GETTING PREPARED FOR HIGH SIERRA

Almost everything that works in Sierra will work in High Sierra but note that is ALMOST everything. There are exceptions:
  1. 32 bit applications will not run period, end of discussion! (The High Sierra installer may remove some of them along with other extensions, plug-ins, etc. to an appropriately named folder on the desktop)
  2. Gatekeeper may require you to authorize printer drivers and other kernel extensions (kext) from legacy developers. (I ran into that with the driver for my 6 year old Canon PIXMA ip4500)
    • NOTE: I understand and applaud Apple's drive to keep MacOS as secure as possible which necessarily includes doing as much as possible to protect against vulnerabiities in third party software, but in the case of drivers an inevitable but unintended side effect can be forcing users to newer hardware externals whose drivers are actively supported.
    • It means Apple has to be vigilant about offerings in the App Store to be sure they not only meet standards and are actively supported
    • It behooves users to be vigilant about their software as well. (After a nuke and pave install of High Sierra rather than recovering all the apps from my Time Machine backup, I elected to reinstall them from scratch. As a result I have roughly half as many apps and I have yet to miss one of those I eliminated.
  3. I said almost all, but there are still apps that are being broken, or fixed, with every High Sierra beta update.
    • Many (most?) active developers are working with Apple to make fixes as quickly as possible but...
    • the App Store approval process is stringent and takes time so even though the developer has a "fix" it may take time to get it on the App Store.
    • Some "fixes" will work, but due to the stringent App Store standards such as (particularly?) sandboxing will not be approved for App Store release.
    • Because of sandboxing some App Store releases will have fewer features than the non-App Store version of the same product.
  4. In summary when preparing for High Sierra like all MacOS upgrades…
    • Be sure all of your third party software is up to date
  5. CONSIDER: For the last few years I had fallen into the pattern of simply running the updates and upgrades and I had not performed a clean (a.k.a. nuke and pave) upgrade in years. This time circumstances (ie. getting rid of an unwanted/undeletable user account) forced me into it and to be honest I am glad I was forced into it.
  6. My new upgrade resolution is:
    • Do a Nuke and Pave at least every other upgrade with a re-install of all the apps and drivers.
    • Don't worry about combo updaters, instead simply boot from the Recovery Drive and perform an OS reinstall from there.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein