MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design? • Hacker News Board

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#431

Post by saagarjha » Fri, May 22, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #417

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…

> 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.

It's possible that they have certain security features disabled.

> 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.

Welcome to Hacker News…this is common on any discussion on any topic, especially one that many people can understand in some way.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#432

Post by mixedCase » Fri, May 22, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

soraminazuki wrote: post #418

danudey wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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doesn't conform to the FHS way of organizing directories so it made perfect sense to use /nix when the decision was originally made.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

I'm probably missing something, and please let me know if so and why, but it sounds like a chroot could solve path reproducibility.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#433

Post by saagarjha » Fri, May 22, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

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.

> Brew never had this problem because they chose a sane path without corrupting the system directory.

Ha, no. They did the absolute worst thing they could have done and now that they are popular they think they "own" /usr/local. (They used to camp out in /usr, but Apple rightfully put a stop to that real quick when SIP came out.)

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#434

Post by ChuckNorris89 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

fetbaffe wrote: post #306

blyry wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Rumors on the internets have spoken positively about Opensuse Leap & Tumbleweed, any truth to that?

Another vote from me for tumbleweed.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#435

Post by saagarjha » Fri, May 22, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

soraminazuki wrote: post #409

tomp wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. What's more, if we're talking about user hostility, how hostile is when a software doesn't provide a configurable install dir? It's literally a single damn variable!!

> doesn't provide a configurable install dir This is completely false. You can change the installation directory at the cost of losing binary packages. When you change it, packages would be built from source instead. This is what Homebrew does too. What's more, I don't think many package managers provide this option. Not apt, not yum.

Homebrew itself recommends you not do this, and while it is getting better at working in this case you will still run into issues if you try to do certain things.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#436

Post by hitekker » Fri, May 22, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

> Another way to reduce the delays is by disabling System Integrity Protection. I say reduce, because I still do get some delays even with SIP disabled, but the system does overall feel much faster, and I would strongly recommend anyone who thinks their system is sluggish to do the same.

The tone of this article reminds me of a passage from the seminal Google+ Platforms Rant:

> Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there's more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdy are the two ever at odds. > But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#437

Post by tinco » Fri, May 22, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #417

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…

Did you run the test yourself? Why do you assume people are blindly assuming it's true? For me first run was 0.5s, second run was 0.004s, so there's definitely something going on.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#438

Post by kick » Fri, May 22, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

BruceEel wrote: post #412

kick wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pl…

My favorite package managers, personally:

xbps

apk (terrible interface; wonderful technically)

pacman (wonderful interface; so-so technically; dislike the distro that uses it because of technical choices)

InstallPackage (GoboLinux is kind of cheating, because InstallPackage isn't a "real" package manager, but that's kind of the point)

I love TextMate, too! Something you might find nice is how easy it is to run Mac in a VM on Linux; there are scripts that manage the entire thing for you, and it's pretty painless (and so fast; I was surprised). Useful if you have a few packages you can't find replacements for.

You mention Apple Music elsewhere, which you might be interested to know has an Android client and a web client, and you can probably get a native client on Linux, though I'm not immediately aware of one.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#439

Post by kens » Fri, May 22, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

kar1181 wrote: post #27

I completely understand why things are going the way they are as our computing environment has become ever more hostile. But I am very nostalgic for the time where I would power up a Vic-20 and within seconds be able to get to work. Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.

At the Computer History Museum, I use an IBM 1401 mainframe (1959). When you hit the power button, relays go ch-ch-chunk and it's immediately ready to use. Because it has magnetic core memory, it even has the previous program already in memory, preserved over power-down. Computers have taken many steps backwards as far as startup time. Of course, loading a new program from punch cards is slow, so some things have improved :-)

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#440

Post by kup0 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

10.15.1 and then 10.15.4 both introduced random kernel panics on my iMac. Only way to solve was to reinstall MacOS on top of itself (via Recovery, kept files/apps intact).

Still no idea what or why the panics would happen, or why the reinstall solved it.

Catalina has been a very bumpy road for me so far.