Talking about nationalism…it’s time to quote Arthur Schopenhauer (German philosopher, 1788-1860)
The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
We have posts referencing philosophers, detective stories, the perfidy of some politicians. Elsewhere, there are technical discussions of new software, and the display of photographs, some with processing by different people.
Have friend running small business based in UK with his wife making v high quality, hand-crafted, organic items and employing people in her village in China.
Main markets are U.K. and U.S. after they quit EU before Brexit vote because uncertainty meant European buyers didn’t want to sign long-term contracts.
They’re now pivoting “like everyone else” to Europe again.
Pleased to see that the UK Chancellor is now saying that we must establish stronger links with the EU. Hopefully, the government is no longer running scared of the far right.
I have professionally developed on Windows, Linux, and MacOS at various points in my career. Frankly, they are all horrible in their own ways.
I will say that XCode (the Apple IDE) is uniquely bad compared to Visual Studio (the Windows IDE) and command line DEs on Linux. If you’re not bound by the official IDE, the command line workflow is the same on Linux, macOS and WSL.
I find the OSes themselves all equally fine, and equally weird. They all take time to learn, and work around their quirks. Whenever I see people slam an OS they don’t know well, it just tells me they don’t know it well. It took me a good few months to get to grips with each of them when I first started with them.
It was interesting to watch a recent Linus Tech Tips video where he forced three of his colleagues to swap their iPhones for an Android for a while. I bounced off iOS pretty hard last time I tried. But again, that’s just my lack of familiarity. What that video showed me is that there are redeeming factors I was not aware of.
I don’t think this can be true; a lot of people love Apple products to the extent that they are willing to pay a very high premium for them.
I think that Apple aims to hide complexity from users. The more people know about computers and software, they more they understand that this cannot be done, complexity emerges and you will have to deal with it, but to people who don’t want to deal with the quirks of software this can be very appealing. Apple claims to manage this for you; in the worst case you take it to a service center.
The price (in addition to the premium you pay for the devices) is of course loss of control. Like many people here I found that this is not for me, but nevertheless it is a legitimate option.
I completely agree with this, and I’m sure that with more time I would warm up to the operating system. I also believe that first impressions are important, and it rubbed me the wrong way how difficult some things were to do, especially around the file system. The default “files” app is pretty poor in my opinion and difficult to use, but again, it could just be a “me” problem as many people use the OS without complaints.
The second thing that bothered me were the amount of abstractions everywhere, it’s almost like you never know what is happening. How can dropping an app into the bin uninstall it? It’s just strange
Genuinely, are Apple laptops worse value these days? I remember reading when the ARM-based computers came out people saying finally these weren’t overpriced in capability.
Maybe this was just spin filtered through web commentary, I dunno. I’m not talking about vs chunky laptops that have less stuff soldered in and so you buy cheap RAM/SSDs or whatever but like for like machines.
The thing I think that is missed about why people buy Apple products is that it’s easier to buy them.
My first computer was an iMac because you basically had a choice of three. Fast, faster, fastest. I’d never thought about Apple as it was all Windows in work and I knew that people were saying that Apple was selling old tech for too high prices at the time. But after spending days in computer shops with sometimes bamboozely sales guys offering a million different options when at the time I had little clue what they were on about, that simplicity was a godsend.
The main thing for me with Apple laptops is that they’re extremely overpowered for what I want to do. I’m still rocking a 2012, 11 inch MacBook Air that works fine bar the lack of updates. I just want something to replace the second iPad I’ve ever owned and that I decided not to replace after I broke it so I don’t spend so much time mesmerised by an always on, intravenous content-consumption device.
I bought a desktop PC to run Linux and Darktable only. And recently I wondered about updating the MacBook with something with Linux and, to be honest, while my knowledge has increased somewhat, so have the options. I read the many threads here and went down the thinkpad cult rabbit hole for a bit and in the end I just couldn’t be arsed.
That’s such an Apple thing to do. On the one hand, it’s brilliantly simple: Each app is a self-contained directory, so you “install” it just by dragging it into your applications directory, and “uninstall” it, simply by deleting it.
On the other hand, some apps are more than just a directory, and need a regular installer program. But then Apple, in their eternal wisdom, just do not offer any standardised uninstallation procedure at all. And even an app bundle (the aforementioned directories) often litter your system with background tasks and config files and caches, none of which are properly cleaned up when you trash the app. It’s properly baffling. (Apple of course will claim, just use the Mac App Store, as if all software was available over there, and as if using that software wasn’t an enormous PITA due to the egregious sandboxing requirements)
Not that Windows or Linux necessarily do this better in all cases. But at least they don’t pretend that installation and uninstallation is so trivially simple.
Historically, you are right, but Flatpak & friends handle this just fine. There is rarely a need to litter your filesystem with products of a make install any more.
My understanding is that homebrew on OS X is something similar, but never used it.
My last OS X machine and I did not get along really well, so I finally installed Linux on it to the horror of all Apple fans I know. One friend (& Apple fan) who borrowed the machine to check something online and was confronted with XFCE is probably still going to therapy.
I’ve used mac’s at work as well as windows and run linux at home, my phone is android. The rest of my family use iphones.
The biggest apple selling point is imho the lack of crapware. An android phone undeniably has similarities to early 2000’s crapware infested PC’s. I’ve not seen a fresh from the shop “PC” in ages so it may still be the same. Even relatively stock android such as motorola come with strange apps preinstalled and nag you about amazing new “features”. Android has also developed in an apple direction with it’s storage and usb handling becoming a bit limited.
MacOS is incredible frustrating with a filemanager that barely works etc. It’s handling of compatibility of peripherals reminds me of early linux.
But again with apple products there is lots you simply cannot do. Which makes things easier. You just accept the limitations and buy new products to overcome them. Guaranteed to be tinker free! Not worth even thinking about.
