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Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

morrick.me

21–30 of 327 posts

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#21
Author hasn't tried Catalina, and their biggest complaint appears to be that the email app allegedly has a new UI--but I don't think it does. Mail app looks the same in Catalina, doesn't it? I can't say I noticed any differences.

Either way, this is an extremely long blog post to say basically just "I don't like change, and I'm not willing to see change as a potential improvement to try to accept it".

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#22
post #6

I’m always wary of MacOS upgrades from when Snow Leopard made my Warcraft and Age of Empires stop working. Ultimately, I find it best to just suck it up and upgrade and use virtualization to run specific stuff. Mac is the easiest for me to have a daily driver browser while also being useful for most dev and basic Unix user tasks.

Unfortunately Apple has lousy backward compatibility, particularly for games. Dropping 32-bit is going to kill a bunch of games.

On iOS it seeem even worse, with yearly releases breaking many apps; Apple's aggressive ABI changes offload a large maintenance burden onto app developers, who have to keep updating their apps every year just to keep them working the same way.

Windows seems to do a lot better, and game consoles do even better: with the exception of multiplayer games whose servers get shut down after a year or two, most games keep working indefinitely across firmware revisions.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#24

I couldn’t tell from the article if the author had actually tried Catalina. I have been running the beta since day one of the beta release and the only issue is that applications have to be signed or built locally. Apple wants macOS to be a safe walled garden like iOS and Chromebooks. I am fine with this, but I also have a very nice Linux laptop to play with. I expect organized crime and most governments to continue…

Why would you try it? Some of us lose money when our machines go down. Apple is supposed to represent quality, but that hasn't happened in so long that if your machine is the machine you make money on, you wait to hear what other people are encountering.

Thanks for being my beta tester!

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#26

I couldn’t tell from the article if the author had actually tried Catalina. I have been running the beta since day one of the beta release and the only issue is that applications have to be signed or built locally. Apple wants macOS to be a safe walled garden like iOS and Chromebooks. I am fine with this, but I also have a very nice Linux laptop to play with. I expect organized crime and most governments to continue…

What about all the iCloud bugs? https://tyler.io/broken/

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#27
I find it slightly annoying too, especially when an upgrade breaks the command line tools, or homebrew, and make me lost a few GB of SSD space. The last upgrade made me lose about 30 minutes of my day to fix a few issues. And I didn't notice much changes, besides the welcome screen picture, and that something changed with itunes, which prevented me from using it.

So overall, I tend to think that there are too frequent upgrades and that I don't need them. But overall, I'm still a satisfied mac user so I give Apple the benefice of the doubt.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#28

I couldn’t tell from the article if the author had actually tried Catalina. I have been running the beta since day one of the beta release and the only issue is that applications have to be signed or built locally. Apple wants macOS to be a safe walled garden like iOS and Chromebooks. I am fine with this, but I also have a very nice Linux laptop to play with. I expect organized crime and most governments to continue…

>I avoid arbitrary web browsing on my Linux laptop and just use it for coding.

What makes web browsers less secure on Linux than on macOS?

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#29

That reads less like a reasonable, well-thought breakdown and more like a whiny diatribe coming from an entitled teenager. If the entire argument boils down to "I don't wanna!", then what's the point? Don't upgrade. Apple isn't forcing anyone to upgrade at all. If you need to run all your old software, don't upgrade. That's not a fault of the new OS. Technology changes. That's a fact of life. Even the example of Aper…

Catalina does break a lot of games. I am pretty sure that if you get on Steam, the list of games that Catalina breaks is longer than the list of games that work on Catalina.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#30
post #5

"why mess with Mail’s classic layout? It’s been my preferred layout since Mac OS X 10.0, and that type of layout has basically been the one I have used since I started using email more than twenty years ago" This seems to be the heart of the post. I see the value in stable, unchanging things, but I also have to believe the designers at Apple are trying to make things better, and I think that is honorable.

> but I also have to believe the designers at Apple are trying to make things better

Except they're not trying to make things better. They're just changing things - often ignoring their own UI guidelines to do so - and introducing bugs that cause data loss at the same time.

Updates shouldn't cause data loss - especially for something as critical as email.

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