Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

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> Leopard to Mountain Lion were the glory days of OS X stability, with Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, and High Sierra standing out as focusing on bug fixes rather than introducing new features (and new bugs).

This is a common misconception. Major OS updates always introduce more bugs than they fix. Bertrand Serlet put up a "No New Features" keynote slide for Snow Leopard, but that was highly misleading, because Snow Leopard had many big under the hood changes, and the early versions of Snow Leopard had some nasty bugs. You can go back and look at the old Mac OS X release notes to see the descriptions of the bug fixes. What was different about Snow Leopard than today is that it received a full 2 years of nothing but bug fixes. The Snow Leopard people remember fondly was 10.6.8 v1.1 not 10.6.0, which was much buggier than its predecessor 10.5.8.

The current yearly major OS update schedule is death for quality, because there's never enough time to fix the bugs. The engineers always have to turn around and start working on the next big thing, never fix the current big then. There's no solution except more time between major updates.

The other difference between now and the past is that now Apple is immediately pushing everyone to update, whereas new major Mac OS X versions used to be paid rather than free, so there was a lot more lag, you had to go to the store and purchase new discs in order to upgrade, and a lot more users were sticking with the older versions.

> This is a common misconception.

This is vague.

> Major OS updates always introduce more bugs than they fix.

This was my major point.

> Bertrand Serlet put up a "No New Features" keynote slide for Snow Leopard, but that was highly misleading, because Snow Leopard had many big under the hood changes,

But no new features. The major goals of Snow Leopard were to improve performance and reduce its memory footprint (by removing a lot of PPC code). What was nice about it, and what my point was, Apple had 2 years for bug fixes.

> and the early versions of Snow Leopard had some nasty bugs. You can go back and look at the old Mac OS X release notes to see the descriptions of the bug fixes. What was different about Snow Leopard than today is that it received a full 2 years of nothing but bug fixes.

Yes, thank you, this is the entire point of my criticism of annual upgrades in that a year is not enough time to fix bugs before introducing instability and new bugs in a major release.

> The Snow Leopard people remember fondly was 10.6.8 v1.1 not 10.6.0, which was much buggier than its predecessor 10.5.8.

Thank you for the straw man, but, in fact, this was my entire argument against major annual releases. I'm not sure who expects point zero software to be bug free. I would actually prefer that major releases stop entirely unless there are fundamental changes, such as a new platform.

> The current yearly major OS update schedule is death for quality, because there's never enough time to fix the bugs. The engineers always have to turn around and start working on the next big thing, never fix the current big then. There's no solution except more time between major updates.

>< This is like Scooby Doo. Thank you for making me into Thelma, Fred.

> The other difference between now and the past is that now Apple is immediately pushing everyone to update, whereas new major Mac OS X versions used to be paid rather than free, so there was a lot more lag, you had to go to the store and purchase new discs in order to upgrade, and a lot more users were sticking with the older versions.

This is a fair point, except for the part about Apple pushing upgrades. Unrestrained users push themselves with no regard to what they're using continuing to work. Though software updates can be configured automatically by the user, and security updates are pushed, Apple isn't pushing upgrades, and I don't think the OS can be configured to upgrade automatically, only update.

> > Major OS updates always introduce more bugs than they fix.

> This was my major point.

I don't think your words said what you thought you might have meant: "with Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, and High Sierra standing out as focusing on bug fixes rather than introducing new features (and new bugs)"

Major updates never focus on bug fixes rather than introducing new features (and new bugs). Otherwise they wouldn't need major updates at all, they'd just keep releasing minor bug fix updates. There's nothing really special about 10.6.0 (Snow Leopard), 10.8.0 (Mountain Lion), or 10.13 (High Sierra) compared to other major releases. These were all much buggier than the previous stable release.

> Yes, thank you, this is the entire point of my criticism of annual upgrades in that a year is not enough time to fix bugs before introducing instability and new bugs in a major release.

Except the annual release cycle actually started with Mountain Lion, which was 1 year after Lion, and High Sierra was also 1 year after Sierra, but you put them in the "the glory days of OS X stability".

> Apple isn't pushing upgrades, and I don't think the OS can be configured to upgrade automatically, only update.

I wasn't talking about automatic upgrades, I was talking about how macOS annoyingly advertises new major updates, for example in Software Update, and even permanently badging your System Preferences Dock icon until you upgrade. This didn't occur in the days when major updates were on physical discs.

> I don't think your words said what you thought you might have meant

> Except the annual release cycle actually started with Mountain Lion, which was 1 year after Lion, and High Sierra was also 1 year after Sierra, but you put them in the "the glory days of OS X stability".

They mean what I said, but I'm certain now that instead, you did this, but let's see if this helps

>>>> Leopard to Mountain Lion were the glory days of OS X stability,

COMMA (NEXT STATEMENT AND NEW THOUGHT)-->

>>>> with Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, and High Sierra standing out as focusing on bug fixes rather than introducing new features (and new bugs).

> I was talking about how macOS annoyingly advertises new major updates, for example in Software Update, and even permanently badging your System Preferences Dock icon until you upgrade.

I don't think your words said what you meant and/or I made a poor assumption by your use of "pushing" in the context of "updates" or upgrades. Apple did start to push out security patches for supported OS versions, but you meant notices, or nags, of available OS upgrades. These can be avoided by disabling push notifications via the gui[1] or more permanently using the Terminal and launchd to disable push notifications:

     sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist

or by completely disabling Software Update

      sudo launchctl unload -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.softwareupdate*

or less permanently disable automatic software updates with the defaults command (duplicating the gui method)

     sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate AutomaticDownload -boolean FALSE

Outdated, but easily modernized for current macOS, and still my favorite list of disabling things.[2] Here is a nice source of defaults commands,[3] though the script is personalized for the author, I've only copied out what I wanted. Here's a similar script to pick through (blindly run scripts at own extreme risk).[4]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-turn-off-...

[2] http://tech.masterofsql.com/os-x/unload-disable-unwanted-age...

[3] https://gist.github.com/mvanbaak/e98b7b622ea2c8ab626d51cb88e...

[4] https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/main/.macos

> But no new features. The major goals of Snow Leopard were to improve performance and reduce its memory footprint (by removing a lot of PPC code). What was nice about it, and what my point was, Apple had 2 years for bug fixes.

But there were major features, but they were not user facing. Snow Leopard introduced Grand Central Dispatch, improvements to Objective-C, things like that are major changes, more significant than simply changing the way the UI looks.

High Sierra introduced APFS, a major major change. Sierra was probably a better release as far as no new features, they fixed the USB stack they broke in El Capitan.

Mountain Lion introduced iCloud related stuff like notifications I think.

The releases that you believe are stable because of no new features, actually have major new features, but the guys writing the low level code are more talented than the guys writing the UI code, that's why those releases are more stable.

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