Most of the desktop applications I have wrote over the years have been in other languages like Java and Go as I have wanted them to mostly be cross platform. In these cases I have always used the Software UI, which in Java is Swing and in Go is Fyne. These are usually reasonably fast, don't necessarily look native depending on how its themed but ultimately fit the language better than trying to bridge to Win32 or GTK/QT.
Its possible to design internal structures such that its easier to use as a Fridge and freezer with some loss of space to avoid having to reach down into it. It would waste space and some efficiency however, the more complicated it becomes with assisted lifting and such the worse the gap would become. But the problem is often space, a lot of kitchens do not have 2x the floor area to be putting in chests making them good for secondary storage somewhere else but not a primary kitchen appliance.
There is no doubt its better thermally just because cold air falls out the front of a normal fridge/freezer and huge amounts of energy are wasted everytime you open the door. A chest design looses considerably less of its cooled air but its also a lot more awkward to use and ends up less floor space efficient.
Perhaps the solution is to rethink the role of the fridge in the kitchen. It could be designed to be a part of a kitchen island, or have cabinets placed above it. In conventional kitchens, a chest does not make sense. But it could be well integrated if we start with the assumptions the fridge will be a chest.
Its one thing when code was hammered out by someone to just work, its worse fixing code that no one even wrote to begin with. This period of programming is going to produce a lot of code people dump and replace because its not worth fixing.
What I fear is that early or even current steps of this process is replacing parts of the code or all code wholesale. With as broken or just slightly less broken code. Albeit the way it is broken could be different each time. So problems are not fixed, they are just replaced with different problems. Ad nauseum...
And like SEO blog spam it’s just going to grow in volume because people want to pad their CV’s with all sorts of activity in GitHub regardless of the quality
Microsoft has spent over a decade swimming against their users interests at this point and during that time frame Linux has been improving its desktop and improving kernel performance. We are now at the point where Linux emulating Window's entire API space for games with worse drivers is dangerously close on performance with none of the privacy invasion and anti user features. Its pretty late in the game for them to start trying to switch back to producing an Operating system users actually want. Users refusing to switch from Windows 10 should have been that wake up call.
I don't think Microsoft can pull this off, I think as mindshare is shifting it will continue to do so and its going to take Microsoft a long time to row back and right now its only talking about doing some minor things. Now Nvidia is developing the drivers on Linux seriously there is every chance this transition snowballs and nothing Microsoft does will be enough.
Much of big tech became Product leaders running amok. Somehow It shifted from users know best to "Product" knows best.
I think this all stemmed everyone wanting to be Apple except no one actually achieved it and now we have 3 different versions of the audio control panel in Windows, the start button is somehow in the middle of the screen, and windows search no longer searches your PC.
Deleting "Product" might save windows, short of that, I am doubtful.
Apple achieved it with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Apple then spent ~15 years un-achieving it. It started with iOS 7, and has culminated in the Liquid (Gl)ass era: a mess of unintuitive menus, terrible and inconsistent UI patterns, the lobotomite twins Siri & Apple Intelligence.
Although, surprisingly, built on top of absolutely incredible silicon.
Pretty cool being racist. I noticed people from varying ethnic backgrounds seemed to land in particular divisions (maybe schools in those countries focused on these cores), but I wouldn't ascribe nationality to anything as broadly as you did.
I don't particularly care what their ethnicity happens to be. Just write good, bug free code that does things people want. How they get to there from here? No f'ing idea -- but I know that first they have to have to want to and they _clearly_ do not.
UNIX had already won the server room by them with RISC.
Lets not pretend outside IIS with ASP, later ASP.NET, Active Directory, Sharepoint, SQL Server, SMB, there were any other deployment scenarios left for Windows.
The noteworthy thing about Snow Leopard is that it was released at all. Apple had shifted all their effort onto getting the iPhone released and development on OS X pretty much stopped.
> ... the start button is somehow in the middle of the screen ...
If you take a look at the size of widescreen monitors, you can kinda guess why someone decided to move the start button/menu to the middle of the screen.
I know Samsung and Dell have ginmorous 49 inch monitors. Start menu that pops up from the lower left corner of the monitor would be a bad UX - the user might not even notice that a menu had popped up if that lower left corner of the monitor is out of their peripheral vision.
Moving the Start menu to the middle of the screen does go against years of muscle memory... moving your mouse/trackpad to the lower left, using the monitor border as a stop-zone though.
I guess they didn't want to make it an option/toggle hidden in some dialog box somewhere...
You used to be able to move the taskbar to any side of the screen. IMO the more sensible move for widescreen monitors is to move it to the side so it takes up less screen real estate. Windows 11 removed the ability to move the taskbar like that; it's stuck on the bottom (unless you seek out 3rd party software solutions).
Also it should be noted that (at least as recently as September, haven't used 11 since) you could move the start button back to the left side.
Which is absolutely a good thing, but my point is that they removed a feature when it had only become more relevant with time. They get no credit for the change to move the start button to the middle, which is admittedly defensible if the goal was to accommodate widescreen displays, when they removed the ability to move the taskbar entirely, which had been in windows for 25+ years, and also had that benefit.
It's inconceivable they ever removed it. Why would they do that? It's been a feature for a long time and a lot of people use it.
If you're going to introduce a new thing, you have to make sure it justifies replacing the old thing. The new windows 11 taskbar was essentially a straight downgrade.
I have a 48" 4k non-curved monitor, running stock KDE with the launcher in the corner and UI scale set to 100%. Not only is the experience just fine, I simply cannot see having the launcher in the middle being useful. It would lead to a beak in left-right organizational thinking for where window and pinned tasks live as my active applications change and I have to hunt for their new screen position. Alt-tab breaks down after a certain number of windows, as does the exploding "overview". Having a consistent order and positioning for multitasking is both faster and less cognitive load.
I've never been bothered by Windows's changes, and I mostly think they were reasonable. But for a number of reasons it's never going to be easy for them to gain total acceptance: 1) the massive backwards compatibility back to Windows 95 stuff, 2) the willingness to try new and/or silly things that Apple is too stuffy to try, and 3) the fact that there's only ever going to be one "flavor" of Windows; if we were stuck with one single Linux distro people would be complaining about that one too.
The first is coercion. Installing without a Microsoft (Outlook) account is more and more difficult. An attentive steward of Windows would allow older gui themes (xp, Win7 Aero, etc.) to be applied for the nostalgic. And there would be an easy control to disable all Copilot integration. Microsoft is coercive towards their customers with these and other actions.
The second is incompetence. The Windows update process is intrusive, lengthy, and prone to repeatedly bricking unlucky PCs. Linux updates are far more pleasant.
These are big problems, and I agree, it will take great institutional change to curb these abusive tendencies. I don't know if they can.
It doesn't, I have installed many Windows updates that didn't require a reboot. Even ones I expected to need an update, like an update to a graphics driver. Screen just went blank, then came back a second later.
AFAICT it's only updates to things that run at startup time that require a reboot, probably because NTFS doesn't allow you to write to a file that's currently opened (as opposed to nearly every Linux filesystem, which handles that just fine: the process that has the file opened continues to see the "old" file, while any that open it after the write will see the "new" file — but NTFS, probably due to internal architecture, can't handle that and so you have to reboot to change files that background services are using).
It has nothing to so with NTFS, but all with the Win32 API. The Windows kernel supports this file model, proven by WSL1. There is a blog post somewhere (Old New Thing?) stating the engineers would like to e.g. allow deleting a file even if there is still a program with with a file handle to it, but are concerned deviation from current behavior would cause more problems than it solves.
The reason that they want a reboot is that they do not want to support a system using two versions of the same library at the same time, let's say ntdll. So they would have to close any program using that library before programs that use the new version can be started. That is equivalent to a reboot.
And I completely understand the reason. For a long time when Firefox would update on Linux, the browser windows still open were broken; it opened resources meant for the updated Firefox with the processes runnung the non-updated Firefox. The Chrome developers mentioned [2] that the "proper" solution would be to open every file at start and pass that file descriptor to the subprocesses so all of them are using the same version of the file. Needless to say, resource usage would go up.
This isn't an NTFS thing. The I/O Manager implements NtLockFile. Applications can request exclusive byte-range write access to a file. And perhaps it is lazy programmers, or defaults, but they generally do.
I don't think Microsoft sees client machine reboots as an issue, and it used to be much worse when they used to be released weekly. On the server side, Microsoft expects that you'd implement some form of high availability.
NTFS on non-Windows follows the locking semantics of the underlying driver model/kernel, e.g. you can replace an in-use file on Linux. Likewise, using FAT on Windows you cannot replace an in-use file. This is just to demonstrate it isn't a file system-specific "issue" (if you feel it is one). It was a design decision by the original NT OS/2 development group.
Ultimately, the NT byte-range locking is a holdover from NT OS/2, where in OS/2 byte-range locking was mandatory.
There a enough apps that keep old files open, but also (re)open updated files that do not fit to the old, open ones, thus have all kind of issues.
(Subjectively Thunderbird has major issues with not restarting if libs it depends on get upgraded.)
I stopped answering support mails and tickets from users with long uptime with anything else than: reboot first.
And it was >>80% the cause of problems.
And yes, most times a logout would suffice, but with our users having >100d uptime with desktops and laptops, the occasional kernel update is done /en passant/ this way.
(The impatient could kexec and have the advantage of both. Or look at the output of "need restart" or "checkrestart". But I couldn't care less in case of end user devices)
Ive read this many times, so I tried this a few times, giving it the benefit of the doubt, only to find the PC on login screen the following morning every time.
Can‘t replace files that are in-use and that includes running programs or loaded DLLs. Linux can, it keeps the inode and only actually deletes upon termination of last access.
Ugh, I've had this happen over and over. I can't trust my laptop to actually shut down. I have to wait to see the light stay off for a couple seconds before I put it in my bag.
If you have two candidate ui designs you pick the best of the two. If you have an established ui and a candidate the new design needs to be dramatically better. It has to scream superiority. If it isn't that you are just ruining ux.
I install Gimp one time. I like to casual draw on autopilot, usually while doing something else, talking, watching a movie, listening to a podcast etc. For some reason half the icons were missing and the existing set was replaced with the hipster horrifying flat single color monstrosities. This would have been a waste of their time if it was only an option for no one who wants this some place buried deep in the settings where it would only clutter the nesaserily complex options.
With MS it feels more like intentionally trolling the user
The best spot for the applications sub menu is to not make it a sub menu. The second best is to leave it wherever the fuck it was before. I want to struggle remembering what an application was called and wonder why they are organized so poorly. (Not by file Association) In stead they have me wonder where they even are???
I'm actually not sure what you're saying about GIMP. I mean - I understand the frustration, the "button groups" or whatever they did to declutter things made things (imo) worse; I don't think it's a good default.
BUT
I don't actually understand your sentences for the most part. I really had to work to glean what you were talking about.
I'm not trying to be insulting here; sometimes I write in inscrutable ways too. But - could you reword a few things so I know what you're trying to say?
I've never been sentenced to repeating myself. I'm sure people normally hope for improvements in silence without informing me. Thanks!
The general point was that "Improvement" that ruin muscle memory usually aren't. It should be the most basic UI design principle.
One should be able to instinctively click on the Gmail icon while focused on the task at hand. If the icon isn't where one expects it to be you are no longer doing email things. Same goes for having the user search for the inbox inside the application. If they can't find it they are unproductive and feel dumb but they aren't to blame. Some bad designer came up with the brilliant idea to call it "all mail". The inbox is expected to live at the top of the menu. You can't improve it.
It's such basic stuff. It's like someone used your tools or your kitchen and put everything in a new spot. Eh, I mean the wrong spot.
I could give 1000 example inside windows but it seems everyone is trolling their users. They all want to create the new and improved slashdot, now without threaded discussions! - Hurray!
Very impressive effort. He mentions so many cool ideas. I really like the drop-down with what you want on the toolbar. Good way to unclutter the settings menu.
I wonder what would be a good way to visualize settings the user changed (and changed back) and some way to see the defaults. Perhaps save custom settings? Useful but it adds even more cans of worms.
Say, after I change the minimum font size on my browser, is it still usable for webdesign?
What if I want to configure Audacity for podcasts and for music?
I wondered if one could ask the user when they started using an application but it seems unworkable.
Then had a silly idea to do a slider that moves the ui in time with animations so that you can see buttons fly in and out of sub menus. Slide it a few decades to the left and you are back in windows NT. Not a realistic thing for MS to make but depending on the project it might be cool.
Then had an idea for a tree shaped slider with all the ui branches in it.
For websites I often keep the old designs on the server and append a date to the file name. Never had a reason to expose the user to those but it could be fun. I did lots of crazy experiments that didn't live up to expectation.
Can in stead throw designs in there that appeal to single digit % users. And then they won't be able to find it.
> This would have been a waste of their time if it was only an option for no one who wants this some place buried deep in the settings where it would only clutter the nesaserily complex options.
I'm not sure what this sentence means. Perhaps you already knew that Gimp's monochrome icons can be replaced by colorful ones by going to the Gimp settings under Theme -> Icon Theme, and unchecking the "Use symbolic icons if available" checkbox. That may be what you meant by "some place buried deep in the settings". But if you didn't, at least now you know how to get the colorful icons back.
The reason I'm making this comment, though, is to contrast it with Windows. A comment by chasil, left shortly after your own comment, said that "[a]n attentive steward of Windows would allow older gui themes (xp, Win7 Aero, etc.) to be applied for the nostalgic." Gimp has done just that: in Icon Theme, you can choose the "Default" or "Legacy" icon theme, so if you got used to the older icons, you can get them back. And you can still use the newer icon set if you like, but get the icons' colors back by unchecking a (confusingly-named, the name definitely needs improvement) checkbox. Windows doesn't have any built-in way to get the older themes back; if you want Windows 11, or even 10, to look like Windows 7 or XP or whatever version you trained your visual memory on for years, then it takes third-party software to make that possible. (And it may not even be possible, I haven't checked).
When even one of the most infamous-for-confusing-UI pieces of open-source software (I mean Gimp, of course) is doing a better job of providing good UI than Microsoft is, Microsoft has a problem.
I'm happy the old icons are still available. I consider the flat icons (by default) a bad idea because one can't use them with peripheral vision. Even after getting used to them i have to look much longer to see which does what.
There's another pressure: each major release has to look different from the last one, otherwise it feels like a minor release. In this regard XP, Vista and 7 were successful. 8 also succeeded here, but at the expense of usability.
It doesn't have to use different window layouts, just differently themed decorations. Changing the default wallpaper is a simple way to do it.
With games it's performance. I have a graphics card, I'm uninterested in losing %s off it for running on Linux.
It's doomsday if Linux starts outperforming Windows. If SteamOS for PC still required me to dual boot - which I already do - but guaranteed is get 100% windows performance or better, then that would be the official end.
It's not clear to me this couldn't happen either: I am very willing to hand over the entire PC configuration if the promise I get in return is "your games will run as fast as it is possible to run them".
Depending on which game, and which month it is measured in, Linux and Windows have been on par or trading blows for performance. Last I saw the performance had swung back slightly in favour of Windows though (seemed they started fixing some of the issues they had).
When you think about it, it is kind of insane that Linux can match or outperform windows when it has an extra layer translating the system calls though. And for many of us, who don't play competitive twitchy shooters on a high level, the performance of gaming on Linux is perfectly adequate currently. I played Baldur's Gate 3 on Linux earlier this year for example, and it maxed out the frame rate of my monitor.
I'm not sure it does have an extra layer. Reading through the design, it's quite possible the number of layers is the same or less. It might translate win32 calls to Linux libraries and system calls, but on Windows pretty much the same thing is happening, win32 -> lower level libraries and system calls.
I haven’t had a Windows box in about 8 years, but even back then all the big names had consistently better performance on Linux.
Usually about a 10-20% fps improvement for my usual fare in those days: League, Overwatch, Civ5, Minecraft, Crusader Kings, Factorio, etc. Try it for yourself and see what you get.
I'm very sus on Linux not receiving regular driver updates.
I just last month solved an ongoing issue I had with many games, no uniform reason, but widespread force closures w/o error messages and some of the games with the most significant issues - could run on a potato. I dont have a potato. It was frustrating - and it was a random driver, that I stopped from being updated and never fixed.
In a few years, when I am thinking about upgrading - I might consider linux. I really do expect more users and more stuff made for that platform in the near future.
Drivers are high priority tho bc they directly transfer into functionality also.
IIRC from some discord threads, some games already perform better on Linux than on Windows. We are getting there. The only moat left is kernel anti cheat for games like Battlefield. I’m just fine if those stay on windows actually.
Windows compatibility is pretty overrated at this point. There are a bevy of programs we use commercially that are quite old that just don’t work on 11, and not well on 10. Compatibility mode only gets you do far.
> Somehow It shifted from users know best to "Product" knows best.
In a world where consumers have less and less power, products are designed to please CEOs.
Money is power, as inequality grows and concentrates the average user/worker/citizen has less power and their voices matter less. Today's Internet is designed for the needs of big corporations, users are there just as another product to be sold.
At this point Apple isn't even Apple. Product ate the world. I don't remember the last time someone came to me with a customer problem to solve. It's all warring fiefdoms.
Great point. Just last week I used AI to build a minimal replacement for a SaaS tool I’ve used in the past that has obnoxious feature gating/price tiers. My version isn’t nearly a complete replica, but it has the base functionality I want without having to feel like someone spent hundreds of hours perfecting price tiers with artificial limitations that annoy me just enough to upgrade.
Getting a tool that did exactly what I wanted with no fuss was delightful.
If you like “Everything”, you might like https://filepilot.tech/ - a 2MB, no install, Explorer clone designed to be quick and including a similar fast search.
Even this cannot adjust volume levels independently for multiple tabs in the same browser, which I have always been able to do on linux with pulseaudio/pipewire. People on windows use browser extensions for this, with full access to all tabs/sites...
Every time I try to build a castle in my swamp, it gets to a certain height and then it just sinks?
STOP telling me about civil engineering, we fucking invented that shit. And NO, we have to build it in the swamp, it feeds us and keeps us safe, and I'm darned proud to say we invented that too.
I right click the volume icon in Windows, select "Volume Mixer", and it gives me per-app mixing. Which I guess is an extra click, as with eartrumpet you can access the mixer with a single left click on the icon.
> I think this all stemmed everyone wanting to be Apple except no one actually achieved it
Given the repeating pattern of Apple shipping a hated operating system update in recent year, it feels like it's more “everybody wants to be Steve Jobs and no one actually achieves it including Apple”.
Valve and devices like the Steam Deck and soon the Steam Machine are also grabbing the gaming segment away from Windows. Distros like Bazzite also are enticing to those technically inclined enough to boot from a USB drive and run the simple installer.
There are an awful lot of groups installing Linux on Win 10 cast offs around the world.
My uncle runs one in Bradford on Avon and they are slapping on an OS for you whilst you supp tea and chat. Often, the user-agent is set to something Microsoftie in the browser. If necessary Edge is installed but that is frowned on 8)
I have not heard of this MacBook Neo thing ... Why would ? I only own a little IT company and hang around on HN.
1. The usage statistics don't reflect your anecdotal Linux usage; Linux desktop/laptop usage share has not grown that significantly in 20 years and Windows remains quite dominant.
2. MacBook Neo was widely discussed on HN not very long ago, and I'd think if anything an owner of an IT company would be more aware of it than an average HN user. It's definitely going to shake up the market for lower-end laptops.
1. The devil is in the details: How are those stats gathered? Many, if not most Linux users hide their OS affiliation via USER-AGENT
2. Missed it or perhaps blanked it. It really will not shake up the lower end because anyone wanting a lower end laptop (whatever that is) will insist on it running Windows and not Apples.
There is a really good reason why car manufacturers run multiple marques - the budget, standard and premium ones. Attempting to put the Apple "premium shine" on a budget effort may backfire spectacularly (and devalue the entire brand) or maybe they will somehow manage to re-invent marketing.
I’m not sure what market you are in, but this thing will absolutely upend the low end market in North America. This is a MacBook which handily competes with used/refurbished M1 airs for performance, but sells for less. Hell, it sells for less than an iPhone.
They have managed to keep the build quality without really sacrificing anything you would expect on an entry level computer.
My experience with the low end of laptops is that people can’t even tell you what OS they have (chrome or windows). People are going to see this and think that apple makes good phones, good tablets, and now good computers for affordable prices. The existence of the c model iPhones never “cheapened” the high end models. The existence of the iPad does not cheapen the iPad Pro. All the reviews and media basically are people wondering how they managed to create such a high quality product at this price point.
I don't think anyone cares. I remember the switch from a MacBook with a (no-adjective) trackpad to a MacBook with a haptic trackpad. There was absolutely nothing earth-shattering about that switch, it was a great trackpad before and a great trackpad after.
True, I don’t think people care since Apple’s non-haptic trackpad is still far (and I mean FAR) better than anything else in the market. People who eventually move on to a higher priced Mac with a haptic trackpad will probably feel a difference and think of it as a nice bonus that came with their upgrade (and probably would not like to downgrade, if possible), but I dont think any newcomers would frown at its absence first-hand.
I’d say 100% with a fair share of confidence since Apple’s magic lies both in hardware AND software (as usual). The hardware is already phenomenal (and far above anything else in the market) but the Mac makes fantastic use of it in such a way that neither Windows nor Linux have managed to even start replicate.
Tried one of those MacBooks Neos in a store a few days ago because I got curious.
As a Linux/windows user I was completely baffled that you actually have to click (at least in the default setting) to make a mouse click instead of just giving it a tap. Does anyone prefer that?
> Why would ? I only own a little IT company and hang around on HN.
Something’s not quite right here.
If you hang around HN you have absolutely heard of the Neo. And I’d be downright frightful to have anything to do with your little IT company (whatever service it provides) if you haven’t at the very least /heard/ of the Neo at this point.
I suspect this is a little white lie just to drive a point home but I fail to see the benefit of such an act when all it does is make you look like you’re lying.
I blank threads I'm not interested in. To be honest I certainly did not notice it here and now I have engaged, I've only now noticed the adverts on TV here.
Now I know what I'm looking at, the Neo ads here are so up their own arse that it is unlikely that anyone has noticed what is on offer. Its an Apple {something, in pastel shades} is my only takeaway.
That might be what they think. I just installed windows and it had countless dialogs. Most have a reason to exist but it's a lot of work. The Ubuntu live usb on the other hand just boots into the desktop environment. It just works? There is nothing to do?
I hadn’t tried Fedora until late last year, and was very impressed. Came across as highly polished and complete.
Hadn’t tried Pupply Linux until a couple months ago, and it’s now my new favourite. I’m now running it on a small form factor desktop HP with no internal drive.
But this also mean you are not consulted on some critical configuration choice and that you are left alone wondering what to do next.
Earliest Macintoshs in the 1990 launched a tutorial on first boot until you explicitly finished or skipped it.
This was a wonderful experience as a kid and still warm my heart today thinking back of it.
Today's Mac only display "tips", "what's new" after first boot or major update because people are generally more computer literate. But (unless Liquid Glass changed that too) they never gave on this mantra that the OS should guide newcomers.
So yeah I think Linux distro have room to do better.
Normal people can definitely install an OS. Last weekend I set aside time help a friend install CachyOS. They'd never used a terminal before and wanted some help.
When I called them, they had already set it up and was playing Risk of Rain 2. They started streaming for me on the Discord Flatpak they installed from the app store.
Define normal. I would argue at least 75% of the US population has zero interest in learning how to install a new OS, let alone actually do so themselves.
I say this as a decades-long Linux user (who has tried to evangelize it many times).
Gamers are one of the few demographics still buying new Windows PCs. There are now so many discord servers and subreddits filled with people discussing which Linux distro to use.
Honestly for your average home consumer, there isn't much need for a Windows PC now days.
Well I can agree with that, but that's not the same thing as being incapable of doing it. Both of my parents could easily install Linux, it's infantilizing to argue that they can't fill out a user wizard and select a drive to wipe.
You don't have to know. The Calamares installer annotates your partitions and explains what will happen in natural language. If you can order a pizza online, you can install Linux.
Yeah. If ordering a pizza also regularly involves entering BIOS setup to change boot device ordering, change SATA mode from RAID to AHCI and disable secure boot, depending on your distro.
This is funny. I have an HP PC that has an option in the BIOS to "prepare for RAID" or some such. I wondered what that was, so I turned it on. I had Linux on it at the time, and nothing happened. I shrugged and just forgot about it.
Fast forward a few months later, when I gave this PC to my dad. He installed Windows on it, then started thinking the PC was somehow borked: "the installer sees the drive, installs, reboots, then it fails to boot". I was shocked, that PC worked perfectly.
Then I remembered about that setting, told him to untick the box in the BIOS, and he was off to the races.
I don’t disagree that installing windows/macos and certain Linux distros can be stupid easy but to a layman it’s daunting.
In my experience most people who use a computing device may be able to tell me “this is window” or “this is Mac” by virtue of the branding being all over the stuff but for all intents and purposes these things are appliances.
In the same way most people except ambitious DIYers don’t rip apart their 500-1000 dollar washing machine to replace a worn belt the call a repair guy. Or in your case, have a buddy who knows how to do it.
I bought two Linux pre-installed PC's last October. They were €350 cheaper apiece than the same Windows PC (presumably because the Windows machines came with a lot of additional software installed idk).
Of course they can. They might be too lazy or ignorant to do so, but it's not really any harder to learn to install Linux than it is to learn to make mashed potatoes once you're motivated to bother -- and billions of people have managed to do the latter just fine.
Normal people are absolutely capable of following basic directions like: "download this file", "insert a USB stick", "run this program", "reboot your computer", "double click the install icon", "click the 'Continue' button (or similar) following the on-screen prompts".
That all sounds really difficult compared to going to the Apple store , and buying a Neo.
Not to mention Linux is great, things start going wrong. Cool, you found a DE you like, it's on X11. Another application you want to use only works on Wayland.
Ohh, you want to use a Bluetooth headset, your DE might randomly crash upon connect.
The best thing about Linux is you can customize it. The worst thing about Linux is you can customize it. We have no single answer as to what distro a new user should try.
Ubuntu might not support your wifi card. Ok, so you try Arch. A bad update bricks your system.
I love Linux, but I've spent countless hours to understand and use it. Some people might prefer to buy a Neo and then go play with their cat, etc.
I think GP's point is that a chromebook is a perfectly cromulent apternative to windows, running normal ChromeOS, for users looking for a simple web/docs/email machine.
This is why Linux doesn't exist on more PCs - this is a problem.
Imagine a plumber talking about how much better his toilet is than everyone else's - bc everyone believes only a plumber can install it (which was truth for most of Linux history and general PC users).
Nobody took it seriously bc they took it as mostly an odd humblebrag for niche Windows haters.
What can possibly be wrong with giving people a different option to try Linux? If it’s not right for you, who cares because you have other options? The constant negativity is so boring.
Correct. And they usually don’t install windows on their computer either. The 8 year old laptop they got at Best Buy had it pre installed. So if Linux is going to go mainstream it’ll be because stores start offering PCs with Linux that are at a $140 discount.
These days it's as easy as running a powershell script. There is 0 functional barrier to installing Linux from any windows machine. Soon the same will be true for the Neo.
Normal people will be expected to upgrade to Windows 12 next year after seeing "your hardware isn't supported" Windows Update messages, without any idea of what an NPU is or why it's a system requirement to receive a system upgrade.
I think this is in response to slightly abnormal people trying Steam OS and other user-friendly Linux distros as they grow increasingly annoyed with Windows 11 antics.
You hope it offers a way to revert or accept your computer no longer works. I bumped into someone at the local bar, I think Windows is just corrupted, but she had no interest in fixing it.
Framework, System76, and a few others do offer it now but yeah only as a niche dev thing.
I think there is a real chance that there will be an EU push for that to be made available as a way of gradually decoupling national security interests from the US, for obvious reasons.
> Converting directX into Vulkan (potentially very large performance gains)
That's not at all how that works. DirectX12 isn't slow by any stretch of the imagination. In my personal and professional experience Vulkan is about on par depending on the driver. The main differences are in CPU cost, the GPU ultimately runs basically the same code.
There's no magic Vulkan can pull out of thin air to be faster than DX12, they're both doing basically the same thing and they're not far off the "speed of light" for driving the GPU hardware.
Emulating DX11 and below, as well as OpenGL, using Vulkan does not confer any performance benefits. In fact, it’s really hard to surpass them that way.
The performance benefits of Vulkan and DX12 come from tighter control over the hardware by the engine. An engine written for older APIs needs to be adapted to gain anything.
There's really no reason why DirectX 12 can't be as fast as Vulkan. In fact, the fact that converting DirectX to Vulkan makes it faster sort of proves that point.
> its going to take Microsoft a long time to row back
They won't actually move back to a user-focused OS at all. It's nice for them to declare they will, but their culture and business pressures will prevent any kind of sustained effort. (Their users aren't their customers.)
It hard to say what went wrong with this company. They were doing all the right things, hiring top notch decision makers like Satya, Pavan Davuluri, Asha Sharma, Sonali Yadav. Then employing tens of thousands of highly skilled H1Bs. I guess its just bad luck that this company's product quality is down in the drain.
I don't know, man. For the past year I've been having the "pleasure" of using Windows again for the first time in 16 years. My coworkers recommended I try the WSL since in their eyes I'm a "Linux guy". Well, the WSL crashed an hour into using it (forcing me to reboot Windows because nothing else helped) and then a couple more times that very same day. On a fresh Windows installation.
I ended up installing VMWare and using a full Linux VM. Yes, VMWare. That's how desperate I was.
It's definitely not bad luck. It's entirely a driven chosen situation. Read the blog post. They're not improving quality there reverting anti-end user decisions. "Quieter defaults," "more control over widgets"
There's zero intention to improve the fundamentals of the os. These are what a smart group thinks will be the smallest concession to retain goodwill.
Look at the names, the parent comment is implying hiring Indians destroyed Microsoft with a wink/nudge. And conspicuously omitting Phil Spencer who led the deteriorating Xbox/gaming division for almost a decade but instead chose to include Spencer's replacement of 1 month and some Xbox PM because his ethnicity wouldn't fit.
I wish you were right, but Microsoft has a lot of money they can throw at the problem. Right now they don't care about Windows because their money comes from Azure. There are a few concerns here: if people _really_ moved away from Windows that would actually threaten the Azure ecosystem. Further, since Microsoft doesn't care to make a profit (with Windows) they could also just throw resources at Windows because it supports their Azure business. Microsoft can hire talent if they need to and turn the ship around.
It's possible that due to Azure success they decided that consumer sector is a testing ground for their exploitation patterns, where they can test out how much their userbase can withstand before being seriously annoyed. And this is what happen, people said "enough" by looking for alternatives.
They can throw money to tweak some stuff but I doubt they'll fully back off from pushing for software+services or all this recent conditioning for Copilot. This piece is a damage control but wording shows they won't change. I doubt that in last 26 years we had a company that truly admitted its mistakes - that's not in the "nature" of such entities.
I think companies think that once they go past the threshold they will know almost immediately and then returning is a simple matter of returning to the threshold. But it doesn't work like that its more like how tires loose grip at the limit, once they start to slide they loose an enormous amount of grip and you need to roll back your use a lot before they regrip up. In tires its 30%, but the amniosity with customers that all the anti user things they have done its a never ending list of complaints and the last 10% nor 30% is going to cut it to stop the exodus. Once people have left its very unlikely they come back if Linux is still working well for them. People change operating systems like they change banks.
I'm waiting for a better Nvidia drivers/performance in either Ubuntu or Fedora family and that's it for me.
I prefer user experience on Linux so much more (I've been always using Linux laptop as a work PC), its just that I like gaming casually in my free time.
I'd try the migration already, but due to the *** up NVMe prices I don't have a new disk to start with, so I'll have to do the slow and more careful migration.
Its going to take a lot longer than that. Hardware companies are very slow to adopt this sort of change, for this transition to happen it requires Microsoft to not get its act together for another decade.
I would love for you to be right. Unfortunately in many cases the “windows” decision is made by C-levels who barely understand what you are talking about (or if they do, pretend they don’t to save their jobs)
The irony here is that their "commitment to quality" is essentially an admission they never delivered. And half of what they promised—like moving the taskbar—are features that already exist in Windows 10. They removed them, ignored complaints for years, and now they say they're "listening to feedback."
Similarly with "reducing unnecessary Copilot integration." They added it everywhere before, users hated it, and now removing it is considered a feature.
This isn't a commitment to quality. This is just a fix for years of treating the operating system as an advertising platform.
The efforts to make Windows a storefront and user data harvester over an OS will never be suspended, at least not under this CEO.
Nice to see them finally admitting user needs might be important to some level, but the way MS operates historically is that no bad idea ever dies, at best they get delayed and then shoehorned in with less fanfare at a later date.
I really hope you're right. The challenge with Linux still seems to be practicalities -- like in particular, does Zoom run well on most distributions?
Reports seem to be of system crashes and degraded performance. I imagine there are lots of 'it works for me' stories, but think: for Linux to eat into Windows user market share (which I would greatly support), critical things like Zoom have to work at least as reliably as on Windows. For nontechnical users who would never figure out which incantations to type into the terminal to fix it -- because they have their next meeting in 15 minutes.
I installed PopOS (22) and zoom worked fine right off the bat. So did steam and all my steam games. Heck even my printer worked. (It has since become more temperamental and now only works with one of the 3 print dialogues on my Linux box...)
My game controller worked, my BT headset, the media keys on my keyboard even worked.
Lots of stuff was mildly broken but no more so than it was on Windows. It is just differently broken.
I'm not talking about that. I was replying to a claim that Zoom is less stable on a platform, as if that somehow happened for free and not as a result of a team tracking and fixing bugs on the application side, likely over the course of years.
Even my Starbook, so... literally made for Linux, doesn't do things like going to sleep when I close the lid. It made me switch back to my Mac because despite being able to, I have a life and little time for my main work device to decide to not work randomly.
Linux is never, and I mean never going to be a legitimate alternative to Windows or MacOS on the desktop under the current paradigm. "Switch to X desktop or distro" means less than zero to 99.9% of computer users (probably a few more nines in there too).
"Oh but the Steam Machine!" essentially no one who uses that will actually care what the OS is, it's a shell and a very specific one to do a single task, no-one is buying it as a general purpose machine they can do their taxes on.
Yes, precisely. And then as I anticipated, the "it works for me" stories, even here in this thread. Wish we could get past this steady-state in the Linux ecosystem.
Imagine a Linux distro largely displaced Windows and Mac simply due to usability, security, reliability, and the fact that there's no monstrous corporation pulling the strings. That would be awesome.
Works fine on recent Ubuntu and Fedora, both Wayland and X.
"Fine" and not amazing because occasionally I have screen sharing issues, but that's like once in a blue moon? Could be down to my specific configuration, but it's allegedly more stable than my coworker's zoom on Mac.
I mean... Windows legitimately doesn't work. I work at one of the mag7 and it's a running jokes while using windows that suddenly everyone's microphone quits. We then have to restart. This has been going on years. Our colleagues on Linux don't have such problems.
It's just that we accept windows issues as "that's how computers are". While Linux is expected to work
I haven't used Zoom in years, but Teams in the browser on Linux runs better than Teams natively on Windows. Which is odd, since I understand it is just an electron app on Windows, so it is effectively running in the browser anyway. Still, those of us on Linux have way fewer audio and connectivity issues.
And it really comes down to $MSFT. If the stock keeps dropping, how long do you think any real commitment to “quality” for a boring, low(no?) revenue product will last? Very little when the ad/partner revenue really starts flowing for “ai focused metrics” that can directly tie to windows surveillance (ie recall).
Are the Linux graphics drivers actually worse, though? I thought it was widely agreed that the open-source user-space drivers, e.g., in Mesa, are actually very good these days.
I am curious whether they will "suddenly realized" this after the community feedback process they initiated because they supposedly care so much about their users. Then, out of nowhere, they discovered that users do not want to be spied on or treated as the product. They just want to use their fucking operating system in peace without Microsoft constantly forcing its own products on them.
I wonder when that realization came and why. Maybe they started losing market share to Apple or users just prefer phones to pc even more?
I really wonder how much of an impact these AI tools are going to have on the Linux ecosystem. Seems like huge potential advantage brewing over proprietary OSs. Look how fast Omarchy came together and improved…it’s phenomenal.
I keep hearing that marketing term beautiful but I'm really not seeing it. It just looks like a tiling windows manager. Feels like we're going back in time.
It is a very well integrated, smooth and preconfigured tiling window manager that also has a scroll mode like Niri.
I was using a different tiling manager before and there were all sorts of annoyances, pops breaking things. Behaviorally, this one gets everything right.
Even though MacOS is not terribly better, it's good enough. Add to that the new cheaper macbook and it must inspire pause in the great folks at Microsoft.
I've used *nix extensively headless for the last 30 years, but I have decision paralysis when it comes to figuring out what the heck Linux distro is good for a desktop.
Just go for whatever DE looks pretty to you, I personally like KDE. Don't be afraid to switch to a different desktop later on, its just a few packages to install most of the time.
As for distros, pick something established that looks good to you. You said you have experience, so you probably know what you want from a distro.
I ran arch on my machine a lot but recently switched to fedora for its simpler installation.
You know, I tried KDE recently on a UBUNTU install it's got some nice features, but man is it buggy when it comes to scaling on 4K monitors. Also, the UI is a little rough. I switched back to gnome.
Well the look and feel is subjective, I like KDE because it feels like what windows could have been if it was done well.
As for the scaling, I use it on a 1080PC laptop screen but also sometimes my 3440x1440 display and haven't really run into bad scaling. Were you using X11 or Wayland? I've been on Wayland for years.
There's a handful of the easy ones, all offering slightly different experiences, all good.
Ideally you'd spend at least a day or so trying them all, and about a week reading and watching about their differences, pros and cons.
Unless you are using nVidia for gaming or have an obscure hardware configuration, chances are you're supported wonderfully well at this very moment, by at least 2-3 distributions (Mint, Manjaro, Fedora, Ubuntu, Bazzite, SteamOS, PopOS, CachyOS -- you'll also have a choice KDE/Gnome).
All you need is pendrive. For the super easy transition you'd want an entirely separate system drive (nvme for example). I know, its expensive. I said for the super easy transition, its not necessary. Slow portable disk to store your current documents and game saves should be enough.
Honestly, pick one of the well known distros at random. Personally I use Manjaro with GNOME: up to date software and a polished out of the box experience. I never have to go to the terminal unless I want to.
This is a good time to reflect on how business actually works (as opposed to how hopeful consumers wish it would work).
A business exists because its shareholders invest capital with the expectation of a return. As a result, nearly all businesses go through similar lifecycles. The stages are launch, growth, maturity, decline, and sometimes renewal. There is a lot of capital injected in the early stages and to capture market share the firm often produces the best product it can.
Once the market share is acquired, the business puts up moats if it's able, and then it enters the MATURITY phase. That's where the Windows business is. In the maturity phase a business focuses on TAKING PROFITS wherever it can find them. This includes but is not limited to cutting back on its investment in product, as much as it can. If it can cut budgets and quality and give that money to the shareholders it will. If it can inject ads into the product or resell your data it will.
The very purpose of a business is to reach maturity and then take profits.
That's capitalism. The investors provided the capital. In the end, they gets what they wants.
Now if a company leans into this dynamic as hard as Microsoft has, you should know what's coming. No one should be surprised - maybe they're scared of the Neo right now and there'll be a few years of reprieve, but they're a mature firm, they're in profit taking mode, and the goal in this phase is not to make Windows as great as possible, it's to squeeze as much money out of it as they can.
The next stage is decline -- where the squeeze gets so hard that the business actually collapses. All businesses fail sooner or later. Everything becomes lawyers and accountants slicing it up, selling it off, and sometimes it gets restructured and reborn, sometimes it doesn't. This can take years or it can take decades but it's basically a bumpy downhill road from maturity to that point. If you stick around at this point and keep using Windows, keep in mind that's what you opted into. There isn't really any other way. It's just business.
Intriguingly, free software in its more elemental forms doesn't appear to follow this lifecycle. It's not for profit and there are no investors to satisfy. Contributors who build the software do it mainly out of self-interest: they build what they want to use, and as a result they may come and go at any time. But the software remains there, and you are welcome to tinker with it, too.
I'd argue that although publicly-traded businesses do usually go through that cycle (I would say that it's not ALL, but it's certainly MOST, because I can't come up with a counterexample), privately-owned businesses are more likely to avoid it. For example, McMaster-Carr. Privately-owned, with just a few owners rather than a large number of shareholders. And as far as I know (never having been one of their customers myself, just hearing testimonials), they're still just as good at making quality products that their customers want as they were a hundred twenty-five years ago when they got started. No "TAKING PROFITS" stage, and no subsequent decline.
But it does seem like publicly-owned companies go through those stages. It may be shareholder pressure, but part of it also appears to be when they get people in upper management who went to business school to get an MBA, rather than who have been with the company for years. I don't know what makes MBAs so prone to the nonsensensical pursuit of short-term profits that tank the company, rather than the greater (in the long run) long-term profits available by just continuing to make good products that customers want, but it shows up often enough (in many industries) that I'm starting to think of it as "MBA syndrome". And if a company is publicly-traded and run by MBA-style management? Sell your shares now and get out while you still can, is my advice.
Ive found it useful to regard MBAs and the entire pipeline from education to managing companies for MBAs akin to a clergy class.
They spend so much time and effort learning the scripture and then are praised as having some sort of intimate knowledge of business practices and working towards the ever growing prophet (read: profit).
Their forecasts akin to divination (but with charts and graphs, oh my!)
In this context, it's helped me understand, or at least create a useful caricature of what must be going on in those spaces where everyone drinks the kool aid of "there is only the next quarter".
100%. It's amazing how unfriendly/hostile MS has become with things like forced updates, trying to force users to use their shitty, bloated "Edge" browser, MS "Copilot", building location "services" as an "on-by-default" aspect of the OS. it's like they were deliberately trying to make users switch to Apple or Linux. But since Linux is a little more for "tech-savvy" ppl, I imagine Apple has been the biggest winner of MS's blindness.
One thing I will give to them is the MSVC ecosystem. (Something something developers)
No doubt it’s starting to show its age but it’s like watching a lion die. Win32 amenities just being automatically available is quite sick and I wish there was something similar for Linux.
It’s like windows devs and users live in alternate realities, I’m sure a lot of cool things can happen if they bring some of that dev love over to their UX.
Microsoft Windows will be just fine for a very long time. Corporate security systems and IT admin doesn't typically run on Linux well or at all, but it does run on Windows and MacOS. We're using popular auth software at my work, but it does not run on Linux otherwise I'd have switched to Linux on my work machines a while ago. That alone is 3 computers that won't ever have Linux. Anecdotal, I know, but the corporate world does not care about Linux as a computing platform outside of servers and machines that people don't use as a desktop/laptop to get work done. Sadly, Microsoft isn't going anywhere and I doubt they are worried about losing any market share to Linux.
When I first tried Ubuntu decades ago it was like an awakening and I started seeing every developer using Windows and Mac as brainwashed fools. That's not to pick on others because I also started seeing my former self as brainwashed.
For a developer, Linux is far superior for many reasons.
Moving from Windows to Linux reminds me of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
A lot of times, with software, you could be severely constrained but not realize it because you don't know better. The effect is very strong in this industry.
> We are now at the point where Linux emulating Window's entire API space for games with worse drivers is dangerously close on performance with none of the privacy invasion and anti user features.
.. yet. The absolute roll-over I've seen regarding OS level age verification is concerning and disheartening.
Linux works about as well on the desktop as it did in 2003 - if you know what you're doing, you can make it work, and if not, you can still run a browser but most things won't work for you.
Linux is better than Windows on the desktop because Windows got worse, not because Linux got better.
Unless you mean for gaming. That was Valve's exit strategy from Windows.
Its everywhere now its becoming a real problem in every corner of the internet and in the real world. People are using hallucinated legal cases in lawsuits, they are generating images to create fake events, they are using AI to write their CVS and just about everything you can imagine. People are having to wade through all this slop professionally, calling it out and pointing out the mistakes doesn't seem to help, the people using this stuff believe the AI is correct no matter what you say or do.
Like most things that go mainstream it will take a good while before people understand, by which point they will have learnt a lot of things that aren't true and they will never let them go. We might get a healthy use of current AI at some point in the future or if the product drastically improves.
All you can do now is hold them to the same standard you normally would, if you catch them lying whether an AI did it or not its their responsibility and you treat them accordingly.
One of the ways corruption hides its intentions is lying to make it look like incompetence. It takes a very long time for the truth to come out and it rarely does but corruption depends on people buying the lies and assuming its just incompetence.
Incompetence should carry liability as well. If some politician signs his name to random documents without understanding what he's doing and causes harm to people, he should simply pay the price to make the other party whole, whatever damage was caused should be undone to the fullest possible extent and he should be removed from office for good measure because he's clearly too dumb to exercise it responsibly.
That's the benign case. If it turns out he wasn't actually incompetent but was signing things in exchange for money or favors he should go to literal death row. Proven corruption should result in the death penalty for all involved.
If anything it's not going far enough. Corruption should be considered high treason and lead to public executions.
As a common citizen, very few things in this world are more demoralizing than witnessing corrupt politicians get filthy rich while trading favors, embezzling money, creating loopholes for corporations to exploit while pretending to regulate them or whatever else it is that they do, there are so many scams it's impossible to enumerate them all. It breaks one's spirit to realize that it's the honest and the just who get punished on a daily basis while the corrupt get constantly rewarded. That is an incalculable crime against society and should absolutely be severely punished.
If they don't like it, they can just not be a politician. Nobody asked them to seek power, they fought to be there. Normal citizens get to go to jail, not them.
> But he that knew not and committed things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes.
> For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required
> and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.
Revoke their right to privacy. Normal citizens get to have privacy protections. Not them. They are in power to serve us. We should be entitled to know everything they are doing at all times. Let's see them try to scapegoat anyone then. If they don't like it just resign.
If a solution isn't working, it's probably because it's not extreme enough. Always go further. If they try to weasel out, preempt them. We aren't dealing with innocent lambs here. These are rich elites who graduated from top universities, high functioning sociopaths who absolutely have enough education and mental acuity to know right from wrong. They take an almost sadistic pleasure in not only subverting morality but in getting away with it. They don't just do things, they rub it in our faces that they did it and got away with it, and think us fools for not stopping them.
Corruption is power without responsibility. The more power you have, the more scrutiny you should be subjected to and the more consequences you should suffer.
I feel like every time I have expected an area to be the major bottleneck it has been. Sometimes some areas perform worse than I expected, usually something that hasn't been coded well, but generally its pretty easy to spot the computationally heavy or many remote call areas well before you program them.
I have several times done performance tests before starting a project to confirm it can be made fast enough to be viable, the entire approach can often shift depending on how quickly something can be done.
The number 1 issue Ive experienced with poor programmers is a belief that theyre special snowflakes who can anticipate the future.
It's the same thing with programmers who believe in BDUF or disbelieve YAGNI - they design architectures for anticipated futures which do not materialize instead of evolving the architecture retrospectively in line with the future which did materialize.
I think it's a natural human foible. Gambling, for instance, probably wouldnt exist if humans' gut instincts about their ability to predict future defaulted to realistic.
This is why no matter how many brilliant programmers scream YAGNI, dont do BDUF and dont prematurely optimize there will always be some comment saying the equivalent of "akshually sometimes you should...", remembering that one time when they metaphorically rolled a double six and anticipated the necessary architecture correctly when it wasnt even necessary to do so.
These programmers are all hopped up on a different kind of roulette these days...
Sure, don't build your system to keep audit trails until after you have questions to answer so that you know what needs to go in those audit trails.
Don't insist on file-based data ingestion being a wrapper around a json-rpc api just because most similar things are moving that direction; what matters is whether someone has specifically asked for that for this particular system yet.
.
Not all decisions can be usefully revisited later. Sometimes you really do need to go "what if..." and make sure none of the possibilities will bite too hard. Leaving the pizza cave occasionally and making sure you (have contacts who) have some idea about the direction of the industry you're writing stuff for can help.
> Sure, don't build your system to keep audit trails until after you have questions to answer so that you know what needs to go in those audit trails...what matters is whether someone has specifically asked for that for this particular system yet.
I spent ~15 years in life sciences.
You're going to build an audit trail, no matter what. There's no validated system in LS that does not have an audit trail.
It's just like e-commerce; you're going to have a cart and a checkout page. There's no point in calling that a premature optimization. Every e-commerce website has more or less the same set of flows with simply different configuration/parameters/providers.
Going "what if?" and then validating a customer requirement that exists NOW is NOT the same thing as trying to pre-empt a customer's requirement which might exist in the future.
Audit trails are commonly neglected coz somebody didnt ask the right questions, not coz somebody didnt try to anticipate the future.
> poor programmers is a belief that theyre special snowflakes who can anticipate the future.
Some of us are actually reasonably good at anticipating the future, and don't mesh well in environments where people claim to care about quality but are always deferring stuff for the next release.
> This is why no matter how many brilliant programmers scream YAGNI, dont do BDUF and dont prematurely optimize there will always be some comment saying the equivalent of "akshually sometimes you should...",
You write as if there are no brilliant people doing BDUF. This is unequivocally false.
> remembering that one time when they metaphorically rolled a double six and anticipated the necessary architecture correctly when it wasnt even necessary to do so.
You've doubled down on the gambling trope. Any development is gambling. Thinking otherwise is foolish.
Sure, people who live and breathe YAGNI gamble in different ways, but they still gamble. I can't count the number of times I've made the statement "but if this happens and then that happens, it will be bad" which was countered with "but what are the chances of that?"
Look, if you have to ask, the probability of it being a problem at the customer approaches one.
My personal solution?
I went to work for chip companies. Chip companies have to put a stake in the ground and work to build something that they will be able to sell as designed and implemented.
This doesn't mean that there isn't a triage for features, or the potential for feature creep, or that there isn't a triage for the most important bugs right before tapeout, but the process that works and gets you a chip that customers will use is much closer to what people call BDUF than it is YAGNI.
Aye. The number one way to make software amenable to future requirements is to keep it simple so that it's easy to change in future. Adding complexity for anticipated changes works against being able to support the unanticipated ones.
It really depends on your requirements. C10k requires different design than a web server that sees a few requests per second at most, but the web might never have been invented if the focus was always on that level of optimization.
A lot of the use of open source code has directly breached the terms under which that code is shared and they are now monetising the sale of this code.
An index is also a lot more discoverable for content like the others. The issues of classification still exist its not a tree like they tried to make it but indexes based on human effort on value I think still have their place
Age of account was sufficient for Google and third-party services for verification until recently. My gmail account is almost 22 years old, in continuous use. I have a credit card on file with Google Pay. Why would I need to submit a photo to engage with a private service, outside of volunteering to help train a surveillance apparatus?
Is there any forum short of a senate subcommittee that the public can ask companies these questions? The silence is deafening.
Contact your senator and ask them. Call your senator's offices and ask to meet with them or a representative in person, they can schedule an appointment, and most maintain offices in major population centers in their states.
...That would be a cost center, sir. If you don't like our product, you are free to not use us and make your own while foregoing doing any business in anywhere with either of one of the two major political parties.
There is a reason why I don't accept private enterprise as something separate from Government. The nature of the incorporation legal fiction makes them proxies of Government power and influence, hence why I believe private enterprise should in some ways be as heavily restricted by Constitutional guardrails as the Government itself (allegedly) is.
Probably because the transfer of accounts (typically for reasons of better spamming, but in this case for adult access) is possible.
However, that makes me wonder what mechanism might "unverify" an account holder's age upon transfer. I suppose it's simply a need to re-verify (take a new photo) upon every login, but then folks could transfer the session cookie to avoid needing the new owner to perform a login (unless a new device ID/fingerprint makes the old cookie useless).
Since you don't have to verify every time you use the account, transfer of verified accounts will still be a "problem" though. It's just a CYA to be able to say "we verified this account owner."
But… You could transfer the account after age verification too. The only way to be sure is to ask for ID every time people use the website / application, then children will be truly finally safe from the horrors of the Internet.
Yes, but you also said it's a CYA, when indeed it's not sufficient CYA if only a former account owner, but not "this account owner," had been verified.
It's definitely CYA. Because not transferring accounts is almost definitely in the TOS. So "we didn't know it was someone else using the account, thats against our TOS" will be the response.
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