> And we have 20x the manpower to review this footage?
I was involved with a startup that did inspections of power generation windmills. The computer vision anomaly detection was really good and that was about five years ago. The goal was to have the automated visual inspections route images with suspected anomalies to humans for review and it was working well the last time I heard.
Compared to having a human who needs to rappel down to the blades for a manual inspection, this is a huge productivity and safety boost.
I've been running a Linux desktop for about 13 years. There are still "moments" where you have to work on it and it can be more opaque than Windows/Mac. But you have the control to do what you need to do, which is one huge factor for me in Linux's favor.
I moved my immediate and mostly non-tech family to all run Linux including an aging relative who needed a locked-down Firefox install to keep her from falling victim to predatory sites and extensions. Pretty easy to script the entirety of the OS install and lockdown so that it was documented and repeatable. Can't do that without techie roots but I love that it's possible and mostly straightforward from a scripting perspective. It's almost exclusively get the right file with the right config in the right place and restart a service.
The only major day-to-day downside IMO is battery life on Linux laptops. Can't compare to current generation of Macs but that's true for Windows too.
I have been using desktop Linux for about the same amount of time and the way I see it now, even on the occasion where I have to troubleshoot something weird (which has maybe been one or two times in the past few years), it doesn't sound any different from the issues people are having with Windows and Mac these days—and at least I can fix it!
Yes exactly. When I had a Mac for work, I had to tinker with that thing just as much if not more so than I do Linux. To windows credit, it was the best of the three when it came to not having to tinker to get what I want, but the lack of ability to configure it in a way that was comfortable and preferable was more limited and difficult, so there were annoyances I had to just live with. The point at which they started injecting ads into my desktop experience was a dark day and the day I said goodbye
Oh god, I had a Mac for work recently and had to spend 3 weeks becoming an expert in Mac External Displays And Thunderbolt just to get my HP Thunderbolt 4 dock (officially compatible with Macs!) to use a dual monitor setup with it. Finally I got it working, but every configuration I tried Just Worked(tm) on Linux. Jeez...
This sounds more like problem of HP’s dock than a Mac. Just because they said it is officially compatible with Mac doesn’t mean it is. Also, compatible with which Mac- Intel or M series? I use three different docks on two Mac Mini (M4 Pro) and they all worked out of the box. I did my research before buying them by watching YouTube reviews.
This is exactly the double standard, or bias when talking operating systems.
When it's macOS/Windows, it's someone else's fault; when it's Linux, it's Linux fault.
When you have to tinker on macOS/Windows that's just what has to be done, no biggie; when you have to tinker on Linux, it's a burden nobody should be subjected to.
People are blind to the work they've grown accustomed to. There are many things that are much, much easier on Linux than macOS or Windows.
Indeed, and especially the double standard regarding "oh but on Linux you have to carefully check if the hardware is supported by Linux" but when it's a Mac it will "just work." In GPs comment they have to do the same hardware compat research as a Linux user does, but that's never listed as a downside for Mac
This is a bizarre complaint. There are more Mac users than Linux users but still far fewer than Windows users. As such, there are so many examples of hardware and software that are incompatible with Mac. Our IT dude keeps telling me to switch to Windows because of better support from third party vendors.
My comment was specifically about the HP dock. I have nothing for or against Linux as I have never used it, don't know anybody who uses it, and I have no plans to use it. I am simply not qualified to comment on Linux.
Don't take it personal. This wasn't about you specifically, but the sentiment frequently observed. No one would have been blaming HP when we were talking Linux. The need for tinkering, or hardware considerations is frequently brought up against Linux; it's never brought up for macOS, on the contrary, on macOS everything "just works" - even when it doesn't. On Windows, for years, you had/have to search the web for obscure software and drivers, then download them from shady third-party websites, repeating the process for updates; on Linux you always were able to install and update almost everything signed and shipped from trusted sources through the package manager, long before app stores, but apparently adding a line to some config file is unbearable inconvenience. Somehow people are very ignorant about the limitations (sometimes unfixable) and troubleshooting in Windows and macOS, but hyper vigilant when it comes to Linux.
I am running this Fedora installation for a few years, now. No clean install in-between, just super stable and pleasant upgrades. Everything just works for me. Zero tinkering. If there is a bug, it's usually tracked and gone in a few weeks, at most the next release 6 months off. If a HP dock doesn't work, it's HP's fault for not using open standards, certainly not a problem of Linux.
So Mac doesn't support DisplayPort MST like everyone else does (Windows and Linux have supported this STANDARD for years), because they are assholes and don't care about their users, and the fact that multi monitor support is different between Intel Macs, certain M1s (cannot use more than one external monitor at all!), and the rest of the Apple Silicon lineup (other M1s, M2+) is insane.
I eventually got it working on this Intel Mac by using one HDMI and one specific DisplayPort output on the dock so it wouldn't try to multistream it internally in the dock or whatever (can't remember what exactly it was doing). It might have involved an HDMI to DP converter. I honestly tried to purge my memory of it once I got it working.
Note that all setups worked fine with Linux without modifications. Would have likely worked fine on Windows, too, since it supports MST. Only one specific setup worked with Mac.
So no, it's not a problem of the dock, it's a problem with Apple refusing to support a standard so they can make people buy the expensive $400 docks they hawk in Apple stores. Or because they are lazy and think because they don't care, their users shouldn't either.
You will find many people complaining about Mac's multi monitor support (or lack thereof) online. They are choosing to ignore user feedback.
> Openbox does everything I need it to. I don’t want Mac or Windows, they both suck in ways I can’t change.
Sure, Linux can be rougher, but at least I’m not helpless here. I can make the changes I need, and the software is generally less broken IME
In my experience, the remaining difficulties with Linux tend to revolve around managing ownership and permissions of files and directories.
I recently plugged in my external hard drive into my Linux PC and it just wouldn't read it. "You do not have permission to access this drive" or something like that. The solution after googling ended up being (for some reason) some combination of sudo chown -R user /dev/sda1 and unplugging and reconnecting the drive.
No way to do that from the GUI (on KDE at least) and I'm not sure how I'd even solve that problem if I didn't know the super user password.
Still glad to be using Linux, of course, but sometimes these problems still pop up.
This shouldn't happen with external disks formatted with ntfs, ext or udf. If you have an EXT4 or something like that external disk things get more hazy...
Whether it should or shouldn't, it did. But I think the issue is less that it happened, and more that the user interface doesn't respond to the "no permission" error by offering up a button you can click to attempt to grant yourself permission. If it can be done through the terminal, there should be a novice friendly way as well.
(For that matter, a novice user shouldn't even have to know how their external hard drive is formatted! It might not even be their drive; it could be a family member attempting to share photos with them. If they're just plugging it in for the first time and seeing errors, they'd be pretty hesitant to mess around with the terminal typing in commands they don't understand).
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply this isn't an important problem that needs to be addressed. I mostly agree with what you say and I bet the right way to deal with this is to have it be mounted with a special user space filesystem like fuse that wraps the permissions to always look correct for the user that mounted it, but I guess no one so far has decided to take upon such task...
no? A file system is the format that the data on the disk is stored as. If you mount an ext4 disk as ntfs, it wouldn't load properly. It's not just the interface for loading the data, it's how the data is actually stored.
There's no concept of "external". What would it be, "USB" or anything mounted under /mnt or /media? What if it's the root OS drive of another computer you're trying to fix connected through a USB-SATA adapter? Should any program running with minimized privileges get to overwrite even root files in that OS drive?
I think that it's a pretty good heuristic that if permissions exist in the filesystem, they matter and shouldn't be ignored.
They shouldn't be ignored. but they can be ignored, is the problem. File permissions are not encryption or security: If I can't read a file on this machine, because I'm not root, I'll just move the drive to a different machine where I am root.
But I agree with you, they do have a use and to some use cases matter, and we shouldn't arbitrarily decide to ignore them.
I don't doubt you had that problem. But it, and the solution you want, sound a bit strange. You want a button that gives your user access to everything despite its access settings... Than login and work as root.
I mean it's hard to tell what really happened. But a different user could have created this files with access rights only for himself on purpose. Something one can do with NTFS on Windows too. It also could have been a distro bug.
> but sometimes these problems still pop up.
I'm a 90% Windows- 9.5% Linux- 0.5% Mac-Admin at day job: Don't tell me Windows has no problems poping up. ;-)
Yes. Another user could have restricted access rights on purpose, maybe? But I can still apparently seize them for myself by typing an arcane command into the terminal. Why shouldn't the UI give me a way to do this more easily?
If it requires typing in an admin password to solve, so be it, but at least the UI could lead me to the answer while offering a password prompt.
And yes, I wasn't telling you that Windows has no problems. In fact, Windows probably caused this problem -- this drive worked just fine with Linux the night before; then I transferred some files into it from Windows and plugged it back into my Linux computer and suddenly this happened. I have no doubt that Windows was responsible for messing up the drive state and causing the problem. But to a non-technical user, it's not a question of who is to blame; Windows reads the drive fine whereas Linux gives an error that has no obvious solution. And it can't be solved by right clicking the drive in the explorer and selecting "take ownership and mount" or something like that, it requires using an unfamiliar command into the terminal to fix the problem. And that's basically the case with most file-permission errors that I encounter on Linux systems.
>Windows reads the drive fine whereas Linux gives an error that has no obvious solution. And it can't be solved by right clicking the drive in the explorer and selecting "take ownership and mount" or something like that, it requires using an unfamiliar command into the terminal to fix the problem. And that's basically the case with most file-permission errors that I encounter on Linux systems.
That definitely seems like a feature that could/should be added to some (most? all?) linux file managers. In fact, it doesn't even sound like that difficult to implement with standard system calls[0].
It's not really an issue for me (I prefer the command line -- heck, I still use octal when setting permissions instead of 'rwx'), but it sounds like it bugs you a lot.
You don't mention which Desktop Environment (DE) you're using, but I imagine the file manager in your DE is open source. As such, I'm sure you could make yourself and the (I'm sure) many others who'd like to be able to modify file/dir/filesystem permissions/ownership via their GUI file manager much happier.
Try doing that with Windows Explorer or Finder. I think not.
Hm, I'm a KDE user. I just tested what happens when I try to open a folder I don't have access rights for. The standard file browser Dolphin says authentication is required. "Act as administrator." If clicked there comes a warning and I can enter my password. Than it shows the content.
Good! That's exactly what I would like to have happen! I think the error was more like that it didn't have permission to mount the drive. I logged the message at the time, but I don't have access to that computer this week, so I'm going from memory.
I've been on Mint for nearly 4 years now,. migrating from Windows.
The only hiccup I had was botched updates once, and the OS would error during boot.
The fix was easy, boot to terminal, fiddle with timeshift to restore to the point prior to update, then apply de updates carefully with a few reboots in between.
Now, was that easy? For someone well versed in the technicalities, yes. For a layman, probably not.
Now, that said, it was the only problem I had in 4 years. It has been very smooth sailing besides that.
My experience with Windows prior to that was always horrible. Yearly clean installs because after a while the computer felt extremely sluggish. Random blue screens for god knows what reason.
For a layman, that's a catastrophic entire OS-loss right? Especially if your issue is somewhat novel or stack specific. *Most people* (not us) just lost their only desktop computer and are now trying to debug by googling random OS words and browsing reddit and forums on their mobile to try and find out what went wrong with a seemingly benign update.
---
Now, AI makes this *WAY* easier since you have a practically omniscient distro debugger with infinity patience and you don't have to wait on their responses. So this is probably coming down as a barrier soon, but I want to stress that "the only problem I had in 4 years" is loosely the same as "I bought a new car and the only problem I had was a catastrophic transmission failure. I just had to rebuild the transmission from scratch using specialized tools and knowledge and it was okay.
I managed to get around ~7W idle on a 2024 dgpu/igpu laptop, with room to further optimize. From my limited casual checks (nowhere near proper benchmark), it's better than windows.
But yes it's an area that still requires tweaking, which is a cost I don't want to incur. Also just within this year I got a regression (later fixed) because of a bug in nvidia-open driver so it stopped going into low power state giving me a toaster on the go. These are still very obscure to root cause and fix.
> The ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 Intel lasted for more than 21 hours in our Wi-Fi test (150 cd/m² brightness). This device will easily last more than ten hours in everyday use.
Also, tested on Windows not Linux. Still, if I could get 10 hours of regular usage on Linux, I'd be ecstatic.
If you add a MacBook to comparison there on that website, you'll see they last basically the same in same usage. Qualcomm actually can get even more hours, if I remember correctly.
In any case, I don't think the battery time is an issue anyone with 2025+ devices.
As a multi decade Python user, uv's speed is "life changing". It's a huge devx improvement. We lived with what came before, but now that I have it, I would never want to go back and it's really annoying to work on projects now that aren't using it.
I'm so sick of the NFL doing exclusives like this. I refuse to watch. Glad it blew up on them. Hope they will stop doing this kind of thing in the future (but I doubt it).
> "The smartphone for children that blocks porn" - AI being used to surveil children phones for nudity. (???)
The article mentions that all detection happens on the device, and the manufacturer doesn't collect any user data. I have no idea if that's true, but they are at least aware of the risks and saying they are addressing them.
My org is currently at 7 people and we have 365 repositories associated with our github org. We've been around for a number of years and I'd guess that impacts the number of repos more than the number of team members.
You may want to consider filling a small claims lawsuit against Apple for the maximum amount of damages your state permits in small claims.
It's not really about winning the claim. It's about getting them to acknowledge you and hopefully resolve it before the court case comes up. That is, you want them to "settle" by restoring your account.
The OP is in Australia, but I'd like to add some advice which would apply in the US: Apple is one of the few organizations which does not use an arbitration clause, which means suing in court really is an option.
(With the exception of some services like their credit card, but you can opt out of that more easily than any other arbitration clause I've seen.)
I was involved with a startup that did inspections of power generation windmills. The computer vision anomaly detection was really good and that was about five years ago. The goal was to have the automated visual inspections route images with suspected anomalies to humans for review and it was working well the last time I heard.
Compared to having a human who needs to rappel down to the blades for a manual inspection, this is a huge productivity and safety boost.
reply