Down From the Mountains, Into the Desert
Dec. 1st, 2018 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIt might have been just possible the thought of upgrading what computers I have that can run macOS Mojave didn't intimidate me as much as it could have the last few times around. Whether this came from not poking into those online sites I suspect may concentrate "change can only upset things now" complaints, I don't know. Still, I can think a few ambiguous thoughts about "fussy command-line tools" and whether things might have wound up honed to comprehensible perfection had they stuck with fitting assembly language into the 64 kilobytes of memory directly accessible by 8-bit microprocessors, and just what sort of applications however many people would be running in that case.
In any case, after waiting for the first "point upgrade" and buying some new external hard drives to preserve old backups as well, I did start off with a test. This involved backing up my MacBook Air to one of those new external drives, restarting from it, the big step of reformatting the internal drive, and starting the installer to let it download data for hours. With the system in place, I went to the further length of "starting from scratch," tracking down and installing just those programs I could think of using right away. After about a week of that, I was ready to move on, but did find myself uncertain. There was at least the thought of clearing out the years of unidentifiable files collected through multiple uses of Migration Assistant in the darkest recesses of my iMac. However, there was also the thought of whether I could copy my mail folders and photo library from the old backup and get the new system to recognize them, something I wasn't trying with my portable. In the end, I ran the installer in place over several hours, and once again it seemed to work.
I was interested in the new options for interface tweaking. Beyond "Dark Mode" (which doesn't apply to every third-party application yet, or even to some of those programs I use the most often) and hopes of third-party "Dynamic Desktops" beyond the two supplied with the system (although I haven't looked too far for them yet), there's an option that calls back to the days of Mac OS 9, namely being able to highlight menus in more than blue and grey. It could be I'm so used to blue highlights that the others will take getting used to, though.
In any case, after waiting for the first "point upgrade" and buying some new external hard drives to preserve old backups as well, I did start off with a test. This involved backing up my MacBook Air to one of those new external drives, restarting from it, the big step of reformatting the internal drive, and starting the installer to let it download data for hours. With the system in place, I went to the further length of "starting from scratch," tracking down and installing just those programs I could think of using right away. After about a week of that, I was ready to move on, but did find myself uncertain. There was at least the thought of clearing out the years of unidentifiable files collected through multiple uses of Migration Assistant in the darkest recesses of my iMac. However, there was also the thought of whether I could copy my mail folders and photo library from the old backup and get the new system to recognize them, something I wasn't trying with my portable. In the end, I ran the installer in place over several hours, and once again it seemed to work.
I was interested in the new options for interface tweaking. Beyond "Dark Mode" (which doesn't apply to every third-party application yet, or even to some of those programs I use the most often) and hopes of third-party "Dynamic Desktops" beyond the two supplied with the system (although I haven't looked too far for them yet), there's an option that calls back to the days of Mac OS 9, namely being able to highlight menus in more than blue and grey. It could be I'm so used to blue highlights that the others will take getting used to, though.