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Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

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Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#381

Post by bdcravens »

bricestacey wrote: post #374

I am like the author. Natively, I just use Google Chrome, iTerm2, and Android Studio. Otherwise, I don't really do anything else (well, I do a lot from the CLI, thanks homebrew). It's an amazing experience though. No complaints. I will say my 2009 MBP core 2 duo with an HDD is slow and painful to use, but I upgraded to the top of the line in 2014 and I'm very happy. It doesn't really surprise me. I mean, come on. Wha…

The author didn't really say anything about performance, other than long upgrade times; nothing about the computer being slow and painful to use. Pretty much everything was software related. I doubt cost is even an issue. There are plenty who conclude Apple hardware is great, and purchase it to run Linux. Linus Torvalds himself used to have a MacBook Air as his personal machine, and he says his kids still have MBAs.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/06/09/linus...

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#382

Post by riffraff »

rsync wrote: post #345
overgard wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you have to: OSX doesn't have much of a culture of backwards compatibility, and every update tends to pressure developers into the latest greatest thing. Maintaining old software is just not a cultural value. Once the developers move, the users pretty much have to. I have an iMac from 2009. I had two OS's on it. Windows 7? Everything still works there. Runs fast, new software is great, etc. OSX 10.6.8? DEAD.…

I am running snow leopard on a 2009 mac pro. It works perfectly. I have zero complaints or issues. It's no problem at all. I use chrome and terminal for most of my work, but I do run itunes and vmware fusion and run some apps that give me a tiled interface and focus-follows-mouse. No problems at all. I couldn't be happier. I am sure it would all go to hell if I got a current model and tried to run SL on it ...

I upgraded SL -> Mavericks a few months ago when it stopped receiving security updates.

It's slightly worse (I don't like mission control, messages is useless to me) but not as bad as Lion (i.e. you'll just need to disable the stupid scroll behaviour, but performance is good).

On the plus side, you get the option to use new software developed for "10.7+" (heroku's db client, atom editor, swift etc)

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#383

Post by Kadin »

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 did the same thing recently, and I've hated it since. 10.7 removed Rosetta, broke "Save As", and annoyified the Save dialog.

But there were just too many pieces of software that wouldn't run, and unpatched security holes didn't seem like a good idea either.

To add insult to injury, Apple doesn't allow you to virtualize non-server versions of 10.6. You can, thankfully, hack VMWare Workstation and keep running your previous machine's image that way, but it's shitty that you have to jump through those hoops. It seems geared specifically towards keeping people from continuing to use their old apps.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#384

Post by arthurfm »

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…

> If the dev is running on the latest version, it never crosses his mind to do otherwise.

New and/or updated frameworks/APIs [1] make the developer's job easier. Why wouldn't you want to take advantage of them?

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/MacOSX/...

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#385

Post by yourad_io »

vosper wrote: post #350
yourad_io wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just format it"? Really?

He'd have to format it for Linux, so it seems like he may as well try the OSX re-install first. But, as the grandparent said, this sounds more like a hardware issue,

If it was a hardware issue, that's one thing, but:

I despise the "fresh install"/"just format it" response to problems - it shows that nobody really knows wtf is going on and/or can't help you, but maybe starting from a clean slate will make it not broken? (Until it happens again and you need to clean-slate it, naturally). Wreaks of Windows ME-level quality in both software and software support.

The "format it for Linux anyway" argument seems a litte fallacious to me. You'd have to format it to put any other OS on it, sure. The point is to get to a state (OS/whatever) where you don't have to resort to random "nuke blasting" methods to fix something.

If formatting once for Linux means I never have to nuke it from space again to fix an issue, then yeah, I'll take it.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#386

Post by wcummings »

kevindication wrote: post #119

My primary professional OS progression went something like: Slackware -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> OS X. As with the author, I'm pretty sure I'm done with OS X. If I want to go back to Linux, what is the best path? Mint? Back to Ubuntu? Something new?

I run Fedora w/ MATE, pretty set-and-forget, not a lot of issues.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#387

Post by pmontra »

techrat wrote: post #349
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.…

>I just dread the idea of moving to Linux again. I don't want to tinker that much. The thing about Linux is that once you've tinkered, things stay the way you are. Copy over your home folder to your next distro and just about everything goes back to the way it was. When I wiped xUbuntu 14.04 and installed the 15.04 alpha, I didn't have to do anything to get XFCE back the way I wanted after I copied the contents of my…

Well, most of the times but not always. I use Ubuntu and I don't like having a bar on the top of the screen and the modal menu at the top, which are the primary reasons I don't use OSX. I was using Gnome 2 with all the menus and icons moved to the bottom bar, plus Compiz for the virtual desktops cube which I find a more natural way to remember where I am than with sliding desktops. One day Canonical introduced Unity, with a bar fixed to the top. No way to remove that, so I started using gnome fallback mode, or whatever is called. Enter Gnome 3, with much more workflow changing features. We can work around almost all of them now, not so much years ago. I kept using gnome fallback, which unfortunately requires more and more tweakings to mimic a subset of the functionality of Gnome 2 (which was all I need to work). So I ended up with an Ubuntu 12.04 with kernel upgrades (the hardware enhancement stack from Canonical) and a DE that doesn't work as well as it used to (some quirks here and there). It's very much the first lines of the post about OSX. At least Linux gives me more flexibility than OSX does.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#388

Post by bdcravens »

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

Still runs in the Windows terminal, right? Small as it seems, one of the first things to push me to OSX from Windows was the ease of copying and pasting in and out of the terminal.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#389

Post by Decade »

virmundi wrote: post #365
proveanegative wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does OS X' swappiness affect performance?

I don't have personal experience since my MBP has a SSD. Things page fairly quickly. It will affect the total life expectancy of the drive. With the new models of MBP that's a real problem. The drive and it's logic board have to be replaced. This will require me to pay a "Genius" to do that. Ideally I could just pop a few screws and be done.

SSD lifespan concerns are overdone. Tech report took 100TB of constant writing to get a TLC SSD to start showing errors, and you're not likely to do that. However, by avoiding swap, you're in all likelihood causing extra reads, which also degrade performance. I advise saving your worry for other aspects, such as reliability during unexpected power loss.

http://techreport.com/review/25559/the-ssd-endurance-experim...

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#390

Post by selimthegrim »

dkuntz2 wrote: post #172
azakai wrote: 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'…

My T42 worked like a dream on Ubuntu 14.04 until recently, and now it refuses to awaken from sleep properly at all because of some update or other. I'm dreading trying to track this down and possibly finding out I'm stuck with using Windows 7.
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