Perform terribly on modern AAA titles, sure, but that’s a tiny % of the total Steam library. A lot of people these days don’t even bother with new AAA titles, instead playing older games or indie games. I bet Valve knows this and is working on the ARM transition specifically because of this fact.

MicroEmacs was written in 1985 and has nothing to do with GNU Emacs (which people just call Emacs these days). It’s entirely outside of the vi-vs-emacs war.

There’s a lot of advantages that simply come with using a more popular distribution. For one, having a larger pool of package maintainers (and therefore more packages) is pretty important. Have you ever tried using NixOS as a daily driver? I did a few years ago. Very annoying having to create my own packages for so many different (and relatively common) things I wanted to use.

I bet the sign is just driven right off the serial port so Linux just treats it as a console to log to. Then their custom signage app just starts right up from init. Nice!

I think you mean there’s never a right time to update! You’re always rolling the dice!

Zeesh. Rhymes with sheesh!

Are you using low moisture mozzarella?

All the spatial persistence stuff was handled by the desktop database which was an invisible file that got stored on the disk. Hard drives and floppies each had their own so that if you shared a floppy with a friend the spatial properties of the floppy would travel with it. This also worked if you moved a hard drive from one system to another for the same reason.

It also worked over AppleShare network file sharing. Where it didn’t work was if you had 2 different computers since there was no way to sync information between them. You essentially treated each computer as its own thing which is really more in keeping with the spirit of spatial design. After all, it would be really weird if 2 different drawers in different rooms in your house somehow always had identical contents which stayed in sync.

Q for all those with suggestions: do any of these attempt to replicate the Spatial Finder? No other system I’ve seen (contemporary to OS 9 or since then) seems to have got this element correct (or even attempted to do so).

It’s such a key part of the OS 9 (and earlier) experience. Double click a folder and it opens where you expect it to, in the shape you left it, with the icons laid out as you left them. It’s a method of working that gives you great familiarity and confidence.

If anyone’s worked in a kitchen or workshop for a long time and developed a deep memory for the layout and the location of every tool, material, and control, then they’ll know what I’m talking about. You can move around and work incredibly efficiently, relying greatly on muscle memory.

Since the demise of OS 9, the only way to retain this level of operation has been to rely heavily on the keyboard. Since almost everything on the screen is transient and unreliably positioned (non-spatial), only the keyboard is persistent enough to allow us to work at the speed of thought and rely on muscle memory. It’s been so long now that I think people forget (or never knew) that the contents of the screen could also be persistent and spatial this way.

Do you have a source for this?

It’s really simple: Microsoft is a business solutions company. Microsoft helps your boss spy on you at work. Your boss is their customer, not you.

Apple is a consumer products company. You are their customer. They market their products on privacy and security. Betraying that marketing message by spying on users is shooting themselves in the foot, so they’re incentivized not to do that.

Neither company is trustworthy. Economic incentives are the trustworthy concept here. Barring screwups, we can trust both companies to do what is profitable to them. Microsoft profits by spying on users, Apple does not (not right now anyway).

I mean the Gimp in particular. My point is that if we could suddenly wish the Gimp into non-existence (a counterfactual) then we could get a do-over. But because the Gimp actually exists it occupies a niche that could go to something better. Instead of banding together to create a better tool, people just grumble a bit and then use the Gimp (or hand over their wallet to Adobe).

I think my biggest issue with the Gimp is that it simply exists. If it didn’t exist there’d be a huge hole in the free software space and people would get together to build software to fill it. But of course there’s no guarantee that would actually produce something better.

Maybe the real problem with the Gimp is that it’s built to scratch an itch for its own developers who are used to its bizarre UIs and workflows. For all the people I’ve seen complaining about the Gimp over the years, none have stepped up to create an alternative. I think this is likely due to the intersection between visual arts people and software engineers being extremely small (and likely most working for Adobe already).