I suspect a lot of Apple’s decisions in the past decade regarding software is due to an increasing number of Apple employees who are not familiar with the philosophies of 1970s-era Xerox PARC, the classic Mac, NeXT, and Jobs-era Mac OS X. Granted, it’s possible to be too introspective, too focused on the past. Unfortunately Apple’s software is losing its perfectionistic qualities, which has long been the selling point of the Mac compared to Windows and Linux.
Half the OS was still running under emulatiom
I think that is what was said:
> (Though I’m partial to the classic Mac OS from a UI point of view, Mac OS X had a better UX due to its stability.)
Jokes aside, I'm in agreement. Audio was still slightly buggy for me using a Elgato XLR USB interface, but it consistently worked with annoying workarounds. Linux is in a very good place for even normal consumers these days, I'm hoping Valve ends up making SteamOS a generalized gaming platform that will pull more market share away from Windows in that specific niche. I'm so ready.
But like, I don't manage linux servers and stuff so I am sure it sucks in certain very specific ways for people who need to deal with it day in and out.
I remember my young days of using Slackware with init.d. That was hell.
In my professional experience, I've come to understand that the systemd project has an assload of accidental complexity that the systemd folks are unwilling to reduce. At least once a year, we'll have a production-down page from a customer whose root cause turns out to be systemd failing in some bizarre and entirely inscrutable way. After a ton of digging, we'll eventually find someone who has run into something similar, and either got no response, or a "Wow, that's weird. Well, there's nothing WE can or should do." response from the systemd people.
"Solving" these issues is very frustrating, because we usually end up changing things from one way that the docs indicated would work just fine, to a different way the docs indicate would work just fine... which doesn't give us any confidence that what we did won't suddenly stop working next year. A project that is as fundamental as systemd wants to be really should be aggressively reducing complexity to the minimum required to get the job done and regularly documenting caveats and quirks as they're discovered and deemed "E_WONTFIX".
Other than that, though, Ubuntu on any old laptop (expensive thinkpads are my favorite) is my go-to daily driver. Except at work where I'm learning to deal with a (new, shiny, powerful) Macbook that I will use to... connect to a Linux VM because that's the only way to work on our software. Seriously, a whole fleet of zillion dollar macbooks so we can all ssh into beefy VMs to build/test/deploy on Linux.
IT onboarding made a point that if you want to get a Windows laptop and wipe it for Linux, you need permission and a "good reason." How about "this is stupid just let me work on stuff." Of course it's about tech support and security, which is fair enough but I feel like they have it backwards. Support Linux and then require special permission for the $4000 ssh client...
After spending a couple of days with homebrew and building some things natively on aarch64, though, I might make a hobby out of moving stuff local. It really is a beautiful machine.
Also, (FWIW) I've a fine time with JACK2, openrc, and xorg. I had to do some manual work to tell JACK which sound card to use and to set up the pulseaudio backfill for software that doesn't know how to speak to JACK, [0] but everything else just works.
[0] The "tricky" part was disabling all pulseaudio backend modules but the JACK backend. This was -of course- not tricky at all.
Thanks much for the link to the FAQ.
I'm going to disagree. This is a false nostalgia.
15 years ago the market for consumer laptops that were not MacBooks straight up sucked. If you walk into a Best Buy today, almost any laptop you buy is going to blow any laptop from back then out of the water in terms of build quality. And credit where it's due, in no small part it came from playing catch up with Apple.
On the Windows side of things, this was when Microsoft got serious about security, with plagued earlier versions of Windows XP (worms were so rampant around 2005) until later service packs helped fix things. Windows 7 was solid and performant. While my favorite version of Windows is 2000, 7 was another high mark for Windows.
Much has been said about Snow Leopard, but it was the pinnacle of Mac OS X, the refinement of an already great OS, Leopard. I would gladly used Snow Leopard today if it weren’t for needing current web browsers and up-to-date security patches.
Even the Web was better back then. By 2008 many mainstays of modern Web life, such as social media and YouTube, were already in existence. Google was excellent. Internet Explorer’s dominance was successfully challenged, and there was an ecosystem of standards-compliant browsers (later IE versions, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera). Web developers were coding to standards instead of only writing for one browser. Yes, ads existed, and there was also malware, but ads were less intrusive, and malware can be avoidable with more careful browsing.
I miss 2009- and 2010-era computing, when Windows and Mac OS X were at their peaks, when the browser ecosystem was diverse, and when many commercial websites like Facebook were still pleasant to use.
Perhaps there were peaks and troughs in individual technologies. Late 2000s / early 2010s felt like a good time for operating systems, for instance.
But is everyone forgetting having to navigate through Flash websites and Java Applets using Internet Explorer, for instance?
Also, people are just forgetting. There’s nostalgia in this thread about the iTunes desktop app, for instance. That program has been a pile of trash for as long as I can remember back in the 2000s.
It only became "problematic" when they tried to overload it too much to be able to "support" Windows for the iPod/iPhone without having to develop dedicated software.
They largely killed it and the replacement is lackluster. The best version was around version 10-11 with the colorized album view.
To this day there are no audio library management software that come close to what iTunes was. Apple Music, being a fork, is the closest thing, but it's not really the same thing at all.
Tell that to Dell and their shit trackpads and prone to death battery charging circuits. And the joy of soldered RAM so you cannot upgrade can't be overstated enough.