Looking for best practices for upgrading

[notned]

Hello, we have an approximately 2012 Mac Mini running Mavericks. We previously owned a MacBook Pro, I'm thinking 2008. This was my wife's computer and she took every software upgrade. The last one was too far and the computer couldn't handle it.

So now. When we got the Mac Mini, my wife didn't want any upgrades and I didn't care. I blinked and now Mavericks is no longer supported (wouldn't install a program I wanted).

Options that I'm thinking of. 1. Leave it alone (happy wife, happy life) 2. Update to Yosemite hoping that it would let me install my program (mpsyt) 3. Be open to what the nice people on this forum have to say.

Thank You for your time.

 

[ElectronGuru]

El cap is the minimum for many apps I use and would be a good choice for any medium aged ssd upgraded mini

 

[Kamolas]

I don't think you can install Yosemite anymore from the App Store, only High Sierra or Mojave. If you can, upgrade your RAM(easy to do) and an internal SSD (not so easy, you can go external if you want to avoid that trouble)
With an SSD, it should be much faster and with High Sierra or Mojave you should be fine.
I kept Mavericks on mine and created a partition for a clean install of High Sierra. It's still the original HDD and so far I haven't had any issues. I have only upgraded RAM yet and I am planning to upgrade to an SSD next year.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Sierra could be installed, not Yosemite or El Capitan unless you already "Own" them from another computer. But you're going to possibly need other software updates for other 3rd party apps.

 

[Fishrrman]

Use El Cap or Low Sierra.

Get El Cap here:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206886
https://itunes.apple.com/app/os-x-el-capitan/id1147835434?mt=12

Get Low Sierra here:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/macos-sierra/id1127487414?mt=12

 

[ssmed]

You could put LINUX on the 2008 machine - with a tiny bit of effort it will work well for many basic tasks. Otherwise. I would go Sierra for the other as long as it has more than the minimum RAM which I think might have been 2GB at that time.

 

[Kamolas]

Go with High Sierra, it's now on the latest version ( 10.13.6 ) and you shall have security updates for 2 more years.

 

[notned]

I'm back with an update. I had to go with High Sierra. I could click on El Cap but wasn't allowed to use it. I'm running Manjaro on the old laptop.