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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

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Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#981

Post by guildmaster »

mindfulhack wrote: post #746
ochoa wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you write anywhere online about your workflow setup using AppleScript? It sounds interesting. I’d like to configure my macOS experience more.

Oh it's not like I have a Cmd+ for every single possible task you can imagine, it's a very tailored and customised set of sometimes complicated scripts for my weird personal needs that I've built up over the years. Each time I want to do something, I goddamn will spend 8 hours figuring it out if have to. E.g. this: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/381441/163629 - one hotkey to change macOS Notes text into a specific…

Would be great if you could write about the scripts you hack to optimize your workflow

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#982

Post by hexchain »

dTal wrote: post #644
nromiun wrote: post #2

> This is not just for files downloaded from the internet, nor is it only when you launch them via Finder, this is everything. So even if you write a one line shell script and run it in a terminal, you will get a delay! > Apple’s most recent OS where it appears that low-level system API such as exec and getxattr now do synchronous network activity before returning to the caller. Can anyone confirm this? Because hones…

Making this about speed is burying the lede. From a privacy and user-freedom perspective, it's horrifying . Don't think so? Apple now theoretically has a centralized database of every Mac user who's ever used youtube-dl. Or Tor. Or TrueCrypt.

I always wonder why people usually choose to neglect privacy issues about Apple.

First, there was Apple scanning photos to check for child abuse[0] (that obviously got no attention on this site), then there was this one - Apple uploading hashes of all unsigned executables you run.

Do people really accept that company's "privacy" selling point?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21180019, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22008855

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#983

Post by brmgb »

IshKebab wrote: post #963
nottorp wrote: post #870

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly it's not the "shiny"... it's the fact that Mac OS has a GUI that works. Been using linux since the days you installed Slackware from floppies and recompiled your kernel to get drivers. Command line has always been a bliss, but no one has managed to come up with an usable and consistent GUI yet. Btw does sleep work on linux laptops these days? How's hi dpi support?

Some people at my work use Linux laptops. Judging by the Linux slack channel, no sleep doesn't work reliably yet, external monitor support is terrible and touchpads still suck. No idea about HiDPI but I doubt it works reliably. Whenever you bring anything like this up though you'll just get a load of "When was the last time you tried it? It works perfectly for me" replies. Linux users don't want to admit its flaws.

It's pretty difficult to acknowledge a supposed flaw pointed by a guy who knows a guy who uses Linux when you have never had it yourself.

I used Linux at work for years. Sleep just works, external monitor also just works. HiDPI was rough at the start but works fine now.

Touchpads do kind of suck. I generally really dislike the default mouse acceleration. Font rendering is still so so if you don't have a HiDPI screen and the most popular desktop environments are still kind of terrible.

But sleep definitely does work.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#984

Post by hexchain »

defnotashton2 wrote: post #498
tsukurimashou wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like people still have in mind what Linux desktop was 15 / 20 years ago. It improved a lot in the past years, battery life improved on laptops, Ubuntu that was already very stable and feature complete also got a lot of things with previous releases and I've personally been running Arch on my main computers now for 5+ years and haven't got any major issues while upgrading.

Try using the latest version of software that has a more frequent release cycle than arch. If you have an incompatibility there goes your install. Have yet to see a distro do multi monitor hi dipi that results in readable fonts out of the box.. This gets updated yearly - https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...

Arch does not have a release cycle, sorry.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#985

Post by pram »

aflag wrote: post #966

Did apple make any comments on this? I haven't been able to find any public responses from them. I'm really interested on reading their side of things. This is quite jarring, it's hard to believe it is a thing. However, as I read through tests people did, it seems just as bad as it sounds. I was actually getting a mac mini now that I'm working from home (I thought I'd get better integration with some of the company's…

This is frankly hyperbole. A single checkbox in a GUI menu that is routinely accessed for managing other system-wide sandbox privileges isn't exactly obscure. It also isn't some difficult, inconvenient task. It needs to be done once.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#986

Post by ecnahc515 »

Yetanfou wrote: post #864
saagarjha wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if using macOS enables me to be a more effective FOSS contributor? What if I think that FOSDEM is actually has many participants who aren't really into free software?

> What if using macOS enables me to be a more effective FOSS contributor? How would that work? When you build a house on rented ground the house may seem to be yours but it can always be taken away from you.

Your analogy isn't the best. This is like someone renting construction equipment to build a house on land they own, and finding out that the construction equipment phones home to the owners about how it's being used.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#987

Post by ecnahc515 »

roenxi wrote: post #704
userbinator wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to look at it is that Apple is making it harder to run the system in an insecure fashion. You may not agree with that decision, but I certainly appreciate how Apple is looking out for the safety and security of the user. "Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither." (Yes, I know the original intent was slightly different, but that old saying has gotten a lot more vivid recently, as companies a…

The quote isn't at all relevant to technical decisions though. Eg, there is enforcement that a program can't arbitrarily access any RAM it likes on the same machine. That is trading freedom for security and it is a good trade. And there isn't really an argument against gatekeeping software - users as a body don't have time to verify that the software they use is secure. I'd be shocked if the median web developer even…

I agree. I'd take your point on gatekeepers being a good idea further.

Gatekeepers are a good idea for even experts. There's a reason it's still in your best interest to use battle tested crypto libraries instead of writing your own, even if you're a security expert. The reason stands that it's possible for experts to make mistakes, which is why auditing is so important.

Now for this to hold, we need to assume Apple has done a good job with their notarization system, and that it's regularly audited to ensure it's not causing too many issues.

In this case, I trust Apple isn't doing these things to make developers life harder. They're doing it because it's incredibly difficult to make something both ergonomic for experts (developers) and secure/safe for non-experts (average end-users), and they would rather ship something less-than-perfect for developers if it's going to help non-developers.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#988

Post by ecnahc515 »

Yetanfou wrote: post #884
john_alan wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting analysis, thanks for sharing. command line apps installed via home-brew don't have gate-keeper/notarization though. I don't know why ppl seem to think they do... What am I missing? I'm on the latest Catalina and, for me, anything installed via home-brew / scripts/c++/python/rust I write and run/compile myself, just run. I also don't see any time different between my apps on linux and macOS. I use itemr2,…

Maybe you're missing to foresee the future step in Apple's strategy which will make it harder if not impossible to run something like Homebrew? As far as I know there is no such thing on (non-jailbroken) iOS. Apple seems be be steering macOS in that direction, a curated platform instead of a general-purpose computing device.

You realize Apple employs engineers right? The same engineers who use homebrew for their own job? If they go down that route, it's likely they'll need to support something like homebrew or similar.

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if it just meant distributing package via homebrew means signing the package, much like any other package manager. Yes, you can get something similar with checksums, but it doesn't provide any method of authenticity of the distributor.

Is it friction? Hell yeah. A pain? Yes. Is it purely bad? No. Does it have positives? Some. It's not black and white.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#989

Post by vegardx »

1123581321 wrote: post #920
vegardx wrote: post #861

I had put off upgrading for a long time because nothing good can come from running the latest stable release. They've never been stable. But Apple sort of forced me to update recently since wanted to back up my phone, which I wanted to do before switching to a new one. I imagined that it would be better after a year. Boy was I wrong, and I regret doing it much. It has been a constant pain ever since, bluetooth is com…

Those all sound like unusual problems. What external hardware and phone are you using?

I've drunk the cool aid. Never drink the cool aid: iPhone 11 Pro, Magic Trackpad and Keyboard, AirPod Pro and Bose QC35. If you search for these issues on the community forums or web in general you'll see that it's quite common, and it all started with Catalina.

Some brave people that were running the public beta reported these issues to Apple, but we're now four point releases in and still no fix. Apple seem to not even want to acknowledge the issue, they just send users to their FAQ which sums up to "have you rebooted?"

The issues seems to start if you have bluetooth devices connected and your laptop becomes memory constrained. And after that it's in a broken or bricked state it seems. You can do tricks like killing coreaudiod to get audio devices to connect, but trackpad is still broken.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#990

Post by fluffything »

vetinari wrote: post #916
fluffything wrote: post #868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've partially switched from MacOS X to Linux now that wayland pipewire is reaching a mostly functional state and am quite happy with it. It took me maybe 150 hours to do the switch though during quarantine, and I still haven't managed to be able to properly connect to SMB at work...

What problem do you have connecting to SMB? It's one of the things that work better for me on Linux than on MacOS (no problem with browsing shares, no disappearing shares, no problem with non-normalized unicode filenames).

It just doesn't connect / mount at all. Last time I tried to debug it, this was caused due to a too old samba protocol version being used on the Windows side.

On MacOSX, I just click on connect to server, and it works for me "as is".

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