Mac OS X Yosemite: Skip This Release Entirely

I've been using OS X since OS X 10.0, which came on the first model G3 500 iBook - the white one - that I got when those came out in 2001. The machine booted into OS 9 from the factory, but it had the Boot Disk selector with OS X as the alternate OS. I loved it immediately, so I was one of the earliest adopters. Back then, getting drivers for OS X was the battle, so I made gear choices based on whether or not there was OS X support. Every release got better until OS X 10.4.11, which was the first truly great release: Stable, well supported, and very useful. I liked it so much, I still have a hotrod G4 Cube that runs it, but it has been retired to the guest room (Maxed RAM, TwinView video card, 23" lucite Cinema HD display). OS 10.5 was kind of a clunker, but 10.6.8 was another stellar release, and I still have - well, had - two 2011 superdrive Mac Minis running that OS.

Yesterday, I decided to upgrade one of those 10.6.8 machines to 10.10.1 Yosemite, figuring it ought to be usable by now. Big mistake. It broke everything all over again, just like 10.9 did. Even my Bose Companion 5 sound system would not work with it, and forget about MIDI device drivers; they were all toast. Well, I couldn't restore from Time Machine back to 10.6.8 (So what use is Time Machine, really? The first time I needed it, it failed), so I went to the App Store and Purchases and downloaded 10.9.5, which I have on another 2011 Mini and my 2011 Mac Pro, which is the most recent great release. No dice; the old installer won't write over 10.10 (Which is really and truly bullshit of the very highest possible order: You should be able to switch between OS X versions with a single click, whenever you want to). What I had to do was offload Mavericks to an external HD, and wipe the drive clean with a format thumb drive, losing years of data on that machine (I don't guess that's possible to get from Time Machine now either, but I'm not sure. I never tried to use Time Machine before yesterday). Then, I had Mavericks installed on the wiped computer (I could not do this myself, I had to take the computer to Mac TLC, which is in my neighborhood).

So, forget Yosemite. It is also ugly as sin: Flat, no character; might as well be Windows. Even the Aqua buttons are gone, replaced by flat, ugly, characterless versions in pastels.

Tim Cook has been a disaster. I don't like Apple anymore, and I've been an Apple user since the Newton 110 and System 7. I've toyed with the idea of UNIX before - 10.7 and 10.8 almost drove me to it - but I think it's time to get serious about a new OS. Mac OS X is complete crap now. Utter garbage. Filth.