Let’s cut to the chase....how buggy is it?

[BWhaler]

After the quality dumpster fire that is Catalina, how is Big Sur looking in terms of bugs? Yes, I know it’s a beta, but have they fixed bugs like mail, etc which have plagued macOS for 12+ months?

are we going to see a series of “how to turn off auto install” articles in the times, Wall Street journal, et al.?

 

[ek9max]

iOS 14 beta. 6/10. Big sur. 4/10 imo.

I didn’t do Catalina beta so I have nothing to compare. But this is worse than earlier macos beta 1 that I age tried. I’m going back to Catalina tomorrow. And I’ve never downgraded a beta OS.

 

[Naalsi]

It's flawless for me so far. On a 2018 15"MBP (i9/32/1TB) installed on top of a clean Catalina.

Noticed a bump in speed and smoothness in Logic Pro especially, as well as in Safari and Finder. I can't say anything about Mail unfortunately.

Not one crash, not one hang-up, not one kernel panic, nothing.

 

[vaugha]

I'm interested in hearing from people who beta tested both catalina and big sur. Catalina is still a hot damn mess and really degraded my trust in macos.

 

[ErikGrim]

Catalina was a hot mess almost throughout. Big Sur beta 1 is almost as stable as 10.5.5. Some people had problems launching Safari or Mail, both fixed by deleting preferences. Safari and Logic are indeed noticeably much faster and smoother UI wise.

There are some apps that are broken. For me, Steam and Steam games hurt the most. For some it is Dropbox. Look for what you use in the broken apps thread and see if you’d be able to live without them

 

[macintoshmac]

After the quality dumpster fire that is Catalina, how is Big Sur looking in terms of bugs? Yes, I know it’s a beta, but have they fixed bugs like mail, etc which have plagued macOS for 12+ months?

are we going to see a series of “how to turn off auto install” articles in the times, Wall Street journal, et al.?

I'm interested in hearing from people who beta tested both catalina and big sur. Catalina is still a hot damn mess and really degraded my trust in macos.

I tested Catalina developer betas right from the first, and that OS borked my iCloud Drive contents. Some files were corrupted and some were thrown in the bin, and I had to restore them manually on the website using the Restore Files option. It was as if a virus was let loose on the Drive contents. I did not use any Catalina beta after 3 months. Release versions were fine for me, from a consumer standpoint and my use case.

Now I am on Big Sur beta, and so far the experience is better. Drive contents are intact, does not look like anything is amiss so far.

What you may appreciate:
- readability is vastly improved, I am on non-retina display and love macOS Big Sur for this.
- a bug existed in Launchpad for me, where specific icons from Other folder randomly spread out of the folder. Resetting Launchpad did not help. Effectively, Launchpad organisation was meaningless for the last year. That bug is now fixed.
- Calendar in Launchpad stopped reflecting the current date after manually putting the icons in the Other folder. Now Calendar icons is always up-to-date. 😆
- Smoother UI and user experience on my MacBook Air 2017. Newer and older models with more power should definitely see a tangible jump in user interface smoothness and performance.

What you may find problematic:

iCloud Tabs In Safari

Previously, when you had tabs open in Safari on macOS and iOS/ iPadOS, Safari on other browsers would show you the name of your device and tabs underneath. Now, Safari on devices does something like this - John AppleSeed's MacBook (9). That number inside can change, and I have even seen multiple computers listed under iCloud Tabs in Safari, and they seem to relate to my 'browsing sessions'. For example, suppose my current session has 6 tabs open on macOS, and I close all tabs and close Safari. Next time, I use Safari to browse websites in 3 tabs, say. Now, if I check my iPhone, Safari will list two computers, with numbers in brackets that are not relatable to anything, containing my two sessions. Clearly something is wrong somewhere.

 

[ErikGrim]

iCloud Tabs In Safari

Previously, when you had tabs open in Safari on macOS and iOS/ iPadOS, Safari on other browsers would show you the name of your device and tabs underneath. Now, Safari on devices does something like this - John AppleSeed's MacBook (9). That number inside can change, and I have even seen multiple computers listed under iCloud Tabs in Safari, and they seem to relate to my 'browsing sessions'. For example, suppose my current session has 6 tabs open on macOS, and I close all tabs and close Safari. Next time, I use Safari to browse websites in 3 tabs, say. Now, if I check my iPhone, Safari will list two computers, with numbers in brackets that are not relatable to anything, containing my two sessions. Clearly something is wrong somewhere.

FWIW, I’m not experiencing that bug at all...but it seems nasty.

 

[macintoshmac]

FWIW, I’m not experiencing that bug at all...but it seems nasty.

Joys of beta.. different experiences for different people! iCloud is raking up ghosts of MacBooks and iPhones past for me.

 

[teflocarbon]

I've used it for a bit now and its great, not many issues to report here at all.
The installer was a bit weird and skipped Touch ID but I just added it later, cant change the clock menubar settings and safari also still seems a big buggy as well but I dont use it anyway.
Thats about it though, everything else is a-ok.

I actually think its better than Catalina which was atrocious in beta and atrocious on release.

 

[iMacDragon]

I'll be giving it a go once VMware beta is out ( I need VM support to do daily things )

 

[chama98]

I have installed the beta myself, as a container under Catalina. So can boot back into Catalina if needed, I have also installed app from the App Store which I will be using to best the software out. So far so good, had one crash which was maps but apart from that not really bothered. Like the new software BUT hate the sounds!

 

[vaugha]

Any os-wide crashes/kernel panics so far? Catalina still crashes my lightly-used 2019 mba even on 10.15.5. I can't wait to get off catasphrophic catalina and get on the big sur bandwagon.

 

[chama98]

you might get this when you reboot back into Catalina. I rebooted into Big Sur and the disk (disk2s7) wasn't showing in Big Sur nor int eh Big Sur recovery. So either it must be connected to Big Sur in some way? Would be interested to hear what others think.

 

[Ansath]

Any os-wide crashes/kernel panics so far? Catalina still crashes my lightly-used 2019 mba even on 10.15.5. I can't wait to get off catasphrophic catalina and get on the big sur bandwagon.

None here, but then I wasn't having anything like that in Catalina.

My only issue, after using it since it came out, is the iCloud tabs as per @macintoshmac

 

[aeternitas]

For me Big Sur has been 100% free of bugs so far... I'm quite amazed TBH.
Same thing with iOS14... no bugs and all my apps work.

It's the first year in around ~13 years of Beta testing that I try a Beta that's giving me no headaches.

I still hate the new Big Sur icons tho...

 

[vaugha]

For me Big Sur has been 100% free of bugs so far... I'm quite amazed TBH.
Same thing with iOS14... no bugs and all my apps work.

It's the first year in around ~13 years of Beta testing that I try a Beta that's giving me no headaches.

I still hate the new Big Sur icons tho...

Did you beta test catalina?

 

[macintoshmac]

FWIW, I’m not experiencing that bug at all...but it seems nasty.

This is definitely some bug. After I switched off Safari in iCloud on both my devices, mobile and laptop, and switched on after couple of hours, the number seems to have stabilised itself at 13 for the MacBook Air and 2 for the phone.

Some more thoughts on this issue:

Positives

iCloud Tabs is working almost in real time now. It is very fast. You remove a tab on one of your devices from another, and the change is reflected almost instantly. This sync is definitely faster than before.

Negatives

I observe that the moment I remove a tab on another device from one of my devices, for a second or two, the bracket system (x) gets removed beside my device's name. Second or two later, it comes back. This behaviour leads me to think this is a bug. Apart from this nomenclature, nothing else seems out of the ordinary so far.

Wondering why the nomenclature has frozen to iPhone (2) and MacBook Air (13) now. A while ago, it was all over the place, the highest I saw was MacBook Air (20). This number is not related to the number of tabs open at all.

Another Observation

I just realised that when there is just 1 tab left to close on devices, then the name shows just fine, without the (x). Now this revelation leads me to believe this might be a work-in-progress feature wherein iCloud Tabs will now list the number of tabs on the other devices. There can be no other explanation for this. Currently there is one tab in my phone, and Safari on macOS lists the device without brackets. There is one tab open in macOS Safari, and the iPhone lists the MacBook without brackets as well.

@Ansath, would you kindly check this on your devices and report how iCloud Tabs feature behaves on your devices? Leaving just one tab on Mac and iPhone, does the name show without brackets? Also, just for fun, what number are you on by now?

Aside from this, this is a pretty stable release for a beta. It feels well-optimised for a first beta. That said, Mail > Preferences > Accounts does not show my accounts, not even the default iCloud account. Interesting bugs, but none too worrisome so far.

 

[S8ER01Z]

No issues to report so far... compared to any previous BETA 1 this is impressive. Of course it appears that both iOS and MacOS just got a coat of paint so maybe it shouldn't be surprising.

 

[joshkhaos1]

Nothing major. A few crashes on Safari but again nothing cataclysmic.

 

[Ansath]

@Ansath, would you kindly check this on your devices and report how iCloud Tabs feature behaves on your devices? Leaving just one tab on Mac and iPhone, does the name show without brackets? Also, just for fun, what number are you on by now?

My only one with numbers is my MacBook, and there's now 4 versions showing, up from 2 a couple hours ago. 2 of them are just my pinned tabs, the other 2 seem to be instances from the last 2 hours or so. The numbers are 2,4, 8 & 9.

 

[joshkhaos1]

You knows, slightly off topic, but whats interesting to me is how a lot of people always kept saying they wished that Apple would bring full Mac OS support to iPad...I dont think anyone ever expected them to bring iPad OS to Mac, which is the direction I actually think they are heading in with Big Sur.

 

[cmhsam]

I just did an upgrade from Catalina on my 2020 16" MBPro and so far it seems to be working very well. I did not have issues with iCloud and messages, etc synced. Note: I did not have APFS encrypting my files on Catalina.

• Office 365 (downloaded from office.com vs App Store) is working after the upgrade. Onedrive syncs as well, no issues...yet.
• Zoom launches but their main splash page doesnt show the icons for "Join Meeting", "Start Meeting", etc.
• MS Teams is working so far.
• Logitech Options working.
• Alfred is working.
• CleanmyMac seems to work as well.
• SnagIT is NOT working.
• Physical resources (CPU/Memory/SSD) seem to be using less physical resources.

 

[xgman]

It's flawless for me so far. On a 2018 15"MBP (i9/32/1TB) installed on top of a clean Catalina.

Noticed a bump in speed and smoothness in Logic Pro especially, as well as in Safari and Finder. I can't say anything about Mail unfortunately.

Not one crash, not one hang-up, not one kernel panic, nothing.

I had the exact opposite experience, but I run a lot of 3rd party apps. I notice you only mentioned Apple apps. You might as well just use an ipad then.
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I'm interested in hearing from people who beta tested both catalina and big sur. Catalina is still a hot damn mess and really degraded my trust in macos.

I find big sur more restrictive than catalina for power users, but i'd say the 1st catalina release and this Big Sur are neck and neck about similar degrees of "mess". Instead of building on months of bug fixes and stability improvements, They take a relatively stable version of the os, and then scramble it up and destabilize it all over again every year. woopie...

 

[kissmo]

Besides slow graphics switch from integrated to discrete when launching FCPX and Motion, I have to say it’s better than Catalina on my MBP 2018 15’’ core i7.

It’s crazy how many problems I had with Catalina and for 1 day of usage, I must say I haven’t had any problems. Battery life is at the same level with Catalina.
Not encouraging anyone to use as primary OS, I have a spare Mac available to test this out.

 

[antisomnic]

I'm not a power user but I haven't experienced any bugs yet on my 2020 MacBook Air (base model).

I did have some finder crashing but it was my fault. I had cDock installed (an app that lets you skin your dock) and I forgot to uninstall it before installing the beta.