What I am missing with Gnome is the global menu I have with macOS. It's just my preferred way of working. This is also what I liked about Unity. Gnome seems to follow the same direction as Windows.
Additionally miller columns in Finder are just awesome and I don't have them with Nautilus. Those two things are honestly dealbreakers for me.
I would much prefer if MacOS got rid of the global menu. I've contemplated it for literally decades, and my opinion has only gotten stronger.
1. Sometimes a program has no open windows. Understanding when its menu shows up in the menu bar is confusing at best. Explaining to another user "oh, you are in [such and such program already] even though there's nothing there -- click File then Open" is silly.
2. Sometimes a program has two or more open windows. Sure, File/New makes sense in this context, but anything that acts on the current window is not visually linked to the window and is thus confusing.
3. With the advent of multiple monitors, global menus are even worse. Which monitor should they live on? Always primary? Both? There is no right answer.
4. Old-fashioned title bars tell me which window belongs to which program. Global menus try, but only if I'm sure which window's menu is currently displayed, and it does not let me identify a non-selected window without interrupting myself to select it.
5. Opening a menu that's part of a non-current window takes one click. With global menus, it's two clicks.
6. One might imagine that they conserve screen real estate, which is maybe slightly true in our brave new world of notched viewports, but it's barely true and is avoidable. And Apple doesn't seem to care about efficient use of screen real estate anyway.
Personally, I think the trade offs for more window space is worth it versus window positioned app menu bars. If you really are trying to maximally optimize menu bar navigation you go with the menu bar as a context menu wherever your cursor is, or a key command to prompt searching for the menu option you want to use.
As for 3, the way you'd solve this while retaining the 'global' menubar style is by treating screens more individual and having a screen unique menubar. Introduce screen focus, and have the screen focus follow where the cursor is. Further you could make it so that when a screen regains cursor focus it also refocuses the last window on that screen. The menu bar would then serve the purpose of visually indicating and emphasizing which app on which screen has latent focus even when the screen lacks focus itself. (Which now saying it honestly might have been an original MacOS consideration before losing focus caused window dimming)
You don't have to like it, but the global menu bar is at the top of the screen which means you just fling the mouse to the top and then go left or right, instead of having to get to the right vertical.
True. This could be nicely solved by placing a non-global window all the way at the top of the window, so that you can still fling the cursor to the top of the screen if the window is maximized or otherwise along the top edge of the screen.
I had a longer reply but turfed it, but the global menu is based around muscle memory for eye and mouse locations. My personal experience sounds nothing like yours so I suspect we navigate very differently such that it impacts you far more than me.
I’m a heavy keyboard user so rotating apps and windows in apps means I always know where I am and don’t even notice the costs you’re talking about.
In Gnome, the top bar stays in the Primary monitor only, and worse, even the app switcher always displays on Primary monitor, NO MATTER which monitor you are in! Which is absolutely infuriating. I can't imagine how messy the Global menu could be in a multi monitor setup. Why would one want that pain!
I quite dislike the global menu of macOS. It means that you need to switch windows to see the menu for the window, which can result in a lot of tedious mouse movement.
But what I absolutely love is the menu search. I would love to see GNOME (well GTK I guess) add menu search. Also bring back the ability to bind hotkeys by typing while hovering a menu item while you are at it!
I went looking for a file manager with miller column on Linux once. It seems to be an extremely rare feature. With how popular column view is in Finder, I don’t understand how it hasn’t made its way to other platforms as a commonplace feature.
I had the exact same journey as you, I even very nearly install GNUStep because the file manager had miller columns.
I even started to think that perhaps Apple has an active patent on it or something.
(this happened with the Genie Lamp minimise effect on Compiz/Beryl- why it needed to have at minimum 3 "waves" before it minimised the window; though you could obviously patch it out).
FWIW I found Ranger (TUI) and Pantheon (ElementaryOS) that supports it, if you're still looking.
I like that Unity puts the global menu on the side. This makes more sense with all the wide-screens that we have nowadays. A huge oversight in MacOS, if you ask me.
On macOS only the dock can be moved to the side. The application menu (left) and the statusbar menu (right) will always be on top of the screen.
Which makes sense to me.
I agree that the side is better and would be a better default. For the record, the location of the MacOS Dock is configurable — I have mine on the right.
GitLab is very very heavy with a lot of bloat and sadly still a bad UI/UX. I prefer Gitea for its simplicity. Gitea Actions are similar to Github Actions and they work great.
The problem with ONCE is that software is never finished. This is why most ONCE software that is still available today is charging a one off licensing fee + update fee (e.g. charge yearly for major updates or 10% of the one off fee per year). This is sustainable, but your model isn't. You will notice down the road in 2-4 years that it's no fun to work for free for users that expect an update because it requires patching or there are breaking changes.
That’s a fair concern, but I see it differently. Software can reach a point of maturity - not “dead” just done. That’s the whole philosophy behind ONCE: build something great, maintain it responsibly, and stop when it’s complete.
What people forget about the OVH or Hetzner comparison is that for those entry servers they are known for, think the Advance line with OVH or AX with Hetzner. Those boxes come with some drawbacks.
The OVH Advance line for example comes without ECC memory, in a server, that might host databases. It's a disaster waiting to happen. There is no option to add ECC memory with the Advance line, so you have to use Scale or High Grade servers, which are far from "affordable".
Hetzner per default comes with a single PSU, a single uplink. Yes, if nothing happens this is probably fine, but if you need a reliable private network or 10G this will cost extra.
These concerns are exaggerated. I've been running on Hetzner, OVH and friends for 20 years. During that time I've had only two issues, one about 15 years ago when a PSU failed on one of the servers, and another a few years ago when an OVH data center caught fire and one of the servers went down. There have been no other hardware issues. YMMV.
They matter at scale, where 1% issues end up happening on a daily or weekly basis.
For a startup with one rack in each of two data centers, it’s probably fine. You’ll end up testing failover a bit more, but you’ll need that if you scale anyway.
If it’s for some back office thing that will never have any load, and must not permanently fail (eg payroll), maybe just slap it on an EC2 VM and enable off-site backup / ransomware protection.
Wasn't my product as a product manager but my long-ago company came out with an under the desk minicomputer product for distributed sites. And they didn't use ECC memory in the design. The servers didn't fail very often but multiply that fairly low error rate by a large number of servers and a system failure was happening every few days or so. The customer wasn't happy.
Yes, but there are options for dedicated server providers who offer dual PSU and ECC ram etc. It's more expensive though for e.g a 24 Core Epyc with 384GB RAM dual 10G netowork is like $500/month (though there's smaller servers on serversearcher.com for other examples)
I can't believe how affordable Hetzner is. I just rented a bare metal 48 core AMD EPYC 9454P with 256 GB of ram and two 2 TB NVME ssds for $200/month (or $0.37 per hour). Its hard to directly compare with AWS, but I think its about 10x cheaper.
Their current advance offerings use AMD EPYC 4004 with on-die ECC. I can’t figure out if it’s “real” single correction double detection, or if the data lines between the processor and dimms are protected or not though.
I'm pretty sure they keep internal internal checksums at various points to make sure the data on disk is intact - so does the filesystem, I think they can catch when memory corruption occurs, and can roll back to a consistent state (you still get some data loss).
But imo, systems like these (like the ones handling bank transaction), should have a degree of resiliency to this kind of failure, as any hw or sw problem can cause something similar.
The most annoying thing for me currently is that when connecting to local smb shares with Finder and adding favorites (directories on shares), after a reboot they are still there under favorites, but it won't connect to them when clicking on them. So I have to manually reconnect to the server every time. This wasn't happening before.
Other than that, of course some things got slower, but overall it's an OK release. For example he new system settings were bad before, now they got a bit worse, but macOS 26 didn't introduce those changes.
They changed their license to AGPL, removed features (Web UI, etc.) and now they don't provide docker images/binaries. It's their project but; what's next?
Obviously they will eventually no longer license AGPL at all. It's wild to me how this can be a surprise to anyone, this entire company has been one gigantic red flag for years and that's just what's publicly known. It's a legal department with a software product as a side business.
In general I would agree, but Siri is honestly still so bad.
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