7 ms·

macOS Sonoma 14.4 removes critical functions from the fileproviderctl command

103 points by luckman212 3y ago

zshrc 3y ago
HN is definitely going to remember that 14.4 is still in early beta. But Apple might forget about us and deliver broken software ONCE AGAIN
- freitzkriesler2 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - mantas 3y ago
    I’ve a feeling this truly ended with the iPod. No more iPods and Apple software quality is going downhill pretty fast :(
    - treprinum 3y ago
      My top-specced 14" M3 Max has all kinds of weird issues I've never seen before - half of the screen going pink when I switch between local users too often, getting completely unresponsive with only power off helping, not mounting USB sticks by default with only some window appearing for a millisecond on the screen, battery lasting 5 hours in VSCode (!!!) etc.
      - KennyBlanken 3y ago
        You could, you know, take advantage of Apple's best-in-class support and service? Also: the 5 hours in vscode thing is almost certainly some extension you're running that is constantly spinning its wheels. This isn't hard to figure out - just look in Activity Monitor.
        treprinum 3y ago
        Nothing shows up eating more than 4% CPU. Also when I go to sleep with battery at 100%, turn off the WiFi for the night and close the lid, I often find battery at around 30% the next morning. Don't tell me it's a user problem. I suspect 128GB RAM is eating too much power or something. I also refuse to visit Apple "geniuses" as they don't honor appointment times (fed up from waiting 2 hours until somebody talked to me) and then going through 30 minutes of trivial questions before they actually do something. Not mentioning they always wipe out drives when they "fix" something and I end up with some refurb motherboard that failed for somebody else before.
        fullspectrumdev 3y ago
        Apple support has not been best in class for years now.
        akyuu 3y ago
        Is there any other laptop manufacturer that offers generally better support than Apple? I'm asking because I'm genuinely interested.
        fullspectrumdev 3y ago
        I mean, I’ve found Apple support has become incredibly disappointing in the last 5 or so years, and Lenovo support has actually improved, though you usually have to mail your device in. I’m legitimately unsure what changed in Apple to make their support go from “pretty damn good” to “honestly a waste of damn time”.
      - least 3y ago
        Not to say that the quality of OS updates has been stellar in the past several years, but Sonoma stands out as an especially buggy release. I've encountered a lot of weird bugs, including it occasionally becoming completely unresponsive, that I've not had on this particular machine before. This machine being a 16 inch M1 Max.
      - stephenr 3y ago
        That you mention a specific app in regards to battery life suggests it's more likely an app specific problem. I don't think it's a coincidence you're having poor battery life with an electron app.
        treprinum 3y ago
        Surprisingly I don't have that issue on my other two Macbooks. Also WiFi goes randomly down without any notification and so does USB charging. M3 Max for $8000. One would expect something less messy for that price.
        stephenr 3y ago
        What model are the other MacBooks? Possibly it's something not optimised or even not compiled for arm. Wifi can be a very mixed bag, the usb-c charging issue sounds like something worth taking/sending it back for (assuming it's not something obvious like a crappy usb charging brick).
        treprinum 3y ago
        Other MacBooks are Intel and never drop WiFi. USB-C charger is the original 140W Apple one. If I send it back, I'll get a refurb mobo with another set of issues as returned by somebody else and not a new one, and all my data wiped out. I pay yearly AC+. I still hope some future OS release will fix it but I am not so sure.
        stephenr 3y ago
        If you're not willing to take it in to have what sounds like a hardware fault fixed under the warranty you're paying for and not using, I'm not really sure what you want, except something to complain about. Warranties exist for a reason, if you choose not to make use of it, that's on you, not the manufacturer.
        treprinum 3y ago
    - freitzkriesler2 3y ago
      It is, apparently no one can handle sarcasm on this forum.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Counting down till the commenters start telling everyone to switch to Linux. Not that I disagree with them.
  - neilv 3y ago
    https://www.debian.org/distrib/ https://www.debian.org/distrib/
    - badgersnake 3y ago
      Not much help if you’ve got an ARM Mac.
      - Astraco 3y ago
        You're welcome https://asahilinux.org/ https://asahilinux.org/
        neilv 3y ago
        Also: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1 https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1
        hu3 3y ago
        https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/M3-Series-Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/M3-Series-Feature-Su... A large list of things that don't work and are not even being worked on doesn't sound enticing. Things like HDMI, WiFi and Bluetooth don't work and are not being worked on.
        neilv 3y ago
        For anyone who doesn't make using Apple hardware the top priority, might be a lot easier to just find more-open laptop hardware that you like, and use stock Debian atop that.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  It's not "broken." Apple has been increasingly hostile to "traditional" file servers (dropping AFP support - AFP is still superior to SMB both performance and compatibility-wise) and non-iCloud file sync services. They also disabled third party cloud syncing to folders on external drives fairly recently. I'm blanking but there were other changes in Ventura related to third party cloud sync, too. There's a reason your iPhone/iPad defaults, every fucking time you try to save a file, to iCloud storage and the "default storage location" option was removed from preferences. Apple is taking the "frog in the pot of boiling water" approach, slowly pushing everyone toward iCloud file storage, despite it being a dogshit service with numerous problems because the dev team are more interested in coordinating their nail color to their McLaren (I wish I was joking.)
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    > There's a reason your iPhone/iPad defaults, every fucking time you try to save a file, to iCloud storage and the "default storage location" option was removed from preferences. I assume you're right about Apple removing the preference, but I just shared a photo, picked "Save to Files" and it defaulted to Cryptomator. In case it's helpful to know, you can also turn off "iCloud Drive" as a Location.
  - illiac786 3y ago
    TresorIt can synchronise file to and from folders on external drives just fine. Don't know why others don't want to implement it...
rzzzt 3y ago
From the macOS 13 thread by OP: > If you don't know what it is, and don't use it - it probably won't affect you. > > But some people use this tool to control and work with apps that use the > FileProvider API: such as Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, ShellFish, etc. I feel like I'm covered by the first sentence, but still curious as to what can be controlled by the CLI tool portions.
- luckman212 3y ago
  One important thing for me was being able to fix broken cloud storage paths that had become out of sync for whatever reason. This was a frequent-enough issue for my users of Google Drive, and to a lesser extent, OneDrive that I had built some tooling around it into our MDM. This worked by calling the subcommands `fileproviderctl materialize`, `fileproviderctl domain remove` and `fileproviderctl evict` to clear these broken paths and restore the sync to a working state. No longer possible.
  - notso411 3y ago
    [dead]
  - jorvi 3y ago
    It’s kind of sad that even after 15+ years, no one has caught up to Dropbox. None of the other cloud providers do proper block-level sync, and I hear much less about Dropbox breakage than other providers. It does make sense because OneDrive, iCloud and Google Drive are tie-in services. If you use Microsoft 365 / Apple / Android you are “forced” to use them to gain access to certain features, meaning there is no competitive pressure.
    - menschmanfred 3y ago
      I'm not sure on what basis you came to your conclusion but I do not have my issues with OneDrive on Mac and gdrive on Windows for ages.
      - 3y ago
gjsman-1000 3y ago
14.4 is beta. If betas can’t be beta, they are pointless and Apple shouldn’t bother releasing them.
- whoopsie 3y ago
  [flagged]
- alberth 3y ago
  I don’t even understand what this comment means in this context. This isn’t like a bug that was introduced in the beta, and betas are intended to help find bugs. This is functionality deliberately being removed, that is wildly known to break cloud storage software.
  - jmull 3y ago
    > I don’t even understand what this comment means in this context. Not OP, but it means you should expect beta software to be broken and incomplete. How would you know this isn't due to a bug introduced in the beta? Seems as likely an explanation as anything else at this point, unless you have some inside information. A lot of things use a "plugin" organization, and if a certain plugin was missing -- say, due to bug leading to a failed compile, the tool would work fine but the functionality provided by the plugin would simply be missing. Not that I have any insight into this particular case, but just pointing out there are perfectly reasonable ways a bug could cause this. Also, I've personally disabled features in a beta release when I knew the feature was broken and it would cause long term issues if someone tried to use the broken feature (like data corruption). So it could be deliberately removed but only temporarily. Or maybe Apple just removed this to be dicks, IDK... But I don't think you do either, do you? If you do have inside info, can you let us know whyx this was removed?
    - luckman212 3y ago
      It's not a "bug" - I ran `strings /usr/bin/fileproviderctl` on 14.3 and 14.4 and you can clearly see that the commands and their related helptext have been completely removed.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
4 versions into the public release and they still haven’t figured out how to let users reliably download wallpapers from their servers
- swozey 3y ago
  LOL really? I'm behind on the wallpaper drama but a few weeks ago I installed something that downloaded all of the new Sonoma realtime HD whatever they're called wallpapers to a foler on my NAS so that all my android tvs could stream them as idle screens.. It is like 60gb+ of data I didn't want that getting hammered by 3 different tvs because I have a limit. Also they're really not that interesting. I find them pretty boring to be honest and prefer Wallpaper engine by far.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Every few months I test to see if its still broken. It’s kind of hilarious seeing scrappy startup-esque triaging of longstanding known issues from the crown jewel desktop os of a three trillion dollar company.
    - swozey 3y ago
      Yeah I am a huge OSX/macos fan that converted 10-12 years ago and every single job in my last 10+ years has given me a MBP so I know it almost better than linux or windows now (I've been an eng for both). Whatever goes on in the Apple MacOS meeting rooms every year lately is like, nothing that I could ever imagine in my wildest fever dream. Stage manager? Why do I still have 5 app packages "mounted" on my desktop after 3 years that I eject every few weeks and come right back? Webcam emojis with thumbs, cool. etc etc. That iphone webcam thing was cool for a week but i completely forgot about it until I wrote this. I can think of so many goofy bugs or weird MacOS idiosyncracies that just never get mentioned that we deal with. I've had SO many Macbook Pros, I have 3 M1s in my house right now and I have like 2x the amount of white chargers than I have of actual laptops nowadays and they all act exactly the same. When I wake up monday morning and bang on my keyboard no matter what version of OSX it is I have a 40%ish chance of it not waking up without me grabbing the laptop and opening the lid. 20 years later. Honestly, nowadays, windows is my "chill and relax" OS. It's windows snapping is amazing. I hate developing on it though, I did it awhile with WSL2 years ago and had many frustrations, like completely breaking my wsl vm somehow.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
Apple has hired people from Microsoft Windows's team or what?

103 points by luckman212 3y ago

HN is definitely going to remember that 14.4 is still in early beta. But Apple might forget about us and deliver broken software ONCE AGAIN

freitzkriesler2 3y ago
[flagged]
- mantas 3y ago
  I’ve a feeling this truly ended with the iPod. No more iPods and Apple software quality is going downhill pretty fast :(
  - treprinum 3y ago
    My top-specced 14" M3 Max has all kinds of weird issues I've never seen before - half of the screen going pink when I switch between local users too often, getting completely unresponsive with only power off helping, not mounting USB sticks by default with only some window appearing for a millisecond on the screen, battery lasting 5 hours in VSCode (!!!) etc.
    - KennyBlanken 3y ago
      You could, you know, take advantage of Apple's best-in-class support and service? Also: the 5 hours in vscode thing is almost certainly some extension you're running that is constantly spinning its wheels. This isn't hard to figure out - just look in Activity Monitor.
      - treprinum 3y ago
        Nothing shows up eating more than 4% CPU. Also when I go to sleep with battery at 100%, turn off the WiFi for the night and close the lid, I often find battery at around 30% the next morning. Don't tell me it's a user problem. I suspect 128GB RAM is eating too much power or something. I also refuse to visit Apple "geniuses" as they don't honor appointment times (fed up from waiting 2 hours until somebody talked to me) and then going through 30 minutes of trivial questions before they actually do something. Not mentioning they always wipe out drives when they "fix" something and I end up with some refurb motherboard that failed for somebody else before.
      - fullspectrumdev 3y ago
        Apple support has not been best in class for years now.
        akyuu 3y ago
        Is there any other laptop manufacturer that offers generally better support than Apple? I'm asking because I'm genuinely interested.
        fullspectrumdev 3y ago
        I mean, I’ve found Apple support has become incredibly disappointing in the last 5 or so years, and Lenovo support has actually improved, though you usually have to mail your device in. I’m legitimately unsure what changed in Apple to make their support go from “pretty damn good” to “honestly a waste of damn time”.
    - least 3y ago
      Not to say that the quality of OS updates has been stellar in the past several years, but Sonoma stands out as an especially buggy release. I've encountered a lot of weird bugs, including it occasionally becoming completely unresponsive, that I've not had on this particular machine before. This machine being a 16 inch M1 Max.
    - stephenr 3y ago
      That you mention a specific app in regards to battery life suggests it's more likely an app specific problem. I don't think it's a coincidence you're having poor battery life with an electron app.
      - treprinum 3y ago
        Surprisingly I don't have that issue on my other two Macbooks. Also WiFi goes randomly down without any notification and so does USB charging. M3 Max for $8000. One would expect something less messy for that price.
        stephenr 3y ago
        What model are the other MacBooks? Possibly it's something not optimised or even not compiled for arm. Wifi can be a very mixed bag, the usb-c charging issue sounds like something worth taking/sending it back for (assuming it's not something obvious like a crappy usb charging brick).
        treprinum 3y ago
        Other MacBooks are Intel and never drop WiFi. USB-C charger is the original 140W Apple one. If I send it back, I'll get a refurb mobo with another set of issues as returned by somebody else and not a new one, and all my data wiped out. I pay yearly AC+. I still hope some future OS release will fix it but I am not so sure.
        stephenr 3y ago
        If you're not willing to take it in to have what sounds like a hardware fault fixed under the warranty you're paying for and not using, I'm not really sure what you want, except something to complain about. Warranties exist for a reason, if you choose not to make use of it, that's on you, not the manufacturer.
        treprinum 3y ago
  - freitzkriesler2 3y ago
    It is, apparently no one can handle sarcasm on this forum.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Counting down till the commenters start telling everyone to switch to Linux. Not that I disagree with them.
- neilv 3y ago
  https://www.debian.org/distrib/ https://www.debian.org/distrib/
  - badgersnake 3y ago
    Not much help if you’ve got an ARM Mac.
    - Astraco 3y ago
      You're welcome https://asahilinux.org/ https://asahilinux.org/
      - neilv 3y ago
        Also: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1 https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1
      - hu3 3y ago
        https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/M3-Series-Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/M3-Series-Feature-Su... A large list of things that don't work and are not even being worked on doesn't sound enticing. Things like HDMI, WiFi and Bluetooth don't work and are not being worked on.
        neilv 3y ago
        For anyone who doesn't make using Apple hardware the top priority, might be a lot easier to just find more-open laptop hardware that you like, and use stock Debian atop that.
KennyBlanken 3y ago
It's not "broken." Apple has been increasingly hostile to "traditional" file servers (dropping AFP support - AFP is still superior to SMB both performance and compatibility-wise) and non-iCloud file sync services. They also disabled third party cloud syncing to folders on external drives fairly recently. I'm blanking but there were other changes in Ventura related to third party cloud sync, too. There's a reason your iPhone/iPad defaults, every fucking time you try to save a file, to iCloud storage and the "default storage location" option was removed from preferences. Apple is taking the "frog in the pot of boiling water" approach, slowly pushing everyone toward iCloud file storage, despite it being a dogshit service with numerous problems because the dev team are more interested in coordinating their nail color to their McLaren (I wish I was joking.)
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > There's a reason your iPhone/iPad defaults, every fucking time you try to save a file, to iCloud storage and the "default storage location" option was removed from preferences. I assume you're right about Apple removing the preference, but I just shared a photo, picked "Save to Files" and it defaulted to Cryptomator. In case it's helpful to know, you can also turn off "iCloud Drive" as a Location.
- illiac786 3y ago
  TresorIt can synchronise file to and from folders on external drives just fine. Don't know why others don't want to implement it...

rzzzt 3y ago

From the macOS 13 thread by OP: > If you don't know what it is, and don't use it - it probably won't affect you. > > But some people use this tool to control and work with apps that use the > FileProvider API: such as Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, ShellFish, etc. I feel like I'm covered by the first sentence, but still curious as to what can be controlled by the CLI tool portions.

luckman212 3y ago
One important thing for me was being able to fix broken cloud storage paths that had become out of sync for whatever reason. This was a frequent-enough issue for my users of Google Drive, and to a lesser extent, OneDrive that I had built some tooling around it into our MDM. This worked by calling the subcommands `fileproviderctl materialize`, `fileproviderctl domain remove` and `fileproviderctl evict` to clear these broken paths and restore the sync to a working state. No longer possible.
- notso411 3y ago
  [dead]
- jorvi 3y ago
  It’s kind of sad that even after 15+ years, no one has caught up to Dropbox. None of the other cloud providers do proper block-level sync, and I hear much less about Dropbox breakage than other providers. It does make sense because OneDrive, iCloud and Google Drive are tie-in services. If you use Microsoft 365 / Apple / Android you are “forced” to use them to gain access to certain features, meaning there is no competitive pressure.
  - menschmanfred 3y ago
    I'm not sure on what basis you came to your conclusion but I do not have my issues with OneDrive on Mac and gdrive on Windows for ages.
    - 3y ago

gjsman-1000 3y ago

14.4 is beta. If betas can’t be beta, they are pointless and Apple shouldn’t bother releasing them.

whoopsie 3y ago
[flagged]
alberth 3y ago
I don’t even understand what this comment means in this context. This isn’t like a bug that was introduced in the beta, and betas are intended to help find bugs. This is functionality deliberately being removed, that is wildly known to break cloud storage software.
- jmull 3y ago
  > I don’t even understand what this comment means in this context. Not OP, but it means you should expect beta software to be broken and incomplete. How would you know this isn't due to a bug introduced in the beta? Seems as likely an explanation as anything else at this point, unless you have some inside information. A lot of things use a "plugin" organization, and if a certain plugin was missing -- say, due to bug leading to a failed compile, the tool would work fine but the functionality provided by the plugin would simply be missing. Not that I have any insight into this particular case, but just pointing out there are perfectly reasonable ways a bug could cause this. Also, I've personally disabled features in a beta release when I knew the feature was broken and it would cause long term issues if someone tried to use the broken feature (like data corruption). So it could be deliberately removed but only temporarily. Or maybe Apple just removed this to be dicks, IDK... But I don't think you do either, do you? If you do have inside info, can you let us know whyx this was removed?
  - luckman212 3y ago
    It's not a "bug" - I ran `strings /usr/bin/fileproviderctl` on 14.3 and 14.4 and you can clearly see that the commands and their related helptext have been completely removed.

kjkjadksj 3y ago

4 versions into the public release and they still haven’t figured out how to let users reliably download wallpapers from their servers

swozey 3y ago
LOL really? I'm behind on the wallpaper drama but a few weeks ago I installed something that downloaded all of the new Sonoma realtime HD whatever they're called wallpapers to a foler on my NAS so that all my android tvs could stream them as idle screens.. It is like 60gb+ of data I didn't want that getting hammered by 3 different tvs because I have a limit. Also they're really not that interesting. I find them pretty boring to be honest and prefer Wallpaper engine by far.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Every few months I test to see if its still broken. It’s kind of hilarious seeing scrappy startup-esque triaging of longstanding known issues from the crown jewel desktop os of a three trillion dollar company.
  - swozey 3y ago
    Yeah I am a huge OSX/macos fan that converted 10-12 years ago and every single job in my last 10+ years has given me a MBP so I know it almost better than linux or windows now (I've been an eng for both). Whatever goes on in the Apple MacOS meeting rooms every year lately is like, nothing that I could ever imagine in my wildest fever dream. Stage manager? Why do I still have 5 app packages "mounted" on my desktop after 3 years that I eject every few weeks and come right back? Webcam emojis with thumbs, cool. etc etc. That iphone webcam thing was cool for a week but i completely forgot about it until I wrote this. I can think of so many goofy bugs or weird MacOS idiosyncracies that just never get mentioned that we deal with. I've had SO many Macbook Pros, I have 3 M1s in my house right now and I have like 2x the amount of white chargers than I have of actual laptops nowadays and they all act exactly the same. When I wake up monday morning and bang on my keyboard no matter what version of OSX it is I have a 40%ish chance of it not waking up without me grabbing the laptop and opening the lid. 20 years later. Honestly, nowadays, windows is my "chill and relax" OS. It's windows snapping is amazing. I hate developing on it though, I did it awhile with WSL2 years ago and had many frustrations, like completely breaking my wsl vm somehow.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

Apple has hired people from Microsoft Windows's team or what?