Anyone brave or crazy enough to install Catalina public beta 1?

In a past life, I used to work in technical support for part of a university computing division. We were always running Macs with beta versions of stuff, and system crashes were sources of bragging rights. Thus, I’ve never been terribly afraid to run beta operating systems—especially “public” betas.

So over the weekend I installed Catalina public beta 1 on one of my Mac Book Pros.

For the record, I backed up the hard drive beforehand. (If I learned one thing from providing technical support to users, it was the need to back up data.)

Smooth installation, no hiccups, and other than occasionally taking a bit longer to do something I have not seen any issues. (And I expect an early beta to not be completely optimized.)

Of course, since that experiment went so well, I had to install it on my other Mac Book Pro. Not so smooth. Install froze, and I had to restart. The laptop came alive, but from the get go it has been weird. Even at the login screen, the mouse pointer isn’t drawn correctly, the normally black dots that appear as you type in your password are in bright cyan, and there’s no Desktop folder to be found. Deleting preference files didn’t fix that odd thing, nor did making it invisible/visible via the Terminal.

Thankfully, I have a full backup of this laptop from before the Catalina install, so this evening’s project is to get the backup files installed.

I have not yet had the chance to put the working Catalina install through its paces yet, but in basic operations it seems to be fine. After I’ve had a chance to try out some of the new features (Sidecar is intriguing) I will leave observations here in the forums.

Cheers!

IMHO it is best to run betas off of external drives, then if something goes wrong (and it will) you don’t have to do a restore.

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What do you think made the difference between the two MBPs?

Yes, I installed it. I basically made my MacBook useless, not even the Finder works… . Have downloaded the last two versions (High Sierra and Mohave) without major problems. This time it forced me into going iPad only… .
Hope public beta 2 will fix it.

I installed 10.15 Developer ß2 on a new partition on my work machine and restored the user from the 10.14 partition. Most things seem to work, but I can’t build my main work project, there is a weird error in Xcode.

I’ll try again when Dev ß3 is out.

This is the most confusing issue for me. Both of the MBPs were running the same version of Mojave. I can only guess that the second one had some kind of corrupted file somewhere that caused things to fall apart.

This is true, but running off external drives lacks adventure. :grinning:

Yup. Ran it for a few days as a partition on my MacBook before deleting it. Clearly not fully baked. I’ll try it again in a month or so, give or take.

Ran it for a few days and not good experience. I will advise to Beta 2 or Beta 3. However, I used the feedback app like crazy for all issues… to make sure they get reported on higher quantity…
Back to Mojave.