Comment by konart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by konart | Hacker News Reader

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No, I have Fedora install on my PC for some experiments (I've been a linux user for ~8 years before switch to macOS in 2014) and sadly linux experience is far behind from macOS from my user experience.

I don't need full customization or tens of forks of some window manager, or "ricing", or "independence".

All I need is a stable environment for work, media etc. It should be convenient without me spending hours configuring the OS. It should have pleasant UI\UX. It must have seemless integration with my mobile devices.

In my experince linux distros are good in case you only need it for one task and you are okay with constant changes (that will take your time). I'm not okay with this anymore. I want to spent my free time with my family or my hobby. Not trying to investigate why app X stopped working and how should I configure a new fork of this app created due to some drama.

Sorry if this is too emotional.

PS: do we have fractional scaling for Gnome under wayland yet?

I don't know. That may be true if you want to be on Arch, with something super custom, but on a long term distro, you make your choices, you customize and then don't touch for years.

I agree with you mostly that I'm not interested in tweaking bells and whistles endlessly but you don't really have to do that in KDE or gnome.

>I don't know. That may be true if you want to be on Arch, with something super custom, but on a long term distro, you make your choices, you customize and then don't touch for years.

I've been on Red Hat (my first distro in school), Ubuntu, Arch and then Fedora for quite some time. Ironically Arch was the most stable one for them despite being almost bleeding edge.

It took me jsut a few seconds to visit Fedora's subreddit, search for "after" keywork and as expected I got a list of issues people are faceing after a simple upgrade, like this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/zkqhhg/cant_find_wi...

Not saying macOS has not issues with this, but in my experince they much less common.

>I agree with you mostly that I'm not interested in tweaking bells and whistles endlessly but you don't really have to do that in KDE or gnome.

Well this is a matter of taste too. I can't stand modern KDE (but like modern Gnome quite a lot even though I find its "overgrown" mobile-like controls a bit strange).

> Arch was the most stable one

On rolling release, it changes all the time, you risk new bugs, but old bugs get fixed.

On an LTS distro, it never changes. That also means you're stuck with whatever bugs are there until the next release.

Fedora is somewhere in the middle, and I've had some pretty bad luck with updates there, over the years.

Like with most things, there are tradeoffs to every decision.

I've found using Debian on desktop more fragile because I'm often trying get newer software installed that isn't in the stable repo. Rolling release and the AUR means I don't need to do that with Arch. Flatpaks have also come a long way.

I'm in the same boat. I learned long ago the following maxim:

"Linux is free if you don't value your time."

I value my time more than my money now.

Kubuntu may looks like it meets your expectations.

No, it does not. Not only (*)ubuntu is not quite stable (at least when I was an active user) - KDE is just a nightmare from UI\UX point of view. I'm more of a Gnome 4\Cinnamon guy.

But anyhow - regarldess of distro you have 3rd party apps. It's not like switching distro can solve the problem that stems from the very nature of linux distros - no (or almost) standards. Everyone is doing whatever they feel is better at the moment. Hence all thouse forks, different UX approaches etc.

Going back to MacOS for my new job gave me RSI. The touchpad centric UI is painful as a power user, and the haptics somehow don't work for me.

That and the inability to stretch a desktop across two monitors. I have a T-mux hack and basically live inside vim and chrome (unfortunately can't use Firefox). I'd be better off with a Chromebook.

  >That and the inability to stretch a desktop across two monitors.

macOS does this. ChromeOS doesn't really do it.

  > I'd be better off with a Chromebook.

Since you don't like centric trackpads and tiny keyboards, and apparently aren't open to external keyboards and mice, I have some bad news for you about Chromebooks.

Different people - different things.

As a fellow (neo)vim user - I've tried tilling managers (both on macOS and linux) and figured out I don't neen them. I love vim-like navigation in web browser but for everything else I'd rather use mouse (I barely use macbook without an external monitor)

MacOS supports mice, trackballs, tablets, and has good keyboard shortcut and focus traversal. The trackpad ballistics are industry leading too. What happened that you didn't like?

not sure what you mean by stretching a desktop across multiple monitors, but i’m pretty sure this is a pref you can set in macOS. Also, no need to use a touchpad if you don’t want.

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