Why are people saying Big Sur feels faster than Catalina?

[fisherking]

Zero science here as well, but I find that on my 5 year old iMac, Big Sur runs very well. Faster than Catalina? Not to the naked eye. Equal I would say.

As for 8GB being enough, yeah it will run, but it will be constantly paging to disk for Virtual Memory which will slow things down. My iMac would be running significant swap @ 16GB RAM as well as when I increased to 24GB (under Catalina). When I finally jumped to 32GB, the machine finally has enough that it does not swap to disk. My personal experience, YMMV.

a lot depends on what you do on your mac; on my 12" macbook, it's all email, notes, writing; some graphics, etc. and, even with it's dweeby processor & 8gb ram, i never have an issue, nothing feels sluggish.

but my imac, with a fast processor & 16gb, is the best experience i've had with logic and final cut. and big sur is, so far, great on both macs; am just working, not thinking about the OS... which is all i ask.

 

[mwidjaya]

Big Sur runs very well on SSD - this is key. If you have fusion drive or spinning disk, it is not going to be a good experience.

Light users will be entirely happy with 8GB RAM. Scale this up if you run heavy workload.

Don't have any experience with Catalina. It was introduced with many problems so I skipped it entirely and stuck with Mojave until now.

 

[halofan56]

big sur is a little better on my 12" macbook (8g ram), and feels about the same on my imac (16gb ram), a thoroughly-unscientific observation).

A lot of it depends on your configuration. How much RAM. processor and how much stuff runs in the background.

 

[fisherking]

A lot of it depends on your configuration. How much RAM. processor and how much stuff runs in the background.

of course. but my point is, my (minimally-spec'd) macbook and (well-spec'd) imac are both running big sur really well...

 

[halofan56]

of course. but my point is, my (minimally-spec'd) macbook and (well-spec'd) imac are both running big sur really well...

Yes they are. My point is, why so many users out there are having so many issues that aren't running well. We all have the same macs. If you just, say, re-install from scratch, the Big Sur operating system. Out of the box, it is going to run pretty well. When you start adding your data over via Migration Assistant, now it changes the configuration.

 

[fisherking]

Yes they are. My point is, why so many users out there are having so many issues that aren't running well. We all have the same macs. If you just, say, re-install from scratch, the Big Sur operating system. Out of the box, it is going to run pretty well. When you start adding your data over via Migration Assistant, now it changes the configuration.

we don't all have the same macs...

but it's not nearly that complicated. the OS is the OS, it has nothing to do with your documents, photos, email, etc. it has everything to do with your hardware, your processor, ram, disk space; also, to be fair, the apps that are open, services that are running, settings...

i don't run logic pro on my 12" macbook, it would not be great, on any OS. but i have tons of documents, files on the macbook, and they don't affect the MB's performance... unless i try to open them all at once.

 

[halofan56]

What I'm trying to say we all have 21" or 27" iMacs, MacBooks Air, MacBook Pros and Mini Macs built in the same manner. If I had 20 iMacs, and I installed Big Sur on each one of them. 18 out of 20, would be good except for the two. That would be possibly a hardware problem.

 

[fisherking]

What I'm trying to say we all have 21" or 27" iMacs, MacBooks Air, MacBook Pros and Mini Macs built in the same manner. If I had 20 iMacs, and I installed Big Sur on each one of them. 18 out of 20, would be good except for the two. That would be possibly a hardware problem.

count every configuration of every mac, from, say, the last decade; there's a lot of variables. add in customizations (ie 3rd-party ram, an external graphics card), the different apps & processes we each run. just saying!

 

[halofan56]

count every configuration of every mac, from, say, the last decade; there's a lot of variables. add in customizations (ie 3rd-party ram, an external graphics card), the different apps & processes we each run. just saying!

I realize that. I'll let it go at that.

 

[Heliotropen]

I agree super slow and sluggish here.

 

[CTHarrryH]

Seem to be faster and smoother to me

 

[profdraper]

Agreed that as always, macos performance & 'happiness' depends on the model and age of the hardware.

In my case, a 2019 macpro shipped with Catalina and always felt like a bit of a kludge (bugs etc). On Big Sur 11.1, this now feels like a 'v2' Catalina and indeed feels appropriate for this machine. It much happier, runs faster, more responsively and the Catalina bugs have gone (some Finder issues, UEFI etc). This is a multiboot system running Catlaina 10.15.7, Big Sur 11.1 & Windows 10 for workstations 20H2. Big Sur is now the daily driver & Catalina will be retired shortly once just a few updates come along.

I *suspect* that a rule of thumb 'might' be: if the computer shipped with Catalina (ie, no backward compatibility as is Apple's demand) - then I would upgrade to Big Sur as an improvement and refinement of Catalina. Assuming the hardware is there, but then, most if not all Catalina computers should have the necessary hardware even at base model. With older machines I'd be inclined to stay at Mojave as the optimum macos.

Security on Big Sur is a bit of a drag though: click, click, click, click endlessly until set up. Then there's always the awful Apple thing of destroying old 3rd party software, drivers, plugins etc (unlike Win10) and so we have to get new versions, pay for upgrades etc. Still, for me most of this seems to have come together now, only really awaiting SoftRAID 6, but the beta seems to be fine for now.

 

[JPi686]

Its fast or at least feels like it on my i5, 256 gb ssd, 16 gb ram, early 2015 mbp.