[FeloniousHam]

Crappy? I use MacOS everyday, and it's a goddamn delight compared to the (perfectly reasonable) experience of Windows 11 + WSL. Anything that doesn't "just work" was replaced by very thoughtfully written third party software a long time ago.

Yeah, like you I lived in Linux for years and delighted in the freedom to recompile my video driver with every upgrade, but then I had kids, and a life to live, and found that accepting some limitations of the excellent OSX was a worthwhile tradeoff. Today I couldn't tell you what I'm missing that can't be fixed with a 30s Google + `brew install`.

And complaints about default choices, or limitations with easy work arounds, on Hacker News are just weird. No one typing on this message board runs default anything.

Please share specific (legitimate) gripes and win my sympathy.

[FireBeyond]

Photos.

Take a photo on your iPhone and wait for it to sync on your Mac. You might get lucky and it syncs nearly immediately (which is still typically a minute or so, even if your phone and Mac are on the same network and have gigabit internet). But you won't know when. And it might not be immediate.

Both sides will tell you they're up to date. You can't force a sync. They'll be synced when Photos is ready, not you. And if that's ten minutes or more later? So be it. You'll just deal with it.

[hyperhello]

This is a very good example of a disruptive bug that destroys the ability to work. I’m making a document on my laptop and using the phone as a camera to take pictures, I am working on, now. Same WiFi, same person, same cloud, inches apart. No work.

[bdangubic]

airdrop that :) (I do the same all the time and always airdrop from phone to my laptop after taking a pic)

[hyperhello]

No. Fix the problem.

[MoonWalk]

Saying that it sucks less than the execrable mess that is Windows doesn't prove anything.

Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.

Mac OS examples: Apple removed the "get new mail" button from the Mail toolbar. So all those millions of people who log into their bank accounts and are told to check their mail for 2FA are left hunting for it or simply waiting for Mail's next poll. There's no excuse for removing one of the most-used buttons from a sparsely-populated toolbar. What is driving this attack on usefulness? It used to be Jony Ive.

Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.

Garbage like this is scattered all over the UI now. I needn't beat the dead horse of the hated System Preferences panel here.

Meanwhile, Spotlight still doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff, and neither does the inappropriately-named Finder. "Location" or "path" isn't even an OPTION in the column headers you can add to the results list. So you can't discriminate between identically-named files or irrelevant volumes or backups as you scan the list to find what you're looking for, or sort by location.

The removal of Launchpad is another blunder. Apple didn't even replace it with anything. So now you have no comparable way to group your applications.

"Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS that ruins my family's weekly Zooms by randomly swooping the camera view around and cropping one of my parents out, when they're sitting side by side. Utter trash that there's no universal way to disable, shoved on all users by default without permission. That's Apple today.

[FeloniousHam]

> Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.

Windows 11 is perfectly cromulent. I don't prefer it, but with WSL, it's like a slow almost-MacOS. The anger over the transparency is I guess personal, I genuinely don't notice it. I certainly haven't stumbled over it. (I might have changed a setting?)

> Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.

I just hit Play and the music comes on. I'm not crazy about their search, but it's not that big a deal. The Podcasts app now... THAT is a complaint I can get behind. I would use something else but for the integration with the car.

> Spotlight and Launchpad

Spotlight seems good enough to me. I tried Alfred and Raycast, but never used any of the helper functionalities. Just used it to open apps and files.

I never used Launchpad. I do forget the names of apps, but I just open Applications.

>"Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zoom/comments/1i0j9db/how_do_i_disa...

I do appreciate that your list is specific, but I think these complaints fall well short of "crappy" :).

[somebehemoth]

I am a long time mac user and I agree with all of their points. I guess you disagree, but I am not sure why you are being dismissive. Each point is a legitimate criticism from many peoples' points of view.

[FeloniousHam]

I acknowledge the complaints, I love a good complaint! My issue is that these superficial, and in many cases, easily remediable annoyances add up to a "crappy OS". MacOS has to satisfy a very diverse userbase from Paris Hilton-types to grumpy Hacker News readers (but thankfully not Bank of America), and I think they do a better than decent job at it.

Also: I don't use Mail.app.

[MoonWalk]

I don't consider the Mac's less-than-half-assed search facilities to be a superficial problem. I don't see how you can argue that a search that doesn't show WHERE it found hits is competent. Beyond that, it often just doesn't work. You can be sitting in a directory full of JPEGs and search for .jpg and get zero results. Zero.

And dismissing the asinine removal of the "get mail" button from Apple's default E-mail program because YOU don't happen to use it isn't exactly respectable, is it?

Mac OS DID satisfy a great many people; I've seen no credible (or even incredible) argument that the recent raft of faffing about with the UI has brought new users into the fold. That's the foundation of so many people's outrage over it: The changes offer no improvement and don't address any longstanding user requests. But it IS demonstrably regressive, and subjectively dated and tacky.

"Transparent" UI came and went 20 years ago for good reason.

[cholantesh]

Not as weird as this really persistent delusion that Linux is anywhere as user-hostile in 2026 as it was in the early noughts.

[FeloniousHam]

It has been a while. And I should say when I stuck to distro-tested options, I didn't have many issues. But I always ended up installing and configuring things that ended up causing conflictions, and all too often did clean installs instead of in-place upgrades.