17 ms·

Is Catalina a Good Upgrade Yet?

160 points by mrzool 7y ago

chmaynard 7y ago
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 want 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.
- ultrarunner 7y ago
  I do, but I’m not ready to abandon obscure bits of software from years ago that accomplish one complicated task and therefore have no current maintainer. I’ve been too busy to devise a game plan for this, and in the meantime Mojave is running fine. I wonder if the music app will run on Mojave
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  This just shows you can't please everybody, iTunes has to be the most complained about piece of software from Apple.
  - ValentineC 7y ago
    > iTunes has to be the most complained about piece of software from Apple Apple seems to have moved most of the iOS maintenance functionality from iTunes over to iOS itself. Personally, I have an iCloud storage plan, and I don't use iTunes regularly anymore except when upgrading phones.
  - Marsymars 7y ago
    Sure, but the podcast management for my iPod Nano on Catalina is dreadful, to the point where I gave up and switched to using my Android phone for podcasts.
- olliej 7y ago
  Re: iTunes - seriously I thought the old “one app does everything” was annoying but “let’s have multiple apps for each type of media” is far worse. All I think anyone wanted was to remove the iDevice setup and sync stuff from iTunes. I’d also kill to have a preference to remove Apple Music from the top of the music management interface.
armitron 7y ago
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.
- jki275 7y ago
  What is the issue with VMs? I develop using them all the time - I’ve got at least five VMs (Linux, BSD, and Windows) loaded on my MBP right now and use three of them constantly.
  - armitron 7y ago
    Running macOS in a VM is highly problematic.
    - jki275 7y ago
      The terms of service prohibit doing so on other than a Mac, so it’s generally unsupported on other platforms - maybe I misunderstood.
jbj 7y ago
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. I refuse to pay for the upgrade, and just use Libre Office now. Further more I am looking into best compatible linux system to run on the hardware. So far I have read that the cinnamon based manjaro linux should be reasonable.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  You can still get local versions of Office it's just the version you had (2011 I assume, older possibly?) was 32 bit only.
  - jbj 7y ago
    I previously looked for this without luck, but it seems there is a manual upgrade here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/office-for-mac/office-2016-for-mac-64-bit-upgrade https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/office-... I will check it out.
    - zamadatix 7y ago
      Office 2019 for Mac would be the version to target for longest support. The reason 2011 didn't have an upgrade path is its support ended in 2017.
      - jbj 7y ago
        the one I used to have before catalina was Office 2016, I am not sure if my license is compatible with 2019. I just tried the packagefile from the link, and after installing I am still stuck with MS office 365. At this point, libreoffice does the job, and I cant be bothered to invest more time to get MS office, 2016 edition 64 bit, or whatever would be applicable in my case, to work like before catalina. thanks for the tips though.
chadlavi 7y ago
I don't get all the static over this. I've been using Catalina since the betas and it's been fine the whole time.
- wool_gather 7y ago
  The static is because some (many?) people haven't had the same smooth experience that you have.
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  You must not develop anything in Perl 5 because I can't get a single Perl 5 version after 5.26.1 to compile through perlbrew - at least one if not multiple tests fail.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    I'm not saying that yours is not a valid data point, but "developing in perl" strikes me as likely to be a fairly tiny subset even of developers in general.
    - ohithereyou 7y ago
      Fair. Catalina is the last version of macOS that I will run. I will move my mac mini to Linux after Catalina loses security support, should it live that long, or I'll replace it with a NUC running Linux if it doesnt.
- Marsymars 7y ago
  Different experiences for different people. Catalina is the first macOS update in years that hasn't broken core parts of my workflow on macOS.
- csomar 7y ago
  It's the same for me except for 32-bit apps (which turned to be a productivity boost since I can no longer play any games). Also Catalina fixed a weird bugs with the 3 external monitors which required, before, multiple unplugging and plugging to display normally.
ycombonator 7y ago
No
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
newscracker 7y ago
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. Dear Apple: 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. 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. 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. 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.S.: If I have to lose some virtual points for this critical comment, so be it]
- macinjosh 7y ago
  I have been using Catalina on my dev machine since the public beta and have none of the issues you claim. Catalina is my favorite macOS yet. Just because it doesn’t work the way you want doesn’t mean Apple messed up.
  - wool_gather 7y ago
    Conversely, the fact that it works for you doesn't preclude it being buggy, or problematic in other ways, for other people.
someonehere 7y ago
I still think there’s too much chatter, but it seems to have calmed down. 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. I haven’t really come across anything that impedes our workflow at work.
wespiser_2018 7y ago
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. 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: https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/blob/master/macOS_Catalina.md https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/blob/master/macOS_Catalin... 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. 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!
- treden 7y ago
  Also there's some weird bug with external monitors where after waking up from sleeping the TrueTone is maladjusted leaving the screen super dark- turning TrueTone off and back on again (of course) fixes it.
  - ascagnel_ 7y ago
    I have the exact _opposite_ experience (at least until the .2 patch) -- waking up from sleep would put the screen at maximum brightness.
- beamso 7y ago
  1. I hadn't seen that guide, but there is some issue where Catalina thinks that the command line tools installed are up to date, but `brew doctor` reports otherwise and you are forced to manually download the command line tools, just like in that guide. 2. I tried zsh briefly, then just used the bash that you can install via homebrew.
- isolatedbyyou 7y ago
  Every major update appears to uninstall xcode command line tools. All you have to do is that xcode-select --install or whatever it is, but I mean, god, how much testing do they do to not see this.
kirstenbirgit 7y ago
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.
- tbrock 7y ago
  You are probably swapping which cord goes in which port. This world flawlessly for me.
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    I have the same problem as OP and I only use one USB port for my two monitors
    - tbrock 7y ago
      Maybe daisy chaining is the problem then? It has something to do with the order the devices are enumerated.
- Marsymars 7y ago
  Hey my office Windows desktop also tends to flip all my windows around when I'm moving between RDP/local access.
- matheist 7y ago
  I also have 2 monitors and I used to have this problem too! I also use spaces, and all the spaces would be switched over, so I'd have to do a lot of switching. Here's what works for me, if I dock my laptop and find that the screens are reversed: 1. Unplug monitor A, wait for screens to stabilize. 2. Unplug monitor B, wait for screens to stablilize. 3. Plug in monitor A, wait for screens to stabilize. 4. Plug in monitor B, wait for screens to stabilize. And that fixes it every time. My "default" monitor is set to be my laptop's monitor. Try reversing the roles of A and B if it doesn't work. If you use spaces as well — I also find it helps to have an empty space as the first space for each monitor.
oxfordmale 7y ago
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
- Roboprog 7y ago
  Sadly, my 2011 MacBook Pro won’t update to these later versions, so I just have to leave it running for months at a time. Perhaps when the keyboard fails, someday, I’ll replace it, instead of just upgrading the RAM and drive. Kidding aside, I would like to get a newer version someday with better screen resolution and size, but Apple seems to have many missteps to recover from the last 5 years or so. I’m assuming an implied “/s” at the end of your comment.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    I also have a 2011 and still running El Capitan because I was concerned about how it would handle updates. What version are you running right now and how much RAM do you have?
    - cglong 7y ago
      I have a 2011 iMac that's running High Sierra (its last supported release). I upgraded it from its base 4GB to 20GB of RAM. Since getting High Sierra, everything's been really smooth, but the Sierra -> High Sierra upgrade actually bricked my computer. It was perpetually stuck in the installation phase, bailing after 45 minutes because it couldn't unmount my partition. To Apple's credit though, after I used recovery mode to reinstall the OS, everything worked and my data was intact.
  - gimboland 7y ago
    FYI, You can replace the keyboard on a 2011 MBP; I've done it. Fiddly but not especially difficult. The 3rd party keyboard I replaced it with isn't as good as the original (in particular the backlight is very leaky) but it's not bad and gave the machine a new lease of life...
kitsunesoba 7y ago
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. But my use case is almost exclusively programming and Blizzard games, so maybe the problems are centered around particular types of software or something.
- craftinator 7y ago
  Permanent data loss in multiple Apple cloud applications is the biggest issue I've seen, followed by a pretty gnarly permissions issue that I can't quite wrap my head around. But data loss and security issues are the two largest problems you can have with an OS, so really the contempt people have for Catalina is not overblown, IF they run into these issues.
- xtracto 7y ago
  Macs permission prompts remind me of this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8CwoluNRSSc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8CwoluNRSSc There is several software that doesn't work with Catalina. In my case RingCentral meetings. But in general people shouldn't downgrade to it... it is 100% a downgrade, as it removes features available in the previous version.
  - pilif 7y ago
    The prompts appear once per app. The vista prompts appeared every time an app was doing something that required elevated privileges which, back then, was all the time. This issue is totally overblown and, TBH, I like to know what application has access to what data on my machine. If the price for that is a one-time prompt per application, I'm willing to pay that. If you are not and you are willing to forego the security advantage, then use spctl to disable Gatekeeper
- pier25 7y ago
  AFAIK many audio dev companies still recommend its users to not upgrade to Catalina. Ableton: https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009770040-Live-10-compatibility-with-macOS-10-15-Catalina https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009770040-Live...
noctilux 7y ago
I don't think anyone has mentioned yet that wine doesn't work yet on Catalina. Until that's fixed I'm staying with Mojave.
- krackers 7y ago
  Codeweavers has this working with their professional Crossover app. I recall it requiring some hacky tricks and a special compiler for the shimming, so there's been some issues trying to upstream the changes.
  - kristiandupont 7y ago
    I am using the crossover app now and it works but it feels painfully slow compared to running Wine. Not sure exactly why, I am running a very simple text editor.
sumanthvepa 7y ago
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.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  > 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. So, first off, sincere sympathy. I feel you, I've been there. My current recommendation to people is: whatever you do in your personal life (Apple, Android, Windows, whatever), keep your Apple-related work environment completely segregated — that usually just means one dedicated Mac and the test iOS devices. Do not use any of it for anything else than work. Do not mix a home server with work-Mac-related stuff and personal life. Do not use the same AppleID. Do not mix anything. It's generally a good approach anyway, regardless of one's development platform/target. It then becomes natural to e.g. never worry about NFS and simply use the "recommended" Apple path — like some Thunderbolt drive, or whatever MacOS networks with these days. The downside that it obviously induces additional cost is debatable: - developing for Apple systems usually translates to higher income, and Apple is somewhat "fairly" (at least in their mind) forcing some extra burden of cost on developers, but it's likely marginal for said devs (although hostile to developing markets, at first glance). - work-related machines generally fall under different tax regimes than personal stuff, and while we surely all dabble into the grey area, it's always better to have it 100% legit work or personal but not both. Insurances etc. may care too. So... Yeah. I hope you can segregate and rationalize the work-Mac(s) to follow Apple's best practice (whatever they push as "This is the way" for MacOS).
  - eric-hu 7y ago
    > Do not use the same AppleID. I've done what you suggested in this paragraph, and do this as well. It means you can't use a personal iPad with Catalina's Sidecar feature, which just sucks knowing a second monitor is almost right there.
russellbeattie 7y ago
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: $ sudo softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina" $ defaults write com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs 0 $ killall Dock This ignores the system update, and gets rid of the red update dot.
- forthispurpose 7y ago
  How do I roll it back?
  - kevan 7y ago
    $ sudo softwareupdate --reset-ignored That will clear all ignored updates. From the CLI docs it doesn't look like there's a way to do it individually but there's probably a plist somewhere you could modify.
    - forthispurpose 7y ago
      thank you
- dolguldur 7y ago
  don't `killall Dock` if you have lots of minimized windows
- mnm1 7y ago
  The dot comes back after a minor update. But it doesn't show Catalina anymore. Just the dot. Running this makes it go away. Until software update is started again. It's like the option to install software from anywhere. That goes away too after an update. It seems to be Apple's way of fucking with power users who dare do things that it doesn't want them to do. Or maybe it's just another bug in the sea of bugs that is MacOS. Hard to say.
LilBytes 7y ago
PAM auth w/ YubiKey and I assume other cards is still broken too.
LeoTinnitus 7y ago
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. 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?
asiachick 7y ago
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. 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. 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.
- drukenemo 7y ago
  That’s a massive issue for me too. I used iTunes to transform audio files into a podcast format and play it in the Podcast app. Now I have to do it via iTunes for Windows. It works, but the files disappear after a few days from my iPhone. A complete mess.
  - jbverschoor 7y ago
    Deezer actually has a decent interface and has music, podcasts and radio streams
RedComet 7y ago
It's junk from my perspective. No 32 bit apps means I can't run tools I need, particularly via Wine.
olliej 7y ago
Current Catalina is a great upgrade, if you’re running an earlier version of it :) More seriously at this point most of the annoying issues seem to have gone away. 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.
- asddgsgsaxg 7y ago
  I don't think anyone is having issues with "new software" being 32bit here. The issues with lack of 32-bit support brought up in this thread already is rather: - Adobe CS6 (last non-subscription photoshop) is 32bit. - Office 2011 is 32-bit and paid upgrade. - Wine (running windows apps on mac) cant run 32-bit windows apps on Catalina.
krisgenre 7y ago
I am still on a 13' inch early 2015 MacBook Pro (128 GB SSD). Mojave already takes up 50 gb, is it worth upgrading to Catalina?
- tacheiordache 7y ago
  I’d wait. It may worthwile be when things are fixed and alternatives for things that no longer work pop up
m3kw9 7y ago
Works very well here and I use it for work
Akababa 7y ago
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.
makecheck 7y ago
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. 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 after 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. 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? If a system is really complex, it is not only hard to get it right once but it is really hard to keep it right over time. I am worried that all these special cases will just be fixed and re-broken for months on end.
why-oh-why 7y ago
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)
- GreenJelloShot 7y ago
  Yeah, I do this every time there is a major OS update and it saves me a lot of hassle. It also forces me to re-evaluate everything I had previously installed. Usually I end up with a much cleaner, smaller, and more optimized image. It also trains me to get very comfortable testing backups and restores and knowing how to quickly recover from any problems.
- lioeters 7y ago
  Thanks for this idea - I've been holding off on upgrading, but I would be much more comfortable installing on a new volume and migrate instead of upgrade.
FraKtus 7y ago
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...
Ididntdothis 7y ago
It seems alright. I can't forgive them what they did to audiobooks in itunes though...
ojosilva 7y ago
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. 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. This ex Apple OSX engineer in fact paints it as doomed from the start: https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-ever-be-possible-to-clone-macOS-and-fork-it-like-Linux https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-ever-be-possible-to-clone-...
- RossBencina 7y ago
  I'm curious why you would claim that MS is "not focused on Windows any more". Win 10 Pro gets regular updates, still runs Win XP binaries, etc.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    Not GP but I would guess: "Cloud first, Mobile first" Satya Nadella
- DCKing 7y ago
  > 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. As your Quora link points out - it's not feasible to do this. The killer features of macOS - the UI framework, all other OS frameworks, the interesting drivers integrating all of this - are not available. macOS more than other OSes is an integrated package. And that stuff is not open source. The parts of macOS that are open source are just sufficient to allow you to make your own Unix-like distro. OpenDarwin and PureDarwin are efforts that bolt on open source tools, X11 and desktop environments on top of Darwin. The result is an open source desktop like FreeBSD or some Linux distro. Then it turns out that the macOS kernel is not really a killer feature of anything, and if you're looking at an open source desktop you'd better run FreeBSD or a Linux distro anyway. Technically, PureDarwin is binary compatible with macOS. You can take the macOS version of, say, tar or grep, and it will run on PureDarwin. Any command line utility that doesn't integrate with macOS specific frameworks (i.e. all the stuff they import from FreeBSD, stuff from MacPorts) will probably work. That's not very interesting though. All that stuff is there on Linux and FreeBSD too. Your Quora link gives some big time and team requirements for this to happen, but it also touches on the fact that there's really no business model and lots of legal risks involved. At this point, I don't think an open source clone of macOS is ever going to happen. If we're going to get something that's close, it's not going to be based on the Darwin kernel, but something in the direction of Darling [1]. [1]: https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/
buu700 7y ago
The regular kernel panics (multiple times daily) on my 2015 MBP are pretty annoying. I would recommend sticking with Mojave for now.
- hellofunk 7y ago
  What is the symptom in the operating system that you notice that means it is having a kernel panic?
  - buu700 7y ago
    Essentially the same thing as a BSOD: https://macpaw.com/how-to/fix-kernel-panic-on-macos https://macpaw.com/how-to/fix-kernel-panic-on-macos
    - hellofunk 7y ago
      Interesting, I’ve never in my life seen this on any of the macs I’ve had, including one I have now with Catalina. (2015 MBp)
- jki275 7y ago
  You have a hardware problem. This is abnormal.
  - buu700 7y ago
    I don't think so; it started only after upgrading. It happens inconsistently when waking from sleep, possibly just when Chrome and/or Docker are/is running.
asdff 7y ago
I'm holding out until sim city 4 is finally ported.
diebeforei485 7y ago
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. 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. 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)
- discordance 7y ago
  Ah, yes just like 10.6.8: Snow Leopard. No new features. The best Mac OS I’ve used. Those were the days.
  - huebomont 7y ago
    Snow Leopard is such rose-colored-glasses nostalgia. That release was buggy as hell too and only came to be the "rock-solid" release that people love after like 8 months of bugfixes and patches.
jillesvangurp 7y ago
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. 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.
akerro 7y ago
Yes, Tomcat has been used on production for a few years at least.
gherkinnn 7y ago
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. Running two Catalina machines, I feel confident in saying that it is now a solid setup. It is of course a disgrace that it took em 6 months to stabilise the OS.
Razengan 7y ago
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. 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.
- mrzool 7y ago
  Or until they just slow it down a little... nobody needs a major OS release with 20 shiny new features every year. We need quality and stability.
kup0 7y ago
As an iMac user for years, I've lately considered the idea of either a hackintosh or just giving up on MacOS completely. 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. 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. 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
- djitz 7y ago
  Unless things have drastically changed in the last 2 years, any MacOS update on a hackintosh is an absolute shitshow
  - kup0 7y ago
    I think things have changed some with using OpenCore now instead of the older system. It does take more initial setup but from what I've heard it's a bit more resilient when it comes to updates. I'd still be scared of an update completely borking everything though...
joshstrange 7y ago
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...
agent_simon 7y ago
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.
pier25 7y ago
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.

160 points by mrzool 7y ago

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 want 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.

ultrarunner 7y ago
I do, but I’m not ready to abandon obscure bits of software from years ago that accomplish one complicated task and therefore have no current maintainer. I’ve been too busy to devise a game plan for this, and in the meantime Mojave is running fine. I wonder if the music app will run on Mojave
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
This just shows you can't please everybody, iTunes has to be the most complained about piece of software from Apple.
- ValentineC 7y ago
  > iTunes has to be the most complained about piece of software from Apple Apple seems to have moved most of the iOS maintenance functionality from iTunes over to iOS itself. Personally, I have an iCloud storage plan, and I don't use iTunes regularly anymore except when upgrading phones.
- Marsymars 7y ago
  Sure, but the podcast management for my iPod Nano on Catalina is dreadful, to the point where I gave up and switched to using my Android phone for podcasts.
olliej 7y ago
Re: iTunes - seriously I thought the old “one app does everything” was annoying but “let’s have multiple apps for each type of media” is far worse. All I think anyone wanted was to remove the iDevice setup and sync stuff from iTunes. I’d also kill to have a preference to remove Apple Music from the top of the music management interface.

armitron 7y ago

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.

jki275 7y ago
What is the issue with VMs? I develop using them all the time - I’ve got at least five VMs (Linux, BSD, and Windows) loaded on my MBP right now and use three of them constantly.
- armitron 7y ago
  Running macOS in a VM is highly problematic.
  - jki275 7y ago
    The terms of service prohibit doing so on other than a Mac, so it’s generally unsupported on other platforms - maybe I misunderstood.

jbj 7y ago

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. I refuse to pay for the upgrade, and just use Libre Office now. Further more I am looking into best compatible linux system to run on the hardware. So far I have read that the cinnamon based manjaro linux should be reasonable.

zamadatix 7y ago
You can still get local versions of Office it's just the version you had (2011 I assume, older possibly?) was 32 bit only.
- jbj 7y ago
  I previously looked for this without luck, but it seems there is a manual upgrade here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/office-for-mac/office-2016-for-mac-64-bit-upgrade https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/office-... I will check it out.
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    Office 2019 for Mac would be the version to target for longest support. The reason 2011 didn't have an upgrade path is its support ended in 2017.
    - jbj 7y ago
      the one I used to have before catalina was Office 2016, I am not sure if my license is compatible with 2019. I just tried the packagefile from the link, and after installing I am still stuck with MS office 365. At this point, libreoffice does the job, and I cant be bothered to invest more time to get MS office, 2016 edition 64 bit, or whatever would be applicable in my case, to work like before catalina. thanks for the tips though.

chadlavi 7y ago

I don't get all the static over this. I've been using Catalina since the betas and it's been fine the whole time.

wool_gather 7y ago
The static is because some (many?) people haven't had the same smooth experience that you have.
ohithereyou 7y ago
You must not develop anything in Perl 5 because I can't get a single Perl 5 version after 5.26.1 to compile through perlbrew - at least one if not multiple tests fail.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  I'm not saying that yours is not a valid data point, but "developing in perl" strikes me as likely to be a fairly tiny subset even of developers in general.
  - ohithereyou 7y ago
    Fair. Catalina is the last version of macOS that I will run. I will move my mac mini to Linux after Catalina loses security support, should it live that long, or I'll replace it with a NUC running Linux if it doesnt.
Marsymars 7y ago
Different experiences for different people. Catalina is the first macOS update in years that hasn't broken core parts of my workflow on macOS.
csomar 7y ago
It's the same for me except for 32-bit apps (which turned to be a productivity boost since I can no longer play any games). Also Catalina fixed a weird bugs with the 3 external monitors which required, before, multiple unplugging and plugging to display normally.

ycombonator 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

newscracker 7y ago

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. Dear Apple: 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. 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. 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. 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.S.: If I have to lose some virtual points for this critical comment, so be it]

macinjosh 7y ago
I have been using Catalina on my dev machine since the public beta and have none of the issues you claim. Catalina is my favorite macOS yet. Just because it doesn’t work the way you want doesn’t mean Apple messed up.
- wool_gather 7y ago
  Conversely, the fact that it works for you doesn't preclude it being buggy, or problematic in other ways, for other people.

someonehere 7y ago

I still think there’s too much chatter, but it seems to have calmed down. 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. I haven’t really come across anything that impedes our workflow at work.

wespiser_2018 7y ago

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. 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: https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/blob/master/macOS_Catalina.md https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/blob/master/macOS_Catalin... 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. 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!

treden 7y ago
Also there's some weird bug with external monitors where after waking up from sleeping the TrueTone is maladjusted leaving the screen super dark- turning TrueTone off and back on again (of course) fixes it.
- ascagnel_ 7y ago
  I have the exact _opposite_ experience (at least until the .2 patch) -- waking up from sleep would put the screen at maximum brightness.
beamso 7y ago
1. I hadn't seen that guide, but there is some issue where Catalina thinks that the command line tools installed are up to date, but `brew doctor` reports otherwise and you are forced to manually download the command line tools, just like in that guide. 2. I tried zsh briefly, then just used the bash that you can install via homebrew.
isolatedbyyou 7y ago
Every major update appears to uninstall xcode command line tools. All you have to do is that xcode-select --install or whatever it is, but I mean, god, how much testing do they do to not see this.

kirstenbirgit 7y ago

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.

tbrock 7y ago
You are probably swapping which cord goes in which port. This world flawlessly for me.
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  I have the same problem as OP and I only use one USB port for my two monitors
  - tbrock 7y ago
    Maybe daisy chaining is the problem then? It has something to do with the order the devices are enumerated.
Marsymars 7y ago
Hey my office Windows desktop also tends to flip all my windows around when I'm moving between RDP/local access.
matheist 7y ago
I also have 2 monitors and I used to have this problem too! I also use spaces, and all the spaces would be switched over, so I'd have to do a lot of switching. Here's what works for me, if I dock my laptop and find that the screens are reversed: 1. Unplug monitor A, wait for screens to stabilize. 2. Unplug monitor B, wait for screens to stablilize. 3. Plug in monitor A, wait for screens to stabilize. 4. Plug in monitor B, wait for screens to stabilize. And that fixes it every time. My "default" monitor is set to be my laptop's monitor. Try reversing the roles of A and B if it doesn't work. If you use spaces as well — I also find it helps to have an empty space as the first space for each monitor.

oxfordmale 7y ago

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

Roboprog 7y ago
Sadly, my 2011 MacBook Pro won’t update to these later versions, so I just have to leave it running for months at a time. Perhaps when the keyboard fails, someday, I’ll replace it, instead of just upgrading the RAM and drive. Kidding aside, I would like to get a newer version someday with better screen resolution and size, but Apple seems to have many missteps to recover from the last 5 years or so. I’m assuming an implied “/s” at the end of your comment.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  I also have a 2011 and still running El Capitan because I was concerned about how it would handle updates. What version are you running right now and how much RAM do you have?
  - cglong 7y ago
    I have a 2011 iMac that's running High Sierra (its last supported release). I upgraded it from its base 4GB to 20GB of RAM. Since getting High Sierra, everything's been really smooth, but the Sierra -> High Sierra upgrade actually bricked my computer. It was perpetually stuck in the installation phase, bailing after 45 minutes because it couldn't unmount my partition. To Apple's credit though, after I used recovery mode to reinstall the OS, everything worked and my data was intact.
- gimboland 7y ago
  FYI, You can replace the keyboard on a 2011 MBP; I've done it. Fiddly but not especially difficult. The 3rd party keyboard I replaced it with isn't as good as the original (in particular the backlight is very leaky) but it's not bad and gave the machine a new lease of life...

kitsunesoba 7y ago

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. But my use case is almost exclusively programming and Blizzard games, so maybe the problems are centered around particular types of software or something.

craftinator 7y ago
Permanent data loss in multiple Apple cloud applications is the biggest issue I've seen, followed by a pretty gnarly permissions issue that I can't quite wrap my head around. But data loss and security issues are the two largest problems you can have with an OS, so really the contempt people have for Catalina is not overblown, IF they run into these issues.
xtracto 7y ago
Macs permission prompts remind me of this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8CwoluNRSSc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8CwoluNRSSc There is several software that doesn't work with Catalina. In my case RingCentral meetings. But in general people shouldn't downgrade to it... it is 100% a downgrade, as it removes features available in the previous version.
- pilif 7y ago
  The prompts appear once per app. The vista prompts appeared every time an app was doing something that required elevated privileges which, back then, was all the time. This issue is totally overblown and, TBH, I like to know what application has access to what data on my machine. If the price for that is a one-time prompt per application, I'm willing to pay that. If you are not and you are willing to forego the security advantage, then use spctl to disable Gatekeeper
pier25 7y ago
AFAIK many audio dev companies still recommend its users to not upgrade to Catalina. Ableton: https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009770040-Live-10-compatibility-with-macOS-10-15-Catalina https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009770040-Live...

noctilux 7y ago

I don't think anyone has mentioned yet that wine doesn't work yet on Catalina. Until that's fixed I'm staying with Mojave.

krackers 7y ago
Codeweavers has this working with their professional Crossover app. I recall it requiring some hacky tricks and a special compiler for the shimming, so there's been some issues trying to upstream the changes.
- kristiandupont 7y ago
  I am using the crossover app now and it works but it feels painfully slow compared to running Wine. Not sure exactly why, I am running a very simple text editor.

sumanthvepa 7y ago

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.

K0SM0S 7y ago
> 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. So, first off, sincere sympathy. I feel you, I've been there. My current recommendation to people is: whatever you do in your personal life (Apple, Android, Windows, whatever), keep your Apple-related work environment completely segregated — that usually just means one dedicated Mac and the test iOS devices. Do not use any of it for anything else than work. Do not mix a home server with work-Mac-related stuff and personal life. Do not use the same AppleID. Do not mix anything. It's generally a good approach anyway, regardless of one's development platform/target. It then becomes natural to e.g. never worry about NFS and simply use the "recommended" Apple path — like some Thunderbolt drive, or whatever MacOS networks with these days. The downside that it obviously induces additional cost is debatable: - developing for Apple systems usually translates to higher income, and Apple is somewhat "fairly" (at least in their mind) forcing some extra burden of cost on developers, but it's likely marginal for said devs (although hostile to developing markets, at first glance). - work-related machines generally fall under different tax regimes than personal stuff, and while we surely all dabble into the grey area, it's always better to have it 100% legit work or personal but not both. Insurances etc. may care too. So... Yeah. I hope you can segregate and rationalize the work-Mac(s) to follow Apple's best practice (whatever they push as "This is the way" for MacOS).
- eric-hu 7y ago
  > Do not use the same AppleID. I've done what you suggested in this paragraph, and do this as well. It means you can't use a personal iPad with Catalina's Sidecar feature, which just sucks knowing a second monitor is almost right there.

russellbeattie 7y ago

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: $ sudo softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina" $ defaults write com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs 0 $ killall Dock This ignores the system update, and gets rid of the red update dot.

forthispurpose 7y ago
How do I roll it back?
- kevan 7y ago
  $ sudo softwareupdate --reset-ignored That will clear all ignored updates. From the CLI docs it doesn't look like there's a way to do it individually but there's probably a plist somewhere you could modify.
  - forthispurpose 7y ago
    thank you
dolguldur 7y ago
don't `killall Dock` if you have lots of minimized windows
mnm1 7y ago
The dot comes back after a minor update. But it doesn't show Catalina anymore. Just the dot. Running this makes it go away. Until software update is started again. It's like the option to install software from anywhere. That goes away too after an update. It seems to be Apple's way of fucking with power users who dare do things that it doesn't want them to do. Or maybe it's just another bug in the sea of bugs that is MacOS. Hard to say.

LilBytes 7y ago

PAM auth w/ YubiKey and I assume other cards is still broken too.

LeoTinnitus 7y ago

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. 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?

asiachick 7y ago

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. 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. 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.

drukenemo 7y ago
That’s a massive issue for me too. I used iTunes to transform audio files into a podcast format and play it in the Podcast app. Now I have to do it via iTunes for Windows. It works, but the files disappear after a few days from my iPhone. A complete mess.
- jbverschoor 7y ago
  Deezer actually has a decent interface and has music, podcasts and radio streams

RedComet 7y ago

It's junk from my perspective. No 32 bit apps means I can't run tools I need, particularly via Wine.

olliej 7y ago

Current Catalina is a great upgrade, if you’re running an earlier version of it :) More seriously at this point most of the annoying issues seem to have gone away. 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.

asddgsgsaxg 7y ago
I don't think anyone is having issues with "new software" being 32bit here. The issues with lack of 32-bit support brought up in this thread already is rather: - Adobe CS6 (last non-subscription photoshop) is 32bit. - Office 2011 is 32-bit and paid upgrade. - Wine (running windows apps on mac) cant run 32-bit windows apps on Catalina.

krisgenre 7y ago

I am still on a 13' inch early 2015 MacBook Pro (128 GB SSD). Mojave already takes up 50 gb, is it worth upgrading to Catalina?

tacheiordache 7y ago
I’d wait. It may worthwile be when things are fixed and alternatives for things that no longer work pop up

m3kw9 7y ago

Works very well here and I use it for work

Akababa 7y ago

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.

makecheck 7y ago

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. 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 after 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. 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? If a system is really complex, it is not only hard to get it right once but it is really hard to keep it right over time. I am worried that all these special cases will just be fixed and re-broken for months on end.

why-oh-why 7y ago

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)

GreenJelloShot 7y ago
Yeah, I do this every time there is a major OS update and it saves me a lot of hassle. It also forces me to re-evaluate everything I had previously installed. Usually I end up with a much cleaner, smaller, and more optimized image. It also trains me to get very comfortable testing backups and restores and knowing how to quickly recover from any problems.
lioeters 7y ago
Thanks for this idea - I've been holding off on upgrading, but I would be much more comfortable installing on a new volume and migrate instead of upgrade.

FraKtus 7y ago

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...

Ididntdothis 7y ago

It seems alright. I can't forgive them what they did to audiobooks in itunes though...

ojosilva 7y ago

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. 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. This ex Apple OSX engineer in fact paints it as doomed from the start: https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-ever-be-possible-to-clone-macOS-and-fork-it-like-Linux https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-ever-be-possible-to-clone-...

RossBencina 7y ago
I'm curious why you would claim that MS is "not focused on Windows any more". Win 10 Pro gets regular updates, still runs Win XP binaries, etc.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  Not GP but I would guess: "Cloud first, Mobile first" Satya Nadella
DCKing 7y ago
> 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. As your Quora link points out - it's not feasible to do this. The killer features of macOS - the UI framework, all other OS frameworks, the interesting drivers integrating all of this - are not available. macOS more than other OSes is an integrated package. And that stuff is not open source. The parts of macOS that are open source are just sufficient to allow you to make your own Unix-like distro. OpenDarwin and PureDarwin are efforts that bolt on open source tools, X11 and desktop environments on top of Darwin. The result is an open source desktop like FreeBSD or some Linux distro. Then it turns out that the macOS kernel is not really a killer feature of anything, and if you're looking at an open source desktop you'd better run FreeBSD or a Linux distro anyway. Technically, PureDarwin is binary compatible with macOS. You can take the macOS version of, say, tar or grep, and it will run on PureDarwin. Any command line utility that doesn't integrate with macOS specific frameworks (i.e. all the stuff they import from FreeBSD, stuff from MacPorts) will probably work. That's not very interesting though. All that stuff is there on Linux and FreeBSD too. Your Quora link gives some big time and team requirements for this to happen, but it also touches on the fact that there's really no business model and lots of legal risks involved. At this point, I don't think an open source clone of macOS is ever going to happen. If we're going to get something that's close, it's not going to be based on the Darwin kernel, but something in the direction of Darling [1]. [1]: https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/

buu700 7y ago

The regular kernel panics (multiple times daily) on my 2015 MBP are pretty annoying. I would recommend sticking with Mojave for now.

hellofunk 7y ago
What is the symptom in the operating system that you notice that means it is having a kernel panic?
- buu700 7y ago
  Essentially the same thing as a BSOD: https://macpaw.com/how-to/fix-kernel-panic-on-macos https://macpaw.com/how-to/fix-kernel-panic-on-macos
  - hellofunk 7y ago
    Interesting, I’ve never in my life seen this on any of the macs I’ve had, including one I have now with Catalina. (2015 MBp)
jki275 7y ago
You have a hardware problem. This is abnormal.
- buu700 7y ago
  I don't think so; it started only after upgrading. It happens inconsistently when waking from sleep, possibly just when Chrome and/or Docker are/is running.

asdff 7y ago

I'm holding out until sim city 4 is finally ported.

diebeforei485 7y ago

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. 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. 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)

discordance 7y ago
Ah, yes just like 10.6.8: Snow Leopard. No new features. The best Mac OS I’ve used. Those were the days.
- huebomont 7y ago
  Snow Leopard is such rose-colored-glasses nostalgia. That release was buggy as hell too and only came to be the "rock-solid" release that people love after like 8 months of bugfixes and patches.

jillesvangurp 7y ago

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. 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.

akerro 7y ago

Yes, Tomcat has been used on production for a few years at least.

gherkinnn 7y ago

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. Running two Catalina machines, I feel confident in saying that it is now a solid setup. It is of course a disgrace that it took em 6 months to stabilise the OS.

Razengan 7y ago

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. 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.

mrzool 7y ago
Or until they just slow it down a little... nobody needs a major OS release with 20 shiny new features every year. We need quality and stability.

kup0 7y ago

As an iMac user for years, I've lately considered the idea of either a hackintosh or just giving up on MacOS completely. 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. 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. 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

djitz 7y ago
Unless things have drastically changed in the last 2 years, any MacOS update on a hackintosh is an absolute shitshow
- kup0 7y ago
  I think things have changed some with using OpenCore now instead of the older system. It does take more initial setup but from what I've heard it's a bit more resilient when it comes to updates. I'd still be scared of an update completely borking everything though...

joshstrange 7y ago

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...

agent_simon 7y ago

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.

pier25 7y ago

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.