Ah I’ve had issues with new machines/hw before and they have always ironed them out.
It’s possible you may have a hardware issue as well - weird artefacts could mean a gpu issue..
AstonJ
simon
I’m 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 Apple’s 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.
2
victorolinasc
Linux is certainly NOT bug-free… 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 (let’s hope for the better but considering it is NVidia don’t expect too much).
Recently it is easy to have a fully functional setup for:
- Local development (I’d 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 on…
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 Erlang…). But this is somewhat political so let’s not get into it 
This is very subjective but in my experience there is nothing that I miss from any other OS.
4
Ninigi
Yeahl… 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.
0
victorolinasc
Specter and Meltdown were 2 issues with the processors architectures. They affected ANY operating system.
I wasn’t 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.
1
dimitarvp
Yeah but they really are slow when it’s about external hardware – and more and more of macOS’ problems come from that. Apple really drops the ball in that department lately.
I’ve used an external HDD with zero problems on my Win10 PC for at least 2 years now… and when it’s 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 – I definitely panicked then!
Catalina hasn’t been, like, a disaster, but definitely brought with itself some issues. I personally didn’t have problems upgrading at all on two Macs but really, some things – especially the sleep mode – are much more finicky and unreliable. 
Still wouldn’t make me use Linux because I love my retina screens – and they are very easy on my tired eyes – 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.
0
Exadra37
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 “screw-ups” of Apple.
0
dimitarvp
I don’t 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 there’s no universally better platform anymore.
1
simon
sasajuric
Author of Elixir In Action
About 6 months ago I bought a laptop from Tuxedo computers, and so far I’m happy. There’s also System76. Both companies have desktops in their offering. Can’t say if they are good and if they fit your purposes, so you should definitely investigate this in details. The benefit of both companies (I think they are not the only ones) is that their machines are Linux friendly (at least for supported distros), so the initial setup is trivial, and I think both actually ship a preinstalled version. Past that point, you might experience some problems setting up external devices, so be prepared for that.
4