[HN Gopher] Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
___________________________________________________________________
Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
Author : trbutler
Score : 920 points
Date : 2025-03-27 22:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (reviews.ofb.biz)
(TXT) w3m dump (reviews.ofb.biz)
| asadotzler wrote:
| I don't think that's quite right. Snow Leopard was a lot of
| changes to a lot of the OS code base and wasn't great out of the
| gate, taking multiple dot releases, like all large-scale software
| updates do, to stabilize and bugfix enough to be "good."
|
| There is no silver bullet, just a lot of lead ones and the answer
| to Apple's quality problem is to begin baking QA back into the
| process in a meaningful way after letting it atrophy for the last
| decade or so.
|
| Hire more humans and rely less on automation. Trust your
| developers, QA, and user support folks and the feedback they push
| up the chain of command. Fix bugs as the arise instead of
| assigning them to "future" or whatever. Don't release features
| until they're sufficient stable.
|
| This is all basic stuff for a software company, stuff that Apple
| seems to have forgotten under the leadership of that glorified
| accountant, Cook.
| 1over137 wrote:
| Why do any of that? What they're doing has made them infinitely
| rich, and that's all that matters. /s
| blitzar wrote:
| Being infinitely rich might also be the cause of the problem.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Well, you can only win playing the stock market (Wall St. is
| Cook's only real customer) for so long while your products
| deteriorate. Financializing Apple and eliminating its
| technical prowess opens the door for the someone else with
| contemporary technical strength to take Apple's users.
| bigdubs wrote:
| Adding to this, a solution might be enabling continuous
| releases and leaning into release channels could help in terms
| of getting more out to users.
|
| In practice it's a challenge because the OS bundles a lot of
| separate things into releases, namely Safari changes are tied
| to OS changes which are tied to Apple Pay features which are
| tied to so on and so on.
|
| It would require a lot of feature flagging and extra complexity
| which may reduce complexity.
|
| Another way is to start un-bundling releases and fundamentally
| re-thinking how the dependency graph is structured.
| dcow wrote:
| I think they're painted into a corner with WWDC. Everything
| has to be a crowd pleasing brain busting wow drop each year.
| I'm certain there are teams that design their entire workflow
| around the yearly wwdc. It honestly feels like an executive
| leadership problem to solve.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| If that is a significant part of the problem, then moving
| WWDC from an in-person keynote attended mostly by nerds and
| glanced at by the media to an overproduced movie geared at
| the media and ordinary consumers _first_ probably didn 't
| help. They could've gone back to a stage presentation after
| COVID, but some of that transition had already been
| happening prior to that (I recall an increase in how many
| jokes/bits they were doing in the late 2010's, although
| that could just be my perception).
| computerdork wrote:
| Appreciate the sentiment, but in my humble opinion, seems like
| they should lean into creating even better automated testing,
| because adding all the new bugs to their suite of automated
| tests would be a more certain way to decrease their chance of
| happening again.
|
| But, in a sense, this still incorporates your idea, because the
| devs and QA must be given the mandate of finding these bugs,
| and also towards making the automated tests cover the bug's
| related test cases (as well as charged with improving the test
| code itself, which is often in a mediocre state in most code
| bases I've seen at least).
| asadotzler wrote:
| Sure, more and better of everything, with engineering,
| including QA, calling the shots on what's sufficient to
| ensure great quality.
| quitit wrote:
| I think some people would be surprised how effective reaching
| out to apple is for squashing bugs. Three times now I've been
| assigned an engineer to pin point the bug I was experiencing,
| after which it was fixed in the next dot release.
|
| By all means people should complain on forums (why not?), but a
| forum post complaining about some years-old bug isn't going to
| be anywhere near as effective as contacting apple's support or
| filing a bug report.
|
| I'm not a developer, I'm just a regular user - so if I can get
| all this special treatment, so can you.
| tiltowait wrote:
| Interesting. Apple podcasters frequently rant about what a
| black hole Apple's Radar bug system is. We're talking hours-
| long rants in some cases. Luck of the draw, maybe? I'm not
| doubting you, just surprised to read it.
|
| (It feels similar to how those same podcasters absolutely
| blast Apple Intelligence, while non-tech users I've heard
| from seem to love it.)
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Yes, I am very surprised to hear that you've had such success
| with reporting bugs to Apple. That is very unlike my
| experience. I've had exactly one macOS bug that I reported
| fixed, and that required going to a WWDC lab, talking to a
| person on the relevant team in person, and having them dig
| the bug report out of the backlog for a completely unrelated
| team that it was incorrectly assigned to.
| eviks wrote:
| They would be surprised because it's not true, those years-
| old bugs in the forums have been reported many times to the
| official bug tracker, with reference number sometimes posted
| in those very forums.
| noname120 wrote:
| You must be the lucky one, because other people have had
| horrible experiences with Apple's Feedback Assistant:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38164735
| ninkendo wrote:
| > the answer to Apple's quality problem is to begin baking QA
| back into the process in a meaningful way after letting it
| atrophy for the last decade or so.
|
| As a former Apple employee of 13 years: Apple knows about the
| bugs. QA isn't the problem.
|
| A lot of people complain that their radar for some obvious bug
| isn't getting noticed, and conclude that Apple must not be
| QA'ing, or not dogfooding their own product. This isn't the
| case at all. I guarantee the bugs you care about are well
| known, and QA has already spotted them.
|
| The reality is, they just don't care. The train leaves the
| station in September. You're either on it or you're not. If you
| spent the year rewriting some subsystem, and it's July and you
| have this huge list of bugs, there's a go/no-go decision, and
| the answer is nearly always "go" (because no-go would mean
| reverting a ton of other stuff too, and _that_ carries its own
| regression risk, etc.)
|
| So instead there's just an amount of bugginess that's deemed
| acceptable. And so the software is released, everybody slaps
| high-fives, and the remaining bugs are punted to next year,
| where they will sit forever, because once we do one release
| with a known bug, it couldn't be that important, right? After
| all, we shipped with it! Future/P2, never to be seen again.
|
| An attempt was made to remedy this by pushing deadlines earlier
| in the cycle, to make room for more QA time, but that just
| introduced more perverse incentives: people started landing big
| features in later dot-releases where there's less scrutiny, and
| even more tolerance for bugs.
|
| The honest answer is that Apple needs to start _giving a damn_
| about the quality of what they're pushing. As Steve once said
| at a pretty famous internal meeting, "you should be mad at your
| teammates for letting each other down like this". And heads
| need to roll. I can only hope that they're realizing this now,
| but I don't feel like the culture under Tim works this way.
| People's feelings are way too important, and necessary changes
| don 't get made.
| mberning wrote:
| Hard to disagree. You would think for a company obsessed with
| performance per watt and battery life that every release would be
| as fast if not faster that its predecessor and more efficient to
| boot.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| ...and speaking of Snow versions, bring back those cool welcome
| videos when you first purchase a Mac!
|
| I miss those. Unfortunately, since Apple doesn't do the whole
| space theme anymore, you'd probably get some really boring drone
| shots of California at best before a Setup Assistant faded into
| view from behind a Redwood or something.
| blitzar wrote:
| That assistant had better be Clippy. "It looks like you're
| trying to setup your Mac, Would you like help?"
| wpm wrote:
| Most Mac admins might disagree.
|
| I had to hear those goddamn songs so many times, often all at
| the same time.
|
| I'm weird though, and never stopped liking it.
|
| Doo-do-doo-doo-do...
| paradox460 wrote:
| World be cool if they commissioned artists to make music for
| them again. The fact that they secured Royksopp and Sofa
| Surfers is still impressive
| geerlingguy wrote:
| > In the 22 years since I became a "switcher", this is the worst
| state I can remember Apple's platforms being in.
|
| Indeed, I remember three times when Apple went a bit overboard on
| the feature front, but dialed it back and made some of the most
| stable and useful OS versions:
|
| OS 8.5/8.6 pushed a bunch of features and were the last big
| pushes pre-OSX, but then OS 9 fixed a TON of bugs, and added a
| few smaller quality of life improvements that made running
| 'Classic' Mac OS pretty good, for those who were stuck on it for
| the transitional years.
|
| Mac OS X 10.0 rewrote _everything_, and especially 10.0 was _dog_
| slow, with all the new Quartz graphics stuff in an era where GPU
| accelerated 3D display widgets wasn't quite prevalent. 10.1
| patched in a bunch of missing features (like DVD Player--it was
| still a pretty useful tool back then), and fixed a couple of the
| most _glaring_ problems... but 10.4 Tiger was the first OS X
| release that was 'fast' enough OS X was a joy to use in the same
| way OS 9 was at the time. At least on newer Macs.
|
| And then of course Snow Leopard, which is the subject of the OP.
|
| macOS 13/14/15 have progressively added more little bugs I track
| in my https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook project;
| anything from little networking bugs to weird preferences that
| can't be automated, or don't even work at all when you try
| toggling them.
|
| That's besides the absolute _disaster_ that is modern System
| Preferences. Until the 'great iOSification' a few years back,
| Apple's System Preferences and preference pane were actually a
| pleasure to use, and I could _usually_ remember where to go
| visually, with a nice search assistant.
|
| Now... it's hit or miss if I can even find a setting :(
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| Minor nitpick about early OS X
|
| There was no acceleration (even 2D!) until 10.2
| rcarmo wrote:
| Well, actually, there was. I was doing OpenGL stuff at the
| time on a Bondi iMac that barely ran early OS X and
| distinctly remember that.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Mac OS X versions before Jaguar supported GPU accelerated
| applications, but the windows were composited in software
| which caused severe performance problems. Jaguar introduced
| something called Quartz Extreme, where the windows are
| treated as OpenGL surfaces and the window contents are
| textures mapped onto the surfaces. This made OS X
| significantly smoother on computers with a fast enough GPU
| and enough VRAM to support it, as the CPU didn't have to
| spend a bunch of time copying all the window contents to
| the framebuffer.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Settings is not that bad. It's _awful_, yes, since it broke the
| panel design we had since the NeXT days, but for me the real
| annoyance is the way Apple progressively, inexorably broke
| desktop automation to a point where they now effectively
| painted themselves into a corner regarding having enough of a
| foundation to make Apple Intelligence useful
| (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/03/14/1830).
|
| That said, I expect things to get worse as they manage to
| converge their multiple platforms in exactly the wrong way (by
| dumbing them down across the board even as people keep hoping
| they'll make iPad OS more useful, etc.).
|
| But at least we still have Safari, Apple Silicon is pretty
| amazing and I can survive inside Terminal and vim. For now.
| karel-3d wrote:
| Ahh Apple Vision Pro.
|
| I entirely forgot it existed! They still sell that?
| nashashmi wrote:
| With appointment .
| lupinglade wrote:
| Not sure.
| karel-3d wrote:
| They apparently do sell it in my country with a price of a
| good used car. Nope.
| rcarmo wrote:
| There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard
| was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac
| user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs
| alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's
| software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has
| steadily decreased.
|
| It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped
| complaining about it and moved on (taoofmac.com, my blog, was
| started when I wrote a few very popular switcher guides, and even
| though I kept using the same domain name I see myself as a UNIX
| guy, not "just" a Mac user).
|
| For me, Spotlight is no longer (anywhere) near as useful to find
| files (and sometimes forgets app and shortcut names it found
| perfectly fine 5 minutes ago), and there is no longer any way to
| effectively prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet
| garbage).
|
| Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to be
| honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I
| consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever
| match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that is
| _just a computer_).
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage).
|
| Settings -> Spotlight -> Websites, UNCHECK
| rcarmo wrote:
| Does not work. I happen to know a fair bit about mdutil and
| the like and confirmed that does exactly nothing for my
| particular issue. A full Spotlight index reset works
| temporarily, but after a while it just conks out again.
|
| Also, I vaguely remember there being a way to _order_
| results, not just disable them.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Also, I vaguely remember there being a way to _order_
| results, not just disable them._
|
| Good memory! Apple removed this feature in El Capitan.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I'm ancient by today's AI standards :)
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I have a vaguely related, kind of interesting story related
| to search indexes, but on windows instead of mac.
|
| My C drive was was super full for some reason I couldn't
| understand, and Explorer couldn't tell me where the data
| was. There was about 100GB just unaccounted for.
|
| I don't even use the search index.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Yea this has been happening on all of my family's MacBooks.
| Spotlight indexing just hammers the CPU, and also seems to
| be doing nothing at all.
| rcarmo wrote:
| It seems to churn the index. I have no other explanation
| for its behavior. And of course filing Feedback in
| Apple's tools doesn't help.
| AHTERIX5000 wrote:
| Spotlight straight up broke on both of my Macs after Sequoia.
| It can't even find exact matches in many directories marked for
| indexing and re-indexing did nothing. Just searching for apps
| under Applications doesn't seem to find all apps.
| przemub wrote:
| I've had so many issues with it as well! To the absurd level
| where I could not search for settings in the Settings app...
| People all over the net have had all kinds of issues and
| there's never been any help other than ,,oh go and reindex".
| adriand wrote:
| Just yesterday I was trying to find a file in Finder, using
| the search, and it could not find it even though I was just
| one directory up from the directory it was sitting in. It
| made no sense to me at all. Reading these stories, it's
| clicking for me.
| prawn wrote:
| I gave up on it because of this and installed Raycast which
| seems a lot more reliable. I used Spotlight effectively as
| my launcher for apps/settings, and have the Dock completely
| hidden and Spotlight set to hide everything else. But when
| it can't even do that consistently, I have no idea how!
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Just adding a "me too" here, Spotlight used to be
| incredible. Now it's basically only good if you wait 5-10
| seconds... sometimes.
| cflewis wrote:
| iOS has this problem as well. You search for a setting in
| the Settings app. It'll say "doesn't exist" (or whatever)
| while it's looking for something extremely obvious (like
| "software update") instead of just showing a processing
| icon.
|
| Then when it does show the results, they're usually in some
| terribly unhelpful order. It took me ages to try and go
| through the CUJ of "this app isn't sending me notifications
| because I turned them off now I want them back on"
| djhn wrote:
| It's a relief to hear this is common. I thought this was
| user error or a consequence of frequently filling up the
| internal SSD thus nuking the index.
| anon7000 wrote:
| The nice thing is that there are several apps which replace
| it and do a lot more at the same time. (Like LaunchBar,
| Raycast, Alfred)
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Spotlight seemed to go from great to unusable in 5 years
| icsrutil wrote:
| 8 years mac user here, never use Spotlight, it's a trash.
| r5Khe wrote:
| I've been using Macs since Mac OS 9, and Snow Leopard was
| indeed very good. It remains my favorite version of Mac OS. I
| actually think it was Snow Leopard that started the rush of
| developers to Mac as _the_ platform to use.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| People don't want animojis, and they don't want other trite
| new features that only seem to exist because Apple feels it
| needs to demo something new every year.
|
| What they want is something that _just works_ without
| annoyances, distractions, failures, or complications.
|
| Give them that and they'll break down the doors trying to get
| their hands on it, because it's so far from how most tech
| works today.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Something that just works and is stable is bad business for
| companies these days.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Why would it be bad business for Apple? Their business
| model is based on selling a holistic ecosystem. They
| don't have any need to chase new features and there
| steady stream of high margin hardware revenue is at
| stake.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > Their business model is based on selling a holistic
| ecosystem
|
| Yeah and they succeeded in that so now it's about selling
| subscriptions on top of that.
| secstate wrote:
| Animojis really feel like peak corporate board asking,
| "What do the kids like these days?" and dumping that shit
| into the world. Honestly ... AVERAGE age of the Apple board
| is 68!! This is a company that's reached some sort of
| corporate red giant stage where it's influence is massive
| but it's ability to grow is over and it's only real purpose
| is to generate heavy metals and seed them throughout the
| rest of the universe after it's eventual explosive death.
| airstrike wrote:
| To be fair, I'd wager the average of nearly all Fortune
| 500 companies boards hovers around the 65 mark
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to
| be honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I
| consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever
| match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that
| is _just a computer_).
|
| I'm there as well. I've been really enjoying desktop Linux
| lately, but I can't go back to a non-Apple laptop at this
| point. There's just nothing else on the market that comes
| close, they all make some tradeoff I'm not willing to make -
| either screen, speakers, keyboard, heat/battery life/fan noise,
| touchpad, etc. Apple is the only one that has the entire
| package.
|
| There's Asahi, but no thunderbolt yet and I'm not sure the
| future of that project with the lead burning out and quitting.
| I just want an Apple Silicon-esque laptop, no trade offs on
| components, that runs Linux, and there's no OEM out there
| that's offering that experience.
|
| So, until that happens I'm staying on mac, and even with
| declining quality, it's not all that bad compared to the
| alternatives yet. I've learned to mostly work around/ignore the
| odd bugs.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I have some hope that Framework and AMD can fix some of those
| issues. Would love to try out their new desktop (because it's
| a simpler, more tightly integrated thing) and replace my Mac
| mini -- then wait for Linux power management to improve.
| nextos wrote:
| Linux power management is pretty good. The problem is that
| defaults favor desktop and server performance. On a MacBook
| Air 11, my custom Linux setup and Mac OS had the same
| battery autonomy, despite Safari being much more energy
| efficient.
|
| The real problem is that, just like the grandparent post
| pointed out, Apple's software quality has been declining.
| The Tiger to Snow Leopard epoch was incredible. Apps were
| simple, skeumorphic, and robust.
|
| Right now, the whole system feels a lot less coherent and
| robustness has declined. IMHO, there are not so many extra
| features worth adding. They should focus on making all
| software robust and secure. Robustness should come from
| better languages that are safe by construction. Apple can
| afford to invest on this due to their vertical integration.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| What's the actual argument that will credibly convince
| the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the
| list of priorities?
|
| Because right now it's clearly so far down, beneath
| dozens of other priorities, that expecting it to just
| happen one day seems futile.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| It's all their OS software. The Messages app on 18.3 will
| just... not open the menu to send a photo attachment
| about ~10% of the time now...
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Ya and it's something in maybe the top 3 of most used
| user actions. Really indefensible
| what wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the touch target only covers the text
| label. Tap anywhere other than the text labels and it
| does nothing but close the menu. Really bizarre.
| nextos wrote:
| IMHO, Mac OS X contributed decisively towards making
| Apple cool, which was followed by lots of boutique apps
| and the success of iOS. Loosing that critical mass of
| developers, even if it's a tiny userbase, would worry me
| if I was a top leader of Apple.
| yyyk wrote:
| Apple has had a contemptuous attitude towards developers
| since.. the App Store? when the iPhone was out? The last
| two decades? They don't seem to care about this.
| yunwal wrote:
| And that's a huge part of the reason why the Vision Pro
| will never take off.
| greener_grass wrote:
| I disagree - if the Vision Pro had some strong use-cases
| then developers would hold their nose and make apps for
| it. The platforms that get apps are the ones where
| businesses see value in delivering for them. Of course
| businesses prefer it when making apps is easier (read:
| cheaper) but this is not a primary driver.
| ben_w wrote:
| I think the potential high-return use-cases for VR and AR
| are (1) games, (2) telepresence robot control, (3) smart
| assistants that label (a) people and (b) stuff in front
| of you.
|
| Unfortunately:
|
| 1) AVP is about 10x too pricy for games.
|
| 2) It's not clear if it can beat even the cheapest
| headsets for anything _important_ for telepresence
| (higher resolution isn 't always important, but can be
| sometimes).
|
| Irregardless, you need the associated telepresence robot,
| and despite the obvious name, the closest Apple gets to
| iRobot is if someone bought a vaccum cleaner because
| Apple doesn't even have the trademark.
|
| 3) (a) is creepy, and modern AI assistants are the SOTA
| for (b) and yet still only "neat" rather than actually
| achieving the AR vision since at least Microsoft's
| Hololens, and because AI assistants are free apps on your
| phone, they can't justify a EUR4k headset -- someone
| would need a fantastic proprieraty AI breakthrough to
| justify it.
| ben_w wrote:
| App Store was a big improvement for developers when it
| was new, relative to the alternatives.
|
| The things it does may not seem important today, but back
| then even just my bandwidth costs were a significant
| percentage of my shareware revenue.
|
| ObjC with manual reference counting wasn't much fun
| either; while we can blame Apple for choosing ObjC in the
| first place, they definitely improved things.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Apple was incentivized to deliver a polished App Store DX
| when it first released, because it meant apps which meant
| iPhone sales.
|
| Now that the platform is cemented, they don't have an
| incentive to cater to developers.
| bolognafairy wrote:
| This is a ret-con. If you - as a user - were
| philosophically and inherently against the App Store,
| then it may seem that way, I guess?
|
| The reality is that there was a long period of time where
| Apple built up lots of goodwill with a developer
| ecosystem that exceeded by many orders of magnitude the
| pre-iPhone OS X indie Mac developer scene.
|
| There were many, many developers that hadn't even touched
| a Mac before the iPhone came out, and were happy with
| Apple, and now are certainly not.
| yyyk wrote:
| >This is a ret-con...
|
| Another way to see it is that people who programmed for
| Mac OS already had reasons to be annoyed by Apple (e.g.
| 64bit Carbon). The iPhone let it get new people, who
| eventually found out why the pre-iPhone scene felt that
| way.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| They stopped caring about developers when they dropped
| the price of the developer program and no longer gave you
| a T-shirt for being one.
| syeare wrote:
| The actual argument would be people voting with their
| wallets and moving away from the Apple ecosystem, but
| this something impossible at least in the USA due to
| these bullshit "blue bubbles"
| briandear wrote:
| How do blue bubbles make any difference?
| api wrote:
| For most of the people here they don't. In popular
| culture and especially among teens and non-technical
| twenty-somethings there's this absurd "eww green text!"
| thing. A blue bubble is a status symbol for some reason,
| even though there's lots of Android phones that cost as
| much as iPhones.
| whstl wrote:
| At this point this is not an argument anymore, it's just
| a thought terminating cliche.
|
| Expecting users to change their daily habits in order to
| marginally improve the operating system of a trillion
| dollar company feels naive and a bit disrespectful to
| people who actually use these machines for work.
|
| Even developers... the vast majority of developers
| ignored Apple for decades (and Apple was also hostile)
| and it managed to grow despite that.
|
| Might as well ask people to contribute to Gnome or
| whatever so in the future everyone can go somewhere
| better. Feels way more feasible.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| But the opposite is assuming that Apple has a
| "responsibility" towards its existing users and has to
| acknowledge their expectations from them.
|
| A sentiment which famously led Steve Jobs to respond that
| he doesn't understand this, because "people pay us to
| make that decision for them" and "If people like our
| products they will buy them; if they don't, they won't"
| [0]
|
| So according to Steve Jobs himself, the only Apple-
| acknowledged way to disagree with Apple is to NOT buy
| their products, and by extend into the services-world of
| today it means STOP USING their products.
|
| Now Steve Jobs doesn't officially run this company
| anymore, but I don't see any indication that this
| philosophy has changed in any way.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=772s
| whstl wrote:
| I don't think that's the opposite. The opposite is
| admitting that people have more than one reason to choose
| computers, and "voting with your wallet" only works for
| easily replaceable items, like groceries, clothing, etc.
|
| Most people are not going to migrate to Android, Windows,
| Linux or whatever else just to make macOS marginally
| better.
|
| And it's fine: marginal quality improvements of a product
| are not the "responsibility" of consumers.
| bolognafairy wrote:
| This is absurd. You quite clearly don't experience "blue
| bubble" envy yourself, because you've so obviously
| corrupted the sentiment, and argument.
|
| Nobody is saying "gosh, macOS is so damned unstable, but
| I've gotta use it, because...blue bubbles on my iPhone?
|
| You've just read some story about a company you already
| hate and are parroting it.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I don't think you're taking their argument in good faith.
| At least my read on what's being said here is that the
| psyops lock-in effects that Apple uses are too strong.
|
| It's not just "blue bubbles," but "blue bubbles" seems
| like a good shorthand to me. It's also things like Hand-
| off, or Universal Control, or getting Messages on both
| iPhone and Mac seamlessly, or being on the same WiFi
| network allowing your iPhone/Watch to work as a tv remote
| for the Apple TV even if you're just visiting a friend.
| Features that any platform can and does enable, but that
| do to Apples vertical can work seamlessly out of the box,
| across all the product lines, while securing network
| access in the ways most users will want, creating a
| continuous buy-in loop wherein the more Apple products
| you buy, the more incentive there is to buy exclusively
| Apple.
|
| And it's a collective "you." If your entire family uses
| exclusively Apple products, then you'll be the only
| person who can't easily use eg the Apple TV in the living
| room, or the person "messing up" the group chats with
| "User reacted with Emoji Heart to [3 paragraph text
| message]," or the one trying to decide between competing
| network KVM software platforms so that you can use your
| tablet when your 12-yo can just set their tablet next to
| their laptop and get a second screen without any setup.
| Nevermind that these are all social engineering
| techniques that only exist BECAUSE Apple chose not to
| play nice with others, they still socially reinforce a
| deeper commitment to Apple products with each additional
| Apple product in the ecosystem.
|
| I say this as someone "stuck in the blue bubble" with
| eyes open about what's going on. I'll keep picking Apple
| as long as they're a hardware-oriented company, because
| their incentives are best aligned with mine for the
| consumer features they are delivering (for now): consumer
| integration that sells hardware. It's insidious in its
| own way, but not like "hardware that sells eyeballs"
| (Google/Meta) or "business integration that sells
| compliance" (Microsoft).
| whstl wrote:
| Apple is addicted to growth. It is as big as it should
| be, but it acts like an early stage startup always trying
| to build some new flashy thing to attract the next
| customer.
| bolognafairy wrote:
| Okay, if you are so confident in your convictions,
| convince enough Apple shareholders of this.
| whstl wrote:
| Why should I? That's not my job.
| tesch1 wrote:
| b- was probably hinting that the confidence of your
| conviction may be unsupportable?
| whstl wrote:
| It's also not my job to prove my conviction to aggressive
| internet people.
|
| Regardless: that kind of message doesn't feel like HN-
| worthy productive discussion.
| andrepd wrote:
| It's not Apple, it's capitalism. "Unlimited growth is the
| ideology of the cancer cell", yet for Apple (or any
| corporation), it's not good enough to sell 100,000,000
| phones. Next year you must sell 105,000,000. And the year
| after 112,000,000 (not even 110 or your growth is
| stagnating).
|
| So you get rid of removable batteries so customers have
| to toss their phones away more often, you gimp other
| feature, you spend more money on advertising _than you
| did actually developing the product_ (read this bit
| several times until it sinks in how crazy it is, yet that
| 's how we are with every major phone, every major movie,
| etc), and so on.
| genewitch wrote:
| In 2016 RedLetterMedia did a breakdown of the movies that
| year, like top and bottom ten grossing movies. They
| stated that the advertising budget was the same as the
| production budget, unless they had knowledge of a
| different number.
|
| I don't doubt that after 2020 the advertising budgets far
| outstripped the production budgets - multiple times; I am
| curious if that trend continues now, now that production
| isn't hamstrung by covid restrictions.
| api wrote:
| Do you want to retire?
|
| Capitalism works this way because its customers, the
| investors, want it to work this way, because growth is
| how you get compound interest. Investors include anyone
| with an interest bearing bank deposit, a 401k, stocks,
| bonds, etc.
|
| No growth means it would no longer be possible for an
| investment to appreciate.
|
| I think of a similar thing when I see people complaining
| about how companies don't want to pay good wages. When
| you go shopping do you buy the $10 product or the $5
| essentially equivalent alternative? Most people will buy
| the $5 one. If you do that, you're putting downward
| pressure on wages.
|
| It's in _your_ (purely economic) best interest for _your_
| wages to be high but everyone else 's to be low. That's
| because when you're a worker you are a seller of labor,
| while when you're a customer you are an (indirect) buyer
| of labor.
|
| Everything in economics is like this. Everything is a
| paradox. Everything is a feedback loop. Every transaction
| has two parties, and in some cases you are both parties
| depending on what "hat" you are wearing at the moment.
| HFguy wrote:
| Growth isn't necessary for high returns on equity. And it
| isn't necessary for the investment to provide a return.
|
| Equity returns ultimately come from risk premiums. (Which
| are small now in US equities BTW).
|
| I'm invested in a microcap private equity fund that has
| returned >20-25% for years. They have high returns
| because they buy firms at 3-4x cashflow. You will get the
| high returns even with no growth. And with no increase in
| valuation. The returns are a function of an illiquidity
| premium.
|
| With Apple explicitly, growth is expected given the
| valuation level. If it doesn't grow, the share price will
| decline. So yes, in their case, firm is certainly under
| pressure to grow.
|
| I also don't agree with your "best interest for wages to
| be high and everyone else's lower". That is one aspect.
| It is more complicated. Consider Baumol Effect for
| starters.
| api wrote:
| I'm talking about macroeconomics, not micro. Risk premium
| means there is risk; not everyone gets a return at all.
| The entire society, as a whole, cannot experience
| consistent returns unless there is macroeconomic growth.
| If the pie is not getting bigger, someone has to be
| losing for someone else to gain.
|
| Things like retirement, 401ks, etc., are society-wide
| institutions subject to macroeconomic rules.
| butlike wrote:
| I buy the $10 one because the margin has to come from
| somewhere. 9/10, the more expensive product is better.
| casey2 wrote:
| I'm sure everyone has seen this 100 times already but it
| really fits given modern advertising practice of every
| major company, especially in designing products to fit
| advertising plans.
|
| There are also entire "industries" designed to shield
| people who want to find quality content from big 'A'
| advertising.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGKsbt5wii0 For context
| John Sculley said "Apple was the marketing company of the
| decade" in the 80s and Kicked Jobs out of Apple
| whstl wrote:
| I love how he uses the word "craftsmanship", something
| that he understood quite well (considering how close he
| was working with people like Bill Atkinson, Andy
| Hertzfeld, Burrell Smith, etc).
|
| Today engineers have to put up a fight to do anything
| resembling craftsmanship.
| troupo wrote:
| > What's the actual argument that will credibly convince
| the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the
| list of priorities?
|
| That their own products depend on it because they
| developer their products in Mac. And that the
| professional people they pretend they cater to depend on
| Macs, and steadily move away.
| latexr wrote:
| > What's the actual argument that will credibly convince
| the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the
| list of priorities?
|
| Unrelenting bad press. People talking about nothing else
| but the decline of their software quality. We can already
| see that with the recent debacle which caused executive
| shuffling at the top of the company.
| rollcat wrote:
| That shuffling was caused by Apple utterly failing to
| deliver a major feature, that was a key selling point for
| the latest generation of their hardware.
|
| "Bad press" for their declining software quality is like
| people complaining there's no iPhone mini/SE anymore.
| Apple just doesn't give a fuck. They've joined the rest
| of the flock at chasing fads and quarterly bottom lines.
| whompyjaw wrote:
| What was the major feature? The complete uselessness of
| "AI" on macOS? I updated and enabled all the AI features
| and I would ask Siri from my M1 and it failed every time.
| Would just continuously try with its annoying ping sound
| and never work. Blew my mind that they let this out.
| rollcat wrote:
| Yeah I was talking about the "AI". It's such an utter
| failure that even Gruber has been calling it out.
|
| It was already the same story with AirPower (the wireless
| charging mat). They've pre-announced it, even tried to
| upsell it by advertising it on the AirPods packaging. It
| just turned out physics is ruthless.
|
| TBH I've been increasingly sceptical about voice
| assistants in the "pre-AI" era. I sold my HomePods and
| unsubscribed from Apple Music because Siri couldn't even
| find things in my library.
| ben_w wrote:
| > I sold my HomePods and unsubscribed from Apple Music
| because Siri couldn't even find things in my library.
|
| I have almost the opposite problem this year. I tell the
| HomePod to turn the office lights on, it _sometimes_
| interprets this as a request to play music even though my
| library is actually empty, and the response is therefore
| to tell me that _rather than turn on the lights_.
|
| Back in the pandemic, same problem with Alexa. Except it
| was in the kichen, so it said (the German equivalent of)
| "I can't find 'Kitchen' in your Spotify playlist" even
| though we didn't even have Spotify.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The decreasing effectiveness of machine-local search is
| just developers fucking up integrations and indexing.
|
| This is a solved problem since ~1970 -- they're just not
| spending enough time on it.
| p_ing wrote:
| A few months ago, for quite a few years, Siri (in the
| car) would respond correctly to "Play playlist <playlist
| name>". Now it interprets that as of about two months ago
| that it should play some songs of the genre (I have a
| playlist named "modern").
|
| No idea what changed, but it sucks.
| butlike wrote:
| Probably nothing as it seems the major push is to get
| iPad OS and macOS in parity (and I assume to retire macOS
| completely)
| jajuuka wrote:
| I think the best argument is to remind Apple that they
| aren't selling the OS anymore, so they don't need a new
| version every year. And that macOS features is not what
| is pushing Mac sales. People aren't buying the M series
| machines because of the new macOS version, they are
| buying it because of the hardware. The M series chips are
| impressive and provide some great benefits that you can't
| get elsewhere.
|
| And that hardware needs to be coupled with solid software
| to hook and keep people on this computer. So they can
| take more time to create more compelling upgrades and
| sand off more edges.
|
| I think they need to desync all their OS's and focus on
| providing better releases. There really is no benefit to
| spending the day updating your Mac, phone, tablet,
| appletv, and HomePod. Especially when there are no good
| reasons to update. I feel like Apple became far to
| addicting to habit and routine that it's become more
| important to keep that than deliver product. Apple
| Intelligence is a good example of that.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's
| _ir...
| api wrote:
| The iron law of bureaucracy happens because humans have a
| finite amount of time to spend doing things. Those
| dedicated to bureaucratic politics spend their time doing
| that, so they excel at that, while those dedicated to
| doing the work have no time for bureaucratic politics.
|
| It's related to why companies with great marketing and
| fund raising but mediocre or off-the-shelf technology
| often win over companies with deeper and better tech
| that's really innovative. Innovation and polishing takes
| work that subtracts from the time available for fund
| raising and marketing.
| gzer0 wrote:
| Great insight--thanks for sharing. It strikes me that
| bureaucracy is inherently self-perpetuating- once
| established, it rewards compliance over creativity,
| steadily shifting the culture until innovation becomes
| the exception rather than the rule.
|
| Perhaps the real challenge isn't balancing innovation and
| marketing--it's creating a culture that genuinely rewards
| bold ideas and meaningful risk-taking.
| hiatus wrote:
| It seems most organizations naturally become more risk-
| averse as they age and grow since the business becomes
| more well-defined over time and there is more to lose
| from risky ventures. The culture has to reward meaningful
| risk-taking even when that risk-taking results in a loss,
| which can cause issues when people see the guy who lost a
| bunch of money getting a bonus for trying (not to mention
| the perverse incentives it may create).
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _[Bureaucracy] rewards compliance over creativity_
|
| Imho, this is the wrong takeaway from parent's point.
|
| Bureaucracy rewards many things that are actual work and
| take time. (Networking, politicking, min/max'ing OKRs)
|
| Creativity and innovation are rarely part of the list,
| because by definition they're less tangible and riskier.
|
| A couple effective methods I've seen to fight the overall
| trend are (a) instill a culture where people succeed but
| processes fail (if a risky bet fails then the process
| goes under the spotlight, not the person) and (b) tie
| rewards to results that are less min/maxable (10x vs
| +5%).
| NavinF wrote:
| > Linux power management is pretty good
|
| > defaults favor desktop and server performance
|
| Desktops are in S3 half the day consuming ~0 power.
| During use, electricity costs are so much lower than
| hardware costs that approximately nobody cares about or
| even measures the former. Servers have background tasks
| running at idle priority all day so the power consumption
| is effectively constant. Laptop and phone are the only
| platforms where the concept of "Linux power management"
| makes any sense.
| rollcat wrote:
| My Mac mini (M1) sips ~6W idle and is completely
| inaudible. It acts as a desktop whenever I need it to,
| and as a server 24/7. I only power up my NAS (WoL) for
| daily backups. The rest of the homelab is for fun and
| experiments, but mostly gone.
|
| "Idle" x86-64 SOHO servers still eat ~30W with carefully
| selected parts and when correctly tuned, >60W if you just
| put together random junk. "Cloud" works because of
| economies of scale. If there's a future where people own
| their stuff, minimising power draw is a key step.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| The low power draw is definitely not exclusive to Macs, a
| similar x86 mini PC with Linux will also draw around 5W
| idle.
| rollcat wrote:
| Does the mini PC go from zero to eleven though? Can I
| play BG3, Factorio, or Minecraft on the same hardware?
| Can I saturate a TB3 port? Transcode video? Run an LLM or
| text2img? Any of that while remaining responsive, having
| a video call?
|
| If I already need a powerful machine for a desktop, why
| would I need a second one just so it can stay up 24/7 to
| run Miniflux or Syncthing? Less is more.
| franzkappa wrote:
| > Robustness should come from better languages that are
| safe by construction.
|
| Nahh, robustness comes from the time you can spend
| refining the product not from some magic property of a
| language. That can help but just a bit. There was no
| Swift in Snow Leopard. Nor there is not much Rust in
| Linux (often none) and even less (none) in one of the
| most stable OS available, FreeBSD.
|
| They should just release a new version when the product
| is ready and not when the marketing says to release it.
| canpan wrote:
| Currently also looking at Framework+AMD.
|
| I want Mac hardware but Linux software. The other makers
| build quality is horrendous. Especially in the 13inch
| segment which is my favorite. Using a pretty old laptop
| because there is no replacement right now.
|
| The new Ryzen AI looks really interesting! Sadly there is
| no Framework shop for me to look at it and they not ship to
| Japan..
| adastra22 wrote:
| Asahi?
| canpan wrote:
| Yeah, I heard good things about it. I do a lot of gamey
| development stuff and x64 makes that easier. But Asahi
| seems to be catching up a lot recently, maybe I should
| look at it again!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799068
| MillironX wrote:
| Asahi is an adventure. I am in the same camp where I got
| a MacBook for the hardware, but am really a Linux guy. I
| got really excited when the fex/muvm patches came out for
| Asahi, and switched to mainly booting it for a couple
| months. 80% of what I needed to do worked, but that 20%
| still wasn't there. It was mainly the little things too:
|
| 1. Display output from USB-C didn't work 2. Couldn't run
| Zotero 3. Couldn't compile Java bioinformatics tools 4.
| Container architecture mismatches led to catastrophic and
| hard-to-diagnose bugs
|
| There were things that worked better, too (better task
| management apps, and working gamepad support come to
| mind). Overall, even though I only needed those things
| once or twice a week, the blockers added up and I erased
| my Asahi partition in the end.
|
| I really appreciate the strides the Asahi project has
| made (no really, it's tremendous!), and while I would
| love to say that Linux lets me be most productive,
| features like Rosetta2 are really integrated that much
| better into MacOS so that I can't help but feel that
| Asahi is getting the worst of both worlds right now. I'll
| probably try again this summer and see what has
| developed.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| The biggest issue Framework have right now is shipping. I
| can order a ThinkPad practically anywhere. No so with
| Framework - they are literally leaving money on the table
| from what I would assume their core segment: affluent
| tech savvy users trying to get off the planned
| obsolescence cycle.
| jpk wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow. Your complaint is that Framework
| only sells direct and not through retailers?
| capitol_ wrote:
| No, there is a lot of us who live in countries that
| framework doesn't ship to.
| xarope wrote:
| ditto (insert sad puppy face here)
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| And if you use a mail forwarder, they deny your warranty.
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| Tell me you're from the US without telling me you're from
| the US.
|
| Jokes aside, I had to wait years for Framework to finally
| allow shipping via a friend in Berlin. I think they ship
| to Sweden now--they seemed to have an unfortunate
| misunderstanding that they needed to produce a Swedish
| keyboard and translate their website before shipping
| here, which of course is poppycocks.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I am pretty sure that if you have reached the point that
| you are ordering a laptop online from a brand unknown to
| the general public, it means you are past the point you
| need the actual physical keys to match your keyboard
| layout on your OS settings. You could just have blank
| keys.
| sofixa wrote:
| > The other makers build quality is horrendous
|
| Out of curiosity, what are you basing this on? From
| having spoken to people who manage IT fleets, and being
| the person regular people ask for advice for what device
| to get, with the occasional exception (which Apple also
| had plenty of, cf. the butterfly keyboard), you get what
| you pay for. A 1k-1.5k+ Asus/Dell/HP/Lenovo will get you
| decent and good build quality.
|
| The cheapest $500 Acer won't.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| At work, our Windows devs use expensive XPSs that are
| complete crap failing constantly, both hardware and
| software. As someone who used Latitudes and Precisions
| when these were the reliable workhorses you seem to
| describe, the new stuff is just outrageous. (My personal
| laptop is still an e6440).
|
| My work machine is an M2 Pro MBP and except the shitty
| input HW (compared to the golden era of
| Thinkpads/Latitudes without chiclet keyboards) and MacOS
| being quite bad compared to Linux, it completely trounces
| the neighbouring Dells that constantly need repairs
| (mostly the USB-C ports and wireless cards failing).
| nottorp wrote:
| Maybe if you run a fleet that's statistically true. If
| you're a regular person you can have incredible bad luck
| with specific models.
|
| Got two "2k" Lenovos at 4 year intervals.
|
| The first one worked fine but that model was known to
| have a weak hinge. Had to replace it three times.
|
| The second one had a known problem that some units simply
| stop working with the internal display and the only
| solution is replacing the motherboard. My unit worked
| about a week for me. Seller refunded me instead of
| repairing because it was end of the line and they didn't
| have replacements.
|
| Got a "2k" Asus ordered now, let's see how that goes :)
|
| Compared to that, even the one emoji keyboard macbook pro
| that i had worked for years. The keyboard on those models
| _is_ defective by design and kept degrading, and I still
| think Cook should take his dried frog pills more
| regularly, but the rest of the laptop is still working.
| Not to mention my other, older apple laptops that are
| still just fine(tm), just obsolete.
| goosedragons wrote:
| I think price isn't the only thing. PC gaming/consumer
| laptops lean pretty heavily on price to performance
| ratios and I think they cut build quality to do it.
| Business lines like Thinkpad/EliteBook tend to offer
| worse performance dollar for dollar but they are built
| better.
| nottorp wrote:
| Yeah, I happen to need a laptop for that niche between
| gaming laptop and high end workstation.
|
| Where's a Thinkpad that can run Maya comfortably for a
| student? AFAIK they only have models with Quadros that
| have anything but student prices.
|
| So I'm stuck with "gaming" models.
|
| Besides my daughter likes the bling :) If only they could
| sell me something that doesn't die in a week...
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > A 1k-1.5k+ Asus/Dell/HP/Lenovo will get you decent and
| good build quality.
|
| And it still won't be on par with a $999 apple silicon
| air, or a MBP.
|
| I've deployed latitudes, precisions, and thinkpads. They
| all still make tradeoffs that you don't have to deal with
| on the mac.
|
| The X1 carbon is probably the "best" but, even with that
| - you are still getting a 1920x1200 screen unless you
| spend more than a MBP for the 2.8k display (which is
| still less than the 14" MBP, and costs more than an
| equivalent specced M4 pro). The trackpad is worse, the
| speakers are worse, battery life is worse, and they're
| loud under load.
|
| They're all fine for a fleet where the end user isn't the
| purchaser, which is why they exist, but for an individual
| that doesn't want tradeoffs (outside of the tradeoff of
| having to use macOS), there's no other option on the
| market that comes remotely close to the mac. For someone
| that wants Apple silicon MBP level hardware but wants to
| run Linux, there are zero options.
|
| The screen is the most egregious tradeoff though, the PC
| world is still adverse to HiDPI displays and even on high
| end models 1080p or 1200p is still the standard. I can
| excuse poor speakers, it is a laptop after all, if I
| really had to I can deal with fan noise, but I shouldn't
| have to spend more than a MBP to get a decent 120hz HiDPI
| screen with sufficient brightness and color accuracy.
| Daneel_ wrote:
| Thinkpad line from Lenovo. Amazing build quality, and you
| can order them with Linux.
|
| I have a P1 Gen 7 and it's fantastic. It feels premium,
| and it's thin, light, powerful, has good connectivity and
| 4K OLED touch screen. I'd take it over Mac hardware any
| day.
| regularfry wrote:
| Non-Thinkpad Lenovos have some standouts too. I'm running
| Debian Stable on an AMD Yoga Slim 7 from a couple of
| years ago and sure, it's not an Apple, but for the PS800
| or so I paid for it, it's a _really_ polished machine.
| Loads of ports, and it 's approximately performance-
| competitive with a Dell XPS13 from about the same time
| that cost literally twice as much.
|
| The one snag I ran into was that when it was new,
| supporting the power modes properly needed a mainline
| kernel rather than the distro default. But in the grand
| scheme of things that's relatively trivial.
|
| I have an M1 Macbook Pro from work and honestly I'm not
| tempted to get one for myself. I _am_ tempted by the M3
| and M4 beasts as AI machines, but as form factors go I 'm
| just not sold.
| mzmzmzm wrote:
| Aren't the only Thinkpads with displays in the 4k
| neighborhood 16-inches? The 14-inch Macbooks are
| 3024*1964 and have all been like that for a while. I
| don't know why the PC world (and Linux ready by
| extension) undervalues high DPI so much, because it makes
| it hard to consider going back.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| The screen keeps me on macbooks as well (well, and the
| touchpad, the speakers, and the lack of fan noise).
|
| But it is baffling how 1920x1080 (or 1200p) are still the
| "standard" elsewhere. If I want an X1 carbon, the best
| screen you can get at 14" right now is 2880x1800 (2.8k).
| Spec it with 32GB of RAM and it's clocking in at $2700,
| for a laptop that still has a worse trackpad, worse
| sound, and worse screen than a 14" MBP at $2399. And the
| Ultra7 in the thinkpad still doesn't beat the Mac, and
| it'll be loud with worse battery life.
|
| There truly is nothing else out there with the same
| experience as an Apple Silicon MBP or Air.
|
| So, my only options for the foreseeable future is wait
| for Asahi Linux, or suck it up and deal with macOS
| because at this rate I don't think there will ever be a
| laptop with the same quality (across all components) of
| the mac that can run Linux. The only one that came
| remotely close is the Surface Laptop 7 with the
| Snapdragon elite, but no Linux on that.
| dsego wrote:
| Consider a thinkpad or lenovog yoga pro. I don't think
| the difference is is that pronounced anymore, maybe it
| never was, but you always need to look at the premium
| segment. Somehow people end up comparing budget pc
| laptops and macbooks.
| onli wrote:
| What dou you mean with more integrated? It is a regular
| desktop PC with an apu (like is totally common for office
| PCs, just bigger) and soldered instead of upgradeable ram.
|
| It would be kind of funny, but also very sad, if Apple guys
| mistook the copying of apple's worst behaviour - producing
| throwaway devices - as a sign of quality. Though I think we
| are there for years now with phones, I wouldn't expect such
| thinking here.
| rcarmo wrote:
| It is fully designed around the limitations of that
| particular APU and makes the best of it, without being a
| generic motherboard.
| onli wrote:
| It is "integrated" in the way that the processor is an
| APU that has specific memory bus requirements. That's
| all. It is not an integrated software-hardware system
| that is finetuned, and that board is not any better than
| a a generic motherboard would be for a regular processor.
|
| My point is that this system is not integrated in the way
| apple fans usually define the word. I'd claim it is not
| integrated at all. It is a regular PC (but with soldered
| ram), which is exactly like framework announced it.
|
| There should be no need to sprinkle some apple marketing
| bs on that to make it attractive.
| bolognafairy wrote:
| I _really_ wish everyone would stop entertaining these
| borderline crackpot hypotheticals that all rely on the
| notion of "those damn Apple dummies not getting it!"
|
| It's absurd.
| onli wrote:
| Thanks, what a nice characterization.
|
| As someone who actually studied human computer
| interaction, and since I had to work with borderline
| unuseable macs multiple times in my career now, plus as
| someone seeing the utter failure of relatives in just
| using an iPhone (bought since "it is so much easier", now
| not even able to call from the car system since it is so
| buggy), the Apple popularity is absolutely a case where
| you have to look at external factors like social status.
| And if that translates to "the users are dummies" to you,
| then that's your interpretation. Plus yes, translating
| marketing/status concepts like a bogus "integrated"
| status absolutely is interesting, thus my intent to
| clarify whether that is really happening here (plus some
| criticism, admittedly).
|
| Probably not worth it going further into this though, it
| will only derail.
| _0xdd wrote:
| This really is exactly how I feel. There are too many
| tradeoffs to switch to non-Apple hardware at this point. I'd
| love to run Linux/BSD full-time, as many of the apps that I
| frequently use on my Mac are FOSS (e.g., R, PyCharm,
| darktable, etc.) I've been a Mac user since 2002, and Mac OS
| X served as my gateway to the Linux/BSD world (that, and a
| short-lived use of RH 6.2 on an old Dell laptop). IMO, macOS
| really does need a Tiger/Snow Leopard-esque release, but I'm
| not sure the vast majority of macOS users would even
| appreciate such a release.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Also while Apples software quality has definitely diminished
| over the years, Windows in the same period has utterly
| CRATERED. Like I get along fine with 11 for my gaming PC but
| with every single update one feature or another becomes
| notably broken.
| rcarmo wrote:
| One word: Bazzite.
| hyperhello wrote:
| That's not a word
| fsckboy wrote:
| "That's" is two words, contracted.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Wiki tells me:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazzite_Linux
| > Bazzite is named after the mineral, as Fedora Atomic
| Desktops once had a mineral naming scheme.
|
| More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazzite
| > Bazzite is a beryllium scandium cyclosilicate mineral
| with chemical formula Be3Sc2Si6O18.
| devilsdata wrote:
| Fedora atomic distributions in general are great. I
| recommend Bluefin-dx over Bazzite (they're both GNOME-
| based Fedora Atomic from the same group-- universal blue)
| for developers, because it's really easy to install the
| packages that Bazzite gives you, and it comes pre-
| installed with Docker.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I use Bluefin-dx as well, but pointed out Bazzite due to
| the mention of gaming. It's been rock solid for me for
| that use case.
| gonzalohm wrote:
| Is it comparable to gaming on Windows? Last time I tried
| the performance wasn't as good for some games (Deadlock)
| and it took ages to compile shader (it takes 30 seconds
| on Windows with the same specs)
| devilsdata wrote:
| It's comparable for nearly every game I've tried, and
| takes less than 30 seconds to compile Vulcan shaders on
| my rig.
|
| That said, I think anything with kernel-level anti-cheat
| either does not run or runs poorly.
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| I saw long shader compile times for at least one game
| last month, might have been Deadlock. I have a Radeon RX
| 7600 & Ryzen 9 7900X3D for reference.
|
| There is mention on the arch wiki about enabling multi-
| threaded compiles, but also I have read you perhaps dont
| even need to precompile them now and possibly get better
| performance as the JIT compiles via a different vulkan
| framework (VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library).
|
| I disabled pre-caching (which effects the compile too
| afaict) and never noticed any stuttering, possibly past
| some level of compute it's inconsequential. I also
| noticed that sometimes the launcher would say "pre-
| compiling" but actually be downloading the cache which
| was a lot slower on my internet.
|
| Certainly on my (very) old intel system with a GTX1060,
| Sekiro would try to recompile shaders _every_ launch,
| pegging my system at 99% and running for an hour. I just
| started skipping it and never really felt it was an
| issue, Sekiro still ran fine.
| devilsdata wrote:
| Yep Bazzite is great. But the difference between them is
| mostly just the packages installed. To me it's easier to
| install the gaming related packages from Bazzite onto
| Bluefin.
|
| I have a problem with Docker sockets while installing
| onto Bazzite, and didn't care enough to look further into
| it.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| I also recommend Bluefin-DX. Been running it for about a
| year now and love it.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Windows is indeed an execrable shitshow. Every aspect of it
| assaults the user with incompetence or outright hostility.
|
| First is the endless badgering to log in, LOG IN, LOGGGG
| INNNNN with an asinine Microsoft account. If you can
| tolerate that and actually get the OS running, you're
| wading through a wonderland of UI regressions and defects.
|
| The default hiding and disabling of options is infuriating.
| Try showing content from your Windows computer on a TV, for
| example. You plug your HDMI cable in, and you can select
| the TV as an external monitor in a reasonably logical
| manner. Great.
|
| But wait... the sound is still coming from the laptop
| speakers. So you go to Sound in the system settings. Click
| on the drop-down for available devices. NOPE; the only
| device is the laptop speakers.
|
| So you start hunting through "advanced settings" or some
| such BS. And buried in there you find the TV, detected all
| along, but DISABLED BY DEFAULT. WHY??? Not auto-selecting
| it for output is one thing, but why is it DISABLED and
| HIDDEN?
|
| This is the kind of shit I have to talk my parents through
| over the phone so they can watch their PBS subscription on
| their TV. The sheer stupidity of today's Windows UI isn't
| just annoying, but it's demoralizing to everyday people who
| blame THEMSELVES for not being "computer-savvy" or slow
| learners. NO; it's Microsoft's monumental design
| incompetence and user-hostile behavior.
|
| Microsoft doesn't get the relentless excoriation it
| deserves for its miserable user experience. There's no
| excuse for it.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Wow, it's almost like Linux in the late 1990s/early 2000s
| now!
| dsego wrote:
| I thought I was the only one having issues with HDMI
| sound, I usually unplug a few times before it switches
| the audio to the TV speakers.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I can't say I've ever had HDMI audio mystery-disabled
| when I try and use it, that's for sure a new one for me.
| That said the entire audio stack is an utter fucking
| _nightmare._ Selecting sound devices usually works,
| unless the game /software you're using either isn't set
| up to know about it, or isn't being told by Windows,
| either or. Then of course there's the fun game you play
| having two HDMI displays where Windows will constantly
| re-enable one you've disabled because _it doesn 't have
| any fucking speakers on it._
| pjmlp wrote:
| Might be, still I no longer feel like baby sitting Linux on
| laptops as I used to, yes I had another go at it just last
| year I know how well it works, and I will never pay the
| Apple tax outside assigned work laptops.
| bigpeopleareold wrote:
| My job gave me an expensive high-specced laptop with
| Windows on it. This is the first time I am stuck using
| Windows daily. It's W10. With Windows Defender and a bunch
| of windows, it starts to slowly become unusable. Today, it
| blue screened for me just fixing again (and again and
| again) the bluetooth headphones never gets automatically
| switched to when I turn them on. Forget about having Visual
| Studio open on it for an extended period of time.
|
| Meanwhile, my 7-year old laptop with Fedora on it I type
| this is wonderfully snappy and stable. I started to get
| tempted to actually switch back to a Mac just to get some
| predictability and stability, but I have avoided macs for
| years. (And - never having to deal with constant line
| ending issues)
|
| All I hear from other co-workers is how their perfectly
| specced laptops lag with Windows. It's freaking Stockholm
| Syndrome here!
| bigyabai wrote:
| Your loss. I haven't been able to tolerate the MacOS
| experience since Catalina, running GNOME with a Magic
| Trackpad has felt head-and-shoulders better for the past 3
| years at least. Apple Silicon is neat but was never an option
| for native development in my workflows anyways. The software
| matters more to me, and MacOS has been sliding down the
| subscription slopware slope for years now.
|
| I am perfectly happy to use last-gen hardware from Ebay if it
| runs an OS that isn't begging me to pay for subscriptions and
| "developer fees" annually. My dignity as a human is well
| worth it.
| miunau wrote:
| Why not start supporting Asahi financially, if you aren't
| already?
| queuebert wrote:
| As a former Mac user, I'm really happy with my System76 linux
| laptops. The only tradeoff is the terrible built-in speakers.
| My Lemur is lighter and has better battery life than my
| Macbook Air and has been bulletproof despite my ill
| treatment. Each of my Macs, however, have had various
| hardware failures or the famous keyboard recall on the
| horrible touchbar Macbook Pro. I also prefer matte screens to
| glossy, so that's a win for me, but ymmv.
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| The screen quality is why I didn't get a system76 laptop
| the last time I did a refresh a couple years ago.
| rofrol wrote:
| I have found this old comment:
|
| * Battery life is a lie, especially since it drains almost
| as much battery closed as it does open.
|
| ...
|
| Overall, I think I am probably going to switch back to a
| macbook after this, not being able to go a day without
| charging and your laptop always being on low battery is a
| bit anxiety inducing.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38206173
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| i used to run debian on an intel macbook air. regular debian.
| was pretty nice.
| bloppe wrote:
| The newer XPS 13 comes with snapdragon x elite now
| (Qualcomm's answer to Apple silicon). Curious if anybody here
| runs Linux on one of those
| toomim wrote:
| It's still waiting for good linux support.
| rcarmo wrote:
| That is highly unlikely to happen in the near future (say 2
| years).
| sensanaty wrote:
| My ideal laptop would be the macbook trackpad, monitor and
| battery life stuck inside any thinkpad. Or just anything non
| MacOS, even Windows, in the macbook. I despise MacOS with
| every fiber of my being, but the hardware is damned good.
| briandear wrote:
| Windows is far worse.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The reason that keeps me on Windows, is that you left out of
| your list gaming and 3D graphics on laptops.
|
| Metal isn't really on pair with Vulkan and DirectX in terms
| of relevance for graphics programming, the M chips aren't up
| to NVidia ecosystem, SYCL, the two major compute APIs for any
| kind of relevant GPGPU workloads, and thus don't really
| matter.
|
| And gaming, well, even though all major engines support
| Metal, there is a reason DirectX porting kit is now a thing.
|
| So why pay more for a lesser experience, and then there is
| the whole issue macOS doesn't have native support for
| containers, like Windows does (their own ones), and WSL is
| better integrated and easier to use than Virtualization
| Framework.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Gaming is pretty great on Linux now. I just finished a
| little Elden ring session and it still blows my mind that
| when I close the game my Linux desktop is there behind it.
| No more dual booting, hopefully will never need windows for
| anything ever again.
| pjmlp wrote:
| You mean translating Windows and DirectX APIs is great,
| there is hardly a Linux gaming ecosystem.
|
| Proton is the acknowledgment of Valve's failure to entice
| game studios, already targeting Vulkan/OpenGL ES/OpenSL
| on Android NDK, Switch (which has OpenGL 4.6/Vulkan
| support), or on PlayStation (Orbis OS being a FreeBSD
| fork) to target GNU/Linux.
|
| I rather have the real deal, not translations.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Strange take. Proton is an acknowledgment that the
| windows apis are the de facto for gaming. Not sure why
| the runtime matters. Some games ever run better. Not sure
| why that's not the "real deal" but whatever I'm glad
| you're happy with your spyware gaming OS.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not really, I rather play on the platform they were
| designed for in first place.
| nottorp wrote:
| Do you own a Playstation? :)
|
| If you're playing the likes of Fromsoft/Resident
| Evil/Kojima games on a PC, be it Windows or Linux, you're
| not playing on the platform those games were designed
| for.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The problem with your reasoning is that Windows/PC
| doesn't need to emulate Orbit OS and LibGNM, Sony also
| supports Direct X and Win32 directly on their engines.
| nottorp wrote:
| "supports" as in I see articles in the PC gaming press
| about technical problems with From/Kojima games a year
| after I've finished said games on console with zero
| issues.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Where is Windows Proton like for Playstation APIs?
|
| "Technical issues" has many meanings.
| nottorp wrote:
| The point is, "the platform those games were designed
| for" is the Playstation API for some titles. So you'll
| get the best experience on there.
|
| Unless you play benchmarks instead of games, and care
| about 8k/1200 fps of course.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The point is, the game uses the platfrom APIs on the
| target OS, and doesn't need to emulate API from 3rd party
| platforms.
| dijit wrote:
| As an actual dyed in the wool game developer.
|
| There's no such thing as "native", all the things you're
| talking about _are_ translation layers for hardware
| instructions themselves, and the overhead for doing
| software based translation is _significantly less_ than
| hardware accelerated virtual machines- and we as an
| industry love those.
|
| The reason for this is because the translations are very
| cache friendly and happen in userland, so the performance
| impact is negligible, and the scheduler on Windows is so
| poor compared to Linux ones that it's even common for
| games to perform better on Linux than on Windows.. Which
| is crazy when you consider the difference in quality of
| the GPU drivers.
|
| I understand that you want it to "just work", but that
| tends to be the experience anyway.
|
| You can do what you want, it's your life, but this is not
| a terribly good excuse. Valves "failure" is essentially
| rectified.
|
| I will add though, that it's actually Stadia that made
| linux gaming the most feasible, many game engines (all of
| the ones I worked on) were ported to Linux to run Stadia,
| those ports changed essential elements of the engine that
| would have been slow or difficult to translate; so when
| Proton came around quite a lot of heavy lifting had gone
| away. I only say this because Valve gets some credit for
| a _lot_ of work our Engine programmers did to make Linux
| viable.
| pjmlp wrote:
| So how many of those ported game engines are actually
| making a different on GNU/Linux gaming today?
|
| There is certainly such thing as native, one thing is the
| platform where the APIs were originally designed for and
| battled tested, and the other is other platform emulating
| / translating them, by reverse engineering their
| behaviours with various degrees of success.
|
| Valve's luck is that so far Microsoft/XBox Gaming has
| decided to close an eye on Proton, and it will run out
| when Microsoft decides it has gone long enough.
| dijit wrote:
| > So how many of those ported game engines are actually
| making a different on GNU/Linux gaming today?
|
| Not sure, Unreal Engine is pretty popular though and
| Snowdrop is increasingly common for Ubisoft titles.
|
| https://www.protondb.com/app/2842040
| https://www.protondb.com/app/2840770/
| https://www.protondb.com/app/365590
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yet most games don't make use of Unreal targeting
| capabilities of GNU/Linux, rather Proton.
| dijit wrote:
| Unreal can target Linux, sure, but not all of the plugins
| you might use will, nor any of your own plugins.
|
| Unreal is _almost_ worse because their first party tools
| (UGS, Horde) will not work on Linux, so you have to treat
| linux as a console, and honestly the market share isn 't
| there to justify it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which kind of validates the point of Valve's "success" in
| a Linux ecosystem.
| troupo wrote:
| > https://www.protondb.com/app/2842040
|
| Star Wars Outlaws
|
| Natively Supports: Windows only
|
| > https://www.protondb.com/app/2840770/
|
| Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
|
| Natively Supports: Windows only
|
| > https://www.protondb.com/app/365590
|
| Tom Clancy's The Division
|
| Natively Supports: Windows only
|
| ----
|
| You were saying?
| dijit wrote:
| I know, I worked on those games.
|
| Specifically, _I_ worked on _those_ games so I know what
| they natively support and how things transpired behind
| the scenes.
|
| Proton has absolutely no hope of working without the
| changes we made because of stadia, the code we wrote was
| deeply hooked into Windows and we made more generic
| variants of many things.
|
| The Division 1 PS4 release was significantly shimmed
| underneath compared to the win32 and xbox releases: this
| became much less true over time as porting the renderer
| to linux (specifically debian) made us genericise issues
| across the OS's and when Div2 shipped we had a lot more
| in common across the releases; we didn't rely on deep
| hooks into Microsoft APIs as much
| troupo wrote:
| > this became much less true over time as porting the
| renderer to linux (specifically debian)
|
| Strange how you ported the renderer to Debian, and yet
| you couldn't even find a link to a game that has a native
| Linux support.
|
| Was there ever a port?
|
| > Proton has absolutely no hope of working without the
| changes
|
| You keep saying this as the absolute truth, and yet at
| the time when Stadia launched Proton already had 5k
| working games under its belt.
|
| Strange how Stadia is this monumental achievement without
| which Linux gaming wouldn't happen according to you....
| and yet no one ever mentions Stadia ever contributing any
| code to any of the constituent parts of what makes Proton
| tick. Apart from the changes that engines supposedly made
| to work on a yet another game streaming platform.
| dijit wrote:
| I don't know how to say this without being unkind.
|
| There is a functioning version of The Division 1,
| Division 2, Avatar and Star Wars outlaws that run on
| Linux internally at Ubisoft.
|
| Nobody will release it because it can't be reasonably
| QA'd. (Stadia was also very hard to QA, but possible, as
| it was a stable target and development was essentially
| funded).
|
| I'm not sure what your problem is; I said - as clearly as
| I can - that architectural changes to the engine were
| neccessary for proton.
|
| I know this, for an absolute fact, because Proton was a
| topic when I worked on those games and it was not until
| Stadia (codename Yeti) was on the roadmap, and our
| rendering architect lost all his hair working on it -
| that Proton started to even function slightly.
|
| I'm not shilling for Stadia - there's nothing to shill
| for, it is dead.
|
| Get over yourself, if you don't like the truth then don't
| start going in on me because my reality does not match
| your fantasy. Sometimes corporations do things
| accidentally that push other things forward
| unintentionally.
|
| I just want to share my thanks to Stadia because _I know
| for a concrete fucking fact_ that at least some of the
| AAA games I worked on would not function at all on Linux
| without Stadias commercial interference.
| troupo wrote:
| > I'm not sure what your problem is
|
| All I'm saying is that "it's actually Stadia that made
| linux gaming the most feasible" statement is _at best_
| contentious because _in reality_ gaming on Linux was
| already made (more) feasible when Stadia had only just
| launched.
|
| _And_ Stadia used the same tech without ever giving back
| to Proton at all (atl least nothing I can quickly
| discover). So the absolute vast majority of work on
| Proton was done by Valve which you dismissed as "when
| Proton came around" (it came around before Stadia) and
| "quite a lot of heavy lifting had gone away" (Valve did
| most of the heavy lifting).
|
| That's the extent of my "problem".
|
| > at least some of the AAA games I worked on would not
| function at all on Linux without Stadias commercial
| interference.
|
| So, not "actually Stadia that made gaming feasible on
| Linux" but "because Stadia used all the same tech, and
| there were possible commercial incentives early on until
| Google completely dropped the ball, bigger studios also
| invested in compatibility with the tech stack"
| dijit wrote:
| You've taken a weird position here.
|
| Stadia did a lot to help by being a stable target and by
| being seen as commercially viable. Google also helped a
| lot to aid developers, not just financially.
|
| That they didn't contribute code _to proton_ doesn't
| factor at all, I just hate to see people not get their
| dues for their part in the prolification of Linux gaming-
| because I saw it first hand.
|
| You are labouring under the delusion that I've implied
| Proton did nothing, no, they levied a lot of existing
| technology and put in a lot of polish. They were _helped_
| by Stadia, by Wine, by DXVK and others.
|
| They didn't do it alone, that doesn't minimise their
| contribution, it contextualises them.
|
| Also: Stadia ports of games were native, they did not use
| proton- it was architecture changes of the games
| themselves that made proton work better- not Google
| making proton itself function better.
|
| That proton was running some games is a weird revisionist
| take, very few AAA games ran at all, those that did were
| super old and there was always some crazy weird bugs-
| proton got better but also AAA games coalesced into
| conforming to linux-y paradigms underneath better- so
| support got better much quicker than expected. You can
| even see this if you track the "gold" released games over
| years, some of the worst supported games for Proton are
| from 2015-16; before stadia but after game complexity
| started rocketing up with next game engines of the day.
|
| Hope that helps, because honestly this conversation is
| like talking to a brick wall.
| Yasuraka wrote:
| Speaking from experience, Helldivers 2 and Monster Hunter
| Wilds both ran better on Linux from day one before any
| special fixes and still do - I'm not sure what "original
| design and battled testing" is worth or good for if the
| underlying Kernel and/or OS is a mess.
| nottorp wrote:
| > and the scheduler on Windows is so poor compared to
| Linux ones that it's even common for games to perform
| better on Linux than on Windows..
|
| I play most of my games in a window and switch away a
| lot. A million years ago when I was still playing world
| of warcraft, the system overall was much more responsive
| on the same hardware with wow on wine on linux than with
| wow natively running on windows :)
|
| > it's actually Stadia that made linux gaming the most
| feasible
|
| Stadia was the most predatory gaming offering aside from
| IAP games, sorry. Buy your games again on top of the
| subscription? Lose them when Google cancels the service?
| No thanks.
|
| Nvidia's GeForce Now was a lot more honest. Pay for the
| GPU and streaming, access your owned games from Steam.
| I'm not using it any more so I don't know how honest they
| still are, but I did for like a year and it was fine(tm).
|
| The fact that Stadia advanced wine compatibility is
| great, but technical reasons aren't the only reasons that
| make a service useful to your customers.
| gessha wrote:
| OP is talking about Google (Stadia) throwing money at the
| problem and incentivizing game engine companies to better
| support Linux. They're not talking about pro or
| anticonsumer the tech was.
| nottorp wrote:
| I know and even agree with them. I'm also surprised that
| Stadia was useful for something...
| troupo wrote:
| Stadia's impact on gaming in general is next to zero. And
| given that the vast majority of gaming on Linux is
| happening via Proton, its impact on gaming on Linux is
| similarly next to zero.
| dijit wrote:
| What games have you made to justify this statement?
|
| I worked closely with productions using proprietary game
| engines, I feel qualified in stating that Stadia had an
| outsized impact on our development process in a way that
| helped proton succeed.
|
| That you don't see it as an end user, is exactly my
| point.
| troupo wrote:
| > What games have you made?
|
| You don't have to be a chef to judge what's coming out of
| the kitchen.
|
| What is the _objective_ impact of Stadia which at its
| height had a whopping 307 titles [1]? At the time of
| writing ProtonDB lists 6806 titles as "platinum, works
| perfectly out of the box" and 4839 games as "gold, works
| perfectly after tweaks". Steam Deck alone has almost 5x
| the number of games with "verified" status [2].
|
| What games are being made for Linux thanks to Stadia, and
| don't just target DirectX and run through Proton? How
| many Stadia games were ported to Linux thanks to Stadia?
|
| Also, to put things into perspective. Proton was launched
| in 2018. Stadia was launched in 2019.
|
| In 2019 there were already over 5000 games that worked on
| Proton. [3]
|
| In 2022 there already were more games with verified
| status for Steam Deck than there were games for Stadia,
| and 8 times more games verified to work by users [4].
| Stadia shutdown was announced half a year after the
| article at [4].
|
| Stadia had zero impact on gaming in general and on gaming
| on Linux in particular _as judged by the results and
| objective reality_. Even the games you showed as examples
| don 't support Linux, only target Windows, and are only
| playable on Linux through Proton [5]
|
| > I feel qualified in stating that Stadia had an outsized
| impact on our development process in a way that helped
| proton succeed.
|
| > That you don't see it as an end user, is exactly my
| point.
|
| It's strange to claim things like "when Proton came
| along" when Proton was there before Stadia and already
| had over 5k games working in the year when Stadia only
| just launched.
|
| It's strange to claim outsized impact on development
| process when there are no outcomes targeting anything
| even remotely close to Linux development, with studios
| targeting Windows as they have always done.
|
| It's strange to claim Stadia had outsized impact when
| none of the work translated into any games outside
| Stadia. When Stadia did not contribute any significant
| work to the tech that is running Proton. In 2022 they
| even started work on their own emulation layer that went
| nowhere and AFAIK never contributed to anything [6]
|
| It's strange to claim that "it's actually Stadia that
| made Linux gaming feasible" when there's literally no
| visible or measurable impact anywhere for any claim you
| make. Beyond "just trust me".
|
| [1] According to
| https://www.mobygames.com/platform/stadia/ According to
| wikipedia, at the time of shutting down it had 280 games,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stadia_games
|
| [2] https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
|
| [3] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2019/07/a-look-over-
| the-proton...
|
| [4] https://www.protondb.com/news/how-many-games-work-on-
| linux-a...
|
| [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43503018
|
| [6] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/03/google-talk-
| about-thei...
| dijit wrote:
| You are literally arguing that your ignorance is as valid
| as my experience. And you're arguing that you didn't see
| the impact; which was kinda my entire point - there was
| impact beyond what was visible that propelled Proton
| forward.
|
| You don't know how the sausage is made just because you
| ate a hotdog.
|
| Maybe you should consider things more carefully before
| making yourself look like an idiot on the internet and
| simultaneously raising my blood pressure.
| sph wrote:
| I'd rather use Linux and game with an imperfect
| translation layer, than put up with Windows.
|
| Proton is a lesser implementation of Windows API, sure,
| but Windows itself is a lesser implementation of an
| operating system for power users.
| boudin wrote:
| It's not really a failure. Linux distribution and diverse
| ecosystem brings a level of complexity. The only way to
| support it long term is to either having your team
| continuously update and release builds of the game to
| cater for that which is an impossible task to ask for a
| lot of studios.
|
| The initial approach of runtimes did help but it's still
| has its limitation.
|
| If now a studio just need to test their game under a
| runtime+proton the same way they would test a version of
| Windows to ensure it's working under Linux it's a win/win
| situation. Proton becomes the abstraction of the complex
| and diverse ecosystem of Linux which is both its strength
| and weakness.
|
| Another solution would have been everybody using the
| exact same distribution which would have been way worse
| in my opinion.
|
| And who knows, maybe one day Proton/Wine would be the
| Windows userland reference and Windows would just be an
| implementation of it :D
| pjmlp wrote:
| So it is not really a failure when the solution is to
| adopt Windows and Direct X translation API?
|
| I thought only Apple had a distortion field.
| nottorp wrote:
| Is it a failure when everyone writes javascript/html/css
| instead of doing native applications for non gaming?
|
| Most of HN seems to think using a web browser as a
| translation layer is a good idea, yet they complain when
| games use a translation layer.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, definitely, that is why now we have ChromeOS
| developers instead of Web developers.
| WD-42 wrote:
| You better have made this comment via a native windows
| hacker news desktop application.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I would gladly have used one, if it existed without being
| a web widget wrapper.
|
| I miss the days of native apps with Internet protocols,
| and USENET discussions.
| nottorp wrote:
| Hacker news is a web site, not an application.
|
| A web site makes for a crap application and the reverse.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| _Is it a failure when everyone writes javascript
| /html/css instead of doing native applications for non
| gaming?_
|
| Yes?
| troupo wrote:
| It's a complete failure across the board to create any
| compelling graphics APIs for desktop platforms (both
| Linux and Mac) beyond DirectX.
| octopoc wrote:
| That's not the goal though. The goal is to play games on
| Linux. If Valve's goal was to end up with a Linux-
| specific graphics api for most games that run on Linux
| then they provably would have tried to do so.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| When I was gaming on Linux, every game with a native
| version worked better using the Windows version in
| proton. I think the only exception was Factorio.
| mythz wrote:
| Gaming/WSL kept me on Windows for a lot of the last decade,
| however after Windows 10 became EOL'd and Windows started
| turning into ad/spyware I finally gave it up over a year
| ago after 25+ years on Windows Desktops.
|
| Anyway Linux is liberating, Fedora Desktop is great, no ads
| in the OS, a Software Store/Installer I actually like to
| use, curated by usefulness instead of scam Apps. All my
| Windows Steam Games I frequently use just worked, I have to
| login to X11 for 1 title (MK11), but everything else runs
| in the default Wayland desktop. Although I'll still check
| protondb.com before purchasing new games to make sure
| there'll be no issues. Thanks to Docker, JetBrains IDEs and
| most Daily Apps I use are cross-platform Desktop Web Apps
| (e.g. VS Code, Discord, Obsidian, etc) I was able to run
| everything I wanted to.
|
| The command-line is also super charged in Linux starting
| with a GPU-accelerated Gnome terminal/ptyxis and Ghostty
| running Oh My Zsh that's enhanced with productivity tools
| like fzf, eza, bat, zoxide and starship. There's also
| awesome tools like lazydocker, lazygit, btop and neovim
| pushing the limits of what's possible in a terminal UI and
| distrobox which lets me easily run Ubuntu VMs to install
| experimental software without impacting my Fedora Desktop.
|
| Image editors is the one area still lacking in Linux. On
| Windows I used Affinity Designer/Photo and Paint.NET for
| quick edits. On macOS I use Affinity & Pixelmator. On Linux
| we have to chose between Pinta (Paint.NET port), Krita and
| GIMP which are weaker and less intuitive alternatives. But
| with the new major release of GIMP 3 and having just
| discovered photopea.com things are starting to look up.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I hardly find anything interesting about command-line, I
| grew up in a time where the command line was the only way
| to interact with home computers, it fails on me the
| interest on staying stuck in up to early 1980's computing
| model.
|
| Xerox PARC is the future many of us want to be in, not
| PDP-11 clones.
| mythz wrote:
| Weird flex, most commands, utilities, server software and
| remote tools are going to be run are going to be from the
| command-line. All our System Administration of remote
| servers uses the command-line as well since exclusively
| deploying to Linux for 10+ years.
|
| Sure you can happily avoid the command-line with a Linux
| Desktop and GUI Apps, although as a developer I don't see
| how I could avoid using the terminal. Even on Windows I
| was using WSL a lot, it's just uncanny valley and slow
| compared to a real Linux terminal.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Sadly, because many of the authors live stuck in UNIX cli
| model instead of Xerox PARC REPL approach.
|
| It is like praising Ratatui for what Turbo Vision,
| Clipper and curses were doing in 1990's, if I wanted that
| I would kept using Xenix and MS-DOS.
| writebetterc wrote:
| REPL-ify your command line then? There's nothing that
| says you have to be stuck on bash for your command line
| needs. https://www.nushell.sh/
| pjmlp wrote:
| Already doing that a much as possible.
| sunshowers wrote:
| There are _huge_ interoperability advantages to CLI and
| TUI tools. Composing them, using script(1) on them, etc,
| are much simpler than the same for GUI tools. They are
| also much easier to rapidly iterate on.
|
| GUIs are very useful but they are not clearly better (or
| worse) than CLIs.
| troupo wrote:
| > Weird flex, most commands, utilities, server software
| and remote tools are going to be run are going to be from
| the command-line.
|
| It's not a weird flex. Weird flex is this: "The command-
| line is also super charged in Linux starting with a GPU-
| accelerated Gnome terminal/ptyxis and Ghostty running Oh
| My Zsh" and then listing a bunch of obscure personal
| preference tools that follow trends du jour.
| mythz wrote:
| That's not a flex, it requires no skill to install
| software, they're just some of the better tools you can
| install to boost productivity in Linux terminals. I doubt
| they're obscure to any Linux CLI user who spent time on
| improving the default OOB UX of bash terminals.
|
| And you just alias them, so you can keep using the core
| utility names to use them.
| WD-42 wrote:
| None of those tools are obscure, they might just seem
| like it from the perspective of mouse dependent vscode
| users.
| troupo wrote:
| > Metal isn't really on pair with Vulkan and DirectX in
| terms of relevance for graphics programming
|
| As if Vulkan had relevance to graphics programming.
|
| > and WSL is better integrated and easier to use than
| Virtualization Framework.
|
| you don't need WSL on MacOS because, well, MacOS is already
| a *nix environment.
| regularfry wrote:
| > you don't need WSL on MacOS because, well, MacOS is
| already a *nix environment.
|
| Right up until you need Linux syscalls. If you're doing
| anything with containers it's an annoyance.
| pjmlp wrote:
| > As if Vulkan had relevance to graphics programming.
|
| It surely has on 80% of a mobile platform, and on a small
| handset from this little japanese games company.
|
| > troupo 3 hours ago | parent | context | flag | on:
| Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
|
| > Metal isn't really on pair with Vulkan and DirectX in
| terms of relevance for graphics programming
|
| As if Vulkan had relevance to graphics programming.
|
| > you don't need WSL on MacOS because, well, MacOS is
| already a *nix environment.
|
| Agree if everything one wants out of it is classical UNIX
| experience, that breaks down when having to work with
| containers and kubernetes locally.
| troupo wrote:
| > It surely has on 80% of a mobile platform,
|
| And which platform brings in more money?
|
| > and on a small handset from this little japanese games
| company.
|
| And not on PS, not on XBox, not on PC (that is, no first-
| party support).
| jamespo wrote:
| Gaming on windows is fine, but there's no reason to use
| windows for anything else. Dual boot to linux for a better
| desktop and none of the crud that Windows 11 has in it.
| timeon wrote:
| I haven't been gaming since when there was huge gap between
| graphical possibilities and actual design (that is
| beginning of 3d era) - so I do not miss that. However I can
| see the decline in macOS, like pushing for 'apple
| intelligence', more and more restricting gatekeeper, iOS-
| ification of desktop (ie.: mentioned system settings),
| constant connections to AWS, etc.
|
| But since I'm not gaming I cannot imagine going back to
| Windows. On the other hand I'm quite enjoying Linux...
|
| > So why pay more for a lesser experience
|
| ...however, with few exceptions, I haven't used mouse in
| decade... and I haven't found anything like MBP's touchpad
| yet. Maybe I just need to do better research.
| edwinjones wrote:
| Not quite what you're after but if you want a fanless option
| that runs full linux and doesn't use much battery, the new
| argon 40 CM5 laptop that's being built looks like it could be
| viable as long as you'd be happy with that much of a drop in
| performance and a few pi based niggles (No USB C video, only
| one pcie lane for the SSD, etc.)
|
| https://liliputing.com/argon40-is-making-a-raspberry-pi-
| cm5-...
| jlundberg wrote:
| I would highly recommend giving a virtualized arm Linux
| installation a go, using the built in Apple frameworks who
| are blazingly fast.
|
| Have a look at this sample code: https://developer.apple.com/
| documentation/virtualization/cre...
| ohgr wrote:
| Yeah I stopped using spotlight a few years ago. I didn't really
| notice that I stopped using it until recently. It just became
| useless. I reorganised my stuff carefully so I know where I put
| it. I think that turned out to be more powerful than hoping a
| search engine over the top would be able to sift through the
| nuances.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| ... I'm not sure I've ever found _any_ GUI system search
| reliable enough that I 've used it on-purpose (though
| accidentally, sometimes) on Windows, Linux, or Mac. I always
| just use "find" and "grep" (and ripgrep when I remember that
| exists and realize I just grepped a _lot_ and will be waiting
| for like an hour if I don 't re-run the command with rg
| instead). Or nothing on Windows, which is fine because I
| haven't used Windows for anything but launching video games
| in about two decades.
| ad-astra wrote:
| Alfred
| wyclif wrote:
| Spotlight was bad back in the day, so I installed Alfred
| and started using that. Then Spotlight suddenly improved
| a lot, enough that it was usable for me, and I deleted
| Alfred. Then about five years ago something happened
| internally at Apple to the Spotlight team and it just got
| worse and worse and more difficult to use, making me
| regret deleting Alfred.
|
| I wish Apple would just fix Spotlight. They don't seem to
| think it's worth fixing.
| asimovDev wrote:
| I wonder if Apple has internal metrics that most people
| just stick everything in the dock and on desktop and
| don't use Spotlight
| wyclif wrote:
| That is a good question. I like my dock uncluttered. I
| have it placed vertically on the left side, with only the
| apps I use every single day: Alacritty, Brave, Cursor,
| and Zoom. With Finder and Launchpad included, that's only
| six docked apps. Everything else I use Spotlight to open,
| so I feel the pain when the usability gets degraded or
| buggy.
| ohgr wrote:
| Windows 11 LTSC one is quite good because it's so damn
| stupid. You can indeed hit start then just type what you
| want. Only does files though, by name, which is fine.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Windows 11 is beyond pale. It's infuriatingly bad. But it
| could be a benefit if you do a bit of manual organizing
| and ignore most of its dumb features. Only use it for
| work, I will never use it at home.
| ohgr wrote:
| Try the LTSC version. All the infuriating bits are not
| installed :)
| inatreecrown2 wrote:
| "everything" app on windows works well for me for file
| search. Incredibly fast.
| biglyburrito wrote:
| ^^^ this so hard. Voidtools Everything is how I find what
| I need 90% of the time now.
|
| https://www.voidtools.com/
| hnlurker22 wrote:
| Apple (at least current leadership) is programmatically
| degrading it's products so people would buy a new one. Who
| expects anything good from such a team.
| intrasight wrote:
| That statement makes no sense, as the new products are worse
| than the old ones
| Fr3ck wrote:
| Umm the new products are better than the old ones. Not sure
| if you are being nostalgic.
| atombender wrote:
| Regarding Spotlight, one thing that started happening for me on
| Sequioa was that Finder and other apps started getting very
| slow to react to file changes. For example, I can save a new
| file to a directory, and the Finder window takes maybe 10-20
| seconds before the file shows up in the list. If I navigate to
| a different folder and then back, the file is there. I notice
| the same delay in apps like IntelliJ.
|
| I could be wrong, but apparently Spotlight is the service that
| drives this kind of file system watching. I think macOS has a
| lower-level inotify-style file system event API, which should
| be unaffected, but Finder and these other apps apparently use
| Spotlight. I really wish I had a fix, because it's just crazy
| having to constantly "refresh" things.
| robszumski wrote:
| This KILLS me. It's so frustrating. APFS is supposed to be
| great at deduping files and such, but in practice it seems
| like it really sucks. It's bad at both saving a file to the
| desktop and dumping a million npm files into a directory.
| kevincox wrote:
| My favourite feature is when spotlight tells me that indexing
| is paused when I am searching for something.
|
| You went through the effort to show some UI when something I
| am looking for may not be there because indexing is paused...
| but you didn't think to just _unpause the indexing so that I
| can find it_? I feel like I am being spit on, "Yeah, you not
| finding what you are looking for? I know, I'm not even
| trying"
| lobsterthief wrote:
| I highly recommend using Alfred. I've been using it since
| before Spotlight came out, tried and then disabled Spotlight,
| and went back to Alfred. It's extremely configurable but
| highly usable out of the box. Sort of like creating your own
| CLI shortcuts to open files, apps, copy things to the
| clipboard, etc.
|
| https://www.alfredapp.com/
| atombender wrote:
| Alfred is nice. I use Raycast these days:
| https://www.raycast.com/.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Same here. Spotlight used to be my everything, i.e. I never
| use the dock I would always use spotlight to launch
| applications or navigate to folders. Now it is littered with
| internet garbage, takes seconds to even return any results,
| and the results are always useless.
|
| Who the hell thought integrating internet search is a good
| idea - because "aosldkfjalsdkfjalsdkfj" just as _everything
| else_ is a valid search result in Spotlight now showing me
| "Search for aolsdkfjoalsdfjasdlfkj in Firefox"...
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| If only there was a good Linux version of Alfred.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| I just wanted to say that I've been a keen reader of your blog
| for ... I guess, decades. I appreciate your work. Thank you.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Thanks!
| detourdog wrote:
| I have been using a Mac since the 128k came out. System 7.5.3
| and Snow Leopard 10.6.8 are in my opinion the high water mark
| for both OS's.
|
| I still have some 10.6.8 install media for both server and
| client. Truly loved them both.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I worked at Apple Retail during the Snow Leopard launch. I
| think I still have a boxed disk somewhere, too. I remember it
| was not a product I had to sell to customers. People came in
| asking for it.
|
| Another highlight of that job was selling a green iPod Nano
| to "John Locke" from LOST
| detourdog wrote:
| Those were the days...
|
| The most ridiculous thing that happend to me was in the
| early days of the Apple Store in SOHO I stopped in to see
| if I could just buy RAM.
|
| The music was loud so it was like I was speaking loudly to
| be heard and asked for RAM and the they thought I was
| asking if I could buy a gram.
| flenserboy wrote:
| Interesting that you think that of 7.5.3 -- it _worked_ ,
| sure, but it could be painfully slow. System 6 was preferable
| as an OS -- MultiFinder was better than 7, at least in the
| first couple iterations -- but much of the software I needed
| demanded 7. 7.6.x was the first bright spot since 7.1 fixed
| much of what went wrong in 7.0, & there was a ton of waiting
| after that. 9 just chugged along for me, for the most part,
| which was nice.
|
| Loved Snow Leopard too, & was shocked by how bad Lion was in
| comparison. Glad they got back on track after that.
| detourdog wrote:
| System 7 was better for me due to AppleTalk file sharing.
| System 6 was confined to LocalTalk or printer sharing.
| kergonath wrote:
| > System 7.5.3 and Snow Leopard 10.6.8 are in my opinion the
| high water mark for both OS's.
|
| Wasn't 7.5.3 the worst of the string of terrible releases
| between 7.5 and 7.6? In my memory 7.5.5 was much better, but
| I still preferred 8.1.
| olivierestsage wrote:
| I can't believe I'm saying it, but I agree with you about GNOME
| being my forever desktop. I used to really make fun of GNOME
| during the 2->3 transition, which seemed so profoundly
| misguided, but now I love it. I don't know if they've massively
| improved it or if my perspective has just changed with time.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| It could be a third option, the bloat in other OSes has made
| a less bloated OS look very pleasant and useful.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's not just you, the early GNOME 3 releases sucked. It has
| seen a lot of gradual improvement over time. Of course there
| are reasonable alternatives also, such as Xfce, MATE or
| Cinnamon. (And these three 'alternative' desktops have also
| edged closer over time, sharing more and more of the
| underlying tech stack even as GNOME itself has continued to
| develop in a rather seperate direction).
| cassepipe wrote:
| Unified button that disguises as two different icons hiding
| other useful options
|
| You can only cycle windows in one direction even if you try
| to do some remapping
|
| Choosing keyboard languages hides a lot of options. Once you
| understand you need to click on English US to see more
| detailed options then you get them all, UK, Canadian... Then
| it's unclear which keyboard layout is currently selected and
| how to select one from the list you made.
|
| I can't fathom how a DE whose is all about human machine
| interface guidelines whatever and supposed to be the epitome
| of UX can't figure out basic stuff about discoverability and
| clarity
| secstate wrote:
| Default keybindings have Shift+Super+Tab doing reverse
| window cycling in GNOME. Just tried it. Also, which unified
| button masquerades as two icons?
|
| Keyboard layouts are a pain, but there are some solid
| extensions that clean the flow up and may be upstreamed
| into GNOME at some point.
|
| It's all opinions, but boy, compared to the mess that is
| macOS and iOS regarding discoverability ... I'll take GNOME
| any. day.
| cassepipe wrote:
| True ! So why can I only remap cycling window in one
| direction and not the other ... ?
|
| The volume and power icons on the top right is actually
| one button and hides other option like screen lightning
| volume and wifi etc. If at list they had made a three
| vertical dots/stacked bars and is the convention for
| hamburger menus...
|
| From what I heard GNOME devs do not like change and it
| sucks to be a GNOME extension developer, a quick google
| search seems to confirm that so it casts some doubt about
| them up-streaming any of them but maybe you know better.
| Has it ever happened to other extensions ?
|
| https://discourse.gnome.org/t/developing-gnome-shell-
| extensi... https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/pvvku5
| /why_do_extens...
|
| Haven't really used MacOS or iOS more that five minutes
| so I can only trust you on that.
|
| On the other hand for example, it is very easy to remap
| CapsLock to Escape on MacOs. Just go to Setting -->
| Keyboard and you easily find the option. GNOME ? No, not
| in settings. Wait I have to use an app called gnome-tweak
| ? Ok it's in "Advanced keyboard otions" --> Opens a big
| list of loosely classified options. Oh well it was in
| miscellaneous category.
| secstate wrote:
| I can believe that its easy to bounce off software
| because of a million paper cuts. But the problem with
| them trying to address every one of those proactively is
| that GNOME is a huge undertaking and they do their best
| to move at a fairly slow pace (now, after the 3
| transition, which was akin to ripping a bandaid off ...
| go fast, piss the person off, but then the bandaid is
| gone).
|
| I don't know if the CapsLock -> Escape switch is on a
| roadmap somewhere, but that is a little bananas. That
| said, my partner comfortably uses GNOME every day to
| browse the web and manage some files. Has she EVER
| wondered how to remap CapsLock? No. The people who do
| want to? Google can give you the answer pretty quickly.
| Not saying it's good UX, but GNOME balances a lot of use
| cases, and as this thread suggests, I think they've
| actually (with a LOT of complaining from engineers and
| power users) kept that balance pretty damn well to the
| point where I haven't been surprised by GNOME is a long
| time, and seems to slowly and progressively get better.
|
| And yes, whoever jumps in here with their own papercut
| story, I know there is pain in not being the primary
| audience for software. But honestly, at least I'm in the
| same Venn diagram with my partner. The primary audience
| for macOS or iOS now appears to be ... I don't even know
| anymore. Used to be content creators, now it seems like
| even Apple doesn't actually know who uses their
| computers.
| wdavidw wrote:
| > consider it to be my "forever desktop"
|
| Feelings shared, if only Gnome would provide this column-based
| file navigation that I miss so much
| tristor wrote:
| Wow, I feel like I almost could have written this except I
| prefer Plasma/KDE to GNOME. I use Linux + Mac laptops somewhat
| interchangeably since 2012, and have also seen the marked
| decline in quality. In fact, it seems like Linux has gotten
| better at almost the same pace (or maybe a bit faster) than
| macOS has gotten worse.
|
| The things that most frustrate me about Macs is that they've
| violated the never spoken but always expected "it just works"
| in so many ways. Things like how Thunderbolt Displays
| containing a USB hub which are Apple-certified handle re-
| connection to a Macbook, should "just work", but require
| fiddling every time. That's just one of numerous examples I
| could come up with.
|
| Apple historically was probably the best company in the world
| in understanding the full depth of what "User Experience"
| means, and it seems like they've really retreated from this
| position and are regressing to the mean.
| wyclif wrote:
| At one point a few years ago, Spotlight improved enough that I
| could use it instead of relying on Alfred. So I deleted Alfred,
| and whaddaya know...a few years later Spotlight got worse and
| worse, making me regret that move.
| GolDDranks wrote:
| My biggest annoyance with recent macOS versions that most
| QuickLook plugins stopped working. Apparently one could re-
| develop them with their new framework-of-the-day, but I have no
| doubt a lion's share of what I'm using will just become
| abandonware.
| lisper wrote:
| > There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow
| Leopard was
|
| Here are some data points I collected at the time:
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster...
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/09/esata-on-snow-leopard.ht...
|
| In retrospect Snow Leopard deserves the love it eventually got,
| but at the time it was not entirely clear.
|
| > Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just
| plain QA) has steadily decreased.
|
| Amen to that.
| adastra22 wrote:
| > and there is no longer any way to effectively prioritize the
| results I want (apps, not internet garbage)
|
| OMG this one drives me bonkers. If anyone out there knows how
| to turn off internet results, please share!
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| Open Settings, scroll down to Spotlight. Unselect the things
| you don't want.
|
| You're welcome :-)
| ballenf wrote:
| Just noticed that I was sharing my entire Safari, Spotlight
| and Siri search history in that menu. Why is that setting
| in Spotlight settings and not under Privacy/Analytics?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Because spotlight indexing is local and not shared with
| Apple?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Thanks!
| rcarmo wrote:
| Like I pointed out elsewhere, it doesn't stick for me.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| I've found that kind of thing is often caused by a
| damaged preferences file. The easy way to check that is
| to make another user account, and see if it happens there
| too.
| amluto wrote:
| Spotlight is unbelievable bad, especially on iOS. If I type a
| substring of the name of an installed app, it should find it
| effectively instantly (say, within 1-2 frames of the input
| showing up). Instead, it finds it sometimes. On occasion I need
| to hit backspace (removing a letter that should match) to get
| it to find it.
|
| I struggle to imagine the software design that works so poorly.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Finder search is just as bad. You can be viewing a directory
| full of JPEGs, all with the jpg extension.
|
| Then you do a search for .jpg, and get NOTHING. But only
| sometimes. Other times it'll work.
| sph wrote:
| I've yet to find a decent implementation of search-as-you-
| type anywhere, not just Spotlight. I have that same issue on
| Firefox, and with Windows Search, for example.
|
| And it makes no sense whatsoever. If "foo" matches "foobar",
| so should "foob". I honestly don't know how the hell can they
| still f up such a simple piece of technology in 2025.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Windows 7 start menu search was always reliable and had
| predictable behavior from my experience. It _can_ be done,
| just that modern software engineers ' skills and career
| incentives no longer permit it.
| SSLy wrote:
| > _I 've yet to find a decent implementation of search-as-
| you-type anywhere_
|
| https://www.voidtools.com/en-uk/support/everything/
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| See this same search issue in everything these days for what
| was a solved problem a decade ago, what "best practice" is
| causing this
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Spotlight was never useful, because of an absurd and glaring
| design defect: It doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff.
| There's no path shown with hits. Same blunder in Finder's
| search, and you can't even optionally add "path" as a column.
| WTF.
|
| So... when the hits include six identically-named files, you
| can't eliminate ones that you know are wrong (on a backup
| volume or whatever). The level of stupidity here is just mind-
| boggling.
| phony-account wrote:
| > There's no path shown with hits
|
| I guess you do know the path _is_ shown at the bottom of the
| window if you select the filename in the list of results?
| pickdan wrote:
| In all fairness, you do need to hold down the command key
| to show the file location in Sequoia. It is an interesting
| default behavior to pretend the files location doesn't
| exist, mobile-centric.
| Reason077 wrote:
| No you don't. In Finder search results, the path is
| always shown at the bottom. For regular Finder windows,
| you can optionally show the path with "View -> Show Path
| Bar"
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Not a solution, because, again, you have to click on
| every single entry one at a time, and you can't sort by
| it.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| In all fairness, secret hotkey BS may as well not exist.
| Are you supposed to mash every modifier key and every
| combination thereof on every screen and in every menu,
| looking for hidden goodies?
|
| Absurd.
| xarope wrote:
| we have simplified the interface to just one home button
| and the screen interface, as well as the volume up/volume
| down key.
|
| To select, just press on the item.
|
| To hover, press and hold for at least 2 seconds.
|
| To get a list of options, press and hold for at least 2.5
| seconds, but not more than 3.5 seconds.
|
| To delete, press and hold for 3.6 seconds, but not longer
| than 3.9 seconds.
|
| To save, press and hold for 4.1 seconds. Pressing and
| holding for exactly 4.0 seconds activates the archive
| action. Pressing and holding for 4.2 or more seconds
| sends the item to the blocked list.
|
| To retrieve the list of items in the blocked list, press
| and hold and simultaneously press the volume up and
| volume down key.
|
| To delete all items in the block list, press and hold and
| simultaneously press the volume up key only.
|
| To completely reset your device, press and hold and
| simultaneously press the volume down key only, whilst
| holding the device in a completely vertical plane, and
| rotating clock-wise and counter-clockwise, smoothly, at
| precise 2.35619 radians every 30 seconds.
|
| To trigger the emergency call feature, drop the device at
| an acceleration of no less than 9.6m/s and no more than
| 9.7m/s
|
| /s (kind of)
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Yep, but that's totally unacceptable because you have to
| tediously select every entry, one at a time, and peer at
| the status bar.
|
| It also doesn't allow you to sort results by location, as
| you could if it were a column.
| toomim wrote:
| You hold down command to see the path.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Where? And how is that option displayed to the user?
|
| I also just tried it in Spotlight and Finder, and it did
| nothing. Which I consider a relief, because undiscoverable
| bullshit is worse than the feature not existing.
| sofixa wrote:
| macOS and iPadOS are full of those undiscoverable "if you
| do this combination of buttons/swipes while at full moon,
| something happens". As a Mac user not by choice (work
| issued) I hate how impossible to discover these are.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| As a Mac/iOS/iPadOS user it seems that it's almost
| mandatory to watch each Keynote / product announcement
| video if you want to keep up with new features. Lots of
| cool features that I only knew about by watching those
| videos that are completely undiscoverable otherwise.
| vvillena wrote:
| These kinds of shortcuts are part of Apple software as a
| whole, and apparently have been a thing since at least
| OSX. These behaviors were supposed to be covered in the
| documentation, but I don't know how true this is
| nowadays.
|
| Special mention to all text input fields in macOS having
| Emacs-style shortcuts.
| regularfry wrote:
| It goes back further than that. I remember being able to
| buy key-combo cheat cards for System 7, and I have no
| reason to think the shortcuts they covered wouldn't also
| have been present in System 6.
| TheCoreh wrote:
| It's in the documentation for Spotlight:
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-
| help/mchlp1008/mac
|
| I agree that discoverability could be better, but macOS
| has pretty consistently had hidden power user shortcuts
| and modifiers, to keep the basic workflow
| streamlined/simple for those who don't need it.
| lloeki wrote:
| And press command+return to open the _location_ in Finder
| (and the item selected)
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| And now spotlight defaults to the whole computer even when I
| start a search within a folder... for items in the folder...
| Turned to garbage sometime in the last ~18-24 months.
|
| At least there's quicksilver
| sandreas wrote:
| I personally think that it is reasonable to "want" an Apple
| notebook. They have great hardware, great battery life and an
| ecosystem where every device integrates. Only on macOS you can
| nicely develop software for iOS. Furthermore most vendors
| release software for macOS, while they don't for Linux (not
| only Adobe). BTW the apps I miss most on Linux is the Preview
| App and Apple Mail.
|
| However I'm done with Apple. I think it's a decision - not
| "reasoning". That decision takes time and is painful. It's also
| a decision specifically against "the best" ecosystem available
| in favor of something "ok".
|
| Not only they repeatedly disappointed my expectations - they
| just suck as a company (in my opinion). It's not about being
| less innovative for decreasing software quality, they have done
| so much for the market, that I think GNOME wouldn't even exist
| as it is without them... Its about sealing off every inch of
| their software and hardware they can. No repair without
| paying... Making RAM and SSD upgrades ridiculously expensive,
| you cannot even put default NVMe drives into a mac mini -
| everything is proprietary. Even their sensors have serial
| numbers to prevent hibernating if you change them out without
| "hacking" the firmware.
|
| Hardware-wise I have high hopes for framework working with AMD
| - although they did not address the issues I'd suggest
| (speakers, lpcamm2), they're constantly improving without
| breaking their promises. This is hopefully not going to change
| when they get bigger.
|
| OS-wise I'll stay on Linux. After a long journey going from
| Ubuntu to Debian to Fedora using GNOME, KDE and even NixOS with
| Hyprland for a short period, I gained enough knowledge required
| to really enjoy Linux. System76 is working on COSMIC, which
| could be pretty amazing, once it is released.
|
| In case anyone would like to try my current Linux config, I'm
| constantly working on an "install everything" script (pretty
| early stage):
|
| https://github.com/sandreas/zarch
|
| HF ;)
| musicale wrote:
| Apple delivered on Steve Jobs' vision of an "appliance
| computer".
|
| You might not want one though.
| sandreas wrote:
| Yeah... probably. I forgot to mention that Apple computers
| are a pretty good deal if you are looking for an AI / LLM
| experimentation machine due to unified RAM which nearly
| translates 1:1 into VRAM.
| davidthewatson wrote:
| Indeed. I complained that Apple design gets a free pass while
| being haunted by Steve from beyond the grave for a decade. Your
| comments resemble my habits except rusted sway right into
| cosmic desktop alpha and done.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon
|
| What is wrong with an AMD Ryzen 9 with 16 physical cores? If
| you need more and you have a virtually unlimited budget, then
| Ryzen Threadripper is even better. Also: Is Asahi Linux an
| option for you?
| rcarmo wrote:
| Of course Asahi isn't an option. The hardware support is far
| from finished.
| bullfightonmars wrote:
| Oh wow. I am realizing I have just been living with these bugs
| as tiny frustrations all day long not understanding how
| pervasive they are!
|
| This issue with spotlight is so bad. I use the switcher to pull
| up my Downloads or Documents directories and half the time it
| can't even find them!
| th3iedkid wrote:
| Did you know, you can set your wallpapers to be continuously
| updating and make macs use terabytes of your network in hours
| or days depending on speed?
| https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255329956
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| I also wish I could preview the wallpapers without triggering
| a 100MB download. There's nothing in between the 320x240
| thumbnail, and the 4k video.
|
| And so many tiny thumbnails wedged into the too-narrow System
| Settings window.
| donatj wrote:
| > no longer any way to effectively prioritize the results I
| want (apps, not internet garbage)
|
| FWIW you can massively improve things by just disabling the
| internet results. It's easily done in the System Preferences
| mschnell wrote:
| I would much prefer if you could change the order so that
| _local_ results come first, web results after -- not possible
| (anymore). Sad.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Like I pointed out elsewhere, it doesn't stick for me.
| jamil7 wrote:
| I generally agree it's decreased steadily but I also remember
| macOS 9 and early X versions especially being pretty buggy and
| having awful performance.
| echohack5 wrote:
| Honestly yeah, Raycast is the replacement I'd recommend these
| days for spotlight.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| It's wild how much of the original "it just works" ethos has
| eroded
| danieldk wrote:
| _Apple 's software quality (either in terms of polish or just
| plain QA) has steadily decreased_
|
| I think the decline of software went hand-in-hand with the
| decline of the native indie Mac app. They still exist, but when
| I started with the Mac (2007), there was a very rich ecosystem
| of native Mac apps. Most stood head and shoulders above their
| Linux and Windows counterparts.
|
| Apple has nearly destroyed that ecosystem with: race-to-the-
| bottom pricing incited by the App Store; general neglect of the
| Mac platform (especially between ~2016 and Apple Silicon); and
| a messy reactionary toolkit story with Catalyst, SwiftUI, etc.
| The new toolkits seem to imply that Apple says that it's the
| end of AppKit, but most SwiftUI applications are noticeably
| worse.
|
| With their messy toolkit story and general neglect, developers
| have started using Electron more and more. Sure, part of the
| popularity is cost savings, since Electron apps can be used on
| multiple platforms. But part of it is also that a Catalyst or
| SwiftUI app is not going to provide much more over an Electron
| app. They will also feel weirdly out of place and you become
| dependent on Apple working out quirks in SwiftUI. E.g.
| 1Password tried SwiftUI for their Mac app, but decided in the
| end that it was an uphill battle and switched to Electron on
| Mac instead.
|
| I recently bought a ThinkPad to use besides my MacBook.
| Switching is much easier than 10 or 15 years ago, since 80% of
| the apps that I use most frequently (Slack, Obsidian,
| 1Password, etc.) are Electron anyway. Even fingerprint
| unlocking works in 1Password. I was vehemently anti-electron
| and still don't like it a lot, but I am happy that it makes
| moving to a non-Apple platform much easier.
| cameldrv wrote:
| I think most of this is just downstream of the Mac being
| eclipsed by the iPhone in terms of Apple's revenue. The Mac
| just isn't critical to Apple's business like it was in 2009
| when Snow Leopard came out. They would have started
| development on SL in 2008, when the iPhone was still a fairly
| niche product and there wasn't even an App Store.
|
| Now, ios gets the executive attention and it will generally
| get the best developers assigned to it, and the Mac has to
| live with the scraps.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yeah I think this is the one, in terms of number of users,
| revenue, etc. The iPhone is more than 50% of their revenue,
| Mac is only ~8. Lower volume and higher price, but it
| doesn't come anywhere near their phone. Same with tablets,
| although they share an app revenue income stream with the
| iphone which makes up for the difference in hardware sales.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > 1Password tried SwiftUI for their Mac app
|
| 1Password had a beautiful native Mac app that works to this
| day. Even assuming SwiftUI is actually bad, why did they
| _have_ to migrate at all? What was wrong with the existing
| app?
|
| I'm not disagreeing with the opinions on Apple software
| quality, but I think the 1Password case is more down to their
| taking of VC money and having to give (JS) devs some busywork
| to rebuild something that worked perfectly well.
| SSLy wrote:
| >What was wrong with the existing app?
|
| It didn't work on Windows and Linux desktops.
| ShrimpHawk wrote:
| 1Password is also now subscription only and online only.
| Gone are the days of a forever license and fully offline
| encrypted database allowing for 3rd party syncing via
| iCloud or others. The death of their old app went hand in
| hand with their race to the bottom subscription payment VC
| backed ecosystem. It's only time until they suffer a breach
| like everyone else.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Gone are the days of a forever license and fully
| offline encrypted database allowing for 3rd party syncing
| via iCloud or others._
|
| While it's true for 1Password, there are other password
| managers. KeePass is great for local password database
| files if that's what you're after.
| junga wrote:
| > I recently bought a ThinkPad to use besides my MacBook.
|
| I'm on the same boat here. Something is driving me away from
| my MacBook M1(Pro? Don't even know). I have a gut feeling
| that it's macOS but can't really put a finger on it yet.
|
| Bought a heavily used ThinkPad T480s (from 2018) and replaced
| almost every replaceable part of it, including the screen.
| Being able to replace many parts easily is a nice touch since
| I am using MacBooks since 2007 exclusively. Guess that's why
| I somehow overdid it here. Slammed Pop!_OS 22.04 on it and
| I'm very pleased with the result. The first Linux desktop I
| actually enjoy since trying SuSE 5-something. Pain points are
| teams (running in browser), bad audio quality with AirPods
| when using the microphone and cpu speed and heat. I guess one
| has to stop using Apple silicon in laptops to realize how
| amazing these processors are.
| danieldk wrote:
| _and cpu speed and heat_
|
| Intel CPUs from that era were quite bad and everyone has
| upped their ante since then. I was thinking about getting a
| second hand from ~2021-2022, but my wife convinced me to
| get a new one, so I got a Gen 5 T14 AMD. It has a Ryzen 7
| Pro 8840U and I rarely hear the fans, mostly only when Nix
| has to rebuild some large packages (running NixOS unstable-
| small).
| lostlogin wrote:
| > As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been
| consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years
| I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of
| polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased.
|
| Similar for me but started in system 7.
|
| It's just lucky Windows has got worse faster.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been
| consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years
| I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of
| polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased.
|
| Similar for me but started in system 7.
|
| It's lucky for Apple that Windows has got worse faster.
| nvarsj wrote:
| I do love Gnome. If only we had hardware to run it :/.
|
| I'm stuck on a MBP because it's the only laptop with a great
| screen, speakers, and battery life. Meanwhile my keyboard keys
| keep getting stuck after a year of usage, and OSX is garbage.
| Soon as there is similar hardware I can load Linux on, I'll be
| insta-switching.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| AMD AI Max 395 (superb name) proved that x86 can get to Apple
| silicon perf. (even not that far in power efficiency), but
| there seems to be 0 devices from non-trash brands (I am not
| buying ASUS or HP).
|
| I would love to finally get out of Apple ecosystem, I just
| don't have any decent alternatives right now. Hopefully next
| year.
| dsego wrote:
| I'm going to purchase a framework just because I value
| repairability. And honestly, before the m1 macbook I was using
| a t480s, and I'm okay with compromising on hardware, esp.
| having been burned with the 2016 butterfly macbook. Apart from
| the haptic touchpad I wouldn't miss much, other makers are
| finally ditching low resolution 16:9 screens and you can even
| find nice oleds. I'm mostly missing the polished software
| that's only available on macos (things like carbon copy cloner
| or pixelmator). But with my m1 having degraded battery and
| having to send it off for a week or two to the nearest service
| center just to get a new battery, the prospect of a repairable
| laptop like framework where I can just order a new battery and
| replace it myself is looking all the more enticing.
| GTP wrote:
| > if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon
|
| IIRC some competitors are starting to offer a few laptops with
| ARM processors, I think Samsung has a few. How do you feel
| about those?
| keyle wrote:
| I've said this many times, snow leopard is still my favourite OS
| today. If you could add iMessages to it, although not necessary,
| it would be perfect.
|
| Of course today it would be insecure, missing security patches
| etc. SSL...
| parkcedar wrote:
| Another example was High Sierra. They completely swapped out the
| file system on that release, focusing primarily on under-the-hood
| changes, and imo was also one of the most stable macOS releases
| to date.
| mistyvales wrote:
| I was thinking of that the other day. I think I stayed on High
| Sierra as long as I could.
| themagician wrote:
| This is an interesting idea, and I am actually curious what Apple
| is going to do going forward. A "Snow Leopard"-esque release
| would be nice, but I think what would be better is an LTS
| release. Historically, you get a new Mac and you usually only get
| 5-6 years before they drop your model from the latest release.
| This has always made some sense to me, as after 4-6 years, you do
| start to feel it.
|
| I bought an M1 Max that is now almost 4 years old and it still
| feels new to me. I can't really imagine a change that would
| happen in the next 2 years that would make this thing feel slow
| where an M3 would feel sufficient, so I'm curious to see if Apple
| really does just go hardcore on forced obsolescence going
| forward. I have a few M series devies now, from M1 to M3, and I
| honestly cannot tell the difference other than export times for
| video.
|
| I can imagine some kind of architecture change that might come
| with an M6 or something that would force an upgrade path, but I
| can't see any reason other than just forcing upgrades to drop
| support between M1-M5. Maybe if there is a really hard push next
| year into 8K video? Never even tried to edit 8K, so I don't know.
| I'm guessing an M1 might feel sluggish?
| basisword wrote:
| I don't feel like they ever used forced obsolescence with
| Mac's. When they dropped support for the latest OS on your
| machine it was usually because it couldn't run it. I recently
| updated some older Mac's and even a couple of OS's before
| support was dropped things got really sluggish. I imagine with
| the Apple Silicon machines the OS support will stretch longer
| than it has on the Intel ones. Maybe the higher prices are a
| hint they expect people to keep the machines in use for longer
| than before.
| dontblink wrote:
| Opencore legacy patcher would be to differ.
| yakz wrote:
| They need to somehow start marketing effectively to gamers,
| because the GPU in your M1 Max is shit. Sure, it's fine for
| mostly-2D UIs and the occasional WebGL widget, but for AAA
| gaming it's just dogshit.
| bluescrn wrote:
| 'Gaming laptops' with more powerful GPUs are generally awful,
| though. Even ignoring the state of Win11.
|
| Yes, they can theoretically perform better, but only when
| plugged into mains power, and creating so much heat and fan
| noise that the experience really isn't good.
|
| Don't think there's anything out there that will outperform
| the GPU of an M-series Mac without consuming way more power
| and producing problematic levels of heat+noise.
| yakz wrote:
| Sure, but this is another avenue to onboard people to the
| upgrade train. Sure your display is great, your CPU is
| great, the speakers are great. But the AAA graphics scale
| up every year and there are often big performance cliffs
| for new features on old hardware.
| nullpoint420 wrote:
| What about M3 Max?
| dlivingston wrote:
| M1 Max @ 32 GB. I can run Shadow of the Tomb Raider with max
| settings at native resolution (3024x1964 px) and get ~60 FPS.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > I think what would be better is an LTS release. Historically,
| you get a new Mac and you usually only get 5-6 years before
| they drop your model from the latest release
|
| In fairness, Apple to do tend to continue to release critical
| security patches for older versions.
|
| I suspect that it will be AI features that push Apple into
| deprecating older hardware. But I also hope that the M series
| hardware will be supported a bit longer than the intel hardware
| was. Time will tell.
| bluescrn wrote:
| > I bought an M1 Max that is now almost 4 years old and it
| still feels new to me.
|
| How are the keycaps doing? Mine looked awful after about 2
| years of relatively light use, developing really obvious ugly
| shiny patches (particularly bad on the space bar), quite a
| letdown on an otherwise great machine.
|
| (Realised that you can actually buy replacements and swap them
| yourself, via the self-service repair store, so have replaced
| them once, but am starting to notice shiny patches again on the
| new set)
| jedberg wrote:
| Not OP but have the same Mac. Every key is shiny. Doesn't
| really bother me though because I touch type. Also clearly I
| favor hitting space with my right hand because only the right
| side is shiny.
| dmix wrote:
| If you have AppleCare they will basically rebuild your
| MacBook for ~$200. I got MBP M1 Max usb ports and top case
| replaced and a bunch of other stuff I didn't even ask for but
| they replaced with new stuff. Felt like a new machine when I
| got it back.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Still better than the butterfly debacle of 2016-2019. I have
| one for work that spends 99.9% of its life docked to a real
| keyboard and it _still_ has keys that only work sporadically.
| Some of these keys probably have < 10,000 actuations on
| them.
| fumufumufumu wrote:
| Trying to use Wan2.1 to generate AI video or other various LLM
| or StableDiffusion style stuff is slow compared to other other
| platforms. I don't know how much of that is because the code is
| not optimized for M1+ Max (Activity Monitor shows lots of GPU
| usage) or how much of it is it's just not up to the
| competition. Friends on 4070 Windows PC are getting results
| many X faster and 4070 perf iss not even close to 4090
| rcarmo wrote:
| You need to run it under MLX, and AFAICT ComfyUI and the like
| are not really optimized for it (or at least not as optimized
| as LLM inference).
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't have any Macs or iPhones that can even run the latest
| software anymore. My absolute newest Mac is stuck on Ventura
| 13.7. On the other hand, I can get the bleeding edge version of
| any Linux distribution out there and run it on decades-old
| hardware.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Unfortunately, "decades old hardware" doesn't give me the
| combination of speed, quietness, battery life and the ability
| to use my laptop on my lap without so much heat that it puts
| me at risk for never having any little Scarfaces.
|
| Using an x86 laptop in 2025 is like using a flip phone.
| Rohansi wrote:
| You can at least get 90% of the same experience with modern
| x86 laptops. Just exclude anything that has a dedicated
| GPU.
| _s wrote:
| Not just their software, the hardware is beginning to be get
| pretty unwieldily complicated.
|
| From an OS / software perspective:
|
| Have a "core" macOS that has none of the apps / integrations are
| baked in at an OS level.
|
| You install the things you want, how you want - eg iMessage,
| Mail, and then iCloud if you want to sync it, and Photos etc.
|
| Have a slim, fast, stable OS that I can just turn on and get
| going with.
|
| From the hardware perspective, I made this comment a little while
| ago but what I want to be able to choose is:
|
| - Device: Watch, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac, Mac
|
| - Size: Mini, "Normal / Default" (Air), Max
|
| - Processing Power: "Normal / Default", Pro, Ultra
|
| - And maybe storage.
|
| That way I can go and buy a MacBook Pro (13"?), or a MacBook Max
| Pro (15"), or a MacBook Mini (11"), or a normal iPad Mini Ultra,
| or an iMac Mini (21"?), or a Watch Pro, or a Mac Max Ultra etc.
|
| Device + Size + Power.
|
| It's kinda there, but not quite.
| petercooper wrote:
| I agree. It seems ridiculous that an app like Messages is
| considered so much part of the OS given what it does. I don't
| use it, I don't care about it, but it seems like it could be a
| regular app that updates independently of the OS, along with
| Maps, Notes, and so on. So many macOS "upgrades" nowadays seem
| to be Apple tinkering with such apps rather than the actual OS
| experience.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Why do you want to destroy computing for everybody else just to
| make a very small group of hackers pleased? Can't you be
| satisfied with Linux or Windows or BSD? Let normal people have
| at least one platform that is usable for them.
| debesyla wrote:
| How is letting users to disable bloat a bad feature?
|
| For example, can you remove Chess from MacOS? Nope! Why? What
| I found on Reddit, it seems because it's integral part of
| MacOS somehow and I am a bad person for even asking, somehow.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Chess is 11Mb, you must be desperate for space if you want
| to remove that.
| hu3 wrote:
| Bloat adds up.
|
| Each part alone might not be large but together it starts
| to become an annoyance.
|
| Also bloat is not just about disk space but also
| cognitive load and clean interface.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| "iMessage, Mail, and then iCloud if you want to sync it,
| and Photos"
|
| Those are not bloat, those are core features of a computer
| for 99% of users who are not developers.
|
| There already exists a platform which is unusable for
| normal people and great for developers, it's called Linux.
|
| There already exists a platform which is great for
| corporate and hell for normal people, it's called Windows.
|
| So why aren't we allowed to keep the only computing
| platform which is good for normal users?
| pndy wrote:
| I did said similar thing weeks ago regarding all shenanigans
| with W11: every software should include two paths of
| installation/OOBE: default "express" where vendor shoves you _"
| the experience"_ and customized "expert" where you select
| features YOU want. And either way allows you to change system
| afterwards. We had that in Windows years ago but then it was
| removed; some Linux distributions do offer package selection
| beyond the default set.
|
| There's no need for a separated core version - just give back
| control to the user. But honestly, I don't know what would need
| to happen so we could get it - it feels like it's a lost cause
| against corporations. There's of course Apple-EU situation
| where you can remove applications, set defaults, install
| additional app stores but this is still limited to that market
| and happen way too late and too slow.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _I am not suggesting Apple has fallen behind Windows or
| Android. Changing a setting on Windows 11 can often involve a
| journey through three or four different interface designs,
| artifacts of half-implemented changes dating back to the last
| century. Whenever I find myself stuck outside of Appleland, I am
| eager to return "home," flaws and all._
|
| Hard agree with this. I sometimes have to boot up a windows
| laptop to play Minecraft with the kiddo, and it never stops
| reminding me how little I know about Windows now, how counter-
| intuitive everything is, how everything feels designed for a user
| whose mind I cannot comprehend.
| lttlrck wrote:
| I lost Windows fluency around 7. I have little desire to get it
| back even though I use it every day as a secondary system.
|
| How many "control panels"? How many places are there to adjust
| audio device properties?
| rcarmo wrote:
| Around four.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Also, every time you run something in Windows (whether it's
| part of the OS or an App) it can be a trip down memory lane,
| UI-wise. Oooh, this dialog is 2015 vintage! This dialog is
| styled like Windows 8! This one is from the XP era! Ohh, and
| that rarified dialog has controls that have not been changed
| since Windows 95!
| hajile wrote:
| There's still UI stuff that hasn't changed since Windows
| 3.1 minus the UI kit updates.
| alp1n3_eth wrote:
| If you want a super bad audio-related journey, try fixing
| external speakers connected to a Linux box. It's abysmal, and
| 99% of it can only be done via the CLI. Nothing wrong with
| that... but for something so normal I expected more ease-of-
| use.
| HypnoticOcelot wrote:
| How come you have to use Windows to play Minecraft? Are you
| using Bedrock edition?
| yoz wrote:
| Hey, if we're already complaining about Microsoft products,
| can someone explain why the Bedrock and Java versions of
| Minecraft have not been made cross-compatible in the TEN
| YEARS since the Mojang acquisition?
|
| (... speaking as another dad just trying to play with my
| kid.)
| banqjls wrote:
| What does cross compatible mean in this context? They are
| two different games written in two different languages. I
| mean, they _look_ like they are the same game, but they are
| not. Making one compatible with the other is a Herculean
| task. If not impossible.
| yoz wrote:
| I'm talking about network compatibility, so that a
| Bedrock client can join a Java server and vice versa.
| It's clearly _somewhat_ possible because GeyserMC[1]
| exists. It 's just ridiculous that it's a third-party
| addon.
|
| [1] https://geysermc.org/
| pathartl wrote:
| The games state is handled completely different between
| bedrock and java
| janetmissed wrote:
| I'd imagine mostly due to a lack of incentive on
| microsoft's part. Like minecraft is literally the biggest
| video game to ever exist with, making 2 entirely separate
| code bases work while keeping all the features the same and
| preserving compatibility with over a decades worth of mods
| just so the mostly separate java and bedrock communities
| can play with each other is just not worth the risk. So
| many people play minecraft in so many different ways means
| that making even minor changes in gameplay can be huge
| sources of controversy, let alone major infrastructure
| changes.
| Rohansi wrote:
| They still exist separately today because the modding scene
| is completely different for them. Minecraft Java is the
| original and has a huge modding community based on
| decompiling and patching the game. Those mods are all
| incompatible with Bedrock because Bedrock is a separate
| reimplementation of the game for performance or whatever.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I... think so? Whichever one works with Microsoft Realms,
| which is the $2/month solution I settled on after somewhat-
| getting a self hosted server to run for a little bit on my
| desktop.
|
| I figured that I make a six-figure salary as a software
| developer, I can afford $2/month so that I don't have to
| fucking become a sysadmin for a game server my child depends
| on.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| I believe both versions of the game support realms,
| although I haven't tried it.
| handsclean wrote:
| Just FYI:
|
| There are two editions, Java and Bedrock. Java is the
| original, available on PC and Mac, and supports
| programming-like technical play and mods. Bedrock is
| Microsoft's reimplementation, available on all devices
| except Mac, and supports emotes and microtransactions.
| Other than that they're largely the same game, and buying
| either gives you both versions. Realms supports both, but a
| server is one or the other, not both. There are also other
| managed hosting providers for Minecraft (both versions),
| but Realms is probably easier and cheaper for you. Java
| version has performance problems, but mostly because
| Microsoft's code is inefficient, there are a few mods (also
| written in Java) that everybody uses to fix performance
| without affecting gameplay.
| epolanski wrote:
| I use both Mac and windows extensively and I'm not sure what
| are you referring to.
|
| You can access most settings by Windows + "yourquery".
| wpm wrote:
| Using search as a UI is admitting the UI sucks.
|
| It is indicative of a failure, not a solution in and of
| itself.
| p_ing wrote:
| Just like System Settings in macOS! Always have to use
| keyword search in that thing.
|
| FWIW, search as a UI isn't a bad thing, Cmd + Space is the
| main way I launch apps on macOS (or Win + "type whatever").
| ziml77 wrote:
| Search feels to me like a good compromise between
| memorizing terminal commands (including the correct set
| of parameters to do what you want) and navigating through
| a UI to find what you're looking for.
| int_19h wrote:
| Search is fine as a one-off thing, but if you
| _repeatedly_ have to use search to find some common
| setting, that 's a clear UX fail.
|
| To be fair, it's hard to say whether the Settings app is
| more broken in Windows or macOS these days. I think I'd
| have to give the crown to macOS here on account of search
| itself being more broken.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| Why is it a UI fail? Honestly search as the default way
| of going to settings is my favorite development in modern
| OS design, I no longer need to memorize 3-6 deep menu
| trees to find a trivial setting.
|
| For example:
|
| I prefer keeping my hands on the keyboard, and typing
| cmd+space followed by mouse is so much faster than
| finding the right pixels to click through in menu trees
| when I want to adjust my mouse sensitivity.
| bdavbdav wrote:
| Disagree with this. I use the search for everything. It's
| just so much quicker than even a well designed UI.
|
| On my iphone, I have one page of apps, everything else in
| the app drawer, and use the search all the time. It often
| gets what I want in one or two chars.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| Hard Disagree, search is great for anything that is
| common, but not common enough to justify a shortcut /
| other accomodations
|
| It also has the benefit of being roughly bilingual
| (English + Installed language) and being there even in
| machines not setup for you
|
| I can get my mom's computer, fully set in spanish, and I
| can win + "query", into settings, programs and tools to
| setup whatever she needs
| epolanski wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree.
|
| I admit I honestly have no idea where the system settings
| are located as I haven't pressed the start button in ages,
| but the same applies to MacOS as I would use spotlight
| there as well.
| sxg wrote:
| Using search as a UI means you can only find things that
| you know exist, but there are plenty of important
| settings that I've only discovered by actually navigating
| through the UI.
| epolanski wrote:
| Just type "settings" then and you go to the main menu.
| sxg wrote:
| The point of this comment thread is that important
| Windows settings are scattered throughout many different
| interfaces beyond just the Settings app, and you can
| never be sure where to find what you're looking for,
| which results in a poor user experience. Off the top of
| my head, you have the Settings app, Control Panel, Device
| Manager, System Configuration, and Network and Sharing
| Center.
| consteval wrote:
| This doesn't work on Windows because there's half a dozen
| "settings" applications, which is the original complaint.
| fumufumufumu wrote:
| then Mac fails as hard as windows. there's a reason search
| exists in the settings app on both MacOS and iOS. and there
| are plenty of settings that require "default write ..." or
| editing some plist file or worse
| trinix912 wrote:
| > You can access most settings by Windows + "yourquery".
|
| The search doesn't even work all the time. Sometimes it won't
| do fuzzy search, sometimes typing "bluetooth settings" will
| do a Bing search, some other time it will open a PDF, and so
| on.
| dsego wrote:
| I recently discovered that I can change audio settings on a
| mac by using the opt+volume shortcut and it takes me directly
| to the sound panel. Now if I could only make it stay on the
| built-in microphone instead of always switching to the worse
| sounding airpods one.
| ohgr wrote:
| It's fine if you stay away from the consumer releases. Windows
| 11 LTSC (based on 24H2) feels like windows 7. Most of the stuff
| you had to futz with powertoys and GPOs back then. That hasn't
| changed. I quite like it. It has been utterly boring compared
| to my recent Apple experiences.
| starik36 wrote:
| I disagree with that. As an occasional user of MacOS, the new
| Settings app is quite bewildering. There are just as many dials
| as in Windows and sometimes requires a trip to ChatGPT.
|
| And for reasons I don't understand, why is the window itself
| not resizable?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| To be fair, I agree with you that the recent OS X control
| panel changes suck shit and are awful, and get worse with
| every update.
| pathartl wrote:
| I'm a Windows fan (I actually really like 11) so I'm a bit
| biased, but I just dove back into macOS since 2014 and the
| settings app is truly terrible. The built in search barely
| works and the layout is so damn confusing. God forbid I
| install some remote desktop software, now I have to go to
| accessibility settings 5 simes and approve some permission
| that is strategically buried for only what I can tell as a
| way to thwart "normies" from enabling something via
| obfuscation.
|
| It would be fine if the settings available were actually
| useful or at least could bring me to some tool that does it
| better. I get no meaningful report of what's eating my batter
| and why every time I open my MacBook it's dead. And if I want
| to change the actual resolution of my display I'm given just
| a list of scaling options pretending to be resolutions. Oh,
| want to set a specific resolution or refresh rate? You have
| to do some stupid kinger king foo of option control something
| _before_ you click on this dialog. I get the criticism about
| the Windows settings app and legacy power tools (I think this
| has largely been solved anyway), at least they exist and
| allow me some iota of control over my computer
| ankurdhama wrote:
| It is resizable vertically but not horizontally as it doesn't
| make sense to resize the window horizontally considering the
| content of settings details panel (the right part of the
| settings window), you would end up with a lot of empty space
| if you were able to resize it horizontally.
| starik36 wrote:
| You could say the same thing about the Windows Settings
| app, but it resizes in every way and it's very much size
| adaptable. In other words, UI components resize or become
| visible/invisible depending on the width.
| lor_louis wrote:
| To be fair, win11 is a nightmare in terms of usability. I can
| only assume a committee of eldritch beings and accountants
| designed it.
|
| It blows my mind that when right-clicking on a file in file
| explorer, the 'delete' option is hidden in a sub-menu under
| 'more options'.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Are you sure about that? Look for the trashcan symbol on the
| upper-right of the context menu.
|
| I agree that having "more options" to begin with was a
| jarring experience coming from windows 10 though.
| alt219 wrote:
| Except for when the placement of the icon strip with the
| trashcan symbol changes to the bottom of the context menu
| because of the location of the context menu on the screen.
| Bonkers. No idea why the UI committee would've okayed that
| one.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Oh that's so weird :\
| DecentShoes wrote:
| It's deliberate. It's the good-bad-good-bad release cycle
| Microsoft insists on. Windows 12 will be decent, then 13 will
| be horrible again.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Ah, so it's like Star Trek movies.
| wavemode wrote:
| Yeah the new context menu is horrible. Fortunately it can be
| set back to classic, I think with a registry edit
| Mashimo wrote:
| I just tested it. It's in the first row, last item. [Cut |
| Copy | Rename | Share | DELETE ]
|
| Out of old habit I always use shift + DEL key and did not
| notice it's in the top row now.
| lor_louis wrote:
| As someone who stopped using windows about 7 years ago, and
| only recently used it last weekend, my eyes probably
| glossed over the fact that some buttons were laid out
| horizontally.
|
| It also makes way more sense.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I was fully braced for Windows 11 being awful when I
| installed it recently but that hasn't been my experience at
| all. If anything it's just a slightly more polished Windows
| 10.
|
| Probably helps that I installed the IoT LTSC version, but
| still, apart from the task bar being stupidly in the middle
| (thankfully there's an option to move it to the left), I've
| had zero issues.
|
| I even added a network printer and it found it quickly, and
| added it quickly and successfully, which is a feat I don't
| think I've seen happen on any OS ever.
|
| The context menu is a clear improvement on the old one (which
| you can still get to with one click).
| some-guy wrote:
| Windows 11 can be usable if you run this debloat script [1].
| Of course, with every update it's a constant game of cat and
| mouse.
|
| 1) https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
| yard2010 wrote:
| You said no word about the god damn candy crush ads. As if we
| don't have enough sources for cancer and other terminal
| illnesses
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| Every article about some issue with Apple MUST also include an
| anecdote about how you couldn't use Windows one time and how
| it's still worse than Mac.
|
| It's the rule lest someone think you made a bad decision and
| you're regretting it. Even though it's an OS targeted for your
| grandmother, you must not let them see weakness.
|
| At this point it's a joke. Either critique Apple or admit you
| can't without also bringing up some other OS. It's weird.
| lapcat wrote:
| See my blog post "The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard":
| https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/11/5.html
|
| TL;DR What people remember fondly is not Mac OS X 10.6.0, which
| was in fact very buggy, and buggier than 10.5.8, but rather later
| versions of Snow Leopard after almost 2 full years of bug fixes.
|
| See also "Snow Leopard bug deletes all user data":
| https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-d...
|
| The yearly release cycle is the problem. Apple needs "another
| Snow Leopard" only in the sense that I mentioned above, "almost 2
| full years of bug fixes", although at this point, Apple has more
| than 2 years of technical debt.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Thank you, the nostalgia for a 15-year-old OS release, which
| absolutely was not great out of gate, is strange.
|
| My recommendation for people who don't absolutely need the
| latest features: Upgrade to the previous version of macOS when
| the new version is released. Sequoia is incredibly reliable 7
| (soon to be 8) updates in.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Sequoia is incredibly reliable 7 (soon to be 8) updates in.
|
| I disagree with that part. ;-)
|
| We wouldn't even be having this discussion right now if
| _today 's_ updates were incredibly reliable.
| grandempire wrote:
| > later versions of Snow Leopard after almost 2 full years of
| bug fixes.
|
| This is what's being asked for in the article.
| lapcat wrote:
| I disagree. From the article: "The same year Apple launched
| the iPhone, it unveiled a massive upgrade to Mac OS X known
| as Leopard, sporting "300 New Features." Two years later, it
| did something almost unheard of: it released Snow Leopard, an
| upgrade all about how little it added and how much it took
| away. Apple needs to make it snow again. Snow Leopard did
| what it was made to do. It was one of the most solid software
| releases Apple ever put out." This gives the impression that
| it was solid out of the gate, which it was not. And the next
| paragraph specifically mentions "2009's Snow Leopard". But
| later Snow Leopard releases were in 2011.
| trbutler wrote:
| Grandempire is right on my overall sense in the piece,
| though perhaps I should have made its ore explicit. I
| actually faired quite well with 10.6.0. But, the lack of
| push for a yearly set of headlining features did allow the
| OS to age quite well in the years after, too. It's the
| drumbeat of what 10 stunning new features will be unveiled
| each WWDC for each platform that means past features rarely
| get the continued polishing they need to shine.
| sorcercode wrote:
| the myth has indeed become everyone's reality
| joshka wrote:
| From a features perspective, they should acqui-hire either Alfred
| or Raycast and build that functionality into spotlight.
| basisword wrote:
| I feel like they're trying to build too many platforms most of
| which have become quite large. macOS, iOS, iPad OS, visionOS,
| watchOS, tvOS. The fact all of these systems are quite tightly
| linked in terms of features/syncing makes it difficult to
| navigate. If you want to ship every single year you need more
| developers, but that might make the collaboration between the
| systems more difficult. They need to move away from the one year
| cycle. It's a stupidly short period of time to ship a whole OS
| (or 6 whole OS's). If you want to keep them all in sync switch to
| two year cycles and decouple some of the apps from the core OS
| (e.g. Music, Safari, etc) so they can be updated as necessary
| outside of the cycle.
| rcarmo wrote:
| The platform teams at Apple don't really work that way. My
| (limited) understanding is that they share a fair amount of
| core code, but each went their own way for a while and have
| recently started getting nudged back together from a UI
| perspective -- unfortunately, the iOS style guide seems to have
| won, and many decades of desktop UX is being thrown out with
| the bath water.
| spudlyo wrote:
| I'm done with macOS, I've migrated to Linux for my general
| purpose computing. With every new release of macOS, Gatekeeper is
| becoming harder and harder to bypass, increasing Apple's control
| over what software can be run on macOS, forcing apps to be signed
| with an Apple Developer ID. While I'm happy they are taking
| security seriously, I'm seriously creeped out that macOS sends
| hashes of every executable I run to their cloud. It's starting to
| feel like a broader move away from the openness of personal
| computing and towards a more controlled, appliance-like software
| experience.
|
| When Sequoia eliminated the ability to override Gatekeeper by
| control-clicking, it became clear to me that Apple is now
| employing a frog boiling strategy towards their ultimate goal --
| more control of the software you can run on their hardware.
| joezydeco wrote:
| My group makes a custom executable to reflash a hardware device
| we produce. We build it for Linux and Darwin.
|
| Trying to get the program to work with our Mac users has become
| harder and harder. These are all _internal_ developers.
|
| Enabling developer mode and allowing Terminal execution isn't
| enough. Disabling the quarantine bit works - sometimes - but
| now we're getting automated nastygrams from corporate IT
| threatening to kick the laptops off the network. I'm exhausted.
| The emergency workaround, which I tell nobody about, is way
| less secure than if they just let us _run our own software on
| our own computer_.
| hkpack wrote:
| I understand that you're doing it on principle, but for a
| software development team, 99$/year is a really minuscule
| price to pay to be able to build / notarise / distribute
| software.
|
| Developers pay exorbitant amount of money for much lesser
| value, and the idea of putting your teammates at risk to
| stick it to apple is kind of sad bordering with negligence
| from a business POV.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| Adding signing as a requirement can easily make what was
| once a very simple distribution mechanism into something
| much more complex - now you need manage signing
| certificates and keys to be able to build your thing.
|
| The cost is far far higher than the price.
| hkpack wrote:
| But it doesn't in practice.
|
| I develop and distribute few free apps for macOS, and
| building / notarising is never a problem.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You seem to be comparing a single dev sending apps to the
| world vs a corporate team pushing to employees (if I get
| parent's case right).
|
| In most cases, just involving account management makes
| the corporate case 10x more of a PITA. Doing things in a
| corporate environment is a different game altogether.
| JamesonNetworks wrote:
| In contrast to this point, as long as I use Xcode and do
| the same thing I've always done allowing it to manage
| provisioning and everything else, I don't have a problem.
| However, I want to use CI/CD. Have you seen what kind of
| access you have to give fastlane? It's pretty wild. And
| even after giving it the keys to the kingdom, it still
| didn't work. Integrating apple code signing with CI/CD is
| really hard, full of very strange error messages and
| incantations to make it "work".
| hkpack wrote:
| I don't know about fastlane, since my CI/CD is just a
| shell script, and signing and notarising is as hard as
| (checking the script) running `codesign ...` followed by
| `notarytool submit ... --wait`
|
| Yes, you need to put keys on the build server for the
| "Developer ID Application" (which is what you need to
| distribute apps outside of AppStore) signature to work.
|
| You do not need to give any special access to anything
| else beyond that.
|
| Anyway, it is indeed more difficult than cross-build for
| Darwin from linux and call it a day.
| 0xCE0 wrote:
| Code signing is absolutely disgusting practically and
| philosophically. It has very reasonable and good intent
| behind it, but the practical implementations cause great
| suffering and sadness both for developers (cert
| management, cost, tools) and end-users (freedom of
| computing).
|
| It is ugly: https://hearsum.ca/posts/history-of-code-
| signing-at-mozilla/
| ehutch79 wrote:
| I take it you feel the trade off for dev team
| inconvenience, vs end user security, is not worth it?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| They're talking about internal software for internal
| users. It can be made insanely secure, but that surely
| isn't the primary concern in this case.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| I'm just observing that the cost is a lot higher than
| $99/year.
|
| I do this professionally, I maintain macOS CI workers for
| my employer. Apple doesn't make it easy.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The principle is what matters. The amount is not the issue.
| The issue is that there is a cost at all. "It's so cheap"
| is never an excuse for charging for something that should
| be free. In this case, running software you have no intent
| to charge for, on your computer. It's as if someone started
| charging $0.01/month for breathable air. "But $0.01 is
| trivial," would not excuse it.
| hkpack wrote:
| The commenter I replied to employed by a business,
| develops software and distributes it within a team of
| engineers with Macs.
|
| For your personal needs, you do not need to pay anything
| for building and using apps locally.
| ethersteeds wrote:
| It costs money, and isn't free, for a reason you're not
| acknowledging. I don't think it's a major profit center
| for Apple.
|
| It's about setting a higher floor for malicious actors
| than "random botnet residential IP + a captcha solving
| service". It's about proving some semblance of identity
| through a card number and a transaction that goes through
| without a chargeback.
|
| As the case upthread shows, there's plenty to dislike
| about a system that inhibits running code built for
| personal use. And it's obviously neither foolproof nor
| without collateral damage. Reasonable people can debate
| if it's worth it. But it still ought be acknowledged that
| the motivations are closer to the reason you have to
| identify yourself and pay a nominal fee to drive a
| vehicle on public roads.
| eviks wrote:
| > But it still ought be acknowledged that the motivations
| are closer to the reason
|
| Since this isn't true, no acknowledgement required, it
| doesn't need to be a "major" profit center to magically
| become a benevolent feature
| amluto wrote:
| I don't buy it. Or rather, I am willing to believe that
| some team at Apple has convinced itself that this makes
| sense, but they're wrong.
|
| In particular, the security boundaries are nonsensical.
| The whole model of "notarization" is that the developer
| of some software has convinced Apple that the software as
| a whole ( _not_ a specific running instance) is worthy of
| doing a specific thing _to the system as a whole_.
|
| But this is almost useless. Should Facebook be allowed to
| do various things that can violate privacy and steal
| data? What if the app has a valid reason to sometimes do
| those things?
|
| Or, more egregiously, consider something like VSCode. I
| run it, and the fancy Apple sandbox helpfully asks me if
| I want to grant access to "Documents." The answer is
| really "no! -- I want to grant access to the specific
| folders that I want _this workspace_ to access ", but
| MacOS isn't even close to being able to understand that.
| So instead, one needs to grant permission, at which
| point, the user is completely pwned, as VSCode is wildly
| insecure.
|
| So no, I really don't believe that MacOS's security model
| makes its users meaningfully more secure. At best, the
| code signing scheme has some value for attribution after
| an attack occurs, but most attacks seem to involve stolen
| credentials, and I bet a bunch just hijack validly-
| notarized-but-insecure software a la the VSCode example.
| csomar wrote:
| Actually the cost is not the issue (you are paying for it
| one way or the other), the issue is the _authorization_
| to do such an action on your (supposedly) own hardware.
| joezydeco wrote:
| The tool is built deep in our CI/CD chain. The whole thing
| is a house of cards built on a massive pile of tinder next
| to an open drum of kerosene. You want me to integrate
| _XCode_ into _that_?
|
| Last time I tried setting up an Apple developer license
| inside a large corporation, one that _they_ paid for and
| not tied to me or my credit card, it was also a nightmare.
|
| And yes, it's also on principle.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Who said anything about Xcode? The codesign tool is part
| of macOS, not Xcode. The CLI tool for notarization is
| bundled with Xcode, but you don't have to use it; they
| have an official REST API that you can use directly.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Do you have any notes on how to run it inside a Gitlab
| pipeline via a Linux Docker instance? I'd love to learn
| how to do this, then.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Sure it's trivial, but it is tacit acceptance that you need
| _permission_ to make a program on their platform.
| Permission that needs to be renewed year over year.
| Permission to earn a living on this platform.
|
| Permission that can be revoked for any reason, including
| being compelled by someone with more power than Apple.
| hkpack wrote:
| It is permission to _distribute to others_, you can build
| and run on your own computer without a problem.
|
| Once signed, binary will work forever, you only need
| active subscription when you need to re-sign / re-
| notarise.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| They can revoke a signature too.
| hkpack wrote:
| If your signature is compromised and you start signing
| malware then yes. That's the whole purpose of it.
|
| Do you have any evidence that it happened in any
| different circumstances at least once?
| NegativeK wrote:
| $99/year for one of the basic uses of a computer isn't
| okay.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| There's extensive documentation. Examples:
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/code-
| sign...
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizin.
| ..
|
| There are dedicated sections of the developer web forums:
|
| https://developer.apple.com/forums/topics/code-signing-topic
|
| https://developer.apple.com/forums/topics/code-signing-
| topic...
|
| ...and there's an apple developer support person, Quinn, who
| appears to be heavily if not solely dedicated to helping
| developers do binary signing/notarization/stapling correctly.
|
| They have written a slew of Tech Notes about signing and
| notarization. Main TN is at https://developer.apple.com/docum
| entation/technotes/tn3125-i...
|
| Quinn also has their email address in their sig so people can
| just reach out via email without even needing an Apple
| account, or if they prefer more confidentiality.
|
| I mean, _come on._
| paradite wrote:
| As someone who actually signs, notorizes and distributes
| desktop apps for macOS, I can safely say their
| documentation is less than ideal.
|
| Maybe because I'm using Electron framework which makes
| things more complicated, but I don't really understand why
| there's is a difference between different types of
| certificates (Developer ID, Apple distribution, macOS
| distribution) and I had to guess which one to use everytime
| I set it up.
|
| Also why is notorization a completely different process
| from code signing, and requires completely different set of
| credentials from it. Seems odd to me.
| latexr wrote:
| > Also why is notorization a completely different process
| from code signing
|
| Because they do completely different things. Signing is a
| proof that you were the one to write and package that
| software; notarisation is an online security check for
| malware. If I recall, you still sign but do not notarise
| when distributing to the Mac App Store.
| paradite wrote:
| Ok, so the certificate used to sign the package is
| generated by Apple, why can't I just use that to prove my
| identity for notarization?
|
| Or maybe simpler, why can't Apple just do code sign and
| notarization with one single cli call, with one set of
| credentials?
|
| Google Play does this under the hook, I don't even think
| about it. iOS is similar, Transponder app does everything
| in one go.
| upbeat_general wrote:
| A lot of developers (including myself) don't want to
| notarize/sign their binaries that they want to run on their
| own machine(s).
| Etheryte wrote:
| I don't really think saying documentation exists says much
| when Apple is notorious for having documentation that's
| either borderline or downright useless. It's generally the
| norm that some random blog post from a decade ago is more
| useful than their documentation, and I say this from
| firsthand experience.
| kbolino wrote:
| Can you sign and notarize your own software made for
| internal use with your own infrastructure? If so, then this
| is a valid response. If not, then this is an irrelevant
| response because the issue is going through Apple, not the
| process being difficult or undocumented. If I own the
| device, then I should be free to decide what the sources of
| authority over it are.
|
| Edit: I haven't tested it yet, but it does seem that you
| can _sign_ an executable with your own certificate (self-
| signed or internal CA-issued) however you can 't _notarize_
| it. Right now, notarization is only required for certain
| kinds of Apple-issued developer certificates, but that may
| change in the future.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| > emergency workaround
|
| I once really urgently needed `nmap` to do some production
| debugging ASAP. Unfortunately, the security tools would flag
| this immediately on my machine, as I knew this from previous
| experiments. Solution - compile my own binary from sources,
| then quickly rename it. I assume that this "workaround" was
| totally fine for sec department. At least production got
| fixed and money kept flowing.
| rollcat wrote:
| > At least production got fixed and money kept flowing.
|
| You were denied the tools to get your job done. You've put
| yourself at risk by applying an unapproved workaround.
|
| Never ever do this (unless you hold substantial shares).
| Let the company's bottom line take the fall. If that's the
| only thing they care about, that's your only way to make
| the problem visible.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| Unfortunately the real world isn't black and white. Yes,
| according to the company policies, I should watch the
| world burn and do nothing, while looking at the company
| bleeding money due to customers SLA being broken. Of
| course, after submitting a ticket to get nmap approved,
| which takes days. Extra points if I'm on oncall, then
| racking that sweet incident money is great.
|
| But the underlying SRE culture here is that, if you know
| what you are doing and have a functioning brain of a
| responsible person, you'd be forgiven a jump over the
| fence, if it means putting out a fire on the other side
| of it. We aren't kids.
| TuxSH wrote:
| xattr -cr <file> should clear the "download" extended
| attribute and make it as if the software was compiled on the
| machine itself, bypassing the ever-so-annoying Gatekeeper.
|
| For binary patching: codesign --force --deep -s - <file> (no
| developer ID required, "ad-hoc signing" is just updating a
| few hashes here and there). Note that you should otherwise
| not use codesign as it is the job of the linker to do it.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Very aware of the attributes, unfortunately these machines
| are on a global corporate network so there are layers and
| layers of monitoring software to prevent internal and
| external attacks. Changing perm bits on an OSX executable
| is instantly noted and sent upwards as a possible security
| breach.
|
| Last time we did this I had to spend a week explaining to
| management that Macs could actually run software other than
| PowerPoint and it was necessary for our job.
|
| The local workaround that we use is to just spin up a Linux
| VM and program devices from there. The less legal
| workaround is using WebUSB and I'm afraid to even tell the
| necessary people how I did it, because it's sitting out on
| a public-facing server.
| kn8 wrote:
| I don't know if it's just me, but i want more Gatekeeper, not
| less - help me stay safer. Or is it a security theatre? Malware
| producers can sign things just fine?
| torstenvl wrote:
| An OS that won't let you do what you want to do _is_ malware.
| ohgr wrote:
| It is indeed starting to feel like that.
| trinix912 wrote:
| The more Gatekeeper, the more used people get to clicking OK
| without considering what it means. No amount of software can
| prevent the social engineering of an actual malware that
| tells the user to just click that OK button that they
| _already have to do on a regular basis_. Less is more here.
| It 's why Windows tuned down their UAC after Vista.
| timeon wrote:
| > clicking OK without considering what it means.
|
| Predefined value on current macOS's Gatekeeper is "move to
| Bin" instead of OK. Other option is Done - which cancels
| opening action. If you want to bypass that, you need to go
| to system settings > privacy & security and manually allow
| particular app there.
|
| Who know what later updated will bring.
| rcarmo wrote:
| The hashes are completely anonymized and not that intrusive.
| I'd rather they do it that way and have a global view of
| possible malware attacks than the complete free-for-all that
| other platforms "enjoy".
|
| But here's my (unpopular) take as a GNOME user and using Fedora
| immutable distros + flatpaks -- I suspect Linux is going to go
| in a broadly similar direction. Maybe not soon (even flatpaks
| aren't universally acclaimed), but sometime.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| "Immutable" distros? We used to live-boot those from optical
| media back in the day. Fedora is quite late to the game.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It doesn't matter whether it is anonymized. Apple has no
| business collecting information about what executables I am
| running on my own computer, or even whether I'm running
| executables at all. I don't care what their stated purpose
| is. I don't care what they want a "global view" of. It's my
| computer, not theirs.
|
| I don't even mind that they've introduced a level on the
| totem pole that's above root. But on my computer, -I- should
| be the one at that level, not Apple.
| redeeman wrote:
| > it's my computer, not theirs.
|
| the issue seems to be that you still believe this?
| redeeman wrote:
| to downvoters: you can think its not fair that apple
| effectively holds control of your device, true, but the
| only way you can change things is to not buy the
| products. If you buy it, you accept how it is. vote with
| your wallets, not in some internet forum
| ndiddy wrote:
| I think it depends on what distro you're talking about.
| Corporate distros like RHEL and SLES are absolutely going
| that way. It takes a lot of effort to backport fixes, and the
| money's not there in desktop Linux to make it worth their
| while if containerization is a viable alternative. Red Hat's
| gotten rid of a bunch of graphical applications for RHEL 10
| and stated that users can get them from Flathub as an
| alternative. I believe there was some consternation when
| CentOS Stream 10 launched without even a packaged web browser
| and the advice was to install Firefox from Flathub (there's a
| lot of use cases where that breaks stuff), but it appears
| they've walked that back and started providing Firefox as a
| traditional package.
|
| However, less corporate distros that mostly just ship built
| upstream software as-is since they don't have to support it
| for long periods (think Arch, Fedora, Void, etc) don't have
| that problem, so I expect we'll continue seeing them use
| traditional packages.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > I believe there was some consternation when CentOS Stream
| 10 launched without even a packaged web browser and the
| advice was to install Firefox from Flathub
|
| Ubuntu does the exact same thing with their snap
| repository, the Firefox apt package from Ubuntu is fake. At
| least Flatpak is a community-led project unlike snap.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| My advice is to add Mozilla's apt repo for Firefox by
| following the handy guide on their website. It's pretty
| short and easy (copy and paste).
| consteval wrote:
| My advice for web browsers is to use Flatpak.
|
| You can limit the file system permissions of the app,
| like giving only access to downloads, so that if/when
| there's a sandbox leak you're fine. You can also disable
| various things, like webcam or mic, this way.
|
| In addition, you can get perpetual updates to the latest
| version of your browser even on old, stable distros like
| Debian.
| spudlyo wrote:
| > I suspect Linux is going to go in a broadly similar
| direction.
|
| Linux is pretty diverse, there are still distributions out
| there that haven't adopted systemd.
| simondotau wrote:
| I understand and appreciate the sentiment, but I see the intent
| very differently. Apple is not employing a frog boiling
| strategy, but rather being responsive to an increasingly
| sophisticated adversary.
|
| It's like criticism of the quality of Google search dropping.
| It has absolutely tanked, but it's not because the algorithm is
| worse, it's because the internet has grown orders of magnitude
| and most of it uses the same hyper aggressive SEO optimisation,
| such that the signal to noise ratio is far worse than ever
| before.
| spudlyo wrote:
| > being responsive to an increasingly sophisticated adversary
|
| "Those who refuse to give up essential Liberty to purchase
| temporary Safety deserve to have to deal with the GNOME
| desktop user experience."
|
| I miss macOS sometimes.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| It is because the algorithm is worse. So many garbage results
| are showing up which they continue to allow.
|
| Kagi lets me completely block specific domains. If Google
| cared about quality they'd let you do the same.
| biglyburrito wrote:
| You can also block specific subdomains, too. Useful when I
| want to be able to see finance.yahoo.com items in my search
| results, but nothing else from the yahoo.com domain.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| That rationalization ignores a lot of confounding evidence,
| such as other search engines being able to deliver great
| results and adequately keep the SEO garbage out.
| ummonk wrote:
| That's kinda the SEO equivalent of security by obscurity
| though, right? SEO spam puts a lot less effort into
| optimizing for other search engines, whereas Google is
| dealing with being the primary target of every adversarial
| SEO spam site.
| masfuerte wrote:
| This is a great theory but it isn't the reason. Google
| management made a conscious decision about five years ago
| to prioritise profit over search quality.
|
| We know this because the emails came out in discovery for
| one of the antitrust suits.
| detourdog wrote:
| The biggest struggle is that the original Macintosh was so
| simple to manage. The original concept of system extensions
| to expand the capabilities and the file structure built on
| the hierarchy with the desktop as the top level was broken
| with the shift to Unix.
|
| Suddenly the users file hierarchy started wherever the Home
| folder was located and it became an island of user controlled
| environment surrounded by complexity of computer operating
| systems.
|
| The result I found overall well thought out but when the
| desktop became just a folder I felt the Mac moved from it's
| simplicity embracing the complexity that was offered by
| windows.
| simondotau wrote:
| Simplicity is fine for a hobby project. An operating system
| having zero concern for any kind of security is a non-
| starter today.
|
| It's amazing the rose tinted glasses people have about the
| original Macintosh environment. It was insanely janky and
| (unless you were ruthlessly conservative) insanely unstable
| by today's standards. By version 10.5 (Leopard) the modern
| UNIX-based MacOS was unequivocally superior to Classic
| MacOS in every metric other than nostalgia.
| detourdog wrote:
| I understand the trade offs and accept them. I was trying
| to point out where the split is and how it won't go back.
| I think the point of view expressed in your comment is s
| distorted as the ones your derding.
|
| I also believe that the simplicity could have security as
| performant. The real advantage of the Unix layer is
| compatibility that the Macintosh was missing.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| _Of course_ Google 's algorithm is worse. Google prioritises
| showing you search results _that make money for Google._
| Google has no incentive to show you anything else.
|
| I can't believe I even have to say this out loud. Look up
| enshittification.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > Apple
|
| Actively depleting the good-will they accumulated over the
| years definitely makes it worse. It's that harder to give the
| benefit of the doubt to a company also showing the middle
| finger to their Devs.
|
| > Google
|
| Giving priority to AdSense sites, fucking around with content
| lengths (famously penalising short stay sites), killing
| advanced search options. That's just thinking about it for
| 10s, but to me most of it is totally of Google's making.
| simondotau wrote:
| As someone who runs a decent sized site with AdSense, _I
| wish._
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > Gatekeeper is becoming harder and harder to bypass
|
| sudo spctl ---master-disable
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Why remember all these little tricks Apple makes you do to
| use your own hardware?
| redeeman wrote:
| stockholm syndrome
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes because everything in Linux is completely intuitive and
| you never have to know anything obscure to use it to your
| liking...
| cayley_graph wrote:
| The difference: in Linux it is a usability issue to be
| fixed, whereas on macOS it is a feature and explicit
| design goal to make it that way. In general, I have found
| that things which are difficult on Linux are so because
| the problem is difficult, not because the people who make
| my computer have paternalistic attitudes about my usage
| of it.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| So it's purely ideological without any real world
| difference?
|
| Are most people better off with Apple defaults?
|
| And it's not because the problem is "difficult". It's
| because for 20 years it has been claimed that this will
| be the "year of Linux on the Desktop" and it's never been
| good enough for most people.
| cayley_graph wrote:
| That isn't the denotation of my post; I was not
| characterizing Linux as a whole, but only responding to
| your specific (unsound) analogy. It works better for me,
| for a number of reasons including that above. Perhaps it
| will work better for you, as well. :)
|
| The second part of your post is incoherent to me, I can't
| tell what you're trying to say.
| consteval wrote:
| It's perfectly fine. KDE and Gnome are both now more
| cohesive, more intuitive, and less buggy than either
| Windows or MacOS.
|
| The problem with Linux is that, while it's very good,
| it's different.
|
| Nobody actually cares how intuitive something is, at
| least not in absolute. People will still say Windows is
| intuitive. Pretty much nothing in Windows, from the
| registry to COM to IIS to setting/control panel/computer
| management, is intuitive. But they know how to use it and
| are used to that particular brand of buggy inconsistency.
|
| Linux desktops have been high quality for a long time
| now. The reality is you, and others, measure quality as
| "how much is it like windows" or "how much of it is like
| macOS". When that's your metric, Linux will always come
| up short, just by definition.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| If I pick up a Linux laptop right now, how well will it
| handle low latency audio? How well will it handle power
| management? My graphics hardware? Getting WiFi to work
| reliably is still an issue.
|
| Can I get a high performance Linux laptop with good
| battery life, fast graphics, that runs cool and silent?
| joseda-hg wrote:
| Yes, but be mindful of the hardware you're using
|
| What's high performance for you?
|
| I can certainly get a Framework (Fedora and Ubuntu
| officially supported), throw my prefered Bluefin-
| Framework image in and get working
|
| Battery life around 7 hours is the average I see
| reported, Fast/Silent will depend on the model, but I
| don't see the issue really Upgradability and easeness of
| battery replacement are a plus
|
| I just picked framework because they were first to come
| to mind, but I think Dell has a nice Linux story, Tuxedo
| also comes to mind
| scarface_74 wrote:
| 7 hours battery life is less than half of what I get on
| my MacBook Air. That wouldn't last me on my ATL - HNL
| flight I took last year or my MCO - LHR 10 hour flight
| I'm taking this year.
|
| These are the typical reviews I see around the Framework
|
| https://community.frame.work/t/fw-16-review-the-good-the-
| bad...
|
| Poor battery life, heavy, runs hot, poor build quality,
| bad speakers, and decent but not great graphics.
| consteval wrote:
| Yes, I just bought one a few months ago actually. A new
| lunar lake laptop. It gets 12 hours of battery life and
| has plenty performance for programming, plus 32 gigs of
| ram. It's under 3 pounds and the screen is OLED.
|
| And yes, everything works. On bleeding edge 2 month old
| hardware.
|
| I even use thunderbolt 4 to connect my external displays
| and peripherals. Not only does it work, but it's
| pleasant. KDE has a settings panel for thunderbolt. I can
| even change my monitor brightness in KDE settings. No OSD
| required!
|
| But wait, there's more! I'm running 2 1440p monitors at
| 240hz and the system never even hiccups.
|
| But wait, there's more more! The battery settings are
| really advanced so I can change the power profile,
| maximum charge, everything.
|
| The only thing I'm unsure about in your comment is "low
| latency audio". It seems low latency to me, but I'm not
| an audio engineer.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| > Getting WiFi to work reliably is still an issue.
|
| This should not be an issue. I have hardware that varies
| a lot and I literally buy random wifi dongles for $1, $4,
| $5, Amazon, AliExpress, etc. and they have all just
| worked on first plugin. I can easily take my phone and
| tether it to my PC using USB-C and it appears in my Gnome
| network list and just starts using it for Internet.
|
| > how well will it handle low latency audio
|
| Pretty well you can use OBS to verify this. There are
| plenty of settings if you want to tune that.
|
| > My graphics hardware?
|
| Just ignore Nvidia and move on. Sure they might figure it
| out one day, I gave up a decade ago and I use Intel
| integrated or AMD dedicated for GPUs. Nvidia does "work"
| for most purposes but it will cause you a headache
| eventually and those are not worth $400 to me.
|
| > How well will it handle power management?
|
| I enjoy the basic controls that Gnome provides that give
| me a simple way to basically say "go all out" or "save
| some battery" etc. There are finer grain controls
| available and I have used commands in the past to push
| crappy hardware to it's limits before I chucked it (old
| Intel iGPUs)
|
| > Can I get a high performance Linux laptop with good
| battery life, fast graphics, that runs cool and silent?
|
| You can get ones that are specifically marketed for this
| purpose. Tuxedo is one that specializes in this and
| obviously System76 also do. These have a higher price
| point than a regular Dell system, which IMO is the better
| option in some ways. Dell sells more systems and has more
| users and it will "just work". They sold Linux systems
| for years and still do I believe.
|
| Regarding "running silent" this is a gripe I have, not
| that it runs loud but some laptops have custom RGB crap
| and sometimes in Linux I don't have access to the extra
| functionality to customize my lighting or manually set my
| fans to ramp up etc. There are projects that aim to do
| this, but I have not looked into them beyond the most
| basic `fancontrol` built in command.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| > Are most people better off with Apple defaults?
|
| I think once you expand the scope to "most people" it
| might become impossible to say what the correct answer
| for that large of a group is. In the past their value add
| might have been more compelling and their feature lock
| not as draconian. It appears some people think that has
| changed over time.
| rollcat wrote:
| > In general, I have found that things which are
| difficult on Linux are so because the problem is
| difficult [...].
|
| Hard disagree. Audio mixing is _not_ difficult[1]. The
| Linux _kernel_ guys were right - it does not belong in
| the kernel. The userspace story however, has been a
| complete shitshow for _decades_. I think Pipewire mostly
| fixed that? Not sure, sometimes I still have to log out
| and back in to fix audio.
|
| The funniest part? It's been working in the BSDs all
| along. I recommend reading the source of sndiod[1].
|
| [1]: <https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/sndiod/>
|
| What's even worse? Probably systemd. I try not to hold a
| strong opinion - I tolerate it, the way I tolerate
| traffic when taking a walk. The technical issue however
| is several orders of magnitude simpler - again, the BSDs
| come to mind, but you can also write a complete PID1
| program in about 20 lines of straightforward C[2]. I
| don't mind the commands being unfamiliar (they're already
| all different in almost every OS family); it's that the
| entire package is dreadfully large in scope, opaque, and
| I find it more difficult to interact with than anything
| else in this landscape.
|
| [2]: <https://ewontfix.com/14/>
| cayley_graph wrote:
| There are indeed always exceptions to generalizations, as
| you've pointed out. Though pulseaudio always trudged
| along fine for me (not like audio had always worked for
| me on other systems), and pipewire works perfectly.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I agree PulseAudio, Pipewire, ALSA, etc. are a pretty big
| shit show in Linux and have been for some time. From what
| I understand there are a few stories there with various
| levels of screw ups, but at no point was this situation
| the goal, and we are moving closer to an easy to use
| system that "just works" for these needs.
|
| However, it's worth noting that audio experts doing high
| grade mixing in production are using these systems quite
| effectively and have been for a long time. It's similar
| to Blender in that regard with it always having the
| "guts" of doing great things, but only the experts that
| knew the correct spells to cast were able to use it
| effectively before the UI/UX was improved with 2.x and
| later I believe.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I never mentioned Linux. I'm curious why people want to
| pay for this component of their product from Apple.
| TuxSH wrote:
| Don't disable SIP, clear the downloaded/quarantine extended
| attribute instead. This clears all extended attributes: xattr
| -cr <file> and bypasses the obnoxious GK.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Frustrating thing is the earlier versions worked well, it
| protected you from accidental things but the way to force it
| was clear and obvious. Now bypass is obtuse and requires
| enough work arounds people advise just disabling it which is
| also bad to normalize.
| StrLght wrote:
| I migrated to Linux about a year ago too. Not the smoothest
| experience ever (looking at you, ath11k with device-specific
| quirks) but so far I am delighted. Finally, I don't have to
| fight my computer to do things I expect it to do.
|
| Unfortunately, I still have to deal with macOS for work due to
| corporate policies.
| spudlyo wrote:
| The main problem I had with living in a Gnome desktop
| environment, is with the keyboard. I'm not willing to abandon
| my use of Emacs control+meta sequences for cursor and editing
| movements everywhere in the GUI. On macOS, this works because
| the command (super/Win on Linux/Windows) key is used for
| common shortcuts and the control key is free for editing
| shortcuts.
|
| I spent a day or so hacking around with kanata[0], which is a
| kernel level keyboard remapping tool, that lets you define
| keyboard mapping layers in a similar way you might with QMK
| firmware. When I press the 'super/win/cmd' it activates a
| layer which maps certain sequences to their control
| equivalents, so I can create tabs, close windows, copy and
| paste (and many more) like my macOS muscle memory wants to
| do. Other super key sequences (like Super-L for lock desktop
| or Super-Tab for window cycling) are unchanged. Furthermore,
| when I hit the control or meta/alt/option key, it activates a
| layer where Emacs editing keys are emulated using the Gnome
| equivalents. For example, C-a and C-e are mapped to home/end,
| etc.
|
| The only problem is, this is not the behavior I want in
| terminals or in GNU/Emacs itself. So I installed a Gnome
| shell extension[1] that exports information about the active
| window state to a DBUS endpoint. That let me write a small
| python daemon (managed by a systemd user service) which wakes
| up whenever the active window changes. Based on this info, I
| send a message to the TCP server that kanata (also managed by
| a systemd user service) provides for remote control to switch
| to the appropriate layer.
|
| After doing this, and tweaking my Gnome setup for another day
| or so, I am just as comfortable on my Linux machine as I was
| on my Mac. My main applications are Emacs, Firefox,
| Mattermost, Slack, ChatGPT, Discord, Kitty, and Steam. My
| Linux box was previously my Windows gaming box (don't get me
| started about frog boiling on Windows) and I'm amazed that I
| can play all my favorite titles (Manor Lords, Hell Let Loose,
| Foundation, Arma Reforager) on Linux with Proton.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata
|
| [1]: https://github.com/hseliger/window-calls-extended
| wpm wrote:
| I'm convinced a DE that figures this shit out out of the
| box will explode in popularity. Super for the OS and DE
| shortcuts. Ctrl for the Terminal and readline cursor
| movements. It can't be impossible to bake these in as
| defaults.
| benn0 wrote:
| Love this, and I'm in the same boat. Is your configuration
| of kanata public at all?
|
| I know it's mostly muscle memory, but macOS shortcuts just
| seem sane and consistent and that has been one of the
| biggest frustrations when trying to switch. I found
| toshy[0] which does something similar - did you try that?
| The goal is purely macOS key remappings in Linux, so a much
| smaller scope than kanata.
|
| [0]: https://toshy.app
| spudlyo wrote:
| I didn't try toshy, I had a bad experience when I tried
| kinto.sh a couple of years back, and I had a pretty clear
| idea of how I could get what I wanted out of a fully
| featured keyboard remapping tool under Linux. I initially
| started with Kmonad, but once I found Kanata, and
| realized that it had a TCP interface for programmatically
| changing layers, I quickly switched.
|
| I have a Kinesis 360 keyboard, and my config[0] probably
| won't work for other keyboards, but it can give you a
| starting point for your own config.
|
| [0]: https://gitlab.com/spudlyo/dotfiles/-/blob/master/ka
| nata/.co...
| HexPhantom wrote:
| What used to be a powerful, user-respecting OS is increasingly
| starting to feel like an iOS cousin with training wheels
| berkes wrote:
| What OS are you talking about?
|
| If Linux, you'll have to be more specific, because users
| don't use Linux. They use Android, Ubuntu, Gnome, pop!os,
| redhat etc.
| sagacity wrote:
| They're clearly talking about macOS in that comment.
| Macha wrote:
| One thing that has been slowly creeping in is a little bit of a
| Microsoft-like "you will use our feature", like launching apple
| music every time I hit headphone controls, or nagging me to turn
| on reactions every time I start a video call. In some ways that's
| more annoying than the outright bugs, as they could choose not to
| be that way and market themselves as not being that way.
| tonymet wrote:
| I feel your pain. I hate pushy upsells and promos. Also the
| cluttered settings App "Remember to setup Apple Pay" promos. I
| do value user education. They need to consolidate all of the
| feature promo services into a revised Tips tool that allow
| users to engage with new features at their own pace.
| silvr wrote:
| Agree. Apple needs to clean up shop - MacOS has been egregiously
| worsening year over year. Some features like Universal Control
| and Continuity Camera are legitimately awesome, but they do not
| make up for the INSANELY slow System Settings app that gets
| harder to navigate with each release and which has >2s wait times
| for the right pane to respond to a change in the left pane. Steve
| Jobs would have fired the person responsible for that overhaul
| three years ago, it's embarrassing. Messages too needs a ground-
| up rewrite. Getting more elaborate emoji tapbacks doesn't make up
| for fundamental instability and poor syncing behavior. C'mon!
| yawndex wrote:
| Absolutely. I love the work they have been doing on the
| backend, like PQ3 [1], but it just doesn't work for me when the
| Stickers and Emojis extensions on Mac leak several GBs of RAM
| and I have to terminate it several times a day to free up
| memory.
|
| Another thing I dislike is that it stores the whole message
| history on the device. It's nice to have at times, but I send a
| lot of photos, which adds up in storage over time. I pay for
| iCloud, and store my messages there. Why does my Mac need to
| hold every single photo I have ever sent?
|
| [1] https://security.apple.com/blog/imessage-pq3/
| CuriousRose wrote:
| Local iMessage storage is debilitating. I have over 90GB of
| iMessage history that I don't want deleted. The keep messages
| for x days removes it from iCloud and the Mac though. Why?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| System Settings is awful. Whoever decided to hide tons of
| settings inside innocuous "(i)" non-buttons should be kept far
| away from UX design. It's the hamburger menu of macOS.
| wpm wrote:
| It's what they have available in the SwiftUI toolbox of
| "shitty widgets from mobile operating systems" though.
|
| Thankfully, that is also somehow the future of UI frameworks
| on all of their platforms!
| HexPhantom wrote:
| Apple used to obsess over details like these. Now it feels like
| they're hoping we won't notice.
| ninkendo wrote:
| > Getting more elaborate emoji tapbacks doesn't make up for
| fundamental instability and poor syncing behavior. C'mon!
|
| Oh but you forgot about the "catch up" button they added 2
| releases ago that takes you to the last unread message! ...
|
| ... but only if said last message is within the N most recent
| messages, in the messages which are already "fetched" from
| local storage. If it's more unread messages than that, the
| button is nowhere to be found.
|
| Like they said "ok we can implement a catch up button but it'll
| be hard to solve due to how we do paging." "Ok we just won't
| put the button on screen if we have to page then. Save the hard
| problem for the next release." Then they just forgot about it.
| mistyvales wrote:
| I'm enjoying Sorbet Leopard on my 20 year old Dual Core PowerPC
| tower. Mostly just messing around with old versions of Max making
| weird sounds.. but when I do interact with the OS it feels great
| and responsive and a joy to use. Modern MacOS can feel that way
| if you turn off a lot of crap. I don't even sync my accounts to
| the OS anymore.
| Andaith wrote:
| They need a Snow-IOS too.
|
| - Ever since I've updated to the latest iOS 18, my watch
| complications(weather doodad) stop working randomly because they
| just lose the location services permission. Then in settings, the
| location services permission list acts like the weather app isn't
| installed.
|
| - The new Mail app now automatically classifies your email, but
| still gives you the "All Mail" option. But the unread count badge
| on the app only works off of what they classify as your
| "Priority" mail. There's a setting to change that, so that it
| shows you the unread count of ALL mail, not just priority mail,
| but when you change that setting nothing changes. This is my
| biggest problem with new iOS.
|
| - Keyboard sometimes doesn't get out the way any more when it
| should.
|
| These are just off the top of my head. It used to be such a nice,
| polished experience. Their competition was just outclassed. Now,
| when my phone dies I'm going to have a good look at all the other
| options.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| > - Keyboard sometimes doesn't get out the way any more when it
| should.
|
| Depends on where you were seeing this of course, but this could
| very well be an app problem instead of a system problem.
|
| Native UIKit/SwiftUI do a little bit of keyboard management for
| "free", but there are many circumstances where it falls on the
| developer's shoulders to do this. For cross platform
| frameworks, some do keyboard management others don't even try.
| For web apps it's a coin toss and depends on which of the
| gazillion ways the dev built their app.
|
| It's not actually that hard, usually just a matter of making
| sure that your scrolling content either resizes to match the
| keyboard-shrunken viewport or adding bottom padding equivalent
| to the height of the keyboard and then and adjusting scroll
| position accordingly, but it's not unusual to see this
| partially or fully absent, especially on poorly built cheapest-
| bidder-contracted apps.
| jshier wrote:
| In modern UIKit it's as simple as constraining to the
| keyboard layout guide. That gives you full animation support
| for free as well, no more need to listen for the notification
| and manually set up animations with the same timing and
| curve. On iPads the keyboard guide can even help you avoid
| the split keyboard, it's really nice.
|
| Of course SwiftUI gives you almost none of this control,
| forcing you to hope the magic automatic support works how you
| expect.
|
| But then neither help you with any of the other interactions,
| like any background dimming you may want, or tapping away
| from the keyboard to dismiss. That has to be done manually.
| moralestapia wrote:
| The recent Photos app update was a major regression.
| jes5199 wrote:
| my iPhone gets into a state lately where a pane will suddenly
| lose the the ability to _scroll_. it can happen in any app, but
| I see it a lot in Safari. Like, what is even happening, this is
| a fundamental UI interaction. The only way to fix it is to
| close the tab or force-quit the app. Super weird.
| tonymet wrote:
| Permissions needs a complete rewrite. Layers and layers of
| permissions screens. To get anything done takes 4-5 forward and
| reverse UI stack traversals
| pickledoyster wrote:
| Absolutely. And turning off Siri's "Learn from this app"
| should not require the user to navigate to every single app's
| menu, when Siri has a top level page in Settings.
| consteval wrote:
| The division of per-app vs app list in general is bad.
|
| I think they should just throw in the towel and duplicate
| settings. Meaning, we can turn off Siri learning from an
| app or from the Siri page. Or we can turn off banners from
| the app or the notifications page.
| ohgr wrote:
| I don't think it does. Long term Apple user here (since 2007).
| I'm typing this on a 5 year old pile of junk with Windows 11 LTSC
| on it. The (M4) Mac is sitting next to me acting as an SMB server
| until I can be bothered to get all my stuff out of it. It's just
| tiring using a Mac these days. It's difficult to explain but
| everything feels slightly frustrating. The nice things are really
| nice. The whole experience is quite nice. Until you hit a
| problem. Then it's a complete pit of pain and misery and there
| just aren't enough ways out of it.
|
| Had a few issues with iCloud syncing and data loss as well and
| what with being based in the UK and the general problems with
| geopolitics and the cloud I figured I'd try and get as much stuff
| out of iCloud as possible. Well there's not much advantage now.
| Most of it is in the ecosystem tie in, not the hardware. And on
| top of that the provisioned services such as Apple Music are just
| pain for me on a daily basis. My entire music catalogue
| disappeared in a puff of smoke when I was offline for nearly a
| week. The one thing I wanted it for!
|
| So back to the PC. I ran out of disk space on the (soldered in
| SSD) Mac. I can't delete anything and macOS has leaked out about
| 20gb suddenly. I don't know what this is other than about 5 gig
| of it is Apple Intelligence despite telling it to fuck off. So
| it's late Friday afternoon and I need to get something done so I
| can have a clear weekend. I dig in the junk cupboard and find a
| couple of hard disks but no way of connecting them to the USB-C
| only Mac. Amazon solutions aren't available for delivery until
| Sunday. There upon I discovered the kids' "covid work PC" for
| when they were home studying. Despite the acceptable 16Gb of RAM
| it only had a meagre 256Gb disk in it. No worries. Opened it up
| and there's a hole for an SSD in it. It now has +500Gb SSD.
| Brilliant. On goes windows 11 LTSC. I'm back up running R in
| under an hour and have transferred all the data over.
|
| I never went back. It feels better here. This thing is a swiss
| army knife. And extension of me. Not the other way round like on
| the Mac. The Mac feels like it feeds off me: both cash and
| energy. Apple need to fix _that_.
| jessekv wrote:
| > macOS has leaked out about 20gb suddenly
|
| time machine?
| intrasight wrote:
| > Long term Apple user here (since 2007)
|
| That would be medium-term user. Long-term would be people like
| me that have been using it since 1984.
|
| I have a collection of Macs going all the way back to 1984.
| Even the newest one hasn't been turned on in three years.
|
| My daily driver is Windows Server 2016. But it has VMware
| Workstation so there are lots of virtual machines for my work,
| including Linux.
|
| I am so tempted by the new M4s. Amazing piece of technology. So
| sad about the operating system though. Every year I say I'll
| wait for a quality Linux port.
| notShabu wrote:
| what are some good alternatives to mac os? there some features
| like image/text copy-paste being cross device that are insanely
| useful that make it hard to switch
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >what are some good alternatives to mac os?
|
| There are three main choices and they are all compromised in
| their own way. You just need to figure out what is important to
| you and what isn't.
|
| What you shouldn't do is take too much notice of posts like
| these, I've read through the whole thing and haven't had any of
| the issues mentioned. I've also not seen a mention of the
| issues I do have. HN has a negative tone, it seems we like to
| whinge.
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| > I could walk item by item through System Settings and point out
| many equally inexplicable decisions. Did anyone at Apple really
| believe a Mac user's life would be better if common features were
| buried deep in menus?
|
| I have to agree with this, System Settings seems very
| inconsistent (design) and has terrible information architecture /
| organization.
| lupinglade wrote:
| Use it every day and still no idea where anything really is in
| there. What a shitshow.
| runjake wrote:
| It should be noted that Snow Leopard was pretty buggy until
| several versions in.
|
| Our memory is a lot rosier than the reality.
| dmix wrote:
| Everyone keeps making this comment but the article's about the
| idea of a maintenance release more than about Snow Leopard. It
| was a good idea that's stuck around in the dev community,
| something we've been talking about forever, so it's basically a
| meme at this point to say "Snow Leopard release"
| runjake wrote:
| I understand, but my point is that it took a lot of time for
| Snow Leopard to reach a level where it lived up to that.
| aresant wrote:
| It is literally insane that when I search for Photos on iOS I
| can't zoom in to make the thumbnails bigger. As an approaching
| mid-40s person this is untenable, even worse that it DOES let you
| zoom in prior to search.
| dmix wrote:
| Photos definitely regressed in last release. I like change and
| new things (AI searching/tagging photos is extremely useful)
| but when they changed it I realized how important my muscle
| memory was for that app and features like pulldown iCloud
| sync/status seems to be gone and other small things changed in
| annoying ways.
| prawn wrote:
| The lack of filters in things like Photos or the iCloud version
| baffles me. Tools that would be effective and far more useful
| than half of what they add instead.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I clicked this because I was confused why someone felt so
| strongly about Apple needing a winterized SUV.
| tonymet wrote:
| Apple needs to restore primacy to the UI. MacOS and iOS used to
| feel non-blocking with a UI that would always respond regardless
| of how long a remote or long-running background task required.
|
| Now iOS and MacOS feel sluggish and slothlike, waiting on IO,
| typically from a remote call. The webdevs have taken over.
|
| Yes they need to remove cruft, and also re-hire the ruthless UI
| Nazis who would enforce 120hz responsiveness at all cost.
| JeremyHerrman wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. Moving a file from one folder to another
| has a huge delay. Dragging files for spring loaded folders
| doesn't work well anymore.
|
| As a user since System 7 it's so sad to see.
| tonymet wrote:
| i respect a fellow UI autist
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I don't think it's just an Apple thing. I think it's just a big
| company thing. For example, the YouTube app has so many errors in
| the very common path, such as opening comments on channels and so
| on. I think after a while big companies simply become hollow from
| the inside and self-combust. Just like large animals have a
| cancer protection gene, I think there is a max size companies can
| get before they sell combust and they do not have a cancer
| preventing gene.
| stmw wrote:
| Great post.
|
| BTW, there is an (earlier) example of Snow Leopard in the
| Microsoft ecosystem -- that would be Windows XP, which similarly
| avoided major new subsystems and new applications built-into-the-
| OS, but was remarkably fast and stable for its time.
| senderista wrote:
| I think you mean XP SP2?
| o11c wrote:
| I never tried the pre-SP XP, but even SP1 wasn't too terrible
| compared to what it was competing against (there was a lot of
| perfectly-usable 95/98/ME still around with their lack of
| privilege separation, and 2K was mostly better only if
| comparing at the same amount of RAM but XP machines were
| newer and often had more).
|
| For me, service packs were largely a question of "do we want
| to tie up the phone line for however many hours just because
| Microsoft wants to rearrange a UI layout?"
| senderista wrote:
| I guess it wasn't very obvious, but SP2 had a ton of
| security enhancements.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| XP was a massive change in that it was the merger of the
| Windows NT and Windows 9x lines.
|
| It was perceived as bloated because it struggled on the
| hardware of the time.
|
| Then it needed a near total rewrite with SP2 because it was
| riddled with security issues.
| CuriousRose wrote:
| I am totally invested in the Apple ecosystem, which on principle
| I'm against (closed systems never sat right with me), but at the
| time (beginning ~2015) the products and services were so well
| integrated and genuinely improved my life it was hard to see how
| things could ever get this bad. I'd still never (ever) go back to
| Windows, and Linux doesn't have the same feel or ease of setup as
| macOS, but I am genuinely, deeply concerned about this trajectory
| for Apple. Albeit super opinionated, but I feel that macOS was
| the saviour of modern aesthetic computing especially when Windows
| started its rapid decline post 7. I'm fine trading some
| frustration--like extra steps for untrusted software--if it keeps
| macOS secure and fast, free of Windows-level adware or telemetry.
| But right now, macOS has never been in a worse state.
|
| I recently emailed Tim expressing the same concerns as the
| article and regarding specific issues with Messages and Mail
| resource usage and was surprised to get a response from Craig
| requesting more information and sysdiagnose files, but this is
| where feedback ended unfortunately.
|
| The current state of the macOS UI is atrocious, devices don't all
| need the same button shape or menu UX flow across all devices as
| they are inherently interacted with differently. A Mac isn't an
| iPad -- why force the same rounded buttons and simplified menus
| on both? They're interacted with differently: keyboard and mouse
| versus touch. I have no idea why this is so difficult for execs
| to understand or important for them to change. Software teams at
| Apple are so lucky to have the Apple Silicon innovation on the
| hardware side, Intel Macs would catch fire on boot-up running any
| of the latest releases given how atrocious the resource usage is.
|
| While I'm here whinging, the iOS swipe keyboard is garbage
| (almost totally unusable now) where before it was perfect with
| the innovative predictive hit-box expansion pioneered by Ken
| Kocienda. I think that's now been replaced with AI prediction
| which in 2025 I don't understand why it can be so embarrassingly
| bad. I had to upgrade to the iPhone Max recently to hit the
| letters properly. Also Apple I never want to tell someone to
| "duck off".
|
| Initially I was understanding, but quite frankly now I'm just
| pissed that it has gotten to this stage, and there is no
| indication of resolution from execs about these issues.
|
| I'm starting to worry that Apple could go off the deep-end - the
| way of Microsoft - coasting on hardware sales while letting
| software quality slide (albeit seeming intentional from
| Microsoft's side of the fence). I get it -- software isn't where
| the money is, hardware drives the business - but the two are
| inseparable BY DESIGN. When macOS struggles with basic
| functionality, it undermines the value of the Mac itself.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Apple needs a Snow Apple. Fire Tim, bring in some real change.
| Clubber wrote:
| Careful what you wish for.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| IDK. I'm to the point I kinda would rather they fail and I
| migrate over to android and continue to use Linux than they
| keep stagnating.
|
| If the new wave ushers in some real innovation and vision,
| then it was worth the gamble.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| This alone says a lot about Apple's software "prowess", i.e
| perennial customer hostility combined with clear incompetence,
| (in which their "core" customer base has by now becomes
| participants in some kind of Stockholm syndrome scenario), that
| an attempted de-shittification of their OS is being hailed as
| (nostalgia tinted?) greatness :)
| physhster wrote:
| Apple is becoming like Google, everything is slightly broken and
| nobody cares, because fixing stuff doesn't get you promoted...
| airstrike wrote:
| Wow, that 2013 WWDC video is so incredibly impactful. I had no
| idea I was going to experience what I did when I hit play. It
| resonates with me so strongly, I honestly wasn't ready for it.
| trbutler wrote:
| Yes. I remember it strongly hitting me back then, but
| rewatching added even more punch. I still agree with the
| philosophy, but this time I was also wistful for when I could
| say Apple agreed with it, too.
| tcldr wrote:
| You're right. When I first watched it, I was under no doubt
| they lived and breathed that philosophy. It matched my
| perception of their output 100%. Watching it again now, I'm
| reminded of how I used to feel and how much things have
| changed.
| Dave_Rosenthal wrote:
| Huh, I was actually on this page a few years ago, but iOS and
| MacOS quality has been super solid for me this past year. Anyone
| else feel this way? Judging by the nodding comments maybe I'm
| just the outlier?
| commandersaki wrote:
| I've been using OSX / macOS since 2002. I've not really had
| many issues if any that I can remember or found noticeable (or
| knew they were attributable to the OS). I can't really use
| Windows or Linux because I've been quite accustomed to the
| incredibly useful accessibility tools that come with OSX /
| macOS which are first class, and probably worth a whole lot
| more than I paid for the hardware.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Been looking for a windows replacement and probably will just
| stick to some linux distro. I had hoped Apple was better...
| amatecha wrote:
| Linux Mint is quite good, I've got it on a few machines. So far
| it's the most stable, easily-updatable and "gets out of the
| way" Linux distro I've used in years.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Snow leopard was, as you said, necessary in anticipation of the
| architecture change.
|
| Now there's no such change, but instead AI, this weird new cross-
| cutting but fuzzy function touching everything that no one has
| ever used reliably at the scale of Apple devices. AI is
| impossible to reliably test, and all-too-easy to get embarrassing
| results. I'm glad Apple recently tamped expectations.
|
| The relatively loose concurrency model in Apple's ARM has made it
| rival the network in introducing new failure modes Many quality
| issues cited have their root causes in those two sources of
| indeterminacy.
|
| Amplifying these are the organizational boundaries driving
| software flaws. Siri as a separate organization with its own
| network-dependent stack is just not viable for scattering AI.
| Boosting revenue with iCloud services makes all roads run through
| the servers in Rome, amplifying network and backend reliability
| issues. I also suspect outsourcing quality and the maintenance of
| legacy software has reduced the internal quality signal and
| cemented technical boundaries, as the delegates protect their
| work streams and play quality theater. The yearly on-schedule
| cadence makes things worse because they can always play for time
| and wait for the next train.
|
| And frankly (to borrow a concept from Java land), Apple might be
| reaching peak complexity. With hundreds of apps sporting tens of
| settings, there is simply no way to have a fast-path to the few
| things different people need. Deep linking is a workaround, but
| it's up to the app or user to figure that out. (And it makes me
| livid: I can't count how many important calls I've missed by
| failing to turn off "Silence unknown callers", with the Phone app
| settings buried 3 layers deep ON MY PHONE)
|
| A short-term solution I think is not a rewrite but concierge UI
| setup: come to the store, tell the "geniuses" exactly what you
| need, and make shortcuts + myUI or whatever is necessary to
| enable them to make it happen. Then automate that process with
| AI.
|
| That's something they can deliver continuously. Their geniuses
| can drive feature-development, and it can be rolled out to stores
| weekly and -- heavens! -- rolled back just as quickly. Customers
| and employees get the excitement of seeing their feature in
| action.
|
| The model of sensitive form-factor designers working in quiet
| respectful collaboration to produce new curves every year is just
| wrong for today's needs. All those people standing around at
| Apple stores should instead be spending an hour or more with each
| existing customer designing new features, and they should be
| rewarded for features that take, and especially for features that
| AI can incorporate.
|
| On the development side, any one should be able to contribute to
| any new feature, and be rewarded for it. At least for this work,
| there would be no more silos, and no massive work streams
| creating moral hazards.
|
| The goal is to make software and a software development process
| that scales and adapts. It may start at 5% of new UI features,
| but I hope it infects and challenges the entire organization and
| stack.
|
| Granted, it will take a famously hub organization and turn it
| into a web of hubs, but that in itself may be necessary for Apple
| to build the next generation of managers.
|
| Look for how today's challenges can help you build tomorrow's
| organizations.
| thr0away wrote:
| Apple has gone from Company I loved to the one I hate! They are
| the new Microsoft! They have hired a bunch of idiots in their
| security team who are driving their user base insane! They can
| completely lock you out of all your devices with no recourse! I
| am starting to move away from this pathetic company"s products!
| herodotus wrote:
| Snow Leopard was released while Steve Jobs was on medical leave.
| It was driven (as far as I can recall) by Bertrand Serlet. Rumour
| has it that Steve was furious about the "no new features"
| marketing when he returned from his medical leave.
| wpm wrote:
| Is Bertrand still kickin? Can Apple poach him for a few years
| to clean house? I miss the days when he was running the
| software division at Apple.
| lupinglade wrote:
| This might be the main issue with software at Apple getting
| so much worse. Bertrand knew what he was doing. Apple's (and
| NeXT's) OS used to be an OS, not a collection of toy apps.
| woranl wrote:
| I still remember the Snow Leopard update wiped my drive clean.
| Talk about most solid software releases Apple ever put out.
| Period. Yeah right.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/10/apple-owns-up-to-odd...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| For me, I hiched my wagon to the Apple team, years ago, and have
| held on, through some truly _disastrous_ times.
|
| I can't predict whether or not they will get past this, but I'll
| keep hanging on, anyway.
|
| The _code_ quality (the bits they let us see), however, seems to
| be going downhill, as is the quality of the documentation. These
| are things that always held up, in the past.
|
| It's fairly discouraging. I suspect the quality of their hires
| has been going down. I'm not sure what it is, they want, but it
| doesn't seem to be quality.
| gilgoomesh wrote:
| Snow Leopard was macOS moving so slowly people thought Apple were
| abandoning the Mac.
|
| Apple changed how they tied OS updates to hardware sales in this
| era and this left a lot of Macs on Snow Leopard for half a
| decade. So people remember that last point update - which was as
| close to a low-term-stability release as Apple has ever had.
|
| But to get there, Snow Leopard received 15 updates over 2 years
| and it was really just point updates to Leopard so it was more
| like 29 updates over 4 years without a major user facing feature.
| And this was after Leopard itself took over 2 years to develop.
|
| If Apple did nothing but polish features and reduce bugs for 6
| years, people would proclaim them dead. And they might actually
| be dead since their entire sales model is tied to cycles of
| development, promotion and delivery. For those of us who remember
| Apple getting stuck on System 7 between 1990 and 1997 and how the
| company nearly collapsed in that era: it would be a delay almost
| on that scale.
| mrpippy wrote:
| It didn't have anything to do with Sarbanes-Oxley (that was
| iPhone/iPod touch updates), Apple just charged for OS updates
| back then.
|
| Snow Leopard was notably cheaper than Leopard ($30 vs $130),
| Lion was $30 on the App Store, Mountain Lion was $20, then
| Mavericks and everything after have been free.
|
| Snow Leopard did have a long life though, it was the last OS
| that could run PowerPC apps, also the last to run on the
| original 32-bit Core Duo Intel Macs.
| jjcob wrote:
| Snow Leopard introduced GCD, which was a HUGE new feature. It
| completely changed how we wrote async code. It just wasn't a
| huge user facing feature.
|
| Snow Leopard also introduced the Mac App Store (in a point
| release), which was a user facing feature.
|
| I think the "zero new features" mostly meant "no flashy user
| facing features". It had a lot of new features for developers.
| thr0w wrote:
| What Apple needs, is to fix that weird bug where my mouse cursor
| stops responding to what it's hovering over. How does something
| so fundamentally broken make its way into an OS?
| Lammy wrote:
| I like how my cursor randomly enlarges itself for like it's
| moving between a high-DPI and low-DPI mode despite being
| entirely on one display and nowhere near the edge between my
| internal and external. It gets big for maybe 1 second and goes
| back to normal.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > It gets big for maybe 1 second and goes back to normal.
|
| That sounds like the "shake to locate" behavior and I would
| be totally lost(heh) without it since I have 2 4K monitors
| plus the onboard display, and that _black_ cursor gets lost
| very easily. Shake the mouse, get big cursor, find cursor, be
| happy
|
| It appears that one can disable it if it bothers you enough
| to comment about it: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-
| help/make-the-pointer-ea...
|
| And while there, I learned that I can change the pointer
| color, so hopefully everyone has learned something valuable
| today :-D
| Lammy wrote:
| Oh, neat. I had no idea it was intentional but I can see
| how that would be a useful feature. It felt like a bug to
| me because it felt disconnected from any intentional cursor
| movement on my part.
| sroussey wrote:
| I believe it's also optional, so you can turn it off.
| asimovDev wrote:
| this drives me insane, I only ever encounter it in Safari, but
| I spend most of my workday in Safari as a web dev, so it might
| be the reason why.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Apple got hooked on money. Behead everyone at the helm, let some
| fresh air in.
| Lammy wrote:
| > moving the Mac to a new processor architecture (for the second
| of three times)
|
| Four times kinda -- _maybe_ five if you want to count PPC32 and
| PPC64 separately but I usually don 't since the Intel transition
| happened so soon afterward that there is really no PPC64 lineage
| to speak of.
|
| I definitely count 32-bit and 64-bit Intel separately though due
| to the number of years taken to transition, all of the annoying
| early-Intel-Mac 32-bit EFI issues, and the need to manually opt
| in to the 64-bit kernel on many machines. In fact Snow Leopard
| was the first OS to let you do so! The "no new features" tagline
| was snappy but it's really not true at all :p
|
| https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/261749/in-which-ve...
| sez --
|
| "Mac OS X Snow Leopard and above could only be installed on Macs
| with Intel processors, and introduced a number of fully 64-bit
| Cocoa applications (e.g. QuickTime X), and most applications were
| recreated to use the 64-bit x86-64 architecture (although iTunes
| was a notable exception to this!) This meant these applications
| could run in 32-bit mode on machines with 32-bit processors, and
| in 64-bit mode on machines with 64-bit processors. And yes, the
| kernel was updated so that it could run in 64-bit mode on some
| limited hardware, and only by default on Mac Pros, while other
| newer Macs were capable of running the kernel bit did not do so
| by default."
|
| Relevant articles:
|
| - "Mac OS X v10.6: Macs that use the 64-bit kernel"
| https://web.archive.org/web/20121024223751/https://support.a...
|
| - "OS X: Starting up with the 32-bit or 64-bit kernel"
| https://web.archive.org/web/20121024194635/http://support.ap...
|
| - https://macperformanceguide.com/SnowLeopard-64bit.html
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I've been saying this for YEARS. In fact, I just published a blog
| post saying this very same thing SMH.
| https://blog.webb.page/2025-03-27-spitball-with-claude.txt
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| Speaking of, I just bought a brand new M4 Air. The thing is
| amazing, except I swear that Command-Tab does not work
| consistently sometimes, it just does nothing and I have to press
| it again. It's baffling, has anyone had this before? Never had
| this issue on any computer in the past 20 years, it's strange.
| ErneX wrote:
| I noticed that too, seems that since Sequoia a slight delay was
| introduced, so you need to wait a bit after pressing alt before
| pressing tab.
|
| No idea if it's related to the new double tapping of alt to
| open the siri text input.
| drunner wrote:
| Absolutely drives me nuts that I can't remove the music icon from
| the systray in Mac. And ditto on all the spotlight issues.
|
| Also, why does it take 10 seconds for activity monitor to show
| information? The list goes on.
|
| If only Mac hardware officially supported Linux, I would never
| touch that macOS again.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Can't you just drag it off?
| chrizel wrote:
| > Also, why does it take 10 seconds for activity monitor to
| show information? The list goes on.
|
| That's not a bug, but a feature. Under View -> Update
| Frequency, you can change it.
| geuis wrote:
| No AI please for the love of the spaghetti monster. I'm so sick
| of having this shit shoveled into anything I'm trying to do these
| days. Disabling Siri all these years was bad enough.
|
| So far Apple has kept it as a toggle in the settings, but it's
| easy bloat for it to keep spreading. Does anyone need AI in a
| text editor? No.
| airstrike wrote:
| While I appreciate the sentiment, I think the single best use
| case for LLMs today is drafting text, so a text editor sounds
| like home for an AI assistant.
| geuis wrote:
| Where I fall on this is. "What is the tool for?" I still
| default to nano in the terminal for basic editing. Him and
| eMacs are entire ecosystems when all I need is a chisel.
|
| In the general sense, notepad and TextEdit should just be
| less nerdy nano's. They always have been and that's what they
| were meant for.
|
| If you need something to write reports, a book, etc then you
| use MS Docs, Google Docs, or whatever Apple provides. Those
| are the tools where adding AI might be useful as a feature,
| like the ribbon in Office.
|
| Let purpose made tools just be that.
| sneilan1 wrote:
| Can a publicly traded company be sued if they allocate more
| resources to QA? Could an activist investor argue that cleaning
| up Mac OSX is a waste of time because people will buy the
| computer anyway?
| eviks wrote:
| The myth of Snow Leopard is strong (while in reality a lot of
| fundamental things people still complaint about weren't fixed),
| so Apple can just as well do nothing better and hope a new myth
| will emerge sticking to some other current name...
| t1234s wrote:
| Apple needs to make all of the accessory apps (photos, music,
| news, maps, mail, etc..) uninstallable and able to be added later
| if needed through their app store.
|
| Every MacOS update brings along this bloatware that is not easily
| removed.
| pndy wrote:
| That's possible in EU (prob also in EEA). Of all you mention
| only Photos shows a dramatic sliding modal asking you if you
| want to remove it; data library will stay but features like
| hidden, recently deleted photos and "memories" won't be
| available.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Most mac os feature updates are just updates to all that
| bundled stuff. I use none of that. I use my laptop to run
| various OSS developer tools, browsers, etc. 99% of it is
| available on Linux. And I have moved my workflow to a Linux
| laptop a few years ago. I went back for performance reasons;
| not for feature reasons. I can do that again. There's nothing
| really stopping me. But I like the Apple hardware.
|
| This is also the reason that I don't mind the current version
| of Mac OS. Yes everything you mentioned is a bit meh. Which is
| part of why I don't use any of those applications. So I don't
| care. I've disabled Siri. Never used Facetime. Maps, Numbers,
| and all the other of the dozens of things they bundle: I never
| touch any of it. I don't need that stuff and when I do, I use
| alternatives. I have an Android phone so all of the IOS
| integration stuff is redundant to me as well. They've not
| locked me into their ecosystem. And I like it like that. I
| don't allow myself to be locked in.
|
| As a work horse for doing development MacOS is still a fine OS.
| It does the job. Most updates of the last 10 years or so have
| been minor window dressing that you barely notice, some under
| the hood changes, and misc tweaks that mostly fall into the
| "whatever" category for me. For me the annoying thing is just
| having to sit through these lengthy updates. I keep postponing
| them because it's never convenient to take an hours long break
| when it prompts me.
|
| And I don't really get much out of these updates. To be honest,
| I can barely tell apart the different versions of their OS. The
| main notable visual change seems to be the desktop background.
| Which is usually hidden by applications. So I rarely look at
| it.
| cjk wrote:
| As a former Apple employee that left in part due to declining
| software quality (back in 2015!), and the relentless focus on big
| flashy features for the next yearly release cycle, I could not
| agree more.
|
| I recently had to do a full reinstall of macOS on my Mac Studio
| due to some intermittent networking issue that, for the life of
| me, I could not pin down. Post-reinstall, everything's fine.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Also as a former Apple engineer....
|
| I've explained in another thread how this kind of thing
| happens. It may be the same at other large companies.
|
| Bugs come in (via Radar) and are routed to the team
| responsible. Ever since Jobs came back (and Apple became
| valuable again) it has also become very much top-down with the
| engineers, for better or worse, not calling the shots.
|
| Just an obvious example -- there are of course no engineers in
| the decision to make a "Snow Leopard" release or not. That is a
| "marketing" decision (well, probably Federighi). But further,
| even for an engineering team, they're probably not going to be
| able to make that decision even for their own component(s)
| either. Again, marketing.
|
| So meetings are held and as it gets close to time to think
| about the NMOS (next major OS) the team is told what features
| they will implement. Do you think fix bugs is a feature? How
| about pay down technical debt? Nope, never.
|
| Fixing bugs is just expected, like breathing I guess. And
| technical debt ... do what you can given your workload and
| deliverables. Trust me, many engineers (perhaps especially the
| older ones) want to both fix bugs and refactor code to get rid
| of technical debt. But there is simply not the cycles to do so.
|
| And then what is even more insipid, the day the OS ships, every
| single bug in Radar still assigned to a team, still in Analyze,
| becomes a much much harder sell for the next OS. Because, you
| know, you already shipped with it ... must not be _that_ bad.
|
| I'd love to see a bug-fix-only Mac OS release. But I suspect
| that every time the possibility has come up, something like, I
| don't know, LLMs burst on the scene and there's a scramble.
| goalieca wrote:
| >Because, you know, you already shipped with it ... must not
| be that bad.
|
| This hits right in the feels of any engineer at any company.
| cjk wrote:
| Yup. Well-said. I experienced exactly this type of thing
| during every NMOS planning/brainstorming session I was a part
| of.
| tcldr wrote:
| It's crazy that marketing hasn't worked out that quality and
| reliability can be spun as a feature. In fact, I remember
| with OS X, that was the baseline word-of-mouth _feature_ when
| the comparison was made with Windows at the time.
|
| "It just works"
| lapcat wrote:
| > Ever since Jobs came back (and Apple became valuable again)
| it has also become very much top-down with the engineers, for
| better or worse, not calling the shots. Just an obvious
| example -- there are of course no engineers in the decision
| to make a "Snow Leopard" release or not.
|
| It's unclear how much explanatory value this has, because the
| Snow Leopard that everyone is pining for _was_ during the
| Jobs era. After all, an Apple that goes bankrupt and out of
| business isn 't going to make _any_ software updates.
|
| I find a stark difference between the Jobs era and the Cook
| era. Under Jobs, the early Mac OS X updates (Puma and Jaguar)
| came fast and furious, but then the schedule slowed
| considerably. Panther was 14 months, Tiger 18, Leopard 30
| (delayed due to iPhone), Snow Leopard 22 months, Lion 23.
| Mountain Lion was the first release after the death of Jobs
| and came only 12 months after Lion. Thereafter, every Mac OS
| update came yearly, give or take a few months. That's a
| drastic change in release schedule.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, I should be careful to not make it appear as though
| there were so clear a delineation when Jobs returned. His
| software engineering team got to work reshaping MacOS (as
| we know it now) but he seemed to this software engineer to
| be focused on hardware and "strategies" initially.
|
| Aqua, the new UI, came down from above soon enough.
| Drawers, toolbars were new UI elements that arrived. In
| time Jobs' designers were going through the shipping apps
| with these new UI elements with changes for the engineers
| to implement.
|
| Certainly by the time the iPhone had arrived the transition
| to marketing (and design) calling the shots was complete.
| ttepasse wrote:
| Apropos Drawers: The may have looked a little bit silly
| back then but today almost every Mac app main windows has
| a big grey sidebar, so that in Expose view almost all
| windows look the same. Drawers got an unfair rap, I
| think.
| chedabob wrote:
| I don't even know what these big flashy features are anymore.
| Every year I get asked by staff "Can I upgrade to <latest major
| Mac OS>" and every time I tell them they can, but they won't
| see anything different. There's not even big architectural
| changes under the hood to improve stability or performance.
|
| Short of it being a requirement to use the latest version of
| Xcode (once they bump the minimum in the following Feburary),
| and security updates stopping, there's been very little reason
| to actually upgrade.
| mwinatschek wrote:
| The first thing I do when I reinstall macOS is to disable most of
| the "features", services, and apps Apple added over the last
| decade. I can't imagine how cluttered my digital life would be if
| I'd depend on all those useless toys Apple stuffed into the OS
| and abandons a few years later (looking at you, Dashboard).
|
| My initial wish for Apple was to make macOS as bulletproof,
| lightweight, and bug-free as possible. But now I just want to use
| Linux on my M1 MacBook because of all the bullshit that's going
| on in the US right now. It's only a matter of time until the
| Trump administration will start to dismantle the American
| technology sector, beginning with the softening of encryption and
| the death of Advanced Data Protection I currently rely on on
| iCloud. Mark my words.
|
| Like I've said in a couple of comments before in other threads,
| I'd love to switch to Asahi but without native disk encryption I
| just can't. If my laptop gets stolen, all my files would be
| visible to the thief, and that's a risk I'm not willing to make.
| goalieca wrote:
| Apple is annoyingly doing an AI sequoia.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Author calls out some truly irritating defects, and Messages is
| rife with them. But there are bigger ones in that application on
| both Mac OS and iOS.
|
| Topping the shitlist has to be the inexplicable splitting of
| group threads for random people in the group, even when everyone
| is using an iPhone. Suddenly someone in the group gets the
| messages by him or herself and can't reply to the group. And this
| occasionally also happens in one-on-one threads: I've had years-
| old (maybe decades-old) threads suddenly split off into a new one
| with a friend of mine for no apparent reason.
|
| There's some fundamental incompetence in Message's design, and
| I'm sure that the addition of RCS has made it worse because it
| was slapped onto a rotten core.
|
| Oh yeah, then there's the way Messages (or, to be fair, iOS)
| loses all of your contacts' names if you travel outside the
| country. This is another brain-dead defect: Just because you're
| in a new country code, your iPhone suddenly can't associate U.S.
| numbers with your contacts. How the hell does this go unfixed for
| one major iOS revision, let alone 15+ years?
|
| Oh yeah, then there's the way Calendar "helpfully" changes the
| times on your appointments when you travel... meaning that you'll
| miss all of them if you travel east, because your phone will move
| them hours later. I mean... who lives like that? I you're going
| to London on business and the next day you have a meeting at 10
| a.m., your iPhone will "helpfully" change that meeting to, say, 5
| p.m.
|
| So when the author muses about whether Apple developers ever
| actually use this stuff in the real world, the only logical
| answer is no. Or they just take so little interest in the
| functional quality of their product that they just check in some
| grossly defective trash and call it a day... and refuse to fix it
| year after year.
|
| Or... they're not given time and resources to fix it. I'm pretty
| gentle when filing bugs about Xcode, because I'm sure they are
| understaffed. But at this point, the neglect has (or should have)
| exhausted every developer's patience.
|
| Which brings us to a bit of hypocrisy in the post: "Apple is
| clearly behind on the AI arms race"
|
| NO. Apple's sad capitulation to armchair "industry observers" and
| "analysts" has contributed greatly to the very defects the guy
| complains about. Apple should not have jumped on the "AI" hype in
| the first place. It does not serve Apple's product line or
| market. They are not a search company or gatekeeper to huge
| swaths of the Internet. If they wanted to quietly improve Siri
| and get it RIGHT, fine. But now they're embarrassed, and
| resources that should have been spent on QA have been squandered
| on bullshit "AI" that failed.
| blu3h4t wrote:
| Look snow leaopard actually added the hugest feature ever, grand
| central dispatch. That's what billy always dreamed about
| (concurrent windows) and that is what rust craze is about, adding
| the same to Linux/windows. Like Apple said, snow leopard was
| under the hood changes. So don't you worry you will get your snow
| sequoia, the ai reorganisation is exactly that.
| remark5396 wrote:
| This is not only applied to Apple's software. The entire software
| and hardware market including iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, Windows,
| etc. is pressured to release new products with more and more
| features every year, advertising those new features to facilitate
| sales. The result is, what was once a simple and cool product has
| become heavily bloated with unneccessary features.
| pndy wrote:
| The Nero Burning ROM/ACDSee disease is how I like to call that.
| These were simple once too but quickly degraded on quality, got
| bloated with stuff nobody ask in the first place
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| Apple needs to admit, a product is either new or improved. It is
| never new and improved.
| lupinglade wrote:
| I long for a modern NeXTStep-like OS. A polished, consistent,
| solid operating system that is lean, clean and simply focused on
| getting things done. It should be predictable in every way and
| never get in your way. None of this SwiftUI bullshit, Animoji, AI
| or blurry UI. _sigh_
| colonelspace wrote:
| Curious what's bullshit about SwiftUI?
| musicale wrote:
| Power Mac G5 systems sold in 2006 were abandoned by Snow Leopard
| in 2009.
|
| Apple could conceivably abandon intel Mac Pro systems sold in
| 2023 by releasing an Apple Silicon-only macOS in 2026, but three
| years still seems a bit aggressive.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I know it doesn't affect a lot of people, but pasting in hex mode
| in Calculator broke in Sequoia. Previously, any number pasted in
| hex mode was treated as hex (as expected) even if the number
| consisted only of decimal characters (say 20, which would be
| decimal 32). Now numbers pasted with only decimal characters are
| treated as decimal (pasting "20" turns into 0x14) and numbers
| with with at least one alpha hex char is treated as hex. The
| workaround is to prefix the number with "0x", but that's not
| always practical.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I think they might have fixed this in the latest beta.
| miiiiiike wrote:
| I have two Apple TV 4Ks and both started dropping Bluetooth
| connections every minute or so after a recent upgrade.
|
| My headphones will cut out and when I go to pause the video I'll
| be clicking frantically because the remote isn't working either.
| Or I'll be in the menu and the remote will pin to the left or
| right and scroll to the end of some massive YouTube list.
|
| Reboots, resets, nothing fixes it.
|
| My Apple Watch regularly has a glitched Home Screen too.
|
| I defended Apple's quality recently, right before everything
| started breaking for me.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| It's wild how these kinds of glitches used to be outliers, and
| now they're starting to feel... normal?
| miiiiiike wrote:
| Oh! And the web version of the Podcast app hasn't been display
| or toggling "Saved" state correctly for awhile now.
| mat_b wrote:
| The article is spot on and articulated my feelings exactly. I too
| became a loyal Apple supporter nearly 20 years ago because "it
| just works". Sadly, I no longer feel this way. The operating
| systems on my Macbook, iphone and iPad have consistently gotten
| worse with each update over the last 5-10 years. Apple is losing
| the magic on the software front.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| What's frustrating is that Apple still has the resources and
| talent to ship rock-solid software
| hamstergene wrote:
| I keep being tempted to write same post but named "Does all
| software work like shit now?", because I swear, this is not just
| Apple. Software in general feels more bugged as a new norm.
|
| Most websites have an element that won't load on the first try,
| or a button that sometimes needs to be clicked twice because the
| first click did nothing.
|
| Amazon shopping app needs two clicks every now and then, because
| the first one didn't do what it was supposed to do. Since 3+
| years ago at least.
|
| Spotify randomly stops syncing play status with its TV app. Been
| true for at least a year.
|
| HBO app has subtitles for one of my shows out of sync and it has
| been for more than a year.
|
| Games including AAA titles need few months post-release fixing
| before they stabilize and stop having things jerk themselves into
| the sky or something.
|
| My robot vacuum app just hangs up forever once in a while and
| needs to be killed to work again, takes 10+ seconds after start
| to begin responding to taps, and it has been like that for over 2
| years of owning the device.
|
| Safari has had a bug when opening a new tab and typing "search
| term" too quickly, it opens URL http://search%20term instead of
| doing a Google search. 8 years ago I've opened a bug for that
| which was closed as a duplicate, and just recently experienced
| this bug again.
|
| It really seems that criteria for "ready for production" is way
| lower now. If my first job 13+ years ago any QA noticed any of
| that above, the next version wouldn't be out until it is fixed.
| Today, if "Refresh" button or restarting the app fixes it,
| approved, green light, release it.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I mean, just to consider TV alone (thankfully I do not use
| one), it takes a while for it to start up, and we are talking
| about a modern, new TV. Old TVs started immediately. I told my
| grandma to press the button and wait a bit, before trying to
| press the button again.
| chii wrote:
| > first job 13+ years ago any QA...
|
| such QA jobs no longer exists. Ever since the software dev
| world has moved to doing one's own QA during development,
| software has been consistently worse in quality. May be there's
| a correlation there!
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| The underlying cause of this is online software updates.
| Knowing you can fix bugs any time removes the release date as
| _the_ deadline for fixing all egregious bugs. And so the
| backlog of bugs keeps growing.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The backlog is down to management and priorities, not
| testing per se.
| wickedsight wrote:
| The problem is Agile. Not the way it was intended at some
| point, but the way it has become through Agile consultants
| and SAFe. Also the fact that it's become the default for any
| project and that Waterfall has become a bad word.
|
| Companies abuse Agile so they don't have to plan or think
| about stuff anymore. In the past decade, I haven't worked in
| (or seen) a single team that had had more than 2 weeks of
| work prepared and designed. This leads to something build 4
| weeks ago needing a massive refactor, because we only just
| realized we would be building something conflicting.
|
| That refactor never happens though, because it takes too much
| time, so we just find a way to slap the new feature on top of
| the old one. That then leads to a spaghetti mess and every
| small change introduces a ton of (un)expected issues.
|
| Sometimes I wish we could just think about stuff for a couple
| of months with a team of designers before actually starting a
| multi-year project.
|
| Of course, this way of working is great when you don't know
| what you'll be building, in an innovative start-up that might
| pivot 8 times before finding product-market fit. But that's
| not what many of us in big corp and gov are doing, yet we're
| using the same process.
| amacbride wrote:
| This, 100%. Agile (properly done, for whatever value of
| "proper" you choose) is fine for websites, apps, consumer
| facing stuff. For things that _must_ work, in predictable
| fashion, for years, it's often inappropriate.
|
| OS work is somewhere in between, but definitely more
| towards the latter category.
| regularfry wrote:
| Depends where you look. There's been a QA process in all the
| (agile, some very forward-thinking) teams I've worked with
| for the last decade. That QA might be being done by _other_
| devs, but it 's always been there.
| aylmao wrote:
| Something I found annoying at a previous big-tech work, was how
| the focus on top-level metrics (read, revenue-linked metrics)
| meant we couldn't fix things.
|
| There were a lot of smart people, very interested in fixing
| things-- not only because engineers tend to like fixing things,
| but also because we, and everyone around us, were users too.
|
| For example, many things related to text input were broken on
| the site. Korean was apparently quite unusable. I wanted to fix
| it. A Korean manager in a core web team wanted to fix it. But
| we couldn't because the incentive structures dictated we should
| focus on other things.
|
| It was only after a couple years, and developing a metric that
| linked text-input work with top-level (read, revenue-linked)
| metrics, that we were able to work on fixing these issues.
|
| I find a lot of value in the effort to make incentives
| objective, but at a company that was already worth half a
| trillion dollars at the time, I just always felt there could be
| more room for caring about users and the product beyond the
| effects on the bottom-line.
| aikinai wrote:
| This is exactly the problem. Hyper efficient (or at least
| trying to be) businesses have no room for craftsmanship. If
| you take the time to make quality software, you'll be left
| behind by someone who doesn't. Unfortunately the market
| doesn't care, and therefore efficient businesses don't
| either.
|
| The only solution I know of is to have a business that's
| small enough and controlled by internal forces (e.g. a
| founder who cares) to pay attention to craftsmanship.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| You're implying that buggy software has no impact on the
| bottom line. I'm not so sure. Users weigh the availability of
| features against the quality of features. Getting bugs fixed
| is not necessarly the highest priority for users either. It's
| a trade-off.
|
| Our use of Microsoft 365 is a pretty good example of that. I
| moved our company to Microsoft 365 because it had some
| features we wanted. Then I moved the company off Microsoft
| 365 because it turned out to be too buggy to be useful.
|
| I realise that the actual users of software are not
| necessarily the same people making the purchasing decisions.
| But if productivity suffers and support costs rise then the
| consequences of choosing low quality software eventually
| filters through to purchasing decisions.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > You're implying that buggy software has no impact on the
| bottom line. I'm not so sure. Users weigh the availability
| of features against the quality of features.
|
| The problem is that managers / those that determine
| priorities don't get the numbers, they don't see a
| measurable impact of buggy software. There's only two
| signals for that, one is error reporters - which depend on
| an error being generated, that is, software bug - and the
| other is user reporting, but only a small fraction of users
| will actually bother to make reports.
|
| I think this is a benefit of open source software, as
| developers are more likely to provide feedback. But even
| then you have some software packages that are so complex
| and convoluted that bugs emerge as combinations of many
| different factors (I'm thinking of VS Code with its plugins
| as an example) that the bug report itself is a huge effort.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> The problem is that managers / those that determine
| priorities don't get the numbers, they don't see a
| measurable impact of buggy software._
|
| I don't believe that. IT departments have to support
| users. Users complain and request support. It costs money
| and it affects productivity and everybody knows it.
|
| But that's not enough. You would also have to believe
| that there are significantly less buggy alternatives and
| that the difference justifies the cost of switching. For
| big companies that is an incredibly high bar.
|
| But small companies do dump software providers like my
| company dumped Microsoft.
|
| [Edit] Ah, I think I misunderstood. You're looking at it
| from the software provider's perspctive rather than the
| user organisation. Got it.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| Even if buggy software has an impact on the buttom line,
| managers can continue pretending it doesn't and not
| allocate any budget to fix them. They assume bug fixes
| somehow will be squeezed in between the work they really
| value - new features or better completely new projects.
| Because creating something new (asking debelopers to
| create) is the easiest way for a manager to get a
| promotion. It was many years ago when I last seen a manager
| (with the power to set priorties and not just translate
| them form above) who pays more than a lip service to
| quality and cares about maintenance.
| lapcat wrote:
| > You're implying that buggy software has no impact on the
| bottom line. I'm not so sure.
|
| The problem is that very little competition exists for
| computer operating systems. Apple, Google, and Microsoft
| collectively control nearly all of the consumer OS market
| share on both desktop and mobile. Thus, macOS just needs to
| be "better than Windows", and iOS just needs to be "better
| than Android".
|
| > Then I moved the company off Microsoft 365 because it
| turned out to be too buggy to be useful.
|
| What did you move to?
|
| In general, Microsoft 365 is extremely successful, despite
| any bugs. There doesn't appear to be any imminent danger of
| financial failure.
|
| Software vendors also face tradeoffs, engineering hours
| spent on fixing bugs vs. writing new features. From a bean
| counter's perspective, they can often live with the bugs.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _In general, Microsoft 365 is extremely successful,
| despite any bugs._
|
| That's because of some very hard monopolistic anti-
| consumer behavior from Microsoft in their ecosystem.
| aylmao wrote:
| > You're implying that buggy software has no impact on the
| bottom line.
|
| I'm not implying that, and I don't think my manager was
| implying that either. I think rather there were 2 things
| going on:
|
| 1. It's often hard to connect bug-fixing to metrics.
|
| A specific feature change can easily be linked with an
| increase in sales, or an increase in usage. It's much
| harder to measure the impact of a bugfix. How can you
| measure how many people are _not_ churning thanks to a
| change you pushed? How can you claim an increase in sales
| is due to a bugfix?
|
| In your case, I'm sure some team at Microsoft has a
| dashboard that was updated the minute you used one of these
| features you bought Microsoft 365 for. How could you build
| something similar for a bugfix?
|
| Bugfixes don't tend make the line go up quickly. If they
| make the line go up it often is a slow increase of regained
| users that's hard to attribute to the bugfixes alone.
| Usually you're trying to measure not an increase, but a
| "not decrease", which if possible is tricky at best. The
| impact is intuitively clear to anyone who uses the
| software, but hard to measure in a graph.
|
| 2. A ruthless prioritization of the most clearly impactful
| work.
|
| I wouldn't have minded working on something less-clearly
| measurable which I nonetheless thought was important. But
| my manager does care though because their performance is an
| aggregate of all those measurable things the team has
| worked on. And their manager cares, and so on and so forth.
|
| So at the end of the day, in broad strokes, unless the very
| top (which tends to be much more disconnected from triage
| and edge-cases) "doesn't mind" spending time on less
| measurable things like bugfixing, said bugfixing will be
| incentivized against.
|
| I think we all know this impacts the bottom-line. Everyone
| knows people prefer to use software that is not buggy. But
| a combination of "knowing is not enough, you have to show
| it" and "don't work on what you know, you have to
| prioritize work on what is shown", makes for active
| disincentivizing of bug-fixing work.
| porcoda wrote:
| You're not wrong. I've assumed it's a side effect of the way
| the industry deals with career advancement. If you're an
| engineer or middle manager, you aren't going to get a promotion
| or bonus if you say "we took feature X and made it more stable
| without introducing any new functionality". The industry seems
| to favor adding new features regardless of quality so the teams
| that do it can stand out and make it look like they're
| innovating. This isn't how it has to be: if companies would
| recognize that better doesn't necessarily mean "more stuff" or
| "change", then people could get rewarded for improving quality
| of what already exists.
| ezst wrote:
| > "Does all software work like shit now?", because I swear,
| this is not just Apple. Software in general feels more bugged
| as a new norm.
|
| I think this is just the result of an optimizing game placing
| profit above all else (including quality and user satisfaction)
| which is indeed the norm in this late stage of capitalism. You
| want to opt out of that? Good thing the GPL opened the way
| placing human freedoms front and center, and not-for-profit
| software stacks like KDE (for instance) keep getting better and
| better over time.
|
| I use commercial OSes at work by obligation, and the turning
| point from which my experience as a user became better served
| by free software happened many years ago.
| chvid wrote:
| Am I the only one only who is satisfied with Mac OS X? I use
| Windows from time to time and as far as I can tell it is much
| worse when it comes to random updates and UI quirkiness.
| illiac786 wrote:
| Mac OS X is fine, that would be snow leopard for example =)
|
| macOS on the other hand, is getting worse, I can definitely
| concur that spotlight is getting more and more useless. Time
| Machine as well. It mostly doesn't work for me, always
| breaking, hanging...
| mrweasel wrote:
| Generally I am pretty happy with macOS and I still believe it
| to be the best option for a desktop. Where I'm getting
| frustrated is the increase locked down nature of the OS. I
| get that it's for security, and that's fine for my dad, but
| it's starting to get in the way of me down my work.
|
| So when you already start feeling like the operation system
| is preventing you from doing the things you need to do, then
| all the small cosmetic flaws seems more in your face.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| You can be happy until you're hitting a bug that severely
| impedes your workflow. And then you might feel annoyed when
| they refuse to fix it for years, and there's no recourse
| because it's closed software.
| qwertox wrote:
| Few things manage to make me as angry as a link (even if shown
| in form of a button) which does not open in a new background
| tab when clicked with the MMB.
|
| Preloading selected results in background tabs and then closing
| the main tab, so that I can iterate through the results of each
| clicked item per tab is simply so much more efficient than
| entering a page, hitting back, entering the next, hitting back,
| ...
|
| Like the items in Twitter's Explore page.
| windward wrote:
| >which does not open in a new background tab when clicked
| with the MMB.
|
| Which you notice because your page scrolls up wildly as you
| move to click on what should be the new tab
| ripped_britches wrote:
| I think the financial cost of these bugs is pretty low and the
| cost to employ people to fix all of them is pretty high.
| Everywhere I've worked, there is a huge backlog of known issues
| that are agreed upon that we probably just won't ever get to
| them. And we certainly aren't going to hire new people to solve
| them. It's probably because the systems we build are getting
| way overcomplex due to feature piling and promotion seeking
| complex projects to show off. If these bugs were trivial to
| solve, they wouldn't exist. The fact is, these are pernicious
| bugs because of how complicated everything is.
|
| I actually got penalized in my last performance review because
| something I shipped "wasn't that technically complicated". I
| was flabbergasted because I consider it my job to make things
| simpler, not harder to reason about. But you don't get
| promotions for simple.
| dijit wrote:
| Ironically Linux Desktop environments have never been so
| robust.
|
| As much as I dislike systemd, if this is the reason, then I
| retract everything negative I ever said.
| regularfry wrote:
| Seconded about the desktops: currently loving KDE Plasma over
| here. Less sure about systemd.
| sunshowers wrote:
| It's hard to argue that systemd isn't a part of modern Linux
| robustness! It's not the only way it could have been done,
| but the more declarative model is absolutely better than
| shell script exit codes. Daemons don't have to worry about
| double-fork. User-level services are incredibly valuable.
| paradite wrote:
| It's true. One example I can give is how Gmail used to
| automatically recognise flights and hotel bookings and add them
| to calendar.
|
| It was suddenly completely broken and stopped working a few
| years ago. I tried every setting to try to get it working but
| couldn't.
|
| I feel like a stone age caveman having to manually type
| everything into my Google calendar.
|
| There are a lot of people raising the same issue in Google
| forums, but it's not fixed yet.
|
| Ironically they are adding new Gemini AI features into Gmail,
| which can't do this as well.
| inetknght wrote:
| With regards to Google Flights, I seem to recall that there
| was some European Digital Markets Act occurrence. Google
| decided to comply with it in a malicious fashion.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Don't get me started on Google Home. It was working good-ish
| for years. Lately it started to respond with "sorry, I didn't
| understand" no matter what I asked, happily doing it the 2nd
| time I asked. It became unreliable which is ironic because I
| can build this tool by myself now in a 24h hackathon using
| basic openai/anthropic apis..
| natnat wrote:
| I remember software working really badly in the early 2000s,
| when Microsoft had an unassailable monopoly over everything.
| Then there were a bunch of changes: Windows started getting
| better with Windows 7, Firefox and then Chrome started being
| usable instead of IE, and Google and Apple products were
| generally a huge breath of fresh air.
|
| Since then, Google and Apple products have become just as bad
| as Microsoft's. I think this is because the industry has moved
| towards an oligopoly where no one is really challenging the big
| players anymore, just like Microsoft in the late 1990s. The big
| companies compete with each other, but in oblique ways that go
| after revenue not users.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont...
| mschnell wrote:
| Maybe we should introduce Mean Time Between Annoyance (MTBA).
|
| Many of my appliances (dish washer, coffee maker, ...) work
| just fine for weeks before an annoyance pops up (,,deep clean",
| for example). Many of my applications do not. For most I could
| measure MBTA in minutes. Definitely with Spotlight.
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| Every once in a while I think ,,There is no public bugtracker
| for closed source software -- wouldn't it be great to have
| something like Github issues, but for all the software that is
| developed behind closed doors?"
|
| Like, at least we had a central place to vent about the exact
| same stuff you just listed, and who knows, in the best case, at
| least some companies might feel shamed into picking up issues
| with the most upvotes or see it as a chance to engage with
| their userbase more directly.
|
| Or I'm naive and the most likely outcome is getting sued?
|
| What do you think?
| thenthenthen wrote:
| No. But yes: Get rid of Siri, Make Preference pane alphabetically
| ordered, Get rid of Spotlight and buy Alfred, Disable
| notifications by default.
| bezbac wrote:
| If anything, please let Apple buy Raycast instead of Alfred.
| herf wrote:
| Absolutely agree. This week, I can't get Chrome to connect to
| local servers.
|
| ERR_ADDRESS_UNREACHABLE it says.
|
| Yes, I said Yes to the new permission. Yes the check mark is on
| in Privacy, I mean all 20 of them that say "Google Chrome". Yes I
| toggled it off and on. Yes I rebooted. Still have to use a
| different browser to access my own local server because there is
| a new privacy feature that... doesn't work.
| marcyb5st wrote:
| I thought it was because of my MacBook pro still being an Intel
| One and thought that nobody at Apple cares about that anymore.
| But it seems also the M family suffers from it.
|
| Mine doesn't really sleep. It's always warmish despite all my
| best efforts to make it actually sleep. It's always plugged in,
| so no biggie, but it's annoying as hell.
|
| Reddit wisdom says it's because of my usb peripherals, but it's
| just a webcam, mouse, keyboard, and a yubikey.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Open Activity Monitor, go to the Energy tab and look for any
| apps that are marked as preventing sleep.
| marcyb5st wrote:
| No apps preventing sleep (I checked that already many many
| times), that's why I believe it's OS related in some way.
| physicsguy wrote:
| I find it incredibly developer hostile as an OS now. I don't want
| to have to type a password in to use a debugger. I want to be
| able to download software and run it as I want, whoever wrote it,
| without them having to sign it. All that does is push people away
| from supporting Macs, particularly if they're learning and don't
| want to shell out PS99 for a developer license. And you can see
| that because the Mac ecosystem has become dramatically less
| varied and stagnant.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| They neither have the financial and time capacity left required
| for high quality, nor do they have the engineers and management
| to enable it anymore.
|
| ,,Just get it out somehow."
|
| ,,Fixing bugs is not a KPI for our promotions and salary
| increases."
|
| Old stuff is practically abandoned. No one knows how to fix it
| anymore and it's replaced instead, at best. Disdain for legacy.
| The only thing management gets excited about is the next shiny
| thing, currently tacking AI onto everything.
|
| Can you name big companies where this did not happen?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm still waiting for them to remove Launchpad (which seems like
| a half assed step towards unifying desktop and tablet systems),
| and I've yet to meet anyone that uses their weird new desktop
| management system, the thing with the windows on the left side.
| That just reminds me of the GUI experiments they did in the
| 2000s, with 3d environments and whatever Ubuntu (or
| gnome/kde/whichever) tried to do.
|
| I'm hoping they're gathering usage analytics and will overhaul
| unused features.
|
| Caveat, I'm probably not their average user, I do almost
| everything via Spotlight. I don't even use the bottom menu thing,
| it automatically hides and I only use it when I accidentally hid
| a window.
| drooopy wrote:
| Launchpad has to be one of the worst ways to find and open
| applications on a Mac. That new window-managing system is
| honestly so unintuitive, so bad, and so bizarre that its mere
| existence feels like some sort of practical joke.
|
| I wish that in the next version of macOS, they would strip away
| all those useless features and systems that they've shoehorned
| over the past two decades and have the OS look like how Panther
| or Tiger did, while taking up less than 10 GB of space on the
| puny SSDs that they ship their machines with.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I appreciate that they did UI experimentation and stuff
| but... not to the end user's expense. I wonder if anyone at
| Apple themselves actually use these features.
| misiek08 wrote:
| Dogfooding is a thing right? Right?!
|
| Working for two companies I see how in the small one people
| manually test their changes, try to break them, even having in-
| code tests. At the big corpo - noone cares. Tests are green?
| Release to prod, close ticket and take another. Clients complain?
| There are 5-6 layers of people before such complain can come back
| to the team.
|
| I wouldn't agree with "less glitchy" than Windows. Currently
| Win10 is the best one if it comes to stability, but Microsoft is
| already killing support for it. Windows 11 have problems even
| with typing into Start Menu search - basic functionality.
| Randomly takes input or not. So I think we are lowering the bar
| and the market agrees how low it should go.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > In an era when people still paid money for operating system
| upgrades every few years (anyone else remember standing in line
| for Windows 95?)
|
| No, and I would have been too young to purchase it.
|
| But I'd be surprised at the idea of massive demand for an upgrade
| to Windows 95. What we did was buy a new computer that had
| Windows 95 on it. Computers used to go out of date very quickly.
|
| We kept our older computer that ran DOS. (It had Windows 3.1
| installed, but the only reason you'd start that was if you wanted
| to play Solitaire.) It continued to run DOS just fine.
| trbutler wrote:
| Believe it or not, it was a huge deal. I went to two launch
| parties -- one hosted by CompUSA and one by a local place --
| the night it came out. This wasn't in Silicon Valley, but in
| the U.S. Midwest (St. Louis, MO). Hundreds of people stood in
| line at midnight to get the first copies at the two places I
| went to and the same thing happened all over the world. (Of
| course, CompUSA also had a whole display of upgrades to get
| your computer running better if it wasn't ready for Windows
| 95.)
|
| The same sort of late night excitement existed around each
| early Mac OS X release, incidentally.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The value just wasn't there in giving your old computer a
| software update.
|
| Most notably, that computer with Windows 95 on it also had a
| CD drive.
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| Am I the only one who is perfectly fine with the current
| macOs/IOS landscape? I encounter no bugs on daily basis, if at
| all.
| noname120 wrote:
| No you're not. This thread feels like a nostalgic crowd who
| idealizes the past and falls into the "it was better in the old
| days" trap, letting go of the myriad of things that improved
| since then.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _Yes, they work and are still smoother and less glitchy than
| Windows 11, but they feel like software developed by people who
| don't actually use that software_
|
| I would have to agree here (and Apple also don't seem to assess
| feedback for their GUI changes), but unfortunately this thread is
| already on a software quality meta tangent rather than listing
| individual annoyances so here's my short list in the hope actual
| bugs can be discussed:
|
| - window focus management broken: when you minimize or close a
| window, another random window of that app you're closing the
| window of is put into front even when that window is minimized;
| or other completely unrelated apps get focus
|
| - index/Spotlight not showing file locations (full paths) after
| searching; the fsck?
|
| - gestures being introduced that do stuff that you hit
| inadvertently and leave you in a state where you don't know how
| to undo its effects such as the super-annoying "fullscreen" mode
| when dragging windows around or pressing Command-F since Sequoia.
| Requires you to fscking research how to leave fullscreen mode
| (while not as cringe as Windows help "communities", the level of
| talking past another is getting there, options being discussed
| that don't exist in Sequoia's Dock/Desktop settings)
|
| - update or feature nagging (I don't care I could use my iPhone
| as a webcam right now, go away)
|
| - sometimes difficult to find mouse pointer on large screens
|
| - older problem but I know at least one person on the verge of
| leaving Mac OS because of it after 20+ years of loyalty (or
| outright fanboyism tbh): in a German locale, you can't switch off
| PC gender-neutral language which is not only pushy and annoying
| but also space-inefficient as fsck
| once_inc wrote:
| For the mouse pointer thing: you can shake your pointer left
| and right rapidly, and it will increase in size. It's quite
| handy to find the pointer.
| mandmandam wrote:
| If this is the thread where we're adding gripes:
|
| - How _tf_ does it take upwards of 5 seconds to take a
| screenshot with modern hardware on a fully updated OS. How.
|
| - And why do screen recordings sometimes randomly disappear
| into the bowels of the OS, where even Support struggle to find
| them?
| dsego wrote:
| > window focus management broken
|
| Although I do not mind the way that window management works on
| macos, recently I had a mildly infuriating situation. I was
| doing Cmd+Z to undo something, not sure which app and it didn't
| work so I pressed it a couple of times instinctively. But
| although my target app was visible and on top, it was Finder
| that was actually in focus - accidentally I triggered undo in
| Finder. I think I managed to undelete a file and something
| else, but I'm not sure. Not sure if there is a way to find a
| log of actions. That's something I would love to see in all
| desktop systems, a history of user actions. Also having
| undo/redo shortcuts in Finder is potentially destructive, what
| if I move some files from an SD card, reformat it in camera,
| and then accidentally hit undo in Finder?
| gargs wrote:
| When I started using OS X, one of the biggest draws for me was
| first-class native keyboard shortcuts support that was
| consistently followed and applied by all apps (first party and
| otherwise). So you could be sure that a shortcut for search
| across all contexts (global) would work just as well as the
| shortcut for a contextual search within any app. No one writes
| great third-party native apps anymore and even Apple's own apps
| completely disregard this part of their heritage. Just try
| searching across the AppStore, Apple Music, and the legacy
| Finder.
|
| For newer Apple apps, sometimes the keyboard shortcuts simply
| don't exist. I believe part of the problem here is the
| deprecation of AppleScript, which means there's no incentive to
| spend time on consistency, and the other part has to do with
| organizational indifference towards all the wonderful UX
| innovations from the past.
|
| What Apple has successfully accomplished, in collaboration with
| other 'big tech' companies is drastically reducing user
| expectations from their software. I wouldn't completely blame the
| AppStore's forced race to the bottom for this alone. There is
| still a huge market for tasteful apps that cost more (even
| sometimes with obnoxious subscriptions), but if even Apple isn't
| leading by example, why waste time on it if you could just build
| another simple note-taking app.
| torginus wrote:
| The surprising thing to me, is that I have been a Mac user since
| forever, I think Leopard was my first OS. Things have barely
| changed since then, there have been some subtle redesigns since
| then, but the desktop has remained largely static.
|
| I don't understand why macOS has so many issues. I still
| encounter memory leaks and have to kill Finder or Dock every few
| days lest it eat all my memory.
| joaomoreno wrote:
| With the hopes that Apple engineers are scanning this discussion:
|
| - Using the iPhone to scan documents from Finder has recently
| stopped working on the second scan. I need to restart my phone to
| get it to work again.
|
| - iPhone mirroring is terrible: laggy, UI glitches, drops click
| events, scrolling is a nightmare. This is when it actually even
| manages to connect.
|
| - Often, with Airpods on, lowering the volume, shutting down the
| iPhone display and putting it in my pocket quickly enough will
| entirely turn off volume. If you happen to increase the volume
| instead, you'll get blasted with maximum volume in your ears.
|
| - Use vertical tabs on Safari for one day. You'll see it actually
| crash a few times. Not to mention the UI glitches. - Open the App
| Store on macOS. It first opens empty, then the UI controls show
| up, then it flickers the entire UI. I am convinced it's a Web
| app.
|
| - In System Settings, most of the sections you click have a delay
| in rendering. Nothing feels snappy in that app. I can actually
| click 3 sections quick enough for the second to never even be
| rendered.
|
| - Sometimes dragging an application from the Dock popup menu into
| the Trash does nothing, even though it appears to have worked. I
| often find that it wasn't deleted at all, that I have to open
| Applications folder in Finder and hit Cmd-Backspace to delete it.
| bfelbo wrote:
| Good idea. I'll add some that have annoyed me for years just in
| case:
|
| - On iOS, the alarms app breaks down once you get to ~250
| alarms. You can try to add/delete alarms and it'll appear like
| they changed, but the change wont be saved. I can't use the
| alarms app now and can't fix it as I can't delete alarms. By
| the way, would be nice to reuse alarms when creating at the
| same time as an existing alarm so you don't end up with 250+
| alarms in the first place.
|
| - On iOS, the notes app breaks down in long documents (~10
| pages of text with bullet points). When writing beyond that,
| some text will sometimes disappear only to reappear when you
| type some more. Other times, the cursor disappears. This only
| happens in long documents. All English text, mainly bullet
| points, often with some text pasted in.
|
| It's shocking to me that my iPhone 11 Pro can play gorgeous 3D
| video games, but can't handle 250 alarms or 10 pages of text..
| Swoerd123 wrote:
| In my own experience, I have noticed that Apple's software
| 'breaks' more on older hardware, be that Mac's, iPhones or iPads.
| For all the credit apple gets for supporting older devices, those
| devices are definitely not treated as first class citizens. For
| example, the touch keyboard on my (work) iPhone 12 Pro works
| decidedly worse than on my (private) iPhone 16 Pro. The error
| rate is much worse, and I believe it's due to the amount of
| useless features that get added with each new installment of iOS.
|
| Whether that's intentional or not (I believe it is), Apple should
| focus more on delivering a stable experience, on both new and old
| devices.
|
| I echo the sentiment a lot of people have already expressed. That
| is, using Apple products is like being a junkie. You need to use
| their products because there is no real alternative, but you feel
| kind of dirty because of their practices.To me, that sounds like
| it should be a huge red flag for Apple execs.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Adding my comment as reply as well as it is relevant:
|
| ---
|
| I've been holding over and running 10.5 on my iMac 2019, but
| then in the beginning of the year had to upgrade to Sequoia
| (due to software dependencies).
|
| Of course this is just a correlation, not necessary a
| causation, but within a month the iMac's internal SSD was
| corrupted to the point that it was unrecoverable, and my 40GB
| RAM corrupted.
|
| So, yeah, at the very least not sure how much testing went into
| Sequoia for non Mac Silicon macs.
|
| Quite disappointing considering how long a normal Mac's
| lifetime used to be, which also justified its high initial
| hardware price.
| tastyminerals2 wrote:
| Sigh. I don't get the sentiment and the whole debate here. The
| author is clearly nitpicking (he is the first person who uses
| messages after all). But honestly, complaints about "arrange"
| screens button?
|
| Nevertheless, he is probably right. Only the people who went
| through working on Windows, Linux both on cheap and expensive
| machines while dealing with all the "baggage" these environments
| bring can tolerate MacOS with leniency. I will never come back to
| anything else until I see a competitive offer from just anyone
| because what Apple offers is:
|
| * Fast, silent, extremely energy efficient devices with excellent
| screens and audio.
|
| * The font rendering. I honestly can't believe people who
| professionally work with text all their lives never mention it
| here. MacOS had and continues to have the best fonts and font
| rendering that is.
|
| * Solid build that lasts (I own MacBook Pro and MS Surface Book 2
| both from 2019 so I see how they age).
|
| * A device that is ready to work when you open a lid or touch a
| keyboard button without any "waking up from sleep/hibernation" or
| freezing due to buggy video drivers and inability to work with
| GPU in hybrid mode OUT-OF-THE-BOX in 2025.
|
| The above-mentioned is more than enough for me to tolerate any
| MacOS issues and the ones mentioned in the article are just
| laughable.
|
| Apple offers you the full package that allows cross-device
| integration while Win/Linux users still rely on the Google stack
| or other third party "workarounds". Yes, no surprises here --
| owning the hardware and software stack is a massive advantage.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| > Solid build
|
| Yeah, until the flex cable breaks (a 5 USD part) and you're
| forced to replace the entire screen (for 1000 USD).
|
| I'm 100% supportive of Framework laptops, especially if it can
| be an open standard with aftermarket parts.
|
| Apple products have good quality, but I'd prefer to upgrade
| just the CPU and keep my old display. Hopefully Framework will
| work towards that.
|
| The Apple model is wasteful and profit-engineered.
| sunshowers wrote:
| > * The font rendering. I honestly can't believe people who
| professionally work with text all their lives never mention it
| here. MacOS had and continues to have the best fonts and font
| rendering that is.
|
| Linux has significantly better font rendering than macOS these
| days if you're on a 140 or less PPI screen. Linux still does
| subpixel AA and text looks razor sharp, while Apple pretends
| very large monitors like my 140ppi 57" don't exist.
| virtualritz wrote:
| It's curious how the author mentions iMessage. No Apple user
| among my friends in Europe uses that. Zero. I guess in the US
| this is very much not so.
|
| It's all WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal here, nowadays. I.e. they
| wouldn't know about bugs in iMessage as they never open it.
|
| I'd be curious to hear about other regions of the world. Do
| people there use iMessage?
| isodev wrote:
| iMessage is a very limited and glitchy app when it comes down
| to it.
|
| Just from the top of my head: no E2EE by default. Gifies are
| restricted (and censored). Reactions are clumsy (there are two
| rows of different kinds of emojis to choose from now). Adding
| photos or sharing location is complicated compared to Signal or
| Whatsapp.
|
| Search is ... well, I hope you don't really need to find
| anything. Delayed notifications on macOS for no apparent
| reason, and in 2025 you can still end up with multiple entries
| for the same contact...
| rekoil wrote:
| I think it's different from country to country, here in Sweden
| I think iMessage is reasonably popular, and people here
| generally go to Facebook Messenger rather than WhatsApp when it
| comes to cross-platform communication.
| egeozcan wrote:
| Last week, I switched to a Mac for the first time in my life
| after using Windows and Linux for around 30 years. Naturally, I
| hate a lot of things due to old habits, and the shortcuts
| constantly confuse me. But what really surprises me is the number
| of obvious bugs in common workflows. At least five times a day, I
| catch myself thinking, "There's no way this is actually broken."
| I didn't expect macOS to be even buggier than Windows.
|
| That said, the hardware and the absence of Windows' user-hostile
| nonsense bring me endless joy. I don't think I'll go back to a PC
| (the Mac feels like a different class of quality) but to be
| honest, I expected more.
| rekoil wrote:
| Off the top of my head I'm mainly thinking about `cut and
| paste` in Finder, that's a very common one people complain
| about, but other than that I'm curious what you're referring to
| if it's happening five times a day with new things, any chance
| you could outline some examples?
| egeozcan wrote:
| Examples just from today: Window snapping (or whatever it's
| called on mac) stops working until restart, keyboard type
| detection gets broken because it thinks my mouse is a
| keyboard so suddenly " and > are replaced, title bar
| disappears then the apple logo is halfway off screen when it
| randomly comes back.
| arcfour wrote:
| I took a Mac at my current job since I really don't like
| Windows and I figured I would probably be able to hack it. I
| use Linux for all my personal stuff, all I need is bash and a
| browser, yeah?
|
| Pfft. Nothing works, and a patronizing, laggy OS that actively
| tries to fight me at every step because it knows better than
| me.
|
| What a joy. I'm sticking with Ubuntu/Fedora and having to
| figure out a driver issue every once in a while.
| grishka wrote:
| > Apple's iMessage and SMS tool is an essential app for
| communication for me and, I suspect, the vast majority of Apple
| users.
|
| For the majority _American_ Apple users, sure. But I myself
| hardly ever remember that this app exists.
|
| The thing that drove _me_ nuts in particular in Sonoma though, is
| their "improved" text fields. Where it would show the stupid
| little popup with the active keyboard layout icon next to the
| cursor. Clearly made by someone who doesn't actually need to use
| multiple keyboard layouts (gosh do I envy those people). But at
| least I could disable it with a defaults write command.
|
| Oh and Mail, yes, it would sometimes stubbornly refuse to load
| new messages, or delay them by minutes. It worked fine the
| previous 10 years. It would've been free to just leave it alone.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| > Oh and Mail, yes, it would sometimes stubbornly refuse to
| load new messages, or delay them by minutes. It worked fine the
| previous 10 years. It would've been free to just leave it
| alone.
|
| Oh man, Mail is almost comically bad, to the point that I
| occasionally miss messages from people since they're drowned in
| crap. A native version of Google Inbox that is not Google-owned
| would be enough for me. (or whatever version/implementation
| that integrates nicely with my devices)
| latexr wrote:
| > But I myself hardly ever remember that this app exists.
|
| As a counterpoint, I myself use it everyday. I'm not American
| and most people I know don't have iMessage. I still prefer it
| to using SMS from the phone. And yes, I do agree with the
| author that the app is buggy.
| grishka wrote:
| Well, I use an Android phone :D
|
| But I also never chat over SMS with actual people. It's just
| not done any more by anyone I know. The last time I sent an
| SMS was probably several years ago. It's 99.9% various
| confirmation codes and other notifications for me.
| Khaine wrote:
| It absolutely does. There are so man quality of life issues that
| plague the platform that don't get addressed year after year. I'm
| sick of albums syncing to my phone losing their artwork. With
| Sequoia, I'm sick of running multiple network extensions (you
| know like Tailscale and Little Snitch) causing network issues.
|
| I'm sick of the random Safari crashes.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Starting to really look like building different enough to be
| incompatible OSes for each of your products was a bad idea.
|
| Do we really need MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, TVOS, VisionOS,
| does maintaining all this make the product better kind term.
| egorfine wrote:
| Bug fixes and stability don't sell. That's why what we will
| receive this year is iOS redesign instead of bugfixes.
| protonbob wrote:
| Snow leopard was my favorite operating system ever. I used it on
| my first real computer, a horrible Asus eeepc netbook and it
| worked flawlessly. Best hackintosh I've ever used. Of course I
| used it on official hardware as well but it brings back fond
| memories.
|
| https://www.svenbit.com/2011/02/install-hackintosh-on-eeepc-...
| simondotau wrote:
| It's not even that Snow Leopard was so great. It's that what
| came immediately after was so poor. Lion was noticeably janky.
| Things seemed to improve again with Mavericks becoming quite
| stable after numerous point releases. Then there was a glimmer
| of hope around High Sierra/Mojave/Catalina, but since then it's
| been steadily downhill.
| UltraSane wrote:
| iPad OS is one of the worst operating systems in widespread use.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| > I am not suggesting Apple has fallen behind Windows or Android.
| Changing a setting on Windows 11 can often involve a journey
| through three
|
| Love how you can't find a critique of Apple without the person
| feeling the need to throw shade at Windows. They need to
| constantly reassure themselves and other fanboys it was the right
| decision.
|
| And for an OS that's geared to your grandmother it sure does seem
| to shit the bed often.
| pi-err wrote:
| You could argue that macOS development is too slow, not too fast
| and in need of a maintenance year.
|
| Basic OS features have fallen way behind in term of UX - and of
| vision. Managing files and _searching_ for information have
| become a chore compared to most internet- or llm-based services.
| Even a bug-free Finder or faster Spotlight would not bridge that
| gap.
|
| All apps listed in the article feel similarly lost behind - Mail,
| Messages, Photos. The only exception is System Settings that does
| definitely need a snow version.
|
| This is obviously true for other platforms as well.
|
| We are possibly lacking a leap forward. Not faster horses,
| electric cars.
|
| An obvious root cause of this is the lack of newcomers to the OS
| again. It's an oligopole that has no interest making things much
| improved.
| lo_fye wrote:
| Ok, but can we please call it "macOS Permafrost"?
| therealmarv wrote:
| Interesting take. I'm mostly not affected by that because I use
| except from the OS itself nearly no Apple software to be not
| trapped in the Apple golden cage ever. No photos, no Apple mail,
| no Apple maps, no Notes etc etc. and/but I also use no iPhone.
| But system settings is awful, at least I can search there to not
| wrap my head around it.
|
| I actually see progress in things that matter for me as software
| dev like virtualisation and Docker support. And with frameworks
| like MLX I can even run image generation tools like FLUX locally
| on my Mac (search for mflux). Amazing! And Apple Silicone is a
| screamer... still cannot believe I have the fastest single core
| PC on Earth in my laptop.
|
| I only thing I use is the calendar to see my personal and work
| Google calendars aggregated at the same time.
|
| So far I'm happy with macOS. If the whole graphics industry
| (Adobe etc) would support Linux more I would even switch away to
| Linux but because I'm dealing with photography, color correction
| and a little video too I will never switch to Linux (the graphics
| system quality in macOS is way too good). Windows is
| unfortunately no go too because of the built-in spyware and ads
| in the OS (like WTF).
|
| I consider Apple Intelligence also as a sort of spyware. I don't
| want to activate it ever (but it gets auto activated after
| updates) and I don't want it to download its stuff and waste
| space. If people want to use it: fine, but if I personally opt
| out, I opt out fully Apple!
| ninkendo wrote:
| > system settings is awful, at least I can search there to not
| wrap my head around it
|
| When it works. Last time I typed "keyboard" in the system
| settings app, the keyboard settings weren't part of the
| results. Ditto "mouse" or "trackpad". Settings search has been
| utterly broken on around half of the dot releases for me. If it
| works, it's only temporary and then it's back to not working on
| the next update (or even reboot.)
| coob wrote:
| Yawn, there is some variant of this story after _every_ os
| release.
|
| The articles specific gripes with macOS are Mail, Messages, and
| System settings. Fixing those does not require a 'no new
| features' (which was always BS) major release.
| MrArthegor wrote:
| The "Snow Leopard effect" is more about the transition to Intel
| from PowerPC than the OS itself.
|
| And maybe I'm a minority but the latest macOS is not worse than
| previous editions, for instance I use Sequoia on a M1 Mac but
| also 10.4 Tiger and OS 9.2.2 on a PowerMac G4 (MDD, 2x 1.2Ghz
| with 2Go of RAM) and the stability is not worse on Sequoia than
| Tiger or 9.2.2, in fact I have encountered more crashes in 9.2.2
| and Tiger than Sequoia and all macOS 11+ (except Big Sur who has
| rough edge on beginning on M1 device)
| laughing_mann wrote:
| Open Launchpad and then try to click the spotlight icon in the
| menubar after. Even after returning to the desktop the system
| won't allow me to click its own menubar. Reproducible on all
| machines, drives me insane.
| tempodox wrote:
| I would love to hope that articles like this one could move the
| needle at Apple, but I'm not holding my breath.
| ksec wrote:
| If we look at OSX Releases [1] ; from OS X 10.10 Yosemite in
| 2014. The only useful feature for me was Universal Clipboard.
| That is 10 years of macOS and that was about the only user
| features.
|
| While the 10 years have some security, performance, drivers, file
| system, refactoring going on. Most of the user features were
| useless.
|
| And I spend 90% of my time inside Safari, and yet Desktop Safari
| is still shit after all these years.
|
| I am not excited about 99% of new macOS user features. Most of
| them are features for features sake. Just continue the macOS
| engineering work, and for once pour more resources into Safari
| and allow Safari support on older Mac system.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history#Releases
| crawsome wrote:
| I don't use pretty much any of the features he listed.
|
| But Sequoia has made some M1 Pros run poorly in my environment.
| It's unacceptable the amount of resources it takes to do basic
| stuff that we got right of 30 years ago.
| imbnwa wrote:
| How does Apple Music not have an equivalent to Spotify Connect?!
| Renders Apple Music unusable, and no, we're not talking about
| Airplay, and no, we're not downloading iTunes Remote (can't
| believe it still even has 'iTunes' in its name!).
| aviat wrote:
| Apple should consider a LTS MacOS version, like RHEL.
| icedchai wrote:
| Maybe they just need to stop doing a major OS release every year.
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