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Broken

tyler.io

391–400 of 571 posts

Re: Broken

#391

Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago. I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software. The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. - No communication between orgs. Tons of bureaucratic tape to cut through just to get a hand on someone working on a different product - Barely any communication between teams. Literally ev…

And yet most of Apple's products are consistently best-in-class, so I guess it's working for them? And a bumper crop of bugs in a point zero macOS release doesn't count as a disaster. They've been shipping super buggy point zeros for two decades.

Re: Broken

#392
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes the MacOS UI so much better than say Gnome or Enlightenment? I personally can't stand most of the Mac UI experience, however, I am very curious what you (and others) love about it that cannot be replicated on a different OS?

Font rendering for one. It's really nice. IME, text quality on a Linux desktop varies even between applications, depending on what toolkit they happen to be using.

That might be true, some apps just don't follow standards well (on MacOS too btw, there are old and ugly UIs from third-party vendors all over the place).

But when you're living between a terminal, editor and browser, and fonts are perfect on these 3 (or whatever else you use)... it's hard to justify using a lesser and more expensive platform, just to correct the 1% of the time some app doesn't look great.

In fact, if we speak 'consistency' in a functional way — not disturbing the user's "flow" while working — I'd argue that bad or extremely limited UX the likes of Windows and now sadly MacOS too (by comparison, and because it got worse in the last five years) is a much bigger problem than font rendering, for most workflows.

Case in point if you really care you can fix font rendering for pretty much every app (and select aliasing parameters like strength and RGB ordering to conform to your external displays panel type and pixels 'pitch'; whereas MacOS or Windows will be hit-or-miss with some models and you just can't help it). Haven't needed to on Ubuntu or Fedora, but I know as of 2017 Arch let you apply general font rendering settings over GTK and Qt, and you can use terminals like urxvt to fully control such things.

Re: Broken

#393

Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago. I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software. The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. - No communication between orgs. Tons of bureaucratic tape to cut through just to get a hand on someone working on a different product - Barely any communication between teams. Literally ev…

> The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. Elon Musk says something interesting about this here: "Product errors reflect organizational errors." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg&feature=youtu.be... He's specifically talking about how the product subsystems are effectively mapped out by the product departments and that they should try to interface with each other with minimal const…

Yeah, I’ve been trying to teach my organization that if the input to my team is crap, the chances of anything but crap coming out are fairly low.

  Crap >> Team >> Crap
We’re front-end, and basically the lowest part of the pipeline, so literally everyones crap gets dumped on us.

Re: Broken

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there are people who get around the secrecy/isolation veil, they just have long-standing friends in other projects and can rely on them to push features and bugs though the bureaucracy. If you don’t have that, well, expect your Radars to sit in “punted from this release” until the end of time.

Seems crazy to hire the best engineers and pay them top dollar only to put a bunch of organizational barriers in the way they have to try and navigate if they want to get anything done.

The prestige from hiring very highly paid people is obviously higher than the one attained when hiring lower paid ones.

Managing 20 people on-site at Apple is different from managing 20 off-shore cheapos (even though they could potentially be just as skilled).

Re: Broken

#395
post #203

It's all very depressing. Like most of us here, I have become increasingly frustrated with the state of Mac (touch bar, bad keyboards, odd choices that fit neither creators nor developers well, and so on). No point rehashing it all. But where does that leave us? I spent a year on Windows 10 not so long ago, on upper end laptop hardware with HiDPI screen, and it was less fun and more problem prone than macOS - especia…

you can't just buy any hardware. I'm sure Ubuntu and other distros publish a hardware guide. I have a Thinkpad T490, tried out Manjaro, Suse, Fedora and ended up settling with Kubuntu | Budgie. No hiccups. Everything works out of the box. I have 40gb ram, something I could never get on the current generation macbooks. Keyboard is excellent n trackpoint. only bad thing hardware wise, are the speakers. I also have a Retina macbook pro 2013 personal. and use a 2015 Macbook pro for work. My old job I used the 2018 macbook pro, a shitty computer, that I would compare to my 2012 Dell inspiron, in terms of shittiness. Forgot to mention my thinkapd dispaly is 500 nits 100% ARGB. KDE has fractional scaling to handle DPI displays.

Re: Broken

#396
post #203

It's all very depressing. Like most of us here, I have become increasingly frustrated with the state of Mac (touch bar, bad keyboards, odd choices that fit neither creators nor developers well, and so on). No point rehashing it all. But where does that leave us? I spent a year on Windows 10 not so long ago, on upper end laptop hardware with HiDPI screen, and it was less fun and more problem prone than macOS - especia…

I've come to accept that most OSes are inevitably broken in different ways. OS X has always broken my dev environment on every update. So over three years ago I switched to a ThinkPad X1 Carbon with XUbuntu and have no issues other than having to change my DPI when I connect/disconnect to a non HiDPI screen. Then I recently built a gaming PC with an AMD CPU and an Nvidia GPU, which did not go as smoothly with Linux: I had to install experimental Nvidia drivers, audio is a little wonky, and sometimes the wifi doesnt work and I have to restart. But overall I'm quite happy on XUbuntu and it gives me fewer problems or annoying prompts than Mac OS or Windows ever did. For gaming I use Windows of course.

Re: Broken

#397
post #370
post #203

It's all very depressing. Like most of us here, I have become increasingly frustrated with the state of Mac (touch bar, bad keyboards, odd choices that fit neither creators nor developers well, and so on). No point rehashing it all. But where does that leave us? I spent a year on Windows 10 not so long ago, on upper end laptop hardware with HiDPI screen, and it was less fun and more problem prone than macOS - especia…

> Getting and keeping a Linux Desktop in good working order is harder than it should be at this age of Linux. Maybe because all the developers ran away to Macs, instead of sticking around dogfooding and fixing bugs? Free software is a collaborative social enterprise - it's not really anyone's job to make free stuff for you to use. If, as a developer, you've taken the easy path of proprietary software for years, and n…

This!. Love your reply. I'm also tired of developers criticizing Linux desktop for not being friendly enough and running away to propietary systems instead of trying to help to fix what they don't like of Linux Desktop. That's the good thing of open source: don't like it? Then fix it and send me a patch and stop complaining. Its not like propietary systems where you only can complain (you can't fix)

Re: Broken

#398
post #203

It's all very depressing. Like most of us here, I have become increasingly frustrated with the state of Mac (touch bar, bad keyboards, odd choices that fit neither creators nor developers well, and so on). No point rehashing it all. But where does that leave us? I spent a year on Windows 10 not so long ago, on upper end laptop hardware with HiDPI screen, and it was less fun and more problem prone than macOS - especia…

> Desktop Linux

That’s your problem, stop looking for a windows/OS X replacement. The ideas are fundamentally broken; a lot of them are built around pushing you toward just consuming things from other people.

Re: Broken

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the hardware actually work? I've used Linux several times over the years and the hardware never totally works. I've always had trackpad issues, issues with suspend and hibernate, wifi issues, screen resolution issues, battery life issues, sound issues, driver issues etc. It 'works' in terms of you can technically do work on it, but you have to make a huge number of concessions and this is before considering it h…

> Does the hardware actually work? Considering that HN is full of programmers and technical users, and literally every time Linux is mentioned people go "I had a problem getting Z working, but I did that and...", "X and Y did not work", "U is not supported", I'd say hit and miss. Case in point, just from this thread, and from people who say they are otherwise satisfied: "The worst of my Linux woes were the usual susp…

Everything on the thinkpad x201 works out of the box with alpine Linux. Considering that’s one of the smaller distros I’m sure the other ones work great (unless of course you run chrome on gnome3 but that’s going to suck even on recent computers.)

Re: Broken

#400
> It is absolutely clear that the Mac is far outside of what the upper-ranks of Apple is focusing on.

This is so inexplicable, given that the Mac is necessary to continue producing the apps for the iPad and iOS ecosystems, yet I've never really heard anyone outside of developer community comment on this, nor does it seem Cook or anyone in Apple has contemplated the consequences to their entire company of squandering the buy-in from the developer community by neglecting the company's primary development tool. Mind-boggling.

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