Welcome (back) to Macintosh (opens in new tab)

Gonna say that the switch from X11 to Wayland that was pretty much forced this year across many distributions, broke a ton of things too (screenshot programs, keyboard shortcuts), however, all the code is open source, and there are workarounds and source code available but it still sucks.

Basic keyboard shortcuts are still broke with the Wayland migration. e.g. Copyq has this janky workaround for a shortcut to register with the xdg-portal (that works until reboot, then stops), Warp terminal claims there is no support, Flameshot was impossible to configure, have to use the built in Gnome shortcut tool now. The whole ecosystem got wrecked. I have been so irritated by this that I've been considering switching TO the mac ecosystem, BUT this thread is good on my eyes and makes me disinterested now.

I delayed upgrade to IPadOS 26.3 til reddit users shared on /r/ipad that its performance was on par with older version now. However, once I upgrade, the performance issues and bugs are noticeable instantly. For example,

1. switching between different browser tabs has a sub-second delay(est 200ms) 2. a tab in system settings menu takes 200ms to load 3. maximizing a video doesn't always work(sometimes it leaves a big white space on top) 4. double tabbing a keyboard key often triggers zooming into the browser page

I couldn't believe these issues haven't been fixed after 3 subversions.

“I don't feel like we own them.” ← Well-put!

I was 100% Apple: Mac Mini on the desktop, Macbook Air laptop, iPhone, and two iPads.

Then came Tahoe.

I hated it so badly and it wouldn't let me change the things I hated.

I noticed a subtle sneer as I worked, having to use this stupid computer that wouldn't let me adjust it to my liking anymore.

Then I noticed I wasn't working as much as I used to because I just viscerally hated having to work in that Tahoe environment.

At first I did the thing of erasing the entire computer and doing a USB install just go back to the previous.

But then like you said: “I don't feel like we own them.” I didn't trust Apple to not keep making it worse.

So I switched. Got a Linux desktop, and a Framework laptop. Sooooo nice!! Snappy-fast Linux just the way I want it.

While I was at it, got my first Android phone and installed GrapheneOS on Google Pixel. Sooooo nice! So quiet, doing only what I want.

Even got my first Android tablet to replace the iPad. (OnePlus Pad 3.) It's great too. I'm loving the whole Android ecosystem, when made nerdy like Linux.

So yeah I'm 100% off Apple now and will never go back.

That's how bad Tahoe is.

> macOS 26.3 updated clang and broke my emscripten workflow.

This is actually strange since Emscripten comes with its own Clang toolchain and shouldn't use anything from the system's toolchain (I'm also on 26.3 and haven't seen any behaviour changes in my dev setup).

FWIW, I'm also not a fan of the UI changes in Tahoe, but I mostly just move between the terminal (via Ghostty), VSCode and Chrome, so for the most part I'm blissfully unaware of the UI wreckage ;)

Mac user since the 90s, 10.14 Mojave seemed like the last release I liked and where the apps I used still worked correctly (or at all). Ironically Apple has already broken most of the apps I cared about, and for the rest LLM tools give enough leverage that I may be able to cobble together replacements for the rest.

I used to be on Year of Linux Desktop camp a few years ago with M$ on my email signatures and all, nowadays I rather take Windows and macOS, leaving GNU/Linux for Raspberry PI and servers, even with all the ongoing warts than the endless count of distros on Distrowatch, there is always that pain point that takes weekends to sort out, e.g. having a BRIX UEFI booting the desired distro, like I had to last year.

> My son wanted to try a Java minecraft app on his iPhone, but it required insane workarounds to enable JIT to get acceptable performance. This isn't a technical limitation, it's put in place specifically to protect Apple's walled garden, and their precious services revenue.

This would also not work properly in Android, because it is Android Java, not standard Java.

  > Clicks Communicator

Thank you for introducing me to this! If the keyboard is suitable for Hebrew input I will pursue this. I've tried all manner of external and on screen keyboards, but this looks like it might be a winner.

I'm with you here. Mac user since my father brought home a Mac SE, even briefly worked for Apple. Every new version of Mac OS is worse. Basic things like Finder or Disk Utility are barely usable to say nothing of the poor UX decisions.

How did you solve the Minecraft issue?

From an outsider just going by what you wrote: you are trading a $2000+ year-old computer for a new $2000+ computer because you are annoyed about some temporary problems (yes, they are temporary).

Apple marketers are just going to think that in another year you’re going to get annoyed by some Linux thing (yes, there will be something annoying) and buy a brand new $2000+ Mac.

These kind of posts get a lot of upvotes, but they do nothing to change corporate behavior.

I’m right where you are. Very happy Apple customer since my first PowerBook G4. Currently have an M1 Max, an iPhone 17 Pro, the iPad Pro, HomePod, Apple TV, and Watch Ultra.

All the _just works_ feeling and reliability seem to be gone. Tahoe is so unstable that I now restart the Mac every day, when in the past it happened on software updates only. Apple Music is another huge mess, I can’t comprehend how can it be so unreliable.

Looking for exits as well and kind of looking forward to migrating to Graphene OS, self-hosted Immich, and Navidrome

It is the year of the Linux desktop.

ElementaryOS is supposed to be a very clean transition environment for mac refugees. AI makes everything so much easier, Windows and Mac both have far more friction and hassle in contrast. Good luck!

Off the top of my head:

Yesterday, my wife wanted to use Discord. It was right there in the applications folder. But MacOS couldn't find it. Launching it manually took minutes, for some reason.

We wanted to download a clip using yt_dlp (a Python program). Terminal told us, this would require dev tools, which it doesn't. So we installed Python from python.org instead, which worked. Except, that non-blessed python could not access the internet because of some MacOS "security" feature.

Another security feature requires all apps to be notarized, even the ones I built myself. This used to have a relatively easy workaround (right click, open, accept the risk). Now it needs a terminal command.

I live and work in a multi-lingual environment, and have set up a keyboard shortcut to switch between the German and English keyboard. MacOS does not have a keyboard shortcut for this. But Karabiner can do it, albeit a bit jankily.

Lately, the keyboard layout no longer sticks. It resets to English when I press shift. Sometimes it does work, sometimes it doesn't. This is unrelated to the aforementioned Karabiner shortcut.

The German keyboard layout for MacOS on non-Apple keyboards is insane. So I made my own layout. This is relatively easy, and worked well. Except, every single OS update reinstates Apple's insane layout.

Sometimes my Mac does not wake from sleep. Pressing the power button does nothing. Hitting keyboard keys does nothing. Only a long-press of the power button eventually reboots it. The power button on the Mac Studio is in an insane place of course.

There is still no indication anywhere that the hard drive is getting full.

There is still no simple way to reset the computer to factory conditions.

Gaming is still largely impossible, even though the hardware is very capable.

I have replaced TimeMachine with restic, as TimeMachine keeps resetting itself after a while.

My Linux PC should arrive this week, and will replace the Mac. I've had enough.

It will require wine for two apps, and a VM for two others. At this point, that's a price I'm willing to pay.

I don't have anywhere to escape. With iOS I have at least a chance with Android (even when I am locked in due to Find My, which is still the one thing that works great and keeps me at Apple).

When someone (Google?) finds me a way to seamlessly find/lock my phone from my computer, my computer from phone, and they all find my wife phone and computer, and they all find my keys and my wife keys... that will be the day I escape.

I haven't ran into nearly as many bugs as I've seen from others, but there is definitely a performance hit for me. The UI in general feels sluggish compared to sequoia.

I have two M4 Pro's w/ 24GB of RAM (one work, one personal). Work is on Tahoe, personal on sequoia and there's a really noticeable difference in overall UI responsiveness. It becomes even more pronounced when I hook up to my external display (32" 4k).

In a way it reminds me of the olden days of running KDE or Compiz with every fancy effect enabled but on an underpowered GPU. Yeah, it technically works, but it's not necessarily a fluid or enjoyable experience.

I have my own other nitpicks about liquid glass & the design (there's tons of papercuts here), but that doesn't necessarily impact stability.

I have a dirty confession to make too: I’ve been running Tahoe and Windows 11 on my devices, and both are working fine for the most part. If I ever switch to Linux desktop, it will be mostly out of boredom.

Yes I agree.

I have an M1 Max like the author of this piece and recently upgraded. It's fine.

I don't like the look of it much and the drag targets are annoying but other than that it's been completely normal.

I'm usually in linux on my (2019?) mbp but have had to use macos for some stuff lately (so I'm not exactly tuned in to it and using it hard all day), but I don't see what the problem is tbh and haven't run into anything slowing me down or inducing the rage that I read here.

I also don't have any real complaints about Tahoe. The new UI looks weird, but it's not the first time Apple changes things for the sake of changing things, and I eventually get used to the changes.

The worst macOS releases I remember were in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Back then, I often had to spend a day or two after each release fixing things the update had broken. At some point, I was using Ubuntu VMs on desktop extensively, as it felt more stable and polished for some kinds of work than macOS.

I almost always skip the .0 and .1 versions. In my experience, it's better to wait for a few months after a major release of any software and let early adopters deal with the issues.

> And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path?

In my experience, the OS is as good as it's ever been. I've had to restart a Tahoe machine for something other than updates maybe once with macOS 26, and my main workstation is used 12+ hours/day.

In the HN Extended Universe, everyone using macOS has perpetually Had Enough and "begun to switch to Linux", while in the real world, Apple shipped 10%+ more Macs in 2025 than they did in 2024.

It is generally "fine" but as a life long mac user from the 68k days, what it isn't is up to the standards Apple used to hold themselves to. macOS has over the last handful of years especially become something of a "death by a thousand paper cuts" experience. And I think the problem Apple is facing is Tahoe is such a fundamental UI change (and no one likes those, just go back and read up on reactions to the original OS X UI) that people are paying more attention to the flaws. The noise and inconsistencies of the menu icons, the "last 20%" cases where the liquid glass UI is actually pretty broken (drop down a long list of possible wifi networks with a window with a white background behind the list), the places where the UI just seems to fail to update until some background thread finally gets around to it. The fact that these are nits, but that the nits have really been adding up over the years is starting the wear thin. Apple has always been a corporation of cycles, and things have gone bad before and then gotten better. But years and years ago, the degree of attention to detail that Apple (usually) put into their software and products was the sort of thing you could point to and demonstrate that for whatever other flaws the system might have, the attention to detail really helped make the whole experience just better. These days, while they do sometimes still get it right, it does feel like there's a lot of software design decisions made by "warm bodies" and not, as the article puts it, people who "bleed six colors". Tahoe is the first time in decades of using a mac that I've actually wanted Apple to take a step back and seriously just spend time fixing the bugs. And I daily drove OS X beta, so my tolerance for buggy software in the face of incredible potential is really high.

> And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path? Or are people just particularly confident about complaining about Tahoe after seeing everyone else do it.

That's like asking whether Jackson Pollock or Thomas Kinkade is the better artist. There is no objective measure for it. Some people will have a strong preference, others won't have a preference at all. The designers who made the changes in Tahoe clearly thought the changes are improvements. A lot of macOS users disagree, but some macOS users don't have a preference.

I've only seen a performance hit in rendering all of the icons they have put throuhgout Tahoe and I have had dark mode on. My total experience is about the same and I do like I can color and change the icons easily like classic macOS. I do see the liquid glass changes as a bit weird and inconsistent and while that can be reverted I just got used to it.

This has also been my experience. I don't really have any problems with it. It works fine, it doesn't have the weird telemetry and monetization issues that Windows has.

There are lots of other regressive, mind-bogglingly inept changes scattered across the included applications.

One of my favorites is in Apple Music, where the transport controls and song-title display has been moved from the top of the window down into the content-browser or song-list area... where it's "transparent" and overlaid on other text or album art.

In Mail, the "get new mail" button has been REMOVED from the toolbar. WTF? WHY? So when you're awaiting the ever-more-widespread 2FA from something you just logged into, you get to dig through a menu to hurry up retrieval or re-add the button to the toolbar (which casual users are not going to know how to do).

The utter stupidity of these flailing, desperate changes should concern every computer user. Microsoft is lost, and Windows a clinic on dereliction, design incompetence, and hostility toward users. That leaves Mac OS as the only tolerable consumer computing platform... and it has taken a profound turn for the worse with Tahoe.

And all for nothing. Apple's blunders here don't make sense from any perspective.

It has gotten a lot better since the betas/launch. The beta was _really_ bad.

I didn’t want to be that guy, but pretty much same boat. M3 Max, no issues, no reboots except for updates. Everything seems fine.

I wonder if there’s an issue with older M-series chips? I would image development is done on the latest and greatest, and maybe they’ve unintentionally missed something in the older architectures?

Is the UI great? Eh. But having to work with Windows in my day job, maybe I’m more patient with my Mac?

No issues here either

Yeah, I just don’t get it. My M2 MacBook’s as great as it’s ever been.

I don't know what's happened to Time Machine, with the capabilities available in APFS etc it should be much better if anything. But it's not. Thankfully the failure mode I've experienced didn't lead to data loss but I definitely don't trust it any more.

It is astounding to me how unperformant time machine is. When I went from the 2012 mbp to the m3 pro there was zero difference in time machine peformance. Still taking half a day for a couple gb changes. Moving at orders of magnitude below disk read write. Wtf is even happening under the hood of the time machine service? Rclone would be like warpspeed in comparison.

This is what worries me. I’ve used Time Machine for almost 20 years and it has provided seamless transitions to new MacBooks. But how do I know if it is currently borked?

Better Display is the app that can help with non-5K monitors. I cannot imagine using macOS without it.

I'm like you.

I loved Apple IIs at schools and libraries as a young child, fell in love with my Mac IIsi at home at the age of 7. Later, at 13, I had a Macintosh-evangelizing web site and mailing list that Guy Kawasaki (Apple's lead evangelist) even subscribed to.

I've been a primary Mac user through the 68k, PowerPC, Intel, and Apple Silicon days, from System 6.0.7 through today. Got an original iPhone and iPad, have upgraded my iPhone every few years since.

The technofeudalism, bugginess, and UI crappiness has me done and looking for the exits, to say nothing of the embrace of Trump. My next laptop won't be a Mac, and my next phone won't be an iPhone.

> I just don't know why they seem to be going out of their way to make the system unfriendly to existing users.

Sadly, they’re not going out of their way. It’s fully in the way of beancounters in harvesting mode. Apple has become a lawnmower, just like any other megacorp.

> [on windows 11] my network samba shares stay connected and mounted through restarts. I could never make this work reliably on macOS.

It’s wild to me that Apple has allowed SMB on MacOS to be so broken/slow and poorly implemented for so long. It’s been this way for over a DECADE.

I have friends who work at production studios who complain about network storage and MacOS all the time given any modern video workflow involves a NAS.

You would think a company that halos creative workers in all its ads would care about this. But they happily ignore since “SMB that works” is not a feature that will get much mainstream attention in a flashy keynote (that nobody watches anymore anyways).

I wish I could say Samba worked properly under Windows. I've been migrating file shares to Teams/OneDrive sync as Samba is not reliable anymore. Too many "Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user" or variations on that theme.

It's really sad. When this was introduced (With Lion I believe?) it was such a cool feature to demo to people that didn't have much exposure to Macs yet at that time. Just deleting and restoring a file on the Desktop with the "Space UI" and backups just being there and working without buying complicated backup software was a genuine peak macOS moment.

Now I'm barely using it as every few months I'm prompted to just delete the backup and start fresh because something corrupted.

I think they think of time capsule as a done deal. It doesn’t bring any extra money for them, and even though it’s broken, it exist to a point that when they’re selling a Mac they can say that it comes with a backup software as well. Just like a shady landlord tells you that the apartment facing a wall has a nice window.

I don’t know what these engineers are doing at Apple, but it surely isn’t making the ecosystem better, they’re just chasing hypes and shinny useless UI changes.

"Preventing users from running the software they want to run" seems like such an anti-feature, yet every major system seems to be moving quickly in this direction. I feel like general purpose computing is going to be on life support, soon.

I did it today. It took me thirty minutes to fix the networking because I couldn't get Little Snitch to uninstall since it didn't seem to be compatible. Basically I had to reboot in recovery mode to disable security features (csr) to uninstall Little Snitch (via systemextensionsctl). This is the worst update I've ever gone through on Mac, and I started using a Macintosh SE.

They've done something with the printer system in Tahoe. Brother removed support for native drivers on certain label printers on Tahoe (!!!) when you go searching you find other printer issues.

Like, why. Why would you need to change the printer system? It works.. has worked for a very long time, there's no reasonable need to change it.

Not sure how "purging" the headcount is supposed to fix all the problems.

I run all the betas on my macbook air just to see where things are going. When I first installed Tahoe, I thought to myself, I guess it's just the beta, there's no way they are going to keep this look...

My workstation is pinned firmly to sequoia right now and will be until it's untenable or they undo their new UI design direction, which is, as you pointed out, ghastly.

This will sound like hyperbole, but the direction on iOS and watchOS led directly to me selling my watch and giving my son my phone. I agree it's worse with watchOS.

Apple are so stubborn and persistent in the way they choose directions. I realized I'd rather move on than be stuck with that mess for years. It's wild.

I still use macOS but I'm steadily finding ways off. Weird times. I've been deeply embedded in the apple platform for over 25 years.

I think I sensed things were meaningfully changing around 2020 (I can't recall exactly), but my sense of the ongoing decline is way more rapid than I anticipated back then. Maybe it started and gained momentum earlier than I realized.

ATP spent like an hour complaining about workouts on watchOS 26; if they’re railing against the machine something is very broken.

You need to make sure Files is being indexed, I think the Documents directory indexing, for the clipboard history to work.

> you are entering several tasks in the scheduled view and you hit enter and carry on typing and it doesn't register the enter until several keypresses later

I have been experiencing this type of bug since forever when renaming files. Enter (to switch to renaming mode), start typing, first 1-3 letters are missing.

I thought you could only do it if you have own TM backup. Do they offer cloud recovery for older versions?

Rumors persist that you can in fact put a Linux on a macbook. Just in case you have one lying around (which I don’t).

I’m not waiting any longer. I have exactly zero hope that Apple will fix anything. I even doubt they’re still capable of it, even if they could be bothered to be interested in it.

I would so love to contradict you, but I can’t. I have to completely agree.

I'm a big fan of Planify, which supports a few different syncing backends: https://github.com/alainm23/planify

This would ring slightly true to me if it was say 20-30 years ago, but Apple are in many ways the IBM of end user business machines now and vast numbers of corporate drones have MacBooks - the rough edges are long ago sanded off.

An IT team that treats Mac users this way today is just a bad IT team.

This time for real. Multi-decade users of both Windoze and macOS won’t take any more shit and take action, instead of just complaining. That’s a quality I haven’t seen before.

To be fair, apple silicon is quite an innovation. Or did you mean only software?

Perhaps, Rosetta 2 and the hypervisor/container thingy? Those are pretty cool.

I have an M4 Max Mac Studio, and my record is 5 clicks. I found the success rate much improved after I assigned a keyboard shortcut; I have had it quickly wake up again a couple of times, so it's still not quite perfect, but that's very much the exception now.

Some tiny bit of input from the mouse, which I'm possibly not holding quite perfectly still post-click, perhaps? I can only assume so. The odd thing about it, though: none of my laptop Macs had this problem, even though I am using the same keyboard, the same mouse, and the same USB hub. Something must be different, somewhere. I wonder what.

I think the repetition is the point

Exactly. Guess what: I've been on Apple for 26 years. iOS 26 is already a shit show, the new Watch OS even more so, and never ever will I allow it to update my main work platform, my Macbook Pro, to something which promises to be even worse.

Correct.