231–240 of 658 posts
For the last few days I was trying to revive an old MacBook Air for a non-techie friend. It had 4 GB of RAM. It had Catalina on it and was completely unusable. Hovering on anything would bring up the spinner which would take a couple of minutes to resolve itself. I tried reinstalling the OS, which didn't help. The top recommendation was to revert to Mojave. Finally, after three days of struggle, I gave up and install…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been seeing it a lot on reddit as well, with a lot of non-technical users asking "how do I get started with linux?" I think this is a real thing and I think a combination of MS demanding everyone get new hardware and Valve really polishing a lot of linux has gone a long way to get non-technical users to start seriously considering linux. It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a…
Anecdotally I’ve seen among my non-tech friends more questions about VPNs. Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers. It’s literally the ads and bloatware. Windows is horrible unless you are technical enough to strategically disable the bloatware, and keep on disabling it as the updates continually reenable it. And if you are technical enough to disable it then…
I hope more companies and MBAs open their eyes to this: that the long term cost of user-hostile changes is negative compared to respecting users and building good products.
Also currently it helps to stand out from the sea of crap products.
Play the long game. Make good products. Bring joy and positive experience to peoples lives. Sleep well at night.
“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews” Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
Typing "Visual Studio" into the new start menu may randomly trigger a Bing search for "Visual Studio" instead of running it, but on the other hand that makes Bings KPIs go up so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not.
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macOS is particularly annoying and gets in the way more than an OS should. Windows can be tamed and the Linux experience can be perfectly smooth depending on distro and hardware. I assume macOS can be tamed as well, but it seems like much more of an uphill battle.
If you just install MacOS, Windows, or any major Linux distros, all work okay with default settings and drivers, almost all the time. Problems start when you want something else or more. It’s like when you want Docker on MacOS. Helpful people will say that you should just use colima. Yeah it works perfectly well… until you want to open udp ports (this was the case half a year ago). All 3 OSes are like that, just the…
I really don't understand what is different about my installs of Windows 11 compared to what I read in all these types of articles. I have zero issues with the platform day in and day out with heavy workloads like Pro Tools and Unreal Engine devkit. Games run without stutter and issue, all my features are snappy, Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results. I have tweaked a few s…
I just bought a laptop that came with Fedora installed. This isn't anything new, but what really blew me away is that everything... just worked. No tinkering. No alternative modules built from source (hopefully with a good DKMS script). Everything... just worked. I'd blocked out a few hours to get everything working in a satisfactory state and... I had nothing to do, really.
And when I say everything I mean EVERYTHING, not just the features that were significant to my own use cases. Mind-blowing, if you think about it.
For those of us that have been using Linux for a long time (since 1999, here), the improvements have been incremental, and hard to spot over time. But sometimes I encounter something and it just blows my mind how good desktop Linux has become. I just bought a laptop that came with Fedora installed. This isn't anything new, but what really blew me away is that everything... just worked. No tinkering. No alternative mo…
The only exception is when we got a really new batch of Lenovo P1 laptops for work, and the patches likely were not fully merged yet. So as long as you’re not getting the first batch it is generally pretty good.
I've been using a system 76 laptop for the past 3 years. Runs perfectly, no surprises. Unfortunately, I need a mac for work because the laptop service folks do not know what to do with linux and do not have a relationship with a vendor like system76. Pros: The best development experience you can have. Everything is native linux. There is no beating that. This of course will be a problem if hobbies/work use windows. I…
Really only Photoshop is the big gaping hole I feel as a linux user. Gimp is just atrocious. There is a desktop webview of PhotoPea, but it's not the same.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been seeing it a lot on reddit as well, with a lot of non-technical users asking "how do I get started with linux?" I think this is a real thing and I think a combination of MS demanding everyone get new hardware and Valve really polishing a lot of linux has gone a long way to get non-technical users to start seriously considering linux. It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a…
Anecdotally I’ve seen among my non-tech friends more questions about VPNs. Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers. It’s literally the ads and bloatware. Windows is horrible unless you are technical enough to strategically disable the bloatware, and keep on disabling it as the updates continually reenable it. And if you are technical enough to disable it then…
I would say that’s absolutely the most normal gamer way of playing PC games. As someone who is mostly given up on playing games on a computer and prefer consoles, I’ve thought of doing the same thing.
I agree it’s really impressive that lots of people have decided to try Linux, far more than I remember ever before.
But I’m worried this is “the moment“. Possibly the best shot that’s gonna happen for a long time. And if people find things aren’t as ready as they think from what they hear they’re going to be burned and they’re not coming back. The next time around not only will they not come, they’ll push other people away from trying.
I don’t know if we’ve reached that magical inflection point or not. I think some people are using rosy glasses again though. The real momentum has never been this strong. But it’s not a done deal.
I ve been a happy user of debian stable for 15 years now, if I could get a Linux laptop with a comparable battery life to apple's then it's done for me. I think linux people tend to forget how important battery life is on a laptop
Would be great... what I've heard is, Apple's incredible battery life comes from the vertical integration - they make everything, the laptop, the OS... so they are able to optimize it incredibly well. Even running Linux on a Apple Silicon Mac doesn't get you the same kind of battery life because of how much work the OS does putting different components to sleep etc. (though one could argue Apple's arbitrarily making…
The big "issue" with Linux on non-server workloads imo is a lack of testing like this - which is completely understandable. Afiak Microsoft runs millions of automated tests on various hardware configurations _a day_.
Intel does something similar for the Linux kernel, which no doubt explains the relative stability of Linux server vs Desktop (servers are running far less "OS level" software in general in day to day use than the desktop).
The desktop experience itself needs more automated testing. There are so many bugs/regressions which I've noticed in eg gnome which should have been caught by e2e testing - I do try to report them when I see them.
Doing a bit more digging there seems to be some basic e2e testing for gnome ran nightly but currently most tests are failing https://openqa.gnome.org/tests/12128.
This isn't a criticism at all btw, it's quite boring and resource intensive work for a project like gnome to do. I hope soon some large corp decides to go all in on realLinux desktop (not ChromeOS) and can devote resources to this.