Have you spent any time looking at OpenCore Legacy? I briefly was using it on my 2014 13" MBP to install whatever the latest version-1 was. It worked well for a bit but I ran into an issue after an update. I bailed on it but learned later that it was a relatively easy fix. Might give some new feature support to you.
I really think this era of MBPs was the best. I'm kind of shocked how well my 2014 still works.
I've got a 2010 iMac that my kid uses running Sonoma (macOS 14) via OpenCore Legacy and it works great for him. I'm currently waiting on a wireless card to give him Bluetooth 4 so he can use Airdrop.
I've looked, but never played (this being my primary personal device, it's not something I want to have out of service).
I guess that's probably also why I feel like this is the wrong solution for me. I don't want to have to deal with issues on this laptop. If I pull a system update, I want it to install without a problem, automatically, overnight, and not require hours of debugging and reverting and then finding a fix a week later.
I appreciate the effort and skill that goes into making it, and if this was a less critical device for me it might well be the right solution.
Also, I agree re: peak MacBook. The keyboard is good, the ports are good, they're tough, and I really can't believe that the performance has been enough for over 10 years. It'll be a sad day when I move on.
> I don't want to have to deal with issues on this laptop. If I pull a system update, I want it to install without a problem, automatically, overnight, and not require hours of debugging and reverting and then finding a fix a week later.
This is why I never made the jump to Linux. Around 2017-2019 Apple's Laptops had gotten really bad. I was considering moving to Linux, but I've had several situations where I've run normal Ubunutu updates from Canonical and found myself unable to boot. I don't know if this is common, I don't think I was doing anything unusual (stock Ubuntu).