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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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.

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