I am really intruigued when people say they do most of their computer usage on an iPad. I get massively frustrated anytime I try to do almost anything other than consome on an iPad. As just one example trying to copy snd paste almost anything makes me want to tear my hair out it's so frustrsting. Moving the cursor or trying to fight with the os about what I really want to select as it keeps trying to expand my selection, or the fact tbat I can't copy the text of a link, only the link itself.
That's just one of many frustrstions I run into anytime I try to use ios (or Android) for anything other than consuming and so I'd really like to know am I doing it wrong? Is there some magic to work around these issue? Do others just never need to do the things I need do regularly?
It's so bad I recently bought a headmountable camera to document the frustrations in the hopes of generating some awareness of the issues because I'd love to be able to get by with just a tablet.
I definitely agree with your sentiment. I too get very frustrated with those things, and had a terrible time just formatting this comment!
> or the fact tbat I can't copy the text of a link, only the link itself.
I wanted to share a tip in regard to this: select some text before or after the link text, then use the markers to adjust/refine down to just the link text that you want.
Same here. I bought an iPad a few generations ago and it was noticeably slower than even my iPhone. If your iPad is slower (even a little bit) than your iPhone, you will hate your iPad. Not to mention, anything involving multitasking or juggling several different things at once becomes a frustrating experience on the iPad.
Anything I would have gotten done on my iPad, I could have just done on my iPhone. And if I can't use my iPhone for it, I would have used a real computer.
I have absolutely zero issues of that nature on iOS - it can be a bit fiddly to get the hang of positioning the selection handles, and moving the cursor using the soft keyboard is a relatively recent feature, but it's _miles_ ahead of Android.
I am using elementary OS for the past one and a half years, and honestly speaking, I am in love with it. I am a long time Linux user, and whenever I get a chance, I tell people about all the great things about Linux and why it's better than Windows and the MacOS. But there was always one aspect of Linux that I always felt a bit uneasy about, and this was design/UI/UX/accessibility of the many popular distributions. I liked ubuntu the most in this regards, but after they moved to Unity, I had to ditch it. But then I found Elementary, and have never looked back. Elementary combines the freedom and transparency of open source with beautiful design. I have never seen an OS that scores high on so many different factors.
There's a lot of discussion here about the stock apps in elementary. However, since I am an experienced Linux user, I don't really care about stock apps. The Linux app ecosystem is extremely diverse, and over the years, I have found my best solution for each task. For example, Clementine for music, Atom for text editing etc. So these apps get installed immediately after every installation of elementary and then I never look back at the stock apps again.
Agreed about the stock apps. I think actually they are being too ambitious. They want to have certain interface guidelines which operate across all apps (things like autosaving state so they can be closed and opened seamlessly), and that's why they're so keen on developing a full suite of their own programs. But independently developing so many apps all at the same time is a massive, massive task. In my opinion they would be better off focusing for the moment on areas where there are gaps, for instance making Shotwell / Pantheon Photos or Geary / Pantheon Mail really excellent. It's making the perfect the enemy of the good to redirect their effort to reimplementing their own music app and their own text editor etc, when there are good alternatives.
Agree about the general sentiment, also. In general it's an excellent project.
Really the best strategy would be to take existing Linux desktop staples and send patches that allow them to be reskinned enough to get the consistent L+F they want.
Glad that you have the list of best options for every task, but as you say - it took you several years to figure it out. That would be great to have some sane defaults for most of common everyday tasks without the need of long research and learning, so one can concentrate on what he really cares about(like IDE or image editor) rather than bein stuck choosing a media player that err..plays the media.
With all due respect, when have the stock apps ever been good enough on any OS? I spent 20 years using Windows, and the first thing I did upon getting any new desktop/laptop was immediately go and grab a bunch of apps that I needed. They weren't necessarily the "best" apps, either; my old Windows 7 laptop is still running Winamp as my music player because I've used it since 1998 and it still does what I need it to do.
One's preference for programs is really a matter of personal taste. You can try to make the stock programs "suck less", but I doubt you're ever going to really eliminate the need for third party programs. Distros like KaOS (KDE with all-QT apps) have tried, with limited success. The best thing any distro can do, IMO, is to have an extensive App Center and use a flexible packaging format such that it encourages more apps to support that format.
> and whenever I get a chance, I tell people about all the great things about Linux and why it's better than Windows and the MacOS.
People like this bore me to death. Let's be frank - you're just biased and you're probably wrong, despite all your good intentions. What OS you prefer is a matter of taste and of choice, and there's no "better" or "worse" unless you're so narrow minded as to only measure an operating system's worth by the features that happen to put your chosen OS ahead. These days if I was a dedicated gamer I'd probably say Windows. In fact, after the Surface Studio presentation, it's tempting as a creative platform.
I used one form or another of Linux on my main desktops and laptops since 2002, until 2009. In 2009 I bought a Macbook and since then I've switched to OS X (or macOS) as my main OS of choice. I still install GNU coreutils on macOS, and still keep a separate desktop at home with Linux on it - appropriately named `lab` in my home network.
So, in 2016 my main laptop is a Macbook Air with macOS on which I do most of my work, my desktop is running various flavours of linux (arch which i keep the most updated, but also alpine, ubuntu, fedora... etc easily accessible in grub). Don't lecture us on what OS is better, we've made a decision and it doesn't have to be the same as yours.
> What OS you prefer is a matter of taste and of choice, and there's no "better" or "worse" unless you're so narrow minded as to only measure an operating system's worth by the features that happen to put your chosen OS ahead.
> Don't lecture us on what OS is better, we've made a decision and it doesn't have to be the same as yours.con
I would agree with that but you don't have to be so harsh, he may actually convince people with arguments as to why Linux is actually "better" (i.e. privacy), rather than "lecturing" them.
I really like elementaryOS - not for myself (need to use macOS for dev), but pretty much all of my family was migrated to it.
It has proven to be significantly more stable and simple to use than Windows and the default applications really nicely hit the simplicity and usability for a user that primarily needs web, email, photos and minor document editing. I'd even argue it's better than macOS for that user profile (especially since it's not localized to my local language, which eOS and most of major Linux apps are).
The fact that it actually looks good by default is nice as well.
Known downsides:
- It's based on Ubuntu LTS (which is great!), but the new versions tend to lag after Ubuntu LTS releases by months at a time.
- No upgrade path between versions.
- Releases tend to be buggy on some hardware after release.
Not sure about the stability. I am using Ubuntu for over a year and it's way less stable than Windows was. Sometimes I encounter crashes when suspending or waking up. I also encounter lots of minor problems. For me the Windows experience was definitely more polished.
If you ever feel like giving it a try again do it with a computer that is known to work well. While Linux will run on lots of random PC hardware, its support is not consistent across all hardware. The easiest way to do this is to buy from a company who sells Linux based systems.
One of the biggest problems in the Linux ecosystem is the lack of any good source on hardware compatibility tracking.
Generally the less like a server your computer is, the less nice the driver support. I have a Xeon workstation with a nvidia quatro graphics card at work and it has been rock solid for years. The same cannot be said of my laptop.
Stability largely depends on your hardware. I would not expect one linux distribution to run better than other in most cases. Especially not here given Elementary is based on Ubuntu.
I would move to an Elementary OS if it's UI/UX was moved over an Arch based distribution. I mean Elementary OS simply looks beautiful and is stable(-ish). On top of Manjaro or something that holds back updates I wouldn't be able to figure out a more perfect development/daily driver system.
You might want to try Solus. It has a beautiful UI, works great out of the box and is rolling release. Also the devs are really fucking fast if any issues should arise.
I've been an elementaryOS user for years and I ended up dropping the whole thing in favour of xfwm4 + synapse + tint2.
eOS is a really nice looking thing, but it's buggy, release after release it's losing features, like [1] - this specific one was never fixed in the previous release.
The built-on music app collapses under a reasonable amount of music, same as banshee or quod libet can easily handle. Geary, the mail app looks nice, but lacks basic features and has a tendency to corrupt IMAP folders.
The window manager of eOS, Gala, is indeed impressive, but lack options to tweak. In the previous release, it was impossible to disable the ALT+TAB effect, even if all the other effects were set to none.
So overally: it's looks nice, the window manager is fast, and if you're fine with the defaults, you're probably going to be a happy user - until you find something you miss, and there is no way to fix that.
After over a decade of using Mac OS X, I am considering switching to Linux for my dev laptop. The tools I worry about are those that interact with audio and webcam - Go To Meeting, Google Hangout etc. My work involves me having to teleconf with others often.
Does anyone here have experience using Linux well in such scenarios. If so, what hardware are you using?
Funny story: My new-ish Dell laptop (Inspiron 15 7559 i7 with 4k touchscreen display; which I got at an absurdly low sales price from the Dell outlet store) does not reliably recover from sleep under Windows, but does under Linux (neither worked when I first got the laptop, but now only Windows fails and now only some of the time). That's a first, for me, as I have had a huge variety of sleep related bugs in Linux over the years, but fewer under Windows.
Google Hangouts works fine under Chrome on Linux, but is quirkier under Firefox (I don't think I ever got the voice/video plugin working under Firefox, but I rarely use the video features these days, so I just run Chrome when I need it). Both video and audio Hangouts work fine under Chrome.
With very new hardware, you probably need a very new Linux distribution, and newer hardware can have installation quirks. Getting Linux onto my box took a lot of fiddling, but it now runs Fedora 24 quite nicely.
I've been using Fedora on my desktop machine for a few months and it's fantastic. Because I had such a good experience with it I decided to sell my MacBook Pro about a month ago and bought this laptop. Dual-booted Fedora 24 and Windows (for gaming) and I'm loving it. Like you, I had to finagle Fedora a bit to get it working but now I use it as my main dev machine.
A couple of years back I was having persistent sleep/wake issues that seemed to stem from graphics driver issues. I switched between the open source and Nvidia binaries, trying to find a stable combination. What a nightmare. In the end, I decided that I didn't want to mess around and tried out a few Live CDs (think I tried Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora). In the end, Fedora worked out of the box and completed my "stress test" of sleep, wake, sleep, wake. I had to give up stellar 3D performance, but have found things to be working quite well and consistent now through all the Fedora updates.
Might give Elementary OS a spin. This old Thinkpad T510 is getting dated, but still solid as ever (besides battery life).
I am using Slack, GotoMeeting, join.me, etc., and in general -- I'm working remotely.
Linux is better for development, but worse for collaboration. You can get almost everything working, but it takes effort.
GotoMeeting screensharing tends to work, but not always. Join.me doesn't. The tools for Windows (my other OS) are much better if you need to capture screenshots or recordings often (typical use case: hotkey -> record part of the screen -> paste into Slack.. this is doable on Linux, but on Windows, it takes almost zero effort).
The audio is getting better on Linux, but I have many audio devices (external DAC, audio-through-Displayport, analog headset, etc.), and switching between them quickly is more painful than how it is on Windows. This is aggravated by the fact that I hate all DEs (except maybe Gnome3), so I use i3 WM -- which is brilliant but stuff like clipboard management doesn't work well out of the box.
In general, Linux can work for my (your?) use case, but it's significantly worse than Windows. It's better for development though (in general). Currently I run Linux VMs under Windows, that works okay.
Can you elaborate on "Linux is better for development"? Guessing it can only come down to differences in apt and brew and not much more (not that this couldn't be reason enough)?
edit: this article mentioned MacOS and Linux and so that's all I thought OP's comment was referring to. We all know the advantages compared to Windows. Of course Windows is constantly improving.
Having a Windows VM on Linux seems workable albeit clunky for the ~5% of things that I must have like GoToMeeting, etc. Thing is I already use a Windows VM on Mac for some things like that because I am very security-conscious and OS-pollution-conscious and don't like installing intrusive stuff like GoToMeeting on my main OS.
No matter what this informal poll shows, there will be more problems than with macOS, over the long term. I know lots of people that use Linux and they very often have problems with audio apps. As for sleep-on-closing-the-lid, I think that's gotten better, but I don't think it will ever approach the stability of it on macOS. In 5 years, I think I've had a very small number of problems with this on macOS, and it always involved undocking from a physical keyboard, mouse and multiple monitors. My friends on Windows and Linux are always having problems with this.
I have personally never had any issues with audio on linux the past 5 years. ALSA and pulseaudio have become pretty mature now. Only thing i needed for hangouts to work was to install Chrome instead of Chromium and then it worked. Webcam, audio and mic worked out of the box. I have however heard that there are some issues with the iSight camera on Macs under Linux, I have not tried this myself though.
With a ThinkPad, sleep-on-closing-the-lid has never been an issue, I actually wasn't even aware it was a problem that people faced. Presumably it depends almost entirely on the laptop.
You can use the web version of skype now. I'd never install the dumpster desktop version but if anyone refuses to use alternatives I can just go to web.skype.com and it... works.
I have a Clevo 740su, the same model as the old Galago Ultrapro from System76 (I just got it from Sager instead) which has a webcam that works fine out of the box on Linux, the headphone jack works fine, etc. I use KDE and the plasma-pa tray applet easily lets you switch output audio devices for applications which I use (as an example) to playback movies from my desktop to TV.
I founded MeetSpace, which is video conferencing for distributed teams. I developed MeetSpace on a linux laptop (yoga 2 pro) and a linux desktop (custom w/ logitech c922 webcam).
I can tell you that for the most part it's worked flawlessly. The only issues I ever had were that linux rendering wasn't great, so sometimes the CPU was high just from rendering!
We are browser-only, so because we don't have a native app we just use browser functionality. The only thing we use the extensions for is for security to ask for permission to use the screen (it's really like a dozen lines of code).
Oh, and if you switch, Dell's XPS series tends to work very well in linux, especially if you buy their developer edition, because they support ubuntu, which means you can find the drivers even if you don't use ubuntu.
> Bluetooth is kind of a mess, on Xubuntu at least.
(Speaking as someone who likes Xfce, and is currently switching from MacOS to Linux and is mostly settled on Xubuntu), I think that's mostly an Xfce thing. GNOME (and therefore Unity, Budgie, possibly Cinnamon and maybe MATE) handle it better.
I use Google Hangouts on Linux all the time. No issues at all.
Sleep-on-lid-closing works reasonably well nowadays; I can't remember the last time I've run into a laptop which has issues on that front. However, I'd definitely do my research before buying a new laptop, especially if it's a very new one (in other words: you'll have better chances of power-management compatibility on laptops that are a bit more battle-tested).
I'm using project sputnik from dell. No issues the entire time I've had it. Skype works pretty well and people have told me several times that it is the clearest screen sharing experience they've had but I don't really know what that means. Been about 3 years now and has gone from ubuntu 12.04 to 16.04 without any problems. I expect it to continue to work fine and have been looking into upgrading to the latest model.
Laptop support will vary a bit, but some brands tend to work really well. Look for the specific model + Linux to see if there are hardware issues.
I used to use Ubuntu and had Hangouts and GoToMeeting work just fine (also, Skype and Appear.in).
I switched to Mac for two reasons: browser testing Safari and quality hardware (aluminum case, retina screen, support for 3+ monitors, nice hinges). I suppose iOS app development is another reason you'd want it.
This is why I still choose to go with Mac OS X, even if their most recent hardware is very, very expensive.
I don't have time to tinker with compiling kernels, configuring X11, figuring out which photo management software to use, setting up reliable backups, getting my Bluetooth headset to work, and, yes, getting the machine to suspend when I close the lid and wake up when I open it.
These are basics that will just work with OS X, very, very, reliably.
That said, if anyone can point me to a Linux distro (Debian/Ubuntu preferred) and hardware that actually work reliably together, please do.
Gosh, frankly speaking, I haven't had to do any of that stuff (except for the Bluetooth headset, I never had one of those, no idea how it works) in 7 years.
In 2009 I installed Mandriva on a laptop--everything just worked. In 2011, I jumped ship to Mageia, the community-driven offshoot of Mandriva. Everything still just worked. Fast forward several laptops later, including mine and friends' and relations' laptops, and it all just works. Compiling a kernel? Wouldn't know how anymore. Fiddling with X11? No idea. I don't even have problems with Pulseaudio.
Compare that to dual booting this one with Windows 10. For several months, Windows 10 had a bug where it wouldn't save the touchpad settings. Every time, I'd have to disable tap-to-click. UGH. They finally fixed it, but what a pain.
(And when I had an OS X machine, received as part of payment for a job... between the beach ball and the not-infrequent crashes, where the screen dims and displays that fatal error message, it was a pain to get any work done.)
> compiling kernels, configuring X11, figuring out which photo management software to use, setting up reliable backups, getting my Bluetooth headset to work, and, yes, getting the machine to suspend when I close the lid and wake up when I open it.
I haven't heard of the need for compiling kernels, configuring X11 etc. in a loong time.
> setting up reliable backups, getting my Bluetooth headset to work, and, yes, getting the machine to suspend when I close the lid and wake up when I open it
Again, works out of the box, just pick a laptop that is known to work well, i.e. a Clevo, Lenovo or some of the newer DELL machines to give Linux a proper chance - there's no point in trying a laptop that is known to work only with Windows and then complain about it - the same way you don't complain if macOS doesn't work well on a DELL.
You pick a specific machine to run macOS, do the same for Linux and everything will work beautifully out of the box.
For personal use, I decided to move away from a laptop entirely. I'm very much enjoying having a workstation that enforces me going to a specific place to do work. If that appeals to you, then it's very easy to find 100% compatible hardware.
If not, then I can vouch that my wife's Thinkpad runs Ubuntu with no issues. I concur with others that kernel compiling and X11 configuration have long been non-issues.
Compiling your kernel hasn't been necessary for like a decade by now. Configuring X is becoming a thing of the past, partially because of working automatic config, and partially because of the move away from X to Wayland-based desktops.
I use Fedora on a ThinkPad X230. It works an absolute dream. GNOME is my favorite of all the desktops, and Fedora by default ships a fully setup and functioning Gnome on Wayland session (which will also be the default session in the next release, coming in a few weeks).
The reason I chose to run Fedora on a ThinkPad is because it required no tweaking and fiddling at all to get working nicely. I'm all about that seamless out-of-the-box experience.
I was amused by the post here today about the Touch ID fork of sudo for macOS, because I already use the same feature on my ThinkPad every day, and it required absolutely no configuration or setup (other than enrolling my fingerprint).
For reasonably popular hardware, compiling kernels or configuring X.org has been a thing of the past for years (unless one really wants to).
Since you are asking for specifics, I run openSUSE Tumbleweed on an Asus Zenbook UX 305, and with the exception of keyboard backlight, all the builtin hardware works as expected. I have never tried to attach an external display. I did not try Ubuntu on this machine, the Debian installer pretty much bailed on me. (Tumbleweed is a rolling release distro, so the amount of updates it receives can be slightly annoying at times, OTOH the software is very much up to date.) I have to admit I have not tried suspending the machine by closing the lid, but Fn+F1 works reliably.
linux works perfectly well in all these scenarios and is actually better than Windows.
hangouts works brilliantly. skype (even the old version) works great with both audio and video. in fact i have switched over to the skype web version which works on the chrome browser (no video call for now.. but audio works brilliantly).
i use fedora 24..which just works and is pretty cutting edge. i switched over from Ubuntu pretty recently and have been very happy.
im on a xps 13. previously i was on a thinkpad. there is no dearth of cool laptops on Linux.
Nice to see another Fedora user! I find it runs better than Ubuntu. Faster and more stable. Recently I have been using Cinnamon over GNOME3. What DE do you use?
Google Hangouts works fine. I've had problems with Skype and audio after a distro upgrade on Ubuntu (but an `apt purge` and `apt install` fixed them).
Sleep-on-closing-lid has worked fine for me for many years.
It's funny that, with regards to Just Working after installation, Linux seems to be way ahead of Windows. I installed both of them on my laptop and while on Linux everything worked fine from the start without needing extra setup steps (including the multitouch trackpad; the not-so-standard function keys like keyboard brightness; even the this weird external subwoofer that came with the laptop), on Windows i had to download and install special drivers for all those things, and even for much more basic stuff, like the wireless card (had to dig through old computer stuff to find an ethernet cable to connect to the internet).
Now, i understand why this is the case. Linux distros are designed to be installed by their users, while Windows is designed to come pre-installed on computers. But i still find it curious how Linux is much more non-tech-savvy-friendly in this particular regard.
Only the g2m web client works on linux; anything you need the desktop app for (i.e. pretty much anything for which you are the presenter) does not work.
WebEx's Linux support is excellent though.
Google Hangouts works fine under chrome on linux.
As far as hardware, webcam support is generally good. It's now at the point where if you bought a random webcam, there is a better than 50% chance it will just work. That being said, it's much safer to check if others have used it, or to just buy a laptop that has a webcam and ships with linux support (Both Dell and HP have laptops that ship with linux installed). I have a Creative Labs USB webcam that unfortunately has no model number printed on it (I have a long list of things I don't like about built-in webcams).
Sleep has worked on all laptops I've tried in the past decade or so. Hibernate (i.e. suspend to disk) is much more spotty.
Battery life lies somewhere between windows 7 and Mac, though certain applications are particularly bad at draining the battery (powertop can be useful in identifying these).
In general linux on a laptop has gotten way better; in particular networking is much more bearable now that NetworkManager actually works and it's much easier to find laptops with linux supported wifi gear preinstalled.
[edit]
I saw someone mention audio issues; that reminds me. The situation there is more like what networking was like 5-6 years ago. Pulse Audio promises to provide all the basic features people expect from an audio stack), but sometimes crashes, or drains your battery or just causes weird sounds to come out of your speaker. On the other hand, getting ALSA+dmix setup correctly without pulse audio (which is the only real alternative), is fairly arcane, and leaves you without things like per-application volume control (though many linux applications provide their own software-implemented volume control).
My idea that I think would work but never came around to before Windows became usable for me was to keep a linux workstation or decent developer laptop and then have an iPad (or some good Android pad) for Skype etc.
That I think would be the best of both worlds for me.
Goto meeting does work on GNU/Linux. It even has some terrifying X exploit that allows you to share any window that X knows about. It works fine, you just have to use Chromium.
Using Deb on a macbook 4,1 from 2008. Camera doesn't work though. What year is your mackbook? I configured this one last week for a friend who had it laying around in the closet for years with a locked password and no particular interest in Macs. I convinced them to nix the MacOS and try Linux, arguing it would perform more efficiently, and compared to the MacOS version previously installed, it very much does. And tell me; did you reformat the drive, or just add a partition? I used gdisks and GPT partitioning and eventually wangled it, though not without a little trouble.
I really don't understand why developers use macs at all. They're not good dev machines. All production systems I work with are some flavor of linux (mostly ubuntu). There is actually a real impedance mismatch when I'm using my mac for work purposes. All those cores and RAM become meaningless when I have to do everything in a VM anyway. My personal dev machine is a project sputnik running ubuntu 16.04. I can understand why designers would use them but programmers never made any sense.
1. It's UNIX (more or less, but it's much more UNIX, than Windows), it's familiar bash, grep, awk, etc. It also has proper and popular package manager for command line programs (actually 2, macports and homebrew).
2. It just works. You don't have to configure anything, every hardware part functioning properly and it's guaranteed that this will work in the future without any hassle. You don't have to think about drivers, kernel versions, sleep/wake up scripts, swap. You just install OS and start to work. That's on macs, of course, hackintoshes are more like Linux in that aspect.
3. A lot of hardware designed for Macs. I have yet to see a device which will claim that it support Linux. Yet almost anything will work in Mac. Windows is better, of course, but Mac is good too. With Linux you better google it before you buy it, and even then something might be not perfect.
4. They are nice machines overall. Good enough quality, good casing, good design, good internals, good service. Not best, but not much drawbacks.
5. GUI is pretty nice and pleasant to use, there is a lot of GUI software for macs and almost every useful Linux program will have mac port (but not the other way). Linux doesn't have so polished user experience. Though it's not that important for power users, but it's nice to have IMO.
> it's guaranteed that this will work in the future without any hassle
I wish this was true, but I always hold off updating my work MBP at least 6 months, before all the issues with the newest release are resolved.
I remember updating to 10.7 since 10.6 was a solid release and it was a nightmare.
There's a bunch of stuff broken with 10.12 as well, including a bug which prevents curl from working well and a bug which makes Duet less reliable under Sierra.
> They are nice machines overall. Good enough quality, good casing, good design, good internals, good service.
I'd agree with the aluminium casing and good external design, but in regards to internals; the GPUs are very lacklustre in performance, I had a problem with my MBP showing green tint on the screen after just months of usage and have a dead/red pixel on my new display already.
The fans also do a terrible job at cooling and the CPU can reach 95 degrees C while compiling code, which makes it not so hot a dev machine, (pun intended :-)
> I really don't understand why developers use macs at all.
I don't want to single out your comment, but there's been a lot of this lately (and every time this discussion comes up).
There's no one true version of a 'developer' or a 'pro.'
Broadly speaking, people will be most productive with the tool they know best. And the 'real' pros can be productive with just about anything.
For myself, I consider myself a developer too, but my workflow is probably very different from your workflow. My main machines are a MacBook Pro (2012) and a hefty HP workstation (64GB RAM, dual Xeons) running Ubuntu. There are things I use the Mac for that I'd struggle to do on the HP, and vice versa. But that's just me... But the idea that there's 'one true dev' or 'one true platonic ideal' of a development machine, is just crazy. And that's why I think a lot of this recent Apple criticism is missing the mark (especially when there are plenty of things to criticise Apple for, if that's what one wants to do).
My preferred toolchain and stack just works better on a native linux box because it doesn't need virtualization overhead when I'm on a linux box. Those efficiencies add up pretty quickly. Since I mostly do backend dev work macs have never worked for me as they should.
To address your point about this being a recent trend I actually noticed the mismatch when I first moved to the bay area 5 years ago. It seemed weird to use a mac as a dev machine and then deploy to a ubuntu box in production. There was always some issue that came up because whoever was doing the deployment didn't verify things in a VM first and then had to do some firefighting on a production box.
This wouldn't be a problem if workplaces gave you the option of getting a linux box or a mac. At most places you don't have a choice. All the IT management software is built for a mac so you get a mac.
Maybe because after decades I'm frankly pissed of all the infinite glitches in windows and Linux and I want something that just works?
Every hour spent in fighting those problems is real money that I lose, but above all I want to write code, not to fight with a machine.
I'm not 16 anymore (when I had all the time of this world and when I even enjoyed the fight), now I just want to use my time to write code instead of wasting it. Simply as that.
> Maybe because after decades I'm frankly pissed of all the infinite glitches in windows and Linux and I want something that just works?
I actually ended up switching from OS X to Linux (on a MacBook) for this reason. Things break all the time, but at least I can usually figure out how to fix them on Linux. (OS X would freeze at random times, requiring a hard shutdown, and also sometimes resume from sleep with a black screen and no way to change it, the former happening across every version and the latter only after I upgraded to Mavericks).
I agree but how does a mac deliver that experience? How hard is it to fuck up installing the required dev toolchain and then jumping into Vim or your IDE of choice to get work done? How does a mac help with any of that?
I've never run into any issues with my dell machine and it started with ubuntu 12.04 when I first got it. Each upgrade has gone without any hitches or glitches.
You don't need to understand anything, you just need to accept that not all people are like you. Some prefer pepsi(ugh), some like red, some enjoy winter more. And some like using a Mac.
Why you are trying to group everybody together is beyond me. There are hundreds of programming languages, dozens of popular platforms, maybe hundreds of niche ones. There is no one single, correct solution, just as there is no one single answer to your question, because there is no one single deleveloper, there are millions, and some enjoy the stark look of a terminal and others prefer to look at pretty icons.
> All those cores and RAM become meaningless when I have to do everything in a VM anyway.
Virtualization is a bit less efficient but it certainly does not prevent you from utilizing multiple CPU cores or all your available RAM -- minus the resources consumed by the host OS of course.
> It has polish and care that the stereotypical raging neckbeards who espouse the mantra of Linux on the desktop are unable to appreciate (or, apparently, build), and it has to exist, even if merely as a counterpoint to all the ugliness.
That's the part I don't get I guess. I'm either in Chrome, Vim, some IDE, or experimenting in some REPL. There isn't much room for improving ergonomics in any of those instances by adding extra "polish". I prefer my technical aesthetics to be compositional instead of pretty and the dell machine I have with ubuntu delivers on that front very nicely.
Imagine the Venn diagram of "Has a Unix environment because we deploy to Linux" and "Can run MS Office, including Outlook". The intersection has the word "Mac" in it. That's why our entire team was issued Macs (I work in a 70,000 person company) and lots of other developers choose it too.
I pretty much don't use any technology outside of Node, the browser, and HTTP so it doesn't really matter to me what platform I'm on.
Maybe I'm not a real developer according to your standards. Not enough configuration files and build systems modeled in my brain to qualify. I just prefer code to black boxes.
Wow, that's a pretty great idea. Enough people do this wrong manually that it seems like something that could be better solved by the OS.
One example I've seen of doing it wrong is adding black opaque rectangles as layers and then sending out all layers including the original. Another is pixelating it in a way where it's possible to revert the pixelation since the font is known (e.g. parts of a facebook post)
1. 1Password apparently works fine with WINE, but I haven't used it myself.
2. Spotify will still receive updates for Linux, they just don't have a dedicated Linux developer on it anymore. On my machine it still works fine.
3. I prefer GoodBudget, which IMHO is much better than YNAB, especially when it comes to their iOS/Android apps. The desktop client just runs in the browser. Also, I've heard YNAB will be discontinuing their desktop apps?
5. Haven't used Alfred, but you can get some of it's features using other tools, e.g. indexed search using Tracker, clipboard history using Diodon, and perhaps some other things. However you are right that you can't get the kind of polished automation Alfred seems to provide. Rather, you'll have to write shell scripts and use the commandline tools to get what you want. Absolutely everything is possible, but it'll feel a bit like using lots of duct tape at first.
Note: I'm not saying you should switch right away (1). But I used Linux (Ubuntu) full-time for work and at home for the last 5 years and I was able to do everything with very few exceptions (2). Most peripherals that I bought just worked out of the box. Going Linux full-time is 100% doable.
Also, with so many apps running in the browser (or on Electron) the choice of OS matters less every year.
(1) in fact, I'll probably get a Mac myself this year for developing iOS apps.
(2) Only exception: Windows VM for Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint & iTunes for iPhone syncing. All other software ran in WINE or had a reasonable Linux alternatives.
> 1Password apparently works fine with WINE, but I haven't used it myself.
I run 1Password in Wine in Docker on my (secondary) linux ThinkPad with Dropbox sync. It works, but it's clunky. Part of that is that I don't like the Windows 1Password application compared to the macOS one, though.
> 5. I have a number of Alfred workflows, and enjoy using Alfred in general.
You may want to check-out Albert. [0]
> Yes, there are a number of open source alternatives, but I've built up enough inertia on OSX it's going to be very difficult for me to switch.
The longer you work on one platform the more you get locked into it. This may not be a problem for the time you are happy with the platform you are locking into. But keep in mind that you are currently locking into a closed source platform. I migrated from MS to Linux about a year ago after being on Windows for about 2 decades. The burden migrating out of it was heavy. With the upcoming closed source cloud platforms this will get even worse. An open source platform gives you more control and freedom over your workflows and data. IMO this is something which cannot be valued highly enough.
> 2. Spotify client is no longer being developed for Linux
As a consolation, I'm aware of a number of music clients on Linux that can stream from Spotify via their API. Ad-supported accounts don't have access to the API, of course.
These rely on libspotify which Spotify have not updated for years. Sadly they recently also removed the download links from their site. The new Linux SDK has been promised for a couple of years now but nothing has emerged. The future for Spotify on Linux looks bleak.
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That's just one of many frustrstions I run into anytime I try to use ios (or Android) for anything other than consuming and so I'd really like to know am I doing it wrong? Is there some magic to work around these issue? Do others just never need to do the things I need do regularly?
It's so bad I recently bought a headmountable camera to document the frustrations in the hopes of generating some awareness of the issues because I'd love to be able to get by with just a tablet.
It's the same with my phone, although I am pretty decent typing on it. But long comments and emails I find myself forced to get out the laptop.
I sort of miss the Blackberries in this regard - I could comfortably get over 50wpm on the physical qwerty keyboards.
> or the fact tbat I can't copy the text of a link, only the link itself.
I wanted to share a tip in regard to this: select some text before or after the link text, then use the markers to adjust/refine down to just the link text that you want.
Anything I would have gotten done on my iPad, I could have just done on my iPhone. And if I can't use my iPhone for it, I would have used a real computer.
There's a lot of discussion here about the stock apps in elementary. However, since I am an experienced Linux user, I don't really care about stock apps. The Linux app ecosystem is extremely diverse, and over the years, I have found my best solution for each task. For example, Clementine for music, Atom for text editing etc. So these apps get installed immediately after every installation of elementary and then I never look back at the stock apps again.
Agree about the general sentiment, also. In general it's an excellent project.
One's preference for programs is really a matter of personal taste. You can try to make the stock programs "suck less", but I doubt you're ever going to really eliminate the need for third party programs. Distros like KaOS (KDE with all-QT apps) have tried, with limited success. The best thing any distro can do, IMO, is to have an extensive App Center and use a flexible packaging format such that it encourages more apps to support that format.
People like this bore me to death. Let's be frank - you're just biased and you're probably wrong, despite all your good intentions. What OS you prefer is a matter of taste and of choice, and there's no "better" or "worse" unless you're so narrow minded as to only measure an operating system's worth by the features that happen to put your chosen OS ahead. These days if I was a dedicated gamer I'd probably say Windows. In fact, after the Surface Studio presentation, it's tempting as a creative platform.
I used one form or another of Linux on my main desktops and laptops since 2002, until 2009. In 2009 I bought a Macbook and since then I've switched to OS X (or macOS) as my main OS of choice. I still install GNU coreutils on macOS, and still keep a separate desktop at home with Linux on it - appropriately named `lab` in my home network.
So, in 2016 my main laptop is a Macbook Air with macOS on which I do most of my work, my desktop is running various flavours of linux (arch which i keep the most updated, but also alpine, ubuntu, fedora... etc easily accessible in grub). Don't lecture us on what OS is better, we've made a decision and it doesn't have to be the same as yours.
> Don't lecture us on what OS is better, we've made a decision and it doesn't have to be the same as yours.con
I would agree with that but you don't have to be so harsh, he may actually convince people with arguments as to why Linux is actually "better" (i.e. privacy), rather than "lecturing" them.
It has proven to be significantly more stable and simple to use than Windows and the default applications really nicely hit the simplicity and usability for a user that primarily needs web, email, photos and minor document editing. I'd even argue it's better than macOS for that user profile (especially since it's not localized to my local language, which eOS and most of major Linux apps are).
The fact that it actually looks good by default is nice as well.
Known downsides:
- It's based on Ubuntu LTS (which is great!), but the new versions tend to lag after Ubuntu LTS releases by months at a time.
- No upgrade path between versions.
- Releases tend to be buggy on some hardware after release.
Is Elementary OS significantly different?
One of the biggest problems in the Linux ecosystem is the lack of any good source on hardware compatibility tracking.
Damn it, there is at least one documented case of a motherboard giving a junk ACPI return if the OS identified itself as anything other than Windows.
eOS is a really nice looking thing, but it's buggy, release after release it's losing features, like [1] - this specific one was never fixed in the previous release.
The built-on music app collapses under a reasonable amount of music, same as banshee or quod libet can easily handle. Geary, the mail app looks nice, but lacks basic features and has a tendency to corrupt IMAP folders.
The window manager of eOS, Gala, is indeed impressive, but lack options to tweak. In the previous release, it was impossible to disable the ALT+TAB effect, even if all the other effects were set to none.
So overally: it's looks nice, the window manager is fast, and if you're fine with the defaults, you're probably going to be a happy user - until you find something you miss, and there is no way to fix that.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/switchboard-plug-power/+bug/13590...
Geary was forked after Yorba wound down, and Elementary are moving it over to the Evolution backend, incidentally.
After over a decade of using Mac OS X, I am considering switching to Linux for my dev laptop. The tools I worry about are those that interact with audio and webcam - Go To Meeting, Google Hangout etc. My work involves me having to teleconf with others often.
Does anyone here have experience using Linux well in such scenarios. If so, what hardware are you using?
Also, does sleep-on-closing-lid work well?
Funny story: My new-ish Dell laptop (Inspiron 15 7559 i7 with 4k touchscreen display; which I got at an absurdly low sales price from the Dell outlet store) does not reliably recover from sleep under Windows, but does under Linux (neither worked when I first got the laptop, but now only Windows fails and now only some of the time). That's a first, for me, as I have had a huge variety of sleep related bugs in Linux over the years, but fewer under Windows.
Google Hangouts works fine under Chrome on Linux, but is quirkier under Firefox (I don't think I ever got the voice/video plugin working under Firefox, but I rarely use the video features these days, so I just run Chrome when I need it). Both video and audio Hangouts work fine under Chrome.
With very new hardware, you probably need a very new Linux distribution, and newer hardware can have installation quirks. Getting Linux onto my box took a lot of fiddling, but it now runs Fedora 24 quite nicely.
A couple of years back I was having persistent sleep/wake issues that seemed to stem from graphics driver issues. I switched between the open source and Nvidia binaries, trying to find a stable combination. What a nightmare. In the end, I decided that I didn't want to mess around and tried out a few Live CDs (think I tried Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora). In the end, Fedora worked out of the box and completed my "stress test" of sleep, wake, sleep, wake. I had to give up stellar 3D performance, but have found things to be working quite well and consistent now through all the Fedora updates.
Might give Elementary OS a spin. This old Thinkpad T510 is getting dated, but still solid as ever (besides battery life).
Linux is better for development, but worse for collaboration. You can get almost everything working, but it takes effort.
GotoMeeting screensharing tends to work, but not always. Join.me doesn't. The tools for Windows (my other OS) are much better if you need to capture screenshots or recordings often (typical use case: hotkey -> record part of the screen -> paste into Slack.. this is doable on Linux, but on Windows, it takes almost zero effort). The audio is getting better on Linux, but I have many audio devices (external DAC, audio-through-Displayport, analog headset, etc.), and switching between them quickly is more painful than how it is on Windows. This is aggravated by the fact that I hate all DEs (except maybe Gnome3), so I use i3 WM -- which is brilliant but stuff like clipboard management doesn't work well out of the box.
In general, Linux can work for my (your?) use case, but it's significantly worse than Windows. It's better for development though (in general). Currently I run Linux VMs under Windows, that works okay.
Ah, and Skype for Linux alpha works fine.
edit: this article mentioned MacOS and Linux and so that's all I thought OP's comment was referring to. We all know the advantages compared to Windows. Of course Windows is constantly improving.
Having a Windows VM on Linux seems workable albeit clunky for the ~5% of things that I must have like GoToMeeting, etc. Thing is I already use a Windows VM on Mac for some things like that because I am very security-conscious and OS-pollution-conscious and don't like installing intrusive stuff like GoToMeeting on my main OS.
Last time I tried (2+ years ago, it might be different now) Go To Meeting also wasn't working on Linux.
I've used Linux on the desktop between 2009-2014 and basically anything multimedia related was a chore.
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I can tell you that for the most part it's worked flawlessly. The only issues I ever had were that linux rendering wasn't great, so sometimes the CPU was high just from rendering!
We are browser-only, so because we don't have a native app we just use browser functionality. The only thing we use the extensions for is for security to ask for permission to use the screen (it's really like a dozen lines of code).
Bluetooth is kind of a mess, on Xubuntu at least.
(Speaking as someone who likes Xfce, and is currently switching from MacOS to Linux and is mostly settled on Xubuntu), I think that's mostly an Xfce thing. GNOME (and therefore Unity, Budgie, possibly Cinnamon and maybe MATE) handle it better.
Sleep-on-lid-closing works reasonably well nowadays; I can't remember the last time I've run into a laptop which has issues on that front. However, I'd definitely do my research before buying a new laptop, especially if it's a very new one (in other words: you'll have better chances of power-management compatibility on laptops that are a bit more battle-tested).
I used to use Ubuntu and had Hangouts and GoToMeeting work just fine (also, Skype and Appear.in).
I switched to Mac for two reasons: browser testing Safari and quality hardware (aluminum case, retina screen, support for 3+ monitors, nice hinges). I suppose iOS app development is another reason you'd want it.
I don't have time to tinker with compiling kernels, configuring X11, figuring out which photo management software to use, setting up reliable backups, getting my Bluetooth headset to work, and, yes, getting the machine to suspend when I close the lid and wake up when I open it.
These are basics that will just work with OS X, very, very, reliably.
That said, if anyone can point me to a Linux distro (Debian/Ubuntu preferred) and hardware that actually work reliably together, please do.
In 2009 I installed Mandriva on a laptop--everything just worked. In 2011, I jumped ship to Mageia, the community-driven offshoot of Mandriva. Everything still just worked. Fast forward several laptops later, including mine and friends' and relations' laptops, and it all just works. Compiling a kernel? Wouldn't know how anymore. Fiddling with X11? No idea. I don't even have problems with Pulseaudio.
Compare that to dual booting this one with Windows 10. For several months, Windows 10 had a bug where it wouldn't save the touchpad settings. Every time, I'd have to disable tap-to-click. UGH. They finally fixed it, but what a pain.
(And when I had an OS X machine, received as part of payment for a job... between the beach ball and the not-infrequent crashes, where the screen dims and displays that fatal error message, it was a pain to get any work done.)
I haven't heard of the need for compiling kernels, configuring X11 etc. in a loong time.
> setting up reliable backups, getting my Bluetooth headset to work, and, yes, getting the machine to suspend when I close the lid and wake up when I open it
Again, works out of the box, just pick a laptop that is known to work well, i.e. a Clevo, Lenovo or some of the newer DELL machines to give Linux a proper chance - there's no point in trying a laptop that is known to work only with Windows and then complain about it - the same way you don't complain if macOS doesn't work well on a DELL.
You pick a specific machine to run macOS, do the same for Linux and everything will work beautifully out of the box.
If not, then I can vouch that my wife's Thinkpad runs Ubuntu with no issues. I concur with others that kernel compiling and X11 configuration have long been non-issues.
I use Fedora on a ThinkPad X230. It works an absolute dream. GNOME is my favorite of all the desktops, and Fedora by default ships a fully setup and functioning Gnome on Wayland session (which will also be the default session in the next release, coming in a few weeks).
The reason I chose to run Fedora on a ThinkPad is because it required no tweaking and fiddling at all to get working nicely. I'm all about that seamless out-of-the-box experience.
I was amused by the post here today about the Touch ID fork of sudo for macOS, because I already use the same feature on my ThinkPad every day, and it required absolutely no configuration or setup (other than enrolling my fingerprint).
Since you are asking for specifics, I run openSUSE Tumbleweed on an Asus Zenbook UX 305, and with the exception of keyboard backlight, all the builtin hardware works as expected. I have never tried to attach an external display. I did not try Ubuntu on this machine, the Debian installer pretty much bailed on me. (Tumbleweed is a rolling release distro, so the amount of updates it receives can be slightly annoying at times, OTOH the software is very much up to date.) I have to admit I have not tried suspending the machine by closing the lid, but Fn+F1 works reliably.
That's fine, you are paying a premium for all this, it better "just" works. Elementary OS is free of charge.
hangouts works brilliantly. skype (even the old version) works great with both audio and video. in fact i have switched over to the skype web version which works on the chrome browser (no video call for now.. but audio works brilliantly).
i use fedora 24..which just works and is pretty cutting edge. i switched over from Ubuntu pretty recently and have been very happy.
im on a xps 13. previously i was on a thinkpad. there is no dearth of cool laptops on Linux.
Sleep-on-closing-lid has worked fine for me for many years.
It's funny that, with regards to Just Working after installation, Linux seems to be way ahead of Windows. I installed both of them on my laptop and while on Linux everything worked fine from the start without needing extra setup steps (including the multitouch trackpad; the not-so-standard function keys like keyboard brightness; even the this weird external subwoofer that came with the laptop), on Windows i had to download and install special drivers for all those things, and even for much more basic stuff, like the wireless card (had to dig through old computer stuff to find an ethernet cable to connect to the internet).
Now, i understand why this is the case. Linux distros are designed to be installed by their users, while Windows is designed to come pre-installed on computers. But i still find it curious how Linux is much more non-tech-savvy-friendly in this particular regard.
WebEx's Linux support is excellent though.
Google Hangouts works fine under chrome on linux.
As far as hardware, webcam support is generally good. It's now at the point where if you bought a random webcam, there is a better than 50% chance it will just work. That being said, it's much safer to check if others have used it, or to just buy a laptop that has a webcam and ships with linux support (Both Dell and HP have laptops that ship with linux installed). I have a Creative Labs USB webcam that unfortunately has no model number printed on it (I have a long list of things I don't like about built-in webcams).
Sleep has worked on all laptops I've tried in the past decade or so. Hibernate (i.e. suspend to disk) is much more spotty.
Battery life lies somewhere between windows 7 and Mac, though certain applications are particularly bad at draining the battery (powertop can be useful in identifying these).
In general linux on a laptop has gotten way better; in particular networking is much more bearable now that NetworkManager actually works and it's much easier to find laptops with linux supported wifi gear preinstalled.
[edit]
I saw someone mention audio issues; that reminds me. The situation there is more like what networking was like 5-6 years ago. Pulse Audio promises to provide all the basic features people expect from an audio stack), but sometimes crashes, or drains your battery or just causes weird sounds to come out of your speaker. On the other hand, getting ALSA+dmix setup correctly without pulse audio (which is the only real alternative), is fairly arcane, and leaves you without things like per-application volume control (though many linux applications provide their own software-implemented volume control).
That I think would be the best of both worlds for me.
webcam both on the mbp and my logitech hd work out of the box. sleep on closing lid also works quite well -- and i feel waking it up is faster.
For some reason I had to install "cheese" to make it work. But that's all. No extra drivers needed or anything else.
2. It just works. You don't have to configure anything, every hardware part functioning properly and it's guaranteed that this will work in the future without any hassle. You don't have to think about drivers, kernel versions, sleep/wake up scripts, swap. You just install OS and start to work. That's on macs, of course, hackintoshes are more like Linux in that aspect.
3. A lot of hardware designed for Macs. I have yet to see a device which will claim that it support Linux. Yet almost anything will work in Mac. Windows is better, of course, but Mac is good too. With Linux you better google it before you buy it, and even then something might be not perfect.
4. They are nice machines overall. Good enough quality, good casing, good design, good internals, good service. Not best, but not much drawbacks.
5. GUI is pretty nice and pleasant to use, there is a lot of GUI software for macs and almost every useful Linux program will have mac port (but not the other way). Linux doesn't have so polished user experience. Though it's not that important for power users, but it's nice to have IMO.
I wish this was true, but I always hold off updating my work MBP at least 6 months, before all the issues with the newest release are resolved. I remember updating to 10.7 since 10.6 was a solid release and it was a nightmare. There's a bunch of stuff broken with 10.12 as well, including a bug which prevents curl from working well and a bug which makes Duet less reliable under Sierra.
I'd agree with the aluminium casing and good external design, but in regards to internals; the GPUs are very lacklustre in performance, I had a problem with my MBP showing green tint on the screen after just months of usage and have a dead/red pixel on my new display already.
The fans also do a terrible job at cooling and the CPU can reach 95 degrees C while compiling code, which makes it not so hot a dev machine, (pun intended :-)
But I agree, the service is good.
I may have misunderstood this, but System76[0] specifically make 'designed for nix' desktops and laptops.
[0] https://system76.com/
I don't want to single out your comment, but there's been a lot of this lately (and every time this discussion comes up).
There's no one true version of a 'developer' or a 'pro.'
Broadly speaking, people will be most productive with the tool they know best. And the 'real' pros can be productive with just about anything.
For myself, I consider myself a developer too, but my workflow is probably very different from your workflow. My main machines are a MacBook Pro (2012) and a hefty HP workstation (64GB RAM, dual Xeons) running Ubuntu. There are things I use the Mac for that I'd struggle to do on the HP, and vice versa. But that's just me... But the idea that there's 'one true dev' or 'one true platonic ideal' of a development machine, is just crazy. And that's why I think a lot of this recent Apple criticism is missing the mark (especially when there are plenty of things to criticise Apple for, if that's what one wants to do).
To address your point about this being a recent trend I actually noticed the mismatch when I first moved to the bay area 5 years ago. It seemed weird to use a mac as a dev machine and then deploy to a ubuntu box in production. There was always some issue that came up because whoever was doing the deployment didn't verify things in a VM first and then had to do some firefighting on a production box.
This wouldn't be a problem if workplaces gave you the option of getting a linux box or a mac. At most places you don't have a choice. All the IT management software is built for a mac so you get a mac.
I actually ended up switching from OS X to Linux (on a MacBook) for this reason. Things break all the time, but at least I can usually figure out how to fix them on Linux. (OS X would freeze at random times, requiring a hard shutdown, and also sometimes resume from sleep with a black screen and no way to change it, the former happening across every version and the latter only after I upgraded to Mavericks).
A lot of time was spent fighting to get tap-to-drag without a release delay. Still nope.
Overall, it can be a pretty infuriating operating system as well.
I've never run into any issues with my dell machine and it started with ubuntu 12.04 when I first got it. Each upgrade has gone without any hitches or glitches.
Why you are trying to group everybody together is beyond me. There are hundreds of programming languages, dozens of popular platforms, maybe hundreds of niche ones. There is no one single, correct solution, just as there is no one single answer to your question, because there is no one single deleveloper, there are millions, and some enjoy the stark look of a terminal and others prefer to look at pretty icons.
Virtualization is a bit less efficient but it certainly does not prevent you from utilizing multiple CPU cores or all your available RAM -- minus the resources consumed by the host OS of course.
Because there are developers on this world that don't develop for UNIX, rather native applications for macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS.
Being a developer doesn't mean one is only allowed to work on UNIX.
Maybe I'm not a real developer according to your standards. Not enough configuration files and build systems modeled in my brain to qualify. I just prefer code to black boxes.
Wow, that's a pretty great idea. Enough people do this wrong manually that it seems like something that could be better solved by the OS.
One example I've seen of doing it wrong is adding black opaque rectangles as layers and then sending out all layers including the original. Another is pixelating it in a way where it's possible to revert the pixelation since the font is known (e.g. parts of a facebook post)
Moving to Linux seems like a romantic idea, but I can forsee there being a number of problems that would make it unfeasible for me
1. I use 1Password, no Linux client
2. Spotify client is no longer being developed for Linux
3. YouNeedABudget software is not Linux compatible - I have 2+ years of financial transactions in there...
4. Google Drive, no (official) Linux client
5. I have a number of Alfred workflows, and enjoy using Alfred in general.
Yes, there are a number of open source alternatives, but I've built up enough inertia on OSX it's going to be very difficult for me to switch.
There are things about OSX that couldn't care less about like iTunes, Apple Maps etc, but overall it's not so bad
2. Spotify will still receive updates for Linux, they just don't have a dedicated Linux developer on it anymore. On my machine it still works fine.
3. I prefer GoodBudget, which IMHO is much better than YNAB, especially when it comes to their iOS/Android apps. The desktop client just runs in the browser. Also, I've heard YNAB will be discontinuing their desktop apps?
4. There's https://github.com/odeke-em/drive, a fork of the official drive client, and it's still being actively developed.
5. Haven't used Alfred, but you can get some of it's features using other tools, e.g. indexed search using Tracker, clipboard history using Diodon, and perhaps some other things. However you are right that you can't get the kind of polished automation Alfred seems to provide. Rather, you'll have to write shell scripts and use the commandline tools to get what you want. Absolutely everything is possible, but it'll feel a bit like using lots of duct tape at first.
Note: I'm not saying you should switch right away (1). But I used Linux (Ubuntu) full-time for work and at home for the last 5 years and I was able to do everything with very few exceptions (2). Most peripherals that I bought just worked out of the box. Going Linux full-time is 100% doable.
Also, with so many apps running in the browser (or on Electron) the choice of OS matters less every year.
(1) in fact, I'll probably get a Mac myself this year for developing iOS apps.
(2) Only exception: Windows VM for Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint & iTunes for iPhone syncing. All other software ran in WINE or had a reasonable Linux alternatives.
I run 1Password in Wine in Docker on my (secondary) linux ThinkPad with Dropbox sync. It works, but it's clunky. Part of that is that I don't like the Windows 1Password application compared to the macOS one, though.
You may want to check-out Albert. [0]
> Yes, there are a number of open source alternatives, but I've built up enough inertia on OSX it's going to be very difficult for me to switch.
The longer you work on one platform the more you get locked into it. This may not be a problem for the time you are happy with the platform you are locking into. But keep in mind that you are currently locking into a closed source platform. I migrated from MS to Linux about a year ago after being on Windows for about 2 decades. The burden migrating out of it was heavy. With the upcoming closed source cloud platforms this will get even worse. An open source platform gives you more control and freedom over your workflows and data. IMO this is something which cannot be valued highly enough.
[0] https://github.com/ManuelSchneid3r/albert
As a consolation, I'm aware of a number of music clients on Linux that can stream from Spotify via their API. Ad-supported accounts don't have access to the API, of course.
https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/libspotify/#libsp...
[1] - https://www.googleplaymusicdesktopplayer.com