I personally wasn’t that annoyed about this issue but had a look at TotalSpaces out of general interest. I noticed that you have to disable SIP for this to work on newer versions of OS X, personally that isn’t a trade off I’d make. Regardless of my opinion it is something that shouldn’t be taken too lightly, if someone feels the trade off is worth it for them then that is fine but it is worth noting and considering before purchase.
mindriot
OvermindDL1
Why would that affect SIP? We use SIP at work for all our telephony and there’s been no issues across a huge variety of computers…
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mindriot
In this case SIP = system integrity protection… which needless to say has its pros and cons, but also generally if you (the proverbial you) do not know what they are then you are probably best not to mess with it.
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OvermindDL1
Ahh I see, looked it up, that looks horrifying. You can’t even debug with it enabled? How does anyone get work down?! o.O
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mindriot
Never had a problem with it, on the day to day it doesn’t usually get in the way, that is to say working with debug tools etc at an application level it has never ever been noticeable.
The overview description makes it sound much worse than it is, you can as a admin level user authorise working within protected areas but the problem faced here is that it wants to do code injection with some protected components which does require disabling it. Installing things that live in protected areas or making configuration changes isn’t that big a deal, running signed stuff is fine and authorising unsigned stuff to work is also fine, letting some random app inject changes into system comments other than at normal extension points does require disabling it entirely though and it is something that in general I don’t want to happen nearly all of the time. Others might but it should be considered against a layer of protection that could be taken for grated that has just been sacrificed, that may or may not be a trade off worth making, my point is only that it is worth being aware of what is being traded off particularly when it comes to security features. The stack overflow link is more explicit, the note on the product page is pretty small, takes one link to say what you are changing and yet another to say what that means which in my opinion hides the trade off element a bit deep.
EDIT: It does seem that the restrictions have hardened from what I remembered in that you cannot install to or modify the protected parts, but then I’ve never really noticed since it seems most things I used moved to working outside of those areas. Still never seen it actually cause a problem unless you want to hack how a core system component works, which normally tends to be an interface thing that doesn’t have some way of abusing accessibility functions.
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dimitarvp
Oh yes. SIP stays! Especially knowing that Chrome bricked a lot of Macs lately – those who had it turned off.
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OvermindDL1
Wait what how?! o.O
I’m really curious about the technological processes that caused this?!
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dimitarvp
OvermindDL1
dimitarvp
No idea. Probably want to embed their code in a lower-level kernel start-up hooks?
That being said, “never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence” might be a good explanation as well.
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