Hello, has anyone got any up to date comments about the reliability of Catalina after 10.15.3 was released. Should I upgrade or wait until 10.15.4 for further bug fixes before considering whether to upgrade or not?
Seems to have solved the issue…I upgraded then with no issues.
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No! Still email loss problems. Oh well, too late for you! 
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-10-15/
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I am still hesitant about upgrading. My current workflow is dependent on some older programs that will not work with the new version.
Also, there has been reports of very slow finder updating (from Marco Arment among others)
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Yeah, Marco updated to Catalina and almost immediately regretted it. We’re still cautioning to hold off. It’s just not a good release.
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In a quick read of the article linked below, it cites issues with Mail when upgrading from Mojave to Catalina. I have had no problems with mail since upgrading to 10.15.3. However, my upgrade was from High Sierra… don’t know if that’s a factor. Upgraded to16” MBP
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With the newest iteration of Catalina (MacOS 10.15.4) having been recently released, I’m wondering if it’s yet time upgrade from Mojave. A couple of months ago I bought a new 2019 MacBook Pro and it came installed with Catalina, and I haven’t had a single issue, and that’s got me thinking about upgrading my 2015 iMac.
Thoughts? Are folks still having issues with it?
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I got a 16" MacBook Pro a few weeks ago. I used migration assistant to move from my 2014 MBP running Mojave, and it has been a nightmare. The COVID hit the fan about the time I was making the switch, so I’ve been desperately trying to make things work inside of a pressure cooker instead of taking notes. I’ve already forgotten many of the problems I had but could fix or work around. Here are some remaining ones I can think of off the top of my head:
Mail opens new windows in arbitrary and generally unusable places, often tiny at the very top or bottom of the screen. Moom has been my savior here.
When you click on an interface element in a background window (with Safari and Mail, at least, I haven’t had time to test others) the element will highlight and return just as if the window were active, but no action is taken. This sounds minor, and might be for others, but I have found that it has completely disrupted my workflow. I don’t mind if background windows are active. I don’t mind if they don’t receive clicks. But when they appear to receive clicks, give the user feedback that they’ve received clicks, but then do nothing – that’s horrible.
Printing from Preview to Mail – something I need to do dozens of times a day – is broken, giving an oh-so-useful “Print – Error when printing.” error message. Dozens of posts said to reset the print manager. I tried it. It warned that I’d have to re-install the printers. It didn’t bother to mention that I would lose all my custom print settings that I’ve developed over the years. And printing from Preview is still broken.
I discovered that in Catalina there is absolutely no way whatsoever to safely make a bootable clone of a FileVault-protected internal SSD to an external SSD. The ONLY way to make a bootable APFS clone is to create it unencrypted, then boot from the clone and enable FileVault. That means all the data is unencrypted (for almost two days in my case) and there is a likelihood of leaving traces of your plaintext data floating around the SSD indefinitely. This probably isn’t a big deal for most folks, but if you’re working in a moderate to high security environment, this means that you have to give up hope of having bootable backups; a situation I find unacceptable.
After a lot of agony, I have a working system and I really like the keyboard and display on this machine. The Touch Bar is wasted space so far, but not annoyingly so as I’m not a function key guy anyway. But the migration was so horrific that several times I started to box the machine up to return to Apple. Many things still don’t work right. A lot of information was lost, though that’s probably more due to the migration than from the change to Catalina (for example, I leave many downloads in my Downloads folder because it’s handy for me just to reference them by “Date Added” – but after the migration all the files had their “Date Added” set to the date of the migration).
Other problems:
My 1Password data still isn’t syncing from the Catalina machine. It says it is working, but changes don’t propagate.
Dropbox interrupted my workflow with pop-up messages so many times that I have decided to delete it first thing post-apocalypse.
Fantastical failed in a weird way that caused it to go through all the motions of adding events, animation and sound effects, but the events then immediately disappeared. I missed some important meetings before I realized what was happening, but immediately after I wrote to Flexibits support Fantastical put up a message saying something about a corrupt database and offering to fix it. It seems to work now, but I’m still worrying about what might be missing from my calendar.
Bottom line is that I think one should upgrade to Catalina on the source machine (if possible) before doing the migration. In another era, I would have made a bootable clone of the source machine onto the target machine, but Apple recommends against that now. But Migration Assistant really didn’t do the job for me.
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I just upgraded to Catalina, and wish I hadn’t. I am probably not downgrading, though I do have a bootable copy of macOS 10.14. With Catalina, MacBook Pro performance definitely seems to have improved. (MacBookPro11,2 late 2013)
My immediate concern is finding a new podcast client.
My first look at Apple Mail suggests to me, as does the podcast app, that Apple is no longer able to produce good user software.
Without Catalina upgrade, I find that synchronizing/backing-up with of iPhone and iPad (which have latest IOS) is not possible on my Mac. Therefore, I back them up using iTunes on a PC. Otherwise, I still need and use Mojave.
No worries, it’s busted even if you have Catalina.
Auto syncing is thoroughly broken and manual syncing fails about every other instance. To top it off, every once in a while iTunes Finder will throw a cryptic error message about not being able to sync. Only later in a new window you’ll see that a backup is being listed with the time stamp of the attempt that supposedly failed. It’s a complete **** show. 