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OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

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Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#61
post #56

As another data point - Building a hackintosh is so much simpler now than it was 5 years ago. The reddit forum at r/hackintosh is pretty helpful for getting started and has a nice repository of builds. AMD Ryzen CPUs are fairly well supported now. My current system is a 3700x with radeon 5700xt gpu. I use OSX for my daily work, and Windows 10 for gaming. It's a great setup for $1000. My OSX geekbench specs beat out t…

How is the stability of Hackintosh? What about updating to newer OS versions (minor and patch releases) Is that experience better? I haven’t looked into it since 2010

I did run into some stability issues with the latest 10.15.4 release. But I was not running this latest version of OpenCore (0.5.7) that supposedly works better with 10.15.4. I upgraded before 0.5.7 was released. I have a backup that I can test with before fully committing.

That being said - I had to rebuild my machine to downgrade to 10.15.3. Luckily, I had a spare backup to work off of and things are great again.

Stability and other misc notes for 10.15.3 and below:

* Stable system, no kernel panics

* Sleep does not work (it's a desktop anyway, so not an issue for me).

I don't have USB-C or TB-3 on this system. There are expansion boards for this, but since they aren't common on hackintoshes yet, you're likely going into untested waters. For example, to run the LG 5K display (TB3 only), you need a specific motherboard with a TB3 connector, a usb-c pci-e card, and a lot of frustration to get up and running. I'm sure it's a huge PITA.

> Is the experience better?

I mainly did this because I wanted to have an all-in-one machine to play the latest games with on Win10 and do work in OSX. For my daily work and coding (mostly JS/Python these days), I haven't had any issues. For the price, it can't be beat!

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind sharing what laptop and setup guide you used? I'm still on a MBP 2012 for work which I like, and I'm thinking ahead to my next work laptop -- looking for similar ports/etc as my MBP 2012 (doesn't need to be latest specs, and I'm a creature of habit).

Tri-boot Catalina/Win10/Ubuntu19 on Dell XPS 9650 (i7-7700HQ, 32gb RAM, 1tb NVMe, touch 4K UHD w HD 630 & GTX 1050). Two caveats are WiFi card needs replaced for iCloud (30$ on eBay) and fingerprint scanner only works under Win10. Re: guide -- DuckDuckGo/Github/Google is your friend -- this model in particular is rather common, but which guide is right depends on your comfort level.

This is a good walk through for the Dell XPS 15 9650:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h22MJD8C1r8

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#64
post #8
post #3

I wonder if the VT-d disablement is required for the rootkit to work. Ideally you'd have VT-d in macOS for virtual machines, but then again you also don't have Thunderbolt so maybe it's simply not complete enough to enable 'everything'. (and if you really need everything you should probably just buy a Mac anyway)

I think the story is something like macos fails to parse the DMAR table properly, or something along those lines. If you drop the DMAR ACPI table you don't need to disable VT-d. If you disable Intel Virtualization support from the kernel via the dart=0 kernel flag, you don't need to disable VT-d.

> If you disable Intel Virtualization support from the kernel via the dart=0 kernel flag

So that is what dart=0 does!

I have Googled this, many times, as with several other weird kernel flags. Not even because I want to fix something, but because I'm curious about what's happening!

Every time, without fail, all I ever find are random forum threads of people saying "this flag fixed my computer", or maybe "You need to enable this flag because it makes your PC act more like a Mac" or some such. It's so frustrating!

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#65
Every time I see OpenCore I feel like trying to make a Hackintosh again, but then I remember that my GPU is an Nvidia one and that it will never have drivers on any recent macOS releases.

My laptop is another contender, but that has an Intel wireless card so that will never be supported either. The network card issue can probably be worked around through some virtualisation, but the laptop CPU is too old to do IOMMU properly so doing a KVM Hackintosh is impossible as well.

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#66
If anyone has an Intel NUC that they were thinking of turning into a hackintosh, there’s a really great guide/set of documentation out there for a project called HaC Mini[1] which is based on OpenCore. This was my first exposure to OpenCore after being a long time Clover user and it was very good!

[1] https://osy.gitbook.io/hac-mini-guide/

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for reading and the recommendation. You should see a white background! I am still tweaking the style for all browsers/devices.

FWIW I run firefox with javascript disabled (actually uMatrix) and I see grey on grey as well.

Thank you!

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#68
This will give so many opportunities to people who can pay their 10x monthly income to a buy 2-year-old mac :))

I think Apple had a stupid idea to become more luxurious and hire Angela Jean Ahrendts for 100M. God bless they realize, if they go for volume and price aggressive (as Steve Jobs said), more people can benefit.

I want hackintosh to work so well that indirectly, it will force Apple to develop way cheaper computers for the whole world.

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#69
post #66

If anyone has an Intel NUC that they were thinking of turning into a hackintosh, there’s a really great guide/set of documentation out there for a project called HaC Mini[1] which is based on OpenCore. This was my first exposure to OpenCore after being a long time Clover user and it was very good! [1] https://osy.gitbook.io/hac-mini-guide/

What issues did you run into, or was everything supported onboard?

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#70

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 think there hsould be a place where people could list their hardware and their settings/kexts for successfull builds. And you could just input your hardware and get a list of settings and kexts for your build. Or like dynamic documentation like the stripe docs, but then for your hackingtosh... Hoping to setup one myself this week

Good luck! One thing I think has really tripped up past attempts is there are a lot of variables that can make a difference:

What version of macOS are you running? What are your BIOS settings? Does sleep work? Do CPU C-States work or is it always using full power? Do all the ports on your GPU work, or only some?

Somehow, these things all need to be tracked, and users need to be able to see both exact configuration matches and ones that are just similar.

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