Up to Snow Leopard, OS X updates felt like little Christmas mornings. It went downhill starting with Lion. I’ve stopped caring about new features, there’s too much churn anyway.
In the early 2000th when I was introduced to Apple Macs (G3 iMac MacOS9) I couldn’t understand who wanted to work with these machines. I tried out macOS-X in the school Labs and the only piece of software I actually liked was iTunes (I know weird). It took years and then I saw a machine running leopard and the coverflow in Finder etc. I thought wow this looks and feels so much cooler than my ugly windows XP/Vista. I convinced my wife to buy a MacBook and bought the Snow Leopard update. Freaking unbelievable. I switched to Mac myself and it was such a joy ride. Everything was just working and I actually felt real joy. Updates later and I don’t feel like this anymore. It started with the 2017 MacBook I got from work (the worst machine I ever had to use) This was only hardware. But the software broke under me as well with the introduction of Catalina. I still run a Mac at work cause the company only supports windows and Mac. At home I switched to Linux and try to become the maker of my own joy.
I think they ran out of low hanging fruit pretty fast. Tiger was great, and once they added multiple desktops that was all they really had to do with OSX and it was complete, lightweight, performant. Too bad the more recent stuff has been just taking away things (32 bit, eventually x86 compatibility if thats the trend), or making it annoying (having your OS yell at you every time you open something not from the mac app store is patronizing).
2009 marked the last year of good Operating System releases with both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard shipping that summer. After this point, bloat became good, non-flat design became bad, and existing system apps started to be replaced with buggy alternatives.
Lion was a bad release filled with bugs, but it introduced a lot of features I don't think I could live without. Things like high DPI support, the ability to render emoji (!), and the ability to rename a document from an app's title bar. Behind the scenes, Lion is when Apple introduced Automatic Reference Counting. And, while I know they're controversial, I really like how Apple implemented full screen and auto saving, particularly after the Apple tweaked them in Mountain Lion.
Mountain Lion went a long way towards fixing Lion's problems, and Mavericks just about finished the job. Which is why I run Mavericks. The only remaining Lion things I really dislike are the Launchpad, the hidden Library folder, and some minor-ish aesthetic differences. I've patched some of these.
Hi Wowfunhappy, you got me thinking. Like ... really thinking. So, to cut long story short, I've installed Maverics in a VM to do a short & free PoC, how much would I like this "retro" experience with iWork, iLife and friends.
Turns out, very much! So I've grabbed a refurbished mac mini from 2012 and now I'm running Maverics on real hardware and absolutely love it! I've even patched the snow leopard window controls, so I'm one happy camper! Thank you!!!
> Behind the scenes, Lion is when Apple introduced Automatic Reference Counting.
Hm. I've never written anything serious for Apple platforms but of course played around for a bit. But, I've always assumed ARC is implemented purely in the compiler, isn't it? I remember disassembling something I wrote and learning that the compiler inserted retain/release calls as necessary.
> Which is why I run Mavericks.
Actually, I ran Mavericks for several years after it was superseded. I was made fun of by some people (who complained about glitchy WiFi on Yosemite, lol). Had to finally update when I got a new job and needed to compile an iOS app, which required latest Xcode, which required latest macOS. Then I stayed on Mojave for like 2 more years, refusing to update to Catalina to keep using 32-bit apps. And then several months ago I bought an M1 Max MacBook, which means Monterey.
I haven't been excited for a MacOS update since Mojave. Since then, it's always been a question of "how much are they taking away this time?" instead of "what have they added?"...
> 4. Disabling all the new phone-home daemons Apple added.
Would you care to elaborate what do you disable?
I didn't use any icloud stuff and was kinda shocked how much the OS called the mothership after installing little snitch ... Never properly gotten into finding what every daemon does and if I could disable it.
The script at this gist [0] has been my starting point for disabling Apple daemons.
I typically have to spend some time bisecting this script to keep the few services I need (e.g. Messages) running. It's time-consuming because some services depend on others that have different names, so it's not as straightforward as simply re-enabling every daemon that contains the string "message."
Little Snitch [1] is also quite useful; it's probably easier to install LS with everything disabled and then gradually reenable the daemons you want. I use LS more than I use the above script these days...although LS still allows the daemons to run and consume CPU time, which the script stops. Probably best to use some combination of both approaches, and keep track of any edits you make to the script because Apple will likely reenable everything the next time you upgrade MacOS.
10.6.8 was the absolute pinnacle for OSX for me, but I can't resonably use it daily anymore, so now Mojave is my stopping point. Too many of my necessary applications don't run on Catalina. I worry about the security of staying behind, but none of the new features are relevant to me.
