A few macOS betas ago, a bunch of sites started failing to play video for me in Safari. Disney+, Netflix, YouTube and some other sites will sit at a black screen for a few seconds and then give me an error. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes certain videos will reliably fail while others reliably work fine. I thought this was related to Safari's autoplay protections, but I tried giving permission to autoplay all videos and that doesn't seem to change anything. Not sure if that fits the definition of a Snow Leopard update. If so, Apple needs at least a few more Snow Leopard updates at this rate. I'd also like to see them fix the issue where Liquid Glass uses a downscaled background image even at the most transparent setting. (Except for Siri AI which they seem to have added a special exception for, exactly because the downscaling is super ugly)
Maybe, but it's weird that it started across all these different sites after an OS update. Netflix finally stopped accusing me of not being in the "household", but trying to disable Private Relay hasn't been able to fix a video not playing.
I imagine the author saw this release as "macOS Tahoe but not sucky"
I liken it to Windows Vista and Windows 7. Although fundamentally similar operating systems under the hood, Windows 7 smoothed out Vista's kinks and brought forth additional polish.
I wouldn't mind if they (unofficially) adopted a tick-tock release cycle. New features on even years, refinement and under-the-hood changes on odd years.
If only KDE actually paid attention to UX and maybe cared about the looks and consistency a bit more. I'm sorry for being blunt but their visual design people's have no taste...
There's little margins and whitespace and this bothered me like hell before making the switch. It's funny, now I kind of like it. A lot is happening too. The latest Plasma had a very high degree of polish IMO.
It's far more consistent than Windows 11, but you have to pick Qt/KDE software, not GTK/GNOME for that to be true. I always choose the more KDE native option.
Seriously KDE is so extremely ugly and dated looking compared to macOS, GNOME and even modern Windows. I don’t care about the 30 million configurable options if it looks like a total eyesore. You’d think they’d put some effort into a consistent style / UI framework.
People hate on GNOME for its rigidity but it’s the one desktop actually trying somewhat to provide Linux with an environment that the average person (not an HN user) won’t immediately turn their nose up in disgust at.
Like a decade for me now. I don’t read or watch anything anymore. I just buy whatever the new version is when I need it and live with it. I yearn for something truly exciting, groundbreaking, and accessible (price) from Apple. iPod era was so dope.
Yesterday I managed to update a 2015 MacBookAir7,2 from El Capitan (last update Sep. 2015) to Sonoma (last update Aug 6th 2026). I was excited when it finally worked.
Thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher who show that not supporting old devices is a choice made by Apple.
OCLP is excellent but it's all coming to an end for Intel Macs unfortunately. Even Homebrew just dropped the ball a few days ago (this is the final draw for me, I'll keep a Sequoia partition but my MBP2015 daily drives on NixOS + GNOME)
I've been pleasantly surprised with Golden Gate. It's fresh-looking, works well, got rid of a lot of the ugly flat stuff they did over the last few releases (pre-Tahoe), supports more hidpi modes that make my work machine better...
But honestly, I don't think the average person should feel excitement for an OS release; boring means it just works and they don't have to learn a bunch of new features and different ways of doing things.
I'm stuck trying to figure out what new stuff they could add. Sidecar was neat, but I never need it. I'm very happy on Cinnamon on Linux, which is probably less featured than KDE (haven't daily driven it to confirm), which just confirms I don't actually need or want user-facing new features. I need stability.
I think Apple realise this. There are no genuine new OS features to be added, so they just shuffle things around so that things are changing and thus seem fresh and hip. For anyone who cares about stability and doesn't want to relearn everything they shuffle around, this is nothing but a negative, but Apple et al. have no other levers to pull (well, there's the AI lever, but that's also generally not a positive in and of itself).
Maybe there are new OS features that could be useful, but creating and integrating them in a way that's actually helpful is just such an ordeal that nobody will do it.
Window management (and indeed, desktop environments in general) are rather subjective I think. As someone who's been using Macs in some capacity since 1996 I'd be upset if macOS suddenly resembled a traditional Windows desktop or tiling WM thing, and the absence of Mac-like desktops on Linux (no, GNOME and elementary/Pantheon are not that) is one of the primary factors keeping me from switching.
Window management got better in Mac os but only recently with the addition of window snapping. You could do it before, but you had to drag from the green stoplight button which was an annoying mouse target vs the entire top bar.
Personally I do like the windows approach where there's a bar at the top with a few preselected zones you can use that shows up when dragging a window but the state of things on Mac os now is fine enough that things like that can reasonably be left up to extensions.
What exactly do you miss about the Mac desktops when using gnome's? For me the only thing I've noticed is lack of independent desktops per monitor though Windows also suffers that deficiency.
What exactly do you miss about the Mac desktops when using gnome's? For me the only thing I've noticed is lack of independent desktops per monitor though Windows also suffers that deficiency.
No independent desktops is indeed a big one and irks me just as much under Windows (which somehow in 2026 still can't even set per-monitor desktop pictures without glueing images together in Paint).
On a whole, GNOME is just too simplistic. Where the Mac Way™ (especially in the 2000s) is thoughtfully implemented progressive disclosure of advanced features, the GNOME Way™ is to check if they make the cut for the app's toolbar or "junk drawer" hamburger menu and if not, strip the feature entirely.
It almost feels like they took a tablet OS and then adapted it somewhat to desktop use. That's the vibe I get from the DE itself as well as from the barebones (if pretty) apps that its community tends to produce. It's not as locked down as a tablet OS obviously — there's full fat Linux sitting underneath after all — but I'm always fighting it trying to turn it into a proper desktop experience with GNOME Tweaks and extensions (which constantly break).
An easy way to see the difference in philosophies is to compare the number of settings surfaced in GNOME Settings to that of the settings app for any Mac OS made in the past 20 years. GNOME Settings offers relatively little to tweak where System (Preferences|Settings) has a list that's closer (though not as long) to that of the KDE Settings app.
And of course, no global menubar. KDE lets users enable this but unfortunately many apps do not populate it.
It almost feels like they took a tablet OS and then adapted it somewhat to desktop use.
GNOME is designed to be touch-agnostic, which makes better use of padded UIs than macOS 11+ does. With a rumored touchscreen Macbook still coming down the line, I think GTK and the GNOME developers skated to where the puck was headed. macOS and iPadOS are both constrained for touchscreen users. GNOME is kinda the perfect UI for where Apple sees hardware converging.
I don't think GNOME can adopt any more macOS idiosyncrasies without being a worse holistic experience. The Overview/search accelerator on the Super key is faster than Spotlight search. The desktop switcher is a better-supported use of the menubar than forcing an unsupported global cluster. GNOME could try to cram these round pegs into their square hole, but they know it wouldn't improve things.
And that’s fair, GNOME doesn’t need to be a macOS-alike, but it’d be nice if something was!
As an aside, I have yet to be convinced that touch on desktop operating systems makes any kind of sense and the MacBook Ultra or whatever it ends up being called is unlikely to change my opinion on that. I much prefer an old-style low-whitespace, data-dense, pointer-first UI like OS X used to have. I’m tired of the virtual real estate on my screens declining year after year for the sake of functionality I’ll never use.
Someone who does need a window system can use many of the hundreds of tools available, or use something custom. Regular uses don't really care about window management systems.
On some level, this is probably something your terminal emulator should handle, just as your web browser should handle a mess of 22 tabs, but I don't think we've really come up with good solutions there either. It's hard to implement features nobody's though of.
FWIW I use aerospace and break up those 22 windows into ~4-6 windows with ~3-5 tabs each, then move each window to a different virtual workspace that I switch to with option + hotkey like opt+1, opt+2, opt+3 or even opt+D and so on
Cinnamon was what I used before KDE, I like KDE a great deal but I also liked Cinnamon a great deal, if I had to go back it wouldn't cause me any issues, I only switched for Wayland support.
So if you are happy on Cinnamon stay there (and it's Wayland support has caught up a lot).
They both do an excellent job of not causing me pain, working the way I want and respecting me as a user, that's what a DE should be, if I have to consider the DE more than in passing it's failing at been a DE.
Early on with OSX I would update early because the new features in the OS were truely interesting (AFP, Dtrace, Spotlight, Early Siri, Messages sync with iPhone). Yes all very developer oriented, but I am a developer and that's primarily what I use my machines for. Releases like Snow Leopard and Tiger were full of novel features. Now I find most of the copy is dedicated to things I couldn't care less about like generative AI images or questionable redesigns of the UI.
I would love a review of the new developer and OS level features for macOS releases. The WWDC content is close to unwatchable, it never goes into enough depth and the video only delivery is not the primary way I want to consume technical content. Give me the cool highlights of the virtualisation framework, what still works with Dtrace , explain the infernal code signing permissions system, etc.
So far I've kept to Sequoia as the least annoying version, and avoided the Liquid Glass rounded corners mess.
Debian+KDE here. It's what I use to get away from OS excitement. I miss the 90's when nobody ever updated anything, and if they did it was on purpose and not something that happened behind your back.
For example, the other day Google "updated" the clock/alarm/timer app on Android with pointless and annoying changes. A clock app does not need an update, ever.
"But..." No! /usr/share/zoneinfo handles that. Stop it.
Snow Leopard is right up there with System 7.5.3 for me. I’m happy with their current OS trends compared to the flat OS trend of the past decade. They definitely need detail work and I think they default to turning features on that I would prefer off. Many of the new features I don’t use come off as a spastic GUI.
Snow Leopard was solid, but when I went back and used it I was surprised by how I missed some little bits of polish that'd been added since.
My ideal would probably be Mavericks 10.9.5 with the Leopard/Snow Leopard 2D grid virtual desktop model hacked back in. The linear version of Spaces that's been in place since 10.7 is needlessly simplistic.
File renaming. What Forklift or other dedicated file renamer comes as a standard with both Dolphin and KRename. Latter can drive circles around what's available in macOS, in any form.
AudioCD ripping: kio:// protocol has a native ripper. Just drag and drop. Settings are integrated to system settings directly. Which format do you want? Yes.
Remote connections: While finder can connect to servers, but FTP read access and SFTP requires external apps. IOW, what Cyberduck provides is already available in Dolphin, again.
KDE's standard window management capabilities need Magnet or something more advanced in macOS.
Git/SVN/CVS needs external tools in macOS. Dolphin can detect these repositories and let you work on them on the spot.
KRunner is arguably more Capable than spotlight in some cases. Needs another fair shake though.
If you add your mail accounts and calendars to KDE via KMail or something else, they become available system-wide. macOS is good in that regard, but KDE is betterer. If you use KMail, your mail will sync at the background even though your mail client is not running.
You need to buy another application to be able to edit id3 tags of audio files, but KDE has kid3. I even use its macOS version because it's that good.
I'll not get into customization capabilities, because they are fundamentally different and worlds apart, but this is due to their philosophy.
Keyboard shortcut management are equally powerful in both, AFAICS. macOS used to lag there.
K3b is infinitely more capable than macOS optical media authoring tools.
These are what I can remember with my tired brain, away from my KDE system for the day. The thing is, both side by side, I mostly prefer KDE because I can work way faster on that one, and it's not I'm hating macOS or anything, and as I said, using both for a very long time.
The apps I have given as examples are KDE's default apps and maintained by KDE project themselves. They are part of the default installation.
Homebrew/nix: The most obvious one. MacOS just has no good package manager. It's even worse than Windows, which is also pretty bad, but at least on Windows you can install an app and manage it in a central "Add and Remove Programs" view, and they've standardized an installer format that cares about and manages versions and upgrades.
Middle Click: This is a galling one.
Rectangle: Far better than the MacOS's native snapping, which is half-assed.
AltTab: MacOS's keyboard driven app and window switching are terrible. It feels like they don't test for use that's not entirely mouse-based.
Mac Mouse Fix/LinearMouse: Real mouse support on MacOS sucks, and the unified settings between mouse and trackpad really sucks when you have to occasionally use both and don't want them to behave identically.
Karabiner: MacOS's keyboard mapping is incredibly underpowered.
AeroSpace/yabai: I don't use these anymore, because these also were pretty buggy for my use case; instead, I just use MacOS without Spaces. I hate MacOS window management, but find it less painful if I just lean heavily on tmux. MacOS Spaces are completely broken, especially on multi-monitor. They never do what you expect. I could write a screed on exactly how broken they are, but I won't in this post.
Ice (might be sketchy now; had an ownership change): Lack of menu bar overflow on MacOS is awful. I have icons that just disappear into the notch and can not be clicked, and there's not space for much, especially if you use something like Stats to see resource use.
BetterDisplay+MonitorControl: Non-retina monitor management on MacOS is bad.
SoundSource: Per-app audio control just doesn't exist otherwise.
These are all things that work fine out of the box on KDE and even Gnome. MacOS, for a very UI-focused OS, is simply terrible to use graphically if you're not baby-ducked into it from a young age. I've been using it for years at work (because my options are MacOS and Windows, and MacOS for all its flaws is still less painful than Windows), and I still can't get used to all the bad decisions. Spaces are the most shocking example of something that should work that doesn't, and they still don't fix it year after year.
I dread new macOS releases, because it signifies one year less support for my current version (I'm on Sequoia now, having jumped from Ventura) being supported.
Every new version wrecks my workflow a little. macOS 28 will partially remove Rosetta 2, which means that I'll need to find replacements for some of the ancient Intel apps that never got updated to Apple Silicon.
I've never had so much stuff break than with the macOS updates. I can get some of it, like drivers or programs hooking onto OS features that change. But so much "normal" software just breaks. Or can't even run without the dev recompiling for the new ui kit version or something. While on Windows I can run any random old tool not touched in two decades and it'll work.
10.5 Leopard because 10.4 Tiger was my first interaction with Mac OS X and it blew me away. I couldn't wait to see what was next and how they could improve upon perfection.
All of my stuff updated to the 27 versions today. During indoor cycling class, I kept getting health alerts on my watch about high heart rate while stationary. Despite currently having the very same apple watch tracking my indoor cycling workout.
heart recovery is one of several headline new features they mention on first run (and in app ref info) will calibrate over time
as often the case when Apple makes its move, their implementations -- while late compared to e.g. Garmin which has had them for years -- purport to be leading accuracy on these features among wearables
I’m not a particularly big fan of generative AI. I do not use and have never used it at any stage of the research, outlining, or writing process for any article I’ve ever written, except for the times when I’m testing it so I can write about it.
This is wild from a "tech" site. I used to read their articles fairly religiously, but this bent by their writers and commenters is really telling, and a signal to start looking elsewhere.
What does it tell you? It gives me much more confidence in their output tbh. Reading generated text is unpleasant; feels like mediated and averaged-out humanity.
Continuing the quote gives more context, which I agree with:
"The obviously AI-generated flyers that come home from school with my kid or that get circulated around neighborhood groups strike me as benign but deeply tacky; the kinds of AI-generated images that get passed around by politicians online don’t even have the benefit of being benign.
More than anything, I’m just tired of seeing it everywhere, tired of being on the lookout for it, tired of it polluting every stream of information I have access to. Wasting time actively trying to avoid auto-generated slop is now a daily fixture of my life."
Obviously, one should be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it, and much like any tool that can be misused, just because some malign actor (or dumb actor) uses it "wrong" doesn't mean you should also not use it.
It costs money, but I've been enjoying my Pangram subscription for this. Saves me slop on the internet and confirms whether or not my colleagues' words are what i'm reading or not.
It's not to write the article. I would hope they don't do that; I wouldn't want to read it.
But I do want them using it to help them research, find interesting contrary views on a subject, gut-check assertions (how many weirdly wrong statements in articles would have been caught by feeding it to an LLM and asking it to question unfounded or incorrect claims?), check technical accuracy of things outside the writer's core domain, track interview transcripts, search/summarize across prior work, do data exploration of public/government reports. Etc. It's a very empowering tool for journalism!
Instead, it's become a religious issue that is more or less at the level of "one drop" theory.
"...Golden Gate needed a whopping 17GB more space on the M1 MacBook Air, thanks to a mandatory multi-gigabyte language model download that kicks in automatically the first time you connect a freshly restored Golden Gate Mac to the Internet."
This is the main thing stopping me from updating iOS/macOS. It's completely unacceptable to park a bunch of space on my devices right when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been.
My phone is on iOS 26, and even with Apple Intelligence turned off, there's ~13GB made unusable. My phone ran out of space while recording a bike trip, and yet the model I have no use for remained.
Yes, the disrespect Apple/Google/MS has for their users (on equipment they have purchased!) is palpable. They seem to have a real sense of entitlement these days.
It used to be universally accepted that losing or corrupting user data was a (if not THE) cardinal sin in development.
In many ways we get what we tolerate, but the lack of viable alternatives in some spaces (esp cellphones and TVs) makes it very hard to hold the big players to any kind of account economically. At least no one is holding a gun to our heads to use MacOS or other proprietary systems on our desktops/laptops/servers for the most part.
If there is no way to remove this 17 GB model, then the OS is simply not for me anymore. I'll stick with Sequoia for another year and use it until it stops receiving security updates and then I'm back to being a full-time Linux user.
Phones should have separate storage for their OS so that when you buy a specific phone with specific storage it actually is that much storage available to the user
Maybe macOS 26 was lot bigger... but I went straight from Sequoia to Golden Gate and freed up like 30 GBs. I didn't have enough disk space to download the update prior, so the extra 30 GB wasn't that... but could've been caches I guess. I assumed it was dropping Intel?
The real problem with iOS is that there’s no way to clear an app’s cache without uninstalling it. Every non-indie internet-connected app on my phone has a massive and unneeded cache that consumes gigabytes of space.
I've found today after going to MacOS27 (I skipped 26 fully) that Chrome extensions don't load properly. They're super, super slow. I've found one or two other bug reports of this from older Dev builds but that's it. Bizarre. Time to flip back to Safari I suppose.
Will I get prompted to give Chrome permissions to the Local Network on every update? This is literally the one feature I'd like from Apple because I'm happy with everything else. The update looks cool, but nothing I actually want/need.
So happy they’ve finally added Ethernet status to the menu bar. It has always bugged me there wasn’t an easy way to quickly check if my Mac was using Ethernet or not
That may have been true in the past, and I usually wait for the first point release, but macOS and iOS 27 seem to be a definite improvement. My 5 year old phone is much snappier!
Hmm, I remember when Ars Technica macOS reviews were the gold standard. This one isn't bad, but I miss having more in-depth information about the improvements.
In my opinion, the details here complement the Ars Technica article nicely:
Agreed. While Andrew's done an okay job stepping into some big shoes, I too miss the reviews John Siracusa used to do for Ars. Same could be said for a lot of the old internet when you had people like Siracusa, Anand Lal Shimpi at AnandTech among others, providing very detailed deep dives on the latest technology.
Golden Gate is our second consecutive release named for a body of water, following a stretch of releases named for towns/regions (Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma, Sequoia)
A few macOS betas ago, a bunch of sites started failing to play video for me in Safari. Disney+, Netflix, YouTube and some other sites will sit at a black screen for a few seconds and then give me an error. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes certain videos will reliably fail while others reliably work fine. I thought this was related to Safari's autoplay protections, but I tried giving permission to autoplay all videos and that doesn't seem to change anything. Not sure if that fits the definition of a Snow Leopard update. If so, Apple needs at least a few more Snow Leopard updates at this rate. I'd also like to see them fix the issue where Liquid Glass uses a downscaled background image even at the most transparent setting. (Except for Siri AI which they seem to have added a special exception for, exactly because the downscaling is super ugly)
Hey sorry to be the debugging guy in the comments, but maybe your network issues could be related to iCloud relay? I’ve had similar issues
Maybe, but it's weird that it started across all these different sites after an OS update. Netflix finally stopped accusing me of not being in the "household", but trying to disable Private Relay hasn't been able to fix a video not playing.
No. It wouldn't. Snow Leopard was two years in the making, and then took another few years to actually become the Snow Leopard people remember.
Fixing some transparency and re-drawing a few icons is not a Snow Leopard release.
Like, which features in this 150000-character blog post actually warrant the title of "Snow Leopard release"?
I think people are referring to the speed improvements touted by Apple https://www.newegg.com/insider/ios-27-performance-boost-ever...
I imagine the author saw this release as "macOS Tahoe but not sucky"
I liken it to Windows Vista and Windows 7. Although fundamentally similar operating systems under the hood, Windows 7 smoothed out Vista's kinks and brought forth additional polish.
I wouldn't mind if they (unofficially) adopted a tick-tock release cycle. New features on even years, refinement and under-the-hood changes on odd years.
When was the last time you felt excitement for a macOS release?
Me? Snow Leopard.
When I transitioned to Linux I rediscovered OS excitement. I'm on KDE Plasma now and every update has exciting features that serves my interests.
Mavericks maybe?
When Siracusa wrote the last review.
If only KDE actually paid attention to UX and maybe cared about the looks and consistency a bit more. I'm sorry for being blunt but their visual design people's have no taste...
There's little margins and whitespace and this bothered me like hell before making the switch. It's funny, now I kind of like it. A lot is happening too. The latest Plasma had a very high degree of polish IMO.
It's far more consistent than Windows 11, but you have to pick Qt/KDE software, not GTK/GNOME for that to be true. I always choose the more KDE native option.
Seriously KDE is so extremely ugly and dated looking compared to macOS, GNOME and even modern Windows. I don’t care about the 30 million configurable options if it looks like a total eyesore. You’d think they’d put some effort into a consistent style / UI framework.
People hate on GNOME for its rigidity but it’s the one desktop actually trying somewhat to provide Linux with an environment that the average person (not an HN user) won’t immediately turn their nose up in disgust at.
Like a decade for me now. I don’t read or watch anything anymore. I just buy whatever the new version is when I need it and live with it. I yearn for something truly exciting, groundbreaking, and accessible (price) from Apple. iPod era was so dope.
Yesterday I managed to update a 2015 MacBookAir7,2 from El Capitan (last update Sep. 2015) to Sonoma (last update Aug 6th 2026). I was excited when it finally worked.
Thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher who show that not supporting old devices is a choice made by Apple.
OCLP is excellent but it's all coming to an end for Intel Macs unfortunately. Even Homebrew just dropped the ball a few days ago (this is the final draw for me, I'll keep a Sequoia partition but my MBP2015 daily drives on NixOS + GNOME)
Yes. If anyone reads this in the future: you need to clone the brew repo and use v7.0.2 and install it manually.
Whatever the last one you had to install with a CD/DVD was.
So Snow Leopard, as parent poster had said.
I've been pleasantly surprised with Golden Gate. It's fresh-looking, works well, got rid of a lot of the ugly flat stuff they did over the last few releases (pre-Tahoe), supports more hidpi modes that make my work machine better...
But honestly, I don't think the average person should feel excitement for an OS release; boring means it just works and they don't have to learn a bunch of new features and different ways of doing things.
I'm stuck trying to figure out what new stuff they could add. Sidecar was neat, but I never need it. I'm very happy on Cinnamon on Linux, which is probably less featured than KDE (haven't daily driven it to confirm), which just confirms I don't actually need or want user-facing new features. I need stability.
I think Apple realise this. There are no genuine new OS features to be added, so they just shuffle things around so that things are changing and thus seem fresh and hip. For anyone who cares about stability and doesn't want to relearn everything they shuffle around, this is nothing but a negative, but Apple et al. have no other levers to pull (well, there's the AI lever, but that's also generally not a positive in and of itself).
Maybe there are new OS features that could be useful, but creating and integrating them in a way that's actually helpful is just such an ordeal that nobody will do it.
A functioning window system would drastically enhance OSX productivity.
Window management (and indeed, desktop environments in general) are rather subjective I think. As someone who's been using Macs in some capacity since 1996 I'd be upset if macOS suddenly resembled a traditional Windows desktop or tiling WM thing, and the absence of Mac-like desktops on Linux (no, GNOME and elementary/Pantheon are not that) is one of the primary factors keeping me from switching.
Window management got better in Mac os but only recently with the addition of window snapping. You could do it before, but you had to drag from the green stoplight button which was an annoying mouse target vs the entire top bar.
Personally I do like the windows approach where there's a bar at the top with a few preselected zones you can use that shows up when dragging a window but the state of things on Mac os now is fine enough that things like that can reasonably be left up to extensions.
What exactly do you miss about the Mac desktops when using gnome's? For me the only thing I've noticed is lack of independent desktops per monitor though Windows also suffers that deficiency.
No independent desktops is indeed a big one and irks me just as much under Windows (which somehow in 2026 still can't even set per-monitor desktop pictures without glueing images together in Paint).
On a whole, GNOME is just too simplistic. Where the Mac Way™ (especially in the 2000s) is thoughtfully implemented progressive disclosure of advanced features, the GNOME Way™ is to check if they make the cut for the app's toolbar or "junk drawer" hamburger menu and if not, strip the feature entirely.
It almost feels like they took a tablet OS and then adapted it somewhat to desktop use. That's the vibe I get from the DE itself as well as from the barebones (if pretty) apps that its community tends to produce. It's not as locked down as a tablet OS obviously — there's full fat Linux sitting underneath after all — but I'm always fighting it trying to turn it into a proper desktop experience with GNOME Tweaks and extensions (which constantly break).
An easy way to see the difference in philosophies is to compare the number of settings surfaced in GNOME Settings to that of the settings app for any Mac OS made in the past 20 years. GNOME Settings offers relatively little to tweak where System (Preferences|Settings) has a list that's closer (though not as long) to that of the KDE Settings app.
And of course, no global menubar. KDE lets users enable this but unfortunately many apps do not populate it.
GNOME is designed to be touch-agnostic, which makes better use of padded UIs than macOS 11+ does. With a rumored touchscreen Macbook still coming down the line, I think GTK and the GNOME developers skated to where the puck was headed. macOS and iPadOS are both constrained for touchscreen users. GNOME is kinda the perfect UI for where Apple sees hardware converging.
I don't think GNOME can adopt any more macOS idiosyncrasies without being a worse holistic experience. The Overview/search accelerator on the Super key is faster than Spotlight search. The desktop switcher is a better-supported use of the menubar than forcing an unsupported global cluster. GNOME could try to cram these round pegs into their square hole, but they know it wouldn't improve things.
And that’s fair, GNOME doesn’t need to be a macOS-alike, but it’d be nice if something was!
As an aside, I have yet to be convinced that touch on desktop operating systems makes any kind of sense and the MacBook Ultra or whatever it ends up being called is unlikely to change my opinion on that. I much prefer an old-style low-whitespace, data-dense, pointer-first UI like OS X used to have. I’m tired of the virtual real estate on my screens declining year after year for the sake of functionality I’ll never use.
Same, I enjoy both the current macOS and iPadOS windowing systems. Everything else I tried on linux felt like an extreme downgrade.
Someone who does need a window system can use many of the hundreds of tools available, or use something custom. Regular uses don't really care about window management systems.
Something to improve my mess of ~22 active terminal windows comes to mind.
Christ.
On some level, this is probably something your terminal emulator should handle, just as your web browser should handle a mess of 22 tabs, but I don't think we've really come up with good solutions there either. It's hard to implement features nobody's though of.
Terminal should be responsibility of OS. God knows it’s deep enough. It could be so much better—and it matters!
I know expecting UX innovation from Apple is laughable, but there was a time…
Terminal emulators have tabs and windows already, even macOS’ built in terminal, so what do you mean?
FWIW I use aerospace and break up those 22 windows into ~4-6 windows with ~3-5 tabs each, then move each window to a different virtual workspace that I switch to with option + hotkey like opt+1, opt+2, opt+3 or even opt+D and so on
Have you tried other 3rd party terminal applications? (Iterm, ghostel, CMux)
They have many quality of life improvements over the basic terminal.
I use Ghostty. I’ve tried iterm and cmux.
I think we can do better. It’s a hard problem, admittedly. But important.
Cinnamon was what I used before KDE, I like KDE a great deal but I also liked Cinnamon a great deal, if I had to go back it wouldn't cause me any issues, I only switched for Wayland support.
So if you are happy on Cinnamon stay there (and it's Wayland support has caught up a lot).
They both do an excellent job of not causing me pain, working the way I want and respecting me as a user, that's what a DE should be, if I have to consider the DE more than in passing it's failing at been a DE.
Early on with OSX I would update early because the new features in the OS were truely interesting (AFP, Dtrace, Spotlight, Early Siri, Messages sync with iPhone). Yes all very developer oriented, but I am a developer and that's primarily what I use my machines for. Releases like Snow Leopard and Tiger were full of novel features. Now I find most of the copy is dedicated to things I couldn't care less about like generative AI images or questionable redesigns of the UI.
I would love a review of the new developer and OS level features for macOS releases. The WWDC content is close to unwatchable, it never goes into enough depth and the video only delivery is not the primary way I want to consume technical content. Give me the cool highlights of the virtualisation framework, what still works with Dtrace , explain the infernal code signing permissions system, etc.
So far I've kept to Sequoia as the least annoying version, and avoided the Liquid Glass rounded corners mess.
Debian+KDE here. It's what I use to get away from OS excitement. I miss the 90's when nobody ever updated anything, and if they did it was on purpose and not something that happened behind your back.
For example, the other day Google "updated" the clock/alarm/timer app on Android with pointless and annoying changes. A clock app does not need an update, ever.
"But..." No! /usr/share/zoneinfo handles that. Stop it.
Snow Leopard is right up there with System 7.5.3 for me. I’m happy with their current OS trends compared to the flat OS trend of the past decade. They definitely need detail work and I think they default to turning features on that I would prefer off. Many of the new features I don’t use come off as a spastic GUI.
Snow Leopard was solid, but when I went back and used it I was surprised by how I missed some little bits of polish that'd been added since.
My ideal would probably be Mavericks 10.9.5 with the Leopard/Snow Leopard 2D grid virtual desktop model hacked back in. The linear version of Spaces that's been in place since 10.7 is needlessly simplistic.
Well, it is easy to be excited on a system that is lagging on features.
Using macOS and KDE for almost the same time (~20 years), I still find that I need yet another app on macOS for a standard KDE feature.
Interesting observation, that is.
Like what?
From top of my head:
File renaming. What Forklift or other dedicated file renamer comes as a standard with both Dolphin and KRename. Latter can drive circles around what's available in macOS, in any form.
AudioCD ripping: kio:// protocol has a native ripper. Just drag and drop. Settings are integrated to system settings directly. Which format do you want? Yes.
Remote connections: While finder can connect to servers, but FTP read access and SFTP requires external apps. IOW, what Cyberduck provides is already available in Dolphin, again.
KDE's standard window management capabilities need Magnet or something more advanced in macOS.
Git/SVN/CVS needs external tools in macOS. Dolphin can detect these repositories and let you work on them on the spot.
KRunner is arguably more Capable than spotlight in some cases. Needs another fair shake though.
If you add your mail accounts and calendars to KDE via KMail or something else, they become available system-wide. macOS is good in that regard, but KDE is betterer. If you use KMail, your mail will sync at the background even though your mail client is not running.
You need to buy another application to be able to edit id3 tags of audio files, but KDE has kid3. I even use its macOS version because it's that good.
I'll not get into customization capabilities, because they are fundamentally different and worlds apart, but this is due to their philosophy.
Keyboard shortcut management are equally powerful in both, AFAICS. macOS used to lag there.
K3b is infinitely more capable than macOS optical media authoring tools.
These are what I can remember with my tired brain, away from my KDE system for the day. The thing is, both side by side, I mostly prefer KDE because I can work way faster on that one, and it's not I'm hating macOS or anything, and as I said, using both for a very long time.
The apps I have given as examples are KDE's default apps and maintained by KDE project themselves. They are part of the default installation.
Homebrew/nix: The most obvious one. MacOS just has no good package manager. It's even worse than Windows, which is also pretty bad, but at least on Windows you can install an app and manage it in a central "Add and Remove Programs" view, and they've standardized an installer format that cares about and manages versions and upgrades.
Middle Click: This is a galling one.
Rectangle: Far better than the MacOS's native snapping, which is half-assed.
AltTab: MacOS's keyboard driven app and window switching are terrible. It feels like they don't test for use that's not entirely mouse-based.
Mac Mouse Fix/LinearMouse: Real mouse support on MacOS sucks, and the unified settings between mouse and trackpad really sucks when you have to occasionally use both and don't want them to behave identically.
Karabiner: MacOS's keyboard mapping is incredibly underpowered.
AeroSpace/yabai: I don't use these anymore, because these also were pretty buggy for my use case; instead, I just use MacOS without Spaces. I hate MacOS window management, but find it less painful if I just lean heavily on tmux. MacOS Spaces are completely broken, especially on multi-monitor. They never do what you expect. I could write a screed on exactly how broken they are, but I won't in this post.
Ice (might be sketchy now; had an ownership change): Lack of menu bar overflow on MacOS is awful. I have icons that just disappear into the notch and can not be clicked, and there's not space for much, especially if you use something like Stats to see resource use.
BetterDisplay+MonitorControl: Non-retina monitor management on MacOS is bad.
SoundSource: Per-app audio control just doesn't exist otherwise.
These are all things that work fine out of the box on KDE and even Gnome. MacOS, for a very UI-focused OS, is simply terrible to use graphically if you're not baby-ducked into it from a young age. I've been using it for years at work (because my options are MacOS and Windows, and MacOS for all its flaws is still less painful than Windows), and I still can't get used to all the bad decisions. Spaces are the most shocking example of something that should work that doesn't, and they still don't fix it year after year.
I dread new macOS releases, because it signifies one year less support for my current version (I'm on Sequoia now, having jumped from Ventura) being supported.
Every new version wrecks my workflow a little. macOS 28 will partially remove Rosetta 2, which means that I'll need to find replacements for some of the ancient Intel apps that never got updated to Apple Silicon.
100% Snow Leopard, followed closely by Mavericks.
I've never had so much stuff break than with the macOS updates. I can get some of it, like drivers or programs hooking onto OS features that change. But so much "normal" software just breaks. Or can't even run without the dev recompiling for the new ui kit version or something. While on Windows I can run any random old tool not touched in two decades and it'll work.
I dread updating Macs.
10.5 Leopard because 10.4 Tiger was my first interaction with Mac OS X and it blew me away. I couldn't wait to see what was next and how they could improve upon perfection.
When are they gonna make "macOS South Central"?
At the rate we're going, it would be "macOS America"
Don't give him ideas...
It comes between macOS Fresno and macOS Calexico.
Don't be a menace.
All of my stuff updated to the 27 versions today. During indoor cycling class, I kept getting health alerts on my watch about high heart rate while stationary. Despite currently having the very same apple watch tracking my indoor cycling workout.
I guess Claude doesn’t take spinning classes
heart recovery is one of several headline new features they mention on first run (and in app ref info) will calibrate over time
as often the case when Apple makes its move, their implementations -- while late compared to e.g. Garmin which has had them for years -- purport to be leading accuracy on these features among wearables
This is wild from a "tech" site. I used to read their articles fairly religiously, but this bent by their writers and commenters is really telling, and a signal to start looking elsewhere.
What does it tell you? It gives me much more confidence in their output tbh. Reading generated text is unpleasant; feels like mediated and averaged-out humanity.
There is a lot more to tech than gen AI…
Continuing the quote gives more context, which I agree with:
"The obviously AI-generated flyers that come home from school with my kid or that get circulated around neighborhood groups strike me as benign but deeply tacky; the kinds of AI-generated images that get passed around by politicians online don’t even have the benefit of being benign.
More than anything, I’m just tired of seeing it everywhere, tired of being on the lookout for it, tired of it polluting every stream of information I have access to. Wasting time actively trying to avoid auto-generated slop is now a daily fixture of my life."
Obviously, one should be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it, and much like any tool that can be misused, just because some malign actor (or dumb actor) uses it "wrong" doesn't mean you should also not use it.
It costs money, but I've been enjoying my Pangram subscription for this. Saves me slop on the internet and confirms whether or not my colleagues' words are what i'm reading or not.
wait so not using GenAI makes you persona non grata in "tech" now?
nobody tell my boss
It is a tool in a tool box. If a technician avoided a tool outright, I would (and do) question their biases.
Every technician or craftsman develops some strong opinions about which tools are good tools and which tools are bad tools.
A nuclear weapon is a tool in a tool box. And nobody's used it since WWII for a good reason.
regular people have access to this?
Why? You can type a prompt into the robots if you want their take. Where are you suppose to find out what a human thinks?
It's not to write the article. I would hope they don't do that; I wouldn't want to read it.
But I do want them using it to help them research, find interesting contrary views on a subject, gut-check assertions (how many weirdly wrong statements in articles would have been caught by feeding it to an LLM and asking it to question unfounded or incorrect claims?), check technical accuracy of things outside the writer's core domain, track interview transcripts, search/summarize across prior work, do data exploration of public/government reports. Etc. It's a very empowering tool for journalism!
Instead, it's become a religious issue that is more or less at the level of "one drop" theory.
I'm not sure who has the religious issue.
Why would they need AI to do any of those things? Wrong statements should be caught by editors and fact-checkers.
It more sounds like you're wanting people to shoehorn in AI where it doesn't belong.
"...Golden Gate needed a whopping 17GB more space on the M1 MacBook Air, thanks to a mandatory multi-gigabyte language model download that kicks in automatically the first time you connect a freshly restored Golden Gate Mac to the Internet."
This is the main thing stopping me from updating iOS/macOS. It's completely unacceptable to park a bunch of space on my devices right when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been.
My phone is on iOS 26, and even with Apple Intelligence turned off, there's ~13GB made unusable. My phone ran out of space while recording a bike trip, and yet the model I have no use for remained.
Same. It feels pretty messed up to lose that much storage on a 256gb device.
You can always buy more iCloud storage!!!
Services! Customer sat!
Yes, the disrespect Apple/Google/MS has for their users (on equipment they have purchased!) is palpable. They seem to have a real sense of entitlement these days. It used to be universally accepted that losing or corrupting user data was a (if not THE) cardinal sin in development. In many ways we get what we tolerate, but the lack of viable alternatives in some spaces (esp cellphones and TVs) makes it very hard to hold the big players to any kind of account economically. At least no one is holding a gun to our heads to use MacOS or other proprietary systems on our desktops/laptops/servers for the most part.
17GB when a large majority of the devices sold for it shipped with 128GB of storage is wild. You should be able to opt out of it during install.
If there is no way to remove this 17 GB model, then the OS is simply not for me anymore. I'll stick with Sequoia for another year and use it until it stops receiving security updates and then I'm back to being a full-time Linux user.
How easily we forget the exponential improvements of decades past...
Phones should have separate storage for their OS so that when you buy a specific phone with specific storage it actually is that much storage available to the user
Maybe macOS 26 was lot bigger... but I went straight from Sequoia to Golden Gate and freed up like 30 GBs. I didn't have enough disk space to download the update prior, so the extra 30 GB wasn't that... but could've been caches I guess. I assumed it was dropping Intel?
The real problem with iOS is that there’s no way to clear an app’s cache without uninstalling it. Every non-indie internet-connected app on my phone has a massive and unneeded cache that consumes gigabytes of space.
Same with system cache. Why they can't have some way to clear it still confuses me.
Most expensive it's been for a handful of years.
1TB of spinny disk cost a million dollars as recently as 1994.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...
Apple seems to be doing a lot better job at integrating LLMs into OS, than Microsoft.
it's okay but I wish it would be optional. Why force it on me when I don't want it? E.g. with disk space...
For me, macOS 27 was great for the first 3 betas, then it became horrible. And the release version still has some weird bugs, even iOS 27.
It's as if their Claude credits ran out halfway through
I've found today after going to MacOS27 (I skipped 26 fully) that Chrome extensions don't load properly. They're super, super slow. I've found one or two other bug reports of this from older Dev builds but that's it. Bizarre. Time to flip back to Safari I suppose.
Will I get prompted to give Chrome permissions to the Local Network on every update? This is literally the one feature I'd like from Apple because I'm happy with everything else. The update looks cool, but nothing I actually want/need.
how to disable gen ai features
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250012366
it used to be one toggle
Read the post. It doesn't look possible. Motives unknown.
So happy they’ve finally added Ethernet status to the menu bar. It has always bugged me there wasn’t an easy way to quickly check if my Mac was using Ethernet or not
My macbook only has about 3GB of spare disk space currently, so I guess this isn't for me
If you don't want your mbp to run like garbage, then don't update to the newest version of obsolescenceOS.
Not even the version explicitly designed to run better?
That may have been true in the past, and I usually wait for the first point release, but macOS and iOS 27 seem to be a definite improvement. My 5 year old phone is much snappier!
Hmm, I remember when Ars Technica macOS reviews were the gold standard. This one isn't bad, but I miss having more in-depth information about the improvements.
In my opinion, the details here complement the Ars Technica article nicely:
https://www.macstories.net/stories/macos-27-the-macstories-r...
Agreed. While Andrew's done an okay job stepping into some big shoes, I too miss the reviews John Siracusa used to do for Ars. Same could be said for a lot of the old internet when you had people like Siracusa, Anand Lal Shimpi at AnandTech among others, providing very detailed deep dives on the latest technology.
Does it fix the hideous floating sidebar UI?
That's the headline feature.
Do we have proper dictation?
Wake me up when Apple releases Linux for Macs
You're in for a long hibernation my friend
so I have to get a mac from mainland china to opt out? #Weird
Monterey is a body of water tho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monterey_Bay
So is Sonoma if you're talking about the Creek instead of the Valley surrounding the creek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoma_Creek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napa_Sonoma_Marsh