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macOS Catalina 10.15.5

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Re: macOS Catalina 10.15.5

#221

Post by Wowfunhappy »

everdrive wrote: post #157
SamuelAdams wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is no longer supported, unfortunately.

The last good MacOS

I really think Snow Leopard is remembered overly fondly because it's direct successor—Lion—was quite bad. But, Apple fixed Lion's problems in 10.8 (Mountain Lion), and avoided introducing any new ones in 10.9 (Mavericks).

Consequently, 10.9/Mavericks is my actual favorite version, and what I'm typing on right now.

When I decided I was going to downgrade my main machines earlier this year, I did a lot of comparisons of Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks. I could not see a compelling reason to pick Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion.

Mavericks performs well and never seems to crash. When I loaded all three up in VMs and starved them of resources, Mavericks remained the most responsive, I suspect because it supports memory compression. (Interestingly, Snow Leopard lists 1 GB of memory as the minimum required, whereas Mavericks lists 2 GB, but Mavericks still seemingly did better with 1 GB than Snow Leopard.)

Design-wise, while I prefer Snow Leopard's higher contrast in some places, it has a tendency to look either garish or plain in others. 10.8/9 look more refined, without going all flat. And while 10.8/9 have a lot of stupid defaults, I have a setup script I've been using for years which fixes most of them: https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/Mac-OS-X-Wowfunhappy-Setup-Sc...

The one big advantage of Snow Leopard would have been compatibility with PowerPC apps via Rosetta. But, there are only a handful of PowerPC apps I'd actually want to use, and a lot of Intel apps that support 10.9 but not 10.6.

Re: macOS Catalina 10.15.5

#222

Post by riobard »

derefr wrote: post #196
ryanianian wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this happening for a while, and I tracked it down to time-machine backups starting. Every hour the backupd cronjob would trigger and I'd get a minute or so of beachball. Similar WATCHDOG termination message. It crashed a couple times and corrupted the backup database. I disabled time-machine and haven't had any freezes since.

Is it a remote time-machine backup, i.e. to a Time Capsule (or a NAS pretending to be one)? Time Machine used to use AFP, but since AFP was deprecated, it now exclusively uses SMB for remote backups. (Specifically, it creates a sparsebundle image on the SMB share, and then locally mounts it.) Now, Apple has their own implementation of SMB; and it seems to have been seeing frequent updates in Catalina (see https://sup…

I'm hitting the stupid SMB bug everyday but the symptom seems to be different. I tried to manually connect to `smb://nasbox.local` in Finder and it works with `nasbox.local` appearing in the sidebar. I can also click `nasbox` (without `.local` and this is advertised by the avahi-daemon on the nasbox I believe) and it opens the network shares fine.

However, if the Mac goes to sleep for a while and then later wakes up, I can no longer access the shares with the same message "The operation can’t be completed because the original item for “folder_name” can’t be found".

This is so damn frustrating.

Re: macOS Catalina 10.15.5

#223

Post by ttfkam »

FideoSpecial wrote: post #219
hugey010 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep late 2013 MacBook Pro: Catalina brought some security annoyances but mostly pain-free. IMO this computer is the epitome of function and form; I'm worried nothing will truly replace it when that time comes.

I feel the same about my mid 2014 mbp. I'm thinking I'll pull the trigger on a new one when the rumored 14.1 inch version arrives.

I have bad news. No 14.1" screen. https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/

Re: macOS Catalina 10.15.5

#224

Post by applecrazy »

psychometry wrote: post #131
reaperducer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why have several overlapping boxes rather than just dividing the screen equally and using all of it It's good for smaller screens. I was on a Zoom video conference last week, and all I could think about was how so many people who weren't allowed to/going to speak were taking up valuable screen real estate.

There's a setting to toggle gallery view...

Correct, but if you have multiple people talking at the same tome, you still want to see all of those people, without relying on Speaker Mode to switch between speakers for you.

Re: macOS Catalina 10.15.5

#225

Post by bjoli »

Catalina decided to remap my paragraph key to "ö" this week (using a 3rd party Swedish Dvorak layout). Remaking the layout to the proper symbol works for about an hour. It is my Emacs prefix for functions I don't consider important enough to warrant their own direct key bindings. Annoying doesn't cut it.

I haven't done a factory reset yet, but I started backups today to be able to.

Catalina is a disaster. I got my Mac for free from a relative,but I sure as hell won't buy another.

Re: macOS Catalina 10.15.5

#226

Post by vardump »

MperorM wrote: post #93

Since Catalina I have been getting daily freezes, where the entire operating system locks up. I can still move the cursor around and audio keeps playing as well, but everything else is completely frozen. Once in a while the freeze lasts so long the computer crashes resulting in a crash report: Termination Reason: WATCHDOG, [0x1] monitoring timed out for service Termination Details: WATCHDOG, checkin with service: Win…

Same. My freezes seem to be caused only by GPU lockups.

Other scenario only a reboot can fix is sometimes menus don't draw and/or video playback doesn't work in any app.

But at least Bluetooth is nowadays more stable!

Re: macOS Catalina 10.15.5

#227

Post by Reason077 »

riscy wrote: post #141
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #132

Anybody knows what has happened that multiple manufacturers (at least Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, and now Apple) have released _all within this year_ updates to "enhance battery health management"? Even on devices which were otherwise out of support already. I ponder what has happened. I didn't hear any recent stories of battery explosions, huge battery recalls, or new regulations, yet all manufacturers are reacting to s…

Apple got sued for throttling iPhones with overly aged batteries. My understanding is that for all battery-dependent devices, you either sometimes throttle the CPU so it doesn’t demand more voltage than the battery can reliably deliver, or else you risk sudden power loss at what appears to be 20% life. After the lawsuit I assume now all manufacturers leaving it up to the consumer to decide which behavior they want.

There's nothing wrong with throttling in itself. Pretty much anyone will prefer a performance hit to a spontaneous shutdown.

Where Apple got in trouble was that they were doing it secretly. Now days they still do the throttling, but you can go into battery status and it tells you if the battery is delivering peak performance or not.

Re: macOS Catalina 10.15.5

#228

Post by vardump »

riobard wrote: post #222
derefr wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a remote time-machine backup, i.e. to a Time Capsule (or a NAS pretending to be one)? Time Machine used to use AFP, but since AFP was deprecated, it now exclusively uses SMB for remote backups. (Specifically, it creates a sparsebundle image on the SMB share, and then locally mounts it.) Now, Apple has their own implementation of SMB; and it seems to have been seeing frequent updates in Catalina (see https://sup…

I'm hitting the stupid SMB bug everyday but the symptom seems to be different. I tried to manually connect to `smb://nasbox.local` in Finder and it works with `nasbox.local` appearing in the sidebar. I can also click `nasbox` (without `.local` and this is advertised by the avahi-daemon on the nasbox I believe) and it opens the network shares fine. However, if the Mac goes to sleep for a while and then later wakes up,…

> This is so damn frustrating.

Agreed. And then there's that extremely childish "Windows 95 blue screen" icon representing SMB shares... Really professional.

Re: macOS Catalina 10.15.5

#230

Post by vardump »

MperorM wrote: post #165
satysin wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried the "nuke from orbit" approach of a full system wipe (T2, SMC and NVRAM reset, delete recovery partitions, Pre-boot volume, etc) and doing a fresh install and setup rather than restoring from backup? I know it shouldn't be needed but sometimes it is the only option. It isn't much help to you but my experience with Catalina has been very positive on a 2018 15" MacBook Pro. The initial release and first…

Yes, I have reset t2, smc, nvram, even reinstalled the entire operating system. I have the same problem on both 16 inch laptops I've owned (first one was stolen) suggesting it has to do with the software I use. I am unable to identify a single application as the culprit, unfortunately.

By any chance are you running VMware Fusion?
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