Steve Jobs once said that an operating system was obsolete after 7 years. MacOS is now 36. MacOS X is now 19.
Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
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Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#12I’ve had the new MacBook since December, but still using the old one because there’s no smooth upgrade path for me.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#13It's the bloat that is terrible. Chrome pages are 5x the size of the same page on Linux or Windows. You need 8GB minimum nowadays to run Catalina where Tiger it was 256MB.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#14It used to be a long running joke as well as practical wisdom on the Windows side to always wait for SP1 (Service Pack 1) for better stability and never to install the X.0 version.
For all the “doubling down on Mac” that Apple’s senior employees harp about in interviews, macOS itself has been focusing more on eye candy and iOS parity than on stability. For my machines, I switch to Linux once macOS updates are no longer available, even though the user experience isn’t as great with older hardware and support for external peripherals like the Trackpad. For machines that can run the latest macOS, I upgrade every two whole releases on macOS (and that after it’s way beyond a X.0 release) since security updates are made available to past releases for a few years.
Right now I’m on the latest Mojave release, and skipped Catalina completely. I’ll consider Big Sur a few minor releases after 11.0 is released. This also makes some practical sense because Apple works on features with a multi-year plan but releases them partially done in a “brand new version” (you’ll notice this pattern if you look at it).
I’m thankful to all the brave souls who venture sooner (intentionally or because they bought new hardware that will refuse to run an older OS) and pave the way for me to avoid potholes and land mines.
My days of tinkering with the computer and “yak shaving” are long over. Even though my comment may sound hostile to macOS, there’s no other OS I’d rather start using my personal computer with unless I really, really have to.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#15MacOS has so many features I'll never use. It is starting to feel bloated. I wonder if modern OSs did less would be smaller and feel snappier?
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#16Steve Jobs once said that an operating system was obsolete after 7 years. MacOS is now 36. MacOS X is now 19.
Yeah, but he said that as a sales pitch. Remember he was not an engineer.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#17> 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.…
Maybe a better analogy is: You have a problem with your living room light dimmer not working. The solution is to move all of your furniture out of your house, or being generous, just the living room, and then moving it back. Would you consider that reasonable?
Assuming you have a backup, then lets say some movers come out (for free) and do the moving. That's not inconvenient, right? After all, you don't have to do any of the moving. Just wait an hour or so and the movers will move everything back and quietly disappear.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#18It used to be a long running joke as well as practical wisdom on the Windows side to always wait for SP1 (Service Pack 1) for better stability and never to install the X.0 version. For all the “doubling down on Mac” that Apple’s senior employees harp about in interviews, macOS itself has been focusing more on eye candy and iOS parity than on stability. For my machines, I switch to Linux once macOS updates are no long…
> For my machines, I switch to Linux once macOS updates are no longer available
What's the best way to use Linux on an old MacBook air? Should I be running it in a VM? Is there a way to dula boot? The laptop is quite old, it has 4GB of RAM. So I'm worried nothing will run well on it. Macos definitely feels sluggish on it now.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#19It used to be a long running joke as well as practical wisdom on the Windows side to always wait for SP1 (Service Pack 1) for better stability and never to install the X.0 version. For all the “doubling down on Mac” that Apple’s senior employees harp about in interviews, macOS itself has been focusing more on eye candy and iOS parity than on stability. For my machines, I switch to Linux once macOS updates are no long…
> For my machines, I switch to Linux once macOS updates are no longer available What's the best way to use Linux on an old MacBook air? Should I be running it in a VM? Is there a way to dula boot? The laptop is quite old, it has 4GB of RAM. So I'm worried nothing will run well on it. Macos definitely feels sluggish on it now.
Just install it and use it.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#20It used to be a long running joke as well as practical wisdom on the Windows side to always wait for SP1 (Service Pack 1) for better stability and never to install the X.0 version. For all the “doubling down on Mac” that Apple’s senior employees harp about in interviews, macOS itself has been focusing more on eye candy and iOS parity than on stability. For my machines, I switch to Linux once macOS updates are no long…
> For my machines, I switch to Linux once macOS updates are no longer available What's the best way to use Linux on an old MacBook air? Should I be running it in a VM? Is there a way to dula boot? The laptop is quite old, it has 4GB of RAM. So I'm worried nothing will run well on it. Macos definitely feels sluggish on it now.
I’m not a fan of VMs for older machines since they tend to perform poorly. And 4GB RAM wouldn’t be adequate for that. I’d suggest dual booting with a separate partition for Linux. You can also choose distros that have a lower hardware requirement and perform better on older machines (my first choice is Xubuntu, but there are others too).
Make sure you still retain the macOS partition and installation (after resizing it down). There are tools like reFind [1] that can help you manage dual booting better (do read the extensive documentation and refer to it when needed).
It goes without saying that you should have a full disk backup with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! before you venture into these.
The experience on Linux may not be great out of the box (depending on your exact hardware). So I’d also suggest budgeting some time to iron out kinks and make it better.