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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Man I still haven't even left Mojave for Catalina. I don't think I'm gonna be changing OSs until I buy a second or third generation ARM Air that comes with whatever they're calling the 2022 Mac OS.

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I religiously upgraded every machine up until this same release. I never had issues, and my tenure began at Tiger. Everything was smooth sailing – perhaps because I made sure to take a backup before every upgrade which might have protected me from Murphy's law.

I am also sitting still on Mojave. In the past there were usually compelling reasons to upgrade - in terms of quality of life and performance. Catalina, in my use cases, doesn't really do a whole lot for me. I can't think of a single feature that I want aside from perhaps the standalone Podcasts app. But because of all the noise raised during the last upgrade season from Mojave to Catalina I decided that the juice definitely wasn't gonna be worth the squeeze.

So now I have pretty much decided to just cruise this 2018 MBP along on Mojave until I replace the machine entirely. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Problem is it's broken from a security POV. This Big Sur release of course has a bunch of security fixes and it's not clear when/if they'll get backported to previous versions.

Mojave still receives regular updates.

Might just be me, but the Podcasts app was actually pretty slow for me on a 2015 MBP, even though the phone version always worked great. I ended up switching to Spotify for my podcasts. No other benefits to upgrading I can remember. It makes your security settings a pain to deal with for a while after you upgrade. I didn’t have any 32-bit apps I’m missing so I wasn’t affected by that. The one cool thing about it is Sidecar if you have an iPad and Apple Pencil to use as a drawing tablet, but I don’t.

32-bit apps. I have 32-bit apps where the developer is either gone or will not update, thus if I wish to keep using these I have to stay on Mojava. This applies to four Macs which will likely never move away from Mojava.

One of my round tuit projects is to set up a Snow Leopard VM to run PowerPC apps. with Rosetta, and a Mojave VM to run 32-bit Intel apps.

Out of curiosity, what apps are those?

Of the top of my head:

- software for a "smart pen" where the company went out of business

- some label printing software

- some Steam games

- some games from GOG

Even if I don't run these daily, I don't like to be cut off from my past.

Ah. I forgot there are so many games still only built for 32bit. Is there any kind of workaround using qemu?

Not OP, but non-subscription Adobe.

For what it's worth, it's pretty easy to have a separate Mojave partition that you boot to when you need to use one particular app. That's what I do.

We've got a old legacy multiplatform app that supported OS X for years. Looked at updating it for Catalina, was going to be a massive amount of work, since Apple also killed XWindows and updated OpenGL in some breaking way. Decided it wasn't worth spending months on it.

Still get a regular trickle of emails from schools complaining about it. I tell them to call Cupertino.

Catalina didn’t kill XQuartz, nor did Big Sur. It still works fine, though it hasn’t been updated in 4 years.

It also did not break OpenGL, only deprecate it. macOS is still stuck on a many-years-old version of OpenGL, but what worked in the past continues to work. Even Apple Silicon Macs will support it.

64-bits have been around for few years. This means developer did not have sustainable income or is not compatible due to missing API (old Carbon times). Sooner or later you will need to move on. I am also on Mojave but booting to Big Sur to build for M1 with Xcode 12 is pain in a.

Same but instead of Air I’ll get the 13” ARM Pro with sufficient RAM and hopefully more ports.

Mojave on my 13” MBP 2015 is still fantastic. Great OS, great keyboard, USB ports, MagSafe, etc.

Same RAM, same ports.

Yep. Seems like the only difference is GPU cores.

Also better thermal management.

> whatever they're calling the 2022 Mac OS.

My money's on "Sequoia".

Either that or “Alcatraz”

They’ve had almost as many California places as they had big cats, so it might be time for a new theme soon.

The legendary crack marketing team better get on another drug-fueled minibus-driven vision quest!

One of the reasons given for the change to the California theme was that they wouldn’t be running out of names any time soon. So this will keep going for the foreseeable future.

The jailbreak jokes will be great with that one.

> whatever they're calling the 2022 Mac OS.

Next up has got to be "Bigger Sur", then "Biggest Sur" is up after, and then they'll finally be done.

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