Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop. The grass is not greener on the other side
This article is part of a series:
Due to very bad decisions by Apple's product marketing teams, Mac hardware and software had been in steady decline since 2016.
Therefore, there has been a trickle of articles on the Geekosphere about people switching from Macs to Linux or Windows.
This is the contrarian view. Don't do it.
The TL;DR is right there in the title: migrating to Linux is fine, but don't expect a better experience than the Mac.
My experience with the Dell XPS 13" Developer Edition was positive in general, including a self-hosted Cloud setup, but not good enough to convince me to stay with it.
We will cover:
- A comparison of generic productivity software: email, calendar, image manipulation, etc.
- Available power tools to customize your keyboard, trackpad, and more.
- A quick jab at decades-old issues which still haven't been solved.
- Misc stuff that Linux does better than the Mac.
I feel like I need to clarify that this is an article aimed at Mac users who are considering a migration to Linux in hope of a more polished system. As usual, personal experiences and requirements are subjective. I know that Ubuntu ≠ Gnome ≠ Linux. I also know that I'm not entitled to anything, everybody is welcome to send patches. Just let me say that if you try to cherry-pick any single issue, you're missing the forest for the trees.
Linux productivity software is fine, but there are rough edges for the power user
The typical disclaimer when recommending Linux to a Mac/Windows user is that some proprietary software may not be available, like MS Office, Photoshop, games, etc.
Nobody says, "the main problem you will find with Linux is that email and calendar clients fall apart when you scratch under the surface."
It is truly ironic because I ran MS Office with Wine and it worked well but I was unhappy with my email workflow.
Yes, the apps I missed the most from the Mac were Mail.app, Calendar.app, and Preview.app.
I am an extreme power user, to the point that many of the keys on my keyboard don't do what the keycap says. I want my apps to let me do easy things fast while allowing me to do complex tasks with a bit of extra work.
I send and receive maybe 100 emails per day. Most of them are HTML, with attachments, video conference invitations, and such. I don't live in a vacuum. I can't ask my clients to send me plaintext email only. I need to send long emails with pictures, I want my zoom invites to appear automatically in my calendar.
For some reason Mail.app gets a lot of criticism, but it does almost everything well. It has conversation view, search is fast and helpful, multiple accounts are combined seamlessly including autodetection of the "From" field based on the recipient, and smart folders (search folders) are updated when you need them.
On Linux, the only email client with a native "conversation view" is Geary, which is in early development and still very buggy. Evolution is fine and well-integrated with the rest of the desktop apps, but the lack of conversation view was a deal-breaker for me. Thunderbird is an excellent email client, but conversation view is provided by a plugin that is also buggy. Other options like Claws, Sylpheed, Kmail, and terminal clients are more limited in terms of features and don't work for me.
I ended up using Thunderbird, but I felt like I was doing my email with handcuffs. Suffice to say, I had both Thunderbird and Gmail open and used either one depending on the task I needed to complete.
The situation of calendar and contacts clients is similar, with the same contenders. I also ended up using Thunderbird along with Google Calendar.
About PDF and basic image management, anybody who has used Preview.app will realize that it's much more than just a viewer. There is simply no replacement on Linux. You'll need to open either the Gimp or Xournal for any basic editing. I am an advanced Gimp user, but for most operations, Preview.app is faster and more convenient.
Desktop notifications are something we don't think a lot about, but a bad system can be very annoying. Gnome has a system-wide framework, which is not well thought in terms of dealing with the actual notifications.
Most apps have their own notifications system which runs in parallel, especially Thunderbird and Evolution. You end up with different types of notifications on different parts of the screen, and a non-consistent UI to deal with them.
Finally, on the Mac, you can find an ecosystem of alternative paid PIM apps, like Spark, Fantastical, Things, and others. There is no equivalent ecosystem on Linux, probably because they would be difficult to monetize.
Power tools are more limited and more difficult to use
The previous section could be summarized as "Linux PIM software is fine in general, but gets in the way of power users."
That is counterintuitive, right? Linux is a much nerdier OS than the Mac and everything is customizable.
But when you jump from theory to practice, at some point you just want a tool to help you set up your config, without the need to edit your trackpad driver source file.
Any advanced Mac user knows about Karabiner, BetterTouchTool, Choosy, Alfred, Automator, and more.
With Linux, you can achieve almost the same feature set, but it is harder and more limited.
For example. To customize your keyboard, you will need a combination of xdotool,
xbindkeys, xcape, xmodmap and setxkbmap to capture some event and then run a shell script.
There is a Gnome Shell plugin that allows you to tweak your keyboard, but it's nowhere near Karabiner.
If you want to achieve some specific action you need to read four or five manpages, search online, and figure out how you are going to put the pieces together. That made me appreciate Karabiner and BTT much more.
Furthermore, I couldn't find a real alternative to BTT to customize trackpad multi-touch gestures.
I tried a few approaches with libinput-gestures but none worked.
In the end, I was able to replicate most of my macOS power tools setup via input hooks and shell scripts, but it took much longer than it should have. I found it surprising that, given the number of nerds using Linux every day, there are no specific tools equivalent to those mentioned above.
"I Can't believe we're still protesting this crap"
Please allow me to make a bit of fun of issues that existed back in 1999 when I started using Linux and still exist today.
- Screen tearing with the
inteldriver. Come on. This was solved on xorg and now with Wayland it's back. I fiddled multiple times with the settings but couldn't fix it. Even with OpenBSD it was easier to fix. The default settings should be better. I don't care if the video driver will use an extra buffer or whatever. - Resolving new hosts is slow, with a delay of about 2-3 seconds. I tried to disable IPv6 and other tricks from Stackoverflow threads, but none solved the issue completely. Again, an issue with the default settings. macOS does some DNS magic or something and the network feels much faster.
- Resuming after suspend seems to work at first. As soon as you start to trust it and not save your work before closing the lid, it betrays you and you lose your work. Later, you upgrade the kernel and it works all the time for weeks until you upgrade the kernel again and it goes back to working 80% of the time. What a mess.
We've come a long way with Linux on the desktop but I think it's funny that some things never change.
Linux also hides some gems
I want to end this review on a positive note.
During those six months, I also took notes on apps and workflows that are still better on Linux.
- Tracker/search is better and faster than Spotlight. It's a shame that not all apps take advantage of it, especially Thunderbird.
- Firefox is amazing. On the Mac, Safari is a better choice, but I was very happy using Firefox full-time on Linux. I am going to miss some great plugins, like Multi-account containers, Instagram-guest, Reddit Enhancement Suite, and of course NoScript and uBlock Origin
- Nautilus is better than the Finder. It's not even close.
- The Gnome Shell Extension Gallery has many hidden gems, like Nothing to say which mutes the microphone system-wide with a shortcut, the Emoji selector, Caffeine to keep your computer awake, a Clipboard manager, and Unite to tweak basic UI settings. I am now using macOS equivalents to those, and I discovered their existence thanks to the Linux counterparts.
- Insync for Linux is better than the official Google Drive File Stream for the Mac. In fact, I am now using the Mac version of Insync.
- Gimp and Inkscape are excellent apps, and it's a pity that the macOS ports are mediocre. I'd rather use them than Pixelmator/Affinity Designer. Hopefully, someday either GTK or these apps will get decent macOS versions.
apt-getwas a revolution when it was released in 1998 and it is still the best way to manage software today.brewis a mediocre replacement.- I paid for Crossover which allowed me to use MS Office and other Windows apps I needed. Kudos to the Wine developers for almost 30 years of continuous effort.
- Xournal is an obscure app that allows you to annotate PDF documents as well as draw with a Wacom tablet. I used it constantly as a whiteboard for online presentations. The macOS port is very buggy, unfortunately, so I use OneNote which is not that good.
Hopefully, the success of paid tools like Insync or Crossover can encourage the developer ecosystem to continue developing quality apps, even if they are non-free, or supported by donations.
What's next?
On November 10th Apple showed us the future of the Mac and released again laptops worth buying. So I bought the 2020 M1 Macbook Air. You will read a review of it soon.
The hardware is much better than the Dell's and, I guess, every other PC laptop. The software ecosystem is a big improvement over my Linux setup, and Big Sur course corrects the absolute mess that Catalina was. With every passing year, the iCloud offering keeps getting better, especially if you have other Apple devices.
I am somewhat sad that I couldn't join the Linux Resistance. After all, I've been an annoying proselytizer
heavy free software advocate in the past,
and I still am, though I nowadays admit there are many nuances.
The experience of using Linux as a daily driver has been very positive for me, but I do need my productivity. I can work much faster with macOS and iCloud than I was with Linux and my self-hosted cloud setup.
If there ever was a period where the Mac experience was worse than Linux, it is now over. The Mac ecosystem wins again. Don't switch to Linux expecting it to have fewer papercuts than the Mac. It's quite the opposite.
There is definitely grass on the other side of the fence, but it is not greener.
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