Having formerly upgraded using OpenCore patcher to Monterey and being really happy with the whole experience on a 2012 quad core i7 Mac Mini with EVO 870 SSD and no known problem. I decided to try and go for Ventura becasue I don't want to be so far back when Sonoma comes out, and spent too long stuck on Catalina with it's various issues.
I could not be happier so far with Ventura but it's still early days. I do miss the old system preferences look because that has been around for a long time not just Apple for the nostalgia value. Ah...
What stuck me most is MM may be running better, it seems as if there is a less CPU load or load overall. I don't know what Apple has achieved with Ventura under the hood and it's not built for this generation of mac, but I have the fans set to kick in sooner with CPU temp spikes, which give a more audible indicator of sudden and increased system loads, recently Monterey was spinning up the fans a lot with the spinning beechball of death, but so far on Ventura, performance seems better on this front, less fans whirling and no beachballs.
I'm one of those users who always has way too many open browsers windows and tabs, once SSD's came along bad habits were empowered by hardware to get even worse! I had hoped Tab groups woudl help but that again like the SSD allowed even greater levels of multi-tabbed browser windows, aye! 🤪
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One weird thing though is no matter how many time I update my patcher from 0.6.7 to 0.6.8 it keeps reverting to 0.6.7, any ideas why that might be?