Best OS for Type design (MacBook Pro 2015)

Francisco Torres
Francisco Torres Posts: 9
in Font Technology
Hey!
I would like to know your opinion on what's a good OS version for type design working mostly with Glyphs and Dropbox.

I recently had to update from Mojave (which was quite good) to a newer version. Type design stuff worked quite fine but I was not able to update a lot of other basic softwares, etc.
After some reading I chose Monterey but I'm not really happy with it. For now, I'm having drastic problems with Dropbox that is constantly syncing and is using high% of my CPU (still trying to find the solution for this). Glyphs seems to work fine, but also popping some errors every time I open it. 

I use a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015). It still works fine and I was pushing not to buy a new one until the end of the year but I'm not sure I can spend an entire week trying to find the solution for this.

Thanks in advance 
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Comments

  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 1,991
    Do you want to be stuck with FontForge and Fontlab 8? Because that’s what you get if you give up on Mac OS.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,137
    Do you want to be stuck with FontForge and Fontlab 8? Because that’s what you get if you give up on Mac OS.
    I got the impression Francisco was considering different versions of Mac OS, not planning to switch to a different platform. That said—and leaving aside my sectarian belief that FontLab 8 is massively superior to Glyphs :)—, it should always be remembered that Windows users also have the option of the very excellent FontCreator.

    @Francisco Torres Have you considered using git instead of DropBox? If you don’t need constant syncing, that might be a good option. I use git for most of my file transfer and project needs (alongside Tresorit for more general offsite backup).
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,724
    On fairly recent Mac hardware and OS, Dropbox works without issues. I would guess that Dropbox is not spending much time optimizing or testing for 2015 Macs or older versions of the OS.
  • Francisco Torres
    Francisco Torres Posts: 9
    @John Hudson I would love to use git, but in this case it's my client choice, so it's not an option. 

    @Mark Simonson thanks. After some time it seems to be working fine. But I'm quite unhappy their support. Their forum is confusing and they don't provide any solutions. I believe that's one of the reasons why so many people is moving for other cloud services.

  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,724
    You could also use iCloud. It's a bit of a black box compared to Dropbox (it's not as transparent about telling you what it's doing), but I haven't run into problems with it lately.

    Some differences I've noticed between the two: Dropbox supports legacy MacOS files that have resource forks (such as old Mac font suitcases, Classic Mac applications, etc.) and Finder comments; iCloud doesn't. If you move a file or folder to a different folder, Dropbox will delete it from the original location on its servers and upload it to the new location; iCloud moves it without re-uploading.
  • Roel Nieskens
    Roel Nieskens Posts: 188
    I'm not a type designer so I can't judge the (in)completeness, but is the browser-based Fontra an option? Any OS with a browser will suffice.

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