Posts by ianbetteridge

Elementary OS 8 'Circe' conjures Wayland magic

Re: The easy life

This x10000. There is no reason at all why a distro -- or any OS -- can't be very functional, easy to use, and look great.

Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year

Re: Let's not forget Oric-Calc

I've probably told this story before, but back in 1982 I had a job working at an electrical retailer on Saturdays. I was, of course, the only one there who knew anything about computers which were the hottest thing to buy that Christmas.

Every parent wanted a Spectrum -- or at least that's what their kids told them they wanted. Only thing was there weren't enough of them around. There were, though, lots of Oric-1's. We had crates of them and just before Christmas sold a tonne of them.

Then came the day after Boxing Day... and there was literally a queue outside waiting to return them. I had the job of testing them to see if they were faulty, and the first one was. As was the second. And the third... and so on. Every single one we sold was faulty. After testing about ten of them and all of them failing, my boss told me not to bother and just to give people their money back.

Happy Christmas kids!

Pop!_OS 24.04 and new COSMIC desktop reach alpha

The tiling in PopOS is pretty great if you fall into the same category as me: someone who wants occasional, keyboard-drivable tiling but a more conventional window manager most of the time.

I've test driven the alpha on both the PopOS release and using Fedora and while it's not ready for me to use all the time, it's promising. It also felt VERY responsive, much more so than either GNOME or KDE. Lots of rough edges, of course, but almost at the point where I could use it 90% of the time.

The graying open source community needs fresh blood

"Ultimately, these are the non-technical guys that decades ago wouldn't even be on a computer, so you can discard them from the pool."

And that elitist attitude sums up the actual problem.

Re: New Cow Theory?

"FORTRAN and mainframes? When you went to university 22 years ago?"

I absolutely believe it. I did A level computer science in 1984 and the curriculum still involved learning about ferrite core memory, which had been obsolete for a decade.

Re: New Cow Theory?

I worked for a German company in the UK for several years, and it was notable that their attitude towards apprenticeships was VERY different to every British business I have worked in. Not only did they encourage them at entry level: they encouraged them for existing employees, too (British apprenticeships go all the way up to level 7, which is Master’s degree equivalent - I did one in leadership when I was pretty senior, and it was hugely rewarding).

For once, I think this is only *partly* the government's fault. Every larger business pays the apprenticeship levy, and can draw that money back from HMRC if it sends its employees on certified apprenticeship schemes. Remarkably few actually bother, perhaps because they would rather not commit to allowing 20% of time for a period of training (even though that training can be on the job, and in fact, to satisfy the requirements of the apprenticeship actually has to be beneficial to the business).

British businesses just seem to want to devolve all training to universities, subsidised heavily by government.

OpenBSD enthusiast cooks up guide for the technically timid

"But then an actual MacOS vintage install might be more pleasant to use."

Yes. Yes it would.

Smartphone is already many folks' only computer – say hi to optional desktop mode in Android 15 beta

In the words of the bowl of petunias pulled into existence miles above the planet Magrathea, "oh no, not again".

Linux geeks cheer as Arm wrestles x86

If I can get a Linux-based laptop that gets even 75% of the battery life of my M2 MacBook Air, I will be a very happy camper indeed. And probably sell that MacBook Air.

After delay due to xz, Ubuntu 24.04 'Noble Numbat' belatedly hits beta

Re: These are decade-old machines now

Of course, you can still install 20.04 if you want – it's an LTS release, so it's got another year or so of security releases (and up to 2030 iirc if you sign your friends up for the free personal Ubuntu Pro thingy).

At that point their hardware will be 20 years old, so probably time for a replacement :)

Re: Minimal installation...

Some good digging there, thank you! I'm not sure whether this is just bad packaging on Mozilla's part, or an inevitable trade off from using a sandboxed system like Snap (or Flatpak?) – I'm sure someone can enlighten me ;)

If it's the former then shame on Mozilla. If it's the latter, though… well, I'll take that trade-off. My Linux machine isn't exactly short of storage, thanks to a 2Tb SSD upgrade.

GCC 15 dropping IA64 support is final nail in the coffin for Itanium architecture

Re: Take some credit

"You cannot assume everyone is going to be willing to port everything to a new target architecture."

I mean, that's exactly what Apple has done, and I think what Microsoft would love everyone to do with ARM when/if Qualcomm pulls its finger out. So it's possible, but the way Intel approached it was not ideal.

Re: Rolling rolling rolling ... rawhide

Linus did indeed work for Transmeta for a bit:

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5021

Re: Third time lucky?

This one?

http://www.chip-architect.com/news/2003_03_26_Prescott_clues_for_Yamhill.html

Canonical cracks down on crypto cons following Snap Store scam spree

Re: Snaps just ruins the biggest advantage of Linux OS'es...

And you stil can?

Firefox 124 brings more slick moves for Mac and Android

Re: Consent-O-Matic add-on

Seconded. It's the first extension I install these days.

Fedora 41's GNOME to go Wayland-only, says goodbye to X.org

Re: in a [Linux] world that constantly hypes "user choice!"

Most of the Linux world may not use Fedora, but I would put money on most of the desktop Linux world* using a distribution which is either already or on the way to using Wayland as the default.

(* And while I know it's fashionable to insist that ChromeOS is Linux, I disagree with this slant)

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

Re: Repeat after me:

I have friends who make a good living simply advising companies on how to navigate the complexity of Microsoft licensing. Not my idea of a thrilling job, but it pays very well.

But yes, the entry level Office is about that and a good deal - 1Tb OneDrive storage for each employee plus all the web apps (not the desktop versions, but the web apps are more than good enough for most people).

Re: Repeat after me:

"I just log in using Chromium on a Linux laptop and all fine (well as fine as Teams ever is but no worse than Windows users)...."

Heck even Firefox will work fine for web-based Office 365 (at least in my experience). If there's one thing I'll say for Microsoft, it's that they make decent web apps.

KDE Plasma 6.0 brings the same old charm and confusion

Re: The KDE neon release with Plasma 6 was not ready.

I found the lack of a working restart button quite amusing, in a "how did they miss that one?" kind of way. Their Wayland implementation looks good to me -- but the issue that I have with KDE still remains, which is that even on a recent machine it feels just a little bit more sluggish subjectively than GNOME on the same hardware.

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

Re: Technology moves in circles

"There is more to computing than the lowest-common-denominator mass-market stuff."

But mass market stuff becomes mass market because it meets mass market needs. Oberon etc didn't, because they weren't designed to – they were meant for a different purpose.

I'm left wondering what the problem is that you think all this will solve. It's interesting – and as a person-who-likes-tech I'm interested – but what fundamental challenge is it solving?

The real significance of Apple's Macintosh

Re: Apple reality distortion field...Amiga Alert..Amiga Alert

It might shock you to discover that this applies to every other computer, too. You should see how much an IBM 5150 costs in today's money… and that didn't even include a monitor. “What a joke”.

Re: Before OSX, the Mac didnt appeal to me

That, though, is down to both Linux and Windows becoming a lot better and more reliable over time. We're in the lucky era of computing where it's actually got a lot harder to terminally mess up your OS, with kernels and low-level stuff that is incredibly reliable compared to what we had to use even twenty years ago.

I'd argue that in all three cases, though, we're subject to “it works... until it doesn't”. And when it doesn't, fixing it is incredibly hard. Less so with Linux, where are least almost every “going wrong” scenario is a well-trodden path where a bunch of nerds online have almost certainly written a solution that's a Google search away. But Windows and Mac? Boy, when they go wrong, they really go wrong.

Case in point: last year, I managed to mangle an install of MacOS (or rather, macOS TM) so badly that it needed reinstalling from scratch. There's now no way to do this by simply downloading an ISO and reinstalling: you have to use Apple's recovery tools. Which of course did not work.

After a few weeks of messing around, including getting help from Howard Oakley (former MacUser technical bod, help expert and the man who probably knows more about the internals of Macs than anyone outside Cupertino) I had to admit defeat and send it off to Apple for them to do it.

Re: Before OSX, the Mac didnt appeal to me

I was running Blue (what became System 7) on my Mac Plus in 1990, as I had access to the first widespread internal release (I was working in IS&T at Apple at the time). Even though that version was sloooow as hell, it was better than System 6 in almost every way.

Re: Old Mac photo: MOUSE and GUI matter!

Betteridge's Second Law: In the comments of any article written by Liam, someone will pop up to complain about Wayland.

Re: IPhone

Ha! I reviewed the LG Prada. God, was that a terrible piece of junk. I can't remember if the screen actually was resistive, or whether it was such a terrible capacitive screen that it just behaved like a resistive one. It's probably in one of my boxes of awful old technology, somewhere.

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

Re: The 128K Mac was not "rubbish".. really?

Getting a really very good windowing operating system into 64kb ROM and 128Kb RAM is an amazing achievement.

That it only had 128Kb RAM was down to Jobs’ intransigence.

Re: Apple rubbish

That must have been a fair bit later, as the Amiga didn’t launch till 1985 and production issues meant they were rare in any quantity till 1986.

“ I don't know if Sinclair knew that the Mac was coming, but I don't think it did. I don't think anyone did. I think a just-about-affordable GUI computer shocked the industry.”

Hmmm, not sure about that. Development of the Mac proper kicked off in 1981, and Apple was a pretty leaky ship so I doubt Sinclair wouldn’t have caught wind of it. But it’s worth remembering, as I’m sure you do, that at the time the “obvious” superiority of GUIs wasn’t accepted by everyone, and I suspect Sinclair probably didn’t have the resources to build one on a 68000 - no mean feat, especially with the memory limitations that were inevitable at that price point.

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Re: Sorry Liam, Not Even Wrong...really?..again?...anacdotes

"Those are just personal anecdotes dear boy. I'm talking actual sales."

If you still have the Visicalc spreadsheets to prove that, I'd be impressed ;)

Debian preps ground to drop 32-bit x86 as separate edition

Re: Good thing too

Sure, I agree. And it's open source. So you should maintain it.

Asahi's Fedora remix dazzles and baffles on Apple Silicon

Re: Why?

They're all signed (an ad hoc signature is fine). This is not necessarily a bad thing, but some people are concerned that over the long run Apple will seek to "iOS-ize" macOS and have only known signatories, certified by Apple.

Re: Why?

You've hit the nail on the head. I don't mind Apple making it simple. I don't mind Apple making it harder for ordinary users to mess things up by locking them down a bit. Lord knows, as resident Mac expert it's probably saved me a lot of distraught phone calls from friends and relatives.

But I do mind when it when Apple makes it significantly harder to fix something if it goes wrong, even for knowledgeable and highly-technical users.

Case in point: cloud storage. A few versions ago Apple implemented an API for providing cloud storage seamlessly in the Finder. This means that the likes of Dropbox, OneDrive, etc can write apps implementing their system without having to do weirdo kernel extensions. It makes the experience more consistent, so, for example, if you want to make a file or folder always local, no matter what provider you're using, it's in the same place in the user interface. And your storage is shown in the Finder's sidebar in a single place too. So it's an all-round good thing.

Except when it's not. Because, bizarrely, Apple chose to implement it so that the folder containing your files is hidden in /User/YourUsername/Library/CloudStorage, a place which is hidden from users unless you either hold down an option key and select a menu or use the Terminal.

Why is that bad? Because a user can remove the storage folder from the sidebar in the Finder... and after that, they have no way of getting to their files *unless* their app supports doing it through their own, unique menu. To many users, that looks like you've just accidentally deleted your cloud storage (you haven't, and it's still actively syncing).

But if that's bad, worse is to come. What happens if, say, you delete the Dropbox app from your machine? Well, all your files are still there, hogging up storage space. You just can't easily get to them now. And if you want to delete them, you can't actually remove the folder they're in via the Finder. You have to do it using rm -r in the terminal. So in other words, if you stop using Dropbox and want to clean everything Dropbox-related off your Mac, you *have* to use the terminal to do it. Installing Dropbox and then reinstalling it is worse: when I did this, my files were all there, but when I went to them in the Finder I got a cryptic error message.

I understand why Apple might want to ensure cloud storage files can only go in one place. But a hidden directory, that can't be deleted? That's just bonkers.

Re: Why?

You could do that, but it's really not comparable hardware to either the Framework or Mac, is it? Not that it's a bad laptop. But for one thing, it's 15in with 1080 vs the Framework's 13in, 2256x1504 screen and the Air's 13.6in 2556x1664 screen, both of which will be far nicer screens to use.

Re: Why?

From my real world use, the battery life alone makes one of the M-series laptops miles better than anything I've come across in Intel-land. When I'm using my M2 Air, I charge it once every two days, or a day and a half if I'm pushing it a bit harder. I've had to train myself out of automatically wanting to plug it in once it hits 25% battery.

Some of that is down to tight software/hardware integration, and the battery life tests I've seen with Asahi show some reduction compared to the same hardware under macOS, but I would expect that to improve. And even with that reduction, it's still great.

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

The thing that people don't seem to have cottoned on to is that conversational interfaces are the operating system of the future, and will replace or augment windowing GUIs for many tasks. Go back and look at Apple's “Knowledge Navigator” video of 1987(!) and you get a pretty decent idea of where all this is heading. And I don't think it's that far away.

My worry about that is that it's all going to be cloud-based and thus effectively rented, rather than locally based and owned (and tinkerable).

Re: Monopolistic stagnation

Microsoft has been adding stuff which benefits its bottom line since 1976. It's a company, they tend to be interested in that sort of thing.

Re: Never seemed to gain critical mass...

Apple certainly seems to be selling quite a lot of its "Pencils" (I hate that they're calling it that).

I'm going to look a *little* dubiously at you because I know memory plays tricks.

In my head, my System 6 Mac Plus was incredibly fast to boot. And then I watch a video of one actually booting on YouTube and it turns out it took several minutes.

Re: "Yes, I could buy an ad-free version, but why should I?"

You do remember the days when every update to Windows and before that DOS was paid-for, right?

Re: "Yes, I could buy an ad-free version, but why should I?"

Yep. And you would have to be pretty unaware of the entire history of Microsoft, dating back to the "Open Letter to Hobbyists", not to expect the company to want to charge for anything and everything it makes.

Systemd 255 is here with improved UKI support

Re: Everyone Hates systemd

One person's bloat is another person's "easier to use".

And it was ever thus, he said, remembering the times people told him GUIs were "bloat" in the 1980s.

Canonical reveals more details about Ubuntu Core Desktop

Re: Succesful

You're right that it's a trade off. But I don't think "do less with the machine" is that useful a way to look at it. Unless your job or hobby involves just tinkering with the system (and there's nothing wrong with that!) then what matters is whether you can you use the applications you need effectively and with the minimum amount of fuss. For some users, every minute you're spending configuring, tweaking, massaging etc is time you're actually spending "doing less" -- it's not what you need the computer to do.

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

Re: Seriously

If I was an investor, I would expect the CEO to understand the threat, take it seriously, and have a plan to beat it. What I would not expect him to do is minimise what is a clear threat, because companies that do that don't stay top dog for long. Didn't another CEO once say that only the paranoid surivive?

GNOME Foundation's new executive director sparks witch hunt

Re: It's not a witch hunt.

And people wonder why FOSS doesn't appeal to a whole world of users (and by "users" I mean people who aren't coders, people who aren't technical).

Re: It's not a witch hunt.

"No doubt Apple was feeling some phantom pains from the lashes it took over the first couple versions of OS X and people who preferred the OS Classic look."

And completely ignored them, and were right to do so.

Ubuntu unleashes Mantic Minotaur with 23.10 build

Re: SNAP is an infection that shows no sign of dying off

"We have managed for almost 30 years without it."

We managed without GUIs for a long time too. "We managed without X" is a very poor argument, no matter what you're talking about. "Paved roads? Pah. We managed with dirt tracks for hundreds of years! What do those Romans know?"

55-inch Jamboard and app ecosystem tossed into the Google graveyard

Do we think Google is deliberately going out of its way to show business customers that it just can't be trusted?

Linux interop is maturing fast… thanks to a games console

Re: Given the wealth of good software for the pc...

Christ on a bike, do we really have to do the "M$" thing? It was tedious in the 90s.

Ubuntu and Fedora clash in beta race, but who wears GNOME better?

Most of the more popular extensions -- Dash to Dock, Applications/Places menus, etc -- already have versions available for Gnome 45, which is good to see. It's the smaller ones which are most likely to fail to make the jump.

One thing I found interesting about Fedora 39 beta is that the installer doesn't actually install Gnome 45, or any of the other big new versions of packages -- they're all downloaded in that first big update.