this system had anything private on it.

Use NoMachine. It's by far the *best* experience I've had and I love it. Sure, it's not free software, if that's your thing, but like, it's _really_ good (really good latency and quality). Works on Windows, Linux, and Mac hosts, and clients for all three as well.

Truly a wonderful piece of software.

That’s actually what I’m using. It’s the best I’ve found like you said but there’s no good support for rescaling/dynamic resolutions, and multiple displays. It’s good enough to click a couple buttons but not for any actual work, at least given my setup.

I'm a very happy Pop OS user for the last year and other Linux flavors long before that. Windows as a kid because where I grew up the Apple ecosystem is just prohibitively expensive.

OSS is the future, please support it. Apple won't be around forever, OSS will.

The work System76 is doing is phenomenal.

It's somewhat weird that many of the "alternatives" listed are also available on MacOS. Or that in the games section Steam is listed for both MacOS and PopOS (whereas Spotify or VS Code are only listed for PopOS).

Otherwise it's a nice high-level overview

Curious to see no mention of AppImage [1] next to flatpack [2].

[1] https://appimage.org/ [2] https://flatpak.org/

No Snaps or RPMs or .tar.gz archives or ebuilds or instructions for compiling from source either.

Wanted to read this link, but 404: https://support.system76.com/articles/Pop!_OS-20.04-LTS-Rele...

Wow, this documentation is incredibly thoughtfully-done. It's wonderful to see a Linux distro give this much attention to holistic user-experience for regular people (going beyond just the UI itself)

This makes it sound like only Pop_OS! has the applications listed for it and they are not available for macOS.

It's also funny that macOS has application installs sorted and the Pop_OS side starts listing paths. :))

Option-u (or e) followed by any Latin letter and you get that letter with umlaut or accent. Things like that I miss from macOS. I still have no idea how to do that on GNOME.

It's actually pretty straightforward, you just need to enable a compose key, then press it followed by punctuation then a letter to insert a special character

For example,

    <compose> ” e = ë

https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/tips-specialc...

Switched to PopOs from Fedora kde/xmonad mix. Their tiling manager is functional enough for me and best of all I do not have to maintain my own desktop

What about security patches for the Pop _OS specific desktop components? The underlying Debian components are maintained elsewhere.

Another Linux article for beginners that pretends everyone knows what the Super key is, a key that no one has on their keyboard.

My neighbor asked me to help him get rid of windows 10 and install Ubuntu on his old (2013) laptop. I helped. It was easy and fast to install. Of course, you needed to know what is an image and how to boot from a USB device, but it was easy nonetheless.

Since he doesn't depend on any windows-only software, hardware or service, I didn't expect any problem.

I was particularly happy the printer (an multifunction HP Deskjet 27XX series) needed no fiddle to work, neither did its scanner. The windows driver was EXTREMELY intrusive and required an HP account.

Bluetooth needed a fix: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1232159/ubuntu-20-04-no-soun... which was the first google result and very easy to fix. After that, he was impressed that by just turning on the bluetooth speaker was enough to have the audio routed through it.

Then he proceeded to install software. I then started watching like someone who is following an usability test. He googled to install chrome and asked me if he should download the .rpm or .deb, I answered he needed the .deb. Firefox downloaded it but didn't automatically opened it. I really don't know why. I also don't know if simply double-clicking it in nautilus would be enough, I just typed "dpkg -i" and that was done, but it was not the best experience in usability. This needs a fix.

I then told him that he should not expect to install things the old windows way: download an installer an run it. I then showed him "Ubuntu Software". Most users these days are used to something similar to that thanks to "stores" on smartphones (note that FLOSS was a pioneer with this concept). Things then went mostly downhill from there. It is not that he couldn't install what he needed, on the contrary: he did install what he needed but "Ubuntu Software" is very very buggy! Results are duplicated without clear differentiation, you couldn't tell the state of it just by looking at it, software was installed but didn't appear immediately, there was no clue when an installation finished, first time something was run took a long time without any indication what was happening... I'm glad I'm skilled to use the command line.

If linux want to have a chance on the desktop, the software installing experience still has some way to go. It is better now for novices, but still partly broken.

Conclusion: Much much better but still not there yet for complete novices. The good part: I don't know if windows or mac are "already there" for complete novices either.

you should tell him to always use the "store" for a given distro rather than googling, that's a bad idea and you can end up with malware or breaking your config. Much better to use pacman/apt/pkg/etc if you go through the command line to install. Installing bare .deb/.rpm is a really bad idea unless you are well versed on the distro and it's packaging system. I understand the pain points of stores but they are still far better than googling for it. Pop OS actually has a nice store and bug free as of the latest revision. All my version upgrades have gone well too. The only real issue I had was trying multiple desktops. If you switch from say Gnome/KDE/XFCE it is a good idea to reboot between as they do weird things to dbus and don't plan around having multiple login types going on.

This is interesting, but I’m not sure how it relates to an entirely different OS?

Love to see a comparison of Gnome and MacOS.

How does Pop compare to ElementaryOS?

After using almost every serious distro over the last 25 years, I would have to say Fedora and OpenSUSE are top notch.

This is the distro that LTT used to test Linux gaming, right?

Linus tried it but had an issue where installing steam wiped his DE. He switched to Manjaro and Luke used Mint.

Not paying attention while installing steam wiped his desktop. TBF though he isn't that used to using Linux as a desktop. Manjaro did go much smoother for him.

Linus tried to make the point that on windows you don't have to pay close attention when doing something minor like installing Steam. Because why should something like that ever even have the potential to remove your desktop environment? (*On a system meant for the common consumer that is not an expert in the domain*)

Yes he didn't pay attention to the warning, but in fairness Linux gives a lot of warnings. Sudo gives a warning when you first use it, and that's clearly used all the time. To you and I who know what "gnome-de" is (or whatever the package name is) the warning is clear. But to someone new to the space, DE is not a commonly used acronym.

I believe so. He might have switched or tried out Manjaro since he had issues with steam on Pop_OS.

It's not. Linus used Manjaro.

Linus used it for a bit before a bug in the apt repos caused a forced steam install to uninstall his GUI.

Pretty bad timing because the bug was there for just a short while but at least the devs made changes to prevent such a thing from happening to a beginner in the future

Wrong distro, this is the one where he typed "Yes, do as I say!" into the console verbatim to uninstall his desktop environment...

that chain of events should never have happened in the first place.

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