
Going from macOS to Ubuntu - kvz
https://kvz.io/tobuntu.html
======
laumars
> _On the one hand, yes Electron eats a lot of RAM and native apps are more
> efficient, BUT you can buy 16GB for $100 (and that will only get cheaper
> /more abundant), and we do finally get to have nice things on Linux, which
> is new and exciting._

I'm on the fence about Electron. While I do love how it's made portability
easier (especially to Linux) I do think people outside of our tech circle get
forgotten about.

For example $100 might be pocket money for us but we do need to remember that
not everyone in the world has that luxury. I think sometimes peoples obsession
with making pretty things with Electron leads them to forget about people on
low income or countries where computers are expensive resources.

There's also an argument to be made for how native applications are generally
better for people who depend on accessibility features too.

~~~
my123
Also laptops with soldered RAM, I'm on a 13 inch MacBook Pro for example, and
you cannot move beyond 16GB on that hardware...

~~~
VvR-Ox
Yes you can, buy an old one from 2012 ;-P

~~~
VvR-Ox
Thank you for voting me down on this - it was intended as a joke and not to
upset you. I think you need some vacation.

~~~
my123
I did read your reply pretty much as a joke. :-) (and didn't downvote you for
that one)

The real problem with the older MacBooks (Pro) is weight really, for a machine
that I have to carry with me every day.

As far as I know, there aren't that many 13 inch or less light options with
more RAM outside of Apple either.

~~~
VvR-Ox
Ok I am sorry I assumed you did - so thank you for not dragging me down :-D It
must have been some anonymous jerk who doesn't have the balls to tell me what
upset him and give me the chance to argue with him.

In comparison the MBP 2012 and a MBP 2016 do not differ in weight so much
(1.4kg vs 2kg which is basically a package of flour) and if I am honest I
don't really recognize the difference when carrying them in my backpack.

But it depends on the bag as well, because if you use a messenger bag for
example the strain on the shoulder and the back is probably noticeable. Also
many people like to carry their notebooks around with one arm / hand and of
course this will be a huge difference then.

Some people like to use the Thinkpad X1 or the Dell XPS as a replacement but I
don't have any hands-on experience with those.

I hope someone will recognize the gap in the market and jump in to produce 13
inch, retina screen uni-body metal notebooks with the ability to upgrade the
parts and with all the ports you still need when not living in some bubble
where magically everything was converted into USB-C overnight.

------
mmjaa
I run both Ubuntu and MacOS systems in my studio, each functioning as DAW's in
various capacities, and I find myself feeling very relieved, more and more,
whenever I sit in front of the Ubuntu Studio DAW to work .. everything just
works, and with every update the system is more and more of a joy to work
with.

I just suffered through an automatic update on MacOS to Catalina - this has
been the most painful, idiotic thing to happen in my studio in a long time,
and I now feel about Apple the way I did about Microsoft last century, when I
abandoned them .. just utterly disappointed, and more the point I feel
_exploited_ just so that Apple can update its OS and force us to move onto
their next big thing.

More and more, I'll replace the Mac with an Ubuntu Studio-oriented DAW, and
then I'll phase out using Macs entirely. Linux is catching up in a big way,
especially for use as Audio/Media workstation. Its not 100%, but its certainly
better than having arbitrary decisions forced on me by the OS masters in
Cuppertino.

(And yes, I've disabled auto-update. Shouldn't have been on in the first
place, on this production system...)

~~~
fouc
I'm confused, there was an automatic update that took you from Mojave to
Catalina without your permission?

(Not sure why you got downvoted btw)

~~~
mmjaa
Yes - The update was downloaded automatically, when the machine was shut down
for the night, it installed the update automatically on bootup. This caused
days of frustration and lost productivity.

~~~
tachion
This can't happen unless you approve it. You can sit on old versions of MacOS
for years.

------
haspok
Things like battery life, suspend/resume and proper handling of multiple/hidpi
displays are the Achilles heels of open source projects.

They are notoriously hard to get right, require lots of work invested, and
easy to break (regressions!) but are not too sexy or interesting, require
insane amounts of QA and don't have low hanging fruits. As a consequence,
nobody wants to do them, and so the Linux desktop will probably always be a
mess.

Oh, and then there is that aspect of it that unixes in general were not built
with the desktop in mind, so things like vm.swappiness defaults might be
completely wrong (Ubuntu still defaults to 60 to this day!) and the kernel low
memory handling is just outrageously bad, if you compare it to Windows, for
instance.

I would be the first person to pay proper money for any Linux-based OS that at
least _attempts_ to solve these issues. I might even go as far to purchase a
laptop specifically to get the OS on that laptop, like the Macs, however I'm
not willing to sacrifice on the size and quality of said laptop, actually, I
expect a very high quality product for my extra money, so unfortunately at the
moment there is nothing out there right now that I'd buy based on this.

~~~
lostmsu
AFAIK, macOS only supports 2x DPI scaling, so Linux here is not the worst
offender.

~~~
mikhailt
No, it has extra options. It defaults to 2xDPI by default but you can choose a
different resolution if you want.

I often switch from 2x to higher resolution when I need more workspace.

You can see how it works here: [https://www.imore.com/how-change-display-
settings-your-mac](https://www.imore.com/how-change-display-settings-your-mac)

~~~
lostmsu
That looks like a resolution change, not a DPI change.

------
mxschumacher
Reading those long installation commands makes me appreciate Arch's AUR (also
available on Manjaro). No curl, no manual adding of repos. Compare ease of
installation for yarn by toggling the linux distro:

[https://yarnpkg.com/lang/en/docs/install/#arch-
stable](https://yarnpkg.com/lang/en/docs/install/#arch-stable)

It's even more pronounced for VSCode.

For the jetbrains tools (including Datagrip), I switched to using Toolbox. It
makes updating to new versions easier:

[https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox-app/](https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox-
app/)

~~~
kvz
Author here. I'm hearing good things about Arch yes, maybe I should give it a
shot one day. And thank you for the Toolbox recommendation, I added it to the
post!

~~~
mxschumacher
I'm personally running Manjaro, it's as easy to set up as Ubuntu and gives you
access to the AUR. Much less of a commitment... An Arch installation requires
plenty of effort

~~~
VvR-Ox
Same here. I used various other distributions for years until arriving here.

1\. Suse Linux: don't know what version but it worked and broke my windows
partition somehow (think it was a user error).

2\. Debian: very stable but not cutting edge enough for my taste. I damaged it
trying to get compiz fusion and all the wonderful 3d-FX to run on my desktop.

3\. Ubuntu / Mint: more up-to-date than Debian plus some nice sane default
etc. to just start working very quickly. Also a big community and some good
ideas.

4\. Manjaro (finally :D): even more up-to-date than Ubuntu plus AUR's! I love
the way I can install software on this OS compared to Debian-derivatives. So
far it's not much more work to maintain it than it was for my Mint/Ubuntu
setup.

I installed Manjaro alongside macOS (high sierra) on my MBP 2012 to get the
best of both worlds.

It pretty much works and I also don't have problems with hibernation as the
author of the article describes. BUT I'm afraid my WiFi is not working as good
on Linux as it does on macOS and also connecting my speaker via BT isn't
working as expected - the sound is choppy and I'll need to fix it when I find
some time.

I can confirm the problem with the clipboards, the key-mappings and also
Snaps. This is something they did quite right on the Apple side and I hope
enough people of the active Linux community will implement this consistency
some time, too.

The problems with the keyboard maybe stem from too many choices how to set the
layout. I was given the choice between 3 or 4 layouts without being sure which
one to choose.

Now I can choose what OS to use depending on the task:

\- Linux: Development (things like docker just work which is really nice),
Mail (thunderbird is ugly but it can handle a lot more than Apple Mail which
becomes unusable after some time), Security-related things (I trust my Linux
more than macOS somehow)

\- Mac: Office (especially when working with PDF but also compare Pages to
LibreOffice which tries to resemble M$ office too much for my taste), Graphics
(for me Gimp is no viable alternative to Photoshop; the GUI alone brings me
into rage-mode), Day-to-day "tasks" (browsing, media etc. just work better on
macOS)

~~~
mxschumacher
There must be better alternatives for email. I just installed Thunderbird and
it does lots of things I don't need (Chat, Calendar). It's really hard to give
up on Gmail (the recent addition of powerful autocomplete is amazing!). Plenty
of people are using Mutt, but that seems too minimalist to me.

What made me switch away from Ubuntu was that at some point I was forced to
upgrade my OS version in order to continue to receive updates for my packages.
I now prefer rolling the rolling release model (which Manjaro / Arch use)

Having relatively recent Linux Kernels available is also cool, I'm already on
version 5.3.6 and this was trivial to do (5.3.8 is the most recent stable
branch).

------
YSFEJ4SWJUVU6
>10 years later, copy-paste is still a horrible user experience. Different
apps use different clipboards :scream: Even for copying these commands from
Firefox to the terminal with keyboard shortcuts (CTRL INSERT, SHIFT INSERT, as
CTRL C has a different meaning in terminals), you'll need copy-paste fixed
already.

IMO this thing is way overblown. What applications these days do not simply
use primary and clipboard selections in a consistent way? (FTR I like them
separate very much as I would hate to have my clipboard contents change by
simply selecting some text.) Middle click is not a shortcut for Ctrl+V!

Ctrl-C is indeed used to send SIGINT to the foreground processes in terminals
and thus terminal emulators, and the established alternative for terminal
emulators is to replace Ctrl-C/V copy/paste with Ctrl+Shift+C/V (I think
that's how even cmd.exe works these days). Copying and sending a SIGINT would
hardly be a useful default.

~~~
the-unknown-dev
Is there a way to configure a <Super> or <Meta>-C/-V on linux to be copy/paste
in a halfway compatible way? I often struggle too with my <Cmd>-C/-V muscle
memory when using linux.

~~~
xroker
Take a look at Kinto
[https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto/](https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto/)

------
hi_mom
Seems like an awful lot of configuration to get it half working like you want.

On the one hand, I’m thinking about getting an XPS because it’s literally 2K
cheaper than a macbook and is upgradeable. On the other hand, a macbook still
has a bit better build quality and macOS is still the most polished and easy
to use OS (even after Catalina).

I need a stable OS that allows me to be productive without having to waste
hours looking for workarounds and setup and doesn’t break my config every
upgrade. I also really, really like Time Machine.

~~~
wor3q
> Seems like an awful lot of configuration to get it half working like you
> want.

Now look at it other way around. How much time would you have to spend to
configure OSX to behave like Ubuntu?

As someone who uses both, I'd kill for middle click paste...

~~~
pizza234
I'd kill for having a fully consistent copy/paste on Linux :-D

As of today, without any extra clipboard manager installed, if I copy
something from the Network Manager GUI, and I close it, the content is lost.

(I'm a hardcore linux user, so this is a small joke, but still a typical Linux
issue)

------
wink
I'm always amazed by the obsession of mac users with "just closing the lid for
sleep".

I simply don't want that. If I close the lid then to move the laptop more
easily to the next room/next floor for a meeting, I might not want it to go to
sleep. When I want to suspend I run a single command. I could put that command
on a key combo, so it's not like I can't fix it. I want to control what
happens when I close the lid, and more often I want nothing to happen. I have
a shell open anyway, so I can run my command...

But I've had that close-lid-for-suspend fail on Windows so many times, so
maybe my Linux stance is too muddled anyway :P

Also both of my ThinkPads stay with power for days when suspended (ok, not
weeks, I admit that) so in this case Dell is to blame I guess.

~~~
kvz
Author here. I can relate to that sentiment but indeed, closing the lid worked
so reliably well on my MacBook that it would basically be the same as keeping
the lid open and walking to the next room. Meaning: I open the lid, it wakes
up, unlocks with either my watch or fingerprint, all within a second and I'm
right where I was; meanwhile, while the lid was closed, power consumption was
near-zero; I could leave it like that for a month, and open it, I hear the
clicking sound from unlocking via watch with a tap an my wrist, and voila.
Even my running VMs would still be in the same state.

And yes, Dell is to blame for the power consumption, also according so someone
commenting on the blog post, I updated the blog post accordingly

~~~
tandav
There'are some options on macOS: \- InsomniaX : do not sleep when lid is
closed \- Amphetamine: do not sleep when locked (⌘⌃Q)

I have an old Macbook Air 2014 with 4 gb ram. It is sluggish af. If I open
many heavy apps and then lock screen (I do every tim I go to kitchen or
bathroom on job) then when i unlock it - it can take up to several minutes to
function normally. So Amphetamine.app is must for me.

------
S_A_P
I’m firmly in the camp of use what makes you feel productive, and can’t really
grasp the tribalism around OS choice. I generally have bought Apple hardware
because it’s nicely engineered and offers the most choice for “legal” OS
usage. I’m not all that thrilled with my latest MacBook Pro keyboard and I
definitely use it less because of that. I know it’s a popular meme right now
to say Apple software sucks now! But I’m not really seeing it with Catalina.
In fact I usually wait about 6-12 months to switch to the new version and
didn’t this time. Audio apps are notorious for lagging behind in supporting
the latest version of the os. This time around I updated my iMac Pro and it
surprisingly just worked with all my outboard gear, all my apps and it seems
rock solid. I recently bought a surface for my kids who can’t wrap their mind
around Mac OS and it has been largely uneventful as well. I think that both
windows and Mac are in a pretty good state when using the official hardware.
Maybe I’m just lucky...

------
stockkid
> And say what you will about Electron being a memory hungry beast... but it
> is what allows me to make this jump now, at all.

I never thought about it that way, but this is kind of true. Many apps I use
everyday on Linux are available on Linux because they are built using
Electron.

------
cpr
Wow, best argument I've seen in a while for _not_ switching. ;-)

I'm holding out hope for new keyboards so I can stay with macOS. For now using
wonderful Realforce keyboards 99% of the time anyway.

~~~
kvz
Author here. Yes it certainly wasn't meant to be a piece to advocate
switching. Just meant to give an honest review of my experience, good and bad
and cumbersome. Hopefully this helps people make more informed decisions,
whichever that decision may be!

------
wooptoo
You can use Clipman from the Xfce project to merge your two clipboards into
one or ignore the select one. Doesn't completely solve your issue but it gives
the user more control, and also a nice clipboard history.

[https://docs.xfce.org/panel-
plugins/clipman/start](https://docs.xfce.org/panel-plugins/clipman/start)

------
alien_
I've recently switched jobs and got a Mac work computer after using Ubuntu for
more than a decade.

I like some things but I am also frustrated with a number of things: I miss
the split clipboard, I hate the insufficient number of USB ports and the fact
that I have to use a dongle, I miss the vertical maximize and the touchscreen.

------
ageofwant
Again with the 'have to compile the kernel' meme...

Seriously, I've been on Ubuntu for 11 years prior and Arch for 3 after that. I
have built Linux based supercomputers, and administrated clouds of thousands
of raspberry pi edge nodes and I have NEVER compiled a kernel in all that
time.

~~~
fouc
Compiling the kernel used to be common if you need to enable certain driver or
hardware support though.

~~~
wink
But not 10 years ago, more like 15+.

And I did have other machines than ThinkPads...

------
notadoc
I suspect these moves will continue to accelerate with pro users as Apple
continues to offer the current gen MacBook "Pro" with the annoying Touch Bar
and unreliable keyboard

------
gcmrtc
Why `&& true` after that apt command?

~~~
kvz
Author here. It's a noop that lets me put a \ after each lines (not all lines
except the last) which lets me re-order commands easily. It's a bit like
enjoying trailing comma's for all elements/lines in an array. I agree it's a
bit weird.

