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Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

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Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#311
post #308
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like vintage cars. (My wife and I both drive old cars because it's nearly impossible to find a new car that doesn't spy on you or allow itself to be remotely disabled.)

Really? I drive a base-level 2015 RAV4 and there's no network connection to anything (except, I guess, my iPhone when I play music over Bluetooth). Maybe where I am cars are still behind the times.

I may have given the wrong impression by using the words "vintage" and "old". We're driving 2012 models.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#312

Yesterday a coworker was frustrated with his computers, and said something insightful: "When software gets past a certain age it just gets bad." He was referring primarily to Android and Windows (10) but it applies to every piece of software that suffers from feature creep. If it's a cash cow they have to keep stuffing new things in and periodically repainting it to make it look new again. Around 10.9, MacOS reached…

Windows XP reach a good state.

Windows 7 was the pinnacle.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#313
post #81
post #55

Tangentially related: GitHub has already dropped support for Mojave. The whole site is now broken in Safari 12 because it’s no longer the “current” version of the browser. Well, it is if you run Mojave, as you need to upgrade the entire system to get Safari 13. I can understand not developing new features for Safari 12, but speaking of regressions, why would you go break things that used to work a week ago?

GitHub has already dropped support for Mojave. The whole site is now broken in Safari 12 because it’s no longer the “current” version of the browser. Is that a message Github have put out, or have they accidently rolled out a new feature that has a bug in Safari 12? That seems more likely to me. Github's browser support is usually very good, and it'd be incredibly disappointing if they've broken something intentional…

I did not look into the details. There is a warning at the top of the page, and stuff that has worked before, like previewing markdown in comments, is broken.

Best guess: they removed a polyfill somewhere.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, it doesn’t help that they can’t directly benefit from the general progress the industry is making in virtualization and container areas without rewriting for their own platform. Can you expand on this? Are there limitations on MacOS that prevents them from doing so?

Aside from the software side, the licensing also heavily restricts virtualisation - if Apple would just /permit/ it, I know of several companies (not to mention open source groups) who would /love/ to create some industrial-scale iOS/OSX testing tools - right now they're limited to "duct tape a bunch of iPhones plugged into old-gen mac minis into a rack" and that's an absolute nightmare to manage...

I think this is exactly it. Apple has the keys to the kingdom. If they would loosen that up just a bit, for testing purposes, I bet they’d unlock a huge potential for the ecosystem delivering tools that even they could internally benefit from.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tightening of code signing requirements [see the 'library-validation' flag] even locked out nvidia from providing their own GPU drivers from macOS 10.14 onwards. Library validation has nothing to do with drivers.

Library validation has nothing to do with drivers. Depends on the type of driver. For GPU drivers, it is indeed a problem. I'm going to assume from your comment that you haven't actually written many (any?) device drivers on macOS, so let me explain roughly how GPU drivers on macOS work: - One or more kexts provide an IOFramebuffer implementation, plus an IOAccelerator object which listens for various types of user c…

> I'm going to assume from your comment that you haven't actually written many (any?) device drivers on macOS, so let me explain roughly how GPU drivers on macOS work

I have written a couple toy ones, but nothing major and I'll admit I have no specialized knowledge of graphics drivers.

> Drivers which are implemented entirely as kexts or which are loaded into a "server" user space process are not affected by this, which I guess is what you were talking about.

Yes, I was talking about how anything loaded into the kernel does not have to deal with library validation (though there is still the check that it's signed with a valid KEXT certificate, which I assume Nvidia already has). I generally call the user-space portion of a driver that's loaded into applications to be plugins and keep them outside of the umbrella of "drivers" (which I reserve for the KEXT portion only) but in this case I think we both understand what's going on and are just disagreeing on what the terminology is.

> For similar reasons, classic Core Audio plugins (not to be confused with Core Audio Server Plugins) are deprecated - they used to be loaded directly into the process using Core Audio, which no longer works on apps with library-validation enabled.

These are plugins that implement AudioHardwarePlugIn, right? I think that they're being disabled by default anyways to get people to migrate to AudioServerPlugin, but they were deprecated way before library validation was even a thing because they inherited the sandbox of the application they were loaded into, which was already causing them to fail in odd ways.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#316
post #71

The only iOS 13 bugs I’ve been bitten by are: 1. Safari’s back button now seems to lose the position on the previous page - sometimes. 2. The share sheet has a row of Messages contacts that I didn’t ask for, don’t want, and can’t turn off - and it creates the risk of super-inappropriate sharing, because all my work contacts are eligible for being on this row, seemingly at random.

I can't help getting the feeling that they should make two versions of iOS, one for the average user/teenager, and one for professional use. Really they mostly just need to remove a boat load of features to make it a work phone.

OTOH, I updated a test MBP to Catalina yesterday and after the update completed, I looked at the desktop and thought: 'well hello iOS 13 on MBP.' I really wish the consumer fluff wouldn't keep leaking on my work equipment.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#317
post #251
post #71

The only iOS 13 bugs I’ve been bitten by are: 1. Safari’s back button now seems to lose the position on the previous page - sometimes. 2. The share sheet has a row of Messages contacts that I didn’t ask for, don’t want, and can’t turn off - and it creates the risk of super-inappropriate sharing, because all my work contacts are eligible for being on this row, seemingly at random.

I’ve encountered so many iOS bugs (both in 13 and previous versions) I’ve strongly considered making a website documenting them all. I honestly think Apple CarPlay is the buggiest thing I’ve ever used.

CarPlay on my iPhone 11 Pro has no hysteresis around day/night mode. It will literally go back and forth as frequently as every two seconds - extremely distracting at the periphery of my vision.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#318

My wife updated her macbook to Catalina the other day and suddenly has low disk space errors popping up all the time. She stores no big files and does nothing on the laptop but school work. Turns out it created a new encrypted disk partition containing all of her personal data, and somehow it kept adding disk snapshots multiple times per day. After some research, it seems that this is a known problem! I had to disabl…

I had that too, and 'disk write' errors (which definitely are not). Ended up repartitioning and reformatting, and they went away (though the install and upgrade process even beyond all that still seemed hugely buggy - at one time the fresh install said install couldn't complete. And then it did. With no intervention).

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#319
post #296
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a stash of replacement MBPs You make it sound like they're t-shirts or something haha

More like vintage cars. (My wife and I both drive old cars because it's nearly impossible to find a new car that doesn't spy on you or allow itself to be remotely disabled.)

I was more referring to how the comment made it sound so easy to just stock up on a bunch of new Macbooks. In other words, it's not something anyone could do, especially from a financial standpoint.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#320
post #319
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like vintage cars. (My wife and I both drive old cars because it's nearly impossible to find a new car that doesn't spy on you or allow itself to be remotely disabled.)

I was more referring to how the comment made it sound so easy to just stock up on a bunch of new Macbooks. In other words, it's not something anyone could do, especially from a financial standpoint.

Ah. Well, I consider them an investment. It's either buy old computers now or new computers later (or do without, but that's not really a viable option in today's world).
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