9 ms·

Why can’t you just roll back from a bad macOS update?

118 points by ingve 3y ago

23B1 3y ago
Somehow Ventura changed the way PDFs are handled, and broke three years of my work. I'm not an OSX developer (I'm just a writer) and still trying to figure out where the change happened and why. The devs upon whom I depend are also mystified and/or not talking. Being able to roll back updates when so many people depend on your OS seems like a good thing to me.
- yoyopa 3y ago
  what did they do to pdfs?
  - 23B1 3y ago
    Evidently changes to the way PDFs are rendered by the OS, I think via Preview? So for example, if you 'print' a PDF from another app, a lot of stuff gets broken. I'm sorry, I wish I had more information.
renewiltord 3y ago
I have just as much trouble on Linux, but one could assume that we could do it right by first installing to a subfolder and then restarting with that over root using overlayfs and then restarting again on confirm with changes moved into place. It would be cool for optional dist-upgrades and it would just be so phenomenal to be able to update and then revert - like we can for monitor settings.
- grumbel 3y ago
  You can do that with NixOS, booting back to an earlier version is literally one click in the boot manager and happens instantly, as the OS is just resetting some symlinks under the hood. For Debian you might need a file system with snapshot support, e.g. apt-btrfs-snapshot is a package that handles it, though I never used that myself.
0xedd 3y ago
[flagged]
jdjdjdhhd 3y ago
[flagged]
- jdjdjdhhd 3y ago
  [flagged]
throw0101a 3y ago
Given that APFS supports snapshots, one possible solution would be to create functionality like Solaris/FreeBSD boot environments: * https://wiki.freebsd.org/BootEnvironments https://wiki.freebsd.org/BootEnvironments * https://klarasystems.com/articles/managing-boot-environments/ https://klarasystems.com/articles/managing-boot-environments... * https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-2726/gkwcz.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-2726/gkwcz.htm...
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Boot environments on FreeBSD are so cool. Nice to see them mentioned here.
- mnd999 3y ago
  Doesn’t help with the firmware problem though. If your old boot environment’s driver set doesn’t work with the newer flashed firmware things won’t work as before.
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    > Doesn’t help with the firmware problem though. That's no longer an issue on Apple Silicon systems. There is no firmware resident in hardware; everything gets loaded on boot.
  - krylon 3y ago
    That does sound like a problem Apple could solve if they wanted to. I vaguely recall that some PC motherboards came with a duplicate BIOS, so if an update broke it, it could fall back to a clean copy. AFAIK, some smartphones do this as well. Of course, if Apple manages to not break their OS with updates, that's not a problem in practice. I don't have a lot of experience with macOS, so I have no idea how problem-prone Apple's updates are.
- pxc 3y ago
  Does macOS support labeled snapshots instead of time-based ones yet? Is there a way to tell the OS that a certain snapshot never expires? Does disabling and then reenabling Time Machine still delete all your snapshots?
gchokov 3y ago
Unpopular opinion: I haven’t had a bad update in the last 12 years. Yes, there were some bugs here and there, but nothing dramatic that wanted me to switch back. The worst thing was Intel’s heartbleed issues that killed the CPU, it was around the 8th gen i7 if my memory is correct.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  MacOS Mojave (e.g. 10.14 from 2018) ruined font rendering on standard DPI screens, which included every single Macbook Air from before that year (the first 'Retina' Macbook Air was released in 2018.)
- kelsolaar 3y ago
  Agreed, if anything minor updates have been either transparent or visibly addressing issues. I have had some problems when updating from major macOs version to another though. Windows unfortunately has the tendency to break even with minor updates regularly. It is so much of an issue that we have a process at work to test those updates on a few machines and roll them widely to the remaining after.
- 0x0 3y ago
  macOS 10.15.6 had a showstopper kernel zpool memory leak if you used virtualization software to run windows VMs, requiring multiple reboots per day in order to stay in place. It was an absolute dealbreaker for productivity as a developer who needed windows vms.
- torstenvl 3y ago
  A Catalina update completely broke Thunderbolt docks, causing kernel panics every other time you connected one. (Seems like it got better in Big Sur, and haven't had a single one in Monterey)
saagarjha 3y ago
I don’t see this mention the most likely reason: Apple doesn’t really design their software to support arbitrary rollbacks in that direction. What should happen if an app writes out a database in a new format the old version can’t read? Clearly things would break so they don’t want you going in that direction. (For RSRs they can simply avoid doing things like that.)
- lapcat 3y ago
  > What should happen if an app writes out a database in a new format the old version can’t read? This generally shouldn't be happening in minor updates, and even if it does, there are ways of designing apps to handle this. I've done it before. (And in fact, software developers themselves often roll back versions of their software while developing and testing, which you should know.) As the author indicates, rolling back is possible, albeit overly difficult, so the possibility must be accounted for in any case. Major OS updates are different story. The key there is to avoid being an early adopter. ;-)
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    I mean they absolutely could do this but as you know they don’t actually care much. Most of the time they don’t do breaking changes like this but sometimes they do and you probably don’t want to be one of the people unlucky enough to be caught by this.
- chrisandchris 3y ago
  Or do it otherwise: Break your software and make sure the next OS update fixes your software, aka Microsoft: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/attachments-missing-from-emails-when-using-macos-big-sur-211d83c8-5bd9-4531-99a4-a3d28a2208b8 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/attachments-missin...
- ineedasername 3y ago
  >Apple doesn’t really design their software to support arbitrary rollbacks in that direction Up until recently they did support rollbacks from a bad update, so I'm not sure the above holds as a reason. They used to, and if it's harder now then that is part of a deliberate design decision.
Simulacra 3y ago
At my last job we had a huge problem with employees not wanting to update iOS and macOS software because they feared that it would change things for the worse.
- 0xFFOOFF 3y ago
  That’s why you use MDM to force updates. Employees don’t get a choice. Update or get locked out.
  - lgas 3y ago
    You're technically correct, the best kind of correct, but you essentially responded so someone saying "users have fears" with "respond with (maximum) violence!"
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    Hey, it's "better" to have your entire department/division/company grind to a halt because everyone's machines broke at the same time, rather than pockets of glitches that you can't quite explain, and you have to individually query each device's version number and patch level.
  - ineedasername 3y ago
    That's not a sufficient response to OS updates causing degraded performance.
    - pxc 3y ago
      In the case of macOS updates, you could/should instead: - inform users of the difference between feature updates and security updates - show them how to install security updates rather than major version changes - give them a short window after which they must at least upgrade to the latest security patch on whatever version of macOS they're running so that they can choose their own update time for minimal disruption There's no need to silently break anyone's computer while they sleep, or shut it down while they're working. It's shameful to even expect employees to put up with that.
fn-mote 3y ago
If you haven't read the article: it is not a complaint. It's a relatively detailed explanation including a number of reasons why rollbacks are not supported. It also gives a method to do your own rollback! (I am not knowledgeable enough to verify the practicality of this method.) In short, the author's argument is: - no method to roll back firmware updates - the sealed system volume is huge and rollback capability would require keeping the whole old ~10GB around, which is a lot of wasted space
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Apple could use differential snapshots though. They wouldn't have to store an entire copy of that 10GB.
  - tomxor 3y ago
    They used to do something to this effect with older MacOS X updates by only transferring a bundle of the files, but at some point they just sliced the OS into giant partitions and started sending the full file system image over the wire regardless of the actual changes. This wouldn't be such a wasteful idea had they used file system snapshot differential block transfer a la ZFS send. All I can guess is that they either think their customers are so rich they must all live in places with gigabit internet available, or they just don't care and everyone suffers. Either way it's a massive waste of time, resources and energy, just not theirs.
    - codetrotter 3y ago
      > This wouldn't be such a wasteful idea had they used file system snapshot differential block transfer a la ZFS send. That would have been so epic. They should do that in FreeBSD. Take the macOS idea of having a separate protected partition for the base system, and combine that with the support for ZFS in FreeBSD to use ZFS snapshots to update the FreeBSD base OS, instead of having to run freebsd-update which applies a bunch of patches
      - wkat4242 3y ago
eimrine 3y ago
Is it possible to have 2 disks on macOS devices? On my very important Windows machine I use a full mirroring of disk before letting the OS to update. Rolling back means rewiring a boot disk.
- pram 3y ago
  Yes, APFS has containers. You can actually install beta/other versions of MacOS in them and nuke it with no issue.
cyrnel 3y ago
Is this the issue that the article is referring to? https://www.macrumors.com/2023/07/10/apple-pulls-ios-16-5-1-macos-13-4-1-rsrs/ https://www.macrumors.com/2023/07/10/apple-pulls-ios-16-5-1-... > Unfortunately, it appears that the updates changed the Safari user agent to include an (a), leading some websites to break. Lol...
- olliej 3y ago
  When Safari 2.0.4 was released many many aeons ago a whole bunch of sites broke. Not because of browser issues, but because many websites were looking for "netscape" and "4" in the user agent to detect netscape 4. Then they'd (try to) us JSS and layers \o/
- Wevah 3y ago
  No, that’s a “rapid security response”, which is uninstallable.
greatgib 3y ago
I don't see an explanation of why in this article but just excuses. MacosOS is a mediocre OS, this is the real reason why.
ineedasername 3y ago
Apple is in the top #10 profitable companies worldwide, $400B in annual revenue, decades of OS development experience, and tighter control over OS & hardware integration than any other company on earth. In short, they lack neither resources nor expertise. "It might be hard" is not a good reason when previously they have done so but made a design &/or business &/or UX decision not to. I very much doubt that difficulty was the driving factor in this choice.
jrm4 3y ago
Stallman was right? Stallman was right. People keep making excuses for buying metaphorical "cars with the hood welded shut." Glad to hear that Linux hit 3% market share.
replete 3y ago
I make a full system drive clone with carbon copy cloner before every update. It was handy that time that Apple released a major operating system version that broke all my USB-C hubs for 6 months...
efficulty 3y ago
I honestly have not seen any larger application (enterprise/custom) which allowed real rollback. In practice it's always been "reinstall / restore from backup". I don't see how something as complex as an OS could have that.
- mplanchard 3y ago
  Very happy NixOS user here. If I have an issue with any upgrade, I just boot my system into the previous version, and then all is well until I find time to fix anything in the new version.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Maybe it technically falls under 'restore from backup', but OpenSUSE comes configured to create BTRFS snapshots before and after every package manager operation. Since this excludes the user's home, the effect is that you can rollback an update quickly without losing any work. I think this sort of system would work well for MacOS/Windows/etc, but perhaps it would give the users a bit too much power than these companies prefer...
  - potamic 3y ago
    btrfs is awesome. The number of times I bonked my system only to restore it back just like that. Really gives the confidence to experiment and make bold changes to your system.
prirun 3y ago
I upgraded from Mohave to Monterey because a speaker was crackling and some posts online said it might be a software issue. Big mistake! The upgrade removed emacs, the C dev tools, and deleted any top-level directories it didn't know about / approve of, including my backup! I have Carbon Copy Cloner and was dumb enough to think I didn't need to use it before this upgrade. Now instead of a development system, I have a glorified web terminal. What a pain in the ass.
- fredoralive 3y ago
  Actually deleting things doesn’t sound good, I guess they didn’t test things on such big version jumps or something? Anyway seeing as Apple froze GPL software at the last GPL2 version, surely you’re using Homebrew or MacPorts to get a newer version of emacs anyway? As for C compilers, I’m not sure if they’ve ever been in the base install, but AFAIK it’s “xcode-select --install” you want if you don’t want to install all of Xcode.
  - prirun 3y ago
    > surely you’re using Homebrew or MacPorts to get a newer version of emacs anyway? Nope, because I don't care about emacs' latest upgrades. I've been using the terminal version of emacs (emacs-nox) since the 80's and whatever version is installed has always worked fine. I tried to install xcode tools yesterday. First it has a license agreement window that needs a click, but it doesn't pop-up in the foreground so I didn't even know it was there. The Install button just error beeps. Then it said it would take 59 hours to download. That's nice. I aborted it. I restarted it today. It says it has 11 minutes to go so maybe things will go smoother this time. Still a complete pain in the ass, and nope, it didn't fix the speaker (I didn't think it would, just a long shot). Thanks for letting me vent!
    - goosedragons 3y ago
      Even just using the terminal version there's a LOT of changes for the better than the ancient version Apple shipped (22?). Package management, native compilation, etc.,.
aforty 3y ago
Do bad macOS upgrades even happen that often? Been using macOS full time since about 2007 and I can’t ever recall having a bad OS upgrade. I usually go entire hardware cycles without ever having to fresh install the OS.

118 points by ingve 3y ago

23B1 3y ago

Somehow Ventura changed the way PDFs are handled, and broke three years of my work. I'm not an OSX developer (I'm just a writer) and still trying to figure out where the change happened and why. The devs upon whom I depend are also mystified and/or not talking. Being able to roll back updates when so many people depend on your OS seems like a good thing to me.

yoyopa 3y ago
what did they do to pdfs?
- 23B1 3y ago
  Evidently changes to the way PDFs are rendered by the OS, I think via Preview? So for example, if you 'print' a PDF from another app, a lot of stuff gets broken. I'm sorry, I wish I had more information.

renewiltord 3y ago

I have just as much trouble on Linux, but one could assume that we could do it right by first installing to a subfolder and then restarting with that over root using overlayfs and then restarting again on confirm with changes moved into place. It would be cool for optional dist-upgrades and it would just be so phenomenal to be able to update and then revert - like we can for monitor settings.

grumbel 3y ago
You can do that with NixOS, booting back to an earlier version is literally one click in the boot manager and happens instantly, as the OS is just resetting some symlinks under the hood. For Debian you might need a file system with snapshot support, e.g. apt-btrfs-snapshot is a package that handles it, though I never used that myself.

0xedd 3y ago

[flagged]

jdjdjdhhd 3y ago

[flagged]

jdjdjdhhd 3y ago
[flagged]

throw0101a 3y ago

Given that APFS supports snapshots, one possible solution would be to create functionality like Solaris/FreeBSD boot environments: * https://wiki.freebsd.org/BootEnvironments https://wiki.freebsd.org/BootEnvironments * https://klarasystems.com/articles/managing-boot-environments/ https://klarasystems.com/articles/managing-boot-environments... * https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-2726/gkwcz.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-2726/gkwcz.htm...

wkat4242 3y ago
Boot environments on FreeBSD are so cool. Nice to see them mentioned here.
mnd999 3y ago
Doesn’t help with the firmware problem though. If your old boot environment’s driver set doesn’t work with the newer flashed firmware things won’t work as before.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  > Doesn’t help with the firmware problem though. That's no longer an issue on Apple Silicon systems. There is no firmware resident in hardware; everything gets loaded on boot.
- krylon 3y ago
  That does sound like a problem Apple could solve if they wanted to. I vaguely recall that some PC motherboards came with a duplicate BIOS, so if an update broke it, it could fall back to a clean copy. AFAIK, some smartphones do this as well. Of course, if Apple manages to not break their OS with updates, that's not a problem in practice. I don't have a lot of experience with macOS, so I have no idea how problem-prone Apple's updates are.
pxc 3y ago
Does macOS support labeled snapshots instead of time-based ones yet? Is there a way to tell the OS that a certain snapshot never expires? Does disabling and then reenabling Time Machine still delete all your snapshots?

gchokov 3y ago

Unpopular opinion: I haven’t had a bad update in the last 12 years. Yes, there were some bugs here and there, but nothing dramatic that wanted me to switch back. The worst thing was Intel’s heartbleed issues that killed the CPU, it was around the 8th gen i7 if my memory is correct.

mcpackieh 3y ago
MacOS Mojave (e.g. 10.14 from 2018) ruined font rendering on standard DPI screens, which included every single Macbook Air from before that year (the first 'Retina' Macbook Air was released in 2018.)
kelsolaar 3y ago
Agreed, if anything minor updates have been either transparent or visibly addressing issues. I have had some problems when updating from major macOs version to another though. Windows unfortunately has the tendency to break even with minor updates regularly. It is so much of an issue that we have a process at work to test those updates on a few machines and roll them widely to the remaining after.
0x0 3y ago
macOS 10.15.6 had a showstopper kernel zpool memory leak if you used virtualization software to run windows VMs, requiring multiple reboots per day in order to stay in place. It was an absolute dealbreaker for productivity as a developer who needed windows vms.
torstenvl 3y ago
A Catalina update completely broke Thunderbolt docks, causing kernel panics every other time you connected one. (Seems like it got better in Big Sur, and haven't had a single one in Monterey)

saagarjha 3y ago

I don’t see this mention the most likely reason: Apple doesn’t really design their software to support arbitrary rollbacks in that direction. What should happen if an app writes out a database in a new format the old version can’t read? Clearly things would break so they don’t want you going in that direction. (For RSRs they can simply avoid doing things like that.)

lapcat 3y ago
> What should happen if an app writes out a database in a new format the old version can’t read? This generally shouldn't be happening in minor updates, and even if it does, there are ways of designing apps to handle this. I've done it before. (And in fact, software developers themselves often roll back versions of their software while developing and testing, which you should know.) As the author indicates, rolling back is possible, albeit overly difficult, so the possibility must be accounted for in any case. Major OS updates are different story. The key there is to avoid being an early adopter. ;-)
- saagarjha 3y ago
  I mean they absolutely could do this but as you know they don’t actually care much. Most of the time they don’t do breaking changes like this but sometimes they do and you probably don’t want to be one of the people unlucky enough to be caught by this.
chrisandchris 3y ago
Or do it otherwise: Break your software and make sure the next OS update fixes your software, aka Microsoft: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/attachments-missing-from-emails-when-using-macos-big-sur-211d83c8-5bd9-4531-99a4-a3d28a2208b8 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/attachments-missin...
ineedasername 3y ago
>Apple doesn’t really design their software to support arbitrary rollbacks in that direction Up until recently they did support rollbacks from a bad update, so I'm not sure the above holds as a reason. They used to, and if it's harder now then that is part of a deliberate design decision.

Simulacra 3y ago

At my last job we had a huge problem with employees not wanting to update iOS and macOS software because they feared that it would change things for the worse.

0xFFOOFF 3y ago
That’s why you use MDM to force updates. Employees don’t get a choice. Update or get locked out.
- lgas 3y ago
  You're technically correct, the best kind of correct, but you essentially responded so someone saying "users have fears" with "respond with (maximum) violence!"
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Hey, it's "better" to have your entire department/division/company grind to a halt because everyone's machines broke at the same time, rather than pockets of glitches that you can't quite explain, and you have to individually query each device's version number and patch level.
- ineedasername 3y ago
  That's not a sufficient response to OS updates causing degraded performance.
  - pxc 3y ago
    In the case of macOS updates, you could/should instead: - inform users of the difference between feature updates and security updates - show them how to install security updates rather than major version changes - give them a short window after which they must at least upgrade to the latest security patch on whatever version of macOS they're running so that they can choose their own update time for minimal disruption There's no need to silently break anyone's computer while they sleep, or shut it down while they're working. It's shameful to even expect employees to put up with that.

fn-mote 3y ago

If you haven't read the article: it is not a complaint. It's a relatively detailed explanation including a number of reasons why rollbacks are not supported. It also gives a method to do your own rollback! (I am not knowledgeable enough to verify the practicality of this method.) In short, the author's argument is: - no method to roll back firmware updates - the sealed system volume is huge and rollback capability would require keeping the whole old ~10GB around, which is a lot of wasted space

wkat4242 3y ago
Apple could use differential snapshots though. They wouldn't have to store an entire copy of that 10GB.
- tomxor 3y ago
  They used to do something to this effect with older MacOS X updates by only transferring a bundle of the files, but at some point they just sliced the OS into giant partitions and started sending the full file system image over the wire regardless of the actual changes. This wouldn't be such a wasteful idea had they used file system snapshot differential block transfer a la ZFS send. All I can guess is that they either think their customers are so rich they must all live in places with gigabit internet available, or they just don't care and everyone suffers. Either way it's a massive waste of time, resources and energy, just not theirs.
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    > This wouldn't be such a wasteful idea had they used file system snapshot differential block transfer a la ZFS send. That would have been so epic. They should do that in FreeBSD. Take the macOS idea of having a separate protected partition for the base system, and combine that with the support for ZFS in FreeBSD to use ZFS snapshots to update the FreeBSD base OS, instead of having to run freebsd-update which applies a bunch of patches
    - wkat4242 3y ago

eimrine 3y ago

Is it possible to have 2 disks on macOS devices? On my very important Windows machine I use a full mirroring of disk before letting the OS to update. Rolling back means rewiring a boot disk.

pram 3y ago
Yes, APFS has containers. You can actually install beta/other versions of MacOS in them and nuke it with no issue.

cyrnel 3y ago

Is this the issue that the article is referring to? https://www.macrumors.com/2023/07/10/apple-pulls-ios-16-5-1-macos-13-4-1-rsrs/ https://www.macrumors.com/2023/07/10/apple-pulls-ios-16-5-1-... > Unfortunately, it appears that the updates changed the Safari user agent to include an (a), leading some websites to break. Lol...

olliej 3y ago
When Safari 2.0.4 was released many many aeons ago a whole bunch of sites broke. Not because of browser issues, but because many websites were looking for "netscape" and "4" in the user agent to detect netscape 4. Then they'd (try to) us JSS and layers \o/
Wevah 3y ago
No, that’s a “rapid security response”, which is uninstallable.

greatgib 3y ago

I don't see an explanation of why in this article but just excuses. MacosOS is a mediocre OS, this is the real reason why.

ineedasername 3y ago

Apple is in the top #10 profitable companies worldwide, $400B in annual revenue, decades of OS development experience, and tighter control over OS & hardware integration than any other company on earth. In short, they lack neither resources nor expertise. "It might be hard" is not a good reason when previously they have done so but made a design &/or business &/or UX decision not to. I very much doubt that difficulty was the driving factor in this choice.

jrm4 3y ago

Stallman was right? Stallman was right. People keep making excuses for buying metaphorical "cars with the hood welded shut." Glad to hear that Linux hit 3% market share.

replete 3y ago

I make a full system drive clone with carbon copy cloner before every update. It was handy that time that Apple released a major operating system version that broke all my USB-C hubs for 6 months...

efficulty 3y ago

I honestly have not seen any larger application (enterprise/custom) which allowed real rollback. In practice it's always been "reinstall / restore from backup". I don't see how something as complex as an OS could have that.

mplanchard 3y ago
Very happy NixOS user here. If I have an issue with any upgrade, I just boot my system into the previous version, and then all is well until I find time to fix anything in the new version.
mcpackieh 3y ago
Maybe it technically falls under 'restore from backup', but OpenSUSE comes configured to create BTRFS snapshots before and after every package manager operation. Since this excludes the user's home, the effect is that you can rollback an update quickly without losing any work. I think this sort of system would work well for MacOS/Windows/etc, but perhaps it would give the users a bit too much power than these companies prefer...
- potamic 3y ago
  btrfs is awesome. The number of times I bonked my system only to restore it back just like that. Really gives the confidence to experiment and make bold changes to your system.

prirun 3y ago

I upgraded from Mohave to Monterey because a speaker was crackling and some posts online said it might be a software issue. Big mistake! The upgrade removed emacs, the C dev tools, and deleted any top-level directories it didn't know about / approve of, including my backup! I have Carbon Copy Cloner and was dumb enough to think I didn't need to use it before this upgrade. Now instead of a development system, I have a glorified web terminal. What a pain in the ass.

fredoralive 3y ago
Actually deleting things doesn’t sound good, I guess they didn’t test things on such big version jumps or something? Anyway seeing as Apple froze GPL software at the last GPL2 version, surely you’re using Homebrew or MacPorts to get a newer version of emacs anyway? As for C compilers, I’m not sure if they’ve ever been in the base install, but AFAIK it’s “xcode-select --install” you want if you don’t want to install all of Xcode.
- prirun 3y ago
  > surely you’re using Homebrew or MacPorts to get a newer version of emacs anyway? Nope, because I don't care about emacs' latest upgrades. I've been using the terminal version of emacs (emacs-nox) since the 80's and whatever version is installed has always worked fine. I tried to install xcode tools yesterday. First it has a license agreement window that needs a click, but it doesn't pop-up in the foreground so I didn't even know it was there. The Install button just error beeps. Then it said it would take 59 hours to download. That's nice. I aborted it. I restarted it today. It says it has 11 minutes to go so maybe things will go smoother this time. Still a complete pain in the ass, and nope, it didn't fix the speaker (I didn't think it would, just a long shot). Thanks for letting me vent!
  - goosedragons 3y ago
    Even just using the terminal version there's a LOT of changes for the better than the ancient version Apple shipped (22?). Package management, native compilation, etc.,.

aforty 3y ago

Do bad macOS upgrades even happen that often? Been using macOS full time since about 2007 and I can’t ever recall having a bad OS upgrade. I usually go entire hardware cycles without ever having to fresh install the OS.