Following Leo’s advice, as one should, I will not install Big Sur until the second update is released. However, today my System Preferences icon has a red circle notifying me that Big Sur is available. Does anyone have any idea how to get rid of this? I searched the web but the instructions are for the Catalina update and involve deleting plists which my have unintended consequences.
I haven’t found a way to do it. Software Update still keeps any Catalina updates separate (there was a Safari one this morning) so no biggie for me. Make sure ‘Install macOS updates’ is turned off under Advanced though.
I fixed this for Catalina but don’t recall how. I don’t think it’s necessary to uncheck Install macOS updates: the operating system doesn’t update automatically although apps do.
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Good god all the drama yesterday with the upgrade 
As if it was the first in the history of mankind.
I just ignored it. There will be plenty of time in the future.
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Does this apply with slight modification?
one wonders if you replaced Catalina with Big Sur if it would work…
Unfortunately it didn’t work. The command runs (substituting Big Sur) but the red notification circle is still there.
There are further instructions in the article about how to remove the red circle.
Typical, I didn’t read to the end! Thank you, that worked. It’ll be interesting to see if it returns after a reboot.
It is a good idea to ignore it for now but it might be a good idea to install it after a while though. I am reading that some people have performance improvements after upgrading.
So I hope Big Sur is a real upgrade over Catalina.
(1) Red dot reappears after reboot so will have to run terminal commands:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs 0
killall Dock
each time.
(2) No plan to upgrade until second release.
I wrote a simple Automator app to run the terminal commands so removing the dot is essentially a single click.
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