>> Why is wanking about power use such a big thing?

As you may be aware, power costs money.

My quad core desktop idle's at about 100W of usage. The mac mini uses about 11W at idle.

So, if it's on 12 hours a day for a year, my desktop costs me about $45 in power. The mini would cost about $5.
So over a 5 year lifespan of the equipment the mini saves about $200. Hence add that to the price of the desktop and you get a fair comparison.

>> Even Dell sells a 5K monitor today.

No they don't. They've announced one that isn't shipping.

Hmm, do I want a phone that I can run over with an excavator or one that does every single other thing better. While I do run over my phone almost daily, I think I'm going to go for the one that, you know, does everything else better.

Which idiot voted this nonsense up? Obviously there aren't 1.5 billion android phones sold per day, and Apple shares are not dropping, in fact they have been on an upward trend in the last 6 months.

>> the fancy ones are $8,000 instead of $80 is because IP laws protect monopolies

Wrong. The fancy ones are $8000 because they take a lot of engineering work to develop and the market is very small. If you want to recoup your investment you have to sell it for a high price.

The rest of your comment is just fancyful nonsense.

Apps on iOS can't inject a dialog over top of another app, or even bring their own app to the foreground programatically, so this is not even possible on iOS. Maybe the app could monitor for actions, but it can't do anything with that info.

>> Well, that's what you get for running Ubuntu in a dev environment.

Hey I used to run Debian for years, but since when is it common knowledge that Ubuntu is not suitable for development?

Not quite, but almost. Not once have I had a Windows upgrade break some basic part of the system like 3D acceleration or Wifi that wasn't more than a driver install away from being fixed.

We develop on Android and iOS and Windows and Mac. Only Linux has those problems so far.

>> Xrandr will only by default show the modes that the monitor explicitly supports. So, how did you accidently do that?

Well we picked a resolution from the graphical dialog and the TV said it doesn't support that resolution and we never saw a display again. Like I said, the theory is that the dialog should only display the resolutions that the monitor supports, but in practice that's not the case and we get to waste a couple hours.

>> Also a reinstall, seriously? This sounds like you don't know very much about linux.

Did some googling, couldn't find anything solid. Tried a few things with no results. Faster to reinstall. Back in the day of static configuration this would have been easy to fix but I dunno where the graphical tools keep their config for resolution and nothing good turned up on google.

>> That sounds mighty strange. I've not seen a Linux system respond to monitor hotplug events with an action by default well, ever. They can respond but you have to set it up. Also, I note the problem was with *your* application. Are you sure it wasn't a bug in your code.

Only happened with TVs connected on HDMI, not PC monitors. Also happened with Qt Creator. So not a bug in our application, but possibly some bizarre combination of hardware and Qt and X bug. Again, several hours down the drain chasing stuff that should never be a problem.

Obviously you haven't used Office 365. Large changes again and many times not for the better. Some features seem to be just plain missing.

Pretty much. When choosing between evil overlords I'd go for the one that actually makes a functional product. Google Docs is laughable compared to Microsoft Office. Even LibreOffice is millions of miles ahead of Google Docs in almost every conceivable area.

>> Now queue all the people ranting

Why does no one in the comments know the difference between cue and queue?

Yep. I used Linux almost exclusively for many years at university. Back when I had the time and desire to fix things when they broke. Eventually I was worn down by the endless cycle of update break fix that you get in Linux. When you can't even safely update to the next version the system is broken.

About once a year I do a project on Linux or install it somewhere to see how it has progressed. In the important areas, it hasn't at all.

We did a project just recently using Intel NUCs running Ubuntu and some of our software to be connected to TVs. Here's the linux specific problems we encountered
1. Installing Qt dev environment is a huge pain. The default packages in both 14.04 and 13.10 are broken for multimedia playback in Qt and need files to be manually moved to work. Using a Qt build from qt-project.org also doesn't work with multimedia.
2. On Kubuntu we accidentally changed the desktop resolution to one the TV wouldn't accept. There was no confirm. X totally broken, no obvious way to fix it. Reinstalled.
3. On Kubuntu, we had to delay our delivery at the last moment because we discovered that when using a TV as a monitor and the TV was turned off, our application window disappeared (still running, just invisible). After many hours of debugging and no info, we ditched Ubuntu.
4. Had to install Ubuntu several times and fiddle with Bios settings for it to work (some kind boot issue with UEFI).
5. No standard mounting point for DVDs caused problems
etc etc

In the end it would have been far cheaper to put Windows on there and just have it work. Hours and hours wasted during development on silly bugs that should have never happened. And this is on quality hardware from a vendor that supports Linux (Intel).

>> Apple laptops are not magic, or particularly good value.

Two things that I like about Apple laptops that are unmatched:
1. Trackpad is just first class. I have never seen any windows machine with a trackpad so smooth and accurate. Also the gestures in the OS are actually useful to the point where I prefer using the trackpad over a mouse for most applications (not image editing).
2. Magnetic power adapter. This is just killer compared to the stupid barrel connectors everyone else has. I would pay an extra $100 just for that feature.