Chosen Solution
So I recently updated my laptop to the newest version of Catalina, 10.15.7 update 2. everything was working fine until I went to open an app. It wouldn’t actually open and when I tried to ‘quit’ it, it wouldn’t quit. It was basically stuck and invisible. So I opened “applications” in finder to go and delete the app but none of the apps showed up after waiting for about a minute. I shut down the computer with plans on restarting it, but when I put my password in, the screen froze on my account picture and name. It’s been like this for about 20 minutes. I tried resetting the NVRAM but nothing changed. What can I do?
It sounds like the file system may have been damaged during the OS update. Do you have a recent backup of your data that you can restore from? If not, you will likely need to reinstall the OS through Internet Recovery Mode (hold Option+Command+R during startup). Alternatively you could try booting into Safe Mode (a reduced version of the OS) by holding the Shift key during startup. Booting into Safe Mode can sometimes resolve file system issues.
