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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

(sigpipe.macromates.com)
2031 points jrk | 1 comments | 22 May 20 15:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source
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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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eximius ◴[22 May 20 18:17 UTC] No.23275200[source]▶
What is special about /nix that would make it better suited elsewhere? Aesthetic? Clutter? I don't think there are any technical reasons why the root of the filesystem is important. The /nix folder is just another folder with some ACLs/Permissions (however OSX works, idk)
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prewett ◴[22 May 20 18:53 UTC] No.23275563[source]▶
Historically / has been reserved for the use of the Unix system (the distribution that packaged it, not the computer you're running on). Local programs were installed to /usr/local. Packages installing themselves in /packagename are making your root directory like Windows' Start Menu. Furthermore, if your, say, Physics department has 20 machines, your sysadmin would install everything on an NFS share, which probably got mounted at /opt. Your sysadmin definitely did not want to mount /this, /that, /theother.

So while /nix is no problem from the filesystem driver, it is completely flaunting established Unix norms.

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1. eximius ◴[22 May 20 23:41 UTC] No.23278377[source]▶
You're not _wrong_, but I'm not sure that those reasons really mean anything. They were all new and arbitrary at some point and we're a long way from Unix.

> it is completely flaunting established Unix norms.

Also, _nix_ is completely flaunting established Unix norms in more ways than one. /nix is where all of the nix stores go, the immutable bundles that get pieced together to form all of the stuff you install. It could go in /var/nix or wherever, it doesn't really matter.

But putting it in /nix is kind of nice in that it's so different from the purposes of the rest of the filesystem. /nix doesn't behave like the rest of a normal Linux system, so it is separate. You can still symlink from /usr/local/bin/foo -> /nix/store/abcdef-1.1.0/bin/foo so the rest of your system has the same expectations.