After running Linux (plain, crappy boring Ubuntu) as my daily driver for the last few years, I'm convinced that we're at the point where the only real barrier to wider adoption is software, and this is less and less of an issue the more we work in the browser.
For your basic user, it's performant, simple, stable, and does everything a computer needs. Every time I boot up Windows it takes forever, I find that a new update that further fills my machine with crap requires a restart, I get super weird "news" and advertising thrown at me. I have no idea how normies put up with this.
Hardware support can be a problem as well. There are many combinations that "just work" - definitely more so than 20 or even 10 years ago - but you still need to be careful with network cards, for example. And graphics is still kind of a mess, enough so that all major browsers are still either using whitelists to enable hardware acceleration on supported hardware (like Firefox), or straight up disable it by default on Linux (like Chrome).
Which translates to the other problem that is battery life on laptops. I did a fairly simple test recently that basically opens Reddit main page in Firefox & Chrome and then scrolls it slowly until battery dies. Running on the same exact hardware - Thinkpad T14s AMD gen4 - the battery life was reduced by 30% on Linux with default settings (= no hardware acceleration in either browser). Manually enabling it means that test cannot complete at all because both browsers randomly crash.
And then you look at battery life vs an ARM MacBook, and it's not even funny.
Power/battery tuning differing between manufacturers, models, and even specific SKUs within models is perhaps the greatest hurdle to be overcome. It makes baking those settings into distros by default impractical and means there isn’t an easy string of commands that anybody can run to improve battery life on their Linux laptop.
I'm not a laptop user so I alas never consider these things in my needs, but I imagine "Year of the Desktop" will be followed up with "Year of the Laptop"
For me the "Year of the Laptop" happened ages ago. Everything from old clunkers to a relatively modern HP Elitebook 840 G6... install Fedora, done. I think the fingerprint reader might be tough, and Bluetooth on Linux is truly a sad state of affairs. But everything else works out of the box, and that includes suspend/resume and other power management, the special keys, Wifi and so on. WebGL just works, no need to tweak a whitelist, and battery life is on par with when the thing was running Windows 10. With SSD, and a fan that hardly runs in light use, the Elitebook is a sweet Linux machine.
I even use it on the Displaylink type USB-C dock that my current work laptop came with. Installing the Displaylink driver was a bit of "old school Linux" since the installer was Ubuntu only. But not too traumatic, and dock/undock also works perfectly.
For whatever it’s worth, newer Intel wifi/bluetooth chipsets (e.g. AX200 or AX210) have consistently worked very well for me under Linux. If your EliteBook has a socketed wifi/BT card, it might be worth buying an Intel card (they’re dirt cheap) and installing it.
My issue with battery life isn’t getting it to match what it is under Windows, but that x86 ultraportables tend to have disappointing battery life under either OS. Linux doesn’t make it worse but doesn’t fix it either.
The existing (M.2) wifi/bluetooth module works just fine. My issue with bluetooth on Linux is that it's never been able to pass this testcase: Use a bluetooth headset as an audio I/O device. Repeatedly over disconnects/reconnects. For the past few years, it works when you first configure it - beautifully, you can choose your codec and so on - but soon stops doing so even if unpaired and re-paired. Maybe "the year of bluetooth" on Linux has arrived and I've just not tried lately.
I'm with you there; simply so bad experience w/BT. And, it often worked at first OS install but then degraded through kernel, BlueZ, and interface updates until it was unusable. Until recently, when it has been solid enough through most? Fedora 39 and now into 40, though I've found at times the config gets confused, forcing me to delete and re-add the device, sometimes manually, forcibly. But still, been solid enough for my daily use mouse and HD-Aptx audio (among others, all while crossing my fingers as 40 ages).
Wonder whether you've ever experienced this problem: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203709 (spurious wifi disconnects due to "beacon loss" on Intel cards, been open for 5 years). There were two good blog posts summarizing the situation around that bug but can't find them anymore.
It's been really annoying with my Intel wifi/bt CNVi card for years and there's a lot of people having similar problems...
One thing that bit me, was trying to get a trackpad working on a xxx-xx17-xxx model (17 for 17" display)... out of a lark, I tried searching for xxx-xx15-xxx and found the answer... I added a comment on the 17" model number to help anyone else that may not have otherwise seen the page. It was adding a few options to the boot loader that fixed it.
I've also seen issues with wifi drivers, but those are usually fixed booting up wired with a widely supported USB to ethernet dongle, not too bad, but still annoying.
For me, that is about it for my biggest issues, aside from getting an RX 5700 at launch, where the drivers didn't stabilize until the next LTS releases (about 6 months later). I'd run alpha/beta kernels, which generally worked, and even tried Arch (btw) and both I got a black screen after updates. I went back to windows for a while, and then switched my main boot back to linux and haven't looked back after the Ads in start menu search results on my Windows Insiders install.
For the most part, I've had very few issues in general, and only on initial setup. I've mostly used PopOS, and been exceedingly happy with it.
this isn't true. you can install something like power-profiles-daemon and immediately see a large gain to battery life, without any additional configuration needed.
Just to be clear, I meant the default browser settings specifically (i.e. whitelisted / no hardware acceleration). I didn't do anything special to try to optimize the OS as a whole.
OTOH I was pleasantly surprised that all hardware generally worked, including even stuff like the fingerprint reader (so now I can use that to sudo in the terminal!). Although that did require spending some time in the console to enable it in PAM. I'd say that Linux runs great on that laptop overall, aside from battery life, which is not a big deal if you mostly use your laptop plugged in.
> but you still need to be careful with network cards, for example.
Funny you say that. A while back I reinstalled Windows on a new laptop (get rid of all the default installed garbage) and I couldn't connect wirelessly. Had to connect via ethernet and install and update everything just to have wireless work. I haven't installed Linux on it, but considering its a Broadcom card I don't exactly have high hopes of it working with only upstream drivers.
> Running on the same exact hardware - Thinkpad T14s AMD gen4 - the battery life was reduced by 30% on Linux with default settings (= no hardware acceleration in either browser). Manually enabling it means that test cannot complete at all because both browsers randomly crash.
Were you comparing this to Windows 11?
> Linux
What DE was this done on? Were you using any power-saving daemons (PPD, TLP, Powerdevil)? If not, I strongly recommend installing something like PPD (power-profiles-daemon) which requires 0 configuration out of the box, and retesting.
The worst thing about windows booting up is being lied to that the system is ready to use, when in fact everything is still sluggish for another 2 minutes and default apps are starting up.
While on my Linux computer I consistently can immediately start using the system once I've logged in.
Just the other day I heard a noise I couldn't identify, nothing in notification center, nothing in task manager. I'll die without knowing what that noise meant.
Thankfully I recently switched jobs to one where I'll be 100% linux.
Can not agree more.
It finally struck a nice balance of simplicity for day to day usage and advanced features when needed.
I have been pleasantly surprised discovering recently that Gnome Disks lets you create image files of single partitions or disks with just a couple of clicks.
ChromeOS can do quite a bit. Crostini is a built in take on Distrobox/Toolbox that gives you a Debian container to install anything. Newer versions can run multiple containers and do GUI pass through. ChromeOS can also run Android apps (although some apps don't do this well). And you get a hyper efficient immutable base OS. Five years ago I could get 10+ hours on battery without trying, on airplane WiFi for example.
Yes it's not perfect. But it is a lot more than it was when it was released. I only replaced it with Fedora Kinoite when the outdated Chrome browser version started getting in my way.
If they use emacs as the web browser, quite likely.
My dad spent a couple years basically using it as his standard OS while consulting. Couldn't guarantee what software a company required, but if everything was done through emacs, he'd have no problem setting it up to his liking.
Emails, builds, etc. I think this was before the web browser was up to snuff though. I never quite got into it at that level, but the power users easily demonstrate the value of knowing a powerful system very well.
Did you mean for this to be as condescending or off-putting as it comes across? I'm really trying to be generous in my interpretation but I'm not sure how else to read it.
What else do most people, outside of tech, use computers for? There are web apps for basically everything now. Chromebooks have replaced 'real' computers in most schools and I'm really surprised that they haven't in most Offices. A lot of the windows PCs in offices end up being used as dumb terminals to run citrix or access web apps anyway.
Yeah, I've got friends who are open to the idea (even though they still think the driver situation is the same as 20 years ago - I won't promise there aren't problems, but I think overall it's much better than it used to be).
The main complaint is:
I need my Adobe.
I need my Ableton.
I need my Office.
Some people actually need the official Office products, but I think for most users it's not necessary, though they get really uptight if you suggest it's not.
Adobe is honestly one of the biggest problems I think, and the most likely to continue to cause an issue with adoption.
Ableton can sorta work, but it's not perfect, but I can see them starting to pour resources into it to get it working better or even a proper port, but I could be wrong.
As far as Ableton goes, have you tried Reaper? Reaper has a native Linux version and generally works quite well IMO. One of the better DAWs and certainly one of the cheapest to purchase a license for.
I actually paid for a license, because I think Justin Frankel/Cockos is great for Reaper and supporting Linux. Even though I barely use it (I ended up not doing much music production) - maybe someday I'll get back into it.
I did check (based on the comment above about Ableton not being the same as Reaper in terms of how it's used) - and see that Bitwig (which is more like Ableton) does support Linux (not sure how well, but it looks like it's officially supported). But people who have Ableton specific plugins may not be able to use it, IDK.
I do feel like Reaper was more for "live recording" sessions as opposed to Midi sequencing and electronic production, but that was just based on my small experience. I'm sure it's good for both, just a different work flow.
I use ableton in linux, it works fine. What works amazing is Bitwig, which you'll find is like Ableton evolved, by some of the original developers of Ableton.
Unless Reaper has drastically changed since the last time I used it, it's not even in the same ballpark as Ableton. Ableton strength is using it as a pattern based nonlinear editor and live production. I can't even imagine doing something like that in reaper.
To me reaper is more like a superior version of audacity than a competitor to things like Logic Pro, FL Studio, etc.
> To me reaper is more like a superior version of audacity
I can't tell about Ableton as i never used it, but Reaper is on a totally different planet compared to Audacity. I used Cakewalk Sonar (on Windows) for years until I discovered Reaper, and didn't look back. Then they made the Linux version which works like charm, although the Windows version runs extremely well with very low latency too using WINE. I'm all for using FOSS software, and it hurts me because Audacity is the "good guy" here, but it's really way way inferior compared to just everything else.
What's funny is that I personally am not an Ableton fan, so this applies more for my friends than me. I know Bitwig exists, and just looking now it seems to support Linux. It's not the same exactly but uses the same "pattern"/loop based mode that Ableton is built around.
Reaper's great, but it and Ableton are focused on very different things. It's hard to come up with a workable analogy but they are probably at least as different as Photoshop and Illustrator are from one another.
I feel the author's grief over lack of time, but it has lead me to very different solutions. All around the idea of the OS should not interrupt, should not change rapidly, and my interaction with programs should not be much different from OS to OS.
At work, I opted for a mac due to how terrible the windows options were. But macos itself fought me all the way so the way to be happy at work was to replace finder, to replace the dock with a taskbar, and to rebind the keys, so that everything acted like linux/windows so that I can get my job done without falling in love with apple. To me that was simplicity - the simplicity of not having to relearn for no reason.
At home, I no longer dual-boot because I vm. Now Linux and Windows cooperate.
And the linux got less exotic. Debian: something I can trust, that gets out of my way, and changes slowly.
But I'm also loving the truenas system I set up because it and freebsd take that simplicity to the next level.
In both places, unix tools that go with me, so I am in my natural place everywhere. Basically, tmux, emacs, fzf, eza, and a bash/zsh config.
> Debian: something I can trust, that gets out of my way, and changes slowly.
Wholeheartedly agree. Debian has won the distro wars in my opinion. Their massive effort in safety and not breaking things means I can use stable as a "it just works" tool and focus on my actual work/fun.
Unfortunately, Debian is like Linux on desktop, always 80% there.
You just cannot trust that plain Debian will get it right, even if it works that one time you install it.
Two most recent issues that made me change to something else:
1) VLC in Debian is modified so it cannot play RTSP streams so you cannot watch video from your security camera. Windows VLC wroks. Flatpak VLC works.
2) Debian kernel update in point release broke NVIDIA driver so you cannot even see your desktop.
Debian STABLE is just Linux kernel with old software. If it doesn't work now then it will definitely not work for next 2 years and if it does work now it can break at any time.
All other Linux distros are not much better. Every update has 50% chance of breaking some software from distro repository but at least other distros fix their f-ups faster than Debian.
Linux Mint is basically what Windows should have been. An OS for productive use. Defaults are good enough that you’re almost never tempted to change them. Just install your software and do work. XP (SP3?) was it and Win7 was it too. Everything after that is fighting against you.
macOS is close too, but there’s a couple of painful points. Some basic windows management (solved by rectangle), iCloud doing too many things, and too much locking down for “security”.
Font rendering (kerning specifically) is horrific. Scaling for 4k monitors doesn't work right. Multimonitor doesn't work properly. Paddings/margins, font sizes, and icons are all over the place and lack consistency/polish.
It also doesn't have a reliable backup system included (rsync is not reliable; backups should use snapshots) and you can't roll back system updates if something breaks (which will happen). Bluetooth, audio and suspend/resume still don't work consistently.
Linux isn't all bad but if you expect things to Just Work you'll be sorely disappointed.
Linux is a power user tool and I think that's great. Linux Mint and others are trying to lower the learning curve, but they don't have the same resources that Microsoft and Apple have. But they do manage to do well.
You can create a distro that do all these things well. But that would require coordination across the board and result in something close to Android or Chromebooks.
> Bluetooth, audio and suspend/resume still don't work consistently.
That's a hardware problem. Most manufactures don't bother building drivers for linux or releasing the specifications for their devices.
You can't do rally without knowledge in cars. Linux for the most part is raw computing so having some computer knowledge is a necessity.
• The tiling is clunky, and underneath it's still GNOME, my #1 most hated Linux desktop.
• systemd-boot is clunky, does not play well with others, does not dual boot well at all, and it needs a huge ESP yet does not supply tooling to resize the ESP -- and Gparted can't resize FAT32 partitions as small as the typical ESP.
• It replaces Snap with Flatpak, which is not an improvement in any meaningful way: the only advocates who bleat that it's more open don't understand what the word means, and architecturally, OStree is a Lovecraftian horror.
• The installer is poor and could not handle using an existing `/home` partition when I first tried it (although that did get fixed). It is co-developed with Elementary, which is remarkable because the Elementary one worked better. They'd be better off learning what openness really means and working with Calamares instead.
• In summary, it shows many of the defects you'd expect from a distro designed by a hardware manufacturer: poor installation, poor handling of dual boot, poor handling of existing partitions, and poor handling of being put on an existing machine, especially an older one.
I find its advocates don't dual boot, don't use older kit, don't do complex partitioning, and so don't notice its defects and are unmoved because the problems do not affect them.
Gracefully handling interop and existing tech is one of the things Linux does best, far better than the BSDs for instance, and it is exactly where Pop OS falls down.
Generally I dedicate a drive to Linux and a separate drive to Windows, using a full disk option for Linux install. So, you are right, I'm unlikely to see a lot of the issues you mention.
I rsync my home directory, at least the subdirectories that matter to me, to my NAS and have scripts to do the inverse on a new config. A lot of what is important to me is either in my Dropbox directory, or in git(hub|lab) repositories. I don't have much else that concerns me generally on my local system.
I appreciate what Pop has done above/beyond Gnome, and looking forward to Cosmos, even if it may be a while.
OK. But as a general design principle, it's vital to understand what people actually do with your product, as opposed to what you intended them to do. See the concept of "Chesterton's fence".
> I appreciate what Pop has done above/beyond Gnome
As it happens, as far as GNOME goes, I agree with you!
I like GUIs. I like WIMPs. I am adept at managing my own windows, apps, and files, thanks. I like a desktop that makes it easy for me to manage it as I wish.
GNOME is not. GNOME is a desktop inspired by smartphones and tablets, and it hides window management and app switching as much as possible. No buttons for minimise/maximise. No visual list of windows or apps, unless summoned with a keystroke or a mysterious ambiguous keyword ("Activities") now replaced with an inscrutable symbol.
GNOME is a desktop for people who don't manage windows and who live in a few maximised ones all the time. I do not, so I don't want that.
Pop tries to take that and turn it into a tiling environment, with smart automatic window placement. I don't want that -- I know where I want my windows, thanks -- but I appreciate that they tried and I think as a result it's better than GNOME which tries to make the whole issue go away.
But I tried it, and I wouldn't use it from choice.
In Mac vs Windows I'm Mac for $reasons. That said my personal daily driver is desktop (not laptop) Linux. I've used primarily Macs at work for several decades; that said, my work focuses on systems running primarily Linux these days, and occasionally BSD or in the distant past VMS (once in a while some embedded stuff). I run Linux in a VM on my personal laptop so that I can run KDE desktop apps in the native Mac windowing environment (X forwarding).
Working for a threat mitigation company, I built KDE actual with Brew on my company-issued Macbook. Admittedly that was masochism. We didn't use Brew for anything; we didn't do any development at all on our laptops. Fast forward. I transferred to the threat intel team; we did some work in VMs on our laptops, still no Brew. We got bought.
New overlords wanted to swap spit / infect themselves with that threaty DNA so loaned me to their prod team. They did all their development in Brew, and deployed to cloudy Linux. They said "use Brew, be like us" and I said no way I am doing that, because my laptop touches bad shit; everything needs to be isolated; loan me a different laptop. But no can do. So I used the devops runbook (and submitted edits!) to build the deployment environment in VMs on my laptop. Prod didn't take kindly to this and threw me back. Left shortly thereafter for $reasons.
But not before I made a runbook for the threat team. Some months later heard through the grapevine that the threat team had been tasked with red teaming the actual deployed system which prod was responsible for and that the pwnage was epic.
The moral is obvious: your security team shouldn't be the only team eating dog food.
Curious, do you have a Windows host and Linux guest(s)? Or the other way around?
I currently have Linux as my primary with a Windows guest OS for when I need it (e.g. Office - I actually think Excel is great - or if I'm doing any Win32/C++ dev). But, I'm thinking of doing it the other way around on my next PC.
My experience has been that Linux is significantly more stable under a VM on Windows or Mac than directly on all but the most conservative hardware. Fewer weird multimedia glitches, no needing to involve any part of the Linux wireless stack of any kind (Bluetooth especially, but also WiFi), fewer video driver issues, fewer program or windowing system crashes.
Sadly, vmware, which scares me now that broadcom owns it.
It's had the best balance of seamless + good-enough graphics performance (for media, not games)
My personal rank is
vmware
virtualbox
qemu
I never tried hyper-v by itself.
vmware actually can use hyper-v as a hypervisor if its enabled (as you need it when using WSL), but its inferior to using vmware's own solution, as I end up with weird networking behavior. it does work though.
I think on linux qemu may be the best, but on windows it is rough. I think vmware just has better video technology and better integration technology, such that its easy to copy-paste files, share clipboards, full screen etc.
The title for this blog post should be "I Miss BSD/Linux for Apple devices". Unsurprisingly, if you buy hardware from one of the most FLOSS hostile hardware manufacturers in existence, your BSD/Linux experience will not be great.
> Why doesn’t a great MacBook alternative exist?
I really don't understand this question. Is the author seriously suggesting that MacBooks are objectively the best laptops for any use case and using something else just isn't an option? Am I taking crazy pills?
The Apple Silicon MacBooks are very, very good. They're efficient, fast, well-built, have great peripherals, don't power themselves back on when you close the lid, and are generally the best laptops I have ever used.
The worst part of them is macOS, and I hope that either Asahi Linux can get all of the hardware working correctly or the other laptop manufacturers can get their act together. Unfortunately, I suspect the former is more likely than the latter...
> or the other laptop manufacturers can get their act together
Microsoft is willing to sell you an ARM-based PC if you like. Qualcomm's efforts aren't quite up to Apple Silicon's par, but they aren't terrible either.
Of course, if you are looking to put Linux on a PC I can definitely understand why Microsoft wouldn't be your first thought for your hardware vendor. It's a weird time we live in, if you remember (or are unfortunately stuck in) 90s Slashdot mindsets.
Being arm-based is not important. They could still be Motorola for all I care. It’s how the final product works as a whole. macOS does a disservice to the hardware package, which is too bad, because the hardware is really unmatched.
The hardware package of Microsoft's Surface line is quite elegant at this point. They've taken a lot of notes from Apple and are doing some strong things. At this point Windows itself is doing some disservice to that hardware, too, especially as the current Windows design team seems stuck trying to turn Windows 11 into a watered down macOS clone.
I highly recommend against Microsoft Surface products. I bought them for my dev team and we saw 3 of the 10 or so devices fail and need to be replaced.
The RMA experience in other countries may differ to Australia, but it meant my team were without a dev spec'd laptop in total of close to a month across the whole team. They had to use off the shelf laptops and use a VDI for computational taxing workloads while waiting for a replacement device.
Throw in how ordinary the support process was with Microsoft, e.g., no phone contact number, only email, correspondance takes 1-2 days to start and the back and forth taking another few hours each way. We wasted a lot of time on these devices and the bullshit Microsoft support process.
Devs are now split between Lenovo ThinkPads and MacBooks now depending on their wants and needs. I've never seen a failure record like what we had with the Surfaces as we have with any other hardware provider.
Not sure if the ARM Surfaces have WSL2 but if yes, that alone would be a very serious consideration for my next enterprise laptop requisition, because Apple very obviously doesn’t care.
The vast majority of peripherals available at ordinary stores are still usb-a. If you just run into Target to grab [some peripheral] most or all options in that category will be usb-a.
Yeah but does anybody buy it? In my store the peripherals are covered in dust... And it's some cheap Chinese knockoff, nothing like the old high quality ones.
My company’s mostly Windows and the peripherals issued are all brand new and are all usb-a. We Mac weirdos have to dongle constantly or not use them. Even the non-Apple major brand Bluetooth wireless earbuds they issue have a usb-a plug on the end of the charging cable for the case.
I was scared of getting a Mac for years because of the dongles. Then I got one from work (they even gave me the dongle and I made fun of it) and turns out I never use any of it. And then I realized the USB-A port on my desktop front panel has been broken probably for years and I didn't notice.
USB-A is, in fact, the thing that drove me off of Apple for good.
There is a decent minority of people for whom USB-A eventually stops working and requires a reboot to restore.
The dongle doesn't matter. The dock doesn't matter. The device doesn't matter. Software updates do not fix it. The thread on it is 40+ pages when Apple closes it and then another 40+ page thread on it reappaears.
The problem is an OS problem. I can pinpoint precisely the OS update that caused it. Apple does not care and will not fix it.
Fine, I get it. So I left for Linux and never looked back.
It's a chicken and egg scenario. Motherboard manufacturers load up their I/O panels with USB A ports because people demand them. People demand them because all their perhipherals, like the dongle for their wireless mouse, are USB-A.
Logitech recently released an updated version of my mouse, the G Pro Superlight 2, and the damn thing still ships with a USB-A dongle.
With how many ports modern motherboards often ship with, I would think they could at least split the difference and give me 1/2 USB-C and 1/2 USB-A. but nope, my 2 year old motherboard only has 1 USB-C port on the back and a dozen USB-A. Then at least we would have a path forward.
>don't power themselves back on when you close the lid
Huh? I wish. The thing is periodically blocked throughout the night on my pihole as it continues to send network requests even after I click the "sleep" button in the apple menu.
Everyone seems to prefer to slot into some different niche in the market and leave Apple to have the “actually kinda decent laptops, sort-of” segment all to themselves with no actual competition.
We need a lot of trust-busting in general, but including among computer vendors.
It's remarkable that Apple has maintained such a commanding lead for so long. The 2020 M1 MacBook Air raised the bar for performance and battery life in a fanless laptop, and the rest of the industry is largely still catching up.
The situation will likely continue until the availability of ARM-based ThinkPads, etc.
Main two things for me that (in my opinion) Apple does better than others are 1) excellent trackpad and 2) no air vents at the bottom of the laptop. With those two things I find MacBooks to be very usable on your lap, like for example in trains, airports, or even in an outdoor chair.
It just doesn't get hot. If I remember correctly, there's a massive heatsink there that distributes it all, and having an aluminum body probably helps as well. Either way it's the most comfortable laptop I've ever used for this exact reason (well, and the humongous haptic trackpad).
Yet it's still fast enough to do development on it, never mind more mundane stuff like web browsing or watching movies. I'm not at all an Apple fan, but when people say that M* silicon is almost magic, they're not wrong.
It throttles itself. You can install a thermal conductor on the package which makes the whole chassis into a radiator and the thing gets too hot to touch under load, but you get more performance.
(The page isn’t accessible from Turkey. I had to enable VPN to read the article)
As I understand, the author’s main motive to try alternative operating systems is his frustration with mainstream operating systems, a lack of control and understanding so the speak.
The fallacy of that is that instead of encountering a few significant problems with a mainstream OS, now the author has to experience a death by thousand cuts: hundreds of small issues, a missing driver there, a DPI incompatibility here, and now they spend more time fixing these issues than they spend time charging their laptop two more minutes because a weather widget decided to make a web request. I’m not saying those issues are negligible, I already said “significant”, but our perception of an open and hackable OS saves us time might as well be a myth.
If you like hacking, more power to you. But, if you want to get things done, focus on those scenarios. See how well you can do your job and how much you are hindered on each OS.
Not a MacOS fan myself, but I find this kind of hiraeth (missing a place that doesn’t exist[1]) a sign of being distracted.
Each year I spend close to zero hours dealing with edge case bugs and incompatibilities in Linux and BSD despite all of my personal devices running one form of FOSS OS or another.
My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up than macOS would have, but it’s been just as rock solid since. In fact, perhaps ironically, I’ve had more problems with my work MacBook Pro than I have with my personal laptop running Linux:
- various USB and Thunderbolt hubs not working correctly
- multiple monitors, and macOS forgetting which screen is which
- screen flicker of a older LCD (it’s the screen that’s shit, but still, it doesn’t flicker in Linux)
- literal kernel panics coming out of sleep. Turns out it didn’t like a USB DAC
I don’t think I’ve had a missing driver problem with Linux in something like 20 years.
Your mileage might vary but this old meme that “Linux is buggy and has missing drivers” hasn’t been true in two decades.
So why do people seem to spend more time hacking at Linux?
The answer is probably just selection bias: those who want to tinker will generally gravitate towards a platform that lets them tinker. But that doesn’t mean that you need to be a tinkerer to use Linux.
> My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up
I think the honest way to calculate maintenance time is to amortise setup time over the years your laptop is in active duty.
That becomes like at least five hours per year for me. My Linux installations usually live for 2-3 years, and ArchLinux typically takes 1-2 evenings to set up:
Partly because I enjoy it and want to explore if I should switch file system, login manager, terminal emulator, window manager, etc.
Partly because I want to maintain my sysadmin katas.
Partly because this step isn’t automatic, so even if I want “same as before”, some hardware is different, and installing software is still manual (I’m choosing NixOS next time).
> those who want to tinker will generally gravitate towards a platform that lets them tinker
My Linux is always in some state of disassembly. My MacBook always has working audio and video.
I set up my Arch install on my machine in 2015 and it took me a couple of days. That OS install has seen 5 SSDs so far, and 4 machines.
My secret? I only buy hardware that's known to work well with Linux, mostly thinkpads, and I really don't do anything on the machine beyond coding and web browsing + some light CAD, so I never get anything with GPUs.
20 years brings you to 2004. You’ve either being dishonestly hyperbolic, or your experience is so slim or insanely lucky that it’s not useful as a representative account. That’s TWENTY YEARS. Not a chance in hell.
Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it.
I say this as an ex heavy Linux desktop user. Distributions I used for a considerable period of time include both Ubuntu and Gentoo. I’ve seen the spectrum. But this is just ludicrous.
> Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it.
This was me for a decade. Since I left, any time I check in on Linux it’s like “how did I live like this?!” I was absolutely blind to how many little things I had to do to keep it happy, or how often I was avoiding using my computer ways that should have been fine but that bugs had trained me not to. I still have to force myself to remember drag-n-drop for anything other than moving files around is an option, and will probably work fine and do something reasonable on the platform I use now—though to be fair Windows also helped train me to avoid that particular thing, not just Linux. Took me more than a year to stop feeling anxious when I just closed my laptop without first doing some manual dance to be sure it went to sleep.
2004 was round about the last time I had a major driver issue. I remember it well: it was WiFi drivers and I had to load Windows drivers via some compatibility layer, the name which escapes me. Weirdly FreeBSD worked just fine with any WiFi radio I threw at it.
Bluetooth never worked until recently either but I’ve never wanted to use Bluetooth on a laptop until wireless earphones were the norm so never missed BT functionality.
I rarely game on Linux but never had an issue with graphics card drivers. I will admit that I’ve been exceptionally lucky in that regard though, because radios and graphics do seem to be the rough edges.
These days with everything going USB, support in Linux has become child’s play. If a device presents itself as a USB standard rather than a proprietary protocol operating over USB, then Linux will handle it with ease.
So basically 2004 isnt unrealistic. I’m sure if I were to buy hardware that was tested to run on Linux (much like macOS users have to) then I’d not have had even the WiFi and BT issues.
edit:
just to add, I'd been running Linux since the 90s. I remember having to recompile the kernel if you wanted a new driver. I remember the migration to ELF. I used to love Windows 2000 and that was my daily driver but XP pre-service pack 2 sucked bad. It had double the memory and CPU footprint of 2000, and (in my opinion at least) had worse defaults. So it was XP that pushed me to run Linux as my primary daily driver. First with Slackware on a PC. But then when I got a laptop at around 2004 -- bought because I started getting DJ bookings with Ableton Live -- I tried various Linux distros before landing on SuSE (a vastly underrated platform!) and SuSE was rock solid for me for years.
Imo the maintenance thing is not always true. When I install Linux on a relatives computer I usually never hear from them again because they finally have a OS to run their browser on that doesn't constantly nag them.
For my use, sure I break it. But I broke Macs too and never had a stable environment there either.
Some of us where using Linux desktop/laptops more than 20 years ago (I had a Toshiba Tecra upgraded to 48MiB RAM running happily Debian Linux in '97). And it wasn't a big deal. And I've seen this discussion every so often in the last thirty years. It's always the same: don't buy bleeding edge hardware.
> Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it.
That's probably true, but it's true of everything; the stupid papercuts that Linux users are used to are different from the stupid papercuts that Windows users are used to, but it is not clear to me that they're worse.
On the flip side, I could confidently bet any amount of money that I do proportionally more MacOS maintainance than I do on Linux. And I'm even using Nvidia drivers, it's probably lower still if you've got an AMD card with built-in kernel level support.
I agree. I have a Windows 11 laptop for work. It's had a few issues, including wifi connection problems for a while, but the one that has been most horrible is that it may or may not detect an external display. It's infuriating to plug it in and nothing happens. A reboot always fixes it, but that's no fun.
My work laptop, a Lenovo X1 running Windows 10, was completely busted out of the box. Sleep doesn't work, massive throttling issues running zoom (only improved a bit with firmware updates), WSL 100% CPU bugs, display port MST bugs, the list goes on and on. IT say all my issues are normal and known. About five years ago, I had a Linux Laptop for work, that was rock solid and I miss it very much.
Your post reminds me that my wife's Windows 11 laptop has a bug where it won't always shut down when she closes the lid. Sometimes I'll get up in the morning and hear the fan roaring, and the room will even be warm because of it. Guess who's the one that's going to have to figure out how to fix it. Her Windows maintenance time is low.
Sorry, but this is still true IMO. For example no good driver is available for the GTX 1080 which will result in a buggy experience. Not even talking about software availability and functionalities. I have had other issues, but anyways I don't want to list them all.
I also find it misleading to claim that Arch Linux is "rock solid", just look at the news to see the amount of "manual intervention needed" listed. I love Linux and especially Fedora and OpenSUSE, but it still has its issue that make me sigh and say "ok... I'll just get windows".
I don't have the time to dig into all these links, but this might be different than an OS issue, more of a manufacturer, or a poor choice of hardware from the people posting it, or they messed up with their software (not updated driver etc.). Because in theory, the NVidia drivers for the GPUs are flawless on Windows. So this doesn't play at all in the Linux VS Windows balance.
Yes, this is a good point, however when it comes to GPUs, you might not have an optimal choice at all, since some stuff come only on NVidia GPUs.
However, after the GTX 1080 they released open source drivers and things should be better for more recent versions.
My point was different, the parent was saying "pick the right GPU then". But if I pick AMD I don't have Cuda, and if I use NVidia I have CUDA but buggy graphics. Some other features might or not be well supported by Linux depending on your GPU and the driver (e.g. You might be force to used Xorg). So yeah it's kind of a mess and you have to have everything aligned (Driver, GPU and use cases) to have a flawless experience.
> For example no good driver is available for the GTX 1080 which will result in a buggy experience.
If you have a GTX 1080. For everyone else that has moved on from an 8 year old graphics card, they won't run into that particular issue. Hence some people reporting a rock solid experience with Arch Linux.
The age shouldn't be an issue, and it should actually be the opposite. Also, I'm not talking about Arch Linux in this case. For Arch, my issues were with the Network card. But as I said, just hop on the "news" panel on the arch linux website, and you'll see all the tiny manual interventions you have to do. For a "rock solid" UX, I would definitely not use Arch, but probably Mint or Fedora instead.
Well guess what, old GPUs are still used a lot. According to steam hardware survey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/ The GTX 1060 is more used than any RTX 40XX, and the 1080 is about as used as the 4080.
Might be worth grabbing an RX 6600 to replace the GTX 1080 and sell it on FB marketplace or similar. Assuming you want to stick to similar or slightly better performance.
“Manual intervention” in ArchLinux is just where you need to do something in a specific order during a system update. It takes all of about 30 seconds to do and is still a hell of a lot easier than having to install software on Windows and macOS.
Yeah homebrew exists on macOSbut it’s not part of the base install, let alone official Apple product. The App Store on both Mac and Windows sucks. Not just in the availability of software but also even just raw install performance (they’re slower than pacman + Arch mirrors). Worse still, Windows and macOS still normalise googling for software and then manually downloading and installing it.
So if Arch isn’t “rock solid” because every 6 months or so (though, honestly, it's been more like once every 3 years for me) you need to be slightly more careful doing a full system update, then Windows and macOS are positively primitive by your same benchmark.
To be clear, I’m not a Linux fanboy by any measure, but it’s literally the concept of package management that pushed me towards modern distributions like SuSE and Arch and one of the biggest annoyances I have with Windows and macOS.
There are frustrations on Linux, but there's also a lot of development where its Windows or macOS that gives "death by a thousand cuts" so there are definitely reasons for you to pick that over Windows or macOS - even with WSL2. Having to forward hardware over HyperV can give a lot of headaches.
Windows machines infected by corporate also have crippling I/O speeds. I have a fun example at a customer where even running a Linux VM on the same machine will give 10x compile speed, and something like 100x git operation speeds than the same operations on the host...
If you need it in a corporate setting, Lenovo ships both Fedora and Ubuntu on their thinkpads, with certified hardware support. Someone running Gentoo or Arch Linux are sure to burn many hours on the machine itself which they may or may not enjoy, but you don't have to go that route.
It's not too hard to be on well-supported hardware either - people pick from a handful of laptops to run macOS, so it doesn't seem to unreasonable to also pick the machine for Linux. Think of it as being somewhere in between macOS "runs here only" and Windows "well it came with it" when it comes to having to select your machine.
It's weird that they're mixing ReFS into it, as NTFS is not at all the problem. It feels like they're either using this as a random opportunity to air ReFS again, or as a decoy to make it sound like the dev partition is a fancy special filesystem optimization, rather than the more likely reality of it being duct tape on their weird VFS layer, likely doing away with stuff like in-line Windows Defender I/O interception as all the usage warnings and corp group policy references would suggest to be the case...
Yes, the major benefit of Dev Drive is that the default filter driver stack is minimized from OS drive defaults, including Defender's and other AV's realtime drivers. NTFS itself wasn't the problem. Microsoft seems to acknowledge that the filter drivers in the wild are a part of the problem, and a partition opt-out is useful. (Of course all those warnings about corp group policy also point out that Enterprises are given the ability with group policy to force turn on a lot of those filter drivers for Dev Drive partitions, because Microsoft loves giving Corporations ways to shoot their own feet in Group Policy. What would Group Policy even be if it wasn't just Footgun as a Service?)
It does seem like this is some sort of "trojan horse" (but not in a bad way) play for ReFS. But I'm not sure it is for sinister reasons: Encouraging Developers to use ReFS for their main development partition is a good way to encourage lots of free app compatibility testing on top of ReFS and suss out the minor bugs in applications that assume all Windows runs solely on NTFS. It seems like a play to increase reliance on the VFS layer and its abstractions and further get away from code assuming NTFS specifics.
The primary peculiarity and cause of issues is the Microsoft "filter driver" concept that allows I/O to be intercepted for a variety of purposes. A primary use-case for this is Just-in-Time anti-virus scanning, both for Windows Defender and third party products, which makes tasks that involve many small I/O operations (like compiling sources, using git, dealing with training sets or unzipping something with many files) very slow.
I'm not sure what you're saying, but if it's that if the author installed his BSD/Linux (or whatever variant) he would instead have to handle missing drivers and tons of other small problems.. that's really not true. Only if the hardware is kind of non-mainstream.
Take this Fujitsu laptop, provided by my employer.. it's just Intel inside for everything, and a Linux distro was installed without a hitch and has been working problem-free for years. And it's always like that unless the hw is unusual. After all I've been trying this since 1992, back then there was a bit of manual tinkering involved.
Or this NEC-branded super-light laptop I bought in Japan.. same story. Install and forget. Zero issues. Heck, every developer at work doing their job stuff and development on various Linux computers, except for a couple of guys using Linux under Windows.
I spent an actual month fixing the container story on MacOS where I work, as the first employee with an M1 (eventually wrote a facade for colima). Over the following 6 months I kept a tracker of time lost to MacOS nonsense in an effort to convince my employer to allow us to use Linux. I have objective data showing that MacOS wastes huge amounts of time.
MacOS is an objectively incompetent development OS, if you only count what is possible with what Apple provides. Even if you do consider 3rd party (brew, nixpkgs, colima) it remains a complete fucking mess. Even Windows supports native [Windows] containers. Linux containers in WSL were flawless last I used them (a few years back). And this isn't a critique of colima, that it is a tireless and thankless project that does what it can to pave over the utter incompetence of Apple. I have since been allowed to use Linux, as the sole person trusted to self-serve IT. I see people in Slack struggling with something new in MacOS weekly.
I refuse to do work under Windows due to the bugs, inconsistencies, driver problems and shitty default UI.
For years I've just pushed in Debian with the unfree packages and let it do its hardware sensing stuff and it works, except at one job, where they had a lot of security installation and configuration in pre-made bash scripts for initial setup that were tested on Ubuntu so I used that. It was worse, mainly due to snapd being an annoying turd, but not as bad as Windows.
Multimonitor just works, automatic fan control just works, Bluetooth just works. It's been Toshibas and Lenovos and Samsungs.
From my point of view mainstream Linux distros have been solid for fifteen years or so.
I’d been trying to install Ubuntu or Mint on my desktop and miserably failed. In my case, nothing worked properly: OS picked the wrong monitor as main display, secure boot issues with unhelpful messages, no default HiDPI configuration. Basically, nothing worked out of the box while everything had been working fine with Windows. Here are my adventures:
Around Windows 7 timeframe, I came to peace with FOSS UNIX clones never going to be as mature as proprietary OSes on laptops.
Sure, the situation has improved a lot, but they still require compromises of not having everything supported like on desktop PCs, even when buying from Linux OEMs, my experience hasn't been that great.
For a brief period, netbooks seemed to be on track, but then they suffered multiple attacks that wiped their market segment. First it was Microsoft with their price change for Windows XP, followed by tablets, hybrid laptops.
And now those same OEMs, would rather sell ChromeOS and Android devices, than a full blown GNU/Linux, **BSD experience.
With ARM revolution going on PC devices, something that many might not be yet aware, is that Pluton is also part of the story, adding to UEFI, TPM, and pleotora of other integration issues.
So I just run Linux on a VM, first it was Virtual Box, VMware, nowadays it is either WSL or Virtualization framework.
Missing them, not really, for me it was always more as a cheap way to have UNIX, my favourite one was Solaris, followed by UNIXes with a soul, like Irix, NeXTSTEP, ...
I think the situation is a whole lot different since the days of Windows 7.
The biggest change is that Windows just stopped caring. The UI is inconsistent and messy. It ceased to be an improvement over Linux a long time ago.
Crapware is also another problem. Windows had this problem since the 90s, but it's now worse with Microsoft itself pushing for them. It's the only major desktop operating system to have this problem.
Worst of all, it's a real pain to use. People avoiding it are no longer doing so out of abstract principles. It's just so bad that any person with self-respect wouldn't want to use it. From the constant resetting of user preferences to obnoxious banners and full screen nags, Microsoft is making it very clear that they have no respect at all for the users.
With modern Windows, users are expected to work for Windows and not the other way around. Any data it touches also becomes the property of Microsoft. Or at least they act as if that's the case.
Linux is slowly but steadily maturing. Also, end users are moving away from PCs, meaning those who still use one have a high likelihood of being a power user. I think FOSS desktops are more relevant than they were a decade ago.
Privacy is also becoming a major issue on Windows. Of course, that became some time ago with cloud login (which is becoming progressively harder to work around - it's basically impossible to do so in the most recent Windows installer without mucking around with the terminal; the old "disconnect from WiFi" trick doesn't work anymore!). But on top of that, now there are all those AI features that are shoved onto you that require your data to be sent to the servers. And not even just AI, too - the most recent insult was the retirement of the built-in Mail app and its replacement with the "new Outlook", which, when you try to configure an IMAP account, will tell you that your email "must be synchronized to the Microsoft cloud" in order for it to be able to work with it.
Tons of resources are poured into Linux development by private companies who effectively dictate what features get prioritized. These organizations aren't using Linux as a consumer desktop OS, they're using it for servers, supercomputers, embedded devices and other similar jobs. This is where all the investment goes, so features that support these use cases are by far the most polished.
It means that any normie can get a perfectly working GNU/Linux laptop from a random shopping mall and everything works out of the box without any constraints.
I would really like to see normies do regular computing tasks on their phones, then again HN is full of folks that rather buy an iPad and connect to a cloud VM via ssh, instead of a proper laptop.
It depends. I would have had the same opinion as you until recently when I switched to an M2 for travel work, and it is completely adequete for getting work done.
There’s a handful of edge cases where I’ll fire up the real Linux laptop, but between UTM and Parallels I can get a lot of real work done on the MacBook.
I really don't get this either. Every laptop I've looked at has some wart somewhere - battery life, webcam, structural integrity, display, CPU, temperatures, speakers, IO, repairability (not that Macbooks are good here either).
Some of these things aren't even hard to get right. It's like laptop manufacturers just don't care.
Most laptops are bad intentionally. Less effort, more profit, and replaced sooner.
But that's not to say good non-mac laptops dont exist, nor that mac laptops are the best.
I currently have an m1 mbp and an asus zephyrus g14
They're the same size and weight, but
+ the macbook has longer battery life, though this varies. sometimes they are equal at 5 hours, and they both can go to 10, but it is easier for the mac.
+ the macbook has a webcam, but also a minus, because i prefer to unplug an external one when not in use, and there are really great portable external ones that have gyros to follow you around.
- the macbook's display is worse, because of apple's insistence on these terrible glossy finishes
- needlessly sharp edges. this could be user error, but if they didnt design it that way it wouldnt be.
- I/O? the thing does not have usb A ports. now I need adapters and hubs.
- no nvidia graphics card. part of the worse battery life of the g14 is controlling when that graphics card is in use, but at least it has it, so that i can do certain creative & ai workloads.
- keyboard is just worse. and that's before getting into that macos has forced the keyboard to be worse by having 'option' and 'command' keys to be an obstacle for anyone who uses every other OS that isn't macos. With enough key interception and remapping I got it to act like linux but the keys are still named wrong
macbook like touchpads is what amazed me most, Apple showed their great touchpads around 2006 with the Macbooks (not pro), and to this date no one seems to be able to clone them and deliver the same quality and smoothness.
But yes, it's hit or miss. My Dell M6800 'portable workstation' has an abysmal touchpad (really, what were they thinking?), but then, since it is way too heavy to actually reside on the lap, I use a mouse (which in any case is more precise) there. So the proper question is then, why did they bother with one at all?
Otoh, the cheap lenovo ThinkPad 11e has a surprisingly good one.
I've seen some close ones on higher end chromebooks. The Razor laptops are also close. The clicking motion is a bit off/different on many, but there are some that are very close generally speaking. I get what you mean. Currently using an M1 air for personal laptop, work issued is an M3 pro. My next personal laptop will likely be a Framework AMD 13" running PopOS.
Does any other manufacturer produce their own? I think the major issue is that other companies are integrators of cheapest bids for components, not computer companies.
Apple isn't producing all of the components in their laptops either.
It's a bigger picture thing. Apple has some vision for what a good laptop is like, and has been iterating for decades to achieve that. Each new generation brings some amount of change (including some real failures like the Touch Bar and butterfly keyboard).
Absolutely any other manufacturer could achieve that if they were willing to focus on it, iterate, and not give up. It would take some time, but it would happen.
The build quality is pretty good - particularly given I can tear it apart. The speakers are okay. The webcam and microphone are poor. The battery life is acceptable, but I trust that's at least in part Linux' fault. The fans ramp up more often than I'd like... it's certainly good for a Windows laptop, and I like the ethos, but it's not at all MacBook territory.
For context, the last MacBook I owned was a 2017 model, the one with the awful keyboard. Ironic, I know.
I understand why people like the Framework laptop, but this is like comparing the space shuttle to the pickup truck Lamont used to drive in Sanford and Sons. It doesn't compare favorably to a Macbook.
Having used Macbook laptops for a couple decades, and Linux as my primary desktop for a few years (off and on for decades before that), I'm not sure your comparison holds up all that well at all.
Most of the tools I use in Mac are cross platform and otherwise available in Linux. Many aren't completely UI/UX integrated even (VS Code, Brave Browser, etc). Many others are command line tools that are the same or easier with Linux.
What is it that you think a Macbook has that would be effectively lacking?
> What is it that you think a Macbook has that would be effectively lacking?
I bought a Framework laptop and a Macbook Air M2 at roughly the same time a couple of years ago. The difference in hardware quality is night and day. I think even if I used free cross platform software tools like the ones you mention, that would matter a lot to me.
It was an experience that taught me how little repairability means to me at this stage in life, which I guess is a little sad...
A non plasticky chassis, great touchpad and generally much better build quality and hardware (compared to the Framework) as long as you don't care about upgradeability and modularity it's on a whole other level.
I am not sure what people do with their laptops but I am perfectly happy with a refurbished 5th gen X1, replacement for my t480s, that replaced my t440, after t420s.
I never paid more than $500 for a refurbished model. I can choose which kind of screen I am going for never had any heating issues or driver issues with Linux.
I've had a MacBook at work, I could afford a framework or whatever when I wanted. But except gaming (don't care and better devices available) and AI/rendering (cloud cheaper in most cases) I don't see why the majority of people seems to think they need $2000 machines.
Seriously though, how much do you move with your development computer? I can't imagine being productive without at least two large screens and a fullsize keyboard and trackball anyways..
I have a similar setup to yours, but end up working (for my job, or for personal enjoyment) more than half the time on a single 14" screen, wherever (kitchen table, my couch, someone else's couch, outside, ...).
For some kind of work, I find the extra screen space very useful, but for other tasks it ends up being distracting.
Having a light, quiet laptop that keeps itself cool and has a long battery life is what makes it possible.
And when it's not enough, I can plug a single usb-c cable and have it charging, and connected to a keyboard, mouse, two screens, gigabit ethernet and speakers/headphones.
* /home on it's own partition (having it as a subvolume of btrfs did not work out well with reinstalls) -- saves me a lot of time with reinstalls
* docker works better (no need for an internal Linux VM, that is needed on macOS/windows)
* installing tools that i used sparingly is so much easier: Inkscape/ GIMP/ LibreOffice/ Audacity/ cloc/ ripgrep/ tig/ iotop/ htop/ DbBeaver
* i dont truly trust any big corp's binaries
* Firefox and Chromium/Thorium are solid browser options
* easy to install dev tool chains: package management and opensource secured supply chains are not an afterthought
* I feel since PipeWire and Wayland we come to a point were A/V "just works" for all my usecases
* being on a rolling distro now for some years, and it does sometimes mess up, but rarely (resinstalls are quick) -- i prefer it over OS version upgrades on macOS/windows
* i dont need an Apple ID, or hotmail account for ANYTHING and that keeps my blood from cooking
This is not identical to my experience, but I definitely have the same problem with hobby computing. My lack of time and energy as I get older is frustrating, but also just the fact that I don't want all the hassle. I want a computer to do work in applications, not because I want to meticulously maintain and configure the operating system for a couple hours every week.
It's the same reason why I never buy the latest hardware but always something that came out a year-ish before.
Eventough I had issues with Windows not finding any drivers on my Lenovo. While OpenSuse had no problems at all ... which was a nice surprise for a change.
I've never used arch, but I do love how nixos never breaks, so I can't really let go of that anymore. i do use docker/conda when something is only available that way.
It was just a throw away joke in the article, but every once in a while I think "boy I wish I could have the linux kernel with the openbsd userland" (not often, usually when I want to play a game). Not that the obsd userland is all that great but it is a lot simpler than the linux equivalent. There was a project to do the opposite, the freebsd kernel with a gnu userland(shudders, yuk, what an abomination). But that is not what I want at all. And deep in my heart I know even if you put the hard work to make the obsd userland work with a linux kernel, it would probably be a bit of a shitshow, just too many assumptions broken, the subtle cohesion that I enjoy would be gone.
I mainly use linux day to day for a good 20+ years now but also own a macbook air for a couple of years (and now have a work macbook. I have to say I just don't see how it's supposed to be so much better than linux. Working with it feels like having one arm bound behind my back. Most things work, but everything takes twice as many clicks and some things are just not configurable (There's no mouse follows focus at all for instance).
Open source software has to be installed with separate package managers like homebrew that don't properly integrate into the overall system like a distro package manager does. (it also requires the xcode toolchain which is a >1GB update every month or so)
Desktop customization is largely the reason I learned Linux and programming. Over time I’ve come to abhor knobs and arbitrary decisions I must make as a user. I find macOS’s opinionated, largely very thoughtful design a relief at this point.
Unfortunately, having a tiling WM when most apps don't expect it mean you run into all sorts of corner cases that the app developer didn't think of. No hope of resolution either.
As an ex-Linux and BSD user I share the feeling. But if I am honest to myself, I have to admit that I do not miss them, but my youth, friends, lack of responsibility and time to mess around with such things. Messing around with a new fancy distro for a day or two? Why not!
macOS is fine, I use it for 10 years, know it well enough and have no windows/linux muscle memory anymore anyway. And if I would switch back, I would still stare at the same Alacritty with tmux and neovim.
I started using Linux (nixos first, now back to Arch) more frequently one year ago and I have a nice boring KDE desktop. Everything works pretty well and the UX is way ahead of OS X.
In the past I was a full time user of KDE3/4 but I've used plenty of OpenBox, i3, sway et similia. In the last 8 years I ended up mostly on Mac, albeit I've installed Arch Linux on a 2015 Macbook Pro (and it was glorious).
Funnily enough, I realised I'm at that age where I'm working only on my desk, so I don't really need to waste lithium batteries for a device that's always plugged in. And I'm tired of the Macbook wasting CPU cycles and getting as hot as a volcano on proprietary crappy software I can't change.
Apple really needs to start hiring some software engineers; the hardware is pretty good but the OS is terribly bloated.
It's a shame we still don't have non-Apple decent laptops, I hope things will change thanks to the shift to Arm and cellphone makers (who did a pretty good job with the quality of some Android devices).
I suspect my next laptop will be a Framework, and although I wish they came with touchscreens, that is a blessing in disguise because it means I don't have to worry about touch support in a DE and can play with more BSDs or esoteric Linuxes.
I have been tempted by the MacBooks, especially when on sale, but the closed nature and lack of repairability keeps me in check each time.
I have an M1 Macbook and can't bring myself to switch to the Framework I recently bought.
The trackpad is awful compared to the Macbook's. I keep zooming things that I'm trying to scroll. And the click is the kind where it's hinged at the top so you have to click at the bottom rather than anywhere. I tried switching to taps but those are far too sensitive and have no tactile feedback. And when I boot into Linux it's even worse, failing to interpret two finger scroll actions at all unless my fingers are perfectly aligned.
The screen is also... off. I was able to calibrate it with a colorimeter to look close to my Macbook, but it's still not quite right. It seems like the bright parts are a bit too bright for some reason which ends up being distracting.
Yeah, I think a lot of other touchpads are working around the Apple design patents on their touchpad. The software integration and gestures also tend to be better. Doesn't annoy me too much.
Similar for the screen(s)... I mean, I have calibrated displays on my work and personal desks, and usually work docked, so my laptop use is generally casual content, email, forums, etc when traveling a few times a year.
The touchpad and screen has pretty much been the main two reasons I have been on mac laptops since 2010 or so. I'm just tired of the Windows and Apple games regarding locking things down, and would just prefer to have a Linux environment everywhere. The few key binding differences on Mac throw me off to this day, and I'm kind of over it all.
I had a ‘side’ journey to the Mac wonderland as I got opportunity to use Macbook Pro with Mac OS X Leopard for a year. That allowed me to get real ‘feel’ of the Mac ecosystem and their hardware (and philosophy) so I will not repeat same stereotypes over and over again like a lot of anti-apple people. But after I switched back to FreeBSD system at work it just felt better. I used Terminal.app on Mac a lot but the xterm(1) at FreeBSD just felt more natural.
It wouldn’t be up to scratch for my work anymore, but I’ve found the 2015 MacBook Pros to be a good compromise between quality hardware and being able to run a full blown free Unix-like without any trouble.
(By ‘my work’ I mainly mean including Citrix and Microsoft 365, so this precludes most free Unix-like anyway.)
So far the ideal "portable" setup is MacbookPro M3 Pro with:
- UTM VM for ArchLinux arm64 for all the linux stuf
- UTM VM for Windows for ARM (use it only for retro games)
- Crossover for occasional modern not AAA gaming
Zero issues so far and I have all the benefits of Apple hardware
I miss it too! It's been sad to watch the whole descent of the free software movement into just another avenue for corporate profit 8-(
The original free software concept: that _users_ of s/w can develop and maintain s/w for their use (and all other user's use), thus implementing what users want/need, instead of what will makes the most money; has largely been displaced by the "open" model of getting other people to do part of your s/w dev/debug to reduce costs and increase profits.
Like all powerful technologies, in the long run it's "success" is determined primarily by how much money it can make for the already outrageously wealthy...
I hear this. I have Asahi sitting on a partition on my Mac and I'm itching to make it my primary. Once microphone support lands, I'll be able to move over. It's a real pain right now to have to reboot in order to join video calls, heh.
thinkpads are still a pretty good bet for linux- although battery life is still lacking compared to aarch64 machines. the upcoming snapdragon elite t14s looks pretty promising on all fronts!
I moved from macOS to FreeBSD because I couldn't handle the lock-in, opinionated design and the feeling of not being in control of my computer.
Despite what Michal Sapka says, it was just the thing for me. In fact most of the drawbacks he mentions are advantages to me. Which is probably the point behind his article. I really like that my OS is not changing stuff with every update as even Linux vendors do now.
It seems that there is now a HUGE problem with PDF support under Linux. Since Adobe stopped shipping acrobat reader to Linux, to get official support one needs to run Acrobat using Wine. That's horrible, and really discouraging to any person who works within a larger organisation that uses PDF.
On the other side is the MacOS that has Preview which gives extensive possibilities to annotate and highlight PDF documents even if they are scans containing only jpgs inside.
Oh I am so unhappy because I can't have everything on my Mac. Get a general purpose computer, general brand like Lenovo or Dell, with an Intel or AMD chip. Boom done.
This makes sense. It could be worth dual booting, and seeing how it goes - it may swing back to Linux.
I totally agree with not trying UTM, it really isn't ready yet - I made the mistake of trying to use it on a work laptop for work, and ate a lot of time with various freezes... maybe in a few years it will be fine - dual boot is probably a better option, even more so once USBC display and intermal mics work.
The simplest way to run Linux on any computer nowadays is via WSL2. You can have your cake and eat it these days. Windows 11 is capable of replacing Linux efficiently.
I finally found something that worked with my fingerprint scanner, only to learn that the scan can't unlock the keyring or something -- it's a password but not actually a password. So I'd unlock the desktop with the fingerprint scanner, and then an indeterminate number of seconds later something would pop up asking me to type a password for my keyring.
So now, instead, I just type my password to begin with, and it's all gravy. I'd have to type it anyway.
I have a T480/Ubuntu-Gnome at work and a T480/Debian-KDE at home, both work fantastic, however for some reason the Lenovo Universal USB-C docks with 2 1080p external displays connected (1 HDMI and 1 DP) cause a lot of Gnome crashes when docking, and when it happens, I lose external displays and/or the usb keyboard, and have to spend 15 minutes fiddling around deactivating and reactivating in settings, or unplugging the dock PSU, and other desperate methods. Windows users don't have these issues for some reason, and other usb-c docks seem to work better most of the time, with exceptions.
There's also specific issues unrelated to Thinkpads, like bluetooth headphones microphones, Bose QC 35 II can't be used with mic over bluetooth, maybe Pipewire will improve this, maybe not, IDK.
Apart from Thinkpads, I also have a gaming desktop PC with an Nvidia RTX, I don't use Windows anymore, Steam, Proton, WINE, third-party launchers like Heroic work wonders for gaming, but I can't use Wayland at all, it's Xorg only (probably because of Nvidia drivers), otherwise it's flickering and crashes. And you can't screenshare whole screen easily in Wayland yet.
We're getting there and right now, I think I'm better off on GNU/Linux even with all these issues than with the enshittified Windows, but there's still a long way to go, things are moving slowly, and somethings the whole Linux community relies on unpaid work from one dude that delayed good bluetooth audio support by years because someone insulted him in a PR comment.
Fair points. I've had some frustrations with bluetooth; but, to be fair, same things happen for me on my Windows box (can't use high quality playback and mic at the same time).
Gaming I don't even attempt on Linux, though I've met two or three people now who are convinced you can 100% do it these days with Wine-based platforms and the right drivers.
Docks, in my limited experience, are a shit show on any system. I use Lenovo's thunderbolt dock (the expensive one) with my X1 Carbon Gen 6. It mostly works. I've been having problems with HDMI lately, no idea why.
FWIW, I used to have a super duper high end MacBook from work. It had similar problems. :shrug:
Nice to know MacBooks also can have this kind of problems, I was under the impression that if you paid the price, walled gardens and controlled hardware would make life easy.
Computers are hard. Could be worse, though, in alternate universes, major OSes never agreed on USB and other standards.
You can have Microsoft Linux in the form of WSL2 though and it’s a damn good piece of software; Microsoft’s saving grace on an otherwise - let’s be honest here - idiotic win 11. It’s almost worse than macOS.
My ideal device would be a MacBook Air with a 100% functioning Linux - as in, audio, external displays, usb hubs, chargers etc just work. macOS is crapware and borderline a disgrace for the excellent hardware of the MacBook.
Ah yes, time. Not just time - 'free' time! It is so free people need to sacrifice their freedom in exchange for curated experience and long battery life to get it. What they are unable to sacrifice, though, is convenience and pleasure. And Touch ID.
When freedom is at stake, some may sacrifice their lives on its altar, but worker bees will never sacrifice USB-C displays.
For your basic user, it's performant, simple, stable, and does everything a computer needs. Every time I boot up Windows it takes forever, I find that a new update that further fills my machine with crap requires a restart, I get super weird "news" and advertising thrown at me. I have no idea how normies put up with this.