Get started a corporate surplus mini pc on ebay. They super cheap - search for micro pc - if you get a recent CPU from Dell or Lenovo should be under $200, you can install Fedora or other Linux distribution. Ask Claude for everything else.
I've been a Windows user since 3.0 came out. Windows the last 5 years has been annoying the ** out of me, even more than normal. I'll see what 12 looks like, but looks like I'll be Linux user in the future.
I saw the writing on the wall back when Windows 7 went EOL. I'm now 100% Linux in my home, and insist on Linux with employers. I don't regret a thing; instead I laugh at people who have masochist tendencies with Microsoft.
Switch to Linux today. Unless you're working with a shit company, chances are pretty good that all of your software and workflows will work on Linux too, and possibly even work better. Plus, you'll be able to actually triage your own computer (if you want).
> Unless you're working with a shit company, chances are pretty good that all of your software and workflows will work on Linux too, and possibly even work better.
I wouldn't call the company where I work shit, but in Germany many big companies are deeply entrenched in the whole Microsoft ecosystem, and some sectors are even more entranched. So, I am very certain that a lot of insanely business-critical software at the company where I work at (which is about a market where easily billions of EUR/USD are moved) will not work in a GNU/Linux ecosystem.
Over many, many years, many parts of the (often custom-built) software was developed to work together with the existing big ecosystem of existing (also often custom-built) software. Some parts of the programs that I work on are deeply intertwined with various products from Microsoft - if they weren't, the users would not be able to work so productively with these programs (i.e. the workflows would take a lot more time for the (highly qualified) users, which would cost the company a big load of money).
I've had another annoying problem with some gigs recently where the employer insisted on MacOS for developer workstations.
While I (generally) like the hardware, I don't like the UX in MacOS but more than that I have a strong distaste for having my runtime deployment environment be entirely different from my working environment. I prefer to eat my own dogfood and have Linux all the way through, and I really like my own tooling and configuration I've set up over the years.
I had a job recently where the whole deployment stack was NixOS (to Aarch64) but the issued devices were Mac laptops, and you couldn't even build the software on MacOS (not even Nix Darwin) so had to do everything inside Parallells etc and it was a giant PITA.
I've never understood why .. if you're going to pay people six figure salaries for their time why would you slow them down with process and tooling that makes them less efficient...
My kids go to a stem focused magnet school. I realize different cultures value different things but its depressing to me how many kids are pushed to dedicate their whole childhood to get into top Universities. We'd go to the beach and their friends couldn't come because they were doing extra APs or science fair or Math Olympics or similar. These kids got good grades but never went on a date, couldn't drive or go anywhere by themselves.
I was partially (largely?) one of those other kids. Honestly, I loved it and, though it wasn’t perfect, I definitely wouldn’t re-roll my childhood if given the chance.
Later in life, I managed to catch up in dating and other aspects, but kept a good streak of nerd pride and am totally happy about that.
If you were to have observed my childhood and got depressed about it, that interpretation would have been misguided.
Yeah you're right, I was a pretty geeky teenager myself. Its a tough winner takes all world, maybe working your ass off in HS is a good strategy that I messed up.
> These kids got good grades but never went on a date, couldn't drive or go anywhere by themselves.
One of my friends in high school was like that - always studying, always doing extra classes. Straight As even without it, good grades, six highers one year and another two and four CSYS by the time he left. Then off to Uni where he got a first with distinction in Business Management. He never did anything but study, although he did play football a bit.
In the intervening 30-odd years he's mostly worked as a deputy manager in a supermarket in a small town maybe an hour's drive from the slightly smaller town I live in. He's never done anything else. Moved a couple of hundred miles from where we went to school, got a job, worked his way up to assistant manager.
I see him sometimes in passing when I'm working up that way.
It’s still around, and tends to be adopted by big enterprises. It’s generally a decent product, but is facing a lot of equally powerful competition and is very expensive.
The biggest threat to American software engineers is outsourcing, AI is just a distraction. I am an immigrant, I work at a prestigious financial corporation in NYC. Pretty much 95% of the staff were born and did undergraduate degree in other countries. We hire a few grads but they usually quit or get laid off after a few years - most new hires are H1Bs or contractors on H1Bs. Just about to open another big office in a developing country.
I said that in the next sentence. Than again this is really true only in US. In rest of the world (including europe) Macs are seen as luxury environment.
Macs are not seens as a luxury environment in Sweden at least.
Of the people I know only old folks, gamers and some techies own PCs. A lot of people will however just use whatever wintel laptop their employer provides them with.
I'm not arguing that macs are more common than non-macs, only that "In rest of the world (including europe) Macs are seen as luxury environment." is false.
Chromebooks dominate K12 here so it kinda depends on what you mean by "students". Once people start buying their own computers however my impression is that Macs are quite common of not dominating.
Mac have been certainly picking up in usage worldwide but it's been always pretty openly premium luxury product? Especially in the past. It is even marketed like that. They might be changing their reputation since their entry Macbooks are pretty great price/performance but people simply buy cheaper.
Marketshare of MacOS is like 15% worldwide (curiously declining in US). That's a minor platform.
Also stop with Chromebooks. It might dominate schools in US (often mandatory) and it is popular in specific countries like India. But in majority of the world it's absolutely unknown with global marketshare of like 1%.
And I’m not arguing that Mac’s are the common man’s choice. All I said was that the statement about Macs being seen a luxury environment in every country except the US is plainly false as I know at least a couple of other countries where Mac’s are quite common even among the non-affluent classes.
Very few uni and high school students have MacBooks in East and Southeast Europe and it’s seen as quite a flex there. They’re also impractical for those in engineering schools due to required software that only works on Windows.
I had (the same) Samsung android phone from 2017-2025. I bought an iPhone, mainly because of privacy concerns (for which I consider apple to be the least bad mainstream option, not good).
But I couldn’t get over how bad the ux is compared to my 7 year old phone. Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”, the setup is unintuitive, the hotspot doesn’t work half the time, there are bugs (like email not connecting) that based on my searches are prevalent and have no solution “did you try updating and restarting”. I really couldn’t believe how bad it is.
But evidently people really like them, and I imagine they could find things not to like about my old Samsung, so to each his own I guess.
Yeah that's the joke. 10 years ago all of this basic stuff was working well. Now, autocorrect and cursor placement regularly make me want to chuck the phone into a chipper shredder.
I've had an iPhone since 2009 and feel they have gotten much more confusing over time.
It seems to be there has been some sort of internal conflict between the need to add basic functionality to be remotely comparable with Android, and the desire to keep everything "simple". The end result being a kind of a worst case of neither being especially featureful nor all that simple. There's a cottage industry of apps that exploit users' lack of understanding of their own device's capabilities (e.g. flashlight apps with ads + in-app purchases).
Sure, but neither my Pixel nor Samsung handset defaults to gesture navigation. I consider myself pretty tech savvy but just never use Apple's multitasking provisions on iOS and iPadOS.
I’ve been using iOS since 2013 or so, and even spent five or so years off-and-on developing for the platform.
I never use the multitasking stuff. Too confusing. I regard the loss of the single physical home button as a tragedy. One of the best UI elements ever created. Not joking. So simple, imposible to confuse because there’s just one, basically nothing about it that requires training, and it acted as the perfect “oh shit, get me back to something normal!” button for the tech-unsavvy, which is one of the things they most-need in a UI. So good.
Answer: sometimes apps let you swipe right from the left margin, sometimes there may be a left arrow in the upper left, but it may not be visible unless you enable tinted Liquid Glass, but also look in the bottom left, there may be a less-than sign, and some times you have to force-quit the app and restart (like with Libby books borrowed via Kindle…)
iOS UX-affordance has done an incredible reversal from "one of the best" to "unambiguously the worst" over the years :| it's stunningly unapproachable nowadays, and Android seems excited to follow them
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