

Taking the liberty to choose your own macos is a great step up and experience though. Just assume its out of date and limit what you do accordingly. If you're stepping up to the unsupported mac stage, security isn't something apple provides anymore, its all from you, so don't worry too much about the patches. And of course its not documented, you have to explore via trial and error. Getting catalina up to stratch is a very similar experience to what you had to do to make windows vista work acceptably at the time.
Classic mac os better than x full#
You have to prune down the OS and tinker with a bunch of stuff, but once its had the bloat deleted off, its pretty fast at a higher level to HS, has the modern music and tv apps, and supports full swiftui to date. If you're willing to become a deep dive OS geek, Catalina is great. You do miss out on the current generation of catalyst / swiftui apps though. for the least fuss best raw performance today, High Sierra is the peak, and has a good balance of features and compatibility. Id start with that anchor and work outwards from there. Apple at least don't upset the performance for anything they have on display at their stores. In recent current era, it seems like the macos the machine was designed for and first shipped with will be the fastest, not sure if this is entirely by accident yet.

Generally speaking, you want the latest macos possible for APP compatibility, but runs as close to as fast as the macos it came with. I think the only way to answer this is based on the hardware.
