...and now Apple has altered the deal and we must pray they do not alter it further. Disgusting. Predictable, expected, unsurprising -- but still disgusting.
Speaking of iPhone, the open options are at best abysmal for privacy (at least orders of magnitudes worse than Apple) and at worst part of planned obsolescence that creates e-waste much faster than Apple devices.
Fun fact, at least for now, you can still buy a Mac and boot Linux. Probably not true once Apple silicon hits but that’s a sad day for anyone who liked boot camp.
why would that be the case? All you'd need to do is provide some sort of private network api, and only allow apple signed code to use it.
Are you praing too that Apple will still allow that in the future?
>I buy Apple computers because of the hardware support and integration with iPhone
Have fun then, i dont buy Think different but same.
That being said, Linux is available, and it's perfectly usable by people who would be bothered by Apple's dev policies.
To be fair to Apple though, it's their OS, they can do what they want and we agree every time we update MacOS or iOS. It's crazy to me that we basically only have 3 phone device choices, 2.15 environment choices (OS wise... Linux Desktop is crap, but getting better), and only 2 choices in GPU's, CPU's, etc...
What can we do about this?
I'd argue options really are limited. Your counter argument assumes one can just roll their own OS with the same features and functionality as current-gen OS's. That's quite a leap. Options today are Windows, Mac, or some flavor of Linux if you can get it to work. Linux aside, Windows and Mac both are making it so you no longer own the OS but are "subscribed" to it. Making it easy for them to implement anti-consumer strategies to lock you in.
OS was obscure but, predictable. Different but, familiar. It had kernel extensions, logs and devices. Nothing was extremely obfuscated. It was a UNIX device but, shinier.
Now it feels like a glorified iOS box with more transparent walls. You can see some gears but can't touch them. There are only limited interfaces to some of those, which you can touch remotely but, not alter completely.
I wonder what will happen to my EXT drivers from Paragon though.
Apple has historically always considered itself a hardware company, and now it is a hardware and services company. Small but concrete examples are the Settings page's "Activate your free trial of AppleTV+ today!" and their constant pitching of Apple Card. This is the thin edge, more than likely, of them moving to a model not of monetizing your hardware but rather capturing your data and selling you on a subscription bundle of services.
This transition is in a way necessitated by their declining revenue growth, so they're looking at new ways of monetizing their existing users.
If you’re a native speaker, the comma goes where you’d naturally have a brief pause in speech.
If you’re not a native speaker, it may be helpful to remember that the clause with “but” should be able to be removed & what remains should still be a valid sentence: “He wanted to buy a pen.”, not “He wanted to buy a pen but.”
https://www.trustedtechteam.com/products/windows-10-enterpri...
Where I absolutely agree with you is that under Jobs, there were no attempts to make macOS behave more like a car. Lion did borrow a handful of visual elements from iOS, but it was mostly aesthetic. Jobs was also on medical leave for much of Lion's development cycle, so I wonder if he was less involved.
For don't forget MS Windows has a 'dial-home-to-Microsoft' link that's hard coded within Windows itself. It bypasses the hosts file altogether, and if I recall correctly, it's been in Windows since XP.
The only solution stop the 'talk-home' connection would be to find the destination IPs numbers and then key them into your external router for blocking.
That is at least 3 niche entries in addition to the 2 mainstream choices.
Intel wants really badly to be a 3rd player in the GPU space and its integrated graphics are already good enough if you aren't gaming although I have doubts about their upcoming dedicated GPU.
The Linux desktop space is nicer in the keyboard centric simple environments space or at least ditch gnome and switch to KDE running on an distro that actually stays up to date.
The challenge is not mostly using such an environment its setting it up in the first place.
Looks like every category has 3-5 options.
Alternatively firewall your machine, but apple keeps allowing itself workarounds, like find my where "offline" machines aren't so offline.
And then 5G has all kinds of inter-machine connectivity.
As we(I) go deeper the "let's try linux" route, thousands more papercuts come to the surface. It's fine for specific use cases (e.g. just focusing on backend dev), it becomes worse for wider use cases.
Honestly - just Wayland in general has dramatically improved my linux desktop experience. 10/10, will never go back to X.
Linux has a virtual desktop manager, and Windows has some 3rd-party apps that provide multiple desktops. None of those apps seem as tightly integrated and useful as this Mac OS feature.
There is a free alternative which is better in many ways and has an unlimited supply.
The only reason Apple has a lead in software is that they have made their closed source model deliver end-user benefits at a faster rate than the open source alternatives.
There is no reason this needs to remain true, and there are a lot of signs that it will not continue.
Some speech styles use pause after "but". You can hear it from news reporters and on tv shows in general, when actors read partial sentences from paper or screen. It is not exclusive to english, and it is a common mistake to use punctuation with respect to own/technical intonations and delays instead of correct ones.
"X but, Y" likely means "X, but... Y" here, i.e. the first pause is much less pronounced than the second.
Apple gives me that. Ubuntu gives me that these days in some limited sense too, but not when you factor in AppleTV , phone, pad, homepod and airpod and the watch.
Exactly - but the game itself is the problem. Firewall vendors will go hunting through kernel code for jump targets and structs to plug into hidden interfaces, and Apple will remove and change them, causing crashes and instability. Apple has some leverage if they have a program like WHQL, but even then driver writers will commit shenanigans. Push them out of the kernel altogether and now only Apple can engage in shenanigans and break user trust. Which they already have.
The argument that most of this started under Jobs is valid. True. But like it was commented he was dealing with an illness and it’s unknown just how much involvement he had. This is obviously just my view of the land and my perspective is my own. YMMV.
I am saying the lack of desktop adoption is indicative of the difficulties of doing so. There is a level-of-effort barrier and technical-knowledge barrier to it. 20 years of progress have lowered those barriers a lot, but even if something like Ubuntu will often be fully functional with a standard install, most users never have to install an OS. They can't walk into Best Buy and come out with a computer that runs desktop Linux.
I think the success of Chrome Books show that people would be receptive to alternative operating systems, but we don't have a retail or post-purchase support environment in place to facilitate it, and I don't see that coming on the horizon.
(And no, chromebooks are not linux for any practical purpose, although they probably would be easier to install a real linux system on.)
KDE is by far my preference and in general I don't think neither windows nor macos has fewer problems despite the price tag.
After hearing the "it just works" mantra of apple users for many years I was surprised to find I had at least as many glitches on the Mac as I did on KDE (win 7 was better, 10 has more problems ime).
(I use my computers for development and sysadmin, not gaming or art)
There's also the strong possibility that at least some of these places won't exist anymore at some time over the lifetime of the computer. Purism is only a few years old, with ~ $1million in revenue/year. It uses its own flavor of Linux, meaning support options are extremely limited. System76's website is itself half-broken, with 500 errors when I attempt to customize a system.
You cannot point to niche operations and claim it to be a viable mass-market option. I'm not saying it isn't possible to get there, I'm saying it doesn't exist today, which means it is not an option for mass-market consumers. If tomorrow a million Apple users said "Enough! LittleSnitch is the straw that breaks the camel's back!" and decided they wanted to shop for a desktop linux system, the market couldn't handle it.
Remember, I'm not saying Linux can't be successful on the desktop, I'm saying that it is not a mass-market option right now for users frustrated with Windows/OS X.
Only "free" in terms of literal monetary payments to acquire the operating system. But the choice between Apple's stack and other Linux stacks has many trade-offs in terms of time, support, documentation, complexity, transition cost, etc.
The only thing stopping those trade-offs being changed is people’s willingness to make the changes.
Based on a lot of criticism of MacOS I see here, some of that is because people don’t actually want to change the trade offs.
Sorry WarOnPrivacy, Windows does bypass 3rd-party firewalls and has done so since at least XP onwards (however, I am uncertain if this was the case with Windows 2000).
Microsoft has programmed into Windows dozens of addresses that 'dial home' to Microsoft's servers. As you will be aware, many of these addresses change with the various versions of Windows. Normal program switches can block some of these addresses whilst others are hidden from normal view, but with a little judicious snooping, we can find most of hidden ones and successfully block them with the hosts file.
However, we cannot block all of them, and this has been the case since Windows XP. From my understanding, which I learned from various security experts around 15 or more years ago at the time when the Microsoft 'exploit' was first discovered, Microsoft hard-coded certain dial-home links for the specific purpose of determining which and how many copies of Windows were pirated. (This seemed to have been the consequence of the widespread pirating of certain corporate copies of Windows 2000.)
Whilst the user many have thought he'd secured every talk-home to Microsoft loophole and was safe, nevertheless MS still knew that his O/S was a pirate version. Unlike other activation links that announced an 'illegal copy' status to the user, these links only advised Microsoft of the fact—if you like, there're part of Microsoft's secret surveillance system. Essentially, Microsoft has deliberately sabotaged the DNS client's hosts table lookup functionality by bypassing it with hard coding.
It seems that in recent years, Microsoft has developed this secret system to an even finer art, as these days it gathers much more information other than whether the O/S has been pirated or not.
With having the handle WarOnPrivacy, I gather you're more than just interested in securing your Windows in the usual ways. If I were you, I'd do what I'm doing here and that's to research the details further and then publicize the fact. As will now be obvious, this is not something that Microsoft wants broadcast to the world.
Below are a few links about the matter with a few comments from some of the sites:
https://slashdot.org/story/06/04/16/1351217/Microsoft-Bypass...
https://bugtraq.securityfocus.narkive.com/a2fZWlAb/microsoft...
" Hey, guess what I just found out: Microsoft have deliberately sabotaged their DNS client's hosts table lookup functionality. Normally you can override DNS lookup by specifying a hostname and IP directly in the hosts file, which is searched before any query is issued to your dns server; this technique is often used to block ads, spyware and phone-homes by aliasing the host to be blocked to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file."
https://www.theregister.com/2015/09/01/microsoft_backports_d...
"All the updates can be removed post-installation – but all ensure the OS reports data to Microsoft even when asked not to, bypassing the hosts file and (hence) third-party privacy tools. This data can include how long you use apps, and which features you use the most, snapshots of memory to investigate crashes, and so on."
I used to put commas before, however some grammar checking tools like grammarly marked them as wrong, and I changed my ways.
Comma rules are complex in both in my native language and English and a good, definitive guide would be really helpful.
Thanks for your comment again.
The difference between PureOS and Debian is practically non-existent.
> System76's website is itself half-broken, with 500 errors
OK, it proves that the company is about to die. We of course never see those errors on big websites /s
>If tomorrow a million Apple users said "Enough! LittleSnitch is the straw that breaks the camel's back!" and decided they wanted to shop for a desktop linux system, the market couldn't handle it.
Although it is true, the good news is that such thing just cannot happen. This is not how the market changes. The change is always smooth enough that the companies can adjust. And I am sure Purism and System76 are able to given reasonable time.
> I'm saying that it is not a mass-market option right now for users frustrated with Windows/OS X.
Many (most?) frustrated users on MacOS are those who can use the options I listed. If they understand the problems like the one in the title, they definitely can order a laptop online. Probably also true with Windows. Such changes typically start with geeks anyway (AFAIK geeks switched to MacOS first).
> You cannot point to niche operations and claim it to be a viable mass-market option.
I did not claim that. I suggest that those complaining about users restrictions should go to Linux. Typical users do not complain about such things.
> I didn't say you can't buy Linux pre-installed, I said you can't go into a big-box store like Best Buy to do so, and that there's no significant consumer support infrastructure.
Now you have a point and I actually do not really understand, why I cannot just enter a big shop and ask for a Linux laptop. I actually tried to ask tens of times and they always say there are no. Sounds like a conspiracy by the big labels to me.
Wayland's trackpad support is excellent, I can switch from my mac for work to my personal machine without noticing.
Multi monitor support is MILES (I literally cannot emphasize how much better it is) better. Different scaling ratios for different monitors, much better automatic detection and configuration.
There are two remaining problems in my opinion
- Screen sharing is still rather hit or miss. Pipewire is functional for me on latest versions of chromium, but does not work for some electron apps that package older versions (Slack, in this case).
- X-Wayland applications still make you feel the hurt from Xorg. Most times I don't care, but the default builds of chromium and chrome both rely on X-Wayland. There are AUR builds of chromium that have moved to Ozone and have native Wayland support, though (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-ozone/)
----
Long story short, Wayland is why my personal machine no longer has windows on it. It's genuinely much better, and I don't spend any time at all dicking around with xorg config files (literally not once have I touched a config file related to monitors or user input devices on my current linux box in the last year. It feels very nice.)
Please feel free to post info about actual firewalls, info that isn't about DNS/Hosts.
2. The 'dial-home' mentioned bypasses Windows's firewall.
3. External monitoring has shown that it does bypass firewalls (however, I cannot say whether that's all of them). So does security software such as LoJack (but that's somewhat unusual).
4. This includes ones with kernel drivers.
5. As the code is written to be invisible to other processes, firewall writers would either have to reverse engineer MS's code to stop it or know certain proprietary details about it. I doubt if any legit/reputable developer would risk using info gained from RE (certainty not to stop it functioning as MS intended). Nevertheless, some MS parteners know about it for obvious reasons.
6. From various news reports several weeks ago, it seems that XP's source code has leaked. That means if you are keen enough you can find the 'offending' code and verify the matter for yourself one way or the other (at least as far as XP goes). If you don't, then sooner or later l'm sure others will do so.
If I and others who share this understanding are way off beam, which I doubt having seen evidence, then please let us all know about it in a HN post.