My new Hackintosh is running latest Catalina with no issues.
Mac Pro 2009 is still rockin' High Sierra.
So yeah, best is what your system accepts and has no issues. Other than that, it's just another load of icons n stuff I've no interest in.

 

currently have a park of 10 mac running Sierra for overall compatibility between all developper and K' , easy 32bit bridging, tweaking capability etc..
The only down side right now is apple forcing us to use mojave if you want the very last version of Logic, but mojave still faill on few essential K'.
Otherwize, as smoove grooves said, Snow Leopard was prolly one of the most solid OS from apple this century.

 

Mojave if you're gonna use cracked software, Catalina if you're legit.

 

it doesn't really matter imo,

if you buy a new Mac with 10.15, you cannot downgrade to any lower version,

if you have older Mac/Hacky, you can save yourself lots of trouble not going higher than High Sierra
(for nVidia users it's literally the last MacOS version compatible, and many legacy software/hardware stuff are not really compatible with latest MacOS versions either)
unless you explicitly lack some functionality (I don't remember any software except Logic and Final Cut which would require Mojave or Catalina already, no reason to go with latest MacOS version

 

that is really fucked up... thanks for the info

 

Mojave 10.14.6 with latest Logic version 10.5.0 and working tools without any issues. Tried Catalina earlier this year, resulted in too much chaos. Also, because some developers can't or won't keep up (like AIR, Lexicon and even iZotope but if I'm correct their stuff is compatible now). When Logic demands Catalina, I guess it's time to reconsider. Although Logic still has lots of bugs so updating to the latest version isn't that important anymore so it seems.

 

To be fair that's pretty much been the case for years. For any brand new hardware you can only install the version of the O/S it shipped with for that specific version hardware.

So for example you're stuck with Catalina for a 16 inch 2019 MBP but you can put Mojave on the 13 inch one because that doesnt use brand new hardware. That said I have a 16 inch 2019 MBP with tons of plugins running on Catalina without any problem whatsoever.

 

Windows

 

No Mac or hackintosh owner ever gets that desperate

 

truth to be told, I can't play Forza Horizon 4 on anything else but Windows 10, so dualboot for me

 

wrong Fred....

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jun 11, 2020

High sierra for me , i use a lot of 32 bit plugins that are not available as 64 bit and i also use the latest 64 bit plugins its an all rounder for me Reaper 64 bit works great and all my hardware like the focus rite saffire pro 40

the mac has never faltered.

for what i need my mac to do ,i am sticking with this until i eventually get forced to upgrade because plugins are specifically written to run on certain Os Levels whether it be Mojave or Catalina , i think that's just a marketing hype because if you can get the plugins to run in high sierra then whats the problem.

 

Now can you tell us how it has made your life easier? By the way while you were writing this they came out with OS Long Beach

 

Fair enough I used to bootcamp my first iMac to be fair as I was convinced I'd miss Windows (Nero and similar utils I was used to) but 3 months later I binned the Windows partition through lack of use.

If you want gaming then yeah dual boot but that's not usually for your DAW unless you're completely nuts :p

 

another "problem" with MacOS is absolute lack of NVENC support (nVidia hardware encoding acceleration) so when I wanted to do some (live)streams during Covid times, I had to build another PC from leftover parts, just for hosting OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) to handle realtime video encoding with full gpu acceleration

 

How about now? I was on Mojave on my Hackintosh but it's time to upgrade now. Things like Kontakt 7 and other cool stuff not working anymore on 10.14.6

Any recommendation for a newer an stable system which is not too difficult with cracked plugins? (Batchmod, Codesigner App, disabling SIP and all that stuff would be great if it worked)

ALSO theoretical question - if I build a new Hackintosh and use M1/M2 supported newer plugins - will OSX handle it as a native machine or as an Intel machine? How would Rosetta work in that scenario?

 

Don't go off what you see given as Minimum Requirements by third party developers. They are either getting them slightly wrong or doing it on purpose. Some izotope stuff I have seen give Catalina or Mojave as minimum, but then I test on High Sierra and they work. Not all of them of course, just some. Of course, they are itching to drop as much support as possible, like always. Maybe you just want to run the newest macOS you can put on that machine. Do a Time Machine backup first before using the migration tool.

What is the newest Minimum Requirement that you have seen on something you want to run? That's what I would try to upgrade to, if possible.

Also, with your machine being a Hack; it could theoretically have different amount of compatability issues that will be a little more guesswork compared with those of us on actual Apple machines.

If you build a new machine, you will need to use Intel plugins. It is not going to run any Apple Silicon Only applications/plugins, so if something does not have a binary for Intel/U2B then you cannot use it. Nothing for Silicon will run natively.

 

Last edited: Sep 14, 2023