Ask HN: Mojave, anything developers should know about before upgrading?

From what I've seen around the web, this upgrade seems less problematic than previous years, but has anyone spotted any gotchas that other developers could do with knowing about before upgrading?

19 points | by drcongo 2039 days ago

8 comments

  • blacksmith_tb 2039 days ago
    Very brave - I tend to wait until at least the first point release (so, 10.14.1) or later before taking the plunge. I'd run brew doctor afterwards for sure...
  • ricardbejarano 2038 days ago
    VirualBox does not work: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/17805

    tl;dr: Mojave blocks the VBoxDrv.kext <5.3 kernel extension from loading because "it will panic the machine if allowed to load", and it's up to Oracle to patch on version >=5.3 (current latest is 5.2.18)

    Systems that depend on VirtualBox such as Vagrant don't work either.

    Some guy has posted a workaround but it involves disabling the SIP, proceed at your own risk: https://silvae86.github.io/sysadmin/mojave/beta/vagrant/virt...

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  • caspervonb 2039 days ago
    Downloading it so.. I hope not but Apple updates tend to cause problems rather than solving them, also upgrading Fedora at the same time which may turn out to be dumb, fingers crossed.
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    • caspervonb 2036 days ago
      Dark mode is overrated, looks bad compared to what's available on GNOME but nothing blew up so far.
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      • kizomanizo 2035 days ago
        We (The republic of Hipsters) declare everything dark mode as our default settings.
  • kevinherron 2038 days ago
    I upgraded last night and almost can't tell the difference, which I guess is a good thing.

    Had to reinstall Xcode command line tools after the upgrade finished.

  • nodesocket 2038 days ago
    So far no issues for me upgrading. Just missing dark mode for Chrome.

    I did run `brew doctor && brew prune`

  • nil_pointer 2038 days ago
    Your fonts will look like shit if you use an external display. Luckily there's a workaround:

    defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 3

    defaults write -g CGFontRenderingFontSmoothingDisabled -bool false

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    • toomuchtodo 2038 days ago
      Thank you for this! My Thunderbolt displays looked like garbage this morning, and I suddenly regretted upgrading to Mojave until I found this.
    • stephenr 2038 days ago
      Presumably this is because the vast majority of external displays are not high DPI?
  • chmaynard 2039 days ago
    No gotchas, but I recommend that you do a full backup before upgrading.
  • dfischer 2036 days ago
    Works great for me. I’m pretty surprised.