I've been an Apple fan since I bought an iPod in 2002. Their hardware quality and user experience has always been so damn good. I bought a MacBook Air in 2010 and after getting used to that it was impossible to go back to even the best Windows laptops. (I do miss high-end Sony VAIOs though.) And the sky-high expectations that I've developed over the past two decades are what's made it so unpleasant to see the decline of MacOS in the past few years. A lot of Mac enthusiasts seem to agree that MacOS peaked with Snow Leopard in 2009 and maybe that's true. It has certainly declined in basic usability since someone who clearly never actually uses computers decided that MacOS and iOS should converge. Phones and tablets are designed for consumption. Desktops and laptops are designed for production. These are fundamentally different things. But what concerns me most is the extraordinary decline in basic reliability over the past 2-3 years in particular. The two most basic native apps, Finder and Preview, are overflowing with bugs now and they're getting worse, not better, with each successive release.
It seems that Apple has completely abandoned MacOS maintenance. I'm not even going to discuss the UIs. I'm just talking about basic functionality. For years, Preview has had a weird bug where when I select a collection of image files and right-click Open With -> Preview, for some unimaginable reason Preview opens them in two separate windows. I have no idea how it decides which images go in window 1 and which go in window 2. This doesn't always happen. It doesn't appear to be deterministic. If you close and reopen Preview repeatedly, usually by the third run, certainly by the fourth run, Preview will open them all in one window. In the past 1-2 years it's gotten really bad. If I scroll through a long list of images, eventually Preview will completely freeze. No idea why. I obviously have more than enough RAM and CPU to view a few dozen JPEG images at a time. My Windows Vista laptop in 2009 had no difficulty scrolling through thirty JPEGs, but contemporary Preview running on an M5 chip does. Then there's deletion. If I press Cmd+Del to delete images from the Preview sidebar (they get deleted immediately from disk instead of being sent to Trash which has never made sense), sometimes the thumbnails get removed from the Preview sidebar and sometimes they don't. If the thumbnails don't get removed, the wrong thumbnail will probably be selected from then on. As in, if I'm viewing img1, img2, and img3 and I delete img3, the img3 thumbnail will still be visible and clicking on it will bring up img2. Clicking on the img2 thumbnail might bring up img1 or might stay with img2. And as soon as this happens, a freeze or crash is only a matter of time. These are pretty obvious bugs and I'm certainly not the only person to notice them or file dozens of bug reports about them, to no avail. There were many conversations about these on Apple Support forums before Apple abruptly shut the forums down.
So what should I do about this? Go back to Windows? LOL. Switch full-time to Linux? I like Ubuntu and I use it at work but I don't want to mess around with Linux on a Macbook (again) and the reality is that Mac hardware is still immeasurably ahead of other brands. Ugh. But these days LLMs are really impressive. What if I just tell an LLM to make an app that does all the simple tasks Preview is supposed to do but does them without crashing?
https://github.com/TravisLlado/macos_preview_with_all_the_bugs_fixed
So that's what I'm doing. This won't be a full replacement of Preview. Preview contains tons of weird stuff like personal signatures and ipod syncing. I usually use Preview to sort and filter photos from my camera. I sort and rearrange and delete lots of photos at once. So those are the features I've added so far. I'll add more as I need them.