I recently rescued some old Macs from the glue factory, which provided an opportunity to play with OCLP, in a non-mission critical way, with both Ventura and Sonoma.
I did a fair bit of reading before choosing OS versions, and the common sentiment is that Ventura is the best option of the currently supported OSes, but contrary to that, my experience is that Sonoma runs better than Ventura on the 2012 hardware I tried, albeit both with i7s that support hyper-threading. Clean installs from USB to reformatted drives.
Ventura on a 2012 MBA (i7, 8GB, SSD) was a janky experience, and felt very much like putting a 3-year old OS on a 12-year old machine. Launchpad is often ignored, but I do use it on occasion so I like to configure it, and that was a poor experience; full of lag, especially with folders, and painful to set up. Overall, general tasks were OK, but small hitches in the UX and overall responsiveness were what one might expect from a hack. Subjectively, useable, at best; the level of some of the plaudits expresses are generous, IMO.
The other machine is an i7 mini server (16GB), so I aimed higher for it, with Sonoma from the start. The OCLP install process failed to install both the app and the patches, but after applying them retroactively, the machine ran surprisingly well. Minimal jank, enough responsiveness to feel modern, and Launchpad works without issue. Surprising since both machines have the same GPU. Only time when it feels its age is when the random disk accesses occur, and that's because it's running on the original spinning drives, not an SSD. With an SSD, I suspect it would hide its age quite well. Of course, that's with the age old trick of disabling the increased amounts of eye candy in more recent OSes. If I end up with a spare SSD, I'd probably install it for duty as a boot drive.
That experience prompted me to junk Ventura on the MBA, install Sonoma (without a hitch), and reach the same conclusion -- Sonoma runs better, despite half the cores and half the RAM of the mini. Unexpected, but I'll take it.
I set both up with dual- and triple-boot volumes, with Sonoma, Mojave, and Catalina, so they do have some flexibility and enough utility to avoid the landfill. Suitable for general home use, and a little work has provided some capable backup machines.
I still spend a lot of time in Mojave, and Catalina, other than being the official end-of-the-line for those models, doesn't bring much to the table to me, and loses the valuable ability to run 32-bit apps, so I might reclaim that space, and maybe try Sequoia once it "fully" matures.
Thanks to the OCLP folks, and those like Mr. Macintosh for their guideance.
I did a fair bit of reading before choosing OS versions, and the common sentiment is that Ventura is the best option of the currently supported OSes, but contrary to that, my experience is that Sonoma runs better than Ventura on the 2012 hardware I tried, albeit both with i7s that support hyper-threading. Clean installs from USB to reformatted drives.
Ventura on a 2012 MBA (i7, 8GB, SSD) was a janky experience, and felt very much like putting a 3-year old OS on a 12-year old machine. Launchpad is often ignored, but I do use it on occasion so I like to configure it, and that was a poor experience; full of lag, especially with folders, and painful to set up. Overall, general tasks were OK, but small hitches in the UX and overall responsiveness were what one might expect from a hack. Subjectively, useable, at best; the level of some of the plaudits expresses are generous, IMO.
The other machine is an i7 mini server (16GB), so I aimed higher for it, with Sonoma from the start. The OCLP install process failed to install both the app and the patches, but after applying them retroactively, the machine ran surprisingly well. Minimal jank, enough responsiveness to feel modern, and Launchpad works without issue. Surprising since both machines have the same GPU. Only time when it feels its age is when the random disk accesses occur, and that's because it's running on the original spinning drives, not an SSD. With an SSD, I suspect it would hide its age quite well. Of course, that's with the age old trick of disabling the increased amounts of eye candy in more recent OSes. If I end up with a spare SSD, I'd probably install it for duty as a boot drive.
That experience prompted me to junk Ventura on the MBA, install Sonoma (without a hitch), and reach the same conclusion -- Sonoma runs better, despite half the cores and half the RAM of the mini. Unexpected, but I'll take it.
I set both up with dual- and triple-boot volumes, with Sonoma, Mojave, and Catalina, so they do have some flexibility and enough utility to avoid the landfill. Suitable for general home use, and a little work has provided some capable backup machines.
I still spend a lot of time in Mojave, and Catalina, other than being the official end-of-the-line for those models, doesn't bring much to the table to me, and loses the valuable ability to run 32-bit apps, so I might reclaim that space, and maybe try Sequoia once it "fully" matures.
Thanks to the OCLP folks, and those like Mr. Macintosh for their guideance.
