10 ms·

Maybe we should be angry? Apple has been neglecting OS X since Snow Leopard, thinking that iOS is the only thing worth investing in. Microsoft apparently agree

by ohazi 7y ago

Maybe we should be angry? Apple has been neglecting OS X since Snow Leopard, thinking that iOS is the only thing worth investing in. Microsoft apparently agrees -- they chopped up the Windows team last year, pushing out the Windows chief and dumping the remaining re-orged husk under Azure. Just for security reasons alone, it should be terrifying that there isn't a standalone Windows group anymore. Windows hasn't been usable since 7; the current version literally requires you to let it reboot itself on a 9-5 schedule. And now this with Apple, again. Can we move on already? Most of us spend at least half of our waking hours interacting with a desktop operating system, most of us use either OS X or Windows, and yet both of these companies have made it clear that their desktop OSes are no longer a priority! Why are so many of us still putting up with this? I know people like to knock Linux-on-the-desktop, but you know what? I can go buy a Thinkpad, spend 20 minutes putting Debian or Ubuntu on it, and it'll just work, and I'll get software updates forever. I used to care about flashy widgets back when Gnome was cloning old OS X features, but now I just use XFCE because it looks reasonable, it works, and it stays the fuck out of my way. And when there are bugs, people make a little noise, and then they get fixed. Remind me again what version of bash Apple ships? I don't have the time or the energy to work around that crap anymore.

Beefpro9 7y ago
As of Catalina, Apple has switched the default shell to zsh and nags you when you launch bash. That said... I agree. Between this, the abysmal keyboard failure rate, and some of the user-hostile choices they've made, I've switched to a Razer laptop. Windows 10 Pro lets you avoid most of the jank, by the way. But, I'm only on it as an eventual migration path to something running XFCE (my favorite wm due to its out of box usability).
- elSidCampeador 7y ago
  Wait what? Why/when did they do this?
  - dijit 7y ago
    What are you asking? Why/When MacOS transitioned to zsh? Why; because bash became GPLv3 at some point in history and MacOS couldn’t update their version of bash. (The last GPLv2 version). When; was catalina (just released)
- angrygoat 7y ago
  Amazingly, the message is actually hard coded into the bash binary, rather than having been done via an rc file – so it can't be disabled in any obvious way I can see.
  - c17r 7y ago
    export BASH_SILENCE_DEPRECATION_WARNING=1
    - angrygoat 7y ago
      Thanks!
- soraminazuki 7y ago
  What’s so upsetting about switching the default shell to zsh? It’s compatible enough that most users wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Besides, licensing problems would persist no matter how much more effort Apple is willing to put into macs.
  - my123 7y ago
    They have a big shared codebase between iOS and macOS, so them adding GPLv3 tools can end badly with the anti-tivoization clauses.
    - soraminazuki 7y ago
      You mean they have GPLv2 code in iOS?
      - my123 7y ago
        Yes they do.
ashishb 7y ago
WiFi, battery, and sleep. Have these problems been fixed with Linux on laptops?
- nixpulvis 7y ago
  My thinkpad X1 carbon works just fine with Arch Linux. Though you do occasionally need to refer to the wiki to fix things. It's usually pretty painless.
- garmaine 7y ago
  Yes. Buy a Lenovo and these work out of the box as you expect. In fact I get better battery life than under windows.
- pojntfx 7y ago
  Yes. Since ~5 years I haven't had a single problem with any Laptop (I'm mostly using ThinkPads, the newer ones, here even the Multi-Touch-Trackpoint and touchscreens perform better than under Windows).
- ohazi 7y ago
  Wifi: The advice from five years ago was to select/buy the Intel wifi card. Those are the only ones I've used, and they've all Just Worked. Intel cards are the only option if you're buying a Thinkpad. Sleep and hibernate: Works on every Lenovo I've used. Battery: My most recent laptop gets around 8-9 hours with a new battery on a normal workload, and when it drops to 3 hours, I buy a new battery.
  - haspok 7y ago
    On newer kernels (4.8+) and latest Ubuntu my Thinkpad L390 freezes consistently when I try to suspend. It's gotten a bit better with 5.0.0.31, now suspend works 50% of the cases when I select it manually from the menu, and the laptop is connected to power. Otherwise, 90% freeze. Even my old trusty XPS 13 started not to go to sleep 1 out of 10 times. There must have been a serious regression in the kernel, but no one seems to care. For this reason alone, I started to seriously consider giving up Linux on the desktop.
trimbo 7y ago
In Microsoft's defense, at least the Windows 10 updates are now quick. Last week a minor patch for MacOS took 30 minutes on a 2019 Macbook Pro.
- ohazi 7y ago
  The four hours I spent cleaning up my dad's laptop last week beg to differ. I had enough time to make and eat dinner while it was updating, rebooting, and then cleaning up the updates. Maybe he hadn't updated in a while? I made him a small Linux partition after clearing up enough space, and now everything runs so much faster that he refuses to boot back into Windows.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    Maybe he hadn't updated in a while? That shouldn’t make much of a difference, we only accept it as an excuse because it’s been the norm for so long.
Numberwang 7y ago
I have not rebooted my Win10 laptop for weeks, what are you talking about? Also, regarding XFCE on a laptop, those 20 minutes will include the time before the battery runs out right?
zamalek 7y ago
> the current monstrosity literally requires you to let it reboot itself on a 9-5 schedule. * the previous monstrosity. Windows will now let you carry on without updating until seriously important security updates are a month old. They really do have to force the hand of ignorant users eventually, else Microsoft gets blamed for an insecure OS. I also don't understand where you get the idea that msft doesn't care about their desktop OS. They are basically overhauling it twice a year, for free. These larger updates do take 30 minutes, but, mind you, which is it: do they care too little or too much?
- ohazi 7y ago
  I guess I'm behind the times. Is the Candy Crush installer still in the Start menu? Do they still randomly revert telemetry settings on updates? What was that thing I read last week about no more local user accounts? Maybe all of these things have little asterisks on them, but at this point I don't care anymore. Chrome and Firefox are also noticeably faster on Linux than on a fresh Windows install on the same machine. Don't know WTF is up with that, but this has been consistent for years.
  - Operyl 7y ago
    > Is the Candy Crush installer still in the Start menu? Yup. > Do they still randomly revert telemetry settings on updates? Yup. I've heard that this is a bug? Who knows, I just know I still see it flipping. > What was that thing I read last week about no more local user accounts? It's hidden behind the "Join a Domain" option, or triggers when you're not online. Dark patterns!
    - zamalek 7y ago
      > > Is the Candy Crush installer still in the Start menu? > Yup. No. Windows now remembers that you have uninstalled these apps.
      - Operyl 7y ago
        Then I guess I hit another bug! The dang thing returned on my last big update.
November-Echo 7y ago
About the bash thing: Apple isn’t allowed to ship a newer version due to licensing problems. That’s also the reason why they switched to zsh [1]. [1]: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2019/06/04/why-does-macos-catalina-use-zsh-instead-of-bash-licensing/ https://thenextweb.com/dd/2019/06/04/why-does-macos-catalina...
- ohazi 7y ago
  Yeah, I know. It's not just bash, it's a lot of their other userland tools too. It was sort of funny at first, and you can update them with homebrew and usually not break things, but at the end of the day... this is Apple's licensing problem, and yet I have to deal with it. That's stupid! I have scripts that run perfectly on my servers... why should I have to be a contortionist to test them locally?
- pjmlp 7y ago
  They are allowed, it is just like everyone else on comercial world, they rather not deal with copyleft software licenses. Which is a quite different issue.
  - dwaite 7y ago
    AFAIK GPLv3 means (among other things) that if a company is slapped with an injunction due to a patent suit, you can't just license the patent for yourself - a patent license has to cover all GPLv3 usage. They are allowed, but some of the legal consequences to the new terms in GPLv3 are worth stalling updates, choosing alternative system components and even rewriting components to avoid.
- jeroenhd 7y ago
  Apple is perfectly allowed to ship a newer version, they'd just have to share some of their special sauce. Not entirely unreasonable in my opinion. Apple doesn't want to ship a new version because they don't want people to see how they've modified bash. I don't know what patents or top secret features they've added to make their version of bash incompatible with GPL, as they're allowed to ship GPL code in a closed source product just fine as long as they ship it as a separate binary, but it's more important than their users' convenience apparently. Also note that Microsoft ships entire Linux distros without having a problem with GPL licensing.
lovelyviking 7y ago
I would agree. We should be angry. Especially with news, if they are correct, that you prohibited to install linux on newer Macs. As I understood you can boot linux from external flash drive, but it's not the same as installing it on internal storage. Did someone tried to install Linux after installing Catalina, I am afraid of a few surprises there ...
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  AFAIU you're not prohibited, it's just matter of drivers. Apple uses some non-standard approach to disks which Linux did not implement yet and Apple does not care about Linux to add that support themselves.
self_awareness 7y ago
Angry or not, it doesn't matter. If you're angry and you give your money away, nobody cares. But, at the same time, if you're cheerful but you keep your money, you may start to influence things.
pjmlp 7y ago
Until Linux-on-the-desktop gives me the GUI workflow, a full OS stack of the likes of macOS, Windows, Android, it is going to be left as a travel OS for my tiny surviving Asus netbook. For a couple of years I believed on the dream, nowadays I rather invest my time elsewhere.
- intarga 7y ago
  Although I'm not personally a fan of it, I don't see what Gnome is lacking that you can get on those OSs you listed
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    GNOME, like KDE, still fail short of the full stack developer experience across all distributions, they focus mainly on the UI layer alone. Something like macOS Frameworks, Android Frameworks, .NET/UWP. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/ https://developer.android.com/guide/platform https://developer.android.com/guide/platform https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/choose-your-platform https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/choose...
mantoto 7y ago
I like my windows 10. I also like my arch Linux as well. Even my MacOS rund stable enough that I don't have any issues with that. But if you don't keep your Debian up to date the chance that you can't longer upgrade it is high. After 1-2 years.
- eikenberry 7y ago
  You can update Debian many years later. I just updated a system over multiple versions no problem.
  - grokavi 7y ago
    Yes, you can upgrade after several years. But you can't skip a version. If you started at 8, you need to upgrade to 9 and then to 10. Can't skip 9.
    - eikenberry 7y ago
      Sure, but all versions of Debian are still available so I don't see why that is a problem... Except as an annoyance due to the extra work.
  - mantoto 7y ago
    I had packages just gone on enough occasion s.
eikenberry 7y ago
> Microsoft apparently agrees -- they chopped up the Windows team last year, pushing out the Windows chief and dumping the remaining re-orged husk under Azure. Do you have a reference for this? This seems like pretty big news.
- majewsky 7y ago
  A quick internet search finds news articles from March 2018, for example: > the Windows and Azure platforms are being combined, operating under Jason Zander https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/windows-leader-terry-myerson-out-as-microsoft-reorganizes-windows-division/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/windows-leader-terry...
coldtea 7y ago
>Apple has been neglecting OS X since Snow Leopard, thinking that iOS is the only thing worth investing in What exactly is the evidence behind this? They have been adding several huge components/APIs/tools that they have working for macOS (Metal, APFS, Swift, CoreML, etc), they have had added the Mac App Store, they have tons of under the hood improvements (e.g. memory compression), and so on. What exactly did you expect to see, or was seeing before "Snow Leopard"? >I know people like to knock Linux-on-the-desktop, but you know what? I can go buy a Thinkpad, spend 20 minutes putting Debian or Ubuntu on it, and it'll just work, and I'll get software updates forever. Then don't let the door hit you on your way out. In my experience in most definitely not "just work" except with very careful selection of laptop/peripherals, and all kind of uses cases break too, including no major creative/office apps like Creative Studio, Pro Tools, Cubase, Premiere, FCPX, MS Office, and so on, which I depend on. And every now and then this or that project will decide to majorly break stuff in some transition... (Gnome does it, KDE does it, X/Wayland/etc does it, ...). And I've used Linux (and several UNIX variants) since 1997, and still do professional (as a server OS) everyday, so not exactly new to the game.
- UIZealot 7y ago
  > >Apple has been neglecting OS X since Snow Leopard, thinking that iOS is the only thing worth investing in > What exactly is the evidence behind this? I agree neglect is probably not the right word. I like the term Marco Arment uses on his ATP podcast: drive-by updates. > They have been adding several huge components/APIs/tools that they have working for macOS (Metal, APFS, Swift, CoreML, etc), These all seem to have been developed for iOS first and macOS second. > they have tons of under the hood improvements (e.g. memory compression), and so on. Personally I experienced rage-inducing multi-second freezes after updating to Sierra, disabling memory compression solved the problem. > What exactly did you expect to see, or was seeing before "Snow Leopard"? Stability, usability, and polish. I don't think it's controversial to say that all of these have taken a precipitous fall since Snow Leopard. There are probably many reasons for this. It seems to me the biggest culprit is the yearly release schedule. They've shown themselves utterly incapable of releasing a quality update each year. The question is, why are they keeping it up? To sync up with iOS releases roughly maybe?
jki275 7y ago
Apple has made massive improvements and regular upgrades to macOS since 10.6. I'm not really sure what you are referencing when you say otherwise, but as a Mac user full time at work and at home, you're simply totally wrong. Windows 10 is quite usable, it's in use all over the world by millions of people. The home versions force a reboot when upgrades are required, but even those upgrades and the associated reboots can be delayed 35 days. The enterprise versions and pro versions can be completely controlled as they should be. Forcing upgrades is probably the best thing MS has ever done for the general security and health of the internet. Linux is still today a piece of shit, as it has always been. Apple ships zsh, not bash. If you want an upgraded version of bash you install home-brew and do brew install bash. Done. Or just use zsh because it's better. If you are an xfce linux on the desktop user, you are very out of touch with modern operating systems.
djsumdog 7y ago
> OS X since Snow Leopard 10.6 was my last favourite release. Lion (10.7) removed expose (no way to put it back in) replaced it with the terrible Mission Control (removed having multiple rows of desktops. Now you just had one long row. Expose no longer split out all windows so you could see them; it grouped like windows together without the ability to turn the feature off) I've personally been using Linux at all the jobs I've held since 2012. I use it at work and at home, with my Windows machine being exclusively used for games and photo editing (I have some workflows with Darktable, but I still really prefer Lightroom). Linux is a great development platform and tiling window managers (i3/swap, xmonad, awesome, etc.) really make it shine if you're willing to put in the effort to learn them. I'm lucky I've been at four different companies that either allowed or encourages developers who wanted to run Linux exclusively. These days I ask about it in job interviews and don't continue down paths where a Mac is the only option.

by ohazi 7y ago

Beefpro9 7y ago

As of Catalina, Apple has switched the default shell to zsh and nags you when you launch bash. That said... I agree. Between this, the abysmal keyboard failure rate, and some of the user-hostile choices they've made, I've switched to a Razer laptop. Windows 10 Pro lets you avoid most of the jank, by the way. But, I'm only on it as an eventual migration path to something running XFCE (my favorite wm due to its out of box usability).

elSidCampeador 7y ago
Wait what? Why/when did they do this?
- dijit 7y ago
  What are you asking? Why/When MacOS transitioned to zsh? Why; because bash became GPLv3 at some point in history and MacOS couldn’t update their version of bash. (The last GPLv2 version). When; was catalina (just released)
angrygoat 7y ago
Amazingly, the message is actually hard coded into the bash binary, rather than having been done via an rc file – so it can't be disabled in any obvious way I can see.
- c17r 7y ago
  export BASH_SILENCE_DEPRECATION_WARNING=1
  - angrygoat 7y ago
    Thanks!
soraminazuki 7y ago
What’s so upsetting about switching the default shell to zsh? It’s compatible enough that most users wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Besides, licensing problems would persist no matter how much more effort Apple is willing to put into macs.
- my123 7y ago
  They have a big shared codebase between iOS and macOS, so them adding GPLv3 tools can end badly with the anti-tivoization clauses.
  - soraminazuki 7y ago
    You mean they have GPLv2 code in iOS?
    - my123 7y ago
      Yes they do.

ashishb 7y ago

WiFi, battery, and sleep. Have these problems been fixed with Linux on laptops?

nixpulvis 7y ago
My thinkpad X1 carbon works just fine with Arch Linux. Though you do occasionally need to refer to the wiki to fix things. It's usually pretty painless.
garmaine 7y ago
Yes. Buy a Lenovo and these work out of the box as you expect. In fact I get better battery life than under windows.
pojntfx 7y ago
Yes. Since ~5 years I haven't had a single problem with any Laptop (I'm mostly using ThinkPads, the newer ones, here even the Multi-Touch-Trackpoint and touchscreens perform better than under Windows).
ohazi 7y ago
Wifi: The advice from five years ago was to select/buy the Intel wifi card. Those are the only ones I've used, and they've all Just Worked. Intel cards are the only option if you're buying a Thinkpad. Sleep and hibernate: Works on every Lenovo I've used. Battery: My most recent laptop gets around 8-9 hours with a new battery on a normal workload, and when it drops to 3 hours, I buy a new battery.
- haspok 7y ago
  On newer kernels (4.8+) and latest Ubuntu my Thinkpad L390 freezes consistently when I try to suspend. It's gotten a bit better with 5.0.0.31, now suspend works 50% of the cases when I select it manually from the menu, and the laptop is connected to power. Otherwise, 90% freeze. Even my old trusty XPS 13 started not to go to sleep 1 out of 10 times. There must have been a serious regression in the kernel, but no one seems to care. For this reason alone, I started to seriously consider giving up Linux on the desktop.

trimbo 7y ago

In Microsoft's defense, at least the Windows 10 updates are now quick. Last week a minor patch for MacOS took 30 minutes on a 2019 Macbook Pro.

ohazi 7y ago
The four hours I spent cleaning up my dad's laptop last week beg to differ. I had enough time to make and eat dinner while it was updating, rebooting, and then cleaning up the updates. Maybe he hadn't updated in a while? I made him a small Linux partition after clearing up enough space, and now everything runs so much faster that he refuses to boot back into Windows.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  Maybe he hadn't updated in a while? That shouldn’t make much of a difference, we only accept it as an excuse because it’s been the norm for so long.

Numberwang 7y ago

I have not rebooted my Win10 laptop for weeks, what are you talking about? Also, regarding XFCE on a laptop, those 20 minutes will include the time before the battery runs out right?

zamalek 7y ago

> the current monstrosity literally requires you to let it reboot itself on a 9-5 schedule. * the previous monstrosity. Windows will now let you carry on without updating until seriously important security updates are a month old. They really do have to force the hand of ignorant users eventually, else Microsoft gets blamed for an insecure OS. I also don't understand where you get the idea that msft doesn't care about their desktop OS. They are basically overhauling it twice a year, for free. These larger updates do take 30 minutes, but, mind you, which is it: do they care too little or too much?

ohazi 7y ago
I guess I'm behind the times. Is the Candy Crush installer still in the Start menu? Do they still randomly revert telemetry settings on updates? What was that thing I read last week about no more local user accounts? Maybe all of these things have little asterisks on them, but at this point I don't care anymore. Chrome and Firefox are also noticeably faster on Linux than on a fresh Windows install on the same machine. Don't know WTF is up with that, but this has been consistent for years.
- Operyl 7y ago
  > Is the Candy Crush installer still in the Start menu? Yup. > Do they still randomly revert telemetry settings on updates? Yup. I've heard that this is a bug? Who knows, I just know I still see it flipping. > What was that thing I read last week about no more local user accounts? It's hidden behind the "Join a Domain" option, or triggers when you're not online. Dark patterns!
  - zamalek 7y ago
    > > Is the Candy Crush installer still in the Start menu? > Yup. No. Windows now remembers that you have uninstalled these apps.
    - Operyl 7y ago
      Then I guess I hit another bug! The dang thing returned on my last big update.

November-Echo 7y ago

About the bash thing: Apple isn’t allowed to ship a newer version due to licensing problems. That’s also the reason why they switched to zsh [1]. [1]: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2019/06/04/why-does-macos-catalina-use-zsh-instead-of-bash-licensing/ https://thenextweb.com/dd/2019/06/04/why-does-macos-catalina...

ohazi 7y ago
Yeah, I know. It's not just bash, it's a lot of their other userland tools too. It was sort of funny at first, and you can update them with homebrew and usually not break things, but at the end of the day... this is Apple's licensing problem, and yet I have to deal with it. That's stupid! I have scripts that run perfectly on my servers... why should I have to be a contortionist to test them locally?
pjmlp 7y ago
They are allowed, it is just like everyone else on comercial world, they rather not deal with copyleft software licenses. Which is a quite different issue.
- dwaite 7y ago
  AFAIK GPLv3 means (among other things) that if a company is slapped with an injunction due to a patent suit, you can't just license the patent for yourself - a patent license has to cover all GPLv3 usage. They are allowed, but some of the legal consequences to the new terms in GPLv3 are worth stalling updates, choosing alternative system components and even rewriting components to avoid.
jeroenhd 7y ago
Apple is perfectly allowed to ship a newer version, they'd just have to share some of their special sauce. Not entirely unreasonable in my opinion. Apple doesn't want to ship a new version because they don't want people to see how they've modified bash. I don't know what patents or top secret features they've added to make their version of bash incompatible with GPL, as they're allowed to ship GPL code in a closed source product just fine as long as they ship it as a separate binary, but it's more important than their users' convenience apparently. Also note that Microsoft ships entire Linux distros without having a problem with GPL licensing.

lovelyviking 7y ago

I would agree. We should be angry. Especially with news, if they are correct, that you prohibited to install linux on newer Macs. As I understood you can boot linux from external flash drive, but it's not the same as installing it on internal storage. Did someone tried to install Linux after installing Catalina, I am afraid of a few surprises there ...

vbezhenar 7y ago
AFAIU you're not prohibited, it's just matter of drivers. Apple uses some non-standard approach to disks which Linux did not implement yet and Apple does not care about Linux to add that support themselves.

self_awareness 7y ago

Angry or not, it doesn't matter. If you're angry and you give your money away, nobody cares. But, at the same time, if you're cheerful but you keep your money, you may start to influence things.

pjmlp 7y ago

Until Linux-on-the-desktop gives me the GUI workflow, a full OS stack of the likes of macOS, Windows, Android, it is going to be left as a travel OS for my tiny surviving Asus netbook. For a couple of years I believed on the dream, nowadays I rather invest my time elsewhere.

intarga 7y ago
Although I'm not personally a fan of it, I don't see what Gnome is lacking that you can get on those OSs you listed
- pjmlp 7y ago
  GNOME, like KDE, still fail short of the full stack developer experience across all distributions, they focus mainly on the UI layer alone. Something like macOS Frameworks, Android Frameworks, .NET/UWP. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/ https://developer.android.com/guide/platform https://developer.android.com/guide/platform https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/choose-your-platform https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/choose...

mantoto 7y ago

I like my windows 10. I also like my arch Linux as well. Even my MacOS rund stable enough that I don't have any issues with that. But if you don't keep your Debian up to date the chance that you can't longer upgrade it is high. After 1-2 years.

eikenberry 7y ago
You can update Debian many years later. I just updated a system over multiple versions no problem.
- grokavi 7y ago
  Yes, you can upgrade after several years. But you can't skip a version. If you started at 8, you need to upgrade to 9 and then to 10. Can't skip 9.
  - eikenberry 7y ago
    Sure, but all versions of Debian are still available so I don't see why that is a problem... Except as an annoyance due to the extra work.
- mantoto 7y ago
  I had packages just gone on enough occasion s.

eikenberry 7y ago

> Microsoft apparently agrees -- they chopped up the Windows team last year, pushing out the Windows chief and dumping the remaining re-orged husk under Azure. Do you have a reference for this? This seems like pretty big news.

majewsky 7y ago
A quick internet search finds news articles from March 2018, for example: > the Windows and Azure platforms are being combined, operating under Jason Zander https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/windows-leader-terry-myerson-out-as-microsoft-reorganizes-windows-division/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/windows-leader-terry...

coldtea 7y ago

>Apple has been neglecting OS X since Snow Leopard, thinking that iOS is the only thing worth investing in What exactly is the evidence behind this? They have been adding several huge components/APIs/tools that they have working for macOS (Metal, APFS, Swift, CoreML, etc), they have had added the Mac App Store, they have tons of under the hood improvements (e.g. memory compression), and so on. What exactly did you expect to see, or was seeing before "Snow Leopard"? >I know people like to knock Linux-on-the-desktop, but you know what? I can go buy a Thinkpad, spend 20 minutes putting Debian or Ubuntu on it, and it'll just work, and I'll get software updates forever. Then don't let the door hit you on your way out. In my experience in most definitely not "just work" except with very careful selection of laptop/peripherals, and all kind of uses cases break too, including no major creative/office apps like Creative Studio, Pro Tools, Cubase, Premiere, FCPX, MS Office, and so on, which I depend on. And every now and then this or that project will decide to majorly break stuff in some transition... (Gnome does it, KDE does it, X/Wayland/etc does it, ...). And I've used Linux (and several UNIX variants) since 1997, and still do professional (as a server OS) everyday, so not exactly new to the game.

UIZealot 7y ago
> >Apple has been neglecting OS X since Snow Leopard, thinking that iOS is the only thing worth investing in > What exactly is the evidence behind this? I agree neglect is probably not the right word. I like the term Marco Arment uses on his ATP podcast: drive-by updates. > They have been adding several huge components/APIs/tools that they have working for macOS (Metal, APFS, Swift, CoreML, etc), These all seem to have been developed for iOS first and macOS second. > they have tons of under the hood improvements (e.g. memory compression), and so on. Personally I experienced rage-inducing multi-second freezes after updating to Sierra, disabling memory compression solved the problem. > What exactly did you expect to see, or was seeing before "Snow Leopard"? Stability, usability, and polish. I don't think it's controversial to say that all of these have taken a precipitous fall since Snow Leopard. There are probably many reasons for this. It seems to me the biggest culprit is the yearly release schedule. They've shown themselves utterly incapable of releasing a quality update each year. The question is, why are they keeping it up? To sync up with iOS releases roughly maybe?

jki275 7y ago

Apple has made massive improvements and regular upgrades to macOS since 10.6. I'm not really sure what you are referencing when you say otherwise, but as a Mac user full time at work and at home, you're simply totally wrong. Windows 10 is quite usable, it's in use all over the world by millions of people. The home versions force a reboot when upgrades are required, but even those upgrades and the associated reboots can be delayed 35 days. The enterprise versions and pro versions can be completely controlled as they should be. Forcing upgrades is probably the best thing MS has ever done for the general security and health of the internet. Linux is still today a piece of shit, as it has always been. Apple ships zsh, not bash. If you want an upgraded version of bash you install home-brew and do brew install bash. Done. Or just use zsh because it's better. If you are an xfce linux on the desktop user, you are very out of touch with modern operating systems.

djsumdog 7y ago

> OS X since Snow Leopard 10.6 was my last favourite release. Lion (10.7) removed expose (no way to put it back in) replaced it with the terrible Mission Control (removed having multiple rows of desktops. Now you just had one long row. Expose no longer split out all windows so you could see them; it grouped like windows together without the ability to turn the feature off) I've personally been using Linux at all the jobs I've held since 2012. I use it at work and at home, with my Windows machine being exclusively used for games and photo editing (I have some workflows with Darktable, but I still really prefer Lightroom). Linux is a great development platform and tiling window managers (i3/swap, xmonad, awesome, etc.) really make it shine if you're willing to put in the effort to learn them. I'm lucky I've been at four different companies that either allowed or encourages developers who wanted to run Linux exclusively. These days I ask about it in job interviews and don't continue down paths where a Mac is the only option.