CAUTION: Geek stuff ahead.
Every year, like clockwork a new macOS appears at WWDC. And every year I swear I’m not going to install it until the final version is released to the public. At that point it’s generally assumed that all the big bugs have been worked out—although this isn’t the Apple of fifteen years ago and there are always seem to be glitches now.
Based on everything I’ve read online since last week, the latest iteration macOS, aka Golden Gate—even Developer Beta 1—is incredibly stable right out of the gate.
It purports to address all the complaints that have plagued Tahoe since it was released a year ago, kind of how Snow Leopard concentrated on fixing everything that was wrong with Leopard.
Naturally curious—but cautious since I’ve been burned too many times in the past—to play with a new OS, I created a new container on my Mac and loaded Golden Gate there. Yeah, this route is safest one possible short of installing it on an external drive and lets me play with it without putting any of my data at risk (I backup my entire drive every night to external storage, so even if something gets screwed up I can always wipe and restore everything from the night before). The downside is that this is basically a virgin installation and none of my apps are accessible (although even that seems to be working for the first time with Golden Gate), rendering the whole exercise kind of immaterial for personal real-world testing.
In a fit of madness last night, I threw caution to the wind. I made a full backup of my Tahoe installation, created a new USB Tahoe installer(in case I needed to wipe everything and reinstall that OS and then restore from my backup). And installed Golden Gate on my main drive.
After installing, the machine rebooted and…well, it worked.
I checked all my apps and everything functioned normally. (I know, I just jinxed it by writing that, didn’t I?)
16 hours in, and I’m pleasantly surprised. It’s far more responsive than Tahoe ever was, and for the most part all the graphic glitches and inconsistencies that Tahoe gave us are finally gone. Maybe the change of the head of software development at Apple is actually bringing about real change.
The only thing I worry about is that as the development cycle continues through the summer toward the release of the finished product in September or October is that in the past, each new beta—while squashing bugs in the previous release—often introduced new ones, rendering the whole installation unusable, or at least severely compromised from the previous version.
To that end, I’m going to keep my backup from yesterday intact, but I will also create another backup on a separate external drive of my new install and continue to back that up nightly so if—in case the unthinkable happens and some future beta fucks things up—I can still go back to Tahoe and restore any new material I created under Golden Gate since upgrading.
I’ve also learned to keep copies of the installers for each beta iteration so I can go restore to the most recent unfucked one instead of bailing completely and returning to the previous OS.
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