MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design? • Hacker News Board

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#111

Post by blyry » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:33 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 switched to a linux desktop full time last week because of this exact problem. VPN w/ windows would flake out on me all the time, and I got sooo tired of just...waiting. Remember when windows search worked? Like, you could press the windows key, type what you were looking for and find it? Quickly?

Being able to turn the computer on, type in my password and have it be just..ready is so incredibly refreshing. Having a terminal with 0 latency, where copy/paste is sane? Worth a zillion dollars to me right now.

Currently playing with opensuse tumbleweed, i'll probably get frustrated by something and move to arch, so I can fix that something and also be frustrated by a hundred other things.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#112

Post by BruceEel » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:33 PM UTC

kick wrote: post #86

dmitriid wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Yup. You've just described a disaster. How many permutations of x must a user try before finding a good UX?

Mac is a BSD. OpenBSD exists. FreeBSD exists. NetBSD exists. Because there are at least four BSDs, Mac therefore isn't good. Do you see how ridiculous applying that logic to any operating system is? Linux isn't a disaster. It's a kernel. There are Linux distributions with great user interfaces and great UX, developed by people who are great at it. There are also distributions that aren't.

> There are Linux distributions with great user interfaces and great UX

Could you name some? No sarcasm, actually interested!

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#113

Post by e40 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

I really hope the mess that is Catalina is fixed in the next round, or I might be on Mojave until I can switch to another OS. I've been on macOS for a long time, and I really like it. I'm productive on it. But Catalina... no, I won't touch that.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#114

Post by mbreese » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

oefrha wrote: post #98

mbreese wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 term…

Maybe if you ran Terminal.app once it would work?

(I'm also on 10.15.4 (19E287))

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#115

Post by saagarjha » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

There was a thread on the almost-forgotten Cocoa-dev list about this: https://lists.apple.com/archives/cocoa-dev/2020/Apr/msg00008...

Catalina has a huge number of things that synchronously block application launch, and if any of them fail you get nothing but a hung app. A friend and I have a running discussion of the many ways where an application would just hang and we’d send samples and spindumps, to each other trying to figure out the right daemon or agent to kill to get the process to start responding again. It’s madness.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#116

Post by lgl » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:34 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

Also my first choice for servers and have used it several times on desktop so Debian would also be my recommendation even for a desktop these days.

Plus, if you're already familiar with how Debian works it should be a no brainer. None of that Ubuntu or other Debian-derived distros with extra sugar and bloat and that many times differ from actual Debian in just the right way to keep you scratching your head.

Even Debian "stable" is pretty good for desktop these days which in the past was always notorious for having super outdated packages but has greatly improved in that regard. Obviously, "sid" is still also a good pick for a desktop if you really need to always run the latest of mostly everything.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#117

Post by armatav » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #72

massysett wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that’s what you really want, grab a used ThinkPad and put Arch Linux on it. It will boot in a few seconds and is much more powerful than a Vic-20.

Still doesn't give you a programming environment, unless you want to do bash.

How does that even make sense? It’s an OS, go grab a Desktop Environment and download nvim, VSCode or whatever.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#118

Post by philwelch » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

api wrote: post #67

All of these complaints are about security features. Yes these features could be better implemented, but I'm happy they're there. It's very important to be able to opt out of them, but I like that they're the default. Notarization needs a cleanup pass and the rest of it seems like it needs an optimization pass. P.S. The rationale for notarization is to not distribute and thus advertise the filters and detection mecha…

The OS phoning home for every executable I want to run on my machine is a “security feature” the same way a key logger is.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#119

Post by saagarjha » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

jaimehrubiks wrote: post #36

In our company many of us have similar issues. I have always loved OSX but this time it is driving me crazy. I though the issue was some sort of company antivirus/firewall, or it could even be a combination of that and this issue (maybe my vpn + path to company firewall is what magnifies the issue in this post). The thing is that some commands take 1 second, some others take 2 minutes or even more. Actually, some com…

Try sampling the process as it starts; I doubt your issue is the one shown here.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#120

Post by karatestomp » Fri, May 22, 2020, 4:35 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 remember being able to watch network traffic and if you (or some other actual person on you network) weren't doing anything nothing would be there. Yes even if you had a few webpages open but weren't clicking anything. Now your machine's "idle" and you capture on your network interface and it scrolls at hyperspeed.