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On To El Capitan
11 July 2016
With macOS Sierra beta released into the wild, we felt it was time to hazard the update to El Capitan (OS 10.11.5) on our two working boxes. After five updates, we weren't exactly throwing caution to the wind but we still had reservations.
For one thing, there was no compelling feature in El Capitan to entice us. Sure, the San Francisco system font was intriguing. And being able to install the latest Camera Raw updates might be useful (although we haven't been testing cameras recently).
But we weren't keen on going through the usual reconfiguration of Apache, ImageMagick, PerlMagick, MySQL, etc. to get back up to speed. And we were genuinely worried about losing USB devices like our old Wacom tablet whose untethered mouse we still find handy.
It has been one of the smoothest updates we've ever experienced.
You can, however, only procrastinate so long before the world passes you by.
So we took the plunge on our 16-GB 2011 laptop first. And when that went well, we devoted Sunday to our main working box, circa 2010. The download didn't take as long as the install, which we didn't watch, or Spotlight's interminable reindexing of our large drive.
It has been one of the smoothest updates we've ever experienced.
We did have to reenable PHP in our http.conf file (and consequently restart Apache). But that was about it.
ImageMagick and PerlMagick were still working. ExifTool was working. And, to our delight, our Wacom tablet was still active. We didn't even have to reinstall the driver (as we did for Yosemite).
Which is what the Mavericks and Yosemite updates should have been like. We spent about 14 months on Mavericks and then about 17 months on Yosemite before making the move to El Capitan.
To test the new setup, we edited a recent capture in Exposure X (while Spotlight was reindexing our disk) and ran a Keyboard Maestro ImageMagick macro on the export to resize it. No problem.
No doubt we'll have to tweak a thing of two in the week ahead, but we're running El Capitan now. And will be testing software and hardware like printers and scanners from this version of Mac OS until further notice.