Yes, you can install any version of macOS that was ever supported for your Mac. (It’s been a long time since they used System Enablers.) I’m so frustrated with Tahoe that I’m about to do this.

But you cannot, in general, migrate your data backwards. Apple's system apps will upgrade their data stores forward only. This isn't a problem if you are willing to e.g. re-download all of your (Mail.app) mail.

> But you cannot, in general, migrate your data backwards. Apple's system apps will upgrade their data stores forward only.

One huge reason to use third-party programs where possible. I dislike Apple's tight coupling of utilities as it is.

Yep, that's a great workaround, as long as you have third-party apps you're happy with.

Yep, though you can mitigate it a little bit in various ways. For one weird example, I keep my main user Home folder on my NAS and mount it via iSCSI. Mostly that's for data integrity/size/backup purposes, but it does also make it free to snapshot before trying out a system upgrade. If I hate it I can rollback my entire set of user data along with the OS.

Though amongst many other wonderful things lost in the mysts of Mac history I still desperately miss NetBoot/NetInstall and ultra easy clone/boot with something like CCC and TDM. It's so fucking miserable now in comparison to do reinstalls/testing/restores.

@xoa may I ask what do you use as iSCSI initiator?

Sorry for missing this! I use Xtend SAN by ATTO [0], which has been around a long time but is still getting basic updates including native Apple Silicon support now, and seems to perform well. It uses a kext and I do worry the day may come that Apple kills support despite having nothing ready to go for equivalent functionality, but so far so good.

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0: https://www.atto.com/products/xtend-san-iscsi-initiator/

I generally just “reload” everything.

Safari can't be upgraded past a certain point on older versions of macOS. That can cause certain websites to break. Minor but annoying.

While we're talking about Safari, it also developed this bug where picture-in-picture leaks memory like crazy where it sometimes consumes over 80GB of RAM, gets compressed to nothing but freezes the app to the point where I cannot type anything in the address bar.

That's where the WebKit previews come in handy, if you stick to a preview version you know matches a stable version.

Certain features are not supported unles you're on MacOS 26, period, even with Safari TP

Oh, interesting! Which features?