I wish Apple would separate the updates of their bundleware from their OS. Some of the major updates have meaningful changes to the underlying OS (gatekeeper, SIP, etc.), but others - like this one - are primarily changes to frills like Messages, Notes, Safari and other Apple-native apps that I don't even use.
I have no problem with Apple bundling these apps and making them work seamlessly together, and I don't even mind that they're all updated simultaneously (except for Safari, which I wish I could update independently without relying on the "Technology Preview" beta channel). But I do have a problem with upgrading my entire OS and disabling the new bloatware features just because I want to keep auto-updates enabled. I used to delay updating and then would end up way behind, which is why I enrolled in auto-update. But now it feels like I'm being held hostage to their update schedule.
And for what benefit? There are hardly any useful OS-level changes in this release, but there are a bunch of new features I'll need to disable (while hoping the next auto-update doesn't break my external monitor), all powered by freshly written code contributing to an expanded attack surface. If I had my way, then I'd take the OS updates and skip all the apps. Keep the attack surface small while still meaningfully improving the core. I don't care about the rest.
You know what would be even better? If you could reliably uninstall all this junk or not even install it at all.
Every time I hit some button on my keyboard and the Music app opens asking me to create an account I am reminded how hostile all commercial operating systems are.
It's interesting, I've been using OpenBSD for the past couple years and it has _not once_ enraged me the way Windows and Mac do. I still use Windows for work, and own a ton of Macs (probably getting close to ~30 by now), but OpenBSD is the OS I use for most general computing stuff.
I mean, I'm using a GUI that is really primitive by comparison to Win/Mac (i3wm) but it's actually great. Extremely fast, efficient, and stays out of my way. There is literally no mechanism in the OS to pop up a notification or bounce an icon or blink anything at me. It couldn't interrupt me and piss me off even if some piece of software wanted to. It's amazing. Nothing updates on its own, and the OS runs very very few services or other background stuff -- basically only whatever I have explicitly configured and enabled. Again, awesome. I'm easily aware of every single process that runs on this machine, and if there's one I don't know about, there's comprehensive documentation about it, including how to configure it. That's honestly effectively impossible for someone using Mac or Windows.
Oh, I just installed a security patch in about 20 seconds. Open terminal (winkey->enter), "doas syspatch -c", type pass, see there's a patch, "doas syspatch" to apply it, done in 2 seconds. Once I reboot the newly-patched kernel is active. There is full documentation of the patch, including why it's needed, how the patch resolves the issue, and a diff of the patch is included.
I love OpenBSD…… as a server particularly as a DNS or a network gateway with pf as a firewall.
But, I cannot fathom how using OpenBSD on a Desktop/Laptop for personal computing would NoT enrage me everyday. The things I’d do on my personal computer :
1. Browse all bloated modern websites using a modern web browser - Firefox
2. Work with photos(personal) - edit them, crop them to share with someone, markup screenshots to put in docs etc.
3. Use PDFs without worrying about formats, markup on them as needed, fill forms on PDFs.
4. Media - playback audio and video. Without worrying about whether I have the right codecs or file formats.
Wouldn’t OpenBSD make me constantly fight against its opinionated safety first way of doing things?
Sure, one can run Firefox on OpenBSD, but would it play YouTube and Netflix without making me pull my hair?
I can install ffmpeg, relevant codecs, PDF tools, Darktable or other Unix friendly photo tools, but wouldn’t that be a constant fight and tweaking to keep them running?
I haven't touched OpenBSD for a few years if I'm honest but one of the things that did not enrage me about it was that it didn't nag me to change anything once I'd got it working properly. I suspect that's part of it. There is a clear separation of OS and applications. Regarding all the other stuff I remember it mostly just worked. But of course that is within the realms of the particular package actually working in the first place, which is variable probability.
As for myself I got lazy and just use Windows 10. It doesn't enrage me if you turn off all the cloud shit, treat it like a file manager/window manager shell and run all your open source stuff on it. Again that works because there's a clear separation of OS and applications.
When you start mixing the two (hello Linux) it's where you get problems. I think snaps were an attempt to solve some of that (badly).
On Linux, I enjoy the idea that all the software can be interchanged. So there is no separation between the system and user installed software. For me, it’s difficult to grasp the minimalism of those other systems. When you clearly have your system as a rock that you cannot modify. I have very little experience (some theoretical and none practical) with BSDs, but it pains me there is a base system for macOS with an absolutely unused and not needed software, like Chess.
You can install *BSDs with only the things you want. Same like you can on Linux. However, the question of default packaging holds on both sides.
Trying installing the default .iso of Fedora workstation or Ubuntu-latest and see all the things Gnome brings along.. Maps, Photos, IM client, even a bundled browser (Evolution or something) that is based on Firefox but dependednt on the few Gnome packagers to keep up to date(instead of just letting the user download Firefox on their own or shipping the latest firefox).
Even Archlinux, if you install Gnome-desktop, you get all the cruft. You need to explicitly find a way to install just the minimal gnome desktop without all its apps.
OpenBSD however, for a server usecase, comes with a very cohesive, sane set of tools carefully maintained by the folks who ship OpenBSD. If anything, they are very conservative about adding stuff to that ecosystem.
Oh wow, basically my story! With the difference I have no practical experience with BSDs yet (was eyeing FreeBSD for a while now), so I use very minimal barebones Arch Linux installation with sway wm. Why had you chose OpenBSD?
Oh man, it gets worse than that. After updating to iOS 17 the other day, I said to my phone "play OverCast" (my podcast app). It used to start playing from that app. This time, it started playing a band called Overcast, and told me I had just started a 7 day free trial of Apple Music. What the actual fuck.
It's not a bug, it's a feature. People have done crazier things! Didn't Steve Jobs once say that part of the reason he named the company Apple was because it would be before Atari in the phone book? [1]
I realize it was possible before. My point is that now it's the only way for me to set the lights to be a color other than what my presets happened to be when I upgraded to iOS 17.
iOS has to assume what you mean with play OverCast. Maybe there are other people that wanted the device to play the band? This is such an edge-case which is easily solved by further specifying your prompt.
It knows a) whether you have overcast installed and when was it last used, b) whether you added the overcast band to your favourites or ever explicitly played one of their songs. I'm sure there's some tiny section where the the extra prompt would be useful, but they could be so much better than that.
It's not just playing the wrong band / app. It's signing you up for a subscription. You still have time to cancel before you have to pay. But it's one more thing you have to worry about now.
It should have confirmed that you're fine with subscribing if that's what you have to do to listen to the band. And it's also fine to play the wrong band if you have a subscription already.
Somehow on migrating to a new iPhone the music app decided it needed full notification permissions, apparently because a new Taylor swift album is of the same notification level as an incoming missile strike.
Oh man, I have never loaded music on my phone, so whenever the car starts, it plays the first song on the iPhone. I hate U2! And I hate that they’re receiving money each I do this!
Do they though? It was a gifted digital 'purchase', not a stream.
Anyway, seems you can contact Apple support to permanently remove the album from your account.
Oh yeah, esp. funny if you always hated U2, and suddenly it appears in the middle of your music collection. Same with "Alone at home", not quite my taste.
Reliably removing the U2 album from Apple Music seems impossible. Deleting the album which has helpfully redownloaded itself is now a ritual before I start my car - otherwise it starts playing as soon as bluetooth connects - which is just what I need when I'm pulling away in busy traffic.
I have similar feelings. Apple did a wonderful job with M1/M2, but on the software side, I have mixed feelings. Xcode is a mess, and Swift UI is not a complete replacement for Cocoa.
And on the OS side, I feel like Apple is creating features that I instantly disable because they do the exact opposite of what I want.
Apple's hardware is incredible but the software is increasingly grating for any kind of power usage. Xcode is frustrating, the permissions system is flagrantly designed for Apple's self interest, window, monitor, and app management is rife with ancient bugs and half baked design decisions.
I used to think the same, but I had to sell off the 2016 macbook pro because the keyboard was unusable, my 2019 macbook pro has already gone back for stuck arrow keys a year ago, and now the left command key is randomly sticking, which is really annoying because you never know which shortcut key will be triggered.
Compared to my 2010 macbook pro which was used without any repairs for close to 8 years.
Unless you all are buying new apple devices every year or two, I don't see how the "apple hardware is incredible" claim can be substantiated.
But what's the alternative?
Windows has also become incredibly grating with even more telemetry and commercial offerings embedded in the OS (especially the home versions).
If you think of macOS as 'half baked' I'm curious what you think of Linux distributions with their infighting about everything from the desktop and graphics stack to which tool should start up system services. There's even less internal consistency there.
I bought a 2017 ThinkPad for $100 and installed Linux on it. It's quite good. I would never use it as a daily driver though. I love macOS too much, even with all its flaws. But I try to do as much development in Linux as possible (whether on a device, in a VM or on a remote machine). I feel like every dev tool I install on Mac is more technical debt that I need to pay for each time I update the surrounding OS.
I've had almost 0 problems being a power user with a KDE Plasma Arch Linux. There is internal consistency in distro lineups. Linux is not one OS. You can have the telemetry ridden but more accessible Ubuntu experience to the extremely fast and barebones Xfce Arch experience, it's your choice.
I've been someone who used Windows, MacOS and around 20 Linux distros extensively across many laptops / PCs. Always tempering, endless configuration, customization, frustration with Windows instability, MacOS inflexibility or e.g. needing to spend days so my audio works on Linux.
A couple of years ago, I picked up Thinkpad P1 (Ryzen 4800U) and got settled with Arch + Plasma. I've never before had such a snappy, quiet, stable, 3 monitors, all hardware and software just working, fully customized, and empowering experience of using a computer and went years without needing to touch anything - as it was perfect.
It ended when I couldn't resist a new MBP 14, but I've been slowly accumulating nostalgia for my Linux setup since and will surely get back to it, hopefully when Asahi Linux completes support for external monitors.
XCode is refusing to install. Fails with some error, and asks me to download XCode again. Also now the system needs 70-80 GB of free space to install XCode. One of the funny upgrades so far
There is definitely something buggy going on there. It took 2 attempts for it to install for me! No errors, it just stopped installing somewhere around 90%. Plenty of free disks space and RAM.
Are you sure it actually stopped installing? When I installed XCode for the first time a few months ago, there was a 20-30 minute period where it was completely silent. Ultimately I was able to tail some syslog from the app store daemon that indicated it was actually doing something (downloading dependencies and validating their signatures, IIRC). But I almost restarted the computer thinking it wasn't working.
It is not, yet, a full replacement. You can use Swift UI for some kinds of apps but there are UIs that are still harder in it. Apple acknolwedges that some people still need to use Appkit. It’s clear that their long term plan is to build out Swift UI to be enough to fully replace the older libraries.
Xcode is a mess in many fronts. For example my Xcode updated automatically to a version which couldn't support Ventura anymore, the OS I'm still running. I had to uninstall the app store version and manually download older one to fix the situation.
> I wish Apple would separate the updates of their bundleware from their OS.
In a way it's a bit of a philosophical standpoint: macOS is the whole indivisible thing developed, built, and released in lockstep, kinda like FreeBSB base is the whole indivisible thing developed, built, and released in lockstep (and the rest is ports). In a way, removing tcsh from a FreeBSD install because you only ever use bash from ports does not make sense and may break things; so you just ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist.
So what do you do when
- previous bundle exists, you upgrade raw OS, but the previous bundle is not compatible
- you try to install new bundle, but did not install new raw OS
I am sure this can be managed, but someone else may say they do not want to do it.
I guess the OS installer could have a checkbox "upgrade Apple Apps bundle" and if you uncheck it but have the previous version installed, it could have a disabled, pre-selected checkbox saying "Uninstall Apple Apps bundle (previous version incompatible)"
Something cool however is you can actually build the open-source WebKit browser engine yourself and make closed-source Safari use your locally built version.
For tech minded folk, the upgrade-everyting-or-nothing is indeed unwanted.
But I love the facts that I can tell my family to upgrade and they will have all the new stuff at once, like with an iPhone or iPad. That is for most users what they want and/or need.
Maybe Apple should consider dev editions for MacOS that allows more customization during setup. MacOS is still heavily used by web and mobile developers, so I'm sure this would be received well.
I do end up removing many of the Apple apps, but recently started using Safari, Notes, and Reminders more. Apple does an excellent job making their apps work seamlessly within the Apple ecosystem.
Wow, so much unwarranted hate. It's one download and you have everything updated. If you believe you do not need a new OS version for your laptop for whatever reason, you can always keep using Ventura or whatever you're running now and update that until it is end of support.
I don't think you understand how helpful it is for "normal" users to push a button and have a brand new version of everything. And being afraid of new features that you don't use... pretty irrational.
It is by no means irrational to hesitate on a new major release of an Apple operating system. MacOS upgrades have caused many people all kinds of issues, for instance a Big Sur update broke a metric fuckton of USB-C hubs and they didn't address it for 6 months.
I updated from High Sierra to Catalina and it broke a lot of things. Ultimately sold it in the used goods market and switched it for a new laptop. Installed Linux on it and haven't felt the need to go back to Mac since.
Warning: You are using macOS 11.
We (and Apple) do not provide support for this old version.
It is expected behaviour that some formulae will fail to build in this old version.
It is expected behaviour that Homebrew will be buggy and slow.
Do not create any issues about this on Homebrew's GitHub repositories.
Do not create any issues even if you think this message is unrelated.
Any opened issues will be immediately closed without response.
Do not ask for help from Homebrew or its maintainers on social media.
You may ask for help in Homebrew's discussions but are unlikely to receive a response.
Try to figure out the problem yourself and submit a fix as a pull request.
We will review it but may or may not accept it.
Yea the homebrew dev team is pretty user hostile tbh.
The more you read their github, the more you realize how insufferable and arrogant they are. It leaves a very bad impression.
Also, if you are not going along in the upgrade rabbit race, homebrew gets really annoying and actually in your way at some point.
I see myself moving to macports soon, if brew gets worse and the stability of my setup is compromised (lots of php versions with valet for example).
I guess brew is now more targeted at “prosumers” now since it is imposing unnecessary limits on what “pro” users want and need.
Of course the devs dont need to support everyone and answer every feature request.
Its more nuanced than that.
As a dev, i like a stable environment and i dont like to do big updates all the time, since that means i have to spend hours updating my setup again. Everytime i run brew im scared it will hose my PHP versions, etc, since it auto updates everything.
To install old PHP versions one needs to hack the install files to make it work.
If you bring up any of these issues you are screamed down by the devs as “you should always be on the latest versions anyway bla bla”… but that is just not a realistic scenario in the real world. Legacy code is everywhere.
In the end brew is not really for pro users, but, as i said, maybe for people using it to install youtube-dl or whatever.
Once the pain of reinstalling and hacking it to make it work becomes too big then i will switch.
I'm glad we have both Homebrew as well as MacPorts. It's like having options to choose a bleeding-edge or stable distro. I prefer the former (as a dev, who often wants to use reasonably new features and libraries - and honestly despite keeping up in versions I can count the breakage to my workflow in the past decade on one hand, at least I'm not a JavaScript developer) but I totally respect the latter as well, so I'm glad we can each have what we need.
The homebrew team seems incredibly burnt-out, to the point of hostility. I've really enjoyed the nixpkgs community so far and encourage others to check it out; it hasn't replaced homebrew entirely for me (yet), but it's getting closer every day.
I want to like Nix but those installation instructions for macOS (and their removal friend) are just crazypants as compared to the `sudo mkdir /nix && sudo chown $USER /nix` from the Linux version
And that's not even getting into the "waaa?" from `du -hs /nix` although I am open to that being a misleading number due to hardlinks and other trickery that du may not correctly surface
> And that's not even getting into the "waaa?" from `du -hs /nix` although I am open to that being a misleading number due to hardlinks and other trickery that du may not correctly surface
Nope, du counts hardlinks correctly when it encounters the same inode multiple times in the course of fulfilling a single invocation.
> Files having multiple hard links are counted (and displayed) a single time per du execution.
Nix's disk usage profile is pretty similar to Flatpak's, or to a collection of closely related Docker containers. The difference between no Nix install and having one isn't huge. But your first installed Nix package will pull in very low level common dependencies— on Linux, everything between whatever application and the kernel (and on macOS, a bit less). Your next application will come with a smaller increase. Once you have a handful of programs installed, you no longer have big downloads for individual additions. When you have a lot installed, the difference isn't that huge, proportionally.
Over time, your Nixpkgs version will rotate and you can end up with deps from old versions of Nixpkgs, which can take up a lot of extra space. But that's easy enough to manage by pinning Nixpkgs.
If you ever uninstall programs, Homebrew's broken uninstallation functionality can very quickly make a Homebrew installation much (up to several times) larger than the equivalent Nix one once you have more than a handful of packages installed.
Yeah, that's a long-running and pretty much unfixable issue as macOS updates overwrite /etc/zshrc. AFAIK, the determinate systems installer does somewhat resolve this as you can just run it again and it will fix the issue.
The default installer is not idempotent yet (and my work on trying to resolve that has stalled, unfortunately, see https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/7603), so trying to run it again to fix this issue will result in errors.
Yeah, I generally uninstall (with the remaining nix-installer binary on the nix volume) and then reinstall. It would be great if the installer were idempotent and I could just re-run the installer!
> And that's not even getting into the "waaa?" from `du -hs /nix` although I am open to that being a misleading number due to hardlinks and other trickery that du may not correctly surface
Are you running garbage collection? It gets out of hand if you keep all versions, but you don't need to do that
are we reading the same instructions? i struggle to see what makes a curlbash leading into a few interactive prompts “crazypants”; it's the same story with brew and gentoo prefix
One of the problems with OSS burnout is this many-to-one relationship with the users and maintainer. It’s sort of like the relationship between an outfielder and the bleacher crowd at a baseball game.
Maintainers get requests to do things they have no interest in, like maintaining software for OSes past a certain date. That doesn’t sound so bad, but there are a lot, and they can even be mean. The maintainer can block these users individually, but it’s different users all the time, so that doesn’t stop it.
So, the maintainer addresses the user base, the whole crowd all at once. The problem is most of these users haven’t seen these interactions, so the message seems hostile. Having someone say “I owe you nothing.” seems really weird when you’ve never asked them for anything. Or, if they list of all the ways and reasons for you to not contact them it looks hostile. The users don’t see the fan next to them throwing a beer can at the center fielder.
It's not burnout. The homebrew team have been insufferable and egotistical for a long time.
Max Howell (founder of homebrew) went to interview at Google, shoved a coding exercise back in their faces, made a snotty comment about how all the engineers at Google using Macs use his code and how dare they blah blah greatest engineer in the world blah blah, and walked out the door.
That coding exercise was likely given to him precisely because all the google engineers had a lot of experience using brew, or they did it as ego check to see if he'd be insufferable to work with.
Howell failed to realize that and instead went and bragged about it on twitter, almost certainly confirming for the hiring committee that things had worked exactly as designed.
Whole lot of fucking sass from a man who either didn't care or didn't know about the security implications of making a directory in the default path user-writeable, thus making probably hundreds of thousands of developer's systems less secure:
This is very reductive. For anyone not familiar with the story, Howell's experience at Google was the original source of the "Invert a binary tree on the whiteboard" meme. Opinions on his experience were all over the map, with very thoughtful people defending Google and other thoughtful people criticizing them.
And for what it's worth, Howell did say he regretted his tweet, and that he wasn't up to snuff technically (in the Quora link in a sibling comment to this one).
I am glad that there are people like Max Howell who write such (for me) great package managers. In opposite to what you write, here in a quote reply he comes across as very friendly: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...
PS: if really a lot of Googlers use brew I hope they also generously support the project (do. Apple)
Macos 12 will run on most Macs from 2015 and later.
8 year old hardware isn't Earth shattering, but it's also not a "hostile" period of time for a non-commercial open source project to support. And it's certainly not "new hardware every year".
Completely agree. I have two perfectly good but now unsupported 5K iMacs from 2015 and 2017 in my household, both don't get any more upgrades. Heck, I would even pay up to 100 EUR/USD for longer support. But that's probably not a viable business case for Apple anymore.
Have you tried to install some Linux distro (like Fedora or Ubuntu) on it? If your workflow allows it, of course. I found how well Linux works on my relatively old Apple hardware. And I can use it most of the time, just need to learn some new tools, as many I’m familiar with are macOS only.
I know my way around Linux, as a server OS at least. The issue with switching is more about my previous investment in buying and learning dozens of third-party apps. I also must say that I value the integration between macOS and iOS a lot.
Once my (i)Macs stop receiving security updates though, I might try a Linux distro, just to give them a second life.
By upgrades you mean upgrades that change the major OS version, right?
Those both should still be getting security updates. Ventura just updated to 13.6 this morning, Monterey updated to 12.7 a few days ago, and Big Sur updated to 11.17.10 a little over two weeks ago.
Big Sur is expected to stop getting security updates in a couple months. Monterey will probably get them until sometime in the last quarter of 2024, which would be the end of the line for 2015 5K iMacs. 2017 5K iMacs should get Ventura security updates through the last quarter of 2025.
Indeed, and I hope Ventura will get at least two years of security fixes.
It's still my impression, that the 2017 Macs (sold by Apple well into 2018), should have made the cut for Sonoma. I don't even care about any of the new features. I'm more interested in bug and security fixes. So hopefully I have more time to hunt for the perfect display that can adequately replace the 5K 27" of my current setup. And I know there is the Studio Display. But that one is too expensive for me.
The lack of an iMac 5K replacement is basically the reason why I'm preparing to leave Macs and the whole apple ecosystem behind.
As far as I'm concerned, when the main use of your computer is focused around text, because of Apple technological choice when it comes to scaling for HiDPI display you need a 5k27" display if you don't to want compromise in macOS. Otherwise with a cheaper 4k display your choices are between a much reduced workspace or get constant font blurriness.
Windows doesn't have this problem and I say that as someone who has historically prefered how macOS handle fonts (still do but only on capable hardware).
The way I see things Apple is completely responsible for this problem and should also be responsible for providing a decent solution at a reasonable price.
But currently the cheapest option (Basic M2 Mac Mini + Studio Display + Keyboard & Mouse) 2642€ instead of the previous 2100€ (inflation is unhinged in Apple land) and on top of being much more expensive for a way more locked down configuration (previously RAM was freely upgradable and SSD upgrade was involved but doable) it is not faster in a way that match the price increase or even better than what Intel has been doing. In fact the truly faster is mostly single thread performance (42% better), multicore is a just bit faster (21%) and GPU is actually slower (-14%).
In other words : for much more money you gain a bit not in way that is change what it possible to do with the computer but you also lose in a way that make some things you could do before worse (gaming and generally). That is on a
Lifelong customer, got my first own mac at 15, which was an ibook and also my first personal computer at all. I also bought the second gen ipod (first gen didn't get much availability in france) and even imported the first gen iPhone
I too have been looking into what can replace the 5K 27" iMac display, because my 2017 5K iMac display has developed a column of bad pixels about 30% in from the right side.
It's been that way for about a year and a half now and has not gotten any worse so I don't think I'm in any danger of suddenly needing a new Mac. The way my iMac happens to be on my desk I'm directly in front of a spot about 30% in from the left and most of my main focus is on the left side, so the bad pixels aren't too annoying.
The 27" 5120 x 2880 display has definitely spoiled me. I want something with a similar density and not much bigger or smaller than 27".
These seem to be the choices currently:
1. Apple Studio Display. As you've noted it is expensive. It also comes with a stand that does not have a height adjustment. Add $400 to get it with Apple's height adjustable stand. (Or for $0 get it with Apple's VESA mount adaptor instead of the standard stand, and buy your own stand. If you can find a VESA compatible height adjustable stand for less than $400 this is cheaper than buying Apple's stand).
One thing to not if like me you would really like a monitor that you can keep using for a very long time is that in 2021 Apple made a change to AppleCare. It used to be that you could buy at most a small fixed number of years of AppleCare. Now you can keep renewing AppleCare indefinitely.
For the Studio Display it is $49.99 per year. If the Studio Display is fine for someone except for the price, it might be worth considering if that plus $49.99 per year, which should let you keep it working for a long time, would make it worth it.
2. LG UltraFine 27MD5KL [1]. Supposedly this is the same LG panel that Apple used in the 5K 27" iMacs. Just under $1300. Seems to get good reviews.
3. Samsung ViewFinity S9 [2]. This is new. $1600 so same as Apple's price for the Studio Display, but the S9 is height adjustable and VESA compatible so no paying extra if you want height adjustability.
LG UltraFine 27MD5KL is on my shortlist. One downside is that it hasn't been updated in a while. Upside is, you can get them second hand for 30-40% less than it currently retails for.
The Samsung display seems nice. But how long is Samsung going to support the devices OS? The price is also not competitive in my opinion. For 1600 I would prefer the Studio Display, even if it's not height adjusted.
I will probably wait for the next Mac mini model with the M3 SOC. Luckily I'm not in a hurry.
I have used it before and, in my experience and everyone else I know who has used it, the vast majority of time the newer versions run absolutely fine with no issues. Occasionally some newer features don't work, but I'd but confident that 2015/2017 iMacs would be able to run the latest version no problem.
I used Dosdude's patches to install Mojave on a 2011 Mac mini. That worked well. Thanks for mentioning OpenCore-Legacy-Pather. I have it on my radar, just didn't have the time to look into it more thoroughly.
My issue with Nix is that you are forced to install packages in a global location. Why is it that every package manager assumes I’m an administrator on my machine? Even if I am, how does it make sense to take over a global directory as a single user?
Nix leverages hardcoded paths inside the binaries and other outputs it builds in order to ensure determinacy. Nix packages are not always trivially relocatable. Consequently, reliance on the binary caches means different users have to rely on the same path to the Nix store, since it's part of all those outputs.
You can build Nix with a custom store prefix and run it that way if you're willing to build from source.
In practice, Linux users don't really have to contend with that tradeoff because you can relocate a Nix store wholesale using a bind mount, or a user namespace (unprivileged chroot), or various fakeroot tricks to run a Nix store in your homedir as if it lives in /nix. Unfortunately macOS just doesn't have any of those mechanisms.
If macOS some day gets first-class container support and, consequently, relevant user-facing primitives for user-mode chroot, then unprivileged, cache-friendly Nix installation methods for macOS will doubtless follow. I hope both happen!
I have a bad habit of writing user-mode when I mean 'unprivileged' in the sense of 'not as root' and I don't think the word really works that way. I did it again here! Whoops.
I think he may be referring to installing Nix itself, which does require root even if the intention isn't to install anything system-wide. I did once think about modifying the nix installer to let me set an arbitrary nix store because I wanted nix packages in a docker container I was debugging, but never really got around to it. Let me know if you know of somebody else who tried this.
So this is possible, but there are a lot of caveats. First, the installer itself explicitly says:
```
# Please don't change this. We don't support it, because the
# default shell profile that comes with Nix doesn't support it.
readonly NIX_ROOT="/nix"
```
I haven't seen any configurations where the entire /nix is relocated, but nix _does_ support relocating the store with the environment variable `NIX_STORE_DIR`.[1]
However, this means that you can no longer use the the binary cache and *everything* you install has to be compiled from scratch, including glibc. The reason is that nix usually patches paths like `/bin/myprogram` to `/nix/store/1238f...-myprogram-1.2.3/bin/myprogram` in everything that depends on `myprogram` during build time to isolate the build outputs from the system. If you change your store, all those paths will now be invalid, including the hash part.
So using a nix store that isn't `/nix/store` is possible, but I don't think anyone is actually doing it except in a few select scenarios.
You can also compile nix itself with a different root. That will work as expected, but you still have the issue that you need to compile everything you install yourself.
Now that's interesting. I use Homebrew in a similar way. It does mean I have to compile a lot of things from scratch, but Homebrew has knowledge of which packages are relocatable and which aren't, so I get to use binary "bottles" for about 25% of the packages I install. I'll have to give this a try.
Homebrew is the same, there is no good way to have Homebrew installation shared among multiple users on a single machine, much less to have separate packages for each of them.
Agreed, but it's at least possible. My usual install is just cloning Homebrew to ~/homebrew and setting up a symlink. It's far from ideal, due to the number of packages I need to build from source, but it works, and it's allowed me to function normally in tightly controlled environments.
As far as I can tell, the initial installation for Nix doesn't allow this, though iFreilicht pointed out some options that I haven't seen before, so I may be wrong.
These warnings keep getting longer every homebrew release. You may want to try macPorts, which goes out of their way to explicitly support releases all the way down to 10.5.
One of the cooler experiences I've had with MacPorts was seeing some people go out of their way to ensure builds still worked on PPC Tiger and PPC Leopard.
I remember seeing SBCL builds broken on Darwin/ppc for a long while, and eventually SBCL decided to drop support for Darwin/ppc altogether. Still, these ports maintainers did not give up and eventually found a way to fix SBCL builds on PPC: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/65484
I recall seeing some work to bring back PPC support upstream, but I am not sure what the progress on that is. It's still cool seeing downstream users fix builds that simply didn't work (and to the point where upstream decides to remove support entirely since they couldn't build it anyway).
the issue i found is that you have to basically rebuild your basic unix network tools from the ground up, including ssl and curl and so forth, because the TLS version used by the builtins on 10.old.whatever, not to mention the certificates, no longer work with modern websites and FTP sites are slowly dying off. then you have to figure out which version of those tools are compatible with each other and with 10.version.you.are.using
there are a lot of scripts out there to mitigate this but the boot-strapping is always a bit of a bother. like the script i wrote, my first instruction was "So... you go download chrome for 10.x for PPC... you can find it here in the old forgotten wasteland of google on a deserted old site that might not exist much longer... and by the way this is not secure at all"
like, you just cannot do this securely. cellularmitosis has made leopard.sh linked below, of course the first step is to download from an http site.
its kind of one of those things that have changed about the web, the cultural shock.... nowdays basically so much is based on an account, or at the very least ssl. back then nobody gave a **.
so to actually use a g5 on the modern web, like ... can you log into a video site to watch a video? well only if you dont care about being hacked when you type in your user id and password to the video site. can you shop? only if you dont care about being hacked. same.. can you browse literally anything? google will constantly harass you into logging in. so will basically everything else. and if you dont your experience will suck.
can you... write code for a g5 and try to back port modern algorithms to it? sure just log in to .. .github... on your.. insecure machine that could easily be hacked. and lose your github account to hackers. then you can cry about it after you login to social media. on your hacked account. so maybe not. then you can post about it on hacker news... where of course your account has been hacked by a keylogger.
if your machine doesnt crash because someone installed a bitcoin miner into it, or a tor node, or bittorrent or god knows what that could get you arrested.
the modern web is just such a pile of degenerate criminality and scammers and thieves and robbers, not to mention the spy agencies of various governments, that basically that is the main thing driving old systems off of it. its not that its not possible to optimize code or write new code for old platforms. its that the basic machine running an old OS is compromised at a fundamental level, open to the world for exploitation if you dare to type anything into it that is the least bit private or confidential, and its connected online.
100%! Jordan Hubbard co-founded FreeBSD, created the original FreeBSD ports system (on which the entire idea of package management is based), then worked on the BSD technology team at Apple where he made MacPorts.
port is the standard macOS package manager! port is the standard macOS package manager! port is the standard macOS package manager!
Wow! That's quite impressive. Meanwhile there was a latent bug in the Homebrew formula for Rust that affected 10.13 for a year until I finally spent a few hours to investigate it.
"If you see a Homebrew maintainer walking down the street in your direction, find the nearest wall and bury your face in it in shame and deference until they pass."
That's probably because MacPorts was built by (and for) actual Apple employees, whereas Homebrew was built by someone unrelated who even had to start his own company because FAANGs wouldn't hire him.
But they are definitely at the top end of the compensation and job-security scale, which someone responsible for such a popular piece of infrastructure surely deserves.
All I see is, they protect themself from each and every script kiddy that runs to reddit or github when something doesn't work because of their own config issues.
There are two versions of Perl, awk, and Ruby in a fresh Sonoma install. I would say that moving Python away into XCode tools was an easy thing to do, but to rip the others away, it will take quite an effort.
I predict that Apple will admit defeat at the very least with Perl, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Lindy effect. It has entrenched itself so much that you won't just yank it away without some serious bleeding.
Also, there is jsc if JavaScript is what floats your boat, although it's buried quite deep.
Oh oh, it's getting closer. Currently on MacOS 12 with my trusted 2015 Macbook Pro. It still goes strong, but looks like the next major release may see the end of homebrew for this one. There's really no issue with this computer other than 16gb of RAM being a bit tight when every modern app is using Electron. Oh well, see how we go.
(Message also for your parent) Last week, I saw the writing on the wall. I installed OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher on two MBPs from 2015, updating 12.7 to 13.6. It is a MBP 13" 2015 (early 2016 variant) and a MBP 15" 2015 (late 2015?). Works very well but you need to follow the guide. Both machines are still working well, 'cept for the battery (already replaced on the 13"). Esp the 15" is still in good condition, my wife happily uses it and insists on needing a 15". So a replacement would be expensive.
Can confirm Ventura runs great on a mid-2015 MacBook Pro 15 inch (MacBookPro11,4). Mine has 16gb of RAM and an i7 which probably helps (also added a modern 1tb NVMe drive via an adapter). I use it for a dedicated music production setup and only ever hear fans when installing something or during updates.
My only advice for someone new to OCLP/unfamiliar with Mac boot loader in general (like me one week ago) is that the OCLP boot screen during setup looks very similar to the native MacOS boot picker and went through four different flash drives trying to follow the instructions thinking it wasn't booting properly from the drive. Look closely at the instruction screenshot to distinguish them.
You can just build the latest tarball from source with `./configure && make && make install` [1]. I did so just now without any issues. (You’ll need to install Xcode and the Developer Tools first if you don’t have them already.)
I remember this being a huge issue with MacPorts. It would never keep up with the damn releases, so if you were working on a beta OS, you were hosed until they caught up.
It is, but it is mostly an issue with not having enough resources for the prebuilt images. They haven’t released a package installer for Sonoma yet, but AIUI the minimal required fixes have been in the MacPorts core for several weeks.
There are likely to be more issues related to Apple's switch to the `prime` linker.
(I’m a port contributor and am on macports-users where this issue has come up twice. There is what I think is excessive concern about the macOS beta NDA preventing the creation of a package installer until after GA when it no longer applies. A bigger problem is the availability of sufficient build hardware as they have a smallish Mac mini multi-booting into 11, 12, and 13.)
I've been using MacPorts on beta releases for the last several years, and it does a pretty decent job. I wouldn't say it's significantly behind the competition.
Why would anyone hate homebrew? The only issue I had was a few years ago when they changed from running as root to running as user and it broke some permissions. Then they released a guide on fixing the problem and that was it.
More recent packages, for one. I need to use Ubuntu 20.04 for work, and it's easier to get the latest versions I want from linuxbrew than from apt. E.g. clang is on 10.0 from apt and 16.0 from brew. Similarly, fish is 3.1.0 vs 3.6.1.
The Homebrew UX is great as long as you're on their happy path. Speaking from experience, as soon as I see the warning message I shared at the top, Homebrew gets way worse.
For instance, installing ripgrep now requires building the latest version of Rust from source, which takes three hours per Rust version; installing Pandoc requires building and storing the whole GHC; etc.
macOS or MacOS but never MAC OS or MACOS. MAC is an acronym for Media Access Control (as in: MAC address), Mac (or mac) is an abbreviation of Macintosh.
I'm surprise Apple doesn't, even unofficially, upstream fixes to Homebrew before a new macOS version is released. Why let Homebrew break for so many macOS users on day 0? I know Apple is secretive about unreleased products, but the type of fixes for Homebrew wouldn't reveal too many Apple secrets. Do Apple engineers not use Homebrew on their own Macs while developing macOS?
I see other replies as well, but I just want to tell you guys I came here to recommend mac ports. It’s a shame brew is so popular and mac ports having only a fraction of that attention.
I assume that the message means that Homebrew is incorrectly identifying the installation of MacOS Sonoma as “out of date”, and that means updating Hombbrew is a side-effect of updating the OS.
Once again a good time to remember that there were multiple perfectly good package managers available when Homebrew was invented, they were more future-proof (by eg not putting files in /usr/local), and everyone only switched to it because for some reason Ruby programmers wanted all of their tools to be written in Ruby (and possibly by people with waxed mustaches.)
I switched to it because it worked much better out of the box and required next to no fiddle-fucking to install tools I need, so I can spend my time doing what I'm actually paid for, and good at. I have no idea whether the alternatives improved in the intervening 10-ish years, any I have no good reason to look into it since homebrew still works.
That's great until homebrew breaks in some fucked up way (which a few years ago it used to do often), or they break a package (ditto) and you try to report that to them, and they act like insufferable little shits back (and don't fix the problem.)
It reminds me of my boss emailing gnu.org to tell them one of their mirrors was down and got a nastygram back that said "It's spelled GNU/Linux" and the mirror went unfixed.
I don't care what language Homebrew uses, it just works. When I got my M1 MacBook in 2021 I saw some of this negativity about Homebrew, and since I was doing a clean install anyway I decided to try out MacPorts. I quickly ran into problems and switched back to Homebrew and it's been smooth sailing.
What problems did you run into? I've been using MacPorts for years at this point since Homebrew can never seem to install libraries in a way that pkg-config, gcc, and ld can find them. (Yes, I'm aware there is a subcommand in brew to manually print the paths to libraries, this is still not ergonomic compared to MacPorts where I install a library and it more or less "just works" when I want to use it).
Also, Homebrew attempting to nuke /usr/local on uninstall left a quite bad taste in my mouth. I had installed MacTeX before Homebrew, and thankfully MacTeX had proper file permissions set up, so my TeX installation was left in-tact. Still scary knowing that this is just done in the background without warning (unless the operation fails with errors).
It makes a mess out of iconv because it's not compatible with the OSX bundled version. Without digging into it further it seems like the macports iconv headers and libraries shouldn't be in the default search path.
Ultimately users will go where the package maintainers are. There are more people out there willing and able to write Ruby today than Perl (Fink) or TCL (MacPorts).
I'm sure someone will start a macOS package manager based on python and yum to signal the waning days of those technologies.
MacPorts has 36k active ports. Estimates I see online for the number of Homebrew formulae are less than 5k. TCL isn’t difficult to write and most Portfiles are just a bunch of whitespace-aligned key-value pairs.
I'm secretly hoping for a makepkg / pacman-based replacement to homebrew, to have the same set of commands and package naming conventions across mac / win / linux
I switched because Macports reliably borked itself doing ordinary operations every 4-6 months, and Brew didn’t. That was like 2012 to be fair, but Brew’s never given me much trouble and the package selection is insanely good, so I’ve had no reason to look at other options since.
Its being in ruby is a strike against it, for me. I use it anyway. It’s probably my favorite package manager, all things considered, and I’ve used a lot.
Homebrew built almost everything from source back when everyone was already migrating to it. Fink and MacPorts being frequently broken was really the big driver, IMO.
As for why Homebrew packages seemed to be broken less often, I can only speculate. At least one big benefit it had was being on GitHub. A lot of folks were already familiar with how to cut a PR. Not so with how to submit a Portfile patch to the MacPorts Trac.
I'm sure some Ruby programmers were attracted to Homebrew because it felt more familiar than something written in a language like Tcl.
But Homebrew's fundamental tradeoff w/r/t purity was also a huge boost to installation speed at a time when most package managers for macOS still required you to build most things from source.
That and the slick, user-friendly UI were probably the biggest factors for Homebrew's success when it came out.
I use both MacPorts and Homebrew. By and large, I prefer MacPorts (because I can pin a package and it will stay pinned, whereas Homebrew will upgrade a package if it happens to be a dependency of something else) but there are numerous packages and casks only available in Homebrew.
I wonder why there aren't more "casks" for MacPorts. On my work MacBook, I've got Firefox, Google Chrome, Orbstack, and Visual Studio Code installed via brew casks, and none of them are present in the MacPorts catalog. Maybe I should step up and learn how to package things for MacPorts...
I think that, by and large, MacPorts wants to ultimately build things. I was just looking at the MacVim port and it does not have a way of downloading the Release from GitHub (as far as I can tell). It will download a precompiled binary from the MacPorts build farm, but it has Sparkle disabled, etc., so it is managed fully from MacPorts.
It would be an interesting discussion to have, as they do have some of that sort of thing (the 1Password CLI, for example), but I don’t know what the general policy would be.
I’d love to see MacPorts get more funding for build resources and to potentially add that, because the way that Homebrew works occasionally leaves things broken (`pipx` venvs are a great example).
Does anyone else have no idea what macOS version is which? Which came first? Is there some hidden naming protocol that I just don't grasp?
I've only started using a mac part-time while I've been developing an iOS app over the past few weeks, and I keep seeing different names for the OS version. I have no idea what version I'm on, or if Big Sur came before Sierra, or what. I know I could look it up, but it seems that in the name of good user-experience, I shouldn't need to.
You'd think they'd at a minimum say "people aren't going to be able to figure out which is which, so let's go in alphabetical order with our naming.
Yeah, at this point I wish they'd just use numbers like iOS.
So we're at iOS 17 and macOS 14.
Because honestly I stopped caring about keeping track of the names long ago. It's cute if you care, they can still put it in the About window for the sake of tradition, but it would be a lot more helpful if it were just referred to as macOS 14 in the press and documentation.
It says the <Name> <Version> in the "About This Mac" Apple menu item. In this case, it will be Sonoma 14.0.
Historically versioning is weird due to the integration of NextSTEP after Job's return to the company. First it was versioned up to 9, then the NextSTEP integration was 10, then subsequent major releases were minor bumps (ie 10.1, 10.2) as OSX was a brand unto itself until 11 which rebranded to MacOS and full versions were used again. So Sonoma is the 14th release from the NextSTEP integration. I think referring to them by names eased the confusion some.
Sonoma is the 21st release of a Mac operating system based on NeXTSTEP. The switch to 11 marked the transition to Apple Silicon. The code names have been used as an alternate name since 10.2 Jaguar as a way at the time to differentiate from and shame Microsoft’s Longhorn (Vista).
I've never heard someone pronounce it that way in my life until I saw the video. Maybe it's a regional thing, but it sounds like the wrong vowel sound at the end to me.
Yes, I agree with that post that the USian pronunciation as given there is better than the British one. But Jobs' rendering of the American pronunciation also sounds wrong to me because the final syllable doesn't generally rhyme with 'wire' as I've heard most Americans pronounce the word.
It may be regional. Jobs grew up in Mountain View and I grew up in Santa Clara, just a few miles down the road. My parents and teachers always said something resembling "jag-wire" in pronunciation.
That makes sense to me. Ahr/ire is a pair that gets swapped or blended in other American accents as well, after all! Many Southern accents basically do the same kind of blending but in the other direction.
It may be regional, but I was born and raised in Silicon Valley / SF South Bay, like Steve Jobs, and my parents and teachers all said "jagwire." I don't pronounce it that way myself anymore, but that's because if I say it I'm often talking about the car brand, and I know the brits pronounce it differently so I do the same.
Do some google search for "jagwire" and you'll find tons of results about Americans pronouncing it that way.
EDIT: The word comes from a Native American language via Portuguese. I'm not sure about the indigenous phonetics, but the Portuguese pronunciation is closer to "jagwire" than the British pronunciation.
I went to the wikipedia page, which is kinda the point. No other OS requires you too look it up. Even WatchOS and iOS directly use version numbers.
Saying it's due to NextStep integration sounds like a strange defense of this naming strategy (if that was your intention). They have version numbers, but they decide to use the "code name" as a product name.
Notice how Android clearly was alphabetical, until they realised people weren't getting that (or got sick of coming up with names of sugary foods), and went back to the number system.
Mac has not gone with alphabetical, but seemingly random names related to cats or places in California.
Various projects do the Alphabetical thing. If you're going to have names, it's a great way to do it. OpenStack, Ceph & Ubuntu all do that.
However it's still a challenge. I work with all of those daily and I often think about the project over-all and it's features or bugs in terms of the alphabetical name, but there is also a numerical name and I have to lookup and translate from it - when looking at diagnostic output from customer installs, or git tags, etc. I keep some subset of the translations in my head but not all them :)
I could have sworn the dessert names were code names and they did numbered releases too the entire time but they did drop the 1.x numbering for just whole versions.
MacOS versions have a number, which counts up, the same as iOS and WatchOS. "Sonoma" is a cutesy name for "MacOS 14", the same way that "Jammy Jellyfish" is the cutesy name for Ubuntu 22.04.
The version number is shown in the About This Mac page, which is the top menu item in the Apple menu at all times.
As mentioned in my post the NextSTEP integration - OSX - was a major branding effort for Apple. It was the reason for Job's return to Apple and was seen as the savior of the company. I think Apple wanted something to hang their hats on that lived for many years.
It's weird and clunky, but makes sense in the history of the company as all previous OSes were numbered. Yes, they probably should have moved off that convention earlier, probably by the time the Intel integration had happened at the very least.
How do you figure? Windows had 7, 8, skipped 9, 10, 11, and now 12 is coming.
Windows thought they'd never do a major update again, and tried to hold on to the 10 label, but then realized that wouldn't work. So 11 is a bit of a branding stumble, but we know, it came after 10.
You’re ignoring all yearly updates to Windows 10 and 11, most of them with news features enough that would be a major version if they were on macOS.
I mean[1]:
>As announced in July, the Windows 11 2023 Update (version 23H2) will be released in the fourth quarter of 2023. This new update will have the same servicing branch and code base as Windows 11, version 22H2 and will be cumulative with all the newly announced features. For devices on version 22H2, the 2023 Update will be delivered via a small enablement package (eKB)7. This continues the annual feature update cadence, with new feature updates released in the second half of the calendar year. This new version resets the 24 months of support for Home and Pro editions and 36 months of support for Enterprise and Education editions.
But Windows never used a separate name for minor versions, so there are only 6 exceptions (and hopefully no more). And a half of them are year numbers.
Mac OS X Server version 1.0 was Rhapsody 5.3. It still doesn't make sense even if you know the MacOS System was renamed to OS 8 to kill the clone license.
No, I have no clue. I don't even know my current version (number nor codename). But when I need to check, I click the Apple logo in the top left, "about this mac," note the version number and then search Google for "latest macOS version" (it took a long time to break the habit of typing "OS X").
The name is meaningless. It’s just marketing; every version is named for another location across California. Before that they were named for big cats.
Each version has a number that is sequential though. I think it’s just an effect of sheer quantity. They release a new version every year. It’s hard to keep track.
I wish they’d just get iOS, the iPhone, and macOS or whatever it is called now all the same. Today I should be running iOS 15 on an iPhone 15 talking to macOS 15.
I do wonder the longevity of alphabet-based naming...
It _sort of_ reminds me of a time I spoke to a colleague and said I wanted to try a project (only a couple of years ago) that required Red Hat Linux 5 and he said "oh sure, here's some CDs" and realised, "nope, not RHEL" (to which the response was.. "oh, here be dragons")..
If you loop the alphabet and I reckon you'll inevitably get confusion.
"Hey, Android Juniper has been released" - "Ah cool, I can upgrade from Ice-cream".. "oh no, wait, mine's 27 releases old!".. "No, sorry, it's actually 53 releases old"
> If you loop the alphabet and I reckon you'll inevitably get confusion.
These releases tend to be yearly or half-yearly at most (e.g. android or ubuntu). So a wrap around happens after 13 years at the earliest. Having a 13 year old completely un-upgraded phone (or AR brain worm or whatever we will have in 13 years) wrapping around seems quite unlikely to cause any surprise.
If you have weekly releases or something, then I would see your point.
When there were multiple years between Mac OS releases, it was not as difficult. I also found big cat names easier to remember (perhaps because I’m more familiar with them than California landmarks). I also liked the Leopard/Snow Leopard and Lion/Mountain Lion cadence.
Perhaps I just don’t put as many cycles into following Apple anymore.
It works like airplanes. Some people see Tomcat and know immediately what it refers to. Others prefer the numeric F-14. I still remember NATO codenames from 40 years ago, without the letter/number. Sidewinder, for example.
I have the issue you describe with Ubuntu and (less so) Debian codenames and also with Android codenames. With Ubuntu though, the number is descriptive, like Russian tanks (T-90 etc), so using it is worth more.
But it's alphabetical, if you see Ignorant Ibex and Jaundiced Jackalope, you know that (after singing the alphabet song to yourself quietly) that II came before JJ.
> The implementations of the exfat and msdos file systems on macOS have changed; these file systems are now provided by services running in user-space instead of by kernel extensions.
This sounds interesting!
I really wish there was a native FUSE alternative on macOS; just recently I found myself in a pickle due to not being able to mount an ext4 boot volume on an SD card on my Mac at all. (Passing through to a VM works only via USB.)
I remember creating widgets in windows 98 by setting my desktop wallpaper to a local webpage that had a full-screen background image and some dhtml for interactivity.
“DriverKit is the framework that allows developers to create device drivers that the user installs on their Mac. Drivers built with DriverKit run in user space, rather than as kernel extensions, for improved system security and stability. This makes for easier installation and increases the stability and security of macOS“
File Providers are useful in some scenarios, but they are also not really a FUSE equivalent.
They're more geared towards Dropbox-like synchronizing use cases. Some developers have made it work for SSHFS too, but even that's already a bit of a stretch; for more custom solutions it definitely falls short: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/681325
The only option currently seems to be to implement a network file server such as SMB (which is what Google Drive used to do before File Providers existed!) or NFS, for which there even is a FUSE bridge available: https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t
It's unfortunate that fuse-t follows the same closed source model as MacFUSE did. It's really holding things back.
I was hopeful that Ganesha NFS [1] would suffice as a bridge for the various FUSE filesystems I need to use with macOS, but alas, they have abandoned the FUSE interface and moved to FSAL/FSAL_VFS [2].
It would be really nice to have a clear path to building a copy of Ganesha NFS that supported a whole host of the great FUSE filesystems out there built to this API.
Watch out for for the Mac SMB client. I found a bug in several MacOS versions which causes the SMB client to send an incorrect file handle in some file requests, causing random files to be deleted which are unrelated to the files you're operating on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37345855
If you've ever had a suspicion about files on an SMB share going missing, occasionally, when there's been a Mac client using the share, this does indeed happen.
That's a scary thought, I depend on mounting NFSv4 files systems. I'm not sure SMB is a replacement, almost certainly wouldn't be as performant [on 10/100 GbE networks].
Me too – I actually only found out it was still around (and not just around, but even supporting v4!) when I looked at fuse-t as an alternative to macFUSE.
Don't know if it counts, but RME Audio are now providing drivers for their pro audio gear via DriverKit instead of the ole kext. Installed yesterday, works just fine (modulo checking forums if any widespread issues)
I wish they did something so deleting files from the bin wouldn't take millenia on my iMac Pro. Yes, it's an old computer, but shouldn't that be a solved problem?
I think it's because for some reason they go through an first enumerate the files so they can later show you the progress. But the time spent to enumerate the files is time that could have been spent deleting?
This wasn’t slow for me unless I was deleting a node_modules folder or something with a gazillion files in it. Sounds like something’s weird on your not-that-old iMac Pro.
Are you referring to the "exclusive advisory locks by default" policy it carried over from MS-DOS? If so, yes, I do feel like that's the worst architectural decision of Windows.
Ultimately, it's what makes software updates as hard as they are there: Just being able to do an "apt-get update" with applications open without anything exploding was a true revelation the first time I used a Unix.
Doesn't that require breaking glass in Secure Boot these days, just like macFUSE?
I'm not really willing to install a third-party kernel extension just for a custom file system I need once every few months anymore, especially given that Apple's native exFAT drivers now apparently run in the userspace.
They should just make that capability available to the actual-userspace!
> Explicit language handling. The keyboard will add explicit language that you use to your personal vocabulary list and will learn this usage for each different app. Explicit language that is learned is used for autocorrect and suggestions
I wonder how atypical I am as there was literally nothing in the list I cared about. In particular the widgets seems unfathomably pointless. I don't even use them on the phone, but at least there I can kind of see the point.
This release does add AV1 support, just only for devices with hardware decoding support [1]. I’m not entirely sure that restriction applies to desktop as well as mobile, it doesn’t work on my Mac without hardware support even after enabling the disabled feature flags, but I only upgraded Safari, not macOS.
Hardware-only is the right move IMO. Literally earlier today I was dealing with stuttering video that turned out to be caused by Chrome putting me on a software implementation of a “better” codec. These new codecs are only better on devices that can run them without stuttering, heating up, and chewing through battery.
<pendantic>That's not a macOS update, but a Safari update, and it wasn't there when I wrote that</pedantic>
Wow, that's actually great news. It's the first I have seen of Apple actually supporting it in any way (despite being a member of the consortium that created it).
I don't disagree wrt. phones and tablets, but my MBP laughs at decoding AV1 videos; it's really not that taxing for an M2. Anyway, the more important story here is that A17 (based on this) appears to have AV1 hardware. That's an important first step.
I empathize with your feeling, each OS release has been less and less interesting.
Widgets? I didn’t care for them on Leopard or iOS, why would I clutter my desktop with them now?
Notifications have gotten worse and worse to handle. System Preferences is awful to use now. All the cutesy apps you can’t uninstall…
I’d be happy to pay again for macOS if the list of ‘features’ included fixing long-standing bugs and annoyances, making things more stable, and bringing back features and UI that were both simple and effective.
The number of 'system' features for an OS update is small. The most interesting one to me is the AirPods variable noise cancellation which is more along the lines of hardware accessory support. There's something not quite right when an OS update mainly updates web browser, apps, widgets, etc.
Is there another set of notes that has all the underlying API changes supported that 3rd parties can use?
I was just about to say that there isn't any changes worthwhile in this release and that Apple employees x people in the marketing sub department that takes care of the yearly releases and they will – regardless of anything else – do the yearly release fanfare with all the bells and whistles :-).
Every time a new MacOS version is announced the 1Password staff must be all sitting around praying Apple doesn't add any more bells and whistles to Keychain.
I doubt they care about Mac customers. If they did, they would have avoided ruining the app's UI so that customers don't have a good reason to jump ship at the first opportunity.
The new UI is such a downgrade. It took the app from feeling well made to feeling like your average bloaty SaaS app. I’m gonna have to figure out an alternative once 1PW 7 is no longer supported.
For the past year or so I thought I was being silly for feeing the 1P has gotten so clunky. Now I get it. I had no idea they had migrated to Electron, but the app is much shittier. It can’t even remember which window size I’ve set it to, and prefers to reopen in whatever size it wants. (We’re a business customer.)
Keychain is… not that bad. It works for almost all passwords/general use cases. It definitely is feature-lite compared to dedicated password managers, but it makes that up in integrations if you’re primarily in the Apple ecosystem.
> where the chrome extension doesn't always work and I need to quit and restart
In my experience, this happens when there is a new Chrome version, but you haven't updated to it yet. When you quit and restart Chrome, it can update. Next time the extension stops working, check chrome://settings/help.
Yeah 1Password 8 is really bad compared to 7, ignoring how awful electron is for a password manage it doesn't even have basic feature parity like finding and removing duplicates, completely hiding vaults etc
They only really care about enterprise customers as is pretty obvious, but they haven’t QUITE made it crappy enough for me to bother switching to keychain entirely.
They started with a huge advantage and squandered it with a buggy cloud subscription model and an electron downgrade. Their fate is their own at this point.
This was the release that got me to migrate from 1P to Keychain. Keychain finally has enough features and the 1P’s browser extension has been finicky for me and the UX of 1P8’s desktop app feels like a considerable downgrade from 7.
Can Keychain store anything that's not passwords yet? I like using 1Passwords for all sorts of stuff like SSN, drivers license, passport details, membership details, SSH keys etc
You might have to check your settings. Previously there was a separate password for Notes, but now there is an option to keep it tied to your account's password
I don’t see that happening tbh, since they made Secure Notes for this purpose which (i would assume they believe) offers a better experience than storing not-logins with logins. Secure Notes offer the same level of security as the keychain IIRC.
As others said, you can in chrome, but it's not as smooth as in iOS and MacOS as it only works in Chrome, and doesn't work in apps (like steam or other game launchers).
In Safari, keychain and 1password certainly are fighting harder for my attention than they have in the past. I want to use a workflow where passkeys live in iCloud and normal login pairs live in 1Password. 1Password's passkeys implementation is a nice way to keep keychain from being the only player in the game but I like how much faster they work stored inside of the OS better.
Really the only thing keeping me from going all in on keychain is the lack of a UI for the times when it doesn’t autocomplete or I need a password in terminal or something.
I’d pay for something that provided a global hotkey and an interface that isn’t nested in Settings.
Consumer password management companies compete on the multi-device angle, including Android and Windows. That's not something Apple's going to touch for awhile.
Apple is also certainly not going to touch the more enterprise aspects of password management.
1Password overdid it a while ago for me and I switched to KeePassXC. It is certainly not as polished as 1Password but the developer team is very responsive and since I started using it, especially on macOS, things have improved a lot already. It is a pleasure to watch things evolve and Passkey support is the next big thing that will be added.
Compared to Keychain Access, KeePassXC works cross platform and I need that, since my devices are cross platform. Also helps to avoid vendor lock-in.
That's why they switched to focus on Enterprise customers a while ago. It's all about being a secret store for Kubernetes and other deployments now. I doubt they lose a lot of sleep over personal licenses and the loud group of people complaining about the non-native macOS UI (Including myself there).
I’ve been on the release candidates and the OS is very stable and I haven’t found any major breakages or random crashes . Also, homebrew has been working great and lots of other open source software S
Have been using macOS Sonoma since DB1, this is probably the most favorite update of the OS that I had in a while:
1. Safari Profiles. I used this browser as my primary browser for a long time, but had to use another browser (Chrome) for work, to be able to separate sessions, etc. Since DB1 I use only Safari. And it works great.
2. Widgets. I have two monitors, and love that in one of them I can see widgets with some useful information. Just wish more apps were ready with widgets.
And a quick self-promotion. I am developer of the application OpenIn, and for macOS Sonoma I have added support for Safari Profiles https://loshadki.app/blog/2023-08-23-openin-4-1-beta/, this is the only (as far as I know) app that will let you redirect links to a specific Safari Profile based on various configurations you make.
I am pretty happy with how my M1 mac performs on Monterey. Would you share your opinion/guess on if I will feel a difference going from Monterey to Sonoma? I will go look through the details later. However, you are in the trenches so perhaps you have thoughts?
To be honest I am always on the latest versions of the OS. One of the reasons because I have a lot of pet projects built mostly with SwiftUI. And each release adds some nice new features. And unfortunately to use those new features you have to use latest versions of macOS/iOS.
Ventura overall did not really had any OS features that would force me to upgrade. Just a little more annoying like new Settings app, that was unusable so many times. Freeform I have never used, Weather app is nice, but there were always alternatives.
Sonoma gave really good upgrade for me, those two features like Safari Profiles and Widgets.
With two OS versions upgrade what you will like/hate:
- new Settings application. You get used to it. But would take a while to be able to find things.
+ new dynamic wallpapers. This will be mostly for people who use external monitors/always connected monitors.
+ Notes/Reminders - if you use it a lot, you can use tags and links between notes.
+ If you use Docker and similar software, Virtualization framework is getting a lot of upgrades, so you might see them to work better.
+ Safari Profiles and Tab Groups. If you are Safari user.
+ Widgets might be good only on monitors, you probably would not see them on laptop screen.
Ah yes, and the webapps is a nice feature as well in macOS Sonoma. There were some other apps trying to do the same, but I just like when it is built-in feature.
FINALLY we've come full circle and can have widgets on the desktop again!
It's not like a revolutionary killer feature for me, but I just always preferred having information always in my "peripheral" instead of having to actively check a separate menu.
It failed before because system resources and horsepower were too low to make it work smoothly (&, let's be honest, because there were often poor UI choices going hand-in-hand with poor speed/smoothness). Plenty of ideas resurface, not because they were bad & people think they just might work, but because they weren't practical when they came up. There are plenty of faded-away applications & forgotten old OSes with ideas way ahead of the curve, needed speed and/or memory, & were laughed at & called stupid because of system limitations that will show up again in our systems, someday.
You'd be surprised how many people I see in daily life who like it, mainly my students but some fellow staff colleagues, too. They use it as a concentration aide.
DA's weren't widgets though. They were just regular apps with regular windows but with a black title bar. You couldn't stick them to the desktop or anything.
And Konfabulator was cool but it wasn't part of the OS.
The plist setting is interesting though -- definitely never knew about that. But again, not part of how they were designed to operate for the average end user.
On Mac OS X Tiger, I remember that you could open the dashboard, drag a widget, and close the dashboard before you release the mouse and keep the widget on the desktop. But I may remember wrong.
At least some versions of OSX let you pull widgets out of Dashboard (don't remember if that feature was there in the initial release of Widgets, and it required a defaults setting)
The dashboard and its animations were killer in 2005. For someone coming from Windows XP, where the UI could be often seen painted pixel by pixel, a smooth water drop over everything, including videos, was magic.
There is no way anyone familiar with the guy wouldn’t already know this, but his podcast Hypercritical was great and has aged well.
His is 1/3rd of ATP and there is content overlap. The main problem I find is that once he has complained about something, I can’t unsee it. It’s heavily Apple focussed and gives a lightweight and often hilarious version of his old reviews.
Episode 96 ‘Windows of Siracusa County’ was amazing.
Hah! Yes, I cursed him a few times for making me unable to see something slightly wrong. Like, friends don't point out kerning mistakes to friends. That stuff needed a content warning.
The first app I enabled it for is Slack. The calling functionality doesn't seem enabled there but everything else looked and felt great. Finally, don't need to use all my cutting-edge tech's capabilities just to run a bunch of chromiums side by side.
Windows/Chrome has that feature. For example accessing https://github.com shows an install button, which creates icon for direct access and allows GitHub to have a dedicated window and notifications.
Are these separate instances/containers with regards to cache and cookies and such? I would love to have this because I have multiple Atlassian accounts I need to juggle and it is a pain today.
I hope it can do DisplayPort Multi Stream Transport. Currently I have to connect one screen through TB4, and the other one through HDMI despite the TB4 screen being able to daisy chain through DisplayPort.
One screen is a 32 inch UHD 60Hz monitor and the other one is a 24 inch 2560x1440 90Hz screen which is rotated by 90 degrees.
The hardware supports it fine, if you ran any other OS it'd work.
OSX refuses to support it because it eats into their monitor sales that use an alternative TB-based multiplexing protocol (which is only available on Apple devices, which are, well, not the world's best monitors, yet somehow the most expensive per square inch in a lot of cases).
All the various incarnations as far back as Ivy Bridge's TB2 should have working support in Windows and Linux. I have physically tested it on my MBPR from that era, and it worked, and I know of other people's newer OS-swapped Macs also working.
Lack of MST support in OSX has historically blocked 4k early adopters: 4k screens exported themselves as two logical displays due to 4k monitors coming out ahead of HBR2-capable controllers.
As for ARM-era Macs, as far as I know, they licensed a common ASIC block for their DisplayPort transceiver, which is also what AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have done. So, their hardware should still support it fine, but I have no clue if Asahi's work on the GPU driver has gotten MST to work.
Of course the gardware supports it, otherwise I couldn't connect the second rotated screen through HDMI. But I couldn't figure out why OS-X fails to support DP-MST. If it's because they want to push their own screens then shame on Apple.
It's ridiculous that they refuse to support this. Iit's actually backfiring. Peoppe at work laugh when they see me attaching two cables to my Macbook ehile everyone else with different operating systems use their docking stations or daisy chaining. Even old Chromebooks support it.
It worked on Intel macs because it worked in Windows. May be a different story on Apple Silicon though. Maybe a challenge for the Asahi Linux devs. I have no idea where in the stack MST happens and whether it requires any hardware magic.
I need to check how I have my four displays attached to my MacBook, because I know one is the HDMI, one is HDMI via the dock, but I swear two are connected via some form of daisy chain.
> Notes: Users can view PDFs and scans of presentations, assignments, research papers, and more right inside Notes. They can also create links from one note to another to relate ideas and content.
Can I annotate on PDFs in Notes as well, obviating the need for Goodnotes and friends?
I was about to submit the same comment. This was the thing that would have prevented me from upgrading. I searched if it waa fixed. As it would have affected Little snitch and Mullvad VPN which is essential apps on my mac.
Does the built-in Apple firewall allow blocking of specific applications sending outbound traffic? I know you can block inbound traffic per application.
Depends on what you mean by builtin. The one in settings? No. pf does, however, allow you to do this. Murus is what you need if you want/need a frontend for pf.
I love the included high quality wallpapers. Apple's spent a lot of money filming these around the world and they serve as a nice blend of vibrant but without being so high contrast I can't see my icons.
I scanned the updates hoping for this exact same thing, but alas did not find it there. I am not comfortable disabling SIP to fix this issue personally.
If you're not concerned about losing other animations, you can enable the Reduced Motion setting in Accessibility preferences. It completely removes that animation.
X/Twitter running as a new "Web App" is pretty solid, and a huge upgrade from the older, unmaintained Twitter macOS app. Everything pretty much works as expected & feels native, though not sure if Dock icon badge counts are supported.
I switched to the beta of Win11 just so I could start using ungrouped taskbar items when I got tired of waiting for explorerpatcher to be updated. It is still a bit janky but I'm so glad it is there.
Update: simscitizen has confirmed below that 1Password 7 still works in Sonoma.
This will be the first macOS upgrade I won’t be doing for a while.
I’d like to try it out, but I need to figure out how to migrate off of 1Password 7 (standalone) first or to make sure it still works with Sonoma. (Edit: I'm expecting that 1Password 7 will break with the new OS and make me convert to their subscription product.)
Updated to clarify. My expectation is that 1Password 7 won’t work on Sonoma. In my experience, AgileBits requires an upgrade for new versions of macOS. IIUC, 1Password 7 is also the last version that you can buy outright rather than paying for by subscription.
I reluctantly upgraded to the subscription for 1Pass after the last OS update but I'm glad I did. The features that the 1Pass team has added since then as well as the fact that the subscription includes apps for all their platforms has already paid itself off in my eyes.
I can't recall the exact details, but something didn't work anymore and all the things said "upgrade to 8" and it wasn't until after I got to 8 that I realized there were ways to keep 7 and keep it working.
Honestly, the feeling that I got "forced" into 8 is what makes me mostly dislike the company, and will eventually bounce me out once I get the motivation.
I was also reluctant to upgrade to 1Password 8, mostly out of principle. I didn't want to pay for a subscription.
But after having reconsidered my disaster recovery procedure, I swallowed the bitter pill after all. The problem is that I need to be able to recover my passwords when 1) my house was on fire AND 2) I left my phone behind during the evacuation.
My 1Password db was stored on Dropbox. But my Dropbox password is in 1Password. Furthermore Dropbox sometimes requires 2-factor auth via email... and my Gmail password is also in 1Password. And Google is quite a bit more serious about 2FA than Dropbox. So even if I write down my Dropbox and Gmail password on paper and store them at my parents' home, I still can't login to Gmail easily because I have lost my phone.
This can be solved by writing down even more stuff on paper. Or by storing a USB stick of the 1Password db at my parents' home (but now the stick should be encrypted, where do you store the key?). The point is: the rabbit hole goes deep, and you have to keep all that stuff updated. Plus my parents will have access to all my data. Not that I don't trust them, but what happens if someone breaks into their house?
All this can be much simplified by just getting a 1Password subscription. I store my 1Password secret key (not master password) at my parents' home. They can't do anything with just the secret key. I memorized my master password. All 2FA recovery codes are in 1Password. This way everything can be recovered without the risk that my parents or a burglar at their house can access my passwords. I think this simplicity in disaster recovery is worth the subscription price.
I've never had a problem using 1Password 7 on updated versions of OSX. I'm in the same boat, and am still using 1Password 7 on Ventura after having upgraded through multiple OSs.
>Reminders: Intelligent grocery lists in Reminders streamline weekly trips to the store by organizing lists into sections and arranging them horizontally using a new column view.
> One-Time verification code AutoFill from Mail helps you quickly sign into sites in Safari, without leaving the browser.
I’ve used SMS for 2FA even though it’s vulnerable to hijacking because AutoFill from SMS makes it so easy. AutoFill from Mail will be a welcome alternative.
I never had issues with MacOS. And for the past 10 years I would install it as soon as a new version came out. A few years it would take a longer time for HomeBrew to have packages for the new version right of the bat, but today I did a brew update and brew upgrade and there was an upgrade for a package that had a version for Sonoma already. Pretty nifty.
We recently had a thread on HN about how bad iCloud Drive is. Well it struck again... I upgraded to Sonoma and then it promptly started re-syncing all few hundred thousand of my files. It's just not dependable. If I could do it all over again I would have invested in DropBox years ago... but I am so deeply in the Apple ecosystem including needing their Premier bundle for various family services it seems silly not to use this built-in service.
An SDR content brightness slider for a non-apple HDR monitor/projector would be nice. Anyone knows if Sonoma has changes for this in stock?
Edit: Updated now and it seems like nothing changed :(. External monitor still becomes dim for SDR content if I flick on HDR, and no slider in sight to boost the intensity. There is a projector setting as a color profile, but that only changes the contrast and colors, but not the brightness.
Was a bit surprised to learn that my MacBook Pro from 2017 isn't supported. It doesn't look like Sonoma has many new innovations though, so I guess I'm not missing out on much.
Operating systems feel like they've really stagnated in the past decade.
Is there any update to Music.app? 50% of my work on a computer is managing my local music library, and the app is extremely buggy since the rewrite in Big Sur. Want to make sure it doesn't become more buggy in this release.
It is a small thing, but as annoying in its way to me as the blank space in the Windows 11 Start Menu that remains when the advertisements displayed there by default are disabled.
Sorry if this isn't helpful, but you should consider a Subsonic compatible music manager. I use Navidrome hosted on a server that indexes my music on Dropbox.
- Search sometimes doesn't work (can be solved by exiting all previous searches with the back button)
- Tag editing sometimes doesn't work (can be solved by doing it again and again)
- My status bar always say "syncing" when it's not
It's still being updated and included in the "Additional Tools for Xcode 15"[0] and is the only way to disable vsync/"Beam Sync" at the os level using Apple tooling, afaik.
Beamoff[1]/beamsync.py[2] are good 3rd part solutions, though.
I use my m1 mbp in clamshell mode connected to a 75hz 1920x1080 ips all day every day, so until I can buy a monitor that supports adaptive sync, the reduction in latency that disabling vsync brings is worth it to me.
* Screen Sharing: A new high performance mode in the Screen Sharing app delivers incredibly responsive remote access over high-bandwidth connections — enabling creative professionals to accomplish their work remotely.*
I noticed this for the first time today, despite running the betas on my laptop (you need to connect to Sonoma from Sonoma, and I don't upgrade across the board).
I suspect it's the underlying tech that streams macOS into the Vision Pro. The "High Performance" mode lets you select 1 or 2 virtual displays, and always blacks out the host machine completely.
> Keyboard: Autocorrect receives a comprehensive update with a transformer language model, a state-of-the-art on-device machine learning language model that improves accuracy. A refreshed design makes corrections easier to fix and inline predictions quickly finish sentences. Dictation brings next-level speech recognition and the ability to move fluidly between voice and typing.
Interesting detail from the detailed release notes:
> Explicit language handling. The keyboard will add explicit language that you use to your personal vocabulary list and will learn this usage for each different app. Explicit language that is learned is used for autocorrect and suggestions
I’ve never reinstalled a Mac. I literally don’t know how to do that. I’ve upgraded my M1 Air to Sonoma yesterday and everything seems to be working, just as it did on Big Sur, Monterey and Ventura. My girlfriend still uses my 2013 MacBook upgraded all the way from Mavericks to Big Sur, and used as a dev machine most of that time, without an issue.
I didn't say that everyone should do it. I only started this about 3-4 years ago, and it was always working before that. I just like having a clean OS.
Anyone know if there is any benefit to doing a reinstall vs just installing over current Ventura ? Is it for peace of mind, placebo?... Any quantitative comparisons ?
Any tips to setting up macOS dotfiles? I set up a new Mac today and was going to go that route but after trying to do a diff of "defaults read" and seeing that its thousands of lines largely unrelated to macOS I gave up and changed the obvious things using the settings menu and now just have to deal with all the other minor differences as they popup.
Used to that... but once I accumulated a heap of AU plugins I just couldn't bear the thought of spending a weekend reinstalling all that again (plus most of them won't work with the new macOS on day one).
Yup, using homebrew, I can install everything I need including GUI stuff. Without taking into MacOS install time into consideration, using my script it takes around 1 hour, tops.
I'm mostly a backend dev so I just install Docker and be done with my stack. The script installs the usual tools that I use for daily work, Slack/Discord, editors, browsers.
I do this once a year, and takes like 2 hour. I don't consider this a waste of time as I can do it in the afternoon and not during work hours. I also have a secondary dev box so I could even do it while I'm working on other stuff.
I'm very glad they've fixed the performance issue with stage manager.
Before macOS Sonoma using mission control while having stage manager enabled would be very choppy. This seems to have been resolved and now I can finally use stage manager on macOS.
It's quite telling that they had to invent “Game Mode”. The OS has become so sluggish that you can only run games with the humblest resource requirements.
Same. I have 10 CGPDFService processes running for over 24 hours. Two CPU's are at 100%, and together they're using 15GB of RAM. I can SIGKILL but they come back after 5 minutes. Some people believe they're related to the slow-mo screensaver, which I disabled in my settings. It's only happening on my Mac Studio (which isn't logged in), and not on my Macbook Air (which I'm currently using).
probably just me, but Sonoma sounds like a terrible name. I'm not familiar with the region in California (unlike its predecessors) and it just links to Carcinoma in my mind.
The iconic Windows XP photograph was done in Sonoma County, so the focus on new overhead views of Sonoma County which "crest that hill" is probably part of their tongue and cheek goal here.
Huh. I'm using it without problems. Any chance you're using multiple Safari profiles (new feature in Sonoma) and it's not enabled in the profile you have active?
I tried to use Orion, but when I tried to make a new tab group so I could close one of my windows and come back to all its tabs later, Orion made a new /empty/ tab group and closed all the tabs in the window. Worse, none of those tabs were recoverable with Cmd-Shift-T. I had to go back through ~3 days of History reopening things, discovering they weren't the right things, reopening more things…
I went bacb to Safari after I couldn't find an Orion way to make a new tab group without destroying the current window's tabs.
In Safari, could have made bookmarks for these tabs, I guess, but Safari doesn't give me an obvious indication of whether the current tab already has a bookmark. So, my Safari bookmarks sometimes have duplicates because I forgot I'd already made one and didn't burrow though the Bookmarks menu to check. So, Safari tab groups are more useful to me than bookmarks for anything that's part of an unfinished project/idea.
To be clear, I'm not a Kagi support person or anything, and also not arguing that anyone's wrong for saying it's not working for them. Just saying, it is working for some people on Mac and iPhone, so it's not totally borked.
True. I just followed the instructions again and it is working. Apparently I had to allow access on all websites again and change the search engine from DDG to Google for the extension to work.
I still don't understand why Apple is so bent on coupling application updates together with OS updates.
I just want the new changes to Safari and Notes while I don't care about the other changes, why not have Safari be a normal application downloaded from the App Store, like the rest of us pleebs have to do when publishing apps?
Most of the new app features are tied to OS-wide and OS-APIs wide capabilities, so they can't release "just Notes" without the OS-level frameworks that support those features. Take for example the PDF editing/support in Notes now. Or the Pages compatibility. Or Note widgets for the desktop, etc. Similar case for Safari, as they offer the webkit widget and JSCore as an OS-level APIs too.
Plus of course everything is tested together (which is what Linux distros also do. They update their apps for minor releases and bugfixes but not major releases for the same distro).
I give you that some of the new features are tied to OS-wide updates, but many of them seems they're not. And if they wanted to, they could still decouple apps from OS updates and if you're on a old OS version and the new app update requires a newer OS, just block that specific update from happening.
> Plus of course everything is tested together
That makes sense, Apple's QA department seems to be held together with tape for the last decade or so, as every new update seems to break something, so maybe they're trying to make it as easy as possible now in order to recover.
I'm not sure why Notes needs to be bundled with the OS update, but Safari isn't. You can download Safari 17 for macOS Ventura as well! Only the features that require integration with other apps (such as auto-filling 2FA codes from Mail) require Sonoma.
I reckon it's more likely that Safari as a browser represents a more important set of security holes and therefore Apple feels greater obligation to patch patch problems (and that's easier to do by simply shipping the whole app rather than patches for old versions).
This is exactly it - as long as they support macOS for X years they need to release safari updates for that long, so they might as well decouple that one.
RSRs [1] are sort of not this though. They’re still a bit weird, but can contain updates for WebKit and/or Safari in a very small update that installs very quickly. Also worth noting that WebKit is buried pretty deep in macOS (as it underpins a lot more than just Safari) so isn’t as easy to patch by itself.
Apple knows that you want the app updates. They want you to update to the latest OS for a variety of reasons (support, security, marketing, etc). They also know you paid thousands of dollars for your laptop and aren't likely to switch off of macOS entirely. So, they bundle the app updates to the OS update as an incentive.
macOS is a BSD; the whole point of BSDs is that the OS and "base system" are vertically integrated (and, usually, living in a monorepo together) so that a dev can one day decide to add a new API to replace one currently used by first-party apps, by just adding the code and then doing a big Search+Replace to fix all first-party apps to use it, all in a single commit.
- Darwin is developed "as" a BSD — a vertically-integrated base-system monorepo that contains the kernel, the system libraries, and the low-level userland services and software. Rather than teams working on one component that has a contractual ABI with other components, there are no real "team-shear-layer" ABIs, except at the public API level that gets presented to users; and instead, anywhere below the userland public API level, is free to be modified as part of the project of modifying system software. (Think, by analogy, the introduction of pledge(3) in OpenBSD. Apple can insert new "technologies" like that throughout every layer of the system very easily—and they often do!)
- Darwin is installed and tested like a BSD: it's a whole base-system release, containing an inseparable kernel + base system. There is no way to test individual components in isolation (without a complete mock of the rest of the base system), as the components may all have circular dependencies — the kernel can depend on the base system just as the base system can depend on the kernel, because it's all one "layer." There's no package manager; no packaging; no components with separate build artifacts that get "integrated." You just build an entire base system, and have to wholesale swap your old base-system for the new one. (In the "old days" on minicomputers, the rootfs wasn't BSD per se, but was specific to booting that machine; while /usr was a BSD on tape, direct from Berkeley. An "OS upgrade" of a BSD was a new /usr tape for you to mount on next reboot. These days, macOS uses APFS system volumes to achieve almost exactly the same thing.)
AFAIK, there's no real good name for these properties besides "a BSD" — despite these properties not really being BSD-specific. Maybe let's call this "BSD-style OS architecture"?
macOS before OSX already had BSD-style OS architecture — though it was something closer to embedded OS architecture at first, shipping OS-on-ROM in early Macs, and only evolving toward updateable on-disk kernels with System 7-or-so. But the Apple development team's BSD-style "thinking", is what made the choice of merging macOS with the Jobs' NeXT Darwin BSD base-system, an "intuitive" operation, rather than something fraught with paradigm-conflict. It's the same reason that Apple ran NetBSD on the servers they ran to back WebObjects for iTMS, back when: "BSD-style" is how Apple engineers think.
I have a company-provided mac, I don't have an App Store account as it requires a phone number (and I'm not going to use my personal phone number to register it, it is not even allowed by policy) so I'm not going to update any app via the store
Not really. Consumer behavior is not what technical people expect it to be. The main reason people update their phone OS is for new emoji. People love this stuff.
To get people to upgrade! It's extraordinarily effective. They seem to always do it in the first major patch after a major release, to kinda ensure everyone gets a stable version of the OS.
A few years ago, people here were complaining that MacOS was too unstable from all the new features, and that they wish Apple would just do a few feature-less stability releases.
Apple advertises the things that 99% of the people buying their products care about. That doesn't mean that things aren't changing under the hood.
I do wish they had a developer-focused version of these announcements, though. A lot of very interesting stuff usually never gets mentioned officially at all.
It’s their job to get people to click the upgrade button, so developers can rely on the new advanced libraries, and if the impression they make is “basic maintainance update with some colorful snazz” it is more likely to happen.
I upgraded to the beta version and am having a bug with an app that relies on WebKit so for me I wish I’d waited for the .1.
macOS has felt “feature complete” to me for years now. There is nothing I really want from an OS. I only upgrade for the security benefits and so I can keep all my systems on the same release, since new systems can’t be downgraded.
I actually appreciate not doing relentless “innovation” just for the sake of doing it. Microsoft does this by slapping new UIs on top of old every damn release. They often don’t even remove the old stuff, they just mask it with “innovation.” macOS does this too, but not nearly as bad. In Windows there are like 7 different layers of UI. You can click a half dozen times in the settings in Windows 11 and basically time travel back to Windows 2000.
I think the reason I don’t hate this stuff on macOS as much is because most of the changes are iOS-ification, and I use iOS so I somewhat intuitively know how to navigate the changes.
One of the last macOS versions had - click the mouse in the lower right corner and notes pop up. That's a new OS feature, really? I mean, I haven't really thought about it, but what's left for desktop OSes these days that they need to produce new releases every year.
The new screen savers were bumped up the priority queue because Apple has a bunch of QD-OLED computers coming next year and they're worried about burn-in.
I look forward to them removing all this functionality in four or five years, and then reintroducing it as a stunning new innovation in another four or five years after that.
Adobe has been famous for this annoying behavior for over a decade.
Remove some cool features only to reintroduce them, sometimes years later, as a breakthrough. Annoying, but it didn't prevent them from quietly innovating.
I’ve been using Rectangle Pro for more than a year now and it works pretty great. However, I found that I don’t actually use snapping that much (maybe I’m just not used to it). My most used features is actually the move and resize modifier keys, which let me drag/resize a window without having to go through the pain (more or less, depending on the window clutter) of having to move my mouse to that small area where I can do that. Seriously, it’s been such a game changer for me that I wish Apple would make this a built-in feature.
I moved from Fedora to MacOS a few months ago and its unbelievable the shortcuts apple added to make window management bearable and even still, it is impossible without an add-on. I refuse to believe anyone at apple thinks it is okay and is able to actually work at all.
I did the same transition because my work gave me a m1, cannot stress how good vanilla gnome is and how lackluster is macos desktop.
1. When opening 'mission control' in gnome, all the windows have the application icon at the bottom, it's easier to find what I am searching for. In macos I have to scan every window for the content I am looking.
2. If I don't find an app in 'mission control' in gnome I can just type and open it very quickly. In macos you need to close mission control and then open spotlight.
3. In gnome it's possible to close applications from 'mission control'. In macos if I want to clean up the space I have to go window by window.
4. Mission control arrangement sucks, sometimes windows overlap, position changes randomly.
5. In gnome, when moving a maximized window it resizes to a smaller size so you can easily interact with the windows behind (drag a file or whatever).
Those are the ones on the top of my head. It really kills my productivity and make me wonder if macos is worth the pain. Yes, it comes with lot of very polished applications but most of the time I am just using the basics.
This bugged me when I first switched, too. I highly recommend going with the flow and doing it the Apple way for a while. I was frustrated at trying and failing to make my Mac act just like Linux. It's bad at that.
Rectangle is one of the first things I always install when on a Mac... and yet I never use it anymore.
I remember using it a lot on Windows, but since I've switched to macOS I think I've migrated entirely to their Mission Control way of handling windows. I'm not sure why but I very rarely need to have 2 windows side by side anymore, maybe because I can just three-finger swipe to compare windows.
I still think Rectangle should be integrated as a native feature, but I think I understand why it's not.
Isn't that basically why you get Apple stuff in the first place, to have primitive but well-working things? They're not exactly famous for catering to professionals or people who want a customized experience.
No that is not "basically why you get Apple stuff in the first place". I have never in my life seen either Apple or its fan base market their products this way. That is a post hoc rationalisation for their operating system missing quite a basic feature.
Really? "It just works" isn't something you've ever heard from someone who uses Apple products? Or "I might not be able to change X, but at least I know what's there works well"?
I mean, it is present. Just because it's not as advanced as you'd like it to be, doesn't mean it's not there. You can move windows, you can cycle between different active windows, you can minimize windows and so on. That's window management.
Yes, super basic, but so is most features of Apple software. Simple, basic and without customization, just like how many Apple users like their software.
> They're not exactly famous for catering to professionals
If Mac OS wasn't famous for catering to professionals for a full decade, there would not be any Apple Computers inc. Of course the point still stands that Apple is famous nowadays for its phones, but macOS is still seen by many as the golden standard in window management. That it achieves its reputation without window snapping is a detail.
It supports halves (horizontal/vertical), thirds (vertical), quarters (vertical or 2x2), and sixths (3x2), plus some variations (move to edge, "almost maximize", bigger, smaller, etc). Also supports variations on those, eg. "middle two quarters" or "right two thirds" if that's your thing.
I have an ultrawide external display, and keyboard shortcuts to quickly tile two or three windows at once is where it's at, though it also supports dragging the window to an edge for various snap effects.
after spending the last 2 months on desktop linux full time - I'd rather pay $12 and use macos than pay nothing and have a worse open source experience.
By some miracle, the seven-year old version of Slate continues to work with each new macOS update. I'm dreading the day that breaks, although I'm also worried about security vulnerabilities that might exist in it already.
Currently, snapped windows jump around Spaces and resize for every monitor connection/resolution change. It’s incredibly frustrating to not have any consistent behavior. 3P apps can’t solve this as there is no public API for managing windows with Spaces. Of course, the native window manager could solve this…
I agree to a certain extent, but I see people regularly using the 4 corner window snapping in Windows. Especially as 1440p and 4k monitors gain adoption.
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I have no problem with Apple bundling these apps and making them work seamlessly together, and I don't even mind that they're all updated simultaneously (except for Safari, which I wish I could update independently without relying on the "Technology Preview" beta channel). But I do have a problem with upgrading my entire OS and disabling the new bloatware features just because I want to keep auto-updates enabled. I used to delay updating and then would end up way behind, which is why I enrolled in auto-update. But now it feels like I'm being held hostage to their update schedule.
And for what benefit? There are hardly any useful OS-level changes in this release, but there are a bunch of new features I'll need to disable (while hoping the next auto-update doesn't break my external monitor), all powered by freshly written code contributing to an expanded attack surface. If I had my way, then I'd take the OS updates and skip all the apps. Keep the attack surface small while still meaningfully improving the core. I don't care about the rest.