Old Haswell machine migrated from Clover/Catalina to OpenCore/Big Sur

I know it's old, but it's still my main machine — good enough for what I do (web browsing, writing, driving 4k monitor).

CPU: i5-4590, 8GB RAM, mobo: ASUS H81M-PLUS, GPU: Nvidia Quadro K2000 (2 GB, running natively), generic 240GB SSD, chinese wifi+BT card bought on AliExpress for $30 (running natively).

It used to run on Clover/Catalina, but I wanted to upgrade to Big Sur, so I migrated it to OpenCore — generated EFI with OCGen X app, tweaked it a little, and voila, everyhing works. Then I upgraded to Big Sur with autoupdate, 20 minutes, no problem, again everything works.

I only had to change system definition from iMac14,2 to iMac 15,1. Curiously, it still reports "Late 2013 iMac", perhaps because of unchanged serial number. iMessage and iCloud works (since High Sierra, I didn't change anything).

Very pleasant experience overall. The machine is fast enough, no slower than in Catalina. I still don't like overall Big Sur design, though.

submitted by /u/adaml75
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