What I hate about Gnome is that it's almost perfect but its paradigm includes huge huge window borders.
Oh well, on the plus side there's an actually perfect desktop out there already: i3. And sway potentially. I do miss Gnome's full-assedness (attention to detail and their strong opinions/focus) sometimes.
its too bad the app for youtube music is so horrible. How does it still not have a horizontal mode? How many goldfish are they paying to develop that app?
Currently probably because M1 is absurdly better than the competition. They will certainly draw users away from Linux unless either this porting effort gets done, or unless other ARM options that support Linux better become available.
And the beauty of non commercial software is that we don't actually have to care about that. If people choose performance increase over freedom, you can't really chose for them.
Now I'm not saying that we should not port free software to the M1. I'm saying that the good reason to do so is because the people porting it want to have it there, rather than thinking in term of user retention.
> And the beauty of non commercial software is that we don't actually have to care about that.
If that's really true, then why are so many so intent on increasing Linux Desktop adoption? Popularity means more people working on it, more people making software for it, more hardware having drivers, etc.
The problem, as I see it, is that "free software" becomes
unfree when you have to pay to port it.
Back in the glory of more universal general computers this was perhaps a lesser spoken requirement of the system.
Today, it's clear to me that we are slipping back into chaos.
EDIT: Seems like FSF's "freedom to run" might fit the definitional benchmark for me. I'm not really sure how people are going to react to that though ;)
> "free software" becomes unfree when you have to pay
Not the same meaning of "free". But anyway, for now, you have to pay Apple prices to have a computer with an M1 chip on it. If the price is a string requirement, one probably won't buy Apple hardware and rather get something that less expensive and is already well supported by free software :).
> Free software means that the users have the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share the software. Thus, free software is a matter of liberty, not price.
The remarkable thing about Apple prices these days is just how affordable powerful M1 computers are. The entry-level Mac Mini costs $699 (https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini). In single-core CPU benchmarks the M1 chip has a Geekbench score of 1744 (https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/9460112), which is slightly higher than the Intel Core i9-11900F, which scored 1726 (https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-11900...) and has a recommended customer price of $422-$432 (https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/212254/...). (To be fair, in multi-core benchmarks the i9 outperforms the M1 by nearly 2000 GeekBench points, but the M1 is still comparable with good chips like the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX) By the time you add a motherboard, RAM, storage, and graphics, a Core i9-11900F build would be more expensive than an entry-level Mac Mini. Also, the M1 chip has a TDP of just 15W, while the Core i9-11900F has a 65W TDP.
While it's unfortunate that Apple has kept many of the technical details of their M1 Macs secret, thus making it a gigantic effort to port Linux and other alternative operating systems to it, what has people so excited about the M1 is the performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar ratios the chip provides.
“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.
You may have paid money to get copies of a free program, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.
The meaning of "free" in "free software" is the one from "freedom" or "free speech". It is about liberty, not price. You can totally sell free software for example. And a lot of people are paid to develop free software (so the software itself is not free as in $0 even if it is so for end users).
There's basically only 2 meanings for free (not in jail, price of 0), so if it's not the one, it's the other. Don't think his comment wasn't of value to me.
Then I fear you've oversimplified your model. I believe there is a lot of grey area between being placed behind physical bars and being forced to pay for services.
For example, let's say one comes down with a horrible disease, clearly they are not being directly charged in cash and no police have been involved. Yet I can't shake the feeling that they have been parted with some freedoms.
Anyway, food for thought. This thread is perilous.
But the point is that Apple's software that runs on the M1 is absurdly better than the competition, especially on the M1, because both the macOS software and the M1 hardware were designed to work together hand-in-hand fast and efficiently.
So even if you could get all the hardware drivers working properly, Linux/Gnome still will lose out to macOS because that hardware simply wasn't designed for that software, and that software simply wasn't designed for that hardware, while macOS and M1 were both designed to work together.
But Gnome was originally designed to run on X-Windows, whose hardware model is a MicroVAX framebuffer on acid.
The color situation is a total flying circus. The X approach to device independence is to treat everything like a MicroVAX framebuffer on acid. A truly portable X application is required to act like the persistent customer in Monty Python’s “Cheese Shop” sketch, or a grail seeker in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Even the simplest applications must answer many difficult questions:
The quote is to describe the aforementioned integration trope, not sure it has a succinct name beyond that hence the long description in quotes. It first got really popular when it was note one of the iPhone A* processors added JavaScript specific rounding to much "that's how safari can be so great on this device release, it integrates straight to the hardware" only to find out from a safari dev it hadn't even gained that yet. Yes end to end integration is a huge boon to a consistent user experience but it doesn't change efficiency nearly as !uch as some like to think, certainly not more than can be gained from normal optimizations still available and it's certainly not the ultimate goalpost even for consistent experience just a great aid.
Put = out, please forgive mbile keyboard while on a plane :). I do like the level of creativity for an http put benchmark though!
Because safari isn't purely optimized for speed. It's optimized for 'fast enough', but also low power usage. Chrome is _only_ optimized for speed (and thusly uses far more power), though it's my understanding that google is rethinking that balance somewhat.
Not in most workloads, no. M1 is made on a better fab. Future chips might be better, provided the next process they use (rumors are, TSMC "6nm") is close enough to TSMC "5nm".
Rectangle is pretty great, thanks for that pointer. I've been trying all kinds of tiling wms on MacOS, but they just don't quite work in this world -- since they're unable to do everything that's needed. But Rectangle allows me to make the decisions, which works a bit better here.
What's still missing with this setup is a shortcut for easily moving a window to another desktop. Any clues how to achieve that?
And finally there's the irritating MacOS UX "feature", that selecting an application with cmd-tab doesn't switch to the desktop where it is, or doesn't unminimize it if it's minimized.
I don't think anyone should downvote expressing an opinion, at least when it's done without toxicity like you did. Ok, that "delusion" remark was a bit toxic. But anyway.
Here's my opinion: i3 is vastly superior to anything macos is offering in the desktop space in terms of usability. Sure, wrestling with minutae like proper font rendering and DPI settings is a huge pain, but a) some distros do those things for you and b) if you're not a serial distro hopper / manic reinstaller, those things don't have to be done too often.
I genuinely think it's an UX upgrade. And I've been using macs almost exclusively for 5 years now.
The bad things of Linux are still bad: subsystems get replaced all the time (often with just minimal technical justification), and the replacements are usually (if you compare them to Macs) alpha quality for a long time. And the integration is lacking. Notable contemporary examples: oss/alsa/pulseaudio/jack/pipewire and x11/wayland. This is something I truly don't miss when using macs. Almost everything else I do miss.
To me Mac OS has a nicer looking UI, but i3 has better UX. For instance, the animations on Mac OS are annyoing. There is nothing good about adding a delay to basic operations. On i3, I can switch between workspaces in an instant, on Mac OS, I have to wait for a stupid 200ms animation to finish - and that is after already fiddling in system settings to disable fancy animation effects (the default was slide-in, ugh).
Fair, but it's not vastly superior for the majority of computer users, whose experience revolves entirely around the mouse. That's what I was getting at with macOS being better - generally, obviously not for every person.
This might have been true in the past when corporations were more limited. However, as corporations grow, their power is becoming ad hoc equivalent to those of the state.
You will have even less consent to being governed when you're governed by corporation heads, who will be more and more like lords and barons from the middle ages.
