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Comment by cjbarber | Hacker News Reader

To Apple: People are complaining because they'd rather you fix it, than them having to leave the platform (moving OSes is annoying, because operating systems have a lot of lock in - data you'd have to move, apps you need to find alternatives for and re-learn).

The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours.

Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.

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I coincidentally watched BasicallyHomeless's video on his 100+ day Linux experiment and he made a really good point: because everything on Linux can be done with the CLI, it also has a working natural language interface (Claude Code). He ran into several issues, such as sound (allegedly that's no surprise, but not my experience), and Claude fixed them all.

If it doesn't wipe your drive.

Still, interesting thought.

Yeah, setting up my router with VLANs/Firewall/NAT etc was so damn frustrating with Ubiquiti compared to the Mikrotik router I had before.

While I could just export my config file with Mikrotik and ask ChatGPT to make whatever changes I wanted in seconds ("here's my config, make a vlan 20 with all my iot devices") and get a fully working config back, with Ubiquiti you just get a bunch of inaccurate "click here and there" instructions back instead since the UI changes slightly all the time.

The switchover was still worth it, as the Ubiquity UI is nicer in daily use (and Mikrotik wifi sucks ass, so I had to use other APs). However, every time I want to change something I wish I had an easily ediable config file to edit, and get LLM help with, instead of a confusing UI to click around in.

With OpenWRT, it's likely even easier :)

Indeed, large language models have much easier time working with a real written language.

I wonder if the modern GUI conventions could be reliably translated to machine-understandable text representation, operated on, and then mapped back to the GUI picture.

Response from Apple: We know you have a lot of vendor lock-in, which is why we're doing this. We want shiny features to talk about to get people to buy their first Mac, and don't give a shit about providing a great experience for existing users because we know they won't leave anyway.

The current state does not feel malicious in this way to me at all. It feels bumbling and amateurish. It gives the feeling that the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired, and that a new generation of overly ambitious careerists have entered positions of leadership.

I feel like it says a lot, when intelligent amorality seems genuinely preferable to blundering incompetence. Many such cases. One wonders how much "enshittification" is intrinsic to networked software and our late-stage-whatever political economy, versus how much is a farcical byproduct of office politics and org chart turf wars.

I think any organization at Apple's scale has no shortage of skilled workers and ambitious careerists. But at the product level, I do believe that the result you see is generally an honest reflection of the organization's priorities.

If Apple wanted to ship a rock-solid OS, they could. They're just choosing to put those resources elsewhere.

>the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired

This is everything post-covid. The competent people that could left and retired early.

The current environment is in some ways indistinguishable from COVID. The uncertainty of AI, forced RTO, and processions of layoffs have produced a terrible environment for retaining people who have the means to do literally anything else.

I’m convinced leadership at Apple are not power users. They’ve never put MacOS through their paces, or did any development themselves it seems. If they did they would have found all of the bugs and irregularities and huge performance problems themselves.

Not this simple, unfortunately. Actually this is largely the mindset they have

What do you mean by "largely the mindset they have"? I think the comment you're replying to is right, most Apple execs probably have jobs that can be done entirely on iPads, so none of the complaints by power users about macOS resonate at all (and this group is sadly far too small of a minority to have any financial impact).

Their software lead definitely uses a Mac.

Yeah true, just wish there were more who did though.

The alternative for most people is Windows, which Microsoft seems hellbent into making worse and worse (I didn’t think that was possible but hey, here we are). macOS definitely sounds like the least of two evils anyway.

But what do I know - the year of the Linux desktop for me was 1996.

Win11 and OSX, and to a limited extent Ubuntu feel like they want to just keep selling you stuff.

You see.

It's not enough.

Buy OneDrive, Gamepass, Copilot Pro. This is a big part of why Microsoft is fine with all the sites selling 10$ Windows keys.

Otherwise you might try Linux to save money.

Buy a Mac, you need Apple Plus Deluxe. You need iCloud, etc.

Ubuntu only tries to upsell you via Ubuntu Pro, I guess it's not as aggressive though.

Ubuntu Pro is still free for personal use on up to 5 physical machines, which covers my small home network just fine. It is annoying that they withhold security updates unless you fork over your email address, but I don’t recall them trying to sell me anything since I made an account

Until AI can vibe-code a stable, secure global menu bar for Wayland I'm stuck on macOS for a while.

Can AI vibe code a way to get a macOS keyboard layout, basic shortcuts, and macOS-style emacs navigation in gui text boxes across the OS, on Linux? Last I checked all of that is pretty much impossible to achieve without accepting a ton of jank and some parts of the system where it doesn’t work (even the keyboard layout thing!)

Yeah you can, there's packages like xremap and input-remapper where you can define custom keyboard re-mappings. To replicate the Emacs key bindings from macOS, you can bind Ctrl+F to right arrow, Ctrl+E to End, etc. I even re-binded Cmd+C to Ctrl+C so I didn't lose any muscle memory from years of macOS shortcuts. Obviously requires some upfront time but once you get it working it works very well in my experience (and the keyboard re-mappings work at the input event level, so it works across all applications automatically).

Are existing menu bars unsecure? Or unstable?

Sounds like the revived Unity/Unity7 still has a global menu bar, and there's a version called UnityX with Wayland support.

https://9to5linux.com/unity-7-7-desktop-environment-to-get-a...

https://unityd.org/unityx-7-7-testing/

https://gitlab.com/ubuntu-unity/unity-x/unityx#manual-instal...

there's some ubuntu/gnome thing that replicates the worst features of the mac.

but here's the real question: why? the global menu bar is literally the most dated and outmoded element in macos. it isn't 1993 anymore. your computer can run more than one program at a time. a globally modal application focus is completely ridiculous. the only thing more ridiculous than a global menu bar is a global spinning beach ball mouse cursor. these are relics of the past and have no place in a modern, multitasking, multiprocessing, multiprocessor, multiscreen computing environment.

moreover, the things that matter, browsers and terminals, don't even have normal menus anyway.

kde plasma is superior in all ways. stop wasting time with weird outmoded 1993 era computer interfaces.

Browsers and terminals have "normal menus". Some examples would include Vivaldi and iTerm.

I agree though that placing it on top of the screen (as opposed to the window to which it applies) doesn't make any sense. Windows actually got that right with MDI way back in the day, if you remember how menu merging worked there.

However, there is an unexpected upside to having the menubar there even so. Because macOS apps can't not have a menu bar, they are forced to expose their commands there. Which usually ends up being a more stable UX compared to all the moving around of buttons in the window itself, plus you can search the menus.

> However, there is an unexpected upside to having the menubar there even so. Because macOS apps can't not have a menu bar, they are forced to expose their commands there. Which usually ends up being a more stable UX compared to all the moving around of buttons in the window itself, plus you can search the menus.

that is not nothing- but maybe a vestigial training wheel for onboarding a generation onto single application guis. maintaining separate stacks of applications and then document windows within applications (as is done with the global macos window switching keyboard shortcuts) also feels clunky and more suited to an outmoded (har) ui paradigm.

I like it being in the same place

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