Is Catalina as bad as it looks on this board?

[unfunfionn]

For me it's been mostly smooth after a clean install, but there are a few things that make me deeply regret not staying with Mojave. The main issue is that I'm having nothing but trouble with iCloud syncing ever since. Initially when I installed Catalina, it took nearly 3 hours for my MBP to even start trying to sync my files. I keep a lot of 3rd party software licences, Alfred workflows etc. on iCloud and I had to manually download everything from www.icloud.com to get my machine setup. Today I've been waiting for 4 hours for 4 PDFs to upload and almost 24 hours for a 9 track album to upload in Music. I've tried forcing the 'Update Cloud Library' function in Music and it runs the process and completes it but the files don't sync. There are no error messages (keeping with Apple's recent abandonment of many key error messages, as raised by Marco Arment on Twitter). Notes in the Notes app can take anywhere up to 30 minutes to sync as well. iCloud sync is so pivotal to my workflow, using two MBPs and an iPhone, and this is driving me crazy.

 

[hojoon0724]

I was having daily kernel panics and I had to do a clean install. Still having daily kernel panics. 2019 iMac

 

[fisherking]

I was having daily kernel panics and I had to do a clean install. Still having daily kernel panics. 2019 iMac

check the logs, sounds like something's conflicting. and try unplugging any peripherals... see if that helps. catalina is working beautifully here on my 2019 imac.

 

[SoYoung]

After a week its mostly smooth but many little things here and there that don't work properly like the keyboard shortcut for inverting colours that always cease to work after a day and only re-work if I go back to accessibility settings. Safari iCloud tabs also stop working after a while. It still show but I can't click them and have to close and re-open Safari to make it work again.Also Safari is less stable overall with some site that freeze until I close the tab.

Otherwise, it seems to run like Mojave did.

 

[Ethosik]

check the logs, sounds like something's conflicting. and try unplugging any peripherals... see if that helps. catalina is working beautifully here on my 2019 imac.

I am having the same issue. There is nothing conflicting. Plus the fact that I have NEVER had a kernel panic from my many many computers from Apple shows Catalina is just trash. Mojave NEVER had a kernel panic with my 2019 iMac. Yet Catalina has one daily.

 

[fisherking]

I am having the same issue. There is nothing conflicting. Plus the fact that I have NEVER had a kernel panic from my many many computers from Apple shows Catalina is just trash. Mojave NEVER had a kernel panic with my 2019 iMac. Yet Catalina has one daily.

not everyone is haviing daily kernel panics, so... perhaps catalina isn't 'just trash'. if some are having this issue, it's worth getting help (so much more useful that whining).

 

[Ethosik]

not everyone is haviing daily kernel panics, so... perhaps catalina isn't 'just trash'. if some are having this issue, it's worth getting help (so much more useful that whining).

I asked for help. I have spent days on support with Apple. Mojave never crashes. Boot camp never crashes. What’s the only thing that crashes? Catalina. Even a clean install just keyboard and mouse no other software crashes. I posted my kernel panic and nobody was able to help. It looks like an AMD driver issue.

Sorry, I have work to do. I can’t spend more days trying to diagnose such a horrible operating system. I have had Macs for 20 years and never had a crash until now.

 

[oldmacs]

Maybe my memory is faulty... but I'm frustrated how hard Apple is pushing Catalina. It's buggy/flawed at the moment, yet Apple is making it appear as a permanent system preference notification and coming up as a big 'upgrade button'... I've had clients accidentally update to it which is annoying as I usually hold them off for 6 months.

Can't ignore it like you can (or used to be able to) with other updates and it takes over the update page making it look like a security update.

 

[archer75]

It's that bad. I started on computers with the Apple 2E and later a tandy with their deskmate OS. Then DOS. Then windows for workgroups and every version of windows since. Many versions of OSX and many Linux distros. I could always work through the issues, figure out the changes and adapt. Catalina is the first OS I've ever had to downgrade from. I’m on a 2018 Mac mini.

Even IOS13 and Watch OS6 have been bad.

 

[dogolaca]

My issue is with the native Mail app. The fonts in the message list won't change, I can't add columns.

 

[Macak]

Clean install. Flawless experience on Mac mini 2018 base model with Dell U2415 (USB-C to DisplayPort). No problem with Mail, iCloud or my monitor. Pretty satisfy for the moment ?. Sidecar running well with my iPad Air 3.

 

[fisherking]

deleted.

 

[Miltz]

There is just a page of people posting issues with new replies every few minutes. Is catalina as bad as it looks form this forum?

I was going to install it but now i am not so sure at all.

Thanks!

Don’t install it if you use photoshop. Files don’t save properly.

 

[Mer1In]

I hd no issues downloading it. Only problem I had was with my Logitech keyboard (I posted this query a few days ago), but since I did a system restore Catalina is running flawless on my mid-2015.

Very solid for me, including VMware Fusion 11.5.0.

-Merlin

 

[Oraichu]

It keeps double typing certain character and even full words. However, it depends on the app. I have no problem in my browser. But in mail and pages it kept doing that a lot – apps where I'm writing a lot as well.

 

[jimtparr]

My installation screen got stuck. Apple Support encouraged me to restart by holding down the power button. It turned out it had updated, but the screen had frozen. All okay since then.

 

[Diamond Dog]

People generally don't report in to forums, etc. to say that everything is going swell!

 

[VitaminX67]

Nothing is as bad, as it is made out to be on this board.

 

[GuyManchester]

There is just a page of people posting issues with new replies every few minutes. Is catalina as bad as it looks form this forum?

I was going to install it but now i am not so sure at all.

Thanks!

worked fine for me, just took around 4 hours total and the screen was black for most of the time which is a little concerning and confidence busting. Having said that, since it finished and my photo library got processed it has been fine.

 

[Ledgem]

I'm usually a .0 release updater. I'd commonly hit an issue here or there and just deal with it for a few weeks until it's sorted... and it's been rare that it was something on the OS X or macOS side of things alone. Usually it's that a third-party developer needs to update something, too.

The good news for me is that all of my third-party programs seem to work just fine. SideCar is also working as advertised, much to my delight. The bad news is that the weird glitches are all in macOS.

There are no show-stoppers so far, but annoyances:
1) I wanted to change my iCloud user account photo. Trying to do this ended up showing me JPG file placeholders but never loaded the images, no matter how long I waited.
2) Photos has slowed dramatically. Image thumbnails usually loaded pretty quickly, but now I see blurry previews first and the better preview takes a fair bit to show up. Overall operations (sharing to shared albums, moving photos between albums and deleting photos from albums) are slower.
3) Twice in the span of a week I've received messages that the operating system encountered an error. Usually those are associated with kernel panics, but my system was still running fine.
4) Weird glitch I'm encountering tonight: exporting a bunch of files from my image-editing programs, and Finder isn't updating to show them. The programs, themselves, see the files as being there.

#4 is probably the most worrisome glitch I've come across. I don't know that I can call this "the worst OS Apple has ever released," but it's slowed me down enough that unless we're still in a horrible state by this time next year, or unless there's some must-have feature in the next version, I'll probably take the general advice of waiting until that .2 update release before upgrading to the next operating system.

Here's hoping that the .1 update speeds a lot of things up, and that it comes quickly.

 

[allan.nyholm]

I haven't had many issues. One situation where I do take notice is the iCloud sync to a clean installation. It was a Mojave issue and now a Catalina issue.

On the betas of Catalina I was pleased to see that iCloud Documents&Desktop sync was near instant; giving me placeholders for my files on the very second I turned on the Documents&Desktop sync option within iCloud.

On the actual release of Catalina I clean installed again from the betas I was using. And what happened!? For the 60GB I keep in iCloud, I waited, watching Activity Monitor downloading all 60GB + 10+GB of iCloud app documents. I thought "Great, when that's done I could perhaps see my documents and desktop items?"
That was big fat NO. Once that was done another 60GB in total downloads via the iCloud Finder interface;
The one with the progress copy bar. So Why on Earth is this happening!?
Why the double data download?

I'm not merging files from my previous installation as I've cleaned installed Catalina.

The 2 hour wait for all files to download twice before I could even "use" macOS is awful.

I'm happy that macOS Catalina is otherwise a great macOS release. I didn't have any installation issues like some did; where the installation stopped at certain points. I'm most concerned about my SSD when macOS writes 120+GB of data to the system SSD when is should only write half that in my case. Poor SSD.

Now that I think about Catalina issues some more, I do have a problem with all the requests for allowing recording of my screen and such. I was working in Sketch and wanted to use the colorpicker when Sketch asked me to record the screen. I did as requested and Sketch asked me to Quit Now or Later. I didn't know if I could continue working picking colors and such unless I quit Sketch and the project I was working on. I quit Sketch and I never did get back in the zone of the project - perhaps the project wasn't that important after all.

 

[jgbr]

It's perfectly simple, if the OS is stopping anyone working or being productive it isn't ready.

I haven't had many issues. One situation where I do take notice is the iCloud sync to a clean installation. It was a Mojave issue and now a Catalina issue.

On the betas of Catalina I was pleased to see that iCloud Documents&Desktop sync was near instant; giving me placeholders for my files on the very second I turned on the Documents&Desktop sync option within iCloud.

On the actual release of Catalina I clean installed again from the betas I was using. And what happened!? For the 60GB I keep in iCloud, I waited, watching Activity Monitor downloading all 60GB + 10+GB of iCloud app documents. I thought "Great, when that's done I could perhaps see my documents and desktop items?"
That was big fat NO. Once that was done another 60GB in total downloads via the iCloud Finder interface;
The one with the progress copy bar. So Why on Earth is this happening!?
Why the double data download?

I'm not merging files from my previous installation as I've cleaned installed Catalina.

The 2 hour wait for all files to download twice before I could even "use" macOS is awful.

I'm happy that macOS Catalina is otherwise a great macOS release. I didn't have any installation issues like some did; where the installation stopped at certain points. I'm most concerned about my SSD when macOS writes 120+GB of data to the system SSD when is should only write half that in my case. Poor SSD.

Now that I think about Catalina issues some more, I do have a problem with all the requests for allowing recording of my screen and such. I was working in Sketch and wanted to use the colorpicker when Sketch asked me to record the screen. I did as requested and Sketch asked me to Quit Now or Later. I didn't know if I could continue working picking colors and such unless I quit Sketch and the project I was working on. I quit Sketch and I never did get back in the zone of the project - perhaps the project wasn't that important after all.

 

[Frank7f]

Here on MacBook Air Early 2015 with best RAM and CPU options:

• I don't know if it is related to macOS Catalina or newer version of Safari but there's an awful lag when scrolling between the panels when you have a lot of them so as that you have some of them "packed" on the left. The strange thing is that it seems to lag only if I use the wheel of my Logitech mouse, while using the trackpad doesn't seem to cause the lagging, at least non as much noticeably.
• I can't completely verify this but I think the Bluetooth "Find My Mac" doesn't work well, either the Wi-Fi localization actually. Still, could be that the Bluetooth signal in the spot where I've tried wasn't good, anyway I'll wait to see if anyone has had a similar perception.
• Update 1: When I connect my USB key to the Mac, a process named "mds_stores" keeps my cpu busy at 20% even in idle, and this makes the cpu temperature rise at 90°C. That process triggers any time I connect the USB key to my Mac, and I have to force close it after I disconnect it otherwise it will remain there causing performance issues.

 

[Ifti]

Had an initial issue with my phone not showing in Finder, but that was due to my iTunes library being external and once I connected that all was fine.

No other issues otherwise......

 

[SteamyDinkins]

Don't update if you currently use iTunes to sync music to your devices. The Music app has some pretty significant downgrades w/ viewing your library, syncing to devices, and controlling playlists, not to mention rampant issues with album artwork.

I regret upgrading. At least iTunes was the devil I knew. The Music experience, on both macOS and iOS, is now much worse.