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Comment by DavidPiper | Hacker News Reader

I accidentally hit the wrong button a few weeks ago and upgraded to Tahoe. I didn't think it was that big a deal at the time, I'd just been putting it off.

But having used it for a few weeks now I can confirm it is a strict downgrade over Sequoia for me. I use none of the new features it has introduced, and the changes to existing features are just worse.

Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro. The Finder has gone from fine to janky once again, especially with horizontal scroll. The window corners and mouse interactions are indeed annoying (I'd assumed the many complaints were at least slight hyperbole). Left-aligned window titles are unbalanced and ugly. I've had weird (visual) app duplication issues with the Application smart-folder in the Dock. Cross-device copy-paste SEEMS to be more flaky than usual. And most petty of all I really don't like the new icons - especially the Trash icon for some reason.

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I don't know, I started using a Mac only 3 years ago when joining my current job. The UX always felt so wrong on every matter to me. I don't get where the reputation came from, maybe from an era that was already only mere memory when I started to use it.

I would pick a default bare gnome 3 agaisnt any Mac os version UX without any hesitation.

With a lot of tools from third parties, it puts back the level to supportable, but that's the highest satisfaction level it ever procured to me. Rectangle and some alternative window switcher plus brew are the minimum to survive without going crazy after 2 minutes of exposition. Having finder always present in window switcher and no way to close/hide it? What a monstrosity!

I'm still looking for a working solution to select and paste with middle click.

Glad I don't have to use it out of work.

> I don't get where the reputation came from, maybe from an era that was already only mere memory when I started to use it.

Peak Mac design was 20 years ago, before iPhone. That was where the reputation came from.

Since iPhone became Apple's darling, and especially since Steve Jobs died, the Mac UI has been systematically wrecked, year by year. iPhone design has also been systematically wrecked since Jobs died. Tim Cook clearly had no idea what he was doing when he put hardware designer Jony Ive in charge of software with iOS 7, something that Jobs never did with Ive.

> I would pick a default bare gnome 3 agaisnt any Mac os version UX without any hesitation.

Yeah it's a head scratcher for me too.

So many devs only want to work on a Mac yet they build software that runs on NOT Mac. Then they have to jump through hoops like architecture mismatch and docker having to run a Linux vm anyway.

I prefer Linux as well just to get the same tools and architecture like you said. But at work everything corporate is configured for mac by default. So running Linux is a battle to having to keep up with VPN and other stuff they have.

All that Corporate IT stuff can work on Linux, we just have to start demanding Linux for them to put in the effort. Macs used to be in the same position, Corporate IT only knew how to manage Windows so that's what everyone got. Eventually the ability to use a Mac became enough of a recruitment draw that they had to make it work. The same thing can happen with Linux.

I guess it depends on the kind of "Linux" you want. Corporate IT will probably roll out RHEL or similar to the desktops, take away your root access, and install a virus scanner too.

I worked at a bring your own distro place before, ISO certified. I don’t exactly recall what we had to install for compliance but one of them was Clam AV. So it’s possible.

I recall Arch, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora being used. Relatively small shop though, like 40 devs.

Ironically we were contracting with ASML at the time and ended up having to work on Windows machines using Remote Desktop 99% of the time.

Ubuntu is way more popular for it.

RHEL is very popular on servers but not on desktops. Which is in part due to Red Hat themselves, they don't really do much to promote it for this usecase. Personally (as an admin) I don't mind because it's such a closed ecosystem anyway. They're always rent seeking which Canonical does a lot less. Canonical is always trying to sell us landscape though, but we never went for it because it doesn't solve any of the issues we have with the existing tooling.

Latest Fedora versions can also be regarded as a more modern, faster moving RHEL. Granted it doesn't come with a support agreement or the ability to get one (I just am guessing) so it may not tick all the checkboxes for corporate use.

Well it's ubuntu that the developers are asking for, and that is much better supported by our corporate tooling.

Personally I wouldn't touch redhat with a 10 foot pole after what they pulled with centos, however if my work did want to I'd make an effort on their behalf. They don't seem to though.

It technically can but it's a lot more hassle.

As one example, on Linux most developer tools don't obey the system proxy configuration, each tool has its own archaic configuration for that. So we end up with a lengthy list of how to configure each tool for our MITM proxy. Sure, MITM proxies aren't ideal anyway but we're unfortunately stuck with this.

Many security tools have a Linux version but omit the GUI component where users can do stuff like request exceptions. Another big thing for developers because they often need that.

WiFi certificate auto provisioning is missing from the MDM tool we use. So it has to be all scripted. On windows and Mac we just click a box to turn it on. And this works differently on different distros.

So yeah as someone who builds Linux management I can imagine some companies don't bother.

Tahoe will be gone in 7 months when macOS 27 comes out. Meanwhile we've been talking about ads in the Windows 11 start bar since 2021 and Gnome 3's Gnaval gazing since who knows when?

Apple tries something weird every now and then and then a year later we get something different. Yes, Tahoe was a giant miss, but I'd wager macOS is not what really attracts devs to Apple anyway - it's the hardware that makes Macs such an appealing dev machine. Large glass trackpads with incredible touch controls, aluminum bodies, long lasting batteries, cool and quiet, great screens, years of support - the list goes on.

Snapdragon is only just now finally taking off in the Windows/Linux space, so the landscape could finally change here soon, but for now anyone who's gone ARM is not looking to ever go back to x64 hardware - at least for development (gaming is another convo).

I am at that age were I do not want anything new. Windows is still basically what it was when I was young- with the caveat that you have to spend a few hours tweaking it. Which is not a huge deal for something you do once every 5 years.

> it's the hardware that makes Macs such an appealing dev machine. Large glass trackpads with incredible touch controls, aluminum bodies, long lasting batteries, cool and quiet

Probably so, but I've seen more than a few Macbook Pro keyboards dome up due to heat so bad that you couldn't close the lid.

For me KDE, I can't deal with gnome especially 3. But yeah moving to KDE from Mac was a breath of fresh air. Finally options again to configure my computer the way I want it.

Alt-tab is an app switcher, not a window switcher, and Finder is always running, hence, it appears in alt-tab

You can configure alt-tab on what menu it shows for which shortcut. There is an option to have a menu not showing minified windows, including Finder. While this doesn't eliminate the unclosable Finder non-sense, it's actually even handier in general manner as it allow to pick what windows should remain in my attention switch in current context.

I did the same mistake a few weeks ago ; my company enforces security updates and I picked the Tahoe update instead of the security one. I told myself, what the hell, might as well give it a try!

I wiped my computer and reinstalled Sequoia last week.

You’re lucky that you had a choice. The security policy in my company forces our laptop to be up to date no matter what. You can resist to update for some time but then they’ll force update through management system and sometime it happens in the middle of out meeting

Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro.

It's clear that no one at Apple (or any other big tech company these days) has ever watched old demoscene productions, then contemplated their performance against the available computing power of their current products and the experience thereof, and thought "something is very wrong".

Also Apple Music is much worse (harder to bring miniplayer, seek bar harder to use) and list of misfeatures goes on and on and on

Oh man, that's concerning since it was already terrible on Sonoma. I've been using Museeks for years now.

You have to give Apple credit where credit is due. They have managed to make first iTunes and now Music worse with every release. Which is truly amazing.

Aye it’s fucking terrible. Seek bar is impossible.

I've lowered my expectations over the years, but there's this single stupidity that drives me crazy: When you search for a keyword and play a song from the results, playback continues with the rest of the search results. Why the hell would I want to play all of the songs with similar names? iOS Music, on the other hand, does the expected and creates a station from the first played search result.

The fact that in the miniplayer you can't display both the album art and the track information at the same time unless the cursor is hovering over the window absolutely boggles my mind. If I'm listening to a station, I want to glance over and see what I'm listening to. And I like the album art showing. This worked until Tahoe.

View menu > Hide Large Artwork will show the track info, but you of course lose the album art.

Of course it's not a major issue, it doesn't make the system unusable, but it was a nice little experience thing.

All I know about modern Apple Music is that it’s always active in now playing when nothing else is playing, and accidentally pressing play sometimes summons an account setup screen.

I never use it, and wish I could delete it.

If it makes you feel any better it doesn't detect activity well even if something is actually playing.

I regularly go to pause Apple Music and the play/pause button on my keyboard instead starts playing a YouTube video in some background tab/window.

Apple Music has actually gone to "completely unusable" for my use.

I use it (or did, pre-Tahoe) to play iTunes-shared music over my network. Since Tahoe, it will play a couple (plus or minus a handful of songs) and then just stop rather than transitioning to the next song.

I've been listening to the actual radio for the past couple months because I haven't had the time to work out how to play my network-shared music.

I have Tahoe on my work laptop and Sequoia on my personal desktop, and the thing that keeps me the most rooted on Sequoia is the padding. Everything on Tahoe is padded to hell and back. And the new tab design sucks so much. iTerm2 tabs look fucking terrible in it.

Same - 13" macbook screen becomes less functional when you fill it with padding.

they have really tried hard to make the entire OS less usable. I'm not an "iToddler", I paid for a Unix workstation and will not have lower information density forced onto me.

Why are you not using Ghostty instead of iTerm2?

Not OP, but iTerm is the one I knew and it does it's job. No need to move away from something that works.

No ability to search the scroll back buffer. Stuck on the latest 1.2 release, there shall be no more, even though important bug fixes like memory leaks when using Claude are not backported. That’s a wild “go F yourself” decision. Ghostty crashed the other day for me, I have zero expectations that crash will be fixed for me until the 1.3 release. And when that release happens, the cycle of ridiculousness will restart. All the windows are gone when it crashes. I’m not ready to run Ghostty nightlies, last thing I need is the increased chance of crashing or bugs.

About to switch to native Terminal.app since it now supports truecolor. Or back to iTerm2.

Give Kitty a try. It's my go to on both Mac and Linux, I really enjoy it

Why should an iTerm user switch to ghostty? What do they gain by moving away from a highly mature, feature rich, native offering?

iTerm is slow as fuck. cat large files in iTerm vs Ghostty and you will see the difference. Ghostty always stays responsive, and has much lower memory usage. The typing latency on Ghostty is so low it really enriches the terminal experience. People still using stuff like iTerm2 are likely just either not using their terminal very often or are ignorant to the wider terminal emulator market.

Yeah I guess the only reason I stick with iTerm over some new thing is because I'm either not in the terminal all the time (I just killed an emacs process and my shell reported it was running for 191 hours, 43 min) or because I'm just a big dumb dumb for not using the same program you do, or too dumb to be aware of the "wider terminal emulator market" lmao. Ok man.

Also why would I cat a huge file? That's what less is for. Like wow, in some pretend worse case scenario where you cat out some huge binary file, Ghostty is what, how many ms quicker to paint? Wow! It saved 40MB of memory doing that too, my computer has 16GB I don't care. None of these reasons are very compelling to give up a mature terminal deeply embedded into my workflows, with great tmux integration, and a searchable scrollback buffer.

Not the person you replied to, but I immediately switched back to iTerm2 after finding that Ghostty broke SSH to nearly all my servers by having an odd custom terminfo thing or something. iTerm2 requires no extra configuration after install on my end, whereas I needed to change several things about Ghostty and the UX for changing settings is terrible.

sounds like user error, SSH is fine in Ghostty.

Good to know. My dad recently asked and I didn't know the pros/cons. I haven't upgraded but that's because I don't have a need to. He has a new Mac mini, and I thought it might make sense for him. But it sounds like it's not an upgrade, and is possibly a downgrade, especially if it will make things harder to find.

I've also had a proper Thunderbolt display freak out where the entire desktop just suddenly decides to ultra-saturate/ultra-contrast. Happened twice, across restarts. After the second restart it stopped, but I can't explain it and nothing like it has happened before/since/with other machines I connect to the screen with the same cable.

Not sure about "harder to find" but the sheer number of unexplainable glitches and slowness means I wouldn't otherwise have upgraded had I known. Waiting for a higher 26.X release might be worthwhile.

I also accidentally upgraded due dark pattern of auto-selecting Sequoia instead of update for Sonoma. Now my external monitor won't wake up when waking my macbook from sleep (in clamshell mode, lid always closed). Nothing fixes it, beyond infuriating.

> Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro

On an M4 Pro! Pure planned obsecelence. Noticed it regularly with major MacOS releases. Nothing will convince me otherwise.

Yeah they should have bought the M5 Pro /s

I got an M5 and it unfortunately had Tahoe preinstalled. Out of the box, Quicklook is choppy. My non-Tahoe M1 is buttery smooth. I don't know how Apple managed to ruin a feature that's been running smoothly for decades.

Yikes. That’s terrible (it’s a great feature[+]).

[+]just discovered this, thanks Sindre who I always run into searching: https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins

(but I’m on Sequoia so they work perfectly!)

Anecdotally, I’ve had Tahoe installed for ages now and it runs perfectly smooth on my M1 Pro with an external 4k display as well.

Same for me on a standard M1. The UI is degraded though.

I run a terminal, emacs, and firefox. That's about all I need to work/develop, and I've not noticed anything negative since the upgrade.

I guess I'm not a power-user though.

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