Arq is such a wonderful piece of software. If you go this route, I'd say to go for Amazon Cloud Drive as Arq's datastore--it's $59/year for unlimited data.
Steve also told us no one wanted 5-inch(!) "Hummer" phones. To test our faith, he also said 7-inch tablets were too small and would require users to file down their fingers to use them.
>The difference is that you passively wipe the phone screen inside your pockets or its sleeve
This is some of the worst grasping at straws I've ever seen on HN. Just admit that you are wrong here, you're being completely ridiculous. Cleaning a laptop screen isn't a big deal, and in fact you should be regularly cleaning any Macbook Pro retina display if you care about it's longevity. Oils from the keyboard are regularly transferred to the screen every time you close your macbook, and MBP retina screens are susceptible to staining when the anti-reflective coating wears off.
> Oils from the keyboard are regularly transferred to the screen every time you close your macbook
This is false. If the keyboard continuously touches the screen, it will get damaged eventually. If this happens to your MBP all the time, you should think about handling your MBP differently and protect the lid from outside pressure.
> and MBP retina screens are susceptible to staining when the anti-reflective coating wears off.
So you should touch and clean it even more? Who is the ridiculous one here?
Did you even use a touch screen laptop that does not fold in a 180° angle? I did and it sucks. It really, really sucks. Your arm gets tired after 30 minutes, the display will look like grease city in typical fluorescent office light, and due to the interface changes to make buttons clickable with your fingers, you lose like 50% of your screen space.
Wow, what a dilemma! Which one should I go for: full-bore telemetry including memory contents and keyboard events with RCE capabilities or an Amazon button that just sits there until I click it? Truly, this is like Sophie's Choice /s
I was using (explicitly marked) sarcasm to highlight the false equivalence in parent's post. Obviously the choices of OS is not limited to Windows vs. Unity on Ubuntu
Right, but your response to scummy practices was "which is why I use [other thing with scummy practices]."
I'm sure you can justify why a button isn't as bad as spyware to yourself, but to anyone who puts up with neither, the parent comment makes sense without needing to 'equate' the two. They're both not things you'd put up with; and the 'sophie's choice' (yes, I saw the tag) joke would instead just be a response for a different platform.
> Right, but your response to scummy practices was "which is why I use [other thing with scummy practices]."
This is comparing apples to oranges though: on one side we have a Unity lens that can be turned off and is restricted to searches, and on the other you have what I can only describe as a turnkey APT (RAT,RCE, process spy, device spy, keylogger, memory scraper) that cannot be switched off - how hard do you think it would be for a nation-state to 'enrich' and intercept/redirect this telemetry?
You lose a great deal of detail by intentionally avoiding the nuance of the situation: murder by starvation or Nitrogen asphyxiation is still death, but there is value in discussing the cruelty of persons who would choose one method over the other to kill, especially if one of them lets you opt-out.
Additionally, Ubuntu and Unity (host of the Amazon button) are not equivalent in any case. I use Ubuntu with KDE, others with XFCE or Gnome. So using Ubuntu in no way equates with putting up with scummy practices.
The Amazon integration in the search box isn't even a thing anymore as of 16.04 (i.e. it's now opt-in, rather than opt-out).
The only thing left from the Amazon deal is that they have a referral link on the panel by default. Takes exactly two clicks to get rid of and does not do any form of telemetry.
Xubuntu (with xfce instead of Unity) doesn't have that kind of thing. After you've moved panel #0 to the bottom, it's much closer to Window's UI as well.
He's talking about the Amazon button, not the search box integration. They do still have a referral link glued to the panel by default. But yeah, that's such a non-issue, that I don't understand either why you'd even bring it up, unless you're really trying hard to find something to cling on.
RIP pud