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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

(sigpipe.macromates.com)
2031 points jrk | 3 comments | 22 May 20 15:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.513s | source
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halotrope ◴[22 May 20 16:29 UTC] No.23273850[source]▶
I am using Ubuntu 20.04 on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen2 and you would be surprised how "normal" it feels as a development machine. Sure there some little annoyances, the touchpad behaves a little worse than on windows, sound is a little worse. But the most important things, Keyboard and Screen are excellent. The system in general does not feel like the horror stories that people keep telling about linux on desktop(notebook). Now that WSL2 is getting Cuda even windows looks workable. Their new terminal app is amazing. After a decade of Mac notebooks it was quite liberating and I would not switch back even if the flaws in macOS would be fixed. It is for sure the nicest of the big 3 operating systems but for development work Ubuntu is hard to beat for me. YMMV but it won't hurt to look around you what else is there.
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kristopolous ◴[22 May 20 17:09 UTC] No.23274399[source]▶
I've been seeing the trajectory of Windows (pre-2012 or so) -> Mac (2012 - ~2019 or so) -> Linux (~2018 - now) play out with quite a few people without any issues.

And I don't mean developers. They're all pretty educated people but it's taken me by surprise. They come to me in frustration over Mac, they don't want to return to Windows and they really, really, really want linux. I've been using linux since about 1997 so they come to me. I usually push back, thinking "do you really want a unix workstation?!" but they insist.

My strategy has been some x2xx lenovo (like x230 or so) for about $300 from ebay, 8/16gb of ram or so with an SSD, the extended battery pack, putting mint on it and then just handing it over. Everyone, much to my continued surprise, has loved it and are really happy with it.

It's happened 4 times now and I'm still shocked every time. They've told me they use youtube to figure things out.

They're fine with libreoffice, gimp does what they need, supposedly spotify works on it fine, they don't know what bash or the kernel is and it's all fine. Incredible.

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1. azinman2 ◴[22 May 20 19:23 UTC] No.23275895[source]▶
I recently _really_ tried adopting Linux on a hobby development machine that I built back in 2016 (hardly new hardware -- and desktop not laptop). Sleep never worked, graphics sometimes borked, UI felt janky and inconsistent, icons are super fugly and often too theme-y to the point of being undifferentiated at a glance, HiDPI support is a giant mixed bag (in 2020), machine would randomly freeze (mostly elementOS; Ubuntu didn't freeze as much), Hauppage drivers rarely worked consistently and often required reboots, I hated the mouse acceleration curves and was horrified to learn they were effectively hardcoded in X (I'm not talking just speed which is tweakable), gstreamer was nightmare to develop for, the Ubuntu & elementaryOS stores are a joke, and the mix of apt/snap/nix was very frustrating and the opposite of user-friendly.

I switched back to my 2012 MBP and it's predictably gone well since, plus I get iMessage integration with my iPhone.

YMMV

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2. bproven ◴[22 May 20 21:40 UTC] No.23277363[source]▶
Yeah - the hw really has to be curated. I havent tried using a machine cobbled together from various parts (custom desktop), but off the shelf quality laptops work fine for me last 2 years or so and have none of the issues you mentioned. Emphasis on quality - not cheapo models. I think if you treat Linux same as OSX and run it on known good hardware supported well by Linux you are fine today IME

>HiDPI support is a giant mixed bag I will say that this is still a thing, although with experimental gnome fractional support it works pretty well now.

Honestly I have a 2019 macbook pro 15 and have more problems with it than I do with my Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen with Fedora 32.

3. kristopolous ◴[22 May 20 23:06 UTC] No.23278108[source]▶
See, that's the response I was used to and the one I expected to get from everyone.

The crazy thing is that I haven't heard it yet from the people I helped. Times may actually be changing now, just not swiftly. Perhaps it's the "decade" of desktop linux.

It's also not because linux is so great but because windows and apple are constantly stumbling over their own shoelaces and shooing customers away.