>Mossberg pointed to "a gradual degradation in the quality and reliability of Apple’s core apps." He fingered iTunes for the desktop ("I dread opening the thing"), and the Mail, Photos, and iCloud programs.
As somebody that's used a Mac for 90%+ of all computing-related tasks since OS X was released, all of the above-mentioned apps/services have been dead to me for years. I honestly can't remember the last time I purposely used any of the above.
What's driving me away is a combination of flaky behavior on the desktop (bizarre wifi glitches; bizarre NFS/SMB/AFP mount behaviors; increasing system instability), and a lack of differentiation across both the desktop and mobile platform. There was a time when I needed a Mac or i-Device to do things I cared about/needed, but those days are long over. Almost all of my compute activity happens on a server in my homelab or 'the cloud', and Linux and Android meets or exceeds my needs for completing other tasks. I just swapped my iPhone 6+ for a Nexus 6P, and my current MacBook (12" model) will probably be my last when I retire it in 3-4 years.
I want and need a deluxe Linux OS for which I would pay $200/year, which would do things well. This includes:
- Porting bugfixes forward (I dropped Ubuntu because they didn't port a bugfix from 12.x to 13.04 - After 2 days trying to recover my network auth, I asked a Mac to my boss).
- Designed for me, not for monkeys with big fingers who bring up Amazon results for every search (That's not why I dropped Ubuntu, but desktop developers aren't within the targets of Canonical),
- Who would hire and pay UX designers. I want the Mac OS X experience. I don't want to recompile my kernel. I want few features in the OS, but well-designed. I want people working days over days to fine-tune the mouse controls in the OS (the first warning that made me upset about Ubuntu). I want to hear the rumble of developers integrating Webkit with nice developer tools into an open-source chromium.
- I, developer, using IntelliJ IDEA, using apt-get/brew, I want to be the paying customer of that OS. I don't want my data be sold. I might want some cloud sync, but I don't want share buttons, especially when I watch porn (I'm absolutely serious). And I want the cloud parts of my OS to be under APL-Affero.
- Obviously those bugfixes must be sent back upstream to the OSS community. Ideally there would be half the money left to pay back, but let's start pessimistic.
- As a bonus, in that OS, all apps would be webkit/js-based. But I'm dreaming.
It is totally possible to charge for open-source, even the GPL says it. You can't prevent people from re-sharing the OS online, but you can offer upgrades to subscribed users only.
I wanted the Apple experience, but that's not coming back. Look what Nest did: They're selling a working thermostat for 3x the price. Tesla is selling electric cars for deluxe customers. I want to pay $200 per year, recurring, for a stable env with little novelty and many bugfixes, and I want to "deluxe". I want to purchase the feeling of being superior with my OS.
And I say that as a peson who earns €32.000 gross per year (France).
Because? Because it's slow? Or because it's weakly typed? See it that way: Everyone and their todler can program in js, including experts of PHP, Java, Nodejs. With thousands devs, we'd see an explosion of apps, and many good quality ones in the marketplace. If there's a way we can embed V8 at an X Server level, open all OS APIs to js, sandbox while still optimizing the RAM resources, assist with the type-checking, the benefits would be huge.
All of the things are already there but not packaged in the way _you_ want it. You need to invest the time to chose and pick if you want to use Linux in this specific way. If you don't want to do that job, then I guess Linux is not for you, stick to OS X untill by pure chanse someone creates a distribution which does exactly what you want.
(Btw. I never compiled a Linux kernel for my desktop/laptop)
When I started using Android I subscribed to Google Play Music. It allowed me to upload my music collection, including songs that we're on Google Play. It's not matching, like Apple. It's literally just taking my music and allowing me to store it in the cloud and download it onto mobile devices. It's really handy so far and makes much more sense compared to iTunes. Plus there's no "sync" concept once you're there. You just download music out of your collection or you don't.
I don't know how the iTunes matching works, but Play Music does swap out your version of a song with theirs if they see they're the same thing. I think this has only been within the last year or so that they started doing this though. I don't have any personal files anymore, so I can't comment on how accurate it is.
Play Music does match and does get it wrong, as I've found out with a few continuous albums where tracks have got swapped out for unmixed versions. You can manually tell it not to but only on a per-track basis (e.g. see https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1zruza/getting_kin...)
I feel like there's definitely a gap in the market for a cloud music service that is simple and effective, I would love to just upload all my music and know it was going to play back anywhere (desktop and mobile) with the original tracks and proper gapless playback, and I would be able to download my music back out of there, with a nice clean UI.
Apple Music fails because it swaps out tracks and is generally flaky (little control over the upload process, tracks don't play, etc.), Google Play fails because it swaps out tracks and has, IMO, a pretty horrible UI on both desktop and mobile.
I've played a little with Subsonic but found the clients lacking. Any other suggestions? Maybe I should just build my own!
Thanks for the link. They really boiled itunes down to the core product. Skipping through songs multiple times finally works quickly. I don't know how itunes lags with multiple song skips on an SSD.
As somebody that's used a Mac for 90%+ of all computing-related tasks since OS X was released, all of the above-mentioned apps/services have been dead to me for years. I honestly can't remember the last time I purposely used any of the above.
What's driving me away is a combination of flaky behavior on the desktop (bizarre wifi glitches; bizarre NFS/SMB/AFP mount behaviors; increasing system instability), and a lack of differentiation across both the desktop and mobile platform. There was a time when I needed a Mac or i-Device to do things I cared about/needed, but those days are long over. Almost all of my compute activity happens on a server in my homelab or 'the cloud', and Linux and Android meets or exceeds my needs for completing other tasks. I just swapped my iPhone 6+ for a Nexus 6P, and my current MacBook (12" model) will probably be my last when I retire it in 3-4 years.