Strange observations on Ubuntu versus years of Mac use

[Hooyah]

I've been pulling out of iCloud and my Apple devices at a crazy speed. My first observation was how an iPad Pro with 1TB could competently handle downloading and reliably (but slowly) moving it all to a big spinning hard drive with much less errors than I've had over the years with Macs (256/512GB models). To my knowledge, for once, no precious personal data was lost this time. Who'd have thought forking them over that extra money for the terabyte would have helped.

Secondly... using these years old low spec hard drives, flash drives and this old clunky HP laptop with a Pentium, running Ubuntu (didn't even have to install drivers it somehow just worked and is working remarkably well) but every big file transfer is just working. No errors, failures, loss of data. Even over slow USB speeds everything is actually working for once. No file system errors as on the Mac, no it pretending to 'duplicate instantly' then in the background... waste resources actually committing the copies.

I am running into way less failures with these big file moves compared to with Apple and it's making me question whether or not they deliberately made things slow, unreliable and difficult when it became a matter of not using APFS (or before that.. macOS journaled etc)... their file formats and apps and the direction away from its services and devices to a non Apple service or device. Because for years everything I did within worked fine, and at good speed. Every time I had to work well with Windows users or other formats Apple doesn't like... I ran into annoyance after annoyance, errors and failures.

I'm not sure if I'll be back. I am moving files from a hard drive over to Ubuntu now on the lowest of the low hardware and it's blowing my mind that it's working smoothly. USB doesn't suck. But I strongly suspect Apple made it suck when you weren't using it in favour of your iDevices.

Am I going crazy or have you people also noticed when on other platforms, things just working together to the best of the technologys capability with no artificial f**kery working against you?

 

[ProbablyDylan]

I have previously noticed my MacBook doesn't like long-running file transfers to or from my home server. It makes it annoying to move data in bulk - especially when my desktop running Aurora linux has no such issues.

 

[LeeW]

I work with big files all the time. Never had any issues like this. I'm regularly moving files between Mac, Windows, Synology NAS and Linux.

 

[maflynn]

Personally, if I'm moving large files, I'll use terminal and not the gui. I find it runs much more effeciently, doesn't matter if I'm talking about Windows, macos or Linux

 

[Hooyah]

My iCloud photo export was ready this evening... 360GB a little bigger than in the summer when I last tried to break free. Back then the M4 iMac, M1 MBP, this same HP laptop but with Windows 11, Windows 11 on Parallels on both Macs kept failing and wasting storage, tripping up over itself, OneDrive and iCloud utilities - not sure the CLI utilities for those, I'm sure there are ways to do basic file things, and on Windows, I'm sure there are PowerShell commands but it's always resulted in permanent loss of photos (or full quality originals) and files.

Since 5pm, 28 parts are now finishing on Ubuntu Linux straight on to the 4TB drive... not one has failed and this little Pentium, though it's struggling to do some calendar bulk imports, isn't phased with the downloading. It's just refreshing that computing can be this easy... and although nothing will be as seamless as signing into the Apple ID, turning on all settings and having it all work that way, it's nice for things to work operationally.

To be honest, the Mac has evolved and got better feature wise but it's far from Snow Leopard and Mavericks days where there were still portions of teams dedicated to reliability and bulletproof functionality. Granted, we are no longer in the SJ era where he runs into these issues, and complains and someone listens. TC is the best CEO possibly that has ever lived, based on the figures and sales but i'd argue that's given him a bit of a softer time in not feeling like he needs to care about the end users, or he doesn't use his computer as much as, or how SJ did. I don't really know the reason. I don't blame him for the data issues of my government that has truly pushed me away from embracing any cloud setup after years of it making my digital life easier.

What I can say is if like summer, I had have ran into issues where Apple's servers outright failed to deliver the larger downloads, unlike then when I called support... wasted hours going through basic steps as the agent watched my screen, only to say 'this requires an engineer;, only for days later the engineer to call me and ask me to make a new request.. more days, another call.. same issue , "we don't know, all we can say is to do another request" ... this time they'd be getting a solicitors letter telling them to post me my data if they can't get their act together. Though now, I strongly suspect it was depending on macOS / the utilities to be honest.

 

[LeeW]

My iCloud photo export was ready this evening... 360GB a little bigger than in the summer when I last tried to break free. Back then the M4 iMac, M1 MBP, this same HP laptop but with Windows 11, Windows 11 on Parallels on both Macs kept failing and wasting storage, tripping up over itself, OneDrive and iCloud utilities - not sure the CLI utilities for those, I'm sure there are ways to do basic file things, and on Windows, I'm sure there are PowerShell commands but it's always resulted in permanent loss of photos (or full quality originals) and files.

Since 5pm, 28 parts are now finishing on Ubuntu Linux straight on to the 4TB drive... not one has failed and this little Pentium, though it's struggling to do some calendar bulk imports, isn't phased with the downloading. It's just refreshing that computing can be this easy... and although nothing will be as seamless as signing into the Apple ID, turning on all settings and having it all work that way, it's nice for things to work operationally.

To be honest, the Mac has evolved and got better feature wise but it's far from Snow Leopard and Mavericks days where there were still portions of teams dedicated to reliability and bulletproof functionality. Granted, we are no longer in the SJ era where he runs into these issues, and complains and someone listens. TC is the best CEO possibly that has ever lived, based on the figures and sales but i'd argue that's given him a bit of a softer time in not feeling like he needs to care about the end users, or he doesn't use his computer as much as, or how SJ did. I don't really know the reason. I don't blame him for the data issues of my government that has truly pushed me away from embracing any cloud setup after years of it making my digital life easier.

What I can say is if like summer, I had have ran into issues where Apple's servers outright failed to deliver the larger downloads, unlike then when I called support... wasted hours going through basic steps as the agent watched my screen, only to say 'this requires an engineer;, only for days later the engineer to call me and ask me to make a new request.. more days, another call.. same issue , "we don't know, all we can say is to do another request" ... this time they'd be getting a solicitors letter telling them to post me my data if they can't get their act together. Though now, I strongly suspect it was depending on macOS / the utilities to be honest.

I mean, all I can see is x did this, and y did that, without any actual information that would help to understand why. Not saying one is better than the other, large file transfers are every OS's bread and butter, so there shouldn't be any significant difference in an apples-for-apples comparison. Without more technical info, all I personally can say is that there is something causing it, and you're not able to see it.

 

[Hooyah]

I mean, all I can see is x did this, and y did that, without any actual information that would help to understand why. Not saying one is better than the other, large file transfers are every OS's bread and butter, so there shouldn't be any significant difference in an apples-for-apples comparison. Without more technical info, all I personally can say is that there is something causing it, and you're not able to see it.

A lot of my issue is because I have Time Machine turned on historically... and even though I let it sync hourly / days / weeks and months / years at a time... macOS is incredibly sloppy at handling snapshots and the background inner workings of the system. When you have a 128GB.. 256GB or even 512GB and a lot of file traffic... these snapshots seem to dominate and the OS never seems to get around to dealing with it. That's a large part of it, anwyay.

I did use Onyx to do maintenance and clear out the snapshots. Always had the latest updates installed so they weren't choking out the system. I had DaisyDiskX as well, and pin pointing what exactly led to the 100+ GB of 'system data' wasn't so clear to me. I still have the M4 iMac and 100GB of mystery data blocking it up, only 256GB there so it's unusable completely when you start to actually do anything on it. You know because the whole system grinds to a halt and freezes when it's down to a few GB free.

Clearly, the solution is upgrading and paying Apple £400 per storage tier upgrade. Bloody joke though... my first Mac in 2009 came with 250GB standard... my next MB Pro a few years later 500GB, was able to upgrade that to a 750 / 1TB Seagate 'hybrid' drive which was a welcome speed boost, then SSDs became cheap enough to get around 500GB.. 1TB but I was into the TouchBar Macs then and it wasn't until the M1 I could truly afford a 512GB one. The rest of the world around me outside of Apple were on multi-TB storage before 2020 at very little cost. For years I thought "Yeah but Apple's SSDs are top of the line, even on base models with low capacity, versus the local PC builders 4TB RAID setup.." - nope, can't find any spec or measure that they're that much better if at all than what you can find on the Windows side or custom side these days anyway. The iPad Pro M4 1TB I'm selling did have a lot less issues with file transfers because ample space, so that impressed me, but the USB speeds did not - and is there any damn excuse like on a product like that, at that cost, with that power.

Ubuntu to day was able to unzip all 28 parts of my iCloud export from Apple's data privacy site. Downloaded all good, think one download failed and had to be redone. It unzipped everything with one command. Then it moved every sub folders contents into the main directory (all on an EXTERNAL drive). This on a years old HP with a Pentium that struggles to run my calendars smoothly... and yet, in practice, with a full fat OS, and no f-ery or lock in attempts, it seems to work. That's the main sentiment of this thread really - that other platforms just work. Apple just works, very well, but only when you're within what they want you to be. Step out and they make life hell.

Sloppy engineering or intentional sticks in the mud, either way, I would have expected better.