If it loads at all. The last two days, the start menu refuses to launch it when you click on it.
The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing. And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible. Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.
I love when it takes 3 minutes to open "Add or Remove Programs" because the Start menu search decides that typing a, ad, add, r, re, remove, unin, install, etc. definitely means "let me Bing that for you" instead of opening the one thing I clearly want.
It obviously knows what I'm trying to do (Bing search recommendation is for "Add or Remove Programs"), yet refuses to surface the actual shortcut to that settings page (or "app", or whatever Microsoft calls it this week). Even better: some days it pops up immediately after typing "Add" and other days I'm wrestling with it like I'm training a stubborn animal, clicking the result in the hope that the OS will "learn" that yes, this is what I want when I type "Add".
Most of the time I just give up and dig through the Settings menu like it's 1999.
I started on the cheapest £15/mo "Pro" plan and it was great for home use when I'd do a bit of coding in the evenings only, but it wasn't really that usable with Opus--you can burn through your session allowance in a few minutes, but was fine with Sonnet. I used the PAYG option to add more, but cost me £200 in December, so I opted for the £90/mo "Max" plan which is great. I've used Opus 4.5 continuously and it's done great work.
I think when you look at it from the perspective of how much you get out of it compared with paying a human to do the same (including yourself), it is still very good value for money whether you use it for work or for your own projects. I do both. But when I look what I can now do for my own projects including open-source stuff, I'm very time-limited, and some of the things I want to do would take multiple years. Some of these tools can take that down to weeks, do I can do more with less, and from that perspective the cost is worth it.
I've found it to be terrible when you allow it to be creative. Constrain it, and it does much better.
Have you tried the planning mode? Ask it to review the codebase and identify defects, but don't let it make any changes until you've discussed each one or each category and planned out what to do to correct them. I've had it refactor code perfectly, but only when given examples of exactly what you want it to do, or given clear direction on what to do (or not to do).
Yes, this is a prime example of completely gratuitous breakage.
The change adds zero value. It's a deliberate API break. And it could have been made a non-breaking change all for the sake of a single one-line macro or inline function.
This isn't unintentional. It's a deliberate choice they have made. And not just this one, it's happened repeatedly over the years.
The thing that really gets me, as an end-user/developer, is that it forces incompatible changes not only in my codebases, but in every other application developer's codebases worldwide. A small change in GTK+ imposes hundreds of thousands of man-hours of maintenance work upon every application developer. And this burdensome work not only takes time, effort and money, it doesn't improve our applications one iota, and on top of that, it breaks backward compatibility so our code will not longer build with older GTK+ versions. Most of us won't be chasing the latest development release, applications might need to target a wide range of distributions with a wide range of GTK+ versions. So it's a logistical nightmare as well.
The lack of concern for the needs of actual application developers is why I eventually had to give up on it entirely. At some point it doesn't make any sense either commercially or for free software development, it's just masochism.
I completely agree. This comment should be carved in stone for future generations to see. API breaking changes should never be made just to chase illusory butterflies.
Just for the record, Xalan-C is even less maintained than libxslt. It had no releases for over a decade, and I made a final 1.12 release in 2020 adding CMake support, since the existing builds had bitrotted significantly, along with a number of outstanding bugfixes.
It's a great shame we are now in a situation where there is only a single proprietary implementation of the very latest version of the standard, but even the open-source 1.x implementations are fading fast. These technologies have fallen out of favour, and the the size and complexity of the standards is such that it's a non-trivial undertaking to keep them maintained or create a modern reimplementation.
It's more than generous. You can run it with much less resource utilisation than this. It only needs a few tens of kilobytes of flash (and you can cut it right back if you drop bits you don't need in the library code). 32 KiB is in the ballpark of what you need. As for RAM, the amount you need depends upon what your application requires, but it can be as little as 4-8 KiB, with needs growing as you add more library code and application logic and data.
If you compare this with what MicroPython uses, its requirements are well over an order of magnitude larger.
The main source of complexity isn't the .deb format, but the tooling and infrastructure around the format. It's mired in overcomplexity, and it's very much still in a '90s mindset of building locally with multiple layers of Perl-based tools. If it was rethought to be git-native using docker images or equivalent then it could be of equivalent simplicity to other contemporary systems. When I look at what you can do with the FreeBSD ports and Poudriere or with Homebrew and other systems, I see how much of the complexity has been added incidentally and incrementally, with good intentions, but a radical rethink of the basic workflows are necessary to consolidate and simplify them.
[I used to maintain sbuild and was the author of schroot back in the day]
Honestly, I found that one of the most user-hostile workflows they implemented to date. It's really obnoxious.
The number of times I've wanted to save in their native XCF file format is... zero. But I always want to save in a standard image format, and I don't really consider that to be exporting, just saving.
I understand why they wanted this, but I don't think many of their actual users did.
They do that to preserve data. If you’re making a complex image with all sorts of layers and masks and then you save to a JPEG, you lose all that information as the image is flattened and compressed. Saving in the native format lets you be able to open the file again at a later time and resume working without losing any data.
Users would be seriously upset if they made JPEG the default and the native format a buried option. People would be losing data left and right.
Saving as XCF still loses the undo history so it's really a question of which/how much information is lost. Meanwhile if you have a single layer image and export it to PNG which preserves as much relevant information as saving it as XCF it will then still complain about unsaved data if you try to close it. Absolutely infuriating behavior that no real user ever asked for.
Affinity does the same thing; I don't remember about Photoshop.
The obnoxious thing is separating "save" and "export" into different menu items. Much (most?) software lets you choose "save as" (including saving as a different format) from the regular File/Save dialog. But Affinity Photo (and apparently GIMP) forces you to cancel out of the Save dialog for the millionth time and go back to the File menu and choose "Export." It's annoying and unnecessary.
I don’t know, pretty much all production software I’ve ever used has made a distinction between export and save. Because export takes compute and can change the output, not all formats are created equal.
Saving in the internal format is probably rare if you’re just a user, but if this is a 40 hour a week job, then the compute time savings and potential disk space saving from doing that might be worth it.
The problem not being able to make the save/export decision from the same dialog. A lot of software lets you do "save as" and pick a different format AFTER you go down the File/Save path.
Having to cancel out of File/Save and go back to the File menu and choose File/Export, over and over and over in software that defies this convention, is incredibly irritating.
The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing. And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible. Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.