KDE Plasma has a desktop effect called "Track Mouse" after you activate it you can use it by pressing Ctrl+Meta. It doesn't look like the MacOS variant, but it does the job.
Thanks for pointing that out, I found the setting on my laptop and tried it out. I do like the jiggle approach better, though, simply because that is something many people (myself included) instinctively do when losing track of the mouse cursor.
Just to chip in because I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but I fing LLMs like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot are really good at making regexes and also at explaining regexes. So if you're learning them or just want to get the darned thing to work so you can go to bed those are a good resource.
Apple software team is on another level. You don’t even have to try to find the feature. We all instinctively shake the mouse to locate the cursor, so it just happens.
LMAO the clickbait delusion… has anybody not learnt for how long people stuck to Windows XP and 7? 10 is incomparably more secure and robust than 7 was, and 11 is almost a meaningless cosmetic upgrade. People that do not want to, will not use Linux, and keep using 10. Comfort and compatibility take precedence over security and privacy. People that do install Linux, however, will still want to keep 10 or 11 separately installed, and Microsoft officially suggests workaround to install 11 on any computers.
Command line is a lot more powerful for a lot of cases. Most CLI programs are written with the idea that the caller might be another program, so they tend to be easy to chain with pipes and redirection. So you have tons of simple tools that you can combine however you need.
Back to the to the topic, yes, Linux is not technically Unix by pedigree. In practice, it doesn’t matter that it isn’t and it wouldn’t matter if it were, both for this issue in particular and for most others you are likely to encounter.
The actually relevant technology here is the graphics subsystem, and MacOS’s Cocoa has always been radically different from anything else in the Unix/Linux space. There is no relation whatsoever to either X11 or Wayland. The only thing worth “porting” here is the basic idea. Which is pretty neat, though. Let’s hope Apple hasn’t patented it.
If it was, I don’t think it was a default. I had been using Windows 7 for quite a while back in the day, and I cannot remember ever seeing something like this. On the other hand, I can certainly remember losing track of where on my monitors my mouse cursor was on various occasions…
IIRC, the windows version of this is a setting where you can hit CTRL and it makes a moderately large circle that contracts towards the pointer. It's been in since at least W7/Vista, possibly XP. I've used it on and off for years (especially with 3 27" monitors) because of how easy it is to lose the cursor.
And that functionality is in Gnome, but disabled by default IIRC. I’ve had it on for years in both PopOS and Debian so I may be wrong but I do believe it’s a Gnome feature.
Quartz is the old macOS graphics framework, but the mouse shaking is probably just a cool show off feature of Core Animation. There’s uncontested Windows ports on GitHub, so I doubt Apple will throw any fits for Linux.
In my experience, every computer is faster with Linux than with Windows. But if this measures just the processor performance on similar tasks I guess it’s news.
Consequently battery life tends to suffer on Linux vs windows. Especially on newer hardware before people figure out how to manage performance and battery life.
Usually, applying the same tricks that Windows does, its not true.
But by default, mostl Linux ditros dont do something special for having performance managing.
But actually. Windows does neither, at least the pure Vanilla form. Its a huge difference when using my Levono Ideapad with the preinstalled Windows versus Windows that is reinstalled Vanilla without drivers. Then Linux is more plug and play and better at this job than Windows.
Maybe they do it differently on ideapads. But on all of the modern thinkpads I own the all install at set up the same power profiles and dynamic tuning that the factory image does. Factory install vs fresh install performance is the same on these machines once windows update has done it’s thing. Even the random POS HPs will do the same thing.
I think it comes down to the culture. A minuscule improvement to a file system is big news in the Linux community. There’s also lots of academic interest in the performance critical parts of the kernel that you just can’t emulate with a closed source model. Is anyone writing papers on how to obtain a 2% improvement in the task scheduler on Windows?
Linux dominates the server market, so even small improvements matter when you’re talking about a server farm with thousands of machines or the latest supercomputer. Many, many people care about the scalability of Linux. On Windows, we say: NTFS? It’s good enough. The user won’t notice on modern SSDs.
A lot of the software components under the hood in Linux are replaceable.
So you have a bunch of different CPU and disk IO schedulers to suit different workloads, the networking stack and memory management can be tweaked to hell and back, etc etc.
Because every IDE implementa a different git interface and I can’t be bothered to figure out where they hid the commit, push, pull etc. buttons this time.
Damn I hate with a passion the IDE interactions with source control software. I may make use of the visual information they give me, but I still execute the commands in the console.
Same. Git GUIs can be great for examining commit trees, visualising patches, etc. For any write operations (this includes things like fecth and pull which write to .git), it’s all in the shell.
When teaching programming classes it’s awful trying to figure out every IDE’s git interface that my students are using. Each IDE puts the buttons in very different layouts and they even change the names of the buttons because they don’t like the way git itself named operations. It’s untenable to know them all and actually be efficient and helpful as the instructor.
Instead, I say they’re welcome to use the IDE, but the class materials use the canonical underlying command line tools and terminology. They just need to search for how to translate the real git interface to however their chosen tool does the same operation, but it’s up to them to figure it out.
When they do ask for help, I bring up the terminal (usually even inside the IDE) and run the git commands just like we went over in class.
Give a man a regular expression and he’ll match a string… teach him to make his own regular expressions and you’ve got a man with problems. – yakugo in regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247#comment-3022 (and yes, it is http:// never https:// for this domain)
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