Thursday, February 18, 2021

Mail Search vs. Big Sur’s Fast User Switching

John Gordon:

In our case Ben and Emily both have non-admin accounts on her M1 Air running Big Sur 11.2.1 with fast user switching enabled. When Ben logs out Emily’s Mail search stops working. There’s no error message, but search does nothing and Smart Folders are inactive.

The fix is to kill corespotlightd.

See also: Marco Arment.

Ivan Pavlov:

Fast user switch also breaks Handoff/Continuity/Unlock with Apple Watch. Submitted multiple radars over the last 4 years, still not fixed. Mac needs a year of refinements and bug fixes with no new features.

Clayton Andersen:

I wonder if something fundamental to fast user switching changed with big sur. Had this bug for a while related to it too.

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For me, Mojave introduced an annoying bug where if I log out of an account, I sometimes get a frozen spinner for 5 minutes before the login screen appears. It's seemingly random when it happens,and persists through the latest Mojave revision.

Mac needs a year of refinements and bug fixes with no new features.

There is a lot more than just one year's fixes worth of accrued technical debt at this point.

A no-feature year is like declaring bug bankruptcy. It helps short term, but it doesn’t actually change anything.

They need to change development priorities and processes to make it sustainable.

It looks like macOS 11.2.2 has fixed the Mail search failure related to Fast User Switching.

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