macOS Sierra

TL;DR

Because of the way the login process works on macOS 10.12 there are some special precautions that need to be taken to avoid long hangs when a new user logs in. Essentially you need to suppress the iCloud and Siri setup screens. If you don't suppress these screens then NoLoAD will bring forth a great vengeance and kill the processes that are hanging the login. That's a messy process though so it's not the preferred solution.

Details

It turns out that when you login for the first time on macOS 10.7-10.12 there is some slight of hand going on. First the loginwindow will actually login as a user named _mbsetupuser. This user runs the SetupAssistant in a special mode called MiniBuddy that presents those login setup screens after you enter your name and password. Then it stops that login and then actually logs you in with the info you gave it at the window.

As of now, NoLoAD has no idea how to deal with this switcheroo from the user it asked to login to the MiniBuddy user. So it just sits there on a black screen until the Setup Assistant times out. Which takes a long time. It also sets a preference in the user's loginwindow domain that MiniBuddy needs to launch, so it will just keep trying to do this every time the user logs in. It's not fun.

Solutions

The best solution for macOS 10.12 is to use the SetupAssistant managed settings to suppress the after login screens. This is documented in Apple's Configuration Profile Guide and I've also uploaded a sample mobileconfig file that shows the settings.

If this isn't done then there is an additional SierraFixes mechanism that comes along at the end of the login process, counts to five, then kills any SetupAssistant processes that it can find. This is ugly! It sometimes leads to confusion as to who the console user is if the _mbsetupuser was still active. It does however free up the login to continue to the Desktop.

Our Advice

The "easiest" way to avoid the issue is just to update to macOS 10.13 where Apple isn't doing the strange, fakeout login trick anymore.

If you can't do that then we highly recommend that you use the managed settings to prevent the MiniBuddy screens from appearing. This is supported and nice.

Failing that, and as a last resort, you can let the SierraFixes mech do its dirty work and continually murder MiniBuddy on logins.

Configuration File

SetupAssistant.mobileconfig