MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design? • Hacker News Board

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#191

Post by jcadam » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

_fullpint wrote: post #174

jcadam wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from MacOS to Linux years ago. For a developer workstation these days I'd probably either go with Ubuntu LTS or Fedora (my personal choice). Either runs fine on my XPS 13. Note: I really wanted to like WSL, but it just didn't work for me.

Have you looked into WSL2? I just recently switched from Mac OS to windows and it really hasn’t been a bad experience. I would go full Linux but the drivers for the GPU on my laptop seem to be a bit of a mess currently.

GPU switching (NVIDIA Optimus and the like) seems to be a major headache to get working on Linux. My current laptop (XPS 13) only has an integrated GPU, so I ssh into a desktop for running CUDA stuff.

But no, haven't tried WSL2, I'm comfortable with my Linux setup so not to keen on messing with it at the moment :)

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#192

Post by PKop » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

konart wrote: 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…

Switched from macOS this year having used it for about 8 years to first PoP_OS and now Manjaro. Both were great (GNOME environments) and very productive for both development and general use. I really like the streamlined, "get out of your way" UI.

I would say go for it, I'm glad to not be dealing with any of this nonsense, while paying a premium for it.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#193

Post by arvinsim » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

qppo wrote: post #79

pier25 wrote: 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/

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

There isn't much incentive to improve because they know that people will buy their hardware regardless.

Not to mention people defend and market their products for free.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#194

Post by halotrope » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

konart wrote: 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…

Give windows 10 and WSL2 a try. With the new terminal and editor it is really a neat setup. macOS is hard to beat in terms of smoothness and looks but unfortunately it gets more and more clunky for working.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#195

Post by gfxgirl » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

lol768 wrote: post #9

marcinzm wrote: post #3

If Microsoft wasn't doing ever worse privacy things with Windows I'd seriously look into switching away from Mac OS given the ever growing issues it's been having with every release.

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

It does depending on what software you want to run.

There is no actually good alternative to Photoshop. gIMP is not remotely in the same league. Pixelmator and Affinity Photo are brought up but they're also like nano vs emacs. Photoshop doesn't run on Linux AFAIK. I'm sure for a graphic designer the same is true for Illustrator. The cheaper alternative exist and you can maybe get by but there's missing so many features.

If you're into games there is really only Windows. Same for VR.

I'm sure there are other categories.

I did serious dev on Linux and that dev didn't require any games or apps so it was great and I loved it. It ran my editor of choice and otherwise I only needed a browser and a terminal. But as soon as I step out of that small subset it's pretty much MacOS or Windows only, at least for the things I want to do with my computer.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#196

Post by zozbot234 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

m463 wrote: post #73

kick wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People who have used ubuntu might want to just once try arch linux. I had an ubuntu machine that took a while to boot even with an SSD. Later I installed arch linux on the same machine and boom! it would be to the desktop in seconds. It was night and day.

Debian is just as quick, and does not have the problematic "rolling" updates of Arch. (It does have the "testing" and "unstable" channels which are roughly comparable, but the Debian folks won't tell you to use them in production.)

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#197

Post by 2ion » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #19

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…

Our help desk is wise enough to keep existing mac users on the oldest supported macOS version; but inevitably at some point in the future they'll have to roll out the latest version. This will be the week when I will exchange my macbook for a Windows 10 ThinkPad. A lot of our dev teams have moved to this setup alreay using WSL or a VM for Linux if really needed and it has been really smooth (our helpdesk staying on top of the Active Directory and Windows Update management game also).

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#198

Post by enriquto » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

> 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.

Wow, this is extremely infuriating! I just ran the "hello world" test script with the network connection disabled and it took 5 seconds to run!

     $ echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh
     $ time /tmp/test.sh && time /tmp/test.sh
     Hello
     /tmp/test.sh  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 4.991 total
     Hello
     /tmp/test.sh  0.00s user 0.00s system 77% cpu 0.005 total

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#199

Post by ccmcarey » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

unown wrote: post #139

As someone living in China, this is my result when I connected to my VPN (this is my normal life, thus I can visit sites like HN): > Hello > /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 5.746 total > Hello > /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 79% cpu 0.006 total And even if I didn't connect to my VPN: > Hello > /tmp/test2.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 1.936 total > Hello > /tmp/test2.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 7…

It doesn't work when there's no network connection, wonder if it would be possible to filter out and automatically block notarization traffic, or if it's all encrypted with cert pinning to prevent this type of MITM+filter.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#200

Post by jfkebwjsbx » Fri, May 22, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #177

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…

IIRC the big thing that changed with 10.15 for CLI applications is that BSD-userland processes (i.e. ones that don't go through all the macOS Frameworks, but just call libc syscall wrappers like fopen(2)) now also deal with sandboxing, since the BSD syscall ABI is now reimplemented in terms of macOS security capabilities. Certain BSD-syscall-ABI operations like fopen(2) and readdir(2) are now not-so-fast by default,…

Why would sandboxing be slower?

They are definitely doing something way too slow.