I got my first MacBook at Catalina, and still miss it. For a while, I downgraded my Intel Mac to Catalina again; I love the aesthetic compared to the newer releases, and it’s fast and snappy.

But the situation now is: No recent apps work on Catalina since it’s considered obsolete (except open-source apps you compile yourself). But Big Sur and higher are ridiculously slow on Intel hardware, to the point where it’s unusable. I now have an otherwise perfectly good 2019 Intel MacBook that has been gathering dust for the past years.

▲

ryandrake 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve got a MacBook and Mac Mini stuck on Monterey (12), and an iMac stuck on Big Sur (11). I’m pretty much dead in the water when it comes to software compatibility, unless I want to put Linux on them. Even homebrew gives me a warning that they’ve stopped support and to expect everything to break. It’s a sad state of affairs.

	▲	heavyset_go 13 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This[1] worked well to upgrade old Macs that were stuck on old versions of macOS for me, if you're not choosing to stay on older versions for other reasons. [1] https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher
	▲	Synaesthesia 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		OCLP is the solution.

▲

christophilus 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Linux runs fine on my wife’s old (2013) MacBook. It’s more than fine, actually. I have Arch and Niri on there, and it makes a great SNES emulator.