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OpenCore bootloader – open-sourced Apple UEFI drivers, enabling Hackintosh

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Re: OpenCore bootloader – open-sourced Apple UEFI drivers, enabling Hackintosh

#181
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having done dev on OSX you are going to be constantly fighting the machine. Apple is worse about walled gardens than MS is. With Apple, you need to do exactly what they want or you will have pain.

My experience is the exact opposite - but we're probably looking for different things. That walled garden approach is why, in my opinion, the OS feels as good as it does. MacOS feels like a mature operating system that Apple have created with restraint and control - where to me Windows feels like a piece of legacy enterprise software with a shiny UI. If I wanted out of a walled garden, there's no way it'd be to a non…

A definition courtesy of wikipedia

> A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, wherein consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications and content.

By this definition Mac OS isn't a walled garden, save for kernel modules, although it could become so in the future thus its cohesive design is to be pedantic a product of itself rather than a closed ecosystem. A product of actually having a mental picture of how the whole thing works and a cohesive set of applications to go with it.

Historically windows has without third party applications been a pretty garbage experience even its image and text editors were so bad that you could randomly generate urls until you hit an alternative and most likely get a better choice. Its not shockingly that a platform that doesn't even know what good look likes doesn't have an ecosystem full of anything that represents this.

Re: OpenCore bootloader – open-sourced Apple UEFI drivers, enabling Hackintosh

#182
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that Apple has moved away from allowing unsigned drivers to be loaded?

Depends on your definition of "allow". By default they're blocked, yes, but you can change that by booting into recovery mode, opening a Terminal window, and typing: csrutil disable && csrutil enable --without kext Now unsigned kexts will be allowed to load (while leaving the rest of System Integrity Protection intact). For most software this requirement would be a massive problem, but I'm not sure that applies to th…

While I would agree with that in general, with the rise of the eGPU it seems a little less clear cut.

Oh well, it is what it is...

Re: OpenCore bootloader – open-sourced Apple UEFI drivers, enabling Hackintosh

#183
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dont use Ryzen, virtualization does not work, including Docker and some other apps like Adobe ones are buggy. Other than that I agree. I made a hackintosh a month ago for half the price of what I would need to pay Apple and it is rock solid. Everything works including all wireless features like sidecar, airdrop, etc. Sleep, thunderbold, rx5700xt, everything is working well.

You'd run QEMU KVM instead and use GPU passthrough for a macOS VM. Proxmox is great for this, here's a guide: https://www.nicksherlock.com/2020/04/installing-macos-catali...

Fascinating. I had never considered using Proxmox for this, and had abandoned the idea of building a Hackintosh because of my Ryzen processor.

Re: OpenCore bootloader – open-sourced Apple UEFI drivers, enabling Hackintosh

#184
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you primarily a mac OS user? I am primarily a Windows user and when I occasionally have to use mac OS, I find myself regularly facing many seemingly inconsistent behaviors that really surprise me. I'm inclined to think it is a matter of familiarity more than anything.

Counter: I grew up with Windows, using Macs only occasionally in stores and such. Never really liked Windows. Tried Linux for a year when I was 12 or so, ended up coming back to Windows. When I was 16 I decided to Hackintosh my Dell and absolutely fell in love with Snow Leopard. I've used OS X in some form ever since.

If hackintoshes becomes popular enough to threaten their bottom line the very next version of OS X and those thereafter will include countermeasures designed to make your life difficult. This doesn't seem to be a sustainable love affair with a counterparty that will never share your affection because you represent a potential loss not a customer.

Re: OpenCore bootloader – open-sourced Apple UEFI drivers, enabling Hackintosh

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter: I grew up with Windows, using Macs only occasionally in stores and such. Never really liked Windows. Tried Linux for a year when I was 12 or so, ended up coming back to Windows. When I was 16 I decided to Hackintosh my Dell and absolutely fell in love with Snow Leopard. I've used OS X in some form ever since.

If hackintoshes becomes popular enough to threaten their bottom line the very next version of OS X and those thereafter will include countermeasures designed to make your life difficult. This doesn't seem to be a sustainable love affair with a counterparty that will never share your affection because you represent a potential loss not a customer.

I have bought real Macs since, it just so happened Hackintosh was my introduction, because I didn't have money when I was a teenager. It worked out very well for Apple, actually.

Re: OpenCore bootloader – open-sourced Apple UEFI drivers, enabling Hackintosh

#186
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Ryzen in my "Hackintosh". However, these days I've been using GPU-passthrough and running macOS in a VM on top of Linux.

This is what I'm planning on doing. Have you had any issues? The thing I'm most concerned about is hooking my apple id up to it for icloud. Any recommendations?

The recommendation to use an AMD GPU still stands, since it's passed into the VM. I've been using an RX 560D on Catalina (the one that didn't advertise having 2 fewer CUs, grrrr) without any graphical trouble.

iCloud mostly works, the only two apps that I can't get working are iMessage and FaceTime. This is a common issue for all Hackintoshs, it's not a VM specific problem. It comes down to needing to provide a real Apple SN that matches the kind of Mac you set your Hackintosh to identify as. I'd half recommend picking up a broken / for-parts iMac off eBay to lift the serial number off of (and to say you do actually own a Mac =P ).

I did have some trouble doing passthrough of NVMe drives in the past. I don't know if this was the VM's fault or the fact that it would get hooked by Linux on the host boot and then be unbound before booting the VM. I haven't tried again in the last 18 months, so it's entirely possible any issue there got fixed. I've been booting from an iSCSI volume from my NAS (QEMU hides this fact from macOS).

I should add that I moved away from the Apple ecosystem awhile ago in terms of my personal data. I use a mix of Google services and NextCloud (hosted on my own hardware). My Apple ID getting banned isn't too much of a concern for me. I've never heard of someone actually getting their Apple ID blocked for using a Hackintosh, I figure there are so few people actually doing it it's not worth it to Apple to enforce.

That being said, I don't know how they'd respond to a wealthy company using a bunch of Hackintoshs. I still don't understand how they expect people to properly do CI/CD for iOS without macOS in a server / virtualization environment though. My employer uses rack mount sleds for Mac Minis, but without proper IPMI, managing them is a pain. I wish you could license macOS for a virtualization environment so you could deploy a few 1U dual socket 64 core EPYC servers (128 core / 256 thread total) rather than 4x 6 core boxes per 1U.

Either that, or they should let the toolchain run on more than just Macs. I think that is one of the major features of React Native - you can develop your apps on whatever machine you want. You only need a proper Mac when you're bundling for release.

Re: OpenCore bootloader – open-sourced Apple UEFI drivers, enabling Hackintosh

#187
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I used homebrew extensively. It helps but does not solve every problem. There's still things Apple does not want you to do and you will not do them.

Okay, I'm still quite curious what specific development tasks you're able to do in Linux but feel restricted from doing on macOS. If you turn off SIP (takes five minutes), you can rewrite kernel memory if you want to. Which is of course a different thing than ease-of-use, but I'm not sure what would be so different.

I'll echo this, I develop C/C++ on OS X every day. Have no issues with it at all.

Re: OpenCore bootloader – open-sourced Apple UEFI drivers, enabling Hackintosh

#188
post #74

Hackintoshes are very stable if: - You buy the right hardware. Intel CPU and AMD GPU. Choose Ryzen if you like those and like tinkering and hacking on your OS a lot. And no, it's very unlikely your Nvidia GPU will ever work with a recent macOS. - You use the vanilla method of macOS install. The dortania guides along with /r/hackintosh are all you need. Avoid tonymacx86, insanelymac, and any software with the word "be…

> You do not want to update willy-nilly and you definitely want to wait a day or few for the more brave to guinea pig any issues.

To a lesser extent good advice for non-hackintoshes

Re: OpenCore bootloader – open-sourced Apple UEFI drivers, enabling Hackintosh

#189
post #135
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar set up. I got some Thunderbolt dock for the mac and a USB input switcher that I connect all my peripherals to and can press a button to switch between the Macbook dock and my Windows PC. The only unoptimized part is I just use the DisplayPort input on my monitor for the PC and the HDMI input to the Macbook dock. So to swap all I have to do is press the button on the USB switcher and then change my mo…

That sounds great! Can you please share some good models/links for the usb switcher thingy? (I had no idea such a thing existed in the first place!)

Here's the one I got: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07T89NTXK

I can't vouch that it's not a keylogger given it sounds like some brand you'd find on AliExpress, but it does what it's supposed to do.

Since it's plugged into my desktop and I leave that running it's powered by that, but it also has a micro USB input for external power.

Re: OpenCore bootloader – open-sourced Apple UEFI drivers, enabling Hackintosh

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tools largely come from a Russian guy who goes by vit9696, along with some of his developer friends. He may (loosely) use InsanelyMac for OpenCore discussion, but the rest of the site is generally full of questionable and often outright wrong advice and to keep things short for the noobs I was speaking to, it's easier to steer people away from it. Pretty much everything can be done just using the Dortania guide a…

>He may (loosely) use InsanelyMac for OpenCore discussion, Checking the discussion shows it's not true. >but the rest of the site is generally full of questionable and often outright wrong advice May be you had a bad experience with the site, or may be it really isn't 'noob' friendly anymore, but that doesn't mean you should discredit the actual developers of the tools in favour of the 'How To' guides written about t…

We're going to have to disagree.

The InsanelyMac site is riddled with bad advice from questionable sources. Eg. using the beast tools, binary patching kexts for dumb reasons, rando plist changes.

I did not have a "bad experience" per se, with the site. It's just full of unschooled people all too eager to offer bad advice.

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