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macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

arstechnica.com

61–70 of 159 posts

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#61
post #58
post #4

When was the last time you felt excitement for a macOS release? Me? Snow Leopard. When I transitioned to Linux I rediscovered OS excitement. I'm on KDE Plasma now and every update has exciting features that serves my interests.

Well, it is easy to be excited on a system that is lagging on features.

Using macOS and KDE for almost the same time (~20 years), I still find that I need yet another app on macOS for a standard KDE feature.

Interesting observation, that is.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#62
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? You can type a prompt into the robots if you want their take. Where are you suppose to find out what a human thinks?

It's not to write the article. I would hope they don't do that; I wouldn't want to read it. But I do want them using it to help them research, find interesting contrary views on a subject, gut-check assertions (how many weirdly wrong statements in articles would have been caught by feeding it to an LLM and asking it to question unfounded or incorrect claims?), check technical accuracy of things outside the writer's c…

I'm not sure who has the religious issue.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#63
post #31
post #4

When was the last time you felt excitement for a macOS release? Me? Snow Leopard. When I transitioned to Linux I rediscovered OS excitement. I'm on KDE Plasma now and every update has exciting features that serves my interests.

I'm stuck trying to figure out what new stuff they could add. Sidecar was neat, but I never need it. I'm very happy on Cinnamon on Linux, which is probably less featured than KDE (haven't daily driven it to confirm), which just confirms I don't actually need or want user-facing new features. I need stability. I think Apple realise this. There are no genuine new OS features to be added, so they just shuffle things aro…

Something to improve my mess of ~22 active terminal windows comes to mind.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#64
post #4

When was the last time you felt excitement for a macOS release? Me? Snow Leopard. When I transitioned to Linux I rediscovered OS excitement. I'm on KDE Plasma now and every update has exciting features that serves my interests.

I dread new macOS releases, because it signifies one year less support for my current version (I'm on Sequoia now, having jumped from Ventura) being supported.

Every new version wrecks my workflow a little. macOS 28 will partially remove Rosetta 2, which means that I'll need to find replacements for some of the ancient Intel apps that never got updated to Apple Silicon.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#65
post #42

If you don't want your mbp to run like garbage, then don't update to the newest version of obsolescenceOS.

That may have been true in the past, and I usually wait for the first point release, but macOS and iOS 27 seem to be a definite improvement. My 5 year old phone is much snappier!

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#66
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm stuck trying to figure out what new stuff they could add. Sidecar was neat, but I never need it. I'm very happy on Cinnamon on Linux, which is probably less featured than KDE (haven't daily driven it to confirm), which just confirms I don't actually need or want user-facing new features. I need stability. I think Apple realise this. There are no genuine new OS features to be added, so they just shuffle things aro…

Something to improve my mess of ~22 active terminal windows comes to mind.

Christ.

On some level, this is probably something your terminal emulator should handle, just as your web browser should handle a mess of 22 tabs, but I don't think we've really come up with good solutions there either. It's hard to implement features nobody's though of.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Window management (and indeed, desktop environments in general) are rather subjective I think. As someone who's been using Macs in some capacity since 1996 I'd be upset if macOS suddenly resembled a traditional Windows desktop or tiling WM thing, and the absence of Mac-like desktops on Linux (no, GNOME and elementary/Pantheon are not that) is one of the primary factors keeping me from switching.

Window management got better in Mac os but only recently with the addition of window snapping. You could do it before, but you had to drag from the green stoplight button which was an annoying mouse target vs the entire top bar. Personally I do like the windows approach where there's a bar at the top with a few preselected zones you can use that shows up when dragging a window but the state of things on Mac os now is…

> What exactly do you miss about the Mac desktops when using gnome's? For me the only thing I've noticed is lack of independent desktops per monitor though Windows also suffers that deficiency.

No independent desktops is indeed a big one and irks me just as much under Windows (which somehow in 2026 still can't even set per-monitor desktop pictures without glueing images together in Paint).

On a whole, GNOME is just too simplistic. Where the Mac Way™ (especially in the 2000s) is thoughtfully implemented progressive disclosure of advanced features, the GNOME Way™ is to check if they make the cut for the app's toolbar or "junk drawer" hamburger menu and if not, strip the feature entirely.

It almost feels like they took a tablet OS and then adapted it somewhat to desktop use. That's the vibe I get from the DE itself as well as from the barebones (if pretty) apps that its community tends to produce. It's not as locked down as a tablet OS obviously — there's full fat Linux sitting underneath after all — but I'm always fighting it trying to turn it into a proper desktop experience with GNOME Tweaks and extensions (which constantly break).

An easy way to see the difference in philosophies is to compare the number of settings surfaced in GNOME Settings to that of the settings app for any Mac OS made in the past 20 years. GNOME Settings offers relatively little to tweak where System (Preferences|Settings) has a list that's closer (though not as long) to that of the KDE Settings app.

And of course, no global menubar. KDE lets users enable this but unfortunately many apps do not populate it.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#68

"...Golden Gate needed a whopping 17GB more space on the M1 MacBook Air, thanks to a mandatory multi-gigabyte language model download that kicks in automatically the first time you connect a freshly restored Golden Gate Mac to the Internet." This is the main thing stopping me from updating iOS/macOS. It's completely unacceptable to park a bunch of space on my devices right when that storage is at its most expensive i…

Same. It feels pretty messed up to lose that much storage on a 256gb device.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#69

"...Golden Gate needed a whopping 17GB more space on the M1 MacBook Air, thanks to a mandatory multi-gigabyte language model download that kicks in automatically the first time you connect a freshly restored Golden Gate Mac to the Internet." This is the main thing stopping me from updating iOS/macOS. It's completely unacceptable to park a bunch of space on my devices right when that storage is at its most expensive i…

Yes, the disrespect Apple/Google/MS has for their users (on equipment they have purchased!) is palpable. They seem to have a real sense of entitlement these days. It used to be universally accepted that losing or corrupting user data was a (if not THE) cardinal sin in development. In many ways we get what we tolerate, but the lack of viable alternatives in some spaces (esp cellphones and TVs) makes it very hard to hold the big players to any kind of account economically. At least no one is holding a gun to our heads to use MacOS or other proprietary systems on our desktops/laptops/servers for the most part.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#70

"...Golden Gate needed a whopping 17GB more space on the M1 MacBook Air, thanks to a mandatory multi-gigabyte language model download that kicks in automatically the first time you connect a freshly restored Golden Gate Mac to the Internet." This is the main thing stopping me from updating iOS/macOS. It's completely unacceptable to park a bunch of space on my devices right when that storage is at its most expensive i…

17GB when a large majority of the devices sold for it shipped with 128GB of storage is wild. You should be able to opt out of it during install.
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