> If you want to achieve some specific action you need to read four or five manpages, search online, and figure out how you are going to put the pieces together. That made me appreciate Karabiner and BTT much more.
This is still accurate to this day and what they don't tell you. Hence why you always need to search for 'xorg/wayland error' this, 'dbus initialization error' that or a random core dump occurred on a freezing window. I have zero time to search for these issues when I configure what I want and prefer it to 'just work' like it should on macOS.
> On November 10th Apple showed us the future of the Mac and released again laptops worth buying. So I bought the 2020 M1 Macbook Air. You will read a review of it soon.
If you like the M1, you will also like the M1X, M2 or M3 Macs. No need to rush for last years model, hence why I skipped this one.
> The experience of using Linux as a daily driver has been very positive for me, but I do need my productivity.
Exactly. Rather than messing around or spending days playing around with my setup or window manager.
>ther than messing around or spending days playing around with my setup or window manager.
I don't get why this narravitve still exists today. Linux works out of the box on many distros perfectly fine.
Keybindings are a very special use case, and if you need that customizability and its better on a Mac, then get a Mac. Doesn't mean that Macs are "more productive"
If you want to argue actual semantics in terms of value, Linux wins hands down for what you get. You can look at things like VM software, which is costly for Mac while Free for Linux. You can look at things like privacy - Apple still collects data for themselves, while in Linux you can fully disable that. You can look at open source software, which has a way higher compatibility rate with Linux than Mac, especially with M1 chips where Rosetta, as good as it is, isn't fool proof. You can look at hardware, where most "non-Mac" laptops that run Linux are upgradable and repairable.
If you like Mac, then stay on Mac, and stop publishing articles on how good Macs are and how Linux is neat, but your time is so valuable that you can't spend learning a few commaind line tools.
>If you like Mac, then stay on Mac, and stop publishing articles on how good Macs are and how Linux is neat, but your time is so valuable that you can't spend learning a few commaind line tools.
"Stop writing good things about things I hate and bad things about things I like!"
> don't get why this narravitve still exists today. Linux works out of the box on many distros perfectly fine.
Yeah. And then you connect two monitors with different scaling factor. Turns out X11 can't handle this and Wayland is still broken.
Yeah. And then you connect two monitors with different scaling factor. Turns out X11 can't handle this and Wayland is still broken
Actually, this works fine in Wayland. I have used Wayland without any issues with amdgpu, including with mixed-DPI screens with GNOME's fractional scaling. However, things go downhill once you have to use X11 applications, and you typically do. E.g. JetBrains IDEs are a train wreck with fractional scaling enabled in GNOME on Wayland.
That's the problem. This work fine in Wayland but some things that were working fine on X11 do not.
In the end you just give a sigh and go back to you macOS (assuming you were trying to switch).
PS: for me though linux distro share the same problems they had back when I was using Ubuntu and the Arch before 2013. Not much have changed since then. Linux on a home\work pc is still mostly about freedom but mostly not about well build human-to-machine interface.
For every niche feature that you cant do on Linux, I can name a niche feature that you cant do on Mac. And for every reason that you tell me how its not an issue on Macs, I can also tell you that its not an issue on Linux.
The point is that this is such a stupid conversation to have.
Double monitor setup works fine. Double monitor scaling setup is iffy.
Also, speaking of external monitors and Macs "just working", google "mac external monitor not working after sleep", which is the problem that i definitely have on my work issued Mac, but not any of my linux laptops.
Ubuntu literally does not have an easy way to configure what happens when you close a laptop. I want it to hibernate instead of sleep. Someone else didn't want it to go to sleep at all. None of the settings options allow this. While Googling it for a friend the only result was running a few commands and changing some stuff in some config file. You cannot possibly expect a business analyst who hasn't even opened the terminal once in their life to not be immediately put off and scared by this. This is the advantage of Macs. They literally do just work
So, does "Just Work" now include easily accessible noob-proof configuration of the things you want? In that case, macOS doesn't Just Work for me, because I want to be able to see what apps are playing sound or recording and manually set them to different sinks/sources, maybe even have sound playing from multiple devices at the same time. On Linux with PulseAudio and pavucontrol, this is effortlessly configurable with an intuitive GUI. I'm not even sure this is possible on macOS.
My point is, unless we agree on roughly what features are required, "Just Works" is a useless subjective specifier. We all have different priorities, so we either have to accept that there's no universal way to evaluate OSs or agree on some subset that really should Just Work.
By the way, KDE Plasma has pretty comprehensive GUI settings on power-related settings. I think having GNOME 3 and Ubuntu be the de-facto standard Linux experience is actually harming the perception of desktop Linux. People switch expecting a customizable, power-user friendly experience and get a DE that's trying to be the opposite.
Everything you require is not in the least beginner user problems. I'm talking basic issues faced by a person who only views emails, looks at spreadsheets and word documents and opens their browser
I get that, and my setup is definitely not beginner-friendly. But I think we need to agree on what beginners actually do, because I wouldn't say customising power settings falls into that category.
The problem as I see it is that even people who really are beginners sometimes want to reach for more advanced functionality, and different systems expose different advanced functions in a user-friendly way.
Try soundflower for mac. I think JACK audio also works on Mac/Win.
> "Just Works" is a useless subjective specifier.
I'd say a good usable mail client, a readily available video editor, sound recording software and office suite are more important than an advanced audio mixer.
> sound playing from multiple devices at the same time
This seems like a very niche use case. Along the lines of the usual nerdy response of linux being able to compile gcc or run vim and why would anyone use their computer for anything else.
> I'd say a good usable mail client, a readily available video editor, sound recording software and office suite are more important than an advanced audio mixer.
I'm not disputing that. It isn't hard to agree on what an average user definitely needs and therefore must work. The hard part is where to draw the line, what is still needed and what is niche.
> This seems like a very niche use case.
Maybe. But it's very much something an "average user" might want. It's actually something I want to be able to do so I can watch a film with my sister, each with our own headphones. That's a real user need, not something "meta" like the FLOSS things you mentioned (not a solution by itself, but something that can help a programmer fill that user need).
This is still accurate to this day and what they don't tell you. Hence why you always need to search for 'xorg/wayland error' this, 'dbus initialization error' that or a random core dump occurred on a freezing window. I have zero time to search for these issues when I configure what I want and prefer it to 'just work' like it should on macOS.
> On November 10th Apple showed us the future of the Mac and released again laptops worth buying. So I bought the 2020 M1 Macbook Air. You will read a review of it soon.
If you like the M1, you will also like the M1X, M2 or M3 Macs. No need to rush for last years model, hence why I skipped this one.
> The experience of using Linux as a daily driver has been very positive for me, but I do need my productivity.
Exactly. Rather than messing around or spending days playing around with my setup or window manager.