Another discovery!
Discovered that the logs on mac contain info about plist values it tries to access that doesn't exist. For example the Display Settings looks up a ton of things.
Wrote a small command that cleans it up and highlights if the setting exists, as well as prevents outputting the same keys multiple times. Many of these can be added to preference files.
log stream --predicate 'subsystem=="com.apple.defaults"' --info --debug | sed -unE 's/.* (found no value|looked up value).* for key ([^ ]+).*Domain: ([^ ,]+).*/\1 - \2 - \3/p' | awk '!seen[$0]++ {split($0, parts, " - "); if (parts[1] == "looked up value") {printf "\033[32m!\033[0m"} else {printf "\033[31mx\033[0m"}; printf " - \033[33m%s\033[0m - \033[37m%s\033[0m\n", parts[3], parts[2]}'
To filter the output use grep like this to avoid issues with buffering: | grep -i --line-buffered Smooth
I'm absolutely certain there exists values that affects how retina resolutions scale. Next step would be to turn on logging of debug entries from startup and filtering all the logs.
Some info about setting defaults. Note that many can be set in local versions instead of overwriting the original. https://eclecticlight.co/2022/11/25/changing-preferences-isnt-so-simple/
Useful tool to diff what prefs change after doing certain things. But do note that this DOES NOT show what things it tries to read that doesn't exist. macos-defaults/diff.sh at main · yannbertrand/macos-defaults (github.com)
