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Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

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Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#741

Post by sunshowers »

tastyminerals2 wrote: post #507

Sigh. I don't get the sentiment and the whole debate here. The author is clearly nitpicking (he is the first person who uses messages after all). But honestly, complaints about "arrange" screens button? Nevertheless, he is probably right. Only the people who went through working on Windows, Linux both on cheap and expensive machines while dealing with all the "baggage" these environments bring can tolerate MacOS with…

> * The font rendering. I honestly can't believe people who professionally work with text all their lives never mention it here. MacOS had and continues to have the best fonts and font rendering that is.

Linux has significantly better font rendering than macOS these days if you're on a 140 or less PPI screen. Linux still does subpixel AA and text looks razor sharp, while Apple pretends very large monitors like my 140ppi 57" don't exist.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#742

Post by sunshowers »

pjmlp wrote: post #490
mythz wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird flex, most commands, utilities, server software and remote tools are going to be run are going to be from the command-line. All our System Administration of remote servers uses the command-line as well since exclusively deploying to Linux for 10+ years. Sure you can happily avoid the command-line with a Linux Desktop and GUI Apps, although as a developer I don't see how I could avoid using the terminal. Even on…

Sadly, because many of the authors live stuck in UNIX cli model instead of Xerox PARC REPL approach. It is like praising Ratatui for what Turbo Vision, Clipper and curses were doing in 1990's, if I wanted that I would kept using Xenix and MS-DOS.

There are huge interoperability advantages to CLI and TUI tools. Composing them, using script(1) on them, etc, are much simpler than the same for GUI tools. They are also much easier to rapidly iterate on.

GUIs are very useful but they are not clearly better (or worse) than CLIs.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#743

Post by sunshowers »

dijit wrote: post #432
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…

Ironically Linux Desktop environments have never been so robust. As much as I dislike systemd, if this is the reason, then I retract everything negative I ever said.

It's hard to argue that systemd isn't a part of modern Linux robustness! It's not the only way it could have been done, but the more declarative model is absolutely better than shell script exit codes. Daemons don't have to worry about double-fork. User-level services are incredibly valuable.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#745

Post by ahartmetz »

consteval wrote: post #658
ahartmetz wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My advice is to add Mozilla's apt repo for Firefox by following the handy guide on their website. It's pretty short and easy (copy and paste).

My advice for web browsers is to use Flatpak. You can limit the file system permissions of the app, like giving only access to downloads, so that if/when there’s a sandbox leak you’re fine. You can also disable various things, like webcam or mic, this way. In addition, you can get perpetual updates to the latest version of your browser even on old, stable distros like Debian.

Running a new browser on an old distro would be a strong reason for me (if I somehow couldn't update the distro - but I can and I do.) Regarding security, the added work and complication outweighs the added security for me. I can't really disagree with having a different preference. More security on this wild internet is better, right?

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#746

Post by blt »

thewebguyd wrote: post #701
sofixa wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The other makers build quality is horrendous Out of curiosity, what are you basing this on? From having spoken to people who manage IT fleets, and being the person regular people ask for advice for what device to get, with the occasional exception (which Apple also had plenty of, cf. the butterfly keyboard), you get what you pay for. A 1k-1.5k+ Asus/Dell/HP/Lenovo will get you decent and good build quality. The che…

> A 1k-1.5k+ Asus/Dell/HP/Lenovo will get you decent and good build quality. And it still won't be on par with a $999 apple silicon air, or a MBP. I've deployed latitudes, precisions, and thinkpads. They all still make tradeoffs that you don't have to deal with on the mac. The X1 carbon is probably the "best" but, even with that - you are still getting a 1920x1200 screen unless you spend more than a MBP for the 2.8k…

Fully agree. Asahi is pretty good now though, and the list of missing features continues to shrink.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#747

Post by dwaite »

amluto wrote: post #298
ethersteeds wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs money, and isn't free, for a reason you're not acknowledging. I don't think it's a major profit center for Apple. It's about setting a higher floor for malicious actors than "random botnet residential IP + a captcha solving service". It's about proving some semblance of identity through a card number and a transaction that goes through without a chargeback. As the case upthread shows, there's plenty to disli…

I don't buy it. Or rather, I am willing to believe that some team at Apple has convinced itself that this makes sense, but they're wrong. In particular, the security boundaries are nonsensical. The whole model of "notarization" is that the developer of some software has convinced Apple that the software as a whole ( not a specific running instance) is worthy of doing a specific thing to the system as a whole . But th…

Notarization is not a trusted system on macOS - or rather, notarized binaries still have a "this was downloaded from the internet" prompt, and the user is meant to make a decision on whether it is trustworthy.

Notarization does some minimal checks, but is mostly about attaching a real identity so that maliciousness has at least some real-world consequences. The most obvious being that you lose the ability to get more apps notarized.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#748

Post by dwaite »

NegativeK wrote: post #262
hkpack wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that you're doing it on principle, but for a software development team, 99$/year is a really minuscule price to pay to be able to build / notarise / distribute software. Developers pay exorbitant amount of money for much lesser value, and the idea of putting your teammates at risk to stick it to apple is kind of sad bordering with negligence from a business POV.

$99/year for one of the basic uses of a computer isn't okay.

Distributing software is not what I would call one of the basic uses of a computer.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#749

Post by int_19h »

whatevertrevor wrote: post #410
int_19h wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search is fine as a one-off thing, but if you repeatedly have to use search to find some common setting, that's a clear UX fail. To be fair, it's hard to say whether the Settings app is more broken in Windows or macOS these days. I think I'd have to give the crown to macOS here on account of search itself being more broken.

Why is it a UI fail? Honestly search as the default way of going to settings is my favorite development in modern OS design, I no longer need to memorize 3-6 deep menu trees to find a trivial setting. For example: I prefer keeping my hands on the keyboard, and typing cmd+space followed by mouse is so much faster than finding the right pixels to click through in menu trees when I want to adjust my mouse sensitivity.

I didn't say that search itself is a UX fail. It's not; it's great!

The UI fail is if search is required to find the setting every time you need it, because categorization and/or navigation is broken otherwise.

As to keeping your hands on the keyboard, that's an argument for having proper keyboard support in any UI, complete with hotkeys and shortcuts. The big difference between these and search is that the former is (if properly done), consistent and predictable. So e.g. when the app adds new things in the future, your existing key sequences will still do the same thing they did before.

To take your specific examples, if I do Cmd+Space, "mouse", Enter on my system, it will bring up LinearMouse, not system mouse settings.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#750

Post by dwaite »

trinix912 wrote: post #478
kn8 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but i want more Gatekeeper, not less - help me stay safer. Or is it a security theatre? Malware producers can sign things just fine?

The more Gatekeeper, the more used people get to clicking OK without considering what it means. No amount of software can prevent the social engineering of an actual malware that tells the user to just click that OK button that they already have to do on a regular basis . Less is more here. It's why Windows tuned down their UAC after Vista.

It is not a consent prompt. You get a choice on whether to trash the binary or quit.

To run a non-motorized app requires you to open a separate app, navigate to the security section and select that you want to authorize the app to run.

Apple does not have any desire to make distribution of non-notarized binaries commercially viable.

And we've seen this change across all browsers. There no longer is a "continue" prompt for TLS issues. The result is, way fewer maintained sites go months with an expired certificate.

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