I'd wait until they stabilize it a bit before upgrading. Or just don't upgrade.
Many asked for tabs in every app, shared clipboard, more voice control, improved Photos app and better iTunes, picture in picture, and more full featured Messages app. Plus few would ask Apple to take back the ability to save space (up to tens of GB) through iCloud/Desktop integration and more.
In the meantime, there's also a new filesystem on the way, already in early public developer versions.
>and there's a ton of nonsense none of us will ever use, as the Mac platform gets increasingly complex
Like? I can't possible thing anything that got made more complex, save for a couple of trivial things (with an equal amount of other stuff or more becoming easier).
>moves away from Unix compatability
In what way it had moved one iota from Unix compatibility?
>and doesn't do anything useful with this additional complexity
What complexity? What exactly did you find more complex compared to 10.10, or 10.7 or 10.5 or whatever?
Besides something like "sandboxed apps make it difficult to piss all over the filesystem, like old apps could".
UI complexity: Apple keeps moving the goalposts on its UI focus, and it shows: The new interface is WAAY more complex.
EC did some interesting unix things, which broke some stuff IIRC.
The new FS will be nice, but it's not there now.
What would be a concrete example?
(And is that example major and/or indicative of lots of changes towards difficulty, or just a random example, among other things that got easier and some that got harder?)
>EC did some interesting unix things, which broke some stuff IIRC.
Well, even Linux might break some UNIX stuff ocassionally (systemd anyone?). But is there anything specific and important in EC or Sierra regarding that?
>The new FS will be nice, but it's not there now.
A developer version is included with Sierra, but yes, it's no there fully formed and default.
Colour me skeptical
Then, let's check all those media pundits lamenting for the lack of something like Cortana on the Mac...
It seems to only break apps.
* Notifications
* Air Drop
* Face Time
* Native Full Screen apps
* Multi-touch gestures (mostly use with multi-desktop and fullscreen apps)
* Mac App Store (I like it better for OS updates)
* Recovery Partition
* App Resume
* Terminal improvements (I stopped using iTerm)
* Air Play mirroring
* Notes (and syncing with phone)
* Compressed memory
* Full Disk encryption
* Improved multi-monitor support
* Spotlight improvements
* updating while asleep
* hi dpi monitor support- Notifications : Had Growl, nothing new.
- Air drop : Perhaps but personally in no need.
- Native fullscreen : This is crazy. I turn iTunes fullscreen on secondary display and somehow it blacks out the primary screen for no good reason. Never using this feature.
- Multi touch gesture : Customizability is a joke. BetterTouchTools is what is keeping my sanity by applying custom trackpad gestures.
- Mac app store : Apparently this is big.
- Recovery partition : One of the great invention was network recovery but not like I use it often at all.
- Terminal : It was ok back then. Perhaps better if you say so. I do use SSH all the time. Never needed third party terminal.
- Air play mirroring : Don't have experience.
- Notes : Calendars, notes, reminders, stickies... What's coming next for note taking app? It's just cluttering my app folder.
- Compressed memory : Sorry I don't know what this is. Does this help you daily?
- Full disk encryption : Important feature.
- Multi monitor support : It was fine back then. As said above, part of it is a joke now.
- Spotlight : Maybe. I keep my files and mails all tidy, so I don't need a search helper.
I mean, Leopard brought Time Machine, grid view folder display from dock, quick look just to remember from top of my head which are all vastly useful and Snow leopard perfected it by making it lighter than previous OS. And today they boast they added like 100 new stuff which almost doesn't matter and I doubt things ever get lighter than previous OS these days.
Ever since they thought merging iOS feature into OSX was a good idea, it keeps adding useless pieces and they call it the best release ever.
Back then I thought Windows had tons of crapware on newly bought machine but funnily lately OSX is almost a victim of that from the vendor itself...
I love using OSX because of high quality third party apps. And in my opinion frankly Windows is still far worse.
And for OSX naming... I thought Apple is an international company. Tiger, Leopard etc was easy to read and understand as a word for us foreigners and now what? El capitan? I must think their vision is just getting narrower naming a OS to some local name they thought was cool.
a few sporadic replies:
* Notifications: very few things apps supported growl and I like the integrated implementation better. Growl also started charging money, which is fine, but yet another thing to juggle licensing and that friction drove me away.
* multi-monitor: People complained about multi-monitor handling in OSX /a lot/ until the last few years. I haven't heard of any problems recently (maybe I've missed it). I don't deal with it that much, but I still have problems with Windows and Linux...dialog boxes popping up straddling two windows, for example.
* Native fullscreen: Fullscreen API was added in 10.7, then changed in 10.8 and again in 10.9. It sounds like because of a limitation at the time of the initial implementation it was integrated with Spaces which blanked out the second monitor. If I remember, there was an option to have each screen use separate "Spaces" to avoid this and in recent version it works out of the box. I think some apps like VLC or iTerm still use their own fullscreen implementation--but now all apps can be fullscreened without developer intervention. I just pointed it out because as it exists today, it's a new feature like to use.
* Compressed memory: compresses RAM when it can. Improves performance on lower-end hardware. I don't know about this specifically, but I've seen this kind of thing actually increase performance where i/o is more of a bottleneck than compressing.
* Spotlight: I rarely use it for file search (that in itself hasn't changed since SL), but I use it all the time as an app launcher and calculator.
The reason your new applications require new versions of the OS is because the frameworks got better. If new versions of the OS were just adding new applications you don't use, then people would still write their applications with the older, better APIs.
At least in El capitan, I can no longer even touch any of system files even with root privilege. And then I could put shortcuts of the only apps I use in a separate folder but they add arrow badge at the bottom corner for each icons which is visually annoying, and I try to find out how to remove it, searching reveals I could rename the image file for that arrow but turns out I can't touch system files. No, I don't want to turn off that security feature just for this.
Next iOS feature that needs merged into macOS is, hide first party apps.
It's not just foreigners. Even us on the opposite side of the United States have no idea what El Capitan or Maverick is or means.
I was recalling the other day that I switched from Windows to Mac as my primary operating system because Windows kept popping up notifications for things I didn't need to see. Now OS X is doing the same thing with all the automatic update notifications that need user input to dismiss.
I'd also point out how frustrating it is that Linux laptops tend to be on the cheap side (on par with a 13" Air), or generally massive, plastic, and loud.
I haven't found the good combination and bought a new MBP and still happy with it.
I've used UNIX for ages, started on Sun OS (pre-Solaris), HP-UX, have used several early Linux distros, RedHat, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake (!), FreeBSD for a year or so, and now I use Ubuntu for personal stuff and Centos professionally.
I wouldn't use a Linux loaded laptop.
What OS X has?
Great hardware (Linus himself used to praise the Air for example -- which he used as a personal machine until 2014, and complained why no other company could make something like that -- he now uses a hi-end Chromebook).
No messing to get it to sleep, work with external monitors, including dual 4K, import camera photos and videos, work with new RAW formats, external peripherals etc. And by no messing I mean "an order of magnitude less messing that those things take in Linux".
Certified UNIX with full terminal access, bash, classic userland, etc.
Several package managers (brew, macports etc) to get 99% of anything one will need in Linux. And make && make install etc usually just works too, if one is so inclined.
Runs Linux on a VM just fine -- why would a developer pollute their OS with development environment stuff like installing DBs, compilers etc directly? And if you don't run it directly, then OS X is as good as Linux to host your developing VMs -- or SSH to some remote host.
A full, well thought out UI, even if it's not perfect. Even from 10.1 to 10.12, it never has the sudden "let's change everything and break everybody just because we can" turns that Gnome and KDE have had (I've used KDE but stopped with the 3 to 4 transition -- now I just run bare Linux or when I need a UI Linux whatever comes with Ubuntu).
Ability to run basic proprietary apps: Adobe Creative Suite, MS Office, etc. Lots of developers need those too, and I, for one, sure do for my sideprojects.
>These yearly updates seem to break everyone's workflow for a while.
No, it's just the vocal minority. Have used OS X since 2003, using it for programming (JS, Python, Java, Go, PHP, some C), video editing and music (various DAWs), and never had my workflow break, and I usually jump at a new OS the first day it comes out. The worst case was having to wait 1 month for Cubase 8.5 to support 10.11 -- but that's the fault of Steinberg for milking their customers, as other DAWs I have worked just fine, or had updates within the week or so.
Linux changes break just as many workflows (percentage wise) but there are so fewer (1/10 or so) Linux desktop users and even they so fragmented (different DEs, desktops, WMs, etc) that their laments are not really heard. Of course most major tech outlets hardly ever publish Linux related stuff in the first place, in contrast with Apple stuff that helps get eyeballs...
But Thunderbolt is not "proprietary" is an open standard adopted by the industry at large, including PC makers.
Also the "expensive Apple hardware (outdated $1000 monitors only" is not really apt. It's not that running dual monitors necessitates using old Cinema Displays. It's just that Cinema Display's are old, and Apple hasn't made any new monitors for a few years. But no need to buy/use Apple monitors for that -- and it would be foolish to buy them when there are 4K ones around by Dell etc. Apple even keeps a page with supported and tested third party 4K monitors.
Recently, I upgraded to a single 4K monitor and that did require some fiddling (using switchResX) but it still works nicely.
But it's certainly not unusable. It's not a good thing, by any stretch, it's a pretty face over a horrific monstrosity, but it's usable.
But the fight between the systemd/non-systemd camps, especially in the form of docker/rkt, is a real pain for both sides.
Because it's 2016? What about multimedia? Or an IDE? Or my proprietary apps like Photoshop and Premiere?
Frankly, I find the experience of stumpwm to be far more modern and futuristic than that of macOS or Windows. They both seem very 1980s and dated in their concepts.
> What about multimedia? Or an IDE? Or my proprietary apps like Photoshop and Premiere?
Ummm, Debian plays music, videos and games just fine. Firefox plays music, videos and games just fine.
emacs is my IDE. I could also use Eclipse, IntelliJ or whatever if I enjoyed pain and suffering.
I've no desire to use Photoshop or Premiere, but if I did I'm sure I could run Wine.
Emacs works better than any IDE.
Your browser is usually good enough for multimedia unless you're talking about creating it.
In the immortal words of Jeffrey Lebowski: Well, that's like, your opinion, man. Good IDEs like IntelliJ and VS have so much better integration for given languages that only result in ad-hoc, ho-hum solutions in Emacs (if one can suffer the millions of key bindings).
>Your browser is usually good enough for multimedia unless you're talking about creating it.
Well, if multimedia we mean "watching web video" or some flash pages. The browser can't even put up with viewing RAW images or playing FLAC files...
But true, I'm talking about creating (which doesn't mean anything at the Michael Bay level -- even something as simple as family vacation video or high school project).
Of course the browser can't play back all multimedia. With its pedigree, I'm sure FLAC was running Linux before it was running on Linux or Windows. I haven't heard of much of an issue with RAW files in Linux either. VLC works better more reliably than anything proprietary for macOS or Windows.
Creating videos is something that seemed "the thing to do" in the early 2000's. IMHO, Apple did have the best consumer tools back then. But I haven't really hear of much use in the last 10 years. Linux might have decent tools? I wouldn't know.
Thanks for the clarification of what you meant by multimedia. VLC, GIMP, Openshot, or an app run through Wine can handle all the things you described.
Yes, but IDEs being more integrated with certain languages (e.g. IntelliJ and Java, VS and C#) instead of ad-hoc collection of scripts for a language that Emacs offers (except perhaps for Lisps) is a fact.
Besides, does your IDE read email, come with an integrated tetris package, and also contain one of the finest tools for outlining, planning, todo lists, writing and publishing, literate programming in any language ever devised (if it wasn't obvious, yes, I'm talking about org-mode)? No? Well then, I'll stick with emacs for now. :-D
Only most of the work we do while programming is not text editing -- we're not courtroom clerks or secretaries -- it's reading code, with a modicum of writing (less than 300-500 lines per day).
For this, a "great text editing mode" is almost of no use, compared to great language-related facilities for code navigation, AST-based autocomplete, intelligent refactoring, integrated debugger and build system, etc etc.
>Besides, does your IDE read email, come with an integrated tetris package
Thankfully, no.
>great language-related facilities for code navigation
ectags, Semantic, and various other extensions for various languages
>AST-based autocomplete
Various autocompleters, including Autocomplete (not AST-based, AFAICT), company mode (which is, I think).
>intelligent refactoring
CEDET, Semantic Refactor, and various modes for various languages, provide a good bit of this (although it's not up to Java IDE standards).
>integrated debugger and build system
Check, check, and check. We've got GDB integration, as well as GUD, which can run DBX, SDB, XDB, the perl debugger, PDB, and JDB. integration with make, or any other command-line build tool you want with M-x compile.
So yeah, refactoring aside, we're actually pretty well off.
And you still don't have org-mode.