I must maintain a fully 32bit capable OS but that appears to be not straight forward.
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The apps are what they are and I can't change how they're compiled or find a 100% comparable solution. I've looked.
I'm using a dedicated 5,1 Mac Pro. It doesn't need to dual boot or be compatible with anything modern. There's just a few bugs that need to be worked out to truly make daily use of it. Please note this machine does not and should never connect to the web. It's just here to keep certain 32bit apps alive without compromise.
/skip
I am trying High Sierra but there are some irritating functions intrinsic to this OS. Trust me, I am searching exhaustively but not quite finding the exact solutions. I will update as they are resolved.
If you want to suggest a different OS that may circumvent all of these difficulties, I am willing to give them a try. The purpose of trying 10.13 is that is is the last fully 32-bit capable OS. I have read that Mojave broke many 32-bit apps even though it is supposedly compatible.
10.13 is not the end of the world. It is incredibly slick and I have tried and failed to overload my Mac Pro but it's just not possible with my applications no matter how hard I try to punish it. Leopard was not capable of using 1/16th of the capability of these machines and that can't be denied. It's super capable and probably the best experience I've had on some of my early Intel Macs but here's where it's not perfect.
Optimization warning
So every single time I move, edit, reset or change the version of a 32bit app I'll get this warning. I know it's a "tag" that is attached to every app and that by clicking "OK" it goes away but surely there is something in the system folder that can be flipped, deleted or redirected so even if it tries to warn me it fails safely. Never was a problem in Leopard. VERY annoying as I experiment.
Cloud stuff, location, monitoring etc.
Despite not signing into iCloud, disabling location services etc. I still have processes in my activity monitor pertaining to syncing, iCloud, location, online logins etc. The machine isn't even connected to the internet so why are these things in the way? You might argue that it's a drop in a bucket as far as resources but more moving parts means more failure points. Any way to basically dumb down the system so it's as "cloud savvy" and "connected" as Leopard was, that is to say wasn't? I wouldn't mind stripping anything and everything pertaining to Siri for all time and forever.
SLOW preview and quicklook
In Leopard I could select 50 large tif files and they would open in about two seconds and then pop in almost as quickly as I could page through them. Once they popped in, they were in memory and so I could switch through the images with zero delay. Quicklook was very near instantaneous. Opening the SAME images in 10.13 is so slow I sometimes am not sure if it's actually opening but eventually the Preview pane launches and sits blank for as much as a minute before displaying. If I swap back and forth between two images, they take two seconds to react. This makes things extremely difficult for quick "a b" comparisons, which is different from side-by-side and each has its own purpose. Preview also splits large selections into two different panes which Leopard never did. Why be annoying?
LOW memory persistence
I first noticed this the day I upgraded to Mavericks many years ago. Ever since Mavericks, I've had whole web pages unload from RAM which resets them and I lose where I was. If I have 20 tabs open in a browser, then I go to do another task, I expect my 20 tabs to be exactly as I left them whether they were paused in a video, paused in a song, scrolling an ebay search results list, in the middle of playing an embedded game, in a certain line of text I was reading or just a field I was writing a wall of text into. Instead, I come back to Safari and half of my tabs were "unloaded to reduce energy usage" or to free RAM. This was NEVER a problem in Leopard and is extremely annoying because now I just assume that no matter what I was doing I have to constantly mind it or else it will vanish. This is not just Safari because other apps began to implement this since Mavericks. I've noticed several other apps stumbling and reloading whenever I go back to them because Apple seems to think I should never be using more than 1/4 of my 48GB of RAM.
Notification Center
Don't want it. Don't need it. Why am I still getting invitations to "Explore what's new in High Sierra" even a month after install? Why is the feature even running when it's just tying up resources? I want it wiped out thoroughly. As with the 32bit warning, surely there must be some way to break Notification Center so that it fails safely and indefinitely per-startup. (Do not Disturb absolutely is not the same)
Unknown Developers/Signed apps
"uh uh uh, you didn't say the magic word". Every time I have to install something or even run something from a disk image I have to first try it, knowing it will fail, close it, open preferences, allow it, type my password, then try again. Every. Time. If I can break the Gate Keeper, I want to break it.
SIP?
Whatever sort of security they're trying to integrate, I don't need it and I don't want to stumble upon it as I muck around in the system files etc. So if I installed High Sierra on a 5,1 Mac Pro, does that mean they added these security systems? If so, what are they and how can I fully disable them keeping in mind that the machine will NEVER connect to any network what-so-ever?
APFS?
I wouldn't mind using APFS but how stable is it in this version? I'm using an SSD from a 2013 Mac Pro in a PCIe slot and would sure appreciate any more speed. It's not an NVME drive but AHCI.
PCIe drive=External?
In Leopard my PCIe card holding the 2013 Mac Pro SSD appears of course as the main internal drive but in later versions it's treated as a removable drive and thus some functions are restricted.
fseventer
This was the most handy app. It would track EVERY SINGLE file and folder touched by the system so you could precisely trace all activity. Unfortunately, it does not work post Leopard, I think, and I have to have the exact same functionality.
Thanks for any contribution here.
skip
The apps are what they are and I can't change how they're compiled or find a 100% comparable solution. I've looked.
I'm using a dedicated 5,1 Mac Pro. It doesn't need to dual boot or be compatible with anything modern. There's just a few bugs that need to be worked out to truly make daily use of it. Please note this machine does not and should never connect to the web. It's just here to keep certain 32bit apps alive without compromise.
/skip
I am trying High Sierra but there are some irritating functions intrinsic to this OS. Trust me, I am searching exhaustively but not quite finding the exact solutions. I will update as they are resolved.
If you want to suggest a different OS that may circumvent all of these difficulties, I am willing to give them a try. The purpose of trying 10.13 is that is is the last fully 32-bit capable OS. I have read that Mojave broke many 32-bit apps even though it is supposedly compatible.
10.13 is not the end of the world. It is incredibly slick and I have tried and failed to overload my Mac Pro but it's just not possible with my applications no matter how hard I try to punish it. Leopard was not capable of using 1/16th of the capability of these machines and that can't be denied. It's super capable and probably the best experience I've had on some of my early Intel Macs but here's where it's not perfect.
Optimization warning
So every single time I move, edit, reset or change the version of a 32bit app I'll get this warning. I know it's a "tag" that is attached to every app and that by clicking "OK" it goes away but surely there is something in the system folder that can be flipped, deleted or redirected so even if it tries to warn me it fails safely. Never was a problem in Leopard. VERY annoying as I experiment.
Cloud stuff, location, monitoring etc.
Despite not signing into iCloud, disabling location services etc. I still have processes in my activity monitor pertaining to syncing, iCloud, location, online logins etc. The machine isn't even connected to the internet so why are these things in the way? You might argue that it's a drop in a bucket as far as resources but more moving parts means more failure points. Any way to basically dumb down the system so it's as "cloud savvy" and "connected" as Leopard was, that is to say wasn't? I wouldn't mind stripping anything and everything pertaining to Siri for all time and forever.
SLOW preview and quicklook
In Leopard I could select 50 large tif files and they would open in about two seconds and then pop in almost as quickly as I could page through them. Once they popped in, they were in memory and so I could switch through the images with zero delay. Quicklook was very near instantaneous. Opening the SAME images in 10.13 is so slow I sometimes am not sure if it's actually opening but eventually the Preview pane launches and sits blank for as much as a minute before displaying. If I swap back and forth between two images, they take two seconds to react. This makes things extremely difficult for quick "a b" comparisons, which is different from side-by-side and each has its own purpose. Preview also splits large selections into two different panes which Leopard never did. Why be annoying?
LOW memory persistence
I first noticed this the day I upgraded to Mavericks many years ago. Ever since Mavericks, I've had whole web pages unload from RAM which resets them and I lose where I was. If I have 20 tabs open in a browser, then I go to do another task, I expect my 20 tabs to be exactly as I left them whether they were paused in a video, paused in a song, scrolling an ebay search results list, in the middle of playing an embedded game, in a certain line of text I was reading or just a field I was writing a wall of text into. Instead, I come back to Safari and half of my tabs were "unloaded to reduce energy usage" or to free RAM. This was NEVER a problem in Leopard and is extremely annoying because now I just assume that no matter what I was doing I have to constantly mind it or else it will vanish. This is not just Safari because other apps began to implement this since Mavericks. I've noticed several other apps stumbling and reloading whenever I go back to them because Apple seems to think I should never be using more than 1/4 of my 48GB of RAM.
Notification Center
Don't want it. Don't need it. Why am I still getting invitations to "Explore what's new in High Sierra" even a month after install? Why is the feature even running when it's just tying up resources? I want it wiped out thoroughly. As with the 32bit warning, surely there must be some way to break Notification Center so that it fails safely and indefinitely per-startup. (Do not Disturb absolutely is not the same)
Unknown Developers/Signed apps
"uh uh uh, you didn't say the magic word". Every time I have to install something or even run something from a disk image I have to first try it, knowing it will fail, close it, open preferences, allow it, type my password, then try again. Every. Time. If I can break the Gate Keeper, I want to break it.
SIP?
Whatever sort of security they're trying to integrate, I don't need it and I don't want to stumble upon it as I muck around in the system files etc. So if I installed High Sierra on a 5,1 Mac Pro, does that mean they added these security systems? If so, what are they and how can I fully disable them keeping in mind that the machine will NEVER connect to any network what-so-ever?
APFS?
I wouldn't mind using APFS but how stable is it in this version? I'm using an SSD from a 2013 Mac Pro in a PCIe slot and would sure appreciate any more speed. It's not an NVME drive but AHCI.
PCIe drive=External?
In Leopard my PCIe card holding the 2013 Mac Pro SSD appears of course as the main internal drive but in later versions it's treated as a removable drive and thus some functions are restricted.
fseventer
This was the most handy app. It would track EVERY SINGLE file and folder touched by the system so you could precisely trace all activity. Unfortunately, it does not work post Leopard, I think, and I have to have the exact same functionality.
Thanks for any contribution here.