31–40 of 82 posts
All we ever needed was in Snow Leopard. Everything since then (ok except maybe for SIP and XProtect) is bloatware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s true. The nostalgia nerds can rightly criticise the ever-spiralling bloat and inefficiency of modern systems. But modern macOS can go for months without a crash/reboot! Almost unimaginable in the Mac OS 9 / Win95 era.
This is what pushed me to get my parents on NT4 in 1997: the system would run until you wanted to reboot it, rather than crashing twice a day because Netscape decided to have a conniption like Win9x did. Never looked back. Win2000 was absolutely awesome for them, WinXP was twice the size and half the speed but fine and very long-lived, Vista was extremely reliable despite all the hate heaped on it...and we're approac…
There’s something about the Platinum UI that makes it timeless. I have been running XFCE with a Platinum theme on several of my machines/VMs for a while ( https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 ) and I’m a bit sad that the XFCE top-level app menu plugin seems to have been deprecated in recent releases, since it really adds to the experience.
The XFCE global menubar plugin being deprecated likely happened because there’s no standardized way for applications on Linux to surface their menus to the environment for display (or to power a Unity-style HUD or whatever), which means that hackery via plugins for GTK and Qt are required to make a global menubar work. Keeping that hackery functional probably is a constant battle. There’s also how GTK apps have been…
All we ever needed was in Snow Leopard. Everything since then (ok except maybe for SIP and XProtect) is bloatware.
As a multi-computer user, "Continuity"[1] is magical. Being able to drag my cursor over to my other computer, drop some files, etc, is really great. [1] https://www.apple.com/macos/continuity/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still can't believe we once had an operating system named OS X Panther. The puns...
I have an ancient laptop with Snow Leopard running. It keeps my Nikon Film Scanner useful since Nikon abandoned the software for these scanners rather abruptly. I've been a pro photographer since 1990 and the Kodachrome setting embedded within the Nikon scanner is fantastic for capturing the color and detail of this exceptionally sharp film.
Do you still do film photography? Ektachrome?
All we ever needed was in Snow Leopard. Everything since then (ok except maybe for SIP and XProtect) is bloatware.
I get the nostalgia, but boy are computers so much better than back then. MacOS 7-8 (not sure about 9, never used it) would crash constantly. There was no protected memory, so as soon as one app started misbehaving, you'd have to reboot the computer and it would take forever and you'd lose your work. My recollection was that this would typically happen 3-4 times a day. Apple's project to make a new MacOS that didn't…
All we ever needed was in Snow Leopard. Everything since then (ok except maybe for SIP and XProtect) is bloatware.
SIP is quite terrible. Requiring an access level higher than root to access system files, and only processes that are signed by Apple and have special entitlements can have that access level? It's my computer, I should be at the top of the permissions totem pole, not Apple. If they're dead set on using signing to enforce the higher-than-root level, then I should be the one signing the executables. Fortunately, you ca…
But for those of us who need that access we can disable it, with a bit of a dance to make it hard for people who _don't_ need it.
All we ever needed was in Snow Leopard. Everything since then (ok except maybe for SIP and XProtect) is bloatware.
All we ever needed was in Snow Leopard. Everything since then (ok except maybe for SIP and XProtect) is bloatware.
SIP is quite terrible. Requiring an access level higher than root to access system files, and only processes that are signed by Apple and have special entitlements can have that access level? It's my computer, I should be at the top of the permissions totem pole, not Apple. If they're dead set on using signing to enforce the higher-than-root level, then I should be the one signing the executables. Fortunately, you ca…