Great post detailing everything wrong with Catalina so far. I installed it on my personal Mac, and that scared me off of ever installing it on my work laptop. Hopefully I can jump to whatever the next thing is. Or maybe it's time to get off Macs for good.
At least don't try to use the version of Linux under MacOS as a Linux system. The OP is running cron jobs and Python in the background, and changes in the Apple security environment broke them. If you need to run Linux stuff, put it on a real Linux system.
If you want a BSD system, run {Free,Net,Open,Dragonfly}BSD. You can do it on cheaper and better hardware than Apple offers. It just might not look as stylish, but who cares? T-series Thinkpads have better keyboards than Macbooks, and you can still get a used T60 for less than a hundred bucks. (More recent models will cost more, but you'd be shocked at what you can do with a T60 once you get a new battery, max out the RAM, and replace the HDD with a SSD.)
I'd just like to second the used-Thinkpad route. I picked up an X250 (Skylake i5) on eBay last spring for $160, and after maxing out RAM (8GB), a decent SSD and a new battery I'm out ~$350 for something that is both indestructible and quite zippy. Yes, it's not shiny, but IMHO it's a far more practical Unix-y workstation. (I mainly run Linux but I've tested OpenBSD too and everything Just Works.)
>> don't try to use the version of Linux under MacOS
MacOS is based on Unix not Linux.
However, I mostly agree with your sentiment and would extend it to “use the right tool for the job”. Use launchd (although I hear it is on the way out) instead of Cron etc.
I recall Rene Ritchie saying that Apple introduced a new scheduler that they have used privately since Mojave (could be related to the BGTaskScheduler, but I'm uncertain).
I just remember thinking, oh crap, now I need to learn a new scheduler.
macOS runs on Darwin, which is a BSD derivative. There’s no Linux involved at any level as far as I know. Also, cron is a standard Unix tool that predates Linux by at least a couple of decades I think.
Reading the post, I didn't get the impression that he was complaining about permission dialog boxes in general, but rather about the specific implementation (including lack of documentation and lack of power-user features) in Catalina.
OP here. Thank you. I have no issues with the tightening of security and permissions on Catalina. In fact, I welcome it both for myself and my aging parents who I want to remain safe online. My issue, as you said, is the implementation and lack of documentation for those of us who do know what we're doing.
I just upgraded to Catalina today on my MBP, and that screenshot of Allow/Deny notifcations hits the nail on the head! Likewise the popups about allowing apps to control other apps - what a wonderful way to introduce me to Catalina!
I mean, come on, there has to be a better way than this, especially from a company supposedly famed for it's user-orientated designs and thinking?
Maybe Apple could have gone through all the apps on their own App Store, built a whitelist out of the privileges that each of those apps effectively needs to do its job at all (not optional features, just the “makes the app more than a paperweight” feature-set), and shipped Catalina with said whitelist.
For example, if, when you upgraded to Catalina, the App Store version of Alfred was already installed on disk, then macOS should assume that you’re an Alfred user, who wants to continue to be able to do “the thing Alfred does” (launch apps) without asking.
And before you say “but what if this whitelist authorizes malware to continue being malware”—if there’s malware on the App Store, then they should probably solve that by removing the app from the App Store and deauthorizing the developer’s code-signing cert, so that Gatekeeper won’t run it any more. Just kill the vampires; don’t ask the user if they want to let them in.
> if there’s malware on the App Store, then they should probably solve that by removing the app from the App Store and deauthorizing the developer’s code-signing cert
Apple has been spectacularly poor at spotting bad apps on the Mac App Store.
Well, I'm not famed for my user-orientated designs and thinking!
But there are numerous ways this could be handled. A few off the top of my head:
1. Do nothing - leave things the way they were pre-Catalina
2. Default all apps installed pre-Catalina to "Allow", so you only get the prompt for newly installed apps
3. Make it configurable at the OS level, so you can set the default you want, and then tweak individual apps as you see fit
Honestly, I just want an off switch for TCC. (It can be in the Terminal-only.) I'm kind of surprised there isn't one—Apple is usually pretty good about providing this stuff on macOS (at least relative to that other platform).
Even with SIP turned off, there's no way to just blanket dismiss the dialogues. (Although, I'm sure without SIP someone could use code injection, but no one has, and given the amount of work it would require I'm not surprised.)
With SIP disabled, it might be possible to directly modify the TCC database…maybe someone can write a script to do this so it includes all your applications already.
I once put a 200 point bounty on an Ask Different question for how to directly edit the TCC database (when SIP is off). No one answered. No one answered :(
Maybe handle it with a sidebar that lists all of the requests. Apple knows people are going to get flooded with these requests, they should have had a queuing sidebar to list all of the requests and that you can go through them one at a time.
I haven't upgraded yet, but I would expect there to be a one-time user flow when upgrading. Walk the user through new features and then bring up a single page with a list of apps that need modified permissions. Let the user select all for 'Allow' and have them type in their password once. Done.
I would have given all already-installed applications the permissions they had in the previous version of macOS. If I've been using an app for years it's a bit late to worry about it reading things that I don't want to read, and in practice showing a giant wall of permission prompts on first startup is just going to result in users clicking on Allow on all of them anyway.
What about coalescing the lists of applications requiring specific permissions, for instance, and presenting that to the user at the end of the setup process in a more structured step? I'm imagining a list of "here are XYZ applications requesting location services access, pick which ones you don't want to give location access to" and then a list of "here are ABC apps that want microphone and camera access". It's not great, but it does eliminate the myriad popups. The more "Apple" solution would be to just have sensible defaults (deny) and only prompt the user when the app in question wants to access that specific item (the way iOS implements it).
> The more "Apple" solution would be to just have sensible defaults (deny) and only prompt the user when the app in question wants to access that specific item (the way iOS implements it).
This is how it works; it’s just that macOS applications are not used to delaying authorization prompts to the appropriate time so they ask for it on startup.
Detect when there are multiple apps that are asking for new permissions simultaneously and then ask the user if they want to go to the "bulk permission editing page" to manage them.
On that page there could be a grid of apps vs permissions with the permissions each app is requesting highlighted. One click to switch on each permission and even a power user could be on their way in a couple minutes.
LineageOS has a similar permissions list for all apps installed (albeit without a nice overview grid) that I think makes it very easy to manage what each app is allowed to do.
Take a look at where Windows UAC eventually ended up. A lot of this can definitely be streamlined by having the action itself also be the permission approval, as UAC now does.
Doesn't necessarily help with 3rd party apps, but it's a bit insane that the bundled apps on the OS itself have all these issues, too (like iterm fighting finder??)
EDIT: Or for notifications they could take a page out of Android's book. Default allow notifications, but after the user dismisses a few of them without interaction prompt if they still want to keep receiving them. Take a spam-filter type approach instead of allow/deny prompts everywhere.
"please review permissions" opens a table with your applications listed in rows and permissions requested by each in columns. Popups like this remind me of the internet in 2003.
I had the same response when they dropped the live version. I've been using the beta for weeks, and when I heard it went GM I was shocked.
My biggest issue is that the whole computer freezes for about 10 seconds when I activate a dropdown in Safari, Chrome, or Firefox sometimes. It will also freeze everything but audio playback for 10 to 30 seconds when watching videos full screen with VLC. I dunno, maybe it's just me.
But this release is the buggiest .0 release I've ever seen from Apple.
Or unfortunately when trying to build an iOS app: the ability to target an iOS version (sometimes minor, such as from 12.3? to 12.4?) depends on Xcode version and the latter is often hard-locked to a MacOS version.
I can add something to the list which is Sidecar i.e. using an iPad as secondary screen. It was a real nightmare to set it up as it’d not detect the iPad despite meeting all the requirements. I found no fixes online so I had the idea of logout & login again (iCloud) so that it might detect it.
Well, it detected I had an iPad but the connection would time out every single time. After rebooting both the Mac and the iPad (another wild guess) it kind of worked - very laggy and couldn’t use the Mac properly as clicking in e.g. System Preferences would open Finder to show me the app under Applications instead of the actual system preferences panel because of reasons.
It’s truly broken and felt like an alpha version. But this has been the trend with macOS and guess it’ll stay like this unless someone high enough at Apple decides to wake up.
Not helpful but I had the opposite experience. Sidecar Just Worked with my MBP and 2016 iPad Pro, and drawing on it was extremely smooth. A better experience than Astropad so far, personally.
SideCar was the reason I was excited for Catalina. But alas, the feature is not supported on 2015 Retina Macbook Pros, only the newer ones with the horrible keyboard, pointless touchbar, only one kind of port, etc.
I'm in the same boat. Installed the betas on both iPad and MBP about a month ago. Turns out my 2015 pre-horrible-keyboard MBP is too old. And none of the published hacks around the restriction work nowadays.
Had the same issue initially. Called Apple support who debugged it via remote desktop. Turns out Sidecar uses iCloud for handshake between the two devices (god knows why), and for some reason requires 2FA on iCloud to be turned on for both the iPad and the laptop, on each device. I didn't have iCloud 2FA setup completed on the laptop, so it didn't work until that was resolved.
Yeah, this is a big reason why I read hacker news. Laptop started bugging me about Catalina and after reading this article I changed my thought process from, “I guess I’ll do that this weekend” to, “I guess I am going to disable automatic updates in every way I can.”
Can I just say how happy I am with Xfce. It's a Linux desktop environment that looks like in the early 2000s. It's fast. There are no unnecessary frills. It just gets the job done. Its release cycles are measured in several years, and keep it minimal. I used to be on Windows, then macOS, then Ubuntu and now this. As a developer with soon to be 20 years of experience, it's the best environment I've had.
So was I until I switch to a 4k monitor and realize that there's no real, stable, functional fractional scaling on Linux, even less so on XFCE, unfortunately.
This is the biggest thing keeping me from leaving the Mac for Linux, and it hasn’t really improved much in the last 4 years. I don’t think most people care about HighDPI (or whatever you want to call it), particularly Linux devs. But I can’t go back to lower DPI screens.
> I don’t think most people care about HighDPI (or whatever you want to call it), particularly Linux devs. But I can’t go back to lower DPI screens.
I find this surprising. I'd say anyone who does any serious amount of multitasking (whether a Linux dev or not) would easily want one. I think people do care but they are just waiting on better pricing/availability.
My experience with hiDPI on Linux has been pretty varied. On GNOME, everything just works, and I recommend GNOME to most first-time Linux users. I use i3, and the scaling situation there involves setting some environment variables globally, but is otherwise fine (GDK_scale or something like that). The only issue I usually run into is when Firefox opens my file browser, which breaks the scaling somehow. Other than that, hiDPI is as good as it is in windows. MacOS definitely leads in that regard, but things have certainly gotten better to the point of not really worrying about it in Linux these days.
This is far from true. Gnome shell itself is mostly OK (if buggy), but only a minority of real apps work properly. The standard Gnome apps (Nautilus, Gnome Shell etc) are fine, but that's where the support pretty much stops.
I think things will improve as more Linux devs get HiDPI monitors (ones with good IPS panels are still quite expensive). Ubuntu has some beta-level support for fractional scaling but it looked awful when I tried it. But I live in hope that it'll all be sorted out soon!
Seconding i3. I bought into vim when the evangelists came for me early in my career and it has payed wonderful dividends. I can't recommend i3wm for everyone but for those who like keeping their hands on the keyboard and want the wm to just get out of their way, i3 is perfect.
> I find this surprising. I'd say anyone who does any serious amount of multitasking (whether a Linux dev or not) would easily want one.
I would have thought so too, but this isn't my experience. The smartest developers I know at my current job still develop with old laptops with awful 720p screens (I mean, awful beyond just the low res) and can't be bothered to attach an external Full HD monitor, let alone ask for a 4K one. And still they are brilliant, produce great software, and are key when planning profound software changes in the company. These are people who I deeply admire and from whom I always learn something valuable when they speak. Keep in mind they are also developers, not "whiteboard engineers".
My conclusion is that we nerds tend to overestimate ergonomics, because they are easier to see ("pff, I can only type with a mechanical keyboard!", "how can people code with fewer than three 4K monitors!"), but the actual bottlenecks and difficulties of building complex software lie elsewhere.
Nah it's too big on a 28" 4k, trust me I tried everything before going back to Windows, even using Gnome Shell (which I despise) and experimental fractional scaling (which barely works, freezes and scales back to 100% randomly)
Ubuntu 18.04 using 2x scaling is broken in lots of little ways for me.
From the simple (boot screen runs at 1x so text is unreadable) to the wierd (VirtualBox tangle of bugs), to the frustrating (dolphin file manager, which I use to avoid UI bugs in the gnome file manager).
I found workarounds for some issues, and maybe they are fixed in the next LTS, but there is no way I could recommend 18.04 with 4k to a non-professional.
I do care about high dpi but not in the way most people seem to mean: I want as much text as readable on a screen. One of the many reasons for not using Gnome everything is that it insists on making everything SO BIG with enormous amounts of wasted space around it. Those 1600x1200 pixels on my laptop or 1920x1280 on the monitor are there to be used, not wasted. Firefox used to be another offender in this respect albeit one which is easier to tame - just change layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to something sensible (0.7 works quite well), move all controls to the navigation bar and close all toolbars.
Qt 5.14 is now in beta and has a toggle switch to do per-display scaling based off DPI on all platforms.
I've had a 4k 27" monitor mixed with 1080p and 1440p monitors of varying sizes for years and have managed to get 90% of software working great, and whenever I dip into Wayland get to use the fractional scaling there it goes up to 99% of software.
typing this from a Linux desktop on a 4k screen, don't understand what does not work ? I can set whatever dpi in my .Xresources's Xft.dpi key and it looks fine
Gnome does, but a WM that works isn't much use without apps that do likewise. Linux desktop software support for hdpi is an absurd mess. Some apps can switch resolution when you move them between screens. Others can't. When you combine this with Gnome's inability to deterministically start an app on the main monitor, this means sometimes it's sometimes literally impossible to get an app in the resolution & on the screen you want. Some apps start up with an apparently random resolution (Calibre, I'm looking at you!). What a horror show it is.
Wayland sort-of handles this. That is to say you can set scaling per-screen without xrandr hacks (with Gnome anyway, not sure about xfce). But there's such a variation in support from apps, it's still a mess).
This lol and the tiny title bars that can't be resized in XFCE unless editing the XFWM theme images (unlike Mutter where the title bar size can be changed in a file).
Sorry but I don't have time for this anymore. I would have on my SUSE box in 2003.
Try using Linux on a laptop with an hdpi internal monitor, and a regular old external. It's a guaranteed way to generate a daily urge to throttle yourself. (Using Gnome in my case rather than XFCE, but it's still an unparalleled shitshow)
My work laptop is in this situation and it got to the point where I just ran the eDP display in 1080p instead. Honestly on a 15 in screen where I'm only doing code and not editing photos, there's no point in running it in UHD.
I dismissed this initially out of a felt need to max out the use of my hardware. But actually it does solve some problems. I prefer native resolution + 200% scaling when using laptop (also a 15") on its own. But given the laptop screen is further away when I'm plugged in at the desk, 1080p is more than adequate. It also means I can go back to Xorg, which obviates some Wayland bugginess.
So thanks for the idea - it truly had never occurred to me (oddly).
Depends on your distro but on Debian+XFCE I use ARandR (front-end to xrandr cli tool, which is a front-end to xorg's randr). Laptop plus external monitor works great, with auto-config on connect and other stuff.
By using a combo of xrandr and Xfce's hi dpi setting, I've managed to make my linux desktop more stable, functional and consistent across a 4k screen and a 1920*1200 screen next to it than Windows can manage.
Sure, I had to put in a bit of effort, but now that I have the results are excellent, there's no scale jumping or even the weird rendering MacOS does when moving windows around.
Honestly I just had to switch window scaling to 2x in the Xfce appearance settings, then I run this to fix my layout on each login, giving me a consistent size and no weird rendering -
AFAICT this effectively renders the smaller screen as if it had a much larger resolution (2880x1800), then downscales, giving a good quality image, and then positions the 4k screen to the right of it. The key is the scale factor compensating for different DPI on the different screens.
I tried scaling the other way first, by giving a sub-1.0 scaling factor to the 4k screen, but that meant rendering a lower res and then upscaling, which looked terrible!
The only annoyance now that I have this set up is that occasionaly driver updates change which output is which and I have to update the script so it works again.
Not sure I did anything special, I'm using the clearlooks theme with some customisation of the fonts. See the other answer for how I sorted out the res/DPI stuff.
It isn't simple? no. You have different env variables for QT, GTK and xrander can set its own DPI as well. It is kinda a mess, but I use i3 so I figure I'm in for whatever pain I put myself into.
I've been running Linux on HiDPI devices for a couple of years now and I've got things sorted to where it's no an issue on any new device. I need to give Wayland/Sway another shot at some point. I hope it has better native zoom support than X11.
KDE has excellent support for fractional scaling, to a single decimal point. It is also a very lightweight and fast desktop environment, but has plenty of useful features.
I did try with Plasma on both Kubuntu and Arch at 1.2 and in both cases some controls had very ugly and/or blurry fonts and some were fine. The inconsistencies were too annoying.
I main Linux on virtually every one of my computers, and I love it. I wouldn't switch off Linux if you paid me. But this complaint is spot on. It drives me crazy that we still don't have good support for higher resolutions.
And there's nobody else to blame for that -- we've known for ages that 4K and fractional scaling was going to be a thing, just like we've known for ages that touchscreens were going to be a thing.
But nope, let's just measure everything in pixels. It's like the majority of native developers on Linux all looked at responsive design on the web and thought, "I'm pretty sure that's just a fad." Everybody just dug in their heels almost on principle or something and refused to make it a priority, and now we're behind both Windows and Mac when it comes to high-resolution touch devices.
And I still run into people who argue that what we should just scale the physical size of a pixel for the entire desktop by a percentage, just so we can keep building fixed layouts that absolute position all of their elements. At a certain point, it feels more like a cultural problem than a technical one.
Everybody else is doing responsive design. QT already supports `em` units (well, sort of[0]). We could be using them on Linux.
Step 1: put 'xrandr --dpi <your actual DPI>' in .xinitrc
Step 2: Use QT applications (Plasma is a fantastic QT desktop)
Step 3: Enjoy your reasonably sized everything.
"Scaling" is a broken concept to work around applications assuming 96 DPI (which is considered scale=1). You don't need it if you use programs that actually respect your real DPI. Unfortunately X11 doesn't properly compute DPI settings, even though EDID information generally contains the screen size - I imagine, for fear of breaking stuff.
(You can correct GTK3/GDK applications by setting GDK_DPI_SCALE=<actual dpi / 96>, but in my view it's a sin that you need to do that)
I'm posting in the Linux thread because it's probably annoying to some to see 'but I moved to Linux' threads throughout this comment.
But the original post is very sobering.
I left OS X a few years back when the new laptop came out. Partly the whole USB-C thing I suppose, but I felt that there was pretty good hardware around and the new MBP didn't really shine (and was fiercely expensive). So I made the move to Ubuntu on some new Lenovo hardware (Carbon X1).
I really look forward to the twice-yearly Ubuntu releases. More of the same, rarely any huge new surprises and just generally more polish. I upgraded to Ubuntu 19.10 immediately once the 19.10beta came out and it seems speedier.
I'm sorry to see Mac users get so badly burnt but I'm very glad I made the decision to leave when I did.
For the touchpad I am undecided how much here is software and how much is hardware. E.g. install ubuntu on a macbook, is the touchpad still great or just average?
See also the discussions on “Everything’s broken And nobody’s upset” from 7 years ago, about Microsoft, by Scott Hanselman focusing quite heavily on sync problems
I'm not sure if anyone has seen this yet, but Catalina is letting me login without entering my password!
I have two users on my machine.
1. I "lock screen" from the Apple menu and close the lid.
2. I reopen the lid and it does not ask for password.
3. I start using laptop and lock screen suddenly pops up, but asks password for the wrong user.
4. I hit random key and the screen goes away, and i can continue working.
Also, it looks like a lot of settings don't work on the lock screen / choose user screen. For instance, the pointer speed doesn't match what I have set, font sizes don't match either, and the resolution looks wrong.
Despite having a lower quality than before since a few years, Windows has login and locking features that actually work (and I don't even really remember of bugs in there, like ever), so no, from what you describe it does not feel like Windows at all, it feels like some completely broken crap.
There were some good bugs in the login part of windows 2000/XP. Most of the ones I know of involve opening a browser while still on the login screen (my favorite was in the help for the screen reader), which is running as the System user that has complete control over the system.
They fixed most of them somewhere around XP SP2 or SP3, where they pretty much disabled help functionality on everything on the lock screen.
When Cortana was introduced, they had some issues of being able to launch the browser while the machine was still locked (though as the user that the computer was locked by). You couldn't do much as the previous bugs as the lock screen still covered everything.
While on the subject, on Linux I've also noticed that Xscreensaver (or GNOME screensaver, can't remember which) sometimes goes straight into the desktop after wakeup for a few seconds before the lock screen prompt actually appears. You can even run programs. Really bizarre and feels like this issue has been present for a while now. Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?
I run xlock on suspend rather than on resume, seems more reliable. I'm any case, locking is trivial to bypass by pressing Control-C a few times on resume to kill xorg, hence why I also start X with "startx; exit" so that this drops to the login prompt instead of the shell.
> Right now with screensavers under X it's basically capturing the input and continually redrawing over the display.
> With Wayland, Kristian plans for the lock-screen to be part of the Wayland compositor. In having the compositor handle the screensaver role, it can ensure that no window can appear atop the screensaver surface, it can properly detect idling and grabs already, and has complete control over the screen. Unlike the X design, there wouldn't even need to be a screensaver "window" that's on top but the compositor could just keep painting a black screen. For those interested in a "fancy screensaver", a plug-in could be used or an out-of-process Wayland client for drawing whatever you desire.
Yeah, saw this the other day on an Ubuntu machine (running whatever the last release was, not LTS) I have hooked up to a TV. Flash of the desktop for a second or so before the login screen. Speaks to something fundamentally wrong with the way the whole thing works, I figure.
I had the same impression. That general feeling that the screensaver is like an app/overlay that is invoked only once the desktop is active. The speed of invocation also seemed related to how fast your machine is at launching general desktop programs...
for the record I used to be able to see a bit of the desktop on windows after waking from sleep before the lock screen came on. can't remember if that's still true, though.
Ah yes, I remember that happening on windows xp a lot when it was waking up or between screensaver and login timeout (when they overlap), you'd even get the transition-to-welcome-screen sound so you know it only just triggered the locking just then. I suspect if you are fast you can run something before it actually locks.
I run the real xscreensaver though (I was building it from the source until around this time last year, now I run the one from alpine but I don’t think they’ve done anything weird (I haven’t checked though))
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen what everyone is talking about and it’s bothered me a little too (granted, my machine is configured in such an undiscoverable way that just opening an xterm window is obscure enough to be nearly equivalent to a very short pin, and then you need to know bash. Now that I’m not in college and don’t have anything important that’s probably good enough even without xcreensaver.)
I think this is because xscreensaver confines (grabs) the mouse cursor to the area occupied by the "Please enter your password" window. If this area somehow suddenly happens to be out of your screen boundaries (e.g. when xrandr --offing external screens), the mouse is ungrabbed and can be used to interact with the desktop. It takes a while before xscreensaver notices and grabs it again. Someone should probably figure out the exact steps to reproduce this and report it.
As said elsewhere, locking X is really hard, and xscreensaver architecture doesn't help. This week I managed to crash xscreensaver login prompt twice, unlocking the desktop without entering my password, and that was the last straw, I switched to xsecurelock which separates the login entry into another process, making such bugs much less severe.
Unfortunately I can't reliably reproduce the crash. A hardware fuzzer (also known as a faulty ThinkPad keyboard) was involved, and I don't possess the device any more. I think what it did was press certain keys very often — the keyboard matrix is sampled at 125 Hz, so I'm guessing it was pressing the keys about 60 times per second, but I'm not sure which keys they were. If anyone manages to reproduce this, please do give me a shout. :-)
Wouldn't know about the windows lock screen particularly, and I haven't been a windows user since Vista, but such low quality software and UX is what I remember being accustomed to during my time with windows.
Recent Windows login issues I've had to deal with:
* Non-consensual insertion of Windows Update latency into my schedule. Often I don't mind. Sometimes, though, I really, really do.
* Said updates failing but giving no indication of failure other than taking infinitely long.
* Keyboard layout sometimes gets swapped back to QWERTY with no visual indication. This interacts especially poorly with stringent Active Directory 3-try-lockout policies.
* Network hiccups + active directory (or something) can cause login to spin indefinitely, requiring a restart.
* Login screen background occasionally changes to a random picture from my computer. Usually a wildly upscaled application resource. I haven't entirely ruled out my own clumsiness as a contributing factor, but I've also seen this in the wild, so it's at least a UX issue somewhere.
None of this is as bad, in a theoretical sense, as Apple's no-password fiasco, but it has resulted in a far larger footprint on my day-to-day activity.
Since Mojave, waking my 2012 rMPB results in a flash of desktop and content before showing the lock screen. This sounds similar, if not a continued degradation.
I've never seen a bug like that on Windows. Honestly, it feels like a lot of Mac users live in a bubble where Windows is a buggy pile of crap. Meanwhile most Windows users around the world are getting on with life on a stable OS with a great choice of hardware. While nothing's perfect, Windows is in a really good place at the moment.
Except that I can not open "Windows Search settings", since it crashes after loading a few seconds. And all the other shit. It might not be as bad as this Mac update, I don't feel confident doing a comparison. But certainly take issue with "Windows is in a really good place at the moment"
Not OP but there will always be counterexamples for any software with a sufficient number of users. I've never experienced the bug you're referring to.
My brand new PC running Windows 10 will simply not wake up from sleep, requiring a hard restart. A google search turns up thousands of similar complaints (and no solution).
> While nothing's perfect, Windows is in a really good place at the moment.
Sure, minus the fact that my Windows box would be _spying on me_ if I wasn't a very technically capable person. That's a non-trivial driver for a lot of folks when they decide to pick Apple products. Or, at least, it was until recently with the iCloud / China debacle.
As a Linux user I feel like windows users live in a bubble where where computers are more or less expected to behave like diseased wild animals rather than machines.
On the other hand, I could scale my external monitor perfectly with W10, while on Linux the answer is still xrandr. Which makes everything blurry. Unless you scale Gnome/KDE to 2x and downscale.. which makes everything slow.
I came up with that idea (windows makes computers behave like organisms and not machines) during an internship where everyone was required to use corporate computers running Windows 10.
I haven’t used it on a personal computer since XP though so I guess you’re not far off.
I've spent 15 years on a Mac before switching (back) to Windows *
I must say that Windows has... changed... In a good way. But that's not even the point. The point everyone keeps forgetting, is that OSX is tightly coupled with native Apple hardware, while Windows has to work on a zoo of devices.
The huge spam of confirmation popups reminds me of the "debacle" of Windows Vista introducing UAC. It's kind of inexcusable that, a decade later, Apple did exactly the same UI fiasco.
Back then, upgrading meant something for the users, like QuickLook, TimeMachine or for the first time in life I saw a new OS actually take less disk space and was released primarily as optimization of the previous release as in Snow Leopard.
Now I don't bother to watch their keynotes as they're too boring and I'm productive on High Sierra and I don't see any reason I should upgrade and cause unnecessary annoyance. How boring Apple software have become.
Is there a reason to upgrade these days? I don't need SideCar as I connect my laptop to a bigger display.
sigh I switched back to WordPress literally five days ago and haven't yet gotten around to installing a caching plugin. My bad. I've turned Cloudflare caching on in the meantime.
Been running WP for god knows how long for my personal site, while my company website is built with Jekyll.
In June I migrated to Ghost simply to try it and learn more about Node. It was _fine_, but never really fit my mental model of how a blog should operate or a web app should be structured. For better or worse, I'm an ex-Yahoo and a PHP guy through and through.
It's interesting to see this from a MacOS release and the security complaints are similar to what's been seen about recent versions of Windows.
To me, both are a manifestation of the idea that these two Operating Systems are moving in the direction of being safer for "ordinary users" at the expense of annoying more technical users who want to do less common things which can be dangerous if you're not careful (like running software as root)
Given that "ordinary users" outnumber technical ones, I guess that makes commercial sense...
As a result of that, I prefer working with Linux where possible as (generally) it lets you do what you want, even if that's really dumb/dangerous. If I say `kill -9 x` or I sudo to root and do `rm -rf .` by accident it's on me.
Frankly, I find it much more dangerous if e.g. OneDrive deletes my desktop randomly or if MacOS doesn't let me log in. Stuff like `rm -rf folder` I still have to type myself, at least.
I take solace in that fact that by definition there will always be developers - increasingly, even. And therefore there will alway be a market for making computers for developers. Apple seems to be dropping the ball on that lately, which is a shame because they had such a lead. But Microsoft is racing to fill the gap with things like WSL and the skyrocketing build quality of high-end Windows laptops.
Safety on Linux is arguably better; with sandboxing utilities like SELinux, AppArmor, bubblewrap and Flatpak, as well as being the platform receiving the most containerization efforts (Docker, Podman, LXC), Linux is arguably more secure. This is especially true if you use an immutable OS like Fedora Silverblue, where everything is sandboxed or containerized by default.
This is a sure sign that the key people who used to run OS X development have moved on. Probably years ago, and we're just witnessing the gradual atrophy. The maintainers they left in their places probably kept it mostly working for 2-3 years. That is all.
> The final (well, first) Catalina release along with the outright awful public beta makes me think one thing. And that is Apple’s insistence on their annual, big-splash release cycle is fundamentally breaking engineering. I know I’m not privy to their internal decision making and that software features that depend on hardware releases and vice-versa are planned and timed years (if not half-decades) in advance, but I can think of no other explanation than that Marketing alone is purely in charge of when things ship.
I don't work at Apple, but this part hit home for me. In the past few years my jobs have revolved around shipping features at all costs with zero regard for engineering feasibility.
We all like to criticize CEOs for prioritize short-term stock prices over long-term company goals, but I'm beginning to think the average employee or middle manager has even more perverse incentives to make poor short-term decisions. I've seen a lot of engineers and managers swing for the fences to deliver headline features that can't possibly be completed on time with any standard of quality, testing, or long-term support. It doesn't matter, though, if your goal is to add that accomplishment to your resume so you can pivot into the next higher-paying job elsewhere. After that, your mess becomes someone else's problem and you're off the hook. Up or out.
I work for a big software corp in SV with a yearly conference where we announce all of our products. Managers give zero shits about product quality as long as we deliver on time for the "big show". Bugs, future maintenance burden, and other shortcomings be damned because they'll probably be long gone after they get their promotion (and probably at another company rinsing and repeating) and by then, these issues become someone else's. This has caused engineers to become incentivized to place priority on delivering over quality. Funny how this short-term growth mindset comes top-down from where it all starts in Wall Street. If we want to fix the system, we need to first fix Wall Street and bring back accountability.
Counterpoint: I've worked at SV unicorns that were not public, and did not intend to go public in the near term. And they had a similar "damn the torpedoes! full speed ahead!" attitude. So I think it is more pervasive than just Wall Street.
The problem is deeper, it's psychological. At the level where full time, professional management begins it starts to become very unclear how to judge a manager's success over short/medium periods of time. Yeah in the very long run "is the product a success" can be used to judge, but that captures a lot of people who aren't the manager and may take years to figure out. You need to evaluate their performance before then.
So people come up with heuristics, like "does this manager meet their commitments". But software is inherently unpredictable so the answer to this question is always random. This results in managers trying to look like they're doing a good job by forcing early releases: they are thus seen to be "meeting their commitments" and must be good managers, with the quality issues showing up much later at which point they can just shrug and say, well, all software has bugs. Unless a layer of management higher up digs into individual bug reports and investigates really deeply to conclude, no, you forced an early release before it was ready, they won't be held accountable.
It's the principal-agent problem coming home to roost in a world without principals. Everyone is effectively an agent because the principals are sufficiently "diversified" that they don't really have substantial direct investment in long-term organizational success. What matters most is the short-term boost that you can use to dazzle the next employer.
Every employee knows that they're going to stay for 5 years max because companies have made it impossible for there not to be a massive market disparity if you keep stable employment. There are no perks to long-term loyalty and thus no reason to consider an employer's long-term interests as identical to your own. The outcome of this is the predictable situation we see now.
Like it or not, the company's culture comes from the top down. If the boss doesn't know or care whether the product is substantial, people who do will eventually be replaced at least until the boss is duly insulated from them. No one wants to rain on the parade of the guy who holds hire/fire authority.
There's a wider thing here too, which is that the market doesn't know or care about any of the technical details either. You need the touted features to work correctly just enough to create sufficient ambiguity, probably about 10-15% of the time. If you invest enough engineering effort to get them working correctly 90%+ of the time, that's a great deal more money and time spent on engineering for no market benefit. A competitor who dumps that money into marketing and sales will come out far ahead because technical quality and reliability simply doesn't drive sales.
Regulation for publicly listed companies means that the bottom is actually higher than for VC-funded companies, where nothing of substance needs to be generally known. (wework?)
Same short term thinking, same self-aggrandizement, same convincing yourself of how rational you are, when most actions are driven by emotions, but with more casual clothing.
> The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.
I guess I post this here as a means to say, while what OP is talking about certainly sucks, Apple seems to have a long history of this. Doesn't make it better, and certainly what he's outlined seems extra bad, but not completely unexpected.
Indeed. Apple's MO for a LONG time has been, "The way things have always worked should always be rethought, and we've come up with a better way for you". Many Apple users on forums like this tend to be Apple apologists until they introduce that one change that's too much, and then it's all "Apple's lost their way!" when the reality is it's just Apple being Apple.
Great read! Thanks for sharing. Highly encourage anyone who is on the fence about reading the whole thing to go for it.
Steve, and others like him, do make me wonder. On the one hand, I work four days a week, never stay late at work, and live a good, steady life. But on the other hand, I see these super-stars, these drive-people-to-the-edge, sleep-on-shop-floor types, and see how much change and drive they create, it makes me start to think that maybe I should work _much_ harder. But then again, I quite like all this time I have to think on things. And of course, we don't get all the details about how this style of work _really_ affects home life; I'm sure we'd have much less respect for these super-stars if we knew they _all_ had screwed up lives away from work.
I know what you mean, the appeal of this total dedication. For myself, I've come to the conclusion that I could not do it for long, not as long as I'd have to. I think for those types like Jobs, Musk, it wasn't even a conscious choice they made to put all they had into their work, they are/were just driven. You'd know it if you were, too. They could never have done a four-day work week with zero overtime, it was never an option for them. So, enjoy your life as it is, this is yours, theirs is different, and don't think you're missing out on anything.
Reminds me of an anecdote I heard about starting your own company. It's great, you're the boss. You can work half days if you want. You even get to choose which 12 hours that will be.
Demos of new products always have golden paths, and even demos of production grade software have golden paths very frequently because maintaining complex software in a demo-able state is hard (i.e. historical reports need to show a plausible history without anyone actually using the system).
"big-splash release cycle is fundamentally breaking engineering"
I strongly prefer Apple ship functionality incrementally. No more big bang.
Especially be more cautious with new kits (core libraries). Just one or two end user facing features on some fraction of hardware. Then expand over time.
With Apple's installed base, it's an engineering marvel there's so little drama. But I want no drama, which means waiting a bit longer. Which is fine.
I've been at Adobe at a time when they shipped Creative Suite, as boxes (even though downloads started to be more prevalent, it was still very much pre-packaged software). People don't give Adobe enough credit for what it was achieving back then - every 18 months, like clockwork, it shipped an entire suite of huge applications, that needed to work well with one another. And they couldn't rely on post-release fixes - because US accounting regulations made it impossible to ship fixes after the GM builds, if I remember correctly.
And they did it. Reliably so - at least until CS6 (with the subscription, things changed, you can now ship fixes anytime). What's more impressive than the fact that they did it, is that from the engineering perspective, it was an "of course we'll do it" - there wasn't at any point any doubt that CSnext will be released, and will be released on time. And it had to be awesome - the entire company depended on it.
Thing is, there was nothing really special that Adobe did and I haven't witnessed elsewhere. Extensive testing, pre-releases/ getting the most loyal users involved early. Waterfall, yes - but "waterfall done right" (I don't think the overhead was too onerous). What they probably did "specially" though, even though it sounds mundane and boring... was to relentlessly cut scope. It was no shame to do less than what you initially planed for - but it was a crime to not say ASAP that you may not be able to do what you promised. I know personally of a feature that didn't ship in CS5, at all, because it was deemed "not ready" (even though at the start it was deemed as "required"); almost brought down a development center (that was supposed to ship it), and their biggest sin was not that they weren't ready, but that they didn't say so until it was too late.
The short version of all this, I guess, is that cutting scope can do miracles. I'm surprised that it's not used more widely - and somewhat saddened that even Adobe lost its skill at this (from my pov, the cloud has enticed the management to ship features that are not quite ready yet, and counter-intuitively, I think this actually slows them down now).
Have you found the solution to keep things from asking for permission on things? I haven't upgraded yet, but experience this for a good 20+ items on reboot, and I haven't been able to find a solution to stop it. (including going into my keychain and trying to allow more permission to some items)
Sometimes this mean 5-10min of allowing things access and typing my password over and over for each prompt. Things usually work after that, but I don't even have a clue, often times different apps seem to be asking if they can access system programs.
> including going into my keychain and trying to allow more permission to some items
This almost certainly is not going to help, because it’s granting access to other things.
> Sometimes this mean 5-10min of allowing things access and typing my password over and over for each prompt. Things usually work after that, but I don't even have a clue, often times different apps seem to be asking if they can access system programs.
It’s interesting to see how we’ve already degrade to the Windows Vista-esque experience when you just approve everything. None of the security benefits, all of the usability downsides…
I mean, I've taken the time to try to search for each of those subsystem things are asking for, but the information out there about doesn't really add much more info to 'if you don't say yes this will not work' or, 'this will ask you again for permission in 10 min'
Some of the more curious ones I've checked via the logs in the ActivityMonitor to try to figure out what is really being asked.
But none of this yields an answer. ie, things need to use launchd, assistantd, and accountsd ect. I never personally revoked those permissions.
Historical web answers point users to use Keychain First Aid, which hasn't been around for years now, but obviously this has been a long ongoing issue which seems to possibly be exacerbated by other OS upgrade issues.
A fix would absolutely quell the rage this gives me when I have to deal with it early in the morning before a deployment.
curiously, on my Windows system, I clicked 'no' to a permission prompt on something one time and now I can't seem to actually give the thing blanket permission after determining I would want it to have it.
So that just asks pretty much every 5 min or so, again it's more a subsystem than an entire program, so bla)
so. yea. yay for technology. ;) I think I'll just go read a book now. on paper. in the other room. ;)
570 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadAt least don't try to use the version of Linux under MacOS as a Linux system. The OP is running cron jobs and Python in the background, and changes in the Apple security environment broke them. If you need to run Linux stuff, put it on a real Linux system.
MacOS is based on Unix not Linux. However, I mostly agree with your sentiment and would extend it to “use the right tool for the job”. Use launchd (although I hear it is on the way out) instead of Cron etc.
See: https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/801429696172374556/
I just remember thinking, oh crap, now I need to learn a new scheduler.
Funny that everyone complains about privacy invasion but then also complains when the needed permissions to protect privacy are introduced.
I mean, come on, there has to be a better way than this, especially from a company supposedly famed for it's user-orientated designs and thinking?
For example, if, when you upgraded to Catalina, the App Store version of Alfred was already installed on disk, then macOS should assume that you’re an Alfred user, who wants to continue to be able to do “the thing Alfred does” (launch apps) without asking.
And before you say “but what if this whitelist authorizes malware to continue being malware”—if there’s malware on the App Store, then they should probably solve that by removing the app from the App Store and deauthorizing the developer’s code-signing cert, so that Gatekeeper won’t run it any more. Just kill the vampires; don’t ask the user if they want to let them in.
Apple has been spectacularly poor at spotting bad apps on the Mac App Store.
"its a bold move cotton..."
But there are numerous ways this could be handled. A few off the top of my head:
1. Do nothing - leave things the way they were pre-Catalina 2. Default all apps installed pre-Catalina to "Allow", so you only get the prompt for newly installed apps 3. Make it configurable at the OS level, so you can set the default you want, and then tweak individual apps as you see fit
Even with SIP turned off, there's no way to just blanket dismiss the dialogues. (Although, I'm sure without SIP someone could use code injection, but no one has, and given the amount of work it would require I'm not surprised.)
This is how it works; it’s just that macOS applications are not used to delaying authorization prompts to the appropriate time so they ask for it on startup.
On that page there could be a grid of apps vs permissions with the permissions each app is requesting highlighted. One click to switch on each permission and even a power user could be on their way in a couple minutes.
LineageOS has a similar permissions list for all apps installed (albeit without a nice overview grid) that I think makes it very easy to manage what each app is allowed to do.
Doesn't necessarily help with 3rd party apps, but it's a bit insane that the bundled apps on the OS itself have all these issues, too (like iterm fighting finder??)
EDIT: Or for notifications they could take a page out of Android's book. Default allow notifications, but after the user dismisses a few of them without interaction prompt if they still want to keep receiving them. Take a spam-filter type approach instead of allow/deny prompts everywhere.
My biggest issue is that the whole computer freezes for about 10 seconds when I activate a dropdown in Safari, Chrome, or Firefox sometimes. It will also freeze everything but audio playback for 10 to 30 seconds when watching videos full screen with VLC. I dunno, maybe it's just me.
But this release is the buggiest .0 release I've ever seen from Apple.
Well, it detected I had an iPad but the connection would time out every single time. After rebooting both the Mac and the iPad (another wild guess) it kind of worked - very laggy and couldn’t use the Mac properly as clicking in e.g. System Preferences would open Finder to show me the app under Applications instead of the actual system preferences panel because of reasons.
It’s truly broken and felt like an alpha version. But this has been the trend with macOS and guess it’ll stay like this unless someone high enough at Apple decides to wake up.
Did you try connecting to it with a cable?
Catalina seems to at least have broken the ability to create symlinks in the root folder. So no more `cd /htdocs` on my laptop.
But yeah once this installer finishes it's probably too late.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/EdlitSq
https://jcode.me/cdpath-with-zsh/
much much saner than having your user files in the root directory, and works the same in any OS.
If you use zsh I recommend using hashed directories. So this in your .zshrc:
Lets you `cd ~htdocs`.Alternatively, use 'fasd' or 'z' and you can just `z htd` without preconfiguring anything or caring where htdocs is.
Or, of course, you could just create the symlinks in your $HOME instead of in root.
I find this surprising. I'd say anyone who does any serious amount of multitasking (whether a Linux dev or not) would easily want one. I think people do care but they are just waiting on better pricing/availability.
This is far from true. Gnome shell itself is mostly OK (if buggy), but only a minority of real apps work properly. The standard Gnome apps (Nautilus, Gnome Shell etc) are fine, but that's where the support pretty much stops.
I would have thought so too, but this isn't my experience. The smartest developers I know at my current job still develop with old laptops with awful 720p screens (I mean, awful beyond just the low res) and can't be bothered to attach an external Full HD monitor, let alone ask for a 4K one. And still they are brilliant, produce great software, and are key when planning profound software changes in the company. These are people who I deeply admire and from whom I always learn something valuable when they speak. Keep in mind they are also developers, not "whiteboard engineers".
My conclusion is that we nerds tend to overestimate ergonomics, because they are easier to see ("pff, I can only type with a mechanical keyboard!", "how can people code with fewer than three 4K monitors!"), but the actual bottlenecks and difficulties of building complex software lie elsewhere.
I still can't stand 720p screens though.
(writing this from a 23" 1366x768 desktop monitor)
And honestly a lot of things are so broken in hidpi anyway that i do not see a reason to bother.
However, this is all assuming that 2x scaling is fine for you, support for fractional scaling is not great yet.
From the simple (boot screen runs at 1x so text is unreadable) to the wierd (VirtualBox tangle of bugs), to the frustrating (dolphin file manager, which I use to avoid UI bugs in the gnome file manager).
I found workarounds for some issues, and maybe they are fixed in the next LTS, but there is no way I could recommend 18.04 with 4k to a non-professional.
I've had a 4k 27" monitor mixed with 1080p and 1440p monitors of varying sizes for years and have managed to get 90% of software working great, and whenever I dip into Wayland get to use the fractional scaling there it goes up to 99% of software.
At least XFCE just works
Sorry but I don't have time for this anymore. I would have on my SUSE box in 2003.
So thanks for the idea - it truly had never occurred to me (oddly).
GTK3 and Qt5 software works great, anything else is a pot shot.
Sure, I had to put in a bit of effort, but now that I have the results are excellent, there's no scale jumping or even the weird rendering MacOS does when moving windows around.
#!/bin/bash
xrandr --output HDMI-0 --mode 1920x1200 --pos 0x100 --scale 1.5x1.5 --output DP-4 --mode 3840x2160 --primary --scale 1x1 --pos 2880x-150
AFAICT this effectively renders the smaller screen as if it had a much larger resolution (2880x1800), then downscales, giving a good quality image, and then positions the 4k screen to the right of it. The key is the scale factor compensating for different DPI on the different screens.
I tried scaling the other way first, by giving a sub-1.0 scaling factor to the 4k screen, but that meant rendering a lower res and then upscaling, which looked terrible!
The only annoyance now that I have this set up is that occasionaly driver updates change which output is which and I have to update the script so it works again.
Now that I'm older, it's just a waste of time.
It's worth it to me and like I say - it works better than than windows or even OS X on the same screen setup.
If that's of no value to you, that's up to you I guess. I'm in my 40s so no spring chicken...
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/msi-ws60-running-linux/
It isn't simple? no. You have different env variables for QT, GTK and xrander can set its own DPI as well. It is kinda a mess, but I use i3 so I figure I'm in for whatever pain I put myself into.
I've been running Linux on HiDPI devices for a couple of years now and I've got things sorted to where it's no an issue on any new device. I need to give Wayland/Sway another shot at some point. I hope it has better native zoom support than X11.
Only a few apps have given me trouble in recent times.
And there's nobody else to blame for that -- we've known for ages that 4K and fractional scaling was going to be a thing, just like we've known for ages that touchscreens were going to be a thing.
But nope, let's just measure everything in pixels. It's like the majority of native developers on Linux all looked at responsive design on the web and thought, "I'm pretty sure that's just a fad." Everybody just dug in their heels almost on principle or something and refused to make it a priority, and now we're behind both Windows and Mac when it comes to high-resolution touch devices.
And I still run into people who argue that what we should just scale the physical size of a pixel for the entire desktop by a percentage, just so we can keep building fixed layouts that absolute position all of their elements. At a certain point, it feels more like a cultural problem than a technical one.
Everybody else is doing responsive design. QT already supports `em` units (well, sort of[0]). We could be using them on Linux.
[0]: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/stylesheet-reference.html#length
I also use 2 different resolutions without problems
KDE plasma gives you fractional scaling
I've heard Wayland supports different scalings on different monitors, but I'm on Xorg so I can't say if it works
Step 1: put 'xrandr --dpi <your actual DPI>' in .xinitrc
Step 2: Use QT applications (Plasma is a fantastic QT desktop)
Step 3: Enjoy your reasonably sized everything.
"Scaling" is a broken concept to work around applications assuming 96 DPI (which is considered scale=1). You don't need it if you use programs that actually respect your real DPI. Unfortunately X11 doesn't properly compute DPI settings, even though EDID information generally contains the screen size - I imagine, for fear of breaking stuff.
(You can correct GTK3/GDK applications by setting GDK_DPI_SCALE=<actual dpi / 96>, but in my view it's a sin that you need to do that)
But the original post is very sobering.
I left OS X a few years back when the new laptop came out. Partly the whole USB-C thing I suppose, but I felt that there was pretty good hardware around and the new MBP didn't really shine (and was fiercely expensive). So I made the move to Ubuntu on some new Lenovo hardware (Carbon X1).
I really look forward to the twice-yearly Ubuntu releases. More of the same, rarely any huge new surprises and just generally more polish. I upgraded to Ubuntu 19.10 immediately once the 19.10beta came out and it seems speedier.
I'm sorry to see Mac users get so badly burnt but I'm very glad I made the decision to leave when I did.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Best-Notebook-Displays-As-...
For the touchpad I am undecided how much here is software and how much is hardware. E.g. install ubuntu on a macbook, is the touchpad still great or just average?
Printing, wifi/vpn, keyring, graphics drivers... everything just works.
Yes.
> There are no unnecessary frills.
My macOs machine doesn't have them either.
> It just gets the job done.
Mine does as well.
Do you want to talk about frills?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4531549
It does seem to me that everything I use IT wise is more “always a bit broken” now, than it ever used to be.
I have two users on my machine.
1. I "lock screen" from the Apple menu and close the lid. 2. I reopen the lid and it does not ask for password. 3. I start using laptop and lock screen suddenly pops up, but asks password for the wrong user. 4. I hit random key and the screen goes away, and i can continue working.
Also, it looks like a lot of settings don't work on the lock screen / choose user screen. For instance, the pointer speed doesn't match what I have set, font sizes don't match either, and the resolution looks wrong.
In all... It feels like windows?
When Cortana was introduced, they had some issues of being able to launch the browser while the machine was still locked (though as the user that the computer was locked by). You couldn't do much as the previous bugs as the lock screen still covered everything.
> Right now with screensavers under X it's basically capturing the input and continually redrawing over the display. > With Wayland, Kristian plans for the lock-screen to be part of the Wayland compositor. In having the compositor handle the screensaver role, it can ensure that no window can appear atop the screensaver surface, it can properly detect idling and grabs already, and has complete control over the screen. Unlike the X design, there wouldn't even need to be a screensaver "window" that's on top but the compositor could just keep painting a black screen. For those interested in a "fancy screensaver", a plug-in could be used or an out-of-process Wayland client for drawing whatever you desire.
It's a joke but sometimes I really do wonder.
That is how it is implemented (in X11)
Warning: copy-paste this link, if jwz sees an HN referrer, you won't be happy.
www.jwz.org/blog/2015/04/i-told-you-so-again/
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen what everyone is talking about and it’s bothered me a little too (granted, my machine is configured in such an undiscoverable way that just opening an xterm window is obscure enough to be nearly equivalent to a very short pin, and then you need to know bash. Now that I’m not in college and don’t have anything important that’s probably good enough even without xcreensaver.)
As said elsewhere, locking X is really hard, and xscreensaver architecture doesn't help. This week I managed to crash xscreensaver login prompt twice, unlocking the desktop without entering my password, and that was the last straw, I switched to xsecurelock which separates the login entry into another process, making such bugs much less severe.
Unfortunately I can't reliably reproduce the crash. A hardware fuzzer (also known as a faulty ThinkPad keyboard) was involved, and I don't possess the device any more. I think what it did was press certain keys very often — the keyboard matrix is sampled at 125 Hz, so I'm guessing it was pressing the keys about 60 times per second, but I'm not sure which keys they were. If anyone manages to reproduce this, please do give me a shout. :-)
To be fair, it was also vista...
Of course it didn't have all the features that were introduced since, but it also didn't have as bad a UX as the more recent versions.
* Non-consensual insertion of Windows Update latency into my schedule. Often I don't mind. Sometimes, though, I really, really do.
* Said updates failing but giving no indication of failure other than taking infinitely long.
* Keyboard layout sometimes gets swapped back to QWERTY with no visual indication. This interacts especially poorly with stringent Active Directory 3-try-lockout policies.
* Network hiccups + active directory (or something) can cause login to spin indefinitely, requiring a restart.
* Login screen background occasionally changes to a random picture from my computer. Usually a wildly upscaled application resource. I haven't entirely ruled out my own clumsiness as a contributing factor, but I've also seen this in the wild, so it's at least a UX issue somewhere.
None of this is as bad, in a theoretical sense, as Apple's no-password fiasco, but it has resulted in a far larger footprint on my day-to-day activity.
Sure, minus the fact that my Windows box would be _spying on me_ if I wasn't a very technically capable person. That's a non-trivial driver for a lot of folks when they decide to pick Apple products. Or, at least, it was until recently with the iCloud / China debacle.
Gah... i hate computers.
I haven’t used it on a personal computer since XP though so I guess you’re not far off.
I must say that Windows has... changed... In a good way. But that's not even the point. The point everyone keeps forgetting, is that OSX is tightly coupled with native Apple hardware, while Windows has to work on a zoo of devices.
[*] I actually blogged about this here, sorry for a shameless plug: https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog/277-back-to-pc-after-14-year...
I'll check back in a year if there's any compelling reason to upgrade.
Now I don't bother to watch their keynotes as they're too boring and I'm productive on High Sierra and I don't see any reason I should upgrade and cause unnecessary annoyance. How boring Apple software have become.
Is there a reason to upgrade these days? I don't need SideCar as I connect my laptop to a bigger display.
In June I migrated to Ghost simply to try it and learn more about Node. It was _fine_, but never really fit my mental model of how a blog should operate or a web app should be structured. For better or worse, I'm an ex-Yahoo and a PHP guy through and through.
To me, both are a manifestation of the idea that these two Operating Systems are moving in the direction of being safer for "ordinary users" at the expense of annoying more technical users who want to do less common things which can be dangerous if you're not careful (like running software as root)
Given that "ordinary users" outnumber technical ones, I guess that makes commercial sense...
As a result of that, I prefer working with Linux where possible as (generally) it lets you do what you want, even if that's really dumb/dangerous. If I say `kill -9 x` or I sudo to root and do `rm -rf .` by accident it's on me.
I don't work at Apple, but this part hit home for me. In the past few years my jobs have revolved around shipping features at all costs with zero regard for engineering feasibility.
We all like to criticize CEOs for prioritize short-term stock prices over long-term company goals, but I'm beginning to think the average employee or middle manager has even more perverse incentives to make poor short-term decisions. I've seen a lot of engineers and managers swing for the fences to deliver headline features that can't possibly be completed on time with any standard of quality, testing, or long-term support. It doesn't matter, though, if your goal is to add that accomplishment to your resume so you can pivot into the next higher-paying job elsewhere. After that, your mess becomes someone else's problem and you're off the hook. Up or out.
The problem is deeper, it's psychological. At the level where full time, professional management begins it starts to become very unclear how to judge a manager's success over short/medium periods of time. Yeah in the very long run "is the product a success" can be used to judge, but that captures a lot of people who aren't the manager and may take years to figure out. You need to evaluate their performance before then.
So people come up with heuristics, like "does this manager meet their commitments". But software is inherently unpredictable so the answer to this question is always random. This results in managers trying to look like they're doing a good job by forcing early releases: they are thus seen to be "meeting their commitments" and must be good managers, with the quality issues showing up much later at which point they can just shrug and say, well, all software has bugs. Unless a layer of management higher up digs into individual bug reports and investigates really deeply to conclude, no, you forced an early release before it was ready, they won't be held accountable.
Every employee knows that they're going to stay for 5 years max because companies have made it impossible for there not to be a massive market disparity if you keep stable employment. There are no perks to long-term loyalty and thus no reason to consider an employer's long-term interests as identical to your own. The outcome of this is the predictable situation we see now.
Like it or not, the company's culture comes from the top down. If the boss doesn't know or care whether the product is substantial, people who do will eventually be replaced at least until the boss is duly insulated from them. No one wants to rain on the parade of the guy who holds hire/fire authority.
There's a wider thing here too, which is that the market doesn't know or care about any of the technical details either. You need the touted features to work correctly just enough to create sufficient ambiguity, probably about 10-15% of the time. If you invest enough engineering effort to get them working correctly 90%+ of the time, that's a great deal more money and time spent on engineering for no market benefit. A competitor who dumps that money into marketing and sales will come out far ahead because technical quality and reliability simply doesn't drive sales.
Same short term thinking, same self-aggrandizement, same convincing yourself of how rational you are, when most actions are driven by emotions, but with more casual clothing.
A choice excerpt:
> The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.
I guess I post this here as a means to say, while what OP is talking about certainly sucks, Apple seems to have a long history of this. Doesn't make it better, and certainly what he's outlined seems extra bad, but not completely unexpected.
And a public beta that will mess your files on other devices(!?)
Steve, and others like him, do make me wonder. On the one hand, I work four days a week, never stay late at work, and live a good, steady life. But on the other hand, I see these super-stars, these drive-people-to-the-edge, sleep-on-shop-floor types, and see how much change and drive they create, it makes me start to think that maybe I should work _much_ harder. But then again, I quite like all this time I have to think on things. And of course, we don't get all the details about how this style of work _really_ affects home life; I'm sure we'd have much less respect for these super-stars if we knew they _all_ had screwed up lives away from work.
I strongly prefer Apple ship functionality incrementally. No more big bang.
Especially be more cautious with new kits (core libraries). Just one or two end user facing features on some fraction of hardware. Then expand over time.
With Apple's installed base, it's an engineering marvel there's so little drama. But I want no drama, which means waiting a bit longer. Which is fine.
Source: Ecstatically happy Apple fanatic.
Quite a lot of that, in my experience, is driven by fear of losing their job in an at-will employment environment.
Thing is, there was nothing really special that Adobe did and I haven't witnessed elsewhere. Extensive testing, pre-releases/ getting the most loyal users involved early. Waterfall, yes - but "waterfall done right" (I don't think the overhead was too onerous). What they probably did "specially" though, even though it sounds mundane and boring... was to relentlessly cut scope. It was no shame to do less than what you initially planed for - but it was a crime to not say ASAP that you may not be able to do what you promised. I know personally of a feature that didn't ship in CS5, at all, because it was deemed "not ready" (even though at the start it was deemed as "required"); almost brought down a development center (that was supposed to ship it), and their biggest sin was not that they weren't ready, but that they didn't say so until it was too late.
The short version of all this, I guess, is that cutting scope can do miracles. I'm surprised that it's not used more widely - and somewhat saddened that even Adobe lost its skill at this (from my pov, the cloud has enticed the management to ship features that are not quite ready yet, and counter-intuitively, I think this actually slows them down now).
Sometimes this mean 5-10min of allowing things access and typing my password over and over for each prompt. Things usually work after that, but I don't even have a clue, often times different apps seem to be asking if they can access system programs.
This almost certainly is not going to help, because it’s granting access to other things.
> Sometimes this mean 5-10min of allowing things access and typing my password over and over for each prompt. Things usually work after that, but I don't even have a clue, often times different apps seem to be asking if they can access system programs.
It’s interesting to see how we’ve already degrade to the Windows Vista-esque experience when you just approve everything. None of the security benefits, all of the usability downsides…
Some of the more curious ones I've checked via the logs in the ActivityMonitor to try to figure out what is really being asked.
But none of this yields an answer. ie, things need to use launchd, assistantd, and accountsd ect. I never personally revoked those permissions.
Historical web answers point users to use Keychain First Aid, which hasn't been around for years now, but obviously this has been a long ongoing issue which seems to possibly be exacerbated by other OS upgrade issues.
A fix would absolutely quell the rage this gives me when I have to deal with it early in the morning before a deployment.
So that just asks pretty much every 5 min or so, again it's more a subsystem than an entire program, so bla)
so. yea. yay for technology. ;) I think I'll just go read a book now. on paper. in the other room. ;)
Jobs would have caught that one.