Do you think disabling the T2 rubbish you mention is still necessary with the latest version of Catalina? And do you possibly have a link or some other information about it?
More than ever - the security matters seem to ramp up further with each iteration of MacOS (eg: more new stuff with Big Sur) & now that all macs will have T2 chips. In any case, for the moment, configuring that to a more sensible state is straight-forward & remains a permanent setting in the UEFI: Boot into Recovery via Command-R on start-up, set Secure Boot to ‘No Security’ and External Boot to ‘allow booting from external media’.
Another dopey thing with the Mac Pro, with an Apple bluetooth keyboard none of the start-up key commands will work (on this box at least; some claim it works for them, but mostly no) - I need to use a wired keyboard to enter recovery or other diagnostic modes.
My 802 has a USB 2.0 connection, no thunderbolt, and so far I don’t read a lot of promising stuff about using USB on the new Macs…
USB has always been flakey from time to time on MacOS in my experience. However, it hasn’t been that problematic on this one. One common bug reported widely is that the 2 x top-of-chassis USB-C ports lose their brain from time to time, like with the latest 10.15.6 update but usually is nothing an SMC reset won’t fix. I also have 2 x USB hubs hanging off the mac pro’s rear USB3 ports - one is a USB 3 hub, the other USB 2. Both have a truckload of peripherals attached & I can’t say there’s ever been any problems here (NI S61, Presonus fader port, webcam, dongles etc). I would say that high quality, powered hubs are required. The Sabrient 16 port USB3 hub gets great reviews from mac pro studio users; there’s also the excellent CalDigit TS3 Plus that many use for if they need more connections other than USB-only.
Re. my RME UFX+, that ran fine with both USB and TB drivers. But yes, for the MacOS ecosystem I would consider a Thunderbolt unit for the future (TB3 with Apollos for example, and UA are such Apple fanboys, LUNA is wonderful etc etc) … you can see the trend here: the costs will become far more than the (gouging) price of the box.
That is almost the same problem I have with my AsRock Taichi motherboard I use on my Windows PC, that needs a BIOS reset quite often… I hate that.
Can’t say I ever have this problem with my Dell workstation. But yeah, overall the most odd thing to me about MacOS, ie: supposedly designed to be ‘friendly’, but anytime you need to configure the back end, Apple make this almost impossible by being inconsistent and poorly designed. For example the silly amount of different key commands to get into various layers of the ‘BIOS’ (apple speak: UEFI) - and these often may not work either because of the keyboard (as mentioned above), or because of some kind of ‘magic timing’ (before the chime, after the chime ?) ‘Zap the PRAM’ Command-Option-P-R … on and on. Whereas Windows has a simple tap-F2 to access a single list of anything you might need. Otherwise, you may need to bone up on and make a notepad for Unix commands to use Terminal for other tweaks from time to time, like we would in the much easier Windows Command-Prompt. ‘sfc /scannow’ anyone? Not so easy on MacOS.
Other observations:
The constant, constant asking for passwords by Mac OS is ridiculous and annoying. In my case here, there are excellent security layers on a Synology router & mesh wifi stations, as well as on the Telco’s modem, as well as VPN for external, blah, blah. Inside the facility and its firewalls however, there is a very simple workflow required between out laptops, tablets, NAS cloud, media server, phones, workstations etc. We should be easily able to drag and drop, sync, backup etc but Apple just keeps asking for passwords … Much prefer Windows Hello.
Use a backup system other than Time Machine or iCloud (longer story), eg, ChronoSync, Carbon Copy Cloner.
It is a vastly overpriced ecosystem, but yes, when its good its very good … be prepared to have deep pockets. For example - every time there’s a OS rev, so much of the software /drivers etc stops working. Invariably this also means shelling out more $$s for software updates. Recent examples: Pro Tools 2019-6 continues to run just fine on Windows 10 2004, won’t work on Catalina; ditto Waves v9 vs. v11. In every case I’ve had to pay for Mac OS updated software, not so on Windows.