391–400 of 801 posts
I long for a modern NeXTStep-like OS. A polished, consistent, solid operating system that is lean, clean and simply focused on getting things done. It should be predictable in every way and never get in your way. None of this SwiftUI bullshit, Animoji, AI or blurry UI. sigh
No. But yes: Get rid of Siri, Make Preference pane alphabetically ordered, Get rid of Spotlight and buy Alfred, Disable notifications by default.
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Alfred
Spotlight was bad back in the day, so I installed Alfred and started using that. Then Spotlight suddenly improved a lot, enough that it was usable for me, and I deleted Alfred. Then about five years ago something happened internally at Apple to the Spotlight team and it just got worse and worse and more difficult to use, making me regret deleting Alfred. I wish Apple would just fix Spotlight. They don't seem to think…
I keep being tempted to write same post but named "Does all software work like shit now?", because I swear, this is not just Apple. Software in general feels more bugged as a new norm. Most websites have an element that won't load on the first try, or a button that sometimes needs to be clicked twice because the first click did nothing. Amazon shopping app needs two clicks every now and then, because the first one di…
I think this is just the result of an optimizing game placing profit above all else (including quality and user satisfaction) which is indeed the norm in this late stage of capitalism. You want to opt out of that? Good thing the GPL opened the way placing human freedoms front and center, and not-for-profit software stacks like KDE (for instance) keep getting better and better over time.
I use commercial OSes at work by obligation, and the turning point from which my experience as a user became better served by free software happened many years ago.
There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and…
> if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon What is wrong with an AMD Ryzen 9 with 16 physical cores? If you need more and you have a virtually unlimited budget, then Ryzen Threadripper is even better. Also: Is Asahi Linux an option for you?
There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and…
> Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to be honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that is _just a computer_). I'm there as well. I've been really enjoying desktop Linux lately, but I can't go back to a non-Apple laptop at this point. There's just nothing…
Metal isn't really on pair with Vulkan and DirectX in terms of relevance for graphics programming, the M chips aren't up to NVidia ecosystem, SYCL, the two major compute APIs for any kind of relevant GPGPU workloads, and thus don't really matter.
And gaming, well, even though all major engines support Metal, there is a reason DirectX porting kit is now a thing.
So why pay more for a lesser experience, and then there is the whole issue macOS doesn't have native support for containers, like Windows does (their own ones), and WSL is better integrated and easier to use than Virtualization Framework.
There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and…
Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased I think the decline of software went hand-in-hand with the decline of the native indie Mac app. They still exist, but when I started with the Mac (2007), there was a very rich ecosystem of native Mac apps. Most stood head and shoulders above their Linux and Windows counterparts. Apple has nearly destroyed that ecosystem with:…
Now, ios gets the executive attention and it will generally get the best developers assigned to it, and the Mac has to live with the scraps.
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Windows 11 LTSC one is quite good because it's so damn stupid. You can indeed hit start then just type what you want. Only does files though, by name, which is fine.
Windows 11 is beyond pale. It’s infuriatingly bad. But it could be a benefit if you do a bit of manual organizing and ignore most of its dumb features. Only use it for work, I will never use it at home.
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> Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to be honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that is _just a computer_). I'm there as well. I've been really enjoying desktop Linux lately, but I can't go back to a non-Apple laptop at this point. There's just nothing…
Also while Apples software quality has definitely diminished over the years, Windows in the same period has utterly CRATERED. Like I get along fine with 11 for my gaming PC but with every single update one feature or another becomes notably broken.
This is not only applied to Apple's software. The entire software and hardware market including iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, Windows, etc. is pressured to release new products with more and more features every year, advertising those new features to facilitate sales. The result is, what was once a simple and cool product has become heavily bloated with unneccessary features.