In two companies we already gave up on Dart and Flutter because of how it's backwards incompatible is. The language and frameworks moves very fast, it develops new tools and classes before the old ones become mature enough and adopted by the industry. Then suddenly, Flutter 27 lands, requires Dart 45, which requires intl 81.2.5. and now you can't compile anything anymore. Whole upgrade process, tools, compiles and libraries are broken for months before Google and OSS catches up. Once ecosystem is on Flutter 27 your upgrade path takes weeks, because a core method was renamed or compiler flag removed and CI/CD is failing. So you just move back to Java and Kotlin, where code from 2012 still compiles and works just fine.
It’s kind of telling that you had to rely on fake examples here because I don’t know what you’re talking about at all as someone in the exact same ecosystem.
I’ve genuinely never run into something that even remotely resembles what you’re describing in half a decade.
Just to point out the ridiculousness of your comment Dart is 10 years old at this point, follows semver and is on version 3. Your story really doesn’t check out at all.
They actually go into fairly stupid amounts of details to make keeping up with changes simple. They strictly adhere to semver so you shouldn’t ever be surprised and then they literally have a tool baked into the CLI which will do all of the upgrades for you that static analysis can handle which is the overwhelming majority of them in my experience.
I released two apps built in dart on flutter. I loved it at the time, but I ran into this issue headlong with both of them. Release v1.0, move on to other things, come back in a year with a new computer to fix a minor bug and I can’t even compile the original release anymore, and had to spend forever rejiggering everything to get it back to the state it was when I left it. I really loved dart, and even flutter, building in it was a breeze. But the churn made the js ecosystem look slow.
You don't get to very rudely accuse someone of giving "fake examples" (why?) and then, later, use weasel words like "in my experience." Perhaps your experience isn't representative of everyone else's.
None of those versions exist, so the example is obviously made up.
Now, it could still be rooted in reality rather than being a complete fabrication. But when all the provided details were made up, it's basically impossible for anyone to check.
Tooling, documentation, language design, balance across a million different competing goals, interoperability, deployability, simplicity, expressivity and much more.
It’s just a REALLY REALLY nice modern language with a team of very smart people behind it who very clearly sweat the small details and have a long history of being able to make great decisions along the way even in ambiguous situations where it’s not always clear what the best path is going to be.
Compact and clean is very far from my experience writing a very simple library management app with flutter. The framework literally gets in the way. You can't do anything without having to deal with some convoluted callback mechanism. You can't manipulate any object without some forced async crap. And it's so verbose. Despite my best efforts to keep things clean and organized, I get lost in the very small codebase after a couple of weeks. It's got to the point where I'm just rewriting it with Qt quick instead. It was my first time touching both flutter and dart, so maybe it's all subjective, but right now I think it's just a badly designed language/framework.
We must have very different definitions of compact, with Go requiring dozens of lines of boilerplate where other languages make do with one line of '?' or '.filter'.
Agreed, one of my pass the time activities during covid was basically just spending the year trying out and evaluating different languages across a whole range of different metrics and features. For me Dart was the clear winner and I’ve never once regretted making it my new default, in fact it’s only increased its gap compared to everything else in the time since then.
Check out Ayn Odin 2 Mini, it's an Android handheld with a PS Vita design, you can use it to emulate lots of games too (including Vita using Vita3k emulator).
At first, I thought it was like $35, and was almost ready to order it. Then, I realized, in my morning haze, that I'm not seeing the decimal point, and it is actually $340.
For that kind of cash, you might as well get the real Vita from a second-hand market. Better yet, for that kind of cash, get Steam Deck, unless you have some restrictions like OP (i.e. "SD is too big")
On a 4090 with most of the shading still not implemented/broken :) . Probably won't be 120+ fps once everything is correctly emulated on a "normal" machine. Still huge tho
It will be 100+ fps on a current mid-tier system easily, because this is not hardware emulation.
Most emulators need to implement/compile a whole different architecture to x86, even if similar to x86 it causes issues because cache gets filled faster, more memory lookups, etc.
PS4 doesn't need to emulate almost anything hardware wise, the CPU is a standard x86 and the GPU is a modified radeon. Similar to how wine can get the same or better performance on linux than windows, the ps4 "emulators" will achieve performance parity because they're not emulating anything, they're just reimplementing the core PS4 libraries. That said there are some differences in hardware, the big one being the PS4s unified memory, but it shouldn't be much of a problem, there's also the usual shaders need to be recompiled, etc.
So it's ok to get hyped for high performing bloodborne gameplay on PC with affordable PCs :)
Not sure how is this relevant. The mobile market is just on another level in terms of users and money. Apple is a business not a charity. It makes sense that they don't want to incur in expenses that don't increase revenue. Tech nerds have this idea that tech businesses should do stuff just because. Do you ask your milk provider to incur in more expenses just because?
It would be different if Apple had made some pledges or commitments towards this. But it hasn't. Its only commitment is to make money for the shareholders. Everything else is secondary
Same and with lots of Kotlin code in the wild on Android, I'm not too afraid to language will fade away. Bu in terms of active development like KMM; I don't like JetBrains being pretty much a single point of failure.
It's not just the browser, it's the OS as well, at least on Windows 11. Literally everything is optimised to force you to try and use Bing and Edge. If I hit start, I get bing, if I run updates it tries to sell me Bing and Edge. If I use edge it throws me at the microsoft portal all the time and I have to futz around with it to disable CoPilot integration and add extensions to give me a blank new tab page etc. Then I get an update. Oh and next thing I know it's trying to sell me vouchers. And then the other day it ripped off all my Chrome credentials which I keep separate. I don't even know how it did it. The final straw was on my pixel 7a when I opened the outlook app and found there's a fucking garbage feeds and subscriptions tab in it now which just pipes crap to you.
I got fed up with it at the start of December last year and rinsed my credit card in the Apple Store. I walked out with an MBP and an iPhone and neither have not yet kicked me in the nuts once. I'm slowly porting my data over at the moment and then I'm chucking this crap on ebay and never touching it again.
Well done Microsoft. You burned a 30 year long developer relationship.
Given MS being horribly anti-user these days, monetizing each user to be farmed like cattle and Apple's massive anti-consumer malicious compliance to any legal rulings, more people should be considering Linux.
It's fast.
It respects the user.
Games work beautifully with proton.
Most software has an equivalent on Linux if they don't offer their own binaries.
More and more I don't understand the desire or need to generate revenue for companies that treat you like dumb cattle.
I second a vote for Linux or Neverware. OMG I used Windows 11 yesterday to debug something. Efficiency mode sucks so bad. Chrome was unusable with it and there's no apparent way to disable it. I'm environmentally conscious but I'd club a baby penguin to disable Efficiency mode.
I would like to use linux but every system I have ever installed it on, it eventually breaks. Then I have to spend several hours searching through forums trying to find the correct command line prompts to fix it.
This is even using the supposedly "reliable" distros like Ubuntu and Mint.
At this point when a linux user says they never have an issue I just can't believe them. I don't do anything complex, but linux always eventually fails in some way. I have above average knowledge of computers, and still linux cannot work reliably for me. It will never go mainstream until it can work without breaking, and never touching the terminal for 10+ years like MacOS can.
As an example, look at the "Switched to linux challenge" Linus Tech Tips did a couple years ago, he tried to install steam and it broke his entire OS. I have never installed anything on Windows or MacOS that has broken my OS. If you want regular users to use linux, things like that should not be possible.
I think this is key. I'm comfortable in the terminal so it really doesn't bother me and I doubt many days go by where I'm not using it. Linux works for me, but its not for everyone and I still have an old macbook for some photo editing applications.
While that is generally true, as others have already reported there is progress being made.
Since a few days ago, I tried installing/running Elden Ring again, which did not work when it came out due to EAC. Works flawlessly out of the box now.
Nonsense. It worked on the day of release for me, on Linux. I don't know what went wrong on your side, but I played it on release day.
There were two issues, namely:
1. It crashed on start-up roughly half of the time. Not great, but survivable.
2. Swapping to a different workspace (Sway, Wayland) for an extended period of time made the game think your framerate is low, and it forced you to play offline with "FPS unsuitable for online play".
That's all. Other than that, the game experience was buttery smooth.
Soulsbornes are a great reason to keep a playstation around if you ask me. They may be porting their games to Windows these days, but their "DNA" is in console gaming and it shows.
Of course, if you play them for the experience. If you have to have 144 fps in 8k, you need to give a kidney to a video card manufacturer indeed.
Last week my wife got prompted by Ubuntu's automatic software update to install a security update that required signing up to some paid Ubuntu subscription.
I'm not sure this is really what it meant (I didn't see the prompt myself), but it was what Ubuntu made her believe.
After updating without this "option", all her VirtualBox VMs stopped working (I don't mean to imply that these two issues are linked).
Ubuntu has a Pro subscription for businesses, which is free for up to five (I think) installs for consumers.
Ubuntu Pro allows for things like patching the kernel while the kernel is running. If you're using VirtualBox, which uses kernel drivers on the host for acceleration, and you do a normal update, you need to reboot to make those drivers work again. You shouldn't need to, but something in Oracle's DKMS driver building process removes the existing drivers for some reason.
If the kernel is replaced while running, the new kernel modules should be loadable immediately and there will only be a brief moment during which VirtualBox wouldn't work.
Ubuntu Pro also provides updates to software packages that weren't maintained before the introduction to Ubuntu Pro (the Universe packages) so it's probably not a bad idea to enable it.
If you don't log in, you'll get the same experience Ubuntu always had before Pro was introduced, which includes the possibility of VirtualBox being broken until you reboot. This isn't Canonical sabotaging your wife's computer, it's just how some updates go down on Ubuntu.
Completely agree on MS. Would not agree on Linux being friendly on the desktop.
I find Apple to be the best for me on the desktop and also family. I use linux on servers, work ...
> Given MS being horribly anti-user these days, monetizing each user to be farmed like cattle and Apple's massive anti-consumer malicious compliance to any legal rulings, more people should be considering Linux.
Apple is the farthest thing from "anti-consumer".
Let's find one company that takes security in any way shape or form as seriously. Name one company that consistently picks up the phone. What device are we going to give to my dad, or my less than stellar relatives... (do you want to be their linux support line?).
>> More and more I don't understand the desire or need to generate revenue for companies that treat you like dumb cattle.
The apple tax: what your family gives to apple because they aren't going to pay you for support.
Honestly I'd love to do this but I'm getting too old to argue with Linux on the desktop. The apps I want don't exist on the platform (Adobe mostly) and the high DPI and fractional scaling is a mess. On top of that the desktop user interface, whichever desktop you use is quite frankly terrible.
I'm just using a Mac as a terminal for an EC2 instance where I do all the software dev now.
Fractional scaling on KDE + Wayland is working pretty well for me. I came from Windows, then macOS, I have been very happy with KDE.
Adobe is an issue, there are many analogs though. In place of Photoshop you could use Photopea, Krita, GIMP. That said I understand that people generally love their Adobe apps.
KDE is reasonable but the problem is that not all toolkits are made equal. If you have to fire up something that uses Gtk, which is somewhat inevitable, it really pokes you in the eyes.
I tend to use Adobe stuff because it is literally a decade ahead of the closest open source software and is not expensive on a monthly basis for what you get. I could not get close to what I do with open source software. I have tried. I mean just the AI denoise in Adobe Lightroom can't be touched by anything. I wish it could. And I wish I could contribute to something open source to do that but I'm not good enough at it :)
On this particular issue Firefox-on-windows is unlikely to be a solution. If they can and are doing it to Chrome on Windows they can to Firefox too. It might be more work as Edge doesn't share a codebase with Firefox like it does with Chrome, but unless FF is somehow encrypting everything in a way that blocks MS⁰ it won't be particularly difficult.
--
[0] Likely impossible. Even making it difficult enough to slow MS if they had the intention is likely completely impractical.
It's the other way around. Trying to search for problems with Stable is more difficult because potential fixes require things your OS doesn't have yet.
I haven't much had this problem with Debian Stable.
For awhile, there would be a thing with people using, say, JS libraries, and they'd want to Stack Overflow copy&paste something. But the more reckless of those people just ended up bypassing Debian with NPM or some other language-specific package manager. And less-reckless people can decide when they can just use Debian or have to pull select bits of software some other way.
Because I use computers to do things, and Windows is the right tool for the job in the vast majority of cases.
No, please don't suggest Linux or FOSS alternatives. They are all dead on arrival. I need Office, not LibreOffice. I need Photoshop, not GIMP. I need Illustrator, not Inkscape. I want Windows, not Proton.
Thanks to the magic of exploitative business models, you'll soon be able to run all of those via your Linux web browser for just $99.99 a month, and not long after that'll be the only option remaining.
I don't care if the code is closed or open, because I use computers to do things. Computers are tools to let me achieve things, thusly I care about the results and not about the process (eg: closed vs. open).
I don't care to computer either, because that's not what I consider computers to be at my point in life. I use tools, not tool tools.
Computers are tools to run software. Software is what makes (or breaks) the computer a useful tool. A computer without software is just as useful as a lump of pig iron: handy as a paper weight but no more.
Closed software which locks your data in its grasp may be OK for some purposes but in the long run it nearly always ends up causing problems - try opening an older Word file in current Word [1] for an example of such.
Tool users with any sophistication almost always need to make modifications or repairs to their tools. Buying tools that make that impossible seems foolhardy to me. That you don't see things this way is interesting to me. Some people are happy eating the slop that's served to them with no interest in even seasoning it themselves. Strange to me, but to each his own.
Linux and FOSS alternatives require me to spend more time fixing and managing them rather than using them. That is unacceptable to me; computers are tools, if I can't use the tools when I need or want them they have fundamentally failed their purpose.
I'm an adult with duties and responsibilities and limited time now, not a naive teenager with too much time, too little money, and a bad case of acne. I simply do not have the time, energy, nor will anymore.
Note: Also, I'm cursed. I've killed more Linux installs (barring Android) than I can bother to count at this point, for something as bluntly mundane as updating them. I cannot rely on Linux (again barring Android).
Do I really need to spell out the fact that computers are a means to an end? Not the end to a means?
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised given the HN audience, but come on. Ordinary people use computers because they need or want to do something, and a computer will help them do it.
Computers are not a means to an end any more. Computers are the end to a means since the ordinary user has no more choice not to use a computer at all. Ordinary people in 2020's use computers because a computer is the God, not because the man wants to run some program on it.
> Ordinary people in 2020's use computers because a computer is the
> God, not because the man wants to run some program on it.
Good point. Is something a tool still if the user has no choice but to
use it?
Certainly it is no longer "an extension of the mind-body and will" as
some philosophers define "tool".
Is it a crutch? And does that imply that we have become "disabled" or
are now "differently abled but dependent"?
I think the GP's appeal to simple dignity of labour and clear purpose
troubles me for other reasons though.
All tools shape their users, and none more-so than a computer. So much
indeed that I think it deserves a different status. It's a different
quality of tool than a hammer. Today, it very much uses you in equal
measure to you using it.
Calling computers (mere) tools seems a little dismissive.
And in that regard I think the GP shows a typical nonchalance around
what they _think_ is their (very mysterious and serious) "doings".
When a system already defines all the possibilities for what you can
make and do, and these days it even curates, censors, "corrects" and
extrapolates for you... what is left of that glorious will to action
(doing)?
Has it been magnified such that it's "AIA" = AI aligns with IA
(artificial intelligence is aligned with intelligence amplifications)
and the tool is a lever (bicycle) for the mind?
Or are we cranking the handle on a auto-cookie-cutter machine that
gives a choice of three shapes? That can feel a lot like "doing" stuff
too.
The closer one is to that kind of "doing on rails" the more vulnerable
to being replaced by a robot/algorithm.
OTOH, remembering how to see computers as engines of possibility
rather than certainty again (as Ada Lovelace did), seems to me more
where humans fit with computers. YMMV
Yeah sorry I didn't mean to be rude other than to josh you about
mysterious "doings".
You made it sound like they were somehow special, like, I dunno,
particle physics that could only run on a custom quantum computer.
Now you're specific, looks like those are all perfectly normal and
ordinary things, right?
I also had to use a very specialist CAD system. In those days the only
things it would run on were Sun Microsystems and HP Unix boxen.
Other than Microsoft's monopoly grip, and your need to interface with
other use ^H^H^Hvictims of that monopoly, is there any reason you
wouldn't try a friendlier, more socially conscious solution?
I mean, I would first point out Linux and FOSS aren't a "friendlier" solution.
Daring to ask about a problem will inevitably devolve into "You're committing heresy." and getting taken for a ride about changing my entire process and environment when that was never my inquiry nor even desirable.
As for socially conscious: Paying for good, practical software that serves my needs is a good thing. Both for myself and the developers, a win-win.
FOSS has a social contract problem. There are many open source developers who need/want money for their labor who get shut down and even coerced into free-as-in-beer for daring to ask for compensation, and many more project derelicts strewing the land abandoned due to lack of resources.
You remind me typical pro-Russian men who claim they are non-interesting in politics with no realizing their choice "not to be interested in politics" is a pro-war choice.
Some of us just want to get shit done and surprisingly there are products out there which you can exchange for money that allow you to get stuff done. I've found you can generally trade time or money to get stuff done and a lot of the time, money is much cheaper.
Recently I needed to de-duplicate 150,000 photographs from my dead father's NAS. I spent about 3-4 days trying to find an OSS solution that did the job and actually worked unsuccessfully. In the end I found some proprietary software (PhotoSweeper) that did the job in a couple of hours and cost $10
You claim to need a computer while rooting for what is essentially becoming a cloud terminal - odd. If you need a computer, get one. If you're happy with a cloud terminal then say so and continue using Windows.
You say that you use computers to do things, then mention not the things that you do but rather the tools that you prefer. That's fine, I also use the tools that I am familiar with. But you should know that other tools exist that do these same things.
Then the article is.. not newsworthy I guess. These things are meant to be: "I will still give them money and expect them to do better, no matter what they do".
Metaphorical you of course. Parent does not want to run it. I believe this is a moral error and a coordination failure, and that saying a computer that is out of your control is "more of a computer" while a computer that actually does what you say is a 'toy' is disingenuous.
It is an unfortunate fact that you pay for freedom with effort. IDK if it ever was not so.
I won't switch from neovim but I gave this a try and I quite like it. It really is very fast and snappy. If I were using VS Code I would've switched to this one.
I use vim and nothing about its commands are "cryptic" to me. You want to "go to definition"? You press "gd" as in "(g)o to (d)efinition". What's cryptic about this?
Exactly. The whole reason I use vim is because it's like a conversation. If you want to talk about cryptic shortcuts, look at IntelliJ. Why should Ctrl+B be Go to Declaration?
Not sure why you say it's not native...
Sure it's made to work along with a ctag file but it's totally native (ie no plugin) if point vim to one, ctag is only crafting the file.
I bought one of those consoles with Android that works great for emulating games. I created the app called Beacon which is an Android launcher that helps organizing all the retro games in a nice interface. I got quite a few people that bought it and are fans of it and even the biggest YouTuber in this space with 400k subscribers showed my app in one of his videos. Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.radikal.ga...
