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Comment by themoonbus | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone give specific examples of OS X backsliding in the feature department? The article he links to talks about having to tweak some settings, and not liking Messages... not really egregious issues in my book. I've been pretty satisfied with how it's progressed (and I'm far from a fanboy. There were times in my life when I was using Linux, Windows, and Mac OS on a daily basis.)

I can think of several features that have improved my productivity... mission control, handoff, updated notifications, the new spotlight to name a few. They also finally fixed multi-monitor support in 10.9 which was a huge deal for me.

I do feel far more productive in OS X than other OS's, but perhaps that's just familiarity at this point. I'm curious to hear what other people's major complaints are.

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> Can anyone give specific examples of OS X backsliding in the feature department?

There was a 475+ post discussion just yesterday on this. I'm sure you could find plenty of examples there. :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8832943

I don't think it's "backsliding in the feature department" as much as bugs.

Missed that post, thanks!

Yosemite is much more memory/swap intensive than Mavericks. On my 4GB 'Air, with 3 apps open, it swaps about 40 times as much as Mavericks. So much so, that SSD lifespan is a concern.

*Based on my own informal tests using vm_stat to measure pageout activity.

Two come to mind:

10.6: No new consumer facing features, just a big ironing out of 10.5.

10.7: Removed 2D Spaces layout to a left/right one. Totally ruined my workflow. Also got rid of scroll-bars.

10.8: ?

10.9: Not exactly OS level, but iWork took a huge backslide feature wise.

10.10: Blurs everywhere. It can put a hit on overall performance of applications, especially visual ones like Photoshop+RAW images or video editing.

Nothing comes to mind for [10.8, 10.9] which might say a bit to your point. However, Messages has been in since 10.8 and items are still out of order? They need to iron out just like they did with 10.6, otherwise the bugs and deep issues will compound year after year.

Yeah, I still haven't gotten over the layout of spaces to be honest, but overall I think mission control improves my productivity so I've accepted it at this point.

Yosemite seems to run fine on my old Macbook pro, but I don't do any heavy lifting with it.

You may be interested in TotalSpaces2 [1]...I just (re)discovered the site yesterday. Haven't had a chance to try it yet.

[1]: http://totalspaces.binaryage.com/

Speaking of the OS not as the desktop, but what traditionally an OS means: device support, memory and process management, application environment, file system and networking.

As a developer, I find OS X to be immature, undocumented, arcane and volatile. Online Core documentation is very sketchy, often no more than a listing of argument types. Googling for help results in only questions, rarely answers. Versions add new APIs as quickly as they obsolete the old standard ones, leaving everybody hopping to update, often several times per year.

I'm speaking 100% from the perspective of a user, which is what I believe the post was focused on.

I've never developed for Apple platforms.

Depending on what you're doing its still frequently better than Win32 (which has an extremely broad range of API and documentation quality), or linux (which is just downright screwy at times).

Although all bets are off if you're including headers from within mach. You're better off finding what you need in POSIX at that point, or, failing that, an external library.

Mavericks SMB file sharing implementation is completely broken. They shipped a new implementation (no longer using Samba maybe?) and the new implementation does not work correctly. Many painful details at http://www.macwindows.com/mavericks-filesharing.html

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