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This is very impressive, but I am curious about why the author has chosen Mavericks as his retro version of OS X versus the other versions. I guess Mavericks is

This is very impressive, but I am curious about why the author has chosen Mavericks as his retro version of OS X versus the other versions. I guess Mavericks is just modern enough but doesn't have the flat UI?

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
Yeah, so the options were Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks. I looked at Snow Leopard. It's famous, it supports Rosetta, and it was my first version of OS X. However, I also think it's somewhat overrated. I remember spending hours writing a paper for High School under Snow Leopard in iWork '09, and loosing hours of work due to a power outage. Yes, I should have remembered to save my work, but I was in the flow of writing! I like a lot of what Apple did in Lion, including some of the more controversial changes, such as autosaving and fullscreen support. Launchpad is an abomination, but it can be mostly pushed aside and ignored. And while Lion itself is a buggy mess, Apple did a lot of polishing in Mountain Lion and Mavericks. I spent a while deciding between Mountain Lion and Mavericks: - Performance seems to be identical except in low memory situations, where Mavericks comes out ahead, likely because it supports memory compression. - I like interfaces that have texture and depth, but I was never a fan of the extreme skeuomorphism of early iOS. Many of the default apps in Mountain Lion share that visual style, with plush leather backgrounds and stitched edges. The Mavericks versions of these apps take a more abstract approach, and actually look closer to Snow Leopard. - The Mountain Lion version of QuickTime Player was the last to support third party video codecs. I eventually solved this problem by getting the Mountain Lion version of QuickTime to work on Mavericks. - Mavericks has much better software support than Mountain Lion. I'm actually still able to run the latest official versions of Zoom and the Affinity Suite. Mavericks supports the same version of OpenGL as the latest versions of macOS, so games tend to work. Mavericks was the sweet spot for me, and I do think it's probably the best version of OS X in general. There are certain things that other versions did better, but no software is perfect, and many of Mavericks's imperfections are things I'm able to fix.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

Yeah, so the options were Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks. I looked at Snow Leopard. It's famous, it supports Rosetta, and it was my first version of OS X. However, I also think it's somewhat overrated. I remember spending hours writing a paper for High School under Snow Leopard in iWork '09, and loosing hours of work due to a power outage. Yes, I should have remembered to save my work, but I was in the flow of writing! I like a lot of what Apple did in Lion, including some of the more controversial changes, such as autosaving and fullscreen support. Launchpad is an abomination, but it can be mostly pushed aside and ignored. And while Lion itself is a buggy mess, Apple did a lot of polishing in Mountain Lion and Mavericks. I spent a while deciding between Mountain Lion and Mavericks: - Performance seems to be identical except in low memory situations, where Mavericks comes out ahead, likely because it supports memory compression. - I like interfaces that have texture and depth, but I was never a fan of the extreme skeuomorphism of early iOS. Many of the default apps in Mountain Lion share that visual style, with plush leather backgrounds and stitched edges. The Mavericks versions of these apps take a more abstract approach, and actually look closer to Snow Leopard. - The Mountain Lion version of QuickTime Player was the last to support third party video codecs. I eventually solved this problem by getting the Mountain Lion version of QuickTime to work on Mavericks. - Mavericks has much better software support than Mountain Lion. I'm actually still able to run the latest official versions of Zoom and the Affinity Suite. Mavericks supports the same version of OpenGL as the latest versions of macOS, so games tend to work. Mavericks was the sweet spot for me, and I do think it's probably the best version of OS X in general. There are certain things that other versions did better, but no software is perfect, and many of Mavericks's imperfections are things I'm able to fix.