Hi guys, new here. Recently brought back my old buddy from the dead with a $15 screen from eBay. Popped in a couple of cheap components because I couldn’t help myself, and now I find myself wondering what OS I should run on this antique.

I’m currently running Monterey 12.6.3 with opencore legacy patcher, and I find it to be running sluggish, hot, and pretty buggy in all actuality. The boys developing these patches are absolutely killing it tho, make no mistake, it’s almost usable for me.

My biggest problem is that if I’m running any application that’s even minimally resource heavy, the machine turns into my own personal space heater. Due to the age of this old girl, I’m trying to keep it as cool as possible, so I’m scared to do any real computing on Monterey. Another bummer is that I would like some of the built in apps to work, like maps.

However, I would like to run the newest possible, but stable macOS I can.

Is High Sierra my best option, or do people have luck with Catalina and Mojave still?