Mac OS Upgrade Problems

Many years ago when my my Mac Pro 1.1 became obsolete I bought a new one, the black cilinder that was considered by many as a step back because of the limited upgrade possibilities, especially compared to the previous tower version. Looking at the latest version of the Mac Pro I guess Apple agreed even though they never said so publicly. I never had real issues with the limited upgrade options. In the end I only had to expand the RAM which was no problem and then at some point needed a bigger internal SSD. That was a bit more difficult as the Apple ones were very expensive and even if I wanted to pay the price my dealer told me I had to bring my Mac to the store and leave it there for them to swap the internal SSD. That was a bit excessive so I ended up opting for an SSD from Other World Computing. This worked like a charm but last week I ran into an expected problem when I wanted to upgrade from Catalina to Monterey. This was not possible because I have an outdated firmware in the BiOS and my cannot upgrade to a newer BiOS because of a non Apple SSD. The solution is to put the original SSD back in and upgrade to Monterey. This will also upgrade the firmware and then put the OWC SSD back in and upgrade to Monterey. A lot of effort to overcome a hurdle placed there on purpose by Apple if you ask me. After the failed upgrade to Monterey I read that upgrading to Big Sur should still work so I tried that but this failed half way and after a second try I finally managed to get my Mac OS upgraded to Big Sur. Unfortunately not everything went well and I lost some settings. I then figured I could push my users and their settings from another Mac using migration assistant and this kind of worked but again only in 2 passes. Thinking alll was fine I discovered some issues with folder access which after a while turned out to be some mess up of usernames being linked to the wrong home folders. After fixing ownership it seems to be OK now but it was a lot more effort than I am expecting from Mac OS. The one positive thing is that nothing got lost. Having spent already this amount of time I decided that during the Xmas holidays I will go through the pain of upgrading to Monterey by swapping SSDs twice. I will make a backup first and then do a clean install of Monterey to get rid of all the old unnecessary folders and files from the past as well. After 15 years of OS upgrades it is time to clean up once. It almost feels like Windows ‘light’.