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OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

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Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#11

Post by Moto7451 »

_vbdg wrote: post #6

I just built a new hackintosh with opencore, and compared to clover, it was so much nicer. The documentation [0] is excellent; I'm able to grok what each option does rather than just guessing. It also feels so much less janky than clover did. Better filevault support, faster, leave SIP on, etc. It's also better in that one can avoid polluting /L/E /S/L/E, which will also allow users to keep running kexts even after A…

Ditto. I built one last week. Everything was straightforward and the documentation great.

My only criticism of the state of building a Hackintosh is the amount of cargo cult advise out there. Figuring out my Audio took longer than it should as finding the layout-id for my ALC892 was buried in threads where everyone kept parroting “use ID 1, 2, and 3 or just keep trying numbers until it works.” My board needed layout-id 7 and it took a while to find out that I could use IORegistryExplorer to search for “HDAS” (my ACPI device name) and read the value from the table listed.

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#12

Post by Wowfunhappy »

_vbdg wrote: post #6

I just built a new hackintosh with opencore, and compared to clover, it was so much nicer. The documentation [0] is excellent; I'm able to grok what each option does rather than just guessing. It also feels so much less janky than clover did. Better filevault support, faster, leave SIP on, etc. It's also better in that one can avoid polluting /L/E /S/L/E, which will also allow users to keep running kexts even after A…

> It's also better in that one can avoid polluting /L/E /S/L/E

I haven't used OpenCore[1], but just to be clear, Clover can do this too!

When Clover first came onto the scene (replacing the even older Chameleon/Chimera), bootloader kext injection was my favorite feature. It's great to have Hackintosh kexts separate, particularly in a place where updates can't touch them.

---

[1] Partly because Clover works and I'm used to it, and party because I want to run Mavericks, and I'm not clear how compatible OpenCore is with old OS's.

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#13

Post by lukevp »

Moto7451 wrote: post #11
_vbdg wrote: post #6

I just built a new hackintosh with opencore, and compared to clover, it was so much nicer. The documentation [0] is excellent; I'm able to grok what each option does rather than just guessing. It also feels so much less janky than clover did. Better filevault support, faster, leave SIP on, etc. It's also better in that one can avoid polluting /L/E /S/L/E, which will also allow users to keep running kexts even after A…

Ditto. I built one last week. Everything was straightforward and the documentation great. My only criticism of the state of building a Hackintosh is the amount of cargo cult advise out there. Figuring out my Audio took longer than it should as finding the layout-id for my ALC892 was buried in threads where everyone kept parroting “use ID 1, 2, and 3 or just keep trying numbers until it works.” My board needed layout-…

I agree, that's always the biggest problem is how much time you have to spend researching what tweaks you have to make for a specific piece of hardware. It seems like there's not that much effort in making the process automatic and more in making the process flexible. I'd rather it either work without any configuration on my end, or fail in predictable ways so I could contribute fixes. For example, for each specific iteration of hardware, there'd be a github issue and everyone with that hardware could swarm it and build an automated fix. There's too much one-off patching that goes on in the hackintosh process these days.

Having said that, I do really appreciate all the work and I think it's great that hackintoshes exist. I just feel like a lot of good research and work is thrown away because it's hidden away within forum threads instead of inlined into the solution.

I was planning on building a hackintosh today (my mac mini just isn't fast enough these days). I'll give Open Core a try. It's been a couple of years since I last built one.

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#15

Post by lukevp »

t0mislav wrote: post #9

What is current state of Hackintosh this days? Is it stable?

I think this is a difficult question to answer because MacOS is built for specific hardware configurations, and Hackintosh has to build unofficial support for all sorts of non-standard configurations. Your experience with a hackintosh really depends what hardware you're trying to install it on.

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#16

Post by stevievee »

t0mislav wrote: post #9

What is current state of Hackintosh this days? Is it stable?

They are more stable than ever right now - probably because the development community has grown in numbers.

I've been using a hackintosh as my main productivity desktop since about 2014. Details on my latest build here: http://stephenvescio.com/blog/building-a-2019-mac-pro-hackin...

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#17

Post by Wowfunhappy »

lukevp wrote: post #13
Moto7451 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto. I built one last week. Everything was straightforward and the documentation great. My only criticism of the state of building a Hackintosh is the amount of cargo cult advise out there. Figuring out my Audio took longer than it should as finding the layout-id for my ALC892 was buried in threads where everyone kept parroting “use ID 1, 2, and 3 or just keep trying numbers until it works.” My board needed layout-…

I agree, that's always the biggest problem is how much time you have to spend researching what tweaks you have to make for a specific piece of hardware. It seems like there's not that much effort in making the process automatic and more in making the process flexible. I'd rather it either work without any configuration on my end, or fail in predictable ways so I could contribute fixes. For example, for each specific…

> There's too much one-off patching that goes on in the hackintosh process these days.

I've been a Hackintosh user for more than a decade, and it has always been this way. On the whole, it's much easier now than it used to be.

I don't know why the bootloaders aren't better at detecting your system and automatically configuring themselves, but I assume it's a legitimately difficult problem, or someone would have done it.

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#18

Post by austinheap »

lukevp wrote: post #15
t0mislav wrote: post #9

What is current state of Hackintosh this days? Is it stable?

I think this is a difficult question to answer because MacOS is built for specific hardware configurations, and Hackintosh has to build unofficial support for all sorts of non-standard configurations. Your experience with a hackintosh really depends what hardware you're trying to install it on.

There are people who publish hardware ‘QVL’ lists for Hackintosh builds — stick to the list and it’s smooth sailing. Venture off the list and you end up on page 16 of some forum convinced you need to dump your DSDT tables to edit some voodoo magic.

I’ve been on developing on Hackintoshs for work full-time (both desktop and laptops) for many many years now with minimal hiccups. 4K HDR touchscreen laptop in 2018, yes please!

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#19

Post by snazz »

t0mislav wrote: post #9

What is current state of Hackintosh this days? Is it stable?

It works very well. I have a Clover Hackintosh (not OpenCore) on my [edit: cheap pre-built generic] desktop (i5-7400, iGPU, macOS has its own SSD). It works great, even allowing me to upgrade from Mojave to Catalina and forget that it's not a real Mac. My monitor always looked pink, but if I change my monitor's input color format to YPbPr it works fine. The patch that I used to fix that in Mojave is broken in Catalina, but I don't really care.

Aside from that, it works just like a real Mac in basically every way.

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#20

Post by austinheap »

zamalek wrote: post #14
t0mislav wrote: post #9

What is current state of Hackintosh this days? Is it stable?

Linus Tech Tips does one every few years, the last one was pretty recent I think. As far as I remember, almost everything worked really well. Notably, Facetime was really hit-and-miss.

Do you recall the issue? Was it FaceTime specifically or all-things-iCloud? The latter is one of the most common last-mile issues since you need to present Apple servers with hardware identifiers that iCloud agrees are real (i.e.: from your old MacBook gathering dust).
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