Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth • Hacker News Board

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#41

Post by saagarjha » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:16 PM UTC

musicale wrote: post #22

prepend wrote: post #6

I’m always wary of MacOS upgrades from when Snow Leopard made my Warcraft and Age of Empires stop working. Ultimately, I find it best to just suck it up and upgrade and use virtualization to run specific stuff. Mac is the easiest for me to have a daily driver browser while also being useful for most dev and basic Unix user tasks.

Unfortunately Apple has lousy backward compatibility, particularly for games. Dropping 32-bit is going to kill a bunch of games. On iOS it seeem even worse, with yearly releases breaking many apps; Apple's aggressive ABI changes offload a large maintenance burden onto app developers, who have to keep updating their apps every year just to keep them working the same way. Windows seems to do a lot better, and game cons…

> Apple's aggressive ABI changes offload a large maintenance burden onto app developers, who have to keep updating their apps every year just to keep them working the same way

Ideally, apps that work on one iOS release will continue working on the next with no change in behavior, as Apple checks when apps were linked and will opt out of the new behavior.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#42

Post by whalesalad » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:17 PM UTC

> my desktop workhorse, a 2017 4K retina iMac

> 5400 rpm hard drive as its main internal volume

Regardless of OS, the author _really_ needs to bail on the 5400rpm HDD and get a solid state disk in there... especially if you're gonna call it a workhorse!

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#43

Post by threeseed » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:17 PM UTC

devxpy wrote: post #23

Not a conspiracy theorist or anything, but all of this seems like a cheap strategy to make users move to iPadOS.

That makes no sense.

1) Apple makes more margins on Mac hardware.

2) Catalina allows you to basically run iPad apps on the Mac. They wouldn't do this if they were trying to push users to iPad.

3) iPadOS and OSX are fundamentally different. There is no way Apple could ever replace the Mac with an iPad.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#44

Post by shantly » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:17 PM UTC

3JPLW wrote: post #31

oneplane wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Time and I/O speed isn't as relevant for everyone as you might think. I sure don't want a system without flash memory, but I know not everybody is me and not everybody will care.

My mother bought a spinning rust iMac two years ago, sold to her as a "fast" machine. It was not fast. It took 15-30 seconds+ to do the most basic of tasks. It was unusable. I did what I could to remove background tasks and it was still painful to work on. She hated it. I cloned the drive onto an external SSD with no other changes. Immediately she had a usable machine, and she now enjoys using it again.

Operating systems increasingly seem to be expecting an SSD. Windows is unreasonably slower on an HDD, extremely frustrating to use at all. IIRC that started with Win8, but might've been 10. Linux DEs, heading the same way. Wouldn't be surprised to find out that MacOS is like that these days, too.

That does mean OS/DE devs are hitting disk way the hell too often and just hoping modern disk speed makes it harder to notice, but there's no way that's not adding up to some real (but less crippling) latency even on SSD-equipped systems.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#45

Post by amiantos » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:18 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #37

amiantos wrote: post #21

Author hasn't tried Catalina, and their biggest complaint appears to be that the email app allegedly has a new UI--but I don't think it does. Mail app looks the same in Catalina, doesn't it? I can't say I noticed any differences. Either way, this is an extremely long blog post to say basically just "I don't like change, and I'm not willing to see change as a potential improvement to try to accept it".

The author is talking specifically about the classic layout, which appears to be missing in macOS Catalina.

Ah, I see, looks like there is a way to get the classic layout back in Catalina if you want it: https://www.macintouch.com/community/index.php?threads/macos...

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#46

Post by benburleson » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:18 PM UTC

Since readers here might be more apt to have the same problem:

Has anyone else noticed Catalina doesn't remember external display rotation when waking from sleep?

There have been a few instances where it somehow restores the proper rotation, but most of the time I am forced to put it back manually. I don't want a "workaround" via AppleScript or a hotkey to easily set it back to what I had configured, I just want it to work like it always had!

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#47

Post by hk__2 » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:19 PM UTC

devxpy wrote: post #23

Not a conspiracy theorist or anything, but all of this seems like a cheap strategy to make users move to iPadOS.

> Not a conspiracy theorist or anything, but all of this seems like a cheap strategy to make users move to iPadOS.

How can users "move" to a different OS that’s not designed for nor compatible with their device?

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#48

Post by umvi » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:20 PM UTC

curt15 wrote: post #28

mark_l_watson wrote: post #3

I couldn’t tell from the article if the author had actually tried Catalina. I have been running the beta since day one of the beta release and the only issue is that applications have to be signed or built locally. Apple wants macOS to be a safe walled garden like iOS and Chromebooks. I am fine with this, but I also have a very nice Linux laptop to play with. I expect organized crime and most governments to continue…

>I avoid arbitrary web browsing on my Linux laptop and just use it for coding. What makes web browsers less secure on Linux than on macOS?

Well, lack of DRM support for one. Disney+ won't work on Linux browsers.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#49

Post by lostgame » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:20 PM UTC

I don't understand the possible, potential advantage removing 32-bit support even has. It doesn't improve security for my sake, because I can't use a system that doesn't allow for 32-bit apps. Why can't we have a Rosetta equivalent? I've had to tell every MacOS user I know, especially non-techie ones, just to not upgrade, and consider something other than Apple moving forward.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth

#50

Post by Razengan » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 10:21 PM UTC

I still love macOS but Catalina has been the buggiest beta and release that I can recall. When we saw betas of x.1 before there were even GMs/release candidates of x.0 we knew it was going to be rushed out the door.

Even after release it's still randomly losing files. Just yesterday my purchased music downloads just disappeared. No explanation (unless I trashed and emptied them in a fugue state). They were still showing as downloaded in the Music app, but when I tried to play them I got the "File missing. Locate?" dialog, so the Music app wasn't aware of this either. They weren't stored on iCloud Drive either, just the default local music folder, so it wasn't related to the iCloud Drive bug. This was a clean installation on a fresh disk, no third party system level junk, and after the unnumbered OS update they released a while ago.

There are quite a few other bugs too. macOS is still the better alternative to Windows, but the wow factor of "It just works!" is becoming rare and bug fatigue is creeping in.