technobabbler

I don't think it's fair to suggest that my use cases and priorities are less important than yours.

Maybe LibreOffice and GIMP are enough for you. They are not for me, especially in professional contexts where 90% similarity isn't the same as actually compatible, especially when I collaborate with other users and designers. And I actually appreciate the Creative Cloud subscription pricing, which is great for occasional users like me who can sub for a while and then cancel without having to spend thousands of dollars at a time. Software have network effects too, and I don't produce documents and graphics for my own gratification, but to satisfy team and client needs, and telling them "Oh, but it looks fine in LibreOffice, you need to use a real document standard and not some proprietary format" is not really an option. Maybe if you're Stallman and get to dictate the terms. I'm not. I need software that works with what other people use, and software that I can use to get jobs with employers that pay me in dollars and not ideals.

Maybe you don't care about anything but 1080p 16:9 displays. That's fine, but there are others who do. Whether for spreadsheets or vectors or photos, sometimes more pixels are better, and definitely having plug and play support for things like monitor brightness are nice too. It's fine if you don't care about any of that. You don't get to tell me what I care about. Shrug.

As for poor buying skills, eh, I'm perfectly happy running Linux on my phone and servers, Windows on my desktop, macOS on my laptop, and iOS on the iPad. And guess what, I don't even know or care what architecture my microwave runs on. I just don't feel the need to install Linux on everything. Each device has their specialty, whether that's cooking food or playing games or mobile apps or web dev or GIS.

I'm glad you like your Linux UI. I tried Ubuntu on a Yoga 2 a few years ago but didn't like it. To each their own, eh?

Even if you completely run out of power, the screen should stay on the last image it was showing. You might just see the same picture for days/weeks/several heat deaths until you decide to charge it again.

How much did the hardware cost? Is e-ink still super expensive?

Sorry, meant to say "show me ads". But yes, it's still an acceptable tradeoff to me.

I mean, our own government harvests even more data and does jack shit with it. At least Google provides a world-class office suite.

Was forced to used the Microsoft stack at a new job and it made me miss the Google ecosystem so much.

At the end of the day privacy isn't that valuable to people. Nobody cared about it in the 90s when the internet was developing, it was barely a blip in the 2000s, and somehow it exploded in the 2010s but plenty of people still use Facebook and TikTok and such. So?

Usability > privacy for most people, a lesson Firefox refuses to acknowledge, I guess.

Shopify?

Google was definitely better than the algorithmic crawlers. But Yahoo often still had gems for a while, a few years maybe, before they gave up. It's too bad.

You probably don't run the same hardware or software, then. DRM doesn't quite work on Linux (so no 4k). MS Office, a business need, requires WINE or similar. No Adobe. There's Proton now for games, but only a tiny sliver of the full Steam library, especially for less-popular indie games (which is where most of the innovation is in PC gaming).

I've had bad drivers melt my dining table when the fan wouldn't kick in and the CPU didn't thermally throttle, during the Ubuntu install process. I've had to manually adjust display settings in the command line because various pieces of the UI couldn't agree with each other (Ubuntu's UI vs Gnome/KDE vs some other stuff), and hi-DPI, > 60 refresh rate, HDR, ultrawide, etc. were all a pain to set up, especially with multiple monitors. And some apps just don't exist for Linux, like the Sonos controller, motherboard firmware upgrade exes, commercial GIS software, Lightroom, etc.

All of that is just plug and play on Windows, and sometimes on Mac. With Linux it's always a multi-hour ordeal, all to end up with a poor ripoff of the Windows 7 UI or whatever Ubuntu's latest experiment is. Just, why?

The command-line is great, but zsh on macOS takes care of those needs 99% of the time. Among high-hassle tools, running WSL on Windows makes for overall less headaches than running a Windows VM or Wine on Linux. In between, Parallels on macOS is that sweet spot of usability and broad compatibility for me personally. There's nothing that I NEED on Linux on the desktop, so I'm happy to set it up on the server side and use something else at home.

Try as I might, every few years I install a few Linux distros to test them out, because people keep swearing they are better and totally ready. I'm sorry, but for an average lazy user like me, they're just not. ChromeOS is as close as any distro has come, and I'd happily install that if it didn't require a 3rd-party repackaging.

My next laptop might be a Chromebook, which is superficially and technically Linux I guess, but minus the regular chaos of the normal Linux ecosystem. I've never just never had a good experience with desktop Linux outside of Android and ChromeOS, sorry. Maybe you're lucky, or maybe I'm unlucky, but it's always been a hassle and never worth it...

The thing about Chrome is that it's a known evil. Google monitors me and sells me ads. OK, not exactly benevolent, but I can live with it. I'd prefer they just charge me $100/yr or whatever instead of ads, but at the end of the day it's a tradeoff I can accept.

The thing about Firefox is that it's an UNKNOWN evil. Mozilla always feel like it's on the cusp of bankruptcy and constantly searching for new dark patterns to sneak in. When Wikipedia needs money they beg for it, but don't purposely sabotage the user experience to get funding.

Mozilla does that with every new release. I always feel like they've added some shady new malware/adware with every new patch, and then use some stupid UI tweak to try to hide it. It's only a matter of time before they sneak Norton in there. I trust the Firefox team even less than Facebook at this point. Firefox just isn't trustworthy, whereas Chrome is a known compromise.

Meh, long before I was a dev, I was a user... and it's true I didn't care about telemetry, but a HUGE difference is that Google's services were USEFUL. Syncing passwords, extensions, bookmarks etc. were automatic, easy, unintrusive, etc. Staying logged into my Google account meant I could auto login to Gmail, GDrive, GSheets, Geverything else along with a bunch of social logins on other websites.

Firefox Sync eventually arrived, but it was a PITA to set up because I didn't need a Firefox account for anything else. And then they added a bunch of third party services that I still don't know what they do (Pocket), ads on the main screen, ads on startup, full-page release nags for pointless features, constantly changing UI for no good reason at all...

It was like Chrome took Phoenix's philosophy and Firefox tried to become Netscape Communicator again. Zero of the Firefox features added in the last decade helped me as a user, but instead constantly bugged me. I can't remember a single annoying thing that Chrome added in the same timeframe. It still feels leaner, quicker, and less intrusive.

Funny how the sides have switched...

Yes. There was a period of several years when Google's results were better than Yahoo, but once the human search engines bankrupt, the algorithmic SEO just kept getting worse and worse =/ Too bad...

I'd gladly pay for a good search engine, but I'm probably in the minority.

I know. I remember and loved it then.

You know, if that were the only roadblock, I wish someone would take the top 10,000 Google queries and just manually curate them. Hire different interest groups -- outdoors, travel, cuisine, etc. -- and manually find the best hits buried deep in some subreddit. No fancy algorithms, just old-fashioned librarian-style research, but constantly updated with the latest findings and queries.

Would happily pay for that... even if it only has 5% of the coverage of Google, that's fine because Google is like 95% noise anyway.

The only UX/UI request I have for Firefox: Stop changing it. Don't add any more useless tweaks or adware or bundled services.

Its UX "history" made it plummet from the top browser at one point to a forgotten has-been. These tweaks were not successes or celebrations, they were the death by a thousand cuts.

IMHO, as a user first and dev second, "things entirely controlled by 3rd parties" aren't a bug, they're a feature. That means someone else gets to jump through the hoops to make it work, not me. The vast majority of useful & fun things on a computer are made by corporate 3rd parties, not GNU & Linux volunteers.

Whether it's Netflix, games, Office/Photoshop, obscure drivers, whatever... I can just run an app and expect it to work, and if it doesn't, it's not my problem. I'll wait a while and someone else will fix it.

I don't have to tweak obscure config files or apply patches or sideload package manager repos.

MacOS, and to a much lesser extent, Windows, mostly stay out of the way and and let my apps and sites take center stage. Linux fails that basic test most of the time, favoring purity of ideology over basic user needs. When I have to jump through hoops to get some trivial device working or an app that takes 3 seconds to install on any other OS, that doesn't say to me "this is a great operating system, I can write my own hack to fix this", it says to me "this still isn't ready, two decades later".

I use Linux at work all the time and it's a great workhorse, but at home, I don't want an operating system whose primary selling point is that it requires even more of my time.

Eh, I only said that because I didn't grow up in the US, and had to learn American ways to live and work here. America's a huge part of the world economy and international business, so you're probably going to run into one at some point (sorry, Earth).

But the US isn't the only place with different practices.

China has no time zones. New Zealand's Chatham Island has a 45 min time zone, as in UTC+12:45. Some institutions use lunar or cultural calendars instead of Gregorian time. Some don't use Arabic numerals outside of Western collaboration.

Time aside, the US, Canada, Chile, Colombia, the Philippines, and a few other places use letter-sized instead of A4 paper. Phone number formats are different everywhere. The time and decimal separators are different in many places. Time and timeliness (as in how important it is to start and end on time) differs by culture. Preference for information density vs simplifying cognitive load (in the UX sense) differs between languages and cultures. Red is a warning in some cultures and good luck in others. Not all colors are even distinguishable between cultures. Do you act casual, or formal? Keep your distance or offer a touch? Right hand, left hand? Is pointing OK? How long should you maintain eye contact? First names, last names? Many cultural systems don't identify people like that. Nodding isn't a universal gesture. Do you do a haka before events? What about a ritual blessing before a competition? There are SO many differences to consider in an international context.

Big companies have entire departments working on this stuff, not because they are ludicrously US-centric, but because it's so different everywhere.

I only mentioned the US vs Europe differences because that's what the OP asked for. Shrug. I'm not shilling for the American ways, just describing them. I wish we went metric decades ago, because it's a far superior system.

But the thing about standards: everyone has their own.

Not the OP, just offering some thoughts.

There are two possible cases here. (snip) I was under the impression that it was common (in places that use the 12 hour system) to instead write 12:00 noon/midnight specifically to avoid this.

IMHO the bigger takeaway ought to be that what is "common" in your area isn't necessarily common in another part of the country, or in another country. This confusion exists because the Europeans (and nowadays the Americans) exported their time measurement system across cultures, to mixed success. It's never obvious and should not be assumed to be... that confusion can exist no matter what actual UNIX time the test was scheduled at.

Second, I don't understand people saying they use 11:59/12:01 AM/PM as a mnemonic. This makes no sense to me as 00:01 a valid time.

For this specific case, it helps clarify what is "noon" vs "midnight". For some reason people are a lot better with knowing 11:59pm is, vs 12:00AM. The cutover is what throws people off. And for most purposes, the +/- 1-3 minute difference won't matter.

The midnight/noon thing doesn't really help when you're going across oceans though. Or, like you said, if you're not familiar with AM/PM at all.

That's really fascinating. When do businesses typically open and close? Are there set times?

Believe it or not, some Americans will be confused by that. Our modern educational systems don't really prepare them for international communications.

It just depends on your audience & context...

I like this. The guerilla war for universal understanding!

I don't think this is a scheduling thing but a cultural thing.

11:59pm would be 23.59 in other places. The mere use of "11" would suggest morning.

If you can convince my government and my CEO, I'm game!

In the United States we do not say "half nine". We'd say "half PAST nine" sometimes but honestly "nine thirty" is a lot more common.

This help domestically, but not across cultures that don't use 12 hour time.

That doesn't help people who don't know what am/pm are. 11:59pm would be 23.59 in some places (like Finland).

It's possible to mix up dates and times from each other too (is 12.30 Dec 30 or half past noon?)

You have to learn other cultures' norms if you want to live or work with them. It goes both ways.

Europe and America do not only time differently, but phone numbers (1-800-123-1234 in the USA, 06 86 57 90 14 in France), dates (Jan 1 1911 would be 1/1/11 in the USA, 11-1-1 elsewhere), decimals (1,000.00 or 1.000,00), units (inches vs centimeters), reading order, daylight savings time, time zones (some countries don't even have them), etc. To say nothing of language and cultural differences, just formatting basic facts.

You don't solve it "universally", you make affordances for diversity the same way you allow for light/dark mode or language or any other user preference.

Not even all calendars have proper embedded time zone information so that's not always reliable either.

There is Unix time but you still have to convert that according to arbitrary rules, especially for countries that observe variable daylight savings like the US.

It gets even harder when you have to do math, like 00:00 Jan 1 1970 plus 30 years isn't automatically midnight of Jan 1 2000. It depends on whether you mean 30 * 365 24-hour days or some # of quartz vibrations or 30 * orbits around the sun or 30 * years of a certain country's time (adjusted for leap years and leap seconds and daylight savings and time zone changes mandated by new laws). There is no "right" answer. Libraries like Luxon or Momoent can help, but it's never easy.

That's just the reality of a multicultural business world. When in doubt, double check and reconfirm.

Yeah, I understand there is that controversy (should newcomers with different bodies be able to displace old timers)... and presumably there isn't as much controversy about trans men who can't perform as well as cis men?

But what I don't get is why women's brackets are so much more important than, say, racial or height or any other brackets.

As a cluster, are "people born with vaginas" more similar in athletic ability than "people born of a certain ethnicity" or "people who reliably ate at last 1500 calories a day" or whatever.

Presumably this goes the other way too, with cis women being better at ultra endurance sports than cis men. So what?

Like isn't the whole point of brackets to give lesser athletes a moment to shine in the spotlight, even though they aren't technically the best? So why don't they just make more brackets not based on genitalia?

Mozilla is a Google funded project whose main driving force is keeping up with Chrome, isn't it? It's not like they determine browser standards... Google and Apple set those and everyone else follows or dies.

Edit: Even in the IE days they were always playing catchup. Firefox is just the poor/free man's alternative to the corporate browser of the moment. They don't really steer the ship, just follow trends.

And these days Mozilla is basically an adware company anyhow. They just keep bundling random crap with their browser.

Great points.

Instead of a trial you could offer a sandboxed demo account with limited functionality and network access only to a demo LAN and not the outside world. Just enough to show your orchestration and control panel features in a realistic way.