Why do people think OSX is so great?

[Fallen god]

I have found multi monitor support to be ok at best and woeful at the worst of times, I have only owned a OSX device since Mavericks and from reading reviews support was much worse per Mavericks.

• Simple things like my dock magically disappearing (My monitors at work are 16:10), or appearing when I take an app full screen.
• Wallpapers are hell, I recently tried to change my Wallpaper, so I changed it on all monitors across all my work spaces. Turn laptop on the next day and it has a mixture of all wallpapers I have used since the day I got my Mac. It shoulnd't be so hard to change a wallpaper, and I always have issues with it
• If I put my Machine to sleep before I unplug my display, when the machine is woken up next it still assumes the display is connected, all my windows will be spread across the displays, and my mouse can freely move off screen to where the displays where last positioned. Pretty annoying bug as I like to close my lid before I remove the cables at work.
• Dragging a app to another windows doesn't automatically make it fixed to that display e.g. I can move PS from my Laptop screen to Monitor 1 but all daliogs, until I manual switch it in the dock.

There are a few other issues I have faced, as a whole I really enjoy OSX but it has had a lot of bugs, moreover with multi monitor.

Sticking too the OP, I don't mind about minimise and such as I just use hotkeys for all that, its a lot more consistent and it allows me to keep my hands on the keyboards.

Battery life has been awesome for me, I would recommend taking a look at apps like CocobutBattery and seeing what they report. I get a solid 10hours using Chrome. A lot of people bitch about battery life on chrome but it is just as good, but you can install 120312 plugins and make it need a lot more resources, if you have a sensible amount of plugins its solid. It also sandboxes Flash which is a plus. Also dislike the UI on Safari, its overall metal design, doesn't have favicons in the tab bar, the whole tab bar idea is nuts, I don't need it full screen tab bar when I have 2 tabs, and chrome works on all my devices.

Keyboard was ****ing annoying, I hate apple for switching things like the @/" out of sheer arrogance to not produce a standard UK keyboard, **** em for that. I'm used too it now, but I hated that I had too.

Also dislike how everything has to basically run through Thunderbolt, without any ports included. My friend got a Sony Vaio Pro and it came with so many ports, a mini ethernet too ethernet, hdmi/dvi -> mini DP, even a mini portable WiFi station. With Apple you have to pony up £30 for every thing and it makes it difficult not to think Apple makes some choices purely to get more money out of users.

Everything else about OSX I really enjoy, I get a real terminal compared to Putty, omg godsend. Scaling actual works, I had a SP2 before and it was not good, I have not had a single scaling issue. Hardware is awesome, price now is very competitive.

Battery life has been awesome, love the display, I like how consistent apps are e.g. I can hit cmd + , in any app and open the settings page. Apps are generally better designed, and I've not seen one piece of crapware trying to trick me to install it along with an app. App store is not bad, sandboxing means most of the apps I use I have to get direct from the developer thou so it is sort of lost on me.

All in all its been good, hopefully 10.10 fixes some of the stupid bugs/crashes I get, its not be as stable as I hoped for but I get a lot more done a lot faster then windows, and it has been more stable then my experience with linux.

 

[MagicBoy]

Keyboard was ****ing annoying, I hate apple for switching things like the @/" out of sheer arrogance to not produce a standard UK keyboard, **** em for that. I'm used too it now, but I hated that I had too.

It's not arrogance - it's a standard Apple UK keyboard.

It's a Mac, not a IBM/Wintel PC. The Mac might share some common components with one now, but that wasn't the case 30 years ago.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

Also dislike how everything has to basically run through Thunderbolt, without any ports included. My friend got a Sony Vaio Pro and it came with so many ports, a mini ethernet too ethernet, hdmi/dvi -> mini DP, even a mini portable WiFi station. With Apple you have to pony up £30 for every thing and it makes it difficult not to think Apple makes some choices purely to get more money out of users.

I really like the idea that Thunderbolt incorporates to much, and especially the bandwidth of it. I dislike that intel are not pushing it more, and as a results so many accessories and docks a costs more.

Although I agree that the lack of ports is annoying. Even with my Mac Pro, and I love the darn thing. I wish it had more USB3.0 ports alone. I can run all my storage and displays through thunderbolt, but I'm an accessory fiend, for controllers, interfaces hot swap docks and the like, and those are USB.

I'm also a fervent wired peripheral user, with my magic mouse only for use in Screenflow and FCPX( dem lovely finger swipes ). So I always want those directly into the pc as opposed to a dock.


My biggest issue by FAR with Apple and OSX, is the horrid OpenGL performance in some applications, and especially for games development. Sadly this is all down to Drivers, especially AMD. OpenGL in OSX, and linux is faster than OGL in Windows for benchmarks, but damn are the drivers on AMD hardware abysmal.

My Old Mac Pro has a cheap GTX 660 in, and it performs just as well in some OpenGL tasks as a single AMD FirePro D700. All due to drivers.
The update to 10.9.3 added more stability for me, but in some cases chopped off upto 20% performance. Something Apple need to seriously address.

 

[Fallen god]

It's not arrogance - it's a standard Apple UK keyboard.

It's a Mac, not a IBM/Wintel PC. The Mac might share some common components with one now, but that wasn't the case 30 years ago.

But isn;t the @/" keys universally different for US/UK keyboards?

I really like the idea that Thunderbolt incorporates to much, and especially the bandwidth of it. I dislike that intel are not pushing it more, and as a results so many accessories and docks a costs more.

I think the idea is sound, but the 'Pro' machines are meant to be business/corporate line although it really isn't. Either way a lot of business still use things like VGA/DVi ethernet ports and so on, I think they should at least included 1/2 stand convertor ports and let users get the rest. I don't mind paying, but the out of box experience is sub par. My old job didn't alone me to work over WiFi for security reasons, simple as. So I had 1 Thunderbolt -> ethernet, 1 Mini dp -> DVI.

A lot of things out the box are awesome, I love how you have a short/long socket I leave the long one at work and keep the plug at home, works great. But I think for an expensive machine it should work a bit better in the corporate environment without having to spend up to £100 getting extra ports.

 

[MagicBoy]

But isn;t the @/" keys universally different for US/UK keyboards?

Maybe now with globalisation, ISO standards etc. The basis of the current Apple layout dates from the early ADB keyboards in the mid 80s.

Here's a Apple II GS keyboard from 1986 - http://deskthority.net/w/images/7/7d/Apple_M0330_top.jpg

 

[V F]

Is it really such effort to adapt?

 

[Fallen god]

Maybe now with globalisation, ISO standards etc. The basis of the current Apple layout dates from the early ADB keyboards in the mid 80s.

Here's a Apple II GS keyboard from 1986 - http://deskthority.net/w/images/7/7d/Apple_M0330_top.jpg

this that an american keyboard, just guessing based on the L shift.

Is it really such effort to adapt?

Not at all, but switching standard layout makes things harder, now we I do go back to windows/Unix to type something the @ key has change. I understand a lot of change just for it being a different OS, but some things like @ have nothing really to do with the OS. MagicBoy does show that it has always been that way, but that doesn't mean its exactly correct.

I basically rather have as much standard keys the same, to make things easier. A lot of my friends also use OSX at only work or home so keeping as much standards makes it much easier. When anyone at work (All the rest of the devs use Unix) come to pair program with me it is a really jarring experience, and I have the same when I see there standard windows keyboard.

 

[Phate]

Getting used to two different layouts is easy

I actually prefer the @ sign above the 2. Find it a bit easier/more natural.

 

[MagicBoy]

this that an american keyboard, just guessing based on the L shift.

It's multilingual. Note the £ sign above the 3.

 

[Fallen god]

It's multilingual. Note the £ sign above the 3.

Ah yes, I guess the current layout is newer then that.

 

[NathanE]

Had more software-induced kernel panics this week alone than in >15 years of Windows.

All related to power management, the specific error is "Sleep Wake Failure". Again, a quick Google seems to suggest this problem has been going on for 2 years but still no fix from Apple. Not sure why I've had so many this week though. Possibly because I've been using the machine on battery a lot more, with it sleeping for several hours between uses.

I know I probably come across as a troll to some of you... but I swear that's not my intention. I am the middleman in all this really. I don't really give a toss about OSX or Windows or whatever these days. I just like a stable machine to write my own software on. Honestly, I have been massively surprised by just how many bugs I have found in OSX in such a short time frame. I had to make this thread to do a reality check to make sure "it wasn't just me". I do think however that some of the (albeit, few) negative reactions were as a result of "inconvenient truths" being highlighted.

 

[Phate]

NathanE, did you try my suggestions above?

I really think this is deeper than just bugs you're finding - I appreciate what you're saying, however any issue you throw into google you're bound to find others having it and someone claiming it to be an ongoing bug/issue etc when it might simply be a small handful of people with an underlying problem causing these bugs.

Try the repair install. What have you got to lose?

 

[NathanE]

Also I figured out how to avoid the bug when disconnecting an external monitor and where all the windows/workspaces would get orphaned and become unaccessible until you reconnected the monitor.

Solution is simple... make sure that external monitor is not "sleeping". It has to be fully awake whilst you disconnect the cable.

 

[NathanE]

NathanE, did you try my suggestions above?

I really think this is deeper than just bugs you're finding - I appreciate what you're saying, however any issue you throw into google you're bound to find others having it and someone claiming it to be an ongoing bug/issue etc when it might simply be a small handful of people with an underlying problem causing these bugs.

Try the repair install. What have you got to lose?

I've been around computers for too long to know that doing a "repair" isn't going to fix this Sleep Wake Failure kernel panic (unless it rolls back the kernel version?). It actually appears to be a bug they re-introduced in the 10.9.3 update, which I seem to recall installing late last week, and this would correlate with me seeing this problem all through this week.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/25871024#25871024

That's just one thread of several dozen. All the various Apple forums are ablaze with this issue so I don't think it can just be written off as "just me" or "a small handful of people".

A more plausible solution would be to roll back to 10.9.2 kernel. Is that possible?

 

[Phate]

I've been around computers for too long to know that doing a "repair" isn't going to fix this Sleep Wake Failure kernel panic (unless it rolls back the kernel version?). It actually appears to be a bug they re-introduced in the 10.9.3 update, which I seem to recall installing late last week, and this would correlate with me seeing this problem all through this week.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/25871024#25871024

That's just one thread of several dozen. All the various Apple forums are ablaze with this issue so I don't think it can just be written off as "just me" or "a small handful of people".

A more plausible solution would be to roll back to 10.9.2 kernel. Is that possible?

I'm not saying the repair will fix this specific issue but I think it could help resolve some of your other issues. As lots of us has said, we do not get anywhere near the amount of problems you do, so you have to start somewhere, agreed?

Like I said, what have you got to lose? Nothing really!

 

[shiver]

Sounds like a picnic error to me

 

[Phate]

Sounds like a picnic error to me

 

[MagicBoy]

A more plausible solution would be to roll back to 10.9.2 kernel. Is that possible?

Yeah, if you've got a time machine backup from prior to installing the 10.9.3 update. You'd have to restore the entire machine though I expect.

Repair install would also work if you've previously made OS media. Using the recovery partition will install the current version (ie 10.9.3) off the Apple servers.

 

[NathanE]

Sounds like a picnic error to me

So we now have Beachballs and Picnics? Fantastic!

 

[shiver]

picnic - problem in chair, not in computer