Catalina is checking notarization of unsigned executables

I guess the list of things keeping me off catalina (and, by extension, new Mac hardware) just got one item longer.

I recently bought a new System76 laptop as a stopgap, but it might end up becoming permanent. Kind of a sad end for 25+ years of Mac use.

My 16” is a huge disappointment. After swearing off Intel PCs after a disaster ours X1 Carbon, I switched back to a 2013 15” until this month. Figured after six months bugs would be ironed out. Wrong. I’m seeing two major glitches that have macrumors threads dozens of pages long: 1) with an external display connected, dGPU utilization shoots up to 20W at idle. (The rest of machine draws well under 10W at idle.) That wouldn’t be a big deal if the CPU and GPU didn’t share a tight 70W power budget. 2) when connected to an external monitor or dock—I’ve tried two different TB3 docks—the machine kernel panics regularly, usually waking up from sleep.

I’m torn. I don’t want to return the machine because everything else is crap. At least the 16” works well as a laptop so long as you don’t plug anything into the ports. But Apple’s Q&A has seriously gone down the toilet ever since Steve Jobs died. Clearly him throwing staplers at people was the glue holding Apple together.

My partner is a graphic designer who loathed her 13" macbook that her work got her. She finally got an upgrade to a 16", i9, 64 gigs of ram.

It runs adobe software like total shit.

I think it's something to do with Catalina + accessing files in Google Drive File Stream + Adobe.

It runs illustrator horribly.

It's basically the saddest thing I've ever seen.

I think I'll get her a 17" XPS for christmas this year.

For what it's worth, I have _never_ had good luck with "big vendor" software (like Adobe) and using any sort of synced cloud-based filestore. I have had untold issues with things and as soon as I moved files local, everything magically went away. Might try that!