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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

sigpipe.macromates.com

331–340 of 1001 posts

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#332

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 share almost all of these issues. What drives me super nuts is the multi-display support which NEVER "just works".

I have to disconnect and reconnect USB-C 3 times, turn off the second monitor, switch inputs, restart the €3000 machines twice or whatever. So annoying, how does this pass QA at all?

Also, don't setup and use multiple users at the same time. That's really messy as well.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#333
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried 19.10 or 20.04? Before that I had a lot of issues with my Dell XPS 9560 because of optimus, but it got a lot better in those versions. YMMV but it actually worked out of the box with nary a hint of manual configuration when I installed 20.04 recently. Edit: should note, when I say work I mean you can switch between GPUs/launch an app on the dedicated GPU with ease.

I've tried 19.10 and Arch Linux and the only option still was to statically choose only one GPU and reboot. How does the offloading work now? I haven't heard anything about it

19.10 added the "NVIDIA On-Demand" profile in Nvidia Settings. It needs the driver version 435 or newer.

It works okay, but you have to launch processes with a specific set of env variables to use the Nvidia card.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#334

Up until the release of Catalina, I've always upgraded to the latest version of macOS within a month or two. But some of the changes this time is really stopping me from upgrading. As of Catalina, there's no sane way to install the Nix package manager without losing functionality because macOS now disallows creating new files in the root directory[1]. Nix stores its packages in the /nix directory and it's not possibl…

IMHO the original choice of the path seems incredibly ill-advised and the main burden lies with the original developers.

sometimes old errors and mistakes come back and bite

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#335
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…

Is HN blocked in China?

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#336
post #312
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, when I’m developing in a compiled language with the workflow edit code -> compile -> run (with forced stapling), changing it to edit code -> compile -> staple -> run doesn’t make it any less slow...

An update: flat out denying network access to syspolicyd using Little Snitch could cut down on the delay. (Yes, syspolicyd does send a network request to apple-cloudkit.com for every single new executable. Denying its access to apple-cloudkit.com only isn't sufficient either since it falls back to IP address directly.) Note that this might not be a great idea, and it still has nonzero cost — a network request has to…

I can repro this locally as well. Interesting if it's inconsistent with Apple docs and when Gatekeeper should be firing, as running stuff locally without distributing/downloading is somewhat out of scope for notarization.

Reached out about this to Apple dev support, hope to get more insight.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#338

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.

What changes permeated into macOS? What did your team do to improve iOS perf?

They set "fast = true" as a global constant variable.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#339
I'm getting 10-15 minute beach ball of death freezes on a month old MBP 16". That recur until I hard reboot. I can't open the 'force quit applications' window during this nor the apple menu. Can't reboot or shutdown from the cli or otherwise. Some apps lose network connections, some don't. The entire system becomes unusable. It requires a hard reboot. I think it's related to Intellij IDEA and similar IDEs somehow, but profiling those shows the slowdown is not in their apps but in the OS. It won't start with anything plugged into the USB ports, not even just power. Been trying various things but if it doesn't go away, I will return this when the Apple store here reopens. The only good thing about this coronavirus is that I've had more than 14 days to test this and find out what a clusterfuck this OS is even on a $4400 brand new mbpro. Do they even test anything anymore?

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#340
post #42

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

I switched almost 2 years ago after 15 years on Macs.

Fedora 32 Workstation is pretty good if you want to see the best of what Linux can offer. It may not be the lightest and fastest distribution but it is easy to install and everything works. You'll get to experience Gnome which is the most original Linux desktop environment and the best one in terms of user experience in my opinion.

If you want something more traditional with the start menu or dock or desktop icons, perhaps something like KDE Neon is better place to start. It might feel more familiar. Will be lighter/faster too.

Put each of them on a USB and run them live on your machine for few minutes each and see which one makes more sense to you.

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