Being the inveterate geek that I am, and attempting to find whatever joy I can in this pre-apocalyptic hellscape wherever I can, whenever a new Mac O/S comes on the scene I immediately jump on the public beta test bandwagon as soon as they're available and give them a spin.
I'm an Apple fan, but not an Apple fanboy (there is a difference), so there's no way I'm paying $99 a year (or whatever the going rate is these days) to be a part of the developer community just to get these releases the moment they become available. I'm satisfied to wait a few days (or in the case of the initial releases) a couple weeks to grab them as a public beta tester.
Several years ago I had a pretty bad experience with one of the betas—admittedly ignoring everyone's advice to not use them as your daily driver—that for a while soured me to the whole experience, but since then I've gotten smarter about trying them out, loading them on external drives so as to leave my main drive untouched.
Tiring of that approach, this year I decided to go a different route. One of the reasons I went with a 1 terabyte drive on my current Mac is so that I can partition part of it off and load the betas on that and have all the speed and accessibility that scenario affords while keeping my main drive fully sequestered.
All that being said, for the couple weeks I've played with Beta 1 and now Beta 2, and in my estimation, they're actually almost ready for prime time—at least for everything I use my Mac for. What's prevented me from throwing caution to the wind and loading the O/S as my daily driver is that there are still glitches—the most notable not being able to unlock the Mac with my watch and Messages not syncing between devices—that prevent me from doing something so foolish. And then there's the fact that some of the much-touted new features (like being able to use your iPhone as your webcam) simply refuse to work for me. In fact, I finally gave up trying to get these things to work and deleted the Ventura partition altogether, returning to using Monterey full time. Unlike my wild and crazy youth, I now prefer reliability over new and shiny. At least most of the time.
UPDATE 10pm: After watching a few more YouTube videos today and realizing all the things I'd missed in Ventura, I decided to give the new O/S one more spin. So this afternoon I created a new Ventura partition, re-enrolled my Mac in the beta program, and went about installing it again. It was only when the install completed and the machine rebooted that I realized that I had screwed up…big time. I had done this at work and had been distracted when I started the install and I never actually specified the Ventura partition, so—you guessed it—I installed it over my existing Monterey installation.
I didn't panic; I had a full Carbon Copy backup from 12 a.m. this morning, so I knew I could always wipe the drive, reinstall Monterey and then restore all my shit from the backup.
But I'm actually not in any great hurry to do that. All the little glitches I just got finished complaining about in the paragraph above had disappeared, and as of this writing, everything is working normally.