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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

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Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Silly user. The computer exists to update itself. Whatever trivial task you want to do is a secondary concern.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#372
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 switched to a linux desktop full time last week because of this exact problem. VPN w/ windows would flake out on me all the time, and I got sooo tired of just...waiting. Remember when windows search worked? Like, you could press the windows key, type what you were looking for and find it? Quickly? Being able to turn the computer on, type in my password and have it be just..ready is so incredibly refreshing. Having…

Windows search turning into bing search is one of the most frustrating little things. You used to be able to instantly pull up files by name but now it just dumps you random garbage from the internet.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#373
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am so glad I decided years ago to leave closed operating systems behind. The problem is, there's nothing else out there. Everything is going to shit in one way or another. Windows is now a disaster, Linux was always a disaster in terms of user experience and isn't improving. Mac OS was the last bastion of somewhat good, thoughtful design, user experience and attention to detail and now they've gone to shit too.

I think the fact is there simply isn't a solution that works for both the "layperson" and highly technical people who want to do development. Laypeople cannot be trusted to admin their machines, but experts need access to those bits. Leaving a backdoor to real admin access for the experts just means laypeople will abuse those backdoors and mess up their machines again, with dire consequences for the entire planet. Yo…

> Laypeople cannot be trusted to admin their machines

Yeah, but they're the ones who paid for their machines. So... you're saying they're not allowed to use them how they wish?

> Leaving a backdoor to real admin access for the experts just means laypeople will abuse those backdoors and mess up their machines again

Remembering the last 20 years of computer history, most of the critical fail wasn't caused by "laypeople abusing backdoors" but horrible security holes in popular, widely used software packages: Outlook, Flash, Acrobat Reader, Internet Explorer. Apple/Microsoft are not locking down their OSs to protect users from themselves, but rather from other developers. We, software engineers, seem to have completely failed our users as a profession.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#374
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux has been a delight to use for me. Things were rough 10-15 years ago, but it's pretty amazing now.

Any distro in particular you'd recommend?

IMO Fedora or Ubuntu. I've used Fedora now for the last few years on Thinkpads (currently Carbon X1 6th gen) and it has been pretty much "just works"

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#375

Okay, I've tried this test on my MacBook Air 2020 several times, first by saving the "echo Hello" shell script in an editor and then, because I wasn't getting the results the author experienced, trying again exactly as he wrote it. Essentially the same result: airyote% echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh airyote% chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh airyote% time /tmp/test.sh && time /tmp/test.sh Hello /tmp/test.sh 0.00s…

10 to one says this is because you've run something calling /bin/sh before.

if he switched the /bin/sh out to /bin/zsh or /bin/bash which ever his default shell was, he wouldn't have seen the first delay.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#376

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

It only seems that way now because some platforms have begun locking down their root directories. Nix, by design, doesn't conform to the FHS way of organizing directories so it made perfect sense to use /nix when the decision was originally made.

> Nix, by design, doesn't conform to the FHS way of organizing directories so it made perfect sense to use /nix when the decision was originally made.

Refusing to conform to the FHS doesn't mean their decision made sense; refusing to conform to the FHS means they made a bad decision in the past and everything progressed from there.

It doesn't 'seem that way now because some platforms have begun locking down their root directories'; it seems that way because creating arbitrary directories in / is a terrible idea, and has been at least since I started using UNIX/Linux systems in the 90's.

Fact is, they made a bad design choice, and now it's come back to bite them (and their users) in the ass.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#377
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it on macOS 10.15.4 (19E287). The full list of categories on my Privacy tab: - Location Services - Contacts - Calendars - Reminders - Photos - Camera - Microphone - Speech Recognition - Accessibility - Input Monitoring - Full Disk Access - Files and Folders - Screen Recording - Automation - Advertising - Analytics & Improvements Granted I don't typically use Terminal.app (iTerm 2 user), so I launched term…

I don't see it on my machine. Do you happen to have System Integrity Protection disabled?

No, SIP is fully enabled on both the machine with the Developer Tools category and the one without.

Interestingly, I rebooted the machine without after some benchmarking and experimentation with syspolicyd (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23274903), and after the reboot the category has mysteriously surfaced... Not sure what triggered it. Launching Xcode? Xcode and CLT were both installed on the machine, but I'm not sure when I last launched Xcode on this machine. Another possible difference I can think of: the machine without was an in-place upgrade, while the other one IIRC was a clean install of 10.15.

In the worst case scenario, you can probably insert into the TCC database (just a SQLite3 database, located at ~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db) directly:

  INSERT INTO access VALUES('kTCCServiceDeveloperTool','com.apple.Terminal',0,1,1,NULL,NULL,NULL,'UNUSED',NULL,0,1590165238);
  INSERT INTO access VALUES('kTCCServiceDeveloperTool','com.googlecode.iterm2',0,1,1,NULL,NULL,NULL,'UNUSED',NULL,0,1590168367);
(Should be pretty self-explanatory. The first entry is for Terminal.app, the second entry is for iTerm 2.)

Back up, obviously. I'm not on the hook for any data loss or system bricking.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#378

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

If you truly want to be "cross-platform" with long-term future proofing in mind, `/nix` is (edit: was) probably the most stable choice.

I get it, people are sensitive about the root directory. "But it's where ALL the stuff lives!". So yeah, try not to ever run 'rm -rf /' (even though this is blocked in most cases now).

But why make it completely inaccessible for creating files/directories in? So much hand-holding for people to make it impossible for a user to ever make a mistake just locks down the ecosystem more, forcing developers to implement proprietary hacks that don't scale properly.

`/var/opt/nix` and `/opt/nix` are options, sure. But you cannot guarantee that those directories will exist on every platform. And if you have to create them, why is this better than `/nix`?

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#379

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?

The obvious option would be /opt/nix, /usr/local/nix, or something to that effect. /nix is a clearly obviously bad choice, and now we're starting to see why.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#380

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…

Longtime Linux user (Manjaro) and I never thought I'd see the day when I could pitch it as noticeably superior to MacOS, considering Apple's once-legendary attention to user interfaces. It seems like those days are behind us, now.

Linux as an actually better experience, without gigantic embarrassing flubs like this, is looking better by the day.

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