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Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

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Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the same thing. Turns out, I'm more of a design snob then I thought I was. Trying to move away from macOS and trying out Windows and a few Linux distro's, my god it's all ugly. I don't care much about Apple hardware specifically, but they got my hooked because of the OS. Pretty lame.

Funny I'm the exact opposite. Only on a MBPr for the hardware, otherwise would prefer Linux to OSX. Lightweight tiling window manager + Vim keybinds for all apps = super efficient. With OSX I actually have to use the mouse. How quaint.

how do you get vim keybinds in every app?

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#252
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the same thing. Turns out, I'm more of a design snob then I thought I was. Trying to move away from macOS and trying out Windows and a few Linux distro's, my god it's all ugly. I don't care much about Apple hardware specifically, but they got my hooked because of the OS. Pretty lame.

Try something without any design at all, like Linux with a tiling window manager and some minimal applications.

I agree. To my mind the greatest obstacle to Linux Desktop adoption is the traditional Desktop concept.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#253
post #17

The latest rev pushed me to a PC for the first time in like 15 years. It's partly because I didn't love the new Macbook Pro, but also cause hey..change is fun sometimes. I'm very happy with my new Surface Book. I never thought I'd like the touchscreen as much as I do. I LOVE being able to go to tablet mode for calls and stuff where I sort of want to just wander around. The pen has completely changed how I do flow-cha…

I'm also considering a switch, but Windows drives me up the wall whenever I touch it. macOS has been getting uglier and more awkward to use the last few years, but Windows is still the king of ugly. So I've been considering Linux as my first option. I fired up a few VMs and dipped my toes in various Linux desktop environments: Elementary, Fedora 25, and Ubuntu (Unity) so far. These are all GNOME 3 variants. And... oh…

> s. Things have gotten a little smoother in the decade or so since I was last exploring Linux desktops,

Actually it has gotten worse

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#254
post #44
post #26

What I really want is for my state (SSD, RAM, maybe the CPU, but probably not the GPU) to be easily detachable from my human interface devices (keyboard, mouse, display). I want to be able to use a desktop in one place, then unplug a small unit which contains the aforementioned state (i.e. the equivalent of a sleeping laptop but with no keyboard or display), carry that someplace else, plug it in to a different set of…

I would go a bit further: I want my state to be inside a seamless hardware agnostic VM, that I can access anywhere through public terminals that I only partially trust. I would have the option of either having my storage with me that I plug in, or in the cloud and I just provide 2fa. My device would have a cpu/gpu/etc befitting a mobile device, and the most barebones / untrusted terminals would just be screen/inputs/…

Could that be done with a Linux pen drive? When I was in college I used to carry around a usb stick with a QEMU image of tiny core linux. With some trickery, that could boot on public, school computers. Back at my house I had a server running and could rsync files back and forth.

It sorta worked as a mobile work station but I'm not sure if that's the kind of thing you had in mind. A vnc or gnu screen could help too but neither have 100% perfect usability (especially on slow networks).

There's another project that does the same[0] but using a usb stick isn't a BYO cpu/gpu solution.

[0]https://github.com/miklevin/levinux

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#255
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the same thing. Turns out, I'm more of a design snob then I thought I was. Trying to move away from macOS and trying out Windows and a few Linux distro's, my god it's all ugly. I don't care much about Apple hardware specifically, but they got my hooked because of the OS. Pretty lame.

Try something without any design at all, like Linux with a tiling window manager and some minimal applications.

Weirdly enough that's how I spend a lot of my time on my iPad Pro - use Mosh to connect to a Linux box and then use tmux and vim to set up tiles and do my work.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on its impact on how you do development? One reason I still have a mac is because it's so developer friendly. Linux is very time-consuming to make things work with and is incompatible with various hardware. Also some mac software is great.

I have a Zenbook. Windows for development isn't nearly as convinent as OSX. Yes there's lots of customization you can do to make it bearable. Powershell isn't as awful as CMD, but projects aren't supporting Powershell as much as bash any time this decade AFAIK. The Linux subsystem works, but the flow between Windows and Linux is lacking. I tried Linux. Linux doesn't handle my mix of high DPI and normal DPI monitors (…

The only times when apt-get fails is when your disk is full (!) or when you're including foreign repositories. (Debian has a LOT more in official repos than Ubuntu).

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#257
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try something without any design at all, like Linux with a tiling window manager and some minimal applications.

I agree. To my mind the greatest obstacle to Linux Desktop adoption is the traditional Desktop concept.

To me, NeXTStep was the best feature rich desktop.

I wish there was a modern version that isn't macOS.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#258
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also considering a switch, but Windows drives me up the wall whenever I touch it. macOS has been getting uglier and more awkward to use the last few years, but Windows is still the king of ugly. So I've been considering Linux as my first option. I fired up a few VMs and dipped my toes in various Linux desktop environments: Elementary, Fedora 25, and Ubuntu (Unity) so far. These are all GNOME 3 variants. And... oh…

Try Linux Mint + Mate. It's simple, pleasant looking, and totally intuitive for me at least.

Mate is not only in Mint.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#259
post #129
post #24

OK, if they are so committed, where is OpenGL 4.5 and Vulkan support? Why is Safari so behind that it's now called "the new IE"? Talk is cheap, let them actually do something.

I'm not challenging your argument, but have you seen Safari Technology Preview [1]? It seems to be under healthy development; for instance, recently it became the first browser to support all ES2015/16/17 features [2]. So it may be just that the standard Safari release is behind. [1] https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13133135

This is inevitable when everyone else is on a 6 weekly release schedule (not sure about Edge, but Chrome/Firefox are) and they insist on aligning browser releases with OS releases for marketing reasons.

It does look like they've got a great release coming some time, but it's clear they care more about marketing it eventually than pushing the web forward by putting the latest and greatest in user's hands.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#260
post #231
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding Nintendo, nice to see they are supporting Vulkan, but Nintendo Switch is not yet on sale and it remains to see how it will fare in the market against Apple and Google devices. All the other devices from Nintendo don't support Vulkan. So nothing relevant in market share for Vulkan.

> All the other devices from Nintendo don't support Vulkan. No reason for them not to support it on any of their future devices. Older ones might not be possible, since Vulkan support has hardware requirements that not every GPU can fulfill (basically, no compute shaders = no Vulkan). Newer ones aren't a problem though, so I expect Nintendo to support it everywhere they can. Also, think about it from GPU manufacturer…

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