Im not sure where you’re going with this OP, unless you’re looking for purchasing advice. It’s kinda like asking if a car or truck tire is better, with the answer being “well, do you have a car or a truck?”
Apple abandons macOS* updates after a computer is over 7 years old or so.
At that point Mint or similar distros are your primary option for running a secure OS on excellent but aging hardware.**
Sleep/wake, battery management, and trackpad don’t work quite as well, and you usually have to install the Broadwell wifi driver manually, and the camera will be fussy, but otherwise it is the better OS for an old Mac.
* (no longer called OSX since they left v.10 behind a long time ago).
** you can force a later macOS onto older models, but it’s not very stable.
I actually got into an argument with one of my friends, but yeah, I am kind of looking for purchasing advice I guess you could say.
The answer to the tire question, is that I have many cars and trucks and SUVs, a few I use regularly and a few that are sort of rotting in this vacant lot next to my home but I swear they’ll be worth something in the future if I fix them up, which I totally will.
I currently have it installed on a 2008 iMac and a 2012 MacBook Pro.
I also have ZorinOS On a MacBook Air that works great, and Debian on a MBPro 2014, and am about to install Fedora on another MBPro, 2013. Those are mostly server experiments, though.
Yes, I wind up with a lot of old macs that I am reluctant to recycle!
If you have a desktop/laptop, you run Linux.
If you have a Mac, you run OSX.
Im not sure where you’re going with this OP, unless you’re looking for purchasing advice. It’s kinda like asking if a car or truck tire is better, with the answer being “well, do you have a car or a truck?”
Apple abandons macOS* updates after a computer is over 7 years old or so.
At that point Mint or similar distros are your primary option for running a secure OS on excellent but aging hardware.**
Sleep/wake, battery management, and trackpad don’t work quite as well, and you usually have to install the Broadwell wifi driver manually, and the camera will be fussy, but otherwise it is the better OS for an old Mac.
* (no longer called OSX since they left v.10 behind a long time ago).
** you can force a later macOS onto older models, but it’s not very stable.
I actually got into an argument with one of my friends, but yeah, I am kind of looking for purchasing advice I guess you could say.
The answer to the tire question, is that I have many cars and trucks and SUVs, a few I use regularly and a few that are sort of rotting in this vacant lot next to my home but I swear they’ll be worth something in the future if I fix them up, which I totally will.
Ignore the downvotes. Mint or Debian or Fedora can be great on Macs earlier than 2016.
Oh yeah? What Apple machine do you recommend for Mint?
I currently have it installed on a 2008 iMac and a 2012 MacBook Pro.
I also have ZorinOS On a MacBook Air that works great, and Debian on a MBPro 2014, and am about to install Fedora on another MBPro, 2013. Those are mostly server experiments, though.
Yes, I wind up with a lot of old macs that I am reluctant to recycle!
Well, the next question is “what do you do when you drive?” Cars and trucks have wildly different roles they’re good at.
So basically, what do you want your computer to be good at doing? That dictates your hardware purchase and the OS you will end up using.