Empiric evidence suggests that macOs does not have any interesting software. People go to great lengths to run Windows programs (through Wine, Steam Proton, VM integrations), and Linux stuff (Docker desktop, WSL/WSLG, X servers). macOs stuff seems to be too useless for that kind of effort.
Microsoft spent decades and billions of dollars buying their way to market dominance. They didn't achieve it through having a superior product, they achieved it through bullying. Software developers were forced to write software for Windows in order to reach an audience.
The fact that people will choose a different platform and begrudgingly emulate the software that's stuck on Windows is a knock against Windows, not a knock against the other platforms.
What specific piece of software are you missing on a mac?
Aside from games, or industry-specific apps (like the goddamn KNX configurator, or CNC controllers), everything is there, at least for me, and with consistent and stable user experience.
I don’t use a mac. As I said — people do not try to run mac-exclusive software elsewhere, even though that’s the norm for most other platforms. That means that there is not enough software, or it’s not sufficiently desirable.
> Aside from games, or industry-specific software, everything is there
This is funny. Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the freshwater system, and public health… what have the Romans ever done for us?
Those users aren't really what I would consider "people", and they should probably use Linux if they want to run software that is especially designed for that platform, such as Docker.
Of course if your requirement is that you use specialized Linux tools, then anything that is not Linux will not satisfy you.
You're focusing on tools and not on outcomes in your previous post. The purpose of a computer is not to use a certain tool, but to achieve a result. The purpose of a car is not to burn a certain kind of fuel, but to transport people. What matters is if it can do that and with what comfort and what cost.
Macs are lacking compared to other platforms when it comes to games, which everybody admits. You can say that it is lacking as a server, but I would doubt that. More expensive yes, but you could serve anything you'd like from it if you want to.
When it comes to very industry specific software, which is used by maybe 3 companies worldwide, those applications do not have any importance for comparing platforms.
In that sense (having software for the most common of activities), all mainstream OSes (and some non-mainstream ones) have a “healthy native app ecosystem”. This is pointless copium.
What matters is stuff for which there are no workable alternatives elsewhere.
I can try and write a condescending automotive metaphor, if you like those, but I’d prefer not to.
> What matters is stuff for which there are no workable alternatives elsewhere.
But we have to limit ourselves to somewhat common use cases. If a company is making a piece of software especially for one or two big clients in their industry, then that has nothing to say about any personal computing platform.
Your example Docker is software which has been especially created to deal with the shortcomings of Linux. Of course we cannot expect it to be great on any other platform. Likewise, we cannot blame MacOS for lacking specific software that has been made by people who explicitly hate Apple, such as a lot of self hosted and open source stuff.
Most Mac users do not mess about with virtual machines or WSL/WSLG, as in your examples. But there are myriad personal and professional use cases that are supported by good native software. In comparison Linux is lacking in native apps. No good photo editor, no good office suite, no good e-mail client. So I wouldn't call it a strong platform if we compare.
And it isn't copium to me. It's quality of life question to be able to use native software, and as a non-programmer I can be more productive with GUI software that isn't some laggy cloud service.
If Facebook had created it, people would recognise the initiative to gate-keep, regulate and curate the Wild West of RSS. "They're trying to keep you inside their walled garden!"
Reader made tons of people use RSS who otherwise wouldn’t, and who now don’t.
It did not live long enough to become a villain (though it certainly would have — there is no reason why G wouldn’t have added recommendations, an algo feed, and all it brings). Therefore it’s remembered well.
Reader died because people were switching to social media.
Reader also had no vendor lock in at all. There’s no network effect like Facebook. There’s no massive infrastructure demands like Google. No corporate sales process like Oracle, Microsoft, etc.
You could very easily create a competitor and after it died, few even tried to replace it. I miss it but not enough to find another RSS reader.
You’re never really the villain if there are viable alternatives and next to no switching cost. It would have been hard to make that product evil.
> Reader also had no vendor lock in at all. There’s no network effect like Facebook.
Reader had a massive social graph and strong network effects. There were social feeds that only existed in Reader and vanished when Reader shut down. I know I had friends that didn't blog but curated fascinating social feeds in Reader based on how widely they read. There were shared comments that only existed in Reader and entire discussions that happened in the margins of feeds that were lost.
Those social feeds were a discoverability joy. You'd find new feeds for yourself. You'd encourage friends to follow feeds you most recommended. None of the replacements have ever quite felt the same. (I love Newsblur, and it has versions of most of those social features, but it has never had the network effect, and probably never will.)
At one point too, the feeds in Reader included full histories up until the date someone first added the feed to Reader. You could scroll back through time "forever" on some feeds all the way to their first posts, sometimes posts that even the site itself had deleted since (and still read Reader-only comments on them). RSS feeds generally only provide the most recent dozen or so posts. Reader was tracking everything. That was a massive infrastructure demand in the Google scale that just about only Google could have done. None of the replacements try, and generally only keep about 45-90 days of feed activity.
Sure, it wasn't a completely walled garden, like Facebook, but it's still a case of Google killing the largest social network it had with the most beloved network effects for a marginal increase in vendor lock-in. They had good vendor lock-in that few could have competed with, and the replacements today are still scored on how much they can't compete with it, despite matching features.
> Reader died because people were switching to social media.
Which especially sucks, because its friend-of-a-friend model for making comments visible on shared items was better for discovering interesting people, constructively limiting the social impact of popular posts, reducing the dangers of unintentionally poor posts, and disincentivizing trolling than any social network has implemented since.
For the few people who even knew Reader had a social network—a group which certainly didn't include Google—it was a better social network than any of the ones credited with killing it.
I think it was just as much that the people who wrote blogs were switching to writing in the walled gardens of social media as it was the consumers. But yeah, I greatly prefer the days of blogs and RSS readers.
Now you have Substack and Medium and such, which are pretty decent.
The Fediverse is a bit like that. Anyone can post replies on things, but they don't spread through the whole network, only to people who are following the replier, and people on the replier's server, and the person who posted the thing being replied to.
It doesn’t seem to work quite like that. I don’t know the technical details, but I definitely see replies from people I don’t follow, from other instances, on posts of people I don’t follow on different (again) instances from mine and the replies.
Perhaps it could be that I’m seeing replies from people that others on my instance follow? Or perhaps there’s some other mechanism to fetch replies.
Probably that. Actually if your server receives the reply for any reason, it displays it, usually. There isn't a mechanism to fetch replies, so this is a kind of accidental filtering, while ATproto is the opposite and tries to make everything globally visible.
I use my own server with only me, so it only receives replies because I'm following the person who replied or their whole-server feed.
Reader died because Google was switching to social media, not because people did.
> It would have been hard to make that product evil.
You can just treat RSS data as content to bring in new users, while building your lock through other means. Sharing, recommendations, algo feeds, commenting, and, eventually, posting. Then apply demands to RSS feeds, leveraging your audience, and lock out new ones.
This is all very easy and the playbook is well understood at this point.
It was from a time where Google's ethos was still "Don't be evil" and generally speaking the naked greed triggered by AdSense hadn't infected the rest of the company yet.
So I think a lot of nostalgia is not just for the reader but also for the company Google used to be.
I wonder if in 20 years time there will be the next generation of programmers sneering over vapour-ware Google products while middle managers still buy them products because "no-one ever got fired for buying Google".
Because we miss what Reader was and not what it could have become.
As a more prolific blog writer at the time I also liked that their bot would include number of people who were subscribed to my blog in their User Agent.
> As a more prolific blog writer at the time I also liked that their bot would include number of people who were subscribed to my blog in their User Agent.
Something I generally appreciate with Google: The level of craftsmanship and the amount of elegant designs like this they come up with. (There are also… other things, but their standards are high compared to many competitors.)
Have you tried opening the links? They show Russia at developed country level in terms of food insecurity (score <5, they don't differentiate at those levels; this is a level mostly shown for EU countries); and a percentage of population below the international poverty line of 0.0% (vs, as an example, 1.8 % in Romania). This isn't great — being in the poverty briefs at all is not indicative of prosperity — but your terrification should probably come from elsewhere.
If Wordpress no longer receives security updates, tons of sites will have to be migrated. Many are not economically efficient to migrate, and will be lost. Given the scope of that ecosystem, this is an extinction event for the Web.
Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written HTML? You need, at the least, single post pages (for permalinks), an index page, and an RSS feed — all slightly different views of the same content. It gets messy, and at some point you write your own SSG, which somehow becomes worse.
This is without going into how you ideally want an image pipeline, sitemaps, cards for twitter and stuff, maybe category pages, …
>Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written HTML?
Yes.
It's all a lot simpler than dealing with some abstraction framework toolkit, at least for me.
Maybe it's because I learned to write websites in the early 2000s where writing your own HTML and CSS was par for the course. You'd also write PHP or Ruby or ASP or something if you wanted to get fancy.
It's certainly easier until you have to deal with different views of the same content. I do not trust myself to keep things consistent, and neither should you.
Back in the day I'd have clobbered something together with SSIs to have, at least, a single copy of text to maintain, but that gets old quickly.
A determined and focused person can probably make do with single-post pages and a titles-only styled rss.
>It's certainly easier until you have to deal with different views of the same content. I do not trust myself to keep things consistent, and neither should you.
I would argue that's not a "static" website, but even so that's still nothing some smart usage of PHP includes or the like can't easily solve.
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