71–80 of 712 posts
I had the same issue with XCode update. Today, the download finally started, progress bar reached 100% then... XCode was not installed. Infuriating. Too bad Microsoft don’t allow easy access to LTSB and destroyed Windows UI. I feel the state of commercial OS declined sharply in the last decade.
Are you on Catalina or Mojave by chance?
/me gets popcorn out Apple people will be outraged about this post, even if it's mostly a joke. My conclusion from it is that there are difficult topics, and, apparently, changing standards fast is not helping at all. (DisplayPort was finally more or less working, but sure, swap to another display outlet... and the same for a lot of things). There is no time to build systems (hw or sw, or god forbid, the two together…
This might be a subjective thing, but Linux when I used it in 2008-9 (I was a kid then) was unfriendly. My local community was very unfriendly, expecting you to RTFM three times except often the manual didn't exist or was obsoleted years ago.
Linux (Debian was what I used then) was rough. I had standard hardware, but I never got GPU to work without extreme tearing and pink-green lines and artifacts on the display. It was fast, I'll give it that. I often had to solve problems by reinstalling it, because I didn't have the resources (most didn't exist) to fix it "properly". I am not gonna talk about it further, but it was worse than now.
Ubuntu's 10.10 "Чиста Десетка" (as we called it here) was a release that started changing things for the better. The purity and exclusive-ness of the comunity was fading, people became more accepting. I attended meetups, met new people, made friends and got a lot of my issues fixed and many things explained.
In parallel with the comunity's development, the OS itself was developing and improving. IMO Unity was better than Gnome Shell at that time, and it really gave a friendlier feel to the OS. The kernel got more and more support for things you would expect to "just work" (especially in Serbia where so many people were using HSPA+ USB modems such as Huawei E1550 which had awful support before). GPU drivers got massively improved, new filesystem improvements reduced unnecessary latency, initiatives to prioritize UI-responsiveness and fludity came to provide a more awe-inspiring UX than Compiz cubes...
It just became better, and it keeps getting better.
I haven’t thought of it this way before but I think you’re right. External monitor support does break randomly and hardware support through dongles is extremely flakey. A small excerpt from my personal list of woes: - Using a USB-c DVI cable gives the monitor a purple hue. An HDMI cable does not. Also, this isn’t an issue in bootcamp. - Can’t use the serial debugger of a Particle Photon because it can’t use the dongl…
For your first problem, perhaps some monitor auto detection has gone crazy with a colour profile. Have a look under System Preferences -> Displays -> Colour (you need to have the monitor plugged in to tweak it.)
For what it’s worth this happens both with a 15” and a 13” MBP from different years.
Which means that there's a pretty good chance w/ time they'll get resolved. (Especially if you avoid upgrading to the latest and shiniest immediately, since Apple seems incapable of finding and fixing problems in-house.)
With linux, you could be running a mix of hardware + software that _no-one_ had ever tested before, and whatever your particular config was, it wasn't shared by everyone -- so whether you could get that mix to function properly was pretty much an unknown quantity and required a lot of luck and elbow grease.
I do wonder if at some point as the curve of hardware progress flattens out and the space of "what should software do" becomes more explored, we'll start to see more finely crafted software w/ fewer problems. Might be an analogy here to how in the early days of cars they were quite unreliable, but now they're pretty amazingly robust, for years on end. We're in the "new & shitty" stage of software, I think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except when you have more than one external monitors and MacOS decides to rearrange them arbitrarily after reconnecting them.
> MacOS decides to rearrange them arbitrarily after reconnecting them Not had that problem personally in at least 3 MacOS major releases. What version of MacOS are you using?
> Apple 2019: plugging an external projector will most likely not work."
Yeah, no.
> Software installation
That was not true for Linux in 2000 (alas, I know, I had to manually compile tarballs for all kinds of stuff, and download binaries of others), and is not true for macOS in 2019. Notarization != the app store.
>Apple 2019: only a limited number of hardware works out of the box, even for popular devices like Android phones.
Yeah, no.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except when you have more than one external monitors and MacOS decides to rearrange them arbitrarily after reconnecting them.
Hasn't happened to me. I'm running 3 external monitors when my MacBook is docked at home, 2 when I'm at the office. Not once the order was not correct when reconnecting.