Every version had its bugs at release and were mostly fixed after a few point releases. If I recall, the only one that was fine from the start was 10.6 Snow Leopard, and that was only because 10.5 Leper was so bad.
Snow Leopard had a bug where using the guest account would wipe the data from the main account.
For me the tooling on MacOS is the only advantage that it offers. I am familiar with it which makes some tasks quite easy and the platform more powerful for me than Windows.
The latter offers alternatives by now and they are quite good as well. Powershell is in parts just a bit more modern than the average Linux shell or you can just install a Linux subsystem to begin with. For me it was a bit late to the party though, but this is one part where Windows really did improve a lot.
But both closed source OS have become worse overall. This isn't some nostalgia the parent hints at, there are certain features that can establish that pretty clearly. From ads to account requirements or thorough suggestions at least.
I had started using OSX with Jaguar on my G4 PowerBook and Snow Leopard doesn’t stand out in my mind. I liked Lion more because it had full disk encryption and AirDrop.
It was faster, smaller, did just as much as leopard, just solid.
While I have soft spots for 10.2 as that’s when OS X finally became usable and 10.4 when it overtook Windows there’s not a chance I’d want to use any of the older versions on a daily basis - it’s never been better than it is now.
I have both in my collection. Including one tattered 2006 first-gen Intel MBP that I picked up from a trash heap and restored.
Every time I open that MBP up, the design makes me feel like a high-roller Hollywood producer. I was just thinking the other day that I wish I could have that machine with M1/M2 guts inside of it.
Those plastic MacBooks are also a joy to sit in front of.
And though I thought the unibody MacBooks/Pros looked spaced aged at the time, they kind of look unsightly today. Those black bezels are huge and obnoxious, and give the laptop a raccoon look.
It does for me. It was the first Intel-only release and at the time I had G4 Powerbook. I was quite pissed at Apple at the time.
Personal favorite release was 10.9/Mavericks.
I don’t feel like MacOS is any more locked down than before. I think that is just a thing people say because it aligns with their computing philosophy and makes it easy to hate on Apple.
Heh
2) XQuartz took a while, but is doing well.
3) was a big one in making upstream wine not work. with wine32on64 you can sure still pull the pinball party trick, but building that thing takes too much.
4) was specifically SIP for me, especially when they started making updates break with system changes. The ntfs-3g automount thing has always relied on replacing mount_ntfs [which is, by the way, not the proper way to make an fs on a Mac -- there's some filesystem bundle business], and now it's too much of a pain to still access the Windows drive.