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Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2016a

You must have really bad luck with Macs.

As a MacOS user for seven years I can't say I've ever had that issue. Certainly not enough to need the seconds to be an indicator. I've had my system completely lock up maybe four times and those times my mouse refusing to move was enough of an indicator.

Heck, right now it's been two and a half months since I've rebooted... and probably a year since I've rebooted because it froze.

I'm not an Apple fan boy either. In fact my next computer will probably be Linux. But I have to admin the last three Macs I have owned have been great computers.

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You must not work in an organization that insists on installing security software for you. If I have >2w uptime on my machine I generally have to restart for some reason or other. It's like people have forgotten that computers can and should have more uptime than that.

A faulty update from one of our security software vendors caused a once-per-hour kernel panic and forced reboot for a day or two. It was really nice.

(Obviously none of this is the fault of OSX or Apple but I would kill for 2.5m of uptime on my work laptop).

My Macs regularly go for 30-60 days before I restart them, and when I do restart, it's not because the computer is misbehaving.

I feel you there. It got to the point at one gig where engineering folks--who were given root on their preconfigured laptops--often spent their first day figuring out how to kill and extricate Sophos from their machines. For developers who weren't seasoned jerks, it could be a real challenge until somebody took pity on them and helped them find single-user mode, yank out the kexts, and manually delete everything. (The happy .pkg BOMs helped out, too!)

Ordinarily I wouldn't do this and just punch out on a gig (because seriously, it's that annoying and that effectively-useless), but we were a recently-acquired startup subsidiary, so we were also our own IT shop--the CTO actively approved.

Is it still possible to do this kind of thing on the most recent macOS? I recall the issue with the 'git' binary not being modifiable, even with sudo, unless you mounted the macOS filesystem under Linux and made the changes from there.

You can disable rootless via the recovery partition.

Ah, thanks. I'm assuming that quietly got added in after "we can't touch the filesystem at all" caused too many complaints...?

It was literally there from day one (from day minus-a-bunch if you count the beta releases) and the hyperbolic inanity that led normal people to the misconception you had was never necessary in the first place.

Heh. Thanks for the info.

I just checked, I read about this at http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/04/17/unprotected/.

I must admit that I am very curious why "git and 64 other files in /usr/bin are all the same size (18176 bytes on my machine)", why dtruss and strings fail, and what behavior changes when you turn rootless off.

Do you use an external display? Mine crashes about once a week after I've unplugged it from the thunderbolt display

I use two external monitors on a pre-touchback mbp and disconnect multiple times a week and never have issues, other than my Windows vm getting confused about which display is high dpi.

What mac do you use? Some of them have issues.

I switch between two external displays at work then go home and plug the computer into a single external display.

Worst case, sometimes the layout of my windows gets messed up and I have to move them around to get back where I want them to be.

The only major issue I've had is sometimes bluetooth gets confused and it takes me a few minutes to get my track pad connected when I switch between home and work. (by a few I mean almost half an hour :( )

> Worst case, sometimes the layout of my windows gets messed up and I have to move them around to get back where I want them to be.

Hyperswitch combined with SizeUp works wonders in this case (you use Hyperswitch to directly target individual windows and SizeUp to properly full-screen them).

Why Apple still doesn't have proper keyboard-only management for windows (Cmd-tab only allows to select the foreground app, not individual windows of it, and what Apple calls "fullscreen" is an abomination) is way beyond my understanding.

> SizeUp to properly full-screen them

Ew.

> Apple still doesn't have proper keyboard-only management for windows

False. Cmd-~ will switch windows within an app. Control-<Left> and Control-<Right> will move left and right between spaces (including fullscreen apps). I use these hundreds of times a day.

I do wish we had more robust features, like keyboard-based window placement/resize. As far as I can tell, third-party tools are the only way to enable that. But I find the above perfectly adequate for 90% of what I do.

Yet what I as a user want is to switch to just the next window in the stack, regardless of application. Ala, the Alt+Tab that Windows had back in Windows 95.

(I usually have multiple browser, terminal, and/or editor windows open, but I'm usually only using one of each at a time. Dragging the entire app to the foreground almost invariably means that some window that I'm not using and don't care about ends up on top of a window from a different app that I do care about. That is, me indicating that I care about a particular window of an app doesn't imply that I care about all of them, but OS X thinks it does.)

My Bluetooth mouse has about a 50 percent chance of being recognized when my laptop is coming out of sleep.

My workaround has been to just open the Bluetooth panel via Alfred and so long as Bluetooth has not totally shit the bed (Bluetooth has turned itself off and the Turn On button does nothing) my mouse is connected in less than 30 seconds, often times under 10.

I used to have a lot of problems with my imac, but that was more a function of have extremely low hard disk space and apps that don't behave well when that happens.

Also many mysterious crashes can be RAM problems.

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