unix
Thursday, April 7 2016
Re: Tell us about your Mac
[10:40:59] matt [wronka.org]/Psi+ On Wed, Apr 06, 2016 at 05:18:58PM +0000, Apple Market Research wrote:
> We love feedback.
>
> Tell us about your experience with Mac.
Creating an Apple ID from the on-device application is broken (you cannot
select the password confirmation box).
Getting on a WPA2 protected (EAP+PAP) network is overly complex compared to
other platforms, requiring downloading a configuration tool through your
application store which has changed its name twice.
Regarding re-installing the OS: there's a catch-22 that you need an
application that's already been used in the Application store. If you've
never used the Application store, this means you can't re-install the OS.
This isn't documented, including in any on-line documentation that I could
find.
It's unclear what the replacements are for basic Unix elements, like
resolv.conf. Generally, documentation seems to be lacking.
The magsafe power connector is a huge improvement over the flimsy and
expensive connector used on the aluminum Powerbook.
Setting-up Xcode with iOS simulators and documentation was a bit annoying,
as it had to be done through the XCode UI, and each install asked for an
administrator's password. Every time I closed my laptop, the downloads
would stop.
Messages (? The app that looks like iChat but which I think was renamed,)
is still a rather shoddy XMPP client. Among other things, it appears to
lack support for Jingle and remote control. (I didn't use it long enough to
check this time, but in the past iChat also handled users logged-in with
multiple resources very poorly.)
Why can't I organize my applications installed by default anymore? Why
can't I delete them? There's so much junk in the default Applications
directory, and most of the included applications are not very good.
Terminal.app is a sub-par terminal emulator. There are graphical glitches
with which I've learned to live (e.g. dividers when using tmux either aren't
shown or are shown across areas where they don't exist). More annoying is
using multiple windows in a workflow. If I have a full-screen emulator, and
need to bring-up a second terminal, I cannot do this on the same workspace:
there's no "maximum-size" now, just full-screen on a dedicated workspace.
XTerms on XQuartz didn't work as a replacement, the experience simply seemed
clunky, and copy-and-paste didn't seem to work right (at all?) even when
fiddling with the options to try and sync the X selection buffer.
[10:40:59] matt [wronka.org]/Psi+ On Wed, Apr 06, 2016 at 05:18:58PM +0000, Apple Market Research wrote:
> We love feedback.
>
> Tell us about your experience with Mac.
Creating an Apple ID from the on-device application is broken (you cannot
select the password confirmation box).
Getting on a WPA2 protected (EAP+PAP) network is overly complex compared to
other platforms, requiring downloading a configuration tool through your
application store which has changed its name twice.
Regarding re-installing the OS: there's a catch-22 that you need an
application that's already been used in the Application store. If you've
never used the Application store, this means you can't re-install the OS.
This isn't documented, including in any on-line documentation that I could
find.
It's unclear what the replacements are for basic Unix elements, like
resolv.conf. Generally, documentation seems to be lacking.
The magsafe power connector is a huge improvement over the flimsy and
expensive connector used on the aluminum Powerbook.
Setting-up Xcode with iOS simulators and documentation was a bit annoying,
as it had to be done through the XCode UI, and each install asked for an
administrator's password. Every time I closed my laptop, the downloads
would stop.
Messages (? The app that looks like iChat but which I think was renamed,)
is still a rather shoddy XMPP client. Among other things, it appears to
lack support for Jingle and remote control. (I didn't use it long enough to
check this time, but in the past iChat also handled users logged-in with
multiple resources very poorly.)
Why can't I organize my applications installed by default anymore? Why
can't I delete them? There's so much junk in the default Applications
directory, and most of the included applications are not very good.
Terminal.app is a sub-par terminal emulator. There are graphical glitches
with which I've learned to live (e.g. dividers when using tmux either aren't
shown or are shown across areas where they don't exist). More annoying is
using multiple windows in a workflow. If I have a full-screen emulator, and
need to bring-up a second terminal, I cannot do this on the same workspace:
there's no "maximum-size" now, just full-screen on a dedicated workspace.
XTerms on XQuartz didn't work as a replacement, the experience simply seemed
clunky, and copy-and-paste didn't seem to work right (at all?) even when
fiddling with the options to try and sync the X selection buffer.
Monday, February 2 2015
SystemD 2015
[16:47:22] matt [wronka.org]/Psi+ http://ma.ttias.be/whats-new-systemd-2015-edition/
Unix: Do one thing well.
SystemD: Why do one thing, when you could be doing other things as well?
I'm not a huge fan of SystemD, in fact, I was considering switching back to FreeBSD for my home workstations to avoid it. However, there were some points in the notes on the 2015 roadmap which might actually be useful for the specific usecase I have for GNU/Linux.
Booting a standard GNU/Linux distro with a read-only root (e.g. from NFS) is frustrating; it doesn't work well, and even though many of the caveats are documented around the Web, it seems like there's always something that doesn't quite work. FreeBSD, for what its worth, booted diskless quite nicely when I was comparing the two about two years ago. In the end, I went with USB boot images for each node at home.
Looking at the roadmap, the 2015 plan for SystemD seems to be moving towards a system which is better designed for read-only root by default, which would be neat, and hopefully mean once the system is configured, bitrot would be less of an issue.
[16:47:22] matt [wronka.org]/Psi+ http://ma.ttias.be/whats-new-systemd-2015-edition/
Unix: Do one thing well.
SystemD: Why do one thing, when you could be doing other things as well?
I'm not a huge fan of SystemD, in fact, I was considering switching back to FreeBSD for my home workstations to avoid it. However, there were some points in the notes on the 2015 roadmap which might actually be useful for the specific usecase I have for GNU/Linux.
Booting a standard GNU/Linux distro with a read-only root (e.g. from NFS) is frustrating; it doesn't work well, and even though many of the caveats are documented around the Web, it seems like there's always something that doesn't quite work. FreeBSD, for what its worth, booted diskless quite nicely when I was comparing the two about two years ago. In the end, I went with USB boot images for each node at home.
Looking at the roadmap, the 2015 plan for SystemD seems to be moving towards a system which is better designed for read-only root by default, which would be neat, and hopefully mean once the system is configured, bitrot would be less of an issue.