> For as awesome as Tiger was, it was RAM heavy compared with Windows XP at the time. 512MB really felt like a minimum to getting it running well, and 1GB if it really wanted to fly.
I think that’s because XP is mostly 2K with a new theme engine and some consumer stuff bolted on. It didn’t have full alpha desktop compositing and high resolution icons and other such things.
The closest Windows analogue to 10.4 is probably late-lifecycle Vista (after all the stability and hardware issues had been sorted) or 7, which are much closer in terms of features and modernness and were similarly heavy.
It's logical, but the low variety is disappointing nonetheless and makes it more likely than none of the available options are well-suited to one's needs/desires.
In the case of media management, ffmpeg is easily usable with just about every programming language in existence and its usage is extremely well-trodden at this point, which makes the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.
ffmpeg is a beast, not gonna argue that. As another commenter noted however, only a small fraction of those options are necessary to cover a media center project, especially if you're not beholden to supporting esoteric/archaic formats, aren’t bothered with trying to make broken/corrupted files play, etc. Being willing to specialize can also help reduce scope.
> the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.
What is there to be puzzled about? Doing media transcoding is the easy part, dealing with humans is the hard part so.. programmers aren't rushing out to do it.
This is partially on third-party devs' shoulders. There are community-maintained backports of Chromium and Mozilla for old versions of macOS, which means it isn't strictly impossible, but Google and Mozilla just don't bother and cut off compatibility earlier there than on other platforms.
It's even possible to build Mac apps to run on everything from OS X 10.4 (2005) through macOS 27 (2026) across PowerPC, Intel, and Apple Silicon in a single binary. See XLD[0], which does exactly that.
Command-line tools are fine like this; a full-fledged GUI apps, not so much on account of how Cocoa/AppKit/UIKit evolved. Your x86_64 slice would have to deal with all shenanigans between 10.7 and 26, and I suspect it’s not fun at all.
It's certainly more challenging for user-facing apps with UIs, but still doable. XLD does it. The key is to keep the UI simple, avoid chasing design trends, and avoid custom widgets.
iPods and AirPort Express units from 20+ years ago still work in modern macOS too. Things have been shuffled around some (iPods are now managed with the Finder instead of in Music.app) but they still work.
I would agree with the idea that they're not bothered about breaking workflows, particularly those involving command line tools, but hardware compatibility isn't nearly as bad as the internet might have one think. Source compatibility isn't all that bad either, many ancient Objective-C/AppKit codebases can be made to compile in an evening. It's mainly binaries that break.
Frankly, I don't think it's practical to expect operating systems to continue to run binaries perfectly in perpetuity. It's an enormously burdensome expectation that holds development of the platform hostage.
Usually all it takes to keep one's software running on macOS is compiling against the latest SDK once every ~5 years. Depending on the nature of the app, source changes often aren't even required. As a dev I don't think that's too much to ask.
> Frankly, I don't think it's practical to expect operating systems to continue to run binaries perfectly in perpetuity.
A lot of that is going to depend upon perspective.
Take something that is coming up: Apple has mentioned that Intel application support is going to end in the next release, or about 8 years after the introduction of the M1. Eight years may sound like a good run, but there are all sorts of edge cases: software that doesn't receive updates because the publisher is no longer in business, or software developers who are providing updates under a disagreeably different business model (ahem, subscriptions). Some software may have been released Intel only after the release of the M1, simply because the developer wasn't going to test a new architecture immediately after its release.
I'm not going to pretend that I know how much software that affects, because there was a 12 or 13 year gap in my use of Macintosh. Something I did notice after my return to macOS was the absence of software due to earlier changes in the platform. An more exotic example is F-Script[1]. Not only is the project gone, but the change in the security model pretty much ensures that nothing like it will ever exist again. A more common example will be games, where only a select few will receive updates a couple of years after its release.
x86 translation will be slimmed down but remain for compatibility with the Game Porting Toolkit[0]. Their reasoning is likely that they want to limit the set of libraries that they ship x86 slices for as much as reasonably possible because each supported architecture multiplies surface area across the entire system.
It’s also notable that virtualizing macOS on macOS has now been officially supported and easy for several years, so it’s possible to just spin up a VM running an old version of macOS for software that requires Rosetta. Some kind of containerization probably isn’t a bad idea in that situation anyway, as software that’s gone so long without updates likely carries a number of vulnerabilities.
And on that note, the highly permissive state of desktop OS security as it had been for the 2000s and 2010s was never going to last. It’s been proven repeatedly that third party software must be treated adversarially, both because the big guys like Adobe can’t be trusted to keep their fingers to themselves and the little guys and FOSS projects sometimes fall victim to supply chain attacks. The OS must try to limit the blast radius where possible.
Apple unfortunately takes the opportunity of you compiling against the newest SDK to change and break all kinds of undocumented behaviors your app has been depending on, which almost always negotiates source code changes. If you’re lucky you’ll actually notice the changes; more than likely your app just appears more unstable and buggy to your users.
Figuring out how to scale it may be a challenge, but it may be worth considering something along the lines of the directory sites that used to be the main method of discovery on the web prior to the rise of search engines, which itself can be searched.
I would personally find this useful at least, particularly when diving into unfamiliar topics. In a lot of those situations, a handful of high quality links can preempt a litany of more granular searches.
This might be an area where a traditional, respectful search engine style crawler backed by a small cheap LLM paired with human curation would work well. The crawler+LLM finds sites, attempts to compute some quality score, figures out where they'd fit in the directory's hierarchy, and then submits them for human review and approval. If a poor quality link makes its way through, users can flag it for review and if curation agrees it gets booted.
I'm leaning against the user flagging model of content moderation because it keeps the incentive for bad actors to try to game the system. Bad content, even briefly included can still do a lot of damage. It's like spam email -- even though something like 99.9% gets filtered out, that 0.1% is still valuable enough for spam senders to keep trying. If the problem of spam is just a numbers game, then bad actors will just increase the volume to compensate.
The problem is that it can also be gamed in the opposite direction. Anything automated gives a way for hostile third parties to disappear links at will, which can be similarly damaging especially if timed right. YouTube and many other sites with automated DMCA handling for example have major issues with this.
Physical products are different because potential buyers are afforded a bevy of free, easily accessible ways to evaluate the product prior to purchase.
I have no way to throughly evaluate the quality of a blog that cuts off everything but the first sixth of its posts or a news site that stonewalls me after viewing an article or two.
I subscribe to multiple news sites and programming blogs and none of them resort to such tactics.
Most newspapers/magazines have extremely generous intro offers. NYT offers $4/month! WSJ offers $8/month! You can get a great literary magazine like n+1 with physical issues for $3! These are extremely good deals.
I mean, plenty of vibe-coded Show HN projects want more than that for something built in a weekend with close to zero ongoing costs.
It’s not just the monetary cost, but also the overhead involved. It’s yet another subscription to have to manage (and eventually jump through hoops to cancel) as well as the friction in the moment of needing to pull out a credit card or sign into PayPal or whatever.
As far as vibe coded projects go, I go out of my way to not pay for them not just because of the same reasons outlined above, but also because their value is questionable at best.
Prob easier to manage a month’s worth of subscriptions than write a single paragraph of one good article (spoken as someone with a subscription allergy personally!). Darn I feel bad for journalists, almost wish physical newspapers were just about our everything so we paid a few bucks for 1-2 things and felt the products in our hands. I think that status quo was OK for the industry (or maybe journalism has never been a decent business, but seemed OK).
I would be a lot less reticent to try subscriptions if cancellation were always a standard one-click affair. It’d also help if it were the norm for companies of any kind selling subscriptions to notify you before trials, promotional periods, etc are going to end instead of keeping silent and hoping you forget.
Remembering to cancel subscriptions that I wasn’t enthused with and figuring out the mystic ritual required to cancel are types of stress I don’t need any more of.
The "/month" is the problem - I just don't read the same paper often enough to justify a recurring subscription even at the intro price, let alone the full price it'll eventually transition to.
I would love it if I could be able to pay _once_ in one-click just like if I was purchasing a physical paper. But until this happens, I'm more than happy not paying (nor reading) paywalled online news.
> I have no way to throughly evaluate the quality of a blog
I don't like paywalls but this is very silly. You have exactly the same tools to evaluate products and blogs: reviews. You wanna figure out if you should pay for The Information? Go lookup a reddit thread on if it's worth it[1].
Also what "tactics"? Being indexed by a search engine? Nefarious!
I’m not likely to go on a side quest to look up reviews on a site I stumble upon in search of information. There’s a decent likelihood that the nugget I came for is either the only thing I need from the site or the site is something I’d use a small handful of times per year at most.
There’s “tactic” being used here is bait and switch.
The small handful of news sites I willingly subscribe to are in my RSS reader (where stories are even more de-junked than is possible in a browser), so paywalled sites showing up in search adds no value.
If a news site wants to join the ranks of my RSS feeds they need to be of high enough quality that their reputation does more work than paywalled search results do.
Right. I don’t mind paying when the value is clear and I feel like my time has been respected, and paywalled link showing up in search violates the second of those two.
In most of the circumstances when those show up in my search I’m looking for information for immediate use and I am not going whip out a credit card. If I run into a paywall, I’m immediately hitting the back button and moving on to the next result, so it’s better if they just never show up in search at all.
This sounds a bit odd to me. When I'm hungry, I dont run to McDonald's and expect to be fed for free. I whip out my card, pay for the items, patiently wait for the food to be arrive and then eat.
You could very well argue that why are you making me wait for my food when I'm hungry.
The sibling reply has the right idea. Information and food are very different things, with the former spreading and duplicating every time a human comes in contact with it and often becoming readily available from a wide variety of sources.
To be clear, I have no issue paying for what I find to be quality writing, especially when it brings a novel, well thought out perspective or context. The a large majority of stuff I see turning up in search results is not this, however, especially in recent years. That category is dominated by AI-written growth hacky low info drivel.
And related to that, native cell recycling for long lists would be nice, particularly with cases where the cells are on the heavy side.
Yes, it can be done with JS, but nothing is going to beat the browser engine for frequent DOM manipulation of that sort. It's also just one less dependency to have to pull in.
Programmers are not a monolith. The minimal tiling keyboard driven thing works great for some, but it drives me up a wall as much as the standard macOS arrangement seems to irritate you.
Actually one of my peeves with Linux is that as of yet, there’s no WM or DE for Linux that gets even 80% of the broad strokes right for people who find a traditional Mac style desktop productive. Most options either lean Windows-style or minimal tiling style, with the only outliers (GNOME, Pantheon, COSMIC) representing the odd niche of a small handful of macOS fundamentals hybridized with conventions from the tiling things and Windows.
I'm not talking only about WMs on Mac - just in general. The restrictions they put around things get to ridiculous level of hassle experience. All those "you're holding it wrong" and "customers don't know what they want" vibes are just super annoying and unproductive. I hate when the software on the hardware you own treats you like a baby. What's the point of calling yourself a "software programmer" when you can't even control the damn software? It feels like making you helpless was the point.
I mean it's all subjective. The relative rigidity of the macOS UI just means that it isn't for people who don't like it.
For those of us who do enjoy it, it's great because a stock install is already 80% of the way to a productive setup. I can have a new Mac ready for work in 15-20m without copying dotfiles or anything like that.
Not that there isn't a place for tinkering and customizing, but it's not the computer(s) that I get work done on. It's for leisure time machines. When I try to work under Linux I end up on side quests trying to fine-tune everything to perfection (which is for practical purposes impossible, unless I write an entire desktop environment for myself) and can't get any work done. On a Mac most things are already configured the way I like and the things I can't I shrug and then focus on my work.
> On a Mac most things are already configured the way I like
Well, I'm not "the defaults" person - there isn't a single piece of software that I ever installed and didn't have to configure later, except maybe some CLI tools. To me, that's the point of "soft" in "software" - it should be malleable. Not everything has to be of the Emacs level of extensibility, but I should be able to change things to extract maximum utility out of it. I don't "tinker" for the sake of it - I make changes for performance and execution.
I squeeze both Linux and Mac environments to their utmost possible scriptability. Bootstraping a Linux box from scratch for me is a matter of minutes. I wish I could say the same thing about Macs - there are tons of things you just can't easily change from the command line, it's a long cycle of - click, open, navigate, click, browse, confirm, click, logoff, reboot, etc. And it's simply annoying. It feels like needless ceremony for the "cybersecurity theater" or whatever. And the 80% of opinionated pre-made things to make you productive is just bullshit - like for example, the very first thing I always do on a new Mac is that I run:
This makes a huge difference in keyboard latency. Why the heck these values are not reachable from the UI is a mystery to me. I'm glad that at least this one is tweakable from the command line, but many other things are not.
I suppose I should be thankful for not having to deal with Windows. Which is way worse.
Ha ha ha. I did settle into using a Mac for development work, but not without a moderate degree of customisation. Reducing keyboard latency was, like you said, one of the changes that made the most difference.
I'm curious what other kinks you have had to iron.
I think that’s because XP is mostly 2K with a new theme engine and some consumer stuff bolted on. It didn’t have full alpha desktop compositing and high resolution icons and other such things.
The closest Windows analogue to 10.4 is probably late-lifecycle Vista (after all the stability and hardware issues had been sorted) or 7, which are much closer in terms of features and modernness and were similarly heavy.
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