
From Mac to Linux – the setup I've grown to love - derp_unicorns
https://shooting-unicorns.com/battlestation/from-mac-to-linux-the-setup-ive-grown-to-love
======
selfup
I use Windows/Linux/macOS.

From a performance to value perspective you cannot beat Linux. Docker/Microk8s
the overhead is so low. Dev speed is leagues ahead the unfortunate
circumstance of having to run Docker/Minikube in a VM on Windows and macOS.
Also filesystem IO is unreal compared to Windows at least.

Getting a refurb Thinkpad on ebay and having better compute hardware than a
mac pro for half the price is also a nice cherry on top so to speak. That and
the insane sales Lenovo has all the time for brand new machines is kind of
hard to beat as well.

Next up is Windows from a hardware perspective. Same refurb thinkpad can dual
boot without issue.

Then lastly macOS. I have had a mac since 2011. I am having a hard time with
the direction Apple is going with their laptops.

I have all 3 and they all have their merits, but I find myself using
Windows/Linux at home exclusively and macOS at work and I don't mind the
context switch.

To each their own!

With the uncertain future of mac with their potential switch to ARM and not
shipping python and ruby by default, I see some drawbacks to the dev
ecosystem. I know brew will package a ruby version to handle this but I do
worry about the ARM switch.

Linux used to be quite difficult, but I stuck with Ubuntu and the UX/UI has
improved so much :)

~~~
cpursley
> Thinkpad

Which Thinkpad model do you recommend?

And which Linux distro do you use?

~~~
xgb84j
Not gp, but I currently use a Lenovo T 480s dual booting Windows 10 Pro and
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and it's the best development setup I have used so far. No
driver or hardware problems whatsoever.

~~~
gawin
Second that T480s, love it. 24GB RAM, 2TB SSD. Booting OpenBSD, macOS and
Linux. Scaling on WQHD display works solid. Only drawback is that the WWAN
(4G) only works under Linux and the touchpad is not as good as in a MacBook
Pro.

------
mrozel
I come at this from a productivity perspective after using Mac's for several
jobs - Linux boosts my productivity by 30-40%. Anecdotal, sure, but things
just work in Linux and your not constantly having to fiddle around and click
through things. It could also be that Mac's have declined in quality and I can
put Linux on nearly anything and it lasts forever, especially when you put it
on high quality gear that just doesn't exist at Apple.

~~~
darrmit
My experience is somewhat opposite. I love Linux. I've used it for over a
decade in various roles. But it always ends up the same - either some obscure
Bluetooth or graphics bug frustrates me to the point I can't stand it anymore,
or I get fed up with 2 hours of battery life and go back to macOS.

In this case, I'm measuring my productivity by the time it takes to mess
around with the OS to get the desired result, and the fact that the stability
baseline just never seems to get there.

I get and support the attraction to Linux on the desktop, but find YMMV to be
very much true.

~~~
minimaul
Yeah, this is exactly my experience too.

I try to move over every six months to a year or so, and it's the same gripes
every time at this point.

Driver support's reasonable now, and the desktop environments are generally
solid enough, but things like mixed DPI work really badly on Linux, my browser
nearly always tears when scrolling on my secondary display, etc.

But... the single biggest killer for me though is how badly Linux copes with
very low amounts of free memory. Put 32G in a machine and it still
periodically runs completely out under my dev workload and when that happens,
the whole system becomes unusable and I have to hard reboot it. I'm not sure
what macOS and Windows do differently, but it just doesn't happen on either of
those two OSes.

I really want to have the freedom to pick and choose my hardware more, but at
the moment I keep falling back to macOS.

It's a UNIX environment so it has the tooling I want and a solid GUI that
works well.

~~~
tonyarkles
There are discussions happening on LKML right now about how to solve this. I
don’t have a link handy, but saw them either here or on LWN recently.

I used to have that problem too, but it went away when I stopped using
JetBrains products :). Not for any reason other than the contract I was
working on ended.

~~~
minimaul
Then I shall live in hope that it will be fixed :)

And I didn't even have a JetBrains product in the loop, it was a mix of
virtualbox and VS code, along with browser, mail client, etc.

~~~
tonyarkles
To elaborate a bit based on my understanding of the issue: VirtualBox seems
like a great program to tickle the issue.

During a memory pressure scenario, the kernel starts looking around for things
that it can get out of RAM to free up space. If swap is enabled and not
saturated, paging out some data to disk is a likely option. Reducing disk
cache size works too. But... when the usual candidates run out, things have to
get more clever. Things like shared libraries can get paged out! If one of
those pages is requested, it can be reloaded from disk. Or, in the VirtualBox
case, the mmap'd disk image can be removed mostly from RAM and have those
pages loaded from disk as needed. Performance sucks terribly, but it keeps
trucking on.

The wrinkle in all of this is SSDs. The out-of-memory (OOM) killer
heuristically watches the system and kills off processes that cause memory
pressure problems. These heuristics, however, are expecting these page-in and
page-out operations to be slow (as they were on HDDs). On newer SSDs, the
disks are too fast to trip the OOM killer into action! This is why, when this
problem manifests, your disk activity light goes on solid, even if you don't
have swap enabled. The kernel is sitting there trying every trick in the book,
and the OOM killer doesn't see what's happening. Every individual page fault
is handled quickly, there's just waaaaaay too many of them.

~~~
bscphil
Yep, this is an accurate description according to my understanding of the
issue too.

The lesson I've recently learned is that, for now, swap is necessary on Linux
machines with SSDs. I've enabled zswap and added a 4 GB swap file to my
machine with 16 GB of RAM, and the problem hasn't reoccurred for me since
then. Supposedly, the memory pressure measure in the kernel gets a more
accurate reading when swap is enabled, but I don't know for sure that that's
true. At the very least, you can page out the memory you're using the least
instead of file-backed pages, which is what happens in memory pressure
situations on SSDs (as opposed to OOM killing).

------
intellix
There's a guy at the office who has to tinker and customise everything. He
can't use anything that touts itself as opinionated because he has his own
opinions.

Kind of reminds me of this article. You say you're more productive but
honestly: how much time have you spent working on and customising your OS and
is it a continuous project? Can you really say you're more productive than the
people who open their lid and just work?

~~~
dejawu
Shortly after I graduated from college, I switched from Arch to Ubuntu and it
was a bigger step in growing up than getting my actual diploma

~~~
bhaak
And how often do you draw on skills you learned on Arch that you wouldn't have
learned on Ubuntu?

~~~
Tehchops
Arch Linux teaches skills like:

\- Knowing what happens if I have the audacity to update my computer without
reading 3 different forum threads

\- Understanding how to fix hilariously bad font rendering issues in a
terminal, a software paradigm that's almost as old as computers themselves

\- Tempering expectations that incredibly obscure apps like "Spotify" will
"just work".

I think to imply Arch teaches much beyond the skills needed to deal with Arch
Linux is a tenuous premise at best.

~~~
glitchcrab
I use Spotify for hours every day and I've had absolutely zero issues with it
since I moved to Arch 3 or so years ago.

Agreed on the fonts, that has always been a pain. That being said, I recently
installed Arch on a new laptop and the fonts weren't too bad out of the box -
times change.

I update at least twice a week and I've only had one breakage in 3 years - I
didn't update a config file with some new settings.

All in all, your response comes across a little FUDdy IMO.

~~~
mellett68
My experience of Arch is that it's fun as a home computer tinkering exercise
but I don't trust it for my work computer since I can't resist a version
number bump and the amount of time spent faffing around would be a nightmare.

~~~
glitchcrab
I think it can definitely differ between individual systems - the fact that
Arch is so flexible also means that each system can have individual little
foibles. Personally speaking, I've used Arch for work for the 3 years
mentioned previously with no problems. At my previous job I used to be oncall
for a week at a time and I wouldn't upgrade during those periods just in case,
but that was the extent of my caution.

------
Doctor_Fegg
> As a developer, I spend almost 80% of the time in my terminal

In which case then sure, pretty much anything will suit you fine. It's not a
universal rule though - I spend the vast majority of my time in TextMate or an
IDE and probably 10% of time in my terminal, so the comfort of the Mac UI is a
more significant factor.

~~~
dgellow
Also, even if I would spend 100% of my time in a terminal, iTerm offers such a
better experience than Linux terminals (that’s just my personal experience, I
used various Linux distributions for ~6 years)

~~~
chaosite
I use iTerm2 when I'm on MacOS, but I basically use it like I use a Linux
terminal. I just don't need so many features from the terminal itself... I do
need Unicode, with RTL, and colors, and a nice scrollback buffer.

For example, I don't use tabs in the terminal. I usually open a new window and
use the WM from outside the terminal, or use tmux inside the terminal. Tabs in
the terminal itself are not that useful in my workflow.

My current favorite Linux terminal is kitty
([https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/](https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/)), and
before that I used rxvt-unicode.

~~~
theobeers
Wait, you use iTerm2 on macOS, but you need RTL support? Is there a way of
making that work? I’ve long wanted to switch to iTerm2, but its treatment of
Arabic script is so janky, I just can’t do it. I’m still using the default
Terminal app as a result.

~~~
severine
There's a proposed patch in the bug tracker:
[https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/1611#note_10740636...](https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/1611#note_107406363)

Maybe you can give it a try.

~~~
theobeers
Thanks, I’ll check that out!

------
JulianWasTaken
In 2019 you still cannot get a decent macOS-like modifier key setup on Linux
where OS-keys are mapped to Super (e.g. Super-C being copy) and such that
Control works like it does on macOS, so I still always find these kinds of
articles nice but you're in for lots of surprises if you try to switch.

And I say this as someone with both macOS and Linux laptops that I work from,
but because of the above and other similar things I think you're always up for
disappointment if you expect to get Linux to be exactly like macOS.

~~~
brightball
Why not just get used to the default CTRL + SHIFT + C instead of Super + C for
use in the terminal?

When I switched over from Mac my initial thought was “get this working like my
Mac”. After about a day that changed to “learn the Linux way.”

Switched 2 years ago and the only thing I miss after 10 years on OSX is
OmniGraffle.

~~~
glandium
What's annoying with Ctrl+Shift+C is that it's not the same as other
applications, where it's Ctrl+C.

On Mac it's Command+C everywhere.

~~~
guntars
This is my gripe too, as someone who’s recently switched back to Linux after a
10 year OSX hiatus. My current Linux system is designed and developed by
thousands of developers who were just trying to get their stuff working for
them, each of them working on a small piece. OSX has a lot more consistency
because it was decreed by a few UX designers, alas, that is the price you pay
for flexibility.

~~~
ageofwant
You apply the consistency, you degree what you want. People decide to use
Linux and still expect to be told what they want. Decide what you want and
make it so, Linux is fundamentally a user-centric system and for it to work
best it needs a creative guiding force in the middle: you, the user.

~~~
zapzupnz
I'm not sure this really addresses the point. macOS manages to have both user-
configurability for keyboard shortcuts _and_ consistency __out of the box __.

On macOS, you can also define consistent keyboard shortcuts universally and
per-application. This is achieved via a very simple interface in System
Preferences -> Keyboards -> Shortcuts. This will apply to all applications
because they must all respect and populate the macOS menu bar, the mechanism
through which keyboard shortcuts and processed and thus made modifiable. Easy,
friendly, user-centric.

But on Linux? Good luck. Between all the various user interface libraries with
their own mechanisms for defining and modifying keyboard shortcuts, not to
mention those apps that hardcode the shortcuts in order to avoid the utter
mess of the mixed desktop environments that so many users are forced to use in
order to get certain jobs done.

In this sense, Linux is _not_ a user-centric system because nobody who makes a
distribution, even the better ones, gives a toss about the user; it's all
about the developer's manifestos and freedoms long before it's ever about the
user. The average user who just wants to work, not sit there slaving over a
billion different and wildly inconsistent configuration file formats each in
different locations, who just wants the damned Copy command to require the
same two-finger salute in one program as another, is resolutely _not_ the one
being catered for.

Linux distributions are just as opinionated as Windows and macOS; DIY distros
are utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of people, including the HN crowd
who, just like the technically illiterate we sometimes hold our noses up to,
also have lives to live.

------
jasoneckert
Ditto here - this article captured my own reasons for moving from macOS to
Linux. My Mac Pro tube (late 2013) now runs Pop!_OS (~Ubuntu) natively for my
Web and cloud development. macOS isn't a bad OS per se, but it's designed for
people who fear technology, not developers like me.

------
withaplomb
I recent switched to a Mac laptop and tmux CC mode is iterm2’s killer feature.
Tmux niceness without it taking a key prefix, and with real scroll bars. It’s
worth the cost of a Mac!

Any tmux CC mode supporting terminals for Linux or Windows?

~~~
techntoke
> It’s worth the cost of a Mac!

Have used a Mac before for work, and run Arch with Sway for home and work now.
The only thing worth the cost of a Mac is having money to spend on a Mac and
feeling like that it is best for you. If you use i3 or Sway on Linux and like
it, you'll likely never want to go back. Especially with an Arch-based distro
with the AUR.

~~~
new_realist
I have used i3 and Arch. I prefer a Mac with chunkwm and iTerm2.

~~~
mjfisher
It's interesting to see how broadly the same experiences lead people in
different directions. I loved iTerm2's window splitting and resizing so much I
wanted it for all my windows. That lead me directly to install i3 on my Linux
machine, and I absolutely love it.

------
esotericn
I've always found this OS warfare thing kind of weird.

I develop GNU/Linux software, for GNU/Linux desktops and servers. Obviously I
use a GNU/Linux desktop. If I programmed Windows software, well, yeah, I'd
probably use that.

The whole debate strikes me as some sort of weird discussion about, like, how
the house that a professional (or hobbyist) woodworker/carpenter lives in, and
the house that a lawyer lives in, are probably completely different, because
one just doesn't find it difficult to build a shelf or make up a kitchen or
whatever, it's barely even an inconvenience to them, they eat that shit for
breakfast, whereas the other might find it a better use of their time to
employ someone to do it.

That said, you should obviously use free software because otherwise you're
basically a kiddy fiddler.

~~~
thom
Anyone who doesn't despise every piece of software on their machine from the
OS up, whatever it is, is using it wrong.

------
stevenjohns
One of the major things I missed (and eventually brought me back to MacOS)
were things like maximising a window means it becomes its own virtual desktop,
and the touchpad gestures that would let you move between them. I tried a lot
of hacks to replicate those features effectively but never came close, and it
ultimately pushed me back to Macs.

~~~
doubleunplussed
In GNOME you can four-finger swipe to switch workspaces. Maximising won't
automatically put the app on a workspace, but you can use a keyboard shortcut
to shift the current window to the next workspace until you get to a blank
workspace, then maximise it. Or you can drag and drop the window to a new
workspace in the overview.

~~~
theossuary
Swiping feels awful in Linux though. Linux still doesn't have proper animation
mapping to swiping, so moving workspaces happens after the swipe gesture, not
during. Scrolling in Linux using a trackpad feels terrible too. I almost
switched away from Linux just because scrolling in Firefox felt so bad.

~~~
snazz
You’re painting this as a fault with Linux, but it’s almost certainly the
fault of a desktop environment. Were you using GNOME? You can adjust the way
that trackpad scrolling works in Firefox and in GNOME Tweak Tool, IIRC.

~~~
antigirl
The fact you have to configure anything for scrolling to work smoothly on a
web browser paints linux in a bad light itself. The main reason i do not watch
to switch to linux [apart from missing adobe catlogue and sketch] is stuff
like the track pad, being able to navigate around using various gestures,
having little things like invisible scroll bars etc. Subtle animations and
visual queues really make the experience smooth. Its not even about eye candy,
just seemlessness so your mind doesnt notice the workflow - which is what you
want. The latest ubuntu doesnt even let you drag drop on the desktop? i really
want linux but it still seems miles away from sleekness of osx

------
MarcScott
Nowadays the OS means far less to me than my windows manager. I use nixos
because I like the fact that I can see and configure the state of my machine
in a few text files, but that does not give me a huge productivity boost.

Like the OP I use i3, and every time I have to use Windows or macOS I feel
like I'm using a crippled machine. If I could put i3 on Windows or macOS, then
I'd happily switch. With brew or wsl I really wouldn't notice much of a
difference, given 90% of my day is spent in emacs, a terminal or a browser.

~~~
vharish
This, I completely agree with. Moving away from a tiling WM is pain that it's
actually very demotivating.

------
techntoke
I suggest you try out Sway, which is pretty much i3 for Wayland. Also, Arch
Linux has some great documentation for setting up things like screenshots.
You'll have to get used to the flags for forcing xcb for a few Qt applications
though, but totally worth it and not difficult at all once you understand it.
I do miss rofi though, but am waiting for a Wayland version or the next best
thing.

~~~
adgud
If you miss rofi, you may want to check out Ulauncher [1]. It is a nice app
launcher with plugin support (eg. emoji picker).

[1] [https://ulauncher.io/](https://ulauncher.io/)

~~~
oehtXRwMkIs
Still doesn't fully support HiDPI though :(

------
dwrodri
There is already quite the discussion going on related to macOS versus [insert
linux distro here], but here are my two cents. I've been quite happy with my
2015 MBP since I took the time to "gut" most of the default shell tools and
replace them with newer ones. It's not a convenient process, but from my
experience, it's really not that much harder than setting up a fresh Arch
install. It's as close as I've been able to get in terms of having the
"hackability" and freedom of working in a Linux environment, while still
having the pleasant UX that comes with macOS (good DE, decent memory
management, lovely touchpad, etc.).

~~~
neighbour
Care to elaborate on the modification you made to macOS? Currently running a
2015 MBP and am really happy with it but always looking for improvements.

------
setheron
I made the ThinkPad switch with Fedora. I can't be happier !

The biggest draw of the Lenovos is that the they have yet to run hot. My
previous Macbook would get sooo hot... I worried when I kept it on my lap.

The documentation on the fedora website had been so exhaustive and well
written.

------
bdcravens
Every so often I get excited about doing the same, and ditching my MBP and
getting a shiny XPS or X1 Carbon. Then I look at a few pieces of software I
can't find good replacements for (for example, Transmit for working with S3)
or software where the replacements require giving up functionality or ease of
use (thinking of Screenflow or Pixelmator). Maybe one day ....

~~~
philliphaydon
I prefer cloudberry for S3. Last time I tried transmit I couldn’t generate
expiring urls or cloudfront urls. ( using cloudberry via parallels )

~~~
bdcravens
A lot of my use cases are massive storage of data files like CSVs and the
like, so ease of use in searching and previewing are what I look for. Will
remember to give Cloudberry another look however.

~~~
philliphaydon
Ah yeah that makes sense. We are using for different purposes. I need to look
at like 100 buckets and change settings and generate urls.

------
therealmarv
No Photoshop, no Final cut, no Adobe Premiere, no CaptureOne or Lightroom. No
good color management

=

no Linux if you want to do something serious with photography or video.

~~~
snazz
I was blown away the last time I tried Darktable as a Lightroom replacement. I
can see why you might not like GIMP instead of Photoshop (and using Blender as
a video editor has a pretty big learning curve), but most of the functionality
you’d need is actually there.

If the proprietary media apps are a must, having a Windows VM works good (with
GPU pass through if you need it), as does dual-booting with Windows or a
Hackintosh system (which is actually pretty easy these days).

~~~
GordonS
Ooh, I see darktable is finally available on Windows too! I'm still running an
antiquated version of Lightroom I purchased something like 10 years ago - very
keen to give darktable a try!

------
reacharavindh
To each their own. My personal experience is that Macs are a proxy for high
quality Retina display(sharp text) and more vertical resolution than thos
remedial optimised laptops. I just happen to run MacOS which it comes with.
Give me that display, and sensible aspect ratio, and I’ll run Linux at the
endpoint. Until ten, Linux only on servers for me.

~~~
tsar9x
I think Huawei Matebook has even better display than MacBooks, 3:2 ratio hidpi
screen. Also something from Surface line, not sure about Linux compatibility
though.

~~~
reacharavindh
Thanks for the info. I looked at Matebook x pro with 13 inch display, 256GB of
storage and 16 GB of RAM.

Again, a personal opinion. It costs as much as the equivalent MacBook Pro. I
would not choose it over a MacBook because why? Apple has been known to care
for customers in the sense that even if they fuck up keyboard design, they run
a service program for free. Battery mess up - replacement for cheap. Simply
that they have a brand to protect. I can rest assured that I can make a
warranty claim that will go through. I’m not sure if I can say that about
Huawei. I might try them if they are cheaper or give me some incentive to try.
But, if they are the same cost, why would I willingly take the uncertainty?

Some incentives hat would make decide that way are :

1\. Open drivers and documentation.

2\. Promise of equivalent service or replacement if necessary.

3\. Repair/upgrade friendly design - no soldering of memory and SSD. I'm okay
if that makes the laptop a few millimeters thicker and a few grams heavier.

Thanks for the info though.

------
mderazon
I too made the transition and it's almost perfect for me. The only thing
missing for me is a decent pdf editor.

I need to fill out pdf forms pretty often (bureaucracy) and sign them with my
signature png.

There is no decent software for Linux that let you do that.

I have tried them all, currently I am using foxit reader in wine and it's not
great and very sluggish but usually works

~~~
yakubin
Foxit Reader is natively available for Linux.

~~~
mderazon
The native version is worse than the wine version. It was hanging constantly
for me

------
sp0ck
iMessage and iCloud integration is still missing. I can’t image to reach for a
phone every time I’m getting text when working on a computer. I’m surprised
that such synergy is still not covered by community. [edit] My killer app is
iTerm. There isn’t anything even close to it on Linux. (features _and_
documentation)

~~~
StanAngeloff
There are alternatives for those of us not obsessed with the Apple universe.
Android supports Android Messages which can be read/responded to from the
browser/an app. iCloud may be substituted with any number of offerings, some
will keep files on the cloud and sync as needed to preserve space. If you are
invested in the Apple ecosystem, you're out of luck.

~~~
wwright
Android Messages is not a true competitor here, since iMessage naturally
scales up to E2E encryption. (Not a concern for everyone, of course.)

------
shortformblog
Longtime Mac/Hackintosh user who has been dabbling more into Linux in recent
months. I come to it from the mindset of an advanced non-technical
professional user—someone who only sometimes has to write code as part of a
day job, but is comfortable in a terminal and has a strong understanding of
the underlying systems even if I’m not writing an app anytime soon.

I’ve been using PopOS a bit of late, and have found their tweaks on Gnome to
mostly work pretty well. I have had to swap around keys to get used to the
format some—basically my big thing is having the special characters available
through the Alt/Option key is important to me as I do a lot of writing and
frequently use things like long dashes.

One thing I found helped a lot was replacing the caps-lock functionality with
the super key, which makes the super functionality easily accessible while
still keeping the extended characters within reach.

There are apps I wish had stronger equivalents—Alfred immediately comes to
mind—as they have helped speed up my workflow in MacOS. And some apps
(Photoshop, InDesign) don’t have a replacement strong enough to use as a daily
driver.

While I’m still mostly MacOS these days, PopOS is pretty likable.

------
ukj
If tiling is what you are after, was Spectacle not a good enough solution on
OSX?

I use a QMK-based keyboard (although I am sure you can achieve similar levels
of functionality with Karabiner) where choosing my window placement is a 2-key
macro.

~~~
xrisk
Spectacle doesn't even come close to i3.

The biggest deal breaker is that you can't programmatically move a window to a
new workspace (I think?); and that you can't disable the animations for
switching workspaces (biggest problem).

~~~
ukj
Is it a case where perfect is the enemy of good enough? I've never felt the
need to move anything programatically e.g automatically without it being
triggered by my intention.

Spectacle has "next/previous display" shortcut.

To disable animations on workspace switching:

defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES &&
killall Dock

~~~
WildGreenLeave
That command doesn't work anymore since a few versions back of OSX. As far as
I know there is no way to fully disable the animation and I hate it!

------
csense
I tried to go the other direction, from Linux to Mac, years ago. The two
complaints I clearly remember:

\- I couldn't figure how the heck to open a web browser, apparently it's a
completely unlabeled compass icon.

\- You have to use some non-obvious, secret combination of keys while clicking
on an application icon if you want to open another instance of that
application.

I never did understand why people will pay so much more for Mac machines. I
tried it, hated it, could only get things done by opening a terminal and
treating the Mac like a generic UNIX system. Went back to Linux as quick as I
could.

I'm not surprised this guy's happy to be switching away from Mac.

------
adreamingsoul
(designer/developer) I too have finally switched to linux from osx. The final
decision came down to the current models of Macbook Pros. I’m currently using
a Lenovo P1 Thinkpad with Ubuntu 18. So far it’s worked out great!

------
sneak
how do you type an em dash, a mu, an eszett, et c on linux without looking up
arcane codes each time? (option dash, option m, option s, respectively). how
do you do color calibration? how do you do messaging? how do you get non-ugly
fonts?

these are the barriers to me switching.

~~~
snazz
I don’t manually type the Unicode characters for any of that because I’m
usually using TeX, where typing three dashes becomes an em dash and there are
commands for Greek and other characters. You can also configure the right alt
key to be used for this kind of stuff.

If you want to use GNOME, it includes a good color management interface that
will look oddly familiar coming from macOS. There’s other ways to do it too:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_color_management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_color_management)

As for messaging, I’ve heard good things about KDE Connect. Not sure if it
works with iOS though.

For pretty user-interface and default fonts, you can edit a fontconfig file
that will let you specify aliases for fonts and some pretty complex
configuration to get the right font in each saturation. See
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration)

~~~
inferiorhuman
_I don’t manually type the Unicode characters for any of that because I’m
usually using TeX, where typing three dashes becomes an em dash and there are
commands for Greek and other characters._

I use xetex for a little project, and while some of those character mappings
are very convenient others are not. Vulgar fractions, for instance, work in
some fonts but not others. For instance LTC Californian Pro has the unicode
glyphs for the vulgar fractions, but xetex doesn't translate e.g. 3/8 to ⅜.
Goudy Oldstyle is missing many vulgar fractions (e.g. ⅜), but the tex mappings
work. Go figure.

Granted, fractions aren't mapped to keys in OSX, but I use plenty of those
mappings on a regular basis including the bullet (•, ·), degree (°), accented
characters (á, é, í, ó, ü, ö, ñ), currency characters (£, ¢, €), and the
section character — §. I can get all of these with simple keystrokes and, best
of all, zero fiddling with keybindings.

------
magoon
I love linux (and bash) but can’t understand the desire to use it as a desktop
OS, especially when you can work in Terminal on Mac. I’m sure I’m not the only
one.

~~~
Barrin92
my two reasons why I prefer linux is 1. tiling wms, same as in the article.
I've gotten a huge productivity boost and largely solved my hand pain by
moving to a keyboard workflow and 2, I don't really see the upside of using a
mac these days. they're more expensive, more constrained in terms of software
(I like to dual boot windows andl inux), I have an android phone which
integrates well with linux, so linux it is.

the only actual benefit macs used to have was that it was a polished, non-
windows system, but pretty much any mainstream linux distro these days works
fine even out of the box.

------
bengalister
I had to renew my Asus home laptop last June running Windows/Linux. I
hesitated between a Linux or MacOS MacBookPro but I finally decided to buy a
Dell XPS 13 9380. It costed me 1500Euros (i7
8cores/16Gb/512GbNvme/1080p/Thunderbolt3/IntelGpu920). The MacbookPro with a
better screen but inferior keyboard costed 2500Euros... We'll see how long the
Dell will last. I am bit worried about the battery.

Since then I run Arch with Gnome3/Wayland and everything just works including
bluetooth/suspend/usbc dock/etc... except the following: \- the fingerprint
scanner, there are no Linux driver (even for the Ubuntu version sold by Dell)
\- Wayland fractional scaling does not really work, everything is blurry, so I
don't use it. When my I am disconnected from the external monitor I just type
a command to do text scaling... \- Battery life is still inferior compared to
Windows, especially when I watch youtube videos (I don't use Firefox on Linux
because of the lack of hardware acceleration)

Compared to MacOSX I find Linux better for development and Ops. All the tools
just work, are up-to-date and can be installed from the command line (pacman
with the user repositories > brew/cask). For amateur video editing/photo
editing, you now have plenty of choice (especially for video). Of course
Gnome3 is inferior in term of performance, stability and is less visually
appealing.

The OS is a commodity nowadays. Well more and more. Many applications can be
found for the 3 major OS. That is why more and more OS vendors offer cloud
services like backup/security/planning tied to the OS, well integrated and not
opened.

Also more and more Microsoft/Apple/Google will integrate AI related services
tied to your usage and what they know of you, so Linux will not be able to
compete in that area.

------
djhworld
I've always thought about doing this but keep on running into reasons (or
excuses) not to.

Right now I've gone half in and have Fedora Server on an Intel NUC that I SSH
into. So not quite a desktop replacement, but a nice linux environment for
doing dev in. Disadvantage is you rely on a network connection for this
approach, but it will do for now

------
rswail
Most of my work is either in a browser (reading) or in a terminal. I ran Linux
as my OS for years up until 2015, when I'd had enough of tweaking stuff to
make it work (Flash, sound, video etc).

So I moved to a 2014/2015 MBP and installed macports as well (not brew,
because I don't want crap in /usr).

So my GUI "Just Works TM", my wifi etc same, sound, etc. MS Office.

Macports gives me the standard GNU utils/bash/etc, I don't use much of the
MacOS there. iTerm2 is a great terminal emulator and its tmux CC mode is
awesome. I don't have to tweak to get stuff that works.

Yes I'm aware things have come a long way since 2014 on the Linux desktop, but
I don't gain anything from using it. If I need a Linux environment, either AWS
(or DO or Azure or GCP etc) or a VM locally will give me that, but in terms of
userspace in a terminal, there's nothing I need that isn't in Macports.

------
easymodex
I've been using windows my whole life and especially on win 10 everything
works fine, but I've been nagged on from all sides that mac is so much better
than windows that I finally decided to try it and bought it 2 months ago. Long
story short I rarely use it and I still don't have the proper tools and
workflow to completely abandon my win laptop. And to make things even worse
now everywhere I look people are saying windows has gotten better than mac and
people are switching back to windows and such. Did I make a mistake or do I
just need to figure it out more? I really don't know but mac is really super
confusing so far and it looks more for home users or hipsters. I can't say
anything about ubuntu though, I work with it all the time as far as bash and
servers are concerned, but I've never used it as a primary OS.

~~~
Terretta
Your question feels open minded: did you make a mistake, or do you just need
to figure it out more?

What could be going on for you could be individual windows versus end-to-end
workflow.

Origins of Mac are neither home users nor hipsters, origins are content
creators, from office to graphics and publishing. By contrast, origins of
Windows is as window manager for backwards compatible DOS programs. Even
today, many Windows programs in the workplace started as mainframe green
screens now laid out in Windows Forms. This different DNA at the heart makes
the surface behave differently.

MacOS design and feel is less about individual apps, more about creative flow,
with gestures to swipe between apps and (mostly) the same keyboard shortcuts
across tools, almost anything can cut and paste to almost anything, and so on.
The oversized trackpad on the Macbooks is to drive with fluidity.

This difference in flow-centric versus window or app-centric makes crossing
back and forth frustrating, the other side just doesn’t feel right. Neither is
wrong, they’re just coming from a different place, for a different purpose.

To switch, you have to spend long enough in the other side to adapt how you
think about work to the DNA of the ecosystem, develop the new muscle memory to
turn your ideas into productivity in that paradigm for work.

PS. MacOS’s Terminal is remarkably fast, and its command line is bash, so that
may feel comfortable to you. Darwin, the system on which MacOS was built, is a
derivative of 4.4BSD-Lite2 and FreeBSD, so you can think of it as a unix under
a workflow optimized GUI.

------
honkycat
Agreed. I recently went from multiple years of Linux to OSX, and I find OSX
FINE. Not great. Not revolutionary. Just fine. I can install emacs and it
works. Whoopie.

The laptop is fine. It costs 3x what I would pay for a Linux laptop, but I'm
not the one footing the bill. _Yawn_ Oh well. Laptops.

_____

Now what was something that IMPRESSED me is the 2018 Ipad. I did NOT
previously consider the possibility of having a screen, wireless keyboard, and
a 4g tethered phone connection on me at all times.

I have my Linux desktop at home serving on SSH and MOSH. I have my Ipad set up
with a terminal app and an ssh key that lets me remote in. BOOM. My hoss
machine at home with a great internet connection at my fingertips. Totally
portable dev environment.

On top of THAT, the iPad UX is very tolerable. And having a detached screen
with no keyboard is great. I can access Oreilly online learning, Kindle, and
Dropbox and read whenever I feel like it ( which I have done a LOT ).

Heck, this whole summer I have been sitting out on my deck reading books,
watching Youtube, using Steam Link on my gaming PC, hacking on my dev box, and
pretty much EVERYTHING else on that little iPad.

Combo that with the new Sidecar feature coming with the next version of iOS,
and I'm thinking I am going to upgrade to an iPad pro. It is a drawing tablet,
an SSH terminal, a great reading device, a multimedia device with resolution
good enough to watch movies and read comic books on, AND a secondary monitor
when I feel like setting up outside on a nice day and hacking on my work
laptop? Yes please.

The only downsides: iOS native games are few and far between. One of the top
recommendations is FTL, a game released in 2012. If they could get Magic the
Gathering: Arena, Hades ( Supergiant Games ), Into the Breach, and a regular
cadence of good indie titles on there, I would marry the thing.

The other downside: The walled garden means they keep emulators and
implementation for the Switch pro controller out of the app store. Booo!
...but understandable.

~~~
neighbour
>they keep emulators and implementation for the Switch pro controller out of
the app store.

True but macOS also has OpenEmu which is great.

------
sankalp210691
I remember the first time I used Linux. A few years later I got a Macbook Air.
I love the flexibilities Linux offers. The way you can just change the look
and feel of the OS felt empowering. While OS X look and feel is beautiful, I
do miss that customizability.

------
sawaruna
>being a long time lurker of Reddit's r/unixporn

lol of course they would go with Manjaro and i3.

~~~
klez
It goes in waves. At one time it was Arch and Awesome.

------
fortran77
I switched from Mac to Windows 10, and I'm even more productive!

~~~
snazz
Because of the better window management or something else?

~~~
asdff
What are some of the advantages of windows window management? Other than
snapping I find it clunky. To be fair I tried out a tiling desktop as well and
didn't really like it. Too orderly and forced for me. I like piles of papers
all over my desk and windows all over my desktop I guess.

~~~
snazz
Interesting. What I’ve found is that it’s a lot of work to move windows around
on a Mac when I want to see all of them at once. I just feel inefficient when
I have to do a lot of clicking or Cmd-tab to get the window I want visible.
Judging by the number of third party window management stuff for macOS there
seem to be a lot of people who appreciate it either way.

------
antisocial
Two most useful things for me for my transition from mac to linux.

1\. fzf - mentioned in the article. 2\. Albert - application launcher 3\.
Clipit - similar to mac's copyclip, but not as easy CopyClip

~~~
nouney
I'd suggest rofi[1] rather than albert, runs like a charm.

[1] [https://github.com/davatorium/rofi](https://github.com/davatorium/rofi)

~~~
techntoke
God I hope they add Wayland support soon. I really miss rofi.

------
hendersoon
I've used a Mac at work for several years now and generally either like the UX
or have found third-party packages to fix my problems like BetterTouchTool.

All but one-- MacOS doesn't allow click-through. If you're working in one
window and want to click on something in a second window, you need to click
twice, once to select the other window and then again to do whatever you were
looking to do. This drives me crazy on an hourly basis and there is no way to
fix it.

------
braindongle
Docker is the way. Darwin is a mess for development, but it doesn't matter.
Start with a 137 MB bare-bones Debian image, add just what you need, Docker is
the way.

~~~
egwor
Sounds interesting. Tell me more. What do you use to host it on? Do you ever
run any X/window systems?

~~~
braindongle
I'm coming from a web development perspective. When the browser is your gui,
or your app doesn't need one, Docker (running on Linux, Mac, or, cough,
Windows) just takes away your concerns about environment consistency. Like a
VM, but not really. A "container", a minimal Linux image, running a "service"
for your app, is a beautiful and portable thing! (Looks like running guis on
Mac from Docker is messy: [https://cntnr.io/running-guis-with-docker-on-mac-
os-x-a14df6...](https://cntnr.io/running-guis-with-docker-on-mac-os-
x-a14df6a76efc))

------
jsilence
Also made the switch from MacOS X to Linux with i3 and mostly happy with the
result. Things I miss the most are consistent key bindings for the clipboard
and Spotlight.

~~~
benologist
I made the switch from macOS to elementary OS and the keybindings are all I
really miss. Apple seems to have the most-complete and most-consistently-
implemented keyboard shortcuts by far.

------
mherrmann
I also switched from macOS to Linux and am happy. I wrote a blog post titled
"Home and Hotel" about this once [1]. TL;DR: macOS is like a hotel - stylish
but you can't bring your own furniture. Linux feels like home. You have to do
the dishes, but it's yours.

1: [https://fman.io/blog/home-and-hotel/](https://fman.io/blog/home-and-
hotel/)

~~~
mxuribe
The "home and hotel" is a great analogy! (And, nice blog post, too!)

~~~
mherrmann
Thanks! :-)

------
2kabhishek
I use a very similar setup to yours, here's my Dotfiles repo:
[https://github.com/2kabhishek/Dotfiles](https://github.com/2kabhishek/Dotfiles)
if you have any feedback I will be happy to know about it. I use konsole as my
terminal emulator. I use kde on my laptop (Mostly for KDE Connect) and i3 on
my desktop.

------
stjohnswarts
I really don't believe people when they say "I had problems with performance
on browser _________ so I switched to browser ___________". Both firefox and
chrome are about equally performant with chrome having the edge, as any
cursory internet research will show. I choose firefox because the organization
behind it cares about it's users more than making a buck

------
nine_k
Nothing is original in this setup. These all are off-the-shelf packages, well-
known, battle-tested, open-source software. The amount of configuration is
also moderate.

 _And this is great._ This literally means that Linux is ready for a developer
desktop, and has been for years. It wins over the Mac experience in a fair
competition.

~~~
Tehchops
>It wins over the Mac experience in a fair competition.

Define "fair", because I feel like this inevitably means stripping away
legitimate use cases.

~~~
nine_k
Fair as in "I had both, and chose that", as opposed to "I took the free-as-in-
beer option because I was cash-strapped" or "I chose the only variant that
could run my critical apps".

------
sydney6
You may want to give sway a shot. It's like i3wm, but without all off the xorg
pain.

~~~
oehtXRwMkIs
Not unless you have a HiDPI display and rely on some non-Wayland-native apps.
Causes blurry apps which can be headache inducing. It is a known issue being
worked on though.

------
elwell
I spend most my time in Emacs so OS might not matter a whole lot. Though I
like being able to verify browser display / experience on a device similar to
my users (mostly Mac).

------
4b11b4
One stand-out piece you're missing is tmux-ressurect. You mention that you
start the day by opening terminals for each project... You'll never have to do
that again.

~~~
scwoodal
There’s also tmuxinator[1]. I setup profiles for my different development
environments (panes for db/repl/vim).

Just a command away from it setting up the Tmux panes with the right sizes and
processes running.

[1]
[https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator](https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator)

------
camgunz
Interesting that kitty is getting more exposure. I definitely agree it's the
fastest terminal on OS X. Dunno about Linux though.

------
new_realist
User moves terminal-based workflow to Linux, finds it isn’t any worse.
Neglects to try chunkwm.

------
joeblau
If I wasn't an iOS developer, I would probably switch back to Linux as well.

------
lordleft
Awesome article, never heard of Kitty but will check it out!

------
xwdv
dwm is a great tiling window manager for developers. Easy to customize the
source to do whatever you want and far better and more performant than i3.

~~~
wwright
Has i3 performance been an issue for you at some point? It’s always seemed
perfectly fine to me, but that might be the environments I’ve used it in.

~~~
platz
I mean if you crud i3 up with a bunch of mods, maybe it could slow down, but
I'm surprised as well that it wouldn't be performant for some reason

------
sorokod
_Having heard good things about Linux and being a long time lurker of Reddit
's r/unixporn_

Stopped reading at this point. Nothing wrong with tinkering with your GUI, but
my priorities differ.

~~~
klez
Tinkering with GUI is not just about looks. It's also about workflow. So
unless you mean that doesn't interest you either I'm not sure you stopped
reading at the right point.

PS: I'm not telling you what you should or shouldn't read. Just trying to
understand what you meant.

~~~
sorokod
Years ago, I spent inordinate amount of time on that kind of thing. At some
point I realised that while enjoyable no work gets done. Nowadays I don't have
a work "flow". I just work which for me means reading and writing code or
emails without interruptions. Any "flow" on top of that is a waste of time. My
experince for whatever it's worth.

~~~
whorleater
I'm with you on this one. Back in college I used to spend an absurd amount of
time tinkering with XMonad, rainmeter, custom themes, but now my requirements
for a computer are:

\- it has a basic window manager (half screen left/right, full screen)

\- it has emacs

\- it has Firefox

\- it has tmux

\- (if the computer is really fancy) it has a calendar application

~~~
Koshkin
> _it has emacs_

Back to square one.

------
rootoor
Macs are the perfect dumb terminal. They look great, have a smooth ui, and
require little fiddling.

However, I always need to ssh onto a “real machine” to get actual work done.

------
pjmlp
As usual this is the typical "Mac as pretty Linux" user story, so naturally
the migration was quite painless.

------
manjana
He forgot Weechat!

------
peteretep
> prompted me to switch. It was a choice I never regretted

That doesn’t bode well

------
jimnotgym
I have gone one step further, to Windows 10.

I finally removed Ubuntu from my home laptop too. I'm now using it in WSL with
VS Code.

Everything day to day works better. My shares mount easily, my media players
work, but best of all I get proper versions of Word and Excel. I still manage
a bunch of Macs at work, but I have come to regard them as the BetaMax
computer. Worst of all this is BetaMax, with the users not having noticed that
the rest of the world has BluRay. I get so many Mac Users telling me 1990's
anecdotes about things Macs do better than Windows. "Macs update silently in
the background". No they don't. Windows 10 does a pretty good job of it
though.

I have narrowed it down to the real truth. Macs look cool when you are sat in
a hipster coffee shop with your hipster book pro. That and stuff with iPhone
compatibility, home user stuff.

~~~
plg
I have colleagues that swear by some of the new Microsoft portable machines.

The few times I’ve had a look at Windows 10 I’ve been seriously put off by all
of the ‘junk’ that is automatically installed, e.g. candy crush etc.

I also worry about Windows still being a big target for malware.

What can die hard Win10 users tell me about these concerns?

~~~
minimaul
>The few times I’ve had a look at Windows 10 I’ve been seriously put off by
all of the ‘junk’ that is automatically installed, e.g. candy crush etc.

Not a diehard win10 user, but as far as I know you can only disable this
legitimately if you pay out for Win10 Enterprise.

I think there are registry hacks that work on other versions though.

~~~
tjoff
You can't buy Win10 Enterprise if you are an individual.

Now all that ridiculous bloat is pretty easily disabled. But that along with
telemetry and forced updates are probably the last drops that will force me to
linux for my workstation.

I can't believe they sold their trust for that. I can't use an operating
system that I don't trust.

