Brent's World Forums

The public BETA for Apples latest OS v 10.15 Catalina should be released next month!

I am itching to get my hands on it, to test out in a VM. Below is the supported hardware list.

2015 MacBook and later
2012 iMac and later
2012 MacBook Air and later
2017 iMac Pro and later
2012 MacBook Pro and later
2013 Mac Pro and later
2012 Mac mini and later

I am looking forward to the Sidecar feature, which will let me use my iPad as an external monitor when I am on the road. I already have a third party App that provides this functionality and it is very very useful.

It will be interesting to see how the new Music, and TV app work. Though iTunes has had some facelifts over the years, I am looking forward to the new Apps.

32 Bit apps will not function in Catalina, so if you have old apps that the developers have not updated, you will need to run them in an older version of the OS in a VM.

Dashboard will also be discontinued, which I am sad to see it go. I use it all the time to do currency calculations and check the weather. A lot of people dis on DASHBAORD, and Apple doesn't even have it enabled by default, but it is something I use frequently.

What are your thoughts? What new features are you eagerly awaiting?

As mentioned in the post, one of the key new features of OS X 10.15 will be called Sidecar, and allow you to use your iPad / iPad Pro as an external display. I currently use a 3rd party utility to provide that functionality, and it is very useful for blogging on the road.


The pro version of Duet also allows you to use the iPad/iPad Pro with pencil as a graphics tablet. I wonder if Sidecar will also provide that functionality.

I finally have 10.15 installed on a USB drive.

I could not get it to install on a VM, and really did not want to go through the hassle of the posted work around.

I did run into the issue of the network connection dropping, the only workaround was to move the mouse every minute or so.

Also, be sure to give yourself plenty of time to install this.

It took me almost all night to install on my USB 3.0 thumb drive.

Plugging along with the public BETA, and while it is a bit slow on the USB drive, it is useable. So far here are the apps that I have tested (2, Ha!)

CGTerm 1.8 (Yes I am a die hard Commodore User, and connecting to 8-Bit Commodore BBSs are that important to me!). (Works!)
Office 2019 (Works, and seems to be pretty snappy!), though I had an issue with the installer running the post install scripts forever (Had to quit out of the install app in Activity Monitor), but still seemed to install okay. Auto update worked after launch, and I am now on the most current version of all apps.

I will be testing more apps in the coming weeks, and will hopefully be able to go through my entire blog workflow in a couple of weeks!

One thing I noticed though, that I am not sure I am going to like. Security seems to be much more invasive and has popped up alerts when office has loaded it's UI and Auto Update for the first time (Think of how intrusive Windows UAC was in Vista!). So I hope there will be a way to dial this back, or turn it off.

The beta testing continues, I am hoping a fix from VMWare will come soon so I can start running this off a VM, instead of a USB stick too.