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A lot of these examples are just the opinions of the author rather than actual problems. For example: >3. General graphics APIs issues: > No high level, s

A lot of these examples are just the opinions of the author rather than actual problems. For example: >3. General graphics APIs issues: > No high level, stable, sane (truly forward and backward compatible) and standardized API for developing GUI applications (like core Win32 API - most Windows 95 applications still run fine in Windows 10 - that's 24 years of binary compatibility). Both GTK and Qt (incompatible GTK versions 1, 2, 3, 4 and incompatible Qt versions 4, 5, 6 just for the last decade) don't strive to be backwards compatible. The Qt company also changed the licensing model for their toolkit which makes using the library under Linux problematic to say the least. Firstly, I've seen a LOT of Windows 95 apps that do not "still run fine in Windows 10" -- in fact I'm not even certain how you could quantify "most" here because I made a living for several years doing updates of old apps for companies to get them to run on modern supported systems. In many cases using Wine things just worked but many older API calls broke older apps in Windows 10. > There's no universal unified graphical toolkit/API (and e.g. Wayland developers will not implement it) akin to Win32 which means applications using different toolkits (e.g. Qt, GTK, EFL) may look and behave differently and there's no way to configure all of them once and for all. This isn't true on Windows or MacOS either and I'd argue isn't a necessity anymore. Don't get me wrong, I get the appeal. Look and behaviour stability of a whole slew of first-party apps went out the Window with Windows 8 (arguably earlier at the introduction of the ribbon and auto-hiding the menu bar). For the past ten years it's been "stick the web on the desktop" so you get apps like Teams and Slack that look nothing like more traditional applications and have no consistency from app to app. Not to mention there's no behavioural consistency across platforms (let alone within each platform) in those kinds of apps. The author throughout suggests that if there's no purpose-built configuration GUI, it's a problem. Here's an example: > Both PipeWire and PulseAudio are not configured out of the box to support multi-user mode (e.g. multiple users sharing the same device simultaneously) and configuring them to enable this feature is impossible for the average user (no gui whatsoever, you need to edit text files). Then they go on to say: > ! It should be possible to configure pretty much everything via GUI (in the end Windows and Mac OS allow this) which is still not a case for some situations and operations. If you never do anything advanced on either of those operating systems then I agree you can get everywhere with just a GUI. However, this is just factually false -- Windows and MacOS do not provide configuration GUIs for every possible setting. If you have to open regedit to do anything, this is functionally not superior to "editing text files", and MacOS simply doesn't offer you configuration where they don't think you need it, forcing people to edit .plists or use the defaults command-line instead.

adrian_b 4y ago
"It should be possible to configure pretty much everything via GUI (in the end Windows and Mac OS allow this)" Yes, this sentence only shows that the author has extremely limited Windows and MacOS experience, because there are plenty of things that cannot be configured through the GUI in those. I no longer use Apple computers, so I do not know if this is true any more for the recent MacOS versions. However, when I had an Apple laptop, I was extremely surprised to discover that there were plenty of things that could not be configured through the GUI, but they could be configured with some undocumented command options added to command-line utilities whose origin was in FreeBSD, but which had been extended with additional options for OS X. I no longer remember all the cases where I was forced to use Apple CLI tools, but at least one of them was needed to be able to associate to some WiFi access points, others than those overpriced made by Apple, because not all the WiFi configuration options could be modified through the GUI. Also in Windows, a couple of years ago I had to install Windows Enterprise on several kinds of embedded computers and in each case I had to spend several days until convincing Windows to work acceptably, e.g. in order to work fine with a very slow SSD. In every case, the Windows Knowledge Base was not good enough to solve all the problems, so I had to do many Internet searches through forums of Windows users who complained about the same issues, in most cases without receiving any useful reply. Fortunately, in every case I have found some reply with the right solution, and in all cases the solution was not in the Control Panel or in any other GUI tool, but in invoking some obscure Windows command-line system-management tool, using some magic command-line options. The only difference vs. Linux was that the Apple and Microsoft CLI tools did not have adequate documentation and only some gurus were aware of what can be done with them.
itvision 4y ago
> Firstly, I've seen a LOT of Windows 95 apps that do not "still run fine in Windows 10" - Absolute most Windows 95 era 32bit applications run just _fine_ under Windows 10, period. Sans games. Games were often coded for then current GPUs and modern GPUs have different API. > However, this is just factually false -- Windows and MacOS do not provide configuration GUIs for every possible setting. I've not needed to use regedit in Windows or edit text config files since forever. You can fine tune stuff but absolute most people never need it.

adrian_b 4y ago

"It should be possible to configure pretty much everything via GUI (in the end Windows and Mac OS allow this)" Yes, this sentence only shows that the author has extremely limited Windows and MacOS experience, because there are plenty of things that cannot be configured through the GUI in those. I no longer use Apple computers, so I do not know if this is true any more for the recent MacOS versions. However, when I had an Apple laptop, I was extremely surprised to discover that there were plenty of things that could not be configured through the GUI, but they could be configured with some undocumented command options added to command-line utilities whose origin was in FreeBSD, but which had been extended with additional options for OS X. I no longer remember all the cases where I was forced to use Apple CLI tools, but at least one of them was needed to be able to associate to some WiFi access points, others than those overpriced made by Apple, because not all the WiFi configuration options could be modified through the GUI. Also in Windows, a couple of years ago I had to install Windows Enterprise on several kinds of embedded computers and in each case I had to spend several days until convincing Windows to work acceptably, e.g. in order to work fine with a very slow SSD. In every case, the Windows Knowledge Base was not good enough to solve all the problems, so I had to do many Internet searches through forums of Windows users who complained about the same issues, in most cases without receiving any useful reply. Fortunately, in every case I have found some reply with the right solution, and in all cases the solution was not in the Control Panel or in any other GUI tool, but in invoking some obscure Windows command-line system-management tool, using some magic command-line options. The only difference vs. Linux was that the Apple and Microsoft CLI tools did not have adequate documentation and only some gurus were aware of what can be done with them.

itvision 4y ago

> Firstly, I've seen a LOT of Windows 95 apps that do not "still run fine in Windows 10" - Absolute most Windows 95 era 32bit applications run just _fine_ under Windows 10, period. Sans games. Games were often coded for then current GPUs and modern GPUs have different API. > However, this is just factually false -- Windows and MacOS do not provide configuration GUIs for every possible setting. I've not needed to use regedit in Windows or edit text config files since forever. You can fine tune stuff but absolute most people never need it.