31–40 of 173 posts
The desktop experience is still a mess. They’ve become complacent with ‘it works out of the box’ but that’s not the bar. Apple sets the bar and there’s no prize for second place. You’re on Apple or Linux or brain damaged and using Windows, but nobodies using two as their primary driver, and so one ecosystem dominates. I’m glad it’s Apple because the GNU crowd are virtue signalers first and software developers second.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The desktop experience is still a mess. The closest I have seen to creating a good experience was Ubuntu Unity. I noticed it being used in universities, and in the office I used to work at. I'm disappointed that the Unity project wasn't taken forward, and it seems to me that Gnome just reimplemented it, but missed many best parts of the original.
The 2d desktop is over anyway. Tomorrows desktop is 3d AR
It works mostly, until it fails without hints and is a mess to fix
The desktop experience is still a mess. They’ve become complacent with ‘it works out of the box’ but that’s not the bar. Apple sets the bar and there’s no prize for second place. You’re on Apple or Linux or brain damaged and using Windows, but nobodies using two as their primary driver, and so one ecosystem dominates. I’m glad it’s Apple because the GNU crowd are virtue signalers first and software developers second.…
See this about the multi monitor stuff on macOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31361974
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The desktop experience is still a mess. The closest I have seen to creating a good experience was Ubuntu Unity. I noticed it being used in universities, and in the office I used to work at. I'm disappointed that the Unity project wasn't taken forward, and it seems to me that Gnome just reimplemented it, but missed many best parts of the original.
The 2d desktop is over anyway. Tomorrows desktop is 3d AR
How Linux freezes under high memory usage, Mac OS and Windows both handle such situations well without requiring a hard reboot.
The desktop experience is still a mess. They’ve become complacent with ‘it works out of the box’ but that’s not the bar. Apple sets the bar and there’s no prize for second place. You’re on Apple or Linux or brain damaged and using Windows, but nobodies using two as their primary driver, and so one ecosystem dominates. I’m glad it’s Apple because the GNU crowd are virtue signalers first and software developers second.…
Many years ago, around 2006-2008, my PC exclusively ran Slackware after saying goodbye to XP. It wasn't really beefy, so I installed FVWM. I could do all the university assignments on it. Internet browsing, multimedia, USB plug n play, printing etc etc worked fine. Guess my use cases were kinda minimalistic.
These days I mostly work on Mac, but still have a headless Linux PC running for personal tinkering. Probably I need to have another taste of Linux desktop experience :D
On the other hand, window managers under linux are freaking awesome (no pun intended).
Every disagreement leads to a new snowflake distribution, fragmenting the community.
Hence why the Year of Desktop Linux ended up being taken by a browser, a managed language runtime and running inside of VMs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A proprietary driver that works is better than an open-source one that doesn’t work or doesn’t even exist.
Disagree but not because of philosophical reasons like “I want to fix my driver and know what it is doing”, but actually practical reasons — tons of companies make a driver plus hardware and end up semi abandoning it.. but some people in the community with open source drivers will often fix it.. then after some time people end up realizing the way they fixed it is better than the original driver and now the companies…
Maintaining an open-source kernel driver is extremely complex and not user-friendly for the individual, so the complexity level is in practice similar to doing black-box reverse-engineering on a closed-source Windows driver, in both cases you need significant resources.
If you need to have a team of experienced kernel developers to maintain a driver continuously, that same team will be able to reverse-engineer & reimplement the closed-source driver just as well should it become necessary.
On the topic of lack of stable ABI under Linux, I find that closed-source Windows drivers have a much longer shelf-life than their Linux equivalents, so in practice I feel like the downside of drivers being closed-source in Windows is less of a problem because in practice you're less likely to have to modify it.
Distributing drivers is also a massive difference between the two models. With Windows, if someone builds a driver, that binary can be installed by any Windows user on a modern kernel (depending on what "level" of the ABI they're building against, the same driver can work all the way back to Windows 7). Once built, any Windows user can just install the binary, where as with Linux the built binary will only work for that very specific kernel version. The user-experience is definitely much better.