One of the unannounced developments of Catalina's macOS is the lack of the Dashboard, the Apple operating system's distinctive screen with a sequence of widgets selected by the user. The Dashboard was last updated in 2011 with the launch of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion for 14 years with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (in 2005).
The application introduced the concept of widgets in the Apple operating system and was an emblematic part of it to the extent that it represented the evolution in the design of the Apple desktop system's work environment: characteristic of the Dashboard is the fly note-taking widget (among the most useful) or the "scheumorphic" design of the clock, the bag widget or the Apple desktop system.
Precisely the scheumorphism, or software style based on the use of elements taken from the physical world, laid the foundation for the design of the first versions of iOS, which adopted the style of the desktop operating system from 2007 to 2013, proposing it first on a smartphone, then on a tablet. In reality, for more contemporary and plain graphics, iOS has left the style of the past with iOS 7 alone, which was also implemented in the desktop environment.
Since 2011, the Dashboard has not received feature and style updates, establishing a kind of stylistic inconsistency between the ancient widgets and the new plain UI. Yosemite Apple has disabled it by default with Mac OS X 10.10 enabling users to access it by using a keyboard shortcut (or Mission Control). On the other side, on MacOS Catalina, the Dashboard has been totally eliminated and it does not seem to be activable in any manner.
It probably won't be missed by many customers, as the primary widgets on the Dashboard are now accessible through the Notification Center, where third-party widgets can also be installed. The Dashboard, however, remains an iconic component of Apple's desktop operating system history.