jwells89

For personal use, the only issue I take with Obj-C is how it's considerably less "batteries included" relative to Swift.

For collaborative projects on the other hand, it can become a handful to maintain if everybody contributing isn't staying on top of hygiene with null checks, type checks, etc. Swift helps to keep all of that under control.

Be careful with these though, a lot of USB switches (most readily available ones, even) aren't wired correctly and can result in current flowing from one computer to the other.

A fork wouldn't be explicitly required, but generally in established FOSS projects, when attempting to make changes that are either large or widely peppered throughout the project you're going to be fighting against headwinds from people who are happy with project as it is, which is understandable. You're likely going to find yourself spending more time on negotiating and politicking to get changes committed than actually making changes.

Audio/video has more to do the distribution being used than it does one's desktop environment, though the DEs can do things to smartly design configuration UI and surface the most commonly used A/V settings in the right places.

If I sat down to compose the list, it'd be full of lots of small things. Think how under KDE, the file copy progress UI is a semi-persistent notification banner instead of a normal dialog like it's always been on Windows. While each of these differences on their own aren't likely to pose issues, in aggregate they can give an impression of the DE being more unfamiliar/alien (and thus, daunting) than it actually is.

I would probably also overhaul the settings app. For example, the whole Appearance & Style group and its two drill-down sections could be pretty easily reworked into a single panel that directly surfaces the most pertinent settings while tucking away the rest under an "Advanced…" button that opens a modal — with themes for example the average user will at most be interested in changing the global theme. Only advanced users even know the difference between window decorations, application styles, etc much less want to be able to change any of those individually.

Themes are great, but they're surface level and don't change the numerous little behavioral/UX differences between KDE and whichever version of Windows. They also require the user to have gotten as far as to discover that KDE supports themes and downloading, installing, and enabling the theme.

That's why I think a fork that implements the requisite changes would be of value.

The sheer lack of useful software in a stock Windows install has always been a bit baffling to me. Linux is better in this regard (depending on distribution), but nothing beats macOS for time from fresh install to usability. Not only does it come with most of the basics covered, apps like Mail don’t favor Apple’s services, unlike on Windows where MS can’t pass up the chance to upsell an MS service.

KDE is solid but I think is just different enough to throw off less technically oriented would-be switchers. I think a fork of KDE that changes it to be more of a 1:1 match to Windows would be highly beneficial here, especially if this fork has a dropdown menu that can switch which version of Windows it mimics (lots of people miss 7 and XP and would find a zero effort way to get that experience back tempting).

It depends a lot on what hardware one has and what software one uses, in my experience. A laptop that’s a generation or two behind built without discrete graphics, Intel networking, and a display that’s usable at 1x UI scaling? Smooth sailing. A bleeding edge tower with off-brand integrated networking and an Nvidia card hooked up to a monitor that requires fractional scaling on the other hand might be more trouble.

> That means throwing out a lot of code too. It's the cost to pay.

And likely, upsetting power users who want to run with all the safeties off.

As far as I’m aware, Windows doesn’t have anything quite like services on macOS and probably can’t because Windows apps, even those that are first-party, are built with a menagerie of different UI toolkits which means there are no universal hooks for something like services to use.

The reason macOS can do this is because a large majority of apps are either native AppKit or otherwise hook into the system text facilities (which is why text services work in text fields in Chrome and Firefox for example).

Simply put, this chunk of the electorate doesn’t have any kind of grasp on the workings of government. As you say, their motivations for voting are simplistic and difficult for campaigns to reason about because they’re so particular to each individual.

Part of the reason why political media has seen such a decline in quality is because of that fundamental lack of understanding by the people. Neutral nuanced analysis doesn’t resonate because that’s some combination of too incomprehensible and not entertaining enough, which has led to the media landscape we have now where it’s turned to the televised version of junk food: hyper-processed with lots of salt and sugar and practically zero nutritional value.

That said, to some degree I don’t place fault on the people for this. A lot of it comes down to inadequacies in the education system when it comes to civics, wherein young people are not well equipped to become highly functional, fully conscious voting adults.

Works for images in Preview and even in Safari too. Super handy.

Figma to me feels geared toward collaborative prototyping specifically. It’s kinda clunky and awkward for creation of graphical assets, which is where I find Sketch a lot nicer.

I dunno, I'd be more inclined to subscribe to a version of Photoshop CS1/CS2 that runs on modern operating systems where all development effort goes into fixing bugs and improving performance instead of something like current Photoshop CC, where the focus is on gee-whiz gimmicky features. Plugins can fill in for the gee-whiz stuff without turning the core app into a cosmically bloated mess.