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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

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Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#411

Post by marssaxman »

halotrope wrote: post #97

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 never intended to switch away from Mac OS; it just sort of... happened. As Mac OS has grown more paternalistic over the years without adding any notable capabilities that I care about, it's felt steadily easier to just go use Linux instead. It has its own frustrations, but it can always be made to do what I want, and then it just behaves. Starting around Ubuntu 16.04, I found that the balance of frustration was tipping; these days I don't really bother to use my personal Mac any more. I still have one for work, but I'd certainly rather use Linux there too if I had the option.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#412

Post by BruceEel »

kick wrote: post #345
BruceEel wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are Linux distributions with great user interfaces and great UX Could you name some? No sarcasm, actually interested!

It sort of depends on what really fascinates you, right? I'll avoid naming some of the most popular ones, because it's likely that you've already tried them. If you haven't, I'd really recommend giving them a try. Many people seem to really love them. In terms of defaults: I've heard really good things about Solus, and its use of AppArmor seems really cool. Never touched its package manager, so I won't recommend it,…

This is excellent and indeed largely novel information, thank you.

It sounds like the finding right combination of DE and package management solution plays a big role here. I don't remember much of my experience with Gentoo's package manager in the early 2000's other than finding it generally did its job (if a bit slowly)... Experience with package managers on Mac (brew, macports) hasn't been great so I'm eager to play around with modern ones on Linux. Same goes for the DE actually: stock, out-of-the-box, macOS is essentially unusable for me until I get my customization (scroll, trackpad, KeyboardMaestro) done exactly right, I can't imagine this not being better on Linux, if anything for the ability to switch among the various DE's.

I'm starting to contemplate this (fully untested) strategy: trying out a few distros and installing the one I like best on VMWare Fusion and then try to use it as much as possible, falling back to macOS if I get stuck or I'm short on time but gradually replacing Mac-specific stuff as I find suitable replacements.. TextMate, the masterpiece of Allan Odgaard (author of the article being discussed here) probably going to be the toughest one. If I'm successful, I should eventually be able to let Linux 'out of the box' and run it on real hardware..

PS: amiwm! This is going to be a must. I do miss the Amiga, a fair bit..

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#413

Post by soraminazuki »

yalogin wrote: post #362
soraminazuki wrote: post #278

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.

Writing file to /nix shouldn't corrupt the system directory either. What exactly do you mean by "bad design"?

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#414

Post by californical »

soraminazuki wrote: post #403
zozbot234 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nix, by design, doesn't conform to the FHS way of organizing directories That's why /opt/ exists. What's wrong with /opt/nix/ ? Or /var/opt/nix/ for read-write files that need not be a fixed part of any package installation (the Unix equivalent of system-wide "Application Data").

Nix isn't designed as an application. It's designed as a system package manager.

It's also an application, it just happens to manage other applications

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#415

Post by jimsmart »

skohan wrote: post #307
soraminazuki wrote: post #278

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…

For me it's aperture. I like the interface better than lightroom, and I don't want to pay a monthly fee to have access to my photo library which I only add to once in a while. It's a shame because it's a great piece of software, and even the UI doesn't feel dated, but I just won't be able to run it if I upgrade.

There's a fix tool/hack to run Aperture on Catalina, called Retroactive.

https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive

It also works for iTunes and iPhoto. Sadly it won't fix any of the other known Catalina issues, of course! ;)

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#416

Post by pmahoney »

yalogin wrote: post #362
soraminazuki wrote: post #278

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.

Nix living at a predefined path is integral to how it works. An executable does not dynamically link to a generic "ncurses" but (via rpath) links to a specific compiled version of ncurses (such as /nix/store/81rb87agmp9cbsvg2xm2n4kp9c6309lv-ncurses-6.2). This is the root of all the benefits of Nix such as being able to install things side-by-side that use different versions of things or upgrade and rollback without problems.

That predefined path being the same (/nix) across all users of nixpkgs is required to be able to share binary packages (you could perhaps build everything from source, but that's a lot of time, more time even than something like gentoo because package updates require all dependencies to be rebuilt as well).

You can call it an insane choice or bad design, but there aren't a whole lot of options here. Could Nix move to a different path? Maybe, but is there a path that all operating systems could abide? If the new path stops working in some future OS, will it still be insane and bad design? Again, maybe, but I happen to love Nix and I use is on macos because it makes my life easier (and I'm on macos for work reasons). I'm willing to bend and do a lot of legwork to be able use Nix, and I'm upset with the Catalina situation.

Can follow some discussion here https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#417

Post by crazygringo »

I'm so confused about the comments here.

There are a bunch of people who can't reproduce the slowness at all, but nearly all downvoted or you have to wade through 100's of comments to get to them.

The majority of comments are just dumping on Macs, nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the article, and seem to be blindly assuming it's true.

And I can't seem to find any substantive discussion of whether this is actually real or not, or just some weird bug on the author's machine.

I don't see any evidence that Catalina is "slow by design", just a single anecdote from the author. I was definitely hoping for some more substantive critique/discussion...

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#418

Post by soraminazuki »

danudey wrote: post #376
soraminazuki wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 roo…

Not conforming to the FHS is what makes Nix possible. You won't get Nix's reproducibility without it.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#419

Post by ourcat »

neuronic wrote: post #332
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…

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.

Since Steve left us, over time I've witnessed so many issues crop up in the Apple ecosytem, for users/customers and developers, and it's clear that there's nobody to be shit-scared of anymore at Apple.

So many recent things would have pissed him off.

There's no way the 'notch' would have appeared. Nor the fact that the iPhone camera design stopped the device sitting flat on a surface.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#420

Post by saagarjha »

jasoneckert wrote: post #242

"Another way to reduce the delays is by disabling System Integrity Protection." Definitely agree on this one here - I've noticed a big speed improvement when disabling SIP debugging with "csrutil enable --without debug" while in recovery mode. I should note that the main reason I disable SIP isn't for speed, but to install the yabai window manager to make Aqua far more useful as a developer. I wrote a recent blog pos…

I believe disabling System Integrity Protection actually carries over to everything you boot off the computer.
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