Ask me anything: I switched from Mac to Linux because of Apple's surveillance

[nickdalzell1]

I ran it on a Dell Latitude D610 (blew away WinXP on it) and also an old Pentium II (that one I had a really convincing mock-up of IRIX and the Jurassic Park computer system. Quite a shame the mobo is gone. I still got the HDD from it, but it refuses to boot on any other system, reporting a kernel panic not syncing error)

 

[MacDavo]

How do you handle the sheer number of variables with Linux?

For me there are 3 main factors to consider:

1. How good is the package support (new software)
2. How well is the desktop implemented
3. How broad is the community support

Maybe one of the biggest challenges of Linux is that there is no one standard for anything. Redhat variants use yum as a package manager. Debian variants use apt. Then there’s all the special snowflakes in between.

These days most software supports yum and apt, so you’ll often see install instructions for both. If you’re using a lesser known distro that is directly based on these two main flavours of Linux, you’ll have mixed results.

I’d point out here that installing packages from source is a nightmare you should try to avoid. It can get very painful if you’re missing dependencies etc.
The two main desktop flavours are Gnome and KDE. To me Gnome most closely matches macOS. It also seems better supported by software than KDE.

Some software runs on either, some software, themes etc are Gnome specific, others KDE specific.
Just to try and demystify this a little. macOS and Windows have a default fixed Window Manager. Literally the system application that manages window placement and window decoration for you.

In Linux there’s a big choice of Window Managers. Pretty much everything you see in Linux is an application you can change.

The login Manager, Window Manager. Absolutely everything.

So on that note you could install Gnome, KDE, AwesomeWM etc and choose from the login Manager what window Manager you want to use for your session.

Realistically this is very cool if you like to use a tiling Window Manager for dev. Gnome for work and maybe KDE for gaming.

Different users on your system might like to use different Window Managers.

This kind of hints at the power and flexibility of Linux. Of course with this comes huge complexity until you wrap your head around it.
Point 3 influences points 1 & 2. If you pick a flavour of Linux not many people are using, every time you hit a snag; and you will. There won’t be a lot of info out there for you.

I’d go so far to say if something goes awry and lots of people have hit the same thing, not only will there be lots of answers. It’s probably a bug that will get fixed quickly by the distro.

If you’re with a popular distro and there’s next to no info about an issue, it’s probably just you.
At the end of the day no matter how good a distro is, I’d argue that you still need to be a bit of a hacker/dev to really get the best out of Linux for you.

The more something “just works” the more likely you are to be locked into a fixed system.

Having said that if you’re prepared to invest the time to understand what’s under the hood, you can tweak, twist and configure a very custom system that works exactly as you want.

A good example of this is AwesomeWM. It’s biggest benefit is that you can configure every aspect about it. Add custom elements like a dock. Custom launchers, menus, widgets. Customise window layouts etc. The possibilities are near endless.

To me the great thing about the choice, complexity etc is once you understand it; the basic building blocks of a Linux system, from the kernel, boot manger, login manager, windowing system and window manager. You can pick, choose and customise what you want how you want it.

Neither macOS or Windows permits this. At least not in as straight forward a manner as Linux does.

 

[bradl]

This statement reminds me of the very first Linux I ever installed in 1993 using a 1.44” floppy.

Reminds me of me. We did the same thing. In fact, my boss at the university I was a student at as well as managing the computer labs there set up an NFS server, so all we needed were the boot and root disks for Slackware, and installed everything else over NFS. That was 1993 as well, when we had the choice of using two 1.44" floppies, or three 5.25" floppies (yes, PCs still had those back then).

When the terminal prompt appeared I remember thinking “is that it?”

I thought the same.. then as quickly as I saw the login prompt, it started X. It was pretty sick to see half a lab of PCs (at the time, we had 68 PCs and 32 Macs in the lab) become X terminals all at the same time. It saved the university a good $50000 at the time as well, as an actual X terminal was a good $3000 at the time.

Eventually I figured out Usenet, email etc. It didn’t take that much longer for the Internet as we kind of know today to appear and the rest is history.

Usenet (I'm still in the comp.os.linux.* groups), gopher, telnet, wais, IRC, Ew-Too.. Ahh, those were the days.

So yeah. Linux has come a long long way.

Oh yeah. The other brass at the university thought Linux was evil, wanted everything to be Novell Netware, to the point of wanting to ban any student from the labs if they were caught using Linux, let alone try to get them suspended...

... Now, all of their Unix work is primarily on Linux.

BL.

 

[bradl]

I ran it on a Dell Latitude D610 (blew away WinXP on it) and also an old Pentium II (that one I had a really convincing mock-up of IRIX and the Jurassic Park computer system. Quite a shame the mobo is gone. I still got the HDD from it, but it refuses to boot on any other system, reporting a kernel panic not syncing error)

If it's a kernel panic, that can be fixed. If you still have a CD or DVD drive, you can either boot to an install ISO of a given distro (Ubuntu, CentOS, etc.), or even a LiveCD, and fix the kernel. Better yet, if you still have the install media for the distro you used, you can use that, reinstall the original kernel used during installation, and you're back in business.

BL.

 

[c0ppo]

I suspect t it would look much like the world we have now

It would not be like now, not at all. Just imagine every company for itself. Progress would be a lot slower than it is now. Every company would promote their own solutions. FOSS is neutral, and that is the biggest advantage to FOSS. Believe it or not, even MS, Apple and Google rely on open source solutions.

Internet is based on open source. Even your browser. Without FOSS, we would still use something like IE. And some other company would have their own IE with it's sets of standards (remember ActiveX?).

World can easily manage without MS. Or Apple. Or even Google.
It can manage without open source projects as well. But at a far greater cost than all those big companies combined.

 

[maflynn]

It would not be like now, not at all.

I disagree, there will always be someone or some company there to fill in the void. If FOSS didn't exist, a company would have created the commercial (paid) app to achieve the same thing. To the consumer, he/she would still have all of the apps, services and abilities. Would it be more expensive - perhaps, or perhaps the competition would have driven the price down anyways.

Internet is based on open source. Even your browser. Without FOSS, we would still use something like IE. And some other company would have their own IE with it's sets of standards (remember ActiveX?).

So you're saying that without open source, there would be no competition, no company would want to develop a new program? I don't think that's right. We progressed fairly far in the computer age w/o FOSS. I think it would be myopic to think only though FOSS was the internet possible. Much if not all of the progress we made, was due to competition, not because someone decided that open source is a superior licensing and started creating all of these wonderful things we have. I'm not down on open source, but I am of the mind that it wasn't open source that trigger that created the internet.

ActiveX wasn't bad - when viewed in the light for it what it was developed for - it was a great way to extend functionality and power prior to the internet. On a single computer that is not online, its a powerful useful tool - only when computers connected and worked online did we come and find out its short comings.

Nature abhors a vacuum and its my belief that the world would keep on progressing with or without opens source.

 

[nickdalzell1]

If it's a kernel panic, that can be fixed. If you still have a CD or DVD drive, you can either boot to an install ISO of a given distro (Ubuntu, CentOS, etc.), or even a LiveCD, and fix the kernel. Better yet, if you still have the install media for the distro you used, you can use that, reinstall the original kernel used during installation, and you're back in business.

BL.

This was an old system already installed, themed and set up (the mobo died from a power supply short) and if I still had the original PC it was in (the hard disk is a 2.5GB IDE HDD) it would boot up fine, it just refuses to boot on any other system by simply plugging the HDD in and starting up. Each time it gives specifically "KERNEL PANIC: NOT SYNCING" just before it attempts to mount the root fs.

It won't even go to initramfs, so there's no way to rescue it. It was themed to resemble the Jurassic Park system quite convincingly, even down to the sounds. I never did get FSN working, though.

The problem no doubt is some type of driver the old motherboard used that's no longer present, and causing the kernel to panic. I still got that VectorLinux 6 disc, and a PC lying around with IDE support (many of my PCs are SATA, sadly) and maybe one day I'll do what it takes to get it back online.

 

[c0ppo]

I disagree, there will always be someone or some company there to fill in the void. If FOSS didn't exist, a company would have created the commercial (paid) app to achieve the same thing. To the consumer, he/she would still have all of the apps, services and abilities. Would it be more expensive - perhaps, or perhaps the competition would have driven the price down anyways.

So you're saying that without open source, there would be no competition, no company would want to develop a new program? I don't think that's right. We progressed fairly far in the computer age w/o FOSS. I think it would be myopic to think only though FOSS was the internet possible. Much if not all of the progress we made, was due to competition, not because someone decided that open source is a superior licensing and started creating all of these wonderful things we have. I'm not down on open source, but I am of the mind that it wasn't open source that trigger that created the internet.

Of course internet would be possible without open source. And there would be progress. But it would be way slower than with open source. Every company would promote their own proprietary solutions that would not work well with other company solutions. That's the nature of companies, try to make as much $$ as possible.

And I'm not talking about just applications. I'm talking about technologies. I'm talking about programming languages and frameworks. C, C++, PHP, PERL, Python... Those took over why? First, they are better than what any company could produce. And secondly, every company out there could simply take them and use them. And they do.

Internet benefited from something like that. Greatly.
Now imagine internet today with ActiveX, Silverlight, Flash and lots of other similar technologies that other companies would eventually produce. Ewwww....

MS tried to push Windows on servers. Even they are adopting open source.
Open Source doesn't have to be profitable. So people can more easily innovate, and it happens way faster than if some financial manager in some company would stop projects because they wouldn't be profitable right away.

IE owned browser market. Where is IE today? My bet is that you are writting this in browser that is based on open source. And this site is written in language and framework that is open source. Hosted on a server that uses OS which is based on open source.

ActiveX wasn't bad - when viewed in the light for it what it was developed for - it was a great way to extend functionality and power prior to the internet. On a single computer that is not online, its a powerful useful tool - only when computers connected and worked online did we come and find out its short comings.

Well, this is what I'm talking about. And ActiveX was replaced with open source, since every company could adopt it. At first MS tried to push for Silverlight. Adobe had Flash that was very popular. Both of those technologies are basically dead. And replaced with what?

Nature abhors a vacuum and its my belief that the world would keep on progressing with or without opens source.

Of course. I already stated that. There would be progress without open source. But it would be way slower progress and way worse than what we have now. Otherwise we wouldn't be using what we are today

 

[maflynn]

Of course internet would be possible without open source

And that was my point, pure and simple.

I think you went down a rabbit hole, focused on how some of the current open source tools which provide a great service or experience, and I'm not knocking that, they do!

All I'm saying is the in the absence of FOSS, something else would have taken its place. That's it, period stop, nothing else need to be said

 

[nickdalzell1]

I'm thinking a lot of sites would fall victim to far more 404s, 403,s 503s, and various other errors if the Internet relied on Windows. A lot of the infrastructure of the internet, from Apache to servers themselves, run on Linux. It has the habit of remaining stable without regular rebooting, unlike Windows.

 

[maflynn]

I'm thinking a lot of sites would fall victim to far more 404s, 403,s 503s, and various other errors

Why? It sounds more like a bias against windows and assuming if its MS, it will produce errors

I support a number of web servers at work, many of them of are IIS, my company's front facing websites runs on IIS and they are no less stable then other platforms

 

[millerj123]

Why? It sounds more like a bias against windows and assuming if its MS, it will produce errors

I support a number of web servers at work, many of them of are IIS, my company's front facing websites runs on IIS and they are no less stable then other platforms

So, I remember watching when MS bought Hotmail which was running on FreeBSD, they made a big deal about switching it over to NT, and it crashed. Repeatedly.

They kept buying companies offering new and innovative improvements, and ruined them. I'm firmly in the camp that believes the computing world is much better for having FOSS.

 

[maflynn]

So, I remember watching when MS bought Hotmail which was running on FreeBSD, they made a big deal about switching it over to NT, and it crashed. Repeatedly.

All I can say is that I've yet to run into issues with IIS, and its been as stable as other platforms I support such as Weblogic and Apache. As for Apache, we had a number of systems that used it, but not so much anymore, for the applications I support, IIS has been the preferred platform

Edit: also, has hotmail been crashing now?

 

[bradl]

And that was my point, pure and simple.

I think you went down a rabbit hole, focused on how some of the current open source tools which provide a great service or experience, and I'm not knocking that, they do!

All I'm saying is the in the absence of FOSS, something else would have taken its place. That's it, period stop, nothing else need to be said

I'm thinking a lot of sites would fall victim to far more 404s, 403,s 503s, and various other errors if the Internet relied on Windows. A lot of the infrastructure of the internet, from Apache to servers themselves, run on Linux. It has the habit of remaining stable without regular rebooting, unlike Windows.

You both bring up ideas that would make up a full 30 years of Marvel's "What If...".

Without FOSS, we'd have no webservers. Apache wouldn't exist, as it was a fork of the NCSA httpd, which was open source. CERN's webserver was open source.

None of the major specs and standards would exist. The HTML standard wouldn't exist, as it came off of Gopher. Most of the client-side TCP/IP programs would not exist: nothing FTP, no SSH, no Usenet, no email, nothing. All of the readers and browsers for those were open source (Elm, Pine, Mutt, etc.).. All of that would go back to being proprietary to ATT/Bell Labs.

PGP wouldn't exist, GnuPG wouldn't exist, and by extension, no SSL would exist.

Nothing GNU would exist, leaving out most compilers and linkers, let alone 3 operating systems: Linux, 386BSD, and FreeBSD.

No web browsers. while Chrome is and Opera now is FOSS, Firefox is a fork of Netscape, which is a fork of NSCA Mosaic, which was FOSS. without Mosaic, MSIE wouldn't have been made. And regardless, none would work because of lack of webservers.

A lot of us would be screwed because this would put us back to recording videos off of MTV... oh wait, MTV doesn't show music videos anymore.. Anyone for American Bandsta... oh, wait.. How about Kasey Kasem's Ame... oh.. damn...

Back to our teen phone lines! 😂

BL.

 

[Waragainstsleep]

For those that switched off Apple already, share your stories! What hardware or software did you get? What was your decision like? How's it going so far?

inspired by this post below by @RightsOfBill and insight from @hashbreaker2021

2 weeks ago I purchased a Lemur Pro laptop from System76. I had just purchased a 16" MBP from Apple a year ago so I wasn't looking for a replacement. I've used Macs forever and in the past 24 months bought a MBP, iPad, Watch, Airpods pros and max. I was cheering Apple's "Mind your own business" ads. Then this CSAM bs. Bye.

If you're considering switching -- Ask me anything!

If you think switching is dumb, waste of time, aren't interested etc, I kindly request that you only observe this thread or start your own discussion thread.



I would consider Windows but it's closed source so doesn't seem like an option.

Replacing an expensive laptop (and presumably the iPad too if not more) because of a feature that hasn't rolled out yet that you don't have to use?

Seems drastic. And premature.

 

[millerj123]

All I can say is that I've yet to run into issues with IIS, and its been as stable as other platforms I support such as Weblogic and Apache. As for Apache, we had a number of systems that used it, but not so much anymore, for the applications I support, IIS has been the preferred platform

Edit: also, has hotmail been crashing now?

No, that was years ago. It’s just been a pattern they repeat over and over.

 

[nickdalzell1]

Remind me again how many Windows 95, 98SE, ME (haha), NT/XP systems could have an uptime of 100s of days without a single BSoD? That's right, there ain't none. There are Linux/UNIX systems that have been going non-stop, no reboot, no power-offs, for at least a decade. Windows has zero of that stability. In fact, I seem to recall a bug in 98SE that makes it crash after 40 (?) days. Even in my old bias towards Windows 98SE when XP was the new hit (I hated XP entirely) I couldn't even get it to stay up for more than a week without something critical crashing or dying forcing a restart.

As the old joke about IE goes, most folks open it once, to download Firefox! The sad part is our CCTV system at work (UNV) is totally reliant on Internet Explorer 9, which would stop working once the PC gets its 'mandatory' inevitable Windows 11 upgrade. Any attempt at running the website it uses to monitor the cameras on Edge or Chrome shows a 'this plugin is no longer supported' (flash perhaps?). It's going to be an IT nightmare in a few months.

 

[vir]

Open source started it.

 

[MacDavo]

For the beginners I recommend Pop!_OS which is Ubuntu based desktop with easy installation.

I got curious about pop!_os due to the several references to it in this thread not to mention System76.

Although System76 insist it isn’t just a reskinned Ubuntu, after firing it up it seemed a heck of a lot to me like a reskinned Ubuntu.

For anyone running Gnome on Ubuntu who wants a dock, multiple workspaces with custom labels, tiling window management etc, there’s some great Gnome extensions out there.

The on thing that drove me mad for the longest time on macOS was the inability to name the workspaces. It seems like an obvious feature when you can group apps together for different tasks.

So my recommended list of extensions are:
Customised Workspaces
Dash to Dock
Just Perfection
Multi Monitors Add-on
Tiling Assistant
Vitals
Workspaces Bar

At one point I was using the Material Shell extensions which was great, but it just completely locks Gnome up for some reason I haven’t been able to fathom.
Tiling Assistant provides a good enough equivalent.

 

[boswald]

Remind me again how many Windows 95, 98SE, ME (haha), NT/XP systems could have an uptime of 100s of days without a single BSoD? That's right, there ain't none. There are Linux/UNIX systems that have been going non-stop, no reboot, no power-offs, for at least a decade. Windows has zero of that stability. In fact, I seem to recall a bug in 98SE that makes it crash after 40 (?) days. Even in my old bias towards Windows 98SE when XP was the new hit (I hated XP entirely) I couldn't even get it to stay up for more than a week without something critical crashing or dying forcing a restart.

As the old joke about IE goes, most folks open it once, to download Firefox! The sad part is our CCTV system at work (UNV) is totally reliant on Internet Explorer 9, which would stop working once the PC gets its 'mandatory' inevitable Windows 11 upgrade. Any attempt at running the website it uses to monitor the cameras on Edge or Chrome shows a 'this plugin is no longer supported' (flash perhaps?). It's going to be an IT nightmare in a few months.

Right there with you, guy. I switched back to Linux and couldn't be happier. In fact, it gave this dusty old laptop a new life. I have it set to Suspend when I close the lid and/or hit the Power button, so it's constantly up as well. I think I've rebooted it maybe twice in the past couple weeks, and only because of kernel upgrades.

I, too, am old enough to remember the "I use IE... to get Firefox" meme. Hell, I remember when 'Phoenix' rose from the ashes of Netscape, and I even admired Marc for a while because his vision was so different than Microsoft's.

 

[nickdalzell1]

There was another open-source port of Firefox for Linux called Iceweasel but it seems to be gone (can't be found in any modern distro or any repo, forums tend to blacklist anyone asking about it like it were the devil or something) and I'd love to give it a chance given Firefox has its own issues (Post-quantum a lot of classic extensions are no longer available or supported, they took away most control of the user requiring a terminal hack job to disable updates, and they added some sort of telemetry there too). I am currently using SeaMonkey 1.1 which still runs, and works with this forum as well surprisingly. It resembles old Netscape Communicator as well. Netscape is still a sad story.

 

[WriteNow]

Remind me again how many Windows 95, 98SE, ME (haha), NT/XP systems could have an uptime of 100s of days without a single BSoD?

It reminds me of seeing a person post someplace online a terminal screenshot showing that the computer had an uptime of several months. Good luck doing that with Windows 98!

 

[nickdalzell1]

I was lucky if Windows 98SE wouldn't crash or freeze within a week. Granted it was 2009 and I was using a hacked Flash Player to allow FarmVille to run on it, but it was what it was. I have a bad habit of sticking to what I'm familar with long after it's unsupported. Even if it was not nearly as stable as I remembered. I just never got into WinXP. Everyone loved it, of course, it kept being supported well over a decade before Microsoft said 'enough is enough!' But I never could grasp its appeal.

 

[WriteNow]

Right there with you, guy. I switched back to Linux and couldn't be happier. In fact, it gave this dusty old laptop a new life.

One thing I've really liked with Linux is being able to extend the usable life of hardware. I've been able to use more than one computer that--with Windows--would have been long past the"sell by" date.

I, too, am old enough to remember the "I use IE... to get Firefox" meme. Hell, I remember when 'Phoenix' rose from the ashes of Netscape, and I even admired Marc for a while because his vision was so different than Microsoft's.

I don't remember when Firefox first came out--but I do remember its fairly early years. It was interesting, because when I first dabbled with Linux, Mozilla Suite was the standard...but early versions of Firefox were also available. Then, suddenly, Firefox seemed to take over as the standard.

 

[nickdalzell1]

My first dealings with Firefox was when I still used Windows 98SE. I had to use Firefox 2.x just to use Facebook when I actually cared about that site, along with Flickr. (does Flickr still exist? I haven't seen a share option in a long time regarding it) In fact, that hacked Flash player only worked with Firefox. The only other browser was IE 6, and we all know what a mess that one was. Grandmother kept calling it Foxfire. The term 'Mozilla Firefox' gave me vibes of Netscape, specifically Netscape Mail from the full suite. It used to give a 'new email' welcoming you to Netscape Mail on first-launch, from a person called 'Mozilla'.