Ventura Issues
mjtsai.com
mjtsai.com
Between macOS, cpu architecture changes, and the fast pace of Electron’s release cycle (node ABI vs native modules), I’m constantly terrified about keeping builds running. Each upgrade … I’m just clenching my chest waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I never thought I’d become a late adopter of technology. But here we are.
But now I’m much like you. I’ve got stuff to do and digital places to be! If I don’t need an update, I don’t want one.
Of course it’s difficult to follow that trend but for a long time now it’s just been iterative updates.
Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older and my views on consumerism have strengthened, but I used to get excited to preorder their new products, now I couldn’t care less.
I started using macs around the 10.3 area, and boy was it slow and clunky. Was still glad it existed in the first place, but it really came a long way forward to the point it’s now faster than windows on ARM.
One annoying thing is that an iPhone SE 2020 that I bought now requires a fresher version of iTunes that is not available for 10.14. I guess I’ll just wait until it annoys me too much and eventually switch to some android.
Instead of gradually approaching perfection as bugs are fixed over time, software gets needlessly rewritten and introduces a bunch of new bugs. Thanks to the wholly misguided focus on "developer experience", the new version is more inefficient and more complex, leading to even more bugs than the previous one. They call it "progress", but it really isn't. It's an increasingly steep decline fueled by an abundance of developers that need to be given something to do.
that's why opensource platforms are so important, general computing is kind of screwed when apple or microsoft get distracted by something shiney
I guess it’s better than Microsoft, where Metro/WinUI/web rewrites of core apps actually remove tons of long-standing features.
I like the native support for 32:9… But that’s about it.
Yes, and so many other industries have lead the way as well.
On some level I think it’s for the better. I won’t buy perfect, indestructible, 0.1 micron tolerance carrot peeler for the price of a car (nor will buy a car summiting the state of the art technology for the price of a house). I’m for cheap goods striking a good feature/price balance.
But on the other end of the spectrum it all reminds me of John Siracusa’s legendary toaster reviews, every single one of them being so crappy in some specific way. Having overall nice experience for a reasonable price is becoming more the exception than the norm.
I’m still happy we’ve left the Win98 days and kernel level crashes are pretty much a thing of the past.
Well, it is all caused by senior managers counting JIRA tickets and certified scrum masters pushing the sand through the python.
Software enthusiasts in sandals loving technology have been replaced by people driven by compensation structures.
It often goes completely blank, it flickers a lot and in general it's so hard to find stuff in it - the search is bad and they have just jammed settings in places that don't make sense.
I am on a 2020 MacBook Air with m1 chip, 16GB ram - wouldn't expect performance problems in the settings app, yet here we are.
I also get that issue with Safari where it freezes the entire system, that happens on my work laptop which is an M1 Max with 32GB RAM
Now, I'm forced to scroll the pane on the left (unclear since scroll bars are invisible by default) to find the outermost setting, and then deal with nested navigation confined inside of the right pane. Also, gone are the recognizable icons, replaced with confusingly similar colored gradients and a hieroglyph icon that is unreadable because the contrast ratio terrible against the gradient. Also, the 'search' causes the entire left navigational pane to go blank and replace itself with search results, rather than 'show me the way' like it used to. Extremely disappointing!
Design wise...is a different story of course
If you’re seeing high CPU use and slow performance, it might be due to high usage of ObservableObject or other things that may be triggering updates under the hood more often than need be.
SwiftUI is very sensitive to the data model structure since it’s a react style setup.
You can still run into walls with SwiftUI, but there are fewer of them than there used to be.
As a software engineer, I find all three ecosystems (macOS, Windows, Linux) far from perfect, but the only one that ALLOWS me to do all the things I want and need to do, is Linux.
But with Apple Studio Ultra at least build times on both are amazing compared to a few years ago.
More relevant would be the death of Steve Jobs...
The thing is even Microsoft in the post Win 10 era is reliant on insiders to test Windows releases nowadays so there's not really much competition for desktop market nor is there anything huge at stake.
At this point I as a regular non-enterprise customer can't even pay for a churn free, ads free, forced apps free security updates only OS like Windows 7 - unexpectedly fast descent into sadness.
(Where possible I run Linux and thankfully it has worked fine so far but some work things still require Windows or Mac.)
I joke with my wife that being in the Apple ecosystem is sometimes like being married to this inconsistent and erratic spouse who oscillates between a few extremes. They bring out all this high romance show off blingy stuff that elicits high emotions and surprise and delight. But when it comes to the more mundane stuff like cleaning up and daily chores and keeping the socks and underwear off the floor they become lazy bums sleeping on the couch who can’t be bothered. They then try to make it up to you with a “hey babe check this out I can now do fancy thing xyz, see?” all the while ignoring the honeydo list of 125 things that have made no progress in the last three years. The funny thing is I’m still on the fence for determining which ratio the behaviors skew and how it all rolls up in net.
- WiFi driver crashed after I've turned off the wifi, causing kernel to panic, rebooting my device. That happened twice already.
- Plugging TV via HDMI via a USB-C hub, switching to HDMI sound output, causes all media to jump to +8-300 hours (even if given media length is smaller than that...), strangely enough changing audio output back to macbook's fixes the problem.
- Activity monitor (macos task manager) takes FOREVER to load, if top/htop can load in mere miliseconds, why not the native app?
- Sometimes app bar won't hide in fullscreen mode (don't really know if that's intended), hovering mouse over it will fix that.
While I love the overall build quality, battery life and hardware, the software has some measurable "jank" in it, to the point I'm seriously considering not to buy apple stuff again. I've considered those devices to work out-of-the-box and after sitting on barely working linux as my daily driver I've decided to go for it and buy one. Now I've lost all hope for "just works" system, they do not exist.
That said, I'm still running Monterey, having amended my practice of waiting until the after the first point release to now waiting until the 2nd to do a full version update because of Apple's tendency in recent years to introduce major bugs which are not compensated by major functionality improvements. Updating System Settings to look like iOS serves Apple's needs, not mine.
This is not a beta OS. It’s been out for months. Having things randomly freeze because you decided to connect an external drive is not really OK.
> I also am not sure how a Git Tower issue is a Ventura problem.
Presumably it used to work, which means AppKit broke something.
Neither was it written from scratch in a few months. It inherits the effort of two decades of work on what was originally OS X.
This bug has been happening for at least 4 major OS releases now…
I waited until the first point release to upgrade in hope of a seamless transition, but instead I've been keeping a list of issues. I've been meaning to do a writeup (or at lease a tweet), but haven't done so for the same reason I still haven't spent time trying to fix them. It's many small annoying things. There might be a way to fix some of them (like the generic icons for some filetypes, or my NAS not mounting at startup, or Finder constantly crashing), but so far I've decided to keep my sanity.
Do apple and ms share the same clueless designers?
It seems that even though the initial releases of Windows 10 and 11 get criticized, Microsoft is better able to balance new features and bug fixes than Apple for smaller updates. They're also far more transparent about known issues.[0]
edit: Windows is no nirvana, but it's not acceptable for Apple to reserve security updates to the latest major version, and to only fix a previous release's bugs in the next release. It does feel like a permanent beta. Maybe creating a separate, and well-staffed, QA and bug-fix team would sidestep Mythical Man Month issues, and allow them to maintain the current pace of new features? Think about it, Craig! I bet a lot of Mac users avoid Apple's apps because major third-party apps are more stable.
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/sta...
What is “suspend” here? Hibernate? Sleep? Something else?
(One bug of many: “Internet Filtering” randomly fails open after a few hours, allowing private browsing and no filtering on child accounts.)
Now, each time I plug it in to the monitor whatever will happen is pretty random. Sometimes it gets the full EDID from the monitor and everything is as I want it to be, including resolutions, refresh rate and positions. Sometimes, I get partial EDID and only some refresh rates available (my monitor goes up to 144Hz, sometimes macOS can only do 60 or 75Hz). When that happens, resolutions and screen positions may or may not be ok. Most of the time the laptop screen is set to mirror the monitor which is pretty much never what I wanted.
Other times it just doesn't properly detect the monitor which stays blank until I disconnect and reconnect - at which point any of the above paragraph might happen.
More rarely, the computer freezes and I need to force shutdown.
And if I edit a file in downloads and save it - finder sorts it at the top (I sort by date) but an upload file dialog in safari doesn’t see the new date
- Revealing files in Finder (either from the title bar menu or a command in another app) sometimes doesn’t work, revealing an ancestor folder instead of the actual file, or sometimes doing nothing at all.
- Finder sometimes loses all of its sidebar items.
- Finder sometimes forgets which sidebar sections are expanded.
- Sometimes mounted drives disappear from the Computer view, even though they are still mounted and in use.
- Finder windows sometimes don’t get focus when I click on them, even though Finder does become the frontmost app.
btw, if you've ever heard of the word kaizen(改善), the above would be called its opposite "kaiaku" (改悪)
Since upgrading to 13.1, notifications have been severely problematic. Slow, delayed, clicking on Slack notifications would open the app minutes after the click.
This stackexchange reply solved the problem for me: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/219528/34701
cd `getconf DARWIN_USER_DIR`
rm -rf com.apple.notificationcenter
killall usernoted; killall NotificationCenter
# restart computerAt the same time, there's so much stuff going on in macos that there's a very wide surface area for random things like this. I wonder how many people work on it, if I had to guess it would be in the hundreds
Going around making the world better doesnt rank, isnt visible work, isnt tracked or roadmaps, isnt rewarded, and frankly, it's not as fun being a 0.1X hacker tackling the gross ugly old shit, especially when the org wont say thank you either.
I understand the relentless need to innovate, do cool stuff, etc., but somewhere along the way a line was crossed.
A good time to throw in the term exnovation.. there's a reason you rarely hear it, but there's a reason somebody came up with it.
That's not the right idea. Mac OS X 10.3 through 10.7 all took well over a year of development. Yearly major releases is too fast. https://robservatory.com/a-full-history-of-macos-os-x-releas...
> I would surmise that their OS reliability and stability issues have more to do with the switch from Objective-C to Swift than anything else.
There's no evidence of this. Apple itself was one of the slowest adopters of Swift, because it needed ABI stability to put Swift in the OS. https://blog.timac.org/2022/1005-state-of-swift-and-swiftui-...
I don't know whether to blame the monitor or the KVM, but one of my desktops on Windows will try to feed my monitor an unsupported resolution at boot.
Not if I switch to another KVM input and back. Not if I wake it after suspend. Not if I boot the Linux install. Just Windows on a fresh boot.
Don't get me started on the mess that seems to be HDMI.
Apple rewrote the SMB code to make it closed-source starting with 10.12, I believe; the immediately noticeable effect was that it became far buggier.
Must have had some serious managers involved.
It was a bumpy release and it's not remembered fondly, but it introduced a number of fundamental features that modern iOS/Mac users depend on, like iCloud.
The previous version from 2009, OS X 10.6, was essentially a maintenance/refinement release with few new features while the rest of Apple was heavily focused on launching the iPhone and the App Store. Many people consider 10.6 to be the strongest OS X release, but it feels positively retro by today's standards.
> Mail now loses the mailbox selection when you start a search, instead changing the selection to All Mailboxes, which is rarely the scope that I want.
This one isn’t new to Ventura. This happened all the time to me as far back as Big Sur:
> External drives still take minutes to mount or sometimes never mount automatically. Sometimes I can manually mount them from Disk Utility. Other times I need to reboot or disconnect other drives first.
The real question is, has the author opened Feedback Requests about these things? If not, don’t expect them to get fixed any time soon.
I've encountered failing USB disks which appear to work fine on macOS, but suddenly operations take minutes to perform and can block operations system wide. They don't report errors, and they don't show as CPU use in any program, but everything on the system slows to a crawl when you hit sensitive spots on the disk.
It's worth removing external storage devices and adding them back one by one any time you have a hanging or slow Mac to diagnose.
Apple hates to scare or confuse users, but if a disk drive is taking a four orders of magnitude more time to do operations than it used to, I'd like my computer to please let me know.
And if you do open 'Feedback Requests', don't expect them to get fixed any time soon.