> Don't you love how hackable everything is? Removing stock apps from the Applications folder is completely safe—nothing will break—and this is your computer, so you should make it your own. You can always restore apps later using Time Machine. Just don't delete System Preferences, or anything in the Utilities folder.
This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will break”, then in the same paragraph “but don’t do this specific thing”.
Yes, there is immense value in being able to do whatever we want with our computers without restrictions. But let’s not pretend there isn’t value in being able to set restrictions too. Everything in computers is a tradeoff. Having an immutable signed OS has plenty of advantages, including for hackers: I feel much safer telling people to “just try stuff” when I know there isn’t a risk of them breaking everything and being left with an unbootable machine, leaving them feeling stupid and scared of trying anything else. More advanced tasks can come later.
Kudos for the project in general, though, I’m not throwing shade. I too am discontent with Apple under Tim Cook, but staying on an older version of macOS isn’t an acceptable solution for my use cases, I’d sooner switch to a BSD.
This is a hallmark of having achieved comfortable familiarity within a system: You think you have total freedom because, mentally, you’ve excluded the off-limits things from consideration.
It reminds me of a couple jobs where management would tell us we had so much freedom that we could work on whatever we wanted. Choose your own destiny here! Except when you chose something that wasn’t among the short list of acceptable tasks, you were scolded for choosing something that was obviously not an option (to them). They knew the rules so deeply that the set of acceptable things seemed like the entire frontier of possibilities in their minds.
Like you said, it would be more helpful for everyone if the system actually clarified what was allowed and what was not so we didn’t have to guess. Drop the illusion of total freedom and replace it with clear rules that leave nothing to guessing.
> This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will break”, then in the same paragraph “but don’t do this specific thing”.
I think you're being a bit pedantic. There is no contradiction.
You can indeed delete System Preferences and nothing will break, ditto for utilities, it just makes life difficult if you do. For a locked down system for say a child though it might make sense. Also reversing the problem isn't hard, you can just copy in the apps from elsewhere.
macOS isn't perfect, but it does have a nice, clean, logical implementation in many ways.
One huge demonstration of that is the way it runs on commodity hardware so well (ie Hackintoshes). Apple could have easily baked in very hardware specific support in the OS, but instead they mostly implemented a general system that follows PC standards. Security lock downs are orthogonal to that.
Neither have I claimed there is one. I understood the point perfectly, I simply found it humorous. Things can be funny without being contradictions, my point was about the tradeoffs inherent to different types of OS lockdown.
> You can indeed delete System Preferences and nothing will break, ditto for utilities, it just makes life difficult if you do.
And—surprise!—most people don’t want to make their own lives difficult.
> Also reversing the problem isn't hard, you can just copy in the apps from elsewhere.
It is hard for most people. Most of us don’t just have something else at hand to copy from at all times, including the younger OP.
> For a locked down system for say a child though it might make sense.
I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing, but most of the time I see a variation on that comment it is attached to a fair bit of condescension. Like with calling something a “toy OS” when it’s used by millions of adults worldwide for productive work. Locked down systems don’t just make sense for children. On the contrary, children might benefit the most from operating systems which are not locked down, because they have the free time and willingness to experiment and won’t yet have a lot of important data. Or maybe you have kids who don’t really enjoy computers and just want to play an occasional game or need to write a school report. That’s OK too.
Both can also be true of your elderly relative, or your partner, or your cousin, or your friend who doesn’t want to fiddle with the damn machine, they just want to get their shit done without having to worry about screwing up anything. Your other friend will want the freedom to do everything and ask you for help.
There is no right approach for everyone, and there is no age at which one approach is definitely superior to another.
Is this actually true? I thought Chess.app was, from OSX Lion (prior to Mavericks) yea unto the present, protected from deletion from the Applications folder as somehow intrinsically important to the system. It's apparently load-bearing, not just a holdover from NeXTSTEP but an integral element that the OS must defend at all costs to ensure System Integrity.
It's because its in the signed system volume. You cannot modify the system volume in any way. macOS will do all sorts of crazy things to portray that volume as just like the old filesystem, but ultimately there are hard limits. Deleting apps in that volume is one of them it seems.
It's absolutely not true on Lion or on Mavericks. You can just delete Chess. I know because I've done it. I've been using the system for five years.
On Lion—or, well, at least on Mavericks, but I'm assuming this is all Apple did starting in Lion—there is literally just a list of Appications in the Finder binary that, should you try to delete them, Finder will pop up a message stopping you. You can hex edit the Finder binary and the message will go away for the hex-edited app.
(Newer versions of macOS have signed system volume stuff, I'm not talking about that! This was introduced right around the time I nope'd out and built my current Mavericks computer.)
> I feel much safer telling people to “just try stuff” when I know there isn’t a risk of them breaking everything and being left with an unbootable machine
On which non-mobile OS is this true? It's certainly NOT safe on Mac/Windows/Linux to "just try stuff". I can trivially delete all of your data and/or upload all your .ssh files and Documents by "just try it"
If you are running an immutable system like Bazzite it is significantly harder to get yourself into an unbootable state by accident, since if your system-wide change does actually break the machine, you can just boot into an older one. NixOS is quite a bit different, but likewise it is really hard to make the system unbootable just by making changes, since I can just boot into an old generation. I haven't used rescue media for my own machines in probably 5 or 6 years now.
He is a fantastic COO, unfortunately, Apple needs a CEO with vision. They do everything safe. I like Tim Cook because clearly he runs the ship nicely, but we need a visionary at Apple. Apple was always a little different and more daring. Remember the Apple that told you, you were holding your phone wrong? I want that level of energy that pushes for more innovation, it was much more exciting.
running a funky chmod command recursively on my root dir and then learning how to fix it, probably taught me more about how linux works than any tutorial or article i've ever read.
I broke enough things in my early Linux days and learned a lot, but enjoying that, seeing it as a positive, or even having the willingness and time to spend on such fixes is far from universal. Most people have severe mental blocks to doing anything on the command-line for fear of breaking everything. Having an environment where they can’t break anything is a fantastic way to help them build confidence and learn how the computer works.
There is a time and place for each approach. Recognising which is appropriate for each situation and user is a good skill to cultivate.
> This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will break”, then in the same paragraph “but don’t do this specific thing”.
This is fair, but I will say, there's a reason I put this section after "Please enable Time Machine."
...you actually could get rid of System Preferences, if you really wanted to, and use the Terminal to set Preferences instead. The reason I called out System Preferences is because, growing up, my younger brother did delete System Preferences! He didn't have Time Machine, and this didn't come up until we were traveling and he couldn't connect to a new wifi network. So that was a little annoying.
But I'm probably further making your point, and I do largely agree with you! The thing is, my computer is my home--I spend so much time there--and I just can't deal with having my home littered with Apple cruft.
I have a soft spot for Mavericks too. It’s not 100% perfect (as post notes, scroll bars have been flattened and by then sidebar item icons had lost their color), but otherwise visually its probably the closest thing possible to “perfect” Aqua era OS X. It feels very refined in several ways that the earlier versions didn’t.
In my opinion the runner-up in terms of visuals is actually 10.4 Tiger, though — the dark grays ubiquitous throughout 10.5 and 10.6 have always felt kinda dingy and depressing in a similar manner to the dark gray Windows 95/98 (which, as an aside, is why I find the Windows 2000 variant of that look preferable, with its base gray being lighter and more cheery). That said I miss the 2D grid that 10.5 and 10.6 used for virtual desktops even today… the simplified 1D linear virtual desktops that’ve been in place since 10.7 feels needlessly watered down.
Funny enough that version of OS X can also run what to this day I’ve found to be the best implementation of a Quake terminal anywhere, in the form of the haxie Visor/TotalTerminal which added this functionality to the Apple terminal. The way it handled window focus and everything was so smooth and better than iTerm’s as well as any of the Linux dropdown terminals I’ve used.
On the note of Linux, I wish that there were Linux DEs that went the extra mile to produce a true OS X 10.4-10.9 analogue, but no such thing exists. The closest is elementary/Pantheon which is stylistically in the same ballpark but shares too much of its design roots with GNOME’s oversimplified iPadOS-like design. Everything else in the Linux world is Windows-type desktops or minimal WMs, both with flat UI themes.
On the BSD side there has been efforts such as helloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) and rayvnOS (https://ravynos.com/) that aim to provide a FOSS recreation of the Jobs-era Mac OS X experience. Both can be considered BSDs as opposed to mere desktop environments. helloSystem uses X11 and Qt, while rayvnOS uses its own version of Cocoa.
However, it’s been a few years since I’ve seriously investigated these projects, and a cursory glance at them shows that they still have a while to go before they become replacements for existing desktop Linux environments. Both are rather ambitious passion projects from their creators, similar to Haiku, a re-creation of BeOS.
Both those projects can only go skin deep. The macOS experience is not only how it looks, but the depth of its interactivity and the thoughtful implementations within that depth.
I still shudder when I see the limitations of dragging files in Windows. The fact I can drag a folder to a save dialog to jump to that folder is so natural to me, and Windows and Linux never bothered with those details.
I’ve been keeping an eye on these projects too. My hunch is that helloSystem is going to find Qt limiting as it matures, and while ravynOS’ approach is more likely to produce a high fidelity analogue, it’s also much larger in scope and likely to get bogged down in achieving compatibility with existing Mac binaries. I wish the best for both though, because they’re filling an extremely empty niche in the FOSS desktop space.
There's XtraFinder which promises something similar, but now all modern macs require disabling security features, which seems a bit much for a convenient hotkey.
I have also requested TotalFinder-like feature for PathFinder(https://cocoatech.io/) which is the closest thing to what TotalVisor did.
Wild how tiny little utilities can change your expectations of using a computer. Simply cannot get by without quake terminal and bottom file explorer anymore, on any machine I daily drive.
Tiger is cool! The other neat thing about the visuals is, if you think about Apple's industrial design in that era, the UI feels a perfect extension of the hardware itself.
And as much as I love Mavericks, I agree, I would absolutely jump to a Linux distro that recreated the experience faithfully. There really isn't anything though, especially when you add in the larger app ecosystem—I like using Aperture a lot more than Digikam, for example.
Edit: Oh, and:
> and by then sidebar item icons had lost their color
But you can bring the color back with the ColorfulSidebar SIMBL plugin!
I have. Budgie is cool, but falls into a similar bucket as elementary/Pantheon in that it’s not mac-like even if it includes certain Mac features and qualities.
> Removing stock apps from the Applications folder is completely safe—nothing will break—and this is your computer, so you should make it your own
This is the part that hits home the most for me.
I get the benefits of the hardened pc-as-appliance that Apple has shoved down all our throats as "for our own good" but using a modern Mac compared to even Mavericks, or Windows XP, feels to me like if someone came into my house and confined me to a coat closet which they've padded and sealed off. This isn't my house anymore, someone else controls everything and only they can give me permission (revocable at any time) to do literally anything. They promise me that I'll never hit my head now, but I never had that problem in the first place.
Echoes of an article posted here [1] some time ago called I Don’t Like Computers which had the same nostalgic vibe about computing in the past. This is exactly how modern OS's and devices make me feel. The Personal Computer used to be PERSONAL. The User was in control. We used to be in the driver’s seat. We used to tell computers what to do. Now we feel like passengers, and the computer is telling us what it's going to do and hedging us into a few small scraps of functionality it deems safe for us.
>I knew I wanted an operating system from before Apple abandoned the Aqua design language.
I suppose it depends on your definition, but that likely does mean Mavericks is the latest available. For my money though, El Capitan (10.11 to Mavericks' 10.9) was the local maxima (speed, stability, capability). I've no inkling what issues using that would entail—I had no idea that Mountain Lion had "a more capable version of QuickTime"—but my immediate response to this was wondering why not El Capitan.
Strictly speaking, Mavericks (and Mountain Lion and Lion before it) were already some way through abandoning Aqua. Lion dropped the beautiful blue scroll bars that previous OS Xs had, replaced the pill-shaped buttons with rounded rectangles, and somewhat flattened the overall UI as well, though not to the extent that Yosemite did.
But even as a fan of Aqua, I think it's nice that some of these elements got toned down just a bit. Really, you could view most of the design changes from OS X 10.0 onwards as Apple slowly toning down Aqua; the original Cheetah looks kind of gaudy IMO, the interface elements draw too much attention to themselves.
I do miss Snow Leopard's scroll bars though, as I explicitly call out on the website!
You're thinking of QuickTime 7, that can be optionally installed (as a separate app) even on macOS 10.14 Mojave! But the website is referring to versions of QuickTime X. QuickTime 10.2, which was included with Mountain Lion, was the last to support third-party components. (If you've ever used "Perian", that's what I'm referring to.)
We could benefit from a site that describes the best OS for any hardware and has scripts and instructions for how to mod them to be more efficient and up-to-date, with someone assigned to maintaining patches and tools for basic functionality you might need, but also having standalone, airgapped versions of each for longevity.
Right now, this info is dispersed everywhere and it’s not the primary intent of archival sites to provide this.
The MacBook Air mentioned (2014) will install Mavericks when booted into recovery mode anyway (unless you use Option-Command-R which will give you the newest compatible version which is Big Sur).
I did that a few days ago and I agree, it’s quite snappy! Missing certificates can also be installed manually (e.g. from the curl CA bundle), but even then TLS 1.3 support is lacking in most apps which breaks a lot of stuff without the suggested proxy.
> The MacBook Air mentioned (2014) will install Mavericks when booted into recovery mode anyway (unless you use Option-Command-R which will give you the newest compatible version which is Big Sur).
Certain 2014 Macbook Airs, including my own, will install Yosemite instead in recovery mode for some reason, even though obviously I'm using Mavericks and it runs fine.
Regarding SSL: just make sure you are using macOS 10.9.3, earlier versions (all of them, and I mean, all since the 80s) never had a working SSL implementation.
I stayed on Mavericks until late 2016, by which time I had to update to then-current system because I got a new job and needed latest Xcode to compile the iOS app. Surprisingly, I didn't hate the flatter design as much as I anticipated. But of course I still miss skeuomorphism.
The worst transition for me was Big Sur (or, more precisely, Mojave -> Monterey when I bought a new MacBook in 2021). The useless margins, the unification of title bars and toolbars that no one asked for, the borderless buttons (I enabled "show borders" in accessibility settings), SF Symbols (no pixel grid alignment whatsoever), and the redesigned alerts, are the worst. From what I've seen of Tahoe, it makes it even worse, both with the touchscreenification and with the wasted screen area.
I agree; I don’t like the iOSification of the UI/UX, and I also don’t like the increased locked-down nature of macOS, such as having to go through a nag screen whenever I use lldb. I still prefer Macs over Windows for work-issued hardware, but for my personal equipment, I never upgraded beyond Mojave. When combined with the lack of user-serviceability on the latest Macs, I switched back to PCs a few years ago after nearly 15 years on Macs. I have a Ryzen 9 desktop and a Framework 13 laptop. I begrudgingly use Windows 10/11; I would’ve moved to desktop Linux if it weren’t for some proprietary software I need that doesn’t run on Linux. I still have my “trash can” Mac Pro on the rare occasion I need a Mac-only app.
In my opinion both Windows and Linux are much worse than even modern macOS, so I'm going to keep using it for the foreseeable future, but being rather conservative with installing updates.
On hardware, my M1 Max MacBook Pro is the best laptop I've ever owned, period.
You call that insane quality? I took a five second look at the GitHub page and I already noticed that the spacing between the three traffic light buttons is wrong. It immediately felt off.
I wish all of this angst could be bottled up and used to create a simply workable version of GNUstep --- ideally targeting something easy to configure hardware-wise like a Raspberry Pi 5.
Readit News
This was pretty funny. “You can do anything, and you should be able to do anything, nothing will break”, then in the same paragraph “but don’t do this specific thing”.
Yes, there is immense value in being able to do whatever we want with our computers without restrictions. But let’s not pretend there isn’t value in being able to set restrictions too. Everything in computers is a tradeoff. Having an immutable signed OS has plenty of advantages, including for hackers: I feel much safer telling people to “just try stuff” when I know there isn’t a risk of them breaking everything and being left with an unbootable machine, leaving them feeling stupid and scared of trying anything else. More advanced tasks can come later.
Kudos for the project in general, though, I’m not throwing shade. I too am discontent with Apple under Tim Cook, but staying on an older version of macOS isn’t an acceptable solution for my use cases, I’d sooner switch to a BSD.
It reminds me of a couple jobs where management would tell us we had so much freedom that we could work on whatever we wanted. Choose your own destiny here! Except when you chose something that wasn’t among the short list of acceptable tasks, you were scolded for choosing something that was obviously not an option (to them). They knew the rules so deeply that the set of acceptable things seemed like the entire frontier of possibilities in their minds.
Like you said, it would be more helpful for everyone if the system actually clarified what was allowed and what was not so we didn’t have to guess. Drop the illusion of total freedom and replace it with clear rules that leave nothing to guessing.
I think you're being a bit pedantic. There is no contradiction.
You can indeed delete System Preferences and nothing will break, ditto for utilities, it just makes life difficult if you do. For a locked down system for say a child though it might make sense. Also reversing the problem isn't hard, you can just copy in the apps from elsewhere.
macOS isn't perfect, but it does have a nice, clean, logical implementation in many ways.
One huge demonstration of that is the way it runs on commodity hardware so well (ie Hackintoshes). Apple could have easily baked in very hardware specific support in the OS, but instead they mostly implemented a general system that follows PC standards. Security lock downs are orthogonal to that.
Neither have I claimed there is one. I understood the point perfectly, I simply found it humorous. Things can be funny without being contradictions, my point was about the tradeoffs inherent to different types of OS lockdown.
> You can indeed delete System Preferences and nothing will break, ditto for utilities, it just makes life difficult if you do.
And—surprise!—most people don’t want to make their own lives difficult.
> Also reversing the problem isn't hard, you can just copy in the apps from elsewhere.
It is hard for most people. Most of us don’t just have something else at hand to copy from at all times, including the younger OP.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44973333
> For a locked down system for say a child though it might make sense.
I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing, but most of the time I see a variation on that comment it is attached to a fair bit of condescension. Like with calling something a “toy OS” when it’s used by millions of adults worldwide for productive work. Locked down systems don’t just make sense for children. On the contrary, children might benefit the most from operating systems which are not locked down, because they have the free time and willingness to experiment and won’t yet have a lot of important data. Or maybe you have kids who don’t really enjoy computers and just want to play an occasional game or need to write a school report. That’s OK too.
Both can also be true of your elderly relative, or your partner, or your cousin, or your friend who doesn’t want to fiddle with the damn machine, they just want to get their shit done without having to worry about screwing up anything. Your other friend will want the freedom to do everything and ask you for help.
There is no right approach for everyone, and there is no age at which one approach is definitely superior to another.
On Lion—or, well, at least on Mavericks, but I'm assuming this is all Apple did starting in Lion—there is literally just a list of Appications in the Finder binary that, should you try to delete them, Finder will pop up a message stopping you. You can hex edit the Finder binary and the message will go away for the hex-edited app.
(Newer versions of macOS have signed system volume stuff, I'm not talking about that! This was introduced right around the time I nope'd out and built my current Mavericks computer.)
On which non-mobile OS is this true? It's certainly NOT safe on Mac/Windows/Linux to "just try stuff". I can trivially delete all of your data and/or upload all your .ssh files and Documents by "just try it"
He is a fantastic COO, unfortunately, Apple needs a CEO with vision. They do everything safe. I like Tim Cook because clearly he runs the ship nicely, but we need a visionary at Apple. Apple was always a little different and more daring. Remember the Apple that told you, you were holding your phone wrong? I want that level of energy that pushes for more innovation, it was much more exciting.
When I think of the positive elements of Apple's culture/persona under Steve Jobs, that particular episode is not one of them.
Funny thing is that you're still allowed to change things in the latest macOS, just disable SIP. On Mavericks you can because there's no SIP at all.
have fun! break things!
There is a time and place for each approach. Recognising which is appropriate for each situation and user is a good skill to cultivate.
This is fair, but I will say, there's a reason I put this section after "Please enable Time Machine."
...you actually could get rid of System Preferences, if you really wanted to, and use the Terminal to set Preferences instead. The reason I called out System Preferences is because, growing up, my younger brother did delete System Preferences! He didn't have Time Machine, and this didn't come up until we were traveling and he couldn't connect to a new wifi network. So that was a little annoying.
But I'm probably further making your point, and I do largely agree with you! The thing is, my computer is my home--I spend so much time there--and I just can't deal with having my home littered with Apple cruft.
In my opinion the runner-up in terms of visuals is actually 10.4 Tiger, though — the dark grays ubiquitous throughout 10.5 and 10.6 have always felt kinda dingy and depressing in a similar manner to the dark gray Windows 95/98 (which, as an aside, is why I find the Windows 2000 variant of that look preferable, with its base gray being lighter and more cheery). That said I miss the 2D grid that 10.5 and 10.6 used for virtual desktops even today… the simplified 1D linear virtual desktops that’ve been in place since 10.7 feels needlessly watered down.
Funny enough that version of OS X can also run what to this day I’ve found to be the best implementation of a Quake terminal anywhere, in the form of the haxie Visor/TotalTerminal which added this functionality to the Apple terminal. The way it handled window focus and everything was so smooth and better than iTerm’s as well as any of the Linux dropdown terminals I’ve used.
On the note of Linux, I wish that there were Linux DEs that went the extra mile to produce a true OS X 10.4-10.9 analogue, but no such thing exists. The closest is elementary/Pantheon which is stylistically in the same ballpark but shares too much of its design roots with GNOME’s oversimplified iPadOS-like design. Everything else in the Linux world is Windows-type desktops or minimal WMs, both with flat UI themes.
However, it’s been a few years since I’ve seriously investigated these projects, and a cursory glance at them shows that they still have a while to go before they become replacements for existing desktop Linux environments. Both are rather ambitious passion projects from their creators, similar to Haiku, a re-creation of BeOS.
I still shudder when I see the limitations of dragging files in Windows. The fact I can drag a folder to a save dialog to jump to that folder is so natural to me, and Windows and Linux never bothered with those details.
- Windows hotkey bottom file explorer: https://github.com/replete/productivity-ahk/blob/main/Bottom...
- MacOS hotkey bottom Finder: https://gist.github.com/replete/245986ddfb5a912f0bc71f5708be...
There's XtraFinder which promises something similar, but now all modern macs require disabling security features, which seems a bit much for a convenient hotkey.
I have also requested TotalFinder-like feature for PathFinder(https://cocoatech.io/) which is the closest thing to what TotalVisor did.
Wild how tiny little utilities can change your expectations of using a computer. Simply cannot get by without quake terminal and bottom file explorer anymore, on any machine I daily drive.
And as much as I love Mavericks, I agree, I would absolutely jump to a Linux distro that recreated the experience faithfully. There really isn't anything though, especially when you add in the larger app ecosystem—I like using Aperture a lot more than Digikam, for example.
Edit: Oh, and:
> and by then sidebar item icons had lost their color
But you can bring the color back with the ColorfulSidebar SIMBL plugin!
This is the part that hits home the most for me.
I get the benefits of the hardened pc-as-appliance that Apple has shoved down all our throats as "for our own good" but using a modern Mac compared to even Mavericks, or Windows XP, feels to me like if someone came into my house and confined me to a coat closet which they've padded and sealed off. This isn't my house anymore, someone else controls everything and only they can give me permission (revocable at any time) to do literally anything. They promise me that I'll never hit my head now, but I never had that problem in the first place.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30851371
>I knew I wanted an operating system from before Apple abandoned the Aqua design language.
I suppose it depends on your definition, but that likely does mean Mavericks is the latest available. For my money though, El Capitan (10.11 to Mavericks' 10.9) was the local maxima (speed, stability, capability). I've no inkling what issues using that would entail—I had no idea that Mountain Lion had "a more capable version of QuickTime"—but my immediate response to this was wondering why not El Capitan.
I do miss Snow Leopard's scroll bars though, as I explicitly call out on the website!
Right now, this info is dispersed everywhere and it’s not the primary intent of archival sites to provide this.
But something like a pcpartpicker.com but for OS setups would be cool.
I did that a few days ago and I agree, it’s quite snappy! Missing certificates can also be installed manually (e.g. from the curl CA bundle), but even then TLS 1.3 support is lacking in most apps which breaks a lot of stuff without the suggested proxy.
A lot of MacPorts ports also do not build sadly.
The look is so much better than current macOS.
Certain 2014 Macbook Airs, including my own, will install Yosemite instead in recovery mode for some reason, even though obviously I'm using Mavericks and it runs fine.
For more, read about the GOTO FAIL bug: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2014-1266
But if you're using Aqua Proxy, you're not really using the system's SSL implementation anyway, you're using Go 1.19's SSL.
The worst transition for me was Big Sur (or, more precisely, Mojave -> Monterey when I bought a new MacBook in 2021). The useless margins, the unification of title bars and toolbars that no one asked for, the borderless buttons (I enabled "show borders" in accessibility settings), SF Symbols (no pixel grid alignment whatsoever), and the redesigned alerts, are the worst. From what I've seen of Tahoe, it makes it even worse, both with the touchscreenification and with the wasted screen area.
On hardware, my M1 Max MacBook Pro is the best laptop I've ever owned, period.
https://github.com/vinceliuice/Yosemite-gtk-theme
If you want a macOS theme with insane quality on Linux this guy's work is the pinnacle.
It's not really what you're asking, but I know of two Linux desktops that are based around GNUSTEP.
NEXTSPACE:
https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
-- primarily targets CentOS
GSDE:
https://onflapp.github.io/gs-desktop/index.html
-- primarily targets Debian