<story><title>From OS X to Ubuntu</title><url>https://nicolas.perriault.net/code/2016/from-osx-to-ubuntu/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>timtadh</author><text>Linux laptops: buy pre-installed. If you want linux and you want to be sure everything is functional, AND you don&amp;#x27;t want to devote lots of time to a &amp;quot;project&amp;quot; buy a pre-install. Dell Developer Edition laptops (XPS 13, 15) make great laptops. I hear good things about system 76 and purism as well.&lt;p&gt;Save time. Support having good laptops and good drivers. Buy pre-installed. Paying the &amp;quot;windows tax&amp;quot; and installing a Linux on a windows laptop isn&amp;#x27;t just more work, it is bad for the ecosystem.</text></item><item><author>sk1pper</author><text>IMO if money isn&amp;#x27;t an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good.&lt;p&gt;Linux on desktops - as in, not a laptop - has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for &amp;gt;10 years. Not much else to say there. If desktop or server, this shouldn&amp;#x27;t be a discussion.&lt;p&gt;As far as laptops go, I&amp;#x27;ve just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100% usable and gets you everything you need. Getting things set up can be a way bigger PITA on Linux, like function keys, sound, and god forbid, wirless. I&amp;#x27;ve never installed Linux on a laptop and had wireless &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; suck, at least a little bit. Mostly just randomly dropping connection. It&amp;#x27;s gotten better in the last few years, but it hasn&amp;#x27;t reached that perfect reliability that my mbp seems to have. Ubuntu seems to break a bit more on average - and those errors are a bit more likely to be obnoxious, or blockers even - like during boot. Not saying this is commonplace, but I&amp;#x27;ve NEVER had OS X kernel panic on me during boot.&lt;p&gt;Again, I would be perfectly happy a linux box instead, but for me it&amp;#x27;s worth a bit of extra $$ for what has seemed to me to be better reliability.&lt;p&gt;Most of my experiences have been with Ubuntu LTS releases but really, I&amp;#x27;ve tried all the big ones, and on quite a few different laptops over the years. YMMV of course.&lt;p&gt;Edit: all that being said, prob will switch over when this one dies, because touch bar... lol</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ePierre</author><text>&amp;gt; Save time. Support having good laptops and good drivers. Buy pre-installed. Paying the &amp;quot;windows tax&amp;quot; and installing a Linux on a windows laptop isn&amp;#x27;t just more work, it is bad for the ecosystem.&lt;p&gt;I wish I could. Unfortunately, I live in a country (Taiwan) where no one knows about Linux. It&amp;#x27;s impossible to buy a pre-installed Linux laptop here.&lt;p&gt;You know the most ironic part? My job here is to certify hardware (including a lot of laptops) to work on Linux... so that you guys in the US and Europe can enjoy it :)</text></comment>
<story><title>From OS X to Ubuntu</title><url>https://nicolas.perriault.net/code/2016/from-osx-to-ubuntu/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>timtadh</author><text>Linux laptops: buy pre-installed. If you want linux and you want to be sure everything is functional, AND you don&amp;#x27;t want to devote lots of time to a &amp;quot;project&amp;quot; buy a pre-install. Dell Developer Edition laptops (XPS 13, 15) make great laptops. I hear good things about system 76 and purism as well.&lt;p&gt;Save time. Support having good laptops and good drivers. Buy pre-installed. Paying the &amp;quot;windows tax&amp;quot; and installing a Linux on a windows laptop isn&amp;#x27;t just more work, it is bad for the ecosystem.</text></item><item><author>sk1pper</author><text>IMO if money isn&amp;#x27;t an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good.&lt;p&gt;Linux on desktops - as in, not a laptop - has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for &amp;gt;10 years. Not much else to say there. If desktop or server, this shouldn&amp;#x27;t be a discussion.&lt;p&gt;As far as laptops go, I&amp;#x27;ve just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100% usable and gets you everything you need. Getting things set up can be a way bigger PITA on Linux, like function keys, sound, and god forbid, wirless. I&amp;#x27;ve never installed Linux on a laptop and had wireless &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; suck, at least a little bit. Mostly just randomly dropping connection. It&amp;#x27;s gotten better in the last few years, but it hasn&amp;#x27;t reached that perfect reliability that my mbp seems to have. Ubuntu seems to break a bit more on average - and those errors are a bit more likely to be obnoxious, or blockers even - like during boot. Not saying this is commonplace, but I&amp;#x27;ve NEVER had OS X kernel panic on me during boot.&lt;p&gt;Again, I would be perfectly happy a linux box instead, but for me it&amp;#x27;s worth a bit of extra $$ for what has seemed to me to be better reliability.&lt;p&gt;Most of my experiences have been with Ubuntu LTS releases but really, I&amp;#x27;ve tried all the big ones, and on quite a few different laptops over the years. YMMV of course.&lt;p&gt;Edit: all that being said, prob will switch over when this one dies, because touch bar... lol</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>developer2</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; Linux laptops: buy pre-installed.&lt;p&gt;The fact that hardware - though much improved in the past 15 years - is still a crapshoot on Linux, particularly when it comes to laptop hardware, is so frustrating.&lt;p&gt;Windows will work on practically any combination of hardware. OS X will work on any hardware it is permitted to operate on. Linux is the only consortium of operating systems that still suffer from the inability to &amp;quot;just work out of the box&amp;quot;. I can&amp;#x27;t see how it&amp;#x27;s ever supposed to be &amp;quot;the year&amp;quot; for linux when just getting it to run properly on hardware requires buying OEM meant-for-Windows, but we-promise-it-works-with-linux garbage.&lt;p&gt;Is a &amp;quot;pre-installed&amp;quot; linux laptop even cross-distro compatible? If the laptop comes with Ubuntu pre-installed, what are the odds I can replace it with CentOS or Arch? Is the laptop &amp;quot;designed for linux&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;designed for exactly what is factory shipped, and nothing else&amp;quot;? Can I even do a fresh install of the shipped operating system, or do they hack in additional manufacturer packages&amp;#x2F;kernel drivers that require you to never reinstall on top of the shipped install? How about OS upgrades? Are they reliable, or do you risk running into compatibility problems, even with a new version of the same distro?&lt;p&gt;What we really need is a BSD&amp;#x2F;unix&amp;#x2F;linux[1] competitor to OS X. RedHat tried, and IMO failed. We need another closed-source unix&amp;#x2F;linux-based operating system that throws away X.org and its attempted modern replacements, that can directly compete with OS X. I&amp;#x27;m tired of waiting for the open source world to try - and fail - to gather momentum. And tired of Apple, who has the best unix&amp;#x2F;linux operating system, fucking us over with every hardware release.&lt;p&gt;[1] How do you type a literal asterisk on HN? Backslash and double-asterisk don&amp;#x27;t work. &lt;i&gt;nix. \&lt;/i&gt;nix. &lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;nix</text></comment>