71–80 of 166 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>best linux distro around. If I could easily run IntellJ on it I would switch. It's not a Distro.
What makes a distribution a distribution? Wikipedia and others list it as a distribution. I thought any packaging of Linux kernel + whatever surrounding software needed to make an OS is a “distro”?
I have a Macbook Pro, which I bought for the combination of weight and hardware but frankly the experience has not been good. The model I purchased suffers from the "staingate" issue and good Apple customer service where they do repairs and replacements for free is non-existent in this part of the world. I am still running El Capitan because I hear the upgrades break a lot of CLI stuff. One of the speakers is completely distorted as well. As an OS, macOS is great if you buy in to the other Apple ecosystem because it is all built to work well together.
macOS is a lot more polished and a lot more pleasant to use than a Linux desktop, unfortunately it is all very bad value for money, and Apple operates like a criminal enterprise as far as I'm concerned. I received Airpods for my birthday this February and one of them no longer charges or has its battery detected. Apple Support shrugged their shoulders and said they aren't covered by any warranty. By contrast I have Chinese knock-off ones that are working fine. I got them for free when I bought a suit off the rack.
I have recently learned that a lot of the more modern Apple hardware is near-impossible to repair because Apple has locked down the supply chain for spare parts.
In Western countries, there is some semblance of consumer protection and customer service. In the rest of the world you are pretty much hung out to dry.
Since the OS only works with their hardware, that's enough of a scam to keep me away from it. I keep reading all kinds of anecdotes online about how Apple is a benevolent company and has good customer service, but I am wondering if many of those stories are astroturfing. I'm also surprised that they have such a loyal fanbase. I have never owned an Apple product that wasn't horribly defective after being barely used. I have also recently been following the great Louis Rossman on YouTube who regularly talks about the bad design and engineering practices that go into their hardware, which almost make it seem like they are designed to fail and earn servicing revenue.
The writer seems to be treating the porting of Edge to Linux as the first stage of this "phase". This appears quite weird, a rather simpler explanation would be just that Microsoft wants as many people as possible to use its browser. I'm not an experienced programmer but I don't think it's such a phenomenal and revolutionary thing to release Linux builds for Edge, especially considering that it is now based off of Chromium which already has some presence in Linux distributions.
For business software, the complexity is not incidental as shown by the difficulty of writing Wine. When Microsoft makes up entirely new chunks of software and calls them "system libraries", Wine has to replicate their functionality. Such as with including IE as a component of Windows, Wine essentially had to replicate all that functionality in order to run things like Quickbooks. When they added .NET as a "system" component, Wine had to make that work by allowing .NET installs that work or replicating the functionality. Now, with WPF-based Universal Windows Platform apps, the windows API has become horribly complex with lots of little features and bugs that have to be copied to bring a translator to feature parity.
If you go through the Wine source code, you'll see that a lot of stuff is still unimplemented, for features that existed as of 1999 or so in Windows.
Windows has like 3 different ways of formatting text on the screen. It has several graphics apis. It has multiple apis for accessing the same hardware (like scanners). There are lots of little bits of functionality shipped as part of the operating system that seem unnecessary until a random business app uses them.
Getting the "essential" services for a small slice (like with ndiswrapper drivers) is a lot easier than being able to take one of these old applications like Quickbooks and make it work correctly.
As a developer I've been quite happy with the Linux desktop experience. I only ever use Windows for games. I have a Macbook Pro, which I bought for the combination of weight and hardware but frankly the experience has not been good. The model I purchased suffers from the "staingate" issue and good Apple customer service where they do repairs and replacements for free is non-existent in this part of the world. I am st…
But of course, the consumer (even the average one) isn't really served by this attitude, in the long run.
Personally I think this should be regulated more. If a device is built as a general purpose device, then it should be accessible as such by its owner. There are many advantages for the consumer (not just functionality but also privacy), and also the environment can benefit as fewer devices will become obsolete because of software.
As a developer I've been quite happy with the Linux desktop experience. I only ever use Windows for games. I have a Macbook Pro, which I bought for the combination of weight and hardware but frankly the experience has not been good. The model I purchased suffers from the "staingate" issue and good Apple customer service where they do repairs and replacements for free is non-existent in this part of the world. I am st…
I think Apple's story is that they keep OS and hardware tightly coupled because that way they can better control quality. But of course, the consumer (even the average one) isn't really served by this attitude, in the long run. Personally I think this should be regulated more. If a device is built as a general purpose device, then it should be accessible as such by its owner. There are many advantages for the consume…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes a distribution a distribution? Wikipedia and others list it as a distribution. I thought any packaging of Linux kernel + whatever surrounding software needed to make an OS is a “distro”?
But WSL comes with a choice of distros to run on it, so how can it itself be a distro too?
Large corporate applications are increasingly being built using web tech, which doesn't require Windows. If an organization can run a web based desktop and provide a remote desktop for "legacy" Windows apps, then this can reduce admin costs and improve security. The browser is increasingly the platform and the underlying OS just doesn't matter as much anymore.
At some point in the not too distant future, it won't make sense financially to continue to put a lot of R&D into the Windows kernel. It won't make sense financially to maintain two versions of Office and the huge amount of logistics that entails. If Microsoft can slide Windows over a different kernel (and it has been done before from Win95/DOS to NT), they can still preserve their user base, but reduce a lot of dev money spent on maintaining the NT kernel. Same goes for the legacy Office applications. If they can reduce their development spend, and focus resources on the app+win layer, this is what they are going to do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those parts are easily removed by doing a vanilla install the first thing you do. Windows (esp 10) still had some built-in things you don't get away from though. And also all the dialogues from self-updating software and plugins.
It is possible to disable or uninstall all the user-hostile components like Windows Update, telemetry, and the app store, but it takes some effort and manual registry editing. The bigger problem, though, is all the legacy that's holding it back in the name of backwards compatibility. The WinAPI is older than myself. You can still run Windows 95 programs on your new Windows 10 PC. While useful to some, I'll never unde…