From Mac to Linux – the setup I've grown to love - <AUTHOR> https://shooting-unicorns.com/battlestation/from-mac-to-linux-the-setup-ive-grown-to-love <comment><USER5> I use Windows/Linux/macOS.

From a performance to value perspective you cannot beat Linux. Docker/Microk8s the overhead is so low. Dev speed is leagues ahead the unfortunate circumstance of having to run Docker/Minikube in a VM on Windows and macOS. Also filesystem IO is unreal compared to Windows at least.

Getting a refurb Thinkpad on ebay and having better compute hardware than a mac pro for half the price is also a nice cherry on top so to speak. That and the insane sales Lenovo has all the time for brand new machines is kind of hard to beat as well.

Next up is Windows from a hardware perspective. Same refurb thinkpad can dual boot without issue.

Then lastly macOS. I have had a mac since 2011. I am having a hard time with the direction Apple is going with their laptops.

I have all 3 and they all have their merits, but I find myself using Windows/Linux at home exclusively and macOS at work and I don't mind the context switch.

To each their own!

With the uncertain future of mac with their potential switch to ARM and not shipping python and ruby by default, I see some drawbacks to the dev ecosystem. I know brew will package a ruby version to handle this but I do worry about the ARM switch.

Linux used to be quite difficult, but I stuck with Ubuntu and the UX/UI has improved so much :)

<comment><USER6> > Thinkpad

Which Thinkpad model do you recommend?

And which Linux distro do you use?

<comment><USER7> Not gp, but I currently use a Lenovo T 480s dual booting Windows 10 Pro and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and it's the best development setup I have used so far. No driver or hardware problems whatsoever.

<comment><USER8> Second that T480s, love it. 24GB RAM, 2TB SSD. Booting OpenBSD, macOS and Linux. Scaling on WQHD display works solid. Only drawback is that the WWAN (4G) only works under Linux and the touchpad is not as good as in a MacBook Pro.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I come at this from a productivity perspective after using Mac's for several jobs - Linux boosts my productivity by 30-40%. Anecdotal, sure, but things just work in Linux and your not constantly having to fiddle around and click through things. It could also be that Mac's have declined in quality and I can put Linux on nearly anything and it lasts forever, especially when you put it on high quality gear that just doesn't exist at Apple.

<comment><USER10> My experience is somewhat opposite. I love Linux. I've used it for over a decade in various roles. But it always ends up the same - either some obscure Bluetooth or graphics bug frustrates me to the point I can't stand it anymore, or I get fed up with 2 hours of battery life and go back to macOS.

In this case, I'm measuring my productivity by the time it takes to mess around with the OS to get the desired result, and the fact that the stability baseline just never seems to get there.

I get and support the attraction to Linux on the desktop, but find YMMV to be very much true.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, this is exactly my experience too.

I try to move over every six months to a year or so, and it's the same gripes every time at this point.

Driver support's reasonable now, and the desktop environments are generally solid enough, but things like mixed DPI work really badly on Linux, my browser nearly always tears when scrolling on my secondary display, etc.

But... the single biggest killer for me though is how badly Linux copes with very low amounts of free memory. Put 32G in a machine and it still periodically runs completely out under my dev workload and when that happens, the whole system becomes unusable and I have to hard reboot it. I'm not sure what macOS and Windows do differently, but it just doesn't happen on either of those two OSes.

I really want to have the freedom to pick and choose my hardware more, but at the moment I keep falling back to macOS.

It's a UNIX environment so it has the tooling I want and a solid GUI that works well.

<comment><USER12> There are discussions happening on LKML right now about how to solve this. I don't have a link handy, but saw them either here or on LWN recently.

I used to have that problem too, but it went away when I stopped using JetBrains products :). Not for any reason other than the contract I was working on ended.

<comment><USER11> Then I shall live in hope that it will be fixed :)

And I didn't even have a JetBrains product in the loop, it was a mix of virtualbox and VS code, along with browser, mail client, etc.

<comment><USER12> To elaborate a bit based on my understanding of the issue: VirtualBox seems like a great program to tickle the issue.

During a memory pressure scenario, the kernel starts looking around for things that it can get out of RAM to free up space. If swap is enabled and not saturated, paging out some data to disk is a likely option. Reducing disk cache size works too. But... when the usual candidates run out, things have to get more clever. Things like shared libraries can get paged out! If one of those pages is requested, it can be reloaded from disk. Or, in the VirtualBox case, the mmap'd disk image can be removed mostly from RAM and have those pages loaded from disk as needed. Performance sucks terribly, but it keeps trucking on.

The wrinkle in all of this is SSDs. The out-of-memory (OOM) killer heuristically watches the system and kills off processes that cause memory pressure problems. These heuristics, however, are expecting these page-in and page-out operations to be slow (as they were on HDDs). On newer SSDs, the disks are too fast to trip the OOM killer into action! This is why, when this problem manifests, your disk activity light goes on solid, even if you don't have swap enabled. The kernel is sitting there trying every trick in the book, and the OOM killer doesn't see what's happening. Every individual page fault is handled quickly, there's just waaaaaay too many of them.

<comment><USER13> Yep, this is an accurate description according to my understanding of the issue too.

The lesson I've recently learned is that, for now, swap is necessary on Linux machines with SSDs. I've enabled zswap and added a 4 GB swap file to my machine with 16 GB of RAM, and the problem hasn't reoccurred for me since then. Supposedly, the memory pressure measure in the kernel gets a more accurate reading when swap is enabled, but I don't know for sure that that's true. At the very least, you can page out the memory you're using the least instead of file-backed pages, which is what happens in memory pressure situations on SSDs (as opposed to OOM killing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a guy at the office who has to tinker and customise everything. He can't use anything that touts itself as opinionated because he has his own opinions.

Kind of reminds me of this article. You say you're more productive but honestly: how much time have you spent working on and customising your OS and is it a continuous project? Can you really say you're more productive than the people who open their lid and just work?

<comment><USER15> Shortly after I graduated from college, I switched from Arch to Ubuntu and it was a bigger step in growing up than getting my actual diploma

<comment><USER16> And how often do you draw on skills you learned on Arch that you wouldn't have learned on Ubuntu?

<comment><USER17> Arch Linux teaches skills like:

\- Knowing what happens if I have the audacity to update my computer without reading 3 different forum threads

\- Understanding how to fix hilariously bad font rendering issues in a terminal, a software paradigm that's almost as old as computers themselves

\- Tempering expectations that incredibly obscure apps like "Spotify" will "just work".

I think to imply Arch teaches much beyond the skills needed to deal with Arch Linux is a tenuous premise at best.

<comment><USER18> I use Spotify for hours every day and I've had absolutely zero issues with it since I moved to Arch 3 or so years ago.

Agreed on the fonts, that has always been a pain. That being said, I recently installed Arch on a new laptop and the fonts weren't too bad out of the box - times change.

I update at least twice a week and I've only had one breakage in 3 years - <USER2> didn't update a config file with some new settings.

All in all, your response comes across a little FUDdy IMO.

<comment><USER19> My experience of Arch is that it's fun as a home computer tinkering exercise but I don't trust it for my work computer since I can't resist a version number bump and the amount of time spent faffing around would be a nightmare.

<comment><USER18> I think it can definitely differ between individual systems - the fact that Arch is so flexible also means that each system can have individual little foibles. Personally speaking, I've used Arch for work for the 3 years mentioned previously with no problems. At my previous job I used to be oncall for a week at a time and I wouldn't upgrade during those periods just in case, but that was the extent of my caution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > As a developer, I spend almost 80% of the time in my terminal

In which case then sure, pretty much anything will suit you fine. It's not a universal rule though - I spend the vast majority of my time in TextMate or an IDE and probably 10% of time in my terminal, so the comfort of the Mac UI is a more significant factor.

<comment><USER21> Also, even if I would spend 100% of my time in a terminal, iTerm offers such a better experience than Linux terminals (that's just my personal experience, I used various Linux distributions for ~6 years)

<comment><USER22> I use iTerm2 when I'm on MacOS, but I basically use it like I use a Linux terminal. I just don't need so many features from the terminal itself... I do need Unicode, with RTL, and colors, and a nice scrollback buffer.

For example, I don't use tabs in the terminal. I usually open a new window and use the WM from outside the terminal, or use tmux inside the terminal. Tabs in the terminal itself are not that useful in my workflow.

My current favorite Linux terminal is kitty ([https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/](https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/)), and before that I used rxvt-unicode.

<comment><USER23> Wait, you use iTerm2 on macOS, but you need RTL support? Is there a way of making that work? I've long wanted to switch to iTerm2, but its treatment of Arabic script is so janky, I just can't do it. I'm still using the default Terminal app as a result.

<comment><USER24> There's a proposed patch in the bug tracker: [https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/1611#note_10740636...](https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/1611#note_107406363)

Maybe you can give it a try.

<comment><USER23> Thanks, I'll check that out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In 2019 you still cannot get a decent macOS-like modifier key setup on Linux where OS-keys are mapped to Super (e.g. Super-C being copy) and such that Control works like it does on macOS, so I still always find these kinds of articles nice but you're in for lots of surprises if you try to switch.

And I say this as someone with both macOS and Linux laptops that I work from, but because of the above and other similar things I think you're always up for disappointment if you expect to get Linux to be exactly like macOS.

<comment><USER26> Why not just get used to the default CTRL + SHIFT + C instead of Super + C for use in the terminal?

When I switched over from Mac my initial thought was "get this working like my Mac". After about a day that changed to "learn the Linux way."

Switched 2 years ago and the only thing I miss after 10 years on OSX is OmniGraffle.

<comment><USER27> What's annoying with Ctrl+Shift+C is that it's not the same as other applications, where it's Ctrl+C.

On Mac it's Command+C everywhere.

<comment><USER28> This is my gripe too, as someone who's recently switched back to Linux after a 10 year OSX hiatus. My current Linux system is designed and developed by thousands of developers who were just trying to get their stuff working for them, each of them working on a small piece. OSX has a lot more consistency because it was decreed by a few UX designers, alas, that is the price you pay for flexibility.

<comment><USER29> You apply the consistency, you degree what you want. People decide to use Linux and still expect to be told what they want. Decide what you want and make it so, Linux is fundamentally a user-centric system and for it to work best it needs a creative guiding force in the middle: you, the user.

<comment><USER30> I'm not sure this really addresses the point. macOS manages to have both user- configurability for keyboard shortcuts _and_ consistency __out of the box __.

On macOS, you can also define consistent keyboard shortcuts universally and per-application. This is achieved via a very simple interface in System Preferences -> Keyboards -> Shortcuts. This will apply to all applications because they must all respect and populate the macOS menu bar, the mechanism through which keyboard shortcuts and processed and thus made modifiable. Easy, friendly, user-centric.

But on Linux? Good luck. Between all the various user interface libraries with their own mechanisms for defining and modifying keyboard shortcuts, not to mention those apps that hardcode the shortcuts in order to avoid the utter mess of the mixed desktop environments that so many users are forced to use in order to get certain jobs done.

In this sense, Linux is _not_ a user-centric system because nobody who makes a distribution, even the better ones, gives a toss about the user; it's all about the developer's manifestos and freedoms long before it's ever about the user. The average user who just wants to work, not sit there slaving over a billion different and wildly inconsistent configuration file formats each in different locations, who just wants the damned Copy command to require the same two-finger salute in one program as another, is resolutely _not_ the one being catered for.

Linux distributions are just as opinionated as Windows and macOS; DIY distros are utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of people, including the HN crowd who, just like the technically illiterate we sometimes hold our noses up to, also have lives to live.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ditto here - this article captured my own reasons for moving from macOS to Linux. My Mac Pro tube (late 2013) now runs Pop!_OS (~Ubuntu) natively for my Web and cloud development. macOS isn't a bad OS per se, but it's designed for people who fear technology, not developers like me.

</comment><comment><USER32> I recent switched to a Mac laptop and tmux CC mode is iterm2's killer feature. Tmux niceness without it taking a key prefix, and with real scroll bars. It's worth the cost of a Mac!

Any tmux CC mode supporting terminals for Linux or Windows?

<comment><USER33> > It's worth the cost of a Mac!

Have used a Mac before for work, and run Arch with Sway for home and work now. The only thing worth the cost of a Mac is having money to spend on a Mac and feeling like that it is best for you. If you use i3 or Sway on Linux and like it, you'll likely never want to go back. Especially with an Arch-based distro with the AUR.

<comment><USER34> I have used i3 and Arch. I prefer a Mac with chunkwm and iTerm2.

<comment><USER35> It's interesting to see how broadly the same experiences lead people in different directions. I loved iTerm2's window splitting and resizing so much I wanted it for all my windows. That lead me directly to install i3 on my Linux machine, and I absolutely love it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've always found this OS warfare thing kind of weird.

I develop GNU/Linux software, for GNU/Linux desktops and servers. Obviously I use a GNU/Linux desktop. If I programmed Windows software, well, yeah, I'd probably use that.

The whole debate strikes me as some sort of weird discussion about, like, how the house that a professional (or hobbyist) woodworker/carpenter lives in, and the house that a lawyer lives in, are probably completely different, because one just doesn't find it difficult to build a shelf or make up a kitchen or whatever, it's barely even an inconvenience to them, they eat that shit for breakfast, whereas the other might find it a better use of their time to employ someone to do it.

That said, you should obviously use free software because otherwise you're basically a kiddy fiddler.

<comment><USER37> Anyone who doesn't despise every piece of software on their machine from the OS up, whatever it is, is using it wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> One of the major things I missed (and eventually brought me back to MacOS) were things like maximising a window means it becomes its own virtual desktop, and the touchpad gestures that would let you move between them. I tried a lot of hacks to replicate those features effectively but never came close, and it ultimately pushed me back to Macs.

<comment><USER39> In GNOME you can four-finger swipe to switch workspaces. Maximising won't automatically put the app on a workspace, but you can use a keyboard shortcut to shift the current window to the next workspace until you get to a blank workspace, then maximise it. Or you can drag and drop the window to a new workspace in the overview.

<comment><USER40> Swiping feels awful in Linux though. Linux still doesn't have proper animation mapping to swiping, so moving workspaces happens after the swipe gesture, not during. Scrolling in Linux using a trackpad feels terrible too. I almost switched away from Linux just because scrolling in Firefox felt so bad.

<comment><USER41> You're painting this as a fault with Linux, but it's almost certainly the fault of a desktop environment. Were you using GNOME? You can adjust the way that trackpad scrolling works in Firefox and in GNOME Tweak Tool, IIRC.

<comment><USER42> The fact you have to configure anything for scrolling to work smoothly on a web browser paints linux in a bad light itself. The main reason i do not watch to switch to linux [apart from missing adobe catlogue and sketch] is stuff like the track pad, being able to navigate around using various gestures, having little things like invisible scroll bars etc. Subtle animations and visual queues really make the experience smooth. Its not even about eye candy, just seemlessness so your mind doesnt notice the workflow - which is what you want. The latest ubuntu doesnt even let you drag drop on the desktop? i really want linux but it still seems miles away from sleekness of osx

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Nowadays the OS means far less to me than my windows manager. I use nixos because I like the fact that I can see and configure the state of my machine in a few text files, but that does not give me a huge productivity boost.

Like the OP I use i3, and every time I have to use Windows or macOS I feel like I'm using a crippled machine. If I could put i3 on Windows or macOS, then I'd happily switch. With brew or wsl I really wouldn't notice much of a difference, given 90% of my day is spent in emacs, a terminal or a browser.

<comment><USER44> This, I completely agree with. Moving away from a tiling WM is pain that it's actually very demotivating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I suggest you try out Sway, which is pretty much i3 for Wayland. Also, Arch Linux has some great documentation for setting up things like screenshots. You'll have to get used to the flags for forcing xcb for a few Qt applications though, but totally worth it and not difficult at all once you understand it. I do miss rofi though, but am waiting for a Wayland version or the next best thing.

<comment><USER45> If you miss rofi, you may want to check out Ulauncher [1]. It is a nice app launcher with plugin support (eg. emoji picker).

[1] [https://ulauncher.io/](https://ulauncher.io/)

<comment><USER46> Still doesn't fully support HiDPI though :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> There is already quite the discussion going on related to macOS versus [insert linux distro here], but here are my two cents. I've been quite happy with my 2015 MBP since I took the time to "gut" most of the default shell tools and replace them with newer ones. It's not a convenient process, but from my experience, it's really not that much harder than setting up a fresh Arch install. It's as close as I've been able to get in terms of having the "hackability" and freedom of working in a Linux environment, while still having the pleasant UX that comes with macOS (good DE, decent memory management, lovely touchpad, etc.).

<comment><USER48> Care to elaborate on the modification you made to macOS? Currently running a 2015 MBP and am really happy with it but always looking for improvements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I made the ThinkPad switch with Fedora. I can't be happier !

The biggest draw of the Lenovos is that the they have yet to run hot. My previous Macbook would get sooo hot... I worried when I kept it on my lap.

The documentation on the fedora website had been so exhaustive and well written.

</comment><comment><USER50> Every so often I get excited about doing the same, and ditching my MBP and getting a shiny XPS or X1 Carbon. Then I look at a few pieces of software I can't find good replacements for (for example, Transmit for working with S3) or software where the replacements require giving up functionality or ease of use (thinking of Screenflow or Pixelmator). Maybe one day ....

<comment><USER51> I prefer cloudberry for S3. Last time I tried transmit I couldn't generate expiring urls or cloudfront urls. ( using cloudberry via parallels )

<comment><USER50> A lot of my use cases are massive storage of data files like CSVs and the like, so ease of use in searching and previewing are what I look for. Will remember to give Cloudberry another look however.

<comment><USER51> Ah yeah that makes sense. We are using for different purposes. I need to look at like 100 buckets and change settings and generate urls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> No Photoshop, no Final cut, no Adobe Premiere, no CaptureOne or Lightroom. No good color management

=

no Linux if you want to do something serious with photography or video.

<comment><USER41> I was blown away the last time I tried Darktable as a Lightroom replacement. I can see why you might not like GIMP instead of Photoshop (and using Blender as a video editor has a pretty big learning curve), but most of the functionality you'd need is actually there.

If the proprietary media apps are a must, having a Windows VM works good (with GPU pass through if you need it), as does dual-booting with Windows or a Hackintosh system (which is actually pretty easy these days).

<comment><USER53> Ooh, I see darktable is finally available on Windows too! I'm still running an antiquated version of Lightroom I purchased something like 10 years ago - <USER3> keen to give darktable a try!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> To each their own. My personal experience is that Macs are a proxy for high quality Retina display(sharp text) and more vertical resolution than thos remedial optimised laptops. I just happen to run MacOS which it comes with. Give me that display, and sensible aspect ratio, and I'll run Linux at the endpoint. Until ten, Linux only on servers for me.

<comment><USER55> I think Huawei Matebook has even better display than MacBooks, 3:2 ratio hidpi screen. Also something from Surface line, not sure about Linux compatibility though.

<comment><USER54> Thanks for the info. I looked at Matebook x pro with 13 inch display, 256GB of storage and 16 GB of RAM.

Again, a personal opinion. It costs as much as the equivalent MacBook Pro. I would not choose it over a MacBook because why? Apple has been known to care for customers in the sense that even if they fuck up keyboard design, they run a service program for free. Battery mess up - replacement for cheap. Simply that they have a brand to protect. I can rest assured that I can make a warranty claim that will go through. I'm not sure if I can say that about Huawei. I might try them if they are cheaper or give me some incentive to try. But, if they are the same cost, why would I willingly take the uncertainty?

Some incentives hat would make decide that way are :

1\. Open drivers and documentation.

2\. Promise of equivalent service or replacement if necessary.

3\. Repair/upgrade friendly design - no soldering of memory and SSD. I'm okay if that makes the laptop a few millimeters thicker and a few grams heavier.

Thanks for the info though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I too made the transition and it's almost perfect for me. The only thing missing for me is a decent pdf editor.

I need to fill out pdf forms pretty often (bureaucracy) and sign them with my signature png.

There is no decent software for Linux that let you do that.

I have tried them all, currently I am using foxit reader in wine and it's not great and very sluggish but usually works

<comment><USER57> Foxit Reader is natively available for Linux.

<comment><USER56> The native version is worse than the wine version. It was hanging constantly for me

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> iMessage and iCloud integration is still missing. I can't image to reach for a phone every time I'm getting text when working on a computer. I'm surprised that such synergy is still not covered by community. [edit] My killer app is iTerm. There isn't anything even close to it on Linux. (features _and_ documentation)

<comment><USER59> There are alternatives for those of us not obsessed with the Apple universe. Android supports Android Messages which can be read/responded to from the browser/an app. iCloud may be substituted with any number of offerings, some will keep files on the cloud and sync as needed to preserve space. If you are invested in the Apple ecosystem, you're out of luck.

<comment><USER60> Android Messages is not a true competitor here, since iMessage naturally scales up to E2E encryption. (Not a concern for everyone, of course.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Longtime Mac/Hackintosh user who has been dabbling more into Linux in recent months. I come to it from the mindset of an advanced non-technical professional user—someone who only sometimes has to write code as part of a day job, but is comfortable in a terminal and has a strong understanding of the underlying systems even if I'm not writing an app anytime soon.

I've been using PopOS a bit of late, and have found their tweaks on Gnome to mostly work pretty well. I have had to swap around keys to get used to the format some—basically my big thing is having the special characters available through the Alt/Option key is important to me as I do a lot of writing and frequently use things like long dashes.

One thing I found helped a lot was replacing the caps-lock functionality with the super key, which makes the super functionality easily accessible while still keeping the extended characters within reach.

There are apps I wish had stronger equivalents—Alfred immediately comes to mind—as they have helped speed up my workflow in MacOS. And some apps (Photoshop, InDesign) don't have a replacement strong enough to use as a daily driver.

While I'm still mostly MacOS these days, PopOS is pretty likable.

</comment><comment><USER62> If tiling is what you are after, was Spectacle not a good enough solution on OSX?

I use a QMK-based keyboard (although I am sure you can achieve similar levels of functionality with Karabiner) where choosing my window placement is a 2-key macro.

<comment><USER63> Spectacle doesn't even come close to i3.

The biggest deal breaker is that you can't programmatically move a window to a new workspace (I think?); and that you can't disable the animations for switching workspaces (biggest problem).

<comment><USER62> Is it a case where perfect is the enemy of good enough? I've never felt the need to move anything programatically e.g automatically without it being triggered by my intention.

Spectacle has "next/previous display" shortcut.

To disable animations on workspace switching:

defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES && killall Dock

<comment><USER64> That command doesn't work anymore since a few versions back of OSX. As far as I know there is no way to fully disable the animation and I hate it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I tried to go the other direction, from Linux to Mac, years ago. The two complaints I clearly remember:

\- I couldn't figure how the heck to open a web browser, apparently it's a completely unlabeled compass icon.

\- You have to use some non-obvious, secret combination of keys while clicking on an application icon if you want to open another instance of that application.

I never did understand why people will pay so much more for Mac machines. I tried it, hated it, could only get things done by opening a terminal and treating the Mac like a generic UNIX system. Went back to Linux as quick as I could.

I'm not surprised this guy's happy to be switching away from Mac.

</comment><comment><USER66> (designer/developer) I too have finally switched to linux from osx. The final decision came down to the current models of Macbook Pros. I'm currently using a Lenovo P1 Thinkpad with Ubuntu 18. So far it's worked out great!

</comment><comment><USER67> how do you type an em dash, a mu, an eszett, et c on linux without looking up arcane codes each time? (option dash, option m, option s, respectively). how do you do color calibration? how do you do messaging? how do you get non-ugly fonts?

these are the barriers to me switching.

<comment><USER41> I don't manually type the Unicode characters for any of that because I'm usually using TeX, where typing three dashes becomes an em dash and there are commands for Greek and other characters. You can also configure the right alt key to be used for this kind of stuff.

If you want to use GNOME, it includes a good color management interface that will look oddly familiar coming from macOS. There's other ways to do it too: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_color_management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_color_management)

As for messaging, I've heard good things about KDE Connect. Not sure if it works with iOS though.

For pretty user-interface and default fonts, you can edit a fontconfig file that will let you specify aliases for fonts and some pretty complex configuration to get the right font in each saturation. See [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration)

<comment><USER68> _I don't manually type the Unicode characters for any of that because I'm usually using TeX, where typing three dashes becomes an em dash and there are commands for Greek and other characters._

I use xetex for a little project, and while some of those character mappings are very convenient others are not. Vulgar fractions, for instance, work in some fonts but not others. For instance LTC Californian Pro has the unicode glyphs for the vulgar fractions, but xetex doesn't translate e.g. 3/8 to ⅜. Goudy Oldstyle is missing many vulgar fractions (e.g. ⅜), but the tex mappings work. Go figure.

Granted, fractions aren't mapped to keys in OSX, but I use plenty of those mappings on a regular basis including the bullet (•, ·), degree (°), accented characters (á, é, í, ó, ü, ö, ñ), currency characters (£, ¢, €), and the section character — §. I can get all of these with simple keystrokes and, best of all, zero fiddling with keybindings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I love linux (and bash) but can't understand the desire to use it as a desktop OS, especially when you can work in Terminal on Mac. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

<comment><USER70> my two reasons why I prefer linux is 1. tiling wms, same as in the article. I've gotten a huge productivity boost and largely solved my hand pain by moving to a keyboard workflow and 2, I don't really see the upside of using a mac these days. they're more expensive, more constrained in terms of software (I like to dual boot windows andl inux), I have an android phone which integrates well with linux, so linux it is.

the only actual benefit macs used to have was that it was a polished, non- windows system, but pretty much any mainstream linux distro these days works fine even out of the box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I had to renew my Asus home laptop last June running Windows/Linux. I hesitated between a Linux or MacOS MacBookPro but I finally decided to buy a Dell XPS 13 9380. It costed me 1500Euros (i7 8cores/16Gb/512GbNvme/1080p/Thunderbolt3/IntelGpu920). The MacbookPro with a better screen but inferior keyboard costed 2500Euros... We'll see how long the Dell will last. I am bit worried about the battery.

Since then I run Arch with Gnome3/Wayland and everything just works including bluetooth/suspend/usbc dock/etc... except the following: \- the fingerprint scanner, there are no Linux driver (even for the Ubuntu version sold by Dell) \- Wayland fractional scaling does not really work, everything is blurry, so I don't use it. When my I am disconnected from the external monitor I just type a command to do text scaling... \- Battery life is still inferior compared to Windows, especially when I watch youtube videos (I don't use Firefox on Linux because of the lack of hardware acceleration)

Compared to MacOSX I find Linux better for development and Ops. All the tools just work, are up-to-date and can be installed from the command line (pacman with the user repositories > brew/cask). For amateur video editing/photo editing, you now have plenty of choice (especially for video). Of course Gnome3 is inferior in term of performance, stability and is less visually appealing.

The OS is a commodity nowadays. Well more and more. Many applications can be found for the 3 major OS. That is why more and more OS vendors offer cloud services like backup/security/planning tied to the OS, well integrated and not opened.

Also more and more Microsoft/Apple/Google will integrate AI related services tied to your usage and what they know of you, so Linux will not be able to compete in that area.

</comment><comment><USER72> I've always thought about doing this but keep on running into reasons (or excuses) not to.

Right now I've gone half in and have Fedora Server on an Intel NUC that I SSH into. So not quite a desktop replacement, but a nice linux environment for doing dev in. Disadvantage is you rely on a network connection for this approach, but it will do for now

</comment><comment><USER73> Most of my work is either in a browser (reading) or in a terminal. I ran Linux as my OS for years up until 2015, when I'd had enough of tweaking stuff to make it work (Flash, sound, video etc).

So I moved to a 2014/2015 MBP and installed macports as well (not brew, because I don't want crap in /usr).

So my GUI "Just Works TM", my wifi etc same, sound, etc. MS Office.

Macports gives me the standard GNU utils/bash/etc, I don't use much of the MacOS there. iTerm2 is a great terminal emulator and its tmux CC mode is awesome. I don't have to tweak to get stuff that works.

Yes I'm aware things have come a long way since 2014 on the Linux desktop, but I don't gain anything from using it. If I need a Linux environment, either AWS (or DO or Azure or GCP etc) or a VM locally will give me that, but in terms of userspace in a terminal, there's nothing I need that isn't in Macports.

</comment><comment><USER74> I've been using windows my whole life and especially on win 10 everything works fine, but I've been nagged on from all sides that mac is so much better than windows that I finally decided to try it and bought it 2 months ago. Long story short I rarely use it and I still don't have the proper tools and workflow to completely abandon my win laptop. And to make things even worse now everywhere I look people are saying windows has gotten better than mac and people are switching back to windows and such. Did I make a mistake or do I just need to figure it out more? I really don't know but mac is really super confusing so far and it looks more for home users or hipsters. I can't say anything about ubuntu though, I work with it all the time as far as bash and servers are concerned, but I've never used it as a primary OS.

<comment><USER75> Your question feels open minded: did you make a mistake, or do you just need to figure it out more?

What could be going on for you could be individual windows versus end-to-end workflow.

Origins of Mac are neither home users nor hipsters, origins are content creators, from office to graphics and publishing. By contrast, origins of Windows is as window manager for backwards compatible DOS programs. Even today, many Windows programs in the workplace started as mainframe green screens now laid out in Windows Forms. This different DNA at the heart makes the surface behave differently.

MacOS design and feel is less about individual apps, more about creative flow, with gestures to swipe between apps and (mostly) the same keyboard shortcuts across tools, almost anything can cut and paste to almost anything, and so on. The oversized trackpad on the Macbooks is to drive with fluidity.

This difference in flow-centric versus window or app-centric makes crossing back and forth frustrating, the other side just doesn't feel right. Neither is wrong, they're just coming from a different place, for a different purpose.

To switch, you have to spend long enough in the other side to adapt how you think about work to the DNA of the ecosystem, develop the new muscle memory to turn your ideas into productivity in that paradigm for work.

PS. MacOS's Terminal is remarkably fast, and its command line is bash, so that may feel comfortable to you. Darwin, the system on which MacOS was built, is a derivative of 4.4BSD-Lite2 and FreeBSD, so you can think of it as a unix under a workflow optimized GUI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Agreed. I recently went from multiple years of Linux to OSX, and I find OSX FINE. Not great. Not revolutionary. Just fine. I can install emacs and it works. Whoopie.

The laptop is fine. It costs 3x what I would pay for a Linux laptop, but I'm not the one footing the bill. _Yawn_ Oh well. Laptops.

_____

Now what was something that IMPRESSED me is the 2018 Ipad. I did NOT previously consider the possibility of having a screen, wireless keyboard, and a 4g tethered phone connection on me at all times.

I have my Linux desktop at home serving on SSH and MOSH. I have my Ipad set up with a terminal app and an ssh key that lets me remote in. BOOM. My hoss machine at home with a great internet connection at my fingertips. Totally portable dev environment.

On top of THAT, the iPad UX is very tolerable. And having a detached screen with no keyboard is great. I can access Oreilly online learning, Kindle, and Dropbox and read whenever I feel like it ( which I have done a LOT ).

Heck, this whole summer I have been sitting out on my deck reading books, watching Youtube, using Steam Link on my gaming PC, hacking on my dev box, and pretty much EVERYTHING else on that little iPad.

Combo that with the new Sidecar feature coming with the next version of iOS, and I'm thinking I am going to upgrade to an iPad pro. It is a drawing tablet, an SSH terminal, a great reading device, a multimedia device with resolution good enough to watch movies and read comic books on, AND a secondary monitor when I feel like setting up outside on a nice day and hacking on my work laptop? Yes please.

The only downsides: iOS native games are few and far between. One of the top recommendations is FTL, a game released in 2012. If they could get Magic the Gathering: Arena, Hades ( Supergiant Games ), Into the Breach, and a regular cadence of good indie titles on there, I would marry the thing.

The other downside: The walled garden means they keep emulators and implementation for the Switch pro controller out of the app store. Booo! ...but understandable.

<comment><USER48> >they keep emulators and implementation for the Switch pro controller out of the app store.

True but macOS also has OpenEmu which is great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I remember the first time I used Linux. A few years later I got a Macbook Air. I love the flexibilities Linux offers. The way you can just change the look and feel of the OS felt empowering. While OS X look and feel is beautiful, I do miss that customizability.

</comment><comment><USER78> >being a long time lurker of Reddit's r/unixporn

lol of course they would go with Manjaro and i3.

<comment><USER79> It goes in waves. At one time it was Arch and Awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I switched from Mac to Windows 10, and I'm even more productive!

<comment><USER41> Because of the better window management or something else?

<comment><USER81> What are some of the advantages of windows window management? Other than snapping I find it clunky. To be fair I tried out a tiling desktop as well and didn't really like it. Too orderly and forced for me. I like piles of papers all over my desk and windows all over my desktop I guess.

<comment><USER41> Interesting. What I've found is that it's a lot of work to move windows around on a Mac when I want to see all of them at once. I just feel inefficient when I have to do a lot of clicking or Cmd-tab to get the window I want visible. Judging by the number of third party window management stuff for macOS there seem to be a lot of people who appreciate it either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> Two most useful things for me for my transition from mac to linux.

1\. fzf - mentioned in the article. 2\. Albert - application launcher 3\. Clipit - similar to mac's copyclip, but not as easy CopyClip

<comment><USER83> I'd suggest rofi[1] rather than albert, runs like a charm.

[1] [https://github.com/davatorium/rofi](https://github.com/davatorium/rofi)

<comment><USER33> God I hope they add Wayland support soon. I really miss rofi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> I've used a Mac at work for several years now and generally either like the UX or have found third-party packages to fix my problems like BetterTouchTool.

All but one-- MacOS doesn't allow click-through. If you're working in one window and want to click on something in a second window, you need to click twice, once to select the other window and then again to do whatever you were looking to do. This drives me crazy on an hourly basis and there is no way to fix it.

</comment><comment><USER85> Docker is the way. Darwin is a mess for development, but it doesn't matter. Start with a 137 MB bare-bones Debian image, add just what you need, Docker is the way.

<comment><USER86> Sounds interesting. Tell me more. What do you use to host it on? Do you ever run any X/window systems?

<comment><USER85> I'm coming from a web development perspective. When the browser is your gui, or your app doesn't need one, Docker (running on Linux, Mac, or, cough, Windows) just takes away your concerns about environment consistency. Like a VM, but not really. A "container", a minimal Linux image, running a "service" for your app, is a beautiful and portable thing! (Looks like running guis on Mac from Docker is messy: [https://cntnr.io/running-guis-with-docker-on-mac- os-x-a14df6...](https://cntnr.io/running-guis-with-docker-on-mac-os- x-a14df6a76efc))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Also made the switch from MacOS X to Linux with i3 and mostly happy with the result. Things I miss the most are consistent key bindings for the clipboard and Spotlight.

<comment><USER88> I made the switch from macOS to elementary OS and the keybindings are all I really miss. Apple seems to have the most-complete and most-consistently- implemented keyboard shortcuts by far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> I also switched from macOS to Linux and am happy. I wrote a blog post titled "Home and Hotel" about this once [1]. TL;DR: macOS is like a hotel - <USER4> but you can't bring your own furniture. Linux feels like home. You have to do the dishes, but it's yours.

1: [https://fman.io/blog/home-and-hotel/](https://fman.io/blog/home-and- hotel/)

<comment><USER90> The "home and hotel" is a great analogy! (And, nice blog post, too!)

<comment><USER89> Thanks! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> I use a very similar setup to yours, here's my Dotfiles repo: [https://github.com/2kabhishek/Dotfiles](https://github.com/2kabhishek/Dotfiles) if you have any feedback I will be happy to know about it. I use konsole as my terminal emulator. I use kde on my laptop (Mostly for KDE Connect) and i3 on my desktop.

</comment><comment><USER92> I really don't believe people when they say "I had problems with performance on browser _________ so I switched to browser ___________". Both firefox and chrome are about equally performant with chrome having the edge, as any cursory internet research will show. I choose firefox because the organization behind it cares about it's users more than making a buck

</comment><comment><USER93> Nothing is original in this setup. These all are off-the-shelf packages, well- known, battle-tested, open-source software. The amount of configuration is also moderate.

 _And this is great._ This literally means that Linux is ready for a developer desktop, and has been for years. It wins over the Mac experience in a fair competition.

<comment><USER17> >It wins over the Mac experience in a fair competition.

Define "fair", because I feel like this inevitably means stripping away legitimate use cases.

<comment><USER93> Fair as in "I had both, and chose that", as opposed to "I took the free-as-in- beer option because I was cash-strapped" or "I chose the only variant that could run my critical apps".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> You may want to give sway a shot. It's like i3wm, but without all off the xorg pain.

<comment><USER46> Not unless you have a HiDPI display and rely on some non-Wayland-native apps. Causes blurry apps which can be headache inducing. It is a known issue being worked on though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> I spend most my time in Emacs so OS might not matter a whole lot. Though I like being able to verify browser display / experience on a device similar to my users (mostly Mac).

</comment><comment><USER96> One stand-out piece you're missing is tmux-ressurect. You mention that you start the day by opening terminals for each project... You'll never have to do that again.

<comment><USER97> There's also tmuxinator[1]. I setup profiles for my different development environments (panes for db/repl/vim).

Just a command away from it setting up the Tmux panes with the right sizes and processes running.

[1] [https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator](https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator)

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Interesting that kitty is getting more exposure. I definitely agree it's the fastest terminal on OS X. Dunno about Linux though.

</comment><comment><USER34> User moves terminal-based workflow to Linux, finds it isn't any worse. Neglects to try chunkwm.

</comment><comment><USER99> If I wasn't an iOS developer, I would probably switch back to Linux as well.

</comment><comment><USER100> Awesome article, never heard of Kitty but will check it out!

</comment><comment><USER101> dwm is a great tiling window manager for developers. Easy to customize the source to do whatever you want and far better and more performant than i3.

<comment><USER60> Has i3 performance been an issue for you at some point? It's always seemed perfectly fine to me, but that might be the environments I've used it in.

<comment><USER102> I mean if you crud i3 up with a bunch of mods, maybe it could slow down, but I'm surprised as well that it wouldn't be performant for some reason

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> _Having heard good things about Linux and being a long time lurker of Reddit 's r/unixporn_

Stopped reading at this point. Nothing wrong with tinkering with your GUI, but my priorities differ.

<comment><USER79> Tinkering with GUI is not just about looks. It's also about workflow. So unless you mean that doesn't interest you either I'm not sure you stopped reading at the right point.

PS: I'm not telling you what you should or shouldn't read. Just trying to understand what you meant.

<comment><USER103> Years ago, I spent inordinate amount of time on that kind of thing. At some point I realised that while enjoyable no work gets done. Nowadays I don't have a work "flow". I just work which for me means reading and writing code or emails without interruptions. Any "flow" on top of that is a waste of time. My experince for whatever it's worth.

<comment><USER104> I'm with you on this one. Back in college I used to spend an absurd amount of time tinkering with XMonad, rainmeter, custom themes, but now my requirements for a computer are:

\- it has a basic window manager (half screen left/right, full screen)

\- it has emacs

\- it has Firefox

\- it has tmux

\- (if the computer is really fancy) it has a calendar application

<comment><USER105> > _it has emacs_

Back to square one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> Macs are the perfect dumb terminal. They look great, have a smooth ui, and require little fiddling.

However, I always need to ssh onto a "real machine" to get actual work done.

</comment><comment><USER107> As usual this is the typical "Mac as pretty Linux" user story, so naturally the migration was quite painless.

</comment><comment><USER108> He forgot Weechat!

</comment><comment><USER109> > prompted me to switch. It was a choice I never regretted

That doesn't bode well

</comment><comment><USER110> I have gone one step further, to Windows 10.

I finally removed Ubuntu from my home laptop too. I'm now using it in WSL with VS Code.

Everything day to day works better. My shares mount easily, my media players work, but best of all I get proper versions of Word and Excel. I still manage a bunch of Macs at work, but I have come to regard them as the BetaMax computer. Worst of all this is BetaMax, with the users not having noticed that the rest of the world has BluRay. I get so many Mac Users telling me 1990's anecdotes about things Macs do better than Windows. "Macs update silently in the background". No they don't. Windows 10 does a pretty good job of it though.

I have narrowed it down to the real truth. Macs look cool when you are sat in a hipster coffee shop with your hipster book pro. That and stuff with iPhone compatibility, home user stuff.

<comment><USER111> I have colleagues that swear by some of the new Microsoft portable machines.

The few times I've had a look at Windows 10 I've been seriously put off by all of the 'junk' that is automatically installed, e.g. candy crush etc.

I also worry about Windows still being a big target for malware.

What can die hard Win10 users tell me about these concerns?

<comment><USER11> >The few times I've had a look at Windows 10 I've been seriously put off by all of the 'junk' that is automatically installed, e.g. candy crush etc.

Not a diehard win10 user, but as far as I know you can only disable this legitimately if you pay out for Win10 Enterprise.

I think there are registry hacks that work on other versions though.

<comment><USER112> You can't buy Win10 Enterprise if you are an individual.

Now all that ridiculous bloat is pretty easily disabled. But that along with telemetry and forced updates are probably the last drops that will force me to linux for my workstation.

I can't believe they sold their trust for that. I can't use an operating system that I don't trust.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Whats a good book to learn Startup 'Mathematics'? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> What do you mean by 'startup mathematics?'

<comment><USER3> Maybe the OP's talking about metrics, and what goes into measuring/computing them?

Just something off the top of my head. If that's what the OP's going for, "startup mathematics" wouldn't exactly be the best term to throw around, looking for clues.</comment></comment>


What the death of the CRT display technology means for classic arcade machines - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/03/what-the-death-of-the-crt-display-technology-means-for-classic-arcade-machines/ <comment><USER2> I've been working on an existing Apple II emulator, OpenEmulator, which takes an interesting (and as far as I know, unique in the Apple II emulator world) approach: it renders a fairly raw NTSC-like signal, and then uses GPU shaders to convert to colors, while adding fairly realistic CRT effects, like persistence, curvature, dot masks, etc.

The result is an emulation that is incredibly close to what I see when I walk downstairs and run my test code on the real Apple IIe in my basement. I guess that's what happens when a DSP person writes an emulator :-) (The original author has disappeared themselves from the internet, unfortunately.)

<comment><USER3> I made an attempt at this around 2001, as part of the XScreensaver collection. See video at [https://youtu.be/p3QZqhp67l8?t=30s](https://youtu.be/p3QZqhp67l8?t=30s). It generates an NTSC signal, adds noise, and recovers the H and V sync and color in a DSP implementation following the schematic of an old TV. It reproduces the color fringing of text and many other cherished artifacts of Apple ][ computing.

<comment><USER2> Awesome! I've actually seen people reference that as the most accurate emulation they'd ever seen. Perhaps we should add noise to the OpenEmulator one too! :-)

[Edit] the bending, and shadowing to the right of the characters is amazing :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What this article doesn't touch on but I have found an issue with classic consoles on non-CRT screens is:

1\. Light guns

Even on consoles as late as the Sega Saturn, the light guns were design around the timings of CRT refresh rates and thus many (albeit not all) LCD screen are not compatible. I would imagine this could be a real issue for collectors / restorers of cabinets as shooting games (eg Virtua Cop) were quite popular in arcades.

2\. Early 3D systems as used on Sega Scope for the Sega Master System; and the Nintendo 3D System for the Famicom (Japanese NES)

These devices are less common and as far as I'm aware only available on home consoles. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, it's active shutter glasses (ie disabled one eye at a time) and was timed around the interlacing on CRTs. At 50/60Hz (depending on your region) the effect can be a little unpleasant. But it's also pretty amazing to play when you consider the devices are approximately 30 years old.

<comment><USER5> WRT to the light guns, I never quite really understood why you couldn't somehow simulate this with LCDs. Isn't the refresh rate on LCDs higher? So couldn't you work around that somehow? Obviously the answer is prob. not since no one (that I know of) has done it, but I was genuinely curious of what precisely the technical limitation is.

<comment><USER6> The way light guns work, they rely on the fact that a white frame is not displayed all at once but "drawn" by the CRT ray - if you flash a single white frame, one location will flash white slightly later than other, and you can infer the location from the timing.

LCDs, well, change all the frame at once. The issue isn't with the frame rate but at what happens when the device is drawing a single frame change.

<comment><USER7> >LCDs, well, change all the frame at once.

Is this true? It doesn't seem like it is, if it were then we'd not experience tearing in games, etc.

<comment><USER8> Tearing is a property of the output from the GPU. The data takes time to send, and the GPU can be directed to send different data halfway through the process (or the memory it's in the process of sending can be modified, etc.). The display just shows what it's sent... it shows it as it receives it (CRT), or it buffers it up and draws it later (LCD), but if there's a tear, you'll see it just the same.

<comment><USER7> There may be intermediate buffering, but the panel is still updated in a scanning fashion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Have you guys seen Musee Mecanique in Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco [1]? It's a collection of older-than-old slot machines and games, I want to say I've seen some 100 year old ones, but the point is: there's Heavyweight Champ' style boxing, there are all sorts of sport games, and even a mechanical road runner [2].

The gameplay is obviously changed with technology, but for some games the core idea survived some heavy decades of transitions. The originals would probably be less engaging for today's kids, so it's only fair to ship them a 3D/VR/mobile version, and keep our nostalgia from trying to sell mechanical road runner to all arcades. CRTs will phase out in favour of everything else, and that should be ok.

[1] [http://museemecaniquesf.com](http://museemecaniquesf.com)

[2] [https://www.facebook.com/museemecaniquesf/videos/vb.51627194...](https://www.facebook.com/museemecaniquesf/videos/vb.51627194717/10151480936271635/?type=2&theate)

<comment><USER10> This is my thinking as well. Hamfisted attempts to make LCD's look like CRT's by artificially curving the screen and messing with colors is just nostalgia. It doesn't add anything to game and 1980s designers were most likely pissed they had to deal with these limitations like color distortion, curvatures, ghosting, burn-in, etc. Pac-man isn't better on a shittier screen. Pac-man succeeds because it had novel game mechanics for 1982.

Outside of lightguns not working this seems like a non-issue to me. I'm sure the emulation community can find a work-around for this for the few people actually using lightguns under emulation.

>Have you guys seen Musee Mecanique

I live in Chicago and have access to all sorts of barcades as well as one of the largest, if not largest, arcades in a nearby suburb, so I'm pretty well versed in the arcade experience today as well as from my childhood. I went to Musee a few years ago and was expecting an experience like that, but instead the game floor was mostly these near turn of the century mechanical games. I was fairly disappointed, from a gameplay or mechanical perspective they were kinda terrible and largely uninteresting. They had historic value but that's about it and probably better off in a proper museum and lovingly maintained than beaten up for quarters. I think in 20-30 years this is exactly how CRT's will be seen. Kids will marvel at how terrible their low resolutions, framerate, color accuracy, and ghosting are.

<comment><USER11> _This is my thinking as well. Hamfisted attempts to make LCD 's look like CRT's by artificially curving the screen and messing with colors is just nostalgia. It doesn't add anything to game and 1980s designers were most likely pissed they had to deal with these limitations like color distortion, curvatures, ghosting, burn-in, etc. Pac-man isn't better on a shittier screen. Pac-man succeeds because it had novel game mechanics for 1982._

I mostly agree, though I think it gets a little muddier when you consider that the artists of the day — while doubtlessly wishing they had access to "more perfect" displays — were often designing their art to take advantage of those distortions to get effects they wanted. So, if part of why we're doing emulation is for history's sake, we have to keep that in mind. The painters of ancient Roman frescoes probably wanted more vibrant pigments than they had and it might even be interesting and attractive to "enhance" one with modern pigments, but it's ahistorical.

That being said, I've never personally found added distortion in emulators to improve the experience. I'm always constantly aware of its artificiality and that far outweighs any potential gains in "authenticity".

<comment><USER12> Or the (fortunately no longer common) trend in the 1990s of "colorizing" black and white movies under the misconception that this would make them better, ignoring that people filming in black and white took advantage of the medium for things like shadows that actually worked better there than in color.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> They don't really say how large the market might be. Or if there are patents that would block a startup.

I'd be willing to bet that you could find or train people in Detroit right now to build these CRT's. All you'd need are a couple of people to train them for a few months.

They said the same thing about vinyl records, soon the industry would die. Detroit has become a hub for pressing records and as old machines become scarce they're now supporting a company making new machines.

[http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/inside-jack- white...](http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/inside-jack-whites-new- vinyl-pressing-paradise-w468376)

<comment><USER14> I would guess that up until now the biggest thing preventing anyone from investing in small-scale CRT manufacturing is the simple fact that there was an inventory glut that covered the world demand for CRTs for nearly a decade after the last one was made. Now that we're apparently getting close to the point where there's actually demand for new CRTs is when we can find out if it's something that you can build a business around.

<comment><USER15> But is there really a small cohort of CRT nostalgics out there? I mean I get the records, the sound is unique and music is absolutely ubiquitous. Arcade gaming is a much smaller market and I find it hard to imagine that there are enough CRT purists out there to warrant a business.

Especially considering a nice new OLED could be fashioned to look like a CRT.

<comment><USER16> I use CRT as my main screen. Some reasons for it:

1\. I can choose any resolution without blurring... problem now worse with 4k screens (lots of angry posts in Stellaris forums due to UI that is hard to read in 4k and become blurry if you lower the resolution...)

2\. Ridiculous response speed... playing Crypt of the Necrodancer or Super Hexagon is much, much more fun on CRT, all mistakes feel like it was purely lack of skill, instead of feeling something unfair happened. Ditto for fps... CS community in fact is hogging all CRT, the ones I knew for sale all ended in some CS player home willing to fudge settings to end with crazy refresh rate and response speed (there is even a video of a guy pulling 200+ fps by using interlaced mode!)

3\. Better blacks and whites... in fact, this was the main reason, when CRTs died I also abandoned them, but all screens I had after had colour or contrast problems, I had to fiddle with settings constantly, one day my screen broke and a CRT was available nearby, when I plugged it in, I was blown away by the image quality that required only geometry settings, no endless messing with gamma, colour profiles and whatnot.

4\. Not valid anymore, but until recently CRTs were much cheaper than flat panels of equivalent quality, at least on my country... but now with "new" stocks empty, used prices around rising, I even own a CRT tv that now on eBay costs more than the price it has when it was new... (this particular model is also the one used as reference for some SNES emulators CRT "filters")

<comment><USER17> And CRT are just a giant light bulb, bombarding you with not so good radiation. Add to this the fact that the corner are never going to be perfectly square. I get the attraction for some of the superior quality of the CRT, but once this technology has been overtaken by a superior one, there is little sense to look back.

<comment><USER18> > And CRT are just a giant light bulb, bombarding you with not so good > radiation.

In other words, you do not know how a CRT works.

Educate yerself, it's free: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube)

<comment><USER19> The article is a poor source for your argument, because it does at length argue about the health risks of X-Rays emitted by CRTs.

It's more helpful to put it into perspective with other radiation sources:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Radiatio...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Radiation_Dose_Chart_by_Xkcd.png)

IOW, radiation dosage of using a CRT for a year comparable to ten bananas.

<comment><USER18> I don't see the "does at length argue about the health risks of X-Rays emitted" in the article. It discusses them and concludes that they are widely considered safe.

> CRTs can emit a small amount of X-ray radiation as a result of the electron > beam's bombardment of the shadow mask/aperture grille and phosphors. The > amount of radiation escaping the front of the monitor is widely considered > not to be harmful. The Food and Drug Administration regulations in 21 C.F.R. > 1020.10 are used to strictly limit, for instance, television receivers to > 0.5 milliroentgens per hour (mR/h) (0.13 µC/(kg·h) or 36 pA/kg) at a > distance of 5 cm (2 in) from any external surface; since 2007, most CRTs > have emissions that fall well below this limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As someone who missed most of the classic arcade games on CRTs, I was blown away trying out Asteroids on a machine with a CRT Vector Monitor. Because the electron beam can focus longer in one spot, it could pull off ridiculously bright bullets. I don't think you could get the same effect on any modern display.

<comment><USER21> The low input latency of original Tempest is also amazing - I think it's the most fluid game I've ever played.

<comment><USER22> Tempest is my favorite "golden age" game, and I've been trying to find a working copy (to play!) with a vector monitor. Sadly the monitors that were used in Tempest are (apparently) particularly failure-prone.

I came close once, at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, where they had real hardware but, sadly, an LCD screen.

<comment><USER7> With proper amounts of determination any CRT is vector...

[http://spritesmods.com/?art=bwidow_fpga&page=2](http://spritesmods.com/?art=bwidow_fpga&page=2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _> We're looking at a situation where playing Donkey Kong in the way that its creator intended is reserved only for the most dedicated collector. It will be prohibitively expensive to recreate that experience._

While this is a bit sad on some level, the art itself will survive the transition. After all, nobody these days experiences _Romeo and Juliet_ in the way that its creator intended, yet it endures. What I'm more worried about are those games that are going to be completely lost once the hardware expires; we can preserve the game data itself all we like, but without proper emulators you're SOL (and unless CPU speeds start doubling again, we're never going to be able to even semi-accurately emulate anything past the Xbox 360/PS3 generation). To say nothing of online games that will vanish into the mist once the servers get taken offline...

<comment><USER24> > unless CPU speeds start doubling again, we're never going to be able to even > semi-accurately emulate anything past the Xbox 360/PS3 generation

Luckily all the new consoles use x86_64 processors for their main processors, so no low level emulation will be required.

<comment><USER25> Is that true? The prospect of emulating a console on similar-gen PC hardware is super appetizing, but this is the first I've heard of the possibility.

<comment><USER26> Yep. Both the PS4 and XBox One are using semi-custom AMD chips with 8-core CPUs and 1152 shader GPUs. So managably beefy.

<comment><USER27> The XB1 has only 768 GCN cores (12 compute units of 64 cores, versus 18 for the PS4), but both CPU and GPU cores are clocked slightly higher than the PS4 (1.75GHz v 1.6 for the CPU, 853MHz v 800 for the GPU).

The PS4P increases everything except the CPU cores count: CPU clock to 2.1GHz, compute units to 36 (hence 2304 cores) and GCN frequency to 911MHz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I see plenty of comments here about how LCDs will have to be the replacement, but there's a big issue about LCDs as replacements for CRTs (bar specialty ones being made):

The fact that most of the 80s arcade monitors were 4:3 ratio.

Sure - you can get 4:3 ratio LCD monitors today - but they are becoming harder to find. Furthermore, good luck finding them in a larger size than about 17 inches (19 inches, maybe). They never made them larger, from what I remember. The larger LCD screens were all widescreen (16:9?) - and still are. Even most of the smaller LCDs are wide format.

And you can't just stick a wide format LCD into an arcade cabinet and add "borders" \- because there likely isn't room. So at best, you'll get an LCD stuck in, with a matte board around it, and the display smaller than the original. It'll look like crap, to be honest - and that's before the look of the display on LCD vs CRT...

<comment><USER29> More likely you'll have a 16:9 projector with black borders projecting unto flat black side walls, resulting in a full size back projected image.

The CRT people like grainy low res distortion so projecting onto the back of a purposefully bent and distorted piece of plastic should appear extremely similar to a CRT.

Of course this turns the problem of a CRT with finite filament life into a problem of a projector with a finite bulb life but presumably it would be easy to swap out the entire projector.

With considerable plywood hacking you MIGHT pull off attractive forward projection onto a screen for some games (not many of course) Or if you allow really ugly plywood hacking you can just place a projector screen in place of the CRT, ceiling mount the projector, and call it good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Additionally, Ware explained that the refresh rate on an LCD may not play > well with an old game's code that is expecting a much more responsive CRT > monitor. It could cause unsightly screen tearing that looks like one half of > the screen is occasionally redrawing before the other.

Does this really happen with LCD arcade monitors? It happens with PC-based emulators because they usually can't make the OS/drivers/GPU/monitor switch to a refresh rate that matches the emulated hardware (which, despite the quoted "more responsive CRT" bit, is just as likely to be below 60 Hz as above it, and usually not by a large amount either way) but I don't see how CRT vs. LCD is a major factor if we're talking about monitors that are actually made for arcade machines.

<comment><USER31> Many games knew exactly where the beam was and played tricks on your eye. These don't translate well to LCD.

<comment><USER32> Bogost & Montfort's _Racing the Beam_ ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam)) is about that very practice, though concerning the Atari 2600 in particular.

<comment><USER33> Loved that book! Loved all the behind-the-scenes stories and the deep-dive in to some of the tech issues (it was past my ability to comprehend it all, yet "not enough detail" for a friend of mine).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > _"It's just not gonna feel as nostalgic," Ware tells GamesBeat when we asked > him about the problems with the modern display technology. "The pixels will > be sharper on an LCD, but they may not be 100 percent accurate. Colors won't > be quite as vibrant."_

The absolute loss of dead online games bothers me. I can't get too fussed about arcade games that are still 100% playable but with less nostalgic pixels.

<comment><USER35> I've never cared for most online games, although it bugs me on an intellectual level that they'll stop working. CRTs are connected to my childhood and early adulthood, and I get warm nostalgic feelings seeing one still in use. If I had space at home, I'd have a 30" CRT sitting next to my main LCD TV, to connect my older game consoles to. They work on the LCD. Then again, so does emulation on a PC. Not quite the same.

<comment><USER31> I have all my pre-HD systems (NES - Dreamcast) hooked to a round 32" CRT in my spare room the way I remember growing up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I own a Japanese arcade machine, and while they are still somewhat common in Japan, and the US, it was not easy to find in Canada.

The nostalgic feeling and experience of playing not only on a CRT, but actual machine from the 1990's can't be replicated on an LCD.

Static on the screen, the hum of the monitor, the flickering of the colors, the look of the glare on the surrounding arcades, the sound of coins dropping down the chute, are the little things I bought my arcade cabinet for.

I dread the day that my monitor fails. As it'll mean the death of this experience for me without traveling to another country.

<comment><USER37> I own a few of pro broadcast monitors for consoles. I would really like some contingency when they go belly up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> You can see what one custom arcade builder does with their LCDs here, correcting aspect ratio and adding shaders: [http://www.paradoxarcades.com/monitor/](http://www.paradoxarcades.com/monitor/)

They have light guns too (it uses a Wii-like infrared tracker): [http://www.paradoxarcades.com/lightguns/](http://www.paradoxarcades.com/lightguns/)

Nice emulations, but nothing is going to match the latency of a board hooked up directly to electron guns.

</comment><comment><USER39> So playing a classic arcade game will look different than it did back then.

But if you think about it - if the screens we have today would have been available back then, what do you think would the game designers have preferred?

Also, screens will continue to get better. Gaming on [an arcade machine with] a HDR OLED screen could be amazing.

<comment><USER40> >> But if you think about it - if the screens we have today would have been available back then, what do you think would the game designers have preferred?

The best example of design-to-the-CRT by far is the original Star Wars. For starters it's a vector game - electron beam is deflected in lines to directly draw the objects. Vector monitors start with a very distinct look. Then they went further. For the enemy bullets (snowflakes or whatever you call them) they overdrive the electron gun which causes the tube voltage to drop, which in turn defocuses the beam and creates a wide-soft vector for those objects. And finally when you lose a shield (get hit) they draw a very much oversized square so far off screen that the electrons scatter off the back of the tube and flood the entire screen with a haze or fog as you take the hit. Oh, and the death star explosion also has a bit of a unique look as it involves more vectors than the hardware can quite keep up with.

That game was designed for the medium and is the pinnacle of genera. There is no substitute.

<comment><USER39> I agree that there are games that were made for CRTs. Asteroids is another great example.

However, most games do not take advantage of being displayed on a CRT.

Do you think it's better to play Donkey Kong or Galaga on a CRT vs a LCD? If so, why? Just nostalgia?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's only the best quality arcade CRTs that are going to become unavailable. The US still has warehouses full of worthless CRT televisions that are too expensive to recycle because of the lead content in the glass. [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/us/disposal-of-older- monit...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/us/disposal-of-older-monitors- leaves-a-hazardous-trail.html)

</comment><comment><USER42> I was under the impression that there are still a few small companies in China making CRTs --- a search of Alibaba shows a few sellers still advertising CRT TVs, but I'm not sure if those are NOS.

<comment><USER43> The arcade CRT's are different from TV CRT's, the voltages are a lot higher (I heard 10.000 volt somewhere) and therefore quite dangerous to handle even. This is also the reason the colors were much brighter in the arcade then on your home system connected to your TV.

<comment><USER44> The voltage is related to display size, a 17" monitor might run on 27kv while a 32" might run on 34kv, but at higher voltages more X-rays are emitted so most TVs have safety mechanisms to limit voltage.

As for the safety I'd expect anybody servicing arcades to know what they're doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> All this is saying to me is hoard discarded CRT monitors in a storage locker for 3 years then sell them off for good money on ebay. Am I mistaken?

<comment><USER46> Have fun with the shipping costs on those...

<comment><USER45> I don't think it's reasonable either. The eBay market is strange: 1GB 50 pin scsi drives go for hundreds of dollars, 486 machines can go for $150 and ISA sound cards can be auctioned for hundreds of dollars ([http://www.ebay.com/itm/Roland-SCC-1-ISA-Sound- Card-/1623420...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Roland-SCC-1-ISA-Sound- Card-/162342001502?hash=item25cc565b5e:g:pPAAAOSwImRYaVqZ)).

Don't get me wrong, this is a total waste of time - but the market is probably there for someone who wants it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Do not give up on CRT arcade monitors. There is still one manufacturer left in this world making new CRT TV's today in India. Do not give up hope. If we get together, we will find a way to rebuild or manufacturer new CRT Arcade Monitors in The United States or Imported to the United States. CRT technology is not dead. Find ways to learn how the CRT works and do simple Cathode Ray Tube experiments using a glassblower and other tools. If people do this, eventually, we can make custom CRT's one by one for video game and arcade collectors. Yes, this way might cost alot, but there will be collectors willing to pay that price. Another way is to make CRT rebuilding equipment to rebuild CRT arcade monitors. Early Television Foundation and museum will be rebuilding a 1950s B&W CRT TV Tube in May. Please don't give up on CRT displays. Have hope that New CRT displays will come.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm not asking to troll or be annoying, but couldn't we conceivably have LCDs in the future that have really high refresh rates? I'm not saying this year or anything, but is there a technical limitation to the max refresh rate to LCD?

</comment><comment><USER49> Do audiophiles watch movies in "tube" (CRT) screens? :)

<comment><USER50> Videophiles, and I gather they're more likely to use projectors with their vintage LaserDiscs.

<comment><USER51> Or for that matter, projectors with actual film.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> If anyone can fix and maintain classic arcade machines, it would be these people:

Museum of Play - International Center for the History of Electronic Games [http://www.museumofplay.org/about/icheg](http://www.museumofplay.org/about/icheg)

If you are in the area, you should stop by. They have every cool toy possible from many many years back. Brought back many memories.

Plus you can play many old arcade or pinball games!

</comment><comment><USER53> You can already see the rapid appreciation starting in the console CRT market. All the most desirable monitors have doubled or tripled in price over the past year. A 20" monitor easily sells for several hundred dollars, and the larger ones run into the thousands.

More and more people are starting to realize that emulation is no substitute for the real thing, and the supply of functional, high quality CRTs will only continue to decrease.

</comment><comment><USER54> As a person who is more sensitive than average to sub-85Hz flicker of CRT and plasma screens, I'm happy to see these technologies dying.

<comment><USER55> I'm more sensitive to the really high pitched eeeeeeee that comes from CRTs and their flyback transformers.

<comment><USER54> That sensitivity goes away "automatically" with age.</comment></comment></comment>


Keto diet works best in small doses, mouse study finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200127134741.htm <comment><USER2> _> When mice continue to eat the high-fat, low-carb diet beyond one week, Dixit said, they consume more fat than they can burn, and develop diabetes and obesity_

But that's not how anyone is doing Keto. It's not that easy to eat the massive amounts of fat this would require, which is why most people on Keto lose weight easily.

Also, why do we need mice to tell us this? Consuming large amounts of calories in general can trigger diabetes, right? In addition, Keto is extremely popular, so why not test on humans?

<comment><USER3> Don't most human keto studies fail because it's extremely hard to stick with?

[https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/should-you- tr...](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/should-you-try-the-keto- diet)

<comment><USER4> If you over do the protein - fat balance you just end up in gluconeogenesis instead of ketogenesis which is not a good way to do it (it's just atkins). It's very difficult to balance for your average person with a life outside of training and nutrition

<comment><USER5> Which is why proper nutrition needs to be taught as a mandatory class in high- school.

Hell, even medical students "on average only received 23.9 contact hours of nutrition instruction during medical school" [1]

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2430660/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2430660/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > A ketogenic diet -- which provides 99 percent of calories from fat and only > 1 percent from carbohydrates

Uh...People on keto don't get 99% of calories from fat. There's a significant amount of protein mixed in there.

I don't even know how I would get 99% of my calories from fat without eating a diet of pure butter and animal fat.

</comment><comment><USER7> Once you catch up on autophagy debt it's all just a bunch of less efficient energy.

<comment><USER8> Would you mind explaining autophagy debt?

<comment><USER9> Autophagy is the natural, regulated mechanism of the cell that removes unnecessary or dysfunctional components. It allows the orderly degradation and recycling of cellular components.

The debt would be a buildup of those components.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm trying to grow while doing a lot of cardio which takes a quite different eating approach. If I want the benefits of autophagy I would do a few days of keto followed by a few days of fasting. During the fast I would eat small amounts of carbs, near zero protein and small amounts of fat. After that I would eat properly for a few days, say a week and repeat the cycle. The duration of the keto would be something like 4-6 days but if I get bored with it I would cut it down to minimum 2. The fast too should last until I no longer feel like it.

<comment><USER10> Not sure why the down vote but ill give some more details the post was perhaps lacking. A few days of keto to get adjusted for fat burning. Doing that while fasting seems to harsh. Similarly, shutting down the digestive system entirely for longer than 48 hours seems nonsensical and dangerous while one meal per day seems slacking off. A small amount of food less than 10 gr protein (hard to digest) 40 ish grams of carbs and 30 ish grams of fat should be enough to remedy the sense of starvation while not breaking the fast. The variable duration is because I want to enjoy what I'm doing and I listen to my body. You also don't have the sense of failure if you plan things like this. Cheating while dieting seems the nr 1 reason to give up. For example, people always get fat again after they give up on a diet. That keto might be bad if done for longer than a week makes this comfortable approach all the more appealing.

<comment><USER11> Have you considered intermittent fasting instead of keto? Compliance is easier IMHO, and when paired with weight lifting, results are rapidly observed. Also would recommend swimming for cardio.

<comment><USER10> Yes but I see no reason for 24 hour cycles. So few hours is rather short for a fast. Keto seems great to switch on fat burning. Fasting will do it too of course but there is already enough stress when fasting. If it doesn't need to happen all at the same time I'd rather not.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The short life and hard times of a Linux virus (2005) - c-oreills http://librenix.com/?inode=21

<comment><AUTHOR> This article fails to point that Linux system are usually attacked by malware and rootkits, not by old-fashioned binary-file-modifying viruses.

For a recent account, see:

[http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/exclusive-ongoing- ma...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/exclusive-ongoing-malware- attack-targeting-apache-hijacks-20000-sites/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Given the quantity of information like this out there, do people bother with running anti-virus on Linux servers?

It feels like something that you'd do just to err on the safe side.

<comment><USER3> One word: "compliance". A lot of security standards demand that you run an anti-virus regularly on your servers. At least the first version of PCI DSS did, and it's MasterCard and Visa precursors did.

It's checklist items like "run an anti-virus" that make "compliance" into a pudgy, flaccid, bad word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> June 10, 2000 (Updated: July 30, 2005)

<comment> c-oreills Updated title to reflect this. I got the link from <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Antivirus> so apparently it's still considered relevant.</comment></comment>


Digital Transformation Team – Italian Government - <AUTHOR> https://teamdigitale.governo.it/en <comment><AUTHOR> Related blog post from Diego Piacentini, currently on a 2-years leave of absence from his role as SVP of International Consumer Business of Amazon.com:

[https://medium.com/team-per-la-trasformazione- digitale/from-...](https://medium.com/team-per-la-trasformazione- digitale/from-seattle-to-roma-innovation-citizens- talents-6b8c6c06002b#.9eus7kicl)</comment>


Become an intermediate Rust programmer in one day - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@edwardpku/being-an-intermediate-rust-programmer-in-one-day-37283bb1b0b0 <comment><USER2> I'm surprised this isn't receiving more discussion...

Looks to be some good resources linked at any rate!</comment>


Can this new Samsung Ad provoke Apple Fanboys to buy Samsung gadgets? - <AUTHOR> http://zuvvu.com/article.php?id=d96409bf894217686ba124d7356686c9

<comment><USER2> This ad caught my eye on tv, but Samsung needs to simplify their phone offerings. In this ad, they say, "It's a Samsung." Why not "It's the new Samsung Galaxy S"? They need to push "Samsung Galaxy"(Android) or "Samsung Focus" (Windows). All these other names just dilute their brand.

I just bought a used Android device on craigslist. I didn't care what carrier-- I just wanted wi-fi so I could test some mobile web app work. I ended up with a Samsung Fascinate. Okay, so it's a Samsung Android device. A Fascinate. I have never heard of this model. Then on the back it says "Galaxy S". On the original packaging it says, "Samsung Fascinate TM a Galaxy S TM phone Verizon."

So what am I supposed to call it? By introducing "Fascinate" (or whatever they call it on other carriers), I'm just confused. Now when someone asks me what I bought, what do I tell them? A Samsung? A Samsung Fascinate? A Samsung Galaxy? Galaxy S?

What I do say is, "a used Android device I found on craigslist."

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm..valid point. But I guess, With "Its a Samsung", Samsung is aiming at changing perception of brand in US consumers. They want set themselves as a recognized brand which is Asian just by origin but knows US/Europe well and can deliver a good option to Apple gadgets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think that an advert has provoked me or anyone I know to buy anything. Samsung's latest ad campaign is a definite strategy shift though that has grabbed attention (as was the point of course).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea..provocation was in the sense of Perception change and building of interest. Earlier, when I wanted to buy or gift a phone or a tablet to anyone, Apple had a clear position in my brain..but now I take Samsung as a very serious and good option to think about along with obvious Apple. But yea, immediate buy decision is near to impossible with this ad or any ad campaign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, this ad really worked for me and I bought a new Samsung Note couple of weeks back.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the comment dude. And congrats for ur new note. Even in my circle, I have seen this trend that all of a sudden Apple Users are using Samsung gadgets especially the phones and tabs.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the purpose of link shorteners? - <AUTHOR> This may be a dumb question with a simple answer, but I've spent a while trying to figure it out and still don't see it.
These are the 2 reasons I always see.
1. They track clicks - But is their clickthrough tracking any better than Google Analytics + URL parameters?
2. They make links more shareable / manageable - Twitter counts all links as 23 characters. And all it involves is copy-paste.
They clearly have value for the businesses doing the shortening, so I understand why they exist. But for the person sharing the link, is there some value I'm missing? <comment><USER2> URL Shorteners (particularly the ones that support "friendly naming") can sometimes be used to give simpler URLs to "deep links", particularly for inclusion in things like presentations or printed materials where the person may need to type in that URL from memory or a non-digital reference.

For instance, suppose I want to send people to this Ask HN question. I could include on a slide:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521663](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521663)

I could use a shortener with "friendly name" support, let's call this example fake.ly:

[http://fake.ly/shorturls](http://fake.ly/shorturls)

In this way, it becomes a "keyword system" for deep-linking. If my slides use a consistent URL shortener, then all people need to take away/remember from particular examples is the set of "keywords" they are interested in and which shortener I used.

Certainly there are other options in this space (QR codes, for instance), but shorteners with friendly names just work in any ordinary web browser, no need for a separate app.

</comment><comment><USER3> When sending very long links via email, some programs break the link (or used to) and end users may not know how to fix it. Years ago, this was an issue on email lists that I participated in. Members were not necessarily very tech savvy. Link shorteners avoid being so long that they get broken in some environments.

They also look better than some ridiculously long link would. Some links like a paragraph in size.

It is possible they had more value at some point in the past. I used to use them more than I do these days. Perhaps my life has changed. Or perhaps the internet has changed. Or perhaps a little of each.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use them primarily to lessen the perceived-burden on the user when I ask them to share something.

For example, imagine you just checked-out on an eCommerce site, and a modal pops up:

"Thanks for your purchase, share it with your friends: [SuperLongLinkThatWontActuallyTakeYouVeryLongToCopyAndPasteButForSomeReasonSeemsLikeAPainInTheAssToDealWith]"

vs

"Thanks for your purchase, share it with your friends! [short.url]"

I'm actually asking them to do the same amount of work. But the first option seems like a bigger 'ask', so I default to the second one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. This does make sense. Was trying to figure out if I should be using them when I tweet out a link. Seems like the value is more about when you hand off the link to someone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In response to (1), link shorteners provide a very limited amount of clickstream insight and – in most cases – should not be used as a replacement for URL query string parameters.

Several link shorteners may impose their own set of query parameters, unless configured otherwise, which can distort clickstream and referrer data in Google Analytics, Omniture, and so forth.

That said link shorteners are useful for hiding complexity and for quickly and simply tracking how many clicks a link receives. This includes clicks on links to domains that you do not own, or sites for which you would be unable to view visitor and clickstream data.

</comment><comment><USER6> The shorter links fit into smaller packets. Smaller packets consume less space on the wire, so you can cram more of them into the pipe and increase your bandwidth.

Sorry.

The answer is what you posted above as number 2.

But also, Before Twitter, and in the earlier days of the Internet people were not very good at creating sites with readable urls - so even if you were sending it in email it could be massive and not something anyone could easily dictate or type out. Link shorteners allowed for much easier method of sharing or even telling someone the link over voice or text.

</comment><comment><USER7> No expert, but I think they make money off the click itself, the impression being shown to the user while they are waiting for redirection to the destination, and in some controversial cases they add their affiliate IDs when the destination link is to an online merchant such as ebay and amazon.

</comment><comment><USER8> Note, however, that they can also be used to shroud nefarious sites. For example, you get a spoof email masquerading as one from your financial institution; it is easier to spot americanexpress. _somewhereelse_.com than biy.ly/gibrsh

</comment><comment><USER9> 3\. They take up a small, consistent amount of space in a UI

</comment><comment><USER10> They are a conspiracy to break the web of hyperlinks we all use to navigate.</comment>


Modern Computer Arithmetic (2010) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://members.loria.fr/PZimmermann/mca/mca-cup-0.5.9.pdf <comment><USER2> I just went through much of this material using Knuth and various resources on the web, to do some work on elliptic curve cryptography alorithms. Man, I wish I had found this resource sooner! Glancing through the book, it looks like it does a very nice job of presenting algorithms and their proofs. I just downloaded the pdf and am going to save it as a reference.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a good book. Note that it's mostly concerned with (software implementation of) arbitrary-precision arithmetic; which is just one branch of computer arithmetic.

</comment><comment><USER4> If anyone is interested, the best textbook imo on computer arithmetic is Digital Arithmetic by Miloš D. Ercegovac. It's very extensive especially for hardware designers but it's a bit outdated and no easy read at all

</comment><comment><USER5> Mods, please fix the typo in the title's last word. Thanks.

<comment><USER6> Trevor beat me to it.

<comment><USER7> Which raises the question "Who is Trevor?": [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=who%20is%20trevor&type=story](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=who%20is%20trevor&type=story)

Which takes us to the very old discussion page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=82048](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=82048)

Which resolves to a 404 at this point without providing any useful information. Hmm.

Still, it leaves the question of how many people are actively editing typos in titles, and whether we should actually be blaming Trevor any time a typo remains for more than a few minutes.

(No answer actually required.)

<comment><USER8> Presumably he means 'tlb.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Restoration Hardware's Mail-Order Extravagance - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/restoration-hardwares-mail-order-extravagance

<comment><USER2> I received one of these enormous catalog bundles recently. Only one slim catalog of the entire stack was relevant to me, and the rest went straight to the recycling bin.

With all the information they undoubtedly have about their customers, why not be smarter about what you send?

<comment><USER3> It's very baffling. I purchased one item from them 5 years ago and got the 17 pound stack the other month. I believe it went straight into the recycling bin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I vowed never ever to set foot in an RH store again after receiving one of these monstrosities.

</comment><comment><USER5> Send them USPS.. they can use the business and I'd like my local mail subsidized again..

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought it was hilarious and ridiculous at the same time. They eventually went to the trash.

</comment><comment><USER7> David Malki of the web comic Wondermark invented a game called "Restoration Hogwash:"

[http://wondermark.com/restoration- hogwash/](http://wondermark.com/restoration-hogwash/) \- [http://wondermark.com/restoration-redux/](http://wondermark.com/restoration- redux/)

One player selects a catalog item and covers up the description; the other players each write a description that they think fits, and then everyone tries to guess which hilariously overwrought description is the original. One of his commenters pointed out that "There are 72 different items [in the catalog] which are described as being made from wood from '100-year old buildings in Great Britain'." There must have been a sale at Home Depot.

He ran a modified version on his blog in which commenters try to describe an item, and he showed them which _other_ item they had actually described. Very funny stuff.</comment>


Wirecard Collapse Drags Down Online Banking Services - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/06/26/wirecard-collapse-drags-down-online-banking-services/ <comment><AUTHOR> And here the video story from Dan McCrum

[https://www.ft.com/video/37cb70e6-72df-471e-943d-2d32c278565...](https://www.ft.com/video/37cb70e6-72df-471e-943d-2d32c2785650)</comment>