Another one, although I believe this one might be related to newer Safari versions rather than Big Sur itself.
• The “Bookmarks” button for the Safari toolbar does not as you would assume go to the bookmarks page (as in cmd-opt-b), it toggles the favorite bar (as in shift-cmd-b). If that’s the desired behavior, the button never should have been labeled “Bookmarks”, but rather “Show/Hide Favorites”, the same wording used for the Tab Overview button.
Hello Alan,
Additions to this thread seem to have stopped coming. Anyway to encourage folks to keep adding items?
I’m getting ready to update from macOS 10 to 11 and I’m interested in learning from the wisdom of the crowd.
I think you’ve done it 
Small annoyances in Big Sur: Playing music to my headphone jack, the first couple/few seconds are louder than they should be, then it returns to the correct volume. I had hoped 11.2 would fix, but no luck. Dragging windows is a drag. I’ve found some consistent draggable spots but they’re far smaller than in Mojave. The hide-and-seek stuff is annoying but you find them eventually. Ally-ally-in-free. Photos: when I try to add a face it can’t find the existing faces for most of my high frequency People.
I searched for “contrast” and “brightness” but found nothing, so I’ll mention it. I have an external display, and when I connect the new MBA (necessarily running Big Sur), the screen is significantly dimmer and has much less contrast that when I connect the old MB running Mojave. Since I go switch the computers, I don’t want to adjust any setting on the external display. Am I correct that I could calibrate (System Preferences > Displays > Color > Calibrate) one or both Macs to get them to look more similar on the external display?
Perhaps related to this, the MBA seems to have less contrast on the internal display, too, and I had assumed that Big Sur is intended to have less contrast. Can anyone confirm or deny this assumption? (I have turned on System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Display > Increase contrast, but I have not moved the slider Display contrast, because that gets ugly fast.)
Upgraded from Mojave.
The active window and passive windows are similar colours.
Find My app used to work as a widget in Mojave, but has to be launched as an app in Big Sur (maybe also Catalina).
The OS doesn’t seem slower. But activating 1Password using command-\ is noticeably slower. Sometimes I catch myself pressing command-\ again as if the first press didn’t work. Default Folder X is very slow to activate, which is most annoying.
Shared iCloud Drive folders is OK, but just not as good as Dropbox.
2017 MacBook Pro
Check for apps doing lots of I/O or using lots of CPU. My 2016 MBP activating 1Password using command-\ is much less than a second and your machine should probably be as fast or faster.
For me it’s my command option P shortcut that goes directly to the Print to PDF key shortcut I added. The print to pdf button in the print dialog that gives you the pop up menu works quickly but the shortcut is slow…no idea why. Worked fine up through Catalina.
My solution to add a ‘⌘-P’ keyboard shortcut under All Applications pointing to ‘Save as PDF’ in the print dialog. Some macOS version ago, Apple had ‘Save as PDF…’ in the print dialog so I had to edit the shortcut to match the new changed dialog. So far in Big Sur, I have not noticed any significant delay. The best part is not having to scroll a list and hope to land on the desired choice. Caveat - this may not always work if the document being printed is in Full Screen view.
‘⌘-P’, wait for print dialog, ‘⌘-P’ is only a minor addition to muscle memory use and requires no hand motion to other keys.
Wish I knew why there was a 3-4 second delay though…and this started with Big Sur. I also run Default Folder X and some of it’s favorites are on network drives that may or may not be mounted so I did a bit more testing…with Default Folder X both running and not and either the shortcut or the Save as PDF popup both take about the same 3-4 seconds with the beachball before the Save dialog pops up…since it happens even with DF not running seems like an OS but to me.
Small annoyance:
I enjoy using both the Maps.app and FindMy.app in macOS. It bugs me that both look very similar. In fact, IMO a desktop/laptop Maps.app, should have combined functionality of both. In addition, it would be nice™ if the Maps.app could show people’s addresses from Contacts.app on the map (similar to how Calendars.app has the option of putting birthdays there).
In short, I sort of think that separate Maps and FindMy apps work on iOS, but not on macOS. But the apps are likely only on macOS because of underlying Catalyst features that make them direct ports.
This. And is it just me, or do column widths in Mail not stick? I’m not sure why I would ever want over half the Mail window devoted to the message size, when the sender, subject, and timestamp all show ellipses.
I did this a while ago on the MacBook running Mojave and I don’t recall if I did anything else. Now I have a path at the top of each Finder window and on each tab in each Finder window, and changing YES to NO does not reverse it. Any guesses as to what I’m doing wrong?
Bump.
That worked fine, but now I would like to undo it. In my user account, I open a terminal window and execute the following sets of commands (with an admin account name and entering the password for the admin account when prompted).
su admin
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool NO
su admin
su defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool NO
su - admin
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool NO
su - admin
su defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool NO
I also tried it with lowercase no. In all cases, “sorry” is the response from su. What am I doing wrong? Thanks.
The su command is to “switch user”. It does not do anything else. For example,
su admin
Switches your current terminal session to the user account with a short name of “admin”. If the account you want to switch to has a different name, you must replace admin with the short name of that account.
When switching users, you must provide that account’s password (not your own) or the request will be rejected. Once you have switched to an account, all commands will execute as if they came from that user.
This is in contrast to the sudo command, which is used to execute a single command as another account (the root account by default, if you don’t specify one). For example, to run the command foo as root:
sudo foo
Or to run the command foo as the account admin:
sudo -u admin foo
If your account is allowed access to sudo (by default administrator accounts are and other accounts are not), you will be asked for your own password to authenticate the request, and then the command will be executed.
With respect to your specific issues:
You should not need any su or sudo commands. Finder preferences are per-user and the defaults command should only change your own (per-user) configuration. So you should run the command with your own account’s permissions.
To reset a preference to its factory default, you may be better off just deleting the key. This is equivalent to deleting the preferences file, but only for a single preference, instead of everything in the file:
defaults delete com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle
If you prefer a GUI method, you can use XCode (Apple’s primary developer tool suite).
In general, preferences are stored in “plist” files. Per-user preferences are stored in ~/Library/Preferences and shared preferences are stored in /Library/Preferences. The filename begins with the preference domain you passed to the defaults command.
So, to graphically edit preferences in the com.apple.finder file, double-click on ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist. XCode will start, loading the preference file into its plist editor.
As with the defaults command, be careful when editing plist files (especially for system settings). A mistake could cause problems. I recommend making a backup copy of the plist file before you begin, just in case. In the worst case, you can delete the file, but that will reset all of its preferences back to factory defaults.
Don’t forget that when manually adding/deleting preferences for an application, you almost always need to restart that app in order for them to take effect. In the case of the Finder, do one of the following:
Thank you, @Shamino, for the detailed response.
I knew that, and managed to ignore my knowledge. Duh.
That I did not know. Thank you.
The problem is now solved, and I’ve learned (and relearned) some stuff, which I hope not to forget. Thanks again.