5 ms·

Mac OS has been hands down one of the best OS that I’ve used in a long long time. What problems are you running into?

by websap 24d ago

soulofmischief 24d ago
I wouldn't even know where to begin, because the slide in quality has permeated every aspect of the operating system, from stability to design. Numerous networking bugs, SSH agent bugs, sleep state bugs, sometimes having to restart my machine because the network screws up so badly, Bluetooth issues that they keep introducing and then not fixing; I have peripherals that just no longer work due to this. I could go on and on. I could talk about the mobilization of a desktop interface (same mistake the Unity and GNOME teams made) And I don't feel like beating a very dead horse, so just google "macOS Tahoe design issues" and take your pick.
- zer0zzz 24d ago
  Why not just stay on the previous 15 release? They still even push updates for it!
  - xp84 24d ago
    Agreed. I have skipped Tahoe and will update to Golden Gate when it's out of beta. I did the same complete skip on "Sonoma," I think. At this point, the complete absence of quality in MacOS releases has turned me from an "update on day one" guy into a "Skip major version updates unless it's widely being praised for improving performance and fixing existing bugs" guy.
  - soulofmischief 24d ago
    I bought a new macbook as insurance against a potential supply chain crash and it came with Tahoe :( On my M2, I have kept it on 15 but Apple aggressively tries to trick me into upgrading in a way that reminds me of Microsoft's behavior with Windows 8/10.
    - zer0zzz 24d ago
      It's not that bad, pop ups every few months. I just buy older stock or refurbished these days. M1s and M2s are still good enough for me. Recently picked up a refurbished M1 16" because I wanted a larger screen in bed / on the couch for a good price with good condition refurbished from amazon.
      - soulofmischief 24d ago
        Oh no, it got bad for a while until they received lots of backlash. They literally changed verbiage and tried forcing an update at least once unless you read very carefully in between the lines. They directly and intentionally employed sleight of hand and psychological manipulation to try and force an update in order to meet some misguided OKRs.
acomjean 24d ago
stuff that annoyed me on mac was the "find" feature was useful, but to get to a enclosing folder (what I want), involved searching, clicking something, finding the file again in the display and "enclosing folder" (this might not be exact, I don't have a computer in front of me). Sharing files with a windows hard drive. My workmate had a seagate that installed an NTFS driver on mac, which saved us a few times. Never had a problem on linux. Python never seems to work right. Conda, and other stuff, just never worked smoothly with the bioinformatics code we were running. Cluster machines it was easy. There is a wierd issue that you can't close a macbook and use it with an external monitor without plugging it in. It just sleeps. Would you like to join iCloud. No really would you like to join iCloud. How about apple music? (To be fair MS is just as bad if not worse about onedrive...) We had a pythonTK program to print labels from a CSV file. Every MacOS update broke it. We ended up just running it on a windows machine. back up was going command line on mac. case insensitive file systems. generally stability.. Its not bad, just seems the OS has gotten worse.
- codesnik 24d ago
  previously cmd+enter would work to "show in finder". New siri-enabled search seem to break that for some reason, but right click menu/show in finder on a found item still works.
slowin 24d ago
I would say the artist formerly known as OS X has never been good. It literally started its life as a half-assed NeXT attempt and has only gone downhill from there. There's still a "Services" entry in the file menu. .DS_Store files are an abomination. Mac OS thinks it knows better than I do about which software I'd like to install. Plist insanity that makes the Windows registry look pristine. GUI inconsistencies across every surface area... I'm curious what you like about it, because other than font rendering (which it does well), I can't think of anything positive.
- icedchai 24d ago
  In almost 20 years of using Mac OS I can count on one hand the time I've used the "Services" menu, and that was mostly by accident...
  - slowin 24d ago
    No one has ever used it. It's one of those NeXTSTEP things that was copied over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Services_menu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Services_menu
    - icedchai 24d ago
      I'm sure there are some die hard users out there. Speak up!
      - heddhunter 24d ago
        I love it! I write my own services for it all the time. You can assign global hotkeys to them as well which makes it crazy convenient to be able to select text, a file, etc and invoke some script you wrote on them.
      - nxobject 23d ago
        There used to be – pre-LLM days – a "Summarize" service that "summarized" prose to a length of your choice by deleting sentences. I'm sure it was once someone's pride and joy.
alluro2 24d ago
To be clear, I'm definitely not saying that MacOS is now bad - it's absolutely still a pretty good OS. But, personally, I do have a couple of gripes, and my feeling is that things are changing in the opposite direction from what I would like. Compared to Linux let's say a couple of years ago - yeah, better. Compared to Windows - there's no comparison. But, still: - it slows down after a while - design direction is questionable and controversial - that it got more inconsistent is factual - also, so much wasted space and everything got bigger and a little dumber - so little control over system behavior, functionality, looks On modern Linux, you get a more polished (wow, unbelievable thing to say - I first dabbled with Linux in 1997), robust, and infinitely more functional and customizable experience. After a while, I started feeling at home - like it's "mine" - and how distinctively MacOS feels like being a guest there, and that it was never "my environment". I definitely realize how vague and unquantifiable most of this sounds - and how little value those things have for a lot of people - but I've come to enjoy my setup, I spend ~12h / day in it, and I discovered that how it "feels" matters to me.
- websap 10d ago
  I still don’t understand what polish is missing. I’ve been using computers since almost 3 decades now. My MacBook feels like a computer that even 5-6 years ago I would classify as too futuristic. I rarely ever switch it off, I run 40+ chrome tabs, 2 coding agents, and 2 editors all the time, with slack and a few other utilities running. I can install power user software like Raycast and Handy.

Mac OS has been hands down one of the best OS that I’ve used in a long long time. What problems are you running into?

by websap 24d ago

Mac OS has been hands down one of the best OS that I’ve used in a long long time. What problems are you running into?

I wouldn't even know where to begin, because the slide in quality has permeated every aspect of the operating system, from stability to design. Numerous networking bugs, SSH agent bugs, sleep state bugs, sometimes having to restart my machine because the network screws up so badly, Bluetooth issues that they keep introducing and then not fixing; I have peripherals that just no longer work due to this. I could go on and on. I could talk about the mobilization of a desktop interface (same mistake the Unity and GNOME teams made) And I don't feel like beating a very dead horse, so just google "macOS Tahoe design issues" and take your pick.

zer0zzz 24d ago
Why not just stay on the previous 15 release? They still even push updates for it!
- xp84 24d ago
  Agreed. I have skipped Tahoe and will update to Golden Gate when it's out of beta. I did the same complete skip on "Sonoma," I think. At this point, the complete absence of quality in MacOS releases has turned me from an "update on day one" guy into a "Skip major version updates unless it's widely being praised for improving performance and fixing existing bugs" guy.
- soulofmischief 24d ago
  I bought a new macbook as insurance against a potential supply chain crash and it came with Tahoe :( On my M2, I have kept it on 15 but Apple aggressively tries to trick me into upgrading in a way that reminds me of Microsoft's behavior with Windows 8/10.
  - zer0zzz 24d ago
    It's not that bad, pop ups every few months. I just buy older stock or refurbished these days. M1s and M2s are still good enough for me. Recently picked up a refurbished M1 16" because I wanted a larger screen in bed / on the couch for a good price with good condition refurbished from amazon.
    - soulofmischief 24d ago
      Oh no, it got bad for a while until they received lots of backlash. They literally changed verbiage and tried forcing an update at least once unless you read very carefully in between the lines. They directly and intentionally employed sleight of hand and psychological manipulation to try and force an update in order to meet some misguided OKRs.

acomjean 24d ago

stuff that annoyed me on mac was the "find" feature was useful, but to get to a enclosing folder (what I want), involved searching, clicking something, finding the file again in the display and "enclosing folder" (this might not be exact, I don't have a computer in front of me). Sharing files with a windows hard drive. My workmate had a seagate that installed an NTFS driver on mac, which saved us a few times. Never had a problem on linux. Python never seems to work right. Conda, and other stuff, just never worked smoothly with the bioinformatics code we were running. Cluster machines it was easy. There is a wierd issue that you can't close a macbook and use it with an external monitor without plugging it in. It just sleeps. Would you like to join iCloud. No really would you like to join iCloud. How about apple music? (To be fair MS is just as bad if not worse about onedrive...) We had a pythonTK program to print labels from a CSV file. Every MacOS update broke it. We ended up just running it on a windows machine. back up was going command line on mac. case insensitive file systems. generally stability.. Its not bad, just seems the OS has gotten worse.

codesnik 24d ago
previously cmd+enter would work to "show in finder". New siri-enabled search seem to break that for some reason, but right click menu/show in finder on a found item still works.

slowin 24d ago

I would say the artist formerly known as OS X has never been good. It literally started its life as a half-assed NeXT attempt and has only gone downhill from there. There's still a "Services" entry in the file menu. .DS_Store files are an abomination. Mac OS thinks it knows better than I do about which software I'd like to install. Plist insanity that makes the Windows registry look pristine. GUI inconsistencies across every surface area... I'm curious what you like about it, because other than font rendering (which it does well), I can't think of anything positive.

icedchai 24d ago
In almost 20 years of using Mac OS I can count on one hand the time I've used the "Services" menu, and that was mostly by accident...
- slowin 24d ago
  No one has ever used it. It's one of those NeXTSTEP things that was copied over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Services_menu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Services_menu
  - icedchai 24d ago
    I'm sure there are some die hard users out there. Speak up!
    - heddhunter 24d ago
      I love it! I write my own services for it all the time. You can assign global hotkeys to them as well which makes it crazy convenient to be able to select text, a file, etc and invoke some script you wrote on them.
    - nxobject 23d ago
      There used to be – pre-LLM days – a "Summarize" service that "summarized" prose to a length of your choice by deleting sentences. I'm sure it was once someone's pride and joy.

alluro2 24d ago

To be clear, I'm definitely not saying that MacOS is now bad - it's absolutely still a pretty good OS. But, personally, I do have a couple of gripes, and my feeling is that things are changing in the opposite direction from what I would like. Compared to Linux let's say a couple of years ago - yeah, better. Compared to Windows - there's no comparison. But, still: - it slows down after a while - design direction is questionable and controversial - that it got more inconsistent is factual - also, so much wasted space and everything got bigger and a little dumber - so little control over system behavior, functionality, looks On modern Linux, you get a more polished (wow, unbelievable thing to say - I first dabbled with Linux in 1997), robust, and infinitely more functional and customizable experience. After a while, I started feeling at home - like it's "mine" - and how distinctively MacOS feels like being a guest there, and that it was never "my environment". I definitely realize how vague and unquantifiable most of this sounds - and how little value those things have for a lot of people - but I've come to enjoy my setup, I spend ~12h / day in it, and I discovered that how it "feels" matters to me.

websap 10d ago
I still don’t understand what polish is missing. I’ve been using computers since almost 3 decades now. My MacBook feels like a computer that even 5-6 years ago I would classify as too futuristic. I rarely ever switch it off, I run 40+ chrome tabs, 2 coding agents, and 2 editors all the time, with slack and a few other utilities running. I can install power user software like Raycast and Handy.