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Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

wozniak.ca

221–230 of 531 posts

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#221

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, as Yosemite has been the best OS X release since Snow Leopard for me. Runs brilliantly, added a lot of nice features (Continuity and nicer widgets than Dashboard), looks better than Mavericks (and much better than Lion or ML). Then again, I use a MacBook Air, which doesn't usually seem to be the Mac of choice for people on here, so... shrug

My problem with Yosemite is related to VNC (screen sharing): the desktop freezes for minutes after I end a session.

Sometimes the mouse still moves, but nothing else. About 50% of these cases I need to reboot the laptop. I used to reboot my Mac once a month or less. Now it's daily.

I want to downgrade OSX from 10.10 to 10.8, two versions back, because I read somewhere that it's the fastest of them.

In the last 2-3 years, Apple only added self-serving cloud shit and tried to make everything more like iOS, but the fucking Finder columns still don't auto-resize to the length required to read the filenames without "...." in the middle.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#222

I've said multiple times that I use OS X because it's the only unix with netflix. Apparently that's changed. I haven't tried the latest ubuntu with chrome and netflix, but if it does indeed work I think I may try switching.

I'm on the latest xubuntu and just popped open chrome stable and checked - it works! I was even able to send it to my chromecast.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#223
post #191

I haven't quit it, but the problems, annoyances, surprises, seeming ineptitude, and creeping iOSification of OS X that the author describes sure do resonate. Every new major release of OS X is a day or week spent disabling things, shutting down Spotlight again, trying to restore things back to the way they were instead of the way some Designer with a capital D thinks they should be, for no other reason than, "Beauty.…

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/who-moved-my-cheese-spencer-...

I'm not sure you're aware of the extent of pissing that has taken place from Apple on its Power Users' faces between 10.6 and 10.9 (likely 10.10 even, I've given up).

This isn't just "WHY IS THIS 10px LEFT TO WHERE IT WAS ARGH THIS SUX0RZ" - really basic things were broken, such as multi-monitor full-screen. Also, multi-core machines actually benefited (performance-wise) from upgrading up until 10.6. Not so after Lion.

It's easy to blame the users for being change-averse, but... was I really meant to stop using 'full-screen'? "Just resize it from that little corner there?"? Please.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#224
post #96

FYI this was not posted by 'the Woz', but rather by the unrelated Geoff Wozniak. I imagine many others may have clicked through owing to the domain.

Yes and I chuckled at the mental image of woz using the term "shitshow". Only to be disappointed when I got the bottom of the page and saw it was written by a Geoff. Good article, though.

Exactly where I chuckled thinking of woz.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#225
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinkpads have pretty much worked on Linux, for me. Overall, Linux is great these days if you have compatible hardware. A random Windows laptop might be a problem, but a Thinkpad or a System76 or such should all be fine.

While it worked acceptably for three years, I gave up on my Thinkpad W520 this summer and switched to a Macbook Pro. Partly it was due to size (going from a bulky 15" to a really slim 13" computer is awesome), and partly it was due to wanting application support again, after seven years of almost exclusively using Linux. One thing I'd like to say when looking at Thinkpads, or other laptops, for running Linux on, don'…

I had (well, still have, but don't use) a w510. It worked just as well as the t61 before it (which was to say, they both did great under Linux), but it didn't have hybrid graphics... it was Nvidia all the time. The only reason I've replaced it was that it had absolutely abysmal battery life. Old job bought me a comparable ultrabook that weighs 20 pounds less and has 3x the battery life and I couldn't be happier.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#226
post #111
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13, certified for 12.04. It was acceptable, resume didn't work. But Webex doesn't work and GitLab BV customers use it, so I bought a MPB yesterday.

>> resume didn't work I still sometimes have to use Windows for work and resume/hibernate works about half the time. The other half I have to power reset it. That's with HP, Dell and Lennovo running Windows 7. FYI: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/sleep-and-hibern... I'm guessing here but I bet the picture for sleep/hibernate ain't all rosy for Macs either.

This is an issue that is easy to solve when you control the hardware and the software. Also, if a bug crops up the prevents sleep/hibernate from working seamlessly, I'm sure it goes to the top of the priority list.

It's one of those things that has worked well for a long time. I remember on an old Powerbook G4, putting OSX to sleep while it was in the middle of the shutdown process only to wake it later to be welcomed by the shutdown process finishing and powering off.

[Not that OSX didn't have huge warts in those days. SambaFS/CIFS filesystem driver didn't deal well with the server going away for whatever reason. Reads/writes would block forever (because the driver didn't decide to time-out) and anything that attempted to touch it (even Finder) would immediately get sucked in to endlessly waiting.]

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#227
10.10 upgrade was a full reinstall PITA. But the tweaks, hackarounds (EasySIMBL, pqrs.org, etc.) and firewalls (icefloor and hands off) makes the pretty thing fairly usable.

Nit picks:

- iBooks uses up 100% of CPU randomly by pegging storeacountd, even without internet access.

- Mail.app is slow to start and hangs if using email rules to send notifications.

- Not all apps support a dark toolbar.

- There should be more UI LNF's themes that are pluggable.

The cost of Linux though it dependency hell on both Fedora- and Debian-based systems that aren't developed as a whole like FreeBSD or OSX, where library dependencies break things. Sure you can get ZFS going and basically compile most anything on a Linux box without having to wait for the web developers that don't understand UNIX philosophy to maintain a technical dilettante's popular package system. But really, you should be developing in isolated containers as similar to production as possible using something like Docker and Xen|KVM.

Also, the Linux kernel has bazillions of syscalls that change with the wind compared to *BSD and XNU (under a few hundred).

If I had to choose another OS, it would likely be PC-BSD. If that didn't work, the BATNA would be Mint. Failing that: arch.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#228
post #11

It's important to notice that he's switching to a desktop running linux. Running linux on laptops is still a gamble. Sometimes things work great. Sometimes you spend months trying to fix basic stuff like screen brightness[1][2] on hardware certified by Ubuntu.[3] I think there's a market for a linux distro that targets a limited set of premium hardware. I'd gladly pay money for an OS that worked out of the box on any…

I've had incredibly good luck for the last several years with Linux on a laptop. You just have to be a bit careful. Here's what I've found: - Backlight bugs are usually related to ACPI tables in the BIOS. Doing a BIOS upgrade will often fix them. This is especially true on the Thinkpad line where Lenovo explicitly supports Linux in its BIOS. - Be careful with switchable graphics. While they have gotten a lot better,…

> Do a bit of research before buying, like on the arch wiki

This, a thousand times. While I haven't used Arch for a few years, and probably never will again, they have some of the best and most complete documentation in the GNU/Linux world. Chances are, if there's ever been a Linux-specific issue, some Arch user has run into it and either fixed it themselves or found the answer in the Arch community. Their wiki is quite thorough as well.

Another great source is linuxquestions.org. Half a million members and still growing, and they cover all major distros (though there's a ton of Slackware power users there, which suits me fine).

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#229

I haven't quit it, but the problems, annoyances, surprises, seeming ineptitude, and creeping iOSification of OS X that the author describes sure do resonate. Every new major release of OS X is a day or week spent disabling things, shutting down Spotlight again, trying to restore things back to the way they were instead of the way some Designer with a capital D thinks they should be, for no other reason than, "Beauty.…

I agree RE: Duplicate/Save As…, although you can get Save As… back if you hold down the Option key. I don't remember when I last used Duplicate.

Is this a complaint about the Preview app? Because obviously all other programs you might run in OSX make their own decisions about their functionality. Personally, I always use the Menubar search feature via QuickSilver or the default Help>Search shortcut, CMD+?, so I never even noticed those features have been now hidden behind an option key.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#230

I haven't quit it, but the problems, annoyances, surprises, seeming ineptitude, and creeping iOSification of OS X that the author describes sure do resonate. Every new major release of OS X is a day or week spent disabling things, shutting down Spotlight again, trying to restore things back to the way they were instead of the way some Designer with a capital D thinks they should be, for no other reason than, "Beauty.…

I'm in the same boat, basically using Macs for the hardware at this point. Nothing that I'm aware of comes close to MacBooks in build quality, display, and lack of driver issues, and the retina iMac is a fantastic developer workstation. But not being an iOS user, I find most of the changes since 10.6 either irrelevant or negative.

Really? I'm waiting for a new Razer Blade 14" to show up with 970m graphics. Even the old one with 870m stomps a mudhole in a macbook these days man.
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