Which OS should I use for 2012 Mac mini?

[InuNacho]

I've always felt that for a work environment, don't muck around with old OSes and definitely don't muck around with hacks to make something run. You need stability without downtime.

If there is no older software holding you back, just make the jump to Catalina and stay there.

 

[fricotin]

Catalina on a 2012 mini with Fusion drive, no problems.

 

[ian87w]

Alright, so most people voted for Mojave. After thinking about it, I decided to go with Catalina as the only thing keeping Mojave is 32bit, and I don't think I have 32bit apps left. So I went with Catalina. Plus I then have an extra year of support left.

And trying to clean install to Catalina is not straight forward. 😀 Typical Apple.
Apple has instructions how to download and create a bootable flash drive for Catalina, but they failed to mention that High Sierra cannot download the full installation of Catalina. Only the stub. So I ended up "upgrading" to Catalina first, and then download the full OS, and re-format and reinstall Catalina from scratch, just to ensure a clean install.

So far it's going well, ie. I don't notice much difference with High Sierra in terms of performance. I appreciate dark mode, and the files-on-demand feature that is now available for OneDrive.

Thanks for the input guys. 🙂