mato

Because it's a totally awesome and fun challenge? Read the details of the integration!

I used to program pure Xlib when I was 13 or so. I don't think the then-13-year-old me would manage pure Wayland.

Does anyone know of a precedent for this? I've never heard of a social (or other) network claiming to own account identifiers, then again I don't read their ToS with a magnifying glass either.

The combination of 'it just works' and 'SSO integration' is a killer.

To be honest, in 20+ years of working in IT, I never understood the point of the latter until recently, on a gig salvaging systems for a client with ~650 users after their sole IT guy unexpectedly resigned after 20 years and left for the mountains.

IRL, SSO is gold. Many hackers, like me, underestimate it.

Yes, but that's just using the standard browser keybindings for keyboard navigation across links.

I was thinking of <LEFT>, <RIGHT>, <ENTER> or something similarly "DOS-like".

Cute. Keyboard navigation doesn't work though, that'd be properly '80s.

> Or do people actually want their keybindings to change when they change their layouts?

It depends. As a counterpoint to the folks replying "yes", I have for years had Meta-[1..9] bound to "switch to desktop X". I also regularly use US English and Czech/Slovak keyboards.

In the X11 days, I never had to think about this, since for whatever reason (I believe technically a bug and/or X11-specific WM behaviour, but I've lost the reference...) Openbox would use the US English layout for its keybindings exclusively.

Since I switched to KDE Plasma on Wayland, I constantly get annoyed, every day, as I may have my keyboard set to SK, press what muscle memory says is Meta-[1] and instead I get a funky zoom, since that keystroke translates to Meta-[+] in the SK layout :-(

> Windows certainly does not.

Actually, scratch that, comments below suggest that WSL2 uses 9P for file sharing with the host, so it's possible that a version of Windows with the WSL2 bits installed will support 9P.

> Anyway, interesting idea. As another comment pointed out, I wish there was an easy way to mount NFS and 9p shares as a user.

Add e.g. foo.bar.com:/path /net/foo.bar.com nfs to /etc/fstab with options=user ?

> Regarding the article content, I find 9p to be even simpler and probably more ubiquitous than NFS, though I don't know if MacOS and Windows natively support it.

Windows certainly does not. MacOS I don't know, but if you mean "natively" as "stock install without third-party software", then probably not.

> Basically: I think free business models can ignore retention, whereas for-pay subscription models can't, and that's why I prefer them.

I think that only holds if you have enough competition that it starts making a real dent in your profit margin.

I don't have any proper data, but pretty much everyone I've met in the sailing community just uses Navionics. Fair enough; the company has been in the ECDIS business for many many years before smartphones even existed, and their electronic charts are good.

Their competitors, based on my subjective use of some of them, more or less fall into two groups:

(1) Similarly big players. Basically just C-MAP (parent is Navico, also in ECDIS for many years).

(2) Startups: savvy navvy and Orca.

I've only really used (1) enough to form a proper opinion. I originally picked it because it was way cheaper (50 EUR/year for global charts), but gave up since Navionics, despite being Fisher Price, at the end of the day just works, is fast, offline, and does not crash. OTOH C-MAP feels like a neglected side-line of the parent company designed to steer you into buying their expensive chart plotter brands (B&G mainly).

To be fair, I also tried a FOSS alternative (OpenCPN), but the app suffers from such a lack of UI design of any kind that I don't even want to go there, so I don't count it as a real competitor. And there's also Imray Navigator which is surprisingly good, but a different product category (raster charts).

TL;DR: Boating is making good money for Navionics, there's not really an alternative, so they don't care.

I was responding to your comment, but should have used less cut and paste. You wrote:

> This is why I like to pay for things. This dynamic only really exists for things that are given away for free.

Navionics Boating is a paid application, and it's not cheap. There is no free tier, just a 14-day trial period.

Despite that, it seems to have gone down the same route of Marl-ifying the interface as a free app would have done.

So, my point is, that this dynamic exists even for things that you pay money for.

Err, nope.

As I commented on TFA, and will gladly repeat here:

Wow. Well put. The scariest thing is, this translates even to domain-specific apps such as Navionics Boating. I use it every time I go out, because, somehow, they've not yet managed to touch the charts and rendering and it just works, better than any of the competitors. But, the rest of the interface is like a Fisher Price toy. You want to add a waypoint based on a specific lat/long you got out of a pilot book? There is no such thing as "Add waypoint" in the UI, nooo, you enter the lat/long in "Search" and then tap on something or other to add it as a waypoint.

This attitude manifests itself throughout the application's UI, as if, indeed, the application is optimized for "Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero.".

Cool, can we get the same for Pixel4+?

Ta.