Last year I was super excited about Mojave because I was able to speculate, and turned out to be entirely correct, my Mac Pro 3,1 and several other “unsupported” Macs would be compatible with dosdude1 series of patches. This has been great. Not only does Mojave work perfectly on the 3,1, it works nearly perfectly with my new-to-me 2009 MacBook 6,1.
I am considerably less optimistic about dosdude1 or others being able to successfully modify Catalina. Not only has official support been dropped even for the Mac Pro 5,1, but there seems to be a huge emphasis on anti-tampering and sandboxing. The fact that Catalina now runs on its own system volume and Gatekeeper appears more active than it has been even in the past means I might have trouble using some stuff.
Now, that out of the way:
The only feature I so far seem to care anything about is the keeping track of all your Apple devices from within macOS instead of having to go to iCloud. Considering I am currently logged in via Apple ID to like six or seven computers and two iPhones at any given time, this would honestly be quite helpful.
I’ll download the beta at some point (my MBP 11,5 is enrolled in the beta software program), but I’m not clear there is much of a reason for me to care about Catalina at this point, and it is worth asking if any of the new apps or features within them may actually be pushed backwards to Mojave in a future Mojave update.
Starting last year, I really, really started to see the clear divergence between my needs and wants and both the future of macOS (specifically Marzipan) and the future of Apple hardware (though the new Mac Pro definitely seems to account for this concern), and I’m beginning to see my move of Linux + Older Apple hardware as the place to be.
tl;dr lots of Catalina’s features are either updates to features or media based features I don’t use/won’t use. Many of the same features in Mojave are features I don’t use. The feature richness, I suppose you could say, is underutilised by my workflow and I don’t see that changing.
