My personal choice would be to dual boot Mojave and Snow Leopard. That way you get the best of both worlds.
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What have you done with an early Intel recently?
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Rummaging through the spares cupboard, as one does, and found some RAM that fits the iMac 10,1, so now it has a reasonable 8GB. It had got as far as 10, but then a stick in my wife's laptop failed, and back it went to 4.
So, progress!
So, progress!
I recently acquired another early 2008 17“ MBP with that beautiful 1900x1200 resolution and a GeForce with 512MB + max specced out RAM bays with 6GB
Only the 2.6 GHz C2Duo is missing and having that standard 2.5GHz instead.
But I guess I can live with it
My first one died early this year and I was planning on replacing the GPU but this new was less than the GPU replacement +better Screen and more RAM.
Anyway,
I installed chromium on it as it still has ElCapitan on it.
I plan to upgrade.
Shall I go for HighSierra or Mojave instead?
Catalina is out of question for me.
My vote, for now, is High Sierra, in that a) it’s what I’ve been using with my early 2008 17-inch (a 2.5GHz I moved to a 2.6 in 2021 (due to fixed GPU being on a new logic board with a 2.6GHz processor), running 1920x1200 glossy, not the same res in matte, which would have been my preference); and b) obviates any need for additional patches relating to Metal GPU API calls. Of course, one plus for Mojave is if you like the dark mode/theme, then that would more or less steer you in Mojave’s direction.
With the full 6GB RAM filled on yours, you should have an overall good experience. There remain a couple of tiny quirks I have run into on dosdude1-patched High Sierra, but otherwise it runs quite well.
Then for your needs, don’t bother with Snow Leopard.
For folks (including me) who‘ve been using Snow Leopard non-stop since 10.6.0 was released in late August 2009, there are a few solid use-cases for maintaining Snow Leopard on a partition of these older Macs. For one, these Macs were purpose-designed for Snow Leopard’s arrival and, tautologically, Snow Leopard was optimally geared for the Intel Macs already in place in 2009, 2010, and in 2011, as well as all other, earlier Intel Macs. (Heck, the origin of Snow Leopard’s development even ran on PowerPC Macs, but that’s a whole other kettle for another time).
Additionally, for those of us who do have specific software applications and utilities for which later versions either came up short and/or stopped being re-written/updated for more recent versions of macOS, Snow Leopard remains the go-to for these situations. At the time of the major switch from Snow Leopard to Lion in 2011, a lot of software lost support for Lion and later — in particular, those which did not get updated (for instance, frameworks and kexts designed for hardware-related drivers, for professional-level equipment, are at the forefront of my mind).
In some cases, one may kludge older software to work successfully on newer versions of macOS, but not always (or, the older application may launch, but unexpected behaviour might occur — such as running InDesign CS4 in High Sierra or later, or a few of the audio conversion software utilities I have around from the Snow Leopard days, which can sometimes crash and fail to encode/decode within the environment of more recent CoreAudio libraries, especially once some older audio formats were dropped from CoreAudio).
At the other end, this is also (in large part) why many folks around here tend to keep their no-longer-supported Macs updated with, at most, Mojave, as Mojave continues to run 32-bit applications (and there was quite a lot of software to emerge during that period, starting in late 2005 and continuing through probably as late as 2013, as 10.6.8 support for a lot of software continued, and 10.6.8 also being the last version of OS X to run, as-is, on even the 32-bit CPU/EFI and 32-bit EFI Intel Macs of 2006 and 2007).
So that’s probably why theMarble (and most definitely me) suggest[ed] Snow Leopard as at least one of the two OSes you might consider for your early 2008 MBP. Snow Leopard also happens to run quite fast on these early 2008 models because, once more, Snow Leopard was purpose-designed for them in mind. With 10.6.8, SL also happens to be, arguably, one of — if not the — most stable builds of OS X/macOS to ever emerge from Apple.
Unlike the subsequent pattern of Apple cranking out new, major versions of the OS annually, starting with Lion (beginning with the person who’s been responsible for that aggressive, once-per-year cycle ever since, even when the current version has not yet fully had all bugs worked out), Snow Leopard was a thoroughly matured operating system given roughly two years to reach final maturation and stability (slightly more time than for Leopard, which in several cases was a partial, clean-sheet revamping of the OS and the UI over its predecessor, Tiger, whereas Tiger evolved over two-and-a-half years as a second architecture, Intel, was brought into the fold, mid-stream).
There is (and probably will always be) considerable debate around this, but generally speaking, Snow Leopard ends up being the benchmark iteration of OS X/macOS against which all others — before and after — are measured for system stability.
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In addition what @B S Magnet said, Snow Leopard is the last version with Rosetta, i.e. the last Intel version that can look back on the PPC OS X era. There's a decent amount of software that did not make it to native Intel... (or that can be patched to native Intel but you first need to install a PPC-only version)
So, I've been playing around with an online image upscaler. The images I've been using are publicly available, so I'm not concerned about privacy. Just wanting to see what happens.
The upscaler uses some form of AI for enhancement. With todays run through though, I've discovered it's limitation. Basically it seems to be applying some sort of soft filtering during image enhancement. So much so that what you end up with can possibly not be the same thing anymore.
Here's an original image of Amanda Blake…
Now, here's what the upscaler did to her…
She's almost missing her beauty mark and her signature hair curl on her cheek. And most importantly, the upscaler changed her eyes. I suppose that most people would be happy with the fact that the filtering also removes/reduces her wrinkles, but I'm not. That's part of her.
If you find and use an online image upscaler just be aware that you might end up with something different than what you started with.
The upscaler uses some form of AI for enhancement. With todays run through though, I've discovered it's limitation. Basically it seems to be applying some sort of soft filtering during image enhancement. So much so that what you end up with can possibly not be the same thing anymore.
Here's an original image of Amanda Blake…
Now, here's what the upscaler did to her…
She's almost missing her beauty mark and her signature hair curl on her cheek. And most importantly, the upscaler changed her eyes. I suppose that most people would be happy with the fact that the filtering also removes/reduces her wrinkles, but I'm not. That's part of her.
If you find and use an online image upscaler just be aware that you might end up with something different than what you started with.
I decided to bring my Mid 2009 17" into this decade and give macOS 11 a try. Everything is working well with the newest OCLP. Very happy with the result.
I think I’ll give it a try then.
I will transplant a 500GB SSD into the bay of my machine so I can run 2 MacOSes + Linux on it.
Does the drive have to be formatted in a specific way to support Snow Leopard?
The Snow Leopard partition (or any OS X/macOS version prior to High Sierra) uses HFS+ Journalled. The actual SSD/HDD itself, if it’s a brand new SSD/HDD, needs to be prepared with the GUID partition scheme, which is what all Intel and Silicon systems rely on for setting up system partitions.
Unrelated question that I've been meaning to ask for a while. On my 5,1, I have an APFS partition for High Sierra on one drive and a HFS+ partition on another drive with Snow Leopard. Dual boot works great... except... when I boot Snow Leopard, it tries to mount the APFS partition, and gets unhappy and offers to format it. Would be nice if it wouldn't do that.
I did some googling, but the only way I found to get it not to mount automagically would require Snow Leopard to know the file system type, which obviously it wouldn't.
Any thoughts?
Mine does that as well, and that’s not really a surprise. I‘ve observed similar occurrences of this when Linux-related partitions (ext4, for example) OS X can’t mount. It’s basically the system informing the user, “I see a partition here with something on it but I can’t make heads or tails of it, jsyk,” as an extension of whenever one plugs in an unformatted drive: it sees something there, but there is no volume header information it is able to parse.
In other words, I don’t know a way around it.
With APFS, it’s basically a container-with-a-partition-within scheme, and to my knowledge, no one has ever managed a way to just get Snow Leopard to, quote-unquote, “ignore” the volume the way it did with Lion-through-High Sierra HFS+ volumes (nor, to my knowledge, was there ever a community-based workaround for Snow Leopard to be able to read those HFS+ volumes). For APFS, it is simply so far away from what Snow Leopard is “aware” of that it can’t make heads or tails of it.
Now, if only what’s-his-face at Sun Microsystems had kept his trap shut in June 2007, just before the WWDC keynote, we probably wouldn’t be in this forward-incompatibility pickle/mess/nightmare.
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And in a way, I suppose, you can argue it's implementing a long tradition of Apple offering to format (or eject) things it doesn't recognize. Same as what would happen if, say, you put in a DOS floppy in a classic Mac prior to PC Exchange.
I remember encountering this too on my OS 9 MDD relatively recently. Can't remember what it was but it was the same thing "eject or initialize this strange foreign thing".
Very different from Windows where unrecognized volumes will just sit in the background forever until you start interacting with the drive letter Windows assigned them (and you can stop NT-based Windows from assigning a drive letter to a volume if you'd like). And very different from traditional *NIX where volumes (both removable and fixed, really) don't get mounted unless the operator (or some automated thing that wrote a fstab) tells it to explicitly mount that volume and where to mount it too.
Interestingly, the traditional Apple way of drawing attention to the volume with the unknown file system and offering to format/initialize it is probably more likely to lead to data loss. One or two wrong clicks in that Snow Leopard dialog and my High Sierra volume has gone to the big SSD in the sky.
These days, not quite.
Accidentally clicking on “initialize…” should, always, open Disk Utility. If you happen to, unexpectedly, find yourself there, then this ought to be enough to think to yourself, “OK, this isn’t routine. Let’s re-trace our steps.”
Plus, how many people who aren’t total nerds about doing stuff like this are going to have both Snow Leopard as an HFS+) and High Sierra (as an APFS) on the same Mac? The answer is, “Probably not many — i.e., scant and few.”
So in practice, this involves a bit more than “one or two wrong clicks.”
Today I picked up, from a thrift shop, a new/unused Bluetooth keyboard/cover designed for a Lenovo S6000 tablet. My thinking was that this would pair nicely with the iMac and enable me to remove a wired keyboard. And while I was at it, use my Logitech Pebble mouse in BT mode and remove another dongle.
Well, under Mint 21.1, neither would work at all with the iMac.
Fired up the cMP 3,1 on High Sierra and tried again. Absolutely no issues, so there they will stay.
Annoyed that my oh-so-perfect Linux iMac has suddenly become a petulant teenager...
As Linux is so easy to install to the iMac, I'll blow it away and re-install High Sierra on that, and see if it then plays ball...
Well, under Mint 21.1, neither would work at all with the iMac.
Fired up the cMP 3,1 on High Sierra and tried again. Absolutely no issues, so there they will stay.
Annoyed that my oh-so-perfect Linux iMac has suddenly become a petulant teenager...
As Linux is so easy to install to the iMac, I'll blow it away and re-install High Sierra on that, and see if it then plays ball...
And it did. So Linux Mint 21.1 is not the paragon OS I'd been bragging about on here...
Anybody any clue why the BT would work so well on MacOS and so poorly (read: not at all) when Mint is in command? Will now have to try something different, or plug in an alternative BT dongle. Really don't want to do that.
Anybody any clue why the BT would work so well on MacOS and so poorly (read: not at all) when Mint is in command? Will now have to try something different, or plug in an alternative BT dongle. Really don't want to do that.
Not really early Intel but this is seems like the place to post it. Today I successfully replaced the rear camera in a friends iPhone 11. First time I fixed an iPhone. After that laptop surgery will seem like Duplo Lego. 
OK, having determinde that Mint isn't the paragon I thought it was, time to set about some alternatives.
First, decide on a range of alternatives. First choice is LMDE 5, in other words Mint based purely on Debian with no Ubuntu components whatever. Probably the same BT problems, but will use this base to pursue them. If that doesn't work, then I will be asking for what other distros might be better for this machine - iMac 10,1 27" Core 2 Duo 3.06GHz to be exact.
First impressions: LMDE installs even more quickly that standard Mint 21.1. Now to see if the Bluetooth stack will be any different. I'm assuming not, but who knows?
First, decide on a range of alternatives. First choice is LMDE 5, in other words Mint based purely on Debian with no Ubuntu components whatever. Probably the same BT problems, but will use this base to pursue them. If that doesn't work, then I will be asking for what other distros might be better for this machine - iMac 10,1 27" Core 2 Duo 3.06GHz to be exact.
First impressions: LMDE installs even more quickly that standard Mint 21.1. Now to see if the Bluetooth stack will be any different. I'm assuming not, but who knows?
First attempt failed. Didn't like being encrypted, for some reason. Unencrypted is progressing so far...
After a false start, POP!_OS seems to be doing well. All Bluetooth requirements are met, and the system runs well. Initial boot was very slow, will see if that improves.
Not to restart the debate on classifying Intels (but basically doing so), is my 2012 iMac considered early Intel in any remote way? I'd wager not, but I do run Mavericks and mostly 32-bit software on it, so it feels like it to me. Even have the OS skinned to resemble Snow Leopard.
Otherwise, if it is not, I am no longer in the early Intel camp. I haven't been using any of them other than an occasional boot of my 2007 Mac mini. I need to pull out my White iMacs for a spin again, but it's more of a novelty than anything at this point. I am concretely in the Mojave and before OS camp still, I have simply no use case for modern macOS other than developing apps, 95% of my apps don't work anymore.
Otherwise, if it is not, I am no longer in the early Intel camp. I haven't been using any of them other than an occasional boot of my 2007 Mac mini. I need to pull out my White iMacs for a spin again, but it's more of a novelty than anything at this point. I am concretely in the Mojave and before OS camp still, I have simply no use case for modern macOS other than developing apps, 95% of my apps don't work anymore.