And judging from the everpresent "just use " in the relevent forums, it's not something others don't have.
On the other hand, Linux on the desktop never fails to dissapoint me in one way or another because of the need of tinkering, half-sketched apps for many things I want to do (especially anything multimedia and/or document related), driver issues to get things working (sound, compositor, 3D, bluetooth, sleep, etc), and so on. What would those be (talking about something major, not "I can't get my favorite window manager to replace the macOS window management" - the non-tinkering-friendliness is part of the allure to me and from what I read others too)? I've used Linux for close to 20+ years, and Unices more, and never had to jump through any major hoops to make macOS behave. Linux may still have issues, but they're not worse than the hoops you have to jump through to make today's macOS behave. But it's been fifteen years, and all jokes aside, the "year of the Linux desktop" for developers was probably around 2012.
This is what initially got developers to move to Mac. > (c) was relevant in 2006, when the novelty of OS X was that it was a UNIX that you could actually use as a daily driver. The most painful aspect of working with LaTeX was I'd struggle with one buggy package recommended by a tutorial for ages, then search for "why am I getting this error" and find the answer was, "oh, yeah, that's horribly broken, use this one instead." Python's a victim of its own success as the signal to noise ratio in online tutorials is very low worse, the good management tools are relatively new.Įven for smaller audiences, obsolescence is a big problem. Seemingly contradictory, mutual exclusive. > Noob me found all sorts of howtos and getting started guides. Maybe the Python site could do with an official "managing Python for end-users."
Looking at the amount of polish on the Python docs and the fact that people still don't know how to install Python, it gives you a sense of how hard explaining things is.
Probably all the programming toolchains are this hard to a newbie! But it was a humbling experience after 34 years of programming, not being able to load a piece of sample code in a Sunday afternoon.įollowing Python and Java is always informative because, between them, they manage to make almost every mistake imaginable, despite having very smart people putting careful thought into the design.
More googling revealed instructions with complex CFLAGS environment setups to fix it, which didn't - and at that point it was very far from the supposed convenience of scripting languages anyway.
As a complete newbie to the Python ecosystem, I googled for instructions and found various environment managers, which then failed possibly because something is incompatible with Big Sur. Eventually some version of JupyterLab was installed somewhere, but it couldn't find any dependencies for the notebook. There was initially some kind of Python version conflict on my Mac. "It's probably as easy as brew install pip and then use that to load the other dependencies," I assumed. Last weekend I came across an interesting Jupiter notebook and figured I'd give it a try on my work laptop.