[mrozel]

I come at this from a productivity perspective after using Mac's for several jobs - Linux boosts my productivity by 30-40%. Anecdotal, sure, but things just work in Linux and your not constantly having to fiddle around and click through things. It could also be that Mac's have declined in quality and I can put Linux on nearly anything and it lasts forever, especially when you put it on high quality gear that just doesn't exist at Apple.

[darrmit]

My experience is somewhat opposite. I love Linux. I've used it for over a decade in various roles. But it always ends up the same - either some obscure Bluetooth or graphics bug frustrates me to the point I can't stand it anymore, or I get fed up with 2 hours of battery life and go back to macOS.

In this case, I'm measuring my productivity by the time it takes to mess around with the OS to get the desired result, and the fact that the stability baseline just never seems to get there.

I get and support the attraction to Linux on the desktop, but find YMMV to be very much true.

[minimaul]

Yeah, this is exactly my experience too.

I try to move over every six months to a year or so, and it's the same gripes every time at this point.

Driver support's reasonable now, and the desktop environments are generally solid enough, but things like mixed DPI work really badly on Linux, my browser nearly always tears when scrolling on my secondary display, etc.

But... the single biggest killer for me though is how badly Linux copes with very low amounts of free memory. Put 32G in a machine and it still periodically runs completely out under my dev workload and when that happens, the whole system becomes unusable and I have to hard reboot it. I'm not sure what macOS and Windows do differently, but it just doesn't happen on either of those two OSes.

I really want to have the freedom to pick and choose my hardware more, but at the moment I keep falling back to macOS.

It's a UNIX environment so it has the tooling I want and a solid GUI that works well.

[tonyarkles]

There are discussions happening on LKML right now about how to solve this. I don’t have a link handy, but saw them either here or on LWN recently.

I used to have that problem too, but it went away when I stopped using JetBrains products :). Not for any reason other than the contract I was working on ended.

[minimaul]

Then I shall live in hope that it will be fixed :)

And I didn't even have a JetBrains product in the loop, it was a mix of virtualbox and VS code, along with browser, mail client, etc.

[tonyarkles]

To elaborate a bit based on my understanding of the issue: VirtualBox seems like a great program to tickle the issue.

During a memory pressure scenario, the kernel starts looking around for things that it can get out of RAM to free up space. If swap is enabled and not saturated, paging out some data to disk is a likely option. Reducing disk cache size works too. But... when the usual candidates run out, things have to get more clever. Things like shared libraries can get paged out! If one of those pages is requested, it can be reloaded from disk. Or, in the VirtualBox case, the mmap'd disk image can be removed mostly from RAM and have those pages loaded from disk as needed. Performance sucks terribly, but it keeps trucking on.

The wrinkle in all of this is SSDs. The out-of-memory (OOM) killer heuristically watches the system and kills off processes that cause memory pressure problems. These heuristics, however, are expecting these page-in and page-out operations to be slow (as they were on HDDs). On newer SSDs, the disks are too fast to trip the OOM killer into action! This is why, when this problem manifests, your disk activity light goes on solid, even if you don't have swap enabled. The kernel is sitting there trying every trick in the book, and the OOM killer doesn't see what's happening. Every individual page fault is handled quickly, there's just waaaaaay too many of them.

[bscphil]

Yep, this is an accurate description according to my understanding of the issue too.

The lesson I've recently learned is that, for now, swap is necessary on Linux machines with SSDs. I've enabled zswap and added a 4 GB swap file to my machine with 16 GB of RAM, and the problem hasn't reoccurred for me since then. Supposedly, the memory pressure measure in the kernel gets a more accurate reading when swap is enabled, but I don't know for sure that that's true. At the very least, you can page out the memory you're using the least instead of file-backed pages, which is what happens in memory pressure situations on SSDs (as opposed to OOM killing).

[bo1024]

Wow, that's a really cool explanation. Although, I've had an SSD in my desktop for 8 years now, it's a bit sad to hear.

[Abishek_Muthian]

I saw it as more of a Java problem on Linux than a Jetbrains one with Android Studio.

When Android Studio is run with large code base on emulator, memory issues were frequent in Linux with halting issues. SO has several such cases.

No such issues with macOS, even with mutiple Jetbrains IDEs in parallel(Same memory config).

I wonder how Android Studio is doing on ChromeOS, considering many of those are low end machines. I'm sure they had to optimize it, but I assume the issue would persist till the Linux kernel itself is fixed.

[wyclif]

Another alternative for people who still love macOS but can't tolerate the dumpster fire that is the butterfly keyboard is to get a new Mac Mini, then get a monitor of your choice and righteous clickety-clack buckling spring keyboard to go with it.

[ericd]

Seconding this, the Mini has really reduced my periodic urges to upgrade my 2013 MBP.

[tankenmate]

I find that for low RAM situations that zram is very handy and allows for a graceful reduction in performance under memory stress rather than a cliff edge that you get with a swap partition.

[panpanna]

zram has been replaced with some other technology (z-something, can't remember the name) that also compresses swap and removed duplicate pages.

[amaccuish]

zswap?

[koffiezet]

And this is why many people like me stick to Mac. Yes there's a solution for it on Linux, but no I don't want to look for it, maintain it, and at some point when a new 'best solution' is available keep up to date with all that...

[ericd]

I had the same issue. The solution I settled on (and have been very happy with) has been a Mac Mini as a polished front end/web browsing machine, and then a Threadripper workstation running Ubuntu that I ssh into and do all dev work on. The pleasure of OS X without being so limited by Apple’s hardware options (and extreme markup).

[hdfbdtbcdg]

How big is your swapfile?

[mrozel]

I'm really curious, what is your dev environment/setup like?

[michaelmrose]

Have you tried earlyoom?

[eikenberry]

+1 to this as a workaround until the kernel finally addresses the issue. Earlyoom is a user space OOM-killer that kicks in before the system starts the mad paging dance.

https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom

Packages are available in Debian Stable (Buster), so they should be available in most child distros by now as well.

[michaelmrose]

It seems likely that something can be done to make the behavior less perverse but I'm not convinced that the behavior CAN be better than something like earlyoom.

What makes earlyoom useful is the fact that you can tell the machine what is low value and likely to be problematic. I'm not sure that information can be determined automatically. I'm further not sure what a better strategy than start killing low value problematic processes when we reach a threshold looks like.

[yebyen]

Do you have a swap partition?

I've been in a couple of interesting discussions about Linux memory management lately that enlightened me somewhat, and I won't claim to be an expert now, but I've been around the low-memory block enough to understand now that, there's no simple right answer to the question of "Do you have swap?"

"The Linux kernel has overcommit baked into the fiber of its being." I've begun to understand that this idea is so deeply engrained in the kernel that in a multi-tenant or desktop workstation, you simply can't extract it back out and "just provide enough RAM," unless you know the performance characteristics and you really mean it when you say "that should be enough RAM." If you don't have any swap and the kernel starts to run out of memory, it's going to start evicting whatever pages it can back to disk.

(Wait, pages back to disk? I told you I didn't have swap) Yes – the linux kernel can page things back to disk even if you don't have swap, remember all of the binaries you're running have originally come from that disk, and the kernel knows it doesn't strictly need to have them in memory until they are volatile, or you tried to read those pages again.

Having some swap gives the kernel something else to evict, so have a healthy amount of swap and Linux will find the occasion to use it for the least frequently used pages that are not already on disk. This will improve your "nearly out of memory" performance.

The second worst thing that you can do is put your swap on fast SSD or NVMe, and it's not why you think. The kernel is making decisions based on a heuristic which is complicated and well-documented, but inscrutable. If the solid disk is 50x faster than the spinning disk that the swap was originally designed to use, then swapping will cost less overall and the heuristic will lean on it as a strategy to keep the OOM killer away even more often. You may find your cache recycle rates going through the roof because things can be paged out to disk and re-loaded faster than should be possible. I don't fully understand this part, but I suspect the answer is "try to use Swap less, and be aware of when you are using it."

The kernel does really not want to kill off your processes, and it has more opportunities than ever to ensure it keeps too many balls in the air when you have asked it to do so. So, find a way to stay ahead of the kernel and know better. If you have a dock widget that tells when you are going above 50% swap usage, you can close some tabs before it gets to be an unrecoverable situation. It's a mystery to me why modern computers don't come with disk activity lights, as this problem we didn't need dock widgets to solve 20 years ago when literally every computer came equipped with one.

The best advice is to have enough RAM for whatever you're doing, and at 32GB "I think you've had enough." At any rate the one suggestion that I could give is, if you anticipate running out of memory (ever, and it looks like you still do), then you should be sure to have a healthy amount of swap, to me that's probably at least 5 or 6GB but YMMV.

But, 32GB for a desktop workstation really ought to be enough IMHO, so try to find a way that you don't run out? If you're eating all that memory up with VMs, try a lighter weight solution for your ephemeral workloads like footloose, which behaves like a VM in the ways you generally tend to want for your dev workloads, (like for example, it can run systemd like your deploy target most likely does, if you're using VMs to match the deploy target). Footloose doesn't impose the "VM's" whole footprint upfront due to actually being a container, so when you run out of memory it will be because your application workloads used too much, not because your virtual machine manager has grabbed much more than it needed.

[yebyen]

All that being said, my daily driver is a Mac and I don't think about this stuff either, until it affects a server.

[mickael-kerjean]

> I get fed up with 2 hours of battery life

As I'm typing this, I got 14hours and 33minutes of battery left and it's only charged to 83%. In hardcore scenarios out of the grid for a few days (where I go sailing) I got a few spare batteries. (the laptop is the Lenovo X270)

> In this case, I'm measuring my productivity by the time it takes to mess around with the OS to get the desired result, and the fact that the stability baseline just never seems to get there.

The time investment goes down significantly over time. After a decade using linux on as a daily driver, I don't remember the last time I've tweak anything.

> fed up ... and go back to macOS.

Same thing but the other way around. I stay away from my Mac except for:

- making sure my applications look good enough on a Mac and are usable

- making music as I'm not patient enough to relearn everything on a different platform but that's just laziness from my end

[coldtea]

>The time investment goes down significantly over time. After a decade using linux on as a daily driver, I don't remember the last time I've tweak anything.

So, it gets stable after the first 4-5 years of tweaking. Doesn't that make the parent's point?

And after those 4-5 years, wont one have to get a new laptop at some point, upgrade to newer OS version, and adjust to whatever changes the FOSS projects like Gnome/KDE/etc did in the previous years all from the beginning?

>- making music as I'm not patient enough to relearn everything on a different platform but that's just laziness from my end

Just laziness? As if Linux has anything remotely as powerful/coherent as Live/Cubase/Logic/etc, Native Instruments, Arturia, and all the other VSTs?

[OJFord]

> And after those 4-5 years, wont one have to get a new laptop at some point, upgrade to newer OS version, and adjust to whatever changes the FOSS projects like Gnome/KDE/etc did in the previous years all from the beginning?

But that's part of what I love about linux, my text-based configuration doesn't have to change because I upgrade, unlike on Mac where the name of some `defaults write` key suddenly renames or disappears altogether.

In the rare cases that something in a Linux distribution changes so much it upends your config, you're just a package install away from getting the old behaviour back until you want (if ever) to deal with it.

[duncanawoods]

Reaper and bitwig run on linux. Plenty of reaper users come from other daws. Daw choice is mostly workflow preference than feature differences.

Vsts though... people use Carla that’s based on wine to use windows vsts. Results vary.

[tsss]

Yeah sure, I've heard it all. Let me guess: What you conveniently forgot to mention is how you only use terminal applications with a minimal window manager, which makes a comparison to MacOS or Windows completely pointless since their desktop environments are 40 years advanced and thus have to do a lot more computation.

[dredmorbius]

There's very little net gain to changes in GUI. Most of the fundamental metaphors actually date from the MoaD, December of 1968, fifty-one years ago this year.

Actually, that still has capabilities lacking from "modern" GUIs.

https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

jwz observed that "UI is different" years ago when discussing Safari vs. Firefox interface changes. (Wayback link to avoid his "special greeting" for HN visitors): https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.o...

I watch "normal" computer users struggling to keep up with even very modest changes to MacOS UIs. Which, for the record, are remarkably consistent with the first iteration, deployed in 2001, eighteen years ago. It's older now than the Classic Mac interface was when OS X was introduced (1984 - 2001: 17 years).

[tsss]

That's not the point.

[dredmorbius]

What is the point of advances if not to provide greater end-user utility, functionality, ease of use, etc?

Again: changes in GUI demonstrably do not deliver that.

And good GUIs don't change.

Because in large part of the institutional cost of breaking shell scripts, TUIs don't change often (and tools violating this principle are quickly and sharply deprecated and/or replaced with those that don't). Which means that as a user (or administrator or programmer), the investment you put into using console tools tends to have an exceedingly long half life.

Mind: I'd given this deliberate and conscious thought in the mid-1990s when I was faced with a few possible directions to take my own computing career and use. I'd already seen numerous platforms, notably proprietary and GUI ones, change substantially, or die entirely. Seemed to me that the skill-preserving route would be with Linux or the BSDs. That's proved a good decision and rationale.

Even a "minimal window manager" -- say, twm or vtwm, provides extensive functionality and does not change. There's a hell of a lot to be said for learning a skill once and not having to either replace it with another, or keep obsoleting previously acquired knowledge and habits.

I don't use twm myself, outside occasional testing. One of the best and most skillful programmers I've ever known did use it, and had a highly tricked out configuration, almost completely keyboard driven, that let him fly around his display and workspaces with an amazing faculty. The fact that the windowmanager itself is flyweight and bedrock stable only added to this.

My own preference is WindowMaker, based on the design principles of NextStep (1988), and largely static since the late 1990s. It has capabilities modern WMs and DEs still lack, is extremely high performance, and extraordinarily stable. Graphically, it's nonobtrusive. I might swap it for a tiling WM, but it's served me well for over two decades.

[smallnamespace]

> After a decade using linux on as a daily driver

I mean, this is hardly an endorsement for people early in their careers who haven't already concluded the Linux is the best path forward.

[dredmorbius]

Actually, it is.

I'm in my fourth decade of technical activity. I'm leveraging skills and tools I learned in my first day using Unix, in the mid-1980s.

Over the same time, I've gained, and obsoleted, skills on CPM, MacOS, VM/CMS, MVS, VMS, DOS, Windows 3x, WinNT, and classic Macintosh.

Yes, there are a few flavours of Unix -- BSD, SysV4, Solaris, HPUX, Irix, AIX, FreeBSD, and numerous Linux flavours. Those, and even OSX/MacOS share far more in common than all the other platforms.

Unix knowlege has proved extraordinarily durable, as have the tools. Though there are new utilities and environments coming out frequently, old standards remain available and still work. I'm not forced onto that treadmill, most especially not for my personal work.

GRRM still uses Wordstar. Works for him.

(That's ... one of the editors I've used as well, though I vastly prefer vim these days -- one of those "first day on Unix" skillsets I'm still earning dividends on.)

[barney54]

I'm not exactly sure the GRRM point hold true. He might write on Wordstar, but the distraction free writing environment hasn't exactly helped him finish books in a decade.

[dredmorbius]

Have you seen the control-group results? ;-)

There's also Stephen Bourne, who had initially programmed in Algol, and has a bunch of Algol-like macros that he uses when programming in C. I'm not finding an original source, though several references turn up.

Muscle memory is a real beast to change. The local optimum is always "stick to what I know".

[hpcjoe]

I've not had obscure graphics or bluetooth problems for like 4 years now. Graphics problems have not been a problem for the last decade.

I've been running linux desktops and laptops for about 20 years, starting with early/pre-RHEL redhat, and moving around to many others. My first laptop was a pentium thing at 75 MHz, and I triple booted Linux, OS2, and Windows/DOS on it. I wound up kicking off the last two, as I used them only infrequently.

Battery life is an issue for me, but its not linux specific. The laptops I have, all have power hungry ram and GPU cards. I get 2 hours on them, or if I play with the brightness and other things, I can stretch it to 4 hours. My old 2010 laptop (still in use, still running linux) is a 16GB ram, 0.5TB SSD affair with an NVidia GTX560m card. My 2018 laptop is a 48GB ram, 1.5 TB SSD (0.5 + 1.0) with an M2 256GB SSD for the included windows 10 home, and a GTX 1060m card. Windows 10 on the newer laptop lasts about 2.5 hours before it shuts down. I now run the pre-installed windows 10 via a kvm with passthrough of the M2 into the instance.

All of these are currently running late model Linux Mint 19.2 with accelerated graphics.

Work laptop is a Mac 16 GB ram, 512GB SSD with an intel/AMD hybrid graphics bit. This will last 5 hours with significant tweaks to aggressive power off, and me not running any builds on it.

I like the mac for its physical fit and finish, weight, etc. But I need to bring the power supply with me, as I can burn through much of the power in a 2 hour meeting.

I like the linux machine for work, and everything else. It just works. The drivers just work. The networking just works. Single/multi displays just work. I have cinammon (display manager) set up to a very comfortable configuration.

I am hopeful that the day job will enable me to trade up to a bigger machine with linux and nvidia graphics at some point ... 32GB is bare minimum for a functional machine for me, 48->64GB is better.

My home office deskside is an older Sandy Bridge machine with 16 cores, 128 GB ram, old GTX750ti card, running the same environment as on my laptop.

Of course, YMMV.

[pjmlp]

> Graphics problems have not been a problem for the last decade.

Except one happens to have a laptop with an older AMD card or Optimus Intel/NVidia combo.

[zokula]

Older AMD? Any AMD card or igp made in the last 14 years works out of the box with Linux, save their newest GPU arch.

[pjmlp]

Tell that to my AMD Radeon HD 6330M, released in 2010, 8 years ago.

The open source driver still doesn't provide feature parity with the proprietary one that Ubuntu LTS dropped support for.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/ubuntu-drops-amd-catalys...

Namely hardware video decoding and OpenGL version.

[ben-schaaf]

Sounds more like AMD dropped support for Linux. It's shitty, but I'm not sure what you can expect from distributions if AMD stops updating their drivers for newer versions of xserver.

[hpcjoe]

I don't have laptops with older AMD. My current laptop has the ability to switch between CPU and discrete GPU, but it doesn't work well even under windows, so I disabled it in BIOS.

AMD drivers have been hit and miss for a while, which is one of two reasons I tend to prefer NVidia cards. NVidia took time to make sure their whole stack works reasonably well.

[fnord77]

what brand/model is your 48GB laptop? I'm shopping for something that can take lots of ram.

[hpcjoe]

This is a Sager Notebook NP8156. There are newer models, including better NVidia cards. Up to 64 GB ram. I bought mine with 16GB and added 32GB. Very expandable. Battery life is 2-ish hours, though can be increased by reducing brightness.

Lenovo has a 32 GB max model, and HP has a 64 GB max model.

[city41]

I've been using Linux full time for 3 years now and I agree. Linux comes with lots of little, edge casey bugs. Like a thousand paper cuts, they add up and hamper productivity.

I can finally say Ubuntu MATE 18.04 for me is pretty solid. There's still two issues I wrestle with, but other than that it's been very dependable for me.

When it comes to OSes these days, I feel like you have to pick the least bad one. A truly rock solid OS just doesn't exist in my experience.

[colmvp]

Same. I use Linux (specifically Ubuntu) on my work/study computer and I love it.

But, weird hardware issues popped up now and then which I didn't have to deal with on my MacBook, such as the wifi card that had to be manually installed, the headphone jack sometimes doing weird things, the processors overheating.

I was able to solve those problems by searching online and finding others who had the same issue which lead to instructions to fix the problem, but I just can't imagine my family members who have never used the Terminal in their entire life having the same success.

The fact is that with my old MacBooks (and the computers I've given to my family) the only hardware related issue we've had over the last 10+ years is the battery related issues from the MBP.

[logicprog]

I've been using Linux for the last two years, having switched from macOS, and I haven't had a single weird problem. Not one.

I use Arch Linux, and a combination of KDE and i3 so one would expect me to have a ton of rediculous problems. But I haven't had a single problem. It took me a single day to set up my computer how I wanted it (I've used Linux before) and I haven't had to touch a config file since.

Part of this might be that in using a Dell XPS DE, which is designed to work well with Linux, but I think it might just be a YMMV situation. And I do a lot of back end, applications, web and front end development (mostly in my spare time), so I think I've hit a lot of programmer use-cases.

Also, I get 15 hour battery life streaming 4K video on my 4K touch screen, and more doing other stuff.

I also used an Apple Magic Touchpad or whatever over Bluetooth with it, including gestures and it worked really well. Better, actually, as far as Bluetooth, than my Mac. I only stopped because it wasn't good for my hand and wrist health.

Just adding my anecdata. Overall my experience with Linux has been hugely positive.

[ekianjo]

> or I get fed up with 2 hours of battery life and go back to macOS.

Not sure about the Bluetooth part (i had this kind of issue once in like 10 years) but the battery life, getting 2 hours is not common anymore. Sure, you won't get as long as Windows on the same hardware more of the time, but 5 to 7 hours on a full charge is what you can expect, if not longer.

[mrozel]

This and it's come a long way in the last 10yrs but it's more dependent on hardware. Optimus still an issue with nvidia (3hrs) vs 630(5hrs) and have to switch between. However, just bought a pair of (used) x270's to travel with - one has Fedora and the other windows 10. Linux lasts 8-9 hours and the Windows about the same (maybe less).

[p_l]

Maxed out X250 had been reported to last 26h hours online, with plain debian install, no tricks like Macs' "oh, you look outside, I'll go to sleep now"

[dkersten]

Anecdotally, my cheapo $500 linux laptop gets a full work day (so 6-8 hours depending on what I'm doing, unless I run docker, then it gets maybe 3 hours tops) while my previous 2017 $2000 macbook pro typically got around 4 hours for the same type of work.

I did spend about 2 hours optimising for battery when I got the laptop, but it was a once-off thing.

[CarVac]

I guess this all depends on your dependence on mobile hardware.

Bluetooth? I don't even use it. Battery life? I'm on a desktop.

[amelius]

It's a good idea to research any components for compatibility before buying them.

It's true that Linux won't run with all hardware, but this is even more true for MacOS ;)

[sombremesa]

I find that many people who say things like this have never actually tried to boost their productivity on Mac in the first place. As someone who uses Alfred, Karabiner Elements, Keyboard Maestro, Spectacle, Omnifocus, and a host of plugins on fish shell besides, it baffles me how slow my peers are at doing basic stuff they do twenty times a day. Just set up a shortcut, it's trivial.

Not so trivial on Linux. The fact that the author considers Firefox add-ons (!) a Linux feature is a clear indicator they never even tried on a Mac and were enamored by Linux due to the lionisation in the particular subreddits they follow.

Kind of like here! Not that there is anything wrong with getting excited about something. Just don't make sweeping generalizations.

Also, a small tip: You can put your Mac apps and configurations in Dropbox and they will show up and work as you expect across your multiple machines.

[gingerlime]

One thing I sorely miss after switching from Linux to Mac is i3. Spetactle gets close, but something as trivial(?) as switching window focus with the keyboard I couldn't figure out a solution for... Can Keyboard Maestro do it?

[least]

I personally use Contexts (https://contexts.co) for switching between applications. It functions similar to rofi's application switcher (fuzzy keyboard driven switching).

There are a couple of automatic tiling window managers for MacOS, the most notable being Yabai (https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai) and Amethyst (https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst).

Yabai doesn't handle window switching on its own but it can use SKHD (https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd) or any other application that can bind terminal commands to keyboard shortcuts such as Hammerspoon (https://www.hammerspoon.org) or BetterTouchTool (https://folivora.ai) or even Keyboard Maestro. The commands are context-aware of spaces and the placement of windows on the x-y plane so you can move between windows relative to their position on the screen.

[IggleSniggle]

I haven’t used i3, but I missed good keyboard context switching support when I started using macOS. There’s some reasonable solutions out there, but my current favorite interface customizer is BetterTouchTool, which is setup to let you customize any input for any kind of OS function you might want. I have a 4-monitor setup so easy window/tile management is important to me. I have a handful of keyboard chords to put windows on the screen/quadrant combo that I want. My TouchBar is permanently set to media keys with media info + notification area + emoji keyboard. For keyboard control over focus, I use the Contexts app inter-app and ShortCat within app.

[sombremesa]

Depends on your use-case. KM comes with an app-switcher out of the box that looks like this and can be controlled via Keyboard:

https://puu.sh/E9qyC/cdbeb9ce4c.png

On another note, highly recommend Puush (https://puush.me/) for instantly taking and sharing screenshots without having to manually upload.

Anyhow, you're more likely looking for something like Amethyst.

https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

[tqkxzugoaupvwqr]

Switching between windows of the same application:

https://superuser.com/questions/299241/in-mac-os-what-is-the...

[slifin]

I agree with your premise, I'd suggest Yabai if you're curious about getting the productivity of a power user on Linux using something like i3

[coldtea]

I find the opposite (and I've used Linux since 1997, plus several other unices starting from Sun OS).

Things tend to just work on the Mac, even though I use it for a wide variety of tasks (programming mainly, writing, music, and video secondarily, plus some photo work). Music and Video (DAWs and NLEs) are almost a joke in Linux.

You have to be cautious to buy compatible laptop hardware, and still there's always something not working on new setups, usually sleep, sound, GPU compositor, bluetooth, etc.

[chipotle_coyote]

Things tend to just work on the Mac, even though I use it for a wide variety of tasks (programming mainly, writing, music, and video secondarily, plus some photo work).

I'm pretty sure that would be my problem if I tried to move (back to) Linux. A lot of the HN crowd is (understandably!) focused on development, and the chances are your favorite dev environment is going to be good-or-better on Linux as it is on the Mac. But I can't find a screenplay writing program on Linux I personally like as much as Highland for the Mac, or a Markdown editor that I like as much as iA Writer or BBEdit for the "heavy lifting" of technical writing at work, or a graphics editor I like as much as Acorn, or a Twitter client I like as much as Twitterrific, or a Markdown previewer/converter I like as much as Marked, and and and. I know it's all subjective, but it's a sticking point. And the last I checked, at least, I couldn't find good equivalents to OS X Services/Quick Actions, which can be just amazing.

I'm sure if Apple really tanks, I could make the switch and hit a happy place, but it'd be turbulent for a while.

[pjmlp]

> I'm pretty sure that would be my problem if I tried to move (back to) Linux. A lot of the HN crowd is (understandably!) focused on development, and the chances are your favorite dev environment is going to be good-or-better on Linux as it is on the Mac.

Those of us into graphics programming, UI/UX are better served with macOS/Windows tooling, development enviroments and SDKs.

That is what triggered my move back into those platforms.

[chipotle_coyote]

Those of us into graphics programming, UI/UX are better served with macOS/Windows tooling, development enviroments and SDKs.

That's been my observation and occasional experience. I'm more of a technical writer these days, but I've done light graphics and UX work at various points over the years and prefer what's available on the Mac. (My experience on Windows is pretty limited.)

[pjmlp]

For some reason I wrote macOS/Windows and not only Windows.

Also note that not every country is enamoured with Apple price levels, hence Windows for software that runs on both.

Then there are the games console SDKs, DirectX, high performance graphics with SLI cards, e-gaming, ...

[panpanna]

> You have to be cautious to buy compatible laptop hardware, and still there's always something not working on new setups, usually sleep, sound, GPU compositor, bluetooth, etc.

Technically, there are more 100% Linux compatible laptops than macos dito...

That is true even if you limit yourself to thinkpads

[jdsampayo]

It also works excellent on low quality gear, I have some Point of Sales with very old computers, they just need internet, a browser and a thermal printer.

Installed Xubuntu and forgot about those for years, the experience is still smooth, fast and the computers turn-on fast.

[holografix]

“Things just work in Linux” - please do share this magical setup you have because my experience over the last 20 years is that nothing just works. MacOS mostly works, Windows sometimes works, Linux never works.

[bsder]

I'm actually being driven to Linux by the absolute crappiness of Windows 10 and OS X. Oh, how the wheel turns ...

> Windows sometimes works

I'm going to take exception to this. Windows 10 has been a disaster for me.

Effectively, Windows 10 treats me like a "supplicant". "Oh, great computer, can you please do some work for me right now?" "I say NAY! I must now commence my Update Ritual. Please come back and ask again. But I make no guarantees."

Every ... single ... time. WTF!

> MacOS mostly works

Unless you want to do modern graphics and then you get the "joy" of learning Metal (or not). Or, you can simply throw in the towel and switch to Windows/Linux where you can use OpenGL and Vulkan. Valve is funding MoltenVK (a Vulkan shim on top of Metal) because it is more cost effective than dealing with Metal. Let that sink in for a minute.

And OS X hardware is a disaster. We've actually stockpiled used-2015 era OS X laptops in the office. At this point we have enough if someone has a laptop that goes down.

[squiggleblaz]

I didn't use Windows XP or anything since. I'm now using Windows 10 due to a work situation. But seriously. The Update Ritual happens out-of-ours when you're not using your computer. It seems to take a few days longer than it needs to (why not do it tonight? why must you ask me for days and days, and then finally do it overnight?). But it's generally quite reasonable.

I don't fully understand why Linux is able to do its system updates as one of several tasks, but Windows has to take over the computer to do it though. Is it just that if a Linux box gets stuffed during update, the user is probably able to recover, so the relative risks are different?

[ben-schaaf]

I've never had a minor update on Linux break the entire graphics stack like osx 10.14.4 did. And I've certainly never waited month(s) for a major breakage to be fixed. For an ecosystem with the smallest variety of hardware, they sure are bad at supporting it...

[systemtest]

Upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 broke my graphics stack. I couldn't even log on. The only option was to roll back to a snapshot of the previous system. The problem was acknowledged but not deemed important.

[amelius]

Unfortunately, as Apple tries to integrate more and more of the supply chain, and other computer-makers are copying Apple's business model, I predict that generic computers (the ones you install Linux on) will slowly disappear from the market.

[ekianjo]

> I predict that generic computers (the ones you install Linux on) will slowly disappear from the market.

It seems the be going the opposite way, since by far and large there's more offering hardware wise than there has ever been, so what you see is manufacturers catering to niches more than before.

[pjmlp]

Here in Germany, the majority of DIY PC shops have died or are connected to the machine selling parts over the Internet.

Everyone just buys laptops with pre-installed OSes, phones and tablets.

Most parts shops are now targeting the Maker movement, aka Arduino, Raspberry and friends and even gamers prefer solutions like Asus Republic of Gamers series.

So actually it looks like the return of the vertical integration of 8 and 16 bit home markets of yore.

[MegaDeKay]

Agree with vbezhenar that Apple doesn't really budge the needle to make this happen. And then you have vendors like Dell that are specifically catering to the Linux market.

https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/dell-laptops-netbooks-and-ta...

[amelius]

Yes, but what prevents Dell from becoming more like Apple, e.g. by installing vendor lock-in features at the BIOS level, or work with Intel to install such features at the CPU level.

Also, you can buy a GPU but in some ways it is locked down (by NVidia), so as technology progresses we might be moving away from the "generically useful computer" model.

[MegaDeKay]

Because competition. It would only limit their market, not increase it. Dell competes with other laptop vendors in this "generic" market vs. the lock Apple has on their OS. And do you really think Intel would work with one specific vendor in this space to given them exclusive CPU features that nobody else would get?

NVidia has always been locked down so that is not news. If you are concerned about the GPU, buy AMD and enjoy their open drivers. Intel is entering this space too with open drivers as well. And who knows, perhaps NVidia might be opening up a bit after all vs. going the other way?

https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-doc

[pjmlp]

Android, ChromeOS and the now gone netbook market, show what happens when each OEM delivers their own Linux derived flavour.

[snypox]

Why is Android included?

[acomjean]

I always wonder where apple is going to proprietary hardware. For example the “t2” chip, which seems to be a “computer in a computer” and only Apple. I suspect other hardware manufacturers just want windows to work for the most part.

From Wikipedia “Thge Apple T2 chip is a SoC from Apple first released in the iMac Pro 2017. It is a 64-bit ARMv8 chip (a variant of the A10, or T8010), and runs a separate operating system called bridgeOS 2.0,[95] which is a watchOS derivative.[96] It provides a secure enclave for encrypted keys, gives users the ability to lock down the computer's boot process, handles system functions like the camera and audio control, and handles on-the-fly encryption and decryption for the solid-state drive.[97][98][99]”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple-designed_processors

[panpanna]

There are similar things in PC land and most of the time they can be disabled.

Things do not look as good in mobile space (mainly thanks to Qualcomm)

[pw6hv]

I am not sure this is true. I believe that generic computers will be in the market until there will be people willing to buy them.

[comex]

“Generic computers” were never a thing. For decades, every computer shipped with Windows, the drivers were for Windows, the hardware was only tested on Windows, and to make it work, Linux would usually have to pretend to be Windows (e.g. when evaluating ACPI). Except for Macs, which were the same but with macOS. Most hardware was not documented. If Linux support existed, it was thanks to the work of reverse engineers; it often didn’t exist. If you bought a random laptop, you could expect some of the hardware to be unsupported.

These days… I’d say things aren’t all that different. On one hand, Linux has better hardware support overall, and Dell and some smaller manufacturers are offering Linux laptops. On the other, a lot of hardware still doesn’t work, or doesn’t work well. Some laptops have been getting more custom hardware, including Apple’s and others, and Linux has fallen behind a bit in supporting it. But it’s nothing new for Linux to take time to support new hardware.

[vbezhenar]

Apple's market share is tiny. They don't have any significant influence on generic computers. I don't really see other vendors following Apple's model. I still can build PC from different parts, like 20 years ago and it just works. While I did not closely followed non-Apple laptops, I believe that they are the same, just ordinary computers with ordinary parts which can run Linux just fine, if drivers are implemented. Glued batteries and welded SSDs are cancer, yeah, but that's more about overall quality of the product, rather than restricting Linux to run. There are enough "Enterprise" laptops which you can disassemble with screwdriver and they are not going anywhere because enough people understand their value.

[aduitsis]

Isn't it a bit harsh to say that the company that practically shaped the very form of modern computers doesn't have any significant influence?

[amelius]

Well, I still can't install Linux on a phone. This tells me than once freedoms are lost, they don't easily come back and as we get new technology, it doesn't necessarily allow to run Linux.

[weiming]

What are some of those things? (Curious question, haven't thought of switching yet but could try if it's worth it.)

[aquova]

I'm curious to this as well. I recently got a desktop computer to supplement my MacBook, and am now using Ubuntu as my more-or-less primary OS. I'm quite enjoying it, but I certainly wouldn't claim that it works better out of the box than MacOS. Perhaps it's because I've used Mac for so long, but I can't think of anything that I find difficult to set up. Ubuntu on the other hand has several issue that I've just sort of ignore - keybindings don't always work, you can't drag to/from the Desktop for some reason, some startup programs don't always run, little things like that.

[microtonal]

> I'm curious to this as well. I recently got a desktop computer to supplement my MacBook, and am now using Ubuntu as my more-or-less primary OS.

I have used macOS as my primary OS from 2007 to ~2017 (before that BSD and Linux). I am now mostly back on Linux, though I also have a MacBook Pro that I use every now and then. Primary reasons for switching back to Linux:

* MacBook hardware limitations: too few ports, keyboard problems, expensive upgrades.

* Competitive hardware prices for Linux. I got a NUC8i5, which was somewhere between 300-400 Euro and has the same quad core CPU as my 2000 MacBook Pro. I added a 500GB SSD I had lying around and 16GB RAM. I have more resources for a fraction of the price, and can always bump up the SSD or memory relatively cheaply.

* Nix. There is package/system management before and after Nix. I actually started with Nix on macOS, but being able to manage your whole system declaratively is awesome.

* The subscription disease on macOS. I am fine with buying good applications. Overall I have probably spent thousands of Euros on licenses for macOS software. But I will not use an application with a subscription model. Period. [1] It transfers a huge amount of control from me to the software vendor. Unfortunately, more and more macOS applications are switching to subscriptions.

* Linux is generally faster than macOS.

There are also things that I like about macOS: Apple's strong push for security (including sandboxing of applications, T2, etc.), fewer issues with drivers and random paper cuts, better support for hardware decoding throughout applications, traditionally strong 3rd-party applications (OmniGraffle, Little Snitch, LaunchBar/Alfred, Things, OmniFocus, etc.), integration through AirPlay, handover, et al.

[1] Admittedly, there is one exception: 1Password, we like using it for password sharing and arguably, you are paying for a cloud service.

[eof]

Are you a developer?

I think the productivity aspect would only be true in that case, as the things that “just work” are (for me) external libraries, GitHub readmes, sdk examples, etc.

[mrozel]

Yes and I agree that is the case. Came from DevOps, so Linux still feels natural. Though I use it for everything now from developing, image/video editing, browsing. Literally, I feel like the only thing I can't do is IOS development.

[StavrosK]

As a developer and hobbyist photographer and maker, I'm between two worlds. Linux is perfect for development but nothing Adobe or Autodesk runs on it, which is extremely frustrating. I don't even have to reboot to game, but I do need to reboot to edit a photo.

[mroche]

> Linux is perfect for development but nothing Adobe or Autodesk runs on it, which is extremely frustrating.

True for Adobe, technically false for Autodesk if you aren’t in CAD. Maya and MotionBuilder (acquired from Alias in mid 2000s) run on Linux for the film/VFX industry.

Though to be fair, I’m pretty sure they are the only applications in AD’s entire portfolio that run on Linux, and it wasn’t because of them.

[pjmlp]

Being a developer does not equate with UNIX.

Plenty of us are developers in other platforms.

[mrozel]

Docker has been my biggest gripe lately but admittedly has gotten better.

Update environment. MacOS requires reboots and nags you constantly until you do. Whereas, apt and dnf are simple and can be automated in the background.

Doing anything 'interesting' requires you to reboot and fiddle with the firmware. Where linux sudo works as expected.

Outdated software due to licensing issues. See GPL and bash. Not to mention you will be much closer to a production environment and you will find less bugs developing due to differences in OS.

Lots more but this is a good start. All of these things are small and mostly can be worked around but they add up I'm a big way.

The road on Linux isn't completely rosy and can take more learning if you need to do anything really complicated. Tools are great but not necessarily pretty, etc.

[filleduchaos]

This seems rather uncharitable.

Docker [was] off on macOS through no fault of the OS. Particular software dev teams taking shortcuts is on themselves.

Linux also requires reboots for certain updates (plus you can disable checks for updates entirely and run one only when you want to on macOS, or even use `softwareupdate` for finer-grained control, so if it was "nagging you constantly" that's kind of on you).

`sudo` works "as expected" for everything that doesn't involve conflict with the built-in System Integrity Protection, which is most things (in the past three or so years on macOS I've only run up against it twice). There isn't any "fiddling with firmware" going on. Plus if you want total freedom to delete your entire `/bin` folder or something, again you can disable SIP and move on with your life.

I'm currently running Bash 5 on my MBP, so I don't get your outdated software complaint either. macOS doesn't have any magical power to force you to use the versions of (third-party!) software it ships with.

If these are the first complaints that come to mind it just sounds like you haven't used the OS much and entirely refused to explore it or give it a chance in the time that you did. I mean, not even trying to set your own update preferences?

[gattilorenz]

> Doing anything 'interesting' requires you to reboot and fiddle with the firmware. Where linux sudo works as expected.

If you mean SIP, can't you just disable it for good? Then you should be in a situation similar to Linux.

[danShumway]

There are a few low-hanging improvements (updates almost never require you to restart). But it's a lot of tiny things that add up, some of which are hard to put into words. If I had to pick one thing that encompassed a lot of them, it would be that when I use Mac I feel like I'm adjusting my work-style to what Apple thinks it should be. In other words, my Linux setup now feels like it's a professional tool, and the Mac I use for work feels like a consumer-grade OS that happens to have work tools bundled on it.

This is hard to put into words. If I'm an artist, my tools are very, very focused and robust. I might have specific pens and brushes that I know the feel of very well. They're not flashy and they don't have advertisements written on them, and they don't change their properties behind my back. Everything about them is designed to help me draw. If I'm a musician, I spend a lot of money to buy an instrument, and I get to know it very well. I have particular brands of reeds that are consistent that I'm likely preparing or sanding myself. I know my instrument so well that I can tell you which notes trend slightly flat or sharp, and after a while adjusting to that becomes instinctive.

So if I'm a professional programmer, I likewise want a computing environment that I understand completely and can service myself, and that is very customized to my own preferences. It's no different from any other professional field -- the point of the computer is to help me get work done, everything else is secondary.

You'll get different answers if you ask someone why Linux makes them productive, because the benefit of Linux is that it adapts to you. For me, personally, the biggest upgrades to my productivity have been:

1. Switching to Linux in general

2. Switching to Emacs/Spacemacs (Emacs works best on Linux)

3. Switching to Arch as my main distro (which is hard to do unless you already know Linux)

4. Most recently, switching to EXWM as a window manager (which is a lot easier to do on Arch)

Each step of this process has been me getting rid of things that distract me from work, and each step has built on the last. Switching to Linux gives me a setup that is much more customizable and stable, switching to Emacs gives me an editor that is very tightly integrated into the host operating system, switching to Arch allows me to have a very minimal setup (its easier to debug because there's less going on), and switching to EXWM allows me to focus the entire setup on work.

On the other hand, I have an old Surface Pro 3 that's running Manjaro/Gnome that I use for drawing. It's a very different setup from my main computer, because I use it for different things. Again, my computer should adapt to my workflow, not the other way around. The Surface setup is actually interesting, because it suffers from driver issues (unreliable Wifi, bad suspend support). And yet I'm still more productive on it than I was on Windows. I think people underestimate how much time and energy can get lost to distractions, surprise updates, stuff like that. Specialized devices are really stinking good for getting stuff done.

But everyone is different. I know people that get frustrated by the initial setup times or needing to dig more into the OS internals, and I get that -- it's reasonable. For me, once I got past that I found Linux to be really stable, because it doesn't change until you tell it to. Linux is the only OS I'll set up for someone who's not tech-savy, because putting in more work up front means I won't need to do as much regular maintenance.

[microtonal]

> 2. Switching to Emacs/Spacemacs (Emacs works best on Linux)

Just to echo this: Magit (Emacs git client) alone has given me a large boost in productivity.

[danShumway]

I didn't want to go into details there, but Magit is wildly good. Line-by-line git-blame an entire file with 3 keystrokes, time travel back-and-forth over commits for a single file, quickly preview any file in the repo from any branch/commit using fuzzy-search. This kind of stuff really shines when you're working on a large company repo -- it meant if someone from another department called me up to talk about some obscure feature branch, I could open the relevant files without switching branches or stashing my current changes.

Aside from Magit, I also get a lot of use out of Org-mode (Emacs pure-text notetaking/todo-list client). I'm syncing to Android with Orgzly. Org-mode was the original feature that got me to try out Emacs, and for a while it was the biggest reason I stuck with it, since I'd never used Vim keybindings before. Vim keybindings made me less productive until I learned them, but were balanced by just how good Org-mode was.

I've even grown to appreciate packages like Calc (Emacs calculator). Dang if RPN style input isn't actually faster to use once you get used to it.

[sooheon]

I use and appreciate all of these tools on MacOS, FWIW.

[danShumway]

I do as well. If you're on Mac, you should still totally look into Emacs, it's great. Heck, if you're on Windows you should still at least think about Emacs.

Emacs overall works slightly better on Linux, because it's primarily optimized for that system. One big area where you'll notice that is if you start embedding X windows into buffers. EXWM is definitely not something I'd try to set up on Mac.

If you're not trying to do stuff like that, then Emacs on Mac is fine. I use a Mac at work and Emacs is a big productivity boost.

[spookybones]

How is pen support for your Surface using Manjaro? Is it as good as it is on Windows (which is decent at best). I have a Surface 3 sitting around. I would love to repurpose it for drawing using Linux. I imagine battery life is probably terrible though.

[danShumway]

Pen support is great, touch support is adequate, HDPI support is bad. Most of this comes down to individual apps -- Linux devs just don't think about touch or responsive design, and the frameworks they use are buggy or need config options set. Occasionally on Krita I'll get issues where I'll need to hit the tablet home to jump out of the app and back in to reset the touch "mode" that the app thinks I'm in. Kind of annoying.

I would say that it is not nearly as good as the touch support in Windows 8.1, but is comparable or potentially a little better than the touch support in Windows 10. Gnome's touch UI is good, but that's more just a testament to how much worse touch support got in Windows 10.

Krita is not amazing, but is still surprisingly good. When I first started using it, Krita was a massive pain and I missed Clip Studio all the time. It's gotten way, way better, and I now only rarely miss Clip Studio.

I'm honestly not sure what battery life is like. I will regularly use it for about 4-5 hours a day unplugged, but usually I'm at a desk and everything I own is plugged in. I still have Windows 10 on an old partition just to make it easier to calibrate the pen hardware (https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/downloads/W0009338), but I've never taken the time to compare the battery life for both.

It was kind of a pain to get everything set up, but that was years ago, and now that it is set up I just don't think about it any more. I'm very happy with its performance as a drawing tablet; at least for the type of illustration work I personally do. If you're comfortable with Linux, I'd say go for it. If not, you're probably better off with a Wacom tablet that won't force you to fight with Linux drivers.

[spookybones]

Thanks. Yeah, I'm not super comfortable with Linux, but agree with your mindset. I want a professional tool that works for me without constantly demanding updates. I also dabble in Clip Studio, primarily for comic inking. I really like it. It was unfortunate to see it go to a subscription model for iOS.

[exadeci]

To start on a new laptop in an office on OSX I just list my brew packages on my previous laptop, copy my ~/ and move that to the new laptop and I'm set up in the time it takes for it to install all my brew packages and casks.