701–710 of 884 posts
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Looks like switching to linux when win 7 support ended was the right move. All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason, but at least I don't have to deal with that BS.
I can’t wait for Proton to get better so I can ditch Windows for good. I know it’s already really good and it will run for most of the game I play, but I do like to dabble in competitive online or AAA once in a while :(
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I wish this was true, but there are a heck of a lot of office workers who have grown up with Windows and can never be trained to use anything else. You'll get a lot of resistance and rationalisation about why they don't think Linux or BSD or whatever isn't as good, and that the training time is better used to just work.
My kid just graduated high school last year. She would tell me stories about how impressed her peers were with seeing her do something as basic as copy and paste, and navigating files + folders. There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption. Maybe it's done right this time, and not married to a single browser ver…
> There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption.
I'm not aware of any generation for which being comfortable with those things hasn't put one in, at least (I'm being very conservative), the top 20% of computer literacy. Most people are bad at just using a computer—given how long it's been a problem, there's either a lot of essential complexity there that cannot be mitigated or avoided to improve usability, or we as an industry have just done a terrible job designing desktop operating systems for regular people. I don't think tablets et c. have much to do with it.
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When I first heard about this, everything that's ever bothered me about the Windows 8-10-11 evolution makes so much more sense. They're turning it into MacOS.
The Macification of Windows has been in progress for years -- and it makes no sense! When Microsoft designed the UI for Windows 95 they did extensive user studies and everything from how the start menu worked and the task bar was carefully figured out. They've spend the last few decades undoing all that work piece by piece until nobody actually knows how to use it anymore.
But it's hard for a company to justify "paying to leave shit alone" so even if a maximum was reached, it will recede.
Talking about dark patterns, here are a couple I've noticed. In Windows, I'm very careful about NOT signing in to anything Microsoft, unless I have to. I make sure I use a local administrator account instead of a Microsoft account. Yesterday I had to open Microsoft Edge for something that would only work in Edge, and lo-and-behold, Microsoft had taken my Xbox Game Pass sign-in and applied to Edge, then informed me th…
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The difference is that Mac OS actually looks somewhat consistent and has kept much of its familiar paradigms (Spotlight, System Preferences, the menubar, context menus...) the same over the past decade. Microsoft seems to have lifted the aesthetics of Mac OS without any of the UX.
And more importantly, when Apple changes some design guidelines, provided you’re using the Cocoa API (which you likely are, if you’re developing for macOS natively), your application will look consistent with the rest of the OS. Yes, Apple doesn’t care about backwards compatability, so you might have to update your application so that it runs on the latest macOS version, but there’s no way around it. You either have…
If they shipped a version of Windows sporting the Windows-11 kernel, so running all the recent software, but with Windows 2000 UI for a thousand dollars I would buy it immediately.
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What is wrong with Linux nowadays? I've used it as my main driver for long enough that I can't see the big problems that are preventing everyone from switching. Like, it seems easier than even WSL to me. Beginner friendly distos seem to have solved the package management problem, and there are adequate desktop environments, office suites, browsers, gaming, and everything else. If a person has good hardware compatibil…
Beginner friendly distos seem to have solved the package management problem, and there are adequate desktop environments, office suites, browsers, gaming, and everything else. But for professional use "adequate" doesn't cut it. Professionals need "good" and judge that by the standards of what is available on other platforms. 95% compatibility with the industry standard doesn't cut it. 80% of the features working at l…
However bad Linux is at package management, Windows is even worse. So I'm not sure how your argument convinces people that Windows package managers are superior?
This article nails a lot of the issues with Windows 11. I bit the bullet and upgraded to Windows 11 late last year thinking it must be an improvement over Windows 10. It turned out to be a big step backwards. - Changing the default browser is a lot of work instead of a single click. - I can't move the task bar to the side, even though almost every monitor nowadays has much more horizontal space than vertical. - All a…
> no side taskbar This is literally the first thing I do on a fresh install. What the hell were they thinking > start menu further ruined but whyyyyyyyyyyyy I honestly never had a problem with Microsoft Windows over its UI decisions until Windows 8. Windows up to and including Windows 7 were actually ok, because you could put the start menu on the side, switch to classic UI, turn off the graphical embellishments that…
Windows 8 became very
tabletified, but
with options...
Windows 8 became very
tabletified, but
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/me removes foot from mouth I see what you mean now, I screwed up reading your first comment.
I think this is the first time someone has ever reacted non-negatively towards me online after I brought up the subject. UEFI has good PR and I think people refuse to believe the implications of what happened. It would be like having Google officially be the only CA for HTTPS certificates and then removing HTTP from Chrome. That's basically what the security community did with PCs.
Even though Secure Boot can be disabled on most hardware afaict [0] that's still a step consumers won't take so the point still stands easily. Especially with the amount of "you will break everything and kick a a puppy" that manufacturers throw in there to disuade anyone who manages to get to the menu.
[0] worked at a repair ahop until 1.5ish weeks ago, have disabled SB on a lot of hardware.
Of course I agree with these confounding decisions, and I've written about it before. I must, however, point out that yes, you do in fact need an Apple account to log into your Mac device on recent versions of macOS. Not only that, but you won't be able to download any apps (free or not) without adding a credit card to your account. I found the mac setup experience to be even worse than Windows 10 (both of these done…
This is false, at least as of macOS 12.3. However, the install process does encourage signing-in. Unlike Windows, though, it doesn’t require non-obvious shenanigans—like disconnecting from the Internet—to bypass it during the installer. Reportedly, the latest Windows 11 Insider builds do not provide any means to create a local account in the installer.
> Not only that, but you won't be able to download any apps (free or not) without adding a credit card to your account.
This is also false, I presently have an Apple account with no CC and have downloaded (free) Mac App Store applications using it.