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Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

morrick.me

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Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#81
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what the issue is either, once you add the necessary permissions for your apps, it doesn't ask again. Only complaint is Apple seem to ignore long-standing bugs that have been there for years, like monitors switching around every time you dock your MacBook. They should make a Snow Leopard-like release and clean out their bug tracker.

This isn’t something I’ve encountered and I dock to three different desk setups most days. It’s typically good enough that it remembers the correct layout for multiple of the same type of monitor once configured. Is your monitor sending the serial number correctly?

It has happened on several different monitors and MacBooks, even putting it to sleep and waking it can sometimes switch them, so I have to go into System Preferences and drag 'em around.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#82
post #74

It's been a long time since a MacOS upgrade was "worth it", from an end-user perspective. They're much more liked Windows Service Packs these days. This used to be way different, every new OS X release was much more celebrated and often brought features that were really appreciated by the users. Sure, part of that was just easier in the beginning: 10.0 started out with a lot of issues, and just getting rid of most of…

And from the developer point of view, notarisation is a colossal headache. It might be OK if you're shipping a single app, but we have a vast hybrid thing that includes Mono, a JDK, and some Python native libraries. All of which have to be signed themselves.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use several tabs and histories override each other, meaning I could never count on a command being present in the history. I’ve always been told an experienced dev has a folder with txt notes, so that is what I did.

I'm pretty sure that you can configure zsh to write to zsh_history every command to prevent this

    setopt inc_append_history

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#86
post #11

Am I the only person that doesn't have any significant issues with Catalina? I'll admit, some of the permissions-related pop-ups are a bit annoying, but overall it's been a rather stable macOS version for me (developer, working mostly in Xcode and JetBrains IDEs).

I lost the ability to print anything with graphics in it, on a MBP that's been religiously kept up to date for 5-6 years.

Funny thing is, I tend to forget about the graphics problem, because how often do you print anything with graphics in it? Then along comes a boarding pass and oh yeah other computer.

I also find it annoying that it obsoleted a bunch of my software, like MS Office, and constantly asks for permission to use my Desktop.

But other than that, seems fine! And I do like the new XCode goodies!

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#87
post #11

Am I the only person that doesn't have any significant issues with Catalina? I'll admit, some of the permissions-related pop-ups are a bit annoying, but overall it's been a rather stable macOS version for me (developer, working mostly in Xcode and JetBrains IDEs).

I think a lot of issues can be resolved by doing a clean install. Highly recommended on 3+ year old machines. macOS & Windows, suffers from the same issue, in that overtime, after you install a lot of things, and have multiple major upgrades, it can become a bit unstable. Think about all the state an OS has, and how it can changes over a period of years, and how states gets migrated and carried over into a new paradigm during OS updates.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#88
post #7

Also worth reading John Gruber's complaints, over and above bugs: > But I don’t know a single expert Mac user who is not seriously annoyed by the heavy-handed security design of Catalina. Not one. Every single expert user I know is annoyed. That is a bad place for MacOS to be. MacOS 10.16 needs a serious course correction to fix this, and if 10.16 goes the opposite way — growing even more heavy-handed in restricting…

There’s an important point to be made here about the gap between theoretical and practical security. Overly elaborate password policies (excessive complexity demands, passwords expiring, no reusing last five passwords) end up causing annoyed users to make bad decisions that compromise password security. Similarly, an excess of popups doesn’t increase security. It annoys users to the point they stop thinking about ind…

Isn't this something (likely even more) granularity ought to counteract something fierce?

The annoyance is still there/potentially larger, but it's easier to make an informed decision about something specific, rather than the usual "enter your admin password to allow... potentially anything, probably persistently. Or don't, then no app for you." binary which seems easier to just blindly go along with, since auditing is the only way to find out what exactly the privileges are for.

The question is rather where sheer request volume overwhelms gains from actually knowing what's being asked for, but better tools letting user set a base comfort level as far as common requests like disk access etc should help with that.

I am however struggling to articulate my opinion in a way that doesn't boil down to essentially "the issue with the dreaded Vista popup was that there weren't ten different varieties!", heh. Nah, just comes down to asking once vs. every time.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#90
post #11

Am I the only person that doesn't have any significant issues with Catalina? I'll admit, some of the permissions-related pop-ups are a bit annoying, but overall it's been a rather stable macOS version for me (developer, working mostly in Xcode and JetBrains IDEs).

No. I have had no problems with it on four machines. The permissions dialogs are welcome; I run Little Snitch and used to run Little Flocker. Little Flocker was a pain to configure. The new per-app, per-dir setup is much easier, and doesn’t require any install.

It stops random data exfiltration and ransomware dead. I don’t know why people are complaining about it.

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