Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? The cynic's guide to desktop Linux
theregister.com
theregister.com
Before that I used Ubuntu, and find Debian to be a better experience. Especially lately: no need to know what a Snap is, or worry about what weird innovation the Ubuntu people are going to try next to compromise my privacy or security.
I also previously used Xubuntu and Kubuntu but now have Debian on my desktop and Linux Mint on my laptop and media center, and my wife's and parent's PCs.
Debian's amazing. I've been using it on and off for more that 25 years now. I've used it on x86/amd64, ARM, Sparc and even S390. I've tried Ubuntu, I've worked with various flavours of RH and SLES. But I keep coming back to Debian.
This could be engraved in stone.
I know the title isn't really serious, but not being able to afford a Mac is not a good reason to use Linux. Use what you want/need/feel comfortable in, otherwise the experience will be miserable.
If I didn't already have a windows laptop for work, an M1 mac for work, an intel mac for personal use, and a dedicated gaming desktop, I might buy a system76 just to play around with various distros.
I still run a 2009 MacBook Pro (for my partner) and a 2011 Mac Mini. Both max out at 10.13 but they work 100% fine, run the latest browsers etc., and do all we need.
I still have mp3s of their sketches stashed away somewhere.
Edit: a classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LLTsSnGWMI
> This could be engraved in stone.
Glad you liked it. :-)
I downloaded Slackware over a 2400 baud modem, so I was early on the Linux train. Now, I occasionally use my System76 laptop.
My workhorse is using VPSs with mosh or ssh and tmux. A wonderful Linux experience. Either my M1 MacBook Pro or my very nice and very inexpensive little Lenovo Chromebook suffices to reach various VPSs.
Since there is a lot of talk about macOS in this thread, I will add that I would like to get off of the Apple platform, but my digital lifestyle based on my Apple Watch (so I can avoid having to have my iPhone with me when I leave home), supplemented with two sizes of iPad Pros and an iPhone when I need a camera serves me well. I have thought of dropping all of this and going back to just using a small Android phone and a high quality Chromebook (to access those VPSs) - there just seems to be too much “Apple ceremony” in my life.
That said, the subtitle “ A reasonable list of the least bad distros” accurately represents what the article is about.
Again, I didn’t intend to be insulting, so I apologize for that.
There are already a thousand articles out there with short lists of recommendations. There is absolutely zero point in adding another one.
The title (as you said that is all you read) attempted to make it clear. This is a cynical perspective. It is not a list of recommendations. It is the reverse of that. It is a list of what's wrong with them all.
It is not a list of least-bad distros either.
It is a list of the most popular mainstream distros and tries to summarise, briefly, what is wrong with them.
Because all distros have stuff wrong with them. All OSes have stuff wrong with them.
There is no value in pointing out what's good; a million fanboys love doing that. What value I hoped to add was pointing out what bad, in a balanced way, by even-handedly saying what's bad with all of the big contenders.
The Reg is not primarily an American site. I am not American, and I don't live there, or work for an American company.
In my limited understanding of American culture, bare criticism is discouraged. Thus the concept of the "shit sandwich" where the critic attempts to sweeten the deal by wrapping it in praise.
I see no real value in this. I did not want to do that.
I wanted to say what's wrong with them all, as simple, boiled-down summaries of failings are much rarer and harder to find.
This is something which I rather expected might bemuse American readers, but I do not see that as a problem. It's an opportunity for growth for them. :-D
I suggest that you read the whole thing, and as a general rule -- not an attack -- I advise not commenting or seeking to comment if you haven't read all of something.
But, whether you own a mac or not, once you start using Linux (and it takes patience to do so _effectively_), I can guarantee that you _will_ never want to use anything else.
- Linux user for the past 22 years (for the most part been so much fulfilling).
It does take time to be effective. I like to emphasise that learning to be effective at Linux is not a sprint - it's a marathon.
MacOS is a masterclass in bad design and lackluster features.
I always considered buying a Mac but was always hesitant to change. Once I got one for work I swore to never ever spend a dime on a Mac.
People that will disagree haven't used Windows in years.
It has literally never happened to me. However it happens weekly on Mac, where I will lose the focus of my window and be prompted for an update.
That you can disable in System Preferences. On Windows Home, for example, updates cannot be disabled, and the OS will install them even if this means ruining everything you're doing.
System Preferences -> Notifications -> Do Not Disturb
I set Turn On Do Not Disturb 'from 12:01AM to 11:59PM'
That is really just not true. I don't even think one could consider it an opinion. Irregardless of what Windows does, macOS constantly gets in your way. Try to rename iTunes, because that's the only way to keep it from opening every time you connect your non-Apple Bluetooth headphones (there's a convoluted procedure to do so). Try to control the brightness or volume of an external monitor. You cannot. Even the monitor itself isn't as good as it is on Windows due to poor resolution and text handling on macOS, and a Macbook Pro with a discrete video card struggles to drive the monitor. External mice and keyboards are touch and go with macOS and reset settings nearly on a daily basis for me. Developer tools, such as asdf or others installed from Homebrew are incredibly finicky and often require workarounds depending on whatever macOS version you're on and whatever thing it decided to break. (For example, it's actually easier to get Erlang's observer running on WSL on Windows with the GUI interface than it is on macOS, which requires all sorts of hacks in Homebrew.) I don't know why Apple doesn't get the same hate as Windows, because my Macbook Pro constantly installs stuff all on its own. I get pinged by several apps to update through their own update mechanism on macOS.
My CLI do you mean the Unix-like underlying system (like through Terminal, zsh, bash, etc.)? I enjoy WSL on Windows more because it's actually Linux and usually just works. The only trouble I have there sometimes is network related activities, as is usual for VM-like setups.
And yes, I mean the unix like environment. WSL isn't an option for me on my work computer since our giant corporate IT department has the windows machines on an older build (and locked down to the point of productivity sacrifice) that has poor WSL support. I've used it on my home PC and it works surprisingly well and gets better with each update.
You've merely succeeded in demonstrating many examples of "one mans lackluster features is another mans streamlined interface". All of your examples are things that many people won't run into. External monitor? Non-Apple bluetooth? I don't use either of those so, yes indeed, I find it to be a streamlined interface.
> Try to rename iTunes, because that's the only way to keep it from opening every time you connect your non-Apple Bluetooth headphones (there's a convoluted procedure to do so)
Never happened once with any of my non-Apple Bluetooth headphones. What the ** are you talking about? Do you constantly hit the play button on the headphones when you connect them? That's the only time Apple Music or iTunes would launch without the user starting the app explicitly.
> due to poor resolution and text handling on macOS
Yeah. Apple has basically told everyone without a Retina display to go ** themselves. While Windows does handle those in-between resolutions much better.
>I don't know why Apple doesn't get the same hate as Windows, because my Macbook Pro constantly installs stuff all on its own
You can turn off auto-updates on the Mac. You do know that right?
> Macbook Pro with a discrete video card struggles to drive the monitor.
My guess is that you're using a 2016-2019 MBP. If so, try plugging in the dock/monitor to the right side Thunderbolt ports. For some ungodly reason MBPs tend to throttle if a dock is plugged in on the left side.
Regarding the headphones, it's a common issue. In our case, it was done when the Bluetooth headphones (a model sold in Apple stores!) simply connected, as another commenter mentioned. There's all sorts of forum posts about this with a litany of solutions. The only solution that worked for us was to rename iTunes (the name at the time).
Really? You have a 5120x2880 monitor that macOS is messing up? I've never heard that before. Talk to LG, there's got to be something wrong with it.
>Auto-updates can be turned off on Windows as well. I still get updates I didn't expect on macOS, often when I've told it explicitly not to do so (like when you get the notification requesting it).
Not Apple's fault that you don't know what you're doing. I've turned off auto-updates and nothing updates unless I tell it to. There are some apps that auto-update on their own, like Chrome and Firefox. But they do that on Windows too.
> Regarding the headphones, it's a common issue. In our case, it was done when the Bluetooth headphones (a model sold in Apple stores!) simply connected, as another commenter mentioned.
Basically the headphones that do that send a play command when they connect. Apple will auto-start iTunes/Apple Music when nothing is loaded and play is hit. Yeah, that's annoying. I wish Apple didn't program iTunes that way, but that is entirely the fault of the headphones. That's why bluetooth headphones today don't do that.
I can also confirm that OSX doesn’t have a good case with external monitors, but I am no longer sure that it is possible at all. Frankly, all OSes suck at it so hard that one should just try to avoid the situation. Strangely enough the new Wayland on Linux may be the most adequate at it, though it is still far from perfect.
That said, I agree with your 2010 estimate of Mac software peaking in 2010. Mac laptop hardware is still better than Linux laptop hardware. As someone who's considering my first Linux laptop, I need to balance the inconveniences of Linux hardware now with the likely fact I can probably use that laptop significantly longer than current Mac. Somebody has to pay for all those convenient Mac support folks.
The funny thing about that is that it's only with the Apple Silicon Macs that's true. The 2016-2020 Intel MacBooks were a garbage fire.
Really not my current experience and I use W10 daily at work and W11 at home. Not saying it's a good OS, just saying that your statement is plain wrong.
If certain (third party) apps are annoying then you can control notifications through the focus assist setting just like with any mobile OS.
We all have our preferences, obviously, but to assert that MacOS UI is 'a masterclass in bad design and lackluster features' is a grandiose exaggeration stated as fact.
1) It’s very annoying that, in a full screen window, moving your mouse to the top of the screen causes the window to rescale. When reading a book in chrome, realizing the window causes the text to reflow to every time I accidentally move the mouse too far up (when trying to rearrange tabs, for example) all my text jumps around
2) when unzipping a file on the desktop by double clicking it, the unzipped folder appears right behind the zip file and I have to precisely drag it elsewhere. This happens even when i have snap to grid turned on (the new folder ignores the grid)
3) When an app is hanging, I want to click the apple icon in the menu bar to open the force-quit tool. But the menu bar hangs when the focused app does! So I have to switch to a different app just to force-quit the hanging one.
4) If you want to see all possible resolutions of an external monitor, clicking the “Scaled” checkbox in the display settings window won’t do it. Instead you have to option-click the checkbox. How’s that for discoverable?
5) Whyyyy do my virtual desktops rearrange themselves randomly???
6) Dragging a .app from ~/Applications to the trash can doesn’t remove any folders the app has created in ~/Libraries
7) Finder is just terrible compared to windows explorer. Oh how i miss having an editable path bar to make it easy to copy/paste a path! By default you can’t even see the current path and basic functionally like “go up” is missing
8) The default terminal sucks. The windows one does too but at least windows has the microsoft terminal in the windows store.
9) Try dragging an app from launchpad into an app folder. it’s impossible.
10) Yesterday I tried to do an os update. A pop-up appeared saying “you don’t have enough disk space to install the update”. I clicked “ok” and then my computer restarted and installed the update anyway. ????
2) I do not have this issue. But then again I don't really use the desktop for storing files. I use list view and lots of subfolders of Documents. Double-clicking a zip file in list view unzips it to a folder which appears before the zip file in the list (when sorting by date)
3) command-option-escape is the global hotkey to open the force-quit menu. You can also right-click the dock icon and hold option to change the quit command into force quit.
4) That sounds annoying. I have never used an external monitor on my MacBooks.
5) Desktops (the numbered ones you create by clicking +) don't rearrange themselves. It's only full screen windows that do. The desktops stay where they are relative to each other.
6) Why would I want unrelated files to be deleted when deleting one file? That's more of an iOS thing. On my Mac I only want to delete the files I specify and no others.
7) Press command and click on the current folder name at the top of the window to go back in the hierarchy. When you hover over the folder name you can also see an icon next to the name. This icon can be dragged and dropped into other windows to paste the text path to that folder. Or if you like, turn on the path bar under the View menu in Finder to be able to quickly jump back to any higher level in the path hierarchy. Press command-shift-g to open the go-to window where you can tab complete your way to a new path. The go-to window also respects relative directories like ~ for home and ./ for the current directory.
8) I love the default Terminal. It's way faster than all of the other terminals I've tried. It's nicely customizable and it has tabs which are good enough for me.
9) I never use the launchpad. Try using command-space to search for stuff from spotlight.
10) That's weird. In general, funky things happen when you run low on disk space for most operating systems. It's a good idea to keep a healthy amount of free space (20%). Try going to Apple -> About This Mac... -> Storage tab -> Manage... This nifty included tool will help you find and delete things that are taking up a lot of space, particularly things you aren't using very often. You can also turn on a feature that deletes files which have been sitting in the trash for 30 days. I never manually empty the trash anymore!
For this, believe it or not, it's actually a FEATURE. If this again doesn't prove my point I don't know what does.
The good news is that you can disable it: https://www.appsntips.com/learn/how-to-stop-mac-spaces-from-...
You can also command-click the directory name in the window at the top to see the path/access parent directories.
2. Possible solution? Open the Archive Utility app and change the preferences.
3. Command+Option+Esc
5. By default Mission Control uses most recently used ordering. This can be changed in System Preferences.
7. Command+Shift+G (This is in the menubar under Go > Go to Folder...) You can also go up the current folder tree by right clicking on the name of the folder on title bar. (This also works in some apps.)
Hope this helps a little.
2) Yeah, this one could be better. Right/alt click and "Clean Up" might help you a bit.
3) You can also right/alt click the icon in the Dock to force quit [0], but agreed that a hanging application shouldn't cause OS components to hang.
4) I'll admit I wasn't even aware of the option-click ability, so fair enough. In my experience though, the options under Scaled have almost always been the most sensible options for the display.
5) As someone else mentioned, you can turn this off. I personally also hate that they made this the default. Spaces as a whole work really well though IMO.
6) IIUC it _can_, depending on the app. I wouldn't say Windows is any better, though... it's not like Windows deletes files when you uninstall something. Cleanup is purely up to the application's implementation. Also, there's the registry. Also, if you just "delete" an application (i.e. the executable) like you would any other file, you likely just broke the application, not uninstalled it. You might've even broken the uninstall functionality.
7) Yeah, Finder does make some strong assumptions about how you're expected to use it. It doesn't completely replace using text, but try the multi-pane view. It largely accomplishes a similar navigation style involving the up function (which you can also directly achieve with Cmd+Up).
8) The default terminal (Terminal.app) is actually quite good, if barebones. It has some of the lowest text-to-update latencies out there [1]. Though admittedly, I have no idea about terminal latencies on Windows.
And you touch on probably the single-biggest issue I have with Windows: backwards (in)compatibility to a fault. If they made a better terminal, why is that not just the terminal now? I know the answer is "because people are familiar with Command Prompt", but that's kinda my point. MS rarely replaces anything. They just keep adding more versions that are available. It's great that you get the choice, but it sucks that you have to make all these choices [2] for a useable system.
I have a similar issue with Control Panel vs Settings. Edge vs IE [3].
And I'm not saying I want them to replace all the applications every year or something like that. Too bad MS does that, too. Except you also have to use the old one.
9) Totally agreed on this one. It sounds trivial but is absolutely infuriating.
10) I'm... not sure what happened here. Confusing, but sounds like it's okay?
[0]: Although honestly, this might hang as well.
[1]: https://danluu.com/term-latency/
[2]: Assuming you're even aware of the choices.
[3]: To be fair, IE is EOL, but that process has taken a LONG time. Edge and IE have both been included in Windows systems for the better part of a decade at this point.
A lot of what makes a good UI (which is the main part of the OS we've been talking about) is that it takes relatively little effort for the person to understand [0]. This is highly dependent on the person -- their preferences, modes of thinking, use-cases, and historical usage. Even the "type of user" they think they are can play a role [1].
One person's deal-breaking bug is another person's killer feature.
[0]: For lack of a less-overloaded term: "intuitive".
[1]: e.g. someone who considers themselves a "power user" might eschew anything that doesn't provide a ton of options... even if the only options available are the ones they would choose anyway.
10 years ago it was the most polished and consistent UI experience among all the major OSes. Today it's a mess (though IMO still better than the alternatives).
The dock leaving empty space on 50% of the width of your monitor is also a fact.
Or having to run a weird command in the CLI to add an empty space as separator in the dock.
Or having no "Apply to all displays" when changing background images on monitors.
That's just 30 seconds out of the top of my head.
I've been using Macs since 1988 and I've never wanted your point 1, 3, or 4, and my dock doesn't take 50% of the width of the screen, it takes about 5% of it because it's on the side where it belongs and where it was on NeXTstep.
So none of this has ever applied to me, and TBH, I can't even imagine it applying to me.
You just don't know how bad you have it, that's it.
But sure, MacOS is great, go back to installing a 3rd party software to snap windows xD
Linux wins for dev and loses for apps. Windows wins for apps and loses for dev. Mac is second-best at both which is why I prefer it.
That said, I'd love to be running production-ready Mint on my M1 Air.
Edit: I forgot to say, and it's the reason I responded to you in the first place, that I agree. It's really sad that something like Rectangle has to exist just to get decent window handling.
Pot, kettle, black?
To make window management bearable in Windows, I install Powertoys (Fancy Zones). Granted, it is not third-party, it is by Microsoft, but then it is version 0.something, it shows and there's a reason why it is not shipped with the OS.
Secondly, I was a Windows early adopter and have used it since version 2.01. I do not see any relevance.
3rd, yes, I have Rectangle, which replaced Spectacle. So?
On Windows, my development environment is seamless. With WSL, I get an actual Linux distribution. And to be honest, Windows just has a lot less friction than macOS these days. You don't have to jump through all sorts of hoops to actually use your computer.
One example of the inanity of macOS and Apple is that in using an external monitor, macOS or the Macbook Pro is incapable of adjusting the brightness and even volume (!) of the external monitor. It's not that the keys don't work. It's that you just simply cannot do it even from the OS. It's absolutely insane people consider Apple the more simple solution. And oh yea, basically every day, my mouse and keyboard settings change or reset or stop working. The exact same setup works flawlessly with my home Windows 11 PC. I setup things, and they stay that way. Updates do not break my computer or reset settings. Applications work. And Windows 11, for whatever reason, does not hog as much RAM as macOS does.
It's a Chesterton's Fence situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence
While marketing does play a bog role, it is still rooted in the reality: Apple makes good products (that are often leagues better than the competition in several areas), and as a whole the experience of using Apple products is better for a significant number of people.
All I hear are attributes that are supposed to be better (spoiler, they're not), but always without a single concrete example.
First, stop calling people fanatics. And then, and only then, you will hear all the factual arguments.
Finder is the worst file manager I've ever used. Mac's notification UX is a fucking mess. Not to mention users cannot uninstall pre-installed bloatwares.
User account to download from app store? Why the hell should I give an email address and phone number to download apps and SDKs for developement?
Also let's not forget that Mac OS sends hash of the application to mothership each time you start it. Unless it sends the hash and verifies it you cannot open the app. I really doubt if it is my computer.
Excluding system apps from the VPN? No, thanks.
I have the Touch ID Keyboard making sign in seamless (and that’s if my Apple Watch doesn’t unlock if first). Everything is fast, smooth, and if I move away from the screen but want to keep looking at what I’m doing (like reading documentation) I can take my iPad and use either Handoff or iCloud tabs to keep it going. If I deviate from my iPad or go somewhere new and want to continue that process, I can airdrop the page to my Mac or use the aforementioned features to do the same.
This isn’t even touching document previewing in files but just pressing the spacebar , opening any PDF file in Preview, viewing my synced Notes, calendar, and Mail in the native apps and be assured they’ll show up on my other Apple Devices .
All of these things add up to a calm seamless workflow when I develop or do anything on my Mac. All without having to download a single thing. On windows I have to rely on third party services to replicate the same. Added friction that I just don’t have to deal With Mac . It just works (for me). The only edge my windows has over my Mac is gaming (which isn’t an issue for me issue that’s what having a windows machine is for and I prefer having a dedicated machine for that) and windows snapping that I solved using Magnet from the App Store that ensures it’s sandboxes and not collecting data per the App Privacy Page.
+9999999.
I wish they'd just sell hardware and keep the OS.
It’s fine as the OS that I use to play games or occasionally poke at a hobby project in Visual Studio (full fat version, not VS Code) with, but the moment I start trying to use it for actual work it starts driving me insane. It has just as many papercuts as desktop Linux does, just in different places and with far less flexibility to fix any of them. Like yeah, Linux has some legit annoyances but at least I could fix them either by installing a different package or writing something of my own if it’s bothering me badly enough.
I certainly wouldn’t choose Windows over macOS. Among macOS, Windows, and Linux, easily Windows is the one that gets booted out.
> People that will disagree haven't used Windows in years.
Nah, I have a Ryzen 5950X/3080ti tower running Windows 11 (and formerly 10). It gets used at least every other day. I’m plenty familiar with Windows, and it still drives me crazy when using it for anything more than a fancy game console.
>So it bought CentOS, then killed it, as it did with CoreOS
https://www.centos.org/ <- The recommended linux by Cern
https://getfedora.org/en/coreos?stream=stable <- Oh sorry it's now Fedora CoreOS
>SUSE Linux Enterprise – which is to say it has a painfully slow release cycle.
1 year is painfull?
>"Tumbleweed", has a rolling release model, which means the exciting potential of breaking changes every single day.
No, that's why tumbleweed is not exactly a rolling distribution but a snapshot to snapshot rolling distro.
And CoreOS from the company CoreOS is actually dead. Fedora CoreOS is built from scratch. It's very similar to Fedora IoT (runs rpm-ostree, podman, ignition), but it downstreams to RHCOS, which you only get with OpenShift. Neither resemble CoreOS. The biggest fork of real CoreOS is Flatcar Linux.
Also, Leap minor upgrades do not come with upstream version bumps, so in a sense, yes, the release cycle of Leap and SLES is 3-4 years. RHEL 8 and RHEL 8.1 are not different releases either.
It's not death it's just "stream" now, and Centos7 is still without stream
>Fedora CoreOS is built from scratch.
Yes and? It's not death, you don't want to support different software for the same goal, flannel, docker etc.
>the release cycle of Leap and SLES is 3-4 years
Not true Leap15.3 = SLES15sp3. RHEL has the ~same kernel for every dot release, that's not the case with SLES SP's. Every SP has a new/different kernel and new software. You can do that "partially" with modules on RHEL, but just certain packages are in modules.
You can't compare SLES SP's and RHEL dot-releases.
Thanks for that. Genuinely. :-)
If you ask me, Fedora is the new Ubuntu.
Font rendering has improved in other distros in recent years, but at least to my eyes Ubuntu still somehow does it better.
I'm no Linux-on-the-desktop evangelist however, and still rely on a Mac for work use. My personal desktop runs Fedora currently, where I can afford to tinker. It's getting there.
And if you wish you can install Flatpak too, but note, Flatpak is desktop-only, whereas Snap is desktop and server.
So removing and purging snap is not enough. You have to pin is so down, so it won't install again. Canonical makes this unnecessary difficult, which raises question, whether it is a fight worth fighting or just move on a system that respects its users more.
On snap being for servers too, is it relevant at all? There are docker/podman containers, systemd containers, portable services... no need for another way to do the same.
Maybe it's different in 22.04 but in 20.04, once removed, for me it stayed gone.
I don't think it's worth changing distros over an add-on package format, no. I think that is a massive overreaction and "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face", as we say in the British Isles.
I have both Snap and Flatpak installed on both Mint and Ubuntu and use whatever seems to be the most current. I mainly use them both for proprietary apps, such as Slack, Skype, Spotify, and Zoom; it's considerably quicker and easier than adding custom repos, updating them post-upgrade, making sure their signing keys are current, and so on.
I don't see it as an issue of just package formats. It is more of issue, that they want to go someplace and I may want to go someplace else, and the two places are not interchangeable. Snap has control-freaky design, making Canonical the sole controller of what goes through; kind of troll-on-a-bridge. I parse Shuttleworth's remarks of integrity of execution over time as we will force every device to version that we want, at time when we want, and only apps we want and it is something that even Apple didn't dare to do.
So I will rather install flathub repo and keep the option of installing additional ones, than to give Canonical this kind of power.
One of the first things I do on most of my Linux boxes is to install Google Chrome. I regularly encounter websites that won't work correctly without it, and I have work to do and I need stuff to function. I have to be able to join video calls, so I need Zoom and Teams and so on.
But other people are purists and don't want proprietary apps. For instance, I have had colleagues who were happy to use Chromium but did not want a Google binary on their computer.
It's good that there are distros that accommodate this range of preferences.
I often see people saying "Fedora is the new Ubuntu", including in the comments here. I personally strongly disagree with that. I personally find the range of tools and drivers and so on in Ubuntu to be useful and helpful, and Fedora excludes many of them. I do not like upgrading my work machines more often than I must. Once every two years is acceptable; once every six months is not, and skipping a version and hoping that it works OK every other version once a year is not OK for me.
I want the option of stable LTS releases. I think that's really important. Fedora doesn't offer me that, for valid corporate reasons. CentOS rebuilds are not the same thing as Fedora, and if I ran Fedora on my laptop and, say, Rocky Linux on my production machine, I would have to accomodate the differences.
I personally really dislike GNOME and find it a pain to work with. I have discussed my issues and my concerns with the GNOME development team, personally. They do not share them or feel they are important. Fine; it's their project and they are free to run it as they wish.
But I can run an Ubuntu LTS with Xfce if I prefer; I can't pick that as a built-in option in my earlier example of Rocky Linux. It's GNOME or nothing, unless you add external repos such as EPEL.
These are choices and reasons to pick one distro over another. Some are important to you, and that's fine. I am not telling all Fedora users they are wrong. Their choices are valid for them.
I also find the choices in Debian to be restrictive. I quite like where Ubuntu sits, for my own machines. But I run multiple other distros and I am always looking. Recently I have been quite impressed by Alpine Linux: https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/26/alpine_linux_316_rele...
I also have a mid-spec laptop running ChromeOS Flex and it's very pleasant to use, too.
There's more than one way to go.
But a lot of distro advocates forget that. They are so deeply committed to their own choices that they forget that other people have different preferences.
So I tried to write a piece summarizing what I personally feel are the key problems and issues for me with a bunch of the major distros.
I think Framework is going the right way here and their prices are extremely competitive when you compare them with the higher-tier macbooks, especially if you need more storage or RAM. They don't have anything that competes with the $1k Air, which is also sort of crippled by storage and RAM in the $1k configuration, but I'd guess that's a matter of time.
When I'm using my laptop, I'm typically in situations where I'm not using a mouse, and the MacBook touchpad is lightyears ahead of anything else I've ever used. As far as I'm concerned, it's perfect.
Sure not cheap, but on the otherside lots of us have monthly income > $1000, especially if you are a senior or team lead on unicorn startups. So... still manageable.
It’s battery life pretty hard to compete with too. Apple claims 17 hours with typical usage and that mostly holds up in testing.
The issues you raise are about as valid as saying Linux is still not ready for the desktop - facile nonsense, subjective preference dressed as hard fact.
"shitty hardware" ???
I am not aware of any PC laptop that comes close to the build quality of a MacBook Air for less.
"SSD soldered to motherboard, bad cooling, no touchscreen, broken keyboard, no way to replace battery..."
SSD soldered: It is a bit disappointing, but Apple ships the fastest SSD's in the industry.
Bad cooling: The MacBook air is passively cooled and nobody ever has complained about the M1 Air's cooling.
No touchscreen: I don't care about this.
Broken keyboard: Not an issue on the 2020+ MacBooks
Battery: The MacBook air has best in class battery life. iFixit sells replacement batteries for older MacBooks, It is likely they will sell replacement batteries for the M1 Airs as well.
Only because they're not standards compliant/cheating and lose data when you e.g. lose power or your kernel panics: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1494213855387734019?lang...
I maybe saw like 5 macbooks in 30 years of living here (in a poor EU country, so much richer then the average citizen of the world).
Lifetime Windows users do not agree.
>Apple M1 MacBook Air - Long Term User Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i_XWx05FTw
>11 Things My Macbook Does Better Than My Windows Desktop
Yes, SSD and RAM are soldered so you're limited to what you get at buy time.
Otherwise there's really no need for cooling on an M1 Air. It stays passively cool even at full sustained CPU usage. I suspect the lack of touchscreen is considered good by a majority of users but I might be off here. Broken keyboard? In terms of laptop keyboards, this might lose to the 2015 Macs and maybe Thinkpads but that's it.
Battery can be replaced by any corner IT shop, or by yourself or a knowledgeable friend. I've replaced a few. A friend of mine who's not technical in any way has replaced his.
Hardware engineer here: It is totally technically possible to have a SoC and socketed RAM.
Please stop taking Apple's own proprietary implementation as being some universal technical limitations for the entire industry. It's not.
Has anyone added socketed ram to any of the Qualcomm, Mediatek, Rockchip etc laptops out there?
... but we also didn't define whether we were using "possible" in an academic or commercial sense.
The thin-and-light segment has some pretty tough competition, and the best sellers are not the devices with the most sockets.
If you're choosing to put an ARM processor in a laptop, you're probably doing so because it helps you accomplish some of the things this market wants: a smaller thermal solution, lower power consumption, slick packaging, etc. Adding sockets doesn't really help you commercially position that particular product any better, it only hurts you.
Again, the original comment I addressed was the fallacy that it's technically impossible to have socketed RAM on SoCs, which is false, not whether the device with more sockets is better seller which is probably also false, but again, this was not the main topic and we can continue to discuss forever on the pros and cons of RAM sockets, so, having made my technical point clear, I will end the conversation here.
Bought Macbook Air in 2019 directly from Apple website. Paid extra for miserable 256GB SSD and 16 RAM. Over EUR 1800 in total, its current resell value is EUR 700. Apple customer service doesn't exist in the EU country where I'm located. Now when I even think of buying Apple product I hear subconscious voice "you will be violated financially".
When running personal Linux, I want things to generally “just work”, which means staying away from the distro package managers on Debian/Redhat derivatives. Given enough “hobby time” I manage to twist my base system’s packages into pretzels and/or break workflow critical software by noodling around. Back in the day I inflicted a lot of pain on myself trying to get newer Apache running on older Debian or similar. Third-party package repos, PPAs, or installing from source are all false prophets that eventually swamp the system in strangeness.
At least for server software, Docker solves this problem completely and totally. As long as your kernel is new and you have plenty of disk space, it’s trivial to run anything so long as it doesn’t need to integrate with the host OS for a good experience. Docker turned my hobby home server experience from “periodic distress” into “years of smooth sailing”. No matter how weird the server, I can bottle it inside a Docker container. This works because server software integration relies on a few primitives - sockets, boring files, env vars - and coupling is loose.
The same cannot be said for the “Docker for GUIs” stuff like Flatpack/AppImage/Snap, at least the last time I tried Linux on Desktop. I had issues with theme mismatch, weird fonts, broken clipboard, media hotkey problems, etc etc last time I tried Ubuntu & Fedora with these tools. Sure it’s better than running X clients in a docker container, but there were still many issues. Snap on Ubuntu was also slow - how come the calculator snap is slower than a calculator Docker? The issue is there’s tons of wild plumbing needed for GUI apps. Gconf (which is a windows registry clone?), dbus, something something Wayland, arbitrary sandboxing, .desktop files, whatever’s responsible for sound on the host… oy.
I look at systems like Nix or Guix with admiration — they offer an interesting tradeoff, but fundamentally represent a better version of a distro package manager. You can install software from the OS repo without worrying about internal conflicts… but now you’re using a weird system that’s much more difficult for software to understand. Also, I need to learn a new programming language (or whatever Nix is) to use it. Maybe one day I’ll go back to school or retire and I’ll have enough free time for this to sound fun.
I want to download apps as zip files from an upstream, unzip, and double click to run. Copy apps between systems with drag and drop. Never worry about incompatible versions of dynamic libraries. And my apps should use my system theme and respect my font and DPI settings, and have access to whichever files I want to work on. In short I want the ROX desktop dream, but for all Linux apps. http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/about_rox.html
> When running personal Linux, I want things to generally “just work”, which means staying away from the distro package managers on Debian/Redhat derivatives. Given enough “hobby time” I manage to twist my base system’s packages into pretzels and/or break workflow critical software by noodling around. Back in the day I inflicted a lot of pain on myself trying to get newer Apache running on older Debian or similar. Third-party package repos, PPAs, or installing from source are all false prophets that eventually swamp the system in strangeness.
I’ve also had this experience, and would also appreciate a more direct analogue of macOS .app packages. Package manager integration for those .app packages would be cool though — it’d be like brew cask where you’ve got .app packages managed by homebrew, where the worst case scenario is a single app getting botched instead of accidentally breaking sound or something.
Seconded. AppImage is admirable and FlatPak is tolerable, but Linux has become a hopelessly fragmented and complex ball of abstractions and everyone's best efforts to deal with that so we can just install some goddamned applications already have been significantly hindered by it.
Best I've managed so far without getting into hopelessly niche distros is Fedora Silverblue. Immutable base system (OSTree) with FlatPak for most application installs and Toolbox (see Distrobox as an alternative) for things that don't have a FlatPak. It's still a pretty rough experience, especially because of GNOME and its hatred of configurability, but it is the least-suck I've managed to wring out of Linux.
ROX Desktop on top of GoboLinux, with self-updating AppImages, sounds like a great combination to me.
> I think my ideal Linux OS is probably Ubuntu/CentOS + something like macOS’s .app bundle file format for distributing end-user applications.
Then I suggest looking at NeXTspace:
https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
It does exactly that. CentOS, plus .app bundles, all integrated into a single bundle.
But the .app bundles come from GNUstep, so you can't pick your own desktop.
No, I didn't. Also, if you wish, you can read my review of Elementary from a few months ago: https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/21/elementary_os_61/
To counter your points:
• I tried to pick 10 of the most widely-used distros. I do not think Elementary would make that list.
• I don't think it has any more than a trivial cosmetic resemblance to macOS.
• While I admire the coherence of its design, I found its usability and customizability notably poor, and its UI rather annoying.
Gentoo is the distro for people that dont believe ANY distro is properly compiled for their particular hardware. Gentoo users spend hours/days/weeks compiling and recompiling kernels and applications so they they might squeeze and extra millisecond or two of performance from their PC. Its pure cynical masochism for the consumer market.
I don't think so.
That's why it falls under my #0: niche distros.
I did chuckle, because I am still learning that ( Devuan is in my VM now, but it is something of an uphill battle so far ). I just installed PopOS over my Ubuntu media PC and have not looked back. Yes, it is Ubuntu derivative and it has annoying moments, but it does get a lot right. I keep recommending it to my social circle, when they complain about their Windows.
From what I can see, the popularity of hackintoshing has dropped steeply with the introduction of M-series macs. The biggest driver of hackintoshing was Apple not selling compelling hardware, and that’s mostly been solved.