MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design? • Hacker News Board

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#91

Post by robotresearcher » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #46

ronyfadel wrote: post #35

I hope Apple currently has a team focused on macOS perf. I worked on the team in charge of improving iOS (13) perf at Apple and IIRC there was no dedicated macOS “task force” like the one on iOS. Luckily some iOS changes permeated into macOS thanks to some shared codebases.

> IIRC there was no dedicated macOS “task force” like the one on iOS It's not surprising. Macs are less than 10% of Apple's revenue. https://www.macrumors.com/2020/04/30/apple-2q-2020-earnings/

But at Apple scale: 9% of $58 billion = $5.2 billion Mac revenue last quarter.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#92

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

speedgoose wrote: post #59

inimino wrote: post #42

It looks like my time with MacOS is rapidly coming to an end. Any Linux distro recommendations these days?

Windows 10 with WSL if you have a laptop. Debian or similar or ArchLinux if you have a desktop.

Depends on the laptop. I've had good experiences with thinkpads and business class Dells on Linux (and BSDs, for that matter).

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#93

Post by speedgoose » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

inimino wrote: post #81

speedgoose wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 10 with WSL if you have a laptop. Debian or similar or ArchLinux if you have a desktop.

For reasons of personal prejudice, I'll never install any Windows version on any hardware I own. Debian was always my first choice back in the desktop linux days, and still is for servers, but I haven't looked at the landscape recently. It seems to have become more consolidated, which is not surprising but still mildly disappointing. Edit: and WSL is not Linux

I understand but for laptops it's pretty bad these days if you want all features your laptop is providing, and a good energy management.

On mobile it's much better with Android, but Android isn't adapted to laptops. I haven't tried ChromeOS but it's pretty restricted from what I understood. WSL2 on Windows is Linux and it works great for me but I understand if you don't want windows in your life.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#94

Post by m463 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

inimino wrote: post #42

It looks like my time with MacOS is rapidly coming to an end. Any Linux distro recommendations these days?

After you've gotten used to Linux, you might want to try Arch.

It is lightweight, since you choose everything that is installed, sort of opt-in.

It has all the latest software.

It has "rolling releases" which means there is never a giant lost-weekend distribution upgrade.

It has the AUR (arch user repository) for just about any software ever.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#95

Post by WrtCdEvrydy » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

tragomaskhalos wrote: post #60

kar1181 wrote: post #27

I completely understand why things are going the way they are as our computing environment has become ever more hostile. But I am very nostalgic for the time where I would power up a Vic-20 and within seconds be able to get to work. Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.

That computers are just slower to interact with now is such a truism that we hardly remark upon it any more. It seems utterly insane that in the early 90's I could just run Windows 3.1 on a bit of kit that in all likelihood wouldn't even power a toaster today, and the experience was, well, frictionless. I don't recall ever thinking "wtf is this thing doing ?", whereas today, by contrast, if I have the audacity to be…

I call this 'Outsourcing the cost of development to the user'...

Getting knowledgeable people costs money so we build more abstractions that lower the cost of development and pass the costs of development from the company to the user in the form of requiring more hardware to do the same thing.

How come I need 16Gb of RAM these days when 8Gb did it yesterday? How come my phone needs 4Gb of RAM while my 2012 tablet had 1Gb? Sure the hardware is cheaper but we're still not using the hardware to it's fullest.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#96

Post by the_af » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

kick wrote: post #38

Nextgrid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am so glad I decided years ago to leave closed operating systems behind. The problem is, there's nothing else out there. Everything is going to shit in one way or another. Windows is now a disaster, Linux was always a disaster in terms of user experience and isn't improving. Mac OS was the last bastion of somewhat good, thoughtful design, user experience and attention to detail and now they've gone to shit too.

Linux was always a disaster in terms of user experience and isn't improving. Curious: what have you tried? People who use "Linux" as a catch-all in terms of UX usually have only tried a single distribution with a single desktop environment.

Moreover, I've been running Linux for decades now, both in my personal laptop and at work, and Ubuntu has been (mostly) frictionless for me. I'm not an average user, of course, but for most users a friendly distro would work just as well as Windows (browsing the internet, using whatsapp web, watching movies). In some cases I've had a better user experience with Ubuntu than with Windows or OS X, namely seamlessly installing a wireless HP laser printer.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#97

Post by halotrope » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

I am using Ubuntu 20.04 on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen2 and you would be surprised how "normal" it feels as a development machine. Sure there some little annoyances, the touchpad behaves a little worse than on windows, sound is a little worse. But the most important things, Keyboard and Screen are excellent. The system in general does not feel like the horror stories that people keep telling about linux on desktop(notebook). Now that WSL2 is getting Cuda even windows looks workable. Their new terminal app is amazing. After a decade of Mac notebooks it was quite liberating and I would not switch back even if the flaws in macOS would be fixed. It is for sure the nicest of the big 3 operating systems but for development work Ubuntu is hard to beat for me. YMMV but it won't hurt to look around you what else is there.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#98

Post by oefrha » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #23

nromiun wrote: post #2

> This is not just for files downloaded from the internet, nor is it only when you launch them via Finder, this is everything. So even if you write a one line shell script and run it in a terminal, you will get a delay! > Apple’s most recent OS where it appears that low-level system API such as exec and getxattr now do synchronous network activity before returning to the caller. Can anyone confirm this? Because hones…

There are two new Security/Privacy Settings that I just noticed last night. "Full Disk Access" to allow a program to access any place on your computer without a warning. A few programs requested this, so it looks like it's been around for a while. The other one is "Developer Tools" and it looks pretty new. The only application requesting it is "Terminal". This "allows app to run software locally that do not meet the…

I don't see it on macOS 10.15.4 (19E287). The full list of categories on my Privacy tab:

  - Location Services
  - Contacts
  - Calendars
  - Reminders
  - Photos
  - Camera
  - Microphone
  - Speech Recognition
  - Accessibility
  - Input Monitoring
  - Full Disk Access
  - Files and Folders
  - Screen Recording
  - Automation
  - Advertising
  - Analytics & Improvements

Granted I don't typically use Terminal.app (iTerm 2 user), so I launched terminal and did some privileged stuff. Had to grant Full Disk Access to, say, `ls ~/Library/Mail`, but "Developer Tools" never popped up.

Are you running a beta build or something?

---

Update: Okay, I checked on my other machine and that one does have it (Terminal is listed but disabled by default). What in the actual fuck?!?

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#99

Post by andai » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

tragomaskhalos wrote: post #60

kar1181 wrote: post #27

I completely understand why things are going the way they are as our computing environment has become ever more hostile. But I am very nostalgic for the time where I would power up a Vic-20 and within seconds be able to get to work. Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.

That computers are just slower to interact with now is such a truism that we hardly remark upon it any more. It seems utterly insane that in the early 90's I could just run Windows 3.1 on a bit of kit that in all likelihood wouldn't even power a toaster today, and the experience was, well, frictionless. I don't recall ever thinking "wtf is this thing doing ?", whereas today, by contrast, if I have the audacity to be…

Are you on a hard disk drive? I have bestowed upon myself the unique misfortune of running Windows 10 on a spinny disk.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#100

Post by egorfine » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

zimpenfish wrote: post #68

Their "see!" shell script example is a bit rubbish because I get 0.012s, 0.005s on this Mac laptop whilst getting 0.022s, 0.023s on Linux box 1 and 0.006s, 0.006s on Linux box 2. Changing the filename to test2.sh on the Mac (which should trigger the delay, right?) gets 0.006s, 0.006s. I don't think the shell scripts are doing what they claim (and wouldn't the second run be faster anyway because of caching?)

If they are caching based on inode, this will not invalidate the cache. Do cp test.sh test2.sh and try again.