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

Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 459 posts

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#11

Post by Dejital »

Tim has issues with one application, but blames the entire operating system. Is this fair? Further, the trash bin problem of not having an "Ignore All" button has always been around. That does not mean the operating system is becoming worse, just that an age old frustration (albeit a very obscure one) is still around.

I have some issues with Lion, but they are grounded primarily in my complete satisfaction with Snow Leopard and lack of desire to change (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).

When Tim says "there were many things worse in Snow Leopard than in Leopard," I cannot recall a single one. In fact, the Snow Leopard release was undoubtedly a very well received one.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#13

Post by tptacek »

I prefer Lion to Snow Leopard.

I find myself appreciating the more controversial changes, like reversed scrolling and hidden scrollers. I followed Gruber's advice and suppressed the impulse to switch the defaults back to Snowpard behaviors and find that I'm less happy when I have to use Snowpard now.

Meanwhile:

* Mail.app under Lion is the best mail UX they've ever shipped. It's not a small improvement over Snowpard; it has a more reasonable layout now that makes Smart Folders make more sense, and search seems to have been completely rebuilt and actually works now.

* I find myself liking Mission Control enough not to mind not having vertical virtual desktop arrangements.

* Preview can sign documents now!

* The Filevault fix is huge for me (Filevault is now a bona fide block level FDE), since it means I don't have to use PGP WDE, which was a debacle.

My sense of it is, there is zero opportunity for someone to compete with Apple and Microsoft on conventional desktop operating systems, and the problems O'Reilly has with OS X are not generally going to be shared by people like my dad, who are (a) the only people Apple really cares about because (b) they're where all the money is.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#14

Post by tptacek »

overgard wrote: post #5

I'm somewhat of a new mac user, so I can't speak historically, but I will say that lion was quite a downgrade. It broke things that were previously working fine (my network drivers and my dev tools), removed useful features (rosetta), and really didn't add anything new that I care about. I never use the app store; I dislike mission control; really the only thing I actually like is the better window resizing.

What network drivers did Lion break? Are you plugging custom network hardware into your Mac? Why?

We're a pretty dev-tools-intensive shop here and while the transition to XCode4 has been hiccupy, I don't think Lion has broken anything for us.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#16

Post by doe88 »

shadowfiend wrote: post #8

There may be a good point hiding there, but I don't think he made it particularly well. He argues that OS X is getting worse. His specific complaint was that he couldn't find the Library folder to delete his mail. Two things to keep in mind: first off, people who set up Mail extremely rarely will want to delete their email. So on the list of use cases to optimize for, that one lives near the bottom of the ladder. Sec…

Overally I don't consider 10.7 being worse than 10.6, I'm ignoring Mission Control stuffs as I was ignoring Exposé. But there is one thing I find it maddening above all is the settings and behavior of Terminal.app, I understand _nothing_, this is insane. The behavior of Terminal.app is insane, it's even harder to explain since I fail to understand its logic.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#17

Post by dchest »

Dejital wrote: post #11

Tim has issues with one application, but blames the entire operating system. Is this fair? Further, the trash bin problem of not having an "Ignore All" button has always been around. That does not mean the operating system is becoming worse , just that an age old frustration (albeit a very obscure one) is still around. I have some issues with Lion, but they are grounded primarily in my complete satisfaction with Snow…

The problem is not only the absence of "Ignore All", but the fact that Lion's applications have some strange bug with opening files and not closing them. Snow Leopard had it too with built-in screenshot tool (or Preview, I don't remember exactly).

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#18

Post by aw9994 »

doe88 wrote: post #16
shadowfiend wrote: post #8

There may be a good point hiding there, but I don't think he made it particularly well. He argues that OS X is getting worse. His specific complaint was that he couldn't find the Library folder to delete his mail. Two things to keep in mind: first off, people who set up Mail extremely rarely will want to delete their email. So on the list of use cases to optimize for, that one lives near the bottom of the ladder. Sec…

Overally I don't consider 10.7 being worse than 10.6, I'm ignoring Mission Control stuffs as I was ignoring Exposé. But there is one thing I find it maddening above all is the settings and behavior of Terminal.app, I understand _nothing_, this is insane. The behavior of Terminal.app is insane, it's even harder to explain since I fail to understand its logic.

Check out iTerm2 if Terminal.app isn't doing it for you anymore. http://www.iterm2.com/

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#19

Post by hackoder »

For those criticizing- He has given one example of what he thinks is wrong. Not all posts are meant to be essays...

Briefly though, (as another user who switched from Mac OS X), I can certainly give examples of what he says:

Not all of these are specific to OS X, its the overall hardware and software that is getting frustrating.

More user-hostile

- If you replace your SuperDrive with another drive, you CAN NOT boot any operating system (other than Apple's) off usb drives or even external DVD drives plugged into usb slots. So with two hard drives, you can not install Windows or Linux. [1]

- Batteries are not considered user-swappable anymore. [2]

More buggy

- Battery life degradation when moving from SL to Lion. Apple forums are full of examples. [3] (78 page thread, no confirmation or fix from Apple).

- We all know how annoying the switch to Mission Control was, right?

[1] http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1125135

[2] http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1756

[3] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194235?start=0&tst...

[Edit: formatting]

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#20

Post by rbanffy »

slig wrote: post #15

What about a paid GNU/Linux distro that runs perfectly on recent Apple hardware? No drivers bullshit, just works?

Unless you pick your PC carefully with the purpose of breaking Linux, it mostly works out of the box. That said, installing Linux on a Mac seems offensive, like replacing the dashboard of a Maybach with the one of a race car. Macs are a beautifully designed combination of hardware and software that may work for you. Or not.

I like Lion better than Snow Leopard, but neither works for me for work. Casual browsing and presentations are fine, but, for serious web application development, I want Linux.

Post reply on HN