It’s tempting to read the “macOS” rebranding as some grand statement about the Mac, but, truth be told, “Sierra” is more indicative of what we’re getting. The name comes from a mountain range that encompasses Yosemite and El Capitan rather than moving away from them. It’s another year of building on Yosemite’s foundation, another year of incremental change, and another year of over-saturated mountain wallpapers.
Like El Capitan before it, Sierra focuses on a few marquee features, a couple of under-the-hood changes, a smattering of smaller tweaks, and one or two signposts pointing toward future development. It’s the next release of OS X, new name or not. And we’ve spent a week with the first developer beta to dig into some of the new features ahead of the public beta in July and the public release in the fall.
Insights into the developer preview.
If that’s the biggest gripe then there can’t be much wrong with it (joke ok!)
To be honest, just about the first thing I do after installing and patching any OS is customise the look and feel. This includes the wallpaper.
As a Landscape Photographer(amateur) I have plenty to choose from.
My current is a picture of the road from Denilo Junction (NV) looking towards Lakeview (OR) and showing the distance marker. ‘Lakeview 179’, This is near the border between Nevada and Oregon. Oversaturated? Not a chance. (Next Gas is also 179 miles). This may well be replaced by a picture taken at dawn from the bottom of the grand canyon at the end of last month.
YMMV and probably will.
I think the name change is just to re-align the OS name with their other OSes. See tvOS, iOS, watchOS and so it make sense for macOS, it’s of cause just an update as usual.
That and it’s probably a little confusing to have OS X & iOS 10 out at the same time.
This. Also, OS X was meant to differentiate the new system from the old when it was released. It was meant to signal a new Apple, and it worked. But Apple doesn’t need that differentiation any more.
Truth be told, the macOS/Macbook Pro combo makes for the perfect developers machine. That’s why you see Google engineers using MacBooks on google i/o instead of, well, anything else.
I’m personally going to be happy if macOS stays mostly unchanged, except the APFS change is very welcome of course.
Boring is good.
I do with they’d return the old “random resize” button as Thom called it. The full screen window is cool and all, but it’s not what I want most of the time. Most of the time, I want a content aware maximization (document metaphor apps should enlarge to the size of the document, and window/app metaphor apps should fill the whole desktop).
We can double click the title bar now to get content aware maximization, so that’s something.
And yes, Safari does maximization wrong (Apple’s own browser), and Chrome while better, still only gets it partly right (expanding to the full height of the screen, but not width). Firefox is the only one to get it right – app metaphor. The internet is not a document metaphor (despite people still saying “web pages” instead of more appropriate nomenclature like screens and dialogs), and hasn’t been for a long time.
Edited 2016-06-24 14:04 UTC
I wish the random-size-button (which is a perfectly accurate name, in my experience) did its job to begin with.
I prefer the way the Windows maximize button (and the maximize button from every single reparenting WM ever made) works over whatever madness the green button does in OS X/macOS.
Edited 2016-06-28 20:11 UTC
I’d rather have incremental changes with minimal breakage than what, say, GNU/Linux distributions feel the need to do every six months or what Microsoft has done with Windows 10. Slow progress is good sometimes.
If you think Linux distros aren’t iterative, then you know fuck all about Linux. Hell, we’re still stuck with X11.
There are parts that are certainly iterative. Heck there are package which haven’t seen update for over a decade.
However, many of the popular desktop environment do frequently attempt some kind of big bang upgrade which leads to both functional issue and user base schisms.
Oh, I know. X11 is one of the only itorative things in Linux land. The rest… well, we’ve seen subsystems uprooted time and again. /dev to DevFS to Udev, HAL to udev, ALSA to that horrible audio layer called Pulseaudio which just makes ALSA worse, sysvinit/upstart/systemd… yes, clearly I know fuck all. Ass.
XOrg… but before that every distro used XFree and now they are planning to migrate to Wayland or another crazy invention because for some reason X11 is considered “old”… and “old” is always “baaaad” (and We are talking just about X11… I don’t even want to mention GNOME/KDE mess.. hahaha)
Linux distros are the opposite to iterative, they are RANDOM.
The only iterative Linux distro that I know is Slackware and modern Linux admins hate it (or they don’t even know it)… all the rest of the distros break and change tons of things from release to release just because (Debian and RHEL included, systemd anyone?). And the worst part is they don’t give shit about it… because “old is “baaad”.
Linux distros lack any kind of philosophy or design principle… they go with the flow… and that’s why they are a complete mess.
X.org is a fork of XFree86. It was the same codebase, developed by a different organisation. Gnome and KDE tend to shake things up every ten years or so, with a major release. You’re basically still complaining about KDE4.
For anyone who doesn’t know: that’s exactly why I use Arch Linux. When new versions of software are released, they are packaged up and available for installation (often the same day). Every day I get between 0 and 30 updates, on average probably around 5 per day. On the EXTREMELY rare occasion that something breaks, I know exactly which packages to look at for the fix.
I’ve been happily using the same installation of Arch Linux for seven years.
Does everything about an OS have to change every couple of years? Does there have to be a wholsale revamping of the way an OS looks and works have to happen on a regular basis? Does there have to be change for change’s sake? I would say that the answer to all these questions is no. With the current state of Windows, Linux, and macOS, I really don’t see any glaring need to totally change any of them just to satisfy pundits’ glaring need to have something new and different to write about every little bit. All these OS’s do what they do really well as they have done for years. We saw what a wholesale re-do did to Microsoft with Windows 8 and they are still trying to come back from that debacle. Windows 8 was pure change for change’s sake, trying to force a touch-based OS onto traditional mouse/keyboard/monitor hardware and it just plain did not work. I, and evidently no one else, did and do not want to have to reach up from my keyboard and touch things on my monitor screen. It is ergonomically WRONG, not to mention the fact that I take great pride in keeping my monitor screen clean. It is the last place I want greasy film and fingerprints on. Fingerprints on a phone or tablet are OK, a computer monitor is totally different situation. So, in the end, in my opinion, Apple is doing just fine by adding Siri to the Mac and the other changes and leaving the look and feel of macOS just the same.
Edited 2016-06-24 20:57 UTC
In the meantime Disk Utility is the same monstrosity as El Capitan’s. Madness!
Edited 2016-06-27 19:37 UTC
The GUI or the CLI? I don’t see anything wrong with the functionality of the GUI, but the diskutil CLI interface… it makes me cringe. Actually, OS X’s CLI interfaces (the Apple ones, not the BSD inherited userland) all make me cringe. They’re over-verbose, inconsistent, and prone to giving error messages about as useful as Microsoft’s.