MP 1,1-5,1 cMP 5,1 - I gave up on Big Sur as main system

[haralds]

I gave up on my cMP5,1 to run Big Sur 11.0.1 on the main disk and reverted to Catalina. I still have it as an alternate boot in addition to Mojave. The pain was that I had upgraded my fast NVMe and had Catalina as a smaller install on an SSD.

Overall it worked just fine including hand off and watch unlock, but the USB2 and USB3 issues drove me bonkers.

• USB 2 built in would not recognize HID devices unless plugged in before boot.
• USB 3 would stutter video and audio streams (webcam and speakers.)
• VMware would not run due to Hypervisor requiring XSAVE. I had switched to Parallels, so less of an issue.

Very painful, since my CCC clone ended up not restoring properly and I have to spend hours doing a "clean build." I had already upgraded the smaller Catalina SSD to Big Sur.

The differences between the two are mainly optical. I need this stuff to work.

 

[MisterAndrew]

I've thought about trying Big Sur on an unsupported Mac (my 2012 MBP), but it looks it's not worth it with the issues. Especially since Mojave and Catalina work pretty well. I have Big Sur on my 2013 Mac Pro, but I may go back to Catalina or Mojave. We'll see. It seems to have a fair number of bugs still.