I personally hate close fences with no rooms for customization, and many computer scientists are on the same wavelength.
Windows is an awful choice for software development, a job that usually requires a lot of interaction with Unix servers. Microsoft's recent crush for Linux and open source can't fix many years of closed standards, closed protocols, and Embrace-Extend-Exterminate evil culture.
And MacOS, even though it's still loosely based on a Unix *BSD flavor, still falls into the "closed fence" category - brew is nice but can't be compared with the maturity of the package managers on any Linux distro, you can't just recompile or update the kernel on the fly to get support for a new device, and OS internals are purposely obscure to developers. Paying all that money for such a closed box, if you're anything more than an average users, is simply a waste of money.
Linux distros are by far the best environment for a computer scientists - made by developers, for developers - but there's no major vendor that sells machines with Linux pre-installed and supported, and getting Linux installed on the newest Surface or Dell toy is often a challenge that gets many frustrated.
There's definitely a huge gap in the market, and as a computer scientist I feel that none of the major vendors cares to provide me with a solid machine to do my work.
Here's the problem with saying "this is better for computer scientists": It's the same argument every time someone says "the Macbook Pro is not a professional device". Not every computer scientist has the same needs. There are a lot of CS folks who will never need to recompile a kernel or even get into the OS internals. For those people, having to do that is a major downside to any computer. So the obvious choice is a computer where that's never necessary.
Linux is a great OS. I spend all day SSH'd into it. From a Mac. Because my workstation needs to work, and it's not going to work if I'm copying and pasting kernel code from Stack Overflow to get my trackpad to scroll the correct direction. I'm not a C programmer, so keep me as far from the kernel as you can.
The best environment for a computer scientist is the one that lets them get their work done in the most comfortable fashion. And for most of us, that's Linux on the server and something else on our workstations.
Couldn't agree with you more. Ubuntu was my daily driver from the start of 2007 through early 2014 when I finally gave in and bought a rMBP. Despite missing the "real" nix environment being available right under the GUI, I have been much much happier on the Mac.
I fought software update and driver issues for years. I ran the most bog standard HP laptops that I could get, albeit w/ Nvidia GPUs. Every distribution upgrade there was something that went wrong. One of a list of usual suspects: video driver, power management, and wifi. Things were never completely broken. It would be something like not being able to close the lid, sleep, and properly recover. Or not being able to connect to wifi when coming back from sleep. Or not being able to stay connected to wifi after a couple hours and needing the kernel modules to be removed and reinserted.
I kept a set of hard drives so that I could always move to the next version of the OS on a clean install. I could fall back easily if the next release presented problems. I would tinker and fix the sort of issues you get with these random outlier driver problems and press forward. I had a good regimen going, but ultimately it was the power management issues that wore me down. Randomly finding the battery dead because the laptop didn't sleep when I closed the lid or not being able to properly return from sleep was just too much.
I've been running Linux for 20 years and I'm not willing to put up with these problems on my workstation. It seems like it must be a very small minority that can.
If you're going to have an actual destkop machine maybe you can avoid most of these problems. And maybe these things have been solved finally for laptops, but I wouldn't know, I moved on and haven't looked back.
> I've been running Linux for 20 years and I'm not willing to put up with these problems on my workstation. It seems like it must be a very small minority that can.
What makes you think everyone faces the same issues as you? Maybe the problem is your specific hardware? I've been running linux based distros as my daily driver for over 10 years and literally never had any of the issues you described. Never had issues with power management, wifi always worked out of the box on all distros I've tried and suspend/resume always worked flawlessly. If you want a laptop that works well under linux, buy a thinkpad or a dell developer edition laptop.
I'd also like to add my voice as one of those who have used linux for over ten years with excellent out-of-the-box support for hardware. Often, linux will even offer a better experience by including support for obscure hardware out-of-the-box. No internet connectivity or hardware driver media required.
I realize my experience is anecdotal. However, for me and many others it seems, linux just works.
I just bought a Thinkpad T480 to replace my aging (but still functional) T410. I installed Debian (using the nonfree installer to get the wifi firmware), and everything just worked right out of the box.
> and it's not going to work if I'm copying and pasting kernel code from Stack Overflow to get my trackpad to scroll the correct direction
When was the last time you used a linux desktop, 2005? On any linux desktop I can think of (MATE, Gnome, KDE) this is a matter of going to Settings | Mouse & Touchpad | check or un-check the natural scrolling box as desired
Actually, I just installed the latest lUbuntu and am having this exact problem. The preferences don't have a way to select natural scrolling and I've been "fighting" with it for a couple of days now, changing mysterious values in config files and restarting X. Then when I think I have it figured out a system update happens and it resets back to the original scrolling.
This is the real value of macOS. I agree that I liked it better when it was more Unix and less Apple unix-like but it's still better than fighting with your Linux config on a x86 machine.
The problem is not "had to go copy/paste something from the internet to make it work".
The problem is "didn't work out of the box". Using Linux as a desktop OS can be a death-by-a-thousand-cuts experience. Sure, whatever problem you run into there's probably someone who's figured out how to solve it and posted instructions online. But if the solutions are known, then the operating system shouldn't have those problems out of the box.
I agree. In this case I think extra factors must be taken into consideration.
First is the "violation of least surprise" principle. Linux as a UNIX is traditionalist to a fault, sometimes obsessively so beyond what is helpful. Scrolling is typically done inverted in X11.
So, that means this would need to be a configurable option.
From the standpoint you're talking (where the comparison is to macOS), now you're in UI territory, which has typically never been one of Linux's strong points.
Someone has go build the UI, but then that'll only be for one given desktop environment, and so now you have duplication of work. Unless every DE does that work, if you're not using one of the DEs that has done the work - well, you get no radio selection group or dropdown or whatever.
There are very real reasons why Linux isn't best in class. The politics, infighting and greybeard traditionalism does more to hurt the "it just works" flow other environments have.
(Note that I'm not saying "politics", "infighting" and "greybeard traditionalism" are the same thing; they're very different groups and issues, but they combine to form stalemates and inertial cancellations. For example, when traditionalism met systemd, the result was a vicious catfight instead of unified action. Things could have worked out where the community met Red Hat's lobbying with a list of terms and requirements. Nah; everyone just threw their hands up in the air and screamed instead. This is what's broken in Linux. I think KDE had it sorted in 1999 when they pragmatically grabbed the still-closed-source Qt and made a desktop environment out of it. Then GNOME came along and drowned everyone more political overhead than the W3C and Internet working groups combined, and user experience is definitively worse for GTK ever being created.)
It kind of works but not stable as mac’s touchpad. You need to spend a lot of time to make 4 finger, 5 finger, zoom, pinch work stable. Also there are endless weird bugs you need to find out why. Had crashing ubuntu, opensuse right after the install.
Traveling and working remote, battery power is very important. You cant shutdown or sleep your computer seamlessly. Its just simple thing. It should just work.
Yes you can customize it as you wish but I dont want to. I want to spend time for actual coding and having time for myself.
>Yes you can customize it as you wish but I dont want to
This was a big moment for me. I was a huge anti-Apple guy, I had built my own laptops and used Android and everything had to be open and hackable. Until one day I just realized it wasn't fun anymore. I would have to stop what I was doing to fix some broken (virtual or real) duct tape that held everything together.
I bought my first Mac the month I replaced the CPU, then the motherboard (wrong socket), then the RAM (incompatible with my new mobo), and then was staring down a dying video card in my desktop. I realized I didn't want to fix it. I picked the wrong parts because I didn't care anymore, I didn't care enough to do the proper research. I spent all day fixing computer problems, I hated doing it on my own time too.
What I want is a computing appliance that lets me do my job and nothing more. I don't have that yet, I still have to deal with system updates and reboots and filesystem maintenance and all that nonsense with my Macbook, but it's closer. I've been considering a Chromebook but I have had bad luck with Google products in the past.
Not a month goes by where I don't re-read Mark O'Connor's "I swapped my MacBook for an iPad+Linode" series and find myself agreeing more and more.
I think this depends on the specific flavour of Linux. For instance, Linux + i3wm yields a desktop environment where everything -- including seemingly braindead functions like volume control -- needs to be configured by hand on a command line. Other combinations might be more extensively configured by default but even then it's not hard to find something broken.
Used Linux on the desktop through college before switching to a Mac. It’s still not great. Maybe worse now, considering that now you’ve got X and Wayland to choose from and GNOME has somehow alienated everyone and fragmented. How do you set things up so you can use Remote Desktop/VNC into a GNOME desktop using Wayland?
Exactly. Sure if you're trying to revive some old notebook with a Linux distro you're going to face issues (no different to if you try to install the latest MacOS on their earlier machines). With a modern machine, Linux is a very reliable and comfortable OS that doesn't restrict you in terms of hardware. The only minor criticism I have is that it lacks a high quality spreadsheet application like Excel (but with cloud based solutions catching up, that is becoming a non issue).
Does Libre's open source spreadsheet not provide the functionality you need? I took a small HP stream, replaced Windows with POP! OS (from System 76) and the spreadsheet comes as part of the package. As far as I know, it's also easily available with vanilla Ubuntu.
It's 80% there, but for an advanced Excel user, libre office calc feels like Excel from 2005. I'm sure it can do everything advanced users need, but it's slow and clunky at times.
In my experience, having the setting doesn’t make it work. Oh, it works some of the time. In order to make it work MOST of the time, you’ll need to change it in more than one place, at least in X11. And Wayland doesn’t play nice with nvidia, yet. (Not implying who is at fault).
I never got it working all over the system in ubuntu 17.10 (I just resigned myself to testing scroll direction in each app), but in 16.04, there were XKB options, Unity settings, separate Gnome settings (because Gnome ignored the X11-level scrolling!), separate KDE settings (though KDE at least obeyed the base X11 options), and at least an app or two that had their own settings, or used some lib that implemented its own scrolling and also didn't have options to control this.
The thing is, though, desktop linux users are just used to this. Your choices boil down to:
1) do a lot of research and setup and then constant maintenance to restore settings that updates casually break, and understand that there will still be exceptions and gaps, or
2) try to stay inside the lines of Gnome, or Unity, or whatever ElementaryOS calls their graphical shell, and ignore the thousands of applications that do not match the look and feel of your chosen environment.
I keep going back and trying desktop linux every few years since switching from Gentoo to Mac in 2003, and sometimes I use it exclusively as my personal machine for months at a time, but in the end, frustration always drives me back into Apple's arms. :(
I don't know what mouse driver I was using (I don't use a touchpad except on laptops, and all my linux machines have been desktops). I would have assumed it was whatever the default was for Ubuntu over the years. :)
(Actually, I do remember that in some versions you had to figure out how to trick the system into thinking you might have a touchpad before it would provide you a place to change the mouse wheel scroll direction, but that seems like a separate failure of preference panels, rather than the root of the issue).
I’m using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on a MBP and I cannot get the trackpad to work properly (right-click in the corner). I have to hand-edit confit files, the settings involved are undocumented, and it doesn’t work and I don’t know why. Even regular movement just feels janky compared to macOS.
MBPs have gotten worse with linux compatibility over the past few years. It usually takes at least a year to even get usable. It's just not worth getting a Mac to run linux. Mac has successfully made sure that macs are only for MacOS.
That being said, many laptops which were originally for windows have issues like this too. Desktops are usually fine because they tend to use highly standardised components. Laptops, not so much. This is pretty much entirely because companies are not willing to write open source drivers, and the good integration of stuff in package managers only works if drivers fit the packaging requirements. This usually means open source. I imagine this is mostly a problem of slightly higher cost, but also embarrassment of the jankiness of code. For mass produced systems with volume in mind, where the target consumer barely cares about reputation, it just isn't a priority.
In other words, you have to go for something expensive while also not being an OEM who opposes openness.
tl;dr you need to do your research before you buy. Linux needs cooperation from all parties, you can't expect compatibility with everything.
> MBPs have gotten worse with linux compatibility over the past few years. It usually takes at least a year to even get usable.
I don't see a trend there. Some things always worked, while others didn't. Same for the current MBP's. It's the usual problem for hardware where the vendor doesn't provide Linux drivers: you need somebody to write these drivers in their spare time and only a few people are willing to do so. I maintain an overview of the Linux compatibility of the MBP's >=2016 (https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux/) and it's absolutely astonishing what a few people can achieve, even without documentation of the hardware. Given, the hardware support isn't that good yet in Linux, but if there would be 10 instead of 2-3 people working in their spare time on the drivers, first class support would be there pretty soon. So if you care about Linux compatibility of Macs: Get your hands dirty and do something about it!
> It's just not worth getting a Mac to run linux.
For me it's worth it, because it feels like somebody thought really hard about getting things right, which results in really, really nice hardware (except for the latest keyboards and the Touch Bar of course).
the biggest problem with macs is not the software/openness.
the biggest problem is the price.
the older models might have had a justifiable price, however the new 15" models with a touch-whatever, costs way more and have less value. they actually even replaced the SD slot, which probably a lot of professional artists needed (or at least used). I used it to extend my harddrive with a 256gb extension card If I would need a new model (replacement for my pro late 13 model I would need to pay 1000 € more than for the late 13 (I need more harddisk space since 512gb wouldn't be enough and the sd card upgrade is insane.)
even worse the late 13 had a 512gb sd, the new model costs 500€ more and has a 256gb sd card. just insane.
dell sells me a precision with a dock more memory (32gb or 64gb) and the best processor that could be in a mac + 1tb ssd for the same amount than the cheapest new mac book pro. (it has ubuntu 16.04 preinstalled.)
1. You can buy MacBook Pros without the touch bar.
2. Professional photographers for a long time primarily used CompactFlash which has never had built in hardware support. So I can't imagine they are suddenly missing something they never had. It's the prosumers who were the heavy uses of SD cards and who were inconvenienced with the decision. Although most cameras come with WiFi these days so you can see Apple's thinking in removing the port.
3. Using a SD card as external storage is an awful idea. It was never designed for that much IO especially on OSX which can thrash storage devices pretty badly (check fs_usage). Just buy a USB-C enclosure and a 2.5inch hard drive like everyone else. Very cheap and comes in large sizes.
Ethernet ports are still a pain to not have for us. I have staff that travel to sites and need to test hard lines to see if they are live and most of them forget their dongle from time to time. Life was easier when they had built in ports. I do realize for the average user though this is a non-issue.
IMO for MBPs there is no such thing as an ‘average user’. That kinda user buys Chromebooks nowadays. It’s almost all professionals and students with different fields and usecases, and almost everyone is inconvenienced by at least one of Apple’s recent choices, be it lack of USB—A, SD, HDMI, mini-DP, magsafe, more RAM, Ethernet, upgradable components or even optical drives.
Edit: Oh and also lack of CUDA support i.e. NVIDIA cards.
I, too, used to love tinkering with Linux. I would compile my own kernels, hack drivers and fix bugs to make it run better on the hardware I chose to buy. I wanted everything to be just so.
Then, I realized that I have more money than time. I can choose Apple hardware, and run OS X (now macOS), trouble free. The only time I patched my Linux kernel was when some piece of hardware didn't work. Now, I simply choose hardware that works with my mac. It's not that much more expensive, usually.
On the software side, my old workflow with terminals, SSH, and browsers is pretty much unchanged. The only thing I really liked but Apple dropped (and I hate them for it) was virtual desktops. For that, I use TotalSpaces2.
That said, I think you can still get a Dell XPS with Linux preinstalled, no?
I've always kind of wondered what you guys are doing with your computers where you run into issues with Linux. For 95% of users, even software developers, in there off time you just want a web browser.
If you are developing, Linux is almost certainly better. The vast majority of languages have all their libraries available in the built in package manager, the included versions being guaranteed to work together.
I'm obviously not suggesting you run Arch Linux, but any Debian based distro will pretty much just work. And Ubuntu LTS doubly so.
I second that. I own a System76 laptop (Ubuntu 16.04 pre-installed) and an HP stream that I bought specifically to run POP! OS. I have also replaced several of my colleagues' OS with a Linux distro and I have yet to encounter a problem that took more than an hour to solve...and even those minor problems rarely occur.
I am by no means a Linux guru - I just grew disgusted with Windows and wasn't willing to switch to Apple.
Linux has always had issues on laptop hardware. Poor power management, inability to switch between integrated and discrete video, lack of hardware support (eg fingerprint readers). It seems that for every one of these issues that gets fixed a new one appears.
That said you can get some decent laptops now with full Linux support. You have to stick to that hardware though.
I switched to Macs quite a while ago, when many things usually didn't work out of the box with Linux. Wifi, bluetooth, hibernation, full disk encryption, GPU support, and external monitors were all things you would either spend a lot of time configuring or even compiling kernel modules from source.
The situation today is a lot better. I believe some research into Linux support is still a good idea before purchasing, say, a laptop.
Does it feel, though, like Apple is neglecting MacOS in favor of IOS recently? iPhones and iPads seem to be marching forward while desktops and laptops seem a bit stagnant.
They gave up the server line entirely, and the "pro" moniker seems to not mean what it meant in the past. Even the super popular Mac mini seems to be lacking investment.
It would be interesting to see an internal view of growth of investment dollars going into MacOS/desktop/laptop vs the tablets and phones. The recent bugs and vulnerabilities certainly seem to point at some neglect.
Yes. And it just works. Gnome is not at MacOS levels of polishing but you get a proper dev machine instead of a pretty SSH terminal into your real dev machine.
For server side software the deployment environment is overwhelmingly Linux making Linux also the most straightforward choice for the development environment. Its not a slight on MacOS, its tooling might be just as wonderful as the Linux one for deploying on MacOS.
Right, there are still virtual desktops in the form of Spaces, of course. Sorry for being vague.
I was referring to the ability to set up virtual desktops in a 2D grid, which was removed in OS X Lion. I got very used to a 3x3 grid of desktops where I can move around with Control + arrows. No animations, just instantly switching to another desktop. That is what I now use TotalSpaces2 for.
I really dislike the argument for recompiling a whole Kernel to getting something to run is a good thing... I would even say it's very good that Windows and Mac don't need a whole Kernel recompilation for devices... just because Linux has this design for their hardware stack does not make it a good choice. Ever wanted to get custom hardware drivers working in Linux... it's insane and complicated you need to recompile your Kernel for that! Only good thing in Linux is that many hardware drivers are very good or at least good enough and plenty nowadays.
Nothing against Linux... but it's not always a holy grail of architecture!
I still prefer the "closed fence" that is macOS over the complete mess that is desktop on linux. macOS was really really liberating after years of frustrations with all of gnome, kde and xfce. Then was x11 vs mir vs wayland. Desktop on linux is pretty much still a toy when compared to desktop on macos.
There seem to be a lot of misconceptions about the whole developer's environment thing. "Made by developers, for developers" and "all that money for such a closed box" sound a lot more like wishful idealism than actual "best tool for the job" pragmatism.
I also used to think linux was the best desktop, and did so for a long time, because of "by developers for developers, open-source" and other righteous sounding things. But believing you're using the best tools and actually doing so are two different things; I wasn't even living in Emacs or aware of how superior the VIM language is back then, so much for using the best tools ;)
Its easy to fool yourself into thinking you have the best tools, and its near impossible to tell you actually do.
I beg to differ: Take a look at current state of MacOS. There is nothing wrong in idea of quality control with emphasis on security, but actual os implementation lacks it. Only Apple can survive root fiasco from this year. I think that a need of commercial desktop linux distribution is present. I remember commercial SUSE 11. It was a good desktop, but targeted in a wrong direction, if someone is brave enough to target creative market with all good things that Apple is famous for, it will be more than a hit. It will be glorious. Microsoft is going in cloud/ai direction. Apple is mobile only. Desktop computing will not die so easily. Professionals need desktop, bigger screen, and reliable and expandable hardware architecture.
Last I checked getting a 4K monitor to work under linux was a very involved series of configurations. My current MacBook has a retina display and effortlessly supports a 4K monitor as secondary screen. Retina alone is a game changer.
Combined with better text anti-aliasing it makes macOS by far the most pleasing/productive experience for development I've ever used (disclaimer: I have over a decade of experience in both Windows/Linux desktops.)
I stopped believing in desktop on linux a few years ago (and I really wanted it to work!) Things are getting more fragmented instead of unified; that adds lots of extra work for users and app developers, which result in a frustrating experience and vastly different UIs depending on versions/toolkits used. I don't think a commercial desktop will change any of that, even a fully dedicated and financed team will take years to barely get on-par with the desktop on macOS.
Just become a professional games developer, then you are forced to use Windows (for example to develop for Xbox One). The nice thing is: you can then say, 100%, Windows is the right tool for the job, and you can ignore the people claiming Linux or MacOS are better.
I have worked at three games development studios, some of the biggest in Europe and every single developer machine runs Windows.
> Linux distros are by far the best environment for a computer scientists - made by developers, for developers - but there's no major vendor that sells machines with Linux pre-installed and supported, and getting Linux installed on the newest Surface or Dell toy is often a challenge that gets many frustrated.
Is there any reason why something like the various Dell machines preloaded with Ubuntu or RHEL wouldn't count?
for laptops, dell seems to love 16:9 aspect ratio, which makes them inappropriate for development. for workstations, every dell i've seen uses custom cases that prevent upgrading the motherboard with an OTS component
I hate the 16:9 ratio and everyone uses it. It's probably cheaper since that's the same ratio as full HD which is used in many TV panels. A 1920x1200 monitor is much better than a 1920:1080 for me for coding.
Those are certainly downsides, and that's fair enough. The last Dell tower that I used was from about 2008 (Precision T-something). I remember adding a hard drive and RAM to it without trouble, but I can't talk about their non-business line, or larger modifications like replacing an expansion card or power supply.
How about "suboptimal"? 16:9 is OK for games and great for movies, and 1080p is at least wide enough that it can be reasonable to stick 2 terminals side-by-side, but it would be even better if it was a little taller.
> Linux distros are by far the best environment for a computer scientists
I feel like this is a wide enough class that you shouldn't speak for all of us. I spent years on Ubuntu and a bit in centos and then macOS and prefer the macOS UI over both gnome and awesomeWM and brew over apt and yum. For reference I use laptops and spend most of my time on the web, in git, various programming languages, and of course writing latex.
If Linux had proper support for suspend on My MacBook Pro I would use it. The problem with Linux is their laptop support for drivers such as the touchpad and proper ACPi support . Windows and MacOS have this handled but Linux does not unless you buy dell or Lenovo. Also, macs have a lower chance of replacement since they have more reliable parts .
This will have zero impact. Most consumers will not care at all. For me, if I need to build something for x86, ssh to a build server works fine. Heck I have an Intel Mac now and do not build locally. Submit to Jenkins and let the build system sort it for me in parallel. I moved to a MacBook because locally the weight / size matters more than anything else. Hacker news is not the tigers Apple market.
Windows is an awful choice for software development, a job that usually requires a lot of interaction with Unix servers. Microsoft's recent crush for Linux and open source can't fix many years of closed standards, closed protocols, and Embrace-Extend-Exterminate evil culture.
And MacOS, even though it's still loosely based on a Unix *BSD flavor, still falls into the "closed fence" category - brew is nice but can't be compared with the maturity of the package managers on any Linux distro, you can't just recompile or update the kernel on the fly to get support for a new device, and OS internals are purposely obscure to developers. Paying all that money for such a closed box, if you're anything more than an average users, is simply a waste of money.
Linux distros are by far the best environment for a computer scientists - made by developers, for developers - but there's no major vendor that sells machines with Linux pre-installed and supported, and getting Linux installed on the newest Surface or Dell toy is often a challenge that gets many frustrated.
There's definitely a huge gap in the market, and as a computer scientist I feel that none of the major vendors cares to provide me with a solid machine to do my work.