Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

I find myself appreciating the more controversial changes, like reversed scrolling and hidden scrollers. I followed Gruber's advice and suppressed the impulse to switch the defaults back to Snowpard behaviors and find that I'm less happy when I have to use Snowpard now.

Meanwhile:

* Mail.app under Lion is the best mail UX they've ever shipped. It's not a small improvement over Snowpard; it has a more reasonable layout now that makes Smart Folders make more sense, and search seems to have been completely rebuilt and actually works now.

* I find myself liking Mission Control enough not to mind not having vertical virtual desktop arrangements.

* Preview can sign documents now!

* The Filevault fix is huge for me (Filevault is now a bona fide block level FDE), since it means I don't have to use PGP WDE, which was a debacle.

My sense of it is, there is zero opportunity for someone to compete with Apple and Microsoft on conventional desktop operating systems, and the problems O'Reilly has with OS X are not generally going to be shared by people like my dad, who are (a) the only people Apple really cares about because (b) they're where all the money is.

Briefly though, (as another user who switched from Mac OS X), I can certainly give examples of what he says:

Not all of these are specific to OS X, its the overall hardware and software that is getting frustrating.

More user-hostile

- If you replace your SuperDrive with another drive, you CAN NOT boot any operating system (other than Apple's) off usb drives or even external DVD drives plugged into usb slots. So with two hard drives, you can not install Windows or Linux. [1]

- Batteries are not considered user-swappable anymore. [2]

More buggy

- Battery life degradation when moving from SL to Lion. Apple forums are full of examples. [3] (78 page thread, no confirmation or fix from Apple).

- We all know how annoying the switch to Mission Control was, right?

[1] http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1125135

[2] http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1756

[3] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194235?start=0&tst...

[Edit: formatting]

I'm really just waiting to see what post-Lion OS X looks like, and if they keep moving towards iOS/iPhone, then I really don't want anything to do with Apple. I don't need a computer/OS from a phone company.

In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize sweetspot.

When I click the Maximize button on OSX, it doesn't actually maximize the window 99% of the time, it just picks a seemingly random size. I saw an app a while ago that would let you control how your OSX apps are resized when you maximize them, but if I have to buy an app just to make my OS do what it should do anyway, there's something wrong.

I need 10 different apps on a Mac just to do what I can do out of the box in Ubuntu. Nautilus can access Windows network shares, SSH/SFTP/FTP access, and can mount NTFS, HFS, and pretty much any other filesystem type there is.

On a new linux machine I can apt-get most anything, but if I do need to compile something I just apt-get build-essentials and I'm ready to go, on OSX you have to download a DVD just to be able to compile stuff from source.

I just want to see hidden files in Finder, why is that so hard? Why do I have to google it and use a 3+ key combination to enable showing hidden files? I'm all for keyboard shortcuts, I'm a keyboard man, but until I learn and memorize them, you should put them in the menu where I can find them with a little hunting.

And that reminds me, why can't I type a path in Finder? I prefer an address bar, where I can type a path to a directory I want to view, but noooo, I have to click around, and if it's a really deep folder I'm trying to get to I'm screwed.

I like Home and End keys. Where are they?

In the default Terminal app, there are no shortcuts (at least none that I could figure out) for moving around the text I'm typing quickly, like going forward and back a whole word, or going Home or End, you have to hold down the left or right arrows for a while.

Maybe for some people this locked down, dumbed down environment works for them. Maybe some people love learning the myriad of keyboard shortcuts needed to get stuff done on a Mac, but I prefer Ubuntu, I can get stuff done a lot faster and without wanting to kill myself.

That said, I agree that Mac OS X is not getting better. It needs to change. Everything since about 10.3 to today has been fairly incremental, and OS X is showing its age (ever wonder why Apple never changed to OS XI? It's because they're all the same...).

It's also showing that it doesn't have any real push at Cupertino to get better. No-one is driving OS X. Hardware is being driven by Johny Ive, software was arguably being pushed by Jobs, but it's clear that he was only interested in iOS for years. I'd note that iOS is going the same way as Mac OS X: stagnating in the face of competition that is doing more interesting things (amazingly, that competition is Microsoft!).

I feel like Apple is a company that rests on its laurels until the market practically forces it to change. The change that's coming for Mac OS X is that it will go away altogether. I think Steve hated it, and was waiting for the time when they could sell you iOS only. The only reason they keep Mac OS X around is for developers, and Apple aren't exactly known for making them happy.

Microsoft's dual-paradigm Windows 8 shows it's not that crazy. I think Mac OS X has an expiry date of about 5 years from now.

His specific complaint was that he couldn't find the Library folder to delete his mail. Two things to keep in mind: first off, people who set up Mail extremely rarely will want to delete their email. So on the list of use cases to optimize for, that one lives near the bottom of the ladder. Secondly, the Library folder is, for all intents and purposes, something that should have been hidden to begin with. The kind of stuff that goes into a Library folder goes into hidden directories on other OSes anyway (think Application Settings on Windows, or .config, .gnome2, .kde on Linux). The fact that Apple only just now got around to hiding a folder that did nothing but clutter up the home directory for most users is significantly more surprising than the fact that it's hidden.

There was another complaint, which was that upon putting the relevant files in the Trash, attempting to empty it yielded file in use errors. That is indeed a problem, but he complains that he can't skip all of them, and that this is an old issue. So how this is related to OS X getting worse is unclear. It's definitely extremely annoying, but then I also don't think people find themselves deleting thousands of files of which several are in use very often. That said, one wonders what was using those files (unless he'd forgotten to quit Mail, but I doubt that).

Basically, “the latest frustration”, his leading example of something that is “worse in Lion than in Snow Leopard”, seems to not be a very good example at all. What's missing are the ”so many [other] things”. I want to hear them, because I haven't found too many, and I think it would be interesting to see what others genuinely think is worse. Some disagree with the changes in Spaces, for example, which is understandable. What else?

Your application determines the initial size and position of a window, which is called the standard state. If the user changes a window’s size or location by at least 7 points, the new size and location is the called the user state. The user can toggle between the standard state and the user state by clicking the zoom button in the title bar. Follow the guidelines in this section so that users can have the zoom experience they expect.

Choose a standard state that is best suited for the tasks your app enables. A document window, for example, should show as much as possible of the document’s content. Don’t assume that the standard state should be as large as the current display permits; instead, determine a size that makes it convenient for users to use your app. If appropriate, you can allow users to take some app windows full screen if they want more space.

Adjust the standard state when appropriate. The user can’t change the standard state that defines a window’s initial position and size, but your app can do so, based on other settings. For example, a word processor might define a standard that accommodates the display of a document whose width is specified in the Page Setup dialog.

Respond appropriately when the user zooms. When the user zooms a window that is in the user state, your app should make sure that size defined by the standard state is appropriate in the current context. Specifically, move the window as little as possible to make it the standard size, while at the same time keeping the entire window on the screen. The zoom button should not cause the window to fill the entire screen unless that was the last state the user set.

If the user zooms a window in a multidisplay system, the standard state should be on the display that contains the largest portion of the window, not necessarily on the display that contains the menu bar. This means that if the user moves a window between displays, the window’s position in the standard state could be on different displays at different times. The standard state for any window must always be fully contained on a single display.

Don’t allow a zoomed window to overlap the Dock. You always want to make sure that users have full use of both your windows and the Dock. For more information about the Dock, see “The Dock.”

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserEx...

By hiding the Library folder, Apple isn't trying to be hostile: most users never need to access anything in this folder. Users who are advanced enough to be grubbing around inside the Library should also be advanced enough to know that you can easily get to it via command-shift-g "~/Library". Obviously it also shows up in the Terminal. Apple's merely hidden it from view inside the Finder.

OS X is a usability nightmare for me, slowing me down even after many years of using it and trying to adapt to its ways. Lion is buggy on top of that (never ending wifi troubles).

Linux has huge driver issues and the package managers make me think like a data center sysadmin rather than the sole user of a dev workstation that I am.

And Windows is horrible as a development platform unless you stay slavishly within Microsoft's overpriced ecosystem.

But ranting about this is probably pointless. There will not be a new OS any time soon. It's just too difficult even for the largest corporations to start from scratch.

I have some issues with Lion, but they are grounded primarily in my complete satisfaction with Snow Leopard and lack of desire to change (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).

When Tim says "there were many things worse in Snow Leopard than in Leopard," I cannot recall a single one. In fact, the Snow Leopard release was undoubtedly a very well received one.

Then a bunch of people will pop up and explain how to achieve most of the things that are complained about; or explain that they're not problems but features. (The green pseudo-maximise being my most frustrating example.)

What people seem to miss is that discoverability is lousy in OSs. HN isn't read by stupid people who are un-used to tech. So why are what should be simple features either hard to find, or not present? Why do HN readers struggle with simple aspects of modern OSs? Apple (rightly, IMO) gets a lot of praise for usability. MS spent a lot of money on usability testing. Both of them have some awful awful things going on.

My example of a hard to find feature: In windows XP when you copy many files from one directory into another directory you'll get a dialog saying "The folder already contains" etc, with 4 options, [YES][YES TO ALL][NO][CANCEL]. There was a secret option of [NO TO ALL] if you held shift and clicked no.

Link bait.

I still prefer the windows UI to the others. Ubuntu, especially Unity feels always like a step behind the windows UI. In the latest release the taskbar won't stick, they took away the start menu, and menus are stuck at the top of the screen like osx.

I like in windows how I can drag the window to the side or the screen and it expands to fill just the half. Of if I drag the border to the top it will auto-expand the window vertically.

In OSX the max/minimize buttons are too small. And the task bar seems more visually appealing than practical (in windows it fills the whole bottom.) Also the download/install software process, it feels weird. Download a file, have it come up in some jump list, then mount it to the desktop where's there's usually 2 icons one saying to drag the other somewhere. Package management seems more straight forward in windows vs osx/linux. I do like XCode 4 though, I think how it works with tabs is much better.

Default Expose was terrible in Snow Leopard too (strict grid layout vs. the old natural spatial layout) but at least then there was a hack to get the old version back: http://superuser.com/questions/118424/old-leopard-expose-on-...

I think most anyone who is willing to accept that the world is undergoing a transition into a world where tablets coexist with laptops, etc., will embrace this time as a period of experimentation, rapid change, and creativity.

Take the mail example, Mail.app already lets him export his mail box, delete his mail etc. He never needed to rifle through ~/Library to get at it. However if he's tech savvy enough to want to do it the manual way, then he should know how to fire up the terminal to access ~/Library, or more simply by holding the option key and choosing "Library" from the go menu. I don't this is breaking osx.

While I can't vouch for why he has a magnitude of locked files, given the mail example I have a fair idea of how he's gotten in that situation. While os x does give him the option to gloss past certain locked files. He's likely seeing the error because he's removed files which are "spoken for" (i.e in use), these are often located in ~/Library and it's kind of the point of why ~/Library is hidden. Again, if he wants to be tech-savvy, he should just rm the files, or rm the contents of the trash folder. (Or if it was mail.app responsible, just originally remove the mail from inside Mail.app)

OSX certainly has some way to go in addressing this kind of mixed level behaviour, but it's not going to stop you from shooting yourself in the foot.

About the other features: while I don't appreciate the iOS-ificiation of mac os, it's trivial to turn these learning-curve reducing features off, and on laptops I find they make more sense than they do when using a mouse + keyboard.

Some of my favorites are: mission control is much better than exposé + spaces which I could never really put to great use. Fullscreen mode is very cool (although it sucks with multi-monitors, hopefully they'll fix that). Finally the ability to resize windows from every corner. Autosave. Remembering open windows. New gestures are great once you internalize them. What Apple is doing with sandboxing is really a revolution in PC security even if the costs are high to user and developer freedom.

I'm pretty concerned about the App Store model and the future implications, but so far Apple is still doing amazing UX work. I imagine at some point I will have to go Linux if Apple keeps tightening their grip, but that day is not yet here.

Why?

1. They have lost their Zen design philosophy - it has come to the point of ridiculousness with the new features in Lion; features for the sake of features. Since Steve is gone, there is probably no way back.

2. They have lost their perceived moral superiority - system closedness, App Store censorship, sueing people left and right, don't seem to care one bit about chinese labour conditions; they are worse than Microsoft or IBM ever were.

3. They have lost their coolness - the cool kids dig free, independent software; they are not the "Think different." company anymore, they attract people who desperately seek to belong to the masses. They attract sheeple who buy an iPad to tell their friends that they, too, have an iPad.

Summary: The Apple of today is a heartless consumer electronics giant, just like and worse than any other out there. It still sucks the last drops of blood out of the spirit it used to have in the past.

OSX is a non-contender in my book because of its complete disregard for the standard Unix directory structure, its use of registry files, its ancient BSD utilities last updated in the '90s, and its lack of a package manager that actually integrates with the rest of the system. Of course the window manager sucks too, but that's only if you judge according to functionality. To be a Mac aficionado, you've got to judge only according to how slick the UI looks. Right?

Zooom/2, which lets me move and resize windows with my positioned anywhere on the window, activated with customizable key combinations. http://coderage-software.com/zooom/index_green/index.html

SizeUp, which lets me position and resize the activate window with customizable keyboard shortcuts. One common use case is to make one window take up the left half of the screen, and another the right half, if I'm working on something that needs information from both. http://irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

Personal recommendation: http://www.archlinux.org & http://awesome.naquadah.org/ -- a nice compromise between easy configurability and the "suckless" simplicity mentality.

1. That issue of windows not resizing is generally a complaint made by native Windows users who are already used to that property. I'm not saying this makes it an invalid complaint, just putting it in context.

2. Compared with Linux, Mac OS X has more support (this doesn't mean it's superior). Compared with Windows, Mac OS X (at least in my experience) is more sensitive to power users and coders, and people who know what they're doing more. Now, I've used different distributions of Linux, and ideally, I love Linux most. But it just doesn't have as much support as Mac OS X because proprietary backing breeds rapid progress (in the sense of universal or near universal support at least). Sometimes you have to fork your own solution when you're confronted with a problem in Linux. This also happens in OS X, but often times, there's more trouble shooting advice or solutions freely available and accessible. Just a perspective.

Meanwhile the end users adopted it imediately and never looked back. Most of the complaints in the article are about features that we as developers love but that end users could care less about.

As a developer I love getting in to my Library folder and changing stuff around. I love backing my computer up manually and not using Time Machine. I love having complete control of my windows and applications.

But most users don't care. Most users never touch their Library folder and don't need to. Thats why its hidden. Most users don't need to back up their mail because its all on Gmail. Most users love the app store where they don't have to search all over the internet for a simple app.

Mac OS is an end user centric operating system and it always has been. Developers and hackers will have to make some tweaks to the basic OS to make it work the way they want. Honestly looking up a few keyboard shortcuts, enabling hidden folders and installing homebrew isn't that hard.

I understand what Tim is saying, but I disagree that it's time to start over.

With Mac OS X, Apple definitely seems to have begun heavily focusing on feature development over refining existing UX. But the claim that successive releases of OS X become more user-hostile and encourages more lock-in is a bit of a stretch.

Apple has never developed for the power user, and they never should -- this is part of what makes their products so great; their unrelenting focus on the common case. In fact, complaining about a hidden library file for Mail.app misses this point entirely. It's actually a wonderful feature, since the common user is more likely to mess up their own mail library than to have a need to move it between disks.

+Tim O'Reilly's second point is valid, though, the UX for emptying the trash can definitely be improved. But again, is the common case deleting 400,000 files? Is the "delete whatever you can checkbox" too odd for a normal user to understand? Let's take the mom example; if your mom emptied the trash after deleting a file, would she want to know if it couldn't be emptied, or would she be OK with it being emptied without her recently deleted file actually being removed?

People can yell for a OS do-over all they want. The fact remains though: Apple focuses on UX more than any other company I know. If that UX doesn't cater to your particular needs and you'd rather have power-user flexibility and features, even if it means less polish and more annoyances when dealing with common tasks, use Linux or Windows. Or, better yet, just learn to use the Terminal and you can have the best of both worlds.

http://tim.oreilly.com/pub/a/linux/2006/06/01/switching-back...

I would like things to be more consistent. In fact, if I were in charge, I would want this button to be a maximize button by default, while using the Option (i.e. Alt) key should alter the behavior to the second option which is to resize to the best fit for window content.

But this may need debate since now we have fullscreen mode for apps in Lion.

In regards to his question about future OSes, anyone think about a browser/cloud based OS like ChromeOS or JoliCloud being able to save him? These are the future of OSes so it would seem natural to look to them to create that simpleness he's complaining about.

Tim says the Library folder is hidden (power users would quickly change this, and several other things), and that the trashing system (or any copying/moving) is not as good as Windows. I do like W7's copy dialog, but it's very wordy, nothing in OSX would be that wordy.

Your first problem is that you started deleting stuff from a folder that Apple now deems wise to hide. With all due respect, why on earth would you start from the ~/Library folder? Why not delete these from the Mail client?

You can even "backup" from inside Mail.app. (Right click a folder > Export) Also, if you really want the Library folder, you can just go to Finder > Go > (Hold option) Library

There are real criticisms to be aired, this is not one of them.

Snow Leopard was more solid than Leopard. Lion followed Snow Leopard and does admittedly have more bugs. A "streak" of one isn’t a streak at all.

This transitional period poses a huge problem for Apple and looks to be the cause of most complaints I've seen. What are they going to do about the power users who were their early adopters? Is an 'admin' or 'power user' mode appropriate?

For instance, checking emails in mail.app is shift+command+N. Or changing the presentation mode in iTunes or Preview is alt+command+[3-6]. Because of my Azerty keyboard, it's actually shift+alt+command+[3-6].

Isn't one modifier key enough?

Easy install of apps, auto update of the OS, really easy to use, sync across loads of computers, runs on any laptop or pc that can run XP, and is FAST.

I have it on a netbook and also as a dual boot on y pc, and I now rarely boot to Windows.

That said, I have my most productive dev environment now on Lion. The speed with which I can move between apps write code, compile, test, etc, is actually starting to push my laptop.

Apple does certain things for a reason. If you disagree with Apple's reasoning behind something specific and want to change it, then change it yourself. Most commenters complaining about OS X can count the number of grievances they have with their fingers.

When you use rm it does not put things in the trash, but removes them directly. The open command can open anything, even "hidden" things.

Meh. Give me Linux. In a few years, I'll be 100% Linux I figure.

[0] http://mizage.com/#macdivvy

I remember a time when O'Reilly books were the golden standard for things like Perl, Python et al. Nowadays it seems like they are producing crap, half-written books by the ton.

Oreillynet was also, one time, one of the best places to go for nice, informative articles and tutorials. Nowadays it's just an assortment of lame blog entries and book promotions.

And don't let me get started on "Safari books online", a sub par reading experience if I ever saw one.