OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/docs/BENIFITS.md

Benefits and Drawbacks between OpenCore Legacy Patcher and other patchers

With OpenCore Legacy Patcher we recommend users go through the below table to understand what the benefits and drawbacks are compared to other patchers. There are positive and negatives to each and we feel transparency is most important when patching another users machine. There should be no grey areas where users may be mislead.

Features	OpenCore Legacy Patcher	Patched Sur
Over The Air Updates	Native System Preferences, additionally supports Deltas (~2GB) for Metal GPUs	Inside Patcher Sur app (~12GB), only available when InstallAssistants release
FileVault	Supported on Metal GPUs	Not supported
System Integrity Protection	Fully enabled on Metal GPUs	Disabled for early 2013 and older
APFS Snapshots	Fully enabled	Disabled
User facing	TUI interface	SwiftUI interface, more user friendly
Supported OSes	10.7-11	10.15-11
Firmware Patching	None required	Required for models without native APFS support
BootCamp Switching	Requires EFI Conversion for Start Disk support, otherwise still supported	Native
Brightness Control on Legacy GPUs	Supported	Supported
Legacy GPU Acceleration	In active development, see Acceleration Progress Tracker: Link	Currently not researching
WPA Wifi and Personal Hotspot Support	Native, stable	Unstable
HEVC/H.265 Support for Mac Pros and iMacs with Polaris+ GPUs	Supported	Not supported
Big Sur-styled Boot Picker	Available	Not available
El Capitan-era Wifi cards	Supported	Not supported
Hibernation Support	Supports 3rd party SATA SSDs in addition to stock models	Only supports stock drives
Sidecar Support	Supports any Mac with Metal Intel iGPU	Not supported at all