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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • I don’t mind much paying for streaming (although that’s increasingly more and more annoying and I still tend to just download whatever I actually care about) but until and unless I can pay to “own” a movie and they just provide me with a DRM free video file of some sort, I will never “purchase” digital content like this.

    If you tried this kind of bullshit in just about any other context, even normal people would think you’re crazy.

    Normal Person: “hi there, one blender please. I’ll take this one for $25.”
    Sales person: “Cool here’s your receipt.”
    NP:: “It says here at the bottom of the receipt that you can just come in my house and take this blender back whenever you want or maybe never?”
    SP: “yep.”
    NP:: “And you don’t tell people that ahead of time?”
    SP: “no when you buy it you agree to that by opening the box and it is on the receipt you get after you bought it.”
    NP: “you fuckin with me rn?”
    SP: “afraid not, and would you look at that corp says I need that blender back, thanks.”
    SP: “oh, shoot. I see here you also bought a toaster from EvilCorp sold in one of our EvilMart locations a couple years ago, we’ve decided to license that brand instead to our new partners FukUMart, so we’ll be taking that toaster but if you want you can head to your local FukUMart and buy that toaster again for more than you paid the first time.”
    NP: spontaneously combusts


  • I mean, it’s splitting hairs. While the proximity probably didn’t help, I doubt the companies deciding to pull ads weren’t like “sure, we don’t mind hanging out in a nazi bar, just make sure not to seat us next to any nazis.” I mean, some probably were, but there has been increasingly large amounts of pressure on these people and within like 24 hours of each other Elon endorses replacement theory and the MM story drops that Elon is running ads for nazis. There are only so many times you can make a dumb excuse. For lots of us, that was a long time ago. Even the capitalists are realizing now at least that he’s bad for business.


  • I, for one, will turn to Scalzi on this one:

    This is the “So few people find a festering rat’s anus in their can of SpaghettiOs that finding one shouldn’t be considered an actual problem” argument, eliding the fact that the number of rat anuses in ANY SpaghettiOs can should be “zero”

    source

    Like, really looking forward to court case when Elon or Yacco have to explain “yes your honor, the thing they said is true, but to get it to happen they had to use our platform!!!” If I had to guess, Elon has to know he’s going to lose, but the point isn’t necessarily a win, it’s to tie up Media Matters in a legal battle that Elon can keep going effectively forever. This is one of his favorite tactics – doing whatever the fuck he wants because he knows the only thing you can do is sue, and he can pay lawyers forever so you’re going to have to blink first.


  • The vast majority of comments here complaining about Mac and macOS specifically seem to stem from really, really not understanding much about them. This comment is unfortunately not any different.

    I’ve seen developers working for FAANGs unironically praise the M1 Macbooks as work machines.

    The FAANG companies that fight tooth and nail to hire the best people who can basically work wherever they want because of their skill like Macs? Surely, they’re the dumb ones.

    I have one and the damn thing has an option to change the “modifier key” for the fucking mouse

    Originally, and for quite a while (probably early 2000’s) Macs shipped with a one button mouse, and there was no concept of a “right-click.” Originally, they were pretty dogmatic that the OS should be simple enough that one button was enough. You shouldn’t need to hide functionality in a context menu, it should be available through the standard UI. Eventually, that lost out, but they decided they wanted to make context menus* (or other “right-click” actions) a power user feature, rather than a default. So the decided to make it make sense for all of the machines that had always shipped with one button mice, you could hold ctrl and then click an item and you’d get the context menu. For decades now, they support right click, but if you built up years of muscle memory around ctrl+clicking instead, you still can.

    like press the meta key

    You like the meta key? Probably better thank Apple. Apple has had a “meta” key basically forever, only it’s been called “command.” I’m old enough to remember when more manufacturers started to add their own meta keys. If you go grab an older keyboard, you’ll probably find they also have a “context menu” button, which is basically a “right-click” and you almost def won’t find one now.

    you want to do basic window manager things

    Lots of people in this thread seem to really, really like being able to window snap, which I kind of get but also generally disagree with. macOS (again, going back a thousand years) has a different philosophy when it comes to managing windows. On [MS] Windows, pretty much all software aims for full screen, and users def do the same. Window snapping now means you have a convenient way to see 2 whole things. If you really, really want window snapping similar to how MS does it, there are a hojillion ways to accomplish this with very simple app installs. macOS has instead tried to make it so that you can manage multiple apps/windows easily without full screen, going back to tiny, tiny screens.

    But let’s talk about “basic window manager things” for a sec. Windows has easily, and I mean easily had the worst window management generally for like 2 decades. Windows 10 and Windows 11 help catch up to things I switched off of Windows and to Linux for in like, 2004. Expose, or “Task View” as it’s now called in Windows started in macOS, and was adopted in Linux in the mid 2000’s. Not until Windows 10, and not even the first version, do we get that. Ditto for virtual desktops. In Windows, I can press alt-tab and switch between any open app. In macOS, I can press cmd+tab and switch between any open app, but I can also press cmd-` and switch between an app’s windows. In Windows, I can minimize windows to the task bar just as I can in macOS. However, I can also just choose to hide all app windows, or hide all windows except the app I’m looking at. And on macOS, I can use hot corners (which Windows barely touches with its “show desktop” hotcorner, sort of) which I can configure however I want. I can throw my mouse in any corner of the screen and get more “basic window manager things” than exist on Windows.

    Its keyboard is that weird, unresponsive, flat form factor that makes it a nightmare to actually use as a portable device

    If you have one the bad butterfly keyboards, yes. If not, this is nonsense. All laptop keyboards are bad, mac versions (with the very large caveat that the butterfly keyboards were insanely stupid/bad) are generally better.

    I get that it’s a relatively powerful computer for the ludicrous amount of battery life it gives you, but that’s purely because it’s an extremely optimized ARM based processor that’s only designed to work with this specific operating system.

    How is this supposed to be a negative? If we zoom out a little, this comment might as well be “oh sure, you can get your fancy graphic effects when you use a, what did you call it? graphics processing unit?” And even then, this is still not really accurately understanding why Apple has absolutely dominated CPU in mobile, and then is crushing in the class of laptop/desktop processors it competes in.**

    But Apple is practically an antonym for FOSS at this point.

    Aside from darwin, the kernel macOS runs on, Webkit, the browser engine that Chrome forked from, or passkeys, the thing that might replace passwords, you’re still really wrong.

    Beyond those complaints, it’s got good speakers and never produces any heat. Honestly, the only good things about the machines are those hardware elements: the speakers, battery life, and lack of heat.

    How about screens? Trackpad? Physical material, etc?

    I also have a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, which is physically a worse machine: it gets hot, has a fraction of the battery life, etc.

    “I can get vastly less done, and it’s going to be more uncomfortable the entire time.”

    I wonder if the people that really like the M1s like them because it’s the laptop equivalent of an iPhone.

    Lots of misunderstanding here, but I’m already a phone book in.

    * really, they probably never would have added right clicks, but as more software adopted right click actions, especially cross platform stuff like Adobe software, they pretty much had to.
    ** they’ve basically ceded the extreme high end. If you really want the most performant CPU and power\heat aren’t a concern, it’s not Apple.







  • Maybe if the Linux community decided on one default there would be more progress on inroads with desktop Linux.

    Well, Linus at least agrees with you. I just watch a talk he gave the other day in which he described one of the biggest problems with Linux desktop being that the distros can’t even decide on a default package manager/way to package applications and all of the difficulties that creates.

    It’s funny because even for simple stuff like when I used to update my Plex install manually I’d go to the Plex website, and the list is:

    Windows
    Mac

    Linux: Debian x 32 Bit Debian x.1 32 Bit
    Debian x 64 bit
    Debian x.1 64 Bit
    Fedora …
    Ubuntu …
    Cent …

    and god help you if you’re not on one of those versions or you don’t use one of those distros.


  • whofearsthenight@lemm.eetoLinux@lemmy.mlMicrosoft causes learned helplessness
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    11 months ago

    I’m going to have to interject on even on the first point. FWIW, I’m a person who vastly prefers to use a keyboard when possible, can totally live on a CLI only system, etc. Anyway:

    It’s faster and easier than using a GUI. This is because you can type a lot faster than you can click-click-drag with a mouse.

    This is just not true for the vast majority of people. Have you ever watched normies type?

    The other thing is that even with simple stuff like file operations normal users get lost with a GUI where it’s far easier to visualize what is actually happening. If they get a few basic mechanics (click+drag, right click, double click) that’s about all they have to remember to move files around. Compared to learning ls, cd, mv, cp, the directory tree, symbols like . and .. and so forth. Or perhaps my favorite example, quick name a valid tar command. On a GUI system like windows/Mac, they just need to remember they can do things to files by selecting them and right-clicking them. On a CLI only system, how the fuck are you supposed to get a regular user to remember that to compress a file, you type in tar to start with, much less remembering flags (my flavor of choice is usually -xvf.) How many people who regularly use linux even know wtf it’s called tar?

    And that’s even forgetting the things like the defaults often being much harder to recover from. In Mac/Windows (and I think even most distros, though I haven’t daily driven a gui linux in a while) deleting a file the default way is a safe operation and easily recoverable because by default the gui is designed to be more user-safe.

    Though I don’t think anyone will disagree with the fact that the CLI is an immensely powerful tool that a lot of us can’t do without, it has never been really designed in a way to be accessible to normal users, and I’d be willing to bet that if you were designing a CLI today in a vacuum, it wouldn’t look anything like the one we’re familiar with. It’s why I’d also guess that very few of us that use the command line all of the time don’t have a mile long list of aliases, scripts, switching to shells like zsh and things like zsh-autosuggestions or zsh-syntax-highlighting, colorls, a specific terminal emulator they use, and so on and so forth.



  • I also think that it’s not a great take that the OS vendor shouldn’t include decent default apps for most people. I mean, I know we’re in c/linux, but the vast majority of people don’t want to start with a terminal and build their system out from there. Hell, even the vast majority of linux users don’t, so then it’s just nitpicking where the line of which defaults should be included is.

    I have to believe the person who uses Apple Notes, Reminders, Safari, Calendar, etc

    I am that person now. Your example about Reminders is basically exactly why. I used to try and then pay for a ton of services to cover reminders/todos because I too was looking for that perfect app that worked just the way I wanted, and really the only thing I got out of it was making a slightly different trade off that I was then paying for in quite a lot of cases. it also happens that nearly all of those apps were closing gaps with the reasons I moved away from them to begin with. For the average user, they likely won’t even look much past the defaults because the defaults are actually pretty good, and so if you don’t have an advanced use case, your needs are covered. Like, I used Trello and Todoist for kanban for larger projects and it’s now native in Reminders.


  • It’s not really because the developers are cheaper, it’s because the vast reduction in complexity is cheaper. Let’s say you’ve got a great general app idea and you’re going to build a startup. Your app is going to have to be mobile and desktop. To do that well, natively, this means:

    • you’re going to need a backend dev who are probably going to be building APIs that are touching on web tech.
    • You’re going to need a developer team who can target Apple platforms, Android, and Windows. I lump Apple together here because although it’s not entirely fair to say that it’s as simple as they promise where you just click a box and your iOS app works on macOS, you’re at least able to work in the same general toolset (Swift, SwiftUI, Xcode, etc.)
    • You’re going to need designers who can design to the specific needs of the platforms, which is also going to mean more domain expertise.
    • testing for each of those platforms.
    • This is true regardless, but you’re going to have to deal with more platform-specific support. More platform specific documentation, etc. How do you do think x on platform y? Where is the button on this platform vs that one?
    • maintaining feature parity as you continue to build is going to be much more difficult, and you’re going to have to decide if you want to maintain feature parity and slow the whole process, or give up and launch on some platforms first (hopefully there is no one that uses a Mac and an Android phone or Windows and an iPhone or an iPhone and a Samsung Tablet or that gets annoying real fast.)

    In short, moving from one platform to two natively doesn’t double complexity and cost, it’s far, far worse than that. It’s not that a good web dev costs $70k vs an iOS dev that makes $90k, it’s that a good iOS dev costs $90k, and a good Android dev costs $85k, and a good Windows dev costs $80k and one of those people hopefully is familiar enough with each platform to be the team lead so you can tack on another $20k for them…

    And all the while you’re building that team and building your 3 different platform native apps, a competitor or several will launch on Electron and web tech and take the market because no one except us nerds give a shit about whether something is using the right platform idiom or even knows what they are, and far fewer still have any idea how to check RAM usage and the like.