Users are losing out against Big Sur’s sealed System | Hacker News Reader

Users are losing out against Big Sur’s sealed System

eclecticlight.co

310 pointszdw324 comments

This article echoes a lot of the reasons why I ultimately ditched MacOS. Apple no longer respects when the user wants to update, it's all just a different flavor of Windows at this point. Thankfully, leaving MacOS has put most of those issues in the rearview. Hopefully someday Apple recognizes that a bloated OS doesn't make anyone happy, I'm kinda surprised that more people don't talk about the 50 gig download that xCode requires. Kinda insane for a glorified text editor.

Agreed. And on Windows at least there are now mitigation measures created by the community, such as WUMT.

Same feeling here. I reinstalled yesterday and sold my MacBook Pro last night. Feels so refreshing to be going back to Linux after all this time.

“Freedom as in liberty”

Worth noting that Xcode doesn't just include the IDE, but also an entire LLVM/clang toolchain as well as SDKs and simulator OS disk images for macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.

It probably wouldn't hurt to split that up a bit — perhaps Xcode could install only the toolchain and macOS SDKs by default with the rest being downloadable on demand, but there's definitely a lot more going on there than just IDE/text editor. It's an all-in-one appleOS development kit.

> SDKs and simulator OS disk images for macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS

Yes, the vast majority of Xcode's size comes from inside the folder Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms

Android Studio is better in this regard, there's an SDK manager so I don't need to have watchOS/tvOS installed when my apps don't target it

You just need the Studio that actually works, the "stable" to try stable updates, then the beta and canary versions to try out stuff that take months or even years to arrive to stable and still bork on first stable release.

Did they pay for development of that toolchain or just "embraced" the open source?

They most certainly paid for it, as well as financing many of the key contributors to related open source projects.

So not all contributors got paid? Sounds obscene given how much money they have.

Sounds like you’re not a fan of open source software.

Apple has been involved in the toolchain since nearly the beginning. They hired one of the original authors and sponsor its development: https://foundation.llvm.org/docs/sponsors/

Not only have the paid for it, but it wouldn't likely be anything more than an academic project without Apple.

I'd even (somewhat tongue in cheek) say that the text editor is the worst and least important part of Xcode. :)

(In fairness it's been improving in recent years but it's still not flexible/customizable to my TextMate taste.)

> In fairness it's been improving in recent years

Has it? In my experience, the Swift rewrite of Xcode source editing has made it vastly more buggy. I forget exactly when this happened, Xcode 8? 9?

It's definitely been improving since that initial rewrite. There's still a few rough spots, but they can be avoided almost entirely by writing idiomatic Swift — the stuff that trips SourceKit up tends to be things like nesting closures deeply and ridiculously long optional chains.

SwiftUI has done well to expose SourceKit/Xcode's weak spots. Nearly all of the performance improvements brought to both in the last major release were a result of SwiftUI applying pressure in the previous release.

I was playing with swift a few months ago on my 2016 MacBook Pro and Sourcekit sat on 100% cpu for hundreds of milliseconds whenever I typed a keystroke for some reason. There’s also a bug / horrible design choice in the macos kernel from the last couple of years where if the cpu is pegged, the computer drops keystrokes. These two bugs combined to make my computer lose keystrokes while typing function names - they came out garbled unless I purposefully typed really slowly. I was gobsmacked. It was the worst code editing experience I’ve ever had. Maybe I’m “using the wrong swift features” but it really just feels like its amateur hour at Apple. Did all the senior engineers leave in the last few years? Xcode as a whole has sort of felt like beta software since Xcode 3. Every version they fix one bug, add a headline feature and add 3 new bugs to work around. And everything gets 20% slower. It seems like they keep rushing releases out the door for wwdc then they never fix it properly afterwards.

Swift is a lovely language but the experience is thoroughly and totally ruined by Xcode. Xcode manages to make eclipse feel lightweight and snappy.

> if the cpu is pegged, the computer drops keystrokes

not only that, but ive seen bluetooth stack blow up and loose all connections to my keyboard/mouse under those circumstances as well

> Xcode manages to make eclipse feel lightweight and snappy.

its been slow since xcode 4... never really recovered from glomming interface builder into the ide

Yikes I’ve seen that bluetooth problem happen but I hadn’t connected it to cpu load. That makes total sense if it’s dropping interrupts. Maybe I should plug in my “magic” keyboard and trackpad.

I remember when Xcode 4 came out. It was slow and buggy we all thought they’d fix it over the next few releases. That just never seems to have happened. It’s a pity - for all of apple’s history of amazing UX, Microsoft’s visual studio (and vs code) are vastly better IDEs for writing software.

there are two other things i notice that seems to happen as well

1. keyboard repeats keys under high load situations

2. mouse cursor lags badly (like seconds) when switching darkmode or an external monitor...

yea, xcode just seems to be stuck in "itunes mode" where every release seems to just tweak thing but never fundamentally improve... i hope this doesnt forebear "apple music" version of xcode (starts sweating)

It is possible to install just the tool chain - brew asks you to do so if you don’t have Xcode installed.

You can just install the command line tools without having to download Xcode. It has been this way for a decade.

I have also switched back to Linux after about 8 years in Mac world, and have been really pleasantly surprised. Things still aren’t perfect, but they’re a far cry from where they were in 2010. My wife and I recently got a new Lenovo ThinkPad and Dell XPS, respectively, both with Linux preinstalled. The fingerprint readers work! The webcams work! Audio works! Wifi works! All with close to zero hassle (had to enable a PAM option to use the fingerprint reader with sudo, but otherwise no problems).

I miss MacOS keyboard shortcuts a bit, but most of the software I use for work and personal projects (emacs, terminal/tmux, docker) runs an order of magnitude faster. I love having a real package manager again, and I get first class support for most of the developer-centric tooling I really care about (e.g. Nix).

I like many was a little tempted by the M1 Macs, but seeing two coworkers have to switch away from them because critical dev tooling isn’t functional, reading about the SSD write issues recently, and now this about the insane size of update files helps temper the temptation.

Keyboard shortcuts are a big sticking point for me switching away from macOS. I expected I could wrestle Linux into something that resembles macOS shortcuts but it’s tricky and inconsistent. The clearest example of where macOS excels with shortcuts is in a terminal window: Command+C for copy, Control+C to kill a process. Control+Shift+C just doesn’t cut it for me on Linux.

I agree with you on software. Real package managers are great.

I hate to say it, because it’s so against what Linux has been for 25 years, but it would be great if there was a $99 distro with a heavily tweaked window manager that looks consistent across most apps, doesn’t have huge top bars, and conforms to macOS keyboard shortcuts. A lightning fast Spotlight analog would be great too. I recognize I can probably get pretty close to this vision with a patchwork of already available software but I want someone to tie a bow on it and maintain it for me.

You just described Haiku

Oh, what could’ve been. I really like what BeOS does, I’m sure there are analogs to this feature but it’s nice that it’s built in. https://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/node_monitoring

I'm not going to use this as a platform to evangelize Linux, but I think you should give KDE a look. It looks really pretty out-of-the-box, and offers you a lot of control over the look and feel of your desktop. On top of that, it has a nearly endless list of keyboard shortcuts that can be rebound in the settings app painlessly. It's a far-cry from a lot of the other DEs I've used in the past, and the "batteries-included" mentality makes it a great analog for Mac and Windows users alike.

KDE has a lot going for it but its customizability is so deep as to be daunting. Each time I've tried using it I've ended up burning hours trying to get every detail just right.

I think it'd benefit quite a lot from including several sane sets of defaults to use as starting points.

Opensuse has an excellent default kde.

Same with Neon IMO (it is developed by KDE people).

The most recent update---a pretty big one---has improved the daunting experience a lot.

A big factor of it being daunting, was that the settings were a mess. There are settings for appearances of the DE littered in different sections of system settings. This has been vastly improved.

The default Breeze theme felt dated before (not in a good way); the new update had also improved on that.

I'd say, that the default of the latest Plasma (5.21) is quite sane, to the point that I just chose Breeze Twilight (an included theme) without customization and had been happy since.

My biggest blocker isn’t a specific window manager, in that I can get a reasonable setup together in a relatively decent amount of time—it’s more around the fragmentation, or maybe my perceived fragmentation of the ecosystem as a whole.

I’ll get things set up. Then I’ll look for some alternative of an application I’m used to on Mac. There’ll be something, but it was written for KDE and I’m running Gnome, or vice versa, and it looks and feels decidedly out of place.

I’ll run something like Slack, or Spotify, and it’s sluggish and looks awkward next to all of my other windows.

It’s not one big thing that keeps me in the Mac ecosystem. I don’t like the direction it’s headed in either, but every time I try to make the switch it’s like death by a thousand cuts of a bunch of little things trying to get things to a point where it feels comfortable and cohesive—and ultimately I need to be able to work—the time investment necessary to get something that allows me to just sit down and work (and deal with random little issues that pop up throughout the process) pushes me right back to Mac every time.

Why would I press a key to copy/paste?

Highlight text, then middle click

Muscle memory, no middle click on most trackpads. It just feels weird coming from a browser after using Control+C to copy something and then having to use Control+Shift+V to paste. I never got used to the right click to paste paradigm. I expect a context menu.

I've never used a non-mac laptop without a middle button.

Muscle memory and 'the way things work' works both ways. You have to jump through hoops to do basic things like focus-follows-mouse/raise on click, multiple desktops, alt-drag to move a window etc (to be honest I'm not sure if you can even do those on a mac)

ThinkPads are what I reach for on the PC side of things, and those still have a dedicated middle button for the most part. Otherwise I can't think of a single modern example of a laptop with a middle button. They're all click pads these days like Macs.

The standard unix 3rd button emulation is left+right click at the same time. Should work pretty much everywhere without configuration.

In the case of "tap to click", a 3 finger tap would also emulate this, or as a middle mouse click.

> no middle click on most trackpads

If your trackpad has multitouch, triple touch should correspond to the middle click. Works for me on Linux by default.

Because often I need to highlight text in the terminal, copy it, then highlight text somewhere else (e.g. in a text input field in a browser, the address bar in the browser, etc.) and paste over it. Selecting the specific destination text I want to overwrite blows away my previous selection.

In many cases I do just highlight and right-click where I want the text pasted. But that workflow doesn't work a large portion of the time and I need a clipboard that isn't being wiped out almost any time I click on something.

> Selecting the specific destination text I want to overwrite blows away my previous selection.

Oof, is this the normal Linux behavior? That sounds annoying. In MacOS every app (or even tab) has its own separate highlight that it maintains. So in your example, selecting text in the browser would leave the terminal unaffected, and when you bring the terminal back to the foreground your text is still highlighted.

The highlight doesn't vanish, the clipboard contents do, because that's global and it gets written on highlight.

Nitpick: You're talking about the primary selection, not the clipboard. Those are two different distinct things.

It doesn't surprise me to learn that at all, because I've been confused about having two clipboards in Linux. But I don't remember hearing the term "primary selection" - my interpretation of the behavior was that there are just two separate clipboards. I guess that's not accurate - why not?

I've been using Pop_OS for the past few months, and haven't had any issues resembling this whatsoever. Of course my clipboard gets overwritten if I don't use a utility that saves previous text selections, but I don't recall this being a feature in any of the Windows/Mac/Linux Operating Systems by default.

X11 supports this with a secondary selection. Unfortunately this functionality isn't exposed in any modern UI toolkits. It does work with Motif apps though.

You have a modifier key "Super", probably with Windows logo, which you can remap for the shortcuts you've had with command.

Mostly I get by well enough by switching alt to ctrl, meta to alt, and ctrl to meta, plus caps lock mapped to ctrl. This gives me mostly an approximation of the Mac keyboard. Still have to remember the shift when copying and pasting in the terminal, but that’s not a huge deal because most of my terminal use is via emacs, where I have vim mode via evil, so copy and paste is done in normal mode with y and p. For me,a little bit of frustration with the keyboard is not so bad compared to the upsides.

I do Caps Lock to Control too, which frees up the bottom left key as a Function key on external keyboards.

This, plus I just gave up and mapped ctrl+v to paste in terminal directly. Also alt-tab is now windows+tab, which is close enough.

I feel the pain. Unfortunately I gave up trying to get Firefox to understand/use super or hyper as command keys. Mostly however I get by fine with caps lock set as control with the exception of VSCode with the Vim plug-in overriding ctrl-c/ctrl-v and breaking copy/paste. Of course VSCode doesn't support super/hyper instead of control key on Linux.

Firefox _used to_ handle it (ui.key.accelKey = 91) but it's been buggy since Quantum.

When I switched from Mac to Linux a few years back, I also had this issue. My solution was radical, I switched to i3 and configured many, many customized shortcuts. Having to "re-learn" nearly everything made it easier because I was forcing a learning curve.

> Control+Shift+C just doesn’t cut it for me on Linux.

Use middle click.

Gnome terminal and all its derivatives support ctrl-c and ctrl-v natively for copy/paste if you just set those as the keybindings in its preferences.

It then uses smart detection for when to send SIGINT vs copy/paste.

if there's no running process, it copies on ctrl-c

If there's a running process and no selected text, it sends sigint on ctrl-c

If there's a running process and selected text, it copies

It will always send sigint on ctrl-shift-c

---

Frankly I wish they would just default to that setting. It's much more pleasant to use than having to remember a different copy/paste shortcut for working in the terminal.

One of the first things I change on any new machine I setup for desktop use.

You can customize the entirety of the to of a terminal. I understand that this might be annoying, but macOS has it's fair share of "screwed up shortcuts" in spots that are not customizable easily (I did, with heavy use of a custom Karabiner config). The main one is word navigation/word selection/word deletion, which are not located all on the same modifiers (cmd), like it is on windows and linux

Indeed, I switched to Mac in 2004 because Linux was a horrible UX mess at that point. Mac was a great POSIX system with a consistent UI and major first-party apps.

Now Apple is becoming more and more unworkable to use as a unix system, and Linux is really much better now. Only gap is still first-party software unfortunately but luckily I don't really ever need stuff like photoshop and office personally.

> luckily I don't really ever need stuff like ... office

If you do, check out CrossOver: https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover

It's a straight up Microsoft Office suite clone for Mac and Linux, which can open, save, AND create MSOffice formats (.docx, etc.).

Huh? CrossOver is just a Wine fork with a GUI. It's not an Office suite. You can install the real MS Office on it, but it has no actual office applications built-in.

are you thinking of libreoffice?

As someone who's mainly been a macOS user in the past couple decades but regularly uses Windows and Linux, I find that the number of papercuts, sharp edges, and lack of consistency in the desktop Linux experience is still too high for my taste. It's certainly much better than it used to be but still has a way to go. But then again, I have little need to tweak system internals.

I downvoted you for the lack of details. What you are saying can be said about any system, just change the name. Even about Mac.

Fair enough, but if I elaborated much it'd quickly turn into a blogpost.

In attempt to sum things up, I'd say that many of the woes of the modern Linux desktop stem from being stuck between different worlds — one example would be with the X11 vs. Wayland situation. Wayland has slowly been improving over time, but there are still concessions that are being made by using either. I understand that transitions are difficult and that particular case is being made more difficult by parties like Nvidia, but the end result is a degraded end-user experience that won't be fixed until the transition is over.

The easiest fix for this issue is to not use Wayland, like 99% of users. I'm not sure who gave you the idea that Wayland is production ready, but it's certainly not going to see prime-time Linux for another few years.

Ubuntu 21.04 will be using Wayland by default for non-Nvidia users, which would suggest that it's not far off.

There are also configurations that are better supported by Wayland than X11, not to mention Wayland handles things like trackpad gestures better (which at this point, X11 is never going to get better at), so even if it's not yet production ready there are reasons why some might want to use it.

Such is the burden of choice. Today, however, x11 is still the standard.

x11 is considered deprecated and is in maintenance mode so it very much is not the standard anymore.

Well, it is still the standard, in the same way that Windows XP was still the standard in 2010.

X is no more standard than Wayland at this point. While many distributions still use X by default, it is in maintenance mode, and on it's way out.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/trying-wayland-by-default-aga...

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/WaylandByDefault

It seems reasonable to expect that these two distro's are the main ones in use by people who don't know enough to pick for themselves.

"Grass is green, the sky is blue"

"I downvoted you for lack of details"

FFS.

But in reality, the grass is orange and the sky is brown.

::Mind Blown::

> I downvoted you for the lack of details.

Have you heard of... asking?

This is HN. If you are writing something, try to say something meaningful or don’t post at all.

I've just realized the reason I like this site so much is because I can watch a passionate argument play out and still like both sides.

I just tried the latest Ubuntu on an X1 Carbon and was disappointed. At first it was looking good, but then the warts started to show through. I could live with some of the problems, but I had to do some searching to learn that the reason Firefox scrolling was laggy was I was using a non-standard hidpi scale factor, the UI froze multiple times in just a few days, and it felt all around glitchier.

1. Maybe give Kubuntu a try. Have not used Gnome in many years now, but when I did, lag was a given.

2. Have you setup full disk encryption? Unless tweaked (thanks to Cloudflare kernel patches) dm-crypt will cause short system freezes.

3. Firefox is still an unfortunate story on Linux. Still no hardware acceleration enabled by default (and just in the last year, I think, made toggleable universally in about:config)

2. Ah, I did set it up (and it had to do it by hand to dual boot). It's just all these things added up--they're table stakes for an OS.

As a pro, at least, dual booting with Linux is still straighforward. I guess other OSes can't compete there.

I have to admit that otherwise its not all roses in Linuxland. Fedora for example, a couple of versions ago switched their upgrade peocedure to the awful download now, reboot system and wait for updates to complete. Basically upgrades feel like Window upgrades now. Maybe that's the way they want to "force" users to swith to Fedora Silverblue :)

Or, you could just install Debian. Then install all the windowing environments you find interesting. No "swap to Kubuntu" required, just start a different window manager. Hell, run all of them simultaneously on the same install using a VNC server.

Thanks for mentioning the Cloudflare patches. While I had already read about that in the past, I wasn't sure what's the current status of their work. So I checked it out and was pleasantly surprised as their patches are included in the mainline kernel since Linux 5.9.

Here is their blog post about the whole topic: https://blog.cloudflare.com/speeding-up-linux-disk-encryptio...

> The fingerprint readers work! The webcams work! Audio works! Wifi works! All with close to zero hassle (had to enable a PAM option to use the fingerprint reader with sudo, but otherwise no problems).

You're happy now, but wait until you try using the trackpads.

There's only one company in the world that cares enough about ergonomic fit and finish to make a laptop that's actually pleasant to use over long periods of time: Apple. The kinks will be worked out with the M1s and macOS in general, and then Linux will look like the joke it is by comparison again.

Honestly, a mediocre trackpad is a small price to pay for an ethically sourced system. Considering I do 90% of my work with a mouse, I've never really missed using MacOS. The touch-based metaphors only hurt mouse users anyways.

Fwiw I don’t mind the trackpad on my XPS or my wife’s ThinkPad at all. Two finger scrolling works just fine, I’ve set up trackpad gestures to go into the overview and switch between workspaces (three finger swipes), and I don’t have any problem moving the cursor around or clicking on things.

I do try to use the mouse as little as possible on whatever system I’m using, but even when I have to, it’s no problem. Just as a point of comparison, I don’t think the trackpads on these machines are anywhere near as much worse (for me) compared to the MacBooks as the keyboards on the MacBooks on the past couple of generations (2018? whenever they added the zero travel keyboards that constantly broke) were compared to literally any other keyboard.

I’ve got Debian on an X1 carbon and everything is flawless. I wouldn’t doubt that mac’s trackpad is still slightly better by some measure but any difference is in the noise for me.

> I like many was a little tempted by the M1 Macs

If you’re interested in the gains on the M1 but dissatisfied with macOS, I encourage supporting the development of native Linux on M1, Asahi Linux. Please contribute however you can. I can’t do the groundwork, so I joined up on Patreon.

https://asahilinux.org/

Others have spoken about how the Linux experience have improved vastly due KDE Plasma et al. I think something which has been part and parcel of the Linux experience always been the latency(From opening apps to performing other tasks), that's what made it usable on even older hardware and I feel it's underrated.

I switched from Kaby Lake-based Core i5 MacBook Pro to Kaby Lake-based Core i5 Linux laptop half the cost due to the Big Sur issues and the productivity has improved several fold.

The apps just opens at the blink of an eye, A phrase often used to describe M1 based Macs is absolutely applicable to my Linux experience after switching from a Mac. Further with KVM, large enough RAM VMs run like any other apps without bogging down the system.

We should really be thankful of that one guy in france who got linux working with a variety of cameras.

> it's all just a different flavor of Windows at this point

Frankly I don't think that's fair to Windows. There would be a shitstorm of epic proportions if Microsoft unilaterally broke compatibility with thousands and thousands of programs, tools and workflows like Big Sur has done.

Big Sur has been out for 3 months now and the company I work for, like many others, has a blanket ban on upgrading to it because of mountains of compatibility problems with mission-critical software.

Unfortunately you have the PR of Apple to deal with too.

I manage hundreds of Macs and the users are constantly howling about not being able to use Big Sur yet. I can explain there are still many dealbreaking bugs (the 11.2 upgrade space problem caused major headaches taking hours to fix in my testing!), it's slower and more screenspace wasteful but they keep wanting it because of Apple's snazzy PR. There's also a major issue with AD accounts getting completely blocked after the upgrade.

Of course what doesn't help is that new Macs come with Big Sur by default and can't really be downgraded. So we have to support it at least for new machines.

Dump it and run linux. Apple only wants to make instagram scrolling machines.

Which is why they: do WWDC, provide Xcode for free, put machine learning acceleration into the M1, created a brand new Virtualization framework, demoed Linux on the M1 Macs, develop their own professional software for Macs (Final Cut, Logic)..?

> provide Xcode for free

They force you to use it to develop any app for iOS and macOS - it's a significant financial investment to get there ( you need a mac, a developer account), if you had to pay for Xcode as well... ( to be fair, you probably pay for it in a way with the developer account)

>Big Sur has been out for 3 months now and the company I work for, like many others, has a blanket ban on upgrading to it because of mountains of compatibility problems with mission-critical software.

I have being a Mac user since Apple II. All these changes really saddens me. Can we start some kind group similar to class action law suit to pressure Apple into changing this kind of behaviour in Big Sur. If not enough people upgrade, maybe they will have skip a version and come out with something more light weight. I think that happened with Snow Leopard ( don't remember the exact one).

There is already a group of people applying this pressure. Ex-customers who have stopped buying their products. Join us.

Along with many others it seems, Catalina is the last version of macOS I'll be using.

I have a 2013 27" iMac and as of mid-last year I was considering buying a new one sometime in 2021, but I've now changed my mind, due to decisions Apple has made about how they handle their desktop operating system.

Thanks, is there a group where we can join? Maybe a web site would be great. Please post a link or PM me if you know. It relates to both personal and professional usage of MacOS.

Oh no sorry I didn't mean there was an actual group I just meant stop buying Apple products and vote with your wallet.

Apple doesn't care about a group but they do care about money. So do like many of us and stop giving them your money. It's all we can really do.

Sorry for the confusion!

I really hope that something can be done, but Tim Cook's hostility towards the end user gives me a feeling that they're not interested. Don't get me wrong, though, Cook's grip on Apple has offered some much-needed upgrades in a lot of key ares, but the power-user has been ignored the entire time. I also get the feeling that their interest lies in engineering the Mac to appeal to the lowest common denominator. They can sell an iPhone to anyone, they can sell an iPad to anyone, but they can't sell a Mac to just anyone. The solution? Make it run iPhone and iPad apps.

This reminds me of something I read here a long time ago "At Apple we know what users want, and we give it to them good and hard."

It is so sad and misguided from Apple. I remember when OSX 10.0 came out. A nice Apple UI on BSD core! I immediately rushed to buy an Apple laptop, my first Apple product ever (only Linux/Solaris/otherUNIXs before that).

Been on Apple desktops ever since. But the decline in the last several years has been sharp and no longer tolerable to me. I'm still on a Mac dekstop but I'm on 10.11 and will never upgrade. As OSX becomes closer and closer to an iOS-style user-hostile walled garden, I'm not interested. It'll be back to a Linux (maybe, BSD) desktop after this machine no longer works.

I have said this before but here I go again: the company I work for is still maintaining a program written in 1999 in Visual Basic 6.0 nearly unchanged on Windows in 32bit.

Windows is the perfect platform for us because it makes our applications so much less expensive to develop. We are a profitable company with hundreds of B2B customers and thousands of users that deploy on their own hardware and we can deliver our software without Docker or anything because the application just runs on any Windows version since XP. It's basically write and forget (apart from a few hickups here and there when Windows Update accidentally breakes something).

We have been working for years to replace parts of the VB6 application with modern .NET libraries and while this is unsupported by Microsoft, it's still working. The VB application hosts the modern .NET libraries and integrates its functionalities and new functionality is exclusively developed in .NET. Our development speed is not impacted by deprecated APIs that we have to urgently address. We can take our time to improve things without our customers noticing.

If we were supporting macOS, we would have shut down a long time ago. It would've been impossible for us to keep up with yearly macOS API changes and to add new features at the same time.

I feel like this is a security nightmare. How do you handle that consideration?

Everything is running in firewalled environments. Literally nothing written in VB6 is publicly accessible. We are using .NET since the release of .NET Framework 2.0 and only very old code is VB6.

Can anything that lives in that firewalled environment reach out to the internet or have stuff reach in? If so, it’s only a matter of time before something gets popped and it’s a bastion to access everything else behind the firewall.

This isn’t even nation state level attacks, it’s pretty standard behavior for botnets and ransomware.

Is the scenario here that they're already compromised with a relay between outside and inside that doesn't need the VB6 app, and then they can compromise the VB6?

Extra malicious hosts are never great but this isn't exactly a dealbreaker.

I think the comparison is a little non-sequitur. Classic visual basic hasn't had a feature released since 1998 and supported ended in 2005 (with extended in 2008).

It's not a part of Windows itself per se, but a runtime environment. Couldn't you just as well have written an app in Java, which has also kept good backwards compatibility and could still be run on both Windows and MacOS with minimal changes?

Windows maintains backwards compatibility to an amazing level compared to Macs.

If there were a version of Visual Basic for Mac released alongside the Windows version back in 1998, it would have been a classic Mac app which Apple dropped support for after Mac OS 10.4 and never had on Intel-based Macs.

If Microsoft had updated this theoretical Visual Basic for Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X back in 2008, Apple would have dropped support for it with Catalina, which ditched 32-bit app support.

What you're hoping for just wouldn't have worked except for a runtime that was still being supported by the publisher to make the jump from Mac Classic to OS X and then again from 32-bit to 64-bit as Apple broke backwards compatibility.

If Microsoft had somehow brought Mac VB out of retirement twice and done both of the above, Apple would be dropping support for it again a few years from now when they drop Rosetta and only support M1-based apps on Mac OS.

Here is a more modern example, after acknowledging that WinRT hasn't been the success they wanted, and starting the Reunion project to merge Win32 and UWP worlds, they are still running them in parallel and it will take several years to fix 8 years of doubling down on WinRT in detriment of Win32, but they will eventually get there even if the ride isn't as smooth as it should be (like killing C++/CX).

However until then, UWP apps will keep running.

VB6 is a good demonstration of the point being made. Even though development stopped two decades ago and support ended a decade ago, they can continue to use it. They probably didn't anticipate development of VB being dropped so soon, but Microsoft had (and continues to have) a history of maintaining backward compatibility.

While dropping support for VB would have had negative consequences and using Java may have been better, we only know that in hindsight. Java was about half the age of VB at that point in time, it's most vocal advocates seemed to be more interested in cutting Microsoft down to size, while it had a mixed reception among both developers and end users. None of those qualities bode well in the long term, especially from the perspective of those invested in Microsoft technologies.

Backward compatibility is heavily underrated. Windows isn’t my favorite experience in some ways but I’m starting to realize just how compelling a long-running consistent execution environment really is after losing enough mac software to time.

My side project is a Windows application I started writing on Windows XP. I had to make a grand total of 0 changes to the app to support Windows 7, Vista, and 10.

It will still run on anything from XP to Windows 10.

Sounds like you've been working on this side project for a while

In a way it's worse than Windows now. Microsoft doesn't lock parts of the filesystem or prevents you from editing files. As an example, I like to change /etc/ssh/sshd_config to permit only pubkey authentication. But even since Catalina it deletes any changes to this file with any system update.

Why doesn't sshd let you do that in a ~/.ssh/ file?

Server configuration can't be done in ~/.ssh/* files.

Yes, but why can't per-user server configuration be done in a per-user file? It's not any less secure than letting users change their own password.

No, it has to be done in the server configuration.

Can you not chattr +i? Sometimes Linux updates need to be told no and that works for me.

I'm happy with macOS and the UI/UX on Windows and Linux still feels crap in comparison, not to mention the mandatory spyware on Microsoft's side of the fence.

> not to mention the mandatory spyware on Microsoft's side of the fence.

I'm curious. What does Microsoft do that Apple doesn't? I'm a happy Windows 10 user. What should I be worried about?

Try taking a look at the "privacy" page under your live.com account.

They know _everything_ you do on your computer. It's of course for "your benefit". They know every application you lauch, how long it was running for, and if it had input parameters, they also know which files you opened.

They know what you search for (if you use IE/Edge), and lots of other "telemetry" data.

Here you go : https://account.microsoft.com/privacy/activity-history

How does that differ from the telemetry Apple uses?

Microsoft collects all this information despite having answered "no" to every "do you want to" during setup. _If_ Apple uses telemetry, it tends to keep it "on device".

Frequently visited locations ? Yup, on device. If you buy a new device, you restart your frequently visited locations.

Anything AI ? Yup, also on device. The only exception i can think of is photos with iCloud enabled. If you store your photos in the cloud, Apple will process them for faces/locations/whatever AI use. That's the reason you can enter "car and dog" into the search field on your iPhone and get all images containing both.

It's all here : https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

Except you can turn that off

Not easily. I answered "NO" to everything during setup, and it still collects just about everything. And this is Windows 10 Pro.

I'd much prefer an "opt in" scenario where _nothing_ is reported unless i specifically allow it. I'm aware that some things go hand in hand, like "find my device" requires my device to report it's location, but i can't remember EVER opting in to sending every app i open, filename of every file i open, every link i browse, to them.

I would double check if you turned it off. I did and there is no information there. I would much prefer if it was opt in, but that is a trade off im willing to make.

I think the Windows UX is pretty dogshit overall, but part of the appeal of Linux is how varied each user experience can be. You're expected to tailor a workflow that works for you, rather than adjusting an existing one to fit your needs. For some people, OSX just "clicks", but that's the case for every operating system.

I take the opposite view. macOS UX sucks. A few examples off the top of my head: I regularly find myself frustrated that there is no volume mixer for applications, spotlight search is atrocious and often returns different results for the exact same query, finder is also clunky as hell and won't allow me to do simple things like directly input a directory path string, the search feature also behaves completely counterintuitively by performing a global search rather than limiting the scope of the search to the directory you're in, trying to get macOS to permanently show hidden files is a chore and resets after every update, the touch bar is horrid and regularly causes me to accidentally take actions I did not intend, updates are often very unstable and fraught with world breaking bugs and issues that prevent me from doing my work, xcode is generally a nightmare and a mandatory one... the list goes on and on. Linux and Windows might not look as pretty but they are far more functional with respect to accomplishing my work.

Finder can go directly to paths with Go > Go to Folder… (Command+Shift+G) and search scope can be changed to current directory in Finder preferences. Hidden file visibility can be toggled with Command+Shift+. in both Finder windows and open/save dialogs.

Within Finder Preferences there is a dropdown that asks you when performing a search whether to use global or current directory.

And for volume mixer this exists: https://github.com/kyleneideck/BackgroundMusic

I have to say it really doesn't seem like you spent much effort trying to actually fix your issues.

Forced to install third party software for a basic OS functionality? Nah.

Agreed, here are some more things I’ve noticed weird about macOS:

* When a Macbook is plugged into an external monitor, if you close its lid, it will only stay awake if the power cord is plugged in (otherwise it goes to sleep). There is no notification that tells the user this, you’re just supposed to know it I guess.

* On the Displays page of System Preferences, the only way to get it to re-scan for connected monitors is to hold down Alt, which makes a hidden button appear called “Detect Displays”. Again you’re just supposed to know this.

* The green “traffic light” button in the title bar makes the current window fullscreen instead of maximizing it. I never see people use full screen in real life, they always maximize everything

* When in the fullscreen mode mentioned previously, the Cmd ` shortcut to switch between windows of the same program doesn’t work

* When connected to a monitor, there is no way to turn of the laptop's screen, without plugging in and closing the lid. This will overheat your laptop if you are doing anything slightly intensive.

* Sometimes you will lose windows when you disconnect the external monitor.

* Touchpad and mouse scrolling direction is linked. So at least one of them will feel bad to use.

* Macos will randomly choose wallpapers for each new desktop you create, there is no setting for this behavior.

* Due to the unnecessary Cmd button, shortcuts are very difficult to remember. In VS code, to search : Cmd+F. To go to line : Ctrl+G. Drives me insane.

Honestly, I hate Macos. Windows is 10x better. I don't understand what people like about this system.

You can do 1 by setting boot-args to a certain value [1]. But even then it's not the cleanest experience since you have to start in clamshell mode and then open the screen. And if the computer goes to sleep the effect is lost.

[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/152203/turn-off-ma...

> Touchpad and mouse scrolling direction is linked. So at least one of them will feel bad to use.

I get that this goes against your preference but to Apple it's either "your finger moves the content" or "your finger moves the viewport", and that translates to both your finger on the touchpad and on the mousewheel. Remember that Apple sells the Magic Mouse that doesn't even have a mousewheel -- the whole top of the mouse behaves like a touchpad. That's why the settings are linked.

> unnecessary Cmd button

On Apple computers the button has been used for keyboard shortcuts for the last 40 years.

> In VS code, to search : Cmd+F. To go to line : Ctrl+G. Drives me insane.

That's VS's problem, not ours and certainly not Apple's. Apple software and native macOS apps always use the Cmd key as the primary modifier, only adding others for more complicated shortcuts.

I agree that Windows is 10x better than macOS -- at being Windows. You WILL be dissapointed if you expect macOS to be like Windows with a different skin.

> I get that this goes against your preference

This is not just my preference. This is how mouse scroll wheels have always worked. The settings for scroll wheel and track pad scrolling are shown separately too, in apples own software. You'd never know looking at it that they are linked internally. If it is a single setting, it should be a single setting!

> Apple software and native macOS apps always use the Cmd key as the primary modifier, only adding others for more complicated shortcuts.

Is switching to next tab in safari also a "complicated shortcut"? Because that uses Ctrl too.

> This is how mouse scroll wheels have always worked.

Yes, and touch based devices reminded us that maybe the way mouse scroll wheels had always worked was not the best way after all. Apple's defaults since Lion have been "finger moves content" on all their input methods: iDevice touch screens, touchpads, the Magic Mouse and 3rd party mouse scroll wheels. Again, you may not like it, but it's consistent. I do agree that it could be a single less-confusing setting, but the Mouse and Trackpad screens are unfortunately separate.

> switching to next tab in safari ... uses Ctrl too.

It's switching to next tab in everything, not only Safari. And the choice isn't even that weird, obviously Cmd + Tab is taken and Ctrl pairs nicely with Shift to reverse, so why not? They key is there and AFAIK Ctrl + Tab doesn't override anything important, unlike, well, Ctrl + C.

> It's switching to next tab in everything, not only Safari.

So where's the consistency? I thought all shortcuts were supposed to use Cmd as the modifier and Ctrl was only for complicated shortcuts. But switching tabs in a browser is one of the most common shortcut. So why is it Ctrl?

You can't say because "everything" else uses Ctrl in this context. Because then they should fix the mouse issue also. The crux of my problem is that shortcuts randomly use Ctrl or Cmd, there is no predictability or consistency.

But I do recognise that keyboard shortcuts rely on familiarity and tradition more than consistency and logic, so this isn't a major deal for me.

The bigger issues are the other stuff. External monitor support is as good as broken. Full screen apps are as good as unusable. OS updates regularly break critical features like Settings and Fingerprinter. And on and on. I really never had these sorts of bugs in my entire life using Windows.

> I thought all shortcuts were supposed to use Cmd as the modifier and Ctrl was only for complicated shortcuts. But switching tabs in a browser is one of the most common shortcut. So why is it Ctrl?

macOS apps and 3rd party apps that are not ports from other platforms use Cmd as the primary modifier, i.e. the overwhelming majority of shortcuts are Cmd + something. If your apps use Ctrl a lot, they're probably Linux or Windows ports that don't respect the macOS way. There's plenty of those.

They could've used Cmd + G to go to the next tab and Cmd + H to go back (for example), but in this case it's pretty clear why they went with ctrl + tab, isn' t it? It's convenient, makes sense and it's quite close to the close-window Cmd + W and you can easily add a Shift there to go back.

> Full screen apps are as good as unusable.

I use fullscreen apps all the time (on the laptop screen or smaller monitors) and they're perfectly fine. Some people don't like the paradigm, but that's just personal preference again.

> Some people don't like the paradigm, but that's just personal preference again.

No, I love the paradigm. It's just that random stuff is broken. For example, if you have 2 chrome windows, and at least one of them is full-screen, there is no keyboard shortcut to switch between them. Cmd+` is broken.

Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab both work, but I think the original shortcuts were: Cmd-{ and Cmd-} for switching tabs ( Cmd-[ and Cmd-] are back and forward too ). Both of these still work, and are what I've used for 13 years now.

And in "full screen" mode, it auto-hides the menu bar. Unusable for serious work. No way to show it by default, either. Absolutely obnoxious.

All of these design affordances point to one single driving usecase: media consumption. Actual productive work is not a consideration.

> When a Macbook is plugged into an external monitor, if you close its lid, it will only stay awake if the power cord is plugged in (otherwise it goes to sleep).

If it allowed you to run in clamshell on battery power, you'd be able to, for example, switch your monitor to show a different input, forget about the (closed, silent) MacBook and run the battery down to zero with no indication.

> The green “traffic light” button in the title bar makes the current window fullscreen instead of maximizing it.

That's because "maximize" is a Windows thing and you're not on Windows. The green button feature is called Zoom (I believe) in macOS and it's basically "resize to content". The fullscreen thingy used to be a separate button (Mavericks), which IMO was a bit better.

> When in the fullscreen mode mentioned previously, the Cmd ` shortcut to switch between windows of the same program doesn’t work.

The shortcut switches between windows that are on the same Space (so that it switches between your different casual-browsing and work-related windows inside their respective spaces if you're the kind of person who keeps different spaces for different situations/projects). A fullscreen app doesn't cover other apps, like on Windows, but instead goes to its own space. That's why the shortcut can't do anything.

Right there in the boat with you.

I've used Linux extensively in the past (and OS/2, BeOS and more. Even spent a few years as assistant head developer to a deceased linux distribution), and MacOS X just works. Yes there are usually bugs in new major versions, but _nothing_ comes close in integration, be that between apps on the machine itself, or various devices in the Apple eco system.

Yes, you can do it all with different apps on different platforms, but until you've been "all in" you have no idea what i'm talking about.

Maybe you have an app that will extend your desktop on your tablet, now right click the desktop and select "scan document with iphone" and use your phone to scan a document directly to the desktop.

Need a password on your phone that is only on your computer ? fine, select it on your computer and paste it on your iphone. No special keys involved, it just works(tm)

No other platform offers that amount of integration.

considering that Apple is in the hardware business and relatively uninterested in my personal data, i also have a tendency to trust them with my data far more than i trust anything Microsoft or Google.

I've been a very happy Mac user since 2005, and nothing i've seen in recent years has done anything to change my mind. Whatever "obstacles" people run into, they somehow miss me completely. I still run homebrew or macports on my machine, install just whatever i like, and everything works as well as it ever did.

It wasn’t until I had a MacBook, iPhone, iPad and macmini where I really appreciated how the ecosystem just worked, and finally started using iCloud

Every time I look at MacOS (been using it daily for 12+ years) I still feel like it's a toy OS not made for any real work.

> Apple no longer respects when the user wants to update

Huh? You set exactly if, how and when to update in System Preferences.

You can set it to never, always, to ask, to download but not install, etc.

It's been that way for as long as I can remember, and Big Sur doesn't appear to have changed anything. All the checkboxes are still there.

> All the checkboxes are still there

But they don't do anything. I have had all of the checkboxes off for years and I still get "Update Now" notifications.

The only work-around is to say "Update Tonight" because it won't work and will buy me a few days before I get another pushy "Update Now".

Those only turn off auto updating not update notifications, which you could argue should be an option, but I disagree people are entirely too good at not looking for updates if they don’t have too (out of sight out of mind and all).

They prevent the auto updating so they absolutely do something. They do exactly what they say.

Notifications are another matter. And if users didn't get notifications how would they even know when there were updates?

Because updates include security patches it's important to nudge people towards updating.

If you click on the left side of the notification, it opens System Preferences, which you can just close again or ignore. However, while this avoids setting any attempt to update overnight, it doesn't actually stop you from getting another prompt the next day or whatever.

They intentionally broke ignoring updates. You used to be able to ignore updates through a terminal command so you can keep everything else untouched and still use update notifications or auto-updates for unrelated updates.

Since Catalina, this is intentionally broken, so now you have a constant red badge on the System Preferences icon and regular notifications to update to macOS Big Shit, which in the end causes the user to ignore other updates (like security updates) they would actually want to install.

>it's all just a different flavor of Windows at this point.

That is giving too much credit to Microsoft or Windows. Edit: Windows 10X [1] is quite good though.

I also think the discussion completely miss the key point of this update -

> There's a risk of damage to the notebook if you are using a non-compliant powered USB-C hub or a dock.

USB-C. For crying out loud USB-C, Again. Despite all the evidence the vocal Internet and HN still think USB-C as the holy grail. How they should be able to change using a single cable. ( Which is not true ).

I really hope the rumour of MagSafe coming back is true.

[1] https://youtu.be/EPirgHua2sE

I've been a mac user since 2002. I've been getting tired of fighting for access to my own system with each successive OS update. I upgraded to Bug Sur last week, and will be switching permanently to Unix or Linux within a week.

I thought you were already on UNIX.

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3668.htm

Well 50gb for a complete SDK and compiler suite and IDE isn't that large. Visual Studio, the comparable IDE for windows starts at around 20GB but can easily exceed 100GB if you include all the features of the product. For Linux, a complete development tool chain for C++, Java, and Python with all the associated libraries will easily exceed 20GB. So Xcode is in the ball park. The difference between Xcode and Linux toolchains is that the latter are broken up into smaller pieces that can be independently updated and Linux has package managers that handle those updates gracefully.

You're partially correct. It's been a while since I've used Visual Studio, but I've heard that a "full" installation will occupy close to 30 gigs, and the default install uses less than 2. Still pretty large, but the 100gb mark might be a bit of a stretch. It's definitely a stretch on the Linux side of things though, my dev toolchains and associated libraries barely occupy 2 gigs, much less 20. Maybe I'm not quite "enterprise ready" though ;)

When you describe it this way, and I think it is an accurate perspective, it feels like the situation calls for a "new" OS to fill the space the others have abandoned. An OS for people who actually understand something about computers but are not just trying to exploit that knowledge for money.

IMO, the market these OS are targeting generally has no idea what "bloat" even means in the context of computers. The exceptions include people who do understand the concept but are happy to trade bloat for profit.

Nobody wins when the public isn't educated, that much I can agree with. Our goal needs to be shifting to a more equitable digital world, where people aren't "the product" so to speak. That begins by putting the user in control of their own computer, even if it isn't something they're fully capable of understanding or managing themselves. It's always safer for someone to blindly use open source software instead of proprietary software. If the end user truly "doesn't care", then they ultimately won't notice the difference. Eliminating the silly social pressures around computing will hopefully pave the way for a more empowered, creative and effective user.

For us developers and tinkerers that like to abuse our systems every which way: I’m inclined to agree with you. For everyone else: I’m not so sure. MacOS (and iOS) has made it super simple for me to help my parents and other lesser tech literate people I know, and really hard for them to screw up (too badly.)

I bet there’s a better middle ground to be found, but I’m not yet convinced that macOS is fundamentally broken beyond repair. I’m on the fence, currently.

> Apple no longer respects when the user wants to update,

What do you mean by this? I’ve never seen anything forcing me to update.

> I'm kinda surprised that more people don't talk about the 50 gig download that xCode requires. Kinda insane for a glorified text editor.

A glorified text editor which also includes

- A machine learning model builder

- Two complete visual UI builders

- A 3D game asset previewer

- Simulators for 4 different classes of hardware device.

- Instruments - an absurdly full featured profiling and debugging system.

And those are just some of the more obvious features.

You can argue that you’d like a glorified text editor instead of XCode, but it’s weird to say that’s what XCode is.

>Thankfully, leaving MacOS has put most of those issues in the rearview.

In what way, except in the: "I can short of build myself exactly the functionality I want from disparate parts and endless customization in some Linux distro, losing other things in the process, and with the end being even more of a hodgepodge (e.g. of UI toolkits and design sensibilities), and equally subject to change with the creators of this or that distro or DE are bored and want to rewrite/redesign everything for no good reason".

On the plus side compared to its main competitor, when you uncheck “Automatically keep my Mac up to date,” it won’t spontaneously reboot your computer and kick off an update while you need to use it.

I had no idea updates got slower in Big Sur, because I hit the install button and go to bed.

It could take 8 hours for all I care.

I think M$ did this as a favour for people who need to weasel out of meetings etc. "Sorry guys Windows triggered an update." and that will sound plausible where in reality you had to close the laptop to spread a line on the lid.

Big Sur updates are as bad as applying any patch to Windows Server 2016. But I agree, less of an issue given it attempts to auto update overnight.

Windows also updates overnight.

> Windows also updates overnight.

Lol not for me.

It tries to guess when will you use the computer(you can also change it in the config), except it did not work for everyone.

Most painful thing in Big Sur for me is all the paid major updates to utilities because it broke compatibility with a bunch of stuff.

Even bigger headache for the developers of said utilities, but they’re at least getting paid for it.

I think if my 20/30 paid apps only 2 needed $ for big air - really bit that bad (for me)

> it won’t spontaneously reboot your computer and kick off an update while you need to use it.

I've never had this happen on Windows. The worst effect is when I want to shut down and it installs an update before powering off.

> it won’t spontaneously reboot your computer and kick off an update while you need to use it.

That only happened if you ignored and dismissed updates for weeks.

It's amazing how much hyperbole is permitted around here as long as it's about Windows.

If 5 years after release, Windows 10's "active hours" setting wasn't still braindead, I would be more inclined to cut them some slack. But it still hasn't occurred to anyone at Microsoft that the hours I need my home computer to be functional might not be the same on a Wednesday and a Saturday.

Even with working from home during COVID where I'm using my Windows machine for a large chunk of every day and the weekday/weekend use patterns are more similar, they're still not the same. And not everyone is on an office worker's weekday/weekend schedule either.

If it's so important that updates can be installed all the time, just give me a damn weekly calendar and let me say when to do it. "Active Hours" is already buried in a nested page of UI with mostly empty space, it's not like this would over complicate the settings app or take up room that they can't spare. https://i.imgur.com/x5I65Jx.png

A $10 clock/radio has more sophisticated and user-friendly alarm scheduling than Microsoft has managed to create in the world's most popular desktop operating system.

Edit to add: why does "Update and Shut Down" mean "Update and Shut Down then Update a Bit More When Turned Back On Later"?

Even if it has to reboot a couple times before staying off, "Update and Shut Down" should have the updates completely done the next time I turn it on to use it.

Edit 2: Also should point out that the "reopen apps after restart" feature on macOS is pretty much universally supported across apps and works nearly flawlessly. You can reboot and hardly notice it happened afterward. Not as much the case for Windows, where a forced reboot when you're away from the computer is probably going to destroy any unsaved changes in documents that you had open.

Apple has been working on seamless reboots since 2011 (OS X Lion) instead of just shoving in "3 AM is update time and we're forcing your computer to reboot, hope you didn't need the stuff you left open yesterday."

I fully agree. Luckily there’s RebootBlocker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25971264

My personal favorite is when I am presented with the "Shut Down" and "Update and Shut Down" options in Windows. Guess what? Both of them update!

> That only happened if you ignored and dismissed updates for weeks.

I should be able to ignore and dismiss updates for years.

I recognise I'm taking on risks, but it's my hardware and my data. Some of these updates are downgrades in functionality and behaviour. I specifically don't want to be forced to accept whatever patch is pushed out.

You can if you run Win 10 Pro.

Only home users are forced to keep their systems up to date. Which I don’t really see an issue with in the grand scheme of things given what the alternative looks like.

I'd pay to have the option of giving consent! Sure would be great. Or I'd just use Linux, where I'm not treated like a third class citizen on my own computer.

You still can, yes. But as of last year, the UI for doing this in Settings has been removed - Pro is only allowed to defer updates for up to 35 days, the same as Home.

To go any longer than that, Pro users now need to dig through Group Policy Editor, which lets you defer updates for 365 days.

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/237087/windows-1...

>I should be able to ignore and dismiss updates for years.

And then blame Microsoft when you're wormed.

If you really insist on not installing updates there are intentionally dirty ways to do it.

You can if you don't connect to internet.

> That only happened if you ignored and dismissed updates for weeks.

Not true. I only use windows for the occasional game that doesn't yet work well with wine/proton. And every time I do boot it and start playing a game, it suddenly randomly reboots me.

No, I haven't ignored and dismissed updates for weeks. Indeed I haven't updated for weeks because I haven't booted it for weeks. But I haven't dismissed or ignored it.

And it's really annoying.

I have a PC that I use almost exclusively for gaming that is booted at most once a week these days. I don't recall it ever spontaneously rebooting.

The worst I have experienced is slow downs in game because it chose to update in the background.

> that is booted at most once a week

I suspect that's often enough to easily stay under that threshold. For me it's at most every 3ish months that i boot windows for one particular game that releases updates in 3 month cycles. Sometimes I skip one or two and then it's 6 or 9 month between boots.

And everytime it just reboots me, no prompt, nothing, just in the middle of the game, good-bye.

I have similar sporadic Windows use, but never random reboots. What I do get is updates happening at boot or at shutdown. The latter is okayish, but the former is annoying: you haven't used Windows for a while, and when you do need to use it, it takes forever to start up.

I have ignored and dismissed a macOS update on my laptop for weeks with no penalty.

>That only happened if you ignored and dismissed updates for weeks.

Given that some updates have caused systems to brick or deleted data I want a way to wait weeks or longer before updating.

The fact it does that at all and people accept it amazes me.

I volunteer at a community organization that uses a laptop to help livestream some events, and other times it uses the laptop to drive a projector during an event. The laptop is rarely used outside of these events, as it isn't anyone's workhorse machine for anything. In particular it's a good rule of thumb that if someone is booting the laptop up, they have a fairly immediate goal (e.g. they've come straight from work and have 30-60 minutes to set up A/V equipment before a public evening event).

We had to buy a windows laptop, both because of cost and because of strong "I'm a PC person" preference of a few board members. Sometimes we use it 1-2x per week, but sometimes a few weeks go by and we don't use it for anything, so I've absolutely hit this case where the last time I had the machine open, it wasn't concerned with updating itself, but it now, after being off for weeks, feels that I am delinquent in updating.

I curse that machine every single time it hijacks my setup time to install updates. I feel so frustrated, and so powerless. I would so dearly love an option that says "I will stay late after this event. I promise, you can install this update in 3-4 hours, just as soon as all the time critical live stuff is done."

Anyway it's the curse of success, right? I guarantee I'm not the only one with this kind of story, but I guarantee that all of us together are a tiny fraction of a percent of all Windows users.

Still in all, I'd gladly have paid the cost difference for a macbook air that I could trust not to start updating itself shortly before it's going to be relied on for a public event. But I guess the worst case now would be a mac running Big Sur but set to auto-update, cause then you really _could_ be out of operation for 30+ minutes.

(and obligatory - gosh, it has to have been a year since I dealt with this. Everything fades with time but I can still feel that helpless panic.)

Happened to me while being afk for 30 mins. I reboot daily, yet it still force closed programs ...

> What this month has demonstrated, reiterated and rubbed in until the wounds bleed again, is how massive and debilitating updating Big Sur has become.

This is over the top. Most users are not noticing 3gb vs 1gb difference per download or the delta between what was and what is for short updates.

They are just glad it’s getting done without messing with it.

Seriously - my wife is on MacOS - and has never mentioned to me that her wounds have been rubbed until they bleed (??). Where does this type of language come from? If a MacOS update is so bad for you that you need medical treatment I don't know what to tell you.

'Not everyone is happy with the latest version of macOS' doesn't get clicks because I don't think there's a single OS update that everyone likes.

For a good many users, internet bandwidth doesn't grow on them trees. There's quite a bit of world outside of continental US, and even continental US got them so-called rural areas, last I heard.

Those sure as hell gonna notice.

I appreciate your point that not everyone has great internet but let’s also keep in mind that services like Netflix consume about 1GB/hr SD and 3GB/hour HD, and Netflix has over 200 million customers world wide. 1GB just isn’t what it used to be.

Do you think that 200 million Netflix users comprises the same set of people that are bandwidth constrained? I don't see how that's relevant to the point whatsoever.

I was just putting 1GB into context for 2021. My point is there is a substantial number of people that are perfectly fine using 1GB/hr for just one of the things they do online. So the requirement of a few GB every few months is not likely to even register for an even larger segment of the population, regardless of platform.

Of course there are those that this will matter to. And for those perhaps Apple, a premium brand, is not the best solution. But of course they will need to define “best” for their own context.

Edit: And of course there are contexts where the long upgrade time can matter a lot, like a help desk. They won’t care about the data but they may care about upgrade latency. Again I just don’t think the Magnitude of data is going to be an issue for Apple’s target demographic.

> And for those perhaps Apple, a premium brand, is not the best solution.

It's not a question of paying for better internet. There are places in the US where the best internet you can get has a 10GB/Month cap.

Well maybe then the problem is with the ISPs and the unusable service they provide. Maybe their customers deserve better. I'm sure macOS updates are not the only thing that will benefit from the proper internet connection. If you think about it – Apple is building for the future, not optimising for the past. On HN posts about crappy ISPs are a regular occasion, but in this case the blame shifts on Apple for some reason. I agree, small delta updates would be the best, and I'm sure they'll get there, but let's be honest — 1, 2 or 3GBs is not a big difference with a proper connection.

How likely is it that Mac users are in that bandwidth-constrained population either, though?

A lot of people I know were using macs partly because you can still force them to only update at the library, Something you haven't been able to do with Windows for a long time.

In the beginning of the pandemic, my living situation changed, and my family was dependent on mobile LTE for our internet connection due to being in a semi-rural area.

A 1 GB security update would find me at the public library parking lot with a pile of devices in my car, updating all of them on their WiFi some weekend morning.

There are still millions and millions of people in this world who need to change their physical behavior to work around issues of internet scarcity on a regular basis.

Funny because when I read the article I thought "he's in the US on a metered expensive connection".

1 Gb... 3 Gb... not much of a difference for my internet pipe.

Many people outside of US don't know what "data cap" means. So, for them bandwidth do grows on them trees.

I can assure you that the entire population of Australia is intimately familiar with the concept.

As are most of people on this planet. GP's insinuation that most people aren't limited by datacaps is false.

I'm in Australia and unlimited on our amazing NBN.

I agree. My wife and I are facing the transition to a fixed income. We'll move to less expensive digs soon, in a rural area.

We're both on Macs & iPhones. I'm worried about data charges for MacOS & iOS updates. No clear solution ATM.

Enable Sharing > Content Caching on one of your Macs if you have more than one.

Just saw your reply. Thank you, this will help.

I just did this update and it took roughly 15 minutes after I hit 'reboot now' till I was able to login and resume my work. All of the download and preparation work happened in the background without interrupting my work.

If they haven't noticed by now, they'll notice soon that even minor updates like 12.2.2 takes 40+ minutes to install, no matter the download size difference.

They won’t because they don’t take 40+ minutes on a normal system and most people are going to start the morning with the “your Mac was restarted to install an update” message and no idea how long it took.

You all haven't noticed it takes 45 minutes of downtime to update macOS? It's not just the download, but there's a lot of time spent post-reboot actually applying that much data.

I learnt to programme using Pascal on Mac Plus in 1988. I had my first job as a programmer in 1989 on Macs.... Until very recently I had a soft spot for Macs, I had not really used them since 1992

Recently getting a job developing for iOS in Swift I am amazed at how the developer experience has degraded. There is so much friction

In 1988 the documentation was very useful (Inside Macintosh - I think that was the name of the book). In 2020 Apple has decided that documentation is not really worth the effort. There is a cursory description of most APIs, not all, and no examples.

I had to get a license to develop software for the computer (paid for) sitting on my desk. I paid, but did not get the license. I swallowed that insult because if I make a fuss Apple could wipe out my employer at the stroke of a pen.

Accessing the file system is a constant hassle. Why so hard?

I cannot install emacs on my mac. (I probably could, but how hard am I going to struggle?)

Software that is free (as in GNU) is charged for in the App store. For example I cannot get my hands on a simple interface to diff anything like ediff.

The Xcode compiler/debugger has some serious bugs, and as far as I can tell Apple's policy is not to fix bugs in developer tools...

I am amazed that they care so little for those who are not quite the most important. If I could find a quality tablet that runs free software (are you listening Pine?) I would lobby hard to get off iOS.

A lot has changed over the decades, security models and stances have traded a lot of flexibility. To smooth some of the rough edges of purely compiling from source take a look at homebrew (https://brew.sh/). Spacemacs (https://www.spacemacs.org/). I don’t develop desktop software any more and didn’t rush get into it on Mac, I’ve played around with swiftui a bit for iOS and server side (https://vapor.codes/). Perhaps the server side will scratch the itch?

These are stopgap solutions made to imitate aspects of other operating systems, and ultimately "break" the security model of the Mac. Apple knows the end-user is the weakest link in any security model, so by reducing the end-user's capabilities, you limit the risk they pose to the system. I'd rather just use an operating system that doesn't second-guess my choices in the first place.

Installing homebrew and emacs doesn't require turning off security. Maybe the one about "only run Apple signed software" - is that the default? I don't think it is.

I don't think a 3rd party package manager "breaks" the security model. I'm pragmatic and that gives me a few choices about flexibility. I'm able to run the software I need locally (Adobe Products) and the shell is familiar and I've got the utilities I need and the languages to interact with them and I'm able to get what I need done. Thankfully my workflow isn't one that requires fighting the OS or tooling support. I spend my time fiddling with the server side of things and now that docker is a thing it's more application side than anything.

> Accessing the file system is a constant hassle. Why so hard?

Apple prioritise the user at the expense of the developer. I think this is the right balance.

> I cannot install emacs on my Mac.

What's stopping you?

> Software that is free (as in GNU) is charged for in the App store.

I don't think this is in conflict with the spirit of the GNU project? Paying for software distribution is fine in the eyes of the GNU project and their licence. What's your problem with it?

> I am amazed that they care so little for those who are not quite the most important.

Apple think normal users are the most important, not developers. I think they're probably right.

Last month I heard people saying that Apple thinks normal users are more important than graphic designers, and the month before that I heard people claiming that we shouldn't worry about Parallels support because "normal users" don't need it. At this point, I'm not even convinced there is a normal user.

If you prioritised developers over everyone else... who do you think the developers would be developing for?

It's ironic that Apple is also preaching "Everyone Can Code". In other words, everyone is or can be a power user.

Computers are becoming more and more essential to our lives, so deliberately dumbing them down is a disservice to everyone, who should be learning more not less about how computers work.

My dad was in sales. My first exposure to computers was when he bought an Apple II way back in the day. He used VisiCalc, naturally, the "killer app" for the Apple II. Was he a "power user" or a "normal person"? I'd say both!

Why does a coder have to be a 'power user'? Why can't the applications needed for coding be like any other normal application? You don't need to use esoteric stuff like emacs to be a coder.

> Why can't the applications needed for coding be like any other normal application? You don't need to use esoteric stuff like emacs to be a coder.

What's a "normal application"? How would you classify Xcode?

The complexity comes from the nature of the work. Nobody wants complexity for its own sake, but sometimes you need it, otherwise you can't accomplish anything. That's what the "power" part of the power user means. The power to accomplish your goals. I would contrast "power user" with "powerless user". ;-)

Xcode is a normal application. I think you can get it from the App Store? It comes with all the permissions it needs, simulators, ability to connect to your devices etc. You don't need emacs or something like that.

People get this funny idea that coding is a fundamentally low-level activity in conflict with user protection. It isn't - it can be high-level. A compiler is a pure function!

> I think you can get it from the App Store? It comes with all the permissions it needs, simulators, ability to connect to your devices etc. You don't need emacs or something like that.

Haha, that's only because Apple controls the App Store and the OS. The first time you launch Xcode, it wants your admin privileges so it can install a bunch of stuff outside the sandbox. I shouldn't even say sandbox, because I think Xcode is not actually sandboxed?

The whole computer is a sandbox, as far as I am concerned!

Why does a coder have to use Apple's tools? Why can't the applications needed for coding be like any other normal application? You don't need to use proprietary software like xCode to be a coder.

> Why does a coder have to use Apple's tools?

A coder doesn't have to do anything. They don't have to use a Mac, they don't have to use Apple's tools.

Apple provides an ecosystem. Coding tools can fit into that ecosystem, or they can whine about it, or they can leave it.

> Why can't the applications needed for coding be like any other normal application?

They are - install them like a word processor or a graphics editor or whatever.

> You don't need to use proprietary software like xCode to be a coder.

Who said you did? You also don't need to use emacs. And it's Xcode, not 'xCode'.

The point is - Apple make it easy to code - the provide XCode. Saying 'but why not emacs' is entirely missing the point on what they're trying to do.

Seems we're in agreement then. My point wasn't that you shouldn't develop on MacOS, but that it won't fit my needs or workflow. If Apple is disinterested in supporting that, then I'm not interested in supporting them.

Why would I pay a premium to use an operating system that can't run software my free OS can?

> Why would I pay a premium to use an operating system that can't run software my free OS can?

Because you don't need all that software if your goal is to 'code'. If your goal is to run some specific ancient text editor then yeah you may struggle. If you want to code and get something done it's the right platform.

And because the 'normal' things are 10x better - power management, touchpad, display driving, etc.

Do you want to spend your time creating, or time trying to make basic display scaling work on Linux? And why are they better? Because Apple integrates.

I'd like to propose an amendment to their catchphrase, maybe you all can offer some feedback?

"Everyone Can Code*

*Unless you have a 128gb SSD."

> At this point, I'm not even convinced there is a normal user.

i think the right word is maybe "consumers" instead of "users"... the thing is, ipad and ios are fine for those use cases (super locked down, "safe", limited capabilities, better revenue funnel etc), dumbing down macos to get those users just hurts the macs value proposition imo

> Apple prioritise the user at the expense of the developer. I think this is the right balance.

Not for the developer.

> Apple prioritise the user at the expense of the developer. I think this is the right balance.

This assumes the user does no development, which is becoming less and less true over time. Computers are tools, people use them for stuff, and as the generations that didn't grow up with them die off, the ones that did are actually using them for more than just cat videos.

Also, nerfing the development experience means LESS development, which means less software and fewer bug fixes, which means a worse user experience. Gotta bootstrap starting from the boots.

The non-existence of Free Software in iOS or Android (though F-droid has made it more accessible, but still at the cost of being to actually use your device to it's max without going out of your way to Root) is all because of the friction of development to facilitate a monetizability first model.

Monetizability scales inversely with usability. The more usable something is by the end user, the less control a manufacturer has over what eventually gets done with it.

Manufacturers have come to realize this, and are pushing hard to sell people on them knowing what is best for people so they can perpetuate user hostile design paradigms. It's sickening, and practically ensures the creation of a larger rift between those who eventilually learn to use computers to their max potential and those who don't. The mechanisms required to constrain the overall programming space to enable gatekeeping mechanisms necessarily set the barrier to entry higher than it would otherwise need to be set.

Very insightful. I've never thought of it in this way, but you're exactly correct. It's the same with glued-in batteries, dongles, etc. Monetizability scales inversely with usability.

“Software that is free (as in GNU) is charged for in the App store”

It can be argued that the App Store is incompatible with the GPL for other reasons (in spirit, if not in letter), but selling GPL software is allowed. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMon...:

“Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money? (#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney)

Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)”

> I cannot install emacs on my mac. (I probably could, but how hard am I going to struggle?)

Eh? It's as simple as

$ brew install emacs

for me. I haven't come across any Emacs struggles that are Mac-specific?

My ~2013 macbook pro has this issue where, if AppleThunderboltNHI.kext is loaded, it will crash and restart every couple minutes on batteries. I'm not the only one with this issue. If you google that kext you'll see it's an issue with a lot of us and it's a shame that it's such a dumb problem because otherwise this 9 year old laptop is absolutely great to work with. SSD, 2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB RAM. Magsafe and good keyboard.

So anyways, this locked-down system volume is a real problem because typically after a system update I reboot into recovery mode, disable CSR, remove the kext, re-enable CSR and then I'm good until the next OS update where the kext is re-added and my computer starts to crash again.

It seems like a bigger issue now to remove that kext, to deal with Apple's own software problem, to keep using my old laptop. What a pain.

I believe it is possible to unseal the volume and disable these protections, a quick google seems to indicate this. Apple usually does seem to provide (a maybe annoying) way to bypass these sort security measures.

He described how he does exactly this - and has to reapply it after every update.

I'm still on Catalina. I've read reports that on Big Sur you cannot remove the kext and re-enable CSR. Seems the only solution might be to leave csr disabled, which would be unfortunate.

I don’t believe you can turn on file vault if you do this (full disk encryption)

I'm curious if anyone definitively knows why macOS updates can't be differental -- why it requires a gigabyte or more to patch something tiny.

Given the expense of bandwidth and servers needed at a global scale, it seems Apple would have implemented differential updates long ago if it were just a straightforward engineering task.

So it seems pretty clear that something is making it incredibly difficult or essentially impossible. Does anybody know what it is?

In theory, its simpler to guarantee everything is exactly as it should be, so the 'baseline' is identical. Differential based systems can fail in multiple ways (e.g. do you know when it's all done? what if one file is missed? etc.) that are simpler than just a bulk replace. I'm sure they COULD be differential, but that's a lot of extra complexity.

This still doesn't make sense to me. I mean, I don't understand the complexity of this at all:

1. Machine keeps around a baseline version of the OS install

2. A diff is downloaded and applied to the baseline version - that entire new version is then checksummed and validated to ensure it would be identical to what an entirely new version would look like.

3. That new version is then installed.

I could see a downside here of requiring more disk space, but even then doesn't seem like it would be that hard for the system to make some heuristic decisions (e.g. incremental vs. full) based on the amount of free space on disk.

Incremental updates are really not that hard, we've successfully implemented them for decades. Apple engineers are obviously no dummies, so would just like to understand what additional considerations make incremental updates more difficult now.

> that entire new version is then checksummed and validated to ensure it would be identical to what an entirely new version would look like.

Some of the complaints with the current system are that it is slow and needs a ton of free disk space, which are precisely the issues with the system you describe here.

Apple engineers aren't dumb but not all of their staff have their hands in every bit of code on every project. I do know the time pressure there to make deadlines is insanely high. The new hardware announcement/ship date is set in stone weeks or months in advance and the new OS must go out the door on those new machines that day.

AFS supports snapshots, so like windows/etc you just take a volume snapshot, apply a differential update then reboot. The COW nature would make the entire thing even fairly trivial IO wise.

The article notes they are using merkle trees, so its not really necessarily to validate the entire image. Only the parts that change, which should be fairly trivial, and likely is done as each part of the image is run (because you have to do it that way anyway, otherwise changes would sneak by if they were made while the OS was running).

If something bad happens, you "just" revert to the last known good snapshot.

The way this all gets messed up, is if there is some per build versioning information that ends up being propagated into every single part of the system like Linux does with its module loader on clean builds. Then effectively you are forced to update the entire OS just because the version number rolls, some signing key gets changed, or whatever. The differential download in that case would compress really well, but it would take an eternity to apply, and the entire image would probably end up getting duplicated following the volume snapshot.

So I would expect some kind of "bug" like that, the kernel guys/whatever have their own version validation system, and the installer guys have some clever upgrade code, but put them together and neither works right.

As you use and configure and modify the system, it starts to drift into a functionally random state.

An example: directories of plugins/etc. where the update won't have any content, but content exists in the current install. Upgrading/overwriting the app wouldn't 'catch' these directories of stuff, without having/keeping track of every place in the entire fs that functions like that. A checksum would let you know that the directory is different, but not 'how', per se.

By just nuking the whole fs from orbit and unrolling a new one, you have a 'known' state without any of that tracking internally (which is probably impossible to get right organizationally).

I don't think Apple pays normal bandwidth fees for updates.

A family member was working at a telecom company when the iphone was first announced. One of the big worries from the cell providers was all the bandwidth required to push OS & App updates to all the phones. Apple finally agreed to deploy proxy caching POP servers to various locations, and pay to maintain them. I don't know for sure if these still exist...

However, one of the only ways that I can fully saturate my 1gbps FiOS connection is to download Apple updates.

Normally coworkers are excited to update and get new features.

This time everyone was talking about how much they didn't want to, and how scared they were. Then the bugs and issues were a solid month of sadness, very rough release for Apple when looking from afar.

Are there any big features of the OS that folks are excited about? The bugs will get fixed over time.

Here I am on linux 5.11 with the ion window manager from forever ago, using emacs and firefox like I did with mozilla in the 90s. Happily getting less religious about the set up though.

I use Windows and MacOS, and I wince every time either of them has an update.

For one, MS doesn't test updates anymore. You may get something pleasant like losing the ability to print, or having all your network cards vanish.

I had a stack of Mac Minis years ago that I used for various things. One update bricked half of them. I was able to fix them easily, but it should not have happened at all. I installed from scratch on one of them, and an update bricked it. I did nothing to the computer in between the fresh install and pressing the update button. Neat.

The bottom line is Apple and MS have long ago stopped caring about the quality of their products.

Microsoft famously canned their entire group of people who do testing (SDETs). If the problem you hit isn't caught by an automated test at build, Microsoft employees running it in some form of "dogfood," or the people running beta builds, it is getting shipped.

Maybe that's good enough. Maybe people are getting used to software coming out with multiple updates per quarter to fix some "random glitch."

I look at it as the computing industry getting away from the roles and pace that made computers reliable instead of just functional. We used to have Operations staff to keep a service reliable; we used to have Testing staff to make sure a code base was reliable. They had their own failings, but to cut them out entirely did wonders for stock prices and not much for the end user experience.

But maybe being able to launch a pre-VC startup with one person and a stack of cloud services is a better trade-off.

> I had a stack of Mac Minis years ago that I used for various things. One update bricked half of them.

That happened to a former manager of mine when he pushed out an update (might have been High Sierra?). 30 signage machines got sent to surplus as a result, including some that were mounted in some incredibly inconvenient places (which I got to retrieve, of course).

> Normally coworkers are excited to update and get new features.

Really?? I'm a software engineer and I'm usually pretty loath to install major updates because there's usually a greater chance that something will break, costing me hours in fix time, than I'll actually get something super useful that will improve my workflow.

Maybe I sound a little "old school", but I think for most people that at least for the past decade OS updates have been so minorly incremental that any individual update is more likely to cause pain than pleasure. This follows most "mature" technology patterns, e.g. in the late 90s and 00s there was always a pretty good reason to update your mobile phone, for example, but for the past 7 or 8 years the updates have been quite minor (slightly faster processor or better camera) - I really don't feel like I have any significant reason to upgrade until mid band and mmWave 5G become widely available.

The sealed/locked-down system gives me pause, but not in the least for the size of the updates or whatever the update does that takes forever.

The things that give me pause are more in line with IPC, DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH, the App Sandbox, and Hardened Runtime. Plus any private entitlements or APIs that Apple can use, but an indy developer can not.

I'm having to jump through hoops avoiding App Store review pitfalls for something I'm developer and I might not be able to get the app on the App Store in the end. Not looking forward to rolling my own store or distributing the app myself.

Even iOS can do delta updates, sometimes in the size of only a dozen megabytes to download, and I had the impression they've been using sealed system volumes for much longer. Hopefully Apple can get macOS up to par soon...?

It isn’t immediately clear to me from the article why these updates can’t just be patches; it sounded like a large part of the problem here is that what’s ostensibly a couple kilobyte delta to fix ends up bloated to multiple gigabytes because of things like each update requiring firmware for every single Intel mac, and a copy of the entire dyld cache for System libraries. What is it about the update process that makes it so you can’t just skip out on extra fluff if it doesn’t need changing?

It’s not immediately clear why the update system is like this but agreed with author that it totally sucks. There’s an OS update waiting on me to install, stating it contains only a fix for the Mac mini m1, which I do not have. It would be one of those “flash all ye firmware” updates if I would run it. Every update is. Updates are atrocious. The only upside I can think of is that rootkits might have trouble persisting?

My uneducated guess is that they don't have a good way to keep the app signatures intact when patching binaries.

I really still like my iMac and Mac OS as a whole is still very good. However I also experience Windows 10 daily as my work laptop uses that OS. That work laptop also is fully managed by my employer with updates pushed to me weekly mostly to cover the latest security issue.

So I have biweekly updates at minimum to my work laptop; a nothing special i5 SSD based Dell; and these annoy me because I have to spend what feels like nearly five minutes between updates applied, boot, and more updates applied, before I can sign on.

and there is my Mac. I have a 2019 iMac, i9, SSD, and 40g memory. Twenty five to forty minutes complete with a timer on screen just to rub it in, which doesn't show up for some time into the process just to add some spice.

It is as long as the upgrade to Big Sur took or at least it feels that way. I am loathe to let my iMac update and while it claims it can do so overnight it always fails to do so.

Apple's patch process even on iPads and to an extent my iPhone are abysmal too. I really don't understand systems that are otherwise fast take so long to do an update.

PS: On a side note, Big Sur is the least stable OS from them I can recall in recent years. I have had hard freezes in some apps which they Mac three finger salute could not remedy and a few times I found myself signing back in as it just "rebooted"

Microsoft releases updates once per month for Windows and associated components (sans the rare critical RCE etc.) -- for Office, you may be on Current Channel which releases ~3x/month. This would generally be unusual in a corporate environment which favors the Monthly Channel or SAC, both of which get updates 1x per month.

As for your side note, please consider a fresh install. I haven't had a single crash knocks on wood

Imagine the environmental impact of this design decision. 2-3gb download. Installation time of half an hour. Millions of macs. Crazy.

Imagine the environmental impact of downloading all dependencies in a large project every CI run? and running it every commit of a pr? sometimes totalling in multi gigabyes. Crazy.

If your going to apply that logic, take a closer look at a lot of build chains out there.

This is whataboutism.

There is no way Apple's own development process was so wasteful as the waste they will bring to the millions of their own users.

If anything, the moment a company notices waste it goes towards reducing it.

Yes, that's bad too.

This is why we have local cache.

It’s actually basically nothing if you do the math… Let’s assume 50 million macs for a half hour at an average wattage of 20W TDP, wolfram alpha tells me worth that’s 360 metric tons of co2 , or about 24 USA citizens worth of co2 for a year. 24 <<< 300 million people in the USA, apple isn’t having much impact. I’d argue windows would be far worse anyway…

That's just one update.

Multiply that for every week throughout the lifetime of a mac and the benefits of delta updates are clear.

Building a 13" MBP produces ~200kg of CO2[1]. Taking GP's 50 million figure we get 10 billion tons of CO2. Very generously assume each one gets 1000 updates, you end up with 360,000 tons of CO2 total for all of these updates, or about 0.0036% of the cost of building them in the first place.

There are actual benefits to delta updates but the environmental impact isn't one of them.

[1] https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/notebooks/13-...

Do Macs see a multi-gigabyte update each week? I haven’t noticed that. What do I overlook?

MacOS isn’t updated every week, or even every month.

The environmental impact of this decision is nothing compared to this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339

(and the linked one is trivial to fix!)

Dealing in giant gigs of "adaptive" wallpapers in the sealed volume, seemingly just to make you have to upgrade SSDs, was it for me. Some of the included wallpapers are nearly 1GB in size individually, and to remove them you have to do all kinds of stuff only for it to be added back again on update.

Yeah I noticed that too. I'm always struggling with Space (my work only gave me a 128G MacBook :S ), and using DiskInventoryX I found that these wallpapers occupied a non-trivial amount of space.

This is especially weird considering Apple has been pushing HEIF so much which is mainly intended to reduce space occupied by images, really they shouldn't be this large.

It's especially concerning for developers, since this mentality is sadly spreading through the rest of the ecosystem. If your Mac has a 128 gig drive and you install xCode, you'll be left with a little over 20 gigs of free space.

To give some contrast Windows 10 + Visual Studio (not VS Code, but C# workload only) leaves about 15GB from 60GB primary SSD.

My previous Mac was a 2018 model MacBook Air with 128GB SSD, and I soon discovered that 128GB was way too little.

Even the 256GB I have in my 2020 model MacBook Pro M1 is a little bit on the short side tbh.

I have a 1TB external m2 SSD with an USB-C enclosure, but I only use it when I really really need to because it’s still a bit of a drag to have it sitting on the side and taking up one of the two ports.

If I could afford it I would probably go with 1TB internal storage. But even if I could afford it, I would then really really like to see such a MBP have 4 USB-C ports and not just 2.

Apple could pretty easily fix this by offering an M.2 slot in the Macbook. It's a shame they don't too: once the SSD dies in these Macs, they're dead forever. Not very "environmentally friendly" to me.

I just checked and the entirety of the wallpapers folder is 1.14 GB which admittedly is a lot bigger than I originally thought.

/System/Library/Desktop Pictures

That's smaller than I remembered. Still, over 5% of your space is wasted on it after installing XCode on a 128GB.

> Had Apple explained these costs and penalties of the SSV at last year’s WWDC, wouldn’t it have been booed from the virtual stage?

Judging from past WWDC events, no. Sessions about MacOS internals, or operating MacOS at scale are lightly attended. AFAICT, there have been no posts on HN about the new firmlinks file type which made that possible, and nobody in any sessions I attended really seemed to notice how fucked it would be when Catalina went to read only root.

macOS can be booted from a .dmg for decades already, why make a "sealed" "read-only" volume if the updater then unseals it, basically copies all files from the update package into it, those files including generated stuff like the shared dyld cache, and then re-seals the volume again, recalculating all the checksums?

All that work the updater does seems really superfluous, since the System volume is declared "immutable". Why replace files on it? Just drop a .dmg, boot from it.

I don't know enough about macOS system internals to confidently speak about them, but my guess is that there's some kind of legacy cruft/holdover that's preventing a direct disk image replacement for updates. Wouldn't be surprised if this were fixed in the next major release or two, likely paired with dropping support for something.

>The Big Sur 11.2.2 update is a good example of what’s almost a null change, yet requires ... 3.1 GB for an M1 model.

What Is the change?!

Official site doesn't have entry for 11.2.2 or am I missing something ?

GUI says this: macOS Big Sur 11.2.2 prevents MacBook Pro (2019 or later) and MacBook Air (2020 or later) models from incurring damage when they are connected to certain third-party, non-compliant powered USB-C hubs and docks.

Then for more details it sends here: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT211896

What about massive writings to SSD? has it been addressed? Or it's not a problem?

PS: GUI says for my M1 it's 2.17GB and article says 3.1 GB who is correct?

Bug fixes and performance improvements, probably.

(The actual answer is that the release notes are only available in the US version of the support page: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211896 )

For some reason the en-gb page is missing 11.2.2, but it's on the en-us page:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211896#macos1122

I get the feeling Apple isn't going to fix the swap issue anytime soon. I don't think they're being insidious about it, though: the BSD memory model is (arguably overly) complicated, and refactoring any portion of it's memory management is guaranteed to be a pain in the ass. The TL:DR is that MacOS doesn't virtualize memory, and when that memory is unified it will frequently spill over into the swap storage. I have no idea how Apple can pull themselves out of this one, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the swap usage will only increase as time goes on.

macOS doesn't use the BSD VM (UVM), it uses a heavily modified Mach VM.

What do you mean that macOS doesn't virtualize memory? Would you mind expanding on your thoughts a bit more?

I upgraded to Big Sur, and I still can't use my older HP printer. It's absurd. As a user, I need to be able to override what the OS thinks of my HP drivers. They used to work. Now they don't. No amount of uninstalling/cleaning and re-installing works.

IT's not clear to me from this article why exactly a Big sur update needs 600MB of firmware updates and ???GB of dynamic linked libraries. I must confess to not really knowing the design and consequences of Big Sur's sealed system. This article could really use an overview like that.

I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that all updates need to be signed and this makes sure that every Mac gets the same update and uses the part it needs. I guess the alternative is a combinatorial explosion of different combinations of firmware and hardware.

But... there's not THAT many Macs (even years old ones) so I'm a little confused.

Does this SSV system actually improve security or is it just security theater (serious question)?

This explains a lot.

I have a 2015 Macbook Pro that I use irregularly. I haven't needed it for about 6 months and I dusted it off the other day to do something.

It said it had updates to install. 6 hours and 5 reboots later it was up to date.

Does Apple not do cumulative updates?

My wife had exactly the same experience last night with her 2015 MacBook Pro. She was getting regular kernel panics so I went to the updater to see if it was just a software problem. It says Safari is out of date so I clicked "update", and literally 5 hours later (I clicked the button around 20:00, it didn't finish until sometime after 01:00) it finally finished. I'd thought I had it set up to auto-update, but apparently it got stuck on something.

>The Big Sur 11.2.2 update is a good example of what’s almost a null change, yet requires 2.6 GB of installer files to be downloaded for an Intel Mac, and 3.1 GB for an M1 model. For comparison, a minimal update to Catalina required less than 1.2 GB, and for Mojave less than 1 GB, much of which were the seemingly obligatory set of firmware for every supported Mac.

Wouldn't the sealed and tree-hashed OS volume make it easier to provide tiny delta updates?

I don't disagree with the author's points but I think that almost all non-tech Mac users are better off with Big Sur.

My preference is mostly using my new M1 MacBook Pro for software development (Common Lisp, Python, Haskell, mostly), but having a nice System76 Linux laptop when I want to do whatever I want with my hardware or system.

I hope Catalina will be able to run the new versions of Xcode, otherwise I’ll have to stop updating iOS too!

Do Big Sur updates really take longer to install? I’ve been putting off installing a Catalina update on my laptop because my impression is they take ~45 minutes to install, which is what this article claims Big Sur updates take.

Personally I didn't notice, but I haven't timed them. Any OS update takes rather noticeable amount of time, so I switch to something else while this is happening.

I hadn’t even noticed this to be honest. And I’m not particularly bothered. It just works for me. I’m sure at some point it’ll poke me in the eye but so far this has been the least painful OS for me to use for years.

Yes it's running smoother than ever on all my machines.

I was recently annoyed by this but didn't connect the ro distribution with the update pain.

Then there's the Xcode CLI update lest Homebrew start compiling rather than pouring everything, every time :-|

My biggest gripe with the Big Sur update is that it's now incredibly slow to swipe between desktops. It used to be responsive and now I need to wait 5-6 seconds before anything happens.

It’s still instantaneous normally, even on old systems like the 2012 MacBook Air I still use. I’d look in Activity Monitor / Console to see if it’s something like being memory-constrained and the switch is forcing a lot of background activity.

Weird, I can’t reproduce that at all. Swiping between desktops is just as (if not more responsive than) Catalina. What is your model?

I'm running 11.2.1 on a 2018 MacBook Pro i9. Should be sufficient to swipe desktops, you'd think.

IMO this is something that Microsoft got right with time. I don’t mind the mandatory updates as long as they install fast.

Apple seems to know how to fix this: they have small incremental updates for iOS.

I think it’s in development, Big Sur is part one of heading in that direction.

Still, macOS has become far too locked down and inconsistent UI-wise for me. Developing for macOS has lost its magic, just about everything is inaccessible to developers now and the Mac software community has become dull. A real shame - things used to be so vibrant when macOS was more open and more attentively designed.

The march towards a locked down iOS-esque experience continues.

TL;DR

macOS Big Sur updates got bigger.

"Make is fine, but it’s not standard. Disturbingly large swathes of critical open source infrastructure are compiled using a hodgepodge of Make, autogenerated rules from autotools..."

1. Autotools use make. GNU make, but make.

2. There's a historical reason for this goofiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars

"Companies should be paying for this directly: if pyca/cryptography actually broke on HPPA or IA-64, then HP or Intel or whoever should be forking over money to get it fixed or using their own horde of engineers to fix it themselves."

If pyca/cryptography breaks on HPPA or whatever, it's pyca's problem, not HPs or Intels. Unless your project is big enough that you already have HP or Intel working on it.

You seem to have posted in the wrong thread.

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