MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design? - <AUTHOR> https://sigpipe.macromates.com/2020/macos-catalina-slow-by-design/ <comment><USER11> It seems like there is a lot of confusion here as to whether this is real or not. I've been able to confirm the behavior in the post by:

\- Using a new, random executable. Even echo $rand_int will work. Edit: What I mean here is generate your rand int beforehand and statically include it in your script.

\- Using a fresh filename too. Just throw a rand int at the end there. e.g. /tmp/test4329.sh

I MITMd myself while recording the network traffic and, sure enough, there is a request to ocsp.apple.com with a hash in the URL path and a bunch of binary data in the response body. Unsure what it is yet but the URL suggests it is generating a cert for the binary and checking it. See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Certificate_Status_Prot...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Certificate_Status_Protocol)

Here's the URL I saw:

[http://ocsp.apple.com/ocsp- devid01/ME4wTKADAgEAMEUwQzBBMAkGB...](http://ocsp.apple.com/ocsp- devid01/ME4wTKADAgEAMEUwQzBBMAkGBSsOAwIaBQAEFDOB0e%2FbaLCFIU0u76%2BMSmlkPCpsBBRXF%2B2iz9x8mKEQ4Py%2Bhy0s8uMXVAIIfYbtkeEKZsI%3D)

Edit2: Anyone know what this hash format is? It's not quite base64, nor is it multiple base64 strings separated with '+'s but it seems similar...

Edit3: Here is the exact filename and file I used: [https://gist.github.com/UsmannK/abb4b239c98ee45bdfcc5b284bf0...](https://gist.github.com/UsmannK/abb4b239c98ee45bdfcc5b284bf0029e)

Edit4 (final one probably...): On subsequent attempts I'm only seeing a request to [https://api.apple-cloudkit.com](https://api.apple-cloudkit.com) and not the OCSP one anymore. Curiously, there's no headers at all. It is just checking for connectivity.

<comment><USER12> It's called lockdown for a reason. Apple was just the very first to implement centralized binary blacklisting, revocation. They call it notarization.

Problem is, that they did it unannounced. There must be really some weird stuff going on in those managers heads. How can they possibly think to go away with that?

<comment><USER13> There was nothing "unannounced" about it. Notarization was introduced at WWDC 2018 and announced as required at WWDC 2019. Every macOS developer should have been aware of this requirement. It was a special project for my apps.

<comment><USER14> I believe the concern here is that this is affecting not just macOS developers, but all developers who use macOS. That's an important distinction.

<comment><USER15> Developers who use macOS as shiny GNU/Linux replacement are only getting what they deserve, they should have supported Linux OEMs to start with.

Those that show up at FOSDEM, carrying their beloved macBooks and iPads while pretending to be into FOSS.

I use Apple devices knowingly what they are for, not as replacement for something else.

<comment><USER16> Sadly it's not the "shiny"... it's the fact that Mac OS has a GUI that works.

Been using linux since the days you installed Slackware from floppies and recompiled your kernel to get drivers. Command line has always been a bliss, but no one has managed to come up with an usable and consistent GUI yet.

Btw does sleep work on linux laptops these days? How's hi dpi support?

<comment><USER17> Sleep has been working on my last ~10 laptops and desktops, it's a non-issue at this point unless you have brand new exotic hardware. I did have a motherboard issue on a first-gen Ryzen that required a bios update to get it working.

hi-dpi works very nicely if you use GTK or Qt. For the other apps, it really depends how they are implemented. For me it has been working better than Windows.

These are strawman agruments. Give Ubuntu 20.04 a try an you'll see stuff pretty much just works on any common hardware. You can even use slackware and get everything working with a bit of fiddling.

MacOS is a very nice OS but it isn't FOSS and it isn't more capable at this point, it's just a personal preference. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.

<comment><USER18> > you'll see stuff pretty much just works

The problem is the "pretty much" part.

We all know what that means in practice. That's why OSX is popular.

<comment><USER19> OSX can only guarantee that everything works because apple controls both the hardware and software.

Windows can only guarantee that everything works because they have a monopoly and therefore hardware vendors have to support windows.

Most laptops don't ship with linux/are never tested with linux, so it's never going to work flawlessly on all possible hardware configurations. It's just not possible.

It does however, 'pretty much' work on most hardware.

And if you buy a machine from a vendor that actually supports/pre- installs/tests linux, all of the hardware will work out of the box.

<comment><USER20> It's that "pretty much" that's the debate.

I recently switched from macOS to Ubuntu 19.10 and then 20.04 as my daily driver and it's way flakier and has far more random app crashes than macOS.

That said, the system is fast, the UX is way further along than I expected -- in some ways it's got a better UX than macOS. It's way, way faster at nearly everything.

<comment><USER19> my point is that if you want to do better than 'pretty much', you should buy a machine from an OEM that actually supports linux

If you're installing it on a random windows laptop, you're never going to get better than 'pretty much', because the OEM doesn't support linux or test their hardware with linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > a degraded user experience, as the first time a user runs a new executable, > Apple delays execution while waiting for a reply from their server.

The way to avoid this behavior is to staple the notarization ticket to your bundle (or dmg/pkg), i.e. "/usr/bin/stapler staple <path>." Otherwise, Gatekeeper will fetch the ticket and staple it for the user on the first run.

(I'm the author of xcnotary [1], a tool to make notarization way less painful, including uploading to Apple/polling for completion/stapling/troubleshooting various code signing issues.)

[1] [https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary](https://github.com/akeru- inc/xcnotary)

<comment><USER22> Xcode (the UI) is able to bypass GateKeeper checks for things it builds.

The "Developer Tool" pane in System Prefs, Security, Privacy is the same power. Drag anything into that list you'd like to grant the same privilege (such as xcodebuild). This is inherited by child processes as well.

The point of this is to avoid malware packing bits of Xcode with itself and silently compiling itself on the target machine, thus bypassing system security policy.

<comment><USER23> Putting Terminal (and your favorite text editor) in this category and in "Full Disk Access" will change your life.

<comment><USER24> How does "Full Disk Access" help?

<comment><USER25> You can browse Time Machine backup directory trees from the CLI again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In our company many of us have similar issues. I have always loved OSX but this time it is driving me crazy. I though the issue was some sort of company antivirus/firewall, or it could even be a combination of that and this issue (maybe my vpn + path to company firewall is what magnifies the issue in this post). The thing is that some commands take 1 second, some others take 2 minutes or even more. Actually, some commands slow down the computer until they are finished (more likely, until they just decide to start).

For example, I can run "terraform apply" and it could take up to 5 minutes to start, leaving my computer almost unusable until it runs. The weird thing is that this only happens sometimes. In some cases, I restart the laptop and it starts working a little bit faster, but the issue comes back after some time.

It's already been a few months since I try to run every command from a VM in a remote location, since I am tired of waiting for my commands to start.

I have a macbook air from 2013 which never had this issue.

Any easy fix that I could test? Disconnecting from the internet is not an option. Disabling SIP could be tried, but I think I already did and didn't seem to fix it, plus it is not a good idea for a company laptop.

Don't we have some sort of hosts file or firewall that we can use to block or fake the connectivity to apple servers?

<comment><USER27> IIRC the big thing that changed with 10.15 for CLI applications is that BSD- userland processes (i.e. ones that don't go through all the macOS Frameworks, but just call libc syscall wrappers like fopen(2)) now also deal with sandboxing, since the BSD syscall ABI is now reimplemented in terms of macOS security capabilities.

Certain BSD-syscall-ABI operations like fopen(2) and readdir(2) are now not- so-fast by default, because the OS has to do a synchronous check of the individual process binary's capabilities before letting the syscall through. But POSIX utilities were written to assume that these operations _were_ fast- ish, and therefore they do tons of them, rather than doing any sort of batching.

That means that any CLI process that "walks" the filesystem is going to generate huge amounts of security-subsystem request traffic; which seemingly _bottlenecks_ the security subsystem (OS-wide!); and so slows down the caller process _and_ any other concurrent processes/threads that need capabilities- grants of their own.

To find a fix, it's important to understand the problem in fine detail. So: the CLI process has a set of process-local capabilities (kernel tokens/handles); and whenever it tries to do something, it first tries to use these. If it turns out none of those existing capabilities let it perform the operation, then it has to request the kernel look at it, build a firewall-like "capabilities-rules program" from the collected information, and run it, to determine whether it should grant the process that capability. (This means that anything that already has capabilities granted from its code-signed _capabilities manifest_ doesn't need to sit around waiting for this capabilities-ruleset program to be built and run. _Unless_ the app's capabilities manifest didn't grant the specific capability it's trying to use.)

Unlike macOS app-bundles, regular (i.e. freshly-compiled) BSD-userland executable binaries don't _have_ a capabilities manifest of their own, so they don't start with _any_ process-local capabilities. (You can embed one into them, but the process has to be "capabilities-aware" to actually make use of it, so e.g. GNU coreutils from Homebrew isn't gonna be helped by this. Oh, _and_ it won't kick in if the program isn't _also_ code-signed, IIRC.)

But all processes _inherit_ their capabilities from their runtime ancestors, so there's a simple fix, for the case of running CLI software interactively: grant your terminal emulator the capabilities you need through Preferences. In this case, the "Full Disk Access" capability. Then, since all your all CLI processes have your terminal emulator as a runtime ancestor-process, all your CLI processes will inherit that capability, and thus not need to spend time requesting it from the security subsystem.

Note that this doesn't apply to BSD-userland executable binaries which run as LaunchDaemons, since those aren't being spawned by your terminal emulator. Those either need to learn to use capabilities for real; or, at least, they need to get exec(2)ed by a shim binary that knows how.

\-----

tl;dr: I had this problem (slowness in numerous CLI apps, most obvious as `brew upgrade` suddenly taking forever) after upgrading to 10.15 as well. Granting "Full Disk Access" to iTerm fixed it for me.

<comment><USER28> > IIRC the big thing that changed with 10.15 for CLI applications is that BSD- > userland processes (i.e. ones that don't go through all the macOS > Frameworks, but just call libc syscall wrappers like fopen(2)) now also deal > with sandboxing, since the BSD syscall ABI is now reimplemented in terms of > macOS security capabilities.

Is this actually new in macOS 10.15? I seem to recall this being a thing ever since sandboxing was a thing, even all the way back to when it was called Seatbelt.

> That means that any CLI process that "walks" the filesystem is going to > generate huge amounts of sandboxd traffic, which bottlenecks sandboxd and so > slows down the caller process.

Is this not implemented in the kernel as an extension? I thought the checks went through MAC framework hooks. Doesn't sandboxd just log access violations when told to do so by the Sandbox kernel extension?

> Unlike macOS app-bundles, regular BSD-userland executable binaries don't > have a capabilities manifest of their own, so they don't start with any > process-local capabilities (with some interesting exceptions, that I think > involve the binary being embedded in the directory-structure of a system > framework, where the binary inherits its capabilities from the enclosing > framework.)

I am fairly sure you can just embed a profile in a section of your app's binary and call the sandboxing Mach call with that…

<comment><USER29> It's a new behavior that doing 'find ~' will trigger a MacOS (GUI) permissions warning dialog when `find` tries to access your photos directory, contacts file, etc.

<comment><USER28> That is new, but I believe the groundwork for that was mostly laid in 10.14 and is also mostly in the kernel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Adding network calls to syscalls like exec() is utterly insane. This road can lead to bricked laptops where you can't run anything to fix it (imagine an unexpected network error that the code doesn't handle properly). And crackers will just use ways to overwrite running instruction text to avoid the exec().

The comments on the article are annoying: it good that there's a mini way to reproduce, but please, use some further debugging like tcpdump (it still exists on osx, right?). Last time I summarized osx debugging was [https://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/analyzing-os-x- syste...](https://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/analyzing-os-x-systems- performance-with-the-use-method/38)

I'd also stress test it: generate scripts in a loop that include random numbers and execute them.

<comment><USER31> There is no excuse for this except for sheer, utter incompetence. Everyone involved in writing and shipping this should be ashamed of themselves.

<comment><USER32> This is what I scrolled all the way down this thread for - to see if anyone thinks this is a _good_ design/security decision on Apples part. I'm trying to understand what the reasoning is for this particular decision and if it actually makes the OS more secure in any meaningful way? Or does it actually- just degrade performance with very limited benefits? Are there _any_ real benefits to this VS current security design in popular Desktop Linux distros at this point?

<comment><USER33> Couldn't this have been a business decision? Not about security? (just what they say?)

To make non-App-store apps annoyingly unusable, so the App store will sell more apps, instead of people downloading in other ways?

Just like Apple cripples the Safari browser and PWA apps.

Long term, maybe Apple wants to be able to remote-forbid apps if Apple is developing their own competing app?

Whilst most developers working at Apple understands this, and don't like it? Maybe the developers even feel happy about people here at HN being disappointed, and think that _" now the business people here at Apple notice that this causes disappointment"_ ?

<comment><USER28> I don't think the people at Apple are actively trying to make non-App Store apps unusable because they want to make more money from the App Store or anything. It's just that they want code to pass through them, and as a by product making code that has been vetted less or does things that could potentially be abused is made more annoying to run. Such a change is divisive, as you may have guessed.

<comment><USER34> That vetting will come at the cost of 30% of money paid for your software and any money earned within the software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > This is not just for files downloaded from the internet, nor is it only when > you launch them via Finder, this is everything. So even if you write a one > line shell script and run it in a terminal, you will get a delay!

> Apple's most recent OS where it appears that low-level system API such as > exec and getxattr now do synchronous network activity before returning to > the caller.

Can anyone confirm this? Because honestly this is just terrifying. I don't think even Windows authorises every process from a server. This doesn't sound good for both privacy and speed.

<comment><USER36> There are two new Security/Privacy Settings that I just noticed last night.

"Full Disk Access" to allow a program to access any place on your computer without a warning. A few programs requested this, so it looks like it's been around for a while.

The other one is "Developer Tools" and it looks pretty new. The only application requesting it is "Terminal". This "allows app to run software locally that do not meet the system's security policy". So, my reading of this is that in Terminal, you could run scripts that are unsigned and not be penalized speed-wise.

<comment><USER37> I don't see it on macOS 10.15.4 (19E287). The full list of categories on my Privacy tab:

      - Location Services
      - <USER2>
      - <USER3>
      - <USER4>
      - <USER5>
      - <USER6>
      - <USER7>
      - Speech Recognition
      - <USER8>
      - Input Monitoring
      - Full Disk Access
      - Files and Folders
      - Screen Recording
      - <USER9>
      - <USER10>
      - Analytics & Improvements

Granted I don't typically use Terminal.app (iTerm 2 user), so I launched terminal and did some privileged stuff. Had to grant Full Disk Access to, say, `ls ~/Library/Mail`, but "Developer Tools" never popped up.

Are you running a beta build or something?

\---

Update: Okay, I checked on my other machine and that one does have it (Terminal is listed but disabled by default). What in the actual fuck?!?

<comment><USER38> Maybe you need Xcode, try running "mkdir /Applications/Xcode.app"

<comment><USER28> I would expect checks for Xcode to go through xcselect rather than a simple directory check. Installing the command line tools (sudo xcode-select --install) might actually be a better idea to test this.

<comment><USER38> I thought the same, but actually this method worked for me when I wanted the the Spotlight "Developer" option to show up (the CLT were already installed). I have the Developer panel under "privacy" as well, even if I never installed Xcode on my machine

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I experienced this one day while tethering in the train. I was coding and running `go build` multiple times.

I could not for the life of me understand why go build would take upwards to 30 seconds to run and sometimes 100ms. I finally realized it was related to my internet connection being extremely spotty. I went online and searched if anybody had the same experience with `go build` but couldn't find anything.

I finally know what happened. This is a pretty intolerable "feature".

<comment><USER40> Does it work at all when unconnected?

<comment><USER41> There seems to be a delay of about 5 seconds, then it "gives up" trying to notarize your program .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> As someone living in China, this is my result when I connected to my VPN (this is my normal life, thus I can visit sites like HN):

> Hello

> /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 5.746 total

> Hello

> /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 79% cpu 0.006 total

And even if I didn't connect to my VPN:

> Hello

> /tmp/test2.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 1.936 total

> Hello

> /tmp/test2.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 78% cpu 0.005 total

That's just ridiculous and unbearable.

Apple should provide a way to disable this notarization thing, and the user should still be able to enable SIP while disabling it.

additional information:

\- macOS version: 10.15.4

\- terminal: iTerm2 3.3.9

\- didn't install any "security" software

<comment><USER43> It doesn't work when there's no network connection, wonder if it would be possible to filter out and automatically block notarization traffic, or if it's all encrypted with cert pinning to prevent this type of MITM+filter.

<comment><USER44> Dropping packets when there is an otherwise working connection could potentially make the delay even worse depending on timeout or retry strategy used by Apple code. I assume that in the fast case without network connection it checks the network status flag and doesn't try to do any network connection at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Okay, I've tried this test on my MacBook Air 2020 several times, first by saving the "echo Hello" shell script in an editor and then, because I wasn't getting the results the author experienced, trying again exactly as he wrote it. Essentially the same result:

        airyote% echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh
        airyote% chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh
        airyote% time /tmp/test.sh && time /tmp/test.sh
        Hello
        /tmp/test.sh  0.00s user 0.00s system 74% cpu 0.009 total
        Hello
        /tmp/test.sh  0.00s user 0.00s system 75% cpu 0.007 total

Is it _possible_ that Allan Odgaard, as good a programmer as he unquestionably is, has something configured suboptimally on his end? Because it just strikes me as super unlikely that Apple has modified all the Unix shells on macOS to send shell scripts off to be notarized. (From what I've read, while shell scripts can be _signed,_ they can't be notarized, and Gatekeeper is _not_ invoked when you run a shell script in Terminal -- although it _is_ invoked if you launch a "quaurantined" shell script from Finder on the first run, but it treats the shell script as an "executable document." This is the way this has worked for years, as I can find references to it in books from 2014.)

I have my complaints with macOS Catalina, and I know that Apple's "tighten all the screws" approach to security is anathema to a lot of developers (and if there was a big switch that I could click to disable it all, I probably would), but I'm using Macs running Catalina every day and I gotta admit, they just don't seem to be the dystopian, unlivable hellscape HN keeps telling me they are. At least off the top of my head, I can't think of anything I was doing on my Macs ten years ago that I can't do on my Macs today. ("Yes, but doing it today requires an extra step on the first run that it didn't used to" may be inconvenient, but that's not the same thing as an inability to perform a function -- and an awful lot of complaints about modern Macs seem to be "the security makes this less convenient." There's an argument to be had about whether Catalina's security model strikes the right balance, of course.)

<comment><USER38> I don't experience a delay in Terminal.app either, but I've tried running the script with a fresh install of iTerm2 while capturing with Wireshark and it does look like the script triggers a connection to an Apple server

<comment><USER46> I just ran the same script on iTerm2 and had no delay.

<comment><USER38> I had no delay neither until I reinstalled iTerm2, I have no idea why

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There was a thread on the almost-forgotten Cocoa-dev list about this: [https://lists.apple.com/archives/cocoa- dev/2020/Apr/msg00008...](https://lists.apple.com/archives/cocoa- dev/2020/Apr/msg00008.html)

Catalina has a huge number of things that synchronously block application launch, and if any of them fail you get nothing but a hung app. A friend and I have a running discussion of the many ways where an application would just hang and we'd send samples and spindumps, to each other trying to figure out the right daemon or agent to kill to get the process to start responding again. It's madness.

</comment><comment><USER47> I tested whether running a script you just wrote really contacts Apple to "notarize" it. It does.

I first used the author's timing method. First runs are consistently about 300 ms, subsequent runs consistently about 3 ms. Something is happening at first run.

Some in the comments are saying it's "local stuff", so I tested timing again with internet off. First runs go to about 30 ms, subsequent remain the same. So there is "local stuff", but it doesn't explain the delay.

Just to be entirely sure, I installed Little Snitch and got clear confirmation: running a script you just wrote results in syspolicyd connecting to api.apple-cloudkit.com. syspolicyd is the Gatekeeper daemon.

I don't know what exactly is being sent. Maybe somebody else can do a proper packet analysis.

</comment><comment><USER48> I still love macOS, a lot. Since moving over after the disaster that was Windows 8 (and by then I was already using MacBook hardware), I've become a loving power user e.g. with AppleScript and setting up hotkeys or other ways to do absolutely anything I want on the screen. It really is still as powerfully customisable as Linux. Turn off SIP if need be.

My only problem in moving to Linux software is that I prefer Apple's hardware. I'm on the 2019 16-inch MBP. Linux's compatibility with all the T2 and SSD hardware isn't there yet, but apparently it almost is.

If Linux on the T2 MBP becomes solid and stable in the next 1-2 years, after extensive testing I may move over permanently. I already use Linux on secondary computers, and I love and value its privacy. Same with my phone. I just love my privacy.

My needs are a high bar though. Productivity must be held back by nothing. I use macOS notes _extensively_ and it syncs with my iPhone which is an extremely useful tool for me to note things down both in audio and. It needs to be reliable and - heh - 'just work'. I just discovered the cross-platform 'Standard Notes' app, with a bit more money paid out to Linux-compatible services like that, maybe it can all work. Casual photoshop can be taken care of via a VM.

Surprisingly, macOS Catalina is itself a disrupter to my productivity. It seems buggy as hell - glitchy, and weirdly slow for many extremely basic things - all since Catalina. I just don't get it. Is it caused by this article's observation? Something's definitely going on.

Maybe Apple will fix this in the next release? Like how they fixed the keyboard?

Either way, I still want to move to Linux on this fabulous (fixed) hardware that is the 16-inch MBP. (T2 issues aside.)

<comment><USER49> I have a 2019 Macbook Pro 16in and I _hate_ it. It runs exceptionally hot (leading to massive performance problems), doesn't get enough power from the adapter to start with no battery, doesn't play nicely with my display, needs restarting every couple of days so Chrome doesn't crash and takes forever to boot.

That's just the technical problems. I'm willing to give the UI a break, since it's probably as much me adjusting as it being bad.

This is my first Apple anything, and if this is what "just works" looks like, I don't want it. I could be more productive on an Android tablet at this point.

<comment><USER48> Actually, I do agree with you with some of those observations. Apple's been trying to fix their terrible T2 issue and I suspect some of the problems lately have been them trying to prevent the T2 reboot crash, while ruining other parts of the experience in the process as a necessary compromise. It may get worse (or better) as they move to all-Arm architecture.

I also am sick of the touch bar now - after 2 years living with it. I have to press it twice to actually pause my media, because it's an LCD screen and it has to auto turn off to prevent burn-in. That's a regression from the old hard media button in the Fn row which was both instant and far easier to press. At least we got 'Esc' back.

But man, their trackpad...nothing beats it. Still.

<comment><USER28> > it's an LCD screen

OLED.

<comment><USER48> I hear OLED can be just as bad if not worse. So same diff.

<comment><USER28> Much worse. Just explaining why that would be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I hope Apple currently has a team focused on macOS perf.

I worked on the team in charge of improving iOS (13) perf at Apple and IIRC there was no dedicated macOS "task force" like the one on iOS.

Luckily some iOS changes permeated into macOS thanks to some shared codebases.

<comment><USER51> > _IIRC there was no dedicated macOS "task force" like the one on iOS_

It's not surprising. Macs are less than 10% of Apple's revenue.

[https://www.macrumors.com/2020/04/30/apple-2q-2020-earnings/](https://www.macrumors.com/2020/04/30/apple-2q-2020-earnings/)

<comment><USER52> It's surprising that they don't improve the developer experience for their own developers using their own tools, including hardware.

<comment><USER28> Apple uses the same tools you do. They just might not be using it like you are; you can find a lot of features that clearly have no reason to exist outside of Apple nonetheless shipping with their software.

<comment><USER53> Is there a list somewhere of Apple's in house dev environments or workflows? I wonder what cool tricks they use internally that could be pretty useful generally.

<comment><USER28> Nothing special that can really be talked without internal context. You can get a hint at how they use their own tools though (which are available externally) if you pay careful attention to their public appearances and presentations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> This is completely insane. I am so glad I decided years ago to leave closed operating systems behind.

This design seems to cement the trend at Apple to position their products as consumer appliances, not platforms useful for development.

<comment><USER55> > I am so glad I decided years ago to leave closed operating systems behind.

The problem is, there's nothing else out there. _Everything_ is going to shit in one way or another. Windows is now a disaster, Linux was always a disaster in terms of user experience and isn't improving.

Mac OS was the last bastion of somewhat good, thoughtful design, user experience and attention to detail and now _they 've_ gone to shit too.

<comment><USER56> _Linux was always a disaster in terms of user experience and isn 't improving._

Curious: what have you tried? People who use "Linux" as a catch-all in terms of UX usually have only tried a single distribution with a single desktop environment.

<comment><USER57> > Curious: what have you tried? People who use "Linux" as a catch-all in terms > of UX usually have only tried a single distribution with a single desktop > environment.

Yup. You've just described a disaster. How many permutations of <hundreds of distros> x <dozens of DMs> must a user try before finding a good UX?

<comment><USER56> Mac is a BSD. OpenBSD exists. FreeBSD exists. NetBSD exists.

Because there are at least four BSDs, Mac therefore isn't good.

Do you see how ridiculous applying that logic to _any_ operating system is?

Linux isn't a disaster. It's a kernel. There are Linux distributions with great user interfaces and great UX, developed by people who are great at it. There are also distributions that aren't.

<comment><USER58> > There are Linux distributions with great user interfaces and great UX

Could you name some? No sarcasm, actually interested!

<comment><USER56> It sort of depends on what really fascinates you, right? I'll avoid naming some of the most popular ones, because it's likely that you've already tried them. If you haven't, I'd really recommend giving them a try. Many people seem to really love them.

 _In terms of defaults:_

I've heard _really_ good things about Solus, and its use of AppArmor seems really cool. Never touched its package manager, so I won't recommend it, but it might be worth checking out. Its desktop environment is really snappy and has an interesting design philosophy.

Elementary is really cool as a boutique distribution; I don't personally feel any urge to use it seriously (I dislike apt as a package manager), but I always keep its live environment on a flash drive, because it works without any setup on basically anything I throw it at, painlessly, and without error. It's got a cool indie app store full of curated Elementary-centric free software, and overall just feels great. Using it, you'll probably notice a few areas that it clones Mac on, and a few that feel delightfully different.

Clear Linux (Intel's desktop distribution) is pretty popular right now because of how simple it is & how Intel seems to be going to great lengths to optimize it and make it a serious contender, but I don't like its desktop environment (vanilla GNOME 3 as far as I'm aware) all that much.

ChromiumOS is probably the best-designed desktop operating system on the planet right now _technically_ , and I say that as a person who really hates Google. UI-wise it's so-so, but UX-wise it's really something special.

But more interesting are desktop environments in general, since they can be used with any variant of Linux you feel the urge to use. There's an exception there, though, in that Elementary's DE and Deepin's DE tend to not work so well or nicely on platforms that aren't Elementary or Deepin.

 _There are modern environments:_

Plasma has hands-down the best UX of any sort of desktop operating system assuming you've got an Android smartphone; you say you're coming from Apple's environment, so imagine the interop between your Mac and your iPhone, but going both ways instead of just Mac -> iPhone. Texting, handling calls, taking advantage of the computing resources of connected devices, using your phone as an extra trackpad, notifications, unlocking your PC, painless file-sharing, pretty much anything you'd like. There are a bunch of distributions that ship with Plasma by default.

Solus's Budgie is kind of neat in that it takes the main benefit of GNOME 3 (ecosystem) with far fewer downsides.

 _There are also retro environments,_ if those are your thing. There's a pretty much perfect NeXTSTEP clone (including the programming environment, not just the UI), amiwm is still pretty interesting, there are clones of basically every UNIX UI under the sun, so on.

I'm not the best person to answer your question, because for the most part I don't go out of my way to use new desktop environments and distributions, and nothing above is my first choice. (In terms of window management, I usually stick with 9wm & E just because I have ridiculous ADHD and 9wm forces me to focus while E allows me to tile painlessly if I ever need it. I use three distributions overall, none of which are very popular at the moment, pretty much solely because I'm really picky with package managers & design philosophies.) That's a "me" issue rather than a Linux issue, though.

<comment><USER58> This is excellent and indeed largely novel information, thank you.

It sounds like the finding right combination of DE and package management solution plays a big role here. I don't remember much of my experience with Gentoo's package manager in the early 2000's other than finding it generally did its job (if a bit slowly)... Experience with package managers on Mac (brew, macports) hasn't been great so I'm eager to play around with modern ones on Linux. Same goes for the DE actually: stock, out-of-the-box, macOS is essentially unusable for me until I get my customization (scroll, trackpad, KeyboardMaestro) done exactly right, I can't imagine this _not_ being better on Linux, if anything for the ability to switch among the various DE's.

I'm starting to contemplate this ( _fully untested_ ) strategy: trying out a few distros and installing the one I like best on VMWare Fusion and then try to use it as much as possible, falling back to macOS if I get stuck or I'm short on time but gradually replacing Mac-specific stuff as I find suitable replacements.. TextMate, the masterpiece of Allan Odgaard (author of the article being discussed here) probably going to be the toughest one. If I'm successful, I should eventually be able to let Linux 'out of the box' and run it on real hardware..

PS: amiwm! This is going to be a must. I do miss the Amiga, a fair bit..

<comment><USER56> My favorite package managers, personally:

xbps

apk (terrible interface; wonderful technically)

pacman (wonderful interface; so-so technically; dislike the distro that uses it because of technical choices)

InstallPackage (GoboLinux is kind of cheating, because InstallPackage isn't a "real" package manager, but that's kind of the point)

I love TextMate, too! Something you might find nice is how easy it is to run Mac in a VM on Linux; there are scripts that manage the entire thing for you, and it's pretty painless (and so fast; I was surprised). Useful if you have a few packages you can't find replacements for.

You mention Apple Music elsewhere, which you might be interested to know has an Android client and a web client, and you can probably get a native client on Linux, though I'm not immediately aware of one.

<comment><USER58> > I love TextMate, too! Something you might find nice is how easy it is to run > Mac in a VM on Linux; there are scripts that manage the entire thing for > you, and it's pretty painless (and so fast; I was surprised).

That would be excellent! I like the idea of swapping host and guest with this VM strategy, sort of evolutionary platform switching.

<comment><USER56> Take a look at this! It's pretty simple; it just fetches macOS and then gives you a shell script that launches qemu with a few flags:

[https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM](https://github.com/foxlet/macOS- Simple-KVM)

Really, really fast, and fairly painless.

<comment><USER58> It's fetching the disk image right now. Gold... Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> From the comments, roughly, are you running third party "security" tools?

> _Is there any "security" software running on your Mac? I've seen this sort > of thing caused by that, but not in general._

> _I ran the two line test and it had no delay at all. The Mac doesn 't check > for notarization on shell scripts or any non-bundle executable. I just did > it again with a new test2.sh and Wireshark capture and there is nothing._

> _I do a lot of Keychain code and I 've also never seen those delays. The > reason I suspect they told you not to use that API is that it's in the > "legacy" macOS keychain. They really want everyone to move to the modern > keychain but lots of people, myself included, still need the older macOS > specific features._

> _I 'm not saying you are crazy, but all of these things though are the > trademark reek of kernel level security software that is intercepting and > scanning every exec and file read on the system. We had an issue with Cisco > AMP once that took Xcode builds from under 10 seconds to over 5 minutes > until we were able to get it fixed._

<comment><USER37> The only kernel-level security software on my systems is Little Snitch, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't do anything unless there's network activity, so it doesn't explain anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Reminds me of the terrible delay I faced after having Sophos installed on my Mac.

Having to wait 5-10 seconds for a new terminal tab as Sophos churns (checking autoccomplete scripts, rbenv, etc) was infuriating. Oddly, there was fate sharing with Internet interception, so there was a good chance the browser was getting dragged down too, and vice versa.

Convincing corporate IT of how bad the problem was was maddening. Based on what this author says, 10.15 on rural internet sounds like hell.

</comment><comment><USER61> The funny thing is its not transitive. No slowdown if you invoke bash specifically with a new shell.

% rm /tmp/test.sh ; echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh

% time bash /tmp/test.sh && time bash /tmp/test.sh

Hello

bash /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 83% cpu 0.004 total

Hello

bash /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 77% cpu 0.003 total

vs the one from the article:

% rm /tmp/test.sh ; echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh

% time /tmp/test.sh && time /tmp/test.sh

Hello

/tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 2% cpu 0.134 total

Hello

/tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 73% cpu 0.004 total

(edited for formating)

<comment><USER62> When you run "bash hello" you are calling exec() on bash, passing "hello" as an argument, which bash then reads; when you run "./hello" you are calling exec() on hello: the kernel then treats "hello" as an executable, but notes that "hello" starts with "#!" and then will run the specified interpreter for you, passing "./hello" as an argument. The kernel doesn't think of "hello" as a program when you run "bash hello".

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I am using Ubuntu 20.04 on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen2 and you would be surprised how "normal" it feels as a development machine. Sure there some little annoyances, the touchpad behaves a little worse than on windows, sound is a little worse. But the most important things, Keyboard and Screen are excellent. The system in general does not feel like the horror stories that people keep telling about linux on desktop(notebook). Now that WSL2 is getting Cuda even windows looks workable. Their new terminal app is amazing. After a decade of Mac notebooks it was quite liberating and I would not switch back even if the flaws in macOS would be fixed. It is for sure the nicest of the big 3 operating systems but for development work Ubuntu is hard to beat for me. YMMV but it won't hurt to look around you what else is there.

<comment><USER64> I've been seeing the trajectory of Windows (pre-2012 or so) -> Mac (2012 - ~2019 or so) -> Linux (~2018 - now) play out with quite a few people without any issues.

And I don't mean developers. They're all pretty educated people but it's taken me by surprise. They come to me in frustration over Mac, they don't want to return to Windows and they really, really, really want linux. I've been using linux since about 1997 so they come to me. I usually push back, thinking "do you really want a unix workstation?!" but they insist.

My strategy has been some x2xx lenovo (like x230 or so) for about $300 from ebay, 8/16gb of ram or so with an SSD, the extended battery pack, putting mint on it and then just handing it over. Everyone, much to my continued surprise, has loved it and are really happy with it.

It's happened 4 times now and I'm still shocked every time. They've told me they use youtube to figure things out.

They're fine with libreoffice, gimp does what they need, supposedly spotify works on it fine, they don't know what bash or the kernel is and it's all fine. Incredible.

<comment><USER65> I recently _really_ tried adopting Linux on a hobby development machine that I built back in 2016 (hardly new hardware -- and desktop not laptop). Sleep never worked, graphics sometimes borked, UI felt janky and inconsistent, icons are super fugly and often too theme-y to the point of being undifferentiated at a glance, HiDPI support is a giant mixed bag (in 2020), machine would randomly freeze (mostly elementOS; Ubuntu didn't freeze as much), Hauppage drivers rarely worked consistently and often required reboots, I hated the mouse acceleration curves and was horrified to learn they were effectively hardcoded in X (I'm not talking just speed which is tweakable), gstreamer was nightmare to develop for, the Ubuntu & elementaryOS stores are a joke, and the mix of apt/snap/nix was very frustrating and the opposite of user-friendly.

I switched back to my 2012 MBP and it's predictably gone well since, plus I get iMessage integration with my iPhone.

YMMV

<comment><USER66> Yeah - the hw really has to be curated. I havent tried using a machine cobbled together from various parts (custom desktop), but off the shelf _quality_ laptops work fine for me last 2 years or so and have none of the issues you mentioned. Emphasis on quality - not cheapo models. I think if you treat Linux same as OSX and run it on known good hardware supported well by Linux you are fine today IME

>HiDPI support is a giant mixed bag I will say that this is still a thing, although with experimental gnome fractional support it works pretty well now.

Honestly I have a 2019 macbook pro 15 and have more problems with it than I do with my Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen with Fedora 32.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> OSX used to be the OS that started really quick, and ran really smoothly. Certainly far better than Windows. Also search was lightning fast. It was a selling point on its own. But recently it has slowed to a crawl. And I have to ask, what business is it to Apple whether I store a script somewhere? I don't even want them to have a checksum. And I don't want to go through the bother of having to change settings for it either. Do they even ask if this is OK? For me this is just yet another reason to steer well clear of Apple products in the near future. Very sad, because I really used to love their stuff.

<comment><USER68> >OSX used to be the OS that started really quick

Coldboot Windows 10 from pushing the power button to reaching the login screen is 7s for me (i7-7700, m2 SSD, 32GB RAM).

I never ever had quicker startups on OSX.

<comment><USER67> Once I tried out Mac OS X for the first time during the late 2000's it was really striking how much better OS X was, compared to Windows, epspecially for "creative professions," for video, design and the sort. But since then, I have to hand it to Microsoft; they've really stepped up their game. They even seem to be fixing _some_ of the non-UX compatibilities now. Granted, it's nowhere near good enough, but with PowerShell it's workable, at least for the projects I'm currently working on. For the more demanding stuff, I'll probably still Vbox a Linux distro however, while that has remained completely unnecessary for me on OS X. (I'm speaking about the whole personal experience and package deal here, so that's why I'm not mentioning things like Docker.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Damn, I too have noticed that when developing in compiled languages (C, C++, Go, Rust, what have you) the first execution after a recompile is always noticeably delayed. I thought it was odd but didn't bother digging into it. This must be why! (Can't recall having this problem with scripting languages, but maybe subsequent modifications don't trigger a notarization check? Edit: Yeah TFA does mention this.)

</comment><comment><USER69> For anyone looking for more information on what happens on the first run of an app in Catalina, see [0]. Here's a direct link to the diagram [1].

[0]: [https://eclecticlight.co/2020/01/27/what-could-possibly- go-w...](https://eclecticlight.co/2020/01/27/what-could-possibly-go-wrong-on- an-app-first-run/)

[1]: [https://eclecticlightdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/appf...](https://eclecticlightdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/appfirstrunchecks10152.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER70> It looks like my time with MacOS is rapidly coming to an end. Any Linux distro recommendations these days?

<comment><USER71> Windows 10 with WSL if you have a laptop.

Debian or similar or ArchLinux if you have a desktop.

<comment><USER70> For reasons of personal prejudice, I'll never install any Windows version on any hardware I own. Debian was always my first choice back in the desktop linux days, and still is for servers, but I haven't looked at the landscape recently. It seems to have become more consolidated, which is not surprising but still mildly disappointing.

Edit: and WSL is not Linux

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > WSL is not Linux

It _is_ Linux as of WSL2, it's just _also_ Windows, so you lose many of the advantages that would make a person recommend Linux in this thread.

<comment><USER70> TIL. But yes, for me, not having Windows installed is the primary advantage of any non-Windows OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Can anybody actually confirm these claims? I'm no fan of the new notary system, but in my experience the behavior described is not how things work. Has there been an update or change in behavior recently?

I've been running a Debian thinkpad for the last meaningful stretch of time, but from what I recall macOS quarantines any files created by the user via an extended attribute `com.apple.quarantine`. Quarantined files are not allowed to be executed by gatekeeper. It's not about a network check, they just can't be executed. If the user removes the quarantine attribute, then gatekeeper will shut up and the files will execute normally. Alternatively, if a file has a signed hash stapled to it i.e. if it has been notarized, then gatekeeper will also allow execution after verifying the signature. This doesn't require a network check either.

Interestingly, the way to bypass the quarantine behavior is to unarchive a folder. Archives themselves include the quarantine attribute, however, files extracted from the archive using a terminal program (a "developer tools" program) don't. And so macOS doesn't care. Also tools like `curl` don't apply the quarantine bit to downloaded files so curling a binary or shell script still works just fine.

<comment><USER28> Notarization is an additional check that ensures that Apple has not revoked permission for the software to run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Thought I was going insane seeing delays myself on a daily basis since Catalina. Turns out I'm not insane but a victim of Apple's continuous neglect of Mac OS.

How can something as damning as this ever reach end consumers without getting detected?

</comment><comment><USER74> If Microsoft wasn't doing ever worse privacy things with Windows I'd seriously look into switching away from Mac OS given the ever growing issues it's been having with every release.

<comment><USER75> The set of possible operating systems to consider does not contain two items.

<comment><USER76> I find Linux to be a usability nightmare. Weird cut and paste behavior, difficult to resize windows, terrible trackpad support. macOS and Windows will have to get a lot worse before I switch.

<comment><USER77> I found at least in Gnome and KDE Plasma window management works pretty much just how Windows works. Cut and paste it just cut and paste - Do you mean how you can select text and use middle click on the mouse to paste without even needing to do anything but select?

<comment><USER78> There are two X clipboards. They are implemented differently (as in "ownership" model of the content) and the implementation bleeds out everywhere.

You can't remove or change this behavior because some people love it.

EDIT: FWIW the above statements are oversimplifying the situation of course: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_selection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_selection)

And more here: [https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/13585/how-can-i- use...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/13585/how-can-i-use-just-one- unified-clipboard-even-for-intellijs-copy-path)

Most fans of Linux will claim the fact that you can choose any number of clipboard managers to customize things to your liking is a critical aspect that draws them to the platform.

Others among us (whether reformed or uninitiated) will commonly cite this same stuff as the reasons we avoid Linux on the desktop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I completely understand why things are going the way they are as our computing environment has become ever more hostile. But I am very nostalgic for the time where I would power up a Vic-20 and within seconds be able to get to work.

Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.

<comment><USER80> That computers are just slower to interact with now is such a truism that we hardly remark upon it any more. It seems utterly insane that in the early 90's I could just run Windows 3.1 on a bit of kit that in all likelihood wouldn't even power a toaster today, and the experience was, well, frictionless. I don't recall _ever_ thinking "wtf is this thing _doing_?", whereas today, by contrast, if I have the audacity to be afk for long enough for my Windows 10 box to go sleep I know I am in for an infuriating waste of minutes' worth of disk thrashing before the bloody thing even deigns to reacknowledge my existence.

<comment><USER81> I call this 'Outsourcing the cost of development to the user'...

Getting knowledgeable people costs money so we build more abstractions that lower the cost of development and pass the costs of development from the company to the user in the form of requiring more hardware to do the same thing.

How come I need 16Gb of RAM these days when 8Gb did it yesterday? How come my phone needs 4Gb of RAM while my 2012 tablet had 1Gb? Sure the hardware is cheaper but we're still not using the hardware to it's fullest.

<comment><USER82> What's the point of cheaper disk and ram, and faster systems if not for supporting higher level abstractions?

<comment><USER83> To watch more, higher-def cat videos faster. No need to get lost in the weeds of higher level abstractions to do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> I've been using linux distros (~5 years of Ubuntu and ~3 years of Arch) before switching to macOS somewhere around 2013-2014. And now years later I'm thinking about moving back. But every time I'm think about this I start with digging about current Linux situation and every time I realise than it is still a horrible system for anything outside of work, especially if you can't really do without a decent UI\UX.

Apple's ecosystem is also an issue. iOS + macOS is still much better than anything on the market (no alternatives really).

<comment><USER85> Switched from macOS this year having used it for about 8 years to first PoP_OS and now Manjaro. Both were great (GNOME environments) and very productive for both development and general use. I really like the streamlined, "get out of your way" UI.

I would say go for it, I'm glad to not be dealing with any of this nonsense, while paying a premium for it.

<comment><USER84> I've seen both of them, but the "get out of your way" UI is a limited feature. Apps are still do not respect the rest of it.

You install this new distro (like Elementary if it's still alive) and fall in love with the new Finder clone. But then you install twitter client, torrent client and a dozen of other everyday apps. And they all look terrible. And feel even worse. People still don't care.

As much as I hate certain things about macOS - I'd still chose it over Manjaro for example (haven't really tried PoP)

And not to mentions things like continuity and handoff. I can live without being able to copy paste token from my phone to my computer but this is so convenient T_T

<comment><USER86> > twitter client, torrent client and a dozen of other everyday apps

I don't install any of that in work machines, and I'd hope most devs don't either, specially if the company owns the device.

If you really need those, why cannot you use the browser?

> continuity and handoff

Why do you need that for development?

Even if your workflow requires it for some strange reason, why don't you use an alternative? There are plenty of ways to pass data between devices.

<comment><USER84> I think you are missing a point here.

tl;dr: I don't have and don't want to have two PCs for two use cases.

I have my personal macbook that I use for work (development) and everything else. I use it when I have to be at the office or when I want to work outside of my apartment. Needless to say I want my personal computer to have applications that I use. For both - work and ... not work.

>> continuity and handoff

>Why do you need that for development?

I don't. I don't use a computer only for development (see above). But even during development something it can come in handy. For example when you are working on a service that has sms auth. Can I just put in 6 digits by hand? Sure. But having them being copied from you phone for you is very convenient.

<comment><USER86> That is definitely _not_ wise.

Many companies lock down devices for good reason. For starters, to prevent employees doing that and risking the entire company.

<comment><USER84> Many companies also take a screenshot of your screen every 10 seconds to "keep you in shape". I'm not taking part in this shit show thankfully. I've had my time in corporations that do this or similar stuff. Never again.

And the only channel I'm connected to the company is the email and selfhosted gitlab. Now tell me how can a twitter client on my working machine harm this. Not in a fictional one in a life time scenario out of Mr Robot.

<comment><USER86> Don't mix privacy and security. Privacy-invading policies have nothing to do with the discussion.

As for examples, you have many, including ones discussed in HN _regularly_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Their "see!" shell script example is a bit rubbish because I get 0.012s, 0.005s on this Mac laptop whilst getting 0.022s, 0.023s on Linux box 1 and 0.006s, 0.006s on Linux box 2.

Changing the filename to test2.sh on the Mac (which should trigger the delay, right?) gets 0.006s, 0.006s.

I don't think the shell scripts are doing what they claim (and wouldn't the second run be faster anyway because of caching?)

<comment><USER88> If they are caching based on inode, this will not invalidate the cache. Do cp test.sh test2.sh and try again.

<comment><USER28> I feel like cp might do an APFS CoW and this might still cause problems…

<comment><USER89> No, even "cp -c" creates a new inode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I've been forced to update to this pile of shit because latest iOS requires latest Xcode which in turn requires Catalina. It's a nightmare.

First off the new apps (music, podcasts, etc) are terrible. They killed off iTunes but replaced it with much worse. These apps don't behave like standard macOS apps, the UI is full of inconsistencies and is just so empty. This website has nice examples of the failures of modern Mac OS: [https://annoying.technology](https://annoying.technology)

For some reason after updating the "new updates" badge was stuck on the system preferences icon (and even on the preference pane itself) despite no updates being available. I ended up having to delete a plist and reboot to fix it, apparently a common issue.

The Mail app will now randomly play the "new mail" sound. I can't confirm it for sure but I'm assuming it's treating _read_ , existing mails when they are moved to the trash/archive or newly created drafts. They screwed up the _mail_ app, a problem that has been solved for decades. WTF? The worst is that I see no major changes in there, so why touch the mail client in the first place if you're not even going to give me additional features in exchange?

Xcode was stuck upgrading in the App Store. It would start the process and never make any progress. Cancelling it had no effect. Rebooting cancelled it but the second attempt, while making progress, ended up failing with a generic error message with no actual information. Logs are useless because they're being spammed by all the background processes even during normal operation making it impossible to find anything. Finally the third attempt succeeded.

1Password now takes 5 more seconds to unlock my password database. Somehow this disgrace of an OS slowed down the password hashing process by an order of magnitude.

Switching screen resolutions or connecting to an external screen takes a good 10 seconds of flickering and frozen UI before everything starts working again. This is now actually _worse_ than both Windows and Linux. I dread moving the laptop or touching the USB-C cable (also because USB-C is so brittle) when it's connected to an external monitor out of fear that it'll disconnect/reconnect and I end up in a 30-second cycle of flickering.

I upgraded a couple of _days_ ago, so those are not early bugs. Apple had a year to fix all of this. The Xcode thing might be an isolated issue but there's no excuse for the general performance penalty or the stuck update badge which has many hits on search engines suggesting it's a widespread issue.

<comment><USER90> Have you actually done anything to try and fix these issues? Because this is not typical

I use 1password and it doesn't take 5 seconds to open. Did I accidently install linux or something? because since it's the OS causing your delay it would be causing me to have the same delay.

xcode installs just fine for my entire team. Just did the update myself, worked just fine.

I plug into a dock and undock constantly during the day, and while it could be quickinger, 10 seconds and flickering is NOT my experience.

and what the f __k are you doing to your connections that you consider usb-c brittle?!?

<comment><USER70> There's a lot more non-determinism in a modern MacOS install than you imagine. "WFM" doesn't invalidate the anecdote to which you reply. TFA is about putting network requests in system calls ffs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> > You can test this by running the following two lines in a terminal:

>

> echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh

> time /tmp/test.sh && time /tmp/test.sh

Am I missing something here?

I just did this, and the timing between the first and second run was barely noticeable -- in fact, the first run was slightly quicker:

> echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh time > /tmp/test.sh && time /tmp/test.sh

> Hello

> /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 55% cpu 0.006 total

> Hello

> /tmp/test.sh 0.00s user 0.00s system 41% cpu 0.010 total

This is on macOS 10.15.4.

</comment><comment><USER92> > Another way to reduce the delays is by disabling System Integrity > Protection. I say reduce, because I still do get some delays even with SIP > disabled, but the system does overall feel much faster, and I would strongly > recommend anyone who thinks their system is sluggish to do the same.

The tone of this article reminds me of a passage from the seminal Google+ Platforms Rant:

> Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin > who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their > youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there's more > than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdy are the two > ever at odds. > But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important > than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no > product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a > reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.

[https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611](https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611)

</comment><comment><USER93> I had put off upgrading for a long time because nothing good can come from running the latest stable release. They've never been stable. But Apple sort of forced me to update recently since wanted to back up my phone, which I wanted to do before switching to a new one. I imagined that it would be better after a year. Boy was I wrong, and I regret doing it much. It has been a constant pain ever since, bluetooth is completely broken.

\- My external trackpad isn't able to connect, at all. Audio devices require that I kill coreaudiod before connecting, otherwise they just disconnect after a few seconds.

\- I can wake the laptop with a bluetooth keyboard, but when it's awake the keyboard stops working. Flipping the switch on the backside of the keyboard lets it reconnect again.

\- There are transitions that you cannot disable that makes your laptop feel super slow. In Mojave you could disable them, in Catalina you can't unless you want to run with SIP disabled.

\- There's also a super fun bug with mobile hotspot failing to activate, and there's no way for you to just manually connect to your own hotspot, it has to go through this bluetooth activation, even though your mobile hotspot is visible and connectable on all other devices. You end up in situation where you connect to your friends hotspot and they connect to yours, since neither of you are able to connect to your own.

I've given up. The quality control in Apple is down the drain, and have been for quite some time. I'm fixing to downgrade to Mojave this weekend, hopefully that will make it more stable. But I'm not holding my breath. To add injury to insult I'm on my third broken keyboard now. Next time it breaks I might just use the consumer laws and make them refund the laptop so they'll have to take a big loss for creating such a flawed device.

<comment><USER94> Those all sound like unusual problems. What external hardware and phone are you using?

<comment><USER93> I've drunk the cool aid. Never drink the cool aid: iPhone 11 Pro, Magic Trackpad and Keyboard, AirPod Pro and Bose QC35. If you search for these issues on the community forums or web in general you'll see that it's quite common, and it all started with Catalina.

Some brave people that were running the public beta reported these issues to Apple, but we're now four point releases in and still no fix. Apple seem to not even want to acknowledge the issue, they just send users to their FAQ which sums up to "have you rebooted?"

The issues seems to start if you have bluetooth devices connected and your laptop becomes memory constrained. And after that it's in a broken or bricked state it seems. You can do tricks like killing coreaudiod to get audio devices to connect, but trackpad is still broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> I made the jump to a System76 Adder WS laptop and pop!os for development after buying the lemon first gen MBP with the terrible keyboard. It was my seventh and possibly last MBP (including powerbooks before it).

I was considering one of the new 13" MBPs but that seems unlikely if injecting network latency into syscalls is the direction things are going.

If you're not building Mac/iOS apps, find a Linux laptop you can tolerate for development and an iPad Pro for everything else.

</comment><comment><USER96> Thinking about it, this probably also gives Apple a ~fairly accurate set of usage stats for software.

All they'd need to do - and it's very simple - is count the number of requests of each given hash lookup.

Since they know the hash for each of their own executables, that gives a direct count of "most used" through to "least used" programs.

Not sure if they'd have the hash for third party executables though, to know what the given hash request corresponds to.

If they receive the hash for 3rd party executables when developers sign things, then Apple seems like it's able to generate usage stats for their entire OS and 3rd party app ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER97> This seems like a natural outflow of a company design process that (a) prioritizes security highly (b) prioritizes regular users over developers (c) does not allocate sufficient resources to the product to thoroughly cover all the bases (d) is developed by people in North America, for whom the USA === the whole world, and are used to near 100% seamless internet connectivity with latency < 20ms.

I love macOS, but their software generally has issues with flakey internet connectivity and long latencies - down here in South Africa, ~400ms RTT is not uncommon.

</comment><comment><USER98> I understand the purpose of notarization but I feel like they could've come up with a much better solution to this. A network call __everytime__ someone runs an executable is not acceptable. But for the cases where the user is offline, Apple must keep a list of notarized apps on the machine...

</comment><comment><USER99> Up until the release of Catalina, I've always upgraded to the latest version of macOS within a month or two. But some of the changes this time is really stopping me from upgrading.

As of Catalina, there's no sane way to install the Nix package manager without losing functionality because macOS now disallows creating new files in the root directory[1]. Nix stores its packages in the /nix directory and it's not possible to migrate without causing major disruptions for existing NixOS and other Linux users. This is too bad, since apart from Nix being a nice package manager, it also provides a sane binary package for Emacs. The Homebrew core/cask versions only provides a limited feature set[2][3].

[1]: [https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925](https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925)

[2]: [https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew- core/issues/31510](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/31510)

[3]: [https://github.com/caldwell/build- emacs/search?q=support+is%...](https://github.com/caldwell/build- emacs/search?q=support+is%3Aopen&unscoped_q=support+is%3Aopen&type=Issues)

<comment><USER100> Brew never had this problem because they chose a sane path without corrupting the system directory. It's a bad design on part of NixOS and one can even say the changes in the macOS were designed to encourage good/sane design.

<comment><USER101> Nix living at a predefined path is integral to how it works. An executable does not dynamically link to a generic "ncurses" but (via rpath) links to a specific compiled version of ncurses (such as /nix/store/81rb87agmp9cbsvg2xm2n4kp9c6309lv-ncurses-6.2). This is the root of all the benefits of Nix such as being able to install things side-by-side that use different versions of things or upgrade and rollback without problems.

That predefined path being the same (/nix) across all users of nixpkgs is required to be able to share binary packages (you could perhaps build everything from source, but that's a lot of time, more time even than something like gentoo because package updates require all dependencies to be rebuilt as well).

You can call it an insane choice or bad design, but there aren't a whole lot of options here. Could Nix move to a different path? Maybe, but is there a path that all operating systems could abide? If the new path stops working in some future OS, will it still be insane and bad design? Again, maybe, but I happen to love Nix and I use is on macos because it makes my life easier (and I'm on macos for work reasons). I'm willing to bend and do a lot of legwork to be able use Nix, and I'm upset with the Catalina situation.

Can follow some discussion here [https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925](https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925)

<comment><USER102> Unix OS variants have pretty standard paths like /opt or /usr.

Going with /nix was basically the best way to run into trouble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> Nearly every article I see about macOS or Windows these days further confirms to me that switching entirely to Linux was the right call. Maybe 2020 will be the year of the Linux Desktop by default.

<comment><USER104> anyday now...

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> This is also the case with APFS on rotational disk drives. Why does APFS perform so much worse on HDD vs SSD? Will Apple fix it? [https://bombich.com/blog/2019/09/12/analysis-apfs- enumeratio...](https://bombich.com/blog/2019/09/12/analysis-apfs-enumeration- performance-on-rotational-hard-drives)

<comment><USER106> APFS was not designed for spinning disks. No, they won't fix it; because they don't even sell a computer that ships with only a spinning disk (asterisk on the iMac's hybrid drive). HFS+ is still available, just use it if you need to format a spinning disk. I think this is a very different type of issue, with much more reasonable trade-offs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Perhaps related: "How come someone notarized my app?"[0]

It mentions that anyone with an apple developer ID can notarize a qualifying app and submit this notary to the Apple Notary Service. However, the proof of notarization—the notarization ticket—might not be stapled to the application.

In the case of no stapled ticket, Catalina contacts the notary service to see whether a ticket exists. If so, the app is good to go.

[0]: [https://eclecticlight.co/2020/05/22/how-come-someone- notariz...](https://eclecticlight.co/2020/05/22/how-come-someone-notarized-my- app/)

EDIT. More informative link here[1]. It specifically outlines what happens on first run of an app. (and there's a great diagram if you scroll down)

[1]: [https://eclecticlight.co/2020/01/27/what-could-possibly- go-w...](https://eclecticlight.co/2020/01/27/what-could-possibly-go-wrong-on- an-app-first-run/)

</comment><comment><USER107> I feel like the continual development of MacOS is making it worse and worse. Similar to Windows, where every extra feature causes more and more complications.

But alas the 1000s of engineers gotta be put to work somehow.

<comment><USER28> There are significantly fewer than 1000 engineers working on macOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> Did apple make any comments on this? I haven't been able to find any public responses from them. I'm really interested on reading their side of things. This is quite jarring, it's hard to believe it is a thing. However, as I read through tests people did, it seems just as bad as it sounds.

I was actually getting a mac mini now that I'm working from home (I thought I'd get better integration with some of the company's wfh infrastructure while still having a unixy environment, so a win/win situation), but I cancelled the purchase after reading this. I get that you can jump some hoops and set some apple specific flags to things so that it works better, but the reason I wanted a mac was to make things easier and not having to look into obscure APIs and features to get simple things working. I was really looking forward to that, but I don't feel that sort of investment will be justified with issues like this in their OS :/

<comment><USER109> This is frankly hyperbole. A single checkbox in a GUI menu that is routinely accessed for managing other system-wide sandbox privileges isn't exactly obscure. It also isn't some difficult, inconvenient task. It needs to be done once.

<comment><USER108> From what I've read it's not available by default and you need to run some commands (which seem to be hard to google). And that solves only part of the problem, the article had other examples that may be harder to solve. It seems like, if your internet connection is not great, then you're going to have a bad experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> Increasingly I find macOS only to be tolerable with iCloud (and Siri, location, suggestions, bug reporting, et c) entirely disabled, and Little Snitch's built in/automatic whitelisting for Apple services disabled, and most of the background processes entirely denied networking access. It phones home constantly even with all of the services disabled/opted out.

It's indeed a huge mess, from a privacy standpoint too, not just a performance one. It's sad also to lose things like AirPlay or iMessage as collateral damage in the process. :/

I just can't tolerate a machine that hits the network hundreds of times a day when doing normal computing tasks that do not involve the network. They even tolerate this sort of spyware in App Store apps, too.

Is it too much to ask for a polished workstation OS that lets me boot and edit a local text file of notes and save and quit without notifying 4 different parties that I did so?

<comment><USER111> and there are a lot of background processes.

running just firefox and terminal, ps -ef|wc -l is 198

and many of them have _no_ reason to be on my system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> I run a pihole at home, which has intermittent issues. When macOS can't resolve a hostname, almost every user-facing UI grinds to a halt. It's truly bizarre. Applications won't launch, menus don't respond, etc. Feels like a decade ago when your spinning disk was going bad. Not cute :(

</comment><comment><USER112> If it checks with Apple servers every time you execute a new binary, what happens if you don't have an Internet connection? Are you just unable to run new code?

<comment><USER35> > One way to solve the delays is to disable your internet connection.

I think it just skips the checks if internet isn't available. But doesn't that kind of defeats the point of notarization?

<comment><USER40> Hopefully you're also less likely to get new unsafe binaries when disconnected. But it's all still awful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What a ridiculous feature. The people involved in making this decision ought to be fired.

</comment><comment><USER113> I'm showing 20-200ms longer on first run of the exec. Modified the test script a bit to show that it doesn't happen again if you modify the executable's contents.

        echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && \
        chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh && \
        time /tmp/test.sh && \
        time /tmp/test.sh && \
        echo 'echo Hello2' >> /tmp/test.sh && \
        time /tmp/test.sh

<comment><USER114> Another slight modification to make this show the effect every time:

        f=$(mktemp) && \
        echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > $f && \
        chmod a+x $f && \
        time $f && \
        time $f && \
        echo 'echo Hello2' >> $f && \
        time $f

On my system:

        Hello

        real 0m0.131s
        user 0m0.001s
        sys 0m0.002s
        Hello

        real 0m0.004s
        user 0m0.001s
        sys 0m0.002s
        Hello
        Hello2

        real 0m0.004s
        user 0m0.001s
        sys 0m0.002s

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> > With internet enabled, it was reproducible by relaunching the application > and triggering the code that called SecKeychainFindGenericPassword.

I have issues with a lot of APIs, but SecKeychain has got to be one of the worst. I don't think it's gotten any love in many, many years. Unlike literally every other Apple API that a Macintosh application might reasonably use, you call its functions (even from Swift) by passing strings as (length:UInt32, data:UnsafePointer<Int8>?) pairs, and getting results out by passing (length:UnsafeMutablePointer<UInt32>?, data:UnsafeMutablePointer<UnsafeMutableRawPointer?>?) pairs, and checking OSStatus return values. Every aspect of it is painful.

In Apple's "Documentation Archive" there's three "Sample Code" downloads related to Keychain. The newest one is for TouchID, and the oldest is for PowerPC. This is an area of the OS that doesn't get much attention.

> This issue has been reported to Apple and assigned FB7679198. Apple has > responded that applications should not use this function, though the > documentation for SecKeychainFindGenericPassword does not state that it is > deprecated

I see that it's now grouped in a section of the docs called "Legacy Password Storage", but not actually "deprecated". Strange. That means you won't get any indication of its non-current status from Xcode, or even reading the release notes.

I like that there's a newer (and presumably less awful) interface. I don't look forward to having to rewrite/retest that corner of my application. Seeing all the CFString/CFDictionary casting and OSStatus checking with the new functions, it still doesn't look all that great.

</comment><comment><USER115> I got hit by this yesterday, borgbackup (installed using home-brew) had a 5 second delay on every invocation.

Setting Terminal as a Developer Tool in Security&Privacy fixed it

</comment><comment><USER116> This seems to be, once again, a case of user experience being degraded due to lack of attention, testing and measurement of impact by security engineers.

<comment><USER70> Once you have security engineers, security is no longer the responsibility of all engineers equally, and you've already lost at security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER117> The weird thing is the price of windows laptops have skyrocketed with the shortages. New MBPs are cheaper than X1 Carbons and XPSs with 10gen chips.

<comment><USER53> New MBP with a 10th gen chip is a $600 upgrade over the base model with an 8th gen chip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER118> Windows + VSCode + WSL2 + Terminal + PowerToys = Just one love, never looked back.

<comment><USER119> The only problem I have with that is "Windows"

I'm currently trying to figure out how to emulate windows from a *nix distribution using qemu. I plan to use this as a "home lab" (k8s cluster or just plain fucking around), but still retain the ability to play an occasional AAA game.

<comment><USER118> You don't need to emulate windows if you have windows as parent host ;). Windows with WSL is the best linux desktop which i had for past 20 years

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER120> I have been running OpenBSD for all my dev work in a VM for quite some time now.

This just makes me wanna start using it for more things besides dev work :(

</comment><comment><USER70> Last year I was preaching that if you can't develop in a submarine or a space station (or on the metro), from a fresh git clone to your next git push, then your development environment is broken and you should burn it to the ground and start over.

It'll be interesting to see how much power we developers will let Apple take from us before we jump the garden wall.

<comment><USER28> Interestingly, I hear that iPads cannot be used on the ISS because apps will stop launching if you disconnect from Apple's servers for too long.

<comment><USER121> Src?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER122> Just did a test using the command the author listed. Benchmarked on ArchLinux and got 0.00s. I then did the same test on MacBook Pro and got 0.332s. I feel like that's pretty bad. 0.332s might sound inconsequential, but that's just for a single echo command. I would imagine it gets exponentially worse as your executable grows in complexity.

</comment><comment><USER123> I'm getting 10-15 minute beach ball of death freezes on a month old MBP 16". That recur until I hard reboot. I can't open the 'force quit applications' window during this nor the apple menu. Can't reboot or shutdown from the cli or otherwise. Some apps lose network connections, some don't. The entire system becomes unusable. It requires a hard reboot. I think it's related to Intellij IDEA and similar IDEs somehow, but profiling those shows the slowdown is not in their apps but in the OS. It won't start with anything plugged into the USB ports, not even just power. Been trying various things but if it doesn't go away, I will return this when the Apple store here reopens. The only good thing about this coronavirus is that I've had more than 14 days to test this and find out what a clusterfuck this OS is even on a $4400 brand new mbpro. Do they even test anything anymore?

</comment><comment><USER124> Do you think developers make up a significant portion of Mac buyers? I think it's possible, but I'm not sure.

I am pretty sure the laptop market has been shrinking generally (as more people have a phone but no laptop). And most developers I know have macs. They probably don't want to make the OS significantly worse for developers...

<comment><USER125> After this, you can be sure the developer interest will go down even further

</comment></comment><comment><USER126> This why having a vibrant open-source ecosystem is so important. Firstly, the needs of users is the main priority (as opposed to profit or liability minimization or advertising...), and secondly, users have so many options to pick from. For example, if you don't like systemd, you are free to pick an OS without it.

</comment><comment><USER127> I used to use Mac pretty heavily for design and audio work, but around 10.14 because of Apple switching the way they do things, I've now entirely switched to Windows for that, and Linux for everything else. I just don't want to deal with the nonsense described in this post, among several other things.

</comment><comment><USER128> I don't want to send over the Internet a record of every program I run. Is there a way to opt-out completely?

<comment><USER129> Buy a machine not from Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER130> " Another way to reduce the delays is by disabling System Integrity Protection. I say reduce, because I still do get some delays even with SIP disabled, but the system does overall feel much faster, and I would strongly recommend anyone who thinks their system is sluggish to do the same."

Nope.

</comment><comment><USER131> "Another way to reduce the delays is by disabling System Integrity Protection."

Definitely agree on this one here - I've noticed a big speed improvement when disabling SIP debugging with "csrutil enable --without debug" while in recovery mode.

I should note that the main reason I disable SIP isn't for speed, but to install the yabai window manager to make Aqua far more useful as a developer. I wrote a recent blog post on this, actually ([https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2020/5...](https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2020/5/18_Setting_up_macOS_for_development.html)).

<comment><USER28> I believe disabling System Integrity Protection actually carries over to everything you boot off the computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER132> > [...] it appears that low-level system API such as exec and getxattr now do > synchronous network activity before returning to the caller.

WTAF. If this is really true, this is a reason for me to leave the platform for good. This is just in-acceptable in so many ways.

</comment><comment><USER41> > a degraded user experience, as the first time a user runs a new executable, > Apple delays execution while waiting for a reply from their server.

Wow, this is extremely infuriating! I just ran the "hello world" test script with the network connection disabled and it took 5 seconds to run!

         $ echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh
         $ time /tmp/test.sh && time /tmp/test.sh
         Hello
         /tmp/test.sh  0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 4.991 total
         Hello
         /tmp/test.sh  0.00s user 0.00s system 77% cpu 0.005 total

</comment><comment><USER133> I'm so confused about the comments here.

There are a bunch of people who can't reproduce the slowness at all, but nearly all downvoted or you have to wade through 100's of comments to get to them.

The majority of comments are just dumping on Macs, nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the article, and seem to be blindly assuming it's true.

And I can't seem to find any substantive discussion of whether this is actually _real_ or not, or just some weird bug on the author's machine.

I don't see any evidence that Catalina is "slow by design", just a single anecdote from the author. I was definitely hoping for some more substantive critique/discussion...

<comment><USER134> Op linked validated bug reports.. One of which Apple responded with "by design" of which op derived the title.

The down votes are because it seems pretty clear that the people who don't experience have long lived instances of their os and likely have grandfathered or disabled security settings. There are a lot of people saying ita pretty easy to replicate with a new os.

And it is, I just did it. Did you?

<comment><USER133> No they didn't, there's no link. They said it's "FB7674490" but Googling that reveals nothing, so I can't read it.

I don't know what the bug report said, or what specifically was by design. Surely "the entire machine freeze for 1-2 seconds every 10th minute, not to mention everything just being sluggish" is not by design.

And I _was_ unable to replicate it (I was one of the comments that got downvoted), although I don't have the luxury of trying a fresh OS. I haven't disabled any security settings, and I don't know what would have been grandfathered -- that's not mentioned anywhere in the article as a factor.

So that's what's bothering me -- the assumption that contradictory evidence isn't valid while the original post somehow is, and no discussion around that, or what tradeoffs there might be.

Now, finally, there are actually some substantive comments from people testing it. There wasn't before though, and it's _still_ unclear as to whether this really is bad design, a wise tradeoff, or if the author's machine has something else going on. Because their experience of a frustratingly slow Mac is just not the norm at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> With Apple degrading the developer experience with each release and Microsoft working hard on things like WSL(2) and the new "package manager" I think within a year or 2 lots of developers will go back to Windows-based machines.

<comment><USER31> As a security engineer myself, what Apple is doing here is completely fucking insane. I honestly cannot believe that anyone thought it was a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER136> An issue I've been dealing with forever on my mbp 2013 is the machine just pausing input for 2-4 secs (video and audio don't hitch, just keyboard/mouse input).

I recently took the trouble to completely wipe the disk and reinstall macos mojave and it's still happening so it's not due to cruft installed over time in OSX. I dunno. I'll deal with it until it gives up the ghost and probably move to a windows machine with the work they're putting into WSL2

</comment><comment><USER137> High quality laptops shipping with Linux have been available for some time now. I know of a couple of companies that are providing an option for employees to switch.

</comment><comment><USER138> This coupled with the horrible docker 100% cpu usage bug ([https://github.com/docker/for- mac/issues/3499](https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3499)) might be the top reasons why I hate WFH right now. My Linux desktop in office was so much faster at everything (granted its desktop vs laptop but still, it's a laggy mess developing on OSX now)

</comment><comment><USER139> It gets even worse. I was doing some web dev in the last couple months and I noticed that my "localhost" was ridiculously slow. At first, I thought it was NPM/Gulp but then I noticed that it behaved irrationally, sometimes it is slow and sometimes it works.

The problem was: Parental Control. Apparently, every request was checked and thus slowed the whole thing down. Needless to say, a couple days at least were wasted in this.

</comment><comment><USER140> Has anybody in the tech media picked up on this? Doesn't seem like it from a cursory browse of my favorite sites (HN do your magic) This seems like something that Apple really ought to be taken to task for. I'm sure the privacy concerns if not the performance will rile up the broader non-HN public if only the information reaches them. Perhaps then we can get Apple to move to a less stupid system.

</comment><comment><USER141> The only time I've seen similar delays is when my mac decides it needs to do something on an external disk that needs to spin up. I have a 12Tb external that can take 10 seconds to spin up, so get a 10 second stall waiting for I/O once in a while.

I do wonder if the author has something similar going on, either with a directly attached disk or a network share.

</comment><comment><USER142> Did the site get hit by the Slashdot effect? Can't access it.

Archive: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200522164507/https://sigpipe.m...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200522164507/https://sigpipe.macromates.com/2020/macos- catalina-slow-by-design/)

</comment><comment><USER143> Apple has an opportunity here - to fix all these issues in the first release of ARM macOS and disable some more functions that "don't really work well" or are "insecure" \- all of a sudden ARM Mac will be so much better there will be many blog posts and videos about it smugly proclaiming how Intel could not keep up!

</comment><comment><USER144> Just switch to Windows and WSL. For most cases, it works just great/not noticeably slower.

There's a lot of bullshit on Windows too but nothing near OSX levels of wannabe big brother shit.

Can't think of a better long term short right now in the market than Apple (and sister cult Tesla but the electric story is at least in the early days so they may do ok)

<comment><USER145> Windows has SmartScreen and MAPS (which was previously called "SpyNet") turned on by default, on top of telemetry level that goes to eleven and cannot be turned off in consumer editions.

They're not implemented in a braindead way that's being discussed here but they're at the same level big brotherness-wise, if not worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER133> Sorry but it's just not happening for me, on macOS 10.15.3, on my late 2016 MBP. (And I've certainly never done anything like disable SIP.)

I run the commands and get:

      Hello
      /tmp/test.sh  0.00s user 0.00s system 8% cpu 0.045 total
      Hello
      /tmp/test.sh  0.00s user 0.00s system 75% cpu 0.005 total

If I'm reading this correctly, the first run takes less than a twentieth of a second, and the second a two-hundredth? I've never experienced anything like "have the entire machine freeze for 1-2 seconds every 10th minute". And I have the slowest internet package I can buy.

The only delay that's ever noticeable is when running a program I've installed for the first time, which yes usually seems to take a few seconds, before often telling me the application couldn't be verified or something, do I want to run it anyways. Which makes sense if you're running a checksum on a 400 MB application binary. But after that first time, starting an app is always instant.

Can anyone else elucidate what the author is talking about? They're presenting it as a universal, but maybe there's something else going on with their machine? Clearly something's wrong on their end, but possibly it's just some kind of bug. I'd avoid jumping to conclusions that executables taking a second to launch is "by design".

EDIT: switching from zsh to sh gives more granular results:

      Hello

      real 0m0.009s
      user 0m0.002s
      sys 0m0.003s
      Hello

      real 0m0.005s
      user 0m0.001s
      sys 0m0.003s

</comment><comment><USER146> I intend to stay on Mojave for as long as possible, but I am curious to try out Catalina. I believe it is easy enough to install Catalina on an external SSD. My concern is whether this would be safe enough and if my computer would remain unmodified (e.g. could there be changes to firmware settings or firmware updates?)

</comment><comment><USER121> I can see the delay when I remove my terminal from the DevTools permission in Security preferences.

So it's real.

However, scripts are NOT notarised, so what is it doing?

EDIT:

So after digging the scripts are being "checked" for malware, as part of XProtect.

This is interesting, it seems to be hashing scripts and testing to see if its known malware.

Anyway, easy to disable, but weird stuff.

</comment><comment><USER147> "Modern" OSX, iOS, and Android are so secure and safe they even protect you from using your computer.

</comment><comment><USER148> 10.15.1 and then 10.15.4 both introduced random kernel panics on my iMac. Only way to solve was to reinstall MacOS on top of itself (via Recovery, kept files/apps intact).

Still no idea what or why the panics would happen, or why the reinstall solved it.

Catalina has been a very bumpy road for me so far.

</comment><comment><USER149> I don't think they do the notarization for shell scripts and program you build from source. I've been doing large scale software development on my Catalina for quite some time and I observed zero performance degradation compared to previous OS X version.

</comment><comment><USER150> I really hope the mess that is Catalina is fixed in the next round, or I might be on Mojave until I can switch to another OS. I've been on macOS for a long time, and I really like it. I'm productive on it. But Catalina... no, I won't touch that.

</comment><comment><USER151> Anyone of packet captures of this behavior? I'm still on 10.14, or I would check it myself.

</comment><comment><USER152> Man, I think I was having this issue earlier in the year and thought it was some funkyness with the firewall or application -- custom golang apps.

Who at apple thought it was a good idea to hop on the internet when invoking an application without any warning? This is loony.

</comment><comment><USER153> I can't upgrade IntelliJ any more, because it's trying to write to privileged file locations that I (the owner of the computer) no longer have access to. Believe me, I've tried to work around this, macOS has it locked down completely.

<comment><USER154> I use and upgrade IntelliJ fine. Install Jetbrains Toolbox and everything is installed in your home dir. What kind of locations are you having troubles with?

<comment><USER155> I agree: use Jetbrains Toolbox.

A few months ago I installed Rider (an IntelliJ-based IDE) on my Mac without toolbox, and upgrading it was a pain. I don't remember the details, but using JetBrains toolbox makes upgrading as simple as clicking a button and waiting until the download / install is complete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER156> Just wanted to drop this here but WSL & WSL2 makes a compelling case to move to Windows.

</comment><comment><USER157> I have this kind of issues on Mojave. I blamed the firewall. With ethernet disconnected, everything runs smoothly. Connected: random freezes of 1-2 secs.

Why does it need the internet all the time?

</comment><comment> dre-hh Upgraded only in Spring. Waited long enough. Never have been I saw wrong. Now when I want to reboot my computer I just try to pair my Bluetooth headphones - instant hard reboot

<comment><USER28> Does this literally panic your machine?

</comment></comment><comment><USER158> Can we get a MacOS @BruceDawson0xB up in here?

[https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB](https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB)

</comment><comment><USER159> Lack of upgradability of MacBook Pros, numerous bugs in Catalina (ImageCapture Im looking at you), T2 chip and secure boot issues. It all adds up...

</comment><comment><USER160> Why would they send off binary hashes synchronously before execution of the program?

Are they checking if the app is dangerous? Are they logging all my activity?

</comment><comment><USER161> If microsoft was doing this there'd be a riot but since it is Apple but will rationalize this bad behaviour and say it is for the best.

</comment><comment><USER162> NSA had a "hardening macOS" guide on GitHub that I can't find.

I wonder if that defeats the phone home that this article is highlighting.

</comment><comment><USER102> I like the fine grained permissions on Catalina, but along with dropping support for 32 bits binaries, this is getting ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER163> I noticed recently that the first `git` command I run takes longer. This is insane. What's the status of debian on macbook?

<comment> ben-schaaf Last I heard you can't even access the SSD on newer macbooks. If you want a good experience with running Linux on a laptop, don't use a Mac.

</comment></comment><comment><USER164> Did anyone try the setting the terminal to "Developer Tools" permissions and find that things go worse?

</comment><comment><USER165> Wow, this is incredible and clearly a huge step in the wrong direction.

I clearly won't switch to their system anytime soon...

</comment><comment><USER166> My 2011 era MacBook Pro has run Linux most of its life. It runs super fast compared to its performance under MacOS even a year into its existence.

I've heard people ask me "why bother with Linux when MacOS is Unix?". Well technically it is from its heritage, but it gets less unixy by the day.

</comment><comment><USER167> Disabling SIP and amfi kills all the process startup delay and limitations.

</comment><comment><USER168> I feel like this is one of those times, a wut moment.

</comment><comment><USER169> The slowness seems like the smallest concern here

</comment><comment><USER170> How many new applications are you people running?

</comment><comment><USER171> One more reason to stay away from corporate OSes

</comment><comment><USER172> So should we disable SIP on our Macs?

</comment><comment><USER173> By this logic, HTTPS is "slow by design" and a nefarious plot by Big Certificate to siphon money away from tech companies.

</comment><comment><USER174> Linux is waiting for you.

</comment><comment><USER175> now I understand the importance of niche OS.

</comment><comment><USER176> I would give anything to have my Mac be fast again. I have no idea what changed but even 10.14 feels a whole lot slower than it was earlier. Haven't upgraded to 10.15 seeing all the negative reviews it is getting when it comes to perf. Apple needs to seriously give perf a priority for Mac. Do they really expect developers to use a Mac to develop Apps when it is slow as molasses? I shudder to think what will happen to the Apple ecosystem if developers migrate to another OS for development. Apple will come crashing down. I don't wish for that to happen but looks like there is absolutely no one at Apple focused on making it better.

<comment><USER177> Remember, people don't write blog posts saying nothing changes. The negative reviews tend to be one of two things: spotlight reindexing shortly afterwards, or attribution error where every new thing is blamed on the OS upgrade and similar old behavior is mentally discounted. App development didn't suddenly get "slow as molasses" and for most users the install was a reboot and back to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER178> One frustrating experience on the Mac is keyboard shortcuts.

Yes, they have polished the GUI, which makes it easy to navigate by mouse. But, when you need to work in speed mode, then you reach for the keyboard shortcuts.

The problem, is that there are plenty, too much sometimes, and they are often inconsistent between applications.

And yes, the Mac has a keyboard shortcut assignment tool, but it often doesn't work correctly.

I must give credit to Microsoft here. They at least seemed to have perfected most of the common keyboard shortcuts.

Some good features about Windows shortcuts.

1\. Alt-Spacebar to open the windows control menu, to move, minimize, maximize, or close the window.

2\. Alt combinations are used to control the active Window application itself.

3\. Alt-F4 to close the window. But, I would have preferred Alt-Escape instead, to close the window.

4\. Control key for shortcuts inside the application. Like, Ctrl-C for copy. O for open. P for print. Etc.

5\. Then the Windows key, to control Operating System level shortcuts. Like Win-M to minimize all windows. Win-L to lock the computer. Win-R to launch a command.

Some feature I would like are to use, Win-Spacebar to open a command search, similar to Win-R, but with the ability to list all possible commands. Similar to activating the command palette on VSCode.

And Ctrl-Spacebar, to activate keyboard commands for the active window. Kinda like Emacs, where I can run macros on it, like highlighting the words that I want, and execute something on it, like changing to uppercase, or converting to comma separated, or whatever else is needed.

<comment><USER179> this has always been the case. the underlined shortcuts in menus are a godsend in non-osx OSes. I am still astonished at the hostility of macos when it comes to Yes/No dialogs - you usually can't hit Y or N! This changed at some point after snow leopard. If I could run HDCP on my old macbook, I'd still be using snow leopard. aesthetically, they have made no innovations of use since then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER180> How do people put up with the complete brokenness in commercial OSes? Is this really better than having to edit the occasional config file?

<comment><USER28> Personally, I know which process to kill when things go south. It's not early to acquire this information, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER181> When will computer and OS companies start telling us exactly what data they're taking and who they give it to? I was an Apple user from 2002 until last year. I just can't be spied on and telemetized any more. It's not beneficial to me and I can see all kinds of downsides. Especially since big tech has it in for anybody politically to the right of Bernie.

</comment><comment><USER182> I switched to a sleek amd based setup and ubuntu, 64 gigs of ram, tons of nvme storage and for a decent price. Sad to see macos go out my daily toolkit, but fortunately i no longer have to deal with this kind of crap. I still use mac occasionally but day by day it becomes less relevant.

</comment><comment><USER183> Switch to Linux and forget about it.

</comment><comment><USER184> congrats on realizing that your macbook pro 16" is a 4000$ facebook machine.

<comment><USER185> Please don't post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER186> You should know by now:

Apple is the Father, Apple is the Mother.

After Apple has re-invented or re-written the MSFT playbook of the 90s, nothing surprises me anymore.

Yet I cling to these machines, that take away the freedom to do with my hardware as I please. It's odd.

<comment><USER70> The UX is good. Freedom has always been a little more subtle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER187> In many unrelated ways, Mac OS X has just always been slow.

The first computers I ran OS X on were a Pismo Powerbook and one of the first iMacs. Both with upgraded hard drives and maxed out RAM. They were almost unusable, and we'd put classic OS back on them, a new release of OS X would come out, and repeat.

I later got a chance to use a shiny new G5. I couldn't believe how slow it felt. Same goes for the PowerBook G4. The first Intel MacBook Pro didn't feel any faster.

Somewhere around the i5, Mac OS started to feel 'okay'. But I'd always still feel blown away at how fast a similar machine felt running Windows or Linux.

But I've stuck with it ever since 2010. I remember talking about my 16", saying "It's really fast...for a Mac."

</comment><comment><USER188> All of these complaints are about security features.

Yes these features could be better implemented, but I'm happy they're there. It's very important to be able to opt out of them, but I like that they're the default.

Notarization needs a cleanup pass and the rest of it seems like it needs an optimization pass.

P.S. The rationale for notarization is to not distribute and thus advertise the filters and detection mechanisms Apple uses to detect malware. If these things were distributed then malware authors could analyze and evade them. Security through obscurity does make a certain amount of sense here as the Church-Turing thesis means there are an infinite number of ways to implement any given thing including malware and there is no single filter or analytical step that can detect all possible malware permutations.

<comment><USER70> Being able to run arbitrary software on the hardware Apple has graciously lent me is an annoying level of power that I'm not fully comfortable with either. I'm liable to shoot my foot off if Apple the all-seeing doesn't save me from myself.</comment></comment>