Windows ME was released a year before OS X, so that’s not really the era to compare. Also, Windows 2000 was pretty solid. Before Windows 95 there’s simply no comparison, the Mac was much better.
Classic Mac OS might as well be part of the 90s kid starter pack (Kid Pix usually is). Macs were ubiquitous in American schools.
It was pretty intuitive, especially if you grew up on it. It was also still fairly easy to trigger crashes and break things, but maybe not for more normal people.
I’ve used Macs all of my adult life, my first Mac came with System 7, and then up to Mac OS 8 and beyond. I’ve used every iteration of Mac OS since.
System 7, Mac OS 8, and Mac OS 9 were in a word: FUNctional! By that I mean the ol’ Apple tagline “it just works” wasn’t just marketing. It really did just work. Never crashed, no viruses, just easy, smooth, simple functionality.
And it was FUN to use. Since things did what they were supposed to do, and the system was build from the ground up to be intuitive for anyone - from children to the elderly, there weren’t any struggles to get stuff to do what you wanted, and especially the later versions, the OS interface was highly customizable. You could modify the window skins, scroll bars, icons, schemas, everything. Want to make your Mac look like a tropical fish aquarium, with all the windows swimming sound and making glub glub sounds when you opened files? Easy. Want it to be no-nonsense black & white fast as hell pro system? No problem.
Sometimes people got carried away and overdid it with the customizations, and they’d brick their computers (I was an Apple certified tech for a while and had to repair many a file system) - and that was even a fun challenge.
Ultimately, pre-OSX MacOS was a great product of its time. It was different from Windows - and that’s what threw off many Windows users - they’d try to approach MacOS as if it were a WinPC, and things weren’t where they expected them to be, but if you learned MacOS (which was easy) you’d find it did everything you needed it to do.
I don’t follow your comment that the current MacOS “being more fisher priced down in looks,” I think it looks very sleek & professional, but whatever. To each their own.
I recently decided to learn modern macOS after avoiding it my whole life.
The UI isn’t horrible, but I found that I needed to buy about 20 different apps to regain basic OS functionality. Naturally some of these apps will charge me if I want to use them on the next version of macOS as well - honestly their whole app ecosystem feels like a scam.
I bought more apps than I would recommend to anyone just for the sake of testing and learning them. That being said, assuming someone doesn’t know their way around zsh/bash, can’t figure out homebrew, or doesn’t know how to use GitHub, they are probably going to have a bad time (although weirdly my tech illiterate friends like vanilla… am I crazy, or is window snapping extremely efficient?).
What type of OS functionality did you have to buy apps for? I bought a MacBook in 2019, first time using macOS on my own device in my life, and I haven’t ran into anything I’ve needed that I couldn’t get for free from brew, direct git clone then build, or installing from the installer on the vendor’s website instead of the App Store version.
In fact the only app I’m currently subscribed to is Infuse, and that’s because I wanted to turn off my Dell R710 for good and moved Plex to my NAS, but also have a shit ton of both encoded and remux 4K content, and I can almost hear my NAS laughing at me if I’m not direct playing. And that’s more for the Apple TV than the laptop anyway.
To your point about needing to be comfortable with zsh, git, building from source, all that cli stuff in general, I don’t think that’s an accurate assessment. One of the things I like most about macOS is that having that knowledge isn’t a requirement to use and enjoy it, but it’s there if you want it. There’s a reason you get both power users and non-technical people in love with macOS. The crossover appeal is much more weighted to the power user side for Linux. I don’t know anyone who “loves” Windows, they’ve either used it exclusively their entire life because it’s what they were exposed to in school, at the library, at work, or wherever they used a computer, or they have to use it to play games, although that’s thankfully getting better now.
And yeah the snapping is atrocious, when compared to Win11 or pre-11 with power toys. Idk why, I guess I’d just chalk it up to a fundamental difference in how Apple and MS saw their window managers being used during design. At this point it’s kind of crazy Apple hasn’t put work into improving it though.
Sound and battery management come to mind. Things like swish, Alfred, and better touch tool also makes things much nicer.
I wouldn’t say that anything is necessary at all, but my goal was to see how usable I could make macOS (as I had been told it was too easy and non-customizable by people who haven’t used it). Non-mac people generally hate apple for their ridiculous money grabbing techniques (myself included), but they also probably don’t realize how good the M series chips are. Even after realizing I like them though, I will still never buy a first hand apple device… their pricing is absurd.
I’m sure there are free alternatives to most software at this point. However, some of the paid versions are definitely better. Also, if you’re new to macOS it’s easy to assume the app store is “the” place to get apps, without realizing you can buy them directly from sites - I did this myself once.
Overall I probably enjoy using Mac more than windows as it feels closer to Linux to me. But it definitely still has issues (constant iCloud popups are my main complaint). Also the RAM situation is a joke, I can absolutely crash my M1 air by processing too hard. Also it’s definitely NOT good for any sort of gaming, as the video output is choppy (can barely handle factorio).
Allegedly window snapping is coming in the next version of macOS.
Edit: love being downvoted by fanboys (mac fanboys? Linux fanboys? Who knows at this point 😂)
When people say Mac never gets viruses i like to remind them that no one making a virus is trying to target the computer that doesn’t sell as well. They want to reach as many people as possible not as little as possible which would be in Macs case comparatively to windows.
When a program crashed in OS 7/8/9, it would often take down your whole system due to lack of memory protection. Also setting max RAM for each application one by one was tedious and annoying. While I wasn’t a huge fan of the skeuomorphic bubbly OS X interface, I was ecstatic to leave all that memory management nonsense behind.
Oh wow, yeah I remember always having to open that info for each program and change how much RAM was allocated to it. Running slow? Quit it, increase RAM and try again. So glad all that nonsense is gone now.
I remember Ircle having instructions to open the terminal and run emacs to enable some service (identd probably). It was so traumatizing I’ve only ever used vi since.
First started using Macs with OS7 and I find the whole Mac vs. Windows arguments silly. Windows 386, 3.1, and 3.11 were garbage, yes, but all that changed with Windows 95 and it instantly went head and shoulders above MacOS.
OSX didn’t come about until 2001. So Windows had the edge for 6 years. To give you some idea, the initial G3 iMacs that came out in 1998 were still running OS8.
The big problem with using a Mac back then is that Steve Jobs had his own ideas about the way things should work and the lack of compatability with other industry standards was a problem.
Example: Getting my Palm Pilot to sync with my iMac was a NIGHTMARE. I worked with Palm support for several weeks and we finally got it working, if the dock was connected to the iMac directly. The USB ports on the keyboard didn’t carry enough voltage to operate properly.
Windows machine? No problem… until Windows 98, when Microsoft decided to prioritize Windows CE devices and intentionally broke Palm functionality. That was fun! Took a while to get the driver updates to fix that one!
Jobs was his own worst enemy for a while on the compatibility issue.
New OS launches- all your old programs don’t work on it.
Want to use a floppy to transfer files between a Dos/Win and a Mac? Nope, not compatible. When USB drives started coming out they dropped all support for floppy drives, even in machines with them installed.
Constant driver issues with all sorts of things. Many never got resolved. To be fair the market share for Mac’s was so tiny, offering support for them didn’t make business sense.
Want to play a game? Good luck. The majority of games didn’t work on Mac. Same reason as the drivers.
As for stability issues, for a while I ran a computer lab for a college 50:50 win/Mac machines. They both crashed about equally as often.
Oh I liked it a lot. In the early 90s, I had enough UI extensions running that OS7 looked exactly like BeOS. Gaming life was a lot of Bungie and AmbrosiaSW games and shareware games. So many shareware games. I established my first gamer tag at that time when playing A-10 Attack and A-10 Cuba. You want to talk about Nintendo-hard… Bungie’s Myth - The Fallen Lords was super-hard in single player, and the cross-platform multiplayer was amazeballs. I miss that game so much. Did all my Warcraft RTS playing, and waited a few agonizing months for the mac version of Starcraft to come out. Coincidentally, it was around then that I started doing file sharing through Carracho and Hotline
Hunters fly with firearms sometimes. It just depends on the customs regulations. I’ve seen it at the airport. You check the bag and declare it. I’m sure there’s some amount of paperwork, depending on the country.
Then tried to retrieve the password and got “no account associated with that email” so he tried to make a new account and got “there is already an account using that email, please use the lost password link below”.
I’m not missing the point. For most people it is fake and used as a tool against them. The “office family” is a tactic utilized by employers to make workers complacent without raising benefits. It’s in the same toolbox as “pizza parties” and “PTO donation”.
Gotta disagree. I’ve always had the belief that if you’re in management, you don’t get to play the comradery game with staff because that can easily be perceived as preferential treatment or fraternization. Management has their connections with other managers. Staff should use their comradery against management. However, your perspective isn’t wrong either. I just believe that even if you’re faking the “office family,” it still makes work that much easier
The office “family” gets in the way of clear and honest communication by guilt tripping anyone who disagrees by treating them like someone who upset grandma at Thanksgiving. It has always been counterproductive in my experience.
You got the wrong office family haha. I’ve always had the belief that you should always have the life you live at work and the life you live at home. You’re not supposed to take your work home with you and you should never bring your home to work. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be civil and conserting while at work. And I honestly don’t think there’s anything wrong with your mindset. We all perceive situations in different ways. But being earnest to your coworkers with clear social lines never hurts anything. You should be allowed to be very concerned about a coworker that has health issues, but on the same hand, it shouldn’t dictate your home life or emotions when not there. I hope I’m explaining what I’m trying to say correctly.
You are saying the same thing that I am on how it should work, but in my experience any office that says that they are a family tends to be the manipulating, toxic parts of families.
I do agree though, that the forced family is the worst.
At some point, someone found out that people who get along with their coworkers work better and like their job better. So, some dense HR directors thought, “If we want people to work better, we should force them to be friends!”
Then you get mandatory team-builders that maybe two people enjoy, and the rest are thinking about how they’d rather be spending their time.
True. Me and a friend of mine used to work together and live together. Then we’d go home after work, get drunk and play video games just to wake up and do it all over. Granted thar was years ago.
I did work with my now wife at one point. But we never actually hung out too much when we were working together because we were management and she would always go hang out with staff which I wouldn’t do
I met this guy at work. It’s a very long story, but the short and skinny is I was homeless and he and his mom gave me a home. I suppose he’s more like a brother than anything else. They never asked for anything in return. He just wanted to hang out and get into shenanigans. And shenanigans we certainly got into
Isn’t that the whole point of hiring people that fit the company culture? I’ve worked at both types of places in different stages of my life. Both can feel good or bad depending on where you’re at. Don’t try to change the job to fit your needs. Find a different one.
Totally get that. Just saying that different people want different things out of their jobs, and it’s a good thing that there are places where all of them can fit.
If I remember correctly, this is literally one of the points taken from the sabotage handbook. Is your job really making you so miserable, or is this some kind of organized propaganda campaign?
Management and HR departments are quite efficient on that kind of moral sabotage. It could be an organized propaganda campaign, at least those would make sense.
I totally agree with you that I don’t need to make friends at work. I 100% clock out at the end of the day and make a hard cutoff between personal and work life. I can even work with people I personally dislike just fine, as long as they’re not making things harder for others.
But OP was talking about camaraderie, which is mostly just about being generally pleasant to be around - as Merriam-Webster defines it, “a spirit of friendly good-fellowship”. Nobody likes to deal with the moody guy who doesn’t want to talk to anyone either, including the other moody guys. There’s definitely a minimum level of camaraderie required not to make things harder for everyone involved. You don’t have to lean into the “we’re a family” BS not to be unpleasant.
When I was single and living in a 1 bedroom apartment, I had my gaming rig next to my TV in the corner. I ran a long HDMI cable along the baseboard, around the corner, and into the TV. It was clean. I had this keyboard/touchpad combo in addition to my regular mouse and keyboard and that was how I turned my dumb TV into a smart TV running Windows 8.1 circa 2013/2014. I had a DualShock 4 that I’d use specifically for couch gaming because I didn’t always want to play at my desk. My PC has a BD drive so I used it as a Blu-Ray player, too.
I was real proud of that setup. I’m married and we work from home now and so we have to have an office, but I’d love to get an Ethernet cable run between our living room and our office so I can use my laptop to stream my games and couch game again. All I have for couch gaming these days is my ancient consoles (PS2 and Wii).
I just installed Kodi on my smart tv. No problems save for the cache growing to sizes incompatible with the limited memory of my TV, but I clean it periodically.
I believe Steam also has an app for streaming from your desktop, you just need a Bluetooth controller paired to the TV.
Unfortunately in this situation, where the ad requires active user engagement to resolve, a streaming service would have the ability to gate further access to content behind an authorization token they receive from the advertiser after the ad “clears”, like some dystopian Captcha prompt.
Solutions could be to find some way to trick the ad into thinking it had been engaged with to receive the token, or to find some way to crack the algorithm and and generate tokens as if the ad was engaged with…or just skip the bullshit and pirate the content.
A perfectly understandable reaction, but the company will be happy about that. If you willfully destroy a product you bought, they already have your money, and now you need to buy another one.
I get this one so much. I don't consider myself a developer because I tend to just touch code but that means I won't touch any for weeks. Worse I tend to do a lot of poc or boot strapping type of things and so its like there was a user story last pi to check the feasibility of something and now have a user story to get it regularly working in a poc env and I have forgotten everything about that particular system or language or whatever.
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