Beware Catalina

[adryan]

G’day, all

For anyone contemplating moving to macOS 10.15 Catalina, be aware that Mac-related forums appear to be flagging more than the usual number of difficulties with a new operating system. I for one will be sticking with Mojave for many months yet. In fact, if past experience is anything to go by, it may be worth waiting for 10.16 which might place more emphasis on functional improvements than on seductive new features — a “leapfrogging” pattern Apple has adopted before.

A similar caveat applies to iOS 13. How Apple could reach the stage where one of its own phones fails to ring or vibrate for incoming calls is beyond me. The failure of a telephone to perform one of the most basic functions of a telephone is akin to the failure (not so long ago) of the Calculator on the Mac’s giving an error message whenever the percentage key was pressed (a bug that has since been fixed).

It’s hard to know how many of the problems are due to installation and upgrading on top of an existing operating system, and how many would affect the purchaser of a new device with one of these new operating systems pre-installed on it. The answer to this would have considerable relevance to the timing of a hardware purchase, one would think.

Oh, and be aware that 32-bit applications will no longer work under Catalina. So make sure you don’t have any you rely on before deciding to move to Catalina.

Cheers,
Adrian

[xiamenese]

Heartily endorse that!

I normally update my OS at .1 or .2 of a new version, but with Catalina I'm going to hold my horses and wait to be sure that all the gremlins have been squashed.



Mark

[dshan]

Catalina is fine, don't be frightened of it. I've been running it on my 2017 13" MBP since 10.15.0 and am now on 10.15.2. Even .0 wasn't anything like as bad as many press stories claimed. A few minor hiccups every now and then but nothing that stopped me doing my work. As noted previously the main issue is no 32-bit apps, but I'd been prepping for that for months before I upgraded so it wasn't an issue. SuperDuper! is now working, very well, with Catalina so that's no longer an issue to be concerned about.

The main issue I have at the moment is that the Kindle for Mac app (even latest v1.27.0) crashes on Quit, but that doesn't affect what I need to do with it.

As to iOS 13, again I've had very few issues with it on either my old iPhone 8 or my new iPhone 11. They ring just fine and apart from the stupid changes Apple made to the Mail app (you can only compose new messages from the inbox list view, putting the trash button over to the right side of the message view and overloading the reply button functionality like crazy) I have no real problems with it. Ditto for iPadOS 13 on my Air 2.

My advice whenever installing a major iOS/iPadOS upgrade (i.e. when the major version number changes) is to plug the device into your Mac/Windows PC and use iTunes (Finder if you're on Catalina) to perform the upgrade — I find it's more reliable than doing over-the-air upgrades for these major version changes. Minor point updates are fine over-the-air but the annual major version update works better if you download and update the complete OS, not just the changes, which is what iTunes/Finder upgrades do. It takes longer but works better.

[martin]

For anyone that has switched to Catalina, we just released Nisus Writer Pro version 3.1. The new version fixes a handful of Catalina issues and incompatibilities. For more details please see the version 3.1 release notes and scroll down to "Fixes for macOS 10.15 Catalina".

[xiamenese]

Thanks Martin, I'll install NWP 3.1 on my 2015 5K iMac, which is running 10.15.5, and see how I get on.

Have to say, however, that as I've been shielding all this time so haven't been able to take the computer in, but I'm going to have to get it reverted to !0.14 Mojave. As it is, it crashes several times a day to the point where, even though I really want the screen real-estate, I have to use my 2011 MBP running 10.13.6, as I can't risk having it crash in the middle of serious on-line work, or major edits in Final Cut Pro X!

It my well be different on more recent hardware, but as far as I'm concerned, it is still "Beware Catalina".



Mark