macOS 14.4 non-Metal sessions bug

[ASentientBot]

macOS 14.4 is currently unusable on non-Metal due to an issue regarding login sessions. End users should not update. The symptoms are as follows.

• loginwindow crashes on first 1-2 attempts to login
• loginwindow crashes during shutdown
• apps aren't tracked correctly; force quit dialog is always empty, apps can't receive keyboard focus, menubar usually doesn't appear

@educovas has developed some hacks to prevent the loginwindow crashes and allow apps to receive focus; however, the root cause is not well understood yet, and loginwindow is still unaware of the running apps. It seems like LaunchServices is assigning apps to the wrong session IDs, but downgrading related binaries has no effect. Further RE of session handling will be needed.

[ASentientBot]

forgot to update this page, anyways turns out the root cause was my "cycle through windows" initializer which caused AppKit to load prematurely and somehow resulted in every app being assigned to its own audit session. still unclear on exactly why this happens on 14.4 specifically, but simply disabling the bad code resolves the issue.

🤦🏻‍♀️