I recently purchased a 16” MBP despite significant personal concerns over the future of MacOS, being a strong open source advocate and Linux paying my mortgage.
I did this ultimately for a few reasons. MacOS lets me run Adobe (Photoshop, Lightroom, etc), Fusion360, has a good terminal (iTerm and zsh unix like shell) and Logic.
Mac hardware is still some of the best in the business, no other vendors seem to be able to catch-up. The XPS line is a great example, the battery that Dell chose to put in that laptop can’t run the internals at full power when not connected to AC. There are plenty of other comments about Thinkpads here (I have a T480s through work) and find the overall experience just fine.
The MacBook on the other hand, I use for 8+ hours every day. It’s the machine I reach for first. It sparks joy. It just works when roaming on WiFi, always. It just works with Bluetooth headphones, always. It just works with external displays, first time, every time. To put it simply, the machine gets out of my way and lets me get real work done. I can SSH to wherever I want and get ‘the Linux experience’.
My personal desktop runs Arch and KDE but for a portable, annoyingly, I still think Macs are the only way to go. But damn do I wish they had a SD card slot.
I am glad that you like your macbook, but your experience has been very different from mine. It has the worst WIFI radio in a laptop that i have used; one area of my house is basically off-limits to it despite every other Wi-Fi enabled device i own working there (phones and several laptop brands).
The fancy metal case isnt properly grounded- I get occasionally a slight tingling /shock from it when I have it plugged in.
Battery life is on par, at best, with my other laptops.
Macos doesn't let me configure or change the things I want to configure or change. Some programs are usability / discoverability nightmares.
Performance of most programs is, at best, similar to linux or Win10, and is frequently worse against other machines with similar hardware.
I have used several models of MacBook and an Air, and personally will not purchase another again... I am tired of paying top dollar for a mediocre experience.
> It has the worst WIFI radio in a laptop that i have used
This is an extremely disputable claim. Wifi chipset used by Apple is by far the best in class in my experience. I have 4 laptops - ASUS, Thinkpad, HP laptop from work and MBP 16". All of them get a visit to the special room once a week at least. If we use my commode as a benchmark of wifi radio performance, when I am sitting on it and watching Monty Python, I can get every single joke with MacBookPro 16 streaming smoothly at 320p resolution. Not so much with other products of similar class.
What's so "best in class" about that? I don't regard Broadcom as being particularly great.
Maybe your MacBook just has a better antenna. Or it just happens to be configured in just such a way that it works better in that one room in your house.
YMMV, I guess. We have a lot of wood paneling, plus the furnace is in between me and the router, so it would be understandable if the issue was universal.
My HP Spectre x360 has not had a problem with the reception once, but I can barely attend video calls or load Jira with the macbook. Likewise, my wife's chromebook and my previous surface book 2 were all perfectly happy.
That said, the Dell XPS 13 was pretty close to equally bad as the macbook, though I haven't had it in a long enough time that I've since re-arranged my sitting area- whether it actually was worse or not I'm not sure.
I've had Mac wifi adapters that didn't like certain access points in the past (a specific Ubiquiti AP firmware revision circa 2014 comes to mind). Not sure that's still an issue nowadays, but you might want to make sure your AP firmware is up to date.
> > It has the worst WIFI radio in a laptop that i have used
> This is an extremely disputable claim
I don't think it is; GP couched their assertion pretty clearly as only referring to laptops that they have used. Your personal experience doesn't really change that.
The EU plugs are all available with earth. The earthed one only at the end of the extension cord to the power brick. Both included in the box from apple.
Please tell me where you're buying, cause I have yet to encounter an earthed plug included with Apple equipment outside of UK. Only two-pole plugs, on the brick, and getting the long cord with ground wire sometimes requires a wait time.
The radio must be faulty. You should have it looked at or replaced by Apple. They are best in class or at least better than mid-ranged laptops, if you’re only comparing to specialty PC hardware.
I have used a few, and the other most recent one- a MacBook air- had the exact same issue. I wouldn't call anything I use specialty hardware, though both the go spectre and surface book 2 were, at the very least, on the high end of midrange. The Dell xps I honestly don't have much good at all to say about.
I definitely do not put any stickers on my laptops, and especially not ones that are not owned by me (i.e. company issued, which are the only macs I will use).
I'm not sure about the impact being noticed. I thought the wifi antenna hid behind the Apple logo on some machines, but I don't remember which machines.
>It has the worst WIFI radio in a laptop that i have used;
I can confirm. I have 2019 Macbook Pro and I have problems with the wifi + overheating and occasional restarts of the mac. I had to do multiple SMC restart. I'll switch to XPS 15 with linux dual boot.
> The fancy metal case isnt properly grounded- I get occasionally a slight tingling /shock from it when I have it plugged in.
There have been other comments about this, but to make it clear: It's the charger that's not grounded. You will see this effect with every other laptop / charger on the market which has no ground connection in the wall socket. It comes from y capacitors [1] in the switch-mode-power-supply.
I’ve experienced the grounding thing, but almost always only in houses with dodgy wiring. It never happens in office buildings or newer apartments. I’m not sure that is actually the MacBook’s doing.
USB-C and proprietary laptop chargers are double insulated Class II devices. This means that the metal chassis is essentially floating and can charge up if there is some leakage in the charger circuit. I don't see any way how the wiring of the building can influence this behavior.
Just grabbed my multimeter -- my MagSafe MacBook has continuity from the metal chassis to the grounding lug of the power adapter. It stands to reason that a properly grounded outlet used in conjunction with the 3-prong cable would dissipate such a charge -- and potentially, a live ground could introduce a charge.
I actually only notice it about 5% of the time I use it, and it is almost always plugged in at the same outlet, with the same charger (in this case, the two prong adapter). I seem to recall having tested all of the outlets in the house with an outlet tester, but it was two years ago so I'm not 100% sure.
They don't even include the extension cord anymore.
I don't know why Apple thinks it's okay for my computer to run a current through my body. I would love to know what happened at Apple that caused this situation. It's just patently insane.
Oh I didn't know that, I haven't bought a Mac recently.
It's been like this since the earliest days of the metal PowerBooks. Though the un-grounded duckheads appeared only with the later models (the "hockey puck" power supply always had grounding and in fact always had an extension cord). In my house the living room sockets didn't have grounding (at that time it was only mandatory in "wet areas") so I noticed it even then.
It's mainly an issue because of the metal enclosure. On a plastic one you wouldn't notice. And it's not serious current, it's just some induction of the power transformer on the internal shielding.
But yeah I agree, even the duckheads should have proper grounding! The grounding is done through the ground 'pin' that the duckhead clips on to, so technically it should be able to get a third-party duckhead with all three pins. Though I never looked to see if they were available.
My anecdotal experience: I’ve never noticed this with my 2014 MBP until I was at my parents’ recently, plugged into an extension cord from their garage.
With my feet on the ground, the metal body of my MacBook was “tingly” all over. Feet off the ground, no more tingling.
I’d love to better understand what was going on (and whether it’s potentially dangerous).
FWIW, I was using the Mac power cord with the ground pin. Does this just mean that the wiring in their garage isn’t properly grounded?
Electrical devices should be properly grounded to protect the user from faulty wiring though. I assume this is probably not life threatening but it could under some conditions be a fire hazard.
>Electrical devices should be properly grounded to protect the user from faulty wiring though. I assume this is probably not life threatening but it could under some conditions be a fire hazard.
Can I get some laptop recommendations with similar specs (and most importantly battery time) as the MBP from you? I've been looking around for a new one.
I had a dell xps 13, and was not at all impressed. It ran arch alright, at least.
I had a surface book 2 which was actually really nice, but broke down within 2 years, and best buy couldnt get parts to repair it anymore and just refunded the money (laptops are one of tge few things I will always pay for an extended warranty).
Currently, i use an hp spectre x360- a windows partition for gaming, and pop_os for everything else. I was very unimpressed trying to get a few different linux distros to run well on it, though i was trying some strange combinations. Pop_os just works. Literally no tweaking needed whatsoever.
Lenovo's 6th gen carbon x1 got rave reviews, but there was a lot of mixed messaging about newer models and arch, so I never really bothered when i was last looking.
Currently I run the cheapest ThinkPad T495 (AMD hardware) on Arch Linux (but maxed the RAM on my own). Everything works great, except it doesn't remember the screen brightness level after a reboot, which is not a big deal at all for me - I don't reboot very often.
I have a Psomething (the one with Xeon) from work and a T480 for personal stuff, but as I have been getting rid of Intel in my life, the T480 will be the first to go.
How is the T495 with kernel 5.8? How does the GPU handle day to day life, and video acceleration? And more importantly, does the T495 have soldered RAM?
The awesome thing about the T480 is how I could upgrade a bunch of things, from Wi-Fi card, to RAM, to NVMe drive, and I would not like losing that.
The new T14, unfortunately, will take forever to show up in Brazil, so the T495 seems to be the logical option.
As I said, everything works, except for remembering the screen brightness level.
It has 8GB soldered and you can put additional 16GB on the second slot. For me this is good enough.
Hardware video acceleration works out-of-the box with kernel 5.8.
I am not sure if the nvme slot is soldered, but as far as I remember, it's not. It has an additional slot for a standard 2.5 inch drive which you can use to increase capacity.
> laptop can’t run the internals at full power when not connected to AC
How is this worse than a MBP that can’t “run the internals at full power” when it doesn’t take breaks to cool off (except maybe outside in winter?)? (Edit: my currently adjacent sibling comment claims that MBPs don’t run at full power off AC either, so their internal utilization seems strictly worse. Reminds me of how Apple arranged with Intel to buy a weaker (and presumably cooler and cheaper) variant of the Xeons available to anyone else for iMac Pros).
> I can SSH to wherever I want and get ‘the Linux experience’.
Depending on your definition of ‘the Linux experience’. For me X is half the GNU/Linux/*BSD experience: dwm, sxhkd, keynav, xcape, the Compose key, simple highlight + middle click/Shift+Insert copypasta. (Edit: xteddy, xeyes, xcowsay, buckle, etc. too).
Addendum: And of course you can get ‘the macOS experience’ with Adobe products, etc. on a Thinkpad (making a Hackintosh seems easier than ever with OpenCore &c).
Not that I as someone who has used Adobe products on macOS for a class and prefers free-as-in-freedom alternatives ever would.
Yep, now’s just the time to try elementaryOS or any free/libre OS and get weaned off Apple before addiction to macOS becomes more of a restrictive/oppressive/heavy burden than ever.
Some people will take snipes at the battery life/performance impact but just to give concrete examples.
I had a 2018 13" Macbook Pro and XPS 13 running Ubuntu. Former with Retina, latter with 4k. The Macbook's battery on a daily basis was never a huge problem for me unless running heavy applications like video chat. The XPS 13 has to be tethered to the power brick to run at 4k for more than a few hours. During normal dev work, I can't really get more than 90 minutes where the Macbook would last maybe 4-5 hours.
I suspect it's deeper than better hardware. Linux laptops just have worse battery life (nb4 "just install X Y Z with apt", that's not an acceptable solution when the OS is installed by the OEM and driver stability is still a problem on Linux laptops)
When it comes to Bluetooth headphones, I have a totally different experience with iPhone 11. I have Sony WH1000XM3 headphones. I really like them, yet every time I connect them to my iPhone the sound volume jumps to almost 100%. I reported the issue to Apple but got no answer (the headphones are working without any problems with my old android phone - Samsung Galaxy s7). The only solution so far was to enable EU sound volume limits to decrease the initial bang.
The other problem that I had with my iPhone is that for the first few days it was getting really hot. I called the Apple support and they told me that it is "normal" - just wait for about a week. OK they where right, after a week problem was gone, but for something that costs a lot of money I would expect better.
Macbooks (I got one at work and I own a small 13'' MBP) are OKish. My only complain is that they can heat up to really high temperatures (maybe I will appreciate it in the winter).
When it comes to Linux, it a good OS but it still has troubles with hardware accessories. About I year ago, (I have a 4 year old PC with Ubuntu) I tried to connect Bluetooth headphones with it and it was a total disaster. I tried about 2 different Bluetooth dongles and installed at least 2 different BT stacks, without effect. After about 15 mins the BT disconnected. I searches the Internet but I couldn't make it work. It may be connected to the fact that I was running quite old Ubuntu 16 LTS back then.
Actually those Sony headphones are one of the reasons I am interested in Linux instead of OSX. LDAC support is not present on OSX, but it is for Linux.
It makes a huge difference in audio quality over bluetooth in my experience.
Excellent, not sure what I missed before, but I have aptx and aac now! A good step in the right direction. Still would love LDAC and/or Aptx HD of course in the long run.
No, I meant AAC. The XM3s do not seem to negotiate AAC over BT on OSX. They fall back to SBC and obviously sound bad. AAC would be a step up, but AptX HD or LDAC would be ideal.
They work fine in my case on both iPhone and Android.
So as I was saying I'm tempted to move back to Linux for my work laptop for LDAC over BT support as well as other reasons of course.
That is because the integration is not there in the linux ecosystem. Apple has this very tight integration because it controls both the hardware and the software.
But there are some companies which have started doing the same thing:
- System76
- Tuxedo
These companies test their devices well on a distro and well, it reflects in their pricing too!
Dell also sells an XPS “Developer Edition” with Ubuntu pre-installed and officially supported, and Lenovo recently announced a range of workstations and Thinkpads being certified to support Ubuntu and Fedora. There’s also Purism that created a custom PureOS to closely fit their custom hardware, eg. a TPM designed for user security instead of vendor lock-in.
> fit their custom hardware, eg. a TPM designed for user security instead of vendor lock-in.
Just here to point out that they use a standard commercial off-the-shelf TPM manufactured by Infineon. It's not custom hardware. As with all TPMs, it is the firmware/OS that decides whether to use it for lock-in purposes or freedom.
I think the firmware is custom (and of course it’s the nexus of hardware and software, so exactly the part that OEMs can best provide the user unique value through. System76 and Pine64 (and I think Purism) provide open source firmware you can reflash yourself for custom keyboard layouts, firmware killswitches, etc., though System76’s hardware itself seems very off-the-self (Clevo white-label). (Edit: And I think Purism Librems overall design with hardware killswitches, etc. are custom ofc.)
I don’t think they ship anything with it preinstalled right now (unlike each of the other companies I and the parent mentioned). But they’ve had a reputation of generally good Linux support for a while now, and it’s seems they’ve just now decided to make it official, and there’s plenty of hope for preinstalled GNU/Linux in the future.
> None of the Linux vendors make their own laptops
Dell, Lenovo, Purism, Pine64 et al. do.
The two in your parent may (at least System76’s laptops are said to) use Clevo hardware, but they can still ship with custom open source firmware.
It’s also not as if Apple sells their own custom CPU at the moment. Even then, they’ll probably buy other parts from third parties (eg. they buy iPhone OLEDs from Samsung, though they’re said to calibrate them differently).
And finally, integration can be seen as a bad thing. It’s conducive to lock in (see above comment on ARM Macs ending Hackintoshes).
Dell's Linux laptops are not custom made for linux (they even still have a Windows key!). They just swap out the wifi card.
I'm pretty sure Purism's are just standard barebones too, but with some extra modifications like hardware switches. They showed how they solder the wires to the motherboard - if they'd designed it themselves they wouldn't have to do that.
Pine64, indeed, that's true. The enclosure is standard (the PB Pro is the same as my Chinese "ChuWi" laptop :') ) but indeed they made a custom motherboard. I really like that company.
I have the same headphones. I've had that issue too, but only a few times. It might be relevant that I use them almost exclusively with my iPhone, rarely with other devices.
Strange about the WH1000XM3s I haven't had that problem with the same headphones and an iPhone X. I have however gotten the same heat issues from time to time.
Well, macs don't run at full power either if you don't plug them in. And thermal issues are definitely a thing on macs. I have a friend who is complaining about stability issues on his 16" mbp already. And there is of course the whole notion with the uncertainty around ARM and their commitment to supporting what they are selling right now. So, I'm not super keen on buying that just yet though I probably will eventually.
I've had lots of silly issues with bluetooth, wifi and other things not quite "just working" lately on my 2017 MBP. Don't get me started on the keyboard situation. Apple's standards have been slipping on that front. But they are undeniably still very good laptops overall. If it wasn't for the weird keyboards, they'd make pretty decent linux laptops too. As it is, the touchbar is a PITA for that, even if you do manage to get that working (apparently it is doable).
I actually wouldn't mind a linux laptop except that seems to involve a lot of compromises on form factor, sucky touchpads, plasticky/fugly designs, screen resolution, driver compatibility, and manufacturers with not so great reputations on the quality and support front. Apple is also problematic for support lately of course.
I recently bought a new camera and the ability to take the usb-c power cable and plug that into the camera to quickly transfer some photos is quite nice. I don't really miss the memory card slot that much. I also charge my phone of my laptop via usb-c when on the road. I once watched 8 hours of offline netflix on my phone on a transatlantic flight and left the plane with a full charge on my phone and 80% charge on my mac.
I've been considering a linux laptop for ages but there are not a lot of models that meet my requirements of having a form factor that isn't hideously ugly (no "gaming" laptops please), has decent specs for CPU, memory, ssd (this eliminates 98% of the market), an hdpi screen (now we are talking 2, maybe 3 models), and a touchpad that comes reasonably close to what I'm used to. There are not a lot of things in the market that come close enough that I would consider them and none that I'm aware off that don't involve compromising on at least a few things I care about.
You'll get the same performance, but you'll see a decline in the battery charge when really putting the hardware to the test. I've seen it happen just using a Google Hangout.
Modern macbooks can ship with a 40 or 60 amp power supply, whereas they should have 90 or 120 amp power supplies. They assume, mostly correctly, that the really intensive workloads will complete before the internal battery is in trouble.
> You'll get the same performance, but you'll see a decline in the battery charge
Right, but the initial problem was that full performance wasn't even possible from the battery, regardless of how much charge you were willing to sacrifice.
This matches my experience. I have been using macs for 20+ years, and have on occasion tried to switch to Linux. Linux is definitely way faster (sometimes, amazingly so), but that is it; almost all other parts of the experience are quite a downgrade, so I haven't really come close to switching.
Lol yeah. That is literally the worst thing about MacBooks. It's hard enough getting it to work properly in a dual monitor setup, but I can reproducibly generate forced power cycles by plugging into a dock when the lid is closed due to a kernel panic bug that still hasn't been solved despite numerous reports from users suffering the same fate on Catalina.
I also just had to reboot my MBP 16 because every so often when the VPN connection drops, there is no way to resuscitate the WiFi network connection without a full reboot :-/
As someone who moved from an XPS to MBP to have a smoother experience with less hardware glitches, I have been sorely disappointed. Once WSL gets full support for running GUI apps and CUDA support, I will almost certainly be moving away from the MBP. The direction of OSX is concerning, and I find it insane that their sandboxing results in a 5 second wait to open a simple Word or CSV file. I booted up my 5 year old XPS a few weeks back and it felt so much snappier than my fully loaded MBP 16!
My previous MBP and 4k monitor would, on every other connection, not recognize the USB devices. So every other time I plugged into the monitor, I had to un-plug & re-plug to get the peripherals.
I also have a Linux Thinkpad. It's not perfect either, but it is definitely better.
The Linux Thinkpad also more reliably associates with my Bose headphones. It was hard to pair them the first time around, but after that, they've auto-connected. The MBP will occasionally get into states where it won't find the headphones or the headphones don't find it, and I have to request they manually connect. The MBP does this with my old phone, too…
I do have to agree with the article on the points about the touchpad (MBP's is superior) and on the emoji support. (It's getting there in Linux… but slowly.)
I'd recommend Terminator over gnome-terminal, though.
Yes, totally the opposite to my own experience with mac. Getting external displays to work properly has often required nasty EDID hacks and disabling SIP on the machine.
I'm on my third MacBook Pro (the current one is MBP 16"), always used various external monitors (24" FullHD back in the day, recently mostly 27" 4k), with either mini DP, USB-C to mini DP, or USB-C with recent LG monitors, and in eight years since I'm on Mac I never had any issue.
The OP review is very patronizing of MBP but I could not take it after this. Colleagues at our lab meetings have been harassed by external display issue week after week at lab meetings. Some of them reported external display failing immediately after Catalina upgrade.
I have a recent macbook for work. The only way I managed to get my 4k external monitor to run at >24 Hz—such a slow refresh rate it was painful to use—was with a $15 3rd-party utility[1]. And that was after failing to fix the problem with hours of debugging and switching from HDMI to DisplayPort.
The same monitor worked perfectly without any configuration on both Windows and Linux.
I feel like that phrase was extremely accurate... before the buggy OSes, awful keyboards, and hordes of security prompts. If you're starting to use Apple devices in 2020 I can see why you'd think that phrase is infuriating, but believe me when I say things used to be so much better!
I started in 2013. I have not noticed a significantly greater number of things just working on it then I have on Windows or Ubuntu over that time period. Maybe it just works for non-programmers.
One USB-C cable into an LG USB-C monitor. I'm not saying there aren't issues with MacOS and external displays but my experience on a daily basis is consistently good.
The same cannot be said for my experience docking and undocking the T480s with the same monitor and cable.
I got the ivanky dock[1] for dual display and works like a charm. I have a MacBook Air and a MacBook Pro and I haven't had any issues with any of them so far. It's really just plug-and-play. I have a couple of other docks and connectors and I had issues with all of them.
I'm not saying it's not possible, but if you're an open source advocate, why do you bother with Adobe and their subscriptions? As someone who dabbles in a lot of raster graphics on the side, after the learning curve of switth, I'm just as productive using GIMP, darktable, Hugin, Krita, and Inkscape.
Probably because they feel their time is too valuable for that learning curve, or because even by spending lots and lots of time on learning, you still can't match the productivity of somewhat usable software (please note that I hate Adobe as much as the next guy but they're lightyears ahead of Darktable or Gimp)
Sounds like you’ve not had Linux on a laptop for a while, it’s no where near as bad as you describe.
I run NIxOs on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2.
I really love it and it “sparks joy” for me too. Especially because I understand how it’s lit together and sort of “built it” and contribute to the Platform. Very satisfying.
I have literally used Linux as my daily desktop driver at work for 6 years and counting.
I'm not saying it can't be a great experience if you have a well defined use case such as development. But for an all-round, no compromises experience when stepping outside of development (and this does annoy me btw) I find MacOS to give the least worst set of compromises.
I even watch DistroTube and read r/unixporn. I love Linux!
I have a 2013 MacBook Air that I still love. Works fine for 90% of everything I want. Only recently started to feel sluggish for Camtasia & Premier Pro video editing.
I love Linux, have used it from the very beginning, want to use it on the desktop more, may buy a small NUC to host it and some containers for development -- but I'm not sure I want to spend any time thinking about hardware compatibility and living with it 100% on the desktop.
That said, all the recent reports of Mac hardware concern me. I'm really hoping their next product line is a return to the early 2000s form. We bought a lot of those at the company I was at, and it was a no-brainer.
I could flip it -- convert to a Linux laptop and keep a Mac mini on the desk for media projects.
A Lenovo Legion I bought recently for my kid is nice... but I don't see the hardware lasting as long as the MacBook Air has. I'll see if it even lasts 3-4 years. If it's like the Dells I've owned, it'll "work" but won't feel solid.
I've certainly been keeping my eyes open for a MacBook Pro alternative. On my last time looking, I thought I'd try to find something with:
- retina-like resolution 15" screen
- 32GB RAM
- slim and light without a flimsy plastic case
- good battery life
- good trackpad
- keyboard home row centred
I could not find anything. I couldn't even find something with the first three items.
For some reason (bad software support? tradition?) the PC laptop market seems to simply not care that much about extremely high resolution displays. There are some, but none in systems with the overall build quality of a MBP.
I could get the retina screen with 16GB RAM, or 32GB RAM with a lower res screen. It was a few months back, so hopefully that has changed. I'm no longer looking though.
I'm glad it worked out for you. I so much wanted to love the 16" MBP but in clamshell mode I can hear the fan at least 80% of the time, and if I do anything at all involving the Xcode simulator the fan kicks up high enough I can't hear myself think. When open the fan's not so bad but it would fry my legs like an egg even through jeans.
I look forward to going back to my old 13" which has an SD slot and MagSafe and all the rest, even though it'll feel crazy slow. The 16" is, for sure, a beast when it comes to performance, but I have found the downsides to be significant.
In my experience the 16" MBP is just bad. This is my first Apple laptop and it's pretty, but that's about it. Despite having a serious horsepower (on paper) the fan runs constantly while doing basic tasks, I get tons of beachballs, and my wireless mouse has to plugged into a specific port or it's janky as hell. It's not intuitive (for me) or performant. It's not even a good linux stand in.
My takeaway from this whole experience is that computer people will give up practicality for fashion just as much as anyone else.
External displays of variable DPI unusable without a paid app like switchresx.
Suspend always drains the battery if using any kind of usb or microscope drive. Endless hacks to finally get it to fully hibernate when closing the lid. Updates break it over time and a new way has to be figured out.
x86 support suddenly thrown away in new updates, decimating game libraries.
Out of date OpenGL and heavy push into proprietary Metal.
App notarization that was promised to just be used for security now being used for iOS related business punishments, bleeding into the desktop.
Windows with WSL gets all the advantages of the terminal in OS X and finally was enough for me to move. With the WSL 2 GPU integration gets rid of the remaining issues, especially as it moves into GPU display application support and not just GPU compute.
That's not correct. Unix, the operating sytem family, is different from systems that are certified as UNIX (uppercase) 03-compliant. Macos is a UNIX 03-compliant operating system certified by The Open Group.
how can you be an open source advocate and still work with adobe & friends? - no question on the quality/productivity of those, just on your argument.
A more consistent argument would’ve been: “open source advocate, Gimp, Inkscape and others run even better on my mac than on linux” (would disagree on that, but at least it would be a more consistent argument)
Because the tool you use is just part of the equation. It's same reason I use Discord, Telegram, whatever. You trade convenience for money, time or privacy. Sadly, I genuinely don't think that any of the tools you mention come close to Photoshop or Lightroom (Darktable is getting there but still misses a few key things for me).
To be an open source advocate I have to only use open source software? How would I drive my car? Or use my phone? Or my TV? It's just not practical.
I advocate for mostly open source server side software. I wrote a Masters dissertation on Linux and normal peoples interactions with the Linux desktop. I record a podcast twice a month (selfhosted.show) and edit it under Linux sometimes and sometimes on Mac.
My argument, such as it is, is that the tool I use to build and maintain my open source infrastructure doesn't need to be open to allow me to further the open source agenda. Linux changed my life and I do everything I can to give back to the community.
You can be an open source advocate while not exclusively using open source software. I've been an open source advocate for most of my life, during the early days I predominantly used Windows, but I was aware of Linux and skilled with it and worked to ensure it was used where appropriate and possible on servers in my workplaces. It's a given that Linux dominates servers in 2020, but that wasn't always the case.
The way now is really not even on the desktop, Linux lost there and now the world has moved on. The war is on mobile, and Android isn't truly open in the way that Linux upstream is due to binary blobs and baseband. Hopefully someday we'll see a truly open mobile platform rise to supremacy, but right now we have two separate walled gardens on mobile and not much else.
Within those walled gardens, advocacy can be to use apps which are open source vs proprietary options (e.g. to use andOTP instead of Authy, or Bitwarden instead of LastPass, as a simple example).
Existing inside the walled garden we're all forced to exist in is not hypocrisy, it's pragmatism. Using the best tool for the job and acknowledging the deficiency of open options is just being realistic, not an example of a fall from purity. Not everyone is Richard Stallman.
Because you need to actually get your work done and need to interoperate with files from others?
Being dogmatic and pure about the license of every piece of software you use might win internet points but it’s not going to actually get the job done.
>Being dogmatic and pure about the license of every piece of software you use might win internet points but it’s not going to actually get the job done.
Sure. But I wouldn't go around calling myself an "open source advocate" while supporting some of the worst.
Why does it have to be a zero sum game? Frankly, that’s the sort of gate-keeping that keeps people away from trying or adopting OSS.
Someone can support and advocate for a software development model and for the freedoms and opportunities that can allow for without having to go all-in and ensure that every piece of software they buy, use, or support follows that same model.
A really great way discourage people from advocating for OSS is to harangue them for daring to use Photoshop in lieu of Gimp.
Obviously it’s really convenient and rewarding when best-in class products are also OSS, but that’s not the world we live in.
It strikes me as a really shitty message to say that the only way you can advocate or support something is to go all-in on the model. If the goal is to get more people using and adopting and developing with open tools, yelling at them for not being the pinnacle of “purity” sure seems like a strange way to do it.
If someone calls themselves a “free software advocate,” I’ll agree that that implies a much stronger dogma to a specific set of licenses — but that’s an ideological movement that is materially different from OSS.
A list of my open source contributions include co-founding Linuxserver.io, the Self-Hosted podcast, blogging extensively about open source software (blog.ktz.me) and work for Red Hat. I say this not to be 'look at me' but to show that I try to put my money where my mouth is. I wonder what the other commenters have contributed.
I am also running Linux on Thinkpad (Debian unstable on T440s).
As to the battery life, this typically requires some work but I found it is generally possible to get good battery life. I am able to get my T440s to run for total 24 hours with the highest option 9-cell, the built in 3-cell and another 3-cell that came original with the laptop. This I did to be able to work on a long yacht cruise with no extra power and required to get backlight almost to minimum and to downclock CPU a little bit.
Now, to get there there are tools that can tell you what is using up the battery and some howtos on the Internet. I don't remember details so it is best if you go look it up yourself.
If you are using i3 you are generally well set up to easily get over 10h of operation.
As to touchpad these are all disappointing on all ThinkPads but probably especially on T440s where it is something called "clickpad". The entire touchpad is a button and you need to press it and try to move your finger while pressing HARD to drag things, for example. Dunno who thought this is a good idea. I always travel with a mouse and a mouse pad to be able to work comfortably:) Still, it is easier to use built in keyboard and a mouse than the reverse, luscious touchpad but keyboard to replace miserable something shipped with Macbook. I don't like typing on something that feels like a solid pane of aluminum with some markings on it.
Getting excellent battery life on Linux nowadays should be as simple as installing the "tlp" (the laptop project) package. I can't compare to a Mac, but I use both Thinkpad and Latitude and on both get better battery life on Debian than colleagues on Windows 10 (also and related: much less fan noise...).
Now he complains about battery life after one year. There is a Thinkpad feature that helps a lot: one can limit the charge level to a configurable value. And tlp does support this for Thinkpad. By just limiting the charge level to 90% for example, and making sure never to discharge the battery completely, one can greatly extend a laptop battery life. You can't use the range fully, but then the battery is much less stressed: Li-Ion batteries suffer at the extreme of the charge range. As the battery last enough for me (and charges quickly) I never found this range reduction to be a problem. And my 5 years TP battery is just fine.
The Dell Latitude also supports this BTW, but it's in the BIOS and not integrated with tlp.
I would like two-finger horiz scroll to work better however, especially the swipe for "back" gesture. Somewhere a few months back was a comment about the XInput team comprising one overloaded guy needing help. I mess with stuff like "synclient HorizScrollDelta" but it really needs acceleration detection to trigger the gesture, not scroll.
Mine has long history. I had to hack the BIOS to get LTE working because original BIOS does not support any LTE cards and have already disassembled it completely to the last part twice after I got it wet. Once with hot, sweet latte and once completely drenched with sparkling water.
I had no tools to open the laptop and power button stopped working so it was not possible to go to bios and disconnect power (the internal battery is always on). I had to stand it on its side like an open wet book to let the water drain and then went shopping for tools. The end was that I had to disassemble EVERYTHING including LCD panel where it had water between individual leaves. I never knew that panel has so many layers.
Anyway, it still lives on. I curse it about once a week for being so tough preventing me from buying newer, better machine:)
I have a T440s and a T470. Right now I am using the T440s, because there was record rainfall in my city, and it is humid as hell, and the T470 crashed soon after starting - I think because of humidity. It was working just fine last night after which I had to open all the windows because I lost power.
My next laptop is going to get couple upgrades from the very start. One I am planning is to put conformal coating on major components and that includes entire motherboard.
I find that I can tune the battery life on a ThinkPad to be pretty amazing, but it is hard to get my change to stick after a reboot or even a suspend/wake cycle. One of the things that seems to make a big impact is PCIe ASPM. But where do you change your config files so it's always on? At least on Ubuntu there are numerous config files that formerly controlled power management settings, are still referenced in Stack Overflow answers, still exist on the filesystem, but don't actually do one damn thing, which is infuriating.
Used to be able to just drop commands into rc.local but now it's not as simple.
A Type=oneshot systemd service that is WantedBy=sysinit.target (for early-ish boot) or multi-user.target (for late-ish boot) is the rough equivalent of an entry in /etc/rc.local.
The bootup(7) man page shows how these targets fit into the bootup process.
That said, systemd-rc-local-generator(1) provides backwards-compatibility with /etc/rc.local, so putting stuff in there should still work. Any output or error messages will be logged by the rc-local.service unit.
I have a bunch of scripts that run on every start and wakeup. Some of those scripts do things like configure my machine depending on where I am (for example, detect presence of my home WiFi).
It doesn't seem like you'd be able to do that on wakeup. Don't you have to put those kinds of commands in a hook that runs after a wifi link state change?
> As to touchpad these are all disappointing on all ThinkPads but probably especially on T440s where it is something called "clickpad". The entire touchpad is a button and you need to press it and try to move your finger while pressing HARD to drag things, for example.
My T440 also has the "clickpad", and I hate it for the exact same reason you described. It's another example of the modern design trend toward form-over-function "overminimalism" (e.g. lack of ports, too much focus on thinness, etc.), in my opinion
Lenovo must have realized their screwup, because the later T-series editions went back to discrete mouse buttons.
>Lenovo must have realized their screwup, because the later T-series editions went back to discrete mouse buttons.
I have a T431s and a T450s.
The T431s was a sort of "special edition" which I believe was the first to offer the "clickpad". And I agree, it sucks. However, the T450s was already back to a classic trackpad. It doesn't compare to the MBP trackpad (nothing does), but I have no issue with it. So it sounds like the 440 series was the only Thinkpad with that clickpad?
To be fair, there aren't many devices of any kind that don't have some kind of faults. You just take it as a whole package. I don't mind a bit of irritation as long as I decide that overall this is best option.
I would like a laptop that is perfect but, while I can easily imagine one, there does not exist a laptop that is perfect.
A perfect laptop for me would be a Macbook with LTE, ThinkPad keyboard, that would be serviceable by myself and that would not suck at running Docker.
X240 also had it. I swapped mine out with X250 parts(some pliers work required). E440 as well, probably all of 3-digit 40 series.
I think the idea is as Lenovo not being IBM, they had to have ﾐ田 key and trackpad to get Windows license, while Apple is also praised of their huge clickpads, so the decision to integrate TrackPoint buttons and trackpad into single clickpad made sense on paper, except implementation sucked.
> The entire touchpad is a button and you need to press it and try to move your finger while pressing HARD to drag things, for example.
Same here (X240) but it still has left and right buttons, although not shown. To drag things around, just keep pressed the lower left side of the pad (near the user's belly not the spacebar) then gently move the right finger around the pad. It works the same for selecting text.
I've been a happy user of trackballs for many years, and can also happily recommend the Kensington variety. It is also quite configurable, both in the traditional software sense, and in the sense that you can use it in a variety of different physical ways (thumb, forefingers, at a variety of angles, etc). This variety kind of helps reduce the "repetitive" part of RSI.
I've managed to play slow-paced FPS'es with the trackball (e.g. PUBG) and remain - well, not "competitive" exactly, but not total trash either. You can generally dial it in for great accuracy but slow turning, or less accuracy but fast turning. But not really both at the same time, unlike a mouse. (since there you can your elbow for large movements, and your wrists for smaller ones) With the latter option, you would not be able to hit small targets quickly. In terms of desktop use, you can generally find a balance where it can get across the screen in a single swipe, but you can still hit a button immediately, so it's an OK trade off for me.
So I just now remembered why I don't use trackball. I have two huge monitors side by side and jumping from the end of one to the end of other was really uncomfortable with trackball whereas it is a snap of the wrist with the mouse
I move the width of the mouse to span two monitors yet I have no trouble clicking on a 4 dot cluster on 27inch 4k monitor (which would be equivalent of a single pixel on full HD).
Now I am not sure I want to use regular mouse with a PC and trackball with a laptop. In my mind this is either or choice.
I've opposite experience. Moving cursor in wide display is comfortable by thumb trackball rather than mouse. Just move thumb, don't need snap of the wrist.
> The entire touchpad is a button and you need to press it and try to move your finger while pressing HARD to drag things, for example.
If you have it set up so a single-tap is treated as a click, you should be able to double-tap (single-finger twice, not two fingers) and keep the finger down on the second tap to drag without any clicking.
Likewise, I have two-finger single-tap for right-click, and three-finger single-tap for middle-click. Pretty sure I only had to enable that last one (Ubuntu), all the others were there by default. I can't remember the last time I actually clicked the clickpad...
> Can't debug issues in Safari without borrowing a Mac
> Can't do iOS development
Not legally, no. These can be worked around with a VM, just like with the Windows issue. It sucks, but Apple is never going to support their development toolchain on any other platform.
All in all, I think this is a pretty positive review for an "I switched to Linux" blog post. Usually they're more negative about the lack of finish a lot of Linux tools use, but the author of this blog seems to be more tolerant towards the small things in order to gain the big things.
The homebrew/jailbreak community have a custom toolchain called Theos (https://theos.dev/) which enables you to cross-compile to iOS devices without a Mac. I don't know how legal it is, but it's really frustrating that we aren't seeing more efforts to develop tools like this since so many companies and individuals are scared of pissing off Apple.
I think you're going to struggle to publish to the App Store without a mac of some form. There's too much signing and stuff that requires apple devices for authentication.
I solved this with a Mac Mini that lives at home on my desk and was only used for the occasional bit of testing, debug and publishing (I was building using Flutter).
You can also rent a full Mac mini from MacStadium and access it via VNC/SSH if you need. For ongoing projects though, where you don't need the hosting aspect, it would be cheaper to just buy a used Mac.
At my current place of work, we have a rack of Mac mini’s in a closet as our build server for the iOS app. I was kind horrified and amazed to learn of this at first, but it really is normal. It’s impressive what gymnastics Apple compels us to go through :)
> At my current place of work, we have a rack of Mac mini’s in a closet as our build server for the iOS app.
One of the main selling points that Apple uses to sell Mac minis is their use in build farms and render farms.
If you click on Apple's page on Mac minis and scroll down until the 6th or 7th selling point, you'll end up seeing the part where according to Apple it's combination of stackable form factor and performant hardware makes it ideal to compile large xcode projects or perform video encoding.
Minis are also common in homelabs. Small, cheap when used (even cheaper if it's your own old machine), and natively runs a Unix-like environment for each management and can easily boot into Linux instead. I suspect the switch to Apple silicon is going to change that, however.
That shift already seems to be happening. If you follow /r/homelab, plenty of people are building large homelabs using nothing but NUCs they paid $250 each. It's not uncommon to see racks with 4-8 of them networked together (you usually only see 1-2 Minis). There are also some AMD-based machines coming out that are that size, so there will be even more options available.
I have been using as my sole OS (except for some very occasional gaming on Windows) for 10 years. The longer you use it, the happier you become with your setup imo.
It is about Ubuntu, but many sections apply to all distros. The most important productivity boost for me has been to switch from Bash to Zsh. Mainly because of some great plugins for Zsh, such as z, zsh-peco-history (better history search), zsh-autosuggestions, and zsh-syntax-highlighting. The blog post has copy-paste ready instructions to set it up.
Always remember that the whole debacle of people even moving away from Bash is because Apple and others are afraid of GPLv3. They dread having to contribute back to the open source projects they profit from.
Most of the things I see for Zsh have been possible (and more portable) on Bash for decades. It's just the new javascript-like hype for Zsh that is new, not the capabilities.
True, Bash have lots of baggage, but half the portability and performance trickery is also because of that baggage. It's impossible to have the niceties Bash offer without some of the tradeoffs, and every new shell learned that the hard way.
I'm curious how you arrived at some of these conclusions.
- Sluggish UI -> I've never experienced this in the last three years of using my 2017 MBP.
- Inadequate package manager -> Somewhat nebulous, most package managers on Linux are available on Unix.
- Slow and large updates -> I honestly don't pay much attention as I have updates install automatically while I'm sleeping, but what size differences have you noticed?
- Slow boot to work -> Never experienced this, boot is less than a minute regularly.
- Can't have a minimal desktop -> Beyond hiding all icons and the dock, what more are you looking for?
- High memory usage of base system -> Never seen this come close to the main applications I use on a daily basis. What quantified results are you receiving to notice this?
> - Sluggish UI -> I've never experienced this in the last three years of using my 2017 MBP.
Not the author, but perhaps they meant that the UI was sluggish to use?
I find OSX great if you have one browser window open, but start to multitask at all and I personally find it a real pig to work with. Open windows are hidden behind a tiny white dot on the task bar, lots of wasted space around the task bar, no snapping or window-splitting, the menus are detached from the windows they are for and you need to focus the window to get the menu to appear, the task switcher thing (expose?) is a horrible jarring swooshy animation that is awfully distracting with things moving around on the screen on their own as you are trying to look at them.
I find it so frustrating to use after almost a decade of using macs now - it does not get any better once "used to it". Linux (Cinnamon or Plasma) + Windows 10 are just so much more intuitive for me. I'd 100% bite the hands off of the IT team here if they offered me a Windows 10 machine instead of a mac for my engineering laptop.
This is not a good point at all. Having to rely on third party applications (without any good way to discover them) to provide something that is taken for granted everywhere else is a horrible user experience!
It's the same if you want to use an external, non-Apple, completely normal HDMI monitor - use a third party application to make it use the default (for the monitor) refresh rate (60 Hz) and resolution (1920x1080).
It's the same if you want to use a completely normal USB computer mouse with a scroll wheel - install a third party application in order to make scroll wheel work like you expect.
And pretty much all those third party tools that are required to turn a Mac into a system that is actually working and allowing the user to be productive costs money as well.
I've never had issues with default resolution/refresh rate on any external monitors, including a non-conventional 1080p 240hz monitor that I use daily. Mice work normally for me as well, and you can change the scroll direction in system preferences if you want.
> - Sluggish UI -> I've never experienced this in the last three years of using my 2017 MBP.
I have. Performance generally degrades over time for me.
> - Slow and large updates -> I honestly don't pay much attention as I have updates install automatically while I'm sleeping, but what size differences have you noticed?
Most OS X updates take the system down for 30+ minutes while you're staring at the black screen w/ white Apple logo. By contrast most Linux systems can update in the background, and a reboot after an update takes no more time than a normal reboot, because it is a normal reboot.
> I'm curious how you arrived at some of these conclusions.
> - Sluggish UI -> I've never experienced this in the last three years of using my 2017 MBP.
There seems to be a type a user who perceives any kind of animation as sluggishness. Before I switched to macOS, I used to hang out in #kde. From time to time someone would come in and complain about the sluggish UI. They'd often list specs that were impressive at the time.
I'd instruct them on how to globally increase KDE's animation speed. That almost always "fixed the issue".
I'm not sure what it is, but for some users animations are indistinguishable from lag.
> Inadequate package manager -> Somewhat nebulous, most package managers on Linux are available on Unix.
Here he probably compares homebrew with apt/dnf/zypper. Compared to these three, homebrew is quite primitive and prone to be in a bad state. Luckily now you can use nix on MacOS which is a good package manager.
> Can't have a minimal desktop -> Beyond hiding all icons and the dock, what more are you looking for?
I run a minimal desktop with a tiling window manager (bspwm) and a status bar (polybar in my case), I don't need a window decorator and so I don't have one. I also don't need drop shadows on windows and so I disabled them (while keeping them on popups). AFAIK that is simply impossible to achieve on MacOS.
MacPorts is a better long-term experience than Homebrew.
It takes the BSD ports approach, where all packages are maintained together in a centralized repository. The Homebrew approach is closer to a bunch of PPA's and other independently maintained stuff of questionable integration status.
If all you've tried is Homebrew, then I'm not surprised at the reaction.
- No focus-follows-mouse options means I can't layer windows in a way that accelerates my workflows. Having to switch between windows constantly is a giant speed bottleneck for me.
- No keybinds for quickly resizing and positioning windows as far as I know. I only use the mouse to quickly position windows and even then just use alt-drag on my Linux desktop.
- Animations. Anything that doesn't just instantly do whatever I told it is wasting my time. I don't need pretty or shiny.
Of course this is my own personal experience, but I am extremely less productive on Mac and Windows compared to Linux due to these and more.
After eight years of using Macs exclusively for desktop and laptop use, I still can't get used to the counterintuitive focus management. I'm scrolling up and down in an app, start using the keyboard, and the keystrokes go to a different app! Arg! It just does not compute for me that I can be interacting with app A, move my mouse to app B, start interacting with app B, see my interactions have effect in app B, then start typing and find that my keystrokes are going to app A.
It's not built into MacOS, but you may find Magnet to solve some of your window management issues, depending on how you like to work. https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/
all my laptops/servers run linux and I too have noticed Docker run on osx is just not the same smooth tool as when run on a linux host although Docker was far worse on osx until a year or two ago ... to me the fixation people have for osx is purely inertia and over time the linux laptop will continue to gain converts from the Apple fan clubbers
Did this happen to you? Funny story, I spit a mouthful of La Croix on my 2016 touchbar MacBook Pro just the other day (not for fun, wrong pipe). Keyboard, screen, etc. I thought it was a goner. But I wiped it down and it's still fine.
Make sure to dry it completely, and the insides too. My friend spilled coffee on a macbook air and it was fine for a month and then died. All the internals were rusted. Coffee is different from soda, but still, take care.
OTOH, my wife's MBP was on the backseat of her car when another driver hit the back of her car at high speed, totalling both cars. Her car's trunk and backseat were compressed into about 70 cm.
The computer survived with one scratch to one of its corners.
For me, the worst of all is that you can minimize an app and it's still on focus. That gets me every single time. I don't know who thought of this, but last time I checked, it was supposed to be a feature, not a bug :D
I love the idea of having a Thinkpad running Linux. But there are a dozen apps on my Mac that I would miss terribly. DEVONthink, OmniGraffle, and many more.
I was thinking about getting a used ThinkPad for Emacs + Org plus terminal only. A companion for writing in Emacs/org and for doing dev work (Python, Lisp, Bash). This article made me revisit that plan. (Been using ThinkPads from 2006-2015 and loved the experience. Solid rock hardware and best keybord.) But I can‘t think of getting rid of my Mac as it is adding so much quality to my day to day life.
I needed a new laptop and while I’d prefer a MBP I don’t want to buy one right now with the ARM cutover on the horizon. Instead I bought a refurb t460 for like $400 and slapped NixOS/i3wm on it. It’ll hold me over until the ARM release and if I really need anything Mac specific I still have my old MBP.
I've never thought of MacBooks for the apps specifically, but I checked OmniGraffle which looks like a great replacement for Visio. Visio is one of the few things that keeps me occasionally attached to PCs.
Could you please share the other Mac-only apps that you'd miss, i'd love to see!
I went the same route from Mac to Lenovo Thinkpads. I have not looked back since. Did the Linux swap due to Mac OS X memory pressure issues with virtualization. Basically Mac OS X got a ported feature from iOS where they froze background application memory so that apps would be quick to restart and resume but that did not play nice with virtualization where you want all the memory you can get.
Anyhow since most development is nowadays done for Linux server running Linux on the desktop makes sense. Docker works better on Linux with port mapping.
For the battery time mentioned in the article one can swap batterys on Lenovo and there is a 9 cell battery which should get better run time hours.
- The ABC - Extended keyboard layout gives me easy access to diacriticalized letters like é or č as well as typographic characters like – and –
- long battery life. I'm currently sharing a charger between my work laptop my personal laptop and my iPad and life is easy.
- access to mainstream software like Office, Adobe etc.
- I can easily use my iPad as an external monitor while I'm away from my desk.
- The trackpad is so much more usable than any Windows laptop I've been given from work
- I don't need to spend much time getting stuff in a workable state. Other than disabling caps lock and selecting ABC - Extended as my keyboard layout, I don't feel the need to do much customization on a new Mac.
- Compose key blows your "ABC - Extended layout out of the water." It's more powerful than anything else.
- ... I never really use my XPS 13 without a charger, because I don't really travel around much, but it also has USB-C like all the "cool stuff." I would imagine with some tweaking I can get better battery life but I know it does last a while on standby.
- You won't get mainstream-mainstream stuff on Linux, which is probably a problem for some, but for day-to-day usage many Adobe alternatives exist (Blender, Inkscape, Krita, GIMP), along with commercial and professional things (DAWs (eg. Renoise, Reaper, whatever), and DaVinci Resolve)
- /shrugs VNC maybe? Although there are some pretty small monitors out there that should work. (I use HDMI monitors). Advantages of not being in the Apple ecosystem is that there is more freedom.
- Use a keyboard and mouse. It's faster. And more useful. There are only so many things you can do with a trackpad.
- You don't need to do much customization on Linux either (especially something like Pop!_OS or Ubuntu). Things are a lot better (not perfect, but better) than they were before. Nothing like Windows where you have to uninstall the bloatware though
- I looked up the keyboard shortcuts for compose key and it seems like it takes a lot more typing to get to the characters I need than ABC - Extended: To get an acute accent I type opt-e o, for example, to get ó. The same on Linux is compose-'' o. Everything requires at least two characters with compose held down. There are a handful of characters/diacriticals that are shift-opt to reach, but the most common ones are less typing. Also muscle memory makes a difference.
- Many of the alternatives to mainstream stuff have compatibility issues. Maybe this is better now than the last time I've dealt with them last, but part of why I use word is that I need to send documents to people who use word and I'd rather not have surprises (smaller thing but still significant—Word for the Mac shows the word count at the bottom of the window. Word on Windows doesn't (or at least didn't the last time I used it) and Pages on the Mac will show wordcount only in a mini window.
I'm much more productive with a trackpad. MacOS also includes a number of shortcuts on the trackpad that don't work as well with a mouse (even Apple's magic mouse).
I'd note that some of it is also that I've been trained into the shortcuts that I have on the Mac (both keyboard-based and trackpad-based). Muscle habit goes a long way towards keeping someone on a platform.
Ah, so compose isn't actually held down. What we do is we press compose, then release, then do the combination we want. In this. Now, for ó, it's not actually compose (⎄ is compose's symbol) "o, it's ⎄'o, with an apostrophe, so it's not as bad. Indeed, there, are some pretty bad ones, like ⎄`+o, which gives you ờ (a Vietnamese letter), but it's still usable. The point of compose is the sheer number of combinations it has. Finding a new combination on https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/libX11/i18n/compose/e... is almost magical.
I mean, I'd just use PDF, but I get the need for Word. In that case... Office Online is an option? You can probably write up everything in a solution like LibreOffice (which is not as abominable as people make it out to be, and some of the horrid bugs it used to have have been fixed, but it's not perfect either), and export to DOCX, then check it through in Office Online and it should be good. LibreOffice does have word count in the bottom as well, which is a nice addition
Linux also supports trackpad gestures, although they are prone to not being as smooth or whatnot. Since I spend my life on the keyboard I use that instead, and it's just as productive. I find it annoying to go reach for my trackball.
Indeed, yes. Although I should probably take that into account too since I'm switching to a 60% keyboard that doesn't have arrow keys, and I'm going to have to relearn a lot of stuff. In the end, as others have said, switching to Linux feels bad in the beginning but you grow to love it as time passes. Sure, it has issues, such as these, but it also has other strong advantages.
Agreed on the Wayland point. Wayland isn't particularly usable yet, but we can keep hoping that it gets better. For now, there are some GNOME extensions or applications like fusuma.
... In all fairness, I use a trackball, where I can scroll in any axis. Zooming, of course, can be done with a keyboard. I'm not even sure what 3D touch is.
What trackballs offer free scrolling? And something done with a keyboard is by definition something not done with a mouse. And 3D touch is something that's very convenient.
I don't know if you answered my question: what is 3D Touch? Sure, it might be convenient, but it's hard for me to imagine without knowing what it is.
> What trackballs offer free scrolling?
My trackball (Marble Trackball from Logitech) offers it, with a little configuration. Effectively, you're holding down a button and using the ball as a scroll wheel, letting you move left and right. I can imagine that any trackball (since by nature they have the "ball") with some configuration could be used for free scrolling (at least, well, on Linux).
> And something done with a keyboard is by definition something not done with a mouse.
We scroll on a mouse. We can also scroll on a keyboard (with arrow keys). So they are interchangeable sometimes. I know Windows also has a feature to emulate the mouse with arrow keys. So this isn't inherently true, unless I'm misunderstanding.
I was looking at larger laptops to run Linux but they aren't cheap so MBP doesn't look such bad value. I want 15in screen with higher than 1080 resolution, 16GB memory, good battery life and there really isn't much less than $1500 from the main brands that will run Linux well. Any suggestions? Otherwise the MBP16 looks not such bad value as I know it'll be reliable.
Something from https://system76.com/ maybe? Ive never had one, anecdote but the two people i know who got the 16" MBP have had to return them with hardware issues, at least apples support is pretty good. Im hanging on to my 2015MBP for dear life, has great connectivity and reliability, id like the new 16" as it is nice but am waiting for a hardware itteration, suppose by then there might be something arm based released?
arm released is not going to happen in the next 2 years, IMO mpro 16" is going to get better and it is good enough to switch to it permanently. I was testing a few mpros before purchasing one
Architecture switch is not a question whether Apple can do it, I am pretty sure they are capable of releasing it asap. Think about all software that have to migrated, it’s not just re-compile and release button click
I have no idea why Lenovo doesn't offer the Carbon X1 in a larger and slightly heavier configuration for people that like larger screens and use them for full-time work. Clearly the 15" and 16" MBPs show that the market exists.
A 16" or 17" (remember 17" laptops?) Carbon X1 would get me to move away from the Macbook Pro in a heartbeat.
I used to use Thinkpads until I decided to switch when the Lenovo Superfish thing happened more-or-less in conjunction with the sharp decline in keyboard quality. In terms of reliability and compatibility they were always very solid, and I got great price/performance results by buying last-year's top of the line models second-hand and then maxing out whatever could be upgraded (memory + disk) from there.
After that I switched to Dell XPS 13s starting with the 9350, buying new. There was an initial issue with the WiFi adapter being unsupported (as I recall the `developer edition` with Ubuntu supported was more expensive but also had a better supported WiFi card) which initially required me to build a custom kernel module (I think? It was a while ago) but support appeared very soon after in mainline Linux. Subsequently I've had no major compatibility issues - except that support for multiple monitors where the laptop is HiDPI but the external monitors aren't is very poor (the Thinkpads I owned weren't HiDPI - I don't think this is a Dell issue). Edit: Battery life is mediocre on all the XPS models I've had.
Just lately I've been using a work-issued Dell Latitude 7490. I'm enjoying this a lot. Support is solid, the screen isn't HiDPI so multi-monitor usage is fine, its battery life is good enough to get me through a working day without plugging in (sometimes I don't even notice I haven't plugged in), and it has plenty of ports (including USB C, HDMI, and Ethernet).
I've used Macs on and off in the workplace but couldn't get used to them. If I needed to do CAD, Graphic Design, or other things where open source software doesn't cut the mustard I guess I'd go for a Mac, but happily I just don't need to these days (the broad move to Web apps helped a LOT, particularly the move to GSuite for a lot of stuff that would previously have required MS Office).
I am in the same boat, except my daily laptop is a ThinkPad X1 Carbon instead of a T480, coming from a specced out Macbook Air 11. My feelings are remarkably close to this. For anyone who spends a lot of time in emacs, browser, the terminal, with media editing as a secondary concern, I think it's a great setup. The ThinkPad hardware is stellar.
I would underline what he points out about the battery being a relative shortcoming though. Which is important for anyone who likes being away from a power outlet for a good while.
I think linux has historically really lagged on controlling battery use, Apple has exploited its tight hardware/software integration for years in this regard, and I only see this spread widening frankly. The ARM Macbooks will likely be absolute marathon runners in comparison to any linux laptop, at least for a good while. I'd love to be wrong.
I love Thinkpads and I love Linux. My current "daily driver" laptop is an old X220T from 2011, which is a tablet hybrid (including touchscreen and Wacom pen/digitizer). I don't use it because of nostalgia or a love for retro computers, I use it because it's still an excellent experience all these years later. No modern laptop in the current price range can beat it.
I don't know if that's because the build quality was so great back then, or because Intel dropped the ball this past decade. I'm guessing it's a little of both, which is why I'm kind of conflicted right now: I love Thinkpads, but I'm also super interested to try out the new ARM-based Macbooks.
I am sorry, but I find it ridiculous to claim that X220Ts had "great build quality".
When the X2x0 series were released we did complain A LOT about the drop in quality and reminisce about the good old Lenovo times. And of course people already complained about the Lenovo times vs IBM. And I ponder if people used to complain about the drop of quality in IBM times...
But seriously, the X220T specifically is crap. We bought 4 of them and NONE of them survived the first year, with a myriad of failures, including mute microphone/webcam, broken display flex cable, and screen that would not stand in place (it would just fall instead of staying open). Lenovo then replaced them with X230Ts and ALL of them had this issue where the microphone would have a terrible electric noise when the webcam was on (common issue too, google for it). By the time the X240 was released, we just gave up -- no trackpoint click buttons!!! what were they thinking!
A lot of people hated the X200 and the rest of the X2__ series because they owned the X60 or X61, which were the peak of ThinkPad quality. They X200 was when they moved from the best screens in the business to the most shit displays they could find falling off the backs of trucks, from decent keyboards to garbage keyboards, and of course with the X201 they started adding touchpads, which is apostasy, and it didn't help that their first touchpads were incredibly bad, contributing to the perception of the X201 as a piece of crap. Which it was.
Ah yes, how could I forget the damn display. It had so much ghosting, that for a while I thought I had the transparent terminals feature (this was a xcompmgr + gnome(2)-terminal feature) enabled. Imagine my huge surprise when it turned out I didn't had it enabled. It was just ghosting from when the window had been in focus, and it would stay for minutes!!
There is only one other display which I remember comparable in terrible quality: the early color Palm(Pilot)s. With viewing angles measured in arcminutes rather than degrees.
> No modern laptop in the current price range can beat it.
> I'm also super interested to try out the new ARM-based Macbooks
I’m having a hard time choosing between an old Thinkpad and the Pinebook Pro for a GNU/Linux laptop. Thinkpads have a better battle-tested durability + repairability reputation and Libreboot is a significant selling point to me. But x86 seems like it’s just beginning to fade into the past in favor of source-available ARM in the present and open-source RISC V in the future, and the Pinebook isn’t exactly terribly flimsy (magnesium-alloy outer shell, maybe inspired by Thinkpads) or expensive ($200).
I like my Pinebook Pro, but it is slow compared to my T420, and maybe even slow compared to my X200.
The Thinkpads will also work out of the box with basically any kernel from the past 10 years, whereas the Pinebook requiers a patched kernel, patched u-boot, and a third patched component I didn't even know existed and don't remember the name of.
It's a pretty awesome device for $200 but it can't replace a real laptop IMHO, and hardware support is under active development.
Pinebook Pros are nice and cheap, but the hardware support is still very far from equivalent from what you have on x86 desktops. (GPU acceleration is hardly supported, sound issues, etc...)
Recommend not going with the pinebook pro for real work. It is an excellent concept and I bought one to both support the cause and have an interesting toy. That’s about all it is though. Most significantly the trackpad is rubbish. It’s the worst I’ve ever used.
A lot of modern software development is actually pretty light on computer power needs. Unfortunately I'm in the 'have compiled the Linux kernel 3 times today' camp for which that isn't true.
I put an IPS display into my x220. Still lower resolution, but I get away with it with a lot of tweaking. I have laptops with better screens but I usually use my x220 instead. I'd just say: YMMV :)
I didn't know about Darktable or Kdenlive, so I'll have to check those out. Peek is awesome for GIF recording.
I've been using a ThinkPad X1 Carbon running Xubuntu since 2016. Before that I was using a MacBook Pro.
The things I like about this machine/Linux are
- It's light
- The keyboard is great/better
- The battery is really good coupled with the low resource usage of Xubuntu (except when I have Zoom, Docker, and lots of Firefox tabs)
- Don't have any trouble with audio when using Bluetooth
- I don't have to worry about MacOS breaking my dev environment
- Setting up dev environment is a breeze
Things I dislike
- CPU is not as powerful as a MacBook Pro
- The most recent X/Ubuntu broke wake up from sleep
- Some software doesn't have a Linux equivalent (Webex)
- If you want to dual boot Linux and Windows, getting full disk encryption on X/Ubuntu is challenging
- Plugging into a non-hidpi monitor is janky because it can't change dpi per screen
- Speakers on this machine suck
For me doing strictly software development, the benefits of a stable and easy to use environment outweigh the warts of Linux.
If I were to get a new machine I'd consider Lenovo again. The new Dell XPS also looks great. I might also give Windows and WSL2 a try in my dual OS desktop. Windows feels a lot smoother compared to Linux (on a very powerful desktop though), but it's constantly notifying you about things which is a distraction.
I'm on my 3rd X1 (4th if you count my work laptop), and I would be completely happy, except that it's USB-C ports are somehow broken. Both machines have flakey connections to both USB-C docks I've tried, sometimes dropping keystrokes or network packets. It's obnoxious to use, and there's no clear way to debug or diagnose the issue, and sadly I think my next purchase cannot be a Lenovo.
That's a good point. Sorry to hear that. I have the 5th gen which has a USB-C power port and another USB-C and two other USBs. The USB-C power definitely wiggles a lot when it's plugged which makes me concerned though I haven't had a problem. The new Dell XPS 15 has an aluminum chassis, so I wonder if that would eliminate this issue. https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-15-lapt...
My Lenovo IdeaPad has a sliding cover for the webcam. It's about the same size as a MacBook, sports 32 GB or RAM, an 8 core Ryzen and 2 M2 SSDs for ~900€. The trackpad is fine, and the WiFi reaches about 300Mbps. I'm quite happy with it (too bad they put a large black band at the bottom of the screen instead of a 16:10 one...)
it looks very interesting, I came around purism a couple of times but never got to hardware switchers section, very nice.
Is there anyone who has any experience with puri.sm?
> Can't debug issues in Safari without borrowing a Mac
You can debug layout issues to some extent using GNOME Web (also known as Epiphany). It uses same webkit engine as Safari. https://webkit.org/downloads/ way at the bottom.
I always find polished Linux DE's like cinnamon, Gnome 3, Pantheon and unity to be top notch and more usable than OSX.
I'm surprised Mac OS has never had an overhaul of the look, on their windows, buttons, icons or anything.
On the other hand, I absolutely find it to be nightmare to navigate
in Finder - the shortcuts are a mess.. and there is no address bar at all!
Other than that I also do find Mac OS to be slower than Linux due to some bloat. On an overall scale, software availability is almost on par with Mac OS. The only drawback for Linux is graphics applications like Photoshop aren't just either available, or not hardware accelerated properly.
- You can get the directory structure in Finder windows.
- The short cuts are not a mess, they're just not what you're used to.
- macOS may still look similar to previous versions, but, to my taste, anything touched by gnome is a macOS ripoff that looks downright oversized and is either gaudy or too dark.
- Today I tried to get a database manager for mongodb on Ubuntu 20.04 that is more than a wrapper around the command line. Nowhere to be found. And let's not mention video editing, music making, and gaming.
You prefer Linux, fine, but please don't diss the rest.
Gnome is a ripoff? I haven't ever come across this anywhere. It's been around for a long long time really.
It's near perfect for what it is, and it's also nicely customisable.
Regarding the shortcuts, I found Enter, Backspace, using Space Bar for selecting, etc. to be simpler compared to holding down cmd+up/down, and other combinations.
Mac trackpads are unmatched (yay/boo Fingerworks!) but you could always use an external mac touchpad. In any case, shortcut keys are abundant in Linux desktops, and a tiling wm (I like the default one in Pop OS) really changes the game.
Personally, it has been really hard to justify the Apple premium the past few years. My company upgraded us to touchbar MBPs a few years ago. I am thankful as it helped me avoid the mistake of buying my own.
Instead, I went Thinkpad+Linux(Lubuntu) for an iteration. Excellent machine as the article details. I was very happy with it for a couple years.
I wanted something with a beefier GPU though, so most recently went to Asus+W10Pro+WSL2. I was skeptical at first, having been off Windows for a decade, but it is pretty decent. There are some minor annoyances, but not enough to push me back to full Linux yet.
I often think about returning to a Linux laptop. Things, generally speaking, tend to “just work” on a mac, but it fails for a poweruser, even with various tools such as hammerspoon, since I oft want to morph the GUI to my liking - something apple and its gui fanaticism clearly doesn’t abide. The only thing that keeps me here is safari testing and occasional iphone development, two things that are unpleasant but necessary for my job; I hope I’m not forced to upgrade my mac and it’s the last mac I buy for at least half a decade more.
A sweet spot I found is a generic laptop (a good Dell or Thinkpad, with the least imaginative hardware possible so Linux runs happy) and a Mac desktop (can be an iMac or a Mini) for the Mac-ish stuff.
You need to pay attention to what can and can't be upgraded, however. The newest Mini can't have the storage upgraded (you should probably buy it maxed out), but can upgrade the memory to 64GB, so it's cheaper to get the 8GB and then upgrade it yourself. The 21 inch iMac can't be upgraded, so YMMV depending on what you get.
Most of this blog post looks like to be a standard user personal experience report.
Most items make sense in this context I think, but there is one point that surprised me:
<<Emoji support is not 100%>>
Wtf!
In my opinion, that it worths mentioning that, shows at what point Apple marketing brain fucked the Apple device users...
You buy a 2k$ computer, with dozens of high speed CPUs, for what? Putting stupid smileys everywhere?
And in addition, this is more an application specific issue than a system one. Where do you use them? Emails, professional word documents?
Macbooks have nailed down the basics when it comes down to the user experience:
1. Best touchpad period.
2. Good overall keyboards (Ignore the 2016-2020 butterfly keyboards)
3. Best sounding speakers.
4. Every display has 400+ nits of brightness with good color accuracy.
5. Very good battery life per watt-hour of the battery and lasts better with time as well.
The package is what make the macbooks great. I don't have to go through a list of laptops and go through pros and cons of laptops and there are a LOT of cons.
You may think that bad sounding speakers or 250 nits screen is not a very big deal but just try using a macbook for a while and you'll see how these these make a drastic change in the user experience.
People go on about how macbooks are over-hyped and expensive (they are!) but I think that what they offer is a level above anything else on the market.
I am using a MBA 2015 for my dev purposes and sometimes the 8Gigs of RAM feels like it could use an upgrade. (I want to upgrade but it is so much expensive moving on to the new ones). I've tried so many laptops and none of those impress me. This is the only reason that Macbooks, even though they cost a bomb, last for well over 10 years.
Edit:
It "seems" windows laptops are catching up, but please list one laptop that would be usable after, say 8 years. For eg. a MBP 2012 will still work very good in 2020 compared to any of the laptops from even 2015.
Are there any windows laptops in 2020 that you can say the same for?
Cool. I'm running Linux on a Dell Vostro I purchased during their quarterly business sale as my daily driver -- I can't believe the machine I got for the price, and strongly encourage people to look at these sales..
How big of an issue is it to target iOS as a platform on a PC these days with the rise of Flutter, etc? I'm looking to get into app development, but don't have a Mac, nor would I like to buy one if I can avoid it.
"How big of an issue is it to target iOS as a platform on a PC these days with the rise of Flutter, etc?"
Flutter is nice. Yes, a single codebase typically works both on Android & iOS (sometimes, a little tweaking on each platform is needed).
The problem is: you can't avoid iOS SDK for iOS development. This is not Flutter-specific, BTW, but everything: React Native, Ionic, Xamarin, Pascal etc etc. So you need to have either a Mac machine, or access to Mac cloud server.
I vote the former, because it makes debugging easier.
You need a Mac to build for macOS / iOS, yes, but it doesn't have to be your Mac. There are services like Codemagic that have free CI/CD macOS build services [0].
Depends on the app I guess, but you can get far without needing a Mac with flutter etc. Sadly I think there still is some restrictions for some Apple hardware for the developer part of the app store. I'm not super familiar with that part, but we had some issues with some Apple legal terms which could only be accepted on a authenticated device, which means you need Apple hardware.
Whatever solution you pick for iOS dev: Flutter, React Native, Xamarin etc etc, in the end we will always meet the same thing: iOS SDK. And iOS SDK only runs on Mac, unlike Android.
Unless Apple decide to port their SDK to Windows/Linux (which I believe will not happen), you can't practically avoid Mac.
A Mac is required to build to an actual device or Simulator. You'll definitely want that to test out any device specific differences.
You can count on the framework to abstract away big significant parts of your app (business logic, UI) but some of the nuances you will probably have to tweak yourself. Launcher icons, handling notches, device specific features, and other weird oddities.
At least in the React Native community, you can often get away with building to the device only once every native dependency change. This becomes a better experience with Expo though
If you want to get into mobile development there isn't really much choice but to own a mac. You could pick up a used or refurbished mac mini at a reasonable price.
Is there a metric for battery performance while the machine’s asleep?
That’s been my only gripe in moving from a MacBook Air to an XPS running Ubuntu a little over a year ago.
Battery life is comparable in active usage. But if I close my XPS lid and then, for whatever reason, don’t use it for a day or two, I’ll be at zero battery.
I don’t remember this ever being something to even think about with my Mac laptop.
As a C++ backend/distributed systems engineer, I cant imagine working on anything except Linux.
I even use Linux on my personal laptop. It's a Thinkpad actually. Yes, the touch pad on Mac is better. But Linux is just so much quicker and lighter, and really the only major annoying thing I've run into is electronically signing PDFs.
Devs can spend a lot of time getting Macs and Window computers to behave like Linux.. especially given the idiosyncrasies that pop up with docker on them.
It does seem reasonable to develop on Linux.. for Linux.
I've heard of a few recent experiences specifically using Ubuntu 19/20 on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon/T4xx of some type resulting in a really nice experience, including optimized battery life.
While Ubuntu might not be my desktop of choice, it does seem to have done the most that I can find to work well on laptops from a battery life/driver support/sleep perspective.
I have it loaded on a desktop and it's working flawlessly, and I continue to try and find an issue with it. As a development environment, it may be something to consider seriously.
Part of me is wondering if an Ubuntu/Linux laptop could open up a way to use an iPad as a secondary computing device that where I could continue to enjoy the things that I wanted there.
I made that decision in 2011 or so; still use the same thinkpad hardware, and it's still faster and better than the 2017 mbp I was issued by work.
Even if it was a shittier experience (kubuntu is vastly better than osx in every pertinent way), I'd continue using the thinkpad for the trackpoint and keyboard.
Some tips from someone who's been doing this linux laptop thing for a long while now (6 year's ago, I replaced my aging MBP with a cheap HP)
0. TAKE NOTES! Make a setup doc that keeps up with the issues of setting up your computer. ie... I have to do some funky things to get my onboard speakers to work, I never remember how to do it, but my notes remember it for me.
1. The trackpad will suck. Just get an external trackball or mouse, use it instead.
2. Pay for a good built-in keyboard.
3. Make sure you can swap your network card. I have my preference on manufacturer. For historical reasons I typically replace whatever it comes with.
4. If graphics matter to you, avoid NVidia GPU's.
5. Avoid laptops with restrictive bioses. (wifi whitelists, wont let you change boot order but supports two drives, etc)
Wrt note taking for setting up software: I gave up on that in favor of a shell script for initial setup, and pretty much everything else is in Ansible. Works for almost everything, does take some work and sometimes needs updating. But also serves as notes by itself. Anyway the main advantage over notes for me is that I don't have to copy-paste a bunch of commands from notes anymore, and that large parts of it are common to multiple computers I use.
Shell scripting is good when you can use it. Some software I use is manually patched and that doesn't lend itself to automation.
The notes are also geared for the times I move distros or change a major component in the system. I include what I did, why I did it, where the info came from, and why I removed it or decided to go a different direction.
t470s currently but have been using linux and thinkpads since the mid/late 90s.
Battery life isn't great agree. My solution currently is a USB-C portable battery which I get an additional full laptop charge. In the past x220 and t60(p) were favourite models.
Other annoyance (still!) is sleep seems to work on certain kernels and not on others.
Was on ubuntu forever but slowly may move back to debian as I don't like snap packages.
Mouse is Logitech MX Anywhere 2S
Only suggestion currently on getting an laptop is usb-c, ips screen, nvme drive and lots of ram. In fact the CPU doesn't matter much. I used the x series for a decade but now moved to t series and they have gotten lighter and are good value.
This mouse has seriously become my favorite ever. Outstanding battery life, very comfortable, it works on any surface I've tried, and it works great on both macOS and Linux.
your desiderata are now available in the T60 form factor! Xue Yao makes the T70 franken-pad, a 4:3 IPS screen laptop with modern internals [1] ideal for someone who loved the x220 and t60 ... battery life is great too. you should take a look!
I simply cannot get over using non-Apple trackpads. The trackpad is such an important part of a laptop's user interface. Obviously I wouldn't drive a car with flat tires, so why would I use a laptop with a crappy trackpad?
Under appreciated is that macOS is largely a touch-based system now with the magic trackpads. If you configure three-finger drag in accessibility settings you never have to click. Granted it’s not a touch screen, but in my view it’s a touch- and gesture-based system. Using a non-Apple trackpad feels like going back in time and using touch screen devices with keyboards (eg Win 10 laptops) is incredibly annoying.
I will say, my Dell Precision 7710's trackpad works very, very well. I was really concerned when I migrated away from a Mac 3 years ago because I kept reading stuff like this but was very pleasantly surprised.
In contrast, I don't understand the Thinkpad hype. Everyone that I've ever tried has just felt low quality to me. I don't understand why people like them so much.
Half-OT: I'm using a MBP13"(2013) for years now and really like it, but it's not upgradable and it's getting cumbersome to do some more intesive things with it.
Would you recommend buying a new MBP or getting a laptop?
I find my dual-core 2013 to still be alright if I SSH into a six-core NUC to work. Visual Studio Code makes this super easy to do and almost exactly the same as working locally, it can be done without it too. I used a remote VM this way as well for about 9 months while wondering what to buy and on wired connection it was also pretty seamless.
Have you tried Thunderbolt accessories? You should be able to add NVMe storage and AMD graphics that might speed things up. I couldn't try this out because I have an nVidia eGPU, but using Apple's TB2-to-TB3 adaptor I can actually game quite acceptably in Bootcamp.
> Would you recommend buying a new MBP or getting a laptop?
A MacBook is a laptop, yes? What classifies a MacBook as not being a laptop? In terms of form factor, they are the same. There's nothing special. In fact, MacBooks can run Windows or Linux just like regular "laptops."
As for a recommendation, I don't see why Macs are necessary. USB-C is a huge frustration to deal with (and this includes non-Macs, such as my XPS 13). I'd personally recommend a ThinkPad (which I've decided is going to be my next laptop), but I've never had the opportunity to use one that much. It's just that the keyboard seems much better and it has more options, and I really like the build quality.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Right now, it's not very useful for me. Everything is still running on normal USB-A, so I really don't care for USB-C. I'm not about to just go out and replace all my existing and perfectly functional equipment when I don't need to.
- Dongles are a nightmare as well. What if I forget mine when I'm travelling?
I have the MBP 16 from 2019 with the fixed keyboard, and both the hardware and software is solid. If you like macOS and are ok with the Apple premium, I’d say it’s the best laptop I’ve tried in the last 5 years (Just wish it didn’t have the damn Touch Bar).
I have several thinkpads (5) and run them all on Linux. Agree that the battery life is not optimal, even with TLP. Keyboards are typically excellent, but the brand of the keyboard can matter a lot (there are usually 2-3 different manufacturers of Thinkpad keyboards and they don't feel the same). Maintaining Thinkpads is usually a pure joy: super easy to open up, easy to replace RAM, sometimes CPU (depending on the model) and storage. And they are robust (will survive a fall).
Software wise, apart from some rare exceptions (X1 Gen 7?) everything works out of the box on most distros.
There are so many small things that really frustrate me with the Mac and understandably considering I am back on Linux. However, I have a 2010 15" MacBook Pro that I bought used. It is god awful to work on, but I can still run scripts, ssh, browse the web (for the most part), and play emulators.
This is thing is slow and bordering useless, but I genuinely never had any tech product for 10 years work for well. 10 years, only changed the charger and HD once. Everything else is still working, including a really nice touch pad.
> This is thing is slow and bordering useless, but I genuinely never had any tech product for 10 years work for well. 10 years, only changed the charger and HD once. Everything else is still working, including a really nice touch pad.
Same here! I still do web browsing, mail and audio editing on my 10 year old 15" MBP. My FireWire audio interface still hooks up perfectly all the time.
The 2010 MBP range honestly seem like the last ones that were built to last. I've upgraded the OS HD to an SSD (made a world of difference) and replaced the CD/DVD with a second 1TB storage drive.
Looking to move to a system 76 or purism as most of my development is happening on a Linux desktop. I've been way more productive and enjoyed myself more developing on Linux.
Not overly concerned about the trackpad conversations -- I like me so buttons to tap. Only concern is battery usage, but the system76 lemur pro seems to have that sorted pretty well.
I switched from a MBP to a Thinkpad for flexibility & performance: hexa-core processor, 64GB RAM, 3 disks (NVME+SSD+HDD) running Linux (pop-os) with the intent of running OSX in VMs. I didn't like the iOS-ification of OSX, and this will let me run my beloved Snow Leopard, and even run some older aqua UI OSX versions as VMs. I'll probably get an ARM MacBook when they come out, as MacOS and iOS go well together... but 64GB is a HECK of a lot of Chrome tabs, and the 3:2 screen is as good as on my Chromebooks. Linux has certainly matured since I used it as my only desktop back in the comp.os.linux.advocacy days, which is just as well as I can't be bothered futzing with x.org config files any more. My X210 (nb51) "Thinkpad" gets about five hours battery life on a dodgy battery, but if I can find a real TP battery that should rise to 10-15, and I expect the ARM Macs to do 20-24 hours.
I'm actually considering either going with the T480p or an Asus for my next work laptop (from a 2018 MBP) with Linux on it. I have a T470p though that has a broken motherboard right after the warranty expired. When picking it up to move it around, it shorts out and restarts, apparently this is a known issue with the 470's. But I really fear Lenovo's reliability these days.
Has anyone else had reliability problems with the T series? How reliable have the T480's been?
I've been using a T480 (same as author) and it has been very reliable. I even dropped it getting out of the van a while back and it landed on a corner of the laptop when it hit the pavement. It has still been running just as well as when I originally got it. :)
Lenovo has an updated ThinkPad line, T14, that has also AMD 4000 series as an option. I would definitely check that out, as AMD is running circles around Intel CPUs especially on laptops where the power consumption is more limited.
Sweet, I'll consider that. I just upgraded my gaming desktop to an AMD Ryzen 9. I'm so happy to see AMD making a comeback. If I can get an AMD on the next work machine, even better.
The interesting thing here is that the absolute biggest disadvantage is the MacOS/iOS development. Apple's walled garden seems to be working as intended ;).
I would put an asterisk near battery life as a downside, after switching to mpro 2020 13 realized that I overlooked batter life which is 7h at max, 5h if working aggressively (docker, builds), very disappointing. Macs always were laptops with great performance - battery life for me, so be careful with customizations and stick either to defaults or mpro 16 (which is like a plazma TV for me)
if thinkpad is an option do take a look at X2100: a thinkpad chassis & accessories, but with modern internals. it's basically "Peak Intel", a swan song for x86...
The hardware on Mac is unparalleled. I can't hardly stand using my Thinkpad touchpad after having a Macbook work laptop. I know the keyboard on the recent macs have drawn criticism, but for me they work fine and I have fewer mistypes than when I am on the thinkpad. And battery life on macos is great, when not on Zoom. And Ubuntu 20.04 doesn't recognize my 2018 Thinkpad camera.
I had suunto watch issues, too. I used openambit[1] for a bit, but at some point, I was no longer able to get it to sync with my movescount account. Eventually, I got a new watch that synced with my phone over bluetooth and the issue was moot.
I'm seriously considering this since my MacBook Air is so pokey. I do use Microsoft Excel though on my Mac, however it's through Firefox and I find it perfectly acceptable compared to the desktop version I used to use. Anyone know if Excel on Firefox on Linux works as expected? I'd assume it did, but just wanted to make sure. Everything else I'm fine with.
I think it should work as expected, there is generally parity between different OSs for Firefox. I use Google Sheets on my remote linux machine and that seems to work fine. I don't like LibreOffice though.
> Anyone know if Excel on Firefox on Linux works as expected?
I'm not experienced with this, but I can safely say that if you're willing to, you can use Office 2007 (probably 2010 and 2013, and maybe 2016, but that last one is slow). Alternatively, OnlyOffice has extremely good compatibility with MS Office and works well for the purpose.
Software has a lot to do with it, but there is still a lot of work to do on hardware side as well. All the non-mac trackpads I use are physically 'sticky' whereas my finger just glides on the macbook. It's very frustrating.
I agree that mac trackpads are better. I only really use it for a bit of web browsing though, I don't touch a mouse during most of my development flow at all. The trackpoint is pretty good as well as an alternative.
Let’s take Dell for example. There is nothing stopping them from investing in the touchpad controller and designing it themselves if they want full control. And the OS level work is in the driver which is basically controlled by Dell themselves.
Originally Windows treated all touch pads as USB mice, at which point it was understandable that they couldn’t make their touch pads better. However, now Windows has an excellent and full fledged API that allows far more control, equivalent to what Macs can do. Further, if Dell wanted changes to Windows to improve their touchpad I hardly doubt MS would resist.
Personally, I suspect the real reason touchpad haven’t improved in the Windows world is that the vast majority of windows laptops are used for work and business, so they are either docked, or they have mice plugged in and their customers are happy using it that way.
I think that argument has become the default claim for whenever Apple does something well, even when it doesn't make any sense. It particularly doesn't make sense in this case because we're talking about Linux, where anybody can make any changes they like to not only the drivers but the entire operating system. OEMs already commonly have their own distributions.
Apple have a good trackpad because they developed a good trackpad. There is nothing really stopping anyone else from doing the same, whether or not they actually have.
Anyone can make changes, but it's far fewer people who are paid to make changes, and even fewer people paid to polish the experience. Doing the detailed work to make applications "feel good" to use is very difficult, time consuming and the returns aren't immediately obvious. This is not an area of strength for either Windows or Linux. Apple and apps developed for their products tend to be a lot better in this area.
But this still has nothing to do with "controls the software and the hardware" -- which is also true for the people with other priorities. OEMs can modify Linux however they like. Microsoft makes their own hardware (e.g. Surface).
But Microsoft targets businesses who don't care about polish because the buyer and the user are different people, and Linux targets hackers who care more about other things. It has nothing to do with what was originally claimed.
I've been wanting to switch to Windows from Mac for years. The thing that holds me back is the quality of the Mac touchpad vs any Windows laptop, and I recently ordered a Surface Book 3 having heard how great the touchpad is. I've already returned it.
The touchpad is pretty good but it's still not as precise as the Mac touchpad - there is a slight hysteresis that makes it imprecise for short movements. No amount of tweaking settings could overcome this. The only way to be accurate at short range is to slow the overall pointer speed so it takes more than one finger swipe to move across the screen. (If anyone from Microsoft is reading this - why don't you fix it? It can't be that hard.)
The other problem with the Surface Book is the Home and End keys are not accessible at the same time as the function keys - a show-stopper for smooth editing and debugging in an IDE.
I've been wanting to switch to Windows from Mac for years. The thing that holds me back is the quality of the Mac touchpad vs any Windows laptop, and I recently ordered a Surface Book 3 having heard how great the touchpad is. I've already returned it.
The touchpad is pretty good but it's still not as precise as the Mac touchpad - there is a slight hysteresis that makes it imprecise for short movements. No amount of tweaking settings could overcome this. The only way to be accurate at short range is to slow the overall pointer speed so it takes more than one finger swipe to move across the screen.
The other problem with the Surface Book is the Home and End keys are not accessible at the same time as the function keys - a show-stopper for smooth editing and debugging in an IDE.
Not sure if anything changed in last year or two, but to be honest, only after using mac you can see how touchpad actually should and can work.
Anything alse was garbage by comparison.
It definitely is better than most other laptops and one that makes a significant difference. I think XPS 13 has improved the touchpad a lot, but haven't used the recent version.
Macs vibrate the touchpad when you click. There's no hinge. It's the best solution I've used so far, and it's unique to apple as long as it remains patented (US 8,633,916).
3 months ago I made the switch to Linux (manjaro) with i3. I currently run off an Intel NUC, which works perfectly fine, but I have a Thinkpad now on the way. I figured I'd do a writeup because I'm a designer and that makes me a little bit of a freak.
First, I was already a vim user for 8 years, so I was used to config files and the terminal. I moved primarily after watching some videos about I3 / awesome WM and browsing the /r/unixporn subreddit. Primarily I liked the idea of designing my own OS from scratch, and the idea of being able to change ANYTHING was really intriguing to me.
I guess it's important to note that as a designer this wouldn't have been possible without tools like Figma and Framer being web based. Put bluntly, Linux native design tooling isn't up to par with what I had on a mac, and without Figma I wouldn't have been able to move over full-time. It's also important to mention that while I classify myself as a designer, I design 90% of the time in code, writing React + CSS. I realize I'm a little different and this likely sways some of my feelings towards linux.
In short, I've really enjoyed the switch. The window management alone has been reason enough. Being able to navigate my windows with key commands, and generally lay things out the way I see fit between polybar + i3 has been fantastic. Don't like a certain shadow? Change it with picom. Don't like seeing title bars on your windows? Change a config. I'm also a designer that believes in heavy focus (think tab focus in a browser) so every window gets a thick focus border. Everything is matched to a color-scheme that I like, and I mean everything. I don't feel like I'm using Linux so much as I've used Linux to build Dave OS.
I was able to migrate nearly $500 of annual tooling to home-made scripts and services that I run through GCP. For example. I used to use cloud app for screenshot / movie snippets. Any designer will tell you something like that is their bread and butter... "hey what do you think of this?". I moved it to Peek / Flameshot + a 40-line bash script that watches a folder and uploads it to a gcp bucket. It took me a half day of learning. At the end of it I had a funny realization... why have I been paying for these simple services for years and complaining about features they didn't have? Now I just add the features.
Performance is hit and miss. Everything I used to do in the terminal (which is where I spend most of my time) feels faster. In general, I had to drop apps and move command line. This was fun! I moved to buku for bookmarks, taskwarrior for todo lists...etc. What I loved about this was it forced me to engage more in the OSS community. I already do mostly OSS stuff for work, but I was in my bubble. Linux forced me out, and I found myself talking a bit more on Github, asking questions and the like. This was the thing that I've ended up loving. In general I've been amazed at the amount of support I've gotten from maintainers by just saying "Hey, I'm a designer, I'm not so knowledgeable about the guts of this code, can you help me out"?
Slack and zoom are slow. They are pretty resource intensive apps and weren't exactly speed kings on my mac, but they do feel noticibly worse on Linux. I'm hoping this is due to my hardware, but I suspect the apps just aren't as considered in Linux. I've really enjoyed AUR / pacman for package management and it feels like brew, but for everything. The one thing I think Linux is missing is a good calendar application that syncs with gcal. The terminal based ones are a little overweight and underdesigned, and I can't find a GUI one I like.
Anyways, I'll probably do a formal blog writeup at some point, and more importantly make some videos of my setup, since it's probably interesting for folks to see how a designer uses Linux, but I thought it'd be worth a quick post to let others know its possible.
Hardware wise I had no trouble with my mac, mostly because I already had my own custom keyboards and the like, but I'm excited about the new Thinkpad on the way more for it's power-to-price.
I have been a windows/linux user for about as long as I can remember - because cheap! For the 8 months I am using a MBP and absolutely love it. It is a pleasure to look at it and use - except for the keyboard! The trackpad experience is unparalleled IMHO.
TL;DR: if on the fence about replacing a MacBook Pro with a ThinkPad, give the 2020 MBP a try. It's bought me another three years of time to stick with the Mac and see how the ARM transition plays out.
I wanted to let others in my situation (longtime Mac user, avoided the butterfly keyboards so much that I considered a Thinkpad with Linux) know: the new keyboard in my 13-inch 2020 is amazing.
I upgraded from my 2015 to this 2020 a couple of weeks ago under duress: my old machine failed me during an interview videoconference and I couldn't have that happen again. Ran out to buy a new machine and return it if I hated the new keyboard (I expected it to be somewhere between the old keyboard and the terrible butterfly, but at least it has an inverted-T.)
It's spectacular. Key travel is awesome, and it's nice to have inverted-T and dedicated escape key back. This machine is also way faster than my old one thanks to (2x as many cores [thanks to 2018 model]) and the 10th gen stuff (much faster RAM and graphics, etc.).
ARM is coming soon, but there's a lot of uncertainty about that transition and I'm happy to have a highly performant machine that will last me at least three years (when my AppleCare will run out).
I find that running powertop on my Thinkpad I can go from modest battery times of like 5-6 hours on my t460 to all day battery times. Really wish it was just built-in to the distro or kernel in a more automatic way at this point.
I noticed that T480 comes with a U processor. Is this configurable? For a machine that is not going for that ultrabook thickness, M seems like a better choice.
Any Intel Mac is likely to be a paperweight in 5 years; if history is any guide Apple will drop support sooner rather than later, and installing Linux is tricky at best because of the T2 chip. Amusingly pre-T2 Macs may have better longevity.
Same experience but reverted to Mac because the hardware is unbeatable.
Had MacBooks since the white clamshells and eventually wanted to go full linux. So bought the X1 Carbon and really regretted it. Screen and trackpad were by far the worst by comparison.
So I’ve returned. Picked up a Mid-2015 15” MBP a few months back and haven't looked back.
I did this ultimately for a few reasons. MacOS lets me run Adobe (Photoshop, Lightroom, etc), Fusion360, has a good terminal (iTerm and zsh unix like shell) and Logic.
Mac hardware is still some of the best in the business, no other vendors seem to be able to catch-up. The XPS line is a great example, the battery that Dell chose to put in that laptop can’t run the internals at full power when not connected to AC. There are plenty of other comments about Thinkpads here (I have a T480s through work) and find the overall experience just fine.
The MacBook on the other hand, I use for 8+ hours every day. It’s the machine I reach for first. It sparks joy. It just works when roaming on WiFi, always. It just works with Bluetooth headphones, always. It just works with external displays, first time, every time. To put it simply, the machine gets out of my way and lets me get real work done. I can SSH to wherever I want and get ‘the Linux experience’.
My personal desktop runs Arch and KDE but for a portable, annoyingly, I still think Macs are the only way to go. But damn do I wish they had a SD card slot.