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Been using Macs exclusively, since the iPhone came out. At some point I noticed a "do not disturb" icon displayed on the top UI bar, something that somehow got turned on after upgrading to Ventura. It took over half an hour of googling and trying random shit before I was able to turn it off. Yes, Settings is a UI disaster, even ignoring that...

Goofy shit like this randomly happens, particularly after OS upgrades. I remember some crazy hell where I couldn't finish the OS install on a new Mac, because Apple decided that Apple IDs must be email addresses, and my ancient ID was not. Required a call to customer support.

And the "untrusted developer" shit always bites me in the ass every couple months or so... It is particularly painful when using pro audio interfaces, which will just suddenly stop working every now and then. It requires a magic key-press during a reboot to clear some kind of special RAM.

Except that spotlight doesn't find all system settings. And I've already ran into a bug where the system settings dialog loses sync with the configuration requiring the app to restart. And also had settings pane just turn blank.

It’s fine if search is a way to use System Preferences. The problem I have is that since they turned it into a “big list” search is essentially the only way I can use it. They destroyed the spatiality of the app that had created grooves in my brain over the last 20 years. Now it is very disorienting to use because I can’t efficiently browse for things.

I love comments like these. Pure macOS Stockholm Syndrome. “Sometimes some things are a pain but it’s pointless to groan about it.” I mean you do you, but don’t blame other people for finding some of these issues more than they can stand.

> I don't think I've touched the preferences "app" since I initially setup my mac studio. The moaning and groaning about how bad it is just seems so.....pointless to me.

Have you considered that other people have usage requirements different from yours?

Of course there's not much reason to complain about System Settings if you never use it, but that's missing the point.

His usage requirements is using it only once when he sets up his computer, which is probably a good thing for a preferences app. It works well for him, why shouldn't be able to say so? So we can keep this thread strictly about complaining?

You could copy paste your comment to everyone here, "have you considered that other people use it differently".

> It works well for him, why shouldn't be able to say so?

That's not all the commenter said. "The moaning and groaning about how bad it is just seems so.....pointless to me."

If System Settings is fine for the commenter, that's great for the commenter. (Although "I virtually never use it" isn't exactly a great response to "It's virtually unusable" or a great defense of System Settings.) However, the commenter is criticizing other people for complaining about it, and that's not justified.

He undermines his own point. He says he has no problem with System Preferences, and then essentially says he never uses it, explaining why he would have no problem with it.

* People complain about system preferences but I use spotlight to find settings when I need them*

This is exactly how I do it, and I also do it this way in Ubuntu. And in both OSes, I hide docks/apps.

Ubuntu has spotlight?

I'm sure you already know it doesn't contain spotlight itself, which belongs to Apple.

There exist equivalents that have exactly that same functionality as described above. I don't know what GNOME uses, but KDE's krunner searches system settings, user files and applications, bookmarks, browser tabs, solves arithmetic and unit conversions, does spell checking, searches the web, searches active windows, applications and workspaces, etc.. It's configurable with many plugins available. I expect GNOME's system works similarly.

I'm specifically speaking of Ubuntu's version of Gnome, I guess. Press the Super key and a search box appears, a la MacOS's Spotlight. This is how I open apps. There are likely nuances about what is searchable, but in practice it feels the same to me.

> Homebrew still chugging along.

For seven years longer and with 20K more ports than Homebrew, and without leaving a mess on your system or munging permissions, so is MacPorts.

Does Homebrew still have those issues on newer Macs with the /opt/homebrew prefix? I don’t use either at the moment but last time I looked at Homebrew it looked like they had changed the way it installed, at least on Apple silicon Macs.

The default install location for Apple Silicon and Intel is different, for some reason. I got weird problems when many bottles were still Intel-only, but now everything is good. So unless you hate /opt/homebrew, it’s great!

I'm using Nix now on my macOS installs, so I might not be totally correct the current situation. But yeah, I believe most of those sorts of issues have gone away with the new prefix.

There's still some weird annoyances for me, though. For example, it's still intended for single-user mode only. The best solution I came up with was to create a separate user for Homebrew and then basically alias `brew` to `sudo -H -u homebrew brew`.

And generally, if you attempt to use a non-standard prefix, such as in your home directory, packages will have to be built from source. I understand why, but it sucks because this means when you need x86-only packages via Rosetta, you're stuck with the old `/usr/bin` prefix, unless you want to and can build from source.

Also, in general, maintaining multiple prefixes/architectures is annoying too. I wish the default command allowed me to just pass `--arch amd64/arm64` or something when installing packages