MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

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.

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.

I've gone full circle. Went from desktop linux (mostly Arch) to OSX ~7 or so years ago, and now due to a combination of frustration with the butterfly keyboards and then a slew of issues with macOS itself, I'm back to linux desktop for my dev machine.

From my perspective as a quote-unquote power user, it feels like Apple just constantly insists on shooting themselves in the foot with unnecessary and ill conceived innovations. Either way, I'm happy with my new setup and probably won't go back to macbooks anytime soon.

The dual GPU is a pain in the butt since Nvidia still doesn't support Optimus on Linux (and probably never will).

Adding to anecdotal, same trajectory for me, for web development. Really happy with Manjaro on Razor Blade 15 for a year now.

For touchpad issues in Ubuntu uninstall xserver-xorg-input-synaptics and keep only xserver-xorg-input-libinput installed.

I would definitely consider moving to Linux for my next laptop - unfortunately I do a decent amount of iOS development, which I realize isn't impossible to do on Linux, but I can't imagine it'd be worth the hassle. :/

Yup. Ubuntu 20 is the first desktop linux OS that just worked. Every other Linux desktop before it has had suspend/resume issues, wifi issues, sound issues, 3d issues, ratchet settings (things that can be set but never unset without some arcane magic), weird desktop behaviors, buggy software that crashes all the time, etc etc. Yes, I've tried ALL of them, including pop os and deepin.

This year marks the first year that I can just use linux without having to debug it.

When I switched, I just made the macbook not suspend on lid close, plugged it in and left it running 24/7. Then I just screen shared or ssh'd in in whenever I needed to do something iOS related.

Have you tried 19.10 or 20.04? Before that I had a lot of issues with my Dell XPS 9560 because of optimus, but it got a lot better in those versions. YMMV but it actually worked out of the box with nary a hint of manual configuration when I installed 20.04 recently.

Edit: should note, when I say work I mean you can switch between GPUs/launch an app on the dedicated GPU with ease.

Windows is still very much subpar, even with support for CUDA in WSL2. Loading packages is terribly slow in Windows, for some reason. Also don't get me started on package management (no, Anaconda doesn't cut it).

I've tried 19.10 and Arch Linux and the only option still was to statically choose only one GPU and reboot. How does the offloading work now? I haven't heard anything about it

That is not true anymore. With 20.04 it supports hybrid graphics just fine. The only issue I had was sharing cuda and OpenGL context since GL ran on the Intel card. This should not be a concern for most people I assume.

These things are highly hardware-dependent. Typically it takes a few years until support for new hardware devices, features or platforms stabilizes. But it can even take way more than that, and some less common and lower-quality hardware may fail to get support altogether.

Been putting off upgrading from 16.04 finally got it working a while back and was afraid to touch it.

Might give 20 a shot

Not associated at all but due to loving it, I wanted to share PhotoPea as you mentioned Gimp.

https://www.photopea.com

Can you run everything on the iGPU and only activate the Nvidia GPU to do the render offloading on single apps? If you can, I should try 20.04 on a laptop

19.10 added the "NVIDIA On-Demand" profile in Nvidia Settings. It needs the driver version 435 or newer.

It works okay, but you have to launch processes with a specific set of env variables to use the Nvidia card.

I would love to switch back to Linux but Apple's Retina displays are absolutely beautiful and there is no way I could enjoy going back to anything with noticeably lower pixel density on a laptop. I'd like to be told I'm wrong, but as far as I know it's not really possible to recreate a comparable high pixel density experience under Linux on a laptop.

Isn't Ubuntu much worse than this with the push for Snap packages? It can take 10-30 seconds to open software installed through it.

I got pretty good results with chocolatey.

But I agree that even WSL2 didn't cut the mustard, and I doubt GPU support will fix it. MS is advancing too slow, I think.

Yes exactly. This way you have all the GPU memory available for accelerated apps. Not sure if it works for all use cases but worked for me.

Two years ago, I helped a friend install Ubuntu Linux on a Retina Macbook Pro, and it worked like a charm. If you're looking for a new laptop entirely, there are loads of 4K+ Linux-compatible laptops out there (ThinkPads are probably your best bet).

I have a ThinkPad with Ubuntu 19. I'm very happy with it; it's nice to have apt, and to be able to eg use minikube with docker driver rather than a VM.

It's also true that the trackpad isn't as good as Windows. (It used to be that Mac had the best, but Catalina managed somehow to screw up the trackpad and make it laggy. Catalina has not been good for me!)

Longtime Linux user (Manjaro) and I never thought I'd see the day when I could pitch it as noticeably superior to MacOS, considering Apple's once-legendary attention to user interfaces. It seems like those days are behind us, now.

Linux as an actually better experience, without gigantic embarrassing flubs like this, is looking better by the day.

try this:

$ google-chrome --app=https://www.photopea.com

Seconded. I used to work on a Mac laptop for years, then started using a beefy Linux desktop tower on the side for some work that benefited from higher hardware resources. A few months later I realized that I had slowly grown into doing all my work on Linux, even when I didn't need the hardware, mostly because i3 and apt were so much better than the Mac equivalents, and that I was only opening my Mac laptop to walk into meetings. After realizing that I ditched the Mac laptop for a Linux laptop and haven't looked back.

I still use a Mac at home for entertainment (I'm typing this comment on one), and I have to say it works much better used that way. I don't have to worry anymore about random Mac OS upgrades breaking functionality that Apple doesn't care about because it's not part of their vanilla out-of-the-Apple-Store experience, but is vital to me as a developer such as 3rd party window management, dock improvements, keyboard tweaks, or not delaying every new execution by phoning home (LMAO).

I never intended to switch away from Mac OS; it just sort of... happened. As Mac OS has grown more paternalistic over the years without adding any notable capabilities that I care about, it's felt steadily easier to just go use Linux instead. It has its own frustrations, but it can always be made to do what I want, and then it just behaves. Starting around Ubuntu 16.04, I found that the balance of frustration was tipping; these days I don't really bother to use my personal Mac any more. I still have one for work, but I'd certainly rather use Linux there too if I had the option.

From what I head the snap packages complaints is a lot of FUD, ubuntu is still using normal packages except the Application Store application. You can always use Debian or Kubuntu if you prefer function over form.

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

A slowdown when you run an app for the first time, for security reasons -- I wouldn't categorize that as a "gigantic embarrassing flub". I haven't noticed it, actually. But I don't run new apps every day.

It seems the new Dell XPS finally have a touchpad which is close to the ones on the MacBooks. The touchpad and display are the two things which hold me back from switching away from Apple.

I think you're misunderstanding the problem, respectfully. This is not a problem for end users. This is a problem for developers - and a gigantic, embarrassing flub is justified for something as bad as this.

Think that's hyperbole? Look at this, from the link:

> The first time a user runs a new executable, Apple delays execution while waiting for a reply from their server. This check for me takes close to a second.

> This is not just for files downloaded from the internet... this is everything. So even if you write a one line shell script and run it in a terminal, you will get a delay!

Consider a developer in this situation.

If your job involves lots of scripting - not unusual, for a dev - and you create dozens of scripts a day, or more - every single one will take about a second, and up to 7 seconds (!) to run, that first time you run it. And that could easily happen upwards of a dozen times a day, because it will happen for each script you create.

That's pretty terrible, for a developer. I don't think you can normalize startup times, for some hacky script, of 1 second as pretty okay or not noticeable. Certainly not if you're talking about a high end work machine.

Times that bad are associated with some junk laptop that's 15 years old - that's not supposed to be Apple.

Even if you build apps (I do), you might have the need to create scripts now and then, possibly even a lot of them (I do, for testing). I don't consider it acceptable to wait 1 sec+ each time I run one. It really does suggest that Apple has gotten extremely careless about their developer audience.

So, yeah - compared to that, Linux performs way better, and looks like a premium work machine by comparison.

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.

True. Amusingly, I was always trying to make Windows behave more like Unix, but now I'm trying to make Linux behave more like Mac (just a few things, like the global keyboard bindings).

The major pain points are nearly all related to lack of integration with my iPhone (with Messages being the big one, followed by Notes).

Many of us who have been using Linux just fine on desktops and laptops for decades find those horror stories to be overstated...

See, that's the response I was used to and the one I expected to get from everyone.

The crazy thing is that I haven't heard it yet from the people I helped. Times may actually be changing now, just not swiftly. Perhaps it's the "decade" of desktop linux.

It's also not because linux is so great but because windows and apple are constantly stumbling over their own shoelaces and shooing customers away.

But macOS is very hardware dependent too.

Thanks. What do you think about this post? The author sounds knowledgable and I think it contradicts what you said to some degree (in that the experience and app support is not good even though Linux is installed on a machine with a high dpi display):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22958647

I don't know about Ubuntu, but my experience with Gnome on Arch Linux and Arch-derived distributions has been pretty good as far as high-DPI displays go. I've only had to make minor tweaks to a few configurations here and there depending on the application.

If you want to avoid tweaking, stick to native applications, and perhaps more importantly, go for a manufacturer with proper firmware support for high-DPI screens like System76 (Adder WS), Dell (XPS 13), or Lenovo (ThinkPad P1/P53/X1).

Well, it is. However it's much easier with resolutions perfect for 2x scaling, so 4k on 15" XPS works great. As for fractional scaling (needed for 4k on 14/13") it's still kinda work in progress, I think it will be ready when chromium on wayland finally lands (I expect at least 1 more year). If you don't use electron/chrome, you can use it right now.

Obviously you can use less elegant solutions like changing fonts but it won't work with multiple displays with different resolutions.