I had gone through nearly every OS known to man. I had used Linux, I had used Windows, I had also previously used macOS Catalina and Big Sur years back. But in my time revisiting macOS after successfully Hackintoshing, I found that despite having to use UHD 630, macOS was the place to stay.
When I had successfully Hackintoshed, I chose Catalina. I specifically wanted the older design from the 10.10 - 10.15 era, as I absolutely loathe liquid glass and also hate the newer iOS-like design seen in Big Sur and newer. On top of that, I was already perfectly familiar with it, so it would effectively be revisiting the same OS I had used 6 years earlier.
Over time, as I got bored with Catalina, I decided to experiment with other options. The other three OSes I tested were Mojave, High Sierra, and Windows Vista.
By the time June came around, interested in expanding my quintuple boot setup and seeing how far back Geometry Dash could run, I decided to try Mojave. In order to install it I only had to set MinDate and MinVersion in OpenCore to -1, and then from there it was smooth sailing. I was completely expecting it to be unusable, having seen the cliff that is software support between Catalina and Mojave. After screwing around with software, and finding ways to extend what Mojave could normally do, I found that it was a perfectly viable daily driver. That was until August, when I decided to try some other more OSes.
Interested in getting my GTX 1050 Ti to work and getting subpixel font rendering, I decided to try High Sierra. It took at least a day to modify my config to work, and I installed it, but even then I had another challenge ahead of me, that was getting graphics drivers to work. It took at least 4 days, and I was not able to get the drivers to work, which effectively defeated the entire point of installing High Sierra. Furthermore, apps that worked just fine on Mojave that should have worked perfectly fine on High Sierra like Vesktop 1.6.5 would always give BPT/Trap 5, an error that I was never able to fully figure out. Despite also having an Early 2014 MacBook Air on it, I ran into the same compatibility issues, and on top of all of that, it also was not noticeably faster compared to Mojave.
After being a bit frustrated with the results of trying High Sierra, I decided to take an even further step back and try Windows Vista. Set on chasing the dream of installing Vista on physical hardware and with new projects existing for Vista like Second System, I was hopeful that I would be able to daily drive it in some form. After taking the dusty old desktop computer out of the corner of my room to test Vista on, I found that software compatibility was anything but decent. Even with Second System, most Qt5 apps and even older Electron apps would refuse to run.
I had many options in this scenario, a few were:
Most of them seemed like a path to pain, misery, or boredom, so I decided to choose macOS Mojave. Unlike Catalina, Mojave lacks a lot of restrictions on the system, and in addition, Mojave also has 32bit app support as a fun bonus. Compared to older versions like High Sierra, Mojave also has many quality of life improvements and features such as cleaning up files, more accent colors, expanded screen capture options, and most notably dark mode.
High Sierra also did not have any very desirable features, given that not only apps would crash, but I also had no hardware acceleration at all on my main computer. There were no significant performance improvements either, so High Sierra was out.
Vista would be an absolute pain in regard to shimming and bridging compatibility gaps, so it was a bit of a use what you have or leave type of situation. None of what I had was good enough, so I chose to leave Vista behind.
So the choice had been made, it was Mojave.
When it comes to Mojave, any computer with hardware from early 2019 should work just fine, given that it has a metal capable graphics card or integrated graphics.
My main computer is a typical computer from 2018/2019. It has a GTX 1050 Ti, a 9900K, 32GB RAM, an EVO 970 1TB SSD, and a 2TB 7200RPM hard disk. For Mojave it is absolutely overkill, but a thing that Mojave just so happened to drop was support for all cards from Maxwell to Pascal (the GTX 1050 Ti is a Pascal card).
Thanks to my CPU being a 9900K and NOT a 9900KF, I was able to use UHD 630 which worked right out of the box. On my SSD it runs perfectly and I have absolutely no complaints with it at all.
Being natively supported, my old MacBook Pro runs Mojave perfectly, especially with its 16GB of RAM and the GT 750M.
Mainly being more of a travel laptop when I can't use my main computer, it works fine enough. The only real complaint I have with it is that the normal keyboard doesn't work, so I have to put an external keyboard over it when I use it. Either way with its graphics card, 16GB RAM, and its i7-4850HQ, it runs everything perfectly and Mojave is butter smooth.
Now on the opposite side of the spectrum, we have the Early 2014 MacBook Air.
This computer only has an i5-4260U, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. Intending on using it for random tasks as a daily laptop, using Monterey or Sequoia would be painfully slow. Even still on Mojave, it lags and stutters at times, but it's not that bad. It works fine for most tasks.
In order to install Mojave, you'll either have to upgrade from the App Store, or you'll have to write an install image to a disk. I tried both methods.
The process through the App Store is very self explanatory. Search it up and install it.
As for creating a bootable installer, if you're on a newer version of macOS you are not entirely screwed. What I found to work was using dosdude1's macOS Mojave Patcher to download and write the install media. The patcher tool uses 10.14.4. 10.14.4 is new enough to install on my Hackintosh setup without having to screw around with spoofing, but there are also many issues with certificates as it was released back in March of 2019.
To fix these issues with certificates, download the macOS Mojave 10.14.6 Combo Update.
IMPORTANT: If you have a Mac that uses the older startup sound (the F# chime) and you want to keep it, DO NOT update to Mojave 2021-005, otherwise it will flash the newer firmware that flattens it.
After installing Mojave and installing the combo update if necessary, you should have a fully usable system at your fingertips. Safari on Mojave is very outdated and has not gotten any updates since July of 2021. While it somehow manages to still work with websites like YouTube, I would not recommend using it today. Instead, I would recommend the following:
As I like to call this release the immortal release of Firefox, Firefox 115 released back in July of 2023 but still manages to receive updates to this day (until March 2027, but they'll likely extend it again). It still works with nearly any website you'd likely use, and I haven't seem to have found a website where it doesn't work. Even still you might consider the next option:
Built for 10.7 - 10.14 as a fork of Firefox 140 ESR, Momiji would definitely be more compatible with those edge case websites than Firefox 115 ESR. The experience on Momiji vs Firefox 115 ESR is nearly identical aside from some newer Firefox features being present (that aren't really important in the slightest), and I'd say that if you want the most up to date browser, Momiji is really your only option.
If you're feeling a bit adventurous and want to take advantage of what I've been working on, you can try Chromium 128 or Google Chrome 128. Chromium 128 is pretty easy to set up (compared to Chrome at least), only requiring that you screw around a bit with the shim I have, but Google Chrome requires you to completely strip it of code signing first before you run it. The only reason why I recommend this over Chromium Legacy is that Chromium Legacy is stuck at 124, and that my shim allows running the official binaries up to 128. Sure it might be unstable, but from my testing both Google Chrome, Chromium, and Electron work perfectly (I have even found myself using Chromium like a normal browser at times).
DISCLAIMER: If you decide to go for this option, I'd highly recommend disabling Gatekeeper. Even then, disabling Gatekeeper is pretty risky so I would not recommend using it if you have some very sensitive data. If you are absolutely dead set on having Gatekeeper enabled (just go for Momiji at that point, you'll save yourself of some suffering), you can ad-hoc sign everything.
Now that you have looked through everything on this page, take a look at the some of the tweaks and downloads that I have. My main project is OptFix, which is a library that ports quite a few functions from Catalina (and newer) so more modern applications can work under 10.14 like Pixelorama 1.2, LWJGL 3.4, Electron 32, Chromium (and Google Chrome) 128, Geometry Dash 2.2081 (with Geode), and the latest version of OpenRGB (as of this page's writing, it is 1.0-rc3 hotfix 1).
DISCLAIMER: It does require disabling Gatekeeper, which would effectively get rid of most of Mojave's built in security, but if you're fine with being completely responsible for every single action you take and you have nothing super important, then you can try it. Whatever happens, you're on your own, treat it like you're working with an unrestricted environment like Linux that places all of the responsibility on you, and be extremely careful and cautious in your actions.