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Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

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Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#51

Post by cerberusss »

llarsson wrote: post #44
cerberusss wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do you, but the relentless flow of horror stories didn't stop me from upgrading and it was flawless for me. I'd recommend reading these critical pieces and seeing whether any of it actually applies to you.

Very difficult to know if it is going to apply to one's own system. With updates apparently sometimes crashing after being only partially applied, even the most diligent research into application-specific "will I be able to run XYZ after upgrading" might not be able to save you from having to reinstall from scratch. This is the kind of low-quality handling of software updates that I never imagined coming from Apple.…

But your actual experience is that it worked fine, right?

I have the idea that there's currently an atmosphere where it's fashionable to repeat other people's bad experiences. Regardless of one's own experience.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#52

Post by satysin »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #2

The biggest issue I have with Mac upgrades is that for me, it doesn't cache the upgrade. My internet is weak, not as great in speed and bandwidth as US so it downloads 4gb and then fails. Then it starts from 0 sgain. I expected Apple of all companies to cache downloads. Frankly, it caches only the first 500MB. I do not know why. Any workarounds?

I use the installer download script from https://github.com/munki/macadmin-scripts

Has always worked fine.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#53

Post by SkyMarshal »

spoondan wrote: post #13
chalst wrote: post #7

Also worth reading John Gruber's complaints, over and above bugs: > But I don’t know a single expert Mac user who is not seriously annoyed by the heavy-handed security design of Catalina. Not one. Every single expert user I know is annoyed. That is a bad place for MacOS to be. MacOS 10.16 needs a serious course correction to fix this, and if 10.16 goes the opposite way — growing even more heavy-handed in restricting…

There’s an important point to be made here about the gap between theoretical and practical security. Overly elaborate password policies (excessive complexity demands, passwords expiring, no reusing last five passwords) end up causing annoyed users to make bad decisions that compromise password security. Similarly, an excess of popups doesn’t increase security. It annoys users to the point they stop thinking about ind…

>Overly elaborate password policies (excessive complexity demands, passwords expiring, no reusing last five passwords) end up causing annoyed users to make bad decisions that compromise password security.

Similarly, an excess of popups doesn’t increase security. It annoys users to the point they stop thinking about individual security decisions.

It's particularly annoying b/c there's a subset of craftsmen developers who pay close attention to this problem, who realize these cures are worse than the disease, and who reverted years ago to not using these flawed security patterns. Many here on HN, for example.

And then there are Apple engineers who seem to be so far behind the curve that they're just now discovering and implementing patterns that others not only discovered and tested years ago, but discarded years ago.

It's like corporate 9-to-5'ers with no pride of craftsmanship or motivation to stay current with their field made these decisions. Either that or clueless management ordered it, which in any other company besides Apple would be my first guess.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#54

Post by Mindwipe »

syntheticcdo wrote: post #15
chalst wrote: post #7

Also worth reading John Gruber's complaints, over and above bugs: > But I don’t know a single expert Mac user who is not seriously annoyed by the heavy-handed security design of Catalina. Not one. Every single expert user I know is annoyed. That is a bad place for MacOS to be. MacOS 10.16 needs a serious course correction to fix this, and if 10.16 goes the opposite way — growing even more heavy-handed in restricting…

> there should be a single switch for expert users to toggle to effectively say “I trust all of the software on my Mac”. As an "expert" software engineer, I completely trust absolutely zero software running on my computer, in my browser, or basically on any device anywhere. I begrudgingly put up with it all because there is no alternative. Adding friction is good because it will eventually push (force?) developers to…

> Adding friction is good because it will eventually push (force?) developers to use more modern, safer development patterns.

Or more likely it forces the retirement of known good software, and requires you to use unknown, newer tools that have had much less time for security and behaviour auditing my the general community over the years.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#56

Post by jcelerier »

alexis_fr wrote: post #39
mistahenry wrote: post #36

I was already using zsh and somehow the MacOS upgrade path for making zsh the new default shell deleted my shell history. This was a short term blow to productivity since I had only made external notes on about half the difficult command line tasks I’d completed since getting this MacBook in 2017. How do people generally go about backing up this file? Or do most people not

I use several tabs and histories override each other, meaning I could never count on a command being present in the history. I’ve always been told an experienced dev has a folder with txt notes, so that is what I did.

I'm pretty sure that you can configure zsh to write to zsh_history every command to prevent this

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#57

Post by frankchn »

syntheticcdo wrote: post #15
chalst wrote: post #7

Also worth reading John Gruber's complaints, over and above bugs: > But I don’t know a single expert Mac user who is not seriously annoyed by the heavy-handed security design of Catalina. Not one. Every single expert user I know is annoyed. That is a bad place for MacOS to be. MacOS 10.16 needs a serious course correction to fix this, and if 10.16 goes the opposite way — growing even more heavy-handed in restricting…

> there should be a single switch for expert users to toggle to effectively say “I trust all of the software on my Mac”. As an "expert" software engineer, I completely trust absolutely zero software running on my computer, in my browser, or basically on any device anywhere. I begrudgingly put up with it all because there is no alternative. Adding friction is good because it will eventually push (force?) developers to…

Adding friction will more likely resulting in most users blindly giving permissions to anything that asks for it. We’ve seen this before with the endless UAC dialogs in Windows Vista.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#58

Post by fineline6 »

ble52 wrote: post #11

Am I the only person that doesn't have any significant issues with Catalina? I'll admit, some of the permissions-related pop-ups are a bit annoying, but overall it's been a rather stable macOS version for me (developer, working mostly in Xcode and JetBrains IDEs).

I had to Google around to see what the security issues are, I haven't seen a lot of pop ups, maybe I don't use apps that need them. Catalina came on my new MBP 16" and I am loving the whole experience, a serious return to form on the hardware front and a neat new feature in Sidecar, really useful. No problems here. Also primarily JetBrains IDE user.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#59

Post by aganame »

ble52 wrote: post #11

Am I the only person that doesn't have any significant issues with Catalina? I'll admit, some of the permissions-related pop-ups are a bit annoying, but overall it's been a rather stable macOS version for me (developer, working mostly in Xcode and JetBrains IDEs).

Nope. Catalina from the first release on 4 macs, all work fine. Also at work, hundreds of upgrades went through with no problems.

Apple and any hint of problems seem to be clickbait fodder these days. Almost seems like a coordinated pr effort.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#60

Post by jen20 »

fredsted wrote: post #25
ble52 wrote: post #11

Am I the only person that doesn't have any significant issues with Catalina? I'll admit, some of the permissions-related pop-ups are a bit annoying, but overall it's been a rather stable macOS version for me (developer, working mostly in Xcode and JetBrains IDEs).

Not sure what the issue is either, once you add the necessary permissions for your apps, it doesn't ask again. Only complaint is Apple seem to ignore long-standing bugs that have been there for years, like monitors switching around every time you dock your MacBook. They should make a Snow Leopard-like release and clean out their bug tracker.

This isn’t something I’ve encountered and I dock to three different desk setups most days. It’s typically good enough that it remembers the correct layout for multiple of the same type of monitor once configured. Is your monitor sending the serial number correctly?
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