CuriousRose

Linux has terrible UX, no cohesion in design and quite frankly I can't understand how it could possibly be considered a replacement for macOS.

Expecting business users to use a terminal to install apps (yes I know AppImage exists) is so far removed from reality it's not worth entertaining the "year of the Linux desktop" joke for anyone without at least a mildly technical background.

To clarify, I'm speaking about business users not the people we commonly interact with in the IT space - although in my market they are also just as siloed in their knowledge and while they may be great at DevOps or development, good luck getting them to do anything outside of drag an app from a Disk Image to the Applications folder (which will stay mounted for the next 8 months).

Congratulations on the beta launch, an impressive product we will consider integrating.

As a relatively new developer, I'm curious why the dependancy on React?

Was there no way to get the UI you wanted without implementing a framework like React?

We are Svelte based, so it's frustrating for us to have to drag in React for libraries like this.

Microsoft's holistic direction is so bad I have moved all of my on-prem Windows Server clients that will listen to Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024, and all desktop clients out of M365 to Office LTSC 2024.

This was after dragging many endpoint users by tooth and nail that just use Xero or web based apps to MacBook Airs (which are going down a similarly terrible direction post Tahoe).

Is there no saviour for modern software? I'm obviously technical but my adolescent quest for customisation and tinkering is behind me. I want software that works and keeps up with hardware, not degrades its margin of improvement.

Cloudflare runs a high demand service, and the centralisation does deserve scrutiny. I think a good middle ground I’ll adopt is self hosting critical services and then when they have an outage redirect traffic to a Cloudflare outage banner.

Without a personal opinion one way or the other, I would assume the gripe is with congesting the public network as opposed to the choice of public domain documentaries you downloaded.

I don’t fully agree with the nested view argument. In our context (POS software) we use them heavily to have a single source of truth for a clean transaction view, joining common tables like product, category, etc and then using that as the backbone for all user reporting that might be more/less complex. Not doing this means that we need to accommodate for each where clause in each table on each report. For example eliminating voided lines, voided transactions, returned transactions, etc. Not having this means that a single logic change would need to update 20+ views/stored procs so for our case I think its valid to nest.

I love bun, but the things I wish it was used for it is not being implemented. Namely language servers in editors like VS Code and Zed for dramatic performance improvements, and serverless environments like Vercel and Cloudflare. Maybe I'm missing something, but aren't all these bun native APIs useless if they are deployed to environments that only support Node? Is everyone using bun for dev also managing their own infra stack?

This is awesome! I have wanted something like this for ages. Can you please also add posture tracking? Rounded shoulders, hunching, leg up, etc. I have ADHD and constantly fidget and get myself in working positions that are definitely not good for me in the long run.

Fringe product, not geared for ADHD specifically. But look at Gorilla Mind Rush/Smooth depending on your stimulant tolerance. In your position you don't have many efficacious options, but this works for me as diagnosed ADHD probably 60% as good as the low dose stimulant medication I take.

Didn't know this thanks! Looks like only Grok 3 mini is supported on my standard plan currently, and I'll have limited tokens to use on Grok 4 (that I'm already paying for) on the Premium plan. I'll stick to my current setup for now but appreciate the input.

I love and pay for Kagi, but I am afraid paid search providers are in for a tough time. I am using search less and less, and directing more of my search (~90%) to Grok instead of Kagi now. The exception being price comparisons when online shopping. I want the exact information I'm after, in the way that I want it, immediately. Search cannot do this, unless they amalgamate into AI tools more and more, at which point they are in a different space altogether. Looks like an Uber eating Taxi's business situation again to me.

I'm building a fairly large SaaS product that will have global users and show financial reporting across different regions. Nothing gives me more anxiety as a relatively new developer than storing and recalling date/time values from my Postgres database, being converted to/from/being displayed in my app.

I have all records stored in timestampz(3), but I have no idea if what I'm doing is best practice or how to audit said functions. Using luxon at the moment, but a guide or blog post for best practices would help put my mind at ease if anyone has one. I know dates as a library are complex, but the UX managing them isn't much better.

For someone wanting to use nix for the premise of the article (dev environment management), I'd encourage you to checkout Coder[0] which I'm self-hosting personally for my company, but will prove useful once I hire.

[0]: https://coder.com

I understand your point, nobody is claiming that separating the bread and milk is a particularly good experience either and while it probably makes more money in a physical store where you want to buy multiple options at once, this doesn't apply to AirBnB with a single item checkout. The search at Amazon almost always gets me what I want on the first page, which is the desired behaviour almost everywhere to reduce friction to checkout. Why would I want to increase user frustration and bounce rate on a single product checkout?

I imagine significantly reducing database calls and blob downloads due to short-sighted pagination behaviour would result in significant cost saving, reduce bounce rate and increase conversions.

It amazes me that companies like AirBnB get huge valuations and user bases when the fundamental feature of searching for listings is phenomenally atrocious.

- Paginated results that reset and call an API for new results when the map is moved (even to a subset of the initial call such as in a zoom).

- Inability to change pagination size.

- Inability to hide listings you aren't interested in.

- Map only displaying listings on the current page, which change dramatically per page.

- Page changes (the thing you do more of than comparing options), take way too long.

Maybe it's a real-estate website related issue as the two main property sites in Australia (Domain and RealEstate) as also garbage. I have a feeling it's also designed this way to prevent scraping.

Can someone at AirBnB please sort these basic QoL things out.

If humans forgot how to make new CPUs, it might finally be the incentive we need to make more efficient software. No more relying on faster chips to bail out lazy coding and make apps run lean. Picture programmers sweating over every byte like it's 1980 again.

It would be interesting to (optionally) make the AI agent more like an additional collaborative user, sharing the chat between users, allowing collaborative edits to prompts, etc.

I've not had the greatest relationship with Apple software lately, however seeing every "great idea" that comes out of the Microsoft development team is quite possibly the only marketing Apple needs going forward.

Being 50% faster (article based guess-timate) what’s the average time that a mainframe stays in the fleet? Surely significant energy and data centre floor space savings might even capture some customers from the previous generation to upgrade? Or is it a 5-10 year cycle?

I wonder if the author considered pgLite as a layer on top of IndexedDB?

Full postgres querying, and you could even share indexes across devices if you did something with ElectricSQL and a central server.

Local iMessage storage is debilitating. I have over 90GB of iMessage history that I don't want deleted. The keep messages for x days removes it from iCloud and the Mac though. Why?

I am totally invested in the Apple ecosystem, which on principle I'm against (closed systems never sat right with me), but at the time (beginning ~2015) the products and services were so well integrated and genuinely improved my life it was hard to see how things could ever get this bad. I'd still never (ever) go back to Windows, and Linux doesn't have the same feel or ease of setup as macOS, but I am genuinely, deeply concerned about this trajectory for Apple. Albeit super opinionated, but I feel that macOS was the saviour of modern aesthetic computing especially when Windows started its rapid decline post 7. I’m fine trading some frustration—like extra steps for untrusted software—if it keeps macOS secure and fast, free of Windows-level adware or telemetry. But right now, macOS has never been in a worse state.

I recently emailed Tim expressing the same concerns as the article and regarding specific issues with Messages and Mail resource usage and was surprised to get a response from Craig requesting more information and sysdiagnose files, but this is where feedback ended unfortunately.

The current state of the macOS UI is atrocious, devices don't all need the same button shape or menu UX flow across all devices as they are inherently interacted with differently. A Mac isn’t an iPad — why force the same rounded buttons and simplified menus on both? They’re interacted with differently: keyboard and mouse versus touch. I have no idea why this is so difficult for execs to understand or important for them to change. Software teams at Apple are so lucky to have the Apple Silicon innovation on the hardware side, Intel Macs would catch fire on boot-up running any of the latest releases given how atrocious the resource usage is.

While I'm here whinging, the iOS swipe keyboard is garbage (almost totally unusable now) where before it was perfect with the innovative predictive hit-box expansion pioneered by Ken Kocienda. I think that's now been replaced with AI prediction which in 2025 I don't understand why it can be so embarrassingly bad. I had to upgrade to the iPhone Max recently to hit the letters properly. Also Apple I never want to tell someone to "duck off".

Initially I was understanding, but quite frankly now I'm just pissed that it has gotten to this stage, and there is no indication of resolution from execs about these issues.

I’m starting to worry that Apple could go off the deep-end - the way of Microsoft - coasting on hardware sales while letting software quality slide (albeit seeming intentional from Microsoft's side of the fence). I get it — software isn’t where the money is, hardware drives the business - but the two are inseparable BY DESIGN. When macOS struggles with basic functionality, it undermines the value of the Mac itself.

I'm not a developer by trade, and have gone from 0 full-stack knowledge to building a MVP for my startup in 18 months using Svelte 4 and SvelteKit. Looking at the JS/TS ecosystem from the outside, it was a total nightmare and Svelte 4 was the only framework that seemed to make logical and aesthetic sense to me.

Currently porting to Svelte 5 and it is less elegant in my opinion, but perhaps the problems it tries to solve are for more sophisticated developers and I don't really come across them or have knowledge of them. I would prefer to stay on 4, but I will take Rich's word for it that it will be better long term.

Admittedly complicated components with lots of reactivity can be confusing to follow data changes with lots of $: lines so I have tried to minimise that from the beginning. The Svelte 5 code looks cleaner to follow for onboarding devs that aren't familiar with our codebase yet.

I'd really love to hear more about your experience, what were the major issues with process and how would you fix them? I'm running a startup as a software dev looking to have a fast polished product with the Apple-esque perception of the past, but need to know what to avoid doing. Any good resources on running a software company implementing a focus on quality as part of the process that doesn't limit growth?

Can’t wait for my 75 year old father to call me for tech support when the app auto-migrates, changes layouts, corrupts the mail profile or requires sign in for licence validation. Thunderbird is just as bad, there is a new UI change every few months (and they all make it worse).

I would assume it's to prevent buying accounts in locations with cheaper pricing due to local affordability and using them internationally. A Turkish or African continent country would be a significantly cheaper subscription price than say Singapore or Switzerland.

Somebody I know has gone back to torrenting. They state it’s far easier to do that than find content among their combined $100 monthly subscriptions, most of which has modern movie slop catalogues, while great classic films you need to pay for separately anyway. The execs will never learn.

I’m willing to be further educated, but before agriculture was prominent we really had not many other options aside from seafood (which for the record I consume in similar amounts to red meat). A majority of non farmed or cross-bred vegetables and plants in the wild would have been toxic as they are today (try eat anything in a random forest that looks like lettuce - you won’t have a good time), and modern day fruits look nothing like they used to. Carbohydrates would have been far less dense in fruits and more fibrous. The carb exception being honey which is essentially pure sugar, but I don’t know the percentage of early humans that would have consumed it or how often. I see the example of the inuits and hunter gatherer tribes of Australia being key examples of low carb, high fat and protein civilisations which I would say would have been the norm up until around 25,000 years ago.

I have found a dramatic increase in my quality of life doing the exact opposite of authoritative health guidelines.

- More red meat - Less to zero carbs - More salt - Zero vegetables

n=1 I know, but when will they start to get this right? It feels like with every published recommendation, we move further from our evolutionary diet.

I'm so glad that someone else had the patience and articulation to write this article so that I didn't have to (as a personal venting exercise). My personal takeaway of the mutually shared frustrations in poor design has been apparent since maybe the 1990's onwards. It is very sad to see throwaway consumerism, permeate culture to the point where from an industrial design POV you need to buy vintage or ludicrously expensive appliances to have a beautiful and functional product that is also reliable. In the past decades, companies like Braun were able to bring beauty into the house, where now Temu disposables have taken their place.