Well, without warning (after a few reboots), it runs messages now. … We’ll see if I can get Safari stuck again. 
Well, look on the bright side… your experience was a helpful warning to others. 
After seeing all the implosions yesterday, I waited until this afternoon and downloaded and installed Big Sur with zero problems in about 45 minutes.
It’s a great upgrade, everything seems very smooth and fast.
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My progress bar is stuck at the about the same point, but I have no text on the screen
Turns out that the installation had finished, but it got stuck booting afterwards. I reset the PRAM (or whatever it is called now) and reset the SMC. Everything is fine now.
If anyone needs even more on Big Sur after reading John’s review, the Ars Technica review is pretty nice. It takes more of a historical slant (Siracusa’s Mac OS X 10.0 review even gets some link love).
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After some days with Big Sur I just stumbled upon an unexpected issue: I mount several shares on my Synology using SMB.
The mounting process is very, very, very slow. I switched to AFP for the time being.
Apparently, there had been some issues back in September with the beta:
It still does not work as good as it has in previous MacOS versions (for me at least)… 
The beta is working for me.
Big Sur is running smoothly and feels snappier! The UI is fantastic and love all the little details that are so Apple.
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I wonder if Messages didn’t work for me (initially) because it was re-indexing the “database” for the improved messages app/improved search(?).
This problem that I was having was ultimately fixed in a later extension. The problem that I was having was not so much speed, but that it couldn’t be done at all. There was a terminal command that I had to enter everytime there was a restart to activate the SAMBA server:
sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext
It sounds to me like you can connect, but the connection is slow. So, my guess is your system is loading smbfs.kext. But(!), maybe not and maybe it’s slow because the system is using something other than smbfs.kext to manage the SMB connection? You can see if its loaded by running:
kmutil showloaded | grep "smbfs"
If you find it’s not loaded, you can try loading it and see if that fixes your problem.
You may be very sophisticated on the command line, so sorry if I’m over-explaining.
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Thank you so much! I will definitely give it a try. 
Dammit, come on Ableton and iZotope, when was WWDC, seriously? Upgrade your apps, let me get the new shiny OS… 
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Music production, mostly what would be considered synthwave nowadays. Did a commercial game soundtrack a few years ago 
(game here, soundtrack there also available on all streaming services, if you’re interested!)
The next musical commercial projects I have are quite far on the horizon, but since Ableton is what I know, I also edit the podcast about writing we hold with two colleagues every fortnight with it (here), and that’s why I need it on a regular basis
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Well, smbfs is loaded.
No variant specified, falling back to release
176 0 0xffffff7fa06b5000 0x6a000 0x6a000 com.apple.filesystems.smbfs (3.4.1) D17D4216-863F-39C0-9276-D10EB67EDC39 <166 10 8 7 6 5 3 1>
So far, so good. The funny thing is that SMB has improved on my Mac. I did not do anything. I switched back to SMB when mounting my NAS shares. Everything is fine again. I guess…?! Weird. Thanks again!
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Let’s hope it just stays working in this improved state!
I’m still struggling to download the update. MBP 16 2019 on Catalina.
Download gets to the end (12.x GB) then fails saying it can’t be installed. Tried numerous times now and does same every time.
What else can I try?
Not sure if it is the same issue, but I had the same problem on a new Mac Mini. I signed into the Mac App Store, then restarted. When I went to software update, it started downloading again and installed.
installinstallmacos.py is a shell script which will guide you through the process of downloading the official installers directly from Apple’s servers.
Three things to note:
-
It must be run using
sudo installinstallmacos.py(make sure that you have runchmod 755 installinstallmacos.pyto make it executable too) -
It will download the files to the current directory that you are in, so you probably want to make sure it’s not an iCloud or Dropbox folder.
-
When done, there will be a folder named ‘content’ that you will want to delete.
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