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.
For tasks that I know, I’m faster in the terminal. For tasks where I’m less familiar or that are very important (like disk partitioning) I prefer a GUI because with a GUI I can usually see a bit better what I’m doing.
Terminal tasks for me include copying stuff, setting folder permissions, uncompressing or compressing folders, quick edits in vim, etc.
I live and die by ssh and scp. Sometimes rsync for larger moves.
Once you’ve got ssh for terminals (used to be x sessions too!), then port forwarding and socks proxies, add in scp for file moves, and layer in sshfs for whole file system mounts it’s a potential combo for remote work and network tunnels. Such a phenomenal toolkit.
SSHFS is shipped by all major Linux distributions and has been in production use across a wide range of systems for many years. However, at present SSHFS does not have any active, regular contributors, and there are a number of known issues (see the bugtracker).
The current maintainer continues to apply pull requests and makes regular releases, but unfortunately has no capacity to do any development beyond addressing high-impact issues.
When reporting bugs, please understand that unless you are including a pull request or are reporting a critical issue, you will probably not get a response.
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.
Because I can do things in 30 seconds what two windows admins take 15 minutes to do with their point and clicking. Not even making this up, this happened.
Gnome is the desktop environment. You may have gnome already installed if that’s what your OS uses, otherwise you probably have KDE. There are others but those are the 2 big ones.
The Desktop Environment is what gives the OS its look, and typically which GUI programs are installed by default.
That’s just scratching the surface. You can go even deeper and „make your own” desktop environment. Desktop environment is kind of like a pack of software that has a cohesive look and feel. You can leave that and pick and choose programs on your own and configure them to your liking. You can configure KDE or gnome, but this gives you even more control :)
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.
I’m a shell user too, but as programming languages I would rate Bash utter garbage. Fine for little piping but for longer scripts I will be reaching for Haskell.
I have just started trying to use Linux and I find it very hard to actually recommend it to anyone. And the problem isn’t really anything mentioned in the video, it’s just that the UX is not great. You have to google so much to get things working and the answers are almost always typing some cryptic stuff into the terminal. I am technically minded enough to get by but Linux ends up feeling more like a hobby to me rather than something I can actually get work done in.
That said, I really like Linux and am gonna stick with it. I just don’t don’t see it being widely adopted until it becomes a bit more straight forward.
I have tried quite a few now. Fedora, Mint, Debian - none could detect my wifi card so I had to go do a bunch of googling to try and get them working, found what driver I needed but was never able to actually find out how to install it, other than some terminal commands in forums that didn’t end up working. I stuck with Endeavour OS because it detected it without any problems.
I have a keyboard that I configure with an online tool called via that requires something called hid. On windows it just works but on Endeavour I have to enable something through the terminal.
I have a shared data drive and in order to make it mount when I start the computer I had to go and edit some fstab file?
I couldn’t even figure out how to install a dual boot with with fedora and mint because it asked me about the root and home and swap and boot partitions and didn’t explain how to set any of them up or what they did.
I needed a program for work that wasn’t on a repository and I had to google howw to launch an .sh file because clicking doesn’t work haha. Also through the terminal.
I’m not saying these are crazy insurmountable problems, and windows definitely has some similar things, getting my tablet working was so much smoother on Linux for example. But I’ve had to learn so much more about how my computer works to actually use Linux and I’m just not sure the majority of people will have that patience.
I wholeheartedly agree with you in regards to general lack in UX quality and lack of introduction for new users.
I have mived to use Linux exclusively for about 5 years now and whenever a teammember at work tries it, I have to give advice about once a day because of some cryptic info that has accumulated in my head and they couldn’t find through a 20minute internet search, to solve an endless stream of tiny issues.
It is an OS that I definitely could never recommend to people like my parents, which are by no means tech illiterate.
In regards to the specific point of launching .sh files:
On KDE Plasma I can double click sh files and a popup shows asking me whether I want to execute the program or edit the file in a text editor.
o, that’s weird, this one might actually just be user error then, haha. I’ll have to try again as I’m also using plasma.
I actually think it might be better for less tech literate people in some cases. Supposing it’s pre installed or they have someone to set things up for them. If you’re just using it to browse the web or write some documents the general experience is pretty good. It’s only when you start trying to do a bit more with it that things get complicated.
I agree linux can be very difficult but easy as well if you do not have “exotic” needs. If more people were using linux, especially more non techies, a lot would change but we’ll get there just slowly.
to respond to your points
I initially thiught you meant that you had to use commands in order to tinker with the UI - that’s my bad!
Wifi card, drivers, etc. can be a real pain. That’s neither linux or your fault. It’s just that noone prior to you wanted to use it and that’s why it wasn’t yet supported. Most systems are just plug and play. - compare it to macos, and you’ll find that linux is easy to install on most systems.
Auto mount is done using fstab right. Yoz xna also auto mount from the file explorer of the disk utility, it always depends on the system. There are a lot of different things and it’s not perfect.
Dual booting is in my opinion something for advanced people. I have no idea why anyone would ever suggest it to a newcomer! It’s pain in the ass if you deviate from the standard protocol.
Xou can double click on a shell script (.sh) by chmod +x file.sh or > right click > properties > exe as program
I have the same issue with Windows. I’ve been using Linux since I got my first PC. Trying to navigate Windows is a pain in the ass. It’s just old programs somehow put together. When I find some solutions online it’s often opening who knows what via Windows+R or better yet, changing something I have no idea about in regedit.
And even the most basic things are hidden away by many steps.
I feel you, I’m sure a lot of it comes down to familiarity. I just very recently did a fresh reinstall of windows and endeavour in a dual boot. And honestly the Calamares installer is a lot nicer than the windows one. But doing simple things like just writing to a secondary hard drive is a non-issue in windows whereas in Linux it was a whole learning adventure.
But doing simple things like just writing to a secondary hard drive is a non-issue in windows whereas in Linux it was a whole learning adventure.
What do you mean by that? Are you talking about RAID, having some partitions on separate drive or something else? Because if you mean just using secondary drive for files that’s just as easy as on Windows with most distributions.
Or did you mean installing programs to secondary drive? Yeah… I have no idea how that can be done. By a quick 4 minute search it seems… that it’s a problem.
So yeah, I can see a problem here. So many computers have something like 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD.
No, just a secondary hard drive. I use it for Windows and Linux so it’s ntfs. I was just trying to save a file to it but it said I didn’t have access, turns out I needed to specify ntfs-3g in the fstab file before I could write to it.
NTFS is proprietary FS that works on Linux thanks to great reverse-engineering efforts. To make this more fair, try accessing ext4 partition from Windows. Oh, it can’t even recognize it. Except that ext4 is open-source, so it wouldn’t even require reverse-engineering.
That said, have you fully shutdown Windows? You generally get write access out of the box nowadays, but only if Windows is fully shutdown. And clicking “Shut down” does not properly shut it down unless you disable fast startup.
Another method is to choose a “Restart” in Windows, and then instead of continuing with the restart, choose Linux on bootloader screen after you get there.
I’m mostly just speaking to the process. I can right click and mount the drive without a problem, but there’s no way to auto mount it on startup without editing the fstab file and finding the uuid of the drive through the terminal (at least as far as I could tell) all of the functionality is there, which is rather laudable, but the process is unapproachable for a lot of people.
O and yea, I did have to disable some fast startup setting in windows to get the write access, I forgot about that. But yeah, that one’s on Windows.
edit: sorry, this was actually pretty irrelevant to what I actually said, which was just about the write access which you pointed out was a windows issue. I got mixed up with my replies.
but there’s no way to auto mount it on startup without editing the fstab file and finding the uuid of the drive through the terminal (at least as far as I could tell) all of the functionality is there, which is rather laudable, but the process is unapproachable for a lot of people.
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