I'm just speculating here, but...
It does seem like apple has left dashboard to die a slow death. I think that we started seeing proof of that, when they introduced a dropdown menu for disabling Dashboard in Mountain Lion (I think). Before that it could be done through the terminal. This was like apple admitting that people don't really use it that much, so let's give them the option to disable it.
In one of the more recent versions of osx, they disabled dashboard by default (Yosemite, maybe?). I'm pretty sure that unless by some miracle there's a dramatic change in how much people use dashboard, Apple is absolutely going to kill it off at some point.
At least from the users perspective, it's hard to justify the existence of Dashboard, when we got menubar apps that do essentially the same thing and maybe even a little bit more in some cases.
A possible replacement for that translator widget could be Instant Translate.
List of other possible replacements for widgets.
Calendar:
Weather:
- WeatherBug (Free)
- Forecast Bar (~$6) I could be wrong, but I remember this one having the option to set a notification like say every day at a specific time. When I tried this, I remember setting it to 15:50, 10 minutes before getting off from work. Don't trust me on this though... I can't remember for sure.
Calculator
- You can calculate straight in Spotlight. You can always click the magnifier glass icon on the top right of the screen or use the default shortcut to open Spotlight Cmd+Space
. Just write it right there: (20-10)/2
. Escape key closes spotlight.
Stickie notes
- The native app:
Stickies.app
- There are third party stickie apps, but let's face it, this should be more than enough for most.
- Memo (Free) - I'm only mentioning this, because you can password lock memos, if you want. When you lock a memo, the content becomes hidden. They can also auto lock after a while.
A few honorable mentions for people who like to customize things like there is no tomorrow.
iStatmenu has a clock replacement (native menubar clock can be hidden from System
Preferences). The clock replacement can be customized pretty much how
ever you want. It even has a "fuzzy clock", which shows the time in
words: twenty past nine
. Personally I find that cool, that's why I
mentioned it. Anyways, the clock can be clicked to show a calendar
(much like those other apps).
uBar is a Dock replacement that can also show the time and when you hover over it, it shows a very plain calendar. Pretty much just to keep track of what day it is, I'd say.
Clicking it opens the native Calendar.app.
Übersicht Is very much like some sort of spiritual successor to Dashboard. You can download
widgets that show stuff
like Weather, Time, Calendar, Disk Space... etc. It's basically an
overlay on top of your desktop. You pretty much can't be afraid to
dive into some CSS to use this app, because each newly installed widget seems to require
you to change poisition, font size and colors.
I guess it depends on what you mean by realistic options?
In summary though, the three best options are:
- use a virtual machine (as you've already mentioned)
- use a second boot disk (e.g. an external drive, another partition on your internal drive, etc) that has another version of macOS installed and boot from that as required
- have a second Mac with another version of macOS installed. Depending on the Mac model, with this option you could also use the Mac in Target Disk Mode to boot your primary Mac if/when required.
Which ones of the above are the most realistic will depend on your individual circumstances.
Best Answer
There are currently a couple known methods to recover stickies (or anything else that was on the dashboard).
Stickies from the dashboard have automatically been imported into the Stickies application. Simply open
/Applications/Stickies.app
and they will appear there.All widget save data/preferences are still in the original place. This means that as per https://superuser.com/a/608039, the plist for the dashboard stickies are in
~/Library/Preferences/widget-com.apple.widget.stickies.plist
.The most obvious: before updating to Catalina copy over your stickies to different place such as text edit or the stickies app.
Note: In this file they are stored within html tags that are in HTML Entity form. You can use a converter and then strip tags.