After following the changes as well as the issues in Catalina since it was released, I'm in no hurry to upgrade to it. I actually dread that Apple would, in a few short months, announce a new major release with even more changes and new features. So here's my short open letter to Apple.
Dear Apple:
Eat your false pride and do a reset on macOS – in WWDC 2020, don't add a new major macOS release, and don't have a new release name with funny stories of how your crack marketing department came up with it. Accept that you messed up, just like you messed up with the Mac Pro and tried to save face by saying that you "painted yourself into a thermal corner" (but didn't say why you went into radio silence for years). Then work on a stability focused release without adding major new features. We know you don't focus or spend as much on Mac/macOS as you do on iPhone and iOS. Introspect and realize that you bit a whole lot more than you can chew (even with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash) with macOS Catalina.
Fix the design, fix the data loss issues, fix the Time Machine issues, fix the iTunes "replacements", fix the performance issues of APFS on magnetic hard drives, fix Catalyst, improve your QA/QC...the list of big ticket items is long enough to keep your tiny macOS team busy for another year or two.
Follow a tick-tock cycle if you can't solve this with your current organization structure and people – one feature release a year, followed by (another) one whole year for stabilization and tiny incremental improvements.
It takes a big mind to accept mistakes, accept them sooner than later, and then correct them. It's high time for you to grow up (being in the top two or three in market cap and all) and start doing this. You'll find people more accepting of deficiencies/issues and more willing to wait for fixes when you communicate like an adult and treat your customers as adults.
[P.S.: If I have to lose some virtual points for this critical comment, so be it]
Not upgrading either, because I have, you know, real work to do. Which is something that Apple seemingly does not understand these days.
I don't care about marketing gimmicks, fancymoji, "mail stationery" or other crap. I care about having a stable operating system where I can get work done. I care about having a Mail.app that WORKS.
I think we are in an unfortunate situation where Apple's solutions (hardware+software) are far better than the competition, but still suck. And competing with Apple these days is immensely difficult: you need to have huge capital reserves (which Microsoft has), and execute well on good combined hardware+software designs (this is where Microsoft doesn't quite hit the mark).
I wish Apple had a competitor which would make "it Just Works" hardware and software. But I'm afraid we are stuck for the time being.
SSDs still can't compete on byte/dollar. You can get 10TB of magnetic drives for less than $200 while that much in SSD will cost you several times as much. (Certainly the gap narrows for smaller drives, and most users don't need that much space, so SSD by default makes sense.)
That’s true. But I don’t really care about the performance of my external hard drives. They store movies, photos, etc where as long as the hard drive can keep up with the streaming requirements - any hard drive can - it doesn’t matter.
The other purpose is backups. Again if my backups are slow, who cares?
> I don’t really care about the performance of my external hard drives. They store movies, photos, etc
I care very very very much about the speed of the drive that stores my video files. I need to be able to open and seek through them quickly so I can find the clip I'm looking for. When you're working with ProRes stuff, this becomes a big deal.
Luckily, good quality spinning hard drives can be fast enough, at least for my needs. Unfortunately, they're only fast enough when they're not running APFS. :(
> Luckily, good quality spinning hard drives can be fast enough, at least for my needs. Unfortunately, they're only fast enough when they're not running APFS. :(
Nothing prevents you from putting for videos on an HFS+ volume and use it from Catalina. It just can't boot from one.
Good point—this conversation got a little muddled. I actually use either ZFS or NTFS + Tuxera for external drives on Mac, which works great (especially ZFS).
Just listing a bunch of photos is going to have terrible performance on APFS. They don't need to make it work amazingly on hard drives, but they need to do some basic things like lumping together related metadata.
In the context of where you store photos, videos, etc where you want to be able to use massive cheap magnetic media you would use an external hard drive. You would still boot from your internal hard drive. If you have a Fusion drive, more than likely the OS would be on SSD. If you were unfortunate enough to have the cheapest iMac with only magnetic hard drives - it would still be less of a pain and more performant to buy a small SSD external drive as a bout/app drive and an external magnetic drive running HPFS.
I completely agree with you, but it's very difficult to replace the 2.5" drive in recent iMacs, and Apples price for the SSD is unfortunately not $120.
In my opinion the base included option should be a reasonably sized M.2 SSD, with an option to increase the size of said M.2, or to add a 1TB (or larger) 2.5" drive as an extra if more storage is needed.
Replacing the HDD on an iMac is non-trivial. This is not only due to the fact that you have to unglue and then re-glue the screen, but there is also a non-standard thermal sensor on the Apple HDDs which you need to circumvent when putting a standard SSD in which doesn't have that sensor (if you don't, the iMacs fans will always spin at 100%).
It’s a desktop. Why replace the drive instead of just using an external drive? I could understand not wanting to lug around an external drive with a laptop.
And how exactly do you use an external drive? Due to the limitations of the internal drive, I have used quite a variety of external drives with my iMac, but no solution is really good and all are much inferior to an internal drive. USB 3 drives work the best, but are limited and speed as is the number of USB ports on the mac. Going via hubs is possible, but reduces the reliability of the connection, I keep getting drive disconnects. Also, I haven't really been able to find a reliable Thunderbolt 2 drive.
Which ones? Can you list one, which doesn't disconnect from time to time without unmounting the file system?
I used a thunderbolt enclosure from OCW and eventually the file systems were corrupted beyond repair.
I’ve never had that problem, using a Buffalo drive station mini (which I upgraded the 2 SSDs without issue either), neither with Akitito thunderbolt 3 4-bay thing. Both products are discontinued though. People complained about the Akitito one disconnecting on Amazon, from memory someone said the cable was a bit loose. I used an Apple thunderbolt cable from the beginning (because someone left out the included cable and it was coming from the US to NZ over Christmas...) and I dunno if that plays a part, but it’s snug and I’ve never had an issue.
Can someone please point out what the issues are? I am not challenging this statement, it is just that I am not aware of any specific issues with Time Machine so I am a bit worried about any problems (and if there is anything I can do to mitigate the risks).
I am using a separate, third party cloud backup but I still count on Time Machine for day-to-day operations.
Thanks in advance to anyone that could give me more info about this.
I have been bitten by Time Machine in the past. There is not much more frustrating than a fried computer and a backup that doesn't work and can't be recovered.
Since then I only use Carbon Copy Cloner [0]. It has very very very excellent documentation and it is well the worth the purchase. The documentation covers lots of backup scenarios, how to do recovery and dealing with error cases. It also lets you create bootable backups on external drives, though I have only used it for backups over the network.
I'm not affiliated, but I can't praise their work enough.
Thanks, but I wanted to understand what the actual problems of Time Machine are, especially with Catalina, and - most importantly - which are the symptoms I should be wary of.
Well one problem I ran into was because of the changes to iTunes audiobooks are now stored in the Books app but the Books app doesn't support external drives for media so the Catalina update includes hours of copying files from my external HDD to my primary Macintosh HD - filling it up almost entirely (I have/had about 300GB of audiobooks) - this was bad enough (as their was no UI telling me it was doing this) but then Time Machine kicked in trying to back up these files (I had excluded the external drive but obviously not the primary partition) but because I ran out of space during the initial Catalina upgrade run, their were lots of artifacts which also got added to Time Machine. Time machine itself started trashing for hours.
I lost probably a day (to a day and a half tidying things up and cleaning up stuff that was not my fault) and of course I have no decent way of managing audiobooks now.
Yeah, no. CCC goes way above and beyond. Creating verifiable, bootable copies, being able to bundle tasks together, creating recovery volumes, being able to backup locally, remotely or to images etc etc.
Rsync is a good tool but CCC gives massive quality of life. Some of that won’t even be possible with rsync. And rest would require building a complicated set of scripts. Paying Bombich, to deal with all the headaches and mac os shenanigans, $50 every couple of years is a much better deal.
And its not a lock-in like other backup tools. You can access specific files inside the backup without CCC.
CCC + Arq cover all my bases when it comes to backup and restore.
In my own case, TM lost the ability to make new backups to an USB-connected HD. It doesn't report errors. It doesn't explain. Trying to find something useful in Console is a PITA. The only visible symptom is that a few minutes after each backup starts, it ends without copying all that it promised at the start of the process.
I suspect the root cause is some 3rd party software interaction. But since the 3rd party software I have is installed and required by my employer, it's hard to do an A/B comparison.
A significant portion of my hard drive has been completely eaten up by old backups that I can’t seem to remove. I have tried every solution that google provides, there doesn’t seem to be a way to erase these old backups without doing a factory reset.
A bit late on the reply, but here are a couple of places to look – "Time Machine and Backing Up in Catalina". [1] Also see mjtsai.com for Time Machine related posts on Catalina.
That wasn't introduced by Catalina though, it has been there since forever.
For what I understood it happens when the macbook is forced to go to sleep/loses connectivity while in the middle of a backup. It doesn't cleanly unmount the remote file system and it causes data corruption.
There are some ways of "restoring" the remote FS but they may or may not work, are very slow, opaque (what actually was fixed?) and flaky.
I just switched to an external USB drive for Time Machine and not looking back
If I understand this correctly it corrupted an already existing on-going Time Machine backup so that you had to start just as if you had bought the Time Capsule?
And this was made explicit by an OS error at the end (or at the start) of a backup operation?
If TM detects an I/O error while writing to a networked backup volume, it aborts the backup and forces a filesystem check on the remote disk image at the start of the next backup. This fails, because the filesystem actually is corrupt and has been for some time. You had no idea, of course, because TM only reports four-horsemen level errors in the UI, and silently eats the rest. You even had a good run of "successful" backups afterwards, so long as you managed to avoid changing any files in directories with damaged metadata in your backup.
Anyway, as your digital life flashes before your eyes, TM helpfully offers to delete all your backups and start with a fresh disk image now, or delete all your backups and start with a fresh disk image later. And you can't blame it, really, because the filesystem has had some unknown, nonzero amount of corruption for an unknown, nonzero amount of time. For all anyone knows or can prove, the whole backup is random garbage.
This fractal of failure is specific to backups over WiFi. Backups to USB-connected disks aren't that reliable either, because HFS+, but USB backups have all the nines of reliability compared to network backups.
I’m surprised that nobody here is talking about this... Federighi and co had an internal mea culpa and announced some big changes to the way their internal development works. All signs point to this years releases being “snow” versions.
> one feature release a year, followed by (another) one whole year for stabilization and tiny incremental improvements.
In theory this is more or less what they have been doing (with both iOS and Mac), they just have been batching up the stabilization and slapping a whole new version number on it. But I don't disagree.
This is one of the big reasons why Snow Leopard is legendary as a favorite OS X (now macOS) release - it focused on reliability and performance rather than adding new features. I wish more software would follow that sort of major release cadence!
Catalina could certainly do with a refinement release for internals (e.g. APFS) as well as UI polishing.
Disclaimer: I've been using Catalina as my main OS since it came out.
I said the same thing about Apples QA. I highly doubt they even do half the QA that the Ubuntu team does. It's like Apple is so cheap that they treat their users as their personal QA. They also don't like users who are a bit more advanced tech wise so they don't try to test what they may do. It's like they only want to sell to morons and suckers. Security wise I get that downloading something off of the internet is risky, but why the hell are you telling me that KNOWN gpl software downloaded from legitimate and verified sites could potentially be harmful? They treat their machines as a point of contact for the sake of making more money by channeling less savvy people through ways that require you to pay for something.
I have been using Catalina on my dev machine since the public beta and have none of the issues you claim. Catalina is my favorite macOS yet. Just because it doesn’t work the way you want doesn’t mean Apple messed up.
I don't understand the motivation of "works for me" comments like this.
Is your point that you believe other people are just hallucinating their problems, or that you believe they've 'used it wrong' and brought problems on themselves, or that if you personally haven't experienced a bug, then it's not an important bug?
I personally like seeing the “works for me” posts. It helps me gauge if the reported problems are universal, or just hitting a subset, which helps me decide when to roll the upgrade dice.
BTW, I did finally upgrade to Catalina last week and it’s been going fine, with the exception of losing 50% of my Steam library to the 32-bit graveyard....
Does losing data when people use a product like they always do also count within the scope of "doesn't work the way you want" and mean that Apple didn't mess up?
Nobody was complaining of the changes here but the fact that Catalina is littered with bugs. It’s absolutely impossible that the bugs somehow function well on your Catalina installation. I suspect you’re either a fanboy and that you put your judgement after your pride or maybe you are a light user and didn’t run into these bugs
This is an easy Google search, but I'll add it just in case someone hasn't done it yet. If you'd like to avoid upgrading to Catalina until you think it's ready, but still get security updates, etc., run this in your terminal:
The dot comes back after a minor update. But it doesn't show Catalina anymore. Just the dot. Running this makes it go away. Until software update is started again. It's like the option to install software from anywhere. That goes away too after an update. It seems to be Apple's way of fucking with power users who dare do things that it doesn't want them to do. Or maybe it's just another bug in the sea of bugs that is MacOS. Hard to say.
That will clear all ignored updates. From the CLI docs it doesn't look like there's a way to do it individually but there's probably a plist somewhere you could modify.
While Catalina certainly isn’t perfect, the issues are a bit overblown from my point of view. I’ve been running 3 different machines on it since release (hackintosh tower, 2017 iMac, 2015 MBP), two of which are used on a daily basis, and they’ve all been fine. The permissions prompts were annoying for the first hour after install and it’s been smooth ever since.
But my use case is almost exclusively programming and Blizzard games, so maybe the problems are centered around particular types of software or something.
Permanent data loss in multiple Apple cloud applications is the biggest issue I've seen, followed by a pretty gnarly permissions issue that I can't quite wrap my head around. But data loss and security issues are the two largest problems you can have with an OS, so really the contempt people have for Catalina is not overblown, IF they run into these issues.
There is several software that doesn't work with Catalina. In my case RingCentral meetings.
But in general people shouldn't downgrade to it... it is 100% a downgrade, as it removes features available in the previous version.
The vista prompts appeared every time an app was doing something that required elevated privileges which, back then, was all the time.
This issue is totally overblown and, TBH, I like to know what application has access to what data on my machine. If the price for that is a one-time prompt per application, I'm willing to pay that.
If you are not and you are willing to forego the security advantage, then use spctl to disable Gatekeeper
From a file access point of view in Catalina, the OS’ “left hand” still doesn’t always seem to know what its “right hand” is doing.
For example, just today I tried to save a file on top of an existing file, and when the system panel prompted me, I said Replace. That appeared to be accepted but after the panel closed the app failed to actually save, citing something about how I do not have access to the target file. I used the Finder to trash the old file and retried, and then it worked. From a user point of view, this is exactly the kind of work-around that should never be required, and I can imagine some people not even trying and just thinking everything is broken.
And as an app developer these things are even more frustrating because I literally cannot tell all the ways a user “might” have an issue anymore. How many awful combinations of file-related failures are there? How many obscure messages are possible, and is a message even displayed for every case?
If a system is really complex, it is not only hard to get it right once but it is really hard to keep it right over time. I am worried that all these special cases will just be fixed and re-broken for months on end.
I would say no, not worth it if you rely on using your mac for developing software and don't want to spend two days getting everything to work again!
I run 10.15 at work, and 10.14 at home, and so far, here are a couple of the issues I've run with 10.15.
1) Some weirdness around XCode and XCode Command Line Tools that made installing node-gyp a huge pain. I mean, look at these instructions and tell me if this is something you want to deal with: https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/blob/master/macOS_Catalin...
2) Change of default shell in 10.15 from bash to zsh. Kind of minor, but Apple doesn't want to use Bash 5.2 because of licensing. Great.
3) Lack of support for 32 bit programs. This is actually a big deal for me, since a course I am taking requires the use of WinBugs (I know, we should use STAN :) ), which is only available in 32 bit pre-compiled binaries. There is an unfortunately large amount of software like this!
Every major update appears to uninstall xcode command line tools. All you have to do is that xcode-select --install or whatever it is, but I mean, god, how much testing do they do to not see this.
Also there's some weird bug with external monitors where after waking up from sleeping the TrueTone is maladjusted leaving the screen super dark- turning TrueTone off and back on again (of course) fixes it.
1. I hadn't seen that guide, but there is some issue where Catalina thinks that the command line tools installed are up to date, but `brew doctor` reports otherwise and you are forced to manually download the command line tools, just like in that guide.
2. I tried zsh briefly, then just used the bash that you can install via homebrew.
Catalina has much improved since its initial version. My development MacBook now only crashes a few times a week rather than a few times a day. The Apple Catalina developers clearly know what they are doing. /s
Sadly, my 2011 MacBook Pro won’t update to these later versions, so I just have to leave it running for months at a time.
Perhaps when the keyboard fails, someday, I’ll replace it, instead of just upgrading the RAM and drive.
Kidding aside, I would like to get a newer version someday with better screen resolution and size, but Apple seems to have many missteps to recover from the last 5 years or so.
I’m assuming an implied “/s” at the end of your comment.
FYI, You can replace the keyboard on a 2011 MBP; I've done it. Fiddly but not especially difficult. The 3rd party keyboard I replaced it with isn't as good as the original (in particular the backlight is very leaky) but it's not bad and gave the machine a new lease of life...
I also have a 2011 and still running El Capitan because I was concerned about how it would handle updates. What version are you running right now and how much RAM do you have?
I have a 2011 iMac that's running High Sierra (its last supported release). I upgraded it from its base 4GB to 20GB of RAM.
Since getting High Sierra, everything's been really smooth, but the Sierra -> High Sierra upgrade actually bricked my computer. It was perpetually stuck in the installation phase, bailing after 45 minutes because it couldn't unmount my partition. To Apple's credit though, after I used recovery mode to reinstall the OS, everything worked and my data was intact.
My 2017 Air crashed because it couldn't close Firefox. I just hit Cmd+q and it'd close...but remain open, drawing a ridiculous amount of power. I had to hold the power button down to keep it from running Firefox as if I was rendering a 4k video.
I have no clue why I never thought of that. I was kinda in a hurry and needed stuff up and running quick so I just went with the first solution that came to mind.
You are, doesn't mean it's correct. Look at it this way. It's been happening for a while, on multiple platforms, where other software isn't exhibiting the problem, applying Occam's razor suggests the issue lies with the software.
I accept your point of view, but the GP was suggesting this is another in a long list of bugs introduced into Catalina. Since, anecdotally, I have first hand experience of this affecting me on other platforms as well as previous macOS versions, logic and reason suggest that the problem was not in fact introduced in Catalina, but lies squarely at the foot of Mozilla. Not everything is fair and balanced. I believe, in this case, that Mozilla are solely at fault, not any of the OS vendors/distributors.
Apologies if this comes across as tetchy; I've been dealing with pettiness and unreasonableness all day. My intention was not to defend Apple (or anyone else) or to besmirch Mozilla. I was merely trying to be helpful by pointing out that this problem affects the same software in the same way on different platform.
The alternative interpretation is that Firefox is a particularly effective toolkit for finding OS bugs.
No OS should ever fall over because of a misbehaving application. That's one of their fundamental jobs, and failing at it is a defect. The fact that all the major OSes do doesn't vindicate them; nor is it particularly surprising that Catalina doesn't pull away from the pack. It is, however, disappointing.
> The alternative interpretation is that Firefox is a particularly effective toolkit for finding OS bugs.
That is one way of looking at it. I'd argue that it's not a particularly usefully of looking at it. Ideologies aside, your last sentence says a lot. The fact remains that buggy software from a cross platform vendor is causing this issue across the platforms they provide the software for. Be under no illusion, the issue is Mozilla's a no-one else.
Sounds to me like a hardware problem for the two of you. My MBP is running Catalina and I can count on one hand the number of times it has crashed since I bought it 3 years ago (obviously not running Catalina back then).
Oh, and one of the times it crashed I distinctly recall setting it on the table too roughly and hearing a ping sound emanate from the closed laptop. When I opened the lid I saw the kernel panic screen. I'm chalking that one up to shock. It's been completely fine since though.
It doesn't make it any better. The MacBook Pro came straight out of the box after purchase and during the set up, I foolishly decided to upgrade to Catalina. The reduction in kernel panic with subsequent minor releases of Catalina suggests that part of the kernel crashes are software related. If the remaining crashes are caused by hardware problems, I am thoroughly disappointed in Apple's hardware quality. This is my first MacBook. My company only bought it because they do not want me to run a Linux laptop, as they can't secure it. Too be honest, it is has been a poor user experience so far.
Have you taken it in for service? If it’s still under warranty then they’ll fix it for you at no cost. Every company has the occasional defective product.
I’ve been using Macs since 1996 and have not experienced regular kernel panics on any of them since the early 2000s when I started using Mac OS X Public Beta. Your experience is frustrating but it’s the exception, not the norm. The fact that you can find other people, on forums like HN, who have also experienced problems is indicative of the selection bias of the Internet, nothing more.
If AHT shows no errors, clean install macOS. As in, wipe it totally, and reinstall. This is tedious but I expect Apple support will recommend it anyway. And if you've already done it, it might save time.
Wipe the drive, clean install macOS. Tedious but suck it up, it might fix the problem. But at least it will likely skip a step when sending it for warranty support. I don't recommend hesitating, it's not normal.
That’s interesting, with both of these operating systems, I have to remind myself every couple of months to reboot just to be on the safe side, since the actual machines never crash or force me to. When you say your MacBook is crashing, what does that actually mean? I recently realized my Emacs had 300 buffers in it going back many many weeks, and I decided to finally reboot the whole machine and just get back to a blank slate.
My catalina mac mini has never crashed, nor when it was mojave, nor my macbook air.... Actually, I thought OS crashes were an extremely rare event on all operating systems these days.
Apple really needs to have a "maintenance year" for software - where the majority of work is fixing bugs and simplifying complicated features, and minimal new features are added beyond those necessary to support new hardware.
I personally had so many bugs with Catalina that I decided to just wipe my device and start afresh with a clean install of Catalina off a USB stick. It helped a great deal, but I still have some bugs.
It looks like a lot of testing at Apple is done on either clean builds, or a simple upgrade from a year ago (while most real-life users have 3-4 upgrades stacked on each other)
Snow Leopard is such rose-colored-glasses nostalgia. That release was buggy as hell too and only came to be the "rock-solid" release that people love after like 8 months of bugfixes and patches.
With a great deal of caution I finally upgraded one of the 5 Macs I own to Catalina over the weekend. First thing I notice is that my NFS mounts no longer work since, they were mounted at a non-standard location. I've shelved further plans to update until I resolve NFS mounts issue using the automounter. Sigh. The apple ecosystem is becoming harder to use. But I really have no choice I do a lot of iOS and MacOS development, and its the only platform I can use for that purpose.
> Sigh. The apple ecosystem is becoming harder to use. But I really have no choice I do a lot of iOS and MacOS development, and its the only platform I can use for that purpose.
So, first off, sincere sympathy. I feel you, I've been there.
My current recommendation to people is: whatever you do in your personal life (Apple, Android, Windows, whatever), keep your Apple-related work environment completely segregated — that usually just means one dedicated Mac and the test iOS devices. Do not use any of it for anything else than work. Do not mix a home server with work-Mac-related stuff and personal life. Do not use the same AppleID. Do not mix anything.
It's generally a good approach anyway, regardless of one's development platform/target.
It then becomes natural to e.g. never worry about NFS and simply use the "recommended" Apple path — like some Thunderbolt drive, or whatever MacOS networks with these days.
The downside that it obviously induces additional cost is debatable:
- developing for Apple systems usually translates to higher income, and Apple is somewhat "fairly" (at least in their mind) forcing some extra burden of cost on developers, but it's likely marginal for said devs (although hostile to developing markets, at first glance).
- work-related machines generally fall under different tax regimes than personal stuff, and while we surely all dabble into the grey area, it's always better to have it 100% legit work or personal but not both. Insurances etc. may care too.
So... Yeah. I hope you can segregate and rationalize the work-Mac(s) to follow Apple's best practice (whatever they push as "This is the way" for MacOS).
I've done what you suggested in this paragraph, and do this as well. It means you can't use a personal iPad with Catalina's Sidecar feature, which just sucks knowing a second monitor is almost right there.
> But I really have no choice I do a lot of iOS and MacOS development, and its the only platform I can use for that purpose.
I was planning on working on a macOS product but I will hold off for a couple of years and see what happens with the platform. Depending on a diva like Apple that introduces breaking changes without notice is a risky business.
For example, Cocoa and OpenGL are clearly on its way out but nobody knows how long they will be supported. SwiftUI is probably the way to go but it's not supported by the majority of macOS devices.
I really wish the community would take over and fork MacOS at its lowest opensource/forkable denominator to start a free-as-in-Linux, MacOS binary-compatible alternative. Something that is stable and predictable for hardware makers to distribute and drivers to be written for. And inviting for the wider user base to adopt knowing that their favorite apps will run just the same. That would be a game-changer as pc hardware makers are at a dead end running Windows from a company that is not focused on its OS anymore, Linux unfortunately doesn't seem to ever cut it with the massses and app makers and MacOS is only available as a user hack in non apple hw.
Now this would be a serious challenge. Everything from APIs to the ecosystem to the apps themselves have licenses and, righteous or not, would be game for lawsuits left and right should the project be a head turner at some point.
This ex Apple OSX engineer in fact paints it as doomed from the start:
> I really wish the community would take over and fork MacOS at its lowest opensource/forkable denominator to start a free-as-in-Linux, MacOS binary-compatible alternative.
As your Quora link points out - it's not feasible to do this. The killer features of macOS - the UI framework, all other OS frameworks, the interesting drivers integrating all of this - are not available. macOS more than other OSes is an integrated package. And that stuff is not open source.
The parts of macOS that are open source are just sufficient to allow you to make your own Unix-like distro. OpenDarwin and PureDarwin are efforts that bolt on open source tools, X11 and desktop environments on top of Darwin. The result is an open source desktop like FreeBSD or some Linux distro. Then it turns out that the macOS kernel is not really a killer feature of anything, and if you're looking at an open source desktop you'd better run FreeBSD or a Linux distro anyway.
Technically, PureDarwin is binary compatible with macOS. You can take the macOS version of, say, tar or grep, and it will run on PureDarwin. Any command line utility that doesn't integrate with macOS specific frameworks (i.e. all the stuff they import from FreeBSD, stuff from MacPorts) will probably work. That's not very interesting though. All that stuff is there on Linux and FreeBSD too.
Your Quora link gives some big time and team requirements for this to happen, but it also touches on the fact that there's really no business model and lots of legal risks involved. At this point, I don't think an open source clone of macOS is ever going to happen. If we're going to get something that's close, it's not going to be based on the Darwin kernel, but something in the direction of Darling [1].
People always point to GNUStep. But Cocoa is just a fraction of the frameworks you need on macOS, and GNUStep only implements a fraction of Cocoa. There's a reason Darling is just beginning to run graphical apps - nearly all the work is yet to be done.
Copying files to my iDevice seems entirely broken in Catalina. not that it was all puppies and unicorns in itunes but it's gotten worse.
Devices don't show up in the finder. Devices do show up but no info is shown. Devices physically plugged in don't show up. Devices do show up but files tab is empty.
When it does work there is no indication it's working. Drag a file to an app and ... nothing, 100% silent. No copy progress bar, no spinner, no indication what-so-ever that it is or is not working.
That’s a massive issue for me too. I used iTunes to transform audio files into a podcast format and play it in the Podcast app. Now I have to do it via iTunes for Windows. It works, but the files disappear after a few days from my iPhone. A complete mess.
It's the same for me except for 32-bit apps (which turned to be a productivity boost since I can no longer play any games). Also Catalina fixed a weird bugs with the 3 external monitors which required, before, multiple unplugging and plugging to display normally.
You must not develop anything in Perl 5 because I can't get a single Perl 5 version after 5.26.1 to compile through perlbrew - at least one if not multiple tests fail.
I'm not saying that yours is not a valid data point, but "developing in perl" strikes me as likely to be a fairly tiny subset even of developers in general.
Fair. Catalina is the last version of macOS that I will run. I will move my mac mini to Linux after Catalina loses security support, should it live that long, or I'll replace it with a NUC running Linux if it doesnt.
I had to boot into safe mode to log in to iCloud, to get an auth code from a device I removed months ago, just to remove the notification flag that said I needed to log in to use certain apps.
I don't get how they can keep making buggy OS upgrades like this. I mean is the wealthiest company in the world too cheap to hire a good QA team? Or do they just assume those who bitch on their forums are their QA team?
Codeweavers has this working with their professional Crossover app. I recall it requiring some hacky tricks and a special compiler for the shimming, so there's been some issues trying to upstream the changes.
I am using the crossover app now and it works but it feels painfully slow compared to running Wine. Not sure exactly why, I am running a very simple text editor.
I upgraded my MBP (late 2013 edition) 10 weeks ago.
I have experienced more forced software (mac news and some siri stuff)
Additionally the Microsoft office installation I had with a valid license is no longer functional, and was "upgraded" to MS office 365, which is a subscription based model that seems to run online rather than locally.
I refuse to pay for the upgrade, and just use Libre Office now.
Further more I am looking into best compatible linux system to run on the hardware.
So far I have read that the cinnamon based manjaro linux should be reasonable.
Do you have software that needs Catalina to run? Why not downgrade back to Mojave?
I have the late 2013 MacBook Pro as well, and I've only just upgraded to Mojave a few months ago (and did an SSD upgrade to a NVMe+adapter [1] while at it).
I'm sorry. I have a late 2013 mbpro too with Linux on it. Frankly, it's terrible. It doesn't sleep. Connecting thunderbolt monitors can only be done before booting. The os has needed to be reinstalled at least once when it ran out of battery. Nowadays, no external monitors work at all, not even display port. Brightness cannot be controlled. Lately redshift has stopped working. It's been a nightmare.
Linux on laptops is like osx on any machine. It only runs on Linux hardware well from what I hear. I'm quite skeptical of that even given my previous experiences running it.
I'm currently considering an xps 15 as I had ordered a Lenovo p1 and after almost two months they still haven't shipped it. Cancelled that garbage. The laptop space in 2020 is frankly shit, way worse than it was in 2014. It's devolved. Microsoft doesn't even make an os anymore, just malware that goes by the name "Windows" so there is literally no alternative for people who refuse to use such malware. Apple, Lenovo, Dell, or some crappy (hw wise) clevo Linux laptop like the system 76s. Maybe it's time to go back to a desktop as technology keeps devolving.
(K)ubuntu, mint, manjaro, and a few others I don't remember. I went through a whole slew of them and didn't find one that was stable, not even mint. One of the issues is that problems are intermittent and start without any obvious cause. One day the external monitor works, the next day it doesn't. Etc. This is a huge issue when the problem hits six months after purchase and the only solution is to reinstall. I do remember kubuntu used to be stable back around 2007 or so but that was a different era. In 2010, it made it to about six months before the x wouldn't boot anymore after I changed the title bar color or something like that. On my current iteration on the mbpro, I've gotten about 4 months of use out of it after it failed within the first week. Often just changing something minor like the display manager's wallpaper will kill the entire desktop environment. In no case was there an actual kernel crash. It's always the gui. And it doesn't seem to matter what desktop environment runs. None that I've tried have been stable.
Why not use Arch which is Manjaro is based off? The Arch community is larger so support should be better. I have the 2013 mbp running Arch with Gnome and I really like it.
Oh, thanks for the idea! I actually want to migrate to arch a little bit at the time since I am not completely fluent in all the processes, and I would like to understand what each setting does. At the same time I want to have something that is functional from day one. Maybe I am overestimating the time needed to get arch running, I am a ubuntu/debian user through 11 years.
the one I used to have before catalina was Office 2016, I am not sure if my license is compatible with 2019.
I just tried the packagefile from the link, and after installing I am still stuck with MS office 365.
At this point, libreoffice does the job, and I cant be bothered to invest more time to get MS office, 2016 edition 64 bit, or whatever would be applicable in my case, to work like before catalina.
This post seems like a sensible and fair summary of the current situation for users who can't upgrade yet. There's also a group of users (myself included) who don't want to upgrade. In my case, I'm very familiar with iTunes and I don't want to switch to a new, untested music app with a different UI.
Sure, but the podcast management for my iPod Nano on Catalina is dreadful, to the point where I gave up and switched to using my Android phone for podcasts.
I do, but I’m not ready to abandon obscure bits of software from years ago that accomplish one complicated task and therefore have no current maintainer. I’ve been too busy to devise a game plan for this, and in the meantime Mojave is running fine. I wonder if the music app will run on Mojave
Since I need 32bit support and VMs are not option due to no HW acceleration and overall shitty experience (I can’t help but blame Apple for that too) Mojave will be the last macOS version I run before I make the switch to FreeBSD in a few years.
What is the issue with VMs? I develop using them all the time - I’ve got at least five VMs (Linux, BSD, and Windows) loaded on my MBP right now and use three of them constantly.
Only real bug that annoys me in Catalina is the OS switching around the external screens when I dock my MacBook. I have 2 monitors connected, and almost every morning, after docking, I have to go into System Preferences and drag them around. Very annoying, but it's a bug that's been there for years.
I also have 2 monitors and I used to have this problem too! I also use spaces, and all the spaces would be switched over, so I'd have to do a lot of switching.
Here's what works for me, if I dock my laptop and find that the screens are reversed:
1. Unplug monitor A, wait for screens to stabilize.
2. Unplug monitor B, wait for screens to stablilize.
3. Plug in monitor A, wait for screens to stabilize.
4. Plug in monitor B, wait for screens to stabilize.
And that fixes it every time. My "default" monitor is set to be my laptop's monitor. Try reversing the roles of A and B if it doesn't work.
If you use spaces as well — I also find it helps to have an empty space as the first space for each monitor.
I've updated my mac book pro but not my imac. I use my imac mainly for browsing & light gaming and I'm not too eager to deal with some games not working anymore. And since I can't really tell any meaningful difference between my mac book pro and imac in terms of OS experience, I'm pretty confident that the upgrade adds no value whatsoever for me. Apple seems to have mostly done some security tweaks that are amazingly annoying, some window dressing in terms of UI that I mostly don't notice and lots of tweaks to bits of software that come with the OS that I never use. I'll probably do the upgrade eventually but I'm getting less and less out of these yearly upgrades.
I've actually been considering switching the imac to linux but it seems to be a bit of a hassle in terms of hardware support. I booted it once from a usb stick but that messed up my bt keyboard/trackpad pairing so recovering from that was a bit of a PITA.
I just can't stomach all the issues I know I'll run into for getting so little. I am very frustrated that I've lost access to my reminders (which I actually use/used a lot) because my phone updated and now my desktop OS can't see the "new" reminders. Unfortunately I'm not aware of another todo/reminder app that can "park" notifications on the iOS lockscreen so that they don't go away until I do them or reschedule them so I'm kind of stuck...
Since WWDC 2019, I have ran into at least one bug almost every day in Apple’s software and services. I wish that was an exaggeration.
I’ve always been a big proponent of Apple, and they’re still better than the alternatives for me, but I can’t recommend Apple to a new user until there’s a noticeable improvement in their quality control.
I still think there’s too much chatter, but it seems to have calmed down.
Where I work we turned on the ability for people to upgrade now. Before it was dodgy with all the pop up requests that were overwhelming. It seems to be a non issue in 10.15.2 and later.
I haven’t really come across anything that impedes our workflow at work.
As an iMac user for years, I've lately considered the idea of either a hackintosh or just giving up on MacOS completely.
I'm ready to upgrade to a new Apple desktop, and none of the options are even remotely enticing for the amount of money they require.
I just don't like the state of things anymore and 99.9% of what I do doesn't need MacOS. Though there is some investment into the ecosystem that will hurt a bit.
Would have to repurchase Serif products on Windows. As much as I enjoy Linux from time to time, I don't know that I could see myself moving to it full-time
I think things have changed some with using OpenCore now instead of the older system. It does take more initial setup but from what I've heard it's a bit more resilient when it comes to updates.
I'd still be scared of an update completely borking everything though...
I didn’t upgrade: I created a new volume and installed a fresh Catalina on it. Honestly it’s been working great for me and the battery life increased (probably because my old install was… uhm… dusty)
Yeah, I do this every time there is a major OS update and it saves me a lot of hassle. It also forces me to re-evaluate everything I had previously installed. Usually I end up with a much cleaner, smaller, and more optimized image. It also trains me to get very comfortable testing backups and restores and knowing how to quickly recover from any problems.
Thanks for this idea - I've been holding off on upgrading, but I would be much more comfortable installing on a new volume and migrate instead of upgrade.
Current Catalina is a great upgrade, if you’re running an earlier version of it :)
More seriously at this point most of the annoying issues seem to have gone away.
The lack of 32bit still prevents me from playing a few games, but I will continue to blame those developers rather than Apple - OSX has only supported 64bit platforms for a decade, there’s no excuse for any new software having been 32bit only in the last 5 years at least.
Have been using it since beta. Mostly behaved well enough, but bugs mounted over time. A clean install fixed them all. Especially annoying was it fucking around with iCloud. Will be the last beta I try.
Running two Catalina machines, I feel confident in saying that it is now a solid setup.
It is of course a disgrace that it took em 6 months to stabilise the OS.
I have no intention to upgrade any of my Macs to Catalina and neither do any of the Mac users I know. Even hardcore Apple fans will remain for the time being on Mojave.
Works fine for me developing on PyCharm on a new MBA. But on the other hand, I haven't used pre-10.15 macOS so I might be blind to some of the pain points of upgrading.
I don't think so; it started only after upgrading. It happens inconsistently when waking from sleep, possibly just when Chrome and/or Docker are/is running.
I spent the week-time trying it. I did install it on a USB drive. I started from a Carbon Copy Cloned version of my main OS that I updated.
I had to give up, I tried to update a project I am working on and after a 1-hour git pull would not finish even if there were only a few files to update.
Everything takes forever even if the CPU is almost idle, I suppose trying it on an external USB drive is a big issue even if I did that in the past with other macOS versions...
I had to downgrade from Catalina back to Mojave on my 2016 MacBook 15 TB, for some reason the browsers (Safari, Chrome) would stop responding to keyboard at all after a few hours in Catalina.
Dear Apple:
Eat your false pride and do a reset on macOS – in WWDC 2020, don't add a new major macOS release, and don't have a new release name with funny stories of how your crack marketing department came up with it. Accept that you messed up, just like you messed up with the Mac Pro and tried to save face by saying that you "painted yourself into a thermal corner" (but didn't say why you went into radio silence for years). Then work on a stability focused release without adding major new features. We know you don't focus or spend as much on Mac/macOS as you do on iPhone and iOS. Introspect and realize that you bit a whole lot more than you can chew (even with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash) with macOS Catalina.
Fix the design, fix the data loss issues, fix the Time Machine issues, fix the iTunes "replacements", fix the performance issues of APFS on magnetic hard drives, fix Catalyst, improve your QA/QC...the list of big ticket items is long enough to keep your tiny macOS team busy for another year or two.
Follow a tick-tock cycle if you can't solve this with your current organization structure and people – one feature release a year, followed by (another) one whole year for stabilization and tiny incremental improvements.
It takes a big mind to accept mistakes, accept them sooner than later, and then correct them. It's high time for you to grow up (being in the top two or three in market cap and all) and start doing this. You'll find people more accepting of deficiencies/issues and more willing to wait for fixes when you communicate like an adult and treat your customers as adults.
[P.S.: If I have to lose some virtual points for this critical comment, so be it]