Tim Bray, complaining about the direction Apple is taking OS X:
> In Particular · Since Snow Leopard, there’s been exactly one useful new OS X thing: windows you can resize at any edge. And there have been brutal amputations (most painful for me: loss of the Apache GUI and the moronic refusal to tell me what screen resolutions I’m using).
One new feature?
+ iCloud
+ VIP email inbox
+ Omnibar in Safari
+ How about just the overall stability of Safari
+ Fullscreen apps
I’ll stop. What Bray is really upset about, from what I can infer, two things:
1. The new features are obfuscating the nerd parts of the OS. Like the screen size resolutions Bray complains about, these changes are vastly more useful to non-geeks and should be irrelevant to geeks since there are plenty of tools that can hep mitigate this that are asily found using any search engine, even Google.
2. I think the biggest problem Bray is having is one that plagues a lot of people. Which is, unless you buy fully into the Apple environment you get limited benefit from new OS updates. So if you use an Android phone, iCloud is irrelevant to you. Likewise if you don’t use Safari the massive strides there won’t effect you. And so on. This is typical of Apple, you need to fully “buy in” to the Apple environment or you risk wondering why in the hell you keep upgrading.
Bray won’t be better of on Ubuntu, most people aren’t. I tried doing that same thing a few times now, because it sounds so appealing to the inner geek in me: more trouble than it’s worth and I could never fully be just Linux.
Bray’s points are valid, but not a fault of OS X. Rather they are the fault of the user only wanting to have one foot in the door of an ecosystem that requires you to dive in head first.