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Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

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Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#421

Post by pjmlp »

WD-42 wrote: post #411
pjmlp wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason that keeps me on Windows, is that you left out of your list gaming and 3D graphics on laptops. 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, ther…

Gaming is pretty great on Linux now. I just finished a little Elden ring session and it still blows my mind that when I close the game my Linux desktop is there behind it. No more dual booting, hopefully will never need windows for anything ever again.

You mean translating Windows and DirectX APIs is great, there is hardly a Linux gaming ecosystem.

Proton is the acknowledgment of Valve's failure to entice game studios, already targeting Vulkan/OpenGL ES/OpenSL on Android NDK, Switch (which has OpenGL 4.6/Vulkan support), or on PlayStation (Orbis OS being a FreeBSD fork) to target GNU/Linux.

I rather have the real deal, not translations.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#422

Post by ripped_britches »

hamstergene wrote: post #375

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 the financial cost of these bugs is pretty low and the cost to employ people to fix all of them is pretty high. Everywhere I’ve worked, there is a huge backlog of known issues that are agreed upon that we probably just won’t ever get to them. And we certainly aren’t going to hire new people to solve them. It’s probably because the systems we build are getting way overcomplex due to feature piling and promotion seeking complex projects to show off. If these bugs were trivial to solve, they wouldn’t exist. The fact is, these are pernicious bugs because of how complicated everything is.

I actually got penalized in my last performance review because something I shipped “wasn’t that technically complicated”. I was flabbergasted because I consider it my job to make things simpler, not harder to reason about. But you don’t get promotions for simple.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#423

Post by aikinai »

aylmao wrote: post #388
hamstergene wrote: post #375

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…

Something I found annoying at a previous big-tech work, was how the focus on top-level metrics (read, revenue-linked metrics) meant we couldn't fix things. There were a lot of smart people, very interested in fixing things— not only because engineers tend to like fixing things, but also because we, and everyone around us, were users too. For example, many things related to text input were broken on the site. Korean w…

This is exactly the problem. Hyper efficient (or at least trying to be) businesses have no room for craftsmanship. If you take the time to make quality software, you’ll be left behind by someone who doesn’t. Unfortunately the market doesn’t care, and therefore efficient businesses don’t either.

The only solution I know of is to have a business that’s small enough and controlled by internal forces (e.g. a founder who cares) to pay attention to craftsmanship.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#424

Post by whstl »

syeare wrote: post #343
MichaelZuo wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? Because right now it’s clearly so far down, beneath dozens of other priorities, that expecting it to just happen one day seems futile.

The actual argument would be people voting with their wallets and moving away from the Apple ecosystem, but this something impossible at least in the USA due to these bullshit "blue bubbles"

At this point this is not an argument anymore, it’s just a thought terminating cliche.

Expecting users to change their daily habits in order to marginally improve the operating system of a trillion dollar company feels naive and a bit disrespectful to people who actually use these machines for work.

Even developers… the vast majority of developers ignored Apple for decades (and Apple was also hostile) and it managed to grow despite that.

Might as well ask people to contribute to Gnome or whatever so in the future everyone can go somewhere better. Feels way more feasible.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#425

Post by briandear »

sensanaty wrote: post #291
thewebguyd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My ideal laptop would be the macbook trackpad, monitor and battery life stuck inside any thinkpad. Or just anything non MacOS, even Windows, in the macbook. I despise MacOS with every fiber of my being, but the hardware is damned good.

Windows is far worse.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#426

Post by WD-42 »

pjmlp wrote: post #421
WD-42 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming is pretty great on Linux now. I just finished a little Elden ring session and it still blows my mind that when I close the game my Linux desktop is there behind it. No more dual booting, hopefully will never need windows for anything ever again.

You mean translating Windows and DirectX APIs is great, there is hardly a Linux gaming ecosystem. Proton is the acknowledgment of Valve's failure to entice game studios, already targeting Vulkan/OpenGL ES/OpenSL on Android NDK, Switch (which has OpenGL 4.6/Vulkan support), or on PlayStation (Orbis OS being a FreeBSD fork) to target GNU/Linux. I rather have the real deal, not translations.

Strange take. Proton is an acknowledgment that the windows apis are the de facto for gaming. Not sure why the runtime matters. Some games ever run better. Not sure why that’s not the ”real deal” but whatever I’m glad you’re happy with your spyware gaming OS.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#427

Post by dijit »

pjmlp wrote: post #421
WD-42 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming is pretty great on Linux now. I just finished a little Elden ring session and it still blows my mind that when I close the game my Linux desktop is there behind it. No more dual booting, hopefully will never need windows for anything ever again.

You mean translating Windows and DirectX APIs is great, there is hardly a Linux gaming ecosystem. Proton is the acknowledgment of Valve's failure to entice game studios, already targeting Vulkan/OpenGL ES/OpenSL on Android NDK, Switch (which has OpenGL 4.6/Vulkan support), or on PlayStation (Orbis OS being a FreeBSD fork) to target GNU/Linux. I rather have the real deal, not translations.

As an actual dyed in the wool game developer.

There’s no such thing as “native”, all the things you’re talking about are translation layers for hardware instructions themselves, and the overhead for doing software based translation is significantly less than hardware accelerated virtual machines- and we as an industry love those.

The reason for this is because the translations are very cache friendly and happen in userland, so the performance impact is negligible, and the scheduler on Windows is so poor compared to Linux ones that it’s even common for games to perform better on Linux than on Windows.. Which is crazy when you consider the difference in quality of the GPU drivers.

I understand that you want it to “just work”, but that tends to be the experience anyway.

You can do what you want, it’s your life, but this is not a terribly good excuse. Valves “failure” is essentially rectified.

I will add though, that it’s actually Stadia that made linux gaming the most feasible, many game engines (all of the ones I worked on) were ported to Linux to run Stadia, those ports changed essential elements of the engine that would have been slow or difficult to translate; so when Proton came around quite a lot of heavy lifting had gone away. I only say this because Valve gets some credit for a lot of work our Engine programmers did to make Linux viable.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#428

Post by sph »

pjmlp wrote: post #421
WD-42 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming is pretty great on Linux now. I just finished a little Elden ring session and it still blows my mind that when I close the game my Linux desktop is there behind it. No more dual booting, hopefully will never need windows for anything ever again.

You mean translating Windows and DirectX APIs is great, there is hardly a Linux gaming ecosystem. Proton is the acknowledgment of Valve's failure to entice game studios, already targeting Vulkan/OpenGL ES/OpenSL on Android NDK, Switch (which has OpenGL 4.6/Vulkan support), or on PlayStation (Orbis OS being a FreeBSD fork) to target GNU/Linux. I rather have the real deal, not translations.

I'd rather use Linux and game with an imperfect translation layer, than put up with Windows.

Proton is a lesser implementation of Windows API, sure, but Windows itself is a lesser implementation of an operating system for power users.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#429

Post by mrweasel »

chvid wrote: post #401
hamstergene wrote: post #375

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…

Am I the only one only who is satisfied with Mac OS X? I use Windows from time to time and as far as I can tell it is much worse when it comes to random updates and UI quirkiness.

Generally I am pretty happy with macOS and I still believe it to be the best option for a desktop. Where I'm getting frustrated is the increase locked down nature of the OS. I get that it's for security, and that's fine for my dad, but it's starting to get in the way of me down my work.

So when you already start feeling like the operation system is preventing you from doing the things you need to do, then all the small cosmetic flaws seems more in your face.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#430

Post by physicsguy »

I find it incredibly developer hostile as an OS now. I don’t want to have to type a password in to use a debugger. I want to be able to download software and run it as I want, whoever wrote it, without them having to sign it. All that does is push people away from supporting Macs, particularly if they’re learning and don’t want to shell out £99 for a developer license. And you can see that because the Mac ecosystem has become dramatically less varied and stagnant.
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