You didn't say anything about "choosing" Microsoft. You said "use".

I am surprised people on hackernews still don't seem to understand that, on the whole, happy Linux users are a self-selecting group based on their own skills, understanding and tolerances.

I'm not saying that people don't have good experiences with Linux desktops. I'm saying that those experiences are still nowhere near universal, especially when you start to involve people who aren't really power users. The most common desktop environments are still wildly inconsistent at best and frequently an accessibility nightmare at worst. Trying to work out whether a given piece of hardware will be well supported (or supported at all!) is difficult. Resolving package manager conflicts, handling non-free firmwares, building and managing kernel modules, these things are _not trivial_. That's before we've even addressed the software that people are often forced to give up. I use a Linux desktop frequently and there are papercuts _everywhere_.

I'm really not sure where this prevailing mentality that you can just install Linux and ride off into the sunset comes from.

That's obvious. It's much less expensive to buy a Windows PC than a Mac. Linux on the desktop is still quite terrible in a number of ways (particularly if you are ever unfortunate enough to deal with drivers and kernel modules for your slightly uncommon hardware). Chromebooks still don't rate that highly and haven't really entered the public consciousness as a result. Not to mention that many people are using Windows at work, in education or in plenty of other places where they ultimately don't get to choose.

Anything with SQLite3: ~/Library/Messages/chat.db

On the whole, what bothers me most about many parking apps is that they are apps. I don't want to have to download apps and register user accounts. Ideally I'd like to scan a QR code that takes me to a checkout page _without user registration_ where I can just enter the relevant details, Apple Pay and done. You don't need to know my name, address, phone number or email address — no other parking ticket machine in the world would ask for these. Anything more than my vehicle registration and payment method is overcomplicating it.

Yes, I absolutely think they do, whether they realise it or not. Overall I believe that computers have never been harder to use and this "nobody cares" attitude is exactly why.

To use my father as an example, he sat at work with computers on his desk for 20 years, running everything from Windows 3.11 to Windows XP. He never had a problem using or understanding the computers in front of him because generally any pattern that he learned in one place would apply pretty much everywhere else on the system. Buttons had a uniform look. Radio controls worked the same way. Menus were in predictable places and had similar structures. Toolbar icons, if present, had a uniform appearance. Folders and files were presented uniformly. Tooltips appeared over many things if you hovered your mouse pointer over them. Embossing, solid, thick and dotted lines all had meaning designed to guide the user in certain directions. Disabled controls looked visibly non-interactive. Even "Open", "Print" and "Save" dialogs were globally consistent.

In that regard, older versions of Windows were beautiful in their simplicity — they were uniform and predictable. The same is true of classic Mac OS also. The reason for this is because both Microsoft and Apple spent a lot of time and energy working with real world users to figure out what made sense and what needed work. The result was that they both ended up with clear user interfaces that had learnable visual cues.

Then this aesthetic design trend started and now user interfaces have never been more unclear. Overwhelmingly UI elements are now flat or inconsistent in their appearance. It isn't clear at a glance which objects are interactive and which aren't, or what the side effects will be when you click on given thing. To make this worse, Electron happened, effectively leaving developers (who usually have completely insufficient understanding of user experience or design) to roll their own user interface toolkits and to build applications that end up looking nothing like anything else on the system. So now you don't just have to contend with the fact that the operating system controls aren't as friendly as they used to be, but now every application is out there trying to play by its own rules too, with their own designs and their own learning curves.

Now we're in a situation where very little of what you learn in one application makes sense or applies in another, which is the epitome of user hostility. I spend a lot of time trying to remotely diagnose wildly inconsistent applications over the phone and try to help him make sense of the mess that is modern day desktop computing. He rightly finds it confusing and overwhelming. Even in my own experience, modern macOS isn't much better.

At this point, Microsoft's "Official Guidelines for User Interface Developers and Designers" (2001) and Apple's "Human Interface Guidelines" (1995) should be mandatory reading for everyone who thinks they know better.

There's real psychology and methodology to building a good user experience. Every single detail matters.

> Either you're using Docker for Mac which itself is slow on IO mostly due to the macos-linux file share syncing every single fseventsd<->inotify

If you haven't tried the new VirtioFS accelerated directory sharing in Docker for Mac, it makes a _huge_ difference to I/O performance of mounted volumes.

Matter isn't special for any other reason other than that it's the first time so many manufacturers of smart home products have actually decided to talk to each other when designing a protocol.

Every line of code has a maintenance overhead and it is quite likely you are in a minority at this point. Eventually, as with all things legacy, the effort outweighs the gain.

Do they (Microsoft/Apple/whoever) really have much of a choice? The alternative would likely be that their products end up banned if they don’t satisfy the government. Not really a China-specific problem either — strikes me that the same would be true in many countries.

... or that it's just a lot less likely that you'd notice a problem with CPU or memory usage unless you just happened to be looking at a process monitor, due to the abundance of system resources these days. I often wonder whether the art of profiling during software development is dead.

"Awingu". Wonder who comes up with these names.

The crux of the article, which is seemingly more of a sales pitch than anything, is that you should put your RDP services behind a reverse proxying web application in the hope that the gateway is more secure than the application itself. This is not exactly a novel approach — it is almost precisely what Citrix and Pulse Secure have been selling for years — and it comes with all of the problems that traditionally happen when you start adding layers (providing user support, single points of failure, potential performance degradation). It's also not a one-stop security solution as products doing this exact same thing are rarely vulnerability-free either.

> I have never in my life heard of anyone caring about energy draw of a desktop computer

Allow me to introduce myself. I want to be able to leave my computer on all of the time so I absolutely care about power draw, especially with the sharply rising cost of energy.

I have often assumed that the reason that the iPhone SE has never had a design refresh is because it enables them to continue recycling significant amounts of materials from traded-in/recycled iPhone 6, 6S, 7 and 8.

I am not really sure whether you are suggesting people should move closer to their jobs, or to find jobs closer to where they live, but there are all sorts of externalities and life is rarely that simple.

I’m not in the slightest bit surprised you are being downvoted — your comment is overly dramatic and not a remotely useful contribution. The title of the post of “An implementation of Tor in Rust”. The project claims to be an implementation of Tor, which it is, and it claims to be written in Rust, which it is. It doesn’t claim to be a standalone replacement, it doesn’t claim to be finished and it doesn’t claim to be not-a-library.

You could just run a recursive resolver yourself by using the root hints. You don't need to delegate your DNS queries onto a third-party resolver like Quad9.

https://www.iana.org/domains/root/files

It's not about accessing Twitter anonymously. It's about being able to access Twitter when ISP-level blocking is in place.

All else aside, elementaryOS has (had?) an awful lot of promise. Linux desktop environments and graphical applications are often wildly inconsistent and not attractive to look at. It has been nice to watch the development of a desktop that not only tries to looks the part but also has relatively few surprises in real use. It's a shame that another great open source project will suffer due to human differences.

Indeed — they often don’t respect the keyboard shortcuts I’ve come to expect, tab behaviour for keyboard navigation, UI signals that show default enter/space key actions, drag and drop, non-native UI designs, right-click context menus, amongst countless other things. Electron apps “work” but they are noticeably inferior on macOS (and probably on every other platform too).