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Comment by Avi-D-coder | Hacker News Reader

Why is Catalina so unstable, were there major architectural changes? I know they broke Nix, ssh and a few others, but why?

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There were some fairly significant changes. Two big ones off the top of my head were dropping support for 32bit binaries, and moving the entire kernel to read-only memory. Both imply broad changes.

There was a major change in architecture: In spring 2018, beginning with the development cycle for Catalina Apple's developers started to move into the Spaceship, the new office building with open office "pods". ;)

Depends on what you’re looking at, but on the whole Catalina probably has more aggressive changes than Mojave did.

And what has users gained by that? For the past 5 years or so, I don't exactly know anything worth it from users' perspective. Getting third party app updates are enough to increase productivity.

One of the high-impact changes (which broke Nix as the grand-grand parent mentioned) was moving / to a read-only volume:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650

Although this change may not be immediately visible it does increase security a fair bit (malware cannot embed themselves or replace system files) and also prevents accidental deletion.

Apple made large strides in the last few years improving security, e.g. by introducing SIP, but also by offering fine-grained permissions for camera, mic, etc. access. APFS created its own road bumps, but was a long overdue replacement of HFS+.

IMO there were also some nice user-visible changes, such as dark mode, replacing iTunes by several separate applications, and dynamic desktop.

I agree that there are also superfluous changes or steps back, I am still grumpy that they replaced Spaces by Mission Control. I don't care for all the deep iCloud Drive integration and think it is unfair to the competition.

I strongly disagree that there are no useful new features the last five years. The problem is more the lack of quality control. That said, I started using macOS when 10.5 came out, which also had its fair share of ugly bugs (e.g. serious problems with maintaining WiFi connections).

I was using since 10.3 and my, 10.5 introduced Quick Look, Time Machine, Boot Camp, Spaces and folder popup in dock which made me feel it has become totally good enough for daily use. Then 10.6 optimized the entire OS when I was surprised that a new OS release actually required less disk space to install and more performant on a same hardware.

I agree some of those security features are good to have but it's like they forgot about adding anything worthy from users' perspective.

Then 10.6 optimized the entire OS when I was surprised that a new OS release actually required less disk space to install and more performant on a same hardware.

This was nice, though it has to be said that the disk space reduction was not because of real optimizations. They removed support for PowerPC in 10.6, so the included applications are not fat/universal binaries anymore. They also removed printer drivers and Rosetta (binary PPC emulation) from the default install (which became an add-on).

Of course, still nice nonetheless if you didn't have a PPC Mac or didn't use PPC applications.

Given that Apple released separate OS install discs and update packages for PPC vs Intel, why were they installing fat binaries of built-in software anyway?

For 3rd party apps universal binaries made complete sense as a way of simplifying app distribution, but that doesn’t extend to the OS.

Heck, do Intel Windows 10 installs include ARM copies of every binary now? I hope not...

> I am still grumpy that they replaced Spaces by Mission Control

Can you elaborate? This terrifies me as I rely a lot on Spaces to organise my desktop between different projects

Is this a change in Catalina?

Is seems like Spaces is still a thing: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh35798/mac https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh14112/10.15...

I'm pretty happy with how this works in Mojava, apart from the major gripe that the apps don't restore to the Space they were in after you reboot.

> Is this a change in Catalina?

No this was done years ago in 10.7. Spaces was awesome and super configurable. But they combined it into Mission control and made it much simple but less useful.

MacOS doesn’t exist for users these days, it’s only there to let you debug iOS programs.

Actually, it does. Third party apps are still very good. I cannot think about using Windows for web development for quite a while. The OS would be fine if it won't get in the way.

> Third party apps are still very good

That's very much despite Apple.

It hasn’t been until this one, though, if this flaw is true.

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