jemorgan @ jemorgan @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

I would imagine that the relative motion between the entry/exit portal would be more important than the absolute motion of the two portals.

I mean, windows 95 was kind of the tipping point for consumer GUI-first general purpose computing, right? For the common person, using a computer went from reading manpages and learning syntax (at least the bare minimum required to launch a GUI shell), to being presented with a much more limited set of easily discoverable operations.

Gen Z using chromebooks and iPads are just the extension of that. The operations exposed by an application are generally way more limited than they were on windows 9x, and also way more discoverable.

See kids can’t use computers

I’ve known a guy for like 20 years, currently in his 60s, who firmly believes that anthropogenic climate change is entirely false.

He has a bachelors degree in physics, a bachelors degree in mathematics, and a Ph.D in economics. He’s written a handful of high level Econ textbooks, he’s worked as a professor off and on at 3 or 4 respected universities here in the US. He was most recently employed at a supply chain consulting firm, making an ungodly amount of money.

By all accounts, he’s an extremely smart, well-educated, well-read guy. But holy shit if that boomer isn’t constantly reposting the most transparently fake anti-science nonsense on his Facebook page. Think, “New research proves that Climate Change is a liberal myth” - The Religious Conservative Storm.

Just demonstrates how it doesn’t matter how educated someone is if they don’t think critically about information that confirms their expectations.

The spoiler effect is largely the reason that 3rd parties only get 7% of the vote. Few people are willing to cast their single vote for a candidate who has no real chance of winning.

Oh yikes sorry for the hostility, I definitely did mix you up with OP.

I was a dedicated Android user from the Galaxy S2 to the Pixel 3, and was on Google phones since the nexus 5. I always had my phone rooted, and until it became too inconvenient, I was really into ROM hopping.

When I got the nexus 5, I vowed not to get another Samsung phone because of how hard they were making it to unlock your bootloader. Then on the pixel 3, Safety Net kept realizing I was rooted and breaking the apps I needed for work, and I realized I was having to plug my phone into my computer to fix things way more than I wanted to. I ended up just running stock because I didn’t want to worry about not being able to log into my mobile banking when I was out of the house.

When I was looking at replacing my pixel 3, it was clear that Google was no longer as root friendly as they once were, so I started looking at other Android options. I wasn’t impressed. It occurred to me that the main reason I’d always avoided Apple was because of the lack of root support

So I went out on a limb and got the iPhone 12 Pro, and to my surprise, I loved it. If you’ve already accepted the idea of leaving the FW stock, it’s perfect. I get updates the day they roll out, the hardware is so much nicer than anything I’ve seen from Android (that’s partially subjective), the software/hardware integration is so good that it blows me away. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen so much as a UI stutter, I still get a solid 2 days/two nights of battery life on a >2 year old phone. The 3rd party apps are more consistently high-quality, and the native apps actually feel consistent and thought out, rather than feeling like the work of 10 different teams throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. And a lot of people don’t care about this, but it’s a huge deal to me; Google is an ad-tech company that sells user data to advertisers. Apple is a hardware company that sells devices to users. The difference in their policies on user privacy are stark, which means I no longer have to worry about every website I visit knowing what prescriptions I’m taking.

Siri is useless, especially compared to Google assistant. Notifications are better on Android. Ecosystem integration is a huge selling point for Apple products, IT really can’t be overstated how well things work together, but that only matters if you are open to owning an Apple Watch, AirPods, AirTags, an iPad and a MacBook. I miss the *variety * of apps on the Play Store, especially free ones.

I’m not a loyalist for either team, they’ve each got pros and cons, but my best effort at an objective analysis makes me feel that the iPhone is a lot better of a fit for someone like me.

Someone has invested, the solution is tiling window managers.

As 217 people have told you in this thread, tiling window managers allow you keep all your windows full screen if you want.

Sounds like your screen is too close to your face.

Yeah, definitely a matter of workflow and personal preference. Nobody wants to convert anyone else, you just ask why people use tiling WM, and people are answering.

why tile windows at all

I can answer that pretty comfortably. There are two main reasons, the first is that it’s very common to have to look at two things at once. If I’m taking notes while reading something complicated, or writing some complex code while referencing the documentation, or tweaking CSS rules while looking at the page I’m working on, it’s just way too disruptive to constantly have to switch windows.

The second main reason (for me) is that a lot of the time, the content of a single window is too small to make use of the space on your monitor. In those cases, if I have something else I’m working on and it’s also small, I’ll tile them. It might be easy to toggle between windows with a hotkey, but it’s strictly easier to not have to toggle, and just move your eyes over. Peripheral vision means that you don’t entirely lose the context of either window. When you’re ready to switch back to the one you just left, you don’t have to touch anything, and you don’t have to wait for the window to render to visually locate where you left off.

If you’re only actively using one window at a time, that makes sense, but alt+tabbing through a stack of 8 open applications to go back and forth between something you’re working on and something you’re closely referencing sucks. If your primary workflow for a computer involves that, I honestly don’t understand how someone can live without tiling.

I like vimium, but qutebrowser is way faster for me. It’s my go-to for research or reading documentation.

You really hit the nail on the head here. Never having to take take your hands off the keyboard, while always having windows take up exactly the right amount of room, is the main reason I hate having to use non-tiling WM.

And your other point is spot on, too. Any workflow that you use in a standard WM you can also do in a tiling WM, except (imo) more easily. And there are lots of workflows that are agonizing without tiling functionality.

I want to read this book full screen. Hang on, didn’t that other book say something different about this? I want to open it. This is complex, I want to compare side-by-side. Oh, I get it, I should take notes on both of these. Hang on, I need to look at both books while taking notes. Okay I’m done with the second book but I still want to take notes on the first.

Slogging a mouse around to click, drag, click, drag, double click, drag, all while repositioning your hands to type, sucks so bad.

The case is even more clear when you consider that the concept of tiling WMs is just an extension of the game-changing paradigm behind terminal multiplexers and IDE splits.

It’s just better. There’s probably a bit of an adjustment when you’re first adapting to it, especially if they’re really used to a mouse-centric, window-draggy workflow, which is likely the only reason that people think they don’t like them.

Honestly, if you’re using 3 monitors, you’re kind of using a single display split into a minimum of 3 tiles.

Tiling window managers support a workflow with one large monitor that you can split into n tiles whichever way you want without touching your mouse.

I’m not saying it’s objectively better or anything, but once you get past the learning curve, having to manually size all of your windows is a chore. I love having my browser window open full screen, pressing a hotkey, and having a text editor open next to it taking up 1/3rd of the screen, with the browser resized to fit.

Mostly, things are full screen, and I love that my WM launches apps in full screen automatically, unless there’s another window open on the workspace I’m targeting.

And when they’re not in full screen, it’s all handled smoothly without me ever having to take my hands off the keyboard.

Do you have a small monitor?

In my opinion, on a >32 4k or 1440p display, the full screen is just way too big for a single window. Which isn’t a problem, because as easy as it is to switch between two windows, it’s even easier not to. Especially for things like having a web browser and dev tools, switching back and forth every time I tweak a CSS rule would be agonizing.

It’s been super clearly demonstrated that you have to have thumbnails like that for your videos to be successful on YouTube.

You can be annoyed by it, and in fact, a ton of creators hate it. But it’s really not the creators’ fault that they have to do this.

Unfortunately I found that AM did a very poor job of generating an enjoyable personal radio from my “liked” (added to library) songs.

Really wanted to use it, and I tried for about 6 months, but I ended up going back to Spotify. First day going back to Spotify made me even more disappointed in AM because of how spot-on the music discovery is there.

Except that when a business raises prices, the menu shows the increased price. You can decide whether you want to pay before you eat.

This is no different than walking into Walmart, filling up your shopping cart with $100 worth of groceries, and then seeing that they charged you $18 ‘to pay the checkers and baggers’ as you walk out the door.

I’m just like this too, but you have to remember that for every person like us, there’s a person like my wife, who’s buying garbage that she sees on instagram ads nearly every week.

I beg her to at least search for the item and buy it directly so that the website she’s on isn’t getting revenue for ads. It’s petty but makes me feel better.

Yeah and if you really want it to be accessible from WAN, just forward port 80 on your router to the phone.

If you’re sticking an old device into a closet stuck to a charger, a phone is like the worst thing for that. Heck, even an old laptop running Linux would probably allow you to charge it, have an external HDD, and Ethernet at the same time, which already puts it miles ahead of a phone.

Android is open source, so if you really want to do this with an old device, you can build yourself a custom rom and do so. But there is no way that it’s a good play for Google to spend engineering time and resources to build something that is at best a poor replacement for countless existing solutions.