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Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

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Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#171

Post by sircastor »

I’ve given strong thought to switching away from macOS. I too have been a Max user all my life, a Macintosh Plus being the first computer in our house. I would get fed up at Apple’s hardware choices or its limitations on users.

I have had a dozen Linux computers with various systems on them. I don’t know if it’s because they were Dell machines, or if it’s an Ubuntu thing, but I have had almost every single one turn into a brick after a Canonical-issued update.

The kind of brick where you have to boot into the boot loader and into single user mode (?) and start issuing arcane commands to try to recover your system with some old kernel.

The thing that keeps me on my Mac is that I can mess around with Unix computing all day, and then go back to being with done when I want to get back to using my computer. I don’t feel confident like that with Linux.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#172

Post by Maursault »

web3-is-a-scam wrote: post #133
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there are specific issues. The problem is that with each release of macOS usability, reliability and performance regress. If you're interested in these things and not so much in "bling" and questionable new features, then you'd share probably Ken's "atrocious" opinion. An example is the latest System Preferences. It's virtually unusable.

Seems overblown to me, been a macos user for over a decade and the ios-ification o f the mac hasn't been a big deal for me. My greybeard workflows still work the same (everything in iterm, using vim, tmux, all the "standard stuff"), sometimes updating xcode is a pain but w/e. Homebrew still chugging along. Parallels is fantastic. Performance of the M1 Max on my new mac studio is just heavenly. The changes to macos ha…

> Homebrew still chugging along.

For seven years longer and with 20K more ports than Homebrew, and without leaving a mess on your system or munging permissions, so is MacPorts.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#173

Post by rubatuga »

web3-is-a-scam wrote: post #133
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there are specific issues. The problem is that with each release of macOS usability, reliability and performance regress. If you're interested in these things and not so much in "bling" and questionable new features, then you'd share probably Ken's "atrocious" opinion. An example is the latest System Preferences. It's virtually unusable.

Seems overblown to me, been a macos user for over a decade and the ios-ification o f the mac hasn't been a big deal for me. My greybeard workflows still work the same (everything in iterm, using vim, tmux, all the "standard stuff"), sometimes updating xcode is a pain but w/e. Homebrew still chugging along. Parallels is fantastic. Performance of the M1 Max on my new mac studio is just heavenly. The changes to macos ha…

Except that spotlight doesn't find all system settings. And I've already ran into a bug where the system settings dialog loses sync with the configuration requiring the app to restart. And also had settings pane just turn blank.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#174

Post by superposeur »

nntwozz wrote: post #27

Well good for him. But we have to let go of this notion that for GNU/Linux to win, Apple has to lose. I'm paraphrasing but can't shake that feeling when I hear those claps in the video. When are we ever going to grow up?

Note: this was at a linux conference.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#175

Post by ryandrake »

bityard wrote: post #119
garciasn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this continues to be why Linux suffers with the mass market. I ran Linux solely from 1997 to 2004 on the desktop and switched back because it was such a pain in the ass to manage. Every time I go back, it just isn’t catching up to the mainstream OSs’ ability to manage without “futzing”. My M2 currently lasts all day on the battery while spending half of it on conference calls and half of it writing code. Nothing…

I get irrationally angry when people imply that Mac and Linux are somehow similar, or interchangeable. They are not! Not even close! I think this is where a lot of the negative opinion of Linux comes from, people lament some issue they have with their Mac and someone else will say, "oh you should try Linux, it's really good now." And so they do and are surprised to find that experience is vastly different. Linux is a…

I disagree that it’s a trade-off. Linux could match Apple’s out of the box battery performance. It’s just that nobody seems to care about Linux’s “out of the box” default configuration because, well, the user can futz with it! Things are slowly getting better though. But we still don’t have that distribution where things are already futzed for you and everything runs as well as it can.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#176

Post by [deleted] »

milgra wrote: post #159
dtgriscom wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that it should be difficult, if not impossible, for random applications to listen in on user actions, is there a better way Apple could have done this? (Disclaimer: Apple fan/user since 1985.)

A popup on the first start with an alert and a password prompt is a good solution, but usually too many users type in their passwords blindly in case of a password prompt, so I would go with just an alert with "you need root privileges to run this app" and then they have to figure out 1. why do they need root privileges 2. how do they start an app with root privileges.

[deleted]

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#177

Post by wyclif »

blackhaz wrote: post #156
burntalmonds wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"..what Apple is doing to something which should allow you to work is just atrocious.." Anyone know what his specific issues are?

To me it appears Apple has lost all the focus after Steve Jobs, there is no "do more with less" spirit in Apple products anymore. They still got some Mac OS X inertia, but it's mostly about changing colors, animations, rearranging items and trying to address every possible use case - instead of offering new OS paradigms. It's interesting that their hardware division keeps innovating - people seem to love their M1s. I…

I also miss the Snow Leopard era. Not a single crash under stress!

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#178

Post by stametseater »

wkat4242 wrote: post #148
kitsunesoba wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think permission systems are bound to wind up in all desktop operating systems, eventually. They’re already on Linux for those using Flatpak. Trusting random third party binaries with access to everything is increasingly too much of a gamble, even for more technical users. That said, I agree that the macOS implementation has issues. It’s tricky though, because if they make it as simple as confirm/deny dialogs, you’…

"Random third party binaries" are not something Linux users really use, generally. Most of it is open source and comes through the repository.

Indeed. The idea of flatpack is to change desktop linux culture by normalizing the installation of 3rd party software, particularly proprietary software that people otherwise wouldn't trust without some form of sandboxing.

Who does this benefit? I can think of two groups of people. 1. Commercial software vendors who want more Linux users to install their proprietary software. 2. 'Transplants', new Linux users who are already accustomed to the Windows/MacOS style of wantonly installing proprietary third party software they downloaded off random corners of the net, and don't want or know to change their habits.

The value proposition for experienced linux users who don't do that sort of thing in the first place is next to nil. The only applications that might benefit from such sandboxing are applications like browsers, which have large attack surfaces and might be compromised while browsing the net. But even this is mostly theoretical, not a realistic day-to-day concern for typical linux desktop users.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#179

Post by runjake »

dagmx wrote: post #108
rasengan wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple ecosystem is no longer software - only apps. It’s hard to do(code) normal things on the OS because of all of the fancy “security”

What code is prevented by security? Other than limits to kexts, your code isn’t beholden to most of the system security changes unless you specifically opt in to make a sandboxed app.

Your code is certainly “beholden” to most of the system security changes, and your app is effectively sandboxes regardless of your wishes.

Source: Self after working on anti-theft software for macOS, for a few years now.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#180

Post by kitsunesoba »

deergomoo wrote: post #74
davidy123 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get at least 5h on a Thinkpad T14s (Ryzen 6850U), without tweaking, using "balanced" mode. I know some people think 5h is not enough, but it's plenty for a full day of work. If the System 76 system was Intel based, that might have been the problem, AMD has been way ahead of them for power usage in the last few years.

Raw battery life aside, I think one big advantage macOS still has is that its power management isn't modal. There is a low power mode like iOS if you really want to eek out as much runtime as possible, but I've never once hit a need to use it. Outside of that, you lose no performance when running on battery, you get full performance when you need it, and high efficiency when you don't. Needing to manually choose a po…

Plugged-in performance while unplugged without torpedoing battery life is what is really special about M-series laptops for me. It’s such a stark contrast with my ThinkPad which becomes noticeably more sluggish the moment it’s untethered in “balanced” mode and eating through battery like candy with “Performance”.
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