Journal: News & Comment

What he said

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A couple of months ago I wrote that, much as I love using it, Mac OS X:

has so many dependencies, so many thousands of files, and so many intricacies, that manually fixing a choked-up system is close to impossible. [It] may be capable of running for weeks or months or years without a reboot, if something does go wrong, it can go catastrophically wrong, and it's hard to know why.

That was before my machine started refusing to run Mac OS X at all. Now I'm stuck back in Mac OS 9, and while it's been tolerably stable, it feels so, so clunky.

John Gruber, who's always worth reading, agrees about OS X's sometime brittleness:

When things go wrong on Mac OS X, they often happen at a deeper level. File permission and ownership problems, for example, are not something a typical Mac user can deal with. It's not enough that Mac OS X doesn't require any Unix nerdery whatsoever for day-to-day use—it should never require Unix nerdery to recover from software updates, either.

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