> But the truth is very few truck owners are towing huge loads long distances.
This pattern also applies more broadly. Most people don't actually need to drive 400 miles without stopping, don't actually need an SUV, and in some cases don't actually need a truck. For a huge swath of the population some variation on a hybrid/electric hatchback/wagon or minivan is actually the best match for their needs, but practicality is rarely the prevailing factor in vehicle purchase decisions.
The reason I'm holding out for a 400 mile range vehicle is many fold.
1: Sometimes I actually do drive 400 miles in a single sitting, and I want to be able to keep doing that.
2: The last 10% of charge seems to take the longest. If I can safely fast charge in 20 minutes from 30 to 300 miles range, then I would have no range anxiety even when I'm on a long road trip.
3: I know the tech is coming, and I can wait until it gets here. I don't have an "only" option when it comes to vehicles.
This is one of the reasons why I’m a super fan of the macOS global menubar.
It’s always present and cannot be hidden by app developers, and so there’s no reason to not populate it, and thus the menubar serves as a consistently available master index of the program’s functions. That alone makes it invaluable.
Those who undervalue this don’t realise that the Mac menu bar is also the standard mechanism for defining keyboard shortcuts; as long as it has an entry in the menu bar, it can have keyboard shortcuts assigned and even reassigned from System Settings.
There’s incentive for the menu bar to be properly populated with all the functions that a program offers. Mac users expect it.
Compare with non-standard Mac apps (mainly Electron apps or ports from other OS), modern Windows apps, and many Linux apps where the menu bar is often a second class citizen or completely absent, leaving you to the whims of the developer rather than enjoying conformance to a system-wide standard.
I’m extremely disappointed Ubuntu gave up on Unity. It had the same basic concept, and menus being searchable was so good. GNOME’s determined direction (Adwaita) is so dumb for anything but small, simple apps. Just hopelessly bad.
Mind you, app-defined command palettes can be better than a global one because they can provide more information and context and augment it with other widgets as appropriate. The best command palettes are not just a searchable version of the menu, they add more.
I think probably app-defined palettes and a global menu is best possible combo.
The app-defined palette enables more rich functionality as you’ve mentioned, while the system-owned global menu provides a consistent way to see everything an app is capable of without hunting and pecking through the palette. The menu also serves as a unified API for assistive and automation technology to interact with software and allows users to choose how the menus are displayed (don’t like a top-aligned menubar? Cool, your desktop can present it as window attached menus, a pie menu, or NeXT style floating menus or anything else you can imagine).
Absolutely. Social media is designed to elicit a constant stream of dopamine hits, prey on our need for social validation, keep the amygdala engaged, stoke conflict, and bolster whatever beliefs we carry (no matter how deranged). It’s the ultimate distortion machine and is wildly dangerous, particularly for individuals who struggle to keep it at arm’s distance and fail to equip mental PPE prior to usage.
I don't think it's by design. I think it is by its nature.
Most people crave social interaction, and when others engage with them it triggers that dopamine hit. As you say, we all have need for social validation. Even HN has that effect, and it's not engineered to elicit it as far as I know.
Even USENET had that pull, and people would waste hours on it, engage in flamewars, etc.
Now platforms like TikTok and Instagram might optimize for it but even if they didn't, they would have that addictive quality.
I don't think there's any way to do social media that would avoid this.
The effect is much stronger than it has to be due to how these services have been optimized for increasing engagement at the cost of all else.
In more traditional places of online discussion, things like flamebait is at minimum penalized and often deleted. Posters with strong tendency towards incivility and outright falsehoods get banned. Participating with one’s lizard brain at the wheel is strongly discouraged.
There’s no reason why that can’t be true of social media, too. It could be tuned to elevate content that doesn’t pull people into a degenerative cycle, but that’s not nearly as profitable and so it’s not.
Both X and Meta have at various points in time hired addiction medicine specialists. They weren't hired to decrease user attention to their properties.
Sony TVs are some of the most sane options in the TV market right now. Generally decent, and they don't fight you if you want to use them without connecting them to the internet. Still not perfect and they'll cost you more, but it's a worthwhile trade to me.
Friction/barrier to entry is the biggest difference. People generally didn't do things like that before due to a combination of it being a colossal waste of time and most not having the requisite skills (or will and patience to acquire said skills). When all it takes is @mentioning a bot, that friction is eliminated.
When there's a Star Trek running, I subscribe to Paramount+ via the Apple TV+ channel instead of directly, despite it costing a touch more, just to avoid having to use Paramount's official app (instead, one uses the Apple TV app and plays media with the stock tvOS player). It's absurd how much that improves the experience.
I hooked Peacock to the Apple TV app, and while it shows my next playing episode, launching from the Apple TV app just launches the Peacock app, which feels rather pointless.
You have to subscribe with the Apple TV+ channel specifically for it to play in the Apple TV app (confusing, I know). Not all services offer a TV+ channel, unfortunately.
Hmm... I guess I'll check into that next time and pay more attention. I subscribed to Peacock+ through a bundle offer with Apple TV+, and went through Apple to trigger the purchase. It forced me over to Peacock to make an account there and other than billing it seemed totally separate.
Gnome is only similar to macOS in the most superficial of ways. You don't even have to go beyond skin-deep for the illusion to start to fall apart. It compares more closely to iPadOS or Android in desktop mode.
Linux desktops in general skew either Windows-like or ultra-minimal tiling thing.
Philosophically, yes. See decisions like hiding the minimize button, systematically eliminating menu bars, large highly padded touch-like control metrics, and generally omitting functions wherever possible. There’s also the mobile OS style top bar. It’s more customizable than iPadOS and doesn’t obscure the filesystem, but otherwise the two are very similar.
To me, UI look and feel != philosophy. And having a similar looking UI != "very similar"
iPadOS didn't even have overlapping windows until very recently. It barely has application multitasking with a highly compromised implementation. It doesn't even really have a central file system or user directory. It's missing a laundry list of things that macOS has that Linux distributions with also Gnome have.
Let’s not forget that most Windows PCs on the market are available with touchscreens and a lot of people do use them. The Windows PC market is full of 2-in-1 convertibles that do not exist in Apple’s hardware lineup. Gnome isn’t losing their mind by making their desktop environment friendly to them. Apple is one of the only laptop manufacturers that has avoided touch panels on laptops entirely, because they want to sell you two devices with heavily overlapping functionality.
It’s not just look and feel, it’s approach to various things, like how GNOME shares the iPadOS tendency to cut advanced features instead of putting them in a less prominent position. The menu bars of Mac apps are full of such functions that under GNOME simply wouldn’t be implemented because they don’t fit in a toolbar or hamburger menu. There are several aspects of out of the box customization that are more like iPadOS than macOS too, which is why the GNOME settings app has less than half the settings that the macOS settings app does.
If GNOME wants a touch friendly mode that’s fine, but they’re doing the Microsoft Windows 8 thing and forgetting that there’s a ton of desktop PCs that will never have touch as well as plenty of touch-capable laptops where that capability is unused or even flat out disabled. The least they could do is provide a “traditional desktop” toggle in settings to restore more sane padding values that don’t burn 20% of my non-touch 12” ThinkPad’s limited screen space for no good reason.
> The least they could do is provide a “traditional desktop” toggle in settings to restore more sane padding values that don’t burn 20% of my non-touch 12” ThinkPad’s limited screen space for no good reason.
The thing is that Gnome has numerous desktop environment alternatives and nobody is stuck with it. Linux desktop environments are free to be opinionated because they know that their users can just use something else. You can even install Gnome and KDE at the same time and switch between if that's really your thing.
Gnome doesn't limit you to installing applications that are in Gnome's own design system. You say "The menu bars of Mac apps are full of such functions that under GNOME simply wouldn’t be implemented because they don’t fit in a toolbar or hamburger menu" but that's not really how it works on Linux. The desktop environment is just the desktop environment, it's essentially separate from everything else.
When we are talking about "Gnome apps" we are really only talking about ~30 core apps that are included with the OS. Many/most/all of them you could even uninstall entirely and replace with something else.
Gnome choosing to have a small settings pane is a deliberate choice to keep things simple for their desktop environment's intended audience, but it is not a deliberate choice to limit functionality or freedom (installing apps from third parties, changing your browser engine, compiling code on your own system, etc).
Even if that’s true, the stock GNOME apps and third party GTK3/4 apps (which tend to follow GNOME design philosophy) work more smoothly under GNOME than those built with Qt or other frameworks, and so deviating makes for a materially worse experience.
And yes you can switch between multiple installed DEs and I have done so in the past, but that makes for a messy experience with many redundant apps that the user must clean up themselves. It’s a lot nicer to have just one installed.
Shrug, I run Gnome apps in KDE all the time. They run smoothly for me. I’m sure the inverse is perfectly fine as well.
I certainly don’t expect most users to switch between desktop environments but there are so many of them that complaining about one is a waste of breath.
Qt apps under GNOME aren’t great thanks to the client side declaration drama with the GNOME team. In short, the GNOME team believes that programs should be responsible for drawing their own titlebars/chrome (as opposed to windows being provided standard chrome for “free”), and so Qt apps have to draw a simplistic makeshift titlebar which doesn’t match anything when running under GNOME.
> The least they could do is provide a “traditional desktop” toggle in settings to restore more sane padding values that don’t burn 20% of my non-touch 12” ThinkPad’s limited screen space for no good reason.
This is a kind of "responsiveness" that should be implemented in GTK+ 4 and libadwaita (dynamically changing padding/size values within the theme depending on active input devices, with mouse supporting smaller sizes than touch-only input), not so much GNOME itself. Windows does it already, so it's a realistic possibility.
KDE is in better shape than GNOME, but there are still some nits. Nearly all the available third party themes for example are blurry or otherwise render incorrectly with fractional scaling on.
To my understanding, doing that wouldn't be helpful due to hard technical limits that can't be reconciled. Most window chrome themes are Aurora themes, which don't play nice with HiDPI, and to change that they'd need to be rewritten as C++ themes (like the default Breeze theme is), which is beyond the capabilities of most people publishing themes.
It also doesn't offer a Mac-style desktop environment, which is one of the things keeping me away. KDE/Cinnamon/XFCE lean more Windows-style, GNOME/Pantheon (Elementary) is more like iPadOS/Android in desktop mode. My productivity takes a big hit in Windows-style environments and I just don't enjoy using them.
I hope to put my money where my mouth is and contribute to one of the tiny handful of nascent Mac-like environment projects out there once some spare time opens up, but until then…
So apparently when Canonical was the gorilla in desktop Linux, they had a push to have apps make their menus accessible via API. KDE supports that protocol. There are KDE widgets that will draw a Mac-style menu bar from it.
That means you can take the standard KDE "panel" and split it in two halves: a dock for the bottom edge, and a menus/wifi settings/clock bar for the top edge.
There are some things I don't know how to work around - like Chrome defaulting to Windows-style close buttons and keybindings, but if the Start menu copy is the thing keeping you off Linux, you can mod it more than you think you can.
Yep, I've played with it. Things might've changed but I couldn't get KDE's global menubar to work at all under Wayland, and under X11 a lot of apps don't populate it.
I have the widget for global menu right now in KDE Wayland. Its supported by all QT apps, and there's a wayland protocol pull request for it (unfortunaly stalled, as is tradition). Overall I like it a lot - enough of the apps I use support it (if you're a GTK fan then tough luck).
Thanks for sharing. Would you happen to know if Electron apps might surface the same menus they do under macOS via this protocol? Between Qt and Electron a lot of stuff would be covered.
Gnome with a persistent app drawer is relatively Mac-like. With a couple settings tweaks and possibly extensions, it can get pretty close. Even out of the box it feels a lot more mac-like than windows-like to me, but of course everybody is a bit different.
Some of the broad strokes are there, but the details are what matters. Gnome extensions also come with the problem of breaking every other update which quickly becomes irritating.
Yeah quite fair, and also gnome extensions breaking every other update does indeed quickly become irritating. It's hard to believe it's now 2026 and that is still an issue
There are major differences in the design between Windows and Mac desktops, and generally speaking, Linux desktop environments function more like Windows than they do macOS.
The biggest difference is probably that under Windows-style environments, applications/processes and windows are mostly synonymous — each window represents an independent process in the task manager. In a Mac-style environment, applications can host multiple windows each, so for example even if you've got 7 Firefox windows open, there's only one host Firefox process. This is reflected in the UI, with macOS grouping windows by application in several difference places (as opposed to Windows, where that only happens in the taskbar if the user has it enabled).
"Windows style" also comes a number of other patterns, such as a taskbar instead and menubars attached to windows (as opposed to a dock and a single global, system-owned menubar under macOS).
"Mac style" comes with several subtleties that separate it from e.g. GNOME. Progressive disclosure is a big one. Where macOS will keep power user features slightly off to the side where they're accessible but unlikely to confuse non-technical users, GNOME just omits the functionality altogether. It also generally implies a greater level of system-level integration and cross-functionality from apps (including third party), lending to a more cohesive feel.
Windows is more window centered. And macOS is more application centered. But many Windows and Linux applications use 1 process or 1 host process for all windows. This includes Firefox.
ThinkPads run the gamut. Their flagship line is nice. In most regards, I enjoy my first gen X1 Nano — good keyboard, screen (even if it annoyingly requires fractional UI scaling), body feels solid despite being lightweight, soft touch plastic makes it feel nice to hold. Trackpad is just ok but the trackpoint makes for that.
It likes to spin up its fan doing the most insignificant things though (even plugging in a pedestrian 1x scaling external monitor can while idle can do it) and its battery life is somewhat abysmal. Standby time is also quite poor.
Some of these things are in theory improved by a newer CPU (Lunar Lake in particular looks decent) but sadly they discontinued the Nano. The Carbon isn’t that much bigger, but the size difference is noticeable in some circumstances.
It dual boots Windows 11 and Fedora, and I’ve played with other distros in the past. They have minor edges over each other in various ways but none offer a major concrete advantage over the others in any category (except harassment/junkware, which any distro has a major upper hand over Windows 11 in, but Windows 10 accomplishes that almost as well).
Either there’s simply a hard limit on how good this hardware can be in terms of thermals and battery life or neither Lenovo’s tuning of Windows nor any Linux distro has gone far enough in properly leveraging power management and the like.
This pattern also applies more broadly. Most people don't actually need to drive 400 miles without stopping, don't actually need an SUV, and in some cases don't actually need a truck. For a huge swath of the population some variation on a hybrid/electric hatchback/wagon or minivan is actually the best match for their needs, but practicality is rarely the prevailing factor in vehicle purchase decisions.
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