macOS Big Sur

For most things it was fine. I had some issues installing Erlang via asdf. I wasn’t sure if that was due to running the beta. But when trying to install via Homebrew, there was a warning about Big Sur not being supported and that I would have build failures.

That being said Erlang and Elixir seem to run just fine :man_shrugging:

It’s not my main dev machine. I could have avoided issues due to not using it as heavily.

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I’ve always preferred to do a clean install, less cruft and the system is usually faster. I will also probably use an external SSD to try Big Sur first, if I’m satisfied I will install it on the internal SSD. Using an external SSD to test a new release is straightforward with macOS.

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Screwing up my dev env would be a pain, especially this time of year when I have a lot on. Glad yours is working ok but I might hold off till the new year :blush:

I’ve never thought of doing that! I have a few external SSDs so might try that, haha - thanks for the idea Paul!

For major versions what I usually do is backup (to be on the safe side) > upgrade - and if everything is working fine for a few days I then do a clean install as per my notes here.

How does your clean install method differ to mine Paul? Presumably after a clean install you dont’t do a migration afterwards, but copy everything over and reinstall programs etc? (Here’s how I do mine: How to do a clean macOS install – without Migration Assistant!)

I just updated. I see no performance increase/decrease… everything feels pretty much the same.

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Exactly, this also gives me the opportunity to select which programs I really need.

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That’s good to know Mikhail! :smiley:

Do you use SMTP/POP email? If so what is your strategy to get that copied over? Also how do you manage with keychains/passwords without using iCloud? Apple have made it stupidly difficult to copy these over without handing them over to their servers first!!


This is a good comparison:

See, what did I said in the thread you linked :wink:

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After watching this… :see_no_evil:

I’m loving the design, sounds, and even desktop wallpapers are stunning :heart_eyes: there’s way more changes here than I first thought, and pretty much everything I’ve seen in this video I like. I think I might be upgrading sooner than I thought tbh.

What the heck am I doing :robot: :joy:

Hope I don’t regret it :sweat_smile:

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You are doing as I told you the majority do… they always put Security and Privacy to the curb in exchange for convenience and other things, that I don’t want to go into here.

Just read this tweet:

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Well I am going to go back to Catalina! They’ve messed up font smoothing/anti-aliasing - the system font is too thin now and looks washed out. The UI feels slow on things like going in to Mission Control too and while both of these things have happened in previous releases and they’ve fixed it, along with the security concerns I think I’ll just wait until they sort it all out.

I might do a fresh install of Big Sur first, just to check - but otherwise might just wait until a few releases further down the line. Only thing is I noticed there was a Catalina update waiting as well as the Big Sur update, so my backup will be for the Catalina version prior to the latest one - which might mess the migration up. I’ll be annoyed if it does!!

Don’t kill me… but I have just reformatted my machine and put Big Sur on it… and I think I’m gonna keep it - it just looks so good :see_no_evil: The clean install seems to have sorted the slight performance issue I had as well.

I would have kept trustd active on Catalina anyway because blocking it impacted things like slowing requests to rubular.com. I do however intend to file a bug report, and possibly make a SARS request to Apple, asking what info they hold and collect about me - I’m sure plenty of security researchers have done this already tho? Wonder what they found?

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I am not a murder :wink:

This only confirms what I told you several times.

Reputable brands can do whatever they want, that in the end they will always get away with it.

If it was not a reputable brand, they would be crucified and have a huge negative financial impact, but once they have the status they have, people will always forgive and ignore whatever risks they present or flaws they may have. As I said to you, in more then 3 decades as a salesman I have seen this happening in cars, computers, mobile, etc.

And you are a living proof of that…

I don’t think this is true at all Paulo, at least not in the case of Apple. Putting aside the fact that I think they do actually care about customer perception, they actually have to - because a poor brand image would harm them a lot more than it would harm a company that isn’t selling premium products and where ‘privacy and security’ aren’t touted as part of the reason that makes them special and worth the extra price.

All this recent pressure has made an impact - they released a statement and will be making the following changes:

  • A new encrypted protocol for Developer ID certificate revocation checks
  • Strong protections against server failure
  • A new preference for users to opt out of these security protections

So a win for us all, well, at least us Mac users :joy:

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After two days of using Big Sur it feels a bit slower than Catalina, hopefully the situation will improve with the next update.

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Mine felt like that after I did the upgrade, but after doing a clean install it feels much faster :nerd_face: (more than Catalina did too - which was beginning to feel quite slow, hence wanting to upgrade sooner than I usually would).

I have to say, I love it :heart_eyes:

While there are a few areas that need tweaking, it feels really polished - quite a lot nice than Catalina. In fact I think Catalina has been one of the most uninspiring updates in the series, Big Sur feels like they care about macOS again.

I’ve also reset my Feedback Assistant password and have been reporting a few small bugs to them. They are usually really good and I think to date, they have fixed every bug I have ever submitted - and I have submitted quite a few over the years.

The only thing you might need to do is calibrate your display as the colour profiles they shipped seem a little off (things might appear a little washed out). Not sure why but this seems to happen every few years, and again it’s something they seem to sort out.

Overal tho, I really like it!

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Any issues with your development environment – aside from the Docker issue with I gather is specific to the new chips and not to Big Sur?

How about Little Snitch? I understand you have to upgrade to Little Snitch 5 for Big Sur; did you upgrade with Little Snitch 4 still installed and if so, did it do anything weird or just fail gracefully?

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So far I’ve been unable to install Erlang via asdf, but it looks like they just need to add 11.0.1 to the versions list…

I did have a seg fault with sassc-2.4.0/lib/sassc/engine.rb:43: [BUG] Segmentation fault at 0x0000000000000000 in Rails but uncommenting the below from the config worked:

    Rails.application.config.assets.configure do |env|
      env.export_concurrent = false
    end

Other than that my junk folder seems to not be getting any junk! If I change the setting to ‘mark as junk mail but leave in my inbox’ it shows, but as soon as I hit ‘move to junk’ it disappears and is not in the junk folder or anywhere else. I’m going to post this as a bug. I use SMTP/POP mail tho. @iPaul is the junk mail folder working as expected for you?

Soon as Big Sur was on Little Snitch alerted me to an update, I just went ahead and bought it - €25 I think. Installed and all seemed fine - tho I am on a clean install now so all my programs are freshly installed.

Overall, everything is what I would expect - if anything changes I’ll post an update :smiley:

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I don’t use the Mail program, I use Thunderbird for which I didn’t noticed any change.

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I upgraded on the day it came out. I’m on a new MacBook Pro. It feels the same to me. So far so good in respect to user experience. Nice little touch-ups.

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