Sadly it's not the "shiny"... it's the fact that Mac OS has a GUI that works.
Been using linux since the days you installed Slackware from floppies and recompiled your kernel to get drivers. Command line has always been a bliss, but no one has managed to come up with an usable and consistent GUI yet.
Btw does sleep work on linux laptops these days? How's hi dpi support?
Sleep has been working on my last ~10 laptops and desktops, it's a non-issue at this point unless you have brand new exotic hardware. I did have a motherboard issue on a first-gen Ryzen that required a bios update to get it working.
hi-dpi works very nicely if you use GTK or Qt. For the other apps, it really depends how they are implemented. For me it has been working better than Windows.
These are strawman agruments. Give Ubuntu 20.04 a try an you'll see stuff pretty much just works on any common hardware. You can even use slackware and get everything working with a bit of fiddling.
MacOS is a very nice OS but it isn't FOSS and it isn't more capable at this point, it's just a personal preference. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.
I switched my AI workstation to Ubuntu 20 last week, and the experience was fast and great. I can now run docker containers with cuda, use PyCharm to coordinate everything and have code completion as if the code was local, even if it's executing on a docker worker node in our data center.
200% scaling on my 4K screen looks great, wifi, network, sleep, gpu all worked out of the box. And the IDE behaves exactly like on OS X.
The only thing I disliked was the default Ubuntu color scheme, but that was easy enough to change.
OSX can only guarantee that everything works because apple controls both the hardware and software.
Windows can only guarantee that everything works because they have a monopoly and therefore hardware vendors have to support windows.
Most laptops don't ship with linux/are never tested with linux, so it's never going to work flawlessly on all possible hardware configurations. It's just not possible.
It does however, 'pretty much' work on most hardware.
And if you buy a machine from a vendor that actually supports/pre-installs/tests linux, all of the hardware will work out of the box.
I recently switched from macOS to Ubuntu 19.10 and then 20.04 as my daily driver and it's way flakier and has far more random app crashes than macOS.
That said, the system is fast, the UX is way further along than I expected -- in some ways it's got a better UX than macOS. It's way, way faster at nearly everything.
my point is that if you want to do better than 'pretty much', you should buy a machine from an OEM that actually supports linux
If you're installing it on a random windows laptop, you're never going to get better than 'pretty much', because the OEM doesn't support linux or test their hardware with linux.
When was the last time you gave KDE a try? I just switched from using a tiling window manager and was impressed by how much stuff "just works" and the degree of customizability.
That's part of the problem. Customizability is good, but in return you get inconsistency that you can't fix. And even if all system default apps looks the same (they still look horrible in my opinion), 90% of 3rd party apps look and feel different. You can hardly name a linux (qt or gtk) app that can be name elegant or at least thought through (UI wise). Almost all applications still look like they were build to be used on some factory terminal.
Last time i used KDE for a significant amount of time, something was distracting. Then i realized what it was: the "system tray" icons were erasing themselves and then got redrawn one by one and readjusted their position with each redraw. Distracting as hell when you're trying to concentrate on the code in a nearby window.
Mind, that was in 2013, and hopefully KDE has improved since then. Perhaps it has even reached the level KDE 3 was at? It's been downhill from there.
Btw, I switched to Macs from running Linux with KDE as my desktop of choice full time.
Sleep usually works, assuming you get a laptop that's known to with with Linux. The arch wiki is good for this.
HiDPI is hit and miss. Some applications work, some (especially Java) break badly. Expect to need manual, fragile configuration. You also cannot set scaling per-screen, so you're SOL if you have heterogenous monitors.
Personally I use Windows. I check back in Linux every few months, but WSL seems to be improving far faster than native Linux is, so there's not much reason to use it anymore.
Even once HiDPI works, assuming that happens, by that point I'll have HDR and VRR as requirements... and I have no confidence that those will work anytime soon.
Some people at my work use Linux laptops. Judging by the Linux slack channel, no sleep doesn't work reliably yet, external monitor support is terrible and touchpads still suck. No idea about HiDPI but I doubt it works reliably.
Whenever you bring anything like this up though you'll just get a load of "When was the last time you tried it? It works perfectly for me" replies. Linux users don't want to admit its flaws.
It's pretty difficult to acknowledge a supposed flaw pointed by a guy who knows a guy who uses Linux when you have never had it yourself.
I used Linux at work for years. Sleep just works, external monitor also just works. HiDPI was rough at the start but works fine now.
Touchpads do kind of suck. I generally really dislike the default mouse acceleration. Font rendering is still so so if you don't have a HiDPI screen and the most popular desktop environments are still kind of terrible.
> Whenever you bring anything like this up though you'll just get a load of "When was the last time you tried it? It works perfectly for me" replies. Linux users don't want to admit its flaws.
Are you implying that those users are lying?
I'm sure sleep does work reliably for them.
'Does sleep work on linux' is a fallacious question to begin with, because sleep working/not working depends on the hardware.
On some configurations it works flawlessly, on others it doesn't. Therefore you will always have some people saying it works, and others saying it doesn't. FWIW, my current laptop is a machine that ships with linux (system76 darter pro) and sleep works 100% reliably.
In my experience, when sleep doesn't work reliably, it's usually due to buggy firmware behaviour because most vendors don't care about supporting anything other than windows.
Along those lines, since most OEMs don't ship/test linux, it's simply not possible for every single hardware configuration to work flawlessly with linux.
It is hard to improve things when everyone is on other platforms.
I am mostly on Windows devices, and use a GNU/Linux aging netbook for travelling.
In what concerns this Asus 1215B, everything works, with the exception that the open source AMD drivers were a downgrade from the binary blobs (OpenGL 4.1 => OpenGL 3.3 without video hardware decoding).
However I still kept it around, because although I don't target GNU/Linux as part of my work, I wanted to give Asus the message that selling GNU/Linux laptops might be a relevant business.
Eventually when it dies, I will be Windows/Android and occasionally macOS only user/developer, but I am not using any of these platforms to emulate GNU/Linux, I use them for their own value.
If you want a good experience with Linux on an ultra book, you need to buy hardware designed for Linux. System76 or Purism are my recommendations. I don’t trust Dell.
The kernel devs or distros can't possibly support every hardware combination and BIOS bug for each hardware manufacturer.
For Windows the hardware manufactures have a reason to make the drivers bug free, its where they make most of their money, and Microsoft has the capacity to help them get it fixed if needed.
This doesn't exist for Linux unfortunately, unless you buy a laptop where Linux is fully supported (and you use the supported distro and kernel version most likely).
I have to say the main culprit for issues is usually power saving. I assume that's because ACPI is often badly implemented and power saving requires a lot of separate components to function together, to specification. Likely one doesn't, and the laptop comes out of sleep with the touchpad not working, or something worse.
It's one of the things that work better for me on Linux than on MacOS (no problem with browsing shares, no disappearing shares, no problem with non-normalized unicode filenames).
It just doesn't connect / mount at all. Last time I tried to debug it, this was caused due to a too old samba protocol version being used on the Windows side.
On MacOSX, I just click on connect to server, and it works for me "as is".
On MacOS, I get randomly appearing and disappearing servers in the sidebar (they disappear usually when I need them) and "cannot be opened because the original item cannot be found" for already mounted shares. It also keeps permanently mounted "photos" share on my home NAS and bad things happen when I try force unmounting it (but if it disappears because I'm not connected to my home network, that's ok for some reason). This got especially bad in Mojave and Catalina; there was a period of time (10.15.0 - 10.15.2) when I had to restart Finder if I wanted to mount share that was previously unmounted.
Never happened that with Linux. What did happen that there was a period of time on some distributions (circa Fedora 28-30?), when SMB1 discovery didn't work because entire SMB1 was disabled. This was security migitation (EternalBlue/WannaCry/NotPetya) and Microsoft is doing the same in Windows 2016/2019/10[1][2]. In general, using SMB2/3 is good idea anyway, Linux distributions/Samba eventually enabled SMB1 only for client-side discovery, and you can still enable entire SMB1 if you need it for some reason - do you still have Windows 2003 someplace?
> Last time I tried to debug it, this was caused due to a too old samba protocol version being used on the Windows side
IIRC, the only smb version that would be considered too old is smbv1 (which I'd hope they are not using on the windows side... its quite insecure and is deprecated by microsoft).
I'm on Linux now, very interested in using Wayland+Pipewire, but still stuck on Xorg. What distro are you using?
I was considering building a Wayland/Pipewire Desktop software stack from scratch since my distro doesn't support them yet. I have become partial to experimenting with new software this way because it allows me to switch back to my known-good distro software without rebooting (most things I care about preserving the state of exist in the console anyway).
If it is relatively supported in a specific distro, I'm sort of interested in trying it.
What if using macOS enables me to be a more effective FOSS contributor? What if I think that FOSDEM is actually has many participants who aren't really into free software?
Then they are on the wrong spot to start with, and really didn't got the message what FOSDEM is all about.
It is a bit hard to be an aspiring FOSS contributor given the foundations those contributions are built upon.
Those same Apple loving users would be laugh upon at FOSDEM if they demoed any of their stuff on Windows instead.
Yet, there is hardly any difference between those corporations going all the way back to their origins.
Somehow after NeXTSTEP's adoption as OS X, NeXT and Apple's proprietary behaviour was forgotten and everything excused, because "hey they are shipping an UNIX clone"!
In that case you'd do both yourself and those who depend on you for your contributions a favour by taking some of that time to get acquainted with alternative platforms seeing as how Apple seems to be on a course which will make it harder and harder to use their platform for this purpose. Like the Boy Scouts (used to) say, "Be Prepared!". Install a (few) Linux/BSD distribution(s) in a VM and try using those for a while to get a feel of the platform and its strengths/weaknesses so you have somewhere to land when the time comes.
Your analogy isn't the best. This is like someone renting construction equipment to build a house on land they own, and finding out that the construction equipment phones home to the owners about how it's being used.
