I've just moved from Snow Leopard on a MacBook Air 11" 2010 to Mavericks. Fortunately I sprang for the 4GB version at the time. Snow Leopard was fine for typing and reading but just couldn't deal with the modern internet with an old Chromium 40-something. Firefox even upgraded to 46 wasn't great.
Now that I'm on Firefox 63 and Mavericks, internet functionality is not bad. You wouldn't want many tabs open but you can certainly do some basic work in a pinch while travelling, or check train schedules.
I prefer Mountain Lion aesthetics but the compressed memory functionality of Mavericks is an advantage for the low RAM MacBook Air (my other Macs are MBP/Mac Pros loaded with 16GB to 128 GB of RAM). I also use El Capitan on a lot of computers but it seems to me there's some overhead in El Capitan which would slow down an old Core 2 Duo and the memory handling doesn't seem as efficient as in Snow Leopard to Mavericks days.
Cross-graded to Mailmate as Snow Leopard was the last Apple Mail which had full three pane functionality (thanks to Letterbox) which Mailmate still offers (along with write in Markdown).
In any case, thumbs up to Mavericks in 2019 on these old low RAM MacBooks.
Now that I'm on Firefox 63 and Mavericks, internet functionality is not bad. You wouldn't want many tabs open but you can certainly do some basic work in a pinch while travelling, or check train schedules.
I prefer Mountain Lion aesthetics but the compressed memory functionality of Mavericks is an advantage for the low RAM MacBook Air (my other Macs are MBP/Mac Pros loaded with 16GB to 128 GB of RAM). I also use El Capitan on a lot of computers but it seems to me there's some overhead in El Capitan which would slow down an old Core 2 Duo and the memory handling doesn't seem as efficient as in Snow Leopard to Mavericks days.
Cross-graded to Mailmate as Snow Leopard was the last Apple Mail which had full three pane functionality (thanks to Letterbox) which Mailmate still offers (along with write in Markdown).
In any case, thumbs up to Mavericks in 2019 on these old low RAM MacBooks.
