For people who are experiencing a leak on macOS 12: Check if you have set a custom cursor color in the system accessibility preferences. Resetting the cursor color to the default may fix it.
Having worked at Apple adjacent to the likely responsible teams, the relevant details are: overworked engineering teams, insufficient QA investment, and most of all a yearly macOS major release schedule that persists primarily to benefit the egos of Apple's upper management.
Until you see a WWDC that doesn't announce a major release of macOS, expect more of the same.
To any involved Apple folks here, I feel your pain, and I'm sorry.
And this is why I have completely stopped using all Apple products. I used to be a massive Mac fanboy. But the software quality is absolute shit now and has been for at least the past 5 years. I don't understand why anyone puts up with it.
I've been seeing this exact same comment for over a decade now.
The first couple of releases of OSX are always a little rough around the edges. And then by the end of the cycle everyone proclaims how wonderful this release is.
Except the bugs have continued to get worse and worse. For me the deal breaker was the blank page in iOS Safari[1]. After fighting that one constantly, I threw in the towel. I've been so much happier. Btw I was an Apple user from System 7 through to 2019.
Back in the days OS X was a dumpster fire in terms of overall reliability until the very late releases of every major version. Some versions like Lion had pure crashes until the end.
Even looking a few years before, we had the root user password bug and other pretty severe issues way worse than what we’re seeing now.
I speak only for myself, but after Catalina I started transitioning to Linux and couldn't be happier. Being able to set up my entire computer with a single Github repo is a godsend for productivity, all it takes are a few keystrokes and I've got a fully configured desktop with all my dotfiles, keybinds and applications.
I've been a Linux user for some 10 years, but have also had to use a Macbook Pro for a while due to work. There's nothing stopping you from fully configuring macOS through a single repository similar to how you do Linux. For a while my dot files were aimed at Linux (primarily), macOS, and Windows as I anticipated to have to use both macOS and Windows down the line, though I've since removed much of the multiplatform code.
How are you managing the desktop (gnome) files? I swear every time I try to move them to a new system or account all I get is grief; weird bugs, application crashes, dbus weirdness. I would love to see your recipe :) . All I can usually do is bring over app config files like emacs/vim/etc/personal scripts.
That sounds really neat is it some thing you can share? I recently setup a new machine which didn't take very long, but I have run into a few things I forget so would like to set up something similar.
What I don't get about apple, with a compensation policy that is less than the other big techs, because they can't get over the late 90s, team sizes that are usually smaller and being one of the largest market cap companies in the world, why don't they hire more?
Hiring more people isn't going to make them more money. Improving their products/services isn't going to make them more money. Providing more value to customers isn't going to make them more money.
Charging $300 for a screen replacement will make them more money. Selling bluetooth headphones with non-replaceable batteries will make them more money. Collecting taxes on developers will make them more money. etc etc
They got popular because of their commitment to quality. "It just works" is and in many ways still is a key to their popularity. They whittle away at their "quality credit rating" the less and less they invest in these things, until their quality credit rating becomes low enough for a competitor exploit that and make them lose market share very quickly. It does make them money.
I can see the business side of the permanent upgrade hype, constant new features, etc. But aren't we supposed to be reaching some kind of detente with Apple where they realize that power users drive the Mac market, and the release schedule should be built around hardware and stability, rather than endless retreads and new consumer features we'll never use? I'm still on El Capitan and pretty much everything since then looks like bloat to me.
You're right, I've just checked and when I set my cursor to be a custom color in accessibility settings suddenly my Firefox started to eat up memory as crazy :D. This went away as soon as I reset the cursor to default colors.