Office 2016 Proving Unstable With Apple's El Capitan

An anonymous reader writes: Users of Microsoft Office on the Mac are reporting widespread instabilities and conflicts after upgrading to the latest version of the Apple desktop operating system, El Capitan. The first indications that El Capitan and Office 2016 were not working well together came in a now epic thread at Microsoft Community. Many users have surmised that new restrictions in file permissions in El Capitan caused the problems initially, though nearly all agree that Office's Outlook email client is the critical point of failure in the current round of application crashes and loss of functionality.

Comments

Re:Remembering what Microsoft did

[Gr8Apes]

Don't forget about running Windows 95 on DRDos (if OS = DRDOS, randomly throw warning/error) or Office95 on OS/2 (ask for memory at 2GB boundary, OS/2 only had 512MB windows VM). Those are 2 of the notable instances where MS purposefully made their own software flaky or broken for no reason other than to kill the competitor. I'm sure there are others.

I know nobody RTFA's but..

[sconeu]

It's not just El Capitan. Per the linked thread, Yosemite has the same issues.

Not just MS Office

[Mal-2]

I got a notice from Native Instruments warning against upgrading to El Capitan, as a number of their products don't work with it either. Apparently something about the sound driver model was changed. The result of trying isn't just failure, but complete kernel panics.

Is the typical OS X upgrade this perilous? I don't recall hearing warnings like this before.

Re:Not just MS Office

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the iOS-ification of OS X. They're changing the driver model and moving to a "rootless" model where the root account still exists but no longer has access to everything. There is now a list of files you can't change on OS X - at all. This includes the entirety of /bin and /usr, OS X specific things like /System, and random other things like /Applications/Photos.app.

What this means is that people who create third party utilities that hook into OS X via non-Apple-approved ways can no longer do so in El Capitan, and the user has no way to "jailbreak" their Mac to allow them anyway. (That's not entirely true, there is still a method to disable this new iOS-style lockdown, but it involves booting off El Capitan install media. Which Apple doesn't distribute.)

This new locked-down OS X is just the start of forcing all apps to go through the App Store and it's the cause of this Office bug and pretty much every other problem people are having with El Capitan. Since El Capitan offers basically no user visible changes (just backend ones like locking down your own computer from you), there's literally no reason to "upgrade." Basically, Apple pulled a Windows 10.

Re:Not just MS Office

[Anonymous Coward]

You say that like it's a bad thing. Reason: when the inevitable privilege escalation bug happens grandma won't get her Mac compromised (Microsoft should take a big, huge, hunking hint here).

If you're a developer: boot into recovery mode, terminal, "csrutil disable", reboot. Voila, root is back, end of story.

Re:Not just MS Office

[CraigCruden]

Native Instruments problem sounds like it was their (Native Instruments) drivers....

The fact that it has been in public beta for 3 months and now all of a sudden they realize there might be an issue is just negligence on their part.

For me, the update has been smooth and all 40 applications work fine. The only issue I have had is the configuration for background on 2 of my many monitors keeps going back to default on boot :p

Re:Not just MS Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Restart your Mac.
Before OS X starts up, hold down Command-R and keep it held down until you see an Apple icon and a progress bar. Release. This boots you into Recovery.
From the Utilities menu, select Terminal.
At the prompt type exactly the following and then press Return: csrutil disable
Terminal should display a message that SIP was disabled.
From the menu, select Restart.

System Integrity Protector is now disabled.

Re:Not just MS Office

[Lumpy]

"and the user has no way to "jailbreak" their Mac to allow them anyway."

Make things up much? Just Boot into recovery mode, start a terminal, type csrutil disable then reboot.

Rootless is a problem, and Office 2016 > 2011

[aussersterne]

Just upgraded to El Capitan last night.

Problem (1): I found out very quickly that root has been neutered; you can't make any changes to "system" files (in this case, meaning files that were included in the OS distribution, including things like the Mail.app folder or binaries, etc.). You get a message about not having permission, despite being root, and without any extended attributes being set on the files. Turns out that El Capitan uses a new "rootless" model in which root is no longer root and many parts of the system are off limits to any human user. Solution: Boot into recovery mode, start a terminal, and enter the command "csrutil disable" then reboot. You'll get root back and will be able to change files again.

Problem (2): Parts of Office 2011 didn't work at all—just beach balled upon startup. I tried to figure this out for a while but didn't see anyone else talking about solutions online, so I installed Office Mac 2016 (since I'm already paying for Office 365 anyway so that I can use it on my tablet and phone). I've been using the Office Mac 2016 applications all day (Outlook, Word, and Excel for work) heavily, without any trouble, so as a data sample of one I can say that in my case, 2016 is definitely a better bet on El Capitan than 2011, since Word and Outlook 2011 didn't work at all.

Re:advice != information

[phayes]

Ars covered SIP in detail here including the config file /System/Library/Sandbox/rootless.conf.

Other than dev tools like dtrace, few well written tools should be impacted. Yeah, some people are going to have to find other ways of doing things than throwing them into /System, /bin, etc.

Most stuff from across the 'Net isn't installing in SIP protected locations anyway & if they were, they needed to be rewritten.