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Re: Broken

#91

Post by als0 »

temac wrote: post #50
navidkhn1 wrote: post #24

I'm not sure if anyone has seen this yet, but Catalina is letting me login without entering my password! I have two users on my machine. 1. I "lock screen" from the Apple menu and close the lid. 2. I reopen the lid and it does not ask for password. 3. I start using laptop and lock screen suddenly pops up, but asks password for the wrong user. 4. I hit random key and the screen goes away, and i can continue working. A…

Despite having a lower quality than before since a few years, Windows has login and locking features that actually work (and I don't even really remember of bugs in there, like ever), so no, from what you describe it does not feel like Windows at all, it feels like some completely broken crap.

While on the subject, on Linux I've also noticed that Xscreensaver (or GNOME screensaver, can't remember which) sometimes goes straight into the desktop after wakeup for a few seconds before the lock screen prompt actually appears. You can even run programs. Really bizarre and feels like this issue has been present for a while now. Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?

Re: Broken

#92

Post by korpiq »

Nursie wrote: post #68
arboghast wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So was I until I switch to a 4k monitor and realize that there's no real, stable, functional fractional scaling on Linux, even less so on XFCE, unfortunately.

By using a combo of xrandr and Xfce's hi dpi setting, I've managed to make my linux desktop more stable, functional and consistent across a 4k screen and a 1920*1200 screen next to it than Windows can manage. Sure, I had to put in a bit of effort, but now that I have the results are excellent, there's no scale jumping or even the weird rendering MacOS does when moving windows around.

I would really appreciate if you could share some of your findings there.

Re: Broken

#93

Post by ironic_ali »

president wrote: post #78
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #47

> The final (well, first) Catalina release along with the outright awful public beta makes me think one thing. And that is Apple’s insistence on their annual, big-splash release cycle is fundamentally breaking engineering. I know I’m not privy to their internal decision making and that software features that depend on hardware releases and vice-versa are planned and timed years (if not half-decades) in advance, but I…

I work for a big software corp in SV with a yearly conference where we announce all of our products. Managers give zero shits about product quality as long as we deliver on time for the "big show". Bugs, future maintenance burden, and other shortcomings be damned because they'll probably be long gone after they get their promotion (and probably at another company rinsing and repeating) and by then, these issues becom…

Wall Street "incentivises" the people that are there to supposedly make them accountable. Personally, that's where I believe the problem begins.

Re: Broken

#94

Post by crispinb »

noodlesUK wrote: post #65
als0 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t think most people care about HighDPI (or whatever you want to call it), particularly Linux devs. But I can’t go back to lower DPI screens. I find this surprising. I'd say anyone who does any serious amount of multitasking (whether a Linux dev or not) would easily want one. I think people do care but they are just waiting on better pricing/availability.

My experience with hiDPI on Linux has been pretty varied. On GNOME, everything just works, and I recommend GNOME to most first-time Linux users. I use i3, and the scaling situation there involves setting some environment variables globally, but is otherwise fine (GDK_scale or something like that). The only issue I usually run into is when Firefox opens my file browser, which breaks the scaling somehow. Other than tha…

> On GNOME, everything just works

This is far from true. Gnome shell itself is mostly OK (if buggy), but only a minority of real apps work properly. The standard Gnome apps (Nautilus, Gnome Shell etc) are fine, but that's where the support pretty much stops.

Re: Broken

#95

Post by arboghast »

Nursie wrote: post #68
arboghast wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So was I until I switch to a 4k monitor and realize that there's no real, stable, functional fractional scaling on Linux, even less so on XFCE, unfortunately.

By using a combo of xrandr and Xfce's hi dpi setting, I've managed to make my linux desktop more stable, functional and consistent across a 4k screen and a 1920*1200 screen next to it than Windows can manage. Sure, I had to put in a bit of effort, but now that I have the results are excellent, there's no scale jumping or even the weird rendering MacOS does when moving windows around.

Yes, please share! How did you deal with the window title bars?

Re: Broken

#96

Post by magicbuzz »

Animats wrote: post #4
jacquesc wrote: post #2

Great post detailing everything wrong with Catalina so far. I installed it on my personal Mac, and that scared me off of ever installing it on my work laptop. Hopefully I can jump to whatever the next thing is. Or maybe it's time to get off Macs for good.

Or maybe it's time to get off Macs for good. At least don't try to use the version of Linux under MacOS as a Linux system. The OP is running cron jobs and Python in the background, and changes in the Apple security environment broke them. If you need to run Linux stuff, put it on a real Linux system.

lol

Re: Broken

#97

Post by dmix »

Off-topic: I'm having trouble reading this site on mobile, the font color is far too light, my eyes kept losing focus. Desktop it seems much more readable.

Font-weight: 300 with Open Sans + light color is the problem. Font-weight 500 solves it.

Re: Broken

#98

Post by _bxg1 »

To throw my own (admittedly niche) Catalina anecdote into the mix:

In El Capitan, Apple introduced something called System Integrity Protection (SIP). This is a security layer that prevents you from doing certain things, like modifying system directories, even as root. The idea is that malicious software could gain root permissions and still be unable to do the most egregious stuff.

Okay, fine. You can turn it off by booting into recovery mode and running a command. I'd done this in the past because most of my company runs Linux desktops and some of our core software and scripts explicitly refer to network directories normally mounted in the root dir (yes, really). So since macOS mounts remote volumes under /Volumes, I had symlinks pointing from /foo to /Volumes/Foo.

Updating to Catalina removed all of these symlinks. Okay, sure, it's a system directory and they probably just overwrote it in the process. So I went back and turned off SIP, but afterward I still couldn't "sudo ln". What gives?

An extensive Google search turned up the fact that in Catalina, system directories are now mounted as a separate, read-only volume, at startup. So even with both admin permissions and SIP turned off, there is zero way whatsoever to write to them.

An even more extensive Google search revealed someone who'd figured out you can re-mount the root dir after boot (and after turning off SIP, of course) as a writable drive, at which point I was able to finally re-create my symlinks.

This took me about an hour to sort out. If there hadn't been a workaround on that random forum (which by the way feels like a loophole, as it only required root permissions), I would've been forced to stop using a Mac altogether.

Re: Broken

#99

Post by dangus »

All the nightmares are nightmares until they're not nightmares. Weird launch day bugs like the I bug on iOS 11 are distant memories.

Yeah, these bugs are bad, but to me articles like this really feel a lot like a broken record. Every September and October, when the major releases come out, there are bugs. And then by the time you're on 10.xx.2 or iOS xx.1.3 a month later they're just a bad memory.

If you don't want bugs, don't upgrade right away. That's not an Apple-only phenomenon - remember the Windows 10 October 2018 update that had to be entirely retracted?

10.14 is still supported. 10.13 is still supported. 10.12 is still supported. Keep using those if you want.

Re: Broken

#100

Post by chaostheory »

“ Apple has never been good at anything involving the internet. I feel like they could have all the money and engineers in the world (which they basically already do) and still never completely get their services right because it’s just not in their DNA. Applications are. Hardware is. But put a network layer in there and they crap themselves. (Ok, not in every case. I’m obviously exaggerating to make a point. But the overall track record is iffy at best.)”

Haven’t tested it in Catalina yet, but I doubt my Contacts in MacOS is still able to sync with iCloud

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