After that, macOS Monterey also dropped support for my Ivy Bridge GPU, and OCLP had to rely on persistent patches to my system volume to enable 3D acceleration again. These root patches caused some weird issues with 3D acceleration in certain apps, and driver-related regressions introducted by some later Catalina patches took longer to be fixed in OCLP than in the still supported Catalina release.
I think macOS Ventura is the end of the road for macOS on my Mac. The OS now relies on AVX2 binaries, and the OCLP devs made some magic hacks to circumvent that requirement. Still, the OS now feels unreliable, and while I did not see hard crashes or errors, subtile breakage only disappeared, when I rebooted the system every few hours. The macOS 13.3 update also broke my GPU driver again for a few weeks, and I finally gave up on it.
This old Mac now runs Ubuntu LTS without any issues. The battery life is at least equal, it boots faster, and the OS does not immdiately use half of my 8 GiB RAM for itself. There is also less swapping, and while not perfect, it feels more reliable than Ventura or Monterey.
While I was not happy with these issues on macOS, it was still amazing to see how this group of volunteers enabled newer macOS releases on my device. macOS on Intel is dying, but if you have a pre-T2 Mac, you might be surprised by how well Linux might work on it.