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macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

arstechnica.com

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Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#121

Post by Toslink »

ValentineC wrote: post #64
mikae1 wrote: 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.

MacOS 27 also uninstalls Rosetta 2 (if it was previously installed) upon upgrading. [0] "If Rosetta was previously installed, it is not automatically restored after upgrading to macOS 27.0. (163213094)"

Most applications now have native Apple Silicon binaries, although a handful still don't. You can check by navigating to the Apple icon > "About This Mac" > "More Info" > "System Report" > Software > Applications.

We had some printers with drivers who don't support Apple Silicon, thus they need Rosetta2, those filter files aren't displayed in the above menu, although you can run this script (papercut_rosetta_audit.sh) to audit your Drivers and their x86 dependence. [1].

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note... [1] https://www.papercut.com/kb/Main/macos-rosetta-transition-en...

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#122

Post by quesera »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #101
reddit_clone wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried other 3rd party terminal applications? (Iterm, ghostel, CMux) They have many quality of life improvements over the basic terminal.

I use Ghostty. I’ve tried iterm and cmux. I think we can do better. It’s a hard problem, admittedly. But important.

I'm sure you've considered and rejected tmux, but is this only because it has a different UI than a native OS app?

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#123

Post by bigyabai »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #108
bigyabai wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It almost feels like they took a tablet OS and then adapted it somewhat to desktop use. GNOME is designed to be touch-agnostic, which makes better use of padded UIs than macOS 11+ does. With a rumored touchscreen Macbook still coming down the line, I think GTK and the GNOME developers skated to where the puck was headed. macOS and iPadOS are both constrained for touchscreen users. GNOME is kinda the perfect UI for…

And that’s fair, GNOME doesn’t need to be a macOS-alike, but it’d be nice if something was! As an aside, I have yet to be convinced that touch on desktop operating systems makes any kind of sense and the MacBook Ultra or whatever it ends up being called is unlikely to change my opinion on that. I much prefer an old-style low-whitespace, data-dense, pointer-first UI like OS X used to have. I’m tired of the virtual rea…

I think that data-dense paradigm died with Catalina, sadly. GTK/Libadwaita has a lot of room for improvement, but I've come around substantially on their direction. Touch UIs are an inevitability of HID, and most attempts at accommodating them (cough Windows 8 cough) go too far towards alienating desktop users. A compromise has to be made that supports tablets, phones and desktops in the same UI, or else GTK will have to reinvent the wheel for each platform it supports. The final product GNOME settled on wasn't one I liked at first, but it's admittedly super polished on my Magic Trackpad and touchscreen laptop. Apps like Tuba[0] and Resources[1] are high-quality apps in every aspect ratio and input method. It doesn't feel awkward to poke at or click on at all, despite the glut of padding.

The future of desktop computing is probably going to be weird. I don't know how companies like Microsoft will manage to curb-cut their OS while also expanding to new UI/UX paradigms. Simplicity feels like a safe bet, and there's a lot of runway left to build the plane before the wheels go up.

[0] https://flathub.org/en/apps/dev.geopjr.Tuba

[1] https://flathub.org/en/apps/net.nokyan.Resources

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#124

Post by cosmic_cheese »

bigyabai wrote: post #123
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that’s fair, GNOME doesn’t need to be a macOS-alike, but it’d be nice if something was! As an aside, I have yet to be convinced that touch on desktop operating systems makes any kind of sense and the MacBook Ultra or whatever it ends up being called is unlikely to change my opinion on that. I much prefer an old-style low-whitespace, data-dense, pointer-first UI like OS X used to have. I’m tired of the virtual rea…

I think that data-dense paradigm died with Catalina, sadly. GTK/Libadwaita has a lot of room for improvement, but I've come around substantially on their direction. Touch UIs are an inevitability of HID, and most attempts at accommodating them (cough Windows 8 cough) go too far towards alienating desktop users. A compromise has to be made that supports tablets, phones and desktops in the same UI, or else GTK will hav…

That’s the beauty of Linux though, users can use the software that suits them best, at least in theory (said software needs to first exist). Even if it’s deemed a dead end by some, data-dense desktops of various flavors can continue to exist for the users who prefer them.

GTK/Adwaita themselves aren’t terrible (particularly with CSS to tone down the acres of padding) but I still take issue with the quasi-mobile app direction in GNOME-oriented apps.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#125

Post by nvme0n1p1 »

robotresearcher wrote: post #112
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #27

"...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…

> when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been. Most expensive it's been for a handful of years. 1TB of spinny disk cost a million dollars as recently as 1994, and half a billion dollars in 1980. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...

Yeah, and a pound of sugar cost 8oz of gold a few thousand years ago, so inflation isn't real and food insecurity is a myth.

If you want a fair comparison you should look at the price of storage at the capacity required for typical contemporaneous workloads. Don't quote numbers in the billions when that amount of storage didn't exist on the entire planet at the time.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#126

Post by Telaneo »

mijowi wrote: post #103
Telaneo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Terminal emulators have tabs and windows already, even macOS’ built in terminal, so what do you mean?

That solutions like tabs should be the responsibility of the terminal emulator you're using, and not the greater OS.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#127

Post by fragmede »

Telaneo wrote: post #126
mijowi wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terminal emulators have tabs and windows already, even macOS’ built in terminal, so what do you mean?

That solutions like tabs should be the responsibility of the terminal emulator you're using, and not the greater OS.

Should it? In terms of window management, what's ideal? Should every program have to implement tabs and then have its own tab manager, and bookmarks and favorites? If we take a step back and look at the bigger window management problem, what makes the most sense for most users? Monitors these days are relatively cheap, so the fight for screen real estate isn't the same problem as it once was. The onus is on the operating system to make it better for the user to arrange things how they want things to work.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#128

Post by hirvi74 »

The new Siri AI is so incredibly disappointing. I only wanted one thing, and one thing only -- enhanced automation. I don't give a fuck if Siri AI can edit little pictures or some bullshit. I wanted something that could actually replace AppleScript/Automator to a useful degree. Something that actually could interact with the system. Of course, that is asking for too much.

Still no way to move an application window from one space to another without a mouse. If you have a disability, then I guess you cannot really use spaces, which is poor design. But it's not like Apple cares. Snow Leopard had this ability back in 2010. Why it was removed is beyond me.

I am die hard Apple fanboy, but I feel ashamed for having hope in '27.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#129

Post by justinator »

Other than the 17G LM and associate features I won't use and will attempt at least to ignore, looks like a boring release with some good bug fixes including cosmetic. So, alright.

I'm happy to have gotten the max SSD when I got this thing, and I'm already juggling external drives (mostly for large media projects). I guess business as usual.

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