Let's not mince words. Ubuntu and linux OS'es in general are TRASH as far as user experience is concerned.
Lately I even tried elementaryOS, and it's worse than Ubuntu. They keep saying how it's not a copy of OS X, and it evidently isn't as far as user experience is concerned, but on top of that they're obviously inspired by a design that's now completely outdated. At least Ubuntu is looking ahead and thinking of touch interfaces.
Ubuntu is genuinely the only somewhat passable option for people who don't know, nor should know, what process thread is, or even how many cores are in their CPU. Ubuntu has a somewhat consistent UI but still suffers from all kind of major bloopers. I mean, what the fuck. It's 2017, and it still doesn't save the last window size & position in most apps. It drives me mad. Some do, some don't, so it ends up worse than not supporting it at all.
I got fed up with Windows and Ubuntu so I bought a five year old Mac Mini. Sierra looks amazing, and it runs silky smooth. I don't AAA game and this will most likely serve me very well for web development. Came with a big SSD drive too.
It's kinda sad nobody can compete with Apple. But if anybody will I don't think it's the "free software" world.
Maybe it is the attitude that makes it "TRASH." It seems you have only tried Unity and elementaryOS? Right now I use Cinnamon, which is similar enough to Windows to not be "TRASH" imho.
Also here is a Linux joke for you:
If you don't like certain things, just fork it and do your own thing.
Cinnamon is good. Until you try to install a modern nvidia driver. At least, that was the case 6 months ago.
Dual monitors should be plug & play. I shouldn't have to add a new repository to apt-get, I shouldn't have to choose between 15 Nouveau drivers and 15 potentially system-breaking nvidia drivers. It should "just work".
Dual monitors, and just display output in general... this is 2017, this is very basic, expected functionality. It doesn't matter how complicated it is to implement - the user doesn't give a shit, they just want two monitors.
Free software offers a spectrum of quality and innovation; and you've picked the worst of it.
I use a desktop (i3), package manager (nix), editor (Emacs), programming language (GHC Haskell), file system (ZFS), bidirectional sync (unison) and security (gnupg) that are collectively far more innovative, powerful and stable than anything Apple have ever produced.
Of course, if you are specifically looking for consumer tech, ease of use and support, then open source probably isn't for you.
>Of course, if you are specifically looking for consumer tech, ease of use and support, then open source probably isn't for you.
If you can look past your smugness a bit, why? Why is it that if I want "ease of use", open source isn't for me? Do you not see the problem here? I can't see how you can argue your favorite projects are more "innovative & stable than anything Apple have ever produced", but in the same breath say that open source isn't for someone who wants ease of use. What exactly does "stable" mean to you?
Ubuntu are trying for ease-of-use and it's a noble goal. But if you are going to judge them only on ease-of-use, then it is difficult for them to compete with the resources of Apple, who are the richest company on the planet.
My point was that there are quality open-source projects out there, after you appeared to assert otherwise. But ease-of-use is not something developers/startups seem to be interested in spending time on.
If you want me to qualify stable, then let's compare Apple's bidirectional iCloud sync to Unison, or Time Machine to ZFS snapshots.
I used to enjoy tinkering with computers and spending all my time on Linux trying to get things working. I didn't edit any code, just spent days getting ndiswrapper working, reconfiguring my desktop after an upgrade, refinding my partitions after LLVM upgrade decided to forget them, adjust myself to the steady removal of configurability in GNOME, adjust to the deprecation of things I used every day (Konqueror has gone! Use Dolphin! It didn't do half of what Konqueror did), faff around with bust graphics and failed sleep/resume, adjust to the "new" way of window management that decided that 30+ years of windowing paradigm was "distracting" and stopped the use-case tests of someone's mum who had never used a computer before finding it easier to use etc. etc. etc.
I eventually got fed up of all of this and went to OSX with Windows alongside after 15 years of Linux use, and that's from RedHat 5.0 and 6.2 days. No not RHEL, RedHat.
The "ease of use" argument is sad, and precisely what some forget when developing software - it's there to be easily used, else nobody will use it. The computer is there to work for YOU, not YOU work for it (ie, spend hours fighting with it).
You only have to look at Windows 8 to see that "ease of use" was abandoned on the Start menu and see what a mess that was.
Linux doesn't have to be that inconvenient. You can now buy machines preinstalled with Ubuntu LTS. If you want to keep upgrading to the latest and greatest, yes it can be a rough ride.
Don't listen to him, there are open source UIs that are easy to use. Gnome, KDE, and XFCE all behave pretty darn well and are pretty stable.
i3wm, the window manager the post above is talking about, is incredibly complicated, but provides efficiency and a sense of accomplishment when learned. That reward from learning something complicated is where the smugness of most open source enthusiasts comes from. Don't look too much into it.
Any perceived smugness on my part was a response to baiting from the parent such as "It's kinda sad nobody can compete with Apple".
Open-source can compete on many fronts and offers many other advantages (i.e. freedom), but on a pure ease-of-use assessment, I do not agree with you that Gnome or KDE could sway the parent, if Ubuntu completely failed to do so.
When you use a proprietary OS, you rely entirely on its creators to create a system that does what you want. When something in Windows or OS X is not what you want (or is broken), you can't do anything about it. When something in a free OS is not what you want, you always have the option to use something else.
Free is about transparency. Not snooping on my files, do machine learning mumbo jumbo on my habits, surreptitiously nudge in the direction they want is huge part of it.
Free is a promise, a promise that I do what I say. If the software doesn't, it is for all the world to see my deficiencies.
Free is also about not being an asshole. It is about accepting the fact that, just because the users use my software, I don't get to control their lives.
Put simply digestion is one of the most expensive tasks for the body. It makes sense that giving the whole digestive system a break will free up energy in other parts of the body.
IDK, brain needs glucose to function properly. It might be just placebo effect, but when I feel mentally exhausted quick sugar usually helps me to regain attention. If I wasn't allow to eat during the day I wouldn't be able to write usable code in the evening...
If you're healthy, after your quick sugar intake, insulin would kick in and you would probably find yourself with lower sugar levels than 30 mins before.
You don't need to write code all day. I doubt you could even write 'good' code for 6 hours per day, let alone from the morning to the evening even if you were eating as you normally do.
Yeah, I get lightheaded and stupid (basically feel fairly drunk) around hours 14-16 without eating. I've been informed the solution to this is a keto diet. Ugh, not worth it.
Yeah, so we can have one store with strict policies that protect users and the value of the hardware; and a bunch of other shit stores that offer apps that can hijack our devices. That makes sense!
And then Apple is to blame, and can spend tons of dollahs and man hours to fix problems caused by your "open" alternatives.
remember a few years back when windows was trying to promote their mobile app store and they were paying people to write shit apps just to have them hosted in the store? Or android where (at least they used to ) have fake apps that tell you how to "get" the real app ?
It's quite obvious that Apple is slowly converging iOS and OS X even as they say they are different beasts at the moment. Maybe that's why some power users's expectations are frustrated atm?
But that is also precisely why Apple is still WAY ahead of Microsoft and co. They will be able to make the desktop and tablets converge where you can carry your computer in your bag, and when you're home you put it in a dock and you have a full blown powerful desktop with the 5K Retina screen and maybe even a dedicated GPU in the dock fit for triple A gaming. I'm pretty sure that is where they are headed, since obviously you can't make a single "form factor" for both uses. And for people who don't need the full blown desktops you won't even need the dock, external screen, just the keyboard and you'll be able to do most computer tasks.
And that will be possible because they are already thinking ahead, while Microsoft will be stuck with their turd of a desktop and making funny hardware that kinda works for some uses, but can't quite decide what it does.
Pretty strong opinion, but if you took an honest look at the Surface Pro 4 vs an iPad Pro, you might find that Apple is making a device that can't fulfill its promises. I am sure Apple has some great master plan that we haven't seen, but the reality is far from great right now. Logic Pro and iOS dev and the only reasons I still (sometimes) use OSX.
What nobody does is look at a PC, and say, where can we simplify? If you start by assuming that a lambda user needs to be exposed to a complex file hierarchy for example, then you're not really thinking ahead. Then you come up with a hybrid device.
I'm sure Surface Pro is a great device, and it answers the needs of a certain demographic but "windows on the tablet" is not the answer to the computer of tomorrow. For what it's worth I heard from artists the Surface isn't a replacement for the Wacom as it has its problems.
I assume you're referring to the fact that iPad Pro doesn't accept USB keys, or lets you access filesystem etc. But what Apple achieved with the iPad Pro is to make a tablet first and foremost, with a fantastic touch interface. Not a hybrid device.
> The progress in macOS land has basically been dead since Yosemite, two years ago,
And the progress on Windows's side is what exactly?
For the end users, instead of business corporations, practically nothing changes. I swear every freaking version of Windows nearly everything about the user experience is similar to before. It looks nicer at first glance, but once you open some apps, particularly the windows apps like msconfig, disk management and such, you find yourself with UI from ten years ago.
Just look at the file copy window. What a joke. They made it look a bit nicer, they added a fancy animation while copying, but really, it didn't change at all. It stills sucks majorly at giving you a proper estimate of the time it will take to copy a file.
The single biggest change for me in Windows 7 was the ability to use Win + <number> to switch quickly between apps. It's incredibly useful, and thart's pretty much the ONLY real change in may day to day experience of Windows compared to earlier versions.
> And the progress on Windows's side is what exactly?
Safety, performance, stability, easier UI (for the average user).
Yeah, none of these things feature well in tv advertisements, but compared to its predecessors Windows 10 actually does excel in all of those. Heck, i installed 10 on my parents' cheapo PC and with the same programs and such installed it actually is more responsive.
> It stills sucks majorly at giving you a proper estimate of the time it will take to copy a file.
That's not a software problem, that's a hardware problem. Particularly on SSDs you have to deal with deletions being surprisingly slow, and in the copying process itself you often have a very fast phase at the beginning when it's just slurping the file into ram; and then it drops off when it runs into the write limit of the target medium and/or runs out of ram to use cache. If you're copying to the same medium you get an even stronger drop due to read/write happening on the same thing.
Predicting this is HARD.
The only way to get reliable predictions out of the copy dialog would be to disable memory caching while copying, and uh, you kinda don't want that. It would just be predictably slow.
I was booted off YouTube streaming on my AppleTV. Then my main account disappeared from iOS GMail app, even though a secondary GMail account was still there.
Was afraid my accoutn was hacked. My GMail password is unique and quite long compared to my other pw so I doubt someone could find it.
I added the account again on the iOS GMail app and then signed in YouTube and it was back to normal... hmm.
I do think if you take a step back and squint a little bit you can sense their design lacks a bit of contrast, but the black header bar is an ugly fix.
I like Medium for browsing front end dev articles in the morning.
But I think there is a big UX and design issue that should be questioned : the "feed".
This concept has been overused and it doesn't serve users. When I read on Medium, I'm in the mood for reading programming stuff, or design stuff, or other stories. But I'm rarely in the mood for reading a completely random feed of all those topics intermingled. That makes no sense to me.
And you can follow "Publications" but it doens't help very much, you still get a "feed" in the homepage. And the publications don't really work as a magazine rack.
That imho is the biggest weakness of their design.
How would I solve that? First off stop "feeding" people. I mean just the term is wrong. Why do we need to be "fed"? The assumption for this design I assume, is that a feed makes it easy to discover content and for the initial experience. But why should it remain the central piece of focus everytime you start the app?
I think it would make more sense to add the concept of magazines. That is why I think Flipboard works so well (at least for me). The problem with Flipboard is that it also treats every magazine as a feed, and is designed primarily as a RSS kind of consumption where old content is to be forgotten while only new content is relevant. Thus it also doesn't work as a repository of valuable articles. A lot of things are written that are timeless and both the Flipboard and Medium approach and insistence on "current day" writing/ stories reduces the value of these tools.
What I would suggest is to add the concept of magazines at the very least. Let people create "baskets" of interests, and let them drag and drop tags into these baskets. Then present those "smart magazines" with tags showing where there are updates?
----
As an aside my experience with Medium last month could be summed up in two words: "feminist rants".
Ever since I started using Medium, I thought.. I already use Flipboard and Feedly. So let's focus. There are some pretty cool CSS/Javascript articles on here so I decided to follow exclusively programming and design topics. I would read Medium in the morning to catch up on front end dev lang.
But.. Medium had another idea. My feed kept getting ridiculous feminist rants and other political B.S. I don't want to read. No matter how many times I pick "Show fewer stories like this" I couldn't get rid of them. This happened for several weeks.
I contacted them because I thought my account was the perfect example of something wrong with their recommendation algorithm. Why on earth did Medium keep saying I am interested in feminism when I NEVER recommended any such articles (they tend to have obnoxious click bait titles and terrible writing)?
I looked through every person that I may have followed or recommended. I could'nt find anything. The closest to a meaningful connection I could see is one female journalist who "liked" on of my responsoes. Mind you Medium considers a simple comment to someone else's story as a "story". As if a comment had the same value as writing an articile in the first place. But I digress...
So I blocked a couple people. First off, they don't disappear from the notifications pane. This is WRONG imho.
Secondly, it didn't change squat.
Eventually I became sick and tired of seeing feminist rants in the middle of my programming / design feed; so I deleted my account and started anew. Hey at least Medium got this right : you can delete your account entirely and it was easy.
So here is my tips for people who still want to use Medium:
- NEVER EVER follow anybody whom you aren't sure that they share your interests 100%.
- NEVER EVER recommend any articles unless you reviewed the tags and all the tags are specific enough to your interests. (Medium loves to make all kind of tangential connections and also recommend you stuff based on extremely lose tags like "Journalism" or "Essay"... follow these and soon enough raging feminists will entertain your feed every day).
Funny enough even with these rules in place. When I created my new account I still got an influx of feminist/political rants (bad writing) but they were gone after a few days.
And I realize that I use Medium in a way they probably didn't mean to: I really focus my feed on an area of interest. But then again they designed this completely wrong putting things backwards. When I go into a newspaper shop, I browse the rack for magazeines I'm interested in. I don't go to the owner and say, "hey you got something from me to read?" And even if I did, he'd probably look at me weird for a moment, then he'd be like "well, what do you like to read?"
Presumably this is what the tags system is supposed to do. Many online sites lets you pick your "interests" whne you creat a new account. But the analogy stops herE. Because in a newspaper shop, I'd tell the guy "well, videogames, and uh.. science". And he 'd point me to magazines. He wouldn't print a "feed" to me of random crap from different sources.
---
PS: Also please stop writing "stories" in your iOS updates and tell your users what you changed or fixed, even if it's minor thing. Yeah, we get it you're all about "stories". Jesus. Stick to medium if you want to entertain people, and serve your users by describing what yo uactually changed or updated, even if it has to be the usual "misc performance fixes".
Lately I even tried elementaryOS, and it's worse than Ubuntu. They keep saying how it's not a copy of OS X, and it evidently isn't as far as user experience is concerned, but on top of that they're obviously inspired by a design that's now completely outdated. At least Ubuntu is looking ahead and thinking of touch interfaces.
Ubuntu is genuinely the only somewhat passable option for people who don't know, nor should know, what process thread is, or even how many cores are in their CPU. Ubuntu has a somewhat consistent UI but still suffers from all kind of major bloopers. I mean, what the fuck. It's 2017, and it still doesn't save the last window size & position in most apps. It drives me mad. Some do, some don't, so it ends up worse than not supporting it at all.
I got fed up with Windows and Ubuntu so I bought a five year old Mac Mini. Sierra looks amazing, and it runs silky smooth. I don't AAA game and this will most likely serve me very well for web development. Came with a big SSD drive too.
It's kinda sad nobody can compete with Apple. But if anybody will I don't think it's the "free software" world.