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Is Catalina or Monterey worse in terms of bugs and refinement?

  • Catalina

  • Monterey


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mactinkerlover

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 20, 2020
174
113
Okay, so here we go. We know back in the day, catalina was absoloutely a disaster. It was filled with bugs, and obviously made people pissed that it cut 32 bit support. But it seems like monterey has been pretty bad as well. So here's the question. Do y'all think Monterey or Catalina was worse? Also, feel free to comment what you think the worst release of mac os in terms of bugs in the last 10 years was.
 
Can't vote because i don't remember well how Catalina was in the beginning, but Monterey is not a very good release.
 
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I have only used Monterey on my M1 Mac Studio so I don't whether my problems are OS-related or hardware-related. But my experience of using this combination, and trying to get it to 'mate' reliably to the devices in my home studio, has been the singular most frustrating experience I have ever had since kissing goodbye to Windows in 2011. I should have given it a couple more years for everything to settle down.
 
Catalina and kernel panics



 
Since I upgraded from a MacBook Air running High Sierra to an M1 iMac running Big Sur, I missed the Catalina experience (and so I haven’t voted). But that said, I found Monterey to be stable and reliable, and am concerned people are giving it a bad rap.
 
Since I upgraded from a MacBook Air running High Sierra to an M1 iMac running Big Sur, I missed the Catalina experience (and so I haven’t voted). But that said, I found Monterey to be stable and reliable, and am concerned people are giving it a bad rap.
Monterey is being looked at from compatibility issues with external devices like displays being driven by USB, HDMI, TB not turning on, so memory issues earlier with web pages hogging memory. Most of this is gone. Comparably Catalina was the most kernel memory issues I seen in a long time. They resolved it on the tail end of Catalina updates, but it had my intel iMac thinking I had hardware issues. As it stands Monterey for M1 family is where the future is taking us. 12.4RC is running very well on 2 Macs.
 
Catalina introduced a lot of bugs, such as GPU driver bugs that still haven't been completely resolved for some Macs. It also got rid of 32-bit apps. Monterey is an incremental improvement over Catalina and Big Sur.
 
Catalina was proably the most troublesome version of macOS that I’ve experienced. Big Sur and Monterey have been flawless in my use, despite the vocal complaints by some.
 
I found 10.15.1-4 to be an insect factory, after .5 it worked fine. I ran it on a Dell Optiplex and a 2020 i5 Air at the end and it was fine. I thought Big Sur was better in every way. Other than my watch not unlocking my Macs after 12.4 its been fine. Catalina for me was WAY worse comparably speaking.
 
I went from High Sierra straight to Monterey. I don't know about Catalina, but Monterey is bloated as f*** and the buggiest macOS I've ever used. If the M1+ Macs (they're great machines, IMO) would work with Linux, I would switch right away and never come back.
 
Running Monterey on a 2017 27” 5k iMac, 64 gigs. No problems to report except VideoBox Pro doesn’t run on it.
 
I want to chime in, but I really had no bad experience with Catalina and I have YET to try Monterey (still on Big Sur)

I haven't experienced anything annoying in Mac OS for years and years. It is probably just me and the software I use. I might be just lucky.
 
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I want to chime in, but I really had no bad experience with Catalina and I have YET to try Monterey (still on Big Sur)

I haven't experienced anything annoying in Mac OS for years and years. It is probably just me and the software I use. I might be just lucky.
I don't think you are lucky. I think those of us that don't experience issues with macOS, regardless of the version are probably the majority.
 
Catalina have been running super flawless on all my machines for a very long time (can't remember it ever running badly, but I wasn't quick to switch into it either)... giving up 32 bit applications was time ... and I switched to cloud gaming as well instead of the little Mac gaming I was doing.

Think Catalina has my favourite UI design of all the versions macOS so far.

Both BigSur and Monterey is the opposite.
Monterey seems stable enough.
But everything is so ugly and feels like a consumer os instead of a professional.
Hate that it's not special to the device but basically iPad os running on the Mac.
Hate it!
 
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