For personal use, the only issue I take with Obj-C is how it's considerably less "batteries included" relative to Swift.
For collaborative projects on the other hand, it can become a handful to maintain if everybody contributing isn't staying on top of hygiene with null checks, type checks, etc. Swift helps to keep all of that under control.
Be careful with these though, a lot of USB switches (most readily available ones, even) aren't wired correctly and can result in current flowing from one computer to the other.
The sheer lack of useful software in a stock Windows install has always been a bit baffling to me. Linux is better in this regard (depending on distribution), but nothing beats macOS for time from fresh install to usability. Not only does it come with most of the basics covered, apps like Mail don’t favor Apple’s services, unlike on Windows where MS can’t pass up the chance to upsell an MS service.
I was surprised going from Android to iOS how iphone are much more open despite everyone saying it's a closed ecosystem.
On Android to sync my calendar and contacts I need to install a third party app called davx that updates every 30 minutes, meanwhile iOS and macos supports natively icloud but also exchange, google, caldav (standard protocol).
Just having the equivalent of macos mail app on windows would cost me 60$ (em client). A pdf app that actually allow basic pdf organization, that's another 60$ with pdf xchange editor, and so on and so on.
KDE is solid but I think is just different enough to throw off less technically oriented would-be switchers. I think a fork of KDE that changes it to be more of a 1:1 match to Windows would be highly beneficial here, especially if this fork has a dropdown menu that can switch which version of Windows it mimics (lots of people miss 7 and XP and would find a zero effort way to get that experience back tempting).
Themes are great, but they're surface level and don't change the numerous little behavioral/UX differences between KDE and whichever version of Windows. They also require the user to have gotten as far as to discover that KDE supports themes and downloading, installing, and enabling the theme.
That's why I think a fork that implements the requisite changes would be of value.
What exactly would change ? Only thing I can think of 'normal' users using is ctrl-c/ctrl-v which already work in KDE (even ctrl-win-arrow for virtual desktops could be configured without a fork.)? Different icons/shortcuts wouldn't require forking KDE...Not sure what else you'd change?
If I sat down to compose the list, it'd be full of lots of small things. Think how under KDE, the file copy progress UI is a semi-persistent notification banner instead of a normal dialog like it's always been on Windows. While each of these differences on their own aren't likely to pose issues, in aggregate they can give an impression of the DE being more unfamiliar/alien (and thus, daunting) than it actually is.
I would probably also overhaul the settings app. For example, the whole Appearance & Style group and its two drill-down sections could be pretty easily reworked into a single panel that directly surfaces the most pertinent settings while tucking away the rest under an "Advanced…" button that opens a modal — with themes for example the average user will at most be interested in changing the global theme. Only advanced users even know the difference between window decorations, application styles, etc much less want to be able to change any of those individually.
Hmm - I'm not sure those sorts of things would require a fork per se, but I can see making it more familiar to windows/mac users could be a good thing. I was just curious as I was a big KDE fan back when I used Linux full time, and wondered what had changed.
The two biggest issues I'd have with Linux full time would be audio and video. I haven't even attempted to run Linux audio in like 5-10 years - it was always so titchy with multiple 'standards' to configure. Video was not quite as bad, as I don't game much so I just needed basic functionality. But now I have multiple 4k monitors, high dpi, and all that jazz, I don't know how big a pain it would be. I just run linux in VMs (standard device drivers and setup) or ssh into a linux server for now.
A fork wouldn't be explicitly required, but generally in established FOSS projects, when attempting to make changes that are either large or widely peppered throughout the project you're going to be fighting against headwinds from people who are happy with project as it is, which is understandable. You're likely going to find yourself spending more time on negotiating and politicking to get changes committed than actually making changes.
Audio/video has more to do the distribution being used than it does one's desktop environment, though the DEs can do things to smartly design configuration UI and surface the most commonly used A/V settings in the right places.
It depends a lot on what hardware one has and what software one uses, in my experience. A laptop that’s a generation or two behind built without discrete graphics, Intel networking, and a display that’s usable at 1x UI scaling? Smooth sailing. A bleeding edge tower with off-brand integrated networking and an Nvidia card hooked up to a monitor that requires fractional scaling on the other hand might be more trouble.
It’s not just power users either. Regular Windows users howled with outrage when they had to enter their password to permit software to do a privileged task.
Not necessarily “all the safeties off.” I’d define that as like, running as root always.
It’s more about not being locked out of actual admin access to my own computer.
I expect to have at minimum a developer mode that allows me to enter my password to allow me to run whatever code I want without OS vendor blessing. Heck, add a small coding challenge to unlock it. Whatever.
As far as I’m aware, Windows doesn’t have anything quite like services on macOS and probably can’t because Windows apps, even those that are first-party, are built with a menagerie of different UI toolkits which means there are no universal hooks for something like services to use.
The reason macOS can do this is because a large majority of apps are either native AppKit or otherwise hook into the system text facilities (which is why text services work in text fields in Chrome and Firefox for example).
Simply put, this chunk of the electorate doesn’t have any kind of grasp on the workings of government. As you say, their motivations for voting are simplistic and difficult for campaigns to reason about because they’re so particular to each individual.
Part of the reason why political media has seen such a decline in quality is because of that fundamental lack of understanding by the people. Neutral nuanced analysis doesn’t resonate because that’s some combination of too incomprehensible and not entertaining enough, which has led to the media landscape we have now where it’s turned to the televised version of junk food: hyper-processed with lots of salt and sugar and practically zero nutritional value.
That said, to some degree I don’t place fault on the people for this. A lot of it comes down to inadequacies in the education system when it comes to civics, wherein young people are not well equipped to become highly functional, fully conscious voting adults.
Economic vibes with simplistic immediate effects if truly were a major factor then 2020 Biden would have won with bigger margins than Reagan did .
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Countries with far poorer literacy and school attendance rates and patchy education systems vote quite well informed.
In India for example every candidate (party or independent) must have a simple symbol because many voters cannot read, yet nobody is saying Modi wins because of lack of awareness or good understanding of his Hindu nationalist agenda or extreme right wing policies.
It is the third election for both, voters have had a decade to see the effect of the policies have had first hand no matter what they have been told
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Body electorates aren’t as dumb as we like to explain away.
Education, economics, even disinformation (foreign and local) all play marginal role, but can’t explain the core
At some point we have to accept that this is a deeply racist(who come in all colors) misogynist society with facist Christo white nationalism deeply ingrained.
You can even search for text in images in Safari. I was dumbfounded the first time I searched for some text in a page and Safari found it in an image on the page.
Also as a rolodex. I just take pictures of business cards and you can long press to OCR the phone number and dial from that immediately with no need to even create contact entries unless it becomes a repeat relationship, and if you do, you can usually insta-create the contact card in full with just a long press on the image.
The moment I realized this was now a table-stakes feature for a GUI OS, for me, was when I’d been reading and copy-pasting from an image for a couple minutes before realizing it wasn’t a PDF.
For collaborative projects on the other hand, it can become a handful to maintain if everybody contributing isn't staying on top of hygiene with null checks, type checks, etc. Swift helps to keep all of that under control.