I haven't looked at this thread in years, but I have some free time on my hands now and I better understand custom installers. Are there any particular apps you want me to test? I'm happy to try to bundle up a hacked installer that allows you to install to HFS+ without too much trouble.
I have the following tools available: Carbon Copy Cloner (pretty much every version), Get Backup Pro, about forty iMacs for testing ranging from white ones to a 2019, several external drives (rotational, SSD, USB flash-stick), and lots of spare time.
Ambition: To get Catalina into an HFS+/32bit-enabled state that can then be "brainlessly" re-cloned at leisure. (I.e., without having to throw walls of code at a Recovery Partition's Terminal app to fix lingering issues.)
Additional wish-list items:
1) The user will never have to check for and disable Gatekeeper SIP on a new clone target destination; our procedures will deal with it automagically. So there won't be anymore of this nonsense where I have to sock in an old Yosemite flash-stick in order to run a version of Disk Utility that will actually erase the damned drive if SIP won't easily disable
completely (looking suspisciously in the direction of Open Core Legacy EFI meddling) for some reason.
2) A laundry-list of irritating "features" in this more recent OS will be disabled at-launch. No more MRT, Spotlight Indexing (replacing this garbage with a hand-off to
Find My File or
Tembo would be the cat's meow), or auto-Cloud backups
unless the user specifically enables them later on his own volition. (And we could probably include a tool to vet the LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons folders, as those seem to be common haunts of subscription-model phone-home components that are always slowing down boot-ups and splashing impending-doom alerts across the screen.) A major goal here is at-rest ram usage under 2.5gb, ideally under 2gb.
3) Pursuant to the last sentence of #2, this HFS+/32bit Catalina will be aimed at running well on 2008 to 2011 era "blackback" and "silverback" iMacs with rotational drives, e.g., your parent's desk computer, or the perfectly fine dropped-off machine that your local recycler will scrap if you don't give them ten bucks right now. There are probably over a dozen different models of these, and raiding the El Capitan kext set will probably be required to eliminate weird color and audio issues. (Tip: keep the 32bit games
Peggle Nights and
Angry Birds Seasons on hand, as they'll quickly identify any non-immediately-obvious a/v comparability problems.) Silverback era i3 and i7 machines were infamous for overheating issues, and Apple's own background processes thrashing the drive were largely to blame. The utility
Max Fan Control set to boot-launch is a veritable requirement for operating these machines with a "California" OS (and just launching MFC isn't enough, as its default is "auto", which is woefully insufficient).
Personal anecdote: OpenCoreLegacy's kit-and-caboodle sets up a usable Mojave on machines of this era, but it appears that their library of drivers isn't complete, as on random models various bits of hardware won't run. Either that, or OCL's code makes assumptions based on the iMac X,y model number rather than "poking" existing widgets to determine what they actually are -- and since machines of this era were "open architecture" and loved for that reason -- there's a wide degree of customization and upgrading that went on.
4) Cloning will preserve the user's choice of desktop backgrounds, as well as custom volume and folder icons, both as they display on the desktop as well as appear on the option/alt-key startup list of bootable volumes. Cloning will also preserve the user's System Preferences settings. (This may be the fault of our cloning tools not accounting for SIP; in any event, it's still on the wish-list, and a patched & improved older version of CCC5 would be the ideal tool anyway.)
5) Ideally, our finalized Catalina HFS+/32bit version will run "native" on any intel-chip machine capable of booting Mountain Lion. I.e., it won't require an OCL-style EFI boot-loader. All version-checking will be disabled; if an app doesn't run, it'll be because you launched it and it crashed, not because the OS arbitrarily wagged its finger. (Does there exist a utility which prompts your OS to mimic another version, at least as far as an app's requirements are concerned? Typically such app checks are in the form of 10.x.y queries.)
To answer the second part of your questions, I built this method for exactly the same reason you mention - I needed a copy of Catalina I could just plop onto old Macs using ancient imaging tools!
I consider every Mac (well, iMacs anyway) made from 2012 onward (the "thinside era") to be essentially modern. It is at this point that the architectures of basically all computers became fast enough to eclipse most human attention spans. I.e., you no longer waited for your computer,
it waited for
you. Only tortuously long processes (multi-hour render projects) or ailing rotational-drives (which Apple was happy to assist in the destruction of via APFS, MRT, and Spotlight thrashing) would readily demonstrate subjective differences in speed among identical-in-appearance 2012 and 2020 machines for a typical user. Manufacturers would now have to devise artificial contrivences to "obsolesce" their prior years machines rather than simply relying on manifest differences in capability. E.g., changing the ports every five years, or having an OS check for the presence of a Retina screen or a particular iteration of wireless driver. For example, I have a 3.4 ghz i7 2012 "pro model" with a 1.121tb Fusion drive that is
objectively faster than a 3.0 ghz i5 2019 "base model" spinning a vanilla 1TB platter. --It is pure-from-the-cow BS that the 2019 is rated kosher for Ventura while the 2012 is precluded from running Big Sur. I have a 2009 3.6ghz core2duo that is faster than that 2019.
Anyway....
Getting the most bug-free and most software-encompassing HFS+/32bit MacOS to run on the widest variety of machines is the goal. And the focus should not necessarily be "ancient" machines, but
also the newer ones. Apple will eventually (and more quickly than we think) deprecate Mojave and Catalina entirely, and APFS-mandatory Big Sur will become the minimum "official" OS. If we want to maintain the raw speed advantages of combining HFS+ with a vast library of existing 32bit software on ever newer machines, while eliminating the constant data-harvesting of MRT, Spotlight, and various Cloud auto-backup "features", this is the way to go. (Our HFS+/32bit preservation attempts will at some near point merge with the interests of Hackintosh brethren seeking i9, AMD, and Mx compatibility, and maintaining faux modernity with the most recent OS capable of running the latest subscription bloatware will be the last of our concerns.)
It works fine here.
