I've heard this over and over — that Macs are locked-down, uncustomisable machines — and I don't agree with it at all.
I use replacements for almost all the built-in apps. I use a custom launcher. My editor config Git repo is approaching ten years old, and my shell config Git repo is almost eight. There are standard interfaces to per-application Preferences and keyboard shortcuts. When I sit down to use someone else's Mac, I have no idea how to use it!
What changes am I missing? The only thing I can think of is that I can't use a different window manager or a different kernel, but I'm fine with those already.
This started changing about a decade ago. The first time I noticed it was when Apple bundled all of the services involved in NAT into a huge binary (this would have been about OS X 10.8 or .9). You could turn it on or off, but there was no longer a built-in way to serve DHCP on both ports.
There's been a steady progress away from tools aimed at the entire skill gradient and towards the lower end of that gradient: Around 10.9 OSX got new file open/save dialogs, which were infinitely better if you used a mouse... but lacked any cmd-key shortcuts.
Gatekeeper has made it progressively harder for system tweaks like LaunchBar or Little Snitch to exist, and I've had to wrestle with SIP more than once.
In summary, earlier versions of OSX are perfectly fine (my one remaining mac is on 10.10), but Apple has not been doing itself any favors with the dev community in more recent iterations of the OS.
The GNU/Linux community also isn't bending to my will arbitrarily either. Frustrating, to say the least.
In all seriousness, people are all happy to talk about how easy linux is to customize until you broach the subject of changing keybindings to use a mac-like scheme (using command for gui interactions as a rule of thumb, readline bindings everywhere there's text entry), and you find out this is pretty much impossible. In reality software is mostly customizable in the way the creators built it to be customized, including things like windowserver and macos mouse behavior and X11 and gtk and emacs and bash.
As a result, I'd guess that most of the purchasers of new computers are in the generations above and below the ones with technical knowlege: the new generation, without the background to even care about being a power user, and the older generation where most aren't power users anyway.
BTW, I'm using i3, and I think it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to what you're describing. It sounds like you may need to find an OS that's designed to expose the level of customization that you want.
> BTW, I'm using i3, and I think it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to what you're describing.
Really?
How does one go about configuring i3 such that, say, any time you hit ctrl-w it deletes backwards to the previous white space (a common readline binding) in any text entry box in, say, Firefox, IntelliJ, Spotify, VLC, Amarok, Gimp, etc?
Are you quite certain that “readline bindings everywhere there’s a textbox” is really in the scope of i3’s customizations? What OP described goes quite a bit beyond window manager customization.
> It sounds like you may need to find an OS that's designed to expose the level of customization that you want.
On OS X this can be achieved by placing
{
"^w" = "deleteWordBackward:";
}
I don't think this supports the argument that Mac OS X is somehow more customizable that Linux. In my opinion it's the opposite: every application is strongly encouraged to use the same text widget. We're lucky in this case that we like this function. In other cases (like virtual desktop management) Apple's decisions have been towards less customizability. I believe that has long been a Hallmark of Apple, back when OS X was released Apple scoffed at the idea that anyone would ever want to change the default theme (which at that time was a bit more extreme). A "gray" theme.was introduced after much pressure from customers.
That said, I seriously doubt that the Apple Computer of today is as interested in ensuring this functionality to the same degree as the Apple of ten years ago. They have made many developer unfriendly decisions in the past decade, I wouldn't count on this feature being present indefinitely.
Yes, I clearly already understood that. I was pointing out how absurd ColanR’s claim was that he could do this all through i3 config “super easy”. It isn’t within the domain of the window manager to control the toolkits’ widget bindings, which are all over the map in terms of customizability.
> I don't think this supports the argument that Mac OS X is somehow more customizable that Linux. In my opinion it's the opposite: every application is strongly encouraged to use the same text widget.
Which, in my opinion, strongly increases customizability because I can be sure the things I customize work the way I want them to effectively everywhere; I am not limited by every third application author’s obstinate choice to hardcode some other set of bindings in some deliberately incompatible toolkit.
I’d suggest that our disagreement comes down to the fact that configurability is not a linear gradient, but a fairly complex, multi-dimensional topic with a lot of subtle trade-offs that different people may have different preferences surrounding.
> I wouldn't count on this feature being present indefinitely.
Sure. Similarly I don’t count on however you do this in GTK today still working in 5 years, given how often they CADT their way into new incompatible configuration systems.
Of course it’s system textbox specific; if you reimplement your own, there is no magic involved.
And obviously it’s possible in GTK. And KDE, and one-offs like Firefox, for that matter. I’d suggest that the fact that you have to do it in about 20 different ways to cover your common apps, and a few will not even offer this kind of configuration, is net-worse than the OS which makes this so easy because there’s a standard GUI toolkit that nearly everything uses.
This doesn’t mean “Linux Bad, OS X Good”, but it is indicative of the fact that “Linux is configurable and OS X isn’t” is a very poor descriptor of reality.
Configurability is a complex topic with a lot of different facets, and both OSes offer different ranges of ease of configurability in different areas.
ColanR made the extraordinary claim that, ostensibly because he uses i3, “it would be (relatively) super easy to change the keybindings around to <command for gui interactions as a rule of thumb, readline bindings everywhere there's text entry>”. This is a very typical Linux user’s response in which they very narrowly equate mac keybindings with “window manager configuration”, when the flexibility offered by the system is in reality much broader than that.
I know atleast a few programs that people use on osx which break these conventions, hence it's not as universal as your proclaim.
Unless you run only their store apps on your computer(which most likely no developer does), then maybe what you say makes sense. Otherwise it's not better than linux distros like elementary OS where convention is also to use gtk only apps(similar to cocoa only).
This is, frankly, horseshit.
I run a lot of non-store apps, and absolutely none of them are GTK based, because GTK apps on OS X run through X Windows and look and work like dogshit. Next to nobody is voluntarily running that garbage.
Qt uses native text widgets, and works with the default input customization just fine. I can’t even begin to think of a development app that would be written in sdl2, a bloody games API.
Very, very few apps commonly in use by devs on OS X use anything other than native widgets, and it’s ridiculous to suggest otherwise.
The situation is a far, far, laughable cry from elementary OS, because outside of a small limited set of apps specifically targeted at such a niche distro, most Linux apps are still written in a hodgepodge of inconsistent wheel-reinventing mess of incompatible toolkits. The situation is night-and-day in inconsistency compared to OS X.
A lot of games do, some even have their built-in editor and it's not about sdl2, it's anything custom widget toolkit. So your thing is a nice convention which often works but not always.
> laughable cry from elementary OS, because outside of a small limited set of apps specifically targeted at such a niche distro
Small limited set? a lot of programs are already written with gtk, distro merely enforce this convention in their app store like apple does.
I am not going to bother commenting on obvious things about how consistent OS X is.
Cmd-Shift-A: Open Applications folder
Cmd-Shift-H: Open Home folder
Cmd-Shift-D: Open Desktop folder
Cmd-Shift-O: Open Documents folder
Cmd-Option-L: Open Downloads folder
Cmd-Shift-L: Open Library folder
Cmd-Shift-.: Toggle Hidden Files
Cmd-[: Back
Cmd-]: Forward
Cmd-Up: Up
Cmd-Shift-G: Use the filesystem however the fuck you like, with tab completion.
So much easier!
Embarrassingly I am not new to OSX/MacOS.
cmd-s Save
cmd-n New folder
cmd-shift-s Save As
It's possible some have been added back.
Not true. The shortcut is cmd-shift-g which allows one to select files via the standard filesystem directory hierarchy, using a widget which supports tab completion.
Cmd+Shift+G withing an open/save diolog gets you a dialog where you can enter a path with tab completion support.
All macs do.
If i can expect a macbook to work properly running macos, but can't expect a laptop running Linux to work properly, that's all I need to know. I'm not going to be all "I guess it doesn't matter that my laptop doesn't sleep, they have hundreds of models to account for!" and just deal with it.
So--mac and linux are equal?
If you must rebuild Apple’s OSS kernel, you can follow the instructions here: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...
Do you mean i3 cannot handle general browsing tasks?
Please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
An obsolete laptop is the same as an obsolete phone: it's one where it chugs when opening Spotify, or Slack, or any other "nobody ever bothered to optimize this" app that everyone uses anyway.
Or, to put that another way: you can certainly retouch photos in GIMP, or even in Paint Shop Pro 7 on Windows XP. But what if you want to use seam-carving in your photo-retouching? PSP7 ain't got that. Once you know that your use-case dictates a modern version of some memory-hogging software, well, that constraint dictates what kind of computer is "obsolete" or not for you.
One of my biggest complaints about Apple is the difference between what I consider to be obsolete and what they do.
My Unity projects work out of the box.
There's no "real package manager" on any of the BSDs; package managers are a Linux-ism. BSDs (like Darwin) have base-systems, developed and released as a whole; and then, separately, userlands, delivered through some kind of ports system. Critically, nothing in the base system is ever dependent on the userland; the system always works fine with zero userland ports installed.
Under such a paradigm, there's absolutely no difference between a first-party ports ecosystem and a third-party one.
> You can't upgrade your hardware. Once your HW is unsupported by Apple you're stuck with an old OS that is unsupported by third party software as well.
Personally, I like the era of disposable computers. Most computers have got hardly anything in them these days, anyway; just an SoC and a battery. What would you upgrade? It'd be like upgrading the parts in an electric toothbrush. In both cases, there's just a few parts, and they all wear out at about the same rate, such that when the device is worn out, it's all worn out. Just get a new one, and recycle the old one for scrap (i.e. what Apple does when you use their trade-in program.)
(And there's the App Store, which is effectively a non-technically-inclined-user's "package manager".)
I like Homebrew -- is it not adequate enough for your needs?
The latest version of MacOS supports hardware from 2012. High Sierra (released 2 years ago) supports hardware from 2009 and 2010, and very little if any software released today won't run on it.
I don't want to do any of that any more.
Either it works out of the box, or it doesn't.
I think it'd be difficult to get the keyboard shortcut mappings I have working even in Linux -- Emacs-style keyboard shortcuts everywhere without interfering with the more typical keyboard shortcuts.
Another thing is that if I really need something from Linux or Windows, I can either run a VM, boot into one of those OSes natively, or remote desktop to a server with good remote desktop performance. Hackintosh's are a possibility though have their rough edges, and macOS runs better in a VM these days from what I hear, but macOS is my preferred host OS anyway for things like audio/music production apps and video editing, so I'd want to run macOS natively over other OS's anyway. For the stuff I currently do, Linux and Windows run fine in a VM.
So, going with the original analogy, macOS is like a hotel where you can have your own house inside.
I run an environment, on OSX, similar to this although (I assume) much less ambitious in the customization.
My biggest problem is the lack of focus-follows-mouse. I had this in the snow leopard days with an add-on called "mondomouse" which is abandonware and I attempted to solve it with "dwellclick" but that isn't really designed for what I need and doesn't work.
Now I see that in very, very new versions of OSX there is some buried setting in accessibility that does honest-to-god focus-follows-mouse (as in, raise window as if I clicked it when I hover over) ... can anyone confirm/deny ?
There are some third-party macOS window managers out there. Personally I use Amethyst. I'm sure they're not as powerful as Linux WMs can be, but it suits my tiling needs when I have an external monitor plugged in.
I'm still using a mid-2009 MBP. Upgraded the RAM, replaced the hard drive with an SSD, and just last week installed Catalina on it. It's still my daily driver lol.
Tl;dr: Customization is highly overrated.
False. Adding 16GB or 32GB RAM makes real difference to any machine. But it's not profitable for Apple, they want you to buy new one.
All the popular competitors to the MacBook Pro have soldered RAM including the XPS 13 and ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
Really the truth of the matter is that for 95%+ of people, RAM requirements have completed plateaued in the last 5-8 years or so.
They were certanly the first to implement that and starters of the wider trend.
I would argue that consumers demanding portability is not a “trend.”
And the only way to deliver true portability is to combine components. e.g. smartphones.
Do you want some oil on it(ram)?
It's 80 euros because you have to ask the chef assistant (apple store)
Do you want different kind of pasta which is the standard for that receipe? (Nvidia GPU)
You can't
So what are you really paying for?
The forniture?
I go to a museum if I wanna see some fine classy decor...
Hotel-chic is very clean, very minimal, very sparse. Just enough to have the necessary conveniences that appeal to everyone, with absolutely nothing personalised for any individual.
As of about 10 years ago, I made a conscious choice to stop customising my desktop (and then later, mobile) experience away from the defaults as much as possible, as I was fed up of having to document and then re-deploy all of my customisations every time I had to reinstall for whatever reason, which was far too frequent for my liking.
At the same time, I'd been moving home roughly every year for the 7 years prior already, and had grown weary of all my physical effects. I started disposing of more and more of my things (inadvertently marie kondo-ing my life before it was a "thing" I was aware of) and decreasing the personalisation of my physical space down more and more.
I now essentially live a hotel-esque lifestyle, with most of my personal customisations fitting in a small corner of the room. Added bonus of this is with the frequent travel I need to do for work, I can take one or two items with me, and the hotel room instantly feels like home.
I guess this explains why I'm relatively happy as an Apple user. The lack of customisation doesn't bother me, as I don't customise anything outside of the bare minimums (wallpaper and privacy settings, thats about it).
It also explains how I'm able to use Windows 10 at work without killing anyone, while my colleagues are all using tiling window managers under Linux and looking at me like I'm crazy for not wanting to spend a week tweaking and customising my environment....
I just copy my home-dir settings everywhere I go. I have a different setup on my desktop and laptop. It is mostly .config that I need. But when moving, it just moves along to a new machine or install. Happily living on the same config files for 20 years now, and I only need to adjust as I desire. I do have daily backups ofcourse.
I just wanted to draw more attention to this particular snippet. That's a remarkable achievement, and you should be proud of yourself and your working environment.
Regardless that most other people (myself included) are unlikely to be able to replicate what you've done, the reality is you've done it, and it works for you. Good job.
I use KDE, which has many, many, many buttons and knobs available for tweaking. I use hardly any of them: I can set KDE as I wish in about 2 minutes. I add a "Keep window above others" button to the default minimize-maximize-close set, activate "Focus follows mouse", and swap Ctrl and Caps Lock. I think I also change the task switcher (Alt+Tab thing) to only cycle though not-minimized windows on the current screen.
For everything else (Zsh, SSH, etc), I just carry around my dotfiles. I've done this since about 2002.
If I were setting myself up with a clean KDE environment more than once every 2-3 years, I'd make the small effort to work out which bits of KDE config I need to keep. So far, it's not worth it.
They have barely changed in the last decade. Two key things to be able to work like this were:
* Moving most of my computing to 3 platforms (Emacs, Unix and Firefox). I don't use any GUI application aside from a manual tiling window manager.
* Migrating to a barebones distribution, Arch / NixOS. A small half a page imperative / declarative script is enough to configure all my system.
It's more about personal psychology (willing to stick to something that works and not tinker, or even willing to do with less and not seek improvements all the time), than some technological feat (e.g. achieving some "perfect" config).
Possibly not for many people.
But it's not comparable to sway/i3 - not in terms of customisability or functionality. What I suspect we have on Windows, are virtual desktops and snap-to-edge/quarter tiling. Maybe you can get some rigid layouts if you install PowerToys/FancyZones, but it's still a far cry from my usual working environment where I can dynamically create layouts by opening new windows, configure shortcuts to my own desire, programmatically send messages to the window manager and so much more.
With Windows (and to be honest, macOS too), you get least-common denominator functionality aimed at users who don't know what a window manager is.
I have a couple config changes i make to use W10, and Desktops and f.lux are must-haves.
I tried this for some time and came to the conclusion that for me most desktops' defaults don't fit me and it seems to get worse from release to release.
Save the pages with SessionBuddy on Chrome. Then when I have to actually work, I can go to my Windows desktop and jump right into work.
It's come to a point where I'm basically using two operating systems daily and it hasn't affected my workflow one bit
It is also terrible if you stay there for more than a couple of days.
Apple is not an hotel, it is a fast food with overpriced menus because they use expensive ingredients, charge 2x the price because of their fancy plates, but what you get it's still an overpriced hamburger.
It's like ordering a 25$ cheeseburger from McDonald because it's made with a percentage of Kobe beef
- Unless watching movies (not something I used it for) the wide screen aspect ratio was a big step down for productivity. IDEs, browsers, etc. all feel very cramped compared to on a more square 13" MBP.
- With Ubuntu pre-installed, out of the box, the sleep/hibernate mode used about 25% battery per 12 hours of sleep. I was able to configure a working sleep mode but this is the sort of basic functionality I expect to work on a high-end laptop.
- Multi-monitor - with mixed DPI - just never worked and I tried every suggestion I could find.
- Overall battery management was poorer - probably not Dell's fault as I expect this is an issue with the way Linux applications are written. A regular pattern was re-starting applications whenever the fan would start whirring up.
- This could be an issue with our set-up but I had to write a script that ran in the background to refresh the WiFi connection. There was some ARP issue that I wasn't able to (nor had time to) fully debug.
- This is pretty subjective, but I found the keyboard to be cramped an unergonomic.
I actually wanted to like this as I've primarily used Linux on my desktops for a couple of decades.
The camera is no longer placed at the bottom of the screen in the newest model (9380), they moved it up top
With Linux, we have a choice of over 20 different housemaids and lawn-cutting robots, though choosing between them is difficult at first.
Most lawn robots can also sweep patios or shovel snow, so if you move to a different climate you can use the same tools.
Or are we still talking about Linux?
The absolute worst, edge-case-est thing I’ve hit: I did have to install a COPR to install (with zero configuration) Bumblebee to be able to completely disable my discrete GPU to save battery life when I was on vacation, and multi-monitor with Bumblebee sucks, so when I got back I uninstalled Bumblebee and Nouveau took back over.
> Most lawn robots can also sweep patios or shovel
> snow, so if you move to a different climate you
> can use the same tools.
It never applied to other things, like Emacs, and was never a core tenet for server and GUI applications, or frameworks...
MacOS is unix-y enough to compile your own binaries like a John Siracusa does.
And if you’re a dev the Mac is still a much better platform for getting paid than any other platform (until ElementaryOS takes off...).
I use a number of really cool apps to do things I would get likely for free on Linux like magnet for window management (though that’s gotten a lot better in Catalina).
And... even though the current laptops have terrible keyboards my 2013 MacBook Pro is a bit rough around the edges it’s solid and fast and in my experience none of my pc laptops ever made it that far.
Side note: is there a Linux distribution or desktop environment that does what the Mac does with the scaling. Native res is 1440p but renders at half that to effectively give a 2x sharpen on image quality?
I'm not sure I understand your point here; is the fact that you need to use third-party apps for these things being described as a selling point, or is the argument just that you can still find solutions for things that might initially seem like they're missing?
The same can be said for Linux but I find OSX so far more productive for me and the eco system is so nice everything fits nicely with my other idevices
If you can afford hotel prices to actually live inside a nice one (more than 12 sq meters), you can afford 5 people doing your laundry and other chores at your house
Btw, Xfce is a desktop environment while Ubuntu is a distribution. Perhaps you meant to write you're on Xfce instead of Gnome?
First time I hear the X1 Extreme is worse quality wise - I was thinking it'd be my next machine... like in a couple of years. Do you have more info?
Edit: in order to remove battery, you have to remove the whole bottom cover.
I use X1Carbons as a daily Linux driver after MBP and am very happy with them.
A few things which, although obvious in retrospect, I had to learn the hard way:
• Get a ThinkPad with physical buttons under the touchpad, if you like to track with your index finger and click with the thumb. I made the mistake of getting the kind where you push the entire touchpad, and it's very hard to use. Apple's was at least useable, this is not.
• Get a ThinkPad with a physical Ethernet port. USB dongles are finicky and unstable on Linux, and there are places / desks / offices where the WiFi is flaky.
• Choose the stable release of a well-supported OS (Ubuntu, Mint... whatever) because the beta / newest / testing version will make you lose time on bugs and freezes.
- ThinkPads have amazing linux support. Dells aren't bad either. I have used a few dell laptops with linux as my daily drivers and no issues. Currently typing this on a Latitude E7450 and have had everything working out of the box.
- I am using a USB wired connection without issues, works out of the box.
- Currently using Manjaro linux and enjoying the heck out of it. Haven't done a reinstall in over a year and it's very stable across updates.
You can customize your room (your Window Manager, Terminal, etc...) but when you try to make yourself at home in the bathroom or kitchen (use and/or customize common applications), you run into issues. [1]
Since everyone has a different preferences, you have to make compromises.
On Mac, all apps follow similar guidelines. And the end result are beautiful, powerful, intuitive and feature-rich native applications, that make the best use of all the available system features.
The good ones, at least.
1. The thermal situation on newer Thinkpads needs to be called out. Even with undervolting, there doesn’t seem to be a sweet spot where you can avoid regular throttling without the CPU hitting unsafe temperatures. I’ve heard it can be somewhat remedied by applying more thermal paste to the CPU than the meager amount Lenovo provides out of the box (doing it yourself voids your warranty). Ultimately, I think there is a clear regression in the thermal design between Lenovo’s newer laptops and classic Thinkpads like the X200. The internals just aren’t designed to properly dissipate heat and while it’s nice that the fan is quiet, I wish it did more to cool the device. This seems to be a common issue not just with the T480 but other newer Thinkpads like the X1 Carbon. If anyone has any advice here beyond iuvolt, throttled etc. please let me know.
2. My model has a WQHD display and I use an external monitor with the same resolution but a lower DPI. Linux in 2019 is still a bit dicey when it comes to mixed DPI setups. GTK+ 3.0 applications on Wayland scale perfectly between displays but Firefox is a bit buggy and Electron apps are laughably bad. It has come a long way for sure but there’s still work to be done.
All that said, I’m coming from a 2017 MacBook Pro that had way more issues from the failing keyboard to dead speakers and screen burn-in. I’m happier with the Thinkpad and enjoy using it as my daily driver. It’s a solid machine and the keyboard and port selection are perfect. No issues with running Linux on this device either. Everything just worked on a clean install and I’m able to do everything I did before on macOS whether it be software development, multimedia creation or just personal computing. The “hotel vs. home” analogy you used is dead-on and speaks to what I’ve always loved about Linux. I’ll take an OS that lets me tailor my own software experience over the proprietary equivalent any day.
Dell Thunderbolt Dock (TB16) is is disappointment. Others report problems as well.
Generally I'm not fond of XPS 13 (9350) but later firmwares got rid of most issues (except extremely long boot time).
On the other hand Dell is contributing to several Linux projects (such as fwupd) and all of XPS hardware (including touch screen) worked out of the box.
This is no longer the case in the latest gen, they've placed it back at the top on a very thin bezel still.
Never again.
I have used Linux since 1992, literally, but I still find the mac os X more cohesive and fluid. Do not get me wrong, I love linux, but on the XPS I felt like I still have to futz with the OS too much. "hey, I just went to work, I am on the OTHER wifi now mr Dell XPS laptop. Hello? HELLO? OK, gotta reboot and turn the wifi on and off three times to connect". This is with the Dell supplied ubuntu fully updated. Ugh.
I have the same problem big time on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (which otherwise I love). Very unnatural wrist posture to avoid errant clicks!
If you can't find it then let me know, I'll google it.
Glad to see my suggestion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17314002 worked then :) But I run it once in my startup script along with my xmodmap changes and it seems fine to me...
Compatibility wise the dell is great but build quality is lacking. The Thinkpads (X, T, Carbons) are all light years ahead and have similar - if not better - compatibility out of the box.
I have a X1 Carbon 6th gen and the battery life is awesome and everything besides the fingerprint reader works out of the box.
try to avoid gender-specific analogies in computing. You may think you are being clever, but you're really just making yourself look like a cad (And not everybody will give you this feedback directly. They will just stop talking to you).
What is the problem with gender-specific analogies in computing? If I'm making an analogy with relationships, and I am a man, why wouldn't I use a female for the other half?
I guess that to some extent this exchange is affected by being cross-cultural without the participants being aware of it. The fine-pointed contemporary standards that currently apply in—for example—the major cities of the U.S. are not in circulation worldwide. This leads to misunderstanding and excessive harshness. People read comments as if they were written by their next-cubicle neighbor instead of someone on the other side of the world. Does that matter? I think it does; we instinctively make allowances for who the other person is and where they're coming from, in the interests of getting along. Alas, on a text-based internet forum that information isn't available, making tolerance harder. This can easily make the difference between thinking "god, what an asshole" and thinking, "wow, what a pleasant and articulate person". Unfortunately for us all here, the bias is always toward the asshole bit, not the pleasant bit.
Because this bias is so strong and so poorly understood, as moderators we normally urge tolerance and ask readers to stretch a bit to understand each other. In fact I was just writing a defense of your original post in that spirit. But then I figured I'd better read it thoroughly, and noticed this:
> I might stumble a bit and touch her in ways she doesn't like, but overall we get the job done and nothing is broken afterwards
That one sentence is in a different category from the rest of what you wrote. It's one thing to use gendered relationship analogies in a technical discussion. In many places where HN readers reside, that now feels anachronistic and crude—a bit like "take my wife, please" jokes—but is easy enough to give the benefit of the doubt to. But when you take it as far as a sexual analogy that toys with ambiguity around consent, that's crossing into a different zone altogether.
I defend that sentence as meaning "touch her with consent in ways that are different that what she is used to". In keeping with it being an analogy for config files, I would like to edit it to read "stumble a bit when I touch" but it seems that my post is locked to editing.
You are invited to edit that phrasing in, or if you can unlock the post I'll do it.
Thank you for taking the time to explain. I'll do my best to apply what I've learned.
It gets worse actually. If you word your comment in a way that pattern-matches any highly-charged idea that people already have from elsewhere, they are sure to interpret you as meaning that, even if your intention was in a different place entirely. It is comparable to a smaller mass getting pulled toward a much larger mass, even if its intention was to fly elsewhere.
On a forum like HN, where we'll all responsible for taking care of the commons, the burden is on the speaker to disambiguate. To do otherwise is effectively to troll the community, and it turns out not to matter much whether someone did that intentionally or not; what matters is the effects it has.
> If you word your comment in a way that pattern-matches
> any highly-charged idea that people already have from
> elsewhere, they are sure to interpret you as meaning that
There are 7.7 billions people in the world, even if every American chose to not talk to me, there will still be 7.4 billion people to talk to.
Fortunately most of us don't live in the US and people are not creepy weirdos who stop talking to you for stupid reasons.
This probably would have gone down well back in the 60s, but we’ve hopefully since moved on from comparing women to objects, and comparing how we treat women to how we treat inanimate things.
Personally, I downvoted because the author’s attitude to women has absolutely nothing to do with discussing good alternatives to laptops.
And the more men and women wait for that moment to chose the right person, the more the probability of making the right choice increases.
As long as I support women rights, I don't see what's wrong if an eterosexual man talks about choosing the right woman for him.
Should men not chose carefully their partners?
There are very vocal people who have very strong opinions that all hypothetical relationships much be gender-neutral, to them it is horrible to "assume" that if one partner is male then the other is female.
Possibly also cross-domain projection of various strongly held views.
They actively downvote any comments that suggest that M-F is "normal" all over the internet, from Reddit to StackOverflow. I would say it's been happening for a while but the past few months have been very extreme.
There is nothing objectifying anybody here. I really do not see how anyone is getting at that. In what way have I made anybody an "object"?
With all the respect in the world, I understand what you are crusading for. But you are on a witch hunt, and actively making people your enemies who would otherwise support your cause.
That type of behavior is termed "Call-out culture," or "Cancel culture."
(I also find many Dell and Thinkpad models to be as good as if not better laptops than MacBooks).
I'm very happy with the switch. Though I'm on (Debian+) Xfce now instead of Ubuntu and would go for a ThinkPad instead of the XPS, because 1) I want a 14" screen 2) the XPS's fan is too loud, especially when Skyping 3) the XPS's camera is placed at the bottom of the screen instead of at the top, so people you have video calls with look up your nostrils.
[1]: https://fman.io/blog/home-and-hotel