insert rageface here

[solarbird]

OS X has started heading towards that point I hit in Windows where I switched architectures - specifically, where all sorts of WOW ISN'T THIS GREAT LET ME FORCE IT UPON YOU architectural changes make me rageface and want to throw the machine out the window.

Example: autosave. I've turned it off, but it's turned itself back on before and fucked me, because all of my workflow in the world relies on making changes I don't know whether I want, then doing save-as if I like them. Now? NOPE IT'S SAVED FOR YOU NOW MOTHERFUCKER and if I want to undo it, I get to scroll back through who-the-fuck-even-knows how many autosaved revisions to get back to what I actually wanted. And save-as? NOPE. But I've enabled export! Which it occasionally un-enables! And once you do export, you don't always get to go back! At least, not without going into the hellishly awful Time Machine document reversion interface, where you can't see enough of the document to make a good decision!

And so far it's not predictable. So today I found myself staring at a spreadsheet in Office going, "okay, want I want to do is delete these rows here, then move some things around, then save the result in a different file, but I don't know if I can do this, because I have no idea what OS X will do now.

Also today, I was trying to delete several related bookmarks. Delete no longer deletes a selected bookmark, it deletes your (not selected!) search and moves you back to another window! BUT WAIT I'M WRONG IT DOES IT ALSO DELETED THE BOOKMARK. Good? I guess? I just couldn't tell because it took me back to a completely different view! But then I get to reenter the search because it deleted that too and I didn't want to delete just one. I have to select all the matching ones, then delete them all at once, and then since it deleted my search and my view I have to search again to make sure it actually did it, because there's no feedback, you're suddenly in a completely different view.

Steve was a asshole. But his machines did not do shit like this. Not as regularly; not to me.

This is the kind of bullshit that made me abandon Windows. Simple tasks became inordinately difficult because Some Random Thing would happen because Some Goddamn PM had to get their feature in your face.

AmigaDOS, where are you when we need you the most?

Comments

[mdlbear]

You can get LibreOffice for Mac. It may not be as featureful, but it's cross-platform, and *not* marketing-driven.

[solarbird]

It's not Office that's the problem. In fact, I think my antique version of Office (2008, the first Intel build) is completely unaware of this new feature and can't do it.

But that's not the point; the point is that I no longer reliably know what will happen with things, anywhere on the OS. Because it's not reliable.

Crazymaking.

[mdlbear]

Yeah; Ubuntu is moving in that direction, too. But fortunately it's based on Debian, so you can go back to any previous desktop. I have 20-year-old config files that still work, including key bindings.

[stickmaker]

Yah. They take something which works fine and add "features" which do something you don't want and can't be turned off. Which also make the app less stable!

[solarbird]

I miss Snow Leopard.

[attie]

I need to buy a new computer (or two), not just yesterday but about a year ago, but I keep procrastinating for this exact reason. I use Linux at work, if I'm gonna throw 4x the price of a regular desktop at some shiny machine just for the convenience of not having to regularly spend 5h in the console hunting down obscure dependencies and compiling shit because nothing works and the bugfix hasn't made its way downstream in the last year, then it better actually be more convenient.

I had to upgrade from Snow Leopard when they stopped making security fixes for it. I regret it every day. (At least I finally made it stop trying to foist Yosemite on me, wow was that an annoying non-removable notification!)