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It doesn’t have to be a walled garden, it could just be a system where they only do first-party development of products they product and leave it to the community to expand to others.

I’m using a EnGenius EWS377AP and don’t have any complaints.

I had Ubiquiti gear but had some quirks and still wanted something a bit advanced. I don’t know how well meshing works though.

Because in yanks number out of ass 87.74% of threads of “why use X? Linux has Y, it’ll do everything you want”

Ardour/LO/etc are great for what they are and have their uses, but there are some apps that just aren’t available on Linux and the claimed alternatives really don’t work.

The Steam Deck is a great example of consumer Linux done right. You don’t even know it’s Linux. The team who developed it did a fantastic job at focusing on the full end-to-end experience.

Yeah :/

I almost wonder how far (as an example) System76 or someone could get by mirroring Apple’s approach: build a range of devices and focus aggressively on gluing them together without a care in the world for anything else.

I know Samsung tries for their devices with Windows, but their software always felt like there’s an internal competition for who can add the most number of controls to each UI and it comes across as very clunky.

I switched to a Mac a couple years ago but I’ll always at least keep a Linux VM and a separate Linux laptop just in case.

As for why, generally speaking, Apple puts a lot of really, really good work into making a machine that feels immediately productive with little fiddling around, they’re ahead of the pack in some ways, and for advanced stuff it’s “good enough”.

My reasons:

1. Cross-device integration (at least with Apple) - I already use an iPhone, iPad, and AppleTV. The integration between iOS and macOS is just really, really good. Android+Linux just doesn’t come anywhere close. And that’s even if you put in the hours it’d take to set a bunch of disparate apps up to try to replicate it. Anyone telling you otherwise is completely full of bullshit or is showing that they actually haven’t used Apple devices.

• Using my iPad as a secondary display takes literally 2 clicks.
• Setting my Apple Watch to unlock my laptop takes literally 4 clicks.
• Casting my screen or even just sound takes 2 clicks.
• Handoff is just magic. If you recently used something on your phone and have the matching app on your Mac, you get a shortcut in your Dock to load whatever you had on your phone on your computer to pick up where you left off. If I am in a Signal chat, I can instantly open the chat I was viewing on my phone. Same for browsing websites, text messages, and a bunch of things.
• Airdrop between devices “just works”.
• If I connect to a wifi access point from my phone, my laptop will prompt me to automagically copy the password over (i think) bluetooth. Or if I’m at a friend’s house and they use an iPhone, they’ll get a prompt to share their wifi network password with me.

2. Device restoration - Restoring a Mac is just impressive for how little effort it requires. If someone stole my laptop, I can drive 15 mins to an Apple Store, buy a new laptop, point it at my NAS, and be back running in an hour or less to exactly where I left off. Similarly, If I buy a brand new laptop, copying data from the old one to the new one is incredibly boring – in all of the right ways. All apps/info/config/etc gets moved over. No weird quirks or workarounds or anything needed.

3. M-series laptops - At the time, there were no other good options for ARM CPU laptops, especially ones that can be spec’d to 64GB of RAM. The M CPU laptops are crazy fast and efficient. I can literally use my laptop for 9-10 hours in a day going full-hardcore, and still have juice to spare. Yeah I know Asahi Linux works for the most part now, but I don’t have time anymore to beta-test my main box.

4. Adequate Unixy bits - The terminal does everything I need, the utilities are fine. I use Nix (and some Homebrew) to maintain various CLI tools.

5. Software - I wanted to save this for last since everyone quotes this first. I wanted to meddle with music and Ardour doesn’t really scratch the itch the same way Logic Pro does. Another example: as bad as the Mac version of Microsoft Office is, it’s still far more nicer feeling than LibreOffice and requires much less work to get a good looking presentation/etc. out the door on a time crunch.

Gluetun is great for when you want a container that should only use the network on the other side of a VPN.

I’ve been using it for months and maybe popped back over to Google only a handful of times.

DDG is okay but it’s miserable in comparison. I haven’t tried Ecosia long enough to form a proper opinion but my first impressions weren’t great.

The only people who actively rail against it seem to be the standard group of Fediverse who are… a bit too online 😉

While a decade is a stretch, there are some barren areas for Blu-ray Discs.

A few months ago I wanted to build a collection of Blu-rays as a conversation starter in my living room. I checked out well over two dozen Best Buy, Target, and Walmarts in a ~50mi radius (DC area) to find any that had a reasonable selection for sale. I was incredibly disappointed with how much effort I had to put in for this.

It seemed that DVDs were still a higher priority in my hunt.

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The world is getting better in a lot of ways but the uplifting headlines don’t garner clicks and views. A lot of people only post the doom-and-gloom headlines.

Lemmy hasn’t been any better than Reddit in this regard.

I miss my Touchpad. Palm was ahead of its time by making all mobile apps web apps.

Oh well. The HP firesale was one hell of a send-off at least.

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