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You can't easily share media between the Apple ecosystem and others. You can't access some Apple services at all from Linux. There's no way to run userscripts/

You can't easily share media between the Apple ecosystem and others. You can't access some Apple services at all from Linux. There's no way to run userscripts/WebExtensions on IOS. Your device is no longer a user-focused tool to access media, your browser is closer to being a "smart tv" than a customize-able information explorer and augmenter essentially controlled by no one. You're giving up an awful lot for the sake of convenience, trends that if amplified could irrevocably change the character of the Internet for the worse. I also don't get what's missing from a modern Linux desktop, especially since nearly everything is on the web these days.

electricslpnsld 9y ago
> I also don't get what's missing from a modern Linux desktop Adobe software, for one.
- mehrdadn 9y ago
  I have also yet to find an IDE as nice as Visual Studio...
  - mythz 9y ago
    Many of JetBrains IDE's are better and they're cross-platform. I've switched to Rider after getting sick of constant white screen of deaths, crashes, locking and perf issues in VS.NET. Rider is on par with VS.NET/R# for C# and superior for pretty much everything else except for visual GUI designers - although I haven't used one seriously in over a decade.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - mehrdadn 9y ago
      I'm very skeptical but I will try out JetBrains, thanks for the pointer! :) EDIT: These all seem to be .NET development? I use Visual Studio mostly for C++... for that would you recommend CLion?
      - mythz 9y ago
        Yeah you'd use CLion for C/C++ development (tho AppCode includes C/C++ support as well), although haven't used that variant myself, but they're all built from the same high-quality core platform and share many components so I'd expect it to provide a quality experience for C/C++ as well.
        mehrdadn 9y ago
        Interesting, okay thanks! I'll give it a try.
        mehrdadn 9y ago
        I just gave CLion a whirl. It's decent, but unless I'm missing something massive, it's nowhere close to Visual Studio in terms of being a good experience IMO. The debugging experience is so rough in comparison. Aside from the fact that the shortcuts are pretty non-standard (F5 is "copy" instead of "debug"??) here are some issues I can see right away: 1. Artificially long delay when I hover on variables before I can see their values. This drives me insane. 2. I can't view the "raw" values of a variable; I can only see whatever it decides to show me. (So if there's an std::string, I can't examine its fields; at least not by default, if there's any way.) 3. The first time I tried running the debugger, the process stays hanging in the background. I couldn't kill it; I had to manually detach it from the debugger. This was literally the "hello world" example it came with. 4. The completion database for their hello world (all it includes is <iostream>) took quite a while longer than Visual Studio's did. I can't imagine what it's like for actual projects. 5. It initially told me I can't debug because I didn't have a project? So I had to reload the CMake project. This makes no sense. 6. There seems to be no filtering of private variables that I can't access (in the completion UI)? Maybe I'm missing something here. 7. There seems to be no obvious "immediate mode" in the debugger. I'm not well-versed enough to know if GDB has this feature, but regardless, whatever you have to type into GDB to get this feature would be more painful than in Visual Studio (where you literally just type the expression into the Immediate tab and press Enter). 8. Even the cursor hiccups repeatedly. Not that Visual Studio's is perfectly innocent in this regard either, but CLion's stuttering is far more pronounced, far more frequent, and far less excusable (see https://imgur.com/a/Huo2V https://imgur.com/a/Huo2V). This is just after a very quick use. It seems to "work" in the same way Eclipse does -- the functionality is "there" (maybe even more than what Visual Studio has), but it's just clunky and doesn't feel smooth or "integrated" (the 'I' in IDE).
  - sleavey 9y ago
    Microsoft released Visual Studio for Linux [1] a little while ago. I find it to be excellent; it gives comparable functionality to Atom but with a lot of the stuff you get with plugins already built in. [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/ https://code.visualstudio.com/
    - ascagnel_ 9y ago
      VSCode is a good text editor, but it doesn't compare to the full Visual Studio IDE.
      - sleavey 9y ago
        Out of curiosity, what are the killer features of the full IDE over Code?
        welly 9y ago
        I'd probably suggest debugging being one of the main killer features. I'm not a VS/VSCode user but I am a Sublime Text and PhpStorm user. You can debug in Sublime Text but I'm not sure you'd want it to be your primary debugger. I'd guess VSCode/VS might be similar. And again taking Sublime Text and PhpStorm as an example, PhpStorm knows your code far, far better than Sublime Text ever would do and this makes navigating your code quicker and easier.
    - engi_nerd 9y ago
      That's Visual Studio Code, not Visual Studio.
traek 9y ago
> There's no way to run userscripts/WebExtensions on IOS. Your device is no longer a user-focused tool to access media, your browser is closer to being a "smart tv" than a customize-able information explorer and augmenter essentially controlled by no one. I have (personally) never had the desire to write/run a userscript on iOS. If my device being a “smart tv” lets me focus more on other areas of my life (i.e. projects, hobbies, and career) rather than fiddling with my tools, then that’s a trade off I’m more than happy to make. I suspect many other people share this point of view.
- davidy123 9y ago
  As usual, a lot of the innovation you probably take for granted happens through side channels, user-favouring features that would never appear unless they can be "unauthorized" add-ons. Like ad blocking. I understand that some people value convenience above all else, but maybe you never experienced the bad old days when everything was locked down. It's good that Apple still has competition and others are conscious of what might happen.
  - stephenr 9y ago
    Add blocking is something Safari (and Apple) does better than the any other browser vendor, IMO. A good ad blocker for Safari (on Mac or iOS) just uses the Content Blockers system, and provides essentially a JSON blob with a bunch of rules in it to Webkit, which will then take the requested actions (mostly block, sometimes hide elements, sometimes force a URL to https) internally - the Ad Blocker "app" never knows what sites you're visiting and is never involved in actual blocking.
  - reaperducer 9y ago
    >"unauthorized" add-ons. Like ad blocking. There are iOS ad blockers on the Apple App Store, and extensions for MacOS Safari. I'm not sure how much more authorized it can get than that unless you want Tim Cook to hold your hand through the process.
    - LoSboccacc 9y ago
sneak 9y ago
- decent video calling - imessage (signal is getting warmer, but the integration is still lacking) - adobe creative suite - video editing - audio production apps - photo management and post processing (darktable is still garbage) - sleep/wake and connecting/disconnecting external displays - not-ugly fonts
- derefr 9y ago
  It’s kind of funny to compare Linux vs. macOS if your experience of macOS primarily comes from using a Hackintosh. (No sleep/wake support for me! Unplugging my HDMI cable causes a hard-reboot! Etc.) Which is to say: Linux is pretty good on Macs, whereas macOS is pretty broken (after weeks of intense debugging with other Hackintosh folks) on hardware that would run Linux just fine.
  - Tijdreiziger 9y ago
    That's to be expected, of course. Linux maintainers care about the fact that it can run on just about anything. macOS maintainers only care about whether it runs on Macs.
  - reaperducer 9y ago
    You admit you're using a hackintosh, and then blame Apple when stuff doesn't work? That's one heck of a mental disconnect.
    - derefr 9y ago
      I didn’t say I blame Apple. It’s not Apple’s responsibility to write drivers for machines they don’t claim to support. I’m more saying that—although Linux’s support for things like sleep/wake on random machines might be sometimes wonky, the best efforts of the Hackintosh community don’t get macOS to support those same machines any better. It’s the machines that are wonky. (Usually by having horrible off-spec ACPI tables that get patched over with drivers the manufacturer releases only for Windows.) Which is further to say: it’s not really a failing of macOS or Linux if your hardware won’t sleep/wake correctly, or won’t connect/disconnect from external displays correctly. In either case, it’s because your machine is nonconformant to the specs the drivers were written to follow. The only way to succeed in such an environment is to spend man-decades (Linux) or at least man-years (Hackintosh) reverse-engineering the brokenness and writing heuristics into your drivers that patch over it—or by being such a monopoly player that the OEM does that for you (Windows.)
welly 9y ago
> I also don't get what's missing from a modern Linux desktop A user interface that isn't ugly and laggy.
- stuntkite 9y ago
  I bought a system76 bonobo with their pop linux distro. I'm perfectly happy with my desktop experience.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  You know not everyone actually likes the Apple desktop experience either.
- gyaru 9y ago
  What's ugly or laggy? It's not like there is a defacto user interface but there are plenty of them that sure doesn't lag or look ugly!
KajMagnus 9y ago
> what's missing from a modern Linux desktop Networking, printer stuff, graphics stuff that works immediately after installation, without one having to search for various problems & fixes on the Internet. And that doesn't randomly break after kernel upgrades. Because of running into networking & graphics driver problems every now and then (and having to revert to older kernel versions), and problems with printers & drivers, I feel I would never never never recommend Linux to people, unless they enjoy troubleshooting things and learning new stuff.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Um I have never had to download fixes for networking / graphics Ubuntu worked out of the box for me.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  with amd open drivers or even intel ones there is virtually no more support issue for graphics on Linux.
- JasonFruit 9y ago
  I have used Debian almost exclusively for ten years, not counting the last couple months where I've been doing Windows 10 for some contract work. I can't remember the last time I ran into problems with networking, printer setup, or really anything except suspend/hibernation, barring one astonishingly cheap ($168 at Walmart) machine that had a weird integrated Bluetooth/wireless/something else card without a free driver. That being said, Windows 10 is great for regular-user stuff --- really great, in fact. It's only for development that it's sometimes a little awkward, and it's really not bad. If I were working with .NET/MSSQL/IS more, I'd love it: Visual Studio is a nearly perfect IDE on a powerful machine. Debian is still better for me, though.
  - KajMagnus 9y ago
    Well I suppose there're lots of people who never ran into any problems. I've been using Ubuntu and Mint mainly, and usually that works fine for me too (with most laptops & desktops I've had). In one case though (maybe 3 years ago), on fairly new hardware IIRC, I've had to test various kernel versions, until I found one that was compatible with the graphics stuff on the laptop. And then take care to not accidentally auto-upgrade to another kernel version. In another case, networking in Ubuntu didn't work after installation. I installed another distro instead and then everything (incl networking) worked fine directly. Finding printer drivers that doesn't just print random garbage characters, is usually super frustrating (I think), largely because the printer company webites' UX is terrible. I think one is safer, if one use a bit older hardware (laptops and printers), because then the Linux people have had time to look into bug reports and incompatibility problems and fix them? Nowadays when buying a new laptop, I always websearch for the laptop name + "Linux problems" or something like that, to see what bugs & incompatibilities other people have reported already. And then maybe I decide to avoid that laptop. But ... I wouldn't expect my parents or most other people to do this. Instead they'll buy a "random" laptop with new "unknown" hardware, and then there'll be a 20% ? risk that networking or graphics won't work for them? And I think they'll need help to get the printer working. ... And with all that in mind I feel I need to slightly warn them about Linux.

electricslpnsld 9y ago

> I also don't get what's missing from a modern Linux desktop Adobe software, for one.

mehrdadn 9y ago
I have also yet to find an IDE as nice as Visual Studio...
- mythz 9y ago
  Many of JetBrains IDE's are better and they're cross-platform. I've switched to Rider after getting sick of constant white screen of deaths, crashes, locking and perf issues in VS.NET. Rider is on par with VS.NET/R# for C# and superior for pretty much everything else except for visual GUI designers - although I haven't used one seriously in over a decade.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - mehrdadn 9y ago
    I'm very skeptical but I will try out JetBrains, thanks for the pointer! :) EDIT: These all seem to be .NET development? I use Visual Studio mostly for C++... for that would you recommend CLion?
    - mythz 9y ago
      Yeah you'd use CLion for C/C++ development (tho AppCode includes C/C++ support as well), although haven't used that variant myself, but they're all built from the same high-quality core platform and share many components so I'd expect it to provide a quality experience for C/C++ as well.
      - mehrdadn 9y ago
        Interesting, okay thanks! I'll give it a try.
      - mehrdadn 9y ago
        I just gave CLion a whirl. It's decent, but unless I'm missing something massive, it's nowhere close to Visual Studio in terms of being a good experience IMO. The debugging experience is so rough in comparison. Aside from the fact that the shortcuts are pretty non-standard (F5 is "copy" instead of "debug"??) here are some issues I can see right away: 1. Artificially long delay when I hover on variables before I can see their values. This drives me insane. 2. I can't view the "raw" values of a variable; I can only see whatever it decides to show me. (So if there's an std::string, I can't examine its fields; at least not by default, if there's any way.) 3. The first time I tried running the debugger, the process stays hanging in the background. I couldn't kill it; I had to manually detach it from the debugger. This was literally the "hello world" example it came with. 4. The completion database for their hello world (all it includes is <iostream>) took quite a while longer than Visual Studio's did. I can't imagine what it's like for actual projects. 5. It initially told me I can't debug because I didn't have a project? So I had to reload the CMake project. This makes no sense. 6. There seems to be no filtering of private variables that I can't access (in the completion UI)? Maybe I'm missing something here. 7. There seems to be no obvious "immediate mode" in the debugger. I'm not well-versed enough to know if GDB has this feature, but regardless, whatever you have to type into GDB to get this feature would be more painful than in Visual Studio (where you literally just type the expression into the Immediate tab and press Enter). 8. Even the cursor hiccups repeatedly. Not that Visual Studio's is perfectly innocent in this regard either, but CLion's stuttering is far more pronounced, far more frequent, and far less excusable (see https://imgur.com/a/Huo2V https://imgur.com/a/Huo2V). This is just after a very quick use. It seems to "work" in the same way Eclipse does -- the functionality is "there" (maybe even more than what Visual Studio has), but it's just clunky and doesn't feel smooth or "integrated" (the 'I' in IDE).
- sleavey 9y ago
  Microsoft released Visual Studio for Linux [1] a little while ago. I find it to be excellent; it gives comparable functionality to Atom but with a lot of the stuff you get with plugins already built in. [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/ https://code.visualstudio.com/
  - ascagnel_ 9y ago
    VSCode is a good text editor, but it doesn't compare to the full Visual Studio IDE.
    - sleavey 9y ago
      Out of curiosity, what are the killer features of the full IDE over Code?
      - welly 9y ago
        I'd probably suggest debugging being one of the main killer features. I'm not a VS/VSCode user but I am a Sublime Text and PhpStorm user. You can debug in Sublime Text but I'm not sure you'd want it to be your primary debugger. I'd guess VSCode/VS might be similar. And again taking Sublime Text and PhpStorm as an example, PhpStorm knows your code far, far better than Sublime Text ever would do and this makes navigating your code quicker and easier.
  - engi_nerd 9y ago
    That's Visual Studio Code, not Visual Studio.

traek 9y ago

> There's no way to run userscripts/WebExtensions on IOS. Your device is no longer a user-focused tool to access media, your browser is closer to being a "smart tv" than a customize-able information explorer and augmenter essentially controlled by no one. I have (personally) never had the desire to write/run a userscript on iOS. If my device being a “smart tv” lets me focus more on other areas of my life (i.e. projects, hobbies, and career) rather than fiddling with my tools, then that’s a trade off I’m more than happy to make. I suspect many other people share this point of view.

davidy123 9y ago
As usual, a lot of the innovation you probably take for granted happens through side channels, user-favouring features that would never appear unless they can be "unauthorized" add-ons. Like ad blocking. I understand that some people value convenience above all else, but maybe you never experienced the bad old days when everything was locked down. It's good that Apple still has competition and others are conscious of what might happen.
- stephenr 9y ago
  Add blocking is something Safari (and Apple) does better than the any other browser vendor, IMO. A good ad blocker for Safari (on Mac or iOS) just uses the Content Blockers system, and provides essentially a JSON blob with a bunch of rules in it to Webkit, which will then take the requested actions (mostly block, sometimes hide elements, sometimes force a URL to https) internally - the Ad Blocker "app" never knows what sites you're visiting and is never involved in actual blocking.
- reaperducer 9y ago
  >"unauthorized" add-ons. Like ad blocking. There are iOS ad blockers on the Apple App Store, and extensions for MacOS Safari. I'm not sure how much more authorized it can get than that unless you want Tim Cook to hold your hand through the process.
  - LoSboccacc 9y ago

sneak 9y ago

- decent video calling - imessage (signal is getting warmer, but the integration is still lacking) - adobe creative suite - video editing - audio production apps - photo management and post processing (darktable is still garbage) - sleep/wake and connecting/disconnecting external displays - not-ugly fonts

derefr 9y ago
It’s kind of funny to compare Linux vs. macOS if your experience of macOS primarily comes from using a Hackintosh. (No sleep/wake support for me! Unplugging my HDMI cable causes a hard-reboot! Etc.) Which is to say: Linux is pretty good on Macs, whereas macOS is pretty broken (after weeks of intense debugging with other Hackintosh folks) on hardware that would run Linux just fine.
- Tijdreiziger 9y ago
  That's to be expected, of course. Linux maintainers care about the fact that it can run on just about anything. macOS maintainers only care about whether it runs on Macs.
- reaperducer 9y ago
  You admit you're using a hackintosh, and then blame Apple when stuff doesn't work? That's one heck of a mental disconnect.
  - derefr 9y ago
    I didn’t say I blame Apple. It’s not Apple’s responsibility to write drivers for machines they don’t claim to support. I’m more saying that—although Linux’s support for things like sleep/wake on random machines might be sometimes wonky, the best efforts of the Hackintosh community don’t get macOS to support those same machines any better. It’s the machines that are wonky. (Usually by having horrible off-spec ACPI tables that get patched over with drivers the manufacturer releases only for Windows.) Which is further to say: it’s not really a failing of macOS or Linux if your hardware won’t sleep/wake correctly, or won’t connect/disconnect from external displays correctly. In either case, it’s because your machine is nonconformant to the specs the drivers were written to follow. The only way to succeed in such an environment is to spend man-decades (Linux) or at least man-years (Hackintosh) reverse-engineering the brokenness and writing heuristics into your drivers that patch over it—or by being such a monopoly player that the OEM does that for you (Windows.)

welly 9y ago

> I also don't get what's missing from a modern Linux desktop A user interface that isn't ugly and laggy.

stuntkite 9y ago
I bought a system76 bonobo with their pop linux distro. I'm perfectly happy with my desktop experience.
ekianjo 9y ago
You know not everyone actually likes the Apple desktop experience either.
gyaru 9y ago
What's ugly or laggy? It's not like there is a defacto user interface but there are plenty of them that sure doesn't lag or look ugly!

KajMagnus 9y ago

> what's missing from a modern Linux desktop Networking, printer stuff, graphics stuff that works immediately after installation, without one having to search for various problems & fixes on the Internet. And that doesn't randomly break after kernel upgrades. Because of running into networking & graphics driver problems every now and then (and having to revert to older kernel versions), and problems with printers & drivers, I feel I would never never never recommend Linux to people, unless they enjoy troubleshooting things and learning new stuff.

walshemj 9y ago
Um I have never had to download fixes for networking / graphics Ubuntu worked out of the box for me.
ekianjo 9y ago
with amd open drivers or even intel ones there is virtually no more support issue for graphics on Linux.
JasonFruit 9y ago
I have used Debian almost exclusively for ten years, not counting the last couple months where I've been doing Windows 10 for some contract work. I can't remember the last time I ran into problems with networking, printer setup, or really anything except suspend/hibernation, barring one astonishingly cheap ($168 at Walmart) machine that had a weird integrated Bluetooth/wireless/something else card without a free driver. That being said, Windows 10 is great for regular-user stuff --- really great, in fact. It's only for development that it's sometimes a little awkward, and it's really not bad. If I were working with .NET/MSSQL/IS more, I'd love it: Visual Studio is a nearly perfect IDE on a powerful machine. Debian is still better for me, though.
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  Well I suppose there're lots of people who never ran into any problems. I've been using Ubuntu and Mint mainly, and usually that works fine for me too (with most laptops & desktops I've had). In one case though (maybe 3 years ago), on fairly new hardware IIRC, I've had to test various kernel versions, until I found one that was compatible with the graphics stuff on the laptop. And then take care to not accidentally auto-upgrade to another kernel version. In another case, networking in Ubuntu didn't work after installation. I installed another distro instead and then everything (incl networking) worked fine directly. Finding printer drivers that doesn't just print random garbage characters, is usually super frustrating (I think), largely because the printer company webites' UX is terrible. I think one is safer, if one use a bit older hardware (laptops and printers), because then the Linux people have had time to look into bug reports and incompatibility problems and fix them? Nowadays when buying a new laptop, I always websearch for the laptop name + "Linux problems" or something like that, to see what bugs & incompatibilities other people have reported already. And then maybe I decide to avoid that laptop. But ... I wouldn't expect my parents or most other people to do this. Instead they'll buy a "random" laptop with new "unknown" hardware, and then there'll be a 20% ? risk that networking or graphics won't work for them? And I think they'll need help to get the printer working. ... And with all that in mind I feel I need to slightly warn them about Linux.