Big Sur 11.6: The verdict - largely OK? Unexpected problems?

[Alameda]

Snow Leopard was also pretty good!

From subsequent releases (since Apple switched to the yearly update cycle) I've found Mountain Lion, El Capitan and Mojave to be the most stable.

I really hate the yearly update schedule. I looked at the list of new features in Big Sur. Improving security matters to me. And supporting the M1 is obviously important. The rest I don't even notice. I could wait two or three years for better sticky notes or whatever.

To be honest, the UI improvements are often a step backwards, and they're inconvenient to learn. There are some areas where improvement would be great, like the way the cursor "hits" the edges and corners of windows isn't very good. But most of what I do with my Mac is use my application software. And I don't like paying my application developers to keep updating and testing their software to work with new UI changes instead of developing better features and more application stability.

 

[George Dawes]

From reading this I’m sticking with Mojave and going to big sur etc when I buy a new Mac . In the old days upgrading was pretty seamless nowadays it’s painful by the look of it . Shame

 

[oldmacs]

From reading this I’m sticking with Mojave and going to big sur etc when I buy a new Mac . In the old days upgrading was pretty seamless nowadays it’s painful by the look of it . Shame

You might want to think about Catalina because Mojave has lost security support it seems (earlier than it was meant to)

 

[Cinder6]

I've regretted the 11.6 install on my M1 Air. I now get frequent kernel panics on sleep, and Finder randomly becomes unresponsive.

 

[randolorian]

The latest version of Big Sur is rock solid on my 2017 iMac and 2019 16” MBP.