Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#61

Post by oblio » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 7:36 AM UTC

marmaduke wrote: post #48

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.

> option clicking was best analogy to right clicking on Apple since the mouse used to have one button.

Not high praise for Apple, wasn't the 1 button mouse the laughing stock of mouse users everywhere? :-)

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#62

Post by tonyedgecombe » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 7:38 AM UTC

disposekinetics wrote: post #15

MacOS 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?

Apple can't win here can they, one person complains they remove too much functionality, the next complains the operating system is bloated.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#63

Post by bengale » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 7:38 AM UTC

microcolonel wrote: post #47

phoe-krk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, on…

> In the amount of time I used to spend in a month making sure macOS wasn't on the brink

What was it you were having to do to maintain macOS?

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#64

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 7:48 AM UTC

andrewmackrodt wrote: post #54

themodelplumber wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 is…

A lot of macOS seems designed this way, it took me months of using macOS daily before I learnt these little tricks, e.g. pressing option before many operations generally shows an advanced menu (advanced network connection stats, finder merge folder option etc). I'd like for there to be an option for power users where this is the default behaviour if enabled.

I've been using MacOS for nearly 15 years now, and I've only just discovered that the Finder toolbar can be customised.

In fact you can park your own shell scripts on it, although setting that up is a bit of a performance.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#65

Post by mindfulhack » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 7:50 AM UTC

I think in general macOS is an amazing operating system, recent Catalina bugs aside.

Something related: what I've been really living with is the T2 chip kernel panic hardware bug. Over 3 different models (the 2017, 2018, then the 2019 16-inch MBP which is my current), I've seen Apple go from:

- The initial full-scale buggy behaviour of 1-2 complete system crash & forced reboots per week;

- to Apple suddenly deleting all my previous system kernel crash logs (and no longer recording new ones in Console.app) without my consent or knowledge even though it's my own machine that I paid over $5000 for (must be silent updates of some kind because it happened in between macOS updates);

- to observing Apple slowly tweaking how macOS responds to the kernel panic by no longer crashing the system but just freezing the screen and all controls for up to a minute (while sound continues) before unfreezing itself (this happens maybe 3-5 times per week for me, even more, it happens when watching full-screen video in any app).

So they've improved it but it's still disruptive and noticeable, and plain unacceptable on hardware this expensive.

Yes, I'm slowly planning a move to Linux, but it's not easy, it will take time and it's a major adjustment depending on what your computer needs are. Linux Mint Cinnamon seems the safest bet to me.

I say all this knowing how catastrophically worse Windows 10 is in terms of bugs like Windows updates suddenly hard deleting your entire Documents folder.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#66

Post by mschuster91 » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 7:54 AM UTC

livueta wrote: post #9

easton wrote: post #5

I 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…

The effective way is to go "pave it/replace the machine" for the first time you hear an issue, but as soon as the second or third report comes in, it gets investigated.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#67

Post by gtf21 » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 8:02 AM UTC

mindfulhack wrote: post #65

I think in general macOS is an amazing operating system, recent Catalina bugs aside. Something related: what I've been really living with is the T2 chip kernel panic hardware bug. Over 3 different models (the 2017, 2018, then the 2019 16-inch MBP which is my current), I've seen Apple go from: - The initial full-scale buggy behaviour of 1-2 complete system crash & forced reboots per week; - to Apple suddenly deleting…

Recently made that move having spent most of my life on MacOS. For me it was the feeling of losing control of my system (plus the recent quality issues -- feels like they're busy pushing new features out instead of fixing the bugs with the existing ones).

I thought it would be a lot harder than it was for me, but in the end I'm now much happier on Linux than I was on OSX. There's no specialist software I need that doesn't work on Linux, so it was probably easier for me than if you, say, work in FinalCut all the time.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#68

Post by _ph_ » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 8:07 AM UTC

As a long-term mac user, I hope that the transition to ARM and what goes along with it, is largely responsible for what went wrong in recent years. Not only did this transition for sure mean a lot of team reshuffling, additional tasks to do etc. To my understanding, there was a big reorg in the code base itself. iOS began as a fork of macOS (or rather OS X as it was called back then), and over the years, those two codes bases drifted apart. To my understanding, with the move to Apple Silicon, not only macOS was ported to the new architecture, but the code bases got merged again. So the aim is to have one universal core onto which the separate teams can build iOS/iPadOS/watchOS/tvOS and of course macOS.

Such a big code refactoring is of course a very big undertaking, causing a lot of disruption. But once it is finished, not only the disruption goes away, but hopefully maintenance is easier and more systematic. If that holds true, then macOS should be improving again moving forward. That all platforms use identical or at least very similar hardware should also help stability.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#69

Post by fock » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 8:07 AM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #60

Voliokis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're on a device that can only be upgraded to 10.13, after which it won't get security updates anymore after 11 is released. Meanwhile, I can still put W10 on 10-12 year old PCs and it'll run fine (if the hardware wasn't particularly terrible even for back then). It might not support some of the latest features, but it works and you're not subject to some arbitrary decision by Microsoft as to whether you're…

W10 is terrible on traditional hard drives which most PC's were using 10-12 years ago. We are also at the tail end of the core 2 duo era, those devices aren't really up to the job.

well, a cheap SSD costs 20€. And you know, with 95% of Windows-based PCs you can just replace the harddisk. whoaaaa

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#70

Post by mschuster91 » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 8:08 AM UTC

mindfulhack wrote: post #65

I think in general macOS is an amazing operating system, recent Catalina bugs aside. Something related: what I've been really living with is the T2 chip kernel panic hardware bug. Over 3 different models (the 2017, 2018, then the 2019 16-inch MBP which is my current), I've seen Apple go from: - The initial full-scale buggy behaviour of 1-2 complete system crash & forced reboots per week; - to Apple suddenly deleting…

> to observing Apple slowly tweaking how macOS responds to the kernel panic by no longer crashing the system but just freezing the screen and all controls for up to a minute (while sound continues) before unfreezing itself (this happens maybe 3-5 times per week for me, even more, it happens when watching full-screen video in any app).

That's not a kernel panic then, by definition a kernel panic is an unrecoverable event. What you're seeing is likely an issue somewhere in the GUI/GPU driver stack. Windows used to crash upon such issues too, they mitigated it by moving lots of stuff to userspace.

For me, what is a regular event is freezing for a dozen seconds whenever I alt-tab to Cisco VPN, but ah well that may also be a result of shoddy antivirus software.