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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)

#211

Post by nicolas_t »

dep_b wrote: post #186
nicolas_t wrote: post #103

I have a new macbook pro 16 inch so I'm forced to use Catalina for it. Up until 10.15.2, it was extremely buggy with applications like the Terminal crashing and then refusing to start again if you force quit them. I had to restart the computer once a day about... With 10.15.3, it's a bit better but I still see the spinning spinning wheel of death way more than I used to, and my computer completely crashed once with t…

Some issues I noticed on my previous 2015 MBP 15" (still on Mojave) also popped up on my brand new 2019 MBP 16", like the UI completely halting doing mundane stuff like opening a new tab or something. I always thought it was software rot after 5 years of use and a fresh install would fix everything.

At the same time, my old trusty Mac Pro on Mojave never does that... Both have the same amount of RAM, both are 8 cores... But the Mac pro is just that much more stable.

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

#212

Post by hhas01 »

artimaeis wrote: post #151
hhas01 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just about everything you said there is wrong. Hey, don’t get me wrong: if you enjoy 10.15’s tedious security-theatre crap then knock yourself out. But you are not qualified to dictate what other users need or want to do; only they are. Like Apple, you are thinking App-centrically. Stop. Apps are not the center of the users’ universe. The users’ own tasks are. Therefore you need to think task-centrically—i.e. What do…

You're right that tasks are the center of the user's universe. But it's generally not tasks that infect a device with malware. It's malicious applications that do that. This is the case on _every_ OS that lets users install applications. So, how can we make sure users doing tasks aren't afflicted by applications that want to sneak in? You're saying to "structure a security model differently" leads me to think maybe u…

See my other post here. There will always be desktop malware; what really matters is that it is contained and has no access to sensitive information.

Locking down the entire UX doesn’t work because day-to-day operations become onerous while the constant spew of “Are you sure?” dialogs teaches users to click OK without thinking.

Instead, put the sensitive stuff into its own “secure desktop”, and police all movements between that and the “standard desktop”. Even stick in an “unsafe desktop” for doing risky stuff, and encourage users to install new/untrusted software there; e.g. let them install and run anything without nagging, but keep apps completely sandboxed. Boundaries should be clearly delimited, e.g. give the high-security desktop its own window chrome and fixed background image that can’t be mimicked on the others.

It’s deliberately coarse-grained, unlike the current mess, and that’s the point. That makes it easy for users to mentally model and match scopes to tasks, and limits nagging to where it really matters: when crossing scope boundaries with data in tow. Simply switching scopes and working within a scope should not nag, however.

Look, I’m not saying it’s guaranteed to work. But at least I’m thinking about it from the point of view of end-users, not vendor developers and lawyers. It’d need prototyped and tested in both lab and real world, and sure as guns users will discover exciting new ways to screw things up; which means learning and adapting to account for that.

But that’s UX. Either do it right, or go get a job flipping burgers where the worst you’ll do is hospitalize a few dozen locals with E. Coli. TWO BILLION now trust large chunks of their lives to their “personal” machines. That is a lot of people to screw up.

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

#214

Post by hhas01 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #199
syntheticcdo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What if I wrote the software? I have a bunch of Applescripts which start with: tell application (path to frontmost application) to ...so they can control whatever is on screen at the time. Since Mojave, any time a new application happens to be in front, I get prompted to give Bash permission to control that app. And then the entire set of approved apps seems to get wiped sometimes when I edit the Applescripts. There'…

“What if I wrote the software?”

Good point. Apple doesn’t care. If they did, they would’ve put some fricking effort into it. Not only is 10.15’s “Automation” security model pathetically thin and annoying (I’ve used those APIs; they’re crap), it doesn’t even protect users as it claims.

Allowed a script running in Terminal.app permission to access your Contacts? Great, now ANY script that runs in Terminal can do whatever it likes to your address book.

Once again, anything that does not fit cleanly into Apple’s naive App-centric model gets neglected, overlooked, or stomped on.

Honestly, I think now they’re just waiting for AppleScript usage to die out on its own, so they can kill off the old and crusty (but very powerful) Apple event IPC system entirely. So it goes.

--

TL;DR: Apple is in the commercial business of selling Apps. So where’s the benefit to them in you making your own?

:(

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

#215

Post by MperorM »

sudhirj wrote: post #42
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).

Mostly OK, but I'm caught pretty badly with the 16" automatic graphics switching bug - whenever I try scrolling on browsers it tries to engage the discrete GPU, which freezes the screen for a few seconds. Had to disable auto switching, and it hasn't been fixed in the latest update. I expect this will be fixed on the next Intel driver update. Other than that, things are fine. Not annoyed by the security, and Apple is…

Happy to hear I'm not the only one experiencing those freezes!

It's embarrassing how long its taking apple to fix this. Apple's audio doesn't exactly treat me well either.

It feels like we're starting to reach a point where linux 'just works' more often than mac.

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

#216

Post by hurricanetc »

filchermcurr wrote: post #192
hurricanetc wrote: post #152

I am loving Catalina. The new Reminders app is a huge upgrade that allowed me to stop relying on shoddy third party apps. Using Apple Watch to authenticate is handy. Sidecar is useful as hell on business trips. iTunes is no longer a bloated unorganized mess of an application. Safari is dramatically better. Photos is better. Having screen time data on my Mac is great. Catalyst has brought a handful of new macOS apps f…

What Catalyst applications are you using? I haven't heard of any beyond Apple News, Swift Playgrounds, and I think maybe Twitter? Definitely interested in trying more.

Carrot Weather, JIRA, and Rosetta Stone. There may be others that are Catalyst that I am not even aware of. But I use those three heavily on a daily basis.

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

#217

Post by nomel »

mikenew wrote: post #32
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…

One thing that drives me nuts is the way you get a security popup when you're working in a terminal. So you're ssh'd into a mac, you try to do something (like xcodebuild or whatever), and then it just sits there doing nothing while it waits for you to put in a password on a window you can't see. It's not exactly new in Catalina, but it's worse. Apple just does not even think about the fact that you might want to do t…

This is like having a firewall and getting upset that it's not passing everything through.

I believe there should absolutely be intentional, physical, steps to allow full remote access. Intentionally setting the terminal for full disk access is no less crazy than intentionally exposing a port through your firewall.

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

#219

Post by foxx-boxx »

jtbayly wrote: post #158
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 installed it on one computer, and no problems (other than the freeze during install that so many people had). However, that’s ignoring this question: > I didn’t even have to debate too much whether I should upgrade or not. The answer is no. The reasoning behind it is quite simple, actually, and it boils down to this: what Catalina takes away from me is more than what it gives me. And that seems to be the case for m…

File system support is changed, newer file system is the way better. Try LibreOffice, it’s free.

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

#220

Post by chungus_khan »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #200
chungus_khan wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leopard also got rid of Classic, which meant I just couldn't use it if I had wanted to at the time. At that point there had been a long-time legacy of backwards compatibility for the Macintosh, and I was in a position where I frequently needed to retrieve data in oddball formats from older Mac software. Tiger for Intel already didn't have it, and from that point forward Apple's attitude to backwards compatibility has…

I mean, Tiger for Intel had a PPC emulator, that’s not “minimum acceptable level”.

It absolutely was. Pretty much nobody would have been able to use Intel Macs at launch without Rosetta, because there was no software.

What I mean is that Apple used to actively support a very long legacy of backwards compatibility, and since the switch to Intel seems to only care about maintaining as much backwards compatibility as is strictly necessary for ordinary users to accept.

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