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

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#441

Post by dkonofalski » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

pmjordan wrote: post #90

coldtea wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a professional it's unacceptable to only have one work machine and no backup machine. What if it was stolen or broken entirely instead of "SSD needs replacement"? Then there would be nobody to replace it for you (in a month or a day), but you'd still have work to do. At best you would buy a new one, set it up again, and lose a few days to get back on track while your customers wait. And that's assuming you…

Backups (both hardware and data) or not, a month turnaround is still awful and unacceptable, and reason enough to switch suppliers. Companies that take business customers seriously offer same-day on-site service.

You can send in a computer to Apple for a turn around of less than a week in most cases. Because they decided to go to a physical location, it probably caused a delay. I'm not defending the store in any way but that definitely isn't the best place to go if you know there is not a store in your area.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#442

Post by rdiddly » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

Does this mean we've passed Peak Computer?

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#443

Post by scroot » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

linguae wrote: post #439

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…

I wholeheartedly agree. The state of personal computing in 2019 is one of uncomfortable compromises. I'm still using my Macs; I have a 2013 Mac Pro that I regularly use at home, a 2013 MacBook Air that I also regularly use whenever I'm not at home, and a work-issued 2018 MacBook Pro that I use all the time. I believe that the macOS experience and value proposition has regressed from what it was earlier this decade. I…

> Personally I believe the desktop operating system of the future will be one that draws from some ideas from the past that have never been fully realized.

> from the classic Mac era (I admit, as much as I like Mac OS X, I believe that the classic Mac OS era was actually superior from a usability standpoint, even if its infrastructure wasn't solid). Application software should be built using components inspired by Apple's OpenDoc project. The system should be an object system inspired by Smalltalk or CLOS that enables pervasive programmability of the environment and supports an objects-all-the-way-down environment, and the operating system should provide a REPL for programmers. The difficult part will be how to make such an operating system happen, since building an operating system is a large effort, and I believe part of the reason why the desktop computing situation in 2019 is the way that it is has to do with market forces.

This is exactly right.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#444

Post by machello13 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

sounds wrote: post #356

machello13 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem is rose-colored glasses. macOS definitely has bugs today. The question is, is it actually any worse than it was 12 years ago (in what was probably the Mac's heyday in terms of attention from Apple)? I'm not sure it is.

Mid-2014 Macbook Pro user reporting in. This Macbook Pro has an actual keyboard, magsafe power port, continues to function great, works great with external monitors (HDMI port). Other than feeling squeezed for RAM and that the CPU isn't the fastest anymore, it was well worth the purchase price.

I have a 2012 MacBook Pro (same design as yours) and agree with you. I think it's probably the best laptop design Apple ever shipped. My work laptop is one of the new ones, and I don't particularly mind the USB-C ports, but the keyboard and the touch bar are pretty bad.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#445

Post by rusk » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:30 PM UTC

jamesponddotco wrote: post #432

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…

Been using macOS and Ubuntu for years now, and while I try to make Ubuntu my primary operating system so I can ditch my slow MacBook Air 2018, I always end up going back to it. Look, I love Ubuntu. Heck, I am a recognized Ubuntu Member, was the leader of the LoCo Team for my country for a while, helped a few universities in my state switch to Ubuntu from Windows, have a plaque signed by Mark Shuttleworth acknowledgin…

> the entire computer freezes from time to time

Hate to point out what may be obvious, but since this is a self-build, have you entirely eliminated hardware issues? Bad connections or components that just don’t jive properly together? Just saying cause the first thing that came to mind when you described the issue is something similar I had a while back with mismatched RAM; it doesnt sound as though the comparison controls for these kinds of causes.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#446

Post by asjw » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:32 PM UTC

jamesponddotco wrote: post #432

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…

Been using macOS and Ubuntu for years now, and while I try to make Ubuntu my primary operating system so I can ditch my slow MacBook Air 2018, I always end up going back to it. Look, I love Ubuntu. Heck, I am a recognized Ubuntu Member, was the leader of the LoCo Team for my country for a while, helped a few universities in my state switch to Ubuntu from Windows, have a plaque signed by Mark Shuttleworth acknowledgin…

> My Ubuntu machine — which I built to edit photos and game — currently runs on a Threadripper 2950X with two VEGA 64 GPUs. It should be a beast, and it is, but the entire computer freezes from time to time and requires a hard reboot to come back to life.

That's the story with all the assembled pcs out there.

Something is faulty, replace it.

When I stopped doing it myself and started buying workstations with an actual warranty, my problems ended.

My main machine has been a Debian testing for the past 3 years on a Lenovo P70 with 64gb of ram, not a single glitch, except those things a power user running bleeding edge software has to face .

The quality of the hardware is very important, Mac hardware is just good and extremely overpriced.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#447

Post by _bxg1 » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:33 PM UTC

> This felt exactly like using Linux in the early 2000s.

In my experience (I have personal machines running all three OSes), macOS has certainly declined over the last few years, but I would say it just feels like Windows now. Windows has always had the occasional nonsensical problems you had to find an incantation online to solve. Fortunately, the platform (and its pitfalls) are consistent enough across different platforms and users' experiences that it's generally not super hard to find the right fix. The same is usually true for Macs.

The thing with Linux, even in 2019, is that most of its problems are sensical in isolation, there are just more of them. If you really know your system you actually have hope of solving them on your own, whereas you're going to have a much harder time finding a magic fix from someone else who had your exact issue, because there's a good chance nobody else has had your exact issue.

Pick your poison.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#448

Post by jlarocco » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

llimllib wrote: post #240

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…

I was linux-only from 2002 to about 2009, on laptops, when I switched to Mac. I just set up a linux desktop for kicks the last couple of weeks, and it doesn't seem to me to be any better than it was a decade ago. * No way to adjust mouse scroll speed; official answer seems to be "don't want that". (Or install imwheel and change your mouse scroll to be equal to hitting the down button (!) which breaks other stuff) * T…

> * modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent

That's not a Linux problem, it's a window manager problem. Setting keyboard shortcuts is a piece of cake in StumpWM.

> * searching for help usually yields results that are half a decade or more old, and it's very difficult to figure out if it's current advice or not

That's a search engine problem, and it affects a lot of stuff besides Linux.

> * brew isn't the best, but on linux I need to use both brew _and_ apt because you can't reliably get anything approaching up-to-date software with apt

That depends on your distro. Lots of systems use Apt, and they all have their own package servers. I've used Debian testing for years, and it's always been reasonably up to date.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#449

Post by boomboomsubban » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

dkonofalski wrote: post #419

computerex wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you have listed is solvable by using a different distribution/desktop environment. You can use something like Manjaro to get really up to date software, and it comes with different desktop environment flavors like Cinnamon. I think a more modern desktop environment would suit you best, and I highly recommend Cinnamon.

This is my issue with Linux, though, despite having a dev VM environment of several distros. There are a metric f*ckton of Linux distros out there and, for every one of them that fixes the problems mentioned in one breath, they break or ignore a whole litany of other things. When I first started with Linux, it was pretty much Red Hat or bust and that was a pain but you knew what you were getting into. Now, it's nearl…

> Worse yet, it's now happened to me twice where I've set up a distro, spent the time to get it mostly working, and then, after using it for a few weeks, there's some annoyance or hardware issue that I can't resolve that is resolved in another distro

A problem should only be unfixable without distro hopping if it requires a newer kernel or some other updated software. Even then, you can usually opt into a newer kernel and fix it in whatever distro you were running. So a rolling release is unlikely to face this issue, or if you check your hardware compatibility before installing.

Generally though, Linux is Linux, and troubleshooting would solve these problems.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#450

Post by yalogin » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

While I want to sympathize with the author here he hasn't given any examples. If he/she has come up with blanket statements like "does not work with external monitors" or "hardware support is a pain" he should substantiate his claims by telling us what he did and how many monitors he tried.

He also does not mention why having one channel to install software is a bad thing. I am sure he saw issues but presenting use cases will help his argument. I do have an issue with the software installation source. On the whole I see it as a good thing. Linux in 2000 had a problem (one that isn't resolved even now), there is no one channel that gets you all you want, you are inevitably forced to go and find software and install from source which doesn't recognize that dependencies are already solved and will simply install copies again which will fuck up your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and nothing works. Macs on the other hand for the most part don't have that problem. If the app store does not meet your needs, you are most likely a developer and so you would go through home-brew.