didn't Adobe demo something like this?

Yes, Adobe Voco. They demoed[1] it once and then they never talked about it again.

[1]: https://youtu.be/I3l4XLZ59iw

I wouldn't be surprised that companies like Stripe arrive at a point where they want fewer investors controlling their company.

When you are Stripe big, what does YC do for you that you can't do with your own money printing machine? Aside from cash, there must be other advantages to having investors.

that line makes it sound they just killed off an expensive office somewhere + the people working there

If the fascination peaked in 1971 then those who were 20 then finally had the money to spend on cars in the 90s and 2000s.

Cars are a status symbol because most city people don't really need them.

but also on github as soon as you change the header your reference needs to be updated

this so much this. For some reason Microsoft does all these awesome things without winning the market (again)

Yet people still refuse to accept that sometimes, being first makes little difference, delivering something well polished and usable as well as having a track record of quality is worth a lot, and people make choices for reasons other than release timelines.

Being first only matters when you solve a problem people already have. Polishing doesn't matter it that case because you ease people's pain.

If you create a thing that people don't want currently polishing and marketing all that matters.

I have been dreaming of running my own heroku like interface on a DO droplet. Just for small sites, side projects and such.

With heroku you need to pay to keep things running, though sadly with DO you need to do a lot of sysadmin work to keep things running.

After failing with Heroku we migrated to using Dokku on DO. And yes it is more work to do it ourselves, I didn't want to do that but here we are :) It was not a lot of work, dokku is really nice, but it was/is some work. I was hoping for almost no sysadmin work but that didn't happen.

Caprover's probably the closest I've experienced, but there was still a bit to do.

What... no. Install Caprover or Flynn or any of a dozen systems that provide Heroku-like functionality.

Have you tried Dokku?

could you do that in the past though?

I've been using Linux since... oh, 1999 or 2000, and I've never seen a Linux GUI desktop I'd describe as snappy and responsive. The best I've ever achieved is "not incredibly clunky" and that only by ensuring the graphical interface basically did nothing but run the current application or two I had open. I've seen BeOS, QNX, and (Apple) iOS graphical operating systems/environments that were consistently, remarkably snappy and responsive relative to comparable peers. That's... pretty much the entire list. CDE on a wonderfully powerful Solaris machine is close to making the cut. Never used Amiga but I hear it was good.

Wanna talk about stability, not responsiveness and snappiness, you can add OSX/macOS to that list in addition to the above. It's not great but it's vastly better than anything else not on the above list. I've never, in 20 years, had a Linux GUI system that wasn't fairly crashy. "Oh it was just an app crash" or "oh X just quit but the OS is still up and you can restart it" or "oh some KDE daemon just shit the bed, restart X or do [arcane invocation] to put KDE back in a good state and it'll be fine" yeah OK well it's still a crash and I still lost stuff so it may as well have BSOD'd for all I care. Before I switched to macOS I was kinda blind to how bad it was because it was just normal. Modern Windows seems to be getting better on that front but I only use it for gaming so IDK.

[EDIT] to be fair, if I hadn't experienced BeOS and QNX (on shitty hardware, mind you, even by the standards of the time when I ran them) then super-minimalist Linux GUIs might be what I'd consider "snappy and responsive". Those were just in a whole other league, and really reset my understanding of what was possible (but rarely achieved)

Your point about Linux GUIs is quite true. I've found DEs like Gnome and KDE to be more resource intensive and klunky. Some 8 years back, there was only one distro (I forget the name) that used FluxBox that was blazingly responsive but lacked intuitiveness. (I've heard i3 is also very fast, but I have never used it as I don't like tiling WM).

Before corporates entered the Linux market (e.g., Red Hat and Canonical), Linux actually used to be faster than Windows. Today, I find Ubuntu (and most Ubuntu based distros) to be equal or sometimes worse than Windows on the same hardware. It just feels as "weighed down" as Windows.

And yeah, you are absolutely right about BeOS - it felt revolutionary to run two sessions of a movie player on a 200Mhz powered system with 16 MB ram!

I'd love to know what BeOS did to achieve those magical-feeling results, and why it hasn't been copied by everyone else. I reckon it's gotta have a lot to do with process scheduling and how UI events are dispatched, but if it's mostly those couple things, why isn't every modern OS doing what BeOS did? There must have been trade-offs I guess but from the user's perspective it seemed to be 100% an improvement over everything else—it's not like multimedia took a backseat to user interaction, or parts of the UI lagged so others could feel fast, everything felt smoother, quicker, and more responsive. On single core machines with 1/16 the memory it takes to start Slack, too!

I have to disagree. The comparison you make is unfair. I experienced QNX and Beos too. But what could you really do with it out of the box, compared to a full blown Linux-distro? The 'feeling' of snappiness is a matter of carefully choosen defaults IMO. Almost nobody does that anymore. So have this lowest common denominator, and mostly crappy tools to change them from within the GUI, or have to dive down in the cesspool of myriads of different config files in different formats and places, and in addition an explosion of complexity of subtle interactions of several subsystems.

Regarding the shitty hardware...

The f-ing fastest desktop experience i ever had was somewhere in the late days of KDE 3, across NetBSD, ArchLinux and Gentoo, on Pentium3@933Mhz with 512MB RAM, onboard I815 Intel graphics(edit: with the 'superspecial' 4MB VRAM Dimm-thingy), and some IBM Deathstars. With the same toned down look across all three systems, and toolkits, instead of the usual teletubbyfication.

What can i say? When your KDE 3 crashed you were holding it wrong, or it was somehow miscompiled, be it the optimization , or some libraries.

For me it was rock solid and lightingly fast, at least in my configurations.

The same can be seen nowadays with systemd and pulseaudio. They can be used if configured right. The question is if one wants to be hassled with that, if it isn't.

/endrant

shrug I've had Linux desktops across Debian, Mandrake, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and maybe some others. Oh I think Fedora in there somewhere. Gentoo and the first few years of Ubuntu (pre-Pulseaudio, basically, though it's not the only reason it suddenly got worse right around that time) were the only ones that felt like they weren't built on some kind of horrid Jenga tower always on the verge of toppling over, but in Gentoo's case that's only because I placed all the pieces myself. And it's never felt any "faster" or more responsive than Windows unless stripped down to bare bones on the UI side. And God did X used to crash a lot. At least Xorg's mostly better on that front, but then Windows doesn't BSOD a couple times a day anymore either.

[EDIT] oh as for BeOS, it ran a lot of the same junk I ran on Linux just fine. Better, really. It wasn't suitable for a server, but that didn't and doesn't really matter for one's desktop OS experience. Especially these days—can it run a VM (as one supposes any modern BeOS-alike could, because why not)? Cool, then I can run most any deployment target I like on it.

That reminds me of something wrt configuration files. What always rubbed me the wrong way, for instance in Debian were the commented out examples in config files inapplicable for the configuration of the running system. I remember this for the bootmanager, framebuffer and X when setting up a flicker free boot with the SAME video mode as early as possible, networking, and file systems.

Only Mandrake and PCLinuxOS got this right, they had nothing in /etc which wasn't applicable, because somehow generated programmatically by their installer, according to the choosen configuration.

That was CLEAN, there were no useless ##commented out things for stuff the system didn't even had installed.

Unfortunately their package repos at the time were 'clean' (meaning lacking the stuff i needed/wanted) too.

SUSE also tried this with YAST, but got it wrong often, and felt sluggish and bloated.

I can't really remember XFree86 and later Xorg crashing on me, except when pushing its boundaries wrt multi monitor and hotplugging, i guess that depends on the used hardware and the quality of their drivers?

You could with xfce. You still can with xfce though, it's just that most people use gnome or kde.

You know that actually KDE it's light like xfce?

Not in my experience. I tend to use older computers with crappy GPUs though.

you mention using macOS keybinds with linux. have you found a way to set everything to macOS keybindings? it's super frustrating to relearn every keyboard shortcut and terminals not supporting it fully

What I meant to say is that UI-wise I prefer macOS with macOS keybindings over anything I tried on Linux. That being said, Gnome is pretty good. I can't get used to KDE, but if I were new to this whole thing (or were coming from Windows), I'd try it, too. Tiling window manager is powerful, but not very necessary on macOS IMO.

With regards to keybindings, one thing you can do is get ctrl/meta/alt in the same order as your Mac. Personally, I've swapped ctrl and meta on my MBP while I am using VirtualBox (with Kali) because that way when I'm in the VM I get local consistency. I usually SSH into the Kali machine from the MBP anyway.

I've also studied interaction design and service design. In my experience the conflict between what a user/designer wants and what the business wants are so completely different it's just frustrating to work in projects like that.

Getting everyone onboard every time, when they are only looking for you to solve their problem the way they want it solved is just horrible.

You see this time and time again where products that were well received are turned into hellscapes to extract more money from users.

I would also say that I've had "conflict between what a designer wants and what the user/business wants", which is a pain.