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Comment by pcr910303 | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately I’m not expecting to support anything lower than Big Sur. I tried supporting Catalina, and having to support an OS that I don’t use daily was hard… Sorry about that. :-(

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I really wish Apple provided an easy, official way to run older versions of macOS/OSX in a VM. It'd be incredibly useful for testing, and for ensuring reliability in old build toolchains (say, for a years-old product that needs a security patch). I mean, it already has a hypervisor built in. :-/

They don't even make it particularly easy to script an installation of an older version in a VM. There are 3rd-party tools but they're usually just as complete & compatible as whoever wrote them needed them to be, and/or they're abandoned.

[EDIT] like the VM images Microsoft provides. Those are wonderful.

And if you do install macOS on a VM, it won't run with hardware-accelerated graphics. Even if the host is also macOS. And Apple just likes to pretend that older OS versions cease to exist the moment they release a new one.

Regarding Mojave... Yeah I still use that daily. Catalina is a mess, and Big Sur can't be (officially) installed on my mac. I could've tried to have a go at backporting the OP app, but Swift is too annoying of a language and I don't know much of it.

I run a setup where I have 10.13, 10.14, 10.15 and 12.0 installed on dynamic APFS volumes and big Sur (11.0) as my main. While not exactly VM I can switch between them as a matter of rebooting, filesystem is shared and setting each one take 15 minutes as you can download original install images.

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