This is the second in my series on finding an alternative to Mac OS X. Part 1 was about
evaluating 13 alternative operating systems and then choosing one to use full
time. The selected OS was elementary OS. The motivation for this change is to
get access to better hardware since Apple is neglecting the Mac
lineup.If video is more your style I gave a short (10 min) talk
at work on my adventures with Linux that covers the core content of this
post.
This impromptu series is a great read. It’s positive, focused on solutions instead of complaints, and is an honest effort to expand horizons and try out new and different (to the author) approaches to using his computer.
Thanks for the share. Long time reader of the site. Nice to see one of my own posts show up when I was looking through my RSS reader this morning. 🙂
The disclosure of your bias toward Unix-style under-pinning is appreciated.
Given this, the Haiku community should be rather pleased that Haiku was considered in the first stage evaluation. It is quite interesting to note that Haiku was the only operating system looked at which was not directly or indirectly descending from Unix.
If you did not read it in the past, the article “Tales of a BeOS Refuges” ( https://birdhouse.org/beos/refugee/ ) by Scot Hacker soon after the demise of Be Inc., may still be relevant – from an user perspective.
Thanks for the link. I read the first couple of sections — great stuff. Will read the rest when I get home.
Hey look…OSNews is turning into Slashdot circa 1990’s. Why not promote BeOS like OSNews used to.
– being typed on a new macbook pro which is damn good.
Hey! I’ve got a new Macbook Pro, too!
Not the new-new one. Mid-2015 model, but bought it about two weeks ago, and I rather like it.
Edited 2017-01-31 03:10 UTC
And it’s called Windows (in my opinion). I’ve been working as a embedded Linux developer the last ten years, and I love it as a developer platform (the tools are unbeatable). But as a day to day platform, it’s frustrating. There are still problems with graphics drivers (forget switching GPUs on the fly), touch screen support isn’t that good (although GNOME 3 tries to work on it), touch pad support is worse than in Windows these days, and the constant software changes are mildly speaking a waste of my time (which I have less and less of as older I get).
Equip Windows with Qt Creator, MinGW, Bash, git, Emacs, and a few more tools, and end up with something quite *nix-like. I just want stuff to work with the minimal amount of tinkering, and Linux just isn’t there yet (and it’ll never be). I guess I found it more fun and useful when I had more time on my hands.
Sounds like a lot of tinkering to me…
I document everything installed when I want to install a new version of linuxmint. I need to do that once every 4 years. I never minded that it was a few hours work.
(Sidenote: I must confess that I play League of Legends on the Macbook from my work. I just was not able to get it working on one of my linux machines, with playonlinux or equivalent)
As long as the computer is used for software development there will unfortunately always be some tinkering to do, but it’s far easier to install those applications onto a Windows machine, than it is to get the finger print reader, multi-gesture touch input etc to work in Linux. I sacrifice some customizability and software tinkering freedom for less hardware hassle. Not everyone will agree though, but we’re all free to use what we want.
Must depend on what type of development you do. I’ve always worked on c++ scientific applications using mostly c++ with vim/vi remotely through ssh and I find windows to be epically frustrating to deal with, especially for getting packages to work without fiddling. And I can’t live without good fast flipping virtual desktop support.
Nothing quite beats ‘apt install <package>’ and have everything working…
Seriously trying to track down all the packages you need to get Windows into a workable developer station is far more time consuming then to tweak some config files to fix your set up. Depending on which distribution you use (I’m a Debian guy myself), then most of the hardware will work straight out of the box. Even my touchscreen on my laptop works flawlessly, though admittedly Firefox still doesn’t tap into libinput so it doesn’t work like Epiphany does as far as scrolling with the touch screen goes. But there is an addon that fixes that.
Heh. It’s weird that we can do this on Windows now.
Maybe not quite “everything working”, of course, but surprisingly close.
Of course those would be Ubuntu packages, which some while mostly are just rebuilt from Debian, some of them have funky patches.
Also, pretty sure you can’t replace Windows 10’s UI with KDE or Gnome.
Not Gnome, but believe it or not, you actually can replace the Windows shell with KDE4.
I wouldn’t recommend it – it was unstable 2 1/2 years ago, and there hasn’t been a lot of progress since then, but it does technically work, if you were so inclined.
I feel dirty just typing that.
Also, it isn’t done via WSL, so your Ubuntu KDE apps won’t work as-is. You might be able to hack WSL to run KDE, though.
I appreciate the article, I think there are some devs leaving the Mac platform, but I don’t think many will do what the author has done here. I, like many Mac users I know, used a Mac for many years because it was the most simple, intuitive and productive platform to use. It requires little to no tinkering at all, just plug it in and start working. It’s why I used a one for 9 years.
But since then I have left Mac and am now using Windows 10 Pro. I rather like it. I built my own rig a few months ago, the performance is amazing, and the stability and performance of Windows these days is incredible. No tinkering needed, and it doesn’t get in my way at all.
Linux is just too much work for me, I would rather spend my time coding or gaming to be honest.
Edited 2017-02-01 14:21 UTC
[q]But since then I have left Mac and am now using Windows 10 Pro. I rather like it. I built my own rig a few months ago, the performance is amazing, and the stability and performance of Windows these days is incredible. No tinkering needed, and it doesn’t get in my way at all.
Forgot to update to 1607, did you? Since then, Cortana will not stop bugging me no matter how many times I shut it completely off. That’s the very definition of getting in my way.
The software churn depends on the distro, and it sounds like you should buy into the RedHat ecosystem. RHEL/CentOS/SL are very stable; they’re stable to the point people complain about it being too stable.
It’s doing Unix-like things on Windows one of the CIA’s advanced interrogation techniques? It’s seriously painful. Git on Windows alone is enough to be considered a inhumane, and it should be outlawed by international conventions.
For me, stuff working with a minimal amount of tinkering is Linux. MacOS isn’t as good, but it’s at least passable, unlike Windows.
MacOS pretty much needs brew installed, which basically just makes it more Linux like anyhow…
I think it has to do with people ignoring the warts of whichever platform they are more comfortable with.
E.g. as development platforms, both MacOS and windows take a far longer to get set up, than Ubuntu for example. Case in point, the previous poster talking about Windows; The solution he’s proposing takes literally orders of magnitude more time and effort, than the couple of scripts and web searches to get the stuff, he’s complaining about, working on linux. But since he’s used to windows, that level of effort is perfectly acceptable.
Same thing applies to linux fans trying to shoehorn their system into things that OSX or Windows are better suited for.
Edited 2017-02-01 02:25 UTC
1, 10, or 500, they’re all just Unix variants with Linux software. Truly doesn’t matter how many you try since it always goes back to command line maintenance and software repositories, or build the software yourself. The advice of the general public on these Linux variants, “after 2 weeks you’ll get tired of it and go back to Windows.” No matter how many variants there are, none of them solve the problem of making things just work.
The work of private Companies is to create loyalty and commitment. Like Suse, Redhat. Should start by those. Don’t go that way if not existing a resolution to actually learn computing.
I did this years ago to replace my Windows environment. I went to RedHat, then Ubuntu, and pretty much stayed there (before Unity – which I despise).
I had a similar experience with constantly having to update things, and find workarounds. For about a year – it ended up being far too time consuming to stick with it – and it couldn’t play games or Adobe software, which I needed since clients kept sending me stuff in Adobe formats.
Ultimately I ended up going back to Windows for a while, and now OSX. OS X seems to require the least amount of constant figiting. Linux is too much – and Windows is somewhere in between (and I think it’s gotten worse with Windows 10, which just feels disjointed and slow compared with Windows 7 or even Windows 8).
Apple hasn’t prioritized hardware evolution and has overpriced their wares (or maybe stuffed too many expensive components in without offering a version without said expensive components – I’m talking about a 15″ MBP without a touchbar). But I’ll probably stick around for the foreseeable future (and probably run hackintosh on my next desktop anyway.)
Now if I could just take my eyes off the train wreck that is Donald Trump and get productive again…