Hold the Big Sur, and Unexpected Big Sur
Deployed a new MacBook Air at work and asked my client to stay On 10.15.7 until 11.1 is released. I was hoping to avoid not-yet-known compatibility risks. I had only used a test machine for 90 minutes at work by that point.
Another client wanting to stay on top of security updates demonstrated the thing I feared. Printing to a Canon workgroup printer from Big Sur did not work well. Canon’s American web site did not have macOS 15 drivers, which was not shocking. Big Sur did not want packages built for earlier versions of the OS, which was not helpful and quickly closed an avenue of inquiry.
Strangely, yet fortunately, Google lead me to Canon’s Singapore Web presence. Their support pages recognized Big Sur and provided working drivers. This was very unexpected but very helpful. I was really glad because suggesting the black-and-white-only Generic PCL drivers as a work-around would not have worked well for me in that specific case.
My company has a tiny number of Macs. Given our embrace of the Office365 stack, I can’t imagine there will be too many difficulties. I did not run the Big Sur beta on work equipment because in the past that prevented me from accessing my Parallels VM. Last night I was able to update my work MacBook Pro and 24-hours later I have no regrets
