4 ms·

OSX has had the striped progress bar for hard-to-estimate processes as long as I remember. Did they do away with it? There are situations where I don't exactly

OSX has had the striped progress bar for hard-to-estimate processes as long as I remember. Did they do away with it? There are situations where I don't exactly care how far something has progressed but I want to see that it at least has not hung. Fedora's dnf doing SELinux autorelabeling for two hours without any indication of progress is one of those things I hate with passion.

account42 2y ago
The only real indication of progress being made is a log output of steps completed. All a spinner or similar indicator tells you is that the UI thread is not hung but that isn't really useful information.
- anilakar 2y ago
  Obviously in the ideal case indicator animation would be tied to something else, like background process sending output, and there would be a textual description next to it.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  Scrolling logs scare common people. I don't know why.
- 6510 2y ago
  In the 90's I had this idea that in the future steps completed would be confirmed to the server so that the progress can be calculated for other users. Like, on system A downloading step 1 takes 1 minute and step 2 takes 3 minutes. If on system B step 1 takes 1.5 minutes step 2 should take 4.5. Do the same for stuff that requires processing. But we apparently chose to make things complicated in other ways.
xlii 2y ago
There's still progress bar on update and there's timer (but not always). The timer also jumps. Once I had ~40 minutes update that was hope-feeding me with "2 minutes left" for most of the time. My guess is that it's not worth optimizing, but nowadays I shy from updates if I don't have 2h of time buffer (not because I am afraid something will break, but because I know I'll be locked out).
- bayindirh 2y ago
  Their update timer always start from 29 minutes remaining and goes from there, IIRC, and I find that it's way more accurate than Windows' one on 99% of the time. Funnily, Linux (KDE) got very good at their estimations for some time now. Better behaving storage also has a role, I presume.

account42 2y ago

The only real indication of progress being made is a log output of steps completed. All a spinner or similar indicator tells you is that the UI thread is not hung but that isn't really useful information.

anilakar 2y ago
Obviously in the ideal case indicator animation would be tied to something else, like background process sending output, and there would be a textual description next to it.
lupusreal 2y ago
Scrolling logs scare common people. I don't know why.
6510 2y ago
In the 90's I had this idea that in the future steps completed would be confirmed to the server so that the progress can be calculated for other users. Like, on system A downloading step 1 takes 1 minute and step 2 takes 3 minutes. If on system B step 1 takes 1.5 minutes step 2 should take 4.5. Do the same for stuff that requires processing. But we apparently chose to make things complicated in other ways.

xlii 2y ago

There's still progress bar on update and there's timer (but not always). The timer also jumps. Once I had ~40 minutes update that was hope-feeding me with "2 minutes left" for most of the time. My guess is that it's not worth optimizing, but nowadays I shy from updates if I don't have 2h of time buffer (not because I am afraid something will break, but because I know I'll be locked out).

bayindirh 2y ago
Their update timer always start from 29 minutes remaining and goes from there, IIRC, and I find that it's way more accurate than Windows' one on 99% of the time. Funnily, Linux (KDE) got very good at their estimations for some time now. Better behaving storage also has a role, I presume.