Claris switched to agile and now we have a lot of versions / updates available. To many developers I have listened to or even talked to have many opinions. If you run latest Mac hardware the scope is more narrow though ..
What would be your take?
FMS 19.3 and FMP 19.3.1 (both for Mac Intel & M1) are stable and deliver good performance.
In development and operations v 19 proves to be more stable than earlier versions (18 and below).
No experience with Win versions or FMS on Linux I can share, though.
we do not have many installations with 19.3 - therefore it is a bit too fast - and still not much for daily FM work
Note that 19.3.2 has been released today. A new part in the equation.
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Is this with or without Rosetta2 ?
ARM based macs are new on the landscape, but architecture and hardware (intel vs ARM, 32bit vs 64bit, RAM, hard drive, etc) are in my opinion rarely the limiting factors in comparison with software requirements (Operating System).
On that end, having older software can be just as limiting, if not more.
There is also a nuance between what is the supported configuration and configurations that, despite not being supported, can run just fine. I know there were some versions of FileMaker Pro that would run on Mac OS versions that were not supported ones. Backwards compatibility is even greater on Windows.
Stability is the very kind of topic you will get a different answer from every single person you ask. Perhaps defining stability may help. Most article I can find on the topic define it as a subset of performance. That said, I believe that for most metrics, our own design can be more impactful on stability than the platform itself. But if someone wants to go that way, there are some tools that were meant for performance comparison purposes: fm-punisher, FM Bench (a paid product if I am right) and BenchTest (beta 3). (Maybe @HOnza can clarify the distinctions between FM Bench and BenchTest). My understanding is all those tools were meant to compare hardware performances of different builds, but perhaps you can apply some of it to the stability spectrum.
19.3.2 may very well be a stable release, but if I have to be conservative like you mention in the title of this thread, I would not include it in the mix of versions to compare because there would be too little data about it.
actually my motivation behind reaching out here is that one of our members at the South Florida FM meetups told me his vertical market solution running on FMS at some of his clients in Europe bought new servers on M1 Mac minis asked for native support and he rolled it out when FM19.3 was available then regretfully had to roll back due to crashing of FMS.
Another member of our group here reported that with upgrading to FMS19.2 majority of their problems occurring with FMS18 were resolved ..
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It would be interesting to collect what is not working in specific cases.
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