I am saying this as a very long time Windows user, and it saddens me. Politics aside, from a pure technichal, functional, privacy and UX perspective, the case for changing over from Windows to Linux is getting stronger by the day.
I am saying this as a very long time Linux user, and it saddens me. Politics aside, from a pure technical, functional, privacy and UX perspective, the case for changing over from Windows has been apparent for several decades.
If you picked XFCE as your front end you get WinXP functionality, with the nice things from win10/11 (start menu search that's actually local only, multiple desktop workspaces, and graphical settings/updates I've only needed to go to command line twice in four years).
KDE 6.6 is great to me, but there are some quirks I have found. Their "peek at desktop" feature is annoying, I want "minimize all" but you have to do some scripting to enable that.
I've noticed that clicking the network button to see wifi status shows traffic rate, and that seems to lag and I suspect it has an impact on throughput.
I'm interested in Cosmic when it matures some more.
I don't think all the same shortcuts exist out of the box, although win-drag/win-right-drag to move and resize windows (might be alt by default) is _so_ much more convenient than the usual border/title dragging that you might find you don't miss them.
Except when I recently put XFCE on my old macbook air laptop as a trial run, within the first day I found it nearly impossible to do something so simple as add an application to the taskbar/dock. Something about AppPkg's not showing up by default in the taskbar adder? I finally figured it out, but no icon - just an invisible square. And guess what? If I decide the update the app, the whole thing breaks again.
I have a degree in a tech-related field. I do things on the command line on purpose every week. It should not be this hard even for me to so something so simple. It is not even remotely ready for regular joe end users.
No encapsulation… huge functions with tons of local variables shared between closures… essentially global state in practice. I think ant the time, objects with member variables felt “heavy” and local variables felt “light”. But the fact that they were so lightweight just gave me more opportunities to squirrel away state into random places with no structure around it. It really wasn’t all that horrific, and it helped me ship something quickly, but it wasn’t maintainable. These days I think the “heavy boilerplate” of grouping stuff into structs and objects forces me to slow down and think a bit harder about whether I really want to enshrine a new piece of state into the app’s data model. Most of the time I don’t.
Opus 4.6 (high) is doing for me things that i don't know to do myself. Moreover, I don't understand enough what it did after it did it. But it works. The domain is automated debugging and RE.
It is my understanding that actually for Mac one is "forced" to install many 3rd party tools to get features that in Windows are considered basic, for example window auto snapping.
I converted (not by choice) to Mac. Applications that I need to "fix" macOS:
- MOS (free) / Mac Mouse Fix ($3, has some neat extra features) -- without these, mouse scrollwheel is practically unusable
- Karabiner Elements (free) -- to fix modifier keys layout to be consistent with Linux / Windows
- Ukelele (free) -- modify keyboard layout to match Linux / Windows
First is needed only if you use a mouse with a wheel. Last two are just for my unwillingness to learn the Mac layout, since I still use other systems regularly.
I also used to have an app that would close an app after I closed the last window (curiously most apps on Mac keep running after that and you need to close them from right click menu), but I got used to it.
Window snapping was fixed in macOS 15, special apps are only necessary if you have a 32:9 monitor, otherwise the built-in support is solid.
MOS is free, but Mac Mouse Fix lets you perform some touch gestures with a mouse (e.g. switching virtual desktops). But yeah, look at how the official Apple mouse looks, they have terrible support for "normal" ones.
Then came DVD±RW which used the magic pen technology. Each time you write, it changed both the color of the disc and the data. Surprisingly enough if you did it long enough it ended in color/data corruption...
That story about your Otolaryngologist is insane. It's sad how many times doctors don't really listen to their patients and throw out there generic advice that is harmful.
Essentially yes. Companies paid the tariff costs, largely passed this on to consumers via higher prices, and now companies are due the tariff costs back. Consumers of course won’t get anything back.
> Under customs law, importers generally have about 314 days after goods enter the country before a tariff payment is finalized, a process known as “liquidation.”
> If companies fail to challenge the duty and request a refund after the duty is finalized — or liquidated — they must file a formal protest and, in some cases, challenge the decision in the New York-based trade court to recover the funds.
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