Running Spyder on older MacOS versions (17/18)

I teach a University course utilizing Anaconda and Spyder that has around 50 students.

I used to have student encounter frequent issues on Windows, which I traced down to primarily issues of installations in profile paths with spaces (e.g., c:\users\jane doe\anaconda3), and so was able to instruction them to workaround.

The last couple of semesters, I’m starting to encounter more frequent problems with students on Macs. Anaconda seems to install ok, but Spyder will not launch. I believe I’ve traced the common factor on these students running older versions of MacOS. The Spyder page says it supports MacOS 11+, but the problems I’ve seen are on newer versions (but still old), like 17 and 18 (High Sierra and Mojave). Is it some combination of Spyder and Anaconda causing the issue?

The affected students should be upgrading their OS versions this weekend, so I don’t know definitively if that resolves the issue yet.

I think I just figured out the answer. I was looking at the Mac OS “Darwin” version number, not the OS release version number. So the Darwin Version number 17/18 refers to MacOS 10.13 and 10.14. Since both of these predate MacOS 11, it’s not compatible on those systems, which totally makes sense.