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!