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Mavericks Forever
- Thread starter sgtaylor5
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I love that this project exists, and I agree that sometime around the Mavericks era, new macOS versions became regressive in some sense. My primary frustration with modern macOS is the graphical pipeline, with its oversaturated colors, poor contrast balance, and visual flickering/dithering (I became sensitive to all these things over the past several years).
I personally decided on a different target, which is macOS High Sierra. The primary two factors for this were:
1. It is new enough for the boot drive to be formatted APFS. This provides better longevity by avoiding the Y2K40 bug in HFS+. Granted, the argument could be made it is too early to worry about 15 years from now. Also, people were working on patching the kernel to avoid this problem.
2. It is old enough that subpixel antialiasing is still available for standard-DPI displays. Starting with Mojave, font rendering in macOS changed and text became difficult to read on standard-DPI displays (these displays are what I find most comfortable to my eyes).
As far as eye strain, there were some reports strain was introduced when GPU drivers were changed mid-High Sierra (10.13.5), so sensitive users like me have to mind that as well (but this may only affect certain models or GPUs). Generally, the Intel iGPUs produce a comfortable image, especially on older macOS versions. Most people may be unaffected, however.
I personally decided on a different target, which is macOS High Sierra. The primary two factors for this were:
1. It is new enough for the boot drive to be formatted APFS. This provides better longevity by avoiding the Y2K40 bug in HFS+. Granted, the argument could be made it is too early to worry about 15 years from now. Also, people were working on patching the kernel to avoid this problem.
2. It is old enough that subpixel antialiasing is still available for standard-DPI displays. Starting with Mojave, font rendering in macOS changed and text became difficult to read on standard-DPI displays (these displays are what I find most comfortable to my eyes).
As far as eye strain, there were some reports strain was introduced when GPU drivers were changed mid-High Sierra (10.13.5), so sensitive users like me have to mind that as well (but this may only affect certain models or GPUs). Generally, the Intel iGPUs produce a comfortable image, especially on older macOS versions. Most people may be unaffected, however.