Fed up with macOS – it downloaded 47 GB of 4K 240FPS screensavers. Asahi FTW

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Not on my machine with only one files about 100MB. Still Why on earth do they do that?

I keep thinking if Apple is deliberately doing it. From Safari constantly writing 100GBs per day on paging, to this. It is the small things Apple no longer cared about which is worrying in terms of company culture.

  % du -hcs "/Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer/"
  5.1M /Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer/
  5.1M total

Is this only a thing in latest Sequoia? I've been clicking "remind me later" on the upgrade prompts for a couple weeks, since it seems like there's a story like this with every big release.

Is Asahi still making regular meaningful progress since Marcan quit?

https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-l...

It doesn’t download these by default. All the wallpaper and screensaver downloads are user initiated in their respective UI.

Did you click the download button on them by any chance, and forget about it?

the biggest problem with switching away from Mac is losing the ecosystem benefits. When Apple TV automatically knows to fill your iCloud password, all the Apple Watch integration, syncing everything from notes to reminders. I can't see how any Linux can match all that.

Not Asahi but I recently revived a 10-year-old MacBook Pro (MBP 2015) that had been sitting in my closet for many years by installing Fedora on it. To my surprise, it's fast and sleek, just like a brand new computer. All of the drivers worked!

The laptop now serves as a desktop when I'm at home and as an SSH server when I'm at work. And my 5-year-old M1 MacBook is now sitting in the closet, waiting for its turn in the next 10 years.

Unfortunately I think you will find that Linux also has bugs and poor designs

It's sort of insane to switch to an almost completely unrelated operating system because of such a trivial feature as a screensaver.

It doesn't download those screensavers unprompted, you have to actually select them in the System Settings.

It's hard to believe that anyone who thought that a Mac was the right computer for them could so easily switch to Linux on hardware which has a great number of unsupported features.

I know that Hacker News is not representative of the real world, but gosh, stories like this are crazy.

You have to explicitly download these. Just don't do that.

> Running Sway now my whole session (Firefox open) uses around 2 GB of RAM

Well shit yeah that's definitely a problem! Is your OS not making good use of your available memory?

I’d be really interested in understanding how real this is since I have most of them on disk and only a small percentage of that disk space. And they’re not 240fps.

Also, what does 47 GB of used disk space on macOS have to do with 2 GB of RAM used on Linux?

I'm not sure about macOS in that way either. I get disk full errors on my 256GB macbook which has maybe 40GB of stuff I want and the rest seems to be crap that auto downloads. I guess there's some way to control it? But it goes away from the "it just works" Apple ethos.

NH users are a special breed. The slightest inconvenience in MacOS or Windows occurs, and instead of spending the 2 minutes it takes to fix it, they jump ship and embark on months long journey of pain and suffering, complete with blog essay.

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