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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

#531

Post by fragmede »

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 answer, which is far more practical these days, given the proliferation of computers, is setup netconsole (to an RPi?), and get debug messages out of the kernel, assuming the crashed aren't MCE errors that are logged to bios and reported on bootup. The other bit to rail against, is closed source drivers and blobs. They'll crash the kernel, and debugging those are basically impossible.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#532

Post by jandrese »

llimllib wrote: post #354
llimllib wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which version of gnome are you on? 3.24 I think? whatever the ubuntu beta is using. > I just checked gnome settings and it has option to change touchpad speed. Don't have a mouse so can't comment for that but it should be there. I can assure you it is not edit to add issue link: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/issues/3... > Open the app and right click the app icon in dock(if that is what you me…

The thread of responses from the Wayland issue tracker about why "allowing the user to change the scroll speed" is an impossible problem to solve is truly depressing: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/issues/87

I don't know why it would be a Weyland or X issue. Scroll speed should be controlled by the widgets, GTK in the case of GNOME. Trying to set it at the compositor level seems misguided.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#533

Post by CountSessine »

msbarnett wrote: post #520
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…

> 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. This is the kind of hyperbole that Linux advocates like to throw around a lot, and it’s unfortunate, because it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what people are asking for when they say things like “I wish there was a decent replacement for Ka…

I don't think that there's a general appreciation for the depth and configurability of the cocoa/nextstep text and keyboard engine among linux and windows users.

Almost all macos applications use it everywhere, so globally modifying keyboard bindings in all applications in all circumstances is easy. If I want to bind Meta-f to jump a word forward, I can have that behavior in every single text box or editing region in every single application. Url bars, forms, everything!

Accomplishing the same thing in linux typically means descending into the hoary netherworld of xkb mappings.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#534

Post by catalogia »

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…

The GNOME project has gone very far astray. Their UX "experts" are self-appointed tyrants who want to control how you use the computer and seem to get sick kicks out of telling users that they're wrong whenever users want do something even slightly different. "You THINK you want to change your mouse speed but actually you're an idiot and you're wrong" is a classic example of this.

GNOME is more of a problem than linux itself. It doesn't have to be this bad. More distros could be packaging KDE (or even XFCE?) as the default, but incentives seem misaligned.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#535

Post by Nursie »

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've got an HDPI laptop and I want to plug into an old non-HDPI era monitor. Doesn't work.

At all? That's unusual...

I've got a 4K screen and a 1920x1200 screen next to each other, I use XFCE. I had to fart around with xrandr for a couple of hours but now I have the desktop working better than Windows or OS X - no fuzzy font rendering when moving windows between monitors like OS X, no weird size jumps like Windows.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#536

Post by ognarb »

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.

Yes the KDE Usability & Productivity initiative helped a lot making KDE suck less in this regard. A lot of configuration dialogs were improved, a lot of small irritating bugs were fixed and the default are more sane now. And because Nate Graham blog about all these changes every week, KDE also got a lot of new contributors.

Btw Plasma 5.17 will be released tomorrow, so all the improvements of the last 6 months will be available very soon.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#537

Post by gambiting »

"Things break at random for reasons you can't understand and the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best" that's still Linux for me, nothing has changed in the last 19 years.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#538

Post by rbanffy »

drclau wrote: post #495
esotericn wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You assume that everyone wants to modify everything (or the unmodifiable, as you put it). After going through many years of FreeBSD and Linux, I now just want things to work. Mac gives me that. Should have switched sooner.

There was a time I fine tuned every aspect of every desktop environment I had. I had custom widgets on Windows 3 by replacing bitmap resources in Windows 3.1's SVGA.DRV. Did the same up until Gnome 2.

Then I stopped. These days rarely go beyond setting terminal font (I built mine, so it's only fair I play lab rat with it) and some Emacs settings. The effort spent in customizing every detail of every app is very rarely, if ever, recovered.

I feel a bit embarrassed I recently added overline support to tmux because I wanted proper overlined status lines on my terminals. In my defense, I did it for fun, not to improve my performance.

Re: Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000

#540

Post by hatfortguy »

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 write for my day job so I spend a lot of time in "office" software.

I used to deal with a lot of MS Office documents, less so now. Most forms and web docs are PDFs and there's a growing crowd of people happy to send Open formatted docs. I've used Libre/Open Office for about 5 years as my main office suit and had no issues. It does feel less polished, and I do miss the "styles" thing you can do with MS Word but for copy I find it perfectly adequate.

If I need professional typesetting, or really anything more than Libre Office can handle, I use LaTeX. It's actually very quick.

You can also use MS Office online; their web editor is very good. I use it when I need to preserve an MS Word themed document's formatting.

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