Linux vs. Mac | WingNews

[+] dgan|3 years ago|reply

Funny, I just found a new job where I got a MacBook Pro for the first time in my life, M2 chip. I am Linux user for 7 years now, and I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed + XFCE + NVIDIA card, and I literally have 0 problems with it for 2 last years

Opinion on Mac book after using it for barely 3 weeks:

Excellent:

- battery life

- sound

sucks, out of top of my head:

- when you press Enter it wants to rename a file (?? lol)

- terminal hotkeys don't always work (Ctrl + back doesn't delete a word...)

- "fn" is the most left key... instead of control...

- windows management is trash, i cant "magnet" to borders of the screen

- I wasn't able to plug a LG usb mouse (?? apparently I need a tutorial to plug a mouse)

- hotkeys in Pycharm/Intellij are different and not interchangeable

- brew is not as good as zypper

- need to use AppleStore for some applications

- when installing applications they don't seem to be available in terminal ...

[+] ShrimpHawk|3 years ago|reply

Use Rectangle[1] for magnet snapping window management. For almost every mac complaint there exists a tool to solve it.

[1]https://rectangleapp.com/

[+] rcarmo|3 years ago|reply

- the enter command in Finder is a UI convention. Some Linux DEs have a similar one in their file managers.

- the OS uses Emacs key bindings throughout in standard input fields. Try it.

- Search for “Magnet” or, if you’re a tiling person, “Amethyst”

- Mice just work. You may get a dialog for weird HID devices, but I don’t get why you mention a tutorial

- hot keys are configurable in every single application - check the system preferences.

- brew is not the only option, you can also look into MacPorts (but I wouldn’t recommend it)

- there is an “open” CLI command that you can use for to invoke non-CLI apps that do not register themselves in PATH. Use “man open”.

Also, look into native CLI tools like sips, etc. There is a lot of CLI goodness in macOS that impatient people overlook.

[+] ngai_aku|3 years ago|reply

> terminal hotkeys don't always work (Ctrl + back doesn't delete a word...)

Don’t you want M-DEL? Terminal (actually, all text fields in cocoa applications IIRC) use gnu readline commands.

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Readline-...

[+] rado|3 years ago|reply

Windows do snap to edges, maybe it’s too subtle to notice.

[+] mackwell|3 years ago|reply

Crash every 30 minutes on a clean install sounds like a hardware issue. In my experience an Ubuntu install is able to run continuously for long stretches without issue.

Whether you enjoy switching to Mac OS is going to depend on what you use your machine for. In general, for my main work machine I use Mac and I have very little to no downtime ever. However, much of the benefit of going Mac is gained if you go all in on the ecosystem across devices.

[+] TigerTeamX|3 years ago|reply

Yeah definitely weird and it didn't happen before. I am running a memtester as mongol suggested.

I really enjoy Linux and the freedom it gives me, but using 30 hours last month getting things to work so I can do work... is not how I want to spend my time.

[+] chrisfosterelli|3 years ago|reply

I switched from being a lifelong Linux user to being a Mac user. Nearly everything was better: 95%+ of the tools I use were the exact same, everything was just more usable and stable. The biggest draw was that I wasn't stuck with PC hardware anymore, which is nice because I really prefer Macbook hardware and most Linux OS's just don't work well enough with it for me. I'm a web developer though so YMMV depending on what you're doing for work, but for me I was able to bring vim, Chrome, zsh, and most linux commands, which covers the vast majority of my day.

The biggest drawback was that running FOSS was something I cared about and no longer doing so made me feel sad for a bit. The filesystem layout is slightly different but still UNIX-y and newer versions of MacOS don't let you put files wherever you want (which makes sense from a security perspective but is nonetheless an adjustment). I struggle to think of much more than that. The operating system just gets out of my way now and I appreciate that, and we still run Linux on all of our servers for everything so I've got that at least.

[+] unsupp0rted|3 years ago|reply

I’ve never encountered a warning about not putting files wherever I want. Where would you want to put files, say, outside your user’s home folder?

[+] aborsy|3 years ago|reply

Ubuntu works pretty good on laptop and desktop. I don’t recall any problems for years. The hardware support is excellent, but if occasionally something is not supported, there can be inconveniences. You should check if your distribution works on that laptop.

I won’t switch because I don’t trust a closed source black box with my life. I can understand what Linux does, and suitably lock it down and customize it.

I support FOSS, and Linux in particular. Freedom is amazing!

[+] jamesbvaughan|3 years ago|reply

I switched from a Linux laptop to a Macbook Pro for after about 5 years on Linux. The initial reason was that my last employer required us to use Macbooks.

I now have the option to use whatever computer I'd like and (for now at least) I'm still sticking with the Macbook. The main things that keep me on it are: - Excellent hardware. The build quality is higher than any non-Apple laptop I've tried and the display is really good. - Performance and battery usage with the Apple silicon chip is great. - iCloud sync. I use an iPhone and frequently make use of iMessage, photos, and clipboard syncing between devices. I know that you can replicate a lot of that with Android and Linux, but at this point I'm pretty deep in Apple's ecosystem and am unlikely to switch away anytime soon.

The biggest thing I miss is having a good tiling window manager experience. I have a desktop running Sway[0] and really love it. I've tried a handful of tiling window managers for mac and none of them have felt really good to use. They all feel like I'm fighting the OS more than working with it.

If there were a lightweight laptop with good linux compatibility, a high-dpi, high refresh rate display, and competitive battery life, I'd be very tempted to switch back to linux just to have a good window manager again. I'm hoping that Asahi on the MBP can give me that, but it seems like it's not quite ready for daily driving yet.

[0] https://swaywm.org/

[+] brucethemoose2|3 years ago|reply

Terrible windows laptops are just terrible laptops, but seeing my Asus G14 side by side next to a macbook pro doesn't really leave me wanting for anything.

Its about the same size. The screen, keyboard, trackpad... all comparable. It has more ports. The cooling system in the G14 blows the mac away, hence it can run passively and sip battery just piddling around the desktop.

The mac has 3 big advantages as far as I can tell:

- Power efficiency under heavy GPU/AI loads. If you even sniff the dGPU in a PC, you can kiss your battery goodby.

- A large RAM pool for GPU/AI stuff.

- No fussing around with different power settings/fan profiles for different situations.

As for the PC laptop

- It has a huge gaming advantage

-"native nvidia" is often easier for ML stuff.

Software differences are a whole other can of worms.

[+] rcarmo|3 years ago|reply

I’ve tried Amethyst and Phoenix (the former is completely scriptable), and they’re workable.

Here’s my list: https://taoofmac.com/space/apps/window_managers

You will never have the kind of control you have in Sway, but you can get really close.

[+] tsuujin|3 years ago|reply

I recently switched to using yabai for tiling windows on Mac. It is easily the best of the tools I have tried. Not without faults, and some things like dialog popups get treated weird, but it has overall made me happy.

[+] ofalkaed|3 years ago|reply

I have not used Macs in years but the one observation I would offer, a good amount of linux/OSS software seems to break when Apple updates the OS and it does not seem a good platform if you want to keep using such software. This observation is based off of the dozen or so projects I follow the development of (mostly audio related) so may not be at all accurate to the wider view and I just may have found one of the little niches where these problems are more common.

[+] blacksmith_tb|3 years ago|reply

Hmm, is this an AI response? How could Apple break linux sw?

I use four personal machines pretty frequently (a few hours, a few time a week), one Mac Mini, a recent all-AMD Asus laptop running Ubuntu 22.10, an old Dell laptop (with a discreet nVidia card) running Ubuntu 22.10, and a really old Toshiba ultrabook running Pop_OS! None of them break regularly, though the Asus (probably from being the newest) has a fingerprint sensor that has never quite worked right under Ubuntu. Other than the slowness and clunkiness of snaps, Ubuntu seems fine to me? Going forward I will probably stick to Pop, it seems a little better thought out than plain ol' Ubuntu, but the differences aren't night and day.

[+] kkoncevicius|3 years ago|reply

Bad:

- Inability to set up your /home/ (which is /Users/ on a mac) the way you like it. There are default folders for Documents, Pictures, Music, etc and they cannot be deleted. If you delete them they are recreated either immediately or on reboot. My hack-of-a-solution was to alias ls to hide them [1].

- There are also applications that you cannot delete. One such application is Chess - a program that let's you play chess. No idea why it's there by default and why it's impossible to delete it.

- .DS_Store files. Whenever you open a folder in a Finder (default file browser on a Mac) it will add a hidden .DS_Store file within that folder. This file stores and remembers how you chose to arrange your folders in a graphical file manager. But these files often get in a way: you will find them in tarballs, git repositories, etc. Just like with removing folders, I don't think there is a solution that can turn them off.

- Recent OS update made system-settings look like you are on a phone. Apple probably wants to push an interface for system settings that is common to iPads, iPhones, MacBooks and even Apple Watches, but for me it's hard to get used to that.

Good:

- Default Applications are quite tasteful. In particular the Mail client, and default Apple Terminal. They have everything I need without being full of toy features

- Stable. Both hardware and Software. My MacBook pro is 5 years old now, but I never had an issue with hangs, reboots, crashes or anything of this kind.

- Third-party package managers. Homebrew is more popular, but I prefer MacPorts. Whichever you choose, you can set up your system to use linux compilers, shells, coreutils, etc. By default Apple command line arsenal is a bit dated and opinionated so to me this is a must. Once you have this done the command-line experience is almost indistinguishable from Linux (well, apart from /home/ stuff and .DS_Store things).

[1]: http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/posts/cleaning_home_on_macos/i...

[+] rcarmo|3 years ago|reply

I honestly don’t think /Users is a problem (heck, I used time sharing systems where user homes were all over the place, and the original NeXT), but you can turn off .DS_Store creation on network media (I think there is an equivalent one for removable media, can’t find it now):

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool true

Also, check if dot_clean is in your system.

[+] TigerTeamX|3 years ago|reply

Thanks for the nice summary. What about user interface? I always felt MacOS clunky when I tried a Macbook. E.g. no sticky windows.

[+] unethical_ban|3 years ago|reply

Including games in a desktop OS is at least a 30 year habit. I am surprised that it's non removable in this age

[+] rich_sasha|3 years ago|reply

I love Linux, but oh my God it is so unstable for me. Updates crash things all the time. The whole Nvidia driver takes me days to sort out each time. Depending on segment, commercial software tends to be less available. You also need to know just so much low level stuff just to keep going. Wayland vs X, display managers, grub config... Too much for me.

Linux has many redeeming features but it can be a full time job just to keep it running. By contrast, Mac comes in one size and configurability is limited, but out of the box it just works.

[+] the_third_wave|3 years ago|reply

Weird, I've been using Linux since 1993 in one way or another, first together with OS/2, from 1996 exclusively and have not had any stability problems in the last decade or 2. I use somewhat older hardware - Thinkpad P50 and T42p, "late 2009" 27" iMac, DL380G7 under the stairs, a bunch of Core2Duo HP laptops plus a ragtag assembly of Raspberry Pi's - which may help but still... on the P50 I can switch between nVidia and the built-in Intel GPU without problems, on the iMac the Radeon driver works just fine, it works on the T42p as well but that thing is just too slow to make it worth the effort but it just has such a good screen and keyboard that I prefer to use it over more modern machines.

Linux-related maintenance time on all these machines is measured in minutes: sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade, wait a few seconds (gigabit fibre helps here), look through the list of updates, check that it doesn't want to remove something important on those machines which run Sid ("Debian unstable" - this problem does not occur on stable distributions) and let it rip. That's it.

Maybe try a different distribution? I'm using mostly Debian, there are a few machines running Mint, the Raspberries run whatever I happen to experiment with. On the server I'm running Proxmox with a flock of containers running Debian and a few VMs for things-not-Linux. Here, too, I have none of the problems you describe.

Try Debian?

[+] jillesvangurp|3 years ago|reply

The solution to that is using hardware that does not depend on proprietary drivers. If the kernel just supports your hardware out of the box, things get a lot easier.

I've been using Manjaro with a cheap Samsung laptop with an integrated Intel iris GPU for the last two years. Performance is not amazing but very usable. I hear AMD drivers are pretty OK and that's probably what I'd get if I needed more performance on Linux. The whole deal with Nivia sounds like it's just not a great experience. Manjaro is an Arch linux derivative so you need to be pretty hands on to fix things once in a while. That goes without saying.

Though I must say, I don't seem to have a need to fix a lot of things lately and I think the Arch approach of not trying to bend a lot of packages their way and just compiling them as is while keeping on top of upstream improvements, optimizations, etc. is doing a lot of good. Keeps things simple. If things break, they usually get fixed pretty rapidly too. The package manager actually takes btrfs snapshots when it runs. So, that makes trying out new stuff pretty safe.

Mostly stuff just works on Manjaro. Stability has been fine for me. Manjaro defaulted to Wayland when I installed it and I did not have to fix anything to get that working. Just worked out of the box. I had some issues with the Intel sound driver that seem to have resolved itself with kernel updates. Bluetooth is a bit of a mess on Linux sadly. Just very flaky. So, I tend to rely less on that.

I use snap (mostly) and flatpak for running all the usual suspects in terms of electron apps for various video call tools. Steam works great on Manjaro (the steam deck of course uses Arch Linux as well), and I use that for some light gaming on the laptop. And Darktable, which I use for photo editing. The latter two are of course what I'd like a faster GPU for.

I also have a mac for work and it's nice and fast. And while the M1 has a great GPU, a lot of the older Intel macbooks had even slower intel GPUs than my Samsung. And of course while the M1 GPU is fast, you can forget about running most Steam games on it. Darktable works on it but without hardware acceleration. So, there's that.

[+] TigerTeamX|3 years ago|reply

Yeah exactly! Especially the whole Wayland and Snap experience. It seems like it is not quite there - I understand the benefits but just not right there.

[+] redeeman|3 years ago|reply

could you describe a bit what you do that takes days to sort out nvidia driver?

[+] 28304283409234|3 years ago|reply

Long time (23 years) Linux user forced to work on Mac by employer. Hate every minute of it. Brew is only impressive if you never used apt. Everything nags about licenses. Docker … well… hahahaha. External usb Ethernet dongles keep refusing to connect after sleeping. The CapsLock has a “helpful” feature that basically ignores the first press, in case you made a mistake. Fine, but I mapped CapsLock to be another CTRL. So ctrl+c constantly fails due to the stupid delay. Needed to install karabiner.

These are just the things I can name while sitting on the can reading HN. Can you imagine?

Everything but the arm hardware is subpar compared to Linux.

[+] peterhi|3 years ago|reply

The os itself eats much more of the resources than linux running on the same hardware. Macos is a "bigger" operating system (more parts) and they all want memory and cycles. Linux is positively anorexic in comparison :)

It will also depend on how good you are at switching your "muscle memory" at the keyboard. But this is the same for all three of the main oses (linux, macos and windows). It can be very frustrating when you hit a keystroke combination and either it does nothing or something completely different

Ubuntu / Mint is rock solid. I run Ubuntu 22.04 and have had no problems despite heavy customisation on old hardware (Dell Optiplex 3040). If you can install Ubuntu (or Mint) I would expect to run it without issue

[+] CoolCold|3 years ago|reply

> I switched to Ubuntu 22.10, and now every 30 minutes I get a crash. I bought a new Microphone that kinda works, but not really.

[+] locusofself|3 years ago|reply

It's hard to beat the Apple UX. My macbook air m1 is the best laptop I have ever had. Do I love macOS? Not really. But if you need to develop in Linux just fire up a VM.

I use a windows laptop for my work because I work at Microsoft. At the end of the day most of us spend 90% of our time in a browser, vs code, and bash or powershell. The experience between the 3 major OSs is not that different.

[+] shortrounddev|3 years ago|reply

> The experience between the 3 major OSs is not that different

I agree, for programming tasks (though I really came to hate everything about macOS UX for everything else). The one major difference I've noticed is that docker runs great on Linux, runs great on Windows with Docker Desktop/WSL2, and runs like mollases on my company issues 8gb macbook pro

[+] brucethemoose2|3 years ago|reply

"Stable" linux distros like Mint and Ubuntu have given me nothing but trouble, as the packages are so old that they have unfixed bugs with newer hardware.

I am running CachyOS now and love it, but for a "stable" distro I would probably pick Fedora Kionite, or maybe Clear Linux, and augment their package selection with flatpack.

[+] kleer001|3 years ago|reply

Are you on a shiny new desktop with all the bells and whistles with more RAM than you'll ever need and a 10TB RAID setup? Are you on a scuzzy 20 year old laptop with 64MB of ram and a 20GB HD?

Have you considered an Arch based distro?

Personally I switched from 15 years with Apple products to Linux land and while it's a lot different I like it.

[+] beej71|3 years ago|reply

I have an Intel Mac, an M1, and a Linux laptop.

IMHO, the places Linux wins are:

1. Customization. You can customize the desktop experience ad infinitum with Linux. You can customize it a bit with MacOS.

2. Speed. On older hardware, I've never seen Windows or MacOS outperform a lightweight Unix install. Gives old machines new life.

3. Cost. Not only is the hardware cheaper, it's actually possible to upgrade.

So you have to weigh the importance of those factors.

FWIW, the MacOS M1 has panicked on me 3 times in the past 6 months. Which is 3 more times than the other computers combined. 30 minute crashes sound to me like either a hardware issue (either busted or bad driver) or a broken Mint install. (I'm Arch, myself.)

Since I'm a fan of R2R, I'll probably get a Framework next--no ARM, sadly.

[+] mindcrime|3 years ago|reply

I haven't switched, from Linux to Mac in the sense that all of my personal computers are Linux. But I did switch from Windows to Mac at my $DAYJOB, so I have a lot of experience using both Linux and Mac, and in the same day no less. I've been using the Mac for around 2 years now I guess.

My take? I'd scrap Mac OS X and put Linux on that Macbook in a heartbeat if it were allowed by company policy. I can't find a single thing that OS X does bette than Linux, and there are plenty of things that it doesn't do as well (by my personal standards). And that's before even getting into the ideological aspect, and the fact that I fundamentally hate Apple and their entire "walled garden, locked down, proprietary bullshit" world-view.

The Mac hardware is nice, no doubt. But for my money, give me Linux any day of the week.

[+] rcarmo|3 years ago|reply

I’ve been using UNIX (actual UNIX) and MacOS since before it got a BSD userland (so you can add one zero and 10 more years to your two) and it’s actually fun to see this kind of opinion, because it’s so biased to the point of ignoring all the actual shared history that macOS has.

Relax. Touch grass. Figure out why it is that way. You may not like it all the same, but you’ll be able to understand why it’s that way.

[+] ChymeraXYZ|3 years ago|reply

I switched last year after being exclusively on Linux for approx 5 years.

Hardware is hands down the best in terms of battery life. It's hilarious compared to pretty much anything else I have tried.

Software is... Meh. But the part that really is the window management. What is there currently in mac (and Windows) is, mildly put, a joke.

[+] rcarmo|3 years ago|reply

If you have to use Windows, look into PowerToys/FancyZones. I actually prefer that to the Mac at this point.

[+] kingkongjaffa|3 years ago|reply

I love my M1 Mac but it has some personal stuff, development stuff, light steam games etc.

I’m really tempted to buy a used thinkpad and put a Linux distro on it as a pure dev environment that’s easy to wipe and start over quickly.

[+] BenGosub|3 years ago|reply

I have been a happy Ubuntu user for years. For ke the OS is completely stable and never crashes. It's also very efficient with resources, compared to Windows.

I have a music production hobby and the main obstacle for me in using Linux is no drivers for hardware and no VSTs.

[+] cramjabsyn|3 years ago|reply

Yes I ran a linux desktop for years and switched to mac. Aside from getting used to the feel of the UI and finding replacement apps (that sometimes cost a few bucks) the experience has been excellent.

My Mac just works, upgrades are seamless (but do wait a few months before major os upgrades), the battery lasts all day, the audio and video quality are good, lid close suspends the system correctly every time. And everything syncs with my phone.

I spend most of my time in the terminal anyway, and just ssh to my linux dev host. I don't worry about trying to set up a full dev environment on my laptop, I prefer to do that on a linux server

[+] wolfium3|3 years ago|reply

I switched in the other direction (Mac to Linux).

I grew up with Windows PC's + laptops and Mac's keyboard and general way of doing things was just always really unintuitive (maybe infuriating?) for me.

I also didn't like Mac's prescriptive attitude toward me as a user. It's MY machine. I bought it, it belongs to ME. I should be able to do whatever I want to the deepest parts of the configs if I feel inclined to do so. (Like "right to repair" I would like something similar to "right to full control of my own hardware")

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