

Our biggest gripes with OS X Mavericks - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/11/after-a-month-of-use-we-dish-out-our-biggest-gripes-with-os-x-mavericks/

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knodi
OS X to me keeps getting progressively worst every release.

Mac Mail is now unusable with large inboxes, spotlight is slow, the finder is
still stupid (explorer is better then finder at this point). New power
management in the near macbook airs is the worst.

~~~
summerdown2
I'm still on snow leopard because I didn't like the idea of spaces going from
two dimensions to one. Nothing I've read since has told me it's a must-have
upgrade.

The biggest thing I'm happy about is the old version of itunes. I can see
podcasts in a grid and group them by album rating.

~~~
jasonpbecker
Yeah, I am really annoyed with 1D versus 2D. However, if you're using a
laptop, battery life from Mavericks alone makes it a killer upgrade.

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quarterto
One issue that plagues me is that full-screen apps _sometimes_ don't take up
the entire screen. They're still allocating space for the menu bar. Lo and
behold, _there is an invisible menu bar there_. Sometimes the apps still draw
a (totally nonfunctional) window title bar. This only ever happens with
Sublime Text, iTerm, and Chrome Dev Tools. Id est the three apps that I spend
99% of my time in. Quick Look also has severe performance regressions. It
takes ~20 seconds to open the first time. Not so quick, eh. I suspect App Nap
is at fault here.

~~~
disposition2
This is most noticeable for me when using VLC and there doesn't seem to be a
specific set of actions that prevent the ghost menubar from displaying. I end
up just doing random actions (click different desktops, unfullscreen ->
refullscreen) and hope the ghost disappears.

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bnastic
Apple really dropped the ball with multi monitor support since introducing the
full screen mode. Seems like they have their sight squarely on laptops (with
no external monitors) where it works really well (with swipe gestures etc.).

NFS issues... sigh... I'm so used to them that I stopped noticing. Getting
Linux and OS X to agree on exporting/mounting NFS shares is why people hate
computers.

~~~
MetaCosm
Using samba is legitimately less painful.

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zdw
Mail is probably the roughest part of Mavericks. They removed a variety of
options for display and printing, and even after the patch that fixed Gmail
issues, it still forces a re-download of your entire IMAP mailbox.

It also does some weird stuff with folders - if you had an IMAP folder named
"Archive", it magically became special in Mavericks, which took some people
off guard.

~~~
dsirijus
Tell me about it... Just few hours ago I filed a bug report where Mail hoses
up at IMAP-fetching Gmail conversations that are at GMail's theoretical limit
- 100.

Spent too much playing with it last week or so, just to get the core
functionality out. But hey, it works now. :)

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geofd
My complaint is a strange delay that affects the command line, in iTerm and
Terminal alike. My coworker also has the same issue. It's quite tedious to
type faster than the computer; over the network, I can understand; but
locally, with a machine that's not stressed?

I can't help but think the new App Nap is to blame for this, but I have no
proof.

~~~
terhechte
I have the same issue. Though I've only installed Mavericks on my Macbook Air
11" so far, and I thought that it would be an issue with the machine's limited
speed. This delay really bugs me and I hope that it is something software that
can easily be fixed.

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czk
I have to agree with the power button complaint as well. I have a 2013 MBA and
I frequently hit the power button during a backspace spasm. I'm not sure if
it's a problem with my machine, but it won't come back on right away if I hit
some keys or the power button again, I have to wait for what seems like a
minute or two.

~~~
quarterto
We used to be able to use PowerKey [1] to remap the power key to something
useful like ⌦. Mavericks breaks this. The ⌦ still gets sent, but the computer
sleeps before anything else happens.

[1]: [https://github.com/pkamb/PowerKey](https://github.com/pkamb/PowerKey)

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bane
I'm confused. Multi-monitor support in Windows worked very well from the start
and it's pretty simple.

I've loathed multi-monitor support in OS X for quite a while now. Is this a
case of Apple overthinking how to do things?

~~~
bonaldi
Yes, it's overthinking. It's not so much about multi-monitor, which Apple has
had working since the 80s, it's about the interaction with the full-screen
mode they introduced in 10.7.

At first they blanked non-primary screens when an app entered full-screen, now
they're offering this multiple totally-independent bodge.

~~~
bane
> At first they blanked non-primary screens when an app entered full-screen

Right, which was of course a terrible idea and I hated it so much I never
ended up using full-screen support when attached to an extra monitor (even if
I like it well enough when I was just using my laptop on its own).

It doesn't seem to be much different from maximizing in Windows but ever since
full-screen support was introduced it's been a bizarre combination of good
ideas and the kind of bad ideas that only come about from never actually using
the feature.

There's other issues with multi-monitor support in OS X that it sounds like
they're addressing in Mavericks, but these other issues as well as loads of
app compatibility ones I've been reading about are enough to keep me from
upgrading.

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justinsb
Personally I hate the "slide" animations when e.g. launching a new full-screen
window. It takes about a second, but any keys I press during the animation
seem to go into a blackhole (repro: full-screen chrome, open new window, start
typing 123456789; typically 1-4 or 1-5 are lost).

Other than that, pretty happy (though I don't use many of the Apple apps).

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lucian1900
Actually, the new multi-monitor support is great! Besides fixing the silliness
(blanked second screen), this one can support screens of different DPI but
similar apparent size.

~~~
myko
Yeah this is much improved over the old system.

Except when hooking IBOutlets up between monitors and the little dialog
disappears, which can be annoying as hell. But even with that irritation it's
miles ahead of how it was previously.

------
bnycum
My only real gripe is that none of my machines will sleep now and I have to
shut them down. I constantly keep finding my Macbook Pro burning hot while
still closed and on my desk. My iMac does the same. I haven't found a solution
yet.

~~~
dsirijus
Be careful. That much heat near the display can damage it easily. Better to
leave keyboard gathering dust than get hue defects on your display.

~~~
coldtea
> _That much heat near the display can damage it easily._

Citation needed.

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chime
I think I have the same problem with Chrome. When I open some links, Chrome
loads the whole page but only shows a white background. As soon as I start to
scroll, the content appears. It's pretty annoying.

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ricardobeat
I hadn't noticed the power button migrating into the keyboard until now (still
have a 2010 MBP), that's a real step backwards in design / usability.

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frenger
I'm having real issues with the windows of certain specific apps (Chrome
especially) either vanishing or retreating to the edge of the screen and
becoming unmovable each time I lock the machine/it goes to sleep. Really
annoying. Hopefully a bugfix soon!

p.s.: a fix I've found is changing the screen resolution (and back again) each
time you unlock. hmmmmm.

~~~
DavidPP
I have the exact same issue, it's driving me crazy. I'm wondering where the
issue lie as my partner as the same setup (same version of macbook air/same
monitor) and doesn't seem to suffer from that issue.

The biggest difference is that I updated while he did a clean install.

~~~
frenger
I think clean install must be the answer tbh - I upgraded too. I'll let you
know if I try it, maybe over the weekend.

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swombat
> _In Mavericks, pushing that power button automatically puts the computer to
> sleep, no questions asked._

Wtf, really? That was one of the features I used to show as a sensible
difference between mac and PC... that a windows pc will just shut down your
computer if you mistakenly touch the power button while handling it, whilst a
mac wouldn't...

~~~
darrenkopp
What happens when you press the power button is configurable in windows, and I
would guess that by default it shuts down on a desktop and sleeps on a laptop.

The problem here is that Apple put the power button above the delete button
and you end up sleeping your computer very often just because you miss the
delete key.

------
specto
Access speeds to my SAMBA server are so bad since Mavericks I had to switch to
NFS. Even with the workaround to disable Apple's version of sambaV3, I still
have issues.

~~~
easytiger
I couldn't get NFS to work. Really wish i could happily live with Linux on a
MBPr. But the h/w complexity is proving very hard to support. Might be time to
give it another whirl soon.

Also they keyboard layout is fucking stupid. It really upsets me when i'm
coding. Going from a standard UK keyboard to an Apple abomination of a UK
keyboard is highly mentally disturbing for my small brain.

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cwbrandsma
My gripe is how the Magic Mouse works on Mavericks. On Lion it worked really
well, now it flips out all the time. I get scrolling when my fingers aren't
moving a lot, especially right to left. But I cannot tell you how many times
I've tried to click on something...and only have the mouse move the page down
just-a-bit, moving the link away from the pointer.

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booop
The past couple of years have seen some major fuckups in the desktop OS space
for usability.

Windows 8, and now this. Although this is no where near as bad.

~~~
easytiger
And ubuntu and kde 4

~~~
aclevernickname
So how's 2007 treating you?

Don't worry, by 2013, KDE 4 is a better and more stable UI than OS X. :)

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purephase
The scrolling issue is very annoying. Sounds more like a Chrome issue though
as other apps appear to be okay.

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ptaffs
OSX(n) release fails to fix all other OSX(n-1) problems. Ho-hum.

