zerosleeps

I suppose I’d better say something about that ThinkPad I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. This won’t take long, because I didn’t try switching away from macOS very hard.

As a reminder it’s a 4-year old ThinkPad T490s with oodles of RAM. It feels rugged, and I love having status lights - there’s one on the power button so you know if the thing is powered on or sleeping, which is replicated on the outside of the lid so you know what’s going on even when the laptop is closed, plus a dedicated LED for charging status. It has a fan that seems to switch between speeds a bit too aggressively for my liking. It’ll be silent for the longest time, and then suddenly start whining when load increases - there’s nothing between silent and kinda-loud, which annoys me.

The keyboard feels decent to use, and it has dedicated page up/page down/home/end keys which I enjoy. The trackpad is very mediocre, but I like the physical buttons. I tried the TrackPoint but it’s not for me. And the speakers are terrible.

To my surprise having a touch screen is really nice, despite me never installing anything on the machine that was designed to be used by fat human fingers. It’s just cool to be able to reach up and quickly dismiss a dialogue box or drag something out of the way.

Operating systems. Well I tried the default desktop variants of Debian 12, Fedora 42, and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Debian felt a bit outdated for running on a desktop, while Ubuntu felt too corporate. Fedora seems to have it together though, and it had the nicest install and first-run experience in my opinion. I will say that PC architecture needs to get to where it’s going faster than it is. BIOS? UEFI? Secure Boot? Sort it out. Then there’s all the built in “management” stuff that I’m sure corporations insist they need but just adds to the confusion.

My thoughts on using these Linux distributions is kind of the same: everything works, and works well, but there are too many way of doing the same thing. Fedora and Ubuntu in particular seem to be stuck in an in-between land, where they can’t decide whether to go all in on Flatpak/Snap or stick to using traditional repositories. And that really hurts the user experience, as all the distributions have a confusing array of software management stuff installed by default.

And yikes when it comes to stuff that doesn’t appear in an official repo. Take 1Password as an example: they have repositories for all the big distributions which is impressive, but the installation steps are not for “normal” users. Why is adding a custom repository still so difficult to do without using a shell? It was fairly easy to find the GUI for adding a repo, but I couldn’t work out how to add keys outside a console in any of the distributions I tried.

Oh and apparently Gnome removed status bar icons, but a few tools I tried (like clipboard managers) seem to rely on there being a status bar. Messy.

Anyway, those are my thoughts and opinions. It was a fun and informative, if brief adventure. It’s fantastic that all of these operating systems exist and are maintained and are available for free. Linux on the server is incredible, but Linux on the desktop still isn’t for me.

More Australians need to know about this because it’s bullshit and it sets a dangerous precedence. Does nobody in government understand the internet? You can’t hide things from anyone - the technology and entire premise of the internet relies on everything being publicly available. You definitely can’t hide stuff from a subset of users.

And why is it always Google that takes the heat for this kind of thing? Do these people not know that Google doesn’t host the “bad stuff”, it just makes it findable? This is like putting a padlock on the phone book - you can still dial the phone numbers!

I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about this. Write to your Member of Parliament I guess.

Also, The Hon Anika Wells MP is our Minister for Communications and Minister for Sport?? I don’t think you could pair up two industries that are further apart from each other than those two. Jack of all trades, master of none…

Jake Archibald writes:

You, the reader, encounter a tiny number within some prose. This indicates to you that I, the writer, have something more to say on this topic. And, for your inconvenience, I’ve put it way down at the bottom of the page.

The choice is yours: do you skip over it, and stay in the flow of the article, or do you set off on a side-quest to discover the extra wisdom I have to offer?

Yes! Either put what you have to say in the body of your content or don’t say it at all!

A refurbished one, but still…

Previously on zerosleeps.com: first post in what has become a series, second post, and third post.

Shortly before starting this post my MacBook had been up for 9 hours and 8 minutes. Activity Monitor reports that mediaanalysisd has used 6 hours 22 minutes of CPU time (whatever that means in today’s multi-core multi-threaded world) and has read 38.69 GB of data from storage.

log stats --process mediaanalysisd --last 9h reports 1.8 million errors, 93% of which are “Embedding version: 0 not supported, skip embedding publishing”. That’s an average of 55 errors a second when you divide one thing by the other.

And all of this is with “Images” and “Movies” disabled in System Settings → Spotlight, by the way. At the weekend, I moved my Apple Photos library off my Mac just to see if that had some gremlin but it made no difference. (Again, the files mediaanalysisd errors on are never in my Photos library, but I’m trying anything I think of.)

And what would I gain even if it wasn’t behaving like this? Buggered if I know. I’m not playing with Spotlight exceptions any more - whenever I add an exclusion the thing just gets fixated on another location, so I’ve disabled my entire drive from being indexed. Spotlight is now useless, which makes my Mac a little bit more useless too.

Now look, bugs happen. I’m a developer and I’ve written some doozies. But that has never really been my issue with all of this - my issues are lack of control over my own device, and the complete absence of official support. Read my previous posts and tell me what sensible options remain. A visit to my nearest Apple Store where they’ll tell me to try a new user profile (done that) or reinstall (done that) or some other nonsense that will never explain the cause? No thanks.

Between all of this, an awful experience I had with HomeKit a few weeks ago (which I didn’t blog about but the outcome was the same - something wasn’t working and Apple’s “it just works” arrogance doesn’t make it possible to find out what’s going on when it does not just work), the shitshow that is “Apple Intelligence” (does anyone want that - I don’t), and the trust-destroying decision this weekend to use Apple Wallet to push a notification advertising a movie to customers, I need to look around and see what else is out there.

So I’ve ordered a 4-year old ThinkPad T490s just to see. I am under no illusion - I’ve been here before. macOS on it’s worst day is almost certainly better than Windows or Linux on their very best days, but we should poke our heads over the parapet every now and again, right? I have no reservations about the hardware: AUD$400 for a slightly used flagship laptop with 32GB of RAM, touchscreen, a plethora of modern ports, and status-lights-my-gawd-I-miss-status-lights is astonishing.

It’ll come down to the software. Stay tuned.

Well I’ve run out of things to try and people to ask. I have even gone as far as rebuilding my Mac from bare metal and carefully restoring files. I’ve checked permissions, I’ve checked extended attributes, I’ve looked for patterns. The image files that the process chokes on have nothing obvious in common, yet they cause mediaanalysisd (and in turn the mds stuff that drives Spotlight) to hammer my CPU and thrash my SSD during system idle.

I have contacted Apple, but the only path I could find to do that was a form that gave me a text box with a limit of about 500 characters. I am under no illusion - that has been yeeted into a black hole and will never be seen by a human. Certainly not one who has ever heard of mediaanlysisd.

I posted my summary and asked my questions in the Apple Support Community and got some well meaning responses, but it was waving-the-rubber-chicken stuff, and even if they had worked I still wouldn’t have a root cause.

I asked the author of the Mastodon thread I mentioned in my first post - which is the only instance of the error message that I’m interested in that can be found by Kagi or Google - if they ever found a solution, and they didn’t. It sounds like they might have had a different root problem from me anyway, but come on, macOS must have hundreds of millions of users. We are not the only people with this issue.

So now I don’t fucking know. It’s not like it’s causing any functional problems that I’m aware of. Apart from probably killing the lifespan of my SSD (it’s reading and writing tens of gigabytes an hour) but this has really triggered something in me. I am not in control of the tool I use to make my living. It has also brought to the fore the complete and absolute disinterest Apple has in me. Those folk in the Apple Support Community don’t work for Apple: Apple has outsourced “support” to their own customers at no cost to themselves, and it doesn’t work.

Somewhere inside those towering walls that were built with help from the tens of thousands of dollars I’ve spent on Apple products, there is at least one tremendously talented developer who knows exactly what my problem is and would love to help me and/or fix the underlying bug. Engineer-to-engineer. I could give them anything they asked for and try anything they wanted. But those folk will never know I exist.

Probably because some fucking middle manager has decided it’s more important to piss about with “a stunning new design” instead.