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Comment by darkteflon | Hacker News Reader

> Major new releases of macOS are no longer hidden when using the softwareupdate(8) command with the --ignore flag. This change also affects macOS Mojave and macOS High Sierra after installing Security Update 2020-003.

As a Mojave user, not happy about this.

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This is an admission that their upgrade rates for Catalina are bad. Between the now-customary list of new bugs and the 32bit massacre, the Vista comparison clearly struck a chord.

It would have been so much easier to just keep shipping the 32bit compat layer.

If MS wanted to kick Apple in the shins they should get the Github Actions runner to support Mojave (right now it only supports Catalina). Would help me stave off upgrading myself and users for a few more months.

You can't run the latest Xcode versions on Mojave, so it'd already be of limited use and in a year it'd be a very niche thing.

Whether this matters is very dependent on what you're doing. For webdev stuff, for instance, you don't need Xcode—much less the latest version—just Apple's "command line tools".

This really only matters for iOS builds, meanwhile I have users that can't upgrade to Catalina yet and I need Mojave/High Sierra environments to build and test against.

GitHub Actions is a subset of Azure Pipelines, I use Mojave there and don’t intend to move to Actions.

I was just about to let the 2020-003 Security Update run on Mojave, but after this warning I will leave that well alone.

Apple had a great OS once, but now they are losing me more with each update. Can't buy new Mac HW either any more, since it will be systematically unable to run the 32-bit SW I need. Apple forcing decades-long users off their platform to Windoze and Linux is just bizarre.

When Catalina dropped, it became obvious that while Apple computers and I have had a good run, we’re now going in different directions. I started migrating to Linux late last year.

If your workflow is amenable to it, and you can stay productive during the (inevitably drawn-out) transition, I highly recommend you consider taking the plunge.

Not installing security updates with large numbers of pretty critical fixes[1] doesn't sound too smart to me.

1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211170

Putting in a user hostile feature in a security update, leading to people to not update, doesn't sound too smart to me.

Why? Catalina has lots of security improvements so it's a net positive for security if more people upgrade.

But it's a net minus for usability that it can't run 32-bit software any more. That makes it a no-go for some of us, and Apple knows that, so all the nagging to “upgrade” is pointless anyway.

So because 0.5% of people have some dodgy 32-bit software that they cannot or have not updated, Apple should just not bother trying to make the rest 99.5% of people update?

Doesn't seem smart.

I didn't say that. But taking away the option to explicitly tell the OS to stop nagging me is still a user-hostile move.

So, you are saying that all 32-bit software is by definition “dodgy”? But let's break it off here since I realize that disagreeing with you may not seem smart.

Meaning? Can you elaborate a bit? I’ve just downgraded to Mojave on an iMac (fusion drive) primarily used for Logic Pro. Do you think Mojave is not getting updates anymore ?

The "ignored" flag caused macOS to NOT offer the update to the new major version every once in a while (a little popup in the top right corner). It also made the Software Update app report that there are no updates available.

After installing this update, the Update app reports the update to Catalina even though I have ignored the update previously on this machine. This does not mean that Mojave is not getting any more updates, it's just that macOS will nag you to update (but you will still be able to dismiss it manually) without the option to tell it to stop.

Is there a patch somewhere that turns the nag off permanently? I'm definitely not updating several of my machines to Catalina in the next years, and the nag is just an useless distraction.

There was a Mac911 article[1] by Glenn Fleishman which detailed how to do this back in October of last year.

I have the following in a file called Catalina.sh:

sudo softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina" && defaults write com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs 0 && killall Dock

Unfortunately - unless I'm mistaken - 2020-003 means this script is toast.

[1]: https://www.macworld.com/article/3447396/how-to-stop-getting...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23325164

thank you my friend.

I do not understand why they did this, and I say that as a Catalina user. Jeff Johnson seems to have some thoughts (and a sort-of solution) on it, though: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/software-update.html

that solution didn't work for me but this one did

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/system-preferences-soft...

This deserves a frontpage post all my itself. Thank you!

They did this just to annoy the scores of people who refuse to upgrade to Catalina.

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