Its hard to make a commercial decision for something that’s coming someday. But I hope it does arrive - I like Swift as a language (OMG - it was such a pleasure after the ugliness that is Objective C).
wth
joined 1 year ago
ROFL.
True on desktop OSs. I did quite a bit of commercial dev on GTK many years ago, but I always found the look and feel on Mac (esp) and windows quite klunky. I hear that quite a bit of work has been done on native theming, so perhaps my impressions are out of date. Having said that - GTK wasn’t bad to work with. I also did a project in WxWidgets, but again desktop only. It was not too bad for simple apps.
For the current app - first release target was iOS, then Mac, Android, Windows then Linux. So GTK was out since its not mobile friendly (I have heard you can do something on Android, but iOS is out).
Well… this is pretty crappy.
I built a Xamarin app (mac/iOS) because I wanted portability to windows. Then I was forced to upgrade to .net 6/7 because of a library I needed, and that meant upgrading to .Net for Mac/.Net for iOS (which is part of MAUI, but not using MAUI UI controls). MAUI is definitely undercooked at the moment.
What an awful and painful process, but I’m finally there… and they drop the main IDE for development. Damn.
VSCode doesn’t have a visual UI designer (well… neither does VSMac, but it does prepare a copy of your project and opens XCode for editing the storyboard/images, and copies changes back). So does this mean they will add that to VSCode? Or will we all have to switch to raw edits of XML to create UIs like you have to do with MAUI? Ick.
Developing GUIs for windows using MS tools is a lesson in frustration, especially when you want to have cross platform capabilities… WPF -> WinForms -> Xamarin -> Xamarin.Forms -> MAUI/.Net for {Mac,iOS}… Not to mention UWP… Each transition is a rewrite. Damn.
Be wary of RAID 5 or 6.
They both have a « write hole » problem (or though much less so in RAID 6). Any power failure which causes an incomplete write can cause a complete RAID corruption - meaning all data is lost. Hardware RAID controllers usually have an onboard backup battery so they can store some information to complete operations should there be a sudden power failure. Software RAID does not have this, and you need to provide a UPS with automatic clean shutdown as the battery runs low using nut or some equivalent.
Some people go as far as to say that RAID 5 should never be used.
You also have very long recovery times when you replace a failed drive (days). Any other failure during this time means total data loss (of course RAID 6 gives you a second redundancy). Weekly Resyncs are very slow too (hours to days), and (unless you constrain your max throughput) will bring your system to its knees.
zfs does not suffer from these problems, BTW.
I run software RAID 5 via mdadm and have a UPS. I’ve replaced drives twice with no issues other than a slightly nervous long wait during recovery. I’m too cheap to buy the extra HDD for RAID 6, and may end up regretting it one day.
My $0.02c worth - I have run all sorts of servers at home over the years, and one of the main challenges around the hardware is managing heat.
I’ve used mini-ITX mobos and tiny cases for builds. They look gorgeous, but at some point, when you stick enough drives in there (assuming you can) or make the CPU/GPU busy, you are going to have a heat problem, or a noise problem, or both.
On my mythtv build I used M-itx and a gorgeous Lian Li small case. It was a beautiful add to my home theatre stack, but in the end I drilled a ton of small holes in the top and added a slow 140mm fan to control the heat without noise.
The same goes for my file server - it was a slightly larger case with no GPU, but once I added my 6th HDD and had a ton of services running, heat became an issue and I was having to add extra fans, which could only be 80mm so they ran fast and noisy.
My new build I’m going to go all the way with a Phanteks Enthoo Full Tower and a few 120mm fans. I’ve decided that looks don’t matter
The other problem for me with these tiny builds is cable management. I’m complete shit at it, and small builds requires some skills. A big case gives you space to spread those cables out.
Lastly, you can get ATX or EATX mobos with 6, 8 or more SATA connectors - room for growth! And there are very low power options available.
I’ll soon have the appleTV + TV upstairs, laptop in the office, and the monster server downstairs with cat-6 + Gb fibre throughout.
That caps lock light is so cool, but I guess it makes sense since keyboard drivers need to change it.
A great form factor with a superior OS (IMHO).
It could well be survivorship bias, but I did represent the examples as personal. Having said that - I did a quick google for « laptops with longest lifespan » and most of the reviews had apple at #1 or 2.
In common with you, most of my previous laptops (5 or 6) were thinkpads like yours, usually the tablet style for OneNote (which is awesome BTW). They never survived the rigours of the road. Perhaps that’s why I had a different result to yours - I used to travel 3-6 months a year.
They sure do, and its a complete bastard. Soldered ram and disk.
My latest laptop has 96GB RAM (I run a lot of VMs) and 4TB SSD. I think I should get the full 5 years out of it.
That was an awesome laptop with upgradable components. Nice!
IIRC weren’t some of the peripheral drivers a bit dodgy.
Some well off people work way more than 40 hours per week to be wealthy. Not all of them are living the dream (so to speak) - they also can be stuck.
What the super rich people get is time. They have people to take care of all the crap the rest of us deal with - shopping, fixing the car, booking holidays, cooking, cleaning…
Yeah… I’d rather be wealthy than not.
Sad, but true. If a CEO is not maximising profit, then the shareholders can sue, and the board (who represent the shareholders) can replace the CEO.
I wish this structure had a longer term view so that a CEO can also do what’s right - such as make decisions that might lose money now, but have a greater long term value (where value is not only defined by share price, but also things like goodwill, reputation etc).
I really like the idea of having a web UI for its portability and richness (esp thanks to CSS being so close to consistent across all platforms). But I have a metric tonne of business logic and ZKE code in C#/.Net running on Mac/iOS. From your prompt, I did just find Electron.Net, so perhaps there is hope.
And, AFAICT, electron can’t be used for iOS apps on the App Store (am I still wrong about that??)
Plus (personal bent) I did a ton of JavaScript years ago when truthiness and indeterminate behaviour was rampant back in ES5 days. I’m a purist and found it a little ugly, but incredibly fast. Then I found dart which compiled to JS, and I decided that JS made a better assembly language than a usable language. Sadly dart has remained a minor player. JS has moved on and I see lots of the old ugliness (like iterating through properties, exceptions and a sync) has gone away. ES13 looks pretty good, although I haven’t played with it yet.