summerdaledesigns wrote:
I made the mistake of updating to Catalina. It totally messed up my documents and relocated them all to i cloud and I had bought Microsoft word and it would not reload it to my computer but had to purchase new on a yearly basis.....now they are telling me that any third party legacy extensions will not be compatible in the near future...i.e. Malwarebytes...
Those are not reasons to not move to Catalina. The documents were relocated to iCloud because when the settings were being initialized, you were asked about doing that and said yes. If you say no, then it doesn't move anything to iCloud. You can easily undo this choice and have those documents physically back on your computer. MS-Office 2016 and later do run under Catalina, Office 2011 and earlier does not. The message that comes up about Malwarebytes is indicating that it will need an update for compatibility with a future version of the OS. Malwarebytes knows about that and will be providing that update. None these items should be considered showstoppers. I am using Catalina 10.15 on one laptop and older (10.11, 10.12, 10.14) systems on other Macs, along with printer/scanners that are 5 and 10 years old respectively, and to be honest, they pretty much all feel like the same Mac OS. Catalina has some new options and improvements and some more efficient tools for working in the Finder.
A real issue to pay attention to are 64-bit compatibility, since 32-bit software won't run. This can affect some older software including drivers for very old printers and scanner -- there are usually workarounds for those, but something to know about. And if your boot drive is HFS+ and a mechanical drive, performance may suffer significantly when it is converted to APFS during the Catalina upgrade.
The computers we have running Sierra, High Sierra, and Mojave work really well and are quite stable. I think Catalina is nice but am not rushing to upgrade all of these computers aside from the one already on it.
