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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

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Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#161
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…

> Windows 10 box to go sleep I know I am in for an infuriating waste of minutes' worth of disk thrashing before the bloody thing even deigns to reacknowledge my existence.

Yeah, what the heck is this? I use a win10 box solely for gaming, and every single time I wake from sleep, Antimalware Executable keeps my machine from doing anything for several minutes. It's infuriating.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#162
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .

Yes, that is what drives me crazy whenever people say Mac is only 9% of revenue and they dont care about it.

If the Mac revenue was separated out on its own, it would be about Fortune 120, that is higher than Kraft Heinz. With plenty more space for growth. Apple only has 100M Active Mac users. There are 1.4B Windows PC.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#163

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?

> Yup. You've just described a disaster. Hardly. The existence of a distro I don't like doesn't degrade my experience using a distro I do like. You may as well be upset at an ice cream shop for having dozens of flavors when you only like strawberry. Choose the one you like and ignore the ones you don't. It's not rocket science, even children can figure that out.

> The existence of a distro I don't like doesn't degrade my experience using a distro I do like.

The problem under discussion here is not that of using a distro you like, but finding a distro that you like.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#165

I've been forced to update to this pile of shit because latest iOS requires latest Xcode which in turn requires Catalina. It's a nightmare. First off the new apps (music, podcasts, etc) are terrible. They killed off iTunes but replaced it with much worse. These apps don't behave like standard macOS apps, the UI is full of inconsistencies and is just so empty. This website has nice examples of the failures of modern M…

I've had a similarly painful experience upgrading last week. Though it doesn't seem quite so bad as the posters above, and after making a few fixes most everything is back to normal.

My one remaining serious annoyance is that my external monitor color settings are screwed up and there appears to be no fix. Reds are purple and everything is just a little washed out, which is a shame for a 4k monitor that was beautiful with Mojave.

Strangely, right before the computer restarts, or if booted in safe mode the color starts to look perfect again, but I can't seem to replicate that in normal operation.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#166
post #23
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…

Full Disk Access was added in 10.14 (2018), so it's relatively new.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#167
post #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…

> OSX used to be the OS that started really quick, and ran really smoothly.

It was quite slow compared to OS 9, but even most Linux installs have way better performance on equivalent hardware. Windows really is dog slow by comparison.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#168

I experienced this one day while tethering in the train. I was coding and running `go build` multiple times. I could not for the life of me understand why go build would take upwards to 30 seconds to run and sometimes 100ms. I finally realized it was related to my internet connection being extremely spotty. I went online and searched if anybody had the same experience with `go build` but couldn't find anything. I fin…

Does it work at all when unconnected?

I don't remember if it did or not, but I'm fairly certain it did. (otherwise I'd probably remember it, I think...)

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#169
post #23
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'm using the Kitty terminal, and observed the script launch delay described in the blog post. After adding Kitty to "Developer Tools", the delay disappeared. Thanks!

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#170
post #28
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The set of possible operating systems to consider does not contain two items.

I find Linux to be a usability nightmare. Weird cut and paste behavior, difficult to resize windows, terrible trackpad support. macOS and Windows will have to get a lot worse before I switch.

how many DE did you try? you have a variety of choices now, I would recommend trying a popular one such as Ubuntu / Elementary OS / Linux Mint

You should get a very nice experience out of the box with these, which can be reproduced quite easily with less "bloated" distributions such as Arch or Gentoo if you prefer to install things yourself

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