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Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

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

#271

Post by sneak »

skohan wrote: post #237
jwr wrote: post #184

I fully agree with the author, and I am also worried about how Apple treats its users. And I am also an abandoned Aperture user, with huge libraries full of organized albums with non-destructive edits. I still do not know what to do about that. Having read most of the comments, I got the impression that you could correlate them with age. Younger people are all "Catalina works for me! Progress! Change is necessary! Wh…

I'm in the same situation with Aperture. It's not only a problem because of the issue you describe with losing the product of my prior work, but it's not clear what the migration target would be. The most obvious alternative is Lightroom, but this would mean trading a tool I have been using happily for free for 7 years for a 20EUR/month subscription service I would have to maintain the rest of my digital life. My cur…

You can always just pirate Lightroom (LR Classic, that is—the non-cloud-dependent one). It’s not particularly difficult, and sidesteps the subscription lock-in nicely.

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

#272

Post by Razengan »

lostgame wrote: post #131
Razengan wrote: post #50

I still love macOS but Catalina has been the buggiest beta and release that I can recall. When we saw betas of x.1 before there were even GMs/release candidates of x.0 we knew it was going to be rushed out the door. Even after release it's still randomly losing files. Just yesterday my purchased music downloads just disappeared. No explanation (unless I trashed and emptied them in a fugue state). They were still show…

>> it's still randomly losing files. Whoa, no. That is a huge code red for me as a creative. Especially in the music folder. I work at all crazy times of day and night, inspiration hits, and is often impossible to replace. Not alright.

A recent major Windows update deleted user documents as well. [0]

Seems like it's chaos everywhere. Maybe a conspiracy by Big Backup.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+update+deleted+docum...

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

#273

Post by woutr_be »

josteink wrote: post #265
woutr_be wrote: post #167

I've upgraded to Catalina on my 2015 MacBook Pro the day it released (didn't run the betas), and I haven't experienced any problems. I mostly use it for development, everything still works. My only annoyance so far has been SideCar, it just never works the first time, I have to switch from second display to mirror, then back to second display to make it work.

> I haven’t experienced any problems > it just never works the first time Make up your mind. These two statements are not compatible.

They are, the first one is referring to the Catalina upgrade in general, where I haven't experienced any problems, either with the OS, or the existing software I use.

The second one is specifically referring to SideCar as an individual feature.

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

#274

Post by new_realist »

mihaaly wrote: post #207
jwr wrote: post #184

I fully agree with the author, and I am also worried about how Apple treats its users. And I am also an abandoned Aperture user, with huge libraries full of organized albums with non-destructive edits. I still do not know what to do about that. Having read most of the comments, I got the impression that you could correlate them with age. Younger people are all "Catalina works for me! Progress! Change is necessary! Wh…

In my young ages I was hungry for new technology, learning and adapting the progress, experimenting. Nowadays I am for something that works and can be used for what I need. Apple is good in the first, and gives no f* about the second. Their products - including hardware - is for the young. I think I am going to accept that and 'adapt mindset' to this premise as an ultimate step of not 'resisting change'. (I already g…

What computing products “for the old” would you recommend?

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

#275

Post by SiVal »

goatinaboat wrote: post #242
mihaaly wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my young ages I was hungry for new technology, learning and adapting the progress, experimenting. Nowadays I am for something that works and can be used for what I need. Apple is good in the first, and gives no f* about the second. Their products - including hardware - is for the young. I think I am going to accept that and 'adapt mindset' to this premise as an ultimate step of not 'resisting change'. (I already g…

Their products - including hardware - is for the young. I don’t think that’s it. Once upon a time a Rolex was a serious tool for professional pilots and divers but now it’s a status symbol. It still basically tells the time but no one buys it for that. Once upon a time a Mac...

I think there is something to this idea that Apple's products are for the young. Older folks like me learned to use computers as toolboxes of specialized tools that we could use in combination to create customized solutions to whatever we had to do. But Apple would rather sell you solutions (higher value-added) than sell you tools to make your own.

By "courageously" taking things away from users, they frustrate older users who know how to do what they want for themselves, but Apple seems to be counting on a new generation of users who never learned to do things for themselves to be just fine with letting Apple do them. I always appreciated Apple's dedication to "quality", but the quality involved in computers as "bicycles for the mind" is not the Apple of today, where "quality" is about looking young, hip, fashionable, and somewhat wealthy.

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

#276

Post by hrktb »

lilyball wrote: post #162
amiantos wrote: post #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".

I read a few paragraphs, got the same impression, and closed it, because the author admitted they're using practically none of the Apple ecosystem and therefore have already discounted the overwhelming majority of the improvements in Catalina. It's certainly disingenuous to have a clickbait headline "Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it's worth" when it's missing "as explained by someone who doesn't use music, photo…

It's a fair take though.

macOS is a product on its own, especially if you come from the hardware pespective, wanting for instance a iMac Pro and seeing the OS that comes with it as a glorified hardware manager.

Is macOS Catalina the best OS for your machine ? Is it genuinely better than the precedent version ?

That's a question worth pondering.

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

#277

Post by stoobs »

komoreba wrote: post #252

When reading articles like this, I always wonder whether it was that different way back when: Did macOS change less disruptively five years ago? I switched to using macOS just recently (Mojave being the first I really used), so I might not know. I notice myself being less and less open to radical new change and being more willing (and able) to just stick to something that works for me. I have tinkered a fair lot in m…

I think some people have short memories, there have been numerous grumblings (right or wrong) about many of the step-change releases. To me, this feels a bit like when the rosetta fat-binaries were killed off in 10.7, for some people it was pretty bad for those with software which didn't and wouldn't support Intel binaries, but for others it was a minor blip.

Catalina has been fine for me, but I probably have a different use-case.

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

#278

Post by benjymo »

skohan wrote: post #237
jwr wrote: post #184

I fully agree with the author, and I am also worried about how Apple treats its users. And I am also an abandoned Aperture user, with huge libraries full of organized albums with non-destructive edits. I still do not know what to do about that. Having read most of the comments, I got the impression that you could correlate them with age. Younger people are all "Catalina works for me! Progress! Change is necessary! Wh…

I'm in the same situation with Aperture. It's not only a problem because of the issue you describe with losing the product of my prior work, but it's not clear what the migration target would be. The most obvious alternative is Lightroom, but this would mean trading a tool I have been using happily for free for 7 years for a 20EUR/month subscription service I would have to maintain the rest of my digital life. My cur…

I don't use it often but on Linux I found https://www.darktable.org/ great. They also have a Mac Version. Maybe something worth looking into.

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

#279

Post by collyw »

Razengan wrote: post #264
josteink wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s still randomly losing files > it is still the better alternative to Windows I’m not sure what kind of Stockholm-syndrome it takes to put these two sentences in the same post. This is just crazy.

Perhaps this simple illustration of a scale will help? BAD ---X-----Y----Z----- GOOD Given the standard definitions of "better" and "worse", Y needs to regress substantially to put it behind X.

Most users would put "randomly loosing files" pretty far left.

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

#280

Post by swish_bob »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #173
johnisgood wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is evidently NOT opposed to changes, read these quotes from him: > I don't like change when it unnecessarily breaks things that used to work just fine. > I used to like change more when it actually made me work better, when the advantages clearly outweighed the downsides, when progress and improvements were noticeable and thoughtfully implemented. He is opposed to changes that 1) break things that used to work fin…

> He is opposed to changes that 1) break things that used to work fine The arguments for building emulators into the OS are weak. A minority of users running old operating systems in VMs while the majority get a sleeker, better maintained and thus hopefully more secure OS. That is a fair tradeoff. Pulling native 32-bit support may be 2019’s laptop-with-no-disk-drive drama.

People who've been using an OS for a fairly long time tend to accumulate applications. Many of them will have been 32-bit at the point they got them. Many of them still will be, or will be fairly awkward to update. While I'm happy I should be able to find 64 bit versions of everything I want to upgrade, I'm confident I wouldn't be able to talk my mother through it on the phone.

It's been flagged that it's coming for a while, but _at best_ it's a massive ballache for an awful lot of customers. Apple are going to need to provide me with a pretty compelling reason to persuade me to willingly undergo that pain ...

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