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Can you slim macOS down?
- tux3 9mo agoIf you don't like the conclusion, and you have an M1 or M2, see also https://alx.sh https://alx.sh Asahi's not perfect, but there's no restrictions. You bought the computer, after all.
- patates 9mo agoLosing Thunderbolt is a bit too much, isn't it?
- chrisldgk 9mo agoThat and losing the ability to connect displays via USB-C is what’s keeping me from switching sadly. I love what the Asahi team is doing and I’m confident they’ll get it figured out. I wish I could do something to help, but this type of programming is far beyond my skill level so there’s not much I can do other than donate here and there.
- anschl 9mo agoDP over USB-C is coming soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OAiOfCcYFM&t=1681s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OAiOfCcYFM&t=1681s
- cs02rm0 9mo agoI thought development for it was not in a good place?
- prmoustache 9mo agoLooks pretty much stalled to me and with new versions coming every 1.x year it is unlikely to improve much. Seems ok enough if you want to use a M1 mini as desktop or server.
- Jean-Philipe 9mo agoThat's not actually true - they're just working on upstreaming all of the code into the Linux kernel. Development is still going strong and M3 will be added soon after upstream work has been done, as it's expected to be trivial. M4 has the added challenge of another security layer, if I understood it correctly, but once that's solved, the rest of the architecture hasn't changed much. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OAiOfCcYFM&pp=ygULYXNhaGkgbGludXg%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OAiOfCcYFM&pp=ygULYXNhaGkgb... for details.
- peterisza 9mo agoIsn't the battery life shit? Maybe I'll try it
- jbstack 9mo agoI've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users (other than cases where you're required to use one e.g. for work). I can understand it for casual users who just want something simple that works for basic tasks, but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want? In Linux you'd solve OP's problem by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- nxobject 9mo agoFor me, battery life and power management – even with the number of services that macOS runs. I run Asahi Linux when docked, but on the go I estimate I get a warmer lap and about ~1/2 hr less.
- rado 9mo agoPixelmator Pro
- eXpl0it3r 9mo agoA lot of users still like the mix of a good UI for most tasks, while being able to do a lot of power user stuff without an added layer. Plus many will choose macOS also for the hardware, which support for new chipsets is still rather WIP under Linux.
- vladvasiliu 9mo ago> A lot of users still like the mix of a good UI for most tasks This is funny; it's actually the main reason why I asked for a PC when I was up for renewal at work, so I can run Linux on it. I truly like the hardware of the mbp, especially the screen (don't care about battery life, I mostly use it at a desk with power nearby). The OS itself is fine, since it can easily run most of the tools I use. I also like how it handles special characters (I can easily type French on an US-ANSI keyboard) to the point that I've implemented that on my Linux and Windows machines. But what kills it for me is the UI behavior. The window management drives me crazy, especially when multiple screens are involved. And there are quite a few aggravating issues, like being unable to control the audio output of my screen's speakers (connected through DP), being unable to turn off external screens (sometimes I just want to use the power of my monitor, which has an integrated KVM). Yeah, I know there are programs trying to fix these, but I have to go out of my way trying to find them, and then they're hit and miss. On Linux, everything works as expected (though, granted, it's possible I've won the hardware-compatibility lottery, since it actually works better than on Windows).
- Luc 9mo ago> To the Unix purist, this might appear wasteful and unnecessary, but macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix. I get what they mean, but macOS is even Unix certified. https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
- timeon 9mo agoYes on paper. Submitted version differs from what customers run at home/work.
- yokoprime 9mo agoIm sorry, but i dont buy that. Unix certification has nothing to do with number of processes running or "efficiency"! The OS must be SUS compliant, i.e have all the core interfaces in place, all the correct utilities (awk, grep, vi, sed etc) and theres something about header files, filesystem requirements etc. even if the macOS submitted for certification is super trimmed down, it does not matter as long as its a true subset of what is shipped to consumers. MacOS is certified UNIX i.e its "UNIX", like it or not. On this point the article is just wrong.
- timetopay 9mo agoUnix is both a family of operating systems and also a trademark. The name is overloaded - "Unix" is more than one thing at the same time. In addition, the trademark is "UNIX" and the operating system family is "Unix" MacOS is both UNIX and also not Unix at the same time. If the trademark holders decided to UNIX certify my cat, which is well within their legal right to do so, would that make her UNIX?
- greggsy 9mo agoUnlike macOS, your cat does not, and will not, meet the industry-accepted standard that describes unix as we know it today. https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/xym0.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/xym0.htm
- peterisza 9mo agoIt's such a shame that we have come to this. MacOS is basically Windows now. :(
- spiderfarmer 9mo agoAs long as apps can continue to steal focus on windows, windows will always be worse.
- oneeyedpigeon 9mo agoApps can do that on macOS too — Steam is a very good example.
- willis936 9mo agoEvery login steam steals focus no less than two times. Steam is one of the few login items I'd choose to keep, but wasting the first 30 seconds of login is too heavy a price to pay.
- spiderfarmer 9mo agoI personally can’t name any examples and I have been using Macs for design and development for 15 years.
- eviks 9mo agoIt's worse on a Mac, not only can they streal input focus directly, but also visual focus by continuously jumping up at the dock
- closewith 9mo agoI don't know if you've used Windows lately, but Windows is orders of magnitude less pleasant than MacOS (or even previous bad Windows versions like Vista).
- WesSouza 9mo agoWindows 7 you mean. Windows 11 is far deeper into the sewer.
- vegabook 9mo agoI don't understand why Apple doesn't offer a headless MacOS or at least a path to a minimal install. Those mac minis make a great little server box but losing 8GB to hundreds of processes, before you've done anything, just feels wasteful and inelegant.
- silvestrov 9mo agoThere are no sales in it. Apple leadership makes decisions based on money. That is also why there is no iPhone mini even though there is a small number of people that really prefer a small phone.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- icedchai 9mo agoWorse, there's sales in NOT doing it. When I buy a Mac, I get extra memory "just in case." I would've been fine with 24 gigs on my MacBook Pro, but I got 48.
- ksidisnidjsdj 9mo ago[dead]
- downrightmike 9mo agomr money bags over here
- icedchai 9mo agoOh yeah. I should've gone for a M4 Max w/128 gigs.
- mfro 9mo agoThey did provide OS X Server at one time, but the market just wasn't there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server
- egorfine 9mo agoI badly need slimmed down macOS for CI VMs. Yeah, some little things can be cut out but most of the time not. On the other hand, macOS is not that much memory-hungry as one might think. Like, a 4GB VM can start and build software.
- big_toast 9mo agoYes, I thought OP was going that direction from the title. I keep reading posts hoping someone has found the solution but there's always a tradeoff. I think it's important enough that maybe apple will announce something at WWDC. The AIs need better isolation primitives. Running software from un-trusted sources needs easier and more flexible isolation guarantees. Automated builds need lighter weight virtualization options. A dockerfile that you can specify includes xcode-tools, the accessibility APIs. Volume mounting. Network controls. etc. https://github.com/dockur/macos https://github.com/dockur/macos is a little too clunky? Tart VM or manually doing apple's container CLI is maybe most of the way there, but images are huge.
- egorfine 9mo agoI'm working on a Docker-like software for macOS Guests on macOS Hosts. Prototype's done. No, Dockur is ancient for Intel macOS which is almost useless in today's development as some dev tools are only available for Apple Silicon macOS which cannot be virtualized that way.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- thisislife2 9mo agoFor those wanting some semblance of control over macOS system processes, consider experimenting with App Tamer ( https://stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/ https://stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/ ). I was sceptical about it but "rogue" system processes, like Spotlight Indexer / Engine, that randomly demanded and hogged 100% of the CPU is now a thing of the past for me, after I used App Tamer to set it to not use more than 20% of CPU resources. It can supposedly stop (kill?) processes too, and I am experimenting with that too. But yeah, I think it's time to dump macOS (thankfully, I am still using an older version so my experience is less shitty).
- dostick 9mo agoMisleading title, should be “you can’t”
- latchkey 9mo agoInstead of forcing iOS onto laptops, they locked down MacOS.
- quotemstr 9mo agoFor decades now, we've had to deal with articles like this one. People who know just enough to sound credible mislead those who known even less into mutilating their systems in the name of "optimization". This genre is a menace. Much harm has arisen out of the superstitious fear of 100% CPU use. Why wouldn't you want a compute bound task to use all available compute? It'll finish faster that way. We keep the system responsive with priorities and interactivity-aware thresholds, not by making a scary-looking but innocuous number go down in an ultimately counterproductive way. The article's naive treatment of memory is also telling. The "Memory" column in the task manager is RSS. It counts shared memory multiple times, once for each process. You literally can't say the 5MB "adds up". It quite literally is not amenable to the arithmetic operation of addition in a way that produces a physically meaningful result. It is absolute nonsense, and when you make optimization decisions based on garbage input, you produce garbage output. It's hard to blame Apple for locking down the OS core like this. People try to "optimize" Windows all the time by disabling load-bearing services that cost almost nothing just so "number go down" and they get that fuzzy feeling they've optimized their computer. Then the rest of the world has to deal with bug reports in which some API mysteriously doesn't work because the user broke his own system but blames you anyway.
- latchkey 9mo agoYou're not wrong. Let's hope that articles, like the OP's post, shed light on further optimizations that Apple is now fully in charge of making.
- quotemstr 9mo agoI see nothing in the post that convinces me Apple ought to change a single thing.
- giantrobot 9mo ago
- WillAdams 9mo agoHaving trouble understanding how this discussion, and TFA don't mention: https://www.puredarwin.org/ https://www.puredarwin.org/ which would be where I'd go if total control of the OS on Apple hardware was wanted.
- wtallis 9mo agoThat doesn't seem to actually provide a usable OS to run on any remotely recent Apple hardware. The most recent test build available for download is a virtual machine image of a version that aligns with macOS from eight years ago.
- WillAdams 9mo agoSurprised that that wasn't mentioned as a reason for this. Rather a shame it's so far behind.
- sgjohnson 9mo ago> Here’s our first problem, as those are located in the Signed System Volume (SSV), so we can’t change them in any way. The same applies to the other 417 LaunchDaemons and 460 LaunchAgents that account for most of the processes listed by Activity Monitor. In the days before the SSV it was possible to edit their property lists to prevent them from being launched, but that isn’t possible any more when running modern macOS. SSV can be disabled. It would be ill-advised to do so, but Apple intentionally allows you to do that. In fact you can strip away every single security layer of macOS, including allowing unsigned kernel extensions to be loaded. This document is a bit outdated, but it should still be possible to do all of that. https://gist.github.com/macshome/15f995a4e849acd75caf14f2e50e7e98 https://gist.github.com/macshome/15f995a4e849acd75caf14f2e50... Feels like the article is just a cheap dunk on macOS. Has Apple perhaps baked in a bit too much into the SSV? Definitely. Even the Chess.app is in there. Does it really matter? Almost certainly no.
- AceJohnny2 9mo ago> Feels like the article is just a cheap dunk on macOS. That blog, Howard Oakley at eclecticlight.co, is consistently the most informative on the internet about macOS behaviors and internals, that Apple does not explain. He is also the author of several useful tools [1] to help observe and understand some of its underlying details. It's maybe the closest we have to a SysInternals for macOS. [1] https://eclecticlight.co/free-software-menu/ https://eclecticlight.co/free-software-menu/
- sgjohnson 9mo agoThat just highlights my point about this article being a cheap dunk? Because I was very disappointed with it ending at “SSV doesn’t let you”. SSV can be disabled, and the author should have known (almost certainly knows) that.
- AceJohnny2 9mo agoDisabling SSV may have been beyond the scope of the experiment the author was attempting. I suppose he could've been more explicit about that. From one of his comments on his post: > I wish whoever takes that project on, every success, even more so at working out how those processes can be disabled completely while keeping the SSV intact.
- buttocks 9mo agoDon’t read the comments. Author responds like a tool.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- rappatic 9mo agoOur machines all have CPUs that can execute on the order of 10^9 instructions every second. Why waste time worrying about a few hundred processes that use next to no CPU time?
- coleca 9mo agoThe needless processes / bloat still burn electricity though. I'd have to guess that given the millions of installed macOS machines it's a non-trivial amount of wasted electricity. Long gone are the days of ruthlessly optimizing software for the limited hardware.
- kbolino 9mo agoIndeed, these processes are not all sitting there doing nothing. Two processes in particular have been this exact sort of problem for me: mds_stores and mediaanalysisd. On three separate Macs (all Apple Silicon), I've observed the case heating up whenever the computer is plugged in but not actively being used. Assuming Activity Monitor is more or less accurate, the culprit seems to be those two, who always have massive amounts of accumulated CPU time, but never seem to actually be using CPU when watched. I suspect, given what they supposedly do, that they're also needlessly exhausting SSD write cycles, but that's harder to analyze/prove. Naturally, they are also in the untouchable area of the file system. Completely disabling Spotlight, which you can do without disabling SIP, seems to always fix this problem, albeit at the cost of seriously decreased usability. I've also had mixed results with just limiting the categories of Spotlight indexing in System Settings.
- crazygringo 9mo agoYeah, that's not supposed to be happening. Yet it does. For me it's fseventsd that goes crazy sometimes. These processes are all meant to be lightweight, but they're just buggy and end up in bizarre loops. Once my Mac crashed because it was endlessly downloading the same Aerial screen saver videos in a temp directory until it ran out of space.
- crazygringo 9mo ago
- tristor 9mo agoI'm not sure who the author is, but the fact they choose to be stymied by SSV (which can be disabled) to avoid investigation down that path, which is similar to the path enthusiasts do with Windows to build tools like Tiny11, NTLite, and distributions like Atlas, feels intellectually lazy. Asserting that macOS is not UNIX (it is, quite literally, including the most recent release Tahoe) and then arguing with folks who corrected them in the comments, makes me think the author wasn't really interested in answering the question they put forth and instead were trying to mystify readers to shut down exploration and curiosity. It is entirely possible to gain an understanding of those processes running on your computing system and to decide which process you don't want to run at startup, this is regardless of the desires and intents of the maker of the computing system, as long as you retain control of the hardware. Many of the Windows optimization tools at various points even involved community made binary patching. There's no basis to claim that it's not possible to understand or take actions, it's just that the Mac community has a different set of priorities and focus areas than other computing communities, so nobody in the community has yet invested the effort to do so. You could summarize this blog post as answering "No" to the question in its title, without actually exploring the question to determine if that's a true answer. It's not a true answer, and won't be until we completely lose control over our own hardware.
- sbuk 9mo agoHoward Oakley has been writting about macOS internals for a long time, and 99% of the time, his essays and articles are excellent. This is not one of them. Don't be put off by this one article - the site is a goldmine.
- sneak 9mo agoI have often considered making a set of scripts to do just exactly this (after disabling the SSV so that the system can be modified). It would be no less secure than any modern or common linux OS, which do not use a read only signed root.
- t1234s 9mo agoIt would be nice to be able remove some or all of the iOS bloatware apps but you have to disable system protection and they will just reappear on the next macOS update. They really need something similar to the "Windows Components" screen that lets you check or uncheck things that are bundled in the windows install.
- yndoendo 9mo agoThat is no longer the case after Windows 7. Windows 7 Embed allowed for full bloatware removal to the point of removing Windows Updater. Windows 10 IoT still forces the bloatware on the users; XBox bar, Cortana, ... Windows 11 IoT is even worse, they are starting to remove the local only user account ability in the OS that is designed for product hosting. BSD and Linux are the only modern OSes that allow the removal of bloatware. This is why in 2026 I have the job of porting software that ran on Windows Embedded to run on Linux.
- pxc 9mo agoThere's a lot of chatter here about macOS' Unix certification. But in a post shared by another user, it appears that the actual content of that Unix certification vindicates OP— macOS' official Unix compatibility requires disabling SIP: > So, if you want your installation of macOS 15.0 to pass the UNIX® 03 certification test suites, you need to disable System Integrity Protection, enable the root account, enable core file generation, disable timeout coalescing, mount any APFS partitions with the strictatime option, format your APFS partitions case-sensitive (by default, APFS is case-insensitive, so you’ll need to reinstall), disable Spotlight, copy the binaries uucp, uuname, uustat, and uux from /usr/bin to /usr/local/bin and the binaries uucico and uuxqt from /usr/sbin to /usr/local/bin, set the setuid bit on all of these binaries, add /usr/local/bin to your PATH before /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, enable the uucp service, and handle the mystery issues listed in the four Temporary Waivers. https://www.osnews.com/story/141633/apples-macos-unix-certification-is-a-lie/ https://www.osnews.com/story/141633/apples-macos-unix-certif... So it seems very fair to say then, that features like SIP and the SSV are genuine turns away from Unix per se, even given the fact of the certification.
- GrowingSideways 9mo ago[dead]
- 7e 9mo agoNone of those things are at all desirable. setuid uucp? Security nightmare. strictatime? Not needed. Linux doesn't do it either. Apple has retained the good parts of UNIX and ignored the shitty parts. In the end, it is more UNIX than Linux is.
- bigyabai 9mo ago[flagged]
- subjectsigma 9mo agoI don't disagree, but what does that possibly have to do with macOS being a Unix or not?
- ChrisMarshallNY 9mo agoWell, one of the "nice" things about classic mac OS, was that you could write an app that could register with the system, to receive every user event (like keypresses and mouse movements). We used to make fun extensions, with this... I'm sure that couldn't ever be abused... The new UNIX-based OS may have its warts, but it is just a bit more secure.
- LeoPanthera 9mo ago(Generally, to avoid confusion, the classic version is written "Mac OS" and the modern version "macOS", with various versions of "OS X" between.) Modern macOS can do this too, you just have to ask the user for permission. You can see it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Input Monitoring
- sitharus 9mo agoOn modern macOS applications can flag an input field as secure, which blocks keypress interception. The permission is fairly new, but the actual feature has always been there as part of the window server. I used it back in the 10.4 days to implement macro recording. Classic Mac OS extensions on the other hand had free rein to modify any part of the kernel. They really could modify anything.
- ChrisMarshallNY 9mo agoYeah. I can see why they made the decision they did.
- pico303 9mo agoI love how we want to trim macOS down. I totally get it. I open Activity Monitor and think, "WTF?" At the same time, my current job requires I use a Windows laptop, and I have to admit, "Wow, we have it pretty good over here..." Not saying this isn't a valiant effort, but I kind of feel like Mac users are stretched out on a lounge chair at the beach complaining the Bloody Mary could be a touch more spicy.
- karlitooo 9mo agoWas really hoping this would be an article on the OS file size. /system using 80GB on a 250gb drive is crazy. Don't get me started on the state of library directories and app bloat.
- skylurk 9mo agoThey should have to advertise the usable space. Right now it is like opening a can of beans and finding it half water.
- JSR_FDED 9mo agoI think for many the key driver behind wanting to slim down the OS isn’t RAM or CPU use. It’s wanting to control their experience of using the computer. If the OS didn’t feel bloated nobody would care if there were 1000 processes that occasionally woke up briefly. So what makes the OS feel bloated? It’s stuff you don’t need or want pushing its way into the foreground so you can’t ignore it. Notifications and popups are a huge culprit. Best most anxiety reducing thing I did yesterday was turn off pointless notifications like Music showing the name of the new song it’s playing. And used Little Snitch to make sure I’m never getting an update downloaded or nagged about ever again.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- userbinator 9mo agoSeveral years ago I remember making something that could be considered a custom "distro" of macOS that would be VM-oriented and as minimal as it could be for CI purposes, by starting with the recovery/installer partition and adding what I needed while deleting what I didn't. Not surprisingly, there was next-to-no precedent of such that I could find, and my biggest source of information was the Hackintosh community. Nonetheless it was not too difficult, if tedious, to do so, and the final disk image size I arrived at was less than 1GB. In general the macOS community is, to put it bluntly, mostly computer-illiterate non-power-users who will either advocate against you or otherwise have no idea what you're talking about. In contrast there's a HUGE amount of existing information on modding Windows, and of course Linux sits at the other extreme.
- compounding_it 9mo agoIt's sad to see apple go from customer experience first to investor satisfaction first. There is a lot of pressure on iOS26 and Tahoe being bloated and slow with planned obsolescence clearly taking centre stage. People can hope that apple takes their operating systems as seriously as their ARM chips, but it doesn't seem likely. A cycle of 'performance and bug fixes year' will happen which gives them an excuse to bloat further operating systems that are in the pipeline. This is the worst part. We will fix now to show you we can do it and then bloat it in subsequent years so that you upgrade your devices.
- vlovich123 9mo ago> Does that matter, though? This whole sequence was completed in 0.144 seconds, using lightweight inter-process communication with negligible use of resources, and only repeats hourly. Once upon a time there were teams at Apple obsessing over stuff like this because in aggregate it’s a meaningful impact on battery, especially for a service that is functionally disabled. Wonder if it doesn’t matter or there’s low hanging fruit and just so much “dead code” that isn’t actively owned by anyone but also not causing enough problems to matter.
- wepaean 9mo ago[dead]
- Flux159 9mo agoWhat Srouji giveth, Federighi taketh away. Apple's version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
- leokennis 9mo agoNot directly related, but look at this Mac OS 9 screenshot from the article: https://eclecticlight.co/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/macos914.png https://eclecticlight.co/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/macos914... Look at the contrast. Look at the buttons. Look at the scrollbars. Look at the readability. Look at the clear button labels. If only our computers still looked like that...
- mrbadguy 9mo agoMan you got me on readability. Just yesterday I had to input a random string WiFi password in a printer with only arrow keys to select each character. The password had an upper-case I in it but the moronic designers of the little password label that came with the router selected a font where “I” and “l” are indistinguishable. Took me like ten minutes to get the damn thing connected. I only got it right because I looked up the password on my Mac, whose keychain app displays them in gloriously readable monospaced font. FFS
- pjmlp 9mo ago> To the Unix purist, this might appear wasteful and unnecessary, but macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix. It’s a closed-source proprietary operating system designed for use by millions of consumers and regular users. Not only it is a certified UNIX, regardless of the yes and buts being discussed in other threads already, the complaint would apply to all commercial UNIXes, some of them still around not yet killed by Linux.
- zombot 9mo agoTL/DR: No. Betteridge's law of headlines applies.
- haritha-j 9mo agoRegardless of whether its UNIX or not, the author's tone in the replies to all the comments under that particular comment really put me off.