The tools I love are made by awful people • Hacker News Board

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#141

Post by akho » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

ranger_danger wrote: post #136

dismalaf wrote: post #56

I've been using Linux exclusively for 15 years. Went through my entire university degree using only Linux. The biggest issue people face when switching is the desire for it to be the same as their previous OS. It's not. It never will be. It's different (and IMO better). Like GNOME Shell, so many people hate it. No dock, no way to minimize Windows, etc... Until you actually try to learn it a little. Launching apps is…

> the desire for it to be the same as their previous OS I think most FOSS developers completely miss this point, assuming their goal is to get more people to use their software. Sure GNOME can be usable if you learn a different way, but you can't force everyone to do that. Not even most people. So I think if they really cared about doing what's necessary to get a lot more users, they're going to have to make their pr…

> assuming their goal is to get more people to use their software.

That’s rare, and is a very difficult motivation to understand. Such projects are also usually a mess.

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#142

Post by ac29 » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 3:31 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #57

lenkite wrote: post #12

I would love it if I could use Linux on the Desktop. Windows 11 feels a practical joke played on humanity by Nadella. The new Macbooks have amazing hardware, but the software quality has deteriorated considerably - even spotlight has bugs nowadays. However, I need basic sleep/restore to work on my laptop - and it feels like this is a Mars-mission-effort level problem for Linux to solve. If the Linux Software Foundati…

> However, I need basic sleep/restore to work on my laptop - and it feels like this is a Mars-mission-effort level problem for Linux to solve. Pick any model on this list that has all green boxes. There is no step 2. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo (Sent from my thinkpad with perfectly working sleep)

I've been using Intel Dells for years without sleep issues in Linux.

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#143

Post by ac29 » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 3:39 PM UTC

all2 wrote: post #16

lenkite wrote: post #12

I would love it if I could use Linux on the Desktop. Windows 11 feels a practical joke played on humanity by Nadella. The new Macbooks have amazing hardware, but the software quality has deteriorated considerably - even spotlight has bugs nowadays. However, I need basic sleep/restore to work on my laptop - and it feels like this is a Mars-mission-effort level problem for Linux to solve. If the Linux Software Foundati…

I hate that this is true. I have 10 year old hardware and I still haven't managed to get suspend on lid close to work. Also, power management? Linux seems really power hungry. I expect 6ish hours out of the battery I have, but with Linux doing browsing and coding I get 2 to 3ish hours, even with cpu throttling and the dimmest back light settings. Have mainline Fedora or Ubuntu solved these issues?

Any reasonably modern laptop has runtime power control, which can make a huge difference. Personally, I use TuneD: https://github.com/redhat-performance/tuned

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#144

Post by bobsmooth » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #57

lenkite wrote: post #12

I would love it if I could use Linux on the Desktop. Windows 11 feels a practical joke played on humanity by Nadella. The new Macbooks have amazing hardware, but the software quality has deteriorated considerably - even spotlight has bugs nowadays. However, I need basic sleep/restore to work on my laptop - and it feels like this is a Mars-mission-effort level problem for Linux to solve. If the Linux Software Foundati…

> However, I need basic sleep/restore to work on my laptop - and it feels like this is a Mars-mission-effort level problem for Linux to solve. Pick any model on this list that has all green boxes. There is no step 2. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo (Sent from my thinkpad with perfectly working sleep)

What if I have a laptop not on that list and I don't want to buy a whole new machine?

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#145

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 4:05 PM UTC

bobsmooth wrote: post #144

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, I need basic sleep/restore to work on my laptop - and it feels like this is a Mars-mission-effort level problem for Linux to solve. Pick any model on this list that has all green boxes. There is no step 2. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Lenovo (Sent from my thinkpad with perfectly working sleep)

What if I have a laptop not on that list and I don't want to buy a whole new machine?

Then it will probably still work, that just happens to be a nice way to ensure make sure ahead of time. Also, I would argue that expecting any OS to work on every machine anyone anywhere owns is a touch unreasonable; none of the other options (Windows, macOS, Android, ChromeOS) are held to that standard.

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#146

Post by imgabe » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 4:20 PM UTC

ranger_danger wrote: post #134

imgabe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If you determine a Tesla is the best car to fit your needs, there are far better ways to influence Elon's actions than depriving yourself of the best car for you. You could write your Senator / Congressperson to support laws that would curtail Elon's actions. You could speak publicly and propose better things than what Elon is doing or publicize how and why they're harmful, etc. Buying or not buying a Tesla is v…

> Buying or not buying a Tesla is very unlikely to influence Elon at all. But it can certainly influence other people's perception of you... I think what we all have to decide though is how much that matters to us, should we decide to buy one anyway. > Do you also need to individually vet every one of their opinions before you enrich them by buying a Tesla? I think most people's negative image of a company/project te…

> But it can certainly influence other people's perception of you... I think what we all have to decide though is how much that matters to us, should we decide to buy one anyway.

Yes, this is a concern, and it's a direct result of the phenomenon I'm talking about. There are violent, stupid people who will attack you because they think that buying a product means you endorse every political opinion every person who made that product ever had.

I'm actually looking to buy a car soon, and I've considered this in regard to Tesla. Do I want to deal with having my car keyed or painted or set on fire because of what someone thinks about Elon? Do I want to potentially put myself or my family in danger because someone thinks that attacking a random Tesla consumer is the best way to effect change in the world? And, frankly, no, I don't. But that's what I'm talking about. If you find yourself attacking strangers or destroying their property because you disagree with the politics of some CEO the person you're attacking has never met, you are in fact the bad guy.

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#147

Post by imgabe » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 4:33 PM UTC

jmye wrote: post #123

imgabe wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You personally know the conditions? You know that the workers would be better off not having the option of working in the Zara factory? I don't mean a choice between working for Zara and a hypothetical fantasy option of them working in an office with 40 hour work weeks and air conditioning, I mean their actual other option like subsistence farming or whatever they did before there was a Zara factory. You feel you are…

> You personally know the conditions? You think I can only understand the conditions if.. what? I've directly worked at the factory? Published a peer-reviewed study? > You know that the workers would be better off not having the option of working in the Zara factory? That’s not the only other option and presenting it that way is intentionally dishonest. This entire line of thinking, as presented, is absolute sophism…

> You think I can only understand the conditions if.. what? I've directly worked at the factory? Published a peer-reviewed study?

When do you think you understand the conditions? When you watch a TikTok video about it? When you read an artistic the Atlantic? When you watch a segment 60 minutes?

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#148

Post by mrguyorama » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 4:37 PM UTC

thefz wrote: post #108

lenkite wrote: post #12

I would love it if I could use Linux on the Desktop. Windows 11 feels a practical joke played on humanity by Nadella. The new Macbooks have amazing hardware, but the software quality has deteriorated considerably - even spotlight has bugs nowadays. However, I need basic sleep/restore to work on my laptop - and it feels like this is a Mars-mission-effort level problem for Linux to solve. If the Linux Software Foundati…

> The new Macbooks have amazing hardware Hm. You can't really repair or upgrade them, so you don't own the hardware at all. That's far from amazing.

People who insist Apple makes good hardware are falling for marketing. Apple historically has had constant engineering poor choices and bad designs and outright flaws that they just never acknowledge, and for some reason people take that as "good".

Back in the day, Apple laptops used to cook and kill themselves with poor GPU heat management.

Several versions of macbooks shortened a display cable such that it would degrade over time because it simply wasn't up to task, and eventually your screen would be borked and have absolutely ungoogleable issues (this happened to me)

They had an entire run of macbooks with flawed batteries.

The entire keyboard fiasco, all in an effort to bikeshed computer thinness FFS. Meanwhile even before the butterfly tech, macbook keyboards have always been trash. They have un-ergonomic keys and no travel and just seem to prioritize aesthetics over usage.

Internal connectors have 50v backlight pins right next to logic level pins which means instead of a drop of water just killing the backlight power supply, it routes 50v through everything and kills half your mainboard components.

Pre M series macbooks hard thermal throttling issues if you charged them from the ports on one side, but not the other.

Apple laptops have NEVER had good thermal management.

Soldered SSDs that are stupidly tiny, especially in the early M1 machines that had 8gb RAM and bad swap behavior that was actively killing people's SSDs

Apple buys good screens to put in their machines, and the frame is pretty rigid, and THAT'S IT. Nothing else about their machines is a step above other laptop manufacturers hardware wise

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#149

Post by mrguyorama » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 4:59 PM UTC

dismalaf wrote: post #130

geniium wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and the "it simply works" feeling

Install a modern distro. It does just work. I've literally done zero config to my laptop, nothing has broken or not worked. Literally everything works. Touchpad, touchscreen, webcam, fingerprint reader, stylus, suspend, audio, etc...

Always love how arrogant Linux users are: "You can't possibly experience something different from me"

I wanted to make a genuine effort to get into using Linux because it's the only OS I'm not super comfortable admin'ing. I bought a secondhand Lenovo t440 and installed Linux Mint on it. Everything seemed to work well, boot was nice and quick, no issues with WiFi chipset or sleep and battery life was at least okay.

It was fine for browsing the web with Firefox for my normal web browsing, and made a great netflix machine.

Then I kept trying to do other things. I was playing with Blender at the time and despite the laptop being old at the time, it Mint installed a broken intel graphics driver. It couldn't render anything without artifacts and was unusable. The fixed driver was older than the release of Mint I was using. Why didn't Mint install an up to date driver?

I wanted use my steam controller to control mouse and keyboard input exactly like you can on any windows machine. In Linux, it required you to hand edit some config files to allow Steam to even communicate with it's own controller. Like what the fuck? Why?

I wanted to dual boot Windows to play more steam games (this was before proton) but if you want to dual boot Linux and Windows, you have to install windows FIRST. Otherwise you have to be an expert in x86-64 boot semantics to do the configuration required. So this was impossible without reinstalling everything.

So fine, I decided to just install Windows on it. Windows pulled the license details out of the BIOS from the previous owner (whoops) and auto-registered itself, and had the fixed intel graphics driver from the get go. I installed steam and the steam controller worked as expected. Battery life was SIGNIFICANTLY better.

THAT'S usability. THAT'S "just works".

Re: The tools I love are made by awful people

#150

Post by mrguyorama » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #21

dheerajvs wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with the sentiment, just out of curiosity, would you buy a Tesla if it meets your needs and even if you disapprove of Elon's actions?

Yes. If you determine a Tesla is the best car to fit your needs, there are far better ways to influence Elon's actions than depriving yourself of the best car for you. You could write your Senator / Congressperson to support laws that would curtail Elon's actions. You could speak publicly and propose better things than what Elon is doing or publicize how and why they're harmful, etc. Buying or not buying a Tesla is v…

>If you determine a Tesla is the best car to fit your needs, there are far better ways to influence Elon's actions than depriving yourself of the best car for you.

As if "having the best car for you" is some sort of moral imperative or necessity, as if buying a less luxury vehicle is some sort of unthinkable option.

>You could write your Senator / Congressperson to support laws that would curtail Elon's actions.

Ah yes, tell the government that supports elon and that elon is part of to simply not do those things. Surely that is a workable option right now!