Hacker News Reader

Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

I think you might be looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. Apple's always had horrible show-stopping bugs, in every single OS X / macOS release[1], from when simple operations like updating iTunes or enabling the OS's Guest Mode might delete your home directories, to this latest failure.

I suspect one reason is that they like one-person teams so much. I like one-person projects too! But there is always pain when you have to hand such a project to a new person, because the old one quit, or died, or whatever.

Overzealous secrecy even when not warranted for any actual business-relevant reason also probably inhibits software quality. As does change for change's sake.

[1] EDIT: except maybe Mac OS X 10.6? Does anybody remember any critical bugs in that one? I think that might be the unicorn.

View on HN

except maybe Mac OS X 10.6

Snow Leopard. What a wonderful high-point in Desktop OSes that was. Seriously considering rolling back one or two of my old computers, even just to have a living breathing reference-point.

It too had issues, this is the rose colored windows 7/xp/2000 glasses release for mac fans.

All software has issues. Snow Leopard, and Mountain Lion were high points absolutely.

> Seriously considering rolling back

I've just gone and ordered it [0], along with an external optical drive, cause internal drive my 2008 macbook is kaput.

[0] https://www.apple.com/ie/shop/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-...

Snow Leopard was so good it was like exciting. I couldn't wait to get my hands on the final release and installing it felt more akin to getting a new video game.

You evangelized it to friends back then even. Like "Dude you have to get this"

Snow Leopard was a glorious dream of stability and reliability. I miss it.

> EDIT: except maybe Mac OS X 10.6? Does anybody remember any critical bugs in that one? I think that might be the unicorn.

Google "10.6.0 font problems", this caused a major headache at my work

Also caused major issues for the rare users who had antivirus software installed.

Are Windows or Linux QA any better, by comparison?

I've been getting very disillusioned with macOS, but the workflow pain on the other platforms has been enough to keep me coming back to macOS, thus far.

Working on a Linux machine would be the closest thing to perfection (in terms of workflow), but there are so many workarounds needed, and the selection of apps just isn't there.

Operating systems suck. I'm obviously annoyed, as I've just run into lots of issues lately.

Agreed. I ran NeXTStep back in the day and Solaris. Getting OS X was amazing. Now it can be a bit frustrating, however it is still way better then Windows10 (takes forever to disable all the crapware, spying stuff and update). I looked at Linux and it works and the system itself it stable, but the desktop is not - many issues on various flavors of desktop crash-e-ness. Oh, well.

I think you might be looking at the past through rose-colored glasses.

Indeed, we tend to forget the problems. I tend to have the same feeling (10.5 and 10.6 were rock-solid), but with a little digging I found this comment from 2008-me on another website:

And a lot doesn't. My printer (a Laserjet 5L, connected through a parallel to USB converter) works without a hassle on GNU/Linux. It worked terrible on Leopard until 10.5.2, after a certain number of pages, it just refused to print anything but empty or mangled pages.

Similarly, the wireless support is quite bad in Leopard. E.g. I worked for two months on the Eduroam wireless network full-time. On a MacBook plus Leopard, the connection was constantly dropped, and it usually took ten minutes to authenticate succesfully. A friend, who has an Ubuntu laptop OTOH, had no problems connecting at all.

[snip Linux rant, irrelevant]

>except maybe Mac OS X 10.6? Does anybody remember any critical bugs in that one? I think that might be the unicorn.

That was my first version of OS X & it was a fantastic experience. Played around with XCode, Homebrew, and all sorts of fun technical stuff. Also had it booting on a laptop with a RAID1 setup. Never had an issue with it.

Before that was OS 9. I only ever used it to play Bugdom & can't remember any bugs. Was only 10 when I was introduced to it.

Before that was OS 8. I hardly remember what I ever accomplished with it. Was only about 6 when it was released.

10.6.8 was the pinnacle of Mac's OS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com