Every new version of MacOS exhibits four phenomena:

1. Old bugs are not fixed.

2. New bugs are introduced, and I have to spend hours online figuring out workarounds.

3. Old features I depended on are removed, and I have to spend hours online figuring out how to replace them.

4. New features I don't need are added and they get in my way, and I have to spend hours online figuring out how to disable them.

My workflow productivity takes a months-long hit every time Apple upgrades MacOS. As a result I rarely upgrade MacOS until it's around 3 years old and I have no choice.

It appears that Tahoe is going to be the worst example of this in a long time.

Which is why I'm moving as much of my daily workflow as possible to Linux.

I used Mac for 10 years and started feeling the same irritation around 2017. In 2020 I finally bit the bullet and switched to Linux. The initial investment into getting a usable Arch desktop was horrible. It took several days just to get to the point of something that I could boot into and be productive. It takes me a long time to get things working the way I want, but I kind of enjoy that aspect of total customization. The best part is, though, nothing ever changes. I get things working the way I want, and it just stays that way year after year. No UI language updates, no replacing my default shell, nothing. It just keeps working the way I like.

Now if they could just produce a touchpad as good as a MacBook's, give me 8-10 hours of battery life, and make the construction feel slim and solid, and not like it's going to get crushed in my backpack, and I'd be satisfied.

> 1. Old bugs are not fixed.

If Apple would open source some of its OS apps, this would probably be a non-issue, I could see people putting in bugfix PRs the second Apple chooses to open source their core apps.

I don't see them doing this any time soon sadly, but it would make macOS much more stable, and probably secure.

The more I have thought about my views on Open Source vs Commercial software, I strongly feel that infrastructure code (an OS) should be more open source, I dont see Microsoft or Apple open sourcing any time soon, but it would make a world of a difference, imagine a world where Windows XP had been open sourced, and the community took it fully over and maintained its security, you'd have a drastically better version of Windows without all the fluff, or heck even Windows 7, which some argue was the last good version of Windows as well.

I wish ReactOS was drastically more usable.

the same for me (e.g. yabai didn't work anylonger properly with latest update). But for the past 2 months (or so), I couldn't be happier with Omarchy. It's a Linux build that comes with all the Mac specifications out of the box and is set up as a tiling window manager, which is what I used on macOS. But no more bugs, and it just works. Plus I can tweak my own OS, if I need to change something. In case of interest, I wrote a little here: https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/ (It was also on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44955923)

Re 1., based on [1] it seems that some data loss bugs are getting fixed. Asymptotically :)

[1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...

When I was young I loved getting the latest of everything but that was partly because I didn't have to carry certain workflows or older tech along with me. It's the baggage that we accumulate is the problem.

Now I understand why plenty of old timers just leave the OS version on the MacBook that it came with. All you ever really need is the security patches.

Unless there is some specific new feature that you absolutely must need or some push factor, don't upgrade.

> Every new version of MacOS exhibits four phenomena:

This is specific to almost every new software.

As jwz said "But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again. "

Just curious, what yype of featureres where removed?

To be honest Im new to macos, but after spending years suffering with gnome, that did removed a lot of features, Macos seens like it dosent suffer of this that much.

Nothing on this list compares to removing an ESC key. That was apple starting to leave reality. I had to buy used laptops for that time period.

1) and 2) are common to all major software releases (whether it's an OS like macOS a DE like Gnome or some complicated program like Photoshop or Blender or something). Inevitable to a degree as you can't fix everything, and you can't ship 100s of thousands of new lines of code without some bugs.

These are only a big problem if those bugs bugs are major, and/or widely applicable to different user setups, and/or very annoying.

3) is the worse though, especially when it happens for no good reason, or for novelty value.

4) is not that bad

If apple didnt win in hardware theyd be gone.