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Comment by butz | Hacker News Reader

Still using El Capitan on my iMac. Should I upgrade directly to Mojave, or wait a bit?

The rule has always been to wait for the first point update.

Same boat. I'm still on Sierra and still have concerns as a colleague on High Sierra almost hosed his system with APFS. Any stability issues on the new file system?

It's been mostly fine on High Sierra, but I did have one instance where my inodes went wonky. Had to restore from backups as Disk Utility couldn't do anything with it.

HFS+ was terrible, but at least I knew most of the ways in which it was terrible.

People bitch and moan about HFS+ but I've never found anything particularly objectionable about it, even after writing several filesystem utilities on top of it.

I've always found Spotlight to be utter garbage, but that's not the fault of HFS+.

OK, so you're not just spewing nonsense, but it bears repeating that the internals of HFS+ were horribly dated towards the end of its life. This prevented them from adding features or fixing bugs in a way that would be forward looking.

The system requirements for HFS and HFS+ reflected this and partially explain why there was little progress for literally years at a time.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/#hf...

Eventually, you have to start over.

Fair enough; thanks for educating me.

I'm on High Sierra, but still waiting as I have huge issues with deprecating the old Safari Extensions API. I really don't want everything to be an app, and the uninstall procedure on the Mac has always felt weird - coming from Windows - so I'm thinking about how I could run Safari with no extensions and instead use equivalents in Chrome to compensate.

> don't want everything to be an app, and the uninstall procedure on the Mac has always felt weird

Drag the app to the trash?

You really have to run something like AppCleaner because just about every vendor throws files around in /Library and ~/Library, which aren't deleted with the bundle being put in the trash.

This is no different from any other OS

Does that actually matter in practice? I don't remember the last time those files actually caused problems, other than the fact that they take non-zero disk space.

The same behavior may be present on Windows for all I know. I've used Win7 a handful of times and Win 10 once or twice, so I don't have a good handle on how the Registry deals with uninstalls these days.

My complaints re disk space are mostly still around because SSD prices are still not cheap compared to spinning disks. For example, I went from 80 GB (2005 Dell Latitude) to 120 GB (2007 MBP) to 256 GB (2013 MBP). Desktop drives at the time were probably triple to quadruple the storage at half the price, so it's still an issue.

To migrate everything to an SSD in my next machine will take somewhere between 1-2 TB, and last I checked, the 1 TB option on a MacBook Pro was $600.

True. But it can be a non-trivial amount of space, and (especially on SSD) that can matter.

The first review I see for AppCleaner on the MAS right now is from a very happy user who just reclaimed 19 GB on their MacBook Air after a first run on a 4 year old machine.

For that user, hard not to disagree that that matters.

Also: 7 GB was from AirMail not deleting its 'junk'. If that junk was in fact its internal cache of emails then that user has thought that those emails had gone with the app, while in fact they were still carrying them around. Now that could be a very big deal. (Unfair to assume, but a reasonable scenario).

When Apple bought Test Flight, I can remember hearing the ATP guys talk about it and come to the conclusion that Apple probably hates when a 3rd party service exists to cover some corner case that they don't do themselves.

The fact that the Installers don't do well with this kind of situation is probably an indication they should survey the landscape and buy one of them so it can be integrated.

It’s really a shame; Apple has produced a number of tools (XCode.appp, Server.app, Install macOS.app) that demonstrate how you’re supposed to handle the placement of support files like this. Delete any of those apps, and their entire footprint on the system is gone.

There’s also things like Garage Band’s downloaded instrument files, which do stick around... but only because other apps (e.g. Logic) can also use them.

Are you on an SSD? APFS is more efficient than HFS+, and I expect eventually some core apps you use will require an update (though this is dumb). I can't use Davinci Resolve on my '07 Mac Pro anymore because it requires 10.12.

Wait a bit more and you can buy a new iMac directly!

Wait.

Also still using El Capitan, and wondering the same.

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