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Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

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Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#441

Post by tonyedgecombe »

stmw wrote: post #109

Great post. BTW, there is an (earlier) example of Snow Leopard in the Microsoft ecosystem -- that would be Windows XP, which similarly avoided major new subsystems and new applications built-into-the-OS, but was remarkably fast and stable for its time.

XP was a massive change in that it was the merger of the Windows NT and Windows 9x lines.

It was perceived as bloated because it struggled on the hardware of the time.

Then it needed a near total rewrite with SP2 because it was riddled with security issues.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#442

Post by onli »

rcarmo wrote: post #369
onli wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What dou you mean with more integrated? It is a regular desktop PC with an apu (like is totally common for office PCs, just bigger) and soldered instead of upgradeable ram. It would be kind of funny, but also very sad, if Apple guys mistook the copying of apple's worst behaviour - producing throwaway devices - as a sign of quality. Though I think we are there for years now with phones, I wouldn't expect such thinking…

It is fully designed around the limitations of that particular APU and makes the best of it, without being a generic motherboard.

It is "integrated" in the way that the processor is an APU that has specific memory bus requirements. That's all. It is not an integrated software-hardware system that is finetuned, and that board is not any better than a a generic motherboard would be for a regular processor.

My point is that this system is not integrated in the way apple fans usually define the word. I'd claim it is not integrated at all. It is a regular PC (but with soldered ram), which is exactly like framework announced it.

There should be no need to sprinkle some apple marketing bs on that to make it attractive.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#443

Post by pjmlp »

WD-42 wrote: post #426
pjmlp wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really, I rather play on the platform they were designed for in first place.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#444

Post by asimovDev »

thr0w wrote: post #229

What Apple needs, is to fix that weird bug where my mouse cursor stops responding to what it's hovering over. How does something so fundamentally broken make its way into an OS?

this drives me insane, I only ever encounter it in Safari, but I spend most of my workday in Safari as a web dev, so it might be the reason why.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#445

Post by pjmlp »

dijit wrote: post #427
pjmlp wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

So how many of those ported game engines are actually making a different on GNU/Linux gaming today?

There is certainly such thing as native, one thing is the platform where the APIs were originally designed for and battled tested, and the other is other platform emulating / translating them, by reverse engineering their behaviours with various degrees of success.

Valve's luck is that so far Microsoft/XBox Gaming has decided to close an eye on Proton, and it will run out when Microsoft decides it has gone long enough.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#446

Post by boudin »

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.

It's not really a failure. Linux distribution and diverse ecosystem brings a level of complexity. The only way to support it long term is to either having your team continuously update and release builds of the game to cater for that which is an impossible task to ask for a lot of studios.

The initial approach of runtimes did help but it's still has its limitation.

If now a studio just need to test their game under a runtime+proton the same way they would test a version of Windows to ensure it's working under Linux it's a win/win situation. Proton becomes the abstraction of the complex and diverse ecosystem of Linux which is both its strength and weakness.

Another solution would have been everybody using the exact same distribution which would have been way worse in my opinion.

And who knows, maybe one day Proton/Wine would be the Windows userland reference and Windows would just be an implementation of it :D

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#447

Post by drooopy »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #438

I'm still waiting for them to remove Launchpad (which seems like a half assed step towards unifying desktop and tablet systems), and I've yet to meet anyone that uses their weird new desktop management system, the thing with the windows on the left side. That just reminds me of the GUI experiments they did in the 2000s, with 3d environments and whatever Ubuntu (or gnome/kde/whichever) tried to do. I'm hoping they're…

Launchpad has to be one of the worst ways to find and open applications on a Mac. That new window-managing system is honestly so unintuitive, so bad, and so bizarre that its mere existence feels like some sort of practical joke.

I wish that in the next version of macOS, they would strip away all those useless features and systems that they've shoehorned over the past two decades and have the OS look like how Panther or Tiger did, while taking up less than 10 GB of space on the puny SSDs that they ship their machines with.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#448

Post by misiek08 »

Dogfooding is a thing right? Right?!

Working for two companies I see how in the small one people manually test their changes, try to break them, even having in-code tests. At the big corpo - noone cares. Tests are green? Release to prod, close ticket and take another. Clients complain? There are 5-6 layers of people before such complain can come back to the team.

I wouldn't agree with "less glitchy" than Windows. Currently Win10 is the best one if it comes to stability, but Microsoft is already killing support for it. Windows 11 have problems even with typing into Start Menu search - basic functionality. Randomly takes input or not. So I think we are lowering the bar and the market agrees how low it should go.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#449

Post by thaumasiotes »

> In an era when people still paid money for operating system upgrades every few years (anyone else remember standing in line for Windows 95?)

No, and I would have been too young to purchase it.

But I'd be surprised at the idea of massive demand for an upgrade to Windows 95. What we did was buy a new computer that had Windows 95 on it. Computers used to go out of date very quickly.

We kept our older computer that ran DOS. (It had Windows 3.1 installed, but the only reason you'd start that was if you wanted to play Solitaire.) It continued to run DOS just fine.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#450

Post by trbutler »

airstrike wrote: post #140

Wow, that 2013 WWDC video is so incredibly impactful. I had no idea I was going to experience what I did when I hit play. It resonates with me so strongly, I honestly wasn't ready for it.

Yes. I remember it strongly hitting me back then, but rewatching added even more punch. I still agree with the philosophy, but this time I was also wistful for when I could say Apple agreed with it, too.
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