Two days ago I did something I have never done. I installed the current public betas for macOS Catalina, iOS 13, iPadOS, and tvOS. Have always waited for the actual release before installing any OS. Yes, everything was totally backed up beforehand. The reason I did this is because I am a college professor, and really wanted to road test Catalina BEFORE classes resumed in a couple weeks (the other betas were installed just because). Typically OS releases occur a couple weeks after classes start, which is normally not a problem, but with the death of 32bit apps this time around felt I needed to get a handle on what would and would not work with the new MacOS. Doing this has actually been really helpful.
On another note I have actually found doing some beta testing on the various beta OS versions kind of fun (yes, it is a bit geeky). After a few days of use a few minor issues, but overall seem to be pretty stable.
Thus far no huge problems. The grading program I have used for years is 32bit and no longer works, but that program has not been updated or supported for about 4 years so it is not surprising. It was going to break at some point. Endnote, where I store my research literature database is also currently 32bit and does not work, but I know that will be updated prior to the formal release of Catalina so that is fine. Beyond that Mail seems to be leaving duplicate copies of messages sent to my primary google account in the inbox when they are either moved to the trash or to local folders by a rule. This is a minor issue. The News app has not really been functional on my laptop since installing the beta. News works fine on my iPhone and iPad so that is fine as well.
Since I started this thread thought I would mention some issues I have found. First, I have not had the battery issues that David mentioned in episode 492. Perhaps those issues have been resolved as I am running public beta 4 (developer beta 5) of Catalina so one seeding later than when the episode was recorded. Should probably also mention that I am running this on a 2017 15" MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM. Biggest issues I have encountered mostly have to do with the Mail app. Messages sent to trash or to local folders via a rule do not get removed from my inbox. The messages do indeed get moved to where they are supposed to go but a copy is left behind. Further, I THINK this is only happening with my work email which is Google email so it might have something to do with Google integration. Considering that this is a beta it is simply a minor annoyance. The second issue is that Mail does not appear to be talking to my Contacts app. Discovered this when I tried to send an email to one of my Contacts groups and Mail did not recognize the group name. To see if this was a problem with just groups or communication with Contacts in general I created a Contacts record with an email address that I know could not have previously sent me an email. When I tried to send an email to that contact Mail could not find it. So, my conclusion is that Mail and Contacts are not talking. This is a bit more of an annoyance, but not something I can’t deal with during the beta period. I have encountered a few issues with some third party apps and permissions issues to access files in some areas. For example, I use GIMP for photo processing and after updating to Catalina beta it could no longer access files on the desktop. Upon further exploration there are hints that this might somehow be linked to places that interact with iCloud as this problem does not exist when trying access files in places I do not believe are in the normal sphere of iCloud (i.e. GIMP worked fine when I moved my images to my pictures folder that I do not use for the Photos app).