The Ventura Problem ➹

This is the kind of “but it worked perfectly before” reason why I don’t usually upgrade to new macOS versions before there’s at least one point release.

In short, macOS Ventura is the only operating system where you can’t program a Raspberry Pi Pico (and, potentially, any other board that supports MicroPython or CircuitPython, not just RP2040 ones) by just dragging files onto its virtual USB drive.

Like pretty much every single filesystem-related weirdness we’ve been subject to throughout the history of macOS, it may look like an edge case to the Finder team at Apple, but it is a breaking issue for anyone using their otherwise perfectly good Mac for a perfectly normal thing that just works on every other operating system.

I am mostly at peace with the fact that we will never be rid of .DS_Store in USB pen drives because Apple can’t find the willpower to be good removable media citizens, but like all the extended attribute stupidity we’ve seen over the past twenty years, preventing the Finder from writing them by default to non-macOS volumes (or even thinking about that in the first place) would definitely have paid off in this instance…

I’m tracking the GitHub issue to see how long it takes to get this fixed, but I’m not holding my breath here.