Mobile plans? [LWN.net]

Mobile plans?

Posted Mar 28, 2013 15:49 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Except it doesn't work well. I had lots and lots of problems with incorrect styling in GTK3 apps, mismatched fonts, etc.

Mobile plans?

Posted Mar 28, 2013 19:16 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Pretty weak reasoning. Installing Adwaita Xfce theme and customizing fonts is not more work than switching operating systems.

Mobile plans?

Posted Mar 28, 2013 19:22 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Did that. Got various minor corruptions (also, adwaita theme is ugly). I've learned to live with them, but once Retina MacBooks became available I jumped immediately.

And no, it wasn't much worse than fiddling with theme files in Linux.

Mobile plans?

Posted Mar 28, 2013 19:45 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

So the whole reason for switching appears to be the hardware more than anything to do with similarity to Xfce. That wasn't clear from your initial post.

Mobile plans?

Posted Mar 28, 2013 20:00 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

At that point I was looking for alternatives to my environment. GNOME3 clearly was not working for me, KDE was buggy and XFCE had (and still has) a lot of rough edges.

I got tired of fighting with software only for it to break 6 months later.

Mobile plans?

Posted Mar 29, 2013 4:33 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Oddly enough, I find it is Mac that doesn't work a lot of the time. Here are some peeves:

If you download, say, a PDF, it doesn't have the extension ".pdf", the Mac won't open it until it rename it. Even though the underlying Unix system includes the magic file, so running "file filename" correctly identifies it as a PDF.
USB-tethering an Android phone does not work and there seems to be no way to get it to work. An example of Apple's NIH syndrome? In fact the help page on my Samsung phone for USB tethering says it works with Windows and Linux -- no mention of Mac. In fact, in general with unsupported hardware, with Linux you can poke around on the net and find someone who has gotten it to work in some fashion. With Mac there's nothing you can do.
Every time I start the Mac, iTunes starts up too and then complains that there is no net connection. Quitting iTunes before shutting down doesn't seem to help. I cannot figure out how to fix this.
And this comment on slashdot suggests that things are getting much worse. Specifically, getting rid of spaces; an autosave that overwrites your old file rather than use a temporary file (like emacs, libreoffice etc); saving to icloud by default; applications not quitting.

And it is years since I have had to fight with Linux to do anything. It just works.

Mobile plans?

Posted Mar 29, 2013 6:01 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Yes, lack of file utility is bad, but it hardly ever needed. USB tethering works with third-party software (EasyTether). Spaces are re-organized, but they can be brought back by TotalSpaces, I hardly ever notice iCloud, etc.

In short, it actually works pretty well and reliably. Much more reliable than I have come to expect from the Linux desktop.