Best MacOS for Mac Mini

[djc6]

I have a 2018 mac mini - I found the following help a lot with UI reponsiveness:

Go to System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Display and enable "Reduce Motion"

Next, enable "Reduce Transparency" - I noticed the UI was much more fluid after these two changes.

 

[ADGrant]

Tahoe is officially not compatible with the Mac Mini 2018 anyway. I bet there will be an OCLP that makes it work but to your point Liquid Retina may run slow on it unless one has an eGPU.

By the way while the GPU in the 2018 Mac Mini wasn't great it still benchmarked faster than the GPU (Nvidia 9400M) in the Mac Mini 2009, etc which was more than fast enough for Aqua. I bet Apple could tweak Liquid Retina to run reasonably well on the Mac Mini 2018 but I bet they didn't.

Otherwise, I found both machines than fast enough for 2D, 2D-ish 3D, and basic 3D. Of course for Blender, gaming, etc in the Intel era, the AMD systems were more appropriate.

Right, the mini is explicitly not on the list of Intel Macs supported by Tahoe. Will OCLP be able to make it work, currently not clear. The lowest end Intel Mac still supported is the 2020 13" MBP with 4 Thunderbolt ports does have Intel Iris Plus Graphics. I wonder how well the new UI will perform on that.

 

[benwiggy]

The system is quite laggy, probably due to the 8GB of RAM. I am curious what version of MacOS would work better on the system.

I suspect there won't be much difference between MacOS versions. Which CPU does this have -- i3, i5 or i7?

The RAM is likely to be the biggest limiting factor. Also, make sure there is plenty of free space on the internal drive. Don't install any crap utilities that 'manage', 'clean' or modify things.

I used to have one of these; and with 32GB of RAM, it was a solid, serious piece of kit. (Installing the RAM is 'a bit fiddly'...)

The GPU isn't really up to pushing lots of pixels on large displays, though.