Mojave Software Update Issues
During downloading of the update, it appeared that the progress bar had been shifted to the left, relative to the stated time to download the new update. As seen above, with just 7 seconds to go, the progress bar was only just over 80% complete.
Once the download had apparently completed, the progress bar slowly progressed to completion. But the text above it still referred to downloading, and didn’t, for example, change to report that the update was being prepared. Furthermore, there was no estimate of the time to completion, although significant additional time was taken at this stage.
I like having it back in System Preferences instead of the App Store app. But it still has the same old problems, like checking online and then telling you that your OS is up-to-date when it’s obviously not (then, sometimes, refreshing again to show the update a few seconds later).
I also ran into a bunch of problems when my father got a new MacBook Air and it wanted to update macOS during the setup process before proceeding with Migration Assistant. For example, the progress bar showed that it was finished, but the text didn’t say it was done. Seemingly the only thing to do was click a button to move on to the next step, but I later found that it hadn’t actually installed the update—and it had to download it all over again.
The links [in the release notes] are neither clickable nor selectable.
Update (2019-01-25): Thomas Brand:
Just like diskutil the cli softwareupdate command is the answer to getting reliable Mac OS updates in the background; even while running the Setup Assistant.