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High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

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Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#311

Post by valuearb »

EGreg wrote: post #309
valuearb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won’t downvote you, but this are just a bunch of random assertions. I’ve upgraded to High Sierra, no problems. Done all the ios updates, no problems. Apple was constantly dealing with quality issues while Jobs was alive. Remember AntennaGate? Apple has more products and customers than ever now, meaning more anecdotal complaints than ever. And no one uses the Mac App store, so no problems.

No one uses the Mac App Store?? First of all many people do. And second, isn't that there aren't MORE people a problem for Apple? How are people supposed to get apps for their Macs? Download from random websites? How do updates happen?

Yes. Developers would rather distribute outside of Mac app store.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#312

Post by acdha »

gmueckl wrote: post #304
acdha wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headaches appear to be video driver specific. Most of the people I know who upgraded on day one haven't had problems. That said, most of the benefits aren't visible so unless you use Safari or an app which depends on Metal 2, etc. there's no massive reason to jump.

Taking a wild guess here, the issue sounds like a GPU hang or crash. This gives the illusion of total unresponsiveness when only the display is not updated anymore. It would be interesting to see if networking still works in that frozen state. The CPU seems to be unaffected from the looks of it (sound decoding and playback works).

Agreed — and be rather unsurprising given the patchy nature of video driver quality. It'd be really easy to believe that Metal 2 is putting more pressure on a previously less used code-path and is flushing out bugs or hardware issues.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#313

Post by chucky_z »

garyrob wrote: post #228
tjr225 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they really unreliable? I use a 2013 macbook pro (that I bought refurbished mind you) and it works just as well as the day that I bought it, except that the mute key doesn't work. The 2015 mbpr I used at my previous employer seemed just as sturdy. I also abused an iphone 5s for years until an upgrade to an iphone 7 earlier this year. Seems like a pretty stable device. I don't see these problems. Now I'm stuck wit…

Apple hardware still seems excellent to me. It's the software that's unreliable.

I've personally had different experiences in a professional workspace. I'm currently sitting at a ~15% replacement rate (e.g.: Apple saying they cannot fix it, and giving us a new one) across ~12 touchbar MBP's. We have 2 of the 13" MBP's sans touchbar and they've been relatively trouble free.

That's similar to Macbook Air's, which I despise in the workplace simply because they seem to randomly die much more than other models.

All of our 2012-2015 MBP's are still going very strong. We have not replaced a single one.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#314

Post by LarryMade2 »

aaronbrager wrote: post #56
LarryMade2 wrote: post #35

High Sierra is a mess, I had someone whose computer was un-bootable because of it. I went through many "solutions" only to finally roll it back to a previous OS version via backup (thankfully they used Time Machine regularly), and told them do the current system updates but don't update the OS. I've worked through many update issues in OSX over the years, and the fixes were reasonable, but this one is really bad, and…

You can still download old versions of macOS from the Mac App Store, eg Sierra is available here https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202

I see they list of OSs but no location to actually download any older version except sierra. Where do you see that?

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#315

Post by walterstucco »

fatbird wrote: post #267
aaomidi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My avoidance of their built in apps is just simply that I don't want to be locked in to the apple eco system. Apple has always took a closed approach to their software and it's going to hurt them in the long run.

Every time I think their walled garden will hurt them, I end up at my parents trying to help them through various issues on their Android devices, which come from different vendors so it's all kind of different even between devices when it should be the same, and I realize that the walled garden has some really obvious benefits that the HN crowd is somehow uniquely unable to appreciate.

What you are describing are not the benefits of a walled garden but the benefits of having someone that fixes things for you

Apple walled garden is the one that's different from the rest

It's even in their motto "think different"

That's why leaving it looks so difficult

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#316

Post by Ambroos »

jarym wrote: post #2

Had the same issue - the Console App logs have taken a SERIOUS step back from earlier versions; lots of garbage that should clearly be DEBUG or TRACE level (I guess remnants of what developers have been working on). Anyway, after days of experimentation, in my case, I think it was WebGL on Chrome. If I disabled GPU graphics acceleration in Chrome then the freezing would never happen. I downloaded the NVidia drivers f…

Exactly the same experience here. I've started using Firefox with Chrome completely shut down when I'm doing critical work. It's very annoying.

Since about a week however it seems to have been fixed, might have been a recent Chrome Dev or macOS Developer beta build I've updated to (hard to keep track of).

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#317

Post by lispm »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #298
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #61

Apple went from building fantastically reliable software on beautiful, powerful devices, to... Well, this. Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated. Their hardware performance lags the rest of the market at their price point, and skirt the lines of programmed obsolescence. And now apparently their major OS updates go out wit…

I've been programming professionally since 2000, working professionally on a range of operating systems: Windows, Linux, OSX and FreeBSD. I've dabbled with Solaris SPARC back in the day, and grew up with AmsDOS and MS DOS. I've never had the pleasure of using a Lisp Machine, but enjoy Common Lisp and have a (jealous / nostalgic) feeling for what a LispM must have been like. I mention all of this to give context to my…

> a pocket computer that won't let you install software of your choice!

My Ubuntu tablet did not let me either. It was a major disappointment. Anyway, the OS is no longer maintained and the best thing to do is to use it as a large clock.

I'm now using a large iPad Pro, probably the best piece of personal computer hardware I've seen so far... 500GB SSD, fast ARM processor, 120Hz screen with fantastic colors and brightness, LTE, four speakers with excellent sound, ...

I cannot program Lisp on it, but I could not do that on the Ubuntu tablet either and the Ubuntu UI/UX was lacking.

I always liked SUN's hardware, incl. the SPARC machines. Solaris was nothing I would run on my machine. I never liked it. Not its UI, not the OS APIs, not the documentation, it's like food one does not like.

> I recently installed FreeBSD on a 16 year old laptop as an experiment, and it works fine.

My Macbook runs nicely a 4k screen with full scaling UI support. That's more important to me, than trying to use old hardware. I have old laptops around, but nothing is compelling to use. The new machines with fast/large SSDs, low-power CPUs, high-res screens, external 4k screens, are more interesting to me.

2018 again won't be the year of the Linux desktop - it is just not there for people who value UI/UX more than low-level configurability.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#318

Post by teilo »

baggachipz wrote: post #3

Despite the daily nag messages, I still haven't "upgraded" to High Sierra yet because I've heard nothing but bad things about it from friends and coworkers. What does it bring to the table besides headaches?

My company is in the position of having to upgrade soon, because of the abysmally broken SMB stack on everything since Mavericks. It's fine when you are doing SMB between Macs. But against Windows servers with decent sized directories (upwards of 10K folders), it's a nightmare. Unbearably slow, beachball city, missing files and folders that show up just fine on Windows.

We use Acronis Connect (formerly ExtremeZIP) for AFP connectivity at present, but that only helps with the missing files problem. It's still painfully slow.

SMB on 10.13.2 is blazingly fast, almost as fast as Windows, and the missing files/folders problem is gone.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#319

Post by elwell »

baggachipz wrote: post #3

Despite the daily nag messages, I still haven't "upgraded" to High Sierra yet because I've heard nothing but bad things about it from friends and coworkers. What does it bring to the table besides headaches?

I upgraded a couple days ago to get React Native to work (shouldn't be required but I needed to update Xcode). So far works well.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#320

Post by duncan_bayne »

lispm wrote: post #317
duncan_bayne wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been programming professionally since 2000, working professionally on a range of operating systems: Windows, Linux, OSX and FreeBSD. I've dabbled with Solaris SPARC back in the day, and grew up with AmsDOS and MS DOS. I've never had the pleasure of using a Lisp Machine, but enjoy Common Lisp and have a (jealous / nostalgic) feeling for what a LispM must have been like. I mention all of this to give context to my…

> a pocket computer that won't let you install software of your choice! My Ubuntu tablet did not let me either. It was a major disappointment. Anyway, the OS is no longer maintained and the best thing to do is to use it as a large clock. I'm now using a large iPad Pro, probably the best piece of personal computer hardware I've seen so far... 500GB SSD, fast ARM processor, 120Hz screen with fantastic colors and bright…

Okay, serious question: what is the UI / UX experience you get from your OSX system that you think is lacking on Ubuntu? Or one of the other free OSs?

Perhaps my requirements are different.

Firefox, Emacs, SLIME, CCL, Roswell, Ruby, Node, RubyMine, and SyncThing run pretty much identically on all OSs I've tried. Spotify still doesn't support FreeBSD (no Widevine), so I run that in a Linux VM. Kerbal Space Program I haven't tried on FreeBSD, only Linux and OSX (I do have an old MBP I keep around as a gaming and movie machine, as it has a 15" screen and DVD drive).

I found Ubuntu configuration easier than Windows last I tried (Vista) and file based configuration in FreeBSD is the easiest of all, especially courtesy the excellent FreeBSD Handbook.

Also I run a tiling window manager (StumpWM) to avoid unnecessary window chrome, and also to avoid using the mouse.

The last time I used OSX extensively was back in 2011 or so, at Lonely Planet, where we had a fleet of iMac pairing stations. They were ludicrously hard to set up identically; all our attempts at the time to create a "pairing environment setup script" failed to varying degrees. And the screens, as large and beautiful as they were, were the devil in our weirdly lit office because they weren't available in matte options.

Possibly it comes back to your description of "food you don't like", but I really didn't enjoy my time on Apple devices.

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