If time is an issue, consider doing a wipe and fresh install then upgrade instead of upgrade in place. Apparently if you have Homebrew it gets stuck at 2 minutes, potentially for several hours.
So, basically the same advice applies as with the upgrade to Yosemite: move /usr/local to somewhere like ~/local before upgrading, and move it back after.
I knew about /usr/local problem from Yosemite, though on El Capitan (same time as Yosemite, with /usr/local moved to ~/local) it was smooth as butter (I did not move /usr/local). All upgrade took about 30 minutes, and after it was done, I did sudo chown -R $(whoami):admin /usr/local and I was good to go.
I can't speak to El Capitan, but no Apple software has dropped anything in /usr/local that I've found in the last 3+ releases. I'm very confident El Capitan would continue that history.
A lot of other apps do put stuff there though (when I wish they'd keep it in their own bundle).
Even worse, a lot of other apps drop stuff into /usr/bin.
If you wipe the system then the time to set it up exactly like it was before is usually orders of magnitude larger than just waiting for the upgrade to move your brew installation out of /usr/local and back again. A better advice would be to just move the contents of your /usr/local to another directory and then move them back to /usr/local after the installation finishes.
I just ignored this and waited for the installer to do whatever it wanted. It took about 1 hour but everything went fine and I'm now up and running.
I upgraded to the gold master a while back on an iMac and didn't run into this problem. Do we know if it is different for the final release. Oh and a sidenote, my unix tools were not broken after this update. They typically are and need to be reinstalled
I think the same applies to TeX distributions. It awfully slow for some reason, perhaps it double checks each file to avoid bit errors in system critical files?
You need to move everything out of /usr/local into a temp ___location (I just dropped it into a folder in my home dir) and then after install, move it back.
I ran 'brew update' and 'brew upgrade' just prior to upgrading to El Capitan. After the upgrade I just had to change ownership on /usr/local back to myself, but everything else seems fine.
If you do a full reinstall via cmd+r I'm unaware if it goes to El Capitan or the last installed version; obviously going direct would be the best approach.
Another Homebrew user here, El Capitan installed without major issues and is running very smoothly IMHO. A difference might be that I haven't touched Homebrew in a while.
Coming from Yosemite, you should clean you Mac with petrol. But seriously, Yosemite was such a mess, it felt like an old Windows installation where formatting is the only way to regain a decent performance. I'm glad I made a clean install with the GM 2 weeks ago. The system is way better than Yosemite (but still far from being as stable as Mountain Lion)
Whatever problems Yosemite had, they weren't caused because of "file accretion", nor would they remain after the OS is updated (as if it somehow reads old problematic files and goes back to its old buggy ways).
(That said, I had zero problems as a heavy dev+audio/video user of Yosemite, and zero too after updating to El Capitan GM -- with the exception of Cubase and NI audio units not working in Logic).
perception is reality. I've no doubt there are cases that upgrade in place doesnt work as well as fresh install, but I am skeptical that there is dramatic demonstrable differences between the two most of the time.
I believe it's likely more a benefit of clearing out the cruft that has accumulated over time rather than problems with the update itself. A lot of stuff gets installed over the years, and upgrading in place keeps the majority of that in place. Doing a fresh install and putting back only what you're currently using will probably result in fewer programs, daemons, drivers, etc that the system has to deal with.
For yosemite, I have a macbook pro that came with the OS and another macbook pro (nearly identical) upgraded from mavericks. No significant differences. I don't see why it should be like that this time and I would love to read a technical explanation.
I don't know how anybody can look at the bugs and fixes that continually plague .0 versions of Apple's OS software across their devices and jump at the chance to try it out. It now feels like you need to wait a minimum of 3 months before even considering installing a .0 (or .1 or .2) version of their software. It's a shame, too. I'm old enough to remember when Apple's OS was mostly rock-solid.
>I don't know how anybody can look at the bugs and fixes that continually plague .0 versions of Apple's OS software across their devices and jump at the chance to try it out.
Quite simply because I've never once been bitten by them -- with the exception of some haxies not working.
>I'm old enough to remember when Apple's OS was mostly rock-solid.
When was that? Because I remember Mac OS (pre X) beeing anything but rock-solid. I also remember the first X release being a disaster, and people moaning about issues I've never encountered in my (heavy) Mac use for every new release.
(I also remember the hardware problems, from the overheating cube and the G3 logic boards that died by the ton to the G5 tower leaking cooling goo).
Then lets steelman this point of critique: Why doesn't Apple keep their OSes in beta for a couple of months more to release something that is really stable? Is the sample size of beta testers really too small? I doubt 6 months or so later would be a big disadvantage to the competition, quite the contrary, I think releasing more stable 1.0s could be a considerable advantage.
>Why doesn't Apple keep their OSes in beta for a couple of months more to release something that is really stable?
First, because a lot of those bugs you only find in real-life bizarro setups, and beta testers are not enough. Besides not all beta testers actually help with bug reports -- some programmers just test their own software, others just want to play with the latest OS, etc.
Second, because not all of those bugs will be fixed even if a beta tester finds them. There will be a cost-benefit (opportunity cost) analysis, and some might need extensive changes to some subsystems, and only get fixed with the X.2 or even X.4 or X.5 release, half a year or more later.
Third, because there will always be bugs, and at some point you need to release.
Fourth, because OS releases usually also enable or leverage several new hardware features in Macs and iOS devices. Delaying the OS would mean delaying those hardware units, or putting them out with the old OS and no way to use some new advanced hardware stuff they are advertised with (stuff like Bluetooth 4 back in the day, Retina support, or something similar).
> I'm old enough to remember when Apple's OS was mostly rock-solid.
What OS are you talking about? OS X has always had buggy .0 releases. If anything it's gotten better over time, though I still agree with waiting for a .1 or .2.
If you mean Mac OS or earlier, then I wouldn't know. I was young and we always just kept whatever came on the computer.
My point about the .1 and .2 releases were that they're buggy, too. I look into my crystal ball and predict that 10.11.1 and 10.11.2 will both have serious issues (though not as much as 10.11.0. You really have to wait for the waves of bugfix releases after a point release to end before it's safe for human consumption.
Just upgraded. Can't delete apps. Anyone figured this out yet? Admin accound sudo rm -rf "game center.app" is returning operation not permitted. Appcleaner is not even able to find the packkages much less delete them. I have the GM though. What is this about?
Edit: upgrading to the appstore version. Not sure if this was GM specific, or they are locking the Os down even more.
Edit2: if you forget your password immeadiately and use the resetpassword feature in terminal, keychain breaks, can't find "login". Prob fix it with permissions. Note, NOT the case. Had to make an entire new user.
Also, with >30mbps connection, 850mb upgrade is taking ~4hrs. They must be getting slammed.
That’s System Integrity Protection. Under it, system files cannot be deleted or modified, even with sudo. It protects down to the block level, so even if you try to bypass the file system and write to blocks composing system files directly you’ll get an error.
This can be disabled but I wouldn’t advise doing so unless you have a really good reason to.
Thanks. I will disable it. Not to be rude, as I appreciate the advice, but what would you consider:
> a really good reason?
I think access to my own filesystem is good enough. I admit when I looked at the reviews, I made sure there were no major issues before upgrade but missed this "sys integrity" thing.
With SIP off it's pretty easy to social engineer your way into the user's system, especially on dev machines - we all install all kinds of stuff that requires sudo, but until now sudo will let you at literally anything - including replacing core OS files with malware replacements, and most installers are pretty opaque (not that you have the time or inclination to closely examine all installers anyway).
The current state of affairs means that users - even non-technical ones - are routinely asked for their admin pwds in everyday use, but every time they enter it they are susceptible to be totally and utterly pwned.
Even expert users fall victim when they turn off system safeguards - XcodeGhost being only the most recent example, where only users who actively disabled Gatekeeper/codesign checking were susceptible.
It's kind of annoying for power users, but time and time again I think we've proven that power users aren't in any way immune to social engineering or simple blanket malware attack.
Honestly, as devs, we're more susceptible to this kind of attack than the average user, not less (e.g. see XcodeGhost). System integrity protection is great for us, yet I see a great deal of hubris when it's mentioned–as if we're somehow immune, or that we audit all the code we run.
I download all manner of tools for development work, and use sudo as and when necessary, and I'm thankful there's now an extra layer of security. If I needed to modify the filesystem (e.g. if I wanted to delete an app like another poster did), I'd disable SIP temporarily to do so, and I think that's fine, but I think it would be unwise to disable it permanently, especially on a whim. I would hope that modification of these sorts of files would be rare enough that it's not a big inconvenience anyway.
It is your filesystem, but these are system files. Is it really important to you to be able to muck around the OS? If it is, then you go find a way to disable the protections.
Windows also has the System Integrity Protection equivalent.
I share your sentiment towards privacy, I guard mine fiercely as well.
If I may say so though, I think you're coming at this the wrong way.
Trying to disable every component in the OS that phones home simply doesn't scale, may I suggest you explore gateway firewall devices such as PFSense, or the free version of Sophos' UTM if you prefer a more polished UI?
I use a Sophos UTM at home and I can see (and block) every request that my Macs use to try to phone home, with HTTP, HTTPS or regular network traffic.
I also use the Always-On VPN on my phone to apply ad blocking at the firewall level which protects my phone as well.
Very much worth checking out. Gateway protections are the only way to go these days IMO.
Edit: Just to add, at first glance I find the SIP system to be rather anti-user, but people in this thread are right. It's valuable protection to have in place. If I used a Mac at home I would only disable this to make the changes I needed before turning it back on again.
Edit to clarify: I use a Mac, but only has a HTPC and not as a desktop or workstation, and all outbound traffic is blocked by default.
Thanks, this was a helpful response unlike the SOish answers which I found unneccesarily hostile. If you see my comment below I was fairly protected.
I will look into those suggestions. Do to the differences and additions in caputan little snitch does not work. I havent connected to internet yet whoch ice floor needs to be configured properly. Does SOPHOS UTM work well even as a free version. It is annoying when snitch lets traffic out after 3grs.
As sad as this will sound, I cant afford a VPN. I set one up myself using OpenDNS and tunnelblick, which I should probably spin back up. Any other security suggestions? I can only use free stuff ATM .
The only limitation on the free version of the utm that I found so far is that you can't have more than 10 IPs active, but nothing stops you from using nat to get around that.
The utm itself actually hosts and serves the VPN connection by the way. My phone connects directly to the VPN on my UTM. You'll see a speed hit because of the extra hop unless you put your utm in the cloud.
Game Center is ~4MB, and you'll never remove all the potential "phone home" hooks without rewriting the OS. Your approach is akin to taking wheels off a car to reduce weight so it goes faster.
I was simply asking if this was a GM issue or something else. I needed access to my filesystem to make some changes and was providing a bit of feedback to others upgrading. I didn't think this was stack overflow. I had internet disabled and was loading applications from my USB, that I keep for these purposes and running config scripts. I only had mobile anyway so it was difficult to find answers. I still do not know if SIP can be turned back on, but if it can (which would be reasonable) I faced little risk on fresh install with internet disabled. If possible, I will turn it back on after my env is set up.
It ships on the system. Everything that ships on the system should be protected. Among other things, it prevents system updates from having problems when the apps they're trying to patch are missing.
The updater could just fall back to a non-delta update for anything that's been modified. That would help with other problems too, like storage corruption. SIP is supposed to be about security, not keeping updaters from doing a bit more work.
I take issue with bundling unimportant apps with system apps and libraries. I recognize this is a blurred line but I still think that Game Center is not important.
> Everything that ships on the system should be protected.
No. Not Game Center.app. Grand parent is right, this is bloatware that neither he, nor I, nor many others want. If I wanted a bloatware Windows box I would have bought one. There's no excuse for making this app non-removable.
It’s all a matter of opinion, but I’m not sure that “bloatware” is the appropriate term for bundled software that never runs unless it’s explicitly opened by the user, thus having negligible resource usage. Does that extra 4MB really bother you that much? Because that’s the only effect you’ll ever feel as a result of not deleting Game Center.
On the other hand, if we’re talking about the junk that your average Windows or Android device comes preinstalled with that is either configured to run at startup and/or modifies the stock UI (TouchWiz for example), yeah, that’s definitely bloatware and it’s reprehensible to make that unremovable. That isn’t what Apple is doing, however.
> Does that extra 4MB really bother you that much?
No, it doesn't, but what does bother me are the gigabyte+ apps that, like Game Center, Apple does not allow users to remove (without jumping through hoops that are probably both scary and technically challenging for most users).
Are you an Apple fan? Because I am (or was). I've been with Apple since the OS 7 days.
This lack of attention to detail is very uncharacteristic of the Apple I knew and loved.
The comparison to "what others are doing" is also very un-Apple like. Apple did not use others as a benchmark to decide what it should be doing, and the day it starts to do that is the day it's no longer Apple.
My apologies, I was mistaken. I had in mind apps like iMovie since, like Game Center, it's an app that Apple installs by default.
On 10.11, there are many apps that are not deleteable, but all of them seem to be under a gig (unless I'm missing something because I had, long ago, deleted an app and the OS update didn't restore it).
These include: Game Center, iBooks, Safari, iTunes, Photos, Contacts, Maps, Automator, Font Book, Dictionary, Notes, FaceTime, Chess, Reminders, Photo Booth, and perhaps a few other small-ish apps. These are less than 1 gig. I don't know why Apple did not choose to simply make whatever is so vital in the app bundle a system framework instead.
It's not a big deal to me if these small apps are non-deleteable. I assumed—incorrectly—that the big ones (iMovie, Garage Band, etc.) were non-deleteable as well.
This. I used game center as an example. Just removing unused languages saved me over a GB. I also stopped a bunch of annoying background stuff from using the cpu, which is nice, because I need it to do shit like compute for me.
While the attention to detail is lacking, it is becoming even more walled off. I reapect that because the market wants all there stuff synced all the time. Howecer, i don't. I dont need my search results sent to apple so i can get recommendations, i font want every message i text to be an imessage so it goes through there servers as well as att. I am disappoinr.
Thank you. Many people have been quite rude about this, and frankly, I expected better. 1) woz fought jobs on user mods on the apple 2, and released a post a while back about switching bck to linux.
I used game center as an example. Of coure the launchctl list uses an insane amount of resources for apple stuff. I also deleted several other apps and a few other things. Shit, running monolingual alone saved me ~1.2GB.
So thanks. I agree as well. If possible I will turn it back on after.
How incredibly arrogant of you to declare this about a tiny <3MB app just because you personally don't use it. Your personal preferences are not the arbiter of what is and is not useful, and this app provides the sole interface to a system component (GameKit) so it is entirely appropriate to ship on the system. And declaring this minuscule app "bloatware" is so laughable as to be almost insulting, because it's clear that you're just struggling to find a reason to compare OS X to Windows.
Could this be an issue for things like homebrew or ruby/rbenv? Reading about it, one might think 10.11 could have problems with someone trying to use anything but the system-shipped ruby version, or python, etc.
On the other hand, maybe this question is rather stupid as I really can't see Apple scaring away the developer community in such an unnecessary way.
> Could this be an issue for things like homebrew or ruby/rbenv?
/usr/local is not one of the SIP protected paths. The idea behind SIP is to protect system binaries from being surreptitiously patched by malicious parties, not to make the system totally useless.
> Reading about it, one might think 10.11 could have problems with someone trying to use anything but the system-shipped ruby version, or python, etc.
Aside from being really stupid from a customer standpoint, what would be the security benefit of doing this?
> /usr is shareable, read-only data. That means that /usr should be shareable between various FHS-compliant hosts and must not be written to.
Pretty much all modern unices consider that /usr, aside from /usr/local (which the FHS defines as "for use by the system administrator when installing software locally. It needs to be safe from being overwritten when the system software is updated."[1]), is part of the operating system.
It is thus very much unusual to modify /usr[2], and in line with current practices to lock it down tightly.
> Software placed in /usr may be overwritten by system upgrades. For this reason, local software must not be placed outside of /usr/local without good reason.
"we specify that the system can overwrite or remove anything you put there" is pretty much a dead ringer for "modifying this is unusual"
"OS X adds a new feature called "Rootless" that keeps the root user found on Unix-based systems from being able to be run. This can cause some troubles for disk management and backup utilities, so they included a way to turn it off. Open the Terminal and type sudo nvram boot-args="kext-dev-mode=1 rootless=0";sudo reboot to disable rootless and reboot your Mac. Only disable rootless if you know what this feature is used for, and you are experienced with the OS X command line." [1]
Game Center is a nasty piece of work by Apple. It's ruined iOS 9 and I regret installing that on my iPad and iPhone 6. Now, when I enter a very simple solitaire-like game called Midnight Mahjongg, I get slow-animating, built-in-delayed GC upsells and requests to log in to GC, even though I hate and detest and loathe GC. And if I so much as accidentally go to Home screen and back into game, presto, GC upsell appears again. On iPad it appears for 5 times -- you have to cancel 5 times and then it gets quiet. Until the next day. On iPhone, 3 cancels is enough to shut it up. Until the next day.
Use the game the next day and the counters are reset: 5 more cancels on iPad, 3 cancels on iPhone.
GC is the worst thing Apple's done in years. And if they have brought that crap and its fascist ways to MacOSX, then I really am hesitant to install any more MacOSX updates.
Why not just sign into Game Center? It's a serious question. Once you enable Game Center it stops bothering you and as far as I can tell doesn't really do anything other than add you to leaderboards.
"Edit n: seperate and unrelated, system does not seem to restart well. Eiter hangs or takes ages."
This is nothing new for OS X. Mavericks and the last couple of versions cannot restart / shut down properly. I'm sure Apple would say it's a feature not a bug.
Thanks for bringing this up, I just cancelled my download. There is no way I'm going to run an OS that attempts to limit my power to delete or modify applications. I think this may be the final straw for me and OSX.
I very recently had to attack GarageBand with a hex editor to disable app sandboxing so I could use third party VST plugins. I realize System Integrity Protection can be disabled by a kernel boot param, but this really, really, sticks in my craw.
You can delete and modify non-system apps just fine, FWIW. I imagine Game Center.app is not locked down for some nefarious reason, but just because it falls under "system owned" list.
I think GarageBand also ships with the OS (or at least it used to) so I wouldn't be surprised if it's also on the "system owned" list. This pushes all my security vs. liberty buttons.
It’s not uncommon for the App Store/Software Update to make no distinction between the final GM seed and the production version, making it say you’re already up to date if you’re running the GM seed. They’re usually close enough to production that the GM seeds can update to x.x.1 type updates.
That said I’m downloading the official release now and installing it over my GM seed install simply to get beta releases of 10.11.1 to stop showing up in my updates tab.
Are you on public beta or developer beta? Those instructions appear to be for the public beta program. If you were using the developer beta, I expect you have to reinstall the seed configuration utility (if you don't still have it) from https://developer.apple.com/osx/download/ and use that.
That's two OS X upgrades in a row (Yosemite, and now El Capitan) that the upgrade has moved the contents of my home directory /home/users/alphastorm/ into /home-preserved/. Luckily moving/copying everything back seems to fix almost everything.
Anyone else had this happen to them or know why it happens?
Do you really mean /home or /Users? Only /Users is standard to OS X. I would put your home directory there.
They may create /home if it's required to exist for compatibility with other Unix standards. And since an OS upgrade probably has a checklist of things that must succeed (such as the ability to "create" /home), they feel forced to preserve whatever might have been there already before "creating" it again.
On my machine, /home exists but it is completely empty.
I use a lot of audio production applications. I'm still on Mavericks, actually, because I haven't wanted to pay to upgrade perfectly fine software just so I could use a newer operating system. I have been receiving notices from software application vendors alerting me "Please strongly consider not upgrading to El Capitan yet, as there are compatibility issues that we need to work out."
So I'd guess the answer is -- it depends on what applications you want to continue using on your computer.
So far it seems OK. My /usr/local was preserved and restored automatically (mine was about 250 MB and the whole OS installation took about half an hour).
The split-screen view hasn't been fully-thought-through though. I would say almost everything I tried didn't do what I would have expected. There is a way for a window to end up on a space where the menu bar no longer has menus. There's even a mode where almost everything stops working: if the system decides only one of your windows supports splitting, it'll just sit there (even gestures won't work to reenter Mission Control) and you have to click to get out of it.
I wish they'd implemented a full tiled window manager. I'd really like to have at least 3 windows in the split view.
At the very least, an option to stack top and bottom instead of side by side would have been nice.
Seems like they want it to be congruent with how it works in iOS 9 on the iPad, so I don't hold out any hope. Maybe someone will figure out how to hack it.
So I tried it out last night. Overall things seem much more snappy though that is just a qualitative observation. Not much cosmetic changes. No WiFi issues no far!
Actually, Forklift is broken in El Capitan, at least for me. It just freezes after few seconds upon launching and then fails to recognize user input, or lags terribly.
On Windows I've been using Total Commander for 15 years or more. There's nothing like it on Mac, and I've tried them all. But there's this new app, Files (http://filesmanager.info/), which is being actively developed and gaining features fast. I've been using it for some time now I'm liking it more and more. The developer behind it is very responsive and skilled and it seems to be going in a great direction. There's hope for OS X! :)
I think you misunderstand how "rootless" works. Nothing is stopping you from using "sudo su" if you want to be root for some reason. The new security features prevent certain system files from being modified even if you are logged in as root. This can be disabled if you boot into recovery mode and use the terminal. More info: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...
> The new security features prevent certain system files from being modified even if you are logged in as root.
As a superuser, this annoys me. As a security conscious sysadmin, I'm mostly OK with this, though the lack of access except via recovery mode makes for a potential aggravation (makes remote assistance hard).
