Yes please! It's one thing to know what you should do because you've been told to do so, but quite another to fully understand why you're doing something.
There are plenty of other hardware manufacturers out there. One of the practices you might not wish to support is an OS being tied to a specific hardware vendor.
If you don't like the hardware you shouldn't be buying it.
I feel like the "stable" part of things has been eroding away lately. I've been very disappointed with Apple over the past few OS rollouts. The new FS went flawlessly but there have been so many fit and finish bugs, I feel like Microsoft is making it.
I hear it's not very good/stable now, but running a Hackintosh system of Snow Leopard - Yosemite on various hardware worked pretty well. And that's without them trying to optimize it (I guess).
It is a crummy situation indeed. In my case for example, I am just hoping that the next generation will fix the keyboard issues and being lucky that 4 years old work computer works fine.
> For many, dropping macOS would be a much larger disruption than having less usable F-keys.
It's worth it, trust me. I dropped it almost twenty years ago, and I've never looked back. My computers are less expensive, more powerful & more flexible. My computing environment is customised to my needs, not those of some generic 20-something in Cupertino. If I want to, I can dig deep in the guts of my system and fix bugs or add features. Or I can hire someone to do it for me. Or I can just rely on the work of others (which is ultimately what Apple's customers have to do anyway: rely on Apple to fix & extend — and as their recent spate of crippling security bugs indicates, they haven't been doing a great job).
I think that comparing the operating systems of today based on how they worked 20 years ago is a bit of a stretch.
I bought my first Mac in 2009 (still kicking and alive) because I was tired of tinkering with Linux (I have abandoned Windows years before). I do look back at these systems every day at work so I do know quite well how my life would be if I really had to use them for everything.
Just one example of why I like macOS - it has a copy/paste shortcut that really does work everywhere. From Vim running in a console to my vector based drawing program of choice, out of the box.
> I think that comparing the operating systems of today based on how they worked 20 years ago is a bit of a stretch.
My family, friends & colleagues all use Apple computers & phones, so I believe that I've had pretty good exposure to them. There are a few things which macOS does better (system-wide copy/paste is clearly one), but overall I stand by what I wrote. Linux is great, and I don't thinking I'm missing anything by avoid Windows & macOS.
The new keyboards drive me nuts, too. Old ones were 100x better. How did they not notice how quickly and crappily the keys turned to degraded mushstate? Never left the clean room?
You need to catch up. That was true, and a line I often repeated, five years ago. It couldn't be further from the truth today.
High-density ("retina") screens are a standard feature in high-end laptops. Asserting that it's an Apple exclusive feature proves your ignorance.
Many companies now make good touchpads, probably better because they actually have a physical click, which Apple has removed.
Many companies make much better keyboards today, while Apple makes worse. Even my Lenovo Yoga's keyboard, which retracts into the body of the laptop, is better than what Apple offers.
Operating systems are more subjective, but consider whether you really think and operating system whose developers have entirely abandoned it for the better part of a decade is really likely to be the best.
> retina screens and the only usable touchpad in laptops
I mean I don't have a side in this convo. But if you are gonna put up a argument at least make it not sound fanboyish.
Plenty of laptops with similar ppi (what makes retina...retina) and plenty with good touchpads.
Many reasons to choose different laptops including Apples, but those you listed the competitors have themselves. Apple just markets their retina displays as 'special' when its all about pixel density and most laptops have moved in the direction of offering comparable ppi.
> I mean I don't have a side in this convo. But if you are gonna put up a argument at least make it not sound fanboyish.
> Plenty of laptops with similar ppi (what makes retina...retina) and plenty with good touchpads.
If you're going to put up an argument at least make it sound informed. The best trackpads I've used in any other laptop manufacturer was "acceptable", and that's Microsoft's. Plenty with good touchpads? Not even remotely close.
As for retina displays, plenty of laptops with higher PPI, also plenty of laptops with scaling issues up the ass.
Sounds like you never used a Surface Book. The OS is closer to Linux than macOS thanks to WSL, the screen is truly stunning and the touchpad on-par with MacBooks.
Personally, I hate the touchpad on my MBP - I find I have to press the buttons too hard, even with the sensitivity up to the max. Literally gives me sore fingers.
You might consider turning on "Tap to click" in your Trackpad settings. Instead of pressing anything, you can just lightly tap a finger anywhere on the pad to send a click. There's another option for a two-fingered tap to count as a right-click.
I'm getting an annoying amount of spurious clicks even using press-to-click. I dread to think what tap would be like.
Equally annoying is when the palm rejection kicks in because I'm trying to press too close to an edge or something, and the lack of tactile feedback makes it feel like i just stubbed my finger.
I think all the things you just said are opinions, because I am existing in a non-MBP world and am happier for it, and am sad whenever I am forced to use one at work because I left my lenovo at home or whatever.
Keyboard-nub-mouse-thing for life! How do MBP users survive without it? ;P
And have even crappier hardware (thinkpads with screen resolution and disk sizes of last decade, not much cheaper, anyone?) with Win 10 preinstalled...
I tried that for half a year, and it has some issues:
- Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen
- Coil whine
- Shitty battery life
- Shitty touchpad
So as whatever is Apple doing is annoying faddy bullshit, it's still the better option, especially considering the XPS 13 cost as much or more than MBP.
> - Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen
Honestly haven't noticed a single thing.
> - Coil whine
None of that.
> - Shitty battery life
What's shitty? It lasts 5 hours of me working with VMs. I don't think expecting more is reasonable. It's much less laggy than my collegue's MBP, which leads me to assume that Mac just throttles the CPU down to achieve longer battery life? I don't want that.
> - Shitty touchpad
Not at all. It works nicely. Much better than most touchpads I've used.
And as an added bonus, it doesn't get burning hot to the touch when doing actual work on it. Nor does it sound like it's about to take off. And it was like 1.5K EUR vs 3K EUR for a macbook pro.
>> Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen
> Honestly haven't noticed a single thing.
I've got a coworker sitting right next to me with a HiDPI main + non-HiDPI secondary screen. X or Wayland, it's a thousand cuts of hell: set native resolution and render scaling to 200% and you get some (most) apps at 200% on the non-HiDPI screen. Drag an app from HiDPI to non-HiDPI and notice how the overflow is wrongly scaled. There's no way to render at 200% on a non-native resolution then downsample to native, you have to set a non-native resolution, upsampled by the GPU/panel, which results in a useless blurry mess.
> it doesn't get burning hot to the touch when doing actual work on it. Nor does it sound like it's about to take off.
Early '13 and mid '14 13" rMBP here, VMs don't lag, slightly warm, but in no way "burning hot". Early '13 is dead silent thanks to dual fan design, mid '14 slightly less so, and only when I peg all cores for long enough.
> I've got a coworker sitting right next to me with a HiDPI main + non-HiDPI secondary screen. X or Wayland, it's a thousand cuts of hell: set native resolution and render scaling to 200% and you get some (most) apps at 200% on the non-HiDPI screen.
I have quite literally both sides of this problem on my Windows laptop at work. Either the 4K display on the laptop renders everything really tiny, or the 1080p displays make everything huge. I haven't found a decent solution, so I just end up using the 4K display only for Conemu because it's the only thing that doesn't render in some goofy way. Even then, the toolbar icons for it are tiny, and any windows it spawns (e.g. warning that I'm about to paste something with newlines) have tiny icons.
I stick to 1440p displays at home for now. Those work great with everything.
I had a lot of issues with my XPS on Windows, particularly Swing apps.
One handy feature you can use though is to place a manifest file [1] next to the exe with a bit of XML in it tellings Windows to render it at a bigger scale.
Well, I'm not really sure what to say other than that I don't have any of those issues. Sitting here right now with my HiDPI XPS13 screen and a regular HDMI monitor. Things look good and I have no scaling issues. Haven't messed with any of the settings, it's just an Ubuntu install with i3.
I don't know any specific macbook models as I'm not an apple user and there is like no visual distinction between them. All I know is that I have two coworkers who use macbooks, and theirs are incredibly loud & warm.
I don't understand why this was downvoted. This has been consistently my experience whenever I tried switching to a non-Mac notebook. On paper the specifications look great, but in practice the hardware configuration is better tested for Macs and everything just works smoother.
Same here. Mine has an idiotically loud coil whine and sometimes fails to go to sleep(the screen switches off but the computers stays on, resulting in a scorching hot laptop when you pull it out of your bag). The touchpad is horrendous, frequently jumping the cursor when you click on it. I've had the motherboard replaced 3(!!!!) times now, and all of those issues are still present, and from what I heard they are not exclusive to just one generation of the XPS - it's almost like Dell engineers can't make a small laptop without coil whine.
I think people feel like they need to do something to try to stop a “bad behavior.”
My guess is that it’s more effective to simply upvote a comment that is getting downvoted “unjustly” in your opinion. At least that’s what I’ve started doing. Even when it isn’t a comment I would normally upvote.
It‘s easier to change bad behavior if someone clearly states what that is.
My use of „crappy“ in the very first comment? Did that hurt someones feelings because they love their non-Mac system? That i state i think most other hardware is bad?
Then there should be a recommendation too that people should write a comment what they don’t like instead of just voting to help people understand what they did wrong. Like this it feels like downvoting is simply abused to push down opinions some don’t like.
We use these XPSes and the current MBPs here. I do not recommend the QHD screens on a 13", if you ever flip Linux to text mode it is just about unreadable, and I think only MacOS handles HiDPI elegantly. Ubuntu needs a lot of tweaks to be usable.
I also agree that the trackpads are very poor, and that's still one of Apple's main strengths. Although quite why the trackpad needs to be quite so enormous on the current models is a mystery to me, so many people catch it when typing.
I just tried this on an Ubuntu machine and sun12x22 doesn't exist. After some poking around and reading the linked wiki page, I found that Lat2-VGA32x16 (case-sensitive) produced a readable display. Given that running `setfont` on its own errors with `Cannot find default font`, I wonder if the default Ubuntu install neglects some things.
I actually prefer QHD screen since it looks great with 2x scaling (and I don't really care about text mode which is only useful for recovery). I have no problems with HiDPI or touchpad after upgrading from the ancient 16.04 LTS that comes preinstalled. I hope that the next edition would come with 18.04 LTS which should offer a much better user experience out of the box.
I've tried the alpha on a Acer Surface-esque tablet with a HiDPI screen and agree 18.04 is much, much better out of the box - scaling was set sensibly and usably on first boot. Very much looking forward to the release.
I can't say anything about Linux on XPS 13 because I didn't tried it, but for build quality... that's questionable. In my small company we have horrible failure rate with XPS 13 (seven of eight had some problems, from failing fans and SSDs to 'it just died on me'). Macs are much better in that regard. And the price between these two is comparable.
Tried Dell once and didn’t like it. Dont remember exactly why. Plus the service to return the unsatisfying product was complicated.
Last time i checked there was still something missing in the xps linux system so it wasn’t an option and i decided to leave Linux as main OS after 20 years. MacOS is not better in general, mainly it just has different annoyances
e.g. less open and configurable - but therefore not changing things i got used to so fast as Ubuntu and the various graphical desktop suites (yes the superspecial tabbed window managers are more stable, but i dont like them) which seem to try new stuff i don’t need and like with every release.
I‘m based in Germany by the way, so my choice of products here might be different...
I have a few dedicated boxes for almost 10 years now. I highly recommend it. I use it to run bitcoinity.org since it was created in 2011. Because of relatively big database (2TB) and many concurrent websocket connections (peaking around 20K) cost would be prohibitive elsewhere. Great uptime, instant responses, eKVM and blah blah I'm not their marketing team, I'm just a really happy customer.
I've tried OVH I think on two or three occasions, mostly VPS which was really sucked. But that was a few years ago maybe they got their s..ervers together.
How many servers do you have with Hetzner to manage 20,000 websocket connections? Also, did you ever have data loss in your large database because of hard drive failure?
Yup, I switched to phoenix lately. Works as advertised. I didn't even mess much with any kernel options. I still have most of my stack on ruby (on rails), but I bridge more and more things with elixir app (and phoenix), mostly using redis queues. As mentioned just 2 boxes are doing ws pushing currently, they also serve the app, one additional server also serving app but mostly static files, DB server, DB-slave and the app logic (which in my case is mostly fetching data and calculating some stats).
Unfortunately, even though there are some fallbacks and it seems to be pretty reliable, these servers are pets rather than cattle.
Two are doing just fine with the current stack (elixir), I actually have more problem with gigabit connections getting saturated at some points, but that's just my failure to optimize data that's being sent. Before that I was using nginx module (nginx-push-stream-module) which is also great and way ahead of any other out-of-the-box solution that I know.
Every server has RAID1 by default, plus I keep postrgresql slave on another box and I try to keep up to date backup. I actually never experienced a drive failure there (I currantly have ~10 boxes), but on my dev server at home which runs the same service I got I guess 5 HDDs failures already. Just two of them were server-grade though.
The issue is the new admin has no way to know whether all the processes running before the reboot are configured to come up automatically, and no sense of what external dependencies the server has. Further, the admin is forced to deal with problems reactively at boot time, rather than having the opportunity to gain an understanding of the server setup in advance.
Guess nothing I release will be used at Google. Oh well, none of it is particularly good or relevant anyway. Funny though, because they are doing exactly the opposite as what the license allows them to do.
I guess this is a case where the intent of the license might be obvious, but the legal details of the license not worked out well enough. I really don't understand why people, who basically want to open their sources to everyone, don't just take one of the more established licenses for that purpose, like MIT/BSD.
Proper licensing of software is a technical requirement, if you want your software to be used. The technicalities of the law might be unneccessary complex, bizarre even in some cases, but thats how the law is. We programmers are not goint to change that. So, if you really don't care, just take the MIT license, which is about the simplest of the widely used licenses. With that license, anyone interested has a clear base to use your software. Unless of course, you don't intend to share your software for real in the first place.
Your original comment said you "didn't understand," not that you "didn't agree." The former prompts a very different answer than the latter, but you're acting as if you said the latter.
To understand it, all you need to do is understand that some folks take actions based on ideological beliefs, often to the exclusion of pragmatism, knowingly or not.
No, it doesn't. I really do not understand why one thinks this is a good idea. Yes, people are free in their beliefs and expression. But if they try to do this with a nonstandard license, it only means, that the software is effectively not published as open source.
The technicalities of the law are very complicated. Tiny mistakes can render a license unusable or just invalid. So, the best advice I can give any author is to stick to one of the well-known license, as this makes it very likely that the software can be used by others.
WTFPL is essentially an ideological stance against the concept of intellectually property. To use the software you have to partially reject the importance of license compliance.
Did you contact GitHub regarding this and ask them, before bashing them on social media? What was their response? They'll probably gladly remedy the situation.
> Luckily I found an old local copy of my project [...] I haven’t tried contacting customer support, but as this appears to be official policy I would not expect a change there.
The policy itself needs to be changed, the individual case is resolved.
Or the policy was misinterpreted. The piece of text that got quoted is present in every single EULA ever and does not at all indicate if this is actually intentional by GitHub.
Besides, you can request to disconnect your fork from an upstream project. I expect such a request will also resolve this problem.
When two people touch the same file and format it differently you get a merge conflict. Even if the actual code is identical.
The only way I can imagine how you never ran into this is that either your team is tiny, or that people don't touch other people's code. Both of which are not an option as you grow.
