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Your Computer Isn't Yours

sneak.berlin

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Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#541

Post by rootsudo »

ghaff wrote: post #409
morganvachon wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I expect you to buy a well built tool from a Linux-first manufacturer, where you pay a premium to get a device that "just works". This is, after all, the Apple way right? You pay a premium for a Mac because it "just works", right? https://linuxpreloaded.com/

Doesn't even need to be "Linux-first." Our standard Linux laptops at Red Hat are Thinkpads, many of which are used by people who are not particularly technical and use a locked-down corporate build. (Many others run Fedora or CentOS.) I'm sure we have many thousands in use. The Dell XPS 13 is supposedly good too although I don't have personal experience. I use Macs quite a bit but the idea that running Linux on a pro…

Dell XPS 13 is a solid choice, network card/wifi card may have to be changed out, but they support ubuntu natively. Cheap to buy used and generally very good.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#542

Post by zepto »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #407
eecc wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But also Windows phones home.m and Linux desktop is still a shitshow (pardon the French) arguing over and over again about the same melange of disputes that should have been settled a decade ago... Not sure if it’s a sign of aging, but I’m losing hope and interest in most of these pantomimes /s

Linux desktop. I just use what's presented and get on with my work. I don't have a particularly complicated setup, but I found something that works and I've been using it happily enough for over a year having migrated from Windows. I don't know what disputes are being argued over, so I bothers me not in the slightest. Would it help if you just ignored the detail and just worked with what's presented?

If you are happy to just ‘work with what’s presented’, why not buy an Apple device or ChromeOS machine?

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#543

Post by diab0lic »

ubercow13 wrote: post #474
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet rather than take at their word that Linux is unsuitable for their use case or seek to remedy those problems, people insist that it must be because of one or more of the reasons I listed above. Alternatively, they attempt to change the user's use case to one that fits Linux better. It's extremely tiring to watch this happen for as long as I have been watching it happen.

They didn't say Linux is unsuitable for a particular use case or give any meaningful criticism or definition of a use case, they just said that it 'just doesn't work'. Is it any wonder people call out that tripe.

'just doesn't work' and 'doesn't just work' are two very different statements. You said the former, but I've only spotted people saying the latter in here.

Also if you have to argue with someone that linux does work for them, you've missed the point.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#544

Post by joshspankit »

rednum wrote: post #266
kebman wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not. Since the last few iterations of Apple hardware and OS software, I've decided to switch to something else. I'm also advicing all friends and collegues to do the same. There is simply no reason to stay with Apple anymore as a professional. It used to be stability and ease of use, but Windows has since closed that gap, and Linux is a close second (and a must for programming). Most likely that means I'll run a…

I haven't used Windows in long time, but it feels like "the gap" was closed by Apple, by letting their system degrade. The high end 2019 MacBookPro is in many regards less reliable for music production than my old 2012 MacBookAir, which is really, really sad. Unless Apple gets their act together my next music production setup will be Windows-based (or maybe I'll even try Bitwig on Linux).

> “the gap” was closed by Apple, by letting their system degrade.

100% agreed. And I would even go so far as to say that Steve Jobs had such a strong vision of how things could be, that it was his greatest mistake to put someone in charge who did not (Tim Cook).

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#545

Post by zepto »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #416
goatinaboat wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's becoming the antithesis of everything that the original Hacker culture stood for. A hacker in the “Hacker News” sense is more than likely working on an ad-supported web app and dreams of working at a FAANG. The old hacker dream is dead, sadly.

You're not looking hard enough, which is also part of the problem. Back in the "golden years" you'd have to put effort in to finding and participating in the community. The real hackers are still somewhat underground simply because they're anti establishment; actively seeking out the high effort, loss making niches that attract fringe thinkers and the unique characters required for true innovation. Crypto parties, ma…

Maker faires perhaps, but crypto parties seem a lot like pyramid scheme parties on steroids.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#546

Post by mikepurvis »

imtringued wrote: post #505
ben_w wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a kid with a phone but no money wants to know if programming is something they might like to study, and somehow the school also can’t afford a Pi, I’d point the kid at something like https://js.do/

I don't know why a raspberry pi is supposed to be a good device to learn programming other than the fact that it forces you to use Linux. Do kids really ssh into their raspberry pi from their phones? Or do they really buy an expensive screen, expensive cases and expensive peripherals adding up to $200? I also doubt that raspberry pis are actually the type of device that schools are interested in. What they'd want is…

I too have doubts about the real-world suitability of the Raspberry Pi in formal education environments, but certainly the business of resetting it _is_ a solved problem; every kid is issued their own SD card, and can flash it back to the starting image whenever they want.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#547

Post by joshspankit »

II2II wrote: post #385
kybernetikos wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fifth reason - many many laptops have at least some piece of hardware or behaviour that requires fiddling to get to work on major linux systems. Sometimes it's power management, sometimes it's running with multiple monitors or 3d acceleration or the touchscreen, sometimes it's getting the touchpad to work properly or the fingerprint reader.... In my experience, there's usually something .

While this may be true, we should still be impressed by the number of laptops Linux operates flawlessly on. Very few people would expect Windows to run properly on a MacBook and far fewer would expect macOS to run on a generic PC. Yet people expect Linux to work flawlessly on almost anything thrown at it. From my experience, it does a very good job of this (at least in recent years).

This is actually an excellent point that rarely sees the light of day.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#548

Post by bgilroy26 »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #143

What we poor souls didn't understand all these years is that we're effectively helping other companies to steal from Apple by running software that isn't distributed via their app store [1]. I think now that Apple has learned from iOS how profitable a walled garden business model is they are trying to bring that model to the PC world as well. Shipping hardware with their own processors is an important step in that di…

There is always a war on when property is not democratized. In the Anglophone world, the easiest example to think of is enclosure[1] which was a war between the mercantile class on one side and the lazier half of the lords and the little people on the other.

If any company, be they Google, be they Apple, should experience total "victory" in the war on intellectual property they would find everyone who is not

  * An investor
  * In management
  * An employee
  * A temp/contractor, or
  * A happy customer
Set against them and they would fall. Imagine there was a neural network or network of neural networks that could arrange bits into entertaining movies. It would print money and it would not be strategic for whatever company had the resources to do that to hoard the benefits, they would have no customers if they did (I suppose if they had enough compute and memory resources to succeed in such a task they might already have a monopoly on money).

I used to understand the CEO's job as cheerleader, for the investors, for the employees. I still think that is how they operate tactically, but strategically, I think the goal of a CEO in a Obama-era neo-liberal is to put the whole world in one of those categories above I suppose, with the acceptable additions of

  * Vendor/supplier
  * Companies in partnership
  * Competitors who participate in a trade association together in a reasonably civil manner, or
  * Members of government who are lobbied to advocate for your firm or industry or a strategic need that you hold in common with the broader public
In the long run the alternative is to perish. Utopia I think may have been inevitable by the 50s/60s when people started to believe that some companies really would last forever. On a long enough time scale, it is best to do everything in everyone's best interest considered in toto.

So all of that to say that I expect one day, maybe 40 years from now, maybe 80, that IP as it operates today will be transformed into an index of ideas that everyone can take and implement who might put them to use beneficially for the citizenry and other residents. It will be nice after all of that work to have a primary key for the ideas that have been created so far, so I don't think we the people will burn down the USPTO or the LOC or anything like that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#550

Post by cutler »

This is the last straw for me. Can anyone recommend a PC laptop which has screen quality somewhere near my 2013 15" Macbook Pro? My next computers will be running a desktop Linux distro.
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