For various reasons I have in the past had several different user accounts on my Apple machines. This can sometimes be useful, for tryiing out ideas.
Recently we bought a new iMac, and are to some extent sharing it. This seems to highlight a few problems. Previously I used to set up a few user administrator accounts, and few standard accounts. It didn't matter too much if one of the passwords was lost, as it could be reset from one of the accessible admnistrator accounts. In Catalina this doesn't seem to work.
Well actually it does - but with a real gotcha! Passwords can seemingly be reset by an administrator, but only from within the user account. There is a menu which appears with a cmd-click over the user name in the Users preferences, and if the user only has standard access then an invitation for an administrator to login to make the change appears. This may be deliberate, to prevent administrators changing passwords or other aspects of a user's space without either knowing the user password, or asking the user to give them access to enable a feature. If a user's password is unknown/forgotten, it is not possible to get into the account for the admin user to create a new one.
I think I have analysed this correctly. The consequence is that forgetting any password for any user is likely to cause real problems if there are several users sharing a machine. Looking at other comments on Apple forums suggests that this has caused angst for some users, where an admin user was unable to change a password for another user on the same machine.
Assuming I am correct in this, anyone updating to Catalina from an earlier MacOS version for a machine with multiple users should check all passwords, and record them - and if necessary/possible generate new passwords before doing the update. Otherwise there is a danger of losing access to data, and also creating other problems (storage, possibly) which might be difficult to fix afterwards.
Recently we bought a new iMac, and are to some extent sharing it. This seems to highlight a few problems. Previously I used to set up a few user administrator accounts, and few standard accounts. It didn't matter too much if one of the passwords was lost, as it could be reset from one of the accessible admnistrator accounts. In Catalina this doesn't seem to work.
Well actually it does - but with a real gotcha! Passwords can seemingly be reset by an administrator, but only from within the user account. There is a menu which appears with a cmd-click over the user name in the Users preferences, and if the user only has standard access then an invitation for an administrator to login to make the change appears. This may be deliberate, to prevent administrators changing passwords or other aspects of a user's space without either knowing the user password, or asking the user to give them access to enable a feature. If a user's password is unknown/forgotten, it is not possible to get into the account for the admin user to create a new one.
I think I have analysed this correctly. The consequence is that forgetting any password for any user is likely to cause real problems if there are several users sharing a machine. Looking at other comments on Apple forums suggests that this has caused angst for some users, where an admin user was unable to change a password for another user on the same machine.
Assuming I am correct in this, anyone updating to Catalina from an earlier MacOS version for a machine with multiple users should check all passwords, and record them - and if necessary/possible generate new passwords before doing the update. Otherwise there is a danger of losing access to data, and also creating other problems (storage, possibly) which might be difficult to fix afterwards.