Meanwhile, my OSX work laptop needs to be restarted multiple times a week, or the wifi gets temperamental and programs somehow start to accumulate and eat all the available CPU and RAM, it restarts itself periodically with zero warning (thank goodness for the "open everything up exactly how it was" feature, pretty much necessary at this point, compare that with Windows, where I'm glad for the once a month forced restart because otherwise I'd never close out of way too much software), and has had several kernel panics just this year, which are caused by OSX itself according to the dump. It regularly struggles to do basic things, like dismiss the screensaver on wakeup. It truly is a finicky and pathetic system to me, and the only reason I'm okay with using it is that it has SLIGHTLY better support for POSIX than Windows 7, and because I'm required by my work to use it.
This is something you will not have to even think about on a healthy mac, as long as the hardware is not damaged in some way.
> Meanwhile, my OSX work laptop needs to be restarted multiple times a week, or the wifi gets temperamental and programs somehow start to accumulate and eat all the available CPU and RAM, it restarts itself periodically with zero warning (...) , and has had several kernel panics just this year, which are caused by OSX itself according to the dump.
Your mac has hardware problems -- ask for a new one, if possible.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257
Runs mostly ok now, though still a pretty crap machine in my view (keyboard, 4 hours battery life (less if you do any actual work), terrible WiFi (2.4 GHz) when any dongle is plugged in (and with 2 ports, one of which is for charging, you need dongles), etc.).
(Although I admit I've primarily used a Mac the past couple years, so maybe Window 10 has degraded recently.)
My latest fun issue is that my gaming desktop won't install OS updates. It knows there are updates available, but when I tell it to install, the progress bar never progresses. I've tried restarting multiple times, but it makes no difference. I thought maybe I just needed to let it run for a while. It's been running for 3 days now, and the progress bar still hasn't moved.
I guess I'm probably going to have to either reformat the machine, or decide that I don't want OS updates any longer.