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Office 2016 Proving Unstable With Apple's El Capitan
An anonymous reader writes: Users of Microsoft Office on the Mac are reporting widespread instabilities and conflicts after upgrading to the latest version of the Apple desktop operating system, El Capitan. The first indications that El Capitan and Office 2016 were not working well together came in a now epic thread at Microsoft Community. Many users have surmised that new restrictions in file permissions in El Capitan caused the problems initially, though nearly all agree that Office's Outlook email client is the critical point of failure in the current round of application crashes and loss of functionality.
It's not just El Capitan. Per the linked thread, Yosemite has the same issues.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It's the iOS-ification of OS X. They're changing the driver model and moving to a "rootless" model where the root account still exists but no longer has access to everything. There is now a list of files you can't change on OS X - at all. This includes the entirety of /bin and /usr, OS X specific things like /System, and random other things like /Applications/Photos.app.
What this means is that people who create third party utilities that hook into OS X via non-Apple-approved ways can no longer do so in El Capitan, and the user has no way to "jailbreak" their Mac to allow them anyway. (That's not entirely true, there is still a method to disable this new iOS-style lockdown, but it involves booting off El Capitan install media. Which Apple doesn't distribute.)
This new locked-down OS X is just the start of forcing all apps to go through the App Store and it's the cause of this Office bug and pretty much every other problem people are having with El Capitan. Since El Capitan offers basically no user visible changes (just backend ones like locking down your own computer from you), there's literally no reason to "upgrade." Basically, Apple pulled a Windows 10.
Just upgraded to El Capitan last night.
Problem (1): I found out very quickly that root has been neutered; you can't make any changes to "system" files (in this case, meaning files that were included in the OS distribution, including things like the Mail.app folder or binaries, etc.). You get a message about not having permission, despite being root, and without any extended attributes being set on the files. Turns out that El Capitan uses a new "rootless" model in which root is no longer root and many parts of the system are off limits to any human user. Solution: Boot into recovery mode, start a terminal, and enter the command "csrutil disable" then reboot. You'll get root back and will be able to change files again.
Problem (2): Parts of Office 2011 didn't work at all—just beach balled upon startup. I tried to figure this out for a while but didn't see anyone else talking about solutions online, so I installed Office Mac 2016 (since I'm already paying for Office 365 anyway so that I can use it on my tablet and phone). I've been using the Office Mac 2016 applications all day (Outlook, Word, and Excel for work) heavily, without any trouble, so as a data sample of one I can say that in my case, 2016 is definitely a better bet on El Capitan than 2011, since Word and Outlook 2011 didn't work at all.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I've had so much trouble with Apple updates in the last couple years. I ended up stopping doing upgrades, completely. I'm still on Mavericks and iOS 7 and will remain here until these machines fall to pieces, at which point I'm just going to order something cheap on Alibaba and stick Linux on it. The whole point of buying these overpriced products is that they're supposed to "Just work." They just don't live up to the promise, anymore. Apple is looking more like Microsoft each day.
"and the user has no way to "jailbreak" their Mac to allow them anyway."
Make things up much? Just Boot into recovery mode, start a terminal, type csrutil disable then reboot.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.