the correct answer to the OP's question: catalina is not stable yet, but will be on thursday (just not this thursday)...
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Is Catalina stable now?
- Thread starter Kevsurf
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I cloned my Mojave internal start-up to an external SSD, ejected and physically disconnected The external Mojave drive and then installed Catalina on the computers internal drive just last week.
So far so good, for me. The only thing is the well known caveat that 32 bit apps no longer work.
Music management isn’t to my liking but does what it’s supposed to do. Figure I’ll get used to it shortly.
Having a Mojave and separate Catalina is the way to go. As a matter of fact I had to use Mojave today to perform a quick operation in Adobe Illustrator CS3 that Affinity Designer doesn’t have-yet.
My desktop is a 2017, 27" iMac with 32g ram.
So far so good, for me. The only thing is the well known caveat that 32 bit apps no longer work.
Music management isn’t to my liking but does what it’s supposed to do. Figure I’ll get used to it shortly.
Having a Mojave and separate Catalina is the way to go. As a matter of fact I had to use Mojave today to perform a quick operation in Adobe Illustrator CS3 that Affinity Designer doesn’t have-yet.
My desktop is a 2017, 27" iMac with 32g ram.
The Music app is terrible, I have lost a lot of time fixing the album art.
Catalina's doing quite well IMO, unlike Yosemite which spawned an over 120-page hate thread about it. (Yosemite looks terrible!)
I find Catalina is working wonderfully on my 2017 iMac. It handles two external displays plus iPad sidecar, Focusrite audio interface and several midi devices, external SSDs, more bluetooth devices than I can count, Pro Tools DAW and Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom very smoothly. Everything just works. And with a mere 8gb memory. I think it's the best Mac OS ever, and I've been using macs since v.5 or 6.
Now, as for not having critical issues; I've had the worst crash ever with Catalina. In short, I one day turned on "enable computer sleep when displays go to sleep" in sys prefs, and on first wake-up it crashed and rendered my boot disk unbootable. I was backed up, and I was ok. I've never enabled that option again, and everything's fine. There are many reports about this wakefromsleep-problem.
I also recognize the artwork problem with Music that was mentioned, I resorted to re-importing stuff in Music/TV libraries manually to get artwork back.
Now, as for not having critical issues; I've had the worst crash ever with Catalina. In short, I one day turned on "enable computer sleep when displays go to sleep" in sys prefs, and on first wake-up it crashed and rendered my boot disk unbootable. I was backed up, and I was ok. I've never enabled that option again, and everything's fine. There are many reports about this wakefromsleep-problem.
I also recognize the artwork problem with Music that was mentioned, I resorted to re-importing stuff in Music/TV libraries manually to get artwork back.
I must be lucky. My album art is part of the ID3 tag on all my music (mostly dating back to 2009 when downloaded, via Amazon, the rest remnants of Napster/BearShare) and all of it is in MP3 format. I just uploaded it to my iCloud music.
The 32-bit loss is just inexcusable. Windows 10 can do both 64 and 32-bit so there's no reason Apple couldn't have done the same. I really like Portal, Portal 2 and many other games that are now abandonware. Oh well, Got Windows for that!
I've been out of the loop re: computing hardware so I personally can't see one single user-benefit of only having 64-bit support. What does it do that 32-bit can't do? and why anger so many by fully cutting support out? Follow Microsoft's lead for once! You did it when they went flat for crying out loud!
The 32-bit loss is just inexcusable. Windows 10 can do both 64 and 32-bit so there's no reason Apple couldn't have done the same. I really like Portal, Portal 2 and many other games that are now abandonware. Oh well, Got Windows for that!
I've been out of the loop re: computing hardware so I personally can't see one single user-benefit of only having 64-bit support. What does it do that 32-bit can't do? and why anger so many by fully cutting support out? Follow Microsoft's lead for once! You did it when they went flat for crying out loud!
Frankly, Catalina supposed to run better on supported Mac, but in thread running Catalina on unsupported Macs are quite opposite. Older cheese grater Mac Pro are playing nice with Catalina with almost no effort using OpenCore. Quite ironic when unsupported machine are way more stable than officially supported ones…
I only just got Catalina a few months ago and it's already given me more problems than Mojave ever did (non-responsive touchpad, weird slow wakes, random wallpaper problems, etc).
If you don't have it yet, just wait for whatever is out next, 2019 wasn't Apple's year for software quality.
If you don't have it yet, just wait for whatever is out next, 2019 wasn't Apple's year for software quality.
Are you having those issues on your 2016 13" MacBook Pro? Did you do a upgrade from Mojave to Catalina or a clean install of Catalina?
Yup, and my wife is having different but similarly minor/easily fixable/still annoying issues on her 2017 nTB MBP. We both updated from Mojave to Catalia around the same time, no clean install.
Maybe doing the upgrade rather then clean install might contributed to the issues you are having now.
As a test, you could create a new partition on your internal drive and clean install Catalina to the new partition and see how the system functions. Might be worth a try.
I appreciate the advice but I honestly can’t be bothered with that. I’ve never had theses issues in the past with upgrade from one version to the next, and given the cluster **** that Catalina started out as, I tend to blame that.
If it’s still behaving badly on whatever the next version is then I’ll reconsider a clean install.
Define 'stable'.
Does it work? Mostly. For some. Do they still prefer to focus on sparkly new features ('Squirrel!') over fixing the OS and included apps that have issues? Yes. Did they issue Betas of the next version the day after Catalina was dropped, suggesting a 'work-in-progress, but we gotta release something'? You betcha. Have they released patches (sorry...'updates') since Catalina was released? Yuppers. Do they blame 3rd Party app providers for unexpected behaviours and simply not working? Uh-huh.
So yeah, define 'stable'.
Does it work? Mostly. For some. Do they still prefer to focus on sparkly new features ('Squirrel!') over fixing the OS and included apps that have issues? Yes. Did they issue Betas of the next version the day after Catalina was dropped, suggesting a 'work-in-progress, but we gotta release something'? You betcha. Have they released patches (sorry...'updates') since Catalina was released? Yuppers. Do they blame 3rd Party app providers for unexpected behaviours and simply not working? Uh-huh.
So yeah, define 'stable'.
I had my worst Apple experience ever "upgrading" to Catalina. I have an iMac with a fusion drive and it somehow split the drive (so the Apple repair centre told me). They "fixed" it and I've been using since but there are lots of little niggles, for example opening a new Finder window can give you a beachball for a few seconds, or lag. Outlook freezes (maybe an MS problem) and generally things just don't feel as snappy as they used to pre-Catalina. Maybe my hard disc was damaged a bit.... anyway, too late now!
I did one upgrade from Mojave (that was a clean install when I set it up) to Catalina and two that were fresh installs on new 2020 hardware (MBA and MBP 13).
Catalina itself has run fine on all three.
Catalina itself has run fine on all three.
I feel your frustration. I gave up on iTunes properly tagging my imported music or getting the album art many moons ago, as their backend for that info can be very hit or miss. Not sure if it uses CDDB or an Apple Music solution for it. I am sure the Music app has not improved things. I've been using Metadatics for quite some time now, and has been recently updated with Dark Mode. It is, hands down, the best audio tagging program for the Mac, IMHO. It uses MusicBrainz for getting info/artwork, and even has a separate artwork search for higher resolution options. You can manually fill any extra fields that you like, and it truly writes the proper ID3 tags to the files, which also was a hit or miss situation with iTunes. Then I just import into Music, and the library passes my OCD test. Just my 2 cents. 🤡