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Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

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Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#51
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...

It's not always even bugs though. I remember back in ~2013 OS X updates would regularly break my Postgres setup because Apple like to muck around with it on every release. Postgres.app solved that, but the disregard for developer issues has been somewhat annoying since a longer time. And then you have a IDE like XCode that feels many years behind any JetBrains IDE lacking basic refactoring tools.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#52
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For some reason those panics stopped happening to me after a year or so (2014 15" running 10.10.5 here). Now it just panics if I plug a DP cable in cockeyed.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeBSD 12(current) on a 2017 XPS 13 has been great for me. Funny thing is I never imagined buying a dell laptop. I was going to purchase a new mac, but the touch bar killed that for me. So far so good with the XPS 13.

I can at least confirm for you that you made the right choice. Today I went to use the touchbar to adjust the volume on a conference call I was in and ended up hitting the contextual "home" button, taking me away from the page (and call) entirely. I guess I should have memorized which invisible part of the touchbar corresponded to what better. I miss hardware buttons.

Did that end the call? Most conferencing tools I use are happy if you shift away. I have to say I hardly ever use the volume buttons on my Mac and I use it 10-14h a day.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#54

  1. By creating and closing process very rapidly, one could easily reproduce
  this problem. I used something like `while true; do sh -c "exit 0"; done`.
The entire OS dying to rapidly spawned/exited processes permits a pretty nasty DoS. Good thing that nobody ever uses macs as servers or shared machines.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#55
post #17
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…

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…

I've been lucky that with my past three jobs, I've been able to use Linux naively. One place just had custom desktops, another HP workstations and the last I got a Dell laptop. I ran openSUSE on the HP, and Gentoo on the other two.

One of the shops was an open source shop, so all 150+ of us ran some Linux distro (mostly Ubuntu/Debain, some Arch, some Mint .. I was the only Gentoo) except for the graphics people who got Windows or Macs. But I was surprised at the other two shops, there were very few Linux users. There were some here and there around the company, but I'd usually be the only one on my team who ran Linux naively with Windows in a VM.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#56
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…

I had a company like that. I just ran Windows in a VM and connected it to the company domain controller. While at work, I used x11vnc on one display, tightvnc on the Windows VM on another monitor and would use that with WebEx if I needed to share my screen.

At home, I ran the same setup but I used my gaming/windows laptop for my VNC client and WebEx. I could never get the Linux Cisco VPN client to work, so my work laptop just made an openvpn connection to my flat (fibre connections are nice).

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#57
post #9
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 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…

I have made the switch to Ubuntu for Windows on my personal projects. If you aren't trying to run daemons, it is a perfect workstation environment.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#58

Why was this reported to htop instead of Apple? Most of these people "me too"ing don't seem to realize that this isn't htop's problem...

Yea, there's very little indication anyone here has tried to do any serious debugging or realizing this should be a security vulnerability report. The author did eventually post a stack-trace to the actual call that's failing.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#60
post #4

People are missing the point-- it's not an htop problem since a simple console app running as a user should not be able to do this at all. This gives me the willies. Methinks another OSX security bug is incoming.

Yea, if I had a Mac box, I'd be looking at that call stack the author posted and fuzzing the hell out of those functions. There's a DoS bug bounty in there somewhere.
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