Using OpenCore to install Sonoma?

Discussion in 'macOS' started by John Sutherland, Oct 28, 2023.

  1. John Sutherland

    John Sutherland MDL Addicted

    Oct 15, 2014
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    Anyone on the forum tried this yet? Any problems? Just curious. Right now I'm running Ventura on my 2013 iMac, and I'm wondering if upgrading to Sonoma is really worth the effort.
     
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  2. Tito

    Tito Admin / Adviser
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  3. maelcum

    maelcum MDL Novice

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    #3 maelcum, Oct 28, 2023
    Last edited by a moderator: Oct 29, 2023
    @Tito

    Would this be true for a 2017 iMac as well?
    Is there a rule of thumb that could help me (a n00b) decide which OpenCore bootloader to use?
     
  4. John Sutherland

    John Sutherland MDL Addicted

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  5. John Sutherland

    John Sutherland MDL Addicted

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    Thanks to everyone for their replies, but has anyone actually done this themselves? I'm just trying to avoid any possible issues, and I won't bother if there are any. So far, Ventura has been problem free for me.
     
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  6. stayboogy

    stayboogy MDL Addicted

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    I know I am a little late, but Sonoma dropped a lot of native support for a lot of intel related stuff purposely. There are a lot of threads out there on various boards of people have all kinds of issues on their Sonoma installs because the kexts are not present or not working and development has not caught up yet. They are really trying to kill the intel stuff off at this point because they have gone full in for their own silicon.
     
  7. John Sutherland

    John Sutherland MDL Addicted

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    An update for everyone: I installed Sonoma on my 2013 iMac and ran into some issues, mostly with graphics, things like screen tearing and artifacts. So I ended up installing Ventura, and so far, things seem to be back to normal.

    I think stayboogy is right about some of the .kext files needing more development time, particularly for Sonoma, and in my particular case, I think the video .kexts aren't quite there yet.
     
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  8. itsmemario1

    itsmemario1 MDL Expert

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    #10 itsmemario1, Jan 30, 2024
    Last edited: Jan 30, 2024
    Did you try "System Settings" and set "Display" to "unknown display" using Sonoma?
    (regarding tear/gltiches)

    I tried Sonoma on a MacBook Air 3,1 (2011) using Open Core Legacy.
    Tried all tutorials, watched so many youtube videos, but keep getting stuck at the white loading bar right after booting.
    And there are indeed some very logical "solutions" out there, but this MacBook Air doesnt seem to like Sonoma (yet).

    People managed to install it though. But I also went back to Ventura.
    (which is not going through this time. Stuck at MacOS Update Screen after the 1st reboot, bootlooping into the apple logo, always starting at "30 minutes left". Will try an older OCL asap)
     
  9. stayboogy

    stayboogy MDL Addicted

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    with every security update to all older builds of MacOS, installing on unsupported hardware is going to get more and more complicated and harder to achieve with guaranteed reproducible results. For anything with an intel processor, that is not Kaby Lake or newer, should stick with Catalina for the best performance and graphics results. Kaby Lake or newer intel cpus should be using Ventura for best graphics and performance support.

    my Dell i5 runs Ventura so smooth like it was meant for it, almost as perfect as Catalina was. The last version of Catalina from Apple however doesn't work as well on my Dell because of some python updates and some other library updates that Apple did in that last Catalina build. It is a common practice for Apple to do things like this. it is best to all offline installs and save every working build of MacOS just in case. I still have working Catalina and Ventura images that have not been tampered with updates but they require all offline installs which is just a technical step.