3 ms·

All those points are fine, but they're all yes-buts. — I mean, first-party GNOME applications are as consistent as Straight-up disagree. It all depends what y

All those points are fine, but they're all yes-buts. — I mean, first-party GNOME applications are as consistent as Straight-up disagree. It all depends what your threshold of UI/UX consistency is. Unfortunately most open source enthusiasts have a low threshold. It is difficult to convey the importance of a thousand subtle details, each one impossibly trivial, but the sum total moves mountains. — I'd like an example, not really sure what you're talking about here. An example: If my aging father's Mac turns to shit, he can hold down R, boot up the computer from the recovery disk and restore from a Time Machine backup that he himself set up with no assistance required from anyone. — The graphics drivers on macOS are very poor. That's really a marginal opinion. Maybe if you're an OpenGL developer. Apple provides an excellent framework (Metal) which works brilliantly. Yes it would be great if Apple delivered first-class support for Vulkan, but complaining about OpenGL is last decade's problem. — colord works just fine for me It's increasingly robust at handling the basics, yes.

microcolonel 8y ago
> That's really a marginal opinion. Maybe if you're an OpenGL developer. Apple provides an excellent framework (Metal) which works brilliantly. Yes it would be great if Apple delivered first-class support for Vulkan, but complaining about OpenGL is last decade's problem. The Metal drivers are more stable, but the shader compilers generate slow code, just like the old Apple OpenGL drivers (the ones they wrote for the Intel GPUs). OpenGL issues are not "last decade's problem", I have on several occasions needed to write workarounds in WebGL shaders to prevent the NVIDIA drivers from crashing the whole windowing system (and every application with it) on macOS. On the same hardware, the drivers on Linux are faster, more stable, and more featureful and also include implementations of Vulkan. > An example: If my aging father's Mac turns to shit, he can hold down R, boot up the computer from the recovery disk and restore from a Time Machine backup that he himself set up with no assistance required from anyone. That's not a macOS feature though, that's an Apple PC firmware feature. I'll grant that AFAIK no vendor who ships a Linux distribution by default has a durable recovery partition, but there's nothing about macOS itself which makes that easier.
- sjwright 8y ago
  > That's not a macOS feature though, that's an Apple PC firmware feature. That you see a distinction here is telling. The end user doesn't see the distinction. As for all of your complaints about the OpenGL drivers, that's an issue for developers, not end users. Yes, maybe there might be more 3D apps and faster 3D apps if the video driver situation was better, but also maybe not? Either way, this is all irrelevant because the fundamental argument here is the impetus for end users to remain on a platform. Just because you can possibly eek out an extra 20% performance in your Linux app on the same hardware isn't going to shift people. ------------------- On a side note, could the people who are down-voting microcolonel please stop? This is a discussion of ideas, and his/her ideas are being expressed with valid form and structure.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    Basically the point is that either distro or hardware providers can already offer easy to use backup functionality. For example Linux mint comes with time shift. I honestly haven't paid much attention to what people do provide as I've mostly historically used rsync or more recently zfs send/syncoid.
  - microcolonel 8y ago
    > As for all of your complaints about the OpenGL drivers, that's an issue for developers, not end users. I shipped an application with WebGL under the impression that it would not need to be custom tested on a decade's worth of MacBooks Pro, but received a report later that a user had lost data because the graphics driver restarted the windowing system when he opened my webpage. If an honest, non-malicious webpage can cause your windowing system to restart, that is an end-user problem. Even Apple themselves don't bother to test their official websites on more than one generation of Mac, why should everyone who uses this now half-decade-old web API have to buy $10,000+ worth of equipment, some of it with old versions of the OS, because they can't trust the vendor of the hardware to maintain the drivers? And this is on top of the fact that, generally speaking, on a given piece of hardware, the application will run dramatically more slowly on macOS than on Windows or Linux. > That you see a distinction here is telling. The end user doesn't see the distinction. I tend to agree, but in this case there's an important distinction for us to make, even if the end users are generally unaware. In the case of recovering intentional backups on a fully-functioning computer, Apple has done a good job of making that straightforward on their laptops, if you attribute that to "macOS", then you miss the point that a) any vendor could offer the same thing, even if they don't, and it has nothing to do with macOS and b) improving "Linux" won't make a recovery partition suddenly appear on your computer. Furthermore, Apple's advantage here only applies to functioning computers. Apple makes it extremely difficult to recover data from damaged devices, and in the case of the iPhone, they literally censor any mention of it being possible from the forums, and lie straight to the faces of their customers. When something gets a little bit wet, Apple will tell you that you should have bought iCloud, and that your data are gone forever.

microcolonel 8y ago

> That's really a marginal opinion. Maybe if you're an OpenGL developer. Apple provides an excellent framework (Metal) which works brilliantly. Yes it would be great if Apple delivered first-class support for Vulkan, but complaining about OpenGL is last decade's problem. The Metal drivers are more stable, but the shader compilers generate slow code, just like the old Apple OpenGL drivers (the ones they wrote for the Intel GPUs). OpenGL issues are not "last decade's problem", I have on several occasions needed to write workarounds in WebGL shaders to prevent the NVIDIA drivers from crashing the whole windowing system (and every application with it) on macOS. On the same hardware, the drivers on Linux are faster, more stable, and more featureful and also include implementations of Vulkan. > An example: If my aging father's Mac turns to shit, he can hold down R, boot up the computer from the recovery disk and restore from a Time Machine backup that he himself set up with no assistance required from anyone. That's not a macOS feature though, that's an Apple PC firmware feature. I'll grant that AFAIK no vendor who ships a Linux distribution by default has a durable recovery partition, but there's nothing about macOS itself which makes that easier.

sjwright 8y ago
> That's not a macOS feature though, that's an Apple PC firmware feature. That you see a distinction here is telling. The end user doesn't see the distinction. As for all of your complaints about the OpenGL drivers, that's an issue for developers, not end users. Yes, maybe there might be more 3D apps and faster 3D apps if the video driver situation was better, but also maybe not? Either way, this is all irrelevant because the fundamental argument here is the impetus for end users to remain on a platform. Just because you can possibly eek out an extra 20% performance in your Linux app on the same hardware isn't going to shift people. ------------------- On a side note, could the people who are down-voting microcolonel please stop? This is a discussion of ideas, and his/her ideas are being expressed with valid form and structure.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Basically the point is that either distro or hardware providers can already offer easy to use backup functionality. For example Linux mint comes with time shift. I honestly haven't paid much attention to what people do provide as I've mostly historically used rsync or more recently zfs send/syncoid.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  > As for all of your complaints about the OpenGL drivers, that's an issue for developers, not end users. I shipped an application with WebGL under the impression that it would not need to be custom tested on a decade's worth of MacBooks Pro, but received a report later that a user had lost data because the graphics driver restarted the windowing system when he opened my webpage. If an honest, non-malicious webpage can cause your windowing system to restart, that is an end-user problem. Even Apple themselves don't bother to test their official websites on more than one generation of Mac, why should everyone who uses this now half-decade-old web API have to buy $10,000+ worth of equipment, some of it with old versions of the OS, because they can't trust the vendor of the hardware to maintain the drivers? And this is on top of the fact that, generally speaking, on a given piece of hardware, the application will run dramatically more slowly on macOS than on Windows or Linux. > That you see a distinction here is telling. The end user doesn't see the distinction. I tend to agree, but in this case there's an important distinction for us to make, even if the end users are generally unaware. In the case of recovering intentional backups on a fully-functioning computer, Apple has done a good job of making that straightforward on their laptops, if you attribute that to "macOS", then you miss the point that a) any vendor could offer the same thing, even if they don't, and it has nothing to do with macOS and b) improving "Linux" won't make a recovery partition suddenly appear on your computer. Furthermore, Apple's advantage here only applies to functioning computers. Apple makes it extremely difficult to recover data from damaged devices, and in the case of the iPhone, they literally censor any mention of it being possible from the forums, and lie straight to the faces of their customers. When something gets a little bit wet, Apple will tell you that you should have bought iCloud, and that your data are gone forever.