America is too big for planes, too. If your transportation solution is flying, now everyone has to get around via endless highways or big, complicated regional airports, and you can only have so many of those. There's a reason why rural areas in North America have completely different politics from urban areas, and why so much of it is driven by a sense of isolation and abandonment. Trains promise to help here because they are able to stop in small places that will never, ever have practical airports.
A good rail network provides a reliable, consistent, repeatable, and straightforward three hour connection from Nowheresberg to the nearest city. Slow, but good enough to feel like they exist in the same planet. Unfortunately, that promise is subtle, and it plays out over decades, so the reward system we've created for ourselves is incapable of supporting it. And thus, we have Amtrak and confederate flags.
> This was really neat, traditionally you have to access those by right-clicking some whitespace in the list/grid view, but in the list view there is only a narrow band of empty space to right-click, usually you accidentally click a file. So this was a genuine innovation in UI design. Unfortunately they since removed it again.
Wait, no? It hasn’t. I’m looking at a fresh build from the main branch right now. The menu doesn’t have Paste in it in this version, which might be what you’re referring to, but I don’t think it was ever there. (Alas, copy and paste UIs are sad). But otherwise it is very much there. And arguably better because the other big menu has moved somewhere else :) If you’re finding it’s completely gone, um, what distro are you using so I can quietly judge them?
Yeah those others are in the triple dots menu, but paste is gone. Maybe I’m hallucinating that it was ever there, but I notice that I miss it which would be weird if it was never there in the first place.
> It would be better to have these common tasks in a separate menu item in the icon bar where they are always available, in addition to the context menu when right clicking on empty space in a window.
In GNOME Files they are! It’s the folder menu - the one that’s connected to the location bar.
It isn’t the most beautifully discoverable of menus, but it works well, and it’s worth noting the menus have been rearranged a bit in 47.
One of my favourite unreported MacOS issues comes from how, at some point, they changed the appearance of the window close button to be a particular shade of red with a tiny little X in the center. And if you happen to be using a particular kind of screen and possibly wearing glasses, that little X kind of wanders around in the button, appearing just slightly off center in a maddening way. Made only more maddening by the glasses component: https://www.robbert.org/2014/10/the-off-center-close-button/.
That post points out it’s probably just subpixel stuff causing the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the time were adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something that was already visually confusing.
I assume it’s kind of gone away at this point with all the high DPI screens these days. But I remember thinking at the time, if there was a public bug tracker, that issue would be a fun one.
>More expensive lenses have a coating to compensate for this chromatic aberration.
You can't compensate for chromatic aberration with a coating. You need a compound lens made from multiple elements each with a different dispersion, e.g.:
More expensive glasses lenses usually have worse chromatic aberration than cheap ones. The cheapest material for glasses lenses (PADC, often called by the brand name CR-39) has one of the best Abbe numbers (measure of dispersion).
I can confirm this. I had annoyingly bad chromatic aberration with my previous glasses. I specifically asked for CR-39 lenses for my next set of glasses and now it's barely noticeable at all.
I would recommend this to any programmer who uses high-contrast syntax highlighting. To me, it felt fatiguing every time I noticed differently colored words scrolling slight further than other words on a terminal screen on the same line.
One thing to keep in mind is that CR-39 is not impact resistant. They will shatter and can do horrible things to your eyes when they do. Kids should always be put in impact resistant lenses.
If you’re a desk jockey, or impact resistance is not a concern, CR-39 will give the least aberration with the exception of crown glass.
The hidden hack here if you need/want impact resistance is to ask for Trivex lenses. Same impact resistance as polycarbonate but much better ABBE value. It’s often overlooked because it costs a little more than polycarbonate and most people don’t complain about the distortion.
Also, anecdotally, you get what you pay for with progressive lenses. I have a cheap lens in my sunglasses and a higher end lens in my daily drivers and I can easily tell the difference.
For those with stronger prescriptions who want higher index lenses to reduce thickness (and weight), look at http://opticampus.opti.vision/tools/materials.php and/or talk to your optician about available materials. (Personally, I've settled on MR-8 for my last couple pairs of computer glasses.)
This really bothered me many years ago, and I tried CR-39 and even glass, just for fun. I was never that happy with the results. I could always distract myself with chromatic aberration, and I think I eventually decided not to care anymore.
But right now, I have high index lenses and am reading HN with Dark Reader, and even if I use the maximum strength of my glasses (progressive bifocals), I can't really see any chromatic aberration.
I thought I got used to the color fringes in my glasses, but the real problem is that they actually reduce image clarity away from the center of the lenses. If you look e.g. at white text on a dark background from an angle, the chromatic aberration blurs (the color components of) the letters together. You can't really see clearly by moving the eyes to the edge of the FoV of your glasses; you have to turn your head instead.
This is directly contradicting the main purpose of glasses: to see clearly. So it's actually somewhat less safe to e.g. drive with glasses that have major chromatic aberration. No idea why optometrists brush it off as a minor glitch.
I can’t speak to glasses, but limiting chromatic aberration in the binocular world does seem to involve coatings (at least as Swarovski, Leica, Zeiss present it).
You can’t eliminate chromatic aberration with coatings, it’s a physical property of how the lens interacts with light. The only way to fix it is to adjust your lens types or materials. Zeiss’ current marketing seems to agree https://www.zeiss.com/consumer-products/us/nature-observatio...
Coatings are still very useful to reduce other lens artefacts though.
Another irritating thing that is captured in that image is the single pixel gap between the top of the application window and the menu bar. If the desktop background is bright it is very distracting. Not a mistake like the off centre X but drives me mad, nevertheless.
I knew from the very start of using macOS that it was designed around apps NOT being full-screen. Yeah, they are catering to the full-screen-apps people a little more nowadays, but embracing floating windows everywhere, and making good use of the distinction betweend CMD+Tab and CMD+~ makes it so much more powerful than just tabbing through full-screen apps, or three-finger-swiping. It also makes macOS way more beautiful to look at in my opinion.
It’s quite maddening if you use spaces (as workspaces) and same windows across them. An option like CMD-Tabbing being restricted to only applications with windows in the current space will go a long way.
I’m not sure that they’re an unknown concept, because macOS has lots of little things tucked away all over the place for power users. It’s one of the things I miss most when using other desktops, particularly those that go maybe a little too far on the minimalism thing (like GNOME).
It’s just that they expect these users to have fairly specific usage patterns and design around those. The further one’s personal patterns deviate from that expectation, the higher the level of friction encountered.
> It’s just that they expect these users to have fairly specific usage patterns and design around those.
That’s how you design generic appliances, not professional tools. While macOS is great for the users it caters to (that only use a handful of apps), it’s not for people that use their computers as computers (making it do pretty much everything).
It’s kinda tough, because a clean-cut, coherent vision of how the OS is intended to be used is necessary to build a great experience. The more you try to accommodate ways of usage beyond that, the more the vision falls apart and you end up with checkbox waterfalls and branching tunnels of config dialogs added in the pursuit of making everybody happy.
So realistically, judiciousness is required to keep it all glued together, and some usage patterns just won’t be accommodated.
For example, Apple doesn’t seem to be bending over backwards to make former Windows users happy, because the way that desktop works is just too different from what they’ve envisioned and what their long time users are used to. If they add a series of toggles to support Windows usage patterns, that’s a sudden 2x multiplier on the behaviors and UI that needs to be tested.
That said, I don’t necessarily agree with all of Apple’s decisions (I’ve never liked the linear representation of virtual desktops that in place since 10.7 Lion that well and preferred 10.6’s Snow Leopard’s 2D grid, for example), but the lines have to be drawn somewhere.
That gap provides contrast and separation between two similarly-coloured-but-not-quite grey objects. It would look worse without it, though I agree it is silly.
This is the same reason why window gaps are so popular in all tiling window managers. It just looks better.
This is not a software bug, but rather an optical phenomenon called "chromatic aberration". What's happening is that your glasses are bending light at different angles depending on the wavelength, to the red and blue and green are landing at slightly different places on your retina.
It's a hard problem to solve optically and requires specially shaped lens. It's a common issue in telescopes, with higher end expensive scopes having these specially shaped lenses to reduce this effect.
> In conclusion, the off-center “x” is real and probably an artifact of the display or how it is rendered. It is unlikely that it is the result of chromatic aberration.
Chromatic aberration is mostly relevant further away from the center of vision. If there is an icon (or text) visually inspected carefully it is at the center where chromatic aberration matters least.
The icon is mis-aligned, or its the different color subpixels of the screen that are not produced at the same place. Tradidionally, red is to the left.
To be precise: chromatic abberation is lowest at the center of the lens. But with glasses we often don't look through the lens center even if we have something in the center of our vision.
> Another interesting reversal effect was observed in 1928 by Verhoeff in which the red bars were perceived as farther away and the blue bars as protruding when the bars are paired on a white background instead of a black background.
I have pretty strong high-index lenses, and definitely can get a kind of 3D effect.
The classic terminal blue and green text colors on a black background is the situation where I first noticed it: moving my head makes them shift in different directions giving a parallax or depth effect.
I get that a lot with default terminal colors - on black background, dark blue and dark red look shifted in opposite directions relative to baseline (white/light colors); when both colors are used in close proximity, it gives me a strong and quite distracting 3D effect.
I always thought this is specific to that color combination (red and blue on black) and LCDs, thus is perceivable by anyone, and could be used to create intentional 3D effects; I never considered glasses may be a factor too.
> That post points out it’s probably just subpixel stuff causing the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the time were adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something that was already visually confusing.
When I got an ultra wide monitor I also noticed this for the first time on the macOS circular red X button, when wearing glasses. I guess a wide monitor has you looking at things off-axis more. It is really remarkable how much you can make the X dance around the red circle by moving your head. There's something about the colours and simplicity of that particular icon that really cause the effect. The effect is almost non-existent if you're looking at a more complex image, so I guess it's also remarkable how much your brain compensates for chromatic aberration in most contexts.
My glasses cause a bit of chromatic aberration, but not enough that I'd expect to see this sort of effect except at the edges of their field of view.
Now that you point it out, the X is way off center on my up-to-date M2, so I took a screenshot with default display settings and zoomed in to look at the pixel work.
The X is rendered asymmetrically. It appears to be about 0.1 pixels too far to the left and down, since the antialiasing has shaded pixels "outside the X" but only on those sides. The antialiased render of the red circle is symmetric. This matches what I see without zooming in and rules out my glasses.
I wonder if someone fixed the bug for low-dpi displays where subpixel rendering mattered a lot, but did so in a way that hard-coded whatever Apple shipped 10 years ago. Maintaining tall piles of hacks is hard.
Alternatively, maybe their font renderer is getting wobbly in its old age. The window manager is my #1 complaint about this laptop, but crappy font rendering vs. well-configured Linux is also on my list.
This is one of my favourite things about Fedora Silverblue and rpm-ostree. If I run `rpm-ostree status`, I get a list of all the packages I’ve installed or removed compared to the base image. Makes it really easy to keep track of what’s different in my system compared to the current default.
I adored this in Return to Monkey Island, as well. Elaine and Guybrush just have a … functional relationship. They love and support each other and they get along well. It's an important part of them as characters, but it's just there, and you don't have to worry, and the plot doesn't revolve around it. I found it refreshing.
actually, I found their relationship in Return to Monkey Island really weird. In that Elaine forgives basically everything that Guybrush does, even in the last act. It's (somehow) understandable wrt to the ending itself, but it certainly was out of character wrt the older titles in the series and as such I did not like it.
Not cheating, the reference (a tree carving IIRC) would be in the tree before the events of the first game of the series, so before guybrush would have met Elaine. It’s understandable that she would have lovers before guybrush, but the implication that one could have been the big bad LeChuck, makes guybrush fume, even if it’s just an initial.
You all are crazy. It desperately needs work, but Siri is the only mainstream assistant thing that meets users where they are instead of forcing them into whatever ecosystem it's attached to. Sure, Google Assistant's contextual awareness is super cool, but it only works if you use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Tasks, etc.
If we include the umbrella of machine learning stuff in iOS that gets branded "Siri", Siri finds useful connections between my firehose of email from Fastmail, my work Gmail, my text messages, and my Nextcloud calendar and contacts. Completely offline, without even mentioning iCloud.
The voice assistant is extremely clunky and I do hope they'll borrow from LLMs to improve it it, but they really are doing something right here with their modest approach, and "just use ChatGPT" isn't the solution people seem to think.
Siri only works for a few specific apps, most of which are from Apple, and only on Apple hardware.
It's not meaningfully better than Google's walled garden, and the voice assistant is so hilariously bad that it reduces the functionality of the stuff that Siri is actually adequate at handling.
Google is hopeless at doing things offline. You can't even search for photos by their filename in the Android Google Photos app without enabling "backup to the cloud" first.
To be fair, OLPC was accidentally instrumental in making people buy cheap small laptops. The Eee PC netbook emerged very soon after the OLPC, and it was definitely responding to peoples' interest in the OLPC - particularly from the "Give one get one" program. The Eee PC became netbooks, which were eventually strangled to death by Chromebooks.
The OLPC project said "we can help kids by designing $100 laptops just for them", and rich westerners heard "$100 laptops."
The mistakes happened way in the beginning, along with a certain economic downturn. In retrospect, the interest of (on-average) wealthy people in cheap disposable laptops was obscene, and it's a shame the market allowed that interest to be entertained the way it was. Netbooks happened because we are incapable of accounting for the long term costs of crap electronics outside of futile attempts to educate consumers. Thus, netbooks and then equally disposable Chromebooks were dumped into the market without scrutiny, and computers are Google now.
That is indeed a fair point. I find it hard to fault OLPC for these dynamics however. OLPC had a real "hacker" mentality to it in the best senses of the word. It's easy to see the missteps in retrospect, but hard to see how they could have ended up anywhere else given the moment in time
I find this project really confusing, as well. I'm sure sure this project is doing some good work, but I'd love if they take the time to catch us up a little bit, or maybe tweak their name to better reflect what it is they're actually doing. Like, for a modern Linux desktop on well supported modern hardware, what is this affecting?
From my perspective as someone who is rather picky about pixel perfect scrolling and animations, and happily using GNOME 45 with a Magic Touchpad, a Logitech mouse, and a Thinkpad touchpad, and finding nothing particularly amiss with any of those[0] … I'm, um, lost.
Is this all about backporting things to X11? I'm unfamiliar with how touchpads are over there nowadays. (Frankly that sounds like a waste of time to me, but if it still makes people happy, that's cool). Or has this project been actively contributing to exactly those things I'm using, and I just didn't realize?
[0] The Magic Touchpad is definitely a better experience than the Thinkpad one, but they both support multi-finger gestures, and Gtk apps correctly do pixel-perfect scrolling with kinetics and all that jazz. Could maybe do a better job doing the right thing when I lift my finger after scrolling at low speeds. If I used more apps with different toolkits, I know I'd be annoyed by the differences in behaviour between them, so there's definitely something missing there. Happily, since somewhat recently, pretty much every app I use supportsGtk 4 apps all support pixel-perfect scrolling with smooth scroll wheels, too, which is pretty cool.
So, the thing that made Mastodon click for me was when I reminded myself social media doesn't matter. That's really the whole point of this stuff to me. Twitter's long failure began when people were convinced they should make it more important in their lives than it ever deserved to be. When the daily news started to earnestly read nonsense like "X tweeted in response …" for minutes on end, or when the RCMP used Twitter to communicate important public safety information, I felt it in my bones (though I might not have understood exactly why): this was wrong.
I set my Mastodon posts to auto-delete after 6 months so I don't care if I lose them, and I made sure to have some "me" links in the appropriate places pointing at my profile. Even if I were to lose that paper trail from doing proper account migrations, it's pretty easy to say which profile is mine. And if I lose followers, so be it. I'll follow people when I remember who they are. I'll make new posts. If I don't, that's fine. Life happens.
A good rail network provides a reliable, consistent, repeatable, and straightforward three hour connection from Nowheresberg to the nearest city. Slow, but good enough to feel like they exist in the same planet. Unfortunately, that promise is subtle, and it plays out over decades, so the reward system we've created for ourselves is incapable of supporting it. And thus, we have Amtrak and confederate flags.
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