> I should have just bought a Mac a decade earlier.
I switched to Macs nearly 20 years ago from Windows and have been mostly very satisfied. But a recent upgrade from Mohave to Monterey has changed my opinion. It deleted all directories at the root level that the system didn't know about, including my backup (which I had to recover from Backblaze B2), deleted emacs, protected all the system directories to the point where, if you build things in weird system directories, forget it - it's impossible.
Maybe all this protection is good and necessary for the average user, but for me, it has turned my regular development laptop into a web client and I had to back off to an older Mac for development. Apple shoves more and more rules and restrictions down its users' throats, along with shiny baubles I don't care about, and I'm kinda over it.
I really feel this, and it is so disappointing. Since 2012 my primary development machine has been a MacBook Pro, and my 2020 M1 MacBook Pro is maybe my favorite workstation ever (they brought back the good keyboard, the M1 processor is so fast, and the battery life is insane—even at three years old I will get through half a day of work and zoom calls and only be down to 80%).
But at the same time, I see a slow creep of operating system and interface changes. Especially worrying is the push to make macOS look and operate more like iPadOS. I've loved macOS as a development platform because it's Unix-y enough, but with a polished desktop interface where everything just works without fiddling and tweaking.
Perhaps I'm missing something in their vision or perhaps I'm being too myopic, but I don't understand the obsession with adopting mobile/tablet-style interactions and restrictions.
Will I still be able to plan on using this operating system for development in the next 12 years? I've begun revisiting Linux as my desktop operating system on the side, because I fear the answer is no.
I switched to Macs nearly 20 years ago from Windows and have been mostly very satisfied. But a recent upgrade from Mohave to Monterey has changed my opinion. It deleted all directories at the root level that the system didn't know about, including my backup (which I had to recover from Backblaze B2), deleted emacs, protected all the system directories to the point where, if you build things in weird system directories, forget it - it's impossible.
Maybe all this protection is good and necessary for the average user, but for me, it has turned my regular development laptop into a web client and I had to back off to an older Mac for development. Apple shoves more and more rules and restrictions down its users' throats, along with shiny baubles I don't care about, and I'm kinda over it.
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