What's Some Tech That Was Better Than It Is Now?
What's Some Tech That Was Better Than It Is Now?
When you connect a new device to a 'smart' tv, you must pay homage to the manufacturer with a ritualistic dance. Plugging and unplugging the device. Turning them on and off in the correct sequence like entering a konami code.
Every time you want to switch devices, the tv must scan for them. And god forbid you lose power, or unplug something. You are granted the delight experience of doing it all over again.
I have fond memories of the days of just plugging something in, and pressing the input button. Instant gratification. It was a simpler time.
What is some other tech that used to be better?
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I feel like the problem is less with the technology itself and more with some of the stuff within and around it. So let me list my favourite bugbears:
- Buttons!
Here's the thing about buttons and knobs: they are definite. When you press them, you KNOW you pressed them, you can use your finger to feel for them without activating other stuff by accident. Back in the day with my cheap-ass chinese MP3 player, I could change tracks and playlists without taking it out of my pocket just by using tact and muscle memory.
Nowadays with my smartphone even something as basic as skipping a track requires me to take it out and unlock the screen. It's like. Sure, the phone does a lot more stuff, and can stream stuff from the internet so I don't have to download every track (even if I keep a local library for my favourites in ogg format), it has bluetooth for wireless headphones, a lot of good shit -- But that little bit of user experience is just dead and buried.
Heck, my older sister tells me she used to text her friends in class without taking her phone off her pocket. Imagine! IMAGINE typing a text on one of those old phone number pads, just by muscle memory and tact! It may not be the ideal user experience, but holy shit, it was possible! Try doing anything even close to blind typing on a modern smartphone.
Another point: when something goes unresponsive on a device with just a touchscreen, you experience a confusing and annoying experience as all you have feedback-wise is the screen and sometimes it freezes and you're swiping and tapping and just praying something happens.
When a computer with keys and buttons goes unresponsive you can do the three-fingered-salute and that usually gets it to do something, and because the keyboard is a physical object, it can't be hidden from you by a crashed OS.
Nowadays even kitchen appliances are dropping buttons and knobs. My parents' dishwasher is all touch-buttons, sometimes they brush against it while walking around the kitchen and lo and behold, their butt pauses the washing cycle. Something that wouldn't be an issue with a much cheaper set of regular-ass buttons.
To say nothing of cars and the horrid security issue that fusing a tablet to the dashboard and replacing every control with just that has proven to be.
- Customization!
Used to be, Windows 9x let you change every colour of your UI right from the built-in settings app and came with a dozen colorschemes built-in, and Windows XP came with three built-in themes and could with just some changing around (you replaced like ONE dll file, a single copypaste), support themes that totally changed the look of the OS. Nowadays you get "White" and "Black" and that's it.
And like, that's windows, a corporate-ass proprietary system for corporate jerks -- But even Linux -- Linux! the darling of nerds who like to change everything in their computers (like me!) has caught this illness -- And you'll see people defending this. Saying that having no theming support and only having users be able to change highlight colours if even that is the "right way" to do it.
On the note of customization -- In the back-then times, chat applications let you set fonts and colours to give your messages "your look", and your friends could do the same. -- Fuck! The application me and my mates used for playing RPGs by text back in the early 10s supported not just font colours, but also complete rich-text, and would let you set different colours for like, things said by a character vs. narration, resulting in an utterly beautiful formatted text.
Don't get me wrong, we use Telegram/Discord for that now and having a fully searchable archive of everything that we did and talked about is great and I wouldn't trade it for the world. But the most customization you get is -- Setting a profile picture. The most formatting you get is bold/italics.
Webforums would let you have an avatar, a user title under the avatar (that many forums let you customise!), and a signature. Nowadays with things like Lemmy you have to squint to see a person's username.
And like, it's not like there is something about the modern technologies unto themselves that prevents these bits of customisation: Computers are better at drawing shit on screen than ever, internet connectivity has only gotten faster, and we figured out 'sending some markup codes to make rich text' as a thing way back in the 80s. We lost all that simply because the people making the applications don't want to have it.
I feel like for every neat thing that new technology provides us, it takes three steps back for entirely human and not at all technological issues. read: capitalism
Heck, my older sister tells me she used to text her friends in class without taking her phone off her pocket. Imagine! IMAGINE typing a text on one of those old phone number pads, just by muscle memory and tact!
I got a car with a T9 input and I was pleasantly surprised at how good I still was at typing without looking
Touchscreen in cars are so bad for safety. Buttons mean you don't have to take your eyes off the road
Literally what I said.
I got my first dishwasher a few years ago and decided to go sort of all in and get a solid mid range one instead of the cheapest option because I was so excited to not have to do dishes.
The fucking touch buttons are the worst fucking god damn bullshit pieces of shit I've ever experienced. From the jump even when they worked 'properly' it just felt weird, but a couple years later and half the time the touch doesn't register. Sometimes there's the slightest but of crud or water on there and the thing goes crazy and becomes super sensitive all of a sudden, usually I spend 5 minutes loading the dish washer and 10 minutes trying to get it to register which button I pushed.
I want real physical buttons.
Also while I'm on the topic I was highly disappointed to learn that you still have to wash food and stuf off of dishes before you put them in. I don't know why I thought I could throw a plate with crusted lsagana on it the dishwasher but I did. I thought all dishwashers had some sort of garbage disposal thing built into it. They do not.
You shouldn't need to wash food off. Was that in the manual or something that someone told you? Just scrap off what you can. Too much gunk can clog the filter and also end up filling the base with water and tripping an E15 error.
30 mins of a German professor who all his life studied doing dishes and how dishwashers work. (in juicy German accent English).
The answer is soaking.
Obligatory Technology Connections video. Might help with your dishwasher woes: https://youtu.be/jHP942Livy0
Wait a dishwasher with buttons on the outside? I have only seen ones that had them on the inside. Physical and touch.
Odd.
All the ones I've seen have the interface on the outside. Like on the door. Usually at the top.
Well yes but once you close the door the buttons are not accessible anymore?
Nope. Still accessible on the front of the door. Dunno what to tell ya.
Okay. I have never seen such a dishwasher. Where I live they all have buttons on the top of the door but in such a way they are hidden after closing the dishwasher.
This is my Bosch Silence Plus 44-DBa dishwasher and the buttons are still visible.
This is my uncle's bosch silence plus (I am currently not home) but ours has buttons positioned exactly the same. So does any washing machine any of my relatives have.
I suspect that it's a matter of how forward the dishwasher is.
Maybe but those would only stick out if the dishwasher was sticking out at least 5cm. Might also be because everyone I know has those kinds you build into the counter and put a plate over so it's not obviously a dishwasher.
Uhh Linux is a kernel and on its own doesn't even support graphics much less customising them.
But if you wanna actually blame someone, we'll need to know which software youre talking about - could be OPPO's ColorOS for all we know.
That being said a big name in the Linux world is KDE, and they have one of the best theming engines Ive ever used. Everything QT follows the theme - so much so I didn't even realise how ugly some apps look on windows (like prism launcher not matching my file explorer?? Eww)
That being said I couldn't agree more with the first part, and in linux specifically I wish we had more 'basic display driver' like tools to handle emergency situations.
Uhh Linux is a kernel and on its own doesn’t even support graphics much less customising them.
I think we all realise that when someone says "Linux" in casual conversation on the internet, they mean existing well-known distros that include far more than just the naked Kernel, because no one who uses Linux is using just the Kernel, even headless servers aren't "just the kernel".
ANYWAY, I mostly am bitching about Gnome, but other DEs and WMs caught that bug as well to varying degrees. As have a dozen unconnected libre programs. Just for one example try finding a Matrix client that DOESN'T look like a shittier version of Discord (... And doesn't run on the Terminal)
There was even a collective of libre application developers that got together specifically to chastise people for using themes and to beg DEs to disable all theming by default because "muh app's branding and identity!"
Everything QT follows the theme - so much so I didn’t even realise how ugly some apps look on windows
Unless you're using Flatpaks. Then you have to spend an afternoon metaphorically beating your computer with a metaphorical hammer to get the apps (not just qt, gtk too) to look like the rest of the OS.
and in linux specifically I wish we had more ‘basic display driver’ like tools to handle emergency situations.
It's true. It would make the whole thing more resilient.
Of course, but by just saying Linux you're bound to be wrong somewhere - I'm just highlighting its so broad its an essentially useless definition (42% of all computers run it by the way). Gnome is pretty shit for customisability, so what's more customisable than having another option?
By looking at 'just Linux' you couldn't be more wrong for the core argument.
It also shifts the blame to many smaller devs like matrix which tbh they're mostly doing work for free so who's gonna complain they don't want to add extra complexity, just get in that source code if you really care. And in the age of such easy frontend engines an experienced could probably whip up their own in a week.
Also ive never had issues with qt/flatpaks, using prism launcher as an example, its seamlessly followed my color scheme (not saying bugs don't exist somewhere I'm not seeing, but there certainly is 'just works support to some degree).
I you're gonna be mad people don't like something, yikes open source isn't for you - git as a whole all but is designed to handle disagreements without breaking its stride.
"I use Linux as my operating system," I state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. "Actually", he says with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!' I don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "I use Alpine, a distro that doesn't include the GNU Coreutils, or any other GNU code. It's Linux, but it's not GNU+Linux." The smile quickly drops from the man's face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!" Coolly, I reply "If windows were compiled with GCC, would that make it GNU?" I interrupt his response with "-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even if you were correct, you won't be for long." With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I've womansplained him to death. Here is a quick text about GNU/Linux:
"I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!"
Understood? No? Here then:
"I installed Linux and the feeling of freedom and privacy hit me so hard that I immediately began committing crimes, knowing that the FBI could never track me. Piracy, sexual assault, trademark infringement, petty larceny, tax fraud, you name it. I also own several fully automatic firearms even though I live in the state of California, but it doesn't matter. Ever since I removed Windows 10 from my computer and replaced it with Arch Linux, and began using a PinePhone as my daily driver phone, police can't even stop me in traffic. Windows may have a lot of video games, but the benefits of Linux should not be understated."
First, I love this.
To be fair to the original poster though, he did not do the “GNU / Linux” thing. His point seems to be that “Linux” is not enough information to know much about the graphics stack and that seems fair since there is Wayland / Xorg and an array of DE, WM, and toolkit options.
Have you tried Chimera Linux? It does not even use GCC. It is even less “GNU” than Alpine but no less “Linux” and I do not mean just the kernel.
LiGNUx