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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

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Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#441

Post by acdha »

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doesn't conform to the FHS way of organizing directories so it made perfect sense to use /nix when the decision was originally made.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

Can you explain the reasoning here? I can see it being _easier_ than doing it the right way but have trouble coming up with a scenario where it makes it _impossible_.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#442

Post by saagarjha »

soraminazuki wrote: post #428
mjhoy wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 — Sure. But Nix isn't exactly the most friendly package manager to begin with. I wouldn't recommend it if you're not comfortable creating volumes. 2 — Could you explain? Mine is on and working, I didn't need to do anything else. 3 — Is this if you have login items that need nix to be available? I don't have this so I haven't noticed. 4 — I've never run into this, but again I might just not use Nix for the kind of t…

It's not that installing Nix is impossible on macOS, it's just that it has some hard-to-ignore limitations now. 1. Having to create a volume when a plain old directory should suffice is insane. It's creating a hassle for no good reason for users. 2. /nix would be unencrypted by default if kept in a separate volume. There's also the problem of how to unlock it upon boot. 3. Login items is a very common use case so not…

I believe Nix actually picks a volume so that it can be encrypted, and it uses one of the many ways to run a script before login (some of which still happen to work) to decrypt it?

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#443

Post by saagarjha »

danudey wrote: post #361
saagarjha wrote: post #285

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. 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.

That is new, but I believe the groundwork for that was mostly laid in 10.14 and is also mostly in the kernel.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#444

Post by hrktb »

the_af wrote: post #96
kick wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux was always a disaster in terms of user experience and isn't improving. Curious: what have you tried? People who use "Linux" as a catch-all in terms of UX usually have only tried a single distribution with a single desktop environment.

Moreover, I've been running Linux for decades now, both in my personal laptop and at work, and Ubuntu has been (mostly) frictionless for me. I'm not an average user, of course, but for most users a friendly distro would work just as well as Windows (browsing the internet, using whatsapp web, watching movies). In some cases I've had a better user experience with Ubuntu than with Windows or OS X, namely seamlessly inst…

I only tried Ubuntu, a few month ago. For the day or two spent with it:

- multi-language support requires a lot of work to get to the same point as macos.

In particular I use third party shortcut mappers to get language switching on left and right command keys (mimicking the JIS keyboards, but with an english international layout). That looks like something I’d have to give up on code myself.

- printer support is not at the same level.

Using a xerox printer, some options that appear by default on macos where not there on ubuntu. I’m sure there must be drivers somewhere, or I could hunt down more settings. But then my work office two other printers. It would be a PITA to hunt down drivers every time I want to use another printer.

- Hi DPI support is still flagged as experimental, and there’s a bunch of hoops to jump through to get a good setting in multi-monitor mode. Sure it’s doable, but still arcane.

- sleep/wake was weird. It would work most of the time, but randomly kept awake after closing the lid, or not waking up when opening. Not critical, but still not good (I’d ahte to have the battery depleted while traveling)

Overall if I had no choice that would be a fine environment. But as it is now, with all its quirks, I feel macos is still a smoother environment.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#445

Post by chooseaname »

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.

So, the question is will people get to a point and say enough is enough? And if so, will enough people be saying it for it to make a difference?

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#446

Post by Wowfunhappy »

saagarjha wrote: post #433
yalogin wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

This is why, of the two, I prefer Macports.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#447

Post by saagarjha »

derefr wrote: post #231
jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would sandboxing be slower? They are definitely doing something way too slow.

Apple replaced the very simple (i.e. function fits in a cache line; inputs fit in a single dword) BSD user/group/other filesystem privileges system, with a Lisp interpreter (or maybe compiler? not sure) executing some security DSL[1][2]. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Sandbox/OS_X_Rule_Set [2] https://reverse.put.as/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Apple-Sand... This capabilities-ruleset interpreter is what Apple uses the te…

> Lisp interpreter (or maybe compiler? not sure)

I believe it is actually a Scheme dialect, and I would be very surprised if it is not compiled to some internal representation upon load.

> This capabilities-ruleset interpreter is what Apple uses the term "Gatekeeper" to refer to, mostly.

I am fairly sure Gatekeeper is mostly just Quarantine and other bits that prevent the execution of random things you download from the internet.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#448

Post by saagarjha »

oefrha wrote: post #377
saagarjha wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bu…

> In the worst case scenario, you can probably insert into the TCC database

Does this not require disabling SIP?

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#449

Post by acdha »

jaimehrubiks wrote: post #36

In our company many of us have similar issues. I have always loved OSX but this time it is driving me crazy. I though the issue was some sort of company antivirus/firewall, or it could even be a combination of that and this issue (maybe my vpn + path to company firewall is what magnifies the issue in this post). The thing is that some commands take 1 second, some others take 2 minutes or even more. Actually, some com…

> For example, I can run "terraform apply" and it could take up to 5 minutes to start, leaving my computer almost unusable until it runs.

On a clean Catalina install this does not happen. Does “terraform version” have the same delay? If not, check your remote configuration - maybe run with TF_LOG=trace. Terraform Cloud will definitely highlight the inherent performance problems of using a VPN.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#450

Post by catalogia »

withinboredom wrote: post #407
cosmojg wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems macOS is going downhill fast these days.

No, it’s just that they’re becoming more popular. When you become a popular desktop OS, governments and militaries want to start using it which comes with some strange requirements. It also means that you can’t rely on “obscurity” to provide any sort of security, where before you could overlook some things.

Can you cite any sources for your claim that these things are being implemented to satisfy government/military requirements?
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