Like, why. Why would you need to change the printer system? It works.. has worked for a very long time, there's no reasonable need to change it.
I have an old (~10 years old) printer that Cannon stopped supplying updated macOS drivers for several years ago. The installer for the drivers failed so I had to extract the files from the package and install them manually. In the end only the network drivers work, the USB drivers are kexts which won't run.
Yes, 28 years later and it’s still awful.
And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path? Or are people just particularly confident about complaining about Tahoe after seeing everyone else do it.
For sure it has glitches, but as far as I can tell, they're the same glitches that were in Sequoia. (If anyone at Apple is reading this, can you take a glance at your NFS client code? It does like to just hang up occasionally.)
The only major complaint I have is the window resize target, which seems not to line up properly with the actual window corner, since they gave them Very Rounded Corners.
It's also a bit weird that the radius of the VRCs seems to change app to app.
But these are nits. I work on Tahoe every day and it seems fine.
I have an M1 Max like the author of this piece and recently upgraded. It's fine.
I don't like the look of it much and the drag targets are annoying but other than that it's been completely normal.
I have two M4 Pro's w/ 24GB of RAM (one work, one personal). Work is on Tahoe, personal on sequoia and there's a really noticeable difference in overall UI responsiveness. It becomes even more pronounced when I hook up to my external display (32" 4k).
In a way it reminds me of the olden days of running KDE or Compiz with every fancy effect enabled but on an underpowered GPU. Yeah, it technically works, but it's not necessarily a fluid or enjoyable experience.
I have my own other nitpicks about liquid glass & the design (there's tons of papercuts here), but that doesn't necessarily impact stability.
That's like asking whether Jackson Pollock or Thomas Kinkade is the better artist. There is no objective measure for it. Some people will have a strong preference, others won't have a preference at all. The designers who made the changes in Tahoe clearly thought the changes are improvements. A lot of macOS users disagree, but some macOS users don't have a preference.
One of my favorites is in Apple Music, where the transport controls and song-title display has been moved from the top of the window down into the content-browser or song-list area... where it's "transparent" and overlaid on other text or album art.
In Mail, the "get new mail" button has been REMOVED from the toolbar. WTF? WHY? So when you're awaiting the ever-more-widespread 2FA from something you just logged into, you get to dig through a menu to hurry up retrieval or re-add the button to the toolbar (which casual users are not going to know how to do).
The utter stupidity of these flailing, desperate changes should concern every computer user. Microsoft is lost, and Windows a clinic on dereliction, design incompetence, and hostility toward users. That leaves Mac OS as the only tolerable consumer computing platform... and it has taken a profound turn for the worse with Tahoe.
For nothing. Apple's blunders here don't make sense from any perspective.
I was fully locked-in to the ecosystem, the phone, the services, the TV, and I am looking for the exits.
I’m starting to parallelize to software which will play well on Linux, and when I’m feeling ready (or miserable enough) I will not be looking back.
The macOS exodus will be like Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy: very slowly and then all at once.
All the _just works_ feeling and reliability seem to be gone. Tahoe is so unstable that I now restart the Mac every day, when in the past it happened on software updates only. Apple Music is another huge mess, I can’t comprehend how can it be so unreliable.
Looking for exits as well and kind of looking forward to migrating to Graphene OS, self-hosted Immich, and Navidrome
However bad you think Apple is getting with MacOS - windows is getting worse. And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. Queue the linux brigade "my PC works perfect, what linux issues are you having". Meanwhile I can't use bluetooth on my desktop (works perfectly fine on windows), and I was watching laptop reviews from justjosh recently where he's adding a segment where he is trying out linux on the device - and his experience on the two videos I've seen "sound does't work, wifi doesn't work, BT doesn't work ..."
All that said I am looking into leaving the Apple ecosystem as well because I just don't like how locked down and the devices are, but I'm fully aware that it's going to take significant effort for stuff that I'd get out of the box from Apple.
ElementaryOS is supposed to be a very clean transition environment for mac refugees. AI makes everything so much easier, Windows and Mac both have far more friction and hassle in contrast. Good luck!
When someone (Google?) finds me a way to seamlessly find/lock my phone from my computer, my computer from phone, and they all find my wife phone and computer, and they all find my keys and my wife keys... that will be the day I escape.
Btw isn't Rosetta going to be left but only for gaming and containerisation?
Other than the dumbing down of the UI and that kind of stuff, Tahoe seems to run fine. Safari seems to have more bugs than usual, though.
For at least 10 years ...
For several years, ...
For a few months...
For several years, ...
For a year or so, ...
For several years, ...What they did to Watch is much worse than what they did to iPhone and Mac
But in a long time I haven't really enjoyed using the mac and I use other systems instead. They got rid of subpixel rendering and now text is blurry on my monitors. The interactions are much more of a chore. Features were removed from Preview and other apps that were better before. I quit using XCode for a few years and couldn't recognize it when I came back. So I use it maybe every 3-4 weeks now. I have no interest in buying another one.
I just don't know why they seem to be going out of their way to make the system unfriendly to existing users.
In the past I had problems with network attached Time Machine destinations, but now I have zero trust even in the “native” USB-based method.
Another funny thing is that Mac’s built in diagnostic mode, after running for good 20 minutes, proclaimed there were no issues with the system. Even though it was clearly failing in the graphics department, even when booting into an installer usb drive (or even a Linux live mode).
Think my favourite was a conceptual flaw. The lightning strike. You need a completely offline backup or you don't have a backup.
Edit: using ChronoSync and two external (hard) disks, rotated once a month off site at the moment. That has a nice fat VERIFY button on it.
It might be nice for someone to crowd source a reasonable list of features they need to improve or document. Could get traction.
I also held out for as long as possible using Safari, but I had to switch to Firefox. Every once in a while I forget the reason I switched and try to switch back and then get reminded. I'm currently in a "I can't remember the reason, but I'm too lazy to go find out" phase. I'm also one of those weirdos that liked the Safari compact tabs and I'm sad they removed it.
Every time they fuck something I move the workload over to Linux, not out of enthusiasm or any ideological purity but because I need to do some damn work. Add in the current geopolitical shit show, rising surveillance culture and the constant push for MRR and the whole "ecosystem" idea of computing and cloud becomes quite distasteful and risky.
A monumental moment recently was Reminders which has a horrible bug in it since Tahoe where you are entering several tasks in the scheduled view and you hit enter and carry on typing and it doesn't register the enter until several keypresses later, splitting the last word you typed between two tasks. This is a very very minor but utterly annoying thing which has broken my workflow. I was so fucked off with this happening every day I pulled a sheet of paper out of my printer and just wrote everything on that. And I've been doing that for 4 months now. Reminders is dead. I forget things like I did before, but I get over that.
One day I'll wake up and not use the Mac. The iPad and Apple Watch are already gone.
I have been experiencing this type of bug since forever when renaming files. Enter (to switch to renaming mode), start typing, first 1-3 letters are missing.
The M2 and M5 minis I have are the nicest drink coasters I've ever owned.
I have unresolved radars old enough to drive, go to war, or even vote at this point. They used to blame Intel's TB controllers. Guess what? They make their own now and the same fucking issues persist! Enjoy the kernel panics
For one, my network samba shares stay connected and mounted through restarts. I could never make this work reliably on macOS.
File explorer is good. Finder always felt clunky and awkward to use. In addition, certain class of software exists for windows and not for macOS. Like FilePilot, Anything, MusicBee, Foobar2000 (Mac version of the latter is not the same as the windows version).
The biggest issue so far for me is keyboard shortcuts for text editing. Cmd-based movements are great and I have very deep muscle memory by now. I could not find a reliable way to recreate this on windows (I can make the cursor movement work, but some selections don’t work the same).
It’s wild to me that Apple has allowed SMB on MacOS to be so broken/slow and poorly implemented for so long. It’s been this way for over a DECADE.
I have friends who work at production studios who complain about network storage and MacOS all the time given any modern video workflow involves a NAS.
You would think a company that halos creative workers in all its ads would care about this. But they happily ignore since “SMB that works” is not a feature that will get much mainstream attention in a flashy keynote (that nobody watches anymore anyways).
I have been writing on/about and using Macs for 25 years, have had a bunch of semi-catastrophic failures with Tahoe (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2026/02/18/1230) and Time Machine (https://taoofmac.com/space/til/2026/02/01/1630), and I have also been running Fedora daily for four or five years.
Were it not for Apple Silicon, I would probably be running Linux only today. But after Tahoe, I am very, _very_ motivated to accelerate my transition. And, ironically, I can make GNOME look and feel more like what a Mac should feel like than what Tahoe does.
But like I wrote the other day (https://taoofmac.com/space/links/2026/02/26/0806):
> The most likely [outcome] is that they will simply carry on without acknowledging any of it publicly and discreetly patch the most critical issues, because they are still making tons of cash on hardware and services and software quality really hasn’t been a priority in half a decade.
macOS/iOS 26 are bad enough that I've begun switching to Linux. I preordered a Clicks Communicator and Pebble Round 2. Switching from a Macbook Pro M4 to an Asus ROG Flow Z13 with Debian.
macOS 26.3 updated clang and broke my emscripten workflow.
I tried to unrar a file but the version of unrar provided in homebrew is deprecated because it's no longer signed/blessed. I ended up SFTPing the file to a Linux box, extracting, and bringing it back.
My son wanted to try a Java minecraft app on his iPhone, but it required insane workarounds to enable JIT to get acceptable performance. This isn't a technical limitation, it's put in place specifically to protect Apple's walled garden, and their precious services revenue.
Despite the thousands of dollars spent on these devices, I don't feel like we own them. We can't run code without the platform owner's permission. We are at the mercy of the platform owner, that has been making increasingly worse decisions.
I'm really enjoying trying the available alternatives. My hope is that enough of us get fed up, and develop a thriving ecosystem in the open source world. I'll certainly be contributing back the things I build.
Basic keyboard shortcuts are still broke with the Wayland migration. e.g. Copyq has this janky workaround for a shortcut to register with the xdg-portal (that works until reboot, then stops), Warp terminal claims there is no support, Flameshot was impossible to configure, have to use the built in Gnome shortcut tool now. The whole ecosystem got wrecked. I have been so irritated by this that I've been considering switching TO the mac ecosystem, BUT this thread is good on my eyes and makes me disinterested now.
Toshy still works to give me Mac keyboard shortcuts I might never let go of, but I still haven't figured out the keyboard shortcut to switch between open instances of the same program which drives me insane!
Apple marketers are just going to think that in another year you’re going to get annoyed by some Linux thing (yes, there will be something annoying) and buy a brand new $2000+ Mac.
These kind of posts get a lot of upvotes, but they do nothing to change corporate behavior.
We all predict the future, consciously or not. We invest our time and effort into a system that we think has a good future.
Tahoe made me lose trust in Apple's software, and see its trajectory as a bad one that I didn't want to invest any more time into.
I was 100% Apple: Mac Mini on the desktop, Macbook Air laptop, iPhone, and two iPads.
Then came Tahoe.
I hated it so badly and it wouldn't let me change the things I hated.
I noticed a subtle sneer as I worked, having to use this stupid computer that wouldn't let me adjust it to my liking anymore.
Then I noticed I wasn't working as much as I used to because I just viscerally hated having to work in that Tahoe environment.
At first I did the thing of erasing the entire computer and doing a USB install just go back to the previous.
But then like you said: “I don't feel like we own them.” I didn't trust Apple to not keep making it worse.
So I switched. Got a Linux desktop, and a Framework laptop. Sooooo nice!! Snappy-fast Linux just the way I want it.
While I was at it, got my first Android phone and installed GrapheneOS on Google Pixel. Sooooo nice! So quiet, doing only what I want.
Even got my first Android tablet to replace the iPad. (OnePlus Pad 3.) It's great too. I'm loving the whole Android ecosystem, when made nerdy like Linux.
So yeah I'm 100% off Apple now and will never go back.
That's how bad Tahoe is.
They got bored of computing. Writing was on the wall when they started producing movies because Hollywood people are cooler than nerds and hey why earn a giant cash pile if not for some execs to have fun with it.
This is a company which hasn't done anything meaningful to innovate since Steve Jobs died.
Yeah I have all Apple gear. It's fine. Whatever. Nicest commodity on the block. But they could have done so much more in the last 15 years.
Perhaps, Rosetta 2 and the hypervisor/container thingy? Those are pretty cool.
This is what tells me I'm completely misaligned with Apple's vision of the future.
Why would I want an OS that aspires to prevent me from running perfectly good software that runs very well??? And at a time when even smartphones are starting to run x86 software well!
That's literally the opposite of what I want from a computer. If I have to choose between losing Mac software vs losing x86 software it is much easier to leave Mac software behind.
giobox•1h ago
dewey•1h ago
Now I'm barely using it as every few months I'm prompted to just delete the backup and start fresh because something corrupted.
skibble•52m ago
I'm not one of these 'it hasn't happened to me, ergo it's impossible people'. I completely think that many of the design elements of Tahoe are a horrendous regression versus even Sequoia, but I think asserting that Time Machine is completely broken in the shipping version of macOS is a bold statement that deserves a bit of pushback, even among the fire raging in a lot of other places in macOS!
dewey•41m ago
To be clear, I'm not saying it's Tahoe related, it has been there for many years.
hedgehog•48m ago