How do people keep thinking nonsense like this, and then repeating it online to endanger other non-technical folks who also don’t know better?

Author has no idea if he has had any security problems, because most malware isn’t about to alert you to it’s presence.

You don’t run out-of-support software on an internet-connected computer.

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-8601

Remote execution vulnerabilities happen in JavaScriptCore. Tech-savvy won’t save you, all it takes is some malicious ad code or some hacked server providing malicious JS (or media files, etc. etc.)

I think it would go a long way to convincing people if you could for example visit a website that eg. changes your desktop background when you visit it, to show how dangerous it is to run unpatched systems.

There are so many documented vulnerabilities that only apply to certain scenarios, that people (myself included) just think, "Hey, that sounds very theoretical, I don't think it applies in my case"

Despite lots and lots of POCs, I haven't seen attackers use spectre in the wild yet. Maybe sophisticated actors are using it but they haven't been caught yet, or more likely they just use more traditional and reliable ways to get info leaks. But if traditional info leaks dwindle, they may turn to speculative execution attacks.

No. That’s the point. The burden of proof isn’t on anyone to disprove your untestable theory about market penetration (although in the case of JS vulnerabilities your premise is completely baseless anyway).

That’s like saying “you can’t get cancer from smoking if you immediately drink a herbal tea after every cigarette because of it’s mystical healing properties. Prove me wrong.”

The claim is other people saying "don't use an old OS/mitigations turned off because of drive-by malware."

I am the one asking for proof of this. I know the vulnerability is real, but is there malware on the web, right now, that I might chance upon and risk my data?

Unless your proposition is that there are groups exploiting minority unsupported OSes but that they all remain successfully undiscovered, like Russell's teapot[0].

But as others point out, there actually is at least one known counterexample - WannaCry/EternalBlue.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

e.g. If a JavascriptCore vulnerability allows RCE on a Mac running whatever old version, write something to exploit it and execute the "say" command on that Mac, so anyone running that version can go to that webpage and literally see "wow this is a real exploit that actually works and anyone can abuse".

I'd love to see that. Kind of like the XSS script alert triggers, stuff where you can just paste a bit of code and prove that it -is- exploitable, without it actually doing anything harmful.

With Sepctre mitigations rolling out in under a month to almost all PCs, of course there is less incentive to build an exploit. But we know how it was when 90% of PCs were unpatched XP boxes.

I assume the author thinks the same way.

I assume the author thinks the same way.”

Just from reading the article, it does not seem that the author thinks the same way at all.

I think a more accurate analogy would be like driving a car frozen with the safety features from the year 2010. Millions of people do this.

Or driving a car without patching the firmware. Again, this is common.

I agree the risk is unknowable, but I think it’s estimateable enough so that it can be accepted or rejected.

This is actually a great analogy now, because Apple (or whoever) regularly issue “recalls” for their known-insecure software in the form of software updates. If you follow the discussion in the info sec community surrounding these updates, often the vulnerabilities that are patched are being actively exploited.

One recent iOS update that comes to mind is one that patched an issue where a PDF sent via iMessage could give remote code execution with no user interaction or visibility. (Actively exploited.)

So yeah, you can drive around with your faulty airbag if the possibility of getting your face mangled doesn’t bother you. Or you can just follow the recall procedure, which is a bit inconvenient but it seems much less inconvenient than facial reconstruction.

And if you don’t care about your data being compromised and sold to bad actors, who may then steal your identity and cause a LOT of trouble for you, then by all means run known-insecure software. That seems like very poor risk assessment to me.

An interesting example, in that the airbag recall took many years due to the volume of units that needed to be recalled. So no matter what you wanted, you were stuck driving around for a few years with a known risk in your face (literally).

I don't think it's any more accurate really, because whilst newer cars can said to be safer with more recent features, there's nothing that can compromise a 2010 crash structure or airbag without you noticing. The same cannot be said for internet connected machines.

Nah, I’d say GP was within the limits of hyperbole /s

That is of course something that shouldn't happen, but it's not a particularly severe threat.

It’s not that botnets are a myth, but there’s some users who actually do click on scams and let people remote into their machines.

Just because botnets are real doesn’t invalidate GP’s points.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=aol+number+of+customers&ie=U...

I don’t know anyone who thinks they are totally safe.

But I know a lot of tech savvy people who don’t run anti-virus or any countermeasures and think they are acceptably safe.

I know it’s cliche to link to xkcd, but this comic seems relevant… https://xkcd.com/463/

Using a native AV that does basic heuristic detection is fine and dandy and usually comes with a low performance penalty and requires few rights that other parts of the system do not already have.

Using a non-root user for the daily grind and switching to elevated privileges only if required, running a PiHole (or a software adblocker) and monitoring outgoing traffic using Littlesnitch or LuLu likely comes at a better attack surface/performance/security trade-off, though, AFAIK.

It’s important to be conscious of security, but that doesn’t mean automatically upgrading to everything all the time. There’s no way, that I know of, to be completely secure so I’d rather be conscious than a false feeling of safety.

I run Catalina 10.15.7 and I think I run it secure enough. Of course maybe I’m rooted and all sorts of bad stuff, but I don’t think so. Of course, maybe the most recent version has an unknown zero day (negative day?) and would also be rooted.

I think it’s naive to have a blanket rule like never run out of support software because sometimes we must. I run old devices that aren’t patchable or supported because they still have use (YouTube/Netflix) and I use them in an appropriate way, I think. I won’t conduct banking, but if someone breaches my Netflix account, I don’t care much. If it’s part of a botnet, I don’t care much. Of course it’s inconvenient and I don’t want to harm others, but then I also don’t want to keep buying dumb terminals for things and companies don’t seem to be changing their support timelines.

This isn’t even mentioning stuff that’s risky like continuing to run my smart lightbulbs even though Phillips stopped supporting them years ago.

I believe in calm technology and I’m not going to keep replacing stuff just because it has a non-zero risk.

“Letting your machines become part of a botnet is nbd” is quite the take.

I would tend to think the author would be mainly concerned about having his bank account data leaked and loosing money or having some online account hacked and loosing access to it.

As your rightly said, the author might already run some malicious program without knowing but as it doesn't impact his life in any meaningful way, that is totally virtual to him and sort of not existing then.

I once had tripwire setup and would look for any system changes but it got to be too much work.

The rail industry, alas, begs to differ.

https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/

https://www.ecomstation.com

They were acceptable decisions made back in the days before railways started deciding to network all the things, which wasn't really foreseeable at the time... and railway stuff tends to last 20-40 years.

The real problem is that there isn't a reasonable alternative. Windows is out of the question for me due to not being a POSIX-based OS. WSL isn't integrated deeply enough and is still a pain in the ass to use coming from MacOS. I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar. Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.

Ultimately, I'm just going to stick it out with MacOS.

  * Finder -> Path Finder
  * Spotlight -> Alfred
  * Stage Manager/Snapping -> Moom
  * Safari -> Chrome/Firefox
  * Mail/Calendar/Contacts -> Outlook
  * Photos -> Google Photos
  * Maps -> Google Maps
  * Weather -> Weather Channel
  * System Sound -> SoundSource
  * System Screen Shots -> Clean Shot X
  * System Menu Bar -> Bartender
  * Terminal -> iTerm2
  * Preview (I actually use this one)

I did use iTerm2 for a long time until it dawned on me I was using zero features that Terminal didn't support, so I stopped. Terminal's lighter and has lower input latency and it's one less thing to install.

I might start using Firefox again if they fixed a couple integration/UI issues and got their power use to roughly what Safari's is. Until then, it's Safari all the way.

There are some apps that are less impressive though - Photos is merely okay but I haven't found anything else that does the job better, and Numbers is quite sluggish with larger sheets.

https://browser.kagi.com/

I haven’t personally used clean shot X, but a tool has to be way, way, way better than the built-in default to get me to change. It doesn’t matter what clean shot X can do better; clean shot X loses because se it isn’t going to be on every Mac I sit in front of.

Better screen recording would be nice but I do it rarely enough that Quicktime is fine. If I did it more I'd definitely have to find some other solution.

All the marking up and such—well, there are many reasons that Preview is possibly my favorite single program on Macs.

* Moving files is unintuitive. It should be [cmd+x] then [cmd+v]. Instead it's [cmd+c] then [option+cmd+v], and this behavior is not afforded in the UI, you just have to look it up somewhere.

* Search within finder does not search the current context by default, it searches your entire computer. "But you can change this setting!" You shouldn't have to change this setting, and most people don't know it's even there.

* Renaming multiple files is a chore. You expect to rename a file, then press tab to highlight the next file, and begin typing. Instead, you... do some combination of enter, tab, then enter again, except it never quite works the way you expect, and sometimes the file moves because the sorting changes after you pressed enter the first time, and for some reason pressing tab actually moves you to the next folder.

* Speaking of pressing [enter] on files, that should open them, not rename them.

* For that matter, pressing [delete] should delete files. You just have to know that the key for that is [cmd+delete], and that deleting things is called moving them to the trash.

* In general, the number of contextual commands you just have to discover by trial and error, or by looking them up on the internet, because they are hidden in the UI. Even the right-click menu doesn't list things like "open in slideshow", because the right click menu has a secret menu of its own which you have to press [cmd] to see.

* There is no preview panel visible by default, that's another option you have to turn on, like showing the file path. This stuff should all be on by default.

* You have to view file info in a separate window.

* It's not clear to me why I can't close Finder by pressing [cmd+q]. Quitting finder is usually all I want to do when it's open.

That's discoverable by holding down Option while the Edit menu is open. This pattern of "revealing" additional functions with modifiers in menus has existed on macOS for a very long time.

> Speaking of pressing [enter] on files, that should open them, not rename them.

> For that matter, pressing [delete] should delete files. You just have to know that the key for that is [cmd+delete], and that deleting things is called moving them to the trash.

Adding a modifier to these functions helps prevent accidental irritating (opening 500 selected files) or potentially destructive (moving selected files to the trash) actions due to fat fingering, which is a particularly likely occurrence on laptops where edge keys like delete and return are easy to accidentally hit just moving around one's laptop. The accidental opening by hitting return one is something I've done several times over the years and it's never not infuriating.

On Windows, deleting a file moves it to the Recycle Bin which is functionally equivalent to what macOS does. In fact off the top of my head I don't know of a modern desktop environment that just directly deletes files without recourse.

> It's not clear to me why I can't close Finder by pressing [cmd+q]. Quitting finder is usually all I want to do when it's open.

Because the Finder powers the desktop too and its windows are not separate processes. In fact no application on macOS spawns additional windows as separate processes, that's a Windows/Linux thing.

Ironically, holding down "Option" to see hidden menu items is not discoverable at all. Most people will only ever do it by accident. The point is that anything commonly desired should not be hidden like that.

There's also the 'Help' menu in Finder that has the manual, tips, and menu search functionality.

That Finder and the desktop are a single process is an implementation detail that should be hidden from UI mechanisms like this.

So, not discoverable at all.

> Search within finder does not search the current context by default, it searches your entire computer. "But you can change this setting!" You shouldn't have to change this setting, and most people don't know it's even there.

The default behavior used to be great, ~10 years ago (extremely snappy search scoped to the current folder). The change to searching the whole computer with significant lag was an absurd and mysterious regression.

It’s like the difference between US vs. UK spelling conventions. A British person saying “Americans are bad at spelling words” is just trolling.

Apologies, but what do you expect to happen to the file in-between the cut and the paste? Cut content exists only on the pasteboard. If I cut a sentence from a document and then cut another sentence, the first sentence is effectively gone (without an additional clipboard manager).

This is why they went with the select-and-copy and select-and-move operations instead, and mapped them onto the copy/paste system. A true 'cut' would be too destructive.

On Windows, the cut file is dimmed out after you press [cmd+x] to indicate something has happened.

In my mind the only advantage the Windows way has is that it belongs to the more popular platform.

Well, that's exactly how Finder works, isn't it? Cmd+C marks files, Cmd+V copies them, Cmd+Opt+V moves them.

I guess I could also question the proposition that Apple doesn't change things people like about Macs. I could list a few examples of them doing that, too.

Thanks for the suggestion that I read a book.

If you want it different, you want Linux or a BSD.

This bites me on fake FAT filesystems over USB for hardware development kits, and I usually just turn those features off. The heuristics there are often terrible, and I'd rather create a build system that writes a new image, instead of doing manual drag-and-drops.

1. Defaults to the columnar format. It's crazy - to move from a parent to child you've to move the mouse the whole width of the column. Whereas in Windows 3.1 File Manager, you'd have to move less than 10 pixels.

2. Now you could switch to the List View. But in Windows 3.1 File Manager, I can see a tree of directories on the left, and the directory contents on the right. That IMO is way cleaner than a single pane. Navigating to a child directory in the right pane also synchronizes the tree on the left pane. I can't be sure about the last one though because Win 3.1 was nearly 3 decades back, but I that's how it works today.

Gnome File and Finder both have such issue. Gnome file manager at least provide ctrl + L.

This will copy either the directory (if no selection) or the selected file(s).

If you enable the path bar, I believe this is also a copyable element.

Finally, dropping a file or directory into a plain text control that cannot take file or folder references (like this HN comment box) will fall back to the path name.

The Finder has an equivalent with Command-Shift-G, and if that key shortcut is too cumbersome it (along with all other Mac menu items) can be re-bound in System Preferences under the Keyboard prefpane.

Most of the things mentioned in this comment chain are easily discoverable in the Finder's menus… it really pays to peruse menus in Mac apps when searching for a function.

If the path bar is showing a folder, you can right click it and select "Open in terminal".

The resulting path input modal even supports tab completion.

    #!/usr/bin/env bash
    
    ####################
    # Description: Get the path of the most recently used Finder window
    # Author: Ancapistani
    # Version: 1.0.0
    ####################
    
    osascript -e 'tell application "Finder"'\
              -e "if (${1-1} <= (count Finder windows)) then"\
              -e "get POSIX path of (target of window ${1-1} as alias)"\
              -e 'else' \
              -e 'get POSIX path of (desktop as alias)'\
              -e 'end if' \
              -e 'end tell';

https://github.com/Ji4n1ng/OpenInTerminal

Is that standard now, or did I add it long ago and forget?

I actually like some of Apple’s own apps. Particularly - Apple Notes and Preview.

I couldn’t yet find a notes app that would let me drag and drop whatever (screenshots, images, Unicode) into a note and move on with my active work, and later search for what I need easily. Even text that is on one of the screenshots. As a bonus, I can write on my iPhone, and continue on my Mac. All the while not paying some subscription fee to a company that I need to worry about not jacking up the price or simply vanishing.

Preview is nice to quickly view whatever doc, markup etc. It gets out of the way.

These two apps are actually the ones that would make it hard for me to move away from Mac.

Thanks for the valuable feedback, good to know its worth it.

Everything about it verifiably worse than the separate apps Apple ships with macOS, from data storage to integration.

That said, MacOS 10.6 was the pinnacle of Calendar, and it's been on the way down since...

10.4 Tiger

They started to ruin the iCal user interface in 10.5 Leopard.

In general, 2006 was peak Mac. When it was Apple main product, before iPhone.

What does interest me is that pre-Lion software is well understood. The behaviors and expectations and commands are re-implementable. Isn't it time someone just made SwiftUI-Tiger or somesuch?

Mac Mail is probably the worst application I've used on Mac (+ the one on the iOS is not far behind). Search is atrocious - like unusably so, it constantly has syncing issues (even with iCloud) when trying to get new mail, it's incredibly slow, and I don't care for the design.

* Keyboard Maestro (automation) * BetterTouch Tools (trackpad + mouse + shit tons of improvement of Destop Experience) * Curio (The best of The bests note taking App by the worst greedy dev in the world) * PopClip. * Fantastical (calandar app)

You still miss a lot of the potential brought by mac desktop develloper API and might as well be better off with a chromebook ou a Ubuntu Mate on an old lenovo thinkpad from ebay.

I was agreeable until that point. Outlook did/does more to ruin email and discussion on the internet than any other app in that realm.

I had that experience last year when my mac died and I decided to get a cheap laptop. It came with windows 10. Two hours into the process of feeling disgusted with the whole setup (and myself), I installed Linux on it (Manjaro) and have been pretty happy with that since.

It even runs Steam!, which is something that barely works on macs since they dropped 32 bit support. The point here is that because I never bought into the whole Apple universe in terms of software, switching to Linux was actually easy for me. All the OSS tools I use are there. I was up and running with my Linux laptop before I had a meeting with one of my clients the next day. I wouldn't recommend this to non technical users but if you know what you are doing and buy the right hardware, Linux is pretty nice to use these days. And most of the commonly used stuff in companies (Slack, Zoom, Skype, MS Live, Webex, etc.) you can actually get to work on Linux. Snap takes care of most of that and I was able to get webex going with a community package.

I now have a shiny new macbook 14" again for work and I still use the Linux laptop for private stuff. The new mac has the notch and while annoying, you get used to it. But it kind of destroys the case for full screen mode because all that does is replace the menu bar with a black bar. You can't use the pixels for anything else. But otherwise it runs circles around my Linux laptop. Build speeds are about 2.5x better on that machine. The M1 is just a really nice laptop processor. Apple hardware is great. I might another one to run Linux on it if the GPU support keeps on improving.

I use Gmail for probably close to twenty years (2004ish?). Before that, I used Thunderbird and Outlook for work. The last ten years, all my work email has been on gmail as well. So I've never used Apple's offline calendar and office apps that come with Macs. I left MS Office behind about ten years ago. For the same reason the lack of decent alternatives for any of that is a non issue for me on Linux because I can do all of that from my browser. I actually started using Darktable on a mac years ago because it's awesome for raw processing. And of course that runs way better on Linux as this is originally a native linux thing. So, that's nice. And it actually runs well on the M1, which is something I was worried about. No hw acceleration but the fast CPU compensates for that.

The thing I miss most on Linux from my mac is a non Apple product: iterm2. I've not found anything that comes close on Linux. Most alternatives are either too bare bones or just lack UI for any of the settings and are way too fiddly to setup. Kind of sad because you really spend a lot of time on the command line with Linux. But of course there are plenty of adequate terminals for Linux. So, a bit of a downgrade but it works. I have my dotfiles synced via git so, both sides are pretty similar.

Forget what everyone says. Just use Ubuntu (like, regular Ubuntu, not some stupid derivative) with everything default. It's what you're looking for. It takes zero configuration, is super easy to use and is a nice environment.

Sure, they might still not like it, but if you haven't even tried Ubuntu yet, it feels like it's a bit early to say that there isn't a reasonable alternative.

The #1 thing that holds me to macOS is family sharing with iCloud (and Messages). If I could access that from Linux ...

Also, if you want an application-centric desktop management style, macOS is the only game in town. Practically everything else follows Win9X conventions in that regard, even the iPadOS-reminiscent GNOME. While global menubars can be enabled in KDE and added to XFCE, they're only functional in some apps because a lot of apps (those built with GTK, mostly) have eschewed menubars entirely in favor of that infernal hamburger button.

My big problem with Windows HiDPI support is that they still can't seem to handle multiple monitors with different DPI sensibly. I have a 5120x2880 display as my main display and 2560x1440 displays on either side of it. Dragging windows from one display to the other is janky and sized wrong during the dragging. Doing the same thing on Mac just works as you'd expect. How can Microsoft still get this so wrong?

Maybe as "web dev environment" it is enough, but this is the main reason why I absolutely detest these "cmdline/scripting only inside a sandboxed VM" approach that the major commercial platforms seem to be trying to sell us these days.

It really is not enough for general purpose computing. I want true integration with the operating system, not sandboxed crap. I want to be able to do almost anything the host OS is capable of doing from my command line, including receiving and sending SMS, filtering incoming phone calls with a script, renaming files en-masse (from _other_ programs, not just files from inside the sandbox itself), recording and playing sounds, access hardware that I have plugged in like USB serial ports or whatever, access hardware that I have not plugged in like diagnosing bluetooth device pairing, be able to fully backup/restore the "host OS" to my medium of choice, partition and format external OR internal filesystems, etc.

I want to do this stuff quite frequently and WSL is just NOT cut for that. The same applies to ChromeOS/Android sandboxed linux approaches. They are a joke designed for the user who is mostly going to simply run ssh into a real machine from within such a sandbox or perhaps run some programs that were so portable they already had win32 versions to begin with. This was not the case for macOS which until very recently was still a very command line centric OS.

Been a few months since I last checked but there didn't seem to be a way to get to your WSL (VM? Instance?) from outside the windows environment (ie via ssh) without setting up a bunch of firewall rules using Powershell to query the IP and create the rules from there. (Except that doesn't always work correctly because PS seems to get a different IP because it's starting up a new WSL? I dunno, I gave up a while back.)

* make automatic snapshots that you can recover data from as necessary, and have them be created every time the system updates (I've needed to use this once)

* have those automatic snapshots be auto synced to my NAS, creating a backup (also used this once when my hardware failed)

Define this.

But the simple, practical answer is no.

I haven't upgraded and used Stage Manager yet so I don't have any opinion on it.

This seems fine to me. The problem is regular users follow some instructions that say paste in to the terminal and then the OS asks for a password like it always does, and now you have malware embedded in your OS.

With the new model, you’d have to guide the user through getting in to recovery mode which is either too confusing or sets off alarm bells for the user.

As a developer I can’t really see why you’d want to touch these OS files unless you are hacking on the OS itself and at that point you should be smart enough to know how to turn it off

Cygwin.

> I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar.

Did you try any other DE such as Cinnamon, mate, KDE or one of the many others?

Though I feel my recommendations will fall on deaf ears as I have the feeling you're one of those devs that doesn't want to put in the effort to learn a new platform and thus will ignore any and all advice and go back to whatever abusive platform they are familiar with. I get it, time is precious and you just want to get work done. But you cant complain about alternatives when you aren't willing to put in the effort to learn how to use them and help make them better. This isn't an insult mind you, just an observation.

Unfortunately, though it's a goal I'm working on, I'm not going to be in any shape to quit my job and start full-time tinkering on FOSS any time soon.

Point is, because desktop Linux isn't a little bit of effort, it's a lot a bit of effort, so I can't fault anybody for not putting in the effort to learn it whilst there are viable alternatives. Which includes ChromeOS these days, to throw a curve-ball in there.

I wish the Thinkpad wasn't so awful. Unfortunately, the screen, silicon AND power management software of a Thinkpad + Linux is miles behind MacOS.

I haven't seen 13th gen extremely closely. It'll get very, very complicated though.

The performance per watt at the top of the voltage frequency curve for the performance cores, is very different to the voltage frequency curve for the idle cores at base clock.

Especially at low queue depth, infrequent operations.

I mean, frankly... no.

I live in the terminal on my Mac, but I still need a browser to deal with everything else. The battery life on a MacBook alone will kick the everloving hell out of most non-Apple laptops currently. Scrolling is always smooth, and I don't even hear a fan these days with the M1.

Living in the terminal on macOS affords you relative consistency; while yes, Apple has changed things in releases (or held back due to licensing stuff), it all mostly works as expected and will generally not break between OS releases. That's the important bit here.

Keyboard shortcuts generally were the biggest annoyance, however I can’t speak to Sublime shortcuts specifically, as I have all my editors set to use Emacs style bindings.

> Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.

Exactly why I prefer Windows development to macOS and Linux!

But configuring a brand new MacBook or new Linux install for development is pure hell. It’s a bloody nightmare. Linux is, for better and worse, an endless stream of configuration. The upside is you CAN configure it. The downside is you have to, constantly.

> Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.

I was responding to this statement. Do you want constantly and carefully configure your machine? Use Linux and be happy! Do you want something that works out of the box? Windows is pretty darn good.

I do game development which is Windows through and through. YMMV.

Could you give some examples?

I’m a long time linux user and just switched to macOS for work at the start if the year and in that first month I could rattle out a long list of complaints but now I don’t really care about any of that. Most of it was just me applying my expectations of Linux on to another OS. When there are other ways to skin the cat and none of them are really better than the others.

There are also some things that are actually just bad like full screen mode but that you learn to deal with to the point you forgot it was even bad. I can think of these kinds of things for every OS.

I have a sudden flashback of 2012

Apple is still great for Apple ecosystem developers.

This is how I understand all these posts. It’s fine not to like something. You don’t even need a good reason. That is what taste is all about. Just don’t pretend that your emotional response is grounded in objective and universal fact.

Am I being facetious? Not really. Calling a benign (and in my view long overdue) update to the settings panel “a fucking joke” is nothing but an emotional screech.

So these are the pet peeves that are mainly meant to back the author's point.

> With this (and more) in mind, you can see how difficult and painful upgrading to a new Mac becomes for me

I updated to Ventura something like a month ago. At first I was disoriented by the new System settings, as it broke my habits, yet I still managed to find what I needed to, only with a bit of drag because it's reorganised. But then I went back to my work laptop which has the old prefpane stuff, and... the sysprefs I was so used to ever since Tiger just seemed infuriatingly backwards to me, having accreted tons of preferences over time in preexisting places that made increasingly little sense.

So, sysprefs is revamped, things have been shuffled around to hopefully make more sense (personal take: it does), and it's hardly in your face any time of the day.

Then, Stage Manager. I didn't even try it (so can't share an opinion on that) because when you're upgrading it's disabled by default, so the argument that upgrading is difficult and painful falls flat on its face as you're literally left with the same desktop you had before. (I will try the feature eventually, I just didn't get to it yet because time is a scarce resource).

I could reasonably hear some arguments about macOS "losing its way", or being increasingly incompatible with one's values, but these two are not it.

- The Classic way, with piles of overlapping windows in a single desktop, and the ability to minimize and hide them.

- The Spaces way, allowing for full screen apps and also multiple desktops containing separate sets of windows.

- The Stages way, which allows to arrange groups of windows from a desktop into different sets, defaulting to one stage per application, but allowing for arbitrary groupings.

The key aspect is these three modes complement each other. Stage Manager really makes the system more efficient, productive, and even nicer-looking. It's 100% an old-timer Apple feature.

I got a feeling this person would hate Spotlight or Quick Look if those features were to be released nowadays instead of 15 years ago.

For the record I agree with you. I've been running Venture since beta 1. The new system preferences is better and allows for future growth, but they have some bugs to get worked out visually.

I certainly do this a lot.

I'm going to put that paragraph on a postcard and put it up in my office to try to remind me about it.

(It would also be helpful to come up with a name for this phenomenon).

I believe it would be called rationalization[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology)

> Ever since the misguided visual redesign of Mac OS when it transitioned from 10.15 Catalina to 11 Big Sur, and the questionable UI choices embedded in such redesign

This is just so condescending, like that redesign was just obviously wrong and Apple designers are morons for not seeing it. As you say, it's ok not to like a redesign but there's no need to be a dick about it and present it like it's an objective fact and not just a subjective opinion.

Two can play at this game.

Just from a visual balance point of view, the new settings panel doesn't remotely match the intent of Aqua UI. The fact that they are then putting scrollable panels in the _middle_ of a _side_ of a window, with a sticky part both on top and at the bottom, shows you they don't particularly know where shit should go.

Making changes for the sake of making changes is by itself pointless busywork. But ignoring the established practices of desktop UIs to make them more in-line with touch UIs is destructive.

I wouldn't even regard taste as trivial. It is not. An OS not being to taste is reason enough to bin it. In fact, I prefer working with something that is more appealing even if it is inferior on paper. And maybe I'll write about what do or don't like.

Just don't dress it up as objective fact.

I ended up just going out and buying a bunch of old ThinkPads and running OpenBSD and Linux on them. I think I got like five computers for less than the price of a single MacBook Air.

I'm pretty much done with proprietary operating systems because they clearly no longer provide the best experience, from my perspective.

I'm tired of being locked out of software I paid for because I "upgraded" the OS (looking at you, Logic Pro), or vice versa, unable to use new software because I didn't "upgrade" (most new Mac software won't run on my MBP). If I upgrade, I literally throw away a $250 piece of software and have to spend another $250 (or whatever) to use the new version of _that same software_. At least open-source OSes allow me to stay up to date while still having nearly-maximum agency over how the computer works and what software it runs.

I'm tired of my computer doing a ton of stuff I didn't tell it to do. The amount of notifications/nags/etc. on a modern Mac/Windows computer is absolutely mind-boggling to me. The always-online aspect, software-update-checks, "telemetry" and "analytics", phoning home every time I launch a program...

I'm tired of my computer not being a tool for me to use, but rather just a gateway to a bunch of stores and ways I can spend money, with a bit of "productivity" sprinkled on the side. I could go on and on.

Oh, I didn't even touch on the software design/UX aspects. Like Riccardo wrote, it's a worthy of an entire article itself. I could probably spend an entire day documenting/critiquing the degradation of user experience in Mac OS and Windows. Mac OS had a lot further to fall, and indeed has been extra-disappointing because I used to hold it in such high regard :\

Custom OS’s are a complete waste of time, and you’re just fighting an uphill battle. I’d take my 20+ hour battery life MacBook Pro over anything else all day everyday.

For most dev machines Fedora + vscode gives you RTR productivity while maintaining a respectable level of free-as-in-freedom.

Install a linux vm and do k8s there, not on MacOS.

(not to mention you can do without k8s for most of development, I don't know why people like making their lives harder)

I can use (and develop on) MacOS just fine without k8s but if you need it, installing it on a VM is easier

Completely agree with that, Kubernetes is for deployment, not for development. I have no idea why you would ever need a "local Kubernetes". IMO if you need that, you're doing it wrong.

I've worked with K8s for a few years and not once have I thought "damn a local Kubernetes would be so helpful"

Can you please expand "RTR"?

just a guess.

I use Windows at work. It's no faster than when I'm working on my BSD laptop, but I also am not doing extensive development on my laptop. I have done a bit (like building my personal website) and I didn't do anything special to get it going. I have so many different machines, I've got a streamlined setup pretty much down pat, so I can get up and running on anything super quickly. The other thing is: dotfiles. I've got my OpenBSD dotfiles and my Linux dotfiles. Copy from one machine to the new one, done deal.

Oh, I should add, it's definitely not an uphill battle, or at least it sure hasn't been for me. I just checked and I installed this OpenBSD install on Oct 14th 2021, so I just passed the 1-year mark. It's practically unchanged since I got it set up... there's no battle at all, it's the most boring, unintrusive OS I've ever used in my life. The updates are nearly effortless and they don't break my software. I've never been more satisfied with an OS to be honest. (That said I'm not doing music production on this machine, but I'm doing almost all other "everyday" computing tasks and a bit of coding/tinkering, etc.)

Could you tell us how he does it? Every time I have several windows of the same app between two displays, or one window being in the full-screen mode while the other not, I find that I can't move between them quickly or at all with keyboard shortcuts. Can't stop thinking that there must be something I haven't discovered, because the experience is miserable.

Command+tab: switch between apps

Command+`: switch between windows of the currently open app

> Command+tab: switch between apps

Problem scenario: Open two windows of a single app and place them on two different screens. Now open another app and focus on it. You want to jump between this second app and the last window of the first app, which happens to be on the other screen. Oops, you can't (or at least I can't). Command+tab will focus you on the window that's on the same screen as the window of the other app; not on the window you were focused on last.

> Command+`: switch between windows of the currently open app

Problem scenario 1: Open three windows of a single app. Now, suppose you want to cycle just between two of them (focus on one window, do something, return to the other window, do something else, return to the first window, etc.). Oops, you can't. Command+` will cycle you through all three windows.

Problem scenario 2: Open two windows of a single app, and expand one of them to full screen. Now you can't reach it with Command+`.

Problem scenario 3: Open two windows of a single app, and minimize one of them. Now you can't return to it by simply pressing Command+`. It has become inaccessible from the keyboard.

Yes, and I wouldn't have it any other way. When I create multiple screens / spaces, it's because I want to focus on one or the other.

>Command+tab problem scenario

You have to use control + arrow key here. I completely agree that this is an annoyance though, and have mostly stopped making my apps full screen because of it.

>Problem scenario 1

Agreed. Ironically, I might consider full-screening or minimizing the window I don't want to loop over xD

>Problem scenario 2

Agreed again. And again, there's control + arrow key.

>Problem scenario 3

Command+` no longer works, but if you hover over the app you want while in the command+tab screen, and then press the down-arrow-key, you can select which window you want to open, and this includes minimized windows. I actually have never used this and just found out about it because your scenario made me curious.

It allows easy switching between _windows_.