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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

So. The most important feature of this new release "designed for pros" that gets top placement on the announcement page is ... dark mode. The second is stacks. The third is the ports of iOS apps (including the long overdue Home).

I find it very hard to be excited about a yet another "major" release that doesn't even qualify as a minor version bump.

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I’ve been wishing for dark mode for all 6 years I’ve had my MacBook Pro, so I’m pretty happy with that alone. I also have next to no qualms with OS X in its current state so I’m pretty easy to please. I will say that the hardware quality on the other hand has taken a nosedive lately.

It looks like dark mode is not a global option like on Linux, but rather needs to be adopted by individual apps. That means when opening old apps at 2AM, my eyes are really gonna be hurt..

Perhaps try sleeping at 2AM.

Maybe try telling that to every user?

OK. Everyone, get some sleep.

It's so kind of you.

Not everyone is lucky enough to work 9-5.

Does MacOS have night shift like iOS does? Else, f.lux really does the trick.

yes it does indeed - it operates in much the same manner - set by the clock or manually enabled.

it will depend on which APIs the app is built with. I don't know which desktop environment you are refering to, but I assume it's one, not all linux based operating systems. But in this linux DE, if I run xeyes will it come up in dark mode?

Speaking of Stacks, I keep remembering this different feature: https://www.dropbox.com/s/loojgwkskhqn4lu/About%20Stacks.pdf...

It's not designed for pros. Linux is. Apple is about easy usage and they benefit hugely from having Linux underneath, which is why they even are considered by real pros. It looks nice and that's what people like.

Their definition of 'Pro' stretches much wider than developers. Traditionally, their Pro Apps were Aperture (raw editing), Logic (audio workstation) and Final Cut (video editing). Of course, the Adobe suite fits that moniker as well. For most people doing video/audio/photo editing, macOS and Windows are the primary choices (though you can obviously do this on Linux as well).

Note: macOS is not using Linux underneath. It uses the XNU kernel, which is based on Mach and BSD.

It's not "Linux underneath".

It's a Mach microkernel and a BSD userland taken from FreeBSD, which coincided with them hiring the founder of FreeBSD into a role to do release management. He's left since.

The fact you don't know this suggests you might not be aware of macOS fundamentals, the history of OS X, or MacOS that preceded it, the design decisions that went into all of those, the user groups they targeted at key points (including the adoption of FreeBSD userland), or their overall design intent.

I therefore struggle to agree with your premise that it's "not designed for pros", or that you are qualified to make that assertion.

For the longest time ever MacOS was the OS for professional print, professional graphic design, professional sound design and professional sound editing, professional video editing.

When MacOS moved to a BSD-based system, it won over a large portion of software development. Go to almost any IT conference, you'll see people with MacBooks running MacOS (some run *nixes on MacBooks because of hardware).

In the past 4 to 5 years though Apple has let MacOS more or less stagnate.

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