Why do people think OSX is so great?

[NathanE]

I've been using a MBPr 13" 16GB 500GB (Haswell) for a couple months now as my main machine. I use VMware Fusion and do all my development work in that, which generally works fine. And the Mac hosts a Xamarin build host for compiling iOS apps (this is pretty much the only reason I needed to make the switch from bare metal Windows).

In that short time I've found some pretty serious flaws with this so called modern OS. In no particular order:

* The close/minimise/maximise buttons don't work in a consistent fashion across applications.

* The aforementioned buttons cannot be resized, not even as an Accessibility option, and the immutable size Apple has chosen for them is not particularly user friendly; they are incredibly small. That's the first thing my (retired) mum commented on when she had a go on my machine so I'm not just making stuff up.

* Resizing windows is more difficult than it needs to be.

* The built-in firewall was not enabled by default. Seriously Apple?

* Battery usage is appalling compared to Windows. Even my previous non-Haswell HP EliteBook had better battery life. Apparently if you use a non-Safari web browser the OS is too rubbish to schedule threads appropriately in a fashion that doesn't rinse the battery. I am led to assume that Safari contains "hacks" to work around OS design flaws but Apple has not disclosed these to the likes of Chrome?

* The Activity Monitor tool reveals that OSX is using around 5-8% of CPU time constantly. Some "kernel_task" and "WindowsServer" processes are the main culprits. And that's from a fresh boot; once given some time for the machine to settle down.

* The OSX equivalent of the "Windows notification area" does not collapse so when you have installed enough applications it just dominates your menu bar with lots of rarely used "junk" icons.

* The "British PC Keyboard" input mapping is broken. Most notably the back tick and backslash keys are not mapped to the correct symbols. Home/End keys also don't really respond normally.

* "Finder" is like using Explorer on Windows 95. It is diabolically rubbish. Simple file and folder management tasks become massive chores. To such an extent I have several times just reverted to using my Windows VM to, you know, "get **** done".

* Sometimes when I have disconnected an external monitor, all of the windows/workspaces that were left on that monitor prior to disconnection will seemingly remain on that monitor. The windows/workspaces do not show up on Mission Control. The only way to recover the lost windows/workspaces is to either reboot the OS entirely or plug the monitor back in. This has happened maybe about 4 times now.

* Sometimes you get a "multi coloured spinny orb" mouse cursor. When this is shown the machine effectively becomes unusable until the annoying orb has disappeared. I assume there is some background operation occurring that is so damn important that the system wants to stop you doing anything else. In 16-bit Windows such as 3.11 this was called the "global lock" and it was really annoying even back then. So it is surprising that a supposedly modern OS still suffers from a fundamental flaw in its design like this.

* Further to that, last night I encountered the darker more evil twin of the "multi coloured spinny orb" mouse cursor which I shall call "multi coloured non-spinny orb of death" mouse cursor. Because the machine froze hard and even after 10 minutes of waiting was still unresponsive; couldn't even move the mouse cursor and the cursor was not its animated spinny usual self. This "freeze" alone is enough to put OSX back over 15 years in my mind because I simply cannot remember having a software-induced freeze like that since like Windows ME!


Why do people hail this "OSX" as being so great? It is a piece of ******* **** dressed up to look pretty. Windows was more stable than this rubbish back in Windows 2000. It's incredibly frustrating that I have to put up with using a massively sub-par operating system just so that I can run the Xamarin iOS build host, but such is life I guess.


With all that said, and in the interests of balance, OSX does have a couple features that are superior to what I've been used to in the past...

* Virtual desktops or "workspaces" as OSX calls them and the way they tie into the touchpad for fast switching is brilliant.

* A proper Unix-like shell.

* The app ecosystem is generally a lot more minimalist and higher quality. Even the Skype app is better, it doesn't even have adverts like the Windows one!

* Self-contained app containers/packages, even if the install procedure for apps is rather odd where you have to drag an icon into a folder. How did that pass usability testing by the way?

 

[NathanE]

I use a MacBook Pro for work/home stuff, at least 8-10 hours a day, it's never frozen, battery life is on a par with my laptop running Windows 8.1. (i3), I much prefer the software installation method on OS X rather than running all manner of different installers on windows and I've never had problems using external monitors. It looks like half of your complaints are peculiar to you rather than OS X as a whole.

What web browser are you using? And how many hours battery life are we talking?

The software installation is superior (not the drag drop bit though, but the fact everything is self-contained and doesn't pollute the entire system with entrails).

I don't think "half my complaints" are particular to me at all. Maybe 1 or 2.

 

[NathanE]

It sounds like you have something dodgy going on, no way should OSX be that unstable. I agree with you in regards to the inconsistancy of close/min/max, and thus use a window snapper for maximising, and turn off the 'show minimized windows in the dock' so they always go into their 'icon'. When combined with hyperdock this makes it easy to get the window you want back (a la Windows)

Resizing windows? three finger drag at the edge. OSX is overwhelmingly better using a trackpad.

Battery usage with safari vs other browsers IS frustrating.

Finder is odd; why is enter rename? I suppose I've just got used to it.

Multi monitor support is odd and even more odd since Mavericks, I have instabilities with it, too. Sometimes merges all my windows back to one desktop, other times leaves them in another workspace. I tend to turn workspaces off and prefer to just use one.

Thank you for that. I was beginning to think I was going nuts and being too picky.

I should probably clarify that the "multi coloured spinny orb" thing isn't every day. It's more like maybe once a week and doesn't usually last more than 5 seconds. But last night was very annoying where the whole machine froze hard whilst doing the spinny orb. I had just got home and found the machine in that state...

 

[NathanE]

The battery life issues you're experiencing with Chrome probably aren't the fault of Chrome. Adobe Flash for OS X is an absolute disaster. It's a CPU hog and prone to crashing completely. Adobe have made no noticeable effort to improve Flash on OS X and I'm sure you can now understand why Apple were so insistent that the iPhone didn't include Flash.

I use Chrome with "click to run plug-in" enabled. I get around 8 hours battery life out of my 15" MBPr. The other great resource hogs are also Adobe products. Running Photoshop and Illustrator also kill my battery life.

It sounds like most of your other problems with OS X are simply that it does things in a different way to Windows.

Yeah I've been using that FlashBlock thing too for a couple years now; so I don't think it is that.

I don't really have issue with it doing things differently from Windows. I don't know why people keep thinking that is the case. The problem I have is where it does things in a different way and for the worse. Just because "oh it's been like that since the 80s and it pre-dates all other OSes" is not a valid excuse for being ****.

 

[NathanE]

You do seem to have an issue with it doing things different from Windows. Most of the flaws in the OP are compared to Windows.

You think some of the ways of OS X are ****. I think it's different. We're each entitled to our opinions.

If you want it changing let Apple know : http://www.apple.com/feedback

Are you taking the mick? No, seriously? I've pointed out flaws and/or bugs and/or usability issues and you think I'm nit picking over trivial differences between Windows and Mac?

 

[NathanE]

My 13" Retina MBP will happily let me browse the web in Safari for 9 hours on the battery. I don't use Chrome on the Mac because it's a badly coded piece of junk, fortunately the OS publicly shames applications that are eating up resources to hopefully convince the developers to do a better job. The reason you're having issues with Chrome is because it's Chrome, not because developers aren't allowed to make apps that can efficiently use the hardware they are running on.

Not being funny but Chrome uses WebKit, no? Same as Safari. And Chrome works fine on Windows.

Google's ability to write software in general is reasonably bad - Google Drive on Windows has a bug in it that leaves a 40MB folder in Temp every time someone logs in if they didn't shut Google Drive down before logging off (who does this?), and then it sits there preventing the machine from shutting down until Windows forcefully kills it before it can delete the garbage it created at login.

Yup. On that note, why doesn't OSX support the ability to timeout and kill apps which are holding up a shutdown or restart? So annoying.

A lot of your issues sound like you have faulty hardware or are just personal preference issues. Resizing windows works exactly the same in Mac OS as it does in Windows - drag from any corner or edge.

Faulty hardware? Realllyy? Come on dude... This is a brand new machine. I spec'd it out to 16GB and 500GB SSD. It came direct from the China factory since it was a custom build. It's not been sat on a shop shelf for months. If it was bad RAM or something then I'd be seeing far more crashes and segfaults as well.

I think the issue with window resizing is that the windows don't seem to have any visible edging chrome, which means there is literally a pixel or two of which you mouse cursor must be precisely over before it offers the resize cursor. It's not a major issue no, but you would have thought Apple, the masters of UX, would have sorted these fundamentals out by now?

I don't really do enough in Finder to run into any of the limitations that other people seem to have with it. If I need to move large volumes of data around I will use rsync.

Fair enough.

I think you'd have had a better response by posing your questions as questions though, rather than dropping a "OS X isn't as good as Windows" thread into the Apple forum.

Maybe. Response has been pretty good though. I thought I was going nuts but seems not as a couple people have said they've experienced similar issues.

The keyboard layout being different to Windows is exactly that, a difference. It's not broken. You can connect a Windows keyboard if you want and use that, just pick the "British - PC" layout.

You've misunderstood. I have a PC keyboard hooked up by USB, and I've set it to use the British PC layout and yes 90% of the keys work as expected but the ones I highlighted do not. There is no possible explanation for this other than: bug.

The OS X equivalent of the notification area is the notification area that can be invoked by two finger dragging in from the right of the trackpad. This is far superior to anything that Windows has. The icons next to the clock can often be removed by holding down Cmd and dragging the icon out of the menu bar. If they can't be dragged out and there is no option in the application that put them there to disable the icon then feed that back to the developer.

I can't seem to get this to work? The two finger drag from right?
The area I'm talking about is left of the clock, next to all the WiFi and Volume stuff. It's currently full of Dropbox, Chrome, VMware, Skype, Time Machine and Bluetooth icons. I only use one of them; see the problem here?

I am a lot more productive in OS X than I am on Windows, hence why I buy Macs.

I'm not saying you aren't. I like my machine but if I could resolve some of these issues I would like it more.




This evening I had a new problem. My keyboard and touchpad stopped responding to all input. Had to hard-poweroff in the end. Not good. Seems it is a known issue but one which was supposedly fixed with a EFI update. Well, I assume I've got that update since it's not showing up as available to me on the App Store Updates. So looks like another OS bug for the list. FWIW I had just plugged in my phone to charge it via USB...

 

[NathanE]

This is a good explanation for the above close v minimise:

http://superuser.com/questions/1306...en-minimize-in-the-minimize-bar-and-in-the-ba

I have to admit it took me a while to get used to it but now it's not a problem.

But that explanation does nothing to resolve the very real usability problem which is that "close" on some apps will actually close it, but on others it merely enters a sort of state of hibernation that is seemingly no different to simply minimising the app.

 

[NathanE]

There is. But you have to copy it with cmd-c as usual, and then press command-option-v.

Alternatively, right click, press option, and paste will change to 'move item here'.

I can understand that this is simply a different way of thinking; in Windows you have two different 'start' commands; copy and cut, and one final command, paste, whereas in OSX you have one 'start' command, copy, and two final commands, paste, and move.

Putting move under an option key command is *not* intuitive however. Key modifiers are not user friendly.

Yeah exactly. I don't think anyone would begrudge OSX for having a single Copy command and two different types of Paste. That's fine. But hiding away the "alternate" Paste (i.e. Move) is stupid UX design. But I suppose "it's been like that since the 80s" right?

 

[NathanE]

It doesn't matter that an application is using memory, if it's not active then it typically becomes more eligible to be paged out. You don't need to worry about things like that with modern OSes.

Fixed. (in bold)

 

[NathanE]

Not really read any replies yet but it properly sounds like your machine is dodgy.

You have an SSD in there and it shouldn't ever beach ball. The main culprit of beach balling is paging. How much RAM do you have in the machine and do you have a virtual machine up whilst it does it? 8GB is really the bare minimum in my opinion and even more so if you have a VM running.

Being the IT guy at work and also a Apple Certified Technical Coordinator, I find most annoyances people have with using a Mac are their own ignorance.

EDIT - Seen 16GB.

It's not a dodgy machine. The software is dodgy, that's the problem.

It's 16GB. Though my Windows VM has 8GB of that. Don't tell me that OSX needs more than 8GB to run a few Chrome tabs, iTunes, Skype, Transmission and a Xamarin iOS Build Host? Because those are literally the only user processes I have running on OSX.

Don't care if you're some IT guy with a meaningless paper certification. I've found some pretty serious bugs with this OS and I happen to know a thing or two about this subject shall we say. Probably the most annoying right now is all the bugs in its USB support. Just this morning I had to reboot because the touchpad and keyboard in the machine stopped responding whilst my external USB mouse and keyboard were working fine. And plugging in my Nexus 4 phone to charge it will instantly crash the USB controller and prevents use of the touchpad and keyboard. The only way to recover from that is to hold down the Power button. The OS doesn't even seem to do a file system integrity check when it boots back up. I've Google'd these issues are they are all well-known, so not something that can just be blamed on my machine.

 

[NathanE]

OK, now you're just coming off as ignorant as well as arrogant.

I bow to your couple of months of Apple ownership, and realize that my years of experience and Apple certifications are utterly meaningless in that context.

So it's okay when some guy parades around his cert and suggests I may be ignorant about how the concept of virtual memory works. But when I call him out on that it makes me arrogant? Give over mate. You've been hostile in this thread ever since your first post.

Nah, he'd rather blame it on "bugs" in OS X and lecture from his soap box.

Give over.

What he's done is trawl Google for known bugs and claimed he's experienced them, if he did the same for Windows he'd have worn out his keyboard on the first post.

Conspiracy theorist? Yeah, maybe I don't even own the MacBook at all and I'm just making this all up! Unfortunately I don't eat bread so no OcUK Motors style "loaf of Hovis upon MacBook" photo will be materialising But more seriously, maybe the next time the USB controller screws up or I get a "beachball of death freeze" I will take a video for you guys.

so reload osx just like you do on windows. If the problems still exist then it may well be a hardware fault. Then.. take it back to Apple for a full replacement if you can prove what's happening. Problems happen on OSX as well as Windows. No technology is perfect.

I could spend several days reloading my machine, sure. But my research has suggested this would be a fruitless exercise since these appear to be well known issues. If I saw logical reasons why a reinstall might fix these issues then I would obviously go ahead and do it, but I am not seeing it currently.

 

[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.

 

[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?

 

[NathanE]

Sounds like a picnic error to me

So we now have Beachballs and Picnics? Fantastic!

 

[NathanE]

People offer entirely relevant suggestions to be received by "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"

The guy doesn't want to be helped and just wants to moan so might as well give up

Where was the entirely relevant suggestion to fix the Sleep Wake Failure issue? There hasn't been any suggestions. How about, you know, reading the thread rather than just sitting on the sidelines and slinging mud?

 

[NathanE]

Please just try an erase and install, if the issue persists then it's a hardware issue. Or even a archive install first.

Sleep Wake Failure is purely a failure to wake from sleep which could be down to a whole load of things. Did you even read the rest of the panic log?

Yes RAM faults can actually produce intermittent issues, yes so can a SSD.

Is this whole post specifically concerning the Sleep Wake Failure?

Yes I read the rest of the panic log, but it was just dozens of stack traces from the kernel. What else are you expecting to glean from such a log? CPU registers?

RAM faults typically show up as segmentation faults, not as a persistent kernel panic concerning a specific power management failure. An SSD fault causing this seems unlikely since I haven't yet seen OSX do a hibernation to disk. It always seems to just play with CPU sleep states. Which of course means the RAM is kept powered during sleep.

I won't be erasing and reinstalling for this particular issue, no. Evidence is very clear that it is a bug in 10.9.3, and indeed I recognised the symptoms shortly after upgrading to 10.9.3. Unfortunately I don't have Time Machine setup so I can't roll back to 10.9.2 either.

 

[NathanE]

Interesting:

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/467919

 

[NathanE]

I agree with some of your points and overall I'm indifferent to Mac OS. I like it, but I like Windows. I switch between the two regularly.

Me too. I run Windows in VMware Fusion, works pretty good. Wish Fusion supported V-sync though...

It does some things better than Windows, but it does some things far, far worse. Window management is clunky (for example, why can't 'maximise' actually maximise? I want to use all of my screen without having to drag a corner of the window), Finder is awful, network drive support is awful, some settings and configuration options are in bizarre hard-to-find places, Apple seem to like removing features at random with no reason (i.e. the ability to have the battery time remaining in the menu bar.. Why?!).

That is the weird paradox with OSX. One half of its window management is absolutely awful. This is the half which seemingly hasn't been improved since the 1980s for fear of offending what must be 1% of their customer base. The other half, the virtual desktops (workspaces) and mission control and all that lark, is lightyears ahead of what Windows has.

On the contrary, software installation and removal is dead easy, driver support is fantastic and device installation is super quick, Time Machine is fantastic, reinstallation over the internet is a great idea in this day and age.

My only comment on driver support would be... to use a external HDD with NTFS you need to buy Tuxera's NTFS driver. And second, OSX doesn't natively support accessing lots of USB devices that use the MTP protocol. This means all Android phones. But also lots of other devices like media players and cameras. I've not looked into this too much yet, other than discovering that the official Android File Transfer app for OSX is a pile of turd and causes the USB controller to crash resulting in a non responsive keyboard and touchpad.

What I do like the most about Apple computers is the quality of the hardware in comparison with, well, everything else.

Yup.

The stability issues you're having aren't down to Mac OS itself - there's an issue with your system.

Well that remains to be seen really. I'm yet to see anything that indicates to me it is a hardware issue. As said, the Android File Transfer app was causing one of the bigger issues. It seems possible that VMware Fusion may be causing or at least contributing to in some way this Sleep Wake Failure issue. I will keep investigating that one.

Unlike crazy non-suggestions on here to accept my machine is faulty hardware and to get it replaced, or to cross my fingers and do a clean reinstall... I am actually working the problems, doing research, to logically come to reasoned solutions. I guess that's one thing that sets a long-time Windows and Linux power user apart from the typical Apple "where's the nearest Genius bar" worship fodder. Sorry if that upsets anyone but it's the god damn truth.

Oh and yes, unfortunately Chrome on OS X is a huge resource hog / leak it's a shame because it's much better to use than Safari.

Yup, know that now

 

[NathanE]

No it isn't. Well certainly not in my case. I've been supporting Windows systems far longer than I've been working with OSX and have a healthy understanding of both.

The point you don't seem to be grasping is the fact that you're pretty much the only one here with as many issues as this. So what exactly does that say to you?

We're all running similar hardware with basically the same version of the OS, yet we don't get the same issues as you?

If we were all getting them then yes it would be down to a bug that there isn't a fix yet for, but the simple case is is that we're not. Why do you point blank refuse to believe that there could be a hardware issue or a deep software corruption with your machine? That's what I'm trying to comprehend. You've got people here offering you genuine advice but you keep throwing it back saying "no you're wrong" when, if you've still got the issues, clearly you haven't figured out why yet and just blaming it all to bugs what makes you right, and us lot, wrong?

As a matter of fact, a sign where there is a genuine bug is if you look for Mavericks and issues accessing network drives via SMB2, you'll find countless threads detailing the issues and work arounds, those are bug related. One person having the aforementioned issues, is not.

That wasn't really at you Phate... and you should already know that I know you're a long time Windows user...

I don't quite understand your logic here though. I *have* found countless threads from people with the same issues as me. But apparently this does not qualify? There seems to be some train of thought in this thread that if no participants in the thread except me are experiencing a problem (irrespective of the wider web) then it must mean I am doing something wrong or my machine is broken. I really don't understand this logic. OcUK is not the be-all-end-all you know.

And yeah I didn't want to mention the Windows file sharing bugs in OSX. It's basically pretty much broken and unusable It didn't bother me enough though to warrant mentioning it. My view is that if you want to access Windows file shares, then use a Windows VM. Which is what I do.

Are you running VMware Fusion? Remember this installs a hypervisor deep into the system... which would mean, if you don't have VMware Fusion, then your system along with lots of other peoples in this thread is *not* the same as mine.