Comment by pdimitar
5 months ago
Long ranty post.
I'll use the occasion to crap on macOS because yes, I experienced this, not to mention random devices disconnecting in conditions of higher memory pressure (i.e. starting a k8s cluster and doing tests, then tearing it down, then starting another etc.) -- one time even my keyboard disconnected which was annoying to say the least.
To this day my $300 dock sometimes doesn't at all get detected after I wake up my iMac Pro. A $8000 machine and an OS developed by trillion+ $ dollar company cannot properly wake up all devices after sleep. Yep. :|
I appreciate macOS as a system for users where SIP et. al. prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot -- Apple has mostly solved the problem of careless users clicking on stuff they really shouldn't. (Excluding phishing.)
But as a programmer, I am now on a course to gradually and eventually move back to Linux. Why?
- Everything is just faster. A Manjaro XFCE with the latest kernel (6.7 as of 2024-FEB-14) just makes everything fly on my AMD 5500U laptop. Telegram starts in 0.5s while my iMac Pro needs at least 5 seconds. Firefox with all its addons boots up in about 1.5s. I know all of the lag and delays are related to security scanning but it does get tiring after several years. As a programmer I want to say "everything in these directories is trusted, I'll suffer if I am wrong, now leave me alone" which of course I can't do.
- Related to the above: Intel Macs are likely unofficially now second-class citizens and frak all of us who invested in them, right? The iMac Pro costed me $8000 and I'll use it until it blows up in my face, that's non-negotiable for a $8000 machine. So I'd think whatever performance gains or optimizations are being done for macOS, the Intel architecture is probably a persona non grata already.
- Just lately Erlang's team fixed an absurd issue where due to JIT using memory mapping macOS literally shows me a popup while I am coding! Save an Elixir file in my NeoVim (which invokes the LS) and whoops, there, you have a micro popup that disappears after ~0.2s. And it can be a problem if you cancel it (has an X button inside which I assume is focused by default) but seriously, just working in your editor leads to micro popups that disappear fractions of a second later... WTF. And their fix? They moved to use another memory mapping API. Which is a workaround in fact, not a fix. I feel for them so hard.
- A lot of goodies are hidden behind paid software which is 100% fine by me (obviously we all want to be paid for our work) but it does send a signal that Apple doesn't care much -- iStat Menus is a good example and SoundSource is probably the best example (and strongly related to the original article); why do we need SoundSource at all? Why is this not handled by the OS? And again on the money issue, as much as I want to support other programmers, it starts feeling like you are being nickel-and-dimed as time passes by.
Honestly, after using macOS full time for about 4.5 years, I am not impressed. I like the displays a lot and I know I would miss them dearly and my eyes will be unhappy which is basically my main reason for sticking with macOS for a workstation (well that plus the $8000 investment I made 4.5 years ago which let's be honest, has paid for itself already, many times over).
Another thing I do like is the menu bar and I'll duplicate that functionality on my XFCE laptop soon enough, so not much of a loss.
I believe at one point I'll just start ssh-ing into my AMD 5500U laptop so I can reap the benefits of the amazing iMac Pro display while still having Linux's benefits on my side. And I didn't even mention how much I can tinker with it e.g. I wanted to experiment with various ZFS and bcachefs setups and of course I couldn't do that without a VM... did I mention I never found a truly good VM manager for macOS?
But that tinker-ability is just the tip of the iceberg and this comment became huge enough already.
If you have gotten this far -- any ideas how to properly secure an XFCE environment? I'll need to install Chrome and Zoom at one point but I don't trust their creators to not pwn my system the moment I run the installer and as we know X11 is not at all secure; likely both softwares will record each of my keystrokes and upload them somewhere. So, anybody knows how to properly isolate a desktop program on XFCE? And if that's not possible on XFCE I am open to migrate to whatever other DE allows it.
Thanks for reading.
People who have been doing hackintoshes or were installing Windows on Intel Macs have known for a while that macOS is rather slow compared to the competition and with of the lack of features/functionality you have to pay for on top of the way more expensive hardware it is a very bad deal.
I think people sticking with macOS are doing it for convenience and because it is hard to switch to something else when you have done things a particular way all your life. But considering the price of Macs, currently it is an unbelievably bad deal but as long as there are fools to pay the price nothing will change I guess.
Using my iMac Pro has objectively improved my eye health; the displays are amazing and my eyes are almost not getting tired.
But yeah, beyond that the deal gets worse and worse with time. Apple are dropping the ball, it's been visible.
As mentioned upthread, I'm very likely to start using my Mac as a thin client in the next years: get all the benefits of Linux (ultra speed included) with none of the drawbacks (insecure desktop environments; the X11 protocol literally allows you to capture all key presses once you connect), and all happening through the best displays there is.
So it's not about being a fool. There are objective benefits to using Macs. But, these benefits are dwindling with time, so the equation gets less and less in favor of Apple.
I cannot agree with you more. The iMacs prior to Apple Silicon were actually pretty good computers at a decent price everything considered, especially for the display indeed. And if you went with the big one like you did, you could actually upgrade most of the stuff easily, no Apple tax.
I am actually rather mad they stopped making them because it was clearly the best value in the whole Apple lineup, but also lowkey one of the best computers you could buy for the price (unless you needed something exotic or massive amounts of power).
And to be clear, I'm not saying all Apple customers are fools but I am saying that Apple are taking all its customers for fools, including the ones who supported them in their hard times in the PPC days and it feels rather greedy and nasty to me. But some of them try to justify every penny-pinching decision Apple makes and those ones I do think are complete fools and they do not help the case...
TBH I was thinking of getting a 5K iMac to do something similar but T2 Macs are kind of a pain in the ass so it doesn't feel ideal, especially since the 5K LGs are less expensive second-hand than the iMacs.
My fear is that it's going to take quite a while after they go downhill to go back to something acceptable, the way I see it, Tim Cook is dilapidating the brand to make a quick buck but ah well...
I’m lucky my current Mac sleeps well, but in the past I’ve resorted to sleeping the display only (and never sleeping the Mac itself) when I’ve had wake from sleep issues.
The additional power and heat is incredibly small in the long run, and without spinning rust it likely even extends the life as it doesn’t have cool/heat cycles.
I considered it but the iMac Pro has high idle power draw.
Though I probably wouldn't feel it because no matter what I tried I couldn't make it not wake up for 30s each 5 minutes anyway...
My $8000 M3 Max MacBook is having all kinds of crazy issues so it's not just Intel... Apple pays significantly less to SWengs than Meta/Google so I guess you get what you paid for on their side. I just wish I got what I paid for as well.
Yikes. I'm really sorry you're going through this. Are you considering alternatives, or are you collecting fixes?
I'll see if future Sonoma updates fix them or not. I have two other MacBooks and some NVidia-based laptop so it's not a single point of failure luckily.