MacOS 10.15 Catalina & WWDC19 – Updated Index of Need to Know Changes & Links

[ClassicII]

I am collecting all the changes in macOS 10.15 Catalina that are available to the public and putting them all in one place for you. Trust me when I say that you need to read about these changes and how they will affect your deployments. I have included a ton of Apple links along with MacAdmins written articles. I will be constantly updating this article as new info comes in. A big shout out to Robert Hammem, Charles Edge and Rich Trouton for really digging into 10.15's changes.

https://mrmacintosh.com/macos-10-15-catalina-updated-index-of-need-to-know-changes-links/

[scottb]

Thank you for the efforts - all of you. Much appreciated.

[Aaron]

lpadmin: Printer drivers are deprecated and will stop working in a future version of CUPS.

Uuuuuhhhhhhhh...

[MatG]

IPP is the future (I think)

https://www.cups.org/blog/2018-06-06-demystifying-cups-development.html

[lehmanp00]

Yeah, as a K-12 whose users still print a ton, that is disconcerting to read. Although, this might provide the excuse we need to cut done on printing overall!

[Hugonaut]

This is incredibly helpful. Thank you for taking on this task for an all in one spot, huge help! Making my catalina bookmark folder much less crowded.

[Tigerhaven]

@ClassicII tha k you so much for arranging this. it is really beneficial

[CorpIT_eB]

We will get through this together guys!

[ClassicII]

Thanks guys, hopefully the article saves you time! I still can't believe how many changes are in 10.15, I am not even sure where to start! So many how-to articles need to be written. :)

[cwaldrip]

I saw a screenshot showing that the User Template folder is now in Library, not /System/Library/ like it used to be. Which makes sense since /System is totally write protected now.

[kgregg]

Kernel Extensions (Kexts) now require a reboot to load – Installing third party kernel extensions now requires that you restart your Mac before they’re permitted to load.

Oh cool, users love forced reboots.

[scottb]

Look at the bright side (I know, LOL), we now have to so it's not up to us, clients or the "boss"...
Will cure the "we never reboot" crowd I s'pose.

[kevin_v]

I didn't see any mention of Catlina nuking 32bit apps, that buried in there somewhere?

[iRyan23]

@kevin.v

Yes. Per the 10.15 release notes (available on the public site without login):

"Deprecations
macOS frameworks are now thinned for the x86-64 architecture. Apps that execute i386 code now fail with the EBADARCH error code. The remaining stub frameworks are nonfunctional and exist only for compatibility purposes. (51236070)"

[CorpIT_eB]

So question?

With Catalina does this mean that we have to change all our scripts shebangs from

#!/bin/sh

to

#!/bin/zsh

For them to work properly?

I know it's a silly question but I am very new to JAMF and the only sole Admin at my location been working day and nice trying to get something working just right for our current user base and now am beginning to feel that it was all in vain. Will all the scripts written be broken?

[allanp81]

@CorpIT_eB Not at present, all of your bash scripts will still work, it's just the default shell is being changed to zshell. At some point in the future they may remove bash support though, at which point yes, your existing scripts will all have to be updated and tested.

[CorpIT_eB]

@allanp81 thank you, for the reply.

Catalina has me a bit worried about all the hard work I have done here since getting JAMF for the Org.

[sdagley]

@CorpIT_eB As @allanp81 indicates, your existing scripts don't require re-working yet. As with any major update to macOS, you're going to find it necessary to adapt things to Catalina. What you've learned so far will (mostly) still be applicable. And unless you're suddenly blessed with only needing to support one version of macOS that knowledge will be required for at least some part of your installed base.

[CorpIT_eB]

@sdagley Yes, we went JAMF Pro about six months ago, being a 100% Windows System Administrator all my life took on this challenge with 0 Knowledge in #!/bin/sh scripting. Thought I knew my Mac environments and for the last couple of months have been banging my head on my desk. If it wasn't for all of you guys here on JAMF Nation I don't know where I would be.

I finally have a decent, Enrollment processes and because of some poorly made decisions on my end for our mac users have had to physically (manual process) migrate all our machines in our environment from HS to Mojave.

I picked up a book on scripting with bash in hopes I can start to learn but man what a difference this is compared to PowerShell and having to try and understand .plists has been rough.

Now Catalina is dropping and I am like.....GREAAAAAT! lol.

[mm2270]

To @CorpIT_eB (and anyone else concerned) I have already switched my default shell to zsh on my Mac after seeing the news and am running it daily in Terminal. So far I can't say I really see the difference, but of course that's not accounting for some of my mammoth scripts with thousands of lines of code in them. I will at some point start testing those as zsh scripts to see if they fail anywhere. My guess is they may only need some minor reworking. I would not be terribly concerned about. Initially I kind of freaked out at the news, but after diving into the Z Shell a bit, I think most of us will make the switch without too much difficulty.

At least that's my hope :)

[sdagley]

@CorpIT_eB You'll find a lot of script examples on Jamf Nation. If you can arrange it, the Jamf Pro certification courses Jamf offers are well worth it. There's a new site with a collection of links to Mac Admin related resources you might also find useful: Mac Admin Info

[gachowski]

I think every admin that has zero-touch setup and FileVault should be worried!

I think FileVault is going to require user approval to enable. There are some Rich Trouton WWDC notes in the developer forum and this WWDC video @ 29:26.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/303

C

[wmehilos]

@gachowski fdesetup is being deprecated in Catalina, at least the part where you pass it usernames and passwords. I have a feeling it'll only be able to be managed with config profiles going forward.

[gachowski]

@wmehilos

The profile uses fdesetup so I don't think it's deprecated.

Because of the Apple NDA... I am not sure we can talk about the details of the full security changes in Catalina the effect FV and zero-touch.

C

[ClassicII]

Regarding fdesetup and using username/password, it sure seems like this is deprecated and not blocked as @gachowski referred to in https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/303

I would be careful with this as it's still possible for this rule to be enabled during future betas.

I also added 2 great articles by ScriptingOSX's Armin Briegel to the Link List.

One talks about imaging and the other talks about the move to zsh.
http://scriptingosx.com/2019/06/moving-to-zsh/
https://scriptingosx.com/2019/06/imaging-is-still-dead/

[cwaldrip]

For folks worried about moving from bash, as has been stated it’s still available for now. The sh shell isn’t going anywhere either. Take the next year to work on converting your scripts. I’ll be using http://shellcheck.net/ by pasting in my old script, change the shebang to !#/bin/sh or !#/bin/zsh and see what changes it says I need to make. Then test, test, test...

[sdagley]

@cwaldrip Unfortunately shellcheck.net does not currently handle zsh scripts. It's not clear if that's going to change.

[cwaldrip]

@sdagley Wow.... didn't realize that. Yep, totally right. Damn. Guess I'm using sh for my scripts (I have to have shellcheck...)

[FritzsCorner]

@cwaldrip How have I never heard of shellcheck!? Just taking a quick look at it, I can see that this would have saved me HOURS of debugging/troubleshooting my scripts.. :)

[ClassicII]

Thanks for posting that shellcheck link @cwaldrip !

10.15 Beta 2 was released today and includes an unprecedented list of details in the Beta 2 patch notes. I am archiving them each time they are released because the page is overwritten each time a new beta is released.

Check out this list.

17 Deprecations in 10.15 Beta 2
19 New Features in 10.15 Beta 2
57 Resolved issues in 10.15 Beta 2
84 Known Issues - Core OS, Apps, Xcode & SwiftUI

https://mrmacintosh.com/apple-releases-second-beta-of-macos-catalina-10-15-19a487l-beta-2/

[ClassicII]

10.15 Beta 3 just dropped today.

I pulled out all the changes from Beta 2 - Beta 3.

1 New Feature
7 New Known Issues
29 New Resolved issues

https://mrmacintosh.com/macos-catalina-10-15-19a501i-beta-3/

[CorpIT_eB]

@ClassicII Thank You.

[bearzooka]

I just installed beta 5 (19A526h) and Firefox (68.0.1) keeps crashing on me. I've tried reinstalling, deleting preference files, ESR, older versions and so on with no success. I will try to replicate this on more devices, just in case this one has more reasons to cause this behaviour.

[mschroder]

@bearzooka: don't waste any time replicating this, it is a known issue and supposed to be fixed in beta 6, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1570451. Still extremely annoying...

[bearzooka]

Thanks for the heads-up @mschroder

[Heavy_D]

So I have a question we rely heavy on Computer Renaming this script which is python, and we have everything using the bash shebang.

From the looks of it, it looks like I am going to have to redo the whole enrollment processes again from scratch or am I over thinking this and it's just a matter of changing the shebang to the new .zsh I would have to redo all that work, some of those scripts took weeks to create and have work properly.

What can we do to continue using this method shy of redoing the whole script into .zsh this thing has worked amazing since day one.

I have not even started any testing on Catalina whats so ever and I am super behind on this.

[allanp81]

@JarvisUno For now the bash shebang will still work as far as I'm aware, it's just the default shell is changing to zsh.

[Heavy_D]

@allanp81 Well that's a bit of relief I guess but what about Python?

[allanp81]

@JarvisUno This: https://www.macobserver.com/analysis/macos-catalina-deprecates-unix-scripting-languages/ seems to suggest again then that you'll be fine with Catalina but 10.16 will be different. There's nothing to stop you just installing Python during provisioning.

[Heavy_D]

@allanp81 True the problem lies on timing right, install python to then run a python script to name change the computers. I think it might be time to see if anyone has come up with a script similar to the one posted above. As Computer Name change is one of the bigger configuration profiles we have.

Appreciate the help and articles.