Comment by dandellion
10 months ago
I know the feeling. I'm forced to use a Mac laptop for work, and it's really made me appreciate Linux.
10 months ago
I know the feeling. I'm forced to use a Mac laptop for work, and it's really made me appreciate Linux.
Linux is better than Windows on most counts for sure, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to use it full-time without making significant concessions on preferences about how desktop environment stuff works. If you’re someone who grew up on Macs there’s almost nothing in the Linux desktop space that tries to replicate that set of patterns… it’s all Win9X-type taskbar setups, mobile-type setups (GNOME, Pantheon), old niche *nix setups (e.g. WindowMaker), and of course minimal tiling WMs. There’s no clones of Mac OS of any flavor.
I’m proficient with more or less every modern desktop and can get by on any of any of them if I have to, but being happy doing so is another matter.
> If you’re someone who grew up on Macs there’s almost nothing in the Linux desktop space that tries to replicate that set of patterns… it’s all Win9X-type taskbar setups, mobile-type setups (GNOME, Pantheon), old niche *nix setups (e.g. WindowMaker), and of course minimal tiling WMs. There’s no clones of Mac OS of any flavor.
Have you seen https://hyprland.org?
What about hyprland makes you think of Mac? These two things barely resemble each other at all.
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I know of it but haven’t tried it. It looks kin to minimal tiling WMs like i3, but with a lot of polish applied. It’s nice I’m sure, but it’s not all that Mac-like.
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It's the other way around for me, it's all the concessions I have to make on Mac that make it so annoying. All the defaults I don't like, and the inability to change them or find alternatives like I can on Linux.
I "grew up" (from college, before then didn't use computer much) on Linux and I use a Mac at work, it's pretty easy to switch back and forth for me. Just need my tiling WM, my always on screen. I do miss that you could close the laptop lid on Linux without it sleeping. But otherwise, not much complaints either way.
My Mac only sleeps on closing if it’s not plugged in and connected to external monitors. That’s how I would want it to work. How are you wanting it to work? Closing it keeps it on no matter whether it’s plugged in or not?
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There's an app for that.
> preferences about how desktop environment stuff works
Having used KDE plasma, I am convinced that there is no other DE that has more knobs to make things exactly how you want it. Though I never liked the global constantly changing bar on the top in Macs anyway so can't comment on whether KDE can be made to do that.
I’ve spent time using KDE and it indeed has a lot of knobs. The options are nice but it’s still a struggle to get it configured the way I like, partially because there are no knobs for some things while some of the existing knobs control things that don’t make that much of a difference to me.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread the issue with its global menu bar is the sheer number of apps that don’t populate it. Even the same exact Electron apps that populate the menubar on macOS don’t bother under Linux. Over half the time it sits up there empty.
I went from daily driving mac and being very used to the desktop environment, and i am really hating everything i've tried in Linux.
Why is there no macOS clone for Linux? Since there is not, maybe now would be a good time for a project to start.
Others have mentioned a few specific distros. There are also tools like https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy or https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto which make the keyboard and other aspects of the OS behave more Mac-like.
For me, Toshy's out of the box config make it pretty painless to switch between MacOS and Asahi on the same machine.
I believe there are a few projects like that:
https://elementary.io/
https://pearos.xyz/
https://ubuntubudgie.org/
Probably better to select and contribute to one rather than starting your own
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Such a project is something I’ve daydreamed about on many occasions, but the scope is quite daunting, especially if one wants to do it right and e.g. make sure that all core utilities adhere to the HIG and actually populate the global menubar for example.
What about “Pop! OS” ?
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Gnome is not that different from Mac. You have your Mac-style status bar at the top, dock for apps which you can float or hide, typical window management, etc.
I use GNOME daily on one of my laptops and I don’t agree at all. It has some surface-level similarities, but overall is more comparable to something like iPadOS or Samsung DeX when connected to an external screen+KB+mouse.
The global menubar is the biggest difference, but there’s also a pervasive difference in philosophy throughout the desktop; where macOS will have power user functionality tucked away in a menu or hidden behind a modifier key (progressive disclosure), GNOME will just remove the function altogether.
Pantheon is very similar, except dressed up in an (admittedly pretty) skeumorphic theme that reminds me of OS X 10.9 Mavericks.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have its charms, I use it after all, but it’s not a Mac OS analogue in any way.
Gnome is very different from Aqua.
I used Gnome daily for a really long time. Gnome 3 is actually pretty good these days but it took a while to get there.
Aqua is still pretty solid but some of the shine is starting to fade.
I have all the Apple Intelligence stuff turned off yet I got a pop up ad in the OS for “Image Playground”
Apple’s solution? Turn off Image Playground in Screen Time settings. Ridiculous.
Gnome's top bar isn't a global menu, though. It's completely different and IMO pretty much useless.
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The funniest thing for me is that on a Mac you can use EMacs-style motion commands (^A, ^E, ^K, etc) just about anywhere you enter text. No suck luck on Linux which requires using Windows's braindead Home/End buttons outside of the terminal.
GNU stuff should support the Emacs shortcuts. In theory GNOME apps too.
> No suck luck on Linux which requires using Windows's braindead Home/End buttons outside of the terminal.
Not really; I have it set up on my box so that I can press Alt + U as a shortcut for home and Alt + O as a shortcut for End (and many other such shortcuts; it's fully customizable), and this works system-wide in every application and even on the raw Linux console without X11/Wayland running.
I agree, but my M1 MacBook work laptop is by far the fastest dev machine I've ever laid hands on. It struggles a bit from the UX standpoint, two things:
1. I have the same desktop layout every time, from left to right: slack desktop app, a two column wide emacs window, a 90col wide terminal. I also have two chrome windows--1 which is the same width as the slack window and overlays it, and another the same width as the emacs window which overlays that one. The problem is every single time I wake my laptop from sleep the terminal window has shrunk to fewer columns and I have to drag it back to full width.
2. Sometimes the external monitor support bugs out. I don't know if that's my hub ("pluggable" something or other) or the OS or both.
Then of course there's all the warts of homebrew, and the fact that it's not easy to build some software..
However, the performance of the Apple silicon is nothing short of astonishing. I'm curious about the AMD chips that ship in the new Framework as I look towards an upgrade to my personal laptop, but it's basically between that and a new M4 Max Macbook. Never thought I'd see the day.. will probably wait a year or so before deciding but it's interesting that Apple is even a contender.
For the 1st point, I struggled with the same, then a short applescript thanks to claude, attached to a keyboard shortcut on karabiner solved the painpoint. There's also an app called Stay which should do something similar with a ui, but my solution is good enough for me at this point.
Reading back I see I came across as kind of an asshole, I'm sorry for that. I genuinely thought at the time you might be kidding but I wasn't sure--pretty sure I got it wrong. I've grown (probably too) cynical about ux tweak over the years, in the past I did it a lot (even ran stumpwm and i3wm for a while) but over time I kept getting burned by the effort it takes to maintain nonstandard stuff and gave up. I appreciate it's fun, I'll try to remember that.
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lmfao if you're joking, good one, if not... yikes
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My favorite is how when I close my macbook with an external display plugged in, the laptop screen remains on (and lit up!) with seemingly no way to configure this behavior. Sometimes a window will end up on that (non-visible) screen which can be very confusing.
That seems like a misconfig or a broken lid sensor or something. I’ve been using MacBooks with a single external monitor as my only display (MacBook closed) for over a decade and I’ve never had the laptop display stay on when closed with an external display. Maybe time to visit the Genius Bar?
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Huh.. maybe that's why it always runs out of battery on the rare occasion I put it in a backpack and take it somewhere...
I'm curious about your dock/hub. There's a good chance I just ordered the same one as I try to build a more sophisticated home station. Which one and how does it bug out?
Pluggable TBT3-UDC3, input freezes and screen goes all pschedelic with greens and violets and then patterns and lines as everything melts to white noise. Flipping the lid open and closed and/or unplugging the thunderbolt cable and plugging it back in again repeatedly seems to cool the vibes
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Try Prompt from Panic for your terminal emulator
Agreed. The hardware is excellent, but the customizability, and overall snappiness of the UI are far inferior to my XFCE setup.
What are you guys running when you are writing code?
I run IntelliJ and a browser, and mostly call it a day.
Got my workchats and email in one virtual desktop, a checkpoint of what I was previously working on in another, YouTube playing music in another. All controllable with hotkeys, with a UI customized down exactly how I want it. And with no fear of an "update" breaking my setup.
I've taken to vim on a vt320 alongside my main monitor for docs/testing/etc
Work code: vscode, slack, teams, browser. These are always open. Outlook if I want to check my mail.
Personal code: Vim (more recently, zed) and a browser.
Which distro do you use? I've run a mac and Linux laptop and the Linux setup keeps sending me back to Mac.
It's more about the DE than the distro in my experience. Gnome is budget Mac, but KDE and XFCE are chefs kiss
Please try a distro [0] maintained by a company making their own Linux laptops.
[0] https://pop.system76.com/
I set up Mint for a friend a few years ago and it took me about an hour never having done it before. What did you find difficult about it?
NixOS, for me. I deal with a lot of wild development environments, so flakes + direnv has probably saved me hundreds of hours and a few system reinstalls.
Nix is also availible for Mac, but I'll warn you that it may ruin Macports and brew for you forever.
can confirm. nix + home-manager has been the configuration and dotfiles solution i’d been searching for.
it’s not flawless, but its strengths outweigh the weaknesses.
i still need homebrew for casks, but that’s fine.
I run Fedora these days. Ubuntu is the worst.
Always has been unless you're an "email and eBay" sort of user.
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I have a windows for work, Mac as a laptop and Linux on my workstation desktop. Windows is by far the worst, I don’t think Linux is vastly superior to Mac, they both have some things they do better than the other. My main issue is arm vs x86.
Arm is worse or better, in your eyes? I've only used it on servers and aside from build annoyances and slower than x86, it is indistinguishable.
M1 Mac is so nice. Hope to get an M4 soon..
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It is really wild that all these little community groups manage to consistently outperform massive corporations.
I was forced to use a Linux laptop for a work once. It actually managed to make me appreciate Windows!
You have to pay me to run Windows bare metal. The user experience is terrible and of the lowest quality compared to Mac OS and Linux. Even Windows OS 11 IoT LTSC requires work around to not create a Microsoft account, and this is their embedded solution.
Last week I spent a whole day trying to resurrect a Windows 10 IoT LTSC because of a corrupt WMI repository. It crashed out software and to the client it looks like our software is bad where it is the OS that is bad. Client's automation was down until a replacement was sent out and installed.
I've had to implement number of software changes because of buggy Windows drivers. From Intel NICs to touch screen HID messaging. Microsoft talks about backwards capability but it is subjective and only truly bound to the most used applications. Enabling tablet mode on Windows will break their API.
There has never been a Linux system I couldn't resurrect and keep working. With Windows, it is always re-install the OS and all applications. Even the laptop I'm writing this on is the same OS installation that has passed between 4 different computers. You cannot get that quality of OS installation from Microsoft.
Took me a month to convince IT to reinstall Windows on my work laptop. Microsoft's update broke the QA VM environment and would freeze with an infinite loop. Uninstalling the update nor repairing the OS did anything to fix their issues.
Even today I experienced Ctrl+X is broken and does not work in Visual Studio for the git comment text box entry.
Ha. I have to use Linux (Arch) sometimes, and it's made me appreciate OpenBSD :)
Corp IT recently banned my Indy with IRIX 6.5.32 daily driver from the network for some bureaucratic reason. I feel your pain.
I'm confused. Is this sarcasm? Your OS was last released, according to Wiki, in Aug 2006. How can it possibly be secure?
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can't agree more, to the point i ask if the new job mandates mac,if yes i will end the process right away.
even windows is better due to wsl.
There are many issues with using Linux for a corporate workstation. For instance, if the organization uses a proxy, setting it up is a PITA, as many Linux applications don't respect the http[s]_proxy environment variables. Some only accept upper-case, others only lower-case, while many have their own configuration settings for using a proxy.
Additionally, in certain industries Linux support is non-existent, with many applications developed exclusively for Windows and no viable alternatives available. Running a VM is another PITA due to driver issues. Wine ditto.
In the end, I found that running WSL2 provided a more manageable experience. I feel that Microsoft really hit the nail with WSL for productivity. Apparently, you can even run graphical applications from WSL although I don't have a lot of experience with that.
? How is this possible? I have zero issues on my Macbook, while Linux is consistently a PITA for me.
For me the biggest gripe is that I cannot configure it as I want and that it assumes I'm computer-illiterate. On top of that a lot of the approaches chosen by Apple regarding e.g. the UI are simply counterintuitive to me.
I still prefer it to Windows but (at least for me) it is inferior to a properly setup Linux box with stuff like a titling WM. But if I would to recommend someone a computer just for browsing, email, etc. then a Mac would be my top choice.
Linux makes you use the terminal and read manuals and edit configs to accomplish the most basic tasks. At least neither Windows nor macOS need that. Linux is fine for servers, but I can't fathom using that on my actual computer.
I prefer config files a lot to settings GUIs. Two most important points that come to mind:
1. I can manage them in Git 2. GUIs change all the time. With configs you have a much higher probability that some solution you googled will still work even when it is a couple of years old.
But GUIs show you all available options without having to read the docs. They only change when you install updates. You can simply not install updates that you don't like.
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Windows makes you open Registry Editor and tweak completely inscrutable key/value for those.
That's a... like 20 years old talking point by now?
I mean, you can probably find _a_ Linux that's like what you say, but top Linux distros are nowhere like that.