8 ms·

I really miss the colors and contrast of Snow Leopard. I was able to relatively okay with things up to High Sierra. Mojave brought random freezes on wake (~10s)

by icybox 4y ago

I really miss the colors and contrast of Snow Leopard. I was able to relatively okay with things up to High Sierra. Mojave brought random freezes on wake (~10s) on my Macbook Air 2015, Catalina brought call-home on every executable. Big Sur redesign just killed it. I don't like the unicorn coloring book for kids to be my OS! There's no contrast, there's just too much wasted space everywhere (I don't use external monitors). So all and all, I'm running ubuntu unity ( https://ubuntuunity.org/ https://ubuntuunity.org/ ) with Ambiance. Those have the right contrast for me. And I brought in Menlo and Lucida Grande fonts in for GUI and terminal. Those more round corners since Big Sur get on my nerves too :-( I'm sure I was using it wrong tho ... :-P

KarlKemp 4y ago
There is an option "increase contrast" in accessibility, plus a slider to adjust the display contrast, plus a set of color filters for color blindness that can be quite useful even if you don't suffer any of the specific conditions.
- icybox 4y ago
  Thanks! I'm aware of this. I don't know how to describe it properly - the old OSX icons, even the "lickable" control buttons in snow leopard look just right. It's almost like there's a black line around the icons, the saturation is right and also colors go right together. I don't see this in Big Sur or Monterey. It's just oversaturated pastels without clearly defined borders. Looked slightly better in dark mode, but I prefer light mode. Snow Leopard (https://apparelever169.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/4/9/124908212/504838937.png https://apparelever169.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/4/9/124908212/...) vs. Monterey (https://scr3.golem.de/screenshots/2106/MacOS-Monterey/Apple_macos-monterey_facetime_06072021.jpg https://scr3.golem.de/screenshots/2106/MacOS-Monterey/Apple_...) - random searches for screenshots.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  The increase contrast option in modern macOS increases the contrast at the expense of making everything ugly. Aqua in OS X 10.9 and below are naturally designed with high contrast and tonal range in mind.
lproven 4y ago
I am happy to see someone else recommending Ubuntu Unity, especially as being Mac-like. It remains my default OS for my laptops and it continues to improve; version 22.04 uses mainly MATE accessories, to provide proper menus and toolbars, and also supports Flatpak.
- my123 4y ago
  It however didn’t seem to make the move to Wayland… And unity8 (now Lomri) is in perpetual beta, and written in Qt.
  - lproven 4y ago
    > It however didn’t seem to make the move to Wayland… "You say that like it's a bad thing." > And unity8 (now Lomri) is in perpetual beta, and written in Qt. Is it now? I wonder if it's a descendant of Unity-2D then. That was in Qt and seems to be forgotten now. Yes, it does seem mired in dev hell, and I wonder how much is really left to do. Canonical got a lot of stick, especially on here, about Unity etc. (and still do over Snap). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 I think it's undeserved. Unity was and is a damned good desktop, it's just different. Some people are neophobic. There's more to life than the Win95 desktop. IMHO Canonical's only big mistake, really, was Mir. Wayland remains controversial, and I'm not qualified to judge why. But like systemd, it is basically the new standard, and so going with it would have been pragmatic. Trying to write a new WM _and_ a new desktop _and_ a mobile OS _and_ a new packaging format _and_ a new display server was a big stretch. Eliminating one big chunk of it seems like a win to me. Apparently not to them: they pressed ahead and then abandoned the whole thing. Damned shame. _Someone_ in the Linux world needed to address mobile/tablets. It is the entire herd of elephants stampeding about the room. IMHO a few sketchy efforts based on GNOME and KDE are not really enough.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      I mostly agree with everything you've said here. Frankly, I don't think Wayland has the functionality to support what people want to do on Desktop Linux. Wayland apologists will claim "that's the point", which I would be willing to agree with if the development of things like Mutter and wlroots weren't so spread apart. It's resulted in a scenario where two and a half desktops actually support Wayland, and even those don't have feature-complete implementations. GNOME, Sway, and especially KDE are still playing catch-up with x11 functionality. That's simply unacceptable for a software project that's 10 years in the making. Wayland is going to have a hard time being "the new standard" if it continues down it's path of less hardware compatibility, less software compatibility and less overall functionality. I'm willing to point the finger squarely at GNOME here too, because they've intentionally gimped Wayland's development over the years under the guise that they're the lead implementation, while giving the rest of the community the pittance of wlroots. This has been disastrous to the development cycle of Wayland, and ended up splintering the wrong projects and blocking the right features. Stuff like app tray indicators have been completely depreciated on a system level solely because GNOME said they didn't want them. It's really petty, and it certainly isn't moving desktop Linux forward. In general, everything GNOME-related after Unity has just been a really slow downhill decline. The freshness and uniqueness of the desktop is dead, all we're left with now is a lame Mac clone that can't even play nice with the rest of the community. This is probably a real "old man yells at cloud" moment by most respects, but watching their behavior in recent years frustrates and disappoints me. They used to be a pretty respectable group of maintainers; now it's just drip-fed patches, gutting old features and setting inane new precedents as "the standard" and getting mad at downstream maintainers when they don't adopt them.
pygy_ 4y ago
Up to Snow Leopard, OS X updates felt like little Christmas mornings. It went downhill starting with Lion. I’ve stopped caring about new features, there’s too much churn anyway.
- larusso 4y ago
  In the early 2000th when I was introduced to Apple Macs (G3 iMac MacOS9) I couldn’t understand who wanted to work with these machines. I tried out macOS-X in the school Labs and the only piece of software I actually liked was iTunes (I know weird). It took years and then I saw a machine running leopard and the coverflow in Finder etc. I thought wow this looks and feels so much cooler than my ugly windows XP/Vista. I convinced my wife to buy a MacBook and bought the Snow Leopard update. Freaking unbelievable. I switched to Mac myself and it was such a joy ride. Everything was just working and I actually felt real joy. Updates later and I don’t feel like this anymore. It started with the 2017 MacBook I got from work (the worst machine I ever had to use) This was only hardware. But the software broke under me as well with the introduction of Catalina. I still run a Mac at work cause the company only supports windows and Mac. At home I switched to Linux and try to become the maker of my own joy.
- asciimov 4y ago
  2009 marked the last year of good Operating System releases with both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard shipping that summer. After this point, bloat became good, non-flat design became bad, and existing system apps started to be replaced with buggy alternatives.
  - grishka 4y ago
    Lion did introduce the notification center, the one feature that was truly long overdue. I don't miss Growl.
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      Lion was a bad release filled with bugs, but it introduced a lot of features I don't think I could live without. Things like high DPI support, the ability to render emoji (!), and the ability to rename a document from an app's title bar. Behind the scenes, Lion is when Apple introduced Automatic Reference Counting. And, while I know they're controversial, I really like how Apple implemented full screen and auto saving, particularly after the Apple tweaked them in Mountain Lion. Mountain Lion went a long way towards fixing Lion's problems, and Mavericks just about finished the job. Which is why I run Mavericks. The only remaining Lion things I really dislike are the Launchpad, the hidden Library folder, and some minor-ish aesthetic differences. I've patched some of these.
grishka 4y ago
There's an accessibility setting to add borders to toolbar buttons, I had to turn that on to undo all the cLeAnLInEsS and make the damn thing practical. I still wish I could undo the toolbars combined with title bars as well — they're cramped for no good reason yet "airy" because of way too much padding. But then these things apparently don't inconvenience me enough to patch the OS to have it my way. Switching to other OS is not an option for me at this point. Everything else is even worse. Windows is a piece of malware at this point (in addition to being a UX consistency clusterfuck and Microsoft's insistence on making touchscreens a thing), desktop Linux is as much of a nightmare as it's always been.
gandalfff 4y ago
I'm partial to Tiger myself, but Snow Leopard is a close second.

by icybox 4y ago

KarlKemp 4y ago

There is an option "increase contrast" in accessibility, plus a slider to adjust the display contrast, plus a set of color filters for color blindness that can be quite useful even if you don't suffer any of the specific conditions.

icybox 4y ago
Thanks! I'm aware of this. I don't know how to describe it properly - the old OSX icons, even the "lickable" control buttons in snow leopard look just right. It's almost like there's a black line around the icons, the saturation is right and also colors go right together. I don't see this in Big Sur or Monterey. It's just oversaturated pastels without clearly defined borders. Looked slightly better in dark mode, but I prefer light mode. Snow Leopard (https://apparelever169.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/4/9/124908212/504838937.png https://apparelever169.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/4/9/124908212/...) vs. Monterey (https://scr3.golem.de/screenshots/2106/MacOS-Monterey/Apple_macos-monterey_facetime_06072021.jpg https://scr3.golem.de/screenshots/2106/MacOS-Monterey/Apple_...) - random searches for screenshots.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
The increase contrast option in modern macOS increases the contrast at the expense of making everything ugly. Aqua in OS X 10.9 and below are naturally designed with high contrast and tonal range in mind.

lproven 4y ago

I am happy to see someone else recommending Ubuntu Unity, especially as being Mac-like. It remains my default OS for my laptops and it continues to improve; version 22.04 uses mainly MATE accessories, to provide proper menus and toolbars, and also supports Flatpak.

my123 4y ago
It however didn’t seem to make the move to Wayland… And unity8 (now Lomri) is in perpetual beta, and written in Qt.
- lproven 4y ago
  > It however didn’t seem to make the move to Wayland… "You say that like it's a bad thing." > And unity8 (now Lomri) is in perpetual beta, and written in Qt. Is it now? I wonder if it's a descendant of Unity-2D then. That was in Qt and seems to be forgotten now. Yes, it does seem mired in dev hell, and I wonder how much is really left to do. Canonical got a lot of stick, especially on here, about Unity etc. (and still do over Snap). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 I think it's undeserved. Unity was and is a damned good desktop, it's just different. Some people are neophobic. There's more to life than the Win95 desktop. IMHO Canonical's only big mistake, really, was Mir. Wayland remains controversial, and I'm not qualified to judge why. But like systemd, it is basically the new standard, and so going with it would have been pragmatic. Trying to write a new WM _and_ a new desktop _and_ a mobile OS _and_ a new packaging format _and_ a new display server was a big stretch. Eliminating one big chunk of it seems like a win to me. Apparently not to them: they pressed ahead and then abandoned the whole thing. Damned shame. _Someone_ in the Linux world needed to address mobile/tablets. It is the entire herd of elephants stampeding about the room. IMHO a few sketchy efforts based on GNOME and KDE are not really enough.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I mostly agree with everything you've said here. Frankly, I don't think Wayland has the functionality to support what people want to do on Desktop Linux. Wayland apologists will claim "that's the point", which I would be willing to agree with if the development of things like Mutter and wlroots weren't so spread apart. It's resulted in a scenario where two and a half desktops actually support Wayland, and even those don't have feature-complete implementations. GNOME, Sway, and especially KDE are still playing catch-up with x11 functionality. That's simply unacceptable for a software project that's 10 years in the making. Wayland is going to have a hard time being "the new standard" if it continues down it's path of less hardware compatibility, less software compatibility and less overall functionality. I'm willing to point the finger squarely at GNOME here too, because they've intentionally gimped Wayland's development over the years under the guise that they're the lead implementation, while giving the rest of the community the pittance of wlroots. This has been disastrous to the development cycle of Wayland, and ended up splintering the wrong projects and blocking the right features. Stuff like app tray indicators have been completely depreciated on a system level solely because GNOME said they didn't want them. It's really petty, and it certainly isn't moving desktop Linux forward. In general, everything GNOME-related after Unity has just been a really slow downhill decline. The freshness and uniqueness of the desktop is dead, all we're left with now is a lame Mac clone that can't even play nice with the rest of the community. This is probably a real "old man yells at cloud" moment by most respects, but watching their behavior in recent years frustrates and disappoints me. They used to be a pretty respectable group of maintainers; now it's just drip-fed patches, gutting old features and setting inane new precedents as "the standard" and getting mad at downstream maintainers when they don't adopt them.

pygy_ 4y ago

Up to Snow Leopard, OS X updates felt like little Christmas mornings. It went downhill starting with Lion. I’ve stopped caring about new features, there’s too much churn anyway.

larusso 4y ago
In the early 2000th when I was introduced to Apple Macs (G3 iMac MacOS9) I couldn’t understand who wanted to work with these machines. I tried out macOS-X in the school Labs and the only piece of software I actually liked was iTunes (I know weird). It took years and then I saw a machine running leopard and the coverflow in Finder etc. I thought wow this looks and feels so much cooler than my ugly windows XP/Vista. I convinced my wife to buy a MacBook and bought the Snow Leopard update. Freaking unbelievable. I switched to Mac myself and it was such a joy ride. Everything was just working and I actually felt real joy. Updates later and I don’t feel like this anymore. It started with the 2017 MacBook I got from work (the worst machine I ever had to use) This was only hardware. But the software broke under me as well with the introduction of Catalina. I still run a Mac at work cause the company only supports windows and Mac. At home I switched to Linux and try to become the maker of my own joy.
asciimov 4y ago
2009 marked the last year of good Operating System releases with both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard shipping that summer. After this point, bloat became good, non-flat design became bad, and existing system apps started to be replaced with buggy alternatives.
- grishka 4y ago
  Lion did introduce the notification center, the one feature that was truly long overdue. I don't miss Growl.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    Lion was a bad release filled with bugs, but it introduced a lot of features I don't think I could live without. Things like high DPI support, the ability to render emoji (!), and the ability to rename a document from an app's title bar. Behind the scenes, Lion is when Apple introduced Automatic Reference Counting. And, while I know they're controversial, I really like how Apple implemented full screen and auto saving, particularly after the Apple tweaked them in Mountain Lion. Mountain Lion went a long way towards fixing Lion's problems, and Mavericks just about finished the job. Which is why I run Mavericks. The only remaining Lion things I really dislike are the Launchpad, the hidden Library folder, and some minor-ish aesthetic differences. I've patched some of these.

grishka 4y ago

There's an accessibility setting to add borders to toolbar buttons, I had to turn that on to undo all the cLeAnLInEsS and make the damn thing practical. I still wish I could undo the toolbars combined with title bars as well — they're cramped for no good reason yet "airy" because of way too much padding. But then these things apparently don't inconvenience me enough to patch the OS to have it my way. Switching to other OS is not an option for me at this point. Everything else is even worse. Windows is a piece of malware at this point (in addition to being a UX consistency clusterfuck and Microsoft's insistence on making touchscreens a thing), desktop Linux is as much of a nightmare as it's always been.

gandalfff 4y ago

I'm partial to Tiger myself, but Snow Leopard is a close second.