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Because they absolutely can't have disparate visual styles in their product lines, practicality be damned ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At least it's not GNOME, where they shoehorned an unusable mobile-style interface on the whole thing and they don't even have a mobile version.

To be fair, there is sorta kinda a mobile version: Phosh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosh

And amusingly Ubuntu uses Qt for its phone clone of Gnome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch


All 4 users must be really happy.

Allegedly the next gen MBPs will have a touch screen. I think Apple have pushed a touch-enabled macOS UI out a year ahead of the hardware: maybe to iron out issues; maybe 'cos they could... I worry that we're stuck with this shit for a few more years, 'til the touch screen goes the way of the touch bar.

These rumors about touchscreen MacBooks have been going around for at least 10 years. At this point I don't believe any of it. Especially with how they sell keyboards for iPads.

"Consistency".

yeah, but somehow consistency was not a concern when picking icons for menu items. as pointed out by some previous discussions on this matter.

i also hate this "consistency" idea. was working on mobile app for android/ios. and a requirement was for apps to look identical on both platforms. whyyyyy. sure for designer it looks nice, but as a user who uses either ios OR android im used to conventions of particular platform. why throw that all away just to look identical an both platforms.


Consistency is the absolute fucking worst design principle.

I’d tweak it to say that a foolish consistency is the absolute worst design principle. All things being equal, consistency is a good thing, but it sometimes gets prioritized to the point of absurdity and becomes counterproductive.

There are two different things that can be called consistency.

Visual consistency means that your app looks as similar as possible across platforms. Regardless of those platforms' native UI. It's the bad kind.

UX consistency means that your app behaves the same across platforms, but adopts their style and conventions. You actually want this.


I think the core issue here is that consistency bounds are arbitrary and some people tend to push to much on these. Finding the middle is hard and is political. Arguing with UX or QA whether previously unrelated features on different screens should behave the same is exhausting. That's why I prefer small projects where I am the only customer or all users are extremely aligned (internal developer tooling).

It definitely isn’t. It’s good in many contexts, but zealous adherence to some pithy design principle without consideration is bad engineering and bad design.

Maybe people like her should just, uh, not use technology? Or not do it as much? The fact that the society so heavily pushes everyone — regardless of their technical literacy and willingness to learn — to use internet-connected devices is also a huge part of the problem.

I've never used a Blackberry but it was much more efficient for me to input text (an essential task for a communication device!) on non-iPhone-style phones with physical buttons.

Nothing useful to add except, god I miss my Bold 9700. Every time I slip on this stupid touchscreen keyboard and make a stupid typo on this stupid phone I howl inwardly and wish pain and endless torment upon everyone who took us down this path away from light and goodness. Grumble grumble

The fun part for me is that an old dumb phone could replace, like, 50% of my smartphone usage, if I could use Telegram on it. We even still have 2G networks with no plans to shut them down. So, a J2ME Telegram client has been on my list of potential future projects for quite some time.

It's for much longer distances.

There are flights between St Petersburg and Moscow. About 10 daily. It's about 1 hour. Together with everything you described, it's more like 4 hours. A high-speed train is also 4 hours. So the only people who choose to fly are those who have a connection or those who couldn't get a train ticket because those are always in high demand.


Everyone makes mistakes every now and then. He also approved the Ping "music social network", and a few other nonsense products that no one wanted or liked.

But when you see mistakes made consistently, year after year, you know the problem is systemic.


Transliteration is certainly a thing but it's only ever used as a last resort when you really have to pass Russian text through a system that only supports the Latin alphabet, or when you can't input Cyrillic for some other reason. It used to be somewhat common for SMS 20+ years ago.

What if you want to use a newer or older version of just one package without having to update or downgrade the entire goddamn universe? What if you need to use proprietary software?

I've had so much trouble with package managers that I'm not even sure they are a good idea to begin with.


I know you are trying to make a point about complexity, but that is literally what NixOS allows for.


That is the point of flatpak or appimage but even before that you could do it by shipping the libraries with your software and use LD_LIBRARY_PATH to link your software to them.

That was what most well packaged proprietary software used to do when installing into /opt.


Yeah and nothing ever lets you pick which versions to link to. You're going to get the latest ones and you better enjoy that. I found it out the hard way recently when I just wanted to do a perfectly normal thing of distributing precompiled binaries for my project. Ended up using whatever "Amazon Linux" is because it uses an old enough glibc but has a new enough gcc.


You can choose the version. There was apgcc from the (now dead) Autopackage project which did just that: https://github.com/DeaDBeeF-Player/apbuild

It's not at all straightforward, it should be the kind of thing that's just a compiler flag, as opposed to needing to restructure your build process to support it.

It's not straightforward and yes it should be easier, but it's also not rocket science. Containers have made it approachable for the average developer.

Yeah that's what I meant. I also came across some script with redefinitions of C standard library functions that supposedly also allows you to link against older glibc symbols. I couldn't make it work.

Any half-decent SDK should allow you to trivially target an older platform version, but apparently doing trivial-seeming things without suffering is not The Linux Way™.


The reason that there is no SDK is because containers (and before that sysroots) are good enough that no one bothers to maintain the 100% usability solution.

Isn't it funny how most banking apps do all this borderline malware crap, yet most banks also have online banking that you use through a web browser that they have no technical means of "trusting"?


Keep in mind this is also often caused by arbitrary "security" consultants that crap out a list of stuff you need to implement. Like jailbreak detection and the like.

One I repeatedly got back in the day was hilarious: "After uninstalling the app credentials stay present in the keychain". Yes thanks genius, I don't get to run code on uninstall.


As a Russian, this is such a bonkers idea to me. I only took a Deutsche Bahn train once so far. It got delayed 20 minutes. When I complained about it on social media, I was told something like "what do you mean, it arrived and took you where you wanted to go".

Russian trains only get delayed if there's something seriously wrong. Like an accident or an act of sabotage because of the war. A month or so ago, a Sapsan train from St Petersburg to Moscow broke down en route. People had to wait for hours to get out. It made big news. As far as I can tell, this is a weekly occurrence in Germany.


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