Comment by datadeft

Couple of things here:

- late adoption is a synonym to remain production ready. We used to have a badge in the internal system of Amazon called late adopter because most of the staff who run the amzn infra did not want to upgrade anything unless there was a must (mostly security fixes)

- setting up such environments by hand is a time wasting error prone excercise. Automation is a must. I keep an Ansible repo only for the environment I need to maintain.

- using MacOS for Fortran, Matlab etc might not be the most efficient. For problematic software I usually run a virtualized Linux instance that can be snapshotted and transferred to other devices so it is super easy to replicate a complicated environment

- Docker might not cut it, we live in an era when a fully virtualized instance boots up in 3 seconds on a M1 Mac so you might as well just use a full OS instead of a container

Btw. it is a shame that software development is like this. The lack of 1.0 mindset and the continuous "improvements" that are quite often regressions and UX degradations are really annoying and mostly unnecessary. There are tiny improvements between the last 3 major OS versions from Apple.

I could not care less about new notifications (that I immediately disable after installing the new MacOS) and such features and I care deeply about being able to run my usual tools as they were running in the previous version.