8 ms·

>I can't imagine the world of hurt, discomfort and frustration of developing against a lib set I can't read source code of or improve. Thank you. It boggles t

>I can't imagine the world of hurt, discomfort and frustration of developing against a lib set I can't read source code of or improve. Thank you. It boggles the mind that anyone who can write code would ever use a closed source operating system.

sumedh 6y ago
Do the Windows based laptops have a similar touchpad like the Mac which just works, last time I checked they did not.
- MacsHeadroom 6y ago
  At the same price point in the professional space, of course. Lenovo X series and System76 have solid touchpads- and have for years.
  - imwillofficial 6y ago
    “Solid” does not mean comparable. I have both high end dell and Lenovo laptops for work, and my Mac at home. My girlfriends MacBook Pro is far nicer to use despite being slower. Even for Windows.
  - TwoBit 6y ago
    As long as PC laptops continue to use that terrible Synaptics touchpad system, they will always be inferior. Anybody I've seen who claims any PC touchpad matches a Mac doesn't know what they are talking about. And I say this as a user of both but mostly PC.
    - noobermin 6y ago
      I had a 2016 macbook and an HP Spectre 360. The touchpads were comparable. On the other hand, the macOS part of the macbook was pretty terrible.
      - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        I'm kind of the opposite. I have a ThinkPad X390 Yoga and a MacBook. The ThinkPad touchpad is perfectly usable, but not great like the MacBook. The dealbreaker is that the Linux part of the ThinkPad is a complete pain (Intel WiFi headaches - went as far as submitting a kernel bug), while the MacBook just works.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- threentaway 6y ago
  Can you explain why this is such an important feature? How often are you writing code where you're not at your desk with a real keyboard and mouse?
  - scott_w 6y ago
    100% of the time for me. I prefer the trackpad over the mouse.
    - ooobit2 6y ago
      100% of the time for me, I wouldn't wipe my butt with a trackpad, let alone use one for work. It's always fun for me to meet people who do things the complete opposite I do them. It's oddly satisfying, like, I'm glad someone is my polar opposite on an issue or activity.
      - jmnicolas 6y ago
        Tabs or spaces ?
        am391 6y ago
        That made me smile....thanks @jmnicolas :)
        ooobit2 6y ago
        It depends. For lists, I do spaces. Allows for more levels than a tab would. But for everything else, tabs. I've also grown to loathe that first-line tab beginning the second paragraph. It makes left-aligned text look wonky. I loathe centered text too. I'm not a rounded rectangle person. I think the colored block UI that's all over Android, sites like HN, etc. looks tacky. We went from semi-transparent glass UI to flat colored blocks, and somehow interfaces got slower and more processor intensive. Now, that's a horse of a different color.
      - imwillofficial 6y ago
        It’s like we all have an evil doppelgänger out there’re of us who is religiously fervent about trackpads
- sneak 6y ago
  Macs, with their amazing touchpads, are (at least for the moment and the last ten years or so) general purpose computers that can run pretty much every widely available open source operating system. This is a false dichotomy. From GP: > use a closed source operating system That's not "Windows".
  - tkfu 6y ago
    > that can run pretty much every widely available open source operating system. That's just not true, though. Here's a git repo listing what works and doesn't work in Linux for all of the macbook pro models since 13,1 (released in 2016): https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux You'll notice that power management (suspend/resume) doesn't work for any model, wifi only works for a few select models, and support for audio is pretty spotty. If you buy Mac hardware, you're pretty much locked into MacOS if you want to have a reasonably acceptable experience. BSD support is much, much, much worse--it basically doesn't work at all for any relatively recent model.
    - floatboth 6y ago
      > BSD support is much, much, much worse--it basically doesn't work at all for any relatively recent model Well, would probably work fine with an external keyboard/mouse :D NVMe should crash right now like it did on Linux before 5.4, but the Linux patch for that https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/66341331ba0d2de4ff421cdc401a1e34de50502a https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/66341331ba0d2de4ff4... is absolutely tiny, I could probably replicate these quirks in FreeBSD in a few minutes. The SPI keyboard and touchpad thing though is just.. WHY?? Everyone went with HID over I2C, Apple went with a completely new protocol over SPI. So annoying. I wouldn't want to work on supporting that crap. > power management (suspend/resume) doesn't work for any model um, that page says that you have to disable a power saving state on NVMe and it would work on any model with Intel GPU.
- 0xcoffee 6y ago
  They do, when they introduced the precision touch-pad. However ironically it created a lot of problems in software that responded poorly to the high precision events. Chrome being one of the most obvious offenders, took months for them to finally fix it (hence edge scrolling so much nicer then chrome on its release). These days it just works though.
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  Surface line all do and any professional level laptop from the past few years should too. The term to look for is “Windows precision trackpad”.
fsloth 6y ago
Oh, the prejudice! I like developing on Windows. Especially since the programs I write are run only on Windows. That's what the specific trillion dollar industry my employer serves uses mostly on desktop. I don't want to tweak the platform. I want to concentrate on the code I write. I could be equally productive on OS X or Linux, but frankly, I don't care. They are all interchangeable computational substrates for me. As long as you can write any program on them, that is...
- noobermin 6y ago
  It's almost as if none of the replies read Drew's comment. Drew is talking about developing an editor for a closed source system and dealing with interfaces that break and then are hard to change, unlike open source systems that receive patches. It has nothing to do with "tweak[ing] the platform." Fixing a bug (which upstream would do, not you) is not tweaking, a bug is unintended behavior.
  - fsloth 6y ago
    Yes, but I am not paid to fix the platform. From my employers point of view it is irrelevant if I could fix the platform since they most certainly don't want to pay for it. This is not evil. It's just how some parts of the industry work.
    - dandellion 6y ago
      From your employer point of view you might be able to save a lot of time and money by submitting a patch for the bug upstream, instead of having to write your own text layout manager from scratch to work around an issue, which if you're unlucky won't even add any additional value to the client by itself other than enabling that feature.
      - imwillofficial 6y ago
        The operative word is “might” As experienced devs with love of open source, they made this choice after thinking about it. They just have different value weights for their goals and those aren’t the same as other folks. Not a biggie
mwcampbell 6y ago
> It boggles the mind that anyone who can write code would ever use a closed source operating system. Some of us want our work to actually reach people who don't write code or sysadmin their own computer, i.e. most people in the world. I, for one, think my effort is wasted if it doesn't benefit those people. So while working exclusively on a free-software platform is tempting from an ideological purity point of view (edit: and I envy people like you that manage to make a living doing it), I don't think I'd ever actually do it. Edit: I should be more concrete and less snarky. Working on developer tools is good and necessary, and you can do that effectively on a free-software platform like Linux. But I choose to focus on end-user-facing software, particularly in the field of accessibility. I could work on desktop Linux accessibility, for the vanishingly small number of blind people who use desktop Linux (and that number is shrinking; one of my blind programmer friends just switched to Windows). Or I could target one or more of the mainstream platforms where the users actually are. I suppose I could work exclusively on web applications, but I don't think that would be the best use of my skills. And even then, while I could develop primarily on Linux, I'd have to test on other platforms too.
- patrickaljord 6y ago
  Working on a free software platform is not mutually exclusive with reaching the majority of end-users. You can develop web apps for example or use cross platform toolkits for native apps. That's what I do and it works great.
  - jamil7 6y ago
    One of the major selling points of the Editor posted here is that it isn't a cross platform app or built with web tech. Those already exist and it's great that we have choices but some developers like Panic have carved out a niche selling software thats very specific and tightly integrated into the platform. For those developers using the platform they're developing for makes a lot of sense.
  - naravara 6y ago
    When you use Nova and then go back to something web based, like Atom, it becomes clear why that’s not ideal. It jut feels snappier.
pjmlp 6y ago
Some of us prefer the Xerox PARC experience, and gave up on the promise of Linux Desktop with its fragmentation and continuous churn. My MFC/VCL applications work just fine today, and can be easily extended to take advantage of modern UWP APIs.
- r-w 6y ago
  In what way(s) does Linux fail to follow in the footsteps of PARC?
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    It is a bit hard to explain in an HN comment something that requires live experience, You can start by having a look at, http://toastytech.com/guis/cedar.html http://toastytech.com/guis/cedar.html "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknEhXyZgsg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknEhXyZgsg "SYMBOLICS CONCORDIA ONLINE DOCUMENTATION HYPER TEXT MARKUP 1985" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud0HhzAK30w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud0HhzAK30w You can see how NeXT builds on many of these concepts on the famous "NeXT vs Sun" marketing piece, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg Sun also had some ideas along these lines with NeWS, "NeWS: A Networked and Extensible Window System," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zG0uecYSMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zG0uecYSMA Naturally OS/2, BeOS, Windows, macOS, iOS, and even Android share some of the ideas. Now, before I proceed note that actually modern Linux distributions have all the tooling to make these concepts happen, but it fails short to have everyone agree on a proper stack. So basically, the main idea is to have a proper full stack in place for developing a Workstation computer as one single experience, from bottom all the way to the top. On Xerox's case, they used bytecode with in-CPU execution via programmable microcode loaded on boot, and later on just a thin native glue on top of host OS. The environments had frameworks / modules for the whole OS stack, supported distributed computing, embedded of data structures across applications (OLE can trace its roots back to these ideas), REPLs that not only could interact with the whole OS (commands, modules, running applications), it was also possible to break into the debugger, change the code and redo the failed instructions. Linux distributions get kind of close to these ideas via GNOME and KDE, but the whole concept breaks, because they aren't part of a full OS, rather a bunch of frameworks, that have to deal with classical UNIX applications and communities that rather use fvwm (like I was doing in 1995), and use a bunch of xterms, than having frameworks talking over D-BUS, embedding documents, all integrated with a REPL capable of handling structured data, and call any kind of executable code (including .so, because the type information isn't available). And then every couple of years the sound daemon, graphics stack or whatever userspace layer gets redone, without any kind of compatibility, because it is open source so anyone that cares should just port whatever applications are relevant. It is quite telling that most Linux conferences end up being about kernel, new filesystems, network protocols, and seldom about how to have something like a full BeOS stack on Linux. Even freedesktop can only do so much.
boxed 6y ago
If linux wouldn't require you to send patches upstream that would be great. Last time I checked the font rendering was off. So Linux seems to need to catch up to system 7 maybe? Certainly it's lagging osx 10.0.
- gumoz 6y ago
  I laughed so much reading this, certainly not untrue.

sumedh 6y ago

Do the Windows based laptops have a similar touchpad like the Mac which just works, last time I checked they did not.

MacsHeadroom 6y ago
At the same price point in the professional space, of course. Lenovo X series and System76 have solid touchpads- and have for years.
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  “Solid” does not mean comparable. I have both high end dell and Lenovo laptops for work, and my Mac at home. My girlfriends MacBook Pro is far nicer to use despite being slower. Even for Windows.
- TwoBit 6y ago
  As long as PC laptops continue to use that terrible Synaptics touchpad system, they will always be inferior. Anybody I've seen who claims any PC touchpad matches a Mac doesn't know what they are talking about. And I say this as a user of both but mostly PC.
  - noobermin 6y ago
    I had a 2016 macbook and an HP Spectre 360. The touchpads were comparable. On the other hand, the macOS part of the macbook was pretty terrible.
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      I'm kind of the opposite. I have a ThinkPad X390 Yoga and a MacBook. The ThinkPad touchpad is perfectly usable, but not great like the MacBook. The dealbreaker is that the Linux part of the ThinkPad is a complete pain (Intel WiFi headaches - went as far as submitting a kernel bug), while the MacBook just works.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
threentaway 6y ago
Can you explain why this is such an important feature? How often are you writing code where you're not at your desk with a real keyboard and mouse?
- scott_w 6y ago
  100% of the time for me. I prefer the trackpad over the mouse.
  - ooobit2 6y ago
    100% of the time for me, I wouldn't wipe my butt with a trackpad, let alone use one for work. It's always fun for me to meet people who do things the complete opposite I do them. It's oddly satisfying, like, I'm glad someone is my polar opposite on an issue or activity.
    - jmnicolas 6y ago
      Tabs or spaces ?
      - am391 6y ago
        That made me smile....thanks @jmnicolas :)
      - ooobit2 6y ago
        It depends. For lists, I do spaces. Allows for more levels than a tab would. But for everything else, tabs. I've also grown to loathe that first-line tab beginning the second paragraph. It makes left-aligned text look wonky. I loathe centered text too. I'm not a rounded rectangle person. I think the colored block UI that's all over Android, sites like HN, etc. looks tacky. We went from semi-transparent glass UI to flat colored blocks, and somehow interfaces got slower and more processor intensive. Now, that's a horse of a different color.
    - imwillofficial 6y ago
      It’s like we all have an evil doppelgänger out there’re of us who is religiously fervent about trackpads
sneak 6y ago
Macs, with their amazing touchpads, are (at least for the moment and the last ten years or so) general purpose computers that can run pretty much every widely available open source operating system. This is a false dichotomy. From GP: > use a closed source operating system That's not "Windows".
- tkfu 6y ago
  > that can run pretty much every widely available open source operating system. That's just not true, though. Here's a git repo listing what works and doesn't work in Linux for all of the macbook pro models since 13,1 (released in 2016): https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux You'll notice that power management (suspend/resume) doesn't work for any model, wifi only works for a few select models, and support for audio is pretty spotty. If you buy Mac hardware, you're pretty much locked into MacOS if you want to have a reasonably acceptable experience. BSD support is much, much, much worse--it basically doesn't work at all for any relatively recent model.
  - floatboth 6y ago
    > BSD support is much, much, much worse--it basically doesn't work at all for any relatively recent model Well, would probably work fine with an external keyboard/mouse :D NVMe should crash right now like it did on Linux before 5.4, but the Linux patch for that https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/66341331ba0d2de4ff421cdc401a1e34de50502a https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/66341331ba0d2de4ff4... is absolutely tiny, I could probably replicate these quirks in FreeBSD in a few minutes. The SPI keyboard and touchpad thing though is just.. WHY?? Everyone went with HID over I2C, Apple went with a completely new protocol over SPI. So annoying. I wouldn't want to work on supporting that crap. > power management (suspend/resume) doesn't work for any model um, that page says that you have to disable a power saving state on NVMe and it would work on any model with Intel GPU.
0xcoffee 6y ago
They do, when they introduced the precision touch-pad. However ironically it created a lot of problems in software that responded poorly to the high precision events. Chrome being one of the most obvious offenders, took months for them to finally fix it (hence edge scrolling so much nicer then chrome on its release). These days it just works though.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
Surface line all do and any professional level laptop from the past few years should too. The term to look for is “Windows precision trackpad”.

fsloth 6y ago

Oh, the prejudice! I like developing on Windows. Especially since the programs I write are run only on Windows. That's what the specific trillion dollar industry my employer serves uses mostly on desktop. I don't want to tweak the platform. I want to concentrate on the code I write. I could be equally productive on OS X or Linux, but frankly, I don't care. They are all interchangeable computational substrates for me. As long as you can write any program on them, that is...

noobermin 6y ago
It's almost as if none of the replies read Drew's comment. Drew is talking about developing an editor for a closed source system and dealing with interfaces that break and then are hard to change, unlike open source systems that receive patches. It has nothing to do with "tweak[ing] the platform." Fixing a bug (which upstream would do, not you) is not tweaking, a bug is unintended behavior.
- fsloth 6y ago
  Yes, but I am not paid to fix the platform. From my employers point of view it is irrelevant if I could fix the platform since they most certainly don't want to pay for it. This is not evil. It's just how some parts of the industry work.
  - dandellion 6y ago
    From your employer point of view you might be able to save a lot of time and money by submitting a patch for the bug upstream, instead of having to write your own text layout manager from scratch to work around an issue, which if you're unlucky won't even add any additional value to the client by itself other than enabling that feature.
    - imwillofficial 6y ago
      The operative word is “might” As experienced devs with love of open source, they made this choice after thinking about it. They just have different value weights for their goals and those aren’t the same as other folks. Not a biggie

mwcampbell 6y ago

> It boggles the mind that anyone who can write code would ever use a closed source operating system. Some of us want our work to actually reach people who don't write code or sysadmin their own computer, i.e. most people in the world. I, for one, think my effort is wasted if it doesn't benefit those people. So while working exclusively on a free-software platform is tempting from an ideological purity point of view (edit: and I envy people like you that manage to make a living doing it), I don't think I'd ever actually do it. Edit: I should be more concrete and less snarky. Working on developer tools is good and necessary, and you can do that effectively on a free-software platform like Linux. But I choose to focus on end-user-facing software, particularly in the field of accessibility. I could work on desktop Linux accessibility, for the vanishingly small number of blind people who use desktop Linux (and that number is shrinking; one of my blind programmer friends just switched to Windows). Or I could target one or more of the mainstream platforms where the users actually are. I suppose I could work exclusively on web applications, but I don't think that would be the best use of my skills. And even then, while I could develop primarily on Linux, I'd have to test on other platforms too.

patrickaljord 6y ago
Working on a free software platform is not mutually exclusive with reaching the majority of end-users. You can develop web apps for example or use cross platform toolkits for native apps. That's what I do and it works great.
- jamil7 6y ago
  One of the major selling points of the Editor posted here is that it isn't a cross platform app or built with web tech. Those already exist and it's great that we have choices but some developers like Panic have carved out a niche selling software thats very specific and tightly integrated into the platform. For those developers using the platform they're developing for makes a lot of sense.
- naravara 6y ago
  When you use Nova and then go back to something web based, like Atom, it becomes clear why that’s not ideal. It jut feels snappier.

pjmlp 6y ago

Some of us prefer the Xerox PARC experience, and gave up on the promise of Linux Desktop with its fragmentation and continuous churn. My MFC/VCL applications work just fine today, and can be easily extended to take advantage of modern UWP APIs.

r-w 6y ago
In what way(s) does Linux fail to follow in the footsteps of PARC?
- pjmlp 6y ago
  It is a bit hard to explain in an HN comment something that requires live experience, You can start by having a look at, http://toastytech.com/guis/cedar.html http://toastytech.com/guis/cedar.html "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknEhXyZgsg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknEhXyZgsg "SYMBOLICS CONCORDIA ONLINE DOCUMENTATION HYPER TEXT MARKUP 1985" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud0HhzAK30w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud0HhzAK30w You can see how NeXT builds on many of these concepts on the famous "NeXT vs Sun" marketing piece, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg Sun also had some ideas along these lines with NeWS, "NeWS: A Networked and Extensible Window System," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zG0uecYSMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zG0uecYSMA Naturally OS/2, BeOS, Windows, macOS, iOS, and even Android share some of the ideas. Now, before I proceed note that actually modern Linux distributions have all the tooling to make these concepts happen, but it fails short to have everyone agree on a proper stack. So basically, the main idea is to have a proper full stack in place for developing a Workstation computer as one single experience, from bottom all the way to the top. On Xerox's case, they used bytecode with in-CPU execution via programmable microcode loaded on boot, and later on just a thin native glue on top of host OS. The environments had frameworks / modules for the whole OS stack, supported distributed computing, embedded of data structures across applications (OLE can trace its roots back to these ideas), REPLs that not only could interact with the whole OS (commands, modules, running applications), it was also possible to break into the debugger, change the code and redo the failed instructions. Linux distributions get kind of close to these ideas via GNOME and KDE, but the whole concept breaks, because they aren't part of a full OS, rather a bunch of frameworks, that have to deal with classical UNIX applications and communities that rather use fvwm (like I was doing in 1995), and use a bunch of xterms, than having frameworks talking over D-BUS, embedding documents, all integrated with a REPL capable of handling structured data, and call any kind of executable code (including .so, because the type information isn't available). And then every couple of years the sound daemon, graphics stack or whatever userspace layer gets redone, without any kind of compatibility, because it is open source so anyone that cares should just port whatever applications are relevant. It is quite telling that most Linux conferences end up being about kernel, new filesystems, network protocols, and seldom about how to have something like a full BeOS stack on Linux. Even freedesktop can only do so much.

boxed 6y ago

If linux wouldn't require you to send patches upstream that would be great. Last time I checked the font rendering was off. So Linux seems to need to catch up to system 7 maybe? Certainly it's lagging osx 10.0.

gumoz 6y ago
I laughed so much reading this, certainly not untrue.