I mortgaged my future with a Mac • Hacker News Board

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#41

Post by keithpeter » Sat, Feb 23, 2013, 6:13 PM UTC

noahl wrote: post #17

rachelbythebay wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS: sell your soul to Apple. Android: sell your soul to Google. The thing is, I already did the second one to a far greater degree than most people ever do. I'm not about to repeat it.

What about the Ubuntu Phone? It might also make an offer for your soul, but I think it will let you say no. (Not that we have too much information about it yet.)

Oddly enough, that was my first thought. My takeway from the article was that the real annoyance in her life (therefore the itch that a programmer has to scratch, and thus help the rest of us) was iPhone related.

Rachel-by-the-bay is a dyed-in-the-wool linux-sysadmin so I gather from her Web pages, and has recent experience with software defined radio. Ubuntu phone is 'proper' linux but at a very early stage of development, see

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/23/ubuntu_tablets_first...

Sounds like rachel-by-the-bay's skillset fits Canonical's development plan.

Say what you like about Shuttleworth and Canonical, but you won't have to sell your soul to them and the development will be handled in public through the bug tracker and mail lists. They do respond to feedback. Shuttleworth needs to transition Canonical to profit/self sufficiency hence all the Amazon integration, but I think they learned their lesson over the Unity search integration. There will be an off switch in any future experiments of this nature I'm sure.

PS: my new year's resolution is a Web page per week which I owe to rachel-by-the-bay's Web site.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#42

Post by step3 » Sat, Feb 23, 2013, 6:13 PM UTC

So if there's not any good software for exporting iTunes and iPhoto data, sounds like a great opportunity to write something you can sell for $10 a pop.

I'm pretty sure there are already some decent options, though, especially for a programmer.

Regarding the commentary on the phone, it doesn't sound like the complaint is specific to Apple. The author categorically lists every major type of phone and dismisses them all.

There comes a point where it's useless to talk about what you don't like, and figure out what you do like. I take all of these "I'm going to start carrying around a regular phone, a regular camera, a Fodor's guide to the city I live in, a compass, a map, a notebook, a pen, and a gameboy" posts with a grain of salt.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#43

Post by crististm » Sat, Feb 23, 2013, 6:15 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #15

I mortgaged my future with KDE several years ago, and the KDE project "went off the rails" with v4. My usual ways of working weren't improved with new benefits - the entire rug was pulled out from under me. All my effort in learning KDE stuff, and putting my data in KDE apps was wasted, as I had to spend time to migrate all that data to other apps. I'm being somewhat sarcastic, but also honest - I used KDE as a prima…

When I could not bear the KDE4 anymore, I tried KDE3 again for a while and then switched to Xfce. If they deviate from their goal I'll figure out what to do. But for now, KDE4 and Gnome3 are out of the question.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#44

Post by matwood » Sat, Feb 23, 2013, 6:16 PM UTC

But, I'm stuck. All of my music is in iTunes, having been re-imported from the original CDs over a period of time. I can just re-rip all of it on my Linux box, but that's going to suck. Or, I can try to grovel around in their grungy database and try to make sense of it and "export" things, but I'm sure that will be even worse.

I'm confused about this line. I ripped all of my CDs to AAC using iTunes over the years and recently upped all of it to Google Music without any issue.

Oddly enough, the only format that has ever given me any problem with interoperability has been OGG.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#45

Post by mtts » Sat, Feb 23, 2013, 6:17 PM UTC

niggler wrote: post #29

"So, I just sat there and lived the passive life of a consumer at home. I clicked around the web and read stuff. I talked to people online. I listened to my music and watched the latest cat videos. I watched a lot of TV. But I didn't write any code. Oh no." nothing stops you from writing code on OSX. Plenty of people do it for their business . IOKit is strange coming from a Linux world, sure, but it works as well as…

>> "Then there's my phone. How do you use one of these things without a computer upon which to sync your data and backups?" >> Windows VM?

That only works when you disable USB on the host (which makes USB keyboards and mice temporarily unusable) while the Windows VM is running. And even then it sometimes just stops working after a while.

It's one of the reasons I ditched my iPhone and got an Android device.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#46

Post by keithpeter » Sat, Feb 23, 2013, 6:17 PM UTC

rachelbythebay wrote: post #8

ybaumes wrote: post #2

This post would constitute a good/constructive reply to the latter article : 25 Years to Mac - How Ubuntu Pushed Me Away from the PC[1] [1][ http://randomdrake.com/2013/02/23/25-years-to-mac-how-ubuntu... ]

Based on that article, I think Ubuntu probably would push me away from the PC, too. I used a variant called "Goobuntu" (guess where...) during my tenure at one particular company, and it was a mixed bag. I'm not sure how much was due to Ubuntu itself and how much was from the local meddling, but it was wonky in ways my Linux boxes normally aren't. Put it this way - my machine at work was some beastly multi-proc Penti…

Ubuntu is full fat and runs a lot of processes by default.

Once Canonical have the device drivers sorted for native linux on a range of hardware, there is nothing stopping anyone putting arch or slackware on the same platforms. Perhaps some extra gunk in the kernel.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#47

Post by celerity » Sat, Feb 23, 2013, 6:18 PM UTC

I moved my music from iTunes to Linux and back many times. It's really just a matter of finding the files (trivial) and copy-pasting (trivial).

I also don't understand the author's preferences. Macs weren't good enough for programming, so (s?)he switched to Linux. This was the whole cause of the iTunes trouble. Why does it, then, matter whether Macs are going downhill or not?

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#48

Post by helmut_hed » Sat, Feb 23, 2013, 6:18 PM UTC

webwielder wrote: post #16

I would be able to stomach this vague, disjointed rant if it had a different title, something like "I am experiencing minor inconveniences as a result of wanting to switch computing platforms".

IMO she did a good job of capturing the Linux vs. proprietary system tensions a technically sophisticated user might experience. I've had (and have) similar problems myself.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#49

Post by crusso » Sat, Feb 23, 2013, 6:18 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #23

Sitting here, still using a Mac as a dev/everything machine. I know Lion is supposed to suck and all, but my 2010 MBA still gets insane battery life under OS X, the tool chain is top-notch (Clang, LLVM, etc), there have been a ton of improvements under the hood (TLS support being a big one), and I actually appreciate full-screen XCode or Emacs given the 13" screen. Even Xcode seems to, in 4.6, be getting back to the…

Yeah, this is a really weak set of complaints to sail to the number one HN spot on a Saturday.

None of the problems seem like real problems.

Even the concern that Apple is post-Steve is insubstantial. I'm watching for signs of that eventual decline as much as the next Apple user, but there isn't any product degradation evidence... yet.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#50

Post by ricardobeat » Sat, Feb 23, 2013, 6:21 PM UTC

So she never actually used the MacBook for development yet says it "wasn't cutting it"? What specifically was missing that you can only get on Linux?

She also paints the consumption-only device picture, yet it has nothing to do with the machine, only herself; that and the post-steve thing makes it look like she's just regurgitating the stereotypical anti-Apple ideas.