u/Electronic-Glove-714

Pretty basic laptop setup compared to what I've seen here. But I felt I should post mine because I love this and it's incredibly distraction free.

Windows 10 LTSC 2019.

Tahoe changes my idea of macOS quite a bit; design has become very heavy and many new "features" (like click on desktop to hide all apps) are terrible. New settings is terrible.

Maybe my GPU is to blame here for the overall lag/slowness I feel, coming from Catalina, because I have a 2GB iGPU (Vega 8). But I do still feel UI could have been more optimized. macOS seems very changed and different with Tahoe.

For those wondering how I installed Tahoe with NootedRed, it actually works fine if you don't use a video wallpaper and Memoji as account avatar, and you disable must transparency from accessibility settings. Just note that there will be a performance drop, especially boot times, login completion time, and artefact loading times (panels, dialogue boxes, etc.) compared to older macOS versions.

Feel free to ask questions.

Have actually posted questions on this subreddit earlier regarding the QCA9377 and CS8409 found on this laptop, but after researching a lot I realized these two components were completely unsupported. Then had given up hope.

A couple of days back, I finally (getting tired of Windows the nth time) bought a TPLink adaptor (TL-WN725N) which is supported using chris1111's kext. Apart from that, I realized that Bluetooth on my QCA9377 works though WiFi doesn't (weird). So for audio and mic I now have a portable speaker with a mic built-in and for WiFi I have that TPLink on the go and HoRnDIS when I'm at home. :)

Why Catalina? Sonoma and up simply freeze on this laptop upon installing NootedRed (no idea why). Might upgrade to Ventura later but I love Catalina, it's before everything got rounded and is still smooth and fast on my not-so-powerful laptop.

Thanks to this community and the entire OpenCore community for this project. Love macOS, might completely transition to this in a few days (still have Windows with dualboot). Few quirks here and there, subtly worse battery life, but still the best OS in terms of design and stability.

Feel free to ask questions.

P.S. "almost" in the title because no native support yet for audio and network, having to carry around a dongle and BT speaker is not-so-portable.