I don't use WebEx much, but its "Hey, I know you just tried to quit but don't you want me to hang out just in case" attitude makes me CRAZY.
I'm a little confused by your reference to the "tray" on OSX tho. Where's the tray? We have a dock, and we have a menu bar where some things go, but no tray that I'm aware of.
This didn't used to be possible in MacOS X. When I switched from Windows, it was such a lovely surprise I considered it one of the best reasons to make the change.
That didn't last. Maybe five years ago, something changed and MacOS allowed programs to hijack focus. I was so disappointed.
Apple seems to be (very slowly) getting back to fundamentals. I wish reverting this change was part of that program.
Agreed. There's few seemingly "minor" things that can make me see bright red quite like this. It's such an actively hostile dark UX pattern. It should simply be made impossible.
What drives me crazy the most is I can see the context menu, for example for Webex, is disabled intentionally so we can't have the quit option there
People think I'm weird or must struggle with bad UIs for being picky and only using older FOSS apps but IME your life/UX is actually a lot better for it.
By now I do almost everything in the terminal except for web browsing. And what can I say, I do not miss the popups, confusing menus, dark UI patterns, and all the other bad ideas.
One dedicated solely for remote connection to my work. The company insists on software to scan that my PC is "secure", so I give them a finger with an almost virgin Windows install. Their crap can work only on Windows, so I don't actually have any choice.
Another is for any application that I use that I absolutely can't find replacement for on Linux.
I also have separate Linux VMs for suspect software like Zoom that I have to use but I don't trust to run on my machine or try to take over my desktop.
Maybe this software actually is crap and you know this for a fact. Maybe whoever is in charge doesn't know what they're doing. If so maybe ignore this comment.
With that said though, the principle to only allow "secure" systems for remote access sounds absolutely reasonable.
Having been on the other side of this situation, I have to say users like you are a real pain to deal with sometimes. There are always a few who "know their stuff thank-you-very-much", and feel that they need to "give the finger" to whatever measures are taken to secure things.
Try to see it from the IT-sec guy's perspective. Maybe some "crap" endpoint security software on the PCs isn't the end of the world if it helps keep things secure?
My personal laptop stays personal. It's mine and doesn't belong to anyone else. I never use it for work, even if alongside me during working hours. Zero crapware, minimal AV.
I have the same approach to phones. There's my phone, and my work phone. I was pressured to put Outlook, Teams on my personal phone since my work phone is switched off out of hours - I nearly succumbed, until that Office Portal app wanted to 'manage my device'. Nope. Our primary on-call comms mechanism remains SMS/direct call.
If employer is really interested in achieving some measure of security, there would have to be separate computer configured and locked to only allow it to be used for work.
That would, I think be "reasonable".
What I think is not reasonable is meddling in my own machine which I treated as my own until one day my employer said "Sorry, from now your private PC is ours to audit because we are not willing to spend equivalent of two days of your income to provide a machine for you to securely, conveniently and reasonably access our system".
Nobody really cared for the fact that my all machines are running Linux, they just have assumed that I must have some kind of PC and that that PC is running either Windows or Linux. And so they configured their system so that before I can use Citrix (which works perfectly fine on Linux) their piece of crap written for Windows or Macos (no Linux version) must run and report what is installed and running on my machine for their own silly needs.
No, that is not "reasonable" and for that my honest middle finger.
It's obviously not really reasonable to expect you to install such things on your private computer. Sounds like there could actually be some legal issues with such practice?
If it was your own choice to use your private computer then that's a different story. But it sounds like it is definitely not by choice.
> Nobody really cared for the fact that my all machines are running Linux
2021 is the year Linux becomes a mainstream desktop OS right? ;-)
Except I have been running Linux on desktops since 1999. I have Debian server that has been regularly updated since 2000 (that includes hardware changes and moving OS image from HDD to HDD and finally to SSD).
There is also the matter of endpoint protection to consider. If I am allowing a personal device to connect to my environment, how do I know that device is secure? The only way to have any level of assurance to that fact is to install remote monitoring agents, inspect the configuration of the system, and restrict administrative permissions so the end-user (or an attacker who hijacks the end user's access) cannot mess with things in such a way as to compromise the already shaky ground the integrity of that system stands upon.
If I worked at your company, I would give two options: either use a corporate machine for work activities, or if using a personal machine for whatever reason then IT gets administrative control of the device. There is no third option. And before IT assumes administrative rights to manage the device, the end user is signing an acceptable use policy that they agree to any and all IT security controls placed upon the device. If that is unacceptable then the alternative is always to use the corporate device.
I am not sure if you're an FTE or a contractor or what your locale is, but IMO imposing that kind of control over a privately owned device without an agreement would be at best inappropriate, and potentially illegal. My response would have been "No, thank you." I do however sympathize that it is not always possible to take that stance.
Not to mention things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25843874
I can use my t440s (7yo) for over 24 hours on three batteries, internal 3 cell, and external 3 cell and 9 cell. I use it for light development, reading PDFs, some web, etc.
There are also laptops that are more Linux friendly than others. It is best to buy laptop specifically for Linux use and do research before the purchase.
I've used it on many laptops including a fully specced Dell XPS 13 (which burned out after a small spill on the keyboard)
My tip is to always have IPA, distilled water and tools to disassemble and clean your laptop.
Safest method is to use distilled, deoxygenated water (aka electronic water) to remove most contaminants, followed by 99% isopropyl alcohol or 96% ethyl alcohol to remove the rest and also water.
Don't skimp on water and alcohol, submerge the board and use brush while submerged, to pull and dilute contaminants.
Just never use tap or mineral water. You can use regular distilled water as long as you do it quickly, but unless it is deoxygenated it will be corroding so don't leave it in water for long.
Alcohol is there mostly to dilute water so that it dries out very quickly. Without alcohol water could stay under components for a long time and kill or damage your board.
Alcohols can damage some plastic components, so don't keep it in alcohol fo too long, either.
It is also normal to wash a board in ultrasonic cleaner after any rework or at the end of production process (especially in small scale production).
On the other hand if you own an expensive machine that can be reasonably disassembled (ie. almost anything else than a Mac) and you plan to use it for a long time and you don't have any other insurance against spill, then you might be able to save a lot of money with a very small amount of effort.
My laptop was fully beefed up Lenovo T440s and I live in Poland. In Poland, this laptop represented about 3-4 average monthly salaries. Not much compared to half a day of effort to disassemble, clean and reassemble again.
Half a day assumes you have no idea what you are doing and you are need extra time to figure out what to do, find videos on Internet, figure out why you can't pull a part and what still keeps it in place, etc.
For a person that knows what they are doing this is half an hour of effort.
It's indeed annoying. More so that it generally is solved but is to be found somewhere in the fragmented linux ecosystem.
I had no issues with my laptop and it worked better than windows which turns it into a jetengine for some reason except for bluetooth earbuds for which i needed a fork of pulseaudio or so....
There are, of course, rough spots. But overall Thinkpads are just so much better machines.
For example, GNOME Files (formerly Nautilus) and the GTK file chooser are not even as good as competitors from the 1990s (like the Mac or Windows equivalents). GIMP and Inkscape are also noticeable steps down from the equivalent software we used in the 1990s (not just the well-known Adobe products, but also products from Corel, Macromedia, etc.)
My impression is that the Linux desktop is playing catch-up with the Windows and Mac desktops, but since Microsoft and Apple have better funding it’s an impossible job—the target is moving too fast. In an effort to catch up with modern UIs, features that used to work are getting broken or the UX is degrading. The GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3 switch is just one example. I’m not saying GNOME 2 is better than GNOME 3 overall, just that large-scale changes are moving too fast and the polish and long-term fixes are coming too slowly by comparison.
Linux is usually my primary desktop and when I switch to my Mac it feels like a breath of fresh air.
It's more than doubled battery "life" (== time to discharge) for me.
Imagine a world where users only ran the bare minimum software necessary for an atomically specific work task. It sounds like pure joy from my perspective.
I also have a bunch of other VMs. For example, I keep my toolchains for embedded development in separate VMs so that I can trust they still work years later when I need to do some quick correction to some project of mine. These have auto updates turned off. I hate when I want to quickly change something and program the device but first I have to investigate why the tool chain no longer works.
Not all of these VMs are active at the same time. I usually have 2 or 3 VMs active, some paused and most turned off.
Any time I'm working on a machine that was set up non-deterministically, I feel vulnerable...
It's so seamless. I now run my Windows "VM" on that, and works fantastically. I have it installed to a separate SSD as well (I was curious if it would work) and performance is excellent.
I mean in theory on Mac you can just remove the .app file.
I would like the 'profile' files for an application to be a bit more obvious though, e.g. stored in /Users/<username>/Application Data/Adobe instead of the deeply nested and hidden-by-default Library folder.
But I think even people like me with 15 years of pictures in Lightroom are seriously eyeing the door. I'd LOVE to find something I could use at trust as well, but I also have little time to search, and Adobe isn't annoying me QUITE enough yet.
But they're already on the wrong side of the "delight/annoy" barrier, if you know what I mean.
You'll probably have to spend some time playing with it to find your "look", but once you do, Lightroom can't come close.
That said, it's missing a great organization/sorting workflow and painted adjustments, so if you rely on the latter or expect the former in your RAW processor, it might not be for you. A fantastic (commercial) alternative is CaptureOne. It's the Rolls Royce far as I'm concerned. Strongly recommend you stay away from Darktable, because it's close enough to Lightroom (but not as good) that you'll get frustrated.
Hope this helps!
On Windows, binaries end up strewn all over the place, including C:\Windows, which is one reason that C:\Windows grows inexorably over time (even under 10) if you frequently install and uninstall software, and the only approved-by-MSFT approach to shrinking it is a wipe and reinstall.
Now, the Mac doesn't prevent installers from doing goofy stuff, or from dropping binaries more widely. VMWare, for example, does this, but VMWare is also doing something more elaborate than an Office app. Adobe does this, but that's Adobe being a jerk -- there's no technical reason they need to do it.
And anyway, you can easily go into the folders in /Library & etc to zap the leftover stuff if you want -- there's no Registry or anything that would cry foul. It's just that most people don't bother.
Are you sure about this? I mean I know for a fact that it happens but in my experience this is rare. I very much doubt that it's enough to make any real difference to the total size of the Windows folder.
I PowerShell'ed through all exe-files and DLLs in C:\Windows and C:\Windows\System32 on my private computer ("188 programs installed" according to Control Panel) and I couldn't find anything that didn't look like Windows defaults (i.e. Microsoft stuff basically) or drivers (found lots of Intel, Logitech, etc. Some Apple).
We make Windows software. We install and uninstall a LOT. Windows folders on our text machines balloon to alarming sizes, at which point it's time for a new VM (or, if it's your laptop, it's time to wipe and start over).
If the system be designed such that the task of uninstalling lies with the program itself rather than some other program then one never really did.
I understand this design not. I would assume that uninstalling the program means deleting some set of files and perhaps registry keys on Windows, or is there more to it?
Maybe I'm just getting burned out on computers, but I'm really considering going rms-style with a desktop computer, an e-ink display with i3wm and sticking to text-only. I really think we're regressing in terms of tech and ux and am finding it less and less tolerable. In my day to day I'm dealing with go, k8s, elixir, js, vue, various deployment and monitoring solutions, etc, I don't want to fight just to keep a baseline OS functionality uncluttered.
You only have all this software bothering you because you chose it over alternatives. (OK there are some cases where choices are forced upon us but I don’t see those in your examples)
Isn't that being professional?
Apple are one of the biggest offenders of "Don't you dare do what you want with your device. We'll tell you what you want to do"
Unfortunately now OSX is going in the same direction of the users not owning their hardware/software as with iOS. And many users get sucked into it because it looks pretty
It's because they use a custom installer that dumps code all over the filesystem that makes Adobe apps are difficult to uninstall.
FUD.
The only restrictions on MacOS are reasonable defaults to prevent unsigned, non-app-store programs from running. Given that there are many more users like my 80 year old mother than there HN-types, this is FINE, since those settings are easy to turn off.
Windows, btw, does the same thing on home versions -- except its "S Mode" is WAY more fiddly to get rid of, and once turned off cannot be turned back on.
macOS is nothing like iOS WRT apps you can install and run.
Turning off Gatekeeper is literally a single terminal command. (sudo spctl --master-disable)
Again, just my personal opinion.
That's a lot of assumptions you're making there bud.
>Windows gives you much more control and freedom than your Apple or G$$gle operating system.
But I run Linux and Windows.
The process to eliminate items from startup is quite straightforward. You can do it in system preferences under your user startup items area - or wipe them from the CLI.
Just off the top of my head right now on osx: can't shut down creative cloud app from the app bar, can't shut down webex, docker desktop regularly hijacks everything I'm doing (once when having a presentation in front of 100 people) to show there's an update, steam client jumping in the tray for hours unless I acknowledge there's an update, apps registering to be started on boot by themselves and having to go through a convoluted process to turn it off (if it even exists)...