iCloud ruined my day

Yesterday, I was doing my usual tinkering on the computer, when things went haywire. Suddenly, apps wouldn't launch. Or would take up to a minute to launch. The Finder was crashing constantly. Trying to "Save As..." anything caused apps to hang.

I played back the things I may have installed or changed, but nothing jumped out as a feasible cause.

After an hour of trying simple things and rebooting, I re-installed Sonoma. No change. Starting in Safe Mode seemed to work, but then didn't. I disconnected every drive and USB device. Nothing helped.

Somehow it felt network related. It was just a feeling, but that's all I had by that point. I noticed that the apps that wouldn't launch were mostly apps that relied on iCloud for sync. A few searches pointed to turning off iCloud. One in particular mentioned deleting  ~/Library/Application Support/CloudFiles. So I did that. Stopped iCloud (and didn't bother keeping copies of the files, since they were already in iCloud and backed up elsewhere). Then I deleted the CloudFiles folder. Then started iCloud. 

Once all my iCloud stuff was re-synced, the machine started working great. Apps launch instantly. The Finder works. "Save As..." works. I can finally get back to my tinkering. 

I'm not going to stay mad enough at iCloud to swear it off and move to Linux or anything, but that kind of sucked.