Thoughts on leaving macOS for Linux? (split thread)

Yeah, feels the same here. :confused: And I made a much bigger investment, the iMac Pro I got was $8000 at the time I bought it (2019).

As a programmer I get it, you want to move on to the good stuff and stop fighting legacy problems and whatnot but as a user I can’t excuse Apple. People can’t just buy a new machine every year, most can’t anyway. And even if they can, it’s a huge e-waste problem. Whatever happened to sustainability?.. It’s only touted when it profits the corps, that’s what happened – and that’s how it always was.

If it was only that. Opening system settings takes two full seconds. Makes me angry every time. In 2025 this is simply shameful.

This… is just sad. Apple we knew practically no longer exists and is the same in name only.

And it only confirms my gut feeling that’s been building up for 2 years now. Time to spec a good (if not absurdly overpowered) Linux workstation, go all-in, learn all the kinks – subreddits like this one can inspire and help people, I reckon – and just forget about Apple. They are ruled by a logistics expert and an accountant. :expressionless:

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Never understood what is the point to get a expensive machine for development, especially if you don’t plan on doing more exotic stuff like running or training models. If you plan on investing such a large sum, then I think you will get better value by getting a proper server and placing it in a datacenter in your country.

I personally have used for the last year the cheapest air m1 and it’s more than enough to work on elixir projects, it usually doesn’t even get warm. I have a setup with a docking hub, where I can connect it to proper keyboard/mouse and monitors. The only limitation I don’t like is that m1 chips support only 2 monitors in total.

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It is for our geeky self esteem, man. I can make do with a cheap chrome book, but I don’t want to be seen with it.

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You leave the house!? :upside_down_face:

I’m not much of a gearhead and blindly just buy Apple stuff, although being Canadian I’m second guessing this atm (I’m hoping this changes, but I won’t be needing a new laptop for a long while). I got a new job recently so I have a M3 MacBook Air from last year. I use the track pad and keyboard that comes with the laptop I’m using. I once tried getting into mechanical keyboards but, believe it or not, I actually like chiclet keyboards :person_shrugging: (well, except for the awful butterfly era, those were horrendous). I also go between working at a desk and on my couch, so an external keyboard never really made sense.

Software-wise I’m not very fancy. I’ve been using solely Vim for the past 15 years, I haven’t fully jumped on the AI train yet (I’ve used copilot a bit but don’t love it) and what else… Recently I’ve been trying to find a browser I actually like that isn’t Chrome but it’s been tough. I’m probably forgetting some stuff.

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Yep. Also it has a memory leak, at least on macos, where after a while you notice a delay that keeps getting long and long every time you switch to it. At least that was happening for me.

I tried Zen for a bit and don’t much like it. Arc is decent. I really, really, really want to like Orion. I’ve been using it a lot lately but it’s still so buggy. They recently released a whole bunch of patches (as in, not even 24 hours ago) so I’m all this stuff gets sorted out soon.

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But I plan to do a lot with it actually. Plus I hate slow machines in general. Not like I stress my machine 24/7 but (1) I have ideas for project that would do that and (2) I work in a flow state and can absolutely have my productivity destroyed if I have to wait 7 minutes for something.

Plus, future-proofing. I don’t want to buy machines every few years. As we chatted with you before, I want to get something that will last me good 10 years or more. Computers are tools and they have to be reliable and durable. So I’ll do my best to find one such machine.

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I know you are kind of joking (or you’re not? :smiley: ) but I honestly give zero fraks about prestige. At my last company’s meetup I was one of the few people with Linux laptops and was actually pretty proud of it. And as said above, it was and still is pretty damn fast, often faster than Macbooks, even the M series.

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If you are buying enterprise-grade parts that are certified and have long-term support then I can agree with the price of 8k you mentioned above.

If you are buying consumer-grade electronics, there is simply no guarantee on how long it will last, and the saddest thing is that everything is made disposable these days, so you most likely won’t be able to repair it, this is especially true if we talk about laptops.

I simply don’t see why you would pay 3x-4x the price for the hardware to last 10 years instead of upgrading every 4-5 years.

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That was a one-time investment that I’ll never repeat again. It was an informed decision as I was ramping up my efforts in contracting back then. Which is a thing I want to put behind me now. I’ll be finding a stable job and will be holding on to it for a while. Not because of the world markets or anything else – we the programmers will always have a job no matter what the passionate LLM advocates say – but because I need a more peaceful phase in my life with much less turbulence. Anyway, off-topic but still a needed context.

It will not be 3x-4x though. It will be just be a high-end consumer-grade PC with carefully selected parts to make it professional i.e. with a motherboard that has more PCIe lanes. Should be no more than +20% price compared to a high-ish end gaming PC, for example. So definitely no more than 3000 EUR I think. If even that.

Yeah, agreed, this is why I am not interested in modern laptops. The one I have I’ll use until it breaks. Laptops should just be terminals to more powerful machines anyway.

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Good thing I don’t give a hoot about LLMs then. :smiley:

But yep, valuable advice, thank you. Hopefully ROCm catches up with CUDA one day before we are buried. :003:

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I’ve seen it, it’s a pretty interesting concept and I hope they will be successful, so they can drop the price more in the future.

Back in the day it was very pricey for the specs, but looks like it’s getting there. If they ever release a version with a ARM CPU that can at least last closely to 7-8 hours on battery(while doing work), then this most likely will be my next choice of laptop for many years to come.

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Who need a fast computer. I once make do with this setup for a few days. No brand El-cheapo Android tablet + mechanical keyboard. I still use it to test websites: if it usable on here, it is usable everywhere.

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Dude, you should be cloned and the eyes of the clones should be used as implants for people like me.

Give me that setup for one week and I might be legally blind. :cry:

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It is a badly lit picture. The keyboard has backlight, and the tablet screen, while not the brightest, is plentiful bright. And I wear reading glasses.

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It’s not only the brightness and contrast though. They are important, yeah, but most cheap screens have bad text legibility – the letters are not clear. Combine that with the smaller font and/or bad refresh rate and I guarantee I’ll be tired in 3 hours max.

There’s a reason I went for a very expensive Mac. It was the first display in my life that legitimately did not torture my eyes. After that I discovered others, of course, but Mac displays just have some dark magic behind them that apparently nobody else wants to duplicate.

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Be careful what you wish for. I’ve been hoping for years that Linux would catch up and become as reliable and usable as MacOS even 3-4 versions behind, but I still don’t think it’s there yet. I’ve been through about 4 distros over the past couple of years and I don’t think I’d take any of them over MacOS for general purpose use as a desktop. I’ve run into frustrating problems with all of them and the companies/devs managing these different distros don’t particularly inspire confidence either. If you’re motivated you can certainly make it work, but it’s like adding another thing you have to manage and become expert in. I’ve got too many of those already.

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Yeah that’s part of the research. I use Manjaro for several years now and only had an issue twice I think. They are not perfect but do pretty well. I also heard good things about Void.

So these two at the top of my list of candidates.

You got any other recommendations? And don’t say Ubuntu – that’s the Windows of the Linux world. Very bloated. I want something extremely lightweight but still very functional and not having to assemble everything like you have to do with a raw Arch Linux.

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Depends on what you want to do with the ā€œdesktopā€. I’ve been using Linux full time on the desktop since circa 2011, for development at least. I always have a Mac laptop around for anything too unwieldy on Linux though. Only since circa 2019, I moved my Linux PC to the basement and retired my last Linux laptop and went full Mac on the desktop.

My current job is unrelated to development and I have a company issued windows laptop for office work. So, to move to Linux on the desktop/laptop again, it is just back to pre-2019 situation for me.

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I got frustrated the last 4 times I broke my debian installation in less than 2 months trying to update some incompatible drivers and I switched to nixos + plasma6.

I can say that for me it checks all the boxes, love the immutable configuration and ability to do rollbacks, love the declarative nature, the package manager has all the packages I need. Plasma covers all my UI needs, not that I care a lot about advanced functionality in this regard.

Nix shells are also a cool thing, you basically can create declarative isolated shells with specific dependencies and the versions you might need.

Unless I get into some hard limitations, I will most probably use this distribution on all my linux devices for years to come.

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Your fault for using Debian really. :stuck_out_tongue: Their packages model is hopelessly outdated but they are clinging to it with a death grip.

Here I am a bit envious. I really want that but hate Nix with all my heart and am still waiting for Manjaro to have their own immutable distro variant. Which they already have, come to think of it, I’ve been too lazy and sick to try it though. But that’s definitely how it should have always been. No idea what took the collective world so long to figure out elementary good practices…

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