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macOS Big Sur Preview

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321–330 of 391 posts

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#321
post #52

I was really hoping they'd take some time to address Catalina's glaring issues — its slowness, bugginess, just general sloppiness — and instead they did the opposite. Honestly, every time Apple has done anything with the Mac the past couple of years, they've screwed it up. The infamous keyboards that they doubled-down and then tripled-down upon (I have personally had five keyboard replacements). The way Catalina send…

That's what point releases are for. If they're going to fix the things you're talking about, it'll be done as a point release to 10.15.

Which they really haven't done.

Mail still has a message loss bug. 5 point releases later...

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently contemplating the switch as well. Any recommendations about making the keyboard shortcuts as similar to macOS as possible? I'll be using my MBP, and after years of muscle memory, it'd be nice if I could continue using CMD as the primary modifier key for all things: clipboard, navigation, etc. I know you can configure everything, but maybe there's some easy patch or pre-configured plugin for KDE?

Take a look at my response[1] from a couple of weeks ago to a similar question on HN. The tl;dr is to use Plasma Desktop, take advantage of its ability to create keyboard shortcuts for everything, and use Plasmoids to create a global menu and dock. I didn't mention it in the post, but KDE Connect[2] works on most desktop environments and integrates with tablets, phones and other computers, and it's great. There's san…

Thanks for these suggestions, I will be returning to linuxland after over a decade away.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#323
post #34

The UI and UX seem to be getting worse on macOS with the “iOSification” of the OS. I thought Jony Ive’s exit would stop that trend. It’ll be interesting to read perspectives from John Gruber, M J Tsai, Marco Arment, etc. I still haven’t upgraded from Mojave to Catalina because of serious bugs reported by other people (including data loss issues in Mail). I’ll see if Big Sur shows improvements (reported by others) and…

my immediate reaction to seeing that ui was 1. playdoh os 2. (more seriously) its pretty obvious they are making it look like ios so that catalyst and pure ios/ipad apps dont look too out of place personaliy, i think its a bit sad, because it makes the desktop feel less professional and notice the larger fonts, spacing etc... seems like the ui could be used for touchscreens almost, instead of optimized for mouse/keyb…

It seems a UI regression is a new feature for every OS these days. Very disappointing.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#324
post #34

The UI and UX seem to be getting worse on macOS with the “iOSification” of the OS. I thought Jony Ive’s exit would stop that trend. It’ll be interesting to read perspectives from John Gruber, M J Tsai, Marco Arment, etc. I still haven’t upgraded from Mojave to Catalina because of serious bugs reported by other people (including data loss issues in Mail). I’ll see if Big Sur shows improvements (reported by others) and…

Yeah, the design is far too “bubbly” and “floaty” and really doesn’t fit what I’d want out of a desktop environment.

Every app looks like the old iTunes, which had an appalling interface. I don’t understand this at all.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at my response[1] from a couple of weeks ago to a similar question on HN. The tl;dr is to use Plasma Desktop, take advantage of its ability to create keyboard shortcuts for everything, and use Plasmoids to create a global menu and dock. I didn't mention it in the post, but KDE Connect[2] works on most desktop environments and integrates with tablets, phones and other computers, and it's great. There's san…

Thanks for these suggestions, I will be returning to linuxland after over a decade away.

No problem. Check out r/unixporn and r/kde on Reddit, too, there seems to be a trend of some users mimicking macOS flows on there.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#326
Why are new features in apps mentioned in an OS update? It is a recent trend but I recall being able to upgrade to Office 2003 from 2000 without requiring an entire new OS.

These days, they talk about tiny features in one of the apps (eg. Messages) as if it’s a giant new feature of the OS. Application software is not system software!

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#327
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, escape is actually slower (both in movement speed and in actual invokation) than ^[. lit: `CTRL+[` I know habits die hard, and "you're holding it wrong" is not a valid excuse- and I know that I also dislike massively not having an escape key. But for vim specifically; there is an escape sequence and the escape key is an alternative method for that. (similar to how the arrows "work" but hjkl is the "real" way of…

So you’re saying that pressing two keys is faster than pressing one key? In which universe?? Is eating 2 sandwiches also faster than eating one? Are 2 electrical impulses also faster than 1? I think not.

yes pressing two keys can be faster than pressing one, because you have two hands, pressing A+L is faster than pressing control+delete, due to locality.. your hands are likely closer to A+L than control and delete.

Locality is important, in fact it's the largest factor in determining speed of a hotkey's access.. "distance from home-row"[0] is a measurement that is consistently touted when referring to vim in particular.

Control+[ is significantly faster because your hands move independently. However I'm just now remembering that I always remapped my capslock to be an additional control, so it isn't necessarily universal that control is "as fast" since my "control" is actually on the homerow.. which is unusual.

As it happens, though I was wrong earlier and was confusing ^c and ^[

from `:h i_CTRL-C`

> CTRL-C: Quit insert mode, go back to Normal mode. Do not check for abbreviations. Does not trigger the InsertLeave autocommand event.

^[ is interpreted exactly the same as ESC; vim can't see a difference. (you can see this under `:h keycode` )

[0]: https://books.google.se/books?id=LA9QDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT201&lpg=P...

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cleaning up and using a consistent design language across platforms This is not a positive. A laptop is not a big iPhone and shouldn't use the same design language. One of the worst thing about Windows 10 is its use of huge, touch-friendly interfaces in an OS most commonly used with a keyboard and mouse. MacOS appears to be headed the same way (and it doesn't even support touch screens).

Per Fitz's Law, touch-friendly is mouse friendly. The larger the click target the faster and easier it is to click, especially as the distance between the current mouse position and the target increases. It's a huge mouse accessibility win to design touch-first target sizes, and there's decades of UX research on that topic. Just because the mouse is precise enough to do it doesn't mean that users should have to "360…

Larger targets also increase the distance between the current mouse position and the target for everything but the closest item.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this answer is "buy something else to make your life eaiser" but hear me out - either a USB-C monitor, or a thunderbolt dock. I got a USB-C monitor last time I upgraded (LG 27" 4K) and having a single cable to plug in, which not only carries the display signal, but also charges my MBP, AND carries the USB signal so that I can plug wired keyboard and anything else into the hub in the monitor still feels ridicul…

Any recommendations on a TB3 dock? I recently searched for one, and none of the top rated ones can support a 16" MBP power requirements. One of the manufacturers even went as far as saying "How often do you really use your CPU/GPU at 100%?"[0] Dell and HP have higher powered docks, but there are many conflicting reports on if it can deliver 96W to non-dell/hp laptops. TB3/USB-C is a giant mess that is too confusing f…

CalDigit TS3 Plus: I have a 16” MBP and two 4K monitors, keyboard and mouse attached to it.

Charging works fine even though I don’t think it pumps same power as PSU out.

I do a lot of Rust programming and use VMs too. Haven’t run into a situation where it runs out of juice while attached.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible they will do both. Fixing bugs isn’t really keynote worthy, so hopefully there’s a ton of stability fixes behind the scenes.

It was keynote-worthy for Snow Leopard, with the infamous "0 new features" slide.

"0 new features" was marketing that seems to have worked quite well. I can't remember where, but I swear I remember hearing that later from people at Apple. The major thing is they didn't do a big UI refresh. In Snow Leopard they: finally rewrote Finder in Cocoa, released Quicktime X, shipped a 64bit kernel, released Grand Central Dispatch, released OpenCL. Plus a bunch of smaller updates and tweaks. They dropped included things like printer drivers (which now download on demand) which make the install size smaller.
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