Is El Capitan the best version of Mac OS X ever?

[retta283]

Tiger, Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, and El Capitan were the best versions. Panther, Leopard, Mavericks, Sierra, and Mojave were good too. Out of all of them, I think Snow Leopard and Tiger are still the best, but I think Snow Leopard has some nice features that give it the edge. Unfortunately as time passes they become more and more outdated so it's not realistic for a lot of people to use the older Ones (Indeed there are some still, see PPC Macs board). Mojave is where I am staying.

 

[Tozovac]

I miss how Mavericks looked like an Apple operating system. Anything since from Jony has looked like a Microsoft version of an Apple operating system.

 

[AZhappyjack]

Another vote for Snow Leopard.

But by 10.x.4 all versions are pretty solid.

 

[theorist9]

My favorite was Snow Leopard. After that, High Sierra. What distinguishes them both for me were (1) They were stability releases; and (2) In the releases that followed each of these, Apple degraded its text-rendering, requiring that one upgrade to a much higher-res (and more expensive) monitor before it would look sharp again.

So Snow Leopard was the last release that looked sharp on my 24" 1080 HD monitor (~90-something ppi), making all subsequent releases unusuable (at least for me) until large ~160 dpi external monitors monitors (e.g., 27" 4k) became readily available. For that reason I stuck with Snow Leopard until early 2015, when the Dell 27" 4k came down to ~$500.

And High Sierra is the last release that looks sharp on my 27" 4k monitor, meaning all subsequent releases will be unusuable for me until I upgrade to a 27" 5k or 32" 6k "retina" (220 ppi) monitor—which I can't until I buy a new Mac, since my current one won't drive them.

 

[mmomega]

My favorite is always the next version. My personal laptop and desktop stay in a constant state of beta releases outside the occasional few weeks a year when there is only a public release.
Since back with Windows 95 and I had a teacher that taught our small little electronics class to essentially beta test back then. He would randomly introduce issues, depending on the difficulty, it would be weekly or bi-weekly. Hardware or software.
He was an electronics troubleshooter by trade and profession and it really planted a seed with my from a young age.

Didn't care for Snow Leopard as much as many people do. El Cap is probably higher on the list than most.

 

[christiann]

I find it quit amusing how the opinions differ and by which considerations and experiences those objectively subjective decisions are drawn.
I for my part have had a rough start with Catalina but ever since the last dot (10.15.5) release I'm mostly satisfied. That said I would argue that Mojave has been a pretty solid release, though purely subjective I find High Sierra one of the most stable ones yet, and I even recommend it for machines that are artificially limited to El Capitan. I read a semi-analytic comparison regarding bugs and overall stability a while back which I cannot find right now, arguing how Snow Leopard was far from being the holy grail OS it's now hailed to be, but rather being the comparatively last solid release till Mavericks. As I've been using macOS since release 9 (and I do not refer to Mavericks), I consider myself relatively unbiased regarding any specific release, though I still have some kind of a nostalgic relation to 10.4. This might stem from Tiger being somewhat groundbreaking regarding underlying software technologies including spotlight and double "emulation" in form of running PPC OS9 applications as well as PPC code on Intel machines, but I admittedly really liked the AQUA UI being at it's peak having the blue menubar apple logo, the sleek blue default background, which still is the default background for the display tab under system information today and, of course the brushed steel window theme.

Mojave is better than Catalina though because it still has support for applications that Catalina cut off; its more stable too.

 

[levmc]

My favorite was Snow Leopard. After that, High Sierra. What distinguishes them both for me were (1) They were stability releases; and (2) In the releases that followed each of these, Apple degraded its text-rendering, requiring that one upgrade to a much higher-res (and more expensive) monitor before it would look sharp again.

So Snow Leopard was the last release that looked sharp on my 24" 1080 HD monitor (~90-something ppi), making all subsequent releases unusuable (at least for me) until large ~160 dpi external monitors monitors (e.g., 27" 4k) became readily available. For that reason I stuck with Snow Leopard until early 2015, when the Dell 27" 4k came down to ~$500.

And High Sierra is the last release that looks sharp on my 27" 4k monitor, meaning all subsequent releases will be unusuable for me until I upgrade to a 27" 5k or 32" 6k "retina" (220 ppi) monitor—which I can't until I buy a new Mac, since my current one won't drive them.

How does that happen? Why does an OS suddenly start to look not sharp on a certain monitor?

 

[theorist9]

How does that happen? Why does an OS suddenly start to look not sharp on a certain monitor?

I don't know the specifics of what caused text to look less sharp on 10.7 than on 10.6. But the change between 10.13 and 10.14 is well-documented: Apple stopped using subpixel text rendering. There are many discussions about why they did this -- you can find them by googling.

For an explanation of what subpixel rendering is, see:

GRC | How Sub-Pixel Font Rendering Works

A complete and clear explanation of Microsoft's 'ClearType' Technology -- including a freeware demo application.

www.grc.com

 

[Isamilis]

It depends. El Capitan runs great on HDD on my MacBook5,1. But when it comes to video decoding, Mavericks is a clear winner on the same hardware.

I think the best Mac OS (on their time) are:
1. Snow leopard
2. Mavericks
3. Mojave
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Hi. I have external SSD the hold each El capitan, Sierra, High Sierra and Mojave and I keep Mountain Lion on the internal 1 t Fusion drive. I must say that El Capitan is the fastest booting one. Honestly there's only fractions of seconds that differentiate each OS. I can even testify that Mountain Lion can still make my old 2012 iMac i5 scream for what it means. But overall, Mojave is the fastest. Still I'm not the kind of user that edit videos and stuff like that so I may to be the better judge. For day to day tasks, some photo editing and watching videos, even ML is faste enough for me. I like the UI of ElCap, Sierra and HIS cause they have the dark theme applied to menu bar and dock and leave the rest sunny. For me, dark theme of Mojave is just too hard on the eyes. One thing: I've decide that I would stop upgrading. No Catalina this time.

It’s unusual, that Mojave is more fluid and faster than HS or Sierra (my experience)