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Ask Slashdot: Mac To Linux Return Flow?
jasnw writes "I'm one of apparently many people who moved to OS X from Linux in the early/mid 2000s for their desktop system, keeping Linux boxes around for the heavy lifting and server work. I may also be part of a large segment of that group now considering a return because of all the iOS-ification of OS X, despite the fact that the Linux desktop still falls short in the 'it just works' area. I'm angry enough at Apple, and wary enough of Linux, that I might just go to using Windows 7 for the desktop (not Win8, however). What is the feeling/experience of other 'traitors' who run OS X for the desktop and Linux for everything else?"
I actually feel like KDE and Gnome were the traitors, not me. If Windows 9 is anything like Windows 8 I'm going to have a huge problem.
Windows 8 is pretty good if you install a third party Start Menu program that allows you to skip the Metro start screen at login. With Windows 8 sales lagging, I bet MS will add something like Start8 to Windows 8...overall Windows 8 is better than Windows 7 in all aspects except Metro (on anything that's not a phone or tablet).
Regarding Linux, I'd go with any Distro that uses Cinnamon or KDE.
I have to admit, I really like Windows 7. I've tried various distros of *nix and they all left me in the cold when I realized that I had to hack a bunch of files to get my video/lan/wireless/modem working, and then pray like hell that what worked for one guy on a forum someplace would also work on my machine but never did. Windows 7 is the first version of Windows that I haven't felt like I needed to reinstall every 4-8 months just to keep it running stably with some snap. Hoping to eventually stick it on all the machines in my house. I haven't tried Windows 8 yet, but...with as well as 7 seems to run, (at least for me.) I can't see the need to 'upgrade'.
2009 must've been a different year.
I installed a PostGIS, Apache, PHP, QGIS, mapserver stack on both a Debian server and my OS X desktop. Getting it to run on Debian required moving the entire server to unstable, but after that it was easy and painless. Getting it running on OS X required a few manual downloads, but no other troubles.
I mean, if you're happy then all is good. I'm just saying. Because I just did the mostly same thing.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You say that like it's a bad thing...
I switched over from linux to OSX, here's what I found out:
Apple wins at:
- Setup is way longer in Linux (No surprise). OSX was pretty quick thanks to google integration and good defaults (i.e for the trackpad).
- Applications. Work uses Go2Meeting and others, so I'm a bit stuck with that. I don't like dual booting, so OSX was my best shot.
- The hardware is really good. I do not regret having paid the price for a retina, since I use it a real lot, on the go and at home. This isn't really about OSX, but I wouldn't mind having an Apple laptop with Linux as the main OS. That's if the price isn't too much of a problem, I guess.
Linux wins at:
- Compliance to my development work. Rarely have any problems installing anything from source. With OSX you can expect a problem whenever you try that.
- Linux, in my experience, is much less buggy. OSX works in very narrow setups, but will recklessly bug everywhere as soon as external monitors are involved with my laptop.
- Customisation, if you're that kind of guy.
Now, if you're a developer or other IT professional, I recommend some good flavor of linux nowadays (Arch, Debian, Gentoo...)
OSX is good, but it's in decline if you ask me. They aren't doing any real improvement that will matter for me, and we see more and more software being ported to Linux, so it only gets better. The stuff is all locked-in to iCloud and iOS, and even having an iPad, I don't want that. I much prefer having my notes on Evernote or google for example, rather than using the very limited Apple solutions. Whenever you get a bit serious in any usage, you'll see apple falling short quite often.
Drafts being saved in like 40 duplicates by default on google? Check
Same for notes? Check.
Reminders only sync on iOS? Check
Calendar randomly resets own settings as it syncs up to Facebook while I specified it shouldn't? Check.
iTunes missing many audio formats? Check
That's the tip of the iceberg. I'd rather choose my own solutions rather than being bloated with completely useless software that I can't delete.
Brief background: I've been using Linux since Slackware '96, with kernel version 1.0.0. I prefer using Linux for servers, but often have used Windows in cases where it presents some advantage (like using Active Directory so I can govern Windows desktops, etc)., and most environments I've worked in have become mixed Linux/Windows environments. Still, I am known much moreso for my *nix talents and content to leave Windows to the armies of Windows sysadmins out there.
For a while now at work, I've been using Windows 7. Using KiTTY (or PuTTY) I can generally work well with unix systems, and the Windows system gives me an environment like a normal user, which helps in reproducing issues, etc. The downside is, well, it's still Windows and prone to quirky issues, e.g. problems caused by Windows update, wanting to reboot more often than I'd like..
At home, I use Mac OS X rather than Windows 7. I run a custom-built hackintosh pro system (built late last year, i7-ivy bridge type). Using Mac OS X, I can still interact with systems I need to (using CoRD for Windows Remote Desktop), and it runs all the other programs I need elegantly. It also doesn't need reboots very often and is quite a stable system.
However, I too have been looking for a solution now that Apple is moving in the iOS-y direction for OS X, in terms of a system that lets me keep the awesome BSD power of Mac OS without being confined to Apple's walled garden of App Store restrictions etc.
Linux doesn't work as a Desktop environment for me for a lot of reasons, despite the fact I love Linux. It requires too much overhead to install software (packages, dependencies, etc), often doesn't run software I need (and/or open source equivalents fail to install on my distro, etc etc), and the end-user experience in X windows is generally clunky and not nearly as elegant/streamlined as Mac or Windows. A lot of open source products that do work are second-best to the product you could use on a desktop -- e.g. Microsoft Word on Mac and Windows vs OpenOffice on Linux. It'll work most of the time, but sometimes, it'll be a problem. I'm not a one man team and I work with people using Windows and Mac -- so I have to accomodate. In order to work in Linux, I'd have to have a VM running Windows or Mac -- and that kind of defeats the purpose of Linux.
So, in short, I am searching for an operating system that has the nice interface and POSIX-compliant backend of Mac OS, the openness of Linux, and runs all the software Windows can. Will a solution ever exist? :)
I've used a Ubuntu desktop for years and make my living working online. I use it because it just works. Once I get my desktop setup right it stays that way.
Maybe someone could explain what's not working so I know what I'm missing.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I'm not sure if you are being serious or not. Mac OS X is simply put the best desktop operating system available if you want something that just works. Mountain Lion is incredibly stable, memory efficient and fast. It has full UNIX underpinnings.
The only "iOS-ification" is that there is now an app store. Whoop-de-do. If you don't like it, don't use it.
Mac OS is still UNIX, still fast, easy to use and works properly. It sounds to me like there is no problem you just are looking for a reason to change.
After the story about Miguel de Icaza switching to Mac OS X, it got me thinking about my own history of operating systems. While I had happily used OS X for six and a half years, over that period of time I have drifted back in favor of Linux. This had less to do with new features being offered in Linux as it did with growing tired of foibles in OS X. Here are a list of some of the bigger issues:
- Beach Ball of Death (BBOD): While this didn't occur frequently, when it did it was more frustrating than a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). At least you knew you were fucked when you saw the BSOD. With the BBOD, sometimes you would recover from it and other times you could wait for up to ten minutes before realizing that you're never coming back. During that period, you are completely unable to access the System menu or start another app to find the proc that is chewing resources so that it can be killed. In 2013, this is completely unacceptable from an OS.
- Mouse Acceleration: There is no way to modify the acceleration curve in OS X, let alone disable acceleration. This is not a problem when you are using a trackpad since the acceleration curve is one of the best out of all OS'es for that, but it is incredibly frustrating when using a mouse. I have gone through many forums and found many other users complaining about this issue, but no one has come up with a decent solution for disabling mouse acceleration. For situations in which I am better off with a mouse, I always hopped over to a non-OS X machine.
- Poor Multi-Monitor Support: Since the menu for each application is in a detached panel that is only displayed on one monitor, this means you will be racking up a lot of mileage on your pointing device to hop between apps on the secondary monitor and their menu on the primary monitor.
- Updating Settings Behind Your Back: For me, this shit started with Microsoft and was one of the big reasons I left their OS. After an update, some of your settings would be changed to whatever they felt you should be using. Apple has since taken up this behavior, doing things like resetting all of your file associations to iTunes after one of their many updates. This didn't happen with my latest update, so maybe they stopped, or at least took a break from this behavior, but it has still left a very bad taste in my mouth.
- Frequent Update Cycles: This would not be too bad of a thing if they didn't regularly remove features they didn't like (but you may have loved) as well as make changes that disrupt your workflow. At this point, I am an old curmudgeon who has everything exactly as he likes it. I don't want to upgrade and run the risk of having the upgrade go south. Such an issue would cause me to have to reinstall all of my apps from scratch and attempt to reconfigure tons of settings to get it to work like it did before the upgrade. And with the update frequent cycles, it won't be long before your current OS version is not supported. Once that happens, Chrome and Firefox support go out the window as well. And don't even get me started on how Apple stops supporting perfectly fine hardware when they come out with new versions of OS X. Apple: you control the hardware in your machines yet you can't be bothered to continue supporting it six years after it is released while Microsoft supported XP on an almost infinite number of hardware configurations for eight years and Linux even longer!
There are many, many more reasons, but these are the biggest gripes. None of them on their own were dealbreakers, but over time they wore on me to the point of driving me back to Linux. While I still use my Mac for some commercial software that isn't available on Linux, it's Linux for everything else.
What exactly is this iOSsification people keep complaining about? There's nothing forced onto you that I can think of.
Quite a few things:
They got rid of spaces. You still have different virtual desktops, but I can no longer assign applications to always open in a particular one. They're also not always there, assigned in a configuration that was easy for me to remember, "from here, go to the desktop above to get to the browser, or the desktop to my right to get to xcode.
Applications no longer quit, instead they keep running in the background, if you click the red button. You can command-q for now, but they still try to retain state. Which is insane. When I open up a new video in quicktime, why would I want the last video that I watched to pop up in a window beside it? I keep having to go and close that other window. (At least now they give me the option to not save the current state of the desktop when I log out. No, I do not want to log back in and see what I was working on before. It's very unlikely I'll be working on the same thing. If I do have something that I always open every time I log in, and I do, I know how to set applications to start automatically every time.)
Applications are auto-saving on me. I don't mind that things auto-save into a backup file, for recovery purposes, but you should NOT overwrite the file I'm working on without my specifically clicking save. I know mac os x lets you get back to previous versions. That's cumbersome unless you're the one who chose to punctuate where each new version starts.
Applications are trying to save to iCloud by default, instead of the local drive. I don't have a problem with iCloud, but it shouldn't be the default location.
The launchpad displays applications in multiple screens and I gotta swipe right to see the other applications. That doesn't make any sense when you have a wheel mouse...I just want to scroll down. The applications folder still exists, so this one doesn't bother me as much, I can avoid using launchpad altogether.
When the iPhone came out, I remember many people saying that apple fully intended to eventually make OS X as locked down as iOS, and a bunch of people dismissing that as conspiracy theories. They have, however, been slowly moving toward that. They released the Mac OS X app store, which isn't really a problem. But then they made it so that you can't install any application that doesn't come from the app store by default, until you go and change the settings to allow it. My prediction is that the next step is going to be making it a setting that you can't get to without going to the command-line, and then they'll just not give you the option, and people will have to jailbreak their macs.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
OS X is pretty nice, and I was dubious when I started using it. I don't see any iOS-ification, except for the launchpad which is trivial to ignore, and the apple store which is even easier to ignore. On the other hand you get a full Unix shell and API to work with while still having your enterprise applications that tend to be required at the office. This is much better than when I had both a Linux laptop plus Windows desktop, and I had to keep switching back and forth regularly. Of course, you're stuck using it only on overpriced computers with features you don't need, but we can't have everything.
If you have to run a really old OS on a new system, you often find that while there's no drivers, the default ones work fine. The "standard VGA" driver works ok for display and so on.
There's also the minor issue of 2000 being unsupported (meaning unpatched) and almost 14 years old.
I don't think companies should have to support everything forever, but MS and PC makers like Dell do a pretty good job with older and newer stuff.
We had to install Windows XP on some newer Lenovo systems, for temporary project. It worked surprisingly well. These were Sandy Bridge Core i5 systems, with Intel graphics, and Realtek NICs. We were able to get graphics, sound, and network all working without a problem. It wasn't as easy as setting up Windows 7, which they were designed for, but it worked. While these are exactly latest hardware, they're not all that old.
Also, as you say, it is quite different between not actively supporting something, and actively stopping it from working. Apple not only has extremely short support cycles, they only support to previous OS versions, and their OS release cycle is pretty quick, but they'll then go and actively stop old OSes from working on new hardware.
Microsoft support its OSes for a minimum of 10 years from release. That's pretty good, and far longer than Apple. PC makers generally doing okay job of supporting older OSes on their PCs at least for a good while.
I have no doubt that windows XP support is going to become fairly hard to come by for new hardware quite soon. This is because it is falling out of support in 2014. However, it's rather hard to hate on a company for "only" supporting something for 13 years.
There are still a couple things I miss from back when I used OS X (around 5-6 years ago now). Adium is by far the best IM client. Quicksilver was beyond brilliant. Omni Outliner helped me right many a long paper in college, and Onenote isn't quite as good. Textmate and Textwrangler was also very good. I haven't found replacements for these in Windows or Linux land yet, or replacements that can match their level of usability and polish.
Granted, none of these could woo me back to OS X, especially now, but they were better than anything I've found on any other platform.
OS X is the king of productivity apps, and the people who generally make OS X apps actually pay attention to their usability and interface, unlike most devs in Linux land.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey