And that wheel isn't the "click wheel" which is the touchpad-surface for scrolling and the physical buttons for clicking. The first gen iPod had a mehanical scroll wheel and separate mechanical buttons.
Why can't the circuit be smart enough to detect the orientation of how the plug is inserted without the need to double the number of pins? Manufacturers are looking to cut costs wherever they can and given the choice between whether to make these things easier to handle for consumer or making them buy a new cable that wears out faster, I'm sadly going with them leaning towards the latter.
I came from a 3 year old Thinkpad T400 to borrowing a new 15" MacBook Pro with matte screen and SSD for iPad app dev. After feeling the improvements with the new E420 thinkpads keyboards I think I'm going to wait for the new T430 Lenovos to arrive for my next upgrade.
For me, as a developer, nothing is more important than having a good keyboard. The macbook has really cheap thin keys that don't have the feedback I'd like. The wrist rest edge is sharp which leaves marks on my wrists. The indentation where you cram in a finger to open the screen has knife sharp points on both sides that just makes you wonder what were they thinking. It gets rather hot underneath as well.
So ergonomically, it hasn't been that great of a transition for me even though I wanted it to be. Maybe the macbook air or the 13" pro may be better. Plus I'm too used to using the thinkpad's Trackpoint to mouse around. If you're a vim user, it's awesome with mouse support enabled while keeping fingers near the home row.
If you have ever tried to install the latest version of a distro while keeping the config from the previous version, it's basically the same except spread out over time, which I find a lot more comfortable.
When something is broken after an update, either :
- the steps to take are immediately obvious from the error message
- it looks like a config issue, and I'll then have a look at the new config file pacman has created as file.conf.pacnew and try to merge it with my existing file.conf
- I have no idea and google the error message with "site:bbs.archlinux.org", which 99% of the time will yield the answer quickly.
I have a few packages that are excluded from pacman updates, because they're too important for work (SBCL mainly). They will only be updated once in a while. The rest ot the updates are done depending on my work and my mood : I'll do a complete update, particularly on my home server, only when I have time for it and am in the mood to fix things,
Overall, I find it much more comfortable than always postponing installing the new version of a distro because it will be too much work to replicate my setup, and ending up stuck with outdated software.
I recently tried to set up an HTPC with XBMC on top of Arch. I had never used Arch before, but I was attracted by the idea of being able to install just the very minimum stuff I needed (to keep boot times short), as well as the rolling-release system (to avoid the headache of "upgrading" to a new release).
Unfortunately, I never made it very far because of KMS (which gp mentioned). I'm using intel graphics (Core i3-2100T), and the drivers didn't play nice with KMS: my screen would go blank at a certain point during boot. The system would still boot up: I could log in and execute shutdown commands, all in the blind. It turns out this is a known bug[1], and the only solution is to turn KMS off. Unfortunately, when I turned KMS off (either explicitly in the conf files or by downgrading to an older kernel that doesn't support it), X wouldn't start, citing lack of KMS as the reason! So, I was stuck with a situation where my screen broke if I used KMS, but X wouldn't work if I didn't. After failing to find help on the Arch forums, I ditched Arch for my HTPC and went with xubuntu. At first I was afraid that the same kernel bug would affect me regardless of distro, but apparently ubuntu builds their kernel differently in some key way that lets it work.
All that being said, I enjoyed playing with Arch so much that I'm probably going to install it on my laptop after I finish setting up the HTPC (the laptop has nvidia graphics, so I shouldn't have the same problem). I've been using Linux since the late '90s, starting with slackware and changing distros every few years, but I've become a bit of a GUI-cripple in the last few years. Installing and configuring Arch knocked a lot of rust off. It felt good to once again really understand all of the various settings and the config files that held them.
The slow pace of CD releases can make it difficult to install, although they fortunately got a new one out the door a few weeks ago. It is not fun trying to get your network running without wireless. Others have examples below, these are just some things that make this distro a bad idea for people who don't want to learn Linux.
No one's saying that. All that is said is it's not entirely Apple's doing. In this case it was Synaptics.