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A question that always generates calm and reasonable discussion: What OS do you use?
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The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey.
-- Andy Warhol
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday August 07 2015, @01:19AM
...because I do my "handling of organization" on a MacBook Pro ("Late 2006") with Snow Leopard. But I run whatever is suited best for a job (avoiding avoidable jobs requiring Windows...). The Linux gear mostly is on current Mint LTS with MATE, except for one experimental box on Elementary.
From the "new & cloudy" stuff, I can't stand any. I've got a decked out Retina MBP (that came at the cost of roughly 20 useful used T-series ThinkPads from the 'bay) relegated to occasional compatibility tests and being a surfboard, because I think every OS X since 10.7 has gotten worse.
Not that Windows would have any advantage here. That always was much worse to start with, but gets even more worse even faster. Not even GNOME 3 or Unity (which I both find unbearable) can match that.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Friday August 07 2015, @06:55AM
Amen, brother! Snow Leopard I think was the last truly excellent version of OS X. After that it all went down hill. I really started to notice it when I upgraded from Snow Leopard directly to Mountain Lion on my 2008 iMac with 4 GB of RAM. What was once speedy and nimble thanks to Snow Leopard's full support of the 64-bit architecture turned into a major drudge.
My new iMac is faster, but only because it's quad-core instead of dual-core, has a higher clock speed, and uses newer technology from Intel. Yosemite is still a dog. Apple promises that El Capitan will be faster than Yosemite. I won't bet money on it.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Friday August 07 2015, @03:29PM
Really? The fact your packing a Core2 CPU, DDR2 RAM, SATA2 storage and a graphics chip 9 generations out of date isn't the problem here? Try running a modern OS on modern hardware.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Friday August 07 2015, @06:16PM
Uh..... my point is that it ran great with Snow Leopard, and then something changed. It's called bloat. As far as it being out of date, well, yes, it's out of date. I should have better explained the performance issues with OS X beyond Snow Leopard. When you double-click on a small app like TextEdit and it takes many seconds to pop up when the machine is otherwise idle tells me there is a big problem. And I do run OS X on "modern hardware" now and it's still a dog; it's just a faster dog because the faster hardware makes it look faster But it's a dog, an old lazy one. OS X, a "modern OS", as an allegedly "modern" OS has all sorts of additional crapware that is doing all sorts of generally useless things that just slow it down.
BTW, I do run a "modern OS" on that old iMac. It's called Linux, Ubuntu Linux to be specific with the awful Unity interface replaced with GNIOME. It's blazingly fast and very responsive.
So, I bite my thumb at you, sir!
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Saturday August 08 2015, @10:07AM
Snow Leopard was good, I liked having a workspace per task on my company mandated iMac that I could switch between with my fourth mouse button.
TextEdit on Yosemite is an iCloud app, so that start-up time increase is network latency related - fire it up with activity monitor running (network tab, fast update rate) and you'll see the spikes. Not like TextWrangler suffers from the same problem - if TextEdit bothers you that much, just replace it.
I'm typing this on my Mint Cinnamon-running desktop right now (highly recommended over vanilla Ubuntu) while my MBP idles next to it for lack of a second monitor to attach to this thing. I get Apple's move to the current always-connected always-available paradigm, and I don't mind it; I keep notes and handy copypasta command lines in TextEdit's iCloud storage so I can't lose them when I do a reinstall, but I don't use it for anything else and can't justify spending that much money on an iPhone when I'm perfectly happy as I am. (And I'm going to move those notes into my Mega account when I can be bothered)
I see your thumb biting and raise you a shrug and an "I agree". ;)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mendax on Saturday August 08 2015, @08:57PM
TextWrangler does suffer from the same problem. So, it's not just because it's an iCloud thing. BTW, I don't use iCloud. I don't use cloud services at all. It's against my religion... and common sense.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Saturday August 08 2015, @09:33PM
Hmmm, strange. I get no delay at all pulling it up. Then again, I am using a Core i7 (mobile, Q2GHz) and an SSD with 8gb of DDR3. Pauses like that usually mean it's time to nuke&pave, it seems Mac OS is (has always?) been subject to performance drops over time, just like Windo*ahem*any other OS. Then again, the sheer age of your hardware.... Nothing lasts forever, as much as we'd like it to, know what I mean?
(Score: 2) by mendax on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:28AM
My new iMac, bought in June, is a 2.7 ghz quad-core Intel Core i5, with a 1 TB hard drive instead of SSD (I don't trust it quite yet) but with 8 gb of DDR3. I agree with you that the performance problems you noted in that evil boot virus from the devils in Redmond are not uncommon when using older hardware. I seem to recall the howls when folks transitioned from XP to Vista, only to discover just how god awful slow it was. The problems I have with Yosemite on my 2008 iMac are nowhere near as bad as people had with the transition to Vista. It could be faster on app start up. But once the app gets started, its performance is more than adequate... usually. The exception is when I've overloaded the poor thing and it's having to swap. But that happens only rarely and awful performance is expected then.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:47AM
I think that may be your real problem then - if you don't trust SSDs, at least use an SSHD. [hexus.net] I have one of those drives in my Linux desktop, I don't know how the cacheing algorithm figures out what to keep in that 8gb NAND, but I suspect witchcraft myself.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Monday August 10 2015, @03:10AM
Well, that is an option, but it's still a recipe for disaster in my book. I just don't quite believe what is quoted about the write wear on SSD modules. Not yet. Think of me as politically liberal and technologically conservative.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Monday August 10 2015, @10:11AM
You don't have to believe the quotes - they've been tested already. [techreport.com] The worst drive in these endurance tests got through 728TB of writes before it hard-failed. A couple of the units were up to 1.5PB (yes, PETAbytes) and still going. Obviously your own usage case applies here, but I'd say it's pretty safe to trust SSDs already.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday August 18 2015, @03:28AM
Are you shittin' me? Textedit is a cloud app? In what universe does that make any sense at all? Another reason to hate Yosemite.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Sunday August 09 2015, @06:07PM
It's your RAM. I had the same deal on a 2010 Mac Mini, and I finally decided to try a RAM upgrade before giving up on it.
I'm guessing it's the result of an optimization decision that may have improved performance on newer machines with more RAM, but threw the older systems under the bus.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mendax on Monday August 10 2015, @03:07AM
Well, I'm not going to replace the RAM, not on a machine from 2008. It works just fine in Linux, which I think was one of the points I made. It doesn't HAVE to be slow. Apple just doesn't give a shit, and I'm beginning to think the same way about them, and that should scare them somewhat because I know I'm not alone in that feeling. My latest iMac will likely be my last if I don't see some improvements in the quality of their software and their attitudes toward their customers who buy their overpriced hardware.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday August 07 2015, @06:30PM
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-Intel-Core-i5-5250U [cpuboss.com]
For those too lazy to click: 6.5 : 6.4.
That's 8 year old gear vs. what Apple ships today in the MacBook Air. Better have enough of teh snappy for the old gear, if they want to sell the new one, huh?
I don't notice any big speed differences, by the way. Not nearly enough to even want to change the spinning platter in my MBP for an SSD. If I have to wait for something, it's usually because some remote "cloudy" crap triggers local blocks, has been developed by graduates of "JavaScript for complete retards.", or both. The Quad-2.6-i7 RMBP helps a bit with the latter - but not with the first. Cf. that to the whiners on LKML where they wanted to get kdbus in and Linus measured the overhead to demonstrate what a steaming pile their app stack is.
I probably could even live with Mavericks, once I swap out Preview and TextEdit for older versions that don't overwrite my files when I e.g. just pull up the gamma a bit. Oh. And work through one of the guides to cut off the widespread phoning home.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Saturday August 08 2015, @09:42AM
This is supposed to be relevant? Not sure what I was expecting, seeing as how you couldn't see any difference [youtube.com] between an SSD and an HDD either, but whatever. Actual raw data from your link, rather than the meaningless overall "score" you posted:
In order: Geekbench 32-bit; 64-bit; overall. Passmark overall; single-threaded. Typical power consumption.
E8400: 2862, 3092, 4792, 2172, 1257 (52.81W)
5250U: 4964, 5591, 5591, 3658, 1519 (12.19W)
Not that this means a damn thing, but the 5250U smokes the E8400 in every test while using less than a quarter of the power. Whatever, it's still a comparison between a passively-cooled ultra-low voltage CPU with onboard graphics and an actively-cooled desktop CPU, but don't let reality stop you being a moron, eh? (Pro-tip: mobile Core2 model IDs start with a T)
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Friday August 14 2015, @02:42AM
Right. Please explain this to my secondary 3GHz P4. You see, little P4-bert there shouldn't be able to run Vista perfectly fine, but it does. (Pentium 4s tend to be too thick to understand that they're too old to run Microsoft's most bloated OS plus full graphical effects flawlessly on integrated graphics. Please forgive it, but once it saw my 1.6GHz mobile Core2 with 2GB of RAM running Mint 17, it just wouldn't leave me alone!)
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Friday August 14 2015, @08:40AM
Of course your P4 runs it. Windows Vista was released in 2007. The Pentium 4 went out of production 2008.
Vista may have been a hideously-badly performing POS when it first came out, but SP1 *really* helped sort it's performance problems out (if not any of it's other problems) and Windows 7 was basically Windows Vista SP3 anyway.
I like Mint too. Typing this on 17.2 right now ;)
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday August 18 2015, @03:25AM
I run Debian Wheezy and Snow Leopard (I picked "other"). I have a new macbook pro with Yosemite on it that I got six weeks ago and still haven't transisioned to -- barely even touch it once per week and every time I do, I just get pissed -- it's like the early days of linux when you had to google how configure everything away from some retarded default. Yosemite makes me hate OS X. Seriously despise it. They should have called it New Jersey or Washington DC -- it stinks that bad. Yosemite makes me seriously consider running some version of linux on that computer, but then, over here we have all that systemD crap.
Change for change's sake -- that's all I see in Yosemite and Jessie.
Asshole OS devs.