It's a real detriment to UI, it costs you battery life, it's a distracting gimmick, and it adds $200 to the cost of your machine.
And Apple will never give up on it. Every Mac is going to be worse for years and years because of it.
Enjoy.
And Apple will never give up on it. Every Mac is going to be worse for years and years because of it.
Enjoy.
I say this as pretty much a lifelong Linux desktop user. I've been waiting and hoping for it to take off, but.....
So far, the attempts to bring elements of the OS X experience to the Linux desktop have been very... cargo cult, in the absence of a more forgiving word. Fetishizing design choices and simplicity has made it very unpleasant to deal with a modern Linux system. Many users of tiling-wm-and-terminal-only desktops don't do so "just" because it's the most efficient option, they do it because the alternatives are horrifyingly bad.
I would say it is no better than Windows at all (since you also need to install correct driver on Windows).
Look at the Gnome 3.22 changelog. It lists things like support for multiple renaming, being able to set alarms for events in Calendar and seamless photo sharing via Google Photos and email. I remember being excited about all these features (except Google Photos, for obvious reasons) when I was using Windows. 2000. I was using Windows 2000.
That's why we're rejoicing that we'll soon have ASLR in all mainstream distros and support for a display server/compositor where windows can't snoop on other windows is just around the corner, while Microsoft is perfecting call-flow integrity and has had a proper compositor since the days when we were barely able to bolt our applications on top of an X11 compositor.
Edit: Non-cynically: most of the breakage happens because the level of complexity involved in a most modern technologies is way over the level that can be meaningfully managed by a community. systemd, xdg-everything, they're all very useful tools, but only a handful of people can properly use them, and it doesn't help that so many of them work for Red Hat and aren't exactly transparent about a lot of things. This breeds mistrust and brings about a lot of unjustified criticism along with the justified one.
As for why PulseAudio in particular keeps breaking, I'm not familiar enough with its source code to say. My problems revolve around things like randomly deciding to use another output device. I work around it by not using it, really. Every couple of months I take KDE and Gnome for a ride, they keep breaking, I open up the page of my local Apple dealer, I gaze incredulously at how much money they want for that hardware, close the page, pacman -Rcs plasma-meta and get back to WindowMaker.
I can't stomach dealing with driver/etc issues. I can't handle paying $2k only to deal with debugging things that i want to "just work".
Sure, it might work perfectly, or it might be a nightmare. I've had both experiences on desktop linux.
All I've ever wanted from Ubuntu/Gnome/KDE/XFCE (at least while developing) was the ability to launch programs easily from the keyboard, to tile windows in various configurations, and to manage virtual desktops.
i3 makes all of this easy with an incredibly simple and logical set of keyboard shortcuts. To anyone thinking about trying out i3, the learning curve isn't as bad as it seems, especially if you use a distro like Manjaro-i3 that can take care of some of the harder parts for you.
Though you can replace those components, the time being wasted there makes the Touchbar and other Apple crap seem the worse of two evils
Which brokenness are you referring to?
Systemd breaks things for the sake of speed. https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdAndSys...
I was looking for an excuse to get one recently but found enough testimony of breakage to not make the switch.
Apart from the battery thing, the same could be (and was) said about a mouse.
To fix that, one would need to rework the whole OS and applications in such way that they don't use F-keys at all, but rather something else.
So, fixing Touch Bar means rethinking OS and application shortcuts.
I don't think average users really use F-buttons that much, but we developers generally do.
I agree with the feedback, but I'm certain they will add this.
The older macs, you could have f-key 'default' with the other options activated by holding the FN key, or reverse it, so that the brightness/etc were default, and f-keys activated by holding down the FN key.
There is no option to just have f-keys defaulted, with other touchbar stuff activated by FN key. For people who simply want standard f-keys as default all the time (like you could have in the previous macs), there is no option right now.