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I still use the same installation of macOS as I began using seven years ago. I only moved it to new MacBooks a few times using the built in solution for that. I

I still use the same installation of macOS as I began using seven years ago. I only moved it to new MacBooks a few times using the built in solution for that. I thought that formatting like crazy was a windows thing?

willio58 4y ago
It is, anyone who needs to clean install isn’t running commands right, or doesn’t fully understand what they are running when they run commands
- dagmx 4y ago
  Especially because it’s all relatively self contained. Removing brew stuff is trivial, and with sip being the default it’s really hard to put the machine in a state that requires a clean install. I’m really unsure how someone could put up with clean installing needing to be part of their workflow for that long without questioning whether that’s normal or not. Even in the pre-sip days, I’d have to go out of my way to make my Mac unusable since it’s a very opinionated platform of isolating data/apps into very specific locations. unless a kext is involved. Then all hell breaks loose.
- jrmg 4y ago
  Or it’s an elephant powder, and they just think that it’s doing something. What are the symptoms of an ‘unclean’ Mac? It should be possible to say with some exactness what’s causing them with the use of diagnostic tools like ‘top’, or just the Activity Monitor app. I’ll admit that _fixing_ issues might not be straightforward - but I can’t recall the last time I reinstalled my Mac aside from buying a new one with a new installation - although I don’t think that should really count... Dave is out walking early one morning. The streets are quiet, but for one man sprinkling a white powder along the middle of the road. Intrigued, Dave approaches the man and asks what he is doing. The man explains he is sprinkling elephant powder - he does it every morning. Dave is visibly puzzled. The man continues “it keeps the elephants away”. Dave, still puzzled, says “But there are no elephants here!”. In agreement the man exclaims “Great stuff, isn’t it!”
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    The problems associated with impure programming environments are well-documented, I should hope I don't need to repeat them here. Anecdotally though, the packaging for lots of popular programs (rabbitmq, minio, mongo) is pretty consistently terrible. Many packages lack behavioral parity between x86 and ARM (software is installed to different locations) and linking becomes a total headache when your libraries are spread out across /opt/ and your lib folder. On top of that, Homebrew is extremely slow and processor-intensive, and demands root access for trivial operations. It's unsafe, impure, and wastes my time.
    - d3nj4l 4y ago
      What are you talking about? Homebrew flat out refuses to work under sudo.
    - oneplane 4y ago
      Are you seriously suggesting using system-wide installations and modifications to run development environments? Even if all else fails, you should at least have a chroot for that. Or if you don't know how that works, virtual machines have been a thing for decades. Vagrant exists. Containers exist, heck, even in a user-friendly button-click interface with Docker...
- Pinus 4y ago
  Googling around for answers to Mac related problems, I can easily see that about half the people "answering" questions are completely clueless, just cargo-culting various voodoo stuff. I suspect that among the other half, half of those are equally clueless, but I can't tell which ones because I'm myself not mac-savvy enough! And Xcode itself does not help. I install Xcode. Well, actually, I didn't, because you need to actually start Xcode for it to completely install itself. It seems to come with a complete set of command-line tools; I can compile and run plain Unix stuff from the command line. Great. Except when you try to run Homebrew, that complains that you don’t have the True Command Line Tools; you need to run xcode-select --install to install what appears to be a completely different copy of the same things. Wtf?
jbverschoor 4y ago
For me it’s 15 years of upgrades, including betas. Everything is fine Just don’t run things as root you don’t understand / copy/paste blocks of shell script because stack overflow says so

willio58 4y ago

It is, anyone who needs to clean install isn’t running commands right, or doesn’t fully understand what they are running when they run commands

dagmx 4y ago
Especially because it’s all relatively self contained. Removing brew stuff is trivial, and with sip being the default it’s really hard to put the machine in a state that requires a clean install. I’m really unsure how someone could put up with clean installing needing to be part of their workflow for that long without questioning whether that’s normal or not. Even in the pre-sip days, I’d have to go out of my way to make my Mac unusable since it’s a very opinionated platform of isolating data/apps into very specific locations. unless a kext is involved. Then all hell breaks loose.
jrmg 4y ago
Or it’s an elephant powder, and they just think that it’s doing something. What are the symptoms of an ‘unclean’ Mac? It should be possible to say with some exactness what’s causing them with the use of diagnostic tools like ‘top’, or just the Activity Monitor app. I’ll admit that _fixing_ issues might not be straightforward - but I can’t recall the last time I reinstalled my Mac aside from buying a new one with a new installation - although I don’t think that should really count... Dave is out walking early one morning. The streets are quiet, but for one man sprinkling a white powder along the middle of the road. Intrigued, Dave approaches the man and asks what he is doing. The man explains he is sprinkling elephant powder - he does it every morning. Dave is visibly puzzled. The man continues “it keeps the elephants away”. Dave, still puzzled, says “But there are no elephants here!”. In agreement the man exclaims “Great stuff, isn’t it!”
- smoldesu 4y ago
  The problems associated with impure programming environments are well-documented, I should hope I don't need to repeat them here. Anecdotally though, the packaging for lots of popular programs (rabbitmq, minio, mongo) is pretty consistently terrible. Many packages lack behavioral parity between x86 and ARM (software is installed to different locations) and linking becomes a total headache when your libraries are spread out across /opt/ and your lib folder. On top of that, Homebrew is extremely slow and processor-intensive, and demands root access for trivial operations. It's unsafe, impure, and wastes my time.
  - d3nj4l 4y ago
    What are you talking about? Homebrew flat out refuses to work under sudo.
  - oneplane 4y ago
    Are you seriously suggesting using system-wide installations and modifications to run development environments? Even if all else fails, you should at least have a chroot for that. Or if you don't know how that works, virtual machines have been a thing for decades. Vagrant exists. Containers exist, heck, even in a user-friendly button-click interface with Docker...
Pinus 4y ago
Googling around for answers to Mac related problems, I can easily see that about half the people "answering" questions are completely clueless, just cargo-culting various voodoo stuff. I suspect that among the other half, half of those are equally clueless, but I can't tell which ones because I'm myself not mac-savvy enough! And Xcode itself does not help. I install Xcode. Well, actually, I didn't, because you need to actually start Xcode for it to completely install itself. It seems to come with a complete set of command-line tools; I can compile and run plain Unix stuff from the command line. Great. Except when you try to run Homebrew, that complains that you don’t have the True Command Line Tools; you need to run xcode-select --install to install what appears to be a completely different copy of the same things. Wtf?

jbverschoor 4y ago

For me it’s 15 years of upgrades, including betas. Everything is fine Just don’t run things as root you don’t understand / copy/paste blocks of shell script because stack overflow says so