Making a competitive alternative to iMessage is a game of whack-a-mole that you will always lose, too. Apple would never give a third-party the same level of control they have to integrate with iOS.
So, Beeper's approach here at least makes sense to me. They aren't representing the "hacker spirit" like Torvalds or Stallman, but they are highlighting how arbitrary some software limitations can be. Their efforts here, wasted or not, will be cited when iMessage finds itself in court next time. And to Beeper, a company founded on the idea of unifying all messaging clients, that may be a worthwhile business investment.
It's probably my favorite part of HN, at this point. The reaction from people the other day when Google/Apple admit to cooperating with FIVE-EYES was priceless.
Well, you can't pass legislation to shut down the school shootings factory or invade climate change's homeland. However, Europe has shown us that tying your economy's profitability to a basis of digital standards can easily compel more open behavior.
Given that Apple is quite literally the Largest Company, they're somewhere on that list. Maybe not next to abortions and climate change, but Apple antitrust is an inevitability unless they get smaller or the economy gets bigger.
How is it fascinating? Apple exerts pressure on customers to buy their products, and then further pressures to keep them integrated with Apple's ecosystem. Here, a customer gave in to the first pressure and is disappointed by the artificial friction Apple uses to upsell their customers.
So... are we shocked that iPhone customers don't de-facto agree with everything Apple does? Or the fact that OP would be willing to criticize something they paid for and supposedly identify with?
It's really not fascinating at all. It reads like a perfectly level-headed and candid criticism of an ecosystem by someone who isn't invested in the success of one particular company. It's almost too lucid for HN.
I will say that to their market cap. Such an insane capitalization on digital sales can only be achieved by extinguishing the alternatives your platform can host. It's a regressive featureset that can (apparently) only be reversed through legislative demands a-la Digital Market Act.
Many, many companies have had huge market caps while funding anti-humanist or exploitative processes. Given Apple's scale you almost have to assume that they're abusing something lucrative.
I have multiple flakes and a lotta CUDA drivers. In fairness though, this is after a few months of no manual GC. I think nix-collect-garbage could bring it down to ~120-150gb.
It's totally worth the stability, but maybe not the best choice for the storage-constrained.
EDIT: According to nix-tree my current generation is only 45gb right now.
As someone with firsthand experience in this field: it's not worth your time. Getting GTK4 to work in other desktops is a shitshow in the first place (it has horrible rendering issues on x11/Plasma configs), but all of the good stuff like gtk::Builder and connect-closures have been removed, making imperative development an enormous pain in the ass. If you still manage to make an app despite that mess, you'll be left with horrible font rendering issues that can only be fixed with a very specific Flatpak configuration (hope you didn't want to run your own app natively!) and by the time you've got it all figured out you'll probably be looking into Qt.
Please, just use GTK2 or GTK3 if you're planning on making non-GNOME apps. GTK4 is simply not finished yet.
The issue (as I see it) is that libadwaita is GNOME's bartering chip. For years they've been anal-retentive about custom theming, be it their infinite diatribes about how XDG only needs to respect 2 themes, the "Don't Theme My App" disaster or their ongoing attempts to put custom stylesheets further and further away from the user's control. GTK4, libadwaita and Flatpak are their leverage here. Each of these systems, when taken separately, make it difficult to theme your app (though still technically possible). When incorporated though, it becomes outright unreasonable to theme things. This is wholly their fault, and this notion that "they didn't know what they were doing!" makes me roll my eyes. They know exactly what they did, and their behavior has been insanely harmful to the rest of the community.
As a matter of fact, I think the Linux desktop might just be permanently split as a result of their actions now. It's a more extreme version of the old GTK2 vs GTK3 argument, but this time the divide is more extreme. Wayland is borderline unusable on anything but GNOME. GTK4 refuses to integrate with any desktop but GNOME. libadwaita is dividing the development of applications to "GNOME app" and "not GNOME app". Flatpak is a broken olive branch that is in a comical state of neglect (and only integrates well with GNOME anyways).
This segregation has to stop, or it will kill the Linux community along with it. In their attempts to make Linux competitive with Windows and MacOS, the GNOME maintainers have completely quit listening to their users and sabotaged everything that people genuinely liked about Linux.
The high-contrast mode does not accommodate for all people with colorblindness. I knew a number of people in Libera who were appalled when they updated to GNOME 40 and could no longer theme the shell to be actually visible.
> Besides the fact that cocoa on mac has evolved over a decade(when linux people were busy constantly reinventing gtk themeing engines and display servers)
I'll be the first one to concede that Wayland has been more or less a monumental waste of development effort, but can you point to the constant reinvention of themeing engines? Stylesheet modification has been a thing for decades now, there's very little that needed to be done to accomodate for them, at least from a GTK development standpoint (that I'm aware of).
> What is the reason for no group emerging, forking gnome and doing it the right way? I'd actually pay to support such efforts.
That's basically what happened with XFCE, MATE, Cinnamon and Budgie, the rest of the userbase is pretty contented with other desktops like Plasma that can fill most of the same gaps.
With that being said, I too would fund a GTK2 or GTK3 fork if I could be promised developers who don't swing their ego around like a sledgehammer and refuse to apologize when things break. The GNOME project is starting to be the albatross of Linux development, and while I'm happy to develop with GTK3 ad-infinitum, I do hope that a fork emerges from someone more capable (and with more free time) than me. Come to think of it, it's kinda crazy how most modern DEs are made just because of how tired people are running the GNOME treadmill.
> I have very limited experience with Linux but every time I try to install something, I find that I lack some dependency and then wind up trying to build from source. What could fix these types of issues?
There's a number of solutions, none of them (even Apple's own) are really all that ideal. Pretty much all of your Mac apps are statically linked, which is why you download a large 300mb DMG or .app file that lugs along all of it's dependencies with it when you're getting a program. This has a few advantages (it's arguably safer, you can expect most software to "just work", etc) but it also has some disadvantages (uses more memory, lots of redundancy and "wasted" space with every download, kinda obfuscates directory structure, etc).
Honestly, there is no right answer here. Linux has tried doing a similar thing with Flatpak, but it's oftentimes more trouble than it's worth. Linux desktop software is supposed to be run as a local user without sandboxing; there's very little you can do to change that without re-architecturing the entire program to work that way too.
> Why does most software just install effortlessly on Mac OS?
Wait until you try Brew or Macports. The main reason why I genuinely cannot use MacOS on a regular basis is because of it's lack of a proper package manager, and moreover it's container support and general virtualization is unbelievably bad. If you manage to install Docker you're a hero, but if you manage to get it working properly? That would be news to me. Here on Linux it's just a "sudo pacman -S docker" away, and I don't have to lift a finger afterwards for configuration. Sometimes there are perks to running the same software you deploy to.
At the end of the day, it really depends on how you want to use your computer. I do SRE stuff for a living and desktop Linux is a godsend for that workload. Would I recommend it to a family member though? Not in a hundred years. Linux is still a server operating system first, and a desktop OS second. For me, that makes more sense than buying a Macbook and then using it to SSH into a remote server to do all my work.
I wish I could get any Linux on my Surface Pro 3. That thing heats up to 60c within 5 minutes of turning it on, and then randomly freezes. This is how I learned about the awesome feature Wayland has where you can't reload your session like you can in x11...
History is back around to repeating itself. I'm an avid Linux user (and even a developer who uses GTK pretty regularly), but the recent developments surrounding GNOME, Flatpak and their related libraries has not made me optimistic for the future of Linux applications.
GTK4 is really bad. It launched with horrible text rendering issues (still unfixed, 10+ months later), broke compatibility with a number of basic features, and then had those features replaced by the GNOME middleware known as libadwaita. libadwaita is in a "functional" release state, but still lacks support for custom stylesheets, basic desktop integration on non-GNOME desktops and has it's own litany of bugs that accompany it. Fair enough for brand-new software, but the state of GTK4 is unacceptable and borderline impossible to use on a daily basis. If you're a developer, things only get worse. Gone are the days of fast app development with gtk::Builder workflows, and now Glade has been thrown by the wayside with no replacement. Talk about a second-class developer experience. And then there's the strange omissions that the GNOME team insists on; some issues are marked as WONTFIX since they can be mitigated with Flatpak. Some features (like appindicators) have been ignored completely because they don't align with the GNOME desktop's vision. The general demeanor of the team has been my-way-or-the-highway, so making suggestions mostly gets you labelled as a troll in their gitlab and sees you forcibly removed if you don't give up and assimilate into their opinion.
Flatpak itself is becoming the new Wayland. With more than 600 open issues on Github and outstanding issues like random data deletion, portal malfunctioning, compositor glitches, security holes and more, it's less like the "one package manager to rule them all" and more like "snap but it doesn't work". It's slow, doubles the dependencies that you store on your system (!!!) and doesn't integrate with your desktop unless you go out of your way to install questionable third party hacks that forward your native stylesheet and XDG options. I'd honestly rather use AppImage if given the option.
The future of app development on Linux is bleaker than ever. Fragmentation is at an all-time-high, and the technology that was supposed to fix it only fanned the flames into an unsalvageable dumpster fire. If you are a Linux developer planning on shipping an app, please stay on GTK2/3 for the sake of your users. I outright refuse to run GTK4, libadwaita or Flatpak on any of my systems. Nothing I've seen recently changes my opinion on that.
So, Beeper's approach here at least makes sense to me. They aren't representing the "hacker spirit" like Torvalds or Stallman, but they are highlighting how arbitrary some software limitations can be. Their efforts here, wasted or not, will be cited when iMessage finds itself in court next time. And to Beeper, a company founded on the idea of unifying all messaging clients, that may be a worthwhile business investment.