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by mibbiting 3513 days ago
I've had macbooks for years. I finally gave up and got a Dell XPS running Ubuntu earlier this year. Best decision I ever made. So much faster, so much more responsive. No massive delay waiting for that idiotic spinner. It's been clear for a while Apple don't care about developers.
3 comments

I have been meaning to switch to Linux, however I am yet to find something that has as good of a display quality (retina fonts) as the Mac. How is the XPS like?
The XPS13 has a hiDPI screen. Hardware wise, the screen definitely seems on-par with MBP but on the software side, it's a little infuriating encountering applications that don't support hiDPI. Instead of those apps just looking blurry like when OS X introduced 2x resolution, they show up at native resolution (50% of normal size)

But who knows, maybe I missed a setting somewhere to correct that.

I've used high-DPI displays under Linux, and they consistently work fine.

GNOME autodetects a high-DPI display and scales well by default, and all modern applications handle this as well. (If you run old non-toolkit applications, they may not scale automatically.) I did find that Firefox doesn't seem to autodetect high-DPI displays, but if you open about:config and set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.4 (for 1440p) or 2 (for 4k), Firefox works great. (Adjust to taste.)

This is not true. Linux does not handle HiDPI just fine. Try using 2 displays with 2 different dpis. You get your choice: one screen normal, and one screen teeny tiny.
actually on wayland it does. tough there aren't many wayland distro's.
Good point! I haven't had any Wayland distros work long enough to plug in a 2nd monitor. :)
Linux is not something that handles hiDPI. X handles it, Gnome handles it, Qt handles it. Almost all of them are a bit different, and you have to take care of them separately. There are things that already work together well, e.g. X DPI detection works with Gnome 3, but if you open a Qt GUI (old Skype) then that might very well be tiny. Chrome has not worked well until recently, I don't know if they fixed it already or not.
That's all I needed to hear to know that 2016 (and probably 2017) is still not "the year of the Linux desktop" (coming from a Linux desktop guy until 2004: switched to the Mac because I value my time, I keep monitoring any new developments in my old camp but if I had held my breath I'd be dead.)
This is something I'm considering. I'm interested to hear more about your switch. Did you have any major problems? Is there anything you're particularly missing about your MB? I wonder whether there are a whole load of solid integration things I take for granted with Apple products (simple stuff like the machine actually going to sleep when you close the lid etc)
Nothing I miss.

The Dell XPS goes to sleep when lid closed, and correctly (and fast) wakeup when you open the lid. Battery life amazing as well. So I just shut the laptop, and open it the next day and continue...

Did your previous MacBook have an SSD or a hard drive? What were its specs?