I just passed week 5 of first time ownership. The review is spot on. The product is mostly a buggy, stinky, noisy mess while we wait for the OTA updates to finish.
You appear to have forgotten the state of linux until fairly recently. For literal decades, MacOS "just worked" and it meant that the user did not have to fight their OS to get shit done.
In the professional world where "I did not get any work done today because an update fucked my wifi card" is not a valid excuse, MacOS (and Windows to a lesser degree) triumphed. Large orgs who can afford a whole IT department might be fine deploying linux on their fleet of desktops, but there is always a tremendous amount of testing and validation behind the scenes to ensure that everything "just works". This just was not the case for the indy professional, or small tech startup.
Now, in the past 5 or so years two things happened: 1) linux reached a state where a "normie developer" could take a chance and install it on a work machine and be just fine, and 2) MacOS has regressed enough where OS updates are risky now, and the "it just works" slogan does not really apply any more.
2 days ago I saw a colleague not using his dock. Turns out he can’t update the dock firmware under Linux, and has to live with having a 20% chance of his laptop detecting external displays.
He recently gave up trying to have a wake from sleep that works well too.
I mean, Linux is great, but the paper cuts are still very numerous.
Although I fully agree that the papercuts are sill numerous, allow me a counterpoint:
Recently I bought a cheap epson inktank printer/scanner, with built in wifi. Getting it working on my work Windows PC was a huge faff, struggling to find the right drivers and all that. The main installer for some asinine reason needed location permissions, which was disabled by MDM, so the default route did not work. Let's not even begin talking about getting scanning working...
On my Linux Mint personal laptop, the printer just appeared after I connected it to my network, and it worked perfectly. The built-in scanning app detected the scanner and allowed me to scan without any configs.
This is the first time for me where linux "just work"ed, and I was truly delighted.
Works as intended. If you’re looking for a baby bottle it’s reasonable to assume that your house is in disarray from the whole new baby in the house thing, and it’s above average probability that you’ll buy completely unrelated products during your search.
I'm not so sure. The article starts by stating MS does not have the resources to properly support Windows any more. And the solution is to roll their own linux distro?
Also, NT, the Windows kernel, is actually pretty good. Is that the bit MS will swap out?
Also also, for better or worse, Windows is famously backwards compatible. Will they throw all that out?
>Also also, for better or worse, Windows is famously backwards compatible. Will they throw all that out?
Sure, why not? Because after all, Windows is not actually backwards compatible; it's why they have something call "WoW" (Windows on Windows). Basically, when you run older Windows software, you're not running it natively, you're running it through a compatibility layer, exactly how "WINE" works in Linux.
Doing the same thing in Linux would be mostly trivial, since WINE already exists, and they could even improve it since they own all the important DLLs.
>Also, NT, the Windows kernel, is actually pretty good. Is that the bit MS will swap out?
It is? How so? It's tied to a crappy and obsolete filesystem, and its device driver support isn't that great since it relies on vendors a lot still, rather than being under MS's control. Perhaps the scheduler is nice, I dunno, but there's a lot more to a kernel than that, and I'd say filesystems and drivers are the most important parts, and parts where MS is behind Linux.
I'm coming around to the idea that permanent chat history is not a good thing, but that's because the company I work at recently changed our workspace retention period to 365 days. You quickly realize how much you depended on searching for 2+ year old slack threads for the context behind why a feature works the way it does when it gets yanked away from you and all you're left with is an underused/disorganized Notion and the code itself.
Legal would probably tell you to purge anything older than 180 days, unless there is active discovery for a lawsuit, in which case retain until end of law suit. Retention is a legal policy issue, which may vary from company to company, and change when a new GC onboards. That should be driving the technical requirements.
I have seen slacks for "former employees of $Company" where the house rules are that what is said should be taken as seriously and recorded as much as any remark said in a bar meetup. (i.e. not that seriously, not recorded). For these, not keeping old messages is a feature.
I try to treat slack/teams/irc like the office water cooler. Sure, we can discuss work, make decisions or come up with solutions to problems, but it has to be recorded elsewhere, in an email or internal documentation or whatever for it to matter and for it to be official.
Nothing sucks as much as trawling through old chats to find some decision that was made ages ago.
Yes, while a "work slack" or "company teams installation" is more formal than the ones that I mentioned above - it is for doing your job, while on the job - it's really not a good store for decisions and other facts.
To be clear, the slacks for "former employees of $Company" were not set up by the company, but by those people in order to keep in touch with each other. The chat had no official relationship to the company. This is why these slacks were regarded as the online equivalent of the pubmeet.
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