Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kvz 2431 days ago
Author here. Agreed, macOS is much quicker to get going. Although if you'd really log all the `brew`s and UI interactions that made your machine yours, it'd still be a long post too : )

But again, if this post is signaling to you: Ubuntu is still no macOS. Then that's exactly what my experience is like. That said, I'm productive on it, and there's things to like even so.
1 comments
laumars 2431 days ago
> Agreed, macOS is much quicker to get going

It really depends on what you're preferences are. The author is customising Ubuntu to behave like macOS, so naturally it will take longer. I have the opposite problem where I've spent hours in total configuring macOS to be more Linux-like and it's keyboard controls are still not quite "right", CLI isn't quite "right", etc. It's still a nice OS to run but it will never behave quite like the my personal preferred platform.

However I'm not saying one OS is better nor worse than the other, just that the level of personalisation on modern OSs will always depend more on the person than the OS.

link
Fnoord 2431 days ago
Why does it have to be one or the other? Speaking for myself, I believe I try to create more coherent experience on different OSes, so that the switching is less severe. This is true regardless of OS, but the modifications are just different. When I share my experience with my OSes, this is where I am coming from, but it is unrealistic for the rest of the world (due to my modifications).

We should, IMO, take into account the default user experience. How is that? Sure, you can install WSL and Bash on Windows but by default you have a different CLI. How is that CLI? The reviewer went with Ubuntu because that is the most popular Linux desktop with a healthy community, yet at the same time considered NixOS [1]. At the same time, they're making all kind of modifications which makes it very personal and unique but also less useful. As a blister, they're sharing their modifications (with comments) which is nice.

Whenever I use a VM in macOS (usually Kali) I also am running with hacks in macOS to make copy/paste work seemless in the VM. Because from Linux, I can't expect it to work. But that is also why this review is useful: you can try to run a VM on Linux, and see if you can modify it to a more Mac-like experience. If that works for you, perhaps running macOS on your laptop and Linux on your desktop works out. Because for something like a desktop, I find it silly to shell out so much for so little (iMac, Mac Pro) given you can build a powerful workstation for very little amount of money (I just did that with the latest Ryzen series).

[1] I'm currently trying to find time to install NixOS on a separate partition and giving it a whirl to replace Ubuntu 19.10.

link
laumars 2431 days ago
Sorry but I'm rather confused about the point you're address because your opening sentence is a disagreement to my post yet the rest of your content is anecdote where you reiterate the same points I was making. Obviously you're welcome to disagree with me but I can't tell what it is you are disagreeing with.
link
Fnoord 2431 days ago
Sorry, I did not quote properly. I was replying to this specific part:

> The author is customising Ubuntu to behave like macOS, so naturally it will take longer. I have the opposite problem where I've spent hours in total configuring macOS to be more Linux-like and it's keyboard controls are still not quite "right", CLI isn't quite "right", etc.

I could've summed it up as follows: reviews like these are in-depth but specific, while generic out of box experience applies to all but lacks for power users.

As an example, macOS does not come by default with a package manager, it nowadays has Zsh as default shell, and does not ship with Python anymore.

link