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Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

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Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#311

Post by bsg75 »

timonovici wrote: post #297
orangecat wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Chromebook pixel... You just hook up a bigger SSD, and you are done ;)

Can the internal SSD be replaced, or are you referring to an external?

Is the RAM still limited to 4GB on these as well? That is what killed the idea of the Pixel for me.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#312

Post by PhasmaFelis »

roadnottaken wrote: post #244
crag wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely. And believe it or not, I went back to Windows. Sort of. I'm testing the waters. My big issue is iTunes. Yeah I drank the kool-aid and now have an iTunes library of about 100GB. Despite how much I hate what iTunes has become at least is runs on Windows. Also, it's easier to "turn features off" in Windows than OSX these days. I'm sad about it though. But after 14 years on Mac I'm done. It was the up…

Cygwin

I use Cygwin on a regular basis. It's basically indispensible, because it's the only thing that does what it does. But I get the strong impression that it was designed to punish Windows users. Just off the top of my head:

* It has no idea about Windows file system conventions. IIRC, the default install directory is "C:\Cygwin".

* The "default" install is super bare-bones, and missing a lot of pretty basic Unix utils. This would be a minor complaint, except:

* The installer--the bit that you download--is also the package manager. This means that if you install it and then delete the installer like a responsible, space-conserving user, then the first time you realize that you don't have, I dunno, rsync, you have to download the installer again. And then, unless you having to manually navigate to your Downloads folder every time you want to install a damn package, you have to find a place for it to live on your drive and set up a start-menu shortcut for it. These things are why we invented installers, so why doesn't the installer do them?

* And, as you may have guessed from that last bit, there is no way to install packages from within the Cygwin terminal. In fact, you have to close all open terminals every time you want to run the package manager. You can imagine how much fun that is. The excuse for this is "such a program would need full access to all of Cygwin's POSIX functionality. That is, however, difficult to provide in a Cygwin-free environment, such as exists on first installation." In other words, they can't provide a proper package manager because then they couldn't make the installer and the package manager the same program which they shouldn't be fucking doing anyway.

* Every time you run the installer/package manager, you have to click "Okay" seven times (yes, I counted) to confirm a load of options that you will almost certainly never change after first install.

This ran way longer than I intended. Apparently I am fussed. :-/ The thing that really gets me is that this isn't even a case of Unix grognards not knowing or caring about Windows standards. There is no modern OS where installing an application off of the root directory is acceptable. I don't get it.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#313

Post by ryukafalz »

badsock wrote: post #307
brianstorms wrote: post #101

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.…

You can switch to Linux, but unfortunately it's been degrading along similar lines. Big, wrong ideas are destructive, and the two biggest, wrongest ones right now seem to be: "desktops are just out-of-date tablets", and "the only good affordance is a dead affordance". Affordances are what make computers humane, and there's a world of difference between how phones are used (mostly social), tablets are used (mostly med…

I disagree regarding the "tablet" point - while the major DEs take some UI inspiration from tablets, in general they're still very much desktop-oriented. People often complain about Unity for being "too much like a tablet", but actually try using it on a tablet and it's not well-suited at all in its current form.

You might want to look at KDE and XFCE though - both are sticking more to traditional Linux desktop ideas than Gnome and Unity.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#314

Post by everyone »

He should try windows 7. I have experience doing many different computery tasks (cad, photoshop, making music, programming,making games + the usual) on linux, windows and osx (+ messing with android and iOS (and DOS and the c64's os back in the day)) Windows 7 is in my opinion the best modern OS for personal productivity ie. getting stuff done without much fuss. I also feel in control of it. I have it set up exactly the way I want (for best performance) and updates are very unintrusive and tend to mainly be security updates.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#315

Post by JohnTHaller »

TD-Linux wrote: post #264
crag wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely. And believe it or not, I went back to Windows. Sort of. I'm testing the waters. My big issue is iTunes. Yeah I drank the kool-aid and now have an iTunes library of about 100GB. Despite how much I hate what iTunes has become at least is runs on Windows. Also, it's easier to "turn features off" in Windows than OSX these days. I'm sad about it though. But after 14 years on Mac I'm done. It was the up…

Why can't you migrate your music collection away from iTunes? I thought the DRM was killed long ago.

Apple removed the DRM from new music sales. All existing music sold before then is still DRM locked. When Apple discontinued DRM, they made user spend $0.30 per song to unlock them (seriously). Now, it appears you can spend $25 for iTunes Match, ensure the affected songs are available, delete the local DRM-infected ones, and it will download proper ones to replace them.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#316

Post by dang »

dfabulich wrote: post #125
geerlingguy wrote: post #24

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.

It would be nice if a moderator would update the title to, "Why Geoff Wozniak Quit OS X."

Thanks for the suggestion. We updated the title to remove the ambiguity.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#317

Post by mattkrea »

pervycreeper wrote: post #199
mattkrea wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very specific Chromebooks fit the bill as well. One that works particularly well is the Acer C720. Edit: wanted to clarify that this C720 is my current personal portable. My other is a custom built desktop also running Ubuntu.

No (non-chrome) distro currently works out of the box on the c720 (at least among the x64 variants). The most convenient solution at the moment involves recompiling the kernel after every security upgrade, which is hardly ideal.

While technically you're right the worst I have to do is pay attention when a kernel upgrade is part of apt-get dist-upgrade and then run a single script then reboot.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#318

Post by PhasmaFelis »

One thing that stands out for me:

> I've gone back to a desktop system running Linux (for now) and while I consider it markedly inferior to OS X in terms of usability, it feels like a personal computer again.

I like that Woz recognizes that usability (interface design, etc.) is (a) not the most important thing, but (b) it is still important. The idea that usability is the only thing that matters are the reason why people are moving away from OS X; the idea that usability is just useless bells and whistles is why Linux has never gained a major desktop foothold. There needs to be a balance.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#319

Post by overgard »

Apple has been doing a really bad job at UX for the last few years. (Disclaimer: I say this as a person where I'm currently surrounded by two iMac's, a macbook pro, and an iphone, so I'm not exactly a hater).

The weird thing is I don't even know what they're going for.

There are two trends I've seen:

1) Be more like iOS (for example, the dumb reverse scroll (wait sorry, "natural" scroll") and removing things like UI elements reacting to hovering.) I have no idea what's even clickable anymore. That's idiotic. I get consistency, but you shouldn't kick one platform in the knees to replicate the shortcomings of another. OK so touch screens don't have hover. Still, I'd like to have that back on the desktop. It'd be nice to know what's actually clickable.

2) Being more "social". Like now all my OSX devices want to be connected to my phone, and tell me about every goddamn text message. And if I try to ignore this, I get berated by annoying login screens. "Cancel". Hey maybe you want to see that screen again! NO! fuck off! I have no interest in iCloud, stop asking me five times to log in. Apple seems hell bent into annoying you into signing up for a lot of privacy degrading services.

Not only that, but they just choose bizarre fucking defaults. Like, if I sync my iPhone, it will pop up iPhoto automatically with all my recent photos. Jesus christ. On the plus side, I'm boring, so there's nothing really there, but who the hell thought that was a good idea?!? Does apple have any idea what people actually use cell phone cameras for? Sure there are tame uses, but all the same, I mean jesus christ. That's the dumbest default I've seen, and turning it off is basically impossible.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#320

Post by LVB »

gnu8 wrote: post #191
brianstorms wrote: post #101

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-...

"The more important your Cheese is to you, the more you want to hold on to it."

Insofar as Cheese == Wi-Fi connection, I couldn't agree more.

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