> One way to add some level of complexity is to add JSON output to programs. Then you can push them trough `jq` instead of `grep`, `sed`, or `awk`. Or push it through another tool to make a nice table.
That's still text. Even PowerShell passes objects between commands.
Plan9 did this correctly. A terminal was just a window which could run graphical applications or textual applications. Locally or remotely. It all worked. You create a window, you get a shell with a text prompt. You can do text stuff all day long. But maybe you want that window to be a file manager, now? Launch vdir, and now that same window is home to a graphical file browser. close that and remote into another plan9 machine. launch doom. it runs. it all just works, and it all works smoothly.
And the entire source code for that OS could fit into one person's brain.
It is a very simple OS, appears (to my layman eye) to have sandboxing between all applications by default (via per-process namespaces) making it very easy to keep one application off of your network while allowing others to talk via network as much as they want, for example.
Plan9 shed the textual terminal baggage we all carry today, and it did so in 1995.
The terminal of plan9 was just a window. By default you got a shell with a textual prompt, but you can launch any graphical application in there or any textual application. you can launch a 2nd window manager with its own windows. you can run doom. you can `ls` and `ssh` all you like. it all just works.
this debuted in Plan9 in 1995 or so. 30 years ago we had the terminal of the future and the entire world ignored it for some reason. I'm still a bit mad about it.
Make the terminal very simple and easy to understand.
Rid us of the text-only terminal baggage that we deal with today. Even graphics are encoded as text, sent to the terminal, then decoded and dealt with.
Plan9 had the terminal right. It wasn't really a terminal, it was just a window which had a text prompt by default. It could run (and display!) graphical applications just as easily as textual applications.
If you want a terminal of the future, stop embracing terminals of the past.
The discussion is about the terminal as an interface rather the emulator/renderer specifically, or in this case the windowing system. So in Plan 9 you could've a GUI app overtake the root window but could you have graphics intertwined with text when working at the shell?
Why with Tahoe did they get rid of the volume indicator that popped up middle of screen that they’ve had for 20+ years - a critical indicator that the volume controls are even working in the first place - in favor of a tiny set of bars at the top right of my screen in the menu bar where I can barely make them out? It’s also less precise about my volume level now. Why?
That sure seemed random. It sure isn’t functional.
Because before you many users complained "IT TAKES UP THE WHOLE SCREEN!!!!" and it was a bit annoying to be honest when it obscures a video or something else you're trying to view.
But it doesn’t take up the whole screen, it flashes for like 2 seconds, and it has been around so long that it has created a very ingrained user behavior.
I’d be very curious to see how many complaints they’ve actually gotten about it. This definitely struck me as “random”
The issue arises when my output is not what I think it is or the audio is otherwise not being adjusted (happens a lot when your pushing through an HDMI output). It could be going out my speakers, my headphones, or something else entirely. So when I’m pressing the volume up and down trying to see what is going on, I don’t want to have to squint at a very tiny set of bars in the top menu bar. That is annoying and far more distracting than an opaque layer that gives me clear information showing up for 2 seconds.
At the end of the day I want Apple to adhere to the “it just works” philosophy. That little pop up served as a critical source of information I needed daily that tells me more than just the volume level. It’s easy to understand, it’s been consistent for I believe two decades, and it provides information to multiple questions instantly. It did not need to be changed and what they changed it to is worse.
perpetual licenses give you access to the software you purchased perpetually. a perpetual license doesn't usually give you access to later versions of the software, only updates & fixes for the version you bought.
you were lucky to get the updates that you got. that is not normal, and is not something that a perpetual license purchaser should expect to get.
Computers work on data. Every single software problem is a data problem. Learning to think about problems in a data oriented way will make you a better developer and will make many difficult problems easier to think about and to write software to solve.
In addition to that, data oriented software almost inherently runs faster because it uses the cache more efficiently.
The objects that fall out of data oriented development represent what is actually going on inside the application instead of how an observer would model it naively.
I really like data oriented development and I wish I had examples I could show, but they are all $employer’s.
The number of Linux fanboys coming out of the woodwork to complain about Windows (and to provide anecdotes about Windows which are clearly exaggerated) is very high.
Please read the Linux Advocacy HOW-TO.
Shitting on Windows and MacOS does not make you look authoritative, honest, or credible. It makes you look like you have a very strong opinion and shut off from anything that does not conform to your opinion.
no, of course not. I swear to God, reading comprehension among Linux fans falls lower and lower every year.
shitting on them makes anything you say about a competing operating system appear like fully biased opinion, rather than fact. if you want people who you have not already captured to listen to you, you must do your best to appear unbiased. shitting on anything is 100% bias. and if you have opinions like that, how can someone you're trying to win over trust that the positive things you're saying about this other thing aren't also 100% opinion?
Stick to the facts if you want to ever hope to do anything other than make Linux fans appear like they are rabid dogs who attack anything they don't like on sight.
You can do that if you want, I don't care. But I don't go to rabid dogs for their opinions when it comes to choosing things, and no one else does either.
You say things like this to get a mob going, and I want you to admit that. you all shit on things you don't like because you want to feel heard by others who also shit on those same things. but people who aren't like that come here and they read this stuff, too. And you're shitting on them in the process.
they have definitely not completely switched sides. Linux is still clumsy and hard to configure if everything isn't configured for you. Linux has worse UX than Windows has ever had (I'm including windows 8 in that comparison)
Really liking Linux doesn't make Windows worse, and it doesn't make Linux better.
Watch someone who is not familiar with Linux and how it works attempt to install it and use it. Do not intervene. Now do that with a dozen different people on a dozen different machines which you do not preselect.
On Windows it is a much smoother experience.
I am making zero statements about any application compatibility or application comparisons between platforms. I am talking only about UX, UI, and installation.
Linux still has so, so very far to go.
And, honestly, there is no operating system which a complete newbie can start using without help in some form. Linux is not some golden child, here.
You like Linux on the desktop, and that's fine. Keep enjoying it. Just be aware that your experiences color your viewpoints, sometimes completely.
I am not a fan of Microsoft, I use Windows about once a month these days, but the UX difference between Linux and Windows is still very large. Very large.
Yeah, I don’t understand the parent commenter either. Even with my latest laptop, it took days and weeks to make everything work (like audio, my monitors, DPI, VLC/mpv, even networking). And even then I had to turn off some hardware functionality, because it’s so buggy (bye-bye battery life). And this is before introducing Wayland for example…
Also installing is way easier for beginners with Windows. I’m happy that Linux installation now at least reached the level of Windows 98, but I still need to search for things every single time, even when I do it about every other years for several decades now. Just because somebody thought that it’s so important to ask simple users about an implementation detail which almost nobody care about. And this is before bugs… which I encounter quite frequently.
It’s getting better, but by not much. It could be a very stable OS with the right hardware even 20 years ago. That didn’t change, you still need to be very careful if you want a good experience with Linux and a GUI. I had no laptop or PC in the past 30 years on which I could install Linux without serious hiccups if I wanted anything more than terminal. I could almost always make it usable (it was impossible with one laptop), but I always had to give up something, like battery life, game performance, my headset at the time, etc. And of course a ton of time.
That feels like bad luck to me. I've had a Dell, two Asus, and a ThinkPad over the past decade or so, and except for hibernate with the Dell, everything has just worked out out the box with no tinkering.
With 2 ASUS? You seem to be the lucky one, not me. ASUS is quite infamous for more than a decade about its bad Linux support. Basic things can work sometimes well, but you need to be extremely lucky to have one which really completely works as intended, like temperature control.
> Watch someone who is not familiar with Linux and how it works attempt to install it and use it.
What a dumb analogy. My mother can use Windows very well, it doesn't mean she could also install it. The same rule applies to most Windows users. That's why it comes preinstalled, and not with an attached bootable USB stick.
UX of recent Windows versions is crap. The bearish tendency started with 8 and have never recovered, with Windows 11 being the cherry on top of the crap. Telling that as a user of almost every Windows version since 3.11. Microsoft completely changes user interface with every recent version, this is an anti-pattern in UX world. How is that I can smoothly switch between Debian and macOS major updates, and when Windows does the same it is a nightmare? "Oh no, where are the network settings again..."
> Watch someone who is not familiar with Linux and how it works attempt to install it and use it. Do not intervene. Now do that with a dozen different people on a dozen different machines which you do not preselect.
Have you done this, or is this just a science fiction story? Have you watched a dozen people install Windows on a dozen different machines?
The reason people sorta know Windows is because they've already used it, not because it is good. And if you don't give them something straightforward like MATE or Cinnamon as a Linux desktop, you might as well compare it to new Vista users, not Win11 users.
You don't have to convince me that Gnome is bad. But everything else now pretty much follows the WinXP paradigm that we're all used to.
I think just saying "installing the OS" is a bit of a trap, that's step one, and important step but then you get to all the different subsets of features and software that they use, including not included in the OS or its repos.
When you're looking at consumer usage of a PC for anything that remotely makes sense to do on that platform I think windows has the advantage of decades of a different software ecosystem. Cumulatively there's a huge broad library of software that linux can't touch, or gets partway there but falls short. For example I can tag music files on linux, but it's painful compared to something like Mp3tag (which has been going for about 17 years). Or if I want fan control on my 9 year old intel platform I need to learn about and add a kernel parameter and manually detect sensors before I get started whereas it's straightforward on software available on windows.
Well, the comment I was replying to cited ease of installation, so I did, too.
> Linux shoots itself in the foot just because Windows has two feet
This is exactly the opinion that everyone who is not accustomed to all of the GNOME nonsense gets after using GNOME. And GNOME fans are far too used to things to even hear that it is imperfect.
That's still text. Even PowerShell passes objects between commands.
Plan9 did this correctly. A terminal was just a window which could run graphical applications or textual applications. Locally or remotely. It all worked. You create a window, you get a shell with a text prompt. You can do text stuff all day long. But maybe you want that window to be a file manager, now? Launch vdir, and now that same window is home to a graphical file browser. close that and remote into another plan9 machine. launch doom. it runs. it all just works, and it all works smoothly.
And the entire source code for that OS could fit into one person's brain.
It is a very simple OS, appears (to my layman eye) to have sandboxing between all applications by default (via per-process namespaces) making it very easy to keep one application off of your network while allowing others to talk via network as much as they want, for example.
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