I have an old MacBook (2012) that runs macOS 10.13 (High Sierra, released in 2017) on 4GB RAM. I use it a couple times a year if I need to compile something for Mac x86 and don’t want to spend time setting up cross-compiling from my newer (M1) machine.
That MacBook is literally 13 years old, and the only upgrade I’ve given it is a new SSD back around 2018. It runs just fine.
Rip on the walled garden all you like, but if you want an OS with the stability and simplicity of a commercial OS, together with unix compatibility and a shell that lets you do whatever you want… macOS is your best bet. Using it literally feels like using a commercially polished and widely supported version of Linux.
I could definitely run Linux on the machine, no doubt it would work even better then. In fact I have an old Ubuntu partition on it that I haven’t booted in years, but which worked fine when I last used it.
However, the only purpose that machine serves at the moment is being an x86 Mac with a toolchain for compiling whatever, so that I can quickly compile distributables whenever I need to distribute something for x86 mac and don’t want to spend time setting up a full pipeline for cross compiling (once or maybe twice a year).
I have an old MacBook (2012) that runs macOS 10.13 (High Sierra, released in 2017) on 4GB RAM. I use it a couple times a year if I need to compile something for Mac x86 and don’t want to spend time setting up cross-compiling from my newer (M1) machine.
That MacBook is literally 13 years old, and the only upgrade I’ve given it is a new SSD back around 2018. It runs just fine.
Rip on the walled garden all you like, but if you want an OS with the stability and simplicity of a commercial OS, together with unix compatibility and a shell that lets you do whatever you want… macOS is your best bet. Using it literally feels like using a commercially polished and widely supported version of Linux.
Try open core legacy patcher Sonoma will work fine on it.
I could definitely run Linux on the machine, no doubt it would work even better then. In fact I have an old Ubuntu partition on it that I haven’t booted in years, but which worked fine when I last used it.
However, the only purpose that machine serves at the moment is being an x86 Mac with a toolchain for compiling whatever, so that I can quickly compile distributables whenever I need to distribute something for x86 mac and don’t want to spend time setting up a full pipeline for cross compiling (once or maybe twice a year).