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macOS 10.15 Vista

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Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#261

Post by coldtea »

UIZealot wrote: post #259
coldtea wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These all seem to have been developed for iOS first and macOS second. iOS and macOS is basically the same OS. iOS uses the same kernel and main userland, and was developed just as a spin-off of OS X with more lockdown enabled, some inapplicable services removed, and a profile that fits smaller devices. Otherwise the kernel, fs, userland, etc is 90% the same, minus different APIs (mostly UI) on top (which they also…

> iOS and macOS is basically the same OS. I'm aware of that. But they are not exactly the same, are they? > Of course features still need integration to the respective form factors and UI paradigms. Isn't that what usability and polish are all about? > And yet, Snow Leopard was created exactly because people complained Leopard and earlier were not stable enough. It was the release to focus on stability and polish ove…

>I'm aware of that. But they are not exactly the same, are they?

Yes, in minor ways I already mentioned.

>Isn't that what usability and polish are all about?

Yes, and as I already wrote: "Apple has done that for both platforms.". You don't get a lesser Metal or a lesser APFS on macOS vs iOS, or less UI integration.

>I know, and that's why we all love Snow Leopard. Why the regression since then?

I'm not particularly fond of Snow Leopard over other releases, nor I see much "regression since then". There are several legendary Siracusa reviews until Yosemite (after which he passed the torch) here: https://arstechnica.com/author/john-siracusa/

Here's e.g. Mavericks:

Over the past three years, each successive release of OS X has found its way onto all of my Macs in less time than its predecessor. This year, I may have already gone Mavericks-only across my whole household by the time you read this. Barring any unforeseen bugs or compatibility issues, Mavericks seems like a no-brainer upgrade to me.

And here's Yosemite:

Viewed in isolation, Yosemite provides a graphical refresh accompanied by a few interesting features and several new technologies whose benefits are mostly speculative, depending heavily on how eagerly they’re adopted by third-party developers. But Apple no longer views the Mac in isolation, and neither should you. OS X is finally a full-fledged peer to iOS; all aspects of sibling rivalry have been banished.

Do you see much talk about regression there? There are also post-Siracusa reviews on Ars for each macOS release up to and including Catalina.

>They release updates alright, but what about the quality? The fact is overall, macOS has gotten slower, buggier, and uglier with every release.

Uglier is pretty subjective if not downright wrong. The new dark mode is great, and the UI is as good as ever. What was better? The skeuomorphic years? The candy colored Aqua years?

Slower is easy: it's 100% wrong. In fact, can you show any number of it? If anything, memory compression and battery savings in recent releases made the macOS more performant, and dropping 32bit apps (and double-loading of the same libs for 32/64) even more so... And APFS is also a big improvement over HFS, and Metal is faster than the previous stack and has already given significant performance boost to FCPX and other apps.

I'm not sure what exactly you find "slower" then...

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#262

Post by [deleted] »

Razengan wrote: post #122

Apple seems to be forgetting their own credo against nag-based security: https://i.imgur.com/qbUy5aH.png (from an ancient WWDC slide mocking the Windows approach.) They may have overdone it in a few cases, and not done anything where it's really needed (like a unified list of all third-party startup items, such as Google’s sneaky Keystone malware, or seeing all outgoing data and connection attempts like Little Snitch…

[deleted]

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#263

Post by alimbada »

Apple's reality distortion field still at work. Praise Apple engineers for this... nagfest[?] but if it were Microsoft everyone was and would be up in arms about it.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#264

Post by grokavi »

eikenberry wrote: post #191
mantoto wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like my windows 10. I also like my arch Linux as well. Even my MacOS rund stable enough that I don't have any issues with that. But if you don't keep your Debian up to date the chance that you can't longer upgrade it is high. After 1-2 years.

You can update Debian many years later. I just updated a system over multiple versions no problem.

Yes, you can upgrade after several years. But you can't skip a version. If you started at 8, you need to upgrade to 9 and then to 10. Can't skip 9.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#265

Post by UIZealot »

coldtea wrote: post #261
UIZealot wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iOS and macOS is basically the same OS. I'm aware of that. But they are not exactly the same, are they? > Of course features still need integration to the respective form factors and UI paradigms. Isn't that what usability and polish are all about? > And yet, Snow Leopard was created exactly because people complained Leopard and earlier were not stable enough. It was the release to focus on stability and polish ove…

> I'm aware of that. But they are not exactly the same, are they? Yes, in minor ways I already mentioned. > Isn't that what usability and polish are all about? Yes, and as I already wrote: "Apple has done that for both platforms.". You don't get a lesser Metal or a lesser APFS on macOS vs iOS, or less UI integration. > I know, and that's why we all love Snow Leopard. Why the regression since then? I'm not particularl…

> Yes, and as I already wrote: "Apple has done that for both platforms."

Yes I saw it the first time. They certainly did it. But we're talking about how well they did it, aren't we? Usability and polish?

> I'm not particularly fond of Snow Leopard over other releases, nor I see much "regression since then".

You clearly aren't and clearly don't, but quite a few macOS users are, and do.

Here's a sampling of regressions for your perusal:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/macos... https://furbo.org/2015/05/05/discoveryd-clusterfuck/

> Uglier is pretty subjective if not downright wrong.

If you like the new looks, good for you I guess.

> Slower is easy: it's 100% wrong. In fact, can you show any number of it?

I don't have any numbers. What I do have, is the experience running these successive releases on the same laptop. And it has definitely not been positive.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#266

Post by Lio »

JustFinishedBSG wrote: post #198
Lio wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only real problem I have left with my XPS13 is with sleep/hibernate. I’d like it to work like macOS. It seems like that’s possible but it requires a swapfile to save state to. As far as I can tell that means enabling virtual memory which is a no no on SSD. Just that and I wish Bluetooth remembered the on/off state it was left in after reboot.

Both s2idle and deep ( https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/power/states.txt ) are what you want, and work. > Just that and I wish Bluetooth remembered the on/off state it was left in after reboot. That's just a Qualcomm problem. The BT is completely broken. Fixed in the latest kernel for me.

I might be missing something but doesn't that still depend on swap space and having a swapfile and virtual memory set up?

I'm fine with having a swapfile but I don't want it used for anything other than Suspend-to-disk. i.e. I don't want the SSD being hit with multiple writes caused by VM.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#267

Post by Lio »

phoe-krk wrote: post #184
Lio wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only real problem I have left with my XPS13 is with sleep/hibernate. I’d like it to work like macOS. It seems like that’s possible but it requires a swapfile to save state to. As far as I can tell that means enabling virtual memory which is a no no on SSD. Just that and I wish Bluetooth remembered the on/off state it was left in after reboot.

> It seems like that’s possible but it requires a swapfile to save state to. Has macOS solved this issue differently? Do they save RAM state to some non-SSD non-volatile memory, or do they just not care and dump it to SSD anyway?

It's not the swapfile that's the issue it's having the swapfile also be used for virtual memory.

If it was only used for suspend that would be fine because it would only be written to when you suspend the laptop, which in the grand scheme of things is pretty rare compared to writes caused by virtual memory swapping.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#268

Post by psychometry »

justintoon wrote: post #21
psychometry wrote: post #14

Wait, Bartender 3 can record my screen?

They provide a detailed explanation why at this page: https://www.macbartender.com/Screen-Recording-Permission/

Well, I decided that none of that was worth the risk and uninstalled it. They need to find a better way.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#269

Post by wayneftw »

microtonal wrote: post #155
wayneftw wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should read and write whatever files it needs to without bothering me for every little thing. For instance, supposing they want to show you a welcome screen with all of your documents from your Documents folder (or anywhere else) - I don't want some asinine popup asking me for permission. Word is a well-known application. I installed it. I trust it and the corporation that wrote it. That's enough for me. The alleg…

For instance, supposing they want to show you a welcome screen with all of your documents from your Documents folder (or anywhere else) - I don't want some asinine popup asking me for permission. Word is a well-known application. I installed it. I trust it and the corporation that wrote it. That's enough for me. But this is not how it works. Word from the App Store is sandboxed. If you open a document in Word, this i…

> But this is not how it works. Word from the App Store is sandboxed.

Yes, that is how it works. Sandboxed apps can absolutely request access to an entire folder. See here:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Se...

> An app-scoped bookmark provides your sandboxed app with persistent access to a user-specified file or folder.

But all of that isn't really relevant to what I was saying. You're bringing up technical details about how sandboxed apps work. I'm saying that sandboxes suck and I don't want them, particularly from Apple who will just use security as an excuse to take away more of my freedoms.

> I guess these extra permissions are to provide a certain level of protection against such apps, which is good.

I would rather not trade my freedom and liberty for even more annoying and absolutely useless security measures. You see the top comment on this thread now right? It's about how useless these dialogs are and how Apple has actually argued against them in the past.

> There are many well-known incidents of trusted applications being compromised and backdoored.

So? Don't update right away if your OS manufacturer can't be bothered to run a properly curated package management system that vets packages before anyone installs them.

> But now that applications are distributed over the web, allowing unfettered access is insanity.

I've been using desktop software for 30 years and for 25 of them, I've been downloading it from the Internet. My simple security measure are to verify sources, turn off automatic updates, don't update right away and read the news. Haven't had a problem yet.

> The Linux ecosystem is also moving towards immutable base systems (Fedora Silverblue, NixOS) and restricted, sandboxed applications (Flatpak).

Some Linux distributions are moving towards that. Anyway, I'm fine with immutable base systems. I'm even fine with sandboxed apps, as long as the permissions request infrastructure isn't annoying as it is in iOS and now macOS. And, as long as I can still install non-sandboxed apps without any further useless annoyance.

> This is getting tired and old.

No it's not. It's getting one tick closer with every release and if you want, we can certainly detail each time that macOS has changed to become more like an iPhone. Some part of you must realize that this is exactly what Apple would love to do as quickly as possible but they won't risk alienating users just yet. Do you really not see how Apple has been moving towards a less general purpose computer?

I mean, I wouldn't even call macOS "general purpose" to begin with because you can only really install it on Apple hardware. Right from the very start with Apple, their OS has always been more like "Apple purpose" - software that you can only use for Apples purposes.

> macOS is still an OS for 'general purpose computing'.

Yes, for now. Just a little bit less with each release.

> I wish Linux was as far as macOS with application sandboxing and system integrity protection.

No thanks. The world needs less security theater, more actual security and more freedom to use our own bodies and properties as we wish.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#270

Post by Wowfunhappy »

CDSlice wrote: post #73
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You expect applications to have access to your desktop? Yes! That's what applications do , they read and write files. Most other software is, more likely than not, either a game or a web page. Does every app need to access my desktop specifically? No. But if we're trying to protect "normal users", I don't think most of them have the wherewithal to think through "what exact locations does and doesn't app X need to a…

But they should only read and write files that you give it permission to. E.g, Word should only be reading and writing whatever files you open to edit, it shouldn't be able to access all the files in your Applications folder. If it needs temp files it can write those to it's designated section of the file system.

Sure, if applications are able to do things in the exact way Apple imagines. Unfortunately, the real world is almost always more messy—there's always at least one exception that isn't provided for by Apple's sandbox. Look at how many Mac apps offer both stripped-down Mac App Store releases and separate, more robust versions if you buy from their official websites.

I'm by no means against Sandboxing, by the way. I think it's great that if you want to buy and use sandboxed apps—and are willing to accept more limited functionality as an occasional consequence—the Mac App Store provides that option for you. However, there needs to also be an alternate path, by which I can say "this is an application I trust, please let it do its job."

There should, of course, be several different permission levels—Parallels needs its own kernel extension, most applications don't. Permission prompts are an important part of enforcing that. And that's precisely why prompts need to be use sparingly—if you bombard the user with too many of messages, they'll ignore all of them.

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