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Comment by cliveowen | Hacker News Reader

I recently upgraded to Mavericks and I found it to be a buggy mess. SMB support for my Android phone? It's gone, God knows why. Installing the Dev tools (which for some reason were deleted during the update process from Mountain Lion) was incredibly slow and froze my machine, so I had to force a shutdown three times before managing to install everything.

The quality of software couldn't be worse, there's really not a single application client or cloud based that isn't a piece of crap. Even Google products (Youtube most of all) are full of (known) bugs that have been there for years (literally) and remain unfixed.

After more than 50 years of software development one would think we should've nailed the basics. At this point I'm hopeless, I don't think there will ever be reliable, high-quality software, it's just unattainable.

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> Installing the Dev tools (which for some reason were deleted during the update process from Mountain Lion) was incredibly slow and froze my machine, so I had to force a shutdown three times before managing to install everything.

Your hard drive might be failing.

Mavericks has much improved performance, and performance introspection tools, than Mountain Lion. If you feel your computer is generally slow or has poor battery life, running "sudo systemstats today" or powermetrics might help.

If there's a specific task where it has terrible system performance, hit the sysdiagnose key and reporting it later will be a lot more productive, if you want to do such a thing.

I've recently changed my hard drive, and no, my macbook pro 2009 does not run mavericks smoothly with 2GB of ram.

kernel_task takes 200 to 500MB of ram. Programs take age to start.

13-inch or 15-inch? If 13-inch, you may have a bad HD cable.

and whre do I get a new one ?

At an Apple Authorized Service Provider or Apple Store (https://locate.apple.com/). You can't usually visually identify a bad one, so I wouldn't buy one used.

2 GB of RAM is nowhere near enough for OS X anymore. You need 8 GB minimum and 16 GB if you are doing anything substantial.

that's why I don't like OSX. I prefer minimal OSes.

I have a 2007 MacBook Pro running Mavericks with 4GB of ram... no problems, Mavericks actually sped up the entire system and has brought an older machine I was getting ready to recycle back to life.

> Your hard drive might be failing.

And/or the filesystem might be corrupt. Run SMART Utility[1] (free trial). If it passes, run Verify Disk in Disk Utility on your disk(s) and volume(s). You'll need to boot to another volume (the recovery partition works) to repair the boot volume if needed.

[1]: http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php

I've spent way too much time screwing around with my macbook for no reason, and I still didn't know about `systemstats`. thanks!

is there a (modern) list anywhere of OSX-included CLI tools like this?

I kernel panic about once a week (probably VMWare Fusion's kext). Wireless sometimes doesn't re-connect, often for extended periods of time. The location services icon always puts itself in the same place in the menubar, rather than take the leftmost slot, leaving weird gaps.

Mavericks is pretty crappy as far as OS X releases go. They need to slow down with all the nifty features. I'm all for yearly OS updates, but regressions are worrying.

I had lots of WiFi issues until I turned off bluetooth. Give it a go!

I had been having really bad issues with my 2010 iMac freezing up for a few seconds every couple of minutes since upgrading to Mavericks, and yesterday I finally decided to do something about it. I spent a good amount of time digging through Console.app and finding problem spots in the event logs, running tools like OnyX and CleanMyMac, and digging through various system files. Here's what I did to get it running like butter again:

* Reboot into recovery mode (hold cmd-R at boot) and run Repair Disk and Fix Permissions in Disk Utility (always a good idea just to catch any disk problems before you get going).

* Run EtreCheck (http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck) and remove anything described as a problem kext or problem login item. For me the main culprits were Soundflower (used with Audio Hijack) and old versions of Paragon NTFS and extFS.

* Open up Font Book, click All Fonts, select all, and pick File > Validate Fonts. Change the dropdown to "Warnings or Errors", and when the scan finishes choose all the fonts with warnings or errors and remove them. This actually fixed a lot of weird issues with Chrome and other apps.

* Run OnyX (http://www.titanium.free.fr/downloadonyx.php) and run pretty much every verification, maintenance, and cleaning task. Don't forget to go through the sub-tabs in each section. Also, read the help if you don't know what you're doing. Delete ALL the font caches (in the Cleaning tab) and reboot.

* Run CleanMyMac (or similar tool) to get rid of old logs, unused garbage, etc. Get rid of any old applications you don't use anymore and all their garbage too. Extensions Manager in CleanMyMac will help you track down login items that you don't know you're running.

Basically, the problem for me ended up being that I had been migrating my profile, development tools, apps, and other stuff from Mac to Mac since 2005. It seems like everything was mostly ok until Mavericks, when Apple clearly made a lot of changes under the hood and all that really old garbage all over my Mac ended up freaking the computer out.

After running all of the above stuff I haven't had any of the aforementioned issues. I'm planning to upgrade this old iMac pretty soon, and I'll definitely be starting fresh and not using Migration Assistant. Luckily, everything important these days is synced up with Dropbox or Google Apps (something that wasn't so easy in 2010) so it should just be a matter of reinstalling all my applications.

You should come work at YouTube and help us fix those bugs. It's a really nice place to work. You could even try to finagle a job description that lets you just fix the random stuff you're referring to :-)

Ha, is this the new way to apply for a job?

If you guys could just stop making it impossible for me to run through and watch new things posted to the channels I'm subscribed to I'd be 150% happier.

Funny that I'm running Mavericks on a Hackintosh and I haven't had any issues in the last 3+ months.

using it at a daily basis, have no fucking clue what you're talking about.

win ME was a buggy mess. mavericks too? hyperbole much? and oh, how much did you pay for it?

overall, software quality has increased a lot in the recent years. haven't seen a BSOD in ages. OS are rock solid nowadays.

I think that people sometimes look upon certain OS releases with rose-colored glasses. Snow Leopard is certainly one example, and I wouldn't be surprised if people felt that way about Windows XP (or maybe 7) as well.

Operating system quality has gone nowhere but up, and that's true for every player I can think of, both desktop and mobile. This includes Windows 8, embattled as it may be in the UI department, as I've found it fairly fast and stable.

Yeah, Windows XP was a 'disaster' at the beginning according to most people. I personally didn't think it was great until Service Pack 2.

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