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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

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Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#141

> a degraded user experience, as the first time a user runs a new executable, Apple delays execution while waiting for a reply from their server. The way to avoid this behavior is to staple the notarization ticket to your bundle (or dmg/pkg), i.e. "/usr/bin/stapler staple ." Otherwise, Gatekeeper will fetch the ticket and staple it for the user on the first run. (I'm the author of xcnotary [1], a tool to make notariz…

> The way to avoid this behavior is to staple the notarization ticket to your bundle (or dmg/pkg) Maybe in some cases, but the article says "even if you write a one line shell script and run it in a terminal, you will get a delay!" Shell scripts don't come in bundles. I don't think this kind of stapling is possible for them? I don't think it'd be reasonable to expect users to do this anyway.

The Gatekeeper behavior is specific to running things from Finder (not Terminal), and only if you downloaded it via a browser that sets the com.apple.quarantine xattr.

Two posts from Apple dev support (Cmd+F "eskimo") describe this in more detail.

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/127709

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/127694

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#142

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.

Doesn't arch come with python & gcc out of the box?

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#143
post #86

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.

macOS is actually kind of mediocre at being a BSD these days ;)

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#144
post #131

I've been using linux distros (~5 years of Ubuntu and ~3 years of Arch) before switching to macOS somewhere around 2013-2014. And now years later I'm thinking about moving back. But every time I'm think about this I start with digging about current Linux situation and every time I realise than it is still a horrible system for anything outside of work, especially if you can't really do without a decent UI\UX. Apple's…

I use my work machine for work and my personal equipment for everything else. My iPhone is more standalone then they used to be. I don't see any reason why I'd ever connect my personal phone to my work computer. So I don't see many downsides to making the switch.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#145
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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))

Terminal actually gives an error if you poke into the top level library folder with full disk access disabled, no prompt to change without me looking on stack overflow for the solution.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#146
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…

How could this possibly not be absolutely awful on projects that run hundreds of executables during their execution (e.g. some shell wrappers like oh-my-zsh call out to a large amount of different scripts every time they run).

It looks like it is done once by executable lifetime. Changing the content doesn't cause it to rerun.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#147

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.

I feel like cp might do an APFS CoW and this might still cause problems…

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My 256MB RAM, 900Mhz Duron machine (single core, naturally) in ~2002 (IIRC?) could do just about everything my modern one can. We even had video chat! It was just much lower res. The limiting factor in online stuff was, by far, connection speed, not the power of my hardware. That was about the point where the hardware was fast enough and had enough memory that I could multitask in a modern way without hitting problems like popping/stuttering audio or bad swap issues. Aside from legitimate increases in memory use for higher-res media, most everything since then, from my perspective, has been pure bloat. Why does 16x that memory and two cores at double the clock feel insufficient for extremely similar workloads and software feature-sets? Fucking bloat is why. Largely, but far from solely, web-tech infesting everything.

Before that, my 64MB RAM 100mhz Pentium could usually have a couple things open before it'd hit swap too badly. I'm talking like Word and a web browser, not calc and notepad. None of the equivalent programs to those can even open all on their own in a footprint smaller than 64MB these days, let alone with other programs and the OS in the same space. Hell, how many operating systems fit in that with a GUI as capable and usable as, say, Win98se (let alone something really incredible on the performance front, like BeOS)?

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#149
post #46

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/

It's not surprising. Macs are less than 10% of Apple's revenue.

Without Macs for developers and other content creators that other 90% doesn’t exist.

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