Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

wozniak.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 531 posts

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#351

Post by microtonal »

walterbell wrote: post #337
JohnTHaller wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or you can burn your DRM songs to CD, then rip to DRM-free MP3.

Encoding music that has lossy compression with a lossy compressor? Not a good idea ;).

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#352

Post by stouset »

overgard wrote: post #319

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…

Sorry, but switching the scroll direction was completely justified. It takes literally five minutes to adjust to, and unifies the scrolling direction between touchscreen and non-touchscreen devices.

It's not like, in lieu of this reason, there's some massively compelling argument to prefer one way or the other. If not for touch screens, the direction would be completely arbitrary. It didn't end up that way, so they've changed it now.

There are plenty of reasons to complain about OS X. This isn't one of them.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#353

Post by sandGorgon »

A lot of people here default to Ubuntu for Linux (including me), but I encourage those who are moving from OSX to give Fedora 21 [1] a shot - The Gnome 3.14 UI and the systemd integration is a wonderful experience.

If I was not so vested in the whole debian ecosystem, Fedora 21 would have been perfect.

For those who have only ever used OSX, you should know that you need a USB stick to build a bootable LiveUSB - this allows you to try Linux without actually installing it on your Mac [2]

[1] https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/

[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_US...

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#354

Post by Kadin »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #149
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.…

Why do people update OS X? Just curious. If it works how you like, why update it? Security flaws are probably the main reason, but isn't there a way to get those without acquiescing to an OS redesign?

Apple has a pretty vicious hardware/software upgrade treadmill.

I resisted updating 10.4 for years; IMO that was the high water mark for OS X, everything has basically been downhill from there. If I could still run 10.4 plus bugfixes and security updates, with modern software, I would.

But that's not possible. They push out new versions of the OS, along with new versions of development tools, which produce software that's not backwards-compatible past a certain point, such that eventually you can't run new software without installing major (0.1) updates. Apple's own products are the worst for this, but eventually you lose 3rd party apps as well.

Even if you resist the demands of new software, you'll eventually get forced to upgrade via hardware. Each generation of Apple hardware has a minimum OS version, keeping you from going back too far. For instance, Mac Pro "quad core" and 8-core systems won't run OS 10.4; Nehalem-based machines won't run 10.6. And Apple has purposely killed off its compatibility layers, dropping first the Classic environment and more recently Rosetta, in order to introduce barriers to running old software.

It's pretty frustrating as a user.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#355

Post by josh64 »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #283
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people update OS X? Just curious. If it works how you like, why update it? Security flaws are probably the main reason, but isn't there a way to get those without acquiescing to an OS redesign?

The reason--the only reason--I'm seriously considering upgrading from 10.6 is that new programs increasingly don't support it anymore. I download a simple little helper app and it says "The program requires OS X 10.8 or higher." My best guess is that programmers build with the latest libraries, and the latest libraries require the latest OS version. If the dev is running on the latest version, it never crosses his mi…

I'd like to keep 10.6 support in the open source app I help out with but there are so many improvements in 10.7 and 10.8 from a developer point of view that the latest release will be the last to support 10.6 (and 32-bit macs). By improvements I mean genuine time saving features like base localisation, not "ooh shiny dot syntax!".

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#356

Post by yuhong »

morganvachon wrote: post #276
yuhong wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But ever since Lion was released, I would rather use Windows Vista on a Core Solo machine than OS X on any Mac Huh? And I am not saying that they don't have problems.

Sorry, a bit of hyperbole on my part. I was alluding to the "Vista Capable" days, when machines barely able to run XP were touted by their manufacturers as "Vista Capable", even though they knew very well that the new OS had much higher requirements than XP. Core Solo CPUs were particularly bad at running any Windows OS, and were featured in many of those machines. My point being, even a kludgy setup like that was mo…

And it is that point that I am talking about, and I was wondering what problems made it that unusable. I was not saying that there is no problems.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#357

Post by LeoPanthera »

ac29 wrote: post #165
TD-Linux wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same complaints wrt video tearing, however in very recent distros (F21+) the issue has largely been resolved. In non-composited environments, tearing would happen unless a hardware overlay used. In composited environments, tearing would be inevitable because the compositor would use a nonsynchronized back-to-front-buffer copy. This has largely been replaced with a synchronized buffer flip, so that there is…

All video tearing problems I had on my laptop were solved with the TearFree option of the intel driver: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel#Tear-free_video

Which would be great, except I have Nvidia graphics.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#358

Post by tolmasky »

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #325
yourad_io wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free upgrades can still come at a cost. Multi-monitor full-screen was broken from 10.7 through 10.8. Thousands complained, Apple claimed it a feature. Not fixable, not tweakable, not reversible. 10.6 or one full-screen monitor at a time. Fuck off, Apple.

I worked on the full screen feature in 10.7 through 10.9! Full screen in 10.7 and 10.8 did render secondary displays useless. But it was a new feature in 10.7, so there was nothing to reverse. You can't take Safari, Mail, etc. full screen in 10.6. Perhaps there was an app you used that switched from a custom full screen implementation to the system one, and so regressed on secondary displays?

QuickTime and iTunes. I used to watch tv or a movie on one of my displays while coding on another. Instead I got to watch linen one screen while watching a movie (double whammy here because even showing pure black on the other screen would have been better since at least it wouldn't distract from the video).

I can't specifically recall, but I think the same was true of full screening video content from Safari (perhaps technically a "plugin feature", but maybe html5 video was around?), but QuickTime was 100% an apple regression.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#360

Post by Kadin »

tedunangst wrote: post #193
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Windows has become more sane than OS X in terms of security updates? EDIT: Windows 7 was released in 2009 and is still receiving security updates. 10.6 was released in 2011 and has been EOL'd. Seeing as both people still want to use these products, but one group is being forced not to, that's why I'm saying OS X is taking a less sane stance than Windows. Is this false?

OS X upgrades are free, more like Windows Service Packs in a way. Microsoft also drops support for pre-SP versions of Windows after a time. The clock is ticking for Windows 8.0; you have to upgrade to 8.1.

They'd be like Service Packs if Service Packs broke backwards compatibility and changed core functionality of the OS, which they typically don't. They are not analogous.
Post reply on HN