An Apple for a Penguin – My first three months on Linux

In my previous article about leaving macOS, I expressed my discontent with Apple’s hard and software and why and I moved from macOS to Linux. It has been three months now, a good time to make a proper evaluation.

My love for Linux is flowering but there are things I miss about macOS, and other things I don’t. For the ones among you thinking about switching as well, I’ll leave you some valuable tips I which I knew before starting out on this journey.

Things I miss about macOS

Of course I knew that by switching to Linux I would have to make compromises. But as it turns out, there are not as many as I expected at first. Nevertheless, there are some things I which would be available on Linux as well.

Airdrop is the number one thing I miss the most, especially for photo’s. It’s a really convenient tool to send files between various devices. Until a better solution presents itself, email to the rescue!

Simple things, like being able to add or remove pages in a PDF in Preview.app. I had to install a small additional utility called PDF Mod which does exactly that, but it would be a nice additional feature for Document Viewer.

Quickly editing a photo, again, in Preview.app. Now I have to launch an editor like Polarr or Gimp. In hindsight, Preview.app really is a one-stop shop for a lot of things. Very convenient.

Something else I am really starting to miss is folder labels/colors. And also related to the file browser, column view. I could just choose another distro like elementary OS, which has both of those features, but then I would have to give in on other aspects.

Monitor calibration. The default white point on my laptop screen is rather blue and I prefer it to be a bit softer. Some calibration profiles are provided with the system but they are too extreme. And, as far as I know, there is no easy way to calibrate your display visually.

So far, I manged to make it warmer with tools like redshift or f.lux. But their goal is limited to exactly that: control the global color temperature of your monitor.

Of course, it’s Linux, so there is a solution for almost everything. But I’m not a fan of too many add-ons and manual fixes. Especially in the long run. So for now I find solutions by changing my habits. After all, we’re talking about minor changes in my workflow, nothing really disruptive.

Things I don’t miss about macOS

iTunes.app

Was by far the biggest source of irritation on macOS. It’s a slow, incoherent and bloated piece of junk. They really should put it in the trash and start over form scratch. As swift and rigorous they tend to eliminate hardware components, just as slow they are with reworking their software. I’m glad it’s out of my life.

Photos.app

Is another app I am happy to leave behind. It’s a perfect example of how to ruin something simple like photo management. Behaviour of the app gets in the way too often, like magically straightening your images while going in crop mode. It’s always wrong and has to be undone every time. Or no longer being able to simply drag a photo to an application like Photoshop for example. I could go on…

Slowness

Of open source apps especially. Before I moved to Linux I was afraid of how sluggish open source apps are. Like Gimp, LibreOffice or Inkscape to name a few. I was happy to learn those apps run super smooth on Linux, they are just slow on macOS.

The nagging

Something that has annoyed me for a very long time is the rather patronising message when you unplug a storage device before ejecting it. It’s 2018, shouldn’t they have found some way by now to make it work without manually clicking eject first? Just like all other operating systems have?

Save. Save? Save!

Changes made to the saving process in Apple apps are just awkward. Instantly saving changes without a warning when closing a document simply is a bad choice. It did more harm than good and I have never grown into it. And I am not alone on this one.

An Apple employee explained me once this is done to have a more consistent experience between working online and working on your Mac. But what if you never use the online apps? They chose to degrade user experience for the sake of promoting their cloud services, which are mediocre at best.

Things I which I knew

When I installed my first Linux production environment, I quickly made a mess of it. Thirty years on macOS does make you a bit overconfident. “With great power comes great responsibility” is very true for your Linux installation. Linux is not as foolproof as macOS and as a life-long mac user, it took some getting used to.

Partition, partition, partition!

One of the biggest mistakes I made was installing everything on one single partition. This made my life hell because I messed up two or three installations in the beginning, by making reckless and stupid decisions.

Fortunately, the installer of Pop!_OS 18.04 makes it really easy to partition a drive in two major components: the root (or system) partition and the home (or data) partition. This might not seem like much, but it is such a great concept. Especially if you are distro-curious.

You see, by separating system and user data, you can always reinstall your system and continue working in no time. Or install a different distro, or even multiple distros. I find that very liberating and it’s the best safety net you can get.

Just one tip in this area. I chose to make my system partition 50GB and that is way too much. The minimum required size is 26GB so 30GB would be more than sufficient, allocating the rest your data partition.

Nvidia drivers are a pain

Installing drivers is not something you’ll have to do often on Linux. Most of what you need will be working out of the box.

So far, I had to install one additional driver for and eID reader from the Belgian government. No complaints, it works as advertised.

Nvidia drivers, on the orther hand, should be treated with silk gloves. They came packed with Pop!_OS, but every time it went south with my installation, Nvidia drivers were involved. Now I always act cautiously with anything related to Nvidia. Something I which I knew going into this.

Ask, but no answers

The folks at askubuntu.com are not very helpful. They’ll shoot you down if they even smell you’re not using the real Ubuntu but a derivative. For seven questions asked I got only one with an answer (kind of).

Fortunately, Pop!_OS has a chat channel where answers are given on most questions almost instantly, given you’re there a the right time.

iPhone

There is only one aspect where I need my iPhone and my laptop to collaborate, and that is importing photo’s. Regrettably, that’s were it goes wrong most of the time. For some reason — and by no fault of Linux — the iPhone can’t be mounted. It is recognised, but on trying to import photos, the device seems to be busy. Once in a while it does work, probably by following specific steps in the right order, but I have yet to figure out what they are.

Obviously, the next step would be to sell my iPhone. I’m already scouting and found the Fairphone. Although, I won’t be using Android but its privacy and security-oriented little sister LineageOS.

Recovery procedure

If you’re new to Linux, do investigate the way back in, in case your system gets messed up. Although, many distros share the same elements, recovering a system can be very distro-specific. Have a look at what the recovery process would look like, even once. Knowing your way really helps a lot.

Things to look forward to

After three months, I am really comfortable with my decision. In hindsight it’s not that big of a deal. At first I was afraid of Gimp, because image manipulation on Linux is such a deal breaker to many. It all depends on how flexible you are. I, for one, am looking forward to the developments of Gimp, because it’s starting to grow on me.

I also can’t wait to get my hands on elementary OS 5.0. It will be a great release and I am curious about the developments.

Other distributions are also attracting my attention, like Deepin for example. Not that I am unhappy with Pop!_OS, quite the contrary in fact, but I would like to see how other distributions approach the same scenarios.

Hope to see you in another three months!