Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
OS X Yosemite public beta starts tomorrow (macworld.com)
71 points by danielsamuels on July 23, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 51 comments


If anyone is interested in tracking adoption tomorrow, my employer released a real-time counter showing adoption by % of web traffic (obviously a sample): gosquared.com/yosemite.


It's interesting that ~15% of OS X users are on Snow Leopard (I have an old iMac that doesn't support Mavericks running 10.6, but I mostly use it as a local server)

How many of those users are still using Safari 5.1 (as opposed to FF/Chrome/Opera)?

PS: It's even weirder that people are still using Lion when apparently any Mac that runs Lion can run Mavericks (and 10.9 in my experience is much more stable than 10.7).


I'm one of those 15%. I have a first gen Intel MacMini that I bought in 2006. I've since put in a 64-bit Core 2 Duo CPU, SSD and 4GB of RAM. It runs everything perfectly, but 10.6.8 is the newest OS I can use. I'm pretty sure it's not getting security updates so I'm considering replacing it only because of that.

I think it can run 10.7 unofficially, but it requires a little bit of hacking.


This is great news and a good direction for Apple to be taking. I've been using Yosemite since day one and apart from a few bugs, the majority of features are working nicely.

I'll probably install the public beta version on my work environment, in case there are any differences between the developer preview.


Anyone here using the developer beta? Is it stable enough to use day to day?


GCC is essentially broken, rendering compilation of standard packages impossible.

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=61407

Our team was on Yosemite but we all had to move back to Mavericks to actually do work.


brew (which I'd consider on OS X to be `standard packages`) generally uses LLVM rather than GCC, and has been fine throughout 10.10


As you mentioned, there are still a handful that currently have GCC issues, namely Haskell (GHC) and MongoDB.

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/issues/29845


Correct... but many ruby gems and node.js modules compile using gcc. (v8 being the most annoying one for us)


are you sure it's actually gcc and not clang, because "gcc" on OS X is clang


It's doing gcc 4.2, and when you try to install / compile a higher version it fails. Pretty sure.


I've had luck installing most Ruby gems used by my projects. The only exception so far has been Nokogiri, and even in that case there were instructions on the project's web page that got it to install without a hitch.


I've been using it for a bit. There are a couple of snags, but nothing has stopped me from getting work done. Most of my issues have been with homebrew formulas that aren't updated to work with 10.10 (mongodb is the one on the top of my head). Other than that, the only real issue I've had is with installs. Each update has taken upwards of an hour and a half to install while it constantly tells me 4 minutes remaining. Post install, pretty smooth though.

Things I'm regularly using without issue: PyCharm, Thunderbird, Chrome, Firefox, Subline Text 2, and iTerm


Using it on a mid-2010 MacBook Pro, for about a week. OS X itself is stable.

However, WiFi with unreliable internet connection (like tethering over a phone) is very flaky – the WiFi connection itself keeps dropping.

Safari has trouble with some video streaming sites – YouTube at 1080p, Netflix. This can be because of my older hardware, but never had any issues with Mavericks. Also WebGL does not seem very performant. Chrome does all of this perfectly fine, though.

If you use virtualisation with VMWare Fusion, note you need 6.0.4 for it to work under Yosemite. 6.0.3 will not run.

The new dark mode menu bar and dock are nice, but there are some rendering issues. It seems 3rd party menu bar icons are also not compatible yet, so most will be invisible or broken in dark mode.


are you tethering over bluetooth?


Been running it since beta 2 or so. Latest build is pretty good. Wifi drops out every once in a while and something weird is going on with my audio routing where it keeps trying to route to airplay devices that may or may not be present. VMware fusion works now if you use the technology preview release.

I use it full time for iOS dev and casual use and haven't had any showstoppers. I have my old mavericks install in a second partition and rarely reboot into it.

Otherwise it's in good shape for a beta OS that's still a couple of months from GM.


I am running beta 4 (14A298i) on a mid-2013 11" MacBook Air. It sometimes loses the WiFi connection, but reconnects automatically. I've noticed the laptop will restart itself with PowerNap turned on, and plugged into an external display and external drive. Turning off PowerNap seems to fix it. Everything works pretty well. Handoff is a little funky, but you'll probably not be running iOS 8.


Using the developer preview for about a week. I have a 2012 Air 13". DP3 was mostly ok, but would freeze and immediately reboot once or twice times a day. The newly-released DP4 seems stable enough though.

There's also something weird about Safari on Yosemite. Sometimes the tab bar would just hide completely and to get it back you'd have to reopen Safari. (The tab switcher and cmd-{ cmd-} would still work.)


I use it daily : Emacs, Illustrator and Photoshop works quite well; Safari has gone a long way and is now a pretty cool browser (except it crashes often, but I guess this is what betas are for). I had no problems with my homebrew packages. Indeed I've just realized that I've installed a dual-boot Mavericks/Yosemite but I'm no longer using Mavericks.


I'm using it on some older hardware (2011 MacBook Pro) and it's been working just fine for me. It's maybe a bit more sluggish than Mountain Lion on the same hardware, but the difference is small enough that that might just be in my head.


It has been fine for me. I've been using things like Xcode, sublime text, mamp, codekit, git, mail. Haven't used virtual machines much though so can't comment on that. I typically find the OS X betas easier to work with than iOS


If you use Audio Hijack, and you boot to no sound, disable it (GIYF).

Other than that, for node / homebrew / mongo etc everything's been fine.


Interactions with XCode have been frustrating. Can't install XCode 5.1.1, and the XCode 6 beta has been a little crashy but usable.


I was trying it out for a while, but had to go back to 10.9 because of some Photoshop issues. So be careful if you use Adobe apps.


I had issues with installing Photoshop and Lightroom through Creative Cloud in Beta 3, but it looks like Adobe fixed those issues, and everything's been fine since.

And Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5.4 have been rock-solid for me.



You may want to wait for the release notes from the public beta before condemning them to not fixing anything in DP4. Odds are some if not many of these things will be addressed before they let the public use them.


Do they require signed kexts now? How does virtualbox, vmware, osxfuse work?


I'm not sure if there's been any changes regarding signing, but I can confirm that VirtualBox has been working fine through Vagrant for me.


VMWare has an early access Fusion update that works, you can download it from their support site. Works okay for me so far.


They do. This broke Viscosity VPN software for me between DP3 and DP4, and the Viscosity guys say they are waiting for their key to be signed before they can release a new beta.

This also broke AT&T AllAccess (software for my LTE USB modem).


So no more homebrew osxfuse then :(


As a ruby dev, I haven't noticed any unsurmountable issues (with the exception of mongodb, but I only use that when I'm using node). I documented all of the snags I hit, in case anyone is interested, however by now it's all well documented online.

https://gist.github.com/bendyorke/fd5203aae3b833d4fa2e


I've been putting off testing the dev beta. Does anyone do Python development on their Mac? Did you have any issues with Python or PIP?


About half of our team is on Yosemite with no issues so far with Python or various Python packages.


Is the iOS8 to OS X phone call handoff working yet? I tried an earlier beta and it wasn't ready.


The SMS thing works ok - I can receive but not send. Phone calls have never worked for me which is a shame as this was one of the features I was really looking forward to. Mail is pretty unstable. Other than that, I've been enjoying using Yosemite from Preview 1.


It's flaky at best. Sometimes calls show up, sometimes they show up a few seconds later. Often times, they don't disappear when you accept it on your phone.

Definitely not as polished as in their demo yet.


Worked for me in beta 3, but they removed it in beta 4. Also, sending SMS from Mac doesn't work anymore.


It worked at beta 3 for me :)


iMessages still don't alway sync correctly for me. How are they going to manage phone calls?


By treating them as they are - completely different things. The phone call stuff just makes the Mac a Bluetooth headset and routes the audio accordingly. After whatever wizardry they use to connect the phone to the computer is done, it should be easy.


I have been using the developer beta since it was released. I like it. It seems like my laptop battery lasts longer now so power management probably was improved.

The best feature in my opinion is the spotlight improvements.


I am very interested in the spotlight improvements. As of now, 10.9.x, my external HDDs are not indexed and unsearchable. :(


That seems like a configuration error or a bug. I currently have eight external USB drives indexed through Spotlight on 10.9 without issues.

Check the Spotlight settings to make sure your drives are not excluded, and trigger a full reindexing process through the Terminal.


Just go in the from the command line and delete the spotlight (V100 etc) files in their root.

Or add them in the "privacy" section of Spotlight preferences, and then remove them, to have the index rebuilt.


Downvotes for an issue-fix suggestion? Really?


In your spotlight settings, exclude the external drives from indexing and then add them again.


Does anyone knows the source from this? I read the MacWorld text and could not find it. Thanks!


To those using it: How are apps running under XQuartz, especially w/ multi-monitor?


Are there any improvements in flash performance for the retinaMBP?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: