Successful transitions to linux?

[Erehy Dobon]

So windows is better?

Windows is ABSOLUTELY better than Linux in regard to all of the major bullet points I listed, the same disadvantages Linux had in the late Nineties.

No operating system is perfect however Windows 10 is definitely a credible, relatively low maintenance environment that does not require scads of system administration hours.

Remember the good ol' days of bootloaders like GRUB or Lilo? Good times, good times.

Windows itself has come a long way in the past thirty years. Some versions were half-baked (Me, Windows 8), others have been excellent for their era vis-a-vis the alternatives.

Go to Best Buy and pick up the latest $50 HP OfficeJet MFP, take it home and set it up. On Windows & macOS, you just download the software, run the installer and you are done: copy, print, scan, fax. Oh, wait, HP thinks you should upgrade the device firmware. Easy with Windows and macOS.

macOS still has the lowest absolute system administration load of the three.

As mentioned above I come from a commercial UNIX background (mostly IRIX and Solaris). I know all about system administration load and yes there were about five years of overlap between my UNIX time and my Linux time. During that time, Linux certainly was NOT a cakewalk compared to commercial UNIX.

Hell, I tried FreeBSD just that era as well just to see if the grass was greener on the other side: it wasn't.

Yes, Linux has improved over time but so have all of the other major operating systems.

Note that I still use Linux after nearly a quarter decade of experience with it. It has its places and its strengths. But the desktop still is not one of them and likely will never be.

I get it that most Linux enthusiasts are upset when someone with long-time UNIX/Linux experience comes out strongly against Linux as an everyday desktop operating system and calls out every single major shortcoming with desktop Linux as well as the wisdom that these were the same exact sticking points over twenty years ago.

 

[filu_]

This thread is a hilarious throwback.

It must have been a terrible experience that you decided to spend the next 20 years of your life fighting Linux ....

No, I didn't spend hours or years installing the printer, I just finished installing Linux drivers from the manufacturer's website. Maybe there is a way out of the situation but I don't want to look for it.

If I have to print something, I prefer to use the Brother iOS app. However, scanning by these applications does not even have the 25% options that the world-old Sane package provides (eg, scan quality management). This is important when scanning a photo.

I have a lot of Apple devices, so it would be natural to switch to a Mac computer, but it is expensive and I will have to spend hours setting the system up for myself, because over the years on linux I have learned that the computer is for me and not the other way around. In MacOS, I will have to fight with applications such as Music or Photos, which will want to destroy my entire chronological and thematic system and plow it under their rules ...

To run a minimal DLNA server I will have to install packages from outside the official repo because Plex is an overkill for me.

Finally, I will have to collide with the paid and limited world of Apple applications and services ... many of which I just don't need.

So I will probably buy an entry-level Macbook to manage my iPads / iPhones and a Linux computer will still be a data server in my ecosystem, DLNA server or for torrent.

 

[LeeW]

To run a minimal DLNA server I will have to install packages from outside the official repo because Plex is an overkill for me.

Finally, I will have to collide with the paid and limited world of Apple applications and services ... many of which I just don't need.

Use case matters, as always.

 

[sanfrancisofont1984]

Go to Best Buy and pick up the latest $50 HP OfficeJet MFP, take it home and set it up. On Windows & macOS, you just download the software, run the installer and you are done: copy, print, scan, fax. Oh, wait, HP thinks you should upgrade the device firmware. Easy with Windows and macOS.

Go to newegg and order the highest rated graphics card. Oh wait, it could be an NVIDIA that doesn’t work with macOS any more. I like my macOS setup still but I think macOS hardware also needs homework before purchase (esp. since Catalina)

For firmware updates there’s https://fwupd.org/ I have my Logitech receiver firmware updated there.

 

[filu_]

I really wanted to buy peace of mind from linux. I bought a Mac mini and the illusion is over.

Windows is absolutely beyond my interest - although I have to use it at work, I don't have administrator rights. The last time I was running Windows XP. On my wife's laptop with Winfows 10, I can not touch anything. This old laptop is barely booting up ....

 

[Partron22]

I will point out that the last big institutional adopter of desktop Linux -- the Munich City Government -- kicked desktop Linux back to the curb a couple of years ago and returned to Windows. There are no large institutional supporters of desktop Linux anymore.

May 14, 2020:
Linux not Windows: Why Munich is shifting back from Microsoft to open source – again

 

[2984839]

I also barely used Windows in the last decade. What use case makes OpenBSD better than macOS or Linux?

I wouldn't say it's better or worse. These things are more a matter of preference. I will say that it's simple, clean, well-documented, and everything works how I would expect. The devs have a razor sharp idea of what they want, so there's no feature creep. It's got a lot of interesting security measures that few other operating systems have.

But I am 100% non-evangelistic about operating systems these days. I'd never tell someone what they should run, even if I know what I would.

 

[filu_]

The case of Munich is not that scale, how does it translate into the choice of the ordinary home user?

OP asked about migration on home computer if I understand correctly. As we almost all agreed, it is possible, and under certain conditions it could be even better.

In normal use, there can be driver problems, though the dependency hell scare in the 21st century is archaic, unless someone is building Linux from scratch.

Popular distributions are user-friendly. Of course, there is a risk that something will not work and it will increase with the user's tendency to cutomize the system. But the same thing awaits the Windows or Mac user - on Windows you have to run the command line, if you want to change the default location of the iTunes library, the console is also used on the Mac. I personally struggled with the problem of access rights on an external disk, I am following another thread where the console is used for system diagnostics (one of the "remindd" processes takes up almost all the CPU power).

And I never believe someone who uses great quantifiers ...

 

[Erehy Dobon]

It must have been a terrible experience that you decided to spend the next 20 years of your life fighting Linux ....

I never said that. I just said that desktop Linux still sucks. I'm fine with many other Linux usage cases. My DSL router undoubtedly runs Linux. My SNES Classic is a Linux device. Probably my Roku, my Blu-ray player. My credit union's ATM. The gas station's pump POS. The rapid transit ticket vending machine. Fine.

I just voiced my dissatisfaction with Linux as a desktop computer operating system which is what the OP's inquiry was about. Don't put your own interpretation on my motives using words I didn't utter.

I haven't used Linux as a daily desktop operating system since I abandoned it in 2002. However, since I picked up a Raspberry Pi 4, I have been re-introduced into desktop Linux and unsurprisingly it still sucks rocks, just like it did in 1997.

Note that I didn't buy the RPi4 to run desktop Linux, I bought it to run Kodi; I'm okay with LibreELEC because it is about the least amount of Linux possible for a media device like Kodi and it's not a desktop distribution.

No, I didn't spend hours or years installing the printer, I just finished installing Linux drivers from the manufacturer's website. Maybe there is a way out of the situation but I don't want to look for it.

If I have to print something, I prefer to use the Brother iOS app. However, scanning by these applications does not even have the 25% options that the world-old Sane package provides (eg, scan quality management). This is important when scanning a photo.

I have a lot of Apple devices, so it would be natural to switch to a Mac computer, but it is expensive and I will have to spend hours setting the system up for myself, because over the years on linux I have learned that the computer is for me and not the other way around. In MacOS, I will have to fight with applications such as Music or Photos, which will want to destroy my entire chronological and thematic system and plow it under their rules ...

I am willing to bet a buffalo nickel that I spend less time administering my electronic devices annually than you do.

That leaves me with more free time to do other stuff. That's important far more to me.

To run a minimal DLNA server I will have to install packages from outside the official repo because Plex is an overkill for me.

The spirit of OP's inquiry was about desktop Linux. Please stick with that.

I don't rail against Linux usage in other non-desktop applications.

And no, you do not need to use the command line to move the iTunes/Apple Music library to a different partition. Apple has long provided support documentation instructing how to do this through Finder.

And yes, I moved my iTunes Library to an external drive using a tarpipe: tar -cpO Music | ( cd /Volumes/MyExternalDrive/Music ; tar -xvpf - ). Tarpipes work great, I still use them for copying stuff on Macs.

That should be adequate proof that I have no issues with UNIX-y tasks and command line incantations.

However I stand by my statement that Linux as a desktop operating system is still absolute garbage. I have no problems with Linux/FreeBSD/UNIX underpinnings.

Hell, I'd be happier with Windows if it had FreeBSD/OpenBSD guts. Alas...

 

[2984839]

The case of Munich is not that scale, how does it translate into the choice of the ordinary home user?

OP asked about migration on home computer if I understand correctly. As we almost all agreed, it is possible, and under certain conditions it could be even better.

In normal use, there can be driver problems, though the dependency hell scare in the 21st century is archaic, unless someone is building Linux from scratch.

Popular distributions are user-friendly. Of course, there is a risk that something will not work and it will increase with the user's tendency to cutomize the system. But the same thing awaits the Windows or Mac user - on Windows you have to run the command line, if you want to change the default location of the iTunes library, the console is also used on the Mac. I personally struggled with the problem of access rights on an external disk, I am following another thread where the console is used for system diagnostics (one of the "remindd" processes takes up almost all the CPU power).

And I never believe someone who uses great quantifiers ...

Agreed 100%, this is the most accurate answer. It's certainly possible to run it as your main desktop, and it could even be the best choice depending on what you're looking for.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

Go to newegg and order the highest rated graphics card. Oh wait, it could be an NVIDIA that doesn’t work with macOS any more. I like my macOS setup still but I think macOS hardware also needs homework before purchase (esp. since Catalina)

Apple has an eGPU support document where they make very specific hardware recommendations.

I read it very carefully several times before I bought my eGPU enclosure and graphics card. It was plug-and-play. The Nvidia card incompatibility has been well covered.

And how easy would you expect a brand-new WiFi-6 compatible card to set up in Linux?

Or program that $100 Logitech Harmony remote you picked up from Best Buy?

Or that smart ____ household device from IKEA?

It's not 2003 where you just need Linux to drive a computer monitor, connect to Ethernet and run a web browser.

I did eventually buy an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER and dropped it into my Sonnet for a while to run with an Acer ultrathin notebook PC. It also worked great. Today that Nvidia card lives in a custom build PC and the Radeon RX 580 is back in the Sonnet paired with my Mac mini.

Say, how easy is it to plug a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU into a Linux PC and get it to run? My RPi4 doesn't have TB3 so this is one scenario have no experience with concerning desktop Linux.

 

[grmlin]

Apple has an eGPU support document where they make very specific hardware recommendations.

I read it very carefully several times before I bought my eGPU enclosure and graphics card. It was plug-and-play. The Nvidia card incompatibility has been well covered.

And how easy would you expect a brand-new WiFi-6 compatible card to set up in Linux?

Or program that $100 Logitech Harmony remote you picked up from Best Buy?

Or that smart ____ household device from IKEA?

It's not 2003 where you just need Linux to drive a computer monitor, connect to Ethernet and run a web browser.

I did eventually buy an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER and dropped it into my Sonnet for a while to run with an Acer ultrathin notebook PC. It also worked great. Today that Nvidia card lives in a custom build PC and the Radeon RX 580 is back in the Sonnet paired with my Mac mini.

Say, how easy is it to plug a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU into a Linux PC and get it to run? My RPi4 doesn't have TB3 so this is one scenario have no experience with concerning desktop Linux.

issues with Thunderbolt 3 and a hidpi monitor connected to my Thinkpad were the reason I abandoned Linux. Everything else worked great and out of the box.

 

[sanfrancisofont1984]

Apple has an eGPU support document where they make very specific hardware recommendations.

I read it very carefully several times before I bought my eGPU enclosure and graphics card. It was plug-and-play. The Nvidia card incompatibility has been well covered.

And how easy would you expect a brand-new WiFi-6 compatible card to set up in Linux?

Or program that $100 Logitech Harmony remote you picked up from Best Buy?

Or that smart ____ household device from IKEA?

It's not 2003 where you just need Linux to drive a computer monitor, connect to Ethernet and run a web browser.

I did eventually buy an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER and dropped it into my Sonnet for a while to run with an Acer ultrathin notebook PC. It also worked great. Today that Nvidia card lives in a custom build PC and the Radeon RX 580 is back in the Sonnet paired with my Mac mini.

Say, how easy is it to plug a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU into a Linux PC and get it to run? My RPi4 doesn't have TB3 so this is one scenario have no experience with concerning desktop Linux.

I was speaking for Mac Pro but I guess one could probably infer the connection between eGPU and dGPU. Still not supporting Nvidia/CUDA means certain applications couldn’t run well.

WiFi 6 not sure. I like the fact that I could grep the kernel source for these kind of stuff though.

Smart home stuff doesn’t even need/support a real computer from my experience. Just use a smartphone.

TB3 also not sure but I did see GNOME built a setting for TB. I would try Linux in your situation so my brain doesn’t have to switch between Unix and win32.

 

[sanfrancisofont1984]

I haven't used Linux as a daily desktop operating system since I abandoned it in 2002. However, since I picked up a Raspberry Pi 4, I have been re-introduced into desktop Linux and unsurprisingly it still sucks rocks, just like it did in 1997.

This is the part I don’t understand. So you are comparing the experience on an inexpensive SBC to a proper Intel/AMD PC or Intel Mac? Can I buy a Windows on ARM device, compare it with Linux running on thinkpad and conclude that windows sucks?

 

[filu_]

I am willing to bet a buffalo nickel that I spend less time administering my electronic devices annually than you do.

That leaves me with more free time to do other stuff. That's important far more to me.

zypper -ref
zypper -up

I enter it in the terminal once every 3 months.
I do a zypper -dup every two years and update the whole distribution. I paste samba.conf into / etc / smb, installs drivers from Brother website. I set up DLNA configuration.

When I am not on a heavy watch at the Linux machine, I travel by bike - because it is my passion. The computer is just a tool, I care so little about it that I still have an 8-year-old computer, and I feel sorry for the cheapest Macbook Air - I would buy a third bike for it ...

Changing the path to iTunes - I wrote about Windows, not MacOS.

 

[370zulu]

I have spent 30 years of my life in IT with about 20ish of those years working in UNIX and Linux. I am not a developer, but I have worked extensively in storage, virtualization and operating systems. I have professionally used Windows, macOS and a few different distributions of Linux to perform my job over this time. I have also used all three at home for personal use (currently macOS, Debian and openSUSE).

It never ceases to amaze me to see the amount of hate put on display when someone doesn't share the same opinion about technology preference and use. This kind of BS has been going on for a long time. It's never going to change because people have this need to trash and belittle anything aside from what they are using. No need to debate or argue with them - it does no good.

Just an opinion from a veteran IT sysadmin - all three of these desktop operating systems have their use cases, their flaws and failings, their successes and strengths.

OP, there are many positive things that come from making a choice to change. Learning is never bad. You may discover that you are good at something else and find enjoyment in what you have learned. For me, I have been migrating slowly to Linux because my use case makes Linux a better choice for me. Nothing wrong with my macOS use cases. But, Linux is just better for me professionally and personally.

The Apple ecosystem is the major hurdle and it really depends on how deep you are involved with it. Here are a few that I am still solving. I decided the best thing to do was evaluate and decide on open alternatives that are cross-platform. Ecosystem lock-in or captivation is not something that only Apple does. So I have decided to look at best of breed and open alternatives even if they are not as functional or polished. I don't have any trouble spending some time getting things to work the way I need them and I don't have any problem with searching and reading about solutions to problems. Lastly, I don't have a problem with being the person that solves the problem for others. All of those things lend themselves to my migration effort to Linux. YMMV here depending on what your personality and preferences are. Best of luck whatever you decide.

Email - iCloud?​

Calendar - iCloud?​

Contacts - iCloud?​

Web - Safari bookmarks?​

Notes - iCloud?​

Reminders - iCloud?​

Storage - iCloud Drive?​

Music - Apple Music, iTunes?​

Podcasts​

Photos​

Virtualization - VMware, Parallels, Virtualbox?​

Office apps - Microsoft Office, Apple iWork apps?​

File system encryption - FileVault?​

​

 

[filu_]

I am still interested in staying on Linux but I lack the functionality related to the management of iPhones and IPads - I lack a tool to transfer music to the system application. Yes, VLC is a sensible alternative and you can get around that too.

Bookmarks can be synchronized using Firefox between devices, Thunderbird has good email management. Evernote and Dropobox make it much easier to access your files.

However, there is always an incompatibility in the file formats, because there is no sensible OpenOffice application on the iPad, and Pages on Linux will only open via www. But it is possible.

It would probably be easier if I were to use Android, but prefer iOS devices. Everything I like about Linux for pc bothers me on Android

However, using the iPad application, I can run my Linux server in my home network, copy, for example, photos there, and then turn it off with the command.

There is a dedicated thread for mixed ecosystems where OPs can read more about different ecosystem ideas.

Besides, if you are a bit more advanced user, then regardless of the operating system you will spend time customizing

 

[phillytim]

I would switch to Linux-only in a heartbeat, if I could sync my iPhone & iPad - IF Apple would release iTunes on Linux!

Otherwise, I keep a Linux VM to browse the web and bone up on my command-line skills.

Only other option is to change to Android hardware.

 

[UKgaryb]

I switched to Linux on my work laptop (x1 carbon) when I joined the company, now after the ARM transition I'm selling my 2019 13" Macbook Pro and getting a System76, will nuke popOS and put Arch on it.... Linux has come a LONG way since the 90's and most things just work (Including Steam).

I won't touch Windows 10 with a barge pole, too many duff updates which break a LOT of things including your so-called easy printing

 

[timidpimpin]

There are plenty of users in this sub forum that made the migration to windows. How about those that primarily use linux now? I am a comp sci student, and predominately use my macs for programming + command line. This makes the move to windows more difficult than running software. Unfortunately the allure of better hardware is always strong. Who made the switch to linux? What distros are you actively using? What is the use case, and how well did it go?

If you're used to the Mac Terminal, then BSD would be the natural choice for you, not Linux. I would recommend FreeBSD, as it's the closest to the BSD base that macOS uses.

 

[filu_]

I just finished scanning some documents to pdf. The start was poor because the scanner did not work after updating OpenSUSE to Leap 15.2. I downloaded the drivers, installed it despite the errors reported by the installer - and it worked.

And I thought that I would have to scan again from the iPad (which I announced for sale). But I still have the feeling that it is more happiness than routine

Yesterday, for a change, I was setting up iTunes in Windows in a virtual machine. What a twisted mind made this up ....

It will always be an emergency exit for me (VM> Windows> iTunes) but now I'm thinking about Android ...

 

[c0ppo]

I'm using OnePlus phone, with everything google related removed from it. Phone is automatically mounted to my PopOS installation (KDEConnect+GSConnect). Everything is blazing fast, and works like a charm. I have no intentions on changing my phone or my laptop

 

[filu_]

I am sorry, my mistake

 

[topcat001]

I use Arch as my general purpose distribution, and Clear Linux (from Intel) on my work machine. Not using Windows too much these days. While I love using my mac, I enjoy configuring my Linux machines to build the system exactly how I like it. Have a couple of BSD machines too as servers.

 

[filu_]

I was considering an Intel distribution. But they must have gone towards the server, not the desktop?