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Comment by typicalbender | Hacker News Reader

I miss my days on Ubuntu with i3 tiling window manager. I currently use an app called Amethyst[1] but find it to be a bit buggy at times and just doesn't live up to i3 or awesome. I wonder if hydra can be used as a launch point to create a better tiling window manager for OSX. I'm not familiar with the APIs that OSX exposes, if any, to do things like window management but it would be awesome to see some more control over workspaces and not just the windows within a workspace.

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

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Amethyst is the first tiling window manager I've used for any substantial length of time. I made my desktop transition from NetBSD -> OSX before tiling window managers were really much used. Amethyst gets props from me in being the first that has worked intuitively and stabily such that I've actually stuck with it for any length of time.

As for Linux, I realize that I'm personally in a place where leaving OSX would cause me no grief whatsoever. I catalogued everything I run on my Mac these days, and was pleasantly surprised to find I have zero local commercial software that I depend on, or indeed any Mac-only software. Generally, when I've used recent Linux desktops, I've discovered that the experience is at least on par with my Mac, with the added bonus that Emacs doesn't have so many quirks.

Battery life on my MacBook Air is really the only thing keeping me from moving back. I have to wonder if there is any movement to achieve power management parity with OSX in Linux.

I was in the same position and switched to Arch long ago. Power management in my MacBook Air 11 2013 is as good as in OS X, if not better. This sounds like a bold statement, but mind that it's almost 100% Intel hardware. Intel funded powertop, which is a utility that allows you to track and optimize software and hardware power usage.

Even Linus himself used this machine for quite long. He then moved on to a Chromebook Pixel. These days he seems to be using a Vaio.

How long does your battery last under Linux, with reasonable screen brightness? What's the battery discharge rate indicated by powertop? Are you using a full desktop environment?

I run a very minimalistic environment without a DE. I use XMonad as a WM. My only graphical applications are Firefox and Zathura.

With wireless on, while browsing the web, powertop shows around 5.2W. This is with a pretty bright screen. With reasonable usage, you can go well past 5 hours. Note this machine has a tiny battery in comparison to the 13 inch model.

I believe things could be even better (-0.5W) if I used another driver for the Broadcom wireless card (currently using the stock one in the kernel), as it doesn't support power management. Besides, on X11 the keyboard and the trackpad do not sleep properly.

Best hardware I've seen in this regard was a X220, and a Nokia N9. But the Mac is extremely good. If one cherry picks hardware for Linux like Apple does for OS X, the experience can be very good these days.

Hmm... Even 5 hours is pretty low compared to what I get under OSX with normalish usage on my MBA 11". I've also found that I get markedly better battery life when I connect to my Apple-branded wifi base station than when I connect to wifi just about anywhere else. This makes me wonder if Apple doesn't have some proprietary power scaling stuff with the wifi. Still, 5 hours is good enough that I might consider a more thorough checking out.

EDIT: I should add that I've only spent time in 10.9 on this MBA 11 2013 model. I've been told the battery life in 10.9 really is quite a lot better than in 10.8.

Well, with comparable usage I was getting perhaps 20 extra min on OS X. It's very good I think. It's pretty clear when you check sensor temperature: both machines are equally cold.

In the old (and not so old) times, laptops with horrid Linux power management would be extra warm due to all components being powered up all time. Far from it right now, if you cherry pick hardware. There's still room for improvement, though.

Having emacs-like keybindings by default in all native text fields and text boxes (including this one) is a huge plus for OS X. In Linux, I had to write everything in emacs and copy/paste it into the field in question. Fine for emails, not so great for address bars, impossible for dmenu, etc.

I have emacs-like keybindings in most Linux apps, including dmenu. For some apps that don't support this by default, you can configure it via their gtk backend.

I installed Ubuntu with xmonad on my work mac after one terrible month with OSX's pathetic window manager/amethyst/hacks.

I also miss awesome, and xnomad wasn't cutting it. Hopefully Amethyst is what I need.

What is that you prefer from awesome?

i3 is great - currently solving my needs quite nicely.

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