That can't be the whole story.

If we assume the drive can write 500MB/s (conservative), and an OS install takes up 50GB of space (conservative), it should take less than 2 minutes to write the partition. Where does the other 58 minutes go?

At much of it, the OS and even applications actually seem to be running. I remember a macOS update with the full-screen progress bar, where a few minutes in, a browser tab suddenly started playing music, with no way to turn it off...

I wondered the same about Linux installers. I'm installing some kind of debian minimal which will take 300 MB on disk. It should be installed in a fraction of the second. Instead it takes minutes. All installer should do is: dd pre-assembled Ext3 filesystem from ISO to disk; extend filesystem to the desired size; write some configs like fstab. It could be really fast.

My guess is that nobody really took the time to optimize it. Installation is only one-time procedure and even it if takes a hour, who cares.

thatd work if it wasnt for (some) settings of course. but even then, image and then update /etc and friends and done but here we are

What you describe is the cloud image. You can dd it to your hard drive and it should work as is (initial password will be displayed on first boot).

As for Debian, the slowness comes mostly for fsync calls I think. You should be able to use eatmydata to avoid this. See: https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_insta...

Yeah, I know, my point is that ordinary installer should do the same with ordinary installer UI rather than trying to install every deb package over and over again, running its pre/post scripts, etc. What's the point? It should be deterministic anyway.

I jumped on the upgrade bandwagon quickly this morning and the entire upgrade took about 15 minutes on my M1 MBP 13".

Presumably, you're experiencing the same download issues my work MBP is experiencing. It's been downloading for over an hour and is just barely past 50%. My Internet bandwidth is 10G real-world and un-busy, so presumably Apple's CDN is getting hit good.

EFI updates are sometimes included with new versions of macOS.

Other 58 minutes is collecting telemetry

> on newer Macs, it’s rewriting the whole OS partition with a new firmware image

TIL

Apple switched to a read-only system volume beginning with macOS Catalina, released 3 years ago.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650

That doesn't imply it should be slow; that should imply it should be fast.

At least, given that macOS is using a copy-on-write filesystem such that you can share blocks between multiple volumes/snapshots — which it is; and that the OS base-image is a sealed "everyone has the same cryptographic checksum" volume — which it is; and that Apple are using a binary-diff-based "create aside" OS-image update process, like ChromiumOS/CoreOS — which they are. They should only have to write out disk pages for the changes, and then just link the existing pages in to form the rest of the extents. Like a `btrfs receive`.

But for some reason, despite all that fancy tech, it's still slow; and the install process still requires rebooting into a separate Recovery OS to do parts of the installation. Which, given the "create aside" part especially, is just ridiculous. You should be able to just run the installer in the background as you're using your device, and eventually be told "when you reboot, it'll be into the new OS."

"when you reboot, it'll be into the new OS." Oh man, wouldn't that be amazing!

NixOS then lives in the future, as that is exactly what it does!

Pff, FreeBSD and Illumos/Solaris have BE's (boot environments) since years

Can you give your system’s declarative configuration to another machine and boot into an equivalent one? :D

Yes.

With FreeBSD I can 'send' entire BE to other system and boot it there - which I often do.

Just use:

    # zfs send <ZFS-BE-DATASET@snap> | ssh <IP> zfs recv <ZFS-BE-DATASET>

I also sometimes installed FreeBSD/GhostBSD system in a VM and then 'send' it to physical hardware.

Hope that helps.

This isn't really a viable excuse. Silverblue is also immutable and updates are applied in under 10 seconds prior to reboot (which is never affected by updates).

Coming from Windows and Linux, macOS had been a very unpleasant experience for me. It's full of papercuts.

> Coming from Windows and Linux, macOS had been a very unpleasant experience for me. It's full of papercuts.

The same could be said to the opposite transition, from macOS to Linux and/or Windows. All of these OSs are mature and old enough to have thousands of papercuts different from the thousands of papercuts of the other OSs, the impression is mostly based on what you are used to.

I used to be staunchly anti-Apple/Mac up to 2010-ish, nowadays I simply can't work and feel productive with a Windows machine. Linux can be a bit more pleasant until I get to the edges of the Linux-on-desktop UX and the experience crumbles.

Windows is definitely the most unpleasant experience I've ever had on desktop OSs, and I was a user all the way from Win3.11 to Windows 7 (latest iterations only on a gaming computer though).

Windows' updates got much less granular since Windows 10. It used to be that updates were delivered in individual packages that can be installed and uninstalled independently (within reason).

Nowadays more and more updates come in a "rollup" package which is a bundle of many updates and it's take it or leave it. Even worse, some of the bigger feature updates are actually full OS reinstalls under the hood.

It's not how old the Mac is, but rather whether its running macOS Catalina or newer when Apple switched to a separate read-only system volume:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650