Ask HN: Has anyone else skipped El Capitan entirely? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has anyone else skipped El Capitan entirely?

15 pointsgnicholas22 comments

Have used Macs for 25 years, and I just realized that El Capitan will be the first major OS version I've ever skipped. I recall seeing that the initial upgrade numbers were low, but I didn't suspect at the time that I might end up skipping the version altogether. Anybody else in the same boat? Would also be interested to know what I'm missing out on, if there's anything cool.

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El Capitan is a refining-things release, much like Snow Leopard was to Leopard or Windows 7 was to Vista (although comparing Yosemite to Vista is admittedly a big stretch). If you're using Yosemite, just upgrade to El Capitan.

There are some subtle new features that, since you're a long-time Mac user like myself, are nice to have but that you probably won't use. However, it fixes a lot of things that were rough in Yosemite. For example, the San Francisco system font is much more legible than Helvetica Neue was. There were also just a lot of general bug fixes in El Capitan. Now that it's been out for almost a year, most issues should be ironed out, so it's never been a better time to upgrade.

Thanks for the specifics. I've been eager for past optimization releases, like Snow Leopard, but didn't hear great things about El Cap. My biggest hesitation is that I'm a longtime user of MenuMeters, which is not compatible with El Cap: https://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/.

I wonder what's up with MenuMeters. What could code signature restrictions prevent them from doing that isn't preventing iStat Menus from running on El Capitan? They seem like similar products.

Yeah, dunno. Also, this [1] popped up, which appears to be very similar. I trusted MenuMeters and used them for over a decade, and I'm hesitant to jump onto some no-name version (even if it is open source, since I'm not savvy enough to investigate myself). Will probably try iStat since they've been around for a long time.

1: http://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/

Thanks for that link. The bottom section satisfies my curiosity very nicely.

Regarding your question, I adopted El Capitan as early as the public beta, and was happy with the improvements even at such an early stage. I never encountered any of the problems that I read about others having. I got the impression that those of us who were satisfied simply had no motivation to post online (in contrast to those who were encountering bugs).

That section satisfied my curiosity, too.

For those of you that might be interested in confirming or denying that the "no-name" version of MenuMeters does not contain any malicious code... Here are some links:

Original: http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/download/MenuMeters.tar...

Base of the fork: https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters/archive/f71e581819e3d...

You need to confirm that the base of the fork is a 1:1 exact match with the original.

If it is and you accept that, then here are all the differences between the latest version on github[1] and the original: https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters/compare/f71e581819e3d...

Footnotes:

1. That link is a moving target. If new commits come in today (or tomorrow), it will change.

2. This project has a health ecosystem of forks, some of which have newer commits than the one linked to in this HN thread.

3. Not like y'all ain't gonna download binaries to your macs anyway!

Yeah, there's definitely skew in comments that lean toward complaints. I was going mostly based on reports that adoption was significantly slower than previous releases, although it neared 50% by Feb 2016: http://www.computerworld.com/article/3040692/apple-mac/mac-o...

There's an interesting graph on this article that could have put that article's observation about adoption rate into an interesting perspective. Alas, the El Capitan line is just getting started, so it doesn't show the part of the story that I was hoping to see.

But it shows graphs of the last several versions – the last four of which are interesting because they show what adoption has been like since Apple started the annual release cadence. Their profiles aren't remarkably different, to my eye. They all have similar peaks immediately prior to the release of its successor.

http://lowendmac.com/2015/the-rise-and-fall-of-mac-os-x-vers...

El Capitan runs on the same machines as the previous several OS X versions, supporting machines back to 2007. The next one, MacOS Sierra, drops support for many of those machines.

This suggests that El Cap is the final cleanup of an underlying version that hasn't changed much, while Sierra will be make larger changes underneath. I look at that as a good sign for El Cap. They've identified various problems that they'll never admit to but have silently fixed, so El Cap will probably help more than harm.

Sierra, on the other hand, might be worth watching for a while before you decide.

The fascinating part is they're dropping support for a few boxes with no real logical cut off, prior were non-64 bit EFI machines, largely 2006 Mac models. Despite this, you can still install and run OS X rather smoothly on 2006 Mac Pros.

I have a 2008 Mac Pro, and probably will end just bypassing Apple's safe guards. You'd think it'd be not worth the effort but the only things I've noticed my 2008 Mac Pro misses that my 2015 Mac Pro are mostly the lack of VP-x which means you can't run the Windows Phone simulator (not a big deal) and there's a minor performance gap CPU wise and disk performance wise. That said, a lot of the long-in-tooth reason why this machine is still going strong is modular design: 24 GB of a RAM + GeForce GTX 780 means that its still a better gaming machine than any Mac laptop to date.

I don't see any reason to drop 2008 Mac Pros, and I've already seen users running the beta, so I imagine I'll be upgrading against Apple's wishes.

great points—I am looking forward to some features in Sierra but not planning to jump right in. Might give El Cap a try for the next 3-6 months while keeping my ear to the ground on Sierra.

I'm still on OSX 10.9.5 (Mavericks). Don't really like the iOS-style UI stuff they added after and don't need any of the features. The next time I have an iOS project that'll probably force me to upgrade though...

I use iTerm2 and for some reason couldn't upgrade it to 3.x on previous mac os version. The bug ticket on MacPorts even said that I need to have El-Capitan before updating. (But that might simply be a problem within mac-ports).

Only upgraded yesterday. Don't find anything that different. Screens (at least iTerm) seem to fade in and out faster. Also if you move your mouse in a circle consistently the cursor will become bigger. Presumably to help detect it on big screens.

The official post-update "show-off" was talking about updated FaceTime, Messages, iPhoto and a bunch of other programs I never use.

I did, but probably not for any specific reason other than having my dev environment setup and not wanting to disturb it. Some tools I use were very shaky with the root changes (was it?) so I just skipped it.

I also keep Xcode6 around for the same purpose and the thought of adding yet another Xcode version is not pleasant. And the latest version requires El Capitan.

I'll jump to Sierra directly, if my mac runs it (Macbook late 2008).

I am still at 10.6.8

Is hardware compatibility/sluggishness a concern?

I'm on a 2013 MBA and assume it could handle El Cap but just had no reason to upgrade. When I think back on prior upgrades, they were typically driven (for me) by feature compatibility with iOS (iMessage, Airdrop, etc.).

Security fixes?

Security updates still auto-download regularly. I don't know how many OSes back Apple issues these for, but being -1 seems OK.

I run Mavericks and Yosemite. Mavericks so far has been much more stable for my workflow as a Linux developer.

I put it off for a while but El Capitan was a painless and definitely sped things up and improved things so I wish I'd upgraded earlier.

I am running El Capitan and I have not really had any issues with it. It is largely just a refinement to the previous release.

Sounds like you have actually skipped LOTS of major OS versions, like Debian 5.0 for example.

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