I think it all comes down to curiosity, and I dare think that that's one of the main reasons why someone will be using Arch instead of the plethora of other distros.
Now, granted, I don't usually ask an LLM for help whenever I have an issue, so I may be missing something, but to me, the workflow is "I have an issue. What do I do?", and you get an answer: "do this". Maybe if you just want stuff to work well enough out of the box while minimizing time doing research, you'll just pick something other than Arch in the first place and be on your merry way.
For me, typically, I just want to fix an annoyance rather than a showstopping problem. And, for that, the Arch Wiki has a tremendous value. I'll look up the subject, and then go read the related pages. This will more often than not open my eyes to different possibilities I hadn't thought about, sometimes even for unrelated things.
As an example, I was looking something up about my mouse the other day and ended up reading about thermal management on my new-to-me ThinkPad (never had one before).
It's by and large the slowest, jankiest, laggiest software I use regularly. And I say that as someone who swears Adobe has added a bunch of sleeps in Lightroom.
On basic chat: it will sometimes scroll up when I get a new message, while I'm actively participating in that chat, so I need to scroll back down to read the new messages. Occasionally it flickers, for bonus points. It will not mark the chat as read if I'm on it without clicking on a different chat and coming back. It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy. Don't even get me started on its handling of copy/paste. I'm also pretty sure there's some joke I just don't get around the search function.
For calls: it refuses to pick the correct microphone, and will sometimes mute it completely somehow (I lose the feedback in the headphones – I have a jabra headset that does this). This will even happen when I hang up a call and start another one right away. Other times it works well. My default mic is always my wired, always connected, headset mic. I don't use BT headsets that switch from music to communications or whatever depending on what I do, which could confuse the available / selected mics.
It drains my laptop's and iphone's battery like no tomorrow, even if I turn off video and only do voice chat, even if nobody has the camera on or shares a screen. Also, on Windows, for some reason it doesn't use the native notifications, but implements its own crappy ones – but this isn't that big of an issue, since I mostly disable them anyway.
All this is happening on both the "heavy" (heh) Windows client, and on chrome on Linux, both running on a fairly beefy new PC with gobs of RAM. Fun fact: the experience was exactly the same on my 5-year-old laptop with a U-series Intel CPU, so I don't think it's a resources problem.
Also if you are using language with more than 24 letters - like you know, most of the world... You can't do {left alt}+n in teams while {right alt}+n works perfectly fine, and I haven't found a way to disable this awful behavior.
Like mate - I'm on Mac, I use CMD+n for new tabs, not windows-like shortcuts...
If you are having perf issues in calls, see if you can buy the hevc codec from the Microsoft store. Windows does not come with it by default, and supposedly teams needs this to offload video processing to the gpu. I think it made a difference to me. But who knows.
I have that installed for watching Prime Video and stuff while away with only my work laptop. Watching Prime Video in its app or YouTube in the browser doesn't heat the laptop (fan stays quiet), but I've never done this on battery, so I don't know how those fare on that front.
Now, I don't have performance issues per se, by which I mean that I don't have video or voice skipping or whatever. The interface lags, but it does that all the time, even without a call happening. If I only looked at the PC during a call, I'd think everything was fine. But I notice the fan ramping up and the battery draining if I'm unplugged. And this happens even when there is absolutely no video whatsoever on the call. I'm not even sure that not having video on makes that much of a difference battery- and heat-wise. Switching the Windows power profile to battery saver doesn't seem to affect Teams in any noticeable way, nor does it help with battery drain.
> Use Teams in Firefox with ublock for battery issues, somehow it consumes much less.
I've tried it multiple times in Firefox, since it's the browser I normally use for everything else, and it was somehow even wonkier than in Chromium. I didn't stick with it long enough to notice the difference in battery use, especially since I don't often run the laptop unplugged.
> That's because the typed letters appear with a large (often even ~1 s) delay. Close your eyes while typing and you'll be back on you track.
I do notice the delay, but I swear they sometimes come out in the wrong order. The most common occurrence is it registering the enter key and sending the message before the last 2-3 letters. Sometimes it doesn't register the enter at all and the message just sits there, while I wait for a reply, which obviously never comes.
I'm not saying I'm some kind of god of dactylography, I do make mistakes, but, somehow, I only have issues of this magnitude and frequency in Teams...
I have this problem with Microsoft software in general lately. Last time I had the Office suite installed on a Mac, it was constantly popping up focus-stealing (literally and figuratively) notifications that it was updating PowerPoint or whatever, even when I didn’t have any Microsoft apps open.
I really try to stick to the web-based Office suite and Apple Pages/Numbers/etc. to avoid dealing with this.
What do you mean lately? I remember Office apps always looking and behaving a bit off ever since, like, Office 2000. For some reason, they seem to have never quite embraced the design language of the current Windows version, even though they're in-house apps.
Now, the latest version of whatever the suite is called this second is a web page in some weird browser window, which has some rather funny failure modes [0]. What makes this all the more ridiculous is that running them in actual full-blown browsers is a better experience.
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[0] I'm specifically thinking of New Outlook, which, sometimes, kinda hangs, but not completely. It will fail to either fetch new mail or update the view with the new mails (can't tell which it is), but the view isn't actually broken! You can click around, select different mails and it will show the contents, move around folders—everything looks fine! Except no new mail comes in. And then, you want to, say, maximize or minimize the window. But you can't! The window controls don't react at all to the mouse! You obviously need to "end task" and restart that crap to get it working again.
> it's that speakers don't require any tuning to match a person's specific physiology
But they do interact with the environment. Having walls which reflect the sound can mess with the sound. Changing speakers won't help. Changing headphones can help.
I also find that exercise has an influence on my cravings and on what I eat generally. It basically makes it much easier to avoid stuffing my face with random calorie laden foods.
I honestly don't know if there is a standardized way to pass the information or if it depends on the brand. I remember in the earlier version of gnome I had on my lenovo yoga the visual keyboard would popup on most text box but not on firefox which obliged me tolo use Gnome Web / epiphany when in tablet mode but they sorted it out later. I think there wasn't a tablet mode per se but I had used gnome tweak or an extension to have the accesibility options easy to access and enable the visual keyboard but it may have been mpre automatic later. I am saying all this out of memory because that computer died 2 years ago and I didn't use the tablet mode enough to replace it with similar one.
Is firefox actually fully integrated with gnome/gtk, or does it rely on some form of adaptor?
I've recently installed kde on one of my laptops (I usually use i3) and firefox is pretty wonky there. For example, with the OOB configuration, if I double click the top border of a window, it will maximize vertically. Firefox seems to ignore that. It does fully maximize if I double click the title bar, though.
Right and middle clicking the maximize button maximize horizontally and vertically with KWin and that does work with Firefox. Hard to say which part is to blame with i3 + Firefox. But it's not that Firefix needs Gnome.
While I agree with your point about understanding, I think there's also an issue of self-image. "What? Me? Influenced by some ad? Get outta here! I make my own decisions!"
I'm firmly in the camp of "I'm not influenced by ads (or so I think)" / "not convinced that ads are actually a net positive". But even so, I don't fully agree with your take.
I think that it's very possible to think we aren't influenced, yet still be. My reasoning is that basically no one admits to being influenced. Yet you can definitely see the effects of ads on people: whenever there's a strong campaign for something, little after you'll see everyone buying it. Maybe they just try to "follow trends" or whatever, but that's just a form of advertising, isn't it? I only very rarely watch TV and have ad blockers everywhere, yet I can still detect when all of a sudden everybody has the same bag or same jacket or whatever. My bags last years and years. I doubt it's simply a coincidence and they all needed new bags right at the same time.
> Ads are extremely overblown as a threat to society; you only need to look as far as eye-tracking studies of web browsers and the prevalence of ad blockers to see pretty good proof that people do just ignore them most of the time.
I think that many people don't know about ad-blockers and try to ignore the ads while reading a website or scrolling some app. But that doesn't imply they aren't influenced. In my case, I'm fairly convinced that I'm not influenced by my instagram's feed's ads, since they try to sell me pregnant women's garments, of which I have 0 use as a single, childless male. But there can be other factors of which I don't have conscience, like seeing people use the same brand camera or whatever. Call it advertising-by-proxy.
However, take a look at people's screens when taking the metro or whatever. Many do watch the ads instead of just scrolling past. This is what I actually have a hard time understanding: people would spend a comparable amount of time on what looks like ads and what looks like their friends' stuff, as if it was the same thing. Which, granted, isn't a very long time. In my case, I only follow photographers and would spend a fair amount of time on people's pictures but scroll right through anything that looks like an ad (text or video of any kind).
What's wrong with those? I don't have a single screen which does 120 Hz + HDR, but I'm typing this on a 120 Hz laptop, with variable refresh rate, at 125% scaling, and everything works great with Plasma (haven't tried anything else). I also have an external HDR screen, but it only does 60 Hz. It works great, too, doing HDR on it but not on the laptop screen (running at the same time, of course). They also run at different scaling (125% and 100%).
Now I don't know how to confirm that VRR is actually doing anything, but I can tell there's a difference between setting the monitor to 60 and to 120 Hz. HDR on the other screen also produces a clear difference.
This is all running from integrated intel graphics, maybe with other GPUs it's more of a crapshoot, no idea.
I admit I love the mbp hardware, but I can't stand macos anymore. So when my work computer was up for replacement, I didn't think twice and went with a PC, the latest thinkpad p14s. Everything works out of the box on Linux.
Is it as nice as a mac? No, especially the plastic case doesn't feel as nice under the hands as a mac's aluminum, the touchpad is quite good but worse than a mac's, and there are some gaps around the display hinge. But the display itself is quite nice (similar resolution, oled, although not as bright as a mac's), it's silent and it's plenty fast for what I do. I didn't pay for it, so I don't directly care about this point in this situation, but it also cost around half of what an equivalent mbp would have cost.
I also haven't tried the battery life yet, but it should hold at least as well as my 5-yo hp elitebook, which still held for around 5 hours last year. I basically never use it for more than an hour unplugged, so battery life is low on my priorities.
Now, granted, I don't usually ask an LLM for help whenever I have an issue, so I may be missing something, but to me, the workflow is "I have an issue. What do I do?", and you get an answer: "do this". Maybe if you just want stuff to work well enough out of the box while minimizing time doing research, you'll just pick something other than Arch in the first place and be on your merry way.
For me, typically, I just want to fix an annoyance rather than a showstopping problem. And, for that, the Arch Wiki has a tremendous value. I'll look up the subject, and then go read the related pages. This will more often than not open my eyes to different possibilities I hadn't thought about, sometimes even for unrelated things.
As an example, I was looking something up about my mouse the other day and ended up reading about thermal management on my new-to-me ThinkPad (never had one before).
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