Yeah, the default [homes] share is really not necessary on a home network where you really just want a common share. On my home storage server, I just have a “files” user, and a corresponding, anonymously readable/writable share:
[public]
vfs objects = catia fruit streams_xattr
fruit:encoding = native
comment = Public share
path = /home/files
force user = files
force group = files
guest ok = yes
browseable = yes
read
create mask = 0644
directory mask = 0755
readdir_attr:aapl_max_access = no
The default [homes] share is still there in case I need it for anything, but it's “browseable = no” so it doesn't confuse visitors.
Install avahi-daemon. Samba will automatically register with it to advertise SMB/CIFS to macOS and Linux clients over DNS-SD.
Install wsdd2 so that your server will be auto-discovered by Explorer on Windows 10+ clients with SMB 1.0 disabled, too.
Your Linux hostname is probably lower-case, but by default, Samba publishes a capitalized rendering of the hostname to NetBIOS and Avahi. If this bothers you, set “host-name=something” in the [server] section of /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf, and set “mdns name = mdns” in the [global] section of /etc/samba/smb.conf.
If you have macOS clients, you should enable vfs_fruit in your Samba configuration: https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/vfs_fruit..... There are some compatibility reasons to do this, but mostly it means you can set the “fruit:model” so that your server has a fun icon in the Finder sidebar.
Although macOS deprecated AFP in favour of SMB years ago (and are slated to remove AFP client support altogether in the upcoming macOS 27), SMB client support in macOS is still pretty miserable. The upcoming macOS 27 is set to drop AFP support, but until then I will continue to run Netatalk side-by-side with Samba. Netatalk also registers itself with Avahi, and macOS will (tellingly) use AFP preferentially to SMB, so clients will talk to the right daemon automatically.
The CPUs were powerful enough, sure. The GPUs (Intel GMA950) absolutely weren't. Even on Windows with better drivers, Half-Life 2 is a slideshow on that class of hardware.
Only the very first few models of Intel Macs had strictly 32-bit processors (the 2006 iMac and Mac minis with Core Solo/Core Duo processors), and none of them were realistically capable of playing Half-Life 2. Apple is guilty of many sins, but this isn't one of them. Valve should never have shipped a 32-bit application in the first place. The binary was already obsolete before it even left Bellevue.
> There is a funny email that had been released after before Jobs's passing where a user complained of a spotty signal, and his advice was basically to not hold the phone in that direction (or with his hand over the top part where the antenna was positioned).
Is this a reference to “antennagate”[0], when Jobs dismissed an affected user telling them to “just avoid holding it that way”[1]?
> because 3G technology at the time wasn't robust, and one shouldn't have expected him to have all the solutions that were out of his control
If so, this is an incredibly bad take. Lots of other phones had implemented good 3G connectivity at the time, including Apple's own prior iPhone. Apple made a mistake here, and the takeaway should be that corporate hubris is real and companies aren't your friends, not some cockamamie prattle about how we should accept bad products because technology is hard, boo hoo.
> had Jobs lived to 70 or 80
Jobs' own death is another fine demonstration of his arrogance. Very ironic to refer to it in this paragraph.
No, they blocked the UK because it was either that or open themselves up to £18m in fine liability thanks to the Online Safety Act[0]. Social media sites which are unable or unwilling to operate strict, full-time content moderation have all blocked the UK because the alternative is being held punitively liable for abuse by bad actors. Pretty much a no brainer. (And that's without even getting into the quagmire of legitimate, consenting, age-gated adult content.)
> it would be almost unusable at anything less than 13"
Native resolution on a 13" MacBook Air is already pretty unusable. Out of the box, the 13" MacBook Air (physical screen resolution 2560x1664) is configured with display scaling so that the “looks like” resolution is 1470x956 (i.e., macOS renders everything at 2x1470x956 – 2940x1912 – and then scales it down to match the display for output). If you dial the “looks like” resolution down to 1280x832 (so that the rendering resolution matches the output resolution; because, say, you prefer that every UI element not be a little bit blurry from being scaled down), you'll find yourself unbelievably short (ha) on vertical resolution. You basically have to turn dock hiding on. Even then, fixed-position headers are very common on websites these days, so between that and browser chrome, you'll often find that actual webpage content is crammed into the bottom half of the display.
And when you say “PC original”, you really mean “DOS version wrapped in DOXBox”, because it's easier to ship that on both Windows and Mac than patching the Windows version for Windows, and shipping a Wine wrapper for Mac. (Have they ever shipped a Wine wrapper for anything? I don't think so.) What a shame.
I do really wish an application-level classic Mac OS emulator existed. There are lots of great full-system emulators for classic Macs (Basilisk II, SheepShaver, DingusPPC), but no Rosetta-style “make the old application run in the context of a new machine” execution environments. I'll grouse to whoever will listen that all of the best edutainment software of the '90s and early '00s is trapped on PPC Mac OS.
The default [homes] share is still there in case I need it for anything, but it's “browseable = no” so it doesn't confuse visitors.