[HN Gopher] Ken Thompson's keynote talk about a jukebox he built...
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Ken Thompson's keynote talk about a jukebox he built [video]
Author : nixcraft
Score : 420 points
Date : 2023-03-19 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| voytec wrote:
| Exact fragment: 57:49 [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/live/kaandEt_pKw?t=3469s
| pjmlp wrote:
| Whatever what some CS star uses is not what is going to pay for
| the bills of each one individually.
|
| Use whatever you like.
| [deleted]
| never_inline wrote:
| Boy didn't he use plan 9 or something?
| euclaise wrote:
| Perhaps you're thinking of Rob Pike?
| mseepgood wrote:
| Ken Thompson was also part of the Bell Labs Plan 9 team
| before they went to Google and created Go, but I'm sure both
| don't use it as their regular OS today.
| nzoschke wrote:
| I feel the swing of the pendulum here.
|
| I own mostly but Apple gear right now but I'm being pulled back
| towards more open and extensible hardware and software.
|
| The GPU is a big one. Nvidia hardware unlocks a lot of gaming,
| graphics, video and machine learning stuff.
|
| Open vs closed is another one. Android development unlocks so
| much more hardware and software and peripheral and protocol
| support.
|
| For the first time in a decade do have an Android device I
| develop on, and am very close to building a PC with a GPU and am
| considering a Steam Deck.
|
| Open and hackable and extensible for the win.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Jeez, if nvidia hardware is "open and extensible" by your
| standards, they must have been _really_ lowered by Apple 's
| shenanigans.
| smoldesu wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, Apple was the one that blacklisted
| Nvidia hardware, not the other way around. You can still
| download bog-standard UNIX drivers for Nvidia hardware, Apple
| just won't let you install them.
| sbuk wrote:
| It's understandable when you consider _why_ , but that
| doesn't fit you narrative.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It was understandable that Apple stopped shipping Nvidia
| hardware. Blacklisting Nvidia hardware and preventing the
| installation of Nvidia drivers is another thing, though,
| and goes too far in speaking on the user's behalf. If
| that's somehow more of a "narrative" than Apple's
| perspective on the matter, I don't know what to tell you.
| JonathonW wrote:
| What are "bog-standard UNIX drivers" and what other GPU
| vendors supply such a driver that can be installed on a
| Mac?
| [deleted]
| binkHN wrote:
| > Android development unlocks so much more hardware and
| software and peripheral and protocol support.
|
| Seconded. However, with each release of Android, Google tends
| to lock things down further.
| dcow wrote:
| As a lazy developer I also dislike what's slowly happening to
| macOS. Apple wants you to switch to sandboxed apps but they don't
| provide a way for you to do even half the things a traditional
| app can (because they can't imagine them all up front). That's
| just frustrating and lazy on their part and makes the developer
| UX shitty.
|
| But, as an end user, what Apple is doing (bringing sandboxed apps
| and better security to the desktop) is inarguably the right thing
| to do. It's a far superior position for the user and it greatly
| raises the bar for malware.
|
| As developers, to me, it feels a little bit backwards. I guess my
| critique is that there must be a nuanced way to say "hey Apple
| you need to do a better job at supporting valid developer use
| cases" (and I'll be the first to admit I have many grievances)
| while at the same time acknowledging that the increased
| complexity of modern computing systems is moving the needle
| meaningfully from a security standpoint and so we should be okay
| with having to work harder to keep our users secure. Like, I'd
| truly hope if we all switched to Linux, we'd find a way to make
| secure boot and code signing standard. Not just say "ah isn't the
| old dying way of user-domain permissions nice let's live here
| forever".
|
| Even Microsoft is pushing code signatures and sandboxed apps. We
| should be making a stink and pushing for these platforms to allow
| custom root signing keys and fully secure/sandboxed replacements
| for the functionality they're taking away. Not just throwing up
| our hands and saying fuck security I'll just use Linux. Not a
| great image...
| lapcat wrote:
| Developers vs. users is a false dichotomy. Users need software.
| Without software, there's nothing to use. The native Mac
| software ecosystem is slowly dying. Eventually everything on
| the Mac will just be a cross-platform afterthought.
| Maursault wrote:
| [flagged]
| lapcat wrote:
| > only in your little dreams
|
| Please don't violate the HN guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| > 21.5% of developers used macOS in 2015,[1] increasing to
| 27.5% in 2020.
|
| I said the _native_ Mac software ecosystem is slowly dying,
| and eventually everything on the Mac will just be a _cross-
| platform_ afterthought. The total number of registered
| _Apple_ developers (not Mac specifically) isn 't really
| relevant to that. Every iOS developer has to use macOS in
| order to access Xcode, but that doesn't mean they're making
| native Mac software.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| But, increasingly, users don't need desktop software.
|
| In fact, the move towards sandboxes apps makes native apps
| closer to browser apps.
|
| I'm not even saying it's a good thing. Just that gimping
| native apps isn't the footgun it would have been 10 years
| ago.
| lapcat wrote:
| What do you mean by "need"? Increasingly, users are force-
| fed cross-platform web apps. I wouldn't say that's what
| they need, and you're not even saying it's a good thing.
|
| If users don't need desktop software, then why do they need
| desktop hardware?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Take Figma for example. Couldn't have been a web app 10
| years ago. Users would have needed a desktop app in that
| case.
|
| You emphasize "need" but it seems you mean "want."
|
| You bring up a great point about hardware too. People
| don't need as much hardware given the increased
| connectivity and cloud computing.
|
| Again, I'm not suggesting all this is good. But of course
| users _need_ local compute and native apps less than 10
| years ago.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Again, I'm not suggesting all this is good. But of
| course users _need_ local compute and native apps less
| than 10 years ago.
|
| Isn't this a problem for the future of Mac, though? It
| seems to me that dumbing down the Mac is the opposite of
| what Apple should do. Why not place emphasis on what
| makes desktop special, rather than morphing the Mac into
| an overpriced iOS device that only runs web apps?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| That's an interesting point. I don't necessarily think it
| will go that far for the record. But Mac is probably
| comparatively well suited to make a profit off fancy
| devices with low computing power.
| dcow wrote:
| Developers are really lazy. We have terms like DX and UX.
| It's not a false dichotomy at all.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Developers are really lazy.
|
| Speak for yourself.
|
| > We have terms like DX and UX. It's not a false dichotomy
| at all.
|
| It's still a false dichotomy, because they're not
| necessarily opposed. Making the native Mac software DX
| worse can also make the UX worse, and making the DX better
| can make the UX better. When I said "Eventually everything
| on the Mac will just be a cross-platform afterthought", I
| meant that the UX is becoming totally crappy. We get
| Electron, we get Catalyst, we get iOS apps on macOS. Crap.
| Bad UX.
|
| Lack of powerful software, due to excessive security
| restrictions, is also a bad UX. Endless "Cancel or Allow"
| dialogs are a bad UX.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > We should be making a stink [...] Not just throwing up our
| hands and saying fuck security I'll just use Linux.
|
| I'm not sure what you're asking for, here. People have
| protested OS changes from Apple and Microsoft for decades, but
| it's never worked. Your only viable method of protest is using
| an OS where you control the featureset, which (as you've
| pointed out) is an unrealistic and bad habit.
| mrits wrote:
| See you back next week
| zvmaz wrote:
| I have used Linux for most of my adult life: I don't get the sens
| of control over my own computing with other operating systems.
| It's not clear though why exactly Thomson is switching.
| Kukumber wrote:
| [dead]
| rwalle wrote:
| Eh, why should anyone ever care about another person's OS choice?
| Can't people mind their own business? Why is this even on hacker
| news?
| rattray wrote:
| What was the stated reason?
| YPPH wrote:
| 57:50 of the video. In effect, disillusion with Apple's
| direction.
| okamiueru wrote:
| In case anyone wants to know if he clarified on why Raspbian
| in particular: he did not.
|
| Raspberry Pi hardware would be the obvious constraint.
| Though, that only pushes the question one step further: Why a
| Raspberry Pi hardware? I... don't know. If you went from
| Apple devices, it seems like a non-sequitur. There are much,
| much better options, unless on an extremely limited budget.
|
| But, I also don't know his use case. Does he have a gazillion
| of them for some (I assume interesting) reason?
| smt88 wrote:
| Yes, he has a lot of Pis (something like 50) around his
| house.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| > I have most of my life, because I was sorta born into it, run
| Apple
|
| > Recently, meaning the last 5 years or so, I have become more
| and more depressed...
|
| > (laughter)
|
| > And what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to
| work is just atrocious.
|
| > But they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it's
| okay.
|
| > And I have come, in the last month or two, to say even though
| I've invested a zillion years in Apple, I'm throwing it away.
|
| > And I'm going to Linux, to Raspbian in particular
|
| > (applause)
|
| > Anyway, I'm half transitioned now.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Ok...
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| While a raspi is not a great dev env, maybe raspbian on a modern
| laptop is fantastic precisely because it has been developed for
| constrained envs.
|
| I have to give this a try.
| prime17569 wrote:
| I wonder what he would think of Asahi Linux for Apple silicon
| Macs.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| There's still a lot of work to be done on Asahi, so as a daily-
| driver, perhaps not yet.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| How was he running MacOS on RPIs? Emulation?
| chj wrote:
| At one point, I even went back to Win10. But it's become so bad.
| Now I find myself a happy mate desktop user.
| amelius wrote:
| He should have written his LICENSE.txt more carefully ...
| transfire wrote:
| More developers should do this!
|
| Why? If your software runs smoothly of. Raspberry Pi then you
| know it will fly on typical PCs.
| steve1977 wrote:
| But I need 32 GB for my JetBrains IDE...
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Before spending time around here, I used to think it would be an
| embarrassing reveal for most programmers if it came out they used
| Apple hardware. Like being a WWII expert and rooting for Germany.
| Couldn't believe that people who could appreciate the beautiful
| magic of coding and OSS could still even like hyper-commodity
| computers. But I understand now how naive that was.
| Kye wrote:
| "It Just Works" was Apple's value proposition for a long time.
| Now that's on shakier ground, and other operating systems are
| catching up on stability to the point where the vastly superior
| cost:performance of non-Apple hardware increasingly wins out.
| Linux and Windows OEMs are also catching up on style with
| options available that don't compromise on repairability.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Wasn't he using plan9?
| beefman wrote:
| Timestamp for the OS question (but the whole talk is great):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaandEt_pKw&t=3470s
| jasoneckert wrote:
| It's also worthy to note that shortly after that part of the
| video, he notes (from another question) that he has over 50
| Raspberry Pis (including 12 stacks of 4xPi4s). So his choice of
| Raspberry Pi Linux is likely the result of that.
| Macha wrote:
| So that's where all the Pi 4s went
| [deleted]
| blibble wrote:
| they run plain debian just fine these days
|
| (with no random dude on github deciding to add microsoft
| directly into apt's trusted keys/repository list)
| sircastor wrote:
| I've given strong thought to switching away from macOS. I too
| have been a Max user all my life, a Macintosh Plus being the
| first computer in our house. I would get fed up at Apple's
| hardware choices or its limitations on users.
|
| I have had a dozen Linux computers with various systems on them.
| I don't know if it's because they were Dell machines, or if it's
| an Ubuntu thing, but I have had almost every single one turn into
| a brick after a Canonical-issued update.
|
| The kind of brick where you have to boot into the boot loader and
| into single user mode (?) and start issuing arcane commands to
| try to recover your system with some old kernel.
|
| The thing that keeps me on my Mac is that I can mess around with
| Unix computing all day, and then go back to being with done when
| I want to get back to using my computer. I don't feel confident
| like that with Linux.
| fanatic2pope wrote:
| My experience is that what holds Linux back is NVidia. Their
| proprietary drivers work great when you first install them, but
| inevitably break on update bringing you to a text mode
| emergency command line. When I made the switch to Linux in 2018
| I made the conscious decision to avoid Nvidia hardware and it
| has worked out really well.
| dagmx wrote:
| NVidia have moved most of the driver stack on to device local
| firmware instead. The parts of their driver that interface
| with the GPU are now largely open source as a result.
|
| Of course this only applies to more recent GPUs so doesn't
| invalidate your comment
| troad wrote:
| I'm sorry to hear about your experience! I feel like noting
| that my primary driver has been Kubuntu on an (nvidia) laptop
| for a few years now, and it's been the most pleasant
| experience. Sure, you get rough edges every now and again, but
| I was honestly getting rougher edges on the Mac (it's been a
| long time since they 'just worked', alas).
|
| Certainly no involuntary grub prompts to date, thankfully!
| Happy as a clam with my Linux laptop as a daily driver,
| including for gaming (!) and work.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| To those who are complaining about the lack of power/issues with
| Raspberry pi, don't forget, this is not one of your run-of-the-
| mill tinkerers, this is Ken Thompson.
| nntwozz wrote:
| Well good for him. But we have to let go of this notion that for
| GNU/Linux to win, Apple has to lose. I'm paraphrasing but can't
| shake that feeling when I hear those claps in the video. When are
| we ever going to grow up?
| solarkraft wrote:
| I don't read it like that. I interpret it as people just really
| liking Linux.
| superposeur wrote:
| Note: this was at a _linux_ conference.
| nntwozz wrote:
| Hehe, yeah. I saw Stallman in Gothenburg 2007 and even bought
| his book Free Software, Free Society. It was memorable,
| getting flashbacks now from him eating toe jam/callous skin
| from his foot.
| tyingq wrote:
| I'd summarize it more as him saying he's choosing to opt out of
| Apple's direction because he doesn't like it. Was there
| something beyond that...calling for Apple's demise?
| nntwozz wrote:
| I'm referring to the audience laughing and then clapping when
| he mentions he's depressed about Apple.
| rcstank wrote:
| What's wrong with other people agreeing? Maybe they like
| Linux too. Also, why does it matter to you if people have a
| different opinion?
| nntwozz wrote:
| To answer your questions, nothing and it doesn't.
|
| The laughter and clapping just reads as puerile to me.
|
| On a tangent I'm very fond on GNU/Linux, I run a Debian
| homelab plus some Pi 4s. I also use Macs since 2006.
| kjhughes wrote:
| For those who might prefer text over video: Q:
| What's your operating system of choice, today? A: I
| have for most of my life, because I was sort of born into it, run
| Apple. Right now, recently, meaning within the last five years,
| I've become more and more and more depressed and [Laughter] what
| Apple is doing to something which should allow you to work is
| just atrocious, but they are taking a lot of space and time to do
| it so it's ok. [Laughter] And I have come within the last month
| or two to say even though I've invested a zillion years in Apple,
| I'm throwing it away and I'm going to Linux -- to Raspbian in
| particular. [Applause]. Anyway, I'm half transitioned now.
| binkHN wrote:
| > ...what Apple is doing to something which should allow you to
| work is just atrocious...
|
| This is exactly how I feel about Microsoft Windows.
| muyuu wrote:
| yep I think it about both, which is why I stopped using
| Windows many years ago and MacOS more recently
|
| it's becoming more and more unbearable to use them even just
| part-time for testing purposes, etc
|
| recently I'm more concerned about the lack of real
| alternatives for mobile
| zoeli wrote:
| Haha but Windows isn't even in the discussion because dev
| that are able to ditch it has already done so.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I wonder if he is running Plan9 on all of his Raspberry Pi
| Computers. If you have 50 of them that would be really cool.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
| kderbyma wrote:
| You have to be blind to ignore the horrors that apple is
| inflicting slowly on its user base....death by a 100000 cuts
| zht wrote:
| Nice to be able to laugh at the word depression
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| They're not laughing at the word, they're laughing at the
| notion that he has become depressed by being an "Apple user".
| andybak wrote:
| The word "depressed" has multiple meanings only one of which
| refers to clinical depression.
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/depression
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| "A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more
| dark clouds than any other one thing." -Laura Ingalls Wilder
| ar9av wrote:
| Some Ken Trivia:
|
| The early versions of the Google Go compiler used Ken's C
| compiler (kencc, originally written for Plan 9) as part of the
| toolchain.
|
| You could even run the bundled compiler directly on Linux,
| Windows, etc.
|
| Stay tuned for the next bit of Ken trivia!
| burntalmonds wrote:
| "..what Apple is doing to something which should allow you to
| work is just atrocious.."
|
| Anyone know what his specific issues are?
| fundad wrote:
| Apple addresses a market of people who entered the market
| over 5 decades. Most of them way after Ken. It went from
| improving on the Mac to completing the Mac's destiny as a
| computing appliance.
| chongli wrote:
| If I had to guess, it would be Gatekeeper and SIP. These
| technologies can really get in your way if you're used to
| having full access to your own machine.
| underdeserver wrote:
| I mean, you can disable both of these.
| asveikau wrote:
| Most people won't. And if you're developing software
| distributed to others, this will put your machine in a
| state where you aren't testing what your end users get.
| Sargos wrote:
| You can disable the telemetry in Windows but it still
| caused many die hards to abandon Windows.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| And in that context, it's better to at least have the
| option, should you ever feel the need to use it.
|
| Personally I leave both on because even having used
| computer for 27 years at this point, I can still slip up
| and I'm still vulnerable to social engineering among
| other things, and so it's nice to have something to help
| cover for those situations. It's no cure-all, but it at
| least raises the bar for malware and such.
| wsc981 wrote:
| That was my guess as well. And as a lifelong Mac user it
| makes me consider switching to Linux as well.
|
| It's just that I still need macOS for iOS dev right now,
| but that might change in coming months ...
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I don't think there are specific issues. The problem is that
| with each release of macOS usability, reliability and
| performance regress. If you're interested in these things and
| not so much in "bling" and questionable new features, then
| you'd share probably Ken's "atrocious" opinion.
|
| An example is the latest System Preferences. It's virtually
| unusable.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| > An example is the latest System Preferences. It's
| virtually unusable.
|
| Most people are familiar with the iOS model already. It's
| rare to find Mac users who aren't.
| lapcat wrote:
| It's a bad model, because the iPhone Settings app itself
| is bad.
|
| The order is seemingly random. You can't reorder, pin
| favorites, or hide unwanted settings. Many things are
| buried deep in hierarchies.
|
| Not to mention that iPhone Settings is based on a small,
| non-resizable window and a touch interface, neither of
| which are true of the Mac.
|
| Familiar crap is still crap.
| rasengan wrote:
| Apple ecosystem is no longer software - only apps. It's
| hard to do(code) normal things on the OS because of all of
| the fancy "security"
| dagmx wrote:
| What code is prevented by security? Other than limits to
| kexts, your code isn't beholden to most of the system
| security changes unless you specifically opt in to make a
| sandboxed app.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| I have to deal with refusal to install apps from
| "untrusted developers" constantly, I can't even believe
| you wrote that.
|
| For starters, the UI experience is terrible. You get a
| dialog telling you you can't install an app; close the
| dialog then you have to know to go to a certain Settings
| tab under Privacy & Security, and there will (hopefully)
| be some text that allows you to enable the app. This is a
| UI disaster. Maybe they do it so that non-technical users
| will give up in frustration.
|
| Once MacOS decided that my official Oracle JRE was
| "untrusted", and I would get the bullshit dialog every
| time I started a Java process (note: I develop apps using
| the JVM). I had to google to learn some arcane CLI magic
| to disable the untrusted bits on my JRE files.
|
| More recently, I couldn't get CIV 6 to run. Instead of
| telling you what to do, you get a "app is corrupted"
| dialog (maybe this was the fault of Steam). This required
| multiple enabling via the magic permissions tab. I mean,
| are Steam and Firaxis not "trusted developers".
|
| All this pales in comparison to the pain when using my
| MOTU audio interface. Getting it to work was an enormous
| pain in the ass thanks to Apple security. And then MacOS
| would randomly decide to break things every 6-12 months,
| and getting it to work again requires discovering an
| arcane NVRAM reset procedure using magic key presses
| during reboot.
| pxc wrote:
| > I mean, are Steam and Firaxis not "trusted developers".
|
| Does 'app from a trusted developer' mean something other
| than 'app from the app store, or from someone you've
| specifically allowlisted'?
| dagmx wrote:
| It just means the app is not signed+notarized.
|
| They don't necessarily need to be from the App Store, but
| they do need to be notarized.
|
| If they're not, the warning can be bypassed.
| dagmx wrote:
| All of that is irrelevant to both my response and the
| person I was replying to where we were talking about
| coding specifically.
| runjake wrote:
| Your code is certainly "beholden" to most of the system
| security changes, and your app is effectively sandboxes
| regardless of your wishes.
|
| Source: Self after working on anti-theft software for
| macOS, for a few years now.
| dagmx wrote:
| Your app is not beholden to sandboxing unless you
| specifically are using sandboxing as part of your
| application configuration. It would also only apply to
| app bundles.
|
| I can make a command line tool or a standalone Qt
| application right now without having sandboxing pop up at
| all.
|
| Even for access that the OS protects the user from, as an
| app developer I rarely need to think about it. When I try
| and access a limited area it asks the user for me.
|
| Source: self after working on lots of varied code bases
| from web dev to 3D libraries and standalone applications
| for over a decade.
| speedgoose wrote:
| The latest system preferences are an improvement to me. It
| was a mess before and it's still a mess but the app layout
| makes it easier to browse, and at least it's consistent
| with iOS.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > and at least it's consistent with iOS.
|
| And thanks to this peculiar way of thinking we also have
| several layers of UI inconsistencies in Windows, for
| example. Someone thought "let's unify everything" but,
| assuming this is a good idea at all, you really need a
| lot of work, planning, effort, and most of all
| imagination to make sure the final result is actually an
| improvement for the users of both mobile and desktop
| systems rather than being a mediocre one-size-fits-all
| solution.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| I am however, not using IOS.
| lanna wrote:
| Why does a desktop OS need to be consistent with a 5"
| touchscreen phone?
| fruit2020 wrote:
| Right? It's a middle finger to mac users with an external
| screen. It was too hard to make it scale horizontally, or
| even prefetch the settings in the background and not have
| a lag between clicks. Not the end of the world, but
| backwards
| ryandrake wrote:
| This obsession with "unifying" disparate things under One
| True API / UI / Language is all over software. It's
| probably the same mentality behind what what Microsoft
| was doing with Windows 8 and Metro. Unnecessary
| abstraction is the bad Software Engineer's bread and
| butter. We've all worked with That Guy who kept arguing
| "We could call X and Y the same way if we just had a
| unifying abstraction Z. It would simplify everything!" Z
| becomes the worst of both X and Y and the customer is
| less satisfied just wants to keep X and Y separate. But
| the developer is more comfortable now, and that's what
| matters.
|
| Everything seems to get sacrificed at the altar of
| Developer Comfort. Performance gets thrown under the bus
| so we can write everything in JavaScript. Platform-
| specific features get abandoned or neutered in a cross-
| platform framework so we only have to target one API. We
| ship gigs of Docker containers so we don't have to get
| our software to work on all the customers' computers.
|
| This is just another example. Wouldn't it be great if iOS
| apps and Mac applications converged on the same thing?
| Only a developer would want this.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| For the majority of the world, their primary computing
| device is their touchscreen phone.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Because it's confusing to have two ways of doing things
| when one way works just fine.
|
| Why would you ever want added cognitive complexity?
|
| If things _need_ to be different then sure. But if they
| can be unified in a way that works great for both then
| please do!
|
| Honestly, with their tight integration, I don't even
| think of watchOS and iOS and macOS as being so separate.
| They're all just a kind of "appleOS" that gets applied to
| different form factors. So UX unification is ideal
| wherever it makes sense.
| Nobm wrote:
| I'd love to chat with you in private regarding your work
| with Ok Cupid. How can I reach you?
| speedgoose wrote:
| To improve the user experience of the many Apple
| customers deciding to buy an old fashioned Mac.
| einherjae wrote:
| The very argument that was presented when iOS first came
| out, as well as whenever touchscreens on MacBooks come
| up, is that the UX is fundamentally different.
|
| So why would it suddenly be a good idea to import this
| from iOS?
| speedgoose wrote:
| Perhaps the people against touchscreen on MacOS finally
| retired or gave up the fight, so Apple is slowly
| preparing what Microsoft did years ago with Windows 8.
| philistine wrote:
| What Microsoft did, and still hasn't finished. System
| preferences still contain massive amount of details
| contained in Windows 7 (and older!) style windows.
|
| At least Apple managed to move all their settings from
| one paradigm to the next in one year. I'm looking forward
| to the improvements they make to the app in the future.
| bitwize wrote:
| They didn't finish it because they went hard, all in one
| go, and suffered consumer backlash as a result. From this
| Apple learned that you have to boil the frog _slowly_.
| wpm wrote:
| Except the iOS settings app is also a disaster
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| It forces you to search to do anything useful, since the
| grouping is all over the place, and the search feature is
| really poor.
|
| > and at least it's consistent with iOS
|
| What a huge win for Mac users.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Grouping has always been all over the place. If anything
| the new grouping is more intuitive.
|
| And search works better than it used to as well. To me
| it's been entirely improvements.
| web3-is-a-scam wrote:
| Seems overblown to me, been a macos user for over a decade
| and the ios-ification o f the mac hasn't been a big deal
| for me. My greybeard workflows still work the same
| (everything in iterm, using vim, tmux, all the "standard
| stuff"), sometimes updating xcode is a pain but w/e.
| Homebrew still chugging along. Parallels is fantastic.
| Performance of the M1 Max on my new mac studio is just
| heavenly. The changes to macos have been nowhere near as
| egregious as what MS is butchering windows with.
|
| The latest update added "Stage Manager" or whatever, tried
| it out for an hour...didn't really like it and turned it
| off, it never gets in my way trying to force itself on my
| like Windows does with all of its anti-features.
|
| People complain about system preferences but I use
| spotlight to find settings when I need them, which works
| great - and once a setting is set I rarely change it. I
| don't think I've touched the preferences "app" since I
| initially setup my mac studio. The moaning and groaning
| about how bad it is just seems so.....pointless to me.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I don't think I've touched the preferences "app" since
| I initially setup my mac studio. The moaning and groaning
| about how bad it is just seems so.....pointless to me.
|
| Have you considered that other people have usage
| requirements different from yours?
|
| Of course there's not much reason to complain about
| System Settings if you never use it, but that's missing
| the point.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| His usage requirements is using it only once when he sets
| up his computer, which is probably a good thing for a
| preferences app. It works well for him, why shouldn't be
| able to say so? So we can keep this thread strictly about
| complaining?
|
| You could copy paste your comment to everyone here, "have
| you considered that other people use it differently".
| lapcat wrote:
| > It works well for him, why shouldn't be able to say so?
|
| That's not all the commenter said. "The moaning and
| groaning about how bad it is just seems so.....pointless
| to me."
|
| If System Settings is fine for the commenter, that's
| great for the commenter. (Although "I virtually never use
| it" isn't exactly a great response to "It's virtually
| unusable" or a great defense of System Settings.)
| However, the commenter is criticizing other people for
| complaining about it, and that's not justified.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| He undermines his own point. He says he has no problem
| with System Preferences, and then essentially says he
| never uses it, explaining why he would have no problem
| with it.
| selimnairb wrote:
| It's fine if search is a way to use System Preferences.
| The problem I have is that since they turned it into a
| "big list" search is essentially the only way I can use
| it. They destroyed the spatiality of the app that had
| created grooves in my brain over the last 20 years. Now
| it is very disorienting to use because I can't
| efficiently browse for things.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| Been using Macs exclusively, since the iPhone came out.
| At some point I noticed a "do not disturb" icon displayed
| on the top UI bar, something that somehow got turned on
| after upgrading to Ventura. It took over half an hour of
| googling and trying random shit before I was able to turn
| it off. Yes, Settings is a UI disaster, even ignoring
| that...
|
| Goofy shit like this randomly happens, particularly after
| OS upgrades. I remember some crazy hell where I couldn't
| finish the OS install on a new Mac, because Apple decided
| that Apple IDs must be email addresses, and my ancient ID
| was not. Required a call to customer support.
|
| And the "untrusted developer" shit always bites me in the
| ass every couple months or so... It is particularly
| painful when using pro audio interfaces, which will just
| suddenly stop working every now and then. It requires a
| magic key-press during a reboot to clear some kind of
| special RAM.
| Maursault wrote:
| > Homebrew still chugging along.
|
| For seven years longer and with 20K more ports than
| Homebrew, and without leaving a mess on your system or
| munging permissions, so is MacPorts.
| snazz wrote:
| Does Homebrew still have those issues on newer Macs with
| the /opt/homebrew prefix? I don't use either at the
| moment but last time I looked at Homebrew it looked like
| they had changed the way it installed, at least on Apple
| silicon Macs.
| OmarAssadi wrote:
| I'm using Nix now on my macOS installs, so I might not be
| totally correct the current situation. But yeah, I
| believe most of those sorts of issues have gone away with
| the new prefix.
|
| There's still some weird annoyances for me, though. For
| example, it's still intended for single-user mode only.
| The best solution I came up with was to create a separate
| user for Homebrew and then basically alias `brew` to
| `sudo -H -u homebrew brew`.
|
| And generally, if you attempt to use a non-standard
| prefix, such as in your home directory, packages will
| have to be built from source. I understand why, but it
| sucks because this means when you need x86-only packages
| via Rosetta, you're stuck with the old `/usr/bin` prefix,
| unless you want to and can build from source.
|
| Also, in general, maintaining multiple
| prefixes/architectures is annoying too. I wish the
| default command allowed me to just pass `--arch
| amd64/arm64` or something when installing packages
| philistine wrote:
| The default install location for Apple Silicon and Intel
| is different, for some reason. I got weird problems when
| many bottles were still Intel-only, but now everything is
| good. So unless you hate /opt/homebrew, it's great!
| rubatuga wrote:
| Except that spotlight doesn't find all system settings.
| And I've already ran into a bug where the system settings
| dialog loses sync with the configuration requiring the
| app to restart. And also had settings pane just turn
| blank.
| jamesgill wrote:
| * People complain about system preferences but I use
| spotlight to find settings when I need them*
|
| This is exactly how I do it, and I also do it this way in
| Ubuntu. And in both OSes, I hide docks/apps.
| giardini wrote:
| Ubuntu has spotlight?
| jamesgill wrote:
| I'm specifically speaking of Ubuntu's version of Gnome, I
| guess. Press the Super key and a search box appears, a la
| MacOS's Spotlight. This is how I open apps. There are
| likely nuances about _what_ is searchable, but in
| practice it feels the same to me.
| stametseater wrote:
| I'm sure you already know it doesn't contain spotlight
| itself, which belongs to Apple.
|
| There exist equivalents that have exactly that same
| functionality as described above. I don't know what GNOME
| uses, but KDE's krunner searches system settings, user
| files and applications, bookmarks, browser tabs, solves
| arithmetic and unit conversions, does spell checking,
| searches the web, searches active windows, applications
| and workspaces, etc.. It's configurable with many plugins
| available. I expect GNOME's system works similarly.
| talentedcoin wrote:
| I love comments like these. Pure macOS Stockholm
| Syndrome. "Sometimes some things are a pain but it's
| pointless to groan about it." I mean you do you, but
| don't blame other people for finding some of these issues
| more than they can stand.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| As time goes in from 10.5 System preferences UI kept on
| degrading to the point that I didn't know what icon to
| click and frequently just made the search bar for
| everything. Having the search bar more prominent and making
| the UI standard for all of the other products probably is a
| good idea.
| elcapitan wrote:
| Those are the first system preferences on macOS that are
| usable to me, and I'm not even a big iOS fan. The chaotic
| version before felt like Windows to me.
| luckman212 wrote:
| Say what you will about the new version, but the old
| version of System Preferences was certainly not
| "chaotic". I found it very pleasant to look at and
| navigate.
|
| This new thing violates much of Apple's own HIG, and
| despite running Ventura for half a year, I still find
| myself hunting for things that should be easy to find.
| Quick: where do you go to turn the volume menubar control
| on or off?
| elcapitan wrote:
| I type "volume" in the search field and pick the right
| option?
| wpm wrote:
| Now do it with a cup of coffee in one hand and a mouse in
| the other.
| elcapitan wrote:
| Maybe they should make special operating systems just for
| people who constantly hold something in their one hand
| while clicking around with the other.
| garyrob wrote:
| I agree. In the old SP I usually used spotlight to find
| what I wanted as quickly as possible. Now, I usually
| still do. The practical difference is negligible. I have
| no trouble finding the settings I want to modify, and a
| rarely have a need to modify any.
|
| My response is similar for the other complaints I see
| here. I can ignore new features I don't like. I've got
| integration with my phone and watch that took zero
| effort. No need to waste time on drivers, etc. If I want
| to run Photoshop I can.
|
| (I've used Macs since the original Mac Plus with one one-
| year Windows interlude. For servers I use Linux, which is
| obviously appropriate for that use.)
| BearOso wrote:
| What bothers me is how they're charging developers to build
| for their system and semi-require server verification for
| programs to run.
|
| In the earlier Mac OS X era they used to be very open (and
| free) with their tools and actively encouraging.
|
| It feels very backwards now. For example, Microsoft was
| really restrictive with its expensive tools at that time and
| gradually opened them up. It's like the two companies
| reversed positions. As a kid, I could never afford to buy pro
| dev tools, and while it's not as expensive currently, I think
| that's the way Apple is headed. It's not going to help more
| people get into programming.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| I don't know what his specific issues are but I've always
| found it odd how many IT professionals prefer Apple. The
| interface is so frustrating to me and there is so much the OS
| makes hard to do. It really does get in the way a lot more.
| m463 wrote:
| I think apple is degrading general purpose computing.
|
| It seems like you have to buy software to do anything on
| macos more conveniently.
|
| Why can't I write a script in python? or a gui script in
| python? it's the top language.
|
| You can use say swift, but even with "oh we opened it up",
| it's really an apple-specific language, and it's compiled.
|
| Yes you can get brew going, but that's not apple.
|
| and ios - what a travesty. You don't own your phone. You
| can't access your filesystem. you have to ask permission to
| do anything (and they don't grant it for most things)
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > It seems like you have to buy software to do anything on
| macos more conveniently.
|
| > Why can't I write a script in python? or a gui script in
| python? it's the top language.
|
| You definitely don't need to buy Python, it's F/OSS and one
| command away.
| baby wrote:
| Having to install xcode to compile C code?
| kderbyma wrote:
| [flagged]
| e40 wrote:
| The command line tools are enough. I have never used Xcode
| and I compile stuff all the time.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| You don't need to install XCode. You can install Clang
| easily, or GCC if you must. You can just install the XCode
| command line tools if you need them.
| milgra wrote:
| I don't know the exact issues but might be related to the
| issues why I left Apple : I was developing a very successful
| little tool for MacOS (
| https://github.com/milgra/macmediakeyforwarder ) which
| listened for keypresses. From 2016 to 2019 it became harder
| and harder to install it because apple added more and more
| restrictions to apps like this. By 2019, you had to enable
| the application explicitly to listen for events at least in
| three places deep down in the system preferences, click
| accept in various popups and if you stuck somewhere then
| nobody could tell why it wasn't working. So I had a very
| expensive laptop and the OS didn't let me use it freely. So I
| just switched to freebsd and linux. Hardware quality is far
| away from Apple's but it is cheap, I don't have fancy
| productivity apps like photoshop and final cut but with open
| source tools and with my own desktop applications I created
| the best looking/most usable desktop experience MacOS will
| never have. ( https://swayos.github.io/ )
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| The situation with Wayland is actually worse than this by
| far.
| asveikau wrote:
| Not sure what you mean.
|
| But at any rate, Wayland is completely optional. You can
| keep running X and nobody will stop you. People will keep
| running X without issue for a very long time. This is
| very different from what the Apple world is like.
| equivocates wrote:
| Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I prefer my OS put
| several hurdles in front of a key logging app.
| milgra wrote:
| Even if you downloaded that app explicitly for key
| logging? That's crazy! :)
| tourist2d wrote:
| ... and the OS is supposed to determine your intent how?
| noisy_boy wrote:
| By whatever mechanism the OS has to verify that you have
| the privilege. E.g. sudo. Not by raising a plethora of
| hurdles.
| kergonath wrote:
| An admin check tells the OS that you are an admin, not
| that you know what the software does and that you are ok
| with CoolWallpapers logging all inputs.
| oefrha wrote:
| An admin password prompt is hardly a deterrence to people
| doing stupid things. A young physics PhD friend of mine
| fell victim to a tech support scam, happily installing
| whatever spyware "Apple Support" told her to install over
| phone. That was a few years ago. The average person is
| too easily social engineered into allowing anything.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| At what point do we say "that's her own fault"? How do we
| evolve to be alert to threats if we just hide them away
| and take agency from individuals?
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Sure, I don't think either this[1] commenter or Ken
| Thompson were trying to say that the product category
| shouldn't exist. A computer is vastly overpowered for
| what the average user is capable of or interested in
| doing[2], which is why toy devices like iPads are so
| popular.
|
| I interpreted both of their comments as claiming that the
| direction MacOS is taking is a poor fit for those who
| still get value from powerful, general-purpose computers
| (myself very much included! I occasionally have the
| misfortune of using Macs, but am much much happier on
| systems where I can dig as deep into its layers as I need
| to solve my problems or scratch my itches)
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=35219381
|
| [2] Though I do think it's a minor tragedy that the
| increasing amount of guardrails has narrowed the
| opportunity for an inquisitive youngster to explore his
| computer's internals
| amelius wrote:
| They should have built this in from the start then, not
| semi-randomly break things.
| jen20 wrote:
| This is a bizarre argument.
|
| Do you feel the same way about Windows finally starting
| to take security seriously back in the mid 2000s?
| amelius wrote:
| Security should never come as an after-thought.
|
| This especially holds for complex systems with multiple
| stakeholders, like OSes.
| jen20 wrote:
| So what should happen when the threat model changes? Just
| abandon all software, ossify it in a poor state, or
| something else?
|
| You always to be advocating for ossification to avoid
| breaking apps which are no longer ok under an evolved
| threat model.
|
| Finally, you didn't actually answer the question I asked.
| It's all very well and good to say how things should be,
| but people have to face the world as it actually is
| instead.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| "keylogging" is such a moral panic.
|
| If applications can edit arbitrary files on the system
| it's already game over. I have no idea why people focus
| so much on "keylogging" as the supposed super important
| and dangerous thing.
|
| If one run any malware with the full file edit
| permissions of one's user account at that point in theory
| the only solution is erase not only the hard drive, but
| also every other drive on any other system one's user
| account has access to or at least in sofar those do not
| have some logging for connexions in some way to see who
| connected that cannot be edited by the permissions one
| has on that system. Of course if one has root on one's
| own system nothing on that system can be trusted any more
| from that point. The malware could in theory have edited
| the firmware at that point to hide any checks one could
| do with a recovery system on a portable drive, but that's
| all quite theoretical of course, but it's possible in
| theory.
|
| Keylogging is such a strange thing to focus on in the
| face of being able to edit arbitrary files owned by the
| user.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Oh I dunno, maybe because there's so few third party
| needs to log keystrokes from the user. When that need
| arises then you have to ask why...
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Given that it should be difficult, if not impossible, for
| random applications to listen in on user actions, is there
| a better way Apple could have done this?
|
| (Disclaimer: Apple fan/user since 1985.)
| tomrod wrote:
| One click is preferred. Anything that gets in between a
| legitimate program and the user is friction.
| milgra wrote:
| A popup on the first start with an alert and a password
| prompt is a good solution, but usually too many users
| type in their passwords blindly in case of a password
| prompt, so I would go with just an alert with "you need
| root privileges to run this app" and then they have to
| figure out 1. why do they need root privileges 2. how do
| they start an app with root privileges.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| The security barriers for getting keyboard events in
| macOS are not as simple as "root has access to
| everything", and for various reasons can't and shouldn't
| be that simple. So ignoring that part, Apple could make
| this into a one-click solution, but the number of legit
| apps that need to do this are so small that it's very
| unlikely they will dedicate engineering time to it.
|
| This is obviously where open source is superior. Apple
| probably can't justify cleaning this up in macOS, but you
| can just go in and make it easier on on Linux if you have
| the knowledge and time.
| [deleted]
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I think permission systems are bound to wind up in all
| desktop operating systems, eventually. They're already on
| Linux for those using Flatpak. Trusting random third party
| binaries with access to everything is increasingly too much
| of a gamble, even for more technical users.
|
| That said, I agree that the macOS implementation has
| issues. It's tricky though, because if they make it as
| simple as confirm/deny dialogs, you've set users up to
| quickly succumb to "yes-click syndrome" which is likely why
| Apple went with the "flip a switch in a preference pane"
| design for some permissions instead.
| tsuujin wrote:
| "Click yes syndrome" is so prevalent is has an actual
| name: banner blindness.
|
| Last year you might have heard a court case talking about
| a nurse who killed a woman by accidentally giving her the
| wrong medication. She took responsibility but talked at
| length about how the system in place encourages workers
| to blindly click yes on alerts about medication because
| there are many of them. The training they got was
| basically "just click yes three* times" (* I don't
| remember the actual number but three seems right).
|
| One of those warnings could have saved a life had she
| read it, but she had been clicking yes many times a day
| every day for a long time and she no longer even saw the
| banner for what it was.
|
| Interesting stuff from a UI/UX perspective.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| > Trusting random third party binaries with access to
| everything is increasingly too much of a gamble, even for
| more technical users.
|
| Regardless, I'd still like the final say in making that
| decision, otherwise it's not really my computer anymore,
| is it.
| kergonath wrote:
| This why there are settings for this sort of things.
| Nobody in this thread is saying that something was
| impossible, just that some settings had to be changed and
| the UX was suboptimal.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Escape hatches should exist, but I think it's better if
| those exist on a per-program basis.
|
| If a systemwide "disable all safeguards, give all
| programs access to everything all the time" switch
| exists, the level of friction encountered when accessing
| it should be very high to help deter social engineering
| attacks. It's a one-time action so the annoyance level of
| that friction is negligible, since those using it will
| only need to do so on clean installs.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| These permission systems in practice don't really do as
| much to shield users as many think though.
|
| People often just drop the word "sandbox" and say
| "applications are sandboxed" and that that means that
| they're safe but it's really not that simple in practice.
| What often happens is that such applications still need
| to communicate over some socket with some server that was
| never designed for such a sandbox, say PulseAudio, and in
| many cases can then simply instruct the outer daemon to
| do whatever they want with full permission, either by
| design, or by oversight since the no one who wrote the
| outer daemon thought about it at the time since they were
| never designed for that purpose.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Of course, but that just means that said daemons need to
| be reworked to not have access to everything either.
|
| This is why there's a push to do as much as feasibly
| possible in userland in both macOS and Linux, so even
| when a bad actor tries to route through system components
| the blast radius is limited. Realistically, they should
| be sandboxed too -- an audio daemon for instance has no
| business directly accessing storage or network facilities
| for example.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I think permission systems are bound to wind up in all
| desktop operating systems, eventually
|
| What I'm about to say may seem wrong, stupid, or crazy at
| first. I think permissions often belong in the GUI.
| Applications would get no access to the file system
| directly, but they could use an API in the gui to open
| files - only files that are granted access by the user,
| often by selection in a File->Open dialog or other direct
| user interaction. By putting the granting of access in
| the GUI toolkit, we can run untrusted apps natively with
| no OS permissions.
|
| Maybe not directly in the GUI, but something like that.
| Trust the user but not the app.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| At some point you have to trust the user to choose the
| apps they want to run. That's simply not the OS's job.
|
| To the extent that it _is_ the OS 's job, you don't have
| a computer anymore. You have an appliance. Sometimes
| that's OK; I don't complain because I can't run Doom on
| my dishwasher. But let's be clear about what is a
| general-purpose personal computer, and what is not.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > To the extent that it is the OS's job, you dn't have a
| computer anymore. You have an appliance.
|
| In my opinion, that depends on the existence of an escape
| hatch. If it's like iOS where there effectively is none,
| sure, but if it's like macOS where SIP, Gatekeeper, etc
| can be temporarily disabled to make changes and then re-
| enabled or disabled entirely it's a different story.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| "Random third party binaries" are not something Linux
| users really use, generally. Most of it is open source
| and comes through the repository.
| pjmlp wrote:
| curl | sudo bash
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Repos are generally safer yes, but they can still act as
| vectors for malware.
|
| There's also systems like Arch's AUR which is quite
| popular and more likely (if still unlikely) to carry
| malware, to the point that the Arch Wiki warns that use
| of AUR is at the user's own risk.
|
| Plus, many people are going to need to use proprietary
| software, which is always an unknown and likely to act
| badly in any number of ways. A lot of such software is
| Electron-based to boot, and devs are notorious for using
| ancient (and vulnerable) Electron versions.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Except when it comes to hardware. Proprietary drivers are
| still widespread.
| wpm wrote:
| Yeah, because I definitely double check the provenance of
| the 30 dependencies that blow past my terminal when I apt
| install something, that I also very much looked into and
| aren't blindly typing commands from Stack Overflow into
| my terminal because I'm trying to solve some problem.
| em-bee wrote:
| _because I definitely double check the provenance of the
| 30 dependencies that blow past my terminal when I apt
| install something_
|
| why would you? that's the package maintainers job. each
| of these dependency also has a maintainer, so by
| definition all dependencies have a provenance that is as
| good as the package you are installing.
|
| this is not npm where anyone can upload something and you
| have to check the provenance of each yourself
| stametseater wrote:
| Indeed. The idea of flatpack is to change desktop linux
| culture by normalizing the installation of 3rd party
| software, particularly proprietary software that people
| otherwise wouldn't trust without some form of sandboxing.
|
| Who does this benefit? I can think of two groups of
| people. 1. Commercial software vendors who want more
| Linux users to install their proprietary software. 2.
| 'Transplants', new Linux users who are already accustomed
| to the Windows/MacOS style of wantonly installing
| proprietary third party software they downloaded off
| random corners of the net, and don't want or know to
| change their habits.
|
| The value proposition for experienced linux users who
| don't do that sort of thing in the first place is next to
| nil. The only applications that might benefit from such
| sandboxing are applications like browsers, which have
| large attack surfaces and might be compromised while
| browsing the net. But even this is mostly theoretical,
| not a realistic day-to-day concern for typical linux
| desktop users.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| for 6 years you could get root on Debian with the "beep"
| command
| stametseater wrote:
| In those 6 years, how many programs packaged and
| distributed by Debian were exploiting that?
|
| If you can run the "beep" command, you can also edit the
| user's environment and from their easily escalate to root
| anyway. In modern desktop linux, the user is almost
| always the admin as well, a single person using their
| personal computer, so getting root is merely a matter of
| waiting until the next time that user uses sudo/etc.
| Windows tries to mitigate this sort of attack using
| secure UAC prompts that are apparently difficult for
| attackers to emulate, or so I've been lead to believe.
| But common desktop Linux distros don't require anything
| like that. Instead, the user has to be cognizant of such
| possibilities and not run programs from people and
| organizations they don't trust.
| MayeulC wrote:
| > The value proposition for experienced linux users who
| don't do that sort of thing in the first place is next to
| nil. The only applications that might benefit from such
| sandboxing are applications like browsers, which have
| large attack surfaces and might be compromised while
| browsing the net. But even this is mostly theoretical,
| not a realistic day-to-day concern for typical linux
| desktop users.
|
| You are jumping to conclusions here. RCEs are probably
| more common than you think, and I'd prefer anything that
| interacts with the Internet to be sandboxed.
|
| Flatpak allows me to easily sandbox Steam games. It
| provides an easy target to tell user to test against to
| eliminate distro-specific issues. It allows to run glibc-
| only software on distributions such as Alpine. It allows
| me to have multiple versions of a program installed
| concurrently. It prevents programs from cluttering my
| home directory, and sandboxing gives me extra peace of
| mind. As a non-root user, I can also install flatpaks.
| Ostree also usually makes updates more efficient.
|
| If you use a couple flatpak apps, they are available
| regardless of your distribution. That helps when working
| on multiple different distributions.
|
| Use an old-ish debian but need a feature from the latest
| unstable software ABC? Install ABC as a flatpak, and do
| not compromise the stability of the base system by
| enabling all sorts of external, unstable sources.
| jcastro wrote:
| Citation needed?
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Insecurity through obscurity is possible even in open
| source. See log4j, but there are other examples -- and
| infinite proof of concepts of people breaching
| repositories. Even on the desktop, you want multiple
| layers of security to limit potential damage.
|
| Do use Linux on the desktop and be happy if it makes you
| happy, but don't smugly assume you're immune to the
| outside pressures in today's world that are causing Apple
| to institute basic UI security measures on macOS. This
| isn't a walled garden issue, it's "make sure the user
| knows this binary is doing something that allows it to be
| a keylogger if the developer is so inclined."
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Well yes but Linux has had solutions for this a long
| time. AppArmor, SELinux.
|
| Some distros like RHEL already bundle apps with profiles
| that make sure the app can only do what it's supposed to
| do.
| ilyt wrote:
| SELinux in particular is complex enough many vendors just
| give up and write "disable SELinux" in install manual...
|
| Also it is totally not fit for the "ask user for
| permission" model.
| cglong wrote:
| It worked for Android!
| https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/selinux
| mvanbaak wrote:
| every package system (apt/yum/pkg/whatever) is
| distributing binaries. So yeah, the upstream project can
| be open source, but there is 0 guarantees that the binary
| I install on my system is the exact same binary as I
| would get if I build the source myself (and this does not
| even touch on the subject that compilers can add weird
| stuff as well)
|
| Sure, it's better than closed source, because at least
| you have the possibility to check all this. In practice
| though, we outsource this responsibility to the package
| maintainer of the package system we use.
| em-bee wrote:
| _there is 0 guarantees that the binary I install on my
| system is the exact same binary as I would get if I build
| the source myself_
|
| not true, for years there are efforts in various
| distributions to make package builds reproducible. there
| are ways to build a package from source that allows you
| to get the same results and verify it.
|
| _we outsource this responsibility to the package
| maintainer_
|
| which is the point. i trust the package maintainers to do
| a better job at that than myself.
| drivers99 wrote:
| using Second Reality as the music for the swayos video was
| a pleasant surprise
| milgra wrote:
| I'm glad you liked it! I miss the golden age of tracker
| music/demoscene.
| kergonath wrote:
| > By 2019, you had to enable the application explicitly to
| listen for events at least in three places deep down in the
| system preferences, click accept in various popups and if
| you stuck somewhere then nobody could tell why it wasn't
| working.
|
| It's an improvement for users because it means that not all
| random applications and programs that run can act as
| keyloggers. It's optimising for the common use case (random
| people running random software and being very annoyed if
| they get ransomed) against the rare case. It's the same
| thing with debuggers and attaching to other processes. In
| the end it is a _good_ thing to not be able to do that
| without explicit authorisation.
|
| > So I had a very expensive laptop and the OS didn't let me
| use it freely.
|
| It does not prevent you from doing it. It added some
| friction, sure, and you can find that this friction is
| unacceptable (and changing OS every now and then is a good
| idea in general anyway). But from a fundamental perspective
| the functionality is still there. The OS still lets you do
| this.
|
| > I created the best looking/most usable desktop experience
| MacOS will never have.
|
| It is great that you have both the ability and the time to
| do this. I'll look into it for my Linux boxes.
|
| However, my experience is that it's never actually "the
| most beautiful/user-friendly/consistent/polished" (things
| we see all the time with new DEs). They all tend to fall
| apart with millions of corner cases and inconsistencies
| every time you get off the beaten path. In any case, good
| luck with your project.
| elcritch wrote:
| Sure optimizing for security makes sense, but Apple isn't
| just doing that. They're also removing ways to override
| those restrictions. Often old methods to disable them or
| to whitelist an app silently stop working. Sometimes new
| ones don't always work, or require an absurd number of
| hops.
|
| It seems alongside security there appears to be a strong
| desire at Apple to make macos a walled garden like iOS
| devices. They've hamstrung mobile safari for years to
| ensure the app store doesn't have competition from web
| apps.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| As an Apple user since the early days of OS X, I remember
| watching that part of the presentation thinking to myself "he
| knows he doesn't need to elaborate on that."
|
| I think many of us watching Apple for the past two decades
| have seen the OS move slowly towards closed standards and
| tighter control instead of openness and functionality. Each
| time I boot my PowerBook G4 running Leopard for a nostalgia
| kick, I'm reminded of how great OS X once was.
|
| But as Ken pointed out, they've been doing it over a long
| period of time, so it's OK (i.e., it's given us plenty of
| time to move to other alternatives).
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Isn't it obvious? Look at how Apple devices are used and look
| at what he built. I'm surprised he stuck around this long. He
| doesn't care if the touchpad is marginally better or their
| silicon is marginally faster because they are trying to
| destroy his world.
| blackhaz wrote:
| To me it appears Apple has lost all the focus after Steve
| Jobs, there is no "do more with less" spirit in Apple
| products anymore. They still got some Mac OS X inertia, but
| it's mostly about changing colors, animations, rearranging
| items and trying to address every possible use case - instead
| of offering new OS paradigms. It's interesting that their
| hardware division keeps innovating - people seem to love
| their M1s. I miss coherent Unix environment on good hardware.
| Snow Leopard times were great.
| wyclif wrote:
| I also miss the Snow Leopard era. Not a single crash under
| stress!
| justinzollars wrote:
| I have to admit, I tried and failed to switch away from Apple.
| I bought a Linux Laptop - an System 76. I was surprised at how
| terrible the battery management of linux was compared with my
| mac. And that particular issue broke me.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Which is really weird because they clearly CAN do it for
| mobile phones with Android, so why hasn't that trickled down
| to laptops?
| nvarsj wrote:
| I feel like this comment has short memory. Battery life on
| intel macbooks was terrible ime. Frequently it would drain
| completely while the lid was closed overnight. Always had to
| keep it plugged in. Of course Apple silicon is fantastic and
| nothing beats it now.
|
| On the Linux side, I've had great luck with AMD + recent
| kernels. I get around 6 hours now on my Thinkpad X13 gen 2
| which is good enough for me.
| qumpis wrote:
| It requires lots of manual control but from my experience I
| can match or exceed battery life in comparison to running
| windows, with some tweaking. Out of the box it was terrible
| as well.
| hollander wrote:
| But if ou bought a Linux laptop, it should come
| preconfigured with the optimal settings, with at least one
| or two distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, plus the settings
| described in a manual.
| acc_297 wrote:
| What did you adjust?
| deaddodo wrote:
| This wiki article covers a lot of the big things:
|
| https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavin
| gTw...
|
| But generally powertop is enough for a significant boost.
| For certain manufacturers (ASUS is a good example), you
| want to use their vendor specific tools to manage CPU/GPU
| powerbands.
| prophesi wrote:
| This is for the Framework laptop and not a System76
| machine, but going through this lets my laptop last an
| entire day doing Android dev.
|
| https://community.frame.work/t/guide-linux-battery-life-
| tuni...
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| Has Framework made progress on battery drain while
| sleeping? I'm interesting in getting one but that sticks
| out as a big problem for me.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| Similar experience over here on one of the earlier 11th
| gen models and recently on a new 12th gen model as well
| (build quality feels a lot improved vs the early stuff
| too, fyi). People are still right to call BS on having to
| run any of this to get decent battery performance but it
| is possible to get if you jump through a few hoops. Next
| step for distros should really be sane defaults for this
| stuff and/or an option to tell the installer it's going
| on a laptop/non workstation desktop so that it gets sane
| defaults for the laptop based on efficiency per watt
| rather then the sane defaults for a server/workstation
| (max performance).
| prophesi wrote:
| Yep, and another frustration with Fedora in particular
| are the defaults for DNF. I don't get why the distro
| doesn't set `/etc/dnf/dnf.conf` with
| `max_parallel_downloads=10` and `fastestmirror=True`.
| sudo dnf update is so much faster with that (though you
| still need to keep away from the GNOME software app).
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| I havent really ised redhat based distros since redhat
| 5.4....If you want to go for a walk on the wild side try
| cachyos. It makes arch easy and has some nice defaults
| (atleast for kde, not sure about gnome, as i went kde
| them recently hyprland). It also has v3 and some v4
| architecture compiled packages which are more performant
| on newer cpus. The pacman defaults are reasonable as well
| regarding parallel downloads.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I can understand distributions not having optimal
| settings for every laptop under the sun, but it seems
| like a no-brainer to at least create a repository of
| power config profiles for different models that users can
| submit to, eventually creating a decent library that
| could then be integrated into the settings app or and
| first run wizard.
| pongo1231 wrote:
| Whilst not strictly for power settings, NixOS has a
| repository where users can contribute general optimized
| settings for their hardware.
|
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware
| prophesi wrote:
| Not sure why this is downvoted, that's awesome on NixOS's
| part.
| Arnt wrote:
| It's not that simple.
|
| Two of my last five laptops were macs, three linux boxes,
| if you consider corporate laptops as "mine". One of the
| three linux laptops just worked beautifully (wrt. battery
| and other driver issues), one didn't at all, and one
| worked poorly until I installed some software that
| shouldn't matter for battery lifetime, and since then
| it's had excellent battery management. There was a long
| list of dependencies, so I suspect that the software I
| installed depended on a package that solved whatever the
| problem was.
|
| You may chance to buy hardware where someone really has
| tested and fixed linux. Or you may get something else.
|
| FYI: The two good ones are some Huawei thing that weighs
| 1.3kg and a GPD P2 Max, a tiny toy, _really_ portable,
| https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/hardware/attovax
| justinzollars wrote:
| I'd love if you wrote a blog post. I didn't know where to
| start (but I guess we have ChatGPT now)
| garciasn wrote:
| And this continues to be why Linux suffers with the mass
| market.
|
| I ran Linux solely from 1997 to 2004 on the desktop and
| switched back because it was such a pain in the ass to
| manage. Every time I go back, it just isn't catching up to
| the mainstream OSs' ability to manage without "futzing".
|
| My M2 currently lasts all day on the battery while spending
| half of it on conference calls and half of it writing code.
| Nothing can match that right now, but I am still hopeful
| for a Linux future.
| bityard wrote:
| I get irrationally angry when people imply that Mac and
| Linux are somehow similar, or interchangeable.
|
| They are not! Not even close!
|
| I think this is where a lot of the negative opinion of
| Linux comes from, people lament some issue they have with
| their Mac and someone else will say, "oh you should try
| Linux, it's really good now." And so they do and are
| surprised to find that experience is vastly different.
|
| Linux is a great choice for people who want the highest
| degree of control and freedom over how they interact with
| their computer. The trade-off is that sometimes you have
| to futz with it or report bugs.
|
| If you view your computer strictly as a tool to let you
| get other things done, then you want Mac. All of the OS
| and UX decisions have been made for you and you get what
| you get, but you (should) never have to tinker with the
| system itself.
| ccouzens wrote:
| I prefer Linux (fedora with gnome) because it needs less
| tinkering out the box.
|
| It's the basic things like not having to install third
| party utilities to have window centric window management
| (as opposed to app centric window management). Or being
| able to plug my Android phone in and be able to browse
| the files without additional utilities.
| garciasn wrote:
| Fair enough; if you're talking about random machines
| Linux light be installed on.
|
| But! I believe System76 should ship their laptops with
| tools and/or settings and/or configs for other mainline
| distributions that maximize the experience on their
| hardware while allowing for the inherent customization
| Linux-based distributions.
|
| I'd argue Sys76 is far closer to Apple than just
| installing Linux on a random machine.
| cess11 wrote:
| I use Linux because I don't want to futz with all the
| crap in MacOS and Windows. Takes maybe twenty minutes to
| install Debian and then I touch pretty much nothing for
| years, except maybe change apt channel if I want
| something updated faster.
|
| Everyone I know that is stuck in big corporate OS spend
| more time than that every week fighting something their
| masters push on them.
|
| Application install is a terminal command that's
| trivially easy to learn, there's no e-shop solution with
| ads and surveillance, and while I use i3wm I think most
| people would be about as comfortable in XFCE as in the
| MICROS~1 OS:es of yesteryears. You decide when to
| upgrade, there are no nagscreens or forced reboots.
|
| At least for the last five years or so I've had no
| trouble with UEFI, WLAN or sound.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I disagree that it's a trade-off. Linux could match
| Apple's out of the box battery performance. It's just
| that nobody seems to care about Linux's "out of the box"
| default configuration because, well, the user can futz
| with it! Things are slowly getting better though. But we
| still don't have that distribution where things are
| already futzed for you and everything runs as well as it
| can.
| runjake wrote:
| > It's just that nobody seems to care about Linux's "out
| of the box" default configuration
|
| Define "out of the box" because with Linux there's
| millions of hardware variations to deal with.
|
| The only possible way this would work OOB is if the OEM
| or the community maintained OOB settings for each
| hardware variant.
|
| Heck, I was recently shopping PC laptops and would see
| variations in CPU OEMs (AMD vs Intel) for the _same_
| model.
| acomjean wrote:
| i switched. I have the previous gen AMD powered (Ryzen 5700U)
| system 76 and the battery life is decent (6-7 hours).
|
| I have one 4 year old system 76 notebook with the NVIDIA gpu
| and that thing when running the 3d graphics mode is terrible
| (<3 hours), but its a gaming laptop and a beast (well 4 years
| ago it was..). I have 2.5 TB of storage, huge memory. Its
| more of a portable desktop than a notebook.
|
| I really like software development on Linux much better than
| mac. There are a few things I miss from the apple side, but
| generally its been great.
| justinzollars wrote:
| OP here. Same. I was using NVIDIA graphics and it was very
| very bad.
| newsclues wrote:
| Linux Workstation with a Mac laptop seems to best the best of
| both worlds. I even have a windows box for gaming.
|
| I pick the right tool for the job and try not to apply
| ideology to tool choice.
| drewg123 wrote:
| For desktop, I had exactly the opposite experience in ~2006.
| I had a whitebox *nix box that had a catastrophic failure and
| I needed to be up and running quickly. I was working 12+
| hours a day, had a new baby, and I didn't have time to
| install / maintain a *nix box. So I bought an iMac to use as
| a desktop. What a mistake.
|
| Everything that was easy in *nix was a massive PITA in MacOS.
| I'm talking about things like basic desktop customization
| (focus follows mouse, customized mouse buttons + keyboard
| hotkeys combos to move/iconify/resize windows, etc). I ended
| up using open source X11 based utils for most things but my
| web browser & mail because as long as I stayed within X11, I
| could satisfy my 20+ year old muscle memory with focus-
| follows-mouse and my hotkeys. However, every now and then I'd
| blindly start typing and the focus was still on my mail
| client or browser and random things would happen (adding
| bookmarks, deleting emails, etc) After a year I never managed
| to unlearn ffm & my hotkeys, so I gave up, gave the iMac to
| my then in-laws, and built a new whitebox.
|
| I realize there are extensions for ffm, but ffm on MacOS is a
| crapshoot in my experience and I was never able to find an
| extension that I like. Similarly, at the time, I could not
| find any extension that satisfied my muscle-memory window
| management hotkey/mouse button combos. I don't mind click to
| focus so much on a laptop, but I can't stand it on a desktop.
|
| Over the years I have settled on *nix on a desktop and MacOS
| on a laptop..
| davidy123 wrote:
| I get at least 5h on a Thinkpad T14s (Ryzen 6850U), without
| tweaking, using "balanced" mode. I know some people think 5h
| is not enough, but it's plenty for a full day of work. If the
| System 76 system was Intel based, that might have been the
| problem, AMD has been way ahead of them for power usage in
| the last few years.
| deergomoo wrote:
| Raw battery life aside, I think one big advantage macOS
| still has is that its power management isn't modal. There
| _is_ a low power mode like iOS if you really want to eek
| out as much runtime as possible, but I 've never once hit a
| need to use it.
|
| Outside of that, you lose no performance when running on
| battery, you get full performance when you need it, and
| high efficiency when you don't. Needing to manually choose
| a power/performance profile feels incredibly archaic to me,
| though I appreciate that some folks may want that level of
| manual control.
| davidy123 wrote:
| I see your point, but I just leave it on "balanced"
| unless the battery is critically low. Fan very rarely
| comes on, everything runs quickly, and I get decent
| battery life. This was NOT, btw, my experience with Intel
| laptops.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Plugged-in performance while unplugged _without_
| torpedoing battery life is what is really special about
| M-series laptops for me. It's such a stark contrast with
| my ThinkPad which becomes noticeably more sluggish the
| moment it's untethered in "balanced" mode and eating
| through battery like candy with "Performance".
| tssva wrote:
| I have a Thinkpad T495 which is also AMD based. When I 1st
| got it battery life was atrocious under Linux. Kernel
| release 5.17 greatly helped battery life. Now it is just
| horrible even with TLP installed. The battery life under
| Windows is about double what I get when running Linux. It
| isn't the only but is the main reason I run Windows and not
| Linux as my main os on it.
| drivebyops wrote:
| There simply isn't a proper contender to Apple. And with
| Apple silicon, it's a done deal for the next decade at least.
| Apart from hardware, you need a company that is willing to
| take Linux from the ground up and create a macOS type OS. Not
| simply make your own distribution and DE and call it a day.
| Chromebook was close, but they had bad execution and wrong
| ideas.
| runjake wrote:
| Linux is a kernel. Making your own distribution and DE is
| how you create a Linux-based macOS.
|
| I'd say System 76 _is_ doing that but their execution has
| stumbled for the past year or so. They are working on their
| own Rust-based DE, to some level of success. I hope they
| get back on track.
| NexRebular wrote:
| No need for linux. There's the helloSystem[1], a FreeBSD-
| based macOS clone...
|
| [1] https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/
| akho wrote:
| How do I get full-disk encryption on Linux without having
| to type a password twice on boot? This is not a surface-
| level issue you can solve at distribution / DE level, and
| it's not the only one.
|
| A good pre-installed environment of current tools would
| be nice, of course.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I feel the same way, but I know that moving to Linux isn't for
| me. My approach has been to run a Hackintosh, which provides
| excellent compatibility, reliability and parts availability,
| and resist upgrading macOS at every major update. I'm currently
| still on 10.14 and haven't been forced off it yet, and maybe
| never will. Generally, if something requires a more recent
| version, I just reject it. There tends to be a positive
| correlation between the quality of software and the age of
| minimum OS requirements anyway.
|
| An interesting thing to note is that even with software that
| states support for an older version of the OS, it usually is
| more buggy, so there is a tendency for software to degrade over
| time as it gets updated.
| andybak wrote:
| That's odd - I'd prefer the opposite tradeoff. Apple hardware
| is excellent but for me their software design choices are
| usually the problem.
|
| Even the much-lauded excellence in UX doesn't really hold up
| any more.
|
| But at least you can close the lid on a Macbook, put it in
| your bag and be secure in the knowledge it won't decide to
| switch on and probably cause permanent heat damage to itself.
| (looking at you windows...)
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| > But at least you can close the lid on a Macbook ...
|
| Macs have the same issue, but you can turn off the feature
| that causes it.
| post_below wrote:
| You can turn it off in Windows too, though it it takes a
| few minutes and requires some knowledge (or Googling).
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| My understanding is that you had to go into the BIOS to
| do it, if turning it off was supported at all.
| post_below wrote:
| Maybe you're referring to whether or not the core ability
| to wake from sleep can be disabled? I've never tried to
| do that, so I can't say.
|
| In my experience you can reliably stop windows from
| waking in unwanted ways. I usually disable everything
| except input devices (keyboard, mouse).
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| No that's not it. The issue is actually pretty involved,
| there is a LTT video on it, this is the bit I'm
| remembering: https://youtu.be/OHKKcd3sx2c?t=475
| wyclif wrote:
| How do you turn it off?
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| It's in System Preferences somewhere (good luck).
|
| It's the option to allow software updates while your
| machine is asleep.
| phforms wrote:
| In Ventura (13.2), you can turn off automatic updates in
| the "General" tab, then "Software Update" and click on
| the little "(i)" icon to the right of "Automatic
| updates".
|
| When I saw it the first time, it was unclear to me that I
| can even click on it, since it doesn't look much like a
| button. They shouldn't hide such important settings in a
| tiny icon or at least should have made it much more
| apparent that it is clickable.
|
| Couldn't find any settings related to the closed lid
| though.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| It's actually "Wake for network access" setting, see
| here: https://youtu.be/OHKKcd3sx2c?t=349
| steponlego wrote:
| Raspbian is kind of shit. For such a huge community there is very
| little being done with it. Also, systemd is _EXTREMELY_ heavy for
| a Pi.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I just wish there were hardware to support a full switch to
| Raspbian. Ken has a lot of RPi 4. Those are usable as an
| interactive desktop but it's not a great experience, the hardware
| is just barely capable of being a responsive desktop OS.
|
| I really like what Google has been doing with ChromeOS and
| Chromebooks. I wish there were a program like Chromebooks for a
| Linux desktop. Arguably that is ChromeOS itself, but the Linux
| environment you use is a VM.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| FydeOS is Chromium OS. Works on Pi.
| fundad wrote:
| Apple claimed "Unix" because Mach shipped with BSD tools for
| testing and research purposes. Now even Windows has a Linux
| compatibility layer now too and everyone but RTOS all run
| containers and VMS.
|
| Funny story: even Apple switched to Linux in the Data Center.
| They doubled down on Appliances (which happen to run an OS).
|
| Are people pressed that an appliance won't fit hacker
| workstation/embedded needs!?
| ar9av wrote:
| I wonder why he'd transition to Raspbian and work on a Raspberry
| Pi.
|
| Maybe to get that nostalgic "let's wait 4 minutes for our 20 line
| program to compile" feeling again that he must have had in the
| late 60's and early 70's :P
|
| People: "Linux is not ready for the desktop."
|
| Ken: "You know nothing. Compared to what I'm used to, it's been
| ready since version 0.01."
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I moved from 15+ years of Mac to FreeBSD about 2 years ago for
| similar reasons. It's too locked-down, too opinionated, too iOS
| for me now.
|
| Very happy with FreeBSD + KDE which gives me configuration
| choices again.
| zvmaz wrote:
| Could you share with us why you chose FreeBSD over Linux?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I don't really want to get too deep into it because this same
| discussion comes up every time there's an article about
| FreeBSD :)
|
| But my personal reasons are:
|
| - Less commercial influence on the OS and "distro"
| development process (think of things like Canonical pushing
| snap and other not-invented-here behaviour)
|
| - A stable (release-based) base OS with rolling packages. The
| perfect combination which for some reason is not as common in
| the Linux world. There it's usually all-rolling or all-
| release.
|
| - The ports collection - Recompile any repository package
| with any parameters you like
|
| - Excellent documentation because the world is not as
| fragmented as on GNU/Linux
|
| - Not as much drive to constantly change things as on
| GNU/Linux (which is partly driven by point #1 of course)
|
| - ZFS on root <3 And jails and bhyve
| milgra wrote:
| I did exactly the same and my reason is : Linux is chaos,
| FreeBSD is order. FreeBSD is so very well engineered,
| everything feels just right and logical. It's not the case
| with the fragmented world of Linux distributions.
| Unfortunately FreeBSD doesn't have the laptop driver coverage
| Linux has so I'm using Void Linux on my laptops because it is
| the most BSDish Linux.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah good point. I'm not really a 'laptop guy'. I only use
| desktops (mostly NUCs). Which is basically a laptop without
| the battery, screen and keyboard anyway.
|
| But I've heard WiFi drivers in particular are not so good -
| never really looked into it because I wire all my stuff up
| anyway.
|
| I use a thinkpad laptop for work and a cheap $150 Chuwi
| laptop for the makerspace but that's all.
| slim wrote:
| I feel privileged to watch this. I live in north Africa and I
| feel like taking a flight to California to go visit him, inquire
| about his health, tell him about my children progress at school,
| show him how much I love him and how much I'm grateful.
| ramrunner0xff wrote:
| completely agree with you. ken and the not so big group of
| people who has positively shaped all our technology really need
| more appreciation from us users, although i'm sure he would be
| weirded out by it like any proper geek. That been said: thanks
| ken!
| [deleted]
| sureglymop wrote:
| Here I am waiting for apple to finally introduce side loading
| (and with that hopefully easier ways to jailbreak) in iOS so that
| I can switch to a better smartphone experience.
| layer8 wrote:
| There is zero reason to assume that sideloading will make
| jailbreaks easier. Anyone can already sideload today using a
| tool like AltStore [0]. It uses the same mechanism that app
| developers use to test their apps on actual hardware. The only
| difference to "real" sideloading is that Apple limits it to a
| maximum number of ten apps and that the apps need to be
| refreshed after seven days.
|
| [0] https://altstore.io/
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I was using a combination of windows/linux for a while until my
| archlinux laptop shit the bed after an update and I decided to
| say, fuck it, I'm finally buying a macbook because at least then
| I can still do unix shit without having to worry about everything
| working the next day.
|
| I'm not happy about "Apple Silicon", it does feel restrictive and
| often times the only way to get around it is to use licensed VMs,
| which feels like a bit of a rip off. At the same time, my laptop
| runs phenomenally well, does everything I need it to do, and it
| never dies or gets overheated under normal use. I can't really
| complain.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Have lived with MacOS on a "late 2014" Mac Mini until it became
| so slow as to be virtually unusable (amongst other things). Now
| happily run Linux on it.
| asah wrote:
| jump past the intro:
| https://www.youtube.com/live/kaandEt_pKw?feature=share&t=672
|
| announcement:
| https://www.youtube.com/live/kaandEt_pKw?feature=share&t=347...
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Is he serious or just trolling?
|
| (He has previous form for trolling/having a laugh)
| tyingq wrote:
| He seems quite serious. He mentions he has 12 stacks of 4 each
| of the Rpi devices, and another 20 around the house.
| HighChaparral wrote:
| The real reason for the shortages is revealed!
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Hey now, before the pandemic, you could get as many Pi4s as
| you wanted. And if you were ok with the 2GB and/or 4GB
| version, they were usually selling at less than MSRP.
|
| At the Microcenter near me, they kept stacks of them in a
| cabinet near the cash registers, and would offer them up at
| a discount when checking out.
| fundad wrote:
| Institutional buyer
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| That's a lot of devices. I've got six of the Model 4 Rpi and
| whilst they're fun to play with, they're not ideal in terms
| of their hardware and it's a pain trying to find a decent USB
| drive to boot them from to get decent performance (they'd be
| so much better with an M2 interface). The only one that I use
| regularly is one that I've got LibreElec installed on and
| running as a Kodi box.
| [deleted]
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| I was at the talk, and it's strange this what people take from
| it. You should watch the whole thing and see what he built over
| years.
|
| I was a bit disappointed that most of the questions ignored his
| talk about a very cool jukebox he built and focused on OS drama.
|
| He built a jukebox with all hit songs he could find in it
| 1900-2000 and for prerecorded music, got a player piano and sheet
| music and midi and integrated the whole thing. Touch screens,
| voice activation and so on. Hardware and software and data
| hoarding project.
|
| He said he has massive cabinets of CDs, all the music he ripped
| and tested audio encoders with his own ears.
|
| Ken is 80, and still building cool side projects and scratching
| his own itch! That's the story.
|
| Be like Ken by building something cool, not by using whatever OS.
| amelius wrote:
| That's cool but I can understand the audience: you don't have
| to be named Ken Thompson to build a RPi based jukebox.
| ramrunner0xff wrote:
| what about designing the DSP/memory scsi disk that managed to
| do realtime ripping to PAC, then changing all that to mp3
| using LAME, and the most important, creating usable metadata
| and finding all these CDs, and even finding ways to find a
| top-N song collection from dates that didn't have any
| relevant publications. I think you're underselling his
| achievement a bit ;). I found the talk to be an epic geek
| journey.
| asddubs wrote:
| i guess at the end of the day, people just want you to play the
| hits
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Thanks for this.
| klyrs wrote:
| Thanks, the headline has all the appeal to me of "big celeb
| wears new t-shirt." The jukebox sounds awesome
| mtillman wrote:
| I'm sure he'd laugh at being called a big celeb. Jukebox is
| def cooler than the headline.
| pmarin wrote:
| @dang Can you change the title to the original one?
| dang wrote:
| Yes, but I added what the GP says the keynote talk is
| actually about.
| [deleted]
| Simplicitas wrote:
| Love your summary. It's more for the minority of us. For the
| masses, the negative headline makes the money :-)
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Thanks for this! If anyone can suggest a good title for the
| talk as a whole, we'll change it above.
|
| (By 'good' I mean accurate, neutral, and representative of the
| talk as a whole.)
|
| ((The submitted URL was
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaandEt_pKw&t=3473s, but our
| software swapped in the canonical URL, which has no
| timestamp.))
|
| Edit: I've put a placeholder up there for the time being until
| we get a better suggestion. Submitted title was "Unix legend
| Ken Thompson announces he's switching From macOS To Raspbian
| Linux". I agree with the parent that this is trivializing (also
| cherrypicking and editorializing) and we should focus on the
| substance of the talk.
| rezonant wrote:
| Thompson's talk is very interesting, but it's also
| interesting that Thompson has decided to use a UNIX clone for
| his daily compute over macOS. The original submission
| included the timestamp to concisely link to the comment. It
| might be that autocanonicalizing YouTube submissions to
| remove the timestamp is the actual issue, perhaps that could
| be reconsidered.
| dang wrote:
| The one is a talk going deeply into a cool technical
| project and the other is a cherry-picked bit of celebrity
| gossip--admittedly a fun fact, but not interesting (at
| least not intellectually interesting) in the same degree.
|
| Although we didn't write code to do it on purpose, I think
| removing timestamps from videos (and similar things, like
| removing HTML anchors) generally does more good than harm,
| because people tend to use those to cherry-pick some detail
| they think is important rather than letting the reader make
| up their own about the whole submission. Generally we try
| to discourage that (see e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRa
| nge=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., which is about titles
| but makes more or less the same point).
| rezonant wrote:
| Well that's certainly your call but it's not gossip when
| it's first party at the very least. It's a statement by a
| luminary in the industry. As for timestamps, I can
| understand the intent with stripping them, but it might
| be an outsized measure when there are definitely other
| cases where including timestamps can help with context.
| Perhaps most usefully, allowing timestamps ensures the
| submitted title (which we as readers are voting on)
| matches the actual content you get when you visit the
| URL, so that the topic of comments can remain aligned
| with the submission itself.
|
| Ideally, I think this talk should have been two
| submissions, one for the OS commentary (which HN mods can
| choose to moderate or not) and one for the actual talk.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I listened to the question and answer at the timestamped
| link, and I wonder if he was giving a completely bogus answer
| to see if anyone was paying attention. Consider:
|
| > I have for most of my life, because I was sort of born into
| it, run Apple.
|
| Assuming that's actually still Ken Thompson talking, that
| makes absolutely no sense. He's several years older than Woz,
| never mind Apple itself. He was already well into developing
| Unix on DEC minicomputers when the Apple I came out in 1976.
| Then, all through the 80s and 90s, I'm sure he used whatever
| non-Apple computers they used at Bell Labs. I think I read
| somewhere that by the 90s they were using x86 PCs. Anyway,
| you get the idea. So I wonder if he was totally messing with
| us in that answer.
| rezonant wrote:
| A good title might be "Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A
| century of popular music in a jukebox"
| dang wrote:
| "75 year project" seems to suggest that he's been working
| on it for 75 years - is that correct?
| rezonant wrote:
| He's counting it from when he first started saving to get
| his first reel to reel tape recorder.
| lapcat wrote:
| dang, it's far too late to change the submission title when
| there are already hundreds of comments focused on the old
| title. The commentary makes no sense now.
|
| If anything, there should be a separate submission with the
| new title.
| dang wrote:
| Normally I would agree but not in this case. There's plenty
| of context in the thread, readers are smart enough to
| figure it out, and adamgordonbell is right: the talk, and
| the speaker, deserve better.
|
| You're right that titles dominate discussion though. That's
| one of the most reliable phenomena on HN, for better or
| worse.
| agent281 wrote:
| Agreed!
|
| I have to say I was disappointed by the question at 59:23. They
| seemed to expect a retrospective on Ken's career or some grand
| philosophical statement on software or open source. To be
| honest, I was pretty surprised by the direction of the talk
| myself, but I ultimately enjoyed it.
|
| You see, Ken decided to talk about his 75 year project: his
| music collection. He talked about audio formats, collecting
| music from different groups, sourcing metadata, building
| hardware to play music and more. He was deeply interested in
| the topic and honestly probably a bit obsessive for multiple
| decades. This was very humanizing. And to be completely honest
| he reminded me a lot of my girlfriend's father who we think is
| undiagnosed autistic.
|
| Ultimately, I think the reason why Ken was so prolific over
| such a long time is his ability to be deeply interested in
| problems. He was not too fussy about tools. He didn't push Go
| or Linux or UNIX. He wasn't self aggrandizing. He just wanted
| to tell people about his project that he's been working on.
| Honestly, I thought it was a great lesson that might have gone
| over a lot of people's heads.
|
| ---
|
| This comment was copied from lobste.rs.
| https://lobste.rs/s/htwiag/ken_thompson_reveals_his_surprisi...
| kristopolous wrote:
| It's a technically oriented, open source, Linux conference
| and he's talking about basically his home stereo.
|
| Well ok, I guess he can do whatever he wants. There's
| expectations from the context though.
|
| That speech was the first time I understood how people can
| become too famous for their own good.
|
| I saw him the day before (and I've got the photos to prove
| it) and he made a bunch of factual mistakes. Nobody cared
| enough to push back. I only did a little when he claimed
| raspberry pi prices have been stable and plentiful throughout
| the pandemic. But even I quickly gave up and I'm usually an
| asshole about things being right. (2019: 1gb pi4 was $35.00
| and now it's $132.95 for the record. Buying 1000 cheap
| computers to sit on them 4 years and then just resell would
| have made you about $100,000)
|
| He can basically say whatever and do whatever and people just
| politely murmur in approval because he's computer royalty.
| There's no real feedback loop or anything to keep him in
| check.
|
| It'd be like if Beyonce held a concert and then instead of
| singing, talked about composting and gardening. I mean sure,
| whatever.
|
| High status gives people a pass
| [deleted]
| justin66 wrote:
| I think we can all agree that a man who is unaware of the
| troubles you have experienced obtaining Raspberry Pis at
| list price is nobody's hero.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Do you want more?
|
| He didn't know pac's relation to he-aac, or that digital
| FM was renamed hd radio (which uses mdct, based on he-
| aac, based on pac). I was volunteering for the debian
| booth and he didn't know the connection between Debian
| and raspberry pi os and claimed they had no relation.
|
| None of these things matter because you're just being an
| asshole.
| superposeur wrote:
| I was there too and, at first, was wondering if the music thing
| was just a warm up to the main talk. But soon enough I settled
| into the flow of it.
|
| His slides were incredibly minimal throughout and then, at the
| end, he played a video of maple leaf rag pouring forth from his
| player piano midi setup and it was like choirs of angels
| singing.
|
| How many boring ass talks have I sat through that I'll never
| remember -- but I suspect I'll remember his talk for a long
| long time.
| hedora wrote:
| Better headline: "Unix Legend Ken Thompson Announces he is
| Switching From iTunes to a Raspberry PI, a Player Piano and
| Cabinets of old CD's"
|
| Hmmm. I meant for that to be snarky, but it _is_ a better
| headline.
| amelius wrote:
| A better headline: Unix Legend Ken Thompson discovers that
| you can't use Apple products for building cool DIY stuff.
| artificial wrote:
| Community sourced headlines (toggleable visibility natch)
| would be a great addition. Tie the voting to karma on them.
| jen20 wrote:
| I'm suddenly reminded of the existence of n-gate!
| codetrotter wrote:
| It doesn't exist anymore. Or rather I mean, it hasn't
| been updated in months. Probably the author found
| something better to do with his time.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| I spotted a user on the FT with that handle, and asked if
| they were the eponymous one.
|
| They didn't reply.
|
| But just in case you're reading this, person/people/AIs
| behind n-gate, you are sorely missed.
|
| That is all.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > Community sourced headlines (toggleable visibility
| natch) would be a great addition. Tie the voting to karma
| on them.
|
| I remember when I first discovered the StackOverflow
| website. Every question had tags on it and some number
| next to each tag. Me at the time thought that this number
| meant how many times people had added each of those tags
| to the specific question I was looking at. It took like a
| year or something before I realised that this is not what
| those numbers meant.
| tomxor wrote:
| He has already been using raspberry PIs for years, and if you
| watched the talk you will find this has nothing to do with
| iTunes, it predates it by decades.
| leonewton253 wrote:
| Apple music is only 10 bucks a month and lossless. But that
| is pretty cool.
| fsckboy wrote:
| Apple music is lossless from the moment lossless analog
| signals get imperfectly sampled and chopped into bitly
| approximations, yes. There must be an alias for the name of
| that process...
|
| (i love DSP, calm down, but i also like lossless English)
| convolvatron wrote:
| today it is. tomorrow it might not be at all. or it might
| be $100/mo. or they might decide they need interstitial
| ads. or only if you use their recommendation engine with
| preselected 'channels'
|
| the computational requirements to store and play music are
| so minimal now, I'd rather just take care of it myself
| fsckboy wrote:
| "Unix Legend Ken Thompson, still out of step, taps his foot
| to the sterile sound of CDs just as they are now again being
| outsold by warm, pressed, analog vinyl"
|
| (i have no beef with CDs, it's just a headline)
| tyingq wrote:
| _" 8GB ought to be enough for anybody"_, I guess?
|
| Also, he said "Raspbian", rather than the "Raspberry Linux" in
| the title...which I don't think is a thing.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Raspbian and Raspberry Linux both refer to Raspberry Pi OS,
| which was renamed from Raspbian. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/
| benn_88 wrote:
| Raspbian [1] is the name of the original community project to
| port Debian to armhf (armv6 hard float) which ran on the
| Raspberry Pi 1.
|
| Raspberry Pi put our their own images based on this, and
| called it Raspbian until about 2020 [2] when they started
| calling it "Raspberry Pi OS" after they started producing
| aarch64 images.
|
| [1] https://www.raspbian.org/
|
| [2] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/8gb-raspberry-pi-4-on-
| sale-...
|
| Further reading:
|
| [4] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-os-no-
| longer-...
|
| [5] https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/602658/253655
| tyingq wrote:
| I don't see the phrase _" Raspberry Linux"_ in the linked
| page.
|
| Google results only seems to show those words as a deliberate
| name for a few niche things like _" RT Raspberry Linux"_.
| Meaning, I still don't think _" Raspberry Linux"_ is a thing.
| HN should probably change the post title here.
| mattl wrote:
| Yeah it's not called Raspberry Linux. This is a mistake but
| I think most people know he meant Raspbian/RPi OS
| tyingq wrote:
| He said Raspbian. It's just the post title here that's
| off.
|
| Edit: Yes, it's something of a nit, but it helps for
| searching, etc, later. Or if in the future, a different
| product does have that name. "Raspberry Pi OS" is an
| option if Raspbian seems obscure.
| Kiro wrote:
| The post title is fine. I wouldn't have clicked this if
| it said something obscure like "Raspbian".
| [deleted]
| abudabi123 wrote:
| rpi-imager - Raspberry Pi imaging utility
|
| That tool gets you the option to install the image of your
| choosing.
|
| 8GB can be exhuasted, use a System Load Viewer dock widget and
| _btop_ to spot /stop/start the process over-consuming your
| memory. Typically, the web browser hogs up to 1GB then I quit
| it. The next upgrade is to 16GB or 32GB from 8GB for me. I went
| from the Mac Mini at 8GB to Rpi 4GB then 8GB.
| jesusofnazarath wrote:
| [dead]
| jonas21 wrote:
| The announcement is in the Q&A after the talk - but the talk
| itself is definitely is worth watching. It starts at 10:56 (link
| below), and covers his "75-year project". It's kind of an amazing
| story that his life has spanned so many different eras of
| technology.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/live/kaandEt_pKw?t=656
| sreeramb93 wrote:
| My main three asks for Ubuntu to replace my mac is -
|
| 1. Alternative to magnet or any window management systems that
| does not require elaborate tmux setup.
|
| 2. More adoption of snapstore and auto-updates.
|
| 3. Comparable performance and battery life to today's arm
| laptops.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| At least for the first request, Pop OS is a fantastic
| replacement for the Mac. It the system 76 variant and is based
| on Ubuntu. I switched last year and have been blown away at how
| far desktop Linux has come
|
| I use it full time for work and home. Chrome, VS Code and Steam
| all work flawlessly. It's also nice to be able to develop
| software in containers without needing any VM layer.
| freeplay wrote:
| > 1. Alternative to magnet or any window management systems
| that does not require elaborate tmux setup.
|
| Try Pop_Os or install Gnome extention on you're current install
| (https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/)
|
| > 2. More adoption of snapstore and auto-updates.
|
| Flatpak is what you're looking for.
|
| > 3. Comparable performance and battery life to today's arm
| laptops.
|
| While I agree with this one, I think this is more on the chip
| and hardware manufacturers.
| ggop wrote:
| Actual announcement from title is at 58:30
| [deleted]
| nprateem wrote:
| [flagged]
| mrelectric wrote:
| I doubt there's a software engineer that doesn't know of Ken.
| stodor89 wrote:
| You're vastly overestimating the average modern software
| engineer.
| [deleted]
| jchw wrote:
| Raspbian* apparently. That's really interesting; even the highest
| tier Raspberry Pi still feels pretty sluggish as a desktop thanks
| to the limitations of SD card throughput/latency/queue depth/etc.
| I wonder what his usage looks like.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| With the pi 4 you can boot off a USB3 drive like a SSD. I setup
| a 4gb memory model with SSD boot and it's a flawless little
| desktop--it runs full gnome and Ubuntu just fine. If you can
| get a 8gb memory model it would be perfect. I love it.
| bmitc wrote:
| An Intel NUC is not much more than the top tier Raspberry Pi,
| once you get a case and stuff it needs, but is orders of
| magnitude faster. I got one and installed Linux Mint on it.
| It's a much, much better system than the Raspberry Pi 4 I
| have.
| stametseater wrote:
| I was using a Raspberry Pi v1 as my NAS for years. It was
| fast enough and got the job done to my satisfaction.
| However when that pi eventually died and I tried to replace
| it, I found that v4 Pis were 1) just as expensive as NUCs,
| and 2) not even available for purchase anywhere that I
| could find. So now I've got a NUC filling that role. The
| Raspberry Pi org has really dropped the ball.
| fundad wrote:
| That is unfortunate about the R Pi. I got a 3B+ a year
| before 2020 and it better last a long time.
|
| I think the foundation's pressures are similar to Apple's
| pressure to upsell their paid service all over the UI.
| That's what I resent about Apple; it's enshittification
| like with EBay, Amazon and even Google bugging me to sign
| in to make searches.
| dbrueck wrote:
| Ha, what timing: literally yesterday I went down the
| rabbit hole of researching Pis for NAS and wound up
| ordering a NUC.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| I bought my pi 4 at launch in 2020 before the shortages and
| scalping, it was $49 IIRC. There is no Intel NUC that's
| only 50 bucks. And I like that the pi is aarch64
| architecture as I am developing for that architecture.
| hrrsn wrote:
| You can pick up a Wyse 3040 with an Atom X5 for ~$20.
| It's limited to 2GB RAM, and of course x86, but the
| processor benches on par with the Pi 4.
| lexicality wrote:
| Either you have found an amazing discount for NUCs or
| you're getting ripped off on your raspi accessories!
| bmitc wrote:
| It may depend on one's definition of "not much more". I
| got my Intel NUC in the barebones configuration since I
| already had spare 32GB of RAM and an SSD for $387.59. To
| me, that's not much more than the highest end Raspberry
| Pi 4 with a case with a heatsink and fan because the NUC:
| actually works and is usable, has DisplayPort and just
| generally better I/O aside from the Pi's GPIO,
| configurable memory, and better CPU and GPU. Plus, you
| can actually buy one. To me, that's worth it.
|
| My Raspberry Pi's are just unusable for anything other
| than as high-level embedded platforms. I've started
| selling them off, only keeping one or two for embedded
| use cases.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| You literally lost perf by moving to ssd through USB
|
| https://alexellisuk.medium.com/upgrade-your-raspberry-
| pi-4-w...
|
| >Interestingly, the SD card gave a seemingly better buffered
| disk read than the M2 SATA SSD at 43.35 MB/sec
| spacetime_cmplx wrote:
| When it comes to how sluggish a system feels due to its
| disk, it's much more useful to measure the read latency and
| throughput of random reads because that's what the system
| is doing: you read a lot of sectors randomly when you boot
| or start chromium.
|
| https://raspberrytips.com/raspberry-pi-usb-vs-sd/ says
| their SD card latency was 1.15x the USB disk.
|
| Note that the sample size is just 1, so I wouldn't place
| value on any single benchmark (it could just be that they
| chose their USB disk and SD card poorly or it was too
| cloudy that day). This is evident in my URL's hdparm result
| being wildly different from yours.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| And? For desktop use it doesn't matter. If you're not
| paging out of ram you will never ever notice. I'm not
| sitting here running disk benchmarks all day... I'm
| browsing some web pages and using a text editor.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| Hope you never want to do updates or reconfigure any
| packages or change up any docker containers, etc.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| It doesn't matter. I'm not losing sleep over an apt
| upgrade taking maybe 10 more seconds. I'd much rather
| live with that and have a little desktop that barely sips
| 5 watts of power total.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| 10 seconds? Heh.
|
| I measured apt upgrades in multiple minutes on the Pi 3B.
| And forget about doing anything else; the system would
| hang hard until I/O was cleared.
|
| By contrast, upgrading my desktop tower from HDD to SSD
| was an incredible, dramatic speedup in terms of booting
| and especially apt upgrades. The latter became nearly
| instantaneous. Blink and you miss them.
|
| Now, on the Pi I use only the heavy-duty brand-name
| sdcards. I have found that the weak ones tend to suffer
| badly from ESD. I am not sure how much lower performance
| is from the heavy-duty cards, but I doubt it is much
| slower than the fragile ones.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| What relevance is the Pi 3B in 2023? This is like
| invoking a 2016 Android phone against the latest Pixel.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| I don't know; has the sdcard storage interface, the
| driver, or sdcards themselves, been revolutionised in the
| past 7 years?
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| > If you're not paging out of ram you will never ever
| notice.
|
| What you say is true but you didn't respond to someone
| complaining about ram latencies, you responded to someone
| lamenting poor disk access perf. And you recommended
| booting off SSD which is demonstrably specious advice.
| justin66 wrote:
| > recommended booting off SSD which is demonstrably
| specious advice
|
| Booting the Pi 4 off a quality USB-connected SSD to
| address stability and performance concerns is really good
| - and normally not controversial - advice. You're
| betraying a lack of familiarity with the subject matter
| here. The Raspberry Pi people provide a whole forum where
| people can discuss this, and other, stuff and educate one
| another.
|
| https://forums.raspberrypi.com/
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Again I will tell you--it doesn't matter to me and I
| suspect 99% of users. Unless you are like a Linus tech
| tips fanatic and eeking out every percent of performance
| for your Good Gaming Rig then it's fine.
|
| Yes the storage performance isn't perfect.
|
| It's fine.
| hellcow wrote:
| I couldn't stream YouTube videos on 1080p without
| terrible stutters when I tried the Pi4 a few years ago.
| Has that been fixed?
| Shared404 wrote:
| I believe that there is hardware accelerated video now,
| though I haven't had hands on a Pi4 to test.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Never had a problem here. Make sure you're using Raspbian
| and getting hardware accelerated video.
| justin66 wrote:
| 4K might cause some problems in my experience, but 1080p
| should be totally fine.
|
| (in my memory the problem was more with running the
| display itself in 4k and trying to get a full frame rate
| out of it, but I think the advice still holds - 1080p
| videos on a 1080p or 2K display shouldn't be any sort of
| major challenge)
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| Why did you recommend SSD at all if it doesn't make a
| difference?
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Because not all SD cards are the same and I have more
| large SSD drives sitting around than SD cards. Why do you
| think results for one SD card map to all of them?
|
| Again, it doesn't matter. Real people in the real world
| aren't performance tweakers.
|
| Oh no! Someone on the internet suggested someone do
| something that isn't optimal to performance! Wow better
| go on a multi reply freak out about it!
| [deleted]
| handwarmers wrote:
| this is a good point, despite its being downvoted. ty - you
| saved me a future debug session
| incone123 wrote:
| Runs on PCs so he's got options if he needs more power.
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| I see "Raspberry PI Desktop for PC and Mac", but it's 32 bit.
|
| https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/raspberry-pi-desktop/
| sphars wrote:
| Your can run DietPi[0], which is a minimal image based on
| Raspbian, on an x86_64 PC if you want
|
| [0]: https://dietpi.com/
| nixcraft wrote:
| s/Raspberry/Raspbian/
|
| Sorry about that :(
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| For our generation the Pi is sluggish. For Thompson's
| generation, it is a beast!
| noisy_boy wrote:
| As per the talk, he is running scores of them - probably as
| multiple purpose-specific clusters.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| That is a hacker's hacker. Hacked a 50s jukebox that combines LCD
| display with manual switches and supports voice input to play the
| chosen song on a player's piano - from a catalog that spans a
| century.
|
| Also loved the video of his wife enjoying the setup -
| straightforward and effective.
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