Downgraded to Mojave, best thing I ever did!

So I have been a Windows user all my life (more than 20 years), I finally got fed up of Microsoft's bugs, updates, telemetry, etc. and decided enough was enough. I have no more time to keep formatting daily and wasting my precious time, it's time for a change.


I went ahead and sold my Alienware Area-51m and bought the latest MacBook Pro 15 2019 model fully specced out with the i9-9980HK and Vega 20 Pro.


As I was awaiting for my laptop to arrive and reading MacRumor forums seeing how many problems people are experiencing from upgrading, I decided to clean install Catalina the moment I received the laptop, didn't even see what Mojave feels like so my first experience with macOS was with Catalina.


I installed it just fine, logged in with my iCloud, everything was syncing properly from my iPhone including Mail, Notes, Photos, etc. thanks to the supplemental update which fixed those syncing bugs.


I installed all the apps that I purchased but then I realized, when I reboot, sometimes the loading bar would reach 70% then the screen would go black so I had to force shut down maybe 3 or 5 times until I would finally boot.


I formatted my laptop more than 5 times trying to figure out maybe what app that I am installing perhaps is causing this but no luck.


I contacted Apple Support and they made me reset my NVRAM and a few more things to no avail. They said I need to bring it in to the Apple Store but the appointment was only after 1 week.


I was frustrated as I spent an arm and a leg on this laptop. I didn't want to believe there was a hardware issue as when I am booted the laptop could run forever with 0 issues it's only the rebooting that was the problem.


Did a lot of research and tried a few things like disabling automatic graphics switching in the power settings, trying to enter my password and hitting enter while at that black screen, nothing worked.


Finally by accident I discovered that if I set the scaling back to default, the issue doesn't happen, it's only when I change the scaling to anything other than default it happens but I was not happy as the default scaling is not so sharp and clear I want a scaling of 1440x900 which looks super sharp and crisp. But I had to live with the crappy default scaling until maybe one day Apple would fix this, I did send them feedback regarding this issue on their site by the way.


Another thing I didn't like was, I didn't feel the laptop as snappy as I anticipated with the specs that I got. I thought that's just how macOS is.


Today, finally, I thought of formatting and downgrading back to Mojave which the laptop originally shipped with, first thing I did was change the DPI scaling to 1440x900 and rebooted and BAAM! It rebooted just fine! Tried a few times, it rebooted just fine every time! I am so happy!


Also, Mojave seems to me way snappier than Catalina, in Catalina I felt there was a bit of a lag in everything I did including minimizing/opening Windows, opening apps, it just felt weird. Now with Mojave everything is much faster.


So glad I did this downgrade and I can finally enjoy my laptop the way I wanted. I am not sure I wanna take the risk of upgrading to Catalina again even when the next update hits. It seems like I am the only one with this issue since I have the Vega 20 Pro others I've asked on the forum who only have the Intel HD Graphics didn't have any boot issues when they changed the DPI scaling.

 

Catalina is a major jump for OSX with the transition to a pure 64-bit environment and much more going on under the hood with some quasi convergence with 64-bit iOS 13 as Apple pushes developers to adhere to some cross compatibility standards for interoperability between OSX and iOS.

This is a major transition time for OSX.

There is no way I'm upgrading any of my machines till at least January at the minimum except for a singular guinea pig Mac.

 

oh I forgot to add, stuff like my ExpressVPN which only worked connecting to 1 location (Armenia) now can connect to all locations, weird.

I dunno man this Mojave seems much more polished and mature. I know Catalina is still new but they've had so many Betas and to not support their own hardware like the issue I was facing above since I have switchable graphics where changing a simple built in setting into the OS could almost brick a machine is beyond me.

 

Every major Macos release had many bugs which took Apple months to fix, I remember that since using my old MacBook (I don't remember model year, it had Nvidia GPU). It's always better to use old OS for as long as you can.

 

Not only that but Catalina is definitely the buggiest release in recent memory (probably because of all the under-the-hood changes). A good rule is to wait for a 10.xx.1 or 10.xx.2 release at least before upgrading. Even Mojave was a bit wonky when it first hit, so I was on High Sierra for a few months.

 

I have a 2013 Macbook Pro with the nVidia GeForce GT 750M. I always run the "More Space" scaling. I've been testing the beta for Catalina since it came out, never experienced this issue. It may be an issue related to the Vega series GPU with your specific model.

Also don't experience it in my Area-51m with my Radeon VII + Intel iGPU enabled at the same time.

I'd say stick to mojave for a few more months. They already released two supplemental updates and next update will be 10.15.1 which adds support for RX 5700 GPUs and may have an updated GPU driver for your Vega 20 as well.

This definitely has been one of their more non-polished releases, I'm still running the GM build upgraded from beta build. Don't feel like reinstalling yet until a fully stable release is out.

I'd look around the internet and try and find someone else with your same config and see if they have the issue as well.