10.6.8 was solid (people often forget that 10.6 and the intermediate patches were a bit of a mess) but when I use it I definitely feel a few spots where some polish and QoL improvements would be welcome. Its theme’s dominant gray is also a bit too dark.
I don’t mind SIP personally. It always unnerved me that any random executable was just a single admin password entry away from doing whatever it pleased.
My ideal desktop OS environment would be something like a polished-up Snow Leopard using the brighter, more refined theme from 10.9 Mavericks (except with the flat scrollbars de-flattened). If I had that I don’t think I could use anything else.
SIP is quite terrible. Requiring an access level higher than root to access system files, and only processes that are signed by Apple and have special entitlements can have that access level?
It's my computer, I should be at the top of the permissions totem pole, not Apple. If they're dead set on using signing to enforce the higher-than-root level, then I should be the one signing the executables. Fortunately, you can disable this crap.
"General purpose computing" is a niche market. Most buyers would be more than content with a machine that lets them run the specific software they need for their specific use cases, and otherwise protects them from executing malicious code. Joanna Rutkowska's "evil maid attack" is a real security threat; and one of the edges that Apple has in the marketplace is being one of the first vendors to design practical, evil-maid-resistant personal computers.
Genuinely curious, what are you doing that requires you to turn SIP off? I'd have thought only OS developers and maybe forensics people of various stripes need to do that.
Of course it doesn't, SIP would be pointless if it did. But since GP is so opposed to temporarily disabling SIP when they need escalated permissions, I assume they must feel the same way about needing to `sudo` and enter their password.
Its performance over wifi is also shockingly close to that of third party KB+mouse sharing software running hardwired which is crazy. Trying to use Synergy, etc over wifi is normally a laggy mess.
You can use Steam Link to render a VR environment on one device and project it into another's goggles over wifi. Or you can use Stadia and its compatriots to play 3D-rendered video games over WAN.
The amount of low-latency bandwidth modern computers have available is mindboggling.
Yep, I’ve used Sunshine and Moonlight to do exactly that. It’s super impressive, which makes it all the more confusing why Synergy and friends and send cursor movements and keystrokes (which I’d expect to be a stream of ints and chars) over WiFi without lagging.
It's certainly not true that it focused on stability even if Bertrand said it. Any kind of change reduces stability by introducing regressions. This includes performance improvements and it even includes other stability fixes.
Not from me. A black box filesystem that can't even accurately say how much space is free and destroys mechanical hard drives with longer term use. There were other options to deal with HFS+'s 2038 problem.
I have an ancient laptop with Snow Leopard running. It keeps my Nikon Film Scanner useful since Nikon abandoned the software for these scanners rather abruptly.
I've been a pro photographer since 1990 and the Kodachrome setting embedded within the Nikon scanner is fantastic for capturing the color and detail of this exceptionally sharp film.
