What happened to my MBP 16" with Catalina 10.15.4? I don't want to repeat it

[Dusan Stojanovic]

I was browsing through some mp4 videos with preview (space bar + up/down) when my mac froze. So i restarted it with long power button press. When it restarted, I didn't have menu bar, my wallpaper was black and I couldn't click on anything. I went to safe mode and it was completely the same, no menubar, black and not being able to click on anything. Then I went to recovery mode, reinstalled Catalina without erasing - still the same behaviour. Lastly, I had to do erase + reinstall, at last with with success.

Anyone got slightest idea what happened?

I experienced more bugs with my two Catalina powered Macbooks (16" and 2019 Air) in these last couple of months than with every computer/OS I ever owned since 1999. I'm on Macs exclusively since 2011 and now I'm seriously reconsidering switching to Linux.

 

[atomic.flip]

Catalina is largely hosed due to some awful power management bugs (deep in PM IOKIT components). I'm hoping they fix this mess with the latest Dev Beta and public release of 10.15.5. Otherwise, if you can stick to 10.15.3 I would suggest you do that to be safe.

If on 10.15.4. Disable most power management features... and / or at minimum "Power Nap". That should improve stability significantly.