Anyone here with 2011 iMac recommendations?

Hey, hope you’re all well.

Currently in the process of buying a cheap 2nd hand iMac with the following specs:

Apple 27" mid 2011 iMac 3.1Ghz quad-i5 16Gb ram 1Tb HDD AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1gb vram Mac OS Success' href='/2020/12/install-macos-catalina-on-supported-pc.html'>Catalina 10.15.7

I haven’t had a working computer since my black late 08 MacBook with Lion finally gave up. So havent had much experience with Mac OS after that (or windows since xp)

Can’t afford any hardware upgrades (ssd or graphics), but really excited, and it already sounds like an awesome machine, despite the age.

Seller has pre installed a fresh copy of Carolina (for some reason?) - I really have no idea if this is a good idea… if I’ll be too restricted by having older hardware… or actually the newer os may have efficiency improvements that make it an upgrade?

Would really appreciate any feedback/advice from anyone with the same/similar hardware!

• I don’t necessarily want to try out every OS from supported to all the ones available via OCLP.

To be honest, will probably try and get boot camp set up with windows 10 (for occasional games/window only programs - looks to be tricky to set up with this particular model) and other than that would ideally just like one Mac OS to use, just not sure which will have best balance of features/compatibility. So which version should I run? (And why?)

Thank you so much for any advice (: