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Fguerouate

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 13, 2018
25
6
Oregon
It has a perfect blend of performance and useful features, I personally think its the best version ever. Agree or disagree?
 
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redheeler

macrumors G3
Oct 17, 2014
8,419
8,841
Colorado, USA
I am on Mojave now and much prefer the look of dark mode over light. I remember when Yosemite came out with the dark menu bar and Dock (partial dark mode), I expected the next version would have a full dark mode. Instead it took four years and Apple chose to stop supporting many older Macs in the process. Very frustrating.

But I digress. Admittedly El Capitan was more stable and the performance was decent on an SSD. By contrast, I have FileVault turned on, and for some reason the Mojave 10.14.6 update lengthened my iMac's boot times considerably. I also get brief system freezes occasionally just trying to open the Notification Center.
 

Isamilis

macrumors 68020
Apr 3, 2012
2,045
955
I have 2 MacBook Air 2017. One installed with El Capitan and other Mojave. No FileVault on both. Surprisingly, Mojave is more responsive and snappy than El Capitan. Both are used for my kids school. Installed apps are also similar.
 

Ruggy

macrumors 6502a
Jan 11, 2017
973
630
The real stand out for me was Snow Leopard and I had to reinstall it on an old iMac last year to get it running again.
It looked so beautiful! It seemed to be a big jump at the time and it all seemed to make sense.
Those old OS ran on anything. Tiny footprint.
 
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Fguerouate

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 13, 2018
25
6
Oregon
No. Snow Leopard was perfect.

I prefer the modern UI, but I agree snow leopard was amazing
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I am on Mojave now and much prefer the look of dark mode over light. I remember when Yosemite came out with the dark menu bar and Dock (partial dark mode), I expected the next version would have a full dark mode. Instead it took four years and Apple chose to stop supporting many older Macs in the process. Very frustrating.

But I digress. Admittedly El Capitan was more stable and the performance was decent on an SSD. By contrast, I have FileVault turned on, and for some reason the Mojave 10.14.6 update lengthened my iMac's boot times considerably. I also get brief system freezes occasionally just trying to open the Notification Center.

I've found that catalina is more stable and fast than mojave, but El Capitan in my experience trumps both
 

avz

Suspended
Oct 7, 2018
1,766
1,847
Stalingrad, Russia
It depends. El Capitan runs great on HDD on my MacBook5,1. But when it comes to video decoding, Mavericks is a clear winner on the same hardware.
 

Racineur

macrumors 6502a
Jun 11, 2013
576
175
Montréal, Québec
Hi. I have external SSD the hold each El capitan, Sierra, High Sierra and Mojave and I keep Mountain Lion on the internal 1 t Fusion drive. I must say that El Capitan is the fastest booting one. Honestly there's only fractions of seconds that differentiate each OS. I can even testify that Mountain Lion can still make my old 2012 iMac i5 scream for what it means. But overall, Mojave is the fastest. Still I'm not the kind of user that edit videos and stuff like that so I may to be the better judge. For day to day tasks, some photo editing and watching videos, even ML is faste enough for me. I like the UI of ElCap, Sierra and HIS cause they have the dark theme applied to menu bar and dock and leave the rest sunny. For me, dark theme of Mojave is just too hard on the eyes. One thing: I've decide that I would stop upgrading. No Catalina this time.
 
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RLRL

macrumors member
Jan 31, 2015
70
6
I use El Capitan on my high performance iMac. I see no reason to change. El Capitan is fast, reliable, and I have on my iMac a bunch of apps that work perfectly with it.

El Capitan is the last Max OS to support USB faxing that I use a lot. Apple will try and tell you that faxing is no longer viable and they are arrogant and wrong.

Personally, I find it distracting that they change OS's so often to sell Hardware. After this iMac dies, I am not sure I will buy another Apple. Microsoft is no better.

For now all our Mac's (4 of them use El Capitan).
 
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levmc

macrumors 6502a
Jan 18, 2019
687
25
for some reason the Mojave 10.14.6 update lengthened my iMac's boot times considerably. I also get brief system freezes occasionally just trying to open the Notification Center.
Did you ever figure out how to solve the boot time and freezing problem?
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It depends. El Capitan runs great on HDD on my MacBook5,1. But when it comes to video decoding, Mavericks is a clear winner on the same hardware.
What is a MacBook 5.1 and which app do you use for video decoding?
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Personally, I find it distracting that they change OS's so often to sell Hardware. After this iMac dies, I am not sure I will buy another Apple. Microsoft is no better.

So which computer would you buy if not an iMac?
If you buy a new iMac, would it be incompatible with El Capitan?
 
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RLRL

macrumors member
Jan 31, 2015
70
6
I tried High Sierra, Sierra, and in my opinion no reason to change to those Mac OS's. I did not like them. They were buggy, and required me to reconfigure my iMac for no apparent advantage.

Also no USB fax moving forward with Apple. I use the USB fax all the time, very useful, and free. El Capitan works perfect, never an issue and all my apps run without problems. I have a high end late 2013 iMac, that still runs perfectly and is fast.

I can see no reason to buy any more Apple Mac's. My wife has the Mac Book Pro running El Capitan.

My self I prefer Android over IOS! It is superior. My wife likes her iphone, ipad.

Personally I get tired of Apple changing Mac OS's so often for cosmetic purposes with little or no advantage for the customer to buy more hardware.
 
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ScreenSavers

macrumors 68020
Feb 26, 2016
2,115
1,688
Bloomingdale, GA
El Capitan was pretty decent, but there were some broken features that were never fixed right, such as parental controls. It was much more refined than the disaster that was Yosemite.

I think the most stable “current” release is probably Mojave, although I haven’t had any major issues with Catalina personally. It’s just slow!

The pre APFS versions have significantly faster boot times. High Sierra was the beginning of the slow messes we have today.
 

cmaier

Suspended
Jul 25, 2007
25,405
33,471
California
El Capitan was pretty decent, but there were some broken features that were never fixed right, such as parental controls. It was much more refined than the disaster that was Yosemite.

I think the most stable “current” release is probably Mojave, although I haven’t had any major issues with Catalina personally. It’s just slow!

The pre APFS versions have significantly faster boot times. High Sierra was the beginning of the slow messes we have today.
I find catalina as fast as anything that came before, back to leopard at least. The problem i have is with finder and networked drives.
 

ScreenSavers

macrumors 68020
Feb 26, 2016
2,115
1,688
Bloomingdale, GA
I find catalina as fast as anything that came before, back to leopard at least. The problem i have is with finder and networked drives.

The Finder issues are awful. They drive me crazy sometimes. Copying large files and like you said NAS’s seem to be problem points.

I think its slower because it does a bunch of useless malware checks and verifying constantly. Overall not a terrible OS on modern hardware, but sure hoping for a performance-focused release this year!
 

Rastafabi

macrumors 6502
Mar 12, 2013
334
155
Europe
I find it quit amusing how the opinions differ and by which considerations and experiences those objectively subjective decisions are drawn.
I for my part have had a rough start with Catalina but ever since the last dot (10.15.5) release I'm mostly satisfied. That said I would argue that Mojave has been a pretty solid release, though purely subjective I find High Sierra one of the most stable ones yet, and I even recommend it for machines that are artificially limited to El Capitan. I read a semi-analytic comparison regarding bugs and overall stability a while back which I cannot find right now, arguing how Snow Leopard was far from being the holy grail OS it's now hailed to be, but rather being the comparatively last solid release till Mavericks. As I've been using macOS since release 9 (and I do not refer to Mavericks), I consider myself relatively unbiased regarding any specific release, though I still have some kind of a nostalgic relation to 10.4. This might stem from Tiger being somewhat groundbreaking regarding underlying software technologies including spotlight and double "emulation" in form of running PPC OS9 applications as well as PPC code on Intel machines, but I admittedly really liked the AQUA UI being at it's peak having the blue menubar apple logo, the sleek blue default background, which still is the default background for the display tab under system information today and, of course the brushed steel window theme.
 
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ScreenSavers

macrumors 68020
Feb 26, 2016
2,115
1,688
Bloomingdale, GA
I feel that El Capitan and Sierra were the last OS’s to be somewhat useable WITHOUT an SSD. Enter that APFS junk with High Sierra and later and forget it.

With El Capitan, especially on a desktop like an iMac or Mac Pro, El Capitan moves right along on a 7200 HDD. (Not that anyone shouldn’t use an SSD these days but I have noticed that...)
 
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