Shut Up About The F*cking Glass
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I have seen a lot of hate towards macOS 26 Tahoe.
Some of is is genuinely warranted. I've seen truly abhorrent memory leaks in both Calculator and Messages, and some very strange behaviour in Safari. I've seen weird UI bugs, issues with window rendering, and a lot of odd behaviour in the some of Apple's own apps. But that's not what the vast majority of the complaints are about — god forbid we bring attention to misbehaving software. No, instead, most of the complaints are levelled at the appearance of the Liquid Glass redesign, and frankly, it's driving me up the fucking wall.
Genuinely, some of the stupidest sentences I have ever read online have come from people complaining about the look of macOS 26. To some extent, I understand. The quality of the UI chrome (or rather, glass) in the 26.0 update is well below the standard that one has come to expect from Apple based on their track record, in terms of stability at least. But regarding the UI elements themselves? You'd be forgiven for thinking Apple made the entire interface neon green the way the some folks are complaining about it.
Some of the complaints I've seen make me genuinely question my sanity. I have seen comments on forums and reddit threads and tech blogs about how "no-one can use the computers anymore because the corner radius is bigger now!" or how the sidebars "look like other windows now and it's too confusing!" Do you hear yourselves? Am I the only person alive still managing to use their Mac daily despite the "terrible horrible update"? What the hell do you mean about the sidebar looking like a whole seperate window?? What the hell about your computers is so hard to use???
The more hilarious comments I've seen are about how Apple has lost their way, and people are moving to Linux in search of UI consistency. Sorry to break the bad news to ya champ, but you won't find any of that over there. Linux is a lot of things, but visually consistent across all apps on the desktop it certainly is not. GNOME's been trying, sure, but it's a far cry from Apple, and doesn't have nearly the level of polish that even the most unpolished UI glass has on a Mac.
Complaints from app developers I can understand — Apple dropped a whole new UI on you and gave you a few months to completely change and rebuild your apps against the new SDK, so being pissed about the amount of development work required just to change how your app looks when you could've been writing new features is completely understandable. But from users? Nah.
The computers look different, I get it. But not that different. It's a little rounder, a little brighter, and a little more translucent. Honestly, some of you just have to get the fuck over it. And if you really can't, you can always roll back your OS version to Sequoia. It's not the end of the world because the buttons are rounder.
My honest feelings about the whole issue are these: if you're utterly unable to do any work on your computer because the window corner radius got larger or the sidebar got more transparent, then maybe you should be doing something more important. And if the changes to the UI are enough to turn you off macOS for good, maybe you weren't enjoying it to begin with, and maybe it's better if you use Linux or Windows instead.
I've been working just fine with macOS Tahoe. Dare I say, I actually prefer it to Sequoia. Beyond the UI changes (which I enjoy), there are heaps of changes across the board which make the whole operating system more enjoyable and useable. I think Apple released all the operating systems too early, and they needed much more time in the oven before they were ready for public release. But it's not a crime againt humanity for the user interface of an OS to change. The whole issue is way overblown.
Please, for the love of god, Shut Up And Use The Fucking Computer.