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Comment by cytzol | Hacker News Reader

I was really hoping they'd take some time to address Catalina's glaring issues — its slowness, bugginess, just general sloppiness — and instead they did the opposite.

Honestly, every time Apple has done anything with the Mac the past couple of years, they've screwed it up. The infamous keyboards that they doubled-down and then tripled-down upon (I have personally had five keyboard replacements). The way Catalina sends the hash of every binary you run to Apple. The built-in Catalyst apps that look ugly and feel out-of-place. The Touch Bar which I still, years later, inadvertently activate several times a day (I've had to remove all the buttons on the right), which they addressed by making mandatory. The recurring bugs and kernel panics that have been lying around for years, unfixed.

I have the least confidence in Apple I've ever had. I'm afraid to run Big Sur, not because it changes things, but because it's Apple who are behind it.

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It’s possible they will do both. Fixing bugs isn’t really keynote worthy, so hopefully there’s a ton of stability fixes behind the scenes.

It was keynote-worthy for Snow Leopard, with the infamous "0 new features" slide.

Sure but Snow Leopard had serious bugs when it launched too. It was only in later dot releases that it got its reputation for stability.

I didn't switch to Mac until about halfway through Snow Leopard's lifespan. I'm aware of the big data loss bug—and that's serious for sure—but if you weren't one of the very unlucky few (relatively) to run into it, was 10.6.0 buggy in other ways?

That’s why I have hopes for them to come back and square up the Mac platform to where it should be for stability and usability. They could have been treating the whole platform as a beta for what they want to make of it after the move to their own silicon for many years now - perhaps even a decade. They’ve been well financed for as long. They also seem to have something like institutional anti-ADHD in so far as they can really only “nail” one product down well at a time.

"0 new features" was marketing that seems to have worked quite well. I can't remember where, but I swear I remember hearing that later from people at Apple. The major thing is they didn't do a big UI refresh. In Snow Leopard they: finally rewrote Finder in Cocoa, released Quicktime X, shipped a 64bit kernel, released Grand Central Dispatch, released OpenCL. Plus a bunch of smaller updates and tweaks. They dropped included things like printer drivers (which now download on demand) which make the install size smaller.

It's possible they will do both, and I hope they do! I should add the disclaimer that I didn't actually expect them to talk about stability or Catalina's woes, for general corporate "avoid talking about things that make us look bad" reasons. Mentioning bug fixes inadvertently draws attention to the fact you added bugs; claiming increased stability highlights that the OS was once unstable. This is why Snow Leopard's "no new features" tagline was so memorable — it's so rare for a company to outright claim something like that.

But I have to ask myself: why this release? Why fix bugs in Big Sur, but not Catalina or Mojave? For example, the annoying bug where Mail randomly becomes the active application[1] has been floating around for years and still isn't fixed, and there are only two reasons for this: Apple is stretched too thin and can't spare the developers to work on bug fixes, or Apple doesn't care, and is simply willing to let the Mac languish, taking the reputation hit in favour of increased iPhone sales. The fact that they've overhauled the entire interface means it's not the first one — they do have enough resources to make large, sweeping changes to the OS. So I will be absolutely unsurprised if, ten months from now, I decide to upgrade to Big Sur on a whim, and a couple of minutes in, Mail pops up once more.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23359820

I've also seen it reacted to very negatively when announced.

I don’t remember this but it’s credible. Can you dredge your any links from back then?

I wasn't specifically thinking about Apple, but a game I play. When I dug up the history on Reddit, it was a single troll commenting on every dev diary post.

>It’s possible they will do both.

Unlikely, given their recent track record. They'll just ignore the bugs in this release until the next big release like they've been doing for the past few versions.

The Touch Bar is honestly by least favorite aspect of anything Apple has done in recent memory.

My touch bar had dead pixels (twice), effectively wiping out half the function keys. And when it did work, it was hard to use.

I've been using my MBP as a desktop for the past 8+ months, and while it's slightly better experience, it still sucks that I'm stuck having to buy 3 USB adapters just to make it usable.

I will say I really like the lock button and the touch ID integration. I hate the lack of physical escape key (especially for vim); however, they are fixing that on many (most? all?) new models. Mostly I'm pretty meh about the touch bar. Not sure how much cost it's adding, but I'd probably rather they reduce the cost.

Have you considered remapping Caps Lock to Escape? There's an option for that in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences.

I've remapped Caps Lock to Control, which turned out to be very useful in various Remote Desktop and VirtualBox scenarios since it requires a left-Control key, which Mac laptop keyboards are missing.

FWIW, escape is actually slower (both in movement speed and in actual invokation) than ^[.

lit: `CTRL+[`

I know habits die hard, and "you're holding it wrong" is not a valid excuse- and I know that I also dislike massively not having an escape key.

But for vim specifically; there is an escape sequence and the escape key is an alternative method for that. (similar to how the arrows "work" but hjkl is the "real" way of moving).

So you’re saying that pressing two keys is faster than pressing one key? In which universe??

Is eating 2 sandwiches also faster than eating one?

Are 2 electrical impulses also faster than 1?

I think not.

yes pressing two keys can be faster than pressing one, because you have two hands, pressing A+L is faster than pressing control+delete, due to locality.. your hands are likely closer to A+L than control and delete.

Locality is important, in fact it's the largest factor in determining speed of a hotkey's access.. "distance from home-row"[0] is a measurement that is consistently touted when referring to vim in particular.

Control+[ is significantly faster because your hands move independently. However I'm just now remembering that I always remapped my capslock to be an additional control, so it isn't necessarily universal that control is "as fast" since my "control" is actually on the homerow.. which is unusual.

As it happens, though I was wrong earlier and was confusing ^c and ^[

from `:h i_CTRL-C`

> CTRL-C: Quit insert mode, go back to Normal mode. Do not check for abbreviations. Does not trigger the InsertLeave autocommand event.

^[ is interpreted exactly the same as ESC; vim can't see a difference. (you can see this under `:h keycode` )

[0]: https://books.google.se/books?id=LA9QDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT201&lpg=P...

My beef is that ESC in macOS is the universal non-destructive dismiss button. I'm glad they went back to making it a physical key.

This really depends on your keyboard layout. On mine (Canadian Multilingual, yes, I like my accents), [ is actually Alt+9. So Ctrl+[ becomes Ctrl-Alt-9 which is an unwieldy combination, to say the least. I like my Esc key where it is.

I know this answer is "buy something else to make your life eaiser" but hear me out - either a USB-C monitor, or a thunderbolt dock.

I got a USB-C monitor last time I upgraded (LG 27" 4K) and having a single cable to plug in, which not only carries the display signal, but also charges my MBP, AND carries the USB signal so that I can plug wired keyboard and anything else into the hub in the monitor still feels ridiculously futuristic to me.

Any recommendations on a TB3 dock? I recently searched for one, and none of the top rated ones can support a 16" MBP power requirements. One of the manufacturers even went as far as saying "How often do you really use your CPU/GPU at 100%?"[0]

Dell and HP have higher powered docks, but there are many conflicting reports on if it can deliver 96W to non-dell/hp laptops.

TB3/USB-C is a giant mess that is too confusing for even techies to reliably navigate.

[0] - https://www.caldigit.com/using-the-16-macbook-pro-with-the-c...

Looking at the link, if you peg the CPU and GPU to 100% even the charger that comes with the MBP will struggle.

Another 100w option is the Targus dock - https://us.targus.com/products/usb-c-universal-quad-4k-docki...

Personally I find the razer core x chroma really good

It’s a hub secondary, and an egpu primarily, but it works fine to power my

Personal 2019 mbp 13 (1.7 i7, 16gb)

Personal Lenovo s740

Work 2019 mbp 16 (2.8 i7, 16gb)

CalDigit TS3 Plus: I have a 16” MBP and two 4K monitors, keyboard and mouse attached to it.

Charging works fine even though I don’t think it pumps same power as PSU out.

I do a lot of Rust programming and use VMs too. Haven’t run into a situation where it runs out of juice while attached.

I can second this recommendation. Not cheap, but this dock has been excellent.

Yeah, sure, but at least on my Macbook Pro 16, Thunderbolt/USB-C monitors both instantly make the area near the touch bar hot enough so as to be uncomfortable to the touch.

If you're sharing a screen via video conference, you can easily hit 90c, with the CPU throttling hard the whole time.

That's because the second you plug an external monitor in (at all) it switches off the iGPU and spins up the dGPU on the old 15" and new 16" ... what you're feeling is the dGPU pumping out heat.

> The way Catalina sends the hash of every binary you run to Apple.

Wait, what?! What are you referring to here? I just updated to Catalina and I wasn't aware of this.

App notarization works by hashing binaries and sending said hashes to Apple. Here you go: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/catalina-executables.htm...

What the actual f*ck. Thanks for the link. Looks like I'll need Little Snitch...

If you don’t trust your kernel I don’t think some dinky application-layer firewall is going to save you.

Little Snitch is good but what happens if the kernel can’t get a binary approved to run??

And people complained about Windows 10 telemetry.

Last time I run macOS. Time to return to Linux (Pop OS I think)

I tried installing little snitch on catalina and it needed a network connection exactly for that.

I would like to know how to disable this and install little snitch. Maybe spctl or csrutil?

How is this bad? They are likely sending a SHA-256 hash of the binary, not anything the binary itself to compare it to a bloom filter of known exploits. I'd expect any decent OS malware protection to be doing that.

It was all the rage in news a few weeks ago, and it is true. Apple sends the hash of every script and executable you run as part of its notification process (even command line commands & scripts)

I'm still afraid to run Catalina. I have to use it on one laptop (me hardware) an it is slow and problematic. I've had actual system crashes. I can't remember the last time that happened pre Catalina

I can't remember the last time I've had a crash on Catalina. That being said, I did do a clean install when I upgraded out of fear of issues. Not sure if that had something to do with it.

I had a new computer pre installed with Catalina

You may want to run a hardware check, look around online for people with similar issues and hardware as you...or just take it to the Genius Bar. In my experience kernel panics in macOS in the past 10+ years has come from bad hardware, badly written kernel extension, or corrupt preferences (which a clean install addresses).

A few years ago I remember reading an article where Apple looked at crash metrics and worked very hard to address those. The criticism at the time was that this wouldn't catch slowdowns, hangs, or issues like "why aren't my Messages showing up?" which has been issues more recently.

>Honestly, every time Apple has done anything with the Mac the past couple of years, they've screwed it up.

Compared to what OS?

The latest Windows 10 update buggers up Storage Spaces and printing, hard on the heels of another Windows 10 Update that deleted the user's files.

Is it uncommon for folks to use a Linux desktop as their primary OS? I've been doing so for about 10 years and I've had no complaints. Whenever I need some specific software I boot to Windows or use Virtualbox. I also have a Macbook Pro 2015

Same. I’ve been on Pop OS on a System76 Darter for over a year. Very happy with the combination, and the price.

Unified keyboard shortcuts and I'd be all there. I've come kinda close-ish in Elementary, but it's still clunky enough that I can't commit full-time.

I used to use Linux as a daily driver until switching to macOS because I wanted to get stuff done instead of faffing around and learning edge cases for every app. I used to use KDE 3.5 which was near perfect and didn’t require learning new methods of using a computer for each app, but then KDE4 and GNOME3 got released which was like stepping backwards 20 years.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head that unified interactions (and with the keyboard, not some dumb new hamburger menu for mouse users like the new gedit) are what’s required and missing for speedy daily use. I couldn’t articulate it until reading your comment, thanks.

>Is it uncommon for folks to use a Linux desktop as their primary OS?

Serious question? Otherwise I have to respond with LOL. Only people inside the tech bubble would think a Linux desktop was normal, and even inside the tech bubble you truly have to have a reason.

The largest install of Linux as a desktop for a company I've seen has been at a post house where all of the software ran on Linux. The users only used it to launch the specific app they needed. They had TDs (technical directors) to do all of the Linuxy type of stuff.

Welcome to this website. It's name is "Hacker News". The name, in case you didn't guess, comes from the main demographic that it targets/is driven by.

Uncommon? Yes. Very few people run Linux as a their primary OS.

Not sure why this is downvoted, it’s objective truth. I’ll go one farther though and say that Linux sucks, and in fact we must admit that if we want it to ever be good. It requires constant investment by the community to remain competitive with the other big players, who are constantly reshaping and making advances we need to keep up with. This is spoken as a desktop Linux user.

Out of curiosity; if Linux sucks, why do you still choose it over other systems?

Why would that surprise you, given the comment? The desire is to make it better, using it in spite of its issues is a way to do that. More users = more inertia to make it better, more resources for reporting issues, etc.

I personally use Linux all the time, but not on the desktop because it's just bad enough that I can't stand it (It's really not Linux, it's X and all its associated crap). I won't criticize those who do because they want a better OS though, that's a good thing.

> Why would that surprise you, given the comment?

Because people choose the least shitty solution for themselves whenever they can. So it doesn't make sense to torment yourself with an OS you don't like or cannot utilise to the extent that you'd like.

It's more about generativity. I have the capability to make this thing better, and I see vendor-imposed problems all the time with the proprietary solutions. Put two and two together and there's really only one responsible choice.

Open source software is great when it works, much better than proprietary software. I have a strong preference for open source; but I can't use Linux for anything serious because of how so many things are broken (not the kernel per se, so not "technically" Linux itself but the surrounding ecosystem). So, I use it as my hobby machine for whatever I can, because of dogfooding. The only way I will know what to fix, or even want to fix it, is by having to deal with it day after day.

Been using Linux for work and as my daily driver for 10+ years. Never had any problem that would make me consider jumping ships.

Professionally, I work with ultra-low latency systems for high frequency/algo trading and it would be impossible to achieve the level of tuning and performance that Linux offers on other OSes.

I'm interested in the types of issues that made the experience bad for you.

Here's a few...

* Even though there is tons of extra swap space, running too many apps at once causes the entire system to become unresponsive for ~20s at a time. Granted, I am using older hardware, but there should be some minimal amount of responsiveness allocated to indicate the system isn't just totally dead.

* Wifi GUI Gnome utility often ceases working and requires wifi to be turned off and on again. I got so fed up with this I just wrote a command to set Wifi to my credentials, and even then, I have to unplug/replug the wifi dongle frequently to get it to re-register with the system. On Arch Linux, this GUI utility doesn't even work at all. This has happened with multiple different makes of dongles.

* When I was using Ubuntu for work purposes (and Python / node / Docker stack), it would frequently run out of file descriptors. There was no solution other than to restart.

* Last night I started to encounter an issue where Ctrl-X would cut text successfully, but when I go to paste it, it will not be there. Possibly a bug with VSCode, not sure yet, but I haven't encountered it running VSCode on Mac at all.

* Something about programs being interrupted by context switches to other programs that are using large slices of CPU time leads to input being misinterpreted. If I am running a Rust compilation in one window, typing `hello` into an adjacent terminal window might show up as `hellllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllo`. This happens in a wide variety of applications. I suspect the problem has to do with input library routines not receiving real time priority, or something like that. Weirdly enough, I saw the same issue on FreeBSD.

>re: WiFi gui

Don’t use gnome and in particular don’t use their network configuration tools. I’ve never seen those reliably work.

>re repeat under load

I’ve had this happen on OSX but I don’t think I’ve ever had it happen on Linux. Then again I almost exclusively type anything long in vim so maybe it’s a bug with the widget toolkit the app is using?

> Don’t use gnome

This kind of response, though, gets to the core of why desktop Linux isn't a super popular choice. The defaults should _work_. Most popular Linux distributions use GNOME by default. We should fix GNOME rather than say people should know they need to not use it. If using KDE is the obvious solution to the plurality of problems someone might encounter, why isn't KDE the default for most distros? I'm sure there are political reasons too, but those are reasons that matter to the end user just as much as technical ones. They are, in fact, indistinguishable from that perspective.

Even if the solution is KDE (or something else), a person who switched will find that KDE itself has issues as well, and when someone encounters them, they will complain and be told to not use KDE, use GNOME because it doesn't have that issue. We can't continuously flip flop stacks just because we encounter particular bugs.

> maybe it’s a bug with the widget toolkit the app is using?

I assume that's GTK, and it's possible. I see the bug in Firefox, Chrome, and GNOME's terminal, although strangely not VSCode.

I think even in the tech community it's uncommon...especially if you mainly use a laptop. Thankfully, laptop options have expanded quite a bit.

However, a few years ago a Steam update had potential to erase a bunch of data[1].

Is there a Linux option similar to Time Machine or Windows Backup (backing to a local network drive)? I've used things like rsync and restic. They work great for jobby-job like needs, but isn't something I could show a point-and-click user to manage themselves.

How soon did you install Linux on your Macbook Pro 2015? Which distro did you go with? When I get a new Mac I usually test out a few Linux distros and it can take years (if ever) to get decent support. Things like; wifi, palm rejection of trackpad, power management (decent battery optimizations or sleep/wake).

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2871653/scary-steam-for-linu...

Yes, I gave up on Linux for anything desktop related about 15 years ago.

Still have an ASUS Netbook with Ubuntu LTS, which allows me to validate the "progress" of Desktop Linux on laptops.

Naturally I occasionally get to deal with it via VMs and server deployments, however for my choice of languages the OS hardly matters anyway.

I've been using Debian GNU/Linux with KDE as my main Desktop from 1999 (21 years now): in home and work. As a "family administrator" my father use Linux in the Desktop too from about the same time. My 2 sisters and my brother also use it all the time. If they have any problems, they call me and I'll take care of it. I got married in 2004, and since then my wife and in-laws have also used Linux on the desktop as their only operating system.

My oldest daughter is 16 years old and has always used Linux at home, and she had no problem when Windows was found in some classes in the High School. I think it is possible, as long as you have someone to turn to if there are problems (I am that someone in my family).

Why does it need to be compared to any OS? One of the reasons I switched to Mac was the OS X was far more stable than Windows. I still want a stable OS.

I have biweekly kernel panics on macOS... somewhere in the io sub system. Luckily vscode etc store their state

This hasn't been my experience at all. I'm running a hackintosh of all things on vanilla x86 hardware and I haven't had a kernel panic for months (and even then the only thing I can think of was when I was screwing with something that's supposed be behind the curtain). Importantly, I'm more and more resolute against installing Catalina.

Then you probably have a hardware defect somewhere

You have a hardware problem.

I had maybe one or two kernel panics since OS 10.1 more than 15 years ago, even with hackintoshes or water damaged MacBooks, so that would be a real shame if that’s due to Catalina and it’s not a hardware problem.

I never reboot my laptop

> OS X was far more stable than Windows.

I'm not sure that was ever true but certainly hasn't been true for over a decade. Neither OS is fully stable (how ever you might define that) and neither OS is a terrible unstable mess either.

I'm not sure that was ever true

I am. Absolutely sure. Stability was the reason I switched to Macintosh two decades ago. I've had to run Windows boxes for work at the same time, and with the exception of the most recent few years, Macs have been 100% more stable than Windows.

can't speak about the very recent updates, but windows have been consistent and adamant on keeping the backward compatibility. they still use reserved file names for io devices so that 30+ year old printers can still work, and you can still open a 2000s doc file in office 365. (I'm looking at you Apple, who made many of the 32 bit apps I loved useless)

relevant video: https://youtu.be/bC6tngl0PTI (Tom Scott: Why you can't use CON as filename in windows)

Actually you can use CON as a filename in Windows, you just have to use the right API. The command:

    type CON > "\\?\C:\CON"

will create a file named CON. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming... has some details about this.

Even the, now official, merge of UWP with Win32 is planned to take years as they don't want to introduced hard breaks for those that decided to bet on WinRT.

Compared to the previous (-ly used) macOS release, obviously. That's the only OS that matters in this context.

That is what I have been saying about the Mac.

It isn't the Mac is so good, it is the alternative is downright awful. From Design, UX, to even technical.

I would imagine that a lot of bugs will be squashed (albeit with new ones surely created) in the process of tweaking literally the entire codebase to run well on a new platform.

I’m still holding out on Mavericks b/c of Catalina problems. I’ve learned over the years to not be an early adopter of some critical things, like OS updates.

That's what point releases are for. If they're going to fix the things you're talking about, it'll be done as a point release to 10.15.

Which they really haven't done.

Mail still has a message loss bug. 5 point releases later...

"The way Catalina sends the hash of every binary you run to Apple."

<irony> They truly care about privacy... </irony>

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