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Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

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Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#241
macOS is still light years better than subjecting yourself to Windows or Linux and the Escheresque nightmare they call a GUI.

Maybe once they have figured out how to scale for high-DPI displays without looking like something stretched up in Deluxe Paint*, I might tolerate giving them a second glance.

(Not a jab at DP, it was the bomb and I miss it dearly.)

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#243
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the first point, I had to give up on using an external monitor because fonts look blurry and give me a headache after a while. The same monitor with Windows and Linux shows perfectly fine fonts. I tried all sort of incantations found on forums, and nothing works.

Apple redid font smoothing with Mojave, and now it looks like garbage on non-retina displays. Most 4K displays seem to be bigger, rather than denser, so you can't do much to fix it.

I brought an Apple PowerBook G4 back in 2005, and one of the standard system configs allowed you to calibrate the subpixel rendering parameters of fonts for the built-in display, as well as any external displays. It remembers each external display by serial model so that it could load the correct calibration profile for that particular display each time it's plugged in. I must have obsessively calibrated each of my displays at least ten times.

Was this feature removed from OSX? Or did OP try it already and it didn't help much? Honest question here; I haven't touched a mac in over a decade.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#244
post #3

"There is only True Way of installing software: using the Apple store. If you do anything else you are bad and you should feel bad." Isn't this sentiment a bit excessive. Homebrew is a perfectly safe and accepted way of installing software.

Not only that, there are and were multiple ways of installing software in Linux, both back in 2000 and now. Notoriously ./autogen.sh && make && make install wasn't mentioned but installing via `rpm|dpkg|apt|yum` is?

> Not only that, there are and were multiple ways of installing software in Linux

Technically true, but practically false. To this day I get told that I shouldn't be even trying to use software that isn't in the repo. There are still a whole lot of applications released with a Windows binary and a tar.xz of source for Linux.

At DebConf 2014, none other than Linus himself bitched out the community for how difficult distributing things for Linux was. It should not require an army of maintainers across a score of repos to distribute software. And it isn't like the technology to make it simple isn't available. AppImage has been around since 2004 (it was called Klik at the time) and its existence has and continues to be largely ignored by the community. Other parts of the community are openly hostile to the very concept of simple application distribution, like Drew DeVault.

The situation is so awful, that recently when I wanted to use an application on my Linux laptop I found it easier to run the Windows version under WINE than get the Linux version installed.

And the most infuriating thing about it all is how incredibly resistant the community is to doing anything to change this situation.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, there are and were multiple ways of installing software in Linux, both back in 2000 and now. Notoriously ./autogen.sh && make && make install wasn't mentioned but installing via `rpm|dpkg|apt|yum` is?

autogen.sh isn't intended to be invoked for user installs. Users are supposed to invoke ./configure, with the configure script being generated by a developer invoking autogen.sh and readily packaged as part of the software's tarball.

[deleted]

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#248

Well, no, it's not the Linux of 2000, it's worse than that, because it's closed source. The GNU/Linux (e.g. the ecosystem) of 2019 is really fantastic. It keeps on getting better, and better, and better. There may be a few missteps, maybe you don't like GNOME 3, but you can still use Xfce, or KDE, or LXDE, or i3 or whatever else if you want, no-one is stopping you. By contrast, if Apple or Microsoft update the OS and…

Earlier this year I purchased a fairly pricey Asus laptop. A few months in the wireless card appeared to commit seppuku so I reinstalled the drivers, no dice, reinstalled windows, no dice and now my touchpad was broken. Every driver failed to affect any device, so I installed the latest Ubuntu and it all 'just worked', including the keyboard backlight. When I explained this to ASUS support they said the hardware must…

I had this happen to my Dell XPS 15 about 2 years back. It was a year old at the time so still under warranty. Dell said it was a hardware failure and I had to return it. IT issued me a new Precision 5520 that has worked really well since.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#249
post #190

Meh. I bailed out of the Mac ecosystem last year, as my mid-2012 retina Macbook was finally getting too creaky, and the latest Mac hardware was a regression in many respects, while simultaneously utterly unaffordable. I'm now dual-booting Ubuntu/Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15". What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks. The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are…

Opinions are a funny thing, I find MacOs vastly inferior to Windows, but I grew up with Windows so I'm biased that way; I'm betting you and people claiming 'the good old days of mac' are biased too.

There were periods where the outlook and software quality was bleak... and there were periods where the outlook and software quality was amazing.

Right now is not anywhere near as bad as it’s been a few times in the past (pre-OS X, early OS X days especially)... but if someone doesn’t turn around the ship things are headed that way currently.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple support has always been great in my experience. They’re worth the money.

I dropped my personal Dell laptop (XPS13) and broke the screen. Dell sent a tech to my workplace and repaired it. No charge.

You definitely have some deal with them. I couldn't get them to respond before I showed some proof of warranty when my Dell XPS battery inflated.
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