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Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

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Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#141

Post by chrisweekly »

TimMeade wrote: post #126
Hamuko wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I heard someone complaining about this when docking to two identical displays (with identical model names in display settings).

I have two identical setups, both with two 27 monitors and to make it worse one is horizontal and one vertical. Most of the time when i go to the other desk the monitors switch and I have to reset the orientation in display preferences. I have been fighting this for two years. Reset everything apple has told me to and no fix at all. Total PIA.

Tried 3rd party app "SwitchResX"?

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#142

Post by kevinherron »

ble52 wrote: post #11

Am I the only person that doesn't have any significant issues with Catalina? I'll admit, some of the permissions-related pop-ups are a bit annoying, but overall it's been a rather stable macOS version for me (developer, working mostly in Xcode and JetBrains IDEs).

I've got 2 laptops with no issues. One is a 16" that came with Catalina, the other is a 2018 that I upgraded.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#143

Post by thawaway1837 »

tambourine_man wrote: post #119
thawaway1837 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely not true. I haven’t been in the Mac ecosystem for some time now, but I can say for sure that no one was writing these articles until Snow Leopard at least. I thin what has led to the prevalence of these articles is Apples shift to an annual release cycle for their Mac OSes. It used to be well known that you didn’t upgrade to an OS until the .1 version at the earliest, and it was only until .3 or .4…

Memory is a curious thing. Snow Leopard had a very problematic release but got better during the dot updates. Its “no new features” slogan was commendable and resonated well, but it meant under the hood changes that broke things. Perhaps they should reconsider the yearly release schedule. Either go back to a more conservative one, letting things settle after many point updates and enjoying the achieved stability for…

Well, no one moved to a new OSX release on their main machines until .1 at least. That applied to Snow Leopard as well. And so SL wasn’t penalized for that.

The difference was that the non annual release cycle meant that the .0 version was a significantly smaller proportion of Snow Leopards life cycle, than is the case for recent annual releases of OSX.

Let’s assume Apple takes 3 months to stabilize an OS right after release. If you’re always up to date, an annual release cycle means that for 25% of your time, you’re using an unstable version of the OS. A 2 year cycle would mean that you’re using an unstable version for only 12.5% of your time. That’s a very significant change.

And in practice I think it’s worse because with the non annual release cycles, most OSX devs would use the time right after release to stabilize the OS. Whereas with the annual release cycle, it’s apparent that most devs’ priorities shift to next years OS instead.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#144

Post by tambourine_man »

thawaway1837 wrote: post #143
tambourine_man wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memory is a curious thing. Snow Leopard had a very problematic release but got better during the dot updates. Its “no new features” slogan was commendable and resonated well, but it meant under the hood changes that broke things. Perhaps they should reconsider the yearly release schedule. Either go back to a more conservative one, letting things settle after many point updates and enjoying the achieved stability for…

Well, no one moved to a new OSX release on their main machines until .1 at least. That applied to Snow Leopard as well. And so SL wasn’t penalized for that. The difference was that the non annual release cycle meant that the .0 version was a significantly smaller proportion of Snow Leopards life cycle, than is the case for recent annual releases of OSX. Let’s assume Apple takes 3 months to stabilize an OS right after…

> The difference was that the non annual release cycle meant that the .0 version was a significantly smaller proportion of Snow Leopards life cycle, than is the case for recent annual releases of OSX.

Exactly. That’s what I meant.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#145

Post by monkin »

ble52 wrote: post #11

Am I the only person that doesn't have any significant issues with Catalina? I'll admit, some of the permissions-related pop-ups are a bit annoying, but overall it's been a rather stable macOS version for me (developer, working mostly in Xcode and JetBrains IDEs).

No, you are not. I'm using macOS in betas for last 4 years, and most annoying thing is always the first beta release (e.g. broken keychain, iCloud, missing files, etc.). I don't even have permission-related pop-ups! :)

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#146

Post by rsynnott »

ble52 wrote: post #11

Am I the only person that doesn't have any significant issues with Catalina? I'll admit, some of the permissions-related pop-ups are a bit annoying, but overall it's been a rather stable macOS version for me (developer, working mostly in Xcode and JetBrains IDEs).

Yeah, this has been one of my less annoying MacOS upgrade experiences.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#147

Post by benologist »

ble52 wrote: post #11

Am I the only person that doesn't have any significant issues with Catalina? I'll admit, some of the permissions-related pop-ups are a bit annoying, but overall it's been a rather stable macOS version for me (developer, working mostly in Xcode and JetBrains IDEs).

I didn't have any issues until I dived into my archive of DRM-free games and none of them work anymore.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#148

Post by mattkevan »

ble52 wrote: post #11

Am I the only person that doesn't have any significant issues with Catalina? I'll admit, some of the permissions-related pop-ups are a bit annoying, but overall it's been a rather stable macOS version for me (developer, working mostly in Xcode and JetBrains IDEs).

No you’re not the only one. I’ve been running Catalina since the early betas on all my Macs and haven’t had any problems.

I’m sure that people do have legitimate issues, but Catalina doesn’t seem nearly as bad as some previous releases, such as 10.5 Leopard (or Leper as we knew it).

I don’t even mind the security pop-ups - it’s reassuring that not everything has access to anything without my say-so.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#149

Post by wlll »

filchermcurr wrote: post #65
ble52 wrote: post #11

Am I the only person that doesn't have any significant issues with Catalina? I'll admit, some of the permissions-related pop-ups are a bit annoying, but overall it's been a rather stable macOS version for me (developer, working mostly in Xcode and JetBrains IDEs).

Most of my problems seem to revolve around using an eGPU with the laptop shut. I'll randomly get intermittent freezes where the display stops updating and user input stops being accepted. When I look at the logs, AMDRadeonAccelerator is going nuts. The AirPlay icon in the menu bar also flashes between Sidecar, Airplay, and nothing at all. I had to remove it for my sanity. Speaking of Sidecar... performance is abysmal…

My problems are mostly around external monitors too. I have the new 16", but I had issues on my 2014 MBP running mojave too.

I have two external monitors, an Apple 27" and a Samsung 32. Sometimes the mac won't wake up my Samsung external monitor and it needs re-plugging to get it recognised (re-arranging my windows in the process).

Also, if the laptop sleeps and puts the external displays to sleep, when the laptop is then woken up there's a high chance that the non-Apple external display won't wake up in time for the OS to think it's there and it will temporarily remove it, re-arranging my windows again. These issues only happen on my non-Apple monitor, and happened the same when I had a Dell monitor too.

I used to have Finder isses too, though not Mojave related. I solved it accidentally by switching from Chrome to Firefox. YMMV.

Re: Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)

#150

Post by kstenerud »

xkemp wrote: post #115

How can there still be people writing these yearly "I'm so disappointed" articles. It's the same for every single MacOS release . I bet if I look through the archives here, the last halfway usable OS release from Apple was Mac OS 8. You'd figure the people writing these articles wold leave for other platforms, and those that remain should be less likely to do hot-take duty next year, considering they didn't feel the…

Leopard was an utter crap release with tons of complaints. I remember the many issues just trying to get Finder to work without crashing, or syncing a phone.

Snow Leopard was "better" in that it wasn't so terribly broken, and they eventually got it working decently.

From then on, the only complaints were about how locked down each new version was, what was no longer supported, and how many new annoying dialogs they'd introduced... UNTIL Catalina.

Now we're back to the Leopard problem again. Plus more annoying dialogs.

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