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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

(sigpipe.macromates.com)
2031 points jrk | 7 comments | 22 May 20 15:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.893s | source | bottom
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soraminazuki ◴[22 May 20 17:36 UTC] No.23274749[source]▶
Up until the release of Catalina, I've always upgraded to the latest version of macOS within a month or two. But some of the changes this time is really stopping me from upgrading.

As of Catalina, there's no sane way to install the Nix package manager without losing functionality because macOS now disallows creating new files in the root directory[1]. Nix stores its packages in the /nix directory and it's not possible to migrate without causing major disruptions for existing NixOS and other Linux users. This is too bad, since apart from Nix being a nice package manager, it also provides a sane binary package for Emacs. The Homebrew core/cask versions only provides a limited feature set[2][3].

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925

[2]: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/31510

[3]: https://github.com/caldwell/build-emacs/search?q=support+is%...

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glofish ◴[22 May 20 18:03 UTC] No.23275063[source]▶
IMHO the original choice of the path seems incredibly ill-advised and the main burden lies with the original developers.

sometimes old errors and mistakes come back and bite

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soraminazuki ◴[22 May 20 18:09 UTC] No.23275118[source]▶
It only seems that way now because some platforms have begun locking down their root directories. Nix, by design, doesn't conform to the FHS way of organizing directories so it made perfect sense to use /nix when the decision was originally made.
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1. zozbot234 ◴[22 May 20 18:15 UTC] No.23275179[source]▶
> Nix, by design, doesn't conform to the FHS way of organizing directories

That's why /opt/ exists. What's wrong with /opt/nix/ ? Or /var/opt/nix/ for read-write files that need not be a fixed part of any package installation (the Unix equivalent of system-wide "Application Data").

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2. soraminazuki ◴[22 May 20 18:32 UTC] No.23275367[source]▶
Nix isn't designed as an application. It's designed as a system package manager.
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3. californical ◴[22 May 20 18:45 UTC] No.23275481[source]▶
It's also an application, it just happens to manage other applications
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4. soraminazuki ◴[22 May 20 19:08 UTC] No.23275735{3}[source]▶
To be more clear, it wasn't designed as a third-party package manager. It's supposed to be part of the system.
5. sneak ◴[22 May 20 20:10 UTC] No.23276383[source]▶
Or NIX_PATH, or ~/.nix, et c.

I am infinitely tired of this node_modules “we know better than you, it isn’t configurable and will never be configurable so stop asking” hubris. It’s not open source entitlement to say that a maintainer with that attitude is bad and wrong.

My homebrew is installed to ~/Library/Homebrew and while they claim it’s unsupported, it works, and if it stops working, then I’ll stop using Homebrew.

I don’t trust software that demands root when it doesn’t need it.

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6. jeremyjh ◴[22 May 20 20:57 UTC] No.23276917[source]▶
You can use an alternate path with Nix. When you choose to do that, you will have to build all packages from source instead of installing prebuilt binaries.
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7. sneak ◴[22 May 20 21:06 UTC] No.23277044{3}[source]▶
That makes sense, and is good news. I withdraw my complaint against Nix; in my defense my ignorance was based on the thread on their GitHub about how Catalina makes Nix basically unusable. Turns out those people were both a) wrong and b) speaking authoritatively from ignorance. :/

I’m quite glad I can just install it somewhere else, and finally ditch the Homebrew spyware. Thank you for letting me know!