Welcome (back) to Macintosh | Hacker News

I have been a Mac user since the classic mac days. I waited in line for the first iPhone.

macOS/iOS 26 are bad enough that I've begun switching to Linux. I preordered a Clicks Communicator and Pebble Round 2. Switching from a Macbook Pro M4 to an Asus ROG Flow Z13 with Debian.

macOS 26.3 updated clang and broke my emscripten workflow.

I tried to unrar a file but the version of unrar provided in homebrew is deprecated because it's no longer signed/blessed. I ended up SFTPing the file to a Linux box, extracting, and bringing it back.

My son wanted to try a Java minecraft app on his iPhone, but it required insane workarounds to enable JIT to get acceptable performance. This isn't a technical limitation, it's put in place specifically to protect Apple's walled garden, and their precious services revenue.

Despite the thousands of dollars spent on these devices, I don't feel like we own them. We can't run code without the platform owner's permission. We are at the mercy of the platform owner, that has been making increasingly worse decisions.

I'm really enjoying trying the available alternatives. My hope is that enough of us get fed up, and develop a thriving ecosystem in the open source world. I'll certainly be contributing back the things I build.

Gonna say that the switch from X11 to Wayland that was pretty much forced this year across many distributions, broke a ton of things too (screenshot programs, keyboard shortcuts), however, all the code is open source, and there are workarounds and source code available but it still sucks.

Basic keyboard shortcuts are still broke with the Wayland migration. e.g. Copyq has this janky workaround for a shortcut to register with the xdg-portal (that works until reboot, then stops), Warp terminal claims there is no support, Flameshot was impossible to configure, have to use the built in Gnome shortcut tool now. The whole ecosystem got wrecked. I have been so irritated by this that I've been considering switching TO the mac ecosystem, BUT this thread is good on my eyes and makes me disinterested now.

I do all my gaming and LLM inference on devuan. (That laptop should chew through 30-120B parameter LLMs, depending on how much RAM it has.)

I don't have any of the problems mentioned by you or sibling comments, full stop.

Up until about a year ago, audio was janky as hell, but then as part of the great de-Poettering, they switched from PulseAudio to PipeWire. I've had zero issues since then.

Copy paste works. Login works. X11 runs at native panel speed (144Hz) with bug-for-bug parity with windows 3d acceleration, but open source (AMD drivers). XScreenSaver works (and can lock the screen). I can't comment on any of the stuff you mention in the second paragraph. I assume it's a bunch of broken Wayland workarounds?

Anyway, instead of switching to Mac, just switch to a stable distribution. Devuan is Debian minus systemd, so essentially everything works out of the box. Even crap that requires systemd usually works, since they install stubs. LLMs like Claude will happily admin it once you tell it that which init system to target.

  > the great de-Poettering

If I remember correctly, Devuan uses sysv, yes? Other than Pulse Audio, what other Poettering software is in normal Debian?

Well, systemd, including logind, which was incredibly unstable for me under manjaro (basic session management was flaky).

Devuan uses elogind, which is a fork of logind that doesn't require systemd. I haven't noticed any problems with it.

> ... what other Poettering software is in normal Debian?

A rube-goldberg version of SSH that somehow depends on many things that should be totally unrelated to SSH. Because ofc Poettering needing to mess with everything does need to have systemd notifications available from SSH.

This excuse allows to link many libs and pretend the backdoor attempts are unrelated to systemd, like the liblzma one.

Not of course it's an excuse that doesn't run very far seen the following undisputable fact: the XZ backdoor only affect systemd-enabled SSH. Ouch. Facts do hurt.

I cannot wait for the day a good hypervisor comes out for Linux that runs perfectly on a systemd-less Linux distro, like Devuan (I already used Devuan, but not as an hypervisor).

Basically "Proxmox but systemd-free". I know I've got the FreeBSD+bhyve option too. And at long last I'll be systemd-free again.

Also, a DNS client and NTP reimplementation that have both had security bugs, the broken replacement for syslogd, etc.

After a while, I just lost track. Happily, I don't have to deal with any of that stuff these days.

I'd expect devuan to be a decent hypervisor host, but haven't tried. There's also SmartOS (a few forks away from being Solaris), which looks like it had a release this year. It includes native ZFS.

Honestly, at this point, I'm looking at devuan as the last stop before I jump on the FreeBSD train. It looks like they let you choose between X11 or Wayland, at least for now. I got Steam to work in a FreeBSD VM, but it face-planted because the VM host didn't support any sort of 3d acceleration.

Hopefully enough users will revolt to keep X11, systemd-free Linux viable, but I wonder if that particular niche (which still works great out of the box) is going to end up less popular than the BSDs.

You can probably just dedicate 1GB for the framebuffer, and then let Linux dynamically allocate memory to it at runtime. As far as I can tell this doesn't impact performance, so there's no downside. (Older AMD stacks required a static partitioning under Linux, I think).

I haven’t had much time with it, but I’ve had to set the split in the BIOS. There’s probably a way to do it from within Linux though. Also hoping some progress is made on using the AMD NPU in Linux. I know it only recently got kernel level support.

I thought I had to split it in the BIOS, but then I just didn't (this is on a 2025 machine), and llama ended up with the same available "GPU" ram either way (confirmed by running inference on it).

I have been so irritated by this that I've been considering switching TO the mac ecosystem, BUT this thread is good on my eyes and makes me disinterested now.

It really makes me miss Classic Mac OS 9. I used it from 7.5.1 to 9.2.2. I remember being so excited about Mac OS X when the Public Beta came out that I switched immediately. It really sucked and I went back immediately. But eventually Mac OS X got better and I switched to it, and never looked back.

Now I am looking back and remembering everything I lost. A computer that was so simple and so predictable. It didn't change behind my back all the time. It never shoved upgrades down my throat. It just worked!

"A computer that was so simple and so predictable."

This is what cachyOS + KDE is giving me at the moment. Ok, so it's not totally simple and there are A LOT of updates. But it's by and large predictable. I never had a 1980-90s Mac, but I had an Apple IIe and an Amiga 500. While cachyOS is so much more powerful it doesn't abuse that power like Windows and OSX with so many background processes and telemetry. I have a Mac laptop and I dual boot my PC with Windows + Linux. I don't have hate OSX but CachyOS + KDE is by far my favourite as it's customisable to the extent I want and it just gets out of my way. Highly recommend it if that wasn't obvious!

If you've lived in your house/apartment for a good long while and settled in, you have an idea of what it was like to use Classic Mac OS 9 (and earlier).

It's like flicking a lightswitch or reaching into a drawer and grabbing a spoon without looking. Everything is always right where you left it. Double-click a folder and the window opens in exactly the same state that you left it when it was last closed. All the icons are arranged in the same way, with the same label colours you gave them, and each of the folders inside that folder open the same way as well. One folder might open in list view sorted by Date Modified while another opens in icon view with the exact arrangement you decided on, all according to the way you left them.

All of those folders open their windows in the exact same position, size, and shape they had when you closed them. This lets you quickly drill down through layers of nested folders, moving your mouse to the next one before your eyes can even register it on screen.

The effect of this extreme level of persistence is that you develop muscle memory for the mouse. No other operating system environment I have ever used works like this, or at least this pervasively (modern macOS still has this for the menu bar). Everyone else just gives up and relegates the muscle-memory control to the keyboard only. This is a huge tragedy! A Classic Mac OS power user works with one hand on the mouse, one hand on the keyboard, and uses muscle memory with both to fly around the UI and work very efficiently. This is especially valuable when you're working in software that needs the mouse anyway, such as art or design software.

It's been a very frustrating year, I made the mistake of upgrading Pop OS 22.04 that I'd been using for years that was a rough couple of weeks!

Toshy still works to give me Mac keyboard shortcuts I might never let go of, but I still haven't figured out the keyboard shortcut to switch between open instances of the same program which drives me insane!

FWIW exactly because it is open source, there isn't anyone actually forcing you to use Wayland (distros changed a default, they didn't remove the ability to install something else - even Fedora that got rid of X11 support for GNOME in their distro still provides other DEs and WMs). As long as there are people who want to keep using X11, there will be an option (be it Xorg or some fork).

Keyboard shortcuts have been a big pain point, but I'm adjusting. I'm using Plasma 6, and trying to use the defaults vs emulating the mac shortcuts. Print screen as a screenshot button makes considerably more sense to me than Command-Shift-4, and Meta+Print Screen captures just a single window.

Logiops + Plasma's multi desktop support has given me something very similar to the multi desktop experience I had before, and the pager in the taskbar is a big improvement.

The tiling in Plasma needs work. I initially loved it until I released that when I arranged the tiles differently on one desktop, it changed them on the others... Hopefully that gets better.

Hyprland it's doing a lot of efforts in solving these problems. For now I'm using i3 and will come back one the ecosystem stabilizes more. (More than that I've lazy bc from what I've seen now is ready)

> Hyprland it's doing a lot of efforts in solving these problems

Is it? Do you have any examples?

I've been exclusively on wayland (xwayland for games and browsers before they support/ed wayland natively) since 2019 (!)

Yes, there were and are problems, but far, far less than before and not much more than on X11, just different ones.

I delayed upgrade to IPadOS 26.3 til reddit users shared on /r/ipad that its performance was on par with older version now. However, once I upgrade, the performance issues and bugs are noticeable instantly. For example,

1. switching between different browser tabs has a sub-second delay(est 200ms) 2. a tab in system settings menu takes 200ms to load 3. maximizing a video doesn't always work(sometimes it leaves a big white space on top) 4. double tabbing a keyboard key often triggers zooming into the browser page

I couldn't believe these issues haven't been fixed after 3 subversions.

Mac user since the 90s, 10.14 Mojave seemed like the last release I liked and where the apps I used still worked correctly (or at all). Ironically Apple has already broken most of the apps I cared about, and for the rest LLM tools give enough leverage that I may be able to cobble together replacements for the rest.

I'm with you here. Mac user since my father brought home a Mac SE, even briefly worked for Apple. Every new version of Mac OS is worse. Basic things like Finder or Disk Utility are barely usable to say nothing of the poor UX decisions.

  > Clicks Communicator

Thank you for introducing me to this! If the keyboard is suitable for Hebrew input I will pursue this. I've tried all manner of external and on screen keyboards, but this looks like it might be a winner.

“I don't feel like we own them.” ← Well-put!

I was 100% Apple: Mac Mini on the desktop, Macbook Air laptop, iPhone, and two iPads.

Then came Tahoe.

I hated it so badly and it wouldn't let me change the things I hated.

I noticed a subtle sneer as I worked, having to use this stupid computer that wouldn't let me adjust it to my liking anymore.

Then I noticed I wasn't working as much as I used to because I just viscerally hated having to work in that Tahoe environment.

At first I did the thing of erasing the entire computer and doing a USB install just go back to the previous.

But then like you said: “I don't feel like we own them.” I didn't trust Apple to not keep making it worse.

So I switched. Got a Linux desktop, and a Framework laptop. Sooooo nice!! Snappy-fast Linux just the way I want it.

While I was at it, got my first Android phone and installed GrapheneOS on Google Pixel. Sooooo nice! So quiet, doing only what I want.

Even got my first Android tablet to replace the iPad. (OnePlus Pad 3.) It's great too. I'm loving the whole Android ecosystem, when made nerdy like Linux.

So yeah I'm 100% off Apple now and will never go back.

That's how bad Tahoe is.

I am currently all-in on the Apple ecosystem and have been for almost 13 years now. But quality of life in Apple land has steadily been getting worse, so I have been considering making the sort of change you describe, but not quite ready to make that leap yet. What would you say was the hardest part of the transition for you?

None. Way easier than expected.

Even GrapheneOS on an Android phone, which I’d heard was hard to install, was dead easy and so worth it.

For Mac to Linux, you can just rsync your /Users/{me} to /home/{me} and enjoy updating some old habits.

He found a sideloadable JIT server + VPN setup. It seems super sketchy honestly, and it's a shame that people have to go through this to enable a feature that should just be available. There is no legitimate reason to block access to JIT.

From an outsider just going by what you wrote: you are trading a $2000+ year-old computer for a new $2000+ computer because you are annoyed about some temporary problems (yes, they are temporary).

Apple marketers are just going to think that in another year you’re going to get annoyed by some Linux thing (yes, there will be something annoying) and buy a brand new $2000+ Mac.

These kind of posts get a lot of upvotes, but they do nothing to change corporate behavior.

> because you are annoyed about some temporary problems (yes, they are temporary)

What leads you to believe that anything he mentioned is temporary?

Before anyone downvotes this guy, spend some time on the official Apple support forum.

I can't point at a bug that I've seen addressed in subsequent OS releases.

Seizure-inducing HDMI flickering from Night Shift. Finder Trash not supporting put-back _sometimes_. Printers becoming permanently "paused" sporadically, or worse, very consistently. Mouse lag/stuttering because you used "the wrong USB port." Apple photos libraries corrupting themselves with no recovery paths.

It would be strictly better to just not have the forum, then shouting sorrows into the void would feel more solitary.

Countless of issues are not being resolved. I stopped submitting detailed and reproducible bug reports a while ago.

I basically don’t care anymore. Timeline consistently pinkscreens my laptop.

I just don’t give a f anymore. I barely run any Apple software on my Mac.

The only reason I stop use it, is because I have not spent the energy into researching:

- performant + long battery laptop with a good build quality

- disk encryption + while on X attempts

- good trackpad

The rest, the os, the shortcuts, I can change or adapt.

I hit issues in MacOS on a monthly basis, and have been for years.

Not once have I hit an issue that wasn't documented and left unresolved on Apple's for over 3 years.

Some people believe the Republican rule is also temporary. It’s a difference in ahem, temperament I suppose.

The fine article made the same comparison.

I've been running Debian on servers for 20+ years now. And in the last few years I've been running it on my desktop, sort of a toe in the water. Debian hasn't let me down, and I'm very familiar with it.

I was on my way out the door before the Apple Silicon launch. They managed to briefly bring me back in, but the software is only getting worse. It's a shame too, because I do believe Apple has the best hardware.

No, the difference is trajectory and trust.

We all predict the future, consciously or not. We invest our time and effort into a system that we think has a good future.

Tahoe made me lose trust in Apple's software, and see its trajectory as a bad one that I didn't want to invest any more time into.

While I understand that, I can't help but compare this to Mac hardware rather than software. There was a years-long stretch when it seemed like they'd really seriously lost the plot: the butterfly keyboard, the Touch Bar, the "trashcan" Mac, heat issues across the line. There was a real case to be made for abandoning Macs based on hardware issues alone (and I'm sure some folks did, and hopefully they're happy for it).

Then came Apple Silicon. And at least in my eyes, Apple hardware is the best it's been in a really long time.

There are some definite trainwrecks in the current state of Liquid Glass (especially on the Mac), and there have been other dubious choices and mounting bugs made over the last few years. But I've used both Windows 11 and a recent Linux distribution (Fedora, via Asahi Linux, running KDE Plasma), and while I like the latter it's just not enough to make me give up what I like on the Mac in terms of Mac-only applications and little life-bettering affordances I've internalized over the years I've been here. Yes, if the trajectory they're on now in software continues, I'll have to re-evaluate that -- but their hardware took a real turn for the better after Jony Ive and some of his deputies left. Alan Dye and some of his deputies left earlier this year, and I'm not going to count the new team out before giving them a chance to prove themselves.

It's a good point. I hated that butterfly keyboard, and the Touch Bar was an utterly useless gimmick for me. And they realised that and rolled it back (and added ports again!).

They do eventually listen to their customers. Let's hope it doesn't take as long for these changes to get rolled back.

I'm kinda stuck with Mac at work. I don't mind it, but I run Linux on all my personal computers and find that is way better.

I wonder how much connect there is between those in charge of hardware and those in charge of working software. It would be one thing if the software had a design direction, we all hated it, but it was implemented to its logical conclusion and pure stupid bugs weren't left to linger for years. That would be a matter of difference in taste and vision.

But I wonder if they have the ability to execute... anything, anymore. It's starting to look a little like Windows, which in a totally shameless and burlesque fashion has 3 or 4 design paradigms at the same time, jumbled together in a big stew.

It does feel like the decision making is internal-politics-driven rather than customer-satisfaction-driven, for both Mac and Windows now. Senseless changes that have little in common with other changes.

We've had this for decades with Windows, and internal leaks confirming that it's all to do with turf wars between departmental heads.

As you say, it's an indication that Apple are going down the same road, and are unable to actually execute a vision anymore.

> they do nothing to change corporate behavior.

Well, they should. I've been on Mac since System 6.0.7. I've had a Mac Clone. I've been mocked by more Windows users for "using a toy computer" than I can remember. I remember (and briefly used) BeOS. I remember The Mac Performa-series fiasco. The Copland failure. Steve's return. The launch of OS X.

In all those years, I have NEVER witnessed such widespread dissatisfaction among long-time, loyal users, heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem. Users so frustrated with Apple's moronic decisions and the design of the OS that they are literally paying money to abandon it. I'm one of them. The frustration isn't rooted in nostalgia or resistance to change. It's the accumulation of what feels like contemptuous decision-making.

If that doesn't set off alarm bells in Cupertino, I guess it's just one more proof that parting ways is indeed the right call.

Setting aside whether the problems are temporary: what else is he supposed to do? As a customer, the only power you have in the relationship is "I'm not going to do business with you any more". And you can certainly threaten that, but at some point you have to actually walk away. If all people do is complain but keep buying Apple products, Apple will never have an incentive to improve.

First, I have no reason to believe these problems are temporary. There are problems MacOS has had for years that have never been addressed, before they added the new problems when forcing Liquid Glass on people.

Just to put cards on the table, the problem Apple has is disillusionment. They've managed to disabuse people of the notion that Apple designs quality software that is useful in their lives.

People who have lost faith in Apple won't regain their faith even if Apple fixes all the Liquid Glass problems in six months. And that is not something that will happen. On top of that, people are anticipating AI features and a touch-optimized interface.

It's why Google Trends shows larger-than-ever numbers of people having iPhone battery issues, performance issues, and searching for how to switch to Android. "Macos to Linux" peaked after Tahoe, at 3x higher than its pre-LG peak, for example.

Yeah, I still remember when I flipped from Linux to Mac at home. In my case it was a long time ago when I got a 4k monitor and couldn't scale the display text/icons and so couldn't read shit on it, and setting up a multi-monitor setup with Linux with different display resolutions was completely impossible. It worked in a few buttons with Mac. Digging into the issue on the Linux side there was some developer just yelling into the issue that people couldn't see 4k resolution, so there was no point to buying that hardware and everyone was just making a purchasing mistake with 4k monitors. I'm sure it has been long fixed by now, but that's the social problem which is waiting there. It won't be that issue, but there'll be something else like that...

Who cares what Apple marketers think if you are not using Apple products? The point of switching to Linux is that you no longer have to care whether their corporate behavior ever changes: you just live in the open-source world instead.

I gave up on Apple twelve years ago and I can't imagine ever buying another Mac.

If multiple people stopped buying Macs and complained and that got apple to solve the temporary problems, isn't that hat what people intended to accomplish?

> because you are annoyed about some temporary problems

I mean, all problems are temporary, time is money etc. etc. And there are signs that suggest that some of these problems (namely freedom to run your own software) are not going to get resolved soon. Is there something deeper in your thought that I missed?

> These kind of posts get a lot of upvotes, but they do nothing to change corporate behavior.

I don't understand, we are on a discussion forum. Of course writing comments here does not influence what Apple does, that's not what HN is for, I think (I hope) that everyone already assumes that. Why do you feel the need to point that out?

Apple has been headed down this road for over a decade. Not sure why you would think any of this was temporary.

This is going to be remembered as a comical fumble, in my view.

I was fully locked-in to the ecosystem, the phone, the services, the TV, and I am looking for the exits.

I’m starting to parallelize to software which will play well on Linux, and when I’m feeling ready (or miserable enough) I will not be looking back.

The macOS exodus will be like Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy: very slowly and then all at once.

I’m right where you are. Very happy Apple customer since my first PowerBook G4. Currently have an M1 Max, an iPhone 17 Pro, the iPad Pro, HomePod, Apple TV, and Watch Ultra.

All the _just works_ feeling and reliability seem to be gone. Tahoe is so unstable that I now restart the Mac every day, when in the past it happened on software updates only. Apple Music is another huge mess, I can’t comprehend how can it be so unreliable.

Looking for exits as well and kind of looking forward to migrating to Graphene OS, self-hosted Immich, and Navidrome

I can't quite believe how bad Apple Music is. I will say this for Apple, when I tried out Music on a brand new Mac and it didn't work properly, I got to chat to a real support person who walked me through fixing it.

It shouldn't have been broken though. It shouldn't be a native app written by Apple that feels worse to use than both Spotify and YouTube music. I mean, I open it now just to see if there's anything janky and yeah. "Get 3 months for $5.99" and then below that "Get 3 months for $8.99" and you'd have to scroll and read much smaller text to see that the second one is for family - I mean that's reasonably obvious but it's weirdly unpolished. And then the play bar, which is floating around, looks unintegrated with the app, obscures the content area, and provides enabled controls that do nothing because there is no song to play. Not broken, but UX stuff that shows a lack of care.

And yet Apple engineers are going through numerous forums and Reddit posts to gaslight people by commenting “well, it doesn’t happen to me, mine works perfectly”.

They managed to mess up an entire ecosystem and they’re acting so stupid about it that I cannot believe all this software was made by Apple.

There’s no elegance, no thought out user experience, no good design, it’s all stupid glass design with comical amount of padding. It all looks like it was designed and implemented by a team five over a half assed pool party.

What the hell is Apple doing with its tens of thousands of engineers, if they cannot make a freaking window manager.

I'm convinced that this is the fate of all successful software companies. It's not a result of arrogance or hubris or anything else like that. It's the result of turnover.

Take your favourite rock band and turn over all the musicians until no one is left from the original band. Should we expect the band to continue cranking out chart-topping hits?

There's one further factor that makes the situation even worse than the "Rock Band of Theseus." That's the fact that young software engineers are not interested in stewardship. They want to build their own projects, not fix bugs in someone else's. Across the software industry we see this lead to a continual churn, rewrites and redesigns no one wants, and a huge amount of wasted effort reinventing the wheel (and often making a worse wheel).

It often feels like Apple hires the best hardware and marketing people in the world and holds them to the highest standards, but the software design and engineering people are left to just kind of screw around, redesign stuff for shits and giggles, and laugh as people fill their forums with bug reports and (very obvious) feature requests.

When even my "boomer" aged and non-tech savvy dad who has always used an iPhone notices the update is bad, I think you are in at least a little bit of trouble if you don't quickly course correct.

I'm sorry but if your out is linux and windows because you're not happy how stuff doesn't "just work" in the Apple ecosystem boy are you in for a bad surprise.

However bad you think Apple is getting with MacOS - windows is getting worse. And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. Queue the linux brigade "my PC works perfect, what linux issues are you having". Meanwhile I can't use bluetooth on my desktop (works perfectly fine on windows), and I was watching laptop reviews from justjosh recently where he's adding a segment where he is trying out linux on the device - and his experience on the two videos I've seen "sound does't work, wifi doesn't work, BT doesn't work ..."

All that said I am looking into leaving the Apple ecosystem as well because I just don't like how locked down and the devices are, but I'm fully aware that it's going to take significant effort for stuff that I'd get out of the box from Apple.

The problem isn't that MacOS doesn't work, it's that MacOS doesn't work _and_ you can't fix the things that don't work.

You can anticipate "the linux brigade" because it works well for many of us.

This isn't to say there _aren't_ problems. Bluetooth, audio, etc. working all depend on having the luck that someone wrote good drivers for the device you want to install Linux on. When you do have a problem, you don't have the benefit of having many people on your same configuration like you do with Apple. You might find yourself troubleshooting as the only person with your specific combo of dongle, mobo, cpu, distro, and kernel.

I've been on Linux since 2009 and MacOS since 2021. I've never had a bluetooth problem with Linux but I've had a ton on MacOS (but that might just be airpods).

The nice thing about Linux is that you have control over all your problems. On MacOS, if you have a solvable problem, the solution is often either "Pray that Apple fixes it in the next release" or "The fix for that costs $10 per month and it'll clog up your app switcher". On Linux, if you have a solvable problem, the solution is often "go into the settings for your distribution" or "install this tweak tool" or "find someone who had it before on a support forum and follow their steps".

It's not unreasonable that someone who is fed up with unsolvable problems on MacOS would find Linux more appealing. It's not a naive mindset, it's just how things are.

Thanks for this very important point. It often gets lost in the discussion.

The big idea with Linux/BSD/fully-open-source is that you can fix whatever you don't like.

That was the breaking point for me with Tahoe. I never loved MacOS before that, but it never got in the way. Then with Tahoe, it got in the way, so I went to fix it, and found out that fixing it is actually impossible! That was the breakup moment.

Sophisticated LLMs make it even easier to fix or tweak any Linux/BSD/fully-open-source software to our liking.

> The big idea with Linux/BSD/fully-open-source is that you can fix whatever you don't like.

That's a great theory, and sometimes it's actually true, but in reality for most users most of the time, Linux is as "fixable" as Windows or macOS, because most people, even the technically savvy ones aren't driver developers. Heck most software developers probably aren't even C programmers anymore. And even if someone had the competency in the language and low level system programming, do they have the time and the inclination to re-write the audio stack so that it finally works correctly? Or to fix the fact that even in 2026, sleep and hibernate are hit and miss? And then to maintain their patch against future system updates or go through the process of getting it upstreamed?

Most Linux users, and especially most Linux users switching from something like macOS or Windows would be waiting and hoping that someone else decided to fix the thing for them because they either lack the skills, time or inclination to do it themselves. And we know this is true because if it weren't true, all the various "wars" over the years like systemd and pulse audio and wayland wouldn't have been a war at all because everyone who didn't like it would have easily patched it out and moved on. But a modern full fledged OS experience is a mess of intertwined and complex dependencies. So when a distro decides to switch a big chunk of the underlying stack like that, most people either have to go along with it, or hope that enough people feel strongly enough about it to fork everything and make their own distro, and then they have to hope the forkers have the passion and drive to maintain that for them.

Yes, you "can" fix whatever you don't like in linux. Just like you "can" find all the information you need to diagnose and treat whatever medical condition you might have online and at your local libraries. But most people are still going to pay a doctor, because most people don't have the time or skills to actually do it.

> but in reality for most users most of the time, Linux is as "fixable" as Windows or macOS,

I disagree with this. For most users, most of the time, Linux is significantly more fixable than Windows or MacOS.

In nearly 20 years, I've never had to write a line of C or touch the Linux kernel to fix issues I've had on Linux.

For example, one of my big peeves I've had lately on both PopOS and MacOS are the looooong animations to switch desktops.

On PopOS, I had two paths to fix this: Tweak the COSMIC desktop to fix the behavior, or the simple thing of simply installing GNOME (or KDE or any other DE of choice).

On MacOS, I'm SOL. There's no way to fix that on my Macbook (short of installing Asahi Linux, of course).

> Just like you "can" find all the information you need to diagnose and treat whatever medical condition you might have online and at your local libraries. But most people are still going to pay a doctor, because most people don't have the time or skills to actually do it.

This isn't a great analogy, but it's worth noting: Many conditions are expected to be self-diagnosed and self-treated. I don't go to the doctor for scrapes, bruises, colds, dry eyes, a stubbed toe, etc. By this analogy, Linux users are buying their own aspirin and applying their own band-aids, while MacOS users are waiting in line, dependent on someone else to fix these things.

I say this as someone who uses both MacOS and Linux daily.

Does it matter? Generally Linux desktop distributions are made for the people who use them, who would tend towards people who will fix things. You mention distros but there obviously are a lot of passionate distro makers because right now it seems like there are more distros than ever.

There are often comments on threads like this that go along the lines of "If only the people making Linux desktop did X then they'd get more people". But there there isn't really anyone making Linux on the desktop. It's not a product. Even the products within it are built on the work of people with very disparate interests. It's kind of amazing that we get a cobbled together working experience at all.

Apple and Microsoft can focus on particular things, like getting more users, or supporting hardware they want to sell, or trying to get you to sign up to Office 365. No Linux desktop environment can have that kind of focus. So when you say it's not fixable to most users I think: well it's not supposed to be. It's not supposed to be anything, it just kind of is. Like coming across a mountain instead of a theme park - it's not a curated experience, it's not going to be for everyone, you might get hurt, but it's far far more beautiful.

We seem to have a world where neither Linux, nor MacOS, nor Windows "just work". None of them have meaningful support channels for individuals. All of them have issues. They're very similar in these ways.

The first of these systems is actionable: When it doesn't work, it can generally be made to work. The whole journey may be an awful affair for the entire duration, but a person can usually (not always!) get there.

The other two systems are inactionable: When it doesn't work, there is no fixing it. There is no pathway, nor any journey. One can only accept that it is broken, that they are powerless to change it, and that this is the end of the road for that problem.

---

There are probably healthier ways to learn acceptance than this.

And phones are even worse!

I have come to hate Android, but every time I seriously look at switching to iOS, it seems Apple has chosen that time to make things even worse. Unfortunately, there's no Linux equivalent for phones. (Or at least, nothing that's easier than gentoo was in 2004. That was great for learning, but for daily use of a critical device, not so great.)

> The first of these systems is actionable: When it doesn't work, it can generally be made to work. The whole journey may be an awful affair for the entire duration, but a person can usually

It's also important to mention that it is more likely a person would get help along the way.

And - it should also be said that there are non-Linux free operating systems, like the BSD's, for which it can also "generally be made to work". And there's the more niche HaikuOS (where I don't know if what doesn't work can be made to work, but people do use it).

they have yet to invent a linux laptop with good battery life, quality keyboard & trackpad, sleep-then-suspend, bluetooth. as long as apple makes computers with those things, i can be content even if it means living inside my full screen linux vm

> I'm sorry but if your out is linux and windows because you're not happy how stuff doesn't "just work" in the Apple ecosystem boy are you in for a bad surprise.

I think you and GP agree more than you realise, their point seems to be that Apple was worth all the locked down walled garden stuff because at least it "just worked." Now it's a locked down walled garden which _also doesn't work._ Tahoe and iOS 26 are the worst of both worlds.

> Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. Queue the linux brigade "my PC works perfect, what linux issues are you having". Meanwhile I can't use bluetooth on my desktop...

Ok, you're having Bluetooth issues. Fair enough. But using Bluetooth (on a desktop no less) is not so overwhelmingly common that one can justify a sweeping statement like yours on that basis. The "Linux brigade" says that stuff works for them because it does. My desktop "just works" for me and it has for like 5 years at this point. That doesn't mean everything is perfect, but neither is Linux the train wreck of incompatibility you describe.

> And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues.

I think that's probably a few years out of date. Certainly, it used to be completely true and was a major problem.

I'm just not finding that now. Drivers are better, and more widespread, and there are less odd hardware innovations in standard PC components that screw it up.

And, if you want a laptop that runs Linux perfectly, there are more than a few options out there that ship with Linux installed and supported now.

I prefer my MacBook, but the Thinkpad whatever I bought to have Windows and Linux available for some software I need occasionally has a fingerprint reader that worked out of the box on Ubuntu.

Since when is using a fingerprint reader on laptops at all common? If that's a requirement for you then fair enough, but not having a fingerprint reader doesn't make a laptop so niche that one would be justified in saying "get serious".

Luck doesn't play a factor in getting your hardware to work with Linux. It's either supported or it's not, and since the code is Open Source you can Google/ChatGPT the answer in less than 2 minutes.

Your experience isn't uncommon, but it's largely the result of trying to force a square peg into a round hole. There are thousands of different smartphones, game consoles and set-top boxes that rely on Linux for all of their basic functionality. You only get problems trying to smash reverse-engineered drivers and hardware together expecting OEM-level support. If you want good Linux support, pay for good Linux support.

It is the year of the Linux desktop.

ElementaryOS is supposed to be a very clean transition environment for mac refugees. AI makes everything so much easier, Windows and Mac both have far more friction and hassle in contrast. Good luck!

I'm rocking cachyos(arch based though) wayland+kde and https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy. it's great to keep the keyboard shortcuts that I'm so used to from the mac almost seamlessly. kde lets you configure pretty much everything how a mac was if you want it though it did take a month or two to get everything the way I like it. I've found that it is nice to have an operating system that is mine and not the whims of some company trying to make money off me. I don't think I'll go back unless I'm forced to for a job.

I don't have anywhere to escape. With iOS I have at least a chance with Android (even when I am locked in due to Find My, which is still the one thing that works great and keeps me at Apple).

When someone (Google?) finds me a way to seamlessly find/lock my phone from my computer, my computer from phone, and they all find my wife phone and computer, and they all find my keys and my wife keys... that will be the day I escape.

I've been running Tahoe since 26.2, after cowardly skipping 0 and 1.

And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path? Or are people just particularly confident about complaining about Tahoe after seeing everyone else do it.

For sure it has glitches, but as far as I can tell, they're the same glitches that were in Sequoia. (If anyone at Apple is reading this, can you take a glance at your NFS client code? It does like to just hang up occasionally.)

The only major complaint I have is the window resize target, which seems not to line up properly with the actual window corner, since they gave them Very Rounded Corners.

It's also a bit weird that the radius of the VRCs seems to change app to app.

But these are nits. I work on Tahoe every day and it seems fine.

It is generally "fine" but as a life long mac user from the 68k days, what it isn't is up to the standards Apple used to hold themselves to. macOS has over the last handful of years especially become something of a "death by a thousand paper cuts" experience. And I think the problem Apple is facing is Tahoe is such a fundamental UI change (and no one likes those, just go back and read up on reactions to the original OS X UI) that people are paying more attention to the flaws. The noise and inconsistencies of the menu icons, the "last 20%" cases where the liquid glass UI is actually pretty broken (drop down a long list of possible wifi networks with a window with a white background behind the list), the places where the UI just seems to fail to update until some background thread finally gets around to it. The fact that these are nits, but that the nits have really been adding up over the years is starting the wear thin. Apple has always been a corporation of cycles, and things have gone bad before and then gotten better. But years and years ago, the degree of attention to detail that Apple (usually) put into their software and products was the sort of thing you could point to and demonstrate that for whatever other flaws the system might have, the attention to detail really helped make the whole experience just better. These days, while they do sometimes still get it right, it does feel like there's a lot of software design decisions made by "warm bodies" and not, as the article puts it, people who "bleed six colors". Tahoe is the first time in decades of using a mac that I've actually wanted Apple to take a step back and seriously just spend time fixing the bugs. And I daily drove OS X beta, so my tolerance for buggy software in the face of incredible potential is really high.

I haven't ran into nearly as many bugs as I've seen from others, but there is definitely a performance hit for me. The UI in general feels sluggish compared to sequoia.

I have two M4 Pro's w/ 24GB of RAM (one work, one personal). Work is on Tahoe, personal on sequoia and there's a really noticeable difference in overall UI responsiveness. It becomes even more pronounced when I hook up to my external display (32" 4k).

In a way it reminds me of the olden days of running KDE or Compiz with every fancy effect enabled but on an underpowered GPU. Yeah, it technically works, but it's not necessarily a fluid or enjoyable experience.

I have my own other nitpicks about liquid glass & the design (there's tons of papercuts here), but that doesn't necessarily impact stability.

> And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path?

In my experience, the OS is as good as it's ever been. I've had to restart a Tahoe machine for something other than updates maybe once with macOS 26, and my main workstation is used 12+ hours/day.

In the HN Extended Universe, everyone using macOS has perpetually Had Enough and "begun to switch to Linux", while in the real world, Apple shipped 10%+ more Macs in 2025 than they did in 2024.

I have a dirty confession to make too: I’ve been running Tahoe and Windows 11 on my devices, and both are working fine for the most part. If I ever switch to Linux desktop, it will be mostly out of boredom.

I run Tahoe on my MacBook Air, Windows 11 on my home desktop, and Debian Trixie on my two desktops at work. They all have their pluses and minuses. I don't feel an overwhelming pull to run one OS on all my machines.

I have time for them all - I have a debian workstation, an ubuntu server, I mostly work on my Tahoe macbook and I run windows 11 on my games box.

Windows seems like windows. I don't care. I'll keep updating to the latest so long as MS wants to give me free updates. My Mac desktop changes looks a bit on each new release but otherwise it's all entirely unremarkable. Maintaining my linux boxes is a little more involved, which is fine, I enjoy it and learn about the internals. SystemD works OK, I don't like its philosophy or the whole binary logs thing, but I quite like the service files metaphor.

The last time I got annoyed enough to change anything was Gnome 2->3 being forced by an update on debian testing, which is why I now run Xfce on any given linux box. I haven't yet gone to Wayland.

Maybe I'm just easy. Or maybe it's all the time I spent switching between Linux/Windows/HPUX/AIX/Solaris/whatever in the 00s. I just look for how I can get on with my day and then ... get on with my day.

Yes I agree.

I have an M1 Max like the author of this piece and recently upgraded. It's fine.

I don't like the look of it much and the drag targets are annoying but other than that it's been completely normal.

Which particular long list of bugs? I’m on my work laptop, personal laptop and phone all day no problem. I’ve seen all the ranting here about the interface, window corners and menu icons but in day to day use have not encountered a single “bug”. And after some initial skepticism I actually like the design direction of Tahoe.

They definitely do. But in my experience they "accumulate".

Like, things all work pretty well at first. And then god only knows what happens as config and preference files get into weird states, and temp files accumulate and never get deleted, and cache files get stuck with old info and refuse to update, and god only knows.

So people with relatively new installations have a pretty good time, while people who have migrated their data across three MacBooks over ten years are encountering problems left and right.

I reinstalled Sequoia fresh last year because some mystery process would slowly consume 50GB of disk space over the course of every two weeks, no disk utility could locate any file responsible, but restarting reset it. But with the fresh reinstall, everything started working fine again. It's annoying. Then I upgraded to Tahoe and zero problems. But I'm sure they'll gradually start appearing over the next year or two.

Death by a thousand cuts.

Yes, things like small bugs and abnormal user experiences accumulate and over time the OS and other apps become inconsistent.

As heavy users who are generally by profession spend a lot more time with a Mac, they tend to experience more issues, and things that used to work for decades start to crumble. It all works if you’re acting like working on glass pieces, but that’s not what computers are made for.

You’re supposed to use it extensively and get more efficient over time without a glassy UI and other broken systems pulling you down at every turn.

It’s not about using a system for 10 minutes to visit a website with Chrome, but instead spending days programming things, having a normal life, and still having the very simple file discovery features working.

There’s no reason for a computer to be this choppy and slow (in things like context switching etc.) unless something else is going on in the background.

They happen but you learn to work around them and they fall into the noise.

FtFF has been a mantra for 20+ years; it’s never going to happen, stop trying to make it happen.

I also don't have any real complaints about Tahoe. The new UI looks weird, but it's not the first time Apple changes things for the sake of changing things, and I eventually get used to the changes.

The worst macOS releases I remember were in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Back then, I often had to spend a day or two after each release fixing things the update had broken. At some point, I was using Ubuntu VMs on desktop extensively, as it felt more stable and polished for some kinds of work than macOS.

I almost always skip the .0 and .1 versions. In my experience, it's better to wait for a few months after a major release of any software and let early adopters deal with the issues.

I'm usually in linux on my (2019?) mbp but have had to use macos for some stuff lately (so I'm not exactly tuned in to it and using it hard all day), but I don't see what the problem is tbh and haven't run into anything slowing me down or inducing the rage that I read here.

> And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path? Or are people just particularly confident about complaining about Tahoe after seeing everyone else do it.

That's like asking whether Jackson Pollock or Thomas Kinkade is the better artist. There is no objective measure for it. Some people will have a strong preference, others won't have a preference at all. The designers who made the changes in Tahoe clearly thought the changes are improvements. A lot of macOS users disagree, but some macOS users don't have a preference.

I've only seen a performance hit in rendering all of the icons they have put throuhgout Tahoe and I have had dark mode on. My total experience is about the same and I do like I can color and change the icons easily like classic macOS. I do see the liquid glass changes as a bit weird and inconsistent and while that can be reverted I just got used to it.

This has also been my experience. I don't really have any problems with it. It works fine, it doesn't have the weird telemetry and monetization issues that Windows has.

There are lots of other regressive, mind-bogglingly inept changes scattered across the included applications.

One of my favorites is in Apple Music, where the transport controls and song-title display has been moved from the top of the window down into the content-browser or song-list area... where it's "transparent" and overlaid on other text or album art.

In Mail, the "get new mail" button has been REMOVED from the toolbar. WTF? WHY? So when you're awaiting the ever-more-widespread 2FA from something you just logged into, you get to dig through a menu to hurry up retrieval or re-add the button to the toolbar (which casual users are not going to know how to do).

The utter stupidity of these flailing, desperate changes should concern every computer user. Microsoft is lost, and Windows a clinic on dereliction, design incompetence, and hostility toward users. That leaves Mac OS as the only tolerable consumer computing platform... and it has taken a profound turn for the worse with Tahoe.

And all for nothing. Apple's blunders here don't make sense from any perspective.

In Mail, right click on the toolbar and choose customise. Put the "get mail" action where you want it.

Thanks. I noted in my comment the option to re-add it to the toolbar, but everyday users can't be expected to know this is possible or how to do it.

Nor should they have to, given that mail retrieval is something that everyone can logically be expected to do if they're told they were just sent a message.

People who want to click a button to skip waiting for the next mail poll time (and who even know what that means!) probably can be expected to know that just about every toolbar can be customised.

I didn’t want to be that guy, but pretty much same boat. M3 Max, no issues, no reboots except for updates. Everything seems fine.

I wonder if there’s an issue with older M-series chips? I would image development is done on the latest and greatest, and maybe they’ve unintentionally missed something in the older architectures?

Is the UI great? Eh. But having to work with Windows in my day job, maybe I’m more patient with my Mac?

My partner’s iMac recently died (seemingly the Radeon graphics card had failed, which is not uncommon on 2017 model). It was frustrating to find out that Time Machine was not operational for 8 last months. It was always connected. There were zero indications of any issues. It just stopped backing up at some point. The disk had enough space.

In the past I had problems with network attached Time Machine destinations, but now I have zero trust even in the “native” USB-based method.

I don't know what's happened to Time Machine, with the capabilities available in APFS etc it should be much better if anything. But it's not. Thankfully the failure mode I've experienced didn't lead to data loss but I definitely don't trust it any more.

Luckily I had Backblaze backup set up on our machines. In addition, this older iMac can still be booted up in Target disk mode, i.e. acting like an external drive. So I could salvage all data.

Another funny thing is that Mac’s built in diagnostic mode, after running for good 20 minutes, proclaimed there were no issues with the system. Even though it was clearly failing in the graphics department, even when booting into an installer usb drive (or even a Linux live mode).

It was always shit. I have seen horror stories going back since the day it came out.

Think my favourite was a conceptual flaw. The lightning strike. You need a completely offline backup or you don't have a backup.

Edit: using ChronoSync and two external (hard) disks, rotated once a month off site at the moment. That has a nice fat VERIFY button on it.

This is what worries me. I’ve used Time Machine for almost 20 years and it has provided seamless transitions to new MacBooks. But how do I know if it is currently borked?

I heard in the past that Time Machine backups would inevitably become corrupt because of a fundamental defect. Pretty vague, I realize, but I wouldn't have used it anyway; I rely on Carbon Copy Cloner to back up only what's important.

The problem was directory hard links. Fortunately that particular issue was resolved by replacing it with APFS snapshots. But the reputation damage is done; I don’t really trust Time Machine.

test your backups. disaster recovery gamedays shouldn't be optional. you can spin up macos vms on your mac (or in qemu on linux if you want, or in docker, or rent a mac cloud vm) and test the backup restore.

It is astounding to me how unperformant time machine is. When I went from the 2012 mbp to the m3 pro there was zero difference in time machine peformance. Still taking half a day for a couple gb changes. Moving at orders of magnitude below disk read write. Wtf is even happening under the hood of the time machine service? Rclone would be like warpspeed in comparison.

I have been feeling the same way _for years now_, and am writing this on this machine: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/11/05/2200 - an Intel MacBook Air running Fedora Silverblue.

I have been writing on/about and using Macs for 25 years, have had a bunch of semi-catastrophic failures with Tahoe (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2026/02/18/1230) and Time Machine (https://taoofmac.com/space/til/2026/02/01/1630), and I have also been running Fedora daily for four or five years.

Were it not for Apple Silicon, I would probably be running Linux only today. But after Tahoe, I am very, _very_ motivated to accelerate my transition. And, ironically, I can make GNOME look and feel more like what a Mac should feel like than what Tahoe does.

But like I wrote the other day (https://taoofmac.com/space/links/2026/02/26/0806):

> The most likely [outcome] is that they will simply carry on without acknowledging any of it publicly and discreetly patch the most critical issues, because they are still making tons of cash on hardware and services and software quality really hasn’t been a priority in half a decade.

Coincidentally, I had to leave macOS for a Windows 11 pc about a month ago and it’s… fine. There are absurd bugs and ux decisions, but I honestly think there are different but equally bad aspects of macOS. On the other hand, some of the things in windows land are just nicer.

For one, my network samba shares stay connected and mounted through restarts. I could never make this work reliably on macOS.

File explorer is good. Finder always felt clunky and awkward to use. In addition, certain class of software exists for windows and not for macOS. Like FilePilot, Anything, MusicBee, Foobar2000 (Mac version of the latter is not the same as the windows version).

The biggest issue so far for me is keyboard shortcuts for text editing. Cmd-based movements are great and I have very deep muscle memory by now. I could not find a reliable way to recreate this on windows (I can make the cursor movement work, but some selections don’t work the same).

I wish I could say Samba worked properly under Windows. I've been migrating file shares to Teams/OneDrive sync as Samba is not reliable anymore. Too many "Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user" or variations on that theme.

> [on windows 11] my network samba shares stay connected and mounted through restarts. I could never make this work reliably on macOS.

It’s wild to me that Apple has allowed SMB on MacOS to be so broken/slow and poorly implemented for so long. It’s been this way for over a DECADE.

I have friends who work at production studios who complain about network storage and MacOS all the time given any modern video workflow involves a NAS.

You would think a company that halos creative workers in all its ads would care about this. But they happily ignore since “SMB that works” is not a feature that will get much mainstream attention in a flashy keynote (that nobody watches anymore anyways).

> It’s wild to me that Apple has allowed SMB on MacOS to be so broken/slow…

Is 1100+ MB/sec read and write (single 10 GbE interface) slow?

They rewrote their own SMB handler because they didn’t want the Samba license. Which means they get none of the improvements from the Samba code.

it's wild to me that Apple has retained SMB as the default option on macos for over a decade. There are plenty of faster/more secure protocols that are still widely recognized, yet they're still encouraging use of a protocol that could expose user data without so much as an Apple-y bother dialog about the consequences

I was a big Mac user. I had a IIcx and an LC, and I evangelized it even when apple stock was $0.95 and the wolves were at the door. I couldn't afford a PowerMac at the time, but I generally used them at the university when I could. I had a desk lamp iMac, then bought the first big screen iMac, which lasted me quite a while. I really liked everything up to Snow Leopard, probably a little beyond that, too.

But in a long time I haven't really enjoyed using the mac and I use other systems instead. They got rid of subpixel rendering and now text is blurry on my monitors. The interactions are much more of a chore. Features were removed from Preview and other apps that were better before. I quit using XCode for a few years and couldn't recognize it when I came back. So I use it maybe every 3-4 weeks now. I have no interest in buying another one.

I just don't know why they seem to be going out of their way to make the system unfriendly to existing users.

I'm like you.

I loved Apple IIs at schools and libraries as a young child, fell in love with my Mac IIsi at home at the age of 7. Later, at 13, I had a Macintosh-evangelizing web site and mailing list that Guy Kawasaki (Apple's lead evangelist) even subscribed to.

I've been a primary Mac user through the 68k, PowerPC, Intel, and Apple Silicon days, from System 6.0.7 through today. Got an original iPhone and iPad, have upgraded my iPhone every few years since.

The technofeudalism, bugginess, and UI crappiness has me done and looking for the exits, to say nothing of the embrace of Trump. My next laptop won't be a Mac, and my next phone won't be an iPhone.

I genuinely view Time Machine as abandonware at this stage, Apple haven't really invested in it for many years and I would recommend a lot of other third party backup solutions first.

It's really sad. When this was introduced (With Lion I believe?) it was such a cool feature to demo to people that didn't have much exposure to Macs yet at that time. Just deleting and restoring a file on the Desktop with the "Space UI" and backups just being there and working without buying complicated backup software was a genuine peak macOS moment.

Now I'm barely using it as every few months I'm prompted to just delete the backup and start fresh because something corrupted.

I have set up Time Machine backups for literally hundreds, if not thousands of people in a support role over many years and have hardly ever witnessed this happening. It's one thing to say you may have had to do this once or twice in a decade or the like, but every few months is ridiculous and speaks to some other underlying issue with your setup, like a quietly failing drive or bad cable, etc.

I'm not one of these 'it hasn't happened to me, ergo it's impossible people'. I completely think that many of the design elements of Tahoe are a horrendous regression versus even Sequoia, but I think asserting that Time Machine is completely broken in the shipping version of macOS is a bold statement that deserves a bit of pushback, even among the fire raging in a lot of other places in macOS!

This is a very common error case, more common with storing the backup on a network share (Wifi / Ethernet doesn't matter). If you look for "Time Machine must erase your existing backup history and start a new backup to correct this." you'll find a lot of references for this problem.

To be clear, I'm not saying it's Tahoe related, it has been there for many years.

Did you only set up Time Machine? Or did you continue supporting all those users for years and years. If the issue is that eventually the backup store becomes corrupted then you may not see it at all if you're only setting up backups but never dealing with users who actually need to restore something from backup years later.

For me, it's backing up over a network share. My Synology NAS works perfectly and flawlessly for literally everything else. It's RAID 1. It supports Time Machine. But somehow it would get corrupted every few months and I'd have to start it all over.

Tons of people complain about this. I suspect it's some subtle bug with sparse bundles and SMB.

I think they think of time capsule as a done deal. It doesn’t bring any extra money for them, and even though it’s broken, it exist to a point that when they’re selling a Mac they can say that it comes with a backup software as well. Just like a shady landlord tells you that the apartment facing a wall has a nice window.

I don’t know what these engineers are doing at Apple, but it surely isn’t making the ecosystem better, they’re just chasing hypes and shinny useless UI changes.

The cynic in me thinks Apple more or less gave up on Time Machine while ramping up on selling iCloud storage as a backup solution for macOS as well as iOS/ipadOS devices.

> Even ignoring bugs and design changes, in which way does it serve users to phase out Rosetta 2, which in a container-heavy world is more or less required for developers due to the ecosystem of ARM64 Linux containers being nowhere near as widespread as for AMD x86-64 ones, and which keeps many applications runnable that otherwise wouldn't be?

This is what tells me I'm completely misaligned with Apple's vision of the future.

Why would I want an OS that aspires to prevent me from running perfectly good software that runs very well??? And at a time when even smartphones are starting to run x86 software well!

That's literally the opposite of what I want from a computer. If I have to choose between losing Mac software vs losing x86 software it is much easier to leave Mac software behind.

"Preventing users from running the software they want to run" seems like such an anti-feature, yet every major system seems to be moving quickly in this direction. I feel like general purpose computing is going to be on life support, soon.

Every time I see a comment on the state of Tahoe I look wearily at my current install of Sequoia. I'll have to update at some point. But I'll hold out as long as I can...

I did it today. It took me thirty minutes to fix the networking because I couldn't get Little Snitch to uninstall since it didn't seem to be compatible. Basically I had to reboot in recovery mode to disable security features (csr) to uninstall Little Snitch (via systemextensionsctl). This is the worst update I've ever gone through on Mac, and I started using a Macintosh SE.

As far as I know Little Snitch uses a user-space Network Extension, which uses a public API added by Apple to the OS specifically to help devs move out of kernel space.

In the past, MacOS has automatically made a folder of incompatible software that it leaves on the desktop. Little Snitch seems like something that could have been tested.

It is a commonly used extension, which was restricted so that I could no longe remove it. What's more odd is that supposedly I was running the latest version.

They've done something with the printer system in Tahoe. Brother removed support for native drivers on certain label printers on Tahoe (!!!) when you go searching you find other printer issues.

Like, why. Why would you need to change the printer system? It works.. has worked for a very long time, there's no reasonable need to change it.

This might've been a side effect of removing support for third-party kernel extensions rather than something changing with the printer system specifically.

I have an old (~10 years old) printer that Cannon stopped supplying updated macOS drivers for several years ago. The installer for the drivers failed so I had to extract the files from the package and install them manually. In the end only the network drivers work, the USB drivers are kexts which won't run.

Oh man! I came here to complain about printing! I just discovered yesterday that you can no longer drag and drop print jobs from one printer to another. Apparently you can move a print job via some command line stuff but it just ended up deleting the jobs entirely. The only reasons I found this out is because the printer which had been working fine moments before just stopped working after replacing toner. No amount of deleting and re-padding the printer or power cycling either machine fixed it. One time the whole OS just froze and I had to force reboot. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon trying to get one 3 page document to print. To be fair, I haven’t had problems with this setup for 10+ years but when it went south it also went to the remote frigid corners of Antarctica.

Apple needs a 50% purge in headcount. Yes, they have so much money they don't need to but the organizational bloat there is on another level. The issues brought up in the article have been going on for decades and the right people are needed to address these things.

Apart from the mess it caused for iPhone and Mac, my watch upgraded last night to 26 flavor. I am not kidding - I can't see anything on the screen now before coffee. Watch has become completely useless for my early morning eyes.

What they did to Watch is much worse than what they did to iPhone and Mac

This will sound like hyperbole, but the direction on iOS and watchOS led directly to me selling my watch and giving my son my phone. I agree it's worse with watchOS.

Apple are so stubborn and persistent in the way they choose directions. I realized I'd rather move on than be stuck with that mess for years. It's wild.

I still use macOS but I'm steadily finding ways off. Weird times. I've been deeply embedded in the apple platform for over 25 years.

I think I sensed things were meaningfully changing around 2020 (I can't recall exactly), but my sense of the ongoing decline is way more rapid than I anticipated back then. Maybe it started and gained momentum earlier than I realized.

ATP spent like an hour complaining about workouts on watchOS 26; if they’re railing against the machine something is very broken.

Since Apple turns 50 this year, I went looking for a graphic that symbolizes what I always liked about Apple and the Mac, without implying I condone anything I dislike about them.

Here's my vector reproduction of the logo for MacAddict's and Guy Kawasaki's "EvangeList", circa 1997 :

https://rezmason.net/evangelist.svg

Tahoe has this really cool clipboard history feature that just does not work on my work laptop. Maybe some corporate keep-me-safe-ware is preventing it from working but my third-party app, Maccy, has no problem at all, so I guess it's just Apple being Apple these days.

I also held out for as long as possible using Safari, but I had to switch to Firefox. Every once in a while I forget the reason I switched and try to switch back and then get reminded. I'm currently in a "I can't remember the reason, but I'm too lazy to go find out" phase. I'm also one of those weirdos that liked the Safari compact tabs and I'm sad they removed it.

You need to make sure Files is being indexed, I think the Documents directory indexing, for the clipboard history to work.

I (reluctantly) gave up on the Mac several years ago. Being on a PC might initially seem clunky and unrefined but it is actually very freeing to be able to choose my manufacturer, the OS, components, have tons of ports available, compatibility with older hardware (especially low res monitors). Standards and modularity are a beautiful thing.

Apple has created a social system - the company which causes this. Perhaps it could be called "The Next Big Thing" syndrome. In the past this worked for Apple. Unfortunately creating the "Next Big Thing" requires a creative process they collectively do not understand and are not able to instantiate. They could adopt another strategy, but doing so would be an admission that they do not have a clue. So instead they follow a cargo-cult system of enacting the side trappings without understanding the functionality.

Personally my guess is the core of the problem is their contempt for the users. The willingness to act directly against the best interest of the users, as this article points out so well, is bewildering. You just have to wonder that a company so large, with so much money and so many resources can be so utterly dysfunctional.

The iPhone, the iPod, the early Macs all demonstrated a profound understanding and care for users. And now? Contempt.

Oh well.

Yeah this resonates with me. Every single point.

Every time they fuck something I move the workload over to Linux, not out of enthusiasm or any ideological purity but because I need to do some damn work. Add in the current geopolitical shit show, rising surveillance culture and the constant push for MRR and the whole "ecosystem" idea of computing and cloud becomes quite distasteful and risky.

A monumental moment recently was Reminders which has a horrible bug in it since Tahoe where you are entering several tasks in the scheduled view and you hit enter and carry on typing and it doesn't register the enter until several keypresses later, splitting the last word you typed between two tasks. This is a very very minor but utterly annoying thing which has broken my workflow. I was so fucked off with this happening every day I pulled a sheet of paper out of my printer and just wrote everything on that. And I've been doing that for 4 months now. Reminders is dead. I forget things like I did before, but I get over that.

One day I'll wake up and not use the Mac. The iPad and Apple Watch are already gone.

> you are entering several tasks in the scheduled view and you hit enter and carry on typing and it doesn't register the enter until several keypresses later

I have been experiencing this type of bug since forever when renaming files. Enter (to switch to renaming mode), start typing, first 1-3 letters are missing.

Each version has had its share of quirks.

Other than the dumbing down of the UI and that kind of stuff, Tahoe seems to run fine. Safari seems to have more bugs than usual, though.

I’m in a camp where Tahoe is just ugly, but worked fine on my mac and with my usage and devices. On the other hand, iOS 26 is so incredibly bad. Anything from anti-user choices, UI glitches, to keyboard… it’s tiring. It might be the one where I’m pushed to a different OS for the first time. I doubt Apple can fix itself in the near future, with the leadership they have.

I run all the betas on my macbook air just to see where things are going. When I first installed Tahoe, I thought to myself, I guess it's just the beta, there's no way they are going to keep this look...

My workstation is pinned firmly to sequoia right now and will be until it's untenable or they undo their new UI design direction, which is, as you pointed out, ghastly.

macOS is in desperate need of another snow leopard. Theres a very good reason they did a zero feature OS cycle that year. It was unsustainable pumping out so many changes year after year.

We're in a way worse position now as they rushed out all the comically poor UI updates (Why do I still have 6 different border radiuses, and about 40 different icon packs being used on the default damn applications?) and the half baked AI crap that I've yet to see anyone use.

This has been the first year in a very long time that I’ve thought about leaving macOS. They seem to have lost the plot on software and documentation.

It might be nice for someone to crowd source a reasonable list of features they need to improve or document. Could get traction.

I still have my childhood/family's Macintosh II, been a lifelong fan of Apple (warranted or not doesn't really matter), Tahoe and the rest of the version 26 updates have left such a bad taste in my mouth that I'm considering swtiching to Linux. Not sure what I'll do for a phone, but I'm actively replacing Apple, apps, workflows etc with stuff that will work on Linux to switch if it doesn't get fixed soon.

TBH I plan downgrade i.e. recovery. I wanted Tahoe because apparently it contains Rosetta with x86-64-v3 support but more I need it in my work, so home computer will be reinstated.

Btw isn't Rosetta going to be left but only for gaming and containerisation?

I thought you could only do it if you have own TM backup. Do they offer cloud recovery for older versions?

Part of my focus to begin this year has been identifying cross platform replacements for any Apple native apps I still use, with a preference for open source and self hosted (where possible). The one I can't seem to fully kick is Apple Reminders, but I've been able to replace pretty much everything else.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. What keeps me on mac, however, is the hardware seems so much better than the alternatives. I'd love a macbook quality linux laptop.

“For at least 10 years, every Time Machine set up I have been in charge of, or tasked with maintaining for someone else, has eventually run into an issue where it stops backing up successfully.”

Is this with or without feedback that backing up wasn’t successful?

Writing has been on the wall for some time now. It's completely unsuitable for serious work, or serious play. I had a massive rant written but it isn't worth it. Fuck em

The M2 and M5 minis I have are the nicest drink coasters I've ever owned.

I have unresolved radars old enough to drive, go to war, or even vote at this point. They used to blame Intel's TB controllers. Guess what? They make their own now and the same fucking issues persist! Enjoy the kernel panics

Apple hasn't been able to ship software in decades.

They got bored of computing. Writing was on the wall when they started producing movies because Hollywood people are cooler than nerds and hey why earn a giant cash pile if not for some execs to have fun with it.

This is a company which hasn't done anything meaningful to innovate since Steve Jobs died.

Yeah I have all Apple gear. It's fine. Whatever. Nicest commodity on the block. But they could have done so much more in the last 15 years.

To be fair, apple silicon is quite an innovation. Or did you mean only software?

Perhaps, Rosetta 2 and the hypervisor/container thingy? Those are pretty cool.

Apple Silicon and Rosetta 2 are amazing precisely because the One Eye of Cupertino isn’t watching them so they can get real work done.

Everyone else is mandated to make things unlickable.

Tahoe introduced some changes to the windowing code that badly disrupted my DisplayPort device that was rock solid on Sequoia. I ended up switching to a new device as a workaround. Window memory use (I have a lot of virtual desktops and extra screens) is much higher and there's a peristent bug where taking a screenshot with CleanShot somehow resets the DisplayPort driver and everything flips out for a minute and it has to rediscover the external monitors. Infuriating.

Another issue I wanted to rant about is sleep. My last three desktop macs (Mac mini i7, iMac 5k, Mac Studio M2 Max) would with 50% probability wake up seconds after clicking “Sleep”. I have gotten used to having to do a “double sleep” routine.

I have an M4 Max Mac Studio, and my record is 5 clicks. I found the success rate much improved after I assigned a keyboard shortcut; I have had it quickly wake up again a couple of times, so it's still not quite perfect, but that's very much the exception now.

Some tiny bit of input from the mouse, which I'm possibly not holding quite perfectly still post-click, perhaps? I can only assume so. The odd thing about it, though: none of my laptop Macs had this problem, even though I am using the same keyboard, the same mouse, and the same USB hub. Something must be different, somewhere. I wonder what.

Absent the Satanists who run California and the nation conducting a dark ritual to summon Steve Jobs back from the abyss, the chances of him saving Apple from total enshittification collapse again the way he did the first time are slim to none. It's peak Apple fan to grouse about how rotten everything is in the Fruit Empire, and then conclude "Welp, nothing to be done for it except smoke hopium that Apple somehow gets better."

Hint: This is what happens when you commit to joining any single company's ecosystem. No matter if it's Apple, Microsoft, Google, Commodore, or frickin' IBM. At some point, the beancounters are going to smother what drew you to them in the first place, and find ways to nickel-and-dime you whilst flipping the table on you UX-wise hoping to tap some rich vein of unconverted users to continue the illusion of quarterly growth.

I've run IT at two different multi-hundred million dollar companies (IT director 15+ years and help desk before that). I want Mac users to know that using a Mac, if you aren't very tech savvy, can have a dramatically negative impact on your career.

When yours is the only computer in the meeting that can't load the graphics network share, and you're the graphics expert, your boss will be calling IT and sternly asking why. He/she will learn that the MacOS has known issues with basic file sharing in business networks, among other annoying problems that you keep contacting about, and that Apple will never fix. Your boss will discover that IT recommended that you use a Windows machine, and provided you with viable workflows that meet or exceed all of the needs for your work responsibilities. And that other users don't have these issues when following their guidance. But, you opted for a Mac despite all of that.

Your boss will sigh. They will carry that sigh into how they perceive you. They will bring up how annoying your situation is every time they talk with IT.

I've heard this exact conversation or many other similar conversations 100s of times in my career. I've heard your boss sigh.

Do yourself a favor. If you aren't very technical, don't damage your career over something stupid like which OS you're using. It's the wrong hill to die on.

This would ring slightly true to me if it was say 20-30 years ago, but Apple are in many ways the IBM of end user business machines now and vast numbers of corporate drones have MacBooks - the rough edges are long ago sanded off.

An IT team that treats Mac users this way today is just a bad IT team.

Disagree. Explaining that they can't fix Apple's Samba implementation isn't "treating Mac users this way" such as to be called a "bad IT team." Or the rest of the laundry list of bugs in the post. How do you recommend an IT team should handle Apple's inability to function for basic business file sharing so that the user's boss doesn't think less of the end user or the IT team?

They are being friendly, and objective. Their job is to fix problems so that employees can be productive. It's not to lie for them, or to them. It's Apple's marketing team who has that job. You'll notice they don't do much in the way of advertising to IT directors and business decision makers. Their focus is college kids, specifically graphic designers and iOS app developers. It's definitely not businesses.

IBM? These are software issues. IBM doesn't make desktop operating systems for end users. Do you mean Microsoft? Apple never was and still isn't the Microsoft of business OS. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

Of course I mean IBM - my point is the sheer volume of hardware Apple have sold to enterprise markets in the last 10 years. If things were as close to as bad as you describe this simply wouldn't be the case. IDC and others have Apple's marketshare in US enterprise markets at 23-25 percent as long ago as 2021 - using a Mac has long ceased to be an unusual or troublesome choice in business environments and I would be extremely unimpressed by any IT staff making these arguments today.

If familiar with Apple's history, the IBM example was deliberately chosen. Once upon a time one would have seen an army of IBM desktops in the enterprise, much like the MacBook today...

> https://osxdaily.com/2011/12/30/young-steve-jobs-gives-ibm-t...

IBM is not a good comparison, as I mentioned, because we're talking about Apple's OS software being bad for its users' careers. I don't think that's ever been the case for IBM or Microsoft. Anyway, the hardware is irrelevant.

> If things were as close to as bad as you describe this simply wouldn't be the case.

Selling stuff means you have good marketing, not good products. Microsoft isn't better than Apple because they sell more software, right?

So, I don't follow your logic on that point at all. I have 20% of my current employee base running Mac OS. Why would that imply that they are a good career choice for the end user to make in a desktop OS? It implies they are the 1 in 5 who will be left out of the discussion and then complain that their computer wasn't working.

That 20% accounts for much more than their fair share of help desk interactions. And their boss still sighs when they come up in conversation. Why would you advise anyone to shoot themselves in the foot like that?

And more importantly, how dare you judge my IT department (friendly joking tone here)? But seriously, do you have a solution to make Apple's Samba implementation work?

That's kind of a critical component for business if you're going to say that Apple is so good for business like IBM/Microsoft. Wouldn't you say?

Given one can only run Apple's software on their own machines, whether we talk about OS sales or hardware sales, we are talking about the same thing. Are you really prepared to argue 25 percent of the corporate computer market userbase are sabotaging their careers? I'd argue thats absurd, personally.

I'm not responding to the Samba critique because millions of people share files at work between virtually any OS and Macs, every day, just fine. Would I like Apple's Samba implementation to be better? Sure.

There are many studies that prove the opposite of your point, including one from IBM, and find the modern Mac significantly cheaper to support than Windows machines in business environments with less helpdesk tickets to boot:

https://www.jamf.com/resources/press-releases/ibm-announces-...

Also this IBM article predates Apple's abandonment of AFP. That's a huge kick in the argument. At this time, Apple worked for file sharing, at least. It had many other problems for businesses at the time, though. But less so for medium ones, more for big ones. So I'm still surprised to read that from IBM.

Here's more recent research to the contrary.

https://prowessconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/PCs...

I don't go by any of this stuff, though. It's all marketing. I have my own data and experience to work with. And I've given some hard to debate examples where it's a problem for one's career, and it's not one their IT department, or whomever I'm talking to here can help them with.

They had deprecated, but still supported it for several OS versions afterwards.

Big deployment in that article. I would guess we can find similar size deployments from Microsoft to the contrary. Again, it's all marketing. I wouldn't make decisions based on that. You should be looking at your data as an organization and making decisions based on the entirety of your infrastructure.

And the same goes for individual employees. If you work in a company where most people are on Macs, where you're not the odd duck with problems, maybe it's a smarter move for you.

But most people aren't at those companies. And for those people, being the odd duck with problems that can't get to the file share, or the guy with slower access to files than the coworkers you're competing with, might be the difference between "That guy always nails it. What's his name?" and "Omg, this dude always has problems sharing files. Just go up and present it for him. This is embarrassing. In front of clients? Next time John should present."

Trust me, you would rather be John in that situation. And as a non-technical user, you're likely going to find yourself in made for Windows presentation situations more often. There are simply more of them.

Mac OS X Server is discontinued. It's not for business, unless your business is entirely cloud operated. That might be okay if your company is so big that you get Apple products and theirs or someone's cloud offerings for nearly free. But it's not practical for most companies of any size. Especially when you consider the delays caused by opening large files over the internet.

I don't think it's absurd. I've watched as they get skipped over for the graphics guy that uses Windows, can share files in meetings, and quickly interacts with their coworkers. And, honestly, why would you promote the guy that can't do that? I can't disagree with it. We should be promoting pragmatic thinkers that get stuff done, not people that intentionally choose machines with problems or make other such bad choices in life and in business.

Again, tell me about Samba. How do you call a machine with major problems interacting with a business network, a business computer?

(Should I answer that question? You blame the IT team, and say it's a business computer based on the sales data. It's all very illogical.)

>millions of people share files at work between virtually any OS and Macs

Right. Using cloud solutions. That's not practical in many applications, especially where medium and large businesses are concerned. You're going to make them download large files from the cloud every time they want to open them while their Windows counterparts are streaming those same files over a 10G fiber drop to the server?

Which one makes more sense here? One of these users is getting promoted. It's not the guy working the slowest, usually.

Anyway, the request to make Samba work comes from the users. I didn't go looking for a problem to solve, right? I prefer it when my phone doesn't ring, my pay being fixed and all.

The first 6 paragraphs of this post start like this:

    For at least 10 years ...
    For several years, ...
    For a few months...
    For several years, ...
    For a year or so, ...
    For several years, ...

Exactly. Guess what: I've been on Apple for 26 years. iOS 26 is already a shit show, the new Watch OS even more so, and never ever will I allow it to update my main work platform, my Macbook Pro, to something which promises to be even worse.