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It Just Works

danielandrews.com

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Re: It Just Works

#121

Post by zxcvcxz »

danielweber wrote: post #118
tragic wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't see what's so hard about desktop Linux at this point. In the last 3-4 years, I've installed various Ubuntu flavours on hardware varying in vintage from 2005 to 2012-ish, with no problems, every bit of hardware just working. In 2012 I even put puppy on a Toshiba laptop from roughly 2000, that wqas still going strong-ish with Windows 98 (!) but could obviously not run any browsers newer than IE6 or whateve…

If you've installed it a lot, you know how to make it work when it doesn't work. Usually the first install is fine for me with Ubuntu, but then I need something, like two different programs to be able to play sound at the same time.

>like two different programs to be able to play sound at the same time.

It just works on Fedora with GNOME.

Re: It Just Works

#122

Post by vinceguidry »

navait wrote: post #62
gshubert17 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any knowledge or experience of System 76 laptop computers as Linux machines?

I purchased a system 76 Gazelle laptop, and it's a pretty reliable . Wifi, audio and dual monitors worked out of the box, but it has trouble with 3 monitors(includes laptop screen) My main complaint is the battery life.(This is probably a linux issue) At best I get 2.5 hours, which needs serious improvements. However, so many things on linux lack polish, crash at random times, or have UI problems. Apple would have to…

My Galago Pro runs three screens just fine. It makes a fine desktop, I use a MacBook Air for a laptop.

Re: It Just Works

#123

Post by tonylemesmer »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #69
bzudo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree with you on Photos. Everything about it is overly complicated. It should be a simple as take photo, it's on my phone, automatically added to my computer and in the cloud. Edit/delete anywhere. At least they got rid of the Camera Roll. If I do plug my iPhone into the computer, I should be able to drag and drop photos from my phone through Finder. No application needed. I miss the old iPod Classic and i…

"If I do plug my iPhone into the computer, I should be able to drag and drop..." This may sound petty, but this is the biggest reason I don't use an iPhone. Smartphones are more than consumption devices. They are tiny computers and I want the flexibility of using a tiny computer.

Not at all petty. This and being forced to use iTunes are my primary reason for disliking iPhones.

Having said that, my Android phone is rooted, so there's probably an argument that I could have an iPhone and root it to achieve what I want.

Re: It Just Works

#124

Post by afandian »

x0x0 wrote: post #40
geophile wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify is a possible replacement (even without their streaming and music finding services), but I find that application quite buggy.

spotify is pretty crappy (experiences on android): * they broke google maps for about 3 months. Originally, when google maps needed to give audio directions, music would pause. It worked. Some moron decided, instead, to make the audio keep playing but make it quieter while google maps was giving audio directions. What he or she actually did is to mute google maps. This persisted for 3 months while assholes there made…

How do you avoid updates? Just never quit?

Re: It Just Works

#125

Post by afandian »

rbritton wrote: post #47
ino wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My Macbook Air. It's better, but the power button no longer does anything when I press it. Press and hold. It's this way to prevent accidental logouts which were frequent in my case when it was just a press.

Thanks. That's something that would have been really helpful to see a note on. It changed the behavior of a button that's been consistent for as long as I can remember.

It happened when the moved the button onto the keyboard. People kept hitting it by mistake and sleeping their machines.

Re: It Just Works

#126

Post by slantyyz »

steverb wrote: post #109
baseballmerpeak wrote: post #23

When it works, it is brilliant and seamless. On the other hand, there is not any redundancy, in the sense that if one piece of the equation (OS + the hardware + the software) is rubbish, it cannot be readily replaced by substitution (e.g. swapping Windows for Linux).

I dunno, Windows 7 runs brilliantly on my MacBook.

I have found that Windows tends to run faster than OSX itself does on the same Mac.

Hell, my 2008 Macbook can run the latest version of Windows 10 in 64 bit, but can't run the latest version of OSX. Win 10 runs snappy, while Lion (the last supported OS) is now a crufty pig on it.

Re: It Just Works

#127

Post by x0x0 »

afandian wrote: post #124
x0x0 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

spotify is pretty crappy (experiences on android): * they broke google maps for about 3 months. Originally, when google maps needed to give audio directions, music would pause. It worked. Some moron decided, instead, to make the audio keep playing but make it quieter while google maps was giving audio directions. What he or she actually did is to mute google maps. This persisted for 3 months while assholes there made…

How do you avoid updates? Just never quit?

phone: set manual updates only and never approve them;

laptop: archive the entire directory structure and replace it =P

all devices: wonder why the fuck I have to do this and why spotify can't get their shit together

Re: It Just Works

#128

Post by jsolson »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #99
jsolson wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the 'pride' behind being a Linux hacker came from heavily customizing, breaking, fixing, and generally maintaining your dev kit. I have a friend who's taken on a motorcycle rebuild project and I can see a lot of analogs there. For me, personally, I realized that having a system which I can take from zero to 'dev ready' in less than an afternoon (which I did recently with a freshly shipped MacBook) is the main…

The hardware is very nice. I'm typing this into a Macbook running Arch Linux. However, I don't know if it's fair to say you can't get up and running in an afternoon these days, even if you have a heavily customized system like I do ( https://sr.ht/-77r.png ). I expect that the sort of people who invest heavily in making their Linux setup their own are people who have the hardest time with OS X - everything just felt…

Personal preferences will naturally remain personal. There were a bunch of things that felt unfamiliar to me on OS X, but few that felt 'wrong'. Then again, I made the switch back in 2005 or so to a PowerBook G4. Linux was a very different beast then, and just having it run on a laptop was a bit of an effort. Expecting decent battery life (or all of your hardware to be functional) was more or less out of the question.

Another factor is that there a bunch of things people want/expect from a window manager that I never took advantage of, the biggest two being virtual desktops and focus-follows-mouse. I imagine if I had a strong dependency on either of those, the switch to a Mac would've been considerably more painful. On the other hand, features like Expose felt very natural to me (and at the time Linux equivalents were... poor).

These days my life consists almost entirely of running full-screen apps and trackpad swiping between them, which would probably drive most X11 users batty :)

Re: It Just Works

#129

Post by ericabiz »

plug wrote: post #84
planetjones wrote: post #6

It's really frustrating for me just how many bugs Apple software has. Let's look at a simple one - the icons on iOS safari for frequently visited websites. They "randomly" assign the wrong favicon e.g. I click the Facebook icon and it loads Hacker News. This has been present since iOS 8. Yesterday I pulled down the notification screen and it occupies only 50% of my screen. Cue another reboot of the iPhone. My iMac. U…

"Very disappointing for a machine which isn't 3 years old". This really resonates with me, sitting at a similarly aged iMac that frequently displays bafflingly poor performance, displaying what I like to call the "psychedelic jelly-tot of death". Sort of off-topic, but another thing that really frustrates me with Apple products is when something goes wrong with the hardware. I have a 3+ year old Macbook Air. The 't'…

The 2012 Macbook Air you are referring to does have a replaceable keyboard. I co-own a repair shop and we just did one. However, it is a daunting task. We charged $200 for the replacement ($30 for the part + $170 in labor) and it took our most experienced tech nearly 2 hours to complete.

The problem is (for anyone who's never opened a MBA) that if you look between each key on the keyboard, Apple decided for some crazy reason to put a teeny tiny screw there. So between the Q and W is a screw, and between the W and E is a screw...you get the picture.

This is a totally nutball design. It is a doable repair, but it takes forever, and be prepared for your hand/wrist to be quite sore after you're done.

If you can find someone or have a friend who does phone repairs, get them to do it and pay them for their time. I say phone repairs because the people who do phone repairs are used to dealing with teeny tiny Apple screws for a living.

Re: It Just Works

#130

Post by jads »

geophile wrote: post #14

Major Apple applications have become inscrutable and frustrating. - iTunes, Music and the iTunes store are a mess. I understood the old iTunes organization. Navigation within my music collection has become highly non-intuitive. It seems that there are multiple paradigms (long list of tracks, and another sectioned off by album), and it isn't always clear why one or the other is used. I keep forgetting how to get to th…

Photos had been exactly what I'm looking for in a photo management app. It's rock solid, I have all my photos available on all my devices, all of which update almost instantly. It was a total mess before, with fragmentation between iPhoto and Aperture, but this new solution actually seems to work really well and seems to be well received.

Everyone has a different experience but mine has literally been: take photo on iPad or iPhone, it appears on every device - including the Mac and Apple TV - almost instantly

As for Podcasts, I view many of Apple's apps as "starter apps". If you have outgrown what you can do or want to be able to do, that's what 3rd party apps are for. Power users like us make up a far smaller number of overall users than we think, so apps are intentionally designed to be simple, as opposed to restricted. If you want granular control, check out Overcast or Pocket Casts.

The iTunes Store itself is still ok, but Apple Music is a shitshow. The Music app has been so badly nerfed that I can't rely on it for a daily commute on the tube.

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