<story><title>So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux</title><url>http://richardmavis.info/so-long-macbook-hello-again-linux</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Tehchops</author><text>End-user Linux has definitely improved in the last few years.&lt;p&gt;It offers a lot of attractive features for what I imagine to be the typical HN demographic.&lt;p&gt;That being said, it&amp;#x27;s still got rough spots that OSX doesn&amp;#x27;t. It works great when it works, but when it doesn&amp;#x27;t....&lt;p&gt;Font rendering, display&amp;#x2F;compositor fragmentation etc...&lt;p&gt;Inb4 the anecdotal &amp;quot;well it works for me I just had to download the xf86 font library and compile with a legacy glibc version...&amp;quot; crew comes in with a thousand and one rebuttals. Problems like that are still a suboptimal user experience, no matter how you slice it.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d definitely consider a Linux daily driver for some of my work, but there are things that are just going to be less painful on Apple.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davidy123</author><text>Maybe I&amp;#x27;m missing something, but font rendering seems fine on Ubuntu without any after install steps.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been using Ubuntu exclusively for well over a decade for everyday work, only occasionally going into a Windows VM, and it&amp;#x27;s really been perfectly fine, great even, as a developer. I bought a X1 Yoga the month after it was released and Ubuntu installed perfectly on it, the only thing that didn&amp;#x27;t work out of the box is the fingerprint reader.&lt;p&gt;Until a year ago, battery life wasn&amp;#x27;t as good as Windows&amp;#x2F;Mac, but it&amp;#x27;s very good with the latest versions.&lt;p&gt;Proprietary software that some people need to run, now that&amp;#x27;s another issue, but for most development tasks it&amp;#x27;s fantastically manageable and accessible, a real pushback against closed systems.</text></comment>
<story><title>So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux</title><url>http://richardmavis.info/so-long-macbook-hello-again-linux</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Tehchops</author><text>End-user Linux has definitely improved in the last few years.&lt;p&gt;It offers a lot of attractive features for what I imagine to be the typical HN demographic.&lt;p&gt;That being said, it&amp;#x27;s still got rough spots that OSX doesn&amp;#x27;t. It works great when it works, but when it doesn&amp;#x27;t....&lt;p&gt;Font rendering, display&amp;#x2F;compositor fragmentation etc...&lt;p&gt;Inb4 the anecdotal &amp;quot;well it works for me I just had to download the xf86 font library and compile with a legacy glibc version...&amp;quot; crew comes in with a thousand and one rebuttals. Problems like that are still a suboptimal user experience, no matter how you slice it.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d definitely consider a Linux daily driver for some of my work, but there are things that are just going to be less painful on Apple.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasondclinton</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s true: some things are easier on Mac. In particular, I&amp;#x27;d say that using software that hasn&amp;#x27;t been packaged for your distribution is much easier on Mac.&lt;p&gt;However, your example of fonts is definitely not one of those areas, anymore. Font rendering on Linux is as advanced and capable as any other OS including in the areas of kerning and hinting. It should just work without any user intervention and look great.&lt;p&gt;I agree with you that compositing&amp;#x2F;window manager fragmentation is a problem. And this article is a perfect example of that. The author may think that they&amp;#x27;re happy using i3 with Firefox and st at the moment, but the desktop computing environment has gotten so complex and the expectations of users who interact with desktop applications so rich, that a small hobby project DE&amp;#x2F;WM cannot fully satisfy all of those use cases over the long term. The only two desktop environment projects that have enough resources to meet the needs of users behind them are KDE and GNOME. And we shouldn&amp;#x27;t be telling new Linux users to try anything but those two.&lt;p&gt;FWIW, I&amp;#x27;ve worked at Google for 7 years where we use Linux on our workstations. Many engineers fiddle with various &amp;quot;hacker&amp;quot; window managers like i3, Sway, Awesome, or fvwm. They almost universally give up and switch to GNOME(&amp;#x2F;Cinnamon) or KDE: it&amp;#x27;s just too fiddly&amp;#x2F;not complete and they&amp;#x27;d rather use their brain power for solving real problems. The authors example of messing around with dmenu because &amp;quot;unix philosophy&amp;quot; is an example of this kind of waste of time that people eventually get tired of because they have better things to spend their time on.</text></comment>