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I haven't quit it, but the problems, annoyances, surprises, seeming ineptitude, and creeping iOSification of OS X that the author describes sure do resonate. E

I haven't quit it, but the problems, annoyances, surprises, seeming ineptitude, and creeping iOSification of OS X that the author describes sure do resonate. Every new major release of OS X is a day or week spent disabling things, shutting down Spotlight again, trying to restore things back to the way they were instead of the way some Designer with a capital D thinks they should be, for no other reason than, "Beauty." I just dread the idea of moving to Linux again. I don't want to tinker that much. But I am worried sick that OS X is dying, in the sense that it's becoming a platform to deliver people to Apple's (and partners') cloud services and sharing services and that's it. Screw all of that. One major shot across the bow was the loss of "Save As..." and the change to "Duplicate". WTF, Apple? I now have to do 10 extra steps just to Save As. It feels like Apple is abandoning its longtime users, the master users, the users who've climbed the pyramid, who've achieved a lot of game levels. It's just going after that huge base of newbies and midlevel people who don't notice or complain about all the changes that really, truly are not improvements. They're just changes. That's the problem in a nutshell: OS X changes because there's new management that wants to put its stamp on things, regardless of whether it improves the productivity of the user or not.

DennisP 12y ago
I bought a linux laptop from System76 early this year, and aside from a fiddly trackpad, everything just works. I've seen a lot of people say the same about thinkpads.
- azakai 12y ago
  Thinkpads have pretty much worked on Linux, for me. Overall, Linux is great these days if you have compatible hardware. A random Windows laptop might be a problem, but a Thinkpad or a System76 or such should all be fine.
  - yourad_io 12y ago
    +1 - Thinkpads work out of the box in my experience, and with a bit of tweaking, I managed to move my parents to Linuxes (Mint) on "random Windows laptops" - a Compaq and a 17" HP. But I guess it was just luck of the draw - YMMV.
  - dkuntz2 12y ago
    While it worked acceptably for three years, I gave up on my Thinkpad W520 this summer and switched to a Macbook Pro. Partly it was due to size (going from a bulky 15" to a really slim 13" computer is awesome), and partly it was due to wanting application support again, after seven years of almost exclusively using Linux. One thing I'd like to say when looking at Thinkpads, or other laptops, for running Linux on, don't get one with hybrid graphics. My experience in trying to deal with it was a huge pain. Maybe my problem was in going for the W-series. The older T-series laptops I've installed and used Linux on were great.
    - fixedd 12y ago
      I had (well, still have, but don't use) a w510. It worked just as well as the t61 before it (which was to say, they both did great under Linux), but it didn't have hybrid graphics... it was Nvidia all the time. The only reason I've replaced it was that it had absolutely abysmal battery life. Old job bought me a comparable ultrabook that weighs 20 pounds less and has 3x the battery life and I couldn't be happier.
    - sandGorgon 12y ago
      I have a T430s - fairly thin with hybrid graphics. You should know that you can switch off hybrid graphics in the BIOS. Please feel free to get a hybrid graphics thinkpad - you can use it whichever way you want.
    - selimthegrim 12y ago
      My T42 worked like a dream on Ubuntu 14.04 until recently, and now it refuses to awaken from sleep properly at all because of some update or other. I'm dreading trying to track this down and possibly finding out I'm stuck with using Windows 7.
    - Nullabillity 12y ago
      I have an ASUS with Nvidia Optimus, and once I installed Bumblebee the hybrid graphics work fine.
    - MrDom 12y ago
      I have a w530 running linux and couldn't agree more about the hybrid graphics. It's caused me so much grief I almost switched to windows.
- pakled_engineer 12y ago
  Same, tried Trisquel and it just worked, except some flash media doesn't play which actually increased my productivity. Coursera videos, youtube work but spending countless hours streaming some TV links won't happen anymore unless I manually install a nonfree flash plugin from repository outside Trisquel, which is enough of a time transactional cost that I haven't bothered
- yourad_io 12y ago
  What's the overall build quality like? I've read (almost exclusively) bad things about the keyboard and overall plastic-ity of them.
  - pervycreeper 12y ago
    Probably that was in comparison to past models. Compared to other brands, they are still pretty nice.
  - DennisP 12y ago
    I've got a 17" model. It is plastic, but I have no complaints about the overall build. The keyboard has pretty nice long-travel keys. The trackpad is horrible, the cursor tends to jump around a lot when you try to click. This is my first linux laptop so I don't know whether that's a common driver issue on linux. If not for that I would be 100% happy. Another model got a lot of complaints about the keyboard a year or two ago, and System76 responded by sending everyone a better one for free.
lucisferre 12y ago
I believe the term they use is "buttery". I'm with you on moving back to Linux, having sufficient experience with both I'm loathe to move back for both hardware and software envrionment frustrations. I do have hope that things will get better on that side of the fence, but OSX would have to become pretty terrible for me to do that anytime soon (though they seem to really be pushing their luck lately).
- virmundi 12y ago
  Here's my OS X vs Linux experience circa 2014. I have a new OS X MBP. 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA Something (650?), SSD, Yosemite, i7. I have an older i7 Sager, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia 550m, HDD. The Sager for years has been a terrible computer due to the WIFI support. It was crappy in Windows and worse in Linux. I actually looked forward to getting the MBP. Recently, however, I found a guy's opensource driver for the RealTek WIFI. This is more stable than the actual official driver. His blog post was great about how to install it. Now I've got two computer to compare. OSX is apparently terrible at memory management. Running Eclipse and like 10 tabs in FF can cause the system to swap. On the SSD I loath the very concept. Some of my comments on HN about Light Table stem from the fact that LT uses .5 GB of memory when everything is said and done (node helpers, etc). LT on OS X ran great, but OS X would swap. Running multiple VirtualBox instances made it worse. I tend to run about 260-350 MB of swap if not more for a few small programs. Cut to Ubuntu. Once I got use to Unity I liked Ubuntu. The OS is smooth, use-able and well-supported both at a community level and from a system update perspective. I can run a 2 GB Arango VM, and 3 Hadoop VMs at once all nicely networked to each other via host-only. FF with the same 10-ish tabs running with lein REPL and Counterclockwise (Eclipse IDE for Clojure) and still only use 76 KB of swap. Now aside from following a few steps about getting the WIFI to work, I've not really done much Ubuntu customization. I haven't had to. I installed it, it worked, I worked. OS X had some nice ideas, but, IMHO, Linux caught up. The terminals available with Linux are better than the default terminal with OS X. They are more memory efficient than Console 2. Unity works well. I actually have muscle memory trying to work with OS X as I do Unity. I will grant that the OS X laptop is light years ahead of my Linux box's battery. Even when the battery was new, the Linux laptop was lucky to get 2.5 hours. The OS X laptop gets 5 hrs or so under my daily load. Interestingly, the only laptop of the 5 or so I've owned to have a dead pixel is the MBP. Under white backgrounds it's easy to miss. On dark backgrounds I'm annoyed.
sillysaurus3 12y ago
Why do people update OS X? Just curious. If it works how you like, why update it? Security flaws are probably the main reason, but isn't there a way to get those without acquiescing to an OS redesign?
- overgard 12y ago
  Because you have to: OSX doesn't have much of a culture of backwards compatibility, and every update tends to pressure developers into the latest greatest thing. Maintaining old software is just not a cultural value. Once the developers move, the users pretty much have to. I have an iMac from 2009. I had two OS's on it. Windows 7? Everything still works there. Runs fast, new software is great, etc. OSX 10.6.8? DEAD. It's basically useless. I guess it's nice that apple offers free upgrades, except that they mysteriously make a system that used to be lightning fast extremely slow, even though other OS's seem to run just fine..
  - rsync 12y ago
    I am running snow leopard on a 2009 mac pro. It works perfectly. I have zero complaints or issues. It's no problem at all. I use chrome and terminal for most of my work, but I do run itunes and vmware fusion and run some apps that give me a tiled interface and focus-follows-mouse. No problems at all. I couldn't be happier. I am sure it would all go to hell if I got a current model and tried to run SL on it ...
    - Kadin 12y ago
      Snow Leopard is no longer receiving security updates; that'd give me pause in anything but a very firewalled desktop installation.
    - riffraff 12y ago
      I upgraded SL -> Mavericks a few months ago when it stopped receiving security updates. It's slightly worse (I don't like mission control, messages is useless to me) but not as bad as Lion (i.e. you'll just need to disable the stupid scroll behaviour, but performance is good). On the plus side, you get the option to use new software developed for "10.7+" (heroku's db client, atom editor, swift etc)
davidbarker 12y ago
I agree RE: Duplicate/Save As…, although you can get Save As… back if you hold down the Option key. I don't remember when I last used Duplicate.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jaxn 12y ago
  Whoa! Thanks for that tip. I am amazed I never tried that as well as sure grateful to now know it.
  - davidbarker 12y ago
    Happy to help!
- x0054 12y ago
  Is this a complaint about the Preview app? Because obviously all other programs you might run in OSX make their own decisions about their functionality. Personally, I always use the Menubar search feature via QuickSilver or the default Help>Search shortcut, CMD+?, so I never even noticed those features have been now hidden behind an option key.
  - JonathonW 12y ago
    The Duplicate/Save As thing is present in any app that's using the system document-based app frameworks and has opted-in to autosave... you'll see it in most of Apple's apps (like TextEdit, Preview, or Pages) and in some third-party apps (off the top of my head, I know Pixelmator does it, and there are others).
    - oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
      iA Writer is another to go down this route. To be honest, I hadn't really noticed since most of my time is spent in Chrome, Sublime Text, Spotify/iTunes, Cyberduck, and Mail. None of these - even the last - have adopted the new api/framework.
na85 12y ago
>I just dread the idea of moving to Linux again. I don't want to tinker that much. If you don't use Unity and instead use a different environment like KDE, Ubuntu is actually a great system that requires minimal tweaking.
- morganvachon 12y ago
  I hated Unity at first, enough to stick with 10.04 when I ran Ubuntu (I was never impressed with Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu, there was always something broken somewhere in all of those). But I finally gave it a go in 14.04, and it has vastly improved. It may still not be your cup of tea, but in my mind at least it's better than Gnome 3 and is worth a look. That said, for my money you can't beat Mint with Xfce for a quick and easy casual GNU/Linux box. I always skip Xfce's compositor and install Compton for tear-free window dragging and video watching (Nvidia-specific issue I believe), but otherwise the default install is very good.
- fixedd 12y ago
  Same for Ubuntu Gnome. There's a few addons (or plugins, or whatever they call them) that I install to suite my preferences, but I can do a clean install + additional packages + tweak to my needs in under an hour. If you don't know the package names you'll want, maybe double that. The past few upgrades have also worked flawlessly for me, which makes it even easier. That said, I intentionally purchase hardware that's known to work well with Linux (if you buy a system with all Intel chipsets, you'll probably be fine). Also, the power management is still abysmal. I still have to tinker with powertop to get battery life comparable to other OS's.
  - timonovici 12y ago
    Amen to that. After doing some magic with powertop, I get about 5 hours out of my Thinkpad X201 9-cell battery, which is still less that the 7 on Windows they claim. But it guess the battery is getting older too, I've never replaced it (it has about 2 years)
SeanLuke 12y ago
> I now have to do 10 extra steps just to Save As. I feel your pain. Fortunately you can have Save As back: System Preferences -> Keyboards -> Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts. Add a shortcut called "Save As..." with Command-Shift-S. Magically, Duplicate is gone.
- orangecat 12y ago
  Thank you! Actually Duplicate is still there for me, but that's fine.
  - SeanLuke 12y ago
    Sorry, you also need to assign Command-Option-Shift-S to Duplicate. Then Duplicate will magically be hidden behind Save As... in the way that Save As... was previously hidden behind Duplicate. [That is, when you hold the option key down, Duplicate changed to Save As...]. Otherwise they'll be shown together in the menu.
- gshubert17 12y ago
  Great suggestion, but I could not get "Save As…" (associated with Command-Shift-S) to appear in the File menu of the Preview app (where I'd like to see it), after following your guidance. I have 10.7.5. I don't care if Duplicate is there or not; I would like to add Save As as you described.
  - SeanLuke 12y ago
    I'm sorry, I can't speak to 10.7.5; though I'd be surprised if it didn't work. This trick works great in 10.8.x and 10.9.x.
orangecat 12y ago
I'm in the same boat, basically using Macs for the hardware at this point. Nothing that I'm aware of comes close to MacBooks in build quality, display, and lack of driver issues, and the retina iMac is a fantastic developer workstation. But not being an iOS user, I find most of the changes since 10.6 either irrelevant or negative.
- uherdwong 12y ago
  Really? I'm waiting for a new Razer Blade 14" to show up with 970m graphics. Even the old one with 870m stomps a mudhole in a macbook these days man.
  - toakmu 12y ago
    The Razer has a much worse processor, half the RAM, half the storage, half the battery life, and it's heavier than the 15" MacBook even though it's only 14". And according to reviews "it runs incredibly hot". Not exactly "stomping a mudhole" is it?
    - uherdwong 12y ago
      lol Battery life is 5-6hrs compared to Apple's "up to 8 hrs" for the MBP 15. That's amazing considering Razer runs a 1344 core GPU. What does a pitiful MacBook Pro have? Integrated graphics. Hahaha. And for the highest end MBP they have? A puny 750m. I'm sure you won't get 8hrs with that one. Compare the two on any graphics benchmark. There's the mudhole I mentioned. 870m is 2x faster than a 750m. The Razer also delivers a higher res touch screen. The Razer is thinner. It's also black and green which IMO looks much better than those boring silver MBPs. And heavier than a MBP you say? https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/ 2.06Kg http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade 2.03Kg Razer wins again. Seems you don't know what you're talking about fanboi. Face it, Razer makes the nicest laptop you can buy anywhere. Period.
      - toakmu 12y ago
prapam2 12y ago
Desktop Linux is mostly install an work. I have not done any tinkering for a long time. But the Yosemite upgrade on laptop brought back my memories of initial Ubuntu distributions. I had disable few setting to get some performance. I had to change few UI setting to get a decent look. It looks a transition phase OS.But ubuntu on that m/c had few touch pad issues otherwise it would have been the default OS for me on the laptop.
- morganvachon 12y ago
  > Desktop Linux is mostly install an work. It is...until it isn't. Nine out of ten Ubuntu or Mint installs will go off without a hitch, with no weird issues or regressions, and a warm, friendly, comfortable development environment welcomes you. Then there's that one time you install it on your laptop so you have a to-go environment that matches your workstation, and BOOM! your wifi isn't recognized (what year is it again??) or your sound card sputters (damn you PulseAudio!), or your hybrid graphics screws the pooch. Hell, I built this workstation I'm typing on with GNU/Linux and BSD compatibility first in my mind, and I still had issues with some hardware right off the bat. Nothing that can't be fixed with some fiddling, but it's annoying as hell. Yes, all of the above issues can be fixed, just like the issues you dealt with in OS X. It's a computer, after all; Garbage In (Apple/Linux/BSD developers), Garbage Out. And don't get me started on Windows 8.x; it's finally becoming usable daily, but there are a million reasons I chose to stick with 7 for Windows-specific work, and wait it out until 10 ships. Apple broke the cardinal rule: If it isn't broken, stop fixing it! They want to innovate and improve and conquer the world, fine; but they need to remember that they had the best OS X release with Snow Leopard (and in my personal opinion, that was the best desktop OS period). In their rush to wow the masses, they broke their OS for those of us who use it to be productive and creative. At this stage, I feel that a good old fashioned, stable OS like FreeBSD or Slackware Linux or Debian is the best choice for a solid 'nix workstation, something you can get real work done on. But ever since Lion was released, I would rather use Windows Vista on a Core Solo machine than OS X on any Mac.
  - prapam2 12y ago
    More wifi then Sound were common for me before don't have them now. Actually i face these issues when doing a fresh installation of Win7. Many times i had use Ubuntu to find windows drivers! My Macbook pro Ubuntu installation went without any problems. Touch pad mouse clicks weren't as exact as OS X. I am used to it hence was not able to use Ubuntu. Maybe i should tinker a bit.
gnu8 12y ago
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/who-moved-my-cheese-spencer-johnson/1100425725?ean=9780399144462 http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/who-moved-my-cheese-spencer-...
- yourad_io 12y ago
  I'm not sure you're aware of the extent of pissing that has taken place from Apple on its Power Users' faces between 10.6 and 10.9 (likely 10.10 even, I've given up). This isn't just "WHY IS THIS 10px LEFT TO WHERE IT WAS ARGH THIS SUX0RZ" - really basic things were broken, such as multi-monitor full-screen. Also, multi-core machines actually benefited (performance-wise) from upgrading up until 10.6. Not so after Lion. It's easy to blame the users for being change-averse, but... was I really meant to stop using 'full-screen'? "Just resize it from that little corner there?"? Please.
- LVB 12y ago
  "The more important your Cheese is to you, the more you want to hold on to it." Insofar as Cheese == Wi-Fi connection, I couldn't agree more.
crag 12y ago
I agree completely. And believe it or not, I went back to Windows. Sort of. I'm testing the waters. My big issue is iTunes. Yeah I drank the kool-aid and now have an iTunes library of about 100GB. Despite how much I hate what iTunes has become at least is runs on Windows. Also, it's easier to "turn features off" in Windows than OSX these days. I'm sad about it though. But after 14 years on Mac I'm done. It was the upgrade to 10.10 that finally pissed me off enough to leave. By the way, anyone know of a good terminal app for Windows? Not too crazy about Powershell. I have been using Git Bash and that's decent so far.
- roadnottaken 12y ago
  Cygwin
  - moinnadeem 12y ago
    You cannot get better. About as close to Bash as you can get on Windows.
    - imron 12y ago
      Git bash is better.
  - PhasmaFelis 12y ago
    I use Cygwin on a regular basis. It's basically indispensible, because it's the only thing that does what it does. But I get the strong impression that it was designed to punish Windows users. Just off the top of my head: * It has no idea about Windows file system conventions. IIRC, the default install directory is "C:\Cygwin". * The "default" install is super bare-bones, and missing a lot of pretty basic Unix utils. This would be a minor complaint, except: * The installer--the bit that you download--is also the package manager. This means that if you install it and then delete the installer like a responsible, space-conserving user, then the first time you realize that you don't have, I dunno, rsync, you have to download the installer again. And then, unless you having to manually navigate to your Downloads folder every time you want to install a damn package, you have to find a place for it to live on your drive and set up a start-menu shortcut for it. These things are why we invented installers, so why doesn't the installer do them? * And, as you may have guessed from that last bit, there is no way to install packages from within the Cygwin terminal. In fact, you have to close all open terminals every time you want to run the package manager. You can imagine how much fun that is. The excuse for this is "such a program would need full access to all of Cygwin's POSIX functionality. That is, however, difficult to provide in a Cygwin-free environment, such as exists on first installation." In other words, they can't provide a proper package manager because then they couldn't make the installer and the package manager the same program which they shouldn't be fucking doing anyway. * Every time you run the installer/package manager, you have to click "Okay" seven times (yes, I counted) to confirm a load of options that you will almost certainly never change after first install. This ran way longer than I intended. Apparently I am fussed. :-/ The thing that really gets me is that this isn't even a case of Unix grognards not knowing or caring about Windows standards. There is no modern OS where installing an application off of the root directory is acceptable. I don't get it.
badsock 12y ago
You can switch to Linux, but unfortunately it's been degrading along similar lines. Big, wrong ideas are destructive, and the two biggest, wrongest ones right now seem to be: "desktops are just out-of-date tablets", and "the only good affordance is a dead affordance". Affordances are what make computers humane, and there's a world of difference between how phones are used (mostly social), tablets are used (mostly media consumption), and how desktops are used (mostly productivity). The visionaries in charge of all three of Windows/OSX/Linux are of similar mind about the "big ideas", and it's caused a lot of grief for productive people.
- ryukafalz 12y ago
  I disagree regarding the "tablet" point - while the major DEs take some UI inspiration from tablets, in general they're still very much desktop-oriented. People often complain about Unity for being "too much like a tablet", but actually try using it on a tablet and it's not well-suited at all in its current form. You might want to look at KDE and XFCE though - both are sticking more to traditional Linux desktop ideas than Gnome and Unity.
  - badsock 12y ago
    I don't think we actually disagree. The tablet/desktop convergence is them trying to sit between two barstools - true that they're still mostly toward desktop, but they aimed for both and hit neither. And agreed on your second point, using XFCE right now.
- MrDom 12y ago
  What's an affordance? I've never heard that term in this context before.
  - deong 12y ago
    In UI terms, it's any sort of visual clue for the user to do something. A button might be drawn as a "raised" thing inviting you to press it down; a window corner that has larger and visually obvious "drag handles" where you can grab it to resize the window; that sort of thing.
techrat 12y ago
>I just dread the idea of moving to Linux again. I don't want to tinker that much. The thing about Linux is that once you've tinkered, things stay the way you are. Copy over your home folder to your next distro and just about everything goes back to the way it was. When I wiped xUbuntu 14.04 and installed the 15.04 alpha, I didn't have to do anything to get XFCE back the way I wanted after I copied the contents of my home folder over and gave it a reboot. This is far, far more friendly than what OSX forces you to go through after each and every update.
- pmontra 12y ago
  Well, most of the times but not always. I use Ubuntu and I don't like having a bar on the top of the screen and the modal menu at the top, which are the primary reasons I don't use OSX. I was using Gnome 2 with all the menus and icons moved to the bottom bar, plus Compiz for the virtual desktops cube which I find a more natural way to remember where I am than with sliding desktops. One day Canonical introduced Unity, with a bar fixed to the top. No way to remove that, so I started using gnome fallback mode, or whatever is called. Enter Gnome 3, with much more workflow changing features. We can work around almost all of them now, not so much years ago. I kept using gnome fallback, which unfortunately requires more and more tweakings to mimic a subset of the functionality of Gnome 2 (which was all I need to work). So I ended up with an Ubuntu 12.04 with kernel upgrades (the hardware enhancement stack from Canonical) and a DE that doesn't work as well as it used to (some quirks here and there). It's very much the first lines of the post about OSX. At least Linux gives me more flexibility than OSX does.
  - techrat 12y ago
    kUbuntu. xUbuntu. lUbuntu. Honestly. Fuck Unity and Gnome.
- acdha 12y ago
  > The thing about Linux is that once you've tinkered, things stay the way you are. Until they don't – I supported Linux desktop users for years and, even ignoring fun with the occasional kernel/driver update rendering systems unbootable or breaking sound/video, every so often I had to troubleshoot something which turned out to be caused by a backwards-incompatible change. It turns out that Linux developers are just like developers for every other platform and make mistakes or intentional changes for things they no longer wish to support. > This is far, far more friendly than what OSX forces you to go through after each and every update. My experience with every release since 10.0.0: install, reboot, go back to work. The thing to remember for every platform is that you hear about complaints from the small percentage of people who encounter something unusual because relatively few people spend months camped out on forums to remind everyone that an update didn't break anything.
diminoten 12y ago
As a heavy user of OS X, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about related to your difficulties upgrading to new versions. I've gone from 10.4 all the way to Mavericks and have yet to have a single shred of trouble.
vcjohnson 12y ago
>Every new major release of OS X is a day or week spent disabling things To be fair, I'm a .NET dev who has to do this in most Windows releases as well. It's a part of the customization of the OS. They don't tailor it to devs, they tailor it to normal users.
vram22 12y ago
>That's the problem in a nutshell: OS X changes because there's new management that wants to put its stamp on things, regardless of whether it improves the productivity of the user or not. I'm not an OS X user, but that's a solid observation, that at least partly accounts for the issues, based on my experience of other OS's and software. I've seen the same happen, from the inside, in large companies where I've worked, and also, from the outside, a lot, as a user of various software packages and OS's, that seems to be the case, many times. Of course there are other reasons too. I was just talking to a non-tech [1] friend yesterday who was complaining about the OS problems he was having (Ubuntu, in his case), and who said, essentially, that things are too difficult - upgrades screwing things up, etc. etc. My reply to him: the state of the art in software (in general) is still below what it should be - or words to that effect. [1] Of course, part of the reason for his problems is that he is not tech-savvy (though he actually is more so than the average layman), but that raises the question of why software in general cannot be more user-friendly and easier to use. Difficult question, I know, since the field is so complex, and compounded by the existence of so many different versions of hardware, operating systems, and applications, all (mis)interacting with each other. Reminds me of my erstwhile system engineer days: customer has a problem (in a specific app situation) with this model of that computer that we sell and support? check the OS version: is it Ver. x.y.z? ah, that's not compatible with BIOS (or motherboard) Ver. a.b.c - only when using that particular RDBMS / compiler / whatever; upgrade the BIOS (or motherboard or OS or problematic software) to Ver. p.q.r ...... :) (which point was sometimes learnt after system / hardware engineers had spent a lot of time trying to solve the problem on their own, before escalating it to head office) It was good fun and learning, but frustrating too at times, and must have been for some customers too ...
wwweston 12y ago
Given how common sentiments like this are (I certainly share them enthusiastically), I'm kindof surprised there hasn't been more support for projects that attempt to address this somewhat by taking OS X compatibility beyond OS X: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/203272607/gnustep-project http://www.gnu.org/software/gnustep/ http://www.darlinghq.org/

DennisP 12y ago

I bought a linux laptop from System76 early this year, and aside from a fiddly trackpad, everything just works. I've seen a lot of people say the same about thinkpads.

azakai 12y ago
Thinkpads have pretty much worked on Linux, for me. Overall, Linux is great these days if you have compatible hardware. A random Windows laptop might be a problem, but a Thinkpad or a System76 or such should all be fine.
- yourad_io 12y ago
  +1 - Thinkpads work out of the box in my experience, and with a bit of tweaking, I managed to move my parents to Linuxes (Mint) on "random Windows laptops" - a Compaq and a 17" HP. But I guess it was just luck of the draw - YMMV.
- dkuntz2 12y ago
  While it worked acceptably for three years, I gave up on my Thinkpad W520 this summer and switched to a Macbook Pro. Partly it was due to size (going from a bulky 15" to a really slim 13" computer is awesome), and partly it was due to wanting application support again, after seven years of almost exclusively using Linux. One thing I'd like to say when looking at Thinkpads, or other laptops, for running Linux on, don't get one with hybrid graphics. My experience in trying to deal with it was a huge pain. Maybe my problem was in going for the W-series. The older T-series laptops I've installed and used Linux on were great.
  - fixedd 12y ago
    I had (well, still have, but don't use) a w510. It worked just as well as the t61 before it (which was to say, they both did great under Linux), but it didn't have hybrid graphics... it was Nvidia all the time. The only reason I've replaced it was that it had absolutely abysmal battery life. Old job bought me a comparable ultrabook that weighs 20 pounds less and has 3x the battery life and I couldn't be happier.
  - sandGorgon 12y ago
    I have a T430s - fairly thin with hybrid graphics. You should know that you can switch off hybrid graphics in the BIOS. Please feel free to get a hybrid graphics thinkpad - you can use it whichever way you want.
  - selimthegrim 12y ago
    My T42 worked like a dream on Ubuntu 14.04 until recently, and now it refuses to awaken from sleep properly at all because of some update or other. I'm dreading trying to track this down and possibly finding out I'm stuck with using Windows 7.
  - Nullabillity 12y ago
    I have an ASUS with Nvidia Optimus, and once I installed Bumblebee the hybrid graphics work fine.
  - MrDom 12y ago
    I have a w530 running linux and couldn't agree more about the hybrid graphics. It's caused me so much grief I almost switched to windows.
pakled_engineer 12y ago
Same, tried Trisquel and it just worked, except some flash media doesn't play which actually increased my productivity. Coursera videos, youtube work but spending countless hours streaming some TV links won't happen anymore unless I manually install a nonfree flash plugin from repository outside Trisquel, which is enough of a time transactional cost that I haven't bothered
yourad_io 12y ago
What's the overall build quality like? I've read (almost exclusively) bad things about the keyboard and overall plastic-ity of them.
- pervycreeper 12y ago
  Probably that was in comparison to past models. Compared to other brands, they are still pretty nice.
- DennisP 12y ago
  I've got a 17" model. It is plastic, but I have no complaints about the overall build. The keyboard has pretty nice long-travel keys. The trackpad is horrible, the cursor tends to jump around a lot when you try to click. This is my first linux laptop so I don't know whether that's a common driver issue on linux. If not for that I would be 100% happy. Another model got a lot of complaints about the keyboard a year or two ago, and System76 responded by sending everyone a better one for free.

lucisferre 12y ago

I believe the term they use is "buttery". I'm with you on moving back to Linux, having sufficient experience with both I'm loathe to move back for both hardware and software envrionment frustrations. I do have hope that things will get better on that side of the fence, but OSX would have to become pretty terrible for me to do that anytime soon (though they seem to really be pushing their luck lately).

virmundi 12y ago
Here's my OS X vs Linux experience circa 2014. I have a new OS X MBP. 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA Something (650?), SSD, Yosemite, i7. I have an older i7 Sager, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia 550m, HDD. The Sager for years has been a terrible computer due to the WIFI support. It was crappy in Windows and worse in Linux. I actually looked forward to getting the MBP. Recently, however, I found a guy's opensource driver for the RealTek WIFI. This is more stable than the actual official driver. His blog post was great about how to install it. Now I've got two computer to compare. OSX is apparently terrible at memory management. Running Eclipse and like 10 tabs in FF can cause the system to swap. On the SSD I loath the very concept. Some of my comments on HN about Light Table stem from the fact that LT uses .5 GB of memory when everything is said and done (node helpers, etc). LT on OS X ran great, but OS X would swap. Running multiple VirtualBox instances made it worse. I tend to run about 260-350 MB of swap if not more for a few small programs. Cut to Ubuntu. Once I got use to Unity I liked Ubuntu. The OS is smooth, use-able and well-supported both at a community level and from a system update perspective. I can run a 2 GB Arango VM, and 3 Hadoop VMs at once all nicely networked to each other via host-only. FF with the same 10-ish tabs running with lein REPL and Counterclockwise (Eclipse IDE for Clojure) and still only use 76 KB of swap. Now aside from following a few steps about getting the WIFI to work, I've not really done much Ubuntu customization. I haven't had to. I installed it, it worked, I worked. OS X had some nice ideas, but, IMHO, Linux caught up. The terminals available with Linux are better than the default terminal with OS X. They are more memory efficient than Console 2. Unity works well. I actually have muscle memory trying to work with OS X as I do Unity. I will grant that the OS X laptop is light years ahead of my Linux box's battery. Even when the battery was new, the Linux laptop was lucky to get 2.5 hours. The OS X laptop gets 5 hrs or so under my daily load. Interestingly, the only laptop of the 5 or so I've owned to have a dead pixel is the MBP. Under white backgrounds it's easy to miss. On dark backgrounds I'm annoyed.

sillysaurus3 12y ago

Why do people update OS X? Just curious. If it works how you like, why update it? Security flaws are probably the main reason, but isn't there a way to get those without acquiescing to an OS redesign?

overgard 12y ago
Because you have to: OSX doesn't have much of a culture of backwards compatibility, and every update tends to pressure developers into the latest greatest thing. Maintaining old software is just not a cultural value. Once the developers move, the users pretty much have to. I have an iMac from 2009. I had two OS's on it. Windows 7? Everything still works there. Runs fast, new software is great, etc. OSX 10.6.8? DEAD. It's basically useless. I guess it's nice that apple offers free upgrades, except that they mysteriously make a system that used to be lightning fast extremely slow, even though other OS's seem to run just fine..
- rsync 12y ago
  I am running snow leopard on a 2009 mac pro. It works perfectly. I have zero complaints or issues. It's no problem at all. I use chrome and terminal for most of my work, but I do run itunes and vmware fusion and run some apps that give me a tiled interface and focus-follows-mouse. No problems at all. I couldn't be happier. I am sure it would all go to hell if I got a current model and tried to run SL on it ...
  - Kadin 12y ago
    Snow Leopard is no longer receiving security updates; that'd give me pause in anything but a very firewalled desktop installation.
  - riffraff 12y ago
    I upgraded SL -> Mavericks a few months ago when it stopped receiving security updates. It's slightly worse (I don't like mission control, messages is useless to me) but not as bad as Lion (i.e. you'll just need to disable the stupid scroll behaviour, but performance is good). On the plus side, you get the option to use new software developed for "10.7+" (heroku's db client, atom editor, swift etc)

davidbarker 12y ago

I agree RE: Duplicate/Save As…, although you can get Save As… back if you hold down the Option key. I don't remember when I last used Duplicate.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jaxn 12y ago
Whoa! Thanks for that tip. I am amazed I never tried that as well as sure grateful to now know it.
- davidbarker 12y ago
  Happy to help!
x0054 12y ago
Is this a complaint about the Preview app? Because obviously all other programs you might run in OSX make their own decisions about their functionality. Personally, I always use the Menubar search feature via QuickSilver or the default Help>Search shortcut, CMD+?, so I never even noticed those features have been now hidden behind an option key.
- JonathonW 12y ago
  The Duplicate/Save As thing is present in any app that's using the system document-based app frameworks and has opted-in to autosave... you'll see it in most of Apple's apps (like TextEdit, Preview, or Pages) and in some third-party apps (off the top of my head, I know Pixelmator does it, and there are others).
  - oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
    iA Writer is another to go down this route. To be honest, I hadn't really noticed since most of my time is spent in Chrome, Sublime Text, Spotify/iTunes, Cyberduck, and Mail. None of these - even the last - have adopted the new api/framework.

na85 12y ago

>I just dread the idea of moving to Linux again. I don't want to tinker that much. If you don't use Unity and instead use a different environment like KDE, Ubuntu is actually a great system that requires minimal tweaking.

morganvachon 12y ago
I hated Unity at first, enough to stick with 10.04 when I ran Ubuntu (I was never impressed with Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu, there was always something broken somewhere in all of those). But I finally gave it a go in 14.04, and it has vastly improved. It may still not be your cup of tea, but in my mind at least it's better than Gnome 3 and is worth a look. That said, for my money you can't beat Mint with Xfce for a quick and easy casual GNU/Linux box. I always skip Xfce's compositor and install Compton for tear-free window dragging and video watching (Nvidia-specific issue I believe), but otherwise the default install is very good.
fixedd 12y ago
Same for Ubuntu Gnome. There's a few addons (or plugins, or whatever they call them) that I install to suite my preferences, but I can do a clean install + additional packages + tweak to my needs in under an hour. If you don't know the package names you'll want, maybe double that. The past few upgrades have also worked flawlessly for me, which makes it even easier. That said, I intentionally purchase hardware that's known to work well with Linux (if you buy a system with all Intel chipsets, you'll probably be fine). Also, the power management is still abysmal. I still have to tinker with powertop to get battery life comparable to other OS's.
- timonovici 12y ago
  Amen to that. After doing some magic with powertop, I get about 5 hours out of my Thinkpad X201 9-cell battery, which is still less that the 7 on Windows they claim. But it guess the battery is getting older too, I've never replaced it (it has about 2 years)

SeanLuke 12y ago

> I now have to do 10 extra steps just to Save As. I feel your pain. Fortunately you can have Save As back: System Preferences -> Keyboards -> Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts. Add a shortcut called "Save As..." with Command-Shift-S. Magically, Duplicate is gone.

orangecat 12y ago
Thank you! Actually Duplicate is still there for me, but that's fine.
- SeanLuke 12y ago
  Sorry, you also need to assign Command-Option-Shift-S to Duplicate. Then Duplicate will magically be hidden behind Save As... in the way that Save As... was previously hidden behind Duplicate. [That is, when you hold the option key down, Duplicate changed to Save As...]. Otherwise they'll be shown together in the menu.
gshubert17 12y ago
Great suggestion, but I could not get "Save As…" (associated with Command-Shift-S) to appear in the File menu of the Preview app (where I'd like to see it), after following your guidance. I have 10.7.5. I don't care if Duplicate is there or not; I would like to add Save As as you described.
- SeanLuke 12y ago
  I'm sorry, I can't speak to 10.7.5; though I'd be surprised if it didn't work. This trick works great in 10.8.x and 10.9.x.

orangecat 12y ago

I'm in the same boat, basically using Macs for the hardware at this point. Nothing that I'm aware of comes close to MacBooks in build quality, display, and lack of driver issues, and the retina iMac is a fantastic developer workstation. But not being an iOS user, I find most of the changes since 10.6 either irrelevant or negative.

uherdwong 12y ago
Really? I'm waiting for a new Razer Blade 14" to show up with 970m graphics. Even the old one with 870m stomps a mudhole in a macbook these days man.
- toakmu 12y ago
  The Razer has a much worse processor, half the RAM, half the storage, half the battery life, and it's heavier than the 15" MacBook even though it's only 14". And according to reviews "it runs incredibly hot". Not exactly "stomping a mudhole" is it?
  - uherdwong 12y ago
    lol Battery life is 5-6hrs compared to Apple's "up to 8 hrs" for the MBP 15. That's amazing considering Razer runs a 1344 core GPU. What does a pitiful MacBook Pro have? Integrated graphics. Hahaha. And for the highest end MBP they have? A puny 750m. I'm sure you won't get 8hrs with that one. Compare the two on any graphics benchmark. There's the mudhole I mentioned. 870m is 2x faster than a 750m. The Razer also delivers a higher res touch screen. The Razer is thinner. It's also black and green which IMO looks much better than those boring silver MBPs. And heavier than a MBP you say? https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/ 2.06Kg http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade 2.03Kg Razer wins again. Seems you don't know what you're talking about fanboi. Face it, Razer makes the nicest laptop you can buy anywhere. Period.
    - toakmu 12y ago

prapam2 12y ago

Desktop Linux is mostly install an work. I have not done any tinkering for a long time. But the Yosemite upgrade on laptop brought back my memories of initial Ubuntu distributions. I had disable few setting to get some performance. I had to change few UI setting to get a decent look. It looks a transition phase OS.But ubuntu on that m/c had few touch pad issues otherwise it would have been the default OS for me on the laptop.

morganvachon 12y ago
> Desktop Linux is mostly install an work. It is...until it isn't. Nine out of ten Ubuntu or Mint installs will go off without a hitch, with no weird issues or regressions, and a warm, friendly, comfortable development environment welcomes you. Then there's that one time you install it on your laptop so you have a to-go environment that matches your workstation, and BOOM! your wifi isn't recognized (what year is it again??) or your sound card sputters (damn you PulseAudio!), or your hybrid graphics screws the pooch. Hell, I built this workstation I'm typing on with GNU/Linux and BSD compatibility first in my mind, and I still had issues with some hardware right off the bat. Nothing that can't be fixed with some fiddling, but it's annoying as hell. Yes, all of the above issues can be fixed, just like the issues you dealt with in OS X. It's a computer, after all; Garbage In (Apple/Linux/BSD developers), Garbage Out. And don't get me started on Windows 8.x; it's finally becoming usable daily, but there are a million reasons I chose to stick with 7 for Windows-specific work, and wait it out until 10 ships. Apple broke the cardinal rule: If it isn't broken, stop fixing it! They want to innovate and improve and conquer the world, fine; but they need to remember that they had the best OS X release with Snow Leopard (and in my personal opinion, that was the best desktop OS period). In their rush to wow the masses, they broke their OS for those of us who use it to be productive and creative. At this stage, I feel that a good old fashioned, stable OS like FreeBSD or Slackware Linux or Debian is the best choice for a solid 'nix workstation, something you can get real work done on. But ever since Lion was released, I would rather use Windows Vista on a Core Solo machine than OS X on any Mac.
- prapam2 12y ago
  More wifi then Sound were common for me before don't have them now. Actually i face these issues when doing a fresh installation of Win7. Many times i had use Ubuntu to find windows drivers! My Macbook pro Ubuntu installation went without any problems. Touch pad mouse clicks weren't as exact as OS X. I am used to it hence was not able to use Ubuntu. Maybe i should tinker a bit.

gnu8 12y ago

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/who-moved-my-cheese-spencer-johnson/1100425725?ean=9780399144462 http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/who-moved-my-cheese-spencer-...

yourad_io 12y ago
I'm not sure you're aware of the extent of pissing that has taken place from Apple on its Power Users' faces between 10.6 and 10.9 (likely 10.10 even, I've given up). This isn't just "WHY IS THIS 10px LEFT TO WHERE IT WAS ARGH THIS SUX0RZ" - really basic things were broken, such as multi-monitor full-screen. Also, multi-core machines actually benefited (performance-wise) from upgrading up until 10.6. Not so after Lion. It's easy to blame the users for being change-averse, but... was I really meant to stop using 'full-screen'? "Just resize it from that little corner there?"? Please.
LVB 12y ago
"The more important your Cheese is to you, the more you want to hold on to it." Insofar as Cheese == Wi-Fi connection, I couldn't agree more.

crag 12y ago

I agree completely. And believe it or not, I went back to Windows. Sort of. I'm testing the waters. My big issue is iTunes. Yeah I drank the kool-aid and now have an iTunes library of about 100GB. Despite how much I hate what iTunes has become at least is runs on Windows. Also, it's easier to "turn features off" in Windows than OSX these days. I'm sad about it though. But after 14 years on Mac I'm done. It was the upgrade to 10.10 that finally pissed me off enough to leave. By the way, anyone know of a good terminal app for Windows? Not too crazy about Powershell. I have been using Git Bash and that's decent so far.

roadnottaken 12y ago
Cygwin
- moinnadeem 12y ago
  You cannot get better. About as close to Bash as you can get on Windows.
  - imron 12y ago
    Git bash is better.
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  I use Cygwin on a regular basis. It's basically indispensible, because it's the only thing that does what it does. But I get the strong impression that it was designed to punish Windows users. Just off the top of my head: * It has no idea about Windows file system conventions. IIRC, the default install directory is "C:\Cygwin". * The "default" install is super bare-bones, and missing a lot of pretty basic Unix utils. This would be a minor complaint, except: * The installer--the bit that you download--is also the package manager. This means that if you install it and then delete the installer like a responsible, space-conserving user, then the first time you realize that you don't have, I dunno, rsync, you have to download the installer again. And then, unless you having to manually navigate to your Downloads folder every time you want to install a damn package, you have to find a place for it to live on your drive and set up a start-menu shortcut for it. These things are why we invented installers, so why doesn't the installer do them? * And, as you may have guessed from that last bit, there is no way to install packages from within the Cygwin terminal. In fact, you have to close all open terminals every time you want to run the package manager. You can imagine how much fun that is. The excuse for this is "such a program would need full access to all of Cygwin's POSIX functionality. That is, however, difficult to provide in a Cygwin-free environment, such as exists on first installation." In other words, they can't provide a proper package manager because then they couldn't make the installer and the package manager the same program which they shouldn't be fucking doing anyway. * Every time you run the installer/package manager, you have to click "Okay" seven times (yes, I counted) to confirm a load of options that you will almost certainly never change after first install. This ran way longer than I intended. Apparently I am fussed. :-/ The thing that really gets me is that this isn't even a case of Unix grognards not knowing or caring about Windows standards. There is no modern OS where installing an application off of the root directory is acceptable. I don't get it.

badsock 12y ago

You can switch to Linux, but unfortunately it's been degrading along similar lines. Big, wrong ideas are destructive, and the two biggest, wrongest ones right now seem to be: "desktops are just out-of-date tablets", and "the only good affordance is a dead affordance". Affordances are what make computers humane, and there's a world of difference between how phones are used (mostly social), tablets are used (mostly media consumption), and how desktops are used (mostly productivity). The visionaries in charge of all three of Windows/OSX/Linux are of similar mind about the "big ideas", and it's caused a lot of grief for productive people.

ryukafalz 12y ago
I disagree regarding the "tablet" point - while the major DEs take some UI inspiration from tablets, in general they're still very much desktop-oriented. People often complain about Unity for being "too much like a tablet", but actually try using it on a tablet and it's not well-suited at all in its current form. You might want to look at KDE and XFCE though - both are sticking more to traditional Linux desktop ideas than Gnome and Unity.
- badsock 12y ago
  I don't think we actually disagree. The tablet/desktop convergence is them trying to sit between two barstools - true that they're still mostly toward desktop, but they aimed for both and hit neither. And agreed on your second point, using XFCE right now.
MrDom 12y ago
What's an affordance? I've never heard that term in this context before.
- deong 12y ago
  In UI terms, it's any sort of visual clue for the user to do something. A button might be drawn as a "raised" thing inviting you to press it down; a window corner that has larger and visually obvious "drag handles" where you can grab it to resize the window; that sort of thing.

techrat 12y ago

>I just dread the idea of moving to Linux again. I don't want to tinker that much. The thing about Linux is that once you've tinkered, things stay the way you are. Copy over your home folder to your next distro and just about everything goes back to the way it was. When I wiped xUbuntu 14.04 and installed the 15.04 alpha, I didn't have to do anything to get XFCE back the way I wanted after I copied the contents of my home folder over and gave it a reboot. This is far, far more friendly than what OSX forces you to go through after each and every update.

pmontra 12y ago
Well, most of the times but not always. I use Ubuntu and I don't like having a bar on the top of the screen and the modal menu at the top, which are the primary reasons I don't use OSX. I was using Gnome 2 with all the menus and icons moved to the bottom bar, plus Compiz for the virtual desktops cube which I find a more natural way to remember where I am than with sliding desktops. One day Canonical introduced Unity, with a bar fixed to the top. No way to remove that, so I started using gnome fallback mode, or whatever is called. Enter Gnome 3, with much more workflow changing features. We can work around almost all of them now, not so much years ago. I kept using gnome fallback, which unfortunately requires more and more tweakings to mimic a subset of the functionality of Gnome 2 (which was all I need to work). So I ended up with an Ubuntu 12.04 with kernel upgrades (the hardware enhancement stack from Canonical) and a DE that doesn't work as well as it used to (some quirks here and there). It's very much the first lines of the post about OSX. At least Linux gives me more flexibility than OSX does.
- techrat 12y ago
  kUbuntu. xUbuntu. lUbuntu. Honestly. Fuck Unity and Gnome.
acdha 12y ago
> The thing about Linux is that once you've tinkered, things stay the way you are. Until they don't – I supported Linux desktop users for years and, even ignoring fun with the occasional kernel/driver update rendering systems unbootable or breaking sound/video, every so often I had to troubleshoot something which turned out to be caused by a backwards-incompatible change. It turns out that Linux developers are just like developers for every other platform and make mistakes or intentional changes for things they no longer wish to support. > This is far, far more friendly than what OSX forces you to go through after each and every update. My experience with every release since 10.0.0: install, reboot, go back to work. The thing to remember for every platform is that you hear about complaints from the small percentage of people who encounter something unusual because relatively few people spend months camped out on forums to remind everyone that an update didn't break anything.

diminoten 12y ago

As a heavy user of OS X, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about related to your difficulties upgrading to new versions. I've gone from 10.4 all the way to Mavericks and have yet to have a single shred of trouble.

vcjohnson 12y ago

>Every new major release of OS X is a day or week spent disabling things To be fair, I'm a .NET dev who has to do this in most Windows releases as well. It's a part of the customization of the OS. They don't tailor it to devs, they tailor it to normal users.

vram22 12y ago

>That's the problem in a nutshell: OS X changes because there's new management that wants to put its stamp on things, regardless of whether it improves the productivity of the user or not. I'm not an OS X user, but that's a solid observation, that at least partly accounts for the issues, based on my experience of other OS's and software. I've seen the same happen, from the inside, in large companies where I've worked, and also, from the outside, a lot, as a user of various software packages and OS's, that seems to be the case, many times. Of course there are other reasons too. I was just talking to a non-tech [1] friend yesterday who was complaining about the OS problems he was having (Ubuntu, in his case), and who said, essentially, that things are too difficult - upgrades screwing things up, etc. etc. My reply to him: the state of the art in software (in general) is still below what it should be - or words to that effect. [1] Of course, part of the reason for his problems is that he is not tech-savvy (though he actually is more so than the average layman), but that raises the question of why software in general cannot be more user-friendly and easier to use. Difficult question, I know, since the field is so complex, and compounded by the existence of so many different versions of hardware, operating systems, and applications, all (mis)interacting with each other. Reminds me of my erstwhile system engineer days: customer has a problem (in a specific app situation) with this model of that computer that we sell and support? check the OS version: is it Ver. x.y.z? ah, that's not compatible with BIOS (or motherboard) Ver. a.b.c - only when using that particular RDBMS / compiler / whatever; upgrade the BIOS (or motherboard or OS or problematic software) to Ver. p.q.r ...... :) (which point was sometimes learnt after system / hardware engineers had spent a lot of time trying to solve the problem on their own, before escalating it to head office) It was good fun and learning, but frustrating too at times, and must have been for some customers too ...

wwweston 12y ago

Given how common sentiments like this are (I certainly share them enthusiastically), I'm kindof surprised there hasn't been more support for projects that attempt to address this somewhat by taking OS X compatibility beyond OS X: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/203272607/gnustep-project http://www.gnu.org/software/gnustep/ http://www.darlinghq.org/