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Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

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Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#171

Post by coldtea »

bromuro wrote: post #158
coldtea wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To not make it sound like it's all roses, some issues I had (mostly with hardware though):

1) I hated the butterfly keyboard (but fortunately they have changed that now, even if it took them 3 years, unfortunately I'm stuck with a buttefly model myself)

2) I hate the touch strip - at least the restored the Escape button, but I have no use for it and it just sits there (had higher hopes when it was introduced).

3) I'd like more than 1 port in the MacBook (not that I have one, but I read rumours that they plan to release a new MacBook with AS that I'm interested in)

4) What is the genious that designed the mouse that doesn't work while it charges?

5) I know about "price differentiation" but having the black mouse/keyboards more expensive is a dick move.

That said, 2 things I do:

1) At least every 2 OS releases I do a clean new macOS install. No particular concrete reason, but it might help my case having a "cleaner" system.

2) I've never cared/used Time Machine. I use CCC on my own. So I never have the TM related issues some people seem to have.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#172

Post by kergonath »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #139
kergonath wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, QC of macOS releases is inadequate. I can’t say it’s really new though, even Tiger and Leopard had their issues on day 0 (it was also way worse in the 7.5.x era). On the other hand, it is entirely possible to stay on a given version for the entire life of its successor. It is also possible to wait for the next x.5 version to upgrade, notwithstanding the incredibly annoying notification about a new major version…

> On the other hand, it is entirely possible to stay on a given version for the entire life of its successor. Or the successor of its successor: Apple doesn't make any guarantees about it, but typically the _three_ most recent macOS versions receive security updates. Right now: 10.13, 10.14, and 10.15 (plus of course the 10.16 betas). The real problem for many developers is that Xcode typically requires a fairly rece…

Yes, I’ve had some issues with n-2th version support for some software. Although these days, support for older OSes from third-party developers is better than it used to be, I think.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#173

Post by bgorman »

oblio wrote: post #118
the_other wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only the ones who’d learned about two-button mice. When the one-button mouse arrived, the majority of the population had never touched a mouse.

True, but by the time the one button mouse left, the majority of the population had definitely seen or used a two or even three button mouse. We're talking about a decision that took 2 decades to reverse.

My Apple Magic Mouse 2 doesn't have a discoverable right click button.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#174

Post by bgorman »

dmux wrote: post #156
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.

Do you have a link to the documentation? Genuinely curious to learn how to use my Mac better but a search for "Mac OS Manual" in google turned up no useful results for Catalina.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#175

Post by rowanG077 »

marmaduke wrote: post #160
rowanG077 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No It isn't. You have various shortcuts on your keyboard that can select text. With many of them labeled in context menus as well.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#176

Post by frank2 »

chewz wrote: post #79
perryizgr8 wrote: post #18

Earlier 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.

For good, stable GUI install ChromeOS and then for CLI crostini or crosh/crouton do decent job as they are really just debian.. Neverware builds should work out of the box for MacAir. I am using this for more then 3 years on Macs now and never considered going back to MacOS disaster.

Will you consider going back after Google makes it so that you cannot use Ublock Origin or similar level of adblocking in Chrome or is there some way to install a different browser on ChromeOS I don't know about?

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#177

Post by tester89 »

> We are heading rapidly towards the corollary to “it just works” being “and if it doesn’t, just wipe everything and re-install”.

This was my experience with an issue where my Mac just hangs for 30 s randomly.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#178

Post by randomsearch »

simonklitj wrote: post #77
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.

Could you elaborate on the issues you’ve been having? Been using Catalina since the beta and haven’t really had any major problems..

The main issues seem to be around performance (random pauses), audio problems, suspend/resume. It's not just anecdotal (as someone else suggested), but also from observing the large number of people reporting the same problems on various support forums.

Most of my problems have been on older machines, so perhaps their QA has tanked.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#179

Post by simonklitj »

randomsearch wrote: post #178
simonklitj wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on the issues you’ve been having? Been using Catalina since the beta and haven’t really had any major problems..

The main issues seem to be around performance (random pauses), audio problems, suspend/resume. It's not just anecdotal (as someone else suggested), but also from observing the large number of people reporting the same problems on various support forums. Most of my problems have been on older machines, so perhaps their QA has tanked.

No, I mean, those are very reasonable things to be upset about, I definitely get it, and it shouldn’t be like that no matter the machine. If it’s ok’ed to run the version, it should run without a hitch.

It was pure curiosity on my part, because I haven’t really experienced any major bugs or problems.

Re: Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

#180

Post by LiNeXT »

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.…

> 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.

In the 90s I used to laugh at my Windows friends who had to "reformat the C drive and re-install Windows" every month or so when it became unusable. Their excuses sounded much like yours: a lot of hand waving about how it's "not so bad" and not a big deal.

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