I think it depended on your workload, and how often you rebooted them. But yes, macOS reliability has come a long way since then.

UX I'm less sure about - I now use a 4K monitor to do a bunch of things I used to do quite successfully on 1024x768.

Performance of a bunch of basic apps has also taken a few hits here and there (at least in part due to that big resolution bump, and despite massive hardware improvements).

I definitely have some nostalgia for that era, but it's possibly more nostalgia for the age before the internet consumed all of computing...

That’s true. The nostalgia nerds can rightly criticise the ever-spiralling bloat and inefficiency of modern systems. But modern macOS can go for months without a crash/reboot! Almost unimaginable in the Mac OS 9 / Win95 era.

I think it used to be that the back end (hardware, kernel, services, libraries) was in many ways worse, but the front end (UI/UX) was largely better. And today we have the reverse; amazingly fast and mostly reliable hardware, solid underlying components, and ugly, hostile interfaces on top. Hence the number of folks wishing for the Windows 2k GUI on a modern NT OS, a slightly more robust version of some OS X (I think I usually hear Snow Leopard?), or those of us running CDE on bleeding edge Linux.

People aren't nostalgic for the stability of the system, they're nostalgic for a time when user interfaces were more friendly to humans and less flat/abstract

Most popular PC operating systems (CP/M, DOS, Mac, ...) from the 1980s to the early 1990s didn't have memory protection, yet people used them and still use them.

George RR Martin famously wrote on WordStar for DOS (a rewrite of the CP/M version) until at least 2014.

Turbo Pascal didn't have memory protection, but people still loved it and compare it favorably to modern IDEs. Both Turbo Pascal (DOS and CP/M) and Think C (Mac) have featured on HN repeatedly iirc.

As I understand it, Apple's Lisa had memory protection, but the Mac gave it up to reduce hardware and memory requirements. Apple's Pascal compilers (like many) supported range checking, but developers turned it off, giving up reliability for performance and code size. Then they switched to C, which laughs at memory safety* and introduced null pointers that conveniently pointed to Mac OS data in low memory/writable RAM (perhaps a hangover from Apple II/6502 programming.)

It's almost like CPU designers going for performance at any cost and introducing isolation and security flaws.

* Prof. Kernighan might point out that there are ANSI C compilers that are memory safe and that nobody uses, and that clang/LLVM might even implement a safe memory model someday

OS X Lion was the most stable operating system I've ever used.

Tbh, it's all downhill from there, every new release gets a little worse not to mention all the hardware issues too.

One of the reasons why I love the Angry Videogame Nerd is that when he came out, the state of third-generation retrogaming nostalgia involved a lot of wearing of rose-colored glasses. Remember Castlevania? Remember Mega Man? Double Dragon? Remember having to blow on the cartridges before they'd work (which never did really work)? Etc. The AVGN stood as a counterpoint to all that, reminding us that many of the games from that era -- even games we loved or wanted -- kind of sucked, and that we can appreciate modern games for the extra bit of care that went in to them to make them not suck so bad. (This was 2004, though, and what goes around comes around...)

The same is kind of true of retrocomputing. We look back to these old platforms as if due to coming from a "simpler time", they never had any latency and never experienced bugs. And sure, if you fire it up for five minutes on some online WebAssembly emulator you find on Hackernews, it seems much snappier and more pleasant to use than Windows 11. But back then, we were running them on CPUs literally hundreds of times slower than even a potato-class computer from today. And due to memory protection being frickin' absent from almost all consumer-grade operating systems, they crashed. A lot. Even the Amiga was crash- and Guru-Meditation-prone depending on what you were running on it. It was such an enormous relief for me, trying out Linux or even Windows NT for the first time, to watch the OS simply yeet out a misfiring app; disconnect any access it had to the network, file system, or window system; and proceed merrily on its way as if nothing happened. Not following the exact sequence of steps it required to set up the message pump properly so that your program can respond to messages as required in Windows 3.1, for instance, can cause strange glitches within Windows itself, requiring a restart of Windows; or even hard-lock the system requiring a cold boot.

Our computers are so powerful these days, and our software so sophisticated, that they've eliminated entire classes of problems from the old days, only to open the door to entirely new classes of problems (like adware that would have brought a Pentium II to its knees, and sparked a user complaint campaign that would have resulted in major egg on the vendor's face if not bankruptcy from the ensuing lawsuits, being routine, and even required, on commercial operating systems of today).

Offtopic, but here's how to feel old: More time has passed between the debut of the AVGN and the present, than has passed between the debut of the NES in the West and the debut of the AVGN.

While what you said is true (MacOS was really unstable in these tumultuous years), this link specifically celebrates the user interface of the later versions of non-OSX MacOS. This doesn't really have a relation to the stability of the OS.

You just reminded me of the 60s Batman-style steel bomb icon that dominated the Macs of my childhood…

It was the 90s equivalent of a kernel panic - you'd get a dialog that basically went "the computer is about to explode. click here to restart"

Does anyone else remember the early third party tool that would help you find extension conflicts by enabling half of them, asking you if the problem was still there, and then subdividing again and again? (Can't remember what it was called, but boy! was it helpful.)

I still recall the workaround to avoid restarting with some of these, once to the bewildered confusion of the ageing IT teacher looking over my shoulder in the library:

At the ">" ROM debugger prompt, type the following lines, pressing Return after each:

SM 0 A9F4 G 0

It's unfortunate Apple never shipped any of the modern OS's it worked on from 1988 to 1996. All of them would have had a classic Mac UI style on top of a microkernel. Resurrecting Pink would be an interesting retro move.

it's possible to bring back the usability of earlier operating systems with the stability of also earlier, but not quite as earlier, operating systems (OSX has crashed hard-booted three times on me this year, haven't had that happen in a long time)

Remember "Machine Always Crashes, If Not, The OS Hangs"?

:)

Snow Leopard and Windows 7 are from a time when computers were made to serve the user.

Then we discovered how much more money could be made by focusing on ad tech.

The relationship between people and technology was so different in 2009. I miss it.

10.6.8 was solid (people often forget that 10.6 and the intermediate patches were a bit of a mess) but when I use it I definitely feel a few spots where some polish and QoL improvements would be welcome. Its theme’s dominant gray is also a bit too dark.

I don’t mind SIP personally. It always unnerved me that any random executable was just a single admin password entry away from doing whatever it pleased.

My ideal desktop OS environment would be something like a polished-up Snow Leopard using the brighter, more refined theme from 10.9 Mavericks (except with the flat scrollbars de-flattened). If I had that I don’t think I could use anything else.

SIP is quite terrible. Requiring an access level higher than root to access system files, and only processes that are signed by Apple and have special entitlements can have that access level?

It's my computer, I should be at the top of the permissions totem pole, not Apple. If they're dead set on using signing to enforce the higher-than-root level, then I should be the one signing the executables. Fortunately, you can disable this crap.

Snow Leopard was truly the best. An actual OS release based around performance improvements under-the-hood instead of flashy, half-baked features.

As a multi-computer user, "Continuity"[1] is magical. Being able to drag my cursor over to my other computer, drop some files, etc, is really great.

[1] https://www.apple.com/macos/continuity/

I wonder how much of this sentiment is driven by Apple saying Snow Leopard was taking Leopard and focusing on performance and stability?

App auto saving was added in the next release Lion, I think you want that one.

No love for APFS?

Still can't believe we once had an operating system named OS X Panther. The puns...

The XFCE global menubar plugin being deprecated likely happened because there’s no standardized way for applications on Linux to surface their menus to the environment for display (or to power a Unity-style HUD or whatever), which means that hackery via plugins for GTK and Qt are required to make a global menubar work. Keeping that hackery functional probably is a constant battle.

There’s also how GTK apps have been on a crusade against menubars since GTK3 which doesn’t help matters. Same goes for Linux builds of Electron apps, which don’t offer the user the option to display a menubar even though all the menu work is already done for macOS builds.

Whatever the case it bums me out too. I know a lot of people hate global menubars but I’ve always loved them and it kills me that they’re not a practical option on the Linux desktop, despite ultimate customizability being one of the most frequently-cited reasons to use Linux as a desktop OS. You can do anything you want, as long as what you want falls within the boxes of Win9X-like, tablet-like, or "trendy minimal tiling window manager"…

Press Option and it behave the way it used to. Or you can double click on the top of the app's window

What I miss is not being able to set the priority of WiFi networks

Agreed. The Platinum UI design holds up extraordinarily well - it had a clear design language which was easy for developers to use and extend.

> So weird to be nostalgic of something I never owned or used.

For what it's worth, I feel the same way about the Nintendo 64, and the Mario franchise, etc.

Makes me think that nostalgia requires a certain quality, not just familiarity.

> Things just seemed so much more discoverable and made more efficient use of space

Apple (and Microsoft for that matter) had solid user interface guidelines in that era.

And real desktop apps (using the native system UI) rather than clunky web apps (each with its own non-native UI.)