Comment on Strategies and advice for transitioning out of Apple's ecosystem of devices?
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week agoThis is such bad advice. If you tell people that, people expect it too work like AirDrop, which it doesn’t.
LocalSend is great, but it is much more limited than AirDrop. As the name suggest, it only works if people are in the same network. If you’re in your home network, and both devices are yours, that’s probably fair enough, but that isn’t the point or (only) use case of AirDrop.
Also if you’re installing it on a Linux machine which happens to have a firewall enabled by default, you will have to open the correct ports for it to to work out even just see the other devices.
wltr@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
I won’t call it a bad advice, because I’ve been struggling without LocalDrop, as there’s no similar thing for Linux world. AirDrop is surely works better, you can send files just being on the street, connected to no WiFi. However, I had a number of issues with it for family usage, while LocalSend just works seamlessly between my Linux computers and iOS devices.
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
You misunderstood my point. LocalSend is great. It does exactly what it promises, and works well.
But you’re claiming “AirDrop = LocalSend” and that is not true and causes false expectations. People used to Apple think they can use it in all the same situations and for the same things, which they can’t. Just because you mostly used it in the game network doesn’t mean most people use AirDrop that eat, and I know quite a few that mostly use it while out and about, meeting new people etc.
The “Good advice” version is too tell them there is LocalSend, which can do quite a few things like AirDrop, but not all. Basically make it clear they need to be on the same network.
wltr@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Yeah, I shouldn’t have been lazy, and might write that ‘if you need to and files from one device to another, you may use LocalSend, which is similar to AirDrop, but does work only when you’re on the same network’ or something like that.