Ask HN: What are major things you miss after switching from Linux to Mac?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40968604

by pawelduda • 2 years ago

4 6 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm looking for a new personal laptop. For work, I've been using M1 Mac for a few years and I have to admit, this is a major thing that sold me on Macs - performance is stellar, great battery life and thermals - I completely forget this thing has fans in it.

For personal use I have Dell XPS, which annoys me more and more - broken power management, terrible touchpad and lackluster screen, so I'm looking to replace it.

I'm torn between Linux-based laptop (no idea what's been going on in the market over last 5 years) or Mac (M2/3 Chip). While a Mac would suit my needs today, which is mostly coding, media, browsing Internet, I wonder what are other things I could be using it for in the future but are worse, or completely missing (perhaps some hard to bypass system limitations come to mind). Gaming is not an issue.

bearjaws• 2 years ago

Honestly I am struggling to think of what I am missing.

zsh + homebrew are the first installs. Other than that, I don't really miss anything.

I bought a Mac after an Ubuntu update broke my Nvidia install on a Dell notebook and I spent the better part of 2 days trying to fix it.

pawelduda2• 2 years ago

I guess homebrew isn't going anywhere tho? For me it's the biggest downgrade from Linux pkg management. I'm used to it now, just annoys me from time to time

warrenm• 2 years ago

zsh has been the default shell for quite a while on macOS

welkinSL• 2 years ago

As much as I love my experience with Homebrew, it is not easy to maintain it so understandably the project tends to only support the latest few OS versions.

This can be problematic for older laptops.

Linux on the other hand tends to work better, even for older computers.

The Homebrew project is also said to be insecure, and have a tendency to be a bit authoritative, as in ignoring criticisms, but thats another story.

derbOac• 2 years ago

I like my M2 Mac, it's great hardware-wise. I thought hard about Linux laptops and decided for the Mac. In a lot of ways it feels like linux on a slick piece of hardware with good commercial support.

Coming from linux I miss the freedom though. That maybe sounds kinda stilted or melodramatic or something but I don't mean anything ideological. I just mean it annoyed me, for example, to find out that a stock market app was installed and I couldn't just get rid of it easily. I looked into it but it involved a whole series of things that I decided just wasn't worth it. But it's still there. Is it a big deal? No, but then again why should I not be able to remove a stocks app?

I also miss KDE which has been my favorite GUI of everything I've used.

Basically I just miss being able to take things off I don't want there, and put on things I do. Seems like something simple to me.

I don't regret buying my Mac and would do it again. I sort of feel like a good combination is Mac on laptop and linux on a desktop/workstation/server. But if for some reason Asahi went away I'm not sure I'd buy another Mac. I haven't used Asahi linux, but it's like an insurance or canary or test case or something. It's this thing in the back of my mind that doesn't really affect me day to day but is always there.

When I was thinking about linux laptops, I was leaning toward an HP developer laptop or Framework, or Starlabs I think? I mention it only because I'm not sure if your XPS experiences would transfer always.

If it makes a difference, I continue to use linux in various capacities, especially for work, so I don't feel like it's gone away entirely in my life. I might feel differently or stronger or something if I wasn't using linux at all anymore.

pawelduda2• 2 years ago

Thanks. I too enjoy the freedom, I thought I could uninstall iTunes but apparently it's not only impossible but it autostarts every time I click "play" media button on my earbuds and this behavior also cannot be easily disabled. There's an app "NoTunes" that works around it but it also randomly doesn't work. I hope there won't be many stupid limitations like this