This is a review on the state of OS X Mountain Lion in 2020 from my personal experience.
OS X Mountain Lion was released on July 25, 2012. The OS received security updates until 2015. Most app developers decided to leave the platform. The major blow to older OS's was Google unsupporting Chrome and not updating it anymore for OS X 10.9 and older. However, there are alternatives to Google Chrome, which I will discuss later.
I run Mountain Lion on a Macbook 4,1. The Macbook 4,1, (also known as the Macbook Early 2008), does not officially support Mountain Lion. Apple supported the device up until 10.7 Lion. I managed to get Mountain Lion running using a patcher tool called NexPostFacto. The patcher was developed by a person named parrotgeek1. You can visit his website here.
Mountain Lion, by itself, is not a great operating system to be running in 2020. Safari is outdated and does not work with the majority of websites. The mail application is not really great in my opinion, although I am a avid Thunderbird user. Although, there are ways you can run a modern web browser on Mountain Lion. Parrotgeek1 has also developed a browser called Firefox Legacy. This takes a more up to date version of Mozilla Firefox and ports it over to older operating systems like 10.7 and 10.8. You can even run a bit of an older version of Firefox on Snow Leopard! You can also find this web browser on his website, which I have linked above.
Firefox Legacy makes Mountain Lion more usable in 2020. Websites actually are decent on the machine, and you can get more modern extensions such as Multi Account Container, which I use for school, LastPass, and more. I was even able to get Google Meet to run!
Older applications tend to run pretty well. I was able to get a more modern version of git using MacPorts. I also used a code editor called TextMate to help fix small issues with my discord bot. Although, I really don't need it because I have vim. I also got an older version of iTerm to run on it and replaced the bash shell with a zsh one. GIMP 2.8 also works pretty well on the device, although you do not want to be editing 4K images on it. Thunderbird also runs pretty well, but you need an older version. Specifically, you need version 45 of Thunderbird, which is outdated and doesn't run the more modern Thunderbird extensions.
Overall, my experience with Mountain Lion has been positive. Sure, I could run Linux on my Macbook 4,1, and I have before. The only problem I have with Linux is that the kernel stops detecting the lid close after a while of use. Mountain Lion did not have the same issue. I also did not want to run Windows 7 or 10 on the devices, since both are not great for a Core 2 Duo machine and the drivers aren't great either. I like Mountain Lion because you can still get by using it in 2020, even though some applications might not run or might be outdated. Most apps I actually use are web based, so I don't even need to download anything. That has been my personal experience with OS X Mountain Lion on my Macbook 4,1.
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