Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkulchenko | Hacker News Reader

I'm someone who used desktop Linux exclusively for 10+ years before switching to a MacBook Air running OS X.

I made the switch because I no longer had the time and interest in maintaining my OS - I wanted it to just work. Much can be said for Linux distros' improvements in hardware support over the years, but it pales in comparison to paying for a superbly built computer (even Torvalds uses an MBA) and never having to think about hardware compatibility or OS breakage again. That's worth the (significant) premium in cost for me, and it is worth it for many others on HN.

(This is only on the desktop side, obviously; I use an Android phone and run Debian/Ubuntu on my servers.)

View on HN

I used that same excuse to switch to Mac, but found that OS X really didn't "just work" and that there were tons of things that needed extensive configuration to get to work properly.

Now, I'm on a Chromebook Pixel, and I can say safely that it's the only computer I've EVER used that really lives up to the "just works" mantra. To top it off, it actually is Linux inside, so for someone like me who uses a Linux VM on OS X most of the time, all I have to do is install crouton, do startx and go with Gnome 3 (which is quite polished now).

if you're bypassing the ChromeOS by installing a full Linux stack then aren't you undoing the "just works" part and you're back to the same issue of "maintaining" an OS. And its a very expensive machine for what you're getting. The Air is less expensive for more hardware, and you get a real operating system.

Not quite. Around 70% of the time, I'm in pure Chrome OS. The 30% I start a GNOME 3 session is to edit in Sublime and do some light image editing, and since GNOME 3 is pretty much full-GUI now without many config files, it's one setup and done.

Can you switch without a full reboot?

I would also like to know this.

I used to use a dirty hack for that (https://github.com/agravier/chromarch), but it was developed for the first generation of Samsung chromebooks, I don't know if it would work on the latest ones.

Yes: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

Can I ask you the remaining 70% of the time what you do in pure Chrome OS? Web browsing, using Google docs etc..?

Browse HN and edit in Vim most of the time.

This is the ridiculous opposite of "just works".

No, actually it isn't. A chroot environment to run Sublime and a few other GNOME applications is not the opposite of "just works." You're going to have to do a hell of a lot more configuration in OS X than in Chrome OS if you want to run X applications.

First of all, why would I want to run X applications?

That said, let's say I do -- so I download and double-click the MacPorts installer, and then run 'port install' to install an X11 app from a binary package.

Not that I'd want to.

Because of using the Samsung Chromebook for a while with ChromeOS, I started getting very used to that way of working. I write code 70% of the time, which is not very nice on a Chromebook indeed, but because Crouton is a chroot, I ended up with a rsync/git chroot which takes a few minutes to install and is almost always synced with my server both at home and at the colo. For most of the work that $249 thing is just definitely good enough. And if it breaks / gets totally destroyed / whatever, I have everything back in no time and ready to work.

That's been my experience. I use OSX, but am regretting it after a few years of it seeming interesting. I think it really was superior years ago when Linux had bad wifi support, but nowadays it seems like it's not going to be my next machine. The experience is so bad that I spend much of my time inside a Debian VM inside Virtualbox inside OSX! The package management sucks: the OSX app store has a fairly narrow range of things, and then brew/Macports/fink have a different range of things, which don't install or work nearly as reliably as the stuff I apt-get inside a virtual machine. Setting environment variables requires a weirdly extensive intervention (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/135688/setting-environmen...). And the difference between the base-install python/perl/ruby and recent versions installed via non-Apple means is an unnecessary hassle. Etc.

Have you tried MacPorts? I use Linux extensively in the server side but really don't like using it as a development machine. I'm using a rMBP right now.

I've just been setting up MacPorts and pkgsrc side-by-side and though certainly have not plumbed the depths of either, I'm finding MacPorts to work better and have more packages.

Huh, everyone I know switched to `brew` as an OSX package manager and never looked back. I've been quite happy with `brew`.

Never really understood the appeal of brew. I tried it several times, ended up wasting a lot of time looking for the recipes. I might be using it incorrectly.

I do enjoy using MacPorts because I can quickly search the packages from their website.

Brew's got you covered, to find mysql for instance it's just

    $ brew search mysql

That is weird; I like brew better than macports so far. It hasn't failed me, as long as you keep everything updated.

brew just seems like a less mature macports. most of the differentiating features have disappeared as brew gradually discovered the same problems that macports/fink had already learned over the past decade.

Similar experience here as well, but it's eons better than linux on laptops. Just getting linux to support your laptop's video card for multi-monitor displays is a complicated beast already. I would rather deal with crappy package management than deal with driver level problems.

With what laptop is this currently true?

I've never personally had this experience, and I haven't heard a sincere account of something as basic as multihead graphics being broken for years.

It's hard to get it to work with optimus-like systems, where the external video ports are not wired to the integrated gpu, and you want to use it by default (which is something you want if you care about battery life at all). Otherwise, yeah it should work out of the box.

There are vendors that create dedicated Linux hardware (I got my laptop from System76) and it does work out of the box very well.

I used to feel this way as well (except I'm a Windows user), until I read the `man` page for `xrandr`. Wrote a little script to automate everything, and I don't even remember the frustration I had before.

Except that's the very anti-definition of "just works".

It's also totally unnecessary in a DE, where XRandR will be wrapped in a GUI.

It really depends on the laptop. If you are fine with mass market (i.e. likely supported) hardware rather than 2 month old bleeding edge cards you will likely be supported. I'm happily running ubuntu on an Asus VE248H - everything worked out of the box (after the install), including multi monitor support. I'd give up my OSX desktop (powermac) at work for ubuntu in a heartbeat (in fact I have a virtualbox install on it for when I really hit the limits of OSX.)

The Pixel seems great, I think I would need a more powerful processor and more storage & RAM for it to work for me though.

The Pixel with the 3.9 kernel is really incredible - it just works with linux. Every single thing works flawlessly - suspend / resume, kernel mode setting, wireless, sound, touchscreen, display backlight. The weight, screen and battery life make the package even more compelling. I liked the macbook pro I had from work quite a bit, but this is the first laptop I have that I love using.

> I made the switch because I no longer had the time and interest in maintaining my OS - I wanted it to just work.

I feel that is no longer a valid excuse. I use ubuntu on thinkpads, and it just works.

I see people around me with more issues with their OS X machines in fact. That might be just anecdotal, of course.

I gave up on Ubuntu when I could no longer have faith that my environment would be recognisable from one release to the next. For me, and my mother, that's a very important part of "just works".

Some would say that is the meaning of being stagnant. If you want something that "just works" in that the environment is recognisable, use something like Redhat.

You caught Ubuntu (or Fedora or other distributions that moved to GNOME 3) were on GNOME 2 greater part of the last decade. A breaking UI change had to be done at some point, and it happened to be 2 years ago. Even on macs, there was a huge overhaul going from OS9 to OSX in 2001.

You can make a point saying that you don't like the new UI. That will be a much more sound argument than saying the environment is changing from one release to the next.

If you want something stable that doesn't change much from one release to the next, you could just not upgrade. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 5 years, and that support includes backporting hardware-enablement work.

Sticking to LTS releases was actually the worst way to do this as it meant catching 10.04 which was effectively a "one off" UI, resulting in two changes to the UI rather than one big overhaul.

My mother started off on 8.04 LTS. When upgrading to 10.04 LTS the window buttons changed sides and there was a new theme (this is enough to throw many users). When upgrading to 12.04 LTS there was a change from Gnome to Unity.

My mother now chooses to use a Mac because she was fed up with her computer "changing" each time I updated it. I doubt I could convince her to try any Linux distribution again - there are no perceivable benefits for her.

You can always install a different windows manager and stay with a Gnome-like interface (Cinnamon). I don't see what is the big issue with that. There are tons of options on Linux, that's the whole point of the system, it gives you choice.

I feel like 10.04 was a real high point -- I was running it the desktop for a long while, and the netbook edition was great on smaller screens. The netbook shell was a one off, it only was 10.04, and I think it's nearly impossible to install now. Unity was a descendent of it, but (IMHO) going the wrong way.

OS X changes every ~18 months also...

Switching to Linux Mint fixed this for me.

I use Window Maker. I've been using it pretty much exclusively since 8.x or so, and I used it before I used Ubuntu, going back to before Ubuntu even existed. It hasn't changed, and it doesn't look like it's ever going to. Your criticism sounds very strange to me.

Edited to add: Not that I think Window Maker is necessarily the solution. I'm just pointing out that the default Ubuntu repos contain a huge number of window managers and even a few desktop environments which haven't changed that much between releases.

That's why I'm such a huge fan of freebsd. It means a bit of editing config files, but once you've got it working it stays working.

I tried to do ubuntu + thinkpad (also fedora + thinkpad), but after two weeks I still couldn't get external monitors to work, and neither could anyone in IT.

I'd rather just get back to hacking.

This is hard to believe. My non-technical wife can set up a second monitor on my ThinkPad running SUSE (she'll hook it up to our Plasma TV to watch XBMC). It's as easy as plugging it in... The first time you may need to change some settings under 'Displays', but maybe not.

If this was on nvidia back before nouveau, I can believe it. nvidia's drivers have never supported xrandr, so you need to do everything through their proprietary tools. My thinkpad hotplugs displays with no trouble at all these days, but I vaguely recall having trouble with nvidia's drivers about five years ago.

Nvidia's drivers now support xrandr.

Fantastic; I'm glad to hear it. I've been using nouveau for the past couple of years because of this issue; sounds like it's time to try nvidia's drivers again.

drivebyacct2: Your account is still dead.

How long ago was this? Even OpenBSD, one of the most conservative OSes out there, is pretty much plug/play for monitors these days.

> I use ubuntu on thinkpads, and it just works

What sort of battery life do you get? Any heat issues? Hibernate/suspend?

(These are all areas where I've had issues with recent versions of Ubuntu, but on an older model Macbook Pro rather than a Thinkpad)

Ubuntu has been spotty for me. Lots of breaking changes even within releases.

Using openSUSE 12.3 with 3.7.11+ kernel on a Thinkpad T530 (Intel graphics, 9 cell battery) I get 4-12 hours of battery life (depends on usage; coding and work on a dimmer brightness gets me 10-12 hours, watching movies and playing games with the brightness higher up gets me ~4-5 hours).

Newer kernels seem to have regressed as far as power consumption goes, I was trying the 3.10 kernel and getting 2-3 hours of battery life...

You need minimal effort to get these right. Powertop suggested configuration gets my X61t to 6h battery life, whereas windows gets slightly more (about 30min). Heat is not an issue, but fan control is. The correction is just installing thinkfan, for a much quieter laptop.

Really, at least with thinkpads, the just works excuse is just that: an excuse.

Looking forward to my X1 Carbon, already in the mail :-)

Unfortunately I bought into this "thinkpads just work with linux" hype and got a thinkpad - only to discover that the wifi frequently craps out because linux doesn't support well whatever intel wifi thing it comes with, and of late hibernate/suspend is broken too. It really doesn't seem like linux will ever change.

Battery life is excellent. I use the machine on long flights. I just disable wifi when not using it, and close unneeded apps.

No heat issues.

Suspend works perfectly. Takes a few seconds to unsuspend, but that's about it.

Macbooks are much worse supported than thinkpads. For all purposes, thinkpads are the reference platform for linux, like macbooks are for OS X.

When discussing whether "linux just works" it is unfair to use a thinkpad as your reference platform. For as long as I can remember the thinkpad has had stellar linux support. The other x86 choices have only recently begun to catch up with the thinkpad and there is still some work to do.

I say this as a 17 year linux only user. I am not trying to disparage linux, I just want to point out that the thinkpad is an exceptional case.

Why is that unfair? Mac OS X doesn't work at all on my Acer, but it "just works" on Apple hardware.

I do not think it is a good idea to make a rule out of the exception. I still believe in the cause--I want linux to reach more users. In order to achieve the goal of wider user acceptance I think it is important to make sure prospective users have realistic (bordering on pessimistic) expectations when trying linux out for the first time.

When a reasonably prudent consumer hears "OSX runs great on my macbook" they do not come away thinking that OSX will run great on any laptop. They know or have heard that "PCs and Macs are different."

When a reasonably prudent consumer hears "linux just works, well at least it works on my thinkpad" they might get the impression that the same can be said for any other "PC laptop." For the vast majority of the computer using population thinkpads and dell/acer/etc laptops are essentially interchangeable. Unless people know of the long and torrid romance between kernel developers and the thinkpad they will be oblivious to differences between thinkpads and every other major laptop brand.

I take it that you are not a linux+thinkpad user?

We were discussing computers for HN coders, though, not for the majority of the computer using population.

You have to buy hardware that runs the software you want to run. This has always been the case, and always will be the case; it's just in the nature of things. I can't say of my own knowledge whether a ThinkPad is the only laptop that runs Linux well, but if that is true, then obviously you have to buy a ThinkPad if you want to run Linux, just as you have to buy a Mac if you want to run OS X.

Linux works great on my Asus gaming laptop. It gets the same battery life as Windows: about an hour.

maybe people don't use thinkpads as a reference because they have the best support, but because they like/own them?

Well thinkpads might as well be reference hardware for Linux, this isn't surprising. Personally I can't stand the keyboards.

The keyboard layout on Thinkpads always bugged me (fn key in lower left instead of to the right of Ctrl)

In case anyone reading this doesn't already know about them, there are options for getting computers designed to work with Linux. I've heard good things about System 76, and Dell now offer a developer-oriented laptop with Ubuntu.

These options probably aren't yet as polished as Macs, but if you want convenience and still care about an open source OS, give them your support. They won't get better without demand from people like us.

I've never had a problem getting Linux to work on a laptop. That includes Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo, even HP EliteBook (pain in the ass, but running LMDE quite nicely with NVidia).

Is the argument that those machines are bad because they ship with Windows?

I'm a huge hater of MS-anything (I can not quantify my hate of Windoze), but I don't see a valid argument to support overpaying for a slow System 76 machine when I can get my i7 Toshiba for $879 and put whatever OS I want (including a hackintosh VM).

Check out Zareason - the prices are pretty reasonable. I like buying from them because they've vetted every part of the hardware to make sure that any distro you want will work on it, and they'll find you the packages to install if the weird one you chose doesn't have them.

I actually do the reverse - buy a Zareason and install Windows on it for freelance projects that I need Windows to maintain, because I know that after the maintenance window has ended on those, I can throw Debian on it without issues.

The impression I get is that major Linux distros will work on almost any laptop, but if you want it to work well (good battery life, flawless suspend/resume, no issues with graphics drivers), you still need to think about your hardware.

I don't believe that Linux can ever go mainstream through just being installed on Windows machines: for most people it's just too much effort for too little reward. And for reasons both practical and principled, I want Linux to be a mainstream option. So I support people selling computers with Linux.

I was in the same boat. Switched from mixed windows/linux desktops to Macs around 2007 or so. Switched back to Linux a couple years ago, though, and honestly it's as much an out of the box experience as OSX ever has been. Mint in particular is stellar out of the box.

You do have to be somewhat careful of the hardware you buy, but arguing that having to buy exclusively Apple hardware is somehow better than exclusively buying, say, IBM hardware to maintain compatibility with your OS is pure sophistry.

From the outside it seems that Mac developers have just as much trouble, but with things like homebrew and developer tools in general. At least if doing anything else than web programming. Is this wrong?

I do mostly platform-independent C++ stuff, using Mac OS for my day-to-day work. No web development. I am unfamiliar with homebrew. What sort of troubles have you heard about?

BSD tools instead of GNU that behave differently and old compiler versions.

And generally incompatibilities that need to be ironed out, but I'm glad to be mistaken.

Yes. The package management is excellent via Brew (similar to archlinux's system).

The "trouble" comes from getting the core OS to behave and play nice with the hardware. That is rarely an issue with Apple's platform, speaking from personal comparative experience.

Also, Apple's SDK for their own platforms is the currently the best around, bar none.

If you try to continue to run Linux apps via various Mac-packaging systems, then yes you are going to have a bad time. It's the same packages and upgrade interdependencies as on Linux, plus extra breakage due to running on not-Linux.

The way forward on a Mac is to run Mac native applications. Not really a surprise -- a Windows user who switches to Linux but wants to run all the same old stuff via Wine would be better served by switching to native apps where possible.

I've tried that, but the officially blessed Mac way of doing package management, the App Store, has almost none of what I want in it. How am I supposed to switch if there is nothing to switch to? Say I want to stop using Audacity and switch to a proper Mac solution. What do I pull from the App Store?

GarageBand? Logic Pro X? Reason? Cubase? Ableton Live? My personal favorite is Renoise, since it's cross-platform. Any number of DAWs are available on OS X — you just have to pay for them, sometimes.

but... where's the source? Those are all closed, proprietary programs. They might be fine in their own right, but they are not free software. Audacity is free software, as is Ardour.

The better answer to this question is probably that Mac OS X is not the best platform to run free software on, just like Microsoft Windows is suboptimal at best. Given that those platforms are closed and proprietary this is not that surprising. If you want to run free software, start at the bottom - the kernel. It is not like there is a dearth of choice when it comes to running free kernels after all.

Downloading executables remains a blessed way of downloading stuff for the Mac; I use Audacity.

I wish more free software developers would pay the $99 tithe to get their stuff added to the Mac App Store though. (Any free software guys here? I'll pay the $99 for the first one to email me at cjensen@acm.org)

Audacity is GPL licensed (only). The App Store imposes restrictions on the use and redistribution of software, which is incompatible with the GPL.

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-...

That article seems to be talking about the App Store for iOS (the one you access via iTunes). We're talking about the Mac App Store that provides OSX applications.

Now although the situation might be the same, I'm not definitely sure that it is - for one thing OSX still lets you run unsigned binaries (and thus modification to source code).

Sorry, I got the stories mixed up. In any case, it seems it suffers from the same problem - or at least it did in 2011:

https://adium.im/pipermail/devel_adium.im/2011-January/00797...

The Mac doesn't need package management, I don't know why you're insistent on it. The App Store isn't package management, it's just one way to download sandboxed apps.

The question then becomes, are the native tools as good or should developers reliant on things like Valgrind stay on Linux?

Valgrind is still working on getting OS X 10.8 support working.

Each platform will have strengths and weaknesses. For example, the upcoming stuff in XCode which will let you see power usage have no parallel in Linux. If your stuff is portable to Mac and Linux, you get to use both Valgrind and XCode to improve your code.

How does the new XCode power usage stuff compare to things like powertop?

For what it's worth, I installed Debian Wheezy on my ThinkPad T420 last week, after years of being away from Debian GNU/Linux (I got caught by the Ubuntu bug), and I must say that I was extremely impressed; my video card, sound card, ethernet card, webcam, microphone, trackpad, trackpoint, SNES and Xbox360 controllers all worked out of the box. I had to apt-get install firmware-realtek, a non-free package to get Wifi working, but once I had downloaded it, my wireless card worked without any further configuration.

As for stability, I think Debian's reputation for being rock solid is well established and deserved. I'm extremely happy with the setup I have and with how little effort I had to expand to get it.

If you have an older machine lying around, I'd heartily recommend giving it a whirl.

I switched to Linux after using OSX for 7 years. You do save a lot of time though not having to agree to EULAs and iTunes updates :)

I think you may have found the one user experience issue that linux handles better.

Pro Tip: if you don't use iTunes (ever) then you can use this.

The next time Software Update asks you to update iTunes:

1. uncheck iTunes from the list of updates

2. click the help menu, search for "ignore update" and click on one of the options. (I don't remember exactly what it's called.)

It's a hidden way to tell Software Update to never bother you with iTunes updates again.

Warning: This will leave you exposed to any security issues in iTunes, so don't run iTunes after you've shut off its updates.

It's not perfect. Mountain Lion crashed for me just two days ago. Just based on my perceptions, I'd say Mac OS stability has declined since they moved off of PPC.

The _hardware_ stability definitely did, though it has improved since. They became quite dependent on Intel for chipsets when they did that, and at the time Intel chipsets for laptops in particular were of quite poor quality compared to their old PPC chipsets.

I use Linux Mint, and it has been running for a year now without maintenance. It was convenient to use and pretty to look at out of the box, and all my hardware worked.

I assume the same is true for other Ubuntu derivatives and probably other major distros. Linux today is not Linux 10, 5 or even 3 years ago. They've improved a lot.

I also need an OS that just work and that gets out of my way. I have used ubuntu until the beginning of this year without fiddling into the system. This is the first year that I have to fiddle because I can not cope with unity. I have tried linux mint with cinnamon, ubuntu with cinnamon. It works but it is not very polished, it looks very old. This week, I have just installed ubuntu-gnome (gnome 3.8) for the computer of my old father. I has required some effort to learn how to configure it. At first, it looks fine. I just hope I will not encounter any problem.

Pretty sure Linus is on a Chromebook Pixel now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com