<story><title>The Decline of the MacBook Pro</title><url>https://www.dannyguo.com/blog/the-decline-of-the-macbook-pro/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>woah</author><text>Unfortunately Mac is still miles ahead of Linux on usability. I recently got an XPS 13 and put Ubuntu on it, and immediately ran into many small issues such as:&lt;p&gt;- Touchpad had a very low resolution. This had to be fixed by using a different display server.&lt;p&gt;- Touchpad had nonexistent palm rejection. I fixed this by turning off tap to click which doesn’t actually fix the problem but stops it from causing an issue when typing.&lt;p&gt;- Touchpad generally had a very old fashioned layout with large zones for the right click button and scroll bar.&lt;p&gt;- All of these touchpad fixes had to be done with some strangely formatted text files.&lt;p&gt;- Key remapping also required diving into a whole set of text files and searching around for incomplete documentation wikis on it.&lt;p&gt;- Gestures do not work without switching back to the display server with the very low resolution touchpad.&lt;p&gt;- The windowing and multi desktop system is generally not as well thought out as Mac.&lt;p&gt;- Bluetooth just doesn’t work well. I need to “forget” and then reconnect to a device to join it again. Feels very buggy.&lt;p&gt;There are also a lot of other things I’m forgetting right now. Currently Linux does not offer a top tier desktop experience, and it’s been 90% of the way there for like 15 years, so I doubt it’s ever going to get better until the dynamics of the ecosystem change. My guess is that Linux developers don’t want to do boring stuff like fixing obscure bugs for certain peripherals, and they don’t want to listen to designers to create a polished unified experience.&lt;p&gt;I briefly used windows while installing Ubuntu and it was generally much smoother. If windows can get the Linux subsystem stuff working 100% my guess is that it will start to gain momentum as a developer OS.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bmelton</author><text>I agree, but the problem is that if the MBP can&amp;#x27;t be considered &amp;#x27;reliable&amp;#x27;, then none of that really matters.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been a happy Mac user for years now, and historically, on the very rare occasion that I had a problem, it was either fixed near immediately, or solved to &amp;#x27;better-than-satisfaction&amp;#x27; levels by the geniuses at the store.&lt;p&gt;My first Touchbar-equipped MBP has been the most problematic computer I&amp;#x27;ve ever owned.  The keyboard, despite that I &lt;i&gt;love&lt;/i&gt; the short throw and initial feel of it, just stops working sometimes, or sticks, or becomes weirdly responsive.   Five times in six months, I&amp;#x27;ve had an update fail to load, with the system complaining that the OS couldn&amp;#x27;t be detected.  Easy to solve for techies, nearly impossible for the average user.  Having to carry three dongles is just an inconvenience, but it&amp;#x27;s very much inconvenient.  The touchbar?  I don&amp;#x27;t even want to get into it.  The physical power button has failed -- the whole thing is flaky as hell, and I&amp;#x27;m forced to choose between a touchbar system that works when it wants, or a tactile ESC key that is a full 1Ghz slower and arbitrarily feature restricted. So on and so forth.&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, for each of my many complaints, Genius bar appointments are being scheduled weeks out, and have been providing fixes that recur as quickly as the same day I receive the unit back.&lt;p&gt;They have problems.  And while you&amp;#x27;re right that the next-best product is still way below the quality of even the worst MBP, that hasn&amp;#x27;t stopped me daydreaming of throwing this thing out the window and replacing it with a Thinkpad.  As it stands, I&amp;#x27;ve retired my old Mac Pro and replaced it with Ubuntu 18 on a desktop. With a standard PC and mouse, the UI polish is still very noticeable, but the usability quirks aren&amp;#x27;t as apparent as trying to run Ubuntu on Mac hardware.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Decline of the MacBook Pro</title><url>https://www.dannyguo.com/blog/the-decline-of-the-macbook-pro/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>woah</author><text>Unfortunately Mac is still miles ahead of Linux on usability. I recently got an XPS 13 and put Ubuntu on it, and immediately ran into many small issues such as:&lt;p&gt;- Touchpad had a very low resolution. This had to be fixed by using a different display server.&lt;p&gt;- Touchpad had nonexistent palm rejection. I fixed this by turning off tap to click which doesn’t actually fix the problem but stops it from causing an issue when typing.&lt;p&gt;- Touchpad generally had a very old fashioned layout with large zones for the right click button and scroll bar.&lt;p&gt;- All of these touchpad fixes had to be done with some strangely formatted text files.&lt;p&gt;- Key remapping also required diving into a whole set of text files and searching around for incomplete documentation wikis on it.&lt;p&gt;- Gestures do not work without switching back to the display server with the very low resolution touchpad.&lt;p&gt;- The windowing and multi desktop system is generally not as well thought out as Mac.&lt;p&gt;- Bluetooth just doesn’t work well. I need to “forget” and then reconnect to a device to join it again. Feels very buggy.&lt;p&gt;There are also a lot of other things I’m forgetting right now. Currently Linux does not offer a top tier desktop experience, and it’s been 90% of the way there for like 15 years, so I doubt it’s ever going to get better until the dynamics of the ecosystem change. My guess is that Linux developers don’t want to do boring stuff like fixing obscure bugs for certain peripherals, and they don’t want to listen to designers to create a polished unified experience.&lt;p&gt;I briefly used windows while installing Ubuntu and it was generally much smoother. If windows can get the Linux subsystem stuff working 100% my guess is that it will start to gain momentum as a developer OS.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Steltek</author><text>Fwiw, I recently was forced to use a MBP at work after being full-on Linux for ~20 years.  I find OSX to be irritating on a number of levels but coming from the opposite direction.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; My guess is that Linux developers don’t want to do boring stuff like fixing obscure bugs for certain peripherals, and they don’t want to listen to designers to create a polished unified experience.&lt;p&gt;I think OSX offering a Unix-like experience drew away a lot of open source developers to donate their free time and expertise towards a commercial company like Apple rather than the community.  If this had not happened, it&amp;#x27;s possible the Linux desktop experience may have kept up with the times better.&lt;p&gt;Decade old coreutils is closer to traditional Unix than Ubuntu.  Heck, OSX started with tcsh as the default shell.  OSX without the magnanimous gift of Homebrew seems pretty garbage.</text></comment>