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Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

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Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#41

Post by emilsedgh »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #33
dm319 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a developer, but I knew developers were previously content with Macbooks usually running OSX or linux. Given so much unhappiness with OSX, and the inability to run linux on the USB-C macbook pros, what are developers generally doing? The Apple hardware is nice, but it generally means you have to use OSX. Windows WSL is pretty convenient, but then you have to use Windows. Linux is, of course, great, but what h…

Apple hardware was nice. Not anymore. I had to have the keyboard replaced on my touchbar model. And the 8 Gig memory limit is silly. Thanks to an external keyboard and vagrant I get to spend most of my time on linux with a good keyboard, so it is tolerable for now. I would dump it for a linux laptop, but I work remote so every type of video chat/screen share tool needs to work. Most of them don't work on linux. My co…

Hangouts, Slack, Zoom.us, Appear.in (even Skype iirc) work fine with Debian.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#42

Post by jey »

driverdan wrote: post #36
malchow wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on macOS High Sierra for the spontaneity. Every morning, I go to wake my Macbook Pro with two 4K USB-C connected displays and external keyboard and mouse. Will one display turn on? Both? Neither? Who knows!

That's not a new problem. My 2012 rMBP w/ 10.11 has the same issue. OS X has always had issues with multiple displays.

Do you get kernel panics too if you don't follow the right sequence of "first wake from sleep then connect external monitor"? I can't believe this is still so broken.

2017 13" TouchBar MBP running 10.12.6

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#43

Post by notadoc »

stephen_g wrote: post #26
notadoc wrote: post #3

High Sierra seems like a great OS if you want an unstable workstation that doesn't work with tools you've used everyday for well over a decade.

It’s weird, I keep hearing things like this but have encountered literally no issues with it on my mid-2015 MacBook Pro... Is there some particular hardware that it’s dodgy on or am I just lucky?

I assume a lot of variables come into play, probably what you use, how you use it, and where you use it.

But it's funny you say that, because that dichotomy seems to define High Sierra; it's either a total mess, or totally forgettable.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#44

Post by seanp2k2 »

malchow wrote: post #32
notadoc wrote: post #3

High Sierra seems like a great OS if you want an unstable workstation that doesn't work with tools you've used everyday for well over a decade.

I'm on macOS High Sierra for the spontaneity. Every morning, I go to wake my Macbook Pro with two 4K USB-C connected displays and external keyboard and mouse. Will one display turn on? Both? Neither? Who knows!

Store the screen layout using serials from the EDIDs. Why it doesn’t do this and “tries” to guess their position somehow is beyond me. I use the OWC TB3 dock with dual Asus PA328qs with the latest firmware. Because of apparently some lame design decisions, in order to run dual external monitors over a single TB3 port, you need the dock, which has one DisplayPort output, then a TB3-> DisplayPort (via USB-C alt mode IIRC) dongle plugged into the dock. This is idiotic, but I wouldn’t mind so much if it actually worked consistently. This is not the case. Half the time, when I go into work and plug in, I get 30hz sync on the monitor plugged into the dock. This is when it works at all, without having to guess if the laptop is actually on, because it’s the rMBP which has no power indicators despite having a useless oled screen across the top of the keyboard. So, plug in, wait 5-30 seconds, nothing, open laptop, nothing, unplug dock, nothing, hold down fingerprint reader (the idiotic power button on the rMBP) until...nothing happens, then wait a random amount of seconds, stab it again, wait another 5-10 seconds for the Apple logo to appear, macOS boots into recovery (reset credentials screen, because it assumed that since I couldn’t log in during a boot that I need to reset my password I guess), restart, wait for disk decryption screen which doesn’t work with my wireless keyboard plugged into the dock, type in that password on the laptop keyboard, wait another few seconds for it to log in, ensure that WiFi is enabled as my normal network connection is via LAN via the dock which isn’t plugged in at this point, log in, wait for everything to start, close lid and pray that I don’t have to repeat this, wait another 5 seconds for it to actually sleep, plug dock in, mash random keys until it wakes up, log in again, rearrange monitor layout as it’s usually swapped L/R, one monitor doesn’t work, or they both don’t work again, fix that by power cycling monitors / dock, then finally maybe do some work if it’s not yet lunch time.

For a ~$6k setup, it’s awful. It’d be awful for $1k. About 10 years ago, I had a Dell D830 running Fedora and later, early versions of Gnome shell. The dock powered the laptop and a mouse, keyboard, external drive, and two monitors. It was a single (albeit proprietary) connector, and the dock was fairly expensive (~$200 IIRC). It worked damn great, nearly every time, even with sleep States in Linux on a laptop 10 years ago.

Why is this suddenly harder than putting a Tesla on Mars? Why don’t we have good real wireless HD displays by now? The current state of affairs with Apple laptops and docking is just sad to me. I’m almost bothered enough by it to switch jobs to go there and work on fixing it.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#45

Post by crispinb »

acdha wrote: post #29
dm319 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a developer, but I knew developers were previously content with Macbooks usually running OSX or linux. Given so much unhappiness with OSX, and the inability to run linux on the USB-C macbook pros, what are developers generally doing? The Apple hardware is nice, but it generally means you have to use OSX. Windows WSL is pretty convenient, but then you have to use Windows. Linux is, of course, great, but what h…

> Given so much unhappiness with OSX Unhappy people post a LOT more and the internet loves a good pile-on. Apple has had plenty of embarrassing QA lapses but the average developer is fine, and it’s not like everything else is perfect. The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin, although there’s a good argument that software compatibility is worth that overhead.

I have to say (and of course this just another anecdote) none of the developers I know (including myself!) are happy any more with OSX. In particular, no-one wants the new MB Pros. We put up with the gradual culling of ports for the sake of the things we liked (OSX's great 3rd party GUI software ecosystem, plus enough unixyness underneath, and the great hardware). But removing 1/6 of the keyboard for the sake of a feeble "innovation" has been a cut too far, and now we're gazing with envy at machines with real keyboards and an actual diversity of ports.

The only developers I know who are replacing their pre-touchbar machines right now with new ones are those making much of their living from iOS / OS X. Many (like me) are kind of hanging on, because it's a pain to change OSs, lose much of the software we love etc. I'm still undecided, but I think my current (ageing) MB Pro is going to be my last.

> The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin

Yep. I shifted from Linux to OS X years ago because I was sick of tech fiddling and wanted to have a machine that needed no hand-holding and let me get on with my work.

There seem to be no good options.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#46

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

shakna wrote: post #23
pavlov wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After updating to High Sierra, OmniGraffle, an app that I use fairly regularly, stopped working. The only available solution was to buy a $50 update to the latest version. At least Omni Group should be happy about macOS 10.13. In Omni's view, my software was hopelessly outdated... But in reality it worked just fine for my needs even though it wasn't the latest version. I had bought the license in November 2009, so ex…

> Microsoft would never break compatibility with a major Windows app from only eight years ago. Microsoft is nearly pathalogic in this. I still run some programs I bought for DOS today on Windows 10, because they're COM files. Still works the same. Apple has always broken things on the other hand, but with the promise of a stable system. Which, having upgraded to High Sierra, is long gone. This feels almost like the…

I got to say... I have a couple MacBooks I use at home, but my work PC is a 2012 era AMD CPU with 32GB RAM and a GTX650 Ti with four random secondhand displays connected to it, running Windows 7, and I never have any issues with it.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#47

Post by notadoc »

malchow wrote: post #32
notadoc wrote: post #3

High Sierra seems like a great OS if you want an unstable workstation that doesn't work with tools you've used everyday for well over a decade.

I'm on macOS High Sierra for the spontaneity. Every morning, I go to wake my Macbook Pro with two 4K USB-C connected displays and external keyboard and mouse. Will one display turn on? Both? Neither? Who knows!

Sounds fun! Every day is workstation roulette!

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#48

Post by djsumdog »

notadoc wrote: post #43
stephen_g wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s weird, I keep hearing things like this but have encountered literally no issues with it on my mid-2015 MacBook Pro... Is there some particular hardware that it’s dodgy on or am I just lucky?

I assume a lot of variables come into play, probably what you use, how you use it, and where you use it. But it's funny you say that, because that dichotomy seems to define High Sierra; it's either a total mess, or totally forgettable.

I actually didn't have any problems with WinodwsME (seriously). It ran about the same as Windows98 ... I mean still buggy and would crash once a week, but that was the entire Win9x era.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#49

Post by linkmotif »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #22
notadoc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well this is purely anecdotal, but at least 70% of the developers, IT workers, and researchers that I know are using prior generation MacBook Pro hardware (the ones without the touch bar or terrible keyboard, and with ports) and are intentionally using the older OSX versions. I know several people who traded in 2016/2017 models for 2015 models because it's literally an upgrade; get an older machine and you suddenly h…

An especially unfortunate truth is that many developers have grown so afraid of workflow-breaking bugs that they're willing to risk security flaws just so they can get work done. The things I would do (and pay) for 2010-Apple tier hardware built for CentOS in both laptop and phone form factors...

> The things I would do (and pay) for 2010-Apple tier hardware built for CentOS

Isn’t it remarkable this still doesn’t exist? Build quality still does not compare in the PC world.

Yet, I’m on a MBA3,2 (late 2010) and it’s great. Still running Yosemite. It’s got 4gb ram but handles running 10 JVMs with modest heaps for development no problem. Stable and runs for months without issue. I’d love more RAM and more cores but none of these computers seem worth it.

I considered buying a 2015 MPB the other month only to learn that Apple glues the battery to the top case. So to replace the battery you need to replace the whole top case. Insane.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#50

Post by blkhp19 »

stephen_g wrote: post #26
notadoc wrote: post #3

High Sierra seems like a great OS if you want an unstable workstation that doesn't work with tools you've used everyday for well over a decade.

It’s weird, I keep hearing things like this but have encountered literally no issues with it on my mid-2015 MacBook Pro... Is there some particular hardware that it’s dodgy on or am I just lucky?

More anecdata - late 2013 15” Haswell + GeForce 750m rMBP, have literally (and I really truly mean this) had 0 issues. Not a single kernel panic or notable userland software glitch. The only thing that glitches occasionally is plugging into an external monitor, but this has happened on every release since Mavericks (what this laptop shipped with IIRC)
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