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Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

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Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#41

Post by bgorman »

I recently switched to macOS after using Linux pretty much exclusively for personal use over the last 5 years. (2020 MacBook Air)

For me the most infuriating thing is that Apple completely hides what is actually going on from the user.

Want to manually scale your display to an exact resolution? Go to Displays, Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this is completely non nondiscoverable.

An exFAT external hard drive wasn't "shut down correctly" ... no problem Mac OS will just run fsck in the background and refuse mount the drive or let you examine the disk in Disk Utility until it is complete. If you kill -9 the fsck, you get stuck in some limbo state where you can't mount the disk or run diagnostics on it.

The worst thing I have discovered is Pages... The stylesheets and layout logic make absolutely no sense, it is way worse than Word or Libreoffice.

However the OS does run smoother on a day to day basis than my work provided MacBook Pro 2019 running Mojave, and there is absolutely no screen tearing.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#42

Post by laktak »

brundolf wrote: post #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.…

>> 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?

I had to reinstall Catalina a few times in the past month. I usually lose half a day waiting for the restore to complete.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#43

Post by themodelplumber »

bgorman wrote: post #41

I recently switched to macOS after using Linux pretty much exclusively for personal use over the last 5 years. (2020 MacBook Air) For me the most infuriating thing is that Apple completely hides what is actually going on from the user. Want to manually scale your display to an exact resolution? Go to Displays, Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this i…

> Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this is completely non nondiscoverable.

This could be a clever designer, if for example the team decided that Mac users don't need manual resolution settings, and this designer lost the argument. So they stick it behind a keypress and make sure word gets out.

The team only cares about what they can see, a common issue with teams. So they don't notice and the designer at least knows they've saved some major pain, at the cost of some annoyance.

If you've worked with people who design for social bell-curve psychology, you have probably been confronted with this problem before. And this is just one possible explanation...

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#44

Post by btgeekboy »

laktak wrote: post #42
brundolf wrote: post #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.…

>> 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? I had to reinstall Catalina a few times in the past month. I usually lose half a day waiting for the restore to complete.

A few times in a month seems a tad excessive. What's causing your installs to become corrupted?

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#45

Post by bitwize »

WantonQuantum wrote: post #7
bradknowles wrote: post #2

And 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.

1) Don't worry too much about distro. Get Debian or something Debian-based.

2) ThinkPads were and are excellent portable Linux machines.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#46

Post by duncan_bayne »

phoe-krk wrote: post #35
brundolf wrote: post #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.…

> Re-installing an OS is free (both the materials and, for Apple customers who don't know how to do it themselves, the service). To make a semi-unrelated quote from Jamie Zawinski, "Linux is only free if your time has no value."

That's true, but it leaves out the other half of the equation: you'll still likely spend less of your valuable time on your making your Ubuntu installation work, than on anything else (speaking as someone with commercial dev experience on MacOS, Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD).

I spent hours trying to stabilise my wife's XPS13 after a recent Windows Update sent it into paroxysms of BSODs. Reset, reimaged, the whole nine yards: nothing. Ended up installing Ubuntu on it and it's been rock-solid stable since.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#47

Post by microcolonel »

phoe-krk wrote: post #35
brundolf wrote: post #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.…

> Re-installing an OS is free (both the materials and, for Apple customers who don't know how to do it themselves, the service). To make a semi-unrelated quote from Jamie Zawinski, "Linux is only free if your time has no value."

FWIW the amount of time I've spent fiddling with my OS in the last year approaches zero, and I don't remember it being this unintrusive when I was using Windows or macOS at work.

Nothing just works quite like something that simply hasn't changed.

In the amount of time I used to spend in a month making sure macOS wasn't on the brink; a couple weeks ago I investigated and implemented a feature in a system component, one that is not present on any commercially available desktop operating system.

Now my input method client displays language-appropriate glyph variants based on the input method's locale, and you just managed to get the App Store to shut up, or fix some of your homebrew after a system upgrade.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#48

Post by marmaduke »

bgorman wrote: post #41

I recently switched to macOS after using Linux pretty much exclusively for personal use over the last 5 years. (2020 MacBook Air) For me the most infuriating thing is that Apple completely hides what is actually going on from the user. Want to manually scale your display to an exact resolution? Go to Displays, Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this i…

> this is completely non nondiscoverable

I also don’t find this discoverable, but option clicking was best analogy to right clicking on Apple since the mouse used to have one button.

Your complaint is like saying that having to copy and paste with ctrl c and ctrl v is non discoverable in Windows with a two button mouse because in Linux it’s just select text and middle click somewhere else.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#49

Post by marmaduke »

bgorman wrote: post #41

I recently switched to macOS after using Linux pretty much exclusively for personal use over the last 5 years. (2020 MacBook Air) For me the most infuriating thing is that Apple completely hides what is actually going on from the user. Want to manually scale your display to an exact resolution? Go to Displays, Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this i…

> If you kill -9 the fsck

“For science,” right? I mean why would you do that? If you did that on Linux, would things really be better?

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#50

Post by tgv »

bgorman wrote: post #41

I recently switched to macOS after using Linux pretty much exclusively for personal use over the last 5 years. (2020 MacBook Air) For me the most infuriating thing is that Apple completely hides what is actually going on from the user. Want to manually scale your display to an exact resolution? Go to Displays, Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this i…

I'm not sure, but can you actually access a drive on Linux while it's being fsck'd? It sounds quite logical not to mount the drive, although perhaps one could get some mileage from mounting it RO.

> Apple completely hides what is actually going on from the user

That's intentional. I know people, ranging from barely computer-aware to MSc., who don't/can't understand what you would mean by resolution. Or exFAT. Or kill -9. However, they do know how to mess up with the slightest amount of power given to them. Hiding the system is a boon.

I'm a computer enginer, and for me, macOS is a great blend of power and simplicity/usability. I won't be happy if they mess up the OS or the hardware.

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