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Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

eclecticlight.co

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Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#151

Post by phendrenad2 »

coldtea wrote: post #148
iansinnott wrote: post #33

> Apple has long taken pride that “it just works”, but seems to have convinced itself that is inviolate fact This. Apple's inability to admit fault coupled with decreasing software stability makes life difficult in many ways. For instance, aside from the obvious detrimental effects of OS bugs, it's often quite difficult to find specific solutions without a specific error message. "$APP silently fails" or "Why is my f…

> Apple's inability to admit fault Like? Because Apple admits fault all the time. E.g.: 1) with the updated Mac Pro design and extended apologies for the old Pro format. 2) with the revised keyboard in the new Macbook Pros. 3) Changing from "skeuomorphic" (bad term, but I'll use it) UI to a flater look and tons of other instances...

I clearly remember the upgrade to Yosemite, and how it crippled Spotlight for anyone who (1) didn't have a SSD (2) did an OS upgrade, not a clean reinstall. Ask around the Apple forums, you'll only get a lot of Apple apologists and fanboys telling you to turn it off and on again, not a peep (and certainly no fix) from Apple.

Or a better example of the general sentiment that I think OP is going for, Apple stopped updating it's OpenGL implementation, and invented their own API. Definitely a user-hostile choice, but they defend it by saying that Metal is better than OpenGL. But now Vulkan exists, but Apple will never defend it's use of Metal over Vulkan, because reasons.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#152

Post by throwaway2048 »

marmaduke wrote: post #49
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?

it can get stuck and not do anything no matter how long you leave it.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#153

Post by pjmlp »

wqsz7xn wrote: post #97
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."

> "Linux is only free if your time has no value." I've always wondered if Ubuntu was introduced to a child would they learn to use it just as fast as a child that uses Windows? All the times I've used Ubuntu it's exactly the same as windows without all the distraction.

Even less distractions, as watching YouTube is painfully slow with software decoding by default.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#154

Post by pjmlp »

phoe-krk wrote: post #98
wqsz7xn wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Linux is only free if your time has no value." I've always wondered if Ubuntu was introduced to a child would they learn to use it just as fast as a child that uses Windows? All the times I've used Ubuntu it's exactly the same as windows without all the distraction.

I guess so, yes. This comment from Zawinski is very old by today's standards, and Linux has made massive progress when it comes to usability. A child should be able to learn it quickly.

My graphics card and time spent configuring hardware video decoding begs to differ.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#156

Post by dmux »

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…

>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.

I agree with the UI discoverability point, but it is called out in the documentation.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#157

Post by brundolf »

ikt wrote: post #39
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.…

> or boot up Linux and have to fight to get a core function like system updates or audio working How are these issues? Ubuntu has had these sorts of problems sorted for a while now?

Just the other day I was trying to install a package through apt and kept hitting some error about a lock file. After some googling it appeared to be because the OS was doing an auto-update process in the background. Which in itself is something I'd want, but it's insane as a user experience that it would block you from installing anything else and show nothing but a cryptic console error. So then I had to dig in and figure out how to kill the other process so I could install what I needed, which ended up putting my apt in a corrupt state so I had to run a repair process. By the time I got everything sorted out, an hour was gone.

This was the simplest possible task, and it was on Ubuntu LTS. Seemingly every time I have to switch over to Linux for something I end up dealing with an issue like this. Yak shaving was fun when I was in college, these days I just want to get on with my life.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#158

Post by bromuro »

coldtea wrote: post #147
randomsearch wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just in case you ever consider it for some reason, under no circumstances should you upgrade to Catalina. Worst OS I’ve used since I left windows nearly 20 years ago.

Reasons being? Because I didn't have a single issue with Catalina. People consider their anecdotal experiences as universal (I offer mine as a single counter example to the parent's experience), when it could be all kinds of weird factors in their case (a faulty hardware run, some incompatible peripherals, user errors attributed to the OS, application errors attributed to the OS and so on).

Yeah i also do love all the recent updates, i am very happy with macOS.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#159

Post by marmaduke »

PostThisTooFast wrote: post #76
marmaduke wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"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." No it isn't, because those functions have equivalent menu items. Easter-egg controls in a GUI are a different (and inexcusable) story.

Selecting text and it going to a clipboard is just as Easter eggy in my opinion. How is a user supposed to discover that?

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#160

Post by marmaduke »

rowanG077 wrote: post #131
marmaduke wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How is that non-discoverable? Most software literally tells you beside the copy/paste entry that it is ctrl+c/v.

Because the first part is to select text with a mouse?
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