So Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on “good” trackpads and most things are fixed with software? But hardware is the arguments they make for their Apple purchases!
Top menu with reasonable use of available space rather than the half-assed attempt to appeal to a hypothetical normie user on a 2014 tablet/netbook that gnome is doing
Touchpad driver that isn't outright physically painful to use
Progress in assistive technologies, font rendering, display technology and resolution rather than shipping hardly readable traditional Linux-style dark-blue on black terminal themes on today's dark default themes coupled with a lack of easy configuration
Actually working power management, and actual power efficiency resulting in 10h running times (despite overreaching stuff such as systemd, the developer of which has now left for MS to feast on INIs)
Focus on end user functionality rather than endless new developer improvements and abstraction frameworks for self-inflicted problems (snap/flatpack/Docker and other meta containers rather than fixing ld.so and glibc or just use static linking) when new apps aren't coming anyways
A feeling that the desktop/Finder and UX is evolving and respecting habits rather than being restarted with every release
State of the art commercial apps for media production rather than 90s apps struggling for compatibility as devs turn to new playgrounds
I would add Keybindings that are the same in all apps. Also, Having Command / Super as the keybinding key is awesome because it opens Control for the Readline / Emacs keybindings and doesn't end up in insane shortcut situations like every linux terminal where "copy" suddenly transforms from CTRL+C to CTRL+Shift+C.
MacOS has by far the best idea and implementation of how desktop keybindings should work (and no, I love vim but having desktop-wide vim keybindings doesn't make sense because not every input field can easily be modal). I'm constantly surprised why no linux distribution has copied this.
FYI: You can enable them in Gnome with Gnome-Tweaks. Apparently a very recent version of Gnome dropped this functionality for reasons that are beyond my understanding (but that's often the case when I look at the decisions that the Gnome devs make).
However, getting the Control -> Command/Super thing to work is much trickier. The best way is to use this: https://github.com/mooz/xkeysnail
However when I tried that, I ran into all kinds of weird behaviours all over the OS. Also, it doesn't work with Wayland.
Another option is https://kinto.sh . It worked perfectly for me out of the box on Pop OS, and with a few tweaks to shortcuts I’m pretty happy with the experience to the point where I can fairly seamlessly switch between computers and not be driven crazy by the shortcuts.
You can't mention Emacs keybindings and claim "keybindings are the same in all apps" when Apple's Emacs keybindings are not the same as Emacs proper. For example moving a word left is now Ctrl-Option B instead of M-B.
Most terminal emulators let you remap Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+V if you really want.
Sure, it's not the full Emacs keybindings. But the existing ones are still better than what Linux Desktops offer. Some of the missing ones can be added by updating the `DefaultKeyBinding.dict` [1]. So in comparison to Linux not only does it have better Emacs keybindings support, macOS also allows adding a ton of custom shortcuts per system - without having to install weird xmodmap daemons that mutate your keys (which you also can do on macOS).
An eye-opener for me on how useful all the configurability of Linux actually is has been looking into getting macOS-alike keyboard layouts and shortcut behavior on Linux. There's pretty high demand for it (lots and lots of posts all over the Web from people trying to figure out how to make it happen) and there are whole projects based around it, so I assume a fair amount of time has been spent trying to make it work, yet all the options I've found are janky as hell and fail to work under all kinds of common scenarios.
The more distance I get from using Linux as a daily-driver desktop OS, the more it looks like most of the benefits of its configurability and modularity are fairly superficial—especially in its GUI stack—while the harm it causes is deep.
> Most terminal emulators let you remap Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+V if you really want.
But that doesn’t really help does it? Because now you’ve made killing and backgrounding a process just as hard. What you need is an extra accelerator key, which is only available on expensive boutique keyboards and not available at all on laptop keyboards.
> Top menu with reasonable use of available space rather than the half-assed attempt to appeal to a hypothetical normie user on a 2014 tablet/netbook that gnome is doing
This (space efficiency, not necessarily the top menu bar) is the main thing that's keeping me away from Linux at this time. "Liberating" a Macbook Air feels like a great idea right until you have to do actual work on it, at which point, unless you're using the terminal, the screen will be largely empty space and huge widgets, with whatever text or image you're working on cramped between all those beautifully hand-crafted organic breathable widgets.
Edit: I'm not talking about window decorations being large, I'm talking about application widgets being large. You can fit like three macOS buttons in the space of a single Adwaita- or Breeze-themed button. See e.g. this SE thread for a comparison -- not with macOS, but basically the same problem: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/489533/how-to-get-a...
There are many desktops for Linux running the full gamut from large intrusive window dressing to nothing at all and all levels of efficiency in between.
This is actually the main reason I can't stand Big Sur and after - why is so much space wasted on touch interfaces if my Macbook has no touchscreen? The Quick Menu is the best/most frustrating example of this, but it's also apparent in the new widget design and settings app.
Pure no, from me. KDE feels much more natural to me now that I've settled in.
Have you tried https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 or any of the similar themes by that project? There's a bit of extra padding still but it's vastly more usable than the Adwaita default. (And of course you don't need to bother w/ the retro icon packs shown in the screenshot, the basic GTK+ theme is plenty enough.)
(The best UI with that kind of widget style today is arguably SerenityOS, but the repo I linked above tries to provide something similar for existing GTK+ apps.)
I have, I've actually written my own GTK theme years ago, before I gave up on it. B00merang Project's stuff is cool -- still way larger than it ought to be but indeed better -- but GTK theming is a raging dumpster fire.
Not just GTK themes but all of the tweaks and extensions that are apparently necessary to have a UI usable by an adult. Even then it's a moving target and some GNOME update will break random shit or remove some control. It's absolutely infuriating.
While I like the overall feeling of those themes for nostalgia reasons, they've got all sorts of quirks. E.g. toolbar icons aren't correctly aligned (you can see that in the screenshot, on the "forward" and "back" buttons in the left corner) -- both the horizontal and the vertical margins are wrong. It's not the authors' fault. I've poked at GTK's CSS before -- you can't make it work, not at the current abstraction level.
Also, for comparison, a Finder sidebar item is about half the height of the (unresizable) Nautilus sidebar item in the screenshot. Thank God for Thunar at least :-).
Ubuntu Unity still works. It's basically the Mac desktop but better.
You can get even better space efficiency with a tiling WM. A lot of them don't bother with window chrome or even have a status bar with a clock out of the box.
> You can get even better space efficiency with a tiling WM.
If you try to run the numbers on e.g. sway/i3, that barely makes a dent. Realistically, you can squeeze maybe 6-8px out of a sane window decoration before it gets impractical.
Meanwhile you can get like 10px of vertical space just by halving the vertical padding of a default Adwaita/Breeze button, and it's still larger than the equivalent macOS button which non-technical users can click just fine. Sane sizing on three stacked widgets saves more space than any tiling WM.
We can have nice things without going back to 1980s UI paradigms.
Then just don't use Adwaita/Breeze themes if that bothers you so much? And yes, it's tied to the theme. Ubuntu Unity's default "Ambiance" theme uses much less space. XFCE's default theme also uses less space. You can get themes like Chicago 95 for XFCE which also use less space.
Having visited the third circle of hell before, and having actually gone as far as writing my own theme before giving up the whole charade, I would rather avoid revisiting the fourth circle of hell that GTK theming is.
Edit: also, both Greybird and Ambiance are both really large compared to anything you get on other platforms. It's through no fault of their authors, GTK's layout rules break (or at least broke, I was on GTK 3.24 last I tried it) at low padding values, and it's extremely hard to keep alignment afloat on small widgets. I'm also not exactly young anymore, the text contrast in Greybird's unfocused windows is pretty awful, and fixing anything related to GTK's :backdrop attribute is a very long-winded affair.
No, it's not mostly a Gnome problem. The default KDE theme, Breeze, is equally tablet-quality, and unless you want to fiddle with old QtCurve (which is nowhere near as space-efficient as macOS anyway) you're largely stuck with Qt's Fusion, which is itself barely tolerable.
As for Gnome applications, it's not a Gnome problem, it's a GTK problem, that affects all GTK applications, regardless of what DE they run under, and all GTK-based DEs, like XFCE.
Top menu does sound like a reasonable compromise until one has to switch between the bottom left corner of the screen and the menu in the top left enough times. I'm all for efficient use of vertical space - I am one of those who still remove the top tab bar and use tree-style-tabs, but in practice I think there is a reason why most of the world allows the menu to follow the thing it is linked to.
Also note that these menus doesn't add up on other systems either. I only "waste" space for one menu line on my Linux or Windows applications too.
> snap/flatpack/Docker
Meanwhile on Mac I still have to use AppZapper.
> A feeling that the desktop/Finder and UX is evolving and respecting habits rather than being restarted with every release
You are probably comparing to Gnome and Unity here I guess, not KDE 5 or Windows?
> State of the art commercial apps for media production rather than 90s apps struggling for compatibility as devs turn to new playgrounds
This varies with job description I think. In my field one of the reasons why I still hesitate to get a Mac next month - despite its many advantages - is the fact that so many open source programs I use looked ugly on Mac last I checked and some weren't available at all. Meanwhile on Linux I can just ap-get them or in Windows I can apt-get them in WSL and run them, GUI and all inside Windows. That is kind of magic!
> Top menu does sound like a reasonable compromise until one has to switch between the bottom left corner of the screen and the menu in the top left enough times.
A top menu was reasonable for the original 9” Macintosh display of 512×342 pixels. (The original Macintosh could not even multi-task, and the visual components of the operating system were not designed for multiple programs at once.) The top menu was always close enough, and famously used Fitts’s law to its advantage. The NeXT system (17” display, 1120×832 pixels) realized that something even closer to the mouse pointer is wherever the mouse pointer happens to be right now, and added a right mouse button to the NeXT mouse; this button was completely dedicated to showing the menu, and was not used for “right-clicking” anything.
Everything up to macOS itself is top notch. Trackpad, keyboard, display, CPU - all best in class. What isn't best in class is good enough. macOS the desktop part... let's keep it polite and call it a matter of preference (it sucks)
Agreed. When I was using Apple laptops as daily drivers I always got the questions why I was replacing the OS with Linux. Fact of the matter was that (at least for me) it was a much stabler environment to work with, less crashing, less unexpected feature failures, etc.
Its funny how the reality distortion works for MacOS, people really look very incredulous when you tell them that Linux on Mac works better for you than MacOS on Mac :-)
I’m not sure when your experience dates to, or what kind of dev you were working, but I’ve had the exact opposite: on MacBooks for ~15 years, range of dev (full stack on a few stacks down to large footprint performance critical golang), VM’s etc. In all that time I can count the number of full on crashes (kernel panics) on healthy hardware on one hand. macOS has been supremely stable in my experience.
I always wonder what people are doing where their computer crashes all the time. I've been using Macs since the G4 days and have rarely had any crashes. But, the same is true for Windows for many years when I was a developer for Windows software. Linux is probably where I've had the most crashes b/c it lets you shoot yourself in the foot - which I did many times while learning linux in the 90s-00s.
People might look at you incredulously because their experience isn't mirroring yours. For instance, I honestly do not recall the last time macOS crashed on me. It does what I want it to do 99% of the time without getting in my way. But.. that's my experience. Linux on Mac might work better for YOU, don't presume that is the same for everyone else.
I run arch linux on my ancient macbook pro 2011. The reason I installed this flavor of linux was to disable a faulty gpu, and the guidance I found was using this distro. This mac has been my all-day-every-day workhorse ever since. And as for linux, with i3 window manager it is fantastic. It runs all the latest things I need for programming and it runs them fast. I almost never boot into mac at all anymore.
Best speakers in-class, consistently decent keyboard and touchpad (butterfly aside), consistently decent monitor/screen, consistent software design language, "It Just Works(tm)" convenience, social status symbol.
With the speakers, it’s the tuning, not the hardware that is great (though I will agree their tuning is the best). The rest related to hardware, every flagship also does it just as well, but a little different. Software, if you’re comparing to Windows then anything will win, but macOS/iOS is really hostile to users in other ways. Idgaf about “status symbol”.
Apple delivers the proprietary ports that deprecate all my yucky existing cables, the walled garden that drives up costs and stifles external innovation, the orthodox design choices that refuse to update in the face of UX concerns, and the tv remote controls so divorced from human reality it guarantees I won’t watch too much tv!
Trackpads like many peripherals are a combination of tightly coupled hardware, firmware, and software. If it were a simple issue, you'd think Microsoft and the Linux people would've fixed it by now.
> you'd think Microsoft and the Linux people would've fixed it by now
I wonder if Microsoft and Linux developers tend to use a mouse over a trackpad? If they don’t use a trackpad, it isn’t a pain point for them and thus not something that would get prioritized. Apple (on the other hand) has historically had horrible mice (pretty, but poor ergonomics) and solid developer laptops, so trackpads get used more. [1]
Regardless of the platform, if a developer feels a pain point, that particular issue will be dealt with sooner. If windows/Linux trackpad usability is “good enough”, it’s not going to be a high priority.
[1] source: me. I’ve used many Apple mice and loved the Magic Mouse, even with the strange charging port. That is until I started having carpal tunnel inflammation and switched to a trackpad and finally a more traditional mouse.
It may be a bit of a chicken & egg thing. All the people I've seen regularly using Windows laptops carry around a wireless mouse with them that gets used anytime they're using it for an extended period, presumably because the trackpad is so bad. That's going to mean MS' metrics say most people use a mouse, even when a trackpad is available, in which case why bother improving it?
That's what I used to do, when I was a Windows and Linux user, because the trackpad on PC laptops was intolerable to use for more than about one minute (and I could never get the hang of trackpoint).
Developed a habit, like checking that I had my keys and wallet, when taking my laptop anywhere. Grab the mouse, grab the power supply, throw them in the bag, because the trackpad was always nigh-unusable and the battery life was only good enough for hopping between outlets unless you had a (charged!) extra battery to carry along.
Took some time to break those habits after switching to Macbooks, where neither was necessary unless I'd be away from my desk more than a day. Unplug laptop, pick up, walk away, don't think about anything else. Go figure, a portable computer that lets you treat it like it's portable.
> Apple (on the other hand) has historically had horrible mice (pretty, but poor ergonomics) and solid developer laptops, so trackpads get used more.
If you have a Mac desktop and don't like the mouse (cause they always did suck), the natural replacement is a third-party mouse, not an external trackpad. I think Apple and its userbase have always been more laptop-oriented, though.
I have always wondered about this. I have never used a Macbook, but I haven't had any issues with the trackpad on Linux either - I flick my finger, point, tap to click, pinch to zoom, double finger to scroll etc. I'm always using laptops a couple generations behind, and it always worked, often out of the box.
Alongside the mouse comment, I also wonder if Linux people don't care about trackpad because many (most?) of us don't like using mouse / trackpads because we prefer using keyboards mostly.
I think I can make an argument that trying to do most things on a keyboard will result in faster workflows and less wrist strain, but to do so feels similar to the arguments I have about avoiding super-googlifying your life, preference for using communication solutions like Signal rather than captured applications like messenger or instagram, recommending libre software, etc. For whatever reasons, normies just wanna slide fingers on trackpad / upload their faces to companies / give up their software rights!
Maybe I'm off base but I really feel similarly about keyboard usage as I do to other "nerd shit" like above. The best argument I've ever heard for it though was from the World of Warcraft days: people who click their spells with their mouse, rather than using extensive keybindings (you have more than 9 spells so need to involve shift, ctrl, and start using the keys around wasd as well), you would simply never be as good as a keyboard user. We called mouse-users "clickers" as a derogatory term. I started as a clicker (like most kids I'm sure) and was so astounded by how much better I got at the game, and how much easier it was to play, when I got used to keyboard bindings for spells, that I started trying it in other software, like MS word and power point. "Clickers suck" was a trueism there too, and so from like age 13 on I've always been the kind of person to invest maybe 5 minutes to an hour learning a new software's keybindings and I think it's paid dividends.
For GNU/Linux I get it. A lot of gaps there are just cause those people aren't interested in certain things. For Windows, I'm actually surprised Microsoft and Dell/whoever haven't gotten together to make a decent trackpad.
The hardware's part of it. They use a big trackpad and they position it centrally, which a lot of manufacturers don't do. But of course a good bit of it is software, Hackintosh touchpads (when they worked) inherited most then-OS X features. I don't know anyone who ever suggested otherwise.
I’ve been using Macs almost exclusively since the 90s, through all of the ISA and OS transitions, and this is literally the first time I’ve ever heard that preference for Mac trackpads might have anything to do with hardware.
I've been running Linux exclusively for over a decade on MacBooks and other laptops (flagship models from ASUS, HP, Lenovo) and I can tell you for certain it's the hardware. There may also be differences due to software, but if so, they're things I don't care about. The major thing for me is that I generally can't press to click on the other trackpads without immediately noticing that I have to press noticeably harder in some areas (eg: near the top) to register the click. On the MacBooks, it's absolutely consistent across the entire trackpad. Literally no other manufacturer seems to be able to do this. I hate using touch "tap" because it messes with typing, and no matter how good the software implementation of "disable tap when typing" it sucks. Pressing the trackpad gently and feeling the click, is the only way for me to use a trackpad.
In case you're wondering, this is because on the MacBooks it's not physically depressing at all - it's detecting a push and then generating haptic feedback that feels like a click. I wonder why PC manufacturers can't do this - patents?
The haptic trackpads are a newer thing, though. I think introduced around 2013. Mac trackpads have been above the rest as far as I can remember, like 2000.
Yep patents, but there was some recentish news that another company found another way to imitate those mechanics, so it might just come to other manufacturers as well soon.
No no, it does. Apple has bought trackpad company — was it FingerWorks? — that developed special HIDs for medical purposes. These things are a combination of pickup and signal processing, therefore hw and sw, that provides many extra layers of data that will contribute. Basic tracking will work out of generally understood signals, but the nuance comes from those that only proprietary sw can render.
Really? I think it's more arguable that it's mostly/entirely software _today_, but there was a fairly long period where an Apple trackpad was a large glass thing whereas the average PC trackpad was a small thing made of soft plastic which didn't support multitouch at all. There clearly _was_ a major hardware gap, though I do think it's less clear there is today.
No matter how good a hardware is, it can be made sucky with bad software -- I honestly don't see how you came to the conclusion that it is fixed in software, that's just faulty logic on your side.
I can at least confirm that Ubuntu 22.10's out-of-the-box touchpad support is PERFECT on a 2008 Macbook Aluminum (Core 2 Duo / 8GB RAM / SSD). Exactly as you'd expect with macOS.
I was actually astounded at how better this model worked with Ubuntu compared to El Capitan (last official supported version) or even Catalina (the last unsupported version I tried with dosdude1's patches, as I didn't know about OCLP at the time - perhaps OCLP didn't even exist when Catalina was out).
Granted it's an older model (compared to yours) and the Linux kernel probably already has support for its touchpad generation baked in, but I'm sure it won't be hard to load an extra driver (e.g. Synaptics?) or tweak some config file to get it to work like on macOS. I had a similar issue with T440 & X240 Thinkpads and the touchpad performance improved dramatically by installing the Synaptics driver from Ubuntu repos (on Ubuntu 20.04 at the time).
Seeing how you can resurrect much older hardware with Linux, the only question that remains is why some freaking companies still refuse not to support Linux with their software - and I'm not just talking about Adobe here, but companies like Panic, Pixelmator and others that choose to be Mac only.
> Seeing how you can resurrect much older hardware with Linux, the only question that remains is why some freaking companies still refuse not to support Linux with their software - and I'm not just talking about Adobe here, but companies like Panic, Pixelmator and others that choose to be Mac only.
Statistically people who use hardware from 15 years ago won't pay much for brand new software licenses :-)
Intel Macs will soon become obsolete. Lots of folks will not just throw away a few years old machines. So between the choice of ditching perfectly fine hardware due to an unsupported OS or switching to Linux, it's really a no-brainer. Unless of course you live in the SV bubble and change devices every 6 months in which case kudos to you.
> Seeing how you can resurrect much older hardware with Linux, the only question that remains is why some freaking companies still refuse not to support Linux with their software - and I'm not just talking about Adobe here, but companies like Panic, Pixelmator and others that choose to be Mac only.
Those companies don't care because those people are non-clients anyway.
Have you ever used said MacBook intensively with OSX? I guarantee you the difference in trackpad performance will be mind boggling and frustrating. Literally the only thing keeping me away from using Linux.
I'm extra careful with compatibility claims after the number of times someone says how Linux works great on whatever Mac, or Mac OS runs great on a Hackintosh, only for me to discover how many "inconsequential" things are broken. Like it'll not sleep, not have wifi or bluetooth, run the fans at 100%, and be missing various forms of hardware accel.
I similarly found the trackpad fine with Linux mint.
Tho I found the difference in gestures quite annoying. Primarily in web apps like Miro. And window / app switching.
With enough hacking around it seemed like all the gesture support was there, but making it all work in the same way as OSX was going to require a lot of configuration.
works yes but it is jumpy and no gestures by default. my ability to precisely mouse over a target and click is significantly diminished from osx. I only installed a few months ago so the loss is still near to me.
I just don't get trackpad gestures on KDE or GNOME under x11. My Magic Trackpad only really "works" when running in a Wayland session of either desktop.
I am constantly astounded watching people use trackpads as their primary cursor control. It's so frustrating watching people just waste your time doing something "the slow way". The least they could do is learn some hotkeys or something.
I haven't tried https://howchoo.com/linux/the-perfect-almost-touchpad-settin... yet.