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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

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Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#991

Post by fluffything »

uep wrote: post #901
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...

I'm on Linux now, very interested in using Wayland+Pipewire, but still stuck on Xorg. What distro are you using? I was considering building a Wayland/Pipewire Desktop software stack from scratch since my distro doesn't support them yet. I have become partial to experimenting with new software this way because it allows me to switch back to my known-good distro software without rebooting (most things I care about pres…

I use Arch with Sway.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#992

Post by vetinari »

fluffything wrote: post #990
vetinari wrote: post #916

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

On MacOS, I get randomly appearing and disappearing servers in the sidebar (they disappear usually when I need them) and "cannot be opened because the original item cannot be found" for already mounted shares. It also keeps permanently mounted "photos" share on my home NAS and bad things happen when I try force unmounting it (but if it disappears because I'm not connected to my home network, that's ok for some reason). This got especially bad in Mojave and Catalina; there was a period of time (10.15.0 - 10.15.2) when I had to restart Finder if I wanted to mount share that was previously unmounted.

Never happened that with Linux. What did happen that there was a period of time on some distributions (circa Fedora 28-30?), when SMB1 discovery didn't work because entire SMB1 was disabled. This was security migitation (EternalBlue/WannaCry/NotPetya) and Microsoft is doing the same in Windows 2016/2019/10[1][2]. In general, using SMB2/3 is good idea anyway, Linux distributions/Samba eventually enabled SMB1 only for client-side discovery, and you can still enable entire SMB1 if you need it for some reason - do you still have Windows 2003 someplace?

[1] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/josebda/2015/04/21/the-d... [2] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/storage-at-microsoft/...

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#993

Post by aflag »

pram wrote: post #985
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.

From what I've read it's not available by default and you need to run some commands (which seem to be hard to google). And that solves only part of the problem, the article had other examples that may be harder to solve. It seems like, if your internet connection is not great, then you're going to have a bad experience.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#994

Post by xenadu02 »

brendangregg wrote: post #613

Adding network calls to syscalls like exec() is utterly insane. This road can lead to bricked laptops where you can't run anything to fix it (imagine an unexpected network error that the code doesn't handle properly). And crackers will just use ways to overwrite running instruction text to avoid the exec(). The comments on the article are annoying: it good that there's a mini way to reproduce, but please, use some fu…

That's not quite correct. If network access is unavailable or fails then the exec is allowed. The behavior has been improved over time, putting stricter limits on how long the check is allowed to take before giving up.

The Mac remains a Mac: if you turn off SIP it also disables this behavior. You are free to choose less security for more convenience if that is your preference.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#995

Post by bwat49 »

moe wrote: post #967
green7ea wrote: post #950

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sleep has been working on my last ~10 laptops and desktops, it's a non-issue at this point unless you have brand new exotic hardware. I did have a motherboard issue on a first-gen Ryzen that required a bios update to get it working. hi-dpi works very nicely if you use GTK or Qt. For the other apps, it really depends how they are implemented. For me it has been working better than Windows. These are strawman agruments…

> you'll see stuff pretty much just works The problem is the "pretty much" part. We all know what that means in practice. That's why OSX is popular.

OSX can only guarantee that everything works because apple controls both the hardware and software.

Windows can only guarantee that everything works because they have a monopoly and therefore hardware vendors have to support windows.

Most laptops don't ship with linux/are never tested with linux, so it's never going to work flawlessly on all possible hardware configurations. It's just not possible.

It does however, 'pretty much' work on most hardware.

And if you buy a machine from a vendor that actually supports/pre-installs/tests linux, all of the hardware will work out of the box.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#996

Post by bwat49 »

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.

> 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.

Are you implying that those users are lying?

I'm sure sleep does work reliably for them.

'Does sleep work on linux' is a fallacious question to begin with, because sleep working/not working depends on the hardware.

On some configurations it works flawlessly, on others it doesn't. Therefore you will always have some people saying it works, and others saying it doesn't. FWIW, my current laptop is a machine that ships with linux (system76 darter pro) and sleep works 100% reliably.

In my experience, when sleep doesn't work reliably, it's usually due to buggy firmware behaviour because most vendors don't care about supporting anything other than windows.

Along those lines, since most OEMs don't ship/test linux, it's simply not possible for every single hardware configuration to work flawlessly with linux.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#997

Post by bwat49 »

fluffything wrote: post #990
vetinari wrote: post #916

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

> Last time I tried to debug it, this was caused due to a too old samba protocol version being used on the Windows side

IIRC, the only smb version that would be considered too old is smbv1 (which I'd hope they are not using on the windows side... its quite insecure and is deprecated by microsoft).

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#998

Post by runjake »

bwat49 wrote: post #995
moe wrote: post #967

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you'll see stuff pretty much just works The problem is the "pretty much" part. We all know what that means in practice. That's why OSX is popular.

OSX can only guarantee that everything works because apple controls both the hardware and software. Windows can only guarantee that everything works because they have a monopoly and therefore hardware vendors have to support windows. Most laptops don't ship with linux/are never tested with linux, so it's never going to work flawlessly on all possible hardware configurations. It's just not possible. It does however, '…

It's that "pretty much" that's the debate.

I recently switched from macOS to Ubuntu 19.10 and then 20.04 as my daily driver and it's way flakier and has far more random app crashes than macOS.

That said, the system is fast, the UX is way further along than I expected -- in some ways it's got a better UX than macOS. It's way, way faster at nearly everything.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#999

Post by bwat49 »

runjake wrote: post #998
bwat49 wrote: post #995

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSX can only guarantee that everything works because apple controls both the hardware and software. Windows can only guarantee that everything works because they have a monopoly and therefore hardware vendors have to support windows. Most laptops don't ship with linux/are never tested with linux, so it's never going to work flawlessly on all possible hardware configurations. It's just not possible. It does however, '…

It's that "pretty much" that's the debate. I recently switched from macOS to Ubuntu 19.10 and then 20.04 as my daily driver and it's way flakier and has far more random app crashes than macOS. That said, the system is fast, the UX is way further along than I expected -- in some ways it's got a better UX than macOS. It's way, way faster at nearly everything.

my point is that if you want to do better than 'pretty much', you should buy a machine from an OEM that actually supports linux

If you're installing it on a random windows laptop, you're never going to get better than 'pretty much', because the OEM doesn't support linux or test their hardware with linux.

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