[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".