Comment by pimeys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pimeys | Hacker News Reader

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> As for the DE experience on other platforms, Windows has had a kinda-tiling WM that regular people do use in the form of AeroSnap, while macOS is now getting tabs-in-the-window-manager, and Exposé+Spaces that evolved into Mission Control has been a positively brilliant experience for years.

> Meanwhile on Linux, the very fact that you have to massage it into something useful ever so slightly at every level is, to me, a telltale sign of its deficiencies. Things are getting better (wayland, drm2), but they're getting better on the other platforms too. The best part is that nobody's standing still and things are moving forward (hopefully, as from the outside it looks like Linux people are running in circles these days around, so I hope reinvented wheels are getting rounder).

And then again, after using almost 10 years xmonad at work and at home for everything, using Windows or OS X is definitely not a nice experience. I don't really care about GUI tricks or clutter on my desktop. I just want my terminal, my editor and my browser to appear when I press the key combinations and I want my desktop to manage the windows so that they're always in the right place.

The other thing I don't miss from the Windows and OS X world are the updates. I don't want to spend one work day to update my system to the next version and possibly fixing things because something changed in the xcode and I need to reinstall it to get my toolchain to work, or something changed in the Windows Linux subsystem and again I'm spending time fixing stuff.

I like things to be simple and a very basic Linux installation with a good wm which you know by heart is miles ahead of everything else. And it doesn't change so you can focus on your work.

Most people, otoh, enjoy playing games, watching videos, that sort of thing. Some people even do work that's dependent on the graphics card. Just because you use your computer for a very minimal amount of tasks doesn't mean everyone else does.

Ever heard of Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman?

I think you are referring to the critique on television? Perhaps you can pay more attention to the last sentence of vertex-four's comment. That being "Just because you use your computer for a very minimal amount of tasks doesn't mean everyone else does."

There are a million and one ways to use your graphics. Be it watching videos or gaming, which while you might have a problem with that, is actually done by people. It can also be used to smoothly decode and render a training video, or to make spreadsheets more pleasant to crawl through without the screen tearing and making everything look like a mess. There are even more minuscule applications you can do with graphics hardware and the software to drive it: transparency to subconsciously still remember what you're returning to when you click on another window, for example.

As nice of you as it is to warn the parent about their information-action ratio, you could use this opportunity to appreciate people's freedom of choice as well as understand there is more to Windows and Mac than Netflix and Call of Duty.

Wow, I am not sure how you managed to infer my lack of appreciation for people's freedom of choice merely from a title of a book. You may understand what I am trying to convey, if you ever read the book.

How about just coming out and saying it, instead of leaving smug hints about some niche book?

You're not adding anything to the discussion.

See, from my point of view enough was added to the discussion with just a comment about a "niche book". Rest of the comments on it are mere reactions of ego:)

That misrepresents the situation on Linux. You can play with it, seriously since Steam is there, and you can watch videos since forever.

Absolutely, I've been using it for a while (NixOS being my current distro), but I took what my parent was saying as that the graphics stack is irrelevant because they don't need to do anything with the graphics stack.

Everybody does that stuff in the browser now a days, which works fine in freebsd.

"Everybody" certainly doesn't play games in the browser.

Most PC gamers will tell you that the experience usually sucks and is often poorly performant.

I do all of those things. My gaming PC is solely for games and netflix and it's connected to our television. I think it more as a gaming console than a computer. It has Windows 10 in it just for Witcher 3 and to remind me of never installing it to my laptop or workstations...

With my arch/xmonad laptop I can handle everything else, except that damn Witcher 3 :)

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