https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/16-mbp-gpu-panics.22210...
There's like a dozen threads on MacRumors and the Apple discussion forums on various crashes, mostly related to sleep, but also to the watchdog timing out for WindowServer due to GPU lockups.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/constant-kernel-panics-...
> After waking from sleep and running a process using hardware accelerated video decoding / encoding, the UI will freeze for a couple of seconds, then starts working again, then freezes again, and so on. The mouse can still be moved but the UI is non-responsive. Eventually, after waiting for long enough, a kernel panic occurs and the machine reboots.
How to reproduce:
1. Use any Navi10 or Navi14 graphics card inside a Mac Pro 2019, eGPU case or use a MacBook Pro 16.
2. Open Video Proc or any other app utilizing hardware video acceleration (e.g. Safari playing Youtube, exporting with FCPX / iMovie).
3. Run the video acceleration test in Video Proc, start playing a H.264 / H.265 video in Safari or export a H.264 / H.265 file from FCPX / iMovie.
4. Put the machine to sleep.
5. Wake it again and re-test video acceleration.
6. If machine doesn't freeze, repeat the cycle from step 4.
7. Repeat this until the UI starts freezing / video acceleration stops working.
8. Eventually the machine will kernel panic after several minutes.
To fix this, I have to restart just to use my monitor again.
The fix was to use a USB-C -> DisplayPort cable (using DisplayPort via USB-C alternative mode). It appears that the HDMI port can't be used with a DVI converter. DVI ports have been replaced by DisplayPort, HDMI, and DisplayPort for some time but it was still a disappointment.
May be it is better on iOS since Apple owns the whole stack from Metal to Drivers to actual GPU.
Also, on macOS, Apple practically controls the whole stack too. Putting macOS on something that isn’t their hardware is a challenge.
Side note: there’s errata on the Intel CPUs, but I’m sure there’s also some (confidential) errata on the “A” series processors in iDevices. If iOS can work around the errata, why couldn’t macOS?
Modern GPU drivers is an insane piece of optimisation / engineering. But the complexity means you will never quite grasp the problem when things go wrong. In the early days of Firefox or Thunderbird it is recommended you turn off Hardware Acceleration whenever you see Font or Graphics rendering problem. While a lot of these have been fix ( or migrated ), it is still popping up from time to time.
There was a recent thread on HN ( I cant find it sorry ) Firefox asked for help on a GPU rendering bug that they have a hard time figuring out what's wrong.
On iOS, Apple owns the whole thing they can figure out what's wrong and fix it. As Apple write their own GPU drivers.
Also, on many Macs, it's actually three separate things. There is the CPU, the integrated GPU, and the discrete GPU. The system switches between the two GPUs dynamically based on load and whether the system is plugged in.
This goes the other way than what you would think.
Owning the whole stack lets you reach through abstraction layers. This can be good for, say, efficiency. You don't have to assume the implementation of another component could work in multiple different ways, you can look inside it and do something that only works with the specific implementation you're actually using.
It tends to be bad for reliability. Having clean interfaces between things makes them easier to reason about, because they're independent components instead of a giant ball of spaghetti. Each component only has to consider the other component's published interface and not have to worry about every detail of its internals. It's "do one thing and do it well" vs. "nothing is ever guaranteed not to change in any way at any time."
The latter gives you greater flexibility at the cost of greater instability and fragility.
Edit: I'm not trying to troll, I genuinely want to know why people put up with this. I bounce between Linux and Windows and have no loyalty to either of them. I've settled on Windows with WSL2 on my desktop but I'm tempted again to install the new Fedora on my Thinkpad. Is it the lock in? With my hardware I can run anything I want except for macOS. Once you buy Apple hardware it seems incredibly difficult to go elsewhere.
1) The hardware quality of other OEMs is bad too. Lenovo has really gone downhill. I sold my maxed-out X1 Carbon 7th Gen, which in less than a year: a) came with an LTE card that never worked for more than an hour at a time; b) had the display bezel start peeling off (it's a sticker!); c) developed a bunch of dead pixels; d) started randomly locking up; e) had weird issues with power usage, where some service related to the touchpad would go crazy and start using all the CPU.
2) Other laptop makers make design choices and trade-offs that I find unacceptable. For me, the 16" MBP is the perfect balance of power, weight, and battery life. It compromises by using a 3K screen instead of a 4K screen, and gets 11+ hours of light usage. Alternatives like the XPS 15 or Lenovo X1 Extreme force you to choose between an FHD panel and good battery life, or a 4K panel and substantially shorter battery life. The Surface Laptop 15" uses a 15W ultra-mobile processor in a machine that runs $2,800 when configured with 32GB of RAM, and has a battery half the size of the one in the MBP 16". Many 15" laptop vendors include a numeric keypad, which is a deal-breaker for me because it forces you to type at an angle to keep your hands centered in front of you when in the home position.
3) Touchpad and high-DPI scaling.
I won't switch back to Windows, but if I ever need to, I'd definitely consider using a MBP for it.
I have a similar issues with OEM's laptop quality years ago with both HP and Dell. System76 laptops have been a pleasure to use.
The new Lemur Pro has a 10th gen CPU, does not have a numpad, and does have an FHD panel. They claim up to 14 hours of battery life on Linux. (21 hours coding on VIM.)
https://system76.com/laptops/lemur
https://www.fosslinux.com/36826/system76-lemur-pro-a-linux-l...
(Or Linux, but I know Linux was in a bad state on new Macbooks as of fairly recently, don’t know if it has gotten better.)
If I didn't dislike Windows so much, I thought I could see myself using that setup full time.
I didn't look at battery life though.
The touchpad works fine though!
I mean, I'd use whatever the heck Bootcamp Assistant downloads for me automatically. I don't think I've ever thought about Bootcamp versions.
Never had issues with brightness and volume keys either...
A weird think to notice is that running a MacBook Air under bootcamp will make the display 300 nits brighter. https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Apple-MacBook-Air-2020-is-...
I think you could find any popular hardware, particularly with any emphasis on performance where there aren't some issues logged.
https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=macbook+pro+coil+whin...
https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=macbook+pro+battery+s...
https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=macbook+pro+overheati...
https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=macbook+pro+killing+y...
Not sure what this proves...
That every laptop exhibits problems. That "Your X has problem? Y doesn't have problem." is wrong and silly.
> As Coil Whining is a big problem on this model we will try to find out witch parts are causing this noises. First we need to disassemble this notebook and identify the noisy parts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/8ptfu8/would_you_acce...
> I immediately noticed I felt slightly 'uncomfortable' when it was on, and within about 30 seconds realised that it was emitting coil whine at a volume/pitch high enough to physically bother me. It's like an ever-present noise that I can only imagine must be how low levels of tinnitus feels to people who have to deal with that type of thing. I am pretty disappointed to say the least.
I might just assume that this is random internet griping, but I had this exact same problem on my last Dell laptop (admittedly, it was almost 20 years ago) and it drove me insane when working late at night. It's one of those little "quality of life" things I'm willing to pay extra for. (Not to say that Apple doesn't have quality-of-life issues, like randomly removing ports. But for the most part I find I can solve those issues just by throwing money at the problem. I can't do that with coil whine, or a non-centered keyboard, or a laptop that only offers either an FHD or a 4K display and no power-efficient compromise.
I'm not saying that it's a bad laptop. But there are just so many little annoying things about it after coming from the MBP and MacOS;
* Trackpad is subjectively worse, but I can't tell you why beyond its just smaller - but I am objectively much less accurate with it and trigger tap-clicks when I don't mean to. The trackpad positioning is also slightly uncomfortable to use.
* Fan noise - the fan curve has it ramping up earlier than a MBP
* Windows was hosed out of the box (fine, fixable, but it wasn't a good start)
* The "soft" covering results in so many fingerprints
* Webcam on the bottom bezel is an awful angle
Pros;
* Great screen, touch is a nice add-on but found I rarely use it now
* Keyboard isn't terrible
* Power adapter isn't a brick
Would I do it again. Honestly, not sure. My daily driver isn't the laptop and I just deal. If I had to use the laptop daily, I'd probably reconsider.
For comparison, MacBooks' batteries are rated for 1000 cycles.
It felt like absolute garbage in comparison. Trackpad was so bad I had to use the touchscreen to scroll. Internet stopped working intermittently. Display felt like far inferior quality (and, like you said, your choices are too few pixels or too many).
It was honestly a confusing experience to me, like reviewers or other people who treat these machines as comparable were living on a different planet or something. Of course I don't expect everyone to like Macs and there's nothing wrong with preferring the Dell but I don't understand why the quality differences are not more widely acknowledged.
Touchpad hardware is good, but the software and adjustability... it's nowhere comparable to a Macbook.
Have you used Sysinternal's Process Monitor or Process Explorer or any of the tracing tools already built into Windows to see why it's slow?
If you've got some service running behind the scenes and keeping the machine busy, of course it'll be "slow".
Yeah, poked it a bit, took some ETW traces. Couldn't find any good reason for it to behave like that with a low CPU load.
There was only a single combination of hardware/OS X release that I ever recall experiencing kernel panics often enough to bother me. It was one of the first generations of Intel iMacs on release 10.4 or 10.5.
I'm currently using 10.5 (Catalina) on a work-provided 2018 13" MBP hooked to an external display via a Thunderbolt 2 dock. I use it for compiling Android and iOS mobile apps, web browsing, accessing work via VPN, Slack, Google Meet, all the normal things you'd expect of a developer machine.
I also have a personal 2017 non-retina MBA running Catalina. My wife has the same laptop running Mojave. Both kids have 11" MBA's running Mojave. There's a 2013 iMac in the house running Mojave.
I can't recall having seen a kernel panic on a single one of these machines ever. I'm not denying they happen to other folks, but if this is so common an issue, I'm surprised I haven't seen it across any of my machines.
Are there other issues with macOS and iOS that occasionally drive me crazy? Sure, let me tell you about iCloud drive syncing issues I've had to deal with. Or the bug in Bootcamp I just experienced yesterday where it doesn't properly account for the SSD portion of a Fusion drive when partitioning the drive for Mac/Windows. Or how screen rotation sometimes just gets stuck on iOS in the wrong orientation or at the wrong aspect ratio.
But having just installed Windows 10 yesterday... OMG, I'll take macOS over Windows any day of the week.
And no, Linux is still not an alternative. (I'm a recovering Sys Admin and used Linux as my desktop for about 5 years.) I want a single OS I can run on all of my devices, and Linux just isn't an acceptable consumer OS for myself and certainly not for my wife and kids. I want an OS that just connects to WiFi, just works with my printer, can sync photos and music with my phone, allows me to rent movies, sleeps and wakes properly, that I don't have to futz with, etc. I want an excellent tablet experience for my artist daughter. As much as possible, I don't want to have to be tech support for my family.
So that's why this guy puts up with Apple, warts and all. It's the best set of tradeoffs for me and my family.
TouchID does the security for me rather than having to repeatedly type in my password unless I restart the machine. Interestingly, it can be done on Apple Watch if you're savvy enough but I won't expect typical consumers to care about that but only TouchID. They would probably ask if this exists on Windows or another Linux distro, which the answer is 'there are equivalents'. For the former, it depends on the computer, but for the latter the kernel may support it, but requires some digging into getting it to work on your chosen distro, which isn't acceptable for a "consumer OS".
Even with Apple's incompetencies with NVIDIA, Metal requirements, no 32-bit support and their silly notarisation services snooping my executables, in the end I still use it. Why? Because macOS still 'just works' and gets out of the way. Some Linux distros are getting there but I have no time to play around with my dotfiles, desktop environment or fix my window manager to get work done. Which is why I'm now dual-booting with Windows for WSL2 instead of installing a Linux distro and worrying about breaking it by installing a conflicting library or system component.
Not sure what the 16"'s excuse is, tho; that's still a Skylake++++ (possibly more pluses, but basically still Skylake).
Basically: Catalina sucks, but there's nowhere to go that's unequivocally better.
No, it doesn’t.
That caveat aside, if you can switch package managers, MacPorts explicitly supports older OS X releases (back to Tiger!) and thus may give you less problems.
https://www.techspot.com/guides/230-prevent-automatic-window...
You can also disable Cortana, the telemetry stuff etc. https://blogs.systweak.com/how-to-disable-telemetry-and-data...
https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script
You can disable the rebooting if you look in Default.preset file.
Even if it were a hardware problem that Catalina somehow tickled more often, if it only affected 5% of users it's still a problem. Being one of the lucky 95% doesn't diminish the experience of the 5%, especially if with Mojave the affected user base could have been 1%. We're not talking about $200 Chromebooks. These are $3K+ professional tools.
Bottom line: Catalina is less stable than Mojave.
Consequently, 10.9/Mavericks is my actual favorite version, and what I'm typing on right now.
When I decided I was going to downgrade my main machines earlier this year, I did a lot of comparisons of Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks. I could not see a compelling reason to pick Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion.
Mavericks performs well and never seems to crash. When I loaded all three up in VMs and starved them of resources, Mavericks remained the most responsive, I suspect because it supports memory compression. (Interestingly, Snow Leopard lists 1 GB of memory as the minimum required, whereas Mavericks lists 2 GB, but Mavericks still seemingly did better with 1 GB than Snow Leopard.)
Design-wise, while I prefer Snow Leopard's higher contrast in some places, it has a tendency to look either garish or plain in others. 10.8/9 look more refined, without going all flat. And while 10.8/9 have a lot of stupid defaults, I have a setup script I've been using for years which fixes most of them: https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/Mac-OS-X-Wowfunhappy-Setup-Sc...
The one big advantage of Snow Leopard would have been compatibility with PowerPC apps via Rosetta. But, there are only a handful of PowerPC apps I'd actually want to use, and a lot of Intel apps that support 10.9 but not 10.6.
The privacy. The comfort of having two devices (phone and computer) to be in sync in a private and safe manner. Excellent app ecosystem. Timely and long term updates, upgrades, and support.
But as the parent commenter says I am at my wit's end as well, for the first time since I started using Macs a decade ago - crappy recent OSX and iOS releases, iPhones getting bigger and bigger, being trapped in a data/communication silo etc.
So why am I still here? Because there's nowhere else that's better.
Linux users said the same thing in 1996. It didn’t work then, either.
Anyone working on desktop Linux should know they’ve hit saturation with their current approach. What‘s missing or broken that’s causing Mac users to prefer a system that crashes once a day?
- driver support (even my thinkpad has an unsupported fingerprint driver, and a buggy intel wifi driver)
- fragmentation that affects user experience. For example, there is still the gnome / kde divide, and using a combination of apps from both is visually jarring.
- lack of microsoft and adobe apps, lack of high quality productivity apps (e.g. i would love a pixelmator equivalent)
- many paper cuts, like how copy and paste of images only works half of the time
- when things break, you have to drop down to the terminal to fix them, instead of running some automated repair wizard
So, no snark intended, but where you have you been for the last 5 years? Windows and Microsoft are undergoing a renaissance and moving ahead and improving. macOS is regressing.
- Runs Adobe CC
- Does not throw ads at me
I‘m happy to take suggestions for an alternative to macOS.
Also, the seamless integration (call it lock-in) across devices is a nice bonus.
2 - Not really. On paper perhaps. On real life not really. I had Apple support live via screen-sharing and it was about my app (well, my client's app) on their store. They couldn't care less that I was running High Sierra on a VM. Maybe because the project I was working on was a successful app that was bringing revenue to them (and my client as well)? In the end money talks.
I bought XPS 13 laptop about a year ago, in the hopes of finally jumping to the other side.
I have tried to use both, Linux and Windows, and UX just isn't there. Linux is still the most buggy desktop OS (I know, it's not an OS, but a kernel, but in this context I mean every possible combination of drivers, programs, and desktop environments).
If we start with the XPS 13, which is/was regularly recommended as the Linux laptop, the most annoying things are coil whine and fan loudness. I cannot even watch a movie at night, without either of them bothering me. My MBP is fairly quiet, especially when not doing much (doing hardware accelerated decoding of H.264 is something that should produce any noise). Not just the laptop, even the charger has the coil whine (thankfully I can just reuse MBP charger here).
Moving on, let's talk about Linux. There is still no sane way of having multiple screens with different scaling factor (I can't see anything useful on 4k 13" display without the scaling, and external 4k monitor shouldn't need it.) I have tried Wayland, which sort of fixes the issue, but there are other problems there. Last time I checked, GNOME Wayland cannot handle playback of a video, and scrolling in the browser on the same screen. When you scroll the content in the browser, video frames drop, and make video unwatchable. I forgot what the underlying issue was, but it was open for quite a while. Most of the things are broken on KDE wayland, and for the rest you usually need hacks.
Then we have things like bad performance (especially regarding the graphics) of web browsers, which work fine on Windows, on the same machine.
Touchpad issues are well known; I couldn't make it to mimic Windows behaviour (which should be possible since it's the same hardware), so let's just not get started on macOS experience here.
Regarding the Windows, general UX is much much better than Linux, and apart from touchpad, it seems on par with macOS, if we ignore all the telemtry, preinstalled CandyCrush and other unneeded software. Some things are bettern than on macOS, and vice versa.
Regarding the development UX, we do have WSL2, Windows Terminal, and stuff like this, which is great. It's a major improvement from the state we had a year or more ago.
However, WSL2 is far from perfect. I have seen issues such as WSL2 not starting for a single user, but it worked for the rest, which required reboot to solve. Sometimes, Visual Studio Code couldn't connect to the WSL2, and again, occasionally machine would have to be rebooted.
There is no USB support for WSL2, so I had to resort to exposing of USB devices via network on Windows, and using a client to attach those devices in WSL2 VM. There is no support for bridged network, so we cannot easily discover LAN devices, for example when we want to flash ESP8266 devices. Did I mention there is no native USB support, so you cannot flash it this way either?
Running Windows programs from WSL or viceversa has its own problems, and since there is no virtualization support in WSL2 (understandable of course), using Minikube was far from ideal.
macOS is far from perfect, and even if majority of the apps/libraries need fixes, since macOS is not completely compatible with Linux APIs, majority of the libraries have the support for it. I can easily run majority of the software natively, without any VMs. With Windows, some things work natively, but for the rest you have to resort to an VM or WSL(2).
Using libusb is the same as on Linux, and projects using it can be compiled for macOS with minimal changes.
"It's like a B&D (bondage and dominance) relationship. There needs to a psychosexual analysis of the Mac community."
Some people like cheap laptops. Some people like expensive laptops. Some people, like you, obsess over people's choices.
An, apparently, if you make a choice (the wrong one, in your eyes), you're not allowed to complain when things go wrong.
Jeeze.
I can reproduce it pretty reliably by previewing a bunch of videos in Messages, and quitting the app usually solves it.
Edit: I use a 13" MBP, so that rules out most popular theories e.g. problems with the discrete GPU or graphics switching.
Now, Apple has their own implementation of SMB; and it seems to have been seeing frequent updates in Catalina (see https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT210803).
Since the Apple SMB stack has some decent amount of kernel integration—and Time Machine doesn’t really have any—I’d guess that recent changes to Apple SMB are also the culprit for any freezes where it’s in the critical path.
And Apple SMB seems likely to blame, because there are already other well-known regressions from the recent changes to Apple SMB. Seemingly, there’s a lot of cowboy coding going on in this part of the system right now. For example, macOS can no longer connect to SMB shares via their mDNS names (e.g. smb://example.local). This means that any SMB server that shows up in the Finder sidebar (through an mDNS announcement configured to achieve AFP or Time Machine serving) now just chokes and kills the Finder process when you try to connect to one of its exposed SMB shares through that sidebar connection (see e.g. https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/3/post/129160). You now have to explicitly connect to the share using its IP (e.g. smb://10.0.0.1) from the Finder ⌘K modal.
Weirdly enough, Time Machine itself isn’t broken for the SMB shares it auto-discovers through its configuration modal, so presumably they realized their error in that specific case and made Time Machine pre-resolve the mDNS name in the smb:// URI to an IP address, before attempting the connection. But they forgot to add this same code to the Finder. :/
However, if the Mac goes to sleep for a while and then later wakes up, I can no longer access the shares with the same message "The operation can’t be completed because the original item for “folder_name” can’t be found".
This is so damn frustrating.
Apple networking had mostly "just worked" since the 80s. It took a big hit when they abandoned Appletalk, and now with Catalina it doesn't work at all. Apple has fallen a long way since its glory days.
Agreed. And then there's that extremely childish "Windows 95 blue screen" icon representing SMB shares... Really professional.
The host metadata, as it shows up in the macOS Finder/open dialogs/etc, is configurable by having your host publish an mDNS _device-info._tcp service record. You can publish a display name (as arbitrary unicode), an icon (as a machine model name), etc.
I'm guessing Apple figured that if they made the default icon insulting, that might incense Microsoft into building mDNS support into their SMB stack, just in order to use it to broadcast that _device-info service, to make Microsoft SMB present more professionally on macOS clients.
Sadly, Microsoft never bothered. But at least I get to use it to make my Linux homeserver look like an Xserve! (See https://www.tumfatig.net/20170607/let-mac-os-auto-discover-y...)
(Though, sadly, this exact combination of mDNS-announcing-SMB is what is broken in the newest macOS, so I can't recommend you follow the above guide right now. Maybe we'll get support for this back in a few releases...)
I don't know, I find it funny/charming and I'd be sad if Apple got rid of it. It's something of an easter egg—you can't tell that it's a BSOD unless you open the QuickLook or Get Info window (or set your Sidebar Icon Size to "Large").
Right; that part still works, seemingly because probing for SMB shares doesn’t involve passing an SMB URI through whatever layer of the SMB stack can no longer resolve mDNS origins. It’s only connecting to the shares themselves that generates that arcane error message.
> I can also click `nasbox` (without `.local` and this is advertised by the avahi-daemon on the nasbox I believe) and it opens the network shares fine.
Yup; the Apple SMB stack is seemingly happy to resolve a WINS origin. Which means SMB servers will interoperate fine with macOS clients as long as the SMB server doesn’t run AFP (which nobody has a reason to be running these days anyway) and doesn’t offer Time Machine backup (which... is often the whole point of having a NAS.) If your NAS is configured to offer Time Machine backup, the WINS announcement gets subsumed by/attached to the mDNS host metadata record for the NAS (which is required to make Time Machine work), such that trying to connect to the SMB share via the Networks item (or the sidebar) will try to use the "canonical" mDNS origin for the host, rather than the WINS SMB-service origin—even if mDNS pointed at it.
> However, if the Mac goes to sleep for a while and then later wakes up, I can no longer access the shares
A thing about mDNS is that it gets announced on intervals, and clients are expected to cache it; but like regular DNS, the cached record announcements have TTLs, and you’re not allowed to use a record after its TTL runs out... but unlike regular DNS, you can’t just go re-fetch the mDNS record from the source once it expires; you have to wait for it to be re-announced.
This is why every bonjour/avahi/zeroconf tutorial has a line that says “now wait 15 minutes to see if your changes took effect.”
And this also means that these services inevitably do this thing where their URIs won’t resolve for the first few minutes after your computer wakes up from sleep, until they receive a refreshed announcement of the mDNS peer’s A and SRV records.
This has always been an inherent flaw in mDNS, papered over by various pre-resolution or standards-violating caching strategies by things higher-up the stack than the mDNS resolver itself. I’m not surprised that this sort of hacks papering-over is something prone to regressions, in macOS or any OS.
(This is also why Apple gave up on "Back To My Mac." It was dependent on "Wide-Area Bonjour", which was even more fraught and flaky than regular mDNS, with service records frequently disappearing from their domain, leaving you unable to resolve the address of your remote peer, despite it sitting there happily waiting with ports open. It especially didn't play well with laptops sleeping in a Wake-on-LAN state, despite several generations of Power Nap trying to make it work.)
So basically I cannot have both Time Machine and SMB from the same NAS box servicing a Catalina Mac? I just tried disabling Time Machine share in Samba and Catalina Mac still complains "The operation can't be completed because the original item for "Share" can't be found." if I click the sidebar to connect to a share.
Also, wait 15 minutes. Because mDNS.
Turns out it was one of my mini displayport -> hdmi adapters, replaced that and everything was fine.
I know it shouldn't be needed but sometimes it is the only option.
It isn't much help to you but my experience with Catalina has been very positive on a 2018 15" MacBook Pro. The initial release and first two point updates had some silly UI bugs but since .4 it has been solid as a rock for me.
I just updated to .5 and noticed I haven't had to restart my laptop since the last update I installed 42 days ago. In those 42 days I haven't had a single issue so I am pretty happy about that.
I am unable to identify a single application as the culprit, unfortunately.
It is frustrating and time consuming but have you gone step-by-step on a clean system to at least narrow down when the issues begin to occur?
The issue is I use a far different system than most reporting the issue. I see mentions of macbooks, sleep, etc, but I'm running an iMac 2013, a program that keeps it awake 24/7, etc.
No idea yet what the underlying cause is, but the panics started with 10.15.1 and got worse with 10.15.4, they were not an issue prior to 10.15.1
If I'm going to be my own Applecare at least with a Free OS, I can access the source code.
Other scenario only a reboot can fix is sometimes menus don't draw and/or video playback doesn't work in any app.
But at least Bluetooth is nowadays more stable!
Bit the bullet and finally updated to Catalina, all problems gone. Not sure what to make of this but it definitely resonates with stories of Apple practically forcing updates.
Once in a while the freeze lasts so long the computer crashes resulting in a crash report:
Termination Reason: WATCHDOG, [0x1] monitoring timed out for service
Termination Details: WATCHDOG, checkin with service: WindowServer returned not alive with context:
unresponsive work processor(s): WindowServer main thread
I am at my wits end to what can be causing this. Is anyone else experiencing similar freezes?