I feel for developers on macOS bugs, bloat and unreliability, but for many users, it still works every day for 5 to 7 years without issue, and updates just mean some new emoji are available.
Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
21–30 of 199 posts
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#22I 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…
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I worked somewhere that avoided reimaging PCs at all costs. Every system had tens of random workarounds applied to 'fix' issues as quickly as possible. Nothing was consistent, and IT also had a very poor reputation.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#23Steve Jobs once said that an operating system was obsolete after 7 years. MacOS is now 36. MacOS X is now 19.
The “Mac OS X” was more of a brand name than a singular OS. Each major release (the ones with new code names) was essentially a whole new OS. iOS just turned 13, but each year, it’s full of big changes.
I think Jobs might’ve been referring to the actual OS internals, not the brand name. As in, support period. After all, Linux (while not technically an OS) is older than Mac OS X / macOS, but it’s not obsolete. Just don’t expect to get security patches on kernels in the 2.x or 3.x range.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#24It 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.
On my Macbook Pro, I found Linux used more energy running directly, than running inside a VM (tested with VMware Fusion).
So I'm happy running Linux in a VM.
This might be due to the dual GPUs (on higher end MBPs), I didn't check further after the initial battery test.
It's nicer anyway, because of the ability to run MacOS and Linux at the same time, and four-finger swipe between their desktops. That way I get the nicer GUI of MacOS, consistently good touchpad (including in Linux), and Linux for my command line dev needs, and can use utilities for either that aren't available on the other.
On an old Macbook Air, Linux might us less energy running directly rather than VM. To be sure you'd have to try both.
4GB of RAM is tight for current software, even Linux, and a VM will make it tighter. Firefox is using more than 4GB for me right now, and Safari is also using more than 4GB. So you will need to avoid using Firefox the way I do, regardless of OS :-)
You might need to stick with older versions of whatever you decide to use. I would pick one of the Linux distros that is explicitly for old machines and small memory usage.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#25> 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 an…
It is ridiculous, but I can't help but think of cars.
I had a car a couple years back, where I had to get behind the side panel of the trunk to get to something (tail light?). The (ford) trunk panel was not held on by a screw, but y a weird fastener that had to be pried out (and I felt like I was breaking it). When it was out, the fastener looked like a christmas tree, and went into a hole easily in one direction and the design really didn't support coming out very well.
Turns out all cars are designed this way. They are "designed for assembly". Pretty much everything in the world is that way or moving that direction.
I think the computer equivalent is package managers and app upgrades and os upgrades and modular data.
But it's different. "designed for assembly" for cars becomes "designed for re-install" and the more troubling "designed for one-way upgrade"
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#26> 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 an…
Depends how often it happens. If I had to move all the furniture out of my house to fix the dimmer every five years then it still wouldn't be a huge deal. Anecdotally, I've been using MacBooks for six years and never had to reinstall the OS.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#27It 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.
FWIW, when I upgraded my parents operating system for their iPhone, it bricked the phone and I had to take it to the Apple store to get them to get it to stop freezing after attempting to boot the system following the upgrade.
The Apple tech told me that next time I want to upgrade multiple versions, that I should install fresh instead of upgrading.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#28And 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'm more or less in the same situation. I own a 2013 15" MBP that still works perfectly but I'm afraid of what will happen if / when it stops working. I actually use it often, so it could get stolen / I could drop it / etc.
My client uses Windows and HP computers. I've been able to save an "old" Elitedesk 800 G2 SFF (6th gen i5) from the dumpster and upgraded it with an old ssd I had lying around and 16 GB of ram (instead of 8). I've set up ArchLinux on it with I3 and boy do I love that machine. It's plenty powerful, quiet, and everything just works. It actually replaced my MBP as my "dev" machine during the WFH phase.
I've also had close to no issues running Arch on a Probook 430 G5. Everything except for the fingerprint reader works. But while the desktop is great, I'm less happy with the laptop. It's not so much related to Linux but to the physical machine itself (the touchpad isn't great, the keyboard's texture feels weird, it has coil whine, assembly is half-assed and rubs the wrists while working on it, etc).
As they say, YMMV, but my experience is that depending on what you do day to day with your computer, a Linux PC may actually work surprisingly well compared to a mac, especially on the desktop where the superior materials and assembly of the mac are less of an issue.
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#29It 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.
Linux will run really well on a machine with 4GB of memory. Check out Plasma Desktop, you can mimic macOS with it pretty well[1].
Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
On my Macbook Pro, I found Linux used more energy running directly, than running inside a VM (tested with VMware Fusion). So I'm happy running Linux in a VM. This might be due to the dual GPUs (on higher end MBPs), I didn't check further after the initial battery test. It's nicer anyway, because of the ability to run MacOS and Linux at the same time, and four-finger swipe between their desktops. That way I get the ni…
Look into tuning TLP with a GUI if you plan on running Linux on your laptop and power usage is an issue.
> 4GB of RAM is tight for current software, even Linux, and a VM will make it tighter. Firefox is using more than 4GB for me right now, and Safari is also using more than 4GB. So you will need to avoid using Firefox the way I do, regardless of OS :-)
You can use cgroups to limit the amount of memory an application can use. I use it to limit Firefox's memory usage on a machine with much more memory than that.