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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

I have heard enough horror stories about stability and security prompts that it’s the first macOS release I’ll probably skip. Can’t afford to lose a day or more of productivity to fiddling with my OS.

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You do you, but the relentless flow of horror stories didn't stop me from upgrading and it was flawless for me. I'd recommend reading these critical pieces and seeing whether any of it actually applies to you.

Very difficult to know if it is going to apply to one's own system.

With updates apparently sometimes crashing after being only partially applied, even the most diligent research into application-specific "will I be able to run XYZ after upgrading" might not be able to save you from having to reinstall from scratch.

This is the kind of low-quality handling of software updates that I never imagined coming from Apple.

I upgraded when it came out, had no issues, and only a few prompts. Because the machine was entirely new to me anyway (inherited MBP2016), I couldn't imagine having anything to lose. But on my older machine? Still have not upgraded. Don't see a reason to, until they've ensured higher quality.

But your actual experience is that it worked fine, right?

I have the idea that there's currently an atmosphere where it's fashionable to repeat other people's bad experiences. Regardless of one's own experience.

Nah, it's pretty bad.

The security prompts apply for everyone who has and uses more than a few applications. There is no scope for individual differences there except for the number of prompts.

That's perhaps the difference between me and others. I like getting prompted if software attempts to read my Documents folder. I've got about a dozen packages installed via brew cask, plus a handful from the Mac App Store. The first day, most of them prompted me once or twice, but that was about the extent of it.

It's basically like the prompts you get on iOS. I don't have a problem with these either.

The main thing I get concerned about is homebrew packages. Because that's where all my dev work happens (everything else is browser based).

So there really is no way to know what packages are supported. Unless homebrew has a way to check..... I've never checked to see if it has a "compatibility check for catalina" mode

I'm a commandline person and often prefer to use something from Homebrew instead of the graphical equivalent. I've got a dozen or so packages (besides whatever is installed via brew cask) and it's going well for me. If you reply with the output of "brew list", I have no problem with installing and testing packages you require.

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