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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

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Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#151
High quality laptops shipping with Linux have been available for some time now. I know of a couple of companies that are providing an option for employees to switch.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#152
Can anybody actually confirm these claims? I'm no fan of the new notary system, but in my experience the behavior described is not how things work. Has there been an update or change in behavior recently?

I've been running a Debian thinkpad for the last meaningful stretch of time, but from what I recall macOS quarantines any files created by the user via an extended attribute `com.apple.quarantine`. Quarantined files are not allowed to be executed by gatekeeper. It's not about a network check, they just can't be executed. If the user removes the quarantine attribute, then gatekeeper will shut up and the files will execute normally. Alternatively, if a file has a signed hash stapled to it i.e. if it has been notarized, then gatekeeper will also allow execution after verifying the signature. This doesn't require a network check either.

Interestingly, the way to bypass the quarantine behavior is to unarchive a folder. Archives themselves include the quarantine attribute, however, files extracted from the archive using a terminal program (a "developer tools" program) don't. And so macOS doesn't care. Also tools like `curl` don't apply the quarantine bit to downloaded files so curling a binary or shell script still works just fine.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#153
post #116
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Debi…

Debian still feels like home. Unless I try a BSD or something without systemd I think this is probably where I'll end up.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Same.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#155
I'm showing 20-200ms longer on first run of the exec. Modified the test script a bit to show that it doesn't happen again if you modify the executable's contents.

    echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && \
    chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh && \
    time /tmp/test.sh && \
    time /tmp/test.sh && \
    echo 'echo Hello2' >> /tmp/test.sh && \
    time /tmp/test.sh

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#156
post #42

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

Fedora "just works" and has the some of the more sane defaults. Only tweaks one typically needs to do is add the RPM Fusion repos and, at some point, disable/tune-down SELinux when it is a bit too paranoid.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#157
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 recall windows 95/98 being pretty slow to boot. I also recall being warned by teachers not to move the mouse while things were booting as that would allegedly slow things down further. These days the only real time I wonder "wtf is this thing doing" is when I'm waiting about 5-10 seconds for my mac to wake up from sleep.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#158
OSX used to be the OS that started really quick, and ran really smoothly. Certainly far better than Windows. Also search was lightning fast. It was a selling point on its own. But recently it has slowed to a crawl. And I have to ask, what business is it to Apple whether I store a script somewhere? I don't even want them to have a checksum. And I don't want to go through the bother of having to change settings for it either. Do they even ask if this is OK? For me this is just yet another reason to steer well clear of Apple products in the near future. Very sad, because I really used to love their stuff.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I recently learned that `xattr -cr path/to/my.app` solves the “this App is damaged would you like to move it to the trash” you get when you copy an app from one Mac to another.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#160
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's surprising that they don't improve the developer experience for their own developers using their own tools, including hardware.

Apple uses the same tools you do. They just might not be using it like you are; you can find a lot of features that clearly have no reason to exist outside of Apple nonetheless shipping with their software.

Is there a list somewhere of Apple's in house dev environments or workflows? I wonder what cool tricks they use internally that could be pretty useful generally.
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