[sillywalk]

-edit- thanks for that mystery meat link, now I have a name for that. -

My special gripe is removing text labels below abstract, monochrome icons. The Markup toolbar being a good example of this {expletives deleted}. That an how finder colour labels turned into tiny little dots.

John Siracusa's Mac OS X reviews, do a good job of documenting the downfall at least for Mac OS X (before it became the barf that is macos).

Here's a start

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/macosx-10-4/3/#mail-...

[jjtheblunt]

If I understand what you're saying, it's the macos UI that is degenerate?

I say that because the reliability with advanced hardware (power management, power per watt) has been famously rejoiced over increasingly with the M1 and M2 hardware and macos on it.

Personally I too get annoyed with the UI inflexibilities, prefer Asahi so i can just control the visual aspects.

[sillywalk]

(I've got an Airbook M2)

Windows became unusable for me around 8, now it's an ad-filled dumpster fire. I'm amazed at how quickly Asahi has developed hardware support, Linux isn't a serious option for me, yet, so I'm stuck with macos.

If somebody wants to port Haiku to the M2, with flawless hardware support, including accelerated video, and power management, that would be great, and probably no more than an hours work. Or port Mac OS X Panther/Tiger

{Rant starts, you can stop reading now }

I offer no solution, and this isn't really a criticism, but an observation:

Linux,... I'm glad it exists, but I've reached JWZ's CADT point. I'm amazed at all the hard work, but. I can't use it. It's always something, and I'm too "old" or lazy to care anymore.

I've used Linux since Slackware with kernel 1.2, I remember ipfwadm, I've configured XFree86 Modelines. I bought Caldera OpenLinux, that included Word Perfect (and let you play a game while it installed). Over the years, I've used RedHat, Fedora (Core), openSuse, Debian, Ubuntu, Mandrake, and more as a daily or sometimes daily driver.

The entire concept of a "distro" is just sort of absurd, 99% the same software - Linux Kernel, GNU+misc Userland, Xorg/Wayland, some sort of desktop or GUI toolkit, and all the same open source apps.

I don't care about package managers, or init systems, or kernel versions anymore. I don't know or want to know about the merits of FLapak Or Snaps, I just want to use the damn apps.

Now get off my lawn!

[syntheweave]

Also a longtime, off-and-on Linux user. Using old gaming laptops instead of Apple HW, though.

My latest thing has been Solus Linux. The hardware has "just worked", the package management is genuinely original, it has a stable rolling-release and definitely cleaner feeling than the Debian/Redhat landscape(I have not opened a command line for packages, not even once!), it has a MATE desktop(which they plan to switch over to XFCE, but it's basically the same to me - tried and true over bold and new) and the remaining bits of snowflake software work in a VM running whatever other OS.

So the computer has finally gotten out of the way for me, at least until I do software development. But that's one of the things I bottle up in the VM, and the only associated hassle of that is the edit/test cycle, for which I just forgo IDE functions to do fast local editing and try not to rely on a fast iteration loop otherwise. I've learned that it mostly gets you to wrong answers faster and the insights need time anyway.

[jjtheblunt]

Air M2 too, and totally agree including old slackware etc

[mcswell]

I'll take your special gripe and raise you one. My gripe is not being able to get rid of the icons in favor of the text labels. There's a reason alphabetic (and similar) writing systems won out over hieroglyphics, and why we don't use both today.

And this is not just Mac OS, it's Microsoft and an increasing amount of Windows-compatible software. I wouldn't mind the Ribbon half as much if I could just turn off the hieroglyphs, I mean the icons, and keep the text labels.