You should always test for yourself, if possible. 
Naaa… 
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I’ve been running from an external USB SSD on my ancient Mac mini (Late 2012) and it works great. Running from the Carbon Copy clone on the internal HD is agonizing. Upgraded to Catalina when it came out and haven’t had any issues. Lots of iOS development on this machine.
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I second the recommendations to not upgrade to Catalina. For me it is a dog with lots of bugs and very slow. I recommend upgrade to MacOS 10.14 then download Xcode 10.1. You can do all of your development. I haven’t submitted an iOS app for a few months so I don’t know if you might have to use Xcode 11.x for your final App Store build.
You do, since June. And it demands both Catalina and Xojo 2019R3
Just to be clear here, especially as you’ve mentioned this in the past.
When you install a new version of the OS, you don’t upgrade in the laymans sense, you’ve mentioned that you wipe your drive, install the new OS, then copy back your apps and data.
This made a huge difference for Catalina and I suspect for all OSes going forwards. Migration assistant was once an excellent and a trustworthy tool, ensuring a good experience with a new Apple OS. Apple Care told me this year, that Apple knows Migration Assistant is broken for Catalina, and recommended me to do what you did.
So for those who’re considering migrating to the latest Apple OS, for the best experience, it is recommended by Apple that you wipe your drive, install the new OS, then migrate your data and apps across, avoiding problems that Apple’s Migration Assistant may cause.
You do, since June. And it demands both Catalina and Xojo 2019R3
No! Xcode 11.3.1 works on macOS 10.14 and it can be user for App Store submission.
You can Download Xcoode 11.3 directly from Apple´s developer center.
See More Downloads for Apple Developers where Xcode 11.3.1 is listed.
Getting the feeling that anything Apple can break is now on that way…
Is anything being “improved” in recent OS versions?
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Well, some like the new interface in BS. It somehow looks “cleaner”. And yes, it’s kind of better. But the extra-whitespace isn’t really needed.
I’d like to see a working menubar. Opening files in Preview is still broken. Scrollbars are too complex for Apple. Maps still crashes. And let’s not talk about the messageboxes or windows with toolbars in Xojo.
What is really nice is that you can now set the language of apps in System Preferences.
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Ok, so enhancements are all about UI… Not what interests me.
I agree about message boxes; another iOS-like change that shouldn’t be applied to regular computers. They look ugly, are unintuitive and it’s not a matter of being not accustomed to them.
As for the crashes and new broken parts, software that is still in beta cannot be taken into account; I’ll consider comparing BS to other versions when it’s “ready to ship”. In other words, it’s expected to see broken things in a beta software, even for an OS and even if there are a lot/deeply broken things.
Thank you.
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Think new versions, techniques and security coming from Apple makes this OS less popular than it used to be.
Yes and no. Of course, betas have bugs. But some of the bugs shouldn’t have made it through Apple’s quality department. If they still have such a department…
Erm… Please tell me you got the memo and just forgot. We’re the QA department! What’s even better is that we PAY Apple for the right to do so!
Yeah, I know.
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I have been working on my 27" Mac with Catalina for a month and half or so. Besides having to update some apps to 64 bits, it has been fair so far.
There is a long tradition in this forum to denigrate every single new version of macOS. Perhaps it is like the rampant hatred to the Xojo IDE. Forgive me, but it looks like “it was better in the good ol’days” syndrome.
I have always embraced new technologies, and so does Apple. It is strange to witness the resistance from programmers, who should be at the forefront of innovation.
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Some of the hatred for Catalina is well justified, it does have serious problems, the Kernel Panic on sleep issue that many MacBook Pro users experience, is a good example. Another is the delay caused by the computer phoning home every time you try to launch a new build of your application. 90% of the time it only takes ~300 microseconds, but on a really bad day, I’ve clocked it at 12 seconds. NSPipes are broken with NSTask, which leaks a process using an entire CPU core each time it’s run. Some file API leaks in the kernel every time you open a file, eventually preventing your app from opening another file until it’s rebooted. Apple still haven’t fixed the bug in their atomic saving API, which leaks empty folders in the temporary folder, which means once there’s 512 items in the temporary folder, you can’t use Apple’s atomic saving API to save files any more, until the machine is rebooted.
As a user, most of the issues I had with Catalina, were because of bugs in Apple’s Migration Assistant, making my first experience of using Catalina as an operating system an absolute degrading experience. I returned my first 16" MacBook Pro because I spent 12 days (of my 14 day return period) tracking down a bug in Catalina that was preventing me from completing the work that Apple wanted me to do so they’d allow my app on the Mac App Store. For 11 of those 12 days, Apple didn’t believe me that there was even an issue, until I sent them GBs of logs.
Since I did what Apple suggested with this second MacBook Pro, I have had a better experience as a user, there are still weird issues, especially the spotlight window not appearing, or inability to use my external display if I wake the machine while it’s backing up to an external drive connected to the external display. So I can see both sides to it, and I’m afraid I very much lean to the side that the hated is justified. Apple simply do not allow themselves enough time to properly QA their OS updates (and everything else that it entails) before they release them.
Sure a percentage of customer won’t notice any problems or didn’t have any problems, but a great deal of customer did have terrible problems and there are unsolved issues with Catalina.
I think the OS versions were of better quality when we had to pay for them. The free OS updates seem like a disservice to the quality of the operating system. Apple has a lot of quality issues in their desktop systems. I think iOS has pulled them away from their core. And I have been a major Apple fanboy. I bet on the company in 1996 when Steve Jobs came back by purchasing stock that I still own and that has grown tremendously. I want them to succeed. Being honest and stating what is wrong is not hating on Apple. It’s pointing out where a company we love and have supported has gone way off track.
Stuff has been broken in much of Apple for years. Spotlight for example is a terrible search engine. The caching is all messed up and messes up things like Outlook which rely on Spotlight. I can search for emails in Outlook that I received 2 days ago and search doesn’t find them. Spotlight used to be great but it broke somewhere along the way. Or in Preview, I have the option set to always open files in new windows. Yet, Preview gets to a point where it starts opening new files in new tabs. It’s absolutely annoying,
The fact that Catalina is restricting 32 bit apps is quite depressing. There’s a lot of old apps out there that are quite good (ZTerm for one) that are 32 bit only and you can’t run them any more. Microsoft has done a very nice job keeping 32 bit compatibility in its 64 bit OS. I’m not sure why Apple can’t manage that.
And now, we are going to a whole new silicon so it will be like the old days where your PowerPC apps will no longer run on your Intel machine. Now your Intel apps won’t run on your ARM based Mac.
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I believe more of a collateral damage of the iPhone coming (that clash with the free OS).
Read in the last Apple’s finantial results the numbers for iPhone and compare them with the Macintosh.
The former sales are astoundishing, the later are poor.
Conclusion: they spent far more time with one OS than with the second.
The explanation is clear: the OS quality follows the quantity of hardware sold for each OS.
Nota: I never used the Migration Assistant. I always followed the other path: backup my data, format (low level) my HD, clean install a new macOS version.
But in the later years, I was more and more reluctant to do that until I stay with El Capitan and never upgrade again (even if I installed High Sierra in an external HD, for testings).
So: is today OS less quality than old ones ? Probably.
Is today OS more complex than old ones ? Of course. Do that have an influence on the OS quality ?
Probably: it ask for far more time to develop for the same quantity of hardware. 
Since 2015 Apple products and their operating system are not satisfied
The time spent on development is not worth the price they want for this product
For example, MacBook 15 Pro - since 2015 it’s just horror and marketing.
Only one thing for now - the materials are of good quality compared to the others, but the price is great)
In 2019, Apple sold 185 Million iPhones.IMacs sold less than 50 million. The writing is on the wall. If Apple can find a way to consolidate as much as it can between its leading platform iOS and the Mac, it makes good business sense.
Catalina is probably just an interim system pending a true hybrid, such as Big Sur, which runs iOS on a Mac natively. With Apple Silicon, the same chip or very similar will run Mac and iOS devices.
As a developer, I must make sure my apps run on the latest system. If it means Catalina, fine. If it soon means Big Sur, fine. When Apple Silicon machines will come, I will pull my credit card.
I cannot risk issuing apps that no longer run on the system that users have adopted. If anything, iOS has accustomed users to adopt immediately any new system. It only makes sense they do just the same on Mac.
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