High Sierra seems like a great OS if you want an unstable workstation that doesn't work with tools you've used everyday for well over a decade.
When they get fixed, they’ll be re-released…
Throughout this Apple Support has been anything but (aborting when for some reason my Mini’s S/N failed to match their records for Server machines, and thus bailing on me on the premise that I shouldn’t have RAID anyway so basically screw me.)
Can't imagine how much pain you've been through with this. Got enough backups to revert back to Sierra?
Still, rolling out APFS on such a large number of iDevices/Macs is a very impressive feat (although APFS is, of course, a simpler filesystem). The problems are with many of the 'edge cases' (RAID, etc.). This is not really surprising, btrfs has been in development since 2007 and still has problems with more complex setups.
For a ~$6k setup, it’s awful. It’d be awful for $1k. About 10 years ago, I had a Dell D830 running Fedora and later, early versions of Gnome shell. The dock powered the laptop and a mouse, keyboard, external drive, and two monitors. It was a single (albeit proprietary) connector, and the dock was fairly expensive (~$200 IIRC). It worked damn great, nearly every time, even with sleep States in Linux on a laptop 10 years ago.
Why is this suddenly harder than putting a Tesla on Mars? Why don’t we have good real wireless HD displays by now? The current state of affairs with Apple laptops and docking is just sad to me. I’m almost bothered enough by it to switch jobs to go there and work on fixing it.
Now that office suites are in the cloud along with music and everything else, I no longer see the draw of Apple hardware for a developer laptop.
Only thing left is someone willing to clean up the code and upstream it.
I like the touchpad on my X1 Carbon, but I never used a mac long enough to really adapt my workflow to all the touchpad gestures (I think on Linux you'll be happy with general usage/scrolling/etc, but stuff like pinch to zoom is still not widely supported).
Surprisingly, some Tk applications that I use irregularly actually work with HiDPI with Tk 8.6 (as in, they are scaled up with an integer scaling factor, and are sharp).
Multiple displays with different DPIs also work with Wayland (I have one 4k screen and a LoDPI display 90 degrees rotated). Though, there are some bugs with GNOME 2.26 on Wayland with HiDPI displays that are switched off and on again (e.g. some applications such as GNOME Terminal become blurry, they seem to be rendered at lower DPI and scaled up). I have reported some bugs and the gnome-shell/mutter developers are quite responsive.
HiDPI is generally pretty decent although it's slightly annoying that different layers of the graphics stack (Xorg, GTK2, GTK3, etc.) have different mechanisms for tweaking the scaling but with a few evenings of work, I have everything dialed. A small price to pay for years of use to come. The Arch Linux wiki is super helpful for this.
You want to look for windows precision touchpad support. Turns out the problem with windows touchpads was not the hardware, but the crappy drivers touchpad vendors make. Microsoft made their own drivers and if you can get hardware compatible with those you'll have a much nicer experience.
The touchpads are fine too. I regularly bounce between a macbook and a T460, and I don't have any problems operating the latter.
Yoga 900's touchpad is way worse though, so if you really care, always check if you can try it first.
The older hardware can be quite nice with linux, but my next notebook wont be a mac, not due to value for money (spec and built quality balance is actually quite good for price these days), but because all attempts to run linux or any OSS on the more recent models are a disaster.
If I was to buy right now my list is roughly in the order of:
- Dell XPS 13/15
- Razor Blade (It's getting official linux support soon)
- Librem 13/15
- One of the million and one thinkpad models although I have no idea which
Developer is not a synonim for UNIX programming.
Lucky for me I have a copy of all of it on my 2011 iMac hiding in my closet.
What does this mean/how do you do it?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Display_Identificatio...
The usual problems were missing mode lines that were actually supported (and needed) and incorrect dimensions.
And what did we learn here?
That I should pay Apple $10k for my next MBP so these features can work?
If the problem is in fact lazy device manufacturers botching the identification data then I'm not sure how a third party could effectively work around the issue.
If I make two devices that report identical ID information there's no practical way for the OS to tell them apart.
Most folks on my team have the same deal to differing amounts. We don’t use any special software.
2017 13" TouchBar MBP running 10.12.6
I’m assuming I’m an outlier because I see this in almost every thread that mentions MacBooks and I am real curious how it manifests.
Edit: reading further comments it sounds like possibly the monitors use the same edids? Wonder if you can check that easily.
I’ve almost always used Dell monitors fwiw.
You shouldn't be. This is an actual GIF from the Ars Technica review of High Sierra: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Sep-2...
I've had over the years a 2005 PowerBook G4, three 2010ish MacbookPros, a 2014 MacBook Air and a 2016 MacBook Pro. All have occasionally hung on a blank screen after lid open. The latest routinely forgets Dell screens (two identical ones at once) and I have to replug them.
Otherwise, no issues (except random kernel panics). Like brains, I'm astonished that they work at all, let alone work so well. Of course I'd like something bulletproof, but Apple doesn't seem to be able to make one.
Then there’s the case of it getting an ip from the docks ethernet.
And all of that is assuming the thing even wakes up.
1. Stopped using clamshell mode (laptop lid closed) and that has helped.
2. Downloaded the LG firmware update for the monitors. Updated both monitors, also seems much more reliable.
(10 day uptime, up from about the usual 12 hours)
I have to reboot my late 2013 MacBook Pro a few times a week, when it freezes or becomes partially unresponsive in weird ways. Previous to High Sierra, I tried to remember to reboot it every few months, mostly out of superstition.
I plan to upgrade to a 2015 model when this one dies, for the reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread and here https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/10/benjamin_button_reviews_the...
Personally, 6 Macs upgraded and I had one problem that was caused by crappy vendor software which assumed port 8080 would be available for them to use.
In the office we finally got the okay to update everyone and 100s of devs are doing fine. There was a homebrew issue that, if you hit it, required a reinstall, but that wasn’t so bad.
High Sierra finally kills Python 2.6 in favor of 2.7, and I had an app fail that embedded Python 2.6 pyc files as an obfuscation — 2.7 wouldn’t run them. I worked with that developer to debug and got a new build out — they were receiving many reports of High Sierra issues that were all caused by that.
Pretty typical OS upgrade, other than the early stuff — but there’s a reason you don’t upgrade until at least .1 is out!
Look at it this way: there are literally dozens of complaints posted in this thread. But Apple sold 5.39 million Macs in the most recent quarter.
You're always going to hear more from people who are unhappy, than the quietly satisfied.
It was a shame because they were, on the surface, basically the best thing since sliced bread for dgpu on Apple hardware, so you must have gotten a gem :)
Or she just got a few lemons out of the millions manufactured.
In my case, that’s a 2nd gen 15” touchbar MacBook Pro, a 15” 2015 MacBook Pro, and a Skylake i7 hackintosh tower. I use Asus and Dell monitors and stick to first party or Mac exclusive third party software wherever possible. All three give me little or no trouble with high sierra... reboots are infrequent (1-2 per month, sometimes less) and are usually done to install updates or boot into windows.
I feel like my 2014 rMBP is silently yelping "What have you done to me?" every day.
MBPr with the strip myself, High Sierra latest, absolutely no problems. Connect it to external mechanical keyboard and Dell monitor when at work, also have external audio cards and MIDI gear. And many external HDs.
Where exactly are all those issues?
But it's funny you say that, because that dichotomy seems to define High Sierra; it's either a total mess, or totally forgettable.
In Omni's view, my software was hopelessly outdated... But in reality it worked just fine for my needs even though it wasn't the latest version. I had bought the license in November 2009, so exactly eight years before Apple broke it for good.
Microsoft would never break compatibility with a major Windows app from only eight years ago. I've accepted Apple's hostility towards older 3rd party software in exchange for a sense of forward momentum in the OS, but that pact seems to be history now with High Sierra largely feeling like a step back.
Microsoft is nearly pathalogic in this. I still run some programs I bought for DOS today on Windows 10, because they're COM files. Still works the same.
Apple has always broken things on the other hand, but with the promise of a stable system. Which, having upgraded to High Sierra, is long gone. This feels almost like the early days of Linux. I've got WiFi breakage, graphics driver breakage, occasional filesystem breakage, and several really concerning CVEs that have come over the last few months.
Never thought I'd see the day when I call Windows more stable than a *nix.
The first time I saw it made me respect and appreciate the stability Windows has provided over the decades...
Note: there are similar videos that show the exact same process on actual hardware.
But stability means it doesn't crash, or have driver issues or basically interfere with a user trying to use it.
But the Mac way, to which you sign in when you get a Mac, isn't running 8 year old software forever. It's updating things every few years, and breaking stuff going forward, not being burdened with backwards compatibility forever.
In exchange you get a more uniform and comprehensive experience, with software that adapts to new features faster.
Do you know how old the version of Bash that ships with High Sierra is?
OS X is not about the version of bash it includes -- that's a historically hidden behind the UI tool for us geeks, not what's intended for the everyday Mac user to use (and the UI had been the priority there ever since the original Mac).
Lastly, I've used bona fide certified UNIX machines from vendors like IBM, HP and SUN that had much worse core userland -- awfully limited BSD versions of GNU tools, much older stuff, etc. So there's that too.
The Apple hardware is nice, but it generally means you have to use OSX. Windows WSL is pretty convenient, but then you have to use Windows. Linux is, of course, great, but what hardware?
I know several people who traded in 2016/2017 models for 2015 models because it's literally an upgrade; get an older machine and you suddenly have usable ports, a keyboard that works, and an escape key, what a luxury. I also know a fair amount of people getting Thinkpad and even Surfaces.
The things I would do (and pay) for 2010-Apple tier hardware built for CentOS in both laptop and phone form factors...
Isn’t it remarkable this still doesn’t exist? Build quality still does not compare in the PC world.
Yet, I’m on a MBA3,2 (late 2010) and it’s great. Still running Yosemite. It’s got 4gb ram but handles running 10 JVMs with modest heaps for development no problem. Stable and runs for months without issue. I’d love more RAM and more cores but none of these computers seem worth it.
I considered buying a 2015 MPB the other month only to learn that Apple glues the battery to the top case. So to replace the battery you need to replace the whole top case. Insane.
Razer comes close, though I wouldn't buy them because of the compensating-for-something #branding on the machines. The Alienware 13 I can personally vouch for as being better than my last MacBook Pro for sure. And the keyboard is like an old ThinkPad's but not quite so heavy. Still not a fan of the alien logo, but at least it's tiny.
I have the same hardware but unfortunately my experience is the exact opposite. It’s barely usable. I literally can’t browse JavaScript-heavy websites (e.g. Gmail).
I wonder if having kept up with the OS releases has anything to do with it (I’m on High Sierra).
I'll admit some of the really heavy websites are crap, but that's mostly because the websites are crap and wont be smooth on anything than the latest i7. Generally I have no problem with gmail or google maps which are reasonably heavy.
Depending on what version of OS X you are using that might be the culprit, OS X is a pretty heavy OS, especially post 10.6. For me 10.6 was o-k but changing to linux and a tiling window manager freed up a lot of resources, I never end up paging out with web browsing even though it's only 4GiB, additionally I find graphics are faster on linux but that may be GPU and driver specific due to Apple's underclocking tactics. If I hadn't switched I would probably have ditched this hardware by now.
Alternatively the GPU difference between these machines may explain web browsing speed considering how much stuff is hardware accelerated these days.
I think this era of hardware is pretty linux friendly if you wanted to try it, you don't have dual GPU which is the biggest pain for linux too... there is no issue with mac EFI from grub anymore so should be zero configuration install for you, at the most you might have to manually select the proprietary drivers for your GPU for reasonable performance.
Can't blame them. Ultimately, it's productivity that pays the bills.
Librem? https://puri.sm
It's not ideal, but our environment is rock solid for what we need, and newer software that we need still supports us just fine.
You can have my 2015 MBP when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
But yes. We recently sold off a bunch of hardware resulting from workforce reductions; I clued a friend in on this and he was begging me to nab him a 2015 MBP. The obsession is real, it is the last truly great Macbook in a while, in my own opinion.
One of the shops was an open source shop, so all 150+ of us ran some Linux distro (mostly Ubuntu/Debain, some Arch, some Mint .. I was the only Gentoo) except for the graphics people who got Windows or Macs. But I was surprised at the other two shops, there were very few Linux users. There were some here and there around the company, but I'd usually be the only one on my team who ran Linux naively with Windows in a VM.
I know there are reasons this can't happen at large corporations such as security... more to do with contracts and culpability than measurable security improvement AFAIK.
I can't quite imagine _not_ having control over my work environment in this way in a job anymore and do greatly appreciate it. It's not all about familiarity, there are many objective reasons using certain proprietary OS can be a significant drain and inefficient, even more so for development work. This freedom would be a significant factor in considering a new job for me, even over pay because it's a big part of my "happiness" and "sanity" factor in the job.
Hehe
Unhappy people post a LOT more and the internet loves a good pile-on. Apple has had plenty of embarrassing QA lapses but the average developer is fine, and it’s not like everything else is perfect. The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin, although there’s a good argument that software compatibility is worth that overhead.
The only developers I know who are replacing their pre-touchbar machines right now with new ones are those making much of their living from iOS / OS X. Many (like me) are kind of hanging on, because it's a pain to change OSs, lose much of the software we love etc. I'm still undecided, but I think my current (ageing) MB Pro is going to be my last.
> The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin
Yep. I shifted from Linux to OS X years ago because I was sick of tech fiddling and wanted to have a machine that needed no hand-holding and let me get on with my work.
There seem to be no good options.
This is why I use LTS Ubuntu. I don't do any sysadmin work at all. Every couple of weeks or so a dialog opens up saying there are updates, and I click OK. Everything "just works".
I moved from Windows 7 to Debian 8 a year or so ago and have never looked back (except for the Adobe Suite...)
I use an OSX Macbook Pro for my 9-5 and have been avoiding High Sierra forever - it's just a slap in the face.
At least I know my Debian 8 box will almost always operate as expected - even through a distribution release. I need stability from my system, and there's just no other option anymore.
I would dump it for a linux laptop, but I work remote so every type of video chat/screen share tool needs to work. Most of them don't work on linux. My computer choice is dictated by chat tools, which is kind of sad.
At home, I ran the same setup but I used my gaming/windows laptop for my VNC client and WebEx. I could never get the Linux Cisco VPN client to work, so my work laptop just made an openvpn connection to my flat (fibre connections are nice).
You mean 16, not 8.
So besides the wifi everything is working and iirc someone has been working on a driver for the builtin wifi card and plans on merging it into 12 sometime this year.
But so far I'm loving it, I have ZFS, Dtrace, Sublime3, Firefox57 and xterm, which is an ideal dev environment for me.
sudo pkg install drm-next-kmod The USB wifi dongle is a TP-LINK TL-WN725N. I found it at my local Microcenter.
[1]: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/hardware.html#wlan
We are in 2018, not in 1995. You can easily find good desktop and laptop that run fine under pretty much all major distros.
Especially if you compare to MBP & the like, meaning you have no budget issues...
Plenty of threads on this forum (and others) to choose from when it comes to choosing hardware for Linux. The answers are often similar: Thinkpad T4xx, Dell XPS 13/15, System76. I don't see HP mentioned that often but I have a bunch of (older) HP laptops running here and there which do just fine, just stay away from their consumer products and focus on (used) business hardware. Purism is cropping up here and there as well, mostly due to their active stance against Intel ME.
In other words it is not that hard to find good hardware to run Linux on. Given the state of MacOS these days the experience is likely to be less trouble-prone than that of those staying on (or hopping on) the Apple platform.
What have you tried?
I have a MacBookPro14,1 (2017) and had a bit more of a problem than expected triple-booting Windows, Linux, and High Sierra, but I got it working.
My main issue seemed to be that nvme wasn't supported for many of the Linux installers. I think it was a newer Fedora I finally got working. I may have had to manually mount the drive before running the installer (I cant remember). I haven't used it as my primary OS, but everything seemed to be working (hi-dpi, wifi, trackpad).
I think like any other new hardware, it'll take a couple years before Linux works out of the box.
Handily filters down to 2 companies: Dell and Lenovo. I am unsure about Librem and PogoLinux.
Oddly they come with the disclaimer "IMPORTANT! This document is intended for HP authorized service providers only." which makes you wonder why it's available to download from the support website.
I am beyond flabbergasted at how much these idiots have managed to break between Sierra and HS. They must literally be high when they say 'this is good, let's ship it'. The OS is abysmally unfinished, and with each of these stupid failures we're going past Vista levels of unfinished. These are tools I use in my daily workflow (thankfully I use Linux instead), and other developers in my company use these tools. At this point, upgrading to HS would be a massive step backwards for us.
I literally cannot believe how sh*t MacOS has become. It's a cesspit of broken Unix with a shiny iOS layer covering it. I absolutely loved Snow Leopard and cannot believe it has evolved (or mutated) into this. I'm beyond pleading and into exasperation.
APPLE, WILL YOU MAKE AN OS WE CAN ACTUALLY USE?!
Yes, it’s fodder to continue to dump on Apple—I get that. But it certainly doesn’t help solve the issue, assuming there’s really an issue in the first place.
For the record, I’ve installed htop many dozens of times using Homebrew on a variety of Mac hardware and operating systems over the years and have never experienced an issues.
After many years of Mac IT tech support, I can tell you: it’s usually what’s not being reported that's the problem.
Was this a clean install or was it upgraded from a previous version of macOS?
Are there 3rd-party kernel extensions installed? Pretty common with antivirus software and hardware drivers.
When’s the last time Disk Repair was run? I’ve seen corrupted/damaged hard drives cause machines to kernel panic or hang.
Did htop ever work correctly? If so, when did that change?
I’d be pretty surprised to hear a new iMac that was unboxed and had Homebrew and htop installed would crash. Actually, if that were the case, they could boot into the recovery partition, format and reinstall.
I clean-installed macOS High Sierra 10.13 the day it was released on a 2009 iMac and have been running the public betas and haven’t had any issues since.
I’m running macOS High Sierra 10.13.3, build 17D29a. I’ve installed 157 command line and 71 GUI applications using Homebrew…
As someone mentioned, it’s only the problems that are part of some narrative that make news; people like me don’t post “Hey—I’m a web developer and I’ve been using High Sierra on a nearly 10 year-old iMac with zero issues, even when running beta versions”.
This doesn’t excuse Apple at all for the bugs and vulnerabilities that have been well-publicized; but lets not make it seem worse than it actually is.
Apple has already starting releasing mitigations for Meltdown and Spectre, like many OS vendors are doing.
I run a FreeBSD server on Digital Ocean; here’s their statement:
FreeBSD was made aware of the problems in late December 2017. We're working with CPU vendors and the published papers on these attacks to mitigate them on FreeBSD. Due to the fundamental nature of the attacks, no estimate is yet available for the publication date of patches.
This is pretty underwhelming, especially given the severity of these vulnerabilities.
No they are not. A lot of the same reports with same combination of htop + iTerm should prompt the company to investigate. At least when they are selling $2k "premium" machines.
> I’ve installed htop many dozens of times using Homebrew on a variety of Mac hardware
Neither did I except since I upgraded to High Sierra, happened within an hour after.
> it’s usually what’s not being reported that's the problem.
Usually is. So who from Apple is investigating what is not being reported. It seems like after enough people seeing the issue, they'd prioritize it a bit.
> Did htop ever work correctly? If so, when did that change?
Even if htop doesn't work correctly, and is complete garbage it doesn't install kernel extension and doesn't run with admin privileges so it shouldn't freeze the machine or render it unusable which is seems to do.
> it’s only the problems that are part of some narrative that make news;
The corollary there is that to make the news and get the attention, would need to build a narrative. In many cases with large companies with lots of consumers the best way to solve a problem is to make a big stink on the social media. It's unfortunate but because it's effective, that's what people use.
> but lets not make it seem worse than it actually is.
For people who see their expensive machines which used to work, stop working is pretty bad. Had these been some no-name $150 cheapo chromebooks there wouldn't be such a big deal.
And this issue might not be as serious, but you do recall the "root party" vulnerability, just a month or so ago? That was actually pretty bad, wouldn't you say? And at some point the effect is cumulative. One thing after another starts to get to people. So people will let off steam online about it.
> This is pretty underwhelming, especially given the severity of these vulnerabilities.
One is a non-profit foundation and another is a company with almost $800B in capital. There is a slight difference and different expectations there as well.
To run correctly on macOS and display all processes htop needs to be root via sudo/setuid.
You don’t know whether or not they’ve investigated this issue or not.
There’s a decent chance they have, which might explain why I haven’t had this problem because I’m running a beta of 10.13.3 and nobody else on the GitHub thread is as far as I can see.
I also haven’t seen evidence of bug reports to Apple; that might’ve helped: https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/
True, because the company we're discussing isn't exactly the champion of communication when it comes to things like that. A simple reply from an Apple developer that it is being looked into, that it got linked to an internal KB, would've been suffice.
1. You’re confusing Apple’s market capitalization (around $890 billion) with it’s cash on hand + marketable securities , which is only $268 billion: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/02/earnings-4q-2017/
Regardless, it’s not relevant to this discussion since we know all of these companies who make tens of billions each quarter have bugs and security issues.
Given your logic, there’s no excuse for Intel creating vulnerable processors going back to 1997, with literally hundreds of millions of computers that can be compromised and hacked. It wouldn’t take more than a few percent of these machines to be hacked to potentially cause havoc all over the world.
The point being: money doesn’t mean you can’t screw up; being a non-profit doesn’t let you off the hook. It’s not crazy to expect the FreeBSD team to say more than “we’ll get back to you” regarding fixes. At least the Linux guys are dealing: http://www.zdnet.com/article/major-linux-redesign-in-the-wor...
FreeBSD also doesn’t have over 1 billion vulnerable devices in the wild either; their threat model is tiny compared to what Apple and the rest of Intel’s OEM’s have to deal with.
I know, I know: Apple is always held to a different standard; they should give equal weight to an incorrect compiler flag for htop as they would for preventing more than 1 billion of their smartphones, tablets and computers from being hacked.
That's exactly what I was getting to. They should be held to a different standard.
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/63985/
They were notified in late December, before the holidays. Intel knew for 6 months at least. So even there some vendors had more time than others.
Turns out it doesn’t, but it’s not unusual for people to make these types of unsubstantiated claims; turns out it’s a build issue that conflicts with High Sierra.
The Homebrew team updated the formula so it doesn’t try to install on High Sierra until they can fix it.
[0]: https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/issues/682#issuecomment-355...
What are the unsubstantiated claims? That these people including me are lying and have made this crash up? Do you really believe that?
> turns out it’s a build issue that conflicts with High Sierra.
Thanks for checking, but what is the build issue is exactly?
The original point was that unless htop installs kernel extensions or runs as admin it shouldn't break the rest of the system. So there might be an htop issue but there is most likely a macOS issue as well.
You do realize, don't you, that if this is a relevant question I already have cause to complain? It's been the future for some time now, give us reliable upgrades already.
Yes, it’s the future, but as I mentioned, the Mac I’m running High Sierra on is nearly 10 years-old—it shipped with a version of Snow Leopard, MacOS x 10.6.
That was 7 major operating system releases ago—pretty sure nobody at Apple tested upgrading from an operating system that hasn’t been supported by Apple in many years, not to mention all of the permutations of hardware, kernel extensions, file systems, 3rd-party software installs, etc.
This is the double-edged sword: no matter what Apple does, they’re wrong. If they don’t support older machines with the latest operating system, then it’s a conspiracy to force its users to upgrade.
If they do support older machines and can’t guarantee perfect upgrades from every version operating system they’ve ever shipped, regardless of the condition of the user’s machine and how well (or not) the machine has been maintained, they’re also wrong.
Yeah, I'm an idealist. Sue me.
Yes, a $50 billion company that doesn't run massive amounts of automated regression tests on one of its flagship products is Wrong. Come on, Microsoft manages to support absurd levels of backwards compatibility (see the discussion upthread about upgrading from Windows 1.0 to Windows 10), what's Apple's excuse?
Here’s what I got when attempting to upgrade; for the record, htop still works fine for me:
==> Upgrading 1 outdated package, with result:
htop 2.0.2_1
htop: This formula either does not compile or function as expected on macOS versions newer than Sierra due to an upstream incompatibility.
Error: An unsatisfied requirement failed this build.Did they shift too much developers to iOS and forgot about macOS?