Rotten Apples by Cristie Guevara

Yesterday, I bit the bullet and upgraded my Macs to Catalina. Perhaps I did this a little too early. Here are my problems and observations so far:

  1. Hazel has issues. I knew this before I upgraded, but I decided to live with it. I use Hazel to file PDFs automatically scanned from my iPhone. I can wait for them to be filed later.
  2. VGA monitors do not work even with Apple VGA dongles. I cannot get anything to display on a VGA monitor as a secondary monitor or as a primary monitor. My Mac mini uses a VGA monitor as its primary monitor... grrrr, thanks Apple. I cannot get a VGA monitor to work as a secondary monitor on a MacBook Pro either. I had to reboot the Mac mini into safe mode to get it to use an HDMI monitor.
  3. Screen Sharing doesn't work. I've turned it on. Cannot get it to work.
  4. XCode Developer tools do not upgrade nicely. For example, you might get errors like this:

% git status

xcrun: error: invalid active developer path (/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools), missing xcrun at: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/xcrun

The fix is to run:

xcode-select --install

5. Bash is deprecated. Not that this is a massive issue, just one for awareness. You will need to run

chsh -s /bin/zsh

to be future proof. Actually I use tcsh in terminal, just because I've historically used it as an interactive shell. Still it is better to use the official shell for running scripts and so own.

6. Bye bye 32-bit. There was fair warning on this. For me, this means kissing goodbye to Scrivener 2. There may well be key applications that you need to check before upgrading. Look for 32-bit applications in the System Report.

No doubt there will be more. Actually yes - added 17/10:

7. They broke cron out of the box. Although apparently they broke it in Mojave. You need to allow cron to have full filesystem access. I'm probably in the minority, but I still use cron for a few scheduled jobs.

They have, however, fixed the ability to add a Gmail account - this has been broken for about a month on the previous release of Mac OS X, probably by the update of Safari.

The picture is by Cristie Guevara and was obtained from here.