Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
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eclecticlight.co
For all the “doubling down on Mac” that Apple’s senior employees harp about in interviews, macOS itself has been focusing more on eye candy and iOS parity than on stability. For my machines, I switch to Linux once macOS updates are no longer available, even though the user experience isn’t as great with older hardware and support for external peripherals like the Trackpad. For machines that can run the latest macOS, I upgrade every two whole releases on macOS (and that after it’s way beyond a X.0 release) since security updates are made available to past releases for a few years.
Right now I’m on the latest Mojave release, and skipped Catalina completely. I’ll consider Big Sur a few minor releases after 11.0 is released. This also makes some practical sense because Apple works on features with a multi-year plan but releases them partially done in a “brand new version” (you’ll notice this pattern if you look at it).
I’m thankful to all the brave souls who venture sooner (intentionally or because they bought new hardware that will refuse to run an older OS) and pave the way for me to avoid potholes and land mines.
My days of tinkering with the computer and “yak shaving” are long over. Even though my comment may sound hostile to macOS, there’s no other OS I’d rather start using my personal computer with unless I really, really have to.
What's the best way to use Linux on an old MacBook air? Should I be running it in a VM? Is there a way to dula boot? The laptop is quite old, it has 4GB of RAM. So I'm worried nothing will run well on it. Macos definitely feels sluggish on it now.
Make sure you still retain the macOS partition and installation (after resizing it down). There are tools like reFind [1] that can help you manage dual booting better (do read the extensive documentation and refer to it when needed).
It goes without saying that you should have a full disk backup with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! before you venture into these.
The experience on Linux may not be great out of the box (depending on your exact hardware). So I’d also suggest budgeting some time to iron out kinks and make it better.
So I'm happy running Linux in a VM.
This might be due to the dual GPUs (on higher end MBPs), I didn't check further after the initial battery test.
It's nicer anyway, because of the ability to run MacOS and Linux at the same time, and four-finger swipe between their desktops. That way I get the nicer GUI of MacOS, consistently good touchpad (including in Linux), and Linux for my command line dev needs, and can use utilities for either that aren't available on the other.
On an old Macbook Air, Linux might us less energy running directly rather than VM. To be sure you'd have to try both.
4GB of RAM is tight for current software, even Linux, and a VM will make it tighter. Firefox is using more than 4GB for me right now, and Safari is also using more than 4GB. So you will need to avoid using Firefox the way I do, regardless of OS :-)
You might need to stick with older versions of whatever you decide to use. I would pick one of the Linux distros that is explicitly for old machines and small memory usage.
> 4GB of RAM is tight for current software, even Linux, and a VM will make it tighter. Firefox is using more than 4GB for me right now, and Safari is also using more than 4GB. So you will need to avoid using Firefox the way I do, regardless of OS :-)
You can use cgroups to limit the amount of memory an application can use. I use it to limit Firefox's memory usage on a machine with much more memory than that.
I am using this for more then 3 years on Macs now and never considered going back to MacOS disaster.
Perhaps BSD or some Linux? I can also drop Macbooks as their build quality tanked after 2015 and sooner or later I should get a new hardware.
Personaly I am not a Google hater. They do a lot wrong and stupid things but I am still seeing Google as net positive. Perhaps thats naive.
Volume keys, brightness keys, touchpad & keyboard backlit all works perfect. Only problem is the kernel doesn't support the specific wifi module (broadcom) out of the box, so I installed Fedora via usb-lan dongle (netinstall), which the company also provides anyway. After installation you can install the broadcom modules yourself and it just work. Strange enough the bluetooth works out of the box.
I didn't dualboot or mess with any of that, just wiped the ssd clean and made partitions with the lvm automatic option in the Fedora installer.
Next time I will definitely install Fedora + Xfce instead of Gnome, since I'm using this combination on a another low spec machine and it's great. So maybe give the xfce spin a try.
On the other hand, it is entirely possible to stay on a given version for the entire life of its successor. It is also possible to wait for the next x.5 version to upgrade, notwithstanding the incredibly annoying notification about a new major version being available (I don’t know how they can get away with that).
Or the successor of its successor:
Apple doesn't make any guarantees about it, but typically the _three_ most recent macOS versions receive security updates. Right now: 10.13, 10.14, and 10.15 (plus of course the 10.16 betas).
The real problem for many developers is that Xcode typically requires a fairly recent macOS version. Compiling for iOS is the one thing that developers absolutely _need_ a Mac for, so it's unfortunate that Xcode also forces you to be an early adopter on top of that.
Scanning with Samsung MFPs in color into PDFs is still broken, but this one is since 10.14 actually. 10.15 just made it worse, because the Samsung scanning app that could be used instead of Image Capture is 32-bit, so the workaround doesn't work anymore.
Most of my problems have been on older machines, so perhaps their QA has tanked.
It was pure curiosity on my part, because I haven’t really experienced any major bugs or problems.
I'm on the Big Sur beta and even this late in the game it's really rough. You're better off upgrading to Catalina and sticking to that than making the jump to Big Sur after it comes out.
But if feedback is not that great I will wait until the second point release at least...
I am likely missing some things that did improve - I don't have the change log on my mind right now - but nothing that jumps in your face right away.
People consider their anecdotal experiences as universal (I offer mine as a single counter example to the parent's experience), when it could be all kinds of weird factors in their case (a faulty hardware run, some incompatible peripherals, user errors attributed to the OS, application errors attributed to the OS and so on).
1) I hated the butterfly keyboard (but fortunately they have changed that now, even if it took them 3 years, unfortunately I'm stuck with a buttefly model myself)
2) I hate the touch strip - at least the restored the Escape button, but I have no use for it and it just sits there (had higher hopes when it was introduced).
3) I'd like more than 1 port in the MacBook (not that I have one, but I read rumours that they plan to release a new MacBook with AS that I'm interested in)
4) What is the genious that designed the mouse that doesn't work while it charges?
5) I know about "price differentiation" but having the black mouse/keyboards more expensive is a dick move.
That said, 2 things I do:
1) At least every 2 OS releases I do a clean new macOS install. No particular concrete reason, but it might help my case having a "cleaner" system.
2) I've never cared/used Time Machine. I use CCC on my own. So I never have the TM related issues some people seem to have.
I downgraded to Mojave as I wanted 32bit back, and as a last try before I just gut it for CPU and RAM, and it’ll run for weeks at a time, with me moving, and updates the only thing that had me reboot or shut down.
There is no QA at Apple, they clearly never tested Catalina on a 2013 Mac Pro.
This. Apple's inability to admit fault coupled with decreasing software stability makes life difficult in many ways. For instance, aside from the obvious detrimental effects of OS bugs, it's often quite difficult to find specific solutions without a specific error message. "$APP silently fails" or "Why is my framerate so low?" don't always lead to answers, even though there are probably many others running into the same issues.
The most annoying one is that the whole thing crashes if you unplug it from a dock while it is asleep. You can get around it by setting it to never sleep while plugged in, but guess what? That setting magically resets itself if it crashes.
That said, I can’t remember a time when bugs have been as long-standing as they are now. SMB file shares have been completely broken for nearly 3 years now (the solution is to buy the program AutoMounter), and USB-C docks have been broken since day 1 and still are on Big Sur.
Company policy is more like "it just works, our software has no bugs" (goes ahead and pushes one bug fix update per week).
The irony.
I noticed people stopped using "reality distortion field" since Steve Jobs died, but the idea is still alive to some extent.
Like? Because Apple admits fault all the time.
E.g.:
1) with the updated Mac Pro design and extended apologies for the old Pro format.
2) with the revised keyboard in the new Macbook Pros.
3) Changing from "skeuomorphic" (bad term, but I'll use it) UI to a flater look
and tons of other instances...
Or a better example of the general sentiment that I think OP is going for, Apple stopped updating it's OpenGL implementation, and invented their own API. Definitely a user-hostile choice, but they defend it by saying that Metal is better than OpenGL. But now Vulkan exists, but Apple will never defend it's use of Metal over Vulkan, because reasons.
I clearly don't remember that case. How was it anything that couldn't be solved by, e.g., at worse removing the spotlight index folder (.v100 or something similar)?
>* Or a better example of the general sentiment that I think OP is going for, Apple stopped updating it's OpenGL implementation, and invented their own API. Definitely a user-hostile choice, but they defend it by saying that Metal is better than OpenGL.*
How is it "user hostile"? As a user I could not care less if Apple uses OpenGL or Metal, but I do care that they get better performance (which Metal gives). I'm also in favor in Apple having easier control of the graphics stack to tailor it better to OS X -- that's the whole point of MacOS in the first place - that it can do its own thing and have a differentiated offering.
>But now Vulkan exists
So? Let any interested party build a Vulcan facade for Metal (if the goal is easy porting).
If the goal is features unique to the plarform, then Metal is the way to go.
You say you don't care but there are lots of users that get left out in the cold by such 'upgrades', yourself included. "We don't give an f about you or your workflow or your programs, git gud" is an incredibly hostile attitude, and why there is a fair amount of Apple hatred right now.
Not to mention the clearly lackluster if not abysmal recent record of Apple designing systems that work should make you tremble to be their guinea pigs...
Apple has come a loong way from its reputation of producing dream machines with the durability of titanium cockroaches...and not in a good way.
If they had been fixed in 30 days then maybe you could argue they were good examples.
For me the most infuriating thing is that Apple completely hides what is actually going on from the user.
Want to manually scale your display to an exact resolution? Go to Displays, Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this is completely non nondiscoverable.
An exFAT external hard drive wasn't "shut down correctly" ... no problem Mac OS will just run fsck in the background and refuse mount the drive or let you examine the disk in Disk Utility until it is complete. If you kill -9 the fsck, you get stuck in some limbo state where you can't mount the disk or run diagnostics on it.
The worst thing I have discovered is Pages... The stylesheets and layout logic make absolutely no sense, it is way worse than Word or Libreoffice.
However the OS does run smoother on a day to day basis than my work provided MacBook Pro 2019 running Mojave, and there is absolutely no screen tearing.
This could be a clever designer, if for example the team decided that Mac users don't need manual resolution settings, and this designer lost the argument. So they stick it behind a keypress and make sure word gets out.
The team only cares about what they can see, a common issue with teams. So they don't notice and the designer at least knows they've saved some major pain, at the cost of some annoyance.
If you've worked with people who design for social bell-curve psychology, you have probably been confronted with this problem before. And this is just one possible explanation...
In fact you can park your own shell scripts on it, although setting that up is a bit of a performance.
It’s like the habit of using key combinations to interrupt the boot up sequence, it introduces necessary facilities that aren’t in the way of you don’t need them or don’t even know about them.
I also don’t find this discoverable, but option clicking was best analogy to right clicking on Apple since the mouse used to have one button.
Your complaint is like saying that having to copy and paste with ctrl c and ctrl v is non discoverable in Windows with a two button mouse because in Linux it’s just select text and middle click somewhere else.
Not high praise for Apple, wasn't the 1 button mouse the laughing stock of mouse users everywhere? :-)
When the one-button mouse arrived, the majority of the population had never touched a mouse.
We're talking about a decision that took 2 decades to reverse.
No it isn't, because those functions have equivalent menu items.
Easter-egg controls in a GUI are a different (and inexcusable) story.
“For science,” right? I mean why would you do that? If you did that on Linux, would things really be better?
> Apple completely hides what is actually going on from the user
That's intentional. I know people, ranging from barely computer-aware to MSc., who don't/can't understand what you would mean by resolution. Or exFAT. Or kill -9. However, they do know how to mess up with the slightest amount of power given to them. Hiding the system is a boon.
I'm a computer enginer, and for me, macOS is a great blend of power and simplicity/usability. I won't be happy if they mess up the OS or the hardware.
Why would you do that?
Linux has an amazing level of freedom and flexibility, macOS still have the faster and more responsive GUI. The main reason for me to buy into the Apple ecosystem is still Apple trackpads, both those on the laptops and the external Magic Trackpad. Those are my input device of choice. I really do not want to go back to using a mouse or trackball again.
I agree with the UI discoverability point, but it is called out in the documentation.
For personal use, most people don’t install stuff that’s that complicated to redo (maybe at most, Adobe and Office which are download pkg and sign in), so if the OS was so fundamentally borked that the sealed system volume stood in your way, you’d waste more time trying to fix it by hand rather than just reinstalling the OS from Internet Recovery and signing back in. Especially since Time Machine does a good job at backing up home folders.
It is definitely an effective attitude to take at scale, but it has to be paired with at least some troubleshooting of the class of issue. Otherwise, severe bugs get swept under the rug by user exhaustion and IT inaction.
Is this really all that bad? In the era of everything living in the cloud, it generally takes me only a couple hours to setup a system again from scratch. Not that I've ever had to do this on macOS personally (though I did once on iOS), but if I had, I wouldn't be terribly upset about it.
> If every time your car had a problem you had to replace its engine, wouldn’t you consider that abysmal engineering?
This is a ridiculous analogy. Re-installing an OS is free (both the materials and, for Apple customers who don't know how to do it themselves, the service).
macOS today doesn't always just work. I run into bugs sometimes and get frustrated. But whenever I boot up Windows and have to fight to get the most basic dev tools working, or boot up Linux and have to fight to get a core function like system updates or audio working, I'm reminded how much closer macOS still is to "just working" than anything else out there.
Assuming you have a backup, then lets say some movers come out (for free) and do the moving. That's not inconvenient, right? After all, you don't have to do any of the moving. Just wait an hour or so and the movers will move everything back and quietly disappear.
I had a car a couple years back, where I had to get behind the side panel of the trunk to get to something (tail light?). The (ford) trunk panel was not held on by a screw, but y a weird fastener that had to be pried out (and I felt like I was breaking it). When it was out, the fastener looked like a christmas tree, and went into a hole easily in one direction and the design really didn't support coming out very well.
Turns out all cars are designed this way. They are "designed for assembly". Pretty much everything in the world is that way or moving that direction.
I think the computer equivalent is package managers and app upgrades and os upgrades and modular data.
But it's different. "designed for assembly" for cars becomes "designed for re-install" and the more troubling "designed for one-way upgrade"
I treat them as disposable, like tape or glue, but easier to replace without making a mess of it. They're dirt cheap, so I just rip them out and replace as necessary.
Much of the data in iCloud is not end-to-end encrypted, giving Apple (and the FBI and US military intelligence by extension) full access to a lot of your data, such as photos or notes. I don’t use iCloud at all for this reason.
Additionally, media production, especially 4K video, is not “in the era of everything living in the cloud”.
Also, many people may compete with cloud vendor service offerings. If I were trying to obsolete a GCP service offering, I wouldn’t store my product development notes in Google Drive.
Is all of this true? Apple claim it is not accessible.
Some iCloud data is e2e (keychain, health) but not most of it. Critically, device backups, containing all of your chat history for all time, are not e2e. Cryptographically, you would not be incorrect in describing this as a backdoor in iMessage’s end to end encryption.
It’s encrypted in transit with Apple keys and it’s encrypted at rest with Apple keys. Apple can always decrypt it without you, and you would have no way of knowing if they had done so.
They are vulnerable to subpoena or search warrant, but due to Apple’s participation in PRISM, they often turn over the data to military intelligence without a warrant at all.
https://sneak.berlin/20200604/if-zoom-is-wrong-so-is-apple/
Apparently they were going to fix it, but decided to leave it the way it is because the FBI was complaining.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
It doesn't matter what Apple claim. All their software and hardware is proprietary, including of course their "cloud" computers. You have no way of verifying anything they say.
Everything not on that list is not, and thus readable by Apple. The critical items not end-to-end encrypted being device backups, photos, notes, email.
Probably a question for a post all of its own.
Care to start it??
You will? Yes!
Awesome!!
A winking icon....
But, seriously, how...?
Not sure what tools in particular are you talking about. My main: Visual Studio for C/C++, VS Code for various scripting languages, Delphi, Lazarus install and work flawlessly from the first try. So do whole bunch of other software products I use.
What are the most basic dev tools are you struggling with on windows?
VS Code + git (perhaps the most basic requirements for me) docker, node/deno etc "just works" on windows. WSL handles anything I need that doesn't have native windows builds which is ultra-rare for me these days. Windows is IME now a very viable option particularly if you are doing web and/or container-based development. I don't see any advantage for OS X any more ... apart from appealing hardware/industrial design if your work is paying for it! :)
Linux though I agree is a cluster-fuck. I frequently suffer daily issues with graphics drivers causing visual artifacts and outright crashes on my work Dell laptop which is my current work daily-driver (although my work Linux desktop is rock solid)
To make a semi-unrelated quote from Jamie Zawinski, "Linux is only free if your time has no value."
I spent hours trying to stabilise my wife's XPS13 after a recent Windows Update sent it into paroxysms of BSODs. Reset, reimaged, the whole nine yards: nothing. Ended up installing Ubuntu on it and it's been rock-solid stable since.
Nothing just works quite like something that simply hasn't changed.
In the amount of time I used to spend in a month making sure macOS wasn't on the brink; a couple weeks ago I investigated and implemented a feature in a system component, one that is not present on any commercially available desktop operating system.
Now my input method client displays language-appropriate glyph variants based on the input method's locale, and you just managed to get the App Store to shut up, or fix some of your homebrew after a system upgrade.
What was it you were having to do to maintain macOS?
I've always wondered if Ubuntu was introduced to a child would they learn to use it just as fast as a child that uses Windows? All the times I've used Ubuntu it's exactly the same as windows without all the distraction.
I've known a couple of other fathers that had the same experience. But it isn't common.
How are these issues? Ubuntu has had these sorts of problems sorted for a while now?
This was the simplest possible task, and it was on Ubuntu LTS. Seemingly every time I have to switch over to Linux for something I end up dealing with an issue like this. Yak shaving was fun when I was in college, these days I just want to get on with my life.
>Is this really all that bad?
I had to reinstall Catalina a few times in the past month. I usually lose half a day waiting for the restore to complete.
I guess it depends on your distro of choice, but I haven't seen an Ubuntu machine with these problems in a long long time. You install it and everything just works.
In the 90s I used to laugh at my Windows friends who had to "reformat the C drive and re-install Windows" every month or so when it became unusable. Their excuses sounded much like yours: a lot of hand waving about how it's "not so bad" and not a big deal.
I needed a portable UNIX machine. First and foremost. The software available for it was a bonus.
In the latter half of the 2010s the quality of the Macbooks has had a sharp downturn. The majority of the Macbook Pros my team has bought has had problems. Keyboard, screen connectors, batteries, etc. Fully one third of them have had more than one problem (including recurrence of the same problem after repair).
Experiences colleagues have had with the new Macbook Pro 16" are also quite depressing. Reports of the thing thermal-throttling and spinning up its fans like crazy doesn't make me want to upgrade from my 2015 Macbook Pro 15". I'll hang on to that machine until there's nothing left of it.
The hardware quality argument for Apple is gone. They are odd, fragile, finnicky devices that you can't really repair (it is too expensive, and the approved repair shops generally do not have the qualifications to do board repairs - they can only reliably, and expensively, replace stuff).
And while people have their own anecdata, I've had to approve computer purchases for my department for the last 6-7 years. We do NOT have anywhere near these kinds of problems with Thinkpads.
I, rather foolishly, installed Catalina, and what is immediately obvious is where Apple is heading: they want to lock down Macs more. Getting software from parties that have not paid Apple for access (come on, let's be honest, this is about money) to run is getting more and more painful. And a few things simply do not run anymore.
The trajectory Apple is on means that I might go back to using Macs as my secondary platform - or even start to look to Windows as my secondary platform. With Linux as my primary platform.
I think that right now is perhaps the time in the last 20 years where having more desktop software for Linux would be a very good thing. I really, really want Fusion 360, Affinity suite, Ableton Live etc on Linux now.
Because I really, really do not want Apple to be part of my future if they are going to become a fully walled garden running on marginal hardware.
But they were so easy to use! The operating system was so simple you as one person could understand the whole thing. There weren’t countless background processes running all the time. You knew exactly which applications were running (only one, in the case of system 6.0 and earlier).
And Apple was a different company back then. They were artists and underdogs. Now they’ve become this ruthless capitalist machine of staggering scale. I guess nothing good lasts forever.
I am, of course, assuming you will be doing this for free. Certainly the opportunity to troll people will be its own reward.
So, when I buy “new” hardware, I will make sure that it is compatible with Mojave.
Which means it won’t actually be new....
Something’s wrong when the best hardware you can buy from a manufacturer is from the versions they’re not making any more.
My client uses Windows and HP computers. I've been able to save an "old" Elitedesk 800 G2 SFF (6th gen i5) from the dumpster and upgraded it with an old ssd I had lying around and 16 GB of ram (instead of 8). I've set up ArchLinux on it with I3 and boy do I love that machine. It's plenty powerful, quiet, and everything just works. It actually replaced my MBP as my "dev" machine during the WFH phase.
I've also had close to no issues running Arch on a Probook 430 G5. Everything except for the fingerprint reader works. But while the desktop is great, I'm less happy with the laptop. It's not so much related to Linux but to the physical machine itself (the touchpad isn't great, the keyboard's texture feels weird, it has coil whine, assembly is half-assed and rubs the wrists while working on it, etc).
As they say, YMMV, but my experience is that depending on what you do day to day with your computer, a Linux PC may actually work surprisingly well compared to a mac, especially on the desktop where the superior materials and assembly of the mac are less of an issue.
2) ThinkPads were and are excellent portable Linux machines.
Catalina finally made me do a completely fresh install with transferring data files as the only touch from the old system. Since the fresh install, it has worked perfectly, but before that the system would randomly keep repeating the last typed character. I could not live with that behavior.
Also got a new MBAir 2020 (Catalina) and that has been perfectly fine and solid as well.
Such a big code refactoring is of course a very big undertaking, causing a lot of disruption. But once it is finished, not only the disruption goes away, but hopefully maintenance is easier and more systematic. If that holds true, then macOS should be improving again moving forward. That all platforms use identical or at least very similar hardware should also help stability.
i have a lot of apps in my applications folder crossed out with a / mark because they are 32-bit... its kind of strange to me that if i "downgraded" to mojave they all start working again... isnt that weird? seems almost the opposite of "customer centric"...
The Apple tech told me that next time I want to upgrade multiple versions, that I should install fresh instead of upgrading.
The problem seems rather like they are making too many deep system changes without any bug fix time to let them settle.
Something related: what I've been really living with is the T2 chip kernel panic hardware bug. Over 3 different models (the 2017, 2018, then the 2019 16-inch MBP which is my current), I've seen Apple go from:
- The initial full-scale buggy behaviour of 1-2 complete system crash & forced reboots per week;
- to Apple suddenly deleting all my previous system kernel crash logs (and no longer recording new ones in Console.app) without my consent or knowledge even though it's my own machine that I paid over $5000 for (must be silent updates of some kind because it happened in between macOS updates);
- to observing Apple slowly tweaking how macOS responds to the kernel panic by no longer crashing the system but just freezing the screen and all controls for up to a minute (while sound continues) before unfreezing itself (this happens maybe 3-5 times per week for me, even more, it happens when watching full-screen video in any app).
So they've improved it but it's still disruptive and noticeable, and plain unacceptable on hardware this expensive.
Yes, I'm slowly planning a move to Linux, but it's not easy, it will take time and it's a major adjustment depending on what your computer needs are. Linux Mint Cinnamon seems the safest bet to me.
I say all this knowing how catastrophically worse Windows 10 is in terms of bugs like Windows updates suddenly hard deleting your entire Documents folder.
I thought it would be a lot harder than it was for me, but in the end I'm now much happier on Linux than I was on OSX. There's no specialist software I need that doesn't work on Linux, so it was probably easier for me than if you, say, work in FinalCut all the time.
That's not a kernel panic then, by definition a kernel panic is an unrecoverable event. What you're seeing is likely an issue somewhere in the GUI/GPU driver stack. Windows used to crash upon such issues too, they mitigated it by moving lots of stuff to userspace.
For me, what is a regular event is freezing for a dozen seconds whenever I alt-tab to Cisco VPN, but ah well that may also be a result of shoddy antivirus software.
I went from Ubuntu to macOS as my daily driver because the company switched to Macbooks. I really like the integration of everything. Especially for developers, though, Ubuntu is the perfect OS.
Maybe I'm wrong.
And it still works like new - something that I’ve never heard about a similarly aged Win19 device unless it was very recently reinstalled.
You’re likely to have problems finding drivers for your other hardware, though - especially 10-year old printers or scanners (even though they are likely to work out of the box on Modern Mac and Linux)
And you'd be surprised what kind of old hardware still works on W10.
I’ve tried to help family who were tricked into a win10 upgrade by the dark patterns of the “free upgrade to win 10” window. Some had to buy new printers/scanners because win 10 didn’t support their perfectly-working in XP and win7 ones. (My modern Linux Laptop had no such problems). Also a WinModem of some sort used as a built in fax machine.
As a Linux person, I find it funny that you refer to Windows as “platform that allows me to install or not”. It allows you to install but as of Win10, unless you are on Enterprise or LTSB, it doesn’t let you not install. It’s no longer your machine - you paid for it, but it’s Microsoft’s to manage/brick as they see fit.
Even a 2006 Mac Pro, with 3ghz processors, SSD and a GTX 1030 is still great for day to day.
With competitive, affordable AMD hardware and better GPU support, both WSL and Linux (KDE Plasma) offer compelling competition.
The only rebuttal from Apple being extra padding on the UI, so it seems like I am no longer your target audience.
Fair well, it was a beautiful, cohesive experience while it lasted.
- MacBook Air is still lovely (once ahem I had keyboard fixed)
- Basic productivity tools on Linux - eg email or word processing - still suck and I want native apps for such things.
Any solution?
For an email client, I personally use the GMail web client nowadays, but I've used Thunderbird for a long time and it's fine (not as polished and good looking as Mail.app on MacOS though).
Ads, premium features?
I do all my dev on a surface book laptop running windows. WSL2 has me covered for anything that needs posix, but that's increasingly rare.
Edit: my deploy target is Ubuntu.
So if you need service managment, you won't find it under WSL2.
This individual clearly develops and builds with WSL2 and ships to to Ubuntu VMs or as Ubuntu based containers to some orchestration engine.
The point was that the development and deployment environment are vastly different.
Developing with different environment than prod is difficult; missing service management layer is a huge difference. WSL2 is optimized to show the shell quickly, but in the background, quite a lot is missing.
The list was comical. Had at least 5 things on it that, if they happened to me, would completely ruin my productivity.
I've spent most of my life on macOS but it does seem to be unraveling, while Windows and Linux are only getting better these days.
The first time I tried to update my late 2015 27” iMac, it bricked the system, and I had to reinstall from Time Machine backup. I gave up on updating for quite some time, every day having to dismiss the reminder to update. Recently, I was able to update to Catalina. It was painful and took multiple tries, but eventually it got there.
Yes, it’s bad that a few people are having issues updating firmware. We don’t know how many are versus aren’t. But the article goes down a technical rabbit hole that regular users don’t care about, and I suspect the number of affected users is minuscule.
Plenty of Windows users including myself never bother updating audio/chipset/WiFi drivers unless there’s an actual problem.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Apple’s choice to use the OS updates to also update firmware. It’s typically a benefit to the customer: Mac users never had to worry about updating drivers. I’ve owned plenty of Lenovo and Dell systems with infuriating automatic update software and I much prefer Apple’s approach.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Apple retail employees not knowing how to update firmware. It’s a retail store. There isn’t anything special about it just because it has an Apple logo on the side, and yet every technically inclined Apple customer expects the $18/hour store associates to immediately know how to do complicated things like this.
In reality, I suspect the reason why Apple employees are clueless on what to do is that the problem is so rare.
So macOS is slowly drifting to become iOS. While this might be good for your average consumer as she'll be comfortable manipulating the same patterns of the interface, for the developer it means less performance, less customization, more gatekeeping, etc...
In the future, I think there will be two types of OSes: A developer OS (probably a custom built Linux for the developer or the company) and a consumer OS. The divergence will be big enough that consumer OSes can no longer be used to do any useful programming (aside from programming for the said platform).
I never got any of that stuff to work reliably before I moved off the Mac completely. It would sometimes work and often not work. Often enough that I wrote both of those features off as simple keynote gimmicks.
This was my experience with an issue where my Mac just hangs for 30 s randomly.
I think Jobs might’ve been referring to the actual OS internals, not the brand name. As in, support period. After all, Linux (while not technically an OS) is older than Mac OS X / macOS, but it’s not obsolete. Just don’t expect to get security patches on kernels in the 2.x or 3.x range.
Source?
1. How is this Apple’s fault? You’re complaining about a third-party application that Apple has no control over.
2. How can you be sure that Mac and Windows manage memory in the same way?
The nerds who sit around and stare at their computer metrics and gauges on their menu bar or desktop overlay are completely missing the point: is the computer usable and responsive?
I use both Mac and Windows daily and they’re basically the same thing and do all the same things, including running Chrome.