Comment by jrmg

Perhaps this is not true for the astrophysicist, but my general experience with the systems of people who experience frequent upgrade-induced-breakage is that they change the system rather than working within it. Switch out things. Switch BSD utilities for GNU equivalents at the system level. Change the configuration of OS services that were never designed to be changed. Do simple looking, but actually really invasive, ‘QOL’ hacks that they found on StackOverflow and the like.

macOS’s SIP is designed to combat malware - but it’s also designed to stop people shooting themselves in the foot by doing things like this.

Note that I’m not trying to make the argument that modifying your system should be _impossible_ to do - I’m sure someone will cry out about ‘software freedom’ - but I do think that some people do it without understanding the consequences.

Generally, it’s possible to customize your user environment without delving into OS internals. To a large degree, even - for example, on Mac Homebrew has, in recent years at least, become very good at this. And my experience, at least, is that if you don’t mess with the underlying _system_, OS upgrades proceed smoothly.