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I think it has more to do with a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality. Reliability, attention to detail, correctness occupy a tiny fract

I think it has more to do with a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality. Reliability, attention to detail, correctness occupy a tiny fraction of the "budget" compared to security, slopping out features, and beating competition to market. I suspect that startup culture being the crucible where a large portion of engineers learned their chops and the massive amount of new blood in the industry who are primarily there for money are the biggest factors.

linguae 2y ago
I concur. To add, I wonder how much of the “old guard” is still at Apple? Apple used to be perfectionistic when it came to software, even during the 1985-1996 interregnum when Steve Jobs was absent. Besides Steve Jobs, Apple also had people like Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman who cared deeply about usability. When Apple purchased NeXT and built Mac OS X, Apple’s usability focus was married to reliable, stable infrastructure, culminating with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which I believe was the pinnacle of the Mac experience. (Though I’m partial to the classic Mac OS from a UI point of view, Mac OS X had a better UX due to its stability.) I suspect a lot of Apple’s decisions in the past decade regarding software is due to an increasing number of Apple employees who are not familiar with the philosophies of 1970s-era Xerox PARC, the classic Mac, NeXT, and Jobs-era Mac OS X. Granted, it’s possible to be too introspective, too focused on the past. Unfortunately Apple’s software is losing its perfectionistic qualities, which has long been the selling point of the Mac compared to Windows and Linux.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  I think you have rose colored glasses on. System 7-8 at least were crash proned disasters and the 68K emulator was so bad on the first gen PPC computers you basically had to use SpeedDoubler - a much better third party emulator. Half the OS was still running under emulatiom
  - Nevermark 2y ago
    > I think you have rose colored glasses on. System 7-8 at least were crash proned disasters I think that is what was said: > (Though I’m partial to the classic Mac OS from a UI point of view, Mac OS X had a better UX due to its stability.)
hanikesn 2y ago
Linux seems like the opposite to me a slow marathon to achieve perfection. With pipewire, systemd and wayland there's less cruft than ever and you get the best out-of-the-box experience since it's inception.
- packetlost 2y ago
  Woah now, saying something positive about systemd will bring a bunch of crusty greybeards out of the woodwork who want their Linux to be as close to BSD4.4 as possible. Jokes aside, I'm in agreement. Audio was still slightly buggy for me using a Elgato XLR USB interface, but it consistently worked with annoying workarounds. Linux is in a very good place for even normal consumers these days, I'm hoping Valve ends up making SteamOS a generalized gaming platform that will pull more market share away from Windows in that specific niche. I'm so ready.
  - DanielHB 2y ago
    I don't get the systemd hate, as a user I find it quite nice. Centralized place all services live and I can see all the stuff I use and need. Good CLI for inspecting services and getting logs. But like, I don't manage linux servers and stuff so I am sure it sucks in certain very specific ways for people who need to deal with it day in and out. I remember my young days of using Slackware with init.d. That was hell.
    - packetlost 2y ago
      I've managed Linux systems of all sizes and don't really get it either. Systemd is largely a good thing, though there are occasionally bugs that make if frustrating to deal with.
      - simoncion 2y ago
        It's those bugs and weird cases (and the fact that -IME- systemd provides zero diagnostic help when you hit them) that are the killer. In my professional experience, I've come to understand that the systemd project has an assload of accidental complexity that the systemd folks are unwilling to reduce. At least once a year, we'll have a production-down page from a customer whose root cause turns out to be systemd failing in some bizarre and entirely inscrutable way. After a ton of digging, we'll eventually find someone who has run into something similar, and either got no response, or a "Wow, that's weird. Well, there's nothing WE can or should do." response from the systemd people. "Solving" these issues is very frustrating, because we usually end up changing things from one way that the docs indicated would work just fine, to a different way the docs indicate would work just fine... which doesn't give us any confidence that what we did won't suddenly stop working next year. A project that is as fundamental as systemd wants to be really should be aggressively reducing complexity to the minimum required to get the job done and regularly documenting caveats and quirks as they're discovered and deemed "E_WONTFIX".
deleted 2y ago
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legitster 2y ago
> a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality I'm going to disagree. This is a false nostalgia. 15 years ago the market for consumer laptops that were not MacBooks straight up sucked. If you walk into a Best Buy today, almost any laptop you buy is going to blow any laptop from back then out of the water in terms of build quality. And credit where it's due, in no small part it came from playing catch up with Apple.
- packetlost 2y ago
  I am not referring to hardware. Hardware quality has largely improved, software quality has largely gotten worse.
  - linguae 2y ago
    I think there was a sweet spot in the late 2000s and early 2010s, more specifically, the Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard eras. On the Windows side of things, this was when Microsoft got serious about security, with plagued earlier versions of Windows XP (worms were so rampant around 2005) until later service packs helped fix things. Windows 7 was solid and performant. While my favorite version of Windows is 2000, 7 was another high mark for Windows. Much has been said about Snow Leopard, but it was the pinnacle of Mac OS X, the refinement of an already great OS, Leopard. I would gladly used Snow Leopard today if it weren’t for needing current web browsers and up-to-date security patches. Even the Web was better back then. By 2008 many mainstays of modern Web life, such as social media and YouTube, were already in existence. Google was excellent. Internet Explorer’s dominance was successfully challenged, and there was an ecosystem of standards-compliant browsers (later IE versions, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera). Web developers were coding to standards instead of only writing for one browser. Yes, ads existed, and there was also malware, but ads were less intrusive, and malware can be avoidable with more careful browsing. I miss 2009- and 2010-era computing, when Windows and Mac OS X were at their peaks, when the browser ecosystem was diverse, and when many commercial websites like Facebook were still pleasant to use.
- hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
  I think regarding the combination of usability and stability the Win XP/7 era was still unbeatable.

linguae 2y ago

I concur. To add, I wonder how much of the “old guard” is still at Apple? Apple used to be perfectionistic when it came to software, even during the 1985-1996 interregnum when Steve Jobs was absent. Besides Steve Jobs, Apple also had people like Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman who cared deeply about usability. When Apple purchased NeXT and built Mac OS X, Apple’s usability focus was married to reliable, stable infrastructure, culminating with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which I believe was the pinnacle of the Mac experience. (Though I’m partial to the classic Mac OS from a UI point of view, Mac OS X had a better UX due to its stability.) I suspect a lot of Apple’s decisions in the past decade regarding software is due to an increasing number of Apple employees who are not familiar with the philosophies of 1970s-era Xerox PARC, the classic Mac, NeXT, and Jobs-era Mac OS X. Granted, it’s possible to be too introspective, too focused on the past. Unfortunately Apple’s software is losing its perfectionistic qualities, which has long been the selling point of the Mac compared to Windows and Linux.

scarface_74 2y ago
I think you have rose colored glasses on. System 7-8 at least were crash proned disasters and the 68K emulator was so bad on the first gen PPC computers you basically had to use SpeedDoubler - a much better third party emulator. Half the OS was still running under emulatiom
- Nevermark 2y ago
  > I think you have rose colored glasses on. System 7-8 at least were crash proned disasters I think that is what was said: > (Though I’m partial to the classic Mac OS from a UI point of view, Mac OS X had a better UX due to its stability.)

hanikesn 2y ago

Linux seems like the opposite to me a slow marathon to achieve perfection. With pipewire, systemd and wayland there's less cruft than ever and you get the best out-of-the-box experience since it's inception.

packetlost 2y ago
Woah now, saying something positive about systemd will bring a bunch of crusty greybeards out of the woodwork who want their Linux to be as close to BSD4.4 as possible. Jokes aside, I'm in agreement. Audio was still slightly buggy for me using a Elgato XLR USB interface, but it consistently worked with annoying workarounds. Linux is in a very good place for even normal consumers these days, I'm hoping Valve ends up making SteamOS a generalized gaming platform that will pull more market share away from Windows in that specific niche. I'm so ready.
- DanielHB 2y ago
  I don't get the systemd hate, as a user I find it quite nice. Centralized place all services live and I can see all the stuff I use and need. Good CLI for inspecting services and getting logs. But like, I don't manage linux servers and stuff so I am sure it sucks in certain very specific ways for people who need to deal with it day in and out. I remember my young days of using Slackware with init.d. That was hell.
  - packetlost 2y ago
    I've managed Linux systems of all sizes and don't really get it either. Systemd is largely a good thing, though there are occasionally bugs that make if frustrating to deal with.
    - simoncion 2y ago
      It's those bugs and weird cases (and the fact that -IME- systemd provides zero diagnostic help when you hit them) that are the killer. In my professional experience, I've come to understand that the systemd project has an assload of accidental complexity that the systemd folks are unwilling to reduce. At least once a year, we'll have a production-down page from a customer whose root cause turns out to be systemd failing in some bizarre and entirely inscrutable way. After a ton of digging, we'll eventually find someone who has run into something similar, and either got no response, or a "Wow, that's weird. Well, there's nothing WE can or should do." response from the systemd people. "Solving" these issues is very frustrating, because we usually end up changing things from one way that the docs indicated would work just fine, to a different way the docs indicate would work just fine... which doesn't give us any confidence that what we did won't suddenly stop working next year. A project that is as fundamental as systemd wants to be really should be aggressively reducing complexity to the minimum required to get the job done and regularly documenting caveats and quirks as they're discovered and deemed "E_WONTFIX".

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

legitster 2y ago

> a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality I'm going to disagree. This is a false nostalgia. 15 years ago the market for consumer laptops that were not MacBooks straight up sucked. If you walk into a Best Buy today, almost any laptop you buy is going to blow any laptop from back then out of the water in terms of build quality. And credit where it's due, in no small part it came from playing catch up with Apple.

packetlost 2y ago
I am not referring to hardware. Hardware quality has largely improved, software quality has largely gotten worse.
- linguae 2y ago
  I think there was a sweet spot in the late 2000s and early 2010s, more specifically, the Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard eras. On the Windows side of things, this was when Microsoft got serious about security, with plagued earlier versions of Windows XP (worms were so rampant around 2005) until later service packs helped fix things. Windows 7 was solid and performant. While my favorite version of Windows is 2000, 7 was another high mark for Windows. Much has been said about Snow Leopard, but it was the pinnacle of Mac OS X, the refinement of an already great OS, Leopard. I would gladly used Snow Leopard today if it weren’t for needing current web browsers and up-to-date security patches. Even the Web was better back then. By 2008 many mainstays of modern Web life, such as social media and YouTube, were already in existence. Google was excellent. Internet Explorer’s dominance was successfully challenged, and there was an ecosystem of standards-compliant browsers (later IE versions, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera). Web developers were coding to standards instead of only writing for one browser. Yes, ads existed, and there was also malware, but ads were less intrusive, and malware can be avoidable with more careful browsing. I miss 2009- and 2010-era computing, when Windows and Mac OS X were at their peaks, when the browser ecosystem was diverse, and when many commercial websites like Facebook were still pleasant to use.
hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
I think regarding the combination of usability and stability the Win XP/7 era was still unbeatable.