On 25 Feb 2020, at 10:09, Dr Eberhard W Lisse wrote:

Generally speaking my experience over the years is that one should update as soon as new versions or upgrades come around.

IMPORTANT: All of this is anecdotal - just my experience and opinions.

As a counter-opinion, I've found Catalina to be one of the most bug-ridden Mac OS releases since 10.4.3 (Tiger) where I first started my Mac "journey". The early OS X Lion releases were bad too, but by about ".2" these were settling down while Catalina continues to irritate. As a developer, it has been something of a nightmare and I only upgraded because I was essentially forced into it by the iCloud backwards-incompatible data formats Apple foisted upon us in iOS 13 (Notes, Reminders) coupled with a new machine at work which had Catalina preinstalled.

TextMate is generally OK on Catalina these days. I do see problems with files not refreshing when changed on disc. I've had some data loss arise from that - thank heavens everything is in a Git repo! - but can't comment on what part of the software stack is to blame; maybe the same thing would have happened on OS X 10.14. I do also see the weird fails-to-redraw-on-scroll issues with TextMate 2.0.x which others have reported and a few problems with tabs not redrawing or positioning properly, but I'm fairly sure I've seen that kind of thing on pre-Catalina releases too. Apart from the file refresh trouble, I wouldn't say anything too serious has gone wrong. I see the same sort of issues on:

* A 2011 MBP hacked up to Catalina via the DosDude 1 patcher. * A 2014 Retina MBP that was upgraded to Catalina from Mojave. * A 2020 16" Macbook Pro that shipped with Catalina preinstalled.

...so that's a huge spread of hardware age and capability, pretty much ruling out hardware variations and (as much as one can be certain of anything of this nature) confirming the issues as software based. I have seen similar problems with Catalina especially around sleep->wake recognition of attached USB devices like audio adapters, HDMI capability detection failures and numerous redraw bugs with:

* A 2012 Mac Mini (the "last known good" model with Firewire) upgraded to Catalina from Mojave.

...but don't use TextMate on that machine.

There are few patterns to Catalina's problems. It's just random and buggy. External monitors change their left-right order, brightness on the laptop is at full on wake from sleep, colour profiles are forgotten... All in all, it takes away 32-bit support - a huge loss - but gives nothing back in terms of speed or footprint. The iTunes split into Music etc. has literally just meant the bug count has tripled, across Music, Podcasts and TV, and somehow the Music app at launch takes about twice as much RAM to display the same things as iTunes did. Since 10.15.0, Music app features have been *removed* rather than added (it's no longer possible to scrub through a track using trackpad gestures with the pointer hovering over the position bar, and Podcasts/TV didn't support that from the outset anyway). So it does less, but it's somehow more bloated. I'm able to compare the two side by side thanks to https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive.

Apple are still providing full security updates to OS X 10.14, so if you have no other compelling reason to move, my vote is that I recommend you do not upgrade. Catalina gives you nothing of value in return. Perhaps wait for 10.16 to see if the debacle and brand damage of 10.15 and iOS 13 has convinced Apple to review and improve their quality assurance processes.

Thanks for the helpful replies.

I'm going to stay with Mojave for now as I don't not have a compelling need for any of the new "features" in Catalina.