16 ms·

High Sierra seems like a great OS if you want an unstable workstation that doesn't work with tools you've used everyday for well over a decade.

gargravarr 9y ago
As a sysadmin at my company, I have regular questions from my users (C++ developers) about upgrading from Sierra to High Sierra due to Apple's invasive and unavoidable notifications. After the root-exploit balls-up, I forced the two people who'd upgraded back onto plain Sierra. But I know at some point it'll stop giving us the option to ignore. I am beyond flabbergasted at how much these idiots have managed to break between Sierra and HS. They must literally be high when they say 'this is good, let's ship it'. The OS is abysmally unfinished, and with each of these stupid failures we're going past Vista levels of unfinished. These are tools I use in my daily workflow (thankfully I use Linux instead), and other developers in my company use these tools. At this point, upgrading to HS would be a massive step backwards for us. I literally cannot believe how sh*t MacOS has become. It's a cesspit of broken Unix with a shiny iOS layer covering it. I absolutely loved Snow Leopard and cannot believe it has evolved (or mutated) into this. I'm beyond pleading and into exasperation. APPLE, WILL YOU MAKE AN OS WE CAN ACTUALLY USE?!
RGS1811 9y ago
I came for the filesystem bugs, I stayed for the absurd root exploit, but its the little crashes, rendering glitches, and feeling of general instability that made me fall in love with High Sierra...
- donatj 9y ago
  APFS has been nothing but pain for me. File system changes show up in Finder minutes later! I should have stayed in Sierra.
  - tomjakubowski 9y ago
    Unfortunately, it seems Apple has forced us to choose between Meltdown mitigation and a somewhat working OS. The recent Sierra security updates didn’t include the Meltdown patch. https://twitter.com/theregister/status/949358083431546880 https://twitter.com/theregister/status/949358083431546880
    - sgolestane 9y ago
      Apple has actually backported the fix to Sierra and even El Capitan. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208331 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208331
      - bangonkeyboard 9y ago
        The tweet in the post you replied to points out that the page that you linked to was altered today to no longer say the fixes extended to those two.
      - alwillis 9y ago
        My educated guess, based on 14-years working for MIT’s IT department: the fixes for Sierra and El Capitan broke something important, so they got pulled. When they get fixed, they’ll be re-released…
  - themistocle 9y ago
    And to think that ZFS for FreeBSD had already been up and running for years...
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Not on 1B devices.
      - danieldk 9y ago
        Maybe not on 1 billion devices, but ZFS was running on mission-critical Sun/Oracle hardware with expensive support contracts for many years. ZFS is currently probably the most reliable modern filesystem. Still, rolling out APFS on such a large number of iDevices/Macs is a very impressive feat (although APFS is, of course, a simpler filesystem). The problems are with many of the 'edge cases' (RAID, etc.). This is not really surprising, btrfs has been in development since 2007 and still has problems with more complex setups.
  - qubex 9y ago
    My MacMini6,2 (2012 Server) has two SSDs RAIDed together. High Sierra beta worked fine and upgraded fine to golden master and subsequent. When I decided to reinstall my OS from scratch and reload from backups I discovered to my horror that mine was not a supported configuration and there was no way in hell I would be getting back to where I started from. This happened on the 20th November. I finally managed to boot my system again on the 20th December. After failing to re-enable RAID I broke my system into individual root and /User partitions on separate drives (or tried to) and discovered that APFS (Encrypted) and /etc/fstab don’t get along. I re-defined my home folder to be on the second drive but cannot log in until I’ve logged into a utility account and mounted the encrypted partition separately. Currently permissions are so fucked up I can’t even stream music from iTunes. On Monday I’m gonna nuke it again and try another route from scratch. Throughout this Apple Support has been anything but (aborting when for some reason my Mini’s S/N failed to match their records for Server machines, and thus bailing on me on the premise that I shouldn’t have RAID anyway so basically screw me.)
    - gargravarr 9y ago
      I've felt for a long time that Apple have lost interest in their end-user computers. MacOS Server has long seemed like 'if you REALLY want it, here, have fun'. But the tools tended to work. SoftRAID somehow works fine on Windows, why not on Mac. Can't imagine how much pain you've been through with this. Got enough backups to revert back to Sierra?
- samsonradu 9y ago
  Rendering glitches when in Chrome are awful indeed and happen way too often
- calinet6 9y ago
  Secret hint: if it's an older mac, try the NVIDIA Web Driver for the video driver.
  - RGS1811 9y ago
    It's a 2017 MBP with touchbar (and a Radeon GPU).
dm319 9y ago
I'm not a developer, but I knew developers were previously content with Macbooks usually running OSX or linux. Given so much unhappiness with OSX, and the inability to run linux on the USB-C macbook pros, what are developers generally doing? The Apple hardware is nice, but it generally means you have to use OSX. Windows WSL is pretty convenient, but then you have to use Windows. Linux is, of course, great, but what hardware?
- city41 9y ago
  I switched to Linux running on ThinkPads (between work and my personal laptop I have a Carbon, T470s and a T450). I have generally found ThinkPad hardware is very compatible with Linux.
- E765 9y ago
  I recently bought a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. I'm pretty happy with it.
  - voltagex_ 9y ago
    A useful filter when buying laptops is "does this laptop have the service manual accessible to mortals?" Handily filters down to 2 companies: Dell and Lenovo. I am unsure about Librem and PogoLinux.
    - opencl 9y ago
      HP has service manuals available too, including their consumer models. Oddly they come with the disclaimer "IMPORTANT! This document is intended for HP authorized service providers only." which makes you wonder why it's available to download from the support website.
- folkhack 9y ago
  Thinkpads. I moved from Windows 7 to Debian 8 a year or so ago and have never looked back (except for the Adobe Suite...) I use an OSX Macbook Pro for my 9-5 and have been avoiding High Sierra forever - it's just a slap in the face. At least I know my Debian 8 box will almost always operate as expected - even through a distribution release. I need stability from my system, and there's just no other option anymore.
pavlov 9y ago
After updating to High Sierra, OmniGraffle, an app that I use fairly regularly, stopped working. The only available solution was to buy a $50 update to the latest version. At least Omni Group should be happy about macOS 10.13. In Omni's view, my software was hopelessly outdated... But in reality it worked just fine for my needs even though it wasn't the latest version. I had bought the license in November 2009, so exactly eight years before Apple broke it for good. Microsoft would never break compatibility with a major Windows app from only eight years ago. I've accepted Apple's hostility towards older 3rd party software in exchange for a sense of forward momentum in the OS, but that pact seems to be history now with High Sierra largely feeling like a step back.
- shakna 9y ago
  > Microsoft would never break compatibility with a major Windows app from only eight years ago. Microsoft is nearly pathalogic in this. I still run some programs I bought for DOS today on Windows 10, because they're COM files. Still works the same. Apple has always broken things on the other hand, but with the promise of a stable system. Which, having upgraded to High Sierra, is long gone. This feels almost like the early days of Linux. I've got WiFi breakage, graphics driver breakage, occasional filesystem breakage, and several really concerning CVEs that have come over the last few months. Never thought I'd see the day when I call Windows more stable than a *nix.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    I got to say... I have a couple MacBooks I use at home, but my work PC is a 2012 era AMD CPU with 32GB RAM and a GTX650 Ti with four random secondhand displays connected to it, running Windows 7, and I never have any issues with it.
  - Cyph0n 9y ago
    Here[1] is a short video showing the version by version upgrade of Windows 1.01 to Windows 8. Notice how essentially all user programs, system preferences (e.g., theme), and files are preserved throughout the entire process. The guy also runs an installed copy of Wolfenstein 3D on almost every version to demonstrate that it still works. The first time I saw it made me respect and appreciate the stability Windows has provided over the decades... Note: there are similar videos that show the exact same process on actual hardware. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOzkNtnaS04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOzkNtnaS04
stephen_g 9y ago
It’s weird, I keep hearing things like this but have encountered literally no issues with it on my mid-2015 MacBook Pro... Is there some particular hardware that it’s dodgy on or am I just lucky?
- sarreph 9y ago
  It's more the 2012–14 MBPs... I think Apple just couldn't be bothered to give their QA staff anything that was made before the past couple of years... I feel like my 2014 rMBP is silently yelping "What have you done to me?" every day.
  - calinet6 9y ago
    Try the NVIDIA Web Driver for video. The new Metal-based window manager doesn't play well with something about the stock video driver. NVIDIA's is faster for me.
- osteele 9y ago
  This is anecdata but… I have to reboot my late 2013 MacBook Pro a few times a week, when it freezes or becomes partially unresponsive in weird ways. Previous to High Sierra, I tried to remember to reboot it every few months, mostly out of superstition. I plan to upgrade to a 2015 model when this one dies, for the reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread and here https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/10/benjamin_button_reviews_the_new_macbook_pro/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/10/benjamin_button_reviews_the...
  - calinet6 9y ago
    Try the NVIDIA Web Driver for video. The new Metal-based window manager doesn't play well with something about the stock video driver. NVIDIA's is faster for me.
  - nexfitter 9y ago
    Can confirm that review, my first MBP was the 2015 model with El Capitan, it has been nothing but sheer joy for me. I don't even have to deal with temptation because everything that has come out since has been terrible.
malchow 9y ago
I'm on macOS High Sierra for the spontaneity. Every morning, I go to wake my Macbook Pro with two 4K USB-C connected displays and external keyboard and mouse. Will one display turn on? Both? Neither? Who knows!
- driverdan 9y ago
  That's not a new problem. My 2012 rMBP w/ 10.11 has the same issue. OS X has always had issues with multiple displays.
  - jey 9y ago
    Do you get kernel panics too if you don't follow the right sequence of "first wake from sleep then connect external monitor"? I can't believe this is still so broken. 2017 13" TouchBar MBP running 10.12.6
    - colanderman 9y ago
      For some reason those panics stopped happening to me after a year or so (2014 15" running 10.10.5 here). Now it just panics if I plug a DP cable in cockeyed.
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  Store the screen layout using serials from the EDIDs. Why it doesn’t do this and “tries” to guess their position somehow is beyond me. I use the OWC TB3 dock with dual Asus PA328qs with the latest firmware. Because of apparently some lame design decisions, in order to run dual external monitors over a single TB3 port, you need the dock, which has one DisplayPort output, then a TB3-> DisplayPort (via USB-C alt mode IIRC) dongle plugged into the dock. This is idiotic, but I wouldn’t mind so much if it actually worked consistently. This is not the case. Half the time, when I go into work and plug in, I get 30hz sync on the monitor plugged into the dock. This is when it works at all, without having to guess if the laptop is actually on, because it’s the rMBP which has no power indicators despite having a useless oled screen across the top of the keyboard. So, plug in, wait 5-30 seconds, nothing, open laptop, nothing, unplug dock, nothing, hold down fingerprint reader (the idiotic power button on the rMBP) until...nothing happens, then wait a random amount of seconds, stab it again, wait another 5-10 seconds for the Apple logo to appear, macOS boots into recovery (reset credentials screen, because it assumed that since I couldn’t log in during a boot that I need to reset my password I guess), restart, wait for disk decryption screen which doesn’t work with my wireless keyboard plugged into the dock, type in that password on the laptop keyboard, wait another few seconds for it to log in, ensure that WiFi is enabled as my normal network connection is via LAN via the dock which isn’t plugged in at this point, log in, wait for everything to start, close lid and pray that I don’t have to repeat this, wait another 5 seconds for it to actually sleep, plug dock in, mash random keys until it wakes up, log in again, rearrange monitor layout as it’s usually swapped L/R, one monitor doesn’t work, or they both don’t work again, fix that by power cycling monitors / dock, then finally maybe do some work if it’s not yet lunch time. For a ~$6k setup, it’s awful. It’d be awful for $1k. About 10 years ago, I had a Dell D830 running Fedora and later, early versions of Gnome shell. The dock powered the laptop and a mouse, keyboard, external drive, and two monitors. It was a single (albeit proprietary) connector, and the dock was fairly expensive (~$200 IIRC). It worked damn great, nearly every time, even with sleep States in Linux on a laptop 10 years ago. Why is this suddenly harder than putting a Tesla on Mars? Why don’t we have good real wireless HD displays by now? The current state of affairs with Apple laptops and docking is just sad to me. I’m almost bothered enough by it to switch jobs to go there and work on fixing it.
walshemj 9y ago
You mean having to install a MFT of additional software ala homebrew etc instead of just installing your Linux distribution of choice on a cheaper more powerful system was ever a good choice for a workstation?
alwillis 9y ago
This is why we can’t have nice things--random reports of things not working are pretty meaningless without context. Yes, it’s fodder to continue to dump on Apple—I get that. But it certainly doesn’t help solve the issue, assuming there’s really an issue in the first place. For the record, I’ve installed htop many dozens of times using Homebrew on a variety of Mac hardware and operating systems over the years and have never experienced an issues. After many years of Mac IT tech support, I can tell you: it’s usually what’s not being reported that's the problem. Was this a clean install or was it upgraded from a previous version of macOS? Are there 3rd-party kernel extensions installed? Pretty common with antivirus software and hardware drivers. When’s the last time Disk Repair was run? I’ve seen corrupted/damaged hard drives cause machines to kernel panic or hang. Did htop ever work correctly? If so, when did that change? I’d be pretty surprised to hear a new iMac that was unboxed and had Homebrew and htop installed would crash. Actually, if that were the case, they could boot into the recovery partition, format and reinstall. I clean-installed macOS High Sierra 10.13 the day it was released on a 2009 iMac and have been running the public betas and haven’t had any issues since. I’m running macOS High Sierra 10.13.3, build 17D29a. I’ve installed 157 command line and 71 GUI applications using Homebrew… As someone mentioned, it’s only the problems that are part of some narrative that make news; people like me don’t post “Hey—I’m a web developer and I’ve been using High Sierra on a nearly 10 year-old iMac with zero issues, even when running beta versions”. This doesn’t excuse Apple at all for the bugs and vulnerabilities that have been well-publicized; but lets not make it seem worse than it actually is. Apple has already starting releasing mitigations for Meltdown and Spectre, like many OS vendors are doing. I run a FreeBSD server on Digital Ocean; here’s their statement: FreeBSD was made aware of the problems in late December 2017. We're working with CPU vendors and the published papers on these attacks to mitigate them on FreeBSD. Due to the fundamental nature of the attacks, no estimate is yet available for the publication date of patches. This is pretty underwhelming, especially given the severity of these vulnerabilities.
- alwillis 9y ago
  Turns out there’s some kind of build issue with htop; the Homebrew formula has been modified to not install on High Sierra. Here’s what I got when attempting to upgrade; for the record, htop still works fine for me: ==> Upgrading 1 outdated package, with result: htop 2.0.2_1 htop: This formula either does not compile or function as expected on macOS versions newer than Sierra due to an upstream incompatibility. Error: An unsatisfied requirement failed this build.
SilasX 9y ago
Sadly, my Powerbeats headphones need me to upgrade to it in order to connect with Bluetooth. (???)
spotman 9y ago
I came for the incredibly useful touchbar and stayed for the cascade of un-exit-able menus that occur when you try to combine the awesome powers of the fingerprint reader and keychain.app
- alasdair_ 9y ago
  The one where the escape key used to be? Fuck I hate that thing...
roryisok 9y ago
It seems like every day I read a new reason not to make the update from sierra.
DavideNL 9y ago
I also, am seriously considering downgrading from High Sierra for various stability problems... i hope Apple fixes whatever went wrong. Did they shift too much developers to iOS and forgot about macOS?

gargravarr 9y ago

As a sysadmin at my company, I have regular questions from my users (C++ developers) about upgrading from Sierra to High Sierra due to Apple's invasive and unavoidable notifications. After the root-exploit balls-up, I forced the two people who'd upgraded back onto plain Sierra. But I know at some point it'll stop giving us the option to ignore. I am beyond flabbergasted at how much these idiots have managed to break between Sierra and HS. They must literally be high when they say 'this is good, let's ship it'. The OS is abysmally unfinished, and with each of these stupid failures we're going past Vista levels of unfinished. These are tools I use in my daily workflow (thankfully I use Linux instead), and other developers in my company use these tools. At this point, upgrading to HS would be a massive step backwards for us. I literally cannot believe how sh*t MacOS has become. It's a cesspit of broken Unix with a shiny iOS layer covering it. I absolutely loved Snow Leopard and cannot believe it has evolved (or mutated) into this. I'm beyond pleading and into exasperation. APPLE, WILL YOU MAKE AN OS WE CAN ACTUALLY USE?!

RGS1811 9y ago

I came for the filesystem bugs, I stayed for the absurd root exploit, but its the little crashes, rendering glitches, and feeling of general instability that made me fall in love with High Sierra...

donatj 9y ago
APFS has been nothing but pain for me. File system changes show up in Finder minutes later! I should have stayed in Sierra.
- tomjakubowski 9y ago
  Unfortunately, it seems Apple has forced us to choose between Meltdown mitigation and a somewhat working OS. The recent Sierra security updates didn’t include the Meltdown patch. https://twitter.com/theregister/status/949358083431546880 https://twitter.com/theregister/status/949358083431546880
  - sgolestane 9y ago
    Apple has actually backported the fix to Sierra and even El Capitan. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208331 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208331
    - bangonkeyboard 9y ago
      The tweet in the post you replied to points out that the page that you linked to was altered today to no longer say the fixes extended to those two.
    - alwillis 9y ago
      My educated guess, based on 14-years working for MIT’s IT department: the fixes for Sierra and El Capitan broke something important, so they got pulled. When they get fixed, they’ll be re-released…
- themistocle 9y ago
  And to think that ZFS for FreeBSD had already been up and running for years...
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Not on 1B devices.
    - danieldk 9y ago
      Maybe not on 1 billion devices, but ZFS was running on mission-critical Sun/Oracle hardware with expensive support contracts for many years. ZFS is currently probably the most reliable modern filesystem. Still, rolling out APFS on such a large number of iDevices/Macs is a very impressive feat (although APFS is, of course, a simpler filesystem). The problems are with many of the 'edge cases' (RAID, etc.). This is not really surprising, btrfs has been in development since 2007 and still has problems with more complex setups.
- qubex 9y ago
  My MacMini6,2 (2012 Server) has two SSDs RAIDed together. High Sierra beta worked fine and upgraded fine to golden master and subsequent. When I decided to reinstall my OS from scratch and reload from backups I discovered to my horror that mine was not a supported configuration and there was no way in hell I would be getting back to where I started from. This happened on the 20th November. I finally managed to boot my system again on the 20th December. After failing to re-enable RAID I broke my system into individual root and /User partitions on separate drives (or tried to) and discovered that APFS (Encrypted) and /etc/fstab don’t get along. I re-defined my home folder to be on the second drive but cannot log in until I’ve logged into a utility account and mounted the encrypted partition separately. Currently permissions are so fucked up I can’t even stream music from iTunes. On Monday I’m gonna nuke it again and try another route from scratch. Throughout this Apple Support has been anything but (aborting when for some reason my Mini’s S/N failed to match their records for Server machines, and thus bailing on me on the premise that I shouldn’t have RAID anyway so basically screw me.)
  - gargravarr 9y ago
    I've felt for a long time that Apple have lost interest in their end-user computers. MacOS Server has long seemed like 'if you REALLY want it, here, have fun'. But the tools tended to work. SoftRAID somehow works fine on Windows, why not on Mac. Can't imagine how much pain you've been through with this. Got enough backups to revert back to Sierra?
samsonradu 9y ago
Rendering glitches when in Chrome are awful indeed and happen way too often
calinet6 9y ago
Secret hint: if it's an older mac, try the NVIDIA Web Driver for the video driver.
- RGS1811 9y ago
  It's a 2017 MBP with touchbar (and a Radeon GPU).

dm319 9y ago

I'm not a developer, but I knew developers were previously content with Macbooks usually running OSX or linux. Given so much unhappiness with OSX, and the inability to run linux on the USB-C macbook pros, what are developers generally doing? The Apple hardware is nice, but it generally means you have to use OSX. Windows WSL is pretty convenient, but then you have to use Windows. Linux is, of course, great, but what hardware?

city41 9y ago
I switched to Linux running on ThinkPads (between work and my personal laptop I have a Carbon, T470s and a T450). I have generally found ThinkPad hardware is very compatible with Linux.
E765 9y ago
I recently bought a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. I'm pretty happy with it.
- voltagex_ 9y ago
  A useful filter when buying laptops is "does this laptop have the service manual accessible to mortals?" Handily filters down to 2 companies: Dell and Lenovo. I am unsure about Librem and PogoLinux.
  - opencl 9y ago
    HP has service manuals available too, including their consumer models. Oddly they come with the disclaimer "IMPORTANT! This document is intended for HP authorized service providers only." which makes you wonder why it's available to download from the support website.
folkhack 9y ago
Thinkpads. I moved from Windows 7 to Debian 8 a year or so ago and have never looked back (except for the Adobe Suite...) I use an OSX Macbook Pro for my 9-5 and have been avoiding High Sierra forever - it's just a slap in the face. At least I know my Debian 8 box will almost always operate as expected - even through a distribution release. I need stability from my system, and there's just no other option anymore.

pavlov 9y ago

After updating to High Sierra, OmniGraffle, an app that I use fairly regularly, stopped working. The only available solution was to buy a $50 update to the latest version. At least Omni Group should be happy about macOS 10.13. In Omni's view, my software was hopelessly outdated... But in reality it worked just fine for my needs even though it wasn't the latest version. I had bought the license in November 2009, so exactly eight years before Apple broke it for good. Microsoft would never break compatibility with a major Windows app from only eight years ago. I've accepted Apple's hostility towards older 3rd party software in exchange for a sense of forward momentum in the OS, but that pact seems to be history now with High Sierra largely feeling like a step back.

shakna 9y ago
> Microsoft would never break compatibility with a major Windows app from only eight years ago. Microsoft is nearly pathalogic in this. I still run some programs I bought for DOS today on Windows 10, because they're COM files. Still works the same. Apple has always broken things on the other hand, but with the promise of a stable system. Which, having upgraded to High Sierra, is long gone. This feels almost like the early days of Linux. I've got WiFi breakage, graphics driver breakage, occasional filesystem breakage, and several really concerning CVEs that have come over the last few months. Never thought I'd see the day when I call Windows more stable than a *nix.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  I got to say... I have a couple MacBooks I use at home, but my work PC is a 2012 era AMD CPU with 32GB RAM and a GTX650 Ti with four random secondhand displays connected to it, running Windows 7, and I never have any issues with it.
- Cyph0n 9y ago
  Here[1] is a short video showing the version by version upgrade of Windows 1.01 to Windows 8. Notice how essentially all user programs, system preferences (e.g., theme), and files are preserved throughout the entire process. The guy also runs an installed copy of Wolfenstein 3D on almost every version to demonstrate that it still works. The first time I saw it made me respect and appreciate the stability Windows has provided over the decades... Note: there are similar videos that show the exact same process on actual hardware. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOzkNtnaS04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOzkNtnaS04

stephen_g 9y ago

It’s weird, I keep hearing things like this but have encountered literally no issues with it on my mid-2015 MacBook Pro... Is there some particular hardware that it’s dodgy on or am I just lucky?

sarreph 9y ago
It's more the 2012–14 MBPs... I think Apple just couldn't be bothered to give their QA staff anything that was made before the past couple of years... I feel like my 2014 rMBP is silently yelping "What have you done to me?" every day.
- calinet6 9y ago
  Try the NVIDIA Web Driver for video. The new Metal-based window manager doesn't play well with something about the stock video driver. NVIDIA's is faster for me.
osteele 9y ago
This is anecdata but… I have to reboot my late 2013 MacBook Pro a few times a week, when it freezes or becomes partially unresponsive in weird ways. Previous to High Sierra, I tried to remember to reboot it every few months, mostly out of superstition. I plan to upgrade to a 2015 model when this one dies, for the reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread and here https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/10/benjamin_button_reviews_the_new_macbook_pro/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/10/benjamin_button_reviews_the...
- calinet6 9y ago
  Try the NVIDIA Web Driver for video. The new Metal-based window manager doesn't play well with something about the stock video driver. NVIDIA's is faster for me.
- nexfitter 9y ago
  Can confirm that review, my first MBP was the 2015 model with El Capitan, it has been nothing but sheer joy for me. I don't even have to deal with temptation because everything that has come out since has been terrible.

malchow 9y ago

I'm on macOS High Sierra for the spontaneity. Every morning, I go to wake my Macbook Pro with two 4K USB-C connected displays and external keyboard and mouse. Will one display turn on? Both? Neither? Who knows!

driverdan 9y ago
That's not a new problem. My 2012 rMBP w/ 10.11 has the same issue. OS X has always had issues with multiple displays.
- jey 9y ago
  Do you get kernel panics too if you don't follow the right sequence of "first wake from sleep then connect external monitor"? I can't believe this is still so broken. 2017 13" TouchBar MBP running 10.12.6
  - colanderman 9y ago
    For some reason those panics stopped happening to me after a year or so (2014 15" running 10.10.5 here). Now it just panics if I plug a DP cable in cockeyed.
seanp2k2 9y ago
Store the screen layout using serials from the EDIDs. Why it doesn’t do this and “tries” to guess their position somehow is beyond me. I use the OWC TB3 dock with dual Asus PA328qs with the latest firmware. Because of apparently some lame design decisions, in order to run dual external monitors over a single TB3 port, you need the dock, which has one DisplayPort output, then a TB3-> DisplayPort (via USB-C alt mode IIRC) dongle plugged into the dock. This is idiotic, but I wouldn’t mind so much if it actually worked consistently. This is not the case. Half the time, when I go into work and plug in, I get 30hz sync on the monitor plugged into the dock. This is when it works at all, without having to guess if the laptop is actually on, because it’s the rMBP which has no power indicators despite having a useless oled screen across the top of the keyboard. So, plug in, wait 5-30 seconds, nothing, open laptop, nothing, unplug dock, nothing, hold down fingerprint reader (the idiotic power button on the rMBP) until...nothing happens, then wait a random amount of seconds, stab it again, wait another 5-10 seconds for the Apple logo to appear, macOS boots into recovery (reset credentials screen, because it assumed that since I couldn’t log in during a boot that I need to reset my password I guess), restart, wait for disk decryption screen which doesn’t work with my wireless keyboard plugged into the dock, type in that password on the laptop keyboard, wait another few seconds for it to log in, ensure that WiFi is enabled as my normal network connection is via LAN via the dock which isn’t plugged in at this point, log in, wait for everything to start, close lid and pray that I don’t have to repeat this, wait another 5 seconds for it to actually sleep, plug dock in, mash random keys until it wakes up, log in again, rearrange monitor layout as it’s usually swapped L/R, one monitor doesn’t work, or they both don’t work again, fix that by power cycling monitors / dock, then finally maybe do some work if it’s not yet lunch time. For a ~$6k setup, it’s awful. It’d be awful for $1k. About 10 years ago, I had a Dell D830 running Fedora and later, early versions of Gnome shell. The dock powered the laptop and a mouse, keyboard, external drive, and two monitors. It was a single (albeit proprietary) connector, and the dock was fairly expensive (~$200 IIRC). It worked damn great, nearly every time, even with sleep States in Linux on a laptop 10 years ago. Why is this suddenly harder than putting a Tesla on Mars? Why don’t we have good real wireless HD displays by now? The current state of affairs with Apple laptops and docking is just sad to me. I’m almost bothered enough by it to switch jobs to go there and work on fixing it.

walshemj 9y ago

You mean having to install a MFT of additional software ala homebrew etc instead of just installing your Linux distribution of choice on a cheaper more powerful system was ever a good choice for a workstation?

alwillis 9y ago

This is why we can’t have nice things--random reports of things not working are pretty meaningless without context. Yes, it’s fodder to continue to dump on Apple—I get that. But it certainly doesn’t help solve the issue, assuming there’s really an issue in the first place. For the record, I’ve installed htop many dozens of times using Homebrew on a variety of Mac hardware and operating systems over the years and have never experienced an issues. After many years of Mac IT tech support, I can tell you: it’s usually what’s not being reported that's the problem. Was this a clean install or was it upgraded from a previous version of macOS? Are there 3rd-party kernel extensions installed? Pretty common with antivirus software and hardware drivers. When’s the last time Disk Repair was run? I’ve seen corrupted/damaged hard drives cause machines to kernel panic or hang. Did htop ever work correctly? If so, when did that change? I’d be pretty surprised to hear a new iMac that was unboxed and had Homebrew and htop installed would crash. Actually, if that were the case, they could boot into the recovery partition, format and reinstall. I clean-installed macOS High Sierra 10.13 the day it was released on a 2009 iMac and have been running the public betas and haven’t had any issues since. I’m running macOS High Sierra 10.13.3, build 17D29a. I’ve installed 157 command line and 71 GUI applications using Homebrew… As someone mentioned, it’s only the problems that are part of some narrative that make news; people like me don’t post “Hey—I’m a web developer and I’ve been using High Sierra on a nearly 10 year-old iMac with zero issues, even when running beta versions”. This doesn’t excuse Apple at all for the bugs and vulnerabilities that have been well-publicized; but lets not make it seem worse than it actually is. Apple has already starting releasing mitigations for Meltdown and Spectre, like many OS vendors are doing. I run a FreeBSD server on Digital Ocean; here’s their statement: FreeBSD was made aware of the problems in late December 2017. We're working with CPU vendors and the published papers on these attacks to mitigate them on FreeBSD. Due to the fundamental nature of the attacks, no estimate is yet available for the publication date of patches. This is pretty underwhelming, especially given the severity of these vulnerabilities.

alwillis 9y ago
Turns out there’s some kind of build issue with htop; the Homebrew formula has been modified to not install on High Sierra. Here’s what I got when attempting to upgrade; for the record, htop still works fine for me: ==> Upgrading 1 outdated package, with result: htop 2.0.2_1 htop: This formula either does not compile or function as expected on macOS versions newer than Sierra due to an upstream incompatibility. Error: An unsatisfied requirement failed this build.

SilasX 9y ago

Sadly, my Powerbeats headphones need me to upgrade to it in order to connect with Bluetooth. (???)

spotman 9y ago

I came for the incredibly useful touchbar and stayed for the cascade of un-exit-able menus that occur when you try to combine the awesome powers of the fingerprint reader and keychain.app

alasdair_ 9y ago
The one where the escape key used to be? Fuck I hate that thing...

roryisok 9y ago

It seems like every day I read a new reason not to make the update from sierra.

DavideNL 9y ago

I also, am seriously considering downgrading from High Sierra for various stability problems... i hope Apple fixes whatever went wrong. Did they shift too much developers to iOS and forgot about macOS?