How long should the “Setting Up Your Mac...” step take? My mini has been spinning for more than 2 hrs now.

...I hit post too quickly...if you're at the "Setting Up Your Mac" stage and you can see the Catalina background image, you may want to consider hitting the power button. My experience was that it cleared it up and Catalina is running nicely. I've gone through my apps and everything is humming. I see no latency or sluggishness in any of the apps. So far, it looks like Catalina is going to be a super macOS.

Thanks, forced restart helped. It works now.

Has your problem been solved?

I need help my computer begin setting up for hours. How long it takes I really need cpu asap. How ? I don’t know what to do ?

Mine spun for about 13 hours (I went to bed of course) and then, after my morning coffee, I hit the power button and and powered down...waited 30 seconds and powered back up. Voila...there Catalina sat...a pretty picture.

When I say 13 hours...it had gotten to the "Setting Up Your Mac" stage, and then after a couple of hours at that part, I went to bed. This morning, it was still ""Setting Up Your Mac" and you could see the background image had changed from Mojave to Catalina and the wheel was still spinning, so I assumed that Catalina was there and the install was still working (i.e., not frozen - perhaps trying to sort out all of the junk on my desktop in the setup process).