It would seem that the picture which started this thread off is essentially correct.

By coincidence, I read this the other day: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54690458

Well, macOS Big Sur (11.01) to be precise. OS X is no more.

I installed Big Sur yesterday on my ageing Mac mini. The only problem I had was that Thunderbird threw a wobbly. Re-installing it sorted that out. I haven't tested everything, but both LR and PS seem to be working without problem. I have exported a JPEG from LightRoom successfully, although I have read that this is one of the issues with Adobe.

This is what I did with my Mac mini. I bought an external 1TB SSD and installed Catalina (Big Sur as of yesterday) and all my software on it. It's the 2014 model, so I can't upgrade the memory (8GB). The photos are on an external RAID.

The improvement was noticeable, not just for LR and my occasional use of PS, but for everything. It complains about lack of memory from time to time, but I never actually notice a fall off in performance.

I am agonising over the same choice. I currently have a Mac Mini with a Dell monitor, and even with an external SSD as system disk, I suspect it will struggle with Big Sur.

A top spec latest Mac Mini with a 27in LG monitor like the one Apple sells comes out about the same as the top spec iMac.

I watched the presentation, and wondered straight away whether the 16GB of on-chip memory on the M1, which can't be upgraded further, will really outperform an Intel iMac with 64 or 128GB.

Having read the initial reaction from various online pundits, I have reluctantly decided to wait and see rather than rushing in now.

I am using LRc 10.0 on Catalina, and have had no difficulty exporting pics as jpegs. I can't comment on other possible bugs, as I haven't tried to do any of these things (yet).

We will be doing this year. That is the day when I (and the rest of us in England) can legally have a haircut for the first time in months! Not sure about Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland though.

This actually happened to some friends of mine (although he wasn't drunk). In the policeman's defence, the car was a French Renault, built for the British market with RHD. The policeman was obviously a rookie on patrol with his sergeant, who was not amused.

OK, so this off-topic. We all like precision. But don't rely on a spell checker to provide it. By all means use one, but nothing beats re-reading your post carefully before pushing Send. It's amazing how often homophones (sound the same but spelled differently) creep in when you least expect it. Read any newspaper these days. I would have been fired from my former job as a sub-editor (I think the American term is copy editor) if I had let through some of the things you can see there every day.

Spell checkers simply can't---yet at least---work out the correct spelling from the context. If only they would throw up spelling errors the way computer program compilers do. Write even a simple program, and you soon learn that everything has to be _exactly_ right, or you get a rude message from your computer.

Self-isolation induced rant over

Well, I see there are five more pages to read and it's 1.45am here, so I'm not going to bother. Apologies for picking on your reply, Terkat. Whilst I agree with you that English of any flavour has a unique richness bestowed by the multiple meanings (and ginormous vocabulary, much of it stolen from other languages), I have my doubts about non-native speakers getting it just right.

In former lives I have been both a journalist and a Unix systems administrator. The latter often requires googling web pages about technical issues. Over the years, I have become very adept at guessing the native language of the author of said web pages.

There are two things that give you away straight away: the verbal tense you use, and indeed, the one that always flummoxes me when I write in French, the real meaning of prepositions. I can usually guess correctly the nationality xxx native language of any European at least who replies to me in English.

With regard to prepositions I know what "wash", "wash up" and "wash down" mean to me.

But I think that were I to live (note the use of the subjunctive which is not supposed to exist in English) on the other side of the Pond, these three expressions would mean something slightly different.

And, while I'm ranting, there is this issue of the missing words. It has has become quite common in UK English to say that someone has "passed" as a euphemism for "died". Of course, we (the English) are blaming American films (movies) and TV. When I were a lad (not subjunctive, just local dialect), the euphemism was "passed away". So maybe we are just as guilty as anyone else for chopping words out.

After all is said and done, remember that languages change over time, and what was correct 50 years ago is not right now.

And also realise that, no matter what you or I think, English will change and develop, whether we want it to or no.

Rant over. Back into self-isolation.

I read La Peste (The Plague) at school. Camus and existentialism were very much the vogue then, back in the 1960s. Of course, I can't remember much about it now, but I also had to read (to contrast and compare) Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, some bits of which did stick in my memory.

Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart, is definitely up there among the best SF novels of all time, if not the best novels of any genre. It has been continuously in print since its publication in 1949. Heartily recommended.

I live near Holmfirth, where much of "Last of the Summer Wine" was filmed (but I am not a local, I am from the Big City). What amused me most about the series was that your average viewer, who doesn't come from the Holme Valley, thought the characters were eccentric and exaggerated. Even the surnames sound strange, but, believe me, it was so true to life round here---not the plots, the characters and their names. You can walk round Holmfirth (or at least you could before Covid-19) and meet people you could swear had just stepped off the film set.

Actually some of the scenes were filmed oop North, Halifax way, but one of my few claims to fame is that our dustbins (what you put your garbage in for my US readers) were once on the programme.

Disclaimer: I once met Norah Battye in the flesh, and she was as glamorous and vivacious as you would expect from a very professional actress. Nothing like she appears in the programme. Sadly, she was born on the wrong side of the Pennines.

Have you considered keeping a backup in the cloud?

I use Time Machine for local backups, but following a head crash disaster, I have started using BackBlaze to keep data off site. $72.00 a year. Be aware it doesn't back up everything, you need to read the instructions carefully.

Carbonite is actually the market leader, but I have no experience with this.

Sorry I can't help with your Time Machine problem, except to say that since the upgrade to Catalina I have been having occasional problems too, but the reasons seem quite hard to pin down.

Re: No. 9. If those milk churns are full, I don't fancy his chances of getting them on to the float

I have dealt with them in the UK (selling them a D90), and I was happy both with the price and the service.