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Comment by thomastjeffery | Hacker News Reader

It took me way too long to figure out that Zed exclusively runs on OSX. Why is that not in the first paragraph of their landing page?

edit:

It's not even on the landing page, or even on the about page! The landing page has an entire section, "Work with code on any machine"!

This is worse than bad.

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> Work with code on any machine

This is referring to remote editing support.

Platform support is in their FAQ, but I agree it should be a bit clearer on the homepage. Perhaps the download button should say "Download for MacOS" or similar.

I do think your comment here is unnecessarily rude.

> Work with code on any machine

> This is referring to remote editing support.

I agree with the OP, I thought it meant Zed was cross platform or something.

It's rude to make misleading marketing statements as well, especially when you are addressing a technical market. That is pretty bad, and thinking so is not rude.

It’s “rude” to intentionally mislead. It’s not rude to be bad at marketing.

Rude to who exactly? OP criticized the landing page for a) omitting the fact that ~85% of desktop computer users can’t use Zed, and b) alluding to this not being the case with language about working anywhere. This isn’t an attack on the authors, or on the product they clearly put so much time into.

Yeah, OP said the page is really bad. But IMO we should be able to express negative opinions on things we think suck about technical content without being forced to couch our language in euphemisms for fear of being rude, especially on a site like HN.

Let me quote two of the entries from the "In Comments" section of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.

Expressing negative opinions is fine. But perhaps you should have a fear of being rude. We are a community, and there's plenty of other people reading these comments. I value kindness and being constructive, neither of which the comment I replied to appear to express.

If you value kindness, consider empathy. The person you're somewhat haughtily tone policing is obviously annoyed about wasting a totally unnecessary amount of time on something ultimately useless to them.

And the feedback was constructive (and easily actionable): be upfront about the very limited platform support, don't waste people's time.

You're trying to high horse a complaint about someone referring to a new open source release as "worse than bad"? Because it doesn't support their preferred operating system? And it took them too many clicks on the website to learn that? No, that won't do.

The "Work with code on any machine" is confusing because it's not what you expect by glancing over the headlines. In the section they describe what they actually meant by it... It means that you can collaborate with others who have zed installed and run things on their computer, edit code etc.

I vaguely remember them being on the Rust podcast and I believe they said that they want multiplatform support but they first need to nail it on one platform before they go for the next.

https://rustacean-station.org/episode/antonio-scandurra/

That's all good and fine, but it should be immediately obvious to anyone who can't install their software that that is the case.

Any Mac’hine.

I'm frequently confused when coming across hyperbolic comments like these. You can just say: "feedback: make it more clear that it currently only supports MacOS". Calling it worse than bad is a stretch.

It's "worse than bad" because it's just a flat out lie?

It is not a lie, it just doesn't mean exactly what you want it to, and is certainly unintentionally misleading. You can work with code remotely on any machine.

Words have actual meanings.

The full text is:

> Work with code on any machine > When you join a teammate's project, you can navigate and edit as if the code is on your local machine. Open any file, type with low latency, and interact with language servers. It all works seamlessly, whether you're working with someone at the next desk or on a different continent.

I'm curious what part of that indicates that it means any operating system? It is clearly talking about treating remote machines as local machines. Yes, words have actual meanings but they also have context in which they are said or printed.

It's the context of the entire page that gives it that meaning.

Here's an interesting perspective: https://chat.openai.com/share/6ac010c4-dc4c-43ec-8b34-fc68a2...

I'm assuming that chatgpt agrees with you, personally I'm avoiding using their software until they figure out a better relationship with content creators / artists than they have right now. I still think calling it a lie is hyperbolic and inflammatory when it's just mediocre copy. Hope you have a great day.

You can't install MacOS any machine. You can't install it on most machines. You can install it exclusively on a Mac, a hackintosh, or a VM.

I'm not trying to assume or criticize their intentions. I'm criticizing their unintentional mistake.

My reply was to contextualize that it wasn't a lie. Maybe a poor choice of words, but given the context on the page, it's clear what it is talking about, which isn't the application being cross platform. A lie implies deception, which I think given the context on the page there wasn't any intention to deceive, just poorly chosen words that can have different meanings depending on the context.

I'm expressing an opinion here. It applies as specific feedback, sure, but it was also intended for anyone casually listening: this is a very generalized problem that I would like people to be aware of.

This might be bad in its own way, but I saw that the screenshots were 100% macOS and immediately assumed that it was Mac only and closed the tab. I actually had to go back and look because I could have sworn that I saw it written somewhere, but no, it was just the screenshots and the general feel of the text that clued me in.

I think part of it is that apps that are designed to be multi-platform don't tend to use macOS screenshots because maxOS is a minority of their users.

Roadmap 2024, Adoption: Unix support

https://zed.dev/roadmap

Isn't OSX Unix-based? I'm probably just ignorant, but what exactly does this mean? edit: oh you probably meant "Linux support" whoops ok

I can see "Linux support" though.

They mean Linux. Linux support is on there.

Mac uses a very different graphic stack.

It _is_ Unix.

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

It's fully made in Rust with a GUI in Rust so it should be multiplatform with a few contributions.

There are just packages for OSX for now... you know open source means you can build your own now, and that may be exactly why they release?

Apple has an entirely unique GUI framework (Cocoa) on top of an entirely unique rendering stack (Metal).

I understand why they would choose to implement Zed using those tools, but the sacrifice is platform compatibility. I'm not bothered at all with the fact that this is MacOS exclusive. I just want to know before I go try to download it!

It's at the bottom. Next to the download button

Because it got you to hear the pitch. People hating on Zed is still better than people oblivious to Zed.

sounds hyberbolic

Tim Cook is happy

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