Giving Big Sur another try

[pshufd]

I tested it on a virtual machine when it came out and tried it for a week and there were performance problems. A few months later, I accidentally upgraded my 2014 MacBook Pro 15 from Mojave to Big Sur and had a lot of beachballs and restore from Time Machine. So I'm going to give it another shot on a virtual machine because it's disposable and I won't have to restore from Time Machine. VirtualBox has some fixes for Big Sur in the January update so maybe some things are fixed.

Anyone else tried Mojave on VirtualBox?

 

[saudor]

With VMs there's no graphics acceleration so performance will be bad

 

[pshufd]

With VMs there's no graphics acceleration so performance will be bad

I know but I'm comparing it to the Mojave VM. I had a Mojave VM that I upgraded to Big Sur and there was significant performance degradation from Mojave to Big Sur. So I want to know if those problems are resolved now. If performance is a lot better, then it may be worthwhile upgrading real systems.

 

[sgtaylor5]

For some reason, I was on Mojave and wanted to stay there, but… simplicity became more important. I found I wanted to keep using Pages and Numbers. Big Sur isn’t too bad; I‘ve had no performance issues. I just keep my fan running at 3500 RPM.

 

[pshufd]

For some reason, I was on Mojave and wanted to stay there, but… simplicity became more important. I found I wanted to keep using Pages and Numbers. Big Sur isn’t too bad; I‘ve had no performance issues. I just keep my fan running at 3500 RPM.

I had some security software from a previous job and a bunch of 32-bit programs accumulated over time on my MacBook Pros. Those may be causing the problems but there are some 32-bit programs that I want to keep. So I would keep at least one MacBook Pro on Mojave. The plan is to upgrade to M1X and then sell one of the old MacBook Pros and keep the other for Intel-only stuff and stuff with 32-bits.

In the meantime, I ran out of space on the Virtual Machine so I had to build an ISO, copy it to the host, mount it as the CD and the install is running right now. It will probably take another 30 minutes and then I can play around with it. If it's still a problem, I'll just try again in 3-6 months with whichever maintenance release is out by then.

 

[sgtaylor5]

If I hadn’t wanted simplicity, I would have stayed put on Mojave. I see you can’t have that due to your needs. I wish I could run a VM or two, but I only have 8 GB RAM and a dual core i5.

 

[pshufd]

My testing shows:

• Big Sur uses a ton more resources logging in and setting things up for the user
• The remindd process uses a ton of CPU - it's associated with Reminders and it appears to be a problem in iOS and macOS - I'm assuming with some versions of both
• The Window-Shrinking and Restore issue is still there. I was able to reduce it a little with Accessibility-Display settings but it's still a long time for the system to basically hang. I suspect it's due to window animations but I don't know of a way to completely turn these off.
• I like Big Sur - it's clean and adds a lot of conveniences. But I will wait until I get an M1 or M1X system to use it.

I'm going to leave the Big Sur virtual machine hanging around in case I want to test with it in the future or upgrade it to a new maintenance release.

 

[sgtaylor5]

• Yes, I can see that it does. It took my MBP 1.5 minutes to get everything done
• I don't see remindd, but my address book sync daemon went crazy for about 30 seconds.
• I'll check that out.
• I'm going to wait for the M2 at least to see if it's a more balanced system with less small problems. I remember the first iMacs with the CRT and the clear colored cases. It took Apple until Rev C or D to get all the little bugs fixed.

 

[pshufd]

• Yes, I can see that it does. It took my MBP 1.5 minutes to get everything done
• I don't see remindd, but my address book sync daemon went crazy for about 30 seconds.
• I'll check that out.
• I'm going to wait for the M2 at least to see if it's a more balanced system with less small problems. I remember the first iMacs with the CRT and the clear colored cases. It took Apple until Rev C or D to get all the little bugs fixed.

My daughter has a MacBook Air M1 and it's ridiculously fast and runs Big Sur just fine. So either the M1 is fast enough to deal with some of these background processes or they're not a problem on the M1 systems. I get tempted to buy an M1 Air every couple of weeks - it's hard to be patient for the next generation - especially when it seems that the next generation is getting pushed out because of parts shortages.