MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

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

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.

Re: downloading Xcode, this page has saved me hours: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10335747/how-to-download.... It's just a list of direct links to each version of Xcode at apple.com. Mystery why Mac App Store downloads still can't be bulletproof after all these years.

> 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.

I'm literally halfway there as I type this, Xcode 'installing components'. Having to upgrade essentially everything just to get the right dev tools for the current iOS is madness, feels like buying a new house to fit the new coffeemaker...

I actually prefer the App Store approach because that way the majority of my updates are in one place and can be done automatically in the background. The problem is that it used to work fine and they managed to break it.

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 fk are you doing to your connections that you consider usb-c brittle?!?

I also upgraded days ago, assuming they would have had time to fix the bugs. However, I can say the USB-C external screen flicker was plaguing me before the upgrade and hasn't gotten worse. Turning off hot corners, oddly, helped, although the problem hasn't gone away.

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.

I don't share your issues with Catalina [1] but I have to agree Podcast app's UI design is very strange. The primary interface should be the "Episodes" tab.

Just like Twitter's UI, app developers think they know what content is best for you with a 'feed' or 'featured'... they've completely abandoned chronological ordered lists of content unless you click 2-3 buttons.

[1] Catalina has been painless for me, not sure why my experience was different than everyone else

> The Mail app will now randomly play the "new mail" sound.

It’s not quite random: it plays the sounds as it gets new email, but then it takes anywhere between a couple of seconds to a minute for the new email to be visible in the UI. Infuriating.

> 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.

I just normally kill the store-related daemons when that happens.

I've had a similarly painful experience upgrading last week. Though it doesn't seem quite so bad as the posters above, and after making a few fixes most everything is back to normal.

My one remaining serious annoyance is that my external monitor color settings are screwed up and there appears to be no fix. Reds are purple and everything is just a little washed out, which is a shame for a 4k monitor that was beautiful with Mojave.

Strangely, right before the computer restarts, or if booted in safe mode the color starts to look perfect again, but I can't seem to replicate that in normal operation.

This one drives me nuts. I mean what in the hell is that downloading doing that it manages to fail arbitrarily. This is downloading files, how the fuck can it be so complicated and broken.

Our help desk is wise enough to keep existing mac users on the oldest supported macOS version; but inevitably at some point in the future they'll have to roll out the latest version. This will be the week when I will exchange my macbook for a Windows 10 ThinkPad. A lot of our dev teams have moved to this setup alreay using WSL or a VM for Linux if really needed and it has been really smooth (our helpdesk staying on top of the Active Directory and Windows Update management game also).

Forcibly relocated to a refugee camp tent with leaking water pipes next to your air mattress. But at least everything around you in your tent is white, flat, and material and your coffeemaker works.

What makes you think that your experience is the typical one? I've had these problems as well and so have a lot of people I've talked too. Obviously that's just more anecdotes and doesn't prove anything but neither does your comment.

> My one remaining serious annoyance is that my external monitor color settings are screwed up

Could it have something to do with Night Shift? Have you tried enabling and disabling it and see if it fixes that?

If WSL turns out to be insufficient, https://multipass.run/ is worth a look.

I've just tried connecting to my external monitor again and 10 seconds is exactly how much it took - no exaggeration there. The internal monitor goes blank for 1 or 2 seconds, then both monitors turn on and it takes another ~8 seconds for the UI to adjust and the windows to be moved to the proper place.

> you consider usb-c brittle?!?

It's much easier to unplug USB-C than HDMI or DisplayPort, for one. USB-C itself is a terrible mess that requires an engineering degree to figure out what's compatible and not, and maybe it's just me and I have a shit hub but I had an external hard drive crash midway through a file transfer due to power issues despite being powered by a Apple charger (the hub and all the peripherals went dark and the laptop stopped charging, then started cycling on and off where every time the drive tries to start up again it kills everything).

I have this issue constantly, even the laptop screen itself will get 'washed out'. The solution is to go to Displays > Colour Profiles and change the profile to any other one and then change back to the default.

OP is a typical Apple "You're holding it wrong" reaction. It's never Apple's fault when its OS doesn't work right - it's always the user's fault. Despite the user paying a premium for Apple, or Apple having control over hardware its OS works with.

I share almost all of these issues. What drives me super nuts is the multi-display support which NEVER "just works".

I have to disconnect and reconnect USB-C 3 times, turn off the second monitor, switch inputs, restart the €3000 machines twice or whatever. So annoying, how does this pass QA at all?

Also, don't setup and use multiple users at the same time. That's really messy as well.

Or, you know, just run Linux outright.

Since Steve left us, over time I've witnessed so many issues crop up in the Apple ecosytem, for users/customers and developers, and it's clear that there's nobody to be shit-scared of anymore at Apple.

So many recent things would have pissed him off.

There's no way the 'notch' would have appeared. Nor the fact that the iPhone camera design stopped the device sitting flat on a surface.

I install new versions of Xcode about every two weeks on average. The amount of time it takes to have a new Xcode running is at least an hour: first you download a massive XIP, then the system "verifies" it forever when you try to open it, then it takes forever to unarchive because it's huge, then you need to copy it from ~/Downloads to /Applications which takes another couple of minutes. Then you hit the component installation part… (I think this step has something to do with installing new MobileDevice frameworks?)

Do you know of anything similar that supports GPU acceleration?

if Steve were still alive, iOS would never have been as open as it is today.

I usually keep at least one prior release of Xcode on my machine, up to the latest patch for its series. So right now I have 11.5 and 11.4.1. I've hit so many problems with new versions in the past. I wish I could just let MAS handle it for me, but it's just never been an option, aside from the issues it has actually working.

They don't give a shit if you're not using an Apple monitor. Witness the ProDisplay, which doesn't even have a power button, and talks to the computer to turn on.

Your experience certainly sounds bad, but none of this is normal; mail sound, USB-C cable brittleness, 1password slowness, all of it works nicely for me.