Building a Hackintosh Pro • Hacker News Board

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#11

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 18, 2017, 4:54 PM UTC

adamnemecek wrote: post #4

> I've switched off auto-updates in Sierra. While system updates should work just fine, I prefer to hold off until the community over at tonymacx86 have confirmed there are no issues. Does anyone know why some of the updates can brick the machine? Also how often does this happen? Or like what percentage of updates break things.

[deleted]

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#12

Post by microtonal » Sat, Mar 18, 2017, 4:54 PM UTC

jeffjose wrote: post #3

After years of making fun of Linux folks for having to "know everything about the computer" to get things working, Mac folks seem to be embracing the culture these days.

Sarcasm detected, but this is only a tiny fraction of Mac users. 99.9% will just go to an Apple store, buy a Mac and are sure that everything from power management to Wifi works.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#13

Post by djsumdog » Sat, Mar 18, 2017, 4:57 PM UTC

I had a Hackintosh for years. I used the stock/retail CD from my former mackbook, used some custom kexts and a guide to generate the right plist edit to unlock my nvidia card. I never had issues with updates either.

It ran Snow Leopard and I used it for all my development, video editing, photo editing, etc. Eventually I left for Australia and decided to get a real MacBook and unfortunately it had Lion on it.

I hated Lion. Gone was Expose. Gone were rows of virtual desktops (Missing Control had one row with multiple columns. I hated that shit). There was no way to get the old functionality back. Eventually I started using Linux again in a VM as my primary OS.

Today I'm back on Linux with i3 as my tiling window manager and I don't think I'd ever go back to macos. I think many of their design decisions since Lion and onward have been terrible. I just keep around a Windows laptop or VM for when I need commercial products or to play games.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#14

Post by gfiorav » Sat, Mar 18, 2017, 5:01 PM UTC

Best mac I ever had is my Hackintosh. I built a fusion drive for it and use Clover instead of Chimera for a boot loader, so I can update from major versions without trouble.

I've never had any issues, i just shop for compatible chipsets. I've had tons of issues with Linux on the desktop in comparison to Hackintosh. Never understood how people say it's time consuming to do it!

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#15

Post by elmigranto » Sat, Mar 18, 2017, 5:02 PM UTC

I'm wondering whether it would be easier to run macOS in VM. No more fear of updates with snapshots, and I imagine ease of installation and less compatibility issues.

Anyone does it, how's performance and keyboard "tunneling" (CMD vs CTRL)?

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#16

Post by atemerev » Sat, Mar 18, 2017, 5:03 PM UTC

I have a Ubuntu desktop (i7 6700K, nVidia GTX 1080, like everybody else's), and a recent MacBook Pro.

Each time I open the latter, I have a mixed feeling of "how beautiful everything is!" and "how slow everything is!"

(I am a Scala software engineer occasionally working with GPU-based machine learning)

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#17

Post by MrScruff » Sat, Mar 18, 2017, 5:04 PM UTC

jeffjose wrote: post #3

After years of making fun of Linux folks for having to "know everything about the computer" to get things working, Mac folks seem to be embracing the culture these days.

I can't speak for everyone, but for me there's a big difference from wanting to know everything about the computer and needing to, particularly when I'm not at work.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#18

Post by redsummer » Sat, Mar 18, 2017, 5:05 PM UTC

Apple have made some terrible design decisions since Jobs died.

A 'thin iMac' - whose thin-ness was absolutely pointless.

The MacBook (2 lbs) and MacBook Pro (3 lbs) were designed to weigh arbitrary weights instead of thinking about features: http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/results/?product1=macbook&p...

And the MacPro was possible the worst shape for upgrades.

Jobs inspired people to come up with great machines, but he also had a pragmatism which seems to have been lost at Apple.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#19

Post by devNoise » Sat, Mar 18, 2017, 5:06 PM UTC

jrnichols wrote: post #2

I'm in the same boat this author is. It's disappointing to see the desktop market lagging so far behind. For all of the 68k/PPC years, we could at least say "different architecture" and Intel hadn't caught up. Now we're all Intel, and it's Apple that isn't keeping up. It's frustrating, and I'm not necessarily a "Pro user" anymore at all. I have a current generation Mac Mini, and it's over 2 years old now. What I can…

You touch on what I miss about the old days from Apple, the "speed bumps". Apple used to make updates to the Macs a bit more often then they do these days. A lot of the time the updates weren't much more then a slightly faster CPU and maybe a new graphics. I don't expect completely new designs every year, but it boggles my mind why Apple won't put in better CPUs that are pin compatible with their motherboards.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#20

Post by atemerev » Sat, Mar 18, 2017, 5:07 PM UTC

doctorpangloss wrote: post #9

As a Hackintosh user, I'd recommend an NCASE M1 v5 or the Shuttle SZ170R8 for a significantly better chassis. With the NCASE, you can get a LGA 2011-v3 mini-ITX board and get as fast of a computer as you want. Though truthfully, I don't think there's much of a point. Likewise, an old NVIDIA card for a Hackintosh? Also not much of a point. The web drivers are so bad. Who knows when Apple will ship another NVIDIA chip…

CUDA stuff is awful on Windows (try setting up Tensorflow/Keras there — nothing but overwhelming frustration). So I have to use Ubuntu and miss my happy days with macOS.