Finder window popping up ...

I don't see any software that would be an obvious suspect, but I see that some stuff you have seems to have been installed in... 2010.

This suggests that you may have been upgrading the OS in place, year over year, and mac over mac.

It looks like it may be high time for doing a clean install.

Maybe take advantage of the upcoming release of Monterey, and do NOT just upgrade over the existing system yet again.

Instead, make two full backups, then erase, install and migrate only the user accounts.

This will get you a fresh clean system with all your content nicely in place.

Then install the necessary applications from the App Store or the developers' sites.

Let me see if I understand: you are saying that you click, say, the Safari icon in the Dock, and Finder comes to the front?

Obviously that is not normal in Big Sur, just it was not normal in previous versions.

I had never heard about this, and I cannot reproduce it.

Maybe there is some third party system modification that does not work correctly in Big Sur.

Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here. Use the "additional text" button and paste the report into the text box.

Can you please paste directly from Etrecheck:

1) In Etrecheck, click Share Report->Copy Report

2) Here, click the additional text button and Paste.

I don't know what intermediate steps you used, but it messed up the report, all the accented characters were mangled, like as if you first interpreted the unicode characters as something else (windows latin1, probably); for example Télécharger

instead of Télécharger.

I can read French, but this way it is very hard to sift through.

Robert Lesperance wrote:

I recently migrated from Catalina to Big Sur (11.6). Being a long time Mac OS user, I find it's learning curve rather steep and I am not speaking yet about some UI or unsuspected features being unintuitive.

Now this one ... if I click on an app in the dock, why does the Finder window often pop-up in front instead ? It happens in many apps, not always but quite often: Safari, Mail, OmniFocus ...

It looks more like a bug than a feature. Big Sur should be quite stable after all that time. Any idea what is the hidden feature ?

I have not witnessed this issue.

Big Sur is so close to Catalina the User interface is not that different.

You can try a SafeBoot to clear system caches files, to test, reboot as normal to test again.

SafeBoot https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262

To trouble shoot further you can:

Test issue in another user (or guest user) account https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-other-users-on-your-mac-mtusr001/mac

This will tell you if it a universal issue or isolated to your user/admin account. 

Always advised to— Uninstall all third party apps that are Cleaners/Optimizers/VPN/Anti-Virus—

all these are known to cause issue on the macOS.

in all honesty an app named "OmniFocus" just sound like an issue waiting to happen...

It is exactly the same - do you see it correctly in your browser? If you open this page, click the box in your post, does it show the text correctly? Or does it show, for example, this:

Problème: Pas de problème - seulement la vérification

Etrecheck report is produced in UTF-8, like any international text should be, but somewhere in between the text is being loaded in Windows Latin 1 encoding, which messes any non-ASCII characters, like é, è, etc.

But never mind, I will like have a look at it, it is just uncomfortable but we can see past it.

Well, I am sorry to say that you lost a great opportunity

Robert Lesperance wrote:

I just migrated from an iMac 27" late 2013 to a mid 2019 and from Catalina to Big Sur (v11.6) using my full CCC backup and Apple's Migration Assistant. I thought that Apple was figuring all that out for me.

Full erase and starting over is a tedious work that can bring me to other never ending configuration problems. I've always thought that this kind of erase all and start over kind of suggestion was easy to say but quite more complicated to get done. I never did that for any of my Apple computers coming from 1984. But ... never say no.

Well, you would not have had to erase anything when starting off with your new mac.

I dare say you missed an excellent opportunity at that time. Your mac came from factory with a clean system, so you would not need to erase anything.

When you migrated, you should merely have elected to migrate only the user accounts and have unchecked the other stuff (applications, settings, other files).

This would mean that all your personal files, music, photos, mail... would still be transferred perfectly.

And also that some system extension created for, say, Snow Leopard, would not try to load on Big Sur and cause instability, or even crashes.

Furthermore, all the Apple applications are already there, and the others you can quickly install afresh from the App Store or the developers sites.

I too have used macs for a long time (since 1985, to be precise), and I remember how hard it was to do a clean install (I had to install Excel from seven floppies, more than once, and it was not pretty); but not now, and especially not at the very moment you get a new mac.

Your pdf is perfect, and I understand that everything looked correct when you were pasting the report in the additional text box. But if you click on one of the posted boxes above now, does the report look correct? (I don't think it will, I am trying to figure out how to solve this, as it happens for others as well, and makes my task of helping harder).