With Beta 3 all was fine, and my Mac Studio booted in seconds. After typing in the password it would zip almost straight to the desktop and all was working fine. I updated to Beta 4, and now I type in my password, and it takes a good 80 seconds to get to the desktop. The process stops at around 60%, 10 seconds in. Then it sits there for 70 seconds and then gets into the desktop and all is fine. "Obviously" a login item is slowing it all down, and it wasn't before. Things I have tried already; I disabled all the Login Items, including all the Background ones, and the issue is still present. I tried creating a new account on the Mac Studio, but that account had the long boot issue as well. When booting in Safe Mode, the issue is NOT there. It is a slow boot for sure, but it is actually faster than when I boot normally. Hence, I am sure the issue is related to a login item. I disconnected all peripherals, and the long boot is still present. As we don't really have Verbose mode anymore, I can't easily check what is causing the stop/start in the boot sequence... Anyone?

I use a Thunderbolt Bridge setup to direct-connect to my QNAP NAS. Obviously I have a unique IP setup for that connection, which is not conflicting with my Ethernet network. When I updated from 11.2 to 11.3 Beta 3, and now Beta 4, the Thunderbolt Bridge stopped working entirely. Leaving the Network settings, and leaving the Thunderbolt cable plugged into a Thunderbolt port on my Mac Pro, the boot time increases to 4 minutes, and when in macOS, my HomePod stereo pair cannot be used as default sound for macOS anymore. The second I reboot without the Thunderbolt cable to my NAS plugged in, all is fine. My other Thunderbolt devices work just fine, like my Sonnet external PCIe enclosure, my Lacie SSDs, my ATDs, and my Lexar Thunderbolt card reader. Today I setup a completely fresh install of Big Sur 11.2.3 on an external SSD, and my Thunderbolt Bridge worked fine. The second I upgraded this fresh install to 11.3 Beta 4, the Thunderbolt stopped working again. Fishy...

Just when I was setting up Catalina (Beta 19A501i) after an upgrade from Mojave, I mistakenly created a folder at the root on my system drive in Catalina. I populated the folder with some LightRoom libraries, before realising that I should/could not have these at the root of my system drive.I have copied them elsewhere, but now I need to get rid of that folder, and I can't...I tried disabling SIP, but still I can't delete the folder (I have enabled SIP again).What can I do?