Catalina, I wish I'd never installed it

Glad to hear it’s been working out for you, @billstanford9. You give me hope that when my new 13" MBP arrives I’ll find a way to get along with Catalina unlike some others here (not trying to imply there problems aren’t real of course!).

Good to hear Bill. I think within Catalina Apple shifted a lot around apps, security, peripherals, external services. I suspect there’s something in my particular cocktail that’s not agreeing with it. Yesterday I removed all my startup items and it still happened. Which narrows it down to whatever apps I was running and the OS and peripherals.

If you have been using TimeMachine, just restore Mohave. TM will ask if you wish to replace Catalina with an older OS. Click yes.

Once the bugs are removed from Catalina, try it again if you dare.

In the meantime enjoy using your apps the way they are supposed to work on your Apple hardware.

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Phil, never thought of that. I guess restore the system folder. I wonder if it is still there. I did at one point start Time Machine afresh. Both that and Mojave were quite some time ago.

Reverting the system is a lot more complicated that just restoring the System Folder. There are all kinds of Apps and Unix files that have to match up and a few databases that were converted and will no longer work with older systems.

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Could you describe in detail how this works? It sounds like TM has built-in support for using this to roll back the OS. I’ve never heard of that or thought of it.

I can imagine there’s all kinds of pitfalls there as @alvarnell points out, but if Apple has specifically built such functionality into TM I would also imagine they’ve given these potential issues some thought. Any added detail would be much appreciated.

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Yes, Al, I tend to agree. I’ve held off. I think I’ll be cloning, reformatting, installing Mojave and then restoring by hand each app as needed and my documents from the clone and various cloud services.

Simon. Here is a link for an Apple support article.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/revert-to-a-previous-macos-version-mh15216/mac

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I haven’t used my MacBookPro very often as it was purchased for travel and meetings. Now with Zoom meetings during quarantine, and my kids wanting to do Skype visits, I use the laptop more often. Yesterday it again pestered me to upgrade to Catalina, but I’m putting it off until I hear way better news.

Thanks, @danaeugene. I’m familiar with that procedure. I guess I just didn’t get that that’s what @shastaphil was pointing out. I read his post as describing some method to roll back OS version from within the TM interface. Obviously I should drink more coffee before I read posts here. :wink:

You can turn off the pestering if you like.

Today, there’s one last step Apple Support want me to try before sending it in to them. I think I’ll be downgrading to Mojave instead of that shipping it off however.

Thanks, @Simon.

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I’ve had many if not all of these problems when I was wrestling with a failing hard drive on an older iMac. Actually it was a fusion drive, and it was a mess, causing me huge problems and trips to the Apple store with reinstalls, start from scratch, rebuilds etc.
I’m not saying it’s not Catalina, but I have a fairly complex setup and run Catalina on my iMac with no known problems. Not on my laptop because of a few apps there I need the older system for.

@tommy: if you reinstalled your Mac with TimeMachine your likely reimported your problem.

The problem with Catalina are the inconsistent problems. I had one customer of my software last week who couldn’t access the Application Support folder for one app. For the second app everything worked fine. Similar problems come up again and again in our development forum.

I installed an app. Catalina told me that it had a keylogger. WTF?

The security is simply crazy. Before Catalina you only had failure with AppTranslocation (“Why aren’t my plugin loaded?”) and now you have worse stupidity with your own files.

@beatrixwillius I suspect you are right. Am considering a reformat, a reinstall of the OS, a restore of my cloud based documents, and then adding apps back in as needed.

Trouble is my rather complex setup has me worried that I’ll be leaving something out. And the time, finding the time.

Yes, that’s what I would recommend. And say no to cloud based documents.

I just skimmed this thread here (https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/constant-kernel-panics-userspace-watchdog-timeout-no-successful-checkins-from-com-apple-windowserver.2222878/page-10). The problem seems to be graphics/power one. So reinstalling is not likely to help. The thread recommends changing some graphics/power settings.

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I installed Catalina soon after release on my 2018 MacBook Air, and had the problem of it apparently getting stuck part way through installation (something that was supposedly fixed in the next point update). I have a feeling that it stuck while (or before) migrating the Messages database (I force-restarted it I think), as this app is still not working properly despite much (maybe too much) fiddling around & the fact that I use messages in the cloud.
I also get very frequent crashes of Mail, sometimes multiple times a day.

It seems that Catalina its on its way to being Apple’s Vista 10. I can see many users waiting for the next MacOS to upgrade and skipping this one altogether.

JC

That’s my plan. Don’t see the benefit and wary of the headaches. Late 2015 iMac working fine with Mojave. In fact Catalina will keep me from buying a new Mac for myself or my wife who is Rube Goldberging her MacBook Pro with dead internal keyboard/trackpad by using wireless external keyboard and mouse, at least until the next OS, hopefully more stable, is released.