sbuk

Evidently, and especially in comparison to Windows 11, alive and well. In rude health in fact.

I like it. Debacle isn't the word you're looking for. "Some loud people on the internet don't like it and the user base has largely been ambivalent towards it. In reality, it's rough around the edges and needs some work."

Don't be rude. I did read TFA, hence my comments. You didn't understand my comment, did you?

Whether it disabling SIP, enabling root (see the bit about Linux and Posix in my previous comment), enabling case sensitivity in APFS (done for backwards compatibility), or any of the other stuff, the OS shipped remains the same as the tested one, and pay attention because this is the bit you seem to be incapable of grasping, with the extra bits turned on! Some are dumb, some for backwards compatibility and some are genuinely useful.

A Kia Ceed is still the same Kia Seed if the showroom add their stickers, changed the tyres and put some registration plates on it.

You’re confusing operating mode with operating system.

SIP/SSV don’t create a different macOS, they restrict mutation and introspection. They don’t change the POSIX surface, the SUS semantics, or the kernel interfaces being certified. They just stop test harnesses from instrumenting the system without elevated privilege.

By your logic, no modern OS is anything it claims to be unless you run it in an insecure debug configuration. Linux isn’t POSIX because you need root. Windows isn’t Windows because kernel debugging exists. That’s obviously nonsense.

The Open Group certifies macOS 26 as shipped. Temporarily relaxing protections to run a conformance suite does not produce a “different OS”, it produces a different trust configuration of the same one.

Saying “it’s not really UNIX because SIP is on” is like saying a container isn’t Linux because it doesn’t let you mount /proc without extra privileges.

The Windows 7 vs 8 analogy doesn’t support your argument, it undermines it. Windows 8 wasn’t disliked because it was “modern”, it was disliked because it broke core interaction models in a way that actively obstructed use. macOS Tahoe hasn’t done anything remotely comparable. No Start screen catastrophe, no forced touch-first UI on non-touch hardware, no fundamental workflow regression.

What you’re reacting to is aesthetic drift, not functional decay. Liquid Glass is a visual language experiment, not a UX rupture. You may dislike it, that’s fine, but equating it to Windows 8 is category error. One is a design iteration layered on top of a relatively stable interaction model, the other was a structural interface failure.

Also, invoking Media Player vs Groove Music as if those are meaningful historical markers of “user-hostile downgrade” is... generous to the point of fiction. Windows 8’s problem was input metaphors, not media apps.

This isn’t Apple becoming Microsoft. It’s Apple doing what Apple always does: overreaching aesthetically, then sanding it down in point releases until everyone forgets they were angry in the first place. Which, incidentally, is exactly what happened with Aqua, iOS 7, Big Sur, and every other supposed apocalypse.

It really hasn't. The hyperbole here has been though.

Howard Oakley has been writting about macOS internals for a long time, and 99% of the time, his essays and articles are excellent. This is not one of them. Don't be put off by this one article - the site is a goldmine.

The people that certify it say that you are wrong. What you think and what actually is are two entirely different things in this case. The fact remains that, according to the OpenGroup (and they are the one that matter here), macOS 26 is UNIX.

It is. Add we all have off days. Perhaps Howard has had one here. I mean, he is defining what type of OS it is by how it's configuted. Which is just wierd.

Blender is an interesting case. It's seeing wider adoption in studios generally - an Oscar win has helped and the recent Blender Conference had talks from Framestores vizdev[1] and Paramounts in-house teams[2]. Blender 5.0 is around the corner, which is adding more and more industry standard features[3][4], though recently there was a discussion about pulling away from the VFX Reference Platform[5][6], which they have walked back from[7]. It's not there yet, but it's gaining mindshare rapidly. Enshittification in DCCs is interesting. Arguably the two dominant companies, Autodesk (Maya, 3ds Max) and Maxon (Cinema 4D) are on that path, whereas SideFX (Houdini) is kicking ass!

[1] https://youtu.be/BtZ-ien0WOk

[2] https://youtu.be/DJu7C6tVM8o

[3] https://youtu.be/UiIJytlTFPc

[4] https://landscape.aswf.io

[5] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-and-vfx-reference-plat...

[6] https://vfxplatform.com

[7] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/vfx-reference-platform-stateme...

Webkit (along with Safari) was started under Avie Tevanian's watch. Scott Forstall worked under him and Bertrand Serlet, along with Lisa Melton, who lead the development team for Webkit. Forstall was responsible for the development and release of Apple Maps.

People in glass houses...

Not that OS9 was better - there are thing that I miss, such as drag and drop control panels and system extensions. My point is that people have been complaining about the newer versions of Mac operating systems since there were numbered upgrades.

Rich Corinthian Leather? Green baize backgrounds? Really..?

I feel like every macOS update has been worse than the last, since like 2015-2018 or so.

Tha's been going on for as long as the Mac has been a thing.

Steve saw this and approved it...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Apple_US...

A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout.

The same was said about a smaller iPhone. They made it and sales were lacklustre. I know a few people that lament it, but sale's don't lie...

Tedious tasks, like retopologising, UV unwrapping and rigging would be great examples of where AI in tools like Maya and Blender could be really useful.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

What makes my opinion you any less valid than your opinions? Classic arrogant troll behaviour. I merely pointed out that you are exaggerating. Like I said, you want everything to work like it does with your favourite platform, and if it doesn’t then it’s clearly broken or shit or user hostile. Power user? Don’t make me laugh.

When you've been saying the same thing for the last 40 years, and seeing the same responses, more often than not made by people who don't understand where this all comes from, and which do not really counter what you're saying, you'd be rude and dismissive - especially whith the dogma that surronds the "UNIX philosophy", which, in case you aren't aware, wasn't actually put forward by anyone heavily involved with UNIX development. Some empathy with the protagonist whould help.

But I get your point...

How? Support for RAW formats is reasonably complete. I can hop between different editors without much, if any, hassle at all. Since getting my first DSLR in the early 00's, I have used (in no order) Photos, Bibble, Lightroom, Aperture, Capture One, Photoshop, Pixelmator, Photomator, Darkroom, On1, Raw Power, Nitro Photo, Luminar, Darktable and RawTherapee, all without fuss. Where is the lock in?

"The unix philosophy is a philosophy, not a dogma"

Shame that it is dogmatically followed by a very loud but vocal minority.

It seems to me that it has actually been harmful to F/LOSS in the longer term. Where before, there were companies that were contributing to and using F/LOSS, GPLv3 put a stop to that virtually overnight. Now we see comments like "$MEGACORP should stop leaching" or "$MEGACORP should sponsor/ contribute more" - which of course they did, with time and people before the GPLv3 was released.

The GUI / UX is horrible.

Coming from someone who would "prefer to be in Gnome or KDE", this is a hard criticism to take seriously. KDE is obviously designed by committee and is therefore UI elements are all over the place, and Gnome is just horrible.

Finder is annoying as hell. The icons / layouts do not snap to resizing, proper navigation requires arcane keyboard shortcuts, it's difficult to open new instances in the expected way, tabs suck, navigation sucks. Finder is made for non-power users.

Those "arcane keyboard shortcuts" have been around for 40 years. Or is it the Emacs keybinding that you don't like? Opening a new instance of a Finder window is a Cmd N away. New tab? Cmd T - I do not understand what is hard about that. Oh, and tabs are a feature of the system, and native apps (some non-native too) automatically implement them. It seems to me that someone hasn't RTFM'ed. Some "power user" you seem to be...

The rest is rant that macOS isn't $MyFavouriteDistro and that is the only way computers should work.

I do not want to "define" terms with the shitty built in dictionary tool, yet that option eats up context window space in every tool.

Oh no! A whole line in a context menu! The horror.

“This guy” is Don Hopkins who, amongst a long list of achievements in the field of computer science specializing in human computer interaction and computer graphics, is one of the authors of the UNIX haters handbook - specifically the extremely prescient chapter 7 "The X-Windows Disaster", published when Linux was in its infancy. You don't have to like what he is saying, but he has decades of experience and research behind what he says. Know where your field came from. The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward - sadly something a vocal minority of the community refuses to do.

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/resume.html

You could also say the same of the Linux kernel too. After all, they have chosen, for 20 years, to not go with GPLv3…

Not defending anyone here, and I don’t disagree that the commercial products are hugely expensive, but it’s better now than it was at the turn of the century. Licenses cost in the tens of thousands per seat, rendering software was similarly expensive and rarely included. To add insult to injury, artists needed high powered workstations that also cost tens of thousands! Blender has definitely had an influence on the status quo.

Both the education and indie versions are full versions. The educational version can only be licensed for a year and can only be relicensed a set number of times. The indie version is restricted solely based on income. If the licensee (studio or individual) makes <= 100000 USD per year, then they can use the indie version. There may be slightly different file formats for each.

Thinking of it I suppose I expected MacOS to be as intuitive as iOS...

It is intuitive, but by the sounds of things you have several years, or decades of Windows muscle memory and experience. If you fight against the way the OS works by expecting to match your experience with a different one, you're in for a bad time.

Apple introduced window snapping in macOS 15. It works, but there are better apps that perform the task. I don't use any myself; I've been a Mac user for over 35 years and have never felt the need to have my document windows tiled.

The menu is a discoverability gift! Pro tip - type a command in the search box under the 'Help" menu in any native app, and it will show you where to find it and show the shortcut if one is assigned.

macOS user gestures extensively for navigation around the OS, so look in the 'Trackpad' settings, where it shows the gestures and allows a degree of customisation.

Edit: Regarding external monitors, Apple haven't sold a non-Retina display for quite a while now. Apple being Apple expect you to buy one of their monitors, or at least one that they've blessed, so 4K really is a minimum.