Comment by spangry 16 hours ago
Oh darn, I thought they'd gotten Arch running on an M1 but they actually switched to a ThinkBook.
I somewhat regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me. For the first time in my life I feel like some tech-illiterate grandpa trying to figure out how to make his blasted computer do stuff.
I think it is just us getting old. I used Linux since high school in the 90's, through all the way to the late 00's. I switched to OS X (long before it was macOS) because that's where all the and coming developer tools were, and I got tired of being sysadmin to my own Linux install as things break.
Now I'm the opposite of you. I WANT to run Linux, and I have both a recent Framework and Lenovo laptop at home that I bought for this purpose. But I have some issue with Nvidia drivers, or just stuck down a rabbit hole trying to configure a GUI the way I want, or whatever, and I give up and go back to macOS where everything is familiar and works out of the box. I'm too old and/or busy to deal with that shit, but it probably reflects my age more than it does macOS vs Linux.
The biggest issue with Nvidia drivers, the mux chip issue, doesn't seem to be very prominent anymore these days. With modern laptops, you'll probably boot to desktop, though your experience will be terrible and pretty much unaccelerated.
Nvidia remains a problem on Linux, though they're making steps in the right direction. By putting all of their code in the secret and signed firmware, they can actually open source their drivers now, which is a lot better than how things used to be.
Still, I wouldn't buy Nvidia anything with a computer I want to run Linux on, it's not worth the hassle. Sucks that all developments related to AI are using Nvidia APIs though.
I never have MacOS a chance, I have only used it for some quick safari debugging sessions, but in the last decade+ whenever I see a UI trend that really bothers me, makes things worse and harder to use invariably after some time I discover that they were copying Apple's UI/UX.
So I suspect I would not like using apple devices
Same experience here. I wanted to like it, after all it appears to be exactly what I want. An professional, stable Unix system with enterprise support.
I was and am still surprised that I found nothing of that and even Ubuntu or fedora community look more "enterprise ready" to me these days.
It was not super difficult to get Gentoo running on an m1 MacBook with the (unsupported) instructions some of the Asahi folks left around. I guess Arch might be a bit more difficult in some ways, given the weird status of arm64 being a different project from core Arch?
I can't figure out how to set a shortcut that moves the current window to my other monitor. Always have to go into the toolbar to do it.
Edit: And oh! Why do I constantly have to (painfully manually) maximize windows. Preview is constantly choosing a different size, for example. Why is this not remembered.
I can't recall the last time an application in linux forgot its size after restarting.
Agreed that apps forget where they were, or end up on the main screen instead of the attached one.
Rectangle deals with a lot of that with key shortcuts.
I don't love MacOS, but I don't hate it. I have a bunch of extra utilities like Rectangle, BarTender, MonitorControl, Karabiner-Elements, that make things better.
I use MacPorts so when I open a terminal, I get a Unix/Linux environment.
Things I miss from Linux/X-11, primarily middle button copy/paste, and being able to run an X-11 app remotely over LAN/WAN. But a lot of that is configurable with terminals like iTerm2.
You might like https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
The difficulty in navigating to arbitrary locations in file open/save dialogs.
I wanted to attach a build log to a Teams post (maybe we shouldn't be using Teams on Mac, but it's a corporate decision that's out of my hands), and I could not for the life of me figure how to get the file-selection dialog to look at the relevant folder (which was somewhere under /private/). In the end, I had to use iTerm to copy the file to somewhere the dialog could find.
I would also like a proper address bar in file selection dialogs.
The closest alternative I know of is dragging the target folder from an open Finder window into the dialog. Unlike pretty much any other OS, that doesn’t move the folder, but makes the dialog navigate to it. If you don’t have the folder open in Finder, you can do it with `open .` from a terminal.
It should be more easily discoverable, but command-shift-g lets you type in the path directly, and even has tab completion. If you want to navigate visually, navigate up to the computer or drive where you want to start, then press command-shift-period in order to see all of the directories that are usually hidden.
Both of these approaches work in the open and save dialogs, and not just the Finder.
Considering that macOS is popular among even actual tech-illiterates, it is safe to say that their system is probably pretty logical and easy but since you are a power user on something else you will have to unlearn you previous ways of doing things. At some point it will click and you'll be fine.
Same, I have a Mac at work and can suffer the horrible window management by just having more physical monitors (3 + the built in screen).
I bought one for home use because I liked the hardware and the idea of running local llms. Long story short I'm still using my 6 year old Thinkpad running arch.