Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000 • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#381

Post by pcr910303 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

newscracker wrote: post #353

puranjay wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use both Windows and Mac. I find Windows file management and window management to be much better. Love the preview you get when you hover over an app icon in the taskbar. Also love how windows don't automatically take up the entire screen. I like to have two windows open simultaneously. This is much smoother on Windows than Mac. I also prefer Windows' taskbar instead of Mac's dock. The negative is changing preferen…

> The negative is changing preferences... Windows is so poorly designed that I still wonder why there's Settings as well as Control Panel offering mostly the same settings, and old settings dialogs from Windows XP or Windows 2000 are still around!

> Windows is so poorly designed that I still wonder why there's Settings as well as Control Panel offering mostly the same settings, and old settings dialogs from Windows XP or Windows 2000 are still around!

Mostly due to backward compatibility, as there were a fair amount of Windows applications that loaded DLLs to add a custom panel to Control Panel.

Well, many people on HN hate that Apple has a poor record on managing backward compatibility (like deprecating 32-bit apps or Carbon), but if they do to the scale of Microsoft, this is what happens.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#382

Post by sarah180 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

Is this satire of the ridiculous false equivalencies so often employed in modern rhetoric? Does the author really think using a Mac in 2019 is a complicated and fiddly as using a Linux machine in 2000?

Or are people just upvoting something because it's the kind of lazy hot take that's candy for socially ranked sites like this? This is why I believe sites like HN and Reddit often make their readers dumber despite surfacing good information.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#383

Post by morning_gelato » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

MegaDeKay wrote: post #340

Frondo wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I last used KDE about a year ago, so I'm not sure if this is still a problem, but even KDE doesn't let you slow down mouse cursor speed, only make it faster. Is that still the case? They didn't even have a slider for controlling mouse speed, only a numerical text entry. It boggles the mind.

The "Mouse" Systems Setting I have on screen on my up-to-date KDE right now has a slider for pointer speed with no numerical entry. There is only a small handful of other settings that quite useful (acceleration profile, invert scroll direction, and a couple other things). KDE has been working hard on usability lately.

KDE's pointer acceleration settings have never worked on X11 unfortunately.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#384

Post by Mindwipe » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

song wrote: post #26

I do believe that macos is not as stable, performant or well thought out as it used to be. There are also a few recurring bugs that really annoy me (search not working in Apple Mail forcing me to reindex for example) But, I think this article is over the top... I've never had issues with external monitors (nor know anyone who had some), I never use the App store (I oppose it on principle) and when I've had a non stan…

Specifically the USB-C to HDMI dongle for the Macbook seems to be totally useless. It has terrible reviews, is one of the only Apple products I've ever seen that required multiple full machine reboots to install a driver, and is just completely unreliable.

We'll see if the new version is any better, but I'm not hopeful given either Apple doesn't seem to really know what devices are supposed to be able to play 4K iTunes content or may have just silently pulled the feature at the last minute and not told anyone.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#385

Post by ulises314 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

lostmsu wrote: post #350

airstrike wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Windows it feels the same way, except a lot of what Windows Update does runs silently in the background, sometimes during your most precious computing hours with no way to stop it except force quitting through the Task Manager. And half the time the updates fail. And when you quickly want to shut down sometimes Windows also forces an update...

There is the active hours setting, and I have not seen an update fail in quite a long time (several years).

This, everyone is complaining on how bad desktop OSes are now but even windows is great now, compared to mobile devices, desktop is heaven.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#386

Post by mumblemumble » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #325

nkoren wrote: 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…

Yes. My 2012 retina MacBook was getting long in the tooth last year, so I got an X1 Carbon with all the bells and whistles. Remarkably, the on board LTE just plain never worked. (It would randomly die after a few uses requiring a hard reboot.) The screen bezel delaminated and has to be replaced. Developed three dead pixels after a few months of use. Recently started rebooting randomly with a full battery. My dad had…

> So many apps are not DPI aware.

I tried switching to a Windows laptop at work a couple years ago, and bounced off of it (returning to an ancient MacBook) basically entirely because of this. That, in combination with the laptop's 4K monitor, conspired to make it impossible for me to read text in some applications I used without a magnifying glass.

I suspect that Windows might be totally fine with so many apps not being DPI aware if laptop manufacturers weren't also doing things like creating 15" 4K monitors.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#387

Post by spiralx » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

omegabravo wrote: post #139

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #27

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.

Mine came with a faulty screen from a third-party, also had a Dell technician come to my office and replace it there and then.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#388

Post by zucker42 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:16 PM UTC

bluegreyred wrote: post #132

esotericn wrote: post #120

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…

As somebody on a 2015 15" MBP looking to make the switch, how do you deal with things like Word/Excel documents or updating the firmware of IOT things (not mine but those of relatives) that only offer proprietary Windows and Mac updaters/installers? Do you just spin up a KVM and pass through USB, or use a separate computer? These edge cases (and the uneasy feeling that there are many others that I won't discover unti…

I open word an Excel documents in LibreOffice. Should work for documents without macros. I've had less luck with PP, but it's been years since I've tried that.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#389

Post by esotericn » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:17 PM UTC

woah wrote: post #376

esotericn wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome (3) is just a bit crap. It's the Windows DE of the GNU/Linux world. It's explicitly designed to be boring and not very customizable so that delicate users don't get scared. I use i3 and basically everything is configured via text files. Keyboard shortcuts are trivial etc. You don't need Karabiner to "rebind" because you can directly bind. You don't need to go scary tiling WM, Xfce probably works well, it's been…

Most people have far better things to do than getting into a tinkering rabbit hole to enable basic desktop functionality.

Right. So use Mac, and go for a nice walk outside whenever something pisses you off that is unmodifiable.

You have the free time since you're not tinkering, right? :P

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#390

Post by hota_mazi » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:18 PM UTC

As a JVM developer, to me, Windows became a superior developer operating system to both MacOS and Linux about five years ago.

I still use both Windows and MacOS on a daily basis and dislike my MacOS time more and more each day, due to a mix of hardware reasons and software issues like the ones described in that article.