macOS Sonoma is available today
apple.com
apple.com
I have no problem with Apple bundling these apps and making them work seamlessly together, and I don't even mind that they're all updated simultaneously (except for Safari, which I wish I could update independently without relying on the "Technology Preview" beta channel). But I do have a problem with upgrading my entire OS and disabling the new bloatware features just because I want to keep auto-updates enabled. I used to delay updating and then would end up way behind, which is why I enrolled in auto-update. But now it feels like I'm being held hostage to their update schedule.
And for what benefit? There are hardly any useful OS-level changes in this release, but there are a bunch of new features I'll need to disable (while hoping the next auto-update doesn't break my external monitor), all powered by freshly written code contributing to an expanded attack surface. If I had my way, then I'd take the OS updates and skip all the apps. Keep the attack surface small while still meaningfully improving the core. I don't care about the rest.
Every time I hit some button on my keyboard and the Music app opens asking me to create an account I am reminded how hostile all commercial operating systems are.
At least it’s easy enough to turn off.
It's useful for people like me who want to know when new albums are released.
1: https://www.macworld.com/article/673923/why-is-apple-called-...).
Which, incidentally, was a tremendous return.
It is not new to iOS 17 - well it might be for your setup but others have had these issues with earlier versions.
iOS has to assume what you mean with play OverCast. Maybe there are other people that wanted the device to play the band? This is such an edge-case which is easily solved by further specifying your prompt.
It should have confirmed that you're fine with subscribing if that's what you have to do to listen to the band. And it's also fine to play the wrong band if you have a subscription already.
I mean, I'm using a GUI that is really primitive by comparison to Win/Mac (i3wm) but it's actually great. Extremely fast, efficient, and stays out of my way. There is literally no mechanism in the OS to pop up a notification or bounce an icon or blink anything at me. It couldn't interrupt me and piss me off even if some piece of software wanted to. It's amazing. Nothing updates on its own, and the OS runs very very few services or other background stuff -- basically only whatever I have explicitly configured and enabled. Again, awesome. I'm easily aware of every single process that runs on this machine, and if there's one I don't know about, there's comprehensive documentation about it, including how to configure it. That's honestly effectively impossible for someone using Mac or Windows.
Oh, I just installed a security patch in about 20 seconds. Open terminal (winkey->enter), "doas syspatch -c", type pass, see there's a patch, "doas syspatch" to apply it, done in 2 seconds. Once I reboot the newly-patched kernel is active. There is full documentation of the patch, including why it's needed, how the patch resolves the issue, and a diff of the patch is included.
But, I cannot fathom how using OpenBSD on a Desktop/Laptop for personal computing would NoT enrage me everyday. The things I’d do on my personal computer :
1. Browse all bloated modern websites using a modern web browser - Firefox
2. Work with photos(personal) - edit them, crop them to share with someone, markup screenshots to put in docs etc.
3. Use PDFs without worrying about formats, markup on them as needed, fill forms on PDFs.
4. Media - playback audio and video. Without worrying about whether I have the right codecs or file formats.
Wouldn’t OpenBSD make me constantly fight against its opinionated safety first way of doing things? Sure, one can run Firefox on OpenBSD, but would it play YouTube and Netflix without making me pull my hair?
I can install ffmpeg, relevant codecs, PDF tools, Darktable or other Unix friendly photo tools, but wouldn’t that be a constant fight and tweaking to keep them running?
As for myself I got lazy and just use Windows 10. It doesn't enrage me if you turn off all the cloud shit, treat it like a file manager/window manager shell and run all your open source stuff on it. Again that works because there's a clear separation of OS and applications.
When you start mixing the two (hello Linux) it's where you get problems. I think snaps were an attempt to solve some of that (badly).
Trying installing the default .iso of Fedora workstation or Ubuntu-latest and see all the things Gnome brings along.. Maps, Photos, IM client, even a bundled browser (Evolution or something) that is based on Firefox but dependednt on the few Gnome packagers to keep up to date(instead of just letting the user download Firefox on their own or shipping the latest firefox).
Even Archlinux, if you install Gnome-desktop, you get all the cruft. You need to explicitly find a way to install just the minimal gnome desktop without all its apps.
OpenBSD however, for a server usecase, comes with a very cohesive, sane set of tools carefully maintained by the folks who ship OpenBSD. If anything, they are very conservative about adding stuff to that ecosystem.
The Gnome web browser is based on WebKit (Safari) not Gecko (Firefox): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Web
Is there a good resource/link you could point me to that will get me started using OpenBSD?
I've always read it's quite particular about hardware, and also I'm not even sure if or how well it plays in a multi boot scenario?
launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.rcd.plistAlso available on iTunes for a dollar, search for Samir Mezrahi (the blessed soul who made this).
And on the OS side, I feel like Apple is creating features that I instantly disable because they do the exact opposite of what I want.
$ du -hs /Applications/Xcode.app/
4.5G /Applications/Xcode.app/
A couple of years ago, I picked up Thinkpad P1 (Ryzen 4800U) and got settled with Arch + Plasma. I've never before had such a snappy, quiet, stable, 3 monitors, all hardware and software just working, fully customized, and empowering experience of using a computer and went years without needing to touch anything - as it was perfect.
It ended when I couldn't resist a new MBP 14, but I've been slowly accumulating nostalgia for my Linux setup since and will surely get back to it, hopefully when Asahi Linux completes support for external monitors.
I used to think the same, but I had to sell off the 2016 macbook pro because the keyboard was unusable, my 2019 macbook pro has already gone back for stuck arrow keys a year ago, and now the left command key is randomly sticking, which is really annoying because you never know which shortcut key will be triggered.
Compared to my 2010 macbook pro which was used without any repairs for close to 8 years.
Unless you all are buying new apple devices every year or two, I don't see how the "apple hardware is incredible" claim can be substantiated.
For me the Safari update is always a seperate update in System Preferences which I can install without updateing the OS
But I love the facts that I can tell my family to upgrade and they will have all the new stuff at once, like with an iPhone or iPad. That is for most users what they want and/or need.
I don't think you understand how helpful it is for "normal" users to push a button and have a brand new version of everything. And being afraid of new features that you don't use... pretty irrational.
I can. Great dev tools, and usually is ahead of other browsers in implementing web apis.
What Safari team presented at WWDC this year regarding PWAs as something revolutionary has been available in Chrome for years.
Microsoft has the issue that it's hard to sell why you would need to upgrade and not just update.
I do end up removing many of the Apple apps, but recently started using Safari, Notes, and Reminders more. Apple does an excellent job making their apps work seamlessly within the Apple ecosystem.
In a way it's a bit of a philosophical standpoint: macOS is the whole indivisible thing developed, built, and released in lockstep, kinda like FreeBSB base is the whole indivisible thing developed, built, and released in lockstep (and the rest is ports). In a way, removing tcsh from a FreeBSD install because you only ever use bash from ports does not make sense and may break things; so you just ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist.
I am sure this can be managed, but someone else may say they do not want to do it.
Warning: You are using macOS 11.
We (and Apple) do not provide support for this old version.
It is expected behaviour that some formulae will fail to build in this old version.
It is expected behaviour that Homebrew will be buggy and slow.
Do not create any issues about this on Homebrew's GitHub repositories.
Do not create any issues even if you think this message is unrelated.
Any opened issues will be immediately closed without response.
Do not ask for help from Homebrew or its maintainers on social media.
You may ask for help in Homebrew's discussions but are unlikely to receive a response.
Try to figure out the problem yourself and submit a fix as a pull request.
We will review it but may or may not accept it. export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1There are likely to be more issues related to Apple's switch to the `prime` linker.
(I’m a port contributor and am on macports-users where this issue has come up twice. There is what I think is excessive concern about the macOS beta NDA preventing the creation of a package installer until after GA when it no longer applies. A bigger problem is the availability of sufficient build hardware as they have a smallish Mac mini multi-booting into 11, 12, and 13.)
./configure && make && sudo make installThe homebrew team seems incredibly burnt-out, to the point of hostility. I've really enjoyed the nixpkgs community so far and encourage others to check it out; it hasn't replaced homebrew entirely for me (yet), but it's getting closer every day.
macOS could be a modular rolling release, but you need to milk the peasants from time to time
Macos 12 will run on most Macs from 2015 and later.
8 year old hardware isn't Earth shattering, but it's also not a "hostile" period of time for a non-commercial open source project to support. And it's certainly not "new hardware every year".
Old Macs are often perfectly usable in terms of hardware, but macOS security updates have left them behind.
As of today, it's likely that the 2016 Mac I'm writing this on (which can run Monterey but not Ventura or Sonoma) is out of support.
Of course the Mac apocalypse will be when x86 support is dropped, possibly starting in the next macOS release.
Once my (i)Macs stop receiving security updates though, I might try a Linux distro, just to give them a second life.
I have used it before and, in my experience and everyone else I know who has used it, the vast majority of time the newer versions run absolutely fine with no issues. Occasionally some newer features don't work, but I'd but confident that 2015/2017 iMacs would be able to run the latest version no problem.
Those both should still be getting security updates. Ventura just updated to 13.6 this morning, Monterey updated to 12.7 a few days ago, and Big Sur updated to 11.17.10 a little over two weeks ago.
Big Sur is expected to stop getting security updates in a couple months. Monterey will probably get them until sometime in the last quarter of 2024, which would be the end of the line for 2015 5K iMacs. 2017 5K iMacs should get Ventura security updates through the last quarter of 2025.
It's still my impression, that the 2017 Macs (sold by Apple well into 2018), should have made the cut for Sonoma. I don't even care about any of the new features. I'm more interested in bug and security fixes. So hopefully I have more time to hunt for the perfect display that can adequately replace the 5K 27" of my current setup. And I know there is the Studio Display. But that one is too expensive for me.
It's been that way for about a year and a half now and has not gotten any worse so I don't think I'm in any danger of suddenly needing a new Mac. The way my iMac happens to be on my desk I'm directly in front of a spot about 30% in from the left and most of my main focus is on the left side, so the bad pixels aren't too annoying.
The 27" 5120 x 2880 display has definitely spoiled me. I want something with a similar density and not much bigger or smaller than 27".
These seem to be the choices currently:
1. Apple Studio Display. As you've noted it is expensive. It also comes with a stand that does not have a height adjustment. Add $400 to get it with Apple's height adjustable stand. (Or for $0 get it with Apple's VESA mount adaptor instead of the standard stand, and buy your own stand. If you can find a VESA compatible height adjustable stand for less than $400 this is cheaper than buying Apple's stand).
One thing to not if like me you would really like a monitor that you can keep using for a very long time is that in 2021 Apple made a change to AppleCare. It used to be that you could buy at most a small fixed number of years of AppleCare. Now you can keep renewing AppleCare indefinitely.
For the Studio Display it is $49.99 per year. If the Studio Display is fine for someone except for the price, it might be worth considering if that plus $49.99 per year, which should let you keep it working for a long time, would make it worth it.
2. LG UltraFine 27MD5KL [1]. Supposedly this is the same LG panel that Apple used in the 5K 27" iMacs. Just under $1300. Seems to get good reviews.
3. Samsung ViewFinity S9 [2]. This is new. $1600 so same as Apple's price for the Studio Display, but the S9 is height adjustable and VESA compatible so no paying extra if you want height adjustability.
[1] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1500040-REG/lg_27md5k...
[2] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1760795-REG/samsung_l...
The Samsung display seems nice. But how long is Samsung going to support the devices OS? The price is also not competitive in my opinion. For 1600 I would prefer the Studio Display, even if it's not height adjusted.
I will probably wait for the next Mac mini model with the M3 SOC. Luckily I'm not in a hurry.
The way I see things Apple is completely responsible for this problem and should also be responsible for providing a decent solution at a reasonable price.
But currently the cheapest option (Basic M2 Mac Mini + Studio Display + Keyboard & Mouse) 2642€ instead of the previous 2100€ (inflation is unhinged in Apple land) and on top of being much more expensive for a way more locked down configuration (previously RAM was freely upgradable and SSD upgrade was involved but doable) it is not faster in a way that match the price increase or even better than what Intel has been doing. In fact the truly faster is mostly single thread performance (42% better), multicore is a just bit faster (21%) and GPU is actually slower (-14%). In other words : for much more money you gain a bit not in way that is change what it possible to do with the computer but you also lose in a way that make some things you could do before worse (gaming and generally). That is on a
Lifelong customer, got my first own mac at 15, which was an ibook and also my first personal computer at all. I also bought the second gen ipod (first gen didn't get much availability in france) and even imported the first gen iPhone
Maintainers get requests to do things they have no interest in, like maintaining software for OSes past a certain date. That doesn’t sound so bad, but there are a lot, and they can even be mean. The maintainer can block these users individually, but it’s different users all the time, so that doesn’t stop it.
So, the maintainer addresses the user base, the whole crowd all at once. The problem is most of these users haven’t seen these interactions, so the message seems hostile. Having someone say “I owe you nothing.” seems really weird when you’ve never asked them for anything. Or, if they list of all the ways and reasons for you to not contact them it looks hostile. The users don’t see the fan next to them throwing a beer can at the center fielder.
Max Howell (founder of homebrew) went to interview at Google, shoved a coding exercise back in their faces, made a snotty comment about how all the engineers at Google using Macs use his code and how dare they blah blah greatest engineer in the world blah blah, and walked out the door.
That coding exercise was likely given to him precisely because all the google engineers had a lot of experience using brew, or they did it as ego check to see if he'd be insufferable to work with.
Howell failed to realize that and instead went and bragged about it on twitter, almost certainly confirming for the hiring committee that things had worked exactly as designed.
Whole lot of fucking sass from a man who either didn't care or didn't know about the security implications of making a directory in the default path user-writeable, thus making probably hundreds of thousands of developer's systems less secure:
https://infotoast.org/site/index.php/2021/05/30/homebrew-is-...
And for what it's worth, Howell did say he regretted his tweet, and that he wasn't up to snuff technically (in the Quora link in a sibling comment to this one).
And that's not even getting into the "waaa?" from `du -hs /nix` although I am open to that being a misleading number due to hardlinks and other trickery that du may not correctly surface
Are you running garbage collection? It gets out of hand if you keep all versions, but you don't need to do that
Though it does tend to get clobbered on macOS updates.
The default installer is not idempotent yet (and my work on trying to resolve that has stalled, unfortunately, see https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/7603), so trying to run it again to fix this issue will result in errors.
Nope, du counts hardlinks correctly when it encounters the same inode multiple times in the course of fulfilling a single invocation.
per https://ss64.com/osx/du.html :
> Files having multiple hard links are counted (and displayed) a single time per du execution.
Nix's disk usage profile is pretty similar to Flatpak's, or to a collection of closely related Docker containers. The difference between no Nix install and having one isn't huge. But your first installed Nix package will pull in very low level common dependencies— on Linux, everything between whatever application and the kernel (and on macOS, a bit less). Your next application will come with a smaller increase. Once you have a handful of programs installed, you no longer have big downloads for individual additions. When you have a lot installed, the difference isn't that huge, proportionally.
Over time, your Nixpkgs version will rotate and you can end up with deps from old versions of Nixpkgs, which can take up a lot of extra space. But that's easy enough to manage by pinning Nixpkgs.
If you ever uninstall programs, Homebrew's broken uninstallation functionality can very quickly make a Homebrew installation much (up to several times) larger than the equivalent Nix one once you have more than a handful of packages installed.
```
# Please don't change this. We don't support it, because the
# default shell profile that comes with Nix doesn't support it.
readonly NIX_ROOT="/nix"
```
I haven't seen any configurations where the entire /nix is relocated, but nix _does_ support relocating the store with the environment variable `NIX_STORE_DIR`.[1]
However, this means that you can no longer use the the binary cache and *everything* you install has to be compiled from scratch, including glibc. The reason is that nix usually patches paths like `/bin/myprogram` to `/nix/store/1238f...-myprogram-1.2.3/bin/myprogram` in everything that depends on `myprogram` during build time to isolate the build outputs from the system. If you change your store, all those paths will now be invalid, including the hash part.
So using a nix store that isn't `/nix/store` is possible, but I don't think anyone is actually doing it except in a few select scenarios.
You can also compile nix itself with a different root. That will work as expected, but you still have the issue that you need to compile everything you install yourself.
[1]: https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/env-common.h... (you can also relocate most other directories. The `prefix` in the paths is `/nix`)
Agreed, but it's at least possible. My usual install is just cloning Homebrew to ~/homebrew and setting up a symlink. It's far from ideal, due to the number of packages I need to build from source, but it works, and it's allowed me to function normally in tightly controlled environments.
As far as I can tell, the initial installation for Nix doesn't allow this, though iFreilicht pointed out some options that I haven't seen before, so I may be wrong.
You can build Nix with a custom store prefix and run it that way if you're willing to build from source.
In practice, Linux users don't really have to contend with that tradeoff because you can relocate a Nix store wholesale using a bind mount, or a user namespace (unprivileged chroot), or various fakeroot tricks to run a Nix store in your homedir as if it lives in /nix. Unfortunately macOS just doesn't have any of those mechanisms.
If macOS some day gets first-class container support and, consequently, relevant user-facing primitives for user-mode chroot, then unprivileged, cache-friendly Nix installation methods for macOS will doubtless follow. I hope both happen!
I remember seeing SBCL builds broken on Darwin/ppc for a long while, and eventually SBCL decided to drop support for Darwin/ppc altogether. Still, these ports maintainers did not give up and eventually found a way to fix SBCL builds on PPC: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/65484
I recall seeing some work to bring back PPC support upstream, but I am not sure what the progress on that is. It's still cool seeing downstream users fix builds that simply didn't work (and to the point where upstream decides to remove support entirely since they couldn't build it anyway).
same could be said for pkgsrc I guess. I've used that on other *nix systems; haven't tried it on MacOS yet but the fact it's an option is huge
I’ve also dabbled in this area http://leopard.sh/
there are a lot of scripts out there to mitigate this but the boot-strapping is always a bit of a bother. like the script i wrote, my first instruction was "So... you go download chrome for 10.x for PPC... you can find it here in the old forgotten wasteland of google on a deserted old site that might not exist much longer... and by the way this is not secure at all"
like, you just cannot do this securely. cellularmitosis has made leopard.sh linked below, of course the first step is to download from an http site.
its kind of one of those things that have changed about the web, the cultural shock.... nowdays basically so much is based on an account, or at the very least ssl. back then nobody gave a **.
so to actually use a g5 on the modern web, like ... can you log into a video site to watch a video? well only if you dont care about being hacked when you type in your user id and password to the video site. can you shop? only if you dont care about being hacked. same.. can you browse literally anything? google will constantly harass you into logging in. so will basically everything else. and if you dont your experience will suck.
can you... write code for a g5 and try to back port modern algorithms to it? sure just log in to .. .github... on your.. insecure machine that could easily be hacked. and lose your github account to hackers. then you can cry about it after you login to social media. on your hacked account. so maybe not. then you can post about it on hacker news... where of course your account has been hacked by a keylogger.
if your machine doesnt crash because someone installed a bitcoin miner into it, or a tor node, or bittorrent or god knows what that could get you arrested.
the modern web is just such a pile of degenerate criminality and scammers and thieves and robbers, not to mention the spy agencies of various governments, that basically that is the main thing driving old systems off of it. its not that its not possible to optimize code or write new code for old platforms. its that the basic machine running an old OS is compromised at a fundamental level, open to the world for exploitation if you dare to type anything into it that is the least bit private or confidential, and its connected online.
It’s better suited for a multiuser system (and I share my desktop with my wife who has a different login) and is more stable, too.
port is the standard macOS package manager! port is the standard macOS package manager! port is the standard macOS package manager!
Then I used macports. What a nice experience. Provided what I’m after is listen on there!
The tone with which they write that stuff actually makes me not use it - not because it’s not good (it generally is), I just get annoyed reading it.
LOL dude...
"FAANG" is not the only place to work
All I see is, they protect themself from each and every script kiddy that runs to reddit or github when something doesn't work because of their own config issues.
I'm sure someone will start a macOS package manager based on python and yum to signal the waning days of those technologies.
But it is unmaintained (it seems its author has moved on to Nix).
It reminds me of my boss emailing gnu.org to tell them one of their mirrors was down and got a nastygram back that said "It's spelled GNU/Linux" and the mirror went unfixed.
They don't maintain the mirrors themselves. These are maintained by third party who decide to hosts the mirrors so there is that.
Also, Homebrew attempting to nuke /usr/local on uninstall left a quite bad taste in my mouth. I had installed MacTeX before Homebrew, and thankfully MacTeX had proper file permissions set up, so my TeX installation was left in-tact. Still scary knowing that this is just done in the background without warning (unless the operation fails with errors).
If I could switch entirely to MacPorts, I would.
It would be an interesting discussion to have, as they do have some of that sort of thing (the 1Password CLI, for example), but I don’t know what the general policy would be.
I’d love to see MacPorts get more funding for build resources and to potentially add that, because the way that Homebrew works occasionally leaves things broken (`pipx` venvs are a great example).
…Like I said, language X developers want all their tools to be written in language X, and their package systems too.
As for why Homebrew packages seemed to be broken less often, I can only speculate. At least one big benefit it had was being on GitHub. A lot of folks were already familiar with how to cut a PR. Not so with how to submit a Portfile patch to the MacPorts Trac.
Its being in ruby is a strike against it, for me. I use it anyway. It’s probably my favorite package manager, all things considered, and I’ve used a lot.
But Homebrew's fundamental tradeoff w/r/t purity was also a huge boost to installation speed at a time when most package managers for macOS still required you to build most things from source.
That and the slick, user-friendly UI were probably the biggest factors for Homebrew's success when it came out.
For instance, installing ripgrep now requires building the latest version of Rust from source, which takes three hours per Rust version; installing Pandoc requires building and storing the whole GHC; etc.
[1] https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/INSTALLER...
My only advice for someone new to OCLP/unfamiliar with Mac boot loader in general (like me one week ago) is that the OCLP boot screen during setup looks very similar to the native MacOS boot picker and went through four different flash drives trying to follow the instructions thinking it wasn't booting properly from the drive. Look closely at the instruction screenshot to distinguish them.
Tcl made some sense ~20 years ago but it’s 2023 and the only time I ever touch it anymore is for MacPorts itself.
I predict that Apple will admit defeat at the very least with Perl, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Lindy effect. It has entrenched itself so much that you won't just yank it away without some serious bleeding.
Also, there is jsc if JavaScript is what floats your boat, although it's buried quite deep.
why pay for work when it would've been done for free and apple gets to reap the financial benefits?
Also, if you are not going along in the upgrade rabbit race, homebrew gets really annoying and actually in your way at some point.
I see myself moving to macports soon, if brew gets worse and the stability of my setup is compromised (lots of php versions with valet for example).
I guess brew is now more targeted at “prosumers” now since it is imposing unnecessary limits on what “pro” users want and need.
Its more nuanced than that.
As a dev, i like a stable environment and i dont like to do big updates all the time, since that means i have to spend hours updating my setup again. Everytime i run brew im scared it will hose my PHP versions, etc, since it auto updates everything.
To install old PHP versions one needs to hack the install files to make it work.
If you bring up any of these issues you are screamed down by the devs as “you should always be on the latest versions anyway bla bla”… but that is just not a realistic scenario in the real world. Legacy code is everywhere.
In the end brew is not really for pro users, but, as i said, maybe for people using it to install youtube-dl or whatever.
Once the pain of reinstalling and hacking it to make it work becomes too big then i will switch.
I run:
$ sudo bash
# port selfupdate && port -u -c upgrade outdated && port reclaim
once a week.
When I upgraded to Ventura (from Big Sur), I followed the instructions for an OS upgrade and everything moved across cleanly.
It installs itself in /opt
It works with MacOS's Frameworks for stuff like python and java.
It allows you to run multiple versions with "port select".
Why would I want to run anything else?
I for one, am shocked.
Maintainers of popular free, open source community tool are tired of being asked to support out of date OS.
Colour me even more surprised!
I've only started using a mac part-time while I've been developing an iOS app over the past few weeks, and I keep seeing different names for the OS version. I have no idea what version I'm on, or if Big Sur came before Sierra, or what. I know I could look it up, but it seems that in the name of good user-experience, I shouldn't need to.
You'd think they'd at a minimum say "people aren't going to be able to figure out which is which, so let's go in alphabetical order with our naming.
Historically versioning is weird due to the integration of NextSTEP after Job's return to the company. First it was versioned up to 9, then the NextSTEP integration was 10, then subsequent major releases were minor bumps (ie 10.1, 10.2) as OSX was a brand unto itself until 11 which rebranded to MacOS and full versions were used again. So Sonoma is the 14th release from the NextSTEP integration. I think referring to them by names eased the confusion some.
This gives a good rundown:
Saying it's due to NextStep integration sounds like a strange defense of this naming strategy (if that was your intention). They have version numbers, but they decide to use the "code name" as a product name.
The version number is shown in the About This Mac page, which is the top menu item in the Apple menu at all times.
Off the top of my head I couldn't tell which was later out of Big Sur, Ventura, Monterey ...
And I'm completely lost with Debian releases.
It's weird and clunky, but makes sense in the history of the company as all previous OSes were numbered. Yes, they probably should have moved off that convention earlier, probably by the time the Intel integration had happened at the very least.
Windows thought they'd never do a major update again, and tried to hold on to the 10 label, but then realized that wouldn't work. So 11 is a bit of a branding stumble, but we know, it came after 10.
I mean[1]:
>As announced in July, the Windows 11 2023 Update (version 23H2) will be released in the fourth quarter of 2023. This new update will have the same servicing branch and code base as Windows 11, version 22H2 and will be cumulative with all the newly announced features. For devices on version 22H2, the 2023 Update will be delivered via a small enablement package (eKB)7. This continues the annual feature update cadence, with new feature updates released in the second half of the calendar year. This new version resets the 24 months of support for Home and Pro editions and 36 months of support for Enterprise and Education editions.
[1] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2023/09/26/how-t...
- Windows 3.1
- Windows 95
- Windows 98
- Windows 98 Second Edition
- Windows 2000
- Windows Me
- Windows XP
- Windows Vista
- Windows 7
- Windows 8
- Windows 10 1507
- Windows 10 2004
- Windows 10 21H2
- Windows 10 22H2
- Windows 11 21H2
- Windows 11 22H2
Compare to
- Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah)
- Mac OS X 10.1 (Puma)
- Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar)
- Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther)
- Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
- Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
- Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
- Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)
- Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)
- Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks)
- Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite)
- Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan)
- macOS 10.12 (Sierra)
- macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)
- macOS 10.14 (Mojave)
- macOS 10.15 (Catalina)
- macOS 11 (Big Sur)
- macOS 12 (Monterey)
- macOS 13 (Ventura)
- macOS 14 (Sonoma)
Android 1.0
Android 1.1
Android Cupcake
Android Donut
Android Eclair
Android Froyo
Android Gingerbread
Android Honeycomb
Android Ice Cream Sandwich
Android Jelly Bean
Android KitKat
Android Lollipop
Android Marshmallow
Android Nougat
Android Oreo
Android Pie
Android 10
Android 11
Android 12
Android 12L
Android 13
Android 14
Android 15Mac has not gone with alphabetical, but seemingly random names related to cats or places in California.
However it's still a challenge. I work with all of those daily and I often think about the project over-all and it's features or bugs in terms of the alphabetical name, but there is also a numerical name and I have to lookup and translate from it - when looking at diagnostic output from customer installs, or git tags, etc. I keep some subset of the translations in my head but not all them :)
Debian and Ubuntu frequently refer to releases by codename rather than number
1. Mac OS X Public Beta (Kodiak) - 2000
2. Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) - 2001
3. Mac OS X 10.1 (Puma) - 2001
4. Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) - 2002
5. Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) - 2003
6. Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) - 2005
7. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) - 2007
8. Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) - 2009
9. Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) - 2011
10. OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) - 2012
11. OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) - 2013
12. OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) - 2014
13. OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) - 2015
14. macOS 10.12 (Sierra) - 2016
15. macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) - 2017
16. macOS 10.14 (Mojave) - 2018
17. macOS 10.15 (Catalina) - 2019
18. macOS 11 (Big Sur) - 2020
19. macOS 12 (Monterey) - 2021
20. macOS 13 (Ventura) - 2022
21. macOS 14 (Sonoma) - 2023
Or “Jagwire”, as Steve Jobs said:
A question for the ages.
Do some google search for "jagwire" and you'll find tons of results about Americans pronouncing it that way.
EDIT: The word comes from a Native American language via Portuguese. I'm not sure about the indigenous phonetics, but the Portuguese pronunciation is closer to "jagwire" than the British pronunciation.
Each version has a number that is sequential though. I think it’s just an effect of sheer quantity. They release a new version every year. It’s hard to keep track.
(It's already happened before where Windows jumps versions for various reasons, but one is to not sound too far behind other OSes.)
It works like airplanes. Some people see Tomcat and know immediately what it refers to. Others prefer the numeric F-14. I still remember NATO codenames from 40 years ago, without the letter/number. Sidewinder, for example.
I have the issue you describe with Ubuntu and (less so) Debian codenames and also with Android codenames. With Ubuntu though, the number is descriptive, like Russian tanks (T-90 etc), so using it is worth more.
Reminds me of getting horribly confused reading War and Peace h til I realized one character had like fifty names.
Perhaps I just don’t put as many cycles into following Apple anymore.
So we're at iOS 17 and macOS 14.
Because honestly I stopped caring about keeping track of the names long ago. It's cute if you care, they can still put it in the About window for the sake of tradition, but it would be a lot more helpful if it were just referred to as macOS 14 in the press and documentation.
It _sort of_ reminds me of a time I spoke to a colleague and said I wanted to try a project (only a couple of years ago) that required Red Hat Linux 5 and he said "oh sure, here's some CDs" and realised, "nope, not RHEL" (to which the response was.. "oh, here be dragons")..
If you loop the alphabet and I reckon you'll inevitably get confusion.
"Hey, Android Juniper has been released" - "Ah cool, I can upgrade from Ice-cream".. "oh no, wait, mine's 27 releases old!".. "No, sorry, it's actually 53 releases old"
These releases tend to be yearly or half-yearly at most (e.g. android or ubuntu). So a wrap around happens after 13 years at the earliest. Having a 13 year old completely un-upgraded phone (or AR brain worm or whatever we will have in 13 years) wrapping around seems quite unlikely to cause any surprise.
If you have weekly releases or something, then I would see your point.
That ship has long since sailed with Apple, on so many fronts.
MacBook Pro https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201300
MacBook Air https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201862
iMac/iMac Pro https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201634
Mac Pro https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202888
Mac Studio https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/
This sounds interesting!
I really wish there was a native FUSE alternative on macOS; just recently I found myself in a pickle due to not being able to mount an ext4 boot volume on an SD card on my Mac at all. (Passing through to a VM works only via USB.)
I'm not really willing to install a third-party kernel extension just for a custom file system I need once every few months anymore, especially given that Apple's native exFAT drivers now apparently run in the userspace.
They should just make that capability available to the actual-userspace!
You mean turning off system integrity protection? No. I have both ext4 and NTFS from Paragon, and didn't have to do that.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/inst...
Apple's secure boot process differs significantly between Intel and Apple CPU.
Instead we get widgets on the desktop like it’s 2005 again.
Ultimately, it's what makes software updates as hard as they are there: Just being able to do an "apt-get update" with applications open without anything exploding was a true revelation the first time I used a Unix.
I can't even begin to imagine. If I'm deleting 200 files on my M1 MBA, that's still going to take 30-45 seconds.
It's doing something. What is it doing? Does it have something to do with Time Machine or file versioning or secure erase or what?
Everything else is blazingly fast as it should be.
Isn’t that what DriverKit can be used for?
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/secd0a47c14c:
“DriverKit is the framework that allows developers to create device drivers that the user installs on their Mac. Drivers built with DriverKit run in user space, rather than as kernel extensions, for improved system security and stability. This makes for easier installation and increases the stability and security of macOS“
There needs to be some OS-side FUSE-like kernel interface for userspace drivers like this to be able to actually mount them in the VFS.
They're more geared towards Dropbox-like synchronizing use cases. Some developers have made it work for SSHFS too, but even that's already a bit of a stretch; for more custom solutions it definitely falls short: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/681325
The only option currently seems to be to implement a network file server such as SMB (which is what Google Drive used to do before File Providers existed!) or NFS, for which there even is a FUSE bridge available: https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t
I was hopeful that Ganesha NFS [1] would suffice as a bridge for the various FUSE filesystems I need to use with macOS, but alas, they have abandoned the FUSE interface and moved to FSAL/FSAL_VFS [2].
It would be really nice to have a clear path to building a copy of Ganesha NFS that supported a whole host of the great FUSE filesystems out there built to this API.
[1] https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha [2] https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha/issues/759
If you've ever had a suspicion about files on an SMB share going missing, occasionally, when there's been a Mac client using the share, this does indeed happen.
https://www.apple.com/macos/sonoma/pdf/macOS_All_New_Feature...
This is ducking great.
Yes, not in Outlook, please.
Is there another set of notes that has all the underlying API changes supported that 3rd parties can use?
Meanwhile there's still no support for AV1.
Hardware-only is the right move IMO. Literally earlier today I was dealing with stuttering video that turned out to be caused by Chrome putting me on a software implementation of a “better” codec. These new codecs are only better on devices that can run them without stuttering, heating up, and chewing through battery.
[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/14445/webkit-features-in-safari-17-0...
Wow, that's actually great news. It's the first I have seen of Apple actually supporting it in any way (despite being a member of the consortium that created it).
I don't disagree wrt. phones and tablets, but my MBP laughs at decoding AV1 videos; it's really not that taxing for an M2. Anyway, the more important story here is that A17 (based on this) appears to have AV1 hardware. That's an important first step.
Widgets? I didn’t care for them on Leopard or iOS, why would I clutter my desktop with them now?
Notifications have gotten worse and worse to handle. System Preferences is awful to use now. All the cutesy apps you can’t uninstall…
I’d be happy to pay again for macOS if the list of ‘features’ included fixing long-standing bugs and annoyances, making things more stable, and bringing back features and UI that were both simple and effective.
Bah.
I tried Notes app with the Lock but it requires another password while I want it all under the FaceID/iCloud password like the settings-passwords
Is there a secure note option in passwords - mine all require username web url and password.
I’d pay for something that provided a global hotkey and an interface that isn’t nested in Settings.
The iPad app UI is far more frustrating to use, mainly because the search function is hidden behind a down scroll now.
I'm keeping an eye on Proton at the moment as I use their email and they do have a password manager offering.
In my experience, this happens when there is a new Chrome version, but you haven't updated to it yet. When you quit and restart Chrome, it can update. Next time the extension stops working, check chrome://settings/help.
Apple is also certainly not going to touch the more enterprise aspects of password management.
* Little Snitch needs a nightly build (status: fixed)
* SoundSource doesn't work (status: fixed)
* SpamSieve v2 doesn't work because Mail.app removed plugin support in favor of extensions. (status: SpamSieve v3 is out now and works)
* Marked 2 broke on docs shorter than 999 visible bytes (status: still broken. Workaround: BBEdit text filter to add a bunch of lorem ipsum)
* Bartender 4 doesn't work. (status: Bartender 5 is out and works)
The OS itself and 1st-party apps have been mostly fine from the first beta.
Time to put all these damn shoves and pitchforks back ...
What the hell does that mean? If it is fixed, doesn't it means it works?
1. Safari Profiles. I used this browser as my primary browser for a long time, but had to use another browser (Chrome) for work, to be able to separate sessions, etc. Since DB1 I use only Safari. And it works great.
2. Widgets. I have two monitors, and love that in one of them I can see widgets with some useful information. Just wish more apps were ready with widgets.
And a quick self-promotion. I am developer of the application OpenIn, and for macOS Sonoma I have added support for Safari Profiles https://loshadki.app/blog/2023-08-23-openin-4-1-beta/, this is the only (as far as I know) app that will let you redirect links to a specific Safari Profile based on various configurations you make.
Ventura overall did not really had any OS features that would force me to upgrade. Just a little more annoying like new Settings app, that was unusable so many times. Freeform I have never used, Weather app is nice, but there were always alternatives.
Sonoma gave really good upgrade for me, those two features like Safari Profiles and Widgets.
With two OS versions upgrade what you will like/hate:
- new Settings application. You get used to it. But would take a while to be able to find things.
+ new dynamic wallpapers. This will be mostly for people who use external monitors/always connected monitors.
+ Notes/Reminders - if you use it a lot, you can use tags and links between notes.
+ If you use Docker and similar software, Virtualization framework is getting a lot of upgrades, so you might see them to work better.
+ Safari Profiles and Tab Groups. If you are Safari user.
+ Widgets might be good only on monitors, you probably would not see them on laptop screen.
It's not like a revolutionary killer feature for me, but I just always preferred having information always in my "peripheral" instead of having to actively check a separate menu.
Years ago they were on a separate dashboard screen but that wasn't the desktop.
This seems entirely new, not any kind of full circle.
Edit: just to clarify, I'm talking about on Macs, not Windows.
https://duet-cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0x0:1020x765/2400x1800/...
Konfabulator was a much more modern precursor to Dashboard, and existed in the early 00s. It put them directly on your desktop.
Also you could make Dashboard widgets stick around by changing a plist setting
And Konfabulator was cool but it wasn't part of the OS.
The plist setting is interesting though -- definitely never knew about that. But again, not part of how they were designed to operate for the average end user.
I used to keep a few on my desktop with this.
Episode 96 ‘Windows of Siracusa County’ was amazing.
Nowadays, most of his microphone time goes into podcasts like <https://atp.fm>, and he doesn’t have to worry about the voice recognition screwing up.
Plus they fixed the god awful auto switching for AirPods (phone to mac). Much more seamless
> Web apps let you use any website like an app, complete with an icon in the Dock for faster access and a simplified toolbar for easier browsing.
Windows/Chrome has that feature. For example accessing https://github.com shows an install button, which creates icon for direct access and allows GitHub to have a dedicated window and notifications.
I can close Chrome and any PWA application independently.
None of them have to be kept open. Even for notifications, if I allow.
And I just found out I can even cast the entire window to my TV, which is cool https://i.imgur.com/efF1moy.png
One screen is a 32 inch UHD 60Hz monitor and the other one is a 24 inch 2560x1440 90Hz screen which is rotated by 90 degrees.
OSX refuses to support it because it eats into their monitor sales that use an alternative TB-based multiplexing protocol (which is only available on Apple devices, which are, well, not the world's best monitors, yet somehow the most expensive per square inch in a lot of cases).
All the various incarnations as far back as Ivy Bridge's TB2 should have working support in Windows and Linux. I have physically tested it on my MBPR from that era, and it worked, and I know of other people's newer OS-swapped Macs also working.
Lack of MST support in OSX has historically blocked 4k early adopters: 4k screens exported themselves as two logical displays due to 4k monitors coming out ahead of HBR2-capable controllers.
As for ARM-era Macs, as far as I know, they licensed a common ASIC block for their DisplayPort transceiver, which is also what AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have done. So, their hardware should still support it fine, but I have no clue if Asahi's work on the GPU driver has gotten MST to work.
It's ridiculous that they refuse to support this. Iit's actually backfiring. Peoppe at work laugh when they see me attaching two cables to my Macbook ehile everyone else with different operating systems use their docking stations or daisy chaining. Even old Chromebooks support it.
My records indicate it is this: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMEL2AM/A/thunderbolt-3-u...
I drive two 34UM88 with it.
> Notes: Users can view PDFs and scans of presentations, assignments, research papers, and more right inside Notes. They can also create links from one note to another to relate ideas and content.
Can I annotate on PDFs in Notes as well, obviating the need for Goodnotes and friends?
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/9/22/macos-14-sonoma-firewa...
Rather than "reduced" motion, I'd really look forward to "no" motion.
Like I had with i3wm... practically _instantaneous_ switch between spaces/virtual desktops.
--------------------
30 min average upgrade time on M1/M2 macs
--------------------
+ New features
- Removed features
--------------------
Fixed:
- Bugs
--------------------
Broke:
- Old feature
--------------------
Third Party Breaking Changes:
- Old software, feedback from dev with ETA
.1 update ETA: 6 weeks
This will be the first macOS upgrade I won’t be doing for a while.
I’d like to try it out, but I need to figure out how to migrate off of 1Password 7 (standalone) first or to make sure it still works with Sonoma. (Edit: I'm expecting that 1Password 7 will break with the new OS and make me convert to their subscription product.)
I was forced off standalone when they broke using dropbox as a sync backend, but it's really just a fancy keychain at this point ...
Honestly, the feeling that I got "forced" into 8 is what makes me mostly dislike the company, and will eventually bounce me out once I get the motivation.
- 1Password 7 desktop app
- 1Password 7 Safari extension, which seems to work fine (or at least the same way it always worked)
- The latest Chrome extension, which I believe does everything in the browser
So I don't know how well 1Password 7 works with Chrome.
But after having reconsidered my disaster recovery procedure, I swallowed the bitter pill after all. The problem is that I need to be able to recover my passwords when 1) my house was on fire AND 2) I left my phone behind during the evacuation.
My 1Password db was stored on Dropbox. But my Dropbox password is in 1Password. Furthermore Dropbox sometimes requires 2-factor auth via email... and my Gmail password is also in 1Password. And Google is quite a bit more serious about 2FA than Dropbox. So even if I write down my Dropbox and Gmail password on paper and store them at my parents' home, I still can't login to Gmail easily because I have lost my phone.
This can be solved by writing down even more stuff on paper. Or by storing a USB stick of the 1Password db at my parents' home (but now the stick should be encrypted, where do you store the key?). The point is: the rabbit hole goes deep, and you have to keep all that stuff updated. Plus my parents will have access to all my data. Not that I don't trust them, but what happens if someone breaks into their house?
All this can be much simplified by just getting a 1Password subscription. I store my 1Password secret key (not master password) at my parents' home. They can't do anything with just the secret key. I memorized my master password. All 2FA recovery codes are in 1Password. This way everything can be recovered without the risk that my parents or a burglar at their house can access my passwords. I think this simplicity in disaster recovery is worth the subscription price.
I should add I'm quite impressed Apple implemented import/export. It's not something I expected them to officially support.
Not much left to improve, I guess.
I’ve used SMS for 2FA even though it’s vulnerable to hijacking because AutoFill from SMS makes it so easy. AutoFill from Mail will be a welcome alternative.
Even with a dark wallpaper or no transparency everything is the wrong shade to hide it.
I'll bet some MBA at Apple thinks it's really import to get that notch into everyone's face. :(
MacBook Pro https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201300
MacBook Air https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201862
iMac/iMac Pro https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201634
Mac Pro https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202888
Mac Studio https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/
Edit: Updated now and it seems like nothing changed :(. External monitor still becomes dim for SDR content if I flick on HDR, and no slider in sight to boost the intensity. There is a projector setting as a color profile, but that only changes the contrast and colors, but not the brightness.
Operating systems feel like they've really stagnated in the past decade.
What issues you face with music app ?
- Search sometimes doesn't work (can be solved by exiting all previous searches with the back button)
- Tag editing sometimes doesn't work (can be solved by doing it again and again)
- My status bar always say "syncing" when it's notI am referring in particular to the visual element outlined in the red rectangle in the image below.
https://i.imgur.com/6uOjflM.jpg
It is a small thing, but as annoying in its way to me as the blank space in the Windows 11 Start Menu that remains when the advertisements displayed there by default are disabled.
I'm also excited that they finally fixed Quartz Debug — the "Enable Vertical Sync" option finally works again when disabled.
My mouse feels snappier and there's noticeably less delay when moving windows around.
Beamoff[1]/beamsync.py[2] are good 3rd part solutions, though.
I use my m1 mbp in clamshell mode connected to a 75hz 1920x1080 ips all day every day, so until I can buy a monitor that supports adaptive sync, the reduction in latency that disabling vsync brings is worth it to me.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/download/all/?q=Additional%20Too... [1]: https://github.com/JasF/beamoff [2]: https://gist.github.com/pudquick/2ab183707545413ae9c6#file-b...
* Screen Sharing: A new high performance mode in the Screen Sharing app delivers incredibly responsive remote access over high-bandwidth connections — enabling creative professionals to accomplish their work remotely.*
I suspect it's the underlying tech that streams macOS into the Vision Pro. The "High Performance" mode lets you select 1 or 2 virtual displays, and always blacks out the host machine completely.
> Explicit language handling. The keyboard will add explicit language that you use to your personal vocabulary list and will learn this usage for each different app. Explicit language that is learned is used for autocorrect and suggestions
I have a repo for my dotfiles and install scripts so i can set up my system in like an hour
Maybe time to upgrade to Ventura now.
I'm mostly a backend dev so I just install Docker and be done with my stack. The script installs the usual tools that I use for daily work, Slack/Discord, editors, browsers.
Before macOS Sonoma using mission control while having stage manager enabled would be very choppy. This seems to have been resolved and now I can finally use stage manager on macOS.
To be clear, I'm not a Kagi support person or anything, and also not arguing that anyone's wrong for saying it's not working for them. Just saying, it is working for some people on Mac and iPhone, so it's not totally borked.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/1708-inconsistently-redirects-to-...
If you go into Safari's extension settings, is their extension enabled for all websites?
I went bacb to Safari after I couldn't find an Orion way to make a new tab group without destroying the current window's tabs.
In Safari, could have made bookmarks for these tabs, I guess, but Safari doesn't give me an obvious indication of whether the current tab already has a bookmark. So, my Safari bookmarks sometimes have duplicates because I forgot I'd already made one and didn't burrow though the Bookmarks menu to check. So, Safari tab groups are more useful to me than bookmarks for anything that's part of an unfinished project/idea.
https://apps.apple.com/gb/story/id1699686314
EDIT - COMMAND + R in the settings app will reload the page
I just want the new changes to Safari and Notes while I don't care about the other changes, why not have Safari be a normal application downloaded from the App Store, like the rest of us pleebs have to do when publishing apps?
Not needing to bundle dependencies that you know are provided by your OS environment?
Easy to investigate and fix bugs (You don't need a VM of every MacOS version on your machine)?
They might also see it as an incentive - perhaps new app features act as driver for OS adoption.
From a security perspective decoupling from OS updates seems advantageous.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-mk/guide/deployment/dep93ff7ea7...
Plus of course everything is tested together (which is what Linux distros also do. They update their apps for minor releases and bugfixes but not major releases for the same distro).
> Plus of course everything is tested together
That makes sense, Apple's QA department seems to be held together with tape for the last decade or so, as every new update seems to break something, so maybe they're trying to make it as easy as possible now in order to recover.
i.e. they may have started out that way, but almost nothing is gained thinking about this history today, despite it being factually correct.
- Darwin is developed "as" a BSD — a vertically-integrated base-system monorepo that contains the kernel, the system libraries, and the low-level userland services and software. Rather than teams working on one component that has a contractual ABI with other components, there are no real "team-shear-layer" ABIs, except at the public API level that gets presented to users; and instead, anywhere below the userland public API level, is free to be modified as part of the project of modifying system software. (Think, by analogy, the introduction of pledge(3) in OpenBSD. Apple can insert new "technologies" like that throughout every layer of the system very easily—and they often do!)
- Darwin is installed and tested like a BSD: it's a whole base-system release, containing an inseparable kernel + base system. There is no way to test individual components in isolation (without a complete mock of the rest of the base system), as the components may all have circular dependencies — the kernel can depend on the base system just as the base system can depend on the kernel, because it's all one "layer." There's no package manager; no packaging; no components with separate build artifacts that get "integrated." You just build an entire base system, and have to wholesale swap your old base-system for the new one. (In the "old days" on minicomputers, the rootfs wasn't BSD per se, but was specific to booting that machine; while /usr was a BSD on tape, direct from Berkeley. An "OS upgrade" of a BSD was a new /usr tape for you to mount on next reboot. These days, macOS uses APFS system volumes to achieve almost exactly the same thing.)
AFAIK, there's no real good name for these properties besides "a BSD" — despite these properties not really being BSD-specific. Maybe let's call this "BSD-style OS architecture"?
macOS before OSX already had BSD-style OS architecture — though it was something closer to embedded OS architecture at first, shipping OS-on-ROM in early Macs, and only evolving toward updateable on-disk kernels with System 7-or-so. But the Apple development team's BSD-style "thinking", is what made the choice of merging macOS with the Jobs' NeXT Darwin BSD base-system, an "intuitive" operation, rather than something fraught with paradigm-conflict. It's the same reason that Apple ran NetBSD on the servers they ran to back WebObjects for iTMS, back when: "BSD-style" is how Apple engineers think.
it really isn't
I can't avoid the anecdata game, so: what generation are you? I don't know a single person who would update their phone for a new emoji.
OS to many consumers (and consumer extends even to web developers/data scientists) means graphical shell.
Some are quite funny.
If you are a dev, look for the release notes.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...
I do wish they had a developer-focused version of these announcements, though. A lot of very interesting stuff usually never gets mentioned officially at all.
Can't win.
Some of the outrage you see is to be attributed to people expecting fixes of their pet peeves and not getting them, I think.
I upgraded to the beta version and am having a bug with an app that relies on WebKit so for me I wish I’d waited for the .1.
I actually appreciate not doing relentless “innovation” just for the sake of doing it. Microsoft does this by slapping new UIs on top of old every damn release. They often don’t even remove the old stuff, they just mask it with “innovation.” macOS does this too, but not nearly as bad. In Windows there are like 7 different layers of UI. You can click a half dozen times in the settings in Windows 11 and basically time travel back to Windows 2000.
I think the reason I don’t hate this stuff on macOS as much is because most of the changes are iOS-ification, and I use iOS so I somewhat intuitively know how to navigate the changes.
This OS upgrade looks like it's mostly slapping new UIs on top of old, so I'm not sure this is "doing it right".
Yes, super basic, but so is most features of Apple software. Simple, basic and without customization, just like how many Apple users like their software.
If you don't use them, that's fine, but they do exist and they are well-used.
If Mac OS wasn't famous for catering to professionals for a full decade, there would not be any Apple Computers inc. Of course the point still stands that Apple is famous nowadays for its phones, but macOS is still seen by many as the golden standard in window management. That it achieves its reputation without window snapping is a detail.
I have an ultrawide external display, and keyboard shortcuts to quickly tile two or three windows at once is where it's at, though it also supports dragging the window to an edge for various snap effects.
I remember using it a lot on Windows, but since I've switched to macOS I think I've migrated entirely to their Mission Control way of handling windows. I'm not sure why but I very rarely need to have 2 windows side by side anymore, maybe because I can just three-finger swipe to compare windows.
I still think Rectangle should be integrated as a native feature, but I think I understand why it's not.
1. When opening 'mission control' in gnome, all the windows have the application icon at the bottom, it's easier to find what I am searching for. In macos I have to scan every window for the content I am looking.
2. If I don't find an app in 'mission control' in gnome I can just type and open it very quickly. In macos you need to close mission control and then open spotlight.
3. In gnome it's possible to close applications from 'mission control'. In macos if I want to clean up the space I have to go window by window.
4. Mission control arrangement sucks, sometimes windows overlap, position changes randomly.
5. In gnome, when moving a maximized window it resizes to a smaller size so you can easily interact with the windows behind (drag a file or whatever).
Those are the ones on the top of my head. It really kills my productivity and make me wonder if macos is worth the pain. Yes, it comes with lot of very polished applications but most of the time I am just using the basics.
macOS has had built-in “window snapping” since 2015. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948
And if/when you need more advanced window management, there’s a plethora of free and paid options.
I assume because that type of advanced window management is a poor default for a mainstream audience.
Happily, there are great options for this. My preference right now is Raycast's Window Management extension. https://www.raycast.com/extensions/window-management
after spending the last 2 months on desktop linux full time - I'd rather pay $12 and use macos than pay nothing and have a worse open source experience.