[WildUtah]

It's a real detriment to UI, it costs you battery life, it's a distracting gimmick, and it adds $200 to the cost of your machine.

And Apple will never give up on it. Every Mac is going to be worse for years and years because of it.

Enjoy.

[routelastresort]

The good thing that can come of this would be the resurgence of the Linux desktop. Apple just crossed the line for me (<32GB, no SSD upgrade, messing with the keyboard). I'll miss the almost perfect trackpad, but there's no way I'll support these choices.

[notalaser]

Historically, the side effect this tends to have is that a lot of programmers flock to a new platform but bring the way they use and write programs with them. Fifteen years ago we ended up with CORBA- and Window Registry-like components bolted on top of Linux desktops. On the other hand, seeing how nowadays the Linux "community" is mostly a bunch of big cloud, automotive and IoT/vaporware companies, this could be the closest the Linux desktop has to salvation.

So far, the attempts to bring elements of the OS X experience to the Linux desktop have been very... cargo cult, in the absence of a more forgiving word. Fetishizing design choices and simplicity has made it very unpleasant to deal with a modern Linux system. Many users of tiling-wm-and-terminal-only desktops don't do so "just" because it's the most efficient option, they do it because the alternatives are horrifyingly bad.

[meddlepal]

I wasn't aware the Linux desktop needed salvation. Maybe it needs salvation for non-technical end users but it's good to excellent for end-users whose primary use involve actually using Linux for what it's good at which is basically being a fully open OS and IDE for software and other engineers.

[notalaser]

It has been exactly two days since the last time I had to dig down and figure out what broke in PulseAudio this time. Things are certainly bad for non-technical users, but those of us who write Linux software for a living don't have it much better, either.

[innocenat]

Do you know why it breaks? Because Ubuntu 16.04 just works on my laptop. Things that require one-time technical setup: Function key (screen brightness) and Optimus/bumblebee. I also set up touchegg because Unity hates multi-touch trackpad. But since initial setup I never have to touch anything again, and can upgrade everything via Software Update.

I would say it is no better than Windows at all (since you also need to install correct driver on Windows).

[notalaser]

Cynically, I'd say it breaks because the only mistakes that we live with, try to work around or fix are the ones made no later than the mid-90s. Everything else, we live with for a while, then boldly proclaim that they're outdated, junk from another age, no longer appropriate for a modern system and then promptly rewrite -- so unsurprisingly, a lot of components of a major Linux desktop are basically beta-quality and/or in a continuous state of flux.

Look at the Gnome 3.22 changelog. It lists things like support for multiple renaming, being able to set alarms for events in Calendar and seamless photo sharing via Google Photos and email. I remember being excited about all these features (except Google Photos, for obvious reasons) when I was using Windows. 2000. I was using Windows 2000.

That's why we're rejoicing that we'll soon have ASLR in all mainstream distros and support for a display server/compositor where windows can't snoop on other windows is just around the corner, while Microsoft is perfecting call-flow integrity and has had a proper compositor since the days when we were barely able to bolt our applications on top of an X11 compositor.

Edit: Non-cynically: most of the breakage happens because the level of complexity involved in a most modern technologies is way over the level that can be meaningfully managed by a community. systemd, xdg-everything, they're all very useful tools, but only a handful of people can properly use them, and it doesn't help that so many of them work for Red Hat and aren't exactly transparent about a lot of things. This breeds mistrust and brings about a lot of unjustified criticism along with the justified one.

As for why PulseAudio in particular keeps breaking, I'm not familiar enough with its source code to say. My problems revolve around things like randomly deciding to use another output device. I work around it by not using it, really. Every couple of months I take KDE and Gnome for a ride, they keep breaking, I open up the page of my local Apple dealer, I gaze incredulously at how much money they want for that hardware, close the page, pacman -Rcs plasma-meta and get back to WindowMaker.

[notheguyouthink]

This is probably why i'm going to be replacing my 2014 with a 2017 MBP (hopefully they're not worse...), despite wanting to go with Linux.

I can't stomach dealing with driver/etc issues. I can't handle paying $2k only to deal with debugging things that i want to "just work".

Sure, it might work perfectly, or it might be a nightmare. I've had both experiences on desktop linux.

[pythonaut_16]

I've read about i3 several times over the past few years but finally checked it out a few weeks ago, and it fits exactly what I've been looking for in a Linux desktop for so long.

All I've ever wanted from Ubuntu/Gnome/KDE/XFCE (at least while developing) was the ability to launch programs easily from the keyboard, to tile windows in various configurations, and to manage virtual desktops.

i3 makes all of this easy with an incredibly simple and logical set of keyboard shortcuts. To anyone thinking about trying out i3, the learning curve isn't as bad as it seems, especially if you use a distro like Manjaro-i3 that can take care of some of the harder parts for you.

[vlunkr]

It's funny how much I think about the trackpad when I consider leaving apple. Seems like a a stupid reason when you tell non-apple users, but seriously, everything else feels so primitive in comparison.

[dajohnson89]

Resurgence? When was it ever popular? Iirc, market share right now is under 5%.

I say this as pretty much a lifelong Linux desktop user. I've been waiting and hoping for it to take off, but.....

[rbanffy]

Macs took over some of the developer space that Linux laptops used to be in. As a usable Unix environment with excellent hardware, it's a solid investment.

[timattrn]

Me too. I wanted to move to a quad core. I was ready to get the new 15" but 16gb? My son has a hand-me-down 2010 MacBook Pro with 16gb. Anyway now I have a P50 quad core, with a 95whr battery, 7w idle power consumption, expandable to 3 HDD, two of which are as fast as the Mac, and a keyboard which is ridiculously good. It runs xubuntu. And I got change after selling my 18month old 13" MacBook pro. reality distortion bubble has been popped a bit.

[raverbashing]

The Linux desktop seems to be getting ever more dragged in crap like Unity, systemd, and broken ideas on top of broken ideas

Though you can replace those components, the time being wasted there makes the Touchbar and other Apple crap seem the worse of two evils

[robert_foss]

I can't say there is any usability difference between systemd and upstart on my Ubuntu 16.10 machine.

Which brokenness are you referring to?

[raverbashing]

Just general stuff https://hn.algolia.com/?query=systemd&sort=byDate&prefix&pag...

Systemd breaks things for the sake of speed. https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdAndSys...

[rtpg]

Even the XPS 13 (supposed to be built for Linux support) seems to have a lot of basic hardware/software problems.

I was looking for an excuse to get one recently but found enough testimony of breakage to not make the switch.

[gradstudent]

I tried to buy one of these recently. Dell won't sell them in my country. I looked Too bad I can't buy it with Linux (or nothing!) pre-installed.

[AsyncAwait]

XPS's trackpad is pretty good, not MacBook good, but almost there.

[WillPostForFood]

With only a slightly smaller touchpad, Apple easily could have included a row of function keys, which are half height anyway. Then the touch bar would either be additive, or ignorable depending on one's attitude. But the trade-off makes it painful.

[golergka]

> It's a real detriment to UI, it costs you battery life, it's a distracting gimmick, and it adds $200 to the cost of your machine.

Apart from the battery thing, the same could be (and was) said about a mouse.

[r00fus]

If Apple keeps it, they will improve on it to the point where it doesn't suck.

[hpaavola]

I don't believe that the fundamental issue can be fixed. Ironically "Touch Bar" is something you can't feel when you touch it. Real physical buttons guide your finger to the correct location if you miss them slightly. "Touch" buttons don't.

To fix that, one would need to rework the whole OS and applications in such way that they don't use F-keys at all, but rather something else.

So, fixing Touch Bar means rethinking OS and application shortcuts.

I don't think average users really use F-buttons that much, but we developers generally do.

[mgkimsal]

if there was even a way to just have the f-keys on all the time by default, that would have helped. Last I looked, that was not an option - you needed to hold down the fn key (or control?)

[jrs95]

You can actually, on a per application basis: http://m.imore.com/how-make-function-keys-default-touch-bar-...

[mgkimsal]

I don't want them on a 'per-application' basis.

The older macs, you could have f-key 'default' with the other options activated by holding the FN key, or reverse it, so that the brightness/etc were default, and f-keys activated by holding down the FN key.

There is no option to just have f-keys defaulted, with other touchbar stuff activated by FN key. For people who simply want standard f-keys as default all the time (like you could have in the previous macs), there is no option right now.

[SomeHacker44]

You can't, actually. This only works for some applications. None of my WINE apps, for example, can have this enabled. Apple failed.

[jbverschoor]

Just wait until the force-touchbar and then the 3d-touchbar.

I agree with the feedback, but I'm certain they will add this.

[RugnirViking]

A 3d, force, touchbar sounds awfully like just a row of buttons to me ;-)

[skyrw]

The second that happens they will remove it in the following release.