Live data from Hacker News

MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

sigpipe.macromates.com

361–370 of 1001 posts

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#361
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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. Is this actually new in macOS 10.15? I seem to recall this being a thing ever since sandboxing…

It's a new behavior that doing 'find ~' will trigger a MacOS (GUI) permissions warning dialog when `find` tries to access your photos directory, contacts file, etc.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#362

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…

Brew never had this problem because they chose a sane path without corrupting the system directory. It’s a bad design on part of NixOS and one can even say the changes in the macOS were designed to encourage good/sane design.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not true anymore. With 20.04 it supports hybrid graphics just fine. The only issue I had was sharing cuda and OpenGL context since GL ran on the Intel card. This should not be a concern for most people I assume.

Can you run everything on the iGPU and only activate the Nvidia GPU to do the render offloading on single apps? If you can, I should try 20.04 on a laptop

Yes exactly. This way you have all the GPU memory available for accelerated apps. Not sure if it works for all use cases but worked for me.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#364
Apple has an opportunity here - to fix all these issues in the first release of ARM macOS and disable some more functions that "don't really work well" or are "insecure" - all of a sudden ARM Mac will be so much better there will be many blog posts and videos about it smugly proclaiming how Intel could not keep up!

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#365

I am using Ubuntu 20.04 on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen2 and you would be surprised how "normal" it feels as a development machine. Sure there some little annoyances, the touchpad behaves a little worse than on windows, sound is a little worse. But the most important things, Keyboard and Screen are excellent. The system in general does not feel like the horror stories that people keep telling about linux on desktop(note…

I would love to switch back to Linux but Apple's Retina displays are absolutely beautiful and there is no way I could enjoy going back to anything with noticeably lower pixel density on a laptop. I'd like to be told I'm wrong, but as far as I know it's not really possible to recreate a comparable high pixel density experience under Linux on a laptop.

Two years ago, I helped a friend install Ubuntu Linux on a Retina Macbook Pro, and it worked like a charm. If you're looking for a new laptop entirely, there are loads of 4K+ Linux-compatible laptops out there (ThinkPads are probably your best bet).

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any distro in particular you'd recommend?

not him but same experience, from my previous comment: I would recommend: Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS if you want: nice experience out of the box I would recommend: Arch, Gentoo, Debian Net inst, Void if you want a base system and install things you want on top of it

Gentoo needs vastly better documentation to be useful.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#367

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

What is special about /nix that would make it better suited elsewhere? Aesthetic? Clutter? I don't think there are any technical reasons why the root of the filesystem is important. The /nix folder is just another folder with some ACLs/Permissions (however OSX works, idk)

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What should the default nix store path have been then?

In my very limited (I don't use nix) opinion, the default of /nix isn't an issue, but rather:

> and it's not possible to migrate without causing major disruptions for existing NixOS and other Linux users.

Software that can't be re-parented without breaking is destined to create problems for users... eventually.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#369

I am using Ubuntu 20.04 on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen2 and you would be surprised how "normal" it feels as a development machine. Sure there some little annoyances, the touchpad behaves a little worse than on windows, sound is a little worse. But the most important things, Keyboard and Screen are excellent. The system in general does not feel like the horror stories that people keep telling about linux on desktop(note…

I have a ThinkPad with Ubuntu 19. I'm very happy with it; it's nice to have apt, and to be able to eg use minikube with docker driver rather than a VM.

It's also true that the trackpad isn't as good as Windows. (It used to be that Mac had the best, but Catalina managed somehow to screw up the trackpad and make it laggy. Catalina has not been good for me!)

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#370
post #42

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

Windows 10 with WSL if you have a laptop. Debian or similar or ArchLinux if you have a desktop.

>paying for windows to install linux
Post reply on HN