Ask HN: If you were forced to abandon Mac OS, what would you use? - mrburton
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pixel_fcker
I was forced to abandon macOS because Apple abandoned Nvidia and I need CUDA.
Now running Ubuntu 18.04.

It’s fine. The UX is varying degrees of shitty as always but I can do what I
need without too much hassle (mostly vscode/vim and the terminal).

The only thing I really miss from macOS is how nice editing PDFs was in
Preview (filling out and signing forms). That and Photoshop.

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karmajunkie
I’d go back to windows. With WSL2 I could probably get over most impediments
to my preferred workflow and application choices. Linux is great but honestly
I’d get tired of fighting to get a reasonably stable configuration of
hardware, display, etc. I just want computer to work.

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anonsivalley652
That depends.

On a laptop or most desktops, Ubuntu LTS or something similar. If you still
needed macOS or Windows, don't go hackintosh or dual-booting, that's for the
birds, just run macOS or Windows under VMware Workstation.

On a powerful desktop, VMware ESXi and then Windows 10, macOS, FreeBSD, Arch
or whatever in VMs. If you have GPUs, you can redirect them to the VM...
people even use them for gaming sometimes too with minimal overhead.

In general, in a VM, Arch or Gentoo in a Docker container for userland,
probably combined with habitat (hab). CentOS/RHEL/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian
packages are always old as the hills and their dependency hell package
management is so last century.

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kevinherron
Arch + KDE full time. Not a macOS-a-like experience but it’s really usable.
Not using it since getting my 16” MBP but it’s what’s installed on my desktop
PC.

The worst thing about desktop Linux right now is the awkward transition from
X11 to Wayland and the fact that high DPI support is pretty bad. It’s actually
worse in some ways on Wayland despite the support for fractional and per-
display scaling because half your applications probably still need to run on
XWayland and it doesn’t support scaling at all.

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CyberFonic
I did abandon Mac OS several years ago. Still use a 2009 MBP on very rare
occasions. Have been using Ubuntu LTS desktop most happily ever since.

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xkemp
I recently used a Linux desktop system (Ubuntu 19.4) for a a few weeks, the
first time I've used a non-MacOS desktop in about 15 years.

In the last view years, I had gotten the impression that Linux on the desktop
had made progress. I was surprised to find the experience at just about the
same frustrating level that I last left it a decade ago.

It's all very shiny and translucent. The eye candy must come from the same
designers as these fancy gaming graphics cards that are Ferrari red with lots
of blinking lights, blinking away inside your computer, under your desk. But
that part is not too bad.

What's worse are the inconsistencies and annoyances: windows being placed at
locations where it's impossible to grab and move them; model dialogs _behind_
their (deactivated) parent window;

Application UIs follow the Anna Karenina paradigm: they are all unique in
their failures. Some have menus in the window, some use the top-of-screen menu
bar, other have web interface with Hamburger menus, and then there's Calibre,
which must be intended as a cruel joke.

In one non-gnome environment I tried, there was a launcher with menu entries
"settings", "system", "preferences", "utilities", and "administration". That's
five synonyms as far as I can tell.

There are about six places where I can change settings for the mouse. None of
them allowed me to make it behave as it should: it's either dog slow, or jumps
20px for every quantum of movement.

Minor stuff: Search functions that pop up a model "nothing found" alert window
whenever they don't find anything. The dialog's "Okay" button isn't focused,
so you need to switch to the mouse to dismiss it.

There are three or so places to install software. The Ubuntu Store has no
rhyme or reason: search results are a wild mix of well-known software and
completely obscure widgets last updated during the Bush administration.

Most of the packages are terribly outdated: the version of Calibre I installed
was three years old. And that was from the supposedly faster-moving "snaps"
package. The only package manager that didn't give me any trouble happened to
be _homebrew_ , ported from MacOS just as recently as me.

Don't get me wrong: I've used Linux daily for at least two decades, on servers
via ssh. I'd love to switch to an OSS desktop.

This has really put my opinion of Apple into perspective. There's so much
complaining about every new MacOS release on HN and other places, I had
started to take them seriously. But the gap to Gnome remains vast, and people
claiming to have switched to Linux out of frustration must be lying, or have
severely impaired judgement for some reason.

~~~
ta999999171
It's time you tried KDE.

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BjoernKW
Linux. It's a lot worse than macOS in terms of UI and UX (still better than
the hotchpotch UI that is Windows, though) but I simply couldn't do without
UNIX command line tools.

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alt_f4
I'd use Ubuntu LTS and might also dual boot Windows for Photoshop.

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dman
Linux

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adolph
iOS of course. I’m using it right now as a matter of fact.

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forgotmypw
Qubes

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chandakmayank
go manjaro

