I'm also considering a switch, but Windows drives me up the wall whenever I touch it. macOS has been getting uglier and more awkward to use the last few years, but Windows is still the king of ugly.
So I've been considering Linux as my first option. I fired up a few VMs and dipped my toes in various Linux desktop environments: Elementary, Fedora 25, and Ubuntu (Unity) so far. These are all GNOME 3 variants. And... oh boy. Linux land really needs some kind of unifying revolution to happen, because this is a mess. Things have gotten a little smoother in the decade or so since I was last exploring Linux desktops, but it's like they're still figuring out what it's supposed to even be. GNOME feels like it's stuck between trying to be Windows and OS X, with some super weird details (like the launcher thing) that makes it feel like they had plans to build a touch screen OS for tablets or something. Meanwhile, there's little consistency between apps (and Elementary tries to remove menu bars as a concept, what's up with that?), and everything feels put together randomly by people with widely divergent ideas of what a kind of desktop environment to aspire to. It also struck me how much competition there is -- there are at least three GNOME forks (two of 3.x, one of 2.x), for example -- a situation which seems to exist partly due to infighting.
Maybe with out tweaking and plugins and customization you can beat it into some shape that lets you work efficiently, but the experience put me off, to be honest. I don't like being that negative, but I was a bit shocked about how bad it was. Mint was next on my list, but I'm not sure I will continue since it's another GNOME 3 fork.
I am experiencing the same thing, but on the reverse side.
At my home, I have a Ubuntu desktop which works perfectly. I use Eclipse, Android Studio and Atom editor. On work, I use MBP and pretty much the same environment.
I know it is not a common opinion but no matter what I do, I still like Ubuntu more than macos. I agree that macos looks more polished, engineered and complete but somehow, I prefer Ubuntu's plastic feeling. It has been 6 months and still my opinions did not change.
There is also the problems of macOS with Eclipse and other GTK applications (Meld) some other stuff about Mac that I couldn't fully adapt yet.
Lastly, FYI, no, I am not hater and I like MBP, especially as a solid metal object.
System76 sells laptops with Linux preloaded. I believe Dell does as well (or at least used to if they don't anymore). I'm not sure how high end you are looking for but a quick glance shows System76's most expensive laptop is well over $2,000.
You can also look at Zareason[1]. I have been interested, but my 2015 MBP still gets things done. I did install Lubuntu on my old 2009 MBP. Runs well, but I have yet to get the keyboard mappings right and a USB mouse makes things easier. I want to minimize GUI bling and use my CPU cycles for number (and image) crunching...
My XPS 13 9350 works perfectly with Fedora 25. Installed Fedora and literally everything works out of the box. That includes things like HiDPI auto scaling, touch screen, suspend, media keys, etc.
When it was first released, there were some issues with suspend and the touch screen, but they were all resolved a few months later in a newer kernel release. Fedora 25 ships with that newer kernel by default.
I've run ubuntu with zero issues on my thinkpads (w520 and w541) at work for the past ~5 years. No trackpad issues, no wifi issues, no audio or bluetooth problems. It just works.
Check out Razer Blade or the Blade Pro, any Alienware, any System86 machine, most of the Dell XPS series. Don't touch HP with Linux (really bad firmware and driver compat issues).
I just bought a Razer blade and it has not been flawless with Ubuntu. Specifically, when I close the laptop lid, and then open it again, I keep getting logged out every ~15 seconds, until I restart the computer. As a work-around, I must manually suspend the laptop before closing the lid.
I have the Blade Stealth and haven't had any problems with it yet apart from an update that caused my fans to keep on spinning. It's been fixed since then.
I do agree that Linux has very variable performance and experiences across machines. I really do like the laptop though. I'm looking at the Razer Blade Pro (that machine is a beast but looks sexy still) and some Dell Precision laptops for an upgrade (will be passing on the Blade to my brother) but the Pro is extremely costly at the moment.
MacOS lost me somewhere around Mavericks and the idea of a tablet that is also my PC was appealing, so I tried a Surface Pro 3 and decided to keep it. Ubuntu Bash for Windows is great, but is Beta and still needs some work. As for my old 2011 MBP, Ubuntu runs very well on it. For a couple of decades I kept trying Linux on the desktop, and today I am happy with it. From managing photos, CAD for my 3D printer, Python development and music with my keyboard, Dropbox support, it really is remarkable how far the desktop has come. I am still using the web client for OneNote though...
Eclipse is just super janky under macOS, and the GUI doesn't even work the same as its Windows counterpart -- which makes teaching classes with Eclipse a study in pain
Had the same thing. Turns out, I'm more of a design snob then I thought I was. Trying to move away from macOS and trying out Windows and a few Linux distro's, my god it's all ugly.
I don't care much about Apple hardware specifically, but they got my hooked because of the OS.
My previous laptop was a windows machine that acted as a web browser, music/video player and VirtualBox host. All of my work was done in linux in virtualbox (and my SSH terminal was also bash running on linux in virtualbox).
My linux environment was very minimal though (mostly living in the terminal, used a tiling WM, vim as my editor). In many ways my mac environment isn't that different except without the tiling WM.
That setup worked quite well, although used more resources than if I hadn't used Virtualbox.
Putty (or Kitty or MobaTerm) is still a thing, but there are other options. The Linux subsystem will give you a *nix shell and ssh that works exactly like you expect it to. There is also msys which will give you an ssh client you can run directly from cmd.exe or power shell. Microsoft have been working on a proper native port of OpenSSH, but while it apparently works pretty well, it's still not feature complete or ready to be shipped as a standard part of Windows (hopefully early next year).
Well it depends on what you consider modern but Openbox is still alive and kicking (albeit it is only a window manager).
On a rant tangental note a slight annoyance I have lately is that all the window managers are getting pushed out / ignored because of Wayland.
With Wayland you basically have to write an entire desktop instead of just a window manager. I used to love that about Linux.. the pick and choose what works best model but now the choices are becoming fewer.
Back in 2009 my dream was to run OSX with a Thinkpad keyboard and trackpoint. Now that I have OSX on a Thinkpad X220 my dream is to run i3-wm with unified application design language and underlying foundations. On OSX Spotlight works well and gives me what I want, and applications look good. There aren't any missing icons and text size isn't all over the place. Amethyst WM on OSX is pretty good, but it's not as good as i3. I'm not sure if it's easier to make applications look good on Linux or to get a WM that looks more like i3 on OSX.
Weirdly enough that's how I spend a lot of my time on my iPad Pro - use Mosh to connect to a Linux box and then use tmux and vim to set up tiles and do my work.
Funny I'm the exact opposite. Only on a MBPr for the hardware, otherwise would prefer Linux to OSX. Lightweight tiling window manager + Vim keybinds for all apps = super efficient. With OSX I actually have to use the mouse. How quaint.
pretty much everything has a vi-mode these days. all shells, tmux, browser via extension (vimperator/vimium/cvim/surfingkeys) or by default (uzbl et al), wm by configuration or default (bspwm/i3/awesome etc.).
intellij even has support for an .ideavimrc which surprisingly works quite well.
I never get these screenshots of desktop backgrounds. It's background-porn. The fact that it's made on Linux and has a Linux menubar and different fonts than Windows or Mac - who cares?
I've used Ubuntu since seven years at work, the mac since 17 years, Windows not anymore since seven years, unless when helping others. I would change to Linux anytime if all would just work, meaning Photoshop and other software that now doesn't work. Plus the mac is still my favorite piece of hardware. When I bought this 2015 Macbook, I've looked for a good Linux laptop, and came out at about the same price. Then the choice was easy.
Don't get it either. Most themes or skins or whatever for Linux desktops (including the default ones) are pretty terrible - the fit and finish is generally poor. If I'm going to be staring at something for 8+ hours a day the inconsistencies really start to grate.
Most of those desktop screenshots remind me of Winamp skins from back in the day - yes it's a great piece of software and endlessly customisable, but most of those customisations are terrible. Like a 14 year old with a copy of Neuromancer and MS Paint.
I'm constantly trying Linux distros and DEs and the answer when I talk about this is 'Well if you spend time tweaking it...'
NO, that's not the right answer. Endless configuration options means there wasn't the will to make a design decision and stick to it. 'Customisation' can be an excuse for a poor job. That's why Elementary OS is the least horrible desktop, even if it still has issues. Their lack of global menus may be a questionable decision, but at least it's a decision.
The problem with your rant is that people have different opinions on what is "good". You would probably hate my setup because it's a tiling WM with nothing. No conky bar, no date/time in the bar, no power monitors, etc. But it works the best for me because I don't like any distractions at all.
Linux gives you the freedom to choose the environment that suits you personally best. Windows doesn't give you ANY choice, and it's still bad! If you like to be told what is good and make no optimizations for your personal workflow, more power to you. But don't go saying that Linux is "not the right answer", that's just silly. Works on my machine :)
Most of those posts have a good deal of theming setup. Usually people include just the background alone because people invariably want the source to use on their own setups :P
I used Plasma 5 for a while and really loved the interface and the ability to customize almost anything, but what got me in the end was trying to sync settings across multiple machines. From what I can tell, there are a bunch of random files with names starting with "k" dumped in ~/.config that store most of the settings, but copying them to different machines didn't seem to work. Of course, it's not much easier to sync settings with something like Gnome, but it takes me a lot less time and effort to set up Gnome with the exact settings I like than Plasma. If I didn't switch around machines/distros a lot, I probably would have stuck with Plasma though.
I have to concur, the latest Fedora 25 with the KDE Plasma is a beauty to use. Put it on a new Thinkpad X1 Carbon, screen is amazing, fonts crystal clear, all very smooth.
What makes it worse is that they change, regroup and rename things each f-ing year. W7 made it hard to select apps (floating groups in taskbar), explorer introduced dumb libraries, control panel is always a mess, as is /Users/Shared (iirc) thing. Now that w10. I try it and understand that I'm unable to do anything again and again.
Biggest questionable change in macos for 6 years was new ui flavor and maximize button became fullscreen. That said, iTunes also experiments too much.
>> So I've been considering Linux as my first option.
Linux re-defines ugly. It works great but it's very kludgy. Like many others I can setup my workflow on any of the three machines and have tried it out on many different machines from Dell to IBM to Apple. Sublime, terminals, Chrome/FireFox, DropBox, it works well enough on anything but I made my current choice on 'niceness', battery life, screen, and form-factor, even if it cost me a couple hundred dollars more. On a machine I use for 3 years it's 30-40 cents a day.
Maybe I'm an old fart, but everything seems to be getting worse. OSX is worse than it was, Windows is worse than it was, Linux is worse than it was. If you just want to browse the web, okay, but anything beyond that and you are off in a maze of twisty passages, none of them like the other.
I never understood why XFCE is not the default for Ubuntu desktop. It was(is?) part of Xubuntu, the lightweight Ubuntu distro, years ago. I had the most basic entry level laptop, but I managed to connect 2 external monitors to it while the tiling would remember the locations of all programs in all three monitors and it was FAST. Nothing I have tried since has touched it. It set me up for a lot of disappointment! I now have a macbook and while it's a great and integrated machine, CMD-tab - which I use to switch screens - doesn't even work properly if an application is in fullscreen mode.
On what Distro though? What should I try if I want something that pretty much works out of the box i.e. has acceptable battery life + WiFi + Sound + Suspend mode on a Macbook / Latitude / Thinkpad without me having to set up config files according to all kinds of internet sources for a day... or even a week?
XFCE is very stable so it should work almost exactly the same on every distro. Just pick the one that you like the most / is easier to install for you / etc.
KDE is a bigger and more complex system so it works a bit differently depending on what distribution you use. Some distros like KDE Neon always have the most recent KDE while other like OpenSUSE Leap prefer to use stable versions of the applications.
When it comes to wifi/sound/etc it has to do with whether the driver for that contains binary blobs. Some distros don't ship blobs due to security and/or software freedom concerns while other distros have a more relaxed policy when it comes to proprietary software.
Thinkpads have a reputation for being very easy to run Linux on. You should expect everything to work out of the box. For the Dell computer you might have to install drivers separately but you can't tell for sure without knowing the exact model you have. You could do a test drive with a Live USB to check out. I wouldn't expect things to work out of the box on the macbook though. Apple isn't very Linux friendly and their macbooks have many specialized components that are only found on Apple products so Linux support is not very good. But even then, some dedicated hackers still try to reverse engineer them so you might have better support if you have an older model instead of the latest macbook.
The following table can help a bit with determining if wifi will work on your computer:
Just works, anyone can use it, and if you wish, you can right-click on anything and have tenthousand config options to make everything exactly as customized as you want it.
And it works. No flashy in your face features trying to impress you with bouncing balls or animations, it's just like an improved version of Windows 2000 interface.
Woha! That's some serious design there. I am heavily, heavily impressed by what the KDE folks are building. I will admit that I don't think I'll switch to KDE anytime soon - I had been using it throughout the 3.x series, and was extremely excited about (and then disappointed by) the 4.x releases, but then switched to MacOS and never looked back.
If I get myself a workstation again (and there are solid reasons for doing so, like CUDA for DNN development when you're tired of working on servers for local development), I'll definitely give KDE another go.
> "Meanwhile, there's little consistency between apps (and Elementary tries to remove menu bars as a concept, what's up with that?), and everything feels put together randomly by people with widely divergent ideas of what a kind of desktop environment to aspire to."
This is the product of dictatorship style development on one side (Windows, OSX) Vs democracy on the other side (Linux distros).
It's not democracy vs dictatorship. It's individualism/pluralism vs central planning. You can have central planning with democratic legitimacy or without it.
But I don't actually think the horrible state of desktop Linux is down to any of that. Device drivers are Linux's big problem. Desktop environments are a simple matter of getting used to them and learning what to tweak.
As I said, it's driver issues that make the Linux desktop/laptop experience horrible, not the diversity of desktop environments.
I don't think it's a good idea for Linux advocates to deny or downplay the effect that driver issues have on the overall desktop/laptop Linux experience.
I tried Ubuntu and couldn't get over the ugly font and not being able copy paste from anything to anything else. Plus there's no good power management on laptops and no PC ever came out with a quality trackpad that can match macbook.
I remember that ctrl+c and ctrl+v didn't work across applications. I think Terminal was one of them. Couldn't copy and paste into it. Out of the box anyway.
Yea that is a 'feature'. The problem is that ctrl+c already means something else in the terminal. Many (most?) terminals map copy and paste to ctrl+shift+c and ctrl+shift+v to get around this.
Of course most *nix user use the middle mouse button for copy-paste in the terminal as standard and never really notice this.
Either that or select - right click - copy/paste. It all works, but the shortcuts don't align. Ctrl-c is sigint, ctrl+v varies, but in vim it escapes special key press.
> Also the maximise behaviour in macOS is really annoying.
I use hammerspoon to paper over a lot of the annoying parts of macos (after using linux on desktop+laptop for over a decade). Here's a minimal excerpt from my config to get a more-reasonable "maximize" behavior: https://gist.github.com/philsnow/c19506dec17597ab9e4bf02f8d2...
Install Spectacle. [cmd]+[alt]+[f] for actual maximize (NOT fullscreen). Replace the f with left arrow and you get half pane left, same with right, or up... you get the idea.
Switch alt for ctrl with the same commands to send to the top quarters of the screen, add a shift to that to send it to the bottom quarters.
I don't move windows with the mouse on OSX/MacOS anymore.
I wish the various linux WMs/DEs took inspiration from the Mac on this, vs the Windows ctrl-combo method. In addition to avoiding key combo collisions in the terminal, I like how in Mac OS X all the control keys for line editing work everywhere. It messes me up when I go to a Windows machine and find that ctrl-w closes my window when I just wanted to delete a word.
In MATE Terminal, and I think GNOME Terminal, you can chance the keybindings to remove the shift — and if you do this, you can send ^C with shift-control-c.
Try i3 or fluxbox while you're still experimenting (or KDE for that matter if you've only gone with Gnome so far). Diversity is actually a good thing :)
I've standardized on Xubuntu but there are some pretty sweet desktop managers/window managers out there. That being said I feel like I'm fairly close to converting to i3.
I have surfed through distros, desktop environments and window managers for nearly a year.
My equillibrium point is suckless.org's dwm[0] with all defaults except using Terminus as font and Super(windows) instead of Alt key.
~6 months, no irritation, no configuration change.
Tiling window managers which have extensive configuration options are useful as tinkering material, but not actual working environments. If you want a tiling window manager not for eye appeal and beauty but for simplicity and ease of use, look at r/unixporn/ and use whatever they are not using.
I've ended up in a very similar position: stumpwm, st, Adobe Source Code Pro & Super.
For my particular style, being able to extend the WM (not customise endlessly: actually extend) is pretty awesome, but I understand that not everyone's into that.
After getting everything set up the way I like it, I'll never switch.
Hah, I run the exact same config. I used to be a wmii user but moved to Windows for quite a while when work and school required software that only ran there. Now I'm back on the tiling window manager train with dwm, and I realize I had forgotten how much I like this setup.
Right, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. GP said they were considering Linux Mint, and so I replied with a suggestion for a GUI that in my experience pairs well with Mint.
> they're still figuring out what it's supposed to even be
"It" can be any distro. GNU/Linux distros aren't a single entity, and they never will settle on a common interface---that's a good thing. Larger distros like Ubuntu will, but if you're going to adopt this perspective, you'll need to start thinking about the individual distributions and companies/communities behind them rather than "the" GNU/Linux desktop.
Not if you're looking for a macOS alternative. I'm fine with the "distros" doing what they want. However, that is not going to lead to a cohesive experience of the kind that macOS is able to provide.
A bigger problem than the desktop environment may be that apps are written to different UI toolkits (these days mostly GTK+ and Qt), and the different environments provide themes to get a unified look. Most apps aren't targeting a particular desktop environment, and so you get this inherent tension, where it's "unopinioned all the way down" and nobody makes a clear decision about a unified look/feel to anything.
I can see why a certain group of hackers like this jangly mess where a lot of time is spent on customizing stuff to work exactly the way they like it, being able to choose a completely different "window manager" and so on. I was like that in my early years, and today I just want things that work. What I want is consistency and stability with a mind behind it. I want it to boot up and render high-quality, subpixel-aliased fonts, and then I'd like to get right to work.
The KDE community seems more closely aligned with this idea, but they still don't control the apps, and unfortunately they still seem to be stuck in the Windows 2000 copy machine mindset.
> A bigger problem than the desktop environment may be that apps are written to different UI toolkits (these days mostly GTK+ and Qt)
I can agree with this criticism (granted, I don't use many GUI programs)---not that they're different toolkits, but that they often have drastically different theming and UX. Uniformity through common theming/UX APIs would be beneficial.
You know lots of environments are quite configurable both in aethetics and functionality have you explored this. If you just booted up and didn't explore your options you might have missed the better part of your options.
Functionally I think there a lot to be said for tiling window managers and I think they look great with Compton plus semi transparent windows, selectively obviously.
So I've been considering Linux as my first option. I fired up a few VMs and dipped my toes in various Linux desktop environments: Elementary, Fedora 25, and Ubuntu (Unity) so far. These are all GNOME 3 variants. And... oh boy. Linux land really needs some kind of unifying revolution to happen, because this is a mess. Things have gotten a little smoother in the decade or so since I was last exploring Linux desktops, but it's like they're still figuring out what it's supposed to even be. GNOME feels like it's stuck between trying to be Windows and OS X, with some super weird details (like the launcher thing) that makes it feel like they had plans to build a touch screen OS for tablets or something. Meanwhile, there's little consistency between apps (and Elementary tries to remove menu bars as a concept, what's up with that?), and everything feels put together randomly by people with widely divergent ideas of what a kind of desktop environment to aspire to. It also struck me how much competition there is -- there are at least three GNOME forks (two of 3.x, one of 2.x), for example -- a situation which seems to exist partly due to infighting.
Maybe with out tweaking and plugins and customization you can beat it into some shape that lets you work efficiently, but the experience put me off, to be honest. I don't like being that negative, but I was a bit shocked about how bad it was. Mint was next on my list, but I'm not sure I will continue since it's another GNOME 3 fork.