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macOS Big Sur Preview

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Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#381

Post by ironmagma »

bitcharmer wrote: post #379
jki275 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that surprise you, given the comment? The desire is to make it better, using it in spite of its issues is a way to do that. More users = more inertia to make it better, more resources for reporting issues, etc. I personally use Linux all the time, but not on the desktop because it's just bad enough that I can't stand it (It's really not Linux, it's X and all its associated crap). I won't criticize those who…

> Why would that surprise you, given the comment? Because people choose the least shitty solution for themselves whenever they can. So it doesn't make sense to torment yourself with an OS you don't like or cannot utilise to the extent that you'd like.

It's more about generativity. I have the capability to make this thing better, and I see vendor-imposed problems all the time with the proprietary solutions. Put two and two together and there's really only one responsible choice.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#382

Post by WorldMaker »

wtallis wrote: post #311
WorldMaker wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per Fitz's Law, touch-friendly is mouse friendly. The larger the click target the faster and easier it is to click, especially as the distance between the current mouse position and the target increases. It's a huge mouse accessibility win to design touch-first target sizes, and there's decades of UX research on that topic. Just because the mouse is precise enough to do it doesn't mean that users should have to "360…

> Per Fitz's Law, touch-friendly is mouse friendly. That's only true to an extent. It stops being true when the low-density UI re-design forces the user to take more actions to accomplish the same task. If I have to dig through a deeper menu structure, or flip back an forth between pages instead of having the information all on-screen at once, that change is touch-friendly but hostile to desktop and many laptop users…

First of all, if a UI is badly structured and needs a lot of flipping back and forth that isn't touch-friendly either. Good UX design should be about putting everything the user needs at the user's fingertip (literally so in touch-friendly, but figuratively so for mouse and keyboard).

Particularly on that subject, density is mostly orthogonal to touch-friendly outside of touch target size, and that's something that Microsoft has been very honest about as a series of lessons learned between Windows 8 and Windows 10.

Keep in mind a lot of the density changes in Windows 8 weren't about touch-friendliness, they were about good typography and reading friendly white space. They tried to optimize the basic app templates for comfortable reading patterns as if every app needed to be a well typeset newspaper with good strong margins between columns/articles. On the surface it was a lot of good ideas individually, but the criticisms were valid that it led to some very sparse designs by default and that they made overriding the defaults a little too hard, the defaults a little too hand-holding.

For reading-only "information" the density of an app can be the same, touch-friendly or not. It's the control targets that should be adjusted just that little bit bigger. The difference in size between a past mouse-only target and touch-friendly is a lot smaller than people think, people are fairly comfortable at touching some very small targets (have you seen how dense most smartphone apps are today?). Even there too, Microsoft found out and admitted that user comfort for touch-friendly allows for far more density of touch targets than they at first recommended in Windows 8. (There's some interesting debate if those changes in UX Research Study results over the lifetime of Windows 8 and early Windows 10 testing were due to increased user familiarity with touch surfaces over those intervening years or some interesting unanticipated bias in the earlier studies.)

The density of the UI should be a factor of the user's ability to focus on said UI more than a "touch-friendly" concern. Even after Microsoft greatly adjusted their design guidelines on density in Windows 10 they keep a lot of their own apps UI at low density not because they "have to" for touch-friendly, but for various concerns like user friendliness, good typography, and analysis paralysis when the user is confronted with too many choices at once.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#383

Post by reaperducer »

corobo wrote: post #332
reaperducer wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The accounting software my accountant requires me to use for my business is 32-bit. Luckily I have an old iMac in the closet I use as a media server and for the accounting software.

At least you’re not having to do it with pen and paper I guess That sounds like a right pain in the arse. I’d have replaced them if they’re not using updated software personally.

Easy to say. Not a sound decision with multiple decades of financial documents, both personal and for multiple businesses.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#384

Post by bitcharmer »

ironmagma wrote: post #380
bitcharmer wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity; if Linux sucks, why do you still choose it over other systems?

Open source software is great when it works, much better than proprietary software. I have a strong preference for open source; but I can't use Linux for anything serious because of how so many things are broken (not the kernel per se, so not "technically" Linux itself but the surrounding ecosystem). So, I use it as my hobby machine for whatever I can, because of dogfooding. The only way I will know what to fix, or e…

Been using Linux for work and as my daily driver for 10+ years. Never had any problem that would make me consider jumping ships.

Professionally, I work with ultra-low latency systems for high frequency/algo trading and it would be impossible to achieve the level of tuning and performance that Linux offers on other OSes.

I'm interested in the types of issues that made the experience bad for you.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#385

Post by ironmagma »

bitcharmer wrote: post #384
ironmagma wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source software is great when it works, much better than proprietary software. I have a strong preference for open source; but I can't use Linux for anything serious because of how so many things are broken (not the kernel per se, so not "technically" Linux itself but the surrounding ecosystem). So, I use it as my hobby machine for whatever I can, because of dogfooding. The only way I will know what to fix, or e…

Been using Linux for work and as my daily driver for 10+ years. Never had any problem that would make me consider jumping ships. Professionally, I work with ultra-low latency systems for high frequency/algo trading and it would be impossible to achieve the level of tuning and performance that Linux offers on other OSes. I'm interested in the types of issues that made the experience bad for you.

Here's a few...

* Even though there is tons of extra swap space, running too many apps at once causes the entire system to become unresponsive for ~20s at a time. Granted, I am using older hardware, but there should be some minimal amount of responsiveness allocated to indicate the system isn't just totally dead.

* Wifi GUI Gnome utility often ceases working and requires wifi to be turned off and on again. I got so fed up with this I just wrote a command to set Wifi to my credentials, and even then, I have to unplug/replug the wifi dongle frequently to get it to re-register with the system. On Arch Linux, this GUI utility doesn't even work at all. This has happened with multiple different makes of dongles.

* When I was using Ubuntu for work purposes (and Python / node / Docker stack), it would frequently run out of file descriptors. There was no solution other than to restart.

* Last night I started to encounter an issue where Ctrl-X would cut text successfully, but when I go to paste it, it will not be there. Possibly a bug with VSCode, not sure yet, but I haven't encountered it running VSCode on Mac at all.

* Something about programs being interrupted by context switches to other programs that are using large slices of CPU time leads to input being misinterpreted. If I am running a Rust compilation in one window, typing `hello` into an adjacent terminal window might show up as `hellllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllo`. This happens in a wide variety of applications. I suspect the problem has to do with input library routines not receiving real time priority, or something like that. Weirdly enough, I saw the same issue on FreeBSD.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#386

Post by swiley »

ironmagma wrote: post #385
bitcharmer wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been using Linux for work and as my daily driver for 10+ years. Never had any problem that would make me consider jumping ships. Professionally, I work with ultra-low latency systems for high frequency/algo trading and it would be impossible to achieve the level of tuning and performance that Linux offers on other OSes. I'm interested in the types of issues that made the experience bad for you.

Here's a few... * Even though there is tons of extra swap space, running too many apps at once causes the entire system to become unresponsive for ~20s at a time. Granted, I am using older hardware, but there should be some minimal amount of responsiveness allocated to indicate the system isn't just totally dead. * Wifi GUI Gnome utility often ceases working and requires wifi to be turned off and on again. I got so f…

>re: WiFi gui

Don’t use gnome and in particular don’t use their network configuration tools. I’ve never seen those reliably work.

>re repeat under load

I’ve had this happen on OSX but I don’t think I’ve ever had it happen on Linux. Then again I almost exclusively type anything long in vim so maybe it’s a bug with the widget toolkit the app is using?

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#387

Post by ironmagma »

swiley wrote: post #386
ironmagma wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a few... * Even though there is tons of extra swap space, running too many apps at once causes the entire system to become unresponsive for ~20s at a time. Granted, I am using older hardware, but there should be some minimal amount of responsiveness allocated to indicate the system isn't just totally dead. * Wifi GUI Gnome utility often ceases working and requires wifi to be turned off and on again. I got so f…

>re: WiFi gui Don’t use gnome and in particular don’t use their network configuration tools. I’ve never seen those reliably work. >re repeat under load I’ve had this happen on OSX but I don’t think I’ve ever had it happen on Linux. Then again I almost exclusively type anything long in vim so maybe it’s a bug with the widget toolkit the app is using?

> Don’t use gnome

This kind of response, though, gets to the core of why desktop Linux isn't a super popular choice. The defaults should _work_. Most popular Linux distributions use GNOME by default. We should fix GNOME rather than say people should know they need to not use it. If using KDE is the obvious solution to the plurality of problems someone might encounter, why isn't KDE the default for most distros? I'm sure there are political reasons too, but those are reasons that matter to the end user just as much as technical ones. They are, in fact, indistinguishable from that perspective.

Even if the solution is KDE (or something else), a person who switched will find that KDE itself has issues as well, and when someone encounters them, they will complain and be told to not use KDE, use GNOME because it doesn't have that issue. We can't continuously flip flop stacks just because we encounter particular bugs.

> maybe it’s a bug with the widget toolkit the app is using?

I assume that's GTK, and it's possible. I see the bug in Firefox, Chrome, and GNOME's terminal, although strangely not VSCode.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#388

Post by ljm »

skrtskrt wrote: post #228
nicoburns wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to Apple, the JIRA app is the single worst Mac app I've ever used, by quite a long shot. And their web app also has atrocious performance (so much so that it was the deciding factor in a recent decision to move away from JIRA at $DAYJOB). The Mac App Store is probably a fairer comparison.

Jira truly takes the cake for world's most over engineered website. I wonder how much of the world's coal and gas has been consumed by browsers struggling under the load of Jira.

I still laugh about how it takes over 10 seconds to render a dropdown box so I can move a ticket from 'in progress' to 'done'. It's often one of the last things to become functional on the page.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#389

Post by corobo »

reaperducer wrote: post #383
corobo wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least you’re not having to do it with pen and paper I guess That sounds like a right pain in the arse. I’d have replaced them if they’re not using updated software personally.

Easy to say. Not a sound decision with multiple decades of financial documents, both personal and for multiple businesses.

Pay the new accountant to deal with the old one haha

Anyway yeah it's not my business so it's not by business, nose un-poked-in

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#390

Post by sizzle »

mmastrac wrote: post #202
jtbayly wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just read about this here: https://talk.tidbits.com/t/psa-catalina-spotlight-is-broken-... It's one of the most recent reasons I have yet to update to Catalina.

Oh huh. I use that feature pretty often. I have my fan speeds ramped up to max 24/7 so I never noticed mds_stores going crazy but - yep there it goes.

isn't this really loud? Will it wear out your fans faster? What is this solving for you at cpu idle?
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