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macOS 14 Sonoma on Unsupported Macs Thread

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The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
Richy85 said:
installed Sonoma 14.5 with OPCL 1.5 on an imac 27" 2017 and a mac mini i7 2012. It seems to work very well
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I upgraded from Ventura, because I had that issue with the root patching not being able to proceed because of the version divergence.

I waited for a couple of days but since no solution came up, I felt obligated to make the upgrade.

One thing I noticed right away: it boots a lot faster (with Ventura, after many updates, it took almost 2 minutes to boot; with Sonoma it takes around 30 seconds). I made a mistake when installing from the usb (I installed directly to the SSD and it says it is installed in "HD - Data" and the data is set to be in "HD - Data - Data". I renamed the partitions but in the boot picker still appears "HD - Data".

Then it seems snappier than Ventura.

It looks like it attempts to allocate more RAM than Ventura (I have 16Gb) and the cache is always higher with Sonoma. However, and this might be a false perception, I think it swaps less than in Ventura. And where does my perception come from? At work, I upgraded my Mac mini M1 to Sonoma also. It has 8Gb of RAM and it seems that I see 0 swap in Activity Monitor more often than I used to with Ventura. The same happens at home, with 2012 i7 but since I have more RAM it would swap less than my office Mac mini.

I think I will stay on Sonoma as much time as I can. I didn't mean to upgrade from Ventura, but I had to.

If someone could tip what to disable in Sonoma for a better performance on an usupported Mac, It'd be much appreciated.
 
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sotnas said:
If someone could tip what to disable in Sonoma for a better performance on an usupported Mac, It'd be much appreciated.
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Just one thing: give it time to rebuild spotlight and such. It might settle down after a few hours.
 
houser said:
Just one thing: give it time to rebuild spotlight and such. It might settle down after a few hours.
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Well, I'm sorry for not being clearer. I don't have any issues regarding performance when using MS Office or browsing the net. Actually, this old machine can still take plenty of tasks. As I'm not a video or image editing professional, I think I won't ever notice any big difference in terms of speed.

But being this old, it's only natural that one day some features of Sonoma may take away a slice of the ability to perform. For example, playing VLC or Infuse I get the sense that the machine gets a bit hot. Sure it's an Intel and they do get hot. But does this happen because it's natural or is it related to a OS that wasn't designed taking these specs into consideration? May I disable some effects or kill some useless processes?

I've seen that a lot of people complained about poor performance. I can't say that I ever had any issue in this regard. I upgraded and just let it be on its own for a few hours. And actually the indexing that took more time was related to the iCloud synching.

rehkram said:
You probably know this but the simplest tip is to use a static screensaver/desktop, stay away from the animated ones, they're heavy on system resources.
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Yeah. From my old days with Windows, one of the things I would was to disable any visual effects. The same with my Linux machine, when had one.

So, the screensaver is static.

EDIT: I have a refurbed MacBook Pro 2012 that I bought to my mum. She never used it, so I brought it home. I added an SSD and a stick of 8GB of RAM (it had 4GB, now it has 10). I still have it with Monterey on OCLP. I might install Sonoma in another SSD to see how it handles. The logic would be to upgrade to Ventura, in order to have a more stable system, but since I had the boot time degrading after every update, I might try to install Sonoma and see how it goes.
 
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sotnas said:
EDIT: I have a refurbed MacBook Pro 2012 that I bought to my mum. She never used it, so I brought it home. I added an SSD and a stick of 8GB of RAM (it had 4GB, now it has 10). I still have it with Monterey on OCLP. I might install Sonoma in another SSD to see how it handles. The logic would be to upgrade to Ventura, in order to have a more stable system, but since I had the boot time degrading after every update, I might try to install Sonoma and see how it goes.
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No worries.
Sure, the iCloud stuff and spotlight indexing can take a few hours on my system, which happens to be the same rMBP 2012 that your mum donated to you. This works pretty good on Sonoma here now after a few tweaks. Good luck.
 
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houser said:
No worries.
Sure, the iCloud stuff and spotlight indexing can take a few hours on my system, which happens to be the same rMBP 2012 that your mum donated to you. This works pretty good on Sonoma here now after a few tweaks. Good luck.
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is the sluggishness from spotlight indexing only an open core related thing? On a clean install of Monterey (last supported OS for this iMac 17,1) I don't usually notice any slow downs, and I have a fusion drive. Even when I did try Sonoma, and Ventura with the patcher, still didn't notice anything significant.
 
MacinMan said:
is the sluggishness from spotlight indexing only an open core related thing?
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Not specifically an OC-related thing, although you probably won't notice the performance impact of spotlight indexing on fully-supported Macs that don't need OCLP/OC. The slower the CPU, RAM, disk, and the more data you have to index, the more pronounced will be spotlight sluggishness.

EDIT: I tweak spotlight settings on my MBP6,2 to reduce the performance impact of spotlight indexing.
 
On an early 2015 MacBook Pro 12,1
booting from OCLP v1.5 USB Key, to install Sonoma 14.5 over 14.2, just hangs. (pic)

Tried repeatedly with same result. ...goes through entire install of Sonoma, rebooting several time, and auto-picking the continuous 'Install Sonoma Icon'
and finally on last reboot, auto-picking the Sonoma HD drive icon, it just hangs.

At last reboot, when it auto-picks Macintosh HD, I even hit the space bar and reset NVRAM. Same Hang

what can I try, please?
 

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has anyone found a workaround fot the Photos app not recogniziong faces / pets? I left unchecked the box to disable it in the oclp config, but still no go. From the logs seems like the system is halting the process due to “stress conditions” (don’t remember the exact line) but I tried leaving the mac with nothing else running and it still fails.

stock Late 2013 iMac with a crucial ssd and 8gb ram, latest sonoma and oclp.
thanx
 
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BuffyzDead said:
On an early 2015 MacBook Pro 12,1
booting from OCLP v1.5 USB Key, to install Sonoma 14.5 over 14.2, just hangs. (pic)

Tried repeatedly with same result. ...goes through entire install of Sonoma, rebooting several time, and auto-picking the continuous 'Install Sonoma Icon'
and finally on last reboot, auto-picking the Sonoma HD drive icon, it just hangs.

At last reboot, when it auto-picks Macintosh HD, I even hit the space bar and reset NVRAM. Same Hang

what can I try, please?
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Boot in safe mode by holding the shift key
 
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killsapo said:
has anyone found a workaround fot the Photos app not recogniziong faces / pets? I left unchecked the box to disable it in the oclp config, but still no go. From the logs seems like the system is halting the process due to “stress conditions” (don’t remember the exact line) but I tried leaving the mac with nothing else running and it still fails.

stock Late 2013 iMac with a crucial ssd and 8gb ram, latest sonoma and oclp.
thanx
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Same here with imac14,2 - see my other posts here…
downgraded to Ventura though, but here also the faces detected are crap…

the face detection definitely worked already with Monterey/Ventura (can’t remember exactly)

So sad and disappointing (not targeted at OCLP development of course)…
 
Since at least two releases my Mac Pro 5,1 refuses to boot with Polaris and Vega10/Vega 20 cards. It simply either boots to black screen or freezes with progress bar in the middle.

Normally I was able to recover from such situation by either reinstalling from scratch or placing some old card together with a new one and rerun Post Install Patches and then removing the old card. Now it doesn't work anymore. Safe mode doesn't work too.

I've spent almost whole day trying to fix this but no luck. What's going on ???

Not to mention booting High Sierra from standard boot picker causes all macOS systems installed via OpenCore not to boot.
 

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amaze1499 said:
Me --------------------------------> Sequoia 15.5
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100% agree.

Of course this thread is about adapting new_er_ macOS than originally intended, realistically it serves the purpose of evaluating how long one can use a specific mac model with getting security updates.

That said, if you are serious about "working" with your mac then historically the best advice is one should only ever update a production machine to a X.5 (..ish) release. That's when no new _delayed_ features are coming in and it is no moving target anymore.

That's why I finally updated to Sonoma 14.5 this weekend. (power management/sleeping with 3rd party ssd/nvme upgrade is still a mess, though...)
 
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