alt Hacker NewsI bought an original 128K Mac, and then used them professionally for decades --- Snow Leopard, 10.6.8, which I view as the most perfect Mac OS ever, was the last version I really liked, or found comfortable.
I need to replace a MacBook Pro w/ Touchbar, and am _not_ excited about the options, and I find the OS version numbering/naming baffling (why they couldn't've counted versions, started at the next letter of the alphabet, and then cycled through the alphabet in the California Gazetteer when they switched place names from there on out mystifies me) --- probably I'll end up w/ a hand-me-down iMac, but I'd be a bit more interested if there was a portable Mac tablet w/ a stylus and touch, having preferred that form-factor for portable usage since Go Corp.'s PenPoint on an NCR-3125 (which I paired w/ a NeXT Cube and represents the highwatermark of my GUI experience).
I wish that there was an option to limit the OS to only Cocoa/SwiftUI/equivalent "native" apps, and I really wish that Preferences.app would arrive at a simplified and stable state which makes sense.
I bought my first modern Mac in 2003 to switch from Linux in a (stolen) Compaq to a commercial Unix on supported hardware. Instantly I got it and there was nearly a decade where every update was better.
Last year, for the first time since 2003, I didn’t upgrade to the latest macOS (né OS X) release. I’m hopeful for Golden Gate and continue to love the hardware, but man Tahoe is a low point.
The Swift UI-ification of System Preferences and all of the consistency lost by moving AWS from AppKit drag macOS down to the level of lesser systems and even Electron (that is to say, I’ve used more Mac-like electron apps than some of the first party Swift UI rewrites).
20 years later and desktop Linux still has no consistency. I’m not even sure how people use Windows. Could this be the year Haiku saves the desktop?