> I loved Unity on desktop, and I know many others too.

I loved Unity in the desktop too (I had installed Ubuntu on an old Mac mini). I was disappointed when it was killed and then I switched to XFCE.

I found it was horrible. It is similar to GNOME here - a design for tablets and smartphones. It simply does not work on the desktop computer.

To me, the killer feature of Unity was the searchable application menus. Wish that was still a thing

It really was! I have never even used a tablet, but I was disappointed when they dropped Unity and went back to the old way.

But I was never a Windows user, either, and I've never held the idea that there is one normal and right way to do a computer interface, so I think I was more open to it than many people are.

I've had wake-from-suspend issues on plenty of non-nvidia machines, and I have had nvidia machines that have no issues.

I think it has nothing to do with the GPU and everything to do with the motherboard chipset.

Agreed. AMD just works for me on linux. My problem is that I am addicted to 6+ monitors and top end gpus... nvidia just seems to hate linux for top end setups. Which is sad, windows just handles my dumb 5060+5090 setup easily. Gaming on linux has gotten way better, but I still can't gigure out how to get some games working. So I'm stuck between using linux + sway / i3 which I looooove... and not being able to get the value out of my $6k gaming rig. Sadly this is a tale that's been going on for 20 years for me.

It’s the only issue I have on my CachyOS install on an AMD 5900X+9070XT without additional peripherals. It seems like when I hit sleep it doesn’t manage to fully enter sleep (illustrated by the power lights) and then never wakes up anymore until a hard power reset.

Yeah, it is a general PC thing. Steam deck sleeps perfectly, so it can be done properly, but manufacturers are lazy.

Ubuntu Touch isn't a Canonical thing anymore, it's community driven and was picked up by the UBPorts foundation, which is a non-profit.

Wonder about power usage.

Mac OS Touhou would probably be better received than Mac OS Tahoe.

Almost assuredly, given that 10.0 was released on 32bit PPC... and was built around Carbon, not Cocoa... yeah it's changed just a wee bit.

> figure the new iOS will run like crap on it and then I'll be forced to get a new phone.

Indeed, it does run like crap on older phones. You made the right choice. I don't feel forced to upgrade my phone but the new OS definitely drains the battery faster and feels slightly sluggish, making me regret the "upgrade."

What about the security update, especially for the phone ? There have been critical flaws patched recently.

Agree that iOS 26 is trash and it empty my iPhone 13 mini battery in less time than I need to write it.

For better or worse my 2018 iPad is stuck on ios 18 but I still get security updates.

I'm someone else, but I also feel like macOS is rubbish.

On linux, if I get a kernel panic, I can dig into the kernel, add debug logs, understand what's going on, and potentially fix it. If I want to swap to a scrolling window manager like niri, I can.

On macOS, it's a black box and any radar I file with apple vanishes in a black hole never to be seen again. There's hardly any customization, and the default UX is horribly undiscoverable and can't easily be driven with just a keyboard.

As a hacker, the above makes macOS garbage, and I'd assume anyone on hacker news would understand that desire to be able to understand and hack on the software you use.

Presumably the way he described in the previous paragraph.

> But it’s clear Apple doesn’t test the UI layout much with the new glass look turned off

I turned it off and the keypad buttons for screen time passcode became white on white.

I love GrapheneOS, but note that it only runs on Google Pixels. But that's what I chose for the smartphone.

Hopefully GrapheneOS will soon be supported by a non-US phone...

I really like my Fairphone. I would but their next model if it grapheneos was available.

Graphene only runs on Pixel phones

Look into KDE Connect¹ - it provides some of that seamless experience. It even has some basic support for syncing between iOS and Gnome, but it's originally designed for seamless integration between Android and KDE's plasma desktop.

1. https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

There used to be programs that would connect to multiple proprietary systems, like Pidgin. If we had this today we'd have one free-software app for WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram (and some used in other countries, like IIRC Zangi?). However, the social and regulatory environment changed - now whoever made that app could expect to be charged with a crime.

For the context of this thread, WhatsApp and Signal are both American.

Just look to the federal United States government using it for communicating military strikes, and including journalists.

Not to mention that many of the most important open source events and organizations are based in Europe.

But technically you can also do that with chromium and gecko, but it's a lot of work, so very few do. And those that do don't cut the line, they'll almost all still follow upstream and just apply their changes.

So in the end, they're still dependent on the decisions made in the US. That doesn't need to be a problem, but I don't think "you can get the source code" really changes that.

The situation is a bit different now with sanctions.

Depends on if it's a hardware bug or not

You can but the firmware that is needed to run it is American, because the hardware is American. Even if the company wants to open source it, the US government can block it in whatever country.

The FreeBSD Foundatioin is based in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

OpenBSD is based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

NetBSD is a non-profit based out of Deleware, USA

I am not sure exactly what you mean by "US-focused" though. I do not think the US government has much direct influence in practice. Both governance and engineering contributions in BSD are highly distributed internationally.

That said, FreeBSD in particular has quite a lot of corporate contribution. Netflix is a heavy user of and contributor to FreeBSD for example. And the recent $750,000 laptop push in FreeBSD is being driven by Quantum Leap Research out of Virginia.

The fact that the BSD systems have less coporate reliance does not necessarily offer more protection though. There is less corporate "control" simply because the BSD systems are less important economically.

You could fork Linux anytime you like and your fork would than have as little corporate control as NetBSD. And just like NetBSD, not taking US corporate contributions would mean less engineering investmetn overall and potentially having to do more yourself.

I mean, it would probably be easier for the EU or China to fork Linux than it would be for them to migrate to OpenBSD if they wanted independence from US exposure.

Yes, it started at Berkeley after all, with mostly contributions from US universities, and compiler toolchains are GCC and clang.

Framing it as "fanatical" is a way of not understanding people's needs sometimes and that makes it harder for oneself to admit when they got it right - after all you don't want to find that you've turned into "a fanatic."

I like rolling distributions. Fedora was my longtime ship and at the beginning it was a pain because I always wanted to build something that wasn't available - the newest version of something like python. Then you wouldn't be able to build it because it had dependencies that needed to be newer also than what Fedora had.

I spent countless hours sorting out dependencies, clashes with the versions that were already installed that I couldn't remove, building and rebuilding things to keep them working and fixing @#$%@ SELinux permissions issues that made things fail extremely mysteriously. I tried making my own updated RPMs to ease the dependency management but that turned out to be so hard to do that I gave up in frustration - some tiny mistake and you have to go through almost the whole process again to get an updated RPM. One would have mysterious failures in the RPM build process that were extremely difficult to debug.

Then RedHat fixed the problem in an even worse way: by releasing new versions at a crazy rate. The upgrade process never seems to go smoothly for me.

Ubuntu was/is more uptodate generally but it's based on exactly the same strategy. Packaging on Ubuntu seems to me to be an even more incredible mess of confusion with documentation that doesn't help one iota.

I tried various things but the one that stuck with me was Artix. It's rolling and it sometimes breaks e.g. today when the new nvidia 590 drivers installed and they don't work with my old card. The upside is that it's always at the bleeding edge and I rarely need to build things myself - and if I do I usually already have the required dependencies. Packages also install with all the development headers etc and for me that is just a luxurious simplicity. I could also understand the PKGBUILD files and use makepkg without even needing to see the documentation. It just works.

It also doesn't use systemd. That's a preference you might call fanatical but I did after all get off windows to use Linux partly so that "the man" wouldn't tell me what to like so why would I accept that kind of thing on Linux? I use dinit instead and that is what I would have liked systemd to be - a service manager with a simple file format that is a million times easier to write and more reliable than system V init scripts and the ability to use it for running things in a user session as well .... and nothing else.

Anyhow this is all driven by my personality - I like trying out new things. I'm not fantatical, I think?? My computer is a toy for my mind. My work machines can be "reliable."

There are really any ads in Android itself, even with Google Apps installed. Which, by the way, you don't need to use even if they are installed (except, for example, Chrome to get a different app store or whatnot-, just like a fresh Windows install needing to use Edge to get Firefox or Chrome).

And it's still miles easier to get Android to switch default apps and also respect your choices, than to get Windows to allow you to switch default apps and then shut the fuck about their crap.

Wow, so the only OSs with no money in them are the FOSS ones. Makes sense, though.

(No, at this point Android hardly counts as FOSS anymore.)

I would imagine a significant portion of the cloud revenue is derivative of windows though. Whether that’s lift and shift workloads or entra id which is picked over alternatives for its compatibility with existing windows and AD infrastructure.

The only reason Azure is a success though is because of Windows. Maybe now it's so big that it can exist without Windows but Windows is the gateway into Azure. So many other companies would kill for a platform (aka Meta) and here Microsoft has one and is treating it poorly. In pure financial terms it makes sense but, as a business strategy, I think it's severely lacking.

I don't think it's sentimentality, exactly. Who picks Azure or OneDrive or AD or Office 365 or Sharepoint or Teams or any Microsoft product or service if they're not already running Windows? The desktop operating system, "legacy" though it may be, has near universal reach and has therefore been key in pushing people to their more lucrative services. But they pushed too hard, it's too obviously shit, and now people and enterprises are looking for an exit. What then?

Since when does Apple share their roadmap of anything? They have been super-secretive for decades.

I mean, if this was the strategy, it has clearly failed, right? The Vision Pro doesn't have anything approaching a thriving app ecosystem.

And if this was the strategy, I'd have expected to see that consumer product by now. It has been almost two years.

> Those monopolies seem so scared to "miss the next smartphone" that they invest heavily in whatever their competitors do.

Monopolies so scared of the competition?

"refused to load whatever distro I tried from SSD" sounds very much like a feature in AMI InsydeH2O firmware (and possibly others) where-by one has to manually "trust" the boot-loader file the boot menu entry points to. This doesn't seem to apply to Microsoft Windows boot loaders so I've always assumed the signing certificate is checked directly against the MS UEFI CA root rather than the intermediate 3rd party certificate that is used by Microsoft to sign distro shim files.

I have kept a screenshot of the firmware setup for years to remind me where the option can be found; looking at it now:

menu: Security > "Select UEFI file as trusted"

That would bring up a file-chooser where one can navigate the files in the EFI System Partition and select the distro's initial boot-loader file. For example, for a Debian install it would either or both of:

/EFI/debian/shimx64.efi /EFI/debian/grubx64.efi

I’m not sure what your point is?

You were ahead of the curve on displays and behind the curve on phones and I guess congrats on the 2e start, I had an early Mac.

What does this have to do with the price of CPU cycles in clamshell PCs?

You abstained until ARM because you could see the future and you knew that the specs you demanded we’re gonna be available eventually?

Apple did some OS optimizations. But the next to last x86 laptop generation (the butterfly keyboard era) was really bad. The keyboards were bad and they had poor thermals

I remember battery life on my Late 2015 MBA was great for the time. It easily got through my post-secondary classes, 3-8 hours depending on the day, with leftovers. IIRC Apple claimed 12 hours of battery life. That was a significant improvement over the suggested 5 hours of my previous laptops.

Yeah, but that’s Mac, not Linux on Laptops of the era designed for Windows

It's important to distinguish between the Framework 13 and the Framework 16. The Framework 16 is by far the most ambitious of the two, and so it has had a lot more issues. I use a Framework 13, and I've loved it. It's light, has a solid frame, and runs Linux great. The battery life isn't great, and the speakers aren't either, but I've been able to mitigate the latter with EasyEffects.

If the 16 performs worse in the power efficiency department, that is not great, but it doesnt make my machine run any worse. Calling it heavy is crazy to me, the thing is tiny. If you think it's heavy you'd have trouble using an iPad. The screen thing was a shitty manufacturing issue, they released a kit to fix it, which I luckily didnt need since mine came after they fixed it in production.

Sleep just ceased to exist in the last few years and got replaced with an always on, low power mode.

I believe the reasoning was partly that suspend to RAM had serious reliability issues due to the complexity of saving the state, partly that people starting expecting cell phone-like performance where eg, mail is always received.

I haven't really played around with that much, sorry. I don't typically use sleep on my laptops. I prefer to either hibernate or just shutdown and start up again when I need it.

I'd guess that the X13s hardware support in Ubuntu is likely as good as Debian, and switching probably wouldn't help you much. I have noticed that newer kernel versions (notably 6.12 and later) and the latest firmware (as of sometime last year) really fixed a lot of little issues for the X13s. That probably makes a bigger difference than the distro. I'd check to see which versions you're using.

I have two laptops running linux. One is a MSI gaming laptop with RTX card that no one would recommend for linux.

I had to try about 10 distros before I settled on linux mint. Everything else had some problem but the driver manager on linux mint made setting up the RTX so flawless.

After 8 months of use, it is the best machine I have ever used. If I had just stuck with my old favorite KDE neon though I would have been posting on how not to get MSI if you want to use linux.

They certainly aren't in Europe, Africa or Asia, as not everyone has the income to afford Apple prices.

Just to be clear this is entirely a response to what I have in the parentheses, right?

Ok, perhaps it is not niche. I don’t know. I have never had to use a laptop for 12 hours without any ability to recharge but if that’s a common use case I’m happy that folks are finding a way to satisfy.

I think what you're running into is that you have a different attitude than some of us do about technology. I've been using computers for a very long time as well, but I don't feel a sense of entitlement to the latest and greatest features because it often comes with other compromises regarding freedom and control. Because Linux is several years behind Windows and Mac in terms of adopting those technologies, there is an evergreen argument in every thread about Linux which boils down to "Why can't it do this thing from the last four years?"

This is uniformly tiring and uninteresting. I've been using 1920x1080 displays for 25 years and they're just fine. A retina display is not necessary to do anything that I need. Similarly with these requirements about particular thermals and particular battery lifetime. I can buy a battery and I can find a wall outlet.

You're comparing not having those features to having your husband assassinated during a play. But I don't think a lack of those features ruins the computing experience the way having your husband assassinated would ruin the play. The thing that ruins the play for me is when they chain me to my seat and tell me I have to watch the whole thing while they pin my eyelids open. And that's how I feel about using Windows or Mac OS.

So to turn your original comment around, Windows and Mac OS can call me when they allow me to configure my system as I see fit, and not shove ads for their auxiliary services in my face every time I try to start a program or modify a setting.

If you know what to look for, you can also get good battery life. The 268V CPU will give you pretty good battery life.

Come on, buddy, at this point, nobody could take you seriously.

You are attributing to the software and OS a difference that exists because of hardware.

You can’t seriously sit here and say Linux battery life on x86 doesn’t reach your par when you’re comparing it to a completely different computing architecture.

You’re comparing apples to oranges and complaining the oranges are more sour than the apples.

Run Asahi Linux and tell me how it goes.

> travel - consulting

That's why pity

Pretty much every laptop on the planet will run Linux. Maybe your optics are tinted because you seem to be a Mac person, and Linux support for newer Macs has known issues with low power modes.

I note how your 12+ hour claim was reduced to 5 hours when you actually put it to real work. It's still impressive, of course, but 5 hours aren't out of reach for Ryzen laptops either.

BTW, I have a RISC-V platform with 8 1.6GHz CPUs that uses under 5W under full load; on your 100Wh battery it would last for 20 hours. It's not a complete system, and performance lags behind Apple/Intel CPUs, but I think in few years RISC-V may take a bite out of both.

I personally don't care about battery life, there are power outlets around everywhere I'll be more than several hours.

Still, no one is getting that kind of battery life outside apple, just the way it is. If your existence revolves around battery life there's no substitute.

But note, this thread is about replacing Windows, and Wintel does not do as well as Apple either. So this thread is off-topic.