As someone who never uses spaces or any window manager, what am I actually missing? What’s wrong with cmd tab and just switching between apps?
Is this going to be some
Kind of major epiphany?!
Spaces is what used to known in Linux as virtual desktops (maybe it still is), and that is how I think of it. Or as virtual monitors. Right now I have desktop one for local system iTerm2 and Firefox, desktop two for client 1 (terminals, IntelliJ IDEA), desktop three for client 2 (VirtualBox, terminals), desktop four for incidental stuff that needs a mostly empty desktop, and desktop five for Chrome (for things that need it), and GIMP and Inkscape (as needed). This way everything stays where I put it, including which windows over which other ones. So I can switch to D1 to look up some documentation on a function, then back to D2 to use that knowledge. Or on my personal laptop I can keep my coding project up one desktop and do the daily web surfing on another, and just switch desktops to have the coding project right where I left it.
(You do use a window manager, btw, it's the thing that puts the title bars on your windows and lets you move them around. On macOS it's integrated in, but on Linux you have to choose one. There are many, all of which have some failing. Except for sawfish, whose failing is that it is no longer maintained.)
> What’s wrong with cmd tab and just switching between apps?
Open 3 terminal windows. Try to switch back & forth between just two of them with a keyboard shortcut (without mentally tracking whether or not to press Shift). You can't.
Open a browser and two terminal windows. Try to switch between one terminal (your editor) and the browser window (your reference docs), without also bringing the other terminal above the browser window, covering up your docs. You can't.
> Is this going to be some Kind of major epiphany?!
If you don't use several windows per app, probably not. But, I do, and macOS's window manager is awful for it.
This is so unhelpful. What has happened in the last 5 weeks has hugely escalated the violence in an already difficult situation. It's not wishful thinking or naive to think that deliberately inflaming a difficult situation is a bad idea.
This comment doesn't make much sense. Are you implying German taxes are buying Russian oil and so funding the war in Ukraine? If so, that's a very partial reading of what's happened in recent years. Europe went through a huge and very painful transition away from Russian oil and gas. Germany in particular found this very difficult, but AFAICT it's mostly complete and Germany has prioritised renewables.
Energy is currently expensive because an orange maniac has started a war that only seems to benefit Russia.
Many Lenovos and Dells work pretty well. I use a frame.work laptop and it continually gets better. It's not flawless, but personally I accept that the many benefits of using Linux will come with some tradeoffs. To me it's very worth it. Great battery life and flawless sleep/wake on my macbook weren't worth the inferior (IMHO) UX of macos. If you really care about those things, there are some good resources out there (including a good community of frame.work people).
This probably reflects my own prejudices, but it always struck me that MS based IT people wouldn’t work with anything else, basically because they couldn’t.
That stack optimises for not really having to understand what you’re doing, but also avoiding any major foot guns (and having the general arse covering that buying IBM used to provide, but which MS now does). The price you pay is that everything is horrible to work with. But if the alternative is not really being able to get anything done at all then so be it?
The Windows ecosystem does a lot of things that, to me, as a Linux/MacOS user, seem like a weird bunch of crazy decisions that are different just because.
Whether that's true or not, it does mean that a lot of people who came up on Windows IT don't have a mental framework for how to run or manage Linux systems. Likewise, when I'm trying to diagnose something on Windows it just seems like the entire thing is a disaster; where are event logs? In the event viewer! How do I filter them? It's a mess! Can I search them? Kind of! Do they have information to help me diagnose the problem? Almost never!
On Linux, I know all the tools I need to solve all the problems that come up; on Windows, I have only minimal concept of how things work, and very little way to diagnose or debug them when they go wrong, which is often.
For example, when my Windows gaming machine comes out of hibernation my ethernet controller insists that there's no connection. I can't convince it otherwise except by disabling the device and re-enabling it. I can't figure out where I might find information that tells me why this is happening, so I just wrote a powershell script to turn it off and then on again. I bet some Windows IT dork could figure it out in 30 seconds, but I'm a Linux IT dork and I have no clue.
> For example, when my Windows gaming machine comes out of hibernation my ethernet controller insists that there's no connection. I can't convince it otherwise except by disabling the device and re-enabling it. I can't figure out where I might find information that tells me why this is happening, so I just wrote a powershell script to turn it off and then on again. I bet some Windows IT dork could figure it out in 30 seconds
Windows and Linux dork here (heh). It has to do with how various computer manufacturers implemented the Sleep/Standby State (S3/S4), how they've resisted implementing a common standard at the hardware level, and how Microsoft eventually gave up arguing and patched around it with their own Modern Standby system in the S0 state.
Tbh, though, the only computer I've ever seen Hibernate work well on are Macs. Every x86 computer usually has some sort of issue with it, except for maybe business laptop models (eg HP's Elitebook line).
> Tbh, though, the only computer I've ever seen Hibernate work well on are Macs. Every x86 computer usually has some sort of issue with it, except for maybe business laptop models (eg HP's Elitebook line).
This has always been my experience, going back I'd say at least to the early 2000s on cheap laptops, and all the way back to the earliest days of sleep and hibernate on desktops, where sleep just doesn't matter that much.
When I started dabbling in boot code around 2006, I read a bunch of the specs and one of them was ACPI, which I only scratched the surface of.
I think until then it had just not occurred to me that a modern paged protected OS would even want to call into any code supplied with the computer, vs. having it come from a driver disk, or be built in to the kernel where everyone can see it.
The whole idea of a bytecode interpreter running random code supplied by a fly-by-night system builder is a little unsettling.
This is unnecessarily confrontational. The real point here is that there better functioning democracies than the US. They have faults, but Scandinavia and much of northern Europe (partially excluding the UK) much better approximates what you call a fairytale than a US perspective might allow you to believe. Trust in and satisfaction with government institutions in Scandinavia and Finland are much, much higher than in the US, and it's largely justified by their competence and delivery of public goods.
That's like 3-5 out of 195 countries and only 0,3%-0,5% of the world's population. Being born there is like winning the lottery so maybe take that into consideration when arguing with such examples since that's not the norm. Like what are the odds that people you talk to online are part of that 0,5%? So who's the one being needlessly confrontational?
>Trust in and satisfaction with government institutions in Scandinavia and Finland are much, much higher than in the US
I don't care about the situation in the US since I don't live there. I'm talking from the perspective in Europe(not Scandinavia) where I can't say the democracy is representing or serving me. No law maker asked about the major decisions the EU made.
I really hope you're right. Sadly, though, I don't see any evidence of UK companies disinvesting from big US tech. There aren't good alternatives and what there is is too complex. As long as 'everyone else is still using MS', it seems like it's a brave CTO that switches to European providers. Unless that happens, the network effect of having AI+data is likely to mean US tech still has a big advantage in corp settings. But, HN - please tell me I'm wrong!
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