Mario, can you advise? For macOS users, is it better to stick with Mojave (which is running well enough for my experiments), or is it time to upgrade to Catalina?
Everything else being equal, I’d rather run the current macOS.
Best
Denis
Which part of this is unclear?
http://psychtoolbox.org/requirements.html#apple-macos---not-recommended
To highlight the important part:
" Do not use macOS Catalina 10.15 if you don’t absolutely have to. Psychtoolbox is compatible with Catalina in principle, but Catalina has fantastic new bugs and flaws, e.g., a slow-down of keyboard input by a factor of 5x, and various trouble wrt. keyboard input, sound input, video capture thanks to Catalina’s awful new security design – Prepare for lots of hassle if you choose Catalina, you have been warned! macOS is the most buggy and hazardous operating system you could use for visual stimulation, or DAQ digital/analog i/o, so running real data collection using macOS will likely bring you a world of pain (and possibly irreproducible research) ."
This was the start of the pile of shit that was and is Catalina - not only my opinion, not at all restricted to neuroscience software, but normal use cases, like wanting to use a mail app that doesn’t delete mails, a storage solution that doesn’t delete or corrupt data and file systems, USB-C connectors that one wants to use to connect USB devices or displays, battery managment that manages the battery instead of draining it and turning the machine into a repair case for the Apple shop, broken sound, …:
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/12/waiting-to-update-to-catalina/
I’m at 10.15.3, and that update fixed AMD graphics, but broke video output to most external displays – thank to a broken firmware update not only for macOS, but it even impaired external video quality on Linux, although it didn’t break it as badly as on the trainwreck. 10.15.4 brought data corruption and non-working USB-C and Thunderbolt ports on some machines, 10.15.4 supplemental update brought machines that are completely dead and don’t even power on anymore for some MacBookPro models, 10.15.5 broke USB-2 from what i’ve heard, although on my machine that is already quite broken as of 10.15.3. 10.15.6 is too recent to know already what they frelled up this time, just that some of the problems still haven’t been fixed. Them not even able to get it into half reasonable working order by 10.15.6 - supposedly the last non-security update if we look at past versions - suggests they have reached a new all-time low in OS quality and lack of care. I will probably be forced to update from 10.15.3 to 10.15.6, because i might need the latest XCode, but i am dreading it - i’m horrified by what it might do to my MBP 2017, possibly even on Linux if it comes with more shitty firmware updates.
Stay the hell away from it, forever if you possibly can.
Hi Mario
Thanks! That’s thorough and clear. Thank you. I didn’t know this page.
Best
Denis