MacOS Catalina

The digiKam project, like many open source efforts, has a moderately-active mailing list for users. There was a post today that discussed incompatibilities of older Adobe products with Catalina (I only took a quick look and it seems it’s a 32/64-bit problem).

This link is not to digiKam, but The Register.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/adobe_catalina/

[ADDED] It’s worth following the links in the Register article to read about other changes in Catalina.
 
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BeachOrCity said:
Normally I would wait, but I am getting an iPhone 11 this week, and my understanding is Reminders app only works if I upgrade to Catalina, so I will have to give it a go. My old copy of MS Office is 32 bit, so I will be using LibreOffice going forward.
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After the Reminders upgrade in Catalina, which gives you nested items and icon options, I opened Reminders on the iPhone and it said 0 reminders for everything. Fear not - in a minute or two the data comes back down from iCloud and Reminders repopulated on the iPhone.

My very old Microsoft Office 2011 (lol) did not survive, but I knew it beforehand. Also a few utilities. Nice surprise - more disk space right after upgrade even before I deleted everything that was not going to work anyway.

I spent an entire afternoon going through the new features. What a luxury. No worry about what productive activity I should be doing instead.
 
Since I haven't seen much in the way of reported problems, I went ahead and upgraded to Catalina. Took exactly an hour to download and install. Very easy, no issues.
 
braumeister said:
Since I haven't seen much in the way of reported problems, I went ahead and upgraded to Catalina. Took exactly an hour to download and install. Very easy, no issues.
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I am still skittish. I can live without the handful of 32 bit apps I have left, but I have not seen enough compelling reason to do so in light of it. The Mac was already struggling as a gamers platform anyway, and Catalina breaks a LOT of games. But I also do have a Windows PC as my gaming rig.
 
Rianne said:
Applecare will be very busy. I'm on Mojave and will stay here awhile. Will read about the challenges and fixes.
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I can assure you logistically speaking state capital Apple stores are back to the multi-hour installs for walk-ins :cool:

I'd planned on your plan of action Rianne.
However when everything else fails.
Expunge everything and start again.

I might be an outlier, mine would not comply & needed a wipe and reinstall w/Catalina from Mojave.
As the 70s song goes ;)backinlovvvvve,(pause) ...
Backinloveagain!:dance:
 
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bolt said:
...I might be an outlier, mine would not comply & needed a wipe and reinstall w/Catalina from Mojave...
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And then you restored from a TimeMachine backup (to get all your stuff back)?
 
I swear by cloning software like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. I use it to completely clone my drive as an identical, bootable volume to an external drive. Then if a new OS install really fouls things up, I can just reverse the cloning to restore the older OS install as if I never installed Catalina.
 
If you have an iPhone and use the reminders app don’t upgrade to iOS 13 until you are ready to upgrade to Catalina same day.
They are incompatible across versions.
 
My 2013 iMac has been running sluggish. Ran cleanmymac and it seemed like it helped. And removed iMovie. Now installing Catalina and it looks like the the install is stuck on restart. But some threads online say that the restart takes 10 hours. So I’ll wait.
 
I've heard about certain problems that while not common are enough to make me wait a few weeks more before updating. Here's one issue some photographers may have if they use a non subscription version of PS. I find this interesting, and I may take a look at some PS alternatives. I just told Adobe not to renew my PS subscription.

Are legacy or perpetual versions of Photoshop compatible with macOS Catalina?


No, legacy/perpetual versions of Photoshop were not designed or tested to work on macOS 10.15 (Catalina). They are not supported in any way for use on macOS Catalina.
Adobe does not recommend that customers using old versions of Photoshop upgrade to macOS Catalina.
Incompatible versions (version 19.x and earlier) will not display in the ‘Older Versions’ list within the Creative Cloud desktop app.
Older versions use 32-bit licensing components and installers. Therefore, they cannot be installed and activated after upgrading to macOS Catalina. Upgrading to macOS Catalina with an older version already installed on your computer may allow the application to function in some capacity; however, you will not be able to reinstall or activate the application after the macOS upgrade.

Before upgrading to macOS Catalina, you may uninstall the older versions as the uninstaller will not work after upgrading. If you have already upgraded to macOS Catalina, you can use the Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool to uninstall older versions.
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FWIW, whenever I decide to do an OS upgrade, I first make a complete backup (in addition to the three that are made every night automatically), then perform a restart. Only right after the restart do I download and install the new OS. I think this probably obviates most problems, since I've never experienced any difficulty since I started doing this some years ago.
 
^^^^ That is my point. When bolt did a new install, the data is there, but the apps are missing (unless they did not have any non-native apps).
 
BeachOrCity said:
My old copy of MS Office is 32 bit, so I will be using LibreOffice going forward.
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While it pains me to say anything positive about Msft (after more than a couple brawls with them during my career), I have to give a plug for their home subscription for Office 365 for Mac.

I really missed MS Word and could never get used to Google's Doc or Apple's Pages programs. For $70, I got a one-year subscription to Office 365 that provides Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook (and a couple of other Msft programs which I'll never use).

The bonus for me is that it also includes 1TB of cloud storage (OneDrive) which has been pretty user friendly. It also allowed me to cancel my BackBlaze subscription.
 
^^^^ FYI, for tightwads, like me, you can get an MS Office 2019 license (not a 365 subscription) on eBay for cheap (I paid $2.56, and it is usually $5 or less), and it is permanent, so you don't have to renew every year.

However, you don't get the 1TB One Drive. Well you do, but it is with some funky email, so it is not usable.
 
camfused said:
^^^^ FYI, for tightwads, like me, you can get an MS Office 2019 license (not a 365 subscription) on eBay for cheap (I paid $2.56, and it is usually $5 or less), and it is permanent, so you don't have to renew every year.

However, you don't get the 1TB One Drive. Well you do, but it is with some funky email, so it is not usable.
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I saw that and I may buy it, but it kind of reeked of “stolen”.

So far libre seems perfectly good for my purposes will even do pivot tables in my spending tracker spreadsheet :)
 
IDK why people upgrade unless they absolutely NEED something that only works with that OS.

I'm still on Sierra (10.12) for all my Macs...some even boot back to 10.6 for PowerPC software (I have not gotten those programs to work properly in VMs yet)
 
ncbill said:
IDK why people upgrade unless they absolutely NEED something that only works with that OS.

I'm still on Sierra (10.12) for all my Macs...some even boot back to 10.6 for PowerPC software (I have not gotten those programs to work properly in VMs yet)
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The usual reason to upgrade is improved security.
 
BeachOrCity said:
I saw that and I may buy it, but it kind of reeked of “stolen”.

So far libre seems perfectly good for my purposes will even do pivot tables in my spending tracker spreadsheet :)
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I don't think they are stolen, just people in non-US countries that are taking advantage of the MS developer license to resell. I have been buying these for maybe 5 or 6 years now, for the whole family, and have not had a problem. Those early licenses are still good.

I like LibreOffice, a lot, and it is a good way to go, but if you can get *real* MS Office so cheap, it is a no-brainer to me.
 
Chuckanut said:
The usual reason to upgrade is improved security.
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That’s an important one. Speed is another and often mentioned together with generic “bug fixes”. New application capabilities (e.g. Sidecar in Catalina).

Leaping from a very outdated OS release (several years ago) to the newest can be asking for trouble. Although it’s probably better to wait for an early “point” release, like OS X.1, rather than jumping on a fresh major release as I’ve done with Catalina.
 
camfused said:
^^^^ That is my point. When bolt did a new install, the data is there, but the apps are missing (unless they did not have any non-native apps).
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It had all the native apps, plus my outside.mail, contacts & others.iirc.
I believe a couple outside apps did, & couple did not load w/the wipe-reinstall process.
Outside apps are scrutinized I'm told.
It's not a primary LT. for me.

Odd.

Great point though.

I suspect different apps or options like backup means, time machine & disk players are becoming history w/LapTops.
I'm just guessing.

Good luck!
 
camfused said:
^^^^ FYI, for tightwads, like me, you can get an MS Office 2019 license (not a 365 subscription) on eBay for cheap (I paid $2.56, and it is usually $5 or less), and it is permanent, so you don't have to renew every year.

However, you don't get the 1TB One Drive. Well you do, but it is with some funky email, so it is not usable.
Click to expand...

I saw people selling the license key on Ebay. Assuming this is legal, where does one get the actual software?
 
ncbill said:
IDK why people upgrade unless they absolutely NEED something that only works with that OS.

I'm still on Sierra (10.12) for all my Macs...some even boot back to 10.6 for PowerPC software (I have not gotten those programs to work properly in VMs yet)
Click to expand...
From a virus protection POV, I think not upgrading for such a long time entails unneeded risk.
 
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