6 ms·

We, the old Windows developers, welcome you, the current Apple developers, to the 90's, when Windows was shittier and shittier with each version. Get ready for

We, the old Windows developers, welcome you, the current Apple developers, to the 90's, when Windows was shittier and shittier with each version. Get ready for the next decade when workarounds and basically underground techniques will be your only survivability. As MacOS becomes more popular, it seems it has to go to this shitty phase, as Windows did back in the day. We got rid of this phase with Windows XP release, so around 7 years. For you, who knows, hopefully shorter.

whyenot 3y ago
It's been 23 years (to the day!) since the release of the OS X public beta, and it's a mature product. I'm not sure it's getting "shittier and shittier," I think there are still refinements and improvements, they just aren't as big as they used to be.
- sumuyuda 3y ago
  The UI has definitely gotten shittier and shittier.
  - heyoni 3y ago
    And system settings panel is so unresponsive! I think it’s written in react or something?
  - whyenot 3y ago
    I don't know about that. Aqua with it's pin stripes jewel-like buttons and other quirks was significantly worse than what we have today.
    - can16358p 3y ago
      Yup. I absolutely hated that skeuomorphic blurry 3D-like design. Flat design looks much, much cleaner. Same for iOS. iOS 7 was the first version that I actually liked looking at.
    - BizarreByte 3y ago
      I strongly disagree. Tiger was the best Mac OS ever looked in my opinion, but this is of course subjective.
      - sbuk 3y ago
        Tiger was brushed steel, though it still had the 'lickable' buttons.
    - saltminer 3y ago
      I will confess I miss skeuomorphism, but even if Apple never embraced flatness, Ventura's System Preferences.app is horrendous. I've become reliant upon the search bar to find most things in there, which I rarely had to do before.
    - Angostura 3y ago
      Strongly disagree. Apple’s obsession with making things like scroll bars and window chrome harder to see has been a usability nightmare for me over the last few releases. Frequently these days, with lots of overlapping windows I try to click the top of a window only to find out I’ve clicked on part of the window behind. Yes having everything one colour is lovely and ‘clean’ but horrible to use
      - andrekandre 3y ago
        also all the icons now being the same shape (like ios) i find myself scanning over and over missing apps i used to find so easily before... such a usability regression (though it does look pretty)
    - astrange 3y ago
      Remember that displays were worse then. One reason we have flat lower-contrast designs now is that we have much higher contrast LCD/OLED panels.
- Hammershaft 3y ago
  For me, it certainly is getting less stable & more frustrating to use with each update. even elements of the ux, such as the settings app, has degraded over the years
  - BizarreByte 3y ago
    That's just modern software in a nutshell, nothing is ever "good enough" for designers/companies and they must change it no matter what. The settings app for example was perfectly fine, it worked well for what...near 20 years with only slight tweaks. Now I have to use the search bar for settings, because it's not obvious at all where to find a lot of them. And yet things that would be useful like a volume mixer are still nowhere to be found.
    - Hammershaft 3y ago
      I mean, there were definitely iterative improvements I think could have been made to the settings app, as with nearly all software. Instead, apple threw out the design for a ux that was clearly optimized for palm sized screens that you operate by touch in order to unify the interface between two entirely disparate forms of interaction.
- deergomoo 3y ago
  Apple no longer appears to be able to keep a consistent focus on the Mac. They have some really great fits and spurts in particular areas (e.g. hardware, they’re absolutely nailing it with Apple Silicon at the minute) but it’s far too common for widely-reviled issues to linger unaddressed for literally years. The new System Settings is an obvious one; Sonoma hasn’t really touched that at all despite its glaring issues. But Notification Centre has been borderline useless ever since they redesigned it back in what, Big Sur? I saw a Mastodon post recently [0] that highlighted how bad it is today compared to the old design, yet it’s barely been touched in 3 years. macOS is stable and established and unlike iOS a lot of people rely on it to do actual work, I would rather them not mess with stuff than half-ass it and leave it unfinished. [0] https://mastodon.social/@marioguzman/110997716755684188 https://mastodon.social/@marioguzman/110997716755684188
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  If you count NeXTStep, the OS is closer to 35 years old.
- glhaynes 3y ago
  Every time anything breaks in macOS, people come out to claim that the Mac is dying and Snow Leopard [which shipped with a bug that deleted lots of users' home folders] was the one true version. This wouldn't have happened if Steve Jobs were still alive. Netcraft now confirms that the BSD-based macOS is dying.
- wasyl 3y ago
  Feels like this is true only for Apple Silicon macs. Intels are getting more are more terrible with each upgrade, most noticeable is insane UI latency when doing literally anything — opening an app or a window can take seconds. Changing the tab in Settings app takes a second before the new one is rendered! And that's with a fresh system installation and no resource-hungry apps opened. And it's definitely not just me — colleagues have the same issues and internet is full of such reports.
hulitu 3y ago
Win XP was shittier than 2000.
- xp84 3y ago
  Not really. The biggest unpopular change was the polarizing UI that was simple to toggle off for those who hated it. Besides that, you just got win2k plus much better compatibility with apps written for the 9x series.
steve1977 3y ago
> We got rid of this phase with Windows XP release I assume you were talking about consumer versions like Win 95, 98 and Me (the release we don’t talk about)? The NT based ones like NT 4 and Windows 2000 seemed decent when they came out. I guess MS realized that as well and started using NT for the consumer releases as well with XP.
- unnouinceput 3y ago
  The lack of unification between NT and Win9x before XP was abysmal. Basically you had to have 2 partitions, one for gaming, one for business. NT was unable to have games, Win9x was unable to be useful for business due to sheer blue screens. So yeah, I include NT 3.5, NT 4.0 and W2k in that shitty phase as well. I know it very well because I've lived through it. XP ended that. Hence why, after 20+years, you still have the majority of ATM's and plenty of other KIOSKs around the world still running XP.
  - steve1977 3y ago
    I only ever used NT based systems, but then I also never used PCs for gaming, so I was probably „privileged“ in some regard. But I certainly agree that XP was a nice release, as was Windows 7 (in my experience).
scarface_74 3y ago
Windows is still shitty. After three years of using an M2 MacBook Pro for work and having my own M2 MacBook Air, using a Microsoft Surface laptop is a death by a thousand cuts https://www.amd.com/en/processors/ryzen-surface-edition https://www.amd.com/en/processors/ryzen-surface-edition 1. The fans are constantly going. 2. Everything causes the hourglass cursor to pop up - even just clicking on a button in Outlook 3. It takes awhile for the screen to redraw. Way back in the pre - OS X days, I use to be jealous of how fast Windows drawing was in comparison. 4. Every time my laptop goes to sleep, I have to unplug and replug my external USB C powered external monitor. 5. Did I mention the constant humming of the fans? 6. Even how it handles multiple desktops is inferior to Macs 7. Hopefully I can run WSL2 on my work computer. I can’t imagine being stuck with PowerShell/cmd I don’t even want to think about how bad the battery life is going to be compared to modern ARM based Macs. Yes both my MacBook Air and Windows computer have 16 GB RAM
- jojobas 3y ago
  This sounds very much like crippling effects of an "antivirus", not AMD/Windows as such.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  I had a surface in 2018 and it was really good.
- jorams 3y ago
  > Everything causes the hourglass cursor to pop up - even just clicking on a button in Outlook As someone who had to use a very slow 10-year-old iMac recently, I would prefer if macOS showed more indicators that it was busy. The macOS UI seems to assume things are near-instant that in that environment weren't even close. For example it "reopened" XCode after a reboot, and after a while it seemed the system was done doing background stuff. I clicked the System Settings and another app because I was going to need them, then tried to interact with XCode. Then the window turned gray and a spinner showed up that took a few minutes to disappear. It wasn't done at all. It turns out showing a screenshot to seem more responsive only works if you can very quickly back up the lie when necessary.
wkat4242 3y ago
Yeah I moved to FreeBSD myself because macOS pissed me off too much. It's becoming too closed, too opinionated, too much like iOS. What I loved about macOS originally was that it was a great Unix style OS but with a consistent UI and major desktop apps. Also most major headline improvements in recent macOS releases rely on iCloud and because I've always been a multi-os person these are not something I can use. Some iCloud stuff works on windows but most doesn't. And pretty much none of it works on Linux or BSD. Any service I use must work on all. So after years of getting more and more annoyed with Apple removing powerful options and replacing them with dumb on/off sliders I just can't deal with it anymore. I still use it for work but that's it. At the same time KDE is now mature enough to work great. And it doesn't eschew lots of configuration settings. So it's become my daily driver instead.
mtreis86 3y ago
Feels fairly oscillatory for me, 95 98 nt*.0 were mediocre, 2k was great, me was horrible, xp was decent, xp64 was useless, vista was awful, 7 was better, 8 felt spammy, 10 was ok, 11 is bad again.
keepamovin 3y ago
If you're concerned about this kind of thing, and OK with the reduction in surface, you may consider just using your browser as the way you are protected. With a normal browser, this doesn't exactly work, as obviously it doesn't change your IP, still tracks you, and any zero days still expose your machine. But at dosaygo, we're working on something called a remote browser, which runs on a remote machine, and therefore you have a different IP address. You can incorporate a proxy service or VPN if you want but it already is 1 layer removed from your local machine, which is great for protecting you from browser zero days too. Check us out, we're open source but you can also get licenses for commercial use cases where you don't want AGPL-3.0: https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserBoxPro.git https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserBoxPro.git
- Tempest1981 3y ago
  > But at dosaygo Typo? Although on your GitHub page it's spelled 2 ways: > For support or to purchase licenses, connect with us at sales@dosyago.com or visit: https://dosaygo.com https://dosaygo.com But that URL won't load.
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    Thanks! Oh geez, this is embarrassing. When I started the company I meant for it to be called : DO SAY GO...but somehow in the incorporation form I accidentally transposed it. I guess it still happens! :) haha It's doubly bad because as unique as dosyago is, I think I still prefer the name dosaygo. I don't know how to change it tho! :..(
    - dcow 3y ago
      Lookup "doing business as". Also your product's name, your domain name. your marketing slogans, taglines, trademarks, etc. do not have to match your incorporated name. Just use `dosaygo` everywhere... not sure what made you think you have to match your incorporated name exactly.
      - keepamovin 3y ago
cyclecount 3y ago
Windows is still 100x shittier than macOS. Try to do anything like the repro demo from the command line on Windows as you'll immediately realise how terrible the OS is for simple tasks.

whyenot 3y ago

It's been 23 years (to the day!) since the release of the OS X public beta, and it's a mature product. I'm not sure it's getting "shittier and shittier," I think there are still refinements and improvements, they just aren't as big as they used to be.

sumuyuda 3y ago
The UI has definitely gotten shittier and shittier.
- heyoni 3y ago
  And system settings panel is so unresponsive! I think it’s written in react or something?
- whyenot 3y ago
  I don't know about that. Aqua with it's pin stripes jewel-like buttons and other quirks was significantly worse than what we have today.
  - can16358p 3y ago
    Yup. I absolutely hated that skeuomorphic blurry 3D-like design. Flat design looks much, much cleaner. Same for iOS. iOS 7 was the first version that I actually liked looking at.
  - BizarreByte 3y ago
    I strongly disagree. Tiger was the best Mac OS ever looked in my opinion, but this is of course subjective.
    - sbuk 3y ago
      Tiger was brushed steel, though it still had the 'lickable' buttons.
  - saltminer 3y ago
    I will confess I miss skeuomorphism, but even if Apple never embraced flatness, Ventura's System Preferences.app is horrendous. I've become reliant upon the search bar to find most things in there, which I rarely had to do before.
  - Angostura 3y ago
    Strongly disagree. Apple’s obsession with making things like scroll bars and window chrome harder to see has been a usability nightmare for me over the last few releases. Frequently these days, with lots of overlapping windows I try to click the top of a window only to find out I’ve clicked on part of the window behind. Yes having everything one colour is lovely and ‘clean’ but horrible to use
    - andrekandre 3y ago
      also all the icons now being the same shape (like ios) i find myself scanning over and over missing apps i used to find so easily before... such a usability regression (though it does look pretty)
  - astrange 3y ago
    Remember that displays were worse then. One reason we have flat lower-contrast designs now is that we have much higher contrast LCD/OLED panels.
Hammershaft 3y ago
For me, it certainly is getting less stable & more frustrating to use with each update. even elements of the ux, such as the settings app, has degraded over the years
- BizarreByte 3y ago
  That's just modern software in a nutshell, nothing is ever "good enough" for designers/companies and they must change it no matter what. The settings app for example was perfectly fine, it worked well for what...near 20 years with only slight tweaks. Now I have to use the search bar for settings, because it's not obvious at all where to find a lot of them. And yet things that would be useful like a volume mixer are still nowhere to be found.
  - Hammershaft 3y ago
    I mean, there were definitely iterative improvements I think could have been made to the settings app, as with nearly all software. Instead, apple threw out the design for a ux that was clearly optimized for palm sized screens that you operate by touch in order to unify the interface between two entirely disparate forms of interaction.
deergomoo 3y ago
Apple no longer appears to be able to keep a consistent focus on the Mac. They have some really great fits and spurts in particular areas (e.g. hardware, they’re absolutely nailing it with Apple Silicon at the minute) but it’s far too common for widely-reviled issues to linger unaddressed for literally years. The new System Settings is an obvious one; Sonoma hasn’t really touched that at all despite its glaring issues. But Notification Centre has been borderline useless ever since they redesigned it back in what, Big Sur? I saw a Mastodon post recently [0] that highlighted how bad it is today compared to the old design, yet it’s barely been touched in 3 years. macOS is stable and established and unlike iOS a lot of people rely on it to do actual work, I would rather them not mess with stuff than half-ass it and leave it unfinished. [0] https://mastodon.social/@marioguzman/110997716755684188 https://mastodon.social/@marioguzman/110997716755684188
SoftTalker 3y ago
If you count NeXTStep, the OS is closer to 35 years old.
glhaynes 3y ago
Every time anything breaks in macOS, people come out to claim that the Mac is dying and Snow Leopard [which shipped with a bug that deleted lots of users' home folders] was the one true version. This wouldn't have happened if Steve Jobs were still alive. Netcraft now confirms that the BSD-based macOS is dying.
wasyl 3y ago
Feels like this is true only for Apple Silicon macs. Intels are getting more are more terrible with each upgrade, most noticeable is insane UI latency when doing literally anything — opening an app or a window can take seconds. Changing the tab in Settings app takes a second before the new one is rendered! And that's with a fresh system installation and no resource-hungry apps opened. And it's definitely not just me — colleagues have the same issues and internet is full of such reports.

hulitu 3y ago

Win XP was shittier than 2000.

xp84 3y ago
Not really. The biggest unpopular change was the polarizing UI that was simple to toggle off for those who hated it. Besides that, you just got win2k plus much better compatibility with apps written for the 9x series.

steve1977 3y ago

> We got rid of this phase with Windows XP release I assume you were talking about consumer versions like Win 95, 98 and Me (the release we don’t talk about)? The NT based ones like NT 4 and Windows 2000 seemed decent when they came out. I guess MS realized that as well and started using NT for the consumer releases as well with XP.

unnouinceput 3y ago
The lack of unification between NT and Win9x before XP was abysmal. Basically you had to have 2 partitions, one for gaming, one for business. NT was unable to have games, Win9x was unable to be useful for business due to sheer blue screens. So yeah, I include NT 3.5, NT 4.0 and W2k in that shitty phase as well. I know it very well because I've lived through it. XP ended that. Hence why, after 20+years, you still have the majority of ATM's and plenty of other KIOSKs around the world still running XP.
- steve1977 3y ago
  I only ever used NT based systems, but then I also never used PCs for gaming, so I was probably „privileged“ in some regard. But I certainly agree that XP was a nice release, as was Windows 7 (in my experience).

scarface_74 3y ago

Windows is still shitty. After three years of using an M2 MacBook Pro for work and having my own M2 MacBook Air, using a Microsoft Surface laptop is a death by a thousand cuts https://www.amd.com/en/processors/ryzen-surface-edition https://www.amd.com/en/processors/ryzen-surface-edition 1. The fans are constantly going. 2. Everything causes the hourglass cursor to pop up - even just clicking on a button in Outlook 3. It takes awhile for the screen to redraw. Way back in the pre - OS X days, I use to be jealous of how fast Windows drawing was in comparison. 4. Every time my laptop goes to sleep, I have to unplug and replug my external USB C powered external monitor. 5. Did I mention the constant humming of the fans? 6. Even how it handles multiple desktops is inferior to Macs 7. Hopefully I can run WSL2 on my work computer. I can’t imagine being stuck with PowerShell/cmd I don’t even want to think about how bad the battery life is going to be compared to modern ARM based Macs. Yes both my MacBook Air and Windows computer have 16 GB RAM

jojobas 3y ago
This sounds very much like crippling effects of an "antivirus", not AMD/Windows as such.
keepamovin 3y ago
I had a surface in 2018 and it was really good.
jorams 3y ago
> Everything causes the hourglass cursor to pop up - even just clicking on a button in Outlook As someone who had to use a very slow 10-year-old iMac recently, I would prefer if macOS showed more indicators that it was busy. The macOS UI seems to assume things are near-instant that in that environment weren't even close. For example it "reopened" XCode after a reboot, and after a while it seemed the system was done doing background stuff. I clicked the System Settings and another app because I was going to need them, then tried to interact with XCode. Then the window turned gray and a spinner showed up that took a few minutes to disappear. It wasn't done at all. It turns out showing a screenshot to seem more responsive only works if you can very quickly back up the lie when necessary.

wkat4242 3y ago

Yeah I moved to FreeBSD myself because macOS pissed me off too much. It's becoming too closed, too opinionated, too much like iOS. What I loved about macOS originally was that it was a great Unix style OS but with a consistent UI and major desktop apps. Also most major headline improvements in recent macOS releases rely on iCloud and because I've always been a multi-os person these are not something I can use. Some iCloud stuff works on windows but most doesn't. And pretty much none of it works on Linux or BSD. Any service I use must work on all. So after years of getting more and more annoyed with Apple removing powerful options and replacing them with dumb on/off sliders I just can't deal with it anymore. I still use it for work but that's it. At the same time KDE is now mature enough to work great. And it doesn't eschew lots of configuration settings. So it's become my daily driver instead.

mtreis86 3y ago

Feels fairly oscillatory for me, 95 98 nt*.0 were mediocre, 2k was great, me was horrible, xp was decent, xp64 was useless, vista was awful, 7 was better, 8 felt spammy, 10 was ok, 11 is bad again.

keepamovin 3y ago

If you're concerned about this kind of thing, and OK with the reduction in surface, you may consider just using your browser as the way you are protected. With a normal browser, this doesn't exactly work, as obviously it doesn't change your IP, still tracks you, and any zero days still expose your machine. But at dosaygo, we're working on something called a remote browser, which runs on a remote machine, and therefore you have a different IP address. You can incorporate a proxy service or VPN if you want but it already is 1 layer removed from your local machine, which is great for protecting you from browser zero days too. Check us out, we're open source but you can also get licenses for commercial use cases where you don't want AGPL-3.0: https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserBoxPro.git https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserBoxPro.git

Tempest1981 3y ago
> But at dosaygo Typo? Although on your GitHub page it's spelled 2 ways: > For support or to purchase licenses, connect with us at sales@dosyago.com or visit: https://dosaygo.com https://dosaygo.com But that URL won't load.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Thanks! Oh geez, this is embarrassing. When I started the company I meant for it to be called : DO SAY GO...but somehow in the incorporation form I accidentally transposed it. I guess it still happens! :) haha It's doubly bad because as unique as dosyago is, I think I still prefer the name dosaygo. I don't know how to change it tho! :..(
  - dcow 3y ago
    Lookup "doing business as". Also your product's name, your domain name. your marketing slogans, taglines, trademarks, etc. do not have to match your incorporated name. Just use `dosaygo` everywhere... not sure what made you think you have to match your incorporated name exactly.
    - keepamovin 3y ago

cyclecount 3y ago

Windows is still 100x shittier than macOS. Try to do anything like the repro demo from the command line on Windows as you'll immediately realise how terrible the OS is for simple tasks.