[wheels]

Odd. I've been waiting for a Macbook Pro that has something that excites me for a while (as my present one is 7 years old) and kind of gave up when the most recent Macbooks were announced.

I threw some more RAM and a 4 core CPU in a desktop that I'd previously been using as a PVR, and have gotten along with GNOME just fine. While a lot of folks dislike GNOME 3, I actually find it to be one of the more innovative and interesting desktops going around at the moment (including macOS and the various Windows iterations).

Oddly, the main thing I miss is that, while Mail.app has loads of annoyances, it still seems to do better with large IMAP folder better than anything on Linux except Thunderbird (which I find a bit clunky in the interface).

Were it not for music production software, I'd be very tempted to do a wholesale switch (in my case back to Linux, as it's what I used in the decade before I got my first Mac).

[cmsj]

"Were it not for" is exactly why Linux is such a sub-par desktop experience. GNOME/KDE are fine, but they're just the desktop shell, what is missing is high quality apps.

If all you need is a terminal and a browser, then sure, Linux has you more than covered, but the apps for just about everything else are either lacking in UX or features or both.

I ran nothing but Linux from 1997 to 2010 and I switched to macOS full time in 2011 when I came home from the birth of my son, and decided to take all of the photos of the pregnancy and birth, import them into iPhoto and use the book designer to order a big printed photo book. It was so nice to be able to do that at all, so easy to do, and the results so pleasing, that I immediately demoted my Linux partition to a VM and haven't looked back :)

[wheels]

As of the last few years, there are actually high quality apps for music production on the Linux desktop (BitWig, Tracktion), they're just not the apps that I've used for the last 15 years, and since I have a Mac, I'm not inclined to change. However, if there's not a Macbook I'm excited to drop €3000 on by the time that my current one dies (or stops getting updates), I'd consider spending the time to switch tools.

Notable there too is that my next Macbook will almost certainly be around €3000. My last one was €1300 plus another €80 to max out the RAM. That's a pretty massive difference for the top of the line 13" model.

[wilsonnb2]

Those music production apps have the same issue though - most plugins that people want to use don't support Linux, at least not natively and easily.

Progress has been made but there is still a long way to go.

[mprev]

Precisely. For me it was 2001 to 2012. In the six years since, I miss two things from Linux based desktops: being easily able to launch any application from the terminal and having a clock in the top bar that also has a calendar widget.

What I’ve gained is productivity in a whole bunch of non-dev scenarios. People moan about Creative Cloud or Office pricing but I now no longer have to make a hundred little compromises each day.

[watersb]

> launch any application from the terminal

I am not sure I understand the issue here, but is there some reason that 'open -a "ApplicationName"' does not work for you?

I can think of some things; I haven't tried but the app developer would need to provide an API to handle command-line options. Sometimes I examine an application's Scripting dictionary via the Script Editor or Automator, but in general I am not writing big shell scripts to drive applicaitons.

[mprev]

With Ubuntu, and other Linuxen I've used, it's a matter of typing "firefox" or whatever the app is called. So, sure, I can type the extra but what I like about the Linux world is that there's no distinction between terminal and GUI apps when it comes to launching from the terminal.

[emilsedgh]

> KDE and Gnome are not only desktop shells.

This is just not true. KDE and Gnome both have a huge app offering.

[brightball]

Now that Thunderbird is under active development again it should improve. The beta seems a good bit snappier.