16 ms·

Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?

173 points by sylens 6y ago

bradknowles 6y ago
And this is part of why I refuse to be forced to upgrade to Catalina. So, when I buy “new” hardware, I will make sure that it is compatible with Mojave. Which means it won’t actually be new.... Something’s wrong when the best hardware you can buy from a manufacturer is from the versions they’re not making any more.
- WantonQuantum 6y ago
  This is exactly where I am right now and I’m starting to explore my options for jumping to Linux for desktop and laptop. There are some great distros out there that I’m looking forward to trying.
  - alpineidyll3 6y ago
    I find desktop Linux much better as a developer OS than my MacBook. Now if only there was a good ryzen laptop with amd gfx I'd be up offa the Mac entirely.
  - vladvasiliu 6y ago
    I'm more or less in the same situation. I own a 2013 15" MBP that still works perfectly but I'm afraid of what will happen if / when it stops working. I actually use it often, so it could get stolen / I could drop it / etc. My client uses Windows and HP computers. I've been able to save an "old" Elitedesk 800 G2 SFF (6th gen i5) from the dumpster and upgraded it with an old ssd I had lying around and 16 GB of ram (instead of 8). I've set up ArchLinux on it with I3 and boy do I love that machine. It's plenty powerful, quiet, and everything just works. It actually replaced my MBP as my "dev" machine during the WFH phase. I've also had close to no issues running Arch on a Probook 430 G5. Everything except for the fingerprint reader works. But while the desktop is great, I'm less happy with the laptop. It's not so much related to Linux but to the physical machine itself (the touchpad isn't great, the keyboard's texture feels weird, it has coil whine, assembly is half-assed and rubs the wrists while working on it, etc). As they say, YMMV, but my experience is that depending on what you do day to day with your computer, a Linux PC may actually work surprisingly well compared to a mac, especially on the desktop where the superior materials and assembly of the mac are less of an issue.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    1) Don't worry too much about distro. Get Debian or something Debian-based. 2) ThinkPads were and are excellent portable Linux machines.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  The trouble is it's difficult to get any objective data on this. Catalina has been rock solid for me. So is this a problem for a handful of noisy individuals or is it more widespread? I really don't know.
  - jostylr 6y ago
    I have been upgrading (and porting to new machines) a Mac account starting in 2008 on a white macbook (2006?), transferred to a 2009 iMac, and then transferred to a 2017 iMac. Never had issues until Catalina. Catalina finally made me do a completely fresh install with transferring data files as the only touch from the old system. Since the fresh install, it has worked perfectly, but before that the system would randomly keep repeating the last typed character. I could not live with that behavior. Also got a new MBAir 2020 (Catalina) and that has been perfectly fine and solid as well.
jmercouris 6y ago
It seems all of the engineering resources are going towards iOS and macOS is only an afterthought, a device necessary for making iOS apps... I'll be moving on when I get a new laptop.
- andrekandre 6y ago
  the "rejigging" of mac ui to look like ios in big sur sure makes me feel like that is so... i have a lot of apps in my applications folder crossed out with a / mark because they are 32-bit... its kind of strange to me that if i "downgraded" to mojave they all start working again... isnt that weird? seems almost the opposite of "customer centric"...
- colmvp 6y ago
  FWIW, when I upgraded my parents operating system for their iPhone, it bricked the phone and I had to take it to the Apple store to get them to get it to stop freezing after attempting to boot the system following the upgrade. The Apple tech told me that next time I want to upgrade multiple versions, that I should install fresh instead of upgrading.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  They’re doing lots and lots of engineering on macOS - APFS, read only system partition, app sandboxing with user file protection, app notarization, catalyst, SwiftUI, Big Sur native iOS app support, the whole Big Sur redesign, custom T2 controller, ARM Macs. The problem seems rather like they are making too many deep system changes without any bug fix time to let them settle.
  - the_lucifer 6y ago
    Exactly this. There's no breathing time or a tick-tock cycle for large changes to settle down. The last proper one being High Sierra. Three years of consecutive large scale underlying changes are taking a toll on the overall polish and stability of macOS
easton 6y ago
I don’t know, at scale in a company, my mood has always been (with Windows, mostly, but sometimes older versions of macOS) that if the issue doesn’t exist on a clean test box, we’re reimaging your machine. Since home folders are often somewhere else (folder redirection or OneDrive in Windows, in this case on a separate volume from /System), a OS reinstall isn’t very time consuming. Once the OS comes back up, MDM grabs it and sets up policy and applications. For personal use, most people don’t install stuff that’s that complicated to redo (maybe at most, Adobe and Office which are download pkg and sign in), so if the OS was so fundamentally borked that the sealed system volume stood in your way, you’d waste more time trying to fix it by hand rather than just reinstalling the OS from Internet Recovery and signing back in. Especially since Time Machine does a good job at backing up home folders.
- livueta 6y ago
  At one of the large companies I worked for, IT took that "just pave it" approach for _everything_. Maybe because of the contrast between that and my day job of spending weeks to months root-causing really weird distributed systems issues, it stuck me as penny-wise-pound-foolish. At least in this example, that attitude was used as an excuse to never actually investigate anything, even issues that recurred within days of a re-image. Outlook won't connect? Here, go watch the installer for a couple of hours, use your device for a day or two then back to square one. Eventually, it's easy to get so sick of IT's obvious unwillingness to actually fix shit that IT is avoided unless absolutely necessary, and everyone's productivity suffers as a result. At that company, IT was at the top of the negatives column on every internal survey. It is definitely an effective attitude to take at scale, but it has to be paired with at least some troubleshooting of the class of issue. Otherwise, severe bugs get swept under the rug by user exhaustion and IT inaction.
  - pxeboot 6y ago
    On the opposite end of the spectrum, I worked somewhere that avoided reimaging PCs at all costs. Every system had tens of random workarounds applied to 'fix' issues as quickly as possible. Nothing was consistent, and IT also had a very poor reputation.
  - 6y ago
claytongulick 6y ago
WSL2 on windows is really nice. I do all my dev on a surface book laptop running windows. WSL2 has me covered for anything that needs posix, but that's increasingly rare. Edit: my deploy target is Ubuntu.
- vetinari 6y ago
  Is systemd/systemctl still broken on WSL2? How do you deploy on Ubuntu, when the service control layer is incompatible between Ubuntu and WSL2?
  - majewsky 6y ago
    WSL2 is just a Hyper-V VM with some UI integrations. It uses an actual Linux kernel rather than a NT kernel personality, so systemd should work like in any other VM.
    - vetinari 6y ago
      It is not just Hyper-V VM with some UI integrations. While it uses actual Linux kernel, it does not use actual init system as a just a VM would. It runs Microsoft's /init, which does not handle service management. Not even SysV ones via /etc/init.d. So if you need service managment, you won't find it under WSL2.
  - Tsarbomb 6y ago
    Why would you assume he is deploying to a prod environment that lives in WSL2? That's a ridiculous assumption. This individual clearly develops and builds with WSL2 and ships to to Ubuntu VMs or as Ubuntu based containers to some orchestration engine.
    - vetinari 6y ago
      The point was not that the prod lives in WSL2. The point was that the development and deployment environment are vastly different. Developing with different environment than prod is difficult; missing service management layer is a huge difference. WSL2 is optimized to show the shell quickly, but in the background, quite a lot is missing.
Animats 6y ago
Steve Jobs once said that an operating system was obsolete after 7 years. MacOS is now 36. MacOS X is now 19.
- calciphus 6y ago
  Yeah, but he said that as a sales pitch. Remember he was not an engineer.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  The “Mac OS X” was more of a brand name than a singular OS. Each major release (the ones with new code names) was essentially a whole new OS. iOS just turned 13, but each year, it’s full of big changes. I think Jobs might’ve been referring to the actual OS internals, not the brand name. As in, support period. After all, Linux (while not technically an OS) is older than Mac OS X / macOS, but it’s not obsolete. Just don’t expect to get security patches on kernels in the 2.x or 3.x range.
moltar 6y ago
I’ve had the new MacBook since December, but still using the old one because there’s no smooth upgrade path for me.
sys_64738 6y ago
It's the bloat that is terrible. Chrome pages are 5x the size of the same page on Linux or Windows. You need 8GB minimum nowadays to run Catalina where Tiger it was 256MB.
- mciancia 6y ago
  > Chrome pages are 5x the size of the same page on Linux or Windows. Source?
  - sys_64738 6y ago
    Did ya try it yourself? I did.
    - dangus 6y ago
      Even if they are larger: 1. How is this Apple’s fault? You’re complaining about a third-party application that Apple has no control over. 2. How can you be sure that Mac and Windows manage memory in the same way? The nerds who sit around and stare at their computer metrics and gauges on their menu bar or desktop overlay are completely missing the point: is the computer usable and responsive? I use both Mac and Windows daily and they’re basically the same thing and do all the same things, including running Chrome.
AnonHP 6y ago
It used to be a long running joke as well as practical wisdom on the Windows side to always wait for SP1 (Service Pack 1) for better stability and never to install the X.0 version. For all the “doubling down on Mac” that Apple’s senior employees harp about in interviews, macOS itself has been focusing more on eye candy and iOS parity than on stability. For my machines, I switch to Linux once macOS updates are no longer available, even though the user experience isn’t as great with older hardware and support for external peripherals like the Trackpad. For machines that can run the latest macOS, I upgrade every two whole releases on macOS (and that after it’s way beyond a X.0 release) since security updates are made available to past releases for a few years. Right now I’m on the latest Mojave release, and skipped Catalina completely. I’ll consider Big Sur a few minor releases after 11.0 is released. This also makes some practical sense because Apple works on features with a multi-year plan but releases them partially done in a “brand new version” (you’ll notice this pattern if you look at it). I’m thankful to all the brave souls who venture sooner (intentionally or because they bought new hardware that will refuse to run an older OS) and pave the way for me to avoid potholes and land mines. My days of tinkering with the computer and “yak shaving” are long over. Even though my comment may sound hostile to macOS, there’s no other OS I’d rather start using my personal computer with unless I really, really have to.
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  > For my machines, I switch to Linux once macOS updates are no longer available What's the best way to use Linux on an old MacBook air? Should I be running it in a VM? Is there a way to dula boot? The laptop is quite old, it has 4GB of RAM. So I'm worried nothing will run well on it. Macos definitely feels sluggish on it now.
  - popeathlete 6y ago
    Just install it and use it.
  - AnonHP 6y ago
    I’m not a fan of VMs for older machines since they tend to perform poorly. And 4GB RAM wouldn’t be adequate for that. I’d suggest dual booting with a separate partition for Linux. You can also choose distros that have a lower hardware requirement and perform better on older machines (my first choice is Xubuntu, but there are others too). Make sure you still retain the macOS partition and installation (after resizing it down). There are tools like reFind [1] that can help you manage dual booting better (do read the extensive documentation and refer to it when needed). It goes without saying that you should have a full disk backup with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! before you venture into these. The experience on Linux may not be great out of the box (depending on your exact hardware). So I’d also suggest budgeting some time to iron out kinks and make it better. [1]: https://rodsbooks.com/refind/ https://rodsbooks.com/refind/
disposekinetics 6y ago
MacOS has so many features I'll never use. It is starting to feel bloated. I wonder if modern OSs did less would be smaller and feel snappier?
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Apple can't win here can they, one person complains they remove too much functionality, the next complains the operating system is bloated.
  - reportgunner 6y ago
    Well you do reap what you sow, don't you?
bookmarkable 6y ago
I feel for developers on macOS bugs, bloat and unreliability, but for many users, it still works every day for 5 to 7 years without issue, and updates just mean some new emoji are available.
- Voliokis 6y ago
  Unless you're on a device that can only be upgraded to 10.13, after which it won't get security updates anymore after 11 is released. Meanwhile, I can still put W10 on 10-12 year old PCs and it'll run fine (if the hardware wasn't particularly terrible even for back then). It might not support some of the latest features, but it works and you're not subject to some arbitrary decision by Microsoft as to whether you're allowed to use W10 or not.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    W10 is terrible on traditional hard drives which most PC's were using 10-12 years ago. We are also at the tail end of the core 2 duo era, those devices aren't really up to the job.
    - fock 6y ago
      well, a cheap SSD costs 20€. And you know, with 95% of Windows-based PCs you can just replace the harddisk. whoaaaa
      - rorykoehler 6y ago
        I use Windows at work occasionally and I can't get over how much clicking I have to do. Also some basic stuff is missing without convoluted work arounds (such as resetting the default app to open a file type to none). W10 is not in the same league as MacOS despite MacOs getting worse.
    - jankiehodgpodge 6y ago
      Windows 10 on a core 2 duo and an SSD is still pretty quick, it just doesn't run well on HDDs.
iansinnott 6y ago
> Apple has long taken pride that “it just works”, but seems to have convinced itself that is inviolate fact This. Apple's inability to admit fault coupled with decreasing software stability makes life difficult in many ways. For instance, aside from the obvious detrimental effects of OS bugs, it's often quite difficult to find specific solutions without a specific error message. "$APP silently fails" or "Why is my framerate so low?" don't always lead to answers, even though there are probably many others running into the same issues.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I'm not sure software stability is decreasing, these sort of problems have existed for as long as I can remember.
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    It definitely is. I just got a new 16" MacBook Pro and have had several ridiculous bugs. I frequently have to delete the keyboard layout preferences file in order to set it to ISO. The most annoying one is that the whole thing crashes if you unplug it from a dock while it is asleep. You can get around it by setting it to never sleep while plugged in, but guess what? That setting magically resets itself if it crashes.
  - ansmKJ 6y ago
    Indeed, MacOS 9 was buggy as hell and worse than Windows 98 in terms of stability. OS X apparently fixed some of that for a couple of years, so it looks like Apple is now reverting to its old ways.
    - rorykoehler 6y ago
      OSX was developed by NeXT
  - kalleboo 6y ago
    Yeah, people forget how buggy macOS has been. Both Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion were public admissions that they needed to focus on quality. They haven’t had a proper one of those in a while. That said, I can’t remember a time when bugs have been as long-standing as they are now. SMB file shares have been completely broken for nearly 3 years now (the solution is to buy the program AutoMounter), and USB-C docks have been broken since day 1 and still are on Big Sur.
brundolf 6y ago
> We are heading rapidly towards the corollary to “it just works” being “and if it doesn’t, just wipe everything and re-install”. Is this really all that bad? In the era of everything living in the cloud, it generally takes me only a couple hours to setup a system again from scratch. Not that I've ever had to do this on macOS personally (though I did once on iOS), but if I had, I wouldn't be terribly upset about it. > If every time your car had a problem you had to replace its engine, wouldn’t you consider that abysmal engineering? This is a ridiculous analogy. Re-installing an OS is free (both the materials and, for Apple customers who don't know how to do it themselves, the service). macOS today doesn't always just work. I run into bugs sometimes and get frustrated. But whenever I boot up Windows and have to fight to get the most basic dev tools working, or boot up Linux and have to fight to get a core function like system updates or audio working, I'm reminded how much closer macOS still is to "just working" than anything else out there.
- steffan 6y ago
  Maybe a better analogy is: You have a problem with your living room light dimmer not working. The solution is to move all of your furniture out of your house, or being generous, just the living room, and then moving it back. Would you consider that reasonable? Assuming you have a backup, then lets say some movers come out (for free) and do the moving. That's not inconvenient, right? After all, you don't have to do any of the moving. Just wait an hour or so and the movers will move everything back and quietly disappear.
  - m463 6y ago
    It is ridiculous, but I can't help but think of cars. I had a car a couple years back, where I had to get behind the side panel of the trunk to get to something (tail light?). The (ford) trunk panel was not held on by a screw, but y a weird fastener that had to be pried out (and I felt like I was breaking it). When it was out, the fastener looked like a christmas tree, and went into a hole easily in one direction and the design really didn't support coming out very well. Turns out all cars are designed this way. They are "designed for assembly". Pretty much everything in the world is that way or moving that direction. I think the computer equivalent is package managers and app upgrades and os upgrades and modular data. But it's different. "designed for assembly" for cars becomes "designed for re-install" and the more troubling "designed for one-way upgrade"
apatheticonion 6y ago
It's been fun, MacOS, but it looks like our time is drawing to a close. With competitive, affordable AMD hardware and better GPU support, both WSL and Linux (KDE Plasma) offer compelling competition. The only rebuttal from Apple being extra padding on the UI, so it seems like I am no longer your target audience. Fair well, it was a beautiful, cohesive experience while it lasted.
- xenonite 6y ago
  Bigger padding around UI elements is literally my biggest annoyance with Big Sur. (and still, missing subpixel rendering, hence staying on 10.11 here)
- randomsearch 6y ago
  Was thinking about jumping ship but: - MacBook Air is still lovely (once ahem I had keyboard fixed) - Basic productivity tools on Linux - eg email or word processing - still suck and I want native apps for such things. Any solution?
  - panzerboy 6y ago
    For email and word processing, it depends on what you've previously used. I would say that LibreOffice is quite all right for word processing. Also have a look at FreeOffice (https://www.freeoffice.com/en/ https://www.freeoffice.com/en/) which aims for great compatibility with MS Office. For an email client, I personally use the GMail web client nowadays, but I've used Thunderbird for a long time and it's fine (not as polished and good looking as Mail.app on MacOS though).
    - ffpip 6y ago
      Why is it free? What's the catch? Ads, premium features?
  - pacifika 6y ago
    Geary and google docs
bgorman 6y ago
I recently switched to macOS after using Linux pretty much exclusively for personal use over the last 5 years. (2020 MacBook Air) For me the most infuriating thing is that Apple completely hides what is actually going on from the user. Want to manually scale your display to an exact resolution? Go to Displays, Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this is completely non nondiscoverable. An exFAT external hard drive wasn't "shut down correctly" ... no problem Mac OS will just run fsck in the background and refuse mount the drive or let you examine the disk in Disk Utility until it is complete. If you kill -9 the fsck, you get stuck in some limbo state where you can't mount the disk or run diagnostics on it. The worst thing I have discovered is Pages... The stylesheets and layout logic make absolutely no sense, it is way worse than Word or Libreoffice. However the OS does run smoother on a day to day basis than my work provided MacBook Pro 2019 running Mojave, and there is absolutely no screen tearing.
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  > Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this is completely non nondiscoverable. This could be a clever designer, if for example the team decided that Mac users don't need manual resolution settings, and this designer lost the argument. So they stick it behind a keypress and make sure word gets out. The team only cares about what they can see, a common issue with teams. So they don't notice and the designer at least knows they've saved some major pain, at the cost of some annoyance. If you've worked with people who design for social bell-curve psychology, you have probably been confronted with this problem before. And this is just one possible explanation...
  - andrewmackrodt 6y ago
    A lot of macOS seems designed this way, it took me months of using macOS daily before I learnt these little tricks, e.g. pressing option before many operations generally shows an advanced menu (advanced network connection stats, finder merge folder option etc). I'd like for there to be an option for power users where this is the default behaviour if enabled.
ohazi 6y ago
It's definitely maintainable, the real question is whether Apple is interested in doing so properly.
- majewsky 6y ago
  The article is not about that kind of maintainability.
mindfulhack 6y ago
I think in general macOS is an amazing operating system, recent Catalina bugs aside. Something related: what I've been really living with is the T2 chip kernel panic hardware bug. Over 3 different models (the 2017, 2018, then the 2019 16-inch MBP which is my current), I've seen Apple go from: - The initial full-scale buggy behaviour of 1-2 complete system crash & forced reboots per week; - to Apple suddenly deleting all my previous system kernel crash logs (and no longer recording new ones in Console.app) without my consent or knowledge even though it's my own machine that I paid over $5000 for (must be silent updates of some kind because it happened in between macOS updates); - to observing Apple slowly tweaking how macOS responds to the kernel panic by no longer crashing the system but just freezing the screen and all controls for up to a minute (while sound continues) before unfreezing itself (this happens maybe 3-5 times per week for me, even more, it happens when watching full-screen video in any app). So they've improved it but it's still disruptive and noticeable, and plain unacceptable on hardware this expensive. Yes, I'm slowly planning a move to Linux, but it's not easy, it will take time and it's a major adjustment depending on what your computer needs are. Linux Mint Cinnamon seems the safest bet to me. I say all this knowing how catastrophically worse Windows 10 is in terms of bugs like Windows updates suddenly hard deleting your entire Documents folder.
- gtf21 6y ago
  Recently made that move having spent most of my life on MacOS. For me it was the feeling of losing control of my system (plus the recent quality issues -- feels like they're busy pushing new features out instead of fixing the bugs with the existing ones). I thought it would be a lot harder than it was for me, but in the end I'm now much happier on Linux than I was on OSX. There's no specialist software I need that doesn't work on Linux, so it was probably easier for me than if you, say, work in FinalCut all the time.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > to observing Apple slowly tweaking how macOS responds to the kernel panic by no longer crashing the system but just freezing the screen and all controls for up to a minute (while sound continues) before unfreezing itself (this happens maybe 3-5 times per week for me, even more, it happens when watching full-screen video in any app). That's not a kernel panic then, by definition a kernel panic is an unrecoverable event. What you're seeing is likely an issue somewhere in the GUI/GPU driver stack. Windows used to crash upon such issues too, they mitigated it by moving lots of stuff to userspace. For me, what is a regular event is freezing for a dozen seconds whenever I alt-tab to Cisco VPN, but ah well that may also be a result of shoddy antivirus software.
_ph_ 6y ago
As a long-term mac user, I hope that the transition to ARM and what goes along with it, is largely responsible for what went wrong in recent years. Not only did this transition for sure mean a lot of team reshuffling, additional tasks to do etc. To my understanding, there was a big reorg in the code base itself. iOS began as a fork of macOS (or rather OS X as it was called back then), and over the years, those two codes bases drifted apart. To my understanding, with the move to Apple Silicon, not only macOS was ported to the new architecture, but the code bases got merged again. So the aim is to have one universal core onto which the separate teams can build iOS/iPadOS/watchOS/tvOS and of course macOS. Such a big code refactoring is of course a very big undertaking, causing a lot of disruption. But once it is finished, not only the disruption goes away, but hopefully maintenance is easier and more systematic. If that holds true, then macOS should be improving again moving forward. That all platforms use identical or at least very similar hardware should also help stability.
metabagel 6y ago
“ The most intransigent problem with failed EFI firmware updates has been with the iMac Retina 5K 27-inch Late 2015, or iMac17,1. Some have sailed through updates bringing them to version 428.0.0.0.0, others remain firmly stuck at 170.0.0.0.0, which was current for macOS Mojave 10.14.6 in July 2019.” The first time I tried to update my late 2015 27” iMac, it bricked the system, and I had to reinstall from Time Machine backup. I gave up on updating for quite some time, every day having to dismiss the reminder to update. Recently, I was able to update to Catalina. It was painful and took multiple tries, but eventually it got there.
bborud 6y ago
I used Linux as my main operating system on the desktop for 16-17 years before switching to OSX. The reason was that I was tired of having laptops that didn't work properly and the endless weeks of tweaking whenever I got a new laptop. It also helped that Macbooks were pretty decent laptops. I needed a portable UNIX machine. First and foremost. The software available for it was a bonus. In the latter half of the 2010s the quality of the Macbooks has had a sharp downturn. The majority of the Macbook Pros my team has bought has had problems. Keyboard, screen connectors, batteries, etc. Fully one third of them have had more than one problem (including recurrence of the same problem after repair). Experiences colleagues have had with the new Macbook Pro 16" are also quite depressing. Reports of the thing thermal-throttling and spinning up its fans like crazy doesn't make me want to upgrade from my 2015 Macbook Pro 15". I'll hang on to that machine until there's nothing left of it. The hardware quality argument for Apple is gone. They are odd, fragile, finnicky devices that you can't really repair (it is too expensive, and the approved repair shops generally do not have the qualifications to do board repairs - they can only reliably, and expensively, replace stuff). And while people have their own anecdata, I've had to approve computer purchases for my department for the last 6-7 years. We do NOT have anywhere near these kinds of problems with Thinkpads. I, rather foolishly, installed Catalina, and what is immediately obvious is where Apple is heading: they want to lock down Macs more. Getting software from parties that have not paid Apple for access (come on, let's be honest, this is about money) to run is getting more and more painful. And a few things simply do not run anymore. The trajectory Apple is on means that I might go back to using Macs as my secondary platform - or even start to look to Windows as my secondary platform. With Linux as my primary platform. I think that right now is perhaps the time in the last 20 years where having more desktop software for Linux would be a very good thing. I really, really want Fusion 360, Affinity suite, Ableton Live etc on Linux now. Because I really, really do not want Apple to be part of my future if they are going to become a fully walled garden running on marginal hardware.
- chongli 6y ago
  I honestly miss the classic Macs of the 80s and 90s. Sure they had their bad points. The operating system let badly-behaved applications stomp all over the address space and crash the machine, and preference files (as well as the desktop database) got corrupted frequently. But they were so easy to use! The operating system was so simple you as one person could understand the whole thing. There weren’t countless background processes running all the time. You knew exactly which applications were running (only one, in the case of system 6.0 and earlier). And Apple was a different company back then. They were artists and underdogs. Now they’ve become this ruthless capitalist machine of staggering scale. I guess nothing good lasts forever.
csomar 6y ago
I have recently switched to Linux (ArchLinux)[1] after a not so happy ending with macOS. The new features that Apple keeps adding to macOS helps no developer and are consumer-oriented. I feel this is the new direction they are taking. As Apple gained momentum in the smartphone space, they want to capitalize that on the laptop market. And what's better than giving your users something they are already familiar with: iOS. So macOS is slowly drifting to become iOS. While this might be good for your average consumer as she'll be comfortable manipulating the same patterns of the interface, for the developer it means less performance, less customization, more gatekeeping, etc... In the future, I think there will be two types of OSes: A developer OS (probably a custom built Linux for the developer or the company) and a consumer OS. The divergence will be big enough that consumer OSes can no longer be used to do any useful programming (aside from programming for the said platform). 1: https://omarabid.com/apple-walled-garden https://omarabid.com/apple-walled-garden
habosa 6y ago
At work we were asked to upgrade to Catalina for security/maintainability reasons. There was a list of "Known Issues" with Catalina linked in the email asking us to upgrade. The list was comical. Had at least 5 things on it that, if they happened to me, would completely ruin my productivity. I've spent most of my life on macOS but it does seem to be unraveling, while Windows and Linux are only getting better these days.
coldtea 6y ago
No, it's just a bizarro question. I've been using it since 2003, and it's stabler than ever, while doing more for the user than ever (new fs, virtualization support, Handover, Continuity, and tons of other stuff besides).
- LiNeXT 6y ago
  > Handover, Continuity I never got any of that stuff to work reliably before I moved off the Mac completely. It would sometimes work and often not work. Often enough that I wrote both of those features off as simple keynote gimmicks.
phendrenad2 6y ago
MacOS is amazing. It's a 20-year-old fork of BSD, maintained by a company that differentiates itself via hardware rather than software, and yet it's still "competitive" (more or less) with Windows and Linux today.
dangus 6y ago
Law of headlines: the answer is no. Yes, it’s bad that a few people are having issues updating firmware. We don’t know how many are versus aren’t. But the article goes down a technical rabbit hole that regular users don’t care about, and I suspect the number of affected users is minuscule. Plenty of Windows users including myself never bother updating audio/chipset/WiFi drivers unless there’s an actual problem. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Apple’s choice to use the OS updates to also update firmware. It’s typically a benefit to the customer: Mac users never had to worry about updating drivers. I’ve owned plenty of Lenovo and Dell systems with infuriating automatic update software and I much prefer Apple’s approach. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Apple retail employees not knowing how to update firmware. It’s a retail store. There isn’t anything special about it just because it has an Apple logo on the side, and yet every technically inclined Apple customer expects the $18/hour store associates to immediately know how to do complicated things like this. In reality, I suspect the reason why Apple employees are clueless on what to do is that the problem is so rare.
tester89 6y ago
> We are heading rapidly towards the corollary to “it just works” being “and if it doesn’t, just wipe everything and re-install”. This was my experience with an issue where my Mac just hangs for 30 s randomly.
- guanplee 6y ago
  I experience this also, turns out the bluetooth was trying to detect keyboards and mouse even after I turned it off and explicitly turn off all bluetooth on startup options.

173 points by sylens 6y ago

And this is part of why I refuse to be forced to upgrade to Catalina. So, when I buy “new” hardware, I will make sure that it is compatible with Mojave. Which means it won’t actually be new.... Something’s wrong when the best hardware you can buy from a manufacturer is from the versions they’re not making any more.

WantonQuantum 6y ago
This is exactly where I am right now and I’m starting to explore my options for jumping to Linux for desktop and laptop. There are some great distros out there that I’m looking forward to trying.
- alpineidyll3 6y ago
  I find desktop Linux much better as a developer OS than my MacBook. Now if only there was a good ryzen laptop with amd gfx I'd be up offa the Mac entirely.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  I'm more or less in the same situation. I own a 2013 15" MBP that still works perfectly but I'm afraid of what will happen if / when it stops working. I actually use it often, so it could get stolen / I could drop it / etc. My client uses Windows and HP computers. I've been able to save an "old" Elitedesk 800 G2 SFF (6th gen i5) from the dumpster and upgraded it with an old ssd I had lying around and 16 GB of ram (instead of 8). I've set up ArchLinux on it with I3 and boy do I love that machine. It's plenty powerful, quiet, and everything just works. It actually replaced my MBP as my "dev" machine during the WFH phase. I've also had close to no issues running Arch on a Probook 430 G5. Everything except for the fingerprint reader works. But while the desktop is great, I'm less happy with the laptop. It's not so much related to Linux but to the physical machine itself (the touchpad isn't great, the keyboard's texture feels weird, it has coil whine, assembly is half-assed and rubs the wrists while working on it, etc). As they say, YMMV, but my experience is that depending on what you do day to day with your computer, a Linux PC may actually work surprisingly well compared to a mac, especially on the desktop where the superior materials and assembly of the mac are less of an issue.
- bitwize 6y ago
  1) Don't worry too much about distro. Get Debian or something Debian-based. 2) ThinkPads were and are excellent portable Linux machines.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
The trouble is it's difficult to get any objective data on this. Catalina has been rock solid for me. So is this a problem for a handful of noisy individuals or is it more widespread? I really don't know.
- jostylr 6y ago
  I have been upgrading (and porting to new machines) a Mac account starting in 2008 on a white macbook (2006?), transferred to a 2009 iMac, and then transferred to a 2017 iMac. Never had issues until Catalina. Catalina finally made me do a completely fresh install with transferring data files as the only touch from the old system. Since the fresh install, it has worked perfectly, but before that the system would randomly keep repeating the last typed character. I could not live with that behavior. Also got a new MBAir 2020 (Catalina) and that has been perfectly fine and solid as well.

jmercouris 6y ago

It seems all of the engineering resources are going towards iOS and macOS is only an afterthought, a device necessary for making iOS apps... I'll be moving on when I get a new laptop.

andrekandre 6y ago
the "rejigging" of mac ui to look like ios in big sur sure makes me feel like that is so... i have a lot of apps in my applications folder crossed out with a / mark because they are 32-bit... its kind of strange to me that if i "downgraded" to mojave they all start working again... isnt that weird? seems almost the opposite of "customer centric"...
colmvp 6y ago
FWIW, when I upgraded my parents operating system for their iPhone, it bricked the phone and I had to take it to the Apple store to get them to get it to stop freezing after attempting to boot the system following the upgrade. The Apple tech told me that next time I want to upgrade multiple versions, that I should install fresh instead of upgrading.
kalleboo 6y ago
They’re doing lots and lots of engineering on macOS - APFS, read only system partition, app sandboxing with user file protection, app notarization, catalyst, SwiftUI, Big Sur native iOS app support, the whole Big Sur redesign, custom T2 controller, ARM Macs. The problem seems rather like they are making too many deep system changes without any bug fix time to let them settle.
- the_lucifer 6y ago
  Exactly this. There's no breathing time or a tick-tock cycle for large changes to settle down. The last proper one being High Sierra. Three years of consecutive large scale underlying changes are taking a toll on the overall polish and stability of macOS

easton 6y ago

I don’t know, at scale in a company, my mood has always been (with Windows, mostly, but sometimes older versions of macOS) that if the issue doesn’t exist on a clean test box, we’re reimaging your machine. Since home folders are often somewhere else (folder redirection or OneDrive in Windows, in this case on a separate volume from /System), a OS reinstall isn’t very time consuming. Once the OS comes back up, MDM grabs it and sets up policy and applications. For personal use, most people don’t install stuff that’s that complicated to redo (maybe at most, Adobe and Office which are download pkg and sign in), so if the OS was so fundamentally borked that the sealed system volume stood in your way, you’d waste more time trying to fix it by hand rather than just reinstalling the OS from Internet Recovery and signing back in. Especially since Time Machine does a good job at backing up home folders.

livueta 6y ago
At one of the large companies I worked for, IT took that "just pave it" approach for _everything_. Maybe because of the contrast between that and my day job of spending weeks to months root-causing really weird distributed systems issues, it stuck me as penny-wise-pound-foolish. At least in this example, that attitude was used as an excuse to never actually investigate anything, even issues that recurred within days of a re-image. Outlook won't connect? Here, go watch the installer for a couple of hours, use your device for a day or two then back to square one. Eventually, it's easy to get so sick of IT's obvious unwillingness to actually fix shit that IT is avoided unless absolutely necessary, and everyone's productivity suffers as a result. At that company, IT was at the top of the negatives column on every internal survey. It is definitely an effective attitude to take at scale, but it has to be paired with at least some troubleshooting of the class of issue. Otherwise, severe bugs get swept under the rug by user exhaustion and IT inaction.
- pxeboot 6y ago
  On the opposite end of the spectrum, I worked somewhere that avoided reimaging PCs at all costs. Every system had tens of random workarounds applied to 'fix' issues as quickly as possible. Nothing was consistent, and IT also had a very poor reputation.
- 6y ago

claytongulick 6y ago

WSL2 on windows is really nice. I do all my dev on a surface book laptop running windows. WSL2 has me covered for anything that needs posix, but that's increasingly rare. Edit: my deploy target is Ubuntu.

vetinari 6y ago
Is systemd/systemctl still broken on WSL2? How do you deploy on Ubuntu, when the service control layer is incompatible between Ubuntu and WSL2?
- majewsky 6y ago
  WSL2 is just a Hyper-V VM with some UI integrations. It uses an actual Linux kernel rather than a NT kernel personality, so systemd should work like in any other VM.
  - vetinari 6y ago
    It is not just Hyper-V VM with some UI integrations. While it uses actual Linux kernel, it does not use actual init system as a just a VM would. It runs Microsoft's /init, which does not handle service management. Not even SysV ones via /etc/init.d. So if you need service managment, you won't find it under WSL2.
- Tsarbomb 6y ago
  Why would you assume he is deploying to a prod environment that lives in WSL2? That's a ridiculous assumption. This individual clearly develops and builds with WSL2 and ships to to Ubuntu VMs or as Ubuntu based containers to some orchestration engine.
  - vetinari 6y ago
    The point was not that the prod lives in WSL2. The point was that the development and deployment environment are vastly different. Developing with different environment than prod is difficult; missing service management layer is a huge difference. WSL2 is optimized to show the shell quickly, but in the background, quite a lot is missing.

Animats 6y ago

Steve Jobs once said that an operating system was obsolete after 7 years. MacOS is now 36. MacOS X is now 19.

calciphus 6y ago
Yeah, but he said that as a sales pitch. Remember he was not an engineer.
colejohnson66 6y ago
The “Mac OS X” was more of a brand name than a singular OS. Each major release (the ones with new code names) was essentially a whole new OS. iOS just turned 13, but each year, it’s full of big changes. I think Jobs might’ve been referring to the actual OS internals, not the brand name. As in, support period. After all, Linux (while not technically an OS) is older than Mac OS X / macOS, but it’s not obsolete. Just don’t expect to get security patches on kernels in the 2.x or 3.x range.

moltar 6y ago

I’ve had the new MacBook since December, but still using the old one because there’s no smooth upgrade path for me.

sys_64738 6y ago

It's the bloat that is terrible. Chrome pages are 5x the size of the same page on Linux or Windows. You need 8GB minimum nowadays to run Catalina where Tiger it was 256MB.

mciancia 6y ago
> Chrome pages are 5x the size of the same page on Linux or Windows. Source?
- sys_64738 6y ago
  Did ya try it yourself? I did.
  - dangus 6y ago
    Even if they are larger: 1. How is this Apple’s fault? You’re complaining about a third-party application that Apple has no control over. 2. How can you be sure that Mac and Windows manage memory in the same way? The nerds who sit around and stare at their computer metrics and gauges on their menu bar or desktop overlay are completely missing the point: is the computer usable and responsive? I use both Mac and Windows daily and they’re basically the same thing and do all the same things, including running Chrome.

AnonHP 6y ago

It used to be a long running joke as well as practical wisdom on the Windows side to always wait for SP1 (Service Pack 1) for better stability and never to install the X.0 version. For all the “doubling down on Mac” that Apple’s senior employees harp about in interviews, macOS itself has been focusing more on eye candy and iOS parity than on stability. For my machines, I switch to Linux once macOS updates are no longer available, even though the user experience isn’t as great with older hardware and support for external peripherals like the Trackpad. For machines that can run the latest macOS, I upgrade every two whole releases on macOS (and that after it’s way beyond a X.0 release) since security updates are made available to past releases for a few years. Right now I’m on the latest Mojave release, and skipped Catalina completely. I’ll consider Big Sur a few minor releases after 11.0 is released. This also makes some practical sense because Apple works on features with a multi-year plan but releases them partially done in a “brand new version” (you’ll notice this pattern if you look at it). I’m thankful to all the brave souls who venture sooner (intentionally or because they bought new hardware that will refuse to run an older OS) and pave the way for me to avoid potholes and land mines. My days of tinkering with the computer and “yak shaving” are long over. Even though my comment may sound hostile to macOS, there’s no other OS I’d rather start using my personal computer with unless I really, really have to.

perryizgr8 6y ago
> For my machines, I switch to Linux once macOS updates are no longer available What's the best way to use Linux on an old MacBook air? Should I be running it in a VM? Is there a way to dula boot? The laptop is quite old, it has 4GB of RAM. So I'm worried nothing will run well on it. Macos definitely feels sluggish on it now.
- popeathlete 6y ago
  Just install it and use it.
- AnonHP 6y ago
  I’m not a fan of VMs for older machines since they tend to perform poorly. And 4GB RAM wouldn’t be adequate for that. I’d suggest dual booting with a separate partition for Linux. You can also choose distros that have a lower hardware requirement and perform better on older machines (my first choice is Xubuntu, but there are others too). Make sure you still retain the macOS partition and installation (after resizing it down). There are tools like reFind [1] that can help you manage dual booting better (do read the extensive documentation and refer to it when needed). It goes without saying that you should have a full disk backup with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! before you venture into these. The experience on Linux may not be great out of the box (depending on your exact hardware). So I’d also suggest budgeting some time to iron out kinks and make it better. [1]: https://rodsbooks.com/refind/ https://rodsbooks.com/refind/

disposekinetics 6y ago

MacOS has so many features I'll never use. It is starting to feel bloated. I wonder if modern OSs did less would be smaller and feel snappier?

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
Apple can't win here can they, one person complains they remove too much functionality, the next complains the operating system is bloated.
- reportgunner 6y ago
  Well you do reap what you sow, don't you?

bookmarkable 6y ago

I feel for developers on macOS bugs, bloat and unreliability, but for many users, it still works every day for 5 to 7 years without issue, and updates just mean some new emoji are available.

Voliokis 6y ago
Unless you're on a device that can only be upgraded to 10.13, after which it won't get security updates anymore after 11 is released. Meanwhile, I can still put W10 on 10-12 year old PCs and it'll run fine (if the hardware wasn't particularly terrible even for back then). It might not support some of the latest features, but it works and you're not subject to some arbitrary decision by Microsoft as to whether you're allowed to use W10 or not.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  W10 is terrible on traditional hard drives which most PC's were using 10-12 years ago. We are also at the tail end of the core 2 duo era, those devices aren't really up to the job.
  - fock 6y ago
    well, a cheap SSD costs 20€. And you know, with 95% of Windows-based PCs you can just replace the harddisk. whoaaaa
    - rorykoehler 6y ago
      I use Windows at work occasionally and I can't get over how much clicking I have to do. Also some basic stuff is missing without convoluted work arounds (such as resetting the default app to open a file type to none). W10 is not in the same league as MacOS despite MacOs getting worse.
  - jankiehodgpodge 6y ago
    Windows 10 on a core 2 duo and an SSD is still pretty quick, it just doesn't run well on HDDs.

iansinnott 6y ago

> Apple has long taken pride that “it just works”, but seems to have convinced itself that is inviolate fact This. Apple's inability to admit fault coupled with decreasing software stability makes life difficult in many ways. For instance, aside from the obvious detrimental effects of OS bugs, it's often quite difficult to find specific solutions without a specific error message. "$APP silently fails" or "Why is my framerate so low?" don't always lead to answers, even though there are probably many others running into the same issues.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
I'm not sure software stability is decreasing, these sort of problems have existed for as long as I can remember.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  It definitely is. I just got a new 16" MacBook Pro and have had several ridiculous bugs. I frequently have to delete the keyboard layout preferences file in order to set it to ISO. The most annoying one is that the whole thing crashes if you unplug it from a dock while it is asleep. You can get around it by setting it to never sleep while plugged in, but guess what? That setting magically resets itself if it crashes.
- ansmKJ 6y ago
  Indeed, MacOS 9 was buggy as hell and worse than Windows 98 in terms of stability. OS X apparently fixed some of that for a couple of years, so it looks like Apple is now reverting to its old ways.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    OSX was developed by NeXT
- kalleboo 6y ago
  Yeah, people forget how buggy macOS has been. Both Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion were public admissions that they needed to focus on quality. They haven’t had a proper one of those in a while. That said, I can’t remember a time when bugs have been as long-standing as they are now. SMB file shares have been completely broken for nearly 3 years now (the solution is to buy the program AutoMounter), and USB-C docks have been broken since day 1 and still are on Big Sur.

brundolf 6y ago

> We are heading rapidly towards the corollary to “it just works” being “and if it doesn’t, just wipe everything and re-install”. Is this really all that bad? In the era of everything living in the cloud, it generally takes me only a couple hours to setup a system again from scratch. Not that I've ever had to do this on macOS personally (though I did once on iOS), but if I had, I wouldn't be terribly upset about it. > If every time your car had a problem you had to replace its engine, wouldn’t you consider that abysmal engineering? This is a ridiculous analogy. Re-installing an OS is free (both the materials and, for Apple customers who don't know how to do it themselves, the service). macOS today doesn't always just work. I run into bugs sometimes and get frustrated. But whenever I boot up Windows and have to fight to get the most basic dev tools working, or boot up Linux and have to fight to get a core function like system updates or audio working, I'm reminded how much closer macOS still is to "just working" than anything else out there.

steffan 6y ago
Maybe a better analogy is: You have a problem with your living room light dimmer not working. The solution is to move all of your furniture out of your house, or being generous, just the living room, and then moving it back. Would you consider that reasonable? Assuming you have a backup, then lets say some movers come out (for free) and do the moving. That's not inconvenient, right? After all, you don't have to do any of the moving. Just wait an hour or so and the movers will move everything back and quietly disappear.
- m463 6y ago
  It is ridiculous, but I can't help but think of cars. I had a car a couple years back, where I had to get behind the side panel of the trunk to get to something (tail light?). The (ford) trunk panel was not held on by a screw, but y a weird fastener that had to be pried out (and I felt like I was breaking it). When it was out, the fastener looked like a christmas tree, and went into a hole easily in one direction and the design really didn't support coming out very well. Turns out all cars are designed this way. They are "designed for assembly". Pretty much everything in the world is that way or moving that direction. I think the computer equivalent is package managers and app upgrades and os upgrades and modular data. But it's different. "designed for assembly" for cars becomes "designed for re-install" and the more troubling "designed for one-way upgrade"

apatheticonion 6y ago

It's been fun, MacOS, but it looks like our time is drawing to a close. With competitive, affordable AMD hardware and better GPU support, both WSL and Linux (KDE Plasma) offer compelling competition. The only rebuttal from Apple being extra padding on the UI, so it seems like I am no longer your target audience. Fair well, it was a beautiful, cohesive experience while it lasted.

xenonite 6y ago
Bigger padding around UI elements is literally my biggest annoyance with Big Sur. (and still, missing subpixel rendering, hence staying on 10.11 here)
randomsearch 6y ago
Was thinking about jumping ship but: - MacBook Air is still lovely (once ahem I had keyboard fixed) - Basic productivity tools on Linux - eg email or word processing - still suck and I want native apps for such things. Any solution?
- panzerboy 6y ago
  For email and word processing, it depends on what you've previously used. I would say that LibreOffice is quite all right for word processing. Also have a look at FreeOffice (https://www.freeoffice.com/en/ https://www.freeoffice.com/en/) which aims for great compatibility with MS Office. For an email client, I personally use the GMail web client nowadays, but I've used Thunderbird for a long time and it's fine (not as polished and good looking as Mail.app on MacOS though).
  - ffpip 6y ago
    Why is it free? What's the catch? Ads, premium features?
- pacifika 6y ago
  Geary and google docs

bgorman 6y ago

I recently switched to macOS after using Linux pretty much exclusively for personal use over the last 5 years. (2020 MacBook Air) For me the most infuriating thing is that Apple completely hides what is actually going on from the user. Want to manually scale your display to an exact resolution? Go to Displays, Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this is completely non nondiscoverable. An exFAT external hard drive wasn't "shut down correctly" ... no problem Mac OS will just run fsck in the background and refuse mount the drive or let you examine the disk in Disk Utility until it is complete. If you kill -9 the fsck, you get stuck in some limbo state where you can't mount the disk or run diagnostics on it. The worst thing I have discovered is Pages... The stylesheets and layout logic make absolutely no sense, it is way worse than Word or Libreoffice. However the OS does run smoother on a day to day basis than my work provided MacBook Pro 2019 running Mojave, and there is absolutely no screen tearing.

themodelplumber 6y ago
> Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this is completely non nondiscoverable. This could be a clever designer, if for example the team decided that Mac users don't need manual resolution settings, and this designer lost the argument. So they stick it behind a keypress and make sure word gets out. The team only cares about what they can see, a common issue with teams. So they don't notice and the designer at least knows they've saved some major pain, at the cost of some annoyance. If you've worked with people who design for social bell-curve psychology, you have probably been confronted with this problem before. And this is just one possible explanation...
- andrewmackrodt 6y ago
  A lot of macOS seems designed this way, it took me months of using macOS daily before I learnt these little tricks, e.g. pressing option before many operations generally shows an advanced menu (advanced network connection stats, finder merge folder option etc). I'd like for there to be an option for power users where this is the default behaviour if enabled.

ohazi 6y ago

It's definitely maintainable, the real question is whether Apple is interested in doing so properly.

majewsky 6y ago
The article is not about that kind of maintainability.

mindfulhack 6y ago

I think in general macOS is an amazing operating system, recent Catalina bugs aside. Something related: what I've been really living with is the T2 chip kernel panic hardware bug. Over 3 different models (the 2017, 2018, then the 2019 16-inch MBP which is my current), I've seen Apple go from: - The initial full-scale buggy behaviour of 1-2 complete system crash & forced reboots per week; - to Apple suddenly deleting all my previous system kernel crash logs (and no longer recording new ones in Console.app) without my consent or knowledge even though it's my own machine that I paid over $5000 for (must be silent updates of some kind because it happened in between macOS updates); - to observing Apple slowly tweaking how macOS responds to the kernel panic by no longer crashing the system but just freezing the screen and all controls for up to a minute (while sound continues) before unfreezing itself (this happens maybe 3-5 times per week for me, even more, it happens when watching full-screen video in any app). So they've improved it but it's still disruptive and noticeable, and plain unacceptable on hardware this expensive. Yes, I'm slowly planning a move to Linux, but it's not easy, it will take time and it's a major adjustment depending on what your computer needs are. Linux Mint Cinnamon seems the safest bet to me. I say all this knowing how catastrophically worse Windows 10 is in terms of bugs like Windows updates suddenly hard deleting your entire Documents folder.

gtf21 6y ago
Recently made that move having spent most of my life on MacOS. For me it was the feeling of losing control of my system (plus the recent quality issues -- feels like they're busy pushing new features out instead of fixing the bugs with the existing ones). I thought it would be a lot harder than it was for me, but in the end I'm now much happier on Linux than I was on OSX. There's no specialist software I need that doesn't work on Linux, so it was probably easier for me than if you, say, work in FinalCut all the time.
mschuster91 6y ago
> to observing Apple slowly tweaking how macOS responds to the kernel panic by no longer crashing the system but just freezing the screen and all controls for up to a minute (while sound continues) before unfreezing itself (this happens maybe 3-5 times per week for me, even more, it happens when watching full-screen video in any app). That's not a kernel panic then, by definition a kernel panic is an unrecoverable event. What you're seeing is likely an issue somewhere in the GUI/GPU driver stack. Windows used to crash upon such issues too, they mitigated it by moving lots of stuff to userspace. For me, what is a regular event is freezing for a dozen seconds whenever I alt-tab to Cisco VPN, but ah well that may also be a result of shoddy antivirus software.

_ph_ 6y ago

As a long-term mac user, I hope that the transition to ARM and what goes along with it, is largely responsible for what went wrong in recent years. Not only did this transition for sure mean a lot of team reshuffling, additional tasks to do etc. To my understanding, there was a big reorg in the code base itself. iOS began as a fork of macOS (or rather OS X as it was called back then), and over the years, those two codes bases drifted apart. To my understanding, with the move to Apple Silicon, not only macOS was ported to the new architecture, but the code bases got merged again. So the aim is to have one universal core onto which the separate teams can build iOS/iPadOS/watchOS/tvOS and of course macOS. Such a big code refactoring is of course a very big undertaking, causing a lot of disruption. But once it is finished, not only the disruption goes away, but hopefully maintenance is easier and more systematic. If that holds true, then macOS should be improving again moving forward. That all platforms use identical or at least very similar hardware should also help stability.

metabagel 6y ago

“ The most intransigent problem with failed EFI firmware updates has been with the iMac Retina 5K 27-inch Late 2015, or iMac17,1. Some have sailed through updates bringing them to version 428.0.0.0.0, others remain firmly stuck at 170.0.0.0.0, which was current for macOS Mojave 10.14.6 in July 2019.” The first time I tried to update my late 2015 27” iMac, it bricked the system, and I had to reinstall from Time Machine backup. I gave up on updating for quite some time, every day having to dismiss the reminder to update. Recently, I was able to update to Catalina. It was painful and took multiple tries, but eventually it got there.

bborud 6y ago

I used Linux as my main operating system on the desktop for 16-17 years before switching to OSX. The reason was that I was tired of having laptops that didn't work properly and the endless weeks of tweaking whenever I got a new laptop. It also helped that Macbooks were pretty decent laptops. I needed a portable UNIX machine. First and foremost. The software available for it was a bonus. In the latter half of the 2010s the quality of the Macbooks has had a sharp downturn. The majority of the Macbook Pros my team has bought has had problems. Keyboard, screen connectors, batteries, etc. Fully one third of them have had more than one problem (including recurrence of the same problem after repair). Experiences colleagues have had with the new Macbook Pro 16" are also quite depressing. Reports of the thing thermal-throttling and spinning up its fans like crazy doesn't make me want to upgrade from my 2015 Macbook Pro 15". I'll hang on to that machine until there's nothing left of it. The hardware quality argument for Apple is gone. They are odd, fragile, finnicky devices that you can't really repair (it is too expensive, and the approved repair shops generally do not have the qualifications to do board repairs - they can only reliably, and expensively, replace stuff). And while people have their own anecdata, I've had to approve computer purchases for my department for the last 6-7 years. We do NOT have anywhere near these kinds of problems with Thinkpads. I, rather foolishly, installed Catalina, and what is immediately obvious is where Apple is heading: they want to lock down Macs more. Getting software from parties that have not paid Apple for access (come on, let's be honest, this is about money) to run is getting more and more painful. And a few things simply do not run anymore. The trajectory Apple is on means that I might go back to using Macs as my secondary platform - or even start to look to Windows as my secondary platform. With Linux as my primary platform. I think that right now is perhaps the time in the last 20 years where having more desktop software for Linux would be a very good thing. I really, really want Fusion 360, Affinity suite, Ableton Live etc on Linux now. Because I really, really do not want Apple to be part of my future if they are going to become a fully walled garden running on marginal hardware.

chongli 6y ago
I honestly miss the classic Macs of the 80s and 90s. Sure they had their bad points. The operating system let badly-behaved applications stomp all over the address space and crash the machine, and preference files (as well as the desktop database) got corrupted frequently. But they were so easy to use! The operating system was so simple you as one person could understand the whole thing. There weren’t countless background processes running all the time. You knew exactly which applications were running (only one, in the case of system 6.0 and earlier). And Apple was a different company back then. They were artists and underdogs. Now they’ve become this ruthless capitalist machine of staggering scale. I guess nothing good lasts forever.

csomar 6y ago

I have recently switched to Linux (ArchLinux)[1] after a not so happy ending with macOS. The new features that Apple keeps adding to macOS helps no developer and are consumer-oriented. I feel this is the new direction they are taking. As Apple gained momentum in the smartphone space, they want to capitalize that on the laptop market. And what's better than giving your users something they are already familiar with: iOS. So macOS is slowly drifting to become iOS. While this might be good for your average consumer as she'll be comfortable manipulating the same patterns of the interface, for the developer it means less performance, less customization, more gatekeeping, etc... In the future, I think there will be two types of OSes: A developer OS (probably a custom built Linux for the developer or the company) and a consumer OS. The divergence will be big enough that consumer OSes can no longer be used to do any useful programming (aside from programming for the said platform). 1: https://omarabid.com/apple-walled-garden https://omarabid.com/apple-walled-garden

habosa 6y ago

At work we were asked to upgrade to Catalina for security/maintainability reasons. There was a list of "Known Issues" with Catalina linked in the email asking us to upgrade. The list was comical. Had at least 5 things on it that, if they happened to me, would completely ruin my productivity. I've spent most of my life on macOS but it does seem to be unraveling, while Windows and Linux are only getting better these days.

coldtea 6y ago

No, it's just a bizarro question. I've been using it since 2003, and it's stabler than ever, while doing more for the user than ever (new fs, virtualization support, Handover, Continuity, and tons of other stuff besides).

LiNeXT 6y ago
> Handover, Continuity I never got any of that stuff to work reliably before I moved off the Mac completely. It would sometimes work and often not work. Often enough that I wrote both of those features off as simple keynote gimmicks.

phendrenad2 6y ago

MacOS is amazing. It's a 20-year-old fork of BSD, maintained by a company that differentiates itself via hardware rather than software, and yet it's still "competitive" (more or less) with Windows and Linux today.

dangus 6y ago

Law of headlines: the answer is no. Yes, it’s bad that a few people are having issues updating firmware. We don’t know how many are versus aren’t. But the article goes down a technical rabbit hole that regular users don’t care about, and I suspect the number of affected users is minuscule. Plenty of Windows users including myself never bother updating audio/chipset/WiFi drivers unless there’s an actual problem. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Apple’s choice to use the OS updates to also update firmware. It’s typically a benefit to the customer: Mac users never had to worry about updating drivers. I’ve owned plenty of Lenovo and Dell systems with infuriating automatic update software and I much prefer Apple’s approach. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Apple retail employees not knowing how to update firmware. It’s a retail store. There isn’t anything special about it just because it has an Apple logo on the side, and yet every technically inclined Apple customer expects the $18/hour store associates to immediately know how to do complicated things like this. In reality, I suspect the reason why Apple employees are clueless on what to do is that the problem is so rare.

tester89 6y ago

> We are heading rapidly towards the corollary to “it just works” being “and if it doesn’t, just wipe everything and re-install”. This was my experience with an issue where my Mac just hangs for 30 s randomly.

guanplee 6y ago
I experience this also, turns out the bluetooth was trying to detect keyboards and mouse even after I turned it off and explicitly turn off all bluetooth on startup options.