macOS Sonoma

[AndrewPH]

A friendly tip based on painful experience: if you're running Ventura on a Mac and thinking of doing the Sonoma upgrade, I'd advise against it.

Spotlight (the desktop search) is completely broken and can't (so far, on Sonoma 14.1.1) be unbroken, and browsers that used to be fine suddenly hang when closing tabs. The new moving screensavers are no great shakes, and the Photos screensaver that almost everyone uses has decided that sometimes it wants to show you a black screen instead of your photos. It's a hot mess, to be frank.

I'm currently downloading the Ventura installer to make a bootable USB and will then downgrade and bring my data back from the synced backups on my office servers.

macOS used to be great (Big Sur was probably the peak), but recent versions are getting less and less innovative and more and more troublesome. I'm looking forward to trying Fedora Asahi Remix Linux on my M1 MacBook when that's a little more ready.

[Gyppy101]

I'm running Sonoma on a brand-new MacBook Pro3 with no trouble whatsoever.  Had to reassign one port to get Decoder Pro to work but that's all.   However, this was  not an update but was a migration from time machine.

[Southerngooner]

I upgraded last week on a Mac24" and have had no problems, but I don't go for bells and whistles stuff so maybe I'm not pushing it as much?

Dave

[AndrewPH]

Search for "macos sonoma spotlight broken" - there are many cases, and no working solution.

Glad for those who are using it without issues, but it certainly has issues.

[Yet_Another]

No problems for me, and I quite like the moving screensaver. I hadn't really heard of spotlight, so not an issue.

[AndrewPH]

Wow - I use Spotlight every few minutes, every single day. Couldn't live without it. It completely transformed my workflow when I switched from Windows about 10 years ago.

But now I've found Raycast which is a good alternative that can completely replace Spotlight, so I'm considering keeping Sonoma installed rather than go through the hassle of rolling back to Ventura. For me, the broken Spotlight was the showstopper - I can live with the screensaver issues.