Seeing all the issues that continue to plague Catalina, it would be interesting to see which version of macOS people in this community are on. For those with multiple Macs, list the version of macOS you are using on your primary Mac.
Do chip in with your thoughts if you’d like to as well! I, for one, don’t plan on upgrading to Catalina, or its successor, any time soon.
0 voters
Good survey!
I’m not opposed to upgrading to Catalina. I just never seem to get around to it. There doesn’t seem to be a compelling feature, and I have other things to do.
And there are rumors of problems with Catalina. There are always rumors of that type with any Apple upgrade. But the rumors don’t make me more likely to upgrade.
I don’t have a single primary Mac i have several - I do different jobs on different machines. They are also of different years and models.
I have different macOS installs across these machines.
Catalina may have a hardware related component - I am not too sure that a survey with a single vector “which macOS you use” is going to show much other then a general impression how appreciated (or not) this version of macOS is.
macOS Catalina, as required by recent versions of Xcode
We have two iMacs running Mojave and one 2013 MBP on High Sierra.
The iMacs are there because of the lack of 32-bit support in Catalina. I still have games I’d like to play that won’t run on Catalina and I’m not finding it a compelling enough upgrade to do the VM thing. The MBP is on High Sierra because of third party hardware that’s incompatible with anything newer and because there are graphics performance and compatibility issues with some software when I use newer macOS versions on it anyway.
So, no, I don’t find the narrative behind questions like this one dead and desiccated.
To be fair, the narrative he’s referring to is the “new releases are plagued with bugs” narrative – not related to not-upgrading in order to preserve borderline ‘legacy’ software / components.
As for me I’m on Catalina and I always upgrade pretty much immediately when new .X’s are released. I don’t mess with betas, but I don’t let the little bug here or there deter me as I have everything backed up and protected. (and yes, I use my computer primarily for business purposes)
But you know I rock the Tiger wallpaper from 512pixels 
Which issues?
I’ve run Catalina for about 7 or 8 months, and other than AppleScript being broken with Notes (preventing Notes import macros for some third party apps I own), my Mac runs very well and is not “plagued”.
I recently came across this article on what looks like a pretty major, but not isolated, bug. In addition to what I have read and heard about Catalina, it prompted me to start this poll.
Catalina is widely considered to be one of the buggiest releases in recent times. That is not just my “old and tired”, lazy take on the issue but the general consensus among many respected writers and developers. This is what they have to say (emphasis mine):
Six Color’s report card on Apple in 2019
Then there was macOS Catalina and other technologies rolled out at Apple’s 2019 developer conference, which were met with a lot of skepticism.
Marco Arment said, “The hardware is much better than the software.” Rob Griffiths said, “I think the new hardware has been really good… Catalina, on the other hand, is a mess.”
Charles Arthur said, “Catalina and Catalyst are really uninspiring.” Steven Troughton-Smith said, “Apple fumbled the start of their next major platform transition with Catalyst and SwiftUI with a poorly documented, barely-ready rushed debut for both technologies.” Stephen Hackett said, “Apple needs to be clearer about what it thinks the future of Mac applications should be. Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI feel like they were on separate, parallel and secret paths within the company, just to end up crossing the line into the public at the same time at WWDC 2019.”
Glenn Fleishman said, “Catalina was a disastrous release.” John Siracusa said, “Apple has not done a good job communicating the benefits of Catalina, an update that… comes with more pitfalls than the average macOS update.” Joe Kissell said, “Catalina was, and continues to be, a real downer in terms of missing features, bugs, and overall quality.” Andrew Laurence said, “For the first time in my career, this IT professional warns users away from the new macOS, and took action to prevent users from installing it.”
Catalina’s modified approach to security specifically came under fire.
Stephen Hackett said, “I can’t help but worry about Apple’s on-going tightening of the screws when it comes to macOS and the apps that run atop my OS of choice.” Benjamin Mayo said, “Catalina’s privacy features were not fully designed and make for a pretty terrible first boot experience on updating to the new OS.”
John Gruber said, “Catalina clearly bends too far in the direction of security. By design, it’s just too inconvenient… why in the world is the desktop treated as some sort of sensitive location?… There should be a single switch for expert users to toggle to effectively say ‘I trust all of the software on my Mac.’… I don’t know a single expert Mac user who is not seriously annoyed by the heavy-handed security design of Catalina… I genuinely fear for the future of the Mac as a platform for serious computer users…. Not one thing about Mac software got better in 2019 and everything that did change made it worse.”
More from Gruber
2019 Apple report card
There are always bugs in new OS releases, and we always complain that the state of Apple’s software is too buggy. But no one can convince me that Catalina is not abnormally buggy, even now, months after release.
And then there’s Catalyst. Don’t get me started.
If I could give Mac hardware and software separate scores, I’d give hardware a B and software an F
On the display brightness bug affecting the LG 5K display
Is this the worst bug in the world? Not even close. It’s a paper-cut bug. No data loss, no crash, not some sort of thing where something doesn’t even work — just an annoyance. But no one wants to use a tool that gives you half a dozen paper cuts every day. And MacOS 10.15 is chockablock with paper-cut bugs.
He begins this piece by quoting Lloyd Chambers stating “There are so many bugs in Catalina that I could spend weeks writing them up.”
Marco Arment
On a Finder bug that displays the wrong file size
TidBITS
Refers to Catalina as an “unusually buggy release” and goes on to explain why.
Just after writing the above post I went over to Noodlesoft’s website as I had to download Hazel again. I don’t remember seeing warnings like this, almost eight months after the release date, for another version of macOS.
I put off moving to Catalina for a long time in part due to the LambTracker development and not wanting to muck with what was mostly working. I was still on High Sierra. Skipped Mojave entirely. First machine to get moved was laptop when I replaced the old one with a new MacBook Air. Next came upgrading my 2013 iMac. That took longer mostly due to me doing a large amount of cleanup of old software and misc files and junk first. There have been glitches but basically it’s all working well.
That is because everyone else got the developer preview of Catalina and updated their apps. 
I can think of two examples that touch my workflow:
The bug in 10.15.4 where the finder would hang while copying large amounts data was pretty significant (apparently fixed in 10.15.5.)
The bug in 10.15.5 where, in making a new clone, results in the clone not being bootable even though no error codes are thrown is significant.
I generally think Catalina, and the orientation towards much more robust security is a good to great thing. But it has not been a smooth transition.
I don’t know why this has touched a nerve but it clearly seems to have. If you are happy using Catalina then I am genuinely glad. I was simply interested in seeing the adoption rate of Catalina given its widely documented issues (I’m sorry but you cannot just wish them away.)
I am amazed that your reference to “actual data” is followed by farfetched claims such as “almost none of the actual defects mentioned are critical or affect a majority of users” and that “none of this opinion represents the experience of most users.” How can you presume to speak for most users?!
So, according to you, Marco Arment, Charles Arthur, Steven Troughton-Smith, Stephen Hackett, Glenn Fleishman, John Siracusa, Joe Kissell, Andrew Laurence, Benjamin Mayo, and John Gruber are “just old Mac guys grumping”. Riiight 
From now on my policy though I am on Catalina now, is going to be to wait several months if I can to upgrade on OS. I might even miss the yearly upgrade, I think @MacSparky said on a show that the speed of the new named OS is too short. I am inclined to agree. I am starting to feel that I need to learn new stuff I don’t even need too. I turned off Siri on my Mac yesterday for example. I don’t need it. I use dictation occasionally and that is good enough.
What made you decide to upgrade?
Yup, turning off Siri on the Mac is recommended if you use a MacBook Pro with the touchbar and you often accidentally activate Siri when you meant to do something else.
I can only vote once, but I use Mojave on my personal machine and Catalina on my work machine since my job requires it.
I am considering updating my personal machine to Catalina, with a couple backups ready, just in case.
I’m still running Mojave. Several things have kept me from upgrading.
At this point I certainly could upgrade but I just don’t see many benefits to doing it.
I do feel that Catalina was a more buggy release than those in the past but that is only my opinion colored by the things that I have read. What weights my opinion that way though was how buggy iOS 13 was. Having to support 150+ devices at work, I experienced first hand a lot more issues that we had in the past releases. I think Apple’s software took a big dip in that period of time.
Still running Mojave, still remember the anguish people had running the betas and dealing with sync problems (especially with iOS) and the genuine issues people continued to have even up to February. Pretty content staying here, actually, and still accessing my 32-bit apps (which I’ll miss, as the ones I use never got upgraded). I might upgrade to Catalina later this summer, or should I buy a new iMac in the fall I could end up only upgrading this 2017 iMac only when wiping the machine in preparation for resale.
The first thing I do on a new Touch Bar machine is replace the Siri button with the DND button. I use that one constantly.