Even if you completely run out of power, the screen should stay on the last image it was showing. You might just see the same picture for days/weeks/several heat deaths until you decide to charge it again.
Insofar as there is an overlap between the two I'd pick wordpress. Shopify has all the painful buy-in that comes with a bloated sass with too much market share coupled with a marketplace that is just as toxic as that of wordpress. At least with WordPress you can control your deployment.
Yep, I almost added "not Shopify" when asking for alternative woocommerce suggestions, but thought that was a given! I did indeed mean alternatives where deployment is controlled. Wordpress+Woocommerce does actually tick along okay, like an old bus it blows a bit of smoke and eventually gets the user to the checkout.
You know, if that were the only roadblock, I wish someone would take the top 10,000 Google queries and just manually curate them. Hire different interest groups -- outdoors, travel, cuisine, etc. -- and manually find the best hits buried deep in some subreddit. No fancy algorithms, just old-fashioned librarian-style research, but constantly updated with the latest findings and queries.
Would happily pay for that... even if it only has 5% of the coverage of Google, that's fine because Google is like 95% noise anyway.
>, I wish someone would take the top 10,000 Google queries and just manually curate them. Hire different interest groups -- outdoors, travel, cuisine, etc. -- and manually find the best hits buried deep in some subreddit. No fancy algorithms, just old-fashioned librarian-style research, but constantly updated with the latest findings and queries.
It's not exactly your specifications but 2007 Mahalo attempted something like that and they shut down after a few years:
I think there is an easy exclusion to be made for these types of 'too lazy to type a url' type searches (or 'weather' which is similar in getting a specific piece of data).
Google’s revenue per user in the US underlines that point, taking a credit card out for an annual subscription for a $100 probably isn’t going to score a good conversion rate for anything beyond a very small userbase.
The predicted economic/behavioural constraints are inhibiting innovation. You’re forced to play Google’s game.
Google was definitely better than the algorithmic crawlers. But Yahoo often still had gems for a while, a few years maybe, before they gave up. It's too bad.
+1 I see this repeated over and over in tech where an algo is great but why not manually craft the top value queries?
Like with smart speakers, why not manually add a bunch of interactions? You can do it yourself in settings by adding a phrase and desired response, why not have the team adding a bunch they would want?
Yes. There was a period of several years when Google's results were better than Yahoo, but once the human search engines bankrupt, the algorithmic SEO just kept getting worse and worse =/ Too bad...
The only UX/UI request I have for Firefox: Stop changing it. Don't add any more useless tweaks or adware or bundled services.
Its UX "history" made it plummet from the top browser at one point to a forgotten has-been. These tweaks were not successes or celebrations, they were the death by a thousand cuts.
Firefox would still have declined, that's kind of unavoidable with Google owning Android, but Mozilla wasn't helping here. Turning Firfox into a lame Chrome-clone by removing everything that made it unique in the first place just ensured that there was no more need to bother with Firefox. Loading the browser up with all kind of telemetry, cloud nonsense and ads also removed any desire to ever bother with it again.
I still think there is plenty of room for a privacy respecting browser in the market, but Mozilla hasn't even been trying to fill that niche in years and still claiming to do so just makes them look like untrustworthy liar.
We hackers like to complain about stuff that bother us, but the truth is they don't bother anyone else but us. Firefox didn't lose marketshare to Chrome because it had telemetry. Users don't care about it, and if they did, they'd know Chrome is doing it much worse. Same for "cloud nonsense and ads" - you really think they disliked it so much, so they went to Chrome were they are forcefully logged-in, have every action linked to their Google account and have inferior adblockers? C'mon.
It's kinda like saying "I'm moving to North Korea because freedom of speech in the US sucks!"
People that don't care are already well served by Chrome, they are never going to switch, so there is little point in catering to them. People that do care however aren't well served by Firefox, that's an issue.
Every thread about Firefox is filled with complains, be it removal of essential feature, shifting around the UI for no reason or addition of stuff nobody asks for. Not every user might care about every of those issues, but do you think that amount of negative feedback is good for attracting new users or keeping existing ones? I don't.
Also the level Firefox has sunken too is mislabeling the Screenshot cloud upload button "Save". That's plain old malware dark pattern strategy to steal your data. They took almost a year to fix that and it's downright puzzling how that ever made it anywhere near a release in the first place.
Chrome might be crap, but I am not going anywhere near Firefox anytime soon either. They have shown time and time again that they really aren't on my side, yet love to claim so. The sooner we get rid of Firefox, the sooner there is a chance a real alternative might arise.
So what are you using now? Is Chrome on your side?
IMHO, the _moment_ we get rid of Firefox, the _moment_ we lost the free web. Building a web browser is just too damn hard, and never again would free software stand a chance. All will be Chrome-based, and Google will decide what "standards" to adhere to while it sits in a committee with itself.
> Building a web browser is just too damn hard, and never again would free software stand a chance.
That's what people said when I started to write an open-source DAW 22 years ago. "DAWs are just too damn hard, there'll never be an open source DAW".
Except that now there are several open source DAWs, and several proprietary ones, all created since that time.
I am very, very skeptical of claims like this. There is a reason why creating a new browser that lots of people will use is a challenge, but it's not because it's "too hard".
Thanks for Ardour! I've used it many times. I'm not a DAW expert, but unfortunately I don't think that's really similar though... DAWs are complicated, and hats off for building one, but they're nothing like browsers in how much they're tracking a moving target, and how little tolerance users have for something that is incomplete. I have a musician friend that still uses Cubase 6 and it works just fine. Ever tried using a browser from 2011? Do you even dare to?
Browsers need to follow ever changing standards, do all that in a super performant way (remember the days people said they're leaving Firefox because Chrome "feels snappier"? Good luck beating that), keep it secure even though it's running remote code, and until they get it ALL 100% working, no one is really going to make it their daily driver. I already hear people saying that they're not using Firefox because some websites don't render well.
If it isn't "too hard", why do you think that over the last decade essentially no one managed to do it, while we do have several open source DAWs?
> Browsers need to follow ever changing standards, do all that in a super performant way
You don't have to beat Chrome at it's own game. I think the best course of action would be a drastic course change and building a browser that focuses heavily on the creation and publish of content, not just on the consumption. Focus on the Web as document storage instead of as App runtime. That's an area that is still in serious need of work and isn't really covered with Chrome. Also somebody really needs to reinvent bookmarks, they haven't fundamentally changed in 25 years and are in dire need of an upgrade.
Brave (IPFS and Crypto integration) and Project Gemini (focus on text content) are going a little into that direction, but there is still a lot more that could be done.
> Firefox because Chrome "feels snappier"?
It was less because "feels snappier" and more because "complete browser freezes when using multiple tabs". It has gotten better since then, but when Chrome started Firefox was in dire need of some rework.
Sounds like you're not even aiming to create a web browser... All good wishes, but count me out and I sure hope Firefox doesn't take that route.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the hacker mentality (go Gemini!), but I thought we were discussing the need for an open web. Sure we can even add NNTP support to Firefox, but that ain't gonna get my grandma switching over.
> I thought we were discussing the need for an open web.
What exactly is "open" about just being a Chrome-clone? If you want to keep the Web open, you really have to work on the "how-to-get-content-on-the-web" side of things, just another browser for pure consumption really doesn't add all that much. Stuff like containerizing Facebook isn't really doing anything worthwhile, giving people something to get away from Facebook would. And forcing HTTPS on everybody really didn't help either, that just killed what remained of the old Web.
It's not like Firefox didn't try, at one point they added Firefox Hello and that looked promising and than it got removed again. And at one point they had RSS support, but instead of improving and building up on that, that got removed again. And instead of improving the Firefox bookmarks, Tab Groups or the Save button they gave us Pocket, which is no different than any other cloud service.
> but that ain't gonna get my grandma switching over.
You don't improve the Web by giving grandma a Chrome-clone, she'll just be Facebook'ing around all the same as she did in Chrome. And when grandma is paying your bills by visiting Google Search, why even bother, cut out the middleman and just use Chrome. It makes no difference.
Now I don't necessarily want NNTP support in Firefox, as at that point we'll just be full circle and back at where Mozilla started 20 years ago, but I want something that allows communication and publishing of content without having to rely on Facebook and friends.
It's those Web 3 enthusiasts that tried to convince us that we need new ways to put things on the internet. There's no problem with doing it today. You can `python3 -m http.server` and you're on the internet. There's no technical challenge waiting to be solved there.
Most people are consumers of data. That's why browsers are called Browsers and not Authors. Grandma isn't building a website for herself not because it's hard, but because she doesn't care. The risk with with Google being the only browser is that they define how we browse. They can decide that next year HTML is gone and Flutter is in. They can decide FLOC is mandatory to view a website. They can decide to only show AMP content. Then, my friend, then it's gets harder to put your own content on the internet. And this is why Firefox is important.
> There's no technical challenge waiting to be solved there.
NAT is still a major issue when you try to self host anything. And most of the stuff you can hobble together in a shell one liner just ends up being broken or limited in one way or another, e.g. that `python3 -m http.server` fails with seeking in video files, just gives "Broke pipe" error. Also provides no way to encrypt or authenticate. And without any way to easily mirror the content it will be unreliable and slow anyway.
Trying to do almost any common task is a nightmare when you want to do it cloud-free. An open web run by users themselves is still an unsolved problem. There some projects working on it (libp2p, IPFS, etc.), but none of that is to the point where it works properly and often missing important features.
> They can decide that next year HTML is gone and Flutter is out.
That already happened years ago. Tons of popular Internet apps only exist as mobile apps with little or no Web interface. Worse yet, most of those apps are driven by user created content. Which is exactly why making publishing a first class citizen on the Web is so important, without that people are just leaving the Web and going to places that allow them to publish and those places will be controlled by your favorite mega-corp.
These are fair points, but they are missing the things that have changed in the DAWscape.
In 1999, and maybe even 2011, a DAW that couldn't do elastic time was still considered to be a major player. In 2011, a DAW that couldn't do clip launching was still OK. In 2011, the idea of cross-routable modulation (like Bitwig now does) was a wild and crazy idea (mostly). In 2011, the idea of a modular environment within the DAW was floating around (Logic had done it for a while) but was hardly mainstream. These things are now either already or becoming more or less mandatory to be considered a major DAW.
Then there is the matter of control surfaces, which keep evolving. In 2011, the idea of a controller that was essentially a programmable grid of illuminated pads was mostly the domain of experimental performance (Monome). And every month or two, a new controller appears that claims to support Mackie Control Protocol, but has in fact bastardized it in some small but significant way. There's also the touch-based controllers, frequently using OSC, and their constantly changing suggestion of what should be possible.
And then there's plugin APIs, which also keep evolving, and we are under enormous expectation to ensure that every single one of many thousands of little code blobs written using one of a half-dozen plugin APIs and by developers with a range of experience that goes from nothing to world expert should all just work.
Over the years, we've also seen constant changes on Windows in terms of the OS-level audio APIs, each change bringing with it new possibilities and new problems. There's no POSIX for this. And, of course, a slow but steady evolution in audio interface hardware, which doesn't often impinge on the DAW itself, but sometimes does.
As for performant, browsers don't even have RT-style constraints, and there's plenty of observations about "snappiness" in this domain too. It's just a much smaller niche, and developer culture (as testified to by posts here on HN) is now very dominated by web-centric thinking and experience. As a result those sorts of things aren't really part of the culture in the way that "wow, Chrome is so fast" etc. has become. Look at the praise Reaper receives because of its (apparent) ability to handle more plugins with less CPU cycles.
As to why new browsers are rare ... I think it's because (1) browsers are not really fun at most levels, and (2) adoption is hard when there's a default on just about every platform. The fun part is important though. Many developers enjoy "messing around with audio" and it provides a kind of gratification that is rare (video stuff would be similar). It's not that cooking up a standards compliant and crazy fast and beautiful CSS implementation isn't without its joys, but there's so little point doing that as a standalone project. Contrast that with the steady drip, drip, drip of developers who want to try their hand at a synth, or an audio file editor, or FX processor and eventually think "oooh, how about a DAW". There's not really any evolutionary pathway for browser development: you're either writing a whole browser, or you're not. Audio gives you a way in, and then the sky's the limit.
The current state is only a bit better. It's basically Google developing features that users and developers mostly want, and Mozzila and Apple shooting them down without really offering an alternative for those use cases.
It's almost the same as old school Linux, where commercial software said "Hey I added this one click button for the main use case" and FOSS said "You don't need that, just have a bash one liner instead".
Chromium is openish. Other developers could fork it if they wanted to.
Firefox isn't doing anything about the fact that self hosting is way too much hassle for anyone but a few hobbyists. They're not really doing much in the IoT space.
They don't seem to be addressing the fact that the web is basically just Facebook and Youtube and Amazon in any way, except by adding ever-more tracking prevention tech that's not really relevant when all data goes through the same 5 sites anyway.
They actively get in the way of P2P tech by locking everything down so much it's impossible to implement a lot of things.
The lack of filesystem APIs just promotes even more vendor lockinful web services.
Mozzila does a lot of good things, but I'd rather they just switch to the Chromium engine, restore the removed features, and go back to what they were doing 5-10 years ago in the FlyWeb and WebThings era.
Does Chrome interrupt your flow with some bullshit on every update? My understanding is that Chrome is a privacy nightmare but assuming you submit to it and opt-in to all the dark patterns once, they'll at least leave you alone and just stalk you in the background.
Every Firefox update on the other hand will always find one way or another to interrupt your flow at the worst possible option, whether it's with useless UI updates, post-update notifications about bullshit "features" such as Colorways or a VPN, etc. In contrast, Chrome's minimalistic UI has barely changed in its entire lifetime.
> So what are you using now? Is Chrome on your side?
The question for Firefox users is whether Firefox is on their side. If neither vendor is on your side, why not use Chrome? Has the UI on Chrome ever changed significantly?
> IMHO, the _moment_ we get rid of Firefox, the _moment_ we lost the free web.
I'd date this to the moment that the company that owns Chrome became the source of the vast majority of Firefox revenue, and probably all of its profits.
I disagree. This is repeating all the time, but it was never the question. I'm not giving up on Firefox because it ain't perfect and then going to Chrome because it's a known evil.
Mozilla are doing stupid things sometimes (and I've argued for that many times, in this thread, and in the Mozilla community), but they're just not even remotely as bad as Google. Firefox has containers, uBlock, tracking protection. It's literally the source for Tor Browser.
The question isn't a dichotomy of "who is on my side? none? so it doesn't matter". Firefox is still miles ahead than Chrome in privacy AND in keeping the web open. True, this doesn't make it perfect. But it sure does make it better, for all of us.
The thing about Chrome is that it's a known evil. Google monitors me and sells me ads. OK, not exactly benevolent, but I can live with it. I'd prefer they just charge me $100/yr or whatever instead of ads, but at the end of the day it's a tradeoff I can accept.
The thing about Firefox is that it's an UNKNOWN evil. Mozilla always feel like it's on the cusp of bankruptcy and constantly searching for new dark patterns to sneak in. When Wikipedia needs money they beg for it, but don't purposely sabotage the user experience to get funding.
Mozilla does that with every new release. I always feel like they've added some shady new malware/adware with every new patch, and then use some stupid UI tweak to try to hide it. It's only a matter of time before they sneak Norton in there. I trust the Firefox team even less than Facebook at this point. Firefox just isn't trustworthy, whereas Chrome is a known compromise.
> I trust the Firefox team even less than Facebook at this point.
You trust the goons working for Facebook less than the goons working for Facebook? /s
It hit me really hard when during the whole FLoC controversy Mozilla published its own collaboration with Facebook on the future of browser based user tracking. No amount of technological hand waving could have fixed that first gigantic WTF and a description filled with privacy budgets, trusted third party servers, etc. didn't even have a snowballs chance in hell.
You confused the business model. Google doesn’t sell YOU ads.
You provide valuable behavioural data to Google, which uses it to create very targeted demographics which are used for targeted advertising and analytics that are sold to advertisers.
Seen in this way, it’s quite darker than that, in my opinion.
Sorry, meant to say "show me ads". But yes, it's still an acceptable tradeoff to me.
I mean, our own government harvests even more data and does jack shit with it. At least Google provides a world-class office suite.
Was forced to used the Microsoft stack at a new job and it made me miss the Google ecosystem so much.
At the end of the day privacy isn't that valuable to people. Nobody cared about it in the 90s when the internet was developing, it was barely a blip in the 2000s, and somehow it exploded in the 2010s but plenty of people still use Facebook and TikTok and such. So?
Usability > privacy for most people, a lesson Firefox refuses to acknowledge, I guess.
Meh, long before I was a dev, I was a user... and it's true I didn't care about telemetry, but a HUGE difference is that Google's services were USEFUL. Syncing passwords, extensions, bookmarks etc. were automatic, easy, unintrusive, etc. Staying logged into my Google account meant I could auto login to Gmail, GDrive, GSheets, Geverything else along with a bunch of social logins on other websites.
Firefox Sync eventually arrived, but it was a PITA to set up because I didn't need a Firefox account for anything else. And then they added a bunch of third party services that I still don't know what they do (Pocket), ads on the main screen, ads on startup, full-page release nags for pointless features, constantly changing UI for no good reason at all...
It was like Chrome took Phoenix's philosophy and Firefox tried to become Netscape Communicator again. Zero of the Firefox features added in the last decade helped me as a user, but instead constantly bugged me. I can't remember a single annoying thing that Chrome added in the same timeframe. It still feels leaner, quicker, and less intrusive.
While that's true, constant UI changing certainly didn't help retain what little market share it already had.
It made the browser compete with itself, and pushed people into alternatives. After all, if you're going to learn a new UI, why not try another browser altogether?
Mozzila turned itself into a privacy browser, not a browser with privacy.
Google added things like WebUSB, Bluetooth, all kinds of web app APIs Mozilla rejected because of tracking risk, etc.
Mozzila killed their coolest features like FlyWeb.
They just haven't kept up with Chrome, and their vision is way too "privacy at all costs" rather than allowing users to decide. They don't seem to share in the modern idea of web apps having full native parity.
> They just haven't kept up with Chrome, and their vision is way too "privacy at all costs" rather than allowing users to decide. They don't seem to share in the modern idea of web apps having full native parity.
Those are literally the last things keeping me with Firefox.
They're also things that make them less interesting to anyone who isn't privacy focused.
They don't seem to have fully made up their mind on who the target audience is, it seems like their goal is to convince the mainstream to prioritize privacy over convenience.
A better strategy would ve to either become just another Chrome-alike, or focus on an uncompromising privacy focused experience for the people who really want that. But that might require they not do some of the slightly shady stuff they always seem to want to do, and properly support uBO long term.
IMHO, as a user first and dev second, "things entirely controlled by 3rd parties" aren't a bug, they're a feature. That means someone else gets to jump through the hoops to make it work, not me. The vast majority of useful & fun things on a computer are made by corporate 3rd parties, not GNU & Linux volunteers.
Whether it's Netflix, games, Office/Photoshop, obscure drivers, whatever... I can just run an app and expect it to work, and if it doesn't, it's not my problem. I'll wait a while and someone else will fix it.
I don't have to tweak obscure config files or apply patches or sideload package manager repos.
MacOS, and to a much lesser extent, Windows, mostly stay out of the way and and let my apps and sites take center stage. Linux fails that basic test most of the time, favoring purity of ideology over basic user needs. When I have to jump through hoops to get some trivial device working or an app that takes 3 seconds to install on any other OS, that doesn't say to me "this is a great operating system, I can write my own hack to fix this", it says to me "this still isn't ready, two decades later".
I use Linux at work all the time and it's a great workhorse, but at home, I don't want an operating system whose primary selling point is that it requires even more of my time.
"Whether it's Netflix, games, Office/Photoshop, obscure drivers, whatever... I can just run an app and expect it to work, and if it doesn't, it's not my problem. I'll wait a while and someone else will fix it.
I don't have to tweak obscure config files or apply patches or sideload package manager repos."
I am not sure what you mean.
I have been a linux user for the last 25years and I haven't had to apply any patch manually for the last 15 at the very least, nor looking for obscure drivers.
A config file is the same as an option/settings menu, with the advantage that it is usually much better documented.
Nobody told you that you can watch netflix on Linux as well as running games, use office and powerful photo editing apps as well?
You probably don't run the same hardware or software, then. DRM doesn't quite work on Linux (so no 4k). MS Office, a business need, requires WINE or similar. No Adobe. There's Proton now for games, but only a tiny sliver of the full Steam library, especially for less-popular indie games (which is where most of the innovation is in PC gaming).
I've had bad drivers melt my dining table when the fan wouldn't kick in and the CPU didn't thermally throttle, during the Ubuntu install process. I've had to manually adjust display settings in the command line because various pieces of the UI couldn't agree with each other (Ubuntu's UI vs Gnome/KDE vs some other stuff), and hi-DPI, > 60 refresh rate, HDR, ultrawide, etc. were all a pain to set up, especially with multiple monitors. And some apps just don't exist for Linux, like the Sonos controller, motherboard firmware upgrade exes, commercial GIS software, Lightroom, etc.
All of that is just plug and play on Windows, and sometimes on Mac. With Linux it's always a multi-hour ordeal, all to end up with a poor ripoff of the Windows 7 UI or whatever Ubuntu's latest experiment is. Just, why?
The command-line is great, but zsh on macOS takes care of those needs 99% of the time. Among high-hassle tools, running WSL on Windows makes for overall less headaches than running a Windows VM or Wine on Linux. In between, Parallels on macOS is that sweet spot of usability and broad compatibility for me personally. There's nothing that I NEED on Linux on the desktop, so I'm happy to set it up on the server side and use something else at home.
Try as I might, every few years I install a few Linux distros to test them out, because people keep swearing they are better and totally ready. I'm sorry, but for an average lazy user like me, they're just not. ChromeOS is as close as any distro has come, and I'd happily install that if it didn't require a 3rd-party repackaging.
My next laptop might be a Chromebook, which is superficially and technically Linux I guess, but minus the regular chaos of the normal Linux ecosystem. I've never just never had a good experience with desktop Linux outside of Android and ChromeOS, sorry. Maybe you're lucky, or maybe I'm unlucky, but it's always been a hassle and never worth it...
Adobe softwares can be replaced by other tools and their licensing these day make it something you don't want regardless of the platform it would run on.
Office 365 works well enough on the web, calligra and libreoffice are compatible enough to make it a non issue. You can even upload and work on odf documents on office 365 these days.
I like having 4k in the living room and I have a chromecast for that but I'd rather not have my gf and kids play 4k content while I am working at home and they all have 1080p or lower laptop screen anyway. You don't miss retina if you never used it.
As for the rest of your experience, I guess it comes from poor buying skills. You don't buy a Dell to run MacOS on it. I purchase my laptops and hardware with linux compatibility in mind.
Saying Linux UI is a poor windows 7 ripoff is a lie. I am actually one of the - usually silent - happy gnome 3 user and I think it is a superior desktop UI to anything Microsoft and Apple have produced so far. You get a very focused window without any distraction from unneeded icons and information everywhere and everything can be piloted quickly with the keyboard but also work flawlessly with a touch screen in tablet mode when I flip my Lenovo Yoga.
This line of thinking baffles me. I should put up with subpar text-rendering and pixelated fonts and widgets because that's how we did things before?
> I guess it comes from poor buying skills.
I purposefully went out of my way to buy a Radeon that was explicitly supported by amdgpu.ko. I poured over driver code to see which USB Wi-Fi would work best. I gave up on 4K back in 2017 because neither Qt nor Gtk were "ready" for High-DPI and bought a 1080p panel instead.
None of this changes the fact that I had to patch things all the time because of bugs. Not hardware bugs, but software bugs. Thread safety bugs. GConf bugs. I found and fixed a bug in systemd because they had the GUID wrong for automatic root mount on IA-64. Firefox was doing swizzling wrong causing window tearing on some GPUs. I even fixed a damn bug in the Rust libc crate related to ioctl(3).
The reason your experience is so good is because people find these bugs and fix them. Like I used to do before I left the community, partially due to this mindset that if the user has a problem the user must be the problem.
> This line of thinking baffles me. I should put up with subpar text-rendering and pixelated fonts and widgets because that's how we did things before?
My fonts are fine thank you, and look much better than on the windows 10 that was provided to me initially by my employer.
Now let's take an example. My employer sent me 2 1080p external displays for work. What would Retina on my laptop provide if I don't benefit from it on my external displays? Yes sometimes it is better not experiencing better/nicer technology if you can't afford or if your emplyer can't afford to equip all your devices with it. Otherwise you just get frustrated.
I am not saying you should go back to CRTs and vintage techs. You like it or not, the market and world is not yet ready to provide affordable retina/4K/5K monitor/displays with decent refresh speed and latency in all sizes at prices anyone can afford.
> The reason your experience is so good is because people find these bugs and fix them.
Are you saying other OSes / apps ecosystems are bugfree? They are not. And the bug aren't necessarily fixed earlier than on free software.
For instance, Windows has been virtually unusable in a non US/english only context for decades and they have never cared fixing the default keyboard layouts.
On linux I don't have to memorize arbitrary ALT + 3 digits numbers to type common, daily used letters in my language, I just compose them easily from the default keys.
I can name countless of people swearing every day because their app has bug, eratic behavior, crashes, all OS and software license included.
I don't think it's fair to suggest that my use cases and priorities are less important than yours.
Maybe LibreOffice and GIMP are enough for you. They are not for me, especially in professional contexts where 90% similarity isn't the same as actually compatible, especially when I collaborate with other users and designers. And I actually appreciate the Creative Cloud subscription pricing, which is great for occasional users like me who can sub for a while and then cancel without having to spend thousands of dollars at a time. Software have network effects too, and I don't produce documents and graphics for my own gratification, but to satisfy team and client needs, and telling them "Oh, but it looks fine in LibreOffice, you need to use a real document standard and not some proprietary format" is not really an option. Maybe if you're Stallman and get to dictate the terms. I'm not. I need software that works with what other people use, and software that I can use to get jobs with employers that pay me in dollars and not ideals.
Maybe you don't care about anything but 1080p 16:9 displays. That's fine, but there are others who do. Whether for spreadsheets or vectors or photos, sometimes more pixels are better, and definitely having plug and play support for things like monitor brightness are nice too. It's fine if you don't care about any of that. You don't get to tell me what I care about. Shrug.
As for poor buying skills, eh, I'm perfectly happy running Linux on my phone and servers, Windows on my desktop, macOS on my laptop, and iOS on the iPad. And guess what, I don't even know or care what architecture my microwave runs on. I just don't feel the need to install Linux on everything. Each device has their specialty, whether that's cooking food or playing games or mobile apps or web dev or GIS.
I'm glad you like your Linux UI. I tried Ubuntu on a Yoga 2 a few years ago but didn't like it. To each their own, eh?
I was just mentionning that the days of patching and recompiling kernel and drivers to have a usable computer are long gone.
I am not sure why everybody always mention Gimp as the only photo editing tool that work on linux. There are many other tools in the graphic edition/illustration and video production, including some proprietary ones.
TBH, I have no idea how Ubuntu default desktop UI was a few years ago. I vaguely know they tried going with their own ideas with Unity, a desktop that was loosely based on gnome but without using gnome shell.
Tastes are not universal anyway and I don't understand how you can stand a windows desktop if you are fine with a mac laptop. When I was given back a new laptop with windows on it by my employer, I tried to get used to it and like it. The font rendering is terrible, the ergonomic is bad, the virtual workspace aren't as seamless and quick to use, the software installation process is shitty, even with linux inspired tools such as chocolatey, making containers and virtual machines work with the cisco vpn was a major PITA and involved having powershell scripts being triggered in scheduled tasks by log events to get anything working. I reinstalled Fedora and was up to speed in a few minutes.
> I haven't had to apply any patch manually for the last 15 at the very least
You're very lucky. I've had to apply patches manually for the majority of my Linux experience, to the point where I can literally recite you the package patch contribution instructions for Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, and Arch from memory.
> There are two possible cases here. (snip) I was under the impression that it was common (in places that use the 12 hour system) to instead write 12:00 noon/midnight specifically to avoid this.
IMHO the bigger takeaway ought to be that what is "common" in your area isn't necessarily common in another part of the country, or in another country. This confusion exists because the Europeans (and nowadays the Americans) exported their time measurement system across cultures, to mixed success. It's never obvious and should not be assumed to be... that confusion can exist no matter what actual UNIX time the test was scheduled at.
> Second, I don't understand people saying they use 11:59/12:01 AM/PM as a mnemonic. This makes no sense to me as 00:01 a valid time.
For this specific case, it helps clarify what is "noon" vs "midnight". For some reason people are a lot better with knowing 11:59pm is, vs 12:00AM. The cutover is what throws people off. And for most purposes, the +/- 1-3 minute difference won't matter.
The midnight/noon thing doesn't really help when you're going across oceans though. Or, like you said, if you're not familiar with AM/PM at all.
>I was under the impression that it was common (in places that use the 12 hour system) to instead write 12:00 noon/midnight specifically to avoid this.
(In the US) I've probably seen that done outside this thread but I'm not sure. Just "noon" or "midnight" would be more common than that and if numerals are being written, I'd say "12 noon/midnight" is far rarer than "12 AM/PM". In places where 12 hour time notation is used, people are just expected to know 12 hour time notation.
> For some reason people are a lot better with knowing 11:59pm is, vs 12:00AM.
You mean, people have a mental association like "Oh look it's 12:00 AM [= midnight], better get to bed now" because they see these times in specific contexts, and then use that as a jumping off point to extrapolate the meaning of AM/PM as a whole?
I'm propagating the ISO date format with Guerilla tactics. Whenever I come across meeting minutes or documentation pages using a different date format, I silently reformat into ISO date format and then it just catches on. The "normative force of the factual" can be strong.
