18 posts were split to a new topic: Split posts from Linux thread
Some random thoughts:
Linux user here (debian unstable and ubuntu)
I am using in my current job a mac
So far the mac experience obviously looks somehow polished, however the os sometimes becomes sluggish. Instead speaking about those flat keys on the keyboard. They risk to break instantly. And indeed one of those (CMD) got dirty and stopped to function at some point 
I used in my previous jobs linux at work. worked like a charm except for connecting to a projector safely projectors are the new printers for linux.
Wife is also using ubuntu since years. no complains. no popups, ads or fancy upgrades.
Some apps on macosx (docker, iTerm2, etc) they just interfere with your activity (called also work ;)) by popping up dialogs to ask for upgrade. annoying.
The memory occupied on mac looks way bigger than a linux machine unluckily.
Very weird. Since apple controls hardware and os.
To me it looks like macosx is the new windows with some unix roots. (btw, thanks to brew macosx looks like āalmostā normal). However brew is something external to the os.
As a side note, I had to tweak a lot of things to make macosx work as a dev machine. one funny thing was that the ~ sign was an UTF8 character on my machine. lol? I had to debug it.
For me, linux (excluding the fact that debian has almost all free software one command away ā hello apt-get) is a better experience compared to a mac for a developer.
But also for non techy ppl!
Peace
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I made the terrible mistake of updating to macOS Catalina on Monday and now have the issue where my iMac crashes and reboots when it goes to sleep because I have two external displays attached. This has apparently been an issue for months for many people, I just never found the discussion posts about it until after it happened to me. That combined with no longer needing a Mac for my day-job and a general feeling that the quality of macOS is declining steadily means that I am seriously looking into switching to Linux for a work machine (Iāll keep my MacBook and iPad and iPhone for non-critical and on-the-go stuff).
Iāll do some reading of earlier posts in this thread but does anyone have any recommendations for decent Linux desktop PC suppliers in the UK or who will ship to the UK? Since this will be for coding I donāt need a massively powerful graphics card but I do want to have two external displays (with the option of a third). Everything else would be pretty standard spec-wise I imagineā¦ things like 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD and an 8 or 12 core processor.
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Hi,
Any windows compatible pc should work on Linux. A good video to watch is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdoys_HDZYU.
So you donāt need a specific workstation you can build one from scratch and customize to your needs
This questions will help me and others to offer solutions to your problem.
Iwould go with an amd processor https://www.amd.com/en/ryzen
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Should probably be in a MacOS thread if something like that existsā¦
But I have had a terrible experience with Catalina as well so far. Whenever waking my iMac from sleep, it crashes multiple apps and eventually everything, because I can still use my mouse to move the cursor, but all the OS specific stuff shows me the beach ball.
I have been searching for this issue on the internet for the last 6 weeks, couldnāt find anything related.
EDIT: And this is not about running MacOS on a none-apple machine, it is an iMac. Apple support tells me it must be something I installed outside of their scope. Since I have not found many complaints about this issue I concur, but what the hell is it!? I have not pirated anything, I have not installed any strange applications I am aware off, I have not even watched porn on that specific machineā¦ So what is it! Apple, please fixā¦
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Thanks for the links. I built a PC way back around 1995 I think. I remember having to upgrade the BIOS for it to recognise a 1GB (yes, GB) hard drive.
Have you both tried doing a clean install? https://astonj.com/clean-macos-install-without-migration-assistant/
One thing Apple is good at is fixing issues, if you post them as bugs they usually get around to them (on Catalina use cmd space feedback assistant)
I donāt want to hijack this thread either. I can add a new administrative account to my iMac (which is six months old) and it seems to behave but doing a clean install and installing a few basic applications caused crashes again. Whether or not it is fixed, my main issue is that macOS feels almost as bad as Windows was when I abandoned that and if I donāt need it for work any more (I used to develop Mac software) then I could switch to something more stable and less restrictive for work things.
I did and after installing a few things it started crashing. However, before Iād installed anything I opened the Mac App Store to install things and had weird screen drawing issues going on which didnāt instil confidence. I think that the Radeon video drivers have issues.
How old is your Mac Simon?
I would definitely post as a bug as well 
Itās a six-month old, pretty much top of the range iMac.
I know that Apple will fix the issues eventually but the 10.15.3 beta 1 didnāt do it so Iām not holding my breath.
I will keep the iMac and use it as a single screen computer on my desk for non-coding things (watching videos, photos, etc.) but a separate work machine is just very appealing at the moment.
Upgrading the biso on a new generation of motherboards is straight forward and it also can be done using the tools supplied by the motherboard manufacturer.
So for example Gigabyte has isā own app that searches automatically for new bios updates.
So if you will head down this path this process has become a lot easier and simpler to solve.
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Ah Iāve had issues with new machines/hw before and they have always ironed them out.
Itās possible you may have a hardware issue as well - weird artefacts could mean a gpu issueā¦
Iām sure they will and once I have an at least temporary machine to stand in for it I will take it to my local store and ask them to do a full check on if.
I still like Appleās kit and will continue using them for cloud services, etc. and maybe these issues just coincide with a desire to try something different after 15 years of macOS use for work.
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Linux is certainly NOT bug-freeā¦ Anyone will certainly hit bugs that could potentially be blockers for some scenarios. This is not unlike other operating systems though.
These last 3 years have made Linux A LOT better. Intel and AMD have invested a lot of money and time to tweak the Linux experience recently. NVidia is still lagging behind on that but they have promised some great open source news for Linux on March (letās hope for the better but considering it is NVidia donāt expect too much).
Recently it is easy to have a fully functional setup for:
- Local development (Iād argue it is the best in the market with all editors + language servers + docker and so on);
- Multi monitor (both HDMI and Display Port have a good enough support currently - even thunderbolt 3);
- Games (Mainly Steam with Proton that is based on open source Wine);
- And all the crazy stuff you usually only get on Linux like i3 window manager and so onā¦
Other than the current experience there is the issue of being free and open. We should support more open source that is the base of most of our work (Elixir is open and so is Erlangā¦). But this is somewhat political so letās not get into it
This is very subjective but in my experience there is nothing that I miss from any other OS.
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Yeahlā¦ INTEL and AMD had to deal with meltdow\spectre, which caused them to patch in some stuff that will slow CPUs down (meltdown/spectre was a bug in the very core of almost every computer, abusing CPU guesses.)
There is no way your computer is faster now, unless you upgraded the hardware.
Specter and Meltdown were 2 issues with the processors architectures. They affected ANY operating system.
I wasnāt talking about speed but there are many workloads where Linux is faster than Windows/MacOS. FreeBSD is even faster for many network related workloads.
Intel and AMD made their open source graphics stack OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan compliant just last year. There are some workloads where they are faster than their proprietary driver on Windows/MacOS. This is very nice from an open source perspective.
For anyone that is interested on Linux news/performance comparisons I advise to follow www.phoronix.com.
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Yeah but they really are slow when itās about external hardware ā and more and more of macOSā problems come from that. Apple really drops the ball in that department lately.
Iāve used an external HDD with zero problems on my Win10 PC for at least 2 years nowā¦ and when itās plugged in my Mac during sleep, it regularly makes it shutdown. Three separate times I actually had to boot in safe mode and then boot back in normal mode to be able to use my Mac ā I definitely panicked then!
Catalina hasnāt been, like, a disaster, but definitely brought with itself some issues. I personally didnāt have problems upgrading at all on two Macs but really, some things ā especially the sleep mode ā are much more finicky and unreliable. 
Still wouldnāt make me use Linux because I love my retina screens ā and they are very easy on my tired eyes ā and because using homebrew has probably saved my sanity, but for the better or the worse the gap between a Mac and a Linux machine is much smaller compared to what a hardcore fan of either would tell you.
You are really completely out of date regarding Linux, because on that time it was like you say, but not anymore, at least with Ubuntu, to the point that I keep seeing MAC users migrating to Ubuntu due to the latest āscrew-upsā of Apple.
I donāt disagree. I even said in my previous comment here that the gap is shrinking and is quite small already. Nowadays it seems like the preferences go more into the tastes and specific scenarios camps and thereās no universally better platform anymore.
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