After following the changes as well as the issues in Catalina since it was released, I'm in no hurry to upgrade to it. I actually dread that Apple would, in a few short months, announce a new major release with even more changes and new features. So here's my short open letter to Apple.<p>Dear Apple:<p>Eat your false pride and do a reset on macOS – in WWDC 2020, don't add a new major macOS release, and don't have a new release name with funny stories of how your crack marketing department came up with it. Accept that you messed up, just like you messed up with the Mac Pro and tried to save face by saying that you "painted yourself into a thermal corner" (but didn't say why you went into radio silence for years). Then work on a stability focused release without adding major new features. We know you don't focus or spend as much on Mac/macOS as you do on iPhone and iOS. Introspect and realize that you bit a whole lot more than you can chew (even with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash) with macOS Catalina.<p>Fix the design, fix the data loss issues, fix the Time Machine issues, fix the iTunes "replacements", fix the performance issues of APFS on magnetic hard drives, fix Catalyst, improve your QA/QC...the list of big ticket items is long enough to keep your tiny macOS team busy for another year or two.<p>Follow a tick-tock cycle if you can't solve this with your current organization structure and people – one feature release a year, followed by (another) one whole year for stabilization and tiny incremental improvements.<p>It takes a big mind to accept mistakes, accept them sooner than later, and then correct them. It's high time for you to grow up (being in the top two or three in market cap and all) and start doing this. You'll find people more accepting of deficiencies/issues and more willing to wait for fixes when you communicate like an adult and treat your customers as adults.<p>[P.S.: If I have to lose some virtual points for this critical comment, so be it]
This is an easy Google search, but I'll add it just in case someone hasn't done it yet. If you'd like to avoid upgrading to Catalina until you think it's ready, but still get security updates, etc., run this in your terminal:<p><pre><code> $ sudo softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina"
$ defaults write com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs 0
$ killall Dock
</code></pre>
This ignores the system update, and gets rid of the red update dot.
While Catalina certainly isn’t perfect, the issues are a bit overblown from my point of view. I’ve been running 3 different machines on it since release (hackintosh tower, 2017 iMac, 2015 MBP), two of which are used on a daily basis, and they’ve all been fine. The permissions prompts were annoying for the first hour after install and it’s been smooth ever since.<p>But my use case is almost exclusively programming and Blizzard games, so maybe the problems are centered around particular types of software or something.
From a file access point of view in Catalina, the OS’ “left hand” still doesn’t always seem to know what its “right hand” is doing.<p>For example, just today I tried to save a file on top of an existing file, and when the system panel prompted me, I said Replace. That appeared to be accepted but <i>after</i> the panel closed the app failed to actually save, citing something about how I do not have access to the target file. I used the Finder to trash the old file and retried, and then it worked. From a user point of view, this is exactly the kind of work-around that should never be required, and I can imagine some people not even trying and just thinking everything is broken.<p>And as an app developer these things are even more frustrating because I literally cannot tell all the ways a user “might” have an issue anymore. How many awful combinations of file-related failures are there? How many obscure messages are possible, and is a message even displayed for every case?<p>If a system is really complex, it is not only hard to get it right <i>once</i> but it is really hard to <i>keep</i> it right over time. I am worried that all these special cases will just be fixed and re-broken for months on end.
I would say no, not worth it if you rely on using your mac for developing software and don't want to spend two days getting everything to work again!
I run 10.15 at work, and 10.14 at home, and so far, here are a couple of the issues I've run with 10.15.<p>1) Some weirdness around XCode and XCode Command Line Tools that made installing node-gyp a huge pain. I mean, look at these instructions and tell me if this is something you want to deal with: <a href="https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/blob/master/macOS_Catalina.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/blob/master/macOS_Catalin...</a><p>2) Change of default shell in 10.15 from bash to zsh. Kind of minor, but Apple doesn't want to use Bash 5.2 because of licensing. Great.<p>3) Lack of support for 32 bit programs. This is actually a big deal for me, since a course I am taking requires the use of WinBugs (I know, we should use STAN :) ), which is only available in 32 bit pre-compiled binaries. There is an unfortunately large amount of software like this!
Catalina has much improved since its initial version. My development MacBook now only crashes a few times a week rather than a few times a day. The Apple Catalina developers clearly know what they are doing. /s
Apple really needs to have a "maintenance year" for software - where the majority of work is fixing bugs and simplifying complicated features, and minimal new features are added beyond those necessary to support new hardware.<p>I personally had so many bugs with Catalina that I decided to just wipe my device and start afresh with a clean install of Catalina off a USB stick. It helped a great deal, but I still have some bugs.<p>It looks like a lot of testing at Apple is done on either clean builds, or a simple upgrade from a year ago (while most real-life users have 3-4 upgrades stacked on each other)
With a great deal of caution I finally upgraded one of the 5 Macs I own to Catalina over the weekend. First thing I notice is that my NFS mounts no longer work since, they were mounted at a non-standard location. I've shelved further plans to update until I resolve NFS mounts issue using the automounter. Sigh. The apple ecosystem is becoming harder to use. But I really have no choice I do a lot of iOS and MacOS development, and its the only platform I can use for that purpose.
I really wish the community would take over and fork MacOS at its lowest opensource/forkable denominator to start a free-as-in-Linux, MacOS binary-compatible alternative. Something that is stable and predictable for hardware makers to distribute and drivers to be written for. And inviting for the wider user base to adopt knowing that their favorite apps will run just the same. That would be a game-changer as pc hardware makers are at a dead end running Windows from a company that is not focused on its OS anymore, Linux unfortunately doesn't seem to ever cut it with the massses and app makers and MacOS is only available as a user hack in non apple hw.<p>Now this would be a serious challenge. Everything from APIs to the ecosystem to the apps themselves have licenses and, righteous or not, would be game for lawsuits left and right should the project be a head turner at some point.<p>This ex Apple OSX engineer in fact paints it as doomed from the start:<p><a href="https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-ever-be-possible-to-clone-macOS-and-fork-it-like-Linux" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-ever-be-possible-to-clone-...</a>
Copying files to my iDevice seems entirely broken in Catalina. not that it was all puppies and unicorns in itunes but it's gotten worse.<p>Devices don't show up in the finder. Devices do show up but no info is shown. Devices physically plugged in don't show up. Devices do show up but files tab is empty.<p>When it does work there is no indication it's working. Drag a file to an app and ... nothing, 100% silent. No copy progress bar, no spinner, no indication what-so-ever that it is or is not working.
I had to boot into safe mode to log in to iCloud, to get an auth code from a device I removed months ago, just to remove the notification flag that said I needed to log in to use certain apps.<p>I don't get how they can keep making buggy OS upgrades like this. I mean is the wealthiest company in the world too cheap to hire a good QA team? Or do they just assume those who bitch on their forums are their QA team?
I upgraded my MBP (late 2013 edition) 10 weeks ago.
I have experienced more forced software (mac news and some siri stuff)
Additionally the Microsoft office installation I had with a valid license is no longer functional, and was "upgraded" to MS office 365, which is a subscription based model that seems to run online rather than locally.<p>I refuse to pay for the upgrade, and just use Libre Office now.<p>Further more I am looking into best compatible linux system to run on the hardware.<p>So far I have read that the cinnamon based manjaro linux should be reasonable.
This post seems like a sensible and fair summary of the current situation for users who can't upgrade yet. There's also a group of users (myself included) who don't <i>want</i> to upgrade. In my case, I'm very familiar with iTunes and I don't want to switch to a new, untested music app with a different UI.
Since I need 32bit support and VMs are not option due to no HW acceleration and overall shitty experience (I can’t help but blame Apple for that too) Mojave will be the last macOS version I run before I make the switch to FreeBSD in a few years.
Only real bug that annoys me in Catalina is the OS switching around the external screens when I dock my MacBook. I have 2 monitors connected, and almost every morning, after docking, I have to go into System Preferences and drag them around. Very annoying, but it's a bug that's been there for years.
I've updated my mac book pro but not my imac. I use my imac mainly for browsing & light gaming and I'm not too eager to deal with some games not working anymore. And since I can't really tell any meaningful difference between my mac book pro and imac in terms of OS experience, I'm pretty confident that the upgrade adds no value whatsoever for me. Apple seems to have mostly done some security tweaks that are amazingly annoying, some window dressing in terms of UI that I mostly don't notice and lots of tweaks to bits of software that come with the OS that I never use. I'll probably do the upgrade eventually but I'm getting less and less out of these yearly upgrades.<p>I've actually been considering switching the imac to linux but it seems to be a bit of a hassle in terms of hardware support. I booted it once from a usb stick but that messed up my bt keyboard/trackpad pairing so recovering from that was a bit of a PITA.
I just can't stomach all the issues I know I'll run into for getting so little. I am very frustrated that I've lost access to my reminders (which I actually use/used a lot) because my phone updated and now my desktop OS can't see the "new" reminders. Unfortunately I'm not aware of another todo/reminder app that can "park" notifications on the iOS lockscreen so that they don't go away until I do them or reschedule them so I'm kind of stuck...
Since WWDC 2019, I have ran into at least one bug almost every day in Apple’s software and services. I wish that was an exaggeration.<p>I’ve always been a big proponent of Apple, and they’re still better than the alternatives for me, but I can’t recommend Apple to a new user until there’s a noticeable improvement in their quality control.
I still think there’s too much chatter, but it seems to have calmed down.<p>Where I work we turned on the ability for people to upgrade now. Before it was dodgy with all the pop up requests that were overwhelming. It seems to be a non issue in 10.15.2 and later.<p>I haven’t really come across anything that impedes our workflow at work.
As an iMac user for years, I've lately considered the idea of either a hackintosh or just giving up on MacOS completely.<p>I'm ready to upgrade to a new Apple desktop, and none of the options are even remotely enticing for the amount of money they require.<p>I just don't like the state of things anymore and 99.9% of what I do doesn't need MacOS. Though there is some investment into the ecosystem that will hurt a bit.<p>Would have to repurchase Serif products on Windows. As much as I enjoy Linux from time to time, I don't know that I could see myself moving to it full-time
I didn’t upgrade: I created a new volume and installed a fresh Catalina on it. Honestly it’s been working great for me and the battery life increased (probably because my old install was… uhm… dusty)
Current Catalina is a great upgrade, if you’re running an earlier version of it :)<p>More seriously at this point most of the annoying issues seem to have gone away.<p>The lack of 32bit still prevents me from playing a few games, but I will continue to blame those developers rather than Apple - OSX has only supported 64bit platforms for a decade, there’s no excuse for any new software having been 32bit only in the last 5 years at least.
Have been using it since beta. Mostly behaved well enough, but bugs mounted over time. A clean install fixed them all. Especially annoying was it fucking around with iCloud. Will be the last beta I try.<p>Running two Catalina machines, I feel confident in saying that it is now a solid setup.<p>It is of course a disgrace that it took em 6 months to stabilise the OS.
I have no intention to upgrade any of my Macs to Catalina and neither do any of the Mac users I know. Even hardcore Apple fans will remain for the time being on Mojave.
Works fine for me developing on PyCharm on a new MBA. But on the other hand, I haven't used pre-10.15 macOS so I might be blind to some of the pain points of upgrading.
I spent the week-time trying it. I did install it on a USB drive. I started from a Carbon Copy Cloned version of my main OS that I updated.
I had to give up, I tried to update a project I am working on and after a 1-hour git pull would not finish even if there were only a few files to update.
Everything takes forever even if the CPU is almost idle, I suppose trying it on an external USB drive is a big issue even if I did that in the past with other macOS versions...
I had to downgrade from Catalina back to Mojave on my 2016 MacBook 15 TB, for some reason the browsers (Safari, Chrome) would stop responding to keyboard at all after a few hours in Catalina.