alt Hacker NewsmacOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL
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The general Apple software quality decline seems to be accelerating. We are in the thousand papercut stage where lots of small things just don’t work properly.
One of my Macs has developed the most insane habit of losing audio output capability, and then tries to route it to another one - a feature I didn’t even know existed.
Sad but not surprising. Apple marked their OpenGL subsystem as deprecated all the way back in 2018 with macOS 10.14 Mojave and iOS 12. By some miracle it has kept working all that time. While I hate it that Apple can just up and declare a widely used cross-platform API 'deprecated,' it's their system, not ours. So, we should not expect them to care or lift a finger if they accidentally break it.
Seems like a good time to mention that LunarG’s Vulkan-on-Metal wrapper reached Vulkan 1.4 conformance recently.
https://www.lunarg.com/the-state-of-vulkan-on-apple-oct-2026...
Now we need Mesa’s OpenGL-on-Vulkan to be production-ready when running on KosmicKrisp
Right I'm still on 15.5. But random app windows flicker! FLICKER! And it's a brand new 2025 M4 MacBook Air. This is the kind of thing I would expect from like Linux in say 1998?
Fails to reproduce on macOS Version 26.6 (25G70) (but I can't post a reply on the forums because developer.apple.com currently hates me.)
I get the green triangle and `hasDrawable=1 status=0x8cd5 glError=0x0` which is the expected result.
WTH. 15.8.1 is current, 15.8.2 ought to be security fixes only.
XQuartz performance has been broken for a couple of years now and I believe it is primarily due to an OpenGL issue.
There's a few very annoying audio and Bluetooth bugs on MacOS. I've even installed 3rd party software to hack a fix one of them.
what, there are still regression in the age of AI? or OpenGL is never in regression test suite to begin with?
I'm on macos 27. why are they still using 15?
The response from apple is insane, “please keep trying to reproduce this for us”. That is your job, apple engineer. As a manager of a large software org, a response like that from one of my engineers would drive me insane. Fix the damn problem or provide a timeline for addressing it. When you think the fix is released, then ask them if their issue was resolved.
Brings back memories of when macOS broke samba, coincidentally the moment I decided to switch off the brand.
It's a release candidate. That's what they are for, to catch bugs. Nothing to see here.
...except the interesting tidbits shared like this sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50142208
So they keep breaking previously functioning components even in older OS versions? I thought those were only getting security updates?
Until recently only Windows was the OS where I thought, "how could anyone use that voluntarily?", but Apple has managed to put their OSs right next to that in the same category. After a monotonous decline over more than a decade the final slump only took them three years. They've gotten better at failing faster than before.
I wholeheartedly recommend Linux. Seriously.
> I can't comment on known issues or on whether or when a fix might ship. Your report is the right channel for the issue.
> As new builds become available, please retest and add the results to FB25133383. If you have access to the macOS 26.7.2 RC or the 27.2 beta, results from those builds belong there too.
Waste your donated time and effort testing against each new build, even though we won’t tell you if we even touched that subsystem between them.
If I were this bug reporter and got a response like that (after making a perfect report including a minimal reproducible test case) I would never donate another free bug report again.
You can ask an AI to go through my HN account and see that I used to be an unapologetic Apple fanbitch
Now I must soundly say: Screw Apple.
Momentum and their hardware quality are the only things setting them apart from everyone, while their ecosystem and individual software products are going to shit.
There's no way to have ourselves heard by them. Their "official" forums are just peer support for users to bang heads against each other.
Ironically, our best hope for computing now is that someone eventually uses AI to make a better OS and ecosystem, like they've started doing with the Adobe and Office clones.
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These days you could just ask a bot to port your stuff from OpenGL to a newer API.
Backward compatibility is less of an issue when fixing legacy stuff takes $25 in tokens.
15.8.2 isn't released.
This is a report from the developer forums where people are supposed to report these bugs.
The second response in the thread is an Apple engineer acknowledging the bug, assigning a number, and asking the person to retest when new builds are available.
If you only read the comments here you'd come away with a completely different impression of what's happening.