While I broadly agree that modern Macs "have other annoyances", if this is the one causing you grief, you can get rid of it in 30 seconds.

`sudo spctl --master-disable`

Turning off Gatekeeper also turns off the notarization checks.

I have a running theory about software developers: the average programmer makes code just fast enough that it doesn’t feel slow on their own machine.

Of course, us software engineers usually buy very expensive computers! The end result is that the average software will always run slowly on the average hardware, forever, no matter how fast hardware gets.

It’s a tragedy and I hate it. I feel like software engineers need “slow CPU thursdays” or something, where every Thursday your cpu is intentionally throttled down to run at the speed of a below average user’s computer. If we don’t feel our user’s pain, we will never understand it.

(Though this would only take off if we could whitelist the compiler somehow. Hm! I wonder how you’d implement that!)

> would only take off if we could whitelist the compiler somehow

Well, a slow compiler means you write less code and pull in fewer dependencies to solve a problem, win-win ;)

From a development point of view, you may have a point, though mechanisms to circumvent this are addressed in this thread. But for the typical user, or indeed other 'Pros', these are not showstoppers. Since the topic of the whole thread is about poor performance generally for typical users, I think your (valid) concers are somewhat moot. What is distressing is that in order to get something that is easy to self-manage, Apple is the only choice. Microsoft try to be all things to all people, and linux is still too complex for the majority of everyday users to manage. The closest is Ubuntu, which is often treated with distain by the vocal OSS purists.