Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
eclecticlight.co
Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
1–10 of 199 posts
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#2And this is part of why I refuse to be forced to upgrade to Catalina.
So, when I buy “new” hardware, I will make sure that it is compatible with Mojave.
Which means it won’t actually be new....
Something’s wrong when the best hardware you can buy from a manufacturer is from the versions they’re not making any more.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#3It seems all of the engineering resources are going towards iOS and macOS is only an afterthought, a device necessary for making iOS apps... I'll be moving on when I get a new laptop.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#4It seems all of the engineering resources are going towards iOS and macOS is only an afterthought, a device necessary for making iOS apps... I'll be moving on when I get a new laptop.
the "rejigging" of mac ui to look like ios in big sur sure makes me feel like that is so...
i have a lot of apps in my applications folder crossed out with a / mark because they are 32-bit... its kind of strange to me that if i "downgraded" to mojave they all start working again... isnt that weird? seems almost the opposite of "customer centric"...
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#5I don’t know, at scale in a company, my mood has always been (with Windows, mostly, but sometimes older versions of macOS) that if the issue doesn’t exist on a clean test box, we’re reimaging your machine. Since home folders are often somewhere else (folder redirection or OneDrive in Windows, in this case on a separate volume from /System), a OS reinstall isn’t very time consuming. Once the OS comes back up, MDM grabs it and sets up policy and applications.
For personal use, most people don’t install stuff that’s that complicated to redo (maybe at most, Adobe and Office which are download pkg and sign in), so if the OS was so fundamentally borked that the sealed system volume stood in your way, you’d waste more time trying to fix it by hand rather than just reinstalling the OS from Internet Recovery and signing back in. Especially since Time Machine does a good job at backing up home folders.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#6> We are heading rapidly towards the corollary to “it just works” being “and if it doesn’t, just wipe everything and re-install”.
Is this really all that bad? In the era of everything living in the cloud, it generally takes me only a couple hours to setup a system again from scratch. Not that I've ever had to do this on macOS personally (though I did once on iOS), but if I had, I wouldn't be terribly upset about it.
> If every time your car had a problem you had to replace its engine, wouldn’t you consider that abysmal engineering?
This is a ridiculous analogy. Re-installing an OS is free (both the materials and, for Apple customers who don't know how to do it themselves, the service).
macOS today doesn't always just work. I run into bugs sometimes and get frustrated. But whenever I boot up Windows and have to fight to get the most basic dev tools working, or boot up Linux and have to fight to get a core function like system updates or audio working, I'm reminded how much closer macOS still is to "just working" than anything else out there.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#7And this is part of why I refuse to be forced to upgrade to Catalina. So, when I buy “new” hardware, I will make sure that it is compatible with Mojave. Which means it won’t actually be new.... Something’s wrong when the best hardware you can buy from a manufacturer is from the versions they’re not making any more.
This is exactly where I am right now and I’m starting to explore my options for jumping to Linux for desktop and laptop. There are some great distros out there that I’m looking forward to trying.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#8And this is part of why I refuse to be forced to upgrade to Catalina. So, when I buy “new” hardware, I will make sure that it is compatible with Mojave. Which means it won’t actually be new.... Something’s wrong when the best hardware you can buy from a manufacturer is from the versions they’re not making any more.
This is exactly where I am right now and I’m starting to explore my options for jumping to Linux for desktop and laptop. There are some great distros out there that I’m looking forward to trying.
I find desktop Linux much better as a developer OS than my MacBook. Now if only there was a good ryzen laptop with amd gfx I'd be up offa the Mac entirely.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#9I don’t know, at scale in a company, my mood has always been (with Windows, mostly, but sometimes older versions of macOS) that if the issue doesn’t exist on a clean test box, we’re reimaging your machine. Since home folders are often somewhere else (folder redirection or OneDrive in Windows, in this case on a separate volume from /System), a OS reinstall isn’t very time consuming. Once the OS comes back up, MDM grab…
At one of the large companies I worked for, IT took that "just pave it" approach for _everything_. Maybe because of the contrast between that and my day job of spending weeks to months root-causing really weird distributed systems issues, it stuck me as penny-wise-pound-foolish. At least in this example, that attitude was used as an excuse to never actually investigate anything, even issues that recurred within days of a re-image. Outlook won't connect? Here, go watch the installer for a couple of hours, use your device for a day or two then back to square one. Eventually, it's easy to get so sick of IT's obvious unwillingness to actually fix shit that IT is avoided unless absolutely necessary, and everyone's productivity suffers as a result. At that company, IT was at the top of the negatives column on every internal survey.
It is definitely an effective attitude to take at scale, but it has to be paired with at least some troubleshooting of the class of issue. Otherwise, severe bugs get swept under the rug by user exhaustion and IT inaction.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#10WSL2 on windows is really nice.
I do all my dev on a surface book laptop running windows. WSL2 has me covered for anything that needs posix, but that's increasingly rare.
Edit: my deploy target is Ubuntu.