3 ms·

El Capitan is a refining-things release, much like Snow Leopard was to Leopard or Windows 7 was to Vista (although comparing Yosemite to Vista is admittedly a b

El Capitan is a refining-things release, much like Snow Leopard was to Leopard or Windows 7 was to Vista (although comparing Yosemite to Vista is admittedly a big stretch). If you're using Yosemite, just upgrade to El Capitan. There are some subtle new features that, since you're a long-time Mac user like myself, are nice to have but that you probably won't use. However, it fixes a lot of things that were rough in Yosemite. For example, the San Francisco system font is much more legible than Helvetica Neue was. There were also just a lot of general bug fixes in El Capitan. Now that it's been out for almost a year, most issues should be ironed out, so it's never been a better time to upgrade.

gnicholas 10y ago
Thanks for the specifics. I've been eager for past optimization releases, like Snow Leopard, but didn't hear great things about El Cap. My biggest hesitation is that I'm a longtime user of MenuMeters, which is not compatible with El Cap: https://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/ https://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/.
- pohl 10y ago
  I wonder what's up with MenuMeters. What could code signature restrictions prevent them from doing that isn't preventing iStat Menus from running on El Capitan? They seem like similar products.
  - gnicholas 10y ago
    Yeah, dunno. Also, this [1] popped up, which appears to be very similar. I trusted MenuMeters and used them for over a decade, and I'm hesitant to jump onto some no-name version (even if it is open source, since I'm not savvy enough to investigate myself). Will probably try iStat since they've been around for a long time. 1: http://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/ http://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/
    - pohl 10y ago
      Thanks for that link. The bottom section satisfies my curiosity very nicely. Regarding your question, I adopted El Capitan as early as the public beta, and was happy with the improvements even at such an early stage. I never encountered any of the problems that I read about others having. I got the impression that those of us who were satisfied simply had no motivation to post online (in contrast to those who were encountering bugs).
      - gnicholas 10y ago
        Yeah, there's definitely skew in comments that lean toward complaints. I was going mostly based on reports that adoption was significantly slower than previous releases, although it neared 50% by Feb 2016: http://www.computerworld.com/article/3040692/apple-mac/mac-owners-in-no-rush-to-adopt-os-x-el-capitan.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/3040692/apple-mac/mac-o...
        pohl 10y ago
        There's an interesting graph on this article that could have put that article's observation about adoption rate into an interesting perspective. Alas, the El Capitan line is just getting started, so it doesn't show the part of the story that I was hoping to see. But it shows graphs of the last several versions – the last four of which are interesting because they show what adoption has been like since Apple started the annual release cadence. Their profiles aren't remarkably different, to my eye. They all have similar peaks immediately prior to the release of its successor. http://lowendmac.com/2015/the-rise-and-fall-of-mac-os-x-versions-2009-to-2015/ http://lowendmac.com/2015/the-rise-and-fall-of-mac-os-x-vers...
      - daveloyall 10y ago
        That section satisfied my curiosity, too. For those of you that might be interested in confirming or denying that the "no-name" version of MenuMeters does not contain any malicious code... Here are some links: Original: http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/download/MenuMeters.tar.gz http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/download/MenuMeters.tar... Base of the fork: https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters/archive/f71e581819e3df07fd6f7c5d62d1fb7b3e534ce3.zip https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters/archive/f71e581819e3d... You need to confirm that the base of the fork is a 1:1 exact match with the original. If it is and you accept that, then here are all the differences between the latest version on github[1] and the original: https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters/compare/f71e581819e3df07fd6f7c5d62d1fb7b3e534ce3...yujitach:master https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters/compare/f71e581819e3d... Footnotes: 1. That link is a moving target. If new commits come in today (or tomorrow), it will change. 2. This project has a health ecosystem of forks, some of which have newer commits than the one linked to in this HN thread. 3. Not like y'all ain't gonna download binaries to your macs anyway!

gnicholas 10y ago

Thanks for the specifics. I've been eager for past optimization releases, like Snow Leopard, but didn't hear great things about El Cap. My biggest hesitation is that I'm a longtime user of MenuMeters, which is not compatible with El Cap: https://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/ https://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/.

pohl 10y ago
I wonder what's up with MenuMeters. What could code signature restrictions prevent them from doing that isn't preventing iStat Menus from running on El Capitan? They seem like similar products.
- gnicholas 10y ago
  Yeah, dunno. Also, this [1] popped up, which appears to be very similar. I trusted MenuMeters and used them for over a decade, and I'm hesitant to jump onto some no-name version (even if it is open source, since I'm not savvy enough to investigate myself). Will probably try iStat since they've been around for a long time. 1: http://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/ http://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/
  - pohl 10y ago
    Thanks for that link. The bottom section satisfies my curiosity very nicely. Regarding your question, I adopted El Capitan as early as the public beta, and was happy with the improvements even at such an early stage. I never encountered any of the problems that I read about others having. I got the impression that those of us who were satisfied simply had no motivation to post online (in contrast to those who were encountering bugs).
    - gnicholas 10y ago
      Yeah, there's definitely skew in comments that lean toward complaints. I was going mostly based on reports that adoption was significantly slower than previous releases, although it neared 50% by Feb 2016: http://www.computerworld.com/article/3040692/apple-mac/mac-owners-in-no-rush-to-adopt-os-x-el-capitan.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/3040692/apple-mac/mac-o...
      - pohl 10y ago
        There's an interesting graph on this article that could have put that article's observation about adoption rate into an interesting perspective. Alas, the El Capitan line is just getting started, so it doesn't show the part of the story that I was hoping to see. But it shows graphs of the last several versions – the last four of which are interesting because they show what adoption has been like since Apple started the annual release cadence. Their profiles aren't remarkably different, to my eye. They all have similar peaks immediately prior to the release of its successor. http://lowendmac.com/2015/the-rise-and-fall-of-mac-os-x-versions-2009-to-2015/ http://lowendmac.com/2015/the-rise-and-fall-of-mac-os-x-vers...
    - daveloyall 10y ago
      That section satisfied my curiosity, too. For those of you that might be interested in confirming or denying that the "no-name" version of MenuMeters does not contain any malicious code... Here are some links: Original: http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/download/MenuMeters.tar.gz http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/download/MenuMeters.tar... Base of the fork: https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters/archive/f71e581819e3df07fd6f7c5d62d1fb7b3e534ce3.zip https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters/archive/f71e581819e3d... You need to confirm that the base of the fork is a 1:1 exact match with the original. If it is and you accept that, then here are all the differences between the latest version on github[1] and the original: https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters/compare/f71e581819e3df07fd6f7c5d62d1fb7b3e534ce3...yujitach:master https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters/compare/f71e581819e3d... Footnotes: 1. That link is a moving target. If new commits come in today (or tomorrow), it will change. 2. This project has a health ecosystem of forks, some of which have newer commits than the one linked to in this HN thread. 3. Not like y'all ain't gonna download binaries to your macs anyway!