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by bobbyz 2085 days ago
What is 'Good' software in your book, let alone great?
1 comments

Software that works as advertised and lets me get my work done.

My work '17 MBP video driver crashes every time it resumes from sleep. The laptop kernel panics at least once a week. This has been true for the three years I have used it. I plan an extra 20 minutes on Monday mornings to unfuck my laptop.

My '14 RMBP can't run some resolutions in MacOS but they work fine in Windows on the same hardware. This is a known driver issue in MacOS and Apple refuses to fix it.

mail.app is a flaky mess as always. I added a fastmail account and my laptop became unusable until I removed it. Still no idea what that's about.

I just double clicked an image in the MacOS messages app because I honestly had no idea what would happen. Will it be a reaction or open a preview? It opened a preview (good) but of a completely different image (not good).

To be honest, those seem very specific. Some issues on your side (like remembering a password).

My experience, I have multiple macs in the house (7) with different hardware and OS versions and haven’t experienced none of these issues.

I use mail.app (multiple accounts including gmail, google apps, exchange, and others using smtp+imap), iWork, iCloud, and messages without issues. With the exception of iWork, the rest I use daily.

The only annoying thing is a delay on FaceTime which means that multiple devices might ring once more even though I already answered a call.

Remembering a password is my failing, I admit to that.

What stinks is how hard it is to successfully change in MacOS. Messages never seems to pick up the change to my iCloud account in settings. I have to go in and fiddle some settings to make it work again.

At my old job I had a '14 RMBP with a Thunderbolt display and everything worked flawlessly. The newer USB-C stuff is a major headache.

I use mail.app and messages every day as well. It mostly works but it still requires fiddling to make it work properly from time to time. Moving large volumes of emails is a major challenge. It requires several restarts of the app and a lot of fan spinning.

> My work '17 MBP video driver crashes every time it resumes from sleep. The laptop kernel panics at least once a week.

This is not normal and will be fixed under warranty like any other hardware defect.

> mail.app is a flaky mess as always. I added a fastmail account and my laptop became unusable until I removed it. Still no idea what that's about.

This is similarly not normal - possibly file corruption due to those panics?

I'm not sure if it is hardware or drivers causing the crashes, it appears to be multiple causes for multiple issues. The laptop is three years old, there is no warranty.

The kernel panics are on a different laptop ('17 MBP) than the mail.app system instability issues ('14 RMBP).

Moving large volumes of mail has been a problem in mail.app for at least six years and remains a problem on both.