Catalina now beloved by MR / hailed as 'Snow' Mojave, post-Big Sur?

[thadoggfather]

what was once often maligned as a bug ridden dumpster fire release, "plagued from beta 1 onwards," in the eyes of some and offering little to no tangibly amazing feature set from Mojave outside of additional security jumping jacks for the end user, for others.

is now suddenly near universally lauded a perfect most refined version of Mac builds for the past decade. The end of a mighty long journey, at its pinnacle of perfection.

...is that where we are at? with further iOSification and rounded corner innovation? And appearance that should be touch implemented / looks like it’s gearing up to be but isn't (dock icons, CC like status bar configuration, wonky non-touch sliders in that CC)

11.0 marks a new era, and the death of OS X known as macOS 10.x (non Roman numeral) to buh bye.

 

[Falhófnir]

El Cap was probably the pinnacle of modern OSX/ MacOS 10 releases for stability. It was also the last version branded as OSX. Before that Mavericks was the last with the classic OSX design, Between Mojave and Catalina, the last two versions of 10.x I think Mojave will be the one more affectionately remembered, Catalina took away more than it added, and was a mess on launch (even if it eventually got cleaned up, that’s going to stick). Different versions will be remembered for different nostalgic things, but I don’t really see anything particularly positive with Catalina that wasn’t there with Mojave or earlier...

 

[Yebubbleman]

what was once often maligned as a bug ridden dumpster fire release, "plagued from beta 1 onwards," in the eyes of some and offering little to no tangibly amazing feature set from Mojave outside of additional security jumping jacks for the end user, for others.

is now suddenly near universally lauded a perfect most refined version of Mac builds for the past decade. The end of a mighty long journey, at its pinnacle of perfection.

...is that where we are at? with further iOSification and rounded corner innovation? And appearance that should be touch implemented / looks like it’s gearing up to be but isn't (dock icons, CC like status bar configuration, wonky non-touch sliders in that CC)

11.0 marks a new era, and the death of OS X known as macOS 10.x (non Roman numeral) to buh bye.

I disagree with much of this. Catalina is still ****. And the removal of 32-bit apps (which, given the transition explicitly to 64-bit ARM, really could've been kept around until Rosetta 2 meets the same fate its PowerPC-to-Intel predecessor met in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, was pretty much unnecessary) still sucks. I have a PC for gaming, but I own a fair amount of Mac games and all but a handful are dead in the water, making it one less thing I can do with my Mac. Apple Mail in Catalina gutted many UI features for reasons that dumbfound me. The System Preferences layout was changed needlessly. Don't get me started on how much I dislike the split of my startup disk just so Apple can further prohibit me from modifying the OS.

And I get that none of that will change or be different in Big Sur/macOS 11, but, much like I don't look on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion fondly for gutting Rosetta (1) in what seemed like a needless fashion and making interface tweaks merely in the name of their holy quest to bring iPad interface conventions "Back to the Mac", I'm not going to look fondly on Catalina for dropping 32-bit support and making their UIs more annoying for the sake of having an excuse to make Catalina seem like a substantial upgrade from Mojave.

 

[ruka.snow]

And the removal of 32-bit apps (which, given the transition explicitly to 64-bit ARM, really could've been kept around until Rosetta 2 meets the same fate its PowerPC-to-Intel predecessor met in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, was pretty much unnecessary

The 32-bit thing was a precursor to ARM and probably why they also wanted to kill OpenGL. It means Rosetta 2 only needs to know how to understand one set of pretty new applications. It also splits the blame, we've had a whole year of having most macOS games broken and those old applications.

 

[Jack Neill]

I will never forget or forgive Apple for destroying the Music and Books apps in .15.

 

[bousozoku]

I'm not sure how stable Catalina is, but with an SSD instead of a hard drive (grinding forever to update something), it's good, even on a mid-2012 MacBook Pro. I don't believe than any of the releases have been all that stable, though. They tend to not test things as well as they should.

I wish I'd known about the 32-bit thing when I returned to this machine because I would have found a version that still ran my games.

 

[Taz Mangus]

For me Catalina has been very stable running on (2) 2015 13” MacBook Pro computers. There have been a couple of quirks that have shown up but nothing that diminished the usability. My only quibble is how slow fast user switching is. Beyond that I can’t think of anything else that is worse than when I was using Mojave.

 

[2984839]

Panning the most recent macOS version as the worst one ever is a long and distinguished MR forum tradition. They all magically are everyone's favorite once they're no longer the newest.

 

[Solomani]

I will never forget or forgive Apple for destroying the Music and Books apps in .15.

Correction. They destroyed the iTunes app. The Music app (built into Catalina) that replaced it is a bug-infested dumpster fire.

 

[ThisBougieLife]

Correction. They destroyed the iTunes app. The Music app (built into Catalina) that replaced it is a bug-infested dumpster fire.

Agreed. I don't mind the splitting up of iTunes, but Music is full of bugs that have still not been addressed.

 

[bunnspecial]

At this point, given how much of a dumpster fire Catalina has been from day 1 and what I've seen so far in a few days of beta Big Sur(I installed it the day of WWDC-haven't played with it since probably Wednesday so don't know if they've pushed another update) it's going to be even worse.

At this point, I'm holding High Sierra/Mojave(the difference to me largely depends on the hardware you're using-I use them pretty much interchangeably) as a high water mark, although I don't know if anything will match the ultimate stability and staying power of Tiger, Snow Leopard, and Mountain Lion.

 

[Solomani]

At this point, given how much of a dumpster fire Catalina has been from day 1 and what I've seen so far in a few days of beta Big Sur(I installed it the day of WWDC-haven't played with it since probably Wednesday so don't know if they've pushed another update) it's going to be even worse.

At this point, I'm holding High Sierra/Mojave(the difference to me largely depends on the hardware you're using-I use them pretty much interchangeably) as a high water mark, although I don't know if anything will match the ultimate stability and staying power of Tiger, Snow Leopard, and Mountain Lion.

Agreed. Mojave was flawless for me, no issues whatsoever. Mojave was so solid and stable.... it was.... boring. 🤣

 

[jdoyle]

Agreed. Mojave was flawless for me, no issues whatsoever. Mojave was so solid and stable.... it was.... boring. 🤣

Mojave is fast and stable for my iMac that is just a couple of years old. Catlina runs like a dog. All I wanted from Mojave was Dark Mode. That was a huge thing for me. Im staying on this for some time to come.

 

[edubfromktown]

Mojave has been a workhorse on 2012 plus 2015 and newer hardware for me and my family members.

I had a couple of minor issues with Catalina. Other than that, stability and performance have both been fine.

It does boggle my mind that user experiences/challenges across a more tightly controlled set of hardware components vary so widely compared to the Windows universe/snake pit.

 

[bousozoku]

I wonder how many having performance problems on Catalina are using a hard drive, and how many are using an SSD.

 

[mikzn]

I wonder how many having performance problems on Catalina are using a hard drive, and how many are using an SSD.

I wonder about that too especially on older iMac and MBP's etc. - SSD makes a huge difference - I have a mid 2012 MBP running Catalina just fine (with SSD)

 

[frou]

Anything that finally kills off the urban legend of Snow Leopard being heaven-on-earth is fine by me

 

[Jack Neill]

I wonder about that too especially on older iMac and MBP's etc. - SSD makes a huge difference - I have a mid 2012 MBP running Catalina just fine (with SSD)

I can’t even fathom using anything newer than .10 on anything but a SSD. I haven’t used a spinner as a boot drive for at least 5 years. It’s by far the biggest bottleneck of last decades early computers. My MBP 2012 runs .15 just fine as well. My fav computer of all time
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Anything that finally kills off the urban legend of Snow Leopard being heaven-on-earth is fine by me

I always attributed the problems I had with it to I only used it on Hacks at the time. The later versions were pretty solid for me.

 

[lexvo]

Are there people who do NOT have problems connecting to network shares (like a NAS) on Catalina? I am asking because there is a whole thread on discussions.apple.com, and I didn't upgrade mainly because of this.

 

[dukebound85]

Anything that finally kills off the urban legend of Snow Leopard being heaven-on-earth is fine by me

oh man snow leopard was great

 

[mikzn]

Are there people who do NOT have problems connecting to network shares (like a NAS) on Catalina? I am asking because there is a whole thread on discussions.apple.com, and I didn't upgrade mainly because of this.

Catalina works well with Time Capsule - never had an issue - been using time capsule for sharing media (movies, music and garargeband projects) to apple TV, and several apple computers on different OS's

 

[ssls6]

Finder issues on Catalina is the main reason I went back to Mojave. I grew tired of killing Finder to get functionality back.

I now have Mojave on:
2012 Mac Pro 5,1 (GTX680)
2014 Mac Mini (plex server which can have uptimes over 30 days+)
2014 MBP
2017 iMac Pro

3 of my 4 macs could go to Catalina but I can't find a compelling reason to put up with issues I've reported on. This is especially true once you consider what it will be like in another 3-5 years where A-series Mac are the norm and bloated dual binaries apps start to fade away. I look forward to that future but on new machines. I have no problem leaving my old machines where they are. If Catalina becomes a bridge via catalyst to access some apps that Mojave will not, then I may change my find but that's not true today.

 

[bousozoku]

I wonder about that too especially on older iMac and MBP's etc. - SSD makes a huge difference - I have a mid 2012 MBP running Catalina just fine (with SSD)

I started with a 500 GB hard drive and it was spending so much time grinding away at a few processes, that the system was unusable. Once the SSD was installed, it was totally different.

Back in 2013, I installed the fastest SSD I could find in a similar mid-2012 MacBook Pro and it didn't seem to make such a huge difference.

Anything that finally kills off the urban legend of Snow Leopard being heaven-on-earth is fine by me

Snow Leopard on PowerPC was a very buggy POS, but it was finally a release on Intel that was good, 10.6.8 anyway.

I still remember 10.4.11 being the final good release for PowerPC. They broke so much in Leopard to push toward Intel processors.