42 ms·

MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

• nromiun 6y ago
  > This is not just for files downloaded from the internet, nor is it only when you launch them via Finder, this is everything. So even if you write a one line shell script and run it in a terminal, you will get a delay! > Apple’s most recent OS where it appears that low-level system API such as exec and getxattr now do synchronous network activity before returning to the caller. Can anyone confirm this? Because honestly this is just terrifying. I don't think even Windows authorises every process from a server. This doesn't sound good for both privacy and speed.
  • greatjack613 6y ago
    Privacy it may be a plus since in theory notarization provides some protection. Speed, definitely not, this is going to make things slowwwww
    • tromp 6y ago
      > provides some protection. That's security, not privacy...
      • sooheon 6y ago
        Although insecurity leads to less privacy as well.
        • ashtonkem 6y ago
          Insecurity leads to loss of privacy, but security does not lead to privacy. Things can be secure and non-private by design.
        • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
          Sometimes, but sometimes security measures lead to less privacy. Say, if executing local programs sends information to a remote server.
          • Razengan 6y ago
            If that information can’t be used to identify anyone then it retains privacy while being secure. Being slow would still be an issue.
            • simion314 6y ago
              But you can't be 100% sure that the server where the information is sent is not putting in a database your IP, the app you run and whatever else. As a power user I would prefer a prompt before anything is sent.
  • mbreese 6y ago
    There are two new Security/Privacy Settings that I just noticed last night. "Full Disk Access" to allow a program to access any place on your computer without a warning. A few programs requested this, so it looks like it's been around for a while. The other one is "Developer Tools" and it looks pretty new. The only application requesting it is "Terminal". This "allows app to run software locally that do not meet the system's security policy". So, my reading of this is that in Terminal, you could run scripts that are unsigned and not be penalized speed-wise.
    • 0x0 6y ago
      I wonder what "Developer Tools" grants in practice. Clicking the (?) for viewing built-in help does not mention this particular setting, it skips right over it going from "Automation" above it to "Advertising" below it.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • saagarjha 6y ago
        I believe it means the process will no longer check for the Quarantine xattr.
        • 0x0 6y ago
          But the quarantine xattr has nothing to do with checking notarization?
    • oefrha 6y ago
      I don't see it on macOS 10.15.4 (19E287). The full list of categories on my Privacy tab: - Location Services - Contacts - Calendars - Reminders - Photos - Camera - Microphone - Speech Recognition - Accessibility - Input Monitoring - Full Disk Access - Files and Folders - Screen Recording - Automation - Advertising - Analytics & Improvements Granted I don't typically use Terminal.app (iTerm 2 user), so I launched terminal and did some privileged stuff. Had to grant Full Disk Access to, say, `ls ~/Library/Mail`, but "Developer Tools" never popped up. Are you running a beta build or something? --- Update: Okay, I checked on my other machine and that one does have it (Terminal is listed but disabled by default). What in the actual fuck?!?
  • ccmcarey 6y ago
    How could this possibly not be absolutely awful on projects that run hundreds of executables during their execution (e.g. some shell wrappers like oh-my-zsh call out to a large amount of different scripts every time they run).
    • parhamn 6y ago
      It looks like it is done once by executable lifetime. Changing the content doesn't cause it to rerun.
    • gowld 6y ago
      If you don’t trust Apple, don’t run a multi Gigabyte closed source OS they provide.
  • parhamn 6y ago
    I can confirm that executing a trivial script takes 20-200ms longer on the first run. Using 10.15.
  • neurobashing 6y ago
    not sure if I'm lucky or somehow I disabled something but the trivial script problem isn't affecting me on any of my machines. I am using Homebrew for a large % of command line/scripting so maybe that's why?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • dTal 6y ago
    Making this about speed is burying the lede. From a privacy and user-freedom perspective, it's horrifying. Don't think so? Apple now theoretically has a centralized database of every Mac user who's ever used youtube-dl. Or Tor. Or TrueCrypt.
    • threeseed 6y ago
      Apple already has every iPhone user's photos, messages, browsing history, keychains etc. Not sure how a list of installed apps is going to be worse than that.
      • saagarjha 6y ago
        Not if you choose to not sync them.
        • radicaldreamer 6y ago
          Yup, you can choose to not use iCloud backup and back up offline in an encrypted way (even over wifi) if you’d like.
    • gitgud 6y ago
      Richard Stallman's ideals have become a bit less crazy for me now... Either you have the ability to control the software, or it controls you
      • verytrivial 6y ago
        I think coming to this realisation about Stallman's ideas (not the man, mind) is something that most rational computer users are bound to do. It happens at different times for different people, but I think people very rarely go back after that "Hang on a second ....??" moment.
        • m463 6y ago
          I remember once he said "proprietary software subjugates people" and I just sort of blinked a bit. It seemed sort of over the top. And over time I started to understand that the way things end up working out, it is very true.
• marcinzm 6y ago
  If Microsoft wasn't doing ever worse privacy things with Windows I'd seriously look into switching away from Mac OS given the ever growing issues it's been having with every release.
  • lol768 6y ago
    The set of possible operating systems to consider does not contain two items.
    • nsxwolf 6y ago
      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.
      • C1sc0cat 6y ago
        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.
      • Accacin 6y ago
        I found at least in Gnome and KDE Plasma window management works pretty much just how Windows works. Cut and paste it just cut and paste - Do you mean how you can select text and use middle click on the mouse to paste without even needing to do anything but select?
        • rrdharan 6y ago
          There are two X clipboards. They are implemented differently (as in "ownership" model of the content) and the implementation bleeds out everywhere. You can't remove or change this behavior because some people love it. EDIT: FWIW the above statements are oversimplifying the situation of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_selection And more here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/13585/how-can-i-use-just-one-unified-clipboard-even-for-intellijs-copy-path https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/13585/how-can-i-use... Most fans of Linux will claim the fact that you can choose any number of clipboard managers to customize things to your liking is a critical aspect that draws them to the platform. Others among us (whether reformed or uninitiated) will commonly cite this same stuff as the reasons we avoid Linux on the desktop.
• davidvartan 6y ago
  > a degraded user experience, as the first time a user runs a new executable, Apple delays execution while waiting for a reply from their server. The way to avoid this behavior is to staple the notarization ticket to your bundle (or dmg/pkg), i.e. "/usr/bin/stapler staple <path>." Otherwise, Gatekeeper will fetch the ticket and staple it for the user on the first run. (I'm the author of xcnotary [1], a tool to make notarization way less painful, including uploading to Apple/polling for completion/stapling/troubleshooting various code signing issues.) [1] https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary
  • oefrha 6y ago
    I mean, when I’m developing in a compiled language with the workflow edit code -> compile -> run (with forced stapling), changing it to edit code -> compile -> staple -> run doesn’t make it any less slow...
    • davidvartan 6y ago
      Notarization/stapling/etc. is for distribution only, not generally part of your dev workflow.
      • oefrha 6y ago
        But TFA and my personal experience do point to a noticeable delay after each recompile in dev workflows, and TFA claims this is due to notarization checks... So I guess I’m confused and you’re talking about something else?
      • rgrs 6y ago
        How does mac identify a dev workflow and normal workflow?
        • jmercouris 6y ago
          When you use XCode you have different compilation options.
• commandlinefan 6y ago
  I can't upgrade IntelliJ any more, because it's trying to write to privileged file locations that I (the owner of the computer) no longer have access to. Believe me, I've tried to work around this, macOS has it locked down completely.
  • mschuster91 6y ago
    You can disable SIP in recovery mode.
  • stephenr 6y ago
    ... Can you elaborate? I use IntelliJ on a daily basis on Catalina, and I have zero issues updating it.
  • ehutch79 6y ago
    Why do you need access to the areas protected by SIP?
    • commandlinefan 6y ago
      Beats me - it's a common problem, though: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40251201/upgrading-intellij-idea-after-sierra-upgrade-does-not-have-write-access-to-pri/41383566#41383566 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40251201/upgrading-intel.... The only thing that ever worked was uninstalling and reinstalling the whole thing.
  • dfabulich 6y ago
    The latest IntelliJ 2020.1.1 works out of the box on macOS 10.15.4, without disabling System Integrity Protection (SIP). Whatever problem you're having, it's a problem specific to your machine.
  • tebruno99 6y ago
    I use and upgrade IntelliJ fine. Install Jetbrains Toolbox and everything is installed in your home dir. What kind of locations are you having troubles with?
• oasisbob 6y ago
  Reminds me of the terrible delay I faced after having Sophos installed on my Mac. Having to wait 5-10 seconds for a new terminal tab as Sophos churns (checking autoccomplete scripts, rbenv, etc) was infuriating. Oddly, there was fate sharing with Internet interception, so there was a good chance the browser was getting dragged down too, and vice versa. Convincing corporate IT of how bad the problem was was maddening. Based on what this author says, 10.15 on rural internet sounds like hell.
• leephillips 6y ago
  This is completely insane. I am so glad I decided years ago to leave closed operating systems behind. This design seems to cement the trend at Apple to position their products as consumer appliances, not platforms useful for development.
  • Nextgrid 6y ago
    > 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.
    • kick 6y ago
      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.
      • addicted44 6y ago
        This is a good point. It's really hard for me to use non i3wm supporting OSes now, even though I have to use Windows from work, and have used Macs for the better part of the last 2 decades personally and in college.
      • BruceEel 6y ago
        Interesting. I regularly use RHEL (server/CLI only) but have not tried desktop Linux in a while. I get a fair bit of weekly exposure to Windows 10 and well, it's not like heaps of fun, UX wise. I'm reluctant to drop Apple mainly because I'm so 'tied up' with the rest of the ecosystem, iphone, Apple Music, iCloud etc.. They are not irreplaceable (for sure) but it always feels like moving away will cost way too much effort and be a pain... Well played, Apple.
• skykooler 6y ago
  If it checks with Apple servers every time you execute a new binary, what happens if you don't have an Internet connection? Are you just unable to run new code?
  • cpncrunch 6y ago
    The article says "One way to solve the delays is to disable your internet connection" so I assume it just doesn't bother with notarization when you do that.
    • zmmmmm 6y ago
      Which makes a mockery of the whole security angle - how can this be utterly essential for security while connected and then just tossed aside as optional as soon as you exit Wifi range? It can't be both.
  • nromiun 6y ago
    > One way to solve the delays is to disable your internet connection. I think it just skips the checks if internet isn't available. But doesn't that kind of defeats the point of notarization?
    • lallysingh 6y ago
      Hopefully you're also less likely to get new unsafe binaries when disconnected. But it's all still awful.
  • OskarS 6y ago
    The linked website isn't loading, so I don't know what it says, but: if we're talking about notarization, you can "staple" the notarization to a .app or a .pkg, which means you don't have to do the internet lookup at all, and you can run the apps without having access to the internet. I'm not sure about the technical details, but I would assume you add some sort of signature that's like "This .app with hash X has been notarized and it's fine" signed by Apple's secret key. EDIT: how to staple: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/notarizing_macos_software_before_distribution/customizing_the_notarization_workflow#3087720 https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/notarizing_m...
• oefrha 6y ago
  Damn, I too have noticed that when developing in compiled languages (C, C++, Go, Rust, what have you) the first execution after a recompile is always noticeably delayed. I thought it was odd but didn’t bother digging into it. This must be why! (Can’t recall having this problem with scripting languages, but maybe subsequent modifications don’t trigger a notarization check? Edit: Yeah TFA does mention this.)
• mkchoi212 6y ago
  I understand the purpose of notarization but I feel like they could've come up with a much better solution to this. A network call __everytime__ someone runs an executable is not acceptable. But for the cases where the user is offline, Apple must keep a list of notarized apps on the machine...
• beders 6y ago
  You should know by now: Apple is the Father, Apple is the Mother. After Apple has re-invented or re-written the MSFT playbook of the 90s, nothing surprises me anymore. Yet I cling to these machines, that take away the freedom to do with my hardware as I please. It's odd.
  • inimino 6y ago
    The UX is good. Freedom has always been a little more subtle.
• Nextgrid 6y ago
  I've been forced to update to this pile of shit because latest iOS requires latest Xcode which in turn requires Catalina. It's a nightmare. First off the new apps (music, podcasts, etc) are terrible. They killed off iTunes but replaced it with much worse. These apps don't behave like standard macOS apps, the UI is full of inconsistencies and is just so empty. This website has nice examples of the failures of modern Mac OS: https://annoying.technology https://annoying.technology For some reason after updating the "new updates" badge was stuck on the system preferences icon (and even on the preference pane itself) despite no updates being available. I ended up having to delete a plist and reboot to fix it, apparently a common issue. The Mail app will now randomly play the "new mail" sound. I can't confirm it for sure but I'm assuming it's treating read, existing mails when they are moved to the trash/archive or newly created drafts. They screwed up the mail app, a problem that has been solved for decades. WTF? The worst is that I see no major changes in there, so why touch the mail client in the first place if you're not even going to give me additional features in exchange? Xcode was stuck upgrading in the App Store. It would start the process and never make any progress. Cancelling it had no effect. Rebooting cancelled it but the second attempt, while making progress, ended up failing with a generic error message with no actual information. Logs are useless because they're being spammed by all the background processes even during normal operation making it impossible to find anything. Finally the third attempt succeeded. 1Password now takes 5 more seconds to unlock my password database. Somehow this disgrace of an OS slowed down the password hashing process by an order of magnitude. Switching screen resolutions or connecting to an external screen takes a good 10 seconds of flickering and frozen UI before everything starts working again. This is now actually worse than both Windows and Linux. I dread moving the laptop or touching the USB-C cable (also because USB-C is so brittle) when it's connected to an external monitor out of fear that it'll disconnect/reconnect and I end up in a 30-second cycle of flickering. I upgraded a couple of days ago, so those are not early bugs. Apple had a year to fix all of this. The Xcode thing might be an isolated issue but there's no excuse for the general performance penalty or the stuck update badge which has many hits on search engines suggesting it's a widespread issue.
  • davidvartan 6y ago
    Re: downloading Xcode, this page has saved me hours: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10335747/how-to-download-xcode-dmg-or-xip-file https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10335747/how-to-download.... It's just a list of direct links to each version of Xcode at apple.com. Mystery why Mac App Store downloads still can't be bulletproof after all these years.
• heinrichhartman 6y ago
  > [...] it appears that low-level system API such as exec and getxattr now do synchronous network activity before returning to the caller. WTAF. If this is really true, this is a reason for me to leave the platform for good. This is just in-acceptable in so many ways.
• ronyfadel 6y ago
  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.
  • pier25 6y ago
    > 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/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/04/30/apple-2q-2020-earnings/
    • qppo 6y ago
      It's surprising that they don't improve the developer experience for their own developers using their own tools, including hardware.
      • pier25 6y ago
        Maybe internally they are using a different version of macOS?
        • azinman2 6y ago
          Nope
        • saagarjha 6y ago
          It’s basically the same ones you’re running, possibly a couple builds ahead and with all the security features turned off.
      • saagarjha 6y ago
        Apple uses the same tools you do. They just might not be using it like you are; you can find a lot of features that clearly have no reason to exist outside of Apple nonetheless shipping with their software.
• kar1181 6y ago
  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.
  • massysett 6y ago
    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.
    • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      Still doesn't give you a programming environment, unless you want to do bash.
      • armatav 6y ago
        How does that even make sense? It’s an OS, go grab a Desktop Environment and download nvim, VSCode or whatever.
        • goatinaboat 6y ago
          How does that even make sense? Because that was the experience on those old machines. Switch it on, straight to BASIC prompt in a second or so. If you want to program it’s frictionless. And you can’t break it because BASIC is in ROM.
          • harpratap 6y ago
            Flexibility vs complexity is a slippery slope.
          • cycomanic 6y ago
            If you want that today get a BBC microbit, switch on and you're directly in a python environment
• rb808 6y ago
  The weird thing is the price of windows laptops have skyrocketed with the shortages. New MBPs are cheaper than X1 Carbons and XPSs with 10gen chips.
  • jarjoura 6y ago
    Every other week Lenovo has some crazy 25-50% off coupon for their laptops.
  • asdff 6y ago
    New MBP with a 10th gen chip is a $600 upgrade over the base model with an 8th gen chip.
• jaimehrubiks 6y ago
  In our company many of us have similar issues. I have always loved OSX but this time it is driving me crazy. I though the issue was some sort of company antivirus/firewall, or it could even be a combination of that and this issue (maybe my vpn + path to company firewall is what magnifies the issue in this post). The thing is that some commands take 1 second, some others take 2 minutes or even more. Actually, some commands slow down the computer until they are finished (more likely, until they just decide to start). For example, I can run "terraform apply" and it could take up to 5 minutes to start, leaving my computer almost unusable until it runs. The weird thing is that this only happens sometimes. In some cases, I restart the laptop and it starts working a little bit faster, but the issue comes back after some time. It's already been a few months since I try to run every command from a VM in a remote location, since I am tired of waiting for my commands to start. I have a macbook air from 2013 which never had this issue. Any easy fix that I could test? Disconnecting from the internet is not an option. Disabling SIP could be tried, but I think I already did and didn't seem to fix it, plus it is not a good idea for a company laptop. Don't we have some sort of hosts file or firewall that we can use to block or fake the connectivity to apple servers?
  • dcow 6y ago
    A command like `terraform` shouldn't trigger the check because the quarantine system is bypassed altogether when you download and extract an archive. Maybe this is a red herring and your initial gut inkling is correct.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    Try sampling the process as it starts; I doubt your issue is the one shown here.
  • derefr 6y ago
    IIRC the big thing that changed with 10.15 for CLI applications is that BSD-userland processes (i.e. ones that don't go through all the macOS Frameworks, but just call libc syscall wrappers like fopen(2)) now also deal with sandboxing, since the BSD syscall ABI is now reimplemented in terms of macOS security capabilities. Certain BSD-syscall-ABI operations like fopen(2) and readdir(2) are now not-so-fast by default, because the OS has to do a synchronous check of the individual process binary's capabilities before letting the syscall through. But POSIX utilities were written to assume that these operations were fast-ish, and therefore they do tons of them, rather than doing any sort of batching. That means that any CLI process that "walks" the filesystem is going to generate huge amounts of security-subsystem request traffic; which seemingly bottlenecks the security subsystem (OS-wide!); and so slows down the caller process and any other concurrent processes/threads that need capabilities-grants of their own. To find a fix, it's important to understand the problem in fine detail. So: the CLI process has a set of process-local capabilities (kernel tokens/handles); and whenever it tries to do something, it first tries to use these. If it turns out none of those existing capabilities let it perform the operation, then it has to request the kernel look at it, build a firewall-like "capabilities-rules program" from the collected information, and run it, to determine whether it should grant the process that capability. (This means that anything that already has capabilities granted from its code-signed capabilities manifest doesn't need to sit around waiting for this capabilities-ruleset program to be built and run. Unless the app's capabilities manifest didn't grant the specific capability it's trying to use.) Unlike macOS app-bundles, regular (i.e. freshly-compiled) BSD-userland executable binaries don't have a capabilities manifest of their own, so they don't start with any process-local capabilities. (You can embed one into them, but the process has to be "capabilities-aware" to actually make use of it, so e.g. GNU coreutils from Homebrew isn't gonna be helped by this. Oh, and it won't kick in if the program isn't also code-signed, IIRC.) But all processes inherit their capabilities from their runtime ancestors, so there's a simple fix, for the case of running CLI software interactively: grant your terminal emulator the capabilities you need through Preferences. In this case, the "Full Disk Access" capability. Then, since all your all CLI processes have your terminal emulator as a runtime ancestor-process, all your CLI processes will inherit that capability, and thus not need to spend time requesting it from the security subsystem. Note that this doesn't apply to BSD-userland executable binaries which run as LaunchDaemons, since those aren't being spawned by your terminal emulator. Those either need to learn to use capabilities for real; or, at least, they need to get exec(2)ed by a shim binary that knows how. ----- tl;dr: I had this problem (slowness in numerous CLI apps, most obvious as `brew upgrade` suddenly taking forever) after upgrading to 10.15 as well. Granting "Full Disk Access" to iTerm fixed it for me.
• thedanbob 6y ago
  Nearly every article I see about macOS or Windows these days further confirms to me that switching entirely to Linux was the right call. Maybe 2020 will be the year of the Linux Desktop by default.
  • luckydata 6y ago
    anyday now...
• jwlake 6y ago
  The funny thing is its not transitive. No slowdown if you invoke bash specifically with a new shell. % rm /tmp/test.sh ; echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh % time bash /tmp/test.sh && time bash /tmp/test.sh Hello bash /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 83% cpu 0.004 total Hello bash /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 77% cpu 0.003 total vs the one from the article: % rm /tmp/test.sh ; echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh % time /tmp/test.sh && time /tmp/test.sh Hello /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 2% cpu 0.134 total Hello /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 73% cpu 0.004 total (edited for formating)
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • azinman2 6y ago
    Are you sure it's just not cached from the prior result? If I run the article's commands twice in a row, the 2nd time is faster.
  • saurik 6y ago
    When you run "bash hello" you are calling exec() on bash, passing "hello" as an argument, which bash then reads; when you run "./hello" you are calling exec() on hello: the kernel then treats "hello" as an executable, but notes that "hello" starts with "#!" and then will run the specified interpreter for you, passing "./hello" as an argument. The kernel doesn't think of "hello" as a program when you run "bash hello".
• inimino 6y ago
  It looks like my time with MacOS is rapidly coming to an end. Any Linux distro recommendations these days?
  • dhruvkar 6y ago
    Pop_OS! By far the best linux I've tried when trying to get feature parity with macOS.
  • swebs 6y ago
    Give Pop OS a look. It's based on Ubuntu with some additional UI polish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGcvHMNaDd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGcvHMNaDd0
  • speedgoose 6y ago
    Windows 10 with WSL if you have a laptop. Debian or similar or ArchLinux if you have a desktop.
    • inimino 6y ago
      For reasons of personal prejudice, I'll never install any Windows version on any hardware I own. Debian was always my first choice back in the desktop linux days, and still is for servers, but I haven't looked at the landscape recently. It seems to have become more consolidated, which is not surprising but still mildly disappointing. Edit: and WSL is not Linux
      • speedgoose 6y ago
        I understand but for laptops it's pretty bad these days if you want all features your laptop is providing, and a good energy management. On mobile it's much better with Android, but Android isn't adapted to laptops. I haven't tried ChromeOS but it's pretty restricted from what I understood. WSL2 on Windows is Linux and it works great for me but I understand if you don't want windows in your life.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
• Terretta 6y ago
  From the comments, roughly, are you running third party "security" tools? > Is there any "security" software running on your Mac? I've seen this sort of thing caused by that, but not in general. > I ran the two line test and it had no delay at all. The Mac doesn't check for notarization on shell scripts or any non-bundle executable. I just did it again with a new test2.sh and Wireshark capture and there is nothing. > I do a lot of Keychain code and I've also never seen those delays. The reason I suspect they told you not to use that API is that it's in the "legacy" macOS keychain. They really want everyone to move to the modern keychain but lots of people, myself included, still need the older macOS specific features. > I'm not saying you are crazy, but all of these things though are the trademark reek of kernel level security software that is intercepting and scanning every exec and file read on the system. We had an issue with Cisco AMP once that took Xcode builds from under 10 seconds to over 5 minutes until we were able to get it fixed.
  • oefrha 6y ago
    The only kernel-level security software on my systems is Little Snitch, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t do anything unless there’s network activity, so it doesn’t explain anything.
• gouggoug 6y ago
  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 finally know what happened. This is a pretty intolerable "feature".
  • lallysingh 6y ago
    Does it work at all when unconnected?
    • gouggoug 6y ago
      I don't remember if it did or not, but I'm fairly certain it did. (otherwise I'd probably remember it, I think...)
    • enriquto 6y ago
      There seems to be a delay of about 5 seconds, then it "gives up" trying to notarize your program .
• api 6y ago
  All of these complaints are about security features. Yes these features could be better implemented, but I'm happy they're there. It's very important to be able to opt out of them, but I like that they're the default. Notarization needs a cleanup pass and the rest of it seems like it needs an optimization pass. P.S. The rationale for notarization is to not distribute and thus advertise the filters and detection mechanisms Apple uses to detect malware. If these things were distributed then malware authors could analyze and evade them. Security through obscurity does make a certain amount of sense here as the Church-Turing thesis means there are an infinite number of ways to implement any given thing including malware and there is no single filter or analytical step that can detect all possible malware permutations.
  • philwelch 6y ago
    The OS phoning home for every executable I want to run on my machine is a “security feature” the same way a key logger is.
  • inimino 6y ago
    Being able to run arbitrary software on the hardware Apple has graciously lent me is an annoying level of power that I'm not fully comfortable with either. I'm liable to shoot my foot off if Apple the all-seeing doesn't save me from myself.
  • JadeNB 6y ago
    > the Church-Turing thesis means there are an infinite number of ways to implement any given thing That's true (or else there are 0 ways), but it's not what the Church–Turing thesis says.
• zimpenfish 6y ago
  Their "see!" shell script example is a bit rubbish because I get 0.012s, 0.005s on this Mac laptop whilst getting 0.022s, 0.023s on Linux box 1 and 0.006s, 0.006s on Linux box 2. Changing the filename to test2.sh on the Mac (which should trigger the delay, right?) gets 0.006s, 0.006s. I don't think the shell scripts are doing what they claim (and wouldn't the second run be faster anyway because of caching?)
  • egorfine 6y ago
    If they are caching based on inode, this will not invalidate the cache. Do cp test.sh test2.sh and try again.
    • saagarjha 6y ago
      I feel like cp might do an APFS CoW and this might still cause problems…
      • ken 6y ago
        No, even "cp -c" creates a new inode.
    • zimpenfish 6y ago
      Sorry, when I said "changing the filename to test2.sh", I meant in the commands run, not `mv test.sh test2.sh`. i.e. I have both `test.sh` and `test2.sh` in `/tmp` now.
• andarleen 6y ago
  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.
• sneak 6y ago
  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?
  • m463 6y ago
    and there are a lot of background processes. running just firefox and terminal, ps -ef|wc -l is 198 and many of them have no reason to be on my system.
• halotrope 6y ago
  I am using Ubuntu 20.04 on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen2 and you would be surprised how "normal" it feels as a development machine. Sure there some little annoyances, the touchpad behaves a little worse than on windows, sound is a little worse. But the most important things, Keyboard and Screen are excellent. The system in general does not feel like the horror stories that people keep telling about linux on desktop(notebook). Now that WSL2 is getting Cuda even windows looks workable. Their new terminal app is amazing. After a decade of Mac notebooks it was quite liberating and I would not switch back even if the flaws in macOS would be fixed. It is for sure the nicest of the big 3 operating systems but for development work Ubuntu is hard to beat for me. YMMV but it won't hurt to look around you what else is there.
  • kristopolous 6y ago
    I've been seeing the trajectory of Windows (pre-2012 or so) -> Mac (2012 - ~2019 or so) -> Linux (~2018 - now) play out with quite a few people without any issues. And I don't mean developers. They're all pretty educated people but it's taken me by surprise. They come to me in frustration over Mac, they don't want to return to Windows and they really, really, really want linux. I've been using linux since about 1997 so they come to me. I usually push back, thinking "do you really want a unix workstation?!" but they insist. My strategy has been some x2xx lenovo (like x230 or so) for about $300 from ebay, 8/16gb of ram or so with an SSD, the extended battery pack, putting mint on it and then just handing it over. Everyone, much to my continued surprise, has loved it and are really happy with it. It's happened 4 times now and I'm still shocked every time. They've told me they use youtube to figure things out. They're fine with libreoffice, gimp does what they need, supposedly spotify works on it fine, they don't know what bash or the kernel is and it's all fine. Incredible.
    • alluro2 6y ago
      Adding to anecdotal, same trajectory for me, for web development. Really happy with Manjaro on Razor Blade 15 for a year now.
    • neuronic 6y ago
      Not associated at all but due to loving it, I wanted to share PhotoPea as you mentioned Gimp. https://www.photopea.com https://www.photopea.com
• Craighead 6y ago
  People please check how hot your devices are.
• AlexanderDhoore 6y ago
  I noticed recently that the first `git` command I run takes longer. This is insane. What's the status of debian on macbook?
  • ben-schaaf 6y ago
    Last I heard you can't even access the SSD on newer macbooks. If you want a good experience with running Linux on a laptop, don't use a Mac.
• e40 6y ago
  I really hope the mess that is Catalina is fixed in the next round, or I might be on Mojave until I can switch to another OS. I've been on macOS for a long time, and I really like it. I'm productive on it. But Catalina... no, I won't touch that.
• saagarjha 6y ago
  There was a thread on the almost-forgotten Cocoa-dev list about this: https://lists.apple.com/archives/cocoa-dev/2020/Apr/msg00008.html https://lists.apple.com/archives/cocoa-dev/2020/Apr/msg00008... Catalina has a huge number of things that synchronously block application launch, and if any of them fail you get nothing but a hung app. A friend and I have a running discussion of the many ways where an application would just hang and we’d send samples and spindumps, to each other trying to figure out the right daemon or agent to kill to get the process to start responding again. It’s madness.
• konart 6y ago
  I've been using linux distros (~5 years of Ubuntu and ~3 years of Arch) before switching to macOS somewhere around 2013-2014. And now years later I'm thinking about moving back. But every time I'm think about this I start with digging about current Linux situation and every time I realise than it is still a horrible system for anything outside of work, especially if you can't really do without a decent UI\UX. Apple's ecosystem is also an issue. iOS + macOS is still much better than anything on the market (no alternatives really).
  • formercoder 6y ago
    PC + WSL + somewhat illicit OS X VM has been a dream for me as a former Mac user.
    • konart 6y ago
      My mother asked me to help her out with her win 10 installation on her work notebook. This was terrible. UI is still inconsistent between apps, sometimes it feels like you are using 3 different OS from 3 different time periods. But you can get used to that I guess. OS settings are still a strange place created to make an average user (or someone who haven't been using the OS for more than a decade) feel as an idiot. No, amount the Big Three - Windows is the last place I'd look moving too. At least Linux gives me freedom at the expense of UI\UX. Windows give me... well games. I can't thing of any other reason to install linux except competitive gaming.
      • formercoder 6y ago
        Interesting it’s possible that we have different priorities, but I’m not bothered by UI inconsistencies. I use chrome, office, adobe suite, a trading application, games, VSCode, they all have different interfaces that I know how to navigate. I agree that the settings can be tough. Half the time you are in “new” stuff and half the time you’re pulling up the screens from XP. I just google what I need to do though, and never have trouble getting it done.
        • 6y ago
• unown 6y ago
  As someone living in China, this is my result when I connected to my VPN (this is my normal life, thus I can visit sites like HN): > Hello > /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 5.746 total > Hello > /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 79% cpu 0.006 total And even if I didn't connect to my VPN: > Hello > /tmp/test2.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 1.936 total > Hello > /tmp/test2.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 78% cpu 0.005 total That's just ridiculous and unbearable. Apple should provide a way to disable this notarization thing, and the user should still be able to enable SIP while disabling it. additional information: - macOS version: 10.15.4 - terminal: iTerm2 3.3.9 - didn't install any "security" software
  • ccmcarey 6y ago
    It doesn't work when there's no network connection, wonder if it would be possible to filter out and automatically block notarization traffic, or if it's all encrypted with cert pinning to prevent this type of MITM+filter.
    • ttsda 6y ago
      I'm still on 10.14, but I guess it will show up on Little Snitch. Unless they bundle it with some other more essential traffic.
    • Karliss 6y ago
      Dropping packets when there is an otherwise working connection could potentially make the delay even worse depending on timeout or retry strategy used by Apple code. I assume that in the fast case without network connection it checks the network status flag and doesn't try to do any network connection at all.
  • neonate 6y ago
    Is HN blocked in China?
    • unown 6y ago
      HN has been blocked in China since about 9 months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676573
• s800 6y ago
  Anyone of packet captures of this behavior? I'm still on 10.14, or I would check it myself.
• rch 6y ago
  High quality laptops shipping with Linux have been available for some time now. I know of a couple of companies that are providing an option for employees to switch.
• dcow 6y ago
  Can anybody actually confirm these claims? I'm no fan of the new notary system, but in my experience the behavior described is not how things work. Has there been an update or change in behavior recently? I've been running a Debian thinkpad for the last meaningful stretch of time, but from what I recall macOS quarantines any files created by the user via an extended attribute `com.apple.quarantine`. Quarantined files are not allowed to be executed by gatekeeper. It's not about a network check, they just can't be executed. If the user removes the quarantine attribute, then gatekeeper will shut up and the files will execute normally. Alternatively, if a file has a signed hash stapled to it i.e. if it has been notarized, then gatekeeper will also allow execution after verifying the signature. This doesn't require a network check either. Interestingly, the way to bypass the quarantine behavior is to unarchive a folder. Archives themselves include the quarantine attribute, however, files extracted from the archive using a terminal program (a "developer tools" program) don't. And so macOS doesn't care. Also tools like `curl` don't apply the quarantine bit to downloaded files so curling a binary or shell script still works just fine.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    Notarization is an additional check that ensures that Apple has not revoked permission for the software to run.
• parhamn 6y ago
  I'm showing 20-200ms longer on first run of the exec. Modified the test script a bit to show that it doesn't happen again if you modify the executable's contents. echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && \ chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh && \ time /tmp/test.sh && \ time /tmp/test.sh && \ echo 'echo Hello2' >> /tmp/test.sh && \ time /tmp/test.sh
  • eugenekolo 6y ago
    Another slight modification to make this show the effect every time: f=$(mktemp) && \ echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > $f && \ chmod a+x $f && \ time $f && \ time $f && \ echo 'echo Hello2' >> $f && \ time $f On my system: Hello real 0m0.131s user 0m0.001s sys 0m0.002s Hello real 0m0.004s user 0m0.001s sys 0m0.002s Hello Hello2 real 0m0.004s user 0m0.001s sys 0m0.002s
• kebman 6y ago
  OSX used to be the OS that started really quick, and ran really smoothly. Certainly far better than Windows. Also search was lightning fast. It was a selling point on its own. But recently it has slowed to a crawl. And I have to ask, what business is it to Apple whether I store a script somewhere? I don't even want them to have a checksum. And I don't want to go through the bother of having to change settings for it either. Do they even ask if this is OK? For me this is just yet another reason to steer well clear of Apple products in the near future. Very sad, because I really used to love their stuff.
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    > OSX used to be the OS that started really quick, and ran really smoothly. It was quite slow compared to OS 9, but even most Linux installs have way better performance on equivalent hardware. Windows really is dog slow by comparison.
    • kebman 6y ago
      This is true, but then Linux has a whole host of other issues that makes it nigh unusable for Muggles and non professionals. Thus, if they're not an avid gamer, I'd usually recommend OS X, until about 2016. Then I stopped doing that.
  • haunter 6y ago
    >OSX used to be the OS that started really quick Coldboot Windows 10 from pushing the power button to reaching the login screen is 7s for me (i7-7700, m2 SSD, 32GB RAM). I never ever had quicker startups on OSX.
    • kebman 6y ago
      Once I tried out Mac OS X for the first time during the late 2000's it was really striking how much better OS X was, compared to Windows, epspecially for "creative professions," for video, design and the sort. But since then, I have to hand it to Microsoft; they've really stepped up their game. They even seem to be fixing some of the non-UX compatibilities now. Granted, it's nowhere near good enough, but with PowerShell it's workable, at least for the projects I'm currently working on. For the more demanding stuff, I'll probably still Vbox a Linux distro however, while that has remained completely unnecessary for me on OS X. (I'm speaking about the whole personal experience and package deal here, so that's why I'm not mentioning things like Docker.)
• znpy 6y ago
  congrats on realizing that your macbook pro 16" is a 4000$ facebook machine.
  • dang 6y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• harpratap 6y ago
  This coupled with the horrible docker 100% cpu usage bug (https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3499 https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3499) might be the top reasons why I hate WFH right now. My Linux desktop in office was so much faster at everything (granted its desktop vs laptop but still, it's a laggy mess developing on OSX now)
• trashburger 6y ago
  Did the site get hit by the Slashdot effect? Can't access it. Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20200522164507/https://sigpipe.macromates.com/2020/macos-catalina-slow-by-design/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200522164507/https://sigpipe.m...
• crazygringo 6y ago
  Sorry but it's just not happening for me, on macOS 10.15.3, on my late 2016 MBP. (And I've certainly never done anything like disable SIP.) I run the commands and get: Hello /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 8% cpu 0.045 total Hello /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 75% cpu 0.005 total If I'm reading this correctly, the first run takes less than a twentieth of a second, and the second a two-hundredth? I've never experienced anything like "have the entire machine freeze for 1-2 seconds every 10th minute". And I have the slowest internet package I can buy. The only delay that's ever noticeable is when running a program I've installed for the first time, which yes usually seems to take a few seconds, before often telling me the application couldn't be verified or something, do I want to run it anyways. Which makes sense if you're running a checksum on a 400 MB application binary. But after that first time, starting an app is always instant. Can anyone else elucidate what the author is talking about? They're presenting it as a universal, but maybe there's something else going on with their machine? Clearly something's wrong on their end, but possibly it's just some kind of bug. I'd avoid jumping to conclusions that executables taking a second to launch is "by design". EDIT: switching from zsh to sh gives more granular results: Hello real 0m0.009s user 0m0.002s sys 0m0.003s Hello real 0m0.005s user 0m0.001s sys 0m0.003s
• bluedino 6y ago
  In many unrelated ways, Mac OS X has just always been slow. The first computers I ran OS X on were a Pismo Powerbook and one of the first iMacs. Both with upgraded hard drives and maxed out RAM. They were almost unusable, and we'd put classic OS back on them, a new release of OS X would come out, and repeat. I later got a chance to use a shiny new G5. I couldn't believe how slow it felt. Same goes for the PowerBook G4. The first Intel MacBook Pro didn't feel any faster. Somewhere around the i5, Mac OS started to feel 'okay'. But I'd always still feel blown away at how fast a similar machine felt running Windows or Linux. But I've stuck with it ever since 2010. I remember talking about my 16", saying "It's really fast...for a Mac."
• enriquto 6y ago
  > a degraded user experience, as the first time a user runs a new executable, Apple delays execution while waiting for a reply from their server. Wow, this is extremely infuriating! I just ran the "hello world" test script with the network connection disabled and it took 5 seconds to run! $ echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh $ time /tmp/test.sh && time /tmp/test.sh Hello /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 4.991 total Hello /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 77% cpu 0.005 total
• chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  Okay, I've tried this test on my MacBook Air 2020 several times, first by saving the "echo Hello" shell script in an editor and then, because I wasn't getting the results the author experienced, trying again exactly as he wrote it. Essentially the same result: airyote% echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh airyote% chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh airyote% time /tmp/test.sh && time /tmp/test.sh Hello /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 74% cpu 0.009 total Hello /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 75% cpu 0.007 total Is it possible that Allan Odgaard, as good a programmer as he unquestionably is, has something configured suboptimally on his end? Because it just strikes me as super unlikely that Apple has modified all the Unix shells on macOS to send shell scripts off to be notarized. (From what I've read, while shell scripts can be signed, they can't be notarized, and Gatekeeper is not invoked when you run a shell script in Terminal -- although it is invoked if you launch a "quaurantined" shell script from Finder on the first run, but it treats the shell script as an "executable document." This is the way this has worked for years, as I can find references to it in books from 2014.) I have my complaints with macOS Catalina, and I know that Apple's "tighten all the screws" approach to security is anathema to a lot of developers (and if there was a big switch that I could click to disable it all, I probably would), but I'm using Macs running Catalina every day and I gotta admit, they just don't seem to be the dystopian, unlivable hellscape HN keeps telling me they are. At least off the top of my head, I can't think of anything I was doing on my Macs ten years ago that I can't do on my Macs today. ("Yes, but doing it today requires an extra step on the first run that it didn't used to" may be inconvenient, but that's not the same thing as an inability to perform a function -- and an awful lot of complaints about modern Macs seem to be "the security makes this less convenient." There's an argument to be had about whether Catalina's security model strikes the right balance, of course.)
  • Sangeppato 6y ago
    I don't experience a delay in Terminal.app either, but I've tried running the script with a fresh install of iTerm2 while capturing with Wireshark and it does look like the script triggers a connection to an Apple server
    • false_kermit 6y ago
• sorryitstrue 6y ago
  An issue I've been dealing with forever on my mbp 2013 is the machine just pausing input for 2-4 secs (video and audio don't hitch, just keyboard/mouse input). I recently took the trouble to completely wipe the disk and reinstall macos mojave and it's still happening so it's not due to cruft installed over time in OSX. I dunno. I'll deal with it until it gives up the ghost and probably move to a windows machine with the work they're putting into WSL2
• jakearmitage 6y ago
  This seems to be, once again, a case of user experience being degraded due to lack of attention, testing and measurement of impact by security engineers.
  • inimino 6y ago
    Once you have security engineers, security is no longer the responsibility of all engineers equally, and you've already lost at security.
• blackrock 6y ago
  One frustrating experience on the Mac is keyboard shortcuts. Yes, they have polished the GUI, which makes it easy to navigate by mouse. But, when you need to work in speed mode, then you reach for the keyboard shortcuts. The problem, is that there are plenty, too much sometimes, and they are often inconsistent between applications. And yes, the Mac has a keyboard shortcut assignment tool, but it often doesn’t work correctly. I must give credit to Microsoft here. They at least seemed to have perfected most of the common keyboard shortcuts. Some good features about Windows shortcuts. 1. Alt-Spacebar to open the windows control menu, to move, minimize, maximize, or close the window. 2. Alt combinations are used to control the active Window application itself. 3. Alt-F4 to close the window. But, I would have preferred Alt-Escape instead, to close the window. 4. Control key for shortcuts inside the application. Like, Ctrl-C for copy. O for open. P for print. Etc. 5. Then the Windows key, to control Operating System level shortcuts. Like Win-M to minimize all windows. Win-L to lock the computer. Win-R to launch a command. Some feature I would like are to use, Win-Spacebar to open a command search, similar to Win-R, but with the ability to list all possible commands. Similar to activating the command palette on VSCode. And Ctrl-Spacebar, to activate keyboard commands for the active window. Kinda like Emacs, where I can run macros on it, like highlighting the words that I want, and execute something on it, like changing to uppercase, or converting to comma separated, or whatever else is needed.
  • astronautjones 6y ago
    this has always been the case. the underlined shortcuts in menus are a godsend in non-osx OSes. I am still astonished at the hostility of macos when it comes to Yes/No dialogs - you usually can't hit Y or N! This changed at some point after snow leopard. If I could run HDCP on my old macbook, I'd still be using snow leopard. aesthetically, they have made no innovations of use since then.
• jasoneckert 6y ago
  "Another way to reduce the delays is by disabling System Integrity Protection." Definitely agree on this one here - I've noticed a big speed improvement when disabling SIP debugging with "csrutil enable --without debug" while in recovery mode. I should note that the main reason I disable SIP isn't for speed, but to install the yabai window manager to make Aqua far more useful as a developer. I wrote a recent blog post on this, actually (https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2020/5/18_Setting_up_macOS_for_development.html https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2020/5...).
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    I believe disabling System Integrity Protection actually carries over to everything you boot off the computer.
• bfrog 6y ago
  I feel like this is one of those times, a wut moment.
• inimino 6y ago
  Last year I was preaching that if you can't develop in a submarine or a space station (or on the metro), from a fresh git clone to your next git push, then your development environment is broken and you should burn it to the ground and start over. It'll be interesting to see how much power we developers will let Apple take from us before we jump the garden wall.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    Interestingly, I hear that iPads cannot be used on the ISS because apps will stop launching if you disconnect from Apple's servers for too long.
    • john_alan 6y ago
      Src?
• shripadk 6y ago
  I would give anything to have my Mac be fast again. I have no idea what changed but even 10.14 feels a whole lot slower than it was earlier. Haven't upgraded to 10.15 seeing all the negative reviews it is getting when it comes to perf. Apple needs to seriously give perf a priority for Mac. Do they really expect developers to use a Mac to develop Apps when it is slow as molasses? I shudder to think what will happen to the Apple ecosystem if developers migrate to another OS for development. Apple will come crashing down. I don't wish for that to happen but looks like there is absolutely no one at Apple focused on making it better.
  • acdha 6y ago
    Remember, people don’t write blog posts saying nothing changes. The negative reviews tend to be one of two things: spotlight reindexing shortly afterwards, or attribution error where every new thing is blamed on the OS upgrade and similar old behavior is mentally discounted. App development didn’t suddenly get “slow as molasses” and for most users the install was a reboot and back to work.
• headmelted 6y ago
  “ Another way to reduce the delays is by disabling System Integrity Protection. I say reduce, because I still do get some delays even with SIP disabled, but the system does overall feel much faster, and I would strongly recommend anyone who thinks their system is sluggish to do the same.” Nope.
• soraminazuki 6y ago
  Up until the release of Catalina, I've always upgraded to the latest version of macOS within a month or two. But some of the changes this time is really stopping me from upgrading. As of Catalina, there's no sane way to install the Nix package manager without losing functionality because macOS now disallows creating new files in the root directory[1]. Nix stores its packages in the /nix directory and it's not possible to migrate without causing major disruptions for existing NixOS and other Linux users. This is too bad, since apart from Nix being a nice package manager, it also provides a sane binary package for Emacs. The Homebrew core/cask versions only provides a limited feature set[2][3]. [1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925 [2]: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/31510 https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/31510 [3]: https://github.com/caldwell/build-emacs/search?q=support+is%3Aopen&unscoped_q=support+is%3Aopen&type=Issues https://github.com/caldwell/build-emacs/search?q=support+is%...
  • mjhoy 6y ago
    It's funny, I just had to do this a few days ago. This comment has worked for me on two machines: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925#issuecomment-539570232 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925#issuecomment-539570...
    • soraminazuki 6y ago
      There's just so many problems with that approach: 1. You have to create a separate volume just to install a package manager, which is a poor user experience 2. A separate volume means FileVault won't work out of the box 3. The volume can be mounted only after GUI apps are brought up 4. Restoring after sleep might fail because of 3 All of these are mentioned in the Github issue, but it might be hard to find because it requires so many clicks and scrolling to view the whole thread.
      • mjhoy 6y ago
        1 — Sure. But Nix isn't exactly the most friendly package manager to begin with. I wouldn't recommend it if you're not comfortable creating volumes. 2 — Could you explain? Mine is on and working, I didn't need to do anything else. 3 — Is this if you have login items that need nix to be available? I don't have this so I haven't noticed. 4 — I've never run into this, but again I might just not use Nix for the kind of things that would cause issues.
• trollied 6y ago
  The only time I’ve seen similar delays is when my mac decides it needs to do something on an external disk that needs to spin up. I have a 12Tb external that can take 10 seconds to spin up, so get a 10 second stall waiting for I/O once in a while. I do wonder if the author has something similar going on, either with a directly attached disk or a network share.
• vbsteven 6y ago
  With Apple degrading the developer experience with each release and Microsoft working hard on things like WSL(2) and the new "package manager" I think within a year or 2 lots of developers will go back to Windows-based machines.
  • xvector 6y ago
    As a security engineer myself, what Apple is doing here is completely fucking insane. I honestly cannot believe that anyone thought it was a good idea.
• csomar 6y ago
  It gets even worse. I was doing some web dev in the last couple months and I noticed that my "localhost" was ridiculously slow. At first, I thought it was NPM/Gulp but then I noticed that it behaved irrationally, sometimes it is slow and sometimes it works. The problem was: Parental Control. Apparently, every request was checked and thus slowed the whole thing down. Needless to say, a couple days at least were wasted in this.
• tozeur 6y ago
  I feel like the continual development of MacOS is making it worse and worse. Similar to Windows, where every extra feature causes more and more complications. But alas the 1000s of engineers gotta be put to work somehow.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    There are significantly fewer than 1000 engineers working on macOS.
• fulldecent2 6y ago
  NSA had a "hardening macOS" guide on GitHub that I can't find. I wonder if that defeats the phone home that this article is highlighting.
• vortico 6y ago
  I used to use Mac pretty heavily for design and audio work, but around 10.14 because of Apple switching the way they do things, I've now entirely switched to Windows for that, and Linux for everything else. I just don't want to deal with the nonsense described in this post, among several other things.
• dwighttk 6y ago
  How many new applications are you people running?
• 3combinatorHN 6y ago
  Beyond me how people still paying for mac and windows botnet , just switch to linux everything just works
• mnm1 6y ago
  I'm getting 10-15 minute beach ball of death freezes on a month old MBP 16". That recur until I hard reboot. I can't open the 'force quit applications' window during this nor the apple menu. Can't reboot or shutdown from the cli or otherwise. Some apps lose network connections, some don't. The entire system becomes unusable. It requires a hard reboot. I think it's related to Intellij IDEA and similar IDEs somehow, but profiling those shows the slowdown is not in their apps but in the OS. It won't start with anything plugged into the USB ports, not even just power. Been trying various things but if it doesn't go away, I will return this when the Apple store here reopens. The only good thing about this coronavirus is that I've had more than 14 days to test this and find out what a clusterfuck this OS is even on a $4400 brand new mbpro. Do they even test anything anymore?
• markdog12 6y ago
  Can we get a MacOS @BruceDawson0xB up in here? https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB
• 3combinatorHN 6y ago
  Beyond me how people(and specially “power users”) are still paying for mac or windows botnets , just switch to linux everything works
• shmerl 6y ago
  Switch to Linux and forget about it.
• blinkingled 6y ago
  Apple has an opportunity here - to fix all these issues in the first release of ARM macOS and disable some more functions that "don't really work well" or are "insecure" - all of a sudden ARM Mac will be so much better there will be many blog posts and videos about it smugly proclaiming how Intel could not keep up!
• cmckn 6y ago
  I run a pihole at home, which has intermittent issues. When macOS can't resolve a hostname, almost every user-facing UI grinds to a halt. It's truly bizarre. Applications won't launch, menus don't respond, etc. Feels like a decade ago when your spinning disk was going bad. Not cute :(
• anderspitman 6y ago
  "Modern" OSX, iOS, and Android are so secure and safe they even protect you from using your computer.
• ken 6y ago
  > With internet enabled, it was reproducible by relaunching the application and triggering the code that called SecKeychainFindGenericPassword. I have issues with a lot of APIs, but SecKeychain has got to be one of the worst. I don't think it's gotten any love in many, many years. Unlike literally every other Apple API that a Macintosh application might reasonably use, you call its functions (even from Swift) by passing strings as (length:UInt32, data:UnsafePointer<Int8>?) pairs, and getting results out by passing (length:UnsafeMutablePointer<UInt32>?, data:UnsafeMutablePointer<UnsafeMutableRawPointer?>?) pairs, and checking OSStatus return values. Every aspect of it is painful. In Apple's "Documentation Archive" there's three "Sample Code" downloads related to Keychain. The newest one is for TouchID, and the oldest is for PowerPC. This is an area of the OS that doesn't get much attention. > This issue has been reported to Apple and assigned FB7679198. Apple has responded that applications should not use this function, though the documentation for SecKeychainFindGenericPassword does not state that it is deprecated I see that it's now grouped in a section of the docs called "Legacy Password Storage", but not actually "deprecated". Strange. That means you won't get any indication of its non-current status from Xcode, or even reading the release notes. I like that there's a newer (and presumably less awful) interface. I don't look forward to having to rewrite/retest that corner of my application. Seeing all the CFString/CFDictionary casting and OSStatus checking with the new functions, it still doesn't look all that great.
• unilynx 6y ago
  I got hit by this yesterday, borgbackup (installed using home-brew) had a 5 second delay on every invocation. Setting Terminal as a Developer Tool in Security&Privacy fixed it
• chadlavi 6y ago
  > You can test this by running the following two lines in a terminal: > > echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh > time /tmp/test.sh && time /tmp/test.sh Am I missing something here? I just did this, and the timing between the first and second run was barely noticeable -- in fact, the first run was slightly quicker: > echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh time /tmp/test.sh && time /tmp/test.sh > Hello > /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 55% cpu 0.006 total > Hello > /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 41% cpu 0.010 total This is on macOS 10.15.4.
• crazygringo 6y ago
  I'm so confused about the comments here. There are a bunch of people who can't reproduce the slowness at all, but nearly all downvoted or you have to wade through 100's of comments to get to them. The majority of comments are just dumping on Macs, nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the article, and seem to be blindly assuming it's true. And I can't seem to find any substantive discussion of whether this is actually real or not, or just some weird bug on the author's machine. I don't see any evidence that Catalina is "slow by design", just a single anecdote from the author. I was definitely hoping for some more substantive critique/discussion...
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    > There are a bunch of people who can't reproduce the slowness at all, but nearly all downvoted or you have to wade through 100's of comments to get to them. It's possible that they have certain security features disabled. > The majority of comments are just dumping on Macs, nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the article, and seem to be blindly assuming it's true. Welcome to Hacker News…this is common on any discussion on any topic, especially one that many people can understand in some way.
    • cerberusss 6y ago
      I've noticed the negativity on macOS. There may be reasons for it, I don't know. I'm pretty happy with it and I've started skipping some discussions because of the amount of comments that lack any curiosity, or worthy discussion.
      • saagarjha 6y ago
        It's not just macOS. What you really want is a topic that most commenters have no background knowledge or preconceptions about, and you have to make sure that you can't link to one in any way whatsoever. The latter is a little hard to do, because people will cling to the most tenuous of relationships in order to be able to provide their input: you could be talking about a Windows API and someone will bring up EEE through some convoluted path and from there the conversation will go downhill. The best comments are the ones on articles about dolphin psychology or whatever and someone might ask a simple question and a real expert will chime in with something like "I have worked with dolphins for 17 years and also I wrote my doctoral thesis in cetacean-human interactions" and it's just a page of an interesting viewpoint that you just never knew about.
• mshockwave 6y ago
  I don't think they do the notarization for shell scripts and program you build from source. I've been doing large scale software development on my Catalina for quite some time and I observed zero performance degradation compared to previous OS X version.
• hitekker 6y ago
  > Another way to reduce the delays is by disabling System Integrity Protection. I say reduce, because I still do get some delays even with SIP disabled, but the system does overall feel much faster, and I would strongly recommend anyone who thinks their system is sluggish to do the same. The tone of this article reminds me of a passage from the seminal Google+ Platforms Rant: > Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there's more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdy are the two ever at odds. > But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network. https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
• kup0 6y ago
  10.15.1 and then 10.15.4 both introduced random kernel panics on my iMac. Only way to solve was to reinstall MacOS on top of itself (via Recovery, kept files/apps intact). Still no idea what or why the panics would happen, or why the reinstall solved it. Catalina has been a very bumpy road for me so far.
• herova 6y ago
  Windows + VSCode + WSL2 + Terminal + PowerToys = Just one love, never looked back.
  • xyst 6y ago
    The only problem I have with that is "Windows" I'm currently trying to figure out how to emulate windows from a *nix distribution using qemu. I plan to use this as a "home lab" (k8s cluster or just plain fucking around), but still retain the ability to play an occasional AAA game.
    • herova 6y ago
      You don't need to emulate windows if you have windows as parent host ;). Windows with WSL is the best linux desktop which i had for past 20 years
• LeoNatan25 6y ago
  Disabling SIP and amfi kills all the process startup delay and limitations.
• usmannk 6y ago
  It seems like there is a lot of confusion here as to whether this is real or not. I've been able to confirm the behavior in the post by: - Using a new, random executable. Even echo $rand_int will work. Edit: What I mean here is generate your rand int beforehand and statically include it in your script. - Using a fresh filename too. Just throw a rand int at the end there. e.g. /tmp/test4329.sh I MITMd myself while recording the network traffic and, sure enough, there is a request to ocsp.apple.com with a hash in the URL path and a bunch of binary data in the response body. Unsure what it is yet but the URL suggests it is generating a cert for the binary and checking it. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Certificate_Status_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Certificate_Status_Prot... Here's the URL I saw: http://ocsp.apple.com/ocsp-devid01/ME4wTKADAgEAMEUwQzBBMAkGBSsOAwIaBQAEFDOB0e%2FbaLCFIU0u76%2BMSmlkPCpsBBRXF%2B2iz9x8mKEQ4Py%2Bhy0s8uMXVAIIfYbtkeEKZsI%3D http://ocsp.apple.com/ocsp-devid01/ME4wTKADAgEAMEUwQzBBMAkGB... Edit2: Anyone know what this hash format is? It's not quite base64, nor is it multiple base64 strings separated with '+'s but it seems similar... Edit3: Here is the exact filename and file I used: https://gist.github.com/UsmannK/abb4b239c98ee45bdfcc5b284bf0029e https://gist.github.com/UsmannK/abb4b239c98ee45bdfcc5b284bf0... Edit4 (final one probably...): On subsequent attempts I'm only seeing a request to https://api.apple-cloudkit.com https://api.apple-cloudkit.com and not the OCSP one anymore. Curiously, there's no headers at all. It is just checking for connectivity.
  • jwatte 6y ago
    Let's assume that sending network packets to verify the trustworthiness of commands is a good idea. (It may not be, but that's a different discussion.) If you have a modern OS with sufficient virtualization and containerization and indirection, you could optimistically let the commands run, and not commit the side effects of the command until you get back a result. Create little write logged mini branches of your file system, and only actually pause when someone else wants to inspect your side effects. By then, an asynchronous check should have gotten back to you.
  • kccqzy 6y ago
    OCSP is Online Certificate Status Protocol, generally used for checking the revocation status of certificates. You used to be able to turn it off in keychain access, but that ability went away in recent macOS releases.
• zapf 6y ago
  One more reason to stay away from corporate OSes
• zelly 6y ago
  Linux is waiting for you.
• twhb 6y ago
  I tested whether running a script you just wrote really contacts Apple to “notarize” it. It does. I first used the author’s timing method. First runs are consistently about 300 ms, subsequent runs consistently about 3 ms. Something is happening at first run. Some in the comments are saying it’s “local stuff”, so I tested timing again with internet off. First runs go to about 30 ms, subsequent remain the same. So there is “local stuff”, but it doesn’t explain the delay. Just to be entirely sure, I installed Little Snitch and got clear confirmation: running a script you just wrote results in syspolicyd connecting to api.apple-cloudkit.com. syspolicyd is the Gatekeeper daemon. I don’t know what exactly is being sent. Maybe somebody else can do a proper packet analysis.
• stephc_int13 6y ago
  Wow, this is incredible and clearly a huge step in the wrong direction. I clearly won't switch to their system anytime soon...
• mickotron 6y ago
  My 2011 era MacBook Pro has run Linux most of its life. It runs super fast compared to its performance under MacOS even a year into its existence. I've heard people ask me "why bother with Linux when MacOS is Unix?". Well technically it is from its heritage, but it gets less unixy by the day.
• brendangregg 6y ago
  Adding network calls to syscalls like exec() is utterly insane. This road can lead to bricked laptops where you can't run anything to fix it (imagine an unexpected network error that the code doesn't handle properly). And crackers will just use ways to overwrite running instruction text to avoid the exec(). The comments on the article are annoying: it good that there's a mini way to reproduce, but please, use some further debugging like tcpdump (it still exists on osx, right?). Last time I summarized osx debugging was https://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/analyzing-os-x-systems-performance-with-the-use-method/38 https://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/analyzing-os-x-syste... I'd also stress test it: generate scripts in a loop that include random numbers and execute them.
  • xvector 6y ago
    There is no excuse for this except for sheer, utter incompetence. Everyone involved in writing and shipping this should be ashamed of themselves.
    • will_pseudonym 6y ago
      Hey, malevolence can also play into this. Don't chalk everything up automatically to incompetence. /s
    • drvdevd 6y ago
      This is what I scrolled all the way down this thread for - to see if anyone thinks this is a good design/security decision on Apples part. I’m trying to understand what the reasoning is for this particular decision and if it actually makes the OS more secure in any meaningful way? Or does it actually- just degrade performance with very limited benefits? Are there any real benefits to this VS current security design in popular Desktop Linux distros at this point?
      • HappyDreamer 6y ago
        Couldn't this have been a business decision? Not about security? (just what they say?) To make non-App-store apps annoyingly unusable, so the App store will sell more apps, instead of people downloading in other ways? Just like Apple cripples the Safari browser and PWA apps. Long term, maybe Apple wants to be able to remote-forbid apps if Apple is developing their own competing app? Whilst most developers working at Apple understands this, and don't like it? Maybe the developers even feel happy about people here at HN being disappointed, and think that "now the business people here at Apple notice that this causes disappointment" ?
• ambernightcrush 6y ago
  This is also the case with APFS on rotational disk drives. Why does APFS perform so much worse on HDD vs SSD? Will Apple fix it? https://bombich.com/blog/2019/09/12/analysis-apfs-enumeration-performance-on-rotational-hard-drives https://bombich.com/blog/2019/09/12/analysis-apfs-enumeratio...
  • cmckn 6y ago
    APFS was not designed for spinning disks. No, they won't fix it; because they don't even sell a computer that ships with only a spinning disk (asterisk on the iMac's hybrid drive). HFS+ is still available, just use it if you need to format a spinning disk. I think this is a very different type of issue, with much more reasonable trade-offs.
• dre-hh 6y ago
  Upgraded only in Spring. Waited long enough. Never have been I saw wrong. Now when I want to reboot my computer I just try to pair my Bluetooth headphones - instant hard reboot
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    Does this literally panic your machine?
• swiley 6y ago
  How do people put up with the complete brokenness in commercial OSes? Is this really better than having to edit the occasional config file?
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    Personally, I know which process to kill when things go south. It's not early to acquire this information, though.
• xvector 6y ago
  What a ridiculous feature. The people involved in making this decision ought to be fired.
• justinclift 6y ago
  Thinking about it, this probably also gives Apple a ~fairly accurate set of usage stats for software. All they'd need to do - and it's very simple - is count the number of requests of each given hash lookup. Since they know the hash for each of their own executables, that gives a direct count of "most used" through to "least used" programs. Not sure if they'd have the hash for third party executables though, to know what the given hash request corresponds to. If they receive the hash for 3rd party executables when developers sign things, then Apple seems like it's able to generate usage stats for their entire OS and 3rd party app ecosystem.
• mindfulhack 6y ago
  I still love macOS, a lot. Since moving over after the disaster that was Windows 8 (and by then I was already using MacBook hardware), I've become a loving power user e.g. with AppleScript and setting up hotkeys or other ways to do absolutely anything I want on the screen. It really is still as powerfully customisable as Linux. Turn off SIP if need be. My only problem in moving to Linux software is that I prefer Apple's hardware. I'm on the 2019 16-inch MBP. Linux's compatibility with all the T2 and SSD hardware isn't there yet, but apparently it almost is. If Linux on the T2 MBP becomes solid and stable in the next 1-2 years, after extensive testing I may move over permanently. I already use Linux on secondary computers, and I love and value its privacy. Same with my phone. I just love my privacy. My needs are a high bar though. Productivity must be held back by nothing. I use macOS notes extensively and it syncs with my iPhone which is an extremely useful tool for me to note things down both in audio and. It needs to be reliable and - heh - 'just work'. I just discovered the cross-platform 'Standard Notes' app, with a bit more money paid out to Linux-compatible services like that, maybe it can all work. Casual photoshop can be taken care of via a VM. Surprisingly, macOS Catalina is itself a disrupter to my productivity. It seems buggy as hell - glitchy, and weirdly slow for many extremely basic things - all since Catalina. I just don't get it. Is it caused by this article's observation? Something's definitely going on. Maybe Apple will fix this in the next release? Like how they fixed the keyboard? Either way, I still want to move to Linux on this fabulous (fixed) hardware that is the 16-inch MBP. (T2 issues aside.)
  • fphhotchips 6y ago
    I have a 2019 Macbook Pro 16in and I hate it. It runs exceptionally hot (leading to massive performance problems), doesn't get enough power from the adapter to start with no battery, doesn't play nicely with my display, needs restarting every couple of days so Chrome doesn't crash and takes forever to boot. That's just the technical problems. I'm willing to give the UI a break, since it's probably as much me adjusting as it being bad. This is my first Apple anything, and if this is what "just works" looks like, I don't want it. I could be more productive on an Android tablet at this point.
    • carnitas 6y ago
• waynesonfire 6y ago
  now I understand the importance of niche OS.
• gitgud 6y ago
  Why would they send off binary hashes synchronously before execution of the program? Are they checking if the app is dangerous? Are they logging all my activity?
• dkmar 6y ago
  Perhaps related: "How come someone notarized my app?"[0] It mentions that anyone with an apple developer ID can notarize a qualifying app and submit this notary to the Apple Notary Service. However, the proof of notarization—the notarization ticket—might not be stapled to the application. In the case of no stapled ticket, Catalina contacts the notary service to see whether a ticket exists. If so, the app is good to go. [0]: https://eclecticlight.co/2020/05/22/how-come-someone-notarized-my-app/ https://eclecticlight.co/2020/05/22/how-come-someone-notariz... EDIT. More informative link here[1]. It specifically outlines what happens on first run of an app. (and there's a great diagram if you scroll down) [1]: https://eclecticlight.co/2020/01/27/what-could-possibly-go-wrong-on-an-app-first-run/ https://eclecticlight.co/2020/01/27/what-could-possibly-go-w...
• dkmar 6y ago
  For anyone looking for more information on what happens on the first run of an app in Catalina, see [0]. Here's a direct link to the diagram [1]. [0]: https://eclecticlight.co/2020/01/27/what-could-possibly-go-wrong-on-an-app-first-run/ https://eclecticlight.co/2020/01/27/what-could-possibly-go-w... [1]: https://eclecticlightdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/appfirstrunchecks10152.pdf https://eclecticlightdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/appf...
• jrochkind1 6y ago
  Do you think developers make up a significant portion of Mac buyers? I think it's possible, but I'm not sure. I am pretty sure the laptop market has been shrinking generally (as more people have a phone but no laptop). And most developers I know have macs. They probably don't want to make the OS significantly worse for developers...
  • vsskanth 6y ago
    After this, you can be sure the developer interest will go down even further
• MintelIE 6y ago
  When will computer and OS companies start telling us exactly what data they’re taking and who they give it to? I was an Apple user from 2002 until last year. I just can’t be spied on and telemetized any more. It’s not beneficial to me and I can see all kinds of downsides. Especially since big tech has it in for anybody politically to the right of Bernie.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• mleonhard 6y ago
  I don't want to send over the Internet a record of every program I run. Is there a way to opt-out completely?
  • dahfizz 6y ago
    Buy a machine not from Apple.
  • sfj 6y ago
    Unplug from the internet.
• discourses 6y ago
  I have this kind of issues on Mojave. I blamed the firewall. With ethernet disconnected, everything runs smoothly. Connected: random freezes of 1-2 secs. Why does it need the internet all the time?
• mattbillenstein 6y ago
  Man, I think I was having this issue earlier in the year and thought it was some funkyness with the firewall or application -- custom golang apps. Who at apple thought it was a good idea to hop on the internet when invoking an application without any warning? This is loony.
• sigjuice 6y ago
  I intend to stay on Mojave for as long as possible, but I am curious to try out Catalina. I believe it is easy enough to install Catalina on an external SSD. My concern is whether this would be safe enough and if my computer would remain unmodified (e.g. could there be changes to firmware settings or firmware updates?)
• gautamcgoel 6y ago
  This why having a vibrant open-source ecosystem is so important. Firstly, the needs of users is the main priority (as opposed to profit or liability minimization or advertising...), and secondly, users have so many options to pick from. For example, if you don't like systemd, you are free to pick an OS without it.
• KevinSjoberg 6y ago
  Thought I was going insane seeing delays myself on a daily basis since Catalina. Turns out I'm not insane but a victim of Apple's continuous neglect of Mac OS. How can something as damning as this ever reach end consumers without getting detected?
• rtomayko 6y ago
  I made the jump to a System76 Adder WS laptop and pop!os for development after buying the lemon first gen MBP with the terrible keyboard. It was my seventh and possibly last MBP (including powerbooks before it). I was considering one of the new 13” MBPs but that seems unlikely if injecting network latency into syscalls is the direction things are going. If you’re not building Mac/iOS apps, find a Linux laptop you can tolerate for development and an iPad Pro for everything else.
• bad_user 6y ago
  I like the fine grained permissions on Catalina, but along with dropping support for 32 bits binaries, this is getting ridiculous.
• soapdog 6y ago
  If microsoft was doing this there'd be a riot but since it is Apple but will rationalize this bad behaviour and say it is for the best.
• HugoDaniel 6y ago
  I have been running OpenBSD for all my dev work in a VM for quite some time now. This just makes me wanna start using it for more things besides dev work :(
• vegardx 6y ago
  I had put off upgrading for a long time because nothing good can come from running the latest stable release. They've never been stable. But Apple sort of forced me to update recently since wanted to back up my phone, which I wanted to do before switching to a new one. I imagined that it would be better after a year. Boy was I wrong, and I regret doing it much. It has been a constant pain ever since, bluetooth is completely broken. - My external trackpad isn't able to connect, at all. Audio devices require that I kill coreaudiod before connecting, otherwise they just disconnect after a few seconds. - I can wake the laptop with a bluetooth keyboard, but when it's awake the keyboard stops working. Flipping the switch on the backside of the keyboard lets it reconnect again. - There are transitions that you cannot disable that makes your laptop feel super slow. In Mojave you could disable them, in Catalina you can't unless you want to run with SIP disabled. - There's also a super fun bug with mobile hotspot failing to activate, and there's no way for you to just manually connect to your own hotspot, it has to go through this bluetooth activation, even though your mobile hotspot is visible and connectable on all other devices. You end up in situation where you connect to your friends hotspot and they connect to yours, since neither of you are able to connect to your own. I've given up. The quality control in Apple is down the drain, and have been for quite some time. I'm fixing to downgrade to Mojave this weekend, hopefully that will make it more stable. But I'm not holding my breath. To add injury to insult I'm on my third broken keyboard now. Next time it breaks I might just use the consumer laws and make them refund the laptop so they'll have to take a big loss for creating such a flawed device.
  • 1123581321 6y ago
    Those all sound like unusual problems. What external hardware and phone are you using?
    • vegardx 6y ago
      I've drunk the cool aid. Never drink the cool aid: iPhone 11 Pro, Magic Trackpad and Keyboard, AirPod Pro and Bose QC35. If you search for these issues on the community forums or web in general you'll see that it's quite common, and it all started with Catalina. Some brave people that were running the public beta reported these issues to Apple, but we're now four point releases in and still no fix. Apple seem to not even want to acknowledge the issue, they just send users to their FAQ which sums up to "have you rebooted?" The issues seems to start if you have bluetooth devices connected and your laptop becomes memory constrained. And after that it's in a broken or bricked state it seems. You can do tricks like killing coreaudiod to get audio devices to connect, but trackpad is still broken.
• john_alan 6y ago
  I can see the delay when I remove my terminal from the DevTools permission in Security preferences. So it's real. However, scripts are NOT notarised, so what is it doing? EDIT: So after digging the scripts are being "checked" for malware, as part of XProtect. This is interesting, it seems to be hashing scripts and testing to see if its known malware. Anyway, easy to disable, but weird stuff.
• sub7 6y ago
  Just switch to Windows and WSL. For most cases, it works just great/not noticeably slower. There's a lot of bullshit on Windows too but nothing near OSX levels of wannabe big brother shit. Can't think of a better long term short right now in the market than Apple (and sister cult Tesla but the electric story is at least in the early days so they may do ok)
  • kasabali 6y ago
    Windows has SmartScreen and MAPS (which was previously called "SpyNet") turned on by default, on top of telemetry level that goes to eleven and cannot be turned off in consumer editions. They're not implemented in a braindead way that's being discussed here but they're at the same level big brotherness-wise, if not worse.
• apatheticonion 6y ago
  Just wanted to drop this here but WSL & WSL2 makes a compelling case to move to Windows.
• RyanShook 6y ago
  So should we disable SIP on our Macs?
• grandinj 6y ago
  This seems like a natural outflow of a company design process that (a) prioritizes security highly (b) prioritizes regular users over developers (c) does not allocate sufficient resources to the product to thoroughly cover all the bases (d) is developed by people in North America, for whom the USA === the whole world, and are used to near 100% seamless internet connectivity with latency < 20ms. I love macOS, but their software generally has issues with flakey internet connectivity and long latencies - down here in South Africa, ~400ms RTT is not uncommon.
• PopeRigby 6y ago
  Just did a test using the command the author listed. Benchmarked on ArchLinux and got 0.00s. I then did the same test on MacBook Pro and got 0.332s. I feel like that's pretty bad. 0.332s might sound inconsequential, but that's just for a single echo command. I would imagine it gets exponentially worse as your executable grows in complexity.
• msie 6y ago
  Lack of upgradability of MacBook Pros, numerous bugs in Catalina (ImageCapture Im looking at you), T2 chip and secure boot issues. It all adds up...
• seemslegit 6y ago
  The slowness seems like the smallest concern here
• rmrfrmrf 6y ago
  By this logic, HTTPS is "slow by design" and a nefarious plot by Big Certificate to siphon money away from tech companies.
• jaykru 6y ago
  Has anybody in the tech media picked up on this? Doesn't seem like it from a cursory browse of my favorite sites (HN do your magic) This seems like something that Apple really ought to be taken to task for. I'm sure the privacy concerns if not the performance will rile up the broader non-HN public if only the information reaches them. Perhaps then we can get Apple to move to a less stupid system.
• aflag 6y ago
  Did apple make any comments on this? I haven't been able to find any public responses from them. I'm really interested on reading their side of things. This is quite jarring, it's hard to believe it is a thing. However, as I read through tests people did, it seems just as bad as it sounds. I was actually getting a mac mini now that I'm working from home (I thought I'd get better integration with some of the company's wfh infrastructure while still having a unixy environment, so a win/win situation), but I cancelled the purchase after reading this. I get that you can jump some hoops and set some apple specific flags to things so that it works better, but the reason I wanted a mac was to make things easier and not having to look into obscure APIs and features to get simple things working. I was really looking forward to that, but I don't feel that sort of investment will be justified with issues like this in their OS :/
  • pram 6y ago
    This is frankly hyperbole. A single checkbox in a GUI menu that is routinely accessed for managing other system-wide sandbox privileges isn't exactly obscure. It also isn't some difficult, inconvenient task. It needs to be done once.
    • aflag 6y ago
      From what I've read it's not available by default and you need to run some commands (which seem to be hard to google). And that solves only part of the problem, the article had other examples that may be harder to solve. It seems like, if your internet connection is not great, then you're going to have a bad experience.
• sj4nz 6y ago
  Did anyone try the setting the terminal to "Developer Tools" permissions and find that things go worse?