Catalina

Hello! I recently upgraded my Mid 2012 13" Macbook Pro to Catalina in order to run the new version of Creative Cloud (specifically for Lightroom). It ran great for maybe a week, then it got exponentially sluggish within a few minutes. 98% of the time I am on my Mac, I was getting the spinning beachball. Even merely opening a folder in Finder took a couple minutes.

I tried rebooting, resetting SMC/NVRAM, deleting Launch Agents. Then, I found a mention of Onyx on a thread. I tried running that, which took 12+ hours to verify, rebuild, clean, etc. And after that, I rebooted and my computer worked great again. But low and behold a few days later, same issue: spinning beachball of death. I'm now on my third time running Onyx to get things back in order but this is not sustainable. I have work to do and can't be running a 12+ hour clean every few days.

Does anyone have any suggestions of ways I can mitigate this? Perhaps the fact that this is recurring issue after running Onyx might give some hints? I've read from others on this forum that Creative Cloud and Catalina have had compatibility issues, so I have a sneaking suspicion that CC is the root of the issue. I've prevented CC from launching on start-up, and have disabled syncing on CC, as well as iCloud syncs. But this hasn't seemed to help.

I also read on this forum that someone was having similar issues with Catalina/CC and wrote that "If I have to use Photoshop or Lightroom for some reason, will have to do a quick file cleanup afterwards - like cleaning up after your dog." It's not 100% clear what they mean by this, but perhaps there is a Cache folder that requires cleaning?

I should emphasize that other than this issue, my Mac was working great/very speedy. I recently upgraded to a SSD and 16gb of ram. If I can fix this issue I will likely ride out my 2012 Macbook for another 5+ years.

Thank you so much for your time and assistance.

Mike