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Comment by Amorymeltzer | Hacker News Reader

In terms of the "Why Mavericks?" section,

>I knew I wanted an operating system from before Apple abandoned the Aqua design language.

I suppose it depends on your definition, but that likely does mean Mavericks is the latest available. For my money though, El Capitan (10.11 to Mavericks' 10.9) was the local maxima (speed, stability, capability). I've no inkling what issues using that would entail—I had no idea that Mountain Lion had "a more capable version of QuickTime"—but my immediate response to this was wondering why not El Capitan.

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Strictly speaking, Mavericks (and Mountain Lion and Lion before it) were already some way through abandoning Aqua. Lion dropped the beautiful blue scroll bars that previous OS Xs had, replaced the pill-shaped buttons with rounded rectangles, and somewhat flattened the overall UI as well, though not to the extent that Yosemite did.

But even as a fan of Aqua, I think it's nice that some of these elements got toned down just a bit. Really, you could view most of the design changes from OS X 10.0 onwards as Apple slowly toning down Aqua; the original Cheetah looks kind of gaudy IMO, the interface elements draw too much attention to themselves.

I do miss Snow Leopard's scroll bars though, as I explicitly call out on the website!

You needed to own a "QuickTime Pro" license in order to enable these features. I used to do all my simple video editing with it until they shelved it.

You're thinking of QuickTime 7, that can be optionally installed (as a separate app) even on macOS 10.14 Mojave! But the website is referring to versions of QuickTime X. QuickTime 10.2, which was included with Mountain Lion, was the last to support third-party components. (If you've ever used "Perian", that's what I'm referring to.)

We could benefit from a site that describes the best OS for any hardware and has scripts and instructions for how to mod them to be more efficient and up-to-date, with someone assigned to maintaining patches and tools for basic functionality you might need, but also having standalone, airgapped versions of each for longevity.

Right now, this info is dispersed everywhere and it’s not the primary intent of archival sites to provide this.

Most of all that is subjective and is going to vary person to person, which is why it’s dispersed everywhere.

But something like a pcpartpicker.com but for OS setups would be cool.

I would have went for Catalina.

I'm still running El Capitan on my 2015 Air.

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