Based on my own experiences after doing some cursory testing and poking at it since July, I've been wanting to sit down and write a lengthy rant about how Apple's next operating system, Catalina, was still—even on beta 4—a hot mess. For all the years I've been playing around with these betas, it's never been this bad this close to the supposed release.
I learned my lesson with Yosemite about never installing a beta—no matter how stable it may seem—as your daily driver, and in all the years since I've been installing these betas on an external USB drive.
Because of the lackluster experience I'd been having with Catalina thus far, a few weeks ago I gave up on it, erasing the external SSD and swearing I wasn't going to waste any more time with it until the Gold Master arrived—and maybe not even then.
But in the Forums lately I'd been reading (hey, just because I'm not actively participating at the moment doesn't mean I'm not still interested) about people who'd installed it on a separate partition on their internal drive with great success. So the other day at lunch, curiosity about how to actually do this led me to a video explaining how Apple's file system actually works, and how each hard drive is just an object within the larger APFS container. Furthermore these objects can shrink or grow as necessary within that container so I didn't have to commit to losing a fixed amount of drive space up front. (At least I hope I'm understanding that correctly.) Since I had about 150GB free on my internal SSD I thought I'd experiment a little bit and create another drive just to see how it worked. It worked. Maybe too well for my own good. Totally separate, and yet fully accessible to the main drive. (Like a separate partition, a "D" drive in Windows parlance.) When I was done experimenting, I deleted it with no ill effects.
Yesterday my masochistic tendencies must've kicked in, and since it was slow at work I thought I'd try the installing the beta—now ticked up to release 5—on the main SSD in a different object. And that's what I did. And you know what?For the most part it worked flawlessly.
The problem I ran into was that while most of the applications I use on a daily basis would run just fine, the Brave browser and several "mission-critical" apps (I'm looking at you, Adobe) wouldn't even install. I could copy Brave and its settings (as well as Photoshop and Bridge) directly over from the main drive and they'd run, but you couldn't install them directly because the installers wouldn't load, being blocked by the new software-must-be-signed-by-Apple (SIP on steroids) security features of the OS. Attempting to run Acrobat DC directly from the old drive produced another, different error, telling me it needed to be reinstalled. 1Password wouldn't integrate with Brave, and well…the list went on.
It was an interesting exercise. this latest iteration of Catalina now seems stable and almost ready to take the stage (a marked change from my last experience with it), but the major supporting players are still struggling with their lines.
September's gonna be interesting…