My personal MacBook Pro (m1 pro) feels (and benchmarks) far faster than my work M1 Max which has cylance and Jamf on it.
Recently it has had a cpu core dedicated to `find / -iname log4j-core*` which has a very unreasonable impact on everything else on the machine.
AFAIRC, it was scanning for vulnerable log4j versions
On the one hand, a lot of security software is poorly written, eats resources like it's Chrome, and introduces all kinds of microstutters through (exclusive) locks all over the place.
On the other hand, many operating systems don't provide a (reliable) API to design decent security software against. Log collection is all over the place, even on Windows, which traditionally had Event Log as a well concentrated logging destination. There's no way to write good security software for an operating system that's written without security software in mind.
If I were handling important secrets, I wouldn't want a fleet of machines out there with just the basic antivirus that came preinstalled with the OS (if it came with one at all). On the other hand, so many pieces of "enterprise" security management are absolutely terrible, and require one (or more) full-time employee(s) to constantly configure them, communicate with users, and solve problems, just to keep software in check.
I think both operating systems and security management software need to listen to each other, and change. Operating systems need to be written with security stuff in mind, and security software needs to focus on a good user experience rather collecting than shiny buzzwords to sell to management.
They won't because by the time the users get fed the "food" the contract is long since signed and valid for a few years, and the competition isn't better so even if management could be arsed to vote with their wallet, they couldn't.
Is there an actual term for "the entire industry is bullshit, but can get away with it because the cost to entry is so high that new, less bullshit competitors can't even enter the industry"?
That's the job of the OS vendor: to design software such that third-party security theatre isn't necessary.
Particularly, it seemed to be configured to scan every file on disk access, which was a performance nightmare for things like that involved "accessing lots of files" like Git on our large repo. Spotlight indexing seemed to cause some pretty big random lag spikes as well.
You're most likely running low on RAM and the machine is swapping. Check in Activity Monitor what's going on.
My personal Macs with none of that crap perform extremely well, but that third-party security crap can be a massive killer.
Anything weird showing in Activity Monitor or Console?
It’s sad but it’s true.
These days I can't seem to hit my M2 Max hard enough. Nothing slows it down. Just about anything will have lag spikes if you crank too much stuff through it, so I assume that (like me) you're experiencing this with devices running MacOS with around 8-16GB RAM, M1 processor at best?
Which Linux do you use? We've had fast enough machines for fast and smooth GUI rendering for decades now. It's just that most software isn't optimized any farther than a few years back.
Linux tends to be quite good on resource consumption. I can still run smooth and fast Linux on my 15 year old laptop. I can't do the same with Windows.
That said, "terrible corporate spyware" would be my first guess here.
8GB is just too little for the base model. From what I've seen the OS alone will use 20-50% of that, and if I do anything productive with a couple applications and browser tabs I'm soon at 100% memory usage. Which can cause lags or short freezes when switching between applications. But on 16GB it's a very different experience, it gives decent breathing room.
I think Apple really shot themselves in the foot with this, anyone using even half the CPU's potential is guaranteed to have significantly degraded performance and a worse experience.