Hacker News Reader

Comment by vkoskiv | Hacker News Reader

> I worry that "unification" will be realized by dumbing down the desktop rather than empowering the mobile device.

This appears to be their plan. It has steadily ramped up since Mojave, and Big Sur was the inflection point. I have used OS X exclusively since 2008, and last year I made the choice to no longer upgrade any of my machines beyond Catalina. I'm slowly getting used to the fact that I won't be able to use Macs for my work in the near future, and am making adjustments to my workflow accordingly. I know this is probably the life-long FruitCo® fan in me speaking, but I'm genuinely distraught about this. My absolute favourite software platform in the world is being chipped away at to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Even worse, most people seem to be cheering them on for doing it. Really upsets me.

View on HN

Apart from questionable changes to the user interface, I don’t see how Apple have been “dumbing down” macOS in terms of usability so dramatically. Could you point to some concrete examples?

Not being able to edit huge portions of the file system, even as root. Apps not having file system access at all until you grant it, and then it’s folder by folder. Those control panel plug-in things just stopped being supported at all, so good bye custom mouse drivers and such.

What you call dumbing down I call incredibly useful security features.

Apps shouldn’t be able to read my entire hard drive unless I give it permission. And the core OS should be immutable.

Also not sure what you’re talking about. Custom mouse drivers of course still work.

It really depends on your usage. It can be a security feature for many contexts, but otherwise:

- docker - you need to be able to bind any folder

- IDE - you need to be able to edit basically anything

- office software beyond "I have some things in 'Documents'" - same

- python, ruby, any other interpreter - same

- brew, or any other package manager - same

etc. This simply doesn't work well for many developer workflows. I tried to use a dedicated app for per-app security control like that (can't remember the name anymore) - but for development it was a disaster. It just makes you click "allow" on a popup 10 times a day until you stop paying attention. Now, macos is not at that level yet, but the direction towards that is the complaint usually.

The problem is that your 'developer workflow' sounds like you are assuming a particular level of insecurity that is unwarranted. Learn about the principle of least authority and try to apply it to your workflows. None of the applications you mention need complete access to the filesystem and in every one of those cases the access could be easily limited to a few directories and you would probably never notice.

Yes/no. The security policies as they are implemented today just aren't possible to effectively use by developers. I've got a project in progress which allows you to go into the context of a specific project as a selinux policy and then work on it that way. It's hard, it's a lot of work, and there are endless edge cases. This is not me giving up, it's actually hard to build a system where you both enforce realistic restrictions and don't end up going "yeah, whatever, I've got enough of those permission questions" after a week.

Consider: An interpreter needs to run homebrew which installs new app, but the same interpreter running a script for your project should not read anything apart from those project files. Same interpreter needs to update local packages via bundle and git, but a random script you run shouldn't be able to access your ssh key via git commands. This is basically impossible to achieve without large compromises outside of selinux right now.

>Learn about the principle of least authority and try to apply it to your workflows

So how would you apply this principle to the python interpreter or to a program that gets compiled to a new executable many times during development?

I like the idea of granting folder permissions to regular third party apps I install and use. I always wanted that and I'm glad Apple is moving in this direction with the Mac.

But contrary to regular apps, language runtimes and software under development do not have a specific purpose. The whole point of software development is to create and test arbitrary code. It is pointless to grant privileges to code that changes in arbitrary ways with every keystroke.

During development, privileges have to be granted to the developer account, not to any particular software artifact. I generally think that granting privileges to software and granting privileges to people each has its legitimate place. One isn't generally better or worse than the other.

Why would you want Docker to be able to bind any folder? Or even edit "anything" in your IDE? Don't you have a /projects folder somewhere?

..and, office?! Do you keep spreadsheets in system folders?

Docker bind to a project folder (common for development) allows the image to take over the shell. Taking over the shell allows taking over the package manager. That allows taking over the system.

I keep spreadsheets in project folders. Allowing full writes to a project folder allows taking over the shell. See above.

Folder-level permissions are not sufficient. Sorry, I shortened it too much, but basically - there's almost no practical difference between allowing writes to a dev project folder and allowing writes everywhere. (It would stop some really trivial attempts) Your actual system folders are safe of course... but who cares about those really?

I completely agree. In fact, many years ago, when FreeBSD was my main OS (including on notebook) I went as far as to isolate each app that used internet into its own custom-setup jail [0][1].

I had Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin and a few others running in complete isolation from the base system, and from each other. I even had a separate Firefox jail that was only allowed to get out via a Tor socks proxy to avoid leaks (more of an experiment than a necessity, to be fair).

Communication between jails was done via commonly mounted nullfs. I have also setup QoS via PF for each of them.

They were all running on the host’s Xorg, which was probably also the weakness of this setup.

It was a pretty sweet setup, but required quite a bit of effort to maintain, even tho I automated most of the stuff.

Now I use macOS, and I would like more control over what apps do what. I’m not particularly impressed with the direction of the UI (it also doesn’t bother me terribly), but I welcome the finer grained security control.

References:

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail

[1]: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=jail&sektion=8&for...

oh beauty! Perhaps you could share those scripts on a github?

Thanks :). If I'll find the time, I'll have to dig them up.

Or maybe I'll attempt to contribute the important parts to an established project, like ezjail [0][1], which seems to be quite competent at handling jails, but is specialized on running services.

Refs:

[0]: http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/ezjail/

[1]: https://www-legacy.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/han...

Eactly, I'm moving much more towards FreeBSD now because Apple is taking so much away from us power users. Its jails (and the ports collection) are amazing.

For one thing: I always require certificate logins on SSH. On Mac I used to simply change /etc/ssh/sshd_config to this effect, but since Catalina macOS reverts this with every update. Clearly they don't want me poking around in there :(

IMO if you offer SSH you should offer certificate-only access as well, either with a glitzy on/off button or with a config file change, whatever. But nope...

With Apple you get a lot of security for 'free', however you give up a lot of customisation in return, even in terms of security features.

dumb q: can you change the path to this file?

Not really as sshd is compiled to look for it there.

You can override it with a commandline flag but that would mean changing the launchdaemon which is protected by SIP as far as I know. But I will have a look for that to doublecheck.

I agree... I'm looking forward to see on the desktop this capability model pioneered in mobile devices.

Unix file access permissions designed 50 years ago for multi-user shells are not adequate when dealing with potentially hostile applications accessing your data.

Today I'm more worried of a random App encrypting $HOME or hoovering up all my PII.

Are you really any more secure after you make the initial mistake installing the app? It's not like an attacker is unaware of the security measures in place.

Well, I still lock the front door with the deadbolt at night although it won't stop a mob from breaking in, it's good enough to keep me reasonably safe against normal threats.

Also, actively circumvent protection devices is proof of malice and possibly even criminal intent (remember DMCA?) so I don't see your point.

Yes, because awareness does not automatically mean ability to circumvent.

Has there been any one year period in the last twenty years (NeXTSTEP for the first few years for MacOS) where there were not plentiful kernel exploits for Linux, MacOS, and Windows?

I don’t think so.

Windows, VMS and some mainframes/micros have had such capabilities based file systems for years, it was not pioneered in mobile devices.

Now if some people just give access to everything instead of using ACLs, that is another matter.

For me it's more the "no access even as root" issue that is highly problematic.

I've been trying unsuccessfully to childproof a Big Sur laptop for a 12 year old for some time now — disable access to some built-in apps etc. I have yet to figure out how, without resorting to disable SIP.

There is Screentime, but that's an unreliable joke which has caused us a massive amount of headaches on iOS due to unreliability, has very limited features and can only be protected by a 4-digit PIN.

If you see no access even as root as problematic, why are you avoiding disabling SIP? That sounds like exactly what you want.

As a last resort, that is what I will do. But that would mean to fight the system, which is rarely a good thing in the long run. When it comes to system setup, I prefer to color inside the lines if at all possible.

"Configuring which programs a restricted user can run" is _such_ an elementary task for an OS that I cannot believe that recent macOS has no provisions for that. I _must_ be missing something.

Exactly. These are restrictions that have been viewed as favorable for security purposes for decades. It’s nice to see a mainstream OS actually implementing them.

The resistance to them seems to be largely due to lazy developers: it would be EASIER if the system let a developer do whatever they want with a “trust me, I’m smart” justification. But we can’t design for the occasional safe and smart developer: we need to design for the sloppy ones and the malicious ones. The smart and safe ones can find a way to work within the constraints. As for lazy and sloppy ones who can’t adapt to the constraints - adapt.

It would be more sensible to assume that "trust me, I'm smart" developers will eventually work out what they need to do - possibly after the third or fourth time they lose all their work to ransomware, but more realistically, by following the inevitable online tutorials which will appear.

OS security is generally a shit show anyway. I don't think it's bad to lock down the OS for most users, but it should still be possible for expert users to get expert access.

If there are security consequences, they should be trusted to learn how to deal with them.

Most will - and the rest will have bad experiences.

> OS security is generally a shit show anyway. I don't think it's bad to lock down the OS for most users, but it should still be possible for expert users to get expert access.

Last I checked, it still is—IIRC, you have to run some specific commands in Recovery Mode to disable the protections, but for "trust me, I'm smart" developers, that shouldn't be a problem.

Personally, I haven't seen any particular need to do that. I can count the number of times I've been blocked by SIP from doing things I wanted to do on one hand, and none of them were critical.

Usually its not about smart. Its about fixing something that is broken in the OS and SIP is blocking fixing it. A missing monitor geometry. Or an incompatibility in a default cone in. Getting rid of unwanted built in apps like News.app.

Core OS? It’s stuff like the iMessage database. Mac OS ain’t Silverblue. :)

I’m not saying it’s bad. More security is great! My kids use MacOS. I’m grateful for it. I love iOS too. But it’s absolutely dumbing the OS down and making it less of a professional machine.

It sure sounds nice, doesn't it?

Now how do I turn off the dozens of daemons that go everywhere on the internet without my control, uploading telemetry, etc? I've still not figured out how.

https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/

If you’re referring to Gatekeeper, that was introduced long before even Mojave. Likewise the third party kernel extension lock down was also a security move. The former can be disabled in recovery mode and you can add exceptions to the latter. Apple usually allows power users to work around their security features. Besides the introduction of new bugs, most changes in recent years have been cosmetic and the unification features are bloat at worst, for users that don’t want them.

There's other little changes. You used to be able to install and use GDB and debug stuff without doing anything. Now you need to dick around with certificates and code signing to get it to work. I never could despite following different sets of instructions to the letter multiple times because of some bug. I gave up and switched to the built in lldb as that worked at least. I think in Catalina or Big Sur they made another change, hardened runtimes, so now if I need to upgrade R I have to install it like it's 1985 and extract a tarball in root. It's shit. Every single version they seem to do something where I need to waste time tracking down some workaround to deal with "security".

I'm tired of granting every other app accessibility permissions for reasons I'm not even sure of, tired of having to grant access to my documents. It's just endless hassle and I don't feel like I'm actually safer. Every new version seems to bring something like this.

> Apps not having file system access at all until you grant it, and then it’s folder by folder.

This is actually a feature I wish Windows had. On Windows you can enable "protected folders" and mark folders as protected. Applications cannot access those folders until you grant it.

On Windows when granting an app permission to a protected folder you grant it access to all of your protected folders.

You cannot grant a specific application access to a specific folder only eg. grant VLC access to your video folder only but will have to grant VLC permission to all your protected folders. In the default configuration this includes all your personal documents.

I wish Microsoft would make the protected folder feature just as granular as I can hear it is an a mac.

I am not that deep into it, but I think it is possible, but only via Active Directory application policies.

> Not being able to edit huge portions of the file system, even as root.

The important part is that system integrity protection can be disabled.

I think the lament has some justificiation if you remember Mac OSX as the de-facto developer dream workstation circa 2009. As a consumer platform desktop macOS will be great, for a non-apple developer workload... not so sure.

Some examples I noticed (haven't look at Monterey yet though), most of those changes make sense on a small portrait display with touch interaction (e.g. iPhone), but not on a notebook display in landscape orientation (most of those fall under "questionable changes to the user interface", but I still think it's important to point them out, because IMHO they don't make sense on a notebook-style computer):

- scroll bars have been removed (but they can be enabled again), not sure when this happened, Catalina maybe?

- Ok/Cancel style dialog boxes are vertically stacked (since Big Sur)

- the completely intuitive "Save As..." action has been replaced with "Duplicate" (at least in Apple tools), no idea what's the reasoning behind this is TBH, this wouldn't make sense on iPhones either

- more vertical space wasted for window chrome since Big Sur, especially in the Finder

- "Natural Scrolling" (can also still be reversed thankfully)

- ...and probably a few more subtle changes which I don't care much about

How is any of that “dumbing down”?

Well, apparently those changes are made to appease iOS users so they don't feel lost on Macs. I just can assume that Apple thinks this user group is too dumb to adapt to a different user interface philosophy? Don't know :)

OK, so none of those things are dumbing down, they're just decisions you don't agree with.

unless we formally define 'dumbing down', I think that's just opinion.

Just to take one example, scroll bars were turned optional with default off -- a simpler UX that's in favor of less visible user interactions for the sake of reducing user complexity is usually considered dumbing down.

Now, in Apple Land, far behind the Reality Distortion Field, they may refer to the reduction of user interaction options as 'beautification' -- but everyone else usually just calls it 'simplification', which is often (diminutively, perhaps) referred to as 'dumbing down'.

(in reply to "scrollbars only disappear without a mouse" , so what? That's still a reduction in user-visible information -- do touch users somehow not need to be told that an active view can be scrolled by anything other than visual gestures and cues? It's a nice pipe-dream, indicative design, but there isn't any design standard that suggests that may be or even could be the case.)

tl;dr : when a user loses visible indications, and loses possible interactions, it's not uncommon to phrase the state as being 'dumbed down'.

Maybe everything went wrong when they put a GUI on top of Unix. Maybe that's where the dumbing down started.

But seriously: What you call "dumbing down" I'd mostly rather call "making peoples' lives easier".

So you assume these changes are made to "appease" a group of people you've decided is stupid, or that Apple thinks they're stupid?

I am a long-time Unix user, hardly an iOS user at risk of feeling lost on Macs, and while I have immediately turned back on my scroll bars, I was delighted by "natural scrolling," and I love that "Duplicate" makes it more clear that my documents are being auto-saved, as they should be.

These things aren't "dumbing down," they're just changes from the way things used to be. Some are better, some are worse, and both of those are opinions. I think labeling them as "dumbing down" and sneering dismissively at people who use iOS is unseemly, speaking of opinions.

OP said the changes didn't make sense on a landscape notebook/desktop.

"Save As..." action has been replaced with "Duplicate" (at least in Apple tools), no idea what's the reasoning behind this is

If I had to guess, it's because Apple wants to remind you they already have your data in their cloud, so saving anything locally is creating a duplicate.

Scroll bars only disappear if you don't have a mouse plugged in (or connected over BT).

But yeah the waste of more vertical space in Big Sur was really surprising to me, considering Apple also tries to minimise it in other apps like Safari. Weird.

I feel these are preferences, that you don’t like - which is perfectly valid. Except “Save As…”, it’s not intuitive. The wording implies renaming the existing file. The actual action is more accurately worded “Save a copy as…”, or more succinctly “Duplicate”.

Relatively new macOS user here.

> scroll bars have been removed

Awesome! Less clutter. I only care about my position in a list or its length when I actually scroll.

> Ok/Cancel style dialog boxes are vertically stacked

Looks sightly weird, but it enlarges click targets and makes a crucial dialog easier to see and use. I guess that makes sense.

> more vertical space wasted for window chrome

I generally like the new style, but yeah, they went over board here 1/3 or 1/4 less height would be about optimal.

> Natural Scrolling

Why would you move your finger against the direction in which you're scrolling?

I do have it disabled on my mouse, so I can more easily flick it to navigate down pages.

> Awesome! Less clutter. I only care about my position in a list or its length when I actually scroll.

Sort of. When the the scroll bar (thumb) is the thing that you want to grab in order to scroll though — where is it?

> Why would you move your finger against the direction in which you're scrolling?

Because I'm scrolling *down* to reveal new content towards the bottom of the screen. Why should I move my finger "up" if I want to scroll "down" ;)

For touch screens it makes sense, no doubt, but for touchpad and mouse it's debatable. It's clearly a personal preference though, I just hope they never remove the settings option.

> Awesome! Less clutter. I only care about my position in a list or its length when I actually scroll.

Except when you don't realize there is more content to be scrolled in any direction including left and right because there is zero indication.

> Why would you move your finger against the direction in which you're scrolling?

It makes absolutely no sense with a scroll wheel and yet, by default it's on for them.

Hidden scrollbars and the Duplicate option are ten years old.

Even the changes to the UI are following current design trends in general. More space, bigger elements, and removing what can be removed for simplicity. See the upcoming Android 12. For years the industry moved towards more and more information density, and is now moving back. Whether macOS is a good implementation of this trend can be debated.

A random example: desktop Spaces has been arbitrarily limited to a single row of max 9 desktops (with Lion I believe). Before you could arrange the desktops in a matrix (up to 16 desktops IIRC). Also the removal of RSS support, X11, emacs.

Kernel Extensions are gone -- regular users would never care about this sort of thing but you can't use products like Little Snitch properly on Big Sur and onwards. Kexts were also used for making Hackintoshes -- again not something normal Apple users would care for. mac OS is simply becoming less versatile and more locked down.

Well, Hackintosh users at least definitely don't care whether Apple is signing third party kexts, because they were never signing Hackintosh kexts anyway. The ability to load kexts in general is still used extensively by Apple and isn't going away any time soon. (Hackintosh's days are numbered anyway due to Apple Silicon.)

?? Little Snitch works fine for me on macOS BS on my M1 MacBook Pro.

Does it fail to work properly on Intel Macs? All of my x86 Macs are far too old to try Big Sur.

EDIT: Oh, I see -- first-party Apple apps can stream unlimited data, tracking your activity. Egads...

https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/

Kernel extensions going away doesn’t mean their functionality is going away.

They not gone, rather replaced by user space solutions, improving overall OS stability.

I was in shock, when realised that everything that I love about Mac Desktop since beginning of OSX era will be showed away in the name of vertical integration.

Now I am ok. Catalina is the last Apple OS that I will run on my computers. Figma is in the browser. Blender is working under Linux perfectly. Windows is horrible, but if used properly for specific tasks it will perform. The big problem was to move away from Logic, but where there's a will, there's a way.

I am deeply thankful for all those years of Desktop Bliss, but Apple nowadays is marketing and shareholders driven company and this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

> The big problem was to move away from Logic, but where there's a will, there's a way.

I moved to Ableton years ago because I wanted a cross-platform DAW.

My workflow these days is to use WSL2 for everything. It even handles CUDA now

> this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy

I would caution you about pigeon-holing "Jobs' philosophy". I have observed that his philosophy often suited the circumstances he found himself in at various points in his fascinating career. ;-)

> this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy.

Frankly, I think that the design changes Apple has been making are very much in line with how Jobs would have done things.

Would he have made it exactly the same? No, certainly not; he was a different person who was very opinionated, so there would be differences—but the direction of the changes would, I think, be very similar.

However, I think it's also pretty irrelevant, given that Jobs himself explicitly said "Don't try to do things the way I would do them. Just do the right things." (Paraphrased from memory.)

May be you are right. My understanding of Jobs way of thinking is "product/user" first. In the context of a Desktop user interaction is not touch oriented. User interface must give options with minimal cognitive overload. Translating iOS to Desktop is serving only the vertical integration of Apple. Implementation is everything. I don't have any doubt that under Jobs the results of this process would be better.

>Just do the right things.

And that is exactly what they did. The right thing they ( Tim Cook ) thought was to extract as much money from their product line and user.

I disagree that macOS is being “dumbed down”. Unfortunately, the days of easy access to system volumes, kernel extensions had to end because the internet isn’t a friendly place and we just can’t have nice things.

I spend more time on the command line now than I did 10 years ago on macOS and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

It’s been a three release arc, starting with Catalina, to Big Sur and now Monterey, that started off pretty rocky and seemingly coming to fruition with this release.

I’m using the public beta of Monterey as my daily driver and the transition couldn’t have gone any smoother, especially given it’s still months away from being released. So much better than Catalina which was ridiculously bad two years ago.

I also don’t agree this is the lowest common denominator; since iPadOS, iOS and macOS all have the same core operating system, it only makes sense there should be a baseline of functionality and that users are able to use the appropriate platform for a given task. But that doesn’t mean unfettered access to everything on the Mac; given the world we live in, that’s a a recipe for disaster, which is why we can’t have nice things.

Question is, what alternatives do you plan to use that are better for you? Many of the same sorts of interface and "unification" changes seem to be coming to Windows, and Linux is sort of in another world as far as usability goes. Great for some people, but if you don't already prefer it, are the changes to MacOS bad enough to accept the similarly-changing Windows or the many caveats Linux desktop?

That is the part that upsets me the most - there are no viable alternatives. Linux I can get by with, but it's a huge compromise on all fronts except the terminal experience. Windows is obviously out of the question completely.

New windows is more like Windows + Linux in one device so dunno if it'll be out of question for most folks who see how apple is killing macos :)

People who think Apple is killing MacOS generally do because they think Apple is sacrificing the utility of the desktop in favor of sharing code/UI with their mobile platforms.

I don't think these people will be fond of the sweeping changes made in Win11's UI that are dedicated to touch interfaces/tablets, and to the big new feature of running Android apps "natively" on Windows, along with an Android app store.

The ability to run Linux software is also mostly irrelevant, as MacOS/Darwin has largely been able to run those same programs natively since the beginning. It's never needed a POSIX compatibility layer -- it was built to support that functionality from day 1. e.g. Apple didn't need to build a compatibility shim to tunnel Wayland/X11 applications because Quartz was designed from the start to support that use case.

The changes in Windows 11 are much more mellow than those in Windows 8, which were ridiculously geared towards tablets and totally ignored the existence of desktops, which happened to be 99% of the Windows userbase :/

Windows 11 is a much better compromise of usability on both, and I like the idea of panes, it is sorta kinda heading towards a tiling window system which really appeals to me.

And the android thing and Amazon's involvement. Yeah a lot written about this and I don't agree with it either. But you don't have to use it.

Actually the changes on Windows 11 are quite deep, even if they appear mellow to those not following Windows dev scene.

Basically Windows 11 presents the opportunity to unify all the kernel and related OS infrastructure to pretend the road started with Windows 8 never happened.

The COM improvements done in WinRT, are ported into Win32 land, .NET Native goes away replaced by .NET 6 AOT, app sandoxing gets replaced by MSIX sandoxing, .....

Thus pretending that all those improvements happened as if Windows 11 suceeded Windows 7, and a couple of years from now, the UWP branch will be dropped from Windows SCM.

Ok I do indeed not follow this too intensely. Windows for me privately is only relevant to my game box. And while I manage endpoints at work, the windows side is a different team :) I'm just waiting for Windows 11 to hit MSDN so I can try it out. I don't really want to do the whole insider thing. I was indeed referring to what I've seen in the videos.

But this sounds like a good thing to me overall. I was never a fan of UWP as most of the apps were too tablet focused. The same issue I have with Mac Catalyst apps. Too dumbed down and basic. I know it's not technically necessary to do so, but these unified platforms seem to stimulate that kind of app. I was also very happy to see that live tiles are going away (It always takes some time for me to rid the start menu of them).

If Microsoft would adopt a more privacy friendly stance e.g. no telemetry or MS accounts required at all, I'd actually consider using it again for more purposes privately.

You can see the signs of this happening live,

UWP dropped from WinUI roadmap and desktop focus,

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/blob/main/doc...

While Project Reunion gets renamed into Windows App SDK

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/06/24/what-w...

C++/WinRT also does COM anyway,

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/cpp-and-winrt-a...

All Language/WinRT SDKs become /windows,

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/05/06/announ...

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/01/21/making...

Microsoft Game Development Kit makes it clear that for AAA titles, the Win32 + GDK model is the future, while WinRT APIs are being deprecated, and only community support is planned for UWP, not from Microft XBox teams.

https://github.com/microsoft/GDK

So one just needs to read between the lines, combine it with years of experience with previous technology reboots from Microsoft, and it is relatively clear where they are heading with Windows 11.

Naturaly when playing futurology games there is always a possibility of being wrong.

Thanks for the summary. I think all these are pretty good changes actually. I was never a fan of UWP at all. Not because of the tech per se, but because it tended to lead to crappy tablet/mobile-style apps that didn't suit the desktop. Same as with macOS Catalyst. I really don't want my desktop being a big iPad. At least Microsoft gets this now, but Apple still doesn't.

Windows hasn't even figured out text rendering yet. My eyes hurt every time I have to read text on my gaming PC. Japanese text is especially bad.

WSL isn't that great either. I've tried to make it so that I can SSH into my WSL instance from other machines - doesn't work. Windows seems to always assign a random IP address to the WSL instance, so I can't actually forward SSH traffic to it. Well, I can but it stops working after I shut down the WSL instance.

It's nice for playing games but I don't see the appeal in any other part of the system. Setting up GPG and Git on a Windows machine is also so much worse than on other operating systems.

Why not just ssh to the windows side and then invoke wsl.exe. You could even set the default shell to WSL so it happens automatically. No need to mess with redirection and making sure it is online.

Use WSL1.

Windows appears to be doing the same thing, also the "+Linux" is just a VM with X11 forwarding, something everyone has been doing since XP and it's not as great as it looks.

Apparently it is, because many have stop giving money to Apple and went to Microsoft due to WSL, and are yet to actually give money to GNU/Linux OEMs.

ye olde price=utility.

For the past few years I've felt the same way; I've been wrestling with these feelings since the release of the 2016 MacBook Pro. I haven't upgraded my Macs past Mojave due to the loss of 32-bit application support in Catalina (I still depend on some 32-bit applications) and due to the increased iOS-ification of macOS (e.g., certain UI decisions, notarization). However, for a while I lamented the lack of alternatives that are as polished as even Snow Leopard was, which was released in 2009. I would be very happy if there were a version of Snow Leopard with security updates.

For laptops, I've decided to go back to Windows after 15 years of using Macs; I replaced my 2013 MacBook Air with a Microsoft Surface Pro 7 running Windows 10. I'm happy with the purchase; the Surface Pro 7 is an excellent tablet, and Windows Subsystem for Linux has made using Windows more pleasant for me since I spend a lot of time in the terminal. For desktops, as of this moment I'm still using a 2013 Mac Pro as my daily driver, running Mojave. Eventually I would like to replace this with a Ryzen 7 or Ryzen 9 build that will probably run FreeBSD.

I'm keeping my eye on the Hello desktop (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) for FreeBSD, which appears to have the goal of providing a desktop environment that is heavily influenced by pre-Yosemite Mac OS X's Aqua interface. If this desktop gains traction, then hopefully there will be applications written that are conformant to Hello's UI guidelines, which are based on pre-Yosemite's Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

I lament the state of personal computing these days, and I wish there were more investment in desktop computing; I talk more about it here (http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/where-did-perso...). If I were independently wealthy, then I'd work on this.

Notarisation actually appeared in Mojave, though it was not yet required. I also don't like Apple having to validate every app I run. Sure it adds security but in this case it depends on the decisions of hundred-billion-dollar company. Whose interests are probably not 100% aligned with my own. I miss the ability to override things when I deem it necessary.

Hello desktop looks good indeed, though a but too early for me too. Right now I use KDE on FreeBSD. It's a bit too 'Windowsy' but Gnome is far too much 'new Apple', taking away user choice, so it's not an option for me.

Same thing happened to me too. I prepared myself for a year or so by replacing everything with an equivalent open-source project. Taught myself Vim so I could use those bindings in editors instead of the standard Apple ones. Then I made the switch, and it was pretty seamless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com