There's also at least a potential aesthetic problem where the new building behind the facade is taller than the facade, especially if it extends above by a significant amount. That's very common indeed.
It varies in how well it’s done - much as with windows, some are very sympathetic and others not. It’s also particularly noticeable for people who occupy higher floors in other nearby buildings and I’m not sure this is often considered in the planning process.
I recently had to set up Ubuntu 19.10 on a friend's laptop with a dead keyboard so had to use the on-screen keyboard. For some reason the keyboard wouldn't show up in the installer's text fields so no way to enter username, password, etc. It works everywhere else, but not in the installer, presumably because it's using the wrong toolkit out of the dozens of GUI toolkits available and the rest of the desktop doesn't recognise its text fields properly.
So unfortunately I still have to agree - how come the built-in installer program not play ball with the built-in accessibility features, and why wasn't this tested?
Logging in with the OSK also had a quirk - if you request the OSK on the login screen, common sense would suggest that you also want the OSK to persist once you're logged in... but no - once logged in you have to manually go in settings and enable it again. This is not a big deal, but just having someone think about the UX would've taken care of this.
Finally getting Netflix to work was annoying; Firefox is actually nice enough to let me know that the page requires DRM content and offered to enable it in one click without arguing about licenses or non-free software, but it still didn't work... after searching around it seems like I had to enable the non-free repo and install an extra "libavcodec" package. I figured it out, but I wouldn't blame a casual user if they gave up and said "Linux sucks".
It was libavcodec-extra which I presume isn't a dependency, or otherwise the stock Ubuntu ships with broken dependencies out of the box but I'd find this extremely unlikely.
It's just so strange. H.264 decoders are free now, because Cisco buys a huge unlimited license for their good software decoder every year, maybe Firefox doesn't have the ability to link against that?
Shipping a web browser package without a functioning H.264 decoder, for most people, is like shipping a kernel without mouse drivers.
The terms of Cisco's patent license are tricky. Basically, you must use binaries built by Cisco. Even though the source is available, Cisco's license only extends to binaries they build. If you build the code, you are not covered by Cisco's MPEG/H.264 patent license.
Cisco also only builds a limited number of architectures and platforms.
All of these things make it difficult to depend on for open source projects like Firefox.
Installing an OS is something emphasised by enthusiasts but is nothing whatsoever to do with ordinary computer use. Most people don't even know where their files on their existing system are (let alone what they are). They will never go through what to the vast majority would seem (and be) an impossibly arcane technical task.
This is correct. The Linux desktop works, but the last ~10% of polish and UX attention is what takes like 95% of the time. It's the little things, the edge cases, the things that just sort of work or break at odd times or in odd ways. The parade of edge case issues that must be fixed to make something really high quality is endless.
That sort of polish is the least fun aspect of programming. It consists of brutal iterative bug fixing, polish, design tweaking, and repeat. It's endless. Since this is the part of programming that is not fun, people rarely do it for free. Linux desktop has basically no economic model so it has no way to raise money to pay people to do the nasty grinding work required to make it truly competitive with a commercial OS.
The other huge problem is unnecessary fragmentation. There are like six popular desktop distributions that are all fairly similar under the hood. There aren't any fundamental differences between them sufficient to merit a fork. So you have to distribute your app many times to target one platform: Linux.
This is true enough. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with why it's not more widely used, given that it applies to all desktop OS's (each in their own distinct ways).
> Bill Gates doing bad stuff 20 years ago has nothing to do with it.
Well that's just not true, is it? If you successfully conspire with governments to force your OS on children, and with computer manufacturers to force it on purchasers, then this 'bad stuff' has a positive effect on your market share. It's not the only reason for Microsoft's position, but it's hardly insignificant.
If Linux had been forced on schoolkids and consumers for a couple of decades, do you not think it would be more widely used today?
I was thinking the same. I considered Vivaldi for some time but it was just buggy. That's a shame because now that Chrome is going to release manifest v3, many users will look for alternatives. Vivaldi has had years to polish their UI but they have missed the train. Eventually I'll settle with Brave, I think.
I used Vivaldi for a long time and never encountered many UI bugs. About a year ago I switched to Firefox mainly because I don't want Chromium to take over the world.
What I miss most using Firefox is the ability to customize almost everything.
Being LGBT isn't the same as being political. It's not a subset of politics. Being accepting of gay people or prejudice against them might align with the two parties in the United States but someone's existence and visibility isn't inherently political. The point is that China (and many others in the world) are taking a stand against LGBT people, not just to preserve their hold on political power.
