Big Sur Gotchas

25 Nov 2020

My upgrade to Big Sur has gone reasonably well. I like the new UI a good bit, with some small quibbles (bring back the proxy icon, please), and there’s some nice capabilities that have been added, along with (seemingly) a little bit of speed up juice.

Here, however, are a couple of the random things that broke and how I fixed them.

Proxy Icon Delay

As mentioned above, if you use the proxy icon in places like Finder (or other toolbars), having the proxy icon hidden behind a mouse over and delay.

I don’t get why they did it, and I expect it’ll be an option in an upcoming point release. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is remove the delay.

defaults write -g NSToolbarTitleViewRolloverDelay -float 0

Apple Wallet Not Working

After upgrading, the cards I’ve added to my wallet, that work everywhere else, weren’t working in Big Sur. Going to the Wallet System Preference Pane would give some error that would direct me to a link about System Integrity and using “Full Security”.

All of that was a red herring. Though I did need to boot into Recovery Mode.

Reboot
Hold CMD+R to get into Recovery Mode
Utilities -> Terminal
csrutil clear
Reboot

Somehow, my system integrity was in an “undefined” state. This fixed it.

Apple Watch Not Connecting

I often use my Apple Watch to unlock my Mac (especially since I’m working from home for the foreseeable ever). But, for some dumb reason, it wouldn’t connect.

Eventually, after a bunch of googling, the advice was “re-pair with your phone”. So I did. And that fixed it.

(And now I can unlock 1Password with my Watch, which is pretty nifty.)

iCloud Tabs Not Syncing

This is just seemingly broken across a lot of users. Sadly, I don’t have a fix.

Don’t Upgrade to a .0 Release If You Don’t Need To

This stuff is why people recommend not upgrading to a .0 release unless you need to. Or, you’re a glutton for punishment.

That being said, these are mostly minor things. All-in-all, it’s been a pretty stable, solid release.

TNSFF