I know nobody asked, but the reputation Macs have amongst IT industry professionals is insanely annoying to me. I guess it's a difference between what I like in a laptop versus what other people like in them.
I've seen developers working for FAANGs unironically praise the M1 Macbooks as work machines. And I'm just sitting here, like...why? You are locked into an inferior operating system that becomes progressively more janky the deeper you get into its configuration. I have one and the damn thing has an option to change the "modifier key" for the fucking mouse, so you can change your mouse's modifier key to its ctrl or shift key, apparently. Y'know, in case your standard 20 dollar Logitech wired mouse, like the one I'm using, has shift and modifier keys. Just super useful /s. It randomly had slack muted after installing it, so I could never get message notifications until I figured out what to alter after digging through the guts of its terrible system configuration UI. It can't remember the order of attached displays and half the time I have to rearrange them after resuming it from hibernation. If you want to do basic window manager things, like press the meta key (also referred to as the windows key on non-macbooks) + direction arrow to have a window snap to a quadrant of your screen, you have to install a 3rd party application with Homebrew. Its keyboard is that weird, unresponsive, flat form factor that makes it a nightmare to actually use as a portable device. With any luck you don't have to compile anything for it, because...you probably won't be able to. Perhaps most annoying is the fact that, even if you want to use it as a full desktop replacement and plug in 3 monitors with the same resolution into it at a desk (most Macs have at least passable 3rd party dock support), the Mac just won't let you. It only lets you plug in 2 and it duplicates one of those two onto the 3rd one. If you want to plug in 3, you technically can: you just have to download 3rd party displaylink drivers, which, knowing Apple, probably won't fucking work and might permanently fuck up your display.
I get that it's a relatively powerful computer for the ludicrous amount of battery life it gives you, but that's purely because it's an extremely optimized ARM based processor that's only designed to work with this specific operating system. I also get that machines running Linux also have their own problems, but you aren't paying for whatever Linux distro you're running (probably) and you also have the power to change things with a little bit of effort. If I'm buying a machine like an M1, where the OS is presumably part of the whole "package," it should just work well out of the box.
Beyond those complaints, it's got good speakers and never produces any heat. Honestly, the only good things about the machines are those hardware elements: the speakers, battery life, and lack of heat. If they could run linux and had decent keyboards, I might like them. But Apple is practically an antonym for FOSS at this point. I also have a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, which is physically a worse machine: it gets hot, has a fraction of the battery life, etc. But you can install any Linux distro (that isn't Nix based, sadly) to it without issue and its keyboard makes it actually tolerable to code on for extended periods. I wonder if the people that really like the M1s like them because it's the laptop equivalent of an iPhone.
I have a "turn off the laser pointer" routine with my cat - nothing crazy, I just bring the pointer up right next to her and cover the dot, turn it off, and then pick it up and let her smell the end. The specifics don't matter, but she knows that that routine means the laser pointer goes away, and a physical toy comes out next to give her something to actually catch.
I don't give a flying fuck about whether I'm using Gecko or WebKit. Both are open-source.
As for why I'm using Firefox over Safari, it gives me better tracking protection than vanilla Safari, it allows me to use SearXNG, and it means I can set a custom homepage. Also, for some reason, Safari has no private mode on my phone.
Not to mention that Mozilla is working on a Gecko-based version of the browser, as Apple is being forced by the EU to allow sideloading, third-party app stores, and third-party browser engines.
Except you've actually changed nothing. Apple forces all third party browsers on their devices to use WebKit (the Safari engine) for the backend, so really all changing browsers does is give you a reskin under Apple's thumb.
Actually, I have. It gives me better tracking protection than vanilla Safari, it allows me to use SearXNG, and it means I can set a custom homepage. Also, for some reason, Safari has no private mode on my phone.
Not to mention that Mozilla is working on a Gecko-based version of the browser, as Apple is being forced by the EU to allow sideloading, third-party app stores, and third-party browser engines.
While Gecko should absolutely be made available for iPhone, it's worth noting there's nothing wrong with WebKit per se. It's open source (forked from KHTML), servers as the base for among others the GNOME Web browser, and is not a monopoly player (outside of iPhones).
In some messed up way, Apple's WebKit insistance has helped competition in the browser market by making sure there's at least one popular platform where Blink is not dominating...
Damn, I never saw it that way. In that regard the EU regulation could actually harm the browser market, because it lowers the incentive for service providers to support anything but Chrome. At the moment that would exclude all iPhone users (which hurts business, because that's a lot of users with large pockets). But then they could simply shrug and tell their users to install Chrome. 😐️
In the other way, there are multiple hacky workarounds needed for bugs Apple is too lazy to fix, since everyone has implemented workarounds on their end.
I guess the pendulum swings in both ways.. luckily, there are enough people using firefox on desktop , so that at least gecko is supported basically anywhere (this would still apply to webkit since most iPhone user just use the standard and don’t bother installing alternative browsers, except if their business uses Microsoft which forces you to have edge installed to open links from teams)
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