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Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

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Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#111

Post by jolmg »

newnewpdro wrote: post #100
jolmg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All it takes is a browser exploit, in any OS. What does the possible existence of exploits have to do with macOS being more secure than Linux? macOS can also have exploits. I don't understand where your claim that there's a specific risk of unrestrained file access to websites comes from. In my eyes, saying that it could be true because exploits could exist nullifies everything you said. You could apply that argument…

Different OSes have different sandboxing capabilities. Until relatively recently, Linux had effectively none , just chroot, and selinux which almost everyone disabled for a decade. The point, which you seem to be missing, is that with generalized sandboxing tools like containers, you can isolate any application to limit the potential damage of application exploits. It's a form of defense in depth. We must assume brow…

You keep trying to shift this conversation into sandboxing. Of course, any form of sandboxing is going to add defense in depth to anything. It isn't of any particular relevance to this conversation.

You said:

> Unless you're going out of your way to run your browser in a container or dedicated VM on Linux, there are substantial risks associated with browsing the web in terms of exposing all of your information in /home, which might include ssh and pgp private keys, basically everything your user can access.

You're saying that there's this particular substantial risk in this particular OS, in this particular scenario. When I ask for any details that can back it up, you reply "All it takes is a browser exploit".

I would hope it would be self-evident that that is no reason to think that the particular risk you mentioned is real, or at least any more real than it is for any other OS, for any other app, or in any other circumstance.

My only interest in the comment was determining if the particular risk is real, but now it seems it was just FUD.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#112

Post by lostgame »

gorgoiler wrote: post #52

The comment about macOS’s Mail.app struck a chord with me. My upgrade to iOS 13 has changed the mail app on my phone to sporadically open old inbox threads. It happens something like 1 in every N times I launch the app. It’s seemingly done at random and is the strangest thing about this upgrade by far. It’s like Apple are trying to nudge me into being better at responding to emails. Is there a PM at Apple watching an…

My God, me, too! I swear to God, I thought I was just confused or something, 'when did I open this?' - and it had only seemed to happen past the upgrade - this is certainly bizarre, if not just a strange coincidence.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#113

Post by curt15 »

newnewpdro wrote: post #100
jolmg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All it takes is a browser exploit, in any OS. What does the possible existence of exploits have to do with macOS being more secure than Linux? macOS can also have exploits. I don't understand where your claim that there's a specific risk of unrestrained file access to websites comes from. In my eyes, saying that it could be true because exploits could exist nullifies everything you said. You could apply that argument…

Different OSes have different sandboxing capabilities. Until relatively recently, Linux had effectively none , just chroot, and selinux which almost everyone disabled for a decade. The point, which you seem to be missing, is that with generalized sandboxing tools like containers, you can isolate any application to limit the potential damage of application exploits. It's a form of defense in depth. We must assume brow…

>Until relatively recently, Linux has effectively none, just chroot, and selinux which almost everyone disabled for a decade.

Chrome has long used several Linux sandboxing features, namely user namespaces and seccomp-bpf [1].

[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/...

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#114

Post by fitzroy »

I got hit with the "not enough space" endless reboot loop during installation. Booting into Recovery Mode and reverting to a previous local Time Machine backup fixed everything in about 5 minutes. However, discovering that 5 minute fix took about 24 hours hours of frustration and command line experimentation. I didn't even know Mojave created local snapshots.

Then I hit the "configuring macOS" forever bug after the second install attempt (just force reboot).

I think both of these installer bugs have been addressed in the recent supplemental update to 10.15.0 for any downloads going forward. Despite all these issues, things have been fine actually running Catalina, but I'd wait a few point releases if I did it again. The whole thing 'feels' very fragile, for lack of a better word — mostly due to the online conversation about it.

I'm definitely leaving my home theater Mac Mini on 10.14 for the foreseeable future after reading about the HDMI issues.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#115

Post by oneplane »

3JPLW wrote: post #31
oneplane wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Time and I/O speed isn't as relevant for everyone as you might think. I sure don't want a system without flash memory, but I know not everybody is me and not everybody will care.

My mother bought a spinning rust iMac two years ago, sold to her as a "fast" machine. It was not fast. It took 15-30 seconds+ to do the most basic of tasks. It was unusable. I did what I could to remove background tasks and it was still painful to work on. She hated it. I cloned the drive onto an external SSD with no other changes. Immediately she had a usable machine, and she now enjoys using it again.

So it's not an option for you, me or your mom, but that doesn't mean it's not an option for the billions of other people in the world. (again, not saying it's a good idea considering the cost and storage requirements for a general user -- but again, not everyone is the same user)

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#116

Post by trustfundbaby »

yodsanklai wrote: post #27

I find it slightly annoying too, especially when an upgrade breaks the command line tools, or homebrew, and make me lost a few GB of SSD space. The last upgrade made me lose about 30 minutes of my day to fix a few issues. And I didn't notice much changes, besides the welcome screen picture, and that something changed with itunes, which prevented me from using it. So overall, I tend to think that there are too frequen…

This is one of the biggest reasons I hate doing Mac updates.

I will usually wait almost 6 months to do the upgrade because of that, and then usually over a weekend/holiday so I don't lose work time trying to deal with the troubles that can arise.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#117

Post by gorgoiler »

lostgame wrote: post #112
gorgoiler wrote: post #52

The comment about macOS’s Mail.app struck a chord with me. My upgrade to iOS 13 has changed the mail app on my phone to sporadically open old inbox threads. It happens something like 1 in every N times I launch the app. It’s seemingly done at random and is the strangest thing about this upgrade by far. It’s like Apple are trying to nudge me into being better at responding to emails. Is there a PM at Apple watching an…

My God, me, too! I swear to God, I thought I was just confused or something, 'when did I open this?' - and it had only seemed to happen past the upgrade - this is certainly bizarre, if not just a strange coincidence.

This also raises the question: not only is it suspected that an email application is being monitored for engagement metrics, but is it also the case that growth-enhancing UI features are being a/b tested on us as well?

Well that is of course all silly conjecture and I doubt its anything more than a bug, but if it were true then that’s some real Silicon Valley stuff right there.

Maybe Apple own stock in whichever paper manufacturer is post commonly used for printing emails from meemaw. More emails really pushes the needle on those paper sales! Q4 performance summary cycle bonuses all round!

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#118

Post by least »

robbrown451 wrote: post #93
saagarjha wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Install it on a new volume/virtual machine?

Except that that may not really tell you much. If you have a system that is working, and are worried that Catalina might make it no longer work as it did before, you don't learn a lot by installing on a new volume or virtual machine.

That's a risk inherent with any upgrade to any software. The answer is ultimately that you can't know without trying it on your system. The best thing you could do is to create a cloned backup of your drive or use time machine to restore it if it doesn't work out.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#119

Post by appleiigs »

dkonofalski wrote: post #15

That reads less like a reasonable, well-thought breakdown and more like a whiny diatribe coming from an entitled teenager. If the entire argument boils down to "I don't wanna!", then what's the point? Don't upgrade. Apple isn't forcing anyone to upgrade at all. If you need to run all your old software, don't upgrade. That's not a fault of the new OS. Technology changes. That's a fact of life. Even the example of Aper…

I agree with the "entitled teenager" feel of the article. The author sees a change in Mail's look and a change font.

A software developer sees Apple finally busting up iTunes which was an overloaded monolithic beast. A software developer sees Apple dropping 32-bit to reduce complexity. This is all refactoring which we'd love to do on our own projects.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#120

Post by least »

pier25 wrote: post #95
Bud wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did? 32-bit apps continued to be supported for a full decade after the hardware architecture went 64-bit. During that entire decade, Apple issued steadily-increasing warnings to users that eventually, the 32-bit support would cease. Seems like a smooth transition to me.

> steadily-increasing warnings Did they? I only saw warnings in Mojave.

The warnings were for MacOS developers to update their codebase to support 64 bit and transition to newer APIs. Mojave's warnings were for users.
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