I've been increasingly feeling the same way, especially about OS X, but what's the alternative for a developer-friendly desktop operating system that looks and works beautifully (almost) out of the box?
Ubuntu.
It Just Works
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Re: It Just Works
#32The thing about saying "it just works" and attempting to hide everything from the user is that it is really, really frustrating when it doesn't "just work".
The amount of hardware and software bugs I've encountered in Apple products has been steadily increasing, to the point where I'm really only happy with my iPhone (and even that has some problems) -
- Connecting a wired keyboard to a Thunderbolt display that is connected to my MBP rarely worked after disconnecting/reconnecting my MBP. I'd have to change which USB port the keyboard connected to - until discovering that this was a common problem that connecting a USB extender fixes. It just works?
- We use Apple TVs in our conference rooms to connect our laptops to and project via a projector/tv. The Apple TVs routinely reboot, fail to connect, and drop connections. I've had my laptop lock up for several minutes trying to connect to one.
- iMessage routinely gets into a state where it shows ghost notifications that I have to clear by deleting conversations one-by-one until I find out which one is causing it.
- iMessage routinely reorders previous messages.
- Safari randomly uses the wrong favicon for frequently visited websites.
And so many more. It is really disappointing that I'm not really that surprised when something doesn't work or feels clunky. At this point, I trust my Windows machine more than I do my Mac.
Re: It Just Works
#33My thesis: part of this feeling comes from the fact that more eyes are on the OS and the apps, but many issues existed before.
- I have some complaints about OS X: wifi, bluetooth, etc.
- I like iTunes as it is today (not considering the synchronization process)
- I struggle with the weakened "iWorks" applications
Re: It Just Works
#34"...In my opinion, Yosemite is the worst non-beta Mac OS release I’ve ever used – and I’ve used everything other than the public betas of 10.0 ..."
???
Personally I find Yosemite AND Windows 10 to be wanting in most every respect. But I think there is a bit of a tendency to view the past through rose colored glasses.
There is no way that Yosemite is worse than 10.0 or 10.1. I know I'm going to date myself a bit here... but 10.1 on that Titanium powerbook, that sagged like rubber if you held it from one end by the way, had to be the single worst computing experience of my life. That INCLUDES waiting for time on the mainframe, punchcards in hand, in the basement of the computer science building at the University of Wisconsin.
"... While I didn’t run into any data loss issues or anything particularly catastrophic..."
That right there should tell you it's better than early OSX. Thank who- or whatever you deem divine for Perforce... because I once lost an entire Solaris build of the Photoshop engine to early OSX. And it waited until I had fixed quite a few bugs to make the engine work on BSD before it crapped on me too.
AWESOME times!!! No actually it SUCKED!!!
Maybe I'm just being harsh on 10.0 and 10.1, or maybe harsh on Titanium powerbooks??? I don't know. Maybe other people were not as annoyed as I was with the crashes and slowness. But it was BAD!!! HORRIBLE actually. I think Vista was a sack of crap... but even Vista gave a better experience than the early OSX versions. Though Vista and early OSX probably are neck and neck for worst desktop OS experiences to date.
I don't know... I could be wrong. I mean... I also think Windows XP has probably delivered mankind the BEST desktop OS experience to date. So what do I know ???
Anyway... Yosemite is bad... but for those too young to remember... BELIEVE me when I say... early OSX was FAR, far worse.
Re: It Just Works
#35Yes, I've also noticed an increasing number of software bugs on my Macs. FWIW, I wanted to try out the Dell XPS "Developer Edition," which appears to be about as close as you can get to a Macbook level build quality in a linux box (without having to jump though the hoops of installing linux on a macbook itself), and you simply can't order it from Dell's website. A chat with a rep suggested that it's out of stock. So,…
Any knowledge or experience of System 76 laptop computers as Linux machines?
Re: It Just Works
#36Apple makes things that "do more" than their products of old, and we expect them to do more than devices past. The combination of features plus our expectation that all our devices be aware of what is happening on the others at all times is a recipe for a combinatorial explosion of unpredicted states, race conditions, you name it. I too miss the simplicity and "it just works" factor of past days. But it's a lot easie…
> As much as Apple screws up, could you imagine using a watch + phone + PC + tablet from some other vendor, and it being better?
I use a phone, watch, tablet, TV dongle, and PCs from a combination of 5 different hardware and 3 different core software vendors (on all but the watch and TV dongle, not the same vendors for both on the same device), and I have a pretty good experience working across them for the things that need to work across them.
Perhaps Apple's ingrained culture is less well adapted to dealing with diversity than those of vendors who are used to having to deal with it because they don't control all aspects of the experience.
Re: It Just Works
#37I dunno, I just don't use Apple produced software on my Mac for the most part and the experience is mostly fine. I use Windows at home and Mac for work, so I probably spend a bit more time on my work Mac.
I loath finder with a passion that would reduce stars to quarks, but that's just because its poorly designed, not particularly buggy. And outside of the OS, that's pretty much all the Apple software I tend to use on a day-to-day basis. I learned a long time ago to just stop trying to make their software work, and I don't know why people keep returning to it after years of dealing with increasingly bad software. Just avoid it.
My day pretty much consists of Chrome, iterm2, MS-Office and a handful of other apps, and things work mostly fine. I could probably have an absolutely equal day on a Windows laptop since most of what I use is cross-platform or has an equivalent.
My only real gripe is that I wish the screen animation and updating was more "snappy" like in windows. It always feels like it's just making the little graphics hamsters work a little extra hard to do things like scrolling quickly.
I think the larger point here is that the apps apple makes all have better replacements in their segment. I can kind of see that for a terminal application or whatever that's tossed in with the OS, but for other kinds of applications, ones you pay good money for, Apple really should be more neck-and-neck with the competition.
There's also really little excuse these days for the huge ecosystem of addons and patches that unfuck missing and broken core OS features. Bettertouchtool, for example, shouldn't actually need to exist. But there's something like half a dozen applications kind of like it, and zero support for what it does built in OS X. People don't really complain about it too much because once you install and set these little widgets up, you forget about them. But the user should never have to install this stuff in the first place.
This seems to me like a combination of a lack of focus, lack of dedicated teams, lack of product ownership and vision, and lack of attention to detail in the software development practice at Apple vs. the software design teams.
Re: It Just Works
#38I got into Apple in 2006, loved the ride up to Snow Leopard. Then things got weird. UI choices that made little sense. Hardware bugs that were impossible to diagnose or fix. Like my parents Mac Mini that would show snow on the display after it went to sleep. Try troubleshooting that remotely. My work rMBP has some similar issues where my monitor just goes green. And then it also has a SystemUI freeze for upwards of 30 seconds that is completely impossible to fix. DiscoveryD, oh god why.
Apple just doesn't seem as focused on a main goal of shipping stable and perfect solutions. The "me too!" attitude shows it.
Oh and lets not forget when they ship iWork with missing features and then slowly add them back over time...
Re: It Just Works
#39I've been increasingly feeling the same way, especially about OS X, but what's the alternative for a developer-friendly desktop operating system that looks and works beautifully (almost) out of the box?
Linux Mint is working for me pretty well for the past 1 year. Check it out.
Re: It Just Works
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
iTunes is absolutely terrible. I did several updates for my girlfriend and friends, and none of them figured out iTunes. Most of them downgraded.
Spotify is a possible replacement (even without their streaming and music finding services), but I find that application quite buggy.
spotify is pretty crappy (experiences on android):
* they broke google maps for about 3 months. Originally, when google maps needed to give audio directions, music would pause. It worked. Some moron decided, instead, to make the audio keep playing but make it quieter while google maps was giving audio directions. What he or she actually did is to mute google maps. This persisted for 3 months while assholes there made excuses (how fucking hard is git revert) and claimed bluetooth audio wasn't supported and therefore customers had no grounds for complaint. What was particularly frustrating across the 100 page support threads was the fact that this bug was so obvious that clearly not a single employee uses the android app or gives a damn about the experience.
* spotify added a moronic "control spotify from other devices" feature. What this does in reality is this: listen to spotify on your way to work. At work, set your phone down and start listening to spotify on your computer. The next time you get a txt or interact with your phone (ie enter your pin into the lock screen), the spotify session that's been lurking steals control of your mac and jumps back to whatever you'd been listening to hours ago on your phone. The cure is to always leave spotify in offline mode and/or kill the task when you're done listening to it.
* listening to files you own -- eg a concert recording unavailable in spotify -- while theoretically supported, is just janky.
* If you make the mistake of allowing spotify to go online on your phone, it eats battery life.
* there's a long list of other bugs, but I now wait at least 3 months before installing any updates and archive previous apks so that I can revert their idiocy. I really need to get on figuring out how to import their playlists into something better.