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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

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Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#71
post #42

It looks like my time with MacOS is rapidly coming to an end. Any Linux distro recommendations these days?

I switched from MacOS to Linux years ago. For a developer workstation these days I'd probably either go with Ubuntu LTS or Fedora (my personal choice). Either runs fine on my XPS 13.

Note: I really wanted to like WSL, but it just didn't work for me.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#72
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.

If that’s what you really want, grab a used ThinkPad and put Arch Linux on it. It will boot in a few seconds and is much more powerful than a Vic-20.

Still doesn't give you a programming environment, unless you want to do bash.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#73
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am so glad I decided years ago to leave closed operating systems behind. The problem is, there's nothing else out there. Everything is going to shit in one way or another. Windows is now a disaster, Linux was always a disaster in terms of user experience and isn't improving. Mac OS was the last bastion of somewhat good, thoughtful design, user experience and attention to detail and now they've gone to shit too.

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.

People who have used ubuntu might want to just once try arch linux.

I had an ubuntu machine that took a while to boot even with an SSD. Later I installed arch linux on the same machine and boom! it would be to the desktop in seconds. It was night and day.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#75
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am so glad I decided years ago to leave closed operating systems behind. The problem is, there's nothing else out there. Everything is going to shit in one way or another. Windows is now a disaster, Linux was always a disaster in terms of user experience and isn't improving. Mac OS was the last bastion of somewhat good, thoughtful design, user experience and attention to detail and now they've gone to shit too.

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.

> 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.

Yup. You've just described a disaster. How many permutations of x must a user try before finding a good UX?

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#76
I switched to a sleek amd based setup and ubuntu, 64 gigs of ram, tons of nvme storage and for a decent price. Sad to see macos go out my daily toolkit, but fortunately i no longer have to deal with this kind of crap. I still use mac occasionally but day by day it becomes less relevant.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#77
Increasingly I find macOS only to be tolerable with iCloud (and Siri, location, suggestions, bug reporting, et c) entirely disabled, and Little Snitch’s built in/automatic whitelisting for Apple services disabled, and most of the background processes entirely denied networking access. It phones home constantly even with all of the services disabled/opted out.

It’s indeed a huge mess, from a privacy standpoint too, not just a performance one. It’s sad also to lose things like AirPlay or iMessage as collateral damage in the process. :/

I just can’t tolerate a machine that hits the network hundreds of times a day when doing normal computing tasks that do not involve the network. They even tolerate this sort of spyware in App Store apps, too.

Is it too much to ask for a polished workstation OS that lets me boot and edit a local text file of notes and save and quit without notifying 4 different parties that I did so?

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#78
post #28
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The set of possible operating systems to consider does not contain two items.

I find Linux to be a usability nightmare. Weird cut and paste behavior, difficult to resize windows, terrible trackpad support. macOS and Windows will have to get a lot worse before I switch.

Why I prefer the three button UNIX style mouse style and I don't ever seem to recall having problems with windows resizing on UNICX an unixlike systems.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#79
post #46

I hope Apple currently has a team focused on macOS perf. I worked on the team in charge of improving iOS (13) perf at Apple and IIRC there was no dedicated macOS “task force” like the one on iOS. Luckily some iOS changes permeated into macOS thanks to some shared codebases.

> IIRC there was no dedicated macOS “task force” like the one on iOS It's not surprising. Macs are less than 10% of Apple's revenue. https://www.macrumors.com/2020/04/30/apple-2q-2020-earnings/

It's surprising that they don't improve the developer experience for their own developers using their own tools, including hardware.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#80

I experienced this one day while tethering in the train. I was coding and running `go build` multiple times. I could not for the life of me understand why go build would take upwards to 30 seconds to run and sometimes 100ms. I finally realized it was related to my internet connection being extremely spotty. I went online and searched if anybody had the same experience with `go build` but couldn't find anything. I fin…

Does it work at all when unconnected?
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