The file managers for Gnome and KDE are both really crashy for me, too. I don't know which graphical file manager to use in Linux without going back to MC or something.
Linux is the only desktop OS I use where application crashes and major glitches (some subsystem of KDE crashing, for example) are still like a once every hour or two occurrence, even when not doing anything especially odd or taxing.
> I didn't have time to nail the cause but it could have very well been me tweaking config.
I've had a couple failed Ubuntu upgrades recently, with similar behavior ("oops, you can't boot anymore, sorry!"). And I only use it on one fairly boring machine doing fairly boring things with it—I don't tweak anything.
Part of why I like Double Dash best. It's simpler, just enough more complicated than N64 for me. The ability to let a second player take the "gunner" role lets me play it with my kids who are too young to drive well—if they suck at gunner and we're playing on a low enough CC we'll still do OK with me driving :-). I don't like or want online play and certainly not DLC. Pop in the disk, a couple seconds of loading, and go. 8's supposed to be awesome but seems too complicated and tuned-to-suit-hardcore-online-players for my taste.
The two newer Deus Exen are worth a go if you like the first one. Infamously and accurately, you may as well skip 2 and go to 3 & 4.
Also both Dishonored games—best of the more recent descendants of the Thief/Deus Ex games. Improved with the right mindset—you start out more capable than the average person, and are very soon "hella OP", so, whatcha gonna do with all that power? Plus no save scumming and turning off all the modern flashy-arrow-waypoint HUD bullshit. Makes you really feel the weight of things better.
> max payne (1 and 2)
Max Payne 2 on the ultra-hard mode that you have to unlock, where you only get like 2-3 saves per level, is one of my favorite gaming experiences, and I'm not usually the sort to like hardcore "challenge" modes. It totally changes how you play. Highly recommended. Plus you get the real ending :-). Hated 3. Repeated "hold on while we take control for a cutscene then leave you standing in the open for no reason, with guys already shooting at you" got old fast, and the game just never stopped doing that, sometimes seeming only to take control in order to do that. Plus the story failed to make me give a damn about anything that was happening, which is a problem.
Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4) might be up your alley if you've enjoyed the open world "make the icons disappear from the map" games (Red Dead, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry from 3 on) at all. It actually has a plot you might care about, unlike almost all the others, and the world is much cooler than average.
It's usually companies or management/product folks paying for their product to have the peacock feathers. See also: flat/material redesigns not to improve usability—in fact it may make it worse—but to avoid "looking old", not because users complained or metrics look bad but because someone with a budget guesses maybe they might. Similar with choices to make fairly simple sites into heavy SPAs with questionable performance.
> It's because I've been trying very hard to understand what your contention is.
Framework-dependent projects tend to go stale and become "ew I don't wanna touch that, it's so last year, we should probably replace it with [newer version of framework that's gonna end up being much harder to upgrade than expected / other framework]" surprisingly fast once eyes are off them, in my experience. Without someone competent doing continual upkeep, the next guy/gal's gonna try to sell the re-write anyway. May not succeed, but they'll try. Framework or no.
Secretly leave the Android one React Native since it does a decent job of papering over Android's worst rough spots, despite how often React Native breaks and how LOLWTF its ecosystem and release management is?
I mean SPAs and near-SPAs. "Web apps". Web sites as in mostly server-rendered sites with HTML, CSS, and some JS sugar on top could sub in for an awful lot of "web apps" and improve UX, performance, maintainability, and development cost.
[EDIT] incidentally I notice you keep arguing against things I've not actually written.
I don't think the JS devs drove it, at least not primarily. I think they're largely eager to exploit the enthusiasm of others (and probably they should be) and I've seen it happen. I do think it's peculiar to the web. Most other GUI app ecosystems are content not to invent their own visual vocabularies over and over or twist every mundane little program or UI element into an "experience", for instance—I think that has something to do with it. It's the set of norms and (self-imposed, to a significant extent) expectations of the web, of the fear of "falling behind" (see again: peacock feathers). I think the background of the Web in bespoke brochure-type graphic design and marketing has an absolute ton to do with it.
I think a lot of the cost has to do with the underlying tech not really being that great for what it's being made to do, in concert with everyone feeling the need to try to be special in even the tinies little looks and behaviors. It's also where a lot of the audience is so will tend to experience oddities like this more exaggeratedly than other fields.
Your manager or project owner or whoever says "we want a webapp" are you gonna stick your neck out and argue against it? "But it's what google's doing", "but Gartner", but whatever. It's cheaper! OK, sure, here's my bill. It's absolutely follow-the-leader behavior, damn the cliff. And it works well enough that it does get the job done, eventually. It's just not necessarily doing the users any favors, or your bottom line.
Decision makers do strange stuff all the time because they think it makes them look better—and, to the extent and in the way they expect it to, they are probably right more often than not. This is just one example. Whole world's run by guesswork, personal quirks of taste or incentive, and blame-avoidance (follow the trends), more than anything else, from what I've seen. It's just people, running around doing funny people stuff, hoping no-one calls their bluff.
[EDIT] actually, look at Java Applets and, more so, Flash. Folks hated the way lots of those were used, but the worst and least-justifiable uses of them happened anyway, for a long time, because managers wanted the bling. That was, seriously, it. And developers went "oh sweet I can add Flash 5 and Actionscript to my résumé, I've been wanting to play with that". That's exactly what happened then. This is exactly the same thing, just much bigger. And in both cases sometimes the tech was used well.
No, web development overall hasn't. Web apps specifically are largely fad-chasing vanity (manager, organizational level) or that, yeah. Which is cool because there's all kinds of dumb money flying around for them now—that part's been amazing. But it's not serving users well. Peacock feathers.
> If you lack a fundamental understanding what people are building obviously it seems overcomplicated.
Hi. I have a fundamental understanding of what people are building. Most of it's overcomplicated and the "web app or not?" decision's very often made due to hype, résumé padding, or making a project look more impressive to other internal folks. Some of it's justifiable as a "webapp" is truly a decent choice but still usually performs worse than is reasonable, indicating overcomplication under the hood—look at various Google "webapp"s performance dropping steadily over the years as features remain similar or drop off, and that's not even comparing them to older non-webapp incarnations which are universally much snappier (though usually missing some features, to be fair).
All the state management stuff seems to be tied up in (=synonymous with) attempts to purify JS frameworks and codebases, as in "purely functional". It's... kinda silly and far removed from either the problem at hand, or the strengths of Javascript (such as they are) much of the time.
Meanwhile objects representing various parts of the view, and plenty of models that don't look much like "modern" JS state management, remain the norm elsewhere, and the sky is not falling. I do not know what to make of it. I go along with it when in that sort of company—when in Rome, and all that—but the evangelism can be pretty funny.
Anyway a bunch of the stuff isn't half as special as you'd think reading about it through the usual channels. Redux? A data cache and a so-so local event bus with somewhat awkward semantics and a few really bad terminology choices thrown in. Whee. There's your "state management". Not that it's useless, but you'd swear it's black magic reading all the blog posts about it.
Revolutionary Road was released at the tail end of 1962 and has some stuff to say about office work. If it's accurate (I suspect it's pretty close) then it was largely about passing papers around trying to avoid having to actually do anything with them, without it looking like you're trying to avoid doing anything.
Very similar to modern corporate email, sending crap around forever and bringing in more "eyes" trying to avoid making a decision or—god forbid—actually personally doing real work that produces an actual good.
[EDIT] tail end of 1961, actually, got that wrong.
There is so much content. Great content, too. The miracle of over 100 years of mass media recording tech. And, you know, 4000ish years of written word records and storytelling. Ad-supported web trash is mostly just a distraction from better things that can be had used for just a little money, or checked out from a library. My life'd probably improve if it all went away (Web would have a better wheat/chaff ratio, I'd be less distracted by junk).
So sure, make your sites, services, and content so annoying that I stop using them, and close copying loopholes, somehow. Or ban spyvertising and let it all go down in the flames of the prophesied ad-pocalypse. I really don't care a bit either way.
They've added new features I like, but that was the sweet spot of discoverability and aesthetic. It's been downhill since. I'm also not loving making it a more general-purpose OS—the iPad/iPhone as a slab of metal & glass that could become any of several tools, with a no-BS operating system keeping it all coordinated, was what really made it special.
I'm starting to get "this will stop working soon" messages on a lot of my Mac games. I assume because of the 32bit deprecation. Expecting to lose 50-75% of my library soonish, maybe more. Of the ~60% of my total library that worked on Mac to begin with.
MacOS was surprisingly good as a gaming OS, so far as game selection, but it's about to go back to the "we have... Breakout! and, uh, Super Breakout!" olden days, it seems.
They need to fix a few things (mostly on the Macbook Pro) and drop their prices somewhat, which isn't a crazy thing to hope for since they did it pretty often not that long ago, sometimes even while announcing an upgrade. I still think their iOS device prices are fairly decent for what you get, but their Mac hardware pricing's gone way out of wack in the last 3ish years.
There were basically three things that made Macbooks very appealing to developers before:
1) Very good hardware at a not-huge markup when compared apples-to-apples (haha) with Wintel hardware.
2) Unixy OS with outstanding Just Works but it's not your fault should it fail to Just Work, as in "ugh Tom's laptop won't connect to the projector again, because he insists on running Linux."
3) Excellent pick-up-and-go, thanks to a good, if not comprehensive, port selection, the best touchpad in the industry by a long shot and the only one I've ever used that doesn't make me start looking around the room for a mouse or feel like I need to keep one in my laptop bag, and battery life much better than the typical "get you from one outlet to another" of many (especially budget and midrange) Windows devices, while also being (yeah, yeah) thin and light. You could just grab your laptop and go, and be ready for most things, for most of a workday, no power cord, no mouse, no anything.
The 1st and 3rd of these have suffered a lot lately, with large price hikes putting them solidly back in the "LOL WUT?" pricing territory they periodically flirt with, and 3 thanks to #DongleLife making it pretty much impossible to plug anything "in the wild" into a Macbook at all without an adapter, and the keyboard going from good-enough to fairly-crappy. I'm hoping for fixes to some of the problems and for some of the "...and all those improvements, and we're also dropping the price $200!" announcements they did pretty regularly there for a while, because man, I still don't see any real competition for them out there, despite their missteps.
Linux is the only desktop OS I use where application crashes and major glitches (some subsystem of KDE crashing, for example) are still like a once every hour or two occurrence, even when not doing anything especially odd or taxing.