That thing would be even happier running Mojave with a few Linux and Windows VMs in Parallels 18. (You'd be able to run three times as much software, especially all of the old fun stuff like 32bit games.) ....And as always, disable MDS_stores in Terminal.
Take a look at Desert OS, LMDE6, and EndeavourOS, as they have out-of-box proprietary driver support, and don't use much ram. (I want to like MX more, but it's irritating incompatible with Yumi/Ventoy grub installation on Macs.)
Definitely Mojave since Catalina is almost as deprecated now, meaning there's little reason to forfeit 32bit support and/or HFS+ booting.
The irritating errors mentioned happen with any and all distros, unfortunately. This is the only Mac I have with a problem. Otherwise, MX it is. Everything I have is single-boot, and Yumi/Ventoy not on my radar, so no issues so far.
I will try Mojave again at some point, but gor pure interest. There's no software it could give me, and my understanding was that HFS+ is no advantage on SSDs. But, as is normally the way, it's probably a bit quicker than Catalina on any given machine.
Congrats on the revival! You gonna keep it on Tiger? I sure do miss that Aqua interface. The brushed metal and the glossy buttons/icons. My very first Mac was a Late 2006 Black MacBook that came with 10.4.8. Good times. 😁
I can think of at least seven off the top of my head: 1) some SSDs (even OEM apple) just won't boot APFS volumes at all for whatever reason. 2) There are many more 3rd-party utilities that can deal with Disk Utility-choking file-system corruption in HFS+ as opposed to APFS (and if an APFS partition containing multiple volumes pokes, you're probably SOL. 3) You can browse the contents of the drive from many other booted operating systems (including El Capitan and earlier APFS-incompatable MacOS versions). 4. Cloning with CCC5 isn't the pain in the ass that it is in CCC6 w/APFS. (For starters, you can create incremental, bootable, backup tasks in CCC5 that put Apple's crappy TimeMachine to shame.) 5. FoxClone and RescueZilla archives are much smaller for HFS+ (FoxClone's dev personally informed me that he won't even bother trying to parse empty space in APFS partitions/volumes). 6. If you forget your user login password, you can reset it in Recovery mode Terminal. 7. If you stick with Mojave/HFS+, you won't be seduced by the siren-song of OCLP/Sequoia firmware IDing and encrypting a soldered-drive device, risking bricking the machine if anything goes wrong (and Apple is extremely desirous of you bricking your out-of-warranty machine).
Does a live session work? If so, try installing your preferred distro clean, just to see if it's a problem with the dual boot.
They did supply the 4 extra screws in the old Mac Pro models that you need to mount an additional optical drive in the case! That was pretty cool of them I thought.
Regrettably this remains elusive, as my "silverback" version of Mojo (for non-metal i-series machines) will not boot 2012+ thinside iMacs because, apparently, MacOS doesn't actually check hardware during launch, and so hangs. (Either that or OCLP 0.43 actually squishes some of the needed kexts even if you don't boot through its loader. Or hard-defaults its root-patches, or whatever. Anyway , it's a shame that dosdude1 never "finished" his Mojave patch so that opencore is no longer needed.)
